March 24, 2019
Jack Dorsey on Solitude, Self-Care, and Shouldering the Health of Global Conversation – The Rich Roll Podcast
Check out The Rich Roll Podcast Episode Page & Show Notes
Key Takeaways
- Perhaps Twitter won’t have follower counts and the number of likes/retweets you receive on a tweet openly listed in the future
- These features more so promote social status, rather than Twitter’s main goal of serving the global conversation
- Two powerful quotes that really show how much Jack focuses on delegation, systems, and automation:
- “If I have to make a decision, I see it as an organizational failure”
- “I want to build a service and company that outlives me, that doesn’t require me being there, and doesn’t require my attention”
- Jack, as CEO of Twitter and Square, tries to sleep 9 hours every night and meditate for an hour every morning
- Twitter is the global consciousness
- With podcasts, we need a way to be able to search for keywords mentioned within audio, and then listen to the relevant clips mentioning those keywords/phrases
Books Mentioned
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
- Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Roseberg
- Speaking Peace by Marshall Rosenberg (audiobook)
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
Intro
- Jack Dorsey (@jack) is the CEO of Twitter and Square
- Check out the Podcast Notes from his latest appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, the Podcast Notes from his appearance on Sam Harris’ podcast, and the Podcast Notes from his appearance on Ben Greenfield’s podcast
Jack’s Meditation Practice
- Jack spends an hour every morning doing Vipassana Meditation
- He’s has done two silent meditation retreats
- One in Dallas, Texas and one in Myanmar
- He had a Twitter thread about the latter
- “And one of the biggest surprises I had was every single monk I saw and every nun I ran into had a cell phone”
- Facebook is VERY popular in Myanmar
- One in Dallas, Texas and one in Myanmar
- “I’ve identified meditation as a practice that makes me a lot stronger, a lot more resilient, a lot more aware, and able to approach my work with a lot more clarity and discipline”
Jack’s Recent Podcast Tour
- Jack has been on quite the podcast tour lately…
- This one with Rich
- He’s done Joe Rogan’s twice (First Appearance) (Second Appearance – Podcast Notes)
- Tales from the Crypt
- Sam Harris (Podcast Notes)
- Ben Greenfield (Podcast Notes)
- Jack says he listens to just about every Ben Greenfield episode
- Why?
- “I think it’s important that I have these conversations in public and that we [Twitter] show our thinking. I want to bring up ideas in public that people can push against and I want to hear the feedback. I want to get the reaction because it’ll make our that answers much better.”
Twitter Features
- Perhaps Twitter won’t have follower counts, and the number of likes/retweets you receive on a tweet openly listed in the future?
- Jack acknowledges that those features do not serve Twitter’s mission – to serve a public conversation
- Potential future Twitter features
- Being able to edit tweets
- Giving people more control over their conversation threads (who can reply, what replies are shown etc.)
- Being able to go back and clarify old tweets
Twitter’s Goals for the Future
- To promote more healthy conversation
- The 4 indicators of a healthy conversation:
- Shared attention
- Shared reality
- Receptivity,
- Variety of perspective
- The 4 indicators of a healthy conversation:
- Twitter’s main goal in the upcoming years is to shift the burden away from user’s having to report abuse/harassment/doxxing
- Using better machine learning algorithms, they’ll soon be able to catch the abuse before it has to be reported
- The number one thing Twitter wants to protect – someone’s physical safety
- Incentivize utility over social status
- This goes back to the idea of Twitter trying to better serve the public conversation, rather than promote likes/retweets/follower counts
- “The world we want to get to is – I want people to walk away from Twitter feeling that they learned something, and right now I feel walk people walk away from Twitter feeling outraged or feeling overwhelmed”
The Echo Chambers of Twitter
- “Very few people, and mainly journalists, follow accounts on Twitter that have a completely different perspective than themselves”
- In 2016, leading up to the U.S. election MIT Cortico Labs put out an infographic (which we couldn’t find) that showed a number of the journalists on the left were not following folks on the right. Whereas folks on the right, were following folks on the left.
On Banning
- Twitter almost never bans someone from one-off occurrences
- They largely take into account an account’s past behavior and history
- One thing Jack acknowledges though – Twitter has not been transparent enough for the reasons behind certain bands
Does Jacky ever get involved in the decisions to ban certain accounts?
- “If I have to make a decision, I see it as an organizational failure”
- “I want to build a service and company, that outlives me that doesn’t require me being there, and doesn’t require my attention”
- ” If I die tomorrow, the company needs to be able to continue and we have to build this into a framework… not into people”
Twitter’s Two Main Operating Principles
- Serve the public conversation
- Earn trust
- This comes through transparency, consistency, reliability, and deliberateness (for example – when you read the rules, you completely understand them)
- Transparency is tricky – because right now, AI can’t explain the decisions it makes, and as Twitter moves to relying more on AI…. you can see the challenge
- This comes through transparency, consistency, reliability, and deliberateness (for example – when you read the rules, you completely understand them)
Twitter’s Rules
- All of Twitter’s rules are centered around two things:
- Protecting the physical safety of users
- Enabling peoples’ right to freely express themselves
A Day in the Life of Jack Dorsey
- He wakes up between 5:30-6 AM and immediately takes a cold shower
- “At the end of it, it just feels I can take on anything”
- Then he meditates (Vipassana Mediation) for an hour
- After this, he’ll check his phone (around 7-7:30 AM)
- He keeps his phone in the kitchen – not next to his bed
- Jack works from home two days a week, but when he does go into the office, he walks 5 miles there – it takes him about an hour and 20 minutes
- He wears all black (jeans and sweatshirt) so if he sweats on the way in, no one can see
- He wears Earth Runner sandals (yes they’re open toe)
- Jack doesn’t eat breakfast, he only eats one meal a day
- He goes 22 hours between each meal
- He usually has meetings at Twitter from 9 AM – 2 PM and then he heads to Square until 6-7 pm
- He takes a Lyft home
- Jack eats dinner around 6:30-7 PM
- Check out these Podcast Notes for more on what he eats
- Then he’ll hop in his sauna
- It’s a SaunaSpace near-infrared sauna (it gets to about 125 °F) – Jack uses it for ~30 minutes to an hour
- Next, he does the 7-Minute Workout with his Seven app
- He’ll then eat again
- He goes to bed by 10 PM
- Occasionally on Friday mornings, Jack will reward himself for sticking to his one meal a day practice and head to Blue Bottle Coffee to get one of their waffles
Twitter is the Global Consciousness
- “These technologies are just reminders to me, and crutches, of what we inherently are born with and have the natural ability to do”
- Expanded – many people, through meditation or psychedelics, have come to “access” this feeling of global connection and consciousness
- “I get my sense of spirituality through connection and Twitter represents something spiritual to me…that act of tapping into the global consciousness is what drives me…that’s where I feel most alive”
R&R
- Every Saturday, Jack tries to not think about work at all
- He’ll often go to Big Sur, have dinner with friends, or take long walks
Where does Jack Dorsey see Twitter in 5-10 years?
- Being a platform that fully serves the global public conversation
- Being a platform that promotes healthy conversation
- Every time you walk away from Twitter – you’ll have just learned something
How Jack Would Disrupt the Podcasting Space
- He’d figure out a way to provide better economic incentives
- Right now, all we really have are advertising and listener supported models
- Perhaps one day, you’ll be able to buy equity in a podcaster’s success with cryptocurrency
- With podcasts, we need a way to be able to search for keywords mentioned within audio, and then listen to the relevant clips mentioning those keywords/phrases
- To expand reach, podcasts should be automatically translated
Random
- Twitter sees about 500 million tweets every day
These notes were edited by RoRoPa Editing Services
