Mark Zuckerberg on Long-Term Strategy

Tim Ferriss

Societal shifts or changes, not necessarily catalyzed by meta, but just that you see coming or plausibly coming that you guys are trying to get ahead of or think about just in terms of Mitigating problems later? Is there anything that comes to mind?

Mark Zuckerberg

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're getting at, but one big shift that I think is happening is the rise of distributed work. I don't view that as a problem. I think it's good. There's just a lot of research that shows that people's opportunities, social, economic, and otherwise are generally pretty anchored to physically where they are. And I think, you know, sometimes people draw this juxtaposition of, you know, say, okay, there's like the digital world and the real world. That's not actually how I think about it. I think that there's a physical world and a digital world and the real world is actually both. And increasingly, I think people will use these technologies to be able to be present in places that they physically can't be. And I think that that's really powerful, right? It's like, we're doing this podcast and we're not sitting next to each other physically, but it like feels like we're here and we're kind of having a live conversation. And in the future, you know, maybe five years from now, if we were doing this, we'll have AR glasses and, you know, hologram version of me will be on the couch next to you.

Mark Zuckerberg

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're getting at, but one big shift that I think is happening is the rise of distributed work. I don't view that as a problem. I think it's good. There's just a lot of research that shows that people's opportunities, social, economic, and otherwise are generally pretty anchored to physically where they are. And I think, you know, sometimes people draw this juxtaposition of, you know, say, okay, there's like the digital world and the real world. That's not actually how I think about it. I think that there's a physical world and a digital world and the real world is actually both. And increasingly, I think people will use these technologies to be able to be present in places that they physically can't be. And I think that that's really powerful, right? It's like, we're doing this podcast and we're not sitting next to each other physically, but it like feels like we're here and we're kind of having a live conversation. And in the future, you know, maybe five years from now, if we were doing this, we'll have AR glasses and, you know, hologram version of me will be on the couch next to you. And I think that that will be even better than what we're doing right now. So I think that, you know, through video chat, you can have moments where you feel present, but I think through things like virtual and augmented reality, when you can have an office And someone can be walking through it as a hologram,

Tim Ferriss

I'm sure.

Mark Zuckerberg

You know, some of them we kept, but we're just changing how we execute them. So one thing that I think our company is pretty well known for is having the value of move fast. I've always basically believed that values are only useful if you can legitimately disagree with them. I always thought values like be honest are not that helpful because of course you have to be honest, right? It's like, I feel bad even needing to write that down. If you have to write that down, then something kind of went wrong. But I don't know any good company that doesn't focus on honesty or demand that of their employees. So from my perspective, that's not like a useful, if you only get to write down like five or six concepts to program into your culture, you want them to be things that good companies can Reasonably do differently. And I think part of this is that good values, you need to be able to give something up in order to get them. So around move fast, we've always had this question. It's like, you can't just tell people to move fast. The question is like, what's the deal? Like, what are you willing to give up? And famously, it used to be move fast and break things. And the idea was that we tolerated some amount of bugs in the software in order to encourage people to move quickly. Because moving fast, I think, is the key to learning. It's like you want to increase the iteration cycle so you can get feedback from the people you serve quickly and then incorporate that into the product. So we would literally get into situations where competitors of us would ship once a year, once every six months, and we'd ship code every day. Of course, we're going to learn faster and we're going to build something better if you're shipping something every day. So the question is, what are you willing to give up? So it used to be we would tolerate some amount of defects in the product. It

Mark Zuckerberg

The one that you just mentioned is, I think, a really fundamental one. I mean, at some level, you can make things censorship resistant, which has a bunch of equities. And there are certainly a lot of people who feel like their expression is restricted online more than they would like. But that also prevents if you really can't stop people from expressing things, then how are you going to fight against terrorism or child exploitation or things that people think are Like really awful, even the people who generally want more stuff to be allowed online. So really removing the ability for anyone to do any kind of moderation at all in a broader platform, I think is problematic. I think in something like messaging, you know, we don't expect, you know, the people who run our messaging platforms, you know, whether it's us or Apple or whoever, to go kind of moderate A message that you send in private. But it's sort of this distinction between the living room and the town square, right? If you're in a space that's a broader space, then I think that there is a little more need to make sure that things conform to the values that society wants, right? And producing things that are just really, that I think everyone agrees are bad, like terrorism and child exploitation and bullying and things like that. Taking

Mark Zuckerberg

Do you know him too?

Tim Ferriss

So Jocko's first ever long-form public interview is on this podcast. Okay, there you go. Yeah, so I know Jocko very well.

Mark Zuckerberg

So this book was recommended to me by Toby Lutke, the founder and CEO of Shopify. And the girls love it. And now they've started training jujitsu. And they're like, so this is the stuff, you know, takes on a life of its own. It's super fun, you know, having stuff that we do that we do together every day. And then I always wrap up the day with them. We have this routine Max calls the good night things, which is basically every night we go through. I'm like, all right, what are the things that are most important in life? And they're health, loving family and friends, and something you're excited about. And like, what did you do to help someone today? And we basically go through each of these things. And it's like, all right, so health. It's like, well, what did you do to like make yourself stronger, more fit today? If you get hurt, Max broke her leg skiing once. Let's go through the parts of your body that like still work and that you're going to like be able to use while you're recovering. And it's like, okay, loving family and friends. Let's go through, you know, something that you did today with a person who is meaningful to you. And then I think something you're excited about is, and this is actually, this is like my philosophy on life.