The Rich Roll Podcast - Biz Stone on Conscious Capitalism & The Power Of Technology To Cultivate Global Cooperation

Episode Date: November 7, 2016

Imagine co-creating a tool so powerful, it literally changes the world. Biz Stone is one such man. Most people know Biz as one of the co-founders of Twitter. Together @biz@jack and @ev created the social media behemoth that seismically impacted how we connect with the world, share information, exchange opinions, consume news, and participate in the daily global conversation. Ironically, Biz never aspired to become successful in business. A most unlikely entrepreneur, he spent his early years as an artist, crafting book covers for a Boston publishing house. Biz’s initial interest in Silicon Valley was sparked not by the potential for riches but rather by idealism – technology as potential energy to greater unite the human experience. Bring people closer. And cultivate global cooperation. An early evangelist of blogging as a vehicle to serve his romantic vision, Biz jumped when Ev Williams invited him to join Blogger, the networked blogging platform Ev had built and sold to Google. Ultimately, Biz walked away from Google. Leaving millions on the table, he leaped into the treacherous unknown of start ups, following Ev to podcast precursor Odeo. In one of the greatest pivots in Silicon Valley lore, Odeo would morph into Twitter. Twitter would permanently change culture. And along with Ev, Biz would later advance to co-found Medium, the über-popular, user-friendly blogging platform of the moment. Today brings us to Jelly, a new kind of multi-platform search engine Biz recently launched that allows you to ask questions and get timely, helpful answers (as opposed to an index of websites) from the people most well suited to intelligently respond. It's fun and surprisingly effective. Give it a try by downloading the iOS app, visiting askjelly.com/richroll, or just add #askjelly to your Twitter questions. Among his accolades, INC. Magazine named Biz Entrepreneur of the Decade. TIME listed him as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, GQ named him Nerd of the Year, and he’s one of Vanity Fair's Top Ten Most Influential People of the Information Age. Despite never graduating college, today Biz serves up Visiting and Executive Fellow duties at both Oxford and Berkeley respectively and authored the humorous memoir, Things A Little Bird Told Me. Beyond the narrative of inhabiting rare entrepreneurial air, what’s most personally interesting about Biz is that at his core, he really is an artist. A true artist. Not one for the sexy stories of Silicon Valley board room intrigue, what excites Biz most is leveraging his fertile, creative mind to serve humanity. To make the world better. More connected. More empathetic. This is a fun, jocular conversation about conscious capitalism, the future of tech and artificial intelligence. It’s about living in alignment with one’s values. It’s about the future of one man’s dedication to cultivating greater human cooperation. And it’s a conversation about what it takes to change the world. Like, indubitably. Oh yeah – he’s also super funny. I sincerely hope you enjoy the conversation. Give Biz a shout on Twitter at @biz and let him know what you think. Peace + Plants, Rich

The whole idea really is to just try to build something that's of value. And if you can build something that's of value to people, then you can build a business out of it. And hopefully, the kind of business that you're trying to make is something that can have some kind of positive impact on the world at the same time. That's the kind of trifecta, is to change the definition of capitalism such that it means you are making money, you love your job, and you're having a positive impact in the world. That's Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

And this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? What's going on? My name is Rich Roll. Welcome or welcome back to the show where I go deep and heady and long form with some of the most intriguing thought leaders and positive paradigm-breaking changemakers all across the globe. People who have devoted their lives to making the world a better place, all in the interest of helping you and me live and be better. If you guys would like to support the show, support the mission, there are many, many ways.

But perhaps the single most powerful way that you can help is to just subscribe. It's totally free. So if you haven't done so already, please, please make a point of clicking that subscribe button on iTunes or on whatever app you use to consume podcast content. I greatly, greatly appreciate it. And it makes a huge difference to us. So thank you. This week, I've got a fun conversation, a jocular conversation with the great Biz Stone,

a guy I think it's fair to say has had a huge, a massive impact on changing the world, particularly on how we communicate and how we share and spread information and ideas. Most people know Biz as one of the co-founders of Twitter. and ideas. Most people know Biz as one of the co-founders of Twitter. But interestingly, maybe a little ironically, Biz started out as a graphic designer crafting book covers. In addition to that, he was also an early evangelist of blogging. And that's what ultimately led him to join Ev Williams as an early employee of Google working on Blogger, the company Ev founded and sold to Google. Biz would then go on to found a whole bunch of other companies or co-found a whole bunch of other companies, Zanga,

Odeo, which was basically a precursor to podcasting and the company that ultimately pivoted into Twitter, as well as The Obvious Corporation and Medium, the super popular blogging platform. and Medium, the super popular blogging platform. Among his accolades, Inc. Magazine named Biz entrepreneur of the decade. Time listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. GQ named him nerd of the year. And he's one of Vanity Fair's top 10

most influential people of the information age. And despite the fact that Biz never finished college, he's a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford, an executive fellow at Berkeley, the author of the humorous memoir, Things a Little Bird Told Me, and a very, very active philanthropist. Most recently, Biz launched something called Jelly, which is a social question and answer platform. It's sort of a new kind of search engine. We get into it in the podcast conversation, but basically it allows you to ask questions and get answers, not a list of

website links or URLs like you'd get with a Google search, but actually really good, helpful replies, responses from the people most well-suited to answer your question. And it's all coming up quick, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing

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All right. So what's personally interesting to me about Biz, beyond the obvious, I guess you could say, is that at this guy's core, he's really an artist, like a true artist behind all the tech, his career, his legacy. Biz is all about creativity. Creativity in the orbit of technology, of course, but moving past the code and the startups and the entrepreneurship, it's a creativity oriented entirely around how to better serve humanity, how to make the world better, more connected, and more empathetic. The other thing I really didn't expect about Biz is that he's super funny. I mean, like really, really funny. So this is a great conversation

about all different kinds of things. We talk about conscious capitalism. It's a conversation about a vision of social networking as a powerful tool for global human cooperation. It's about putting astronomical success in perspective. It's about how to live in alignment with your values. It's about the birth and impact of Twitter, of course. And it's about what it takes to change the world,

like really change the world. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Biz Stone. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Biz Stone. They sell some, they really, nowadays people release on vinyl. Yeah, so the vinyl thing is like a special collector. Yeah, it's like a fancy, cool thing. And it's like, how many do they print? Like hardly any. Right.

And then it's all done. But it's kind of awesome to have it. Yeah. I have a record player. I have two, I was going to say teenagers, but yeah. Can I drink this while we're doing the thing? Of course. Do whatever you want.

You can take breaks. You can go to the bathroom. They love their vinyl, though. Like my 18-year-old and 21-year-old, they just covet vinyl. Oh, yeah. The kids are liking it nowadays. Right. Maybe slide that up a little closer to you, the i was gonna um that's good i wanted to show you something too

because i have a cool demo of this thing what is that alexa this is an alexa tap uh-huh and if you want i can we built jelly for this right and what we did was like this thing is great at answering questions like what's the time difference between here and here or like you know what's four plus four like anything that a search engine could do but jelly is good at the subjective and so or just like jelly is good at the harder questions which are like subjective questions that only a person could answer and so i have this little demo that i can go through where i ask it a question and it's like i don't know what you're talking about and then i ask jelly it and then it and then and then it gives me a question i mean gives me an answer that a person wrote right and it just makes it like sound like this

human thing it's really cool it's really short i'll ask you do it now yeah just do it you want me to just do it are we actually doing the recording right now yeah i didn't even realize that so you're you're holding an alexa it's an it's it's a it's called it's called an amazon tap uh-huh and it's just a way this is not a released skill it's just it's just a way, this is not a released skill. It's just, it's an example of how Jelly works on like everything. It's going to work on everything. It's just, it's an engine that works on, it happens to work on the web. It happens to work on mobile. It happens to work on Twitter. You never have to go to Ask Jelly.

You can just ask a question with hashtag Ask Jelly on Twitter. We'll pull that question into the Jelly engine. It will get answered, and it will go back to you from our Jelly account. And you just released that, like, just now, right? Like, yeah, 10 minutes ago. And so we're also exploring voice because I think with all these voice things coming out, like Google Home is coming out and Microsoft Cortana and the Amazon Echo and there's another one too. I think Sony is coming out with something like a lot of people are coming out with stuff because natural language processing has just finally gotten good just now even just now it's gotten good enough so that we can talk to computers and they can understand us and computers

can talk to us and we can understand them so So that's why I think, did you see the movie Her? Yeah, of course. It's going to be like that. Minus the whole falling in love with a robot lady. That might happen. I wouldn't discount that. That might happen too. But if you watch the movie again,

you'll see that everything he does, he's got this in-ear piece and he's checking his email and doing all this stuff all through voice. i'm convinced that voice is the future like us staring at our phones while we're walking around and even when we're driving and stuff is gonna be like what you did our kids are gonna my kid who's four is gonna be like you still walk around just looking down at a little screen like are you crazy but won't they be wearing like visual you know they'll be wearing headsets they might be contact lenses they might be wearing like uh goggles that put them in a fantasy land but they're still gonna expect to be able to talk because when you want a question

answered the the the conventional sort of core assumption right now that everyone assumes is that you do a web search. And so the core assumption is that for every question, there is a document on the web that has your answer in it. The jelly assumption is totally different. The jelly assumption is for every question, there is a person who knows the answer to your question. So it's really a search engine for the best person to fill the request. The thing that's the hardest thing for us to do is find the person. So what we have to do is we have to elaborately categorize the question itself and then we have to know as much as possible about all the all of the people that sign up to be what we call helpers

so that we can properly route the questions to the helpers so that and it has to all be done in a way that where the people who signed up enjoy very much it's in it turns out it's in human nature to want to help other people a lot of people are asking me how how do you incentivize the people to do it not advice you don't need to you don't need to incentivize them because they uh it's built into our dna like we love to answer questions especially if we know them and if you can do it just right so it's kind of like game flow the flow theory in gaming

where it's like it's not too easy and it's not too hard and you're like oh I know this one and then people it's been scientifically proven that the same amount of dopamine is released in the brain when you know you've helped someone as when you win money so so you you when so what we do is after you answer a

question and if the person who if any person who reads your answer thought it was helpful and taps helpful you get a note back saying that you were a helpful and then you feel like a million bucks you're like oh man they thought my thing was helpful but ultimately how do you how do you end up scaling that though if you're directing that's another trick what we do is we have something called magic answers and what that is is that's one of the ways that we're going to scale and right now that's it's growing every day what happens is you ask a weird, obscure question, right? And it goes through our system, which our system is basically you ask your question. It gets sent through a filter because we want questions that a reasonable person would want to ask.

We don't let through yucky stuff. You know what I mean? reasonable person would want to ask we don't let through yucky stuff you know what i mean and then and then once it goes to the filter it gets auto tagged and then once it gets tagged it gets matched to the right person and then the right person answers the question and then the community marks that question as very helpful and then it becomes what we call a magic answer. So the next time somebody asks a question like that, we just serve it instantly to them. So when you ask a question, you don't get like a whole bunch of results, you get one result, like one curated result?

Well, what we do with magic answers is we give you three results. We give you one, and that should be the best one so so the magic answers are basically a question very similar to yours which the community which has an answer that the community has said great answer so if you if you and and it turns out i used to work at google most of people's questions are the same question there's there's less um there are less unique questions than repeat questions right people ask the same stuff over and over again the answer might not be static that that answer probably needs to evolve yep we have a decay rate on the magic answers as well because if it takes into account like current events and all this other stuff so there's a special decay right there but it's essential to scaling because if we always did

a custom answer then um it would it would probably take too long like right now what happens is the median time to a custom answer is about 15 minutes so's pretty good. And people don't mind that because if you're just trying to find out like, hey, I want to go on a RV trip with my five year old and my husband to the Grand Canyon, and I've never done it before. Like, what should I know? You don't need that information in point three, three seconds. No, you're just just like you could waste hours like clicking on that's the whole idea websites trying to find exactly right and you and you end up on websites that are like everything's great because we we sell the rvs and it's everything's easy and great and guess what it's not like what you want is another mom who's done it and says like okay here's the things right it's a long drive you know and you all this whatever

other things so um you do all this research and you still don't really know like oh this document is five years old i wish i could follow up with the person who wrote this thing and ask them a follow-up question so anyways where was i the magic answers what they do is that's that's one way we're going to scale. We didn't have them when we first launched because we had no corpus. We had no existing answers. Yeah, I mean, it is a crowd-sourced kind of thing. So if there's a great answer to a very similar question, we give that to you instantly.

And you're like, wow, that was perfect in zero seconds. Unbelievable. Love this thing. And if not, we give you to you instantly and you're like wow right that was perfect in zero seconds unbelievable love this love this thing and if not we give you a custom answer someone will write you an answer because they want to they signed up they want to do it they love it and this is like a new iteration on something you started several years ago right because i remember well jelly from a while ago and it was more like cora or you know no it was more jelly a while the the first iteration of jelly was was kind of this aha moment that um you know they redid that study the six degrees of separation studies the same guys redid it and now it's four right and that's your fault by the way yeah it's it was a combination of social and mobile that has

gotten that down and um it's actually 3.8 and it's 3.6 if you're in the same field but the um i was just thinking i was just sort of thinking philosophically with ben my co-founder of Jelly. And I thought, Ben, what if we had built a search engine knowing nothing about indexing web documents or anything, even though Ben probably knows about that stuff because he's super smart. I said, wait a minute. Everyone talks about AI, but they don't talk about I. So what we're doing essentially is AI in the service of I.

Let's try to use AI to get to I. So the first iteration was, Ben, I bet you, if we just sent a question to, like, a hundred of your social media friends, either one of them would know the answer, or somebody that they knew would know the answer or one of somebody that they knew would know the answer yeah like i got the guy and everyone loves to like know the guy like oh i got the guy right the guy that you need and so and but what we did was we we placed our bet purely on mobile and purely on social and there's a big problem with that. And also, even while I was working at Twitter,

I noticed a lot of people asking questions on Twitter because they wanted their questions to go to people. They didn't want to find a document. They did want people. So this is a thing already. People are using social networks to ask people questions. However, think about it this way. It's tied to your social identity it's tied to the

persona you've crafted on twitter or facebook or linkedin or whatever so imagine if every single one of your googles was a tweet there's like not 90 of them you wouldn't do yeah um google traffic would go down substantially i mean exactly and that was our problem was everybody knew like even just forget about health or really personal like your love life

or some health issue that you don't want people to know about or even just maybe some stuff that you know your network is chosen by you in the first place. So they might not know some crazy question about going to Abu Dhabi. Like, I've never been. What do I need to know?

You self-selected those people, so they probably don't know either. But the problem was you attached your queries to your social identity and so now there's a whole bunch of stuff first of all you have to think about it like do i want do i want people to know i don't know this do i want want people to know i'm looking for this um and is this even am i gonna get like less followers because this tweet isn't good. I saw a friend of mine tweet, apologies for the lame tweet, but does anyone know about a good dentist in San Francisco? She was apologizing for it.

Feeling shameful because she doesn't know. Yeah, and every time you have a question, is this something that the whole world needs to know about? Like your self-editing. Yeah, you have to self-edit, which causes this friction. So that was our first bet, and it was the wrong bet because it just, for some things, fantastic. Because what we did was we rolled up the social networks into one giant agnostic network.

So if you knew a person on Twitter who had a friend on Facebook, da-da-da-da-da, you know, we didn't care. We'd come back around you somehow. But it didn't care we'd come back around you somehow um but it didn't work so this time around what we did was it's still we're still directing your question to a person but your questions are all anonymous they're private you can ask anything you want and we don't attach it to your identity and you don't need an account to ask a question. You just ask away. If you want to answer questions or mark things as helpful or have a conversation with the person or do any of these participatory things on the system,

that's when you need to create an account and a profile and stuff. But you're happy about your profile because your profile says how helpful you are and how many helpful you are, what categories you're most helpful in and all this other stuff. But you've iterated out of it being conceptually initially a social network into really what is a search engine. Exactly. With people on the other side. That's the other thing. We're calling it a search engine, but it's fundamentally the core assumption is that there's a person with your answer, not a web document.

So it's like an alternate universe search engine. It's completely, it's not better than web search. It's just completely different. Yeah, it's totally. I mean, we need web search. It's kind of based on this hive mind premise. Like somebody in the hive knows the answer to this. Somebody knows.

Everybody. And I'd rather just have that trusted guy tell me the answer than read a bunch of stuff. So in a certain way, you can look at it like an evolution of the search engine to a more naturalistic, like the AI kind of idea behind it. It's funny that you said that because I actually printed it. We did a user testing thing the other day, and I printed out some of the stuff that the people said oh wait oh i don't have it oh yeah no i don't have it here but one of the one of the things that people said was it seems like an evolution on search that's cool and you yeah because i know you have like a chrome extension and that'll be able to like embed it into twitter so it's you don't have to go to your website or use your app.

It just is integrated where everybody already is already. Exactly. Because everyone's trained to go to web search. I mean, 20 years ago, or 25 years ago, no web search. You just asked your friends. That's what people did. That's what people have done forever. They talked to their friends.

that's what people did that's what people have done forever they talked to their friends and then uh web search came along and google especially and everyone turned to google for everything but it's not actually the greatest for everything sometimes you need a person sometimes up sometimes you're looking for the wrong thing i was i a flat tire the other day, and I've had two flat tires already on this same car that I leased. And the first time I went to this guy, and he was great. He's just one guy, and he was just, for 25 bucks, he patched my tire. And then the second time I got my tire uh flattened I went on the web and I found some place that I thought might be him because I remember remembered he was in San Rafael and it wasn't it but it worked but it was just like this big shop and I had to wait two hours and stuff and then the other day a few days ago I I got a flat tire. And it was a slowly getting flatter tire.

So I had some time. And I had no idea what the name of the guy's place was, but I knew it was in San Rafael. So I asked Anjali, what's the name of the place that fixes tires and it's just a guy and it's in San Rafael and it's something like Bob's Tires? It's like wildly specific. I just, I didn't, it was something simple like that.

I was like, it's just a guy, and he's in San Rafael, and it's something like Bob's Tires. That's all I had to go on. When you did that, what was your estimation that you were going to get that question successfully answered? Like, was it, well, this is a long shot, or were you confident, like, hey, man, my jelly thing's going to come through?

I'm confident because I see the numbers. 99% of our questions get answered. That's pretty good. So 15 minutes later, somebody answered, are you talking about Tim's Treads? Great spot. And I was like, Tim's Treads, that's the place. So my tire was flat, but not so flat I couldn't drive on it. And so I went to Tim's Treads.

$25. But I was Googling for Bob's Tires. I was like, I could sit here and Google all day for Bob's Tires. And you're never going to find it. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's emblematic in a weird way of this evolution of the web, right? Like it became all about WWWs, like what's your destination on the web? And now this new phase of moving past that, as media becomes disintermediated, you don't have to go to nytimes.com for your news.

Those news articles are spread wherever you are. So it's not about the destination. And the brand associated with the information is less important than just the information it's i know it's funny i've even seen people credit google images for an image like they'll they'll write an article and they'll just say image courtesy google images and i'm like that doesn't really count yeah but you but it's like well they that's where i got the picture yeah like they provided it you know so i assume that since they had it they and they didn't say i

couldn't use it you know um i was gonna give you a little demo of this voice thing because it kind of goes back to what i was saying about 25 years ago we would ask our friends and natural language processing has gotten good enough now we can ask our we can talk to our computers i even saw a video um that somebody posted on twitter of a little girl like she must have been younger than two and she went up to a black cylindrical garden light. It had a light on top. And she said, Alexa, play Old MacDonald at a Farm.

I don't know what to make of that. Well, it reminds me of... Is this a good thing? It reminded me of when kids were starting getting used to tablets. And somebody put out a video of a little kid trying to move a magazine picture around yeah they thought like it was just a broken ipad right like this didn't work why isn't it not working and so that but that little girl is sort of like an illustration to me of yep she's gonna grow up assuming that she can talk to her computer and her computer can talk to her so let me let me just demo this little experiment we did to see if jelly would work great over voice so

to frame this up ben and i took ben with me to oxford england and he had massive jet lag and i usually don't have to get jet lag but his was so bad it was contagious. I got it too. So I'm going to ask this device a question that it's really good at answering, and then I'm going to ask questions that it doesn't really know. And for people that are listening that don't know what we're talking about, it looks like a soda can that's all black, right? It's made by Amazon. Yeah, it's a portable uh amazon echo the like the smart lady inside is called alexa normally you have to say alexa what how far is the earth from moon but

with this one you just touch the button so i'm gonna do that so so this is like after our trip to England. So what is the time difference between here and London? San Francisco is eight hours behind London. So she's great at that kind of stuff, right? I'll turn the volume up a little bit. But when I ask her this, why does my head hurt? Sorry, I didn't understand the question. Right, it can't extrapolate from the former extrapolate that's her way of saying i don't know right but but if i ask jelly watch this ask jelly why does my head hurt

the most common reason is because you are dehydrated drink at least 200 milliliters of water an hour was this answer helpful sure so excellent helping people feels good Sure. So we made this little thing. But check this out. Well, she says something different every time. There's one more question. I found it on Jelly, and I just thought it was so great because it really anthropomorphizes this little device, and it makes it seem like it's part

of the family and for anyone who has these things in their house it does feel like it's part of the family because whenever somebody doesn't know you just ask her but for these kinds of questions she can't do it but we can step in and take care of it so listen this is a question that i saw on jelly ask jelly is it a good idea to let my boyfriend and best friend move in with me? Honestly, this sounds like a bad idea. Would you like to hear more? Sure. Living with two of the closest people in your life can cause problems with either relationship.

with two of the closest people in your life can cause problems with either relationship and it's my personal belief that when you move in with your significant other for the first time you should live exclusively together so that you can give your best efforts to this new step in your relationship was this answer helpful yes wonderful thanks for asking me so so she really she does everything in the first person because people are actually writing these. So she's speaking in the first person. So it sounds like she knows all this stuff. Right, exactly. So by simply prompting it up front by saying, ask Shelley, it immediately funnels it.

And those were all magic answers. If we didn't have the answer, she'd say, I'm sending it to some people and I'll email you the answer. I'll say I'm sending it to some people and I'll email you the answer. But as the receiver of that information, you don't know who the original person is that answered that, right? Like you so said, you know, professor of psychology. We tried doing that. We tried doing that, but it wasn't as fun. It's way more fun when it seems like she's answering all the questions herself. Right.

Yeah, it is like her. It's getting weird. She's like, in my opinion, this is a bad idea. I'm like, okay, tell me more. Does it do the same thing with Siri? We're trying to, but Siri is not yet quite as open. We can't. I don't use it.

And then I'm like, how come when I'm in my car, I'm not just asking Siri? And maybe it's a generation thing. Like I'm not acclimated to the voice yet. Yeah. Or it's kind of led me astray in the past. I definitely think it's coming. And it's going to migrate into the ear.

And I use it in my car all the time. But honestly, it's not quite there yet. And it's really only what these devices are doing right now is they're they're either buying or scraping data from places like wolf from alpha has a bunch of data and and they can tell you how far the moon is from the earth and all that stuff but they can't tell you what color to paint your apartment you can't show it a picture and say what is this i mean that's the beauty of the beauty of the search engine we've built is it's going to people.

So you can just say like, is this poison heavy? What is your take on the development of AI? Because at some point, conceivably, AI will be able to provide that kind of predictive response and nuanced answers that are tailored to the individual. I don't think it'll be able to do that without humans in the loop. But it will get to know you over time. Yeah, but I think we still need people. My friend Joy Ito is now the director of the mit media lab i guess he's been there for a few years now and he was he's telling

me about human in the loop ai apparently that's a thing now um it's ai acronym for that probably probably some crazy thing but um it's basically you take ai but you and this is what i i guess we're in this category because what we're doing is we're using people to train our machines and our algorithms to like oh we recognize this question oh oh like this is this is the kind of answer that's better. Oh, okay. And it gets smarter with every use. And so it's just infinitely better when you add people to AI. If you just have AI, I think it would take hundreds of years before. It's like the difference between VR and AR. The integration of these two things together creates a little bit more complexity and nuance.

Exactly, right. That's more helpful for the end user. I mean, when you think about it, the web seems infinitely huge, right? But how much of what you know is published on the web? How much of what any of us know is is published on the web how much of what any any of us know is actually published on the web we know way more than we've actually sat down and written to the web right so when you ask people stuff they know so much more stuff than they've written on i'm not going to

write down random stuff i know on the web right everything i know like let me think everything i know like it's only a person that can tell you when you ask, hey, where's the closest Home Depot? And they say, well, what are you looking for? And you're like, I'm looking for a three-quarter inch whoosie-whatsie. Oh, you got to go to Ace for that. Those guys will help you out.

So the answer to where's the closest Home Depot is Ace Hardware. Go to Ace. But a machine will just be like, okay, here's the home depot here's how to get there here's where it is here's what the price of your who's he what's he is um but only a person can tell you you know don't go there go here or like i'm where's mission street where are you trying to go oh you don't want mission you want second because they're doing

construction i mean there's a million and one reasons why so how many person how many answers do you have logged now and how many people are using this service we just started three months ago and ben knows the those um are the the measurement we're the med the the measurement we're sort of basing everything on is answers served. Kind of like how many answers have we served up to people? Right, that's like the McDonald's thing. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it's like how many times have we answered people's questions?

And that's something like 30,000 in the past three days. 30 oh no it's something like 30 000 in the past three days right um so i don't really i'd have to ask ben how many people are are like fully registered and then and then there's registered like i'm a volunteer i can also answer questions and then there's just passive users who who come by and just do a search and since we just got started and we just built web extensions and we just today launched a Twitter app, it's growing. It's just growing. If you ask me in two weeks,

we'll probably be quadruple what we are now, ideally. There's something I wanted to say to you at the beginning of this that I didn't say because I didn't even know we were starting. Because I thought you might be interested in hearing it, which is I have a 1,000-year vision for humanity. All right. That's interesting for a lot of reasons, but go ahead. Essentially, it's a picture in my mind of what I want humanity to be like in 1,000 years.

I alone am obviously not going to get this done. get this done um but what i do is for everything that i do i rewind from a thousand years in that in that future to now and i ask myself well what can i do to to sort of help increment it even nudge it towards that direction and so i know how to make consumer applications, so that's one of the things I'm doing. I'm doing other things, too. The vision for the future, it clarified in my mind when I saw a flag. The flag, it was actually on this campus, the Lucas film campus.

There's a flag somewhere on this campus that is just a flag of planet Earth. It's not like the American flag or the German flag, but it's a flag of planet Earth. And then it finally sort of gelled in my mind like, ah, yes, that's exactly it. So the vision is one of global cooperation, essentially. So if you can imagine, here's a bad example, but it's an example nonetheless. Google spent at least a decade figuring out how to build the most efficient, cheapest, energy efficient, totally awesome data center

for all the searches that go on right and they hired all these genius phds in computer science and they worked for 10 years and they figured this all out they built it all and it was fantastic and then facebook came along and they had to do this they had to solve the same problem again. They had to take similarly genius PhDs in computer science, build the whole problem. Now, what Facebook's done has open sourced that information and said, here's how you build a really great data center, which is fantastic, right? But if you took this metaphor and you extended it across everything, if you put it into medicine and space exploration and you name it, right? If everyone was just collaborating and saying, hey, we figured out how to do this.

And then we would free up all these people and say, okay, you figured it out. Now we're going to have to do this. We would get stuff done in a year that would normally take 10 years. Right, right, right. stuff done in a year that would normally take like 10 years right right right and so and and the side effect of global cooperation would be no more hunger no more war you know no more all of the bad things because in order to collaborate you need to be friendly and collaborate you know what i mean so it's just this crazy hallucinogenically optimistic vision of the future instead of what we... I'm a huge fan of sci-fi, and I challenge you to find any current science fiction television series or movie that is aspirational.

Like Star Trek was back when I was a kid. is aspirational, like Star Trek was back when I was a kid. That was a vision of the future where the world had gotten its act together, and then they sent out these spaceships, and they were out looking for other planets and stuff. And now everything's a dystopian nightmare future with overturned cars and people shooting each other for cans of chickpeas and you know zombies and everything's terrible and i do believe to some extent that life imitates art and if you and if you just keep pumping this into your brain you're like yep there's gonna be an apocalypse

that's everything's gonna be terrible and if you do the other way around, if you give something to 10-year-olds and 12-year-olds that shows them, look at this bright future we could have, then they can go out and make it. Do you feel like being a parent amplifies that kind of intentionality? Oh, for sure, yeah. How old is your, Jake is your son? Jake is four, but he's going to be five in november so he's almost five yeah and yeah i don't want him to you know i mean things do look like they're headed into a bleak direction right now so that but but if you if you could if you could if you can just it's kind of like

faking it till you make it you know like, like if you say we're going to have a great positive world in the future, then you might, you know? Well, it works on a micro level. It does. If you walk around saying I'm having a great day and my friends are the best and isn't everything awesome, then you're generally going to have a better experience. Yeah. So it's extrapolating on that idea to a global scale exactly there's there's some you know we have to overcome greed and ego and uh you know yeah i know that people structures and all kinds of people push back on me at me when they're like dude you're never gonna have a world like

that and like people are always gonna be fighting over religion and stuff like that. Why not hold that energy, hold that frequency? But I've seen it happen. I've seen people all come together and act as one. Unfortunately, it only seems to happen during times of disaster and horrible things, like all the bombings in Paris. And all of a sudden, everyone was saying, my door is open for you. Come into my home. Or some supernatural storm.

But it's always something terrible. It's always a bad thing. But it is inside us. It is inside people to behave like this. It is inside people to behave like this. That hope and that optimism and that sense of altruism really kind of runs through your core and everything that you do. I mean, that's like a defining theme of Jelly and a big part of your contribution to Twitter. Medium, Twitter.

It's like I've been trying to work towards this, and Jelly is the most specific. You know what I mean? Twitter and Medium were all about, hey, let's open up the dialogue. Let's get free speech. I mean, even back to when I worked on Blogger, it was you don't need to know how to code in order to have a voice on the web. And in some places in the world,

that was all they had was a blog. And I appreciate the fact that your website is still a blogger page. I know. You know that? I know. I was looking at it the other day, and I was like, oh, wow. Like, that's... I really should switch it to Medium, but I'm old school. But it's cool.

I'm old school. No, it says a lot. I think it's very interesting that you're still there. And I also think it shows your sense of humor. You're funny, man. So when I was looking at it, I was like, oh, let's click on the year 2000 and see what this is talking about. And there's all kinds of craziness there. You're like, I wonder why they named pulleys pulley.

Were they just lazy that day? It pulls. But then there was one great post that you were like, you're like, I had this dream last night that I was like, this is the year 2000. You're like, I had this dream that I was fantastically wealthy. And I was so wealthy. And I had a great hallway and I opened it up and there were hundreds of people working in the laundry department. And I was like, not only is that funny funny it's like weirdly prescient you know I know and so then I'm thinking about your 1,000 year plan but I also see you as somebody who you're not like the guy who sits down

and says this is my five-year plan or this is my one-year plan like you're you're going with your gut like your instinct right that's I've always done that I've never i've never based anything off of it like when we made twitter it was for fun it wasn't like we're mbas and we're solving a problem you know there's a message there's a lack of a kind of messaging system in the world right now i mean that wasn't what you know you can go back in time and say yeah we were super geniuses and we knew that this was be a thing um but even when i was a little kid like i had i had a no homework policy in high school and i just explained it to my teachers no homework policy walk me through that because i think

it's really funny well i don't know how you got away with this but i got away with it because so here's what it was i i have been working since I was eight years old because we were on welfare. My mother was adopted by a Swedish couple that lived in an affluent town west of Boston. And she inherited the house when they died. I never met them. And the way we stayed in that town is my mom would sell. My dad wasn't in the picture, but my mom would sell the house that we lived in every few years and get a cheaper house and pocket the money. Until in high school, we actually had a dirt floor.

We were in, I think it was. You're being in the wrong direction. It was basically, it was a barn for horses and they and we lived in it but we fixed it up ourselves anyway kind of an interesting way to finance your life without really working well because she didn't have she didn't really have a career she had a high school diploma anyway um so i had to work right i had to have a job. And I had created a boys lacrosse team. And the other kids voted me to be the captain. And it turns out I was really good at it. And so I had lacrosse practice, too. and i had to do those things and what and i wasn't a particularly fast reader or fast math problem solver or anything so when i got to high school i tried to do all the homework that they gave me and it was taking me to like 3 a.m in the morning you know when i after i got home from work which was like seven or eight and then i was like like, okay, scarf something down. Let's do all

this assigned stuff. And I was thinking, I tried doing it for a week or two. And I was like, there's no way I can do this. Something's got to go and I can't quit my job and I'm not going to quit the team that I started. So I went to each teacher. This is how I pulled it off. I wasn't a punk about it. I didn't just not do my homework. I went to each teacher and I said, excuse me, could I have some time with you after class? Sure. I would just like to tell you that I have a no homework policy. And most of them laughed at me. And they were like, oh, do you really? And I was like, yes, I have a no homework policy. I promise I will pay attention in class, uh i promise i will pay attention in class full attention but i don't do homework and and they would laugh and and they would and they most of them said okay well that's gonna affect your grade

and i was like i fully understand that i just wanted to let you know and and uh i think it was the the way that i approach it by being being so sort of weirdly professional about it. Like precocious, like in an Alex Keaton. Yeah, I was like, I totally understand if you need to lower my grade a little bit, I'm fine with that. But I just can't do the homework. Not even like, I'm going to try, but I don't know. I'm not going to do it. Not going to do it at all.

And I never did the homework. And I distinctly remember my friend Matt Flanagan was, he was really good at school. I mean, because he worked really hard at it. You know, he was always studying. And he got nervous about quizzes and tests and everything. And he had this huge backpack. It was, like, gigantic. quizzes and tests and everything and he had this huge backpack it was like gigantic and the straps were like coming off because there's so many books in there and i remember i distinctly remember one

day um kind of blowing his mind because i dumped my books in my locker and i just slammed it closed and i had no backpack or anything and uh and Matt was like what do you what are you doing well where aren't you bringing your books home and I said no I have no homework policy and he was like you you can't do that I was like Matt it's America you can do whatever you want and and then I just like slammed the locker and left school and i he he just had this look on his face like what what the hell's going on here anyway and and did it catch on with other did other students try to pull it off too did you create like i didn't little movement i didn't go around advertising that i had a no homework policy so and you still ended up graduating i mean you

must have gotten like when it came time to turn your homework in and the teacher's like all right no they well they all knew i didn't do it and also i did i did i i held true to my promise i paid attention very keenly in class i might i mean i to this day i still think like when you're at school you should be at school and when you're at home you should be at at home. Like, I don't, I couldn't agree. I don't get this whole concept of like you're at school and then you have to be at school at home too. And we could talk for six hours about what's wrong with our education.

I mean, nowadays there also, I don't think the teachers were talking to each other because the geography teacher would be like, okay, read 12 chapters and the math teacher would be like, do a hundred problems. And I was like,

you guys really need to get together and figure out how much homework each of you is giving us. Because there's like 80 of you and you're all assigning us. You know, like someone should work this into a system. But what I get out of that is an independent thinker at an early age, right? Like, you know, most kids, like you do what you're told. You show up. This is what everyone's doing yeah and it's not like we're all being you know brainwashed but i guess on some level we are but to have like the spine and the self-confidence and the you know that streak of of you know punk rock or whatever it is that was inside of you to stand up and say yeah everyone's doing that but i'm gonna do this over here and just be like cool

with what everyone thought about that. It's an interesting look into the character. Yeah, and I'm not really sure where I got that. But I do remember in third grade, I got a special award for Artist of the Month because I noticed that the teacher noticed me in third grade that it was time to draw and they were like okay draw whatever you want and I distinctly remember thinking like well what should I draw like I don't see anything very interesting to draw and so I what I did was I I went I laid down on the ground and I looked at

the door from the perspective of laying down on the ground and drew the door that way so it would look all weird and um and I I remember noticing her noticing me do that and I was like ah I think I think I'm doing something that she didn't expect me to do you know what i mean right just like drawing you know like oh he's not just drawing it he's doing some weird thing he's like doing something else and so like real art as opposed to and then i had to and then she was like okay you're artist of the month so we need to put a bunch of artwork up on the hallway and i was like i don't have a bunch of artwork so i did a bunch of crappy artwork and then i was sorry i was artist of the month because i was like what can

i draw really fast that would look like i was like okay grapes circle circle circle but being artist of the month at such a young age did that plant the seed no i think people don't you know it's people don't i think a lot of people don't really understand or realize like that's art was your thing like design yeah that was my thing. This is your entry point. It's not like you were getting an MBA and wanting to go be a startup entrepreneur. I did tell my mom when I was a little kid that I was going to graduate from Babson College and then be a businessman. And I actually got an honorary doctor of laws and did a commencement speech at Babson.

And I guess I'm technically a businessman now. So I didn't lie. You made your mom happy. I didn't lie. But yeah, I decided to be an artist mostly because I said I was. Because I got an opportunity to go to Spain with my friend's mother was a professor and still is a professor she's Armenian but she's a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College and I got an opportunity when I was I don't know what it was, like 18 or 17 or 18, to go for free to Spain and

stay a week in the dorms that the girls were going to stay in later. And we were walking around, checking, I don't know where we were. We went to some caves and stuff like that. And then we met some girls, and they were asking us what we each did. I can't remember if it was college. Were you? I think it was just when some of my friends were going to college. So my friends all had this great answer, like, oh, I'm studying this at Dartmouth, and I'm studying this at, you know, I'm a wrestler scholarship guy at Boston College.

And I was like, oh, no, what am I going to say when it comes to me? Because I got nothing going on. And they were like, what about you? And I just said, I'm an artist. Because I figured that would be a good catch-all. Like, they don't know what. Like, I could be great. Girls love that.

And also, they were like and girls love that and and also they were like oh that's the most interesting one and i was like yep yep that's what i'm with that it becomes a self-fulfilling after that worked i was like yeah that's artists of the month i'm definitely an artist and uh it worked really good i actually um in my like after i anyway i ended up becoming an becoming a professional graphic designer. Right. You got involved in, like, desktop publishing early on. I got sort of a lucky break.

And, yeah. And I was good at designing book covers. And then I went on to do freelance work. And I quickly found out that, like, I wasn't going to get enough book jackets to design to pay for anything. The highly lucrative world of book jacket. Actually, I designed... Did you design the cover for your own book? I sort of did.

I mocked it up and I said... Not for my paperback, by the way. We used to joke... When we designed covers in the art department at little brown we used to joke about how bad it was to put a light bulb on an idea on a book about creativity and that's what they did i was like this is literally a joke it's a joke anyway um the uh but for the um hard cover i just said why don't you know just do have a duotone picture of me with, like, whatever. I did that.

But what was I talking about? Oh. Art being an artist. Oh, so after I went out on my own, there wasn't enough work. And somebody came to me one day, and they said um this was the 90s like late mid mid-ish 90s like 97 maybe somebody came to me and they said we have a five thousand dollar budget do you do do you build websites and i said of course of course it was going right for the for like a book cover at the time?

I think it was like, well, if it was a university publisher, yeah, it was like a few hundred bucks. If it was like a real deal freelance for an actual book, you could get like a thousand bucks. Right. I actually helped design the cover of Infinite Jest. You did? Yeah, but what I did was I made all the mistakes. Because back then, you had to design the whole cover, not just the front, right? So you had to do the flaps, the back.

And back then, what they did was they gave you the copy in paper, and you had to type it in. And I typed it in. My mentor was the guy who designed the cover, and I did the Photoshop. I Photoshopped the clouds in and i i typed it in my mentor was the guy who designed the cover and i did the photoshop of the i photoshopped the clouds in and stuff and uh and then years and years later a friend of mine was like check it out i got a first edition infinite jest and it's worth money because it has these mistakes on it i was like hey i made those mistakes that's pretty cool though I know I was like I mean you know I didn't know it would be a claim to fame history yeah but um but websites are so what happened was some guy came to me and said we have five grand and we need a website do you do

websites and then my immediate answer was yes and then I had to figure out how to do websites and I did a terrible job but back then it didn't really matter they were like look my boss just says we need a website with pictures of us and bios underneath us so whatever and i would just i was like okay i'll just figure it out and do that and and then my friends graduated from dartmouth and they wanted to do a web startup that was back in the day it was that vague like let's do an internet company company that was the idea internet company and so we ended up building i ended up going with my gut and saying we should build a social blogging network because it was we were we were building something else. It was like, the original idea was catalog your collection of books and CDs and write reviews about them. And I didn't have any books or CDs.

I didn't own anything. And we were starting this in New York. And I was paying my rent with my credit card. And I was just writing inside the little form where for the review of the cd like funny things that happened to me my cab ride and stuff yeah yeah and uh and then blogger came out and I was like that's it just write whatever you want let's do that so we added weblogs to our list of things you could write and that's then it like took off like crazy and i thought

we were way better than blogger because blogger you had to have you had to ftp it you had to have a server and all this crap and i was like no all same place you write and you read your friends blogs and then i invented this thing called e-props which were like little super mario brothers coins and you could give somebody an e-prop if you like their post and you were too lazy to write a comment. All these little like details and things that are so similar they're like basic and yeah it was like a like a thumbs up or yeah exactly and even looking at your your blogger page like a lot of those old posts they're only a sentence or two. know almost looks like a twitter well i actually tried in 2002 i made a web service called side blogger and the tagline was for the short crappy posts that aren't good enough for your main blog yeah and it was just a bit of javascript you would put in your sidebar

and you could go to sideblogger.com and you could type in like i'm watching tv and it would just show up over there and we had like a couple hundred people started using it but then i got a cease and desist from google it was really just someone on the blogger team but i was scared enough to just take it all down right because google had bought blogger yeah they had just bought it about three months after they bought it i went to work there right so you had started ev comes on the scene you start reading his posts as soon as you're kind of watching we were using pyra which was the group soft group the coding software no no pyro was a it was like slack today ah okay it was it was how you could work

with a remote team and that's what Ev had built, Pyra. And Blogger was a side project of Pyra. And so my team at Zanga was using Pyra because some of us weren't living in New York. And so we were among the first people to see Blogger. And so I immediately was like, this is what we're going to do. And I was reading Ev's blog, and I was like, man, I agree with this guy.

Up and down and sideways, you know? And I was a big follower of his blog. And then later, after they got acquired. And this is before blogging was a thing. It wasn't like people were talking about blogging, right? No, you could count the number of weblogs. It was just guys like you that knew what was going on. Yeah, you knew who everyone was.

I took an engineer from Zanga, and on the side, I said, let's make a blog search engine. Just index the blogs as they come online. It was called blogsearch.com. Is this pre-rss yeah and uh i was like if we start now and if weblogs become as popular as i think they're gonna be we'll we'll have like the the place to go and um then one of my friends that i started the company with was like what are you doing shut this. We don't have time for a side project. Too bad. It would have been a whole thing.

So yeah, in 2002, I did that thing. It's almost like I was trying to, and then even when I went to Blogger, we did something called Blogger on the go we even had a jingle for it it was, I had a guy do like a song it was called

it went like this, snap a photo and type some text, send it to Blogger and we'll do the rest the idea was it was pre-smartphones because it was 2003 when I joined and what you did was you would take a picture with your feature phone and you would like say something and i even had a little comic that explained it was a lady and she was taking a picture of a ufo and

her text was omg ufo and and then what it did was it automatically created a Blogspot blog with that picture and that text. So it was like two times I tried. But like fun and not precious. Yeah, just stupid stuff. And Stephen Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, talks about something called the slow hunch. It's like something you don't even realize you're thinking about until something enables it to finally happen so i think twitter was just the right time the right place the right people um and then the iphone came out which just changed everything for us that's all about time you know great timing sms coming in right we were just moment where this idea was percolating

sms in 2005 when we when we start audio is a good idea but the time was wrong way too early for for podcasting and and um and uh and then in 2005 in 2004 or 5 the carriers decided that they would allow text messages to go from Sprint to Verizon before it was siloed. And the U.S. wasn't doing text messaging as much as Europe was. And so we started fooling around with text messaging. Like, oh, a text message can show up. We can make a text message show up on the web. And we can type in a web form and make it show up on a phone it's so weird now and then the iphone came out we're not texting and it wasn't that long ago i know it doesn't seem like it was a long time ago actually and we're talking

about like well like 2004 to yeah around that right yeah i know that to me that seems like two years ago but it's 2016 there's people who've lived their whole lives, and they've always had. There's people who've lived their whole lives, and all they thought was the President of the United States is either black or maybe a woman. And that was a huge historic thing. Anyway. Right, so you connect with ev though like ev's ev's your guy and you're just as my guy out a way to like i came out i came out to work with ev like when blogger got acquired i sent him an email i didn't know him at all he sent him an email because i've been reading his blog forever by that time my first company company, Xanga, X-A-N-G-A dot com, had sort of just run out of money and I'd racked up huge debt.

And I went back to Boston and I got a job working at Wellesley College through my friend's mom. She gave me a hookup and I was doing stuff there. And I wrote Evanote and I just said, congratulations on your acquisition, and also I feel like I'm the missing member of your team. Right. And then, to my surprise, a couple days later, he wrote me, do you want to come work here? And I was like, holy crap. Right, you're just psyched that he read it. Yeah, I couldn't. You're just psyched that he read it. Yeah.

You didn't expect he would respond. Yeah. So he pulled major strings. Because back then, in 2003, they were not. Google was hiring PhDs from Stanford. I didn't have a college degree. I had written a couple of books about the future of blogging, how important it is and stuff and there was no social part of social media back then like all the guys on the blogger team were pretty much nerds and and inside the the the google like umbrella was blogger a prior

where did it no pecking order of like what was important to well i don't think it wasn't nobody even pecked it yeah like they were on like in the basement they got acquired and they were still on their own servers they were like i thought we were gonna get on some good google stuff here we're still breaking going down all the time and uh they they were placed in a windowless conference room together and all told they were contractors. It was Google's second acquisition. And the first one didn't have people. It was just an acquisition of a bunch of data. Wow, this is the first time they actually were bringing...

And the funny thing is when I went to work at Google, I wrote a blog post that was a jokey post. It was a fake press release. Yeah, you had to break the news to Genius Labs. Yeah, exactly. That you were going to be bringing your enterprise west. So I wrote a fake press release that says, like, it said, like, Boston. And it said.

In all caps. In all caps, like a real thing. And it said, Google acquires Genius Labs for an undisclosed sum. And I just made it. And I got a quote from Ev, and I made it like a... It was just a blog post, but I made it look like a press release. And the funniest thing is that somehow that got into Wikipedia. And then, right after somebody put it in Wikipedia, Right after somebody put it in Wikipedia, the New York Times decided to do a list of companies that Google had acquired so far.

And it was only like they had acquired one more after Blogger or something. So somebody must have looked on Wikipedia. Because you need a citation to stay on Wikipedia. And so it was so quick that now there was a citation because it was in the New York Times. So to this day, if you look at, like, if you Google for Google's acquisitions, Genius Labs is, like, their third acquisition or something. It's still there as, like, a legitimate thing. That's so great.

Because unless somebody knows you they don't know that you're joking how would you know i know so well a lot of people thought i probably thought i was a total jerk because i called my blog biz stone genius right it was obviously meant to be sarcastic because if anyone had read my blog it was mostly stupid stuff anyway i went to work i went to work for ev and um but you go and work where you really are you are being acquired by the real genius labs yeah i actually went it was it was funny it was like i went to the real it was like going into the willy wonka and the chocolate factory there was like that was the real deal you know and um the thing for me that was crazy is I didn't meet Ev until he picked me up at the airport to go work with him.

And I'd never met him. And it was just all complete surprise to me that he had also been reading my blog. And I was like, oh, that makes sense. But I didn't think that he thought a bit about me. Right. But apparently he had seen something in me that I think he somehow saw the future of social media. And he thought, well, this is a guy that can bring life to a brand. Because that was kind of my job, was to make blogger a little bit more mainstream-ish. Try to make it like hey everybody can have a blog i got all of google blogging at first they were like no no blogs and i was like why no

blogs everyone's here is super smart don't you want to attract more talent you should get these guys blogging so one of my claim to fame claims to fame is i got my cat on the on the official google blog um because we launched photos in Blogger and I was like, for example, you can post a picture of your cat. And I was like, yeah, I got it. So the whole cat meme thing started with that. I don't think it did.

But I was able to do that. And actually, after I left Google, they forgot to take me off the official Google blog for like four years. I could have posted anything that's funny I could have been like Google acquires I don't know whatever I didn't do anything but you quickly figure out that like Google's not the place for you right well no it was it was a great place actually it worked out perfectly because they try what they did was I

somehow that I've went through all these machinations to get me to work there because they weren't larry and sergey were like no way he doesn't have the creds and and ev was stalwart and so uh he at the time they said okay fine um what was his name he's the director of he was the director of engineering at the time um darn it his name is i'm forgetting his name but they said all right let's let him talk to this guy and if if if this guy likes him then we'll then we'll just hire him fine and so you'll stop bugging us and so that guy called me and we talked for 45 minutes or so and i explained to him that i didn't graduate college because i instead had a mentor and i learned graphic design and i did blogging and i wrote a book about blogging

and i'm doing i had a i was writing a second book about blogging and i really love it and i think it's a future and that guy liked me so that guy apparently gave me the thumbs up. Genius Lab certified. Yeah. And then he quickly, as I joined, he quit. So anyway, what happened was I worked for Ev, but Ev wasn't my boss. The way they got me in was I somehow worked for AdSense, which was some other building. But I never even went there. it which was some other building but i never even went there and um and then uh they tried to give me bosses like they were like this is your new boss and that he was like okay let's um let's write down your objectives and key results that was the thing they had OKRs, Objectives and Key Results. And I was like, okay, I don't know. Like, I just do, I was like, I just do stuff.

I, like, write stuff on the blog. What were you doing? I was writing, what I did was I decided to turn, I decided to make the blogger support, the kind of weak-ass blogger support section into a product called Blogger Knowledge. And I wanted to, like, fully flesh it out. the kind of weak ass blogger support section into a product called blogger knowledge and and i wanted and i i wanted to like fully flesh it out i wanted i every week i did a really big blog post about all the different things you can do with blogger just making it easier for the average person yeah i want to mainstream it you know like look how easy it is look what you could do you could have a

wedding thing you could do this for this you know whatever here's how you could use an education it was trying to make it a broader thing trying to give it a brand and like and make it seem accessible and not for the nerds and this the first guy was like okay what are your objectives and key results and i was like i don't know and he was like okay how about they're this and he wrote down a bunch of stuff and then three months later he was okay, so how do we do? And I was like, I didn't do any of that stuff. And he got red-faced and really angry. And I was like, you wrote it down.

I didn't even. And he was just pissed. And he recommended I get, they fire me. And then they were like, all right, settle down. You're not his boss anymore. We're not going to fire him. And then. How many people are on the blogger team? There was like 12 people.

No, there was like eight people. And then there was... Slowly it got a little bit bigger. I was only there two and a half years because I left when I've left. But it was funny, though, because all I did was really piss off. The only bosses I had ever had was my mentor, Steve Snyder. And he was less of a boss and more of a mentor. And you had made this move to work with Ev, but then Ev wasn't even really there, right?

No, no. He was there. Was he around? I worked together. All the blogger guys sat in a pit together. And I was working with... I felt like Ev was my boss. Even though he didn't manage me or anything like that. He just let me do my thing.

And he was like, this is why I wanted you here to do your thing. So do your thing. And I was doing my thing. Then Ev splitting. But AdSense people were trying to put me in a bucket. They just couldn't. They just got really frustrated with me. Finally, just as they left, they decided, they said,

okay, here's what we're going to do. This director of engineering guy is going to be your boss. And he met with me, and he said, I'm going to be your boss. I'm not ever going to check in with you. We're going to give you the maximum bonuses, and you don't have to tell me anything about what you're doing i don't care and if you have a problem just come to me and i was like great and he's like great i'm glad you're happy and so i didn't have anyone i had no responsibilities that's pretty good except for but i did you know i still wanted to do stuff um and then I quit, which was because Ev left.

And we had had this idea in the car ride home from Google. I had this idea. I was like, Ev, you can record your voice in the browser. Because we were doing this thing called Audio Blogger. And it was record your voice in a browser and then using Flash, press play, and your voice would a in a browser and then press using flash press play and your voice would play in the browser and i said but wait if we the the if you can record your voice in a browser and these ipod things seem to be seem to be catching on like big time could we write something

that converts the flash into mp3 and then write something else that syncs that to an ipod the flash into MP3 and then write something else that syncs that to an iPod. And I was like, holy shit, we could. And I was, and then I was like, is that a thing?

Could we democratize radio? Like, like web, web logs democratized, like making web pages. And he was like, holy shit, we can.

And, um, that's kind of the, that was the beginning of Odeo. And, uh, right. And his neighbor was already working on it, right? Yeah, Noah Glass was his neighbor. He was the one who was doing Audio Blogger for us. And so we all started Odeo.

And just to put a pin in that, when you walked away from Google, you had shares that were not vested. I mean, when you walked away from Google, you had shares that were not vested. I mean, you literally walked away from a couple million bucks. All you had to do was ride it out. It seemed pretty cush. I could have been a millionaire. And that's that thing of like, I think that's the same thing in you that made you the no homework guy. Like there's this.

Well, I had to ask myself. this well i had to ask myself well i had to ask myself i joined google and i was massively in debt massively in debt and goo i mean google wasn't paying a lot of money salary wise because they thought their equity was like the way to go so and i had to get my mom a house because she finally... There's no more houses to sell. What she did was she went to Florida and bought four condos, and then everything bombed. So I had to get her a house, and I was in debt, and I was paying for everything,

and so I quickly started racking up more debt because my wife was working full-time a wildlife animal, wild animal hospital. But that was volunteer work. And so I again, just like I got to zero. I got to zero while I was at Google. And then I and so I got to zero and I could have stayed and I could have had a couple million more bucks. But I had to ask the question. All you had to do was stick it out and you could buy your mom a house.

That's a tough decision. What I did was I asked my wife, like, I just felt like something was off because I said, why did we move out here? Did we move out here so I could work at Google or did we move out here so I could work with Ev? And the answer was so I could work with Ev it wasn't I I wrote Ev it wasn't that I wanted to work at Google even though it's great and since Ev left I was like I gotta follow Ev and and that's a choice I've made consistently throughout my life that I realized um when people after I wrote this latest book that i wrote that people had asked me like why did you keep quitting and doing these other things when you had these cushy situations and i was like why did i do that and i realized every move i've ever made was i was following a person

not an institution or money or anything like that it was always the people's always the people has always been your thing. Yeah. And that's the core of Jelly, right? Right. It goes back to people. Connecting people. And it turns out one of my hobbies is helping other people.

I like to solve problems and help people get out of their situations, bad situations. Even just this weekend, my friend was participating in a fundraiser for his kids school and i went to the fundraiser to help raise funds and he was manning the jumpy house that was his job and i was like jay your is crazy. These kids are sweltering in the heat. We've got to make this thing move. We've got to get a system in place here. So I got a whole system in place for 10 kids at a time, three minutes each.

Get them out as soon as possible. Do a one-minute warning. Make sure that the shoes are off for the next 10 kids and the whole thing. I actually just enjoy helping people and solving problems and stuff. So for me, jelly is the perfect thing so i actually just enjoy like helping people and and solving problems and stuff so for me jelly is like the perfect thing right and even and even throughout your tenure at twitter i mean those skills i think seem to seem to have been critical at moments you know there's been so much made of all that kind of you know political mac yeah i was always just trying to i basically was always just trying to help my friend it seems like you've come out of that i mean we haven't

even tracked through it uh linearly yet but you know it seems like you've come out the other side of that with intact relationships with everybody yeah well my the key was i was never mean about i was never mean to anybody i never said bad things I made a decision back when I was in high school based on one thing that happened that I was always going to be nice to people. And the one thing that happened was this girl in my art class

asked me if I liked her painting and I said, God no, it's awful. It looks like a drippy mess. And then I horrified her. She was terribly upset. And I was like, Oh, my God, why did I say that? It was true. And it's exactly what I thought. But I was like, that why didn't need to say that? That was terrible of me. So then I decided from now on, I'm just going to be really nice. And you can be a successful startup entrepreneur

and business person and still be a nice person yeah there's a flip side you don't have to like you don't have to denigrate another person to in order to highlight someone else you know what i mean and i've never i was in charge basically of building the brand at twitter and i never spoke ill of any other brand. In fact, I never mentioned any other brand. I would always just try to say, like, social networks or search engines. You know, I just, I didn't have anything bad to say about anyone else. And my theory was actually don't talk about anyone else. People would ask me, like, well, what about what Facebook's doing?

And the truth was, I don't know what they're doing or what they're thinking. Like, I have no idea what they're doing or what they're thinking. Why would you ask me? You should ask them. So I would just tell them the truth. Like, I don't know. Like, you should ask them what they're doing. I know what we're doing. Especially when you ask Mark Zuckerberg

whether the door should be left open or closed in a meeting and he says yes that was Abby said do you want me to leave the door open or should I close the door he calls you in well set it up a little bit well what happened was I went to work

it all started with a weird shirt it all started because I was down to this one white dress shirt, and I never wear white dress shirts. I put it on, I felt awkward, and I was late. Back then, I was living in Berkeley, so I had to walk half an hour to the BART, and then the BART was 23 minutes to the montgomery station and then montgomery to 164 south park was another half hour walk so

fine finally got there like two hours to get to work yeah it took like an hour and a half because i was walking and barting and got i got to work i think we had just moved to our second office. And I got to work, and Jason Goldman said, Ev's waiting downstairs for you. Just go down and get in his car. And I was like, why? And he said, just go. And I got in the car, and I was like, is this shirt look okay?

I felt so uncomfortable in this shirt. It was just all day long I was thinking about this shirt. I felt so uncomfortable in this shirt. It was just all day long I was thinking about this shirt. Anyway, got in the car with Dev, and he had bought a Porsche because he got a lot of money from selling Blogger to Google. And I got in his Porsche, and we were speeding along, and I was like, where are we going? Anyway, where are we going?

And he said, we're going down to Palo Alto. And I said, oh, no, is today that thing that we said we were going to do the thing for the Google guys? And he was like, no. And I said, is it the thing where we're going to? Because I always talk too much. And he was like, will you be quiet so I can tell you? And I said, okay, where are we going?

He said, we're going to talk to Mark Zuckerberg. And I was like, why are we going to talk to Mark Zuckerberg? And he said, because we are going to talk about Facebook acquiring Twitter. And I said, we are? Since when about Facebook acquiring Twitter. And I said, we are? Since when is this a thing? Because I guess I was left out of the conversations. And is this like 2008, 2009 or something?

I think it was 2008 or 2009. I think it was 2008. I feel like it was 2008. And I said, we are? I didn't know, are we for sale? Are we selling our company? And Ev said, I don't know. And I was like, do you want to sell it?

And he said, no. And then I was like, well, what are we even doing? Why am I wearing this shirt? And I said, so you don't want to sell the company? And he said, no. And I said, okay, well, I have an idea. And he said, so you don't want to sell the company? And he said, no. And I said, okay, well, I have an idea. And he said, what? And I said, here's what we should do.

What we'll do is to get out of this, since you already agreed to the meeting, we'll just make up a number that is so ludicrously out of anyone's range of pay. No one would ever pay this amount. We'll make up a number so high that they'll have to say no, and so we won't have to do it. And he was like, okay, well, what number do you think? And the biggest number I could possibly come up with in my, the biggest number in my head that I could think of was $500 million.

I was like, so he said $500 million. And we both burst into like stomach muscle hurting laughter. Like the kind of laughter where you're laughing so hard you're not making a sound. Like, are you kidding me? Like us for $500 million? We can barely hold our shit together. And so I was like, that'll totally work. Like there's no way.

We're worth tops $5 million if you round up all the guys. And so we went down there. It was a whole thing. We had to check in, get our name tags. And somebody brought us to Mark. And he told us we didn't need name tags. And we said, but yes, we do. They told us we need name tags.

And then he was showing us around it was it was a little awkward because he's like you want me to show you around and we were like okay and they had all these offices all around different buildings in palo alto so we were just walking around with name tags on walking behind mark zuckerberg in palo alto and going to we we went into a building he was like this is one of our buildings and it was a bunch of guys on computers and and we were like oh cool for like the whole campus and yeah we were like oh cool yeah yeah and it was just a bunch of guys on computers and then he was like do you want to see another one and we were like sure and we went to another building it was a bunch of guys on computers and uh and then he was like do you want to see you want to see another building

and we were like okay and we were walking behind him and i was looking at ev like what the hell are we doing like what is this is weird what why are we doing this and ev was like i don't know and then we looked at and we saw the third building it was guys on computers and we were like okay that's good i think i was i think i said something like, that's cool. We got the gist. And he was like, okay, well, let's go in here. And he chose this weird non-room. It was like a super small room. I think it was meant for just making just a phone call, except it had a love seat and a chair.

And Mark went in first, and he sat in the chair, leaving the love seat for me and Ev to snuggle in together on. And I went first and sat down on that. And then Ev... How was the shirt doing? I was just pulling the shirt down. I felt weird. Is it like some weird Machiavellian negotiating strategy that he would put you in that room?

Was that his secret room? No. I don't know. I don't know i don't know but all i all i remember thinking was that it felt like there was 12 people inside of mark's head like he was so smart he had 12 brains that's i that's what i felt like when he talked and i was making all these jokes and stuff and like i felt like he was just like i'm waiting for the clown to finish talking so i can talk. So I stopped joking. But we went in.

He sat in the chair. I sat in the love seat. Ev came in last. He said, do you want me to close the door or leave the door open? And Mark just said, yes. And then Ev didn't know what that meant. So he said, I'll just close it this much. So he left it slightly open, which was even more awkward

because I knew we were going to talk about sensitive stuff and there was people right out there. So whatever. Anyway. Yes. So he's like some sensei. It's like a Zen Koan or something. I don't know.

Cryptic. So then I was trying to make jokes. That wasn't working at all. And so then I just decided I would stop talking. And when I stopped talking, Mark said, I don't like to talk about numbers and Ev said Ev looked at me and he was like we don't like to talk about numbers either and then Mark said but if you say a number I'll tell you yes or no it was so weird it's such a weird this whole thing about acquisitions in Silicon Valley is this weird

thing like, it's like middle school. It was like a girl and a boy like, do you like me? Because if you like me, I might like you. But do you like me like me? Because if you like me, I like you too. But only if you- You can't strike first. So he said, if you say a a number i can say yes or no and then there was a long pause and

ev looked at me and he said 500 million dollars and mark said that is a big number and then i said you said you'd say yes or no and uh ev laughed but nobody else And then he said, let's go to lunch. And we walked, and there was this really long line for the lunch. And Mark just turned his back on us, and we were waiting quietly. And I was looking at Ev like, what should we do? Are we just going to wait here and eat lunch and not talk about anything? Is he going to say yes or no while we're with him? Yeah, like what should we do?

And then Ev tried to make a joke and said, hey, aren't you the boss? Can't you get us ahead in this line? And Mark took it as real and he said, that's not how we do things here. And then turned back around. No sense of humor at all. Well, I'm sure he has his own sense of humor but that but it it didn't go over right and it was made it even weirder and so then i was like ev oh my gosh i completely forgot we have that thing and i did the old we have that thing trick and i was like oh you're right my god mark we're so sorry we can't have

lunch with you we have we have a thing and he was like oh i'm right my god Mark we're so sorry we can't have lunch with you we have we have a thing and he was like oh I'm sorry to hear that so we left and then we went to a coffee shop and we we talked about how ethereal and strange that was and uh and how it had really no end to we didn't know what was next and then um I think it was that end of that day and Mark said okay to the 500 million and we were like what it was at the end of the day I think it was at the end of the same day I didn't realize it that quick it was either the same day or the next morning but I feel like it was like, he said yes. And I was like, what? And I was like, my plan didn't, how could my plan not have worked?

That was a ridiculous number. And so at that point, it was very, very awkward. And at that point, actually, it was our bad. But you didn't want to sell. But then there had to be at least like all right well hold on a second like should we well i was kind of calculating how much money i would get like of course how could you not but at the same time we we weren't like i didn't i we were growing fast and we were having fun and everything was going good and we weren't like i didn't think we were gonna do that i was i that wasn't in my uh that just wasn't in

my mind at all and i didn't even know why i guess someone else had started the conversation and i hadn't been in on it so it was like a meeting that ev had to fulfill and so i thought of a way out of it but then that just got us deeper in and then at that point it was our bad like we we really dug a hole for ourselves um yeah because then you have to say because then you have to turn down this amazingly generous offer so ev wrote a really really respectful nice note and um explaining how we we still felt felt like we were just getting started and we wanted to build a business out of it and stuff and um did that make it mark mark stopped wishing me happy birthday on my facebook wall after that

um so yeah that i mean i also have had to explain to the board like why we weren't gonna sell the company for a ridiculous amount of money and stuff but that was that was a that was a big deal yeah i went on the howard stern show he couldn't he just couldn't get over the fact that we turned down that money he was like he he spent like half an hour like just riding me about why we would turn that down right didn't get it but the current valuation of the company is in the oh it was like i think it was like billions of dollars or something what is it now oh now now what is it it's billions oh yeah it's worth billion yeah and it was worth even more billions like right when we went public i mean it was several years worth a lot of money i mean just to kind of we weren't gonna there was no way we would know that

right at one point evans actually had said to me um if we're worth a billion, then we're worth 10 billion. And I was like, I don't know what kind of math that is, but it sounds good to me. I don't know what it meant. What is that logic? I had no idea what the logic was. But there clearly was a sense that you guys were building and you're having this moment. I mean, it is the cultural dialogue. Everything was happening.

The Arab Spring was happening the arab spring was happening sully sullivan landed in the thing and it was the first picture was from a tweet and it was like you have larry king and ashton kutcher you know yeah that that on television and the oprah thing and then all the politicians yeah and and the first black president you know was it was all twitter was a whole thing for just had to be an, you know, it was all, Twitter was a whole thing. I mean, it just had to be an insane time. It was crazy. It was a crazy, I would like to describe it as we were holding onto the outside of a rocket ship with our fingernails.

Uh-huh. You know? kind of point of reference for it other than just sort of watching it unfold from afar um is uh is the hatching twitter book nick belton's book and and i'm curious about your take on his take like is how much of that resonates with you and how much of it misses the mark from your perspective and like what do people not know or not fully understand about what it was like to be there at that incredible time? It was super exciting. And actually, it was if if there was ever a day where something crazy wasn't happening, it felt like an off day.

You know what I mean? Like every day. Like, oh, every day was like through the front door today. Yeah. Every day was the was the most exciting day for another company, and that was every day at Twitter. Something crazy happened every single day. And if something crazy didn't happen, I was like, what's wrong?

Something's wrong. It was that fun, you know what I mean? And also, since I like solving solving problems there was a lot of problems and so every single day there was some kind of enigmatic situation we had to get ourselves out and despite the kind of like executive shuffle that was going on you were always kind of like the forward-facing yeah I was the guy who had to explain why we were broken and what was happening and why this this leadership move was a good thing for the company and um jason goldman used to always accuse me of spinning everything and i was like i'm just finding the positive side of it you know like twitter is not going to break exactly that

way again it's right like it's going again, probably, but not that particular exact way. Because now we know about that particular problem. So when you say, this will never happen again. Well, I know. I was honest about it. Because it turns out there's value in vulnerability, I think. One of the things we did was we built a brand, a billion-dollar brand, way before we were worth that.

And the foundation, like the original kind of structure upon which you built this thing, wasn't meant to withstand that kind of attention. So it was almost like it was ill-conceived. It was inevitable that you were going to have these problems structurally. Yeah, I mean, we built Twitter on a programming language called Ruby on Rails, which is great for rapid prototyping, but wasn't meant to scale to a huge amount of use. And we built that because that's what Jack was good at. So the site went down a lot.

It went down. The thing is, you were one of the first companies to be really kind of transparent about that. Yeah, I was always explaining, here's why we screwed up. And people stuck with us. There was a lot of companies that came out that were better than, they did the same thing and they worked better. But people were like no i like

twitter and i actually think that people complaining about twitter being down so much i talked to steve case um i had him on the podcast oh you did yeah i wonder if he told you this he he came to twitter in 2009 or something and he told us in the early days of AOL when there was so much heavy usage that they had to kick people off. And people would complain like crazy. Like, I can't believe I can't get online. I can't get on AOL. And he said to a certain degree their strong visceral reaction to the fact that they couldn't use aol like as if the electricity went out or the or there's no more running water made other people think like well what is this

thing that you that you you love it so much you get so angry when it's broken and yeah and that i think some to some extent that helped us like people people would turn to their blog and be like twitter is broken i can't believe it it sucks i'm terrible that it's down and other people like what's you're like why do you care so yeah like why do you care so much it must be a thing and you know people would use it was just it was weird people would use a lot of people were critics like of course twitter was, Twitter was stupid, it was useless, it was dumb. And they would say that over and over and over again. Clearly, clearly, they had, they needed a place to express their thoughts. Like, it was like a perfect example of you should use Twitter for that. Like, and I feel like it's the first, it was, it was the first broad platform that became what the people wanted it to become like

you created this scaffolding this architecture that allowed people to kind of you know cultivate their own purpose around it right so there's there was like from what i gather there's kind of internal discussions and disagreements about um you know what it was going to be about like is it about status updates? Is it about the news and what's going on in the world and that kind of tension? I always thought it was a news thing. The world was sort of like, well, we'll decide that.

And of course, it's both. And now we're seeing with this evolution how much it really is becoming a source of information beyond just personal updates. I was calling it i basically called it i called it the bloomberg terminal for the world and i um jack and i when jack was ceo in the very beginning um we went to new york and we had various meetings And one of the meetings we had set up, that I had set up, was with Reuters. And we went to Reuters.

And we were in a room with a couple of guys. One guy was, I think his title was Head of the Americas. And I was like, that's a cool title. You're Head of the Americas? americas and um and i said i said to the guy i said um how would you guys like to have a um seven day a week 24 hour day constant stream of what's happening everywhere in the world delivered to you in real time and the guy stood up and he said hold on let me get some more guys in here and and he filled the room with a team of like chief scientist guy and all these other guys tech technology guys

and jack was like we don't have that and i was like but you can make that right anyway um and my idea was i said i have an idea i said this, we have basically news coming in from all around the world at all times. And how about this? How about if we figure something out? We write something that recognizes if three different people who aren't following each other, therefore we assume that they don't know each other, each are reporting on something that's the same thing like explosion in midtown then it's probably a thing and if you follow up on it and it turns out to

be a thing and you write a and reuters writes a story you credit twitter reuters and they were like yeah that sounds like a whole that sounds great and i was like yeah it's great twitter's in like a global news feed and and then we left and um around that same time we were way too under fire to even do anything and um reuters was acquired by thompson so the whole thing never happened. But it really was... But the foreshadowing of what it would ultimately be. Yeah, and we never really came out and specifically said anything about what it was, which was our bad and our good. I mean, people called it microblogging,

which was like... Right, it was always that struggle of trying to... We didn't like that name because it sounded so anti-commercial. How do you describe it, though? I mean, every single person, average person, has that, like, what is this? The first tweets are always like, okay, I'm trying to figure this out. What the fuck is going on here? Right, exactly.

And nobody knew. And even internally, if you asked Twitter, probably even today, what is Twitter? Everyone's going to say something different. Right, but now you can be on Twitter. Now it's about live. It used to be like you're lurking if you're there and you're not tweeting, but now it's like, yeah, you can just go

and you can read the news. Well, I used to tell people, you don't have to know how to code to look at the internet. You don't have to have a Twitter account to use Twitter. And also you see tweets on the news all the time. You see it.

There's hashtags. Well, now. I mean, now that's all the vernacular of how we live our lives. It's a normal thing now. But anyway. We only have a few minutes here before I've got to let you go. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about going back to your optimistic vision for the future. Which sounds really hippie.

People roll their eyes like, give me a break. I'm down with it. It's good to hold. What is your life about? What are you standing for? And you're in a position where you can actually make some shit happen right so so what does that look like for you and what are you going to do with that privilege right make a little bit of trying to make something good happen yeah and so that's a but when ben and i started jelly we were like look we're we're we're

trying to build this giant machine that helps people help each other even if it doesn't work you can't say that it wasn't worth a try. We're not going to be sorry we didn't try to do that. And I like the idea that there's this kernel beneath it, which is that people like helping other people. They love it. They feel good when they do it. They do. So this is like a consciousness-raising thing on some level.

You can make that argument, and I think that that's pretty cool. Yeah. thing on some level you can make that argument and i think that that's pretty cool yeah um because look you know you could just sail off into the sunset and become a professional dilettante right you don't have to be doing anything i don't know how good i'd be at that you have choices yeah but i mean you you have that choice available to you yeah you have choices about how to use your time and how you know how you want to invest yourself right my wife and i decided we wanted to live in a normal little house in a normal neighborhood and raise our boy

not thinking that he was mega rich. Like I said, I was born in Boston, raised on welfare, and now I have this rich kid. You know what I mean? And I have to actually teach him that you have to have a job so you can earn money so you can pay for a house and a car and all this other stuff. Right. Well, that's good, man.

I mean, that speaks to core values, right? Yeah. I know you're very involved in philanthropy, and you've made some investments in some pretty interesting companies like our friend Ethan's company, Beyond Meat. I have an accidentally fantastic portfolio. I'm not an investor, and my portfolio— You're on the board of Beyond Meat, though, aren't you? Yeah. You are.

I was an advisor before it was a company, and then it turned into a company, and then me and Ev formed a little investment company and we were the first money in along with uh at beyond me yeah beyond me and then we um and now and then so i'm on the board so right uh cool and and also you're involved with farm sanctuary yeah we've been we've been we've been supporting Farm Sanctuary for like 15 or 16 years. Gene's a fantastic guy. He's an amazing dude. They're one of our favorites.

DonorsChoose is one of our favorites. I mean, they're our favorites because they really get stuff done. They really know how to do what they're doing. There's a lot of nonprofits, which i don't like the name i nothing should be named non first like hey i'm a non-wife beater um yeah but the uh well charity is problematic but they're really good at donors donors choose and uh you know charity what scott harrison has done with charity water to like kind of reimagine and like and innovate and iterate out of the current model of giving, I think, is really interesting and inspiring. And the rise of the B Corp is interesting, too.

The idea that part of the value generated is philanthropic. And so that you don't have to explain to shareholders, if you were to go public, this is why we're giving 10% of our profits to charity. It's in the bylaws. We have to. The conscious capitalism movement. Yeah. That's just become expected as a part of doing good business. I think that's going to be the future.

Well, I think it comes with the transparency that we've all now expect with the companies that we patronize. You just have to be clear about what you're doing. I mean, people like you and I who are kind of hippy-dippy, but more than that, like Generation Z, they come to expect that the products and services that they choose, they know everything, literally down to what the CEO ate for breakfast. Yeah, what do you mean you're not going to tell me where these materials came from and what you're doing?

Right, and they want to know that if they're choosing between two sugar waters, which one is the one that also provides clean water to wherever. Do you know this professor at Oxford called William McCaskill who wrote a book who's all about effective altruism? I should know him. He's a protege of like peter singer and he wrote a book called how to do good better i think that's the exact title that's a cool name yeah i had him on the podcast and he's done he's like the youngest tenured philosophy professor at oxford uh and he's

got all kinds of crazy amazing ideas about how to improve this world of giving and he analyzes it and kind of breaks it down but that's i'm a i'm a fellow at oxford so i should i don't know why i don't know him i should know what does that mean when you're a fellow it means you get a special scroll um and like a papyrus scroll you get a scroll and you well in my case i go every year and i i do three or four lectures uh-huh and i'm allowed and i'm allowed to um you studied there no i know you didn't no no no they i don't think they would had me they wouldn't have had me um i studied at umass and northeastern but i didn't like i didn't really even study right i was not really loving those. I've seen Oxford associated with your name,

so I thought at some point maybe you went back and went to school there. No, first I was an associate fellow at the business school, and then I became a fellow of almost 40 colleges. And I'm also affiliated with a particular, aside from the business school, the Saeed School of Business, I'm also affiliated with Exeter College at Oxford. That's where Tokin studied.

Anyway, I just love it. I've been going there for 11 years, and I've become an Anglophile. It's really fun. Yeah. You go there in the summertime it's like it makes me feel like i i'm um yeah i go in june and and it makes me it's just like since i never graduated college i feel like very academic right i am a fellow fancy degrees and everything yeah um all right i gotta let you go in a minute, but I can't let you walk out of here without like, you know, a final question

or sort of just what's on my mind is, you know, what is it, like when you talk to people about what you're doing and, you know, what Twitter, you know, is and was and kind of how people perceive you in the world and what you do like what are they missing or or what do they get wrong you know what do you tell your friends like don't i wish people just understood this about like what it's really like to do what i do and to have gone through what i've gone through um i don't well i don't really know what people are thinking so i

just what you see in the news or how the narrative is spun about Twitter and being a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with this ascension of the entrepreneur's rock star and what that lifestyle looks like. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is that this is all very, very strange and weird. And it's not like a real life thing at all. very strange and weird and it's not like a real life thing at all i mean you where else can you go and say i would like 10 million dollars to try to make a company and if it doesn't work i'll just say oh well and i don't have to give back the money and uh and i'll just try something else like what world are we living in where that can happen? It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy.

So that's weird. You know, when I talk to, like, my regular friends from Boston, it's just like, you can do that? How can you do that? I can't even get a loan for $1,000 in the bank. How can you just get, like, $ million dollars to do with whatever you want with um and uh so that's strange but um i don't know i i'm not i'm not really sure what you know the um i mean the whole idea really is to just is to try to build something that's of value and if you can build something that's of value to

people then you can build a business out of it but the whole idea of this silicon valley these trying to make these giant leaps from going from zero to hundreds of millions of happy customers is like you know a super low chance of happening. But if you can create value there, then you can create a business. And hopefully the kind of business that you're trying to make is something that can have some kind of positive impact on the world at the same time. That's the kind of trifecta is to change the definition of capitalism such that it means you are making money, you love your job, and you're having a positive impact in the world. And that would be great if that was the definition for capitalism everywhere.

And I think part of unpacking what that means to love your job is to be emotionally connected. Yeah, that's what I always say emotionally invested if you're just like this is a great idea and it solves a problem but you don't care like didn't you you had that kind of moment of yeah audio right like do we want to be the kings of broadcasting like what does that mean yeah even i said to ev i said look you wrote a great plan of how we can slim down and make this a success but even if we're super successful is that what you want to be super successful at this and he put his head in his hands because he knew i was right and so you have that's what i tell people when i talk to students at this business school and stuff is you really have to be emotionally invested in what you do because if you're emotionally invested like we

were with twitter all the criticism just rolls off your back. Like, even when people try to bring you down, like, I literally didn't hear it. Someone tried to criticize Twitter by saying that Twitter was the Seinfeld of the internet, a website about nothing. And I was like, oh, my God, Seinfeld's a hit show. This guy loves us. We should put this on the front page as a testimonial. And everyone's like, you do know that he's insulting you, i was like no he's not seinfeld's huge so it's just

when you're emotionally invested you're just all in yeah that's a good place to end it man all right cool thanks so much for doing it no no thanks man thanks for doing it this is great so podcasting is finally i know It's all from the audio thing. Are you sure you don't want to be the king of podcasting? I know. Maybe you still can. No. Now podcasting kings are distributed.

That's true, right? It's all. It definitely is. All right, man. Well, I really appreciate your time. Sure thing. AskJelly.com. If you're digging on biz, yeah, AskJelly.com.

Actually, AskJelly.com forward slash Rich Roll. Yeah, and you get free answers. You get free answers jelly.com. Actually ask jelly.com forward slash rich role. Yeah. And you get free answers. You get free answers to any question, anything you want in the world. So I think what we should do is end the podcast by turning Alexa back on and asking her, should we ask her like how the podcast went?

What can we ask her? We could get a good answer about the experience that we just had. Who is rich roll sorry i can't find the answer to the question that's perfect oh well she doesn't know you oh well a couple more podcasts thank you oh my god how cool was that super duper cool i really enjoyed that conversation i hope you guys did too uh please make a point of checking out biz's new app jelly again you could do that by going to ask jelly.com forward slash rich roll uh you can download the ios app or just add hashtag ask jelly to your twitter questions and play around with it let me know what you think download the iOS app or just add hashtag AskJelly to your Twitter questions

and play around with it. Let me know what you think. By the way, this is not a sponsored thing. They just set up a cool dedicated URL in my name. That's all. As always, please check out the show notes on the episode page for this episode. We've got tons of links and resources to take your infotainment, your education

beyond the earbuds. We put a lot of time into those show notes and they're really great. So it's worth your time and effort. Thank you to everybody who has shared the show with their friends and on social media, around the water cooler with your colleagues, et cetera, et cetera. And thank you for subscribing to the show. Again, if you haven't done that already, please do that. It's the one thing that you can do that would really help us out the most. And if you have an extra minute or two, leave a review on iTunes. That also is very beneficial to the show

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I've been enjoying it and people seem to be responding to it favorably and enjoying it as well. Big love to Jason Camiolo for his audio engineering and production on today's show. Sean Patterson for help on graphics. Chris Swan for production assistance and help with compiling all the show notes

and theme music by Annalema. Final thought, you guys. Again, what's really interesting to me about Biz is that he is an artist, that everything he has created and built is through the lens of creative expression. But I think we're all artists. Everyone is creative.

So my question or my call to action is, how can you enhance or leverage your form of creative expression in your professional career to perhaps rethink or think outside the box of what is expected of you or what is considered normal to create a multiplier on your output?

Or alternatively, outside your career or your job, how to prioritize creative expression in other areas of your life to better contribute to others, to make space for more meaning in your life. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, and I'll see you guys here next week. Peace. Plants. Thank you.