Talking Tech and Holograms with Mark Zuckerberg!

oh so you must have been like one of the earliest people on youtube then i would i would consider myself like in the second wave of youtube there's a lot of like og youtubers from like 2007 yeah that's like when it first started i was 2009 okay it's been wow it's been a journey for this [Music] what's up mkbhd here so quick background uh before you go down to the comments section and say hey why didn't you also talk about this or why didn't you grill him on this policy or this election stuff and you know there's a ton to talk about i'm sure if we had a two-hour podcast episode we would have gotten to a lot more stuff but he's a busy guy and so we originally had scheduled we slotted 15 minutes to talk tech so my my thought was if we only had 15 minutes to talk tech with mark zuckerberg what would we talk about anyway this is that conversation enjoy all right mark what's up man what's good how are you thanks for having me on yeah i'm good uh so for the talking tech series i think we always start by an introduction i don't know if you need an introduction to this audience but i think people know you as the co-founder of facebook the face of facebook but i'll let you introduce yourself what's your what's your role every day and what is that like for you yeah well i i i guess i started the company and i've been running it for the last 16 years and yeah i i think you know my job is pretty varied you know i never really know when i wake up in the morning what um you know what is going to be thrown at me that day but but overall it's a it's a really interesting mix of of intellectual problems and um you know i i just i'm grateful to get the chance to to build stuff that so many people around the world love and use every day varies from you know the set of apps that you might have on your phone to some more far-reaching advanced technologies like the work that we're doing in virtual and augmented reality which um is is personally one of the things that makes me the most excited we have these announcements um coming out at facebook connect um about some of the new work that we're doing that's really interesting actually do you do you split your time on the regular between facebook instagram uh oculus whatsapp or is it sort of every day has a little bit of everything yeah i definitely split my time a bit more because there are just so many pieces at this point that if i were trying to tune into everything every day then it would just be too much context switching so as a matter of fact what i try to do is like have a theme for a week and you know maybe usually i can't get away with just one theme but and i'll try to do two or three things in a week and have most of my time be focused on on kind of nailing that and doing a good job at that then of course different things come up i'm talking to people throughout the day but you know we have really good people running each of the apps you know it works well as a team and and that that allows me to focus on on you know some of the stuff that i think is the most important and and whatever is coming up that that um that i need to deal with so i think one of the most uh interesting parts of the talking tech series when i get to speak to people is everyone has a unique perspective on tech in some way and obviously you being at the head of a very important company like oculus that's what i'm most interested in because at the head of it you kind of have to have some sort of a vision for what you think the future of it is which is i guess hard for me to wrap my head around but can you talk a little bit about oculus now like the oculus quest 2 by the time this comes out will be the newest latest and greatest but what what does that future road map for a company like oculus look like yeah so if you look at the kind of broad history of technology we get these new major technology platforms every 15 years or so and each one delivers a more immersive experience and allows us to communicate with the people and and businesses and things that we care about around the world with with just higher fidelity and when i look at what we have today you know on our phones um you know phones are pretty amazing right it's a you have this like incredibly powerful computer in your pocket but it's not the end of the line right there's all these things that i think are not uh that good about it right it pulls you away from um from the world around you um it's it's anything but immersive right it's a small screen so the question that i've been asking is you know what's the next wave of technology and what's the next platform going to be and what's that going to deliver for how we all connect and for me the essence of virtual and augmented reality is that you need to have a technology that delivers this feeling of presence right the sense that you're actually right there with another person and all the different sensations um that come with that normally right not just seeing someone on a screen but you know having the spatial audio so it it sounds like if someone's standing over there the audio is coming from there um having it so that you can you can kind of you know if you're interacting with them and you have an object you can pass them the object right and it's kind of real time and there's no latency you know our our eyes um refresh every five or ten milliseconds so you know having it you can have this whole 3d world and what other people are doing render um in in real time faster than that so it just feels real um i think that's different right in every other type of technology platform that we've had you know game consoles on tvs computers you kind of you get some pretty amazing software but you're basically trying to convince your brain the whole time that you're in a different context than you actually are when you're really just kind of sitting on your couch or your desk vr and ar are the first platform where it really just convinces your system that you're in a different place you almost have to have to try to convince yourself to snap out of the reality sometimes and realize hey this actually isn't real i'm in a different physical place but that's pretty powerful so there's a long line of technology that we need to develop to fully deliver that sense of presence but i think that that's really what we're in the business of doing with the oculus virtual reality product lines and with the augmented reality glasses that will that we're working on over the coming years is just how do we deliver that sense of presence and connection for people yeah you know i think that i like that train of thinking my a question i get asked a lot is like i do video now on youtube and my goal is always to make the highest quality video possible so like i can put a product in front of you and it looks as realistic as possible almost like you're holding yourself but what's the next version of that maybe the next version of tech reviews 10 years into the future after its youtube videos and my natural answer has been i think vr makes the most sense if i could literally kind of like put you in my shoes then you'll feel like you're in the car that i'm driving or holding the phone that i'm holding is that a dumb answer have i been giving a good answer this whole time i mean i i certainly agree with that but you know i mean our company is probably investing the most in virtual and augmented reality of anyone else in the world so um yeah i mean i would hope that ten years from now or five years from now you know people will have a you know relatively sleek pair of goggles that they can put on and basically transport into your studio where you are and instead of just holding up the phone in front of you like you just did um they could grab it that you can hand it to them and they can they can play with it and and kind of um experience that themselves or maybe the lighter weight version that would be augmented reality which you know i think you're still going to you know have to go into a some kind of different mode to want to put on sunglasses or goggles and have that fully immersive virtual experience for virtual reality but i think augmented reality once that hits and you have a normal pair of glasses that um you know good looking kind of normal glasses not not anything that's that's super thick or anything like that and that can last all day long but can project holograms into the world um then you'll be able to do a version of your show where your um you know your hologram can just show up on my couch right here um and you can hand me the phone and i can and i can kind of take the phone as a hologram and play with it like that um you know i mean one one kind of trippy thing that i think about that's further out is once we have really good mature um ar glasses we won't even necessarily need other kinds of screens anymore right things like tvs um you know it's tablets all these things could just be digital holograms um it could be apps that you know some kid halfway across the world and some other place makes and you'll be able to get completely um kind of new designs for things like like tvs and kind of different kinds of shapes that are not like the regular thing that that you know samsung can make in their factory and i think that there's just going to be a crazy amount of um creativity that gets unlocked and a lot of innovation when when a lot of stuff that physically today has to be produced in a factory which obviously most people don't have access to doing that um can just get turned into an app that can be a hologram that you can give to someone i think that that's going to be wild so i'm really excited about and that's why that's why we're we're just so focused on this and we have you know thousands of people working on this at facebook because i i just do think that this is gonna be the next major computing platform even if it takes you know several years to get there right and so you so do you see like a world maybe where where screens or displays are sort of a past where you literally can project with ar if the tech is good enough you can just hold like a a rock or whatever like a a very simple inexpensive object and with your ar turn it into a a screen if that makes sense you know i mean the real thing will always have somewhat amount of more fidelity than you'll be able to get with um with augmented i mean like haptics are one area where you know you want to feel something you pick up a rock or an object and it kind of has more weight that's kind of hard to model but i do think we're going to get other senses through augmented and virtual reality that may not be possible in the physical world so let's say for example okay i'm like i'm kind of feeling around on my desk and my hand is getting close to a water bottle where today you don't feel the water bottle until you touch it but it's possible in ar or vr that we can provide some kind of sense so as you start getting close to an object you start feeling some kind of resistance or or kind of or or some sense that you're near something um which of course is how some other animals you know navigate the world through sonar and different things like that getting a sense of different so i think it's going to be pretty wild i think a lot of new things are going to be possible um it's not that it's going to replace all physical things of course not a lot of things you still need to be physical but you know a lot of different types of media books games different things that people have tvs um it's not actually clear that in the future those all need to be physical objects anymore i think a lot of them um you know if you're sitting next to me your hologram is here with me you know and maybe maybe um another friend is kind of uh sitting next to you on the couch hologrammed in from somewhere else and we want to play a game of cards and i can just kind of snap and here's a virtual deck of cards and i can like hand them out right it's like i just think that that's going to be pretty wild um yeah so i think that that's going to be really powerful but there's obviously a lot more technology that we need to develop before we can get there gotcha yeah see this is why it was a good idea to talk to you because i'm not i'm not thinking this far into the future and now i'm like okay you got to address all of your senses you know your sense of sight your sense of hearing but also you can introduce new senses which is kind of crazy but here's a question i've been wondering about it could go with ar or vr um what do you think is more important for people to adopt this tech uh the actual quality of the tech and the experience itself or the the minimalization of the form factor because i'm thinking you mentioned earlier like the glasses maybe having like a thicker rim but not too thick and and being relatively unobstructive is that as important or do you which which do you focus on first well i think it's a little different between virtual and augmented reality for virtual reality because a lot of people you know you're doing it at home or you're kind of doing it in an area where you're where it's it's kind of reasonable to be fully immersive um you know the way it looks is not i think the biggest factor right i think if if we were talking about people walking down the street wearing a vr headset i think that would be a different situation but that kind of doesn't work you don't want to be fully immersed right in some other world where you're walking down the street that's where augmented reality comes in so for vr i think there are all these reasons why you want to get it smaller right you want to make it more portable um of course you want it to be more comfortable the lighter it is the the kind of the more comfortable it's going to be for people to use and and of course anything that people are going to use you want to be cool right you want it to look cool right outside when you care about how the headphones that you're using look right it's like it's you know you probably like the design of them right so it's something that that matters um and that's something that we work on for ar i think there's going to be a completely new threshold um you know because that's meant to be worn and and you're interacting with the world around you and just bringing holograms into the world that i think has a very high bar for kind of aesthetics and um and feeling like um it's a normal pair of glasses so you know it's if you think about the range of glasses on that from you know really thin rimmed glasses to pretty thick rimmed glasses i don't know if we can cram all the electronics into a very thinly rimmed glasses anytime soon but the goal is going to be to try to get all the electronics and things that we need to produce that into kind of a normal thick-rimmed pair of glasses i think that that matters but then in the meantime for virtual reality um you know we just want to get it as light as possible so for quest two the goal um you know we we got it 10 lighter than quest one right we shaved off um about 60 grams and we made it so that it's it's not just lighter it's also smaller right so it um you know it's um the the headset piece is smaller but also the strap is a soft strap instead of the hard strap which when you when it was a little heavier you kind of needed a hard strap in order to make it so that the weight distribution worked on your head and that the harder strap could could kind of support that but now that it's lighter we crossed a threshold where you can get the soft strap then that has a double benefit because now the soft strap makes it a lot smaller so i can just you know chuck it in my backpack when i'm on the go a lot more easily and it makes it a lot more portable so it's functional so think that that kind of thing really matters and we're definitely going to continue focusing on just smaller faster processors better screens until you get down to the retina displays we also were able to lower the price from 399 to 299 which i just think is going to make it possible for a lot more people to access that and get into vr and that's something that i'm really excited about also when i when i whenever i think about ar i think my brain naturally goes back to remembering google glass back in the day and i'm curious when you're thinking about the future of what you want ar to look like do you ever look back at the past like was was google glass ahead of its time well i think that the idea that you're going to want to have some information and context there um i think it makes sense to work on that but and i think that you will see other types of glasses come out i i'd imagine you know i i don't know what apple and others are working on but no there's there's one version that the tech can take which um which i think you can kind of put you can kind of think of as like a smart watch on your face right so it's like what do you use your smart watch for you know notifications um you know maybe some information and maybe you could have that in the corner of your eye um would that be interesting yeah i think that there some people might like that that's not personally the thing that i'm super excited about building um for a number of reasons one is i come at this from the perspective of how do we connect people better so you know having some some kind of uh information in the corner of your eye is a different is is just not as powerful from my perspective is being able to have like hologram marquez here with me um and and being able to like to to interact and and kind of share objects or or play a game physically together um that i think is just like a completely different value proposition that's gonna be harder to build um but i think it's worth waiting for um to to get to that so i think you'll kind of see different things google last was sort of an early take on the kind of smartwatch on the face type of thing and um i don't know i'm sure others will try that too that's um you know that's not the main thing that we're that we're focused on trying to build gotcha so i have a have a little bit of a rapid fire a little yeah little this or that questions and uh we'll see what you think okay algorithmic or chronological oh well i mean i feel like i'm kind of the algorithmic guy so um yeah so it's i mean look there's there's a place for both at the end of the day if your cousin or someone you know if they have a baby or some milestone happens it's like you just kind of expect that you're to see that and people get upset when when they miss that because you know it was 40 posts down because it was in chronological order so i think the ranking um is more valuable um the other thing that we just found is that when we made the whole thing chronological it basically encouraged people to spam right because a lot of pages were like oh i could get to the top by by just posting stuff really really frequently which so i kind of think like having an option to see things chronological in a world where most pages expect that their content is going to have to be ranked and therefore has to be good content um is a valuable is kind of a good balance but having it go all chronological i think kind of produces some bad effects got it i feel like that's the the level-headed algorithmic answer i prefer good algorithmic to current electrical uh favorite non-facebook app um well i mean these days i'm in purple air a lot but i don't know if that's um that's good i mean that's that's because of the the california wildfires it's the aircraft quality app it's i think they actually um yeah i mentioned spotify earlier i i probably spend more time in spotify than almost any other app i like music a lot same um i think daniel is a great entrepreneur and a good person um and it's it's a good company and i think they've just done a great job with their work all right phone in your pocket right now um you know i've been using samsung phones for a few years and and i'm i'm a big fan of them and you know i think i think that they build great phones um i i like android um i also just think you know someone who's building a company where you know billions of people around the world use our products you know most of them use android phones so i think it's um pretty good for for me and for the management team of the company to um have exposure to using different android phones instead of all just having iphones which you know a lot of would probably be the default for for a lot of folks uh last one craft hickory smoked barbecue or sweet baby raise i mean is that even a question it's uh i mean i mean i think it's it's well known in on the internet that i am a sweet baby raised fan um i i i i like barbecuing um and i guess i guess i'm a sweet baby raised fanboy fair to say mark thanks for joining me i appreciate the time i know you're a busy guy so taking the minutes uh to spend with me was uh appreciated and hopefully uh i'll take all this this new knowledge about the future of vr and ar with me awesome all right well thanks for having me appreciate it all right see ya

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 3,015,206

Rating: 4.7168293 out of 5

Keywords: Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg interview, MKBHD, sweet baby ray's, smoking meats, congress, Oculus Quest 2, Oculus, Facebook connect, virtual reality, future of VR, VR vs AR, mark zuckerberg

Id: eAagtcAup0o

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/proboardslolv5]

Facebook is IOI, not GSS