WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.399 Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening 00:00:03.399 --> 00:00:06.679 up a file on a figure who I think is just genuinely 00:00:06.679 --> 00:00:09.300 misunderstood. I completely agree. And I don't 00:00:09.300 --> 00:00:10.660 mean that in some kind of, you know, oh poor 00:00:10.660 --> 00:00:13.800 billionaire way. I mean that the public image 00:00:13.800 --> 00:00:16.780 of him, the perception, is so often diametrically 00:00:16.780 --> 00:00:20.399 opposed to what the data actually shows. We are 00:00:20.399 --> 00:00:22.820 talking about Jack Dorsey. It is such a fascinating 00:00:22.820 --> 00:00:25.100 case study. I mean, usually when we profile the 00:00:25.100 --> 00:00:27.320 giants of Silicon Valley, you know, the founders 00:00:27.320 --> 00:00:30.179 who hit that multibillion dollar tier, we see 00:00:30.179 --> 00:00:32.719 a very specific psychological profile. Right. 00:00:32.799 --> 00:00:35.859 We see the empire builder, the relentless drive 00:00:35.859 --> 00:00:39.520 to centralize, to acquire, to build the biggest, 00:00:39.640 --> 00:00:41.659 baddest walled garden possible. You look at a 00:00:41.659 --> 00:00:43.840 Zuckerberg, you look at Gates back in the 90s. 00:00:43.840 --> 00:00:46.380 It's all about consolidation of power. Exactly. 00:00:46.460 --> 00:00:49.079 The narrative is always I built the castle and 00:00:49.079 --> 00:00:52.390 I own. the keys but dorsey is he's weird he's 00:00:52.390 --> 00:00:54.829 an outlier yeah he built two massive castles 00:00:54.829 --> 00:00:56.829 twitter and square which of course is now block 00:00:56.829 --> 00:00:59.710 and for the last what five or six years he seems 00:00:59.710 --> 00:01:01.869 completely obsessed with melting down the keys 00:01:01.869 --> 00:01:04.069 and just handing out the scrap metal to strangers 00:01:04.069 --> 00:01:07.310 that is the paradox that's the central enigma 00:01:07.310 --> 00:01:11.780 we have to unpack today you have a man who is 00:01:11.780 --> 00:01:15.900 what 49 years old now 49 worth roughly 3 .8 billion 00:01:15.900 --> 00:01:20.739 dollars as of mid 2025. this is a person who 00:01:20.739 --> 00:01:23.480 fundamentally shaped how the world communicates 00:01:23.480 --> 00:01:26.359 and and how it transacts money yet if you look 00:01:26.359 --> 00:01:29.280 at his current obsession this whole freedom technology 00:01:29.280 --> 00:01:33.459 phase It's all about dismantling the very structures 00:01:33.459 --> 00:01:35.459 that made him powerful and rich in the first 00:01:35.459 --> 00:01:37.579 place. So what is it? That's the question we 00:01:37.579 --> 00:01:40.739 have to get to. Is this some kind of guilt? Is 00:01:40.739 --> 00:01:44.400 it a new galaxy brain strategy? Or, and this 00:01:44.400 --> 00:01:45.859 is the interesting one to me, is it actually 00:01:45.859 --> 00:01:47.640 the most consistent thing he's ever done? I think 00:01:47.640 --> 00:01:49.480 it's the third one. And to understand that, we 00:01:49.480 --> 00:01:51.510 have to get past the headlines. Oh, yeah. The 00:01:51.510 --> 00:01:53.689 beard, the ice baths, the silent retreats. We 00:01:53.689 --> 00:01:55.310 have to ignore all that for a minute and actually 00:01:55.310 --> 00:01:57.510 look at the source code. And we've got a massive 00:01:57.510 --> 00:01:59.569 stack of sources here. Biographies, corporate 00:01:59.569 --> 00:02:02.709 filings from the early days of Odeo, even the 00:02:02.709 --> 00:02:04.870 technical architecture of the early Twitter back 00:02:04.870 --> 00:02:06.629 end. And of course, the white papers for the 00:02:06.629 --> 00:02:08.729 new protocols he's funding. And when you read 00:02:08.729 --> 00:02:11.090 through all of that, a really clear picture emerges. 00:02:11.490 --> 00:02:14.370 You realize you can't possibly understand Twitter 00:02:14.370 --> 00:02:18.379 and you definitely can't understand. his fascination 00:02:18.379 --> 00:02:21.879 with Bitcoin without first understanding taxicabs. 00:02:21.960 --> 00:02:24.159 This is what you call the dispatch theory. It 00:02:24.159 --> 00:02:26.439 is the unifying theory of Jack Dorsey. It all 00:02:26.439 --> 00:02:28.479 comes back to dispatch. Okay, so let's start 00:02:28.479 --> 00:02:31.599 right there. Part one, the origin story. Yeah. 00:02:31.960 --> 00:02:34.120 Because before he was a tech mogul, before any 00:02:34.120 --> 00:02:36.259 of that, he was just a kid in St. Louis with 00:02:36.259 --> 00:02:38.659 a police scanner. That's exactly it. St. Louis, 00:02:38.780 --> 00:02:43.199 Missouri, born in 1976. And it was a very traditional 00:02:43.199 --> 00:02:46.159 Catholic upbringing. He went to Bishop Duberg 00:02:46.159 --> 00:02:48.460 High School. Pretty standard stuff on the surface. 00:02:48.699 --> 00:02:50.020 But inside the house, it was a little different. 00:02:50.139 --> 00:02:53.259 His father, Timothy, he wasn't just some generic 00:02:53.259 --> 00:02:55.919 engineer. He worked on mass spectrometers. Right. 00:02:55.979 --> 00:02:57.599 And let's just pause on that for a second, because 00:02:57.599 --> 00:02:59.479 mass spectrometer is one of those terms we all 00:02:59.479 --> 00:03:01.939 hear and we just kind of gloss over it. It sounds 00:03:01.939 --> 00:03:04.919 complicated. It is complicated, but what it does 00:03:04.919 --> 00:03:07.719 is simple to understand. It takes a messy reality, 00:03:08.039 --> 00:03:10.939 a substance, and it breaks it down into its most 00:03:10.939 --> 00:03:14.000 precise data -driven components. It tells you 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:16.020 exactly what something is made of. It's all about 00:03:16.020 --> 00:03:18.430 granularity. Precisely. It's about converting 00:03:18.430 --> 00:03:22.629 the physical world into pure, hard data. And 00:03:22.629 --> 00:03:25.990 his mother, Marcia, was a homemaker. So she was 00:03:25.990 --> 00:03:28.889 providing that stable home base for this very 00:03:28.889 --> 00:03:31.370 observant kid. And he was observant because he 00:03:31.370 --> 00:03:32.969 had to be, right? He had a speech impediment 00:03:32.969 --> 00:03:35.289 when he was young. He was shy. Very shy. So instead 00:03:35.289 --> 00:03:37.710 of talking, he just listened. And what he listened 00:03:37.710 --> 00:03:40.150 to was the city. The pulse of the city itself. 00:03:40.469 --> 00:03:42.610 Through the radio waves. Yeah, he became obsessed 00:03:42.610 --> 00:03:44.990 with maps, but not static maps. He didn't care 00:03:44.990 --> 00:03:47.289 about a paper map. He cared about dynamic maps. 00:03:47.569 --> 00:03:51.009 By the time he was 14, he was glued to police 00:03:51.009 --> 00:03:53.930 scanners, emergency frequencies, taxi dispatch 00:03:53.930 --> 00:03:57.169 channels. Now, most people, I think, listen to 00:03:57.169 --> 00:03:59.909 scanners for the drama. You know, there's a fire 00:03:59.909 --> 00:04:01.849 on Fifth Street or there's a robbery in progress. 00:04:02.310 --> 00:04:04.819 They want the story. They want the narrative. 00:04:04.979 --> 00:04:06.560 Jack didn't care about the narrative at all. 00:04:06.620 --> 00:04:08.599 He cared about the routing. He was listening 00:04:08.599 --> 00:04:11.520 to the syntax of the city. The system. The system. 00:04:11.620 --> 00:04:14.219 Think about what a dispatch system actually is. 00:04:14.280 --> 00:04:17.360 You have hundreds of these autonomous nodes moving 00:04:17.360 --> 00:04:20.420 around. Police cars, ambulances, couriers, taxis. 00:04:20.439 --> 00:04:22.939 They're all operating independently. But they're 00:04:22.939 --> 00:04:24.899 all reporting back. They're all reporting back 00:04:24.899 --> 00:04:27.560 to a central authority with these very short... 00:04:27.870 --> 00:04:31.149 Very structured bursts of data. Unit 1, 1023. 00:04:31.610 --> 00:04:34.850 Unit 5, en route to Mercy Hospital. Cab 7, heading 00:04:34.850 --> 00:04:37.329 to Lambert Airport. It's just a constant stream 00:04:37.329 --> 00:04:39.810 of two things, state and location. That's it. 00:04:39.930 --> 00:04:42.569 It's a real -time database of the physical world. 00:04:42.769 --> 00:04:45.269 And he wasn't just listening. He started writing 00:04:45.269 --> 00:04:47.649 software on his early computers to visualize 00:04:47.649 --> 00:04:50.430 this. He wanted to see the little dots moving 00:04:50.430 --> 00:04:53.050 on a map on his screen. He was trying to convert 00:04:53.050 --> 00:04:56.290 the chaotic noise of the radio into a clean visual 00:04:56.290 --> 00:04:58.550 interface of the city's pulse. That's such a 00:04:58.550 --> 00:05:00.949 crucial insight. He wasn't interested in why 00:05:00.949 --> 00:05:03.149 the ambulance was going somewhere. He was just 00:05:03.149 --> 00:05:05.750 interested in the raw fact of its movement and 00:05:05.750 --> 00:05:08.569 the efficiency of that movement. Exactly. And 00:05:08.569 --> 00:05:11.769 that obsession basically drove his entire academic 00:05:11.769 --> 00:05:15.199 path or, well, his detours from it. He started 00:05:15.199 --> 00:05:17.180 at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. 00:05:17.360 --> 00:05:20.060 Then he transferred to NYU in 1997. Which makes 00:05:20.060 --> 00:05:22.660 total sense. If you're obsessed with dispatch, 00:05:22.980 --> 00:05:25.860 New York City is your mecca. It's the ultimate 00:05:25.860 --> 00:05:28.680 dispatch city. The sheer density of couriers, 00:05:28.680 --> 00:05:32.240 taxis, delivery services. It's unlike anywhere 00:05:32.240 --> 00:05:34.459 else in the U .S. at that time. He wanted to 00:05:34.459 --> 00:05:36.439 be at the heart of the system. But he never actually 00:05:36.439 --> 00:05:39.379 finished, did he? Nope. The classic Silicon Valley 00:05:39.379 --> 00:05:42.170 dropout trope. He left one semester short of 00:05:42.170 --> 00:05:44.509 graduating. And we should probably clear something 00:05:44.509 --> 00:05:47.589 up here. There was a persistent rumor. for years 00:05:47.589 --> 00:05:49.850 that he went to Cornell. Oh, right. I've heard 00:05:49.850 --> 00:05:51.269 that. He's had to correct the record on that 00:05:51.269 --> 00:05:53.329 personally. He never went to Cornell. It was 00:05:53.329 --> 00:05:56.490 Missouri, S &T, then NYU, then dropout. But even 00:05:56.490 --> 00:05:58.670 before he dropped out, he wasn't exactly, you 00:05:58.670 --> 00:06:01.050 know, going to frat parties. He was coding. He 00:06:01.050 --> 00:06:02.990 was trying to get into the system for real. He 00:06:02.990 --> 00:06:05.949 was. And he actually hacked his way into a job 00:06:05.949 --> 00:06:09.250 in a, you know, white hat kind of way. He found 00:06:09.250 --> 00:06:12.009 a security vulnerability on the website of a 00:06:12.009 --> 00:06:14.509 major New York dispatching company. Which one 00:06:14.509 --> 00:06:17.019 was it? A company called Dispatch Management 00:06:17.019 --> 00:06:20.379 Services, run by a guy named Greg Kidd. So Jack 00:06:20.379 --> 00:06:23.100 finds this hole, and instead of exploiting it, 00:06:23.139 --> 00:06:26.079 he emails the chairman, Greg Kidd, and basically 00:06:26.079 --> 00:06:28.899 says, hey, your front door is unlocked. I know 00:06:28.899 --> 00:06:31.100 how to fix it. That's a bold resume. Here is 00:06:31.100 --> 00:06:33.980 how I broke into your house. Now hire me to install 00:06:33.980 --> 00:06:37.180 the security system. And it worked. Kid was impressed. 00:06:37.399 --> 00:06:39.800 He brought Jack on, and that eventually led him 00:06:39.800 --> 00:06:42.899 to move out to California. By 2000, he's in Oakland, 00:06:43.079 --> 00:06:46.399 and he founds his first real startup. And the 00:06:46.399 --> 00:06:49.740 goal was? To dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency 00:06:49.740 --> 00:06:52.829 services using the web. Now you have to put yourself 00:06:52.829 --> 00:06:56.250 in the year 2000. There's no iPhone, no app store. 00:06:56.490 --> 00:06:59.470 GPS is still this bulky, expensive thing, mostly 00:06:59.470 --> 00:07:02.269 for military and maritime use. So the technology 00:07:02.269 --> 00:07:04.170 wasn't really there yet to support the vision. 00:07:04.310 --> 00:07:06.449 The vision was way ahead of the tech. We've seen 00:07:06.449 --> 00:07:08.529 his notebooks from that era. He was sketching 00:07:08.529 --> 00:07:10.649 out these ideas for what he called frictionless 00:07:10.649 --> 00:07:13.670 service markets. He had diagrams of networks 00:07:13.670 --> 00:07:16.730 for medical devices reporting their status, courier 00:07:16.730 --> 00:07:19.110 networks. What's the core idea of frictionless 00:07:19.110 --> 00:07:21.980 there? He wanted to remove the human dispatcher 00:07:21.980 --> 00:07:25.240 entirely. He was thinking, Why does a guy in 00:07:25.240 --> 00:07:27.240 a call center have to tell the taxi where to 00:07:27.240 --> 00:07:29.660 go? The software should just be able to match 00:07:29.660 --> 00:07:32.060 the supply with the demand instantly. That is 00:07:32.060 --> 00:07:35.399 literally the core pitch for Uber, just a decade 00:07:35.399 --> 00:07:38.040 too early. It was Uber without the hardware to 00:07:38.040 --> 00:07:40.720 support it. So that company didn't take off. 00:07:40.800 --> 00:07:43.339 The infrastructure just wasn't ready. But during 00:07:43.339 --> 00:07:45.779 this period of sort of failing and thinking, 00:07:46.040 --> 00:07:48.480 he had this crossover idea. He was looking at 00:07:48.480 --> 00:07:51.180 two popular things at the time, AOL, Instant 00:07:51.180 --> 00:07:54.250 Messenger, AIM, and LiveJournal. The golden age 00:07:54.250 --> 00:07:56.610 of the away message. He loved the away message. 00:07:56.810 --> 00:07:59.870 Bird pizza, listening to Radiohead at the gym. 00:08:00.149 --> 00:08:02.910 He had this flash of insight. He realized an 00:08:02.910 --> 00:08:05.350 away message is just a dispatch update for a 00:08:05.350 --> 00:08:07.889 human being. It's state and location again. Exactly. 00:08:07.889 --> 00:08:10.870 It's the same pattern. And he wondered, why can 00:08:10.870 --> 00:08:13.449 I only show this status to my buddy list? Why 00:08:13.449 --> 00:08:16.050 can't I just dispatch my life, my status to the 00:08:16.050 --> 00:08:18.550 entire world? He wanted to turn every person 00:08:18.550 --> 00:08:20.730 into one of the little dots on a St. Louis map. 00:08:21.100 --> 00:08:23.360 He wanted to visualize the pulse of humanity 00:08:23.360 --> 00:08:26.399 the same way he visualized the pulse of the ambulances. 00:08:26.819 --> 00:08:29.379 But again, the idea just sort of sat on a shelf. 00:08:29.480 --> 00:08:32.059 It was a sketch in a notebook for years. He had 00:08:32.059 --> 00:08:35.840 bills to pay. Which brings us to 2006. and a 00:08:35.840 --> 00:08:39.659 failing podcast company audio audio it was a 00:08:39.659 --> 00:08:41.919 podcasting startup co -founded by noah glass 00:08:41.919 --> 00:08:44.559 and evan williams now evan williams is a key 00:08:44.559 --> 00:08:46.940 figure here he'd already founded blogger and 00:08:46.940 --> 00:08:49.500 sold it to google for a ton of money he was basically 00:08:49.500 --> 00:08:52.139 silicon valley royalty And Odeo was supposed 00:08:52.139 --> 00:08:54.080 to be his next big thing. Right. The idea was 00:08:54.080 --> 00:08:56.220 to make it super easy for anyone to record and 00:08:56.220 --> 00:09:00.039 share a podcast. But then in 2005, Apple completely 00:09:00.039 --> 00:09:02.299 torpedoed their business model. Right. They released 00:09:02.299 --> 00:09:05.480 iTunes 4 .9 with built -in podcast support. They 00:09:05.480 --> 00:09:08.080 ate Odeo's lunch. Suddenly their entire reason 00:09:08.080 --> 00:09:10.559 for being was redundant. So the company was just 00:09:10.559 --> 00:09:12.759 drifting. They were burning through cash. Morale 00:09:12.759 --> 00:09:15.440 was in the toilet. So Ev Williams says, OK, everyone 00:09:15.440 --> 00:09:17.679 break up into teams. Let's have a hackathon. 00:09:18.179 --> 00:09:20.519 Brainstorm something, anything to save the company. 00:09:20.620 --> 00:09:22.759 And that's when Jack dusts off the old dispatch 00:09:22.759 --> 00:09:25.720 idea. He pitches it to his little group, which 00:09:25.720 --> 00:09:27.940 included Noah Glass and a designer named Biz 00:09:27.940 --> 00:09:31.279 Stone. He describes a service that uses SMS simple 00:09:31.279 --> 00:09:34.919 text messaging to broadcast short status updates 00:09:34.919 --> 00:09:38.460 to a small group of friends. He called it 20TR. 00:09:38.700 --> 00:09:41.379 With no vowels, which was very trendy at the 00:09:41.379 --> 00:09:44.139 time. Flicker. Things like that. A fairy web 00:09:44.139 --> 00:09:46.500 2 .0. Oh. And we have to talk about the technology 00:09:46.500 --> 00:09:49.600 here because the limitations of 2006 literally 00:09:49.600 --> 00:09:52.490 define the product for its first decade. This 00:09:52.490 --> 00:09:54.370 wasn't an app you downloaded from an app store. 00:09:54.529 --> 00:09:56.350 There was no app store. It was all based on SMS. 00:09:56.429 --> 00:09:58.649 You would send a text message from your Nokia 00:09:58.649 --> 00:10:01.549 or your Motorola Razr to a short code number 00:10:01.549 --> 00:10:05.090 like 4044. Now, the global standard protocol 00:10:05.090 --> 00:10:08.169 for SMS messaging has a hard character limit. 00:10:08.330 --> 00:10:11.649 160 characters. 160 characters. That is a fundamental 00:10:11.649 --> 00:10:14.470 constraint in the GSM cellular network layer. 00:10:14.830 --> 00:10:17.610 It's not a design choice. It's a physical limitation 00:10:17.610 --> 00:10:20.159 of the pipe. So they needed to reserve some of 00:10:20.159 --> 00:10:22.039 those characters for the username for routing 00:10:22.039 --> 00:10:24.980 the message. Exactly. They decided to reserve 00:10:24.980 --> 00:10:27.039 20 characters for the username and commands, 00:10:27.259 --> 00:10:29.879 which left 140 for the actual content of the 00:10:29.879 --> 00:10:32.820 message. So that creative constraint that artists 00:10:32.820 --> 00:10:35.419 and designers love to talk about, the famous 00:10:35.419 --> 00:10:38.039 140 characters. It wasn't an artistic choice. 00:10:38.100 --> 00:10:40.240 It was just a bandwidth limitation. It was a 00:10:40.240 --> 00:10:43.259 technical necessity. Yeah. But it had this incredible 00:10:43.259 --> 00:10:45.940 side effect. It forced brevity. It forced people 00:10:45.940 --> 00:10:48.559 to communicate in headlines. It stripped everything 00:10:48.559 --> 00:10:51.080 down to the bare essentials. So Jack and Diz 00:10:51.080 --> 00:10:53.200 Stone, they build the prototype. In two weeks. 00:10:53.419 --> 00:10:56.460 They hacked it together. It was raw. It was simple. 00:10:56.620 --> 00:11:00.159 And initially, nobody at Odeo got it. The feedback 00:11:00.159 --> 00:11:02.179 was brutal. Who cares what you're doing right 00:11:02.179 --> 00:11:03.740 now? Why would I want to know you're eating a 00:11:03.740 --> 00:11:06.860 sandwich? This is just narcissism. To be fair, 00:11:07.059 --> 00:11:09.259 if you look back at the very first tweets, it 00:11:09.259 --> 00:11:12.279 was mostly, I am eating a sandwich. Jack's first 00:11:12.279 --> 00:11:15.159 tweet was, just setting up my TweetTR. It was. 00:11:15.340 --> 00:11:17.639 But then something happened. An earthquake hit 00:11:17.639 --> 00:11:20.690 San Francisco. And suddenly, people weren't tweeting 00:11:20.690 --> 00:11:22.730 about their lunch. They were tweeting, did you 00:11:22.730 --> 00:11:25.889 feel that? Power's out on my street. Everyone 00:11:25.889 --> 00:11:29.429 OK. It became a real -time information network. 00:11:29.690 --> 00:11:32.690 It became a dispatch system for reality. And 00:11:32.690 --> 00:11:35.950 as it started to grow, as users started using 00:11:35.950 --> 00:11:38.809 it in these unexpected ways, the infrastructure 00:11:38.809 --> 00:11:41.230 just began to crack. It couldn't handle the load. 00:11:41.800 --> 00:11:45.019 Which brings us to the era of the fail whale. 00:11:45.220 --> 00:11:47.980 Oh, that iconic image. The friendly looking white 00:11:47.980 --> 00:11:50.820 whale being lifted up by a flock of little orange 00:11:50.820 --> 00:11:53.740 birds. Yeah. It was cute, but what it represented 00:11:53.740 --> 00:11:56.659 was a catastrophic failure of engineering. What 00:11:56.659 --> 00:11:58.080 was actually happening under the hood when you 00:11:58.080 --> 00:12:00.139 saw that screen? This is so important because 00:12:00.139 --> 00:12:01.899 it really speaks to the challenges of scaling 00:12:01.899 --> 00:12:05.259 centralized systems. The early version of Twitter 00:12:05.259 --> 00:12:07.740 was built on a framework called Ruby on Rails. 00:12:08.720 --> 00:12:11.460 Now, at the time, Rails was very new and very 00:12:11.460 --> 00:12:14.159 popular for building websites quickly. But it 00:12:14.159 --> 00:12:16.059 wasn't built for this kind of scale. It wasn't 00:12:16.059 --> 00:12:18.360 optimized for the kind of massive, read -write 00:12:18.360 --> 00:12:20.940 -heavy database load that Twitter was generating. 00:12:21.259 --> 00:12:23.500 It's what's known as a fan -out problem. Break 00:12:23.500 --> 00:12:25.419 that down for us. What's a fan -out? Okay, so 00:12:25.419 --> 00:12:27.740 if I have just one follower and I send a tweet, 00:12:27.840 --> 00:12:30.460 the database has to perform one simple write 00:12:30.460 --> 00:12:33.700 operation. Here's the tweet. Put it in my follower's 00:12:33.700 --> 00:12:36.850 timeline. Easy. But what if I'm a celebrity with 00:12:36.850 --> 00:12:39.789 a million followers? When I send a tweet, the 00:12:39.789 --> 00:12:42.169 system has to fan that tweet out and update a 00:12:42.169 --> 00:12:43.990 million different timelines or at least their 00:12:43.990 --> 00:12:47.309 indexes almost simultaneously. So every popular 00:12:47.309 --> 00:12:49.710 tweet was like a denial of service attack on 00:12:49.710 --> 00:12:52.090 their own database. Essentially, yes. The database 00:12:52.090 --> 00:12:54.230 locking was a nightmare. They were constantly 00:12:54.230 --> 00:12:56.429 in firefighting mode, just trying to keep the 00:12:56.429 --> 00:12:59.009 site online. The fail whale was up more than 00:12:59.009 --> 00:13:01.169 the service was, it felt like. And this technical 00:13:01.169 --> 00:13:04.009 chaos leads directly to the first major... turning 00:13:04.009 --> 00:13:07.789 point in Jack's career, his ousting, his firing. 00:13:08.029 --> 00:13:10.370 It does. The official narrative from the board 00:13:10.370 --> 00:13:13.950 in 2008 was that Jack was an absentee CEO. Evan 00:13:13.950 --> 00:13:15.690 Williams and the other board members, they looked 00:13:15.690 --> 00:13:17.470 at the constant server crashes, they looked at 00:13:17.470 --> 00:13:19.549 the complete lack of a revenue model, and then 00:13:19.549 --> 00:13:21.190 they looked at Jack's calendar. And they saw. 00:13:21.759 --> 00:13:24.860 They saw yoga classes. They saw fashion design 00:13:24.860 --> 00:13:27.220 courses at a local apparel arts school. They 00:13:27.220 --> 00:13:30.240 saw him leaving the office at 6 p .m. sharp every 00:13:30.240 --> 00:13:33.019 day to go learn how to make skirts and draw patterns. 00:13:33.360 --> 00:13:35.620 Okay, now, from a strictly corporate governance 00:13:35.620 --> 00:13:38.720 perspective, if your billion -dollar startup 00:13:38.720 --> 00:13:41.840 is literally on fire every single day, leaving 00:13:41.840 --> 00:13:44.429 early to go sew is... It's not a good look. It 00:13:44.429 --> 00:13:46.049 looks terrible. It looks like you don't care. 00:13:46.590 --> 00:13:49.210 But from Jack's perspective, which he's explained 00:13:49.210 --> 00:13:52.909 since, he was trying to understand craft. He's 00:13:52.909 --> 00:13:54.690 always been obsessed with the aesthetics and 00:13:54.690 --> 00:13:57.049 the utility of a product. He has this famous 00:13:57.049 --> 00:13:59.529 metaphor where he compares Twitter to a good 00:13:59.529 --> 00:14:03.129 pair of jeans. Utilitarian, durable, gets better 00:14:03.129 --> 00:14:05.309 with age. Right. And he thought that by learning 00:14:05.309 --> 00:14:07.549 a physical craft like fashion design, he could 00:14:07.549 --> 00:14:09.429 better understand how to build a better, more 00:14:09.429 --> 00:14:11.570 durable digital product. He thought it would 00:14:11.570 --> 00:14:14.889 make him a better CEO. The board strongly disagreed. 00:14:15.100 --> 00:14:17.320 They fired him. Well, they did the polite Silicon 00:14:17.320 --> 00:14:19.639 Valley thing. They transitioned him to chairman 00:14:19.639 --> 00:14:22.639 of the board, which is a powerless ceremonial 00:14:22.639 --> 00:14:25.039 title. It's the nice way of saying get out of 00:14:25.039 --> 00:14:27.980 the way and let the adults handle this. Evan 00:14:27.980 --> 00:14:30.980 Williams took over as the full time CEO. So Jack 00:14:30.980 --> 00:14:33.779 is in exile. But this exile period is really 00:14:33.779 --> 00:14:35.980 interesting because he doesn't just go off and 00:14:35.980 --> 00:14:38.539 sulk. He's still the chairman. He's still involved. 00:14:38.899 --> 00:14:40.980 And this is when the whole State Department story 00:14:40.980 --> 00:14:43.990 happens, isn't it? It is. This is 2009. The Green 00:14:43.990 --> 00:14:46.669 Revolution is erupting in Iran. Massive street 00:14:46.669 --> 00:14:48.830 protests are breaking out to dispute the results 00:14:48.830 --> 00:14:51.490 of the presidential election. The Iranian government, 00:14:51.710 --> 00:14:54.509 as you'd expect, clamps down hard on state media, 00:14:54.629 --> 00:14:57.509 on cell service. But the Internet is still sort 00:14:57.509 --> 00:14:59.799 of trickling through. And Twitter becomes the 00:14:59.799 --> 00:15:02.120 main organizing tool. It becomes the primary 00:15:02.120 --> 00:15:04.539 command and control network for the resistance. 00:15:04.960 --> 00:15:07.700 People are coordinating protests, sharing videos 00:15:07.700 --> 00:15:10.179 of police brutality, getting the word out to 00:15:10.179 --> 00:15:12.720 the world. It was the first time we really saw 00:15:12.720 --> 00:15:15.220 the term Twitter revolution enter the lexicon. 00:15:15.360 --> 00:15:17.379 And right in the middle of all this, Twitter 00:15:17.379 --> 00:15:20.519 had scheduled some server downtime. Yes, ironically. 00:15:21.279 --> 00:15:23.460 to fix some of the very same database issues 00:15:23.460 --> 00:15:26.539 that got Jack fired. They had a maintenance window 00:15:26.539 --> 00:15:28.100 scheduled. They were going to take the entire 00:15:28.100 --> 00:15:30.779 service down for a few hours. And that's when 00:15:30.779 --> 00:15:33.779 a strictly mid -level official at the U .S. State 00:15:33.779 --> 00:15:36.600 Department named Jared Cohen sends an email to 00:15:36.600 --> 00:15:39.679 Jack Dorsey. And what did the email say? It essentially 00:15:39.679 --> 00:15:42.220 said, please, please do not take the site down 00:15:42.220 --> 00:15:45.100 right now. The protesters in Iran are using it 00:15:45.100 --> 00:15:49.840 to organize, to report, to stay alive. Wow. That 00:15:49.840 --> 00:15:52.080 has to be a pivotal moment. That's the moment 00:15:52.080 --> 00:15:54.340 Twitter stops being just a quirky tech company 00:15:54.340 --> 00:15:57.320 and starts being a genuine geopolitical actor. 00:15:57.480 --> 00:16:00.000 Absolutely. Jack gets the email. He forwards 00:16:00.000 --> 00:16:01.960 it to the right people at Twitter and they delay 00:16:01.960 --> 00:16:03.539 the maintenance. They keep the service running. 00:16:03.679 --> 00:16:06.379 And I think that moment planted a huge seed in 00:16:06.379 --> 00:16:08.860 his head. He realized that this little dispatch 00:16:08.860 --> 00:16:11.139 system he built wasn't just for sandwiches and 00:16:11.139 --> 00:16:13.559 earthquakes. It was a powerful tool for freedom. 00:16:13.779 --> 00:16:16.750 But, and this is the crucial part. It was a tool 00:16:16.750 --> 00:16:18.929 for freedom that he and a small group of people 00:16:18.929 --> 00:16:21.450 in San Francisco controlled. He had the switch. 00:16:21.669 --> 00:16:23.970 He had the power to turn it off or keep it on. 00:16:24.110 --> 00:16:26.090 The benevolent dictator problem. Exactly. And 00:16:26.090 --> 00:16:27.929 while he was pondering that massive philosophical 00:16:27.929 --> 00:16:30.789 problem, he went out and built another billion 00:16:30.789 --> 00:16:33.330 -dollar company from scratch. Which brings us 00:16:33.330 --> 00:16:36.669 to part three. Building Block, or as everyone 00:16:36.669 --> 00:16:40.110 knew it then, Square. And once again, the origin 00:16:40.110 --> 00:16:42.549 story starts with a simple dispatch problem. 00:16:42.789 --> 00:16:45.919 A failed transaction. It does. It's 2009. Jack 00:16:45.919 --> 00:16:47.700 is out of the day -to -day operations at Twitter. 00:16:48.000 --> 00:16:50.279 He reconnects with an old friend from St. Louis 00:16:50.279 --> 00:16:52.820 named Jim McKelvey. McKelvey had actually been 00:16:52.820 --> 00:16:55.299 his boss at one of his first programming jobs. 00:16:55.440 --> 00:16:57.820 And McKelvey had pivoted into a new career, right? 00:16:57.960 --> 00:16:59.980 Yeah, he'd become a high -end glass artist, a 00:16:59.980 --> 00:17:03.279 glassblower. And he calls Jack completely frustrated 00:17:03.279 --> 00:17:05.960 because he'd just lost a $2 ,000 sale for one 00:17:05.960 --> 00:17:09.690 of his glass faucets. Why? What happened? The 00:17:09.690 --> 00:17:11.910 potential customer only had an American Express 00:17:11.910 --> 00:17:14.630 card, and McKelvey, as a small artist, couldn't 00:17:14.630 --> 00:17:16.910 get a merchant account that would accept Amex. 00:17:16.910 --> 00:17:19.349 It was too expensive, too complicated. The customer 00:17:19.349 --> 00:17:21.910 just walked away. So Jack hears this story and 00:17:21.910 --> 00:17:24.829 sees a routing error. He sees a routing error. 00:17:25.349 --> 00:17:27.529 The money wanted to move from point A to point 00:17:27.529 --> 00:17:30.390 B, but the gateway was closed. The system was 00:17:30.390 --> 00:17:32.990 broken. He looked at the state of payment processing 00:17:32.990 --> 00:17:35.089 for small businesses at the time. It was a nightmare. 00:17:35.470 --> 00:17:37.410 You needed a credit check. You had to pay hundreds 00:17:37.410 --> 00:17:40.710 in monthly fees. You had to buy or lease a bulky 00:17:40.710 --> 00:17:43.589 Verifone terminal that needed a dedicated landline. 00:17:43.710 --> 00:17:46.170 It was totally exclusionary. It was a gated, 00:17:46.170 --> 00:17:49.349 centralized system controlled by a few big banks 00:17:49.349 --> 00:17:52.109 and processors. And Jack's instinct is always 00:17:52.109 --> 00:17:54.890 to break the gate. So he and McKelvey set out 00:17:54.890 --> 00:17:57.069 to solve this. And the technology they came up 00:17:57.069 --> 00:17:59.750 with is just genuinely brilliant in its simplicity. 00:18:00.069 --> 00:18:02.230 The little white square reader. The square reader. 00:18:02.410 --> 00:18:04.910 They didn't try to build a complex new... piece 00:18:04.910 --> 00:18:07.890 of hardware. They had a key inside. They realized 00:18:07.890 --> 00:18:10.210 that the magnetic stripe on the back of a credit 00:18:10.210 --> 00:18:12.670 card is just encoded data. It's just information. 00:18:13.009 --> 00:18:15.549 And the headphone jack on a smartphone. It's 00:18:15.549 --> 00:18:18.029 an input device. It's an analog audio input. 00:18:18.170 --> 00:18:21.230 It's designed to listen. So they built a tiny, 00:18:21.250 --> 00:18:24.009 cheap magnetic read head. That's the little slot 00:18:24.009 --> 00:18:27.109 in the white square. Wired it directly to a standard 00:18:27.109 --> 00:18:30.250 headphone plug and then wrote software on the 00:18:30.250 --> 00:18:33.190 phone to decode the analog signal. So when you 00:18:33.190 --> 00:18:36.049 swipe the card. the phone literally hears the 00:18:36.049 --> 00:18:39.049 data as a screeching sound like an old dial -up 00:18:39.049 --> 00:18:42.400 modem exactly They turned the credit card into 00:18:42.400 --> 00:18:46.539 an MP3 file, essentially. And the software decodes 00:18:46.539 --> 00:18:48.720 that screeching sound into the account numbers. 00:18:48.920 --> 00:18:51.500 By doing that, they bypassed the need for hundreds 00:18:51.500 --> 00:18:53.559 of dollars of specialized hardware. They could 00:18:53.559 --> 00:18:55.619 manufacture the readers for pennies. Which meant 00:18:55.619 --> 00:18:57.460 they could give them away for free. And that 00:18:57.460 --> 00:18:59.579 changed everything. Suddenly, the person at the 00:18:59.579 --> 00:19:01.619 farmer's market, the coffee shop, the piano teacher, 00:19:01.839 --> 00:19:04.380 the babysitter, they were all instantly dispatched 00:19:04.380 --> 00:19:06.940 into the modern financial system. It's the exact 00:19:06.940 --> 00:19:09.839 same pattern as Twitter. Twitter allowed anyone 00:19:09.839 --> 00:19:12.940 to broadcast a message. Square allowed anyone 00:19:12.940 --> 00:19:15.980 to receive a payment. He empowers the nodes at 00:19:15.980 --> 00:19:17.960 the edge of the network. He routes around the 00:19:17.960 --> 00:19:21.500 central authority. And Square grew exponentially. 00:19:21.500 --> 00:19:23.920 It was a massive success. They went public in 00:19:23.920 --> 00:19:26.420 2015. But you have to notice the date there. 00:19:26.779 --> 00:19:29.859 2015 is a critical year in the Jack Dorsey story. 00:19:30.099 --> 00:19:32.019 Because that's the year Twitter came calling 00:19:32.019 --> 00:19:34.240 again. Twitter had been drifting under its CEO 00:19:34.240 --> 00:19:37.759 at the time, Dick Costolo. The stock was stagnant. 00:19:37.819 --> 00:19:40.059 User growth had stalled. The product hadn't really 00:19:40.059 --> 00:19:42.839 evolved. The board, perhaps realizing they'd 00:19:42.839 --> 00:19:45.400 made a huge mistake years earlier, went back 00:19:45.400 --> 00:19:47.559 to Jack, hat in hand, and asked him to come back 00:19:47.559 --> 00:19:51.299 as CEO. But he laid down a condition. He refused 00:19:51.299 --> 00:19:53.880 to quit Square. He demanded to be the CEO of 00:19:53.880 --> 00:19:56.140 two publicly traded companies at the same time, 00:19:56.180 --> 00:19:57.920 which, I mean, that's almost unheard of. Elon 00:19:57.920 --> 00:20:00.680 Musk does it now with the Tesla and SpaceX and 00:20:00.680 --> 00:20:03.339 X. But at that time, Wall Street viewed it as 00:20:03.339 --> 00:20:05.980 complete insanity. So how on earth did he manage 00:20:05.980 --> 00:20:08.660 it? Two massive companies. Through a rigorous, 00:20:08.839 --> 00:20:11.880 almost robotic scheduling system. He themed his 00:20:11.880 --> 00:20:14.119 days. He would literally work at the Twitter 00:20:14.119 --> 00:20:16.680 office in the morning, then walk across the street 00:20:16.680 --> 00:20:18.500 to the Squire office in the afternoon. Or the 00:20:18.500 --> 00:20:20.660 themes. Monday was for management meetings at 00:20:20.660 --> 00:20:22.980 both companies. Tuesday was for product meetings 00:20:22.980 --> 00:20:25.359 at both companies. Wednesday was marketing and 00:20:25.359 --> 00:20:27.900 so on. It was an incredible feat of executive 00:20:27.900 --> 00:20:30.619 time management and, frankly, mental processing 00:20:30.619 --> 00:20:33.420 power. But this second term at Twitter, from 00:20:33.420 --> 00:20:37.200 2015 to 2021. this is where things get really 00:20:37.200 --> 00:20:40.279 complicated this is where the technological monk 00:20:40.279 --> 00:20:42.640 starts to face the demons of his own creation 00:20:42.640 --> 00:20:45.240 he was walking back into a very different internet 00:20:45.720 --> 00:20:48.940 The internet of 2015 was not the fun, quirky 00:20:48.940 --> 00:20:51.839 internet of 2006. The culture wars had begun 00:20:51.839 --> 00:20:54.599 in earnest. Disinformation was being weaponized 00:20:54.599 --> 00:20:57.579 by state actors. And Twitter, under the previous 00:20:57.579 --> 00:20:59.579 leadership, had made a fundamental architectural 00:20:59.579 --> 00:21:02.240 change that Jack would later come to regret more 00:21:02.240 --> 00:21:04.400 than anything else. They introduced the algorithmic 00:21:04.400 --> 00:21:07.059 feed. Yes. Explain that shift for us because 00:21:07.059 --> 00:21:09.640 it's so fundamental to understanding the problems 00:21:09.640 --> 00:21:12.019 of social media today. Originally, your Twitter 00:21:12.019 --> 00:21:14.930 timeline was simple. Reverse chronological. You 00:21:14.930 --> 00:21:16.670 saw the newest tweet from the people you followed 00:21:16.670 --> 00:21:19.130 at the very top. It was a raw, unfiltered feed 00:21:19.130 --> 00:21:21.230 of information. Like a stock ticker. Exactly. 00:21:21.430 --> 00:21:24.549 But in the race for engagement, to keep your 00:21:24.549 --> 00:21:26.710 eyeballs glued to the app for longer so they 00:21:26.710 --> 00:21:29.250 could sell more ads, they switched to a relevance 00:21:29.250 --> 00:21:31.730 -based model. The algorithm would start guessing 00:21:31.730 --> 00:21:33.750 what you wanted to see based on your past behavior. 00:21:34.150 --> 00:21:36.369 It would surface the most popular or controversial 00:21:36.369 --> 00:21:38.930 tweets and put those at the top. This is the 00:21:38.930 --> 00:21:41.609 move that creates the echo chambers. The algorithm 00:21:41.609 --> 00:21:43.930 learns that I get really angry about a certain 00:21:43.930 --> 00:21:45.869 topic, so it just starts feeding me more and 00:21:45.869 --> 00:21:48.130 more outrage about that topic because outrage 00:21:48.130 --> 00:21:51.990 drives clicks and replies. Correct. It optimizes 00:21:51.990 --> 00:21:54.309 for emotional reaction. not for informational 00:21:54.309 --> 00:21:57.329 accuracy or diversity of thought. And years later, 00:21:57.430 --> 00:22:00.230 in 2022, after he had left, Dorsey wrote this 00:22:00.230 --> 00:22:03.049 incredible postmortem on it all. He said, and 00:22:03.049 --> 00:22:05.549 I'm quoting here, the biggest mistake I made 00:22:05.549 --> 00:22:07.970 was continuing to invest in building tools for 00:22:07.970 --> 00:22:10.690 us to manage the public conversation versus building 00:22:10.690 --> 00:22:12.890 tools for the people using Twitter to easily 00:22:12.890 --> 00:22:15.940 manage it for themselves. Wow. That's a profound 00:22:15.940 --> 00:22:19.079 admission of guilt, almost. He's saying we, the 00:22:19.079 --> 00:22:21.380 company, took the power away from you, the user, 00:22:21.519 --> 00:22:23.680 and gave it to our own engineers and our own 00:22:23.680 --> 00:22:27.470 algorithms. That centralization of power, that 00:22:27.470 --> 00:22:30.650 decision to manage the conversation collided 00:22:30.650 --> 00:22:32.829 head on with the political phenomenon of Donald 00:22:32.829 --> 00:22:35.650 Trump. The Trump presidency. This was the ultimate 00:22:35.650 --> 00:22:38.109 stress test for Twitter's entire philosophy. 00:22:38.329 --> 00:22:40.809 It was. You had a sitting U .S. president using 00:22:40.809 --> 00:22:43.089 the platform as his primary communication tool, 00:22:43.250 --> 00:22:46.390 bypassing the entire traditional media establishment. 00:22:46.650 --> 00:22:49.049 And in doing so, he was frequently posting things 00:22:49.049 --> 00:22:52.049 that for any other user would have been clear 00:22:52.049 --> 00:22:54.369 violations of Twitter's own terms of service. 00:22:57.029 --> 00:23:00.069 So Jack had a meeting with Trump in 2019 at the 00:23:00.069 --> 00:23:02.730 White House. He did. And the readout from that 00:23:02.730 --> 00:23:04.789 meeting is just fascinating. Apparently, Trump 00:23:04.789 --> 00:23:06.950 spent a significant portion of the time complaining 00:23:06.950 --> 00:23:09.430 that his follower count was dropping. He was 00:23:09.430 --> 00:23:11.910 convinced that Jack was personally shadow banning 00:23:11.910 --> 00:23:14.049 him to hurt him politically. And what was Jack's 00:23:14.049 --> 00:23:16.789 response? Jack calmly explained that the company 00:23:16.789 --> 00:23:19.819 was just. purging millions of bot and spam accounts 00:23:19.819 --> 00:23:22.299 from the platform, and that all major accounts, 00:23:22.420 --> 00:23:24.680 including his, were losing some followers as 00:23:24.680 --> 00:23:27.640 a result. But for years, Dorsey defended the 00:23:27.640 --> 00:23:30.019 decision to keep Trump on the platform, even 00:23:30.019 --> 00:23:32.700 when the pressure was immense. He created something 00:23:32.700 --> 00:23:35.539 called the World Leader Exception. What was the 00:23:35.539 --> 00:23:38.319 argument there? The argument was that the public 00:23:38.319 --> 00:23:40.519 has a right to know what their leaders are saying, 00:23:40.700 --> 00:23:43.119 even if it's controversial or factually incorrect. 00:23:43.640 --> 00:23:46.259 That it's more dangerous to deplatform a world 00:23:46.259 --> 00:23:48.430 leader and drive their speech into the shadows 00:23:48.430 --> 00:23:50.569 than it is to let it exist in the open where 00:23:50.569 --> 00:23:53.009 it can be debated and fact checked. That was 00:23:53.009 --> 00:23:57.430 the policy until January 6th, 2021. After the 00:23:57.430 --> 00:23:59.990 attack on the U .S. Capitol, the internal calculus 00:23:59.990 --> 00:24:02.910 at Twitter changed. The risk of imminent real 00:24:02.910 --> 00:24:05.630 world violence was deemed to outweigh the newsworthiness 00:24:05.630 --> 00:24:08.230 of the tweets. They made the decision to permanently 00:24:08.230 --> 00:24:10.789 suspend Donald Trump's account. And Jack, as 00:24:10.789 --> 00:24:13.089 CEO, signed off on it. But he didn't celebrate 00:24:13.089 --> 00:24:14.730 it, which I think a lot of people expected him 00:24:14.730 --> 00:24:17.069 to. No, not at all. And this is where people 00:24:17.069 --> 00:24:19.230 on both sides of the aisle completely misread 00:24:19.230 --> 00:24:21.829 him. Liberals were cheering, thinking he'd finally 00:24:21.829 --> 00:24:24.369 seen the light. Conservatives were furious, screaming 00:24:24.369 --> 00:24:27.549 about censorship. And Jack was, well, he seemed 00:24:27.549 --> 00:24:30.109 mournful about it. Mournful. He posted this long 00:24:30.109 --> 00:24:32.349 thread a few days later saying that while he 00:24:32.349 --> 00:24:34.349 believed it was the right decision for public 00:24:34.349 --> 00:24:36.730 safety at that moment, it was also a failure. 00:24:36.890 --> 00:24:40.089 A failure of their platform to promote healthy 00:24:40.089 --> 00:24:43.650 conversation. And he called it a dangerous precedent. 00:24:44.299 --> 00:24:46.920 He realized that if one CEO in San Francisco 00:24:46.920 --> 00:24:49.220 can unilaterally silence the president of the 00:24:49.220 --> 00:24:52.180 United States, then that CEO simply has too much 00:24:52.180 --> 00:24:54.400 power. And if there's one thing we've established, 00:24:54.619 --> 00:24:57.299 it's that Jack Dorsey fundamentally distrusts 00:24:57.299 --> 00:24:59.980 centralized power, even when it's his own. So 00:24:59.980 --> 00:25:02.180 he's had this realization. He's seen the monster 00:25:02.180 --> 00:25:04.599 that his creation has become. What happens next? 00:25:04.819 --> 00:25:08.000 In November 2021, he resigns. He posts his resignation 00:25:08.000 --> 00:25:10.619 email on Twitter. He says the company is ready 00:25:10.619 --> 00:25:12.980 to move on from its founders. He hands the reins 00:25:12.980 --> 00:25:15.759 over to the CTO, Parag Agarwal, and just walks 00:25:15.759 --> 00:25:18.900 away. But he doesn't retire to an island. He 00:25:18.900 --> 00:25:22.839 immediately rebrands Scared of Lock, Inc., and 00:25:22.839 --> 00:25:26.799 pivots hard into what you call part four of his 00:25:26.799 --> 00:25:30.109 story, the decentralization maximalist. This 00:25:30.109 --> 00:25:32.009 is the part that just completely confuses the 00:25:32.009 --> 00:25:34.250 mainstream business press. He stops talking about 00:25:34.250 --> 00:25:36.410 quarterly earnings and ad revenue and starts 00:25:36.410 --> 00:25:39.069 talking about cryptographic protocols. He goes 00:25:39.069 --> 00:25:41.789 from being a tech CEO to being essentially a 00:25:41.789 --> 00:25:45.210 Bitcoin evangelist. To Jack, Bitcoin isn't just 00:25:45.210 --> 00:25:47.470 a speculative asset to trade. It's something 00:25:47.470 --> 00:25:49.829 much more profound. He calls it freedom money. 00:25:49.970 --> 00:25:52.210 He does. And we have to understand the connection 00:25:52.210 --> 00:25:55.289 in his mind. So why? What's the link between 00:25:55.289 --> 00:25:58.089 a dispatch system for taxes and a decentralized 00:25:58.089 --> 00:26:01.250 digital currency? Go back to the map. In a centralized 00:26:01.250 --> 00:26:03.529 banking system, the one we all use, the bank 00:26:03.529 --> 00:26:05.450 is the dispatcher. They sit in the middle. They 00:26:05.450 --> 00:26:07.470 decide if your transaction is valid. They can 00:26:07.470 --> 00:26:09.509 freeze your account. They can reverse a transaction. 00:26:09.670 --> 00:26:12.549 They have control. In Bitcoin, there is no central 00:26:12.549 --> 00:26:15.170 dispatcher. The network itself is the dispatcher. 00:26:15.190 --> 00:26:17.509 It relies on a mathematical concept called proof 00:26:17.509 --> 00:26:20.109 of work. Can you break that down for us in simple 00:26:20.109 --> 00:26:22.390 terms? Proof of work just means that in order 00:26:22.390 --> 00:26:25.109 to validate a block of transactions and add it 00:26:25.109 --> 00:26:29.509 to the blockchain, a computer, a miner, has to 00:26:29.509 --> 00:26:32.869 expend real world energy. It has to solve a very 00:26:32.869 --> 00:26:35.789 difficult but verifiable mathematical puzzle. 00:26:36.130 --> 00:26:39.049 No single person or company controls this process. 00:26:39.410 --> 00:26:42.329 It's a consensus mechanism run by thousands of 00:26:42.329 --> 00:26:44.630 independent computers all over the world. And 00:26:44.630 --> 00:26:47.750 Jack loves it because it's permissionless. That's 00:26:47.750 --> 00:26:50.410 the key word. You don't need a passport or a 00:26:50.410 --> 00:26:53.170 credit score or a bank's permission to use Bitcoin. 00:26:53.450 --> 00:26:56.250 All you need is a private key. He sees it as 00:26:56.250 --> 00:26:58.960 the native currency of an open Internet. Now, 00:26:58.960 --> 00:27:01.099 we have to touch on the Internet conspiracy theories 00:27:01.099 --> 00:27:03.819 here. There are persistent rumors that Jack himself 00:27:03.819 --> 00:27:06.380 is Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of 00:27:06.380 --> 00:27:08.460 Bitcoin. It's a very fun theory to entertain. 00:27:08.599 --> 00:27:10.859 I mean, he has the deep cryptographic background. 00:27:10.960 --> 00:27:13.200 You have to remember the early dispatch services 00:27:13.200 --> 00:27:15.599 he built were all about secure encrypted communication. 00:27:16.079 --> 00:27:18.980 He certainly has the cypherpunk philosophy of 00:27:18.980 --> 00:27:21.799 privacy and decentralization. And he was in the 00:27:21.799 --> 00:27:23.579 right place at the right time. So do you think 00:27:23.579 --> 00:27:26.259 it's true? I would say it's highly, highly unlikely. 00:27:26.640 --> 00:27:29.460 During the critical period when Satoshi was actively 00:27:29.460 --> 00:27:32.680 coding and writing about Bitcoin, from 2008 to 00:27:32.680 --> 00:27:35.220 2010, Jack was in the middle of getting fired 00:27:35.220 --> 00:27:37.400 from Twitter and launching Square. He was a little 00:27:37.400 --> 00:27:40.500 busy. But spiritually, I think he sees himself 00:27:40.500 --> 00:27:43.339 as Satoshi's most important disciple. He's on 00:27:43.339 --> 00:27:45.720 record saying he believes Bitcoin is one of the 00:27:45.720 --> 00:27:47.539 most important developments for the future of 00:27:47.539 --> 00:27:50.440 world peace. World peace. That's a... That is 00:27:50.440 --> 00:27:53.559 a very big claim for a digital currency. It sounds 00:27:53.559 --> 00:27:55.779 hyperbolic, but his argument has a certain logic 00:27:55.779 --> 00:27:58.680 to it. His argument is that most major wars are 00:27:58.680 --> 00:28:00.819 funded by governments endlessly printing money, 00:28:01.039 --> 00:28:03.799 devaluing their currency to pay for armies and 00:28:03.799 --> 00:28:06.579 weapons. If a government had to operate on a 00:28:06.579 --> 00:28:08.980 sound money standard like Bitcoin that they couldn't 00:28:08.980 --> 00:28:11.380 inflate, it would be much harder to fund perpetual 00:28:11.380 --> 00:28:13.980 conflict. It's an anti -war technology in his 00:28:13.980 --> 00:28:16.259 view. And he's putting his company's money and 00:28:16.259 --> 00:28:18.759 his own money where his mouth is. He funded a 00:28:18.759 --> 00:28:22.039 project called Ocean. Right. Ocean is a Bitcoin 00:28:22.039 --> 00:28:24.700 mining pool. See, one of the problems Bitcoin 00:28:24.700 --> 00:28:27.200 has right now is that the mining process itself 00:28:27.200 --> 00:28:30.660 is becoming more centralized. A few huge publicly 00:28:30.660 --> 00:28:33.099 traded companies control a massive percentage 00:28:33.099 --> 00:28:35.880 of the global hash rate. Which creates a new 00:28:35.880 --> 00:28:39.059 central point of failure. It does. If those few 00:28:39.059 --> 00:28:41.720 companies were ever to collude or be forced by 00:28:41.720 --> 00:28:44.059 a government to do so, they could theoretically 00:28:44.059 --> 00:28:47.359 censor certain transactions. Ocean is what's 00:28:47.359 --> 00:28:50.200 known as a non -custodial mining pool. It allows 00:28:50.200 --> 00:28:53.160 small individual miners to pool their resources 00:28:53.160 --> 00:28:56.000 and earn rewards without ever giving up control 00:28:56.000 --> 00:28:58.700 of their hardware to a central operator. It's 00:28:58.700 --> 00:29:01.339 about decentralizing the decentralization. And 00:29:01.339 --> 00:29:03.180 there's the other side of it. He gave up on Twitter 00:29:03.180 --> 00:29:05.180 as a company, but he clearly didn't give up on 00:29:05.180 --> 00:29:07.140 the idea of social networking. He just. thinks 00:29:07.140 --> 00:29:09.019 it shouldn't be a company. This brings us to 00:29:09.019 --> 00:29:11.940 the whole Blueski versus Nostra saga. It's really 00:29:11.940 --> 00:29:14.599 revealing. Right. Blueski was his own project, 00:29:14.740 --> 00:29:17.619 started inside Twitter. He started Blueski at 00:29:17.619 --> 00:29:20.160 Twitter in 2019 with the goal of building an 00:29:20.160 --> 00:29:23.980 open, decentralized social media protocol. The 00:29:23.980 --> 00:29:26.440 long -term vision was that Twitter itself would 00:29:26.440 --> 00:29:28.759 eventually just become one of many clients that 00:29:28.759 --> 00:29:31.299 could plug into this open standard. But after 00:29:31.299 --> 00:29:33.880 he left Twitter, Blueski spun off into its own 00:29:33.880 --> 00:29:36.319 independent company. It did. It took on venture 00:29:36.319 --> 00:29:38.759 capital funding. It formed a public benefit corporation. 00:29:39.319 --> 00:29:42.500 It appointed a board, which Jack sat on. And 00:29:42.500 --> 00:29:44.319 it started doing all the things companies do. 00:29:44.460 --> 00:29:46.880 It started building centralized moderation tools. 00:29:47.039 --> 00:29:49.960 It started acting like... Twitter. And Jack hated 00:29:49.960 --> 00:29:53.140 it. He grew disillusioned. In May of 2024, he 00:29:53.140 --> 00:29:56.220 very publicly left the blue ski board. He deleted 00:29:56.220 --> 00:29:58.200 his account and said they were repeating all 00:29:58.200 --> 00:30:00.519 the mistakes we made at Twitter. He doesn't want 00:30:00.519 --> 00:30:02.859 a better, more decentralized Twitter. He wants 00:30:02.859 --> 00:30:05.579 no Twitter. He wants a protocol, not a platform. 00:30:05.720 --> 00:30:08.759 So he pivoted all his support and energy to Noster. 00:30:09.259 --> 00:30:11.799 Noster, which stands for notes and other stuff 00:30:11.799 --> 00:30:14.099 transmitted by relays. It's a terrible name. 00:30:14.220 --> 00:30:16.079 It's a terrible name, but the concept is what 00:30:16.079 --> 00:30:18.299 matters to him. So what makes it fundamentally 00:30:18.299 --> 00:30:21.119 different from BlueSky or Twitter? Noster isn't 00:30:21.119 --> 00:30:23.940 a platform. It's a protocol, just like email 00:30:23.940 --> 00:30:27.759 or HTTP are protocols. No single person or company 00:30:27.759 --> 00:30:30.579 owns email, right? You can use Gmail. I can use 00:30:30.579 --> 00:30:32.900 Outlook. A company can run its own server and 00:30:32.900 --> 00:30:36.119 we can all still talk to each other. Right. Nostra 00:30:36.119 --> 00:30:38.420 is the same for social media. There is no central 00:30:38.420 --> 00:30:40.940 Nostra server. There's no Nostra Inc. So where 00:30:40.940 --> 00:30:43.319 does the data actually live? It lives on a network 00:30:43.319 --> 00:30:46.619 of independent relays. Anyone can run a relay. 00:30:46.720 --> 00:30:48.440 You can run one on a cheap computer in your basement. 00:30:48.660 --> 00:30:50.599 When I want to post a message, I sign it with 00:30:50.599 --> 00:30:53.900 my private cryptographic key. That's my uncensorable 00:30:53.900 --> 00:30:56.519 identity. And I send it out to a handful of relays 00:30:56.519 --> 00:30:58.980 that I like. Your app, your client, just connects 00:30:58.980 --> 00:31:01.140 to those same relays and pulls my message down. 00:31:01.359 --> 00:31:04.000 So if a relay owner decides, I don't like what 00:31:04.000 --> 00:31:06.299 this person is saying, and they ban you from 00:31:06.299 --> 00:31:09.440 their relay, what happens? Nothing, really. I 00:31:09.440 --> 00:31:11.319 just start sending my messages to different relays. 00:31:11.400 --> 00:31:13.920 My identity isn't tied to any one server. It's 00:31:13.920 --> 00:31:16.140 tied to my cryptographic key. It is designed 00:31:16.140 --> 00:31:18.920 from the ground up to be censorship resistant. 00:31:19.319 --> 00:31:21.819 And he's even thinking beyond the internet now. 00:31:21.960 --> 00:31:24.099 He's been talking about Bluetooth mesh networks. 00:31:24.539 --> 00:31:27.029 This is the most radical step. This is for a 00:31:27.029 --> 00:31:29.230 situation where the internet itself goes down. 00:31:29.809 --> 00:31:32.470 Imagine a large protest where a government decides 00:31:32.470 --> 00:31:35.210 to shut down all the cell towers and cut off 00:31:35.210 --> 00:31:38.170 Internet access. Bluetooth mesh allows phones 00:31:38.170 --> 00:31:40.170 to talk directly to each other, peer to peer. 00:31:40.349 --> 00:31:42.750 Like a daisy chain of data. A digital bucket 00:31:42.750 --> 00:31:45.490 brigade. My phone talks to your phone, which 00:31:45.490 --> 00:31:47.690 talks to the phone next to you. It creates a 00:31:47.690 --> 00:31:50.490 local ad hoc network with no central infrastructure 00:31:50.490 --> 00:31:54.309 at all. He funded an app in 2025 called BitChat 00:31:54.309 --> 00:31:57.230 that uses this technology. It is dispatching 00:31:57.230 --> 00:32:00.140 without a dispatcher. ultimate realization of 00:32:00.140 --> 00:32:02.440 that teenage dream of watching dots move on a 00:32:02.440 --> 00:32:05.359 map. But now with no central tower controlling 00:32:05.359 --> 00:32:07.440 them, it's incredible how consistent the core 00:32:07.440 --> 00:32:10.099 philosophy is from a scanner in St. Louis all 00:32:10.099 --> 00:32:12.220 the way to blockchain protocols. But we have 00:32:12.220 --> 00:32:14.519 to look at the man himself, part five, because 00:32:14.519 --> 00:32:17.289 the way he lives his life is. Just as intense 00:32:17.289 --> 00:32:19.890 and just as extreme as the software he funds. 00:32:20.089 --> 00:32:21.789 Yeah, we have to talk about the technological 00:32:21.789 --> 00:32:24.910 monk persona because it's not just an act. He 00:32:24.910 --> 00:32:27.210 lives in Seacliff, a beautiful neighborhood in 00:32:27.210 --> 00:32:30.529 San Francisco, has a $10 million compound overlooking 00:32:30.529 --> 00:32:32.849 the Golden Gate Bridge. But by all accounts, 00:32:33.029 --> 00:32:35.670 inside that house, he lives like an ascetic. 00:32:35.829 --> 00:32:38.109 The meditation is a huge part of it. A huge part. 00:32:38.190 --> 00:32:40.710 He practices Vipassana meditation. And we need 00:32:40.710 --> 00:32:42.869 to be clear, this isn't the kind of mindfulness 00:32:42.869 --> 00:32:45.650 you do on a five -minute app. This is an ancient, 00:32:45.809 --> 00:32:49.509 rigorous, demanding tradition. In late 2017, 00:32:49.809 --> 00:32:52.730 he did a 10 -day silent retreat. Walk us through 00:32:52.730 --> 00:32:54.569 what that actually entails. It's intense. You 00:32:54.569 --> 00:32:57.319 wake up at 4 a .m. You meditate something like 00:32:57.319 --> 00:32:59.539 10 hours a day. You're not allowed to eat after 00:32:59.539 --> 00:33:01.640 midday. No reading, no writing, no phones, no 00:33:01.640 --> 00:33:03.480 music. You don't even make eye contact with the 00:33:03.480 --> 00:33:05.859 other people there. You are completely and totally 00:33:05.859 --> 00:33:08.319 alone with your own mind for 10 straight days. 00:33:08.579 --> 00:33:11.420 For a guy whose brain seems to be wired for constant 00:33:11.420 --> 00:33:15.539 high speed data inputs, that must have been excruciatingly 00:33:15.539 --> 00:33:17.740 difficult. He said it was one of the most painful 00:33:17.740 --> 00:33:20.500 and difficult things he's ever done. But he believes 00:33:20.500 --> 00:33:23.720 it's necessary to, in his words, hack his own 00:33:23.720 --> 00:33:27.130 brain to debug. his own mental source code and 00:33:27.130 --> 00:33:29.710 see the world as it really is. But that intense 00:33:29.710 --> 00:33:32.849 inward focus can have a huge blind spot. It can 00:33:32.849 --> 00:33:35.710 backfire. We have to address the Myanmar trip. 00:33:35.890 --> 00:33:38.710 We do. In 2018, for his birthday, he went to 00:33:38.710 --> 00:33:40.529 Myanmar to do another one of these meditation 00:33:40.529 --> 00:33:43.589 retreats. And when he came out, he tweeted about 00:33:43.589 --> 00:33:46.430 how beautiful the country was, how peaceable 00:33:46.430 --> 00:33:48.890 and kind the people were. And he posted this 00:33:48.890 --> 00:33:51.009 at the exact same time that the Myanmar military 00:33:51.009 --> 00:33:54.049 was in the middle of conducting a brutal genocide 00:33:54.049 --> 00:33:56.490 against the Rohingya Muslim minority. It was 00:33:56.490 --> 00:33:59.569 a massive, unforced PR disaster. Critics, I think, 00:33:59.569 --> 00:34:01.289 rightfully pointed out that his own platform, 00:34:01.549 --> 00:34:03.650 Twitter, had been used as a tool to spread hate 00:34:03.650 --> 00:34:06.089 speech and incite violence against the Rohingya. 00:34:06.170 --> 00:34:08.750 And here he was, the CEO, essentially promoting 00:34:08.750 --> 00:34:11.050 tourism to the country without even acknowledging 00:34:11.050 --> 00:34:13.090 the atrocities that were happening. It suggests 00:34:13.090 --> 00:34:15.920 a kind of profound tunnel vision. He was so focused 00:34:15.920 --> 00:34:18.280 on achieving his own internal silence that he 00:34:18.280 --> 00:34:20.400 completely tuned out the screams of external 00:34:20.400 --> 00:34:23.480 suffering. That is the dark side, the shadow 00:34:23.480 --> 00:34:27.079 side of that monk archetype. An extreme level 00:34:27.079 --> 00:34:30.320 of detachment can start to look a lot like indifference. 00:34:30.579 --> 00:34:33.079 Let's pivot to his politics, though. Yeah. Because 00:34:33.079 --> 00:34:35.239 you absolutely cannot put him in a simple box. 00:34:35.440 --> 00:34:37.840 Oh, he's a complete nightmare for political pundits 00:34:37.840 --> 00:34:40.900 who want to label everyone. In the 2020 Democratic 00:34:40.900 --> 00:34:44.119 primary, he donated to two candidates. Tulsi 00:34:44.119 --> 00:34:48.190 Gabbard and Andrew Yang. But both definite outsiders. 00:34:48.650 --> 00:34:50.550 Yang, of course, was a universal basic income 00:34:50.550 --> 00:34:53.309 candidate. And UBI is a huge passion for Jack. 00:34:53.449 --> 00:34:56.730 Right. But then fast forward to 2024 and he very 00:34:56.730 --> 00:34:59.409 publicly endorses Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president. 00:34:59.610 --> 00:35:02.429 Who is the ultimate anti -establishment chaos 00:35:02.429 --> 00:35:05.510 agent. RFK Jr.'s entire platform is built on 00:35:05.510 --> 00:35:07.190 challenging the pharmaceutical industry, the 00:35:07.190 --> 00:35:09.590 intelligence agencies, the mainstream media, 00:35:09.789 --> 00:35:11.869 basically questioning every official narrative. 00:35:12.070 --> 00:35:15.230 And Jack loves that questioning spirit. But here's 00:35:15.230 --> 00:35:17.929 the twist. At the same time he's supporting RFK 00:35:17.929 --> 00:35:21.230 Jr., he donates $10 million to Boston University's 00:35:21.230 --> 00:35:23.710 Center for Anti -Racist Research, founded by 00:35:23.710 --> 00:35:26.170 Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. The leading academic scholar 00:35:26.170 --> 00:35:27.750 of what's often called critical race theory. 00:35:28.090 --> 00:35:30.489 Exactly. So on one hand, you have RFK Jr., and 00:35:30.489 --> 00:35:32.940 on the other, you have Ibram X. Kendi. Most people 00:35:32.940 --> 00:35:34.940 would look at that and see a complete contradiction, 00:35:35.219 --> 00:35:37.900 a political schizophrenic. But I think in Jack's 00:35:37.900 --> 00:35:40.340 mind, it's perfectly consistent. How do you square 00:35:40.340 --> 00:35:42.579 that circle? They are both in their own ways 00:35:42.579 --> 00:35:45.239 challenging the system. Kendi is challenging 00:35:45.239 --> 00:35:47.679 the systemic power structures of race in America. 00:35:48.119 --> 00:35:50.559 RFK is challenging the systemic power structures 00:35:50.559 --> 00:35:53.500 of government and corporations. Jack is fundamentally 00:35:53.500 --> 00:35:56.500 anti -centralization. He will support anyone 00:35:56.500 --> 00:35:59.139 he sees as trying to break up the big monolithic 00:35:59.139 --> 00:36:01.960 blobs of power. He's also tweeted in. support 00:36:01.960 --> 00:36:04.559 of the Gaza war protests and even drew parallels 00:36:04.559 --> 00:36:07.340 to the Vietnam and Iraq war protests. He's very 00:36:07.340 --> 00:36:10.360 consistently anti -war. Because war is the ultimate, 00:36:10.440 --> 00:36:13.679 most violent expression of the centralized state. 00:36:13.840 --> 00:36:16.519 He's a libertarian in the truest nonpartisan 00:36:16.519 --> 00:36:19.280 sense of that word. He trusts individuals over 00:36:19.280 --> 00:36:21.599 institutes every single time. And that trust 00:36:21.599 --> 00:36:23.820 in individuals is the driving force behind his 00:36:23.820 --> 00:36:26.000 philanthropy, right? The start small initiative. 00:36:26.300 --> 00:36:28.219 This is one of the most interesting things he's 00:36:28.219 --> 00:36:31.809 done. It's April 2020. The COVID -19 pandemic 00:36:31.809 --> 00:36:35.050 is just starting to explode globally. Jack takes 00:36:35.050 --> 00:36:38.170 $1 billion of his equity in Square, which at 00:36:38.170 --> 00:36:40.610 the time was about 28 % of his total net worth, 00:36:40.750 --> 00:36:43.429 and he moves it into a new entity. But it wasn't 00:36:43.429 --> 00:36:46.190 a typical foundation. No. He didn't create a 00:36:46.190 --> 00:36:49.050 501C foundation, which comes with a board of 00:36:49.050 --> 00:36:52.170 directors, huge overhead costs and a slow bureaucratic 00:36:52.170 --> 00:36:55.969 process. He moved it into a simple LLC, a limited 00:36:55.969 --> 00:36:57.989 liability company. What's the practical difference 00:36:57.989 --> 00:37:00.969 there? An LLC is just a company. He is the sole 00:37:00.969 --> 00:37:03.429 member. He can write a check to anyone for any 00:37:03.429 --> 00:37:06.329 reason in five minutes. It's agile. And he did 00:37:06.329 --> 00:37:09.030 something truly radical for transparency. The 00:37:09.030 --> 00:37:11.130 Google sheet. The Google sheet. He tweeted out 00:37:11.130 --> 00:37:13.030 a public link to a Google spreadsheet. It's called 00:37:13.030 --> 00:37:14.789 the Start Small Tracker. You can go look at it 00:37:14.789 --> 00:37:17.070 right now. It is a line -by -line public ledger 00:37:17.070 --> 00:37:20.030 of every single donation he has made from that 00:37:20.030 --> 00:37:22.510 billion dollars. So you can see it all. $10 million 00:37:22.510 --> 00:37:25.010 to the Reform Alliance for criminal justice reform. 00:37:25.610 --> 00:37:29.389 $20 million to CORE for COVID relief. $15 million 00:37:29.389 --> 00:37:32.190 for oxygen concentrators for India. It's all 00:37:32.190 --> 00:37:35.079 just there. Why a Google sheet? Because it's 00:37:35.079 --> 00:37:37.239 the dispatch aesthetic again. It's raw data. 00:37:37.440 --> 00:37:40.159 It's not a glossy annual report or a press release. 00:37:40.360 --> 00:37:43.380 It's just a ledger. He wants you to see the real 00:37:43.380 --> 00:37:46.679 -time flow of the money unvarnished. And a huge 00:37:46.679 --> 00:37:48.699 amount of that money, as you mentioned with Andrew 00:37:48.699 --> 00:37:51.019 Yang, goes to universal basic income experiments. 00:37:51.099 --> 00:37:53.829 A huge amount. He's the primary funder for a 00:37:53.829 --> 00:37:55.829 group called Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. 00:37:56.190 --> 00:37:58.590 He believes that the most efficient and dignified 00:37:58.590 --> 00:38:01.269 way to help people isn't to create a complex, 00:38:01.530 --> 00:38:04.230 top -down welfare bureaucracy. That's just another 00:38:04.230 --> 00:38:06.269 centralized dispatcher. He wants to just give 00:38:06.269 --> 00:38:07.969 people the money. Just give them the cash, a 00:38:07.969 --> 00:38:10.670 direct peer -to -peer transfer, and trust them 00:38:10.670 --> 00:38:12.429 to solve their own problems in their own way. 00:38:12.570 --> 00:38:14.650 He trusts the nodes at the edge of the network 00:38:14.650 --> 00:38:17.110 more than he trusts the hub in the center. So 00:38:17.110 --> 00:38:19.519 if we pull the lens back. We have this incredible 00:38:19.519 --> 00:38:22.139 picture of a man who spent the first half of 00:38:22.139 --> 00:38:24.599 his career building these massive centralized 00:38:24.599 --> 00:38:28.059 systems to route information and money and is 00:38:28.059 --> 00:38:30.880 now spending the entire second half of his career 00:38:30.880 --> 00:38:33.179 trying to build the tools that will make his 00:38:33.179 --> 00:38:36.159 own original creations obsolete. He wants to 00:38:36.159 --> 00:38:38.780 abdicate the throne he built. He wants to be 00:38:38.780 --> 00:38:41.840 the technological monk who writes the code, sets 00:38:41.840 --> 00:38:44.199 it free in the world, and then disappears back 00:38:44.199 --> 00:38:46.440 into the meditation hall. But we have to end 00:38:46.440 --> 00:38:48.570 with a harder question. Is he right? That is 00:38:48.570 --> 00:38:51.110 the multi -trillion dollar gamble of the 21st 00:38:51.110 --> 00:38:53.230 century. Because we have seen what happens on 00:38:53.230 --> 00:38:55.670 largely unmoderated decentralized platforms. 00:38:55.929 --> 00:38:58.809 You get floods of hate speech. You get coordinated 00:38:58.809 --> 00:39:01.510 harassment campaigns. You get state -sponsored 00:39:01.510 --> 00:39:04.670 bot armies. You get chaos. If you remove the 00:39:04.670 --> 00:39:06.849 dispatcher, if you fire all the trust and safety 00:39:06.849 --> 00:39:10.190 teams, does society actually function? Or does 00:39:10.190 --> 00:39:12.539 it just crash and burn? Jack's argument would 00:39:12.539 --> 00:39:14.679 be that the crash isn't caused by freedom. It's 00:39:14.679 --> 00:39:17.400 caused by the centralized engagement based algorithms 00:39:17.400 --> 00:39:19.940 that are manipulating us and amplifying the worst 00:39:19.940 --> 00:39:22.880 aspects of human nature for profit. He truly 00:39:22.880 --> 00:39:24.840 believes that if you give people tools that they 00:39:24.840 --> 00:39:27.079 own and control where they can choose their own 00:39:27.079 --> 00:39:30.360 algorithm or have no algorithm at all, that rationality 00:39:30.360 --> 00:39:32.619 and good faith will eventually return. He has 00:39:32.619 --> 00:39:34.960 a deep, almost religious faith in the wisdom 00:39:34.960 --> 00:39:37.480 of the crowd in its purest, most unfiltered form. 00:39:37.619 --> 00:39:40.190 He trusts the nodes. Full stop. It's a beautiful 00:39:40.190 --> 00:39:42.730 vision. Maybe it's a naive vision. Maybe it's 00:39:42.730 --> 00:39:45.429 the only way forward. But when you look at the 00:39:45.429 --> 00:39:48.710 world we live in right now, a world of AI -generated 00:39:48.710 --> 00:39:51.869 deepfakes, of pervasive information warfare, 00:39:52.960 --> 00:39:55.159 The idea of taking all the guardrails off seems 00:39:55.159 --> 00:39:58.519 terrifyingly risky. It is incredibly risky. But 00:39:58.519 --> 00:40:00.659 Jack looks at the alternative, a world where 00:40:00.659 --> 00:40:03.619 a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk or a government 00:40:03.619 --> 00:40:06.900 bureaucrat gets to be the final arbiter of what 00:40:06.900 --> 00:40:09.599 is true. And he thinks that is the far greater 00:40:09.599 --> 00:40:11.739 danger. So he's essentially handing out the matches 00:40:11.739 --> 00:40:14.400 and hoping we collectively decide not to burn 00:40:14.400 --> 00:40:16.760 the house down. Or he's hoping we realize we 00:40:16.760 --> 00:40:18.920 can use the fire to cook dinner and warm ourselves. 00:40:19.239 --> 00:40:21.579 It's a story that's still being written. And 00:40:21.579 --> 00:40:24.179 whether he is Satoshi or not, he is certainly 00:40:24.179 --> 00:40:26.500 the most Satoshi -like public figure we have. 00:40:26.659 --> 00:40:29.780 He embodies that spirit. He is the ultimate anti 00:40:29.780 --> 00:40:32.219 -CEO. We covered a ton of ground today. Mass 00:40:32.219 --> 00:40:34.860 spectrometers in St. Louis, silent retreats in 00:40:34.860 --> 00:40:36.920 Myanmar, the architecture of the blockchain. 00:40:37.239 --> 00:40:39.219 We didn't even get to really deep dive on his 00:40:39.219 --> 00:40:41.340 acquisition of the Music Streaming Service title, 00:40:41.400 --> 00:40:43.300 but that's a whole other story about empowering 00:40:43.300 --> 00:40:46.210 artists. Maybe for another day. I think the final 00:40:46.210 --> 00:40:48.530 thought, the thing for you, the listener, to 00:40:48.530 --> 00:40:51.010 take away from this is to just look at the digital 00:40:51.010 --> 00:40:53.570 tools you use every single day. Look at your 00:40:53.570 --> 00:40:55.869 social media feed, your bank account, your messaging 00:40:55.869 --> 00:41:00.170 apps, and ask yourself, who owns the map? Who 00:41:00.170 --> 00:41:02.829 is the dispatcher? And is it time you started 00:41:02.829 --> 00:41:05.030 dispatching yourself? That's the question he 00:41:05.030 --> 00:41:06.849 wants everyone to ask. Thanks for listening to 00:41:06.849 --> 00:41:08.230 The Deep Dive. We'll see you next time.