Adam Mosseri: AI is a tailwind for authenticity

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a057627b97195e62

No, I think taste matters a ton. In a world where it's easier to build things, it's more important to make sure that your time is spent figuring out what you should be building in the first place. The people who I think are gonna make the most of it are the ones who are clear eyed about what AI is good at and what it's not good at, and also have a
instinct or a nose for
Вот ви гад анакора. Вот сам тим на інстаграм.
algorithm knows about human behavior that
People may not realize it. I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the agreement than there is.
Is the rise of AI content a headwind or a tailwind for Instagram versus other platforms? I think it's gonna be a tailwind, but I think it's gonna be a challenge.
In a world where there's an abundance of synthetic content, I actually think people are gonna seek out
Creativity and authenticity.
And
People.
I don't think we should filter out AI content. I think we should let you know if content is AI content or not. Uh that's hard, by the way. Where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable as AI?
continues to eat more and more of that product development life cycle. That's a great question.
Today my guest is Adam Maseri head of Instagram.
Over three billion people use Instagram monthly.
That's one in every three people alive.
It boggles the mind.
Prior to Instagram, Adam designed and led the early Facebook newsfeed. He also ran the team that built the Facebook ranking algorithm.
And eight years ago he took over Instagram from its founders Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger.
He's a designer, turned product manager, turned leader of Instagram.
Adam is also famous for being the face of all of the controversy and changes that come with evolving Instagram as a product, which we talk about.
Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny'sProductPass.com.
For a free year.
Of the most interesting and well crafted AI products in the world.
Авилли то Лені'снюлетр субсребер.
With that.
I bring you Adam Massery.
Adam.
Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me, excited to be here.
You've been doing product for a long time. You get to see how a lot it
Teams operate across Meta with Instagram.
What is just kinda like the canonical product team?
Look like in twenty twenty six.
What's kind of most
Different.
Today in how teams
operate slash should operate versus say a couple years ago.
It's changed a lot this year.
So for the longest time at a big company like ours, the canonical team was something like two or three Android engineers, two or three iOS engineers, two or three server engineers.
Maybe a generalist, a PM, a designer, or data scientist.
A researcher if you were lucky.
And maybe that's about it. So you know, on the order of a baker's dozen.
And
That is
A function of
You know, you wanna have for anybody who's running code, someone who can review their code and that's who's familiar with that code base and
Having these different functions that are more specialized.
You know I think it's very different at a startup.
But this year it it's changing. We've adopted
what we call pods, which are just
Mini teams where it's
call it four to six engineers who are a bit more generalists.
Uh one
We call product staff, which is
sort of an evolution of the PM. So a PM who can do some of what a designer does and some of what a data scientist does and some of what a research does, leveraging
Uh in the latest.
tools that we have for them.
And then whatever specialist they need. If they if they're doing something that requires a pricing strategy, you need a senior data scientist. If you're doing something that is
really novel from an experience standpoint, you need a very senior product designer.
So we try to
build the team based on the needs of the work a bit, but then end up with a much smaller
Core, which is more on the order of six or seven usually.
And that is a very big shift that's just happening to us this year.
But they
Just by virtue of having less people to coordinate, they can often move faster and make um
Better decisions.
Uh a little bit less designed by committee. So
We talk a lot about, you know, AI
adjusting and improving productivity and that's part of it.
But I think another part of it is just
The small teams I think
Often are just
More effective.
This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, Work OS.
What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercelle, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS.
If you're building a product for the enterprise, you felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim,
Rback, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. Work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS.
Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up market ends up working with WorkOS.
And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer,
Or unicorn expanding globally.
Work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth.
It's essentially Stripe for Enterprise Features. Visit workOS.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience.
Go to workOS dot com to make your app enterprise ready today.
I I love this.
So on this team of
Six to seven. What's what's the makeup again?
And which role are you finding you have less
Oh
If you're going from the kind of the
If you're going fifty percent size.
You just have less specialists, right? So you might not have any. You might be four engineers and a product staff and there's no data scientist, there's no designer.
There's no researcher, there's no content designer.
the product staff is the generalist that sort of supports all of those things. I mean, what's clearly happening is all of the functions are starting to bleed into each other and the and the whole industry is wrestling with what that means.
you know, a lot of what a data scientist does at a big company, for instance, is relatively mechanical.
And so, you know, there's stuff that they do that is really more like you know, art and science, and there's stuff that's really more like just pulling data, data management.
You know, so some of the tools that we're building internally to
understand for instance.
A traditional data science question would be a waterfall. So if you wanted to
looking at people creating reels, you would look at all the steps and then how people
fall off on each step and try to figure out where there might be opportunities.
To improve things.
That kind of basic waterfall analysis is like
Much easier now to use
Some of our internal tools to just
pool automatically as opposed to having
to have a data scientist do much of a spoke work for that. So a product staff might be able to do that now. And they couldn't do that a year ago.
So you just end up with this general these people have more generalist
Shapes and then
And then when you need it, when you really need it, you have a more senior ideally or just more creative.
specialist. Um so you know a phenomenal
uh product designer or just a
Just a genius, uh data scientist or researcher.
This is so interesting. It's exactly
What I just heard I had uh Fiona Fong, the head of engineering for Cloud Code and co work on the podcast. She's

And she described the people she hires now are
One
Builders with
Great taste.
That can take an idea from end to end.
And people deep expertise in a very specific domain.
The tasting matters a lot. I really agree with that. Boris used to work at Instagram. Um I love senior. Yeah, he was a senior IC at Instagram for a while.
I love seeing him, he's all over threads now. It's like he's sort of like the face of Clark Cove. He's he's a he's uh he's a celebrity now.
He really is. He's his own little yeah, for sure. In a world that is like
On fire right now. Um
No, I think taste matters a ton.
Uh so
In a world where it's easier to build things.
It's more important to make sure
that your time is spent figuring out what you should be building in the first place.
Um that actually so a lot of designers right now are very anxious about their roles, you know, they've got this
Other generalists doing design, you've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design.
But
I'm actually pretty long on
design or designers because
They tend to have
taste. And I think that is something that is
much more difficult.
to imagine being automated away.
And so
There's other challenges with design sometimes, but I I'm pretty long right now on designers.
I've always felt that too.
As it is so easy to build.
And all the work that AI produces is so like you can tell this was cloud design. I know what you did here.
This is codex. Well they all have their vibe, right? Oh, like oh that's a codex app. Oh that's a cloud app. Right, and that's repli, that's lovable, like you can you can predict these things. You like I've always thought that too, that design should be thriving or now for some reason it hasn't yet.
If you look at jobs for designers, they're kind of flatlining.
I feel like the missing piece is like the Pami piece of
Deeply understanding
the business and what will grow it and what success, you know, like all that stuff, the business side of it versus the the taste side of it.
Yeah. I think you're gonna see like I know, um, we have a senior designer
uh at Instagram uh called Nate, who just transferred into product stuff. So I think
I think
Some of what you'll see is you know
it will be harder to talk about w design roles and who's a good designer because they're not gonna just stay in traditional design roles, you know.
If you're an amazing designer, you might you probably have
Strong opinions outside of
just the interaction and visual design. You probably have strong opinions on product strategy, even on the business, on the go to market. And so I actually think some of our strongest product staff are gonna be converts from design and from data science.
who are just looking to expand their reach and they were influential across
functional boundaries before, but
This world where those functional boundaries are just
wildly blurred, just allow them just to jump in. And so sure, they'll be technically a generalist on paper, but
There.
They're clearly have a
a uniquely s you know strong ability in one
One type of craft.
But they've got
The ability and strong opinions to make informed decisions across other parts.
Or other crafts. And so
You know, I don't know that all the strongest designers I have will all be in design. They could they probably will be the the majority, but I can imagine a bunch of really strong ones.
You know, moving roles. But I mean, I should also check my own bias here, though, because I started as a designer at Facebook way back when and I'm I switched roles. Um designers are great.
I'm I'm a big fan.
So this is really interesting. There's always been this like GM model where different types of functions can become GMs. It's like this product staff role feels like a similar situation where different functions can become product staff.
Yeah, yeah. And that was true of PM before, but it's just so much more true now. Um and
It'll
I mean
In some ways it's probably the age of the generalist, but I st I still think there's gonna be a real important role for these really amazing specialists who are just
They're all about going I wish I was like that. I always had this like
I romanticize the like phenomenal machine learning engineer or AI researcher or shoemaker. Like I think that's the coolest thing in the world.
But
It's never been my shape. I've always been
Um
I've never been great at anything. I've always just had range. That's always been my strength.
Same.
Yeah.
Okay, so this idea of product staff
So the idea is on these new pods, so this is like a new thing you guys are doing. So there's these pod teams, product staff, engineers.
And maybe one specialist that's going deep on say pricing algorithm or something like that.
So what this tells me is there's these like adjacent roles that are maybe uh more in trouble over the years.
uh data science, for example, user research, for example.
You talked about designers being anxious. Is there is there anything there of just like oh these
Maybe folks in these groups should think about shifting to other roles.
I mean, there's anxiety everywhere. I mean, I I I've talked to a lot of people at a lot of other companies and it just seems like this is a lot of concern right now about
competition, about job displacement, about unintended or unforeseen consequences of all this technology, you know, this moving so quickly.
So that's definitely happening. I d I think that
I think that you will see the functional lines continue to blur, but I still think there will be room for functions. They'll just be shaped differently. There'll be more
They won't all be senior.
ICs necessarily, but they'll all be either senior or on their way to being senior. Like you can't just have
A bunch of super senior
data scientists and like no new ones because then who's gonna be the new
should proceed on geo scientists in the future.
So you need to
basically hire and mentor and grow talent. You know, maybe the team is smaller overall. And then that those who aren't on their way to being super senior
move into more of a generalist role. I think that's like a reasonable soft landing.
But
I do think you're gonna wanna make sure you're investing not only in today's senior talent for each specific function, but in tomorrow's
Um otherwise I think you're gonna regret it in a couple of years, is my take.
That said, who knows what the world looks like in a couple of years. Um
So my big thing in is generally like don't over
Don't be over the
confident in whatever your predictions are because
That's just too much.
Flux right now.
The Benedict Evans was on was on the podcast recently, said the same thing. We don't know anything about what's going on. Yeah, yeah. I like I like I like him a lot. I um I'll make sure I listen to the pod.
Yeah.
So you talked about
Taste. This makes me think about so you're interviewing a lot of people, hiring a lot of people.
What are some traits that
Your that are like trending up in things that you look for more and more.
Now in this world.
And what are some traits that are trending down and maybe less
uh important to you.
I mean, there are some things that are the same, right? So for the longest time, almost no matter what the function, I always look for three things.
Do you have sort of
grit. Like you know, you're kinda like you're really gonna you've got some drive, some fire in your belly.
Are you a quick learner?
And
Are you s you know, are you reasonably
ideally very self aware. So that you can actually take feedback and know what you're good at and know what you're not good.
Because if you're those thrings, if you got fire in your belly, you learn quickly and you're self aware, you can kinda get good at anything eventually.
Um and but if any of those things are missing, there's usually an issue. So that's sort of like the baseline.
Right now for hiring, but just for I think people who are gonna be
more successful over these next five or ten years as things change so significantly.
I think two things that I I'm continuing to encourage
myself to do are to stay curious.
And to put yourself out there. I just think you gotta try things, right? This is like
you know, to that point before where then no one really knows what's going on.
You just have to
be willing to try things. It's almost I don't know if do you speak another language?
Uh, Russian, yeah.
Yeah.
When you learn another language, I think one of the most important things or one of the best predictors this is my guess. I don't have any research on this, about you know, are you gonna get good at speaking?
Is are he willing to sound like an idiot?
Are you willing just to say it?
And be corrected and not be offended and then just get better and better. You just have to put yourself out there.
And with all of these new tools and models and technologies, I think you just have to be willing to try stuff.
Um
So if you're curious and you try stuff, I think that'll you know, you'll learn, you'll adapt.
But if you're not curious or you're not willing to make mistakes or try things, I think you're in a ton of trouble.
Uh or at least I think it's gonna be a really difficult time. So
Those I think are premiums not just for hiring at a company like Meta or a team like Instagram, but I just think across the industry.
And multiple industries over the next ten or twenty years.
Is there something that maybe we're looking for less of for some of these functions? Um
I think that
There's some that are still gonna be very large teams and so you need people who are really good at managing large organizations. Large organizational leadership is its own craft and skill. It's actually different than management.
Um, but I do think there'll be less of those rules. I think we'll have more smaller teams and there'll be less people who manage
thousands of people.
Um and so
That's not that that job will go away, but that will be
less of what I'm looking for in hires because I'm gonna have less roles like that.
Something I'm hearing from a few folks.
Is AI's almost kind of
resetting people's impact and success.
In terms of some people that were maybe low performers pre AI.
Can now do like things they were bad at or uh AI now allows them to do.
And now they're thriving, building all these things, helping other people. Do you see that all just like AI is just like lifting other people up, maybe lowering some people down?
Yeah, I mean the job is just different. I mean t take take us take um take engineering.
Engineering used to be, maybe not majority, but a large percentage, forty, fifty, sixty percent.
Writing code.
You know, it's not.
No, especially if you talk to anybody at these labs, they're spending most of their time planning and reviewing code. That is a very different job. You might hate that and you might have loved
Just writing code. Or you might have
You might love that and you might not have been that fast at running code. So, you know, who
Who succeeds
is a function of whose strengths are aligned with the tools
Needs and the
businesses needs. And so
Y this is uh definitely happening.
Another thing is you've had people who had good ideas about how to contribute it to other functions, but didn't have the mechanical
or technical skills to do so.
And AI reduces the boundary to do that, and then all of a sudden they can.
No, I
It's for me it's kinda funny because when I got hired at Facebook, we all the designers had to be able to program. That was like our I had a I went through a technical.
We gave up on that'cause it was too hard to hire people.
Uh
But
I now get to program again for the first time in maybe ten years. And you know, I am not.
And
Good engineer.
I'm a mediocre engineer on a good day. But now I can write code responsibly, which is just
An amazing thing.
You've seen this across all sorts of
levels of s and seniority and functions. You know, designers who are programming
uh engineers who are
Pulling data and doing strong analyses, data scientists who are putting together proposals for designs.
You know, the tools aren't all great, by the way. I think too often we have this
really polarized binary outlook on the state of AI. Like are you AI pilled or are you anti AI? It's like people aren't.
Binary. I said that to the team yesterday.
And the
State of the tools isn't
Binary either. You know, they're amazing at some things and
remarkably bad at others and
The people who I think are gonna
make the most of it are the ones who are clear eyed about what AI is good at and what it's not good at, and also have an instinct or a nose for what it will be good at and not good at.
You know, not you know, next month or in a couple of months from now.
You mentioned um
That AI writes all our code. Now someone tweeted this. That's this idea that stuck with me.
for like months now of just like remember we used to be able to just write code for free?

I think it's I'll be able to write code for free. Just be with a smaller model. But yes.
But just think about think about the cost. Think about
would you pay for m um a s a a model now and how and
what the level of intelligence you're getting from that model is. And then at that same price point a year ago, what were you getting?
At some point they will just
the the incremental value is will be won't matter. Like
You know, we're
You know, we're getting there, I think, with small projects and programming. Like I d I I think the models of matter
even beyond, you know, this week you've got Fable and obviously Mythos.
From anthropic, but
I
Spent a lot of time with that this week.
I'm it's uh for the first time I'm like, Oh, I'm just talking to a much more technical, much smarter engineer than I am.
you know, the next version, you know, you know, a year out of that model
Do I need to pay for frontier tokens, you know, for whatever, you know.
Entropic.
model
Six that oh is
Or is Fable just fine for all of my side projects? Probably just fine. Probably pretty pr pretty cheap by then too.
Yeah, when Kevin Will was on the podcast when he was CPO at uh
Open the eye he's he famously
Said this is the worst the model will ever be.
Yeah.
Yeah. Still hard to comprehend that.
Wow, that's that's only gonna get better.

Uh token, spend RY and things like that.
Uh
Meta was famous for this like leaderboard of token spin.
It's a terrible idea. No later cards for token stuff.
Okay. We talk about that and just how do you think about just like budgets for engineers and product teams at this point? Just like spend as much as you want, is it like there's a cap we have? Is there any sort of
And you've kind of figured out that works well. Right now we've managed to get the costs reined in a little bit by like s shutting down the silly things that we were doing. And so, you know, it's not that hard to build a token incinerator and that doesn't create a lot of value. And as soon as you actually look at the dollars in and value out, you might just be like, Oh, that's just a bad idea.
And so right now we don't have um token limits for for for our engineers.
Actually I think for anybody really.
Uh I think that'll eventually have to happen. Um, particularly if
costs go up before they go down, I think they'll eventually go down because for the reasons that we just talked about.
But I think of it like as any other resource, right? Like I have to decide how to deploy capacity to my different teams because I have a limited number of GPUs and CPUs and storage and RAM, et cetera.
I have to decide how to deploy OpEx.
for labeling budgets across my teams, I have to decide how to deploy payroll.
four headcount across my teams.
I think that you can m imagine, at least in in a year or two.

the burn rate of a strong engineer might be the same as their salary.
Or the cost of employment.
And if in that world, like you're gonna probably need to put in some caps.
The cap should probably be
Yeah.
come like a proportional to your sort of uh you know the company's sort of trust in your ability to use them in an ROA positive way.
Uh but I can imagine caps being healthy. Right now we're not there.
Uh I think us
Will go up because we'll just be using more tokens. Not because prices will necessarily go up, but then I think prices will come down because all of these frontier models are
Gonna be
in a bit of a pricing war.
Um, so we'll see. I think it'll be a bit of a roller coaster.
So coming back to
This idea that
As you said, we've evolved from
We used to write all our code.
To now
We're approaching all code will be written by AI.
And it feels like now the transition is
It's not just written by AI, but it's like one shotted by AI. Like coding now is steering AI. And it's like how often you have to correct it is is coding now.
And
Then there's uh so it's like the software development lifecycle slowly being eaten by AI.
Uh
It'll start helping us come up with ideas, I imagine more and more.
The question I like to ask people is, where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable?
As AI.

more and more of that product development life cycle.
Taste like we talked about.
Um judgment, particularly around strategy, right? Like you're you're not
You might get feedback from an AI on a strategy, but you're not asking an AI to come up with a strategy anytime soon.
Or if you are, then it's
within the context of bounds you set. So here's my goal, here's my vision, here are my constraints, here's my job, here's my budget.
I think that, you know, it looks more like management, right? Like you are trying to define what success looks like.
decide how prescriptive you want to be about the path to success.
And then giving feedback along the way.
And that is
its own craft. Uh you know, and
You
It'll be interesting to see how Matt
You know,
you know, some of the same dynamics come up. Like I believe that if you are
Too prescriptive as a leader with a team, you end up
Stifling good ideas.
But if you're too open ended, sometimes teams just waste time um going in the wrong direction. And so that level of autonomy you give a team, like maybe that applies.
to mean agents in the future.
Um, particularly when we're talking not just about building something, but deciding what you build in the first place.
Um but I think of I think of vision as an articulation of the
World or the
Or the state of the product you want to get to.
And I think of strategy as an opinionated path to achieve that vision.
Stra Strategy can't be like
Be the best.
Or be amazing.
It has to be
controversial that you have to be or there's a reasonable person should be able to disagree with it, because otherwise you're probably just trying to compete on raw execution.
And
I think there both vision and strategy I think are gonna be where our brains are spending a lot of our more and more of our cycles.
And I think less on
On execution.
Something I
I've always thought is AI should be incredibly good at strategy.
Because you would think.
Here's the market. Here's all the information on the market.
our competitors.
Our metrics, our numbers, our growth, all these things.
Help me figure out how to win.
You think AI
Knowing all that would be really good at this.
I think it could be. I I have found it's not unless you steer it.
pretty aggressively. And I don't mean towards an answer. I mean based on the constraints. It turns out when you're trying to
come up with a strategy, there's a lot of things to consider, right? You need to
Consider the state of the technology.
the personnel on the team and what's motivating them and what you can get, you know, sometimes coming up with an idea that is
On the bubble.
You know it's gonna actually attract some of the best talent and so it
Yeah, kind of like
That kinda the push then goes to the idea.
Uh obviously the competitive landscape.
the regulatory landscape for companies as large as ours and the compliance landscape.
the identity and reason to exist for the brand. Um
you know, you have to consider all of these things. I think if you
Ask an AI just for a strategy lazily, you're not gonna get something great. You're gonna get something pretty predictable that probably the competition would expect you to do.
I think if you want a really more effective one, you need to s think long and hard about what are all of the different inputs that need to be considered.
Make sure you
steer the AI in a way that it's considering those as well. And then it needs to be a conversation and the back and forth.
But I think if you're willing to put in the work and the time
It can definitely be helpful.
And definitely be clarifying.
Um, particularly if you tell it to be critical.
Different models have very different vibes though on how willing they are to be pushed back. So I've
I recommend picking one that likes pushing back.
Yeah. Mythos has gotten really good at being like, I can't do this, let's let's move on. Like uh

A little bit of a jerk in a way that I actually appreciate.
I appreciate it. I really do.'Cause I don't want one that's just like, Oh, you're so right. I'm so sorry I said that. It's like no no hold on I want
I won't
You know, I want the real
Real sort of intelligence. I don't want to please her.
This point you made about people being excited about the strategy is such an interesting one.
There's this idea that I read. I think Cory Cory Doctor wrote this.
There's this kind of concept of a centaur centaur and a reverse centaur.
So centaur is a human body horse uh this is going somewhere, I promise.
Uh.
Human body, uh horse.
Sorry, human upper part?
Lower part.
where the human is in charge.
And that's kind of we prefer that. We want to be charge.
Reverse end chart, which is what we want to avoid with AI, is where
The AI is controlling us.
And we're just doing it biting. Yeah, exactly.
Terrifying.
Like in a sense, like Uber drivers and DoorDash people, kind of this is their life, which is not great.
And this is the danger thing for a lot of people is like like if it's giving us the strategy and telling us here's what we're built, like no one's
gonna wanna do that. So that's a really interesting
counterpoint to we don't want AI to be telling us the strategy almost.
Yeah, no, I I I think there's
A lot of things to be careful w about right now. And I would certainly
Not just assume that because you might be able to outsource some workflow.
to AI that you should.
Um
There are certain ones where I think it's really just a win win, there's certain ones where I think is the risk outweighs the benefits.
This episode is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking loved by over three hundred thousand entrepreneurs, and now with command.
I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. I have never once thought about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy.
Dare I say fun?
To send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team.
Does your bank have an API, a terminal native CLI, or an AI ready MCP server?
I don't think so.
And just recently they launched Command, a conversational interface built directly into Mercury.
Which acts as your financial operator.
I've been using command to transfer money around to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyze my cash flows.
And just today I used it to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year. I just ask, how much have I made from X over the past year?
10 seconds later, I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit Mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes.
Mercury is a fin tech company, not an FDIC insured bank.
Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA members FDIC.
Okay, going back to
Product leadership, things you've learned along your journey.
Uh, we were chatting ahead of this about just things you've learned and one thing that you said about
Some of the product the best product leaders you've worked with.
Is that they're less visionary and more curators.
I'd love to hear more along these lines.
Yeah, I mean you do sometimes find amazing product leaders who are who are just like idea
machines, just prolific idea machines.
But I do think a lot of the best
Are
Have have taste.
Uh
have something about them that really makes once makes really strong talent want to work with them.
But end up sort of being curators, curators of people, curators of ideas, curators of technologies, curators of strategies.
'Cause I don't really care if I'm hiring a strong lead for an area.
If the strategy comes from them or comes from somebody else
I just kid that there is a amazing strategy and everyone has bought into it and that the
And then we're executing against that strategy well. And so
I think that some of the best product leaders
Yes, have ideas. It's hard to be a great curator if you don't have some of your own ideas.
But
Are
The embrace the reality that
they can't come up with everything themselves. And so they need to create an environment in which
Great ideas bubbled up.
And our
uh chosen or decided upon. And so
You know, I think it's not just about curating ideas, but it's sometimes about curating
Teams and people.
I love that. I so agree. I feel like everyone's always joining a team and they just want to do vision strategy just like
Not actually hands on work.

Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And I'll at this point that there's so much power and value and people underestimate
Just the the need for s just a like a really good curator of
of the team's ideas.
Yeah.
Sometimes it's also sometimes it's not just who's good.
Uh or what idea is good, it's also what
Is gonna work.
Given the broader context. So for instance, on team building, a huge thing that I'm always considering is not just like is this person a really strong candidate for this role?
It is how does this person fit?
into their leadership team. You know, so if I, you know, for some an area like
Trust and safety. You know, I have an engineering lead, I have a
product staff lead, I have a data science lead, I have a design lead, I have a research lead.
You know, I need to make sure that those five complement each other.
I need to make
And that's, you know, about what skills each one has, what weaknesses each one might have.
I also need to make sure that they um
This is more art than science.
Have a good vibe.
Right. You know, you need, you know, trust and rapport. A leadership team with strong trust and rapport can work through most anything.
A leadership team was out trust.
Or rapport.
Anything can become an issue.
And so
That that chemistry bit is is is like I said, much more art than science, but that also matters. And so I think some of the best leaders
And product leaders specifically.
Also
either do that instinctively or consciously, but you know, they have an they have a nose for for building teams that are gonna
Have
Good energy and um good collaboration.
Warm and fuzzy stuff.
Yeah. Yeah. Well that's the flip side is also true, right? Like I've I've had many times in my career where I've had two people
Why
think are amazing and I even adore them and love them.
And they just can't get along.


This isn't a competency issue. This is just a personality issue.
And you just have to just sometimes call it and split'em.
I wanna transition talk to talk about Instagram, the product, the platform, things you guys have learned there.
Let me start with this question.
What's something that the Instagram
Algorithm.
knows about human behavior.
That
People may not
Realized one of the most common misconceptions is actually in the opposite direction. I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the algorithm than there is.
Most of what's really driven
the progress in the world of recommenders over the last five, ten years have been
You know, these large embedding models and these other techniques that basically produce artifacts that cannot be read by people. They're not legible. They're like giant vectors. It's like sure I can show you the
vector but it's just gonna be a bunch of numbers and like a
Seven dimensional space. It's like
And so
When
When we talk about does the algorithm know something, usually we think in these more semantic terms. It knows I like surfing. And it's like it doesn't. It just has this big ass number that happens to correlate with surfing. Um
That said, I think that is
starting to change, right? I think that
What
One of the things that LMs are enabling is they can describe in
You know, words, you know, English for
Or whatever language you prefer.
What
Some of those.
Previously illegible artifacts.
Um

At least proximate to, if not mean directly, right? So this is like the thing I've been really I posted about this this week, this thing called your algorithm. Basically the idea is
We take a look at all of the stuff that you've interacted with.
And then you know, we all of that is in an embedding space. You can think of embedding space as a map. You can map a bunch of videos into the same map, and so
Videos that are close or similar.
And now we can just have an LM just be like describe that part of the map. And it can be like, Oh, that is like
Deep.
Pour over coffee snobbery.
Um, and that's kind of amazing. That is so cool.
But like you can ask the LM to look at these numbers and
extrapolate here's like the topic that you're interested in. Yeah.
Or look at the videos.
And so the way you were um both it's uh you can also embed concepts into that same space.
And so
I mean embeddings are really the underlying technology underneath LMs, right? That's how the all the whole thing works.
And so
Yeah, so what
What we what we
What we do now is we let you
you know, quote unquote see your algorithm. You can see what topics we think you're interested in.
Um and you can
adjust it, you can add and remove things.
But
The idea here giving people some agency back in a world where, you know, these social media apps are getting taken over by recommendations.
Um but we can't do a lot of other things yet.
What should we be able to do? You know, you could there's things that aren't topical that you might ask for. I want more
fun content. I want to see my friends more. I don't want to see my high school's
Kids
friends, kids photos. You know, I don't know. We can come up with a I don't want to see seven photos in a row, but I'm happy to see six photos in a row. Whatever your heart can you know, you whatever your mind can come up with.
So we have a lot of work to do and so I'm excited about that. But
Um, I think a misconception historically is until recently
We don't really know as much about you as you think.
We're just like, Oh, like you liked these photos.
This these people also like those same photos and they like these other photos. So you might like those other photos. Like that's kinda how
I'm oversimplifying. That's like Yeah.
Kind of how it worked.
Now only now are we actually getting as sophisticated as I think people have assumed we've been for many years.
That is really interesting.
One that comes to mind is kind of this
Transition everyone eventually goes through.
to this like algorithmic
Broad global.

Uh everyone it always feels like people think. I just wanna see
chronologically, everyone I know and follow, and that's gonna be my favorite feed.
And it continues to be proven wrong. No, you actually engage a lot more.
A a lot more when it's this algorithmic feed of things we think you will love.
Yeah. It's tough because I mean I get I mean I posted this week this thing about agency and I just got destroyed in the comments, which is just part of the job.
I get it, right? Um the y there's but there are a couple of issues
With the algorithm with the chronological feet.
So
One is and some of this is the tension between
An individual's interests.
And what works.
When you scale it up.
Right. So
If you do a pure chronological feed.
The incentive for everybody
Is it just
Post as much as possible.
Uh,'cause it will always be at the top of everyone who follows you're speed as soon as you post. So what ends up happening.
Is that
The fee gets overwhelmed with professional content.
with usually large company content and publishers'cause they get you know, the New York Times can pump out
fifty things a day.
Your best friend
Won't
You might get one thing a week from that.
And so your feed just gets taken over.
Um, so part of it is the incentives that emerge. Cause when you when you design these systems, it's almost like designing a city. You need to think about
Okay, here's the here are the here's how the mechanics work. What are the incentives that arise, how are people gonna act within those incentives, and then what happens.
And the other thing is
Sometimes the most interesting thing was just not the most recent thing.
Recency is an important input.
into relevance, but it's not the only one. My sister got engaged last night.
And you know, she's in Germany. But she didn't. If she did, she's married. She got married last year, that's why it was top of her mind. But if she got engaged, you know, and I missed it because she lives in Europe and you know, where different time differences, like, do I really want to see a picture of like my brother's Pobo sandwich? You know, and I
Pow sandwich, or do I want to like
See my sister's things first.
So I uh it's tough.
It's tough. I'd love to figure out a way to find the right balance. I want to give people agency over the experience.
But I think it needs to be in a way that
creates a system that makes sense, not just for us as a business, which matters. I'm not pretending that's not an issue.
But also for the overall
community'cause we've done chronological
by default and where you can make it default and you see not only does usage go down
Overall sentiment goes down.
The individual who made that choice might
be happy at the moment, but when they you just get pummeled with stuff you're less interested in
Over the course of months.
We ask, we run surveys at massive scales. We just see people start to become less and less satisfied with Instagram.
Kind of along these lines, uh, everybody asks you about this these days, uh AI and content and how that all impacts everything that's going on.
I wanna ask you something I haven't seen someone ask you.
Is the rise of AI content uh a headwind or a tailwind for Instagram?
versus other platforms.
You think this helps?
Or hurts you guys.
I think it's gonna be a tailwind, but I think it's gonna be a challenge.
It's n and not just because it's more content. Obviously we're an attention business driven business, we're an advertising business, more content means potentially more attention.
It that's not for free though. Like I don't think we're very good at ranking AI content yet. There's great AI content, there's crap AI content. You should just see the stuff you're interested in and not any of the stuff you're not interested in.
But I do think that
In a world where
Or for years now, and I've said this many times, power shifting from institutions to individuals across industries. The easiest example of sports were
Players are more relevant than teams now, and that was not the case when I was a kid.
In that world you're gonna s I think it m behooves us to invest in individuals and to invest in
specifically for Instagram and creators. And I mean creators broadly. I don't just mean
influencers who are promoting branded content and making, you know, native only videos.
I mean anybody who's using platforms like Instagram to help do what they do.
Right. It could be you could be a journalist, you could be an artist, you could be selling scarves you sow, but like you're out there as yourself.
So
creating and sharing content that helps you achieve whatever it is you're trying to do.
So we've been leaning in that direction for many years now. That's been our you know, one of our two or three most important audiences for as long as I've been on Instagram.
In a world where there's an abundance of synthetic content, I actually think people are gonna seek out
creativity and authenticity.
And
People.
More, not less.
And I think that m that will help us. That doesn't mean that we won't have AI content on our platform. There's gonna be
bad and good AI content and we're gonna try and handle that.
You know, the way we normally handle content. So unsafe goes away.
Interesting versus not interesting is based on ranking and personalization.
Um, but I think people are gonna really seek out
Other points of view.
'Cause Instagram was never just about the content. It was always all about
to a certain degree the person behind the content, the point of view, the reason they're sharing it, their perspective.
And I think that's gonna become more important, not less, and I think
Given that we are
Not the best at a lot of things, but we are the largest
Uh creator platform.
I mean I you know, if you look at
How we define creators and how many creators use us for the platforms.
I think it'll be a tailwind for us because I think people are gonna seek out people.
And it this connects to your earlier point that
uh companies
Uh like say New York Times can pump out a bunch of AI content.
versus a creator. And so you're saying you kinda want to protect against that too. Allow
individuals to continue to
perform well in spite of just L'Acount.
If you just love AI
Kind of
Great. Like you should be able to have a feed that's just like AI town.
And if you
d don't, then you shouldn't have it in your feet. Thank you, you know, uh to me it's like
I don't think we should I mean I understand why people are, right? There's a I'm not oblivious to the overall
paradigm shift instead of revolution that we're sitting in. But I don't think
We should judge content based on the tool that made it.
Um, I think we should judge it based on the content.
The point of view
The person behind the content.
Like I don't I don't think we should filter out AI content. I think we should let you know if content is AI content or not. I think we should let you know more about the person who posted
Anything so that you can make it.
informed decisions about whether or not
to believe or trust them based on, you know, knowing
who they are or where they are or how many times they've changed their profile or
You know, you know, if their profile's three days old or three years old.
Um but I don't think we should be making value judgments based on what tool you used.
Is there an AI uh
content creator you love. You're just like that's so good.
I love watching these AI videos. Yeah. What is she called? Plastic plastic dream sequence, is that what it is?
Uh I think the technology.
Um plastic dream sequence. I have it on my phone, I'll double check.
Um
It feels like
Uh like sort of
Dolls.
Barbie's.
But they're like
Singing
And it's just
It's just amazing. It's like a little weird, but like also kind of amazing. And it's it's very clearly AI. It's not pretending not to be.
But it's
has a very clear creative and aesthetic point of view.
And every time I come by one, I'm like
Yep, we're doing this now. I'm gonna watch this for thirty seconds. I have it pulled up here and I don't I I wanna watch it, but I'm not going to
Yeah.
That's awesome. If only that AI. That's another one.
He's out of
I think he's in France. I think he's in Paris.
He uses multiple different tools and models, but he kind of tries to create these dreamscapes.
And animate them. So he create uses one model to create the image, another one to create the video, music, et cetera.
Uh he's like very clearly got his own aesthetic. Um
Um and he's just like you could you can think of him as a painter, but like this is his tool.
Is there kind of a vision of AI versus human in the feed? Do you think it'll like
You said you maybe want to market. Like how do you think about people are there gonna be like AI count, non AI count?
How do you think about or is that still kind of a work in progress?
Maybe we'll end up in the same place, but there's a difference between mark and content.
And marking accounts and they're both useful and interesting. So
If content was created with AI, I think you should be able to know that.
Uh that's hard, by the way, because
We can detect that right now, but as these models get better, we might lose the ability to detect that. So we should also be very careful to be honest with you about how confident we are in our own sort of assessment.
Um, but I think you should be able to just ask, be like, Hey, is this AI? And we should be able to tell you we think it probably is, or we're not sure, or we're it's definitely not, or definitely is.
Um I actually think we might be might be more practical to
To
Label.
camera captured content, like basically non AI content as opposed to labeling AI content long term for a couple of reasons.
But then at the account level, I think it also matters. There is definitely an a new spam vector, which is these fake accounts.
Which by the way, uh an AI creator, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. But there is there are these spam vectors which are trying to abuse that and you know, they're selling like
you know, bogus supplements and it's like an AI monk and it doesn't present and it's not obvious that it's an AI and it's just trying to like take advantage of
you know, a certain aesthetic or a certain sort of stereotype.
Like we need to figure out how to crack down on that. And so I do think I do think we should be making sure that
You know.
Basically you just need to know and then you can make your own informed decision. Is the account a real person or not?
Is the content a real piece of content or not?
When you think about other platforms uh in the space, social
Yeah, content platforms.
Are there any um features or just or like ways of
of of approaching stuff that they do well that you're kind of jealous of.
Or really impressed by
Yeah, there's a bunch.
Everybody so many people do so much good. I mean, for me, like one of the things that we are finally catching up with, but I've been always very impressed with is
TikTok.
And their recommenders ability to break
Small talent.
Um in the world of ranking recommenders.
And R um you can talk about
Exploitation based ranking. That sounds terrible, but it just means like using the data you have.
And then you can talk about exploration based ranking, going and trying to figure out
you know, what someone might be interested in that they might even not know they're interested in yet.
And it is much easier to move engagement by showing
People stuff that you know they'll probably like because lots of people like it.
It's much harder to go and figure out
how to
essentially test content so that we can see like hey, may you maybe you sure you like
Beaver, but you might also like AfroPunk.
And so we're just gonna like show you some Afropunk and see what happens.
If you do the latter, this exploration based ranking, you can I think it's really good for niche creators and small creators because
You give them a chance to find an audience that either
wasn't gonna see on them before or didn't even know that they were interested before.
So we've invested a lot over the last couple of years in ranking, not just increasing engagement, but increasing originality, increasing the number of uh pieces of content that break out.
uh increasing recency to stay culturally relevant. And so
A lot of that has been inspired by
By TikTok and by dance.
I think we're catching up. Um, there's actually a couple of those areas where we I think by the best we can tell we're ahead of them. There's a couple where we're still behind, but
for we have line of sight to I think being the best
In class at
recommendations for the first time.
Um during my tenure.
Uh so that's that I think and I they they get a lot of credit for inspiring a lot of that work.
Nice job.
But we'll see. Not there yet.
They call me disappointed dad. My teammates always like Can you ease up on a disappointed dad?
vibe. So I'm tr I'm trying to I'm trying to trying to be a little bit more
Um
Generous about giving people their flowers.
Okay.
Like you say that, but it that's an interesting common thread across really successful
leaders is just never being satisfied.
Yeah. It is. Yeah.
Yeah.
On this creator piece, I think that's also
You know, people.
uh complain about this global
algorithm, not showing them all their friends, but I feel like this is a benefit of what happens when you do this.
Now that you can
break new creators into wide audience.
If you have this kind of global algorithmic feed.
Which is really great for a lot of people.
I mean, I'm out there talking about a lot of these contentious issues and I get beat up a lot.
In the comments, which is fine.
My main thing here is just to try to
Communicate.
That
There's almost always trade offs.
Right. There's that you know, you can't just have all of the things, unfortunately, you know.
You wanna have
Um
You never you wanna never see something you're not interested in, then you're also just gonna see like the most
Basic
general lowest common denominator stuff all the time.
You know, you wanna
discover new and interesting things, you're occasionally gonna see stuff that
Was just a mess.
You know.
You know, but this isn't just true about rankings. All all these major debates have trade offs, right? You know, uh
Privacy and safety.
Those two things are intentioned.
You know.
Do you do you want a company scanning your messages or not? There's some really significant trade offs on both sides of that debate.
Um and so
Generally speaking, when I argue and engage in debate with people who feel
Really strongly about things.
I'm not usually trying to convince them. They usually their mind is usually made up. I'm just trying to
Enumerate.
all of the different puts and takes for the rest of the people watching the conversation.
Speaking of getting torn apart in the comments, like
You're so in the middle and thick of all of these really
Harry
situations changing the feed, you were like in the Cambridge Analytica lawsuit, all this
Just so like you're in the center of so much.
Controversy and
Yeah.
Yep.
Oh man. Is that just like you? I will lead into this. This is the thing I need to do. Or is it like Zuck being like
Adam, you gotta be the front face of all the stuff and get in there.
Like where does that come from?
It started on Newsfeed. So I used to run Newsfeed at Facebook and
I my take was
That the debate was gonna happen with or without us, so we might as well participate.
And so I started being really active on Twitter specifically,'cause that's where journalists really lived at the time. And I thought it would be show some humility to show up on their turf, so to speak.
Uh my Twitter ended up being like the most
The darkest place in my life because I just followed all of our biggest critics. It's not a dig on Twitter. That was just what I did.
Um
And that's where it started.
And it kind of slowly built from there.
For better or for worse, we've become
A really important part of daily life.
For a lot of people. We touch a lot of people. We have a lot of responsibility and
There's a lot of change and there's with change means there's gonna be anxiety and stress and scrutiny.
We've made great decisions, we've made mistakes, um
We've been criticized for things that I think
Um
We've been criticized unfairly, we've been criticized fairly. And so we just need to accept that this debate is gonna happen broadly. So
I just think it's better for us to
Talk about it. Um, and just be clear about what we're doing, why we're doing it, with the trade of star. If people disagree, that's okay. We're not necessarily
you know, winning over friends when we talk about what we do, but I think over the long run, people are fundamentally more afraid of things that they don't understand.
Um and about things
Where
people are more secretive and less accessible. And so I've been tried I've tried to
Show up in a accessible and authentic way.
Um
And I've made
Mistakes and
I have
Enjoyed it at times and hated it other times.
Um
That's kinda how it started.
There was also kind of a fun debate in um Mark's sort of senior leadership team a long time ago where we were just talking about how
We're a social media company, but we had like a very sort of conventional approach to communication and like press releases and say, Why don't we just use our platform? So
Um, I was not in that debate, but I stuck myself into that debate, trying to mediate it. And I think um
No but that was also a reason why I ended up getting sucked in because Mark was like, All right, well let's see. Like, why don't you try and see how it goes.
What's something that helps you?
Deal with the the hate that
Flows at you every time you
Say something that people disagree with.
You try to put it in perspective, right? You know, like so it it started with I did the redesign of newsfeed in two thousand nine. We launched it March of two thousand nine.
For Facebook. I was a designer. I was a front like an I C designer. Front, you know, entry level designer.
And
The first comment
That came in.
Was
Something pretty derogatory.
It was like it was like homophobic and anti-semitic.
Yeah.
It was just like literally we're all sitting there, we launched this thing, and we're just looking at the stream of comments. And it's like the first one, and it was specifically about.
They don't know me, but it was like what
Explitive, expletive.
Um
Censor, sensor.
uh designed this shit. And I was like, Oh, it was me.
Oh
Um
And I was like devastated. I was like twenty five year old kid.
And
I don't know, I thought about it and
I came
I came to this idea that if you spent thirty, forty, fifty minutes a day at a d at at your desk.
And you organized your photos there and you brought letters to your friends there and you read there.
And then I just came and I rearranged your desk and I didn't tell you.
I didn't warn you, it didn't even explain why. Like you would be pissed and that would be reasonable.
Um
And that was what was happening just, you know, with millions of people.
Um so I try to put things in perspective. Um
And then I try to step away from it. Um, get time with my kids, get time outside.
Uh
There are there are months where it's really not hard at all, and there are months where it's really, really grinds on me.
Along those lines there's a famous kind of reversal when you
We designed the feed into this kind of video scrolly experience. There's this whole thing.
Protest. The world protested. That was pretty rough.
Uh, what was kind of like, okay, wow, we're actually not right and we should go back. What was kinda what helped you decide, okay, let's change course.
So actually that one got that one uh three or four things got conflated. We had a redesign of feed that went to the video viewer.
That was a test to four percent of users on IOS. It was a
Not r it was not gonna roll out. It was this is like an early test to get us some sense and feedback on the idea.
We were also leaning into reels a lot.
We were also leaning into recommendations, so
Posts from accounts you don't follow a lot.
And there were also creators who were upset about the fact that their reach was going down and they were blaming ranking changes on that.
Those four things got all conflated.
We had some pretty big name creators publicly like
Slap us.
Then the press covered that creator.
sort of backlash, which then got more creators
doing it. So we ended up with this little bit of like a
multiplier effect or echo.
between the creator community and the press back and forth.
But we were never gonna launch that. That was an early test. We were all we knew it was gonna needed work.
Um we uh actually
have continued to grow
video and invest in creative tools and invest in ranking and invest in recommendations and that's driven in a me most of our growth.
In the years since um
But I think we were pushed.
Well, I don't know. Does it feel like
It
I think we were p I think my real takeaway wasn't that we should have not tested that design necessarily. I think we could have been we could have done a bunch of things better to explain and maybe move a little fast a little slower. I think we were just pushing things a little bit too fast.
And when you are responsible for a a platform like Instagram
You need to be reasonable and
Realistic about how much you can evolve it.
Now I would much rather have backlashes like that.
Every couple years.
I continue to evolve and continue to stay relevant.
than the alternative, which would have been like we didn't have video, we didn't have DMs, we didn't have stories, we didn't have ranking.
And we wouldn't be on having this podcast right now.
Um
Um
But the
cost of leaning in is that you're gonna occasionally like make a mistake and you're gonna definitely
Okay.
Pay for it.
It's interesting how running experiments now is like very risky for companies at your scale. One person spots it. There I go shit.
You kind of need to have a press.
You don't need to be proactive about communicating it, but you need to have a calm strategy.
Like we can't for any for any design change or any test that could be controversial, we we talk about it beforehand and be like, Okay
Not if it leaks, when it leaks, what are we saying? You know, are we
You know, should we talk about proactively, should we talk about reactively? Either way, what's the message? Because
You can't
You can't
You can't launch something to three billion people.
And
Not
Test it first, but you can't test something at our scale and not expect people to cover it and not and be and so you have to be ready to talk about it d before you even know you want to launch it.
Um
So it's um
It makes the development cycle more complicated than it used to be.
Yeah, uh yeah.
Head of growth at Anthropic launched an experiment with pricing and it just went crazy on Twitter. He's like the one percent of people were just trans.
Pricing particularly. That one is a real you gotta be real careful with that one.
I've learned we've all learned these lessons. We should all share notes more.
Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to talk to that about a dropic.
I think he's all right. He's all right.
Okay, I'm gonna take us to two recurring corners on the podcast, Fail Corner and Hot Seat Corner.
Fail corner, what's uh what's something that you worked on that was just a huge failure?
that
Helps you become better.
Oh bunch.
Um so any.
So I'll give you two maybe. So before Instagram
My first project as a PM was on a project called Facebook Home, which was a sort of
fork of Android um t at the operating system level and a and a piece of hardware with HTC. It was a spectacular failure. I learned way more in that
Yeah.
year and a half and I did it any year, I think probably in my career.
I was just a design manager before that. I declared myself a PM because the PM of the project quit and I just
through myself head first and understanding carriers and OEMs and
uh certification as well as Android and operating systems and
Just learn a ton.
Um
So
And I'm happy I brought that project to an end because
They have been going on for a long time and sometimes
You
The best thing you can do is execute an idea that doesn't have market fit well just to dec decide whether or not the idea was a good idea in the first place.
Another big mistake I made.
um uh during my Instagram tenure was the first version of Reels was built on top of stories.
Stories had a ton of momentum. This was I think twenty nineteen.
And we were trying to build reels into stories because we were trying to build on the thing that was growing the fastest.
But it was
Not a strong foundation.
Most
You know, the read through rate on stories is relatively low. There's way more stories than most people have time to consume. So most of the reels were never seen and then they disappeared.
Um
And
If we had the version of Reels that we launched.
In like mid
Just maybe I think it's like the summer of twenty twenty.
In the summer of twenty nineteen.
I think I don't think TikTok is in
I think TikTok is still big and important, but I don't think it's as big
as it is now because
when they really took off was when the pandemic hit and a bunch of people had a lot of time at home and were looking for a little bit of joy.
And we're totally fine with our phone having sound on.
And so if you look at the numbers, the twenty twenty is when they exploded.
And we were out of position.
And
Um, on one hand, you know, I I'm a designer, I'm trying to not add new things to the product, I'm trying to extend existing primitives, and that was the idea.
On the other hand
I was wrong.

And it's a pretty big
fork in the road if you just look at the overall business over the last eight years.
We create a lot of economic opportunity in the world. I'll how we can tick tock too.
Take a row.
Yeah, it's good. I'm I'm glad they exist.
Okay, final question.
Um
I'm curious just about your screen.
time policy with your kids.
I know you have three kids.
Uh
There's a lot of concern these days about Instagram.
for not being great for people, not for ki for kids.
A lot of tech executives don't let their kids use devices while they're building the product.
As head of Instagram.
How do you think about screen time with your kids?
The key thing for me is boundaries. Um
It's also about education and being and having conversations with them, but
My kids are too young to use social media. They're ten, eight, and six, um, but they each have an iPad.
They
I get
Um
They have to earn their time.
Um, so they have different ways there in that time. It's usually about like sitting down to do your homework three times for half an hour each gets you
a total of ninety minutes on the weekend, and then they can use that time on the weekend.
Um, but you kinda have to set that boundary where it's like you can't just like
You know, we can't just be they ask for it and you give it to them. I think that matters a lot.
And then I'm pretty opinionated about what they do on it, right? I approve what apps that they have. I think parents should be approving.
what apps to kids specifically are um
downloading onto their devices. We've been advocating for this at a policy level for a long time, I met a
I think those things happen a lot.
Um
There are some exceptions. Um
One is planes.
It's just like about surviving. I don't know if you've for those of you are parents. I'm going to be, yeah.
Yeah, it's like you just like that's just like all right.
No, we're fly you know, it's a ten hour flight or eight hour flight. It's like yeah, just
Just you just need to get through it.
Um, the other one that I'm starting to experiment with or my ten year old with is
So schools are interesting'cause I think I'm pretty
Supportive of a no
phone in classroom.
Um that's happening more and more. I think that's just probably good for education.
And I do also know in the world of AI that there's concern about kids using AI and not learning critical thinking skills. And I think that's a valid concern.
But I also am worried about kids not
Learning.
how to leverage AI and then being sort of at a disadvantage. So that's a balance. I think you need both.
So with with my eldest, we started um bob coding recently together. Um
He's just
loves video games. So I was like, all right, let's make a video game.
And so he's made this
nineteen level platformer game that kind of looks like an eight bit version of Super Mario.
From when I was a kid.
But like each level has its own theme, its own types of monsters, there's a store where you can buy different
skins or weapons and there's like uh like all it's unbelievable what a ten year old who still types with three fingers can do.
Um
With just
You know.
a couple of hours of sitting together. But that is more of like a I want you to learn how to
Um, make things. I I want you to be thinking, not just playing games.
And I'm gonna sit with you and do the we're gonna do this together.
So to me these are the things that matter boundaries.
Um, scoping it down to the activities you think are healthy for your kid. Every kid is different.
Um, but I do think you want your kids to be
Digitally literate.
um AI literate because
I think if they're not they're gonna be at our disadvantage, but just you also don't want it to be a free for all.
So selfishly useful for me as a as a I have a three year old and I'm trying to figure all this stuff out. So this is useful. Oh yeah, no, it's a strategy.
It's a ma it's a thing. And you're you're you're not that far off.
You're really just not that far off. It's gonna happen in a couple of years. By coding next year. Let's do it.
I I couldn't believe I tried to do it six months ago and it just totally didn't work. And then
Now with the newer models, it's been amazing. What's their platform of choice? Are they cloud code? Yeah, my ten year old is using is using cloud code right now. Amazing.
Um
But um we will see. We'll see how that goes.
Adam, uh I'm gonna let you go.
Thank you so much for being here. This you're just like such a gem of a
Person.
It's just so obvious how clear like how authentic you are and just like how deep
At least you think about everything.
Uh, so I really appreciate you being here. I appreciate you bringing me on. Um been a fan for a long time. It's nice to finally get that. Appreciate that.
I really appreciate that.
Uh let me just ask you this final question to ask everyone. What's a way that listeners can be useful to you?
I just think
You don't even have to s tell this to other people, but just remember that
This world
And technology is complicated.
And there are almost always trade offs.
Um, and you can totally disagree with the decisions I or we make.
Um
But just remember that we are people here trying to make these decisions, just trying to do the best we can. And I I actually do invite the criticism and the critique and the feedback, but um
But know that
None of these contentious debates are nearly as simple as most people pretend to make them.
How to be.
Wise words.
Adam, thank you so much for being here.
Pleasure. Thank you, Danny.
Everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.
You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show.
At Lenny's podcast dot com.
See you in the next episode.