Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth: prediction

Transcript context

…I love that insight. And I know a lot of people watching are like, oh, shit, he's right. Wow, I didn't think of it that way. And so I think it had a lot of that impact. I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about Meta's journey over the past couple years. It feels like there is a huge downturn in public perception of Meta and the stock price. And then over the past couple years, there's been a huge turnaround. And it feels like there's always a lot to learn from these periods. So just an example of the stock price, I was just looking at it, it was down to $80-ish. And now today it's $487. Yeah. I'm curious just what you've learned from going through that downturn and turnaround. And I know it's still in progress, but just what have you learned from that journey? Yeah, well, there's a lot to take away, I got to tell you. I think we had the largest single-day stock drop in history, followed 18 months later by the largest single-day gain in stock market history. As the legendary Lou Holtz said, you're never as good as they say you are when you're winning, and you're never as bad as they say you are when you're losing. Mark has always brought that quote out to guide us internally, to try to insulate ourselves a little bit from the... the vagaries of external opinion. And that's not just true with stock prices. That's true with media and press. It's true across a lot of things. One of the things I told my team, and I still have to repeat it to them, is like, one of the things that's hard to remember when you're in it is that you know more than the critics do. You know more than the analysts in the marketplace do. You know more than the media does. You know more than the podcasters do. You know more than the Twitter does. You know more about what's real and substantial of value about our company than they do. That doesn't mean ignore them. because they have a different perspective and you need to understand it. And it may contain, even if the totality is less than what you know, it may contain parts that you do not know. So I'm a huge fan. I read the criticism of everything and I read it very carefully. looking out for confirmation bias, looking out for things that I might be inclined to resist, but are maybe true. I invite all critique, but I also don't accept the critique blindly. I don't just say, yes, this is obviously true. There's a great, Gail Manning amnesia is a great concept for everyone to understand. Gail Manning amnesia is this property where if you, you'll read a newspaper article, let's say, newspaper, why not? About a thing about which you are an expert. So, and you'll be baffled because here is an article that is not just wrong. It's like, it's inverted causality. It's a, what's it, Michael Crichton, I'll steal Michael Crichton's quote on this. It's a wet sidewalks make rain story. And you'll be like, what a terrible, bizarro story. And then you will turn the page of the newspaper and it'll be another article about a topic about what you know nothing. And you will read it as if it is the gospel truth. You'll tell your kids, oh, no, look at this information about this foreign situation. It's perfectly true. We should be smarter than that. And so does that mean you don't read the thing? No, you read it. You just read everything with that perspective of like, wait a second, like this is another point of view. And how do I integrate that into a whole perspective that I can have and be informed about? So that's the first, the macro thing is, is taking the long view, realizing that when you're in the dumps, it's not as bad as you think. When you're at the top, it's not as bad. It's not as good as you think. It's like somewhere in between at all times. The second thing is communication is the job. dumps, it's not as bad as you think. When you're at the top, it's not as bad. It's not as good as you think. It's like somewhere in between at all times. The second thing is communication is the job. We really did not communicate effectively, I think, with the market around our future investments. And listen, we've had two 10-year-long huge investment areas. One has been AI, one has been Reality Labs. And AI is looking pretty good today. I think we can all agree, you know, with Lama 2, with FAIR, the breakthroughs that we've had. People don't know this, but FAIR, our AI research lab, is the second most cited research lab in AI behind Google. So we've been doing this work. We didn't come here casually. Like, we've been doing it. And so that's looking pretty good. I don't think we did enough to explain those bets to people. Previously, the core business was going strong enough that they kind of were willing to ignore them. And what's the old Warren Buffett quote? It's only when the tide goes out, we see who's not wearing swimming trunks. And so it's like when the tide went out, when you have the Ukraine war and an interest rate hike and recessions, now everyone's scrambling for that incremental dollar. And they're like, get rid of this stuff. And we had to tell the company, you don't want to work at a company that when times are tough, kills all future growth. and just like shores up in the core business, that's a company that's just committing itself to dying at some point, a little later than expected, but like dying at some point. You wanna work at a company that has a balanced portfolio of investments, which we had. We didn't explain that well. And so we spent that time explaining that to the market, to the press, to everybody. And now it's, you know, now it's, I think as people understand the size of it, the scope of it, and of course it helps with the core businesses is kind of overcome its challenges there from ATT and the other kinds of stuff. It's looking pretty good. So yeah, I think, I do think one part is as an internal person, really moderating your, attachment to the external narratives and swings. That's super important. And you do that based on like understanding your own expertise. And the second part is understanding why is there a delta? Like what is there? And it's usually communication.…

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