Curing All Human Diseases & the Future of Health & Technology | Mark Zuckerberg & Dr. Priscilla Chan

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today are Mark Zuckerberg and Dr Priscilla Chan Mark Zuckerberg as everybody knows founded the company Facebook he is now the CEO of meta which includes Facebook Instagram WhatsApp and other technology platforms Dr Priscilla Chan graduated from Harvard and went on to do her medical degree at the University of California San Francisco Mark Zuckerberg and Dr Priscilla Chan are married and the co-founders of the czi or Chan Zuckerberg initiative a philanthropic organization whose State goal is to cure all human diseases the Chan zukerberg initiative is accomplishing that by providing critical funding not available elsewhere as well as a novel framework for discovery of the basic functioning of cells Catal logging all the different human cell types as well as providing AI or artificial intelligence platforms to mine all of that data to discover new Pathways and cures for all human diseases the first hour of today's discussion is held with both Dr Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg during which we discuss the czi and what it really means to try and cure all human diseases we talk about the motivational backbone for the czi that extends well into each of their personal histories indeed you'll learn quite a lot about Dr Priscilla Chan who has I must say an absolutely incredible family story leading up to her role as a physician and her motivations for the czi and Beyond and you'll learn from Mark how he's bringing an engineering and AI perspective to the discovery of new cures for human disease the second half of today's discussion is just between Mark Zuckerberg and me during which we discuss various meta platforms including of course social media platforms and their effects on Mental Health in children and adults we also discuss VR virtual reality as well as augmented and mixed reality and we discuss AI artificial intelligence and how it stands to transform not just our online experiences with social media and other Technologies but how it stands to potentially transform every aspect of everyday life before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the SP sponsor of today's podcast our first sponsor is eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before in this podcast about the fact that getting a great night's sleep really is the foundation of mental health physical health and performance one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3° and in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3° with eight sleep you can program the temperature of your sleeping environment in the beginning middle and end of your night it has a number of other features like tracking the amount of rapid eye movement and slow wave sleep that you get things that are essential to really dialing in the perfect night sleep for you I've been sleeping on an eight Sleep mattress cover for well over 2 years now and it has greatly improved my sleep I fall asleep far more quickly I wake up far less often in the middle of the night and I wake up feeling far more refreshed than I ever did prior to using an eightsleep mattress cover if you'd like to try eightsleep you can go to 8sleep.com huberman to save $150 off their pod 3 cover eights sleep 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I'm sweating a lot in order to make sure that I replace those electrolytes if you'd like to try element you can go to drink lm.com huberman to get a free sample pack with your purchase again that's drink LM nt.com huberman I'm pleased to announce that we will be hosting four live events in Australia Each of which is entitled The Brain body contract during which I will share science and science related tools for mental health physical health and performance there will also be a live question and answer session we have limited tickets still available for the event in Melbourne on February 10th as well as the event in Brisbane on February 24th our event in Sydney at the Sydney Opera house sold out very quickly so as a consequence we've now scheduled a second event in Sydney at the aware super theater on February 18th to access tickets to any of these events you can go to huberman lab.com events and use the code huberman at checkout I hope to see you there and as always thank you for your interest in science and now for my discussion with Mark Zuckerberg and Dr Priscilla Chan Priscilla Mark so great to meet you and thank you for having me here in your home oh thanks for having us on the podcast yeah like to talk about the czi the Chan Zuckerberg initiative I learned about this a few years ago when my lab was and still is now at Stanford as a very exciting philanthropic effort that has a truly big mission I can't imagine a bigger mission so maybe you could tell us what that big mission is and then we can get into some of the mechanics of how that big mission can become a reality so uh like you're mentioning in 2015 um we launched the Chan Zuckerberg initiative and what we were hoping to do at CCI was think about how do we build a better future for everyone and looking for ways where we can contribute the resources that we have to bring philanthropically and the experience es that Mark and I have had for me as a physician and educator for Mark as an engineer and then our ability to bring teams together to build Builders um you know Mark has uh been a builder throughout his career and what could we do if we actually put together a team to build tools um do great science and So within our science portfolio we've really been focused on what uh some people think is either an incredibly audacious goal or a inevitable goal but I think about it as something that will happen if we sort of continue focusing on it which is to be able to cure prevent or manage all Disease by the end of the century all disease all disease so that's important right and a lot of times people ask like which disease and the whole point is that there is not one disease and it's really about taking a step back uh to where I always found the most hope as a physician which is new discoveries and new opportunities and new ways of understanding how to keep people well come from basic science so our strategy at czi is really to build tools fund science um change the way basic scientists can see the world and how they can move quickly in their discoveries and so that's what we launched in uh 2015 we we do work in three ways we uh fund great scientists we uh build tools uh right now software tools to help move science along uh and make it easier for scientists to do their work and we do science um you mentioned Stanford being an important pillar for our science work we've built uh what we call bioh Hubs institutes where teams can take on Grand challenges to do work that wouldn't be possible in a single lab or within a single discipline and our first biohub was launched in San Francisco Isco uh collaboration between Stanford UC Berkeley and UCSF amazing um curing all diseases uh implies that there will either be a ton of Knowledge gleaned from this effort which I'm certain there will be and there already has been we can talk about some of those early successes in a moment but it also sort of implies that if we can understand some basic operations of diseases and cells that transcend autism Huntington's Parkinson's cancer and any other disease that uh perhaps there are some core principles that would make the big mission a real reality so to speak um what I'm basically saying is um how are you attacking this my belief is that the cell sits at the center of all discussion about disease um given that our body is made up of of cells and different types of cells so maybe you could um just illuminate for us a little bit of what the cell is in your mind as it relates to disease and how one goes about understanding disease in the context of cells because ultimately that's what we're made up of yeah well let's let's get to the cell thing in a moment but just to even taking a step back from that you know we don't think that it's czi that we're going to cure prevent or manage all diseases the goal is to to basically give the scientific community and scientists around the world the tools to accelerate the pace of Science and now we we spent a lot of time when we were getting started with this looking at the history of Science and trying to understand the trends and and how they pled out over time and if you look over the this very long-term Arc most large scale discoveries are preceded by the invention of a new tool or a new way to see something and it's not just in biology right it's like having a telescope um you know came before a lot of um discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics um but similarly you know the microscope and um and and just different ways to observe things or different platforms like the ability to do vaccines preceded the ability to kind of cure a lot of different things um so this is sort of the engineering part that you were talking about about building tools we we view our goal is to try to bring together some scientific and Engineering knowledge to build tools that empower the whole field um and that's that's sort of the Big Arc and and a lot of the things that we're focused on including the the work in in single cell and and cell understanding which um you know you can you can jump in and get into that if you want but yeah I think I think we generally agree with the premise that if you want to understand the stuff from first principles um you know people study organs a lot right they like they study kind of how things present across the body but there's not a very widespread understanding of how kind of each cell operates and this is sort of a big part of you know some of the initial work that we tried to do on the human cell Atlas and understanding what are the different cells and um and there there's a bunch more work that we want to do to carry that forward but um but overall I think when we think about the next 10 years here of this long Arc to to try to empower the community to to um be able to cure prevent or or manage all diseases we want that we think that the next 10 years should really be primarily about being able to measure and observe more things in in human biology there are a lot of limits to that it's like you want to look at something through a microscope you can't usually see living tissues because it's hard to you know see through skin or things like that so there there a lot of different techniques um that will help us observe different things and this is sort of where the engineering background comes in a bit because I mean it's when I think about this is from the perspective of like how you'd write code or something you know the idea of like trying to debug or fix a code base but not be able to like step through the code line by line it's like never not going to happen right and at the at the beginning of any big project that we do um at meta you know we like to spend a bunch of the time upfront just trying to instrument things and understand you what are we going to look at and how are we going to measure things before um so we know we're making progress and know what to optimize and this is such a long-term Journey that and we think that it actually makes sense to take the next 10 years to build those kind of tools um for biology and understanding um just how the human body works in action and a big part of that is is cells I don't know do you want to jump and talk talk about some of the efforts could I just um interrupt briefly and just ask about the the different um the different intervention so to speak um that czi is is in a unique position to to bring to the quest to cure all diseases so I can think of I mean I know as a scientist that um money is necessary but not sufficient right like when you have money you can hire more people you can try different things so that that's critical but a lot of philanthropy includes money um the other component is you know you want to be able to see things as you pointed out um so you want to know that normal disease process like what what is a healthy cell what's a diseased cell are cells constantly being bombarded with with challenges and then repairing those and then what we call cancer is just kind of the runaway train of those challenges not being met by the cell itself or something like that um so better Imaging tools and then um it sounds like there's not just a a hardware component but a software component this is where AI comes in so maybe we can at some point uh we can break this up into to three different Avenues one is understanding disease processes and healthy processes we'll lump those together then there's Hardware so microscopes lenses digital deconvolution ways of seeing things in Bolder relief and more more more uh precision and then there's how to manage all the data and then I love the idea that maybe AI could do what human brains can't do alone they manage understanding of the data because it's one thing to organize data it's another to say oh you know you this as you point out in the analogy with code that this particular Gene and that particular Gene are potentially interesting where as a human being would never make that potential connection that yeah so you know the tools that czi can bring to the table we we fund science like you're talking about and we try to uh there's lots of ways to fund science and just to be clear you know what we fund is a tiny fraction of what the NIH funds for instance so you guys have been generous enough that it's uh it definitely um holds weight to NIH uh nih's contribution yeah and but I think it every every funer has its own role in the ecosystem and for us it's really how do we incentivize new points of view how do we incentivize collaboration how do we incentivize open science and so a lot of our grants include um inviting people to look in look at different fields our first Neuroscience um RFA was uh aimed towards incentivizing people from different backgrounds immunologists microbiologists to come and look at how our nervous system system works and how to keep it healthy or um we uh ask that our grantees participate in the pre-print movement to accelerate the rate of sharing knowledge and actually others being able to build upon science so that's the funding that we do um in terms of building um we we build software and Hardware um like you mentioned we put together teams that uh can build tools that are more durable and scalable um than someone in a single lab might be incentivized to do there's a ton of great ideas and uh nowadays most scientists can tinker and build something useful for their lab but it's really hard for them to be able to share uh that tool sometimes beyond their own laptop or forget you know the next Lab over or across the globe so we partner with Scientists to see like what is useful what kinds of tools you know in imaging napari like it's there's it's a useful image annotation tool um that is born from an open source community and how can we contribute to that or a Cell by Gene which uh works on single cell data sets and how can we make it build a useful tool so that scientists can share data sets analyze their own and contribute to a larger um Corpus of information so we have software teams that are building collaborating with Scientists to make sure that we're building easy to use durable translatable tools across the scientific community in the areas that we work in um we also have institutes this is where the Imaging uh work comes in where you know we are proud owners of an electron microscope right now um it it's going to be installed um at our Imaging Institute and that will really contribute to a way where we can sew work differently but we can the more Hardware need does need to be developed you know we're partnering with a fantastic scientists um in the biohub network to build a a mini phase plate to increase to align the electrons through these um through the electron microscope to be able to increase the resolution so we can see in sharper detail to uh so there's a lot of innovative work within the network that's happening um and uh these institutes have grand challenges that they're working on um back to your question about cells cells are just the smallest unit that are alive and um are your body all of our bodies have many many many cells there's you know some estimate of like 37 trillion cells different cells in your body and what are they all doing and how do what do they look like when they're Health when you're healthy what do they look like when you're sick and um where we're at right now with you know our understanding of cells and what happens when you get sick is basically we have we we've gotten pretty good at from the Human Genome Project looking at how different mutations in your genetic code lead for you to be more susceptible to get sick or directly cause you to get sick so we go from a mutation in your DNA to wow you now have Huntington's disease for instance and there's a lot that happens in the middle and that's one of the questions that we're going after after at at czi is what actually happens so an analogy that I used I like to use to share with my friends is right now say we have a recipe for a cake we know there's a typo in the recipe and then the cake is awful that's all we know we don't know how the chef interprets the typo we don't know what happens in the oven and we don't actually H know sort of how it's exactly connected to how the cake didn't turn out how you were had expected a lot of that um is unknown but we can actually systematically try to break this down and one segment of that Journey that we're looking at is how that mutation gets translated and acted upon in your cells and all of your cells have what's called mRNA mRNA are the actual instructions that are taken from the DNA and what our work in single cell is looking at how how every cell in your body is actually interpreting your DNA slightly differently and what happens when healthy cells are interpreting the DNA instructions and when six cells are interpreting those directions and that is a ton of data I just told you there's 37 trillion cells there's different uh large in sets of mRNA in each cell but the work that we've been funding is looking at how um first of all Gathering that information um we've been um incredibly lucky to be part of a very fast moving um field where we've gone from in 2017 funding some methods work to now having really not complete but nearly complete atlases of how the human body works how flies work how mice work uh at the Single Cell level and being able to then try to piece together like how does that all come together and when your health and when you're sick and the neat thing about the sort of inflection point where we're at in AI is that I can't look at this data and make sense of it there's just too much of it and biology is complex human bodies are complex we need this much information but the use of large language models can help us actually look at that data and gain insights look at what trends are consistent with health and what trends are um are unsuspected and eventually our hope uh through uh the use of these data sets that we've helped curate in the application of large language models is to be able to formulate a virtual cell a cell that's completely um uh built off of the data sets of what we know about the human body but allows us to manipulate and learn faster and try new things um to help move science and then uh medicine a do you think we've cataloged the total number of different cell types like you know every week I look at Great journals like cell Nature and Science and for instance I saw recently that um using single cell sequencing they've um categorized 18 plus different types of fat cells we always think of like a fat cell versus a muscle cell so so now you've got 18 types um each one is going to express many many different genes and rnas mrnas and perhaps the uh one of them is responsible for you know what we see in you know Advanced type two diabetes or um in other forms of obesity or where people can't lay down fat cells which turns out to be Ju Just as detrimental in those extreme cases so now you've got all these lists of genes but um I always thought of single cell sequencing as necessary but not sufficient right you need the information but it doesn't resolve the problem and I think of it more of a as a hypothesis generating experiment okay so you have all these gen and you could say wow this Gene is particularly elevated in the um diabetics cell type of let's say one of these fat cells or muscle cells for that matter um whereas it's not in non-diabetics so then of the millions of different cells maybe only five of them differ dramatically M so then you you generate a hypothesis oh it's the ones that differ dramatically that are important but maybe one of those genes when it's only you know 50% ch ched has a huge effect because of some Network biology effect and so I guess what I'm trying to um get to here is you know how does one meet that challenge and can AI help resolve that challenge by essentially placing those lists of genes into a a you know 10,000 hypothesis because I'll tell you that the graduate students in postdocs in my lab get a chance to test one hypothesis at a time and that's really the challenge let alone one lab and um so for those that are listening to this and you know hopefully it's not getting outside the scope of of kind of like standard understanding or the understanding we've generated here but what I'm basically saying is you have to pick at some point more data always sounds great but then how how do you decide what to test so no we don't know all the cell types um I think one of the one thing that was really exciting when we first launched this work was you know cystic fibrosis like cystic fibrosis is caused by mutation and CFT that's pretty well known it affects a certain channel that makes it hard for mucus to be cleared that's the basics of cystic fibrosis when I went to medical school it was taught as fact so their lungs fill up with fluid these are people carrying around sacks of fluid filling up I've known people like I've worked with people like them they have to literally dump the fluid out ex they can't run or do intense exercise life is shorter life is shorter and when we applied single cell methodologies to the lungs they discovered an entirely new cell type that actually is affected by a mutation and the CF mutation and cystic fibrosis mutation that actually changes the Paradigm of how we think about cystic fibrosis amazing just unknown so I don't think we know um all the cell types I think we'll continue to discover them and we'll continue to discover new relationships between cell and disease which leads me to the second example I want to bring up is um this large data set that the entire scientific Community has built around single cell is starting to allow us to say this mutation where is it expressed what types of cell types it's expressed in and um we actually have built a tool at czi called cell by Gene where you can put in the mutation that you're interested in and it gives you a heat map of cross cell types of which cell types are expressing the uh Gene that you're interested in and so then you can start looking at okay if I look at Gene X and I know it's related to heart disease but if you look at the heat map it's also spiking in the pancreas that allows you to generate a hypothesis why um and what happens when this Gene is mutated and in your in the function of your pancreas really exciting way to look and ask questions differently um and you can also Imagine a world where if uh you're trying to develop a therapy a drug and you're your the goal is to treat the function in the heart but you know that it's also really active in in the pancreas again so what is there going to be an unexpect Ed side effect that you should think about as you're bringing uh this drug to clinical trials so I it's an incredibly exciting tool and one that's only going to get better as we get more and more sophisticated ways to analyze the data I must say I love that because if I look at the advances in Neuroscience over the last 15 years most of them um did necessarily come from looking at the nervous system came from the understanding that the immune system impacts the brain everyone prior to that talked about the brain as immune privilege Ed organ what you just said also Bridges and uh the Divide between single cells organs and systems right because ultimately cells make up organs organs make up systems and they're all talking to one another and everyone nowadays is familiar with like gut brain Axis or the the microbiome being so important but rarely is the um the discussion between organs um discussed so to speak so um I think it's wonderful so that that tool was generated by CCI or CCI funded that tool so we built that we built that you built it so is it built by meta is does meta have a hand C has its own Engineers got it they're completely different organizations incredible and um and so a graduate student or postto who's interested in a particular mutation could put this mutation into this database um that graduate student or postto might be in a laboratory known for working on heart but suddenly find that they're collaborating with other scientists that work on the pancreas yeah um which also is wonderful um because it Bridges The Divide between these Fields fields are so siloed in science not just different buildings but they people rarely talk unless things like this are happening I mean the graduate student is someone that we want to empower because one they're the future of science as you know and um within cell by Gene if you put in the gene you're interested in and it shows you the heat map we also will pull up like the most relevant papers to that Gene and so like read these things fantastic as we all know quality nutrition influences of course our physical health but also our mental health and our cognitive functioning our memory our ability to learn new things and to focus and we know that one of the most important features of highquality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body including the gut microbiome now I like most everybody try to get optimal nutrition from Whole Foods ideally mostly from minimally processed or nonprocessed Foods however one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough servings of high quality fruits and vegetables per day as well as fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables that's why way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast I started drinking ag1 and so I'm delighted that ag1 is sponsoring the huberman Lab podcast the reason I started taking ag1 and the reason I still drink ag1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins minerals probiotics and fiber to ensure optimal mental health physical health and performance if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer I I just think going back to your question from before I mean are there going to be more cell types that get discovered I mean I I assume so right I mean no catalog of the stuff is ever you know doesn't seem like we're ever done right we keep on finding more but I think that that gets to one of the things that I think are the strengths of of U modern llms is the ability to kind of Imagine different states that things can be in so from all the work that we've done and funded on the on the human cell atlas there is a large Corpus of data that you can now train a a kind of large scale model on and one of the things that we're doing um at CCI which I think is pretty exciting is building um what we think is one of the largest nonprofit Life Sciences AI clusters right it's like a you know on the order of a thousand gpus and you know it's larger than what most people have access to in Academia that you can do like serious engineering work on and um and you know by basically training a model with all of the human cell out lless data and and a bunch of other um inputs as well we we think you'll be able to basically imagine all of the different types of cells and all the different states that they can be in and when they're healthy and diseased and how they'll interact with um you know different um you know interact with each other interact with different potential drugs but I mean I think the state of llms I think this is where it's it's helpful to understand you know have a good understanding and be grounded in like the modern state of AI I mean these things are not foolproof right I mean one of the flaws of modern llms is they hallucinate right so the question is how do you make it so that that can be an advantage rather than a disadvantage and I think the way that it ends up being an advantage is when they help you imagine a bunch of states that somethingone could be in but then you you know as the scientist or engineer go and validate that those are true whether they're you know solutions to how a protein can be folded or possible states that a cell could be in when it's interacting with other things but you know we're not yet at the state with AI that you can just take the outputs of these things as like as gospel and run from there but they are very good I think as you said hypothesis generators or um possible solution generators that then you can go validate so I that's a very powerful um thing that we can basically you know building on the first five years of science work around the human cell outlas and all the data that's been built out carry that forward into something that I think is going to be a very novel tool going forward um and that's the type of thing that I think we're set up to do well I mean you you all you had this exchange a little while back about um you know funding levels and how CCI is you know just sort of a drop in the in the in the bucket compared to NIH but I think we we have this the thing that I think we can do that's different is um funding some of these longer term bigger projects that it is hard to Galvanize the and pull together the energy to do that you it's a lot of what um most science funding is is like relatively small projects that are exploring things over relatively short time Horizons and one of the things that we try to do is is like build these tools over you know 5 10 15 year periods they're often projects that require you know hundreds of millions of dollars of funding and world-class engineering teams and infrastructure to do and that I think is a pretty cool contribution to the field that um that I think is there aren't as many other folks who are who are doing that kind of thing but that's one of the reasons why I'm personally excited about the virtual cell stuff cuz it just it's like this perfect intersection of all the stuff that we've done and single cell the previous um collaborations that we've done with the field and you know bringing together the the um industry and and AI expertise around this yeah I completely agree that the model of uh science that you're put together with CCI is isn't just unique from an age but it's extremely important the um independent investigator model is what's Driven the progression of Science in this country and to some extent in northern Europe for the last 100 years and it's um wonderful um on the one hand because it allows for that image we have of a scientist kind of tinkering away or the people in their lab and then like the ureas um and that hopefully translates to better human health uh but I think in my opinion we've moved past that model as the most effective model or the only model that should be explored yeah I just think it's a balance you want you want that but you want to empower those people I think that that's these tools ow those fol and there are mechanisms to do that like NIH but but it's hard um to do collaborative science it's um it's sort of interesting that we're sitting here not far for because I grew up right near here as well I'm not far from the garage model of tech right the the H backer model um not far from here at all um and the idea was you know the tinkerer in the garage the inventor and then people often forget that to implement all the Technologies they discovered took enormous factories and warehous so um you know there's there's a similarity there to Facebook meta Etc but I think in science we imagine that the scientists alone in their laboratory and those Eureka moments but I think nowadays that the big questions really require um extensive collaboration and certainly tool development um and one of the tools that you keep coming back to is these llms these large language models and um maybe you could just elaborate for for those that aren't familiar you know what are what is a large language model um uh it for the the the uninformed what is it um and what does it allow uh what does it allow us to do that um you know different types of other types of AI don't allow um or more importantly perhaps what does it allow us to do that a bunch of really smart people highly informed in a given area of science staring at the data what what can I do that they can't do sure so I think a lot of the progression of machine learning has been about building systems neural networks or otherwise that can basically make sense and find patterns in larger and larger amounts of data and there was a breakthrough a number of years back um that some folks at Google actually made called this Transformer model architecture and it was this huge breakthrough because before then there was somewhat of a cap where you know if you fed more data into a neural network past some some point it didn't really glean more insights from it whereas Transformers just you we haven't seen the of how big that can scale to yet I mean I think that there's a chance that we run into some someing but so never ASM tootes we haven't observed it yet but we just haven't built big enough systems yet so I would guess that um I don't know I think this is actually one of the big questions in in the AI field today is basically are Transformers and are the current model architecture sufficient and if you just build larger and larger clusters do you eventually get something that's like human intelligence or super intelligence or um is there some kind of fundamental limit to this architecture that we just haven't reached yet and once we we kind of get a little bit further in building them out then we'll reach that and then we'll need a few more leaps before we get to you know the the level of of um AI that I think will unlock you know a ton of really futuristic and amazing things but there's no doubt that even just being able to process the amount of data that we can now with this model architecture um has unlocked a lot of new use cases and the reason why they're called large language models is because one of the first uses of them is um people basically feed in all of the language from uh basically the worldwide web and you can think about them as basically prediction machines so if you you you fit in um you put in a prompt and it can basically you know predict a version of what should come next so you know you you like type in a headline for a news story and it can kind of predict what it thinks the story should be or you could train it so that it could be a chatbot right okay if if you're prompted with this question you can get um this response but one of the interesting things is it turns out that there's actually nothing specific to using human language in it so if instead of feeding it human language if you use that model architecture for for a network and instead you feed it all of the human cell outlas data then if you prompt it with a state of a cell it can spit out um different versions of of like what you know how that cell can interact or different states that the cell could be an nexted when it interacts with different things does it have to take a genetics class so for instance if you give it a bunch of genetics data do you have to say hey by the way and then you give it a genetics class so it understands that you know you got DNA RNA mRNA and proteins I think that the basic the basic nature of all these machine learning techniques is they're they're basically pattern recognition systems so they're these like very deep statistical machines um that are very efficient at finding patterns um so it's it's not actually you you don't need to teach a a language model that's trying to you know speak a language um you know a lot of specific things about that language either you just feed it in a bunch of examples and then you know let's say you teach it about something um in English but then you also give it a bunch of examples of people speaking Italian um it'll actually be able to explain the thing that it learned in English and Italian right even though so the crossover and just the pattern recognition um is the thing that is pretty profound and Powerful about this but it really does apply to a lot of different things another example in the scientific Community um has been the work that Alpha fold you know that that basically the um the folks at Deep Mind have done on on protein folding um it's you know just basically a lot of the the same model architecture but instead of language there they fold they they kind of fed in all of these the protein data and you can give it a state and it can spit out solution to how those proteins get folded so it's very powerful I don't think we know yet as an industry what the um what the natural limits of it are and that that's one of the things that's pretty exciting about the current state but um it certainly allows you to solve problems that just weren't solved with the generation of machine learning that came before it sounds like czi is moving a lot of work that was just done in vitro in dishes um and in Vivo in um living organisms model organisms or humans to in silico as we say so um do you foree a future where a lot of biomedical research certainly the the work of CCI um included is done by machines I mean obviously it's much lower cost um and you can run millions of experiments which of course is not to say that humans are not going to be involved um but I love the idea that we can run experiments in silico um and Mass I I think the ENC silic experiments are going to be incredibly helpful to test things quickly to cheaply and to um to just unleash a lot of creativity I do think you need to be very careful about making sure it still translates and matches this uh humans um you know one thing that's funny in uh basic Sciences we've basically cured every single disease in mice like mice have uh we we know what's going on when they have a number of diseases because they're where they're used as a model organism but they are not humans and a lot of times that research is relevant but not directly one toone translatable to humans so you just have to be really careful about making sure that it actually works for humans sounds like what czi is doing is actually creating a new field like I as I'm hearing all of this I'm thinking okay this this transcends Immunology Department you know cardiothoracic surgery I mean Neuroscience I mean the idea of of a new field where you certainly embrace the realities of universities and Laboratories because that's where most of the work that your funding is done is that right it's okay so um maybe we need to think about what it means to do science differently and I think that's one of the things that's most exciting um along those lines it seems that bringing together a lot of different types of people different uh major institutions um is going to be especially important so I know that the initial CCI biohub um gratefully um included Stanford um we'll put that first in the list um but also UCSF yeah forgive me they many friends at UCSF and also Berkeley um but there are now some additional institutions involved so maybe you could talk about that and what motivated the decision to Branch outside the Bay Area and um and why you selected those particular additional institutions to be included well I mean I'll I'll just say part of a big part of why we wanted to create additional biohub is we were just so impressed by the work that the folks who are running the first biohub did yeah um and I also think and you should walk through the the uh work of the Chicago biohub and the New York biohub that we just announced but I think it's actually an interesting set of examples that balance um the limits of what you want to do with like physical material engineering and and um and and where things are purely biological because the Chicago team is really building more sensors to be able to understand what's going on in your body but that's more of like a physical kind of engineering challenge whereas the the New York team we basically talk about this as like a cellular endoscope of being able to have like an immune cell or something that can go and understand um you know what is like what's a thing that's going on in your body but it's not like a physical piece of Hardware it's a cell that you can basically um you know have have um uh just go report out on on on different things that are happening inside the body so so making to sell the microscope totally and and then and then eventually actually being able to act on it but I mean but you should you should go into more detail on all this so a core principle of how we think about bioh hubs it is that it has to be um when we invited proposals it has to be at least three institutions um so really breaking down the barrier of a single University often times asking for the people designing the research aim to come from all different backgrounds um and to explain why that the problem that they want to solve uh requires interdisciplinary in interuniversity institution collaboration to actually make happen um we just put that request for proposal out there U with our San Francisco biohub as an example where they've done incredible work in single cell biology and infectious disease and we got I I want to say like 57 proposals from over 150 institutions a lot of ideas came together and you know we are so so excited that we've been able to launch Chicago and New York um Chicago is a collaboration between uiu uh University of Illinois ARA champagne and University of Chicago and Northwestern um and if I obviously these universities are multifaceted but if I were to sort of describe them by their like stereotypical strength Northwestern has an critical medical um uh system and hospital system University of Chicago brings to uh the table incredible basic science strengths uh University of Illinois is a Computing Powerhouse and so they came together and proposed that they were going to start thinking about cells and in tissue um so that one of the one of the layers that you just alluded to so how do the cells that we know behave and act differently when they come together as a tissue and the fir one of the first tissues that they're starting with is skin so they've been already been able to um as a collaboration under the leadership of sha Kelly design um AR uh engineered skin tissue the architecture looks the same as what's in you and I and what they've done is built these th super super thin sensors and they embed these sensors um throughout the layers of this engineered tissue and they read out the data they want to see how these cells what these cells are secreting how these cells talk to each other and what happens when these cells get inflamed um inflammation is an incredibly important process that drives 50% of all deaths um and so this is another sort of disease agnostic approach we want to understand inflammation and they're going to get a ton of information out from these sensors that tell you what H happens when something goes ay cuz right now we can say like when you have an allergic reaction your skin gets red and puffy what is the earliest signal of that and these sensors can look at the behaviors of these cells over time and then you can apply a large language model to look at the earliest statistically significant changes that can allow you to intervene um as early as possible so that that's what Chicago's doing they're starting in the um uh skin cells they're also looking at the neuromuscular Junction um which is the connection between where a neuron uh attaches to a muscle and tells the muscle how to behave super important in things like ALS but also in aging um the slowed transmission of information across that neuromuscular Junction is what causes old people to fall their brain cannot trigger their muscles to react fast enough and so we want to be able to embed these sensors to understand how these different um uh interconnected systems within our bodies work work together in New York uh they're doing uh a related uh but uh equally exciting project where they're um engineering individual cells to be able to um go in and identify changes in uh in a human body so um what they'll do is uh they're calling us it's wild I mean I love it I mean it's this is we I don't want to go on a tangent but for those that want to look it up Adaptive Optics you know there's a lot of uh Distortion and interference when you try and look at something really small or really far away and really smart physicists uh figured out well use the interference as part of the microscope make those actually lenses of the microscope we should talk about Imaging separates talk about new yor it's extremely clever along those lines it's not intuitive but then when you hear it it's like it makes so much sense you know it's not immediately intuitive make the cells that are already can navigate to tissues or embed themselves in tissues be the microscope within that tissue love um the the the way that I explain this to my friends and my family is this is Fantastic Voyage but real life um like we are going into the human body and we're using the immune cells which you know are privileged and already working to keep your body healthy and being able to Target them to examine certain things so like you can engineer an immune cell to go in your body and look inside your coronary arteries and say are these arteries um healthy or their plaques because because plaques lead to blockage which lead to heart attacks um and the cell can then record that information and report it back out that's the first half what the New York biohub is going to do fantastic the second half is can you then engineer the cells to go do something about it can I then tell a different cell immune cell that is able to transport in your body to go in and clean that up in a targeted way and um so I it's incredibly exciting they're going to study things that are sort of immune privilege that your immune system normally doesn't have access to um things like ovarian and pancreatic cancer um they'll also look at a number of neurod degenerative diseases since um the immune system doesn't presently have a ton of access into the nervous system uh but they it's it's both mind-blowing and it feels like sci-fi but science is actually in a place where if you really pushed a group of incredible qualified scientists say could you do this if given the chance the answer is like probably give us enough time the bright team and resources like it's doable yeah I mean it's a it's a 10 to 15E project yeah but it's it's awesome engineered cells yeah I I love the optimism and and the moment you said make the cell the microscope so to speak I was like yes yes and yes it it just makes so much sense what motivated the decision to do the work of of czi um in the context of existing universities as opposed to you know there's still some real estate up in Redwood City where there's a bunch of space to put biotech companies and just hiring people from all all backgrounds and and saying hey you know have at it and and doing this stuff from scratch I mean it's a it's a very interesting decision to do this in the context of an existing framework of like graduate students that need to do the thesis and get a first author paper because there's a whole set of structures within Academia that I think both facilitate but also limit the progression of science you know that independent investigator model that we talked about a little bit earlier it it's so core to the way science has been done this is very different and frankly sounds far more efficient if I'm to be completely honest and um you know we'll see if I renew my NIH funding after saying that but um but I think we all want the same thing we all want to as scientists and and as um you know as humans we want to understand the way we work and we want um healthy um people to persist to be healthy and we want sick people to get healthy I mean that's really ultimately the goal it's not not super complicated it's just hard to do so the teams at the biob are actually um independent of the universities got it so each biohub will probably have in total maybe 50 people working on sort of deep efforts however it's an acknowledgement that not all of the best scientists who can contribute to this area are actually um going to one want to leave a university or want to take on the full-time scope of this project so it's the ab ability to partner with universities um and to have the faculty at all the universities be able to contribute to the overall project um is how the biohub is structured got it but a lot of the way that we're approaching CI is this long-term iterative project to figure out try a bunch of different things figure out which things produce the most interesting results and then double down on those in the next fiveyear push right so we're we just went through this period where we kind of wrapped up the first five years of the science program we tried a lot of different models right all kinds of different things and um it's not that the biohub model we don't think it's like the best or only model but we we found that it was sort of a a a really interesting way to unlock a bunch of collaboration and bring some Technical Resources that allow for this longer term development and it's not something that is widely um being pursued across the rest of the field so we figured okay this is like a an interesting thing that we can that we can help push on but I I mean yeah we do believe in the collaboration um but I I also think that we come at this with you know we don't think that the way that we're pursuing this is like the only way to do this or the way that everyone should do it we're we're pretty aware of you know the um you know what is the rest of the ecosystem and how we can play a unique role in it it feels very synergistic with the way science is already done and also fills in an incredibly important Niche that frankly wasn't filled before um along the lines of implementation so let's say um your large language models combined with imaging tools that um reveal that a particular set of genes um acting in a cluster um I don't know set up an an organ crash let's say the P the pancreas crashes a particular stage of of pancreatic cancer I mean still one of the most deadliest of the of the Cancers and um uh there are others that you certainly wouldn't want to get that's among the the ones you wouldn't want to get the most so you discover that and then and the idea is that okay then um AI reveals some potential drug targets that then bear out in vitro in a dish and in a mouse model um how is the actual implementation of to drug Discovery or even maybe this target is druggable maybe it's not maybe it requires some other approach you know uh laser laser ablation approach or something we we don't know but ultimately is czi going to be involved in the impementation of new Therapeutics is that the idea I less so less so uh that's you know this is where it's important to work in an ecosystem and to know your own limitations like there are groups and startups and companies that take that and bring it to translation very effectively I would say the place where we have a small window into that world is actually our work with rare disease groups um we we have uh through our rare as one portfolio funded Patient Advocates to create um rare disease organizations where patients come together uh and uh actually pull their collective experience uh they build bio Registries Registries of their natural history and they both partner with uh researchers to do the research about their disease and with uh drug developers to uh incentivize drug developers to focus on what they may need for their disease and you know one thing that's important to point out is that rare diseases aren't rare there are over 7,000 rare diseases and uh collectively impact many many individuals and I think the thing that's from a basic science uh perspective the an incredibly fascinating thing about rare diseases is that there are actually Windows to how the body normally should work and so there are often uh mutations that that when uh when genes that were when they are mutated cause very specific diseases but that tell you how the normal biology works as well got it so you discussed basically the the goals major goals in initiatives of the czi for the next say 5 to 10 years um and then beyond that the targets will be explored by biotech companies um they'll grab those targets and and test them and and Implement them there have also I think been a couple cple of teams from the initial biohub that were interested in spinning out ideas right into startups so that's just it's even though it's not a thing that we're going to pursue because I we're a philanthropy um we want to enable the work that gets done to be able to get turned into companies and things that other people go take and and and run towards towards building you know ultimately Therapeutics so that that's that's another Zone but that's just that's not a thing that we're going to do yeah got it um I gather you're both optimists mhm yeah is that part of what brought you together forgive me for switching to a personal question but I love the optimism um that that seems to sit at the root of the czi I will say that we are uh incredibly hopeful people but it it manifests in different ways between the two of us yeah what what do you how would you describe your optimism versus mine it's not a loaded question um I don't know um huh I mean I think I'm more probably technologically optimistic about what can be built and I think you because of your focus as you know an actual doctor um kind of have more of a sense of how that's going to affect actual people in their lives um whereas for me it's like I me a lot of my work it is you know it's like we touch a lot of people around the world um and the scale is sort of immense and I think for you just like it's like being able to improve the lives of individuals whether it's you know students at any of the schools that you've started or any of the stuff that we've supported through the education work which isn't the goal here or you know like just being able to improve people's lives in that way I think is the thing that I've seen you be super passionate about I don't know does that do you agree with that characterization I'm trying I'm trying to yeah I agree with that I think that's very fair and I'm sort of giggling to myself cuz in a day-to-day life as like life Partners our relative optimism comes through as uh Mark just like is overly optimistic about his time management and will get engrossed in interesting ideas I'm late and he's late and I Physicians are very punctual and because he's late I have to channel Mark as an optimist whenever I'm waiting for him that's such a nice way okay I'll I'll start using that I that's what I think when I'm in the driveway with the kids waiting for you I'm like Mark is an optimist um and so his optimism translates to some tardiness whereas I'm a sort of I'm like how does what's how is how is this going to happen like I'm going to open a spreadsheet I'm going to start putting together a plan and like a putting pulling together all the pieces calling people to sort of like bring something to life but it is it's one one of my favorite quotes that is optimists tend to be successful and pessimists tend to be right and yeah I mean I think it's it's true in a lot of different aspects of life right we know who said that did you say that Mark I did I did not abely no I like it I did not invent it um we'll give it to you we'll put it out there just but but I I do think that there's really something to it right I there's like if you're discussing any idea there's all these reasons why it might not work and so I I I think that and those reasons are you know probably true the people who are stating them are you know probably have some validity to it but the question is that is that the most productive way to view the world and you know I think across the board you I think the people who tend to be the most productive and get the most done um you kind of need to be optimistic because if you don't believe that something can get done then why would you go work on it the reason I asked the question is that you know that these days we hear a lot about you know the future is looking so dark in these various ways and um you have children so you have families and um you are a family excuse me and and you also have families independently um that are now merged but um I love the optimism behind the czi because you know you know behind all this there's sort of a set of big statements on the wall one uh the future can be better than the present in terms of treating disease maybe even you said eliminating diseases all diseases I love that optimism um and that there's a tractable path to do it like we're going to put put literally you know money and time and energy and people and technology and AI behind that and so um I have to ask uh was having children um a significant um modifier in terms of your your view of the future like wow like you hear all this Doom and Gloom like what's the future going to be like for them did you sit back and think you know what would it look like if there was a future with no diseases um is that the future we want our children in I mean I I'm voting a big yes so we're not going to we're not going to debate that at all but was having children a sort of an inspiration for the CCI in some way yeah so I think my answer to that um I would dial backwards for me um and I'll just tell a very brief uh story about my family I'm the daughter of Chinese Vietnamese uh refugees um my parents and Grandparents were boat people if you remember people left Vietnam during the war in these small boats into the South China Sea and um the there were stories about how these boats would sink with whole families on them and so my grandparents who both sets of grandparents who knew each other decided that there was a better future out there and they were willing to take risk for it um but they were afraid of losing all of their kids I my dad is one of six my mom is one of 10 and so they decided that there was something out there in this Bleak time and they paired up their kids one from each family and sent them out on these little boats before the internet before cell phones and just said we'll see you on the other side wow and um the kids were between the ages of like you know 10 to 25 so young kids my my mom was a teenager early teen when this happened um and everyone made it and I get to sit here and talk to you so how could I not believe that like better is possible and like I hope that that's in my like epigenetic somewhere and then I carry that on that is a spectacular story isn't that wild it is spectacular how can I be a pessimist with that I love it well and I so appreciate that you became a physician because you're now bringing that optimism and epigenetic understanding and cognitive understanding and emotional understanding to the field of medicine so I'm grateful to um the people that made that decision yeah and then you know when I think you don't re i' I've always known that story but you don't understand how Wild that feels until you have your own child and you're like well I can't even I I refuse to let her use you know glass bottles only or something like that and you're like oh my God like the risk and sort of willing of my grandparents to believe in something bigger and better um is just astounding and it Al our own children sort of give it a sense of urgency again spectacular story and of you're sending knowledge out into the fields of Science and bringing knowledge into the fields of Science and I love this we we'll see on the other side yeah I'm I'm confident that it will all come back well thank you so much for that I um Mark you have the opportunity to talk about did having kids change your world view it's really tough to beat that story it is tough to beat that story and they are also your children so in this case you know you get uh you get um two for the price of one so to speak so having children definitely changes your time Horizon so I that that's one thing is you just like there were all these things that I think we had talked about and for as long as we've known each other that you eventually want to go do but then it's like oh we're having kids we we need to like get on this right so I think there's that was actually of the checklists the baby checklist before the first was like the baby's coming you have to like start czi um truly and like sitting in the hospital delivery room finishing editing the letter that we were going to publish to to announce think that is an exaggeration it was not we really were editing the final draft birth czi before you bir human child well it's it's an incredible initiative I've I've been following it since its Inception and um and it's already been tremendously successful and everyone in the field of science and I have a lot of communication with those folks it feels the same way and and the future is even brighter for it it's clear and thank you for expanding to the Midwest and and New York and um uh we're all very excited to see where all of this goes I share in your optimism you and thank you for your time today thank you thank you a lot more to do I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor insid tracker insid track is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better 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tocom huberman and now for my discussion with Mark Zuckerberg slight shift of topic here you're extremely well known for your role in technology development but by virtue of your personal interests and also where Metate technology interfaces with mental health and physical health you're starting to become synonymous with health whether you realize it or not um part of that is because there's um post footage of you rolling Jiu-Jitsu you wanted Jiu-Jitsu competition recently um you're doing other forms of martial arts water sports including surfing and um and on and on so um you're doing it yourself but maybe we could just start off with technology and get this issue out of the way um first which is that I think many people assume that technology especially technology that involves a a screen excuse me of any kind is going to be detrimental to our health but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case so could you um explain how you see technology um meshing with inhibiting or maybe even promoting physical and mental health sure I mean I think this is a a really important topic it's um you know the research that we've done suggests that it's not like all good or all bad I think how you're using the technology has a big impact on whether it is basically a positive experience for you and even within technology even within social media there's not kind of one type of thing that people do I think at its best you're forming uh meaningful connections with other people and you know there's a lot of research that basically suggests that you know it's it's the relationships that we have and you know friendships that kind of bring the most happiness and in our lives and at some level end up even correlating with living a longer and healthier life because you know that kind of you know grounding that you have in community ends up being important for that so I think that that aspect of social media which is um you know the ability to connect with people to understand what's going on in people's lives have empathy for them um communicate what's going on with your life Express that that's generally positive there there are ways that it can be negative in terms of um bad interactions things like bullying um which we can we can talk about because there's a lot that we've done to basically make sure that that people can be safe from that and give people tools and give kids um the ability to have the right parental controls so their parents can oversee that but that's sort of the interacting with people's side there's another side of of all this which I think of as just like passive consumption which it at its best um It's Entertainment right and entertainment is an important human thing too but I don't think that that has quite the same association with the long-term well-being and health um benefits as being able to help people connect with other people does um and I think at its worst um some of the stuff that we see online um you I think these days a lot of the news is just so relentlessly negative um that it's just hard to you know come away from an experience where you're you know looking at the news for you know half an hour and like feel better about the world so I think that there's a mix on this um I think the more that social media is about connecting with people um and the more that when you're kind of consuming and using um the the media part of social media um to learn about things that kind of enrich you and can provide inspiration or education as opposed to things that um just leave you with a more toxic feeling and that that's sort of the the balance that we try to to get right across our products and think we're pretty aligned with the community because at the end of the day you know I mean people don't want to use a product and come away feeling bad you know there's a lot that people talk about um evaluate a lot of these products in terms of information and utility but I think it's as important when you're designing a product to think about what kind of feeling you're creating with the people who use it right whether that's kind of an aesthetic sense when you're designing Hardware or just kind of like what like what do you what do you make people feel and generally people don't want to feel bad right so I I think when you know that doesn't mean that we want to you know shelter people from bad things that are happening in the world but I I don't really think that you know it's not what people want um you know for us to just be kind of just showing like all this super negative stuff all day long um so we so we work hard on all these different problems you know making sure that we're helping connect people as best as possible helping make sure that we give people good tools um to block people who might be bullying them or harass them or especially for younger folks you know anyone under the age of 16 defaults into an experience where their experience is private we have all these parental tools um so that way you know parents can can kind of understand what what their children is up to are up to in a good balance um you and then on the other side we try to give people tools to understand how they're spending their time um and we try to give people tools so that you know if you're if you're a teen and and you're kind of stuck in some you know Loop of of just looking at type of content will nudge you and say hey you've been looking at content of this type for a while like how about something else and here's here's a bunch of other examples so there were things that you can do to kind of push this in a positive direction but I think it just starts with having a more nuanced view of like this isn't all good and all or all bad and the more that you can make it kind of a positive thing the the better this will be for all the people who use our products that makes really good sense in terms of the negative experience I agree I don't think anyone wants a negative experience in the moment I think we're some people get concerned perhaps and I think about my own interactions with say Instagram which I use all the time um for getting information out but also consuming information and I happen to love it it's where I essentially launched the non-podcast segment of my podcast and continue to I can think of experiences that are a little bit like um highly processed food where it tastes good at the time it's uh it's highly engrossing but it's not necessarily nutritious and you don't feel very good after afterwards so for me that would be my the little collage of default um options to click on in Instagram occasionally I notice and this just reflects my failure not Instagrams right that there are a lot of um like street fight things like of people beating people up on the street and I have to say these have a very strong gravitational pull I'm not somebody that enjoys seeing violence per se but you know I find myself I'll click on one of these like what happened and I'll see someone like you know get hit and there's like a little melee on the street or something and those seem to be offered to me a lot lately and again this is my fault it reflects my prior searching experience but it I notice that it has a bit of a gravitational pull where um you know there's not I didn't learn anything it's not teaching me any kind of useful Street um self-defense skills of any kind um and at the same time I also really enjoy some of the the cute animal stuff and so I get a lot of those also so there's this polarized you know collage that's off to me that reflects my prior search Behavior You could argue that the the cute animal stuff um is just entertainment but actually it it fills me with a feeling in some cases that truly Delights me I Delight in animals and we're not just talking about kittens I mean animals I've never seen before interactions between animals I've never seen before that truly Delight me they energize me in a positive way that when I leave Instagram I do think I'm better off so I'm grateful for the algorithm in that sense but I guess the direct question is is the algorithm just reflective of what one has been looking at a lot prior to that moment where they log on or is it also trying to do exactly what you uh described which is trying to give people a good feeling experience that leads to more good feelings yeah I mean I think we try to do this in a long-term way right I think one simple example of this is we had this issue a number of years back about clickbait news right so articles that would have um you know basically a a headline um that grabbed your attention that made you feel like I need to click on this then you click on it and then the article is actually you know about something that's somewhat tangential to it um but people clicked on it so you know the naive version of this stuff you know the like 10-year-old version it was like oh people seem to be clicking on this maybe that's good but it's actually a pretty straightforward exercise to instrument the system to realize that hey people click on this and then you know they don't really spend a lot of time reading the the news that after clicking on it and um after they do this a few times they you know it doesn't really correlate with them you know saying that they're having a good experience um some of what you some of how we we measure this is just by looking at how people use the services but I think it's also important to balance that by having like real people come in and you know tell us okay we we show them here are the stories that we could have showed you which of these um are most meaningful to you or would would make it that you have the best experience and just kind of like mapping the algorithm and what we do to that ground truth of what people say that they want so I I think that through a set of things like that we really have you made large steps to minimize things like clickbait over time it's not gone from the internet but you I think we've done a good job of minimizing it on on our services within that though I do think that we need to be pretty careful about not being paternalistic about what makes different people feel good right so I mean I don't know that everyone feels good about about cute animals and me I can't imagine that people would feel really bad about it but maybe they don't have as profound of a positive reaction to it as as as you just expressed um and I don't know maybe people who are more into fighting would look at the you know the street fighting videos assuming that they're within our community standards I think that there's a level of violence that we just don't want to be showing at all but that's a a separate question um but if they are I mean then you know it's like I I'm pretty into MMA I I I don't get a lot of street fighting videos but if I did maybe I I'd feel like I was learning something from that um I I think at various times in the company's history we've been a little bit too paternalistic about saying this is good content this is bad you should like this um this is unhealthy for you and I I think that we want to look at the long-term effects you don't want to get stuck in a in a shortterm loop of like okay just because you did this today doesn't mean it's like what you Aspire for yourself over time but I think as long as you look at the long term of what people both say they want and what they do giving people a fair amount of latitude to like the things that they like I I just think feels like the right set of values to bring to this um now of course that doesn't go for everything there are things that are kind of truly off limits and and you know things that you know like bullying for example or you know things that are really like inciting violence things like that I we have the whole Community standards around this but I I think except for those things which I would hope that most people can agree okay bullying is bad right I I I hope that you know 100% of people agree with that you know not 100 maybe 99% um except for the things that kind of get that sort of very that that feel pretty extreme and bad like that I think you want to give people space to like what they want to like yesterday I had the um very good experience of learning from The Meta team about safety protections that are in place for kids who are using um meta platforms and frankly I was like really positively surprised at the huge number of filter-based tools and and and just ability to customize the experience so that it can um stand the best chance of enriching not just remaining neutral but enriching their mental health status yeah um one thing that came about in that conversation however was I realized there all these tools but do people really know that these tools exist and I think about my own experience with Instagram I I love watching Adam aer's Friday um q&as because he explains a lot of the tools that I didn't know existed um and people haven't seen that I highly recommend they watch that um it's I think every takes questions on Thursdays and answers them most every Fridays um so if I'm not aware of the tools without watching that um that exists for adults um how does meta look at the challenge of making sure that people know that there are all these tools I mean dozens and dozens of very useful tools but I think most of us just know the hashtag the tag The Click Stories versus feed uh we now know that that you know I also post to threads I mean so so we know the major channels and tools but um this is like owning a vehicle that has incredible features that one doesn't realize can take you Offroad can allow your vehicle to fly I there's a lot there so uh what could what do you think could be done to get that information out maybe this conversation could cue people to to their I me that's that's part part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this is I mean I think most of the narrative around social media is not okay all the different tools that people have to control their experience it's you know the kind of narrative of is this just negative for for for teens or something and and I think again a lot of this comes down to you know do um you know how is the experience being tuned and is it actually you know like are people using it to connect and in positive ways and if so I think it's really positive um so yeah I me I think part of this is we probably just need to get out and talk to people more about it um and then there's an in product aspect which is you know if you're a teen and you sign up we take you through a pretty um you know extensive experience that um tries to outline some of this but that has limits too right because when you sign up for a new thing um if you're bombarded with like here's a list of of of features you're like okay I just signed up for this really understand much about what the services like let me go find some people to follow um who are my friends on here before I like learn about controls to you prevent people from harassing me or something um that's why I think it's really important to also show uh a bunch of these tools in context so you know if you're looking at comments um and you know if you if you go to you know delete a comment or um you go to edit something you know try to give people prompts in line it's like hey did you know that you can manage things in in these ways um around that or when you're in the Inbox and you're filtering something right it's um remind people in line so I know just because of the number of people who use the products and the level of nuance surrounding to the controls I think the vast majority of um of that education I think needs to happen in the product but I do think that through conversations like this and and others that you know we we need to be doing I think we can create a broader awareness that those things exist so that way at least people are primed so that way when those things pop up in the product people like oh yeah like I I knew that there was this control and like here's here's like how I would use that like I find the restrict function to be very useful um more than the block function in most cases I I do sometimes have to loock people but the restrict function is really useful that you could filter specific comments you know someone might have a you might recognize that someone has a tendency to be a little aggressive and I should point out that I actually don't really mind what people say to me but I try and maintain what I call classroom rules in my comment section where I don't like people attacking other people because I would never tolerate that in the University classroom I'm not going to tolerate that in the comment section for instance yeah and I think that the example that you just you just used about restrict versus block gets to something about product design that's important too which is that block is sort of this very powerful tool that if someone is giving you a hard time and you just want them to disappear from the experience you can do it but the design tra off with that is that in order to make it so that the person is just gone from the experience um and that you you don't show up to them they don't show up to you um inherent to that is that they will have a sense that you blocked them and that's why I think some stuff like restrict or just filtering like I I just don't want to see as much stuff about this topic um you know people like using different tools for very subtle reasons right I mean maybe um maybe you want the content to not show up um but you don't want the person who's posting the content to know that you don't want it to show up um maybe you don't want to get the messages in your main inbox but you don't want to tell the person that you like that you actually you know that you're not friends or something like that I you actually need to give people different tools that have different levels of of kind of power and Nuance around how the social dynamics around using them play out um in order to really allow people to tailor the experience in the ways that they want in terms of trying to limit total amount of time on social media um I couldn't find really good data on this um you know how much time is too much I mean I think it's going to depend on what one is looking at the age of the user Etc but I agree I I know that you have tools that cue uh the user to how long they've been on a given platform are there tools to self-regulate like I'm thinking about like the the Greek myth of the sirens and you know people you know tying themselves to the Mast and covering their eyes so that they're not drawn in by by the sirens is there a function aside from deleting the app temporarily and then reinstalling it every every time you want to use it again is there a true lockout self lockout function where one can lock themselves out of access to the app well I think we give people tools that let them manage this and and and there's the tools that you get to use and there's the tools the parents get to use um to basically see how how the usage works but yeah I think that there's there's different kind of you I think for now we've mostly focused on you know helping people understand this and then you know give people reminders and things like that um it's tough though to answer the question that you were talking about before this of is there an amount of time which is too much because it does really get to what you're doing but if you fast forward Beyond just the apps that we have today to an experience that is like a social experience in the future of the augmented reality glasses or something that that we're building a lot of this is going to be you know you're interacting with people um in the way that you would physically as if you were kind of like hanging out with friends or working with people um but now they can show up as Holograms and you can feel like you're present right there with them no matter where they actually are and the question is is there too much time to spend interacting with people like that well at the limit if we can get that experience to be kind of as rich and giving you as good of a sense of presence um as you would have if you were physically there with someone then I don't see why you would want to restrict the amount that people use that technology to any less than what would be the you know amount of time that you'd be comfortable interacting with people physically um which obviously it's not going to be 24 hours a day you have to do other stuff um you you have have work you need to sleep but I I I think it really gets to kind of how you're using these things whereas if what you're primarily using the services for is to you just you're getting stuck in Loops reading you know news or something that is really kind of getting you into a negative mental state then I don't know I mean I think that there's probably a relatively short period of time that maybe that's kind of a good thing that you want to be doing um but again even then it's not zero right because it's it's you know just because news might make you unhappy doesn't mean that the answer is to be unaware of negative things that are happening in the world I just think that there's like different people have different tolerances for what they can take on that and I think we you know it's generally having some awareness is probably good as long as it's not more than you're kind of constitutionally able to take so I don't know try to not be too paternalistic about this as our approach but we want to empower people by giving them the tools both people and if you're a teen your parents to have tools to understand what you're experiencing and and what the um and how you're using these things and then and then go from there yeah I think it requires of all of us some degree of self-regulation I like this idea of not being too journalistic I mean that's uh it seems like the right way to go I find myself occasionally having to make sure that I'm not just passively scrolling that I'm learning I I like forging for organizing and dispersing information that's been my my my life's career so I I've learned so much from social media I find great papers great ideas I think comments are a great source of feedback and I'm not just saying that because you're sitting here I mean Instagram in particular but other meta platforms have been tremendously helpful for me to get science and health information out one of the things that I'm really excited about which I only had the chance to try for the first time today is your new uh VR platforms the the newest Oculus um and then we can talk about the glasses the rayb bands um those are still that those two experiences are still kind of blowing my mind especially the the um the the Rayband glasses and I I have so many questions about this so I'll resist but um we can get into that okay well yeah I have some experience with VR my lab has used VR um Jeremy Binson's Lab at at um Stanford is one of the pioneering Labs of VR and and mixed reality I guess some they used to call it augmented reality but now mixed reality I think what's so striking about the VR that um you guys had me try today is how well it interfaces with the with the real room let's call it the the physical room I could still see people I could see where the furniture was so I wasn't going to bump into anything I could see people's Smiles I could see my my um my water on the table while I was doing this what felt like a real martial arts experience except I wasn't getting hit uh well I was getting hit virtually but it's extremely engaging and yet it on the good side of things it really bypasses a lot of the early concerns that Balin and lab again Jeremy's lab was early to say that oh you know there's a limit to how much VR one can or should use each day um even for the adult brain because it can really disrupt your um vestibular system your sense of balance all of that seems to have been dealt with in this new this new iteration of VR like it didn't come out of it feeling dizzy at all I didn't feel like I was re-entering the room in a way that was really jarring going into it is obviously whoa this is a different world but you can look look to your left and say oh someone just came in the door hey how's it going hold on I'm playing this game just as it was when I was a kid playing a Nintendo and someone would walk in it's fully engrossing but you'd be like hold on and you see they're there so first of all um Bravo um incredible um and then the next question is you know what is this what do we even call this experience because it is truly mixed it's a truly mixed reality experience yeah I mean mixed reality is sort of the umbrella term that refers to the combined experience of virtual and augmented reality so augmented reality is you know what you're eventually going to get with you know some future version of the smart glasses where you're primarily seeing the world right but um but you can put Holograms in it right so I that will have a in a future where you're going to walk into a room and there going to be like as many Holograms as as physical objects right if you just think about like all the paper the kind of art physical games media your workstation if we refer to let's say an MMA fight we could just draw it up on the table right here and just see it repeat as opposed to us turning and looking at a screen yeah I mean pretty much any screen that exists could be a hologram in the future with smart glasses right there's nothing that actually physically needs to be there for that when you have glasses that can put um a holog there and and it's an interesting thought experiment to just go around and think about okay what of the things that are physical in the world need to actually be physical and your chair does right because you're sitting on it a hologram isn't going to support you but I like that art on the wall I mean that doesn't need to physically be there I mean um so I I think that that's that's sort of the augmented reality experience that we're moving towards and then we've had these headsets that historically we think about as VR and that has been something that kind of it's like a fully immersive experience but now we're kind of getting something that's a hybrid in between the two and capable of both which is a headset that can do both virtual reality and some of these augmented reality experiences and I think that that's really powerful um both because you're going to get new applications that that kind of allow people to collaborate together and um you know maybe the two of us are here physically but you know someone joins us and it's their Avatar there or maybe you know it's some version of the future like we're having a you know you're having a team meeting and you have some people there physically and you have some people dialing in and they're basically like a hologram there virtually but then you also have some AIS that personas that are on your team that are helping you do different things and they can be embodied as avatars and around the table meeting with you are people going to be doing first dates that are uh physically separated I could imagine that some people would is it even worth leaving the house type date and then they find out and then they meet for the first time um I mean maybe I think I think you know I dating has you physical aspects to it too so some people might not be they want to know whether or not it's worth the effort to head out to whether not want to The Divide right it is possible I mean I know like a some of my friends who are dating basically you say that in order to make sure that they have like a safe experience and when they're if they're going on a first date they'll schedule something that's like shorter and maybe in the middle of the day like so maybe it's coffee so that way if they don't like the person they can just kind of get out before like going and scheduling a dinner or like a real full date so I don't know maybe in the future people will will kind of have that experience to where you can feel like you're kind of sitting there and it's and it's even easier and lighter weight and safer and if you're not having a good experience you can just like teleport out of there and be gone um but yeah I think that this will be an interesting question in the future is um there are clearly a lot of things that are only possible physically that or are so much better physically and then there are all these things that we're building up that can be digital experiences but it's this weird artifact of kind of how the stuff has been developed that the digital world and the physical world exist in these like completely different planes where you want to interact with the digital world well we do it all the time but we pull out a small screen or we have a big screen and just basically we're interacting with the digital world through these screens but I think if we fast forward you know a decade or more it's I think one of the really interesting questions about what like what is the world that we're going to live in I think it's going to increasingly be this mesh of the physical and digital worlds that will allow us to feel a that the the world that we're in is just a lot richer because there can be all these things that people create that are just so much easier to do digitally than than physically um but at B you're going to have a real kind of physical sense of presence with these things and not feel like interacting in the digital world is taking you away from the physical World which today is just so much viscerally richer and more powerful um I think the the digital world will sort of be embedded in the in that and um and and will feel kind of just as Vivid in a lot of ways so that's why I always think and when you were saying before you know you felt like you could look around and see the real room I actually think that there's an interesting kind of philosophical distinction between the real room and the physical room um which you know historically I think people would have said those are the same thing but I actually think in the future the real room is going to be the combination of the physical world with all the digital artifacts and objects that are in there that you can interact with them and feel present whereas the physical world is just the part that's physically there and I think it's possible to build a real world that's the sum of these two that will actually be you know more profound experience than what we have today I was struck by the smoothness of the interface between the VR and the physical room uh your team had me try a um I guess it was an exercise class in the form but it was like essentially like hitting mits boxing yeah and and it comes at a fairly fast pace that then picks up it's got some tutorial it's very easy to use and certainly got my heart rate up and I'm in at least decent shape um and I have to be honest I've never once desired to do any of these onscreen Fitness things I mean I can't think of anything more aversive than a like like a CL like I don't want to insult any particular products um but like riding a stationary bike while looking at a screen and pretending I'm on a road outside I can't think of anything worse for me um maybe I do like the leader board maybe I'm just a very competitive person it's like if you're going to be running on a treadmill at least give me a leader board so I can beat the people who are ahead of me I like moving outside and and certainly an exercise class or aerobics class as they used to call them but what the experience I tried today was extremely engaging um and I've done enough boxing to at least know how to to do a little bit of it and really enjoyed it gets your heart rate up and you I completely forgot that I was doing an an onscreen experience because in part because I believe I was still in that physical room MH um and I think there's something about the mesh of the physical room and the virtual experience that um makes it neither of one world or the other I mean I really felt at the interface of those and and certainly got presence this feeling forgetting that I was in a virtual experience and um got my heart rate up pretty quickly we had to stop cuz we were going to start recording but I would do that for a good 45 minutes in the morning and and and there's no amount of money you could pay me truly to uh look at a screen while pedaling on a bike or running on a treadmill so um again Bravo I think it's going to be very useful it's going to get people moving their bodies more which certainly social media up until now and a lot of technologies have been accused of limiting the amount of physical activity that that both children and adults are engaged in so and we know we need physical activity you're a big proponent of and practitioner of physical activity so is this a major goal of meta get people moving their bodies more and getting their heart rates up and and so on I think we want to enable it and I I think it's good but I I think it comes more from like a philosophical view of the world than it is necessarily I mean I don't go into Building Products to try to shape people's behavior right I I believe in empowering people to you know do what they want and be the best version of themselves that they can be so No Agenda that said I I do believe that there's the the previous generation of computers were devices for your mind and I think that we are not brains and tanks um you know it's like I think that there's sort of a a philosophical view of people of like okay you you are primarily you know what you think about or your values or something it's like no you are that and you are a physical manifestation and people were very physical and I think building a computer for your whole body and not just for your mind is very fitting with this world view that like the actual essence of you if you want to be present with another person if you want to like be fully engaged in experience is not just okay it's not just a video conference call that looks at your face and where you can like share ideas um it's it's something that that you can engage your whole body so yeah I I mean I think being physical is very important to me I mean it's um you know it's it just that's a lot of you know the most fun stuff that I get to do um it's a really important part of how I personally balance my energy levels and just get a diversity of experiences because you I could spend all my time running the company um but I think it's good for people to do some different things and you know compete in different areas or learn different things and all of that um is good if if people want to you know do really intense workouts with um with the work that we're doing with Quest or with um you know eventual AR glasses great but even if you don't want to do like a really intense workout I think just having a Computing environment and platform which is inherently physical captures more of the essence of what we are as people than any of the previous Computing platforms that we've had to date yeah I was even thinking just of the um simple task of getting uh better of motion AKA flexibility I could imagine inside of the VR experience you know leaning into a stretch you know a standard kind of like like a lunge type stretch but actually seeing a meter of like are you get are you approaching new levels of flexibility in that moment where it's actually measuring some some kinesthetic uh elements on the body and the joints and I mean I was just trying whereas normally you might have to do that in front of a camera which then would give you the data on a screen that you'd look at afterwards or hire an expensive coach but so or looking at um form and resistance training so you're actually lifting physical weights but it's telling you whether or not you're breaking form I mean there's so much that could be done inside of there and then my mind just starts to spiral into like wow this is very likely to transform what we think of as quote unquote exercise yeah I think so I think there's still a bunch of questions that need to get answered um you know it's I don't think most people are going to necessarily want to install you know a lot of sensors or cameras to track their whole body so we're just over time getting better from the sensors that are on the headsets of being able to do very good hand tracking right so we we have this research demo where you now just with the hand tracking um from the headset you can type it just projects a little keyboard onto your table and you can type and people like type like a 100 words a minute with that with a virtual keyboard yeah we're starting to be able to um using some Modern AI techniques be able to like simulate and understand where your torso's position is um even though you can't always see it you can see it a bunch of the time and if you fuse together what you do see um with like the accelerometer and understanding how the thing is moving you can kind of understand what the body position is going to be um but some things are still going to be hard right so you you mentioned boxing um that one works pretty well because you know we understand your head position we understand your hands um and and now we're we're kind of increasingly understanding your your body position um but let's say you want to expand that to um Muay Thai or kickboxing okay so legs that's a different part of tracking that's harder um cuz that's out of the field of you more of the time but there's also the element of resistance right so you can throw a punch and retract it and shadow box and you know do that um without upsetting your kind of physical balance that much but if you want to throw a roundhouse kick um and there's no one there then I mean you know the standard way that you do when you're Shadow Boxing is you basically do a little 360 but like I don't know is that is that going to feel great I mean I I think that there's a question about what the what that experience should be um and then if you want to go even further if you want to get like grappling um to to work um I'm I'm not even sure how you would do that without having resistance of understanding what the forces applied to you would be and it's then you get into okay maybe you're going to have some kind of bodysuit that can apply you know haptics but I'm not even sure that that even a pretty Advanced haptic system is going to be able to be quite good enough to do to simulate like the actual Force that would be applied to you um in a grappling scenario so this is part of what's fun about technology though is you get you keep on getting new capabilities and then you need to figure out what things you can do with them so I think it's really neat that we can kind of do boxing and we can do this Supernatural thing and um there's a bunch of awesome cardio and dancing and things like that um and then there's also still so much more to do that that I'm excited to to kind of get to over time but um but it's it's a long journey and what about things like um painting and art and music you know I imagine um you know of course you like different mediums like I like to draw with pen and pencil but I could imagine trying to learn how to paint and virtually and of course you could print out a physical version of that at the end this doesn't have to depart from the physical world it could end in the physical did you see the demo the the piano demo where you um either you're there with a physical keyboard or it could be a virtual keyboard but the app basically highlights what keys you need to press um in order to play the song so it's basically like you're looking at your piano and it's teaching you how to play a song that you choose an actual piano yeah yeah but it's Illuminating certain keys in in the virtual space and it could either be a virtual Piano if you or keyboard if you don't have a piano or keyboard or it could use your actual keyboard um so yeah um I think stuff like that is going to be really fascinating for education and expression um and for broad excuse me but for and for broadening access to expensive equipment I mean piano is is no small expense exact and it takes up a lot of space and it needs to be tuned um you can think of all these things that the kid that has very little income or their family has very little income could learn to play a virtual piano at much lower cost yeah it gets back to the question I was asking before about this thought experiment of how many of the things that we physically have today actually need to be physical the piano doesn't um maybe there's some premium where it's maybe it's a somewhat better more tactile tactile experience to have a physical one but for people who don't have the space for it or who who can't afford to to buy a piano or just aren't sure that they would want to make that investment at the beginning of learning how to play piano I think in the future you'll have the option of just buying you know an app or a hologram piano which will be you know a lot more affordable um and I I think it's going to be that's going to be unlock unlock a ton of creativity too because instead of the market for piano makers being constrained to like a relatively small set of experts who have like perfected that craft and you're going to have like you know kids or developers all around the world designing crazy designs for um potential keyboards and pianos that look nothing like what we've seen before but are maybe like bring even more joy and or even more kind of fun in the world where you have fewer these physical constraints so I don't I think it's gonna there's gonna be a lot of wild stuff to explore there's definitely gonna be a lot of wild stuff to explore I was just had this uh this idea slash um image in my mind of what you were talking about merged with our earlier conversation when Priscilla was here of you I could imagine a time not too far long from now where you're using mixed reality to run experiments in the lab literally mixing virtual Solutions getting potential outcomes and then picking the best one to then go actually do in the real world which is very both um financially costly and um time wise costly yeah I mean people are already using VR for surgery and education on it um I there's some study that was done that um basically did it tried to do a controlled experiment of people who learned how to do a specific surgery um through just a normal kind of textbook and lecture method versus like you show the knee and you you have it you know be a large blown up model and people can manipulate it and and kind of practice where they would make the cuts and and like the people in that class did better so um I I think that there's yeah it's I think that it's going to be profound for a lot of different areas and last um example at leavs to mind you know I think uh social media and online culture has been accused of creating a lot of um real world let's call it physical world social anxiety for people but I could imagine um practicing a social interaction or a kid that has a lot of social anxiety or that needs to advocate for themselves better learning how to do that progressively through a virtual interaction and then taking that to the real world because it's in my very recent experience today it's so Blended now with with real experience that the kid that feels terrified of advocating for themselves or or just talking to another human being or an adult or being in a new circumstance of a room full of kids you could really experience that in in silico first and get comfortable let the nervous system attenuate a bit and then take it into the quote unquote physical world yeah I think we'll see experiences like that I mean I also think that some of the social dynamics around how people interact in this kind of Blended digital world will be more nuanced in other ways so I'm sure that there will be kind of new anxieties that people develop to just like you know teens today need to navigate Dynamics around texting constantly that um that we just didn't have when we were kids um so I I think it will help with some things I think that there will be new issues that hopefully we can help people work through too but um but overall I think yeah I think it's going to be really powerful and positive let's talk about the glasses sure this was wild yeah put on a pair of rayb bands I like the way they look they're clear they look like any other glass rayb bang glasses um except that I could call out to the glasses I could just say you know hey meta um I want to listen to the boach variations The Goldberg Variations of box and meta responded and no one around me could hear but I could hear um with exquisite Clarity by the way I'm not getting paid to say any of this I'm just still blown away by this folks um I want a pair of these very badly I could hear okay I'm selecting those now and or that that music now and then I could hear it in the background but then I could still have a conversation so this was neither headphones in nor headphones out MH um and I could say wait pause the music and it would pause um and the best part was I didn't have to quotquot leave the room mentally I didn't even have to take out a phone it just it was all interfaced through this very local environment in and around the head and as a neuroscientist I'm fascinated by this because of course all of our perceptions auditory visual Etc all occurring in inside the casing of this of this thing we call a skull but um maybe you could comment on you know the the origin of that design for you you know what the ideas behind that and where you think it could go because I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface the real product that we want to eventually get to is this kind of full augmented reality product in a kind of stylish and comfortable normal glasses form factor not dorky VR headset so to speak no I mean because the VR headset does feel kind of like it the face there's going to be a place for that too just like you have your laptop and you have your workstation um or maybe the better analogy is you have your phone and you have your workstation um these AR glasses are going to be like your phone in that and you have something on your face and you will I think be able to if you want wear it for a lot of the day and interact with with um with it very frequently I don't think that people are going to be you know walking around the world wearing VR headsets let Hope but yeah that's that's certainly not the future that that I'm that I'm kind of hoping we we get to but I do think that there is a place where um for having because it's a bigger form factor it has more compute power so just like your workstation or your your a bigger computer can do more than your phone can do um there's a place for that when you want to settle into an intense task right if you have a doctor who's doing a surgery I would want them doing it through the headset not through the kind of not through their phone equivalent or the the just kind of lower powerered glasses but just like phones are powerful enough to do a lot of things and the glasses will eventually get there too um now that said there's a bunch of really hard technology problems um to address in order to be able to get to this point where you can like put kind of full Holograms in the world you're basically miniaturizing a supercomputer and putting it into a pair of glasses um so that the pair of glasses still look stylish and normal and um that's a really hard technology problem making things small is really hard um a holographic display is you know it's it's different from what our industry has optimized for for you know 30 or 40 years now building screens there's like a whole kind of industrial process around that that goes into phones and TVs and computers and like increasingly so many things that that have different screens like there's a whole pipeline that's gotten very good at making that kind of screen and the holographic displays are just a completely different thing right because it's not it's not a screen right it's a thing that you can shoot light into through you know a laser or some other kind of projector and it can place that as an object in the world so that's going to need to be this whole other industrial process that gets built up to doing that like in an efficient way so all that said we're basically taking two different approaches towards building this at once one is we are trying to keep in mind what is the the long-term thing that you it's not super far off I think within you know few years I think we'll have something that that's sort of a first version of kind of this full vision that I'm talking about and we have something that's working internally that we use as like a that we'll use as a dev kit um but that one that's that's kind of a big challenge it's going to be more expensive um and it's harder to get all the pieces working the other approach has been all right let's start with what we know we can put into um a pair of stylish sunglasses today and just make them as smart as we can so you know for the first version you know we we worked with um we we did this collaboration with Rayban right because that's like well accepted you know these are well-designed glasses they're classic people have have used them for decades for the first version we got a sensor on the front so you could Capture Moments without having to take your phone out of your pocket so you got photos and videos um you had the speaker and the microphon so you can listen to music um you could communicate with it uh but it was you know that was that was sort of the first version of it we had a lot of the basics there we saw how people used it and we tuned it we made that the camera is like twice as good for for this new version that we made the audio is a lot crisper for the use cases that we saw that people actually used which is some of it is listening to music but a lot of it is like people want to take calls on their glasses um they want to listen to podcasts right you um but the the biggest thing that I think is interesting is the ability to get AI running on it which it it doesn't just run on the on the glasses it also it it kind of prox through your phone but I mean with all the advances in llms we talked about this a bit in the the first part of of the the conversation um having the ability to have your meta aai assistant that you can just talk to and basically ask any question throughout the day is I think it to be really fascinating and you know like you were saying about kind of how we how we process the world as people um eventually I think you're going to want your AI assistant to be able to see what you see and hear what you hear maybe not all the time but you're going to want to be able to tell it to go into a mode where it can see what you see and hear what you hear and what's the kind of device design that best kind of positions an AI assistant to be able to see what you see and hear what you hear so can best help you well that's glasses right where where basically has a sensor to be able to see what you see and um a microphone that is close to your ears that can hear what you hear um the other design goals is like you said to keep you present in the world right so I think one of the issues with phones is they kind of pull you away from from what's physically happening around you and I don't think that the next generation of computing will do that um I'm just I'm chuckling to myself because I have a friend he's a very well-known photographer and he was laughing about how you know people go to a concert and everyone's filming the concert on their phone so that they can be the person that posts the thing but like they're literally millions of of other people who posted the exact same thing but somehow our unique it feels important to post our unique experience with glasses that would essentially smooth that um Gap um completely totally um you can just worry about it later download it there are issues I realize with with glasses because they are so seamless with everyday experience even though you and I aren't wearing them now it's very common for people to wear glasses um issues of recording and consent like I I go into a locker room at my gym I'm assuming with glasses aren't filming whereas when right now because there's a a sharp transition when when there's a phone in the room and someone's pointing it um people generally say no no phones in locker rooms in recording um so that's just one instance I mean there are other instan we have the whole privacy light I don't know did you did you get I get a chance to explore that yeah so it's anytime that it's active that the camera sensor is active um it's it's basically like pulsing a white bright light got it so which is by the way more than cameras do phones aren't aren't kind of showing a light a bright sensor when when you're taking a photo so no people often times will pretend they're texting and they're actually recording actually saw an instance of this in a barber shop once where someone was recording and they were pretending that they were texting and there was an there was a pretty intense interaction that ensued and it was like wow you know it's pretty easy for people to to feain texting while actually recording yeah so I think when you're evaluating a risk with a new technology the bar shouldn't be is it possible to do anything bad it's does this new technology make it easier to do something bad than what people already had and I think because you have this privacy light that is just broadcasting to everyone around you hey this thing is recording now um I think that that makes it actually less discreet to do it through the glasses than what you could do with a phone already um which I think is is basically the bar that we wanted to get over from a design perspective thank you for pointing out that it has the Privacy light I didn't get long enough in the experience to explore all the features but um again I can think of a lot of uses um being able to look at a restaurant from the outside and see the menu oh yeah um get status on how crowded it is um as much as I love I don't want to call out let's just say um app-based map uh functions that allow you to navigate and the audio is okay it's nice to have a conversation um with somebody on the phone or in the vehicle and just it be great if the road was traced where I should turn absolutely these kinds of things seem like it's going to be straightforward for for meta Engineers to create future version will have it so it also have the holographic display where it can show you the directions but I I think that there will basically just be you know different price points that pack different amounts of Technology the holographic display part I think is going to be expensive than doing one that just thei but is um but is primarily communicating you with you through audio so I mean the the current Rayband metag glasses are 299 um you know I think when we have one that has a display in it it'll probably be some amount more than that but it'll also be more powerful so I think that it'll people will choose what they want to use based on what the capabilities are that they want and what they can afford but um but a lot of our goal building things is um you know we try to make things that can be accessible to everyone um you know our game as a company isn't to build things and then charge a premium price for it we try to build things that then everyone can use um and then become more useful because a very large number of people are using them um so it's just a very different approach um you know we're not we're not like apple or or some of these companies that just try to make something and then sell it for as much um as as as they can which I mean they're a great company so I mean I think that that that model kind of is is fine too but um but our approach is going to be we want stuff that can be affordable so that way everyone in the world can use it along lines of Health I think the glasses will also potentially solve a major problem in a in a real way which is the following uh for both children and adults it's very clear that viewing objects in particular screens up close for too many hours per day leads to myopia literally a change in the length of length of the eyeball and nearsightedness um and on the positive side we know based on some really large clinical trials um that kids who spend and adults who spend two hours a day or more out ofd doors um don't experience that and maybe even reverse their myopia and it has something to do with exposure to sunlight but it has a lot to do with long viewing viewing things at a distance greater than three or four feet away and with the glasses I realize one could actually do digital work out ofd doors um it could measure and tell you how much time you've spent looking at things up close versus far away I mean this is this is just another example that leaps to mind but in in accessing the visual system you're effectively accessing the whole brain because it's the only two bits of brain that are outside the cranial Vault so it just seems like putting technology right at the level of the eyes seeing what the eyes see is just got to be the best way to go yeah I think well multimodal right I I think is you want the visual sensation but you also want kind of text or language so sure I think it's that all can be brought to the level of the eyes right what do you mean by well I mean I think what we're describing here is essentially taking the phone the computer um and bringing it all to the level of the eyes and of course one would like more physically at your physically at your eyes right and one would like more um kinesthetic information as you mentioned before where the legs are maybe even lung function hey have you taken enough steps today but but that all can be it can be figured out on the phone it can be by the phone it can be figured out by glasses um but there's additional information there such as what are you focusing on in your world how much of your time is spent looking at things far away versus up close how much Social time did you have today it's it's really tricky to get that with a phone like like if my phone were right in front of us as if we were at a standard lunch nowadays certainly silicon value and then people we're peering at our phones I mean how much real direct attention was in the conversation at hand versus something else you can get issues of where are you placing your attention um by virtue of where you're placing your eyes and I think that information is not accessible with a phone in your pocket or in front of you I mean that a little bit um but not nearly as Rich uh and complete information as one gets when you're really pulling the data from the level of of vision and what what kids and adults are actually looking at and attending to yeah yeah yeah it seems extremely valuable um you get autonomic information size of the pupils so you get information about internal States I mean that you well there's there's internal sensor and outside so there's the sensor on the Rayband metag glasses is external right so it's basically allows you to see what you see then uh allows sorry the AI system to see what you're seeing there's a separate set of things which are ey tracking um which are also very powerful um for enabling a lot of interfaces right so you want to if you want to just like look at something and select it by looking at it with your eyes rather than having to kind of drag a controller over or pick up a hologram or or anything like that you can do that with ey tracking um so that's a pretty profound and and cool experience too um as well as just kind of understanding what you're looking at so that way you're not kind of wasting compute power drawing pixels with in high resolution a part of the kind of world that you're that's going to be in your peripheral vision um so yeah all of these things um they're interesting design and Technology trade-offs where if you want the external sensor that's one thing if you also want the eye tracking um now that's a different set of sensors each one of these um consumes compute which consumes battery um they take up more space right so it's like where are the eye tracking sensors going to be it's like well you want to make sure that the rim of the glasses is actually quite thin because I mean it's you know there's a kind of variance of you know how thick can glasses be before they look more like goggles than glasses um think that this is there's this whole space and I think people are going to end up choosing what product makes sense for them maybe they want something that's more powerful that has more of the sensors um but it's but it's going to be a little more expensive maybe like slightly thicker um or maybe you want like a more basic thing that just looks like very similar to what Rayband glasses are that people have been wearing for decades but kind of has AI in it and you can Capture Moments um without having to take your phone out and send them to people in the latest version we got the ability into live live stream I think that that's pretty crazy that now you can be kind of you going back to your concert case or you whatever else you're doing you know you can be um you know doing sports and and just you know watching your kids play something and and just you can be watching and you can be live streaming it to your your kind of family group um so people can see it I I I think that like that stuff is um I I I think that's pretty cool that you basically have a normal looking pair of glasses at this point that can kind of live stream and and has like an AI assistant so the stuff is making a lot faster progress in a lot of ways than I would have thought um and I don't know I think people are going to like this version but there's a lot more still to do I think it's super exciting and I see a lot of Technologies this one's particularly exciting to me because of how smooth the interface is and for all the reasons that you just mentioned um what's happening with and what can we expect around AI interfaces and maybe even avatars of people within social media are we um not far off from a day where there are multiple versions of me uh and you on the internet where people for instance I get asked a lot of questions I don't have the opportunity to respond to all those questions but um with things like chat GPT people are trying to generate answers to those questions on other platforms will I have the opportunity to soon have an AI version of myself where people can ask me questions about like what I recommend for sleep and circadian rhythm Fitness mental health Etc based on content I've already generated that will be accurate so they could just ask my avatar yeah this is something that I think a lot of creators are going to want that um that we're trying to build um and I think we'll probably have a version of next year but there's a bunch of constraints that I think we need to make sure that we get right so for one I think it's really important that it's not that there's a bunch of versions of you it's that if anyone is creating like an AI assistant version of you it should be something that you could control right it's um I think there are some platforms that are out there today that just let people like you know make I don't know AI bot of me or or other figures and it's like I don't know I mean we we have platform policies for um for like decades like you know since the beginning of the company at this point which is almost 20 years that um that basically don't allow impersonation um you know real identity is like one of the core aspects that kind of our company was was started on is like you want to kind of authentically be yourself so um yeah I I think if you're if you're almost any Creator being able to engage your community and and there's just going to be more demand to interact with you than you have hours in the day so they're both people who out there who would benefit from being able to talk to an AI version of you um and I think you and other creators would benefit from being able to keep your community engaged and service that demand that people have to engage with you but you're going to want to know that that AI kind of version of you or assistant um is going to represent you the way that you would want and um there are a lot of things that are awesome about kind of these modern llms but having perfect predictability about how it's going to represent something is not one of the current strengths so I think that there's some work that needs to get done there I don't think it needs to be 100 % perfect all the time but you need to have very good confidence I would say that it's going to it's going to represent you the way that you'd want for you to want to turn it on um which again you should have control over whether you turn it on um so we wanted to start in a different place which I think is a somewhat um easier problem which is creating new characters that the for or AI personas so that way it's not um you know we we built you know one of the AIS is like a chef and um they can help you kind of come up with things that you should that you could cook and can help you cook them um there's like a couple of people that are interested in different types of Fitness that can help you kind of plan out your workouts or you know help with recovery or different things like that um there are people there's an AI That's focused on like DIY crafts um there's someone who's a travel expert that can help you make travel plans or or give you ideas so but the key thing about all these is they're not um they're not modeled off of existing people so they don't have to have kind of 100% Fidelity to like making sure that they never say something that you know a real person who they're modeled after would never say because they're just made up characters so I that that is um that's a somewhat easier problem um and we actually got those we got a bunch of different kind of well-known people to play those characters because we thought that would make it more fun so there's like Snoop Dog is the dungeon master so you can like drop him into a thread and play text based games and it's just like I do this with my daughter when I when I um tuck her in at night and she just like loves like like storytelling right and it's like it like like Snoop Dog is the dungeon master will come up with like here's what's happening next and she's like okay I like turn into a mermaid and then I like swim across the bay and I like go and find the the treasure chest and unlock it and it's like and then Snoop Dog just always will have a next version of the like the next iteration on the story so I me it's stuff is fun but you know it's not actually Snoop Dog he's just kind of the actor he's playing the dungeon master which makes it more fun so and that's probably the right place to start is you have like you you can kind of build versions of these characters that that people can interact with doing different things but I think where you want to get over time is to the place where any Creator or any small business can very easily just create an AI assistant that can represent them and interact with your kind of community or customers if you're a business um and and basically just help you grow your your Enterprise so I don't know I think that's gon to be cool but I I think this is It's a long-term project I think we'll have more progress on it to report on next year but um but I I think that's coming I'm super excited about because you know we hear a lot about the downsides of AI I mean I think people are now coming around to the the reality that AI is neither good nor bad it can be used for good or bad and that there are a lot of Life enhancing spaces that it's going to show up and really really improve the way that uh we engage socially uh what we learn and that mental health and physical health don't have to suffer and in fact can be enhanced by the sorts of Technologies we've been talking about so I know you're extremely busy I so appreciate the um large amount of time you've given me today to sort through all these things fun and to talk with you and Priscilla and and to hear what's happening and where things are Ed um the future certainly is bright I I share in your optimism and it's been uh only strengthened by today's conversation so thank you so much and um keep doing what you're doing and and um on behalf of myself and everyone listening um thank you because regardless of what people say we all use these platforms um excitedly and it's clear that there's a ton of intention and care and um and thought about you know what could be in the positive sense and um um and that's really worth highlighting awesome thank you I appreciate it thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Mark Zuckerberg and Dr Priscilla Chan if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests that you'd like me to consider hosting on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on 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