Mark Zuckerberg & Dr. Priscilla Chan: Curing All Human Diseases & the Future of Health & Technology
02:11:59 Share

Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmic at stanford school of medicine. My guest today are mark socker berg and dr.

Psili chain. Mark sucker berg, as everybody knows, founded the company facebook. He is now the C E. O of meta, which includes facebook, instagram, whats up and other technology platforms. Doctor, brazil's chain graduated from harvard and went on to do her medical degree at the university of california. 3Francisco mark OK berg and dr。 Psili chain are married, and the cofounder ers of the C, C, I or chin zuker g initiative, a philanthropic organization whose state a goal is to cure all human diseases.

The chance sick of organizational 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 humans cell types, as well as providing A I or artificial intelligence platforms to minor of that data to discovered new pathways and cures for all human diseases. The first hour today's discussion is held with both doctor psili chain and mark october, during which we discuss the C. I.

And what IT really means to try and cure all human diseases. We talk about the motivation, backbone for the C. C. I. That extends well into each of their personal histories.

In video, learnt quite a lot about doctor, brazil's chain, who has, I must say, an absolutely incredible family story leading up to her role as a physician and her motivations for the C, C, I. And beyond. And you will learn from mark how he's bringing an engineering and A I perspective to discovery of new cures for human disease.

The second half of today's discussion is just between march occur g and me, during which we discussed various meta platforms, including, of course, social media platforms and their effects on mental health and children and adults. We also discuss a VR virtual reality as well as augmented and mixed reality. And we discuss A I artificial intelligence and how IT stands to transform, and 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 researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired 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 sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electoral light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of sault magnesium in peason, the so called electoral light, and no sugar.

Now, salt, magnesium and potash are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrical lights need to be present in the proper ratio. And we now know that even slight reductions in electoral light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits.

And cognitive and physical performance element contains a science pack electronic ratio of one thousand milligrams at one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of patashie, sixty milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first in the morning when I wake up in order to hydroid my body and make sure I enough electric lights. And while I do any kind of physical training, and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element L M N T dot com slash huberman. And now for my discussion with mark, soccer er berg and docker, brazil's chain brazil mark, so great to meet you and thank you for having me hearing your home.

Thanks giving us on the podcast.

Yeah, like to talk about the C, C, I, the chance of quebec initiative. I learned about this a few years ago when my lab wasn't 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 tell 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 making in twenty fifteen, we launched the chance like a very initiative. And what we are hoping to do at C, C.

I was think about how do we build a Better future for everyone and looking for ways where we can contribute the resources that we have to bring fanthorpe ics in 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. Um 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, really, really been focused on what uh some people think is either an incredibly audi ous goal or a inevitable goal. But I think about IT is something that will happen if we sort of continue focusing on IT, which is to be able to cure preventer.

manage all disease by .

the in the century.

So that's important, right? A lot of time 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 C, C, I is really to build tools, fun science um change the way basic scientists can see the world and how they can move quickly in their discoveries. And so that's what we watched in two thousand fifteen. We we do work in three ways.

We fund great scientists. We are build tools right now, software tools to help move science along uh and make IT easier for scientists to do their work. And we do science um you mentioned stanford being an important pillar for our science work.

We've built 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 by hub was launched in 3Frances scope， a collaboration between stanford, you see, berkeley and U. C. S. F.

amazing. Curing all diseases implies that there will either be a ton of knowledge clean from this effort, which I am certain there will be, and there already has been.

We can talk about some of those early success, as in a moment, but IT also sort of implies that if we can understand some basic Operations of diseases and cells that trans and autism, hunting's, parkinson's, cancer and any other disease, that perhaps there are some core principles that would make the big mission a real reality, so to speak. What i'm basically saying is um how are you attacking this? My belief is that the cell sits at the center of all discussion about disease, given that our bodies made up of of cells and different types of cells. So maybe could just ruminate for us a little bit of White. 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, let's let's get to the cell thing in a moment. But just even take a step back from that. You we don't think that it's C I that we're going to cure, prevent manager of disease as the goal is to to basically give the scientific community and scientists around the world the tools to accelerate th Epace o f s cience. And now we we spent a lot of time when we were getting started with this, looking at the history of science and try to understand the trends and and how theyve play out over time.

And if you look over the this very long term, mark, most large scale discoveries are proceeded by the invention of a new tool or a new way to see something, if it's not just an biology right that is having a telescope um you know came before a lot of um discoveries and astronomy and astrophysics um but similarly you know the microscope um just different ways to observe things. There are different platforms like the ability to do vaccines proceed, the ability to kind of cure a lot of different things. Um so this is sort of the engineering part that you are 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 um and that that sort of the big ark and and a lot of the things that we're focused on, including the the work in in single cell, in cell understanding which um uh you know you you can jump in and get into that if you want. But yeah I think I think we generally agree with the premise that if you want to understand the stuff from first principles, um people study organs like right this like 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 the initial work that we try to do on the human cell at us and understanding what are the different cells. And there is a bunch of more work that we want to do to Carry that forward. But um but overall, I think when we think about the next ten years here of this long arc to to try to empower the community 的 to build a cure preventer or manager diseases we want that we think the next ten years should really be primarily about able to measure and observe more things。

And in human biology, there are a lot of limits today. And like you, anna, look at something through a microscope. You can usually see living tissue is because it's hard to you see through again or things like that. There are a lot of different techniques um that will help us observe different things.

And this is sort of where the engineering background comes in a bit because I mean, when I think about this is from the perspective of like how you'd write code or something, you know the idea of like trying to debugger or fix the code base, but not to like step through the code line by line. It's not going to happen right the beginning of any big project that we do um at meta. We like to spend a bunch of the time up from just trying instrument things and understand you know what we going to look at and how we're going to measure things before.

Um so we know we're making progress and know where to optimize and is such a long term journey that and we think that IT actually makes sense to take the next ten years to build those kind of tools. Um for biology and understanding um just how the human body works in action. In a big part of that is sales. I don't know. Do you want to jump and talk to talk about .

some of the efforts? Could I just interact briefly and just ask about the the different the different interventions so to speak, um that C C eyes is in a unique position to to bring to the quest to cure all disease 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 that's critical.

But a lot of full Anthony includes money. The other component is you you want to be able to see things, as he pointed out, so you want to know that Normal disease process, like what what is a healthy cell? What's the diseased cell? Are cells constantly being mombi red with with chAllenges and then repairing those? And then what we call cancer is just kind of run away train of those chAllenges not being met by the cell itself or something like that.

Um so Better imaging tools. And then that sounds like there's not just A A hard ware component but a software component. This is where AI comes in.

So maybe we can at some point, we can break this up and to three different avenues. One is understanding disease processes and healthy processes will lump those together. Then there's hardware, so microscopes, lenses, digital deconstruction tion, ways of seeing things in bother relief and 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 do alone. I managed understanding of the data because it's one thing to organize data. It's another to say, know you this, as you point out, the analogy with code, that this particular gene and that particular gene are potentially interesting, where as a human being would never make that potential connection.

So you know, the tools that easy I can bring to the table, we we fund science like you're talking about and we try to uh, there's lots of waste fund science. And just to be clear, you know what we fund is a tiny fraction of what the nh funds, for instance.

So you guys have been generous enough that it's IT definitely holds weight to N H. N H is contribution yeah.

But I think every every funder has its own role ecosystem. And for us, it's really how do we incentivize news points of view, how do we incentivize collaboration, how do we incentivize open science. And so a lot of our grants include um inviting people to look in, look at different fields.

Our first neuroscience um rf 我 uh aim towards and to vision people from different backgrounds immo logic micro biologists to come and look at how are nervous system works and how to keep IT healthy or um we are asked that our grantees participate in the preparation movement to accelerate the rate of sharing knowledge and actually others being able to build upon science。 So that the funding that we do um in terms of building um we we build software and hardware. Um like you mentioned, we put together teams that can build tools that are more durable and scalable, then someone in a single lab might be incentivize to do.

There's a ton of great ideas and a note ays. Most scientists can tinker and build something useful for their lab, but it's really hard for them to be able to share a that tool sometimes beyond their own laptop or forget, you know, the next lab over or across the globe. So we partner with scientists to see like what is useful, what kinds of tools you know in imaging nepi like it's there's it's a useful image innovators l um that is born from an open source community.

And how can we contribute to that? Or a cell by gene, which a 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.

The areas that we work in um we also have institutes. This is where the imaging uh work comes and where you know we are proud owners of electronic scope right now. It's gonna be installed um at our imaging institute and that will really contribute to a way where we can see work differently.

But we can the more hardware does need to be developed. You know we're partnering with a fantastic scientists um in the bio have network to build A A mini face plate to increase to allow the electrons through this um through the electron microscope to be able to increase the resolution so we can see in sharper detail. So there's a lot of innovative work within the network that's happening um and these institutes have grand chAllenges that they're working on.

Back to your question about cells. Cells are just the small lest unit that are are alive and are your body every ever. All of our bodies have many, many, many cells.

There's some estimates like thirty seven trillion cells, different cells in your body and what are they all doing? And how about what do they look like when your healthy? When you're 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 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 accept, able to get sick or directly cause you to get.

So we go from a mutation in your D. N. A to, well, you now have hunting disease, for instance. And there is a lot that happens in the middle. And that's one of the questions that we're going after at at ci 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 is a type in the recipe, and then the cake is awful. That's all we know.

We don't know how the chef interprets the typo. We don't know what happens in the oven, and we don't actually have no sort of how it's exactly connected to how the cake didn't turn out, how you were had expected. A lot of that um is unknown, but we can actually systematically try to break this down.

And one segment of that journey that we're looking at is how that mutation gets translated and acted upon in yourselves and all of ourselves have what's called M R I. M R I are the actual things that are taken from the D. N. A.

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 six cells are interpreting those directions. And that is a ton of data. I just told you there's thirty seven trillion cells. There's different uh, large and sets of mra in each cell.

But the work that we've in funding is are looking at how um first while gathering that information um we've been an incredibly lucky to be part of a very fast moving um field where we've gone from in twenty seventeen 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 um at 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 in the need thing about the sort of inflection point we were at an ai is that I can't look at this data and makes sense of IT. There's just too much of IT and biology. Complex human bodies are complex.

We need this much information. But the use of largest 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, are unsuspected. And eventually, our hope a through the use of these data sets that we've helped create in the application of large language models is to be able to formulate a virtual cell, a cell that's completely a built off of the data sets of what we know about the human body. But allows us to manipur and learn faster and try new things um to help move science and then medicine along.

Do you think we've cat logged the total number of different cell types that every week I look at great journals like cell nature in science, and princess, I saw recently that using single self sequencing, they've catechized be eighteen plus different types of fat cells. We always think like a fat cell s as a muscle cells. So so now you got eighteen types.

Each one is going to express many, many different genes in R N S M R S. And perhaps uh one of them is responsible for you know what we see in you know advance take two diabetes or um 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 list of genes, but um 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 of as a hypothesis generating experiment like, okay, you're all these genes. You can say, well, this gene is particularly elevated in the diabetic ics cell type of what's say, one of these fat cells or muscle cells for that matter, whether it's not in non diabetics.

So then of the millions of different cells, maybe only five of them differed dramatically. So then you you generate hypothesis. Old is the ones that different dramatically that are important. But maybe one of those genes when it's only you know fifty percent changed, has a huge effect because of some network biog effect.

And so I guess what i'm um get to here is, you know how does one meet that chAllenge? Can A I help resolve that chAllenge by essentially placing those list of genes into a ten thousand hypoxic? Because already that the graduate post to my lab get a chance to test one hypothesis at a time.

And that's really the chAllenge, let alone one lab. And so for those are listening to this, and you know, hopefully it's not getting outside the scope of of kind of extended understanding or the understanding we've generated here. But when business 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 insistid virus is like cystic fibrosis is caused by mutation in C F, T. R.

That's pretty well known. Affects a certain channel that makes IT hard for mucus. To be clear that the basic cystic fibrosis, when I went to medical school, IT, was tough as fact so .

that their lungs fill up with lud. These people are Carrying around sacks of fluids filling up. I known people, i've worked with the people. Then they have to literally dump the fluid out if they can't run, or to intense exercise.

Life is shorter, is shorter. And when we applied single cell methodologies to the lungs, they discovered an entirely new hype that actually is affected by a mutation in the C F mutation, antistius fivers mutation that actually changes the paradise of how we think about sic viruses. Just not. So I don't think we know um all the sell types, I think will continue to discover them and will continue to discover new relationships between seven disease which leads me to the second example, wanna bring up as um this large dataset that the entire scientific communities built on single cell is trying to allow us to say this mutation, whether expressed what types of cell types is expressed in and um we actually have built a tool at C I called sell by gene where you can put in the mutation that you're interested in. And that gives you a heat map of cross cell types of which cell types are expressing the a gene that you're interested in.

And so then you can start looking at, okay, if I look at gene acts and I know it's related to heart disease, but if you look at the heat map, it's also spigg in the penguins that allows you to generate a hypothesis why um and what happens when this gene is muted. The function of your pancreas, really exciting way to look and ask questions differently um and you can also imagine a world where if a 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 pinker us again. So what is there going to be an unexpected side effect that you should think about as you're bringing a this drug to clinical trials? So it's an incredibly exciting tool and one that's only onna get Better as we get more and more sophisticated wae to analyze the data.

Must say I love that because if I look at the advances in neuroscience over the last fifteen years, most of them um did necessarily come from looking at the nervous system, came from the understanding that the immune system impacts the brain. Everyone prior to that talk about the brain is immune privilege.

Ed organ, what you just said also bridges and the divide between single cells organism systems, right? Because ultimately also make up organ or organ to make up systems. They're all talking to one another.

Everyone novaes is familiar with like duck brain access or the microbes on being so important but rarely is the um the discussion between organs discussed sort speak so um I think it's wonderful. So that tool was generated by C C I R. C C I funded that tool.

So how does so is .

IT built by metal as metal its own engineers got .

IT yes yeah they're completely different organizations.

incredible. And um and so a graduate junior post was interesting in particularly remote could put this mutation into this database that graduate soon or post p might be in a laboratory known for working on heart but suddenly find they're collaborating with other scientists that work on the pancreas um which also is wonderful because IT bridges the divide between these fields fields are so silos in science, not just different buildings, but they people rarely talk unless things like this are.

I mean, the graduate student is someone that we want to empower because one there is the future of science, as you know. And within cell by gene, if you put in the genie 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.

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is A A vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

The reason I started taking athletic Greens, in the reason I still take out Greens once or usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for god. Health, our god is very important, is populated by got microbiome that communicate with the brain, the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiota health.

In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations, vitamin minerals, that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And IT tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman, and they'll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d three k two. Again, that's athletic Green dot comm slash huberman to get the five free travel packs in the year supply of vitamin three k two.

I just think going back to your question from before I are there going to be more cell types that could discovered? I I assume so where have been no catalog of the stuff is ever doesn't seem like we ever done. We keep on funding more. But I think that, that gets to one of the things that I think we're the strength of, of moderna ams 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 at less, there is a large corpus of data that you can now train A A kind of large scale model on.

And one of the things that we're doing um is that which is pretty exciting as building um what we think is one of the largest nonprofit life sciences A I clusters write is like the one thousand GPS and it's larger than what most people have access to an academia that you can do like serious engineering work on and um and you know by basically training a model with all of the human cell out the data in a bunch of other um inputs as well. We think you'll be able to basically imagine all of the different types of cells in all the different states they can be in and when they're healthy and disease and how they interact with different interact with each other, interact with different potential drugs. But I mean, I think the state of hell am like this is where it's it's helpful, understand, you know, have a good understanding and be grounded.

And like the modern city of I, these things not foolproof. I mean, one of the flaws of modern neo ms, as they hlubi ate, 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 ends up being an advantage is when they help you imagine a bunch of states that something can be in, but then you, the scientist or engineer, go and validate that those are true, whether there are 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 were not yet at the state with the eye, that you can just take the outputs of these things as 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 that's a very powerful um thing that we can basically building on the first five years of science worker around the human cell outlet. And all the data that's been built out Carry that forward into something that I think is going to be a very novel tool going forward. Um and that's the type of thing that I think were set up to do.

Well, I am you all you had this exchange of a little while back about um your funding levels and have C C I S you're just sort of a drop in the in the in the bucket comparator and age. But I think we have this the thing that I think we can do that's different is um funding some of these longer term bigger projects that IT is hard to gravani ze the and pull together with the energy to do that. Now I tell a lot of what most science funding is, is like relatively small projects that are expLoring things over relatives, short time horizons.

And one of the things that we try to do is is like build these tools over in five, ten, fifteen year periods, the often projects that require in 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 aren't as many other folks who who are doing that kind of thing. But that one of the reasons why i'm personally excited about the virtual cell stuff because it's like this perfect intersection of all the stuff that we've done in single cell, the previous um collaborations that we've done with the field and bring together the the industry and .

AI expertise around this. Yeah I completely agree that the model of science that you're put together with C C I is isn't just unique manage, but it's extremely important at the independent investigator model is what driven in the progressive of science in this country into some extending north n europe for the last hundred years.

And it's um wonderful on the one hand, because IT allows for that image we have of a scientist kind of tinkering away are the people in their lab. And then the request and that hopefully translates to Better human health. But I think in my opinion, we've moved past that model is the most effective .

model or the only model that should be explored.

Mechanisms to do that like N H. But but it's hard to do collaboration science. It's sort of interesting that we're sitting here not far for because I grew up right near here as well. I'm not far from the garage model of tech right? He look active model um not far from here at all.

And the idea is that you know the tinker in the garage, the inventor, and then people often forget that to implement all the technology they discover took enormous factories and where, how? So there's a similar there to facebook, meta at sea. But I think in signs what we imagine that the scientists alone in their laboratory, and those you recommend moments. But I think nowadays, the big questions really require extensive collaboration and certainly tool development.

And one of the tools that you keep coming back to as these L M S, these large language models, and maybe could just elaborate for for those that aren't familiar, you know what are what is a large language model IT for the the uninformed, what what is IT and what is IT allow what is allow us to do that? Um you know different types of other other types of A I don't allow. More importantly, perhaps, what is they allow us to do that? A bunch of really smart people, highly informed in a given area of sites, staring at the data. What what can I do that they can do?

sure. So I think a lot of the progression of machine learning has been about building systems. Neural networks are otherwise that can basically make sense and find patterns in larger and larger amounts of data. And there is a breakthrough a number of years back um that some focus google actually made called this transformer model architecture.

And IT was this huge breakthrough because before then, there is somewhat of a cap where you if you fed more data into a neural network past some some point, I didn't really clean more insights from IT. Where is transformers is just we haven't seen the end of how big that can scale to yet. I mean, I think that there is a chance that we run into some, some ceiling.

but they never ask them totes. We haven't .

observed IT yet, but we just haven't built big enough systems yet. And so I would guess that I don't know. And this is actually one of the big questions in the A I feel today is basically our transformers.

And are the current model architectures sufficient? If you just build larger and larger clusters, you eventually get something outside human l or super intelligence ts, or um is there some kind of fundamental limit to the sarcastic cure that we just having reached? And once we we want to get a little bit further and building them out, then we will reach that.

And then we'll need a few more leaps before we get to the level of of A I 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 youth cases. In the reason why they're called large language models is because one of the first uses of them is um people basically feed in all of the language from uh basically the world by web and you can think about them is basically prediction machine.

So if you you you fit in um you put in prompt and IT can basically you know predict a version of what should come next. So you know you you like type in a headline for a new story in IT can kind of predict what he thinks the story should be or you can train IT so that you can be a chat pot right where okay, if if you're prompted with this question, you can get um this response. But one of the interesting things is that turns out that there's actually nothing specific to use in 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 sell out data, then if you prompt IT with a state of a cell, IT can spit out different versions of, like what you know, how that scan and interacts, or different states that the seal could be the next one and interacts .

with different things. Does he have to take something? If you give a bunch tage, you know, you have to say, hey, by the way and then you give you a genus classes that understands, you know, you got DNA, R N A, M R N A and proteins.

The basic nature of all these machine learning techniques is there they're basically pattern recognition systems. So there these like very deep statistical machines um that are very efficient at finding patterns. Um so it's it's not actually you don't need to teach A A language model that's trying to speak a language.

Um you know a lot of specific things about that language, either you just figure in a bunch of examples and then you know let's tell you teacher about something um in english, but then you also give you a bunch of examples of people speaking italian. Um it'll actually be able to explain the thing that I learned to english in italian, right, even though so the cross over just the pattern recognition um is the thing that is pretty profound and powerful about this, but IT really does apply a lot of different thankless. Another example in the scientific community um has been the work that alphago ld basically the the focus deep might have done on on protein folding um it's you know just basically a lot of the the same model architecture.

But instead of language there, they feel they kind of fed in all these the protein data and you can give a state and you can spit out solutions to how those proteins get folded. So it's very powerful. I don't think we know yet as an industry what the um what the natural limits of IT are and that that's one of the things that's pretty exciting about the current state. But IT certainly allows you to solve problems that just weren't solved with the generation of machine learning that came before IT sound .

like cci is moving a lot of work that was just done in vidro, in dishes um and in vivo in living organisms. Model organisms are humans to, in silicon, as we say. So do you can see a future wear.

A lot of biomedical research, certainly, that the work of C, C, I included is done by machines, have been obviously 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 silicon. I'm in mass.

I think the in silo experiments are going to be incredibly helpful to test things quickly, to cheaply into, to just unleash a lot of creativity.

I do think you need to be very careful about making shots still translates and matches this uh humans um you know one thing that's funny and a basic sciences, we've basically cured every single disease in mice like my have um we we know what's going on when they have a number of diseases because they were their use as a model organism. But they are not humans. In a lot of times that research is relevant, but not directly one to one translated to humans. So you just have to be really careful about making sure that IT actually works for humans.

Sounds like what C C. I is doing is actually creating a new field, like I, as i'm hearing all of this, something, okay, this transform in minor logy department cardiothoracic s surgery, I mean, neuroscience of the idea of a new field where you certainly embrace the realities of universities in laboratories because that's where most of the work that you're funding is done.

Is that right OK? So um maybe we need think about what IT means to do science differently. And I think that's one of the things that most exciting um along most lines, IT seems that bringing together a lot of different types of people, different major institutions um is this going to be especially important?

So I know that the initial C C I bio hub gratefully included stanford will put that first in the list, but also use csf. Yeah forgive me, many friends are uses and also berkely, but there are now some additional institutions involves. So maybe you're talk about that and what motivated the decision to branch outside the bay area and and why you select those particular additional institutions to be included as part of .

a big part of why we wanted to create additional bio hubs as we were just so impressed by the work that the folks who are running the first biotype did. And I also think and you should walk through the the um 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 um the limits of what you want to do with like physical, material engineering and and and where things are purely biological because the chicago team is really building more sensors to build to understand what's going on your body. But that's more like a physical kind of engineering chAllenge. Where is the the new york team we basically talk about? This is like a cellular endoscope of being able to have like an immune seller something that can go and understand um 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 is a cell that you can basically you know have uh just go report out on on on different things that are happening .

inside the body. So ico scope yeah then and .

then eventually actually being able to act on IT. But I mean but you should you should go to have more.

And so a core principle of how we think about biohacking IT is that IT has to be um when we invited proposals, IT has to be at least three institutions um so really breaking down the barrier of a single university, often times asking for the people designing the research aim to come from all different backgrounds um and to explain why that the problem that they want to solve uh requires into disciplinary, into university institution collaboration to actually make happen um we just put that request for proposal out there and with our symptoms goodyer hubs an example where they've done incredible work in single cell biology and infections, lous disease and we got I I want to say like fifty seven proposals from over one hundred and fifty institutions a lot of ideas came together and you we are so so excited that we've been able to launch chicago in new york.

Um chicago is a collaboration between UIUC university of illinois a rena champagne and university of chicago and northwestern um and if I obviously these universities are multifaceted. If I were to have described them by their like serotype al strength, north western has an incredible medical um system in hospital system. University of chicago brings to uh the table incredible basic science strengths.

University villino is is a computing powerhouse. And so they came together and proposed they were gone to start thinking about cells and in tissue um so that one of the one of the layers that you just eluded 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 tissues that they're starting with the skin.

So they've been already been able to um as a collaboration under the leadership of shana design um art of uh engineer skin tissue. The architectural looks the same as what's in uni and what they've done is built these super, super thin sensors and they embed these censors. Um throughout the layers of this engineer 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.

Information is an incredibly important process that drives fifty percent of all that. Um and so this is another sort of disease agnostic approach. We wanted understand information and they're gona get a ton of information out from these sensors that tell you what happens when something goes alright.

Because right now, we can say, like when you have an allergic reaction, your skin gets red and puffy. But what is the earliest signal of that? And these sensors can look at the behaviors of these cells over time.

And then you can apply a large language model to look at the earliest, statistically significant changes that can allow you to intervene um as early as possible. So that's what chicago is doing. They're starting in the uh skin cells.

They're also looking at a neuromuscular junction um which is the connection between or neuron attaches to a muscle and tells the muscle how to behave super important and things like l as but also in aging um the slowed transmission of information across that near moscow junction is what causes old people to fall. Their brain cannot trigger their muscles to react fast enough. And so we wanna be able to embeds these centers to understand how these different um uh interconnected systems within our bodies work together in new york. Uh they're doing uh a related but um equally exciting project where there um engineering visual cells to be able to um go in and identify changes in uh in a human body. So um what they'll do is they're going .

a child. I mean, this is I don't want to on attention, but for those who want to look at up adaptive objects, you there's a lot of distortion and interference when you trying to look at something really smaller, 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.

Talk about image separate. So talk about the new.

extremely clever along those lines. It's not intuitive. But then when you hear IT, it's like IT makes so much sense, it's not immediately intuitive. Make the the cells that are already can navigate to tissues or embed themselves and tissues .

be the microscope within that. T 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 them in 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 a munsell to go in your body and look inside your corner arteries and say, are these arteries um healthy or their place? Because because plex lead to block kagge which lead heart attacks um and the cell can then record that information and report IT back out. That's the first half of the new ork bio hob 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, sell that is able to transport in your body to go in and clean that up in a targeted way.

And um so it's incredibly exciting. They're going to study things that are sort of immune privilege that your immune system Normally doesn't have access to um things like ovarian and pancreatic cancer. Um they'll also look at a number of nursing center of diseases since um the mune system doesn't presently have a ton of access into the nervous system. Uh but they it's it's both mind blowing and IT feels like size. I but science is actually in a place where if you really pushed the group of incredibly qualified scientists say, could you do this if given the chance, the answers, like probably give us enough time, the bright team and resources like stable.

Yeah I mean, it's to ten your project but it's it's boss engineer. Itselfe.

yeah I love the optimism and the moment you said, make the cell microscope so he like, yes, yes and yes IT just makes so much sense what motivated the decision to do the work of C, C, I um in the context of existing universities.

I supposed to you there's still some real estate up in red wood city where there is a bunch of space to put biotech companies and just hiring people from all all backgrounds and and saying, hey, you know have at IT and and doing this stuff from scratch. I mean, it's it's a very interesting decision to do this in the context of an existing framework of the graduate students who need to do the thesis and get a first author paper. This is the whole set of structures with an academia that I think both facilities, but also limit the progression of science.

Know that independent investigator model that we talk to about a little bit earlier, IT is so cool to the way science has been done. This is very different and Frankly, sounds far more efficient, if i'm to be, to completely honest. And you will see if I renew my N H.

Funding after sitting. But I think we all want the same thing. We all want to a scientist and and as um you know IT as humans, we want to understand the way we work. And we want healthy people to persist to be healthy and we want seek people to get healthy. I think that's really ultimately, the goal is not .

super complicated, just hard to do. So the teams of the bihac are actually independent of the universities. So each bio have will probably have in total maybe fifty people working on sort of deep efforts, however, is an an acknowledged that not of the best scientists who can contribute to this area are actually um going to one want to leave a university or want to take on the full time scope of this project. So it's the ability to partner with universities um and to have the faculty at all the universities be able to contribute to the overall project um is how the bio have is structured IT.

But a lot of the way that were approaching C I is this long term iterative project to figure out try a bunch of different things, figure out which things produce the most interesting results and then double down on those in the next five year push, right? So we just went through this period where we to wrap up the first five years of the science program and we try a lot of different models. So at all kinds of different things.

Um it's not that the bio hub model, we don't think it's like the best or only model, but we found that I was sort of A A A really interesting way to unlock a bunch of collaboration and bring some technical resources that allow for this longer term development. And it's not something that is widely um being pursued across the rest of the fields. So we figured out this is like a an interesting thing that we can we can not push on. But I I mean yeah we do believe in the collaboration um but I I also think that we come out there with you know we don't think that the way that we're pursuing this is like the only way to do this or the way that everyone should do IT, where we're pretty aware of you know that you know what is the rest of the eco system and how we can play a unique role in IT IT .

feels very synergistic with the way science is already done and also feels an incredibly important is that Frankly wasn't filled before um along lines of implementation. So let's say um your large language models combining with imaging tools um reveal that a particular set of genes um acting in a cluster um I set up in an organ crash let's say the in the banker is crash is particular stage of patriotic cancer I mean still one of the most deadliest of of the cancers and um there are others that you certainly wouldn't want to get, but that's among the ones who won't want to get and the most so you discovered that then in the ideas that okay then um A I reveal some potential drug targets, then bear out in vitro in addition in a mouse model.

Um how's the actual implementation of two drug discovery or even maybe the target is drug able? Maybe it's not maybe require some other approach, you know lase laser ablation approach or something we don't know. But ultimately, is C I going to be involved in the implementation of new thai ux? Is that the idea?

So um 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 in companies that take that and bring IT to translation very effectively. I would say the place where we have a small window into that world is actually our work with very disease groups.

Um we we have a throw areas, one portfolio funded patient advocates to create um rare disease organizations where patients come together uh and uh actually pull their collective experience. They build bio registries, registries of their natural history and they both partner with a researchers to do the research about their disease and with uh, drug developers to uh incentivize drug developers to focus on what they may need further disease. And you know one thing that's important to point out is that rare diseases aren't rare.

There are over seven thousand road diseases and collectively impact many, many individuals. And I think the thing that's from a basic science uh perspective, the an incredibly fascinating thing about their diseases is that there are actually windows to how the body Normally should work. And so there are often uh mutations that when um when genes that were when they're muted cause very specific diseases, but that tell you how the Normal biology .

works as well. Got IT. So you discuss basically the the goals, major goals in the ships of the C, C, I. For the next five to ten years. Um and then beyond that, the targets will be explored by biotech companies um will go grab those targets and test them and and implement them there.

So I think been a couple of teams from the initial bio hub, they were interest spinning out going to start up. So that's just even though it's not a thing that we're going na pursue because I were a um we want to enable the work that gets done to be able to get turned into companies and things that other people go take and run towards, towards building in ultimately theraputics. So that's that's another zone, but just that's not a thing that we're going to do.

Yeah I gather you're both optimists. Yeah is that part of what route you together? But forget me forget switching to a personal question, but I love the optimism that seems to sit the root of the C. C.

I. I will say that we are an incredibly hopeful people, but IT many of us in different ways between the two of us.

Yeah.

you, how would you describe your optimism versus mine? It's not .

a lot of question. I don't know. 哼。 I mean, I think i'm more probably technologically optimistic about what can be built. And I think you, because of your focus, says your actual doctor. Kind of have more of a sense of how that's gonna a affect actual people in their lives. Um was for me, it's like i'm a lot of my work is is it's like touch a lot of people around the world in the scale sort of women. And I think for you, just like it's being able to improve the lives of individuals, whether its students at any of the schools that you've started or any the stuff that we've supported through the education work, which is an 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. Does that do you agree that character zia.

i'm i'm trying to yeah, I agree with that. I think that's very fair and I am sort of gaging to myself because in a data day life as like life partners, our relative optimism comes through as uh mark just like is overly optimistic about his time management and we will get in growth and interesting ideas and he's late.

Every phenicians are very well.

And because he's late, I have to channel markets an optimist whenever i'm waiting .

for him such a nice way. Okay, i'll start using that.

That's what I think when i'm in the drag way with the kids waiting for you. I'm like markey is an optimist and so his optimism translates to some tardiness. Where's i'm sort of i'm like, how is what's how? How is this going to happen? Like i'm going to open a sport cheat, going to start putting together a plan and like a putting, pulling tower, all the pieces calling people to sort of flight, bring something to life.

But this is this one of my favorite ite quotes, that is, optimists tend to be successful and pessimists tend to be right. And yeah, I think it's it's true and a lot of different aspects of life.

right? Who said that? Did you say that much?

I like IT. I do not invent IT.

I do think that there's really .

something to IT right there is like if you're discussing any idea, there's all these reasons why I might not work. And so I I think that in those reasons are probably true. The people are stating number, you know, probably have some validity to IT. But the question is that is that the most productive void of view the world? And I think I across the board and I think the people who tend to be the most productive and get the most done, you can need to be optimistic because if you don't believe that someone can get done and why would you go work on IT?

The reason I asked the question is that you these days we hear a lot about the future looking so dark in these various ways and um you have children so you have families and um you are a family excuse me and and you also have families independently um that are emerged. But um I love the optimism behind the C I because you know behind all this there 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 love that optimism and that there's a tractable path to do IT. We're going to put put little you know money and time and energy and people and technology and AI behind that.

And so um I have to ask, was having children um a significant modifier in terms of your your view of the future? Like, well, like you hear all this doing gloom. Like what's the future going to be like for them? What did you sit back and think, you know what would that look like if there was a future with no diseases? Um is that the future we want our children in and I mean, i'm voting a big yes so we're we're going to debate that at all but was having children an inspiration for the C C.

I in some way?

Yeah so I think my answer to that um I would die backwards for me. Um and i'll just tell a very brief a story about my family. I'm the daughter of chinese genome's h refugees.

Um my parents and grandparents were boat people, if you remember people left vietnam during the war in these small boats into the south china sea and um the there were stories about how these boats would sink, told families on them and so my grandparents who both sides of grandparents who knew each other decided that there was a Better future out there and they were willing to take risk for IT um but they were afraid of losing all their kids I my dad is one of six, my mom is one of ten. And so they decided that there was something out there in this bleak time. And they paid up their kids, one from you family, and send them out on these little boats before the internet, before cell phones, and said, we will see you on the other side. And the kids were between the ages of, like know ten to twenty five so Young kids my my mom was a teenager that early teen when this happened um and everyone made IT and I get to sit here and talk to you so how could I not believe that like Better is possible and like I hope that that in mind, like epigenetic somewhere and then I Carry that on.

That is a spectacular story, isn't that while IT is spectacular.

how can I be a best miss with that?

I love IT well, and I so appreciate that that you became a physician because you are now bringing that optimism and that epigenetic understanding and cognitive understanding and emotional understanding to the field of medicine. And so grateful to the people that made that decision .

yeah and then you know when I think you don't I always know that story, but you don't understand how while that feels until you have your own child you're like, well, I can even I I refuse to let her use you know glass bottles only or something like that and you oh my god like the risk in the sort of willingness of my grandparents to believe in something bigger and Better um it's just a standing and IT also an our own children's sweet ve give a sense of urgency spectacular story and of .

your sending knowledge out into the fields of science and bringing knowledge into the fields of science and I love this will see on the other side yeah i'm confident that they will all come back. Well, thank you so much for that. I mark up. You have the opportunity to talk about, did having kids change your world view?

Tough to beat that.

IT is up to that story. And they are also your children. So in this case, no, you get you get two for the Price of ones. And so having children .

definite changes your time horizon. So that that's one thing as you just like there are all these things that I think we d had talked about, if as long as we've known each other that you eventually want to go do, but then it's like, oh well, having kids we need need to like IT on this, right?

So I like there I was actually one of the checklist, the baby checklist before the first.

It's like the baby's coming. We have to like started easy um truly and like sitting in the hospital delivery room finishing editing the letter that we were going .

to publish to to announce the is not we really were editing the .

final draft birth c zi before you put child. Well it's is an incredible initiative and i've been falling its its inception and and it's already been tremendous ly successful. And everyone in the field of science and I A lot of communication with those folks that feels the same way in in the future is even bridge ford.

It's clear. And thank you for expanding to the midwestern in new york, and we're all very excited. Cy, where all of this goes, I share in your optimism and thank you for your time today.

Thank you. Thank you a lot more to do.

And now for my discussion with mark sugar bird, slight shift or topic here. You're extremely well known for your role in technology development, but by virtue of your personal interest and also wear meta technology interfaces with mental health and physical health, you're starting to become synonymous with health. But realized IT or not part of that because there's post footage of you rolling, Judith, you wanted judge to competition recently.

Um you're doing other forms of martial arts, water sports in the surfing and and on and on. So you're doing IT yourself. But we could just start off with technology and get this issue out of the way um first, which is that I think many people assume that technology is Better.

Technology that involves a screen, excuse me, of any kind is going to be detrimental to our health. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. So could you um explain how you see technology um meshing with inhibiting or maybe been promoting physical and mental health?

sure. I mean, I think this is really important topic. It's you know the research that we've done suggests that it's not like all good or all bad.

I think how you are using the technology has a big impact on whether IT is basically positive experience for you. And even within technology, even within social media, there's not kind of one type of thing that people do. I think at its best, you're forming uh, meaningful connections with other people.

And there's a lot of research that basically suggest that know it's it's the relationships that we have, an friendships that kind of bring the most happiness and in in our lives and at some level end up. But we've been correlated with living longer and healthier life because of that kind of grounding that you have an community and being important for that. So like a bad aspect of social media, which is um of the ability to connect with people, to understand what's going on people's lives, have empathy for them, communicate what's going on with your life, express that that's generally positive there.

There are ways that I can be negative in terms of bad interactions, things like bullying, which we we can talk about because a lot that we've done to basically make sure that people can be safe from that and give people tools and give kids build to have the right parental controls that parents can oversee that. But that sort of the interacting with people's, there's another side of of all this, which I think of is just like passive consumption, which is its best, its entertainment, right? An entertainment is an important human thing, too.

But I don't think that that has quite the same association with the long term well being in health um benefits as being able to help people connect with other people. Does um and I think it's worst um some of the stuff that we see online um I think these days a lot of the news is just so relentlessly negative that is just hard to come away from an experience where you are looking at at the news for than a half an hour and like feel Better about the world. So I think that there's a mix on this.

Um I think the more that social media about connecting with people um and the more that when you're kind of consuming and using um the the media part of social media ah to learn about things that couldn't rich you and can provide inspiration or education as a poster of things is that um just leave you with a more toxic feeling. That sort of the the baLance that we try to, to get right across our products. And I think we're pretty aligned with the community because at the end of the day, you know and people don't want her use the product and come away feeling bad.

There's a lot a lot of people talk about um value of these products in terms of information and utility. But I can as important when you're designing a product to think about what kind of feeling you're creating with the people who use IT, whether that kind of a there's sense when you're designing hardware or just kind of like what like you do, you make people feel and generally people don't want to feel bad, right? So I I think when you know that doesn't mean that we want to shelter people from bad things that are happening in the world, but I I don't really think that it's not what people want um you for us to just be kind of just showing like all the super negative stuff all day long.

So we work hard on all these different problems, making sure that we're helping connect people's 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 sixteen defaults into experience where their experienced private. We have all these parental tools.

That way parents can have understand what with their children is up to, are up to and a good baLance um then on the other side, we try to give people tools, understand how they are spending their time um and we try to give people tools so that teen and and you're kind of stuck in some in a loop of of just looking at one type of content will nudge you and say, hey, you're been looking at content of this type for a while back about something else and here's here's a bunch of other examples. So being there are things that you can do to kind of push this in a positive direction. But I think I just starts with having a more nuanced like this isn't all good or all bad. And the more that you can make that kind of a positive thing, that the Better this will be for all the people use our products.

And 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, and I think about my own interactions, would 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 segment of my podcast and continue to I can think of experiences that are a little bit like highly process food where IT tastes good at the time. It's it's highly growing, but it's not necessarily neutral ous and you don't feel very good afterwards.

yeah. So for me, that would be my little college of default options to click on an instagram. Occasionally I noticed and this just reflects my failure, not instagram, right, that there are a lot of um like street fight, things like of people beating people up on the street.

And I have to say these have a very strong gravitation poll. I'm not somebody that enjoy seeing violence per say but you know I find myself or click on this like what happened and i'll see someone like you get hit and there's like mayday on the street or something. And those seem to be offered to me a lot lately.

And again, this is my fault that reflects my prior searching experience. But I noticed that he has a bit of a gravitational pull where. There's I didn't learn anything.

It's not issue me any kind of useful street self defence skills of any kind. And at the same time, I also really enjoy some of the the cute animal stuff and so I get a lot of also. So there is collage that's offered to me that reflects my prior search behavior.

You could argue that the cute animal stuff is just entertainment, but actually, IT fills me with a feeling, in some cases, that truly delights me. I delighting animals, and when I just my, I mean, animals i've never seen before, interactions betwen animals i've never seen before, they 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 that sense. But I guess the direct question is, is the algorithm just reflective of what one has been looking at a lot prior to that moment where they log on? Or is IT also trying to do exactly what you, uh, described, which is trying to give people a good feeling experience that leads to more good feelings?

Yeah, I mean, I think we try to do this in a long term way, right? I think one simple example of this as we have this issue a number of years back about click bate news, right? So articles that would have um basically a headline that grabs your attention, that made you feel like, god, I need to click on this, you click on and then the article is actually you know about something that someone tend gentle to IT um but people click on IT. So you know the naive version of the staff in the like ten year old version was ago, people seem to be clicking on this. Maybe that's good, but actually press straight forward exercise to instrument the system to realize that hey, people click on this and then you know they don't really spend a lot of time reading the the news that after clicking on IT and um after they do this a few times, they doesn't really correlate with them, you know saying that they are having a good experience.

Um some of you some of how we we measure this is just by looking 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 the stories that we could have showed you, which of the years um are most meaningful to you or would would make IT that you have the best experience and just kind of like mapping the algorithm, 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 as like click bid over time. It's not gone from the internet, but you I think we've got a good job of minimizing on our services within that, though I do think that we need to be pretty careful about napping, Peter nish, about what makes different people feel good, right? So I don't know that everyone feels good about about cute animals, and I can't imagine that people would feel really bad about that, but maybe don't have a profounder.

A positive reaction to IT is as you just expressed. And I don't know maybe people who are more into fighting, we look at the the street fighting videos, assume 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.

Um but they are I mean, you know it's like i'm pretty to M M A. I don't 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. Um I I think at various times in the company's history, we've been a little bit too Peter nalty tic about saying this is good content.

This is bad, you should like this um this is unhealthy for you. And I I think that we want to look at the long term effects. You don't want to get stuck up in a short term loop of like, okay, just because you did this today doesn't mean it's I got you aspire for yourself over time.

But I think as long as you look at the long term of what people would say they want and what they do, giving people a fair amount of attitude to like the things that they like, I just think feels like the right set of values to bring to this. Um now of course, that doesn't go for everything. There are things that are kind of truly off lites and and you know things that like bullying, for example, or you know things that are really like exciting violence, things like that.

And we have the whole community standards around this, but I think accept those things which I would hope that most people can agree. Okay, bullying is bad. I I hope that you know one hundred percent of people agree with that. No one hundred, maybe ninety nine percent um except the things that kind of get that sort of very that that feel pretty extreme and bad like that. I think you want to give people space to like what they want to like.

Yesterday I had the very good experience of learning from the media team about safety protections that are in place for kids who are using meta platforms. And Frankly, I was like really positive ly surprised at the huge number of filter based tools in in adjust ability to customize the experience so that I can stand the best chance of enriching, not just remaining neutral l but in reaching their mental health status.

Yeah, one thing that came about in that conversation, however, was I realize that all these tools, but do people really know that these tools exist? And I think about my own experience with him. program. I love watching ata series friday Q N A because he he explains a lot of the tools that I didn't know existed um and people haven't seen that. Highly recommend they watch that.

Um I think every takes questions on thursday and answers the most every friday um so if i'm not aware of the tools without watching that um that exists for adults, how does matter? Look at the chAllenge of making sure that people know that there are all these tools, I mean dozens and dozens of very useful tools. But I think most of us just know that hashtag, the tag, the click stories were just feed.

We now noted that, you know, I also post the threads, I mean, so we know the major channels and tools, but this is like owning a vehicle that has incredible features that when what doesn't realize can take you off road, can allow your vehicle to fly there a lot there. So ah what do you think could be done to get that information out? Maybe this conversation could cue people to do that.

I mean, that's part part of the reason why I wanted tip talk you about this is I mean, but I think most of the narrative around social media is not okay.

All of the different tools that people have to control their experience know the kind of narrative of, is this just negative for for, for teens or something? And I think again, a lot of this comes down to, you know do um you know how was the experience being tuned? And is that actually like our people using IT to connect and positive voice and if so， I think it's really positive. Um so yeah and I think part of this is we just need to get out and talk to people more about IT.

Um and then there's an in product aspect which is you know if you're a team and you sign up, we take you through a pretty um no extensive experience that um tries to outline some of this but that is limits too, right because when you sign up for a new thing um if you're bombarded with I here's a list of of of features like okay, I just sign up for something really understand much about with the services like let me go find some people to follow and who my friends on here before I like learning about controls to and prevent people from harassing me or something. Um that's why I think it's really important to also show uh a bunch of these tools in context. So you know you're looking at comments um and if you if you go to delete a comment or um you go to edit something, try to give people prompts in lands OK did you know that you can manage things in in these ways um around that or when you're in the inbox and you're filtering something right, it's um remind people in line.

So I know just because of the number of people who use the products in the level of new on surrounding to the controls, I think the vast majority of um of that education, I think needs to happen in the product. But I do think that through conversations like this and and others that we need to be doing and we can create a broader awareness that those things exist that way, at least people are primed. So that way, when those things pop up in the product, people like I I knew that there is this control. And like here's here's like how I would use that.

I got to find the restrict function to be very useful more than the block function. In most cases, I do something themselves. They look, but the restrict function is really useful that you can filter specific comments. No one might have 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 tried to main what I call classroom rules in my comments section, where I don't like people tacking other people because I would never tolerate that in the university classroom. I'm not can tolerate that the comment section.

for instance. yeah. And I think that the example you just you just used about restrictions lock gets to something about product design that's important to, which is that block is sort of this very powerful tool that if someone is giving you a hard time, 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 um and that they you don't stop to them, they don't shop to you um inherent to that is they will have a sense that you them and that's why I think some stuff like restrict or just filling, like I just done to see as much stuff about this topic um you know people like using different tools for very subtle reasons, right? Maybe um 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 you 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 that you're not friends or something like that. You actually need to give people different tools. That have different levels of of kind of power and new on around how would the social dynamics are on using them play out um in order to really allow people to tell her the experience in the ways that .

they want in terms of are trying to limit total amount of time on social media, I couldn't find a really good data on this. Um you know how much time is too much? I mean, I think it's gonna depend on what one is looking at the age of the user.

Etta, yeah, I know that you have tools that queue the user to how long we've been on a given platform. Are there tools to self regulate? Like i'll think you about like the the greek myth of the sirens and you know people know tying themselves to the mass and covering their eyes so they're not drawn in by the sirens. Is there a function aside from deleting the APP temporarily and then we installing IT every every time you want to use IT again? Is there a true lock out, self lock out function where one can lock themselves out of access to the APP?

I think we give people tools that let them manage this and and and there's the tools that you get to use and there's the tools the parents get to use um to basically see how how the usage works. But yeah, I think that there there's different kind of I think for now, we we mostly focused on you're helping people understand this and then you know give people reminders and things like that. Um it's tough though to answer the question that you or talk about before this. If is there in an amount of time, which is too much because he does really get what you're doing.

If you fast forward beyond just the apps that we have today to an experience that this was like a social experience in the future of the augmented reality glasses or something that, that we're building, a lot of this is gonna be you're interacting with people um in the way that you would physically, as if you were kind of like hang out with friends, are working with people um but now they can show up as holograms and you can feel your present right there with them and 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 Richard and giving you as good of a sense of presence um as you would have if you were physically there with someone, then I don't see why you would want to restrict the amount that people use their technology to any less than what would be the amount of time that you be comfortable interacting with people physically um which obviously not could be twenty four hours a day.

You have to do other stuff. Um you work, you need to sleep. But I I I think IT really gets to kind of how you're using these things, whereas what you're primarily using the services for is to you're getting stuck in loops, reading in the news or something that is really kind of getting you into a negative mental state.

Then I don't know me and I think that there's probably a relatives short period of time that maybe that's kind of a good thing that you want to be doing. Um but again, even then, it's not zero. It's it's just because news might make you unhappy doesn't mean that the answers to be unaware of negative things that are happening in the world.

I just think that there is like different people have different tolerances for what they can take on that. And I think we is generally having some awareness is probably good as long as it's not more than europe of constitutionally able to take. So I don't know. I try to not be too pretty, alisa, about this is our approach, but we want to empower people by giving them the tools, both people and if you're a teen, your parents, to have tools to understand what you're experiencing and what the and how you're using these things and then and then go from there yeah.

I think IT requires all of us some degree of self regulation. I'd like the studio of not being too pretty nalty tic, and that's seems like the right way to go. I find myself occasionally having to make sure that i'm not just passively scroll wing that i'm learning.

I like forging for organizing and dispersing information that my life's career so I i've learned so much from social media, I find great papers, great ideas. I think comments are great source of feedback. And i'm not just saying that because you're sitting here. I mean that um in particular but other metal 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 V R platforms, the newest oculus. Um and when then we can talk about the glasses, the ray bds, those are still those two experiences are still kind of blowing my mind especially the the the bay and glasses and I have so many questions about that so I resist but um into that okay well yeah .

I have some .

experience with VR my life is used VR um germy berlin son's lab at um stanford is one of the pioneering labs of V R and and mixed reality I get some these called augmented reality but now mixed reality I think what's so striking about the VR that um you guys had me tried today is how well IT interfaces with the with the real room, let's call IT the the physical room. I could still see people. I could see where the furniture was.

So I did was in going to pup in anything. I could see people smiles. I could see my, my, my water on the table while I was doing this. What felt like a real martial, large experience, except I wasn't getting hit, was getting hit virtually.

But it's extremely engaging and yet is, on the good side, things that really bypasses a lot of the early concerns that baLance and lab again, jermey lab was early to say that you know there's a limit how much of you are one can or should use each day um even for the adult brain because you can really disrupt your the stimulating system, your sense of baLance. All of that seems to have been dealt with in this new, this new iteration of the art. I didn't come out of IT feeling dishy at all.

I didn't feel like I was reentering the room in a way that was really daring going into IT as obviously wall. This is a different world, but you can look, look your laugh and say, oh, or someone just came in the door, hey, how are you going to hold on and playing this game just as I was when I was a kid playing and intendo and so won't walk in. It's fully and growing but you will hold on and you see there there so first of all, bravo.

Um incredible. Um and then the next question is, you know what is this what do we even call this experience? Because IT IT is truly mixed. It's a truly mixed reality experiment.

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 um would be you can put holograms in IT, right? So like that will have a in a future where you're going to walk into a room and talking about the gas, many holograms as as physical objects. So the future think about, like all the paper, the kind of art, physical games, media, your work station .

and up on the table right here, and just see IT repeat as he just turning a look at the screen.

I metty 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 on a hologram there and and it's an interesting thought experiment.

Just go around and think about, okay, what of the things that are physical in the world need to actually be physical? And your chair d does right because you're sitting on IT hologram is going to support you. But I like that art on the wall and that doesn't need to physically be there. I mean um so I think that that sort of the augmented reality experience that are moving towards and then we've had these headsets, that historical, we think about this 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 between the two and capable of both, which is a headset that can do both virtual al reality and some of these augmented reality experiences.

And I know that's really powerful um both because you're going to get new applications that that kind of allow people to collaborate together and made the two of us to hear physically, but someone joins us a or maybe in with some version the future, like we're having a you're having a team meeting and you have some people they are physically and you have some people dying 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 anybody, dias, avatar, ars and around the table meeting with.

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 typed date, and then they find out, and then they meet for the first time.

I maybe, I think, I think, you know, I dating has physical aspects to IT too.

And some people might not be. They want to know what they not. It's worthy effort to head out to .

not to .

divide right? IT is possible.

I know I know like some of my friends who are dating basically say that order to make sure that they have A A safe experience and they are if they're going on a first state theyll schedule or something that's like shorter and maybe in the middle likes, may be it's coffees that way, if they don't like the person, they can just kind of get out before like going and scheduling a dinner like a real full date.

So I don't know maybe in the future, people will kind of have that experience. So where you can feel like you're kind of sitting there and it's and it's even easier and lighter, wait and safer. And if you're not having a good experience, you can just like teleport out of there and began.

Um but yeah, I think that this will be an interesting question in the future is um there are clearly a lot of things there are only possible physically that or so much Better physically and then there are all these things that we're building up that IT can be digital experiences, but it's this weird artifacts. Kind of this stuff has been developed that the digital world and the physical world exist in these like completely different planes where you want interact with the digital world when we do all the time. But we pull out a small screen or we have a big screen that is basically we are interacting with the digital world through the screens.

But I think we fast forward in a decade or more. It's, I think, one of the really interesting questions about what like what is the world that we're going to live in. I think it's going to increasingly be the mesh of the physical digital words that will allow us to feel a that the world that we're in is just a lot richer because there can be all these things that people create.

There are dick then then physically um but A B you're going to have a real kind of physical sense of presence with these things. 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 the digital world will sort of being bedded in the in that and um and animal feel kind of just as vivid and a lot of ways.

So that's why I always think and when you are think before you felt like you could look around and see the real room, I actually think that there's an interesting kind of philosophical distinction between the real room and the physical room um which you know historically I think people would have said those 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 is the physical world is just the part that physically there. And I think it's possible to build a real world that the sum of these two that will actually be a more profound experience than what we have today. Well.

I was struck by the smooth of the interface between the V, R. In the physical room. Uh, your team had me try a, um this is an exercise class in the forming, but is like essentially like kidding meets boxing so here targets box yeah and and IT comes at a fairly fast pace, then picks up it's got some tutorials, very easy to use and certainly got my heart right up I mean at least decent shape.

And I have to be honest, i've never once desire to do any of these onscreen fitness things. I mean, I can't think of anything more aversive than like a like I don't want insult any particular products um but like riding a stationary bike while looking at a screen pretending on on a road outside, I can think of anything works for me. Um maybe you like the leader board.

okay. Maybe i'm just a very competitive Price like you're going to be running on a trade mail. Yeah at least give me a leader board. I can beat the people .

who are ahead of me. I like moving outside and certainly an exercise class or robot classes to call them but what the experience I tried today was extremely engaging um and i've done enough boxing to at least know how to to do do a little bit of IT and really enjoyed IT gets your heart rate up and I completely forgot that I was doing in in on screen experience because in part because I believe I was still in that physical room um and I think there's something about the mash of the physical room and the virtual experience that um makes IT night there of one world or the other.

I think I really felt at the interface of those and and certain ly got presence this feeling forgetting that I was in a virtual experience and got my heart rate up pretty quickly. We had to stop because we were going to start recording, but I would do that for a good forty five minutes in the morning. And and and there's no amount money you could pay me truly to a look at a screen while pedling on a bike running on a trade mail.

So again, bravo. I think this can be very useless, going to get people moving their bodies more, which certainly social media, up until now and allowed technologies, have been accused of limiting the amount of physical activity that that children and adults ter engaged in. So and we know we need physical activity, europe praca physical. Is this a major goal of that to get people moving their bodies more and getting their heart rates up and and so on?

I think we wanted enable at night. I think it's good. But I I I think IT comes more from like a philosophical view of the world. Then IT is mister, I don't go to building products to try to shape people's behaviour. I believe in empowering 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 I think there's the previous generation of computers were devices for your mind and I think that we are not brains and tanks. Um you know it's like that they're sort of a sopo view of people of like look at you, you are primarily in what you think about or your values or something.

It's like, no, you are that and you are a physical manifestation and people were very physical and I think building a computer for your whole body and not just for your mind is very fitting with this world view that like the actual essence of you, if you want to be present with another person, if you want to like be fully engaged 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. Um it's it's something that that you can engage your whole body.

So yeah I and I think being physical is very important to me at some just that's a lot of you know the most fun stuff that I get to do. Um it's a really important part of how I personally baLanced my energy levels and just get a diversity of experiences because I could spend all my time running the company. Um but I think it's good for people to do some different things and compete different areas or learn different things. All of that um is good if if people want to you do really intense workouts s with um with the work that we're doing with quest or with um in eventual A R glasses, great. But even if you don't want to do like a really intense workout, I think just having a computing environment in 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 have had to date.

Everything is just of the i'm a simple task of getting a Better range of motion, A K flexibility.

Yeah, I could imagine inside of the VR experience leaning into a stretch you know, standard kind of like like a lunch type stretch, but actually seeing a meter of like are you get are you approaching new levels of flexibility in that moment? Where is actually measuring some some kinneys tic elements on the body, in the joints? And I mean, I was just try whether Normally might have to do them front of a camera, which I would give you the data, a screen that you look at afterwards or higher and expensive coach.

But so are looking at form and resistance training. So you're actually lifting physical weights but is telling you whether not you're breaking form. I mean that there's so much that could be done inside there and then my mind just starts aspire into like, well, this is very likely to transform what we think of as exercise.

Yeah, I think so. And there is still a bunch of questions that need to get answered. You know, I don't think most people are going to necessarily want to install in a lot of sensors or cameras to track their whole bodies. So were just over time being Better from the sensors that are on the headsets of being able to do very good hand tracking, right? So we have this research time over you now just with the hand tracking um from the heads that you can type IT just project a little keyboard onto your table and you can type in people like .

type a hundred words a minute with .

that with a virtual keyboard yeah we're starting to be able to um using some modern eye techniques, be able to like similarly understand where your torso is position is um even though you can always see IT, you can see IT a bunch of the time and if you fuse together what you do see um with like the accelerometer and understanding how the thing is moving, you can kind of understand what the body position is going to be um but some things are still can be hard right so you mentioned boxing um that one works pretty because you know we understand your head position, we understand your hands um and now we're we're kind of increasingly understanding your your body position um both you want to expand that to um moitie or kick boxing okay. So legs, that's a different part of tracking.

That's harder um 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 retracted IT and shadow box and you do that um without upsetting your kind of physical baLance that much but if you want to throw a around house kick and there's no there, then I mean, you know the standard way that you do and when your shadow boxing, as you basically do a little three sixty but like I know, is that is that going to feel great? I mean I think there's a question about what what that experience should be um and then if you want to go even further, if you want to get like grappling um to work, um I am not even sure how you would do that without having resistance of understanding what the forces applied to you would be in is then you get OK.

Maybe you're gonna 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 to be quite good enough to do to similar like the actual forces that would be applied to you um in a grappling scenario. So this is part of what's fun about technology though. You 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 to do boxing and we can do this supernatural thing and this 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 get to get to over time. But but it's it's a long journey.

And what about things like um painting and art and music? You know imagine um. Of course, like different mediums, like i'd like to draw a pen and pencil, but I could imagine trying n to learn how to paint in virtually. And of course you could print out of physical version of that at the end. This doesn't have to depart from the physical world.

They could end in the physical world. Do you see the demo, the piano demo where you um either you there was a physical keyboard or could be a virtual keyboard, but the APP basically highlights what key is you need to press um in order to play the song. So it's basically like you're looking at your piano and it's teaching you how to play a song that you choose .

an actual piano yeah yeah but it's illuminating. Certain keys in in the virtual and .

IT can either be a virtual piano if you or keyboard you don't have a piano or keyboard or could use your actual keyboard. Um so yeah um I think stuff like that is going to be really fascinating for education and expression.

Infrared excuse me, info broadening access to expense of equipment I my piano is is no small expense. And IT takes up a lot of space, and he needs to be tuned. You can think of all these things, like the kid that has very little in comer, their family, families, real income, to learn to play a virtual piano at much lower totos.

IT gets back to the question I was asking before about the thought experiment of how many of the things that we physically have today actually need to be physical. The piano doesn't. Maybe there is some premium. Where is maybe a somewhat Better, more tactic experience, have a physical one. But for people who don't have the space for IT or who who can afford to, to buy a pano or just aren't sure that they make that investment to the beginning of learning how to play piano, I think in the future, you will have the option of just buying in an APP or a hologram piano, which will be a lot more affordable.

Um and I I think it's that's going to be on unlike on creativity too, because and instead of the market for piano makers being constrained to like a relatively small set of experts who have like perfected that craft what 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. But or 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 think it's going a lot of .

child stuff to explore, definitely be a lot of while stuff to explore. I just this idea slash image in my mind of and what you are talking about merge with our earlier conversation when brazil is here of I could imagine a time not too long from now where you're using mix reality to run experiments in the lab, literally mixing virtual solutions, potential outcomes and then picking the best one to then go actually do in the real world, which is very both financially costly and and time wise costly.

Yeah I mean people are already using V R for surgery and education on IT. There's some study that was done that um basically did try to do a controlled experiment of people who learned how to do a specific surgery um through just a Normal kind of textbook and lecture method verses like you show the knee and you you have IT you be of a large blown up model and people can manipulated and and kind of practice where they would make the cuts and and like the people in that class is Better so um I I think there you as I it's going to be profound for a lot of .

different areas. And last example that leads to me, I think social media, online culture has been accused of creating a lot of um real world let's got physical world social anxiety for people. But I could imagine practicing a social interaction or a kid that has a lot of social anxiety or or 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, is so blended all with with real experience that the kid feels terrified of advocating for themselves, or were just talking to another human being or an adult, or being in a new circumstances, a room for the kids. You could really experience that in in silicon first, get comfortable, let this no, a system, a ten wait a bit and then take IT into the court in court.

Physical world. Yeah I think we'll see experiences like that. I and I also think that some of the social dynamics around how people interact in this kind of blended digital world will be more nuances in other way as so i'm sure that there will be kind of new anxieties that people developed to just like new teens today, need to navigate dynamics around texting constantly that um that we didn't have when we were kids.

Um so I think that will help with some things. I think there will be new issues that hopeful ly we can help people work through too. But but overall, I think I know I think it's could be really powerful and positive.

Let's talk about the glasses. Sure this was wild. Yeah put on a pair ray band like the way they look. They're clear. They look like any other glass rabbin glasses um except that I could call out to the glasses I could just say, you know hey, matter um I want to listen to the buck variations a global variations of book and matter responded and no one around me could hear but I could hear um with exquisite clarity and by the way i'm making paid to say this i'm just still blown away by this folks I wanna hear this very badly I could hear okay, i'm selecting those now and were that music now and then I could hear him in the background but then I could still have a conversation so if this was neither headphones in nor headphones out um and I could say we pause the music and I would pause um in the best part was I didn't have to leave the room mentally I image to got a phone IT was all interfaced through this very local environment in and around the head and as a neuroscience st. Fascine by this because of course, all of our perceptions, auditory, visual, it's occurring in inside the casing of this thing we call a score. But um maybe could comment on the origin of that design for you know what the ideas behind that and where you think you 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 stylish, comfortable, Normal glasses.

Foreign tor. T, V, R had said no, but there's going .

a place for that too, just like you have your laptop and you have your work station um or maybe the Better analogies, you have your phone and you have your workstation. Um these air glasses are going to be like your phone and 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 um with IT very frequently.

I don't think that people are going to be walking around the world wearing the r heads sets but yeah that's a certains not the future that that i'm that i'm kind of hoping get to. But I do think that there is a place where um for having because it's a bigger foreign tor has more compute power. So just like your workstation or your your kind of bigger computer can do more than your phone can do.

Um there's a place for that when you want to settle into an intense task, right? If you have a doctor who is doing a surgery, I would want them doing that through the headset, not through the not through their phone equivalent, just kind of lower powered glasses, but just like phones, we're powerful enough to do a lot of things and the glasses will eventually get there too. Um now that said, there's a bunch of really hard technology problems um to address in order to build to get to this point where you can like what kind of full holograms in the world.

You're basically mini zing, a supercomputer and putting IT into a pair of glasses um so that the pair glasses still looks stylish and Normal. And that's a really hard technology problem. Making things small is really hard. A holographic display is it's it's different from what our industry is optimized for, for in thirty or forty years now building screens.

There's A A whole kind of industrial process around that, that goes into phones and tvs and computers and like increasingly of so many things that, that have different screens like there is a whole pipeline that's got very good at making that kind of screen and holographic display is are just a completely different thing, right? Because it's not it's not a screen right? Is a thing that you can shoot light into through in a laser or some other kind of projector, and I can place that as an object in the world.

So that's going to need to be the whole other, the industrial process that gets built up to doing that like in an efficient way. So all that said, we're basically taking two different approaches towards building this at once. One is we are trying to keep in mind what is the the long term thing that is not super far. Half, I think with, you know, few years, I think have something that that sort of the first version of kind of this full vision i'm talking about and we have something that's working internally that we uses .

like a that will use a devait .

um but that one that kind of a big chAllenge. This can be more expensive um and it's harder to get all the pieces working. The other approach has been are IT. Let's start with what we know. We can put into A A pair of stylish sunglasses today and just make them as smart as we can.

So you know for the first version and we we worked with um we do this collor ation with ray band, right because that like well accepted, you know these are well design glasses. Their classic people of have used them for decades. For the first version, we ve got a sensor on the front so you could capture moments without having to take your phone out of your pockets.

You got photos and videos, um you have the speaker in the microphones, you can listen to music um you could communicate with IT. Ah but that was you know that was that was sort the first version of we had a lot of the basics there, but we saw how people use IT and we tuned IT. We made that the camera is like twice as good for for this new version that we made.

The audio is is a lot crisper for the youth cases that we saw that people actually used, which is some of is listening to music, but a lot of IT is like people want to take calls on their glasses, listen to podcasts, right? Um the biggest thing that I think is interesting is the ability to get A I running on IT which IT IT doesn't just run on the on the glasses, also a kind of proxy through your phone. But I mean with all the advances in l ms, we talk to about this a bit in the the first part of of the the conversation um having the ability to have your made A I assistant that you can just talk to and basically ask any questions throughout the day is I think that would be really fascinating.

And you like you're saying about kind of how we how we process the world as people. Um eventually, I think you're going to want your AI assistant to build to see what you see and hear what you hear. Maybe not all the time.

We are going to want to build to tell IT to go into a mode where you can see what you see in here, where you hear, and what's the kind of device design, the best kind of positions in A I assistance to be able to see what you see and hear what you hear. So can best help you. Well, let's glasses are basically as a sensor to be to see what you see and um a microphone that is close to your ears that can hear what you hear.

Um the other design als is like you said, to keep you present in the world, right? I think one of the issues with phones is they kind of pull you away from from what's physically happening around you. I don't think that the next generation of computing will do that.

I just chuckling myself because I A friend, he is very well on photographer and he was laughing about how, you know, people go to a concert and everyone's filming the concert on their phone so that they can be the person that posts a thing. But like, there are nearly millions of other people who posted the exact same thing.

But somehow our unique IT feels important to post our unique experience with glasses that would essentia smooth that gap completely. You could just worry about IT later download IT. There are issues that I realized with with glasses because they also seamless with everyday experience, even though human aren't wearing them.

Now it's very common for people to work glasses issues of recording and consent. I to the locker room at my gym, I assume that the people with glasses aren't filming where's one right now because there is A A sharp transition when when there's a phone in the room and someone's pointing IT, um people generally say no no phones in lockers and recording. So that's just one instant.

some in the other. We have the whole privacy light.

Don't I didn't get you.

So it's any time that it's active, that the camera sensor is active. It's it's basically like pulsing a White bright light got IT. So which is by way more than cameras, phones showing a light bright sensor. You're take a photo.

So no people often times will pretend their texting and their actually recording. As he saw an instance to this in a Barbara shop once where someone has recorded and they were pretending that they were texting and there was in there was a pretty intense interaction that ensued and I was like, wow, you know, it's pretty easy for people to fain texting while actually recording yeah.

So I think when you are evaluating a risk with a new technology, the bar shouldn't be, is IT possible to do anything bad IT. Does this new technology make IT easier to do something bad than what people already had? And I think because you have this privacy light that is just broadcasting to everyone around you, hey, this thing is recording now. Um I think like that makes IT actually less discreet to do IT through the glasses than what you could do with the phone already, which I think is is basically the bar that we wanted to get over from a design perspective.

Thank you for point out that he has the privacy light. I didn't get long enough in the experience to explore all the features. But um again, I can think of a lot of uses um being able to look at a restaurant from the outside and see the menu, get status on how crowd ded IT is as much as I love H I don't want to call out, let's just say um APP based map of functions that allow you to navigate and the audio is OK. So I have a conversation with somebody on the phone or in the vehicle, and just be great if the road was traced where I should turn. So these kinds of things seem like this can be straight forward for for engineers .

to A S also have holographic like work, can show you the directions. But I think there will just basically just be in different Price points that pack different amounts of technology. The holographic display part, I think, is going to be more expensive than doing one that just has the A I, but is but is primarily communicating you with you through audio.

I mean, the current ribon meta glasses are two ninety nine. Um you know I think when we have one that has a display in IT, IT will probably be some amount more than that, but you will also be more powerful. So I think that little people choose what they want to use based on what the capabilities are that they want and what they are going afford.

But um but a lot of our goal and building things is um you know we will try to make things that can be accessible to everyone um in our game as a company isn't to build things and then charge a premium Price for IT. We try to build things that that everyone can use um and then become more useful because a very large number of people are using them um so it's just a very different approach. Um you know we're not we're not like apple or or some of these companies that just tried to make something and then sell IT for as much um as as as they can, which I mean they're a great company.

I mean, I think that that model kind of is is fine too. But um but our our approaches can be we want stuff that can be affordable. So why everyone in the world can use IT long .

minds of health, I think the glasses will also potentially solve a major problem in in a real way, which is the following for both children and adults, is very clear that viewing objects in particular screens up close for too many hours per day, leads to my opa literally changing the earth engine of the eyeball and near sidedness.

And on the positive side, we know based on some really large clinical trials um that kids who spend in adult who spend two hours a day or more out of doors um don't experience that and maybe even reversed their iope and IT has something to do with exposure to sunlight but 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 realized one could actually do digital work out of doors um IT could measure and tell you how much time you've spent looking at things up close versus far away. I think 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 clinic of all. So IT just seems like putting technology ride the level of the eyes, seeing what the I see is just gotten be the best way to go.

Yeah, I think multimodal right. I thinks 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? Well, I mean, I think what we're describing here is essentially taking the phone, the computer um and bring IT all to the level of the eyes and of course, one would like more physical YSL ally at your eyes, right? And one would like more kinnesasis information, as you mention me, for where the legs are, maybe long function here if you take enough steps today.

But but that all can be if I can be figured out on the phone and can be by the phone and can be figured out by 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 verses at close? How much social time did you have today? It's really tRicky to get that with a phone, like if my phone right in front of us as if we were a standard lunch nowadays tainting to silicon value and then we're Pearling in our phones. I mean how much real direct attention was in the conversation at hand versus something else we can get the issues of where are you placing your attention um by virtue 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 vision. What what kids and adults are actually looking at and attending to yeah.

yeah, yeah, is extremely valuable.

You get all the omy information size of the pupils to. You get information about the internal states. I mean.

there's internal sensor and outside, so there's the sensor on the raybone metal glasses is external, right? So it's basically I was you to see what you see then I was that is sorry, the A I system to see what you are saying. There is a separate set of things which are eye tracking um which are are also very powerful um for enabling a lot of interfaces, right? So if you want to just like look at something and selected by looking at IT with your eyes, rather have to have drag a controller over or pick up a hologram or or anything like that. You can do that with hy tracking.

Um so that's a pretty profound and cool experience to as well as just kind of understanding what you're looking at so that we you're not kind of wasting compute power drawing pixels with a high resolution, a part of the kind of world that you that's going to be in your preferred vision um see yeah all of these things um they're interesting design in technology trade ffs, where if you want the external sensor, that's one thing, if you also want the eye tracking. Um now that's a different set of sensors. Each one of the is um consumes compute, which consumes battery.

They take more space. Where are the I tracking sensors to you make sure that the rim of the glasses is actually quite thin because I mean, I know there's a kind of variance of. You have thick and glasses be before they look more like gog's than glasses. Um I think that this is there is this whole space. And I think people are the end of choosing what product makes sense for them.

Maybe they wants something that's more powerful, that is more the sensors um but it's but it's going to be a little more expensive, maybe like slightly figure or maybe you want like a more basic thing that just looks like very similar what rape and glasses are that people been wearing for decades, but come as a ironed and you can capture moments um without him to take your phone out and send them to people. In the latest version, we ve got the ability to life live stream. I think that's pretty crazy that now you can be kind of going back cancer case or and whatever else you're doing. You know you can be um doing sports and and just you know watching your kids play something and and just you can be watching and you could be live streaming IT to your you're kind of family group um so people can see that I I I think that like that stuff is um I think that's pretty cool that you psk of a Normal looking pair of glasses at this point that can kind of live stream and and has like an A I assistance that the stuff is making a lot faster progress in a lot of ways than I would have thought. And I know I think people are going to like this version, but there's a lot more still to do.

I think it's super exciting and I see a lot technology. Is this ones particularly exciting me because of how smooth the interfaces and for all the reasons that you just mentioned, what's happening within what can we expect around I interfaces and maybe even avatars of people within social media? Are we not far off from a day where there are multiple versions of me and you on the net? People for insists I could ask a lot of questions.

I don't have the opportunity sponde all those questions. But with things like ChatGPT, 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 sleeping, circling, rythm, fitness, mental health, that that are based on content have already generated that will be accurate. So they could just ask my avatar.

yeah ah, this is something that I think a lot of creators are gonna that um that were trying to build um and I think we'll probably have a version of next year, but there's a bunch of constraints that I think we need to make sure that we get right. So for one, I think it's really important that it's not that there's a bunch of versions of you.

Is that if anyone is creating like A I assistant version of you IT should be something that you control, right? It's um I think there are some platforms there out there today that just let people like make I know that A I bought of me or or or other figures and it's like I don't know. I think we have platform policies for um for like decades, like you know since the beginning of the company at this point, which is almost twenty years, that um that basically don't allow in personation um you know real identity is like one of the core aspects that that kind of our company was was started on as like you wanna authentically be yourself.

So um yeah I think if you're almost any creator being able to engage your community and there's just going to be more demand interact with you than you have hours in the day. So there are both people who out there who would benefit from being able to talk to an A I version of you um and I think you and other craters would benefit from being able to keep your community engaged in service that demand that people have to engage with you. But you're going to a want to know that that A I kind of version of you are assistant um is going to represent you the way that you would want.

And um there are lot of things that are awesome about kind of these modern LLM s but having perfect predictability about how it's going to represent something is not one of the current strength. So I think that there is some work that needs to get done there. I don't think he needs to be one hundred percent perfect all of the time, but you need to have very good confidence.

So it's gonna that's going to represent you the way you would want for you turn IT on which you can you should have control over whether you turn IT on. Um so we wanted to start in a different place. What do I think is a somewhat um easier problem which is creating new characters that the for R A I personal so that way it's not you know we built you know one of the a is like a chef and um they can help you come up with things that you should that you cook and can help you cook them.

Um there is like a couple of people that are interested in different types of fitness that can help you kind of plan out your workouts or help with recovery or different things like that. Um there are people as an AI that's focused on like DIY crafts. There's someone is a travel expert that can help you make travel plans or or give you ideas.

So but the key thing at all, the is, is they're not um they're not modeled off of existing people. So they don't have to have kind of one hundred percent fidelity to like making sure that they never say something that you know a real person who their model after would never say because they are just made up characters. So and that is um that to somebody is your problem.

Um if we actually got we ve got a bunch of different kind of a well known people to play those characters because we thought I would make you more fun. So just like smoke dog is the dune masters who can like drop him into a thread and play texas ed games and IT just like I do this for my daughter when I when I talk her in the night and you just like loves like like storytelling, right? I think it's like the sw dog is the dungeon master will come up with what's happening next and just like, okay, I like turn into a mermaid and then I like swim across the bay and I go and find the the treasure chest and unlike and like and then Steve dog, just to always will have an next version of the like the next dedication on the story.

So and it's stuff is fun, but it's not actually snoop dog. He's just kind of the actor he's playing, the don master, which makes them more fun. So and that's by the right place to start is you you have like you, you can kind of build versions of these characters that that people can interact with doing different things.

But I think where you want to get over time is to the place for any creator or any small business can very easily just create an A I assistant that can represent them and interact with your kind of community or customers if you are business um in and basically just help you grow your your enterprise. So I I think that could be cool, but I I think this is it's a long term project. I think we'll have more progress on IT to report on next year. But um but I think that's coming i'm .

super excited about because you know we hear a lot about the downsides of I I mean, I think people are now coming around to the the reality that A I is neither good nor bad IT can be used for good or bad and there are a lot of life enhancing spaces that it's onna show up and really, really improve the way that we engage socially uh what we learn and that mental health and physical health don't have to suffer in, in fact, can be enhanced by the sort of technologies we have been talking about.

So I know you're extremely busy. I so appreciate the large amount time you've given me today to sort through all these things and to talk with you in person in and to hear what's happening and where things are headed. Um the future certainly as bright I I sharing your optimism and it's been only strengthened by today's conversation so thank you so much and um keep doing what you're doing in and um on behalf of myself and everyone listening um thank you. Because regardless of what people say, we all use these platforms um excitedly and it's clear that there's a ton of intention and care and um and thought about you know what could be in a positive sense and and that's really worth highlighting.

awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with mark oker berg and doctor psili chain. If you are learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a horrific zero cost way to support us.

In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both spotify and apple. And on both spotify and apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode.

That's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me, your comments about the podcast or guess that you'd like me to consider hosting on the human and lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on youtube. I do read all the comments not in today's episode, but not many previous episode of the human man lab podcast. We discuss supplements.

While supplements are necessary for everybody, many people derive to remen is benefit from them for things like enhancing sleep hormones, ort and improving focus. If you like to learn more about the supplements discussed on the huberman lab podcast, you can go to live momentous spell O U S. So live momentous dot com slash huberman if you're not ready.

Following me on social media, it's huberman lab on all social media platforms. But that's instagram, twitter, now called x threads, facebook, linton. And on all those places I discuss science and science related tools, some of which over lapse with the content of the huberman lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman lab pocket.

So again, it's huberman and lab on all social media platforms. If you haven't always subscribe to our monthly neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a completely zero cost newsletter that gives you podcast summaries as well as tall kits in the form of brief P. D.

S. We've had two kids related to optimizing sleep, to regulating dopamine, deliberate cold exposure, fitness, mental health, learning and neuroplasticity and much more. Again, it's completely zero costs.

To sign up, you simply go to huberman lab dog, comb over to the menu tabs, scroll down the news letter, and supply your email. I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with mark zuker berg and doctor brazil's chain. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.