Jack Dorsey (Banning Trump, Twitter Files & Elon Musk)
Russell chats to the co-founder of Twitter. Since stepping down as the CEO in 2021, he’s since founded his new decentralized social network, Bluesky and he’s recently endorsed presidential candidate RFK Jr.My comedy special 'Brandemic' is out now! https://moment.co/russellbrandFor a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here: https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come to my festival COMMUNITY - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Thanks for joining me on what is turning out to be the biggest week in Stay Free history, and perhaps the biggest week in the history of free speech full stop.
We've already had RFK on the show, I'm about to talk to Jack Dorsey on the show tomorrow.
Independently, a rare A special conversation with Tucker Carlson.
You might as well start posting your questions for that chat now.
But joining me right now, I couldn't be more excited to announce one of the inaugural engineers, one of the initial mystics and wizards that founded this online space.
He co-founded Twitter in 2006.
He's since founded more tech companies.
He can't stop Found in a block to blue sky among them and now he's endorsing the same presidential candidate as us once he and I shared an extraordinary and peculiar dinner at the house of Larry... Who's that guy?
Larry King.
Yes, Larry King.
It is the incomparable Bearded, peculiar mystic, Jack Dorsey.
Jack, thank you for joining us.
Thank you, Russell, and thank you for everything you're doing to build up independent media as well.
That's really kind of you to say that.
That was really weird, that dinner.
You were different then.
You then seemed like that wave of tech Yeah, there were some characters.
It was a very weird dinner.
I didn't have a beard back then.
'cause I was like, "Oh, no, this is one of them people that's gonna be so rich,"
and, uh, I didn't like it.
And I feel there were a lot of really unusual people there at that dinner.
It was like a sort of a dream, wasn't it?
Yeah, there- there were some characters.
It was- it was a very weird dinner.
I didn't have a beard back then.
I was, uh, I was- I wasn't sure to make of the whole thing.
I still don't understand what happened that day.
It ranks among the strangest.
It was sort of a TV show that Larry King, God rest his soul, was doing, but I don't think it's ever been aired, and I think that's probably for the best for everyone.
Jack, we share a mutual friend in the great Rick Rubin, another pursuit and brilliant man.
And similarly, you and I both endorse Robert F Kennedy.
Why do you think he's the best choice for the Democrats?
What do you think is the significance of his emerging candidature at this time?
And significantly mate, why have you been willing to put your name and neck on the line endorsing him?
I appreciate his authenticity.
Period.
He's curious.
He's willing to admit his mistakes and his failures.
He goes deep in pretty much every single topic that he covers.
I've listened to almost every single one of his podcasts just to learn more about him.
And in every conversation, I learn something new.
And he's willing to change his mind based on facts presented to him.
And I just haven't seen a lot of politicians recently or a lot of public leadership say the words, I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm going to go figure that out.
And that's so refreshing to see.
And he comes with every answer he has, comes with a humanitarian angle.
I do believe he truly cares about humanity and making This country better and making the world better because of that.
Yeah, I agree with you.
It's as if he has an intuitive recourse to principles and values like community service and he's quite loving and spiritually oriented man.
We spoke to him earlier this week with his wife Cheryl in a fantastic and exclusive interview.
If you're watching this right now on YouTube, we can only be on this platform for the first 15 minutes because There are a number of questions that I have for Jack.
I'm going to ask him what he thinks about RFK's stand on certain medications and medicines.
What Jack thinks about the censorship that's already been applied to RFK.
And of course, we're going to be talking about the Twitter files.
For now though, Jack, what do you think about Biden's refusal to engage with RFK publicly?
What does that indicate about free speech?
What does that indicate about Biden's personal capacities and abilities?
I don't know how much it is him versus the DNC.
I think it's extremely disappointing.
I think it removes trust from the system, and I think we need to build more trust into our election systems and everything around them, including primaries and debates.
And I hope The administration and more broadly the DNC is open to actually allowing for debates.
I think it's critical.
It's the only way to see how people think about these ideas and for us to trust who's going to move the country forward the best.
There's a kind of misanthropy in the assumption that what's required for society to work is authoritarianism, censorship, surveillance.
What I figure, Jack, is that you exist in a pretty unique space.
You've been there for the gold rush Inauguration and establishment of essentially new colonies, new territories, new space, new communication dynamics.
It seems to me significant that you've had to take this time out.
I wonder what it was about your role at Twitter that, is it that you have been burned or hurt, burned out, worn out, disappointed, disillusioned?
What exactly is it that led you to step away from Twitter, mate?
There were a number of things.
I mean, the biggest is the realization that as a public company and as a public company CEO, with the dynamics that Twitter had to play in, Which was we were entirely dependent upon brand advertising.
The brand advertisers have huge sway over the very policies of the service, including the ability to protest and remove their ads from our service.
And when you have a service that's entirely dependent upon that brand advertising revenue, it really hurts your ability to do the right thing all the time.
Because if they pull back, Wall Street sees that.
And if Wall Street sees a pullback, they punish your stock.
And if they punish your stock, that affects every single employee because that's how all the employees are paid.
And they leave.
They go somewhere else where they have a better potential outcome for their equity and for their stock.
So it was more the realization that I just didn't believe Twitter could continue to exist as a public company.
If it could, I certainly wasn't that person to make it so.
I just did not... I didn't feel I had that in me and at the same time I was learning about... I come from an open source background.
I come from, you know, learning about the internet when it was truly decentralized and it was truly open.
And Bitcoin in 2009 was a great reminder to me of what the internet wants to be and what it needs to be.
And I just got fascinated more and more with open protocols, and that felt like the answer ultimately for what Twitter needed to be, what role it needed to play in the world in terms of the public square, whether that be global or more local.
And I wanted to put more of my efforts into that and those realizations and just, you know, all the mistakes I made and we made as a company, and a bunch of frustrations I had with the board and just the corporate aspects of the service.
Led me to leave.
That's a really fascinating response.
Sometimes it's difficult for us to identify that immersed within our zombie capitalist state corporatist model are systems of regulation that are not explicit and declarative like you described.
If the advertisers don't support Twitter, Wall Street will respond to that withdrawal.
That will affect stock prices.
that there is an ideology built into the commercial model that doesn't need to declare itself
or make itself explicit.
Even in a plainly innovative space like Twitter and comparable social media platforms,
which felt extraordinarily novel and that we were at the vanguard of something new,
it's interesting to see how quickly it can be colonized by the same kind of imperialist modalities
that are more easy to observe in the last century.
Oh, look, there's this continent of Africa.
We can own that though.
There's this continent, there's this nation of India that there is a certain mentality
that is able to, through kind of materialism, I would say as the primary mentality,
which is not, that doesn't need to declare itself because as Mark Fisher wrote in his book,
"Capitalist Realism,"
the ideology is so, we are so submerged within this ideology that we don't have a context
to judge it from outside of.
But it seems to me that we're involved in nothing less than a kind of ideological war, Jack.
And I sense that you might know that too, that we're at a point where, you know,
I don't fully understand words like, or terms like open protocol and open source.
But it seems to me you're talking about The necessity for decentralised models in order to have truly open discourse and to protect significant principles, which we hear Elon Musk, of course, your descendant in running Twitter, talk about continually.
So can you tell us, do you care about decentralisation?
Why do you care?
And do you agree with me But we're on the cusp of a kind of war between authoritarianism and kind of new unprecedented revolution.
I do agree with you and maybe it's always been that way and it's more and more visible now because some of the structures are breaking down and we're seeing more of the incentives.
I think we live in a world of abstraction and as you said it's very hard to see the levels and the layers of abstraction that we built upon ourselves because they're comfortable.
And we get used to them.
And that momentum is extremely strong.
It's like a riptide out to the ocean.
And you're trying to swim against the riptide instead of going to the side.
And to me, I'm an absolute believer in decentralization.
Decentralization to me means removing single points of failure, recognizing single points of failure, and removing them.
And one of the single points of failure in the Twitter case was the singular control that one company has over the protocol, over discovery, and over distribution of the content.
And if those were separated just a bit, I think the people have more ownership over that.
So when you think of things like Bitcoin, or you think of a distributed decentralized protocol that I love, which is Nostr, these are services that have no leads, They're not controlled by any one company, not controlled by any one government.
There's no one person leading them.
They are truly permissionless.
So if I want to build something to make Bitcoin better for myself or for millions of people, I can do it without asking for permission from a CEO or from a government agency or from anyone.
The same is true for Noster, which is building something equivalent to Twitter and ultimately, I hope, which will support Twitter.
Because it removes some of the burden that Twitter feels today, and it will continue to feel from government agencies, from customers, and also from advertisers, until they've truly diversified their revenue stream and they build resilience against just, you know, being dependent upon one ad model.
That's fantastic and important.
If you want to ask questions to Jack, you have to join our Locals Community.
Press the red button on your screen now to join our Locals Community to ask questions like this one.
Jack, I'm almost reluctant to say this out loud to you, but it's from our chat.
Chief411, why did you allow the US government to use Twitter to mislead the American people?
Now, you might need to provide some contacts Context for that, Chief 411.
If you're watching us on YouTube, I don't think Jack is able to answer that question on YouTube, because it's clear that we're talking about the pandemic.
So to hear the answer to that question, why did you allow the American government to mislead the American people, click the red button.
If you're on Rumble, join us on Locals.
If you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in the description.
Join us over on there because we're talking about free speech to someone whose opinion matters,
to someone who's in the position of knowledge, understanding,
and also in a position, I believe, to change these dynamics.
So, click the link in the description, join us on the comb of free speech rumble.
So Jack, I would add to that question, why did you allow, I'd add to that out of respect,
because as you know I'm English and I see you as a person that I want to form an alliance with,
did you indeed allow the US government to use Twitter to mislead the American people?
I guess we're talking about the Hunter Biden laptop story and presumably the shutting down of the debate around the coronavirus pandemic.
I suppose like my personal observations was not just Twitter, all social media and certainly mainstream media censored information in the words of your peer Mark Zuckerberg were ultimately debatable Or true.
And I can't help but thinking your endorsement for RFK is the revelation.
And in what you've already said in this fascinating conversation, is an appetite for you to improve free speech, improve decentralised models of communication.
So what do you think about Atchi41's question?
You know, we have a lot of pretty out there people in our chat, thankfully.
How do you feel about even that question, really?
I welcome the question.
I welcome the critique.
It's the only way I'm gonna learn.
I mean, the simplest answer is on me.
I wasn't paying enough attention.
My focus was growing Twitter.
And, you know, we were in an extreme deficit when I came back as CEO.
And just to survive as a company, as a public company, as a service, we had to turn things around.
So I had to focus my time on particular things.
I do think, you know, we were a U.S.
company.
When your U.S.
company incorporated Delaware, bound by U.S.
law, any inquiry, any push by the hosting government of your service, of your company, of how your employees get money to feed their families, feels strong.
It feels like, you know, you have to act on it, and it's It's yet another one of those things that just puts pressure including, you know, the threat of advertisers leaving, the threat of people leaving, the amount of times we saw RIP Twitter for policy changes we made or functionality changes we made was immense.
I think it was, you know, every three months we would read about how Twitter is dying because of something that we did.
I think Twitter is ultimately resilient, and the team and the service did push back on a lot of those requests, too, and you can see those in the Twitter files.
It didn't push back on all.
I was surprised.
I didn't see all those emails that were coming in to us.
I didn't see all those requests.
I wasn't aware of everything.
I was surprised by the volume.
I was not surprised that they were happening.
There were significant mistakes we made, like the Hunter Biden laptop story.
And the key issue there was blocking a publication and shutting down their account.
I do believe we reversed that within 24 hours, but the New York Post continued to lock out their account because they didn't want to delete the tweet.
And then that was our policy, and we didn't change our policy.
But I do believe the company had a capacity to admit its mistakes.
I think we were fairly open, not as open as we could have been.
And I don't believe anyone in the company was intending to mislead anyone.
And, you know, it was a company that felt really strongly about humanity.
They may have different ideas from everyone else, but that's part of the problem, is we have this single point of failure.
We have people in the company, whether that be me, whether that be engineers, whether that be policymakers within the company, who could inject bias into their decisions and into policy.
And to me, the only way around that is to remove that element, put that policy into code itself, so that everyone can actually see it if they want to, if they want to work, do the work to understand it.
But ultimately, that is not owned by any one organization.
That, to me, is the most critical learning that I had.
And, you know, I regret, you know, not paying enough attention and All I know to do now is to fix those mistakes so they can never happen again in that way, and hopefully in ways that we're not even talking about right now.
Especially with the rise of AI and all this new regulation around the world, it's critical that if we do want platforms around free speech, around free expression, That we look towards protocols that are not owned by companies, by governments, and have no single leaders.
Oh, Jack, I mean, man, that is so fascinating to hear someone in your position say that and this is my interpretation.
I recognize this is not exactly what you said, but sometimes it feels to me listening to you that you are on a kind of journey of atonement.
I know that is a very sort of spiritual word and I certainly do not feel like I'm in a position to make any judgment because having been a person even with my own version of celebrity, I know these things.
I know that I've seen people say, Oh, Russell Brand, he's controlled opposition.
He's a person that's like in this space in order to ensure that true.
And I said, God, am I, am I not asking the right questions?
Am I not doing things?
Am I still selfish?
What are my limitations as a man?
Am I do, am I doing enough?
And I can't imagine what it's like to come up with a platform like Twitter.
I can't even, I don't even know how you do a thing like that.
And to see it grow exponentially to, I can't imagine that even the greatest visionary on
earth would say, "Oh look, I've invented this thing.
People can do micro blogs.
What happened here is the media will start using this.
Celebrities will have unprecedented access to their audience.
Then it will become politicized.
Then it will become polarized.
Then it will become commercialized and commodified.
Then it will become a source of propaganda."
Who's going to be able to preempt that when you're just like nerding out somewhere, like
inventing something.
It seems to me like a difficult thing to preempt.
But when you find Twitter in this extraordinary position of being able to ban, I don't know
if he was still president or former president, like Trump's ban, that's where we start to
sense that privately owned entities have a power that supersedes political power.
I think what a lot of people said at the time was, "ISIS are on there, but Trump isn't."
What do you think led to that kind of decision?
Because in a sense, you've already given us your answer.
You don't think any one person should be in power.
That's what I believe.
Because I think there's ideas that are right for me, that other people wouldn't want to live by.
I want to raise my children in a way that other people wouldn't want to raise their children.
Why would I spend the rest of my life arguing about that?
Just like you raise your children, now you want to raise my children, now I want to end.
But what I'd like to sort of ask you is, how do you feel about where it got Jack?
You know, it got so powerful that Trump could be kicked off of there, and it sort of, I think, contributed to that sense that, oh, there's this new woke revolution, the Democrat Party are controlled by financial interests and are pretending that they care about people, but they don't.
Trump's just a loudmouth version of everything else.
A lot of people on our platform absolutely love Donald Trump, but me, I agree with you.
Decentralisation, no individuals.
We're all flawed, for God's sake.
So, how do you feel about that particular issue, if I may ask, sir?
I, well, I feel bad about it.
I feel bad that we had to take that action.
Um, I, um, you know, it was, it was a challenging time and I, I do believe the company was working in the, with its best efforts, with the information it had.
Um, but as I said, a few days after that, uh, suspension, I believe it was probably the right decision for the company, but the wrong decision for the world.
And we saw a lot of follow-on companies, such as AWS, take Parler off their services and being removed from the App Store.
And I think it opened a gate that I'm not proud of at all.
And, you know, it was another one of those moments of, I don't want to do... I don't think this can work this way.
I don't want to do this.
It just...
Independent of who this person was or anyone that we permanently suspended off the network, it felt wrong to me, and I was always searching for a different solution, but I just did not come up with a solution within that structure, and I could not figure it out.
I don't know.
Personally, it was heartbreaking.
All of these actions that we took and actions that we didn't take as well.
I grew up as a punk.
I loved punk music.
I loved the ethos.
I loved the hip-hop ethos.
I loved questioning the system.
I didn't have a job, like a real job, until I was 29 years old.
I was an independent contractor.
I only worked on open-source stuff.
I never wanted to be an entrepreneur.
I never wanted to build a company.
I never wanted to be a CEO.
It was the path to grow Twitter and I had to learn what I had to learn and in that I learned what I had forgotten as well.
What I'd forgotten about what I loved about the internet and why I'm here in the first place and how grateful I am to the people that truly built a decentralized internet that a lot of companies, our peers, whether that be Google or Facebook or, you know, Yahoo, all these things Centralized a lot of the internet that we used and that felt very, very free.
And now I think there's different answers and I just want to spend the rest of my life making sure those different answers work.
Yeah, that seems like a beautiful mission because I, as I indicated in an earlier question Jack, sense that we are in a precipitous place.
Whether it's the new EU proposed legislation to be able to fine social media platforms if they do not comply and censor, that's a bill that's going through now, Each of the Five Eyes countries, those are the countries that Snowden's revelations revealed shared data on their domestic populations, the anglophonic countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, UK, those countries are all simultaneously trying to pass legislation that amount to anti-free speech laws.
As always, it's leveraged on understandable issues that any sane person would agree with.
Child pornography should be stopped.
Everyone agrees with that.
Hate speech is not optimal.
But I can't help but feel, Jack, that these issues are used to leverage a centralised and authoritarian model in a space that clearly doesn't need Centralised authoritarianism.
This is obviously, in my view, this is just my opinion, an attempt to retain a 20th century power model in a cyber space that can afford decentralisation, which seems like a necessary social step.
It's clear to me that independent media Necessarily becomes independently political because how long can you talk about information without pointing out laws are getting passed all around the world to censor, to surveil, to control, to social credit score, to shut down.
Once open spaces like Twitter, Facebook, Google, all bought about, let's assume, by idealistic entrepreneurs.
I'm touched by your words, saying you as a punk, you didn't want to end up a CEO that's
working for the man, in inverted commas, and yet what happens is stories end up being censored,
plainly in order to benefit the establishment, that's just my opinion.
Political decisions get made that were right, in your words, for the company, but not right
That, for me, is an earth-shattering revelation.
And where we are now, it seems to me, is we precisely need to establish modes of communication, modes of media, modes of democracy, and modes of election that can respond to these changes.
Otherwise, what we are going to get I do.
is the kind of centralized globalist authority that are actually regarded as wacko conspiracy
theories.
I can see the map of that model being laid out before us.
Do you think that's where we're heading?
And do you think that there's a chance that your journey of atonement can begin to challenge
such gargantuan centralizing forces?
I do.
I think it comes back to these single points of failure.
If you have a CEO that can be called before Congress, you're compromised.
And that technology is compromised.
If you're entirely dependent upon one revenue stream, you're compromised.
And everything that you do is essentially compromised.
And you can fight it.
And, you know, companies will fight it.
But it's ultimately a losing battle based on the foundation you're building upon.
And the only true answer is to build upon a different foundation, a foundation of open protocols
that's not owned by anyone.
And you know, the fortunate thing is that no, absolutely no one has to trust me with these things.
And they're designed in such a way that they should never trust me.
And they continue to work.
I could die tomorrow, and the things would keep humming.
It's not dependent upon any one person or any one government passing any particular laws or regulation.
It's up to the people.
And the policy is actually in the code itself.
And anyone can change it, bring it to the market.
If the market likes it, more and more people use it, that's the winner.
It's all driven by consensus instead of top-down direction.
And I think that's really, really important.
To address a bunch of the issues that you just brought up.
That's true, I think.
In your phrase, which sounds like the kind of thing that a coder would come up with, single point of failure, I would sort of see that more as, all of us are fallible.
Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs not between nations, creeds, races, or people, but through every human heart.
The inevitability of individual fallibility has to be addressed At the outset, through the models we create.
And for me, there's something about the Internet that is reflective of our potential to evolve.
That we are, that somehow, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence are represented in the Internet.
And if you allow that kind of power to be seized in the same way that land was seized a couple of hundred years ago, the way that finance was seized a hundred years ago, then this will be unprecedented centralised control.
It's great to hear that the solutions you're suggesting are precisely the kind of solutions I think could work.
When you heard... Can I just ask you this?
It seems like a question a lot of people want the answer to.
What was your emotional reaction when you heard that Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter, Jack?
I was overjoyed.
I've been trying to get Elon onto the board for quite some time.
He was one of our biggest customers, our biggest users.
I was immediately drawn to his usage because it was authentic it was vulnerable it was transparent and it was always on it was real time and he made you know he he says what was on his mind there was there was no no filter and and i love that and he is obviously a technologist um and an entrepreneur one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time
So I have deep, deep respect for him.
And I left the company.
He invested or he bought, I think, 9% of the company.
And he agreed to join the board.
Unfortunately, I think what he saw within that week of being on the board, I don't know if he was technically on the board, he realized a different answer, which was, I want to take this private.
And that was my hope for it as well, because I just don't think it can exist and persist as a public company, given all the incentives that that puts upon it.
Unfortunately, it was just really bad timing.
And the ad market, the digital ad market, crashed.
All the COVID correction that zoomed these companies up, like Zoom, like Amazon, like Apple, like Google, like Facebook, like Snapchat, suddenly that floor fell away.
And every single company around them, especially within ads, just dropped in value massively.
And That timing and that, you know, that decision to buy before that happened, I think, unfortunately, set up a series of events that, you know, didn't feel great.
I don't think... It became ultimately pretty reactive, in my view, and it put upon him a pretty immense constraint and burden.
to reduce the cost of the company as quickly as possible.
There was a lot of debt put upon the company and solving for that is not easy and I think that created an urgency that just created a bunch of reactive decisions, none of which I necessarily disagree with over the long term, it's just how they were rolled out.
But I believe, you know, I still own two to three percent of the company.
I didn't sell any of my shares.
I made no money on that deal.
All of my equity is with Ivan right now.
I believe in him.
I believe that he will figure things out.
And I believe, and I want to do as much as possible to help Remove some of that burden because he is another single point of failure.
He is another person controlling these policies and these features and how we engage with these experiences.
And my hope and my desire is that we can build technologies like Bitcoin and Oster, which are truly open protocols, and Twitter can build on top of them and remove a bunch of the liability they have.
Remove a bunch of the constraints that are going to be put upon them by foreign governments and our own government and the private market and Wall Street in the future.
So I think there's a path of intersection.
I think it makes Twitter even stronger.
And I think if there's anyone to do it and anyone to see value in that, I think it's Elon.
He believes in open source as well.
He's open sourced a bunch of Tesla for the greater good of the energy market, but also the greater good of Tesla.
You got more competitive electronic vehicle car makers using your grid, everybody
wins.
And that competition is fairly collaborative.
Principles like integrity, authenticity and transparency seem to run through the kind of proposals that you are
making, Jack.
Is it not going to be necessary on the economic level to regulate and decentralize these companies that have this vast amount of power in order to facilitate that?
If companies like Apple and Google, and Facebook of course, have the Amazon, have the amount of influence and power, are able to avoid in many cases paying domestic tax, are able to break down unions, is there not a requirement that beyond what you're suggesting for providing alternative open source platforms, that we also have to break down these structures on an economic level?
Is something this vast Not always going to be a tool for centralization and globalism.
Doesn't it have to at some point, legislatively, have to be decentralized?
I don't know if that's necessarily... it's not my preferred answer.
My preferred answer is that we built something that solves a bunch of those problems and that people choose it because it solves their problems.
And these models such as the App Store centralization and Apple's stranglehold on what apps are in the App Store and what apps are not, and how much you pay to Apple for that privilege, currently it's 30% of any revenue that goes over the App Store.
If we can build alternative models on the free web, on these free protocols, and they actually have quality developers and quality apps upon them, which I have no doubt they will, because they did before these structures existed, then the market is chosen.
And that regulation of an app store, potentially to break it up, is kind of for for not uh you know it may have mattered for a few short years but ultimately i believe the you know the market and the people will choose the the outcomes that are needed for them as long as they have the right technologies to do so and that those technologies are open and free and permissionless most importantly
Do you feel that that fundamentally becomes political?
This model of communication, this model, this advance in technology has already redefined the way that politics takes space.
I can't believe that there's not a connection between the type of regulation and legislation
that's being proposed almost at a global level, albeit through a few different bureaucratic
agencies, whether it's the EU, the UN or the five countries that I just listed, which significantly
include the United States, to me must be a response to the capacity for decentralised,
radical, independent movement in media and indeed politics.
The couple of examples of the anomalies that I imagine these new regulations are there
to prevent are Brexit in our country, Trump in your country and indeed the emergence of
RFK.
I can't believe that the people that are responsible for this legislation aren't predicting
that the way that media space and political space is altering could lead to truly radical
political movements.
It could lead to opt-out communities where people say, "We don't want to pay your taxes,
we're not repaying your debt, we're going to transact in this decentralised currency,
we're going to communicate through these modalities, we don't consider ourselves part of Canada
or France or England or America or whatever nation, we're part of a new separate alliance."
There's nothing to suggest that the nation-state is the zenith of all possible political evolution.
When we're talking about radical change, politically, culturally, ecologically, What does that mean?
You know, everything has to be on the table.
You can't say we want radical change, but we have to have our flags stay the same, though.
I've learned the song now, I've learned the anthem.
Everything has to be up for change.
Do you think that these regulations and legislations are to prohibit that?
And what use are the kind of technologies you're discussing, Jack, if they're not backed by political discourse?
I think you're absolutely spot on on the trend.
I think the trend is more towards hyper local communities.
I think smaller governance models is more important that are actually connected with one another.
I think it's already happening.
You're seeing this in the US.
Florida looks completely different from California, which looks completely different from Texas, and people are choosing to vote with their feet and to go to a governance that they ascribe to.
And I think that's going to happen more globally and I think it's to your point around nation states like you know this concept of a micro nation state that actually has an understanding of what its people are feeling on the ground because it's in it's within that community versus today where we have decisions being made many by unelected officials a lot of these regulators are unelected they're appointed Um, who have so many abstractions between themselves and the actual people so much so many levels of indirection that they can't possibly make policies that that solves for all.
So is there a, um, A fight to keep it all together?
Absolutely.
And I don't think it'll win.
I just think the trend is in the opposite direction.
And now, fortunately, we have the tools to actually make that possible.
And I think that's a trend that's been happening over time.
All of these things that we're seeing, what you said earlier about Twitter starting as this little thing and then being used potentially by governments all around the world to influence, That rhymes with every single technology we've ever built, whether that be television, radio, newspaper, the printing press, like all of these have the similar models.
And all we can do is make the technology more and more resilient, more and more in the hands of the individual.
And ultimately, I think the biggest problem to solve is one of discovery.
How do I find Your podcast.
How do I find your work?
How do I find your voice?
That is what ultimately was centralized in the late 90s with the rise of Google and Facebook and Twitter and AOL and all these companies, is that we got the discovery problem really, really good.
And it was so good that people, waking up, we were the first consideration.
If I have a question, of course I'm going to Google.
There's no other consideration.
Because they nailed the discovery model.
They nailed that discovery problem.
And if we solve that, if we make that decentralized, which I believe we can, it upends so many different things and so much of what has happened in the world, especially with technology and its relationship with the individual, which I do believe is predatory.
It's a predatory relationship where they are looking to ultimately control attention and freedom itself.
It's interesting that many abstract ideas like BF Skinner's ideas on behaviouralism, nudges, you know, in our country, the UK, during the pandemic, there was a nudge unit that was designed to offer, essentially to get people to take medications who weren't really in the demographic that were most affected by, you know, by COVID.
Let's just call it as it was.
Now, the potential to manipulate consciousness is so, as you say, it's so plausible that it must be, and indeed by your words and by your reckoning, has become predatory.
I'm struck, Jack, by the corollary between technology and mysticism.
I'll explain that in a very sort of parochial and anecdotal way.
When I was first introduced To Twitter, like, it was like my major honour from Ross, he's like a TV presenter in our country, hosts like all the big shows, he's like our lemon or whatever.
Like, he was like, look at this thing, Twitter, you can just talk to people, it's mental.
And I was like, wow!
It's incredible!
And people were like, hey, I love you!
And it was all so sort of friendly and joyful and like, it felt like magic.
It felt like, oh my god, I could just communicate with people all over the world.
It felt like something so beautiful.
But it was later, his wife, Jane, that said, you know, if you went to a pub, and like, when you first went to that pub, everyone was really nice and convivial, and, hey, come in, have fun, sit down.
And then you went back to that pub a year later, and everyone was like, hey, you, why don't you go fuck yourself?
You know, like that's kind of what happened to Twitter.
It turned into this sort of place of darkness and gossip and cruelty and nastiness and oppositionism and sort of so weighed down in ugliness.
And that was extraordinary.
That was almost before it became, I believe, a sort of tool of the kind of centralised
interests, be they state or private and corporate, that it felt like it could relieve us from.
Like we can directly communicate with one another.
Trump I think became so notable because he became the master of it.
He was a person who sort of had the skills to sort of go, "I'm going to bypass all your
bullshit.
People are going to believe me rather than you.
It's over."
And in a sense, like, Musk's acquisition of your platform is...
I think was the phrase you used.
a legitimate inheritance because he also seems to understand it in some intuitive, essential
way, as you described earlier.
He's an organic user, I think was the phrase you used.
But it seems that what we're experiencing is the realization of something that would
have once been purely miraculous, and yet it is being colonized by the type of forces
that colonize everything.
So we are at an epochal moment and I think the signs of that are everywhere.
Bureaucratically and legislatively, what's happening with the EU and the questions we've touched upon.
But also in other news stories, and if you've got anything to say about my previous rant, bear it in mind, as I offer you this question from our chat.
This is a Locals member, and if you want to join us on Locals, press the red button and join us there now.
It is a decentralised community as far as I understand, I bloody hope it is.
This is from SMP2K.
Jack's last tweet was a UFO emoji.
What do you think about the subject of UFOs, military whistleblowers?
How do you feel about all that, Jack?
I tweeted that because it's World UFO Day yesterday.
I feel there's definitely something out there.
I feel they're probably with us.
I feel we will never get the information unless someone like RFK is elected president.
Because his one promise is that the government will tell the truth, to be transparent.
Obviously there are limitations to that for public safety, but that is refreshing.
I don't know any other way to answer that question than to understand what we've seen, what we haven't seen, what we think about it, and to bring other governments around the world into that same fold.
It only betters us.
Yeah and it seems now a lot of people know a lot of our community think oh this is a distraction it's being promoted now to keep our eyes off of stuff that's happening at the political level but I've been interested in this stuff for a long time I'm friends with like Jeremy Corbell who talks about it a lot and I've spoken to some pretty high profile and credible journalists who say that these are legitimate whistleblowers and that the CIA and deep state agencies are not happy about this stuff coming out and they're having a role with it it's not sort of like the kind of uh False flag operation that we've become sort of attuned to spot in these days.
Just to, like, Leah, I want to sort of circle back on something I was saying a minute ago
about the sort of incredible potential and how, like, what the optimism around Twitter
when it was created, that it seemed like some sort of mercurial, alchemical, magical power
that we all held in our hands that meant we could connect and be funny and share culture
around the world that ultimately becomes this sort of weapon and the subject of all this
controversy and hate speech and all these kind of things that have sort of swirled around it.
I can't help but think, in part, given some of the things you've said about what your
plans are for the future, what your intentions are, how important transparency is to you,
decentralisation, your sort of fundamental principle that you don't want there to be
any authoritative figure that can be held up before Congress in the way that you were,
that that in itself means that there's a flaw in the model.
I can't help but feel that you are now, in a way, devoting your life to creating alternatives to these corruptible models.
Is that fair, Jack?
100%.
I'm dedicating my entire life to it.
I think the model that Twitter started in the early days and like when the magic that we felt and that I think you felt was it was like tapping into global consciousness.
I could be anywhere in the world and I could actually see people's thoughts.
I could see how they're thinking and that felt so amazing.
It felt like telepathy.
And it's probably the closest thing we have to it.
And, you know, I think it is ultimately a reflection of who we are and what society is.
And I don't think that's a bad thing, even though it might feel bad in the moment.
It's up to us to acknowledge that and choose to see that reflection and to make changes.
And I think we're in that period right now.
I think we're in the period of questioning these abstractions.
I think we're in the period of questioning the incentives.
And looking for much better answers.
And I'm so optimistic that we'll arrive at them.
It's going to be extremely painful.
It's going to take a while.
We have to be patient.
Not everything is going to happen immediately.
But slow and deliberate wins the race.
And as long as we continue to build open models that are truly owned by the people and not just individuals, not just individual institutions and governments, Um, they, they can't be compromised.
By definition, they cannot be compromised.
Yeah, so you don't, in a sense, that's like handing it over to God, the universe, something beyond the fallibility of humankind.
There's a few questions.
These are some of these are my questions.
If you guys have questions in the chat, then please send them through to me and Jack.
I wanted to, like, sort of a mixture of intense things and not that intense things.
One is, like, Julian Assange.
What do you think about Julian Assange being in the position he's in, mate?
Oh, he should be freed and pardoned.
The same with Snowden, the same with Ross.
Yeah, thanks.
Blue Sky, tell us a little bit about Blue Sky, like, which is, I understand, a new thing you're working on.
Two years before I left the company, as I said, I realized a bunch of what was working and what wasn't working as a corporation.
When you see the service versus the company, and I was very much focused on the service and what it could do for the world, I realized we needed to build a protocol.
We needed to build an open source protocol that was not owned by us, and we funded A individual who had built a protocol.
It's completely independent from Twitter.
We gave them $13 or $14 million to build this up.
And they just launched it.
And it's one such experiment and path towards a more decentralized model.
There's another one I discovered which was not Directed by me or created by me and that is Noster.
I have a lot of belief in this one because it is the person who created it is a pseudonym.
He has no ego in the game whatsoever.
He's extremely opinionated.
It is entirely permissionless.
Anyone can build upon it instead of where Blue Sky right now.
A lot of it is still a bit centralized.
It's not truly decentralized yet.
It will get there.
But Nostra is completely decentralized and it really struck a chord with me in terms of how these things should be built.
So I've been doing everything I can to help it, to fund it.
I gave 14 Bitcoin to this student I'd never met.
I have no idea who this person is.
I think he lives somewhere in Brazil.
But I just believe in what he's created so much and how How good it is for the world that I wanted to make sure that he could focus entirely on it.
And there's a whole huge community now that are building upon it.
Unfortunately, the biggest client for it in iOS, Apple just forced them to remove one of the most significant features of this platform, which was being able to send Bitcoin to one another for free.
So for any post, you could actually what's called zap a post and you could get Pennies.
You could get 25 cents.
You could get $15.
The internet has never had micropayments.
This is what we've been dreaming about for 40 years.
If Twitter was started after Bitcoin, we would not be dependent upon the ad model.
We would not have many of the constraints and the issues and the burdens that we grew up with.
Because the internet never had a payment model that was native to it, such as Bitcoin, The ad model rose.
And that's where I think a lot of the predatory practices came from.
And that's what I want to fix.
I want to provide another option around.
That's really interesting because it seems that while I earlier in a more pessimistic way pointed out that I can see the mapping and conditions of a centralized authoritarian global model that will undergird its authority by saying it's for your security and to protect you from misinformation, disinformation, and corrupt and bad actors out there. Also you can see
necessarily the alternative, the if not utopian, certainly a model that is more respectful of freedom.
Individual transactions without some media in model, independent media, communities that do not
share the same geographical space but are timelessly connected, the ability as you indicated
earlier to almost read one another's thoughts. So there is the possibility for you know like
almost what we're seeing in the authoritarianism is the shadow cast by this new possibility,
by the light of this new possibility.
Which I feel is deeply connected to spiritual practice in a more traditional sense.
Now, I know that a lot of... Well, I saw one mainstream media story that said that you were basically mad now because you'd grown a beard and were only eating one meal a day and were having salt shakes and ice baths.
Now, it's not jars of urine, but you... I want to check your fingernails are short before we go much further with this conversation.
That's good.
You're not gone full Howard Hughes.
You're not making a wooden airplane or anything out there, are you?
What's with the salt shakes, the ice baths, the eating one meal a day, and also what's with hanging out with Jay-Z and Beyonce?
What's going on?
I mean, I know you have a meditation practice.
I've always been interested in how I work, and I want to improve it every day.
I was doing one meal a day like 10 years ago, and I was doing ice baths like seven years ago.
I think I was pretty early with a lot of these things, and I did Five years in a row of Vipassana meditation, so the 10-day silent retreat, and all these things I learned from.
And I'm so grateful for the ability to experiment with these practices.
I've never felt healthier, and I've never felt clearer.
And I listen to podcasts like yours.
To discover some of these new things to try and I truly believe there's a saying in the Bitcoin community, don't trust, verify.
Don't trust, verify.
And I've taken that on for almost all my life.
I want to experience it myself and come up with my own conclusions and that those conclusions match others and that I can build upon them.
I found a community of people, including Jay, who feel like that, and do question a lot, and do have a bunch of pushbacks on the systems that we're talking about.
Maybe not as vocal in their everyday, but certainly within their music.
We bought Jay's company, Tidal, Because we see an opportunity to fix what's broken with musicians and specifically the contracts are put on, how they get paid, how they don't get paid, how they reach their fan base.
And I think as you consider AI and what AI is doing in terms of removing mechanical work, There's going to be a lot more people trying to do what you're doing, for instance, trying to do what Jay is doing, trying to do arts and creativity.
I think more of our work moves to creative... content is the wrong word, but creative production.
and creative consumption.
I think that the extremely tangible things of this mechanical work are coming more and more to a close.
It will always be necessary, it will always be part of it.
But the industry and the economy is moving more towards creativity.
And it was important for me that we had answers to that.
And we had answers that were global.
And that again, go towards a model where the people own it and the people benefit the most and we're not building predatory
models against the artists. And there's so many predatory models
against artists and specifically musicians today.
Someone's asking, is your...
uh, apologeticpest says, "Is your 1 meal a 10 course meal?"
Don't be so childish.
These are kind of, these are kind of ridiculous questions that are going to break down this revolution that we're working on.
Um, I like that thing you said, don't trust verify.
I just want to ask you, this is pretty speculative and almost impossible to ask, but with your personal experiences where you're clearly investigating consciousness, Do you intuit that there is something unique about consciousness that cannot be replicated through technology?
While technology might be able to create intelligence through pattern recognition, consciousness is separate.
It is the crucible for information and intelligence and might even precede matter.
As a person who understands both the coding that creates these machines of vast intelligence and as a practitioner of meditation, Do you have a personal awareness of the distinction between consciousness and intelligence?
A hundred percent.
To your first point, to your first question, I believe we build technologies to... The technologies we build are really rebuilding our understanding of consciousness and our understanding of the human experience.
And I think they're a crutch.
I think all of the capabilities that we're building in technology, we're born with.
And maybe these technologies help us unlock them.
And if we see them as replacement instead of assistant and a way to reflect what we're born with and how to, you know, potentially, I know, I, I know you meditate a lot.
I know you've, you've found unlocks in your own consciousness and you found powers, whether they be small or large, um, in, in your view that you may have always thought you had, but kind of forgot or have been abstracted away.
And I've had that experience as well.
We all have it.
It's called intuition.
It's called coincidence.
There's so many of these occurrences that we quickly label and move to the side to then focus on what we are told is important that we lose sight of what is truly important which is what we're born with and I believe that technology can bring us back to that.
I don't think it's always seen that way.
It's seen as something that's scary and again as a replacement but It's only going to replace us if we choose to make it replace us.
It doesn't have to.
When you undergird these ideas with the materialistic model, then it becomes about commodity and replacement becomes possible.
But when you have a spiritual model, and by spiritual I simply mean that which is not material or measurable, discernible through the senses, and yet, as you say intuitively there, they become tools, they become an advancement on fire, the wheel, or flint axes, rather than a replacement for human beings, and love, and personal connection, and the divine felt experience of nature within yourself right now in this moment, the presence of God, Mate, we do this festival called Community that's between the 14th of July and the 17th of July.
Come!
Come there.
Wim Hof is going to be there doing ice baths and stuff like that.
Vandana Shiva, world teacher, she will be there.
We'll put you where you'll fit in.
No one will recognise you anyway.
Everyone else looks like you anyway.
Just people with beards, wandering around, coming up with theories.
Just most of them can't turn it into an international platform within the hour.
Yeah, where is it?
It's on the River Wye, the border between Celtic Wales and Saxon England.
It's sort of a mystical place.
We did it there last year.
It's a pretty amazing festival.
It's kind of drug-free as far as we know, though we would not Thank you.
Yeah.
Happy to.
No, no, no.
Forward.
substances in if that was their thing.
But there's no alcohol or anything like that there.
And so people do jujitsu there and breath work and cold plunges and stuff like that.
You'd be most welcome there.
And I would obviously look after you as best as I could facilitate.
So you're most welcome to come if you want to.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And I'll talk to you on the stage and interview about this stuff.
You know, I'd take advantage of the facts, not in an exploitative way, I hope,
but in a sensible way.
I appreciate it.
No, no, no.
All right, mate, we'll- - We'll have a conversation.
We'll work out the admin.
Now this, we started off talking about RFK and how his candidature could be significant
at a time where centralising forces are coalescing, looking to censor, surveil, shut down debate,
find ways in order, they say, to prevent hate or child pornography or things that all of
us would think should be curtailed and stopped wherever possible.
They're using that to close down free speech and free communication.
That's why we both, you and I, believe that the candidature of RFK is important.
Now I was speaking to RFK and his wife earlier this week and I've ludicrously, and now I
realise stupidly, agreed to do this pull-up challenge to raise money for his campaign.
We're going to do pull-ups.
Now I already know that RFK is better than me at pull-ups because I've seen him with his top off and he looks like a gnarly old man.
All sort of like sun-kissed and like some mad old farmer's body.
And now we're going to do a pull-up competition which he's going to win.
The website is kennedy24.com forward slash Paul for Kennedy.
We've got to get to $100,000, which is a small number for some people, Jack.
I wondered if you'd be willing to make some sort of digital donation to that if we do it.
I'd be down.
I'm actually talking with RFK Jr today, this afternoon.
Well, tell him about the pull-up competition and tell him that I'm going to undermine his campaign by saying that he's juicing from the get-go.
Even though I think he's been quite outspoken about Big Pharma, I'm going to say, that guy's jabbing himself with steroids day and night to win this thing!
Only one way to be sure to test it.
Oh yeah, test and write!
Verify!
Don't trust verify.
Although from a spiritual perspective, Jack, I've got questions.
We'll go deeper on that when we get the time.
Jack, thank you so much for joining us and for providing such a transparent Open and human appreciation of the position we're in.
I think people don't know what it's like to find yourself in a position of incredible power and that you end up dealing with a variety of vectors and certainly I understand differently more than I ever have done.
Oh yeah, imagine if you've got the complexity of running a company, you're dealing with the American government, One thing I thought I've heard once was, you know when they made that documentary about O.J.
Simpson?
O.J.
used to, you know, this was before when O.J.
Simpson was just a regular athlete, people used to go, well why aren't you doing what Muhammad Ali's doing?
You know, it's like, well that dude's a pretty fucking out there person.
Like, all of us are on a journey and we're all moving at different paces, you know?
And I think that one of the ways we're going to form new alliances is with open hearts, open communication, a willingness to explore new territory.
And you've demonstrated A lot of real morality to me today.
Thank you, Jack.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Russell.
And thank you for giving me the space and also, again, everything you're doing for independent media and independent thought.
Thanks, man.
Stay on the line.
Can we exchange numbers so I can harass you and harangue you about stuff?
Absolutely.
Thanks, Jack.
Thanks.
Well, what a fantastic conversation.
If you want to join those kind of conversations live, join us on Locals.
People are there in a live conversation now, like Imagination and SensitiveHearts25, all sending love to Jack.
Tomorrow, we are being joined live in an extraordinary event.
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We're going to relight it.
You've got to make sure Tucker Carlson looks fantastic, feels fantastic.
Send us your questions for Tucker right now.
Hit the red join button and join us live for the conversation.
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Why do anything except enjoy continual pleasure?
As well as these exclusive and fantastic conversations, you get weekly meditations, podcast recordings, We've got such an exciting guest coming up.
I wish I could tell you.
See if you can guess who it's going to be.
No, don't guess, because then you'll give it away.
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I knew it!
Look at it!
Such an exciting guest coming up, I wish I could tell you.
See if you can guess who it's gonna be.
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I'm so excited about this guest, I won't text him.
Oh, them.
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