Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1236 - Jack Dorsey
Uploaded: 2019-02-02T10:10:21.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1236 - Jack Dorsey' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-02-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1236 - Jack Dorsey' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-02-02. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1236 - Jack Dorsey

three two one boom hello jack what's up nice to meet you man nice to meet you
finally yeah
keep this sucker like a fist from your face is always good first of all dude uh
you started
a company when you started twitter when you guys first started did you have any
i there's no way
you could have added any idea what it would be now no but one of the things i
always try to
emphasize with people when they're people like oh twitter's crazy like how
could it not be crazy
there's never been anything like it before like imagine trying to predict
the kind of the president of the united states uses twitter to threaten other
countries yeah i mean
who the fuck saw that coming nobody saw that coming not us what did you think
it was going to be when
you first did it well you know we were building this thing for ourselves and
that's how that's how
everything starts we wanted to use it we wanted to um we wanted to you know
stay connected with each
other like a group text like a group text we loved our phones we loved um
technology we we actually
started this as a hack week project out of a failed company called audio it's
podcasting i remember that
super early on we were uh we're really creative folks but we weren't that
passionate about where
podcasting was going in our particular um domain we just got a lot of
competition early on itunes just
released their podcast directory but we knew we wanted to work together we knew
um we love this idea of
one button publishing we love this idea of collaboration we love this idea of
uh being anywhere and being able to
um share what was happening that was that was that was the idea i mean that
that was it and that's what we
wanted it to be and i think the most beautiful and also sometimes uncomfortable
aspect of twitter is
it um we really learned what it wanted to be and the people helped create it
like everything that we
hold sacred now the at symbol the hashtag the retweet those were not invented
by me or the company those
were things that we discovered things that we discovered people using and we
just observed it and
we we noticed what they were trying to do they're trying to talk with one
another they were trying to
collect tweets around topics with the hashtag has anybody figured out when the
first
use of hashtag something was created yeah it was um it was actually our lead
designer
uh robert anderson who leads our design of the cash app um hired him for square
uh later on
but uh he was the first one he was actually communicating with his brother
and uh he put at buzz his brother's name is buzz and it just kind of spread it
wasn't in mass but people
were doing it but what was most interesting is not what they were doing but
what they wanted to do with
it they wanted to address each other and that's that changed the company
completely that changed the
service because it went from just broadcasting what's happening to conversation
and to being being able to
address anyone publicly out in the open which came with it a lot of power and
also a lot of issues
as well yeah the the use of hashtags like uh looking up hashtag you know fry
fest or hashtag you know
anytime there's something weird that's in the news that's uh that's such a
unique way to find things
but to go on twitter and to to utilize that it's uh i mean it's it's
interesting that you're that this guy
just did it just to contact his brother well that would that was the at symbol
the hashtag was this guy
chris messina and he was trying to he was trying to tag um he was trying to tag
around topics that he was
tweeting about and again that spread all we did was made it easier we made it
more accessible we we enabled everyone to do it uh with the at symbol we made a
page that collected
all mentions of your name with the hashtag we allowed people to search uh
immediately so you could tap on
the keyword and you would see everyone talking about that or tweeting about
that specific hashtag so
these things were just emergent behaviors that we didn't predict and they
became the lifeblood of the
service what's fascinating to me about something like twitter or even something
like youtube
is that there's not a lot of other ones like it there's just this one thing
like how does that happen
where this one thing sort of gets adopted by everybody and takes over and then
just becomes this
overwhelmingly massive platform i mean there's really there's vimeo there's a
few other video
services but nothing on the scale of youtube and that's the same thing with
twitter there's nothing
on the scale of distributing information in a quick short 280 character form
like that we um i i don't
think we could plan for it i don't think we could necessarily build for that i
uh someone said recently
to uh we just you know gathered a bunch of our leadership last week in palm
springs for an offsite and
someone said recently that twitter was um discovered and i think what's behind
all that
is that it it it hit something foundational it hit something essential and my
co-founder biz likes to
say that twitter can never be uninvented it's here it changed everything the
the use of it has been
revolutionary and it's just a simple idea of you know if you could text with
the entire world if you
could actually reach anyone in the world or anyone could see what you're
thinking which i think is also
the beautiful thing about about text and the and the medium you can actually
get someone's raw thoughts
and anyone in the world can see that instantaneously it becomes this
subconscious it becomes this like global
consciousness and it uh it gets to some really deep places in society and and
some of those places are
pretty uncomfortable well it also gets to some really deep places
psychologically um there's there's a
some there's a weirdness to it right there's a weirdness to sending text
particularly anonymously you
know and there's so many accounts that are just an egg you know so many
accounts where they're clearly
designed if you like sometimes someone will tweet something mean to me and i'm
like hmm i wonder
what this person's up to so i go to their site and it's just them tweeting mean
shit at people all day
long like it's probably some angry person at work and they're like i'm just
gonna find people and
fuck with them all day like when did you realize or when did you realize i'm
sure you're aware of it
when did you realize that this was almost out of your control in terms of like
the scale of it
there were there there wasn't there wasn't one moment there wasn't one moment
that um it just felt
completely resonant it's just it's it's unfolded into the next thing and the
next use case and it just
keeps surprising us with how people are are using it we you know it definitely
um recently i think we've
identified some of the areas of the service that we need to pay a lot more
attention to um twitter is
unique and that it has two main spaces one which is your timeline and those are
the people that you
follow and uh you know when you follow someone they've earned that audience and
then it has this
other world where anyone can insert themselves into the conversation they can
actually mention you and
you'll see that without asking for it you can insert yourself into hashtags and
to search and these are
areas that people have taken advantage of and these are the areas that people
have gamed our systems to
in some cases artificially amplify but also just to spread a lot of things that
weren't possible with
the velocity that they're not possible before now when this is all happening
what's the conversation
like at twitter when you're recognizing that this is happening that people are
kind of gaming the system
like what how do you guys how do you mitigate it what's the discussion well
early on it was um
it was pretty surface level like how do we change some of the app dynamics but
more recently we're
trying to go a lot deeper and and asking ourselves a question when people open
twitter what are we
incentivizing what are we telling them to do when they open up this app we may
not explicitly be doing
that but there's something that we're saying without being as clear about it so
what does the like button
incentivize what does the retweet incentivize what does the number of followers
and making that number
big and bold incentivize so i'm not sure what we should i'm not sure if we
should incentivize anything but
we need to understand what that is and i think you know right now we we do
incentivize a lot of echo
chambers because we don't make it easy for people to follow interests and
topics it's only accounts we
incentivize um a lot of outrage and hot takes because of the some of the
dynamics in the service not allowing
a lot of nuance in conversation earlier on um pseudonyms uh this uh you know
this uh ability to not use your
real name incentivizes some positive things like it allows for whistleblowers
and journalists who
might fear for their career or even worse their life and under certain regimes
but also
allows for people like the example you mentioned of just random fire and uh you
know spread of
abuse and harassment throughout so those are the things that we're looking at
and how do we how do we
enable more of the conversation to evolve how do we increase the credibility
reputation of accounts um how do we
identify uh credible voices within a particular domain um not just through this
very coarse grain
blue verified badge but if you're an expert in a particular topic how do we
recognize that in real
time and show that so that we can provide more context to who you're talking to
and if you want to
engage in a deeper conversation or just ignore mute or block them but what is
the conversation like while
you're at work like when you're realizing that all this stuff is happening um
and you're realizing
that now i mean particularly because the president uses it so often it's such a
i mean it's his preferred platform for communicating with
the people i mean even more so than addresses it's really it's very strange
what's the conversation
like in the office when you're trying to figure out hey what's our
responsibility here like how are we
supposed to handle this or how do we i mean you're you're in some ways what
twitter is doing is
it it it's really kind of it's flavoring the public narrative it's flavoring
the way we communicate
with each other in in this in our culture worldwide yeah i mean the the
conversation has definitely
evolved um i think in the past we just got super reactive um we were reacting
to all the negative
things that we're seeing and that led to a lot of short-term thinking um more
recently we've just
looked much deeper we we don't react to the to the present day where we look
for some of the patterns
and um you know we we have a we have a company that uh is not just serving the
people of this
particular country the united states this is global we have global leaders all
around the use all around
the world using us in in different ways some you know more um with a higher
velocity some uh recognize
more of the power um some put out statements some lead conversations but it's
looking at all those
dynamics and not trying to um hyper focus on any one particular one because if
we do we're only building
it for one portion of the population or only one perceived uh present-day
crisis well what i'm what
i'm trying to get at was like okay like when things come up like say if you
find out that there's people
from isis that are using twitter and they're using twitter and posting things
like what is the conversation
like how do what do we do about this do we let leave this up do we we recognize
this as free speech do we only
take it down if they're calling for murder or hate speech like what how do you
handle that well it
it evolves i mean because like we first saw isis when the world saw isis and we
needed to change our
policy to deal with it um what was the what was the initial reaction to it so
once you realized that
people from isis were ma