Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)

22:37And like, you just can't imagine one of your guys like calling out the play to the other team. It's like, can you imagine what you would do in that case? Like, I just, you're off the team. I'm sorry, like, you can't be here. Anyway, sorry, carry on. Yeah, and there's so many more people. It's hard to find who is this? So with this downside as an example, and it's also, I imagine there's other downsides also takes a lot of work, and it puts people on the spot a lot of times. Whatever you've seen as benefits, and why is that such a big part of meta's way of working? Yeah, this comes back to, I think, the principle that really good talented people, you want to leverage them fully.

23:13You really want to make sure that they are fully leveraged. And so anytime they have the wrong information or they don't have the information, you've now blocked one of the economically most valuable things that your company possesses, which is this person's time, attention, talent. Not only that, you've also made them more frustrated, and now they are more likely to leave. Like, if the lifeblood of any company are the people inside of it who collectively commit to some kind of a goal and mission and work together, then you want to maximize that potential. And creating this really open information ecosystem is one of the ways that we do that.

23:53So often, great phenomenal work that has happened that our company has not come from this one top down mandate, but has come from people understanding not just what we're trying to accomplish top down, but also having way more information at their disposal to be able to act on it. And so it's, you know, people talk about top down or bottoms up culture. And it's a bit of a myth in my opinion. If you've ever met Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a, it's not a bottoms up thing. Like the ideas that we're pursuing are Mark Zuckerberg's ideas first and foremost, that's not to say that he's not open to new ones, and of course he is.

24:31And that's a form of bottom up. People can bring ideas to him and he internalizes them and acts them or not. But when he brings it, things top down. He doesn't, he's not micromanaging. He's in the details, I'll be careful on that. But he does create the space for you to bring back three or four versions of the thing that he's talking about and then he shapes it from there. And you can't do that if there's, if you don't have degrees of freedom, sure. But also if you don't have the information, otherwise if you don't have the information available, what we're trying to accomplish, why we're trying to do it, what the, what the, what the infrastructure is like, what the availability is like, what the performance is going to be like, well, you just are stuck, you're just going to have to follow the script, that's very boring for high talent, high creative, high engaged people.

25:14Now it does come at a tremendous price. You have to get really good at managing information on the incoming. Most people in most companies consume all the information that's given to them, but the information itself is carefully managed. Right, like they're getting all the information they're intended to get. We've turned that on a TED and it sounds great, but it's not free. Even somebody, senior, coming from outside the company to the company, one thing I have to coast them on is like, how do you find signal amongst all the noise? You have to have a system for managing your information. You have to have a system for triaging the incoming.

25:54Getting rid of a bunch of stuff that is on the wrong channel or it doesn't matter to you. Figure out what's the groups that you want to be a part of, but you consume only when you choose to and where the things where you're getting push notifications, like that's the real time thing. And that takes some time. This point you made about bottom up first, top down is really interesting because when I think of Meta, I think it's a very bottom up culture. I hear everyone comes up with their ideas, runs experiments, it's very encouraged to just try stuff. And it's really interesting to hear that and it makes a lot of sense that most of the big ideas actually do come from the top.

26:25It's just like one of these mythology things, I don't think it's the wrong as a construct. It's more bottoms up than many other companies because you do have these degrees of freedom within the construct. But like, make no mistake, like Mark or me or Chris Cox or Havi, they have very strong opinions about what we should be doing as a company and you have to, your bottom's upness works within that framework. But we're also, it is true that you can ask Mark any question and he's going to answer it, same with me, same with Chris, same with Havi. And also that we certainly take inspiration from the discussion that we have with employees.

26:58So I don't know, it's just not as black and white as people kind of tend to paint it. I think one of the biggest lessons here is making it at least feel like you have a lot of say. Like even though a company is very, here's the big strategic pillars, we're going to, you're very good at making people feel like they can have an impact in the same. And can I tell you, the most important thing is just giving people clear guidelines. So they know where they, where can they, where do they have space and where do they have no space? You know, one of the things that we go in these reviews with Mark or my team with me, I'm sure.

27:26And I'm like, this is, like for this part of the UI, it is going to be like, I will draw it for you. It's going to be like this. And it's another part of like cool, that's important too. I don't have a clear vision of it. Why don't you do it? So you like, so there's just really clear guard rails. I'm like, okay, like where are we just on assignment and where do we have more flexibility? Is there an example of that that comes to mind where you're just like very in the details and drawing the screen? Over the course of time, there's been quite a few examples. I think early on when we were working on news feed, you know, Mark was absolutely whiteboarding every single like pixel that, you know, the team had to put on the front end.

28:04On the back, and he was like, make it rank, like have some ranking, you know? So I felt like I was lucky there because I was just like, cool, like I'm off to the races on some ranking stuff and like, you know, all these other Chris Cox and all these other guys were having to like really pixel match these things. But it's not always that way, by the way. So now fast forward, and we're talking about ranking, it's not like Mark has always hands off on that when we got into modernizing our ranking systems, which we've done over the last five years. Mark was heavily involved in like, hey, what's the what's the mix shift and the car are you weighing different things?

28:33And so, you know, if you go both ways, for me personally, I've gotten really involved in kind of some relative esoteric things. I was really adamant, for example, that hand tracking and mixed reality, make it into the headset. That's just that there weren't any supporters in the team. Obviously we had a hand tracking team, which is phenomenal, make sure you have a team. But like there's a lot of people who were like, they did not feel those features, we're gonna be critical for this to become a mainstream device. I always believe that they were, for ease of use and for kind of, so like I just like really forced the issue and didn't give anyone any room and held really high standards for the performance benchmarks.

29:05We were gonna hit on the hand tracking and teams told me it was impossible. And it wasn't, it did great. This touches on something that comes up a lot on this podcast and there's this debate between how in the weeds founders and exec should be, whether they delegate and power versus, now we're just gonna do it this way. I'm gonna be very involved in every mock and there's always this up and down that happens where it's like, okay cool, we're gonna let people run and do their thing and then things start to not work as well often. And then cool, we're gonna take back control. You have just a perspective on when it makes sense to go deep how founders should actually think about that.

29:40Such a useless answer for founders, it depends on the weeds. Like you know, like there are some weeds that really matter and there's some weeds that really just don't. And that should say like, that doesn't mean they don't matter at all. You have to do them, but like they aren't like the hinge upon which success or failure will happen. Yeah, like there's people I really respect, Brian Chesky's been on and said like, look, the Airbnb is going to work only on the things that I could work on. Like it's just that's the extent of what it's gonna do. And that's a super extreme form of it. I have a lot of respect for him and I can have their working things.

30:13I think that like if you have great super talented people that you can trust who can own bigger pieces, that's one option if there are ways to structure it so that you can like check in effectively and make sure that it's on track. That's another way to structure it. And there probably is still work happening at Airbnb that has to happen, finance and accounting and HR that like Brian isn't personally managing. So there are clearly non -technical areas that we do, illegal, there are areas that we already, we do trust that this is happening at. And so I think a lot of founders regret delegating too much from what I, you know, my conversations and I totally get that.

30:51Or they delegated something critical that really turned out to be the most important thing. For me, the judgment is like, how do you most important determine what is what matters the most? And so Mark, we joke inside of meta to this day. We call it the eye of Sauron. When Mark has determined that the thing that you're working on is the most important thing, there is no detail too small for him to notice. He will be in a review and in the same review will be like strategically I think we're of course, and also this one pixel is definitely wrong. You have to fix that. Like, you know, that's a big range.

31:29And frankly, if I be a little bit self -congratulatory, I probably myself may be able to do the same. And I think people who work with me often comment that the style of leadership that we have, and I think Chris Cox is the same, is that where it's like we will go hide -alow on the things that matter a ton. Then there's a bunch other things that certainly matter. Like we're glad we're doing them, but either they have pretty clear roadmaps, pretty clear examples in the industry, or it's like that's a feature that you have to have, but isn't gonna determine success or failure. So getting it into rough shape and then iterating on it is fine.

32:03And so I think it really does depend on the weeds. How deep you wanna get. And so funny, I use exactly the same metaphor that I have Sauron when I talk about working on things that are being be that matter a lot to Brian. And my advice to people is you don't wanna be in that Sauron for too long in your career because you're just gonna burn out if you work in the most important thing all the time. But you wanna be close. You don't wanna be in the shire, but you wanna be around. That's right, they're both, so I worked for years in and ads. From 2012, 2017, I ran ads and business platform, this big ads group.

32:35And it was an area where, certainly was very important, but Mark had so many other things going on with the transition to mobile. He did kinda delegate to me. And it was awesome. And it was so cool to have that kind of trust from him. And also, you're constantly terrified. Because Mark does not know, like what if this is all, it's like, my lead's gonna be worried. It's like, we had to review it with Mark in a while. And it's like, yeah, you suffer in the intensity of the gaze of Sauron. You also suffer in the shadow of its absence. There's no perfect place to be. That's hilarious. I'm trying to think of the part of Middle Earth that has a metaphor for that.

33:14Yeah. Okay, so you talked about the newsfeed, which was one of your very earliest projects at Facebook. Here's a couple of fun facts I know about the newsfeed. One is that it was the very first algorithmic newsfeed of its kind of any social network and maybe of any sort of product like this. And two is the very first AI code that was written at Facebook to rank the actual newsfeed. So there were a lot of firsts. And clearly this became a huge deal. The newsfeed is essentially what people think of when they think of Facebook now. But it was super controversial when it came out. People were very against this.

33:50They did not want to be sharing this much information people are so they thought. And then they realized eventually, oh, this is actually exactly what I want. What did you learn from going through that experience of building something that people initially reject and then later realize that they actually do want this and this is exactly what they're waiting for? This is a story that you tell a lot actually through your interviews, which is just like you have to have conviction in what you're building. You're choosing your customers as much as your customers are choosing you is one way I think about it sometimes.

34:18And one mistake that you do see sometimes start off to make is they get an early cohort of users whose needs actually take them kind of orthogonal to a larger market. And so they become kind of held hostage by their earliest customers. Now, so we've time and time again, we've had a vision for what we thought this should look like. And it wasn't the thing we were delivering right now. And so people who were using the thing we currently had were not sure that that changes that they wanted. But we had a conference that over time they would. And we're not always right, but in these cases we were right.

34:53Now, newsfeed was an easier case than people suspect because everyone was outraged at the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product. So we had a few advantages there, which was literally like everyone was like, I hate this so much and they would refresh, refresh, refresh. And so we're like, okay, wait, this is a cognitive dissonance here between what the stated preferences and what the revealed preferences are and the economic sense. So newsfeed was a little easier than people suspect to stick with. But people sometimes misunderstand that. They think, oh, the lesson is don't listen to customers, not at all.

35:27And we certainly care tremendously about it. And even with newsfeed, we did actually screw some things up. I kind of always make this joke that it's almost like, you know, you're near the party and music's loud, you're talking to somebody and the music cuts out right when you're saying something in a super high volume. And so every of the party hears the last thing you said. Now, you were saying it in a public place. So it wasn't like it was a private comment, but you also didn't mean to broadcast it at that volume. We kind of did that to the entire user base because we took what had been wall posts, which sure anybody could have gone to that profile and seen and then put it kind of on blast, like on main, you know, as the kids say these days, put it on main.

36:01And someone's like, ah, you know, so we did that. I do think we like, I don't want to say like we did screw things up. Like it wasn't like, oh, this is a clause execution. So another thing to know is like, when did you see something small up and when did you see something big up? Like when is the thing itself wrong versus when were the details wrong? That is an art. That is a real art. And you don't always have user data to determine it like we did. And so a lot of that is, do you have a clear vision and intuition for what you expected to happen and then what happened instead and can you diagnose that delta there?

36:33So the newsfeed case, we made a bunch of little mistakes. The thing itself was right. And I really am quite proud of the work we did there. You know, me and Chris Cox, the most core, probably the engineering side, which you saw on the, was the PM, like there was no ranked feeds before that. We did have some AI that I'd built before for the anti spam anti things, but it was pretty rudimentary. So it was the, but it was probably the first consumer AI that was in a website of that kind around content. And we built like the most efficient monetizing surface in history outside of search, I think. I think for those who were curious, I don't use monetization because I think money is the most important thing.

37:08I do think it suggests the economic power you've created, which I do think correlates very strongly with human utility, although obviously I respect that some people made a degree. Yeah, in terms of the economic utility, the Venn diagram of Baws of newsfeed and ads, created trillion dollars of value. So it's not well done. It's not nothing. Not nothing. We're proud of that. We're proud of that work. You have this quote when you're post about the newsfeed where you said it consumed me more fully than anything in life had ever consumed me. It opened up to me the truth that when you're passionate about something, you'd do better work.

37:39You'd do smarter work in your, an order of magnitude more productive. There's no substitute for it. I want to think I've learned about myself since that post actually is just the degree to which I am somebody who is inclined to be passionate about things. And that's a, it's a gift that I'm very lucky to have. And I understand that's not every person. And so like, actually, the ads think is a good example when Mark told me to go work on ads, I was like, no, I don't think I have a passion for that. I had this idea of myself at a very strong identity of myself as this like AI infrastructure product guy and I was like working in this space.

38:10And nope, I was wrong. I just like am a guy who gets excited about things and once I got into ads, this is fascinating. It's a three -sided marketplace and there's always different. It was like a real, you know, I felt like I was playing chess times in terms of the moves, the players in the industry. And I was like super pumped about that. And then when I, you want to mean it, work on hardware. I was like, no, I'm not, I'm a software guy. I'm a software guy, Mark. And I've, no, I love this work. I just like, that's such a fascinating space that I may have learned so much. So I do think that's right.

38:36I do think when I find something I'm passionate about, that's good. What I have learned since then is to give myself a space to understand if I can get passionate about it. Now, there are parts of jobs that I've had before where I just never found the passion. And after six months, I just have to move on. I literally, it's like, I'll either quit, get fired, like I'm doing bad work. I don't care about the work, you know. And so I do have a self awareness. It's not that I can get passionate about anything, but I do have a pretty broad palette. It turns out. I think that's a really interesting career lesson of don't assume you won't be excited about something that may come up.

39:07Is there anything there that you'd share with folks that just like explore it, give it six months, see if you can, can't get excited about it? Absolutely. So I have a very unusual career arc in some ways, which is like, I really almost changed jobs like every six months for a long time. Like, you know, I was working on this integrity stuff, well, the newsfeed in the background, then I was working on newsfeed for about a year. Then I worked on site speed and infrastructure and like detecting, saves and issues. And then I worked on boot camp and then I worked on messaging and groups. And it's like, I just, you know, I had this really funny thing.

39:42I was kind of joke. It was like, for those who are old enough to remember Cruddy Kid, I felt like I was, you know, painting a lot of fences, waxing a lot of cars. And at the end, I knew Cruddy. As I hit the end, at the end, I had to pay off, because I'd gone through, I'd met a lot of people and I'd worked in these different areas and I had just a different dynamics. Well, other people who joined in my cohort were getting promoted, but they were like in a single track. Like, they just stayed in one place and they got promoted. Whereas I kept moving around, and probably at some point early in my career felt like I was moving more slowly, relative to my peers.

40:14And then when I finally turned the corner, really with the ads appointment, which I did for five years, I went vertical. I just like, my career went vertical. And I was the kind of, since then I've kind of been on that trajectory. And so advice I most often give people that this, for me at least, the less than I take from this, is just like, I was willing to learn aggressively. I would move because I wasn't learning enough. I was bored. And so I wasn't like learning enough new stuff. And it was cool to find the getting to be ads job and likewise in the job I'm in now. I was like, those jobs I learned a ton for five years.

40:44I never stopped learning in those jobs. You will occasionally find those jobs where they're super deep and you can just keep learning. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends whose careers were on up better, directed me than earlier, they literally got bored of what they were doing, but they didn't have any place to jump to. Like there wasn't like some other, they'd become domains, specialists, in a domain that they'd kind of exhausted for themselves. And maybe they'd even stuck around longer than they wanted to because it was comfortable or because the company wanted them to. And it ended up kind of being a hindrance to them in the middle of their career.

41:18And so for me, it's like, don't be jumping new things, give it six months. If it's not the thing, no problem. Like you just built a ton of new skills, that's gonna come in handy. I promise you that, keep going. And likewise, when you do make that jump, as early career, optimize for learning. Optimize for like, think about a compound interest. Like it's like the first like 10 years of compound interest don't look that impressive. It's like after 10 years, it starts to look good. I love that advice. It's similar advice I always give of variety of experience often ends up being the most valuable thing you build over time, just trying to dump a bunch of stuff.

41:51Doing some internal tools, maybe working on customer support, I don't know, trust and safety, user -facing products, infrastructure. I'm thinking from a PM's perspective, maybe an engineer's in other functions. One question along his line. So we talked about that I have Sauron and working on like the most important thing at the company, the idea of any advice on how much of your career you should be working in that center. Yeah, listen, all that's being equal, I think there's two really good places to be. I think one is carrying a lot of water in areas that the company's not paying attention to, but you know are important.

42:23And it needs to be a lot like you really got to, you got to own that stuff and like really move mountains over there because like I promise you, as an executive, when there's a huge dam holding up, you know, the floodwaters, you respect the heck out of the person who is holding that dam up. Like you're like, you know, you keep doing that at least. Like that is good work over there. The second advice to be, or maybe this equally big, is like on the most important thing. And on the most important thing, that's where you get like to the advice that Eric Schmidt gave Shiro Sanber, which is like, hey, it's a rocket ship, get on.

42:56Like don't ask what seat I'm in, like just get on. If it's the most important thing, you're gonna get a smaller piece. Everyone wants to be there. Get the piece, but if it's the most important thing, get the piece that you can crush, kill, do a great job at and grow from, because you're gonna get a ton of visibility, you're gonna get a ton of experience, you're gonna see what it looks like in the fire, like in the fire, and that is invaluable. You will use that everywhere. And so I say that, that's at Project Selection Time. But now I'll be cautious, understand. Projects that start in the fire, hopefully, are forged in some manner of metal that cools and is no no longer in the fire, like God willing.

43:34And likewise, things like dams that are holding a floodwaters have a tendency to crack or break or floods overcome. So I think you do wanna be at Selection Time in one of those two places. But then you also gonna stick with the ride, and again, to my point, if you're not engaged, if you aren't doing great work, if you don't love it, then move on. If you've exhausted it, you used to love it, but you don't need more, move on. If you still love it and you're engaged, great, that's cool. That's a great thing. You deserve to go from the forge to the dam and back over time. You don't have to always just keep jumping out of the latest fire.

44:12I tried to do that once. After the ad, actually, so I spent six months and we built the first mobile ad product in 2012 and kind of saved the IPO, which had gotten pretty grim at that point. And I told Mark, I was like, this is so fun. Maybe you can just keep doing this. We just put him on the biggest fire every six months. And he turns me and said, Buzz, that's not a real job. He's like, I need you to stay here and usher this forge. I did it for the next four and a half years and it was amazing. It was amazing. And again, I do give him such, it's funny. I'm gonna get a hard time in this. I'm one of the biggest critics as well as being one of his biggest fans.

44:48I have both those jobs. But today we're talking about stuff and I think Mark really demonstrates really well. And he did a great job of pushing me in my career to different places. Right? I didn't think I could succeed. And he saw the opportunity that made it happen. What have you learned about giving Mark like negative criticism, anything that he accepts? What do you have learned about that? Mark's voracious for all information and all points of view. One of the things that's pretty interesting, I talked earlier about how much as a founder, I think especially, you have to just have tremendous conviction.

45:17You just have to. You have to have a tremendous degree of confidence. And I think Mark is somebody who is like, maybe the strongest willpower of a person, I've ever met just in a pure willpower sense. And so one thing to do is think about Mark is you'll give him feedback. He listened. He's a very kind person to work for. So you'll give him feedback and he'll listen. Truly. He'll most often tell you that you're wrong. Why you're wrong. It's just like most often. And what will happen is it's uncanny. He's like over the course of the next week or two. You'll just see shifts. And I don't think he's like doing it.

45:53So I've always kind of joked if the information gets to him. It's so much information every day. It gets to him. And then like at night, he like recompiles the whole world with all that information and comes back. And by the way, this is not just true about product work. In my head, I was thinking about product stuff where he was like, hey, I think this product is doing this wrong. He's like, no, no, that's why it's not that way. And the product will such a ship. Also to give him feedback just on his own presence in a meeting or delivery. He'll be like, oh, well, here's why I did it that way. And then like a couple weeks later, you'll be in a situation and you will, he will moderate like how he shows up.

46:24So I actually find him somebody who's really, it's really satisfying to give him feedback. It really works. It's very effective. But you do have to like take the long view on it. Like and he will have a, he will have the things he did, he didn't do an accident. He will have a reason why he did it in the way he did. It's a great example of strong opinions loosely held. Yeah, that's right. It also makes me think, I think he's the compiler analogy. I'm thinking like the model training, like the re, he's retrained in his model overnight. Yeah, it's funny. One of the things that's so funny about Mark is he, if you give him some feedback in the morning, the next like six meetings he has, whether it's about that product or not, he will ask people what they think of that feedback.

47:02He won't attribute, he's just like, hey, what do you think about this in this product? And so you'll be in a, meeting with him and you'll see him doing it. He'll come to the meeting with you about some other topic. You're like, hey, boss, what do you think about this product and this, this idea? And so he will like over the course of the day, take that little note and kind of pressure test it. Because he, and he loves to triangulate. What is, where are all the points of view on this? That maybe didn't see. So it really values a broad perspective on each thing that's being discussed. Just be fun.

47:28Trying to get more training data for his first model. I get it. You can't get me to call Mark and Ellen. That's not there. That's easy. I can all hope to be as smart as Mark. As you were talking, I noticed your tattoos and it reminded me that you've got at least two tattoos that I'm aware of. One is of California, which I completely understand. California is a very special place. We have this other tattoo that is just the words Veritas. Can you talk about what that's about and why that's important to you? The fun of the way this tattoo is in general is I came out of high school as like, I don't know, I don't know what my, I don't know if there was an archetype for me, but I didn't drink until I was 21.

48:07I was a very rule following person. I was like, why are you gonna get a tattoo, you know, you just like affect your body? Like people would die, why you die your hair? Like just like let it be what it was. And some of this was like, I think I was somebody who was privileged and had a great deal of self confidence and who I was and what I wanted to be and that was fine. But some of us was like, we're the judgey of other people in a way that's kind of off brand for me, certainly today, but at the time, getting a tattoo is a big deal for me because I was like, oh, like this is just like the vehicle for my life and like, you can do whatever you want with it.

48:38And it doesn't have, it's not like a, you know, it's something that you possess and you can, if you feel like, if you wanna decorate it, you can decorate it. And so getting a tattoo was a big deal to me actually. And I kind of completely shift of my mindset of how I thought about my body and how I thought about people's body and their presence and the time, maybe just some degree even like an understanding of mortality, like, hey, this is like, can't take it with you. Like it's all, it's all gonna go, you know, when you're 18, you think you're gonna live forever and when you, my time are 22, I'm a grizzled, 22 year old veteran, you're like, ah, tattoo that bad boy up, it's all going down.

49:13And so yeah, that's why I got the very test tattoo, which is Latin for truth, which is, you know, I will say, it's a little cheesy because it's also Harvard's motto. And I got it in a monotype font, you know, this is the programmers font here. The other thing that's interesting to me about tattoos was it's also part of a generational shift. You know, we grew up in a time when tattoos were really seen by adults as, you know, gangs or bikers or sailors or like, you know, certain types. Now, my understanding, I started to start recently that more people in my generation have tattoos that don't have tattoos.

49:47And so I think, I think we also just culturally shifted it positions in a way that I find, I find richness of self expression wonderful. I really think it's great. And so I'm here for all of it. My assumption from what you're describing as this idea of truth is very important to the way you think and work. My reputation does precede me on this point of a refrigerator. It's just, you know, I think when I was young, I saw being honest and I was wrong, by the way. I saw being honest as like kind of a get out of jail free card. Like you could say whatever you wanted as long as you're being honest.

50:15That's just not the case at all. And I've written about this before, but by far my biggest professional regrets were me not being kind. And I used to think, like I wrote this note a while back called be kind, we're being nice. That's like patronizing or telling somebody things that are half -truths or just like getting by. And I'm against that. But being kind isn't that. Being kind is like, hey, how can I deliver this feedback in a way that is actually productive and helpful? In a way that is going to help them and not cause them just to feel bad and helpless? And I think I did that wrong a lot as a just a young man.

50:53And so being honest is still a big part of my personality. No one would ever accuse me of being dishonest, who knows me. And I think people understand and respect that I'm pretty direct. And if I have concerns or issues, I'm going to bring them up. I'm just much better at bringing them up now and expressing a true care and belief. I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't think we could do better. If I didn't think we could fix it, I didn't believe in the situation. And so being honest is still a huge part of my identity and I think that's something I'm very proud of. But I will say the contextualization of how I'm honest has changed immensely since I got this tattoo.

51:28That seems reasonable. This touches a little bit on something I definitely wanted to talk about, which is one of your most classic pieces. And this is the way I first learned about you is a piece that is called communication is the job. Yeah. I know many people have read this. Many people haven't. I'd love for you to just talk about what this means and why this is important, why this is something that you wanted to share. Yeah, it's one of the things that, especially if you aspire to be a leader and a leadership isn't management and leadership isn't being the only person responsible. It's not even always the same as accountability.

52:02But if you want to have an impact on the world around you, it is exclusively done through the creation of artifacts or verbalizations that affect other humans. That's the only, that is all there is. That's all there is if you want to have an impact, if you want to create some kind of a lasting change and it could be in your low, in your little relationship, it could be in your team, it could be in your company, it could be in the world. It is down to communication and so often you hear people saying, like, oh, yeah, I wrote that up a year ago. It's like, yeah, but you did a bad job of writing for a year ago or we would have not wasted a year not doing it.

52:45It's like, it's like, it's like, people always think it's, oh, I had that idea and that's like means anything. It means nothing. It means absolutely nothing. Or it's like, oh, I wrote this post, like, well, you didn't break through with it. So that's like, that's on you. It's not on the audience. People want to blame the audience. Well, the audience is just there. And so I mentioned this even earlier and I hope people caught it when I said, hey, if somebody's, I give somebody a piece of work and they come back six months later and they have done the wrong thing, now I'll take the L. I will take the L on it.

53:15It's not great for them. They'll be pissed they waste their time. But like I said, that's my responsibility. I did not communicate clearly what I wanted, what the expectations were. Could they have also helped themselves? Sure, they could have. And that's a thing that they would, it takes all sides. We should work on this problem for both angles. I have another post called listening is the job, which is the other side of this. But like, communication is job is I really believe, actually is a relationship to this idea that came out of the US Marines and the Seals of extreme ownership, which is like, so whenever something goes wrong, I was like, I asked myself, what could I have done differently in terms of how I communicated things for this to have gone better?

53:56Could I have said priorities better? Could I have said expectations better? Then you'd have a better metric that I pointed the team at? Did I put the wrong people on it? By the way, I think I talked about org charts or communication devices. They don't exist. There's not a physical string between you and your manager. They're just communication tools that are supposed to give people a rough sense of how things are organized and where to go with who. And so all these things are communication. Silence is communication. Me not reaching out to you, check on you, to check on your project, right? We talked to the IFSR in earlier.

54:29What does that mean? That means trust. That means responsibility. Like the absence of check ins has meaning. You cannot not communicate. You are always communicating something with your face, with your clothes, with your body. What are you communicating? I'll give you a funny example, which I hope we get to put in the podcast. Because if you're watching this on video, you will have noticed that my camera cannot stop adjusting light. It's just constantly too dark or too bright. I'm trying a new camera. I'm a nerdy guy. I try a lot of camera gear. I try a lot of microphone gear. I'm like, I love to have all the latest gadgets and gizmos.

55:05So I'm trying something new. Not working. And in my head, I'm like, what is this communicating about me? People are going to think that I don't care or that I'm not competent. So just a little, little, that's what I'm talking about. And now I felt compelled to explain it in the podcast so that I can communicate clearly. But that's not the case. So I really just think so much of what I try to do in my professional life is understand the mental model of other people. Where are they right now? And I mean, specific people, like my managers or my key technical leaders. And I mean, general people, like teams.

55:36And I mean, broadly, like, just the average human. Where are they at in this conversation? And how can I craft my language, my presence, my persona, everything to usher them from where they are, to where I want to get them? And that requires me to have a very clear idea of where I want to get them, have the clarity of where they are. And I want to tell you, it's not as much work as it sounds. Like this isn't like, I think no one would accuse me of having this big fabricated persona, not that. But it is like having tremendous empathy for where people are starting. And I think, and that, that was the leap for me.

56:11All the rest of it, all the rest of how I show up in meetings and trying to smile more, because I'm not like a big scary guy. Like those things are little things that you work on. Those are, and they become second nature and they're easy. The hard thing is just having the empathy for your audience and being like, where are they, where are they starting? And when you miss taking responsibility for that extreme responsibility for that. There's so much good advice in that. I have, there's so many threads I want to follow. But let's just follow this last one of trying to understand how someone is best communicated to.

56:39Is there an example to make that a little more real for people? Of just what you've done to like, oh, here's I'm going to communicate with this person. I'll give you a couple of. So one is like, multimodality. There's an old saying, right? A petition never spoke of the prayer. And I think most experienced communicators, whether they be writers, whether they be public speakers, talk about the importance of reiterating a point several times and in several different ways to make sure that people have a chance to internalize it. You want to use it, you want to say it directly? You want to use metaphor?

57:07And so for me, it's like, I will give an all hands and then write a post with the content of the all hands, because different people are going to respond differently to these modalities and are going to absorb information at different rates on these different modalities. That's a trivial one. Another one that I think of all the time is making sure that you address people's fears and concerns. People will not listen to you if they think you don't know what's going on. And so one of my favorite things to do when we're talking about some kind of issue is right up top and say, hey, let me be clear.

57:41This is the issue we're having. I know we're having it. I know what matters. And then I'll say the same thing that I would have said but they would have literally ignored me because they're like, how can they trust my conclusions if they don't accept the premise? You know what I'm saying? So there's a whole piece there. Obviously when you're in person, it's a lot easier because you're reading facial expressions. Even on this, right? I'm reading you nodding on that. I'm like, okay, he's got it. He's with me. And then I throw in what I mean. Whereas if you were kind of like, give me a cocktail, I'd bring a second example to try to like drive the point home.

58:17But you build yourself up. Most people are going to realistically start in their careers, trying to influence one or two people. That's where you start. One or two people. That's where you get to communicate with your manager. One teammate. That's what you got. And then you build up and build up and build up a skill set to do it at larger and larger scale. I love so much of this advice. I think it's also helpful for relationships. Here's what your upset about. Totally. Here is what I think we can do. Being a... So graciously supported to do on myself at Meta, with great mentors, Cheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, a bunch of others and coaches, absolutely made me a better partner and husband to my wife.

58:59And then by the way, vice versa, having kids and getting deep in the literature around raising children. Congratulations to you, by the way. Getting deep in the literature made me a better manager. Absolutely made me a better manager in terms of thinking about how people are managing their emotions and how to engage with them in those times. Amazing. We need a second edition of this Boss' Parenting and Vice. That's right. And relationship. It's like it's all the good stuff. It's, you know, no bad kids. Land's very, it's good inside. Dr. Becky, like it's all... I really think that the modern parenting canon is really rich.

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1:00:51Let's talk about the Vision Pro and VR headsets. Have you tried the Vision Pro? Thoughts? Actually, Mark and I tried it together, and I want to say, first of all, when the headset came out, we breathed a little sigh of relief because the stuff inside of it didn't represent a fundamental breakthrough. Everything inside of it wasn't that we probably could have gone and done with the exception of Apple Silicon, which is a marvel. But it's worth not like Apple Silicon is like a 2x marvel when doing things like scaling display resolution is unfortunately a quadratic proposition. And so a 2x linear scaling advantage doesn't buy you as much as you might expect when you're trying to scale resolution.

1:01:29And so that was step one. And then, but we still assumed at that price point, you know, with their legendary attention to detail and polish, they probably produce a great product. And the line that I said, actually, my own podcast with Matthew Ball, a week ago, was like, look, I was prepared to come to market and say, we have the best value headset. Like, if you want to outstanding best possible headset for the money, we've got it. It's the Quest 3. And I was so thrilled when I tried the AVP next to Mark. We were like, no, no, no, we actually really have the actual best headset. Now, we're not saying it's the best at all things.

1:02:05If you're sitting still and watching a movie and high resolution movie, yep, Alboism Pro is really great. It's really great. The resolution shines the way they've tuned the pass through shines if you're stationary and looking straight ahead. And they've done some really nice things with the UI. I'm a little bit, it's one of these things that we do get annoyed with. A mile to the side, we get a little bit annoyed about as proud of people. And this happens to all of us. It happens to Apple, happens to Google, happens to us. We have a bunch of internal things we've been playing with, which will at some point ship.

1:02:39And we will be accused of having stolen them when we actually, you're not still built. If you want, you can go see my Korra answer on the history of the like button, where this happened previously, where we had built the like button internally before it was launched elsewhere. Anyways, so little thing. So this happens in our industry a lot. And I really shouldn't care as much. It's a little bit of my ego peeking through, which I should control and tamp down by being responsible. But yeah, so the beautiful UI polishes, they did a tremendous job with eye tracking. One of the things that's interesting about the eye tracking is to do it the way they've done it.

1:03:11That's why you have to have the prescription insert. So it doesn't support your glasses. You have to get prescription inserts. They're kind of expensive. And they can shoot the cameras that track your eyes through the lens, as well as the light around it. Ars go from the side on the Quest Pro. And that allows you to wear corrective lenses. And so different choices like that have trade -offs, but it's still cool. It's great that they got that in there. At the same time, our hand tracking is better. Obviously, half library we knew was gonna be better. That's not totally fair to them. They just, they've just launched and they have small volume still.

1:03:39But I just find the comfort, the thing they really, I mean, the most, the field of view is really small on the Apple Vision Pro. And some people are characterizing it incredibly on the internet. They're doing a characterization up close to the lens. Once you factor in the eye relief, the distance between where the lenses are and where your eyeball is, their field of view gets pretty narrow for almost all faces relative to ours, which I find distracting. Their view is, their displays are much dimmer than ours. And I find the motion blur really distracting when I'm in mixed reality use cases. And I mentioned earlier in the back.

1:04:06I'm a huge mixed reality buff. I got my huge fan of that potential. For example, the same reason that they are, by the way, which I think hands in mixed reality make it feel much more accessible to more people. I'm pretty glad we have the controller in our set though because it really expands what you can do. And, you know, we don't just like operate our computers with just like one thing. We have keyboard, we have a mouse that we do multiple modalities all the time. So I really feel like the comfort, the lack of persistence and motion blur in our past through the brightness of our displays. I was like, oh, man, like if you had, if you gave me one to take, I would take, Quest 3.

1:04:40Now people have rightly said, that's pretty biased. But of course it is, go get your own opinion. But what kills me is most people haven't done that. They have not tried the Quest 3. That's what kills me the most. If you go and try Quest 3, ask yourself if you'd rather have seven of those, one for you and six of your best friends, or one Apple Vision Pro. I'm sure the answer isn't Quest 3 for every person. There are people for whom there are use cases that really fit their life. The other Vision Pro, I'm cool with it. But people don't even know that the Quest 3, you can do about desktop. You can do it both through an app called remote desktop.

1:05:10It's very popular, or you can go into work rooms, and you can have three monitors surrounding you. And streamed from your machine. I think some of this is just like people have not even done the work. They haven't even tried it. So I welcome all of you who think I am biased to prove one way or the other what you think. But don't do it without putting the Quest 3 on and giving it through its paces. It's a pretty great device. And you can do a lot with $3 ,000 extra dollars. How do they get away with that? By the way, three, we launched a headset that was like $12 .99 and people lost their minds about it.

1:05:45And they're like, yeah, they're 100. It's fine. This is fine. No one cares. I don't know. It says, you know, fairness is too much to ask. I don't care about that. Apple has earned the great brand they've built. They truly have, I think, is tremendous. And I certainly celebrate a large number of Apple products. A huge fan of their work, a huge fan of what they do. That's probably why I expected more from the AVP. Well, I'll show you my favorite AR device, which is these Raybanz. I actually bought them. Yeah. But yeah, here I'll put them on it. Here, I'm going to, what I'm going to do is I'm going to record it until it was going to do this.

1:06:17I'm going to record this as we're talking. Look at this. I like that. It looks so good on you, too. That's a good fit. My mother -in -law is like, you look so sophisticated. You look really smart with these on. And we bought these actually to watch to film our kids or our kid, to like, instead of having camera in space. And it's been awesome. It's really the best. It is so hard to look at a phone screen and have the real thing be like in between you. Like it's like, no, the glass is the way to do it. Look at this. My new look. She's having glasses on all the time. We got to get you the multimodal.

1:06:47I've been playing that since December where you can use the camera to ask a meta AI assistant about things. It's really good. I was in a ski village recently with my family and I had them on. I just like, hey, you know, take a look at what you see. And it like I had found a sign and it gave me directions like, hey, the bathrooms are down those stairs to the right. Like, if you want food, it's over to the right. It couldn't tell what village I was in. But it was like, you're in a ski village somewhere. Like, here's the amenities. And I was like, wow, you know, there's some real magical here. I feel like I need this for my podcasting interviews so I could just have little voice tell me questions to be asking.

1:07:24And where I'm at. Totally. I'm with Abby. I'm going to cheat on this one and say we got a we have obviously we've been talking for a while about playing with glasses that have full AR capabilities. And we've got one that is rumored to be coming internally soon. So heavily rumored in fact that you might even say it's almost been confirmed. And what's been what's been really fun is being able to play with these really time machines really in terms of what they are. That is amazing, amazing technology. And yet people were giving us speeches like big company wide speeches and had all their notes on the glasses.

1:08:01And they could control the slides just using a gesture. Oh my god. So there's there's there's like something things of foot. It's the features looking pretty bright. Something that I wanted to touch on, which is when Mark put out this whole video of here is what I think of Apple Vision Pro versus the quest. A lot of people are just like, oh man, because he's putting out this video. He must be so afraid of what's happening. And it's like it's not the right move. What went into thinking was there like the strategic thinking mayor was it just him like here's what I think. You know, this guy does murder me about the modern era.

1:08:31Everyone's in there met ahead about everything. Everything's like a four dimensional chess. That was just what Mark thought of the thing. That's what he thought about it. And you know, I think he wanted to make sure people remembered. Hey, Cush 3 is literally a better device. And it's you haven't even people have even tried it. And so, you know, we're not always playing four dimensional chess over here. Sometimes we're just like, here's a thing that I believe is true. I'm going to say it out loud with my mouth. Like that's what we did. That's not that hard. And I think I guess people, you know, when I do it, everyone expects it, because of my persona or brand or everything.

1:09:02And I guess people are surprised when a CEO does it. All right, I get that. That's cool. There's like other sets of society like expectations there. And like we've all familiar with like, you know, Apple putting the welcome IBM ad in. The New York Times and then slack doing the same thing with Microsoft and like the bomber iPhone. Come on. None of those were true discussions of a technical merits of a product. Right? Those were all just like big, you know, rally the troops like gestures. This is not that like we were like Mark is deep. He's an expert in this stuff. I'm an expert in this stuff.

1:09:36Like I feel great about our choices. I by the way, when I'm using it, I can get myself completely into the head of the person who designed it. And what I can tell you from using it. What instructions they were given that team was given. I can tell you what they were optimizing for. I can tell you what constraints they were under. By all the choices they made, I can tell you all those things. And I understood it coheres in that way. We made different choices. It shouldn't surprise anyone. We like our choices better. Like we could have made those choices. We didn't make those choices. We made these other choices.

1:10:06And so for me like the weight, the wire, which is always brush against my ear. Like the pocketable thing. Like I get it. It's not what I would have done. And I know that because I had the chance to do it. And I chose not to. It's like I don't know what people are surprised. But but yeah. So I think I think this wasn't like this wasn't some big savvy strategic move. It was just like Mark's like got a chance to use it. He's like, oh man. Like I think we should tell people what the real story is here. And we did. I love that insight. And I know a lot of people watching are like, oh shit, he's right.

1:10:37Wow. I didn't think of it that way. And so I think it had a lot of that impact. I want to do a little bit and talk about Meta's journey over the past couple years. It feels like there was a huge downturn in public perception of meta and the stock price. And then over the past couple years, there's been a huge turnaround. And it feels like there's always a lot to learn from these periods. So just an example of the stock price. I was just looking at it. It was down to $80ish. And now today it's $487. Yeah. I'm curious just what you've learned from going through that downturn and turn around. And I know it's still in progress, but just what would have you learned from that journey?

1:11:16Yeah. Well, there's a lot to take away. I got to tell you. I think we have the single largest single day stock drop in history. Followed 18 months later by this largest single day gain in stock market history. Oh my god. As the legendary Lou Holtz said, you know, you're never as good as they say you are when you're winning. And I never as bad as they say you are when you're losing. Mark has always always brought that quote out to guide us internally to try to insulate ourselves a little bit from the vagaries of external opinion. And that's not just true with stock prices. That's true with media and press.

1:11:50It's true across a lot of things. One of the things I told my team, when I still have to repeat it to them, is like, one of the things that's hard to remember when you're in it is that you know more than the critics do. You know more than the analysts in the marketplace do you know more than the media does you know more than the podcasters do you know more than the Twitter does you know more about what's real and substantial of value about our company than they do. That doesn't mean ignore them because they have a different perspective and you need to understand it. And it may contain even if a totality is less than what you know, it may contain parts that you do not know.

1:12:30So I'm a huge fan. I read the criticism of everything and I read it very carefully looking out for confirmation bias, looking out for things that I might be inclined to resist but are maybe true. I invite all critique, but I also don't accept the critique blindly. I don't just say yes, this is obviously true. There's a great, Gil Manning Amnesia is a great concept for everyone to understand. Gil Manning Amnesia is this property where if you read a newspaper article, let's say newspaper, why not about a thing about which you are an expert. So and you'll be baffled because here is an article that is not just wrong.

1:13:12It's like it's inverted causality. It's a microcrite and I'll still microcrite and quote on this. It's a wet sidewalks make rain story. And you'll be like, what a terrible, bizarre story. And then you will turn the page of newspaper and it'll be another article about a topic about which you know nothing. And you will read it as if it is the gospel truth. You'll tell you it's, oh no, look at this information about this foreign situation. Look, it's perfectly true. We should be smarter than that. And so does that mean you don't read the thing? No, you read it. You just read everything with that perspective of like, wait a second, like this is another point of view.

1:13:47And how do I integrate that into a whole perspective that I can have and be informed about? So that's the first macro thing is is taking the long view realizing that when you're in the dumps, it's not as bad as you think. When you're at the top, it's not as bad as good as you think. It's like somewhere in between at all times. The second thing is communications the job. We really did not communicate effectively, I think, with the market around our future investments. And listen, we've had two 10 -year -long huge investment areas. One has been AI, one has been reality labs. And AI is looking pretty good today.

1:14:27I can't think we could all agree. You know, with with Lama 2, with Fair, the breakthroughs that we've had with the second, people don't notice that fair. Our AI research lab is the second most cited research lab in AI behind Google. So we've been doing this work. We didn't come here casually, like we've been doing it. And so that's looking pretty good. I don't think we did enough to explain those best to people. Previously, the core business was going strong enough that they kind of were willing to ignore them. And what's the old word, Buffet quote? It's only when the tide goes out, we see who's not wearing swimming trunks.

1:14:59And so it's like when the tide went out, when you have the Ukraine war and an interest rate hike and recession spend in recessions, now everyone's scrambling for that incremental dollar, and they're like, you're going to get rid of this stuff. And we had to tell the company, you don't want to work at a company that, when times are tough, kills all future growth. And just like, shores up in the core business. That's a company that's just committing itself to dying at some point, a little later than expected, but like dying at some point. You want to work at a company that has a balanced portfolio of investments, which we had.

1:15:33We didn't explain that well. And so we spent that time explaining that to the market, to the press, to everybody. And now it's a, you know, now it's, I think as people understand the size of it in the scope of it. And of course, the helps of the core business is kind of overcome its challenges there from ATT and other kinds of stuff. It's looking pretty good. So, yeah, I think I do think one part is as an internal person really moderating your attachment to the external narratives and swings. That's super important. And you do that based on like, understanding your next piece. And the second part is understanding, why is there a delta?

1:16:06Like, what is there, and then I, and grab that, it's usually communication. There's also a big flattening of the org. This was something a lot of people talked about where managers became ICs. There anything more there that you've learned of just how to adjust the org to be more efficient. Yeah, of course. And I should have included that in the first section. It was a bit eager to wrap it up elegantly in the tube. But you're right. I appreciate it. We did make, we made significant shifts in how we operate the business, which are super painful. And listen, let's go back. I just, you know, this goes back to the boom times of COVID.

1:16:42When it looked like there was a real lasting, secular shift in things like e -commerce and in working remotely and these tool sits, which are exactly what we build. And it's primed us. And so we built the huge work force to pursue those opportunities. We still believe in those opportunities. But they're a little, they're back on their original timeline. And actually, literally, if you look at a bunch of graphs that we have internally, it literally, the COVID boom. And then, kind of as it, not bust really, as it receded, everything's back on its original trajectory. So we didn't like lose ground or lose time.

1:17:18But the pull forward didn't happen. Well, it means much of your economics don't make any sense anymore. Now, you made a bunch of investments that are going to yield two distant in the future. And getting there faster isn't going to help you. And you're carrying a much extra cost. That sucks, man. It sucks. And we don't feel great about it. We really don't. And it's a business. It's awful. And it happens. I do think one thing that was interesting about that time was for those of us who, you know, grew up in Southern .com boom firsthand. I was born and raised in the valley. So that was like, you know, all around me when I was graduating high school, going to college.

1:17:53And then in the 2008 major recession on the housing crash and the market and all that stuff. Now let's imagine you graduated college in 2009 and got a job. Well, shoot, you're 15 years in your career. You could be a director and you've never seen it downturn. So I think we also had, in addition to, you know, what is very unfortunately conventional, misforecasting in the business that caused us to over hire that we had to correct for. You also had a workforce that was just not at all of a mentality that this could ever happen. Like it's like, this felt like it was a, you know, a rack of God. When in fact, it's like a cyclical nature of all businesses that this will happen at some time.

1:18:34And you hope it doesn't and you wish it didn't object to deal with it. And so I think we bit of a tough storm there for the whole industry. And we're still feeling it. I think, you know, we're still feeling it. Certainly we're happy at meta to be beyond that point. And we're growing again and executing at a stable rate and feeling really good about that. But quite a few of our other companies in the industry aren't. And it's a very uncertain time for engineers, for PMs, for designers, for everyone. And all the support functions around them. So I'm super sympathetic for that. I think what you obviously, the misforecasting that happened inside of a meta's walls happen everywhere.

1:19:11And now that you have, especially with higher interest rates and cash isn't as cheap, runways are tighter. Like people are just making those pragmatic calls. I think we'll rally back from this. I think this is a normal thing that happens to industries. But it doesn't reduce my sympathy and empathy for those who have been affected by it or who live in fear of it. Yeah. I was talking to a friend who works in meta and I was asking them what it's like to work in meta. And she was just like, it's intense. And it used to be more chill. There were people that were coasting here and there and now she's like, no, all those people are gone now.

1:19:42It's just only the intense people left and things are working really hard. Does that bring up anything? Yeah. I don't want to comment on people who left. People left meta for all kinds of different reasons. And likewise, you know, role elimination happened in many cases because we just decided not to do this work at this point. We're going to do it two years from now and don't get to carry a team to do it. So I think it's really hard to generalize because each of these is a specific person with a specific life and a story that is rich and deserves to be told. But I do think that, yeah, if there was somebody coasting and you as a manager have to make tough calls on who you're bringing in, like, you know which way you're going to bias.

1:20:19My profound suspicion and again, I don't know your friend who you spoke with. My profound suspicion is that person was probably already working hard.

1:20:30Yeah. I don't think we like changed how hard any individual work. I really don't believe that. I do think there was a selection bias as to like what was going to happen. And I think that's probably what you saw playing. In fact, if there was a generality that can be found. Maybe is the last question. I have this segment where I call failure corner where I ask people to share a failure of their career and what they learned from that experience. Is there is something that comes to mind? I've failed times and times. I've built products that nobody used. I've built technical architectures that didn't scale.

1:21:02I've failed a kind of times. I don't regret most of those. Almost every one of those I learned from. You know, it was a stop on the path to a better solution. Or it was a recognition that this thing wasn't going to work ever, which is, you know, its own kind of a gift. All the failures that I regret that I take seriously are personal failures. Where I affected a person in a way that I'm not proud of. Maybe I wasn't proud of the time. Because I wasn't in control of my own emotions removed. I was feeling fearful. I was feeling scared. And there's a bunch of these. One or two that stand out that I don't feel comfortable sharing because the person affected.

1:21:43I think it would be before I didn't share. I'll share one that was, you know, I think the person is an airtight now. We have this really silly discussion. I remember it so vividly. In the early days of client server architectures, which Facebook obviously is a website. So you're calling to a server to get the web page. But then that server is going to call the other servers to gather things. And I was one of the major kind of clients of remote procedure calls. Because newsfeed ranking was all done on this other set of servers that had its own special requirements, its special build and how it was put together.

1:22:19And so, you know, your main web server would put a call out over remote procedure call to the remote server. And get a response back. And we had this really janky RPC system that I won't say who built it, but it was built. And it was such a piece of garbage constantly failing. It was not robust at all. And one of our best engineers, Mark Slee, built a new one called Thrift. It was a really great RPC infrastructure. And one of my best friends, Dave Federative, one of my really good friends and a brilliant engineer, we were talking about how to do the encoding. And I was like, I wanted to be binary encoding.

1:22:56I was like, you should binary encoding. I wanted to be super fish on the wire. Because I'm storing these RPCs. They do two jobs for us. One of which is that the active RPC. But I also stored the RPCs in a log and replayed them to do the work that we were doing in newsfeed ranking. That's how it was done back in the day. It was all kind of asynchronous offline. And so I wanted to be as tight as possible because my memory bandwidth is very limited. And memory was so expensive back then. And Dave Federative was like, no, no, no, that's short -term thinking bars. Like we should be using Linux style descriptors that are plain English language.

1:23:28Then you can look at the log. You can see what it is. It's parsable. Like memory bandwidth will get cheaper. But like these logs being screwedable to development is going to be a better thing. This is a totally, this is nerd bait. Those of you who have been engineers in this call, this is like VIM EMAX. This is nerd bait. This goes deep. This is like a long old. And everything. Keep it coming. I think I like, it's a room full of engineers at the company. And the company is not that big. And so like probably half the engineers the company in this room. And I just like absolutely, I was like yelling at day of like, I'm literally like, I'm turning red.

1:24:04I'm like sweating. I'm so angry at Dave Federman. And for like, for a countermanding my proposal, when I'm the major RPC customer, a couple of things. It's just so, I went so dumb. Markly just built two encoders. It's not that hard. You just build you pick which encoder you want for your things. The easiest solution ever. Second thing is Dave was right, by the way, like within a year, the memory bandwidth definitely didn't matter relative to like how inscrutable it was to like try to get in these logs. I had to build a ton of extra custom software to like parse the logs and like understand what's going on.

1:24:35But also it was just like, it was just like, it was a case where my identity was caught up in being right. Like my identity. And for those who don't know identity threat is just the biggest, you're the most your worst behavior is always going to come out when you think you are under identity threat. When you feel like some core part of how you see yourself is in question, you will react with every ounce of your fiber to defend that conception of yourself. It's so expensive to reconceptualize who you are that you like defend yourself. So like my identity was being right. I got a very tough on the wrist.

1:25:08And it caused me to take like one of my best friends, one of the best engineers I knew I literally lived with. And getting like a really embarrassing for me conflict, whichever was just like scratching their head. I was like, what is going on with bars right now? Like I look like an unhinged crazy person. Yeah, I remember so I remember the room. I remember where I was standing in the room. I remember everything about that moment. And I had to go home and be like, what the fuck was that? Like what? What happened? I'm asking myself, like what happened there? And that was kind of one of the many steps on the journey to re -contextualizing what it was.

1:25:41It was not to be right. And to be open minded and curious and have an engagement. I was 22. I don't make excuses for it now. But I remember there was a couple of other examples like that in things that were less technical and more personal. And I won't share. But I remember each of them vividly. And you know, those are the real failures for me. I love how the story is like so long ago at this point and it's still stuck with you in such an impact. Oh my god. Yeah, I'll never forget that. It was embarrassing. And for those, it was the old quote. It's really one of the truest quotes. And I know it's cliche.

1:26:12And sometimes cliches are cliches because they're good. It's like people, they don't remember what you said. They just remember how you made them feel. That's all. That's all anyone remembers is how you made them feel. And I think in that room I made people feel like unsafe maybe. Like it was bad, you know, I like this concept of identity thread. I'll call this podcast episode identity thread. I'm just. There you go. Boss, we started this episode with a billion questions. I have like a billion and one questions. Now I wish we could keep going. But I know we have to wrap this up. Is there anything you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lighting room?

1:26:46Well, in the off chance that we do end up labeling this episode identity thread. Let me give you what really was. I made a lot of breakthroughs with coaching learning about the feeling inside of my own body. When I was feeling that identity thread and learning techniques and tactics to reduce the likely that I would feel it. And how to deal with it when it happened and how to repair it. Like I went through all that stuff. I would say the greatest lesson I learned would come years later. And it was just from observing somebody. Amivora, who was a legendary long time, and he worked on our development platform, then worked with me on ads for a long time.

1:27:23And it was the PM Lee for what's up for a long time. She's since gone on to do even more great things outside the company. Working with her. It was like working with like watching an alien because she was hurt. I was so different in our approach. And she approached. She could have the most profound disagreement with somebody in the in the world. And they would say the thing that she thought was not just like wrong, but like crazy wrong. And she would respond. She would say, fascinating. You have to tell me more about why you think that. And I can't do it justice. She meant it like from the core of her being.

1:27:58She was like intensely cute. She saw this schism between her and that person. And it could have been personal. It could have been professional. It could have been anything. She saw this schism and how they saw the world and how she saw the world. And rather than reacting. As if it was a threat that somebody saw it differently. Or rather than reacting. Afraid that maybe she was wrong and had done things wrong before. She reacted with the most genuine and profound curiosity. And I just watched it. Absolutely tear down walls between points of view. People felt immediately her genuine heartfelt curiosity.

1:28:32And would lean in. And that would cause them to be open minded. And if she was right, which by the way, she usually was, then they would leave. And they would be like, oh, okay, I was wrong about that. But she also would change your mind. And that was the key. I really ever since then, I just, I really have tried to model that. It's just reacting. When I have a strong, strong internal clench. I try to embrace curiosity. Wow. We do not see this thing the same way. Like that is fascinating. Tell me what you see that. And that could be by personal feedback. Someone's like, hey, boss, I don't think you talk enough.

1:29:04Wow. You don't think I talk enough. That is unexpected. Like I would love to hear more about that. Because no one's ever said that to me. So I wanted to give that to anybody who, to who might recognize this behavior in themselves. There's lots of things that you can do. And you should do that work. The work of improving yourself is always fruitful and satisfying. And it pays off as we discuss in every aspect of your life with your family, with your friends. And professionally. This is one that I really thought was so great, which was curiosity, embracing curiosity. In those moments of challenge.

1:29:37Has really completely changed my life. And I know that's a omnivore. Wow. I love this example. It's basically an example of yes and. But in a really like, no, it's going to be like yes and. It's like a really nice way of saying it. Just fascinating. Tell me more. Fascinating. You've got to tell me why I want to understand it. I love that. Maybe that will be the new title. Fascinating. There you go. Anyway, with that, boss, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? The dream machine, which is a tremendous history of prehistory, really, of modern computing.

1:30:15Essentially, following the life of JCR, lick lighter, but really much broader than that, is a tremendous. Missing piece of history, in my opinion, I think in my discipline in computer science, we were not properly educated. We learned about Alan Turing and we learned about some of the technical underpinnings of computer science theory. But the modern computer and the path to it is a profound and fascinating one. It has particular resonance today as JCR, lick lighter's observation was human in the loop computing. And I think we are now in human in the loop AI. And I think there's a tremendous resonance there.

1:30:46The second one is good inside, which is Dr. Becky's book. And again, I think it's a tremendous parenting book. But more than that, it does contain lessons for how we think about our own emotions and how we manage those, which I find to be useful in any context. Amazing recommendations. She's also got an online community for people that like, she's a wonderful, she's a wonderful online community. She's very engaged in it. And again, for those parents out there, you're a little early for this Lenny, but you'll get there, having little scripts that I'm reading on Instagram that like, when I'm in a moment of tremendous emotional challenge with my children, I have the words handy.

1:31:19They're just like top of mind for me. They've been cached in, right? They're primed. It's a big game changer. This will be far parenting episode down the road. That's right. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed? Yeah, so this is super conventional, but Mandalorian. So one of the things that's been fun about that is really my kids again, is we watched it with my kids. So we had a chance to go on the Galactic Star Cruiser. Again, y 'all know I am a genuine and true nerd through and through a huge fan of Scott Trobergen's work at Star Wars. At Star Wars Lands in Disney and also of that.

1:31:51And so before that, we got our kids who were nine and six and watched all the movies together. And then we were watching Mandalorian together as a family. And it's super fun. And it's fun to have that kind of lore connection. So it's not just the classic kid movies, but there's something more. And I think for them, they feel like it's an adult kind of conversation that gets to be a part of. So I've really enjoyed that. And I think the world of Dave Floney and John Fabro and the team that's building that universe out. This is the way. This is the way. Do you have a favorite interview question that you'd like to ask candidates that you're interviewing?

1:32:24One of the most important things that I always ask people is what people who worked with them would say are their greatest strengths and weaknesses. I like this for a couple of reasons, not least of which is I often do follow up with references and I like to try and evaluate their awareness of how other people calibrate though. And also like how they respond to criticism. Are they saying, hey, like sometimes candidates surprise me and they say, hey, you'll hear this critique a lot for me. I don't think it's fair. That can be an okay answer, but they've got to be a pretty robust there. Or it's like, hey, this is something I'm working on.

1:33:01Here's what I'm working on. But I also like to hear what they think the superpowers are. And too often a lot of attention in interviews is paid to weaknesses, which I care about. Because I want to know what the downside is. But way more important to me is like, what are you awesome at? Like what is the thing that if I just like, I can just hit to wag it and ride. Like that's what I want to know. Like where's like, where's the superpower that you're just like crushing it at? And what's funny is people are pretty rarely give a reference to like, they're not that often accurate about what the critiques are.

1:33:27But they are usually pretty accurate about what their strengths are. Interesting. And I'm also a huge proponent of strengths and not worrying too much about your weaknesses. But asking people to contextualize their performance through the team, that's so important. We do not achieve very much on our own communication job. Yeah. Amazing. Is there a favorite product that you recently discovered that you love and meta products are acceptable answers? I the RayVand meta glasses would be a tempting answer. The multi -modal stuff, which I'm going to get in trouble because I've been teasing this for months on social media.

1:34:05And it's still a closed beta. And it's like, we're growing the beta slowly. It's like people are really badly wanted. It was probably one of the most magical things I've like gotten to try recently. It's not totally fair. It's also not that you can buy the meta glasses. And very soon, I won't say when, but very soon, they'll have this capability. But it's more fun to think outside of the box. All right. This is such a, I'm going to get in trouble for this answer because it's a bit of a pretentious one. I am not a car guy. Let me say that right now. I don't like cars. I don't care about cars. Like I want a car that works and doesn't like break.

1:34:33I grew up all my cars growing up at over 100 ,000 miles in them because we only ever had used cars. They're constantly breaking down. And like the power steering would go out where you're driving. And you have to like, how are you going to think? And the brakes would go out. If you throw a rod, I've done it all. So I just wanted a car. And so then I drove a Honda Accord that I bought for 10 years. And then I drove a Tesla Model S for 10 years. And a Tesla Model S had a thing happen to it when it was parked. I will get into that. So I get a new car. And again, I want to get electric car. And I was like, let me get something nice.

1:35:06I'm going to get something nice. I'm going to go something nice. I'm driving a Mercedes Benz AMG EQS. And I didn't know cars could be this nice. Is that a stick? I grew up driving used cars and like, you know, whatever. I did not know it was possible. It is the best augmented reality product I think you could buy in the market today. You know, they had to display it puts your turn in three dimensional space. It's got cameras facing your eyes. So it's positioned correctly on this display relative to your eyes. The turn. And so when you come up like it's like you're hitting a little wall, you get a turn before you hit the wall.

1:35:42And I was like, oh my god, I got to think I think this car is great. Augmented reality. So yeah, not a car guy. And I'm not trying to flex on this car, whatever it is. I like it a lot. And I didn't know they could be that nice. But the thing that I thought was so impressive was they did an amazing job with augmented reality. And it's a great car. Wow. Mercedes Benz, a player in the augmented reality mixed reality space. They're out there out there out in the lead. I sometimes think about having a contest where I give away products people mentioned in a segment. And now you blow my budget way. We had a great.

1:36:11We have been met us. We have been met us. You can afford that. That's an amazing. I'm going to have to check that out. I think we're going to increase some sales from Mercedes. Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to think about share with friends and family by useful? Yeah, we have a funny actually how we came about this. The motto my family has, my immediate family, like me, my wife and kids is just trust yourself. Just trust yourself. Actually, the reason we have that motto is when we have a house, we have a few nice art pieces. And one of them is a Tracy Aiman, a famous UK based artist.

1:36:44And she does neon pieces. And it says trust yourself. And so it's in our bedroom hallway where me and all the kids and my wife are just trust yourself. And every morning the neon lights up. And it's trust yourself. And then we had like a, I had a chance to have like a crest made in the UK and my family's English from way back. And so we have in the, in the crest says trust yourself. And I always talk to my kids especially. I think, I really think people, when you're experiencing peer pressure, like who do you trust, like them or yourself? When you're having like a lot of self doubt and uncertainty, like you have to trust yourself.

1:37:17I just think so much of the success I've had. I think this is probably true of most people who went to startups and succeeded was like, I just had faith that I was making good decisions. I mean, this comes back to the conviction point I made earlier about how you do things like newsfeed or controversial things or how you make big expensive changes to write just conviction. Like you have to, you have to believe that your eyes, ears in an intellect have combined to give you a point of view that has intrinsic value and deserves your respect as opposed to reading that newspaper article about your company and believing it over what your own eyes are.

1:37:52And so that's the motto that we go with. And I think it's all some point say you won't always be right and that's okay. Totally. That's right. You're also trusting yourself also includes taking risks because you trust that you can deal and handle with what happens when they risks don't pay out. Beautiful. Final question. I know that you're an amateur photographer, maybe semi -pro photographer, you like to travel. Amateur, amateur, amateur. Amateur. Okay. You also have this website that I came across. I don't know if people know about it. It's this funny name. I'm not going to mention it. I don't know if you want to go in there.

1:38:21Shortbow. It's an integral of my name. Warden Shortbow. Integrated with Andrew Bosworth. Yeah, wardenshortbow .com. Yeah. I love photography. I love it. It's a real passion of mine. So here's the question. What's your favorite photo that you've taken? Orn is actually a great place to talk about trusting yourself by the way. And I know it's cheesy to say it, but I think Rick Rubin's recent interviews on what art is and how people make it is spot on. You have to make it for yourself and you have to love it. And if someone else loves it and it finds broader resonance, that's awesome. But that's not why you do it.

1:38:52And if you start to try to do it for broader resonance, then you're kind of chasing something else. It's a media. It's entertainment. It's not art. It's some other thing. And I say all this to lazy tap dance. I kind of love a lot of my photos. It's very hard to pick a favorite. The one that is popping to my head, which has more emotions of the difference, is a picture I took of my son playing in the street and just jumping in a puddle, wearing a kind of a rain boot, rain slick kind of a thing. And it's not sharp, not in focus. It's like it's a vignette, it's an idea. And I really do think, Ansel Adams talked a lot about how the goal of the photographer is to create a capture like expresses to the viewer what it felt like to be there.

1:39:39And people forget that he was a master of the dark room, much more, even more so than maybe than the capture of the print. The print was where he did amazing work. And I've had the pleasure to go to his dark room in a big sir and spend time with the sun and watch them do development in that room. And he had elaborate scripts of how you would highlight, you know, you would dodge and burn, different parts of the photograph to get it to have the resonance that he wanted. And he fought for photography to be accepted as an artistic medium, which it wasn't, which I find so resonant in today's AI art conversations, where once again, we're trying to keep what is art and you just don't get to do that, unfortunately.

1:40:20So this picture of my son, no one would call it a technical marvel, but as a vignette of it capturing for me personally, but also I think in general for parents, the like a femerality of these tremendously touching, charming human moments that you have with your children, that's the one that comes to mind. Amazing. We're going to try to find it and link folks to it. And on the point of Rick Rubin, something he says along the same lines is that you think of art as like your diary, like I'm just describing what I find interesting and important. And nobody can come to me and say, my diary is wrong.

1:40:54It's my diary. This is how I see the world. And that's okay. And that's where the best art comes from is just invulting to this. There's an awesome video of him saying exactly this. That was recently watched eventually. Boss, this was so much fun. I am so thankful they made time for this. I'm looking forward to our parenting and relationships podcasts in the future. Joking, not joking. Two final questions. Where can folks find a line if they want to follow what you're up to and how can listeners be useful to you? Sure. I'm at Bos tank on Instagram and on threads and also on X Facebook .com slash Bos.

1:41:27And I also have my own podcast, which is a technical deep dive. So it's pretty different. I would say it's a technical deep dive to try to go deep on one or two topics each time. That's called a Bos to the future. You can find that on Spotify or iTunes. Boss to the future. Buy some quest stuff. Yeah, buy. Get yourself a quest three. That's the honest dude. Treat yourself. Or these Ray bands. I got this as I'm a big fan. Boss, again, thank you so much for being here. Cheers. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

1:42:03Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.