Making Sense with Sam Harris - #148 — Jack Dorsey

Episode Date: February 5, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Jack Dorsey about how he manages his dual CEO roles at Square and Twitter, the role that Twitter plays in journalism, how it’s different from other social media, what makes a conversation healthy, the logic by which Twitter suspends people, the argument for kicking Trump off the platform, Jack’s practice of meditation, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with Jack Dorsey. Jack is the CEO of Twitter and Square. We don't spend a lot of time talking about Square. We get into the details of Twitter. We talk about the role that Twitter plays in journalism now, how it's different from other social media, how Jack and

the rest of his team are attempting to reduce the toxicity on their platform. We talk about what makes conversation healthy, the logic by which Twitter suspends people, the reality of downranking and quote shadow banning. I briefly make my case for banning Trump from the platform. We talk about Jack's practice of meditation. Anyway, I must say I consider this interview a missed opportunity. We really were the casualty of timing here more than anything else. Because we recorded this conversation a week before the Covington Catholic High School Circus, which, as you know, exemplified more or less everything that's wrong with social media at this moment, and Twitter in particular.

If you recall, it really seemed in that week that Twitter accomplished something like the ruination of journalism. So that would have been great to talk about, and our silence on that topic will be ringing in your ears. So much of what we talked about with respect to Twitter's policy around suspending people and the politics of all that really could have been sharpened up had we had a time machine. We also had this conversation before some other interviews with Jack came out, which I've since read in Rolling Stone. And also he went on Joe Rogan's podcast in the interim. And Joe, as you know, streams everything live. So I've seen the aftermath of all that.

And Joe reaped a whirlwind of criticism for not having pushed Jack hard enough. I think he's going to have Jack back on his podcast. I'm actually going to be on Joe's podcast later in the week, and I'm sure we'll talk about all this. But all that notwithstanding, I really enjoyed talking to Jack. One thing I want to make clear, because I saw some of the pain that Joe was getting from his audience, many people were alleging that Joe must have agreed not to push Jack on certain points. I can't speak for Joe, but I must say

Jack had no restrictions at all on this conversation. He was eager to talk about anything I wanted to raise. There were no edits to it. He didn't request any. So he's totally willing to have a conversation about where Twitter has been and where it's going. You'll hear that he is quite good at pirouetting around any concern a person raises. You'll certainly witness that in this conversation, and it was there to be seen in Joe's and in all

these subsequent interviews that I've seen. You know, he really does offer a more or less a full mea culpa on many of these points. You talk about how toxic Twitter is and he fully acknowledges it. You talk about how inscrutable the policy is around banning and how it lacks transparency, the policy is around banning and how it lacks transparency, and he fully owns that. And so there's really, there's not that much to get from him on those points apart from his stated commitment to fixing all of these problems that he acknowledges. So, you know, I don't know what Joe's going to get out of him on a second pass, but given the time I had this conversation with Jack, I really can't express too much regret, but just in light of what's happened in the last few weeks, I would certainly want to turn down the screws a little bit on a few of these points.

That said, I really enjoyed the conversation with Jack, and I hope you do too. And now I bring you Jack Dorsey. I'm here with Jack Dorsey. Jack, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. This is an interesting conversation for me to approach because I think we're going to talk about some things that I'm a little concerned you don't want to talk about, and I'm just going to forge ahead. I want to talk about everything. Okay. But then I think we'll get into areas of mutual interest that I think we'll both be very happy to talk about. So let's start with the weird stuff and just how difficult your job is,

or at least how difficult your job appears to me to be. Obviously, you have two jobs. You've got this dual CEO role with Square and Twitter. I don't know very much about Square. I mean, perhaps you can introduce how you think of your job there, but we're going to talk about Twitter almost exclusively. So I guess to start, how do you think of your career at this point and how are you managing, and I'm sure this is a question you've gotten a lot, but how are you managing this dual CEO life? A lot of it is experimenting and learning. All the experiences that I've had at both companies have definitely formulated how I act every day. And it's pushed me to focus first on my health. and a lot of that has to do with mental health and just how I can be aware and productive and observant throughout the day. A big part of that for me

has been meditation, which I would hope to talk to you about at some point. So we'll save that for the end, something to look forward to. First the pain, then the meditation. First the pain and observing the pain. But a lot of it has just been doing it. And today, I don't really segment the parts of my day. It's one job. This is my life. And I know that the companies will benefit and the people that we serve will benefit from me focusing on consistent self-improvement. And that starts with how I think about things.

And that starts with the mindset I bring to my work. And that's certainly evolved over the past. Twitter will be 13 years in March. I'm thinking about skipping the 13th year, like they skip 13 floors and buildings. But it'll be 13 years in March and Square will be 10 years old this February. But a lot of the balance between the two is possible, one, because of the team I've

been fortunate enough to assemble. And it took some iterations. But also how similar they are in different mediums. Twitter is obviously focused on communication and our purpose is serving a public conversation. We think we're very unique in that regard. And there's a lot of dynamics that are quite powerful and a lot of dynamics that can be taken advantage of, which we'll talk about. Square, on the other hand, is around economic empowerment. And one of the things that we saw early on in 2009 was that people in this country, and certainly this is reflective of the rest of the world, were being left out of the economy because they're being left with access to the slower mediums like paper cash while the world is moving on to more digital. And we are serving an underserved audience. We started with sellers. We're now moving to individuals. We have this app called the Cash App, which we have significant percentages of the people using it who were their only bank account. And it's been a really powerful example of utilizing technology to provide access to people.

And it's needed in so many ways in how we organize our financial lives and how people make a living. And as you've talked about on some of your podcasts, these systems have been under a lot of central control in the past. And a lot of that centralized control has removed access from people or not even created the potential to do so. So one of the things we found in Square in the early days is the only way you could start accepting credit cards was if you had a good credit score. And a lot of entrepreneurs who are just getting started, they don't have a good credit score. I didn't have a good credit score when we started Square. I was massively in debt. Two credit cards, actually. So by shifting that, using better technology, making it more inclusive, we were able to serve a lot more people that the industry just wasn't

able to. So you've got these two massive companies, which at least from the public-facing view, seem diametrically opposed in the level of controversy they bring to the world and to your life, presumably. Square seems like a very straightforward, successful, noble pursuit, about which I can't imagine there's a lot of controversy. I'm sure there's some that I haven't noticed, but it must be nothing like what you're dealing with with Twitter. How are you triaging the needs of a big company that is just functioning like a normal big company and Twitter, which is something which on any given day can be just front page news everywhere, given the sense of either how it's helping the world. The thing that's amazing about Twitter is

that it's enabling revolutions that we might want to support, or the empowerment of dissidents. And there's just this one Saudi teenager know, Saudi teenager who was, you know, tweeting from a hotel room in the Bangkok airport that she was worried that her parents would kill her. And I don't think it's too much to say that Twitter may have saved her life in that case. I'm sure there are many other cases like this where she was granted asylum in Canada. And so these stories become front page news, and then the antithetical story becomes front page news. So we know that ISIS recruits terrorists on Twitter,

or there are fears that misinformation spread there undermines democracy, and we'll get to Trump. But how do you deal with being a normal CEO and being a CEO in this other channel, which is anything but normal? Well, both companies in both spaces that they create in have their own share of controversy. But I find that in the financial realm, it's a lot more private. Whereas with communication, it has to be open. And I would prefer them both to be out in the open. I would prefer to work more in public. I'm fascinated by huge fan of punk rock back in the day,

and then that transitioned to hip-hop, and that led me to a lot of open source, where people would just get up on stage and do their thing, and they were terrible. You saw them a month later, and they were a little bit better, and then a month later, they're a little bit better. We see the same thing with open source, which led me to technology ultimately. So I approach it with that understanding of that we're not here just to make one single statement that stands the test of time, that our medium at Twitter is conversation, and conversation evolves. And ideally, it evolves in a way that we all learn from it. There's not a lot of people in the world today that would walk away from Twitter saying, ah, I learned something, but

that would be my goal. And we need to figure out what element of the service and what element of the product we need to bolster or increase or change in order to do that. So I guess in my role of CEO at Twitter, it's how do I lead this company in the open, realizing that we're going to take a lot of bruises along the way, but in the long term, what we get out of that ideally is earning some trust. And we're not there yet, but that's the intention. Well, on the topic of I learned something, actually, this is one of my, this is actually the only idea that I've ever had for improving Twitter, which is to have a, in addition to a like button, this changed my mind button, or I learned something button, so that you can track.

I mean, one, it would just kind of instantiate a new norm where people tweeting would aspire to have that effect on people. Like this is actually about dialogue. It's about debate. So I give that to you. You can do what you want. Actually, I had one other recommendation for you. It's to de-platform the President of the United States, which I noticed you haven't taken me up on.

One of the ideas we had way back in the day, there was instead of a... The button was actually called favorite before it was called like. We transitioned to like, I think at one of our most reactive phases within the company, we were drafting from a known behavior that you saw on Facebook and Instagram and whatnot. But we were going to, there was a proposal to change it to thanks, which I like a lot. I think it kind of gets at some of the things you're trying to express to the degree to which you're influencing someone's thinking or you're changing someone's mind is another level. But to build a service that people can express gratitude for things they find valuable more directly instead of the emptiness of a like

button is something that we are thinking a lot about right now. The incentives are where we are in the conversation. We realize that what we need to do is not going to be done by changing policy. What we need to do is look fundamentally at the mechanics of the service that we haven't looked at in 12 years. The fact that we have one action to follow and it's following accounts and following accounts in the example of brexit for example if you followed a bunch of accounts that were spouting off reasons to to leave that's all you get you have no other ability to see another perspective of the conversation unless you did the work to follow the account of someone who was opposed to that view. Whereas we do have the infrastructure in the service right now in the form of search and trends. And if you were to follow the vote leave trend, 95% of the conversation

would be reasons to leave, but 5% would be some considerations to make to stay. But we don't make it easy for anyone to do that and therefore no one does it. So these are exactly the things we're looking at in terms of like, is like really the thing that helps contribution back to the global conversation? My own personal view is that it doesn't. My own personal view is it's empty. And it's a lot more destructive than what we considered it to be by, well, everyone knows how to take this action, so we should put it on our service as well. As you were talking, it made me think you could have a kind of dashboard that showed people how siloed they were in terms of partisan information. Like if people may not know that they're getting only one side of a story.

Well, we actually saw that in the 2016 elections. We did some research of the connections. We've been spending a lot more time not looking at the content that people are saying, but the behaviors and the connections between accounts and interactions and replies. And one of the things that was very evident during the lead up to the election was just looking at our journalist constituency, which is one of the most important constituencies on Twitter to my mind. The amount of journalists on the left who were following folks on the right end of the spectrum was very, very small. The amount of journalists on the right end of the spectrum following folks on the left was extremely high. That's interesting. Even just that factoid is worth getting out there. There's a good graphic that an MIT lab called Cortico put out that

illustrates this effect. And you can immediately see what happened at least in the media sphere in terms of these filter bubbles and echo chambers that we tend to create. But that is something that I do take a lot of responsibility around. We have definitely helped to create these isolated chambers of thought. And it's because of the mechanics of how our system works. Just the simplest thing of emphasizing the follower count, only allowing the following of an account versus an interest, a topic, or a conversation. These are the things that don't allow any fluidity and evolution. It's very, very rigid. And you have to do a lot of work to get to some of the fluidity that we know Twitter is, but you have to be an expert to understand that it's even possible. Right. Well, yeah, so you were talking about the

different constituencies on it. And that's one thing that makes Twitter unique, that it really seems like the platform where real journalists and real intellectuals and newsmakers, they're relying on it for conversation. I mean, they're relying on both as a kind of a real-time response to things that are happening in the world, and as a way of just divulging things that are happening in the world, and as a way of just divulging things that are happening in the world, and a way of sharing their opinions. In that sense, it seems completely unlike every other social media platform to me. I have this love-hate relationship, as many people do with Twitter. I have just a hate-hate relationship with all the other social media platforms.

I've never been tempted to use them. Well, at least we're halfway there. Yes, yes, right. But Twitter, I step away from it, and we can talk about just how you, even how you relate to Twitter psychologically, but the idea of not being on it just seems like a non-starter now because it's almost like a public utility it really is just the it is the one place where you can you are you're guaranteed to see a response to news events that you have curated and it can be as good really or as informative as you've curated it what do you think accounts for the adoption of Twitter by those groups? I mean, it's just integrated into, like, even television news has to use Twitter to sort

of leverage the conversation about what they're putting out, and they don't do that with Instagram or Facebook. Is it just the short form? What made Twitter so sticky in the beginning? Was it the short form? What made Twitter so sticky in the beginning? Was it the 140 characters? I think it's a few things. I think I don't believe we're a social network. Social things happen on us, but my definition of a social network would be one that is dependent upon

the people that you know, the graph of your past or your current career or your future aspirations in terms of who you want to work with or who you want to be with or whatnot. And we don't benefit from the address book in your phone. We benefit from more of an interest-based network. We benefit because you're interested in something. And because of that, there's no deliberate join or leave of any one particular community. Simply talking about a topic puts you in it.

And the whole dynamic of Twitter enables that. And that's extremely powerful, but it's also extremely complex for people. it's also extremely complex for people. And I think one of the reasons why journalists took to it so quickly is because it's certainly a marketplace of ideas. It certainly has, you know, people have similar expectations as they would a public square, where ideas are discussed and evolved and debated. So it takes on a lot of characteristics of that because of the dynamic of it, because of the real-time nature, because of the public nature. But I think it serves as this in-between-the-articles function. And, you know, we had journalists write article, broadcast it with Twitter, and then get into conversation to get more perspectives, get different ideas, make corrections, make clarifications.

But then we also noticed something really interesting is that it really unlocked the journalists from their publication. years, journalists that I follow go from a smaller blog to a BuzzFeed to a New York Times to another institution. And it became interesting to just follow them as a person rather than the publication that they work for. And I think that felt very freeing to a number of the journalists I've talked to about it. It wasn't about the fact that I'm at the New York Times. It was the fact that I'm doing great investigative journalism and I have a direct connection with my readers and my sources and maybe even sources that I didn't know were going to be sources because of the openness, because of the public nature of the service so i think that was a big part the constraint has had other ramifications we were

really big with comedians that was a it was a big wave i think because of the rhythmic nature of the constraint really big with the hip-hop community for the exact same reasons we don't see as many poets this day and age but it's anyone with like a poetic poet would have been great for poets but it also to the negative created more of um headline outrage fast take kind of approach and culture and the you know expansion to 280 has helped with that. We haven't seen a decrease or we haven't seen an increase in when you send an organic tweet out just as a broadcast, people typically don't go over the 140 character original constraint, but when they reply to someone else, they do. And that's where the 280 really matters is because it allows for a little

bit more nuance. And those are the sorts of things we're looking at. But the journalists, I believe, we're using it as a way to exist in between their work and also to have conversations with their peers about what's interesting. And there's some positives and negatives to that. What's the philosophy around not letting people edit tweets? Now that I have you here, I'm just going to download all my customer service complaints. When I type a typo and discover it six hours later, why can't I correct that typo? It's going to sound like a really boring answer, but I'm going to give you the context for it. We were born on SMS.

We were born on text messaging. So we were born on SMS. We were born on text messaging. And you could view Twitter as, what if you could text with the world? What if you could have a text conversation with the entire world? With the text, you can't correct. Once it's sent, it's sent, it's gone. And you build on top of it, you evolve it, you carry on the conversation. We obviously were not limited by that, but we built our system so that when you send a tweet, it immediately starts fanning it out. So as soon as you send that, a lot of the potential damage is done. So for us to introduce that edit, and these are things that we're looking at. These are things that we're considering and whatnot. edit. And these are things that we're looking at. These are things that we're considering and whatnot. But for us to introduce edit for a common use case of I made a mistake, I need to fix a link because I sent out the wrong one, it adds a delay into the system. And that's good in some context. For a lot of the things that you tweet about, it's probably what you want. But there's all these Twitters. There's your Twitter,

which you've built by following who you follow. There's politics Twitter, which is a very, very different experience this day and age. There's NBA Twitter, which is super exciting, but very real time. And people use it while they're watching the game and it becomes the roar of the crowd. So even a 30 second delay in a tweet is meaningful. So that's a consideration we need to make. We need to make another consideration for another use case people want in that you might tweet something, you want to go back to it a week later and correct something. But meanwhile, people have retweeted it and it might be a point of view that you've taken on and they've retweeted that point of view. And then you decide to do something a little bit devious, and you change the point of view. So they have then tweeted something that you've completely

changed the message upon. So that requires a change log or some notification that this tweet has changed substantially, and he might be saying something that you don't agree with anymore. Right. It's easy to see how people could game that. You could have somebody who tweets something very sticky and innocuous, and then they flip it to the next neo-Nazi meme that they want spread. Exactly. And then the final use case we're looking at is clarifications. And that is this current moment where people are digging up tweets from 10 years ago or five years

ago and canceling the original tweeter and canceling their career or canceling various aspects of their life. And we don't offer a ability for people to go back and say, well, let me clarify what I meant. And we do believe that's important and we do believe we can help address it, but it just takes some work. But the reason why it's taken us so long is because the majority of our systems are built in this real-time mindset with a real-time fan out. And we just want to be very deliberate about how we're solving these use cases and not just stop at, we need an edit button. What are people actually trying to do? And let's solve that problem. Okay, so let's push into some of the areas of controversy here because it seems to me you have an extremely hard job, and so it's hard to imagine how you can actually get it right, actually do it so well

that you won't continuously have this ambient level of criticism about how you're doing it. And the job is to figure out how to get a handle on the toxicity on your platform. And this has so many forms, one could scarcely list them all, but from trolling to harassing to conspiracy theories and misinformation and lies to doxing to what is generally called hate speech, but it is speech that is, in the political context, protected by the First Amendment, at least in the United States, but you have a global platform subject to different laws in different countries. How are you trying to deal with this problem? And feel free to grab any specific strand of that. I'll start by saying that the problem is more amplified in particular parts of Twitter.

It is definitely the case that it is rampant in politics Twitter. And it comes with a lot of patterns which we're now starting to see be more consistent. So first and foremost, just to take it up a few notches, we were asked a question some time ago, what if you could measure the health of conversation? Could you measure the health of conversation in the same way that you can measure the health of the human body? And we thought that was a very intriguing question because we've all had conversations where we felt it to be just completely toxic. And the result of that is ideally we walk away from it. And we've also had conversations that feel empowering that we learned something from and we want to stay in it. And we actually see this digitally as well. We see people walk away from conversations on Twitter

and we see people stay in conversations and persist them on Twitter. And we're to the point where we can actually see it in our numbers and measure it. So we went a little bit deeper with that. And this must be algorithmic, right? We're not talking about individuals tracking. It's not algorithmic, but then checked by people as well, just to verify our models are working. We took it a step further. So what is health? Health has indicators. Your body has an indicator of health, which is your temperature.

And your temperature indicates whether your system more or less is in balance. If it's above 90.6, then something is wrong. And we need to figure out what the measurement tools are to figure out what that measurement is, what that metric is, which is in this case, the thermometer. And then, you know, we go down the line and as we develop solutions, we can see what effect they have on it. So we've been thinking about this problem in terms of what we're calling conversational health. And we're at the phase right now where we're trying to figure out the right indicators of conversational health. And we have four placeholders. The first is shared attention. So what percentage of the conversation is attentive to the same thing versus disparate. The second is

shared reality. So this is not determining what facts are facts, but what percentage of the conversation are sharing the same facts. The third is receptivity. So this is where we measure toxicity and people's desire to walk away from something. And the fourth is variety of perspective. And what we want to do is get readings on all these things and then understanding that we're not going to optimize for one. We want to try to keep everything in balance. And by increasing one, it probably has a negative effect on another. So you could increase the variety of perspective, but decrease the shared reality in doing so. So step one is getting a sense of what the intend to do through algorithms measuring how people talk and and then of course

humans pairing with that to make decisions around solutions and you know in the same way that like you're you might be sick and i will offer you uh you know this bottle of water and also offer you a glass of wine based on all of our experience if you reach for the water and you offer you a glass of wine. Based on all of our experience, if you reach for the water and you drink the water, there's more probability that you limit the amount of time that your system is out of balance and you're not healthy. If you choose the wine, you'll probably increase the time it takes. So how would we think about giving people more options to at least drive towards more conversational health. So that's the abstract level. At a tangible, tactical level, we're looking at how people

interact with each other. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.