Adam Mosseri Returns (Head of Instagram)

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Adam Mosseri Returns" (Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard)

Date: February 25, 2026
Host: Dax Shepard, with Monica Padman
Guest: Adam Mosseri (Head of Instagram, Meta)

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Episode Overview

In this engaging return appearance, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, sits down with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman for a candid, wide-ranging conversation. The discussion delves into the ever-evolving landscape of social media, the complexities and challenges of AI and content moderation, the blurred boundaries of authenticity in the digital age, and the personal responsibilities of both tech platforms and users. Dax and Monica also touch on generational changes in how we connect online, creator monetization, and the surprisingly personal sides of a top tech executive.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Getting Personal: Family, Upbringing, and Design Mindset

• Adam’s Family and Parenting: Adam shares humorous stories about his sons—Nico, Blaze, and Elio—and what it’s like managing birthday parties at overstimulating venues like Dave & Busters.
  “They are wonderful. And they also are just exhausting. The youngest one is, like, the brute.” (05:02)

• Influence of Siblings: The panel reflects on how being a younger sibling shapes resilience and drive, especially in sports and achievement.
  “A disproportionate number of successful athletes are little siblings.” – Adam (05:33)

• Adam’s Identity as a Generalist: The journey from aspiring designer (influenced by his architect parents) to tech executive, embracing being a "generalist" rather than a specialist.
  “I'm not great at anything. I just have a lot of range. Like, that's my strength.” (10:27)

2. Handling Tech’s Messiest Challenges

• Public Face of Social Media: Adam addresses the pressures and responsibilities of speaking publicly about tech’s hardest issues, especially AI, misinformation, and politics.
  “We are at the intersection of a lot of contentious things... we might as well participate.” (06:44–07:10)
• Embracing Uncertainty: Dax notes the challenge of being expected to predict the future of technology.
  “You don't know any better than anyone else...The fucking people who are designing this shit, they don't know.” – Dax (09:11)

3. Inside Instagram: Structure, Culture, and Evolution

• Instagram as Part of Meta: Adam distinguishes between being the “head” rather than the “CEO” and explains why that matters for team culture.
• Company Language:
  “We try to make sure we use language that embraces the fact that it’s part of a bigger company, not its own company.” (12:25)
• Brand Identities: Discussion about how emotional affinity varies widely across brands—even within the same parent company (e.g., Coke vs. Dasani, Cadillac vs. Chevrolet).

4. AI at Instagram: Moderation, Ranking, and the Arms Race

• Uses of AI:
  • Ranking content to suit user interests
  • Classifying content for guideline adherence
    “People are better at nuance, and technology is better at scale.” – Adam (20:01)
• AI vs. Human Moderation:
  “It’s very adversarial because spammers are constantly trying to work around our safety protections.” (20:35)
• Evolution of AI Tools:
  “We are also getting really disrupted ourselves...how we build, how we write code, how we do research, how we analyze data is changing really quickly.” (21:56–22:06)
• The System Builder Role: Adam likens managing Instagram to designing a city, with indirect but significant influence on user behavior.
  “You have to set healthy incentives. You have to, in our case, moderate content effectively.” (24:02)

5. Algorithms and User Control: Striking a Balance

• Experiential vs. Narrative Self: Dax introduces Daniel Kahneman’s concept—the tension between instant gratification and long-term contentment.
• First-Order vs. Second-Order Preferences:
  “It’s much easier to measure your first order preferences than your second order preferences...There is a strong correlation between how easy something is to measure and how much we optimize for it.” – Adam (29:46)
• “Your Algorithm” Feature:
  • Users can now see and edit topics the AI thinks they're interested in (live demo with Monica and Dax).
  • This tool aims to empower users to steer their feeds more intentionally, especially after significant life events.
  • “By allowing you to get in there...hopefully allows people to express their second order preferences or the narrative self.” – Adam (32:31–32:46)

6. AI-Generated Content and Labeling: Where’s the Line?

• The Fuzzy Definition of AI:
  • Difficulty in drawing lines—much modern content sits between “captured” and “synthetic.”
  • Example: “Is editing a pimple with AI a synthetic image?”
• Challenges of Labeling AI Content:
  • Tech may be better suited to verify authentic, camera-captured content than to reliably spot all AI-generated posts.
  • Potential for industry-wide standards (like digital "fingerprints" for photos).
  • “The models are getting so good...our work...to try to detect things that are automatically generated by AI will get less and less effective over time.” (41:09)
• Need for Digital Literacy: Emphasis on educating individuals to examine sources, motives, and incentives behind content.
  “What digital literacy is gonna become for our kids is...who said it and why they might have said it.” (44:55–45:27)

7. Authenticity, Trends, and AI’s Next Disruption

• The Irony of Authenticity:
  “Imperfections are a(n) indication of authenticity...AI is already recreating it.” – Adam (72:17)
• AI Will Mimic ‘Messiness’: The panel jokes (and worries) over AI soon fabricating fake “authentic” quirks to win attention.
• What Remains Unique?
  “What’s left? It’s our taste, it’s our perspective, it’s our opinions.” (73:40)

8. Creator Economy & Platform Dynamics

• Who Is a “Creator” vs. Regular User:
  • Creators are those with intent to grow and exert influence; most users are just sharing with friends.
  • “Power has been shifting from institutions to individuals across industries for years, and we should be leaning into that.” (63:07)
• Democratization: Publishing → Production:
  • Internet made everyone a publisher; AI will make everyone a producer.
• Monetization on Instagram vs. YouTube:
  • YouTube’s ad revenue split works due to long-form video; Instagram’s structure makes direct payouts harder. Bonuses tend not to pay off for quality/engagement.
  • More emphasis on brand deals (via the Creator Marketplace) and subscriptions.
  • “People create so much content on their own and the incremental content that people create when we pay them is not that high in quality or quantity...” (68:59)

9. User Behavior and Product Evolution

• How People Really Use Instagram:
  • Young people spend most time in DMs, then Stories, less in Feed—counter to many’s perception.
  • “People share way more to stories than they do to feed...teens will often spend more time even in DM than in some of these other surfaces.” (54:28)
• Change Management:
  • Adam recounts learning the pain of rolling out changes, weathering user outrage as things evolve, but stresses the risk of stagnation is irrelevance.
  • “If you’re gonna spend half an hour, an hour using our product a day...and I just rearranged your desk...You're gonna tell me to F off because I didn't ask you.” (57:37)

10. Threads: The Twitter Rival

• Purpose and Progress:
  • Built for “healthy exchange of perspectives,” now evolving toward supporting open communities.
  • Big in Japan, steadily growing in the US.
  • “The goal was to create a place for...the healthy exchange of perspectives, of ideas.” (76:32)
• Integration and Discovery:
  • Threads' posts are surfaced inside Instagram, akin to podcast clips on social to drive deeper engagement.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Facing the Uncertainty of Tech and Culture:
  “The world's changing more and more quickly. It's full of nuance, it's all gray. You have to embrace that ambiguity and that uncertainty. Otherwise I feel like it's gonna bite you.” – Adam (09:49)
• On Change and User Outrage:
  “I would rather lead Instagram...through a bunch of changes and occasionally go too fast, too far and get back, than have it become irrelevant under my watch.” – Adam (58:13)
• On AI’s Democratizing Power:
  “AI is going to make the cost of producing things go way, way, way down...You will just see more content. Our job is to figure out the right way and the responsible way to manage the platform.” – Adam (66:38)
• On “Please” and “Thank You” for AI:
  “I always said please and thank you to Alexa because...I don't want [my kids] to hear me barking orders at a personality.” (75:39)
• On Digital Skepticism:
  “That's what digital literacy is gonna become for our kids: in a world where anybody can create something that looks real...it’s much more important to consider who said it and why they might have said it.” (44:55)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Family Talk: 03:22–06:20
• Adam’s Design & Career Path: 10:05–11:22
• Facing Public Criticism in Tech: 06:20–09:20
• The “House of Brands” Analogy: 12:58–13:53
• Generalists & Challenging Hierarchies: 10:05–11:03
• AI at Instagram—Moderation & Product Impact: 19:16–22:06
• Algorithm Transparency and “Your Algorithm” Demo: 30:04–33:43
• Politics, Anger, and Content Tuning: 36:03–37:48
• AI-Generated Content & Labeling Challenges: 39:04–44:10
• Authenticity as Commodity & Future of AI “Messiness”: 70:47–73:40
• Creators vs. Everyday Users—Monetization: 62:48–69:29
• User Habits: Feed, Stories, DMs: 54:13–55:43
• Threads—Philosophy & Growth: 76:12–78:17
• Personal Side: Adam's Car, Burning Man, Tech-life balance: 79:29–82:02

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Tone & Takeaways

The energy is warm, candid, and thoughtful. Adam’s willingness to entertain tough questions and admit uncertainty is notable, as is his knack for breaking down complex industry concepts into relatable metaphors. There’s a recurring theme: tech is rapidly evolving, and everyone—from executives to users—needs to balance creative potential with responsibility and skepticism.

Dax and Monica press on ethics, user behavior, and the real-life impacts of digital choices with humor and empathy, often looping in personal anecdotes for context. The trio’s rapport makes for a rich and accessible exploration of the realities and dilemmas facing modern platforms—and the people who run and use them.

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a uniquely transparent look behind the curtain at a major social platform and the philosophical crossroads facing social media today. If you’re interested in tech, culture, or simply understanding how Instagram thinks about its present and future, you’ll find this conversation dense with insight and human moments.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by miniature mouse.

[Monica Padman]

Hi there.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm using miniature mouse because our guest has almost mouse in their name. Oh, Adam Mosseri.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Mosseri Mouseri.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It sounds like a European version of

[Dax Shepard]

mouse, like erudite mouse.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Adam is the current CEO of Instagram.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

And he's willing to talk about all the things that are scary in a very fearless way. And I admire it. And I thought this was a great, great conversation. Please enjoy. Adam Mosseri. We are supported by Quints. There's something to be said for clothes that just work. Not trendy, not flashy, just well made pieces that hold up day after day. That's what Quints gets, right? They make everyday essentials with premium materials. Organic cotton sweaters, polos, lighter jackets. The kind of stuff that looks good season after season. And here's the thing, they cut out the middlemen by working directly top factories. So you're not paying brand markup, you're just paying for quality.

[Monica Padman]

I really love Quint. It's becoming startling. I've been walking around, I ask people if I like their clothes.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure.

[Monica Padman]

You got to put yourself out there. And nine times out of 10 these days, it's from Quint.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I just got asked by the fashionista herself, Nicole, what size I work. She's getting her husband something from Quint.

[Monica Padman]

Amazing.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah, we try.

[Dax Shepard]

We hated it at first because you

[Adam Mosseri]

got used to the old way.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that had a special juju.

[Dax Shepard]

How long are you in town?

[Adam Mosseri]

Just a day.

[Dax Shepard]

Just a couple hours.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, I got a couple things and then It's Nico, my 10 year old's birthday. Aw.

[Monica Padman]

Happy birthday.

[Adam Mosseri]

Gotta get back for Buster. Dave and Busters. 21st is his birthday.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you can tolerate Dave and Busters.

[Adam Mosseri]

I put earplugs in.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I was gonna say, we have a mutual friend, Eric, who kept wanting to do play dates there with our daughters. And last time I went, I was like, I don't know what's up with my sensory system, but it's way too much for me.

[Adam Mosseri]

It's wildly overstimulating.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's too much. It makes me feel like I'm getting attacked.

[Adam Mosseri]

My 8 year old wanted to go for his birthday. This was November. And my wife signed up. She's like, cool, we'll take the whole class, 25 kids.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Adam Mosseri]

And she's like. And we'll got him like no other parents.

[Monica Padman]

She's ambitious.

[Dax Shepard]

Talk about ambitious.

[Adam Mosseri]

She's insane. It ended up being like five adults. Cause a couple parents did come and we rented a bus. She's a genius. She got them all yellow vests.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Adam Mosseri]

To like label them.

[Dax Shepard]

That wouldn't have flown at my birthday party. Like, mom, we look like dorks with crossing guards.

[Monica Padman]

A good age.

[Dax Shepard]

They thought it was cool.

[Adam Mosseri]

They were just like, I don't care.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, they didn't even think about it.

[Adam Mosseri]

I made them like I was counting them, you know, off like 1, 2, 3. I'm like, what number are you? Just like, I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

This is an eight year old birthday party.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

You guys, they're 10, 7 and 4, but now they're 11. 8.

[Adam Mosseri]

They're 10, 8 and 5. Now 5. The bruiser is 5. He'll be 6 soon.

[Dax Shepard]

And what are the names again?

[Adam Mosseri]

Nico, Blaze and Elio.

[Monica Padman]

He's great. Really great.

[Adam Mosseri]

They are wonderful. And they also are just exhausting. The youngest one is, like, the brute.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, yeah. He plays soccer with his brothers. They don't take it easy on him. They just beat him. And then he goes and plays soccer with his own age. I took him to his older brother's soccer game, and he's like, oh, I scored a goal. I was like, oh, cool. How many goals did you score? He goes, I scored 15. And I was like, he's clearly lying. He's five. So I called his mom, and she's like, oh, no, he definitely scored.

[Monica Padman]

No way.

[Dax Shepard]

I feel that all the time on here, which is like, I thought I was so weak and so bad at skateboarding because my brother is five years older than me. And then I got to school, I was like, hold on a second. I think I might be strong.

[Adam Mosseri]

Someone told me recently, I don't know if this is true, but they told me that a disproportionate number of successful athletes are little siblings.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, that would make sense because you're competing with somebody, so.

[Adam Mosseri]

And you immediately want to. It's like, as soon as they do it, you want to do it, even if you're way too young for it.

[Dax Shepard]

Chris and I ended up on a trip, and it was with all strangers. I didn't know anyone. And we got to the airport. You were there. Yeah. And I really felt like, oh, well, fucking, thank God Adam's here. I know Adam, and I really, really loved him as a guest. Like, I do remember being charmed by you like crazy.

[Adam Mosseri]

I was really new to the role because it must have been 2019.

[Dax Shepard]

2020 that you were on.

[Adam Mosseri]

That I was on.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe 2019. It was a long time ago, so

[Adam Mosseri]

I was new to the role, so I was still trying to figure out what was what. But I remember having a lot of fun. We hadn't seen each other in years before that trip, Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And, you know, I was watching, of course, some interviews with you prior to your arrival. I just wanted to start with a little bit of compassion. Do you have a hard job to talk about? Because you're really at the forefront of, like, a lot of things people are concerned about. It's AI. It's social media, it's politics. It's deep fakes. It's like everywhere you're going, you're pretty

[Monica Padman]

much sweating just hearing all those things. He handles it so well.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. So we are at the intersection of a lot of contentious things. And so it is tricky. Before I worked on Instagram, I worked on Facebook for a long time. And I remember a really long time ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago now. I just felt like. And we talked about this at the company, that we weren't participating in the conversation. And there was all these conversations happening about tech, about social media. And so my position was like, look,

[Dax Shepard]

we gotta participate whether we want to or not.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, we can put our heads in the sand, but this conversation's happening and we might as well participate. And so I'm gonna get out there and I'm gonna start talking to people and I'm gonna start traveling. I showed up a lot on Twitter. Cause that's where all the journalists were. I was clear internally. I was like, look, I'm gonna do this, and hopefully it'll work. And at some point it won't. I'll say something silly and everyone will hate me and I'll say what happens?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that was the game plan.

[Adam Mosseri]

But it will be better for having done it for a couple years before I get destroyed.

[Monica Padman]

Wait, can I say, before we get too far, that Adam said something very nice about us on Instagram. Did you see this?

[Dax Shepard]

He did his wrap up of podcasts

[Adam Mosseri]

he likes, but I misread the question.

[Dax Shepard]

I know.

[Monica Padman]

I laughed so hard. Someone sent it to me and was like, you're his favorite food. Or whatever the question is.

[Adam Mosseri]

It's like, what's your favorite food? And I don't know why I had podcasts on the brain. Maybe the next question was about podcasts. So I rattled off a couple pods I love. And then everyone, like the calm scene was like, what's wrong?

[Monica Padman]

I laughed so hard.

[Adam Mosseri]

I just do them between meetings on Fridays. It's not like a production.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, right.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not very well thought out.

[Adam Mosseri]

No, it doesn't need to be.

[Monica Padman]

That's okay. I thought it was very funny and flattering.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

To be your favorite food.

[Adam Mosseri]

I was like, oh, God, that's not the best.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What do we taste like? Are we salty?

[Adam Mosseri]

Are we sweet? Burger and a chili dog.

[Dax Shepard]

I think we're savory. I like to think.

[Monica Padman]

I do, too. I do too.

[Dax Shepard]

There's some sweet stuff out there. I dabble in it.

[Monica Padman]

Well, maybe there's some relish on the hot dog.

[Dax Shepard]

There's some garnish.

[Adam Mosseri]

You really laid on the emphasis on the relish.

[Monica Padman]

A relish. I think relish came up yesterday. Oh, garnish.

[Dax Shepard]

Did garnish. A gritty garnish. That's Right, yeah. You didn't like that. And I thought it was pretty impressive,

[Monica Padman]

but I said I'd sleep on it and I like it now.

[Dax Shepard]

But anyways, I'm just really sympathetic because not only you have to go out and talk about these issues and, and so often you're being asked to be clairvoyant. That's really what people want to know. It's like, well, in one year, what will AI be doing in two years, what's it going to be? What will Instagram be in this iteration? And it's like, you don't know any better than anyone else. I go to these conferences. The fucking people who are designing this shit, they don't know. Most of the good ones will admit that, like nobody knows what the timeline is. They don't know what the ceiling of its aptitude is. No one knows. But we need you to know.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

That is attention. And I do think some of us in this industry really pride ourselves on being able to put pen to paper on what's going to happen. And I tend to find that that sometimes feels like false precision. And it's a little bit more driven by our own wanting to be able to do that and to be, you know, prescient. But I think it's just good to always be honest about what you know and you don't. And then to also qualify things not in a way to couch, but to be like, look, I think this is probably what's going to happen and why, but if this other thing happens, maybe we're gonna go left instead of right. The world's changing more and more quickly. It's full of nuance, it's all gray. You have to embrace that ambiguity and that uncertainty. Otherwise I feel like it's gonna bite you.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so now I also wanna. This is the value of having spent a weekend with you. This wasn't clear to me the first time we interviewed you, which I know that you come from a design background, but it didn't set in. And as I spent time with you, you're very much an artist and a designer. That's what you have been wanted to do, set out to do. That is who you are. It's almost weird you're in this role in some way.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, it is a little weird. I mean, so I romanticize the specialist, the amazing architect, or the amazing graphic designer, or the amazing machine learning, or AI engineer, but it's just not my shape. I'm not great at anything. I just have a lot of range. Like, that's my Strength.

[Dax Shepard]

Generalist.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, I'm a generalist for sure. And so for me, it's been important. And this happened maybe when I was right around 30 to embrace that about myself. Before 30, I was always trying to be a designer. I'm the son of an architect. My mom's an architect, My brother's a musician, My sister's a designer. So I'm, like, surrounded by. I'm the suit.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You guys are like a squid in the whale family. They're like a New York kind of intellectual, artistic. Yeah. So I do think it's a bit ironic that you've ended up where you've ended up. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Can you tell people what your role is, just in case we're starting?

[Adam Mosseri]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I lead the Instagram team, so I'm the head of Instagram Meta. I also support the threads app as well.

[Dax Shepard]

We're gonna get how much I made fun of.

[Monica Padman]

Darn it.

[Adam Mosseri]

Ooh.

[Dax Shepard]

My running bit with him for three days was making fun of threads.

[Adam Mosseri]

He did, but it wasn't as bad as the fact that my wife has not installed it.

[Monica Padman]

Gotta keep you humble.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, she's at an age, I'm sure I'm done with the new. That's how I felt about TikTok. I'm like, no, I'm gonna sit that out. I can't do it.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. She's got what she uses and what she doesn't, and she does not care about my world at all. It's great.

[Dax Shepard]

But you do have the title of CEO of Instagram. Yeah. Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

We say head of Instagram.

[Monica Padman]

Isn't that funny? They do. All the tech companies, they have their own fingerprint on what they call people. It's very specific. I find the world's very interesting.

[Adam Mosseri]

That's a very nice. Interesting is what my mom would say when she's like, oh, he's interesting. We are particular and odd in our own special ways. For sure. I will acknowledge that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And obviously there's enough social science to back up the fact that cultures are really important at organizations, but I think if you're at a certain threshold of intelligence, a lot of it sounds condescending. That's what triggers me when it's like I'm mopping up the toilet and you're calling me a partner or whatever, a buddy.

[Adam Mosseri]

I'll give you the context. For us, it's a little bit like Instagram is not its own company. It's part of a bigger company. And there's pros and cons to that, but there's a lot of pros for us. Like, people move back and forth between the teams. We're built on top of the same safety systems, the same ad system, et cetera. And so we try to make sure we use language that embraces the fact that it's part of a bigger company, not its own company. So that's the inside baseball on this language bit. Also, just because it's important for people to know, Like, I don't want people to be surprised. Prize that Instagram is owned by Meta and Meta also owns Facebook and WhatsApp and these other things.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

It's also very fascinating how much public opinion can vary within the offshoots of still the same company. I grew up working for General Motors, and that had that as well. A Cadillac is such a different vibe than Chevrolet.

[Adam Mosseri]

A house of brands.

[Dax Shepard]

Saturn is your progressive, younger consumer. It's all General Motors or the fucking Motors are coming out of the same plant. But it is just kind of shocking how many different opinions.

[Adam Mosseri]

Well, we build up emotional affinity for these different brands. I'm trying to think of a good example in the world of, like, soda and drinks. How many different companies does Coke own? And he might be anti Coke and Pro. I forget which water is theirs.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. Smart water. I don't know that that's it.

[Adam Mosseri]

Oh, no. I'm gonna get yelled at. Dasani. I was trying to say that I think it's Dasani.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. There are some people. Yeah, I think it's.

[Adam Mosseri]

I hope it's Dasani.

[Dax Shepard]

I think there might even be, like, a big war between Awkwafina and Dasani. Like, those are the camps. Yeah. And I think they're both Coca Cola. But Rob will look it up.

[Monica Padman]

I'm saying it. Oh, and let's just throw in shade. I'm serious. There's salt in it.

[Adam Mosseri]

Electrolytes.

[Monica Padman]

No, I do love electrolytes.

[Adam Mosseri]

Dasani is Coke. Aquafina is Pepsi.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, well, that's a legit battle.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yes. Yeah, that's real.

[Dax Shepard]

That's shocking that I love Aquafina. That. That's my pick. I know, because I bleed Diet Coke.

[Adam Mosseri]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

See, again, as you're saying, we're proving your point.

[Adam Mosseri]

I got through college on Diet Coke. Choir just did a pod on them recently, actually.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, they did?

[Adam Mosseri]

I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm excited to because those two guys are really smart. They also have different recipes for different countries, though, which I think is interesting. Coke in Mexico tastes pretty different than Coke in the US for instance.

[Dax Shepard]

And that supposedly is due to whether it's cane sugar or high fructose. But I don't know. I don't want to be sued by either Mexico or the US Contingency.

[Adam Mosseri]

The country of Mexico sues Dax Shepard.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so all to say, I'm going to ask you all those similar questions, and they probably will have a. A tiny bit different bent coming from us. But before that, I just want to double back on the design fact. As I watched you interact with people and I had to assess from afar what I think your skill set is, is you have a very, very intuitive aesthetic that you trust deeply. And you're a great challenger of people and hierarchies and with some kind of savvy that has allowed you to still exist.

[Adam Mosseri]

So without getting crushed.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yes.

[Adam Mosseri]

It'll happen eventually.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Again, like you being in public. This could be the day.

[Adam Mosseri]

Here we go. Microphones are right here.

[Monica Padman]

Good place to end.

[Dax Shepard]

You're holding the loaded weapon.

[Adam Mosseri]

If I'm going to go down, this is a great place not to happen.

[Dax Shepard]

Can you agree with that assessment at all?

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, I'll take the compliment. Design is about problem solving at a fundamental level. And I think you can apply problem solving to any industry. Right. So you're trying to identify what are you trying to get done, what are the different options, what are the trade offs. These are pretty standard patterns that you can apply elsewhere. And so that's the kind of structured thinking that I have to do in my job. Even. Even though I'm not designing anything anymore, even though I would like to. That lends itself to being comfortable in debate, because you can have a position and a reason for that idea and you're comfortable articulating that reason.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's not personal to you, obviously. Right. It's a function. You're arguing how functional this is.

[Adam Mosseri]

Exactly. But that's a thing that designers, and I'm not an exception when I was a designer, often struggle with, is divorcing your sense of self worth from the worth of your work. And critique is like a whole part of design where you're gonna go and you're gonna show your stuff and people are gonna rip it apart. And you have to embrace the signal and understand that it's not an attack on you. It's a way to support you by improving the work itself. And I didn't learn that properly. Cause I didn't go to design school, really. I learned that from a handful of young designers who went to proper design school, who joined Facebook in their early years, who brought that culture to Facebook. And I learned a lot from them.

[Dax Shepard]

Am I wrong that you had a couple of defining moments in your career where you did challenge Mark on something specifically?

[Adam Mosseri]

Oh, yeah, A couple of things.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What were the things?

[Adam Mosseri]

So, okay, a couple different ones. I'm trying to think which ones I may have told you about, but I might just share other things I'm not supposed to share. Well, look, I think careers are often defined by a few major decisions which may be informed or uninformed. And for me, there were a couple. The first one was I was a design director at Facebook. I was managing a bunch of designers, and there was this project that became the Facebook phone. And all the PM leadership ended up leaving the company for different reasons, some personal, some professional. So it was this giant crater where the leadership was and what we call product management, or the PMs. And I just declared myself the PM, which you can't do anymore. You have to interview because that's a reasonable thing to do, to have a job. But this was a long time ago, probably 13 years ago. And Mia, Mark definitely told me not to do it. Mark was like, no, you're a designer, you shouldn't do that. But I did it. He was nice about it. About six weeks later, it was late on a Friday, I was at the office. He was complimenting me, but he said, you're doing a lot better in this role than I thought you would.

[Dax Shepard]

His very Mark way of complimenting someone. Yeah, exactly.

[Adam Mosseri]

Which is great. Which I took the signal. So there's been a couple instances like that over the years, some with Mark and disagreeing with him, some otherwise, where you make these decisions. And I wasn't doing it because I thought it was a good career decision. I was doing it because I was working on the project. There was a need, and I just was trying to fill that need. But I got lucky because like I said before, I'm a generalist, and PMs are basically generalists. You work with the designers, the engineers, the comms people, the lawyers, the policy people.

[Dax Shepard]

You're a translator. No. You have to be able to speak each person's language well enough to bridge all these communications.

[Adam Mosseri]

Absolutely. You're a bridge across everybody. If somebody doesn't know something on your team that they should know, that's probably on you.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Adam Mosseri]

And so my career, for a couple reasons, but this was probably the main one, started taking off because I was in a role that matched my skills much better. I was a middle of the pack designer. I made up for it with sheer work.

[Monica Padman]

Like, hours abundance.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. In terms of, like, raw talent, middle of the pack is maybe even a little generous. And so I did well, but by sheer force of will. And then when I kept working hard but my role embraced my strengths and weaknesses, then things started to accelerate.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so I guess my first question is, how are you guys? Let's just leave what's on the app alone for one second. And just how have you guys been able to utilize AI in the running of the products?

[Adam Mosseri]

So a couple different things. So one thing that we've been doing for a long time is, and this is controversial, is we rank content. We try to show you the content we think you're the most interested in at the top. And we've been using different forms of AI for that for many, many years. Another thing we do with AI for many years, or forms of it, is we try and classify content. So it could be something positive, like, is this about a certain topic that you're interested in? Or it could be negative. Does this violate our community guidelines, therefore shouldn't be on the platform, and that

[Dax Shepard]

the AI is sifting through all that material and trying to put those in buckets?

[Adam Mosseri]

Because there's however you want to count, tens, hundreds, even millions or billions of things uploaded a day. We can't have people review all of it. So we use technology to content at scale and to be clear. And this is changing. But historically, I've said this before, people are better at nuance, and technology is better at scale. And so we've had to focus on things that are less nuanced, like what our rules are, because technology hasn't been as good at understanding nuance historically.

[Dax Shepard]

And humans are so crafty at quickly figuring out what is triggering the safety net.

[Adam Mosseri]

Oh, yeah. It's very adversarial, because one challenge we have is spammers who are constantly trying to work around all of our safety protections have bots, for instance. But bots that don't post every second 24 hours a day, they pretend to go to sleep, they pretend to go to work. They're inconsistent. They add spelling mistakes.

[Dax Shepard]

What's the Japanese word for imperfection?

[Adam Mosseri]

I don't know it.

[Dax Shepard]

This is the second day in a row we can't get it. Wabi sabi sabi.

[Adam Mosseri]

But it's not.

[Monica Padman]

It's wabi sabi, but it's not. It's the one that has the gold that you piece together.

[Adam Mosseri]

Oh, that's a specific art form where they take broken ceramics and they put it back together with gold lining.

[Monica Padman]

Correct. And it's like the imperfections, really, the beauty.

[Adam Mosseri]

That stuff is beautiful.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And it has a name and we're all supposed to know and it's applicable.

[Adam Mosseri]

There's a word that's not as helpful in Japanese for Instagramable, which I learned when I was there recently, which was instabaya.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really? Meaning it's like, so aesthetically pleasing it's worth posting.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yes, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Adam Mosseri]

I'm, like, torn on how I feel about that. What's happening to us now, though, is we're building AI products that are more natively AI into the product, into the app. I say product. That's Silicon Valley speak for, like, the app. But the other thing that's happening to us is we are also getting really disrupted ourselves. Like, how we build, how we write code, how we do research, how we analyze data is changing really quickly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

And so we are also having to reinvent how we do what we do, which I think some people outside of the industry don't realize because they're like, oh, tech is just going to keep doing tech. It's very different.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

And it's going to get a lot more different over the next year or two. And so I can tell you some of the things that we're doing now, but honestly, I think it's all changing really fast.

[Dax Shepard]

People are very right to be concerned because the power of these products is enormous. We've never seen this before. Right. So it is the most powerful thing. So it does deserve the most amount of scrutiny. But also, nothing operates perfectly. Everything is iterations built on previous mistakes and correcting those mistakes. So the notion that, again, people are going to be able to be clairvoyance. Even like when I listen to that Rabbit hole about YouTube and its algorithm of increasing engagement. Everyone had great intentions. No one really could foresee, oh, it's gonna radicalize people. They didn't think, oh, well, what will be more exciting is more and more radical content. And it starts at Jordan Peterson and then you're a white nationalist. I'm sympathetic to that to some degree. Now it has to be immediately corrected the moment that's discovered, all hands on deck to fix that problem. But again, there is probably, like, what you're saying is this illusion that because you guys are creating the product that you're not also victims of it all as well. No one's really immune to the challenges of this AI growth.

[Adam Mosseri]

We're not immune to it at all. I mean, I would say two different things. One, on the industry and the scrutiny and the size is not only is it big and important, and obviously a lot of power in the hands of a small number of companies, it also grew really quickly. There are other industries that are equally important, but they took decades or centuries to get to their scale. I don't know, railroad, the automotive industry,

[Dax Shepard]

the power system, electricity.

[Adam Mosseri]

Exactly. It was 10, 20 years from not a thing to a big deal. And so that's tough because society doesn't have time to really adapt or consider it or get comfortable with it. Laws take much longer to happen as well. So we're dealing with that now as a sort of a backlog of incoming compliance.

[Dax Shepard]

And the second they understand the tech to legislate, it's gone.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, exactly. But on the second thing, an app like Instagram, you make a lot of decisions as the team running it, and you have a lot of responsibility. But what you are mostly doing in some ways, is designing a system that has rules. You could almost think about it as like a city, right? You know, it's like, hey, where are the roads? What are the speed limits? Where are the traffic lights? But then people fill it and they decide what to do. I'm not trying to pass the buck. That doesn't mean that you don't have responsibility as the planner, but that responsibility is different. It's indirect. You have to set healthy incentives. You have to, in our case, moderate content effectively. In even outside of the world of really high scrutiny areas, the decisions you make about the design of Instagram will affect the vibe, how it feels. Is it more positive or is it negative? Is it more about debate? Is it more about visual expression?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And you're right, it's a great point as a city. Cause it's like, yes, we'll install these traffic lights at all these intersections, and then people will blow red lights and they'll drive drunk. And it's questionable whether now the city's responsible. The light was hung. So it is really tricky to figure out where the culpability lies.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, look, I just think the responsibilities are shared and they're just different. We have to understand how the system works. We have to set healthy guidelines and rules. We have to enforce those rules effectively and consistently and appropriately. But people could just decide not to open up Instagram tomorrow, or they could decide to try to abuse the hell out of it tomorrow.

[Monica Padman]

But there is an acknowledgement, right, that it's so hard to not open up Instagram. And I mean, good job, you know, but it's built to get you to keep pressing it. But I guess if we're Doing the metaphor about the city, it's like, okay, we hung the light, but we know everyone runs that light. And oh, well.

[Adam Mosseri]

Well, I don't think running the light is using Instagram. I think running the light is like posting something that's against the rules. But yes, obviously we are interested in creating something that people are going to use more. We think if you use it more, on average, it's a sign that it's valuable to you in some way. But there's well spent time and there's time poorly spent. We're not ignorant to that fact. So we try not to use tactics that make you use Instagram or convince you to use Instagram, that it's going to make you regret using it later. And we try to focus more on ones that you're going to be more excited about how you felt about the product later. So we do things like, we don't just look at how many things you like or how much time you spend. We have these, like, worth your time surveys where actually we do a lot of these where we'll ask you, was this thing worth your time? And we see are people's answers to that question trending up or trending down over time. So it's a balance of different types of goals.

[Dax Shepard]

It's funny too, because, yes, I'm critical of that. And then. But when I turn the lens back onto us, I go like, I don't feel guilty that people would listen to our show six hours a week. We put out six hours of content a week. I would want them to listen to all six hours. That would be my dream, you know, because I think what we're doing is good. It's tricky because I believe in it. And I'm not really too concerned with how much time people are spending or quote, wasting on this, which I believe in. It's a little hard for me to then and be critical of someone else that has a creative endeavor that they also want people to consume.

[Adam Mosseri]

It's tricky, but I think you can do both. I think the scrutiny is merited because the importance is there and I think there are responsibilities. I just think that evaluating how we do is not the same as evaluating how a person behaves. Cause it's a platform, there's lots of people. What you control and what you don't is different. What's appropriate for you to do and not do is different. Like, I don't think you want a tech company in Silicon Valley deciding this topic is the most important topic today or this news event is the most important news event today and we're pushing that out.

[Dax Shepard]

Or a dancing video is irrelevant and a waste of everyone's time.

[Adam Mosseri]

Exactly. But you also don't want us to be agnostic. I really don't think that you can pretend that we're neutral. We make decisions. Those affect how people use the product, what they see, and therefore there's responsibilities that come along with those decisions.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you guys ever approached this with the Danny Kahneman framing of thinking of multiple selves? And for a shortcut, we'll call one the experiential self and one the narrative self. So one is the you that lays in bed at night and evaluates your day, evaluates where you are in this broader story of your life. Am I reaching my goals? Am I the family member I wanna be? And that's your narrative self. And then the experiential self is like, ooh, boobs, horsepower, right? Like, that's instantly. The experience itself is a self you have that you're servicing. And I can almost think of your. Was this useful to your time as being like. Like trying to strike a balance between that narrative self and the experiential, where the experiential is good, but also it doesn't give you a hangover from having used it.

[Adam Mosseri]

I talk about the tension as your first order preferences, and your second order

[Dax Shepard]

preferences is also common.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, I like chocolate. It tastes good. That's a first order preference. I also want to be healthy and I want to eat healthy.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't want diabetes.

[Adam Mosseri]

I want to not want the chocolate. And so that's a second order preference. And I think one of the things that the industry needs to be honest about and struggles with is that we optimize for things that we can measure. And it's much easier to measure your first order preferences than your second order preferences that you like. This thing in the next 500 milliseconds is pretty easy for us to tell. Did you talk about it with a friend that night at the dinner, or did you feel good about it the next day when you thought about it?

[Dax Shepard]

Did you go to the GoFundMe page and donate money to that cause you were made aware of on there?

[Adam Mosseri]

You can measure these things. It's just more difficult. And I have found in my time in this industry, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between how easy something is to measure and how important it is. But there is a strong correlation between how easy something is to measure and how much we optimize for it. Not out of any malicious intent, but

[Dax Shepard]

just because that's what's available.

[Adam Mosseri]

That's what's available. So what I have to do is always push the teams to get more creative about trying to understand these second order preferences or this narrative self so that we can actually lean into it. That's why I really love the Dior Algo stuff. Have you guys seen this? No.

[Monica Padman]

What's that?

[Adam Mosseri]

That's actually not the external name. That's just how I say it. It's called your algorithm. Two years ago, there was a meme on Threads where people were writing letters to the algorithm, making requests, stop showing my high school friends kids photos like, I do not care. Like that kind of stuff. And so that inspired this. And then the tech got to the place where we could do it. So it's only in the Reels tab right now. But if you go to the Reels tab in the top right in the US there's these little sliders with these hearts, and we'll tell you what we think you're interested in. And then you can make edits and you can say, I actually want to see these things. I don't want to see these other topics.

[Monica Padman]

Wait, where is it? Where's the Reels tab? Ease.

[Adam Mosseri]

It's the second tab. Just click on the little.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that at the bottom. Oh, boy. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

We're exposing you.

[Adam Mosseri]

We're doing it live.

[Dax Shepard]

All right.

[Adam Mosseri]

This will be great. All right, so do you see in the top right a little icon?

[Monica Padman]

Yep. Wait, up top there, the hearts.

[Adam Mosseri]

With the hearts. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Okay, click it.

[Adam Mosseri]

I love that.

[Monica Padman]

Your algorithm.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Does it know you? What does it say?

[Monica Padman]

It says lately you've been into. Lately you've been into award show glamour, Sweat sessions, and culinary indulgences. It's pretty good.

[Dax Shepard]

What are sweat sessions? Sessions?

[Adam Mosseri]

No, like workouts.

[Monica Padman]

Workouts. I do get served a lot of workouts.

[Adam Mosseri]

We think you're into them.

[Dax Shepard]

Her narrative self knows she's supposed to be working out more, so it's already servicing your narrative.

[Adam Mosseri]

But you can see there's a list of.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it says what you want to see more of based on your activities, summarized by AI. Golden Globes. Fashion, Luxury Fashion. Fashion. Monica Fashion, Apple Podcast, Los Angeles food scene. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Beauty, comedy, food, fitness, motivation, Golden Globes. Pretty good.

[Adam Mosseri]

But now let's say we were wrong. Let's say you're not into sweat sessions.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Adam Mosseri]

You can actually press that and move that to the. I don't want to see this thing.

[Monica Padman]

What you want to see less of.

[Adam Mosseri]

So you can get your hands in there and you can change it. Because also sometimes we might be misreading a signal. Like you don't really want to see it, but. But you can't stop looking at it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Adam Mosseri]

And another thing is sometimes your interests can change. Like this is a tragic example, but one that I have a friend who went through, which is she got pregnant and she was going deep on the nesting thing and her Instagram got all about all this baby gear. Tragically, she lost a pregnancy. How horrible is it that she's opening up Instagram and we're pummeling her with baby stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes.

[Adam Mosseri]

So that was one of the inspirations for this, which is she should be able to go in and be like, nothing about nurseries.

[Monica Padman]

I like that.

[Adam Mosseri]

And so by allowing you to get in there and not only see what we think you're interested in, but for you to tell us yes and no, that then hopefully allows people to express their second order preferences or the narrative self. Now, again, not everyone's going to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Adam Mosseri]

But one way to learn about these things is just ask. So we pick up on your interests, we learn from them and we adapt. But we don't understand quite as literally as people think we do. What you're interested in. For instance, we don't understand that that's a joke about race. A black comic.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

It's not nuanced.

[Adam Mosseri]

The way it works is an approach we call embeddings. But basically the way you can think about it is you can take any video and map it into a space. It's not two dimensional, but imagine it's a giant two dimensional map. There's no borders or boundaries or labels. It's just a bunch of videos on a big board. Similar videos end up in similar places on the board.

[Dax Shepard]

They concentrate in little areas.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yes, exactly. Because the way the technology works is similar things end up in similar places. And so then if you like one video, whatever it, we look and find videos near it in that space and show you those videos. What allows us to do your algorithm work is now we can embed topics into the same map as the videos. And so we can be like, oh, okay, cool. Like you said, you're into men's vintage fashion. That's here. Let's find the videos near here. You said you don't want to see bikini videos. That topic is here. It won't show you any videos that are near it here.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. So you're giving it a low si, basically.

[Adam Mosseri]

Kind of, yeah. We couldn't do that effectively even two years ago. That's actually, how a lot of ranking works is we're like, all right, you like this thing? What is similar to it? We'll show it to you. People think it's like, oh, you know, I'm into surfing. And it's like, two years ago, it would have just been this giant number. I wouldn't have been able to tell you what it means. Now I can say, oh, that's pretty close to surfing or to, like, skater culture or whatever it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dip there. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. That's smart. Not checking the pockets of your jeans before doing laundry. Classic oversight. That mystery clunking in the dryer. Yeah. That was your lip balm's final moments. And somehow there's always one random receipt in there to dissolve into confetti. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote. That could save you hundreds. Hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate North America Insurance Company Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses, Monica, only use 20% of their data?

[Monica Padman]

That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, or paying for a coffee. That's 1/5 full.

[Monica Padman]

Yuck.

[Dax Shepard]

Point is, you miss a lot unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data. Data you need to grow your business. The insights trapped in emails, call logs and transcripts, all that unstructured data that makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And when you get a full cup of coffee, you can do more, too. But I digress. Visit HubSpot.com today.

[Adam Mosseri]

I appreciate you reading your algorithm out loud, by the way. That took some bravery.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. I didn't know it was coming. It's good. Is there a way to act so I see you can drag, but can you, like, type in whatever you want?

[Dax Shepard]

Things that are getting you angry on a regular basis, figure out what words are associated with that anger and block them out.

[Adam Mosseri]

That's called hidden words. Yeah, you can do that. You can do that for comments, too. And you can also do that for your messages.

[Dax Shepard]

I like that one a lot.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's just people, they like to be angry. This isn't your issue. But I don't see people wanting to get rid of that because they want it.

[Adam Mosseri]

I think it depends on. So for politics specifically, this Research is a bit out of date. We say research, it's usually surveys. We found that there was a small percentage of people who really wanted more politics, but most people were like, I kind of want to see less politics. That's again this tension between the narrative self and what was the other self?

[Dax Shepard]

Experiential.

[Adam Mosseri]

Experiential self.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

Is they like saw it, they clicked on it. We think they like it, but they don't. Their narrative self or their second order preference was like, I just need a break.

[Dax Shepard]

They don't feel good. They know they don't feel good afterwards.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. And most people with these surgeries surveys were in that bucket. There's a very loud call it 5 or 10% of people. I forget what the number is specifically. So a meaningful minority, but minority that are like all it. It also varies by platform. Like Threads has way more politics than Instagram does. Not because it ranks for politics, but because you make these other decisions about how the app works. Threads is designed around back and forth conversation that's better for debate. That's gonna mean topics like politics are better served.

[Dax Shepard]

And would I be right to say Threads is also encouraging you to share thoughts, not necessarily images.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. I think Instagram is about sharing a creative object, a visual creativity, videos, photos. Threads is about perspectives, your hot takes. And you're gonna have a lot of takes on what's going on in politics. So the percentage of Threads that is politics is way higher than the percentage

[Dax Shepard]

of Instagram that's concerning to me. I don't know that it's doing anyone an ego, but whatever, I don't get to say. Okay, now let's talk about AI generated content.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yes. It's a very uncontroversial that.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm sure you have a perfect.

[Monica Padman]

You really put yourself out in the fire. I'm impressed.

[Adam Mosseri]

Well, you got to talk about these things. I would way rather that everything that is in your mind that you're worried about or that someone's watching is thinking about, we talk about than to sweep anything underneath the rug.

[Dax Shepard]

And I hope people have an appetite too. We're not sure and we're doing the best we can to monitor it and see as it evolves. I hope there's some appetite for that and some latitude for that because that. That's the reality of how this is kind of unfolding. So I have a lot of questions about it. One is we should start by defining it. Right. Because here's what's tricky. You were asked during this Bloomberg thing, could you label everything that was AI generated. That would be helpful for all of us. And you're like, yes, we agree. We did that. And what we were doing is it'll read anything you do on Photoshop or Adobe. Adobe as being AI generated. So it's like, where is this line? If someone uses some Photoshop to brush up a pimple on their face in the video, that's now AI. Where are we drawing the lines? So maybe we should just kind of define it.

[Adam Mosseri]

Like most complicated issues, the edges are much easier to define. So there's clearly. You used a film camera and it took light and those photons hit a piece of film and like, you captured a moment. And it's not perfect, but it's authentic capture of a moment in reality. And then there's. I went to some AI model and I came up with an idea and I expressed that as words. And then out came this crazy video of a hippo and a tutu doing a backflip, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Adam Mosseri]

And that clearly never, ever happened. So that's purely synthetic content. And then what I would call maybe captured content. Actually think most content's in the middle. So, like with all of our phones today, when you capture, it's doing a lot of photo processing. Some of it's using AI, some of it's not. It's trying to make sure you are. Are not wildly backlit. So if the sky's bright in front of you, it might use AI to brighten you up and darken the sky so it looks more like you would perceive it as opposed to a film camera where you would never be able to see the.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. AI is doing color correction. Like crazy.

[Adam Mosseri]

All sorts of stuff. Sometimes in some of the default cameras, it's doing skin smoothing. It's doing things that are a little bit more contentious, really. There's lots of work to try to make sure lighting works properly for different skin colors, which is another interesting thing

[Dax Shepard]

that just happened to me. I took a picture with a gal that was working at a restaurant in Detroit that I frequent. As she held it for the self selfie and took the picture, I was like, I look 29 in this photo and she looks much younger. I was like, oh, her go to camera. Is this augmented because it's like an app or something? She only takes photos clearly through this app. I looked at it as it came out, like, well, that's neither of us, but here we go. There's your picture.

[Adam Mosseri]

When you do portrait mode, it's recreating the bokeh effect you get from a shallow depth of field. From a really wide open lens. And so then it's like, okay, well if it's using this kind of, kind of model or this kind of AI model, what is AI? Is an interesting question. If I'm doing a spot cleanup for like a pimple, it might be just literally copying pixels or it might be using AI to generate pixels. Do we call that AI? And so I'm not trying to put my hands up in the air and say we can't do anything. I'm just saying the reality of the situation is it is a spectrum hard

[Dax Shepard]

to define, almost impossible.

[Adam Mosseri]

So there's that challenge and then there's another challenge which is the models are getting so good that like the work that we do now and we do work to try to detect things that are automatically generated by AI will get less and less effective over time as the models get better. Now our models can get better too. But it's an arms race and I actually think at this point we will continue that race. But it might be more practical to essentially mark things that were captured when they are captured by the camera with what's called like a fingerprint and verify that those were actually captured, then verify that things were actually generated. It might be easier to identify what was actually captured by a camera by doing industry wide solutions around some of these interesting technologies than to try and automatically detect what was created with an AI. So we're now exploring that. So then you could click on something that you see on social media and it could be like, hey, this was signed by the Sony camera in a way that can't be replicated or forged by.

[Dax Shepard]

Will they be using like NFT technology to kind of create that?

[Adam Mosseri]

There's a couple different approaches out there. I'm forgetting the name of the one that Adobe's leaned into right now. I was reading about theirs last week or the week before, but basically you work with manufacturers. So whether it's Apple or Google or Samsung or Sony or Canon or whatever, and they actually put think of it as like a signature in the file that can't be replicated.

[Monica Padman]

Is there a way to just require that whoever creates the content. So instead of you guys having to go in and decipher that, it's like illegal if you create something from AI to not not say like the onus is on the creator, not on you guys. Ads are like that, right? Where you have to say this is an ad.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yes, but then the challenge is enforcement.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you have to police it, which puts them in the situation that they're currently in.

[Adam Mosseri]

So like ads is a good example. So in the US there is no law that says you have to mark something as an ad. If it's an ad. In Germany, you do. So in Germany, you'll see a lot of creators will just put ad on everything because they're worried if they unintentionally, there's like a liquid death water in the background going to get in trouble. And then the question is, how does the government police it? Because you said illegal. Now, if we had a rule, let's say you have to mark it as AI. The rule doesn't matter unless we enforce it. Back to this traffic light sort of analogy from before. So to enforce it, we need to be able to detect it on our own and say, like, hey, you didn't label this.

[Dax Shepard]

And then again, what percentage are we going to let slide?

[Adam Mosseri]

If.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it 8% synthetic? Is it 12% synthetic? When do we enforce? Am I writing a ticket for 5 over or 15?

[Adam Mosseri]

I want to give people context to make more informed decisions. So we could maybe show you how likely we think it is to be AI. We don't know for sure, but we think there's a 70% chance. Or we could show you. Oh, this was actually signed. So we know this was actually captured because it's signed by this industry standard. I think we better first adopt a standard than build our own that works across the whole industry because obviously people spend a lot of time on a lot of social networks, not just Instagram. My bias is to. To not avoid the work, but to do the work that is gonna be robust over the long run and then give people information to decide what they wanna trust or not.

[Dax Shepard]

But again, in the same Bloomberg interview, you said something I think is very profound. And again, I think people in general want everyone else to do the work that's also their work. Whether that's your kids not doing well in school, it's the teacher's fault. But you've not done one bit of homework with your kid. Everyone's always off the homework fights are hard. Yes, but you said what you do with your own boys, there is some personal responsibility, which is. We're maybe not asking the right question. The question we're asking is, is this AI or not? And a better framing of it for your own children. What you tell your children is to ask them who created it, what their incentives are and what they're after. You have to identify that because that's really how you're gonna figure all this out.

[Adam Mosseri]

I think that's what digital literacy is gonna become for our kids is in a world where anybody can create something that looks real. Sure. You can be like, does it have a signature or not? Is it like generated by AI or not? But it's still going to become much more important to consider who said it and why they might have said it. And that is something that historically isn't how we think. Not just online, but offline. Right. We just kind of evaluate what we see based on exactly that. What we see, exactly what we believe our eyes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And of course, we get into the vast spectrum of skepticism that people inherently have. What's funny is we want to not have to do on this platform what we do in real life, which is you're telling me you need $20 because you need a bus ticket back to wherever. Cause your kids. So I'm evaluating. Am I getting scammed right now? Is this person genuinely trying to get home or are they trying to go get Mad Dog 2020? I have to try to figure that out. Out. And I have to do my best to assess their intention. And we're doing it all the time in all of our interpersonal relationships.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

If a guy's selling you something, you've got to consider the fact, well, they're a salesman who gets paid on units moved. I must keep that in mind when I'm evaluating how effective this product is or not. And we're going to just have to do that with the content we see.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. And then our role, I think, is going to be to give you and make more prominent, because some of this already exists, but it's too hard to get to more information. This account is based in this country. It was created two days ago or 20 years ago, or in our case, 15 years ago.

[Dax Shepard]

You used yourself as an example.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, yeah. So you could be like, okay, Adam, this account is based in the us it has had no username changes ever. You know, it's been registered for. Call it 13, 14 years.

[Dax Shepard]

This is reputation.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, exactly. And then we could add other things, like this post was recorded with the Sony camera, authenticated by Sony. Or this post was created with AI. That might not mean it's a bad post.

[Dax Shepard]

Then you just know when you said, and I guess this is probably forthcoming. I would be so supportive of this is your biases. So you are left leaning. You are right leaning. You mentioned financial bias, which is incredibly pertinent.

[Adam Mosseri]

But then there's even other things over time. I mean, we're talking about step two now, three, four, five. I think it would be interesting to be like okay, well, this meme or this narrative, where did it come from? Who was the first person who posted about this? That's interesting. Not just from a safety perspective, but from a. The value should go to the original creator perspective. Creatives, right? On one hand, it could be like, okay, this is a lie. Who started it? But on the other hand, could be like, this is an amazing dance or bit. Who came up with it first. There are all sorts of really interesting things that we can do under this umbrella of surfacing information about what you're seeing so that you can not just decide whether or not to trust it, but decide what. What it means.

[Dax Shepard]

I can tell you the one that scared me. I saw, and this was a breakdown. Thank God someone exposed this. But this video that had gone very, very viral. It was a New York City police officer confronting ICE agents saying, you don't have jurisdiction in this city. I, too, am upholding the Constitution. It was compelling. It was inspiring. You wanted to take action when you saw it. And it was millions and millions and millions of folks forwards, and someone had the wherewithal to zoom in on the badge on the shoulder of the cop. And it's not real writing, but I'm telling you, I think I'm quite good at seeing this stuff, as probably all of us think the literacy competency illusion.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we're not good at it.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was like, oh, now this is what's really fucking dangerous. This is like a super inspirational video that could make you leave your house and go react to something that didn't

[Adam Mosseri]

happen and was designed to be. It's not a coincidence that that thing was sent around. It was designed to be sent around around. It was designed to invoke a specific emotion.

[Dax Shepard]

And I just think, man, when you start having people responding to atrocities that haven't even happened, that's the scary part.

[Adam Mosseri]

I think there's tons of things that are concerning and there's tons of things that are exciting. Technologies has continued to change more and more quickly, and we're just accelerating a lot right now. This has been happening as a trend for a long time, but this last year or two, and this next couple years, is a real inflection point in the speed at which technology is changing. And there are lots of things to be excited about, and there's lots of things to be concerned about. And our job as platforms like Instagram is to consider both. In what way can AI give people superpowers, help you remember everything, process immense amounts of information, produce more, be more creative, get people who weren't creative to be creative in the first place, but also, how can it be abused? Where do we have to make sure we're giving people more context that we didn't think about having to give people just a year or two ago? Where do we have to be more careful about how it's going to be misused and then get ahead of that and prevent those misuses from happening in the first place? When invariably something happens that we didn't plan on that's bad, how can we react quickly? It's just the two sides.

[Dax Shepard]

What a stressful fucking job you've taken.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, very.

[Adam Mosseri]

It is amazing. It is very stressful and it's also really amazing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes. Like the product itself, it's not lost on me.

[Monica Padman]

What's like your personal high from the job?

[Adam Mosseri]

I get to meet amazing people, which for me is really energizing for two reasons. One, I love people and I can. But two, I'm really curious about different industries. I get to go talk to a bunch of different podcasters about how their world works, how does the business work, how does the creative process work? I get to do the same thing in fashion. I get to do the same thing with European footballers.

[Monica Padman]

You're just exposed to everyone.

[Adam Mosseri]

I'm lucky enough that I get to talk to people who are amazing in all these different worlds and all these different countries.

[Dax Shepard]

We have the same upside of same job upside.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Literally identical.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. Yeah. That's one of my favorite perks of this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I keep walking around just like it's impossible. The amount of people we've got to meet in this one lifetime.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. And you get to really talk to them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Adam Mosseri]

In a world where not last than me. We have been part of moving the world to shorter and shorter bits of information that are consumed. You all are part of this sort of almost counter trend, which is like, no, we're just going to talk for an hour or two and we're going to go deep. And people want that.

[Monica Padman]

I get nervous because even with what we do, so much has changed in the past eight years since when we started where they knew, like, they would come and you'd have to listen for the whole thing or for most of it. But now clips are such a huge part of doing podcasts and I do worry. I'm like, oh, no. It's just back to the thing that we were escaping, which is late night.

[Dax Shepard]

The antidote.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Literally to the 140 characters.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. In the five minute fun clip on late night, which we love. But the whole point is to have like a real conversation. And now it feels like we're almost real reverting back to that.

[Adam Mosseri]

I think what's key, and you should tell me if I'm off base here because this is not your world, not mine, is to not conflate. What I see is more of the marketing for the conversation and then the actual conversation. And there might be way more views of the short clips on YouTube and Instagram and elsewhere. But the core of the business, I think is still the long form. Both from a, like, who do you have the deepest connection with as a creative, but also from a business perspective.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, the real estate to sell is on the long form.

[Adam Mosseri]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

That's what's a bummer. I think sometimes where I'm like, oh my God. I mean I asked so many people, I'm like, oh, do you listen to that? Or let's say they say something about good hang and I'm like, oh, did you listen? They're like, I saw clips. I mean, I saw clips is so common.

[Adam Mosseri]

Totally. And there will be more people who see clips than listen to the whole thing. But if you're growing the group of people who listen to the whole thing by having 10 times as many people do clips, you're still growing your core base.

[Monica Padman]

It's just hard to compare.

[Adam Mosseri]

But if that's shrinking, then it's concerning, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I don't have that fear. I don't think we're losing listeners to clips. I think we're getting exposed to more people who don't do two hour shows.

[Adam Mosseri]

Personally, the thing I also like about your world is you get to participate with just audio. Obviously videos become a big deal. This is why this place is so beautiful. But I listen to you guys when I'm on the way to work, when I'm in the car, when I'm working out. I can't do that with Instagram, I can't do that with clips and videos. And so you get to participate in parts of people's lives that things and products and apps like Instagram don't.

[Monica Padman]

I agree, that's what I love about it. But I worry that it is changing and moving more into. Because our attentions are much shorter. That it's like, oh, I got the gist.

[Adam Mosseri]

It's a real worry. I think people underappreciate audio in general. Like my whole industry does. Like, I've been trying to push it a little bit. Which is most time spent on Instagram is watching videos. Now that is half audio. Right. But we're not thinking about that experience nearly as much. What does Instagram sound like is an

[Dax Shepard]

interesting question, because the visual component has just gotten better and better and better, and the audio experience is really not.

[Adam Mosseri]

And we tend to, I think, think more about what we see than what we hear. But what we hear, I think can have just as strong an emotional impact.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Another thing that I was sympathetic to is, first of all, I think it might shock people to learn. And you do this great example when you have a crowd of people, it's very easy to demonstra the reality of this, because when you first say it, you almost don't believe it. But tell us where people spend time on Instagram.

[Adam Mosseri]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Because you have basically four options, right? You have the feed, you have reels, you have DMs. Maybe. Is there three stories and stories.

[Monica Padman]

Stories, big one, right.

[Dax Shepard]

So you've got these four columns and also just start maybe at the beginning, what it was and where we're at now.

[Adam Mosseri]

People my age, I'm in my 40s, they think of Instagram almost always as a feed of square photos, because that's what Instagram was when Instagram launched. But if you look at how people spend their time, and even more if you look at what people do, it's just not the core part of Instagram anymore. People share way more to stories than they do to feed. People, particularly young people, spend way more time in stories than they do in feed. But the thing that people do, the most, particularly young people, is actually message is dm. Teens will often. And young people will spend more time even in DM than in some of these other surfaces. And they definitely share way more. And forget about all the text. If you just look at photos and videos sent, there's way more photos and videos sent as DMs than there are posted to stories or feed, or even those two combined at this point.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you ask everyone the room, put your hand up if you've sent a DM on Instagram in the last day and 90% of the room puts their hand up. Great. Now keep your hand up if you have.

[Adam Mosseri]

If you posted. I actually did this just this one time at Bloomberg. I made it up. I was like, did you open up Instagram today? Did you send a DM today? Did you post a story today? And it's like a bunch of hands went down. Did you post a feed post today?

[Monica Padman]

And it was like, every hand.

[Dax Shepard]

Nobody has two people feed, post today?

[Monica Padman]

I did, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we did. We have a schedule.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

But when you did it that way, it really sank in. And then what I appreciated was you being honest about the fact that we have that data. Right. So had we only stuck with feed and we said, no, we're feed only, I wouldn't be on this stage today. We wouldn't be relevant because we see what people want to do and they would have gone to a place where they could have done that.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's just the hard facts of the business. And so what I thought about is we've had very few changes. We went from audio to video, and people lost their fucking mind.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then the other crazy thing was we had you could do it a week early if you joined the subscription. People lost their mind.

[Monica Padman]

Also, when we first went to Spotify, people rent really freaked out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But all to say, we've only had three or four changes in eight years and it was very difficult and people were very, very angry. And so I was thinking like, how you're weathering the outrage and also the frustration. Despite what everyone's saying, once they get over the hurdle, they like it.

[Adam Mosseri]

This challenge of change management was my first exposure to sort of controversy in the industry where, you know, I was the designer on a new design of the homepage of Facebook in late 2008, early 2009. And like people lost their minds.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

I was reading the comments. It was death threats. And I'm like 25. And again, my self worth is totally tied up in my work.

[Dax Shepard]

You're nothing if you're not that.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. And I'm just kidding.

[Dax Shepard]

Pumped you ruined it.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, I was just devastated. You look, learn to accept the fact that, look, if you're gonna spend half an hour, an hour using our product a day, the analogy I used to use is like, it's a desk. You wrote some letters, you organized some photos, you did some things. And I just came in, I just rearranged your desk.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

You're gonna tell me to F off because I didn't ask you.

[Monica Padman]

Get out of my space.

[Adam Mosseri]

And you think of it as your desk, but the alternative is to become irrelevant. And I don't think that's being bombastic. I'll give Mark a lot of credit on this. Mark's always, always said that companies usually fail by hitting their goals all the way down. That's about not really defining success properly and also not being willing to make hard decisions. In that case, it's about aiming high, but in this case it's about being willing to actually do things differently. And I would rather lead Instagram during However long I lead it for through a bunch of changes and occasionally go too fast, too far and get back, then have it become irrelevant under my watch.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's fair. This is relevant because my phone updated last night. Do you have the new update?

[Adam Mosseri]

Oh, you just hate it.

[Monica Padman]

I hate it. So I almost. I was like, I'm in a bad mood today. Like, I can't figure out how to use this. I don't like the way it looks. I'm so mad.

[Adam Mosseri]

We've pushed too far. We've made mistakes, We've experienced our fair share of slaps for it. We're trying something now that's different, that I don't know if it's going to work or not, but we are trying a version of Instagram that is basically, you open it up and it's just stories and then you swipe straight into reels. If and when we launch it, there's going to be all of the. All of the energy.

[Dax Shepard]

Go to Tahiti for a.

[Monica Padman]

So there'll be no grid posts at all?

[Adam Mosseri]

No, no, no. You can swipe through them too.

[Dax Shepard]

You'd have to select to be on the feed.

[Adam Mosseri]

The feed would just be more video. It'll still support photos, but it'll be full screen one at a time.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Adam Mosseri]

Interesting how you consume video mostly in the reels tab and shorts on YouTube and all of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, yeah, that scares me.

[Monica Padman]

I know. I don't want to do that.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. So I don't know if it's gonna work. When we try new things, we have to be ready to answer questions because people see it. So right now we are allowing people, not everybody, but we're allowing people in India to opt in. The idea is to manage this if it's successful over a year or even two, and keep making the experience better and better. And then see how many people opt in and of the people who do switch, how many people keep it. And then when we get to a place where, let's say, the majority of people switch and the majority of them actually also keep it, then we can consider moving everybody else over. That creates a really healthy incentive for us to make it something people want to switch to. But it also takes a long time. It's a trial, so we're trying it out.

[Monica Padman]

Is there a way to mass dm? Is there a way to get people to, like, sign up or something where we DM them channels?

[Adam Mosseri]

You can create a channel which is basically a broadcast DM where people can sign up. It's basically like a group chat, but instead of having every armchair in a group chat. You can just message all of them and then they can reply to your messages. So you can kind of consume it.

[Dax Shepard]

But it's not creating a message board.

[Adam Mosseri]

No, it's just in DMs.

[Monica Padman]

I think we should do that and start sending out the episodes.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. It's not for the thing to understand about that is the number of people who will sign up for that is much smaller than the people who are gonna follow you. So it's for your most passionate people. And so the content strategy should match that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so great. That brings up. It was my grievance the first time we spoke with you, and it continues to be my grievance, and I need to understand the rationale behind it.

[Adam Mosseri]

Please.

[Dax Shepard]

Why can I put a link in stories and I can't put a link anywhere else?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we hate.

[Dax Shepard]

Why the fuck can't I put a link in my feed?

[Adam Mosseri]

It's contentious. I get this one every week.

[Dax Shepard]

Might be time to buckle.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, well, you know, I have buckled before.

[Dax Shepard]

If we.

[Adam Mosseri]

If we do links for everybody, everywhere, I think what will happen is there'll be a lot of links posted very quickly, and it'll change how Instagram feels significantly. And I don't think it'll be for the better one. You get a lot more scam and spam links are the vector for all of that. You get a lot more politics and you get a lot more news because they usually are link and text oriented as opposed to photo and video oriented. And I think we become less differentiated from other platforms like Facebook. And I want us to be about creativity, and I think specifically Instagram is about visual creativity. And I think when we do links, we become more about news and publishers and politics and less about fashion and art and film. And so that's the reason. I don't expect that to be remotely satisfying. Satisfying. But that is the reason.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more armchair experiments. Expert, if you dare. Okay, another quick thing I wanted to ask you about is I watch a lot of your two camera posts, and they are generally bits of advice for creators.

[Adam Mosseri]

Oh, my video.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yours. Your comfort level of speaking directly through the lens is outstanding. The fact that you're not in show business is incredible because I suffer from that. And you get right on that motherfucker and talk directly to Lens all the time. And you're given tips to create. And I was curious, do you have a distinction in your mind between the occasional poster who puts food or their vacation photos up versus someone who's making content yes. What would we call the two groups? There's creators and then what?

[Adam Mosseri]

Just average folks.

[Monica Padman]

Users.

[Dax Shepard]

And what percentage is on the platform? Do you have any sense of that?

[Adam Mosseri]

I mean, it depends on how you define it, but they're definitely, at the very least, tens of millions of creators. And there's over 3 billion people who use Instagram. Instagram.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's a tiny minority. Yeah, but my hunch is, because you're servicing them so much, are they the lifeblood of the platform?

[Adam Mosseri]

They are very valuable for the platform. I think that creators. Well, a couple of things. One, we define creators as individuals or groups of people. So not like a company or corporation or brand that produce original content with the intent to grow. You know, you're trying to get something done, maybe you're trying to evangelize, maybe you're trying to get elected, maybe you're trying to sell some shoes. But there's an intent there to grow. So if you're just posting pictures of your vacations or the occasional hobby, that's cool, but we don't think of you as a creator. You can be creative. That's great. But I believe, and we believe, I should say, that power has been shifting from institutions to individuals across industries for years, and we should be leaning into that. Athletes are much more relevant relative to the teams that they play for compared to like 10, 20, 30 years ago,

[Dax Shepard]

or the fact that these college kids are now, now incredibly well paid. All through that.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. Journalists are building their own brands outside of the publications that they work for. You'll see actors have their Instagrams explode when the new Netflix show gets announced, even before it drops. And I think this is because we want to understand the world through the eyes of people, people we admire or trust or look up to. And that's what creators are. And so we think that we should lean in there because that's what people are most interested in. That's who's going to become more and more important.

[Dax Shepard]

This is so obvious, but I didn't think of it until you said it out loud, which is you said, I think it's useful occasionally to pull all the way back and look at the very big picture, which is what the Internet, the first iteration gave rise to, is. Prior to the Internet, people could not self publish. The expense was too high, or there were institutions that controlled that. And so the first wave of the Internet was really allowing every human to be publisher. And that's like a big, big concept. And it's been great and fucked us up because not everyone should be publishing. And we're hearing from a lot of people that we wouldn't have otherwise. And they're very helpful.

[Adam Mosseri]

We've given a lot of power to everybody.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Very democratized. Everyone's democratization of everything. Well, this is what it looks like.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And now this second wave is really producers productions. So before, studios only could afford the Aeroflex camera, that was 250,000, and the film you put in it, that was 35,000. The processing and the stuff that went into creating content, it was impossible for someone to do it. That's been changing, but AI is really now the insane breakthrough where it's like your environment could be any location. So what we're now doing is democratizing production, which is a fascinating thought.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. My hope is that the way we participate in this wave will empower human creativity. I think think that there's versions of AI that will disintermediate people and displace people in jobs, but there's also versions of AI that can give creative people the ability to do more of what they do so well and to be more successful. And so my hope is that on Instagram, the ways that we lean into AI with creative tools and assistance and the ability to understand your insights or to understand the patterns for what works and what doesn't, or. Or to recreate or create whatever is in your imagination will be really empowering. But it's the same construct. The Internet allowed anybody to publish and reach an audience because the cost of distributing things went almost to zero. And AI is going to make the cost of producing things go way, way, way down as well. And so you will just see more content.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

Our job is to figure out the right way and the responsible way to manage one of the platforms. And I'm hoping that we can really understand, empower human creativity and how we lean into that. But that's the big question for us over the next couple years.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Now, how have you evolved in terms of monetizing the work of those creators? And how is Instagram generating money for these creators? And how does it compare to, say, a creator on YouTube?

[Adam Mosseri]

So what creators do, and they're not the only people who do this, is they make content. People consume that content. And then we sell ads, obviously, between pieces of content, because you could think of it as selling ads against that sort of attention.

[Dax Shepard]

It's really the old network television model. You get this free show, Seinfeld, and you're gonna watch a Clorox commercial.

[Adam Mosseri]

Exactly. Now, YouTube has historically been more focused on long form Video and they show ads before and during the video and then they give creators a cut. Our videos are shorter, so we don't put ads before. You don't get a pre roll on Instagram, which is like, you know, you have to watch this and you don't get ads in the middle of the videos. So there's one challenge, which is who deserves the credit? Yeah, YouTube is the best in the industry at creator payouts, I think. I mean, specifically paying creators directly because the platform can pay them, the fans can pay them, or brands can pay them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

In terms of the platform paying them, YouTube does the best. Now what we've done is we've got tests currently in the U.S. india, Japan and Korea. At different times we've tried to pay creators for creating content. And what we keep finding, particularly with videos, if we pay creators, we're like, hey, if you make this number, number of posts, we'll pay you this number of dollars. They do create more posts, but the incremental posts that they make are not as good and they don't pay that many more. So they actually don't drive up the amount of time people use Instagram that much.

[Dax Shepard]

I was going to say there's really no metric you can decide on that. It's not going to obscure the output because it could either be number of posts or it could be total views. Well, now, total views, I'm incentivized to be provocative. I'm incentivized to be what the algorithm was on YouTube.

[Adam Mosseri]

But even if you ignore those challenges, all the tests we have are just burning money. If we invest $10 million in a bonus program we've never made anywhere near $10 million back, I'd be happy just to break even.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure, sure.

[Adam Mosseri]

For me, if we could have this program break even, have the eligibility be clear so it's obvious how you get to be part of it because it can't feel like a lotto. And ideally the payouts aren't embarrassing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

Then like, then it's a success. People create so much content on their own and the incremental content that people create when we pay them is not that high in quality or quantity on average. I'm sure some people are doing amazing things that we end up burning most of the money. We're a business, I want to be honest about that. We're not just going to burn the money, of course, so we'll continue iterating because that could change, or trying, I should say. But we focus more now on the other ways we can help creators make a living. How can we help with fans paying you directly?

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I was going to say you have a Patreon ish version existing. Right.

[Adam Mosseri]

You have subscriptions, which is actually quietly growing and doing well. Where if you have a platform where people are willing to pay for your content, you can do that on Instagram. You can set the price. I think we just cover the cost of running it. We don't actually make money off that. And then the big one, though, is getting paid by brands. Last I checked was years ago, it seemed like it was more than a $15 billion industry a year, which is creators making deals off platform and getting paid by companies to advertise their products

[Dax Shepard]

to do a post about a pair of sneakers.

[Adam Mosseri]

So we've tried to support that. So we have the creator marketplace, where you have brands and creators find each other and suss each other out. We have ads tools where the ads can then use that creative and run ads with that same creative with the creator's permission.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like a system that integrates that perfectly into their.

[Adam Mosseri]

So that the advertiser can find out the value that they're getting from actually paying for this content. We want creators to get paid, but we can't just burn money writing checks. So we're trying to find the balance.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So interesting.

[Adam Mosseri]

We're gonna do a hard pivot. I can feel it.

[Dax Shepard]

You make a prediction dangerously, perhaps, but your 2026 prediction was. Looking forward to 2026. One significant interesting is that authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, this is a real tension.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me about this statement. I think I understand it, but I'm not sure it's abstract enough that you could deny any implications of the statement in legal terms. This is like real messy language.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, I wrote that thing and I was like, I should write more. And I wrote this thing, and it was like, really boring. And then I was like, all right, I should make it less boring. And then I rewrote it, and I was like, now it's just purposely controversial.

[Dax Shepard]

That's annoying.

[Adam Mosseri]

That's just as boring, just different. So then I was like, all right, I should just cut half of the stuff that I don't have any business weighing in on anyway, and I'll focus on the things that I care most about. So I don't know how it turned out, but you read it, so that's cool. Maybe you had to as your homework for this thing. People think of Instagram's aesthetic, particularly people my age, as these perfect photos, sunsets, Skin smoothing, makeup, this whole thing. That is not what is in the cultural zeitgeist today. What works even on Instagram is content that is kind of very purposely counter to that polished aesthetic. Messy, messy, raw pimples, blurry, not cropped properly real. Because people just want a little of authenticity in this world where we're inundated with processed, intense information. So I think that there's this interesting thing now where that perfect aesthetic is becoming cheap because it's easy to put produce. And so the most savvy creatives across a lot of industries are kind of rebelling against that. Not atypical of what happens in different art worlds.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, as any person in a business, you're looking for a hole in the market and you're trying to fill it. So if everything is perfect and polished, what's available to exploit is this.

[Adam Mosseri]

So we're in this moment now, and I don't know how long it'll last. Where imperfections are a indication of authenticity, that's one of the reasons why they're working. They're also relatable. And so it's a way of being like, I'm not a. Or I'm not a brand who's trying to sell you something. I'm just a person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'm a fucked up mess.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. You know, I curse, I stutter over my words. I make mistakes just like everybody else. So that's kind of where we are. And you're already starting to see it.

[Dax Shepard]

AI's gonna figure that out, right?

[Adam Mosseri]

It's already recreating it. Like, if you talk to ChatGPT, you hear it take a breath.

[Monica Padman]

Ugh.

[Adam Mosseri]

It doesn't need to breathe. That's not a thing. And so you're going to be able to create the illusion of that raw imperfections.

[Dax Shepard]

Imperfections, yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

It's just starting now.

[Dax Shepard]

Adam. I called the front desk of the hotel. I was staying that in Detroit. Busy, busy, busy, busy. Then I went online. I got the actual hard number to the place and called on my phone.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. Landline style.

[Dax Shepard]

It was like, hello, thank you for calling such and such hotel, and blah, blah, blah. And it had a bunch of imperfections in the thing. And I was talking for a while. I don't know what clued me in, but I go, hold on, are you a computer? And she's like, I could see why you would ask that. And I was like, oh, yeah, dude, this is nuts.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

A thing.

[Adam Mosseri]

It's insane. Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I talked for a while before I figured out it was A computer. I know.

[Adam Mosseri]

But in that world, what's left? I think it's our taste, it's our perspective, it's our opinions that are gonna be the thing that makes some piece of content be interesting or not. But the other question for me is, how can you point the technology at what you want to get done? One way to think about it is like, it is an it. It is an algorithm, it is AI, and it is coming for you. There's another way, which is like, all right, it's a bunch of. Of tools. It doesn't care about me. It's agnostic. But what are the things that I want to do that it can help me do more of? Better, faster, stronger, et cetera? And then how do I figure out how to do that? Because it's interesting tension. On one hand, it's so technical, right? Like, you're talking about these giant foundation models and these data centers with all of these GPUs. Anybody listening to this is already like, I don't care what he said. So on one side, it's so technical. On the other side, it makes things so much more approachable. Like I said before, I'm not great at anything I do. I used to program. I used to write a lot of code, really bad code. There'll be some engineers now who will go look up my diffs just if

[Dax Shepard]

they needed to throw up, just to make sure.

[Adam Mosseri]

It was just like rage just dunk on me on internal chords. I can code again now because I can work with an AI to program, and I can speak to it in English. Because I'm technical enough, I can give it pretty good direction, but it's getting easier and easier. And so a couple months ago, I started programming, and I was like, all right, this'll be fun. I haven't done this in forever. Both my own stuff, but I. But also at work. And the way you did it is you basically had an AI you talked to, and you watched a program. That's not how people do it. Well, it's how some people do it, but it's not how I do it now. It's not how a lot of people do it now. Now I've got, like, four of them. That's like four engineers, basically. And I talk to each one of them.

[Dax Shepard]

See who does it better?

[Adam Mosseri]

No, I just check back. I do four things in parallel, or I do two things and see who does it better. It's a completely different way of exercising your brain. I'm multitasking aggressively. I've got, like, four really? Junior employees that I talk to every

[Dax Shepard]

10 minutes without any civilties.

[Adam Mosseri]

I actually do. I say police.

[Dax Shepard]

Me too. I do too.

[Monica Padman]

It's so weird.

[Dax Shepard]

And I heard that it's wasting X amount of money.

[Adam Mosseri]

It is.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm sure it's like 30 a year.

[Adam Mosseri]

But, like, I do this because I've always said please and thank you to Alexa because my kids, I don't want them to hear me barking orders at a personality.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

So it's definitely gotten into my program. She's like, why am I being so. Like, I'm sorry I gave you the wrong instructions the last time. It's like, why am I being

[Dax Shepard]

accountable to the computer?

[Adam Mosseri]

It's so ridiculous. But I don't think it's limited to programming. I think it's going to make technical things, not just programming, more approachable to a bunch of people because it can bridge. And that's an interesting tension that I'm not sure I know how to make sense of yet.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, my last thing is threads. So we were on this trip and I was like, what is thread? And you're telling me about threads. I'm like, so it's Twitter. I don't know. What are you doing? And then I want to say, at that time, I was trying to remember because I said it so often. I think you had 300 million subscribers at that time. Is that possible?

[Adam Mosseri]

About 300 million users, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Every morning I'd ask where we were at and still user account.

[Adam Mosseri]

The goal was to create. Create a place for like the healthy exchange of perspectives, of ideas. It started really in reaction to Twitter. We didn't want to be like a kumbaya, super friendly Twitter. People are going to argue. I don't want to pretend otherwise, but we just wanted it to be more open for more types of perspectives, more ideas, a bit more civil. Over the time, it's evolved, though, and now it's much more focused on trying to support communities, trying to support just the open exchange of ideas. It's growing. We're doing pretty well here in the US we're crushing right now in Japan, which is interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

You're doing a great job of integrating it into Instagram because I see headlines I can't resist, but click on and open threads.

[Adam Mosseri]

That's our equivalent of clips. We showed little bits of threads in Instagram that raise awareness.

[Dax Shepard]

And I go, yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

And so we look at two things. We look at how many people use threads or see threads because of its Instagram integration, and then we look at how many people just go on Their own.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Adam Mosseri]

And that go on their own is the core business. And there are more people who go. Because of the.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you still haven't gotten me to go directly to threats.

[Adam Mosseri]

And we might not ever.

[Dax Shepard]

Who knows?

[Adam Mosseri]

We haven't even gotten my wife to install it.

[Monica Padman]

Well, we're on threads if our listeners

[Dax Shepard]

want to join the conversation.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's follow. It's follow us.

[Dax Shepard]

What is your evaluation of the X Twitter platform?

[Adam Mosseri]

I don't want to underestimate them. I mean, they've gone through a lot of challenges, change.

[Dax Shepard]

Have they grown, shrank, Plateaued? What have they done?

[Adam Mosseri]

It's hard to say. Somewhere between plateaued and shrunk a little. But maybe they're growing in some countries and shrinking others. That's pretty normal for social networks. They obviously laid off, I think, over 90% of their employees. That's kind of scary. It's also impressive. It's very efficient. They've got some good people over there. I just want us to beat them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That's honest and fair.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

As I'm watching the Iran stuff and I'm learning, they've shut off all the social media and they've shut off even WhatsApp there.

[Adam Mosseri]

We got blocked partially there years ago. We were actually really big in Iran. The government there will block certain social media networks, certain websites, and then they'll shut the whole Internet down.

[Dax Shepard]

At times, I wanted to ask just a stupid question. How did they mechanically decide what's on the Internet? To me, the Internet seems like this huge pipeline that you pull different addresses.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, yeah. How do they do it?

[Dax Shepard]

How do they shut off just some parts of the Internet?

[Adam Mosseri]

They work with the Internet service providers to block specific domains. So you don't use Instagram by going to instagram.com, most likely. But behind the scenes, there is an address. It might be a number, might be words somewhere.

[Dax Shepard]

My app goes to there.

[Adam Mosseri]

Your app goes to there to talk to the servers. And so they'll have the people who provide Internet block specific addresses. And then you can play this game of cat and mouse where you can switch your addresses or you can go through a vpn.

[Dax Shepard]

And what about Starlink? How does that factor in? Obviously, there's no control over Starlink. If you somehow have Starlink, you do have access to everything. Yeah, yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

Straight from space.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Crazy. It's the future.

[Adam Mosseri]

It's more than half the satellites in orbit.

[Monica Padman]

It's crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

The last two things I pride myself in being able to look at someone and say, the exact car that they should own.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah, you were right.

[Dax Shepard]

And I spent this time, Monica with Adam, and I said, I'm just going to say it, man. You need a 70s BMW three point. I just need to know what availed you to that advice. Cause you went on a surf.

[Adam Mosseri]

I went on a hunt. Spent a lot of time on bringatrailer.com. i don't know. I've never been a car guy. Like, I drive around a Toyota Sienna. Also, like, you can't be like a tech exec in a Porsche. It's like too much of a. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Stereotype.

[Adam Mosseri]

This is too much of a cliche. I'm saying that out loud as I'm thinking of friends of mine who are in execs with Porsche. I apologize. Let's say that on the record.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you used cliche. That was nice. I used douchey.

[Adam Mosseri]

So I was like, trying to find something that would give me some pleasure that wasn't, like, crazy. But that also was a little bit if, you know. You know, I drive that thing around. Most people don't even look, but every once in a while someone's like, oh, man, check out that he9 and like, they come over and they want to talk.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. What color is it?

[Adam Mosseri]

It's fjord blue. It's like this blue. It's a little bit of a cult fjord. It's a little bit of a cold pink color from the Earth. Early 70s, I had said, too.

[Dax Shepard]

Blue would be my pick for you. That's my favorite.

[Adam Mosseri]

It's blue all the way through. It's blue on the inside and blue on the outside. It's tiny. It's like a gentleman's coupe.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's very art deco y. There's a mix of steel and I

[Adam Mosseri]

love that car, so I should think you brought that. I never would have bought it. I would have been just driving the Sienna around.

[Dax Shepard]

Do your boys like it?

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah. Particularly Blaze. He calls it the Blueberry. He calls it the Blueberry.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And then the last thing I find so charming about you is you are a hardcore Burning man person. What do you call yourselves, Burners or something?

[Adam Mosseri]

In a past life.

[Dax Shepard]

What do you mean, in a past life?

[Adam Mosseri]

I have kids now I haven't gotten in years.

[Dax Shepard]

When's the last time you went?

[Adam Mosseri]

I don't know, but I've been more times than I can count, so you're not wrong.

[Dax Shepard]

Adam's the type that goes Monica a week before and fucking builds the enormous contraptions.

[Adam Mosseri]

The build is, for me, the most fun part. You go and you're like building your camp. You're really making a city in the middle of the desert. By the end of the week, it's like chaos. And it gets a little bit too messy for me. I'm getting old. But to get out there and to be using your hands. We built these yurts, which is what we sleep in. Or these giant trapeze tents, which is what we hang in. Or the kitchen.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

There's ac.

[Adam Mosseri]

We built a shower. We build everything.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Adam Mosseri]

And then you rip it all down. It's a lot of work.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

But in this world where I'm on glowing rectangles all day, it's kind of nice to be outside with no Internet in the desert with your hands all dirty.

[Monica Padman]

That makes sense.

[Dax Shepard]

And fabricating.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Adam, I adore you. You'll be back.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. That was round two. We'll do round three. We'll be laughing at our KN in this conversation. That's right.

[Monica Padman]

It will all be irrelevant.

[Dax Shepard]

In fact, the conversation will happen with our avatars.

[Adam Mosseri]

I believe in human creativity.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, well, thanks for coming. This was a blast.

[Adam Mosseri]

Thanks for having me. It's so much fun.

[Dax Shepard]

We hope you enjoyed this episode.

[Adam Mosseri]

Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

[Dax Shepard]

Excuse me. I'm just sorting my sides here. I just did a little bit of acting a second ago.

[Monica Padman]

And how do you feel like you did, sir?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it was a cold read. It was my first time reading any of it. You know, it was a scene with my friend Monica. So, yeah, looks like she might be doing this role. So we had to do. Do a little self tape.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. Oh, I hope that doesn't happen when I'm on set.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. I'm glad this happened after the audition.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I just put myself on tape for something which is fun. Now, did it make you think you want to act with me someday?

[Dax Shepard]

First of all, I have acted with you.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah. Oh, bless this mess.

[Dax Shepard]

Bless this mess. Chips. I'm just outside the window.

[Monica Padman]

You're outside the window, but you weren't in a scene with me. Just pa. You're right.

[Dax Shepard]

But definitely bless this mess.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, bless this mess.

[Dax Shepard]

Confusing. You were very upset. You were hot, so you fucked up your farmer's market stand or something.

[Monica Padman]

It was really easy for me to get into character.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That was fun. I forgot about that.

[Dax Shepard]

Like a duck to walk.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I had forgot to say this on the last fact check, but I'd like to say it here. One thing I left out about my trip to Florida was that I had the Time finally to binge best dead. And I just want to give a testimonial, most importantly, the first eight episodes. Completely entertaining. I'm entertained. It's sleuthy. It's houdunity. We get an expert. Yeah. Just top notch entertainment.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Extremely interesting. Interesting. And then I started episode nine right as I was taking off into the skies, leaving Miami.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I know. So you. You just said you don't like when I cry, but.

[Monica Padman]

No, I do that.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm insincere. What did you say?

[Monica Padman]

No, no, no.

[Dax Shepard]

I think I'm exploiting it or something.

[Monica Padman]

No, I know it's all true to you and it's all. And I want you to cry because it's not good for you, like farts, but because you never did. And now you do every day. This is also happening simultaneously. This is happening with Jess.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I think it's an older male thing.

[Monica Padman]

I think it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think we've been holding it in for a very long time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then whatever. Well, as all other muscles are atrophying.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Whatever holds in those tears. They are failing too.

[Monica Padman]

I know. And I think it's very sweet. I'm just around a lot of men who are crying and sometimes I'm like, wow, do you mean it? But of course you mean.

[Dax Shepard]

It's what you said last time too. I know, I.

[Monica Padman]

Of course you mean it. But it's. It's just. It's so weird to be around someone for so long who's ne. Who you never see do it. That it takes so much.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And. And then now it's like. It's like drop of the hat.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it's not drop of the hat. There are very. They're very specific categories that get me.

[Monica Padman]

You're right.

[Dax Shepard]

They're pretty predictable. It's not like someone says, like, I just had my first baby and I'm weeping. That's like, you know, no one says, like, I lost my aunt and I start weeping.

[Monica Padman]

No. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

There's this. There's categories. That I'm now defenseless.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, of course. It makes sense.

[Dax Shepard]

It makes sense to hear someone be totally accountable for their bad behavior.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I find so moving.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like it's. It's impossibly moving. So as that's happening. And I'm also a little self conscious because I'm sitting next to a dude who right when we got. I sat down, he. He wanted to bond over the fact that we had the same watch.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

Which I was cool. And I gave that some time. But all that let me know is like, he is aware me. It's not like an invisible object sitting next to him, which is often the case when you fly.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

He's aware of me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So you're being perceived.

[Dax Shepard]

I've got my head, I'm being observed, I think. And then, so I have my headphones on and, and it starts getting, it starts getting me. And then I, I, I start welling up. And then there is a point in that episode nine where now just tears are just streaming down my face. I'm not, like, audibly doing anything. I just have my eyes closed. I have my head. Headphones on.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm hoping the dude's not looking at me. And also maybe, isn't it. Well, it doesn't matter. There's nothing I can do about it. Yeah. And it was just so moving. I was so moved by it in the, in a very similar way that that episode we've talked about for years. Blame from Radiolab. Yeah, Very moved by it. Then there's some score.

[Monica Padman]

Andy. Shout out Andy.

[Dax Shepard]

And then there's a reaction from Elizabeth that then, Now I, Now I audibly do the thing where I start kind of laughing because I'm, I'm clearly crying. Crying now. But anyways, I just was really, really, really blown away with that. And I thought ultimately this entertaining thing that was just entertaining for me became very, very poignant and, and, and a wonderful display of why it's worth finding out everyone's point of view in all situations. So it was, it was great. I just wanted to encourage people to listen to it.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Obviously, obviously means a lot to me that you liked it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, so. And then I can answer without any, without any spoilers. There's, I guess there's debate. You've since brought me up to speed that there's debate. I, a thousand percent believe this person.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I have no, zero doubt whatsoever.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, there's been, there's, you know, the end of the show has led to a lot of questions for people. A lot of people are skeptical of the, the end. And, and a lot of people have said, like, what does Dax think about this? Because no spoilers, but you have a connection to something that's going on in

[Dax Shepard]

this and I hope I'm known as well, too. I have a very good meter.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I think they were definitely expecting you to be cynical about the end.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I, well, it was funny because when I was, you know, we were making, making it and stuff. I, I think I told you a little bit like, oh, this is going on. This is crazy. We're doing this. And I didn't at all think you'd be cynical. But then as soon as people started saying it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I was like, oh no. Like he might, he might hear this and, and be on that team.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And, and which could have happened like again back to. And I can't say it enough up front. First, I absolutely love A Million Little Pieces.

[Adam Mosseri]

James Fry, James Frey.

[Dax Shepard]

Frey. I love the book. I don't care at all that it was fictional.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I love the book. It's a beautiful book. And then my friend Leonard is almost maybe as good the follow up. And this is a beautiful story. But I also was reading it as Stephen King best said it. He wrote little. A little op ed about it. Not one person in recover believed it. That's not the physics of how it all works.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And unless this guy was this one anomaly which is possible. There are anomalies.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But we all thought it was.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But I didn't care.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But yes. If I hear this is why I hated hillbilly elegy. I was the one who wrote. I'm like, this is this. This dude's story is. He's overheard it. Second, Hannah hasn't lived any of this.

[Monica Padman]

The ride that hillbilly ele has taken in my life is wild. You were definitely right about that. I was so wrong.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So given that track record.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm 1,000% certain. As much as one can be.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That that person was speaking honestly.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more armchair ext expert, if you dare. Well, I mean I wish, I wish everyone had heard so we could really deconstruct it a little bit. But it's just like I think people, it's. It's much easier when you're afraid of somebody or, or someone has wronged you to assume that there was a great deal of calculation happening.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And because it fits better with the archetype of villain and it fits better with the archetype of bad person. And as someone who's just done a lot of inexplicable things fucked up, I'm like, I just can relate so much. Like yeah. There people could call me about some stuff and I would be just as like absence of an explanation is the other people would be.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Like I don't know why at the. Well, you know, in my four day blackout that the time I think I got closest to dying, it's like, you know, only later the next day, I'm realizing, like, well, clearly I tried to take a motorcycle ride because the motorcycle is sitting on its side.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I have pulled ribs. I clearly must have tried to pick that motorcycle for a very long time. Like, I don't. I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know why. Where I was going to go or what I thought I should be doing on a motorcycle or whatever. I just, you know, I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

Know. Yeah. I mean, I brought you up, obviously, multiple times at the end in our episode 10 when we recapped. And then we also did two more episodes on Patreon where we took listener question voicemails. And then we, like, answered those. And, you know, there's a lot of poking holes.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And, you know, I think everyone has their own relationship with what happens in the story. And that's also interesting to me.

[Dax Shepard]

For the people who don't believe, I'm very compassionate to them and sympathetic. My hunch is they have been lied to multiple, multiple, multiple times by an addict or a manipulator or a deceiver, and they have lost the willingness to trust again. And I get it.

[Monica Padman]

Me too.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, there were. I felt that way about my dad in some categories. I was like, I'm not even ever buying back into this thing, you know, so if you come in with that. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And if you have no connection to it whatsoever, then you also have all these ideas. And I think that was for me, you know, before knowing you and like Eric, I would have been skeptical too. I definitely would have been one of those people. But there have been so many experiences with you that are contradictory in a way that has made me change the way I think about people in a good way. Like, oh, it's really not black and white. It's not that this person behaves in this way and they don't behave in this way, and they. They're this. And they're not this. It's like, oh, my God. Like, you. We really can be.

[Dax Shepard]

We run the gamut.

[Monica Padman]

All of the things. It is totally changed my perspective on humans and for the better. I mean, I'm so. I'm so. I'm a better person because of it. Definitely. It's the idea that I could never.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Is the part that I don't believe in anymore. Like, I don't believe. For your relapse when all that was going on, it was so hard for me to compute that that was you. You still.

[Dax Shepard]

Uhhuh.

[Monica Padman]

Like, how is this person who I know and Love and trust and know wouldn't lie. And do you know is. Is doing all of like, it. It's very. And disorienting. It's very disorienting. And it's. But what I'm saying. And, and same with, you know, some stuff with some of our other friends. Like, it's helpful. It's helpful to be reminded that we're all capable of. Of all things at all times. And it does. Doesn't mean someone's good or bad. And it definitely. It's definitely possible to do things that you don't think you'd ever.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh yeah. They don't have to be addiction related.

[Monica Padman]

Everyone has the chance to do something they thought they would never do.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Monica Padman]

And it's.

[Dax Shepard]

And everyone knows what it's like to have secrets.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And to have to lie to protect secrets, have regrets and have remorse and. Yeah, it's. It's. Well, because a lot of people were saying like, how. How could the depth of the things that this person was doing. How could they have possibly done that if they had this other thing going on? And I was like, no, I was like. Dax was interviewing big experts.

[Dax Shepard]

One of the smartest persons we've ever interviewed. In fact, at the lowest point of. Of detox.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. It's like it's possible. And I understand if their specific relations relationship with addiction or those people like, doesn't present that way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's the other thing I think that's misleading about people who have a kind of a generic idea of what an addict is, which is like everything the person is before they're fucked up is also carries over to when they're fucked up.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's like if someone's completely irresponsible sober, guess what? When they. That's gonna get exaggerated when they're. But if you're con. Incredibly controlled trolling and buttoned up, guess what? My version of addiction looks very much like that. So it's like there isn't a single version of it. It's like you just. You carry into it all the things you already are and add that on top of it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I also think what's good about knowing addicts is like it is helpful because, you know, we all just want answer. I mean this show explores this too. Like we want answers the whole time during this show where the questions are coming up and I'm like, why? Wait, why? Why did this person do this? Why? What? And there you don't get answers.

[Dax Shepard]

Often we're trying to understand.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but it's also when that. When that person's done something painful, you want to know why? Like, if someone cheats on someone, they're going to be like, why? Why? And. And with addiction, what I have sort of realized is, like, there isn't a why. That's like an obvious common question. And I think the reality is, like, you don't get that. You don't get that often, and it's okay to not get it, but it's. It's practiced. Like, it's. You got to Y2.

[Dax Shepard]

It does imply a strategy. Back to what we were saying, it's like this thing was unfolding in the other person's experience of it as much as it was unfolding in Andy and Elizabeth's. There wasn't a game plan. There was a first thing that led to a second thing that led to a fourth thing that led to. And now it's this enormous snowball.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That is quite complex by the end of it. But, like, an initial dumb comment on a thing is, like, almost innocuous.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then it's. Maybe I'm a commenting, you know, and it. It does grow. It doesn't necessarily require a game plan or a goal in mind from the person. It can be getting away from them just as much as it's getting away from the victim.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm really glad you liked it a lot. And it is great job. Means a lot that you like.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. To you and Elizabeth and Andy.

[Monica Padman]

Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. Check out Beth said if you haven't. It's all available. Available on your podcast.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Now you can really barrel through it if you're driving back and forth from Key West a lot. Couldn't recommend it enough.

[Monica Padman]

Do you want to do facts?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, let's do some facts.

[Monica Padman]

When was Adam on last? He was on March 12, 2020.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Right at the.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. Like, maybe one of our first.

[Monica Padman]

He was in person.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, maybe one of our last.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Because it came out then, so I'm sure we didn't, like. February.

[Adam Mosseri]

February 22, 2020, with him.

[Monica Padman]

So probably one of our last. Yeah. Before COVID Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Now. Are a disproportionate number of professional athletes little siblings Says. Yes. Research indicates that a disproportionate number of professional and elite athletes are younger siblings. Oh, my God. The phenomenon often called the little brother effect. That's not.

[Dax Shepard]

You haven't heard it in a positive way. No.

[Monica Padman]

Mine is little brother energy. Thank you. Studies show that having older siblings to compete with from a young age forces younger children to develop greater skills, tenacity and physical ability to keep up the little brother sister effect. Growing up. Yes, same.

[Dax Shepard]

Reggie Miller's story is great. His older sister Cheryl Miller is the greatest female basketball player of all time. Reggie Miller became one of the greatest of all time, but he was competing with his sister and yet he talks about how long it took him to be able to beat his sister.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, cool.

[Dax Shepard]

I like that one.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I like that too. Okay. Does Coke own Dasani? Yes. The Coca Cola Company owns, license or markets more than 200 brands worldwide as of 2025, a reduction from over 400 in previous years to focus on stronger, high potential products. While known for its flagship soda, the company's portfolio spans thousands of beverage products across categories like water, coffee, tea, score juices and dairy. What's the difference between Mexican Coke and US Coke? The primary difference between American and Mexican Coke is the sweetener. Mexican Coke uses cane sugar while American Coke uses high fructose corn syrup. I think that's what you said. Also, Mexican Coke is typically packaged in glass bottles. Can't count. Sugi comes up yet again.

[Dax Shepard]

Still don't have it memorized.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, he said, he said creators making deals off platform to do post is a 15 billion doll.

[Dax Shepard]

Uh huh.

[Monica Padman]

The content creator brand deal industry is a massive, rapidly expanding sector with influencer marketing alone valued at roughly 24 billion in 2024 and projected to grow significantly.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

How much energy water are we wasting when we say please and thank you to Chat GPT?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh great.

[Monica Padman]

It really wasn't giving me a very correct answer and then that was concerning.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Because it doesn't want me to. Yeah. A recent study found that AI models like Chat GBT use significant amounts of water to see stay cool. Every 20 to 50 prompts you type regardless of their urgency, depth or silliness, consume the equivalent of half a liter of fresh water.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. He said Starlink is more than half the satellites in orbit. As of early 2026, Starlink satellites account for approximately 65% of all active operational satellites in orbit.

[Dax Shepard]

And now Bezos is going to be putting satellites up too. So there's just going to be like a trillion 000 satellites.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It says with over 9400 satellites in

[Dax Shepard]

low orbit orbit orbit.

[Monica Padman]

Low earth orbit. Leo.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just wondering like when they launch a spacecraft up out of low orbit, like are they dodging those things? Like how do they plan it? Like, will there not be a point where there's just a net of those things and we can't even exit now.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Because certainly if you hit one one of those going 17,500 miles an hour, which is how fast they're going, that's going to be an ish.

[Monica Padman]

That's an is. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a big time is.

[Monica Padman]

I have it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, how's it going?

[Monica Padman]

It's fine so far. I didn't. I have to have it. Yeah, it's the only option.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Which is in. I mean, that's interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

I had a thought. I find myself doing this a little bit and I kind of caught myself doing was like, let's just say if you hate Elon Musk, it's kind of natural that you would root for him to fail. You want him to fail. But what you don't think about is like, I don't know, he's probably got 50,000 employees. Like, Tesla is an American company that's employing 50,000 people. And there are a lot of people that would love to see Tesla just go under because they hate him. But you got to really look at like from an agal.

[Adam Mosseri]

It.

[Dax Shepard]

Or utilitarian. Utilitarian point of view is like, do you really want 50,000 jobs to go away? Do you really want a big American, successful company to go under? Do you really want all that tax revenue to go away? Like, that's a lot of damage because you hate one person. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Does that make sense?

[Monica Padman]

It does make sense.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like complicated.

[Monica Padman]

I do think that people with that kind of money just have this unlimited power and then. But if, if they feel it, if their pocketbook feels it or their bottom line feels it, they do adjust. They're still. He's still a businessman at the end of the day. So if everyone stops.

[Dax Shepard]

But currently the SpaceX, they, they're talking about SpaceX having an IPO and they're talking about it being probably the biggest IPO in the history of the stock market. And so even if you took away Tesla, this dude's going to be the richest guy. He's going to get richer. That company is wildly successful. And Starlink is like, so at that point, you know, you're. He's beyond. Probably hurting, unfortunately.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you're just talking about like these tens of thousands of people that live in Texas that manufacture these cars and then the dealerships and all the mechanics. Mechanics and like, you know, and then just a big American car company. I found myself really going like, yeah, I guess I haven't been thinking because I'll. I have found myself getting excited when I hear that, like, their stock went down or something.

[Monica Padman]

Right. And I'm like, there are other company, like the. There are other huge companies, competing companies that I align with more.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Ideologically. And so I want to support that. I just want to support that more.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Unfortunately, there's none of the American big three that have gotten their foot in the door on electric. He's like, that's the only company that really got its foot in the door globally with electric.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I don't have that issue because I. I do not like Teslas, regardless of him.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure.

[Monica Padman]

If that was a car that I was like, fuck. Like, it's a. I love that car. I don't. I feel so nauseous in those cars. Like, I. I specifically ask on Uber, like, no Teslas.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because I don't like them. So that's not an issue for me. What is the. What's. Kristen has an American electric.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And that's a great. That. I much prefer that driving experience.

[Dax Shepard]

I personally do, too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But I also. I want there to be thriving American industry that employs a lot of people, and then I feel, like, ethically compromised if I let my hatred of one person get in the way of 50,000 people's livelihood.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I mean, I guess I know what you mean. But there's all these other people who have jobs at other companies, too, that are. That those jobs are being threatened with this monopoly being like, hell, you know, potentially held by him. So it's like, no, I'm probably just going to, like, veer off over here and try to put my. My money there.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That's just this. All personal people get to spend their money how they want to spend it.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right. You get to vote with your money.

[Monica Padman]

You do. You get to do it. Whatever you want.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I would think it was abundantly clear in the interview, but I love Adam.

[Monica Padman]

I'm impressed that he puts himself out there for. On a hard topic.

[Dax Shepard]

He's also pretty staggeringly smart. Like, when I've watched all these other interviews, like, the. The amount of things he has a full comprehension of is pretty massive.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which I think you have to. In that role.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, definitely. Yeah. Was great.

[Adam Mosseri]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

All right. Love you.

[Monica Padman]

And we're his favorite food.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, right, right. That's right.

[Monica Padman]

And that was. That was flattering. All right. Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Love.