I Don’t Know How To Feel About This 2005 Interview With College Bro Mark Zuckerberg

When you think about it on an abstract level, Mark Zuckerberg’s success with Facebook is incredibly inspiring. At just 20 years old, he looked at the needs and desires of his friends and classmates and used his considerable skill to deliver something useful. He stuck with it. He built it. And now, at just 31 years old, he runs one of the most successful and influential companies of our generation. Whether you like it or not, Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we experience many facets of modern life.

But, when we see the reality of that story, it can be slightly harder to accept. This old footage of a 2005 interview with 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg has recently resurfaced in which he discusses his early motivations and aspirations for Facebook within US colleges. He’s wearing basketball shorts, drinking beer from a red plastic cup, and sitting on an op shop velour couch beneath a Scarface poster which has definitely been scoffed at by every single girl who’s seen it.

Around 2.53 someone does a keg stand and, in that brief moment, every second of my life (and all the corresponding information) I’ve poured into Facebook flickered beneath my eyelids like I was approaching death.

If you can get over the fact Zuckerberg is performing a faultless impersonation of your first boyfriend who thought being drunk at midday was ~edgy~ and no one else had heard of Pulp Fiction, there’s some really interesting stuff in here. Just a year on since its inception, Zuckerberg says he hopes “The Facebook” acts as both an “online directory” and “a mirror for the real community”. That’s fairly descriptive of its current use today.

But when asked where he wants to take it from here, he says “there doesn’t necessarily have to be more”. “I mean, like, a lot of people are focused on, like, taking over the world, or doing like the biggest thing, or getting the most users, and I mean, like, I think that part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely. I really want to stay focused on colleges.”

Considering Zuckerberg last week delivered a grand keynote at the F8 developers conference in which he touted the creation of a “global community” aided by artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it’s fair to say some things have changed over the past 11 years. And, you know, thank God for that.