Hi and welcome to Futurology. I'm Don Nakagawa and in this episode I'm speaking to Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, now called Snap, which was founded in 2012 when Evan was 22 years old. He founded Snap in order to address a distortion he saw in social media at the time. Platforms would allow people to post content and that content stayed there forever. And so more and more people were presenting a version of themselves that wasn't really true or authentic. Evan saw this as a distortion of technology and he founded Snap as a platform where photos could disappear and that ephemerality would give a kind of freedom to people. Many years later, Evan is trying to address a new distortion. Snap is focusing on creating augmented reality experiences and through this sort of blurring the lines between online and offline. Today technology gets a lot of flak for consuming people's attention and taking them out of the world in a way, taking them away from their friends and away from their families. So, how do you address that? Evan believes that you can bring the world of compute into the analog world and create shared experiences using augmented reality. So, let's get into it. Here's the interview between me and Evan Spiegel on Futurology.
Evan Spiegel, welcome to Futurology.
Don, thanks so much for having me. I've really been looking forward to this on this glorious day in January in Los Angeles. I think we might hit the 80s today. So, this is good again in January. It's been great.
Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen you and I'm really excited about this conversation. To catch up, but also to explore with you some ideas that I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to talk to you about. I mean, you share I think a lot of the passion that Bruin Institute has because you've been on our board for so long, for which we are very grateful. And we have, you know, some opportunities to explore what we do and what we think about, but we don't have an opportunity very often to explore how your organization is evolving or how you're evolving through that and how you think about those things. And it's so important given that you have a very successful social media platform that spans the globe and therefore is both a receptacle for the changes that are happening but also driving that change. So I'm really excited to get the opportunity to talk to you about these things.
Oh thanks and thanks so much for having me. Should be fun.
So I thought we'd start just where you started. So, you know, you were a very young CEO. Obviously you were inspired to found a company and I was wondering what inspired you to do that in the first place. Was there a moment in time when you knew this is what you wanted to do or was there somebody out there who inspired you?
Believe it or not, I did have an engineering background, but I was in the product design program which was part of the mechanical engineering program at the time. Now it's its own major which is really cool. I think design in general, the practice of design has just gotten a lot more attention and focus in terms of its importance and the role of empathy in designing products I think is now much better understood than kind of that ancient history when I was in college. But one of the things that I really love doing was just making stuff in college and so Bobby, who was a friend of mine, he lived across the hall from me in college, we started just building things. One of the biggest things we built early on was called Future Freshman, which took us maybe 18 months to develop this really sophisticated piece of software to help people apply to college that literally nobody used except for my mom, despite the fact that Bobby and I both had younger siblings who were applying to college. So we got some early market feedback that maybe it wasn't a fit. But we soon thereafter started playing around with a prototype for Snapchat which was actually called Peekaboo at the time. And to kind of situate us back then, desktop social media at the time was very popular. Back then, we were just transitioning from needing to take photos on a digital camera, plug them into your desktop and upload them to desktop social media to Facebook at the time. And mobile phones were just becoming popular. The app store was just getting started. I think Instagram had launched a year earlier. But what was very clear in that moment in time was that the permanence and public nature of social media was really changing the way that people communicated because they felt so much pressure in terms of what they put online. They knew it would be there forever. They knew it would be judged. It would get likes and comments that were visible publicly. There was actually, and I think there still is on most social media, a public friends list. So everyone was really cognizant of how many friends they had and needing to make more friends. And so social media at the time, even though it was purportedly designed to be social, actually made people like us in college feel a lot of pressure about what we were sharing online. And so in that context, we started working on this prototype for Peekaboo that would just allow your messages to disappear, that would make conversations feel a lot more like you were having them face to face, right? They were visual because you're sending pictures back and forth. And again, this dates me, but back then, sending a picture via text message took a minute or two. I mean, it was really slow. And so it was very hard to communicate visually with text message. We invented a way to send images really quickly. And so this combination of being able to send an image very quickly, opening the app into the camera so it invited you to create, and then of course having the image delete by default unless you wanted to screenshot and save it, just changed the way that people were communicating at the time and I think was really just a welcome relief from sort of the public social media pressure people were feeling.
That's an interesting way to think about it. So that was very deliberate decisions very early on for both privacy and ephemerality and those things were received with mixed reviews though at the time, right? Snap was getting a lot of criticism for this disappearing thing but how did you respond in the moment to the criticism of that and how do you feel that has evolved over time?
I think it's normal with anything new that people ask questions or there are push back. I mean before Snapchat virtually everything you put on the internet was saved forever. Everything was archived. Every conversation you had, every photo, everything was archived forever. And this was before people started really caring about privacy, understanding the impact of data minimization. Understanding that if we don't respect privacy or design services to respect privacy, that there are really meaningful implications, especially now in the age of artificial intelligence, right? Where if you collect all this information, you can then on the positive side personalize services to make them more relevant to people but on the negative side also manipulate people potentially. And so I think people's understanding and realization of the importance of privacy and data minimization didn't really kick in in earnest maybe even until five or 10 years ago. At that time, if you recall the famous Mark Zuckerberg quote about the world being open and transparent. That was really the moment that we were living in. Okay, now everyone's just going to post everything openly and transparently, all their personal and private data they're going to share. That was really the moment that we were living in. And so I think there was some skepticism when we said no actually we think privacy is important, that actually privacy and the ability to have private conversation is the foundation of strong relationships, right? You may tell something to your best friend or your spouse, your partner that you wouldn't tell the whole world and that's really really important to building relationships. So, I think you're right. There was some skepticism because we were talking about the importance of things like privacy, the importance of things like data minimization at a time when the rest of the internet was talking about permanent, open, transparent forever. And that for us didn't really reconcile with the way that we saw most people communicating with their friends and family. So social media was maybe the home for the perfect photo or video or a really important announcement or something like that. But sharing with friends the everyday in between moments or food stuck in your teeth or the beautiful stories of people saying gosh I wound up in the hospital. I would never post a photo of myself in a hospital bed online on social media publicly for the world to see, but I wanted to share that with my family. I wanted to share my road to recovery with my friends, and that was really important to me. And I didn't want that public attention, but I needed to share that. That was really important to me. So, I think Snapchat became the home for this authentic and frankly more frequent sharing, of all the in between moments, the moments that aren't perfect. And I think if you look at the way that we architected Snapchat, when people share a story with their friends, it sparks a conversation, right? People follow up and say, 'How are you doing?' or 'What's going on?' or 'How was that restaurant? That looks fun.' And that conversation is what brings people closer together. So I think ultimately, thinking about the way that people share and not having likes or public comments on stories was only one element of stories. The other thing that was really powerful about the way that we designed stories is that we put them in chronological order. Everything on social media at the time was and still is in many cases in reverse chronological order. So you would go look at the social media feed and you'd see the end of the birthday party and then the middle and then the beginning. It makes no sense. So I think another big thing that changed with stories was that we put everything in chronological order. And so I think that just fits with the way that people naturally tell stories in their day-to-day lives. And so I think you're sort of seeing here this trend where we constantly just look at what are the ways that people are already communicating. How do they feel comfortable expressing themselves and then how can we reflect that in technology rather than designing some new technology that people then have to change their lives or adapt their lives to meet. So I think for us it's always about really understanding the way that people want to communicate and share with their friends and then designing technology to enable that.
There was something else that you said early on too that was about the visual language that people wanted to actually communicate in images and again you were one of the first people I'd ever heard say that and of course it has very much become a visual world we do communicate in images and emojis and things like that, right? These things like text becoming less important and our visual world becoming the way we express ourselves. How has the platform adapted and evolved with that in mind?
What a great question. I mean, I wish I could claim credit for that. I feel like from the cave paintings or whatever. I think humans are so visual and it's one of our real superpowers. I mean, if you look at the human visual cortex, our ability to understand visual information is just extraordinary. We communicate so much visually, right? In terms of the way that we understand how people feel, right? Before they even say a word, just by looking at someone's face, you can understand how they're feeling in that moment. And so, I think in terms of just reducing that barrier to communication, visual language cuts across all different cultures, right? Visual language is something that humans have adapted so well to do that it's not a surprise to me that it's central to the way that we communicate today. But the big change that made that possible was the creation of a worked camera on a smartphone. Right? So up until the smartphone arrived, we didn't have cameras that were always connected to the internet. It was very difficult to share an image or a video in the moment. I think it's hard to appreciate now given how quickly everything has changed. But 15 years ago the idea that you could just communicate by sharing images and videos back and forth was almost unheard of. I mean, your data plan wouldn't support it.
Exactly. One video a month.
So, I do think it's been so exciting to see the way that the worked cameras on smartphones have now enabled humans again to communicate in a way that is actually much more akin to how we've always communicated that plays to our strengths. In terms of our ability to process visual information rather than type out some text on a touchscreen. That's not really innate to who humans are, although it does use our opposable thumbs.
Yes. How is the... now you've been making pretty big investments in augmented reality. How is that for you a kind of obvious evolution of this kind of the visual language that we use in the world?
What a great question. Well, I think augmented reality is sort of this big umbrella term for the idea that we should try to integrate computing in the world around us rather than trying to design computers that take us out of the world. So if you think about, I can give a couple examples. Today, when you're using a desktop computer, a laptop, even your smartphone, you're looking down at a screen. That screen is opaque, right? You can't see the world beyond it and you are locked in to that computer screen. Same thing with some of this new virtual reality technology. You put on this headset, you leave the real world, and you go somewhere else. And that's been the general direction of travel of computing for the last couple of decades which is screen-based and really takes you out of your surroundings. Augmented reality I think reflects the way people want to use computers which is rather than as something that takes you out of the world around you, separates you from your friends when you're using it, is something that grounds you in the real world and that you're able to use with your friends together in that moment. And that's a really big shift in computing and people have been working on this for a very long time but it's very difficult which is why I think until recently and obviously we've been investing in this area for more than a decade now. Until very recently, I think it's been hard to see what that future could look like. But this year, we're launching our Specs. They are consumer augmented reality glasses. So, it's a lightweight wearable pair of glasses that has see-through lenses, that allows you to see computing in the world around you. So, rather than sitting behind a screen or looking down at your smartphone screen, you can embed that computing and those experiences in the world. And what's even crazier is that if your friend is wearing the glasses, you can see the same things and interact with them together. So, you can look at, if you're in a design review and you're looking at the design of a new car, you can walk around that car together, work on it together, grab it, move it around. And that sort of collaboration in the real world through technology is something that we're profoundly excited about because again, it's technology that plays to our strengths as humans, right? To start using a computer the same way you interact with the real world instead of having to learn something new like a keyboard and a mouse or a touchscreen. With augmented reality, with our Specs, you can just grab stuff, right? You just interact with computing the same way you interact with a physical object.
Yeah, but are there other, apart from Specs, are there other ways that we could experience augmented reality?
Well, hundreds of millions of people are already using augmented reality today on their smartphones in Snapchat. So we have things called lenses in Snapchat which are little augmented reality experiences that can transform the world around you or allow you to play games in the world around you. But, using augmented reality on a phone is so constrained. It's this tiny little screen. You've got to hold it with your hand, use your thumbs to interact with it. That's part of what inspired us more than a decade ago to start working on glasses because we realized that if we could take this experience that hundreds of millions of people love and do every day with augmented reality on their phone, but actually bring it into the world, make it immersive, not on a tiny screen, but actually embedded in the world around you. Not something you hold with your hands and play with with your thumbs, but something you can actually interact with and move around with. That to us is incredibly exciting. People already today are using the last generations of Specs that we've released in 2024. We've sold those just to developers. So developers have been building all sorts of different experiences for glasses. So someone just recently released a chemistry lab. So you can have in your living room and again not virtual reality not shut out from the world but sitting in your living room a full chemistry lab and you can do simulated reactions and learn how chemistry works. Somebody else made a lens where you can see all the different molecular structures in 3D and for me I was a terrible chemistry student that would have really helped me to understand how covalent bonds work and all this sort of thing. People have also made simple lenses where you can put on the glasses and stargaze and just outline all the stars and the constellations. I mean it is endless, it's extraordinary what people are creating right now with Specs. Some people even have fun new tools where you can, I think some homes now have like smart lighting and heating and this sort of thing, but now you can wear Specs and just look at the light and turn it on and off. And so I think people are really thinking about the interplay between computing and their real world environment and using Specs, using our glasses to kind of create that interface between the two.
That's really incredible. When you think about augmented reality, I love this idea of it taking you into the world as opposed to taking you from the world and pushing you into the digital world. Do you feel like there are other ways in which we're, what's the word? Like kind of bridging the gap between the digital world and the quote unquote real world?
I mean, I think we're trying to do that all the time. One of, very early on we were so fortunate to have a sociologist work at Snap and his foundational, his name is Nathan Jurgenson. His foundational work was really around this notion of digital dualism and he basically put forward the philosophy, the idea that we continue to conceptualize the online world and the offline world as separate places and they are not. They are actually one and the same. They interact with each other and that we would be much better off in terms of the way that we live and develop services and products and these sorts of things if we recognize that the digital and offline worlds are actually one and the same. And that really inspired a lot of the way that we think about developing our service. I mentioned putting stories in chronological order or having ephemeral conversations that are just like face-to-face conversations. The more that we recognize that we can help shape technology to fit the world that we already live in that we're already used to and that for thousands of years we've been interacting with, I think overall, I think that just helps in terms of the way that we adopt technology and the way we adapt to it.
I mean one of the big issues that and this is what the Bruin Institute deals with a lot is that technology is so far ahead of our ideas and the fact is all of our institutions whether it's education or governance or whatever they're really trapped in this 20th century industrial economy kind of thinking and they really haven't caught up with this digital age. Part of that is a language and experience gap between those who, the institutions haven't been very good and I think in general aren't very good at absorbing the change at the pace that it's coming. It's like there's this reality gap literally between the two. I think that things like this, things that bridge those worlds from the analog to the digital and create those almost interstitial spaces that allow us to understand more clearly in language that maybe we don't have. But through experience, we can actually be part of both worlds will give us the opportunity to shape institutions that are actually adapted more to the world that we are living in. Just like you described, right? This sort of digital dualism to something that is more of a spectrum because that is where we're living right now. Our worlds aren't just analog. They're never just analog and just digital. They're always both, right? And yet we still haven't been able to adapt our institutions at the rate that, not even close. And so it feels like in order to do that, we're not going to be able to do it without a rupture. And so I was thinking about how could the investments that you're making and this idea of augmented reality help us start to more clearly understand what the kind of new institutions and the new ideas are? Are there ways that we could use these tools to start exploring those spaces something beyond what anybody's thought of today? Are there people in your organization who are thinking about that?
I think that's so interesting. I know that one of the areas that the Bruin Institute has thought about and invested in is deliberative democracy. And I think it's really interesting. I mean we a couple years back now worked on a project called America in One Room and helped bring together a statistically significant representation of all of America into one room or I guess a couple rooms, about 500 some odd people. And to me, I think what was so powerful about that is that we can create experiences. We can create platforms that bring people together in that way. But I think today, if you think about how your average leader or your politician is getting information, right? They've got they're surrounded by advisers and donors who have a very specific worldview. They're on social media and so they're coming into contact with a lot of viral content or content that gets the most engagement, right? And I think that can really change your perspective on what issues are facing your constituents or what issues are facing Californians or Americans. And so I think it's just so important now more than ever. I love democracy. I love the idea that we can help change the trajectory of the course of our country. I think the last 250 years of American success have been unprecedented. So I think our institutions have gotten some things right in terms of the enormous human progress we've seen now as compared to any other era in human history. But I do think we're at this unique moment where it's harder than ever for our leaders to empathize with your average Californian, right? Or with your average American because those tools are not readily at their disposal. They've got to spend half their time raising money from donors and then they're engaging on social media the rest of the time and hearing worldviews that sometimes don't actually dovetail with how most Americans or most Californians are feeling, but instead just represent the most engaging or most outrageous content. So, I think now more than ever, especially in a democracy, leaders have to go out of their way to find a way to engage with their broader constituents. I think deliberative democracy is a really interesting way of doing that of bringing together a bunch of different perspectives and I think slows down that policy development process, that thought process so it's not just driven by what's viral or what's engaging, it's actually substantively responsive to what the constituents want.
So I challenge you to save democracy, Evan Spiegel.
No, but I was just thinking that I love that because I'm a huge fan of deliberative democracy for a lot of reasons. I think getting, I have amazing faith in people when they sit down together in a kind of facilitated process but are able to truly share their human experience. Our ability for empathy and compassion is like a human superpower. It really is quite incredible and as was experienced in America in One Room they made some videos that came out of that where you saw people who would never have the opportunity really in their social and cultural context within America to really meet and talk and yet they came out of those experiences saying I really didn't see it from your perspective. I really didn't understand what you were going through and now I do and I feel very differently about this issue or that issue and it happens again and again and again. So, I'm a huge believer in this. But I believe in order to use those tools and harness that compassion at scale, we need technology. We need technology to do that. And so, and there are some examples like they've done Zoom and things like that during COVID and that's great, but I'm sure there's more. I'm sure we can do better. So, have I mean, as a fan of deliberative democracy, have you thought about that? Have you thought about ways to bring people together at scale? And I think with an organization whose roots and DNA are about authentic communication, I think that's again I think you're the right organization to help us do something like that, create a completely different kind of democratic institution at scale.
It's really interesting. I mean I have seen some of the efforts to bring people together on video chat and those sorts of things. I think there are two elements of deliberative democracy that are really really important and that increasingly especially with some of the advancements in AI are probably more possible today in terms of being able to scale it. The first is that expert input. I mean that was one of the things that I saw really make a difference and it's important to get experts with a lot of different viewpoints on these issues. Not everyone agrees. There are experts that see things very very differently. But being able to synthesize that information and present it to the group that's thinking about it and talking through it is so important. And I think this isn't talked about enough. I mean, decades ago in America in our government, we funded and built centers of expertise, right? Whether it's tax policy or you name it, where we really had experts that politicians could rely on when they were drafting policy or to understand a specific issue. Now, a lot of that expert advice is sort of outsourced to lobbyists, right? Or corporations who are trying to shape the political environment because our government isn't funding their own experts really with the objectives of the United States in mind. So I think that expertise component is really really important and I think the moderation component is incredibly valuable. I mean to watch how moderators were able to navigate and help everyone have a voice around the table to share their perspective. I thought that was really meaningful. But both of those things both the moderation and the expertise are things that increasingly I think we can do with artificial intelligence. Right. And so I think you can imagine a world where folks can engage whether that's on a video call or whether that's in chat. We just, we've been testing a new product called Topic Chats where people can get together in public group chats on Snapchat and talk about what's going on in the world or talk about what they're up to. I mean right now it's video games and Christmas are big popular topics but I think increasingly bringing into those conversations whether it's expert articles and opinions or of course we already moderate those spaces to make sure that those conversations are positive and constructive, people respectful of one another. I think you can imagine a digital space that provides a lot more of this deliberative and thought through approach to really getting again the view of a broad base of constituents and not just the folks who are the loudest or the folks who are given the most money. And I think that's going to be really important.
Yeah. The citizens voice I think is really lost in democracy today. Well, in particular in the United States because money is such a big part of our politics. And the United States when it comes to challenges to its democracy does have some very unique challenges that other countries don't face. But you see more and more countries using this kind of technology, this social technology to bring people together in citizens assemblies and so on and solve these problems. I think artificial intelligence, interestingly enough, they've created some platforms that do this kind of deliberative poll, which is what happened in America in One Room. And they've found that the artificial intelligence, the AI moderators are more trusted because the people feel like oh they don't have, and I don't know that that could be good or bad but people generally feel like well the humans are going to have an agenda but the AI probably won't and so they generally trust them more. But coming to AI and I think this is really important obviously it's a topic that everybody's talking about right now in all kinds of different ways but and it's having huge impact on our society and I'm wondering how has AI changed the platform for you and did you anticipate the kinds of changes you've seen?
Oh goodness. Well, we've been working with AI for so long. It powers so much of our service at this point. Whether it's content recommendations, whether it's all the transformations that happen in our camera, for example, if you want to, I turned myself into a sandwich the other day, which was pretty funny. But there's all sorts of ways that we've implemented AI in the core service. I think for me, taking a step back, looking big picture at Snap and the future of the company, one of the things that's so exciting to me about AI is that it's allowing us to spend a lot more time on what we're best at, which is inventing stuff and coming up with new ideas and actually less time on the execution piece, right? Because we're able to take a new idea, a new concept to completion faster than we ever could have imagined. I was just having this debate with one of our team members the other day. She leads our product organization and we were really debating this idea versus execution in the future like what's going to be most important. I think unquestionably today execution is infinitely more important, right? We got millions of ideas the execution piece is the hard part but as that gets easier and easier especially in the software space with artificial intelligence I wonder how much more of a premium there will be on creativity and ideation. And so to me I think that's as I look ahead over the next couple years of Snap we have so many of these really important foundational elements like people's friend graph, people's friendships relationships with one another, all this backend infrastructure we have to power our service. But now with AI, we can take some of those foundational elements and use it to prototype and build totally new app experiences, totally new services and do that really really quickly. So to me, as I think about the future of Snapchat, Snapchat itself is already powered by AI in almost every part of our service. But how is AI going to change the way we actually work at Snap? The types of services we're going to be able to offer. And of course, I think one of the biggest and most profound changes will be people going from interacting with AI primarily through a chatbot interface, through a text interface as it is today, to interacting with AI through glasses, right? Because glasses understand the world around you. They understand your context. They're able to understand multimodal input, meaning they can understand your voice, but also what you're pointing at. And that sort of shift in terms of going from interacting with AI through a chatbot or a text window to interacting with AI the same way you interact with a friend or a mentor or a professor in the real world. I think that's going to be another really big shift that we're helping to power with Specs.
So you talked a lot about how creating the opportunities for authentic interaction and the preservation of that in some way was in the DNA of Snapchat and the way you've created it and it's sort of influenced you over time. Now there's a tremendous amount of AI generated content that's on all the social media platforms. Do you feel like that in any way compromises authenticity or how do you feel, I guess, about how much of this is on there and how it might change the platform and the experience of it?
Well, it's so interesting, one of the unique things about Snapchat is just how many snaps people are making every day. Billions and billions of snaps every day. And they're using that to express themselves with their friends. And AI has become such a fun creative tool for people on our service to make funny snaps and silly snaps that they wouldn't be able to create themselves or draw themselves, but they can express their idea really really quickly with AI and share it with their friends and family. And so the explosion of creativity we've seen that's been supported by AI, I think has been incredibly powerful in our service and has created more ways for people to connect and communicate with one another. I think on the content side in terms of consumption the types of content people want to watch on our service what we have seen is a very very strong desire from our community for authentic content not content made by AI. Folks are much more interested in a video that's made by their neighbor or something like that than they are in something that's made by AI. And so while I do think AI will continue to be a powerful creative tool and some amount of AI created videos will be funny or entertaining or whatever, what we see through our community, the through line is that real desire for authenticity.
One of the big challenges in AI development has been the embodiment issue. Do the Specs help with that?
Well, I was just thinking like if the AI you're using is looking at the world through the same lenses you are. In a way, it solves one of the embodiment problems, right? You're moving through the world. You're interacting with the world. It may not be able to feel what you're touching, but it can certainly see, right? And I know that there's been, I mean there are people like Fei-Fei Li who are working quite hard on that sort of visual experience as one of the really key elements of embodiment to train the foundation models and I was wondering if any of the work that you're doing is contributing to that.
Yeah, Fei-Fei is a Snap alum too which is great. She's, yeah. I think Bobby, first congrats on that one.
Yeah, Fei-Fei is amazing. I mean she's super talented and made a lot of great contributions to Snap.
I mean, Bobby, I think, created our Gen AI lab over a decade ago. So, I think this is a space that we've cared about and thought about for a long time. And as you point out, I do think people are incredibly excited about the ability to capture point of view, perspective, and context on the world and what that will do for AI interactions. Also, what that will do for robotics, which is a really big deal. So I think in going forward, augmented reality and glasses are very likely to be sort of the interface layer with robotics, right? Because they help you understand not just maybe the AI agent's intent, but a robot's intent in your environment and allow you to more effectively work together. So I think there's a lot of this really interesting thinking about how AI and augmented reality are going to come together especially with things like robotics.
Over the next couple of decades. But I think long before we cross that bridge, the most important problem that we're trying to solve is just making computing more human because that I think is existential. We're using computers seven or eight hours a day. You know, with glasses, if you can go from using a screen seven or eight hours a day that takes you out of your environment, separates you from your friends to using glasses that bring you together in the real world with your friends, I think, you know, we're going to be making a ton of progress as a society in terms of the way that we interface with computing and we can cross the bridge on robotics and AI in the future.
And that goes back to like I guess your origins as like the design, the user experience. This was always something that was really really important to you. But something that you said earlier about you know ideas versus execution and where the balance is now. Do you feel like AI that the creative portion of this, the ideation, will remain the domain of the human or is that something that you think AI is going to be ultimately better at as well?
You know, it's a great question and it truly depends on the type of creativity. I mean, I think so much in innovation and invention in the past has come from combining domains or crossing domains of knowledge or finding patterns that exist in different domains and connecting those together. AI is going to be really good at that, right? And I do think there is certainly the opportunity for AI to invent and create. I have found though in my own personal use of AI that the generative capability and capacity in terms of really being able to invent net new things I think is quite limited obviously because AI is more of a mirror reflection of our society as it is today and all the things we've already invented, all the things we've already written and said. So it doesn't surprise me that in my personal use of AI I do feel like there are some limitations on truly net new idea generation. But in terms of that sort of creativity that comes from seeing patterns and connecting things together, I think AI is going to be very good at that. So hard to say. I think AI will shine in some areas creatively but then still be constrained in others.
To the extent that you can share it. What have you seen I guess in the last, I don't know, last few years? You've been working with AI for so long. I don't know. Was there any point in time where you like you were just amazed at something that it did or something that it created or that you were able to do with it?
I mean just last Friday we've been playing around with some ideas for a totally new service. And we were kicking around a couple ideas for how it could work and what it might feel like and one of our team members was like, okay, let me just see what I can vibe code and I'll get back to you. And two hours later we were using the service together. And so I think to me like that's just a reflection of how quickly the world is changing. But again, how can we use some of these foundational elements of Snapchat like people's friend graph and their memories, for example, people save all the snaps they've taken on Snapchat. How can we take some of those foundational elements that are so important to people but then create a service on top of it that's very malleable that can change very quickly that people potentially could even create themselves using AI. So I think it's going to be really really fun to be able to experiment on top of this foundation we've built at Snap because now with the basic outline of an idea you can generate a whole new app interface, a whole new service from scratch in an hour. That sounds so exciting. At the same time, a world moving that fast scares me a little. I don't know if that's normal. It's just because I'm old. But yeah, it does. I mean, it's both amazing and daunting to feel like we'll be in a world where we need to adapt at the rate of our imagination. One of the things that always gives me, I mean I shouldn't say hope, but I guess what makes me optimistic is that we have just time and again adapted to huge foundational technological leaps. Right? I mean if you think about the railroads and what happened when the railroads were developed, when you think about semiconductors, I mean we have been as a society through these massive transitions and I think you're right to point out that they are disruptive and I think we should acknowledge that and talk about that publicly but we should also say we've done it before. Right? And they follow a relatively standard pattern. Right? They unfold over about three to four decades. The first decade is really that very rapid progress, the benefits accrue to a very small number of people and companies, that really rapid rate of change and the very concentrated way that the value occurs tends to create political and societal issues and a lot of political and societal change. And then in the ensuing couple of decades after that the technological progress really diffuses through our society and the benefits are very very widespread. And so typically at that point in time you get much more widespread and enduring economic growth. So I think all this to say like I agree with you, change is hard, it's happening fast, but we've done it before and I think one of the strengths of America is how frequently we've done it in the past and our ability to lead in these moments of change and transformation which have ultimately led to our success overall as a country.
Well, when you think about when we actually, you know, finally, I think institutionally adapted to the industrial revolution, it really took us, you know, a great depression and a world war to get there. I'm hoping that's not what it takes us now, but it certainly looks like the writing is on the wall. And there is this sort of level of chaos in the system as the institutional architecture that we have kind of fails to live up to the challenges we face. And yet the pressure for change is becoming just undeniable. And so I guess what are the like how do we get there? How do we get from where we are now to there and maybe not have World War II?
Well, I think it will take wisdom and leadership. I think, you know, the serious and gravity of even the notion or a thought of a World War II should be enough to scare all of us. And I think, you know, my grandfather served in World War II. He was a tough, very tough Marine. And it was incredibly clear that he would do anything he could to prevent anything like that from ever occurring again. And I think what is so important in this moment in time, especially given that there are so few folks who are still alive, who are part of that generation, is that, you know, we must continue to learn from them, to learn from their experience and to respect the absolute horror that they endured. And then returning from the war, the amount of generosity, frankly, in supporting the rebuild, the investment in the future, the investment in young people to be able to build the society we have today. I think we just have to have incredible respect for the folks who came before us in that regard and to really learn from them. And I think one of the things we can learn from them that I think will help prevent the sort of nihilism that could lead to another terrible war on that scale is investing in young people and investing in the future. And I think that is something if you look at the federal government today in the United States we way overindex in our investments in old people, right? Six or seven dollars for older folks to every dollar for folks under the age of 18. And I think if you look at that sort of disparity it's no wonder that there's sort of that feeling of nihilism in terms of young people or young people feeling they'll never be able to get a great job or afford a house and how AI is going to make it worse, right? And take their entry-level job opportunities. I think it's just critically important at this moment in time that we have a real story and a set of policies that help us to invest in young people and in the future because if people can see a brighter future that they can work towards together, and I think this is true of other countries as well, I think we're going to be less likely to end up in a situation where people could by accident or by intention end up in some sort of horrible horrible crisis.
Maybe that's what we need your specs to do. Sort of remind people of what the world could look like if we make disastrous investments today and not give young people the opportunity because they will. I mean, I think that yes, it's not just the nihilism. Nihilism is in some cases worse, but I think the pressure for change and the sense of abandonment will be enough to cause young people to rise up and say, this is not acceptable. We need a different world. And it's these people who are holding us back from actually creating that future not only just for ourselves but collectively for everybody. And I think that sense of frustration that's building in the young people is dangerous and but warranted. So how do we help them? How do we invest in them?
I think it's such a good question. I mean, to me, I often times when I'm thinking about this sort of stuff, I try to start with California, mostly because I love California, but also because I think it's a more manageable problem. It's a single party state, so actually if they want to change things, they really can. But I worry because at this moment in time and especially with such partisan politics and in a state like California where Democrats have a supermajority, if you call out the problems that we face as California, I think immediately people push back on that, or want to point out sort of partisanship. And so I'm worried that the first step that we need to take here in California is to raise our hand and say we got a real problem. We've got the highest unemployment rate in the United States of America. We've got the highest poverty rate in the United States of America. We've got the most homelessness. We have challenging educational outcomes despite spending a huge amount of money on our education system. And so I think the first thing we have to do is start with a more manageable environment like California where change is possible but then also say we've got some real real problems here and real real challenges. I think as I look at what are the steps, what are the opportunities in terms of changing the trajectory there and making a difference, I do think education is one of those opportunities but not just in terms of can we get the math scores to improve or the English scores to improve. I think we also have to put a lot more investment and time and effort into skills-based trades and education. I mean, I talked to a lot of folks who when they were growing up and they were going to school, they could learn how to weld and they could learn how to build stuff and they could learn how to fix things. And I think not only is that an important skill that then translates into great job, great and very high-paying job opportunities, but it also changes the way that you think about the world because all of a sudden when you realize it's actually not that hard to build stuff or to fix stuff, you've got a lot more agency in terms of your life and the way that you think about shaping your own future. Right? It's really different than filling in the bubble on a multiple choice test when you're building something. And so I do think that especially here in California, we could take the lead in helping young people build things again in a way that I think was so important to prior generations in America having that agency, having that creativity and ability to create things. And then I think carrying through that mindset by really valuing building and as a first order we could take that and flow that through other policy domains here in California. I mean it's no surprise every blue ribbon commission that looks at the housing crisis in California. The solution is very simple. We need to build more housing and there's a lot that we can do again in a supermajority state like California there's a lot we can do right now to make that faster. I know there have been some steps taken last year in terms of CEQA reform but a decade plus late, I mean this has been an issue for such a long time.
That was in response to the fires wasn't it? I mean there was some, Jerry Brown did some of it, and then I believe there was something done after the LA fires last year.
I think there's been momentum. I mean we as a family we've invested in the housing space for quite some time in terms of affordable housing trying to raise awareness of this issue. I think folks have known how challenging CEQA has been for a really really long time. But I think the political will to change things has really only coalesced in the last year or so. So it was great to see some of those changes there. But again, it's this mentality shift of really needing to celebrate and to pride ourselves in our ability to build and to build well and build quickly and I think that's something that we could do here in California.
