Mark Zuckerberg would like us all to know that learning is best achieved through suffering. And how is he telling us this? Through a T-shirt, of course. “I’ve kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them,” Zuckerberg said in mid-September during a taping of the “Acquired” podcast at San Francisco’s Chase Center.
He was wearing a boxy, black tee printed in plump white letters with the Greek phrase “pathei mathos”. Loose translation? “Learning through suffering.” It was, according to Zuckerberg, “a little family saying.
” Another historical pearl was imparted through the T-shirt he wore at a Meta keynote presentation weeks later. This time, Greek was swapped for Latin. Kinda.
His tee (again boxy, again black) read “aut Zuck, aut nihil,” an English-ified contortion of the Latin “aut Caesar, aut nihil” or, roughly, “either a Caesar or nothing.” It took more than a Zuck to create these wide-as-they-are-long tees. As he explained in the podcast, they were made in partnership with Mike Amiri, a Los Angeles-based fashion designer.
Yes, between running Meta, making AI-enhanced spectacles, raising three children and all that MMA training, the 40-year-old Facebook founder has found time to tack yet another title onto his CV: clothing designer. (Before minting his own ancient-slogan shirts, Zuckerberg wore a tee splayed with the Latin “Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed),” to his 4.
