– Podcast station, what is good? A very special episode today. I believe this man will have
no need for an introduction. We have Mark Zuckerberg. I have to start practicing this, Mark. I've been in a bunch of
meetings saying Meta, just a lot of practice. You really threw me for a curve ball. – Yeah, I'm still getting used to it too. – So obviously Mark is at the helm and the head of Meta and I'm really excited
to be talking to him because I really want to
get into the metaverse and the Web 3.0 world. Obviously so much of
this community is aware of my involvement in the NFT space. And it's funny on the way
here I realized, oh my God, this interview is going to
go similar to the Joe Namath interview I had for all
my sports nerd friends that listen to this podcast.
When I had Namath on, I literally asked him 14
questions that were so left field compared to the normal
Joe Namath questions. For example, I asked him about why we lost the AFC championship game and didn't go to Super Bowl IV instead of talking about Super Bowl III. And I realize that's
what's going to happen here because I have so many very
selfish questions for Mark about this Web 3.0 world
that I'm going to be selfish with my limited time with him. So Mark, first of all,
it's good to see you. And how are you? – It's good to see you too. It's been a while since we've
done something like this, but I'm glad to get a chance to do it. There's a lot of exciting
stuff going on right now. You know the reason why we come to you is because you do ask good questions. So let's go for it. I'm curious what you got for me.
– So, Mark, I think what's really funny in the Meta, pun intended,
it's NFT NYC right now. And I was saying to AJ and Kevin Rose, bunch of the old Web 2.0 friends, how much this feels like the
early South by Southwest days. And obviously, one of the
first times we sat down was after your keynote at South by just jamming ,talking about the space. And I remember the conversation vividly 'cause I have a solid memory and 'cause a lot of the
things we talked about about where this was
all going was the topic.
And many of these things played out. As somebody that I feel has always had a disproportionate understanding of communication, consumer, human behavior, give me your first hot take. I know you've had this big
announcement the other day. What is your macro thesis
of the Web 3.0 place we're going, whether it's
the metaverse, the NFT stuff, like what are we on the precipice of and how similar is it to the time where right before Facebook was launched? – Yeah, so the metaverse to me today feels like the next frontier
in social connection in much the same way that
social networking did when I was getting started back in 2004. That's a big reason why we
wanted to change the brand of the company is that
today I think most people think about us as a social media company, but in our DNA, we're a technology company that builds all kinds
of different technology to help people connect and tries to advance human connection. And of course, social media
is one important part of that. But I think increasingly
it's going to be about building platforms and experiences that deliver the sense of presence.
Like you're right there
with another person. There's, of course, all the
virtual and augmented reality parts of that. And there's the hardware. And I'm really excited about that. The work that we've been working on that for seven years now at this point. So that's making a lot of progress. But I think some of the experiences are starting to come together too. We've started to release
Horizon and Workrooms and some of these experiences
where you can feel like you're present with someone in a place.
It's just pretty crazy to
see how that's taking off. It's not just games, games I think is the
natural starting point. But beyond that, we're
starting to see at this point that social interaction
and just hanging out is starting to become the biggest way that people spend time on these platforms. That kind of makes sense and
fits with my experience so far. – Mark, when you say these platforms, are you speaking
specifically in the behaviors seen of people in Oculus? – Yeah. Yeah. – Let's actually go right there because you said something in there and I hope the audience is listening. Seven years. I remember like yesterday
you, Meta, acquiring Oculus.
– Always tough to know how to
refer to it in the past tense. – I'm gonna, I'm gonna use
both, so stick with me. The Oculus purchase was really interesting because the Instagram purchase, which I was really kind of caught up in because of some of the
content I was making, the attempt on Snap, all of those made a ton of sense because you were executing on the thing that I've always thought you had, which is where's the current attention? How do we play within that space? The Oculus one was weird for me because I was like, oh, that's far away.
Why did he do that? Seven years in metaverse,
people are just now starting to kind of get going. What was the thinking of that? Like, why'd you do that? – Well, I mean, a lot of it is just that we spend most of our
days building social apps that you use on a little phone. And you know, as powerful as that is, you have your phone with you all the time, it's also pretty limiting. You're not delivering an experience where you can really feel like
you're with another person. And in a lot of ways, that's sort of the ultimate dream of building these digital
social experiences is actually being able to make
it so that people can feel like they're there together
and doing something together and then kind of collaborating. And no technology that we
have today can deliver that. So we've seen this progression where, when I started the company, it was people, primarily the internet,
was primarily about text.
So people can turn text into a computer. Then we got phones that had cameras. So the internet became a
lot more visual and mobile. And over the last few years, internet connections have gotten
a lot better for everyone. So video is really the primary way that we share experiences. So you have this progression
from text to photos to videos, connection and expressing ourselves keeps on getting more
natural and immersive, but that's not the end of the line. There's going to be something after video and it's going to be much more immersive and it's going to be
something that we can do throughout the day. So you'll have virtual reality
for when you want to go into a really immersive zone, you'll have augmented
reality to have holograms, so you can imagine a
version of this conversation three or five years from now
where instead of doing this over video, you're a hologram
here in my living room, or I'm a hologram in your living room. And that's going to be pretty wild. – On that point, I want to jump into that.
Do you think, and you
know I've watched you talk in the past that I know
how I communicate this because it's always so challenging. Is your intuition that it is
three to five years from now that the tech between 5G, which was an important step
between some of the stuff you're doing and other people, other companies and
entrepreneurs are doing, do you think we can actually… I saw something I think in my feed where you were fencing with somebody as part of the announcement, which looked wild 'cause it was on some Obi-Wan Kenobi shit. Like right? I was like, oh my God, it's happening!` Is that, do you think three
to five is a solid guess? Is that optimistic? Talk to me about that. – I think you want to break it down to there's the virtual reality side and the augmented reality side.
VR is here. I think Quest was really the form factor that was necessary to make it mainstream. Quest Two I think was a
meaningful step beyond that and is kind of the first mainstream hit that we've had so many millions of that… – I don't know what you're
allowed to share or not. So if you don't feel
comfortable, tell me you can't. Is there public… I'm just trying to learn how much… – We don't have a public
number yet, but it's… What I can say is it's many millions and it's multiple times
more than Quest One, which was sort of the form
factor we felt like we needed. So that'll keep on improving and we'll keep on shipping
new versions of that. So there were a lot of
great experiences there and it's been really cool
to see the use cases there broaden out from games to social to now having things around fitness.
– It's a lot of fitness,
that caught my radar, that there was a lot more
people paying for fitness apps in Quest than I had any clue of. – Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, well think about it. It's kind of like the Peloton model where instead of having a bike or a treadmill, you just have your $300 headset and you can take it with
you anywhere you want. You can do boxing or dancing
or different kinds of cardio.
It's pretty awesome. So I think that that'll go for awhile and get extended a lot. So there all these
different use cases in VR. When you're talking
about the fencing video that I showed with Lee
Kiefer in the hologram, that, you're going to need
augmented reality glasses. And that's a harder problem because first, you're inventing a
completely new optical stack. So you're not just using normal screens and kind of building an
architecture around that, which is how virtual reality
has sort of worked to date. You need to design a projector
and a set of wave guides so that way you can have
glasses that look normal, you can see through them. There's a lot of interesting
science and engineering there, but for augmented reality, if you're going to wear
it throughout the day, it's just a lot more
important that the form factor is like normal looking glasses. I mean, virtual reality you
can do in your living room. – Do you think, I'm sorry to interrupt, do you think by the time it hits scale that there's a chance that
this is a contact lens game, not a cumbersome overlay, like a glasses or a thick…
What's your take on that? Is that too hard? – I mean, some people are working on that. I think that that's quite a
bit further off just because, think about it. It's like whatever is projecting the image needs to have an internet connection. It needs to be powered. I've seen some people have
a model of a contact lens that has a little projector
that's sort of like in front of your pupil and your blind spot and it can project something in, but then how are you
going to have that sync with the whole rest of the internet and be powered throughout the day? – What if I swallowed a 5G pill? – I don't know, let's
say 20 years from now. I think that that might be a thing. But AR glasses, I think we're going to start
seeing things that look like normal looking glasses, but
that can project holograms into the world within the next five years. I think that's a somewhat
conservative estimate. – Did Pokemon Go, going
back five years ironically, was that something you watched carefully? Because I was like, holy
shit, this is now happening.
People are pulling off on this highway, jumping into the woods to find a Pikachu. I would have lost… I'm pretty good at this game too, but I would have lost this bet, which was after that was such
a smash hit through the phone, the fact that we're here five years later and there has not been another significant AR phone execution of that scale, surprising to me. What's your take on that? – Well, I think Pokemon
Go, it was interesting and it's a real hit and it is phenomenon, I consider it to be more
of a location-based game than an augmented reality game.
The fact that it shows that you look at it through your camera, I think is somewhat incidental. I think the core mechanic is
that you're going to a place. And so you can do that with
augmented reality or not, but there is certainly is
going to be a whole class of experiences that are like that. But in terms of things that really kind of augment reality,
I think you have filters, face filters, different effects like that, like what you see in
Instagram and Snapchat.
I think that that's a real thing that I think is real augmented reality. And certainly I think that
there's going to be a lot more opportunity there once you get
to these real looking glasses that can put holograms in the world. So yeah, I would hope that
by the middle of this decade, we can have something that's
sort of like that fencing clip that I showed. Now, the other issue on
that is you need haptics. That way, when your sword
hits the hologram sword, you get a sense of feeling from that. So that's a whole interesting
other area of research, and I'm not sure exactly
where that will be by the middle of this decade, but that's another thing
that we're working on because it's clearly an important part of the whole picture is
you need to be able to, whether you're playing basketball or giving someone a high five or shaking their hand, you want to be able to get
a sense of pressure back.
That, I think, is just going
to be an important part of the whole thing too. – Mark, when you make a move like this to get the organization
to this next place, I assume, 'cause I think
about when I do things, oftentimes it's more
for my team internally than for the world. Like if they don't understand where I'm trying to
take Veyner or my stuff, then I've got no shot. Was that a thought about
this in a lot of ways? Like, Hey, I got to make sure, 'cause you're a massive company now. Is this like, I need to
give everybody a north star internally of like, look, no,
no, this is what we're doing.
It's not just refining the
algo or a filter on Insta or something of that nature. – Yeah, you get this, 'cause you're running a company here and a lot of this is really
just about making sure that our team knows what we're doing. Running a company is about
setting prioritization and principles for where you want to go. And I do think that it's
the case that a lot of times the most effective way to
communicate to the organization a level of commitment to something is to go say it externally, because now people know
that you're serious. So we've been talking about
this internally for many years. We've been working on these
VR devices for seven years. We've just sort of steadily
ramped up the investment to the point where now, in 2021, where we're investing $10 billion, more than $10 billion in this. It's still not the biggest
part of what we do, but it's very meaningful.
I think that you'd be hard pressed to find any other organization
that cares as much about this and is putting
as much energy into building all these different parts of the future. And what I think you get for that is that Meta has become the premier place that if you care about these problems, you want to go work on them. So whether that's VR, we're building the best device. AR, I think we're the furthest ahead in terms of actually building
the consumer glass form factor and all the different
research around that.
You mentioned any of the
other problems around that, whether it's haptics or
a lot of the software parts of this, where people can interact. We're going to be the
place where you can build all these different parts
of the metaverse experience and then also weave them
into Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. That's going to be pretty wild. – You said something that
really caught my attention. Obviously the far majority of people, almost everybody who's listening to this that runs a company, is not going to be running
a company of your scale. But what you said there
was not only for your team, but did I hear the undertone
there of the fact that you put out such a public
commitment to this, you see as a recruiting vehicle to the best engineers in
the game in this space? – Yeah.
Well, look. I just think that when you plant a flag and say that you're gonna go do something, you get haters and criticisms, you also get the people who
actually care about that thing and want to make it happen
are attracted to the people who I think have the courage to go say, I'm gonna go make this happen even though it's really far off. So I think that all of these things are, there are pros and cons to them, and there's a lot of complexity to manage, but I think that this is true no matter what size organization you're at is that having the
willingness to just go say, Hey, here's what I want to go build, I think certainly creates
the self-selection dynamic, where when you say here's who
I am and what I want to go do, then you get people
who want to share that. And what I've found in my career is that it's better to
not be timid about that and to not pretend that you're
something that you're not to try to appease critics.
The more that you can just
be honest to who you are and what you want to go do, I think you'll kind of
get the right people to join your team. You'll get the right investors, you'll get the right partners. And I think that that's kind
of how you move forward. – Talk to me now, I'm going crazy selfish. I referenced you and the
company a ton in my content over the last decade as my macro thesis, understand where the attention
is, it matters so much. And I often reference your M&A behavior. Can you just give me, because
I want to know for myself, the insight on the Instagram
deal, the WhatsApp deal, I'm going to leave Oculus off, because that was like, I
want to maybe come back to it in a little bit given
the macro metaverse convo, but specifically Instagram and WhatsApp, which I thought were
really of the moment deals. I don't know if the corporation acknowledges the attempt towards Snapchat. It was well talked about, I don't know the truth or not truth to it, when I heard it or when it
was reported, I was like, there he is again.
He's a hundred percent right. He's on it again. TikTok must've been potentially
a very different thing, given they're China-based,
the complications… I'll be very honest. every day when I saw
Musical.ly way back, I'm like, Facebook's gonna make a play. Facebook's gonna make a play. A, am I right that is a big tenor of how you guys have looked at the world? B, what's that about? – Yeah. So there are a lot of different of these kind of core social interactions that people have in these apps that the different apps
have invented over time. And I'm proud that that we've
invented a bunch of them, going back to some of
the core dynamics around being able to communicate
with people in your college, we were the first that built newsfeed, the core social API work early on… – By way, on the record
for the youngsters, I apologize.
By the way, for all the
youngsters listening right now, when Facebook changed from
you going to somebody's wall and leaving a comment, to this newsfeed, it was fucking carnage. The number one page or group
or whatever you guys called it back then was bringing
back the wall or whatever. Mark, can you speak to that real quick? Just go back to your young, young days, like when you guys made that move, the community within, nobody was even paying attention to you in the mainstream and all that stuff now.
Within the world, immediately
people lost their mind. And now that is the core
way every social network was built in. – Yeah. I mean, look,
sometimes when you invent these things, they can be disruptive. And I think you need
to have the commitment to see it through. But going back to your point about some of these other companies, it's like there was a
kernel with Instagram and with WhatsApp and also with companies like Snapchat, I think
that they created something that I think is really
special and is awesome. I just looked at that and I
was like, all right, okay. There is something, I think people often tend
to look at these social apps and think that they're
frivolous, early on, and they think that they're like these dynamics aren't important. Oh, it's filtered photos or oh, it's disappearing photos or whatever it is. – Or it's only for college kids. – Yeah, when we had that, through our IPO and after when we were having a lot
of business struggles, but I kind of looked at
those and I was like, Hey, I think that there's
something that's important here.
I think the world is probably
underestimating this. And I also think that we
have the skills as a company to go grow these things to reach more than a billion
people around the world. And because we'd done that with the core Facebook experience. And I think that there's two skills there, there's sort of the building
the social experience and then there's the
helping to ramp up a network around that. And that I think is
also a core competence. I don't know what would
have happened with Instagram if we hadn't bought it. I don't think it's guaranteed
that it would have grown to be as big as it is. – Should I assume, 'cause I'm a nerd when it comes to watching business behavior, that much like what you're
doing with metaverse now, which I think is the macro move of that, and that in between now
and that scaled world, the companies that have
the kernels that do best in the attention graph, whether
that's in the metaverse, video, picture, that will
always be a core focus.
– Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's a key
thing with this rebrand to Meta is it's not like now we're
not focused on social media. That's going to be the bread
and butter of what we do. That's the core thing. And our work to build the metaverse encompasses both building
social experiences and building these future
platforms like VR and AR. It's gotta be both. We have to weave all of
these new technologies through these social apps, 'cause you want to be able
to jump into the metaverse and a 3D experience from
your Instagram feed. So you see your friend at a concert, we showed this as part of
the keynote presentation, and just dive in and maybe
be a hologram at the concert.
But a lot of the discovery around that is going to happen through
the core social platforms. So yeah, that's gonna
continue to be a focus. We're going to keep on focusing
on growing and building apps and adding more social
mechanics around that. I think there's a lot
more to invent there. And then I think that there's
this next set of platforms, where one of the things that I reflect on a lot is that social media kind of grew up with the smartphone. Facebook, I started it in 2004. I think Apple was probably
already working on their iPhone designed by then. It came out in 2007. We didn't really get to shape
what the smartphone was.
We built a lot of the most
used experiences for it, but it grew at the same time. And because of that, I feel like the smartphone
sort of grew in a way that it's somewhat limiting
in terms of the type of social experiences that you could have. I feel like there's a lot of things that I would love to
build that we can't build because we're kind of
constrained into this little rectangle and policies
that some other company's set. So that's part of, for me, why I have so much
passionate about helping to bring about this next platform shift and accelerating it because
I think the sooner we get to virtual and augmented reality, the better, the more magical these social
experiences are gonna be.
And I just think our platforms should be designed around people, interacting with each other. And that's like how we
process the world as people. And that's just not how
phones are designed. They're designed around apps today. But I think, going back
to your first question about NFTs and Web 3.0, I think the atomic unit in the metaverse is going to be about you and your stuff and your friends and your connection. So you're gonna have your avatar and you're gonna have
your digital clothing and your digital tools. And unlike apps today
that are all designed to be a little bit siloed, and you have to do all this extra work to get them to work Together, in the metaverse, I think
it's going to be fundamentally more interoperable where
your fundamental experiences that you are embodied in your identity, your digital avatar, all your stuff.
And I think as a user of this, your natural expectation is going to be that you can bring all your stuff in between all these
experiences very seamlessly. So I think that that's
going to be really exciting. And I just want to help bring that about as soon as possible. – Mark, question I've
been dying to ask you. When you first look, you probably given, and maybe I'm making assumptions, so you'll speak to it.
Obviously there was that
2017 wave with CryptoKitties and we started seeing
that early wave of NFTs. That was like the thing that, Punks did not hit my radar, but CryptoKitties did in '17. And obviously now this
has been the year of NFTs, the way we know them,
whether it's Bored Ape, what I do with VeeFriends, obviously Punks and Cool Cats,
many, many, many projects. One of the reasons it was very easy for me when I really dug in late last year to believe in this was actually because of Farmville on Facebook.
There was two things that
happened to me during that year. Farmville on Facebook. Oh my God, People are
buying these digital sheep because they want the social
currency to show their friends they're good at it. And then Ze Frank. I don't know if you remember Ze Frank. – Yeah, uh huh. Ze Franks was one of the
first video bloggers. He had people buy virtual
ducks as little tip jars and have their name hover over it. And those were the first times I was like, oh my God, people are going
to buy virtual things, virtual currency. In my book, Thank you Economy, I talk a lot about virtual
currency in 2010, '11.
Was it natural for you to believe in what's happening right now with NFTs because of the things like Farmville that happened on your platform? – Well, I've always been
a pretty big believer in virtual goods. So I think from that perspective, yeah. But I think a lot of the magic of NFTs and a lot of the Web 3.0 work is that it's designed in a way to be fundamentally interoperable. So I think that that's
going to be really important because it will help break down the silos between different apps and make it so that all your stuff can be more portable between these different experiences, which I think increasingly is what people are going to expect. I think that that's going to be a big part for creators of making it
really worth investing in because if you're designing a digital good for Farmville and it
only works within there, then like, I dunno.
You get to the point
where most of the people who are going to be building that… – To your point, here
the world we live in now. You're a young kid and you're
in Minecraft or Roblox, you grow up and you
want to go to Fortnight. All that money you
invested is stuck in there. In the world that you're
talking about right now, the Roblox and Minecraft of the future, when you're done with that, you're just gonna trade it
for your Fortnite stuff. You're gonna trade the
Fortnite stuff or sell it. It's all gonna be in that
one global ecosystem. – Yeah, the analogy that
I like to think about is, I like your Knicks hoodie, but imagine if you bought a Jersey and you could only use
it in the sports arena where you bought it.
It's like that would be sort of lame and it would reduce
the value of buying it. Because who's gonna want to buy something if they can only use it in that arena? I mean, some people would, but a fraction of the number of people who would want to buy it if they could use in all
these different places. And then if the amount of
commerce is going to be less than that's gonna attract fewer creators.
So I think having it be more interoperable is going to be key to making
the whole thing so dynamic. – What's interesting about that in a much more interesting
human behavior way is people will wear it, to
your point, it's limiting. What's also interesting is the clout, the equity, the social currency, carries more weight from a
tribalism behavior standpoint in Madison Square Garden, which I'm looking at right now, than it does outside, though it has tremendous value outside. What I'm incredibly interested
in is the following.
Obviously, I don't
remember if it was Twitter, I think it was Twitter, who
did the blue check mark first, The verification. We've now lived through a
decade where verified accounts, following counts, social
equity through visualization. We've seen it with followers
and verified accounts, The extremity of the NFT space
is going to be even greater for what that means.
It's almost like our world
is all about to become the fashion industry because
we communicate so much through what we wear, the digital version of
that is going to have an incredible impact on society. – Oh, totally. I think if we're all
spending a lot more time in the metaverse, then I
think we're going to care a lot about our
representation of our identity and we're going to want different outfits. Maybe everyone except me,
I just wear the same thing. – Did you steal that from Steve Jobs? Mark, hard hitting question. Did you steal wearing
the same thing every day from Steve Jobs? – I don't think so. I just think I was maybe a little lazy and then had some good
articulation of like, oh yeah, this is just about saving mental energy.
But I think, I don't know. It was never really a…. – You know what's funny Mark,
I'll be honest with you. I actually think that's the punchline. You consciously or
subconsciously made that decision to represent yourself. And I think that going digital
is going to be extraordinary. I really do. I really think that people
are grossly underestimating that almost all the
things we've been doing are about to get more
visual, more collateralized, more obvious. I don't think a lot of people realize why they bought a Rolex. I really don't. I don't think a lot of people realize. I don't think I overthink
why, at 45 years old, I look like I'm 13 right now. There's a lot going on in that.
And I think that when it hits digital, it becomes more obvious. I think a lot of people's conversation about what's going on on digital is actually just showing us what we are much more than anything else. And so I think as we go into
the realm of consumerism is insane, when you think
about how much people buy things to communicate,
that going digital and being so in our faces, because so many of these
things sit in our homes where 99% of our social
graph never sees it, that going to a full 100 is fucking crazy. – But I think you're hitting on a number of important pieces here.
First, a lot of people think
about this as kind of commerce. And I think a lot of it is
actually really expression, which is the core social dynamics. So the intersection
between that expression and your identity, and then
the commerce around that, especially if we can get
it to be interoperable so it's a more fluid market, I think is just going
to be a really big deal, a much bigger than I think
people internalized today. The other thing that I
think is really refreshing and insightful to hear you talk about is all the lessons from some
of the previous rounds of development. I hadn't really thought
before you raised it about some of the early
Farmville experiences or some of the stuff from a decade ago.
But I think you're right that there is a clear through line, both between the social
interactions that people have and the types of commerce. Obviously there's more technology now that can make it more interoperable and that can give people
more rights over the goods that they have. And on the AR and VR side, making it so people can
feel a more realistic sense of connection. But I think you're right, that a lot of these concepts
are not fundamentally new. They're sort of the next
iteration on dynamics that are evergreen and that
are just always going to be, and always have been
very important to people in terms of how we connect
and direct with each other. – It's my take on what happened
when you were inventing. I'm like, oh, people
put their kid's school on their back of their windshield to flex. My kid's going to Harvard
and might drop out.
That's what they would do. We've been doing all these same things, digital's just exposing
truths and scaling truths. And I think the new
frontier of 3.0 metaverse is going to take us to a
completely different place that I do think Web 2.0
gave us a slight preview to. – Yeah, I agree. I agree. – Mark, since we only have
a couple more minutes, do you own any NFTs, have
you thought about buying any? I feel like you're going more platforms. Obviously, you as the
executive is platform side, metaverse, that makes so much sense.
It's kind of like leapfrogging. I understand that cold. Especially the hardware-software dynamic that I think you've been
through the last 15 years makes all the sense to me in the world. How about you, the human being? Were you a collectors,
were you a comic book, like did you collect as a kid? – I was pretty into baseball cards. So I had that, maybe a few comic books, but more for entertainment
than collection. The baseball cards, I
was really into that, Especially baseball, I think
is really like the nerds game 'cause it's so. – It's math. You're a nerd, Mark. – It's so mathematic. – Shit, Mark, let's call a spade a spade. But have you jumped into NFT land yet? – I try to use all of this stuff. – By the way, real quick,
I'm sorry to interrupt. I know I've been, I'm excited. I gotta give you this shout out because this is back to the one thing I've always connected with you on, using all this stuff. I don't know if you remember this, but when Chatroulette came out, which obviously had a 45 minutes cycle, because at first it was brilliant, and then it got weird real fast.
Literally the first night
I had multiple people take screenshots because
I was early on fan pages and you were on my fan page on Facebook and people connected on interests and you were literally there and Facebook was already a real company and you were like running a big company and sure enough, at very
late into the night, you are literally clicking
around meeting people randomly. A, do you remember that? – I feel like you gotta
use the stuff firsthand. It's tough to just have
someone explain to you or write a presentation
about what it's like. I've had some pretty funny
experiences over the years trying to use different social products. Probably one of the
funnier ones I think is at some point I decided that
I really need to understand how dating apps worked .
At this point, I had been
dating Priscilla for a long time or we may have even been married already. So it was like, look,
Priscilla, just so you know, I'm going to sign up for some dating apps and we can do this together. – Mark, somebody connecting
with the Zuck on Tinder is the greatest thing
I could ever imagine. – Well, I think I was on one, I think it was called Coffee Meets bagel. They give you one match a day. And I got this match and
it was Priscilla's friend and she was having dinner
with her the next night. And I was like, all right. Priscilla, just so you know,
like this came up, heads up. But look, I just believe that
if you want to be in the game building stuff, you really
should remain curious and keep using all of this. So yeah, on all the crypto work, I try to be involved and experience that. I think that there's a lot of
parts of the experience today that are still pretty early.
I hesitate to say something
pejorative like broken, because I think it's, I have much more of the attitude of, it's just not as great yet
as it will be in the future. – That's for damn sure. Some people, they look at
something and they're like, oh, this isn't good. But I think part of the
art of the whole thing is just figuring out when
something is going to be awesome. – Mark, they're not historians. Of course, Web 3.0 doesn't
work as well as Web 2.0 15 years later. Like shopping carts in 1996 took three minutes to buy something. People forget that. People forget the creech to
even get on the internet, like people forget and
they're not historians. And I think that's where they can learn. Mark, thank you so much for your time. I know you're busy. I appreciate you being on the podcast. – Happy to do it.
All right, catch you soon..