Jack Dorsey joins Joe Rogan to reveal Twitter’s accidental birth during Odeo’s 2006 Hack Week, born from an "@" symbol for his brother and hashtags by designer Robert Anderson. The platform’s 140-character limit later expanded to 280, balancing brevity with nuance, while moderation struggles—like the MAGA hat incident or Alex Jones’ reinstatement—highlight Twitter’s focus on conduct over speech. Dorsey admits its design incentivizes outrage and echo chambers but hopes shifting toward topics and interests could foster healthier discourse. Square’s Cash App, a decentralized financial tool, proves his vision of blockchain as "virtual gold" serving underserved users, while both see real-time translation and crypto as keys to global communication. The conversation underscores tech’s dual role: amplifying progress or weaponizing division, with leaders like Dorsey tasked to navigate the chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, it was actually our lead designer, Robert Anderson, who leads our design of the Cash App.
Hired him for Square later on.
But he was the first one.
He was actually communicating with his brother.
And he put at Buzz.
His brother's name is Buzz.
And it just kind of spread.
It wasn't in mass, but people were doing it.
But what was most interesting is not what they were doing, but what they wanted to do with it.
They wanted to address each other.
And that changed the company completely.
That changed the service because it went from just broadcasting what's happening to conversation and to being able to address anyone publicly out in the open.
Which came with it a lot of power and also a lot of issues as well.
Yeah, the use of hashtags, like looking up hashtag, you know, fry fest or hashtag, you know, anytime there's something weird that's in the news, that's such a unique way to find things.
But to go on Twitter and to utilize that, it's interesting that this guy just did it just to contact his brother.
The hashtag was this guy, Chris Messina, and he was trying to tag around topics that he was tweeting about.
And again, that spread.
All we did was made it easier.
We made it more accessible.
We enabled everyone to do it.
With the at symbol, we made a page that collected all mentions of your name.
With the hashtag, we allowed people to search immediately so you could tap on the keyword and you would see everyone talking about that or tweeting about that specific hashtag.
So these things were just emergent behaviors that we didn't predict and they became the lifeblood of the service.
I don't think we could necessarily build for that.
Someone said recently to—we just gathered a bunch of our leadership last week in Palm Springs for an offsite—and someone said recently that Twitter was discovered.
And I think what's behind all that is that it hit something foundational.
It hit something essential.
And my co-founder Biz likes to say that Twitter can never be uninvented.
It's here.
It changed everything.
The use of it has been revolutionary.
And it's just a simple idea of, you know, if you could text with the entire world, if you could actually reach anyone in the world, or anyone could see what you're thinking, which I think is also the beautiful thing about Twitter.
About text and the medium, you can actually get someone's raw thoughts and anyone in the world can see that instantaneously.
It becomes this subconscious.
It becomes this global consciousness and it gets to some really deep places in society and some of those places are pretty uncomfortable.
Well, it also gets to some really deep places psychologically.
There's a weirdness to it, right?
There's a weirdness to sending text, particularly anonymously, and there's so many accounts that are just an egg.
There's so many accounts where they're clearly designed.
Sometimes someone will tweet something mean to me, and I'm like, hmm, I wonder what this person's up to.
So I go to their site, and it's just them tweeting mean shit at people all day long.
It's probably some angry person at work and they're like, I'm just going to find people and fuck with them all day.
When did you realize, or when did you realize, I'm sure you're aware of it, when did you realize that this was almost out of your control in terms of the scale of it?
There wasn't one moment that it just felt completely resonant.
It's unfolded into the next thing and the next use case and it just keeps surprising us with how people are using it.
You know, it definitely, recently, I think we've identified some of the areas of the service that we need to pay a lot more attention to.
Twitter is unique in that it has two main spaces.
One, which is your timeline, and those are the people that you follow.
And, you know, when you follow someone, they've earned that audience.
And then it has this other world where anyone can insert themselves into the conversation.
They can actually mention you, and you'll see that without...
Asking for it.
You can insert yourself into hashtags and to search.
And these are areas that people have taken advantage of.
And these are the areas that people have gamed our systems to, in some cases, artificially amplify, but also just to spread a lot of things that weren't possible with a velocity that they're not possible before.
Now, when this is all happening, what's the conversation like at Twitter when you're recognizing that this is happening, that people are kind of gaming the system?
But more recently, we're trying to go a lot deeper and asking ourselves the question, when people open Twitter, what are we incentivizing?
What are we telling them to do when they open up this app?
We may not explicitly be doing that, but there's something that we're saying without being as clear about it.
So what does the like button incentivize?
What does the retweet incentivize?
What does the number of followers and making that number big and bold incentivize?
I'm not sure if we should incentivize anything, but we need to understand what that is.
And I think right now we do incentivize a lot of echo chambers because we don't make it easy for people to follow interests and topics.
It's only accounts.
We incentivize a lot of outrage and hot takes.
Because of some of the dynamics in the service not allowing a lot of nuance in conversation earlier on.
Pseudonyms, this ability to not use your real name.
It incentivizes some positive things, like it allows for whistleblowers and journalists who might fear for their career or even worse their life under certain regimes, but also allows for people, like the example you mentioned, of just random fire and spread of abuse and harassment throughout.
So those are the things that we're looking at, and how do we enable more of the conversation to evolve?
How do we increase the credibility or reputation of accounts?
How do we identify credible voices within a particular domain?
Not just through this very coarse grain blue verified badge, but if you're an expert in a particular topic, how do we recognize that in real time and show that so that we can provide more context to who you're talking to?
And if you want to engage in a deeper conversation or just Ignore, mute, or block them.
But what is the conversation like while you're at work?
Like when you're realizing that all this stuff is happening and you're realizing that now, I mean, particularly because the president uses it so often in such a I mean, it's this preferred platform for communicating with the people.
I mean, even more so than addresses.
It's very strange.
What's the conversation like in the office when you're trying to figure out, hey, what's our responsibility here?
How are we supposed to handle this?
I mean, in some ways, What Twitter is doing is it's really kind of, it's flavoring the public narrative.
It's flavoring the way we communicate with each other in our culture, worldwide.
Yeah, I mean, the conversation has definitely evolved.
I think in the past we just got super reactive.
We were reacting to all the negative things that we're seeing and that led to a lot of short-term thinking.
More recently, we've just looked much deeper.
We don't react to the present day.
We look for some of the patterns.
We have a company that is not just serving the people of this particular country, the United States.
This is global.
We have global leaders all around the world using us in different ways.
Some with a higher velocity.
Some recognize more of the power.
Some put out statements.
Some lead conversations.
But It's looking at all those dynamics and not trying to hyper-focus on any one particular one because if we do, we're only building it for one portion of the population or only one perceived present day crisis.
What I'm trying to get at was, okay, when things come up, say if you find out that there's people from ISIS that are using Twitter, and they're using Twitter and posting things, what is the conversation?
What do we do about this?
Do we leave this up?
Do we recognize this as free speech?
Do we only take it down if they're calling for murder or hate speech?
So once you realized that people from ISIS were making Twitter accounts, and they were trying to recruit people and doing all these things, what was the thought process?
Yeah, but there are people who have experienced it in different forms, in different mediums.
So we reach out to our government partners, for instance, or law enforcement partners.
We reach out to our peer companies to ask if they're seeing the same things that we're seeing.
We have a bunch of civil societies that we talk to to get their take on it as well, and we try to balance that across various spectrums, whether it be organizations that are more focused on preventing online harassment all the way to the ACLU and the EFF who are protecting the First Amendment online.
So we try to get as many perspectives as possible, take that, and then make some informed decisions, but also realize that we're probably going to make some mistakes along the way, and all we can do to correct some of that is just be open about where we are, and that's probably where we've failed the most in the past, is we just haven't been open about our thinking process, what led to particular decisions, how our terms of service evolve.
As an area in our industry, it's a mess.
No one reads them.
You sign up for these services and you quickly hit accept.
And we expect people to read these rules of the road, but they haven't read them.
But I read ours and one of the things I noticed right away is, you know, you read our terms of service and one of the first things that we put at the top of the page was copyright and intellectual property protections.
You go down, you scroll down, you see everything about violent threats and abuse and harassment and safety.
It's not that the company intended for that to be the order.
We just added things going on.
But even a read of that puts forth our point of view.
We're actually putting copyright infringement above the safety, the physical safety of someone.
So we need to relook at some of these things and how they've evolved and how they reacted.
So what do you do, like, here's a good for instance.
This situation with this young kid who had the MAGA hat on and the Native American gentleman who was in front of him banging the drum, and then people are calling for this kid's name.
They want his name, they want his address, including Kathy Griffin.
It could be trying to use the same phone number, same email address, IP addresses, device IDs, all these things that we can use to judge what's happening within the context.
So we do have a lot of occurrences of...
Suspending or temporarily suspending accounts because of activities across accounts.
And that happens a ton.
But what I mean in that we're helping this right now is some of the incentives.
Just imagine...
Seeing that unfold, and when you see someone with one take, it kind of emboldens something to follow along, and then this mob kind of rolls.
So there has to be a way for us to incentivize a lot more considered and more nuanced introspection of what's going on.
So if I followed a bunch of accounts that, like Boris Johnson, who was constantly giving me information about reasons to leave, I would probably only see that perspective.
Yeah, and a lot of folks just will not follow accounts that have a completely different perspective or a different influence.
A number of people do.
Hopefully journalists do.
But most people won't do that work.
So this is the only tool we give people.
Follow an account.
If, however, during that time you followed the hashtag, you followed the hashtag vote leave, 95% of the conversation and the tweets you see are all reasons to leave, but there's a small percentage that shows a different perspective and that shows a different reasoning.
Follow the hashtag, follow a topic, follow an interest.
And because of that, we help build an echo chamber and something that doesn't really challenge any perspective.
And not to say that we should force that upon people.
But we don't even make it easy for people to do in the first place.
The way you do that today is you go to the Explore tab, you search for a hashtag or you tap into a hashtag and you can see all the conversation.
But that's work.
And most people just won't do the work.
They'll stay in their timeline.
They'll see what they need to see.
And I can certainly imagine why, if I'm just following a bunch of people who have the exact same take on this, it just continues to embolden and embolden and embolden.
And they see nothing of a different perspective on the exact same situation.
But even if there's a photograph, even if somebody posts a photograph on Twitter and has conversation under it, the photograph seems to be of secondary importance.
Yeah, my friend Kurt Metzger likes that about Facebook.
He says, because in Twitter, he goes, I post something, and then all these fucking morons post something, and he goes, you know, Kurt, he's very animated.
He's like, and their shit looks just like my shit.
It's all together, all piled up.
He goes, but if I post something on Facebook, he goes, I have this whole thing.
Like, this is the original statement, and then underneath it, yeah, you fucking say whatever you want, but no one's reading that.
Like, they're reading the original initial post, and it's clear that there's a differentiation between the initial post and the secondary post.
Yeah, I... You know, there's room for both models, but I... This conversation, most conversations, it's not you making a statement and me just reacting to that.
Our conversation evolves based on what we say.
We can interrupt one another.
We can completely change the subject.
I can take control of the conversation and the people who might find that interesting follow it and the folks that don't just stop listening.
Whereas you can't do that in a post-comment model.
The speed demands – the character constraint, the speed kind of just demands a more conscious, present, focused thinking versus like stepping back and – Composing a letter.
Yeah, and composing a letter and thinking about all the outcomes.
You have all these different Twitters and you have a completely different experience based on what Twitter you follow and what Twitter you participate in.
Some of them are like super engaging, super funny.
Yeah, I got to a certain point where I couldn't read replies anymore.
Not that it's that toxic.
The vast majority of interactions I have with people are super positive.
Absolutely, more than 99%.
Didn't I don't have time and I don't have time to be constantly responding to people and it just didn't the sheer numbers Well, I think when I got around three million ish followers.
I'm like I can't do this anymore.
It's just it's Overwhelming like I don't have the resources.
Yeah, I I'm a huge believer in serendipity So you you you look at your replies once and you might see something that just like strikes you and that's enough You don't need to read through all of them.
I wanted to thank people for posting cool stuff, and they loved the fact that they would get a retweet, and so they would send me interesting science stories or very bizarre nature stories, and I'd just be retweeting them all the time.
But then after a while, I'm like, this is a lot of time.
It's a lot of time.
So now, essentially what I do is I just post something and I just kind of like, ugh, I just walk away.
Well, yeah, it's not the experience for everyone, and it's not really...
I don't think it's what everyone wants, either.
Sometimes people just like to go on there and talk shit.
I mean, there's someone that's trapped in a cubicle right now, and they just want to go on there and get in arguments about gun control or whether or not Nancy Pelosi's the devil.
I mean, this is what...
It serves a purpose for them.
The thing that gets strange, though, is who's to decide.
There's this concept...
There's a discussion, I should say, where some people believe that things like Twitter or Facebook or any forum where you're having a public discussion should be considered almost like a public utility.
Like anyone has access to the electric power, even if you're...
Even if you're a racist, you still can get electricity.
And some people think that you should have that same ability with something like Twitter, or the same ability with something like Instagram.
Obviously, we're in uncharted territory, and you are in uncharted territory.
No one has been there before.
So, who makes the distinctions?
When you see someone that's saying something, That you might think is offensive to some folks, but not offensive to the person who's saying it.
Maybe the person who's saying it feels like they need to express themselves and this is important to say.
And how do you decide whether or not this is a valid discussion or if this is, air quotes, hate speech, which is a...
You know, there's some things that are hate speech, and there's sometimes people use the term hate speech, and it's just a cheap way to shut down a conversation.
You're right in that I think when people see Twitter, they see and they expect it to be a public square.
They can go into that public square, they can say whatever they want, they can get on a pedestal, and people might gather around them and listen to what they have to say.
Some of them might find it offensive and they leave.
The difference is there's also this concept of this megaphone, and the megaphone can be highly targeted now with Twitter as well.
We look at oftentimes, as you said, like the probability of someone who is harassing one person, it's highly probable that they're also harassing 10 more people.
So we can look at that behavior.
We can look at How many times this person is being blocked or muted or reported?
And based on all that data, we can actually take some action.
But we also have to correlate it with the other side of that because people go on and they coordinate blocks as well.
And they coordinate harassment and they coordinate, I'm sorry, not harassment, but reporting.
Reporting a particular account to get it shut down and to take the voice off the service.
So these are the considerations we have to make, but it all starts with conduct.
And oftentimes we'll see coordinated conduct, whether it be that one person opening multiple accounts or coordinating with multiple accounts that they don't own to go after someone.
And there's a bunch of vectors.
People use retweet for that, the quote tweet for that a lot as well.
They'll quote tweet a tweet that someone finds and they'll say, look at this idiot, Twitter, do your thing.
And then just this mob starts and goes and tries to effectively shut that person down.
So there's a bunch of tools we can use.
The permanent suspension is the last resort.
One of the things that we can do is we can downrank the replies.
So Any of these behaviors and conduct that look linked, we can actually push farther down in the reply chain.
So it's all still there, but you might have to push a button to actually see it.
You might have to show more replies to actually see this harassing account or what might look like harassing language.
So what happened there, what probably happened there, and I'm not sure of the particular case, but what probably happened there is someone might have reported that tweet.
One of our agents, human agents, without context of their friendship or that relationship, saw it as a violent threat and took action on it.
And those are the mistakes that we're going to make.
We need to make sure that we're reacting the right way.
Like, look, we're going to make mistakes.
The problem with this system right now is most of the work is actually, and the burden is actually on the victims of abuse while they're getting harassed.
So a lot of our system doesn't Enforce or act unless these tweets are reported.
So we don't take suspension actions or removal of content actions unless it's reported.
The algorithms rank and order the conversation, but they don't take suspension actions.
They don't remove content.
They might suggest to a human to look at this, who might look at our rules and look at the content and try to look at the context of the conversation and then take action.
But we would like to move towards a lot more automated enforcement.
But more importantly, how do we amplify more of the healthier discussion and conversation?
Not removing it.
We're going to a world, especially with technologies like blockchain, that all content that exists, that is ever created, will exist forever.
You won't be able to take it down.
You won't be able to censor it.
It won't be centralized at all.
Our role is around what we recommend based on your interest and based on who you follow and helping you to get into that on-ramp.
But if you look at the arc of technology, it's a given that anytime something is created, it's going to exist forever.
This is what blockchain helps enable down the line.
And we need to make sure that we're paying attention to that.
And also realizing that, you know, our role is like, how do we get people the stuff that they really want to see and find valuable that they'll learn from, that they'll make them think that will help them evolve the conversation as well.
Are you like constantly aware of how much this is changing society and that you are one of the four or five different modalities that are radically changing society, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or any of these social media platforms?
It's radically changing the way people communicate with each other.
There's a giant impact on the way human beings talk and see each other and the way we process ideas and the way we distribute information.
It's unprecedented.
There's never been anything like that before.
And you setting up something that you think is going to be a group chat.
Do you remember the early days when you would say, like, at Jack is going to the movies?
Wants to be so it's a pathway for thinking just a pathway for people to get their thoughts out but a really a Powerful one an unprecedented method of distributing information.
It's really nothing ever been like this before no no and in and This mode of communicating will not go away.
It'll just get faster.
It will become a lot more connected and that's why our work is so critical to figure out some of the dynamics at play that cause more negative outcomes than positive outcomes.
I think about it because it's just a hugely significant thing.
But I also think about it because of podcasts, because podcasts are in a similar way.
Just no one saw it coming, and the people that are involved in it are like, what the fuck are we doing?
Like me.
I'm like, what am I doing?
Like, what is this?
Like, for me, it's like, ooh, boy, I get to talk to guys like Ben Greenfield and Jonathan Haidt and all these different people and learn some stuff.
I clearly learned way more from doing this podcast than I ever would have learned without it.
No doubt about it.
Unquestionably.
But I didn't fucking plan this.
So now all of a sudden there's this signal that I'm sending out to millions and millions of people and then people are like, well, you have a responsibility.
I'm like, oh, great.
Well, I didn't want that.
I didn't want a responsibility to what I distribute.
I just wanted to be able to have a freak show.
Just talk to people.
There's certain people that I have on, whether it's Alex Jones or anyone that's controversial, where people will get fucking mad.
Why are you giving this person a platform?
I go, okay, hmm.
I didn't think about it that way, and I don't think that's what I'm doing.
I think I'm talking to people, and you can listen.
But it's giving that person a platform, because they'll say, well, no, they'll tone down, like, Milo Yiannopoulos.
That was one of the arguments people gave me.
He toned down his platform when he was on your show so you could get more people to pay attention to him.
Like, okay, but he also talked about, he, that was one of the reasons why he was exposed was my show because he talked about that it's okay to have sex with underage boys if they're gay because there's like a mentor relationship between the older gay man and the younger, and people are like, what the fuck are you?
What are you talking about?
And that was a big part of why he's kind of been removed from the public conversation.
And then there's the discussion like, well, what is that?
What is removing someone from the public conversation?
If someone is very popular and they have all these people that like to listen to them, what is the responsibility of these platforms, whether it's YouTube or Twitter or anyone?
What is their responsibility to decide whether or not someone should or shouldn't be able to speak?
And this is a thing that I've been struggling with, and I bounce around inside my own head, and I see that you guys struggle with it, and pretty much everyone does.
YouTube does.
And it is a hugely significant discussion that is left to a very relatively small amount of people.
And this is why this discussion of what is social media?
Is it something that everybody has a right to?
Or is it something that should be restricted to only people that are willing to behave and carry themselves in a certain way?
I'm not sure what the actual violations were, but we have a set number of actions and if they keep getting...
If an account keeps violating terms of service, ultimately it leads to permanent suspension.
And when all the other platforms were taking them off, we didn't find those.
We didn't find those violations and they weren't reported.
But again, it goes back to A lot of our motto, people weren't reporting a lot of the tweets that may have been in violation on our service, and we didn't act on them.
Like, a good instance is what's going on with Patreon.
I'm sure you're aware of the Sargon of a Cod thing.
He did a podcast a long time ago, I believe six months or so ago, where he used the N-word and the way he used it is...
Actually against white nationalists and he also said a bunch of other stuff and they decided, Patreon decided that what he said on a podcast was enough for them to remove him from the platform.
Even though he didn't do anything on their platform, that was egregious.
And also, they had previously stated that they were only judging things that occurred on their platform.
There's been a giant blowback because of that, because people are saying, well, now you're essentially policing and not based on his actions, just on concepts and the communication that he was using, the way he was talking.
You're eliminating him from being able to...
Make a living and that you're doing this because he does not fit into your political paradigm, the way you want to view the world.
He views the world differently.
This is an opportunity for you to eliminate someone who you disagree with.
One, it was the context that presidents of this country have used similar language in different mediums.
They use it on radio.
They use it on television.
It's not just through Twitter.
And even if you were to look at the presidency of Obama, It wasn't exactly the same tone in this exact same language, but there were threats around the same country.
And we have to take that context into consideration.
So the second thing is that the most controversial aspect of our rules and our terms of service is probably this clause around public interest and newsworthiness.
Where powerful figures or public figures might be in violation of our Terms of Service, but the tweet itself is of public interest.
There should be a conversation around it.
And that is probably the thing that people disagree with the most and where we have a lot of internal debate.
But we also have some pretty hard lines.
If we had a global leader, including the President of the United States, make a violent threat against a private individual, we would take action.
We always have to balance that with, like, is this something that the public has interest in?
And I believe generally the answer is yes.
It's not going to be in every case, but generally the answer is yes, because we should see how our leaders think and how they act.
That informs voting.
That informs the conversation.
That informs whether we think they're doing the right job or we think that they should be voted out.
You know, it's just I never thought he would keep doing it.
I thought once he became president, maybe just lock it down, try to do a good job for the country and then After four years or eight years, just go back to his old self.
Fuck you, fuck the world, fuck this.
But no, he's just...
In one way, it's hilarious.
See, as a comedian, I think it's awesome because it's so hilariously stupid.
It's so preposterous that he even has the time to talk about Jeff Bezos' affair and And the fact that he got caught with the National Enquirer getting text messages and calls him Jeff Bozo, like, don't you have shit to do, man?
But as a comedian, I am a gigantic fan of folly, almost against my better judgment.
I like watching disasters.
I like watching chaos.
When I see nonsense like that, I'm like, oh, Jesus.
I'm drawn like a moth to a flame.
But the other part of me is like, man, This sets a very bizarre tone for the entire country.
Because one of the things about Obama, like Obama or hate Obama, seems very measured, very articulate, obviously very well educated.
And I think that that aspect of his presidency was very good for all of us because he represented something that was of a very high standard in terms of his ability to communicate, his access to words, the way he measured his words and held himself.
So this is a real challenge and something that we're trying to wrap our heads around.
But, like, one of the things we're trying to do is, like, let's...
Scope the problem down a bit and let's use the technology we have available to us, like Face ID, like Touch ID, like the biometric stuff to identify the humans.
We don't have access to images of your face or whatnot, but the operating system can tell us that this is the legit owner of this phone, and therefore it is human.
And technology always has to change.
People will find ways around that and whatnot.
If we go the opposite direction and we look for the bots, the problem with looking for the bots is people assume that they just come through our API, but the scripting has become extremely sophisticated.
People can script the app, can script the website and make it look very, very human.
So we're going after this problem first trying to identify the humans as much as we can, utilizing these technologies.
None of this is live right now.
These are considerations that we're making and trying to understand what the impact would be and how we might evolve it.
But we need to because that information would provide context for someone like, this is an actual human that I'm talking to and I can invest more time in it or I can just ignore the thing because it's meaningless.
When you want to make a transfer to someone, when you want to send someone money, or when you want to buy Bitcoin, we turn on Face ID and you verify that you are you and you are the owner of the phone and then it goes.
When you saw Zuckerberg testifying and realizing how this platform is being used and what are the dangers of this, and then you see these senators that really don't know what the fuck the technology is.
It really highlights how we're entering into this really, yeah, well not just a gap, a gap in the critical understanding of how these things work and what they are in terms of like how these really important politicians who are the ones who are making these decisions as to whether or not someone has violated laws or whether or not something should be curbed or regulated and they don't really even understand what they're talking about.
They're not using it in the way that people are using it every single day, and they don't have the same experience that people have every single day.
And, you know, in terms of...
Regulatory and our regulators and our governments, I think the conversation is often about how regulators will come in and start writing rules and setting expectations for how companies or services might behave, but there's a role for the company to educate,
and there's a role for the company to educate on what technology makes possible, whether it be I think we have a role to help educate and to help make sure that we're pushing towards what I think the job of a regulator is, which is number one, protect the individual.
Number two, level the playing field and make sure that those two things are not What do you mean by level the playing field?
Level the playing field so that an individual has the same opportunity that someone else might have or a company might have.
When you look at these kind of emerging technologies, not necessarily emerging anymore, established now, but still a new thing in relative terms of human history, where do you see this going?
And does it get more intrusive?
Does it get deeper into our lives?
When you look at new technologies like augmented reality and things along those lines, do you see new possibilities and new things that make things even more complicated?
Yeah, and I think a big part of it is, like, right now, like, how are we ensuring that there is more healthy contribution to that global conversation?
Yeah.
I just think it's so critical that we start talking about the things that are facing all of us, not just one nation.
I do think that that's where our current model really puts the world at a disadvantage because it incentivizes more of the echo chambers which lead to things like nationalism instead of taking the broader picture and looking at what's happening around the world to all people, to all of humanity.
What do you do, though, to balance the conversation or what responsibility do you think you have to balance the conversation in terms of the way conservatives view it versus the way liberals and progressives view it?
Do you have a responsibility or is it just leave it up to the people and let them figure it out the same way they figured out hashtags and everything else?
I've been in my last Netflix special about a woman who said a bunch of horrible things to me because I put a picture up on Instagram of some deer meat, and I wrote, this is some meat from a deer that liked to kick babies and was about to join ISIS. And then I wrote, hashtag vegan, which was a mistake, right, to write hashtag vegan, but the hashtag vegan people went fucking crazy and came after me because I entered into their timeline with meat.
I think we, at least for us, we got more of our roots from AOA, Instant Messenger, and ICQ. ICQ. You remember the status message where you said, like, I'm in a meeting or I'm listening to this music or I'm watching a movie right now?
That was the inspiration.
And what we took from that was being able to, like, if you could do that from anywhere, not bound to a desk, but you could do that from anywhere, and you could do it from your phone, and you could just be roaming around and say...
You know, I'm at Joe Rogan's studio right now.
That is cool.
I don't need my computer.
I'm not bound to this, chained to this desk.
I can do it from anywhere.
And then the other aspect of Instant Messenger was, of course, chat.
So one of the things that the status would do is you might say, like, you know, I'm listening to Kendrick Lamar right now, and I might hit you up on chat and say, like, what do you think of the new album?
But now, it's all public.
So it's just, everyone can see it.
That's the biggest difference, and that to me is what Twitter is.
MySpace was, it was profiles, and people organized around these profiles and This network that developed between people, and that is Facebook.
Facebook optimized the hell out of that, and they scaled the world.
We were something very different.
We started with that simple status, and then people wanted to talk about it, and we decided that it should be on the same surface.
It shouldn't be subverdient to the status.
It should be part of that flow, and that's what makes Twitter so fluid.
Now, when you look at this sort of metamorphosis or this evolution between those initial social media, whether it's AOL, Instant Messenger, that eventually became like ICQ. What was that one that we would use, that gamers would use, that it was like a live stream sort of message board?
Anyway, guys would go there and you could send people files through it and teams would go and meet and it would be a chat, like an online chat that would be in real time.
Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of our roots in AOL and Messenger, but also like IRC, Internet Relay Chat, and Usenet, which were these old internet 70s technologies.
I mean, like the secular trends and, you know, you look at technology and you look at technologies like blockchain, for instance, and I think, you know, we're moving to a world where anything created exists forever, that there's no centralized control over who sees what.
That these models become completely decentralized and all these barriers that exist today aren't as important anymore.
Gab seems to be a response to the fact that some people are getting banned from other platforms and they're just allowing anybody to come on and say anything they want.
The downside of that is, of course, the most horrible people are going to be able to say anything they want with no repercussions.
The good side is anybody can say whatever they want.
It's been both beautiful and scary and uncomfortable and learning.
It's just been a ton of learning and evolving and it shows me every single day where I need to push myself and what I don't know.
I think a big part is just the realization that we're not going to be able to do this alone.
And I don't think we have to either.
These are what the technologies continue to allow.
If we have to have all the answers around enforcement or policy, we're not going to serve We have aspirations to serve every single person on the planet, and we have aspirations to be the first consideration for the global public conversation.
And if we're the bottleneck for all this, we're not going to reach those aspirations.
It's just thinking deeply about how we might distribute more of this work and decentralize more of it and look at the platform itself and what we need to change to reach that reality.
And I think we've got to look really deep and foundational.
It goes back to your question on 140. One of the things that we saw was we shifted to 280 characters and this 140 characters is so sacred.
It became this cultural thing and I was in love with it and so many people are in love with it.
But one of the things we noticed as we moved to 280 is that The vast majority of tweets that are broadcast don't go above 140, even with that limitation raised.
But where they do go above 140 is in replies.
When people reply, they tend to go over the 140 character limit and even bump up into the 280 limit.
And what we've seen it allow is just more nuance in the conversation.
It allows people to give more context and kind of just get their experience on the table a bit more, whereas 140 did not allow that.
So we have seen that increase the health of those conversations and the discussion.
So it's stuff like that that we need to question and not hold so sacred.
Totally, but the issue with going longer than that, it takes that real-time nature and the conversational flow out of it.
So then we're delaying these tweets, and when you're watching UFC or you're watching Warriors basketball, A lot of the great Twitter is like, just like in the moment, just like, you know, it's the roar of the crowd.
It's like, you know, looking across at someone you're in this virtual stadium with and just saying like, oh my god, that shot.
Now, going back to the responsibility that you guys have, and you in particular, like, when this became what it is now, and when it became evident that it became this gigantic way of changing the way human beings communicate with each other, was there ever any regret?
Or was there ever a moment where you're like, what the fuck have I gotten myself into?
Now when you have these considerations, when you take these actions, do you consult with psychologists or sociologists or historians or people that try to put in perspective for you what the ramifications of each individual move would be?
It's interesting the way you're phrasing this, too, that you are looking at this as a method to save or to help people, to serve people.
You're looking at this as a way that you can benefit society.
Society can benefit from your platform, can benefit from this platform.
This ability to communicate.
You're not just looking at it as a tech company that has to remain profitable.
And that is one of the more interesting things about tech companies to me.
I mean, there's been a lot of criticism, maybe justified in some ways, that tech companies all lean left.
But what is interesting to me is that name another corporation that willingly, of its own Choice takes that into consideration, that they want to serve the world and serve culture in a beneficial way, regardless of profit.
I mean, because you're not really selling anything, right?
You guys have a platform.
Obviously, it's financially viable, but you're not selling things.
Well, I mean, we do our models based off people's attention.
And they're paying us with their attention.
And that's extremely valuable and something that we need to really, really honor.
But I agree with you.
I mean, like, look at Tesla.
I just listened to the recent earnings call and one of the things that Elon said was, look, there are two reasons for Tesla.
Number one is to advance different sources of energy and more renewable sources of energy.
Because it's a fundamental and existential crisis that's facing all humanity.
And number two is to advance autonomy because it'll save lives and give people time back.
And then you start talking about how to make that possible.
And that's where our business comes in.
How do we make that possible?
We have a great business.
We need to improve a bunch of it, but it serves what we think are larger purposes, which is serving the public conversation.
We want to see more global public conversations.
We want our technology to be used to make the world feel a lot smaller, to help see what common problems we have before us and ideally how we can get people together to solve them faster and solve them better.
My dad listened to Rush Limbaugh and Hannity all the time.
I found myself somewhere in the middle.
But one of the things I appreciated, we had a ton of fights and arguments and yelling matches around the kitchen table, but I appreciated the fact that we could have them.
And I felt safe to do so and I didn't feel like, I mean obviously they're my parents, but they weren't judging me because of what I said.
I think they were good at least showing different perspectives even in this union that they have.
I don't know.
It developed a skepticism in me that I think is healthy.
And I have a lot of skepticism of companies like ours and leaders like me.
I think that's right.
I think that's right and people should.
And we...
I mean...
I was formed through a lot of the ideals of the internet.
I just fell in love with what it made possible.
And I never, ever want to run afoul of those ideals and the removal of barriers and boundaries and the connection that we have because of it.
I think often and reflect often about my role and the centralization of my role and of our company.
And I want to figure out and help figure out how we can continue to add massive value and be an amazing business, which is us and will always be us, but at the same time, Be a participatory force in this greater good that the internet has really started.
And it's not led by any one individual or any one company, and that's the beauty of it.
And I want to make sure that we find our place in that and we can also contribute massively to it.
I think we can.
It's just going to take a lot of work, a lot of introspection, and a lot of experimentation, a lot of making mistakes and failures, too.
Well, and it's very encouraging that you have that attitude because a lot of people, I think, in a similar situation would try to control the narrative.
They would try to reinforce their own particular perspective on things and try to get other people to adopt it or try to push it.
And I think it's very important to just have this open discussion.
And I think it's very important to review your own thoughts and ideas.
And one of the best ways to do so is through the...
I think we probably did too much of that early on, and that's what led to a bunch of issues from a corporate standpoint.
We're just trying to do too much, too many times.
I don't know.
We were trying to be everything to everyone.
We had a video thing and we were looking at gaming stuff and messaging and it lost focus of what we were good at.
What we're good at is conversation and what we're good at is public conversation.
We now have, as a company, we have just such an amazing focus on what that means and how that evolves.
And there's some really cool things that we can do there.
We have this app called Periscope.
And one of the things that we're discovering is a lot of people are using it to podcast.
A lot of people are using it to share their thoughts and these people come in and they chat and have a conversation.
one of the things we did recently is we allowed the audio to play in the background.
It's super simple.
But what we found was that people didn't necessarily want to watch the video of people talking.
They just want to hear what they're saying.
And that just opened the door for more types of use cases.
And there's some really exciting things coming out with Periscope that I think add a new dimension to what conversation looks like and how it is experienced and how it evolves and And those are the things I get really excited about.
It's like how can we make conversation...
And how do we make it feel more live?
How do we make it feel more electric?
And how do we bring new technology into it that just opens a door for an entirely new way of talking?
And that's the thing that I think has been most educational to me about Twitter.
As we talked about, we started with this idea of sharing what was happening around you, and then people told us what they wanted it to be, and it became this conversational medium.
It became this interest networked.
And it became a thing that was entirely new.
And we observed it and we learned more and more of what it wanted to be.
And as we get deeper and deeper that we're going to be surprised by some of the technologies that we thought would be used in this way.
But it turns out that the massive use case and the resonant use case and the fundamental use case is going to be created right before our eyes by the people using it.
It's one of those things that I personally just have a lot of conviction around.
I have a lot of belief in the format.
Every now and then we don't have instant hits.
It just requires a lot of patience.
And we need to really learn what it wants to be.
And sometimes that takes time.
And I think oftentimes, I've certainly done this, we shut down things a little bit too early.
We did this at Square.
Amazing technology and app I love called Square Wallet.
And it allowed you to, you know, you link your credit card and you have all these merchants around you here in LA and you could walk up to a coffee merchant.
And as you walked up, your name would pop up on the register.
So you could say, like, I want a cappuccino and put it on Jack.
And it just automatically charged your card.
And it would only happen if you were within like two feet.
We're using Bluetooth and geolocation and whatnot.
But we had it for about three years and it just didn't take off and we shut it down and I kind of regret doing that but it also paved the way for another thing that I didn't want to give up on and that was the Cash App.
For four years it was just a slog.
A lot of people in the company wanted to shut down the thing.
They saw it as Something that wasn't successful.
And recently the team reached number one in the App Store in the United States.
We were against all these incumbents like Venmo and PayPal and it finally clicked and it's just because we had the patience and the conviction around our belief.
And the ethics behind it are really fantastic, too.
We're really thankful for the Cash App, especially my friend Justin Wren, and his fight for the forgotten charity that every time you use the code word Joe Rogan, all one word, it all goes.
$5 goes to that.
And they've built two wells for the Pygmies in the Congo, and they've raised thousands of dollars and are building more wells right now.
But more importantly, they don't have access to things like rewards.
You don't get rewards on a typical debit card or a credit card.
So just going to your favorite place and getting an instant 10% off or whatever it is is out of reach for most people because the financial institutions don't enable that.
And they won't even enable them to get in the door in the first place.
Well, if people are listening to this on YouTube, you don't know what the fuck we're talking about.
The Cash app has a thing called a Cash Card, which is a debit card that you get with it, and there's a thing called Boosts.
And with Boosts, all you do is pick a Boost in the app and then use your Cash Card as a debit card, and you get these automatic discounts.
And they're real discounts.
Yep.
And for folks with bad credit, there's no credit check.
You can direct deposit your paycheck right into the app.
And the fact that you guys do do things like support Fight for the Forgotten, and you're supporting UFC fighter Ray Borg's son, who's got some serious medical bills.
I think it will because just given all the tests it's been through and the principles behind it, how it was created.
It was something that was born on the internet, that was developed on the internet, that it was tested on the internet.
It is of the internet.
The reason we enabled the purchasing of Bitcoin within the Cash App is, one, we want to learn about the technology and we want to put ourselves out there and take some risk.
We're the first publicly traded company to actually offer it as a service.
We're the first publicly traded company to talk to the SEC about Bitcoin and what that means.
And it made us uncomfortable.
We had to really understand what was going on.
And that was critical and important.
And then the second thing is that we would love to see something become a global currency.
It enables more access.
It allows us to serve more people.
It allows us to move much faster around the world.
And we thought we were going to start with how you can use it transactionally, but We noticed that people were treating it more like an asset, like a virtual gold.
And we wanted just to make that easy, like just the simplest way to buy and sell Bitcoin.
But we also knew that it had to come with a lot of education.
It had to come with constraint because, you know, Two years ago, people did some really unhealthy things about purchasing Bitcoin.
They maxed out their credit cards and put all their life savings into Bitcoin.
So we developed some very simple restrictions and constraints.
You can't buy Bitcoin on the Cash App with a credit card.
It has to be the money you actually have in it.
And we look for day trading, which we discourage and shut down.
That's not what we were trying to build.
That's not what we were trying to optimize for.
We made a children's book explaining what Bitcoin is and where it came from and how people use it and where it might be going.
So we really tried to take on the role of education and to have some very simple, healthy constraints that allowed people to consider what their actions are in the space.
Now, when you have something like the Cash App, which is very much a disruptive technology in terms of decentralization of Of banks and currency and, you know, to have it where everything is going right at your direct depositing a paycheck right in the app if you so choose.
And then you could also buy Bitcoin, which is another disruptive technology.
I mean, this is another step towards this sort of new way of doing things.
And is there pushback from any companies or is there...
And what that means is that it's basically a distributed database where, you know, the source of truth can be verified at any point around the network.
And you can see, you know, this annotation around how content or how around money like traveled.
It's certainly threatening to certain services behind banks and financial institutions.
It's Threatening to some governments as well.
So I just look at this and like, how do we embrace this technology, not react to it in a, you know, more from a threat standpoint, but like, what does it enable us to do?
And where does our value shift?
And that's what we should be talking about right now is like, How our value shifts?
And there's always really strong answers to that question.
But if you're not willing to ask the question in the first place, you will become irrelevant because technology will just continue to march on and make you irrelevant.
And it's the people that are growing up with this technology or born with the technology, only knowing that technology.
Or are asking the tough questions of themselves that are going to be super disruptive to their business.
And they're thinking about it right now and they're taking actions.
And we're doing that at Square and we're doing that at Twitter.
And that, to me, represents longevity.
That represents our ability to thrive.
And we've got to push ourselves.
We've got to make ourselves uncomfortable.
And we've got to disrupt what we held sacred and what we think is.
Is success today.
Because otherwise it's not going to be bigger than what we have today.
If we want to get the world into a conversation, not a single conversation, but at least being able to see that global conversation, we've got to work on technologies that instantly translate.
We've got to work on technologies that I can speak as I'm speaking right now and in real time people are hearing it in their context, in their language, in their dialect.
That is amazing.
That is so exciting.
And just how that evolves...
And how it impacts not just communication like this, but music.
And just like, you know, hip-hop and rap and, you know, it's amazing to think about where that can go and where that can take us.
Yeah, and I think you and I are extremely fortunate to be alive right now during this time because I think it's one of the strangest and most unique times in human history.
We're able through technologies like Twitter to at least see and acknowledge some of the issues that we're still facing that were probably in the dark before.
And I think that's so critical to Making any sort of improvements for making any sort of evolution and for making it better for everyone on the planet.
As uncomfortable as sometimes Twitter makes people feel, I think it is necessary to see those things and have conversations about them so that we can understand how we might move forward and how we might Really get at the biggest problems facing us all.
And, you know, there's some huge ones.
There's some huge ones right now that if we don't have, if we don't talk about it, like, it will drive us to extinction.
And, like, it will threaten our ability to be a planet, to live on this planet.