- Happy to do it, thanks for having me.

- We have a lot to talk about,

including this thing sitting here between us.

- Yeah, it's a good one.

- This new device you've got.

A lot of ground to cover.

Actually, I wanted to start

where you and I left off a year ago

when we had this conversation,

which was the rebrand to Meta.

It's been a year now.

The world was very different a year ago.

I think your company was in a very different spot,

the world was just in a different spot.

I guess looking back now, I'd be curious to hear you reflect

on doing the rebrand when you did,

and did it achieve what you hoped it would?

- Well, yeah, no,

I think that that is a good place to start.

I'll just start off by saying

that about a year ago this time you gave us a lot of trouble

by breaking the news of this rebrand, so--

- Sorry about that.

- No, well, you know, you were doing your job

and I respect that, so.

- I appreciate that.

- But I think that that was just about

the biggest thing of the year that we were trying to,

we tried so hard to keep it under wraps,

but somehow you got that one, so touche.

I know there's a bunch to reflect on here.

So first is this is a long term journey, right?

I mean, it was never like, okay, we're trying to,

the internal conversations we had

actually always expected

that the initial moment of the rebrand

was gonna be quite negative

and that over time, we would just sort of build this out,

right, just because

like there were all these questions

around what the future vision is that we're building

and all this stuff is ahead, right?

I mean, this is the first version

of the work VR device line that we're shipping

and it's not gonna be until later this decade

when we're on V4, V5

that this stuff really starts to get fully mature.

And so I just figured there's so much story here

left to fill out and this is like a long term thing.

So I'd say the initial response to the rebrand

dramatically surpassed my expectations about

kind of what could be achieved

in terms of people hearing the vision

that we wanted to put out there.

And I think like almost overnight,

in the first few months, you had all these other companies

sort of jumping in

and talking about how they wanted to do stuff

in the Metaverse too,

And I think it really popularized that term and that vision

in a way that that just dramatically exceeded

what I'd actually expected.

You look surprised.

- Well, it exceeded what I,

I'm surprised because it exceeded what I expected as well,

the way that Metaverse became a meme

in the business world, really everywhere.

And now there's Chief Metaverse Officers

at companies, right?

I mean it sounds like you didn't expect

for it to catch on quite like that.

- No I kind of assumed that we were gonna have to

just continue building out the roadmap and that,

I mean maybe sometime like five years from now,

things would start to click

and people would start to understand

what we were putting together.

Instead, I think a lot of people

really got a lot of the vision for what it is.

I mean obviously it's still this high level concept

and there's a ton of stuff that still needs to get built,

but I think it caught people's excitement

just as sort of a kind of a long term hope

for what we want to build

more than I'd actually thought was possible.

And that I think actually poses

different opportunities and challenges.

On the one hand,

a lot of folks are really excited about working on it.

On the other hand,

I do think it just sets up

for a trough of disillusionment at some point

because it is a vision that's far out

and we're obviously investing a lot

and the products are working really well.

I mean, Quest 2 is working really well

and I think a lot of the research that we have,

and mixed reality, augmented reality, neural interfaces,

like all these,

I think these are leading across the industry

so I'm really excited about what we're doing.

But it's not like this stuff is gonna be fully mature

in a year or even two or three years.

It's gonna take a long time

to build out the next computing platform.

So we'll see.

That's been generally good.

But then the other piece that I've reflected on a lot

is as you've said,

I think the world is in a pretty different place now.

You know the market is in a different place.

- Your valuation, I mean it's dramatically different.

- Well, us and pretty much everyone else, right?

Inflation has gone up,

interest rates have gone up.

When interest rates go up,

that weighs on all equity prices, right?

But there are kind of some people

who are like maybe a little bit

overly kind of financial about thinking through strategy

who would say, okay well when you see things like that,

then you need to dial back on on kind of long term projects.

And I do think you're seeing that

across a lot of the industry.

So there's a part of me that thinks

that it actually would've been a lot harder

and probably wouldn't have been received as well

to have kind of announced this vision this year

than last year, given where the world is.

So then the question is, well how do you feel about that,

you know, given that people

might be less excited about it now?

And, you know, I wake up in the morning and I'm like,

I'm pretty happy that we did it

'cause you could either say,

hey, it would be looked at somewhat more negatively today

or it would be harder to do today

so are you psyched that you did this thing a year ago?

And yeah because I think it would've been

kind of harder to mobilize around this now

and like this is what we're here to do

for the next decade

or however long it takes

to build out this next generation of computing

that's gonna be fundamentally more focused on people

and delivering this sense of presence

that you feel like you're right there with another person.

So yeah, I'd say I'm pretty positive

about how it's gone so far.

But also, I don't know,

I feel like I've been doing this for long enough

to understand that everything that goes well

brings its own challenges in different ways too.

So I think you just deal with what's in front of you.

But we're really,

I mean I'm focused on this over the long term.

I mean you've gotten some sense of the road map

and we're here today

to talk about the next step in the journey

and in some ways, it's the beginning

of a big part of the journey

because work is a big part of computing.

There are 200 million people who get new PCs every year

primarily for work.

I do think that by,

as we develop the Quest Pro line

and continue building it out,

you're gonna be able to do

pretty much everything you can do on PCs on VR and more.

So I think that this is just another big vector

for developing the next computing platform

is basically this is a step towards

all 200 million of those people

who get new PCs every year,

instead starting to do some of the work in VR

in addition to all the folks who are gaming,

hanging out socially, et cetera.

- Well, let's talk about the Quest Pro

'cause I got to try it

at your research center in Redmond recently,

and it's very different from the existing Quest line.

And I think there's two big things

that people will have probably not experienced

until they try it.

It'll be the first time they try it and see this

is the face tracking and mixed reality.

And I wanted to kind of

talk about those two points with you

maybe starting with mixed reality, which is your,

this isn't VR in the traditional sense,

you're actually mixing video of the world around you

with VR.

Why is this something that needs to exist?

I mean what is mixed reality represent

on the continuum of like where you've gone with VR today?

- Yeah, so just first for background,

mixed reality, what it basically is is it takes,

you see the physical world around you

and then you can overlay digital objects.

So you can think about virtual reality is

the system is basically painting every pixel,

right, so you're in a fully immersive world,

you're in a completely different place.

Over the long term, you'll have augmented reality,

which are glasses.

Something like what you're wearing now

is basically like the target

of what we would like to get to.

I don't know if you'll be able

to get that much smaller than that

'cause there's a lot of electronics to cram in there,

right, all the silicon and the projector

and the wave guides to display the holograms and the cameras

to basically make sure that all the objects

and the holograms are locked in the right place in the world

and the speakers and batteries and all that,

so a lot of stuff to fit into those glasses,

but you'll get that.

And when you have glasses like what you're wearing now,

you'll see the kind of actual photons from the world,

things around you,

and then you'll overlay holograms just in that place.

So mixed reality is sort of this in between

where it's a VR device

that basically every kind of pixel

that you're seeing in your vision

is rendered by the graphics pipeline in the device,

but it does this thing called pass through

where you have cameras on the outside, an array of cameras,

because your eyes, you we see in stereo,

right, that's how we get 3D.

So it's not just one camera,

it's important that we get the different perspectives,

and it can basically pass that through

in high resolution and in color

and then it can either print what the photons are

that it's getting from the outside

or it can overlay digital objects.

So you can be sitting at a desk

and have your kind of perfect workstation up

with three huge monitors

but you can see your physical keyboard in front of you

and your digital mouse

so you can kind of control

the digital monitors that aren't actually there.

- I tried this, I tried this last week

and I will say the monitor thing is compelling.

What I noticed was the keyboard itself

was a little fuzzy still