Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guests today are Mark Zuckerberg and dr. Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg as everybody knows. Founded the company Facebook. He is now the CEO of meta, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other technology platforms doctor.
Tillich and graduated from Harvard and went on to do her medical degree at the University of California. San Francisco Mark Zuckerberg and dr. Priscilla Chan are married and the cofounders of the czi or Chan Zuckerberg initiative. A philanthropic organization, whose stated goal is to cure all human diseases. The Chan Zuckerberg initiative is accomplishing that by providing critical funding, not available elsewhere, as well as a novel framework for discovery of the basic functioning of cells cattle.
Logging all the different human cell types as well as providing AI or artificial intelligence platforms to mine. All of that data to discover new Pathways and cures for all human diseases. The first hour of today's discussion is held with both dr. Priscilla Chan, and Mark Zuckerberg during which we discuss the czi and what it really means to try and cure all human diseases. We talk about the motivational backbone for the CCI that extends well, into each of their personal histories, indeed, you'll learn quite a lot about doctor.
The Chan who has, I must say, an absolutely incredible family story leading up to her role as a physician and her motivations for the CCI and Beyond and you'll learn from Mark how he's bringing in engineering and AI perspective to discovery of new cures for human disease. The second half of today's discussion is just between Mark Zuckerberg and me during which we discuss various meta platforms, including of course, social media platforms, and their effects, on Mental Health, in children, and adults, we also discuss a VR virtual reality
As well as augmented and mixed reality. And we discuss AI artificial intelligence and how it stands to transform, not just our online experiences with social media and other Technologies but how it stands to potentially transform every aspect of everyday life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the
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Very hard and certainly, if I'm sweating a lot in order to make sure that I replace those electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink LMN t.com huberman to get a free sample pack with your purchase again. That's drink LMN t.com, hubermann. I'm pleased to announce that we will be hosting for live events in Australia. Each of which is entitled the brain-body contract during which I will share science and science related tools for mental health, physical health and performance. There will also be a live
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For your interest in science and now for my discussion with Mark Zuckerberg and dr. Priscilla Chan Priscilla a mark. So great to meet you and thank you for having me here in your home. Thanks for having us on the podcast. Yeah. Like to talk about the czi the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. I learned about this a few years ago, when my lab was and still is now at Stanford as a very exciting philanthropic effort that has a truly big mission. I can't imagine a bigger mission.
So maybe you could tell us what that big mission is and then we can get into some of the mechanics of how that big mission can become a reality. So like you're mentioning in 2015, we launched the Chan Zuckerberg initiative and what we're hoping to do at CC I was thinking about how do we build a better future for everyone and looking for ways where we can contribute the resources that we have to bring philanthropic Lee and the experiences that
Mark and I have had for me as a physician and educator for Mark as an engineer and then our ability to bring teams together to build Builders, you know, Mark has been a builder throughout his career. And what could we do, if we actually put together a team to build tools do great science. And So within our science, portfolio of re really been focused on what some people think is either an incredibly audacious goal.
Or a inevitable goal. But I think about it as something that will happen, if we sort of continue focusing on it, which is to be able to cure prevent or manage all Disease, by the end of the century, all disease, all disease. So, that's important, right things? A lot of times people ask like which disease and the whole point is that there is not one disease, and it's really about taking a step back to where I always found the most hope as a physician, which is new discoveries and New Opportunities, and
New ways of understanding, how to keep people, well, come from basic science. So our strategy at CCI is really to build tools. Fun, science change the way basic scientists can see the world and how they can move quickly in their discoveries. And so, that's what we launched in 2015, we do work. In three ways we fund. Great scientists, we
Build tools right now, software tools to help move signs along and make it easier for scientists to do their work. And we do science, you mentioned, Stanford being an important pillar for our science work. We've built, what we call bio hubs institutes where teams can take on Grand challenges to do work. That wouldn't be possible in a single lab, or within a single discipline. And our first bio Hub was launched in San Francisco.
Collaboration between Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCSF amazing curing all diseases. Implies that there will either be a ton of Knowledge gleaned from this effort which I'm certain there will be. And there already has been, we can talk about some of those early successes in a moment but it also sort of implies that if we can understand some basic operations of diseases and cells that
End autism, Huntington's Parkinson's, cancer, and any other disease that perhaps, there are some core principles that would make the big mission real reality. So to speak. What I'm basically saying is, how are you attacking this? My belief is that the cell sits at the center of all discussion about disease, given that, our body is made up of cells and different types of cells. So, maybe we could just
Illuminate, for us, a little bit of what the cell is in your mind as it relates to disease and how one goes about understanding disease in the context of cells. Because ultimately, that's what we're made up of. Yeah, well, let's get to the cell thing in a moment, but just to even taking a step back from that, you know, we don't think that it's easy, I that we're going to cure prevent or manage all disease. Is the goal is to basically give the scientific community and scientists around the world, the tools to accelerate the
pace of Science. And and we spent a lot of time when we're getting started with this, looking at the history of Science and trying to understand the trends and how they've played out over time. And if you look over the very long term Arc, most large-scale Discovery is are preceded by the invention of a new tool or a new way to see something and it's not just in biology, right? It's like having a telescope, you know, came before a lot of discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. But similarly,
Ben and just different ways to observe things or different platforms, like the ability to do vaccines preceded, the ability to kind of cure a lot of different things. So, this is sort of the engineering part that you were talking about about building tools. We view our goal is to try to bring together some scientific and Engineering knowledge to build tools that empower the whole field. And that's that's sort of the Big Arc and a lot of the things that we're focused on, including the work in single cell and sell
ending which, you know, you can, you can jump in and get into that if you want. But yeah, I think I think we generally agree with the premise that if you want to understand the stuff from first principles people, study organs a lot, right? They like to study kind of how things present across the body. But there's not a very widespread understanding of how kind of each cell operates. And this is sort of a big part of some of the initial work that we try to do on the human cell Atlas and understanding what are the different cells.
And there's a bunch more work that we want to do to carry that forward. But but overall, I think, when we think about the next 10 years here of this long Arc, to try to empower the community to, to be able to cure prevent or manage all diseases. We want that, we think that the next 10 years should really be primarily about being able to measure and observe more things and human biology. There are a lot of limits today. It's like you want to look at something through a microscope. You can't usually see living tissues because it's hard to
You know, see through skin or things like that. So there there are a lot of different techniques that will help us observe different things and this is sort of where the engineering background comes in a bit. Because I mean, it's, when I think about this is from the perspective of like, how you dried code or something, you know, the idea of like trying to debug or fix a code base, but not be able to, like, step through the code line by line. It's like, never not going to happen, right? And at the beginning of any big project that we do that meta, we like to spend a bunch of the time up front, just trying to instrument thing.
Understand, you know, what are we going to look at and how we're going to measure things before? So we know we're making progress in know what to optimize. And this is such a long-term Journey that and we think that it actually makes sense to take the next 10 years to build those kind of tools for biology and understanding just how the human body works in action. And a big part of that is cells. I don't know. Do you want to jump in and talk and talk about some of the
efforts? Could I just interrupt briefly and just ask about the different
The different interventions, so to speak that CCI is a unique position to bring to the quest to cure, all diseases. So I can think of, I mean, I know as a scientist that money is necessary, but not sufficient, right? Like when you have money, you can hire more people. You can try different things, so that's critical, but a lot of philanthropy includes money.
The other component is, you know, you want to be able to see things as you pointed out. So you want to know that normal disease process like what is a healthy cell? What's a diseased cell? Our cells constantly being bombarded with, with challenges and then repairing those and then what we call cancer, it's just kind of runaway train of those challenges, not being met by the cell itself or something like that. So better Imaging tools and then it sounds like there's not just a hardware component but a software component, this is where AI comes in. So maybe we can add some
Some point we we can break this up into three different Avenues. One is understanding disease, processes and healthy prosthesis will lump those together, then there's Hardware. So microscopes lenses, digital deconvolution ways of seeing things in Boulder relief and more more precision and then there's how to manage all the data. And then I love the idea that maybe a, I could do what human brains can't do alone, they manage understanding of the data because it's one thing to organize data. It's another two.
Say, oh, you know, you know this as you point out in the analogy with code, this particular Gene and that particular Gene are potentially interesting. Whereas a human being would never make that potential connection. So you know, the tools that's easy, I can bring to the table. We we fund science like you're talking about and we try to there's lots of ways to fund science and just to be clear you know what we fund is a tiny fraction of what the NIH funds for instance. So what do you guys?
Guys have been generous enough that it's it definitely holds wait it's an IH and uh his contribution. Yeah. And but I think every every funder has its own role in the ecosystem. And for us, it's really how do we incentivize new points of view? How do we incentivize collaboration? How do we incentivize open science? And so a lot of our grants include inviting people to look in look at different fields are first Neuroscience, RFA was
Aim towards incentivizing people from different backgrounds immunologists, microbiologist to come, and look at how our nervous system works and how to keep it healthy. Or we ask that our grantees participate in the preprint movement to accelerate the rate of sharing knowledge and actually others being able to build upon science. So that's the funding that we do. In terms of building, we build software and Hardware, like, you mentioned,
we put together teams that can build tools that are more durable and scalable than someone in a single lab might be incentivized to do. There's a ton of great ideas and nowadays most scientists can tinker and build something useful for their lab but it's really hard for them to be able to share that tool sometimes beyond their own laptop or forget you know the next Lab over or across the globe. So we partner with sign,
To see like, what is useful? What kinds of tools? You know, and imaging the Paris like it's theirs. It's a useful image annotation tool. That is born from an open source community. And how can we contribute to that or cell by Gene? Which works on single cell data sets and how can we make? It build a useful tool so that scientists can share data sets analyze their own and contribute to a larger Corpus of information. So
We have software teams that are building collaborating with Scientists, to make sure that we're building easy to use durable translatable tools across the scientific community in the areas that we work in. We also have institutes this is where the Imaging work comes in. Where you know we are proud owners of electron microscope right now. It needs going to be installed at our Imaging Institute and that will really contribute to
Where we can see work differently, but we can the more Hardware neat does need to be developed. You know, we're partnering with a fantastic scientists in the bayou Hub, Network to build a mini faceplate to increase to align the electrons through these, through the electron microscope, to be able to increase the resolution. So we can see in sharper detail to. So there's a lot of innovative work within the network that's happening.
Oh and these institutes have grand challenges that they're working on back to your question about cells. Cells are just the smallest unit that are alive and are your body ever. All of our bodies have many, many, many cells. There's you know, some estimate is like 37 trillion cells different cells in your body and what are they all doing? And how did, what do they look like when they're healthy in your Healthy? What do they look like when you're sick?
And where we're at right now with, you know, our understanding of cells. And what happens when you get sick is basically, we have we've gotten pretty good at from the Human Genome Project. Looking at how different mutations in your genetic code lead for you to be more susceptible to get sick or directly cause you to get sick. So we go from a mutation in your DNA to wow. You now have
Huntington's disease for instance and there's a lot that happens in the middle and that's one of the questions that we're going after at at CCI is what actually happens. So an analogy that I used. I like to use to share with my friends, is right now, say we have a recipe for a cake, we know there's a typo in the recipe and then the cake is awful. That's all we know. We don't know how the chef interprets the typo. We don't know what happens in the oven.
We don't actually have no sort of how it's exactly connected to how the cake didn't turn out. How you had expected. A lot of that is unknown but we can actually systematically try to break this down and one segment of that Journey that we're looking at is how that mutation gets translated and acted upon in your cells and all of your cells have what's called mRNA mRNA are the actual
Actions that are taken from the DNA and what are working? Single cell is looking at how, how every cell in your body is actually interpreting your DNA slightly differently and what happens when healthy cells are interpreting the DNA instructions and when sick cells are interpreting those directions and that is a ton of data, I just told you there's 37 trillion cells, there's different large and sets of mRNA and each cell.
But the work that we've been funding is looking at how first of all, Gathering that information. We've been incredibly lucky to be part of a very fast-moving field where we've gone from in 2017. Funding some methods work to now, having really not complete, but nearly complete atlases of how the human body works. How flies work, how mice work?
The Single Cell level and being able to then try to piece together. Like how does that all come together and when you're healthy and when you're sick and the neat thing about the sort of inflection point where we're at in AI, is that I can't look at this data and make sense of it. There's just too much of it. And biology is complex. Human bodies are complex. We need this much information but the use of large language models can help us actually
Look at that data and gain insights. Look at what trends are consistent with health and what trends are are unsuspected. And eventually Our Hope through the use of these data sets that we've helped curate, in the application of large language models is to be able to formulate a virtual cell a cell that's completely built off of the data sets of what we know about the human body. But
Allows us to manipulate and learn faster and try new things to help move science and then medicine along.
Do you think we've cataloged the total number of different cell types? Like you know every week I look at Great journals like cell Nature and Science and for instance I saw recently that using single cell sequencing they've categorized 18 plus different types of fat cells. We always think of like a fat cell versus a muscle cell. So now you got 18 types. Each one is going to express many, many different genes and rnas mrnas and perhaps the
One of them is responsible for, you know what we see in the, you know, Advanced type 2 diabetes or in other forms of obesity or where people can't lay down fat cells which turns out to be just as detrimental in those extreme cases. So now you've got all these lists of genes but I always thought of single-cell sequencing as necessary but not sufficient but you need the information but it doesn't resolve the problem and I think of it more as a hypothesis, generating experiment. You okay? See
Of all these genes you could say, wow, this Gene is particularly elevated in the diabetics cell type of, let's say one of these fat cells or muscle cells, for that matter. Whereas it's not in non-diabetics, so then of the millions of different cells, maybe only five of them differ dramatically. So then you generate hypotheses. Oh it's the ones that differ dramatically that are important but maybe one of those jeans when it's only, you know, 50% changed has a huge.
Fact because of some Network biology effect. And so I guess what? I'm trying to get to here is, you know, how does one meet that challenge and can AI help resolve that challenge by essentially placing those lists of genes into a, you know, 10,000 hypotheses. Because I'll tell you that the graduate students and postdocs in my lab, get a chance to test one hypothesis and the time and that's really the challenge. Let alone one lab and so for those that are listening to this and you know hopefully it's not getting outside the scope of kind of like standard understanding or the understand
We've generated here. But we're basically saying is, you have to pick at some point more data? Always sounds great. But then how do you decide what to test? So, no, we don't know. All the cell types, I think one of the one thing that was really exciting. When we first launched this work was, you know, cystic fibrosis like cystic fibrosis is caused by mutation and cftr, that's pretty well-known. It affects a certain channel. That makes it hard for mucus to be clear. That's the basics of cystic fibrosis when I went to medical school
Or it was taught as fact. So their lungs, fill up with fluid. These are people carrying around sacks of fluid filling up. I've known people, I've worked with people like then they have to literally dumped the fluid out. Exactly. Can't run or do it. Intense exercise life is shorter, life is shorter and when we applied single-cell methodologies to the lungs, they discovered an entirely new cell type. That actually is affected by a mutation in the CF mutations. And cystic fibrosis, mutation that actually changes the paradigm.
I'm of how we think about cystic fibrosis, he's like just don't know. So I don't think we know all the cell types, I think will continue to discover them and will continue to discover new relationships between cell and disease, which leads me to the second example, I want to bring up, is this large data set that? The entire scientific Community is built around? Single cell is starting to allow us to say this mutation. Where is it expressed? What types of cell types, it's expressed in. And
We actually have built a tool at CCI called cell by Gene where you can put in the mutation that you're interested in. And it gives you a heat map of cross held types of which cell types are expressing the gene that you're interested in. And so then you can start looking at. Okay, if I look at Gene X and I know it's related to heart disease but if you look at the heat map, it's also spiking in the pancreas that allows
You to generate a hypothesis. Why? And what happens when this Gene is mutated and and your than the function of your pancreas really exciting way to look and ask questions differently and you can also Imagine a world where if you're trying to develop a therapy, a drug and your your the goal is to treat the function, the heart, but you know that it's also really active in the pancreas again. So what is there going to be an unexpected side effect that you
Think about as you're bringing this drug to clinical trials. So it's an incredibly exciting tool and one that's only going to get better as we get more and more sophisticated ways to analyze the data. Let's say I love that because if I look at the advances in Neuroscience over the last 15 years, most of them did necessarily come from looking at the nervous system came from. The understanding that the immune system impacts the brain. Everyone prior to that talked about the brain is immune privileged organ, what you just said.
Also Bridges and the Divide between single cells organs and systems, right? Because ultimately cells. Make up, organs, organs makeup systems and they're all talking to one another and everyone nowadays is familiar with like, gut-brain Axis or the microbiome being so important. But rarely is the, the discussion between organs discussed, so to speak. So I think it's wonderful. So that, that tool was generated by CGI or CCI, funded that tool. So how does this result that we built?
Hold it. So is it built by meta is as meta happened? This is that has its own Engineers got it?
Yeah. They're completely different organizations. Incredible
and and so a graduate student or postdoc who is interested in a particular mutation could put this mutation into this database that graduate student or postdoc might be in a laboratory known for working on heart but suddenly find that they're collaborating with other scientists that work on the pancreas. Yeah. Which also is wonderful because it Bridges. The Divide between these fields fields are so siloed and
In science, not just different buildings but they people rarely talk unless things like this are happening in the graduate student is someone that we want to empower because one they're the future of science as, you know, and within cell by Jean, if you put in the gene, you're interested in and it shows you the heat map. We also will pull up like the most relevant papers to that Gene. And so like, read these things, fantastic. As we all know quality nutrition influences, of course, our physical health but also our mental health and our cognitive functioning our memory, our
To learn new things and to focus. And we know that one of the most important features of high quality nutrition, is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high-quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support, basically all the cellular functions in our body, including the gut microbiome. Now, I like most everybody try to get optimal nutrition from Whole Foods. Ideally mostly from minimally processed or non-processed Foods. However, one of the
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I just think going back to your question from before. I mean, are there going to be more cell types that get discovered Ivan? I assume? So right, I mean
No catalog of the stuff is ever, you know, it doesn't seem like we're ever done, right? We keep on finding more, but I think that, that gets to one of the things that I think are the strengths of modern LMS is the ability to kind of Imagine different states that things can be in. So, from all the work that we've done and funded on the, on the human cell atlas, there is a large Corpus of data that you can now train a kind of large scale model on. And
The things that we're doing, it's easy, I which I think is pretty exciting as building. What we think is one of the largest nonprofit Life Sciences AI clusters, right? It's like a on the order of 1,000 gpus and it's a larger than what most people have access to. In Academia. You can do since like serious engineering work on and and you know, by basically training a model with all of the human sellout list data and a bunch of other
It's as well. We think you'll be able to basically imagine all of the different types of cells and all the different states that they can be in and when they're healthy and diseased and how they'll interact with different interact with each other interact with different potential drugs. But I mean, I think the state of LMS I think this is where it's helpful to understand. You have a good understanding and be grounded in like the modern state of a I mean these things are not foolproof, right? I mean, one of the flaws of
An LMS is they hallucinate, right? So the question is, how do you make it so that that can be an advantage rather than a disadvantage? And I think the way that it ends up being an advantage is, when they help you imagine a bunch of states that someone can be. And but then you as the scientist or engineer, go and validate that those are true, whether their solutions to our protein, can be folded or possible states. That a cell could be in when it's interacting with other things. But, you know, we're not yet at the state with AI that you can just take the outputs of these things.
As like as gospel and run from there but they are very good. I think, as you said hypothesis generators or possible solution generators that then you can go validate. So I think that that's a very powerful thing that we can basically building on the first five years of science, work around the human cell Atlas and all the data that's been built out, carry that forward into something that I think is going to be a very novel tool going forward. And that's the type of thing that I think we're set up to do. Well, I mean, you,
All you had this exchange of a little while back about funding levels and how czi is just sort of a drop in the, in the, in the bucket compared to NIH. But I think we have this the thing that I think we can do that's different is funding. Some of these longer-term bigger projects that it is hard to Galvanize the and pull together the energy to do that and it's a lot of what most science funding is is like relatively small projects that
are exploring things over relatively short time Horizons. And one of the things that we try to do is is like build these tools over 5 10, 15 year periods there, often projects that require hundreds of millions of dollars of funding and world-class engineering teams and infrastructure to do. And that, I think is a pretty cool contribution to the field that, that I think is, there aren't as many other folks, who are doing that kind of thing. But that's one of the reasons why I'm personally excited about the virtual cell stuff because it just it's
This perfect intersection of all the stuff that we've done in single-celled. The previous collaborations that we've done with the field and bring together the industry and AI expertise around
this. Yeah, I completely agree that the model of science that you're put together with CCI is isn't just unique from an age but it's extremely important. The independent investigator model is what's Driven the progression of Science in this country and to some extent in northern Europe for the last
Hundred years, and it's wonderful on the one hand because it allows for that image. We have of a scientist, kind of tinkering away, or the people, in their lab, and then the Eureka's and that hopefully translates to better human health. But I think in my opinion we've moved past that model as the most effective model, or the only model that should be explored. Yeah. I just think it's a balance.
It's about what you want that. You want that, but you want to empower those people. I think that's these tools, I'm
sure.
So I'm there are mechanisms to do that like NIH, but but it's hard to do collaborative science. It's, it's sort of interesting that we're sitting here not far for because I grew up right near here as well. Not far from the garage model of tech right, Hewlett, Packard model and not far from here at all. And the idea was you know, the tinkerer and the garage the inventor and then people often forget that to implement all the Technologies they discovered took enormous factories and warehouses. So, you know, there's there's a similar
Larry there to Facebook meta Etc. But I think in science what we imagine that the scientists alone in their laboratory and those Eureka moments but I think nowadays that the big questions really require extensive collaboration and certainly tool development and one of the tools that you keep coming back to is these LMS, these large language models and maybe you could just elaborate for for those that aren't familiar you know what are what is a large language model it for that? The the uninformed, what is it? And what does it allow?
What does allow us to do that? You know, different types of other types of a I don't allow or more importantly perhaps what does it allow us to do that? A bunch of really smart people, highly informed in a given area of science staring at the data? What can I do that? They can't do.
Sure. So
I think a lot of the progression of machine learning has been about building systems neural networks, or otherwise that can basically makes sense and find patterns in larger and larger amounts of data. And there was a breakthrough, a number of years back that some folks at Google actually made called this Transformer model architecture. And it was this huge breakthrough because before then there was
A cap where, you know, if you fed more data into a neural network, past some, some point, it didn't really glean more insights from it, where's Transformers? Just we haven't seen the end of how big that can scale to yet. I mean, I think that there's a chance that we run into some, some ceiling, but it never asymptotes. We haven't observed it yet, but we just haven't built big enough systems yet. So I would guess that, I don't know. I think this is actually one of the big questions and in the way I feel today is basically our Transformers and are the
Current model architecture is sufficient if you just build larger and larger clusters, do, eventually get something that's like human intelligence or super intelligence. Or is there some kind of fundamental limit to this architecture that we just haven't reached yet? And once we kind of get a little bit further and building them out that will reach that in the will need a few more leaps before we get to, you know, the level of AI that I think will unlock, you know, a ton of really futuristic and amazing things, but there's no doubt that even just being able to
Process. The amount of data that we can now with this model architecture, has unlocked a lot of new use cases. And the reason why they're called large language models is because one of the first uses of them is people basically feed in all of the language from basically, the world wide web. And you can think about them is basically prediction machine. So if you you fit in, you put in prompt and it can basically, you know, predict a version of what should come next.
Next, so you like type in a headline for a news story and it can kind of predict. What I think's, the story should be or you could train it so that it could be a chatbot, right? Whereas, okay, if you're prompted with this question, you can get this response, but one of the interesting things is it turns out that there's actually nothing specific to using human language in it. So if instead of feeding it human language, if you use that model architecture for for a network and instead you feed it all of the
Human cell Outlets data. Then if you prompt it with a state of a cell, it can spit out different versions of like, what, you know, have that cell can attract or different states that. The cell could be a next one. It interacts with different
things. Does it have to take a genetics class? So for instance, if you give it a bunch of genetics now did you have to say hey by the way? And then you give it a genetics class to understand so that you know you got DNA RNA mRNA and protein that I think that the basic,
the basic nature of all these machine learning techniques, is there their base?
We pattern recognition systems. So there are these like very deep statistical machines that are very efficient at finding patterns. So it's not actually you don't need to teach a language model. That's trying to speak a language, you know, a lot of specific things about that language either you just feed in a bunch of examples and then let's say you teach it about something in English but then you also give it a bunch of
A of people speaking Italian it'll actually be able to explain the thing that it learned in English and Italian, right? Even though it is. So the cross over in just a pattern recognition is the thing that is pretty profound and Powerful about this but it really does apply to a lot of different things. Another example in the scientific Community has been the work that Alpha fold, you know, that the basically the folks at deepmind have done on protein folding it's you know, just basically
A lot of the same model architecture, but instead of language there, they fold it. They kind of fed in all of these the protein data and you can give it a state and it can spit out solutions to how those proteins get folded. So it's very powerful, I don't think we know yet is an industry what the, what the natural limits of it are and that that's one of the things that's pretty exciting about the current state, but it certainly allows you to solve problems that just weren't solved.
But with the generation of machine learning that came before, it
sounds like CCI is moving a lot of work that was just done in vitro in dishes and in Vivo, in living organisms model organisms are humans to in silico as we say. So, do you foresee a future where a lot of biomedical research, certainly the work of CCI included is done by machines. I mean obviously it's much lower cost.
And you can run millions of experiments, which of course is not to say that humans are not going to be involved, but I love the idea that we can run experiments in silico and mass. I think the in silico experiments are going to be incredibly helpful to test things quickly too cheaply and 22. Just unleash. A lot of creativity. I do think you need to be very careful about making sure it still translates and matches this.
Humans, you know, one thing that's funny and basic Sciences, we've basically cured every single disease in mice, like, mice, have we know what's going on when they have a number of diseases, because there were there used as a model organism. But they are not humans and a lot of times that research is relevant but not directly 121 translatable to humans. So you just have to be really careful about making sure that it actually works.
Humans.
Sounds like what CCI is doing is actually creating a new field back as I'm hearing all this, I'm thinking, okay, this this transcends Immunology Department, you know, cardiothoracic surgery, I mean neuroscience and the idea of a new field where you certainly embrace the realities of universities and Laboratories because that's where most of the work that you're funding is done. Is that right? It's okay. So maybe we need to think about what it means to do science differently. And I think that's one of the things that's most exciting.
And along those lines. It seems that bringing together a lot of different types of people. Different major institutions is this going to be especially important so I know that the initial CCI bio Hub. Gratefully included Stanford will put that first in the list but also UCSF. Yeah, forgive me. They many friends at UCSF and also Berkeley, but there are now some additional institutions involved. So maybe we could talk
But that and what motivated, the decision to Branch outside the Bay Area. And, and why you selected those particular additional institutions to be
included. Well, I mean, I'll just say part of a big part of why we wanted to create additional bio Hub since we were just so impressed by the work that the folks who are running the first bio Hub did. Yeah. And I also think you should walk through the the work of the Chicago bio Hub and the New York bio Hub that we just announced. But I think it's actually an interesting set of examples.
That balance the limits of what you want to do is like physical material, engineering and and, and where things are purely biological. Because the Chicago team is really building more sensors to be able to understand what's going on in your body. But that's more of like a physical kind of engineering challenge whereas the New York team. We basically talked about this as like a cellular endoscope of being able to have like an immune cell or something that can go and understand. You know what is
Like, what's the thing that's going on in your body? But it's not like a physical piece of Hardware. It's a cell that you can basically have just go report out on on different things that are happening inside the body. So,
so be sure to sell the microscope.
Yeah. And then and then eventually actually being able to act on it. But I mean but you should you should go
into more detail on all this. So, a core principle of how we think about bio hubs, it is that it has to be when we invited proposals, it has to be at least three institutions. So really
We breaking down the barrier of a single University often times asking, for the people designing, the research aim to come from all different backgrounds. And to explain why that the problem that they want to solve requires interdisciplinary and interuniversity institution collaboration to actually make happen. We just put that request for proposal out there with our San Francisco bio Hub, as an example where they've done incredible work in.
Single cell biology and infectious disease. And we got, I want to say like 57 proposals from over 150 institutions, a lot of ideas came together and, you know, we are so so excited that we've been able to launch Chicago and New York, Chicago is a collaboration between UIUC, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Chicago and Northwestern 85.
Right. Obviously, these universities are multifaceted, but if I were to describe them by their like stereotypical strength, Northwestern has an incredible medical system and hospital system. University of Chicago brings to the table. Incredible basic science. Strengths University of Illinois is a computing power house, and so they came together and proposed that they were going to start thinking about cells and tissue. So,
One of the one of the layers that you just alluded to. So how do the cells that we know behave and act differently when they come together as a tissue and the first one of the first issues that they're starting with is skin. So they've been already been able to as a collaboration under the leadership of Shannon Kelly design, art of engineered skin tissue. The architecture looks the same as what's in you and I and what they've done.
Done is built these super super-thin sensors and they embed these sensors throughout the layers of this engineered tissue. And they read out the data, they want to see how these cells what these cells are secreting, how these cells talk to each other. And what happens when these cells get inflamed? Inflammation is an incredibly important process that drives fifty percent of all deaths. And so this is another sort of disease agnostic approach. We want to understand inflammation and
Going to get a ton of information out from these sensors. That tell you, what happens when something goes awry because right now we can say, like, when you have an allergic reaction, your skin gets red and puffy what is the earliest signal of that? And these sensors can look at the behaviors of these cells over time. And then you can apply a large language model to look at the earliest statistically significant changes that can allow you to intervene.
As early as possible. So that that's what Chicago's doing, they're starting in the skin cells. They're also looking at the neuromuscular Junction which is the connection between Werner on attaches to a muscle and tells the muscle how to behave super important and things like ALS, but also an aging, the slowed transmission of information across that neuromuscular Junction is what causes old people to fall their brain cannot trigger their muscles to react fast enough. And so
We want to be able to embed these sensors to understand how these different interconnected systems within our bodies work together in New York. They're doing a related. But equally exciting project where they're engineering individual cells to be able to go in and identify changes in in a human body. So what they'll do is there,
Calling us, it's a wild. I really love it. I mean it's this is I don't want to go on a tangent, but for those that want to look it up, Adaptive Optics. You know, there's a lot of distortion and interference when you try and look at something really small and really far away and really smart physicists. Figured out. Well, use the interference as part of the microscope, make those actually lenses of the microscope. We should talk
about Imaging separate, so
it's just extremely clever along those lines. It's not intuitive. But then, when you hear it, it's like, it makes so much sense.
You know, it's not immediately intuitive make the cells that are already can navigate to tissues, or embed themselves in tissues. Be the microscope with in that tissue. I love it. The way that I explain this to my friends and my family is, this is Fantastic Voyage. But real life, like, we are going into the human body and we're using the immune cells, which, you know, are privileged and already working to keep your body healthy, and being able to Target them to examine certain things. So like, you can engineer
Are an immune cell to go in your body and look, inside your coronary arteries and say, are these arteries healthy, or are there plaques because because plaques lead to blockage which lead to heart attacks and the cell, can then record that information and report it back out. That's the first half, what? The New York while Hub is going to do. The second half is can you then engineer the cells to go do something about it? Can I then tell a different cell? I mean, cell. That is able to transform.
In your body to go in and clean that up in a targeted way. And so I it's incredibly exciting. They're going to study things that are sort of immune privilege that your immune system normally doesn't have access to things like ovarian and pancreatic cancer. They'll also look at a number of neurodegenerative diseases. Since the immune system doesn't presently have a ton of access into the nervous system but they
it's it's both mind-blowing and it feels like sci-fi, but science is actually, in a place where, if you really pushed a group of incredibly qualified scientists I could you do this, if given the chance, the answer is like probably give us enough time the bright team and resources, like it's
doable. Yeah, I mean, it's a 10 to 15-year project. Yeah. But it's awesome. Engineered cells. Yeah,
I love the optimism and and the moment you said, make the cell the microscope, so to speak. I was like
Yes, yes. And yes, it just makes so much sense. What motivated the decision to do the work of CCI in the context of existing universities, as opposed to, you know, there's still some real estate up in Redwood City, where there's a bunch of space to put biotech companies and just hiring people from all, all backgrounds and saying, hey, you know, have at it and doing this stuff from scratch. I mean, it's a very interesting decision to do this in the context of an existing framework of like graduate students that need to do it.
A thesis and get a first author paper because there's a whole set of structures within Academia that I think both facilitate but also limit the progression of science you know that individual independent investigator model that we talked about a little bit earlier. It's so core to the way science has been done. This is very different and frankly sounds far more efficient if I'm to be completely honest and you know we'll see if I renew my NIH funding after saying that but but I think we all want the same thing. We all want to as scientists and as you know, it as humans, we want to
Way we work and we want healthy people to persist to be healthy and we want sick people to get healthy. I mean, that's really ultimately, the goal. It's not super complicated. It's just hard to do. So the teams at the Bayou Hub are actually independent of the University's. So each pile Hub will probably have in total maybe 50 people working on sort of deep efforts. However it's an acknowledgement that not all of the best scientists who can contribute to this area are actually
going to one want to leave a university or want to take on the full time scope of this project. So it's the ability to partner with universities and to have the faculty at all the universities be able to contribute to the overall project is how the Bayou have a structured. Got it.
But a lot of the way that we're approaching czi is this long-term iterative project to figure out, try a bunch of different things
You're out which things produce the most interesting results and then double down on those in the next five-year push, right? So we just went through this period where we have wrapped up. The first five years of the science program, we tried a lot of different models or all kinds of different things and it's not that the bio Hub model, we don't think it's like the best or only model, but we found that it was sort of a, a really interesting way to unlock a bunch of collaboration and bring some technical.
Sources that allow for this longer-term development and it's not something that is widely being pursued across the rest of the field. So we figured okay. This is like a an interesting thing that we can that we can help push on but I mean yeah we do believe in the collaboration but I also think that we come at this with we don't think that the way that we're pursuing this is like the only way to do this or the way that everyone should do it. We're pretty aware of, you know, that you know, what is the rest of the
A system and how we can play a unique role in. It
feels very synergistic with the way science is already done, and also fills in incredibly important Niche that frankly wasn't filled before along the lines of implementation. So let's say your large language models combined with imaging tools at reveal that a particular set of genes acting in a cluster. I don't know setup and an organ crash. Let's say the paint the pancreas crashes, it particular stage of
of pancreatic cancer. I mean, still one of the most deadliest of the Cancers and there are others that you certainly wouldn't want to get, but that's among the ones, you wouldn't want to get the most so you discover that and then and the idea is that okay then AI reveals some potential drug targets then bear out in vitro in a dish and in a mouse model, how is the actual implementation of to drug Discovery? Or even maybe this target is druggable, maybe it's not, maybe in the require some
Approach, you know, laser laser ablation approach or something, we don't know. But ultimately is czi going to be involved in the implementation of new Therapeutics. Is that the idea
I less? Oh, why? So
that's, you know, this is where it's important to work in an ecosystem and to know your own limitations. Like there are groups and startups and companies that take that and bring it to translation very effectively, I would say the place where we have a small window into that
that world is actually our work with rare disease groups. We have through our whereas one portfolio, funded Patient Advocates to create rare disease organizations, where patients come together and actually pull their collective experience. They build bio Registries Registries of their natural history and they both partner with researchers to do the research about their disease.
And with drug developers, to incentivize drug developers to focus on what they may need for their disease. And, you know, one thing that's important to point out is that rare diseases, aren't rare. There are over 7,000 rare diseases, and collectively impact many, many individuals. And I think the thing that's from a basic science perspective, the incredibly fascinating thing about rare diseases is that there?
Actually Windows to how the body normally should work. And so, there are often mutations that when, when genes that were, when there are mutated, cause very specific diseases. But that tell you how the normal biology works as well, got it. So you discuss the basically, the, the goals, major goals and initiatives of the CCI for the next five to ten years, and then beyond that.
Targets will be explored by biotech. Companies will grab those targets and and test them and Implement them. There's also I
think been a couple of teams from the initial bio Hub that were interested in spinning out ideas and to start up. So that's just it's even though it's not a thing that we're going to pursue because I've been where philanthropy we want to enable the work that gets done to be able to get turned into companies and things that other people go take and and and run towards towards building you know, ultimately
Therapeutics. So that's that's another Zone. But that's just, that's not a thing that we're going to do.
I gather, you're both optimists. Mmm. Yeah. Is that part of what brought you together, but forgive me, forget it, switching to a personal question, but I love the optimism that that seems to sit at the root of the CCI. I will say that we are incredibly hopeful people, but it manifest in different ways between the two of us. Yeah. What do you what, how would you describe your
The worst is mine. It's not a loaded question.
I don't know.
Huh.
I mean I think I'm more probably technologically optimistic about what can be built. And I think you because of your focus as an actual doctor kind of have more of a sense of how that's going to affect actual people in their lives. Whereas for me, it's like, I'm a lot of my work, it is, you know, it's like we touch. A lot of people around the world and the scale is sort of
And I think for you just like, it's like being able to improve the lives of individuals, whether its students at any of the schools that you've started or any of the stuff that we've supported through the education work, which isn't the goal here or, you know, like just being able to improve people's lives in that way. I think is the thing that I've seen you be super passionate about and it does that. Do you agree with that characterization? I'm trying. I'm trying to. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that's
very fair and I'm sort of
Giggling to myself because in a day to day, life as like life partners are relative. Optimism comes through as Mark just like, is overly optimistic about his time management and we'll get engrossed in. Interesting ideas, I'm late and he's late. Every Physicians are very punctual, and because he's late, I have to channel. Mark, is an optimist whenever I'm waiting for
him, such a nice way. Okay, I'll start using
that. That's what I'm in the driveway.
The kids waiting for you. I'm like Mark is an optimist and so his optimism translates to some tardiness whereas I'm a sort of I'm like how does what's how is this going to happen? Like I'm going to open a spreadsheet, I'm going to start putting together a plan and like a putting pulling together all the pieces calling people to sort of like bring something to life
but it is it's one of my favorite quotes that is optimists. Tend to be successful and pessimists.
Tend to be right? And, yeah, I mean, I think it's true in a lot of different aspects of life, right.
So who said that, did you say that marks
after? No, I did not. I did not. I like it. I did not invent. It will give it to, you will put it on. But I do think that there's really something to it, right? And there's like if you're discussing any idea, there's all these reasons, why it might not work. And so I think that and those reasons are
Probably true. The people are stating them are probably have some validity to it, but the question is that is that the most productive way to view the world. And, you know, I think across the board and I think that people who tend to be the most productive and get the most done, you kind of need to be optimistic because if you don't believe that something can get done, then why would you go work on it?
The reason I ask the question is that, you know, that these days we hear a lot about, you know, the future is looking so dark and these various ways and you have
Lauren. So you have families and you are a family, excuse me. And and you also have families independently that are now merged. But I love the optimism behind the CCI because, you know, you know, behind all this that there's sort of set of big statements on the wall. One, the future can be better than the present in terms of treating disease. Maybe even you said, eliminating diseases, all diseases. I love that optimism and that
That there's a tractable path to do it. Like we're going to put literally, you know, money and time and energy and people and technology and AI behind that. And so I have to ask was having children a significant modifier in terms of your view of the future like wow that you hear all this Doom and Gloom like, what's the future going to be like for them. Did you sit back and think, you know, what would it look like if there was a future with no diseases? Is that the future we want our
Learn in. I mean I'm voting a big gas so we're not going to we're not going to debate that at all, but was having children to sort of an inspiration for the CCI in some way?
Yeah, so I think my answer to that, I would dial backwards for me and I'll just tell a very brief story about my family. I'm the daughter of chinese vietnamese refugees, my parents and Grandparents were boat people. If you remember, people left Vietnam, during the war, in these small boats, into the South China Sea and the there were stories about how these boats would sink with whole family's on.
And so my grandparents who both sets of grandparents who knew each other decided that there was a better future out there and they were willing to take a risk for it. But they were afraid of losing all their kids. My dad is one of six, my mom is one of 10 and so they decided that there was something out there in this Bleak time. And they paired up their kids one from each family and sent them out on these little boats before.
For the internet, before cell phones, and said, we'll see you on the other side and the kids were between the ages of like, you know, 10 to 25. So, young kids, my mom was a teenager early teen when this happened and everyone made it, and I get to sit here and talk to you. So, how could I not believe that like better is possible? And like, I hope that that's in my, like a
Genetic somewhere. And that I carry that on. That is a spectacular story. It's not wild, it is spectacular. How can I be a pessimist with that? I love it and I so appreciate that. You became a physician because you were now bringing that optimism and that epigenetic understanding and cognitive understanding and emotional understanding to the field of medicine. So I grate ful to the people that made that decision. Yeah. And then you know, when I think you don't realize I've always known that story but you don't
Understand how Wild that feels until you have your own child and you're like well I can't even I refuse to let her use, you know, glass bottles only or something like that and you're like oh my God, like the risk and sort of willingness of my grandparents to believe in something bigger, and better is just astounding. And it also our own children sort of give it a sense of urgency.
So tacular story and you're sending knowledge out into the fields of Science and bringing knowledge into the fields of Science and I love this will see you on the other side. Yeah, I'm confident that it will all come back. Well, thank you so much for that. I Mark out. You have the opportunity to talk about did having kids change your worldview and it's really tough to beat that dirt.
So that's one thing as you just like there were all these things that I think we'd had talked about if there's long as we've known each other but you eventually want to go do but then it's like oh we're having kids. We need to like get on this. Right? So I have
there's that was actually one of the checklist the baby checklist before the
first is like the baby's coming for. You have to like start ZZ I truly unlike sitting in the hospital.
All delivery room, finishing editing. The letter that we were going to publish to, to announce that the work that we're doing
on Susie hydration. It was not. We really were editing. The final drafts. / czi before you? Well it's an incredible initiative. I've been following it since its Inception and and it's already been tremendously successful and everyone in the field of science. And I have a lot of communication with those folks feels the same way and
and the future is even brighter for it. It's clear and thank you for expanding to the Midwest and and New York and we're all very excited to see where all of this goes, I share in your optimism and thank you for your time today. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. A lot more to do.
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You're extremely well-known for your role in technology development, but by virtue of your personal interests and also where meta technology interfaces with mental health, and physical health, you're starting to become synonymous with health, whether you realize it or not, part of that is because there's posts footage of you rolling. Jiu-Jitsu you wanted you Jutsu competition recently, you're doing other forms of martial arts water
Sports, including surfing and, and on, and on, so you're doing it yourself, but maybe we could just start off with technology and get this issue out of the way first, which is it. I think many people assume that technology, especially technology that involves Astro screen. Scuse me of any kind is going to be detrimental to our health, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. So could you explain how
You see, technology meshing with inhibiting, or maybe even promoting physical and mental health?
Sure. I mean, I think this is a really important topic. It's, you know, the research that we've done suggest that it's not like all good or all bad. I think how you're using the technology has a big impact on whether it is basically a positive experience for you and even within technology,
Even within social media, there's not kind of one type of thing that people do. I think at its best, you're forming meaningful connections with other people, and there's a lot of research that basically suggests that it's the relationships that we have and friendships that kind of bring the most happiness and in our lives. And it's some level end up at even correlating with living a longer and healthier life because, you know, that kind of grounding that you have and
Pretty ends up being important for that. So I think that that aspect of social media, which is the ability to connect with people to understand what's going on in people's lives, have empathy for them. Communicate, what's going on with your life Express that? That's generally positive. There are ways that it can be negative in terms of bad interactions. Things like bullying, which we can we can talk about because there's a lot that we've done to basically make sure that people can be safe from that and give people tools and give kids.
Have the right parental controls, their parents can oversee that but that's sort of the interacting with people side.
There's another side of all of this, which I think of is just like passive consumption, which at its best, It's Entertainment, right? An entertainment is an important human thing to, but I don't think that that has quite the same association with the long-term, well-being, and health benefits as being able to help people connect with other people does. And I think, at its worst
Some of the stuff that we see online, I think these days a lot of the news is just so relentlessly negative that it's just hard to, you know, come away from an experience where you're looking at the news for half an hour, and like feel better about the world. So I think that there's a mix on this. I think the more that social media is about connecting with people and the more that
When you're kind of consuming and using the media part of social media to learn about things, that kind of Rich you and can provide inspiration or education as opposed to things that are just leave you with a more toxic feeling, that that's sort of the balance that we try to get right across our products. And I think we're pretty aligned with the community because at the end of the day, when people don't want to use a product and come away, feeling bad. And there's not a lot that people talk about
Evaluate a lot of these products in terms of information and utility. But I think it's as important when you're designing a product to think about what kind of feeling you're creating with the people who use it, right? Whether that's kind of an aesthetic sense, when you're designing Hardware or just kind of like, what, like what do you what do you make people feel and generally people don't want to feel bad, right? So I think when you know that doesn't mean that we want to shelter people from bad things that are happening in the world but I don't
I really think that it's not what people want, you know, for us to just be kind of just showing like all the super- stuff all day long. So we work hard on all these different problems. You know, making sure that we're helping connect people as best as possible, helping make sure that we give people good tools to block people who might be bullying them or harass them or especially for younger, folks, anyone under the age of 16 defaults into an experience where their experiences private we have all these parental tools.
So that way parents can kind of understand what would their children is up to and are up to in a good balance and then on the other side we try to give people tools to understand how they're spending their time and we try to give people tools so that you know, if your teen and you're kind of stuck in some you know Loop of just looking at one type of content will nudge you and say, hey you've been looking at content of this type for a while, like how about something else? And here's, here's a bunch of other examples. So I think that there are things that you can do to kind of
Push this in a positive direction but I think it just starts with having a more nuanced view of like this isn't all good and all or all bad and the more that you can make it kind of a positive thing. The, the better this will be for all the people who use our products
that makes really good sense, in terms of the negative experience. I agree. I don't think anyone wants a negative experience in the moment. I think where some people get concerned. Perhaps, I think about my own interactions with say Instagram, which I use all the time for getting information out. But also consuming information,
And I happen to love it. It's where I essentially launched, the non podcast segments of my podcast and continue to
I can think of experiences that are a little bit like, highly processed food where it tastes good at the time. It's a, it's highly engrossing, but it's not necessarily nutritious and you don't feel very good afterwards. So for me, that would be my little collage of default options to click on and Instagram, occasion. I notice and this just reflects my failure, not Instagrams, right? That. There are a lot of like street fight things like of people being
Eating people up on the street and I have to say these have a very strong gravitational. Pull, I'm not somebody that enjoys seeing violence per se but you know, I find myself. I'll click on one of these like what happened? And I'll see someone like, you know, get hit and there's like, a little melee on the street or something and those seem to be offered to me a lot lately. And again, this is my fault, it reflects my prior searching experience, but it I noticed that it has a bit of a gravitational pull where, you know? There's no I didn't learn anything. It's not teaching me any kind of use
Wall Street, self-defense skills of any kind and at the same time, I also really enjoy some of the cute animal stuff. And so I get a lot of those also. So, there's just polarized, you know, collage that's offered to me that reflects my prior search Behavior. You could argue that the, the cute animal stuff is just entertainment. But actually, it fills me with a feeling in some cases that truly Delights me. I Delight in animals, we're not just on my kids. I mean animals, I've never seen before,
For interactions between animals. I've never seen before that. Truly Delight me, they energize me in a positive way that when I leave Instagram I do think I'm better off so I'm grateful for the algorithm in that sense. But I guess the direct question is is the algorithm just reflective of what one has been looking at a lot prior to that moment where they log on or is it also trying to do exactly what you described, which is trying to give people a good feeling experience that leads to more, good feelings.
Yeah, I mean I think we try to do this in a long-term way, right? I think one simple example of this is we have this issue a number of years back about clickbait news, right? So articles that would have basically a headline that grabs your attention that made you feel like I need to click on this and then you click on it and then the article is actually you know about something that's somewhat tangential to it but people clicked on it. So you know the naive version of this stuff, you know, they're like 10 year old
Version was ago, people seem to be clicking on this maybe that's good but it's actually pretty straightforward exercise to instrument the system to realize that hey people click on this. And then you know, they don't really spend a lot of time reading the news that after clicking on it, and after they do this a few times, they it doesn't really correlate with them. You know, saying that they're having a good experience, some of what you some of how we measure. This is just by looking at
At how people use the services but it's also important to balance that by having like real people come in and tell us. Okay, we show them. Here are the stories that we could have showed you which of these are most meaningful to you or would make its that you have the best experience and just kind of like mapping the algorithm. And what we do to that ground truth of what people say that they want. So I think that through a set of things like that, we really have made large steps to minimize things like clickbait overtime.
Not a gun from the internet, but I think we've done a good job of minimizing it on our services within that though. I do think that we need to be pretty careful about not being paternalistic about what makes different people, feel good, right? So, I mean, I don't know that everyone feels good about about cute animals. I mean, I can't imagine that people would feel really bad about it, but maybe they don't have his profound of a positive reaction to it as you just expressed. And I don't know, maybe people who are more into fighting would look at the
The, the street fighting videos assuming that they're within our community standards. I think that there's a level of violence that we just don't want to be showing at all but that's a separate question. But if they are, I mean, then you know, it's like, I mean, I'm pretty into MMA. I don't get a lot of street fighting videos, but if I did maybe I'd feel like I was learning something from that. I think, at various times in the company's history, we've been a little bit too paternalistic about saying, this is good content, this is bad. You should like this.
This is unhealthy for you and I think that we want to look at the long-term effects. You don't want to get stuck in a short term Loop of like okay just because you did this today, doesn't mean it's like what you Aspire for yourself over time. But I think as long as you look at the long-term of what people both say they want and what they do giving people a fair amount of latitude to like the things that they like I just think feels like the right set of values to bring to this. Now of course that doesn't go for
Everything, there are things that are kind of truly off-limits. And and, you know, things that like bullying for example, or things that are really like inciting violence, things like that. And we have a whole Community standards around this, but I think except for those things, which I would hope that most people can agree. Okay, bullying is bad, right? I hope that, you know, 100% of people agree with that and not a hundred, maybe 99% except for the things that kind of get that sort of very
That feel pretty extreme and bad like that. I think you want to give people space to like what they want to
like.
Yesterday, I had the very good experience of learning from The Meta team about safety protections that are in place for kids who are using meta platforms and frankly, I was like, really positively surprised that the huge number of filter, based tools and, and, and just ability to customize the experience, so that it can stand the best chance of enriching, not just remaining neutral, but enriching their mental health status.
One thing that came about in that conversation, however was I realized that all these tools but do people really know that these tools exist and I think about my own experience with Instagram. I love watching Adam a series Friday qas, because he explains a lot of the tools that I didn't know existed. And people haven't seen that, I highly recommend, they watch that. It's, I think every takes questions on Thursdays and answers the most, every Fridays. So,
So, if I'm not aware of the tools without watching that that exists for adults, how does met a look at the challenge of making sure that people know that they're all these tools? I mean, dozens and dozens of very useful tools but I think most of us just know the hash tag the tag, The Click Stories versus feed we now noted that, you know, I also post to threads. I mean, so we know the major channels and tools but this is like owning a vehicle that has incredible features that one does
Realize can take you off road can allow your vehicle to fly. There's a lot there. So what what do you think could be done to get that information out? Maybe this conversation could Q people
to their existing. That's this part. Part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this is I mean I think most of the narrative around social media is not okay, all of the different tools that people have to control their experience. It's you know, the kind of narrative of is this just - for, for teens or something. And and I think, again, a lot of this comes down to, you know,
No. Do you know how was the experience being tuned? And is it actually, you know, like are people using it to connect and positive ways and if so I think it's really positive. So yeah, I mean I think part of this is Hooper I just need to get out and talk to people more about it and then there's an in product aspect, which is, you know, if you're a teen and you sign up, we take you through a pretty extensive experience, that tries to outline some of this, but that is
It's too, right? Because when you sign up for a new thing, if you're bombarded with, like, here's a list of features you like, okay? I just sign up for the sun really understand much about what the service is like. Let me go find some people to follow, who are my friends on here before, I like learning about controls to prevent people from harassing me or something? That's why I think it's really important to also show a bunch of these tools in context. So, you know, if you're looking at comments,
And you know, if you if you go to delete a comment or you go to edit something, try to give people prompts and months. Okay. Did you know that you can manage things in these ways around that? Or when you're in the Inbox and you're filtering something, right? It's remind people in line. So I'm not just because of the number of people who use the product and the level of nuance around each of the controls, I think the vast majority of that education, I think needs to happen in the product but
You
think that through conversations like this and others that we need to be doing and we can create a broader awareness that those things exist. So that way at least people are primed. So that way when those things pop up in the product, like oh yeah, like I knew that there was this control and like, here's here's like, how I would use that.
Like I find the restrict function to be very useful some more than the block function in most cases, I do sometimes. Yeah, but the restrict function is really useful that you could filter specific comments. You know, someone
I have a you might recognize that someone has a tendency to be a little aggressive and I should point out that actually don't really mind what people say to me, but I try and maintain what I call classroom rules in my comment section where I don't like people attacking other people because I would never tolerate that in the University classroom. I'm not going to tolerate them in the comment section, for
instance. Yeah. And I think that the example that you just you just used about restrict versus block gets to something about product design, that's important to which is that block is sort of this very powerful tool that if
One is giving you a hard time and you just want them to disappear from the experience, you can do it. But the design trade off with that is that in order to make it so that the person is just gone from the experience in that you don't show up to them. They don't show up to you inherent to that is that they will have a sense that you blocked them. And that's why I think some stuff like restrict or just filtering. Like, I just want to see you as much stuff about this topic, you know?
Who like using different tools for very subtle reasons, right? And maybe maybe you want the content to not show up, but you don't want the person who's posting the content to know that you don't want it to show up, maybe don't want to get the messages in your main inbox but you don't want to tell the person that you like that you actually, you know, you're not friends or something like that. I'm you actually need to give people different tools that have different levels of, kind of power and nuanced around. How the social dynamics are on using them play out.
In order to really allow people to tailor the experience in the ways that they
want. In terms of trying to limit total amount of time on social media, I couldn't find really good data on this. You know, how much time is too much? I mean, I think it's going to depend on what one is looking out the age of the user Etc. But I agree. I know that you have tools that cue the user to how long they've been on a given platform. Are there tools to
you late like thinking about like the Greek myth of the sirens and, you know, people tying themselves to the Mast and covering their eyes so that they're not drawn in by the sirens. Is there a function aside from deleting the app temporarily? And then reinstalling it every every time you want to use it again. Is there a true lockout self lockout function? Where one can lock themselves out of access to the app?
Well, I think we give people tools that let them manage this and and and there's the tools that you get to use them. There's the tools, the parents get to use to basically see how
Usage works. But yeah, I think that there's there's different kind of, you know, I think for now we've mostly focused on helping people understand this and then give people reminders and things like that. It's tough though, to answer the question that you were talking about before the sieve, is there an amount of time which is too much because it does really get to what you're doing. Weird. If you fast forward Beyond just the apps that we have today, to an experience that is like a social experience in the
A future of the augmented reality glasses or something that we're building. A lot of this is going to be, you're interacting with people in the way that you would physically, as if you were kind of like, hanging out with friends or working with people, but now, they can show up as Holograms and you can feel like your present right there with them, no matter where they actually are. And the question is, is there too much time to spend interacting with people like that? Well, at the limit,
if we can get that experience to be kind of as rich and giving you as good of a sense of presence as you would have, if you were physically there with someone, then I don't see why you would want to restrict the amount that people use that technology to any less than what would be the amount of time that you'd be comfortable interacting with people physically, which obviously is not going 24 hours a day, you have to do other stuff in your work, you need to sleep, but I think
it really gets to kind of how you're using these things. Whereas if what you're primarily using the services for is to introduce a, you're getting stuck in Loops reading news or something. That is really kind of getting you into a negative mental state. Then, I don't know. I mean, I think that there's probably a relatively short period of time that maybe that's kind of a good thing that you want to be doing. But again, even then it's not zero, right? Because it's just because news might make you unhappy, doesn't mean that the answer is to be unaware of negative things that are happening in the world.
Just think that there's like different people have different tolerances for what they can take on that and I think we it's generally having some awareness is probably good as long as it's not more than your kind of constitutionally able to take. So I don't know try to not be too per turn elastic about this is our approach but we want to empower people by giving them the tools both people and if you're a tea in your parents to have tools to understand what you're experiencing and what the and how you're using these.
Things and then and then go from
there. Yeah I think it requires of all of us. Some degree of self-regulation. I like this idea of not being too paternalistic. I mean, that's it seems like the right way to go. I find myself occasionally having to make sure that I'm not just passively scrolling that I'm learning, I like forging for organizing and dispersing information. That's been my my my life's career. So I've learned so much from social media, I find great papers, great ideas. I think comments are a great source of feedback and I'm not just saying that because you're sitting here
I mean, Instagram in particular, but other meta platforms. Have been tremendously helpful for me to get science and health information out. One of the things that I'm really excited about which I only had the chance to try for the first time today is your new VR platform. So the newest Oculus and when we can talk about the glasses, the Ray-Bans, those are still that those two experiences are still kind of blowing my mind, especially the, the Ray-Ban glasses and I have so many
any questions about this, so I'll resist, but I'm not into that. Okay, well, yeah, I have some experience with VR. My lab is used to be our Jeremy bailenson slab at Stanford as one of the pioneering Labs of VR and mixed reality. I guess some these call augmented reality but now mixed reality, I think. What's so striking about the VR that you guys had me, try it. Today is how well it interfaces with the, with the real room. Let's call it the physical room because I could still see people. I could see where the furniture was. So I did was
A bump in anything I guess. He people's Smiles. I could see my my water on the table while I was doing this. What felt like a real martial arts experience? Except I wasn't getting hit. Well, I was getting hit virtually but it's extremely engaging. And yet it on the good side of things, it really bypasses a lot of the early concerns that bailenson lab again. Jeremy slab was early to say that. Oh, you know, there's a limit to how much we are one can or should use each day.
A even for the adult brain because it can really disrupt your vestibular system, your sense of balance, all of that seems to have been dealt with. In this new, this new iteration of the are like we didn't come out of it. Feeling dizzy at all, I didn't feel like I was re-entering the room in a way that was really jarring going into it as obviously it. Whoa, this is a different world, but you can look look to your left and say, oh I someone just came in the door. Hey, how's it going? Hold on, I'm playing this game. Just as it was when I was a kid, playing a Nintendo and someone walk in its fully engrossing but you be like, hold on. And you see
Are there? So first of all, Bravo incredible? And then the next question is, you know, what is this? What do we even call this experience? Because it is truly mixed. It's actually mixed reality experience.
Yeah. I mean, mixed reality is sort of the umbrella term that refers to the combined experience of virtual and augmented reality. So augmented reality is what you're eventually going to get with in a some future version of the smart glasses where
you're primarily seeing the world, right? But but you can put Holograms in it, right? So like, that will have a future where you're going to walk into a room and you're gonna be like as many Holograms as as physical objects, right? If you just think about like all the paper, the kind of art physical games media. Your workstation, we refer
to let's say an MMA fight it. We could just draw it up on the table right here and just see it. Repeat as opposed as turning and looking at a screen, I've
been pretty much any screen that exists could be a hologram in the future with smart glasses.
There's nothing that actually physically needs to be there for that when you have glasses that can put a hologram there and it's an interesting thought, experiment to just go around and think about okay, what of the things that are physical in the world need to actually be physical in your chair does, right? Because you're sitting on it a hologram isn't going to support you, but I like that art on the wall. I mean, that doesn't need to physically be there. I mean so I think that that's that's sort of the augmented reality experience that we're moving towards and
Then we've had these headsets that historically we think about as VR and that has been something that kind of it's like a fully immersive experience. But now we're kind of getting something that's a hybrid in between the two and capable of both which is a headset that can do both virtual reality. And some of these augmented reality experiences and I think that's really powerful both because you're going to get new applications that that kind of allow people to collaborate together and
Maybe the two of us are here physically, but someone joins us and it's the rabbit are there, or maybe it's some version of the future. Like we're having a, you're having a team meeting. And you have some people there physically and you have some people dialing in and they're basically like a hologram, they're virtually. But then you also have some AI is that personas that are on your team that are helping you do different things. They can be embodied as avatars and around the table meeting with you. Are people
going to be doing first dates that are physically separated? I could imagine that some people would, is it even worth leaving the house type date and then
They find out and then they meet for the first
time. I mean, maybe I think, you know, dating has physical aspects to it too. So, I think
that some people might not be, they want to know whether or not it's worth the effort to head out to whatnot. You know it want to bridge The Divide, right? It is
possible. I mean I know like a some of my friends who are dating basically. Yes. Say that in order to make sure that they have like a safe experience and when they're if they're going on a first date. They'll
Joel something that's like shorter and maybe in the middle the day like some of its coffee. So that way if they don't like the person, they can just kind of get out before like going in scheduling a dinner or like a real full date. So I don't know, maybe in the future, people will kind of have that experience where you can feel like, you're kind of sitting there. And it's, it's even easier and lighter, weight, and safer. And if you're not having a good experience, you can just like teleport out of there and Beyond. But yeah, I think that this will be an interesting question in the future is
There are clearly a lot of things that are only possible physically that or so much better physically. And then, there are all these things that were building up, that it can be digital experiences. But it's this weird artifact of kind of how the stuff has been developed that the digital world, and the physical world exists in these like completely different planes or you want to interact with a digital world. Well, we do it all the time, but we pull out a small screen, or we have a big screen and just, basically, we're interacting with the digital world through these screens. But I think we found
Just forward a decade or more. It's I think one of the really interesting questions about what, like, what is the world that we're going to live. And I think it's going to increasingly be this mesh of the physical and digital worlds that will allow us to feel a that the, the world that we're in is just a lot richer because there can be all these things that people create that are just so much easier to do digitally than physically. But it be, you're going to have a real kind of
All sense of presence with these things and not feel like interacting in the digital world is taking you away from the physical world, which today is just so much, viscerally richer and more powerful. I think the digital world will sort of be embedded in the in that and and and will feel kind of just as Vivid in a lot of ways. So that's why I always think when you're saying before, you know, you felt like you could look around and see the real room. I do think that there's an interesting kind of philosophical distinction between the real room and the physical room, which
Historically, I think people would have said those are the same thing, but I actually think in the future the real room is going to be the combination of the physical world with all the digital artifacts and objects that are in there that you can interact with them and feel present. Where's the physical world is just the part that's physically there and I think it's possible to build a real world. That's the sum of these two that will actually be more profound experience than what we have today.
I was struck by the smoothness of the interface between the VR in the physical room. Your team had me. Try a
I guess it was an exercise class in the form of a book is like, essentially like hitting mints boxing. So he targets boxing or natural. Yeah. And it comes at a fairly fast paced that then picks up its got some tutorials, very easy to use. And certainly got my heart rate up, I'm in at least decent shape and I have to be honest. I've never once desire to do any of these on-screen Fitness things. I mean I can't think of anything more aversive then like like a clap. Like I don't want to insult any particular products.
But like, riding a stationary bike while, looking at a screen of pretending, I'm on a road outside. I can't think of anything worse for Me. Maybe, oh, I
do like the leaderboard. Okay, maybe I'm just a very competitive person like if you're gonna be running on a treadmill. Yeah, least give me a leaderboard. So I can beat the people who are ahead of me.
I like moving outside and and certainly an exercise class or aerobics classes, they used to call them. But what the experience I tried today was extremely engaging and I've done enough boxing to, at least know how to do a little bit.
Of it and really enjoyed, it gets your heart rate up and you I completely forgot that I was doing an on-screen experience because in part because I believe I was still in that physical room and I think there's something about the mesh of the physical room and the virtual experience that makes it neither of one world or the other. I mean, I really felt at the interface of those and and certainly got presents this feeling of forgetting that I was in a virtual experience and got my heart rate up pretty quickly.
To stop because we were going to start recording. But I would do that for a good 45 minutes in the morning and yeah, and yeah, there's no amount of money you could pay me truly to look at a screen while pedaling on a bike or running on a treadmill. So again Bravo I think it's going to be very useful. It's going to get people moving their bodies more, which certainly social media up until now. And a lot of technologies have been accused of limiting, the amount of physical activity that that both children and adults are engaged in. So and we know we need for
Circle activity, you're a big proponent of and practitioners little activity. So is this a major goal of meta? Get people moving their bodies more and getting their heart rates up and and so on I think we
want to enable it and I think it's good but I think it comes more from
Like, a philosophical view of the world than it is necessarily mean. I don't go into Building Products to try to shape people's behavior. But I believe in empowering people to do what they want and be the best version of themselves that they can be. So, No Agenda that said, I do believe that there's the previous generation of computers were devices for your mind and I think that we are not
Rains and tanks, you know, it's like saying that there's sort of a philosophical view of people of like, okay, you, you are primarily what you think about, or your values or something. It's like, know it. You are that, and you are a physical manifestation, and people were very physical, and I think building a computer
For your whole body and not just for your mind is very fitting with this worldview that like the actual essence of you if you want to be present with another person, if you want to like be fully engaged and experience is not just okay, it's not just a video conference call that looks at your face and where you can like share ideas. It's it's something that that you can engage your whole body. So yeah, I mean, I think being physical is very important to me.
I've had some, it's just too, that's a lot of, you know, the most fun stuff that I get to do. It's a really important part of how I personally balance, my energy levels and just get a diversity of experiences because I could spend all my time running the company, but I think it's good for people to do some different things and you know, compete in different areas or learn different things. And all of that is good.
If people want to do really intense workouts with with the work that we're doing with questor with, you know, eventually our glasses great. But even if you don't want to do like a really intense workout, I think just having a Computing environment and platform which is inherently physical captures, more of the essence of what we are as people than any of the previous Computing platforms that we've had to
date. It was even thing. It just of the simple task of getting
Better range of motion AKA flexibility. Yeah, I could imagine inside of the VR experience, you know, leaning into a stretch, you know, standard kind of like, like you lunge, type stretch, but actually seeing a meter of like, are you get? Are you approaching new levels of flexibility? In that moment, I was actually measuring some, some kinesthetic elements on the body, in the joints. And I mean, I was just trying, whereas, normally might have to do that in front of a camera, which then would give you the date on a screen that you look at afterwards or hire an expensive coach. But so, or looking at
Resistance training. So you're actually lifting physical weights, but is telling you whether or not you're breaking form. I mean, there's so much that could be done inside of there, and then my mind just starts to spiral into like, wow, this is very likely to transform what we think of, as quote unquote exercise. Yeah. I think so. And there's still a bunch of
questions that need to get answered. You know. It's a I don't think most people are going to necessarily want to install, you know, a lot of sensors or cameras to track their whole body. So we're just over time getting better.
Order from the sensors that are on the headsets of being able to do very good hand tracking. Right 7, we have this research demo, where you now, just with the hand tracking from the headset, you can type it. Just projects a little keyboard onto your table and you can type and people like type 100 words a minute with that with a virtual keyboard. Yeah, we're starting to be able to using some Modern AI techniques, be able to, like simulate understand where your torso is position is even though you can't always
See it, you can see it a bunch of the time. And if you fuse together, what you do see with like the accelerometer and understanding how the thing is moving, you can kind of understand what the body position is going to be, but some things are still going to be hard, right? So you mentioned boxing that one works pretty well because, you know, we understand your head position. We understand your hands and now we're kind of increasingly understanding your body position but let's say you
To expand that to more Thai or kickboxing. Okay, so legs, that's a different part of tracking that's harder because that's out of the field of view more the time but there's also the element of resistance, right? So you can throw a punch and retract it and shadow box and you know do that without upsetting your kind of physical balance that much but if you want to throw a roundhouse kick and there's no one there then I mean you know the standard way that you do when you're shadowboxing is you basically do a little 360.
Like I don't know. Is that? Is that going to feel great? I mean I think there's a question about what that experience should be. And then if you want to go even further, if you want to get like grappling to work, I'm not even sure how you would do that without having resistance of understanding, what the force is applied to you would be and just then you get into, okay? Maybe you're going to have some kind of body suit that can apply haptics, but I'm not even sure that. That even a pretty Advanced topic system is going to be able to be quite good enough to do to simulate.
The actual forces that would be applied to you in a grappling scenario. So this is part of what's fun about technology, those you get you keep on getting new capabilities and then you need to figure what things you can do with them. So I think it's really neat that we can kind of do boxing and we can do the supernatural thing and there's a bunch of awesome, cardio and dancing and things like that. And then there's also still so much more to do that. That I'm excited to kind of get to overtime, but but it's a long
journey and what about things like painting, and
Art and music. You know. I imagine you know of course you like different mediums. Like I like to draw and pen and pencil but I can imagine trying to learn how to paint in virtually and of course you could print out a physical version of that at the end. This doesn't have to depart from the physical world. It could end in the physical
world. You see the demo, the piano demo where you either? You're there with a physical keyboard.
Or could be a virtual keyboard, but the app basically highlights. What key is you need to press in order to play the song. So it's basically like you're looking at your piano and it's teaching you how to play a song that you
choose an actual piano. Yeah. Yeah. But it's Illuminating certain keys in in the virtual
space and it can either be a virtual Piano if you or keyboard if you don't have a piano or keyboard or it could use your actual keyboard. So
Yeah, I think
stuff like that is going to be really fascinating for education and expression,
and for brought, excuse me. But for and for broadening access to Total expensive equipment on my piano is, is no small expense. It's on its and it takes up a lot of space and needs to be tuned. Yeah. You can think of all these things, like the kid that has very little income or their family has very little income. Could learn to play a virtual piano at much lower
cost. Yeah, it gets back to the question. I was asking before about this thought, experiment of how,
Of the things that we physically have today actually need to be physical, the piano doesn't maybe there's some premium where it's maybe it's a somewhat better. More tactile tactile experience to have a physical one, but for people who don't have the space for it or who can't afford to buy a piano or just aren't sure that they would want to make that investment to the beginning of learning how to play piano. I think in the future, you'll have the option of just buying, you know, an app or a hologram.
I'm piano which will be a lot more affordable. And I think it's going to be that's going to be unlock, unlock a ton of creativity to. Because I'm, instead of the market for piano makers, being constrained to, like a relatively small set of experts who have like perfected that craft you're going to have like, you know, kids or developers all around the world, designing crazy designs for potential keyboards and pianos. That look nothing like what we've seen before.
Her maybe like bring even more joy and or even more kind of fun in the world where you have fewer, these physical constraints. So I do I think it's going to just this can be a lot of wild stuff to
explore. This is definitely gonna be had a wild stuff to explore. I was just had this this idea / image in my mind of what you were talking about merge with our earlier conversation when Priscilla was here of, I could imagine a time not too long from now on where you using mixed reality to run experiments in the lab literally mixing virtual Solutions, getting
Potential outcomes and then picking the best one to then go actually do in the real world, which is very both financially costly and time wise
costly. Yeah, I mean, people are already using VR for surgery and education on it. There's some study that was done that basically did it tried to do a controlled experiment of people who learned how to do a specific surgery, through just a normal kind of textbook and luck.
Method versus like you show the knee and you have it be a large blown up model and people can manipulate it and kind of practice where they would make the cuts and and like the people in that class did better. So I think there's yeah it's I think it's going to be profound for a lot of different areas
and last example that leaps to mind, you know, I think social media and online culture has been accused of creating a lot of real-world. Let's call it physical world.
Social anxiety for people, but I could imagine, I'm practicing a social interaction, or a kid that has a lot of social anxiety, or that needs to advocate for themselves. Better learning how to do that progressively through a virtual interaction and then taking that to the real world because it's in my very recent experience today, it's so Blended now with with real experience that the kid that feels terrified of advocating for themselves, or we're just talking to another human being or an adult or being in a new circumstance of a roomful of kids. You could really experienced that in in silico.
First get comfortable. Let the nervous system. Attenuate, a bit and then take it into the quote-unquote, physical world.
Yeah, I think we'll see experiences like that. I mean, I also think that some of the social dynamics around how people interact in this kind of Blended digital world will be more nuanced in other ways. So I'm sure that there will be kind of new anxieties that people develop to just like teens today need to navigate Dynamics around texting conversation.
Instantly that that we just didn't have when we were kids. So I think it will help with some things. I think there will be new issues that hopefully, we can help people work through to. But but overall I think a on, I think it's going to be really powerful and positive.
Let's talk about the glasses. Sure. This was wild. Yeah. Put on a pair of Ray-Bans. I like the way they look.
They're clear. They look like any other glass Ray-Ban glasses except that I could call out to the glasses. I could just say you know, hey meta. I want to listen to the bach variations Goldberg Variations of Bach and meta responded and no one around me could hear. But I could hear with exquisite Clarity. By the way, I'm not getting paid to say any of this. I'm just still blown away by this folks. I want
Pair of these very badly. I could hear. Okay, I'm selecting those now and we're that music now and then I could hear it in the background but then I could still have a conversation. So this was neither headphones in or headphones out and I could say wait pause the music and it would pause. And the best part was I didn't have to leave the room mentally and I even have to check out a phone. Yes, it was all interfaced through this very local environment in and around the head. And as a neuroscientist, I'm fascinated by this because of course, all of our perceptions auditory visual etcetera.
Coring in the inside, the casing of this of this thing, we call a skull but maybe could comment on what you know, the origin of that design for you. You know what the idea is behind that and where you think it could go? Because I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface. The real
product that we want to eventually get to, is this kind of full augmented reality product in a kind of stylish and comfortable, normal glasses, form factor
not directly VR headset, so to speak. No, I mean, the VRA.
It does feel kind of like it will put this on the face. There's going to be
placed for that too. Just like you have your laptop and you have your workstation or maybe the better analogy is you have your phone and you have your workstation. These AR glasses are going to be like your phone in that you have something on your face and you will I think be able to if you want wear it for a lot of the day and interact with with with it very frequently. I don't think that people are going to be walking around the world wearing VR headsets.
But yeah, that's certainly not the future that I'm that, I'm kind of hoping we get to, but I do think that there is a place where for having because it's a bigger form factor. It has more compute power. So just like your workstation or your kind of bigger computer can do more than your phone can do, there's a place for that when you want to settle into an intense task. Right? If you have a doctor who's doing a surgery, I would want them doing it through the headset, not through the kind of not through their phone equivalent, or the they're just kind of lower-powered glasses. But
Just like phones are powerful enough to do a lot of things and the glasses will eventually get there too. Now that said there's a bunch of really hard technology problems to address in order to be able to get to this point where you can like put kind of full Holograms in the world, you're basically miniaturizing a supercomputer and putting it into a pair of glasses, so that the pair of glasses still look stylish, and normal, and
That's a really hard technology problem. Making things small is really hard holographic. Display is it's different from what our industry is optimized for, for 30 or 40 years. Now, building screens, there's a whole kind of industrial process around that that goes into phones and TVs and computers and like increasingly so many things that that have different screens. Like there's a whole pipeline that's gotten very good at making, that kind of screen and
Holographic displays are just a completely different thing, right? Because it's not it's not a screen, right? It's a thing that you can shoot light into through a laser or some other kind of projector and it can place that as an object in the world. So that's going to need to be this whole other industrial process that gets built up to doing that like in an efficient way. So
All that said. We're basically taking two different approaches towards building this at once. One is we are trying to keep in mind what is the long-term thing that it's not super far off? I think within, you know, a few years I think we'll have something that that sort of first version of kind of this full vision that I'm talking about and we have something that's working internally that we use is like a, we'll use a dev kit, but
That one that's that's kind of a big challenge. It's going to be more expensive and it's harder to get all the pieces working.
The other approach has been. Alright, let's start with what we know. We can put into a pair of stylish sunglasses today and just make them as smart as we can. So, you know, for the first version, you know, we worked with we did this collaboration with rebound, right? Because that's like, well, accepted, you know, these are well-designed glasses, they're classic people have have used them for decades. For the first version, we got a sensor on the front so you could Capture Moments without having to take your phone.
Your pocket. So you got photos and videos, you have the speaker and the microphone so you can listen to music, you could communicate with it, but it was
That was that was sort of the first version of it. We had a lot of the basics there but we saw how people used it and we tuned it. We made the camera is like twice as good for this new version that we made. The audio is a lot crisper for the use cases that we saw the people actually used, which is some of those listening to music, but a lot of it is like people want to take calls in their glasses in want to listen to podcasts, right? Do the the biggest thing that I think is interesting, is the ability to get AI running on it, which it
Just run on the on the glasses at all so it kind of proxies through your phone. But I mean with all the advances in LMS, we talked about this a bit in the first part of the conversation, having the ability to have your men away. I assistant that you can just talk to. And basically ask any question throughout the day is, I think it'd be really fascinating. And, you know, like you were saying about kind of how we, how we process the world as people.
Eventually, I think you're going to want your AI assistant to be able to see what you see and hear what you hear. I'm not all the time, but you're going to want to be able to tell it to go into a mode where it can see what you see and hear what you hear. And what's the kind of device design, that best kind of positions in AI assistant to be able to see what you see and hear what you hear. So can best help you? Well, that's glasses, right? Where we're basically has a sensor to be able to see what you see and a microphone that is
Close to your ears that can hear what you hear. The other design goal is like you said to keep you present in the world, right? So I think one of the issues with phones is they kind of pull you away from from what's physically happening around you. And I don't think that the next generation of computing will do that.
I just chuckling to myself because I have a friend, he's a very well-known photographer and he was laughing about how, you know, people go to a concert and everyone's filming the concert on my phone.
So that they can be the person that post to thing, but like they're literally millions of other people who posted the exact same thing. But somehow our unique experience feels important to post our unique experience with glasses that would essentially of smooth that Gap. I'm completely. Yeah, totally. You just worry about it later. Download it. There are issues. I realized with with glasses, because they are so seamless with everyday experience, even though you and I aren't wearing them now, it's very common for people to wear glasses, issues of recording and consent. Yeah, that's like Mike
Go into the locker room at my gym. That's what we've. I'm assuming that the people with glasses aren't filming whereas winds right now because there's a sharp transition when it when there's a phone in the room and someone's pointing it, people generally say no phones in locker rooms and recording. So that's just one instance. I mean, there are other and we have the
whole privacy light. I don't know. Did you, did you guys didn't get a chance to explore that? Yeah. So it's any time that it's active that the camera sensor is active. It's basically like pulsing.
I'm a white bright light goddess so which is by the way, more than cameras do, right? So much Riley holding a yeah. I mean, phones aren't kind of showing a light bright sensor when you're taking a photo. So
no people. Oftentimes we'll pretend they're texting and they're actually recording. She saw an instance of this in a barbershop once where someone was recording and they were pretending that they were texting and there's an interest, it was a pretty intense interaction that ensued, and it was like, wow you know, it's for pretty easy for people to feign.
Ding well actually
recording. Yeah, so I think when you're evaluating a risk with a new technology, the bar shouldn't be, is it possible to do anything bad? It's does this new technology? Make it easier to do something bad than what people already had and I think because you have this privacy light that is just broadcasting to everyone around you. Hey, this thing is recording now, I've got that makes it actually
Less discreet to do it through the glasses, then what you could do with the phone already, which I think is basically the bar that we wanted to get over from a design
perspective. Thank you for pointing out that it has the Privacy light. I didn't get long enough in the experience to explore all the features. But again, I can think of a lot of uses being able to look at a restaurant from the outside and see the menu. Oh yeah, get status on how crowded it is as much as I love. I don't want to call out.
Let's just say app-based map functions that allow you to navigate and the audio is okay, it's nice to have a conversation with somebody on the phone or in the vehicle and just it be great if the road was traced where I should turn. Yeah, absolutely. These kinds of things seem like it's gonna be straightforward for, for a meta Engineers to create
your version will have it. So it also have the holographic display where can show you the directions, but I think the role which is basically just be a different price points that pack difference amount.
Of Technology, the holographic display part, I think, is going to be more expensive than doing one that just has the AI. But is, but it's primarily communicating you with you through audio. So, I mean, the current Ray-Ban meta glasses are 299. You know, I think when we have one that has a display in it, it'll probably be some amount more than that, but will also be more powerful. So I think that it'll people choose what they want to use based on what the capabilities are that they want, and what they can afford, but
But a lot of our goal and Building Things is, you know, we try to make things that can be accessible to everyone. Our game is a company isn't to build things and then charge a premium price for it. We try to build things that then everyone can use and then become more useful because of very large number of people are using them, so it's just a very different approach, you know? We're not, we're not like apple or
Or some of these companies that just try to make something and then sell it for as much as they can, which I mean, they're a great company. So I mean I think that that, that model kind of is fine too, but, but our approaches can be. We want stuff that can be affordable. So that way everyone in the world can use
it long lines of Health. I think the glasses will also potentially solve a major problem in a real way, which is the following for both children, and adults. It's very clear that viewing objects in particular screens up close
Too many hours per day leads to myopia, is literally a change in the length and length of the eyeball and nearsightedness, and on the positive side, we know, based on some really large, clinical trials, that kids who spend and adults, who spend two hours a day or more out-of-doors, don't experience that and maybe even reverse their myopia and it has something to do with exposure to sunlight, but it has a lot to do with long viewing, viewing things at a distance, greater than three or four feet away. And with the glasses, I
wise one could actually do digital work out of doors. It could measure and tell you how much time you've spent looking at things up close versus far away. I mean this is this is just another example that leaps to mind but in, in accessing the visual system, you're effectively accessing the whole brain because it's the only two bits of brain that are outside the cranial Vault. So, it just seems like putting technology, right? At the level of the eyes, seeing, what the I see is just got to be the best way to
go. Yeah, I think well, multimodal,
I think is you want the visual?
Sensation, but you also want kind of text or language, so sure. I think it's
that all can be brought to the level of the eyes. Right. What do you mean? Well, I mean, I think we're describing here is essentially taking the phone, the computer, and bring it all to the level of the eyes. And, of course, one would like more physically active
physically, get your eyes, right? Yeah. And one would like,
more kinesthetic information, as you mentioned before, where the legs are maybe even lung function. Hey, have you taken enough steps today? But if that all can be for, if it can be figured out on the phone, it can.
By the phone. It can be figured out by that's glasses, but there's additional information there. Such as what are you focusing on in your world? How much of your time is spent looking at things far away versus up. Close, how much Social time did you have today? It's really tricky to get that with a phone, like they give my phone were right in front of us as if we were at a standard lunch. Nowadays certainly in Silicon Valley and then people were peering at our phones. I mean, how much real direct attention and was in the conversation at hand versus something else, we can get issues of where are you placing your attention?
By virtue of where you're placing your eyes. And I think that information is not accessible with a phone in your pocket or in front of you. Yeah, I mean that a little bit, but not nearly, as rich and complete information as one gets, when you're really pulling the data from the level of of vision and what what kids and adults are actually looking at an attending
to yeah, yeah, yeah, sighs.
Extremely valuable. You get autonomic information size of the pupils so you get information about internal States. I mean that you
cares if there's internal sensor and outside
There's the sensor on the Ray-Ban meta, glasses is external where it's basically allows you to see what you see. Then, if I was the start of the AI system, to see what you're seeing, there's a separate set of things, which are eye tracking, which are also very powerful for enabling a lot of interfaces, right? So you want to, if you want to just look at something and select it by, looking at it with your eyes, rather than having to kind of drag a controller over, or
Pick up a hologram or anything like that. You can do that with eye tracking. So that's a pretty profound and cool experience to as well as just kind of understanding what you're looking at. So, that way you're not kind of wasting compute power, drawing pixels with, and high resolution to part of the kind of world that you're not. That's going to be in your peripheral vision. See ya, all of these things. They're interesting design and Technology. Trade offs where if you
The external sensor. That's one thing, if you also want the eye tracking. Now, that's a different set of sensors. Each one of these consumes compute which consumes battery the take up more space, right? So it's like, where are the eye tracking sensors going to be? It's like what you want to make sure that the rim of the glasses is actually quite thin. Because I mean, it's there's a kind of variance of how thick can glasses be before they look more like goggles and glasses. I think that this is there was this
All space and I think people are gonna end up choosing, what product makes sense for them. Maybe they want some that's more powerful, that is more the sensors but it's but it's going to be a little more expensive. Maybe like slightly thicker or maybe you want like a more basic thing that just looks like very similar to what Ray-Ban glasses are that people have been wearing for decades but kind of has a i in it and you can Capture Moments without having to take your phone out and send them to people in the latest version. We got the ability into live stream, I think that's pretty
Izzy that. Now you can be kind of going back to your concert case or whatever else you're doing, you know, you can be doing sports and, and just or watching your kids play something. And just, you can be watching and you could be live streaming it to your, your kind of family group so people can see it. I think that like that stuff is I think that's pretty cool that you piss covered normal-looking pair of glasses at this point that can kind of live stream and and has like an AI assistant. So,
The stuff is making a lot faster progress in a lot of ways than I would have thought. And I'm not I think people are going to like this version but there's a lot more still to do.
I think it's super exciting and I see a lot of Technologies, this one's particularly exciting to me because of how smooth the interfaces and for all the reasons that you just mentioned, what's happening with and what can we expect around AI interfaces? And maybe even avatars of people within social media? Are we not far off from a
Where there are multiple versions of me. And you on the internet where people for instance I get asked a lot of questions. I don't have the opportunity to respond all those questions but with things like chat GPT people are trying to generate answers to those questions. On other platforms will I have the opportunity to soon have an AI version of myself? Where people can ask me questions about? Like what I recommend for sleep and circadian. Rhythm Fitness, mental health, Etc, based on content have already generated, that will be accurate so they could just ask my avatar.
Yeah, this is something that I think a lot of creators are going to want that that were trying to build. And I think we'll probably have a version of next year, but there's a bunch of constraints that I think we need to make sure that we get. Right. So for one, I think it's really important that it's not that there's a bunch of versions of you. It's that if anyone is creating like an AI assistant version of you, it should be something that you control.
Right? It's I think there's some platforms that are out there today that just let people like make. I don't know that AI bots of me or other figures and it's like, I don't know. I mean we have platform policies for for like decades like you know, since the beginning of the company, this point which is almost 20 years that that basically don't allow impersonation. You know, real identity is like one of the core aspects that that kind of
Our company was started on is like you want to cosmetically be yourself so yeah I think if you're if you're almost any Creator being able to engage your community and there's just going to be more demand interact with you, then you have hours in the day. So they're both people who out there, who would benefit from being able to talk to an AI version of you and I think you and other Critters would benefit from being able to keep your community engaged. And
That demand that people have to engage with you, but you're going to want to know that that a I kind of version of you were assistant is going to represent you the way that you would want. And there are a lot of things that are awesome about kind of these modern LMS, but having perfect, predictability about how it's going to represent. Something is not one of the current strengths. So, I know there's some work that needs to get done there. I don't think it needs to be 100% perfect.
All of the time but you need to have very good confidence. I would say that it's going to it's going to represent you the way that you'd want for you to want to turn it on which again, you should have control over, whether you turn it on. So we wanted to start in a different place, which I think is a somewhat easier problem, which is creating new characters that the for Rai Persona. So that way it's not, you know, we built, you know, one of the, a eyes is like a chef and
They can help you kind of come up with things that you should do you cook and can help you cook them. There's like a couple of people that are interested in different types of Fitness that can help you plan out your workouts or help with recovery or different things like that. There are people there's an AI That's focused on like DIY crafts. There's someone who's a travel expert that can help you make travel plans or give you idea. So but the key thing about all these is they're not
They're not modeled off of existing people. So they don't have to have kind of 100% Fidelity to like making sure that they never say something that you know, a real person who they're modeled after would never say because they're just made up characters. So I'm about that is that's a somewhat easier problem. We actually got the we got a bunch of different kind of well-known people to play those characters because we thought that would make it more fun. So there's like, Snoop
OG is the dungeon master so you can like drop them into a thread and play text based games and they're just like I do this with my daughter when I when I tuck her in at night and she just like loves it like like storytelling, right? And it's like, it looks like Snoop Dogg is the dungeon master will come up with like, here's what's happening next. And she's like, okay, like turn into a mermaid and then I like swim across the bay and I go and find the treasure chest and unlock it and it's like and then Snoop Dogg just always will have a next version of the like the next iteration.
On the story. So I mean it's stuff is fun, but it's not actually Snoop Dogg. He's just kind of the actors playing the dungeon master, which makes it more fun. So, I think that that's part of the right place to start. Is you have like, you can kind of build versions of these characters that that people can interact with doing different things. But I think what you want to get overtime is to the place where any Creator or any small business can very easily, just create an AI assistant, that can represent them and interact with your
Community or customers. If you're a business in basically just help you grow your your Enterprise. So I don't know. I think that's gonna be cool but I think this is It's a long-term project. I think we'll have more progress on it to report on next year, but but I think that's
coming.
I'm super excited about because I've, you know, we hear a lot about the downsides of a II mean I think, people are now coming around to the reality. That AI is neither good nor bad. It can be used for good or bad and that there are a lot of life-enhancing spaces that it's going to show up and really, really improve the way that we engage socially, what we learn and that mental health, and physical health, don't have to suffer. And in fact can be enhanced by the sorts of Technologies we've been talking about so I know you're extremely busy. I so appreciate.
Large amount of time you've given me today to sort through all these things fun, and to talk with you and Priscilla, and to hear what's happening and where things are headed future. Certainly is bright. I share in your optimism and it's been only strengthened by today's conversation. So thank you so much and keep doing what you're doing and on behalf of myself and everyone listening. Thank you because regardless of what people say, we all use these platforms excitedly,
And it's clear that there's a ton of intention and care and and thought about, you know, what could be in the positive sense. And, and that's really worth highlighting.
Awesome, thank you. I
appreciate it.
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