Jack Dorsey: Square, Cryptocurrency, and Artificial Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #91
the following is a conversation with Jack Dorsey co-founder and CEO of Twitter and founder and CEO of square given the happenings at the time related to Twitter leadership and the very limited time we had we decided to focus this conversation on square and some broader philosophical topics and to save an in-depth conversation on engineering at AI and Twitter for second appearance in this podcast this conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic for everyone feeling the medical psychological and financial burden of this crisis I'm sending love your way stay strong we're in this together we'll beat this thing as an aside let me mention the jack moved 1 billion dollars square equity which is 28% of his wealth to form an organization that funds kovin 19 relief first as Andrew yang tweeted this is a spectacular commitment and second it is amazing that it operates transparently by posting all its donations to a single Google Doc to me true transparency is simple and this is as simple as it gets this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube review it with five stars an apple podcast supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter and Lex Friedman spelled Fri D ma n as usual I'll do a few minutes of as now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience this show is presented by masterclass sign up on master class comm slash flex to get a discount and to support this podcast when I first heard about masterclass I thought it was too good to be true for $180 a year you get an all-access pass to watch courses from to list some of my favorites Chris Hadfield on space exploration Neil deGrasse Tyson and scientific thinking communication will write creator of Sim City and Sims both one of my favorite games on game design Jane Goodall on conservation Carlos Santana on guitar on my favorite guitar players Gary Kasparov on 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crypto cryptocurrency a blockchain ubi all kinds of philosophical questions maybe we'll get to while life and death and meaning and beauty so you're involved in building some of the biggest network systems in the world sort of trillions and interactions a day the cool thing about that is the infrastructure the engineering scale you started as a programmer with C by building yeah so I'm a hacker I'm not really an engineer not not a legit software engineer and I'm a tracker at heart but to achieve scale you have to do some unfortunately legit large-scale engineering so how do you make that magic happen hire people that I can learn from number one I mean I'm a hacker in the sense that I you know my approach has always been do whatever it takes to make it work so that I can see and feel the thing and then learn what needs to come next and oftentimes what needs to come next is a matter of being able to bring it to more people which is scale and there's a lot of great people out there that either have experience or are extremely fast learners that we've been lucky enough to find and with for four years but I think a lot of it we benefit a ton from the open source community and just all the learnings there that are laid bare in the open all the mistakes all the success all the problems it's a very slow-moving process usually open source but it's very deliberate and you get to see because of the the pace you get to see what it takes to really build something meaningful so I learned most most of everything I learned about hacking and programming and engineering has been due to open source and and the the generosity that people have given to give up their time sacrificer time without any expectation in return other than being a part of something much larger than themselves yeah just great open-source movement is amazing but if you just look at the scale like Square has to take care of is this a fundamentally a software problem or hardware problem you mentioned hiring a bunch of people but said it's not maybe from our perspective not often talked about how incredible that is to sort of have a system that doesn't go down often that secure is able to take care of all these transactions like maybe I'm I'm also a hacker at heart and it's incredible to me that that kind of scale could be achieved is there some insight some lessons some interesting tidbits that you can say about how to make that scale happen is it the hardware fundamentally challenge is it a software challenge is it like is it a social challenge of building large teams of engineers that work together that kind of thing that quotes is there what's the interesting challenges there by the way you're the best Russ hacker I've ever met I think thank you both if the enumeration you just went through I don't think there's one you have to kind of focus on all and the ability to focus on all that really comes down to how you these problems and whether you can break them down into parts that you can focus on because I think the biggest mistake is trying to solve or address too many at once or not going deep enough with the questions or not being critical of the answers you find or not form not taking the time to form credible hypotheses that you can actually test and you can see the result of so all of those fall in the face of ultimately critical thinking skills problem-solving skills and if there's one skill I want to improve every day it's that that's that's what contributes to learning and the only way we can evolve any of these things is learning what is currently doing and and how to take it to the next the next step and questioning assumptions the first principle is kind of thinking it seems like the fundamentals this whole process yeah but if you get to overextend it into well this is a hardware issue you miss all the software solutions and you know vice versa if you focus too much on the software there are hardware solutions that can 10x the thing so I I try to resist the categories of thinking and look for the underlying systems that make all these things work but those only emerge when you have a skill around creative creative thinking problem-solving and being able to ask critical questions and having the patience to like go deep so one of the amazing things if you look at the mission of square is to increase people's access to the economy maybe maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong that's from my perspective so from the perspective of merchants peer-to-peer payments even crypto cryptocurrency digital cryptocurrency what do you see as the major ways our society can increase but this patient in the economy so if we look at today in the next 10 years next 20 years you going to Africa maybe in Africa and all kinds of other places outside in North America if there was one word that I think represents what we're trying to do at square it's it is that word access one of the things we found is that we weren't expecting this at all when we started we thought were just building a a piece of hardware to enable people to plug it into their phone and swipe credit card and then as we talked with people who actually tried to accept credit cards in the past we found a consistent theme which many of them weren't even enabled and enabled but allowed to process credit cards and we dug a little bit deeper again asking that question and we found that a lot of them would go to banks or these merchants acquirers and waiting for them was a credit check and looking at a FICO score and many of the businesses that we talked to and many small businesses they don't have good credit or a credit history they're entrepreneurs were just getting started taking a lot of personal risk financial risk and it just felt ridiculous to us that for for for the for the job of being able to accept money from people you had to get your credit checked and as we dug deeper we realized that that wasn't the intention of the financial industry but it's the only tool they had available to them to understand authenticity intent predictor of future behavior so that's the first thing we actually looked at and that's where the you know we built the hardware but the software really came in terms of risk modeling and that's when we started down the path that eventually leads to AI we started with a very strong data science discipline because we knew that our business was not necessarily about making hardware it was more about enabling more people to come into the system so the fundamental challenge there is so to enable more people to come into the system you have to lower the barrier of checking that that person would be a legitimate vendor is that the fundamental problem yeah and a different mindset I think a lot of the financial industry had a mindset of kind of [Music] distrust and just constantly looking for opportunities to prove why people shouldn't get into the system whereas we took on a mindset of trust and then verify verify verify verify verify so we moved you know when we when we entered the space only about thirty to forty percent of the people who apply to accept credit cards would actually get through the system we took that number than 99% and that's because we reframe the problem we built credible models and we had this mindset of we're going to watch not at the merchant level but we're going to watch at the transaction level so come in perform some transactions and as long as you're doing things that feel high integrity credible and don't look suspicious we'll continue to to serve you if we see any interestingness in how you use our system that will be bubbled up to people to review to figure out if there's something nefarious going on and that's when we might ask you to leave so the change in the mindset led to the technology that we needed to enable more people to get there and to enable more people to access system what uh what role does machine learning play into that in that context of you said first of all that's a beautiful shift anytime you shift your viewpoint into seeing that people are fundamentally good and then you just have to verify and catch the ones who are not as opposed to assuming everybody's bad this is a beautiful thing so what role does the to you throughout the history of the company has machine learning played in doing that verification it was it was a media I mean we weren't calling it machine learning but it was data science and then as the industry evolved machine learning became more of the nomenclature and and as that evolved it became more sophisticated with deep learning and as I continues continues to evolve it'll be nobody another thing but they're all in the same vein but we built that discipline up within the first year of the company because we also had you know we have to we had to partner with a bank we had to partner with Visa MasterCard and we had to show that by bringing more people into the system that we could do so in a responsible way that would not compromise their systems and that they would trust us how do you convince this upstart company with some cool machine learning tricks is able to deliver on the sort of a trustworthy set of merchants we we stage it out in tears we had a bucket of you know five hundred people using it and then we showed results in a thousand and then ten thousand that fifty thousand and then the constraint was left was lifted so again it's it's kind of you know getting something tangible out there I want to show what we can do rather than talk about it and that put a lot of pressure on us to do the right things and it also created a culture of accountability of a little bit more transparency and I think incentivized all of our early folks and the company in the right way so what does the future look like in terms of increasing people's access or if you look at IO T Internet of Things there's more and more intelligent devices you can see there's some people even talking about our personal data as a thing that we could monetize more explicitly versus implicitly sort of everything can become part of the economy you see so what what is the future of square look like instead of giving people access in all kinds of ways to being part of the economy as merchants and as consumers I believe that the currency we use is is a huge part of the answer and I believe that the Internet deserves and requires a native currency and that's why I'm I'm such a huge believer in in Bitcoin because it just our our biggest problem is a company right now is we cannot act like an Internet company opened a new market we have to have a partnership with local bank we have to pay attention to different regulatory onboarding environments and a digital currency like Bitcoin takes in a bunch of that away where we can potentially launch a product in every single market around the world because they're all using the same currency and we we have consistent understanding of regulation and onboarding and-and-and what that means so I think you know the the internet continuing to be accessible to people is number one and then I think currency is is number two and it will just allow for a lot more innovation a lot more speed in terms of what we can build and others can build and it's just it's just really exciting so I mean I would I want to be able to see that and feel that in my lifetime so in this aspect in other aspects you have a deep interest in cryptocurrency and distributed ledger tech in general I talked to metallic butterman yesterday on this podcast he says hi by the way hey he's a brilliant brilliant person talking a lot about Bitcoin and aetherium of course so can you maybe linger on this point what what do you find appealing about Bitcoin about digital currency where do you see it going in the next 10 20 years and what are some of the challenges with respect to Square but also just bigger far for a globally farah world for the way we we think about money I I think the most beautiful thing about it is there's no one person setting the direction and there's no one person on the other side that can stop it so we have something that is pretty organic in nature and very principled in its original design and I you know I think the Bitcoin white paper is one of the most seminal works of computer science in the last 20 30 years it's it's poetry I mean it's a really cool technology I mean that's not often talked about sort of there's so much sort of hype around digital currency about the financial impacts of it but the actual technology is quite beautiful from a computer science perspective yeah and the underlying principles behind it that went into it even to the point of releasing it under a pseudonym I think that's a very very powerful statement the timing of when it was released is powerful it was it was a total activist move I mean it's it's moving the world forward and in a way that I think is extremely noble and honorable and enables everyone to be part of the story which is also really cool so you ask the question around 10 years in 20 years I mean I think the amazing thing is no one knows and it can emerge and every person that comes into the ecosystem whether they be a developer or someone who uses it can change its direction in small and large ways and that's what I think it should because that's what the the Internet has shown is possible now there's complications with that of course and there's you know certainly companies that own large ports so the you know net and conducted more than others and there's not equal access to every single person in the world just yet but all those problems are visible enough to speak about them and to me that gives confidence that they're solvable in a relatively short timeframe I think the world changes a lot as we get these satellites projecting the internet down down earth because it just removes a bunch of the former constraints and and really levels the playing field but a global currency which a native currency for the Internet is a proxy for is a very powerful concept and I don't think any one person on this planet truly understands the ramifications of that I think there's a lot of positives to it there's some negatives as well but I think it's possible sorry to interrupt do you think it's possible that this kind of digital currency would redefine the nature of money so become the main currency of the world as opposed to being tied to fiat currency of different nations and to really push the decentralization of control of money definitely but I think the the bigger ramification is how it affects how society works and I think there were there there are many positive ramifications outside around money just outside of just money money money is a foundational layer that enables so much more I was meeting with an entrepreneur in Ethiopia and payments is probably the number one problem to solve across a continent both in terms of moving money across borders between nations on the continent or the amount of corruption within the current system but the lack of easy ways to pay people makes starting anything really difficult I met an entrepreneur who started the the lyft / uber of Ethiopia and one of the biggest problems she has is that it's not easy for her writers to pay the company it's not easy for her to pay the drivers and that definitely has stunted her growth and made everything more challenging so the fact that she's she even has to think about payments instead of thinking about the best writer experience and the best driver experience is is pretty telling so I think as we get a more durable resilient and global standard we see a lot more innovation everywhere and I think there's no better case study for this than the various countries with and within Africa and and their entrepreneurs who are trying to start things within health or sustainability or transportation or a lot of the companies that we've seen that we've seen here so the majority of companies I met in November when I spent a month on the continent were payments oriented you mentioned there's a small tangent you mentioned the anonymous launch of Bitcoin is a sort of profound philosophical statement sudama's what's that even means there's a pseudonym for said there's an identity tied to it it's not just anonymous it's a Nakamoto so a Nakamoto might represent one person or multiple people but let me ask are you Satoshi Nakamoto just just checking thank you I wear what I tell you yes sure um but maybe you slip a pseudonym is constructed identity anonymity is just kind of as you know ran random like drop something off and leave there's no intention to build an identity around it and well the identity being built was a short time window it was meant to stick around I think and to be known and it's being honored in you know how the community thinks about building out like the concept of Satoshi Toshi's for instance is one such an example but I think it was smart not to do it anonymous not to do it as a real identity but to do it as soon an MB because I think it builds tangibility and a little bit of empathy that this was a human or a set of humans behind it and there's there's this natural identity that I can imagine but there is also sacrifice of an ego that's a pretty powerful thing from beautiful would you do sort of philosophically to ask you the question would you do all the same things you're doing now if your name wasn't attached to it sort of if if you had to sacrifice the ego put another way is your ego deeply tied in the decisions you've been making I hope not I mean I I believe I would certainly attempt to do the things without my name having to be attached with it but it's hard to do that in a corporation legally that's the issue if I were to do more open-source things then absolutely like I don't don't need my particular identity my real identity associated with it but I think you know the appreciation that comes from doing something good and being able to see it and see people use it is is pretty overwhelming and powerful more so than maybe seeing your name in the in the headlines let's talk about artificial intelligence a little bit if we could 70 years ago Alan Turing formulated the Turing test to me natural language is one of the most interesting spaces of problems that are tackled by artificial intelligence it's the canonical problem of what it means to be intelligent he formulated as the Turing test me ask sort of the broad question how hard do you think is it to pass the Turing test in the space of language just from a very practical standpoint I think where we are now and and for at least years out is one where the artificial intelligence machine learning the deep learning models can bubble up interestingness very very quickly and pair that with human discretion around severity around depth around nuance and and meaning I think for me the chasm the cross for general intelligences to be able to explain why and the meaning behind something behind a decision mm-hmm for being behind the decision so we got a sub so Delta so the explained ability part is kind of essential to be able to explain using natural language why the decisions were made that kind of thing yeah I mean I think that's one of our biggest risk and artificial intelligence going forward is we are building a lot of black boxes that can't necessarily explain why they made a decision or what criteria they used to make the decision and we're trusting them more and more from lending decisions to content recommendation to driving to health like you know a lot of us have watches that tell us to understand how was it deciding that I mean that that one's pretty pretty simple but you can imagine how complex they get and being able to explain the reasoning behind some of those recommendations seems to be an essential part although it's a very hard problem because sometimes even we can't explain why we make this that's what I was I think we're being us sometimes a little bit unfair for to artificial intelligence systems because we're not very good at these some of these things do you think a project for the ridiculous romanticized question but on that line of thought do you think we'll ever be able to build a system like in the movie her that you could fall in love with so have that kind of deep connection with hasn't that already happened hasn't someone in Japan fallen in love with this who's AI there's always going to be somebody that does that kind of thing I mean at a much larger scale of actually building relationships of being deeper connections it doesn't have to be love but it just deeper connections with artificial intelligence systems you mentioned explained it there's lots of function of the artificial intelligence and more a function of the individual and how they find meaning and where they find meaning do you think we humans can find meaning in technology in this kind of way yeah 100 percent 1 percent and I don't necessarily think it's a negative but I you know it's it's constantly going to evolve so I don't know but I meaning is is something that's entirely subjective and I I don't think it's going to be a function of finding the magic algorithm that enables everyone to love it but maybe but that question really gets that the difference between human and machine the you had a little bit of an exchange with Elon Musk basically I mean it's a trivial version of that but I think there's a more fundamental question of is it possible to tell the difference between a bot and a human and do you think it's if we look into the future 10 20 years out do you think it would be possible or is it even necessary to tell the difference in the digital space between a human and a robot can we have fulfilling relationships with each or do we need to tell the difference between them I think it's certainly useful and certain problem domains to be able to tell the difference I think in others it might not be as useful I think it's possible for us today tell that difference as the reverse the meta of the Turing test well what's interesting is I think the technology to create is moving much faster than the technology to detect you think so so if you look at like adversarial machine learning there's a lot of systems that try to fool machine learning systems and at least for me the hope is that the technology to defend will always be right there at least your sense is that I don't know if they'll be right there I mean it's it's a race right so the detection technologies have to be 2 or 10 steps ahead of the creation technologies this is a problem that I think the financial industry will face more and more because a lot of our risk models for instance are built around identity payments ultimately comes down to identity and you can imagine a world where all this conversation around deep fakes goes towards the direction of driver's license or passports or state identities and people construct identities in order to get through a system such as ours to start accepting credit cards or into the cash shop and those technologies seem to be moving very very quickly our ability to detect them I think is probably lagging at this point but certainly with more focus we can get ahead of it but this is going to touch everything so I think it's it's it's like security and we're never going to be able to build a perfect detection system we're only going to be able to you know what we should be focused on this is the speed of evolving it and being able to take signals that show correctness or errors as quickly as possible and move and to be able to build that into our newer models or the or the self learning models you have other worries like some people like Elon and others have worries of existential threats of artificial intelligence of artificial general intelligence or if you think more narrowly of all threats and concerns about more narrow artificial intelligence like what are your thoughts in this domain do you have concerns are you more optimistic I think you've all and his in this book 21 boilin lessons for the 21st century yeah his last chapters around meditation and you look at the title of the chapter and you're like oh it's kind of old meditation but the was interesting about that chapter is he believes that you know kids being born today growing up today Google has a stronger sense of their preferences than they do which you can easily imagine I can easily imagine today that Google probably knows my preference is more than my mother does maybe not me per se but for someone growing up only knowing you know not only knowing what Google is capable of or Facebook or Twitter or square or any of these things the self-awareness is being offloaded to other systems and particularly these these algorithms and his concern is that we lose that self-awareness because the self-awareness is now outside of us and it's doing such a better job at helping us direct our decisions around should I stand should I walk today what doctor should I choose who should I date all these things were now seeing play out very quickly so he sees meditation as a tool to build the self awareness and to bring the focus back on why do I make these decisions why do I react in this way why did I have this thought where did that come from that's the way to regain control or awareness maybe not control but put awareness so that you can be aware that yes I am offloading this decision to this algorithm that I don't fully understand and can't tell me why it's doing the things that's doing because it's so complex that's not to say that the algorithm can't be a good thing and to me recommender systems the best of what they can do is to help guide you on a journey of learning new ideas of learning period it can be a great thing but do you know you're doing that are you aware that you're inviting it to do that to you I think that's that's a little risky identifies right is that's perfectly okay but are you aware that you have that invitation and it's it's being acted upon and so that that's your that's a concern you're kind of highlighting that without a lack of awareness you can just be like floating at sea so awareness is key in just the future these artificial intelligence systems in the other movie wall-e well Richard I think is one of Pixar's best movies besides ratatouille right you had me until the ratatouille okay that error is incredible all right we've come to the first point where we disagree okay the entrepreneurial story in the form of a wrath mm-hmm I just remember just the soundtrack was really good so excellent what are your thoughts sticking on artificial intelligence a little bit about the displacement of jobs that's another perspective that candidates like Andrew yang talked about in getting forever yang Yang so he unfortunately speaking of yang Yang has recently dropped out I know it was very disappointing and depressing yeah but the on the positive side he's I think launching a podcast so really cool yeah that's he just announced that I'm sure he'll try to talk you into trying to come on to the podcast so about Reddit Tori yeah maybe he'll be more welcoming of the ratatouille argument what are your thoughts on his concerns of the displacement of jobs of automations of the of course there's positive impacts that could come from automation in the eye and but there could also be negative impacts and within that framework what are your thoughts about universal basic income so these interesting new ideas of how we can empower people in the economy I I think he was a hundred percent right on almost every dimension we see this in squares business I mean he identified truck drivers I'm from Missouri and he certainly pointed to the concern and the issue that people from where I'm from feel every single day that is often invisible and not talked about enough you know the next big one is cashiers this is where it pertains to squares business we are seeing more and more of the point-of-sale moved to the individual customers hand in the form of their phone and apps and pre-order and order ahead we're seeing more kiosks we're seeing more things like Amazon go and the number of workers in as a cashier and Rito's immense and you know there's there's no real answers on how they transform their skills and and work and into something else and I think that does lead to a lot of really negative ramifications and the important point that he brought up around universal basic income is given that this shift is going to come and given it's going to take time to set people up with new skills and new careers they need to have a floor to be able to survive and this $1,000 a month is such a floor it's not going to incentivize you to quit your job because it's not enough but it will enable you to not have to worry as much about just getting on day to day so that you can focus on what I'm what am I going to do now and what am I going to what skills do I need to acquire and I think I think that you know a lot of people point to the fact that you know during the industrial age we we had the same concerns around automation factory lines and everything worked out okay but the the biggest change is just the velocity and the centralization of a lot of the things that make this work which is the data and the algorithms that work on this on this data I think the the second biggest scary thing is just how around AI is just who actually owns the data and who can operate on it and are we able to share the insights from the data so that we can also build algorithms that help our needs or help our business or what not so that's where I think regulation could play a strong and positive part first looking at the primitives of AI and the tools we use to build these services that will ultimately touch every single aspect of the human experience and then how data where data is owned and how its how its shared so those those are the answers that as a society as a world we need to have better answers around which we're currently not they're just way too centralized into a few very very large companies but I think he was spot-on with identifying the problem and proposing solutions that would actually work at least that we'd learn from that you could expand or evolve but I mean it's I think it's ubi is well well past its it's do I mean it was certainly trumpeted by Martin Luther King and even even before him as well and like you said like you know the exact thousand dollar mark might be might not be the correct one but you should take the stuffs to try to to implement these solutions and see see what works so I think you and I eat some more diets and at least I was the first time I've heard this yeah so I was doing it first time anyone has said that to me yeah but it's becoming more and more cool and but I was doing it before was cool so the intermittent fasting and fasting in general I really enjoyed I love food but I enjoy the the I also love suffering because I'm Russian so fasting kind of makes you appreciate makes you appreciate what it is to be human somehow so but I have a outside the philosophical stuff I have a more specific question it also helps me as a programmer and a deep thinker like stifling that from a scientific perspective to sit there for many hours and focus deeply maybe you were a hacker before you were CEO what have you learned about diet lifestyle mindset that helps you maximize mental performance to be able to focus for this thing deeply in this world of distractions I think I just took it for granted for too long which aspect just a social structure of we eat three and there's snacks in between and I just never really asked the question why oh by the way in case people don't know I think a lot of people know who you you at least you famously eat once a day yeah you still eat once a day yep sooner by the way what made you decide to eat once a day like cuz to me that was a huge revolution that you don't have to eat breakfast that was like I felt like I was a rebel like I yeah like abandoned my parents or something and it doesn't an artist when you when you first like the first week you start doing it feels you kind of like have a superpower yeah then you realize it's not really a superpower but it I think you realize at least I realize like it just how much is how much our mind dictates what we're possible of and and sometimes we have structures around us the incentivize like you know there's three may thing which was purely social structure versus necessity for our health and for our bodies and I I did it just I started doing it because I played a lot with my diet when I was a kid and I was vegan for two years and just went all over the place just because I you know a health is the most precious thing we have and none of us really understand it so being able asked the question through experiments that I can perform on myself and learn about I is compelling to me and I heard this one guy on the podcast wim HOF who's famous for doing ice baths and holding his breath and all these things he said he only eats one meal a day I'm like wow that sounds super challenging and comfortable I'm gonna do it so I I just I learned the most when I make myself I want to say suffer but when I make myself feel uncomfortable because everything comes to bear in those moments and and you really learn what your what you're about or what you're not so I been doing that my whole life like when I was a kid I could not like I could not speak like I had to go to a speech therapist and it made me extremely shy and then one day I realized I can't keep doing this and I signed up for the for the speech Club and you know it was a the most uncomfortable thing I could imagine doing getting a topic on a note card having five minutes to write a speech about whatever that topic is not being able to use the note card while speaking and speaking for five minutes about that topic so but it just it puts so much it gave me so much perspective around the power of communication around my own deficiencies and around if I set my mind to do something I'll do it so it gave me a lot more confidence so I see fasting in the same light this is something that was interesting challenging uncomfortable and has given me so much learning and benefit as a result and it will lead to other things that I experiment with and play with but um yeah it does feel a little bit like a superpower sometimes the most boring superpower one can imagine no it's quite incredible the clarity of mind is it's pretty interesting speaking of suffering you kind of talk about facing difficult ideas you meditate you think about the broad context of life of our society let me ask sort of apologize again for the romanticized question but do you ponder your own mortality do you think about death about the finiteness of human existence when you meditate when you think about it and if you do what how do you make sense of it that this thing ends well I don't try to make sense of it I do think about it every day I mean it's it's a daily multiple times a day any afraid of death no I'm not afraid of it I I think it it's a transformation I don't know to what but it's also a tool to feel the importance of every moment so I just use as a reminder like I have an hour is this really what I'm going to spend the hour doing like I only have so many more sunsets and sunrises to watch like I'm not going to get up for it I'm not going to make sure that I that I that I try to see it so it's it just puts a lot into perspective and it helps me prioritize I think it's I don't I don't see it as something that's like that I dread or is dreadful it it's a it's a tool that is available to every single person to use every day because it shows how precious life is and there's reminders every single day whether it be your own health or a friend or a co-worker or something you see in the news so it's to me it's just a question of what we do with that daily reminder and for me it's um am I really focused on what matters and sometimes that might be work sometimes that might be friendships or family or relationships or whatnot but that that's it's the ultimate clarifier in that sense so on the question of what matters another ridiculously big question of once you try to make sense of it what do you think is the meaning of it all the meaning of life what gives you purpose happiness meaning a lot does I mean I mean just being able to be aware of the fact that I'm alive is pretty pretty meaningful the connections I feel with individuals whether they people I just meet or long lasting friendships or my family is meaningful seeing people use something that I helped build it is really meaningful and powerful to me but but that sense of I mean I think ultimately comes down in a sense of connection and just feeling like I am bigger I am part of something that's bigger than myself and like I can feel it directly in small ways or large ways however manifest this is probably uh it's probably a last question do you think we're living in a simulation I don't know it's a pretty fun one if we are but also crazy and random and brought with tons of problems but yeah would you have it any other way yeah I mean I just think it's taken us way too long to as a planet to realize we're all in this together and we all are connected in in in very significant ways I think we we hide our connectivity very well through ego through you know whatever or whatever it is of the day but that is the one thing I would want to work towards changing and that's how I would have it another way because if if we can't do that then how we're going to connect to all the other simulations because that's the next step is like what's happening in the other simulation escaping this one and yeah spanning across the multiple simulations and sharing it and on the fun I don't think there's a better way to end it Jack thank you so much for all the work you do there's probably other ways that we've ended this and other simulations that may have been better well that's a wait and see thanks so much for talking to thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Dorsey and thank you to our sponsor masterclass please consider supporting this podcast by signing up to master class at master class comm / flex if you enjoy this podcast subscribe on youtube review it with five stars an apple podcast supporting our patreon are simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman and now let me leave you some words about Bitcoin from Paul Graham I'm very intrigued by Bitcoin it has all the signs of a paradigm shift hackers love it yet it is described as a toy just like microcomputers thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you