As part of our summer replay series, we're revisiting one of our favorite conversations from the past year.
Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan join Ben Horowitz, Vineeta Agarwala, and Erik Torenberg to discuss the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's ambitious effort to help cure, prevent, and manage disease by the end of the century.
Rather than funding individual breakthroughs, CZI is focused on building the tools and infrastructure that can accelerate scientific discovery across entire fields. The conversation explores Biohub, Cell Atlas, virtual cell models, open biological datasets, and the growing role of AI in helping researchers better understand human biology.
They discuss why biology still lacks a "periodic table of elements," how AI could help scientists test hypotheses before running expensive experiments, and why pairing frontier biology with frontier AI may unlock a new era of medical discovery.
Resources:
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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Biohub started with an ambitious goal of curing, preventing, and managing all disease by the end of the century. A decade later, thanks to the convergence of frontier AI and biological data, that goal may have been too conservative. In this episode, Elad Gil and Sarah Guo sit down with Biohub co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, alongside Biohub Head of Science Alex Rives. Together, they discuss Biohub’s $500 million virtual biology initiative, which integrates frontier AI with wet-lab work to build predictive world models of cells, proteins, and systems. They also talk about their newly announced open-source engine for digital protein and antibody design, ESMFold2; why Biohub is a nonprofit rather than a venture-backed startup; and how hierarchical simulations will soon allow doctors to treat patients at an individual, mechanistic level.
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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Biohub | @finkd | @alexrives | @ChanZuckerberg
Chapters:
00:00 – Cold Open
01:02 - Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Alex Rives Introduction
01:26 – Why Biohub and Their Mission
08:27 – Integrating Frontier AI and Frontier Biology
09:45 – Micro to Macro Biological Modeling
14:22 – Mechanistic Interpretiability
16:58 – Why Biohub is a Non-Profit
21:41 – Understanding How Biology Works
24:23 – Timeline for Curing All Diseases
26:25 – Translating Research to Patient Impact
28:04 – Launch of ESMFold2
32:13 – Tackling Off-Target Effects and Edge Cases
38:39 – Putting the Tech in Individual Hands
41:06 – Talent at Biohub
44:25 – What’s Next After ESMFold2
46:10 – Connecting ESMFold2 to Agentic Systems
46:51 – The Virtual Cell
49:33 – Defining Success for Biohub
51:52 – Biohub Strategy Update
56:20 – Conclusion
Editor’s note: In our first BioHub pod with Priscilla and Mark they discussed their acquisition of EvoScale, led by Alex Rives, who is now Head of Science at BioHub. With ESM-1 they trained language models on millions of protein sequences drawn from across life, with a simple “next token” objective: predict the amino acids that have been randomly masked out, based on the context of the rest of the sequence. But they soon found that these models also learned biological structure and function, including properties the model had never been explicitly shown AND that this ability scales predictably with compute, leading to ESM2 and ESM3.
Today, Alex announced ESMFold 2, an open scientific engine to power prediction, design, and discovery across protein biology.
Building on Cryo-EM data (discussed in the CZI pod), ESMFold2 reports state of the art performance on protein interactions, especially antibodies, a critical modality for therapeutics, and evidence that inference time scaling is also working across five targets in cancer and immunology.
In a nod to that other famous AI x protein folding project, they are also releasing an atlas of 6.8 billion proteins, and 1.1 billion predicted structures, which you can play around with on their website. We are honored to work with them for this huge release!
One of the refrains we’ve heard on the Science pod has been that protein folding, materials design, cellular biology, etc. are very different problems from Language Modeling. They definitely are. Yet Alex Rives and the ESM team at BioHub just released a preprint and model, demonstrating that vanilla BERT-like transformer models trained on sufficiently large and diverse data sets can beat specialized models like AlphaFold3 on some of the hardest protein-related problems.
Andrew White had a great segment in our first LS-Science episode that explained how mind blowing AlphaFold2 was when it was released in 2020: it suddenly solved problems on a GPU on your desktop that DESRes had built custom-ASIC supercomputer clusters to solve. John Jumper and Demmis Hassabis received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.
AlphaFold2 took advantage of an very clever observation: if multiple species co-evolve pairs of mutations, this implies that the mutations correspond to parts of the protein that are close in 3d space. This is usually shorthanded as MSAs (multi-sequence alignments), and is the key insight which makes AlphaFold2 so effective.
Like other inductive biases, however, it hurts generalization.
Scale-pilled before it was cool
If you take a look at the timeline for scaling laws for LLMs and release of structure prediction models, the ESM team notably doubled down on their MSAs-be-damned approach after AlphaFold2 released. This obviously requires a great deal of belief in the scale hypothesis.
Why the conviction?
ESM developed at a time when many of the scaling laws and the “Bitter Lesson” were proving increasingly correct. AlphaFold2’s wild success must have been both exciting and bitterly disappointing. But using MSAs mean that the model is is dependent on training data that contains MSAs in order to be accurate in a given domain. For things like antibodies that don’t have MSAs to train on, AlphaFold tends to do poorly.
ESM takes a different approach: learn the relationship between different proteins by unsupervised training on as much diversity as you can find (sound familiar?) and then correlate that back to structures know from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and other sources.
In other words, a World Model.
World Model for proteins
“World Model” is a hype term that I define like this:
Use unsupervised training to learn abstract patterns from the data:
* The abstraction should be semantic - novel constructions represent things that obey the rules of the real world
* The abstraction should be compositional - recombining different patterns leads to novel and often valid constructions
* The abstraction should support generalization - it predicts things in the real world it wasn’t trained on
Once you have a world model, you can attach “heads” to it for downstream tasks: predict properties of a protein, decompose its functional features, or search the representation for proteins that meet design criteria. The two big models BioHub just released under MIT license map directly onto this:
* World model → ESMC (a model trained on 2.8 billion sequences)
* Structure-prediction head → ESMFold2
One of the interesting ways the world model can “predict things” is to generate proteins sequences and then measure the predicted properties, such as binding affinity, in the lab. Alex talks in the episode about validating some of the harder molecules they predicted in the wet-lab. Very cool!
Another way is to use mech-interp techniques such as Sparse Auto Encoders (SAEs) to extract semantic features from your model, and then find novel features that predict unknown biology. I won’t spoil this part for you: it was one of the highlights of the episode for me!
A cell is a computer
We have all heard that genes are like computer programs, but usually the analogy fizzles after that. Of course genes are transcribed into RNA and RNA is translated into proteins, so genes are programs for building proteins, but that carries the analogy only to “binary digits are programs.”
Here’s a better analogy: you can think of the cell nucleus as a storage device / storage controller, the ribosome as a JIT-compiler and runtime, and the semantic features that we learn from our world model via SAEs as functions, proteins as processes that interact together in workflows (signalling pathways) to produce behaviors and outputs (phenotypes).
Like functions, the SAE features have a hierarchical composition from local, secondary and tertiary structures (mimicing protein structure), but also motifs that are conceptual, such as membrane integrations, disordered regions and disulfide bonds. As we learn to compose these features we into novel protein designs, we move further towards programmable biology.
Alex goes into much more detail about this in the episode, as well as:
* Principles for new data collection
* BioHub’s vision
* Modeling the cell
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This crossover episode from the Latent Space podcast features Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan on the 10-year anniversary of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and their expanded Biohub vision. They discuss how a “Frontier Biology Lab” working in sync with a “Frontier AI Lab” could enable breakthroughs like a Virtual Cell and true N-of-1 precision medicine. The conversation covers the acquisition of Evolutionary Scale and ESM3, new biological data collection at scale, and how AI-powered biology might transform drug discovery and disease prevention.
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Blitzy is the autonomous code generation platform that ingests millions of lines of code to accelerate enterprise software development by up to 5x with premium, spec-driven output. Schedule a strategy session with their AI solutions consultants at https://blitzy.com
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CHAPTERS:
(00:00) About the Episode
(04:27) CZI origins and focus
(08:29) Why tools over cures
(14:43) Virtual cells and imaging (Part 1)
(20:19) Sponsors: Blitzy | Framer
(23:24) Virtual cells and imaging (Part 2)
(25:22) Data diversity and grounding
(32:30) Evaluating models and Biohub (Part 1)
(37:53) Sponsors: Serval | Tasklet
(40:42) Evaluating models and Biohub (Part 2)
(41:06) Future healthcare and aging
(53:39) Modeling scales and immunity
(58:53) Timelines, data, and collaboration
(01:04:01) Outro
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Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg join a16z’s Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg, and Vineeta Agarwala to share how the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is building the computational tools that will accelerate the cure, prevention, and management of all disease by century's end. They explain why basic science needs $100 million-scale projects that traditional NIH grants can't fund, how their Cell Atlas became biology's missing periodic table with millions of cells catalogued in open-source format, and why their new virtual cell models will let scientists test high-risk hypotheses in silico before investing in expensive wet lab work. Plus: the organizational shift unifying the Biohub under AI leadership, what happens when biologists and engineers sit side-by-side, and why modern biology labs are expanding compute instead of square footage.
Timestamps:
4:17 - Building tools to accelerate scientific discovery
5:47 - The credible path to funding basic science
7:21 - Biohub = Frontier Biology + Frontier AI
9:05 - Challenges building on a 10-15 year timeline
9:43 - How CZI chooses what to work on
11:15 - Making sense of science with LLMs
11:31 - Measuring success in the therapeutic realm
13:32 - “Most diseases should be thought of as rare diseases”
15:39 - Inspiration: building a periodic table for biology
19:27 - Why virtual cells?
21:17 - The Biohub Master Plan
21:51 - How virtual cell models allow more risk taking
28:15 - Bringing CZI & Biohub together
30:32 - Why Biohub matters
33:36 - The importance of interface design in democratizing scientific discovery
35:34 - How Biohub encourages cross-functional collaboration
40:38 - Looking ahead: the broader impact of AI on biotech
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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Pivot is off for the holiday! Kara and Scott will return on Friday, but in the meantime, we're bringing you the premiere episode of ACCESS. Tech insiders Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger talk all things Mark Zuckerberg, from the newest Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses to the beverage selections in the new Meta AI Lab. Alex then sits down with Zuck himself ahead of the 2025 Meta Connect conference.
Find ACCESS on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.
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Zuck on:
* Llama 4, benchmark gaming
* Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI
* DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump
* Orion glasses, AI relationships, and preventing reward-hacking from our tech.
Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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SPONSORS
* Scale is building the infrastructure for safer, smarter AI. Scale’s Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, while their public leaderboards help assess model capabilities. They also just released Scale Evaluation, a new tool that diagnoses model limitations. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn how Scale can help you push the frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh.
* WorkOS Radar protects your product against bots, fraud, and abuse. Radar uses 80+ signals to identify and block common threats and harmful behavior. Join companies like Cursor, Perplexity, and OpenAI that have eliminated costly free-tier abuse by visiting workos.com/radar.
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----------
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00:00) – How Llama 4 compares to other models
(00:11:34) – Intelligence explosion
(00:26:36) – AI friends, therapists & girlfriends
(00:35:10) – DeepSeek & China
(00:39:49) – Open source AI
(00:54:15) – Monetizing AGI
(00:58:32) – The role of a CEO
(01:02:04) – Is big tech aligning with Trump?
(01:07:10) – 100x productivity
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We have a very special episode of Decoder today. It’s become a tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the show at Meta Connect. This year, before his interview with Mark, Alex got to try a new pair of experimental AR glasses the company is calling Orion.
Alex talked to Mark about a whole lot more, including why the company is investing so heavily in AR, why he's shifted away from politics, Mark's thoughts on the link between teen mental health and social media, and why the Meta chief executive is done apologizing for corporate scandals like Cambridge Analytica that he feels were overblown and misrepresented.
Links:
Hands-on with Orion, Meta’s first pair of AR glasses | The Verge
The biggest news from Meta Connect 2024 | The Verge
Mark Zuckerberg: publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI | The Verge
Meta extends its Ray-Ban smart glasses deal beyond 2030 | The Verge
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses actually make the future look cool | The Verge
Meta has a major opportunity to win the AI hardware race | The Verge
Instagram is putting every teen into more private and restrictive new account | The Verge
Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss | The Verge
Facebook puts news on the back burner | The Verge
Meta is losing a billion dollars on VR and AR every single month | The Verge
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24017522
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt; our editor is Callie Wright. This episode was additionally produced by Brett Putman and Vjeran Pavic. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Mark Zuckerberg on:
- Llama 3
- open sourcing towards AGI
- custom silicon, synthetic data, & energy constraints on scaling
- Caesar Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, & much more
Enjoy!
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Human edited transcript with helpful links here.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Llama 3
(00:08:32) - Coding on path to AGI
(00:25:24) - Energy bottlenecks
(00:33:20) - Is AI the most important technology ever?
(00:37:21) - Dangers of open source
(00:53:57) - Caesar Augustus and metaverse
(01:04:53) - Open sourcing the $10b model & custom silicon
(01:15:19) - Zuck as CEO of Google+
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In this episode, my guests are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook, Inc.), and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, M.D., co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). We discuss how CZI plans to cure all human diseases by the end of this century by funding transformative projects and technologies at the intersection of biology, engineering, and artificial intelligence (AI). They describe their funding and development of Biohubs and the progress already underway to accelerate the understanding of cell function, pathways, and disease. Then, Mark discusses social media, its impact on mental health, and new tools for online experiences. We also discuss Meta’s virtual reality (VR), augmented and mixed reality tech, and how AI will soon completely transform our online and physical life experiences. This episode ought to interest anyone curious about biology, medicine, mental health, AI, and the future of technology and humanity.
For show notes, including referenced articles and additional resources, please visit hubermanlab.com.
Use Ask Huberman Lab, our new AI-powered platform, for a summary, clips, and insights from this episode.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) Mark Zuckerberg & Dr. Priscilla Chan
(00:02:31) Sponsors: LMNT & Waking Up
(00:05:35) Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) & Human Disease Research
(00:08:51) Innovation & Discovery, Science & Engineering
(00:12:53) Funding, Building Tools & Imaging
(00:17:57) Healthy vs. Diseased Cells, Human Cell Atlas & AI, Virtual Cells
(00:21:59) Single Cell Methods & Disease; CELLxGENE Tool
(00:26:30) Sponsor: AG1
(00:29:53) AI & Hypothesis Generation; Long-term Projects & Collaboration
(00:35:14) Large Language Models (LLMs), In Silico Experiments
(00:42:11) CZI Biohubs, Chicago, New York
(00:50:52) Universities & Biohubs; Therapeutics & Rare Diseases
(00:57:23) Optimism; Children & Families
(01:07:25) Technology & Health, Positive & Negative Interactions
(01:13:17) Algorithms, Clickbait News, Individual Experience
(01:19:17) Parental Controls, Meta Social Media Tools & Tailoring Experience
(01:24:51) Time, Usage & Technology, Parental Tools
(01:28:55) Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality Experiences & Smart Glasses
(01:36:09) Physical Exercise & Virtual Product Development
(01:44:19) Virtual Futures for Creativity & Social Interactions
(01:49:31) Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses: Potential, Privacy & Risks
(02:00:20) Visual System & Smart Glasses, Augmented Reality
(02:06:42) AI Assistants & Creators, Identity Protection
(02:13:26) Zero-Cost Support, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter
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Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/mark-zuckerberg-3-transcript
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(08:38) – Metaverse
(23:01) – Quest 3
(37:50) – Nature of reality
(42:28) – AI in the Metaverse
(59:26) – Large language models
(1:05:23) – Future of humanity
What motivates Mark Zuckerberg these days? It's a question Decoder guest host Alex Heath posed at the end of his interview last week, after he and Zuckerberg had spent an hour talking about Threads, Zuckerberg's vision for how generative AI will reshape Meta's apps, the Quest 3, and other news from the company's Connect conference, which kicked off today.
After spending the past five years as a wartime CEO, Zuckerberg is getting back to basics, and he clearly feels good about it. "I think we've done a lot of good things," he said. "But for the next wave of my life and for the company — but also outside of the company with what I'm doing at CZI [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] and some of my personal projects — I define my life at this point more in terms of getting to work on awesome things with great people who I like working with." For Zuckerberg, "awesome things" means figuring out how to combine his company's AR, VR, and AI ambitions into new products.
This rare interview with the Meta CEO also includes details on his ongoing feud with Elon Musk and the quest to beat X/Twitter using Threads, his perspective on open source, and his vision for decentralized social media. Okay, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Here we go.
Links:
Mark Zuckerberg is ready to fight Elon Musk in a cage match
The three reasons Twitter didn’t sell to Facebook
Threads app usage plummets despite initial promise as refuge from Twitter
Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss
You can now verify your Threads profile on Mastodon
In show of force, Silicon Valley titans pledge ‘getting this right’ With AI
Meta is putting AI chatbots everywhere
A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled
Custom AI chatbots are quietly becoming the next big thing in fandom
Meta’s Smart Glasses can take calls, play music, and livestream from your face
Meta’s $499.99 Quest 3 headset is all about mixed reality and video games
The Meta Quest 3 is sharper, more powerful, and still trying to make mixed reality happen
Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Apple’s Vision Pro
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
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Mark Zuckerberg is CEO of Meta. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Mark’s Facebook: https://facebook.com/zuck
Mark’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/zuck
Meta AI: https://ai.facebook.com/
Meta Quest: https://www.meta.com/quest/
PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(05:38) – Jiu-jitsu competition
(23:01) – AI and open source movement
(35:32) – Next AI model release
(47:48) – Future of AI at Meta
(1:08:25) – Bots
(1:23:53) – Censorship
(1:38:34) – Meta’s new social network
(1:45:20) – Elon Musk
(1:49:25) – Layoffs and firing
(1:56:55) – Hiring
(2:02:48) – Meta Quest 3
(2:09:45) – Apple Vision Pro
(2:16:00) – AI existential risk
(2:22:23) – Power
(2:25:55) – AGI timeline
(2:33:17) – Murph challenge
(2:38:33) – Embodied AGI
(2:41:39) – Faith
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined The Verge’s deputy editor Alex Heath for an in-depth conversation about the company’s new high-end, mixed reality headset, the $1,499 Quest Pro, and why he isn’t backing down from building the metaverse. Zuckerberg and Heath also talked about the future of social media, why he enjoys “being doubted,” and the growing concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
Links:
The Meta Quest Pro is a cutting-edge headset looking for an audience
Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to the Meta Quest
Apple’s mixed reality headset will reportedly come with an M2 chip
We finally got our hands and eyes on the PlayStation VR2
Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion
Mark Zuckerberg took on China in a speech defending free expression
Why BeReal is breaking out
Elon Musk is buying Twitter, probably?
Transcript:
https://www.theverge.com/e/23161228
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone, Vjeran Pavic, and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
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Today on the flagship podcast of low-latency head tracking:
02:35 - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg chats with deputy editor Alex Heath about Meta's new headset, the Quest Pro.
22:00 - Alex Heath and senior reporter Adi Robertson chat with David Pierce about their first impressions using the Quest Pro.
47:45 - Group Publisher for The Verge Chris Grant chats with David about what's happening in VR for video games.
You can listen to the rest of the chat with Mark Zuckerberg on Decoder with Nilay Patel, watch it on The Verge's YouTube channel for the video version, or read it on our site.
Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you.
We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you!
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Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, Magic Spoon delicious low-carb cereal, and Helium 10 all-in-one software suite to sell on Amazon.
Mark Zuckerberg (FB/IG) is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and a focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse—moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.
He is also the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with his wife Priscilla, which is leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges—including supporting the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the 21st century.
Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving to Palo Alto, California in 2004.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature.
And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim or use code TIM at checkout.
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This episode is also brought to you by Magic Spoon cereal! Magic Spoon is a low-carb, high-protein, and zero sugar cereal that tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal. Each serving has 13–14g of protein, 4g of net carbs, and 0g of sugar. It’s also gluten free, grain free, soy free, and keto friendly. And it’s delicious! It comes in your favorite, traditional cereal flavors like Cocoa, Frosted, Peanut Butter, and Blueberry.
Magic Spoon cereal has received a lot of attention since their launch. Time magazine included it in their list of Best Inventions of 2019, and Forbes called it “the future of cereal.” My listeners—that’s you—get $5 off and a 100% happiness guarantee when you visit MagicSpoon.com/Tim and use code TIM. And some great news for Canadian listeners: Magic Spoon now also ships to Canada!
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This episode is also brought to you by Helium 10! Helium 10 is an all-in-one software suite designed to help entrepreneurs launch, manage, and scale a profitable e-commerce business on Amazon and Walmart.com. Whether you are an entrepreneur who wants to start a business on your own terms or you want to scale your existing e-commerce operations, Helium 10 is here to help. They process more than 2 billion data points daily, have a robust 450+ million ASIN database, and provide at-a-glance analytics like seasonal trends for products, profit estimates, and more.
Join more than 1 million Helium 10 users worldwide by signing up for a free account at Helium10.com/Tim!
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How did teenage Mark get involved in the world of competitive fencing? [07:01]
What does Mark find particularly compelling about classical studies and history? [10:00]
Influential and recommended science fiction related to virtual realities. [13:32]
How do Mark and his team get an organization of a hundred thousand people on board with long-term project plans that can extend into the next decade and a half? [17:26]
What does Mark do to get comfortable with discomfort and manage his energy for whatever the day throws his way? [23:05]
How long does Mark think it will take for us to realize VR technology as immersive as presented in Ready Player One? What kind of progress can we expect to see in the not-too-distant future? [27:02]
The challenges of making VR a satisfying, nausea-free experience for everyone. [33:35]
Projections for the societal effects of people earning sustainable livelihoods in the metaverse. [39:00]
The new values being built into Meta’s cultural operating system — and the old values being adapted — to prepare for a more distributed, more honest, and faster future. [44:16]
Challenges presented by moving from a Web2 to a Web3 world. [57:35]
Mark’s assessment of Meta’s oversight board. [1:03:07]
To what does Mark credit the longevity of his unique partnership with Sheryl Sandberg, and in what ways has it shifted his life and business over the past 15+ years? What does he consider to be Sheryl’s superpowers? [1:07:49]
How did Mark’s family dynamics growing up shape who he is today and how he parents his own children? [1:12:52]
What role, if any, does religion play in Mark’s life? [1:20:40]
Did Mark go through an emo phase early in life? [1:24:53]
Of the annual personal challenges Mark undertook for 10 years, which were the easiest — and the most difficult? [1:26:12]
Does Mark foresee navigating the metaverse on multiple mobile devices running OSes not necessarily under Meta’s control, or will there be a more efficient, unifying device in the works? [1:30:49]
Parting thoughts. [1:35:15]
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For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.
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Mark Zuckerberg is CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook.
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(11:29) – Metaverse
(31:06) – Identity in Metaverse
(43:15) – Security
(47:40) – Social Dilemma
(1:09:46) – Instagram whistleblower
(1:14:31) – Social media and mental health
(1:19:56) – Censorship
(1:37:05) – Translation
(1:44:40) – Advice for young people
(1:50:28) – Daughters
(1:53:16) – Mortality
(1:57:49) – Question for God
(2:00:55) – Meaning of life
Casey Newton talks with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his vision for an embodied internet (or "the metaverse), the challenges of governing it, and gender imbalance in virtual reality today. They also discuss President Biden’s fierce criticism of Facebook’s failures in removing anti-vaccine content in the headlines.
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/22352063
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Today, we have a special bonus episode of Waveform! We recently had an interview with Mark Zuckerberg in our series "Talking Tech" on the MKBHD channel, but we left a bit of it on the cutting room floor. Hence, we decided to upload the full and uncut version of the interview to Waveform to let you hear everything we talked about, in its entirety!
Links:
https://twitter.com/wvfrm
https://twitter.com/mkbhd
https://twitter.com/andymanganelli
https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/
shop.mkbhd.com
Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh
Talking Tech with Mark Zuckerberg: https://bit.ly/3c2Uw22
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about a litany of issues, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal and why Infowars and other conspiracy theorists, like Holocaust deniers, don't get kicked off Facebook. He says he believes over-regulating tech companies is dangerous because it could advantage Chinese firms that don’t share Americans’ commitment to freedom of expression. Zuckerberg also talks about how he thinks VR and AR will change the future of work, explains why his 2017 tour of the U.S. was not a political campaign and says that if anyone should be fired for Facebook's recent privacy stumbles, "It should be me." However, he declines to fire himself, instead committing to an audit of all the other companies like Cambridge Analytica that had access to the most user data.
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Stephen Dubner's conversation with the Facebook founder and C.E.O., recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Secret Life of a C.E.O.”
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No, it's not your fault the economy crashed. Or that consumer preferences changed. Or that new technologies have blown apart your business model. But if you're the C.E.O., it is your problem. So what are you going to do about it? First-hand stories of disaster (and triumph) from Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Satya Nadella, Jack Welch, Ellen Pao, Richard Branson, and more. (Part 4 of a special series, "The Secret Life of C.E.O.'s.")
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Mark Zuckerberg's dentist dad was an early adopter of digital x-rays. Jack Welch blew the roof off a factory. Carol Bartz was a Wisconsin farm girl who got into computers. No two C.E.O.'s have the same origin story — so we tell them all! How the leaders of Facebook, G.E., Yahoo!, PepsiCo, Microsoft, Virgin, the Carlyle Group, Reddit, and Bridgewater Associates made it to the top. (Part 2 of a special series, "The Secret Life of C.E.O.'s.")
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They're paid a fortune — but for what, exactly? What makes a good C.E.O. — and how can you even tell? Is "leadership science" a real thing — or just airport-bookstore mumbo jumbo? We put these questions to Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Indra Nooyi, Satya Nadella, Jack Welch, Ray Dalio, Carol Bartz, David Rubenstein, and Ellen Pao. (Part 1 of a special series, "The Secret Life of C.E.O.'s.")
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If you’re Steve Jobs, you can wait for your product to be perfect. For the rest of us, If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released it too late. Imperfect is perfect. Why? Because your assumptions about what people want are never exactly right. Most entrepreneurs create great products through a tight feedback loop with real customers using a real product. So don’t fear imperfections; they won’t make or break your company. What will make or break you is speed. And no one knows this better than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. He shares the origin story of his mantra “move fast and break things” and how this ethos applied as Facebook evolved from student project to tech giant.
Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com
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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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