The Rich Roll Podcast - Jack Dorsey On Solitude, Self-Care & Shouldering The Health of Global Conversation

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

Imagine shouldering responsibility of one of the planet's largest social networks. Now imagine that's just one of your jobs, the second focused on reinventing the world's relationship with money. This is Jack Dorsey's life. The co-founder and CEO of both Twitter and Square, today's guest is one of the most influential figures of the modern age — a man who has made an indelible impact on our cultural landscape by quite literally shaping how society communicates in the emergent digital era. What started as a simple means to share personal status updates, Twitter has swelled into arguably the most important social media platform for breaking news, journalism, and political discourse. A powerful tool for speaking truth to power, it's put wind in the sails of important social movements. Provided safe haven for whistle blowers. And given marginalized groups and dissidents a voice that can be heard across the globe. But Twitter must also account for the noxious devolution of civil discourse — a behemoth apparatus easily weaponized for motives nefarious. Twitter is nothing if not controversial. And Jack is the face of such controversy — a polarizing figure in the crosshairs of Twitter critics across all sides of the social and political spectrum. Recognizing the need to more thoroughly address Twitter's role and responsibility in the growing toxicity of public conversation, Jack has spent the last month publicly addressing the platform's missteps, challenges and aspirations on a wide variety of media platforms and podcasts that include two appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience, Sam Harris' podcast Making Sense, and many others. My sense is that critics were left unsatisfied with Jack's answers to the many hard questions posed. I understand and appreciate the criticism. Just how exactly can Twitter successfully promote healthy conversation, eliminate toxicity and fairly police bad actors across 500 million daily tweets? I don't know the answer. But I do know that I heard an intelligent, empathetic and well intentioned man in an almost impossible situation — someone owning his failures and transparently endeavoring with great equanimity to solve these herculean problems in both good faith and real time. In approaching this conversation, I made the choice not to retread territory explored at great length on Rogan. Instead, my interest is to better understand the human behind the curtain. What does it actually feel like to be at the helm of one of the largest and most powerful social media platforms in the world? What is a day in the life of Jack Dorsey like? What daily self-care practices does he employ to mitigate the stress of his gargantuan responsibilities? And just how did this young man blaze such an extraordinary entrepreneurial path? I first met Jack about two years ago during a visit to San Francisco. A fan of the podcast, he invited me up to the Square offices. Although our encounter was brief, I liked him immediately. Soft spoken, kind and curious, I left our meeting wanting to better understand what makes him tick. Open to sharing his story on the podcast, I visited his San Francisco home on a foggy Saturday morning a few weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, his home is beautiful and well appointed. But it's also strikingly modest given his stature. Minimal to the point of spartan, it's devoid of material excess. No entourage. No private chef. No crazy car collection. Not even an assistant. Just Jack, barefoot, unpretentious and excited to show me his infrared sauna and his cold plunge... Enjoy! Rich

I get my sense of spirituality through connection and what Twitter represents is spiritual to me. Tapping into the consciousness, the larger organism, whether it be the planet, the universe, the social consciousness is what drives me. There's a lot of power to seeing, you know, how people think in ways that make us feel great and also things that are super uncomfortable because we need to be able to acknowledge them first in order to have a conversation about it. There's no other path towards evolution and making something better unless we can talk about it. That's Jack Dorsey, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast.

The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. And today, my guest is Jack Dorsey. Jack is the co-founder and CEO of both Twitter and Square and somebody who I think it's fair to say quite incontrovertibly has become one of the most influential figures of the modern age. Somebody who has made this crazy indelible impact on the cultural landscape by really helping shape the way that we communicate as a culture. Jack has been doing the podcast rounds lately. He's had recent appearances on a wide variety of shows, including Sam Harris, two appearances on Joe Rogan,

Ben Greenfield the other day, and several more. And I listened to all of them. And I realized that Jack is a polarizing figure for many. But on a personal level, I have to say I found him to be quite transparent, somebody who has been open about Twitter's failures, the challenges that he and his organization have faced, continue to face, as well as incredibly composed under the pressure of being held accountable for his platform's shortcomings. And my sense is that his response to many of the hard questions that are being posed to him, that have been being posed to him on all of these podcasts and interviews, to him that have been being posed to him on all of these podcasts and interviews have left a lot of critics feeling unsatisfied. And I guess what I want to say is that if you are such a person,

one of these people, then I'm not sure this podcast is going to change that view because my interest was less on retreading the territory that was explored at length on Rogan, nor was it an attempt to hold him to account in the way that Tim Pool did on Joe's show. Instead, or rather, my intention for this conversation was simply to better understand this human behind the curtain. In other words, what does it actually feel like to be at the helm of one of the largest and most powerful social media platforms on the planet? What does a day in the life of Jack Dorsey look like? And what daily self-care practices does he employ to mitigate the stress of his responsibilities? And just how did this young man blaze such an incredible, extraordinary entrepreneurial path?

It's these kind of questions that informed how I approached this conversation. And I got a lot more I want to say about Jack and what's to come. 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.

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 and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their

site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. 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 and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide.

Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help,

go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, so I first met Jack about two years ago. And because he had tweeted out a few episodes of the podcast, I knew he was at least an occasional listener of this show.

So when I found myself in San Francisco, I DM'd him at least an occasional listener of this show. So when I found myself in San Francisco, I DM'd him to see if he wanted to meet up and he invited me to Square, the Square headquarters. And what I discovered when I met him was a person quite different than what you might imagine. He was sitting on an open staircase by himself with a cup of tea at the far end of this giant open floor plan office space. He told me he doesn't even have a proper office. And I just found this person to be very soft-spoken, kind, curious. And I guess I realized that this is somebody who is an animal altogether different from the typical alpha startup CEO mold. And I liked him instantly. And although our encounter was brief, Jack left me kind of

intrigued. I wanted to better understand who he is and what led him to this rarefied air and really what makes him tick. So when he began showing up on all these podcasts, I reached out to him. He invited me to his home in San Francisco. And this is where it got really interesting. Unsurprisingly, he has a beautiful home. It's very well appointed. But what was surprising was its modesty, considering his essentially unlimited resources. It's very minimal, almost Spartan. essentially unlimited resources. It's very minimal, almost Spartan. There's no entourage. There's no private chef. He cooks his own meals. No, you know, there's no Lamborghini collection. There wasn't even an assistant there. It was just Jack, completely unpretentious, barefoot, excited to show me his infrared sauna, his cold plunge, the kitchen counter where he works from his home a couple of days a week. You know. All in all, a man who has very intentionally and mindfully stripped excess

materialism and distraction away from his life. Somebody who prioritizes solitude, contemplation, meditation. He meditates at least an hour a day and a whole wide variety of self-care practices, all designed to optimize deep thinking and equanimity, including the fact that he walks five miles to work every single day. And I guess what I'm trying to say is I found his intentionality that he brings to his life, his discipline, his curiosity, his presence of mind. I found it all admirable. He's a truly, truly fascinating guy living a very unusual life. So this conversation is really an exploration of that life. We do cover how Twitter was conceived, the responsibilities, the logistics, the challenges involved in shaping and policing the behemoth

platform that sees about 500 million tweets every day and how he envisions the evolution of this platform, the impact of Twitter on culture and how he would ultimately kind of close the conversation with how he would disrupt and innovate the podcast space. And his answer is very interesting on that point. But mostly this was just my attempt to understand Jack and some of the habits, practices, and strategies that he employs, including Vipassana meditation, intermittent fasting,

so many more things to navigate his most uncommon life as one of the most influential figures of our time. Final note, because it took place at Jack's home, we did not video this program. And you might hear a little crackling in the background. It's because we were sitting at the forefront, like next to his fireplace. So we had a live fire as we discussed it.

It was all very nice. So this is me and Jack Dorsey. Thank you for inviting me to your home. Thanks for taking time on a Saturday. Saturday afternoon, it's raining outside. We're sitting by a crackling fire. In a cloud. We are in the cloud. I feel like I'm in Big Sur overlooking the ocean here. So if you hear waves crashing or seagulls or the crackling of the fire over here. That kind of just should create a visual palette where we are right now. And we just did a little meditation, five-minute meditation to set the stage,

which was great. I feel good. Feel good? Me too. So I think that's a natural segue into talking a little bit about meditation in your life. I know you've been meditating for like 20 years and it's something that is important to you. So what does the practice look like for you? Yeah, I started playing with meditation about 20 years ago.

It wasn't that serious. And I think the most I actually practiced within that time frame was probably 20, 30 minutes. And I wasn't really aware of a lot of the theories and some of the focus that I needed until about two years ago when I went to my first Vipassana course. I went to this little town just south of Dallas and did a 10-day silent meditation retreat. And it was one of the hardest hardest but also one of the most rewarding things I've ever done and one of the practices of vipassana is to do one of these retreats every year but also to carry

through with your practice you do two hours a day one hour in the morning one hour in the evening before before bed and the um I mean what it's what it's done for me is really just a sense of clarity, certainly one of focus, certainly one of recognizing when I'm reacting to something which has this momentum of not feeling necessarily in control. you know, momentum of not feeling necessarily in control. Um, but as I did it, uh, you know, at the end of last year, I just went even deeper into that clarity and was, you know, instantly reminded of the year prior. And, uh, you, you, I had this experience where I just felt like I was picking up where I left off. And that was really powerful to me. So for me, every single day, it's a time to build self-awareness. That's what it comes down to.

Yeah. It's something I've been interested in doing for some time yet. I have yet to do one of those. Yeah, attending one of those retreats. They're scary. Yeah, well, I know I have plenty of friends who have done it. And from what I understand, it's around the day five, day six area that you get into, you know, that make or break period

where you start to freak out. Day four is really hard because you go into this mode called strong determination. And up until day four, you're basically focusing on your breath. And it's not just the concept of the breath. It's actually the physical sensation of the breath. It's a physical sensation of the breath on your upper lip and through your nostrils. And that was a huge unlock for me. But on day four, you go into Vipassana training and strong determination, which means that you are encouraged not to move at all. You're sitting in a lotus or half lotus position and you shouldn't be shifting around or moving your posture in any way whatsoever. And that becomes extremely challenging, but also a good reflection into what the practice actually is.

Because you'll, at least for me, my experience was, you know, my legs were just killing me. The urge to move is almost unbearable. And through that, through observing that pain and choosing, deciding not to react to it, you apply that concept and that methodology to everything, to emotions, to physical pain, to mental hardships. And being able to recognize it in that moment and train it for those next few days is really powerful. But day six was my worst day. The morning I was, you meditate with other people, but you're not allowed to talk,

you're not allowed to read, to write, to do any physical exercise, to look anyone in the eye. It's the conditions are such that you feel like you're on a retreat by yourself. And on day six, I kind of looked around in the hall and everyone just looked like a Buddha. They all looked like they were already enlightened. And I'm like, I don't get this. I'm not getting it.

But at the end of day six, you do these discourses at the end where there's some insight into the theory and a little bit into the practice. And something the teacher said just unlocked something for me. So the last meditation of the day at 9 p.m. or 8.30 was one of my best. And I walked out and I just felt so much peace and so much joy. And I cried and then I fell asleep and I woke back up at 4 in the morning

and was back into the pain, back into not understanding what I was doing, which, again, is part of the practice where you can't hang on something, you can't react overly to something that's negative and you can't react overly to something that's positive either. You want to have equanimity in the entire spectrum. Right. And something about becoming an observer of that pain

or that discomfort or that jubilation, creating some distance between yourself and that experience, I think is where the teachable moment where you can kind of mine that equanimity. Absolutely. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's just 10 days of working from four in the morning until nine30, focused entirely on that and realizing that you won't get it right away. And it's just this, the most important thing is the practice of it, not reaching any particular milestone or state.

It's just that constant practice. So you stepped it up this year and you went to Myanmar to do, as opposed to Texas for another silent meditation retreat. And on your return from that experience, you decided to share this in a threaded tweet, what your experience was. And that like became like a thing.

There were a lot of people that jumped on you for not addressing the atrocities of the government. When, you know, it was interesting because I read it and I felt like you were just sharing this experience that you had. It was certainly an apolitical, you know, motivation behind that. But I guess when you're Jack,

you have to be much more mindful about how you choose your words and how you decide to describe these experiences. Yeah. So after my first meditation in Texas, first I met this amazing teacher there. Is that Goenka? No, Goenka passed away I think five or maybe even ten years ago.

And so he has all these assistant teachers that lead you through the courses. And I met one of the assistant teachers and became friends with him and was talking about going, doing, where should I do my next meditation? And we discussed Myanmar-B Burma because that is where Koenka is from that is where a lot of the practice that I was practicing has been kept in a very pure form in terms of the the writings but also the the physical practice and after my first meditation in Texas I had one tweet and I just I didn't feel I was ready to talk about it. I didn't feel it was appropriate

because I didn't feel I had experienced enough to the depth that I could communicate in a way that resonated with people. But after the second retreat in Myanmar, I felt more ready. It was completely different. I went in a day before into Myanmar. I immediately went to the center, and we started meditating, and I left two days after. I started meditating and I left two days after. And I was there as Jack, not representing Square or Twitter.

I was there to focus on myself because I think one of the most important things I believe that I have a responsibility to both our employees and also the people that we serve on the platforms is self-improvement, constant self-improvement. I've identified this as, at least this practice is something that makes me a lot stronger, a lot more resilient, a lot more aware, and able to approach my work with a lot more clarity and discipline. So, um, I went because of the, you know, the, the, the practices lineage within, within that, um, within that country and within that people and within the culture and wasn't really thinking enough about the surrounding

circumstances of the, of the country and the people. And, you know, I think the misstep was not even addressing that, focusing entirely on meditation. That was my intent, which was to focus this entirely on my experience. And if it resonates with people, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. and if it resonates with people it does, if it doesn't, it doesn't. And I think it did resonate with folks,

but there was an ask to just be more aware of the surroundings, shine more light on that, and I get all that. The benefit is I did have a lot of social groups reach out to me immediately after, and folks come to me to at least converse about what is happening and what has changed. And there are multiple atrocities within the country, not just the one that is tend to be focused on.

So I've learned since a bunch of the dynamics and some of the ways I might be able to help, but I'm still in a learning phase where can I actually apply myself and help and drive more of the conversation within the country. So it touched me, and it's something that I will definitely be top of mind

for quite some time. But I think it was important for me to also see that in person and experience it in person rather than read it through text or read it through the major media channels and see the people. And one of the biggest surprises I had was every single monk I saw, every nun I ran into had a cell phone. And Facebook is the internet. It's similar to back in the day when AOL was the internet for many people.

It wasn't about a web browser, the way in was AOL and Facebook was that for nearly everyone in the country. You don't see URLs, you don't see website addresses, you see Facebook pages. And it's just so dominant. And I didn't have that understanding. And I don't think I would have the depth of understanding unless I actually went there and experienced it myself. And what do you extract from that? The fact that Facebook is the internet there, what does that bode for the future? What does that mean?

Having grown up with the internet in St. Louis, Missouri, I was a hacker early on in my life, 12, 13, 14, and St. Louis had this thriving hacker community and it had a lot of the punk ethos, it had a lot of the techno ethos, later it had a bunch of the hip hop ethos in terms of just questioning everything, working in public, sharing everything, sharing all the mistakes, not being centralized at all. I think there's elements that are certainly dangerous to that. I am definitely skeptical of centralized organizations, even my own, even Twitter and Square. I think the Internet, more than anything else, has allowed us to remove so many barriers and boundaries

that can tend to be artificial. And this promise of at least providing the framework and the infrastructure towards a understanding of one humanity. We have the technology to do this and it started in 1979 and the ideals just get stronger and stronger and stronger. Starting with a more decentralized medium and the recent flow towards more centralization,

such as Google and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Square, is something I'm very, very cognizant of. And also, I don't discount the power and also the skepticism and lack of trust that people have in organizations like ours. So I think on the positive, it does breed a healthy skepticism and distrust, which I think is useful to push companies like ours

to be a lot more open and push towards more internet ideals. But there's certainly a hard road to get there. But I would want to see a place like Myanmar to have more entry points than just Facebook, obviously. than just Facebook, obviously. But at the same time, they've gotten a lot of people on who were not on before and on the network. And I think we have to weigh the trade-offs

of getting people on the on-ramp into this global network and the custodian that does it and then hopefully hold organizations like my own to account in terms of making sure that they see all the pathways in and out and have optionality. Right.

I feel like this desire to hold yourself and your companies to account for this is sort of part and parcel of this, for lack of a better phrase, podcast tour that you've been on lately. Out of the blue, all of a sudden, you've made yourself available to talk to all manner of people. You've been on tons of shows. Not enough. I don been on tons of shows. Not enough. Not enough. I don't know, a lot. I mean, you did one yesterday, like a crypto one yesterday I saw. And you've done Sam Harris, Joe Rogan. I think you're going back to talk to Joe. You did Bill Simmons. Clearly, there's a conscious decision here to step out and share your perspective in a transparent way. And my sense of this is that you've done that

with a large degree of equanimity. I think the equanimity was seen in that exchange with Kara Swisher, where you did that experiment and conversation by doing it on Twitter. You maintained your cool under fire. Like in that, I saw meditation coming to the front in the way that you managed all of that. But just the fact that you're making yourself available

for these conversations, I find interesting. And so I think the first, I have two questions on that. The first is, you know, what is, you know, what was behind this decision to do this? And, you know this right now? Yeah, I mean, I've had a few goals with this. One, I'm a student of conversation. And Twitter's purpose in the world is to serve the public conversation.

And in the same light, I am aware that I'm absolutely terrible at it. And I am afraid of it. Why do you say that? Well, when I was a kid, I had a speech impediment. And I went through a lot of speech therapy. I couldn't pronounce most words. I just sounded like gibberish was coming out of my mouth and to some people that still may be the case. But I really pulled back because of that awareness that I was

dysfunctional in some way in communicating with people. And I became extremely shy. I've always been an introvert, meaning that I get most of my energy from solitude versus extroverts getting a lot of their energy from being around people. So I, I'm naturally at that, um, predisposition towards being more quiet and being more in solitude. But that really pushed me into a very, very shy place where even conversations with my parents or brothers were somewhat limited. And eventually I realized it in fifth or sixth grade and I just said, I can't function like this. And I joined the speech club and I joined the debate club and I did the things that just freaked me out. But that still lingers. I still am hyper-aware of how I'm talking

and just a little bit of uncomfort in my own skin and conversation. But I think the characteristics that have made me realize some of the milestones I want to hit in my life and some of the success I've realized is that I will put myself in very uncomfortable situations. I will be patient with myself and I will learn super fast. So I felt, number one, that podcasting was a great way to do that. It's something I'm a huge consumer of. My walks in the morning, it's what I listen to, it's what I take the most joy in in the morning.

And I just get so much out of them that I also wanted to understand the format much more directly. And then second, we don't talk enough out in the open about what we're seeing, how we're thinking, why. And we do that in articles and the traditional press, but there's something about podcasting to me that just allows much more nuance and just some time to breathe. And I think that the thing I enjoy- Well, certainly compared to Twitter. Exactly. We'll talk about that too. I mean, the irony that you're gun-shy about conversation

when facilitating conversation is the core foundational goal of Twitter itself. Yeah, I don't know if it's the gun-shy that I feel. I know I want to master it. And I want to get really great at it. And I know I have a long way to go. Not just in conversations like this, but also personally as well. If I could study

one thing that also serves my company, given our role, then amazing. So I think the thing I love most about podcasts, going back to my introvertness, is conversations like this where you can actually hear the silence between thoughts

and just the amount of time that people take to think. And there's just so much fidelity within that silence that I find intriguing and interesting and there's just a rhythm that I'm trying to understand and and in the master as well so so that's a big part of it a lot of it this year has has you know honestly been you know somewhat reactive people we've we've we don't have a strategist in terms of like who we've been talking to who I've been talking to, who I've been talking to. A lot of folks have been asking me for quite some time and I push it off and just been kind of going down the queue. And I'm also happy to meet a bunch of the folks that I

listen to all the time. I'm going to be going on Ben Greenfield's pretty soon. I listen to every single one of his podcasts. I think I learn so much from him. So I'm excited personally just to get into it with him. I have no idea what we'll talk about because he is so health-focused. I would imagine it would be really granular on like your daily practices. Yeah, which I'm also excited to talk about because I don't get to talk about

that a lot with the exception of my friends and some of my co-workers who just think I'm the weirdest person in the world. Well, we're going to get into it a little bit, probably not to the extent that Ben will. But I think that your observations are correct. I mean, in many ways I see podcasts as an antidote to what ails Twitter, because it provides that space for nuance. And I think anybody is hard pressed to walk away from a conscientious, mature, mindful, long form podcast between two people,

even if you completely disagree with that person's worldview, it's almost like because we're empathetic creatures, we're able to see the shared humanity. And I think that's something that Twitter just isn't built for in many ways. I want us to figure this out because I don't think it's just voice or video that creates empathy.

Text certainly can create the same. I think we have not unlocked that from an experience standpoint, from a pacing standpoint. I think we've provided exactly the wrong incentives on the service. And what I mean by that is when you open up the app, what are we inherently telling you to do implicitly? You know, what are we guiding you through the arrangement of the buttons, through the

numbers and the metrics that we provide? The arrangement of the buttons through the numbers and the metrics that we provide, we're giving people guidelines in terms of what they should optimize for. And I think right now they're completely wrong. We made a decision quite some time ago to make the size of your follower count bold and big on your profile page. And we have this like button. We have a retweet. We haven't really opined on the ordering of those actions and what that means. So when we built this,

we discovered these features and these gaps and then we put them on the interface. And I don't think we gave it enough consideration because we didn't have this focus on this purpose of conversation. Some of it was reactive to our peers, some of it was looking at good ideas over there and putting it in our service,

but we're taking time now to step back and say how do we truly serve a public conversation? Not just people posting, not people posting quick takes or hot takes or outrage, but like, how do we, how do we incentivize more contribution that is healthy to the network? And, and, and this is a concept that we're really spending a lot of time thinking about is this concept of conversational health and what that means and um it's one of the reasons i'm i'm fascinated for my own personal health and why i get into all the practices like meditation that i do is because i feel that there is something to being able to understand

when a conversation is healthy or not. And I know it because we've all had conversations that feel toxic and you just want to walk away from it. We've had conversations that feel really empowering and inspiring and you wish they lasted for hours and hours and hours and um if if we can if we can feel that i feel we can also quantify it enough that we can understand at scale what these things look like and and what um what actions have the greatest potential to create more of them.

And so right now we're in this phase where we're trying to understand what it means to measure whether an online digital conversation is healthy or not. So what are the technological parameters by which you would adjudicate the health of a conversation? We started with probably the best way to articulate this is the body metaphor. And, you know, we have all these indicators of health on our body. One is, you know, just the flushness of your face. The other is your body temperature. And, you know, this internal body temperature should be 98.6 Fahrenheit. And

if it's above that or below that, it indicates that something is out of balance. It doesn't say what, but it indicates that probably something is out of imbalance. And we built this tool called a thermometer to measure that indicator. And then based on that reading, we can start diagnosing solutions. And I could read that your temperature is really high and I can give you a glass of water, hot water with lemon in it, and say, based on all of our experience, on all of our research, if you drink this, there's a higher probability that it will bring your system back into balance, at least this particular indicator, faster than this red wine that I'm about to hand you. And then you have a choice. Do I take this or this red wine, which based on all of our

evidence, all of our research, all of our experiences creates a probability that probably extends the amount of time that your system is in balance. So you can push that to the digital. And then it's what are the indicators of conversational health? So we have four stakeholder indicators that we've shared with the world that we're working to understand how to measure right now. Like we're working to build the thermometers for these indicators. Number one is shared attention. How much of the conversation is attentive to the same things versus on disparate things? Number two is shared reality. Are we, is this, you know, is this conversation sharing the same facts or are they different facts?

Like an example. As a way of judging how siloed a certain conversation is. Exactly, like, so it's not to find truth. It's not to find what is factual or what is not factual, but just like what facts are people using and what percentage of the conversation is using this fact basis versus another one so a recent example is you know the round earth versus the flat earth right um conversation so 99.999 percent of this conversation

is using a fact that the earth is round whereas whereas a small percentage is using a fact that the world is flat so healthier conversation will be sharing more facts so that's number two number three is receptivity so how receptive are the participants to engaging in a civil way in debate and dialogue and finally is variety of perspective. Is it a high variety of perspective or is it a filter bubble or echo chamber? And these four, ideally, as they go higher, conversation is very healthy.

So you want presence and attention. You want to be sharing the same facts to have a debate around them. You want to be sharing the same facts to have a debate around them. You want both to be receptive. You want a variety of opinion and perspective so that we can build off each other and so that we can iterate. But we also realize that if you do something to increase one, it might have a negative impact on another. So, you know, you might increase variety of perspective by bringing more perspectives into the conversation. And by doing so, you might decrease shared reality,

or you might decrease shared attention. So just like the temperature of your body, there are other indicators of health that have some sort of connection. And while your body temperature might go into balance, other indicators like the flush into your skin might get aggravated more. So then how do you take that information that you aggregate and build tools that facilitate conversation to move in that direction? I mean, that's the hard part. Yeah. So an example is, you know, one, we need to identify if these are the right indicators.

We do so by actually building the measurement tools to get a somewhat of a baseline measurement. And we're not doing this alone. We're doing it with external parties as well, researchers, MIT, cortical labs define the first four indicators. And they're actually doing it not just for Twitter, but for talk radio, podcasting as well, to measure the percentage of conversations there. And as we build an understanding baseline of the measurement,

then we can start deploying solutions and we can watch how it deviates from the baseline. So an example of a solution might be, we have all these people sharing links, sharing articles. And I might share an article from Fox News or New York Times. And I might share that article and have my own kind of view on this, like saying a tweet of,

this article is spot on, or this is completely off the mark, and this is all the reasons why. One of the things we experimented with is when we see those articles shared, to bring up other tweets that might have different perspectives as indicated by the text that they're sharing on top of the URL. And, you know, you might then see for the

same article, for the same link, two different perspectives on it. And there's some research to indicate that that emboldens people into their views. There's other research to indicate that that at least gets people thinking about what their viewpoint means and how that evolves. So that's just one experiment. And then we can run that

and then we can look at how it affects some of those metrics at scale we're super early on in this another one um is uh the brexit conversation you know the only tool that and this kind of gets to the core fundamentals of the service we only give you the ability to follow an account so if you were a vote leaver you're probably following folks like uh boris and and nigel and and related accounts very very few people and they're mainly journalists follow accounts that have a completely different perspective than themselves very few people watch cnn and then immediately flip to Fox News just to get the other theater

and the other movie that's playing on the same reality. So if you follow only those people, you're probably only getting reasons to leave. But if you were to do a little bit more work and you saw the hashtag vote leave trending and you tap into that, you'll see 99% of the conversation reasons to leave, but you might see 1% of reasons to stay.

And in that case, at least there is some potential to see a different perspective and see diversity of opinion. But we make that so hard for people. You can't follow a hashtag today. You can't even get into that conversation where there is even an element of variety of perspective. So those are the things we're looking at. If we allow someone to follow a hashtag or follow a topic, does that increase variety of perspective? Does it increase shared reality? Does it increase shared attention or does it diminish those things? Yeah, it's that extra step that you have to do right now. I mean, if you go to what's trending and you click on a hashtag, you're going to see, in general, my

experience is you'll see a smattering of different perspectives on that issue. But if you could follow an issue with an at, like at, you know, issue X, and then your feed would be propagated with different perspectives on that issue, it would break the chains of the silo effect that's creating so much toxicity. But I think it also, it means that you have an optimistic perspective on the malleability of a human psychology.

Right? Oh yeah, I mean, I- Because people are bringing in a lifetime of experience that has formed a certain perspective. And just because you're going to pepper that feed with a smattering of different views doesn't mean that it's going to change that person's worldview.

Totally. And maybe it shouldn't, I don't know. And I don't know if that's your responsibility, but certainly there is a level of toxicity right now on your platform that I know you're endeavoring to address, but these are very difficult problems to overcome. Yeah, and I don't think it's our responsibility to change their view.

I do think it's our responsibility to set up the circumstances where if they choose to look outside their own view or to add to their view or challenge their own view, that it's easy to do so. Right now, it's extremely difficult. And we saw this in 2016, 2015, leading up to the election. you know, this MIT cortical lab put out a, put out an infographic that showed, you know, a number of the journalists on the left, quote unquote, left end of the spectrum were not following folks on the right. Whereas folks on the right were following folks on the left. And you see these huge siloed concentrations

of people on the left who are just feeding themselves with stories around what's going to happen, whereas folks on the right end of the spectrum were seeing everything. And these are just journalists. These are journalists. Right, and journalists by and large

are going to be people that are more likely to follow a difference of opinion. Typically, but in leading up to the US election, according to the graph, they were not. Right. They were certainly not enough. And I mean, to me, the most dangerous thing about what we've done as a service

is to incentivize more of these echo chambers and filter bubbles and not give people tools to at least change the probability that they would see more. And that, I think, can embolden a lot more toxicity, can embolden a lot more of the bad faith actors who intend to disrupt, which we saw certainly leading up. But Twitter will be 13 years old in March and we've probably seen this throughout our lifetime.

And a lot of it has to do with we made a system that people have figured out how to, how to game. And, uh, and we, we haven't had enough punitive actions with the exception of, uh, this very binary decision of leave up or take down. And, and that, that very binary action is just not enough. It's not nuanced enough, especially if you take a broader view on humanity and you believe in the concepts of rehabilitation or redemption, or, you know, at least showing people, you know, the, a path towards health and greater participation in the, in the same sense of like giving people the choice of drinking the water

or the wine when they're sick. We don't do that. You know, we have this very, very blunt tool of leave up or remove. At the same time, the acceleration with which, you know, sophisticated, well-financed entities are weaponizing the platform is only going to increase. And I think there's an analogy to doping in sports

in the sense that the doping, the sophistication of the doping is always a step or two ahead of the policing body's ability to detect, right? So the entity is always playing catch up to what's ahead. And it seems like that's a similar game that's afoot here. Totally. And in the technology world, the metaphor would be security. So, you know, I forget the exact quote, but Edgar Allan Poe brought this up quite some time ago where he believed he was able to build a cryptographic puzzle that no one could crack and quickly learn that anything that one person can design, another person can break down.

And security, probably at a surface level, is considered to, you know, your goal might be one of perfection, a purely perfect system that no one can break into. But the reality of it is the mindset should be one of constant observation, learning, and improving. You want to stay 10 steps ahead of your attackers.

And the way you do so is by really looking at patterns of how they are testing the system and attacking the system. And when you find them, iterate a few steps ahead and then share all your findings so the whole community can get much better. And you just take out that one potential vector. So on that rubric,

how would you grade Twitter's performance on that? Very poor. Because I think for the majority of our lifetime, we were fairly mechanical in our approach to technology. We were not utilizing machine learning and deep learning to lift some of the burden, certainly from our own folks who have to enforce all of our rules,

but also lifting the burden from the victims. Like our system right now is just not fair. You know, our system works entirely on if I'm a victim of abuse, I report that someone just harassed me or doxed me or whatnot. And then we send that- It's entirely dependent upon reporting. Yeah, we- It's not scalable. It's impossible to monitor that. Not scalable, but ultimately not fair. Why should the victim have that burden?

And so we weren't able to even consider removing that because we just weren't as sophisticated with machine learning and deep learning as we are now. So now our number one goal along this health vector is proactive monitoring of our system so that we can catch some of these things before someone even has to report it and there's a variety of tools that we can use to enforce whether it be um asking people to remove tweets, temporary suspensions, all the way to the worst option, which is a permanent suspension.

Which ultimately, over time, we shouldn't feel great about. We weren't able to rehabilitate. We weren't able to rehabilitate. We weren't able to incentivize and show people why healthy approaches and behaviors and participation would increase their reach or increase the value they got out of the service. So that ultimately is where we want to get to.

But right now we're focused on, number one, this is another thing I don't think our industry does enough of, is we haven't really admitted the connection between the digital world and the physical world. And there's a lot that happens on Twitter that I think we could scope entirely to online and we'd miss everything else that's happening offline or those offline ramifications.

Meaning things like doxing or where physical harm really becomes a palpable reality. So the number one thing we want to protect now is someone's physical safety. So it sounds a little bit odd for a predominantly digital company to say that we should be focused on protecting physical safety, but it has real manifestations.

Someone doxing, which is sharing private information about someone's physical location or phone number or email address puts a person in, you know, some physical jeopardy, safety jeopardy, and at least raises a potential. So could we recognize when those occurrences happen in real time and prevent it? And if we can do that, and that's a tightly scoped problem, then we can extend it to more and more of the cases that we see every single day, especially what women on our platform experience on a daily basis. And so we want to get to something that is really measurable, that has impact on someone's real world physical life, and then tie it back to what we're doing online.

And I just think as an industry, we need to focus more on that connection between the physical and the online and show the progress. We talk a lot about this, but we really have to show it. So now that we have a lot more sophistication around machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can automate a lot more of this. But a big part of us progressing in the right way is scoping it so that we can really

make the problem very very small get some sort of success or at least a path towards success there and then broaden it out so you've been going on all these podcasts and talking to a lot of people about these problems and how you're attempting to wrap your brain trust

around how to solve them and the early stages of actually solving them. Do you think that like, like what's your sense of how this campaign is going? Like, is this working? I mean, I don't know. I don't know that it is. And let me just say this and then I'll let you talk.

I mean, I don't know. I don't know that it is. And here, let me just say this and then I'll let you talk. I have this sense that you're in an impossible situation because you're coming on, you're coming online and you're talking about these things. And I feel like you're being very transparent and very earnest about it and very thoughtful, but you're not giving people the answers that they, like the answers are just not inherently satisfying, right? Or the timeline is off or something. And so people are left feeling like they're not getting a direct response. Like you've been accused of being evasive.

I don't think you're being evasive, but perhaps people are just wanting to see the results more quickly. Like, how are you thinking about this? Or what's your sense of how this is going? First and foremost, we have to realize that we have to show, not tell. And my goal here is not to... First of all, I don't consider this a campaign.

I think it's important that we have these conversations in public and that we show our thinking. I want to bring up ideas in public that people can push against. And I want to hear the feedback and I want to get the reaction because it will make our answers much better. And while people might not be satisfied with the level that they're currently at in terms of abstraction, we have to start there to get to something tangible and real. And I think a lot of people fairly come at this as specifically, why haven't you banned this

one person? Or why haven't you taken action on these particular things? And the answer is it's not one case. These are extremely, extremely challenging and a lot of it has to do with the context of the conversation. Just as an example, there are particular racial slurs that are used in a way that are harassing of folks and meant to silence a voice or to get a voice off the platform. And in other communities and contexts, they're perfectly okay.

In other communities and contexts, they're perfectly okay. An example of this is, you know, we have a bunch of gamers on Twitter. And every day we have an exchange between two people saying, hey, Rich, you know, I'm gonna kill you tonight. And in one context, that's a violent threat. And that is something that we would act on. In another context, it's a game. And what that person meant was that I'm going to kill you in this game tonight.

So those are the sorts of nuances that we have to pay attention to in the context. We have to actually look at the context of the relationship between the two people and how they're engaging. to actually look at the context of the relationship between the two people and how they're engaging. So in the old days, we were fairly mechanical in that we looked at the specific words and content being used. Now we have to shift to look at the network. We have to look at the actions on the network, the behavior on the network. You have to contextualize it against the history of past behavior. Exactly. And we have a number of other occurrences where we get accused of taking content down or permanently suspending someone because of something that they said,

which seems completely innocuous. But what was happening in the background was they had 17 accounts that they had control of that were all in unison in a coordinated fashion attacking one particular account with the intent to silence or trigger this person. Or we ban them in the past for a particular activity and then they are trying to evade our ban, which is against our terms of service. So there's a lot on the surface, but there's even more underneath that has to do with behavior, conduct, and activity that is against our term of service that we take action on.

And where we have failed people is explaining the reasons why we take action. Yeah, it's as if it takes place in a black box. In some cases, that's because there might be private information that even either a victim or a bad faith actor might compromise them in some way. In some cases, it might be an active investigation. So there's even nuance in how transparent we can be around the actions that we take on the platform. But then the reaction to the consumer

is that it looks haphazard. Yeah, it looks random. It looks random. Right. And the attention is all on these specific case studies, like whether it's Alex Jones or Jacob Wall or these specific individuals that get a lot of press and attention

for their behavior on your platform. I'm curious as to like how, under what circumstances does one of these case studies like rise to your attention as somebody who's running two different companies and has a tremendous amount of responsibility for keeping both of responsibility for, you know, keeping both of these, you know, ships, Square and Twitter, running in a certain direction. You know, I can't imagine that you can roll up your sleeves and get too involved in specific scenarios. But I would imagine from time to time, it does require your attention and your

discretion as to what to do. Yeah, so to start with the principles of my approach and how I think about this. Number one is I want to build a service and a company that outlives me. That doesn't require me being there. It doesn't require my attention. So by definition, that means that we distribute nearly all of our decision making. And to me, you know, one of the things that I look for is like, if I have to make a decision, I see it as an organizational failure. You know, it's something that for whatever reason, and it's likely my fault, you know, I haven't set up the right organizational structure. I don't have a team dynamic that can work through debate or disagreement.

I haven't presented or we haven't presented the problem with the right context or maybe we're going after the wrong problem. So it's all my fault ultimately. But if I have to make a decision, I think there's something wrong with the organization and that's what I need to fix. It's not making the decision, it's fixing exactly that. So my role then, and my second principle, is I need to ask questions in terms of how we're making these decisions

and why we're making these decisions and raise the bar through my questions. Raise the bar in terms of how we're thinking about our customers, the people that we serve, the secular trends that are happening, whether they be societal or cultural or legal or technological. And then do we have a broader context that is cohesive across the company and also our peer set? So in cases like Alex Jones or Jacob recently, I was notified that we're taking action.

It wasn't brought to me with a question of like should we do this or not I was notified that we're taking action and often times I ask well why did we take this action what evidence do we have to take the action or in the reverse I see something that's on the platform that looks like we should have taken action, but we didn't. And I send that to the team and say, what's going on here?

And again, this points to our failure in terms of the dependency on reporting in that we only see what's reported. So sometimes I see it and I ask the question and that kind of serves as a report. I see it and I ask the question and that kind of serves as a report. But there is no case at my tenure as CEO that I've made a decision on one of these cases or reversed a decision by the team. I have asked a lot of probing questions. In some cases, those questions lead to really looking at our process. If it does, I make damn sure that we admit when we make a mistake and what we've learned from it within the bounds of what we can share, obviously, usually around privacy or legal standards.

So that, I think, that I believe is my role. And again, it's all against this principle of like, if I'm not here, if I die tomorrow, the company needs to be able to continue. And we have to build this into a framework, not into people. We have to think about systems, not in these single points of failure in humans. And we, you know, we just have a lot of work to do that in building into the algorithms and the machines. And even when we do that, even when we move more towards a world

where algorithms are doing more of our work, there's some significant issues. One, our algorithms right now can't explain why they make the decisions they make. That's highly problematic. Extremely scary, especially you're wearing an Oura ring, I'm wearing an Oura ring. People wear Apple watches and the Apple watch every now and then will tell you when to stand. If we start offloading

more and more of our decisions to these devices and we don't understand why they're making the decisions they're informing us to take. And they can't tell you why. And they can't tell you why, then it's really, really dangerous. So we need to invest in explainability. This is a field of research in AI that is quite fascinating. We need to invest in removing bias from machine learning models and artificial intelligence, which we are doing.

But these are very, very early things. But even as we move more of these enforcement actions and policies to algorithms, people need to be able to see why the actions taken are taken. And if they can't see it, they won't trust it. So we have a few operating principles as a company. One, we believe our purpose is to serve the public conversation. Our desire is to promote health in that public conversation.

Two, we want to earn trust. And earning trust comes through a variety of methods. Transparency, reliability, consistency, so that we don't appear random. Deliberateness. When you read our rules, you understand them and you can see why we acted in the particular way we acted based on the rules or why our algorithms did the very same thing. So, you know, we're just putting these principles in place. We're just putting these principles in place. We're just building these models. We're investing in research areas like explainability

and bias and ML. But it is going to take some time and that's not satisfying. I think people get frustrated because we talk about it but I want to talk about it. I want to share some of these ideas. I want to share where we are in the journey. I want to show the map and where we've come from

and where we're trying to get to. In pointing where we're trying to get to, open a dialogue so that people can really push back on us and say, you're going in the wrong direction, and here's why, and you should consider this other path. That's the power of our service. You can see how people are thinking about any topic under the sun,

and you get this sense of global consciousness immediately. So we also have to take advantage of that as well. Yeah, I appreciate the transparency, and I think the openness and the willingness to entertain pushback speaks to your punk rock roots a little bit. I feel like from a PR publicity strategy, it might've behooved you to be like introducing

a new feature to Twitter to address these things. And then sort of said, here's the first of many things to come, but we're introducing a new feature to Twitter to address these things. And then sort of said, here's, here's the first of many things to come, but we're introducing this new thing. And this is because of this. And it would have given you a little bit of, uh,

uh, of insulation, I think against the people that feel like you're, you're, you know, there, that there's a lot of talk, but,

um, the, the challenge with that, I, I agree with you. I mean, I, that would feel good, but the challenge with that is

there's not going to be any one feature that makes one significant debt. This is going to be a constant iteration. Unless you finally allow people to edit their teams. We're not going to get into all of that. That might help some things. If we put too much weight on any one particular feature, I think it's doomed to fail. A lot of this work has to do with constantly iterating our models,

learning in real time at scale, observing. Just this model of observing, learning, and improving is something we want to move. Our issues in the past is we've just moved too slowly on that mindset. Whereas on that model, we're able to much, much faster because we've improved dramatically our infrastructure. We've got a lot more sophisticated about how to apply technology

in the right way. But I definitely hear the call and there are certain features like edit or putting on the conversations of the service or giving people more control over who can reply or how they moderate comments within the replies. Mute replies or just turn off any reaction to a tweet, like the way that you can turn comments off on YouTube. We're experimenting with all those, but all of them have another side.

Recently we tweeted about, we are experimenting with people having more control over their replies. So one of the things we're testing is if you have a tweet and some jerk replies to you, giving you the ability to hide it and not delete it, but hide it, which kind of moves it over to another, call it tab, that allows outside observers who are not you or that replier to actually see that you moderated that reply. But for your own conversation, you can be the host of that conversation. You can edit it, you can curate it a bit

more. You can't delete the tweet from the platform, but you can push it to the side, which forces people to do some work, but also gives them some visibility into what you moderate. And the reason why this is important is because a lot of what's been great about Twitter have been activists and whistleblowers and journalists who, you know,

a powerful figure might tweet something and then you see an immediate reaction in terms of, well, actually that's just not true. That's not factual. I'm sure you've probably at least seen or heard about everything that was going on in the Fyre Festival. And one of the things that you see within the documentaries is the activity by the social media managers

to delete rapidly all the comments that call it out as a fraud. And if we just allowed pure deletion of tweets managers to delete rapidly all the comments that call it out as a fraud. And if we just allowed pure deletion of tweets because you as a person didn't like them, then you miss that huge opportunity to call out and to speak truth to power in a way. So we need to do these things in transparency. And if your goal is to overcome tribalism and the siloing of information, that contravenes that. It's important. So there's a feature like that that is big

and will have impact on someone's individual experience, but it comes at cost. And we need to mitigate the cost that it brings with it. In this case, diminishing the potential for echo chambers, diminishing people to share different facts or, you know, speaking truth to power. There's a certain inevitability to Twitter. I think you've even tweeted,

like if Twitter wasn't invented, then Twitter would have been invented, right? Like that we're of the moment where something like this would have come along had it not been for you and Biz and Ev. But I'm interested in like what the internal experience has been for you, because I look at you, I look at Biz, I don't know Ev, but between you and Biz, like you

guys are, I mean, Biz was designing book covers. Like you were, you know, into fashion design and botanical illustration and punk rock. And I mean like two really inherently creative people. I mean, you're not graduates of Harvard Business School. Not graduates at all. Yeah, right. Like that it's so improbable and in certain respects beautiful that this creation came out of this special group of people

who at the time intended it to be a means for people to connect, right? To just share information about their lives. And Twitter has since become something else entirely in certain respects. I mean, it still retains that aspect of it, but you could have never predicted what it has matured into. And I'm interested in how that feels,

like to be sitting right in the middle of all of this, having to make these kinds of decisions that we're discussing today and try to navigate this behemoth in the right direction. What is that like? I mean, one, it feels amazing. I mean, I think my co-founder, Ev, said it perfectly recently. He said, we often talk about everything that could have gone wrong with Twitter to not enable it to continue to thrive and to be useful to people, but you just have to pay attention to how much had to go exactly right for this to happen.

And we're all pretty quirky and fairly weird. I think the best aspect of Twitter is that it's a little bit weird. It's a weird little thing. We built this because we wanted to use it. That was the intention. We wanted to use this technology in this way and I wanted to be able to go off anywhere and share what I was seeing, share what was happening

and I wanted to be able to follow Biz and see what he was thinking and see what was happening and then I think the most beautiful thing about Twitter is that people showed us what they wanted it to be and I think being able to be observant enough to really listen to what something wants to be, to me, is true creativity. And I, you know, we had this amazing fortune in that we were able to build something that felt very foundational, but was ultimately a discovery. I mean, we discovered something essential, something very, very low level.

something very, very low level. And because it was so low level, because it was so essential, because it was so, you know, this core foundational layer, people built social norms on top of it. And the first such norm was using the at symbol to refer to another person, which, you know, I took my laptop one day and I went to Stacks in Hayes Valley, which is a brunch place and took four hours over a waffle and some coffee. And anytime I saw an at symbol with a name, I would link them. And then we turned that into a reply slash mentions page. And suddenly conversation was born on the platform. We saw a few people using it, but that usage grew and grew and grew. We implemented it so everyone could use it,

and that made it more accessible, and then everyone started using it. Same thing happened with the hashtag. Chris Messina started putting this hash slash pound sign next to a word to tag by keyword and topic what his tweets were about. We found a search engine called Summize. We acquired them because they were

recognizing all of these hashtags and linking them to here's all the tweets that match that hashtag. Suddenly, you had not conversation between two people or multiple people, but you had conversation around a topic. And that just opened another aperture. And then Tim O'Reilly started really pushing this concept of, okay, I'm following these people and all these people are following me

and I want the people following me to see this one tweet from who I'm following. So I'm going to rebroadcast it, which he called a retweet. And again... So suddenly you started seeing the RT. Yeah, and then we implemented the RT away by making it a button and then everyone started doing it. And that created spread and network effects

and contribution back to the conversation. So everything that has made Twitter, Twitter has come from the people using it. It was not invented in-house. And some would argue that we didn't really invent Twitter, we only discovered it. And I would agree with that. I think we tuned into something that was interesting,

that was intriguing, that we didn't know what it was going to become. And in the same light, people figured out how to game it too. And that's where we are. It's a breathing organism, right? That could also become a virus. Yes, absolutely.

Or have a pathogen. Yeah, at least the pathways and the vectors that it provides can carry both positive and negative attributes. I was watching SpaceX Dragon launch yesterday, last night. And certainly taken aback by the accomplishment, but also taken aback that we can be in this big virtual conversation together. I don't know any of these people, but one of the screenshots I took was

the rocket, it was in the T-10 and I was watching through Twitter and I just started seeing all these tweets and Periscope comments saying, you know, congrats or good you know, good luck from Mexico. Good luck from India. Good luck from, from Japan. And I'm like, wow, I just couldn't, couldn't even imagine this in the past. Like have one single plane where anyone around the world can, can, can just share how they're thinking and wish well upon one another.

But the flip of that is you, like any tool, you can figure it out in a way such that you can use the vectors to be more destructive and to be distracting and to divide, which I think is antithetical to the base technology, but it doesn't mean that we should assume that it'll just work itself out. We have to actively maintain and garden this conversation.

And the challenge is no one's done it at this scale before. So we have to learn it. We have to learn it in real time. And the challenge is no one's done it at this scale before, so we have to learn it. We have to learn it in real time. And part of the conversations like this is like, I wanna share that I'm learning it in real time. We're learning it in real time and we're gonna make a ton of mistakes along the way, but we're going to do it in public

and we're going to admit when we're wrong. And we just haven't done enough of that in the past. On this idea of doing it in public, failing and succeeding in the public eye, how do you, just as a human being, deal with the reaction that comes with every single thing that you tweet? Like, do you put a lot of thought

into what you're putting out into the world? Do you not read your app mention? Like, how do you, like knowing that every time you tweet something, at least with respect to what's going on at Twitter, that you're gonna get, like there's gonna be a certain percentage of people that are gonna wanna say not nice things.

Like, how do you insulate yourself? How do you see that and take it to heart, but also protect your own emotional wellbeing? Yeah, I mean, this is where the meditation practice has helped me a lot is just not constantly allowing myself to be reactive to whatever comes in front of me. This is the less control I have over my own wellbeing and space and mindset,

the less effective I am in fixing our issues so i i approach it number one from that mindset of like i want to i want to go into the arena and experience everything that people are thinking because the only way for me to really move forward is to at least see it, ideally to acknowledge it, figure out what I could learn from even the most negative, like what's the question behind the question, what's the statement behind the statement, what, realizing also that, you know, people have a lot of, a lot of fear of companies like ours and, and, and me, you know, running companies like ours and they have a lot of distrust and expressing that comes out often as anger and it comes out as, uh, hateful and it comes out as, um, you know, something that would otherwise set me off. But even that expression, even them doing that might disarm a little bit.

I think with the rest of online, there's very little consequence to doing something like that. And it's easy to be behind a keyboard and say things that some people say. But I do think that there is a health aspect in enabling people to express themselves. But they certainly do not have a right for us to amplify that or to guide it to a person who wasn't open to accepting it. And that's where the mechanics of the network fail today. There's just so many open doors that people can take advantage of, like replies, like trends, like search. There's some power in those doors being open, but

if you don't feel you have enough control over them or your own experience you're just going to give up this isn't useful to me ultimately as we think about health we need to realize two things one, we need to protect someone's physical safety to the best degree that we can, being an online platform.

And then number two, we need to protect people's right to freely express themselves. And we do believe that's a fundamental global right. And we do believe that people weaponize it and they game it and their intent is to silence one another. And I think everyone on the free speech absolutist side would agree that they prefer everyone to be able to speak. And part of that agreement is making sure

that people feel safe to do so in the first place. So we have to guide all of our rules around those concepts and principles in terms of what is impacting someone's ability to freely express themselves. And then third, realize that the conversation to have is around attention and amplification and recommendation. That's where Twitter's true power is. And that's where I think we should be held a lot more accountable publicly is what we recommend, what we allow to be amplified, what we do with people's attention, which is a scarce resource and something that our business is built off of.

And what about capturing the, in speaking about capturing people's attention and maintaining it, how do you think about the addictive nature of not just your platform, but these social media platforms in general. You know, we're now in this era where we have people like Tristan Harris speaking out about the erosion of,

you know, our analog lives as a result of our, you know, our being held hostage by our devices. Actually tomorrow, I'm getting a guy on the podcast called Cal Newport, who wrote a book called Deep Work, and he's got a new book coming out called Digital Minimalism that's all about how we can have healthier relationships with these devices while respecting the addictive nature and what they truly are.

And he talks a lot about, and Tristan talks a lot about how so much energy is put into trying to maintain that attention on the platform. Like, is that like what's going on at Twitter with respect to how you've architected the platform for that purpose? Yeah, I mean, I think this goes back to the incentive conversation.

We're incentivizing a lot more social status than we are utility. I think there's deep, deep utility within Twitter. It's the fastest way and most influential way to get your thoughts to the world. There's nothing faster. Also to find out what's going on in real time. Yeah, it's the fastest way to tap into a global consciousness.

There's nothing faster. It's not segmented by groups or communities or whatnot. Everything's on the same plane. And there's a lot of power to that. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we're aligning the incentives of the network towards that rather than coming up with the best tweet that has the most likes because you're the most outraged or you have the best hot take without any sort of consideration

around what's actually happening. Or an event just unfold or, you know, like an event just unfolds, you quickly fire something off. It's outrageous as hell, which really spreads it throughout the network. And then, you know, two hours later, you realize what you just said was a complete distortion of reality because something new breaks around the event. So I think we need to make sure, at least in the conversation utility aspect, that we're incentivizing

the breadth of the conversation, the timeline of the conversation, the fact that people can go back. It goes back to what I hope to do with these podcasts. I started some with this year and Bill Simmons and maybe I was really terrible and maybe as people progress through the year with me maybe they see my conversational game

gets much stronger and much more authentic and much more real and more open. That would be my hope. So the same thing I want to have happen on Twitter where you can see learning, you can see development, you can see iteration. And the beauty of conversation versus a post is conversation evolves.

It iterates and it grows and it goes in directions and it's very fluid. So we need to show more of that. But in terms of the addictive natures of the technologies, yes, I think we're making, at least from an OS level, we're making the right first steps, which is giving people the data. So iOS and Android, both in the base operating system now,

allow you to track how much time you spend on particular apps or how much you use your phone. And you can see it. I think it's a novelty right now. With the exception of potentially people's kids, I don't think people are actually utilizing that information in a way that is changing their behaviors. At least that's my own experience. I look at my screen time and it hasn't made me make any other new decisions. You've shared it though. You've shared your screen time on Twitter before. Yeah, to generate a conversation about it.

Again, it goes back to incentives. There's no incentive for me to change right now. I just don't see the, like at least within that view, it's not presenting to me a path as we talked about earlier with the water and the wine. It's not presenting necessarily upfront a solution that points me in a direction that has more, you know, fulsome human connection. One of the things we, at Twitter, our main Twitter account at the company, we did this little thing yesterday where we tweeted,

get off of Twitter, go tell someone that you love them. Better to do it in person. And one, I love that we do stuff like that because I don't want to be afraid of telling people to get off the thing. Get off it. Tara Swisher is rolling her eyes right now. I know, and she will. That's her prerogative. But I think if you look at the replies to that tweet, If you look at the replies to that tweet, it's amazing. And if we can do whatever we can to encourage some fundamentally different human connection, great.

But in every one of those moments, we get to learn. And it might have seemed a little bit eye-rolly or stupid or whatnot, but I don't want us to be afraid of stuff like that at that level because we get to learn from those opportunities. And based on those learnings, we get to challenge our assumptions. But the world we want to get to is, and I've said this on other podcasts, is I want people to walk away from Twitter, emphasis walk away from Twitter, feeling that they learned something. Emphasis walk away from Twitter feeling that they learned something. And right now I feel people walk away from Twitter feeling outraged or feeling overwhelmed or feeling like they don't know what the next step is or why the thing's even valuable.

So if we can direct a lot of our efforts towards I put down the phone and I feel like I learned something and I want to build on it in this way and then share back the progress, then we've done the right thing. I know that feels far away from what people perceive of Twitter today, but it's there.

And it does happen in small amounts. It's really a function of what Twitter you follow. You follow health Twitter. You learn a ton of stuff. You know, Rhonda Patrick found my fitness. You, Ben, Mercola, you know, just, you know, all along the spectrum of health from the very extreme to, you know, more of the mainstream to the other end of it. I learned so much from those conversations on the service. Yeah, I would agree with you.

There's a lot of pretty vile arguments going on around diet though. You can fall into that rabbit hole as well. And I would just say, sort of respecting the challenges afoot and the problems that you're facing, that on a personal level, Twitter has been an unbelievable resource for me. I feel like I've built most of my career

on the shoulders of Twitter because it's allowed me this unbelievable ability to directly connect with all these people that I respect and admire and have then been able to meet in real life for purposes of this show. But even before that, like it's been a tremendous value add

in my personal experience. And I would take that, you know, with everything else that it has. And, you know, now there's all these other social networks and I get a lot more traction on other ones. But Twitter is still like the first one that I go to in the morning when I have my social media time. It's like Twitter one that I go to in the morning when I have

my social media time. It's like Twitter first. I want to see what's going on right now. Yeah, and that was a big shift when I came back to the company almost four years ago. I think we had a mindset too much of chasing after the people that we don't have, like trying to increase the size of the pie as quickly as possible versus focusing on the people we do have. We have some of the most influential people in the world using us. And while it might feel, I mean, it's certainly smaller than others, it drives culture, it drives conversation. And we don't even know how to count the impressions that tweets get.

We can't count tweets on CNN being screenshotted. We can't count the tweets being shown within newspapers. So just the impressions that it has around the world is significant. And what we need to focus on is making sure that for the people who do love us, that we're giving them an opportunity to love us more and such that they want to talk about the value they're getting out of it. And back to your point, it's a cost-benefit analysis. There's certainly cost to Twitter. And we're seeing more and more of that. People being fired over tweets they tweeted 10 years ago and not being able to clarify what they meant.

And we also see a lot of benefit in people like you who have said that they've built their networks, their careers, their understanding, their practice by engaging in these communities. We have a woman who was in the Westboro Baptist Church who was using Twitter every single day to spread hate against the LGBTQA community. And there were four or five very patient folks on Twitter who were engaging her every day, showing her a different perspective. And she left the church because of that. And she credits a lot of that to those conversations on Twitter and just showing her a different

perspective. And she's working on getting the rest of her family out of it. She was born into that church. So we don't do a great job at telling all those stories as well. But they're real and they're impactful and they're meaningful. And we need to optimize for more of that occurrence, realizing that there's always going to be negative approaches. And our role is like, we can't amplify that. We need to make sure that people have control over the experience. And if they choose to see everything, that's their right and their choice. But if they don't, they should be able to have the conversation they want to have and be the host that they want to be. What do you foresee for the future as we kind of usher in this post privacy, you know, culture and world that we live in,

where we're seemingly all gonna be held accountable for things that we said or did that were documented on Twitter and other platforms, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, as culture shifts, are we all just going to be, you know, put on trial for these things? Like we're in a very weird, awkward, in-between phase right now,

trying to grapple with this issue. And we're in cancel culture right now, holding people hands to the fire for things that they did quite some time ago. And I see that only becoming more problematic in the short run until we figure out as a culture how we're going to manage this kind of thing. You've talked about, you know, Carol's concept of growth mindset on your podcast. And if we, you know, if we have a culture that cancels people on mistake,

there is no opportunity for growth mindset. There's no opportunity for learning. There's no opportunity for evolution. So I agree with you that we're in a weird state right now. I think as more people experience this and more people see that there is potential for learning, there's potential for rehabilitation, there's potential for redemption. I mean, we're not just seeing this online. We're, you know, we're seeing this in the prison systems in the United States. We're seeing this in like the conversation around infractions around like, you know, cannabis sales in the past and what it now means that it's legalized within the state. And, you know, the hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of

thousands of people we put away because of that very thing. And just like the momentum of the framework and the system that doesn't allow for redemption or rehabilitation. So this is much broader than online and it's much broader than the conversation I think we're having. And I don't think we're allowing ourselves to connect all the dots. ourselves to connect all the dots and i don't think we're we're allowing our our culture and our society to even have the chance at learning or growing if if we if we cancel everyone out there's just no learning and eventually you're going to trip up yourself and if you're not giving someone else the benefit of doubt no one's going to give you the benefit of doubt either and i i think that experience will be had by a lot of people. Certainly all the younger folks and more and more of an older generation. And as long as we have that open dialogue and show that's okay,

we're good. But as Twitter, we could also do some things. Like we're thinking about this feature to allow people to go back and clarify tweets. And what that might look like is you might have tweeted something five years ago about diet and someone might unearth it and say, you know, Rich, you believe this and before this you believe this, and suddenly today that older tweet gets all this traction

and you can retweet it, and then suddenly you might be known as the person that is completely inconsistent in your views. So you can imagine a feature where you could immediately go back, clarify that tweet and when you do so it's kind of like a quote tweet a retweet with comment and by doing so, by clarifying it you're not allowing the original tweet to be retweeted

without the clarification so anytime someone retweets that original tweet the clarification comes with it so at least people have more context. And things like that might make an impact. They may not at all, but we should test it. So it's also like a lot of work, right? Like I'm not going to go back to 2008

and read all my tweets and whatever I said, you know, to try to figure out what needs clarification. In reaction to someone like bringing something in the past up, you can immediately go to that tweet, clarify it, and then the record is straight, at least in your experience. So walk me through a day in the life. What's it look like for you? I know two days a week you're here at the house, right?

Yeah, I've been working from home two days a week, which is a time for me to read, to write, to consider and this gives me a lot of the free time that I need to think. The other days are just back to back meetings and my life is in little boxes in Google Calendar. But every day I wake up usually between 5.30 and 6.30 and I immediately start with a cold shower. That is my immediate caffeine in the morning. And it's kind of like this one of those

small wins where I feel like I already won the day if I can go straight into cold water and have the mental capacity to do so then and the and the it just feels I can take anything and just wakes me the hell up too so I go right away before coffee before anything yep I go straight into the cold shower and there for like you know a minute to five minutes and then I go into this room and I usually sit here and I meditate for an hour and I do a Vipassana-based practice. And after that, I get ready and I usually turn to my phone at that point to see if there's any emergencies. I keep my phone either in my kitchen or my closet, not next to my bed. I turn off all the notifications during the night and I

don't really check it until about 7 to 7.30. And when I'm walking into work, I leave the house around 7.30 and my office is about five miles away and takes me now about an hour, 15 minutes, an hour, 20 minutes to walk. And no matter, unless it's heavy rain, I do it, you know, anytime I'm going into the office, I walk and sometimes it's really cold here. The coldest it's been is 39. But it gets my blood going. It gets my mind going. I listen to podcasts. I listen to audiobooks.

Sometimes I just think. Sometimes I take phone calls. I walk super fast. If you ever see me on the street, I look ridiculous because I'm just like, you know, almost jogging. Same route every day? Same route every day. Sometimes I deviate, but it adds time. So I feel like I've found the optimal path to save time. and I kind of I've shifted my entire outfit to this walk like I wear all black because you if I sweat you can't see anything you can't see any stains if it rains like you can't see any the the wetness and I wear these running sandals because they're the fastest that they enable me to move the fastest they're faster than sneakers. What kind of running sandals? They're called Earthrunners, earthrunners.com.

They're made up in Sonoma, I think. They may be in San Francisco now, but they're super simple. If any of you or you have read Born to Run, all the running sandals. They're like five-rum, five-finger type shoes. Well, they're pure sandals. They don't have any of the articulated toes or whatnot. Like the Tar they're pure sandals. So like they don't have any of the articulated

toes or whatnot. So it's a, you know, it's open. Like the Tarahumara sandals. Yes, the Tarahumara sandals. And so I usually wear those every day, which have been called out as well in press. Like I'm wearing, I'm wearing these sandals and exposing my toes to the CEO of Goldman Sachs. I'm like, man, should I not expose my ugly hands either? I can't be human here. So I walk in with those and that iterated from sneakers and I just try to find the fastest way to be in. And then I wear these black jeans

and this sweater that that keeps me warm and you know i just wake up put these on and and go and then i breakfast i don't eat breakfast um i have one meal a day um so i go i i have um that's every day every Yeah, with the exception, I started experimenting a little bit recently where on, well, I'll finish the rest of the day. So I go into Twitter first. My first meeting's usually at nine. I have meetings until about 2 p.m. And then I walk across the street to Square. I usually stay until about six or seven. I take a lift home. I

don't walk back home. I try to eat dinner at 6.30, around 6.30 or 7, not too late. I go into the infrared sauna, which I really love. I do a workout. I do the seven-minute workout through an app. Sometimes I do multiple circuits of that. And then I eat. And then I kind of wind down at 9.30, try to be in bed at least by 10, and then go to sleep. I try to get nine hours of sleep. That's been hugely impactful. Or a ring to keep me accountable to sleep. I try to get nine hours of sleep. That's been hugely impactful or a ring to keep me accountable to it. But so I learned the one meal a day thing from Wim Hof, you know, two years

ago. And I love learning through experimentation and I love experimenting on myself. And I've always been this way. I was vegan for two years. It's very hard to be vegan in St. Louis, Missouri, at least when I was there. Yeah, but now you're in San Francisco. I know. Come on. I know. I will reboot this. So I love experimenting. I've always experimented with my diet. I've always experimented with health practices. Some have been really informative to me and very healthy, some have not. But the one meal a day thing, I just thought was a really interesting challenge.

And I heard it on a podcast, I think it was with him and Tim Harris, and I just like, I want to try that. And after a week of some pain, I noticed I slept much deeper and during the day, I was so much more focused. So every day I, I fast for 22 hours. I have, you know, I have dinner within two hours and I have a really, really big dinner. And, and, over the past few months, I've been breaking that by having, it's kind of a reward for making it through the week. On Friday morning, I go to Blue Bottle Coffee

and I get one of their waffles, which is amazing in the morning. And then I won't. That's your big cheat. That's a cheat. And I won't, what I've been doing recently is I won't eat until Saturday dinner. And extended fast, because I've been playing with even more extended,

just pure water fast. The longest I've done is three days. And it is trippy. The amount of focus I have on day three is crazy. I was not expecting that. And I would eventually like to go beyond that just to see what happens. But I have to package it into these weekends because I don't trust myself enough to balance it with my day-to-day work

and everything going on at the office and whatnot. So yeah, when I learn something on a podcast like yours or something that David Goggins is doing, I try it. I try it for like a month and if I like it, I stick with it. And I just want to constantly experiment and that's why I dropped out of school. Because I was learning so much more by experimenting myself and I don't know any other way to learn except by tinkering and playing

and trying new things and realizing early on it was just a little bit too haphazard now if I'm going to try something I'm going to dedicate months to it and I have a lot of patience as a characteristic and I have a lot of discipline If I'm going to try something, I'm going to dedicate months to it in a common practice. I have a lot of patience as a characteristic, and I have a lot of discipline. I can really stick to something I say I'm going to do.

That is a practice. I've also been journaling since I was very young, mostly through my phone, but before that I was a was written journals and sometimes online. That's where a lot of the ideas from Twitter came from was live journal. I just started journaling in public, which was this scary, scary idea to be like, what's the edge of honesty that you want to be open about to other people that you don't know and who can follow you? And I experiment with that every day at Twitter as well.

And some of that was me sharing my meditation in Myanmar. I was like, look, I'm aware of what this might be perceived, independent of what's happening within Myanmar. of what's happening within Myanmar, a tech guy in San Francisco, of course he does meditation. Of course he's going to tweet about it. Of course he got bitten up by mosquitoes.

Is he going to show that off? It's so Silicon Valley episode. I get that. That's the thing that I'm cognizant of. I'm just playing into this stereotype. I don't care. I get value out of it. I know I'm going to get some of that back and I know I'm going to get other things back. I don't want to be afraid of at least creating potential

for someone else who might be on the edge of trying something like this to like take the step or for it to resonate in such a way that they develop some questions in their mind and because I would want that I want I get so much of people being open and sharing and even though that they might play into a stereotype, it helps me evolve and grow. So I need to model that behavior as well. And what's learning unless you share it? Well, I think, look, there's certain aspects of that that are stereotypically Silicon Valley-esque.

But I think what distinguishes it is the self-care aspect of it, to me, stands a little bit in contradiction to this hustle porn culture that I think is also pervasive in Silicon Valley where you gotta work 25 hours a day and sleep is for when you're dead and all of that. For you to kind of say,

look, I'm sleeping eight or nine hours a night. Um, and I have the aura screenshots to prove it. If you don't believe me, um, um, living, you know, a relative, I mean, you showed me around your house. Like it's very, there's a, there's a minimalism aspect to it. Like you live, you know, for, for, you know, compared to the way that you could live, um, you're living a relatively, you know, simple stripped down existence. Yeah. I mean, I, and how does that inform like your thinking and your equanimity and how you, you know, the, the creative, um, you know, impetus that you bring to business. I mean, the, the philosophy that I've always, that has always resonated most with me inherently and naturally and feels like I was born with is this essentialism.

What is absolutely essential in my life? And even if you ask my parents, when we moved into a new house, my parents came from nothing. They barely even graduated high school in St. Louis, Missouri. Didn't go to college. Were very upset when I didn't finish college because I would be the one person in my family to do so. But when we would move into a new house, I always chose the smallest room

and I always put the least amount of stuff in it. And I appreciate this concept of like, I want to figure out how to unlock everything I'm born with because I know that's all I need. All I need is everything I'm born with. Like I don't need any of these objects. I don't need any of these technologies. I think of Twitter as insanely useful, but I think of most technologies as a crutch to point back to what we're inherently capable of.

And in Twitter's case, I think it represents the global consciousness. I think it's the closest thing we have to tapping into a global consciousness. And to be able to not just see what people are saying, but what they actually think, the sentiment behind it. And I inherently believe that we have that power internally. And I believe that one of Twitter's roles is to remind us of the potential. And if meditation can get me to a point where I can experience that and feel it, where I can experience that and feel it, which it has in some way. It's gotten me more in tune to my instinct and to my gut and my feelings.

I mark those moments of instinct, and I mark them with enough weight, mental clarity and weight, whether it be through journaling or just considering it deeply, that when the event does happen that I had an instinct about, I can tie it back. Right, that's cool. And that has shown me these technologies like these rings that we're wearing,

they're just reminders to me and crutches of what we inherently are born with and have the natural ability to do so, and they're mirrors. And if we can approach them in that light instead of something that drives us, which I think Tristan accurately articulates, we will be able to develop a healthy relationship with them. we will be able to develop a healthy relationship with them. We're going to start any new technology, we're going to start by a codependent relationship. And then when you get aware of the power and you get aware of the reflection, the reflection is what becomes the interesting part

and it's reflection back on you and your consciousness and your awareness. And anything that builds self-awareness any practice or any tool any object is is something that i want to invest in and and so i i keep my life fairly sparse because i think it'll be distracting otherwise do you canonize this in any specific spiritual perspective that guides your life? I grew up Catholic, and my parents are pretty devout Catholics, and my uncle's a priest. Every Christmas, we go back, and he says mass. But I was the one in my family that left St. Louis and I was the one that was never confirmed by choice and I get my

sense of spirituality through connection and what Twitter represents is spiritual to me like tapping into the consciousness the larger organism whether it be the planet, the universe the social consciousness is what drives me and it's the answer I like to get

at and the question that I like to ask so that's where I feel the flow and that's where I feel most alive is when I feel like I can tap into that. And like, you know, I go down to Big Sur a lot and Big Sur, like we have this amazing fortune here in San Francisco, being able to travel two and a half hours away and go, you know, to this place that you immediately feel is mystical because of the redwood trees and this dynamic coast that goes down a thousand feet to the ocean where you see whales and, and, and you just feel this, this connection and this wisdom. And I think that's so, so powerful and such an important reminder. Like today is my day where I don't, you know, Saturday is my day where I don't think about work at all with the exception of this conversation. But it's at a different level.

I just clear the day completely to, you know, walk outside or to go down to Big Sur or to be with my best friends. to Big Sur or to be with my best friends. I have dinner with them ideally once a week and just laugh and have some wine together. And they just had a baby. So that's a whole nother new sense of joy. And I need a lot of that balance because that is my spiritual connection at the moment. It's just like feeling that connection in as tangible way as possible. And you mentioned my path of thinking about designing jeans and botanical illustration. And I took a thousand hours of massage therapy along my path of becoming an engineer and a CEO because I grew up writing programs and it's so damn abstract. There's so much in your head and you're not using your hands. And every time I realize I'm just like, my dreams were me programming my dreams.

It was just such a weird experience where I would have this dream where I was programming the next part of my dream and it was so lucid, but it wasn't grounded. So I would always shift towards something that I loved, like botanical illustration and just drawing, or something that would solve a need because I was developing carpal tunnel and I didn't just want to get a massage. I wanted to learn the why behind it and the mechanics behind it so I could fix myself. But all these variations, these side paths,

these forks in the road, have always brought me back to building technology because... and added depth and enriched building that technology because it's just where I feel my creativity most. Yeah. I know you had an interest in public transportation and like urban planning early days.

I feel like you should get together with Elon and solve the traffic problem. You guys together. I think he's trying to get the traffic to Mars. Yeah, well, he's going underground too. That's true. That's true. I can't help but think that there's this weird

meta parallel between like your own personal path towards broadening your consciousness and raising your awareness and growing as a human being and the kind of hive consciousness that is Twitter and the commitment to kind of raising the vibration of that, like the interplay between those, I think is super interesting. Yeah, I think in that sense,

like back to our conversation around meditation, the observation is not just that we are um external observers but we are part of the system the very act of observing is changing the system as well and um we we have a responsibility to really reflect the essentialness of humanity and um and and being that reflection on the world for all the good and all the bad i mean there's a lot of power to seeing you know how people think in ways that make us feel great and also things that are super uncomfortable because we we need to be able to acknowledge those things we need to be able to acknowledge in person in order to have a

conversation about it and there's no other path towards um evolution and making something better unless we can talk about it and and um and uh yeah so it's all recursive it's all recursive. It's all recursive. And the more I realize how recursive this world is, I think the better our answers get. But at the same time, it's easy to go down to a very, very abstract path. And I get that. And we have to balance practicality with it. But in that balance is something really magical.

And sometimes we discover something really magical, and sometimes we kind of get ourselves distracted. You know, this nonviolent communication, this concept, have you heard of it? It's just kind of a meditation on how we communicate and utilizing words like should as things that kind of restrict the growth mindset and immediately going towards solutions in our speech versus presenting more of needs and feelings. And it's amazing how if you just change a few words

in your dialogue, it changes a relationship with the person you're having a conversation with or gets to something much deeper in the conversation. So there's a really good... The book is Nonviolent Communication. There's a good audio book read by the author called Speaking Peace, which is sometimes corny at times

because he picks up the guitar and sings, but the substance and the framework and the system and the science behind it is real. There's a lot of gratitude. It's nonviolent in terms of the person that you're communicating with, but also with respect to the self. It's mainly yourself. It's mainly yourself. Saying the word, you know, we should. It's inherently violent because it's holding you to a standard that you feel you can't meet.

You can't learn from. There's no path towards learning when you set this immediate expectation. towards learning when you set this immediate expectation. And that's just one example of the framework. So that has been fairly enlightening. I love looking at how we use language. And one of the things that I've been, over years, been trying to convince both my companies around is we have this word in technology called uh users uh and way back when when howard schultz was on the square board the ceo of starbucks

he pulled me aside one day he's like why do you call your customers users i'm like a good question i don't i don't know where it came from but we've always called them that. And then I started researching it and it was coined back in the early 80s or actually earlier than that in the 70s when people were using mainframes and it was to represent an account someone who was using the time on a mainframe. And then the people who are really good, like the engineers or the system administrators, kind of developed this level system of, I'm a super admin and you're a user.

And the user is stupid. And we can't trust what they do. So it became this term, losers, L-U-S-E-R-S. So it became this term, losers, L-U-S-E-R-S. And then when models like Google came to be, they had no way to refer to their, they didn't have a direct customer relationship with the exception of advertisers. But a lot of the value of something like Google

and something like Twitter is people coming to pay them with their attention. And there's no monetary exchange, as you would assume, with customers. But there is an exchange of value there and it's in attention. So they called that a user of a system as well. So you use Google, you're a user of Google. The problem with the word is that it creates this abstraction layer. So we have 330 million monthly active users

on Twitter. And once you say that, it's this abstract thing. If you say we have 330 million people, then you have more of this empathy for who you're serving and who you ideally want to serve. I look at it through this different lens as somebody who's in recovery.

Like a user is somebody who's an addict. That's another thing. It has negative connotations to the word. And it breeds addiction as well. In Square, we never use the word user. We use customer. We use seller. We use buyer as a word. We use individual. And it just creates more potential for empathy. I'm not going to do it alone.

And I'm trying to get Twitter more and more there as well. So where do you see Twitter five to 10 years from now? Like if you have your druthers and you're able to implement all of these changes that you would like to see, you know, what does it look like? I think number one, that we become known as, you know, we truly serve our purpose of serving

not the public conversation, but the global public conversation. That the predominant conversations on our service are the existential conversations of the planet. And, you know, in Yuval's recent book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he talks about some of the planet. And, you know, in Yuval's recent book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he talks about some of the existential conversations being climate change, displacement of work through artificial intelligence, economic disparity. These are conversations that no one

nation state can solve alone. It requires all of humanity to work together to actually make an impact on. So I believe you need platforms like Twitter to host that conversation, to arrange the conversation, to enable the conversation to live and iterate and to evolve. And I want to be a service that people at least have first consideration for learning from those existential global conversations and also being able to participate in them. And we've seen evidence of that. So that's number one. Number two, in serving the public conversation, the global public conversation, we have a desire. And it is a desire.

conversation we have a desire and it is a desire it you know it it's not it's it's a responsibility of all of us in the world but it is a desire for us to promote health into that conversation and i want us to be known by that i want us to be known like if you engage in public conversation on Twitter, you should expect civil dialogue and debate and to learn something. You should, if you don't know how to get into a conversation in that way, we're going to teach you. And we're going to teach you through the incentives as well. And that leads to the third point. I want to have a strong point of view within the network itself around redemption and rehabilitation and teaching people how to converse. I'm trying to learn right now.

As a company, we're ultimate students of conversation and we're distilling all of our learnings right into the product so that everyone can benefit from it. That sounds super idealistic, I get it. And again, back to the stereotypical Silicon Valley, but we have to have these aspirations. We're not going to get to 99% of it. We're going to get to 80%, maybe even less. But if we can get to that milestone,

I think we'll improve the lives for a few people at least. And maybe that spreads and maybe that pushes. But I think right now we have such a binary view of the world of on-platform, off-platform. Instead of going back to what we were talking about earlier, how do we put the growth mindset into Twitter? How do we enable people to come to it and learn from it? And that, to me, is the potential of technology.

And I think we're going to be taught a lot by people growing up only knowing that I can have a conversation with anyone in the world at any point. I think that is fascinating. Like my friend's newborn, who's only four months old, he's growing up in a world where he only knows touchscreens exist. He only knows that I could have a conversation with literally anyone in the world instantly. He's growing up to a world that has a growing potential for a global currency like Bitcoin and native currency to the internet that's not controlled by any central bank or nation state and therefore reflects a global citizenship in a very foundational way.

That is powerful. And the more we can listen to that experience of like, you've only known this, what do you do with it? Like, what's the next step on this? And it's so exciting. Yeah, it's exciting. There is an idealism that is, you know, venturing through everything that you just said,

but it's beautifully articulated. And I hope that we see all of that come to fruition. I worry about the base nature of us as human beings and this ticking clock that we're facing with global climate change. Like these are pressing matters that need redress in the short run. Let's be eyes wide open about it.

Let's see it truly. There are some scary things that all these technologies enable, but I don't know any other way to get over them, but sharing them eyes wide open and seeing them eyes wide open and talking through them. Last question.

Self-serving question. Because the genesis of Twitter came out of ODO, which was initially intended to be this podcasting platform, right? Come full circle. Here we are in the midst of this golden age of podcasting, the mainstream adoption of this form of media is penetrating to newer and deeper levels,

which is really cool and exciting. And I really, you know, I believe in this medium, you know, as a very potent means of really having meaningful conversations. And I love it to death. But if you were to start a new company today to disrupt this podcasting platform or perfect it or, you know, solve problems that you see as somebody who's a fan and a consumer of podcasts? Do you have a sense of what that would look like? Yeah, I mean, I would first focus on starting with the problem of how do we provide economic incentive? That to me is like the biggest unlock. And I think right now we only have tools of attention and advertising. And

I think some of the contribution models are just in their infancy. And, you know, things like Patreon and what Sam is doing in terms of his own explorations. And we have some, you know, varying experiments and decentralization, but I would go after that problem first. And I would pair it deeply with the podcasting platform. I would figure out the economic incentive first and foremost and that they'd be on the same plane. And I would look specifically to cryptocurrency. I think there's a lot, certainly in the ability to transact,

but I think this concept of what an ICO, an initial coin offering, at least points to, it doesn't offer today, but at least points to, someone could buy equity in your success. Buy equity and the more reach you have, they actually have economic incentive. Because what's interesting about that is it aligns incentives.

Your listeners incentives are aligned with your incentives and that you want to have engaging rich conversations that people find valuable and valuable enough that they're sharing your rating, your podcast or whatnot. And an ICO at least points to a path towards aligning those incentives. And to me, that's the unlock is like, how do we get alignment of incentive between distribution of the podcast and the economic incentives that allow it to grow and to thrive or just to maintain. Some people don't want to grow their presence, but I want to spend 50% of my time on this. And in order to do that, I need to do 50% less of another thing that I make money for to provide for my family.

So that's what it all comes down to. So that's number one, is attack the problem of economic incentives and solve it in such a way that it is on the same surface as a distribution platform. And the second I would look at is, how do we look deeper into indexing what's in a podcast? Our search tools today are so weak. We can't search voice. Exactly, but we can.

We can, right, but no one's doing it. No one's built it. The things I think are exciting, we've had so many keywords in this conversation, from meditation to vipassana to aura. If I could type or speak that word and find all the conversations about Aura. Or I could just pull up the 30-second clip

of you talking about this and it would live somewhere on the internet and be cataloged. Exactly, but also cross-referencing with all the other conversations around Aura. So to go deep in the media, to allow that to be queried, and then once you have that, then you can do some cool things like,

how do you expand your reach? As you look at the world, the biggest way to expand your reach is translation. So automatically translating, no matter what language you speak, I can hear what I need to hear no matter what language they speak. And technology can solve this today, but no one's put it together in one platform. So economic consensus mirrored with distribution and then going deeper into the

content and allowing more accessibility through translation are kind of the through translation are kind of the trio of things I would look at to come together if I were to create one today. Odeo 2.0. We gave up too early. Well, yeah, it was ahead of its time. But to be fair, it just wasn't where your interest lied at the time either.

That is also true. Our interest lied with one-button push publishing, but we were all afraid to talk. Like with our voices, we were comfortable behind the keyboard at that time, but we weren't podcasters. We weren't like you. We didn't enjoy the sound.

Not that you enjoy the sound of your own voice, but it was also early. It was too early. Thank you. Thank you so early. It was too early. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was great. We didn't even talk about Square or Bitcoin really or crypto or anything like that.

So maybe I can talk you into doing another round to focus on that. We'll come back after a significant launch. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Super fascinating. I said that that was the last question, but I have one more.

I've now had, I had Biz on the podcast. Now I've had you. I've been doing this podcast for six years. I've written three books. Am I going to get that blue check ever? I'm still not verified. I don't know what I got to do. Yeah, we're in such a weird state

with our verification program. I don't care, but I just think it's funny. Yeah, we're in such a weird state with our verification program. I don't care, but I just think it's funny. Yeah. No, no, no. Let's see what we can do. But we need to move that whole program away from this blue badge and more towards credibility around the topic. Yeah, well, the idea originally was that it was legitimizing that somebody actually was

who they say they are and that applies to journalists and professional athletes so that people aren't out there mimicking them. But then it got co-opted into this status thing. Yeah, and it's also just too coarse grain. It's at the account level. So what we want to do ultimately is how do we establish credibility within a topic space and authority domain expertise within a topic space? I'm pretty

credible in my topic space. I know you are. I know you are. And like right now we just don't have the framework to do that. So we'll, uh, no blue check for now. And then fortunately it has created this like two class distinction that I'm really upset by. And I think it's unfortunate, but here it is. All right, man. Till next time. Till next time. Thank you. Peace, brother.

Bye. All right. So that happened. I thought it was pretty cool. What do you guys think? It's not often that you get to sit down with somebody who has literally changed the world. So I just wanna, again, thank Jack for taking the time

to share his life with me and with all of you guys. And I just gotta say that that experience, this experience of spending basically the better part of an afternoon with Jack, it really did change me. I left his house that day thinking much more deeply about the level of intentionality that I bring to my day. You know, I'm a busy guy, like a lot of people. I'm prone to stress and anxiety and distraction. And I found the fact that somebody with such an insane level of responsibility has

so effectively and mindfully stripped away the non-essential distraction to prioritize deep thinking and self-care and to really feed his hunger to be constantly learning and involving. And I think that's impressive. It stayed with me. And I hope it left you considering the level of intentionality that you bring to your daily existence. Do me a favor, let Jack know what you thought of this conversation. He is at Jack on Twitter. That's the place to find him.

And please check out the links, the show notes, et cetera, on the episode page, all the show notes that we put together that we compile at richroll.com. If you're looking to dial up your nutrition and need some expert guidance, we've got a special limited time offer on our amazing Plant Power Meal Planner. $20 off an annual membership when you sign up at meals.richroll.com and use the code POWER20 at checkout.

There you will get thousands of customized plant-based recipes, unlimited grocery lists, grocery delivery in lots of metropolitan areas, and access to professional nutrition coaches seven days a week. And you get all of that for basically $1.50 a week, a cup of coffee. It's an amazing product. We're super proud of it. So check it out, meals.richroll.com, code POWER20 at checkout for $20 off. That offer expires on April 13th, so get on it. If you'd like to support our work here on the podcast, just tell your friends about the program, share your favorite episode in person or on social media, tag me, take a screen grab, share it on your favorite platform,

subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, YouTube, Google Podcasts, all those good places. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts and you can support us financially at patreon.richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo, audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, tons of behind-the-scenes stuff. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin, who normally video the show, but this one was not on video. Jessica Miranda for graphics, DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships

and theme music as always by Analemma. Thank you for the love people. See you back here in a couple of days with a really fun one, super fun conversation with musician Mike Posner. This guy is an absolute gem. I think you guys are gonna really dig it. So until then, be kind.

Peace. Plants. Positive tweets. Namaste. Thank you.