Exclusive： Jack Dorsey On RFK Jr. Elon Musk, AI Regulation ｜ Breaking Points

Joining us now is Blockhead Jack Dorsey. That's the title he himself requested. Jack, we really appreciate you joining us. Thank you. Appreciate you both. Thank you for having me. Yeah, super grateful. Jack, you've been outspoken recently. Why do you think that RFK Jr. is the best choice for the Democratic nominee and the best candidate in the field right now? First and foremost, to have a candidate to be president of the United States that is focused on peace and ending all these wars and really focusing on looking at some of the deeper issues that we've had, especially as he states around regulatory capture, the military-industrial complex. He has intimate knowledge of all these things. He's worked extremely hard and tiresome in these fields and made a lot of progress. I came across him this year and I really listened and I kind of went through all of his podcasts, almost every episode. And I appreciate how much of a grasp he has of all the issues he speaks to. I appreciate that he's curious and I appreciate that he comes at everything from a more of a humanitarian angle. There's a deep, deep sense of humanity and actually helping people. And there's an edge as well. There's no fear in exploring topics that are a little bit controversial and may be in the future. All in all, just absolutely refreshing from what I've seen from the whole field. I don't really speak out much on who I'm choosing or why, but I just feel like our country needs his leadership. Do you think it would be important for the Democratic Party to host primary debates so that voters have a chance to view all of these candidates and their alternatives? Absolutely. It would be silly to not have open debates, to not have open primaries, because it feels like it's hiding or everything is planned and already determined. And I don't think that builds trust. And right now we need to build as much trust as possible, open up and be as transparent as possible, and really let the people see and decide for themselves. You know, Jack, speaking of openness, of transparency so far, we haven't had a chance to really hear from you much in, really, the recent years and especially the last several months. What do you make so far of Elon Musk's CEO takeover of Twitter, your former company? I think this is actually the first interview I've done since I left the company, maybe. Well, as I've said, Twitter was going to have a very, very hard time continuing to be a public company. It had many pressures upon it. The advertising business we were entirely dependent upon, and not just advertising, as you might think of it, from Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat. It was brand advertising. It was dependent upon huge brands or a collection of conglomerates of brands seeing us as something that they wanted to spend money on. And because we were so small relative to our peers, if anything happened in the market or with them, they would instantly pull away from us. Snapchat was included in that bucket as well. And they would retreat to the larger ones like Facebook and Google. Because we were a public company without any protections, we had no dual class voting setup. We were open to activists coming in. In fact, we had an activist coming into our stock. It's hugely distracting and really, really challenging to build anything at all and to actually build something that you have to take some risk upon, because you have the pressure from these advertisers and all this revenue suddenly going away if you make a decision they don't like. And at the same time, if that happens, then the stock has an issue and activists comes in it's a death spiral. So the only path to me was to take the company private. And you know, Elon is our number one user. He's our number one customer. He understood the platform deeply. And he's a technologist and he builds technology. So at the very start, I was hoping for years that he would, and I asked him many times to join our board at least, when he decided to make a bid for the company or join the board and then make a bid for the company. I was, it just, it felt great. But as you all remember, that's the time when the market crashed, especially for advertising companies like ours. So if we not get that, I think it would have been very, very challenging for Twitter to live. So what happened, unfortunately, after that, after the bid was made and the market went down is, you know, he wanted to back away. He did have an option to back away at a billion dollars and just walk away. But there was this fight about bots and, you know, the company took him to court when he backed out. And that's when things really went south. Fortunately, you know, he decided to make it, but I think it set up a dynamic where he had to be very hasty. He had to be impatient. He had to move as quickly as possible with features, even if they weren't fully thought out. It all looked fairly reckless, but I do have confidence that he'll figure it out. I do have confidence in his new CEO. And I own, you know, 3% of this new company, so I'm supportive. I have questions about, you know, certain things, and I have questions about the long-term aspects of free speech on a corporate-owned platform, no matter who the owner is. Yeah. But those are solvable. Speak to that piece. First, specifically with regard to Elon, do you think he's lived up to his own free speech commitments on the platform? And then what do you see as the tensions between a free speech commitment and a for-profit company? Well, it depends on where you want the free speech, because we were more, you know, ideally going for a global appreciation of free speech and free expression itself. And Elon took on a principle of anything that's allowed by law on the platform, which sets up a dynamic where you have countries like India and Turkey, who made many requests to us back in the day to take down particular journalist accounts or give contact information and to remove them from the platform. So I think it's easier to do in the U.S., but at the same time, you are dependent right now upon an advertising model, and the advertisers can do things like boycott until policies are changed or actions are taken. And we saw that many, like, well, almost every year I was at the company, we saw that. So my one goal before I left the company was to shift away from this dependency on brand advertising and move to different lines of revenue. And Elon has started with that, and I think that will help the cause of being a platform for truly free speech. But that said, he can always be compelled. He is one person. He's one single point of failure. And pressure can be put upon him by the United States, by the Department of Defense, by China, by Turkey, by India, of course, and it will. And this is going to be the reality for any centrally controlled company or even the protocol that's centrally controlled. So the only way to truly have free speech, to truly be censorship resistant, is to work on open protocols. And there are only two at scale that I'm aware of, which is Bitcoin for money and Nostr for social media and beyond. But they're so niche right now, and they're so small. And to me, it just says at the moment that people don't actually care as much about the censorship resistance. Otherwise, they would be using these technologies more. And maybe there's not much of a need just yet. And certainly, the accessibility and the approachability of these systems is rather arcane for all people in the world. But that will change. So I think we'll see how important censorship resistance truly is to people when some of these issues come up in the future. And it's no fault of Elon, no fault of anyone at the top of one of these companies. It's just impossible to avoid not having to take actions when there's a particular entity, be it a government or your customers, requesting that you do something. Jack, one of the things that a lot of people focus on are the Twitter files. Do you think that that accurately reflected decision makings, what was taking place at the company around so many of these sensitive topics? And what's your reflection on that since their release? I wish that the full corpus of the emails and all the information was released so that more journalists and everyone in the world could see everything. Because I think there is some context missing when you look at the parts. And it's no fault of the reporters necessarily. They had a tool and they had to ask questions of the tool. And that tool would give them back fragments of information. And that might lead them to get the other fragments to provide more context. But if everything was available, I think we'd have a better picture. I think the company, you know, my leadership style in the company was just to trust our folks and that they were doing the right things. There's a lot of stuff in the Twitter files that, you know, I never saw because it wasn't at that level. And I was surprised by the level of engagement with government agencies. I was surprised by the requests. But if you look at that, our people, our team members, like they push back on a lot of that stuff. Not all of it, but a lot of it was questionable. So I think it shows a company that is struggling. You know, it remains the most important public square in the world right now. And it was so challenging to work in that environment. We were under a microscope from day one of the company. And it creates stresses that are just unbelievable. But I think they acted with fairness. I think they generally did the right thing. Of course, we made a bunch of mistakes, especially around the New York Post and the Hunter Biden laptop story. But I believe they're good people and that they were doing the best they could with the information that they had. And I wish, in retrospect, I was a little bit more hands-on in that area. My focus was on, like, when I came into the company, we were losing users. And my focus was just to grow the company again, grow the usage base, grow the revenue. And we did. We actually became a profitable company. We got onto the S&P 500. We had, you know, $5 billion a year in advertising revenue. And we were shifting away from advertising at the same time and growing. So I didn't focus on that area as much as I probably should have, in retrospect, and ask more questions. It was all reactive when I did. But, yeah, it's a tough situation. But I think the company did well. But certainly, we could have done better. And I do believe that we were more fair and more introspective than our peers. In terms of context, you said you felt that some of the context was missing. Do you have specifics there of things that you wish were included or that you felt painted a misleading portrait? Nothing in particular that comes to mind. I mean, there's just so much context in those emails and the communications. And even within that, we would have in-person meetings that would discuss things that may not be represented in the written communication. So there's nothing that, like, stands out. But I believe, like, if you truly want to show how one of these systems work, which I'm fully supportive of opening all this stuff up. We were trying to, like, figure out how to do that ourselves before I left. And one of my goals is to be the most transparent company in the world. But to only give access to a few people with a tool that, you know, takes these fragments, I think that there could have been a better approach. And that would just be open up the whole thing. Jack, one of the things, you're in a unique position. You believe in free speech. That's something I've never doubted about you. You also are in the unique position of having run one of these companies. Can you give us some anecdotes, as you alluded to, foreign governments and the pressures that you were under, if able, just to give the audience an idea of what it is really like to be in a position to have some of the most powerful people literally on earth coming to you and saying, demanding things of your company? And as someone with principles, how did you navigate that? India, for example. India is a country that had many requests of us around the farmers protest, around particular journalists that were critical of the government. And it manifested in ways such as we will shut Twitter down in India, which is a very large market for us. We will raid the homes of your employees, which they did. We will shut down your offices if you don't follow suit. And this is India, a democratic country. Turkey is very similar. We had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their courts and often won, but they threatened to shut us down constantly. Nigeria, yet another one. I don't think we could even put people on the ground because of what the government might do to our employees if we had them there. And then, of course, the US. We started a long time ago, a transparency report about all government requests into us, and we're continuing to make it more fine-grained. And these were requests of takedowns or investigations or any number of things that the government would request of us, especially the US government. And I wasn't as deep in those conversations, but I would say that it feels super challenging because you have the US government asking you things, when asking you to do things, and then also calling you to Congress. I testified before Congress four times, for five to seven hours each time, with the most non-productive discussion, these framed questions of yes or no, with the ability to provide no context whatsoever so that the Congress people and the senators could actually understand and, again, have context for the problems we're trying to solve and use it as a forum for ideas to do this together for the people of the United States and for the people of these other countries. But it just felt like attacks all the time from every angle. Everything we did really upset the right, and everything we did really upset the left. There's no way to win, and you just kind of have to internalize that and move forward. You referred earlier to the fact that there hasn't been a large adoption of some of the Twitter alternatives, and you said that calls into question how much people actually care about these questions of censorship. I view it a little bit differently, which is that it seems to me that these platforms are kind of like the definition of a natural monopoly, right? The reason people are staying on Twitter is because people are on Twitter, right? There's already this critical mass of individuals there. So given the fact that, first of all, I would be curious if you agree with that assessment that they're sort of natural monopolies because the value comes in having the sizable social network, should they be regulated then more like public utilities, which is the other sort of famous example of a natural monopoly? I think natural monopolies happen for a time, but they're easily disrupted. I don't think it's as challenging as one would think. I mean, Twitter has only been around for 17 years, which seems like a long time. But there was a MySpace before that, and a Friendster before that, and a Usenet before that, which was completely decentralized and unknown by anyone. I don't think more government regulation is necessarily the right answer to ward off the monopoly aspects or fix some of the issues. I think having an open protocol that no one actually owns, and governments and corporations can't bend to their will, is the most important thing that allows for the most creative solutions to all the problems we see, including protecting freedom of speech, and including providing safety for folks who want it. And my hope is that, you know, as we build these technologies like Nostra and Bitcoin, that a company like Twitter adopts them, because it removes a bunch of the liability they would have otherwise. And they can build phenomenal businesses on top of it. And to prove that, you see what Google has done with the web. They used an open protocol, built a phenomenal business. They built a phenomenal business on Gmail, which is an open protocol for email. There are real opportunities building on open protocols, where at the same time, the foundational aspect of it, the foundational layer that people own, and a company can't bend towards its will one way or the other. Jack, what do you think about AI regulation? You're a technologist. Do you think we should have regulation? Do you agree with Elon and others who want to shut it down in the meantime to regulate it? It gets to some of the protocol discussion you're talking about right now. I don't believe pausing AI is realistic. We may pause it here in the US, but we're not going to pause it in China. And I think there is a bit of an arms race in this space. I think regulation is needed. I don't think the regulators currently have an understanding of the approach. I'm hoping that they look more at the primitives of these technologies and not focused on driving particular outcomes of the technologies. The most important thing to me is that we have open source models. I've critiqued Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for most of my career, and he's critiqued us. But I really respect the fact that he chose to open source his large language model, and that it created this entire open source ecosystem, building models that are now approaching the level of a chat GPT and what Google is doing with Spark. I think that is absolutely critical that we all have access to these technologies and people can build on top of it, and we can actually see how they work. I think that's far more important than regulation. There are some dangers there that people might take these technologies and build extremely harmful things. But that's been the case forever in open source, and we just haven't seen that play out because there is a balancing effect of people doing the right thing and looking at ways to protect the overall technology and ultimately protect humanity. So I think that the open source aspect has me the most excited about this. You have a lot of respected technologists who have been sounding the alarm about the potential dire impact of AI technology on society. Do you share any of those concerns? Of course I share them. I think there's a lot of hype in AI right now. The technology industry is very trendy, and we move from one fashion to the next fashion. Just six months ago, nine months ago, we were only talking about crypto and board apes, and now all that's gone away, and we're talking about AI and how it's going to destroy us. If you listen to the earnings calls of all these companies six months ago, there was no mention of AI, and now every single earnings call of almost all public companies includes a mention of AI. Some of that, I think, is to pump the stock a bit. Some of the dire stuff is it makes for a good headline, which sells advertising and helps the media immensely. I don't think we're anywhere near the danger point, but certainly it is important for us to consider the potential harmful outcomes and have conversations about them. I think the only way to do that is to really build it in the technology itself. That's why I think open source is so critical. Jack, what do you make of Meta's foray into the headsets? We just had the release of the Apple headset, this type of technological advancement. What do you think about AR, VR, and the current push by these companies into it? It's obvious that it's going to happen. If you want to understand the future of any technology, just read science fiction. They're actually the roadmap writers. It's obvious that Snow Crash, this book from Neil Stephenson, is going to happen. Now that we've seen it in a movie, people want to build it. I think they have a propensity to be phenomenal for gaming. I think it's an obvious user interface evolution. I'm super worried and concerned with how out of touch it might make people and how it distances us even further. I think another movie, Wall-E by Pixar, that's the future we're driving towards with everyone in the floating chairs, drinking their food out of straws and constant 24-7 entertainment. You can see that the whole world is headed this way. I want to believe that there's a different answer. I don't know. It's going to happen. I'm skeptical about some of the benefits. I hope we have an honest conversation about some of the harms around more and more social distancing. I think there's been a huge increase both in research about harms of too much technology, especially on young children and teenagers. I think there's been huge interest from the public in how do we make sure that we still have health, that we're touching grass, so to speak. I wonder, Jack, how you think about those things, advice to parents, advice to people individually, how to stay sane, stay connected, stay living a fulsome and satisfying and thriving life as more and more technology invades the most intimate of our personal interactions. I do think it's important to find some sort of balance. I think with all technologies, when they first come out, we tend to overuse them and abuse them. Then we realize that we're doing that and we look for opportunities to move away from them. I do think the phone is a real addiction. I do think this generation of kids, I don't have kids myself, but just talking with my friends who are parents, a lot of them have made the choice to not allow any media, TV, or devices. Some have made decisions to allow everything because they're growing up in this world and they need to understand how to work with it. Others have found some sort of hybrid. I think if we see it as a tool to help us ask questions about the world, to build things, to make things and not just pure consumption, I think it can be quite healthy as long as you are finding balance elsewhere. I am very worried that there's not a lot of emphasis on finding that balance outside the moment. We've become so dependent. You go to any restaurant these days and you see couples all the time. Both of them are on their phones and a candle is in the middle of them. We've definitely lost a lot of that opportunity for real connection. I do think we should build technologies to suggest that people look up. Look up. That's an inspiring message. Jack, I know that you're a busy man. We just want to say we appreciate you joining us so much. It was a real pleasure talking to you. I think a lot of people get something out of this. Thank you, Jack. Great to talk to you. It's our pleasure. Hey guys, ready or not, 2024 is fully upon us now and Sagar and I have been brainstorming ways that we can really up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand our coverage, to add staff, to upgrade the studio. We just want to give you the best independent coverage of this election which is possible. So if you can help us out, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com or the link is down here in the description video. It really means the world to us and if you like what we're all about, this is the best possible way to keep us 100% independent working only for you.