Week #9

We, humans are weird

Hi, fam!

🎧 Songs I had on repeat this week

• Galaxy

🪐 Various cool stuff

• Lex Fridman’s conversation with Mark Zuckerberg (~2 hours 🎙)

  A values-based discussion with many uncomfortable questions in a friendly setting. Surprisingly deep answers. Completely blew my mind.

  Interesting snippets:

  • Lex: Social media puts a mirror to humanity and reveals the full complexity of our world. Shining a light on the dark aspects of human nature, and giving us hope: a way out through compassionate but tense chaos of conversation that eventually can turn into understanding friendship and even love. But this is not simple.
  • Lex: I don’t care about fame, money, or power and I’m afraid of nothing, but I am who I am. And my goal in conversation is to understand the human being before me, no matter who they are, no matter their position. And I do believe the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
  • Lex: So this is it, this is our world. It is full of hate, violence, and disruption. But it’s also full of love, beauty, and the insatiable desire to help each other.
  • Lex: The people who run the social networks, that show this world, that show us to ourselves, have the greatest of responsibilities. In a time of war, pandemic, atrocity, we turn to social networks to share real human insights and experiences, to organize protests and celebrations, to learn and to challenge our understanding of our world, of our history, and of our future, and above all to be reminded of our common humanity. When social networks fail, they have the power to cause immense suffering. And when they succeed, they have the power to lessen that suffering.
  • Lex: Mark Zuckerberg’s feet are often held to the fire as they should be. And this actually gives me hope. The power of innovation and engineering, coupled with the freedom of speech in the form of its highest ideal, I believe, can solve any problem in the world. But that’s just it, both are necessary, the engineer and the critic. I believe that criticism is essential but cynicism is not. And I worry that in the public discourse cynicism too easily masquerades as wisdom, as truth, becomes viral and takes over, and worse, suffocates the dreams of young minds who want to build solutions to the problems of the world. We need to inspire those young minds. At least for me, they give me hope. And one small way I’m trying to contribute is to have honest conversations like these that don’t just ride the viral wave of cynicism but seek to understand the failures and successes of the past, the problems before us, and the possible solutions in this very complicated world of ours. I’m sure I will fail often and I count on the critic to point out when I do. But I ask for one thing, and that is to fuel the fire of optimism, especially in those who dream to build solutions. Because without that, we don’t have a chance on this too fragile, tiny planet of ours.
  • Lex: I do these podcasts in person because there’s magic to the in-person conversation. How long do you think it’ll be before you can have the same kind of magic in the metaverse, the same kind of intimacy and the chemistry, whatever the heck is there when we’re talking in person?
  • Lex: People in the World Wars used to write letters and you could’ve fallen in love with just writing letters. You don’t need to see each other in person, you can convey emotion, you can get the depth of experience with just words.
  • Mark: Most of the other big tech companies are building technology for you to interact with. What I care about is building technology to help people interact with each other.
  • Mark: Every night when I put my daughters to bed, we go through this thing “goodnight” thing. I basically go through this with Max and Augie, “what are the things that are most important in life? What do I want them to remember and just have really ingrained in them as they grow up?” And it’s:
    • Health: making sure you take care of yourself and keep yourself in good shape.
    • Loving friends and family: because having relationships, the family, and making time for friends is perhaps one of the most important things.
    • Something that you’re excited about for the future: when I’m talking to a four-year-old, I’ll often ask her what she’s excited about for tomorrow or the week ahead, but I think for most people it’s really hard. The world is a heavy place and the way we navigate is that we have things that we’re looking forward to. You have to have things that you’re looking forward to.
    • What did you do today to help someone? I just think that’s a really critical thing. It’s easy to get caught up in yourself and stuff that’s really far down the road, but did you do something concrete today to help someone?
  • Mark: The most important decision you’re probably gonna make in college is who you surround yourself with because you become the people you surround yourself with. I have this hiring heuristic at Meta, which is that I will only hire someone to work for me if I could see myself working for them. Not necessarily that I want them to run the company, but like in an alternate universe, if it was their company and I was looking to go work somewhere, would I be happy to work for them?
  • Mark: One of the promises of all the stuff that is getting built now is that we can be in a world where more people can just live out of their imagination. One of my favourite quotes, I think it was attributed to Picasso, is that “All children are artists and the challenge is how do you remain one when you grow up.”
  • Mark: Coding is building, when I’m coding I’m building something that I want to exist, but my daughter thinks of coding as art, not the code, but the output of what she’s making. For me, coding was this functional thing and I enjoyed it and it helped build something utilitarian, but for the next generation of people, it will be more an expression of their kind of imagination and artistic sense for what they want to exist.
  • Lex: Does it freak you out that life is finite, that there’s a deadline when it’s all over, and there’ll be a time when your daughters are around and you’re gone?

    Mark: That doesn’t freak me out. I think constraints are helpful.

    Lex: Yeah, the finiteness makes the ice cream taste more delicious.

  • Lex: At the moment of your death you get to meet God, and you get to ask one question. What question would you like to ask? Or maybe a whole conversation, I don’t know, it’s up to you. It’s more dramatic when it’s just one question.

    Mark: Well, if it’s only one question and I died, I would just wanna know that Priscilla and my family are gonna be okay.

    Lex: I think God would hear that question and be like “alright, fine, you get in, that’s the right question to ask.”

    Mark: One of the things that I just struggle with in terms of running this large enterprise is “should the things that I care more about be that responsibility?” And it shifted over time. Before I really had a family, that was like the only thing I cared about. And at this point, I care deeply about it but that’s not obvious.

    Lex: We, humans are weird. You get this ability to impact billions of lives, but the weird humans that are closest to us, are the ones that mean the most.

    Mark: [One of the goals of the Metaverse is] to be able to be close not just based on who you happen to be next to. I think that’s what the internet is already doing.

  • Mark: We talked about the duality between the people around you, who you care the most about, and then this bigger thing that maybe you’re building. I think that human connection is the meaning of life. And I think it’s a thing that our society probably systematically undervalues. I just remember when I was growing up and in school, it was like “do your homework and then go play with your friends after.” And I’m like “no, what if playing with your friends is the point?” I think people tend to think about that stuff as wasting time, or that’s like what you do in the free time that you have. But what if that’s actually the point?
  • Mark: The Bible starts by talking about how God created everything. So, I actually think there’s like a compelling argument, that I’ve always found meaningful and inspiring, that a lot of the point of what religion has been telling us that we should do, is to create and build things.

    Lex: To create and to love, which is the ultimate form of connection.

🧑‍💻 Coding

🦉 Quotes of the week

You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching, love like you'll never be hurt, sing like there's nobody listening, and live like it's heaven on Earth.— William W. Purkey

Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.— Jean Racine

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.— George Bernard Shaw

After all, love is a good reason for everything to go wrong.— La Casa de Papel | Tokyo