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

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  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 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 in person in order to have a conversation about it. And there's no other path towards evolution and making something better unless we can talk about it.

• 1:41Rich Roll?

  That's Jack Dorsey, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:56Rich Roll?

  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,

• 2:40Rich Roll?

  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 realize 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

• 3:25Rich Roll?

  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 Poole did on Joe's show. Instead, or rather, my intention for this conversation was simply to...

• 3:58Rich Roll?

  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've got a lot more I want to say about Jack and what's to come. But first.

• 4:46Rich Roll?

  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 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.

• 5:30Rich Roll?

  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. 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, 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.

• 6:15Rich Roll?

  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 is very intentionally and mindfully stripped excess materialism and distraction away from his life. Somebody who prioritizes solitude, contemplation, meditation.

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  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

• 7:36Rich Roll?

  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.

• 8:17Rich Roll?

  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.

• 8:38Rich Roll?

  Thank you for inviting me to your home.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Thanks for taking time on a Saturday.

• 8:42Rich Roll?

  Saturday afternoon, it's raining outside. We're sitting by a crackling fire.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  In a cloud.

• 8:48Rich Roll?

  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.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Sounds good.

• 9:03Rich Roll?

  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?

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 9:15Rich Roll?

  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?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started playing with meditation about 20 years ago. It wasn't that serious. And I think the most I, you know, I actually practiced within that timeframe was, you know, probably 20, 30 minutes. And 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

• 10:13Speaker 01

  retreat. And it was one of the 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 bed. And The, um, I mean, what it's, what it's done for me is, is really just a sense of clarity. Certainly, certainly one of focus, certainly one of recognizing when I'm reacting to something which has this, you know, momentum of not feeling necessarily in control.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  But as I did it, 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 you, I had this experience where I just felt like I was picking up where I, 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.

• 11:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's something I've been interested in doing for some time yet. I have yet to-

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Attend a retreat?

• 11:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, attending one of those retreats.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  They're scary.

• 11:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I know, I have plenty of friends who have done it. And from what I understand, it's, 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.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  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 the 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, you, you know, 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.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  The urge to move is almost unbearable. Right. 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, you know, for those next few days is really powerful. But day six was my worst day. The morning I was, you know, I look, I, you meditate with other people, but, you know, you're not allowed to talk, you're not allowed to read, to write, to do any physical exercise,

• 13:31Speaker 01

  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, I kind of looked around in the hall and everyone just looked like a Buddha. They all, they all looked like they were, they were already enlightened. They've got it figured out. And I'm like, I don't get this. Like, I, I'm not, 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.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  So the last meditation of the day at nine PM or eight thirty was, 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 four 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, 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 between, in the entire spectrum.

• 14:51Rich Roll?

  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.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 15:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's just 10 days of working from 4:00 in the morning until 9:30, 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, is the practice of it, not reaching any particular milestone or state. It's just that constant practice.

• 15:35Rich Roll?

  So you stepped it up this year, and you went to Myanmar

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:38Rich Roll?

  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, I, it was interesting, because I read it, and I felt like you were just sharing this experience that you had. It was, it was certainly an apolitical, you know, motivation behind that. But I guess when you're a jock, you have to be much more mindful about how you choose your words, and how you decide to describe these experiences.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, so after my first meditation in Texas, first I met, you know, this amazing teacher there. And

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  Is that Goenka?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  No, not Goenka. Goenka passed away, I think, five or maybe, maybe even 10 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, you know, was talking about Going, you know, doing, where should I do my next meditation? And we discussed Myanmar Burma because that is where Koinko 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 writings, but also the the physical practice.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  And after my first meditation in Texas, I had one tweet and I just, I didn't feel I was ready to to talk about it. I didn't feel it was appropriate because I don't, I didn't feel I had experienced enough to the depth that I I could communicate in a way that resonated with people. But after the, after the second retreat in Myanmar, I felt, I felt more ready. It was, it was completely different. I mean, it was, I went in a day before into, into Myanmar. I immediately went to the center and we started meditating and I left two days after.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  And I, 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 we serve on, on the, on the platforms is self-improvement, constant self-improvement. And 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, and discipline.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  So I went because of the, you know, the, the practices lineage within, within that, within that country and within that people and within the culture and. Wasn't really thinking enough about

• 18:57Speaker 01

  the surrounding circumstances of the of the country and the people and, you know, and I think the the misstep was not even addressing that, focusing entirely on meditation. That was my intent, which was to focus this entirely on my my experience. And if it resonates with people, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. And, um, uh, you know, I I think it it did resonate with folks, but there was there was an ask to just be more aware of the surroundings, shine more light on that. And and I I get all that. The benefit is I did have a lot of, um,

• 19:39Speaker 01

  social groups reach out to me immediately after, um, and folks come to me to at least converse about, you know, what is happening and what has changed. And, um, there are multiple atrocities within the country, not not just the one that, um, it's tend to be focused on.

• 20:02Rich Roll?

  The Rangana.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  So, um, I I've learned since, you know, a bunch of the dynamics and and, uh, and, you know, some other ways I I might be able to help. But, um, I'm still, I'm still in a, I'm still in a learning phase where, you know, just where can I actually apply myself and and and help and and drive more of the conversation within the within the country? So it touched me, um, and it it's something that I will, uh, will definitely be top of mind for for quite some time. But I think it was, but it was important for-

• 20:40Rich Roll?

  For our next time.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but 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, um, the the major media channels and and see the people. And one of the biggest surprises I had was every single monk I saw, every every nun I ran into had a had a cellphone. And, um, Facebook is the internet. It's similar to, you know, when, back in the day when AOL was the internet for many people. It wasn't about a web browser. It was, you know, the way in was AOL. And Facebook was that for, for nearly everyone in the, in the country. You didn't, you don't see URLs. You don't see website addresses.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:38Rich Roll?

  And what do you extract from that? The fact that, you know, Facebook is the internet there? Like, you know, what does that bode for the future? What does that mean?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Having, um, having grown up with the internet in St. Louis, Missouri. I was a hacker early on in my life, you know, 12, 13, 14. And St. Louis had this thriving hacker community. And it was, uh, you know, it had a lot of the punk ethos.

• 22:06Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  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, that are certainly dangerous to that. I, I'm definitely skeptical of centralized organizations, even my own, even Twitter and Square. You know, and I think the, the internet, more than anything else, has allowed us to remove so many barriers and boundaries that can tend to be artificial.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And, uh, and this promise of at least providing the framework and the infrastructure towards a understanding of a, of one humanity. Like, we, we have the technology to do this. And it started in 1979. And the ideals just get stronger and stronger and stronger. So. Starting with a more decentralized medium and, you know, the recent flow towards more centralization such as Google and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Square

• 23:31Speaker 01

  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, towards more internet ideals. But there's certainly a hard road to get there. But I, I would want to see a place like Myanmar to have more entry points than, than just Facebook,

• 24:15Speaker 01

  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, you know, the getting people on ramp into this global network and, 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.

• 24:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:56Rich Roll?

  I feel like this, you know, desire to hold yourself and your companies to, to account for this is sort of part and parcel of this, you know, for lack of a better phrase, like podcast tour that you've been on lately. You know, 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.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Not enough.

• 25:19Rich Roll?

  Not, I don't know, a lot. I mean, you did one yesterday, like a crypto one yesterday, I saw. And, you know, 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, to step out and share your perspective in a transparent way.

• 25:40Rich Roll?

  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, right now?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I have a, 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.

• 26:42Rich Roll?

  Why do you say that?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, I was, um, 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, 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.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  So I, I'm naturally at that predisposition towards being more quiet and being more in solitude. But that really pushed me into a very, very shy place where, you know, even conversations with my parents or brothers were somewhat limited. And eventually, I realized it in fifth or sixth grade. And I just said, like, 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, freaked me out. But that still, that still lingers. You know, I still am hyper aware of how I'm talking and.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  You know, just a little bit of uncomfort in my own skin and conversation. But I wanna, I think, I think my, the characteristics that have made me realize some of the milestones I want to hit in my life and some of the excess, 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, I felt, number one, that podcasting was a great way to do that. It's something I'm a huge consumer of. I, you know, my, my walks in the morning, it's what I listen to, it's, it's what I take

• 28:49Speaker 01

  the most joy in, in the morning. And I, I just get so much, so much out of them that I also wanted to understand the format much more directly. And then, second, we, we don't talk enough out in the open about what we're seeing, how we're thinking, why. And we do that in, you know, articles and, and the traditional press, but there's something about podcasting to me that just allows much, much more nuance and just some time to breathe.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  And, and I think that the thing I enjoy-

• 29:35Rich Roll?

  Well, certainly compared to Twitter.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. We'll, we'll talk about that, too.

• 29:38Rich Roll?

  I mean, the irony that, that, that you're gun shy about conversation when, you know, facilitating conversation is the core, you know, foundational goal of Twitter itself.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I don't know if it's the gun shy that I feel, I just, I, I know that-

• 29:57Speaker 01

  I know I want to master it and I want to, I want to get really great at it and I know I have a long way to go, not, not just in conversations like this, but also personally as well. If I could study one thing that also serves my company, given our, our, our role, then amazing. So I, you know, I, I, I think the, the thing I love most about podcasts, going back to my introvert-ness is conversations like this where you can actually hear the silence between thoughts and like just the, the amount of time that people take to, to think and there, there's just so much fidelity within that silence that I, I find intriguing

• 30:41Speaker 01

  and interesting and there's just a rhythm that I'm trying to understand and, and, and to master as well. So, so that's a big part of it. A, 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. A lot of folks have been asking me for quite some time and I, I pushed it off and just been kind of going down the queue and, and, and I'm also, you know, happy to meet a, a bunch of the folks that I, I listen to all the time. Like I'm, I'm going to be going on Ben Greenfield's pretty soon and I, I, I listen to every single one of his podcasts

• 31:23Speaker 01

  and I think I, I learned so much from him and I, so I'm excited personally just to, just to get into it with him. I have no idea what we'll talk about because he is so health, health-focused and-

• 31:36Rich Roll?

  It's gonna be, I would imagine it'd be really granular on like your day, you know, daily practices.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, which I'm also excited to talk about because I, I don't, I don't get to talk about that a lot with the exception of my friends and some of my coworkers who, who just think I'm the weirdest person in the world.

• 31:51Rich Roll?

  Well, we're gonna get into it a little bit, probably not to the extent that Ben will, but I think that, that- You know, 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, you know, in many ways.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, although 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?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  We're giving people guidelines in terms of what they should optimize for. And I think right now they're completely wrong. Like, you know, 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, you know, 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

• 34:03Speaker 01

  We didn't have this focus on this on this purpose of conversation. There was 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 like, 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 incentivize more contribution that is healthy to the network? 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.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  And it's one of the reasons 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 like, we've all had, 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 if we can, if we can feel that, I feel we can also quantify it enough that we can

• 35:27Speaker 01

  understand at scale what these things look like and what, what actions have the greatest potential to create more of them. And so, right now, we're just, you know, 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.

• 35:48Rich Roll?

  So what are the technological parameters by which you would adjudicate the health of a conversation?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  We started with, probably the best way to articulate this is the body metaphor. And, you know, we have all of 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.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  And, you know, 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'll 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.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  So, you can push that to the digital, and then it's, you know, 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?

• 38:05Rich Roll?

  As a way of judging how siloed a certain conversation is?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Conversation, so 99.999% 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?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  And these four, ideally, as they go higher, conversation is very healthy. So you want, you know, presence and attention. 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,

• 39:49Speaker 01

  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 flesh under your skin might get aggravated more.

• 40:09Rich Roll?

  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, you know, the hard part.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so, 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 defined the first four indicators and they're actually doing it not just for Twitter, but for talk radio, podcasting as well, to measure that, the percentage of conversations there. And as we build in understanding baseline of the measurement, then we can start deploying solutions and we can watch how it deviates from the baseline.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, you might, 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 elites 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 is the Brexit conversation. You know, the only tool that, and this kind of gets to the core fundamentals of the service,

• 42:31Speaker 01

  we only give you the ability to follow an account. So if you were a vote lever, you're probably following folks like Boris and Nigel 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.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  But if you were to do a little bit more work and you saw the vote leave, 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?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Does it increase shared attention? Or does it diminish those things?

• 44:02Rich Roll?

  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 gonna 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 @issueX,

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:18Rich Roll?

  and then your feed would be propagated with different perspectives on that issue, it would break the chains of this 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.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. I mean, I-

• 44:43Rich Roll?

  Because people are bringing in a lifetime of experience that has formed a certain perspective, and just because you're gonna pepper that feed with a smattering of different views doesn't mean that it's gonna change that person's worldview.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 44:56Rich Roll?

  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.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  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. This MIT cortical lab put out an infographic that showed a number of the journalists on the "left," quote-unquote, "left" end of the spectrum were not following folks on the right, whereas-

• 45:53Speaker 01

  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 in the spectrum were seeing everything.

• 46:13Rich Roll?

  And these are just journalists.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  These are journalists.

• 46:15Rich Roll?

  Right, and journalists by and large are going to be people that are more likely to follow a difference of opinion.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Typically, but in leading up to the US election,

• 46:26Speaker 01

  according to the graph, they were not.

• 46:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  And that, I think, you know, 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, you know, we've, we made a system that people have figured out how to game.

• 47:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  And we haven't had enough punitive actions, with the exception of this very binary decision of leave up or take down. And 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 same sense of like giving people the choice of drinking the water or the wine when they're sick. We don't do that.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  You know, we have this very, very blunt tool of leave up or remove.

• 48:10Rich Roll?

  At the same time, the acceleration with which 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.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Totally. In the technology world, the metaphor would be security. So 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

• 49:29Speaker 01

  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 you just take out that that one potential potential vector so

• 50:11Rich Roll?

  so on that rubric, how would you grade Twitter's performance on that?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Very pu- very poor because I think for the majority of our lifetime, you know, 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 our system right now is just not fair. You know, our our 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

• 50:53Rich Roll?

  It's entirely dependent upon reporting.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, we

• 50:56Rich Roll?

  Which is not scalable. It's impossible to monitor that.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Not scalable, but ultimately not fair. Why should the victim have that burden? And so we 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 systems 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

• 51:35Speaker 01

  asking people to remove tweets, temporary suspensions, all the way to the to to the worst option, which is, you know, a permanent suspension, which ultimately, you know, over time

• 51:53Speaker 01

  We shouldn't feel great about, like, 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 we're, right now, we're focused on, number one, like, how do we, 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.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  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 what it, those offline ramifications. So.

• 52:52Rich Roll?

  Meaning, things like doxing or where physical harm really becomes a palpable reality.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  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, of some physical jeopardy, safety jeopardy, and at least raises a potential. So could we, can we recognize when those, when those occurrences happen in real time

• 53:43Speaker 01

  and prevent it? And if we can do that, and it'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, you know, 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.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  And show the progress. We, you know, we, we talk a lot about this, but we, we, 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 to our success there, and then, and then broaden it out.

• 54:51Rich Roll?

  Right. So you've been going on all these podcasts and talking to a lot of people about these problems and, and, and how you're attempting to, you know, wrap your brain trust around how to solve them in the early stages of, of actually solving them. Do you think that, like, like, what's your sense of, of how this campaign is going? Like, is this working?

• 55:13Speaker 01

  I, I mean.

• 55:14Rich Roll?

  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, or the timeline is off or something. And so people are left feeling like they're not getting a direct response. Like, you, 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?

• 55:58Rich Roll?

  Or what's your sense of how this is going?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Well, first and foremost, we have to realize that we have to, we have to show, not tell. And my goal here is not to.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  My goal here is not to, first of all, I don't consider this a campaign. Yeah. I think it's important that we have these conversations in public and that we we show our thinking and we, I want to, I want to bring up ideas in public that people can push against and I want to hear the feedback and I want to, I want to get the reaction because it'll 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

• 56:55Speaker 01

  this one person or why haven't you taken action on, on these particular things? And it's, the answer is it, it's not one case. These, 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, 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.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  An example of this is, you know, we have, we have a bunch of gamers on, on Twitter. And every day we have an exchange between two people saying, hey, Rich, you know, I'm, 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, we have to actually look at the context of the relationship between the two people and how they're engaging. So.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:32Rich Roll?

  You have to contextualize it against the history of past behavior.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  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 banned 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

• 59:18Speaker 01

  behavior, conduct, and activity that is against our terms of service that we take action on. And where we have failed, people, is explaining the reasons why we take action.

• 59:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's as if it takes place in a black box.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and 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.

• 59:59Rich Roll?

  But then the reaction to the consumer is that it looks haphazard and...

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks random. It looks random and...

• 1:00:07Rich Roll?

  Right, and the attention is all on these specific case studies, like whether it's Alex Jones or Jacob Wall or, you know, these specific individuals that get a lot of press and attention for their, you know, behavior on your platform. I'm curious as to like how...

• 1:00:28Rich Roll?

  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, 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, your attention and your discretion as to what to do.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  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, 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, if I have to make a decision, I see it as an organizational failure. You know, it's, it's something that for whatever reason, and it's likely my fault. You know, I, I haven't set up the right organizational structure. I don't have a team dynamic that can work through debate or disagreement.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  I, 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, if I have to make a decision, I, I think there is something wrong with the organization and, and it's, 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, 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,

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  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 oftentimes, I ask, well, why did we take this action? What evidence do we have to take the action?

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  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, you know, we only see what's reported. So sometimes 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.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  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...

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Even though 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 decisions they make. Uh huh. They don't. That's, that's highly problematic. Extremely scary, especially, you know, you're, you're wearing an Oura ring, I'm wearing an Oura ring. I know. You know, people wear Apple watches and the Apple watch every now and then will tell you when to stand. You know, if, if we don't, 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.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  We need to invest in removing bias from machine learning models and, and artificial intelligence, which, which we are doing, but these are, these are very, very early things. But even, you know, even as we move more of these enforcement actions and policies to, to algorithms, people need to be able to see why the actions taken are, are taken. And if they can't see it, they won't trust it. So we, you know, we have a few operating principles as a company. One, we believe, you know, our purpose serves the public conversation. Our desire is to promote health in that public conversation.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Two, we want to earn trust and earning trust comes through a variety of, 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, did the very same thing. So, you know.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  We're just putting these principles in place. We're just building these models. We're investing in research areas like explainability and bias in ML. But it is going to take some time and that's not satisfying. And 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.

• 1:07:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  I want to show the map and like where we've come from and where we're trying to get to. And 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.

• 1:07:36Rich Roll?

  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 have 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 this new thing and this is because of this." And it would have given you a little bit of insulation, I think, against the people that feel like you're, you know, that there's a lot of talk.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  The challenge with that, I agree with you. I mean, that would feel good, but the challenge with that is like there's not going to be any one feature that like makes one significant. This is going to be a constant iteration.

• 1:08:29Rich Roll?

  Unless you finally allow people to edit their tweets. We're not going to get into all of that.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  That might help some things. That might help some things. But it's, if we put too much weight on any one particular feature, I think it's doomed to fail. Like a lot of this work has to do with constantly iterating our models, you know, 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 we, on that model, we were 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.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  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 their replies.

• 1:09:28Rich Roll?

  Mute, yeah. Mute replies or...

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Mute, I think is a...

• 1:09:31Rich Roll?

  Or just turn off any reaction to a tweet. Like the way that you can turn comments off on YouTube.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  And we're experimenting with all those. But all of them have another side, right? You know, recently, we tweeted about we are experimenting with people enabling, giving, having more control over their replies. So one of the things we're testing is like 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.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  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 and 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. Like, you know, I'm sure you've probably...

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  At least seen or heard about everything that was going on in the Fire 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 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.

• 1:11:36Rich Roll?

  And if your goal is to overcome tribalism and the siloing of information, that contravenes that.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  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 speaking truth to power.

• 1:12:18Rich Roll?

  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, 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 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 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.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  I'm not a graduate at all.

• 1:13:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right. Like, it's so improbable, and in certain respects, beautiful, that this creation came out of this special group of people.

• 1:13:16Rich Roll?

  Who at the time intended it to be a means for people to connect, right? To 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, you know, right in the middle of all of this, having to make these kinds of decisions that we're discussing today

• 1:13:54Rich Roll?

  and try to navigate this, you know, behemoth in the right direction. What is that like?

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  I mean, it, one, it feels amazing. I mean, I think my co-founder, I've said it, said it perfectly recently. You know, he said, you know, we often have, 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 just have to pay attention to how much had to go exactly right for this to happen. And, you know, we're all, we're all pretty quirky and fairly weird. And, you know, and I think the best aspect of Twitter is that it's, it's a little bit, it's a little bit weird.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  It's, it's a weird little thing. And, you know, we, we built this because we wanted to use it. And that was the intention. We, we wanted to use this technology in this way. And it was just, you know, I, I wanted to be able to go off anywhere and, 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, you know, I think.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  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, we had this amazing fortune in that we were able to build something that felt very foundational, but was ultimately a, um, a discovery. I mean, we, we discovered something essential, something very, very low level. And because it was so low level, because it was so essential, because it was so, you

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  know, this core foundational layer, uh, people built social norms on top of it. And the first such norm was using the at symbol, um, to refer to another person, which, you know, I, I took my laptop one day and I went to Stax in Hayes Valley, which is a, a brunch place and took four hours over, over waffle and some coffee and, um, anytime I saw an at symbol with a name, I would link them. And then we turned that into a, a replies slash mentions page. And suddenly conversation was born on the platform. We saw, you know, 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.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Same thing happened with the hashtag. Chris Messina started putting this, uh, you know, hash, um, slash, you know, uh, pound sign next to a word to tag, um, by keyword and topic, what his tweets were about. And, um, we found a search engine called Semise. We acquired them because they were, uh, recognizing all of these hashtags and, uh, linking them to here's all the tweets that match that hashtag. And suddenly you had not, not conversation between two people or multiple people, but you had conversation around a topic. And, uh, and that just opened another aperture.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  And then, you know, Tim O'Reilly, you know, 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 what, see this one tweet from who I'm following. So I'm gonna rebroadcast it, which he called a retweet.

• 1:17:46Rich Roll?

  Yes, so suddenly you started seeing the RT.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  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. You know, 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

• 1:18:31Rich Roll?

  Right, this living, breathing organism, right? That, you know, could also, you know, become a virus.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. It could be, at least, at least

• 1:18:42Rich Roll?

  Or have, yeah, have a pathogen.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least, at least the pathways and the vectors that it provides can carry both positive and, and negative attributes. And, you know, I was, I was watching SpaceX Dragon launch yesterday, last night. And, I, you know, certainly taken aback by the accomplishment, but also taken aback that like we can be in this like big virtual conversation together. I don't know any of these people, but one of the screenshots I took was, you know, you know, the, the rocket, it was in the T minus 10 and

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  I was watching through Twitter and I just started seeing all these tweets and Periscope comments saying, you know, congrats or, you know, good luck from Mexico, good luck from India, good luck from Japan. And I'm like, wow, I just couldn't even imagine this in the past, like have one single plane where anyone around the world can just share how they're thinking and wish well upon one another. But the flip of that is you, you know, like any tool, you can figure it out in a way such that you can use the vectors

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:00Rich Roll?

  On this idea of doing it in public, you know, 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, 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, every time you tweet something, at least with respect to what's going on at Twitter, that you're going to get, like, there's going to be a certain percentage of people that are going to want to say not nice things. Like, how do you insulate yourself? Like, how do you see that and take it to heart, but also protect your own, you know, emotional well-being?

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and 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 Well-being and space and mindset, the less effective I am in fixing our issues. So I approach it, number one, from that mindset of like,

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  I wanna, I wanna 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 can 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 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 hateful.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  And it comes out as, you know, something that would otherwise set me off. But even that expression, even them doing that, might disarm a little bit. I think, you know, with the rest of online, there's, there's very little consequence to doing something like that. And it's easy to be behind a keyboard and, and say things that, you know, 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

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  or to guide it to a person who wasn't open to accepting it. And, and that's where the mechanics of the network fail today. Like, there's just so many open doors that people can take advantage of, like replies, like trends, like search.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  And You know, 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, then you're just gonna give up. Why? This isn't useful to me. And ultimately, you know, 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

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  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, you know, what is impacting someone's ability to freely express themselves. And then third, realize that, you know, the conversation to have is around attention and amplification and recommendation.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  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, you know, a scarce resource and something that our business is built off of.

• 1:25:46Rich Roll?

  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. I wrote a book called Deep Work and he's got a new book coming out called Digital Minimalism.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  That's all about, you know, 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, 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?

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think this goes back to the incentive conversation. Like, we're incentivizing a lot more kind of social status than we are utility. And I think there is deep, deep utility within Twitter. You know, it's the fastest way and most influential way to get your thoughts to the world. There's nothing faster. I think it also-

• 1:27:21Rich Roll?

  Also to find out what's going on immediately in real time.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to, you know, it's the fastest way to tap into a global consciousness. Like, 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, you know, we need to make sure that we're aligning the incentives of the network towards that. Rather than, you know, 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, you know, like, an event just unfolds, you quickly fire something off. It's outrageous as hell, which really spreads it throughout the network.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  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, you know, I think we need to make sure, at least in the conversation utility aspect, that we're incentivizing, you know, 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, like, you know, I started some with this year and like Bill Simmons and maybe I was really terrible and maybe, you know, as people progress through the year with me, maybe they see, you know, my conversational

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  game gets much stronger and much more authentic and much more real and more open, that 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.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  So, you know, 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 novelty right now. I don't, 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.

• 1:30:03Rich Roll?

  You've shared it though. You've shared your screen time on Twitter before.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, to generate a conversation about it, but like it hasn't. There's no, again, it goes back to incentives. There's no incentive for me to change right now. Like, 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.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Go tell someone that you love them. Better to do it in person." And, one, I love that we do stuff like that because, you know, I don't want to be afraid of telling people to get off the thing.

• 1:31:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Get off it. And like-

• 1:31:03Rich Roll?

  Kara Swisher's rolling her eyes right now.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  I know, and she will. That's her prerogative. But, like, I think, you know, if you look at the replies to that tweet, it's amazing. And if, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, the world we want to get to

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  is, and I've said this on another podcast, is I want, I want people to walk away from Twitter, 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...

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  Like they don't know what the next step is or what the thing, why the thing's even valuable. So if we can direct a lot of our efforts towards like, you know, I put down the phone and I feel like I learned something and, you know, I wanna, I wanna build on it in this way and then share back the progress, then we've, we've done the right thing. And I, I know that feels far away from what people perceive of Twitter today, but it's there and it does happen in small amounts. Like it, it's really a function of like what Twitter you follow. You, you follow

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  health Twitter, you learn a ton of stuff. You, you, you know, Rhonda Patrick, Find 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, to the other end of it. I learned so much from those conversations on the service.

• 1:33:14Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Rich Roll?

  And I would just say, you know, sort of, you know, respecting the challenges of foot and, and the problems that you're facing, that on a personal level, you know, Twitter's been an unbelievable resource for me. I, 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, even before that, like it's been a tremendous value add in my personal experience. And I would take that, you know, with everything

• 1:34:06Rich Roll?

  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 first. I want to see what's going on right now.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that was a that was a big shift when I came back to the company almost four years ago and that like I think we were we had a mindset too much of chasing after the people that we don't have, like trying to increase the pie, the size of the pie as quickly as possible versus focusing on the people we do have. You know, 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

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  the, you know, just the impressions that 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 opportunity to love us more and such that they want to, they want to talk about the value they're getting out of it. And back to your point, you know, it's a it's a cost benefit analysis. Like, you know, there's certainly costs to Twitter. And we're seeing, you know, more and more of that, like people being fired over tweets they tweeted 10 years ago and not being able to clarify what they meant. And, you know, we also see a lot of benefit in people like you who have said that they've built their

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  networks, their careers, their understanding, their practice by engaging in these communities. We, you know, we have a woman who was in the Westboro Baptist Church, who was using Twitter every single day to spread hate against the LGBTQ A community. And, you know, four or five very patient folks on Twitter who are engaging her every day, 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.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  And she's working on getting the rest of her family out of it. She was born into that church. So.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, we can't amplify that. Like, we, we, 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, you know, if, if they don't, you know, they should, they should be able to have the conversation they want to have and be the host that they want to be.

• 1:37:11Rich Roll?

  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 going to 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, you know, we're in cancel culture right now, holding people, you know, hands to the fire for, for things that they did, you know, quite some time ago. And I see that only becoming more problematic in

• 1:37:56Rich Roll?

  the short run until we figure out as a culture how we're going to manage this kind of thing.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  You've, you've talked about, you know, Carol's concept of growth mindset on, 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, we're seeing this in the prison systems in the United States. We're seeing this in like the conversation around...

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  And fractions around like, you know, cannabis, 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, 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. 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.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  If, if we, if we cancel everyone out, there, 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 the doubt, no one's going to give you the benefit of the doubt either. And I, I, I think that experience will be had by a lot of people. Certainly all the younger folks and, and more and more of an, of an older generation. And as long as we have that open dialogue and show that's okay, we're good. But, you know, as Twitter, we could also do some things like we're, we're, you know, we're, we're thinking about this feature to allow people to go back and clarify tweets. And what that might look like is you might've said, you might've tweeted something five

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  years ago about diet and someone might unearth it and say, you know, you know, Rich, you believe this and before this you believe, you believe this. And suddenly today, that older tweet gets all this traction and you can retweet it. And, and then suddenly you might be known as the person that is completely inconsistent or 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 quote, a retweet with comment. And by doing so, by clarifying it, you're not allowing the original tweet to be retweeted without the clarification.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  So anytime someone retweets that original tweet, clarification comes with it. So at least people have more context. And, and things like that might make an impact. They may not at all, but we should test it.

• 1:41:05Rich Roll?

  It's also like a lot of work, right? Like, I'm not, I'm not gonna go back to 2008 and read all my tweets and whatever I said, you know, to try to figure out what needs clarification.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  In reaction to someone like bringing something in the past up, you can immediately go to that tweet, clarify it, and then, and then the record is straight. At least in your experience.

• 1:41:24Rich Roll?

  So walk me through a day in the life. What's it look like for you? I know you, two days a week, you're here at the house, right?

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been, I've been working from home two days a week, which I, you know, is a time for me to, to read, to write, to consider, and this gives me a lot of the free time that I need to, to think. The, the other days are just back-to-back, back meetings and, and my life is in little, little boxes in Google Calendar. But every day I, I wake up usually between 5:30 and 6:30 and I immediately start with a cold shower. That, that is my, that is my caf, my immediate caffeine in the morning, and it's kind of

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  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-

• 1:42:28Rich Roll?

  Right away, before coffee, before anything?

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  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, I meditate for an hour and I do a Vipassana-based practice and-

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  And after that, um, I get ready, uh, and I usually, um, turn, you know, turn to my phone at that point to see if there's any emergencies. I, I keep my phone either in my kitchen or my closet, not next to my bed. I, you know, I turn off all the notifications notifications during the night and I don't really check it until about, um, you know, seven to seven thirty. And when I'm walking into work, um, I leave the house around seven thirty. Um, and my, my office is about five miles away and takes me now about an hour fifteen minutes, an hour twenty minutes to, to walk.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  And no matter, um, unless it's heavy rain, I, I do it, uh, you know, and anytime I'm going into the office, I, I walk and sometimes it's really cold here and, you know, the, the cold has been is, uh, thirty-nine. Um, but it gets my blood going, it gets my mind going and, um, I listen to podcasts, I listen to, uh, audiobooks, I, sometimes I just think, sometimes I take phone calls. Um, I walk super fast. If you ever see me on the street, I look ridiculous because I'm just like, you know, almost, almost jogging, but, um,

• 1:44:02Rich Roll?

  Same, same route every day?

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  Same, uh, same route every day. Um, sometimes I, I deviate, but it, it adds time. So I, I, I feel like I've found the optimal path to, to save, to, to save time and I, I kind of, I've, 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 of the, the wetness. And I, I wear these running sandals because they're the fastest. Um, they, they enable me to move the fastest. They're faster than sneakers.

• 1:44:37Rich Roll?

  What kind of running?

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  They're called Earth Runners, um, earthrunners.com. They, they're made up in Sonoma, I think. They may be in San Francisco now, but they're, um, Super simple, like, you know, if any of you or you have read Born to Run, you know, all the running sandals.

• 1:44:52Rich Roll?

  They're like five rum, five finger type shoes.

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  Well, they're pure sandals, so like, they don't have any of the articulated toes or whatnot. So it's, you know, it's open.

• 1:45:01Rich Roll?

  Like the Tara Hamara sandals.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  Yes, the Tara Hamara sandals. And so I usually wear those every day, which have been called out as well in press. Like, 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? Like, what, can't be human here? So we, 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, like, you know, I wear these black jeans and this sweater that keeps me warm. And, you know, I just wake up, put these on and go. And then I.

• 1:45:44Rich Roll?

  Breakfast?

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  I don't eat breakfast. I have one meal a day.

• 1:45:48Rich Roll?

  intermittent fasting.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  So I go, I have.

• 1:45:52Rich Roll?

  And that's every day?

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  Every day, 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 2:00 PM. And then I walk across the street to Square. I usually stay until about 6:00 or 7:00. I take a Lyft home. I don't walk back home. I try to eat dinner at 6:30, around 6:30 or 7:00, not too late. I go into the infrared sauna, which I really love.

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  I do a workout. I do this seven-minute workout through an app. Sometimes I do multiple circuits of that. And then, uh, and then I eat and then I, um, I kind of wind down at nine thirty. Try to be in bed at least by ten and then go to sleep. I try to get nine hours of, of sleep. That's been hugely impactful, um, or a ring to, to keep me accountable to it. But, um, so I, I learned the one meal a day thing from, from Wim Hof, you know, two years ago. And I, I love learning through experimentation and I love experimenting on myself. And I've always been this way. I was, I was vegan for two years. It was, it's very hard to be vegan in St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  At least when I was, I was, I was there.

• 1:47:22Rich Roll?

  Now you're in San Francisco.

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  I know, I know, I know. I, I.

• 1:47:26Rich Roll?

  We'll reboot this.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  I, I, so I love experimenting. I've always experimented with my diet. I've always experimented with, um, health practices. Some, some have been really informative to me and very healthy. Some have not. Um, but the, uh, the one meal a day thing, I, I, I just thought was a really interesting challenge. And I, I just, I heard it on the podcast, I think it was with him and Tim Harris. And I just like, I want to try that. And, uh, I, 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 twenty-two hours. I, I have, you know, I have dinner within two hours and I have a really, really big dinner.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  And, um, and, uh, recently, over the past few months, I've been, uh, breaking that by, by having, um, 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, um, and then I won't.

• 1:48:32Rich Roll?

  That's your big cheat.

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  That's it. That's a cheat and I won't, um, what I've been doing recently is I won't eat until Saturday dinner. Um, so, uh, and it's extended fast because I've been playing with even more extended, just pure water fast. That the longest I've done is three days. And it is, it is trippy. Like, the, the amount of focus I have on day three is like crazy. I, I was not expecting that. And I would eventually like to go beyond that just to see what, see what happens. But I, I have to package it into these weekends because I, I don't trust myself enough to not balance it with my, my day to day work and everything going on at the office and whatnot.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  So, um, yeah, when, when I learn something on a, a podcast like, like yours or, um, you know, something that like, you know, David Goggins is doing and, uh, I, I try it. I try it for like a month and if I like it, I stick with it. And, uh, um, I, I, I just wanna constantly experiment and that's, that's why I dropped out of school. That's why I, cause I, I was learning so much more by experimenting myself and I, I, I don't know any other way to learn, uh, by, except by tinkering and playing and, and trying new things and realizing, eh, early on, eh, it was just a little bit too haphazard.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  Now I like really, if I'm gonna try something, I'm gonna dedicate months to it and like a common practice. And I have a lot of patience as a characteristic and I have a lot of discipline and like, I can really stick to something I, I say I'm going to do. So, um, that, that is a practice. I also, uh, been journaling since I was, I was very young.

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  Mostly, you know, through, through my phone, but before that I was written journals and sometimes online.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  That's where a lot of the ideas from Twitter came from was live journal. And just then journaling in public, which was this like scary, scary idea to, to be like, what's the edge of honesty that you wanna be open about, um, to other people that you don't know, um, and who can follow you. And I, you know, I experiment with that every day at Twitter as well. And like some of that was me sharing my meditation in Myanmar is like. Look, I'm aware of what this might be perceived, independent of like 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.

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Of course, like, he got bitten up by mosquitoes, is he gonna show that off? Like, it's so Silicon Valley episode. And like, I get that. That's the thing that kind of like I am cognizant of. Like, I'm just playing into this stereotype, but I don't care. I get value out of it. And I know I'm gonna get some of that back, and I know I'm gonna get other things back. And 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 get so much of people being open and sharing.

• 1:51:52Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:52:04Rich Roll?

  Well, I think, look, there's certain aspects of that that are, you know, 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, you know, 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."

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  And I have the Aura screenshots to prove it.

• 1:52:44Rich Roll?

  Sharing those or whatever. Living, you know, a relative, I mean, you showed me around your house, like, it's very, there's a minimalism aspect to it. Like, you live, you know, for, you know, compared to the way that you could live, you're living a relatively, you know, simple, stripped-down existence.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I-

• 1:53:04Rich Roll?

  And how does that inform like your thinking and your equanimity? And how you, you know, the creative, you know, impetus that you bring to business?

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  The philosophy that I've always, that has always resonated most with me inherently and naturally and feels like I was, I was born with was, is this essentialism. Like, what is absolutely essential in my life? And even if you ask my parents, you know, when we moved into a new house and my, you know, 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, I would be the one person in my family to do so. But, you know, 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.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  And I, I, I appreciate, 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, I don't need any of these objects. I don't need any of these technologies. I think, 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, you know, I think it represents the global consciousness. I think it's the closest thing we have to tapping into a, a global consciousness. And to be able to not just see what people are saying, but what they actually think,

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  the sentiment behind it. And I inherently believe that we have that power internally. And I, I believe that Twitter's, one of Twitter's roles is to remind us of the potential. And, you know, if meditation can get me to a point where I can, where I can experience that and feel it, which, you know, which, which it has in some way. It's gotten me more in tune to my instinct and to my, into my gut and like my feelings. And I prove, I, I mark those moments of instinct and I, I mark them with enough weight, mental clarity and weight, whether it be through journaling or just considering it deeply,

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  that when the event does happen that I had an instinct about, I can tie it back.

• 1:55:24Rich Roll?

  Right. Oh, that's cool.

• 1:55:25Speaker 01

  And that's, and that has, that has shown me like... 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'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

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  reflection is what becomes the interesting part, and it's reflection back on you and your consciousness and your awareness. Anything that builds self-awareness, any practice, any tool, any object, is something that I want to invest in. And so I keep my life fairly sparse, because I think it'll be distracting otherwise.

• 1:56:33Rich Roll?

  Do you canonize this in any specific spiritual perspective that guides your life?

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  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. Tapping into the consciousness, the larger organism, whether it be the planet, the universe,

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  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 like the flow and that's where I feel most alive is when I 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

• 1:58:05Speaker 01

  ocean where you see whales 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. I have dinner with them ideally once a week and just laugh and have some wine

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  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 that is my my spiritual connection at the moment. It's just like feeling that that connection in as tangible a way as possible. And you know, you mentioned, you know, my my path of like, you know, 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 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.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  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 was so, um, 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 Carpo 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. And, um, but all these variations, these side pass, these forks in the road, have always

• 2:00:07Speaker 01

  brought me back to building technology, um, because, um, and added depth and enriched building that technology, because I, it's just where I feel my creativity most.

• 2:00:22Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  I think he's trying to get the traffic to Mars.

• 2:00:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, he's going underground, too.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 2:00:40Rich Roll?

  You know? I can't help but think that there's this weird meta paralel between like your own personal, uh, path towards broadening your consciousness and, you know, raising your awareness and, and growing as a, 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.

• 2:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, yeah, I, I think, um, in that sense, like, you know, back to our, our conversation around meditation, it's, the, 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

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  Humanity 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 need to be able to acknowledge those things. We need to be able to acknowledge them first in order to have a conversation about it. And there's no other path towards evolution and making something better unless we can talk about it. And, yeah, so it's all recursive. It's all recursive. And the more I realize how recursive this world is, I think the better our answers

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  get. But at the same time, it's easy to go down to a very, very abstract path. And I get that. And I, you know, 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. Yeah. You know, this nonviolent communication, this concept, have you heard of it? It's just, you know, 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

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  towards solutions in our speech versus presenting more of needs and feelings. And, you know, 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.

• 2:03:35Speaker 01

  The book is Nonviolent Communication. There's a good audiobook read by the author called Speaking Peace, which is sometimes corny at times because he picks up the guitar and sings, but it's a... the substance and the framework and the system and the science behind it is real. There's a lot of gratitude.

• 2:03:53Rich Roll?

  So it's nonviolent in terms of the person that you're communicating with, but also with respect to the self?

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  It's mainly yourself. It's mainly yourself. Saying the word, you know, "we should."

• 2:04:04Rich Roll?

  Is inherently violent because it's holding you to a standard that you feel you can't meet or...

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  You can't learn from. You can't... there's no path towards learning when you set this immediate expectation. But... and that's just one example of the framework. So it's a... that has been fairly enlightening. Just... I love looking at how we use language and, you know, one of the things that I've been, over years, been trying to convince both my companies around is like, we have this word in technology called "users." And way back when, when Howard Schultz was on the squareboard, the CEO of Starbucks, he pulled me aside one day. He's like, "Why do you call your customers users?" I'm like, "Good

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  question. I don't know where it came from, but we've always called them that." And then I started researching it and, you know, it was coined back in the early 80s when... 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 were 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

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  and we can't trust what they do. So it became this term losers, L-U-S-E-R-S. And then when models like Google came to be, they know, you know, 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, you know, the value of something like Google and something like Twitter is people coming to pay them with their attention.

• 2:05:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  And that there's no, you know, monetary exchange, as you would assume with customers. But there is a 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, you know, 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.

• 2:06:42Rich Roll?

  I look at it through this different lens as somebody who's in recovery. Recovery, like a user is somebody who's an addict, right?

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  Well, that's another thing is it's a very, it has negative connotations to the word. So, and it breeds addiction as well. So like, we're, you know, 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, it at least creates more potential for empathy. You know, not going to do it alone, but, and I'm trying to get Twitter more and more there as well.

• 2:07:21Rich Roll?

  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, what does it look like?

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  I think number one, that we become known as...

• 2:07:43Speaker 01

  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, Twenty-One Lessons for the Twenty-First 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. Right? So, I believe you need platforms like Twitter to host that conversation, to arrange the

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:08:48Speaker 01

  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. You know, it's not, 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. And you should, you should, if you don't know how to get into a conversation in that

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  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 like I'm trying to learn right now. Like we are ultimate, as a company, we're ultimate students of conversation and like we're, 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, back to the stereotypical Silicon Valley, but like, 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

• 2:10:17Speaker 01

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

• 2:11:02Speaker 01

  that like my, 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, I could have a conversation with literally anyone in the, in the world instantly. He's growing up to a world that has a, you know, growing potential for a global currency like Bitcoin and native currency to the internet. It's not controlled by any central bank or nation state. And, you know, 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

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  only known this, what do you do with it? Like, what's the next step on this? And it's so exciting.

• 2:11:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's exciting. There is an idealism that, that, that is, you know,

• 2:11:55Rich Roll?

  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. These are pressing matters that need redress in the short run.

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  Let's be eyes wide open about it. Let's see it truly. And it is, 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.

• 2:12:31Rich Roll?

  Last question, self-serving question. Because the genesis of Twitter came out of Odeo, which was initially intended to be this podcasting platform, right?

• 2:12:43Speaker 01

  Come full circle.

• 2:12:44Rich Roll?

  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, I believe in this medium 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 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?

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would first focus on starting with the problem of how do we provide economic incentive? That, to me, is 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 varying experiments in 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

• 2:14:07Speaker 01

  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 like someone could buy equity in your success, you know, buy equity and the more reach you have, they actually have economic incentive. And they then, because what's interesting about that is it aligns incentives.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  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 you or rating your podcast or whatnot. And ICO at least points to a path towards aligning those incentives. And to me, like, that's the unlock is like, how do we get alignment of incentive between distribution of the podcast and the economic incentives that 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, and you do 50% less of another thing that I make money for to, you know,

• 2:15:30Speaker 01

  provide for my family. So that's what it all comes down to. So that's number one, is that, you know, attack the problem of economic incentives and solve it in such a way that is on the same surface as a distribution platform. And the second I would look at is how do we go, how do we look deeper into indexing what's in a podcast? Our search tools today are so weak, so weak. I mean, like I

• 2:15:57Rich Roll?

  We can't search voice.

• 2:15:58Speaker 01

  Exactly, but we can, but no one's, no one's built, no one's built it. And the things I think are exciting, like we've had so many keywords in this conversation, right? Like from, you know, from meditation to Vipassana to Aura. And if I could type or speak that word and find all the conversations about

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  Or a

• 2:16:23Rich Roll?

  Or could just pull up the 30 second clip of you talking about this and it would live somewhere on the internet and be a catalog.

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  Exactly, but also cross referencing with all the other conversations around Aura. Or 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? You know, as you look at the world, the biggest way to expand your reach is translation.

• 2:16:52Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:16:52Speaker 01

  So automatically translating, no matter what language you speak, I can hear what I need to hear, no matter what language they speak. And there's a technology can solve this today, but no one's put it together in one platform. So economic incentives mirrored with distribution and then going deeper into the into the content and allowing more accessibility through translation are kind of the the trio of things I would look at to come together if I were to create one today.

• 2:17:24Rich Roll?

  Odeo 2.0.

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  We gave up too early. We gave up too early.

• 2:17:29Rich Roll?

  Well, yeah, it was a little, it was ahead of its time, but to be fair, it just wasn't where your interest lied at the time either.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  That is also true. Our interest lied with like, you know, one button push publishing.

• 2:17:40Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  Um, but we were all afraid to talk in public. Like with our voices, we were comfortable behind the keyboard at that time, but we were, 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 early.

• 2:17:57Rich Roll?

  Too early. Um, thank you.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. This was awesome.

• 2:18:01Rich Roll?

  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 this. Doing another round to focus on that.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  We'll come back after a significant launch there.

• 2:18:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Super fascinating. Um, 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 gotta do.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, we're in such a weird state with our verification program.

• 2:18:39Rich Roll?

  I don't care, but I just think it's funny.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, no, let's see what we can do, but we need to move that whole program away from like this blue badge and more towards credibility around the topic.

• 2:18:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, the idea originally was that it was legitimizing that somebody, you know, 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 became, it got co-opted into this status thing.

• 2:19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's, it's also just too coarse-grained. It's at the account level. And so what we'll want to do ultimately is like, you know, how do we establish credibility within a topic space and authority, domain expertise within the topic space?

• 2:19:24Rich Roll?

  I'm pretty credible in my topics.

• 2:19:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:19:30Rich Roll?

  No blue check for now.

• 2:19:31Speaker 01

  And unfortunately, it has created this like, this two-class distinction that I'm really upset by, and I think it's unfortunate, but here it is.

• 2:19:41Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Until next time.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  Until next time.

• 2:19:43Rich Roll?

  Thanks, Jack. Peace, brother.

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  Thank you. Bye.

• 2:19:48Rich Roll?

  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 want to, again, thank Jack for taking the time to share his life with me and with all of you guys. And I just got to 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

• 2:20:33Rich Roll?

  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 evolving. 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

• 2:21:16Rich Roll?

  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 list, 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

• 2:21:58Rich Roll?

  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 [email protected]/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 Margot Lubin, who normally video the show, but this one was not on video. Jessica Miranda for graphics. DK David Kahn for advertiser

• 2:22:38Rich Roll?

  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 going to really dig it. So until then, be kind, peace, plants, positive tweets. Amos Day

• 2:23:32Rich Roll?

  Subtitles by the Amara.org community