back to indexJack Dorsey: Square, Cryptocurrency, and Artificial Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #91
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The following is a conversation with Jack Dorsey,
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co founder and CEO of Twitter
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and founder and CEO of Square.
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Given the happenings at the time related to Twitter leadership
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and the very limited time we had,
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we decided to focus this conversation on Square
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and some broader philosophical topics
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and to save an in depth conversation
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on engineering and AI at Twitter
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for a second appearance in this podcast.
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This conversation was recorded
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before the outbreak of the pandemic.
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For everyone feeling the medical, psychological
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and financial burden of this crisis,
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I'm sending love your way.
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We're in this together.
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We'll beat this thing.
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As an aside, let me mention
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that Jack moved $1 billion of Square equity,
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which is 28% of his wealth
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to form an organization that funds COVID 19 relief.
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First, as Andrew Yang tweeted,
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this is a spectacular commitment.
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And second, it is amazing that it operates transparently
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by posting all its donations to a single Google doc.
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To me, true transparency is simple.
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And this is as simple as it gets.
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This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
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If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
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support it on Patreon
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or simply connect with me on Twitter
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at Lex Friedman spelled F R I D M A N.
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As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now
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and never any ads in the middle
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that can break the flow of the conversation.
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I hope that works for you
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and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
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This show is presented by Masterclass.
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Sign up on masterclass.com slash Lex
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to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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When I first heard about Masterclass,
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I thought it was too good to be true.
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you get an all access pass to watch courses from,
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to list some of my favorites,
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Chris Hadfield on space exploration,
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Neil deGrasse Tyson on scientific thinking
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and communication,
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both one of my favorite games on game design,
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one of my favorite guitar players,
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Daniel Nagrano on poker and many, many more.
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Pick three courses you want to complete,
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watch each all the way through.
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You can watch it on basically any device.
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Once again, sign up on masterclass.com slash Lex
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to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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And now, here's my conversation with Jack Dorsey.
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You've been on several podcasts,
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Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Rach Roll, others,
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excellent conversations,
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but I think there's several topics
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that you didn't talk about that I think are fascinating
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that I'd love to talk to you about,
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sort of machine learning, artificial intelligence,
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both the narrow kind and the general kind
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and engineering at scale.
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So there's a lot of incredible engineering going on
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that you're a part of,
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crypto, cryptocurrency, blockchain, UBI,
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all kinds of philosophical questions maybe we'll get to
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about life and death and meaning and beauty.
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So you're involved in building some of
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the biggest network systems in the world,
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sort of trillions of interactions a day.
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The cool thing about that is the infrastructure,
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the engineering at scale.
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You started as a programmer with C building.
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I'm a hacker, I'm not really an engineer.
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Not a legit software engineer,
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you're a hacker at heart.
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But to achieve scale, you have to do some,
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unfortunately, legit large scale engineering.
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So how do you make that magic happen?
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Hire people that I can learn from, number one.
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I mean, I'm a hacker in the sense that I,
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my approach has always been do whatever it takes
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So that I can see and feel the thing
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and then learn what needs to come next.
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And oftentimes what needs to come next is
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a matter of being able to bring it to more people,
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And there's a lot of great people out there
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that either have experience or are extremely fast learners
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that we've been lucky enough to find
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and work with for years.
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But I think a lot of it,
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we benefit a ton from the open source community
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and just all the learnings there
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that are laid bare in the open.
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All the mistakes, all the success,
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It's a very slow moving process usually open source,
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but it's very deliberate.
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And you get to see because of the pace,
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you get to see what it takes
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to really build something meaningful.
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So I learned most of everything I learned about hacking
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and programming and engineering has been due to open source
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and the generosity that people have given
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to give up their time, sacrifice their time
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without any expectation in return,
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other than being a part of something
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much larger than themselves, which I think is great.
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Open source movement is amazing.
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But if you just look at the scale,
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like Square has to take care of,
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is this fundamentally a software problem
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or a hardware problem?
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You mentioned hiring a bunch of people,
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but it's not, maybe from my perspective,
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not often talked about how incredible that is
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to sort of have a system that doesn't go down often,
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that is secure, is able to take care
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of all these transactions.
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Like maybe I'm also a hacker at heart
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and it's incredible to me that that kind of scale
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could be achieved.
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Is there some insight, some lessons,
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some interesting tidbits that you can say
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how to make that scale happen?
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Is it the hardware fundamentally challenge?
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Is it a software challenge?
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Is it a social challenge of building large teams
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of engineers that work together, that kind of thing?
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Like what's the interesting challenges there?
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By the way, you're the best dressed hacker I've met.
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I think the. Thank you.
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If the enumeration you just went through,
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I don't think there's one.
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You have to kind of focus on all
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and the ability to focus on all that
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really comes down to how you face problems
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and whether you can break them down into parts
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that you can focus on.
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Because I think the biggest mistake is trying to solve
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or address too many at once
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or not going deep enough with the questions
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or not being critical of the answers you find
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or not taking the time to form credible hypotheses
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that you can actually test and you can see the results of.
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So all of those fall in the face of ultimately
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critical thinking skills, problem solving skills.
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And if there's one skill I want to improve every day,
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it's that that's what contributes to the learning
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and the only way we can evolve any of these things
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is learning what it's currently doing
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and how to take it to the next step.
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And questioning assumptions,
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the first principles kind of thinking,
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seems like a fundamental to this whole process.
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Yeah, but if you get too overextended into,
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well, this is a hardware issue,
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you miss all the software solutions.
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And vice versa, if you focus too much on the software,
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there are hardware solutions that can 10X the thing.
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So I try to resist the categories of thinking
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and look for the underlying systems
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that make all these things work.
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But those only emerge when you have a skill
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around creative thinking, problem solving,
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and being able to ask critical questions
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and having the patience to go deep.
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So one of the amazing things,
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if we look at the mission of Square,
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is to increase people's access to the economy.
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Maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong,
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that's from my perspective.
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So from the perspective of merchants,
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peer to peer payments, even crypto, cryptocurrency,
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digital cryptocurrency, what do you see as the major ways
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that our society can increase participation in the economy?
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So if we look at today and the next 10 years,
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next 20 years, you go into Africa, maybe in Africa
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and all kinds of other places outside of the North America.
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If there was one word that I think represents
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what we're trying to do at Square, it is that word access.
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One of the things we found is that
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we weren't expecting this at all.
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When we started, we thought we were just building
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a piece of hardware to enable people
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to plug it into their phone and swipe a credit card.
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And then as we talked with people
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who actually tried to accept credit cards in the past,
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we found a consistent theme, which many of them
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weren't even enabled, not enabled,
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but allowed to process credit cards.
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And we dug a little bit deeper, again, asking that question.
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And we found that a lot of them would go to banks
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or these merchant acquirers.
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And waiting for them was a credit check
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and looking at a FICA score.
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And many of the businesses that we talked to
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and many small businesses,
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they don't have good credit or a credit history.
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They're entrepreneurs who are just getting started,
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taking a lot of personal risk, financial risk.
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And it just felt ridiculous to us
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that for the job of being able to accept money from people,
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you had to get your credit checked.
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And as we dug deeper, we realized that
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that wasn't the intention of the financial industry,
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but it's the only tool they had available to them
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to understand authenticity, intent,
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predictor of future behavior.
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So that's the first thing we actually looked at.
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And that's where the, you know, we built the hardware,
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but the software really came in terms of risk modeling.
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And that's when we started down the path
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that eventually leads to AI.
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We started with a very strong data science discipline
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because we knew that our business
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was not necessarily about making hardware.
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It was more about enabling more people
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to come into the system.
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So the fundamental challenge there is,
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so to enable more people to come into the system,
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you have to lower the barrier of checking
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that that person will be a legitimate vendor.
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Is that the fundamental problem?
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Yeah, and a different mindset.
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I think a lot of the financial industry had a mindset
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of kind of distrust and just constantly looking
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for opportunities to prove why people shouldn't get
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into the system, whereas we took on a mindset of trust
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and then verify, verify, verify, verify, verify.
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So we moved, you know, when we entered the space,
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only about 30 to 40% of the people who applied
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to accept credit cards would actually get through the system.
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We took that knowledge, we took it to the next level.
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If we applied to accept credit cards,
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we'd actually get through the system.
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We took that number to 99%.
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And that's because we reframed the problem,
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we built credible models, and we had this mindset of,
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we're going to watch not at the merchant level,
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but we're gonna watch at the transaction level.
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So come in, perform some transactions,
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and as long as you're doing things
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with integrity, credible, and don't look suspicious,
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we'll continue to serve you.
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If we see any interestingness in how you use our system,
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that will be bubbled up to people to review,
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to figure out if there's something nefarious going on,
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and that's when we might ask you to leave.
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So the change in the mindset led to the technology
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that we needed to enable more people to get through,
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and to enable more people to access the system.
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What role does machine learning play into that,
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in that context of, you said,
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first of all, it's a beautiful shift.
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Anytime you shift your viewpoint into seeing
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that people are fundamentally good,
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and then you just have to verify
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and catch the ones who are not,
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as opposed to assuming everybody's bad,
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this is a beautiful thing.
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So what role does the, to you,
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throughout the history of the company,
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has machine learning played in doing that verification?
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I mean, we weren't calling it machine learning,
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but it was data science.
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And then as the industry evolved,
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machine learning became more of the nomenclature,
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and as that evolved, it became more sophisticated
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with deep learning, and as that continues to evolve,
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it'll be another thing.
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But they're all in the same vein.
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But we built that discipline up
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within the first year of the company,
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because we also had, we had to partner with a bank,
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we had to partner with Visa and MasterCard,
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and we had to show that,
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by bringing more people into the system,
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that we could do so in a responsible way,
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that would not compromise their systems,
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and that they would trust us.
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How do you convince this upstart company
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with some cool machine learning tricks
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is able to deliver on this trustworthy set of merchants?
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We staged it out in tiers.
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We had a bucket of 500 people using it,
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and then we showed results,
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and then 1,000, and then 10,000, then 50,000,
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and then the constraint was lifted.
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So again, it's kind of getting something tangible out there.
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I want to show what we can do rather than talk about it.
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And that put a lot of pressure on us
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to do the right things.
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And it also created a culture of accountability,
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of a little bit more transparency,
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and I think incentivized all of our early folks
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and the company in the right way.
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So what does the future look like
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in terms of increasing people's access?
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Or if you look at IoT, Internet of Things,
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there's more and more intelligent devices.
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You can see there's some people even talking
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about our personal data as a thing
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that we could monetize more explicitly versus implicitly.
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Sort of everything can become part of the economy.
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Do you see, so what does the future of Square look like
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in sort of giving people access in all kinds of ways
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to being part of the economy as merchants and as consumers?
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I believe that the currency we use
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is a huge part of the answer.
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And I believe that the internet deserves
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and requires a native currency.
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And that's why I'm such a huge believer in Bitcoin
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our biggest problem as a company right now
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is we cannot act like an internet company.
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Open a new market,
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we have to have a partnership with a local bank.
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We have to pay attention
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to different regulatory onboarding environments.
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And a digital currency like Bitcoin
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takes a bunch of that away
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where we can potentially launch a product
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in every single market around the world
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because they're all using the same currency.
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And we have consistent understanding of regulation
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and onboarding and what that means.
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So I think the internet continuing to be accessible
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to people is number one.
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And then I think currency is number two.
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And it will just allow for a lot more innovation,
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a lot more speed in terms of what we can build
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and others can build.
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And it's just really exciting.
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So, I mean, I wanna be able to see that
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and feel that in my lifetime.
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So in this aspect and in other aspects,
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you have a deep interest in cryptocurrency
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and distributed ledger tech in general.
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I talked to Vitalik Buterin yesterday on this podcast.
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He says hi, by the way.
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He's a brilliant, brilliant person.
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Talked a lot about Bitcoin and Ethereum, of course.
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So can you maybe linger on this point?
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What do you find appealing about Bitcoin,
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about digital currency?
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Where do you see it going in the next 10, 20 years?
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And what are some of the challenges with respect to Square
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but also just bigger for our globally, for our world,
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for the way we think about money?
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I think the most beautiful thing about it
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is there's no one person setting the direction.
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And there's no one person on the other side
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So we have something that is pretty organic in nature
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and very principled in its original design.
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And I think the Bitcoin white paper
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is one of the most seminal works of computer science
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in the last 20, 30 years.
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I mean, it really is.
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Yeah, it's a pretty cool technology.
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That's not often talked about.
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There's so much hype around digital currency
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about the financial impacts of it.
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But the actual technology is quite beautiful
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from a computer science perspective.
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Yeah, and the underlying principles behind it
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that went into it, even to the point
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of releasing it under a pseudonym.
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I think that's a very, very powerful statement.
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The timing of when it was released is powerful.
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It was a total activist move.
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I mean, it's moving the world forward
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in a way that I think is extremely noble and honorable
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and enables everyone to be part of the story,
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which is also really cool.
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So you asked a question around 10 years and 20 years.
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I mean, I think the amazing thing is no one knows.
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And it can emerge.
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And every person that comes into the ecosystem,
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whether they be a developer or someone who uses it,
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can change its direction in small and large ways.
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And that's what I think it should be,
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because that's what the internet has shown is possible.
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Now, there's complications with that, of course.
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And there's certainly companies that own large parts
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of the internet and can direct it more than others.
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And there's not equal access
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to every single person in the world just yet.
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But all those problems are visible enough
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to speak about them.
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And to me, that gives confidence that they're solvable
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in a relatively short timeframe.
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I think the world should be able to do that.
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I think the world changes a lot as we get these satellites
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projecting the internet down to earth,
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because it just removes a bunch of the former constraints
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and really levels the playing field.
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But a global currency,
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which a native currency for the internet is a proxy for,
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is a very powerful concept.
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And I don't think any one person on this planet
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truly understands the ramifications of that.
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I think there's a lot of positives to it.
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There's some negatives as well.
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Do you think it's possible, sorry to interrupt,
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do you think it's possible that this kind of digital currency
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would redefine the nature of money,
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so become the main currency of the world,
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as opposed to being tied to fiat currency
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of different nations and sort of really push
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the decentralization of control of money?
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Definitely, but I think the bigger ramification
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is how it affects how society works.
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And I think there are many positive ramifications
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outside of just money.
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Outside of just money.
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Money is a foundational layer that enables so much more.
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I was meeting with an entrepreneur in Ethiopia,
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and payments is probably the number one problem to solve
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across the continent,
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both in terms of moving money across borders
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between nations on the continent,
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or the amount of corruption within the current system.
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But the lack of easy ways to pay people
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makes starting anything really difficult.
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I met an entrepreneur who started the Lyft slash Uber
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of Ethiopia, and one of the biggest problems she has
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is that it's not easy for her riders to pay the company,
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it's not easy for her to pay the drivers.
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And that definitely has stunted her growth
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and made everything more challenging.
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So the fact that she even has to think about payments
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instead of thinking about the best rider experience
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and the best driver experience is pretty telling.
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So I think as we get a more durable, resilient
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and global standard, we see a lot more innovation everywhere.
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And I think there's no better case study for this
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than the various countries within Africa
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and their entrepreneurs who are trying to start things
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within health or sustainability or transportation
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or a lot of the companies that we've seen here.
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So the majority of companies I met in November
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when I spent a month on the continent were payments oriented.
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You mentioned, and this is a small tangent,
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you mentioned the anonymous launch of Bitcoin
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is a sort of profound philosophical statement.
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What's that even mean?
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There's a pseudonym.
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First of all, let me ask.
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There's an identity tied to it.
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It's not just anonymous, it's Nakamoto.
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So Nakamoto might represent one person or multiple people.
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But let me ask, are you Satoshi Nakamoto?
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Just checking, catch you off guard.
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And if I were, would I tell you?
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Yeah, that's true.
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A pseudonym is constructed identity.
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Anonymity is just kind of this random,
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like drop something off and leave.
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There's no intention to build an identity around it.
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And while the identity being built was a short time window,
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it was meant to stick around, I think, and to be known.
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And it's being honored in how the community
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thinks about building it,
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like the concept of Satoshi's, for instance,
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is one such example.
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But I think it was smart not to do it anonymous,
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not to do it as a real identity,
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but to do it as pseudonym,
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because I think it builds tangibility
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and a little bit of empathy that this was a human
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or a set of humans behind it.
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And there's this natural identity that I can imagine.
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But there is also a sacrifice of ego.
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That's a pretty powerful thing
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from your perspective. Yeah, which is beautiful.
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Would you do, sort of philosophically,
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to ask you the question,
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would you do all the same things you're doing now
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if your name wasn't attached to it?
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Sort of, if you had to sacrifice the ego,
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put another way, is your ego deeply tied
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in the decisions you've been making?
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I mean, I believe I would certainly attempt
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to do the things without my name having
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to be attached with it.
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But it's hard to do that in a corporation, legally.
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If I were to do more open source things,
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then absolutely, I don't need my particular identity,
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my real identity associated with it.
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But I think the appreciation that comes
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from doing something good and being able to see it
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and see people use it is pretty overwhelming and powerful,
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more so than maybe seeing your name in the headlines.
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Let's talk about artificial intelligence a little bit,
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70 years ago, Alan Turing formulated the Turing test.
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To me, natural language is one of the most interesting
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spaces of problems that are tackled
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by artificial intelligence.
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It's the canonical problem of what it means
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to be intelligent.
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He formulated it as the Turing test.
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Let me ask sort of the broad question,
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how hard do you think is it to pass the Turing test
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in the space of language?
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Just from a very practical standpoint,
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I think where we are now and for at least years out
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is one where the artificial intelligence,
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machine learning, the deep learning models
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can bubble up interestingness very, very quickly
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and pair that with human discretion around severity,
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around depth, around nuance and meaning.
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I think for me, the chasm across for general intelligence
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is to be able to explain why and the meaning
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Behind a decision.
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Behind a decision or a set of data.
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So the explainability part is kind of essential
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to be able to explain the meaning behind something.
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To explain using natural language
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why the decisions were made, that kind of thing.
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Yeah, I mean I think that's one of our biggest risks
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in artificial intelligence going forward
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is we are building a lot of black boxes
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that can't necessarily explain why they made a decision
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or what criteria they used to make the decision.
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And we're trusting them more and more
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from lending decisions to content recommendation
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to driving to health.
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Like a lot of us have watches that tell us
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to understand how they're deciding that.
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I mean that one's pretty simple.
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But you can imagine how complex they get.
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And being able to explain the reasoning behind
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some of those recommendations seems to be an essential part.
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Although it's hard.
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Which is a very hard problem because sometimes
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even we can't explain why we make decisions.
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That's what I was, I think we're being sometimes
link |
a little bit unfair to artificial intelligence systems
link |
because we're not very good at some of these things.
link |
So do you think, apologize for the ridiculous
link |
romanticized question, but on that line of thought,
link |
do you think we'll ever be able to build a system
link |
like in the movie Her that you could fall in love with?
link |
So have that kind of deep connection with.
link |
Hasn't that already happened?
link |
Hasn't someone in Japan fallen in love with his AI?
link |
There's always going to be somebody
link |
that does that kind of thing.
link |
I mean at a much larger scale of actually building
link |
relationships, of being deeper connections.
link |
It doesn't have to be love, but it's just deeper connections
link |
with artificial intelligence systems.
link |
So you mentioned explainability.
link |
That's less a function of the artificial intelligence
link |
and more a function of the individual
link |
and how they find meaning and where they find meaning.
link |
Do you think we humans can find meaning in technology
link |
in this kind of way?
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%, 100%.
link |
And I don't necessarily think it's a negative.
link |
But it's constantly going to evolve.
link |
So I don't know, but meaning is something
link |
that's entirely subjective.
link |
And I don't think it's going to be a function
link |
of finding the magic algorithm
link |
that enables everyone to love it.
link |
But maybe, I don't know.
link |
That question really gets at the difference
link |
between human and machine.
link |
So you had a little bit of an exchange with Elon Musk.
link |
Basically, I mean it's a trivial version of that,
link |
but I think there's a more fundamental question
link |
of is it possible to tell the difference
link |
between a bot and a human?
link |
And do you think it's, if we look into the future,
link |
10, 20 years out, do you think it would be possible
link |
or is it even necessary to tell the difference
link |
in the digital space between a human and a robot?
link |
Can we have fulfilling relationships with each
link |
or do we need to tell the difference between them?
link |
I think it's certainly useful in certain problem domains
link |
to be able to tell the difference.
link |
I think in others it might not be as useful.
link |
Do you think it's possible for us today
link |
to tell that difference?
link |
Is the reverse the meta of the Turing test?
link |
Well, what's interesting is I think the technology
link |
to create is moving much faster
link |
than the technology to detect, generally.
link |
So if you look at adversarial machine learning,
link |
there's a lot of systems that try
link |
to fool machine learning systems.
link |
And at least for me, the hope is that the technology
link |
to defend will always be right there, at least.
link |
Your sense is that...
link |
I don't know if they'll be right there.
link |
I mean, it's a race, right?
link |
So the detection technologies have to be two
link |
or 10 steps ahead of the creation technologies.
link |
This is a problem that I think the financial industry
link |
will face more and more because a lot of our risk models,
link |
for instance, are built around identity.
link |
Payments ultimately comes down to identity.
link |
And you can imagine a world where all this conversation
link |
around deep fakes goes towards the direction
link |
of a driver's license or passports or state identities.
link |
And people construct identities in order
link |
to get through a system such as ours
link |
to start accepting credit cards or into the cash app.
link |
And those technologies seem to be moving very, very quickly.
link |
Our ability to detect them, I think,
link |
is probably lagging at this point,
link |
but certainly with more focus, we can get ahead of it.
link |
But this is gonna touch everything.
link |
So I think it's like security.
link |
We're never going to be able
link |
to build a perfect detection system.
link |
We're only going to be able to...
link |
What we should be focused on is the speed of evolving it
link |
and being able to take signals that show correctness
link |
or errors as quickly as possible
link |
and move and to be able to build that
link |
into our newer models or the self learning models.
link |
Do you have other worries?
link |
Like some people, like Elon and others,
link |
have worries of existential threats
link |
of artificial intelligence,
link |
of artificial general intelligence?
link |
Or if you think more narrowly about threats
link |
and concerns about more narrow artificial intelligence,
link |
like what are your thoughts in this domain?
link |
Do you have concerns or are you more optimistic?
link |
I think Yuval in his book,
link |
21 Lessons for the 21st Century,
link |
his last chapter is around meditation.
link |
And you look at the title of the chapter
link |
and you're like, oh, it's all meditation.
link |
But what was interesting about that chapter
link |
is he believes that kids being born today,
link |
growing up today, Google has a stronger sense
link |
of their preferences than they do,
link |
which you can easily imagine.
link |
I can easily imagine today that Google probably knows
link |
my preferences more than my mother does.
link |
Maybe not me per se, but for someone growing up
link |
only knowing the internet,
link |
only knowing what Google is capable of,
link |
or Facebook or Twitter or Square or any of these things,
link |
the self awareness is being offloaded to other systems
link |
and particularly these algorithms.
link |
And his concern is that we lose that self awareness
link |
because the self awareness is now outside of us
link |
and it's doing such a better job
link |
at helping us direct our decisions around,
link |
should I stand, should I walk today?
link |
What doctor should I choose?
link |
Who should I date?
link |
All these things we're now seeing play out very quickly.
link |
So he sees meditation as a tool to build that self awareness
link |
and to bring the focus back on,
link |
why do I make these decisions?
link |
Why do I react in this way?
link |
Why did I have this thought?
link |
Where did that come from?
link |
That's a way to regain control.
link |
Or awareness, maybe not control, but awareness
link |
so that you can be aware that yes, I am,
link |
I am, I am, I am, I am.
link |
Yes, I am offloading this decision to this algorithm
link |
that I don't fully understand
link |
and can't tell me why it's doing the things it's doing
link |
because it's so complex.
link |
That's not to say that the algorithm can't be a good thing.
link |
And to me recommender systems,
link |
the best of what they can do is to help guide you
link |
on a journey of learning new ideas of learning period.
link |
It can be a great thing, but do you know you're doing that?
link |
Are you aware that you're inviting it to do that to you?
link |
I think that's the risk he identifies, right?
link |
That's perfectly okay.
link |
But are you aware that you have that invitation
link |
and it's being acted upon?
link |
And so that's a concern you're kind of highlighting
link |
that without a lack of awareness,
link |
you can just be like floating at sea.
link |
So awareness is key in the future
link |
of these artificial intelligence systems.
link |
Yeah, the movie WALLY.
link |
Which I think is one of Pixar's best movies
link |
besides RATATOUILLI.
link |
RATATOUILLI was incredible.
link |
You had me until RATATOUILLI, okay.
link |
RATATOUILLI was incredible.
link |
All right, we've come to the first point
link |
where we disagree, okay.
link |
It's the entrepreneurial story in the form of a rat.
link |
I just remember just the soundtrack was really good, so.
link |
What are your thoughts, sticking on artificial intelligence
link |
a little bit, about the displacement of jobs?
link |
That's another perspective that candidates
link |
like Andrew Yang talk about.
link |
Yang gang forever.
link |
So he unfortunately, speaking of Yang gang,
link |
has recently dropped out.
link |
I know, it was very disappointing and depressing.
link |
Yeah, but on the positive side,
link |
he's I think launching a podcast, so.
link |
Yeah, he just announced that.
link |
I'm sure he'll try to talk you into trying
link |
to come on to the podcast.
link |
I will talk to him.
link |
So. About RATATOUILLI.
link |
Yeah, maybe he'll be more welcoming
link |
of the RATATOUILLI argument.
link |
What are your thoughts on his concerns
link |
of the displacement of jobs, of automations,
link |
of the, of course there's positive impacts
link |
that could come from automation and AI,
link |
but there could also be negative impacts.
link |
And within that framework, what are your thoughts
link |
about universal basic income?
link |
So these interesting new ideas
link |
of how we can empower people in the economy.
link |
I think he was 100% right on almost every dimension.
link |
We see this in Square's business.
link |
I mean, he identified truck drivers.
link |
I'm from Missouri.
link |
And he certainly pointed to the concern
link |
and the issue that people from where I'm from
link |
feel every single day that is often invisible
link |
and not talked about enough.
link |
You know, the next big one is cashiers.
link |
This is where it pertains to Square's business.
link |
We are seeing more and more of the point of sale
link |
move to the individual customer's hand
link |
in the form of their phone and apps
link |
and preorder and order ahead.
link |
We're seeing more kiosks.
link |
We're seeing more things like Amazon Go.
link |
And the number of workers as a cashier in retail is immense.
link |
And, you know, there's no real answers
link |
on how they transform their skills
link |
and work into something else.
link |
And I think that does lead to a lot
link |
of really negative ramifications.
link |
And the important point that he brought up
link |
around universal basic income
link |
is given that the shift is going to come
link |
and given it is going to take time
link |
to set people up with new skills and new careers,
link |
they need to have a floor to be able to survive.
link |
And this $1,000 a month is such a floor.
link |
It's not going to incentivize you to quit your job
link |
because it's not enough,
link |
but it will enable you to not have to worry
link |
as much about just getting on day to day
link |
so that you can focus on what am I going to do now
link |
and what am I going to, what skills do I need to acquire?
link |
And I think, you know, a lot of people point
link |
to the fact that, you know, during the industrial age,
link |
we had the same concerns around automation,
link |
factory lines and everything worked out okay.
link |
But the biggest change is just the velocity
link |
and the centralization of a lot of the things
link |
that make this work, which is the data
link |
and the algorithms that work on this data.
link |
I think that the second biggest scary thing
link |
is just how around AI is just who actually owns the data
link |
and who can operate on it.
link |
And are we able to share the insights from the data
link |
so that we can also build algorithms that help our needs
link |
or help our business or whatnot?
link |
So that's where I think regulation could play
link |
a strong and positive part.
link |
First, looking at the primitives of AI
link |
and the tools we use to build these services
link |
that will ultimately touch every single aspect
link |
of the human experience.
link |
And then where data is owned and how it's shared.
link |
So those are the answers that as a society, as a world,
link |
we need to have better answers around,
link |
which we're currently not.
link |
They're just way too centralized
link |
into a few very, very large companies.
link |
But I think it was spot on with identifying the problem
link |
and proposing solutions that would actually work.
link |
At least that we learned from that you could expand
link |
or evolve, but I mean, I think UBI is well past its due.
link |
I mean, it was certainly trumpeted by Martin Luther King
link |
and even before him as well.
link |
And like you said, the exact $1,000 mark
link |
might not be the correct one,
link |
but you should take the steps to try to implement
link |
these solutions and see what works.
link |
So I think you and I eat similar diets,
link |
and at least I was.
link |
The first time I've heard this.
link |
Yeah, so I was doing it before.
link |
First time anyone has said that to me, in this case anyway.
link |
Yeah, but it's becoming more and more cool.
link |
But I was doing it before it was cool.
link |
So intermittent fasting and fasting in general,
link |
I really enjoy, I love food,
link |
but I enjoy the, I also love suffering because I'm Russian.
link |
So fasting kind of makes you appreciate the,
link |
makes you appreciate what it is to be human somehow.
link |
But I have, outside the philosophical stuff,
link |
I have a more specific question.
link |
It also helps me as a programmer and a deep thinker,
link |
like from the scientific perspective,
link |
to sit there for many hours and focus deeply.
link |
Maybe you were a hacker before you were CEO.
link |
What have you learned about diet, lifestyle,
link |
mindset that helps you maximize mental performance,
link |
to be able to focus for,
link |
to think deeply in this world of distractions?
link |
I think I just took it for granted for too long.
link |
Just the social structure of we eat three meals a day
link |
and there's snacks in between.
link |
And I just never really asked the question, why?
link |
Oh, by the way, in case people don't know,
link |
I think a lot of people know,
link |
but you at least, you famously eat once a day.
link |
You still eat once a day?
link |
Yep, I eat dinner.
link |
By the way, what made you decide to eat once a day?
link |
Like, cause to me that was a huge revolution
link |
that you don't have to eat breakfast.
link |
That was like, I felt like I was a rebel.
link |
Like I abandoned my parents or something
link |
and became an anarchist.
link |
When you first, like the first week you start doing it,
link |
it feels that you kind of like have a superpower.
link |
Then you realize it's not really a superpower.
link |
But it, I think you realize,
link |
at least I realized like it just how much is,
link |
how much our mind dictates what we're possible of.
link |
And sometimes we have structures around us
link |
that incentivize like, this three meal a day thing,
link |
which was purely social structure
link |
versus necessity for our health and for our bodies.
link |
And I did it just, I started doing it
link |
because I played a lot with my diet when I was a kid
link |
and I was vegan for two years
link |
and just went all over the place just because I,
link |
you know, health is the most precious thing we have
link |
and none of us really understand it.
link |
So being able to ask the question through experiments
link |
that I can perform on myself
link |
and learn about is compelling to me.
link |
And I heard this one guy on a podcast, Wim Hof,
link |
who's famous for doing ice baths and holding his breath
link |
and all these things.
link |
He said he only eats one meal a day.
link |
I'm like, wow, that sounds super challenging
link |
and uncomfortable.
link |
So I just, I learn the most when I make myself,
link |
I wouldn't say suffer,
link |
but when I make myself feel uncomfortable
link |
because everything comes to bear in those moments
link |
and you really learn what you're about or what you're not.
link |
So I've been doing that my whole life.
link |
Like when I was a kid, I could not,
link |
like I was, I could not speak.
link |
Like I had to go to a speech therapist
link |
and it made me extremely shy.
link |
And then one day I realized I can't keep doing this
link |
and I signed up for the speech club.
link |
And it was the most uncomfortable thing
link |
I could imagine doing, getting a topic on a note card,
link |
having five minutes to write a speech
link |
about whatever that topic is,
link |
not being able to use the note card while speaking
link |
and speaking for five minutes about that topic.
link |
So, but it just, it puts so much,
link |
it gave me so much perspective
link |
around the power of communication,
link |
around my own deficiencies
link |
and around if I set my mind to do something, I'll do it.
link |
So it gave me a lot more confidence.
link |
So I see fasting in the same light.
link |
This is something that was interesting,
link |
challenging, uncomfortable,
link |
and has given me so much learning and benefit as a result.
link |
And it will lead to other things that I'll experiment with
link |
and play with, but yeah,
link |
it does feel a little bit like a superpower sometimes.
link |
The most boring superpower one can imagine.
link |
Now it's quite incredible.
link |
The clarity of mind is pretty interesting.
link |
Speaking of suffering,
link |
you kind of talk about facing difficult ideas.
link |
You meditate, you think about the broad context of life,
link |
Let me ask, sort of apologize again
link |
for the romanticized question,
link |
but do you ponder your own mortality?
link |
Do you think about death,
link |
about the finiteness of human existence
link |
when you meditate, when you think about it?
link |
And if you do, what,
link |
how do you make sense of it, that this thing ends?
link |
Well, I don't try to make sense of it.
link |
I do think about it every day.
link |
I mean, it's a daily, multiple times a day.
link |
Are you afraid of death?
link |
No, I'm not afraid of it.
link |
I think it's a transformation, I don't know to what,
link |
but it's also a tool
link |
to feel the importance of every moment.
link |
So I just use it as a reminder, like I have an hour.
link |
Is this really what I'm going to spend the hour doing?
link |
Like I only have so many more sunsets and sunrises to watch.
link |
Like I'm not going to get up for it.
link |
I'm not going to make sure that I try to see it.
link |
So it just puts a lot into perspective
link |
and it helps me prioritize.
link |
I think it's, I don't see it as something that's like
link |
that I dread or is dreadful.
link |
It's a tool that is available
link |
to every single person to use every day
link |
because it shows how precious life is.
link |
And there's reminders every single day,
link |
whether it be your own health or a friend or a coworker
link |
or something you see in the news.
link |
So to me it's just a question
link |
of what we do with our daily reminder.
link |
And for me, it's am I really focused on what matters?
link |
And sometimes that might be work,
link |
sometimes that might be friendships or family
link |
or relationships or whatnot,
link |
but it's the ultimate clarifier in that sense.
link |
So on the question of what matters,
link |
another ridiculously big question of
link |
once you try to make sense of it,
link |
what do you think is the meaning of it all,
link |
the meaning of life?
link |
What gives you purpose, happiness, meaning?
link |
I mean, just being able to be aware
link |
of the fact that I'm alive is pretty meaningful.
link |
The connections I feel with individuals,
link |
whether they're people I just meet
link |
or long lasting friendships or my family is meaningful.
link |
Seeing people use something that I helped build
link |
is really meaningful and powerful to me.
link |
But that sense of, I mean,
link |
I think ultimately it comes down to a sense of connection
link |
and just feeling like I am bigger,
link |
I am part of something that's bigger than myself
link |
and like I can feel it directly
link |
in small ways or large ways,
link |
however it manifests is probably it.
link |
Do you think we're living in a simulation?
link |
It's a pretty fun one if we are,
link |
but also crazy and random and wrought with tons of problems.
link |
Would you have it any other way?
link |
I mean, I just think it's taken us way too long
link |
as a planet to realize we're all in this together
link |
and we all are connected in very significant ways.
link |
I think we hide our connectivity very well through ego,
link |
through whatever it is of the day.
link |
But that is the one thing I would wanna work
link |
towards changing and that's how I would have it another way.
link |
Cause if we can't do that,
link |
then how are we gonna connect to all the other simulations?
link |
Cause that's the next step is like
link |
what's happening in the other simulation.
link |
Escaping this one and yeah.
link |
Spanning across the multiple simulations
link |
and sharing in and on the fun.
link |
I don't think there's a better way to end it.
link |
Jack, thank you so much for all the work you do.
link |
There's probably other ways that we've ended this
link |
and other simulations that may have been better.
link |
We'll have to wait and see.
link |
Thanks so much for talking today.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Dorsey
link |
and thank you to our sponsor, Masterclass.
link |
Please consider supporting this podcast
link |
by signing up to Masterclass at masterclass.com slash Lex.
link |
If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
link |
support on Patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter
link |
And now let me leave you with some words
link |
about Bitcoin from Paul Graham.
link |
I'm very intrigued by Bitcoin.
link |
It has all the signs of a paradigm shift.
link |
Hackers love it, yet it is described as a toy,
link |
just like microcomputers.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.