Jack Dorsey joins me on the show to endorse Robert F. Kennedy s presidential campaign. We talk about why he thinks Joe Biden is the best choice to take on Hillary Clinton in 2020, and why he's willing to put his neck on the line in order to do so. And we talk about the censorship that's already been applied to RFK's campaign, and what that could mean for the future of free speech in America. We also talk about how much he's been influenced by the Kennedy family, and how he views the current state of the Democratic Party. And we answer some of your questions! Tweet me if you have any questions, suggestions, or suggestions on how we can improve the show. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What does Joe Biden's refusal to engage with RFK publicly indicate about free speech? 4:30 - How much trust does the DNC have in the system 6:00 What does Biden's lack of trust from the American people remove from the democratic system 7:00 -- What does it mean about the election system? 8:15 - Why do we need to trust in our election systems 9:20 - Who's going to move the country forward? 11:30 -- Who's the best candidate for the country? 12:20 -- Is Joe Biden the best presidential candidate? 13:40 -- Why is Joe Biden better than RFK? 14:15 -- What do we should we trust in? 15:40 - Why does he have the best chance of winning the election? 16: What does he care about the most? 17:15: Who s going to make the country better? 18:00 | What is the most important thing? 19:10 | What does the best idea for us? 21:40 | Who s the most authentic? 22:30 | Why is he the best person to make us better than the other guy? 26:30 27:20 | What do you think we should trust in the country we can we can trust? 29:40 32:00 // Is he a good idea? 35:30 Is he good at making us all better than he s a good person? 31:10 36:00 Is he more authentic than we can change the world better than we should be better than that? 33:20
00:00:57.000Thanks for joining me on what is turning out to be the biggest week in Stay Free history, and perhaps the biggest week in the history of free speech, full stop.
00:01:06.000We've already had RFK on the show, I'm about to talk to Jack Dorsey on the show tomorrow, independently, a rare A special conversation with Tucker Carlson.
00:01:17.000You might as well start posting your questions for that chat now.
00:01:20.000But joining me right now, I couldn't be more excited to announce one of the inaugural engineers, one of the initial mystics and wizards that founded this online space.
00:01:33.000He's since founded more tech companies.
00:01:34.000He can't stop found in a block to blue sky among them and now he's endorsing the same presidential candidate as us once he and I shared an extraordinary and peculiar dinner at the house of Larry who's that guy Larry Larry Larry
00:02:45.000It was sort of a TV show that Larry King, God rest his soul, was doing, but I don't think it's ever been aired, and I think that's probably for the best for everyone.
00:02:53.000Jack, we share a mutual friend in the great Rick Rubin, another pursuit and brilliant man.
00:03:01.000And similarly, you and I both endorse Robert F. Kennedy.
00:03:06.000Why do you think he's the best choice for the Democrats?
00:03:09.000What do you think is the significance of his emerging candidature at this time?
00:03:13.000And significantly, mate, why have you been willing to put your name and neck on the line endorsing him?
00:04:11.000It's as if he has an intuitive recourse to principles and values like community service and he's quite loving and spiritually oriented man.
00:04:23.000We spoke to him earlier this week with his wife Cheryl in a fantastic and exclusive interview.
00:04:28.000If you're watching this right now on YouTube, we can only be on this platform for the first 15 minutes because There are a number of questions that I have for Jack.
00:04:36.000I'm going to ask him what he thinks about RFK's stand on certain medications and medicines, what Jack thinks about the censorship that's already been applied to RFK, and of course, we're going to be talking about the Twitter files.
00:04:47.000For now though, Jack, what do you think about Biden's refusal to engage with RFK publicly?
00:04:55.000What does that indicate about free speech?
00:04:57.000What does that indicate about Biden's personal capacities and abilities?
00:05:02.000I don't know how much it is him versus the DNC.
00:05:28.000It's the only way to see how people think about these ideas and for us to trust who's going to move the country forward the best.
00:05:35.000There's a kind of misanthropy in the assumption that what's required for society to work is authoritarianism, censorship, surveillance.
00:05:45.000What I figure, Jack, is that you exist in a pretty unique space.
00:05:51.000You've been there for the gold rush Inauguration and establishment of essentially new colonies, new territories, new space, new communication dynamics.
00:06:02.000It seems to me significant that you've had to take this time out.
00:06:07.000I wonder what it was about your role at Twitter that, is it that you have been burned or hurt, burned out, worn out, disappointed, disillusioned?
00:06:18.000What exactly is it that led you to step away from Twitter, mate?
00:06:25.000I mean, the biggest is the realization that as a public company and as a public company CEO, with the dynamics that Twitter had to play in, Which was we were entirely dependent upon brand advertising.
00:06:40.000The brand advertisers have huge sway over the very policies of the service, including the ability to protest and remove their ads from our service.
00:06:50.000And when you have a service that's entirely dependent upon that brand advertising revenue, it really hurts your ability to do the right thing all the time.
00:07:01.000Because if they pull back, Wall Street sees that.
00:07:05.000And if Wall Street sees a pullback, they punish your stock.
00:07:08.000And if they punish your stock, that affects every single employee because that's how all the employees are paid.
00:07:15.000They go somewhere else where they have a better potential outcome for their equity and for their stock.
00:07:21.000So it was more the realization that I just didn't believe Twitter could continue to exist as a public company.
00:07:29.000If it could, I certainly wasn't the person to make it so.
00:07:33.000I just did not... I didn't feel I had that in me.
00:07:36.000And at the same time I was learning about... I come from an open source background.
00:07:40.000I come from, you know, learning about the internet when it was truly decentralized and it was truly open.
00:07:47.000And Bitcoin in 2009 was a great reminder to me of what the internet wants to be and what it needs to be.
00:07:55.000And I just got fascinated more and more with open protocols, and that felt like the answer ultimately for what Twitter needed to be, what role it needed to play in the world in terms of the public square, whether that be global or more local.
00:08:09.000And I wanted to put more of my efforts into that and those realizations and just, you know, all the mistakes I made and we made as a company, and a bunch of frustrations I had with the board and just the corporate aspects of the service.
00:08:30.000Sometimes it's difficult for us to identify that immersed within our zombie capitalist state corporatist model, our systems of regulation that are not explicit and declarative, like you described, if the advertisers don't support Twitter, Wall Street will respond to that withdrawal, that will affect stock prices, that there is an ideology built into the commercial model That doesn't need to declare itself or make itself explicit even in a plainly innovative space like Twitter and comparable social media platforms which felt extraordinarily novel and that we were at the vanguard of something new.
00:09:14.000It's interesting to see how quickly it can be colonized by the same kind of imperialist modalities that are More easy to observe in the last century.
00:09:24.000Oh, look, there's this continent of Africa.
00:09:28.000There's this nation of India that there is a certain mentality that is able to through kind of materialism.
00:09:35.000I would say as the primary as the primary mentality, which is not that doesn't need to declare itself because as Mark Fisher wrote in his book capitalist realism, the ideology is so we are so submerged within this ideology that we don't have a context.
00:09:51.000To judge it from outside of, but it seems to me that we're involved in nothing less than a kind of ideological war, Jack, and I sense that you might know that too, but we're at a point where, you know, I don't fully understand words like or terms like open protocol and open source, but it seems to me you're talking about decentral necessity for decentralized models in order to have truly open discourse and to protect significant Principles, which we hear Elon Musk, of course, your, what do I want to say, your descendant in running Twitter, talk about continually.
00:10:26.000So can you tell us, do you care about decentralization?
00:10:30.000And do you agree with me that we're on the cusp of a kind of war between authoritarianism and kind of new unprecedented revolution?
00:10:38.000I do agree with you and maybe it's always been that way and it's more and more visible now.
00:10:45.000Because some of the structures are breaking down and we're seeing more of the incentives.
00:10:50.000I think we live in a world of abstraction and as you said, it's very hard to see the levels and the layers of abstraction that we built upon ourselves because they're comfortable and we get used to them.
00:11:01.000And that momentum is extremely strong.
00:11:04.000It's like a riptide out to the ocean and you're trying to swim against the riptide instead of going to the side.
00:11:11.000And to me, I'm a Absolute believer in decentralization.
00:11:16.000Decentralization to me means removing single points of failure, recognizing single points of failure, and removing them.
00:11:22.000And one of the single points of failure in the Twitter case was the singular control that one company has over the protocol, over discovery, and over distribution of the content.
00:11:36.000And if those were separated just a bit, I think the people have more ownership over that.
00:11:41.000So when you think of things like Bitcoin, or you think of a distributed decentralized protocol that I love, which is Nostr, these are services that have no leads.
00:11:53.000They're not controlled by any one company, not controlled by any one government.
00:12:02.000So if I want to build something to make Bitcoin better for myself or for millions of people, I can do it without asking for permission from a CEO or from a government agency or from anyone.
00:12:11.000The same is true for Noster, which is building something equivalent to Twitter and ultimately, I hope, which will support Twitter.
00:12:18.000Because it removes some of the burden that Twitter feels today, and it will continue to feel from government agencies, from customers, and also from advertisers, until they've truly diversified their revenue stream and they build resilience against just, you know, being dependent upon one ad model.
00:12:36.000If you want to ask questions to Jack, you have to join our locals community.
00:12:40.000Press the red button on your screen now to join our locals community to ask questions like this one.
00:12:47.000Jack, I'm almost reluctant to say this out loud to you, but it's from our chat.
00:12:50.000Chief411, why did you allow the US government to use Twitter to mislead the American people?
00:12:56.000Now, you might need to provide some contacts Context for that, Chief 411.
00:13:00.000If you're watching us on YouTube, I don't think Jack is able to answer that question on YouTube because it's clear that we're talking about the pandemic.
00:13:07.000So to hear the answer to that question, why did you allow the American government to mislead the American people, click the red button.
00:13:14.000If you're on Rumble, join us on Locals.
00:13:16.000If you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in the description.
00:13:19.000Join us over on there because we're talking about free speech.
00:13:21.000To someone whose opinion matters, to someone who's in the position of knowledge, understanding, and also in a position, I believe, to change these dynamics.
00:13:29.000So click the link in the description, join us on the comb of free speech rumble.
00:13:34.000So Jack, I would add to that question, why did you allow, I'd add to that out of respect, because as you know I'm English, and I see you as a person that I want to form an alliance with, Did you indeed allow the US government to use Twitter to mislead the American people?
00:13:48.000I guess we're talking about the Hunter Biden laptop story and presumably the shutting down of the debate around the coronavirus pandemic.
00:13:57.000I suppose like my personal observations was not just Twitter, all social media and certainly mainstream media censored information in the words of your peer Mark Zuckerberg were ultimately debatable Or true.
00:14:09.000And I can't help but thinking your endorsement for RFK is the revelation.
00:14:14.000And in what you've already said in this fascinating conversation, is an appetite for you to improve free speech, improve decentralized models of communication.
00:14:24.000So what do you think about at Chief4One's question?
00:14:27.000You know, we have a lot of pretty out there people in our chat, thankfully.
00:14:30.000How do you feel about even that question, really?
00:15:05.000company incorporated Delaware, bound by U.S.
00:15:08.000law, any inquiry, any push by the hosting government of your service, of your company, of how your employees get money to feed their families, feels strong.
00:15:25.000It feels like, you know, you have to act on it.
00:15:28.000And it's It's yet another one of those things that just puts pressure, including, you know, the threat of advertisers leaving, the threat of people leaving.
00:15:36.000The amount of times we saw RIP Twitter for policy changes we made or functionality changes we made was immense.
00:15:47.000I think it was, you know, every three months we would read about how Twitter is dying because of something that we did.
00:15:54.000I think Twitter is ultimately resilient, and the team and the service did push back on a lot of those requests, too, and you can see those in the Twitter files.
00:16:15.000I was not surprised that they were happening.
00:16:18.000There were significant mistakes we made, like the Hunter Biden laptop story.
00:16:24.000And the key issue there was blocking a publication and shutting down their account.
00:16:30.000I do believe we reversed that within 24 hours, but the New York Post continued to lock out their account because they didn't want to delete the tweet and then that was our policy and we didn't change our policy.
00:16:41.000But I do believe the company had a capacity to admit its mistakes.
00:16:47.000I think we were fairly open, not as open as we could have been.
00:16:50.000And I don't believe anyone in the company was intending to mislead anyone.
00:16:59.000And, you know, it was a company that felt really strongly about humanity.
00:17:03.000They may have different ideas from everyone else, but that's part of the problem, is we have this single point of failure.
00:17:09.000We have people in the company, whether that be me, whether that be engineers, whether that be policymakers within the company, who could inject bias into their decisions and into policy.
00:17:22.000And to me, the only way around that is to remove that element, put that policy into code itself, so that everyone can actually see it if they want to, if they want to work, do the work to understand it.
00:17:35.000But ultimately, that is not owned by any one organization.
00:17:39.000That, to me, is the most critical learning that I had.
00:17:42.000And, you know, I regret, you know, not paying enough attention and All I know to do now is to fix those mistakes so they can never happen again in that way, and hopefully in ways that we're not even talking about right now.
00:17:59.000Especially with the rise of AI and all this new regulation around the world, it's critical that if we do want platforms around free speech, around free expression, That we look towards protocols that are not owned by companies, by governments, and have no single leaders.
00:18:21.000Oh, Jack, I mean, man, that is so fascinating to hear someone in your position say that and this is my interpretation.
00:18:29.000I recognize this is not exactly what you said, but sometimes it feels to me listening to you that you are on a kind of journey of atonement.
00:18:36.000I know that is a very sort of spiritual word and I certainly do not feel like I'm in a position to make any judgment because having been a person even with my own version of celebrity, I know these things.
00:18:46.000I know that I've seen people say, Oh, Russell Brand, he's controlled opposition.
00:18:50.000He's a person that's like in this space in order to ensure that true.
00:18:54.000And I said, God, am I, am I not asking the right questions?
00:20:17.000I want to raise my children in a way that other people wouldn't want to raise their children.
00:20:21.000Why would I spend the rest of my life arguing about that?
00:20:23.000Just like you raised your children, now you want to raise my children, now I want to end.
00:20:27.000But what I'd like to sort of ask you is, how do you feel about where it got Jack, you know, it got so powerful that Trump could be kicked off of there, and it sort of, I think, contributed to that sense that, oh, there's this new woke revolution, the Democrat Party are controlled by financial interests and are pretending that they care about people, but they don't.
00:20:48.000Trump's just a loudmouth version of everything else.
00:20:51.000A lot of people on our platform absolutely love Donald Trump, but me, I agree with you.
00:21:05.000I feel bad that we had to take that action.
00:21:08.000Um, I, um, you know, it was, it was a challenging time and I, I do believe the company was working in the, with its best efforts with the information it had.
00:21:21.000Um, but as I said, a few days after that, uh, suspension, I believe it was probably the right decision for the company, but the wrong decision for the world.
00:21:31.000And we saw a lot of follow-on companies such as AWS take Parler off their services and being removed from the App Store.
00:21:43.000And I think it opened a gate that I'm not proud of at all.
00:21:48.000And, you know, it was another one of those moments of, I don't want to do... I don't think this can work this way.
00:22:49.000But It was the path to grow Twitter and I had to learn what I had to learn and in that I learned what I had forgotten as well.
00:22:59.000What I'd forgotten about what I loved about the internet and why I'm here in the first place and how grateful I am to the people that truly built a decentralized internet that a lot of companies, our peers, whether that be Google or Facebook or, you know, Yahoo, all these things centralized a lot of the internet that we used and that felt very, very free.
00:23:25.000And now I think there's different answers.
00:23:27.000And I just want to spend the rest of my life making sure those different answers work.
00:23:32.000Yeah, that seems like a beautiful mission because I, as I indicated in an earlier question Jack, sense that we are in a precipitous place.
00:23:44.000Whether it's the new EU proposed legislation to be able to fine social media platforms if they do not comply and censor, that's a bill that's going through now, Each of the Five Eyes countries, those are the countries that Snowden's revelations revealed shared data on their domestic populations, the anglophonic countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, UK, those countries are all simultaneously trying to pass legislation that amount to anti-free speech laws.
00:24:13.000As always, it's leveraged on understandable issues that any sane person would agree with.
00:24:26.000But I can't help but feel, Jack, that these issues are used to leverage a centralised and authoritarian model in a space that clearly doesn't need Centralised authoritarianism.
00:24:39.000This is obviously, in my view, this is just my opinion, an attempt to retain a 20th century power model in a cyberspace that can afford decentralisation, which seems like a necessary social step.
00:24:53.000It's clear to me that independent media necessarily becomes independently political Because how long can you talk about information without pointing out?
00:25:03.000Laws are getting passed all around the world to censor, to surveil, to control, to social credit score, to shut down.
00:25:10.000Once open spaces like Twitter, Facebook, Google, all bought about, let's assume, by idealistic entrepreneurs.
00:25:19.000I knew as a punk you didn't want to end up a CEO that's working for the man, in inverted commas, and yet what happens is Stories end up being censored plainly in order to benefit the establishment.
00:25:30.000Political decisions get made that were right, in your words, for the company, but not right for the world.
00:25:34.000That, for me, is an earth-shattering revelation.
00:25:37.000And where we are now, it seems to me, is we precisely need to establish modes of communication, modes of media, modes of democracy, and modes of election that can respond to these changes.
00:25:48.000Otherwise, what we are going to get Is the kind of centralized globalist authority that are actually regarded as wacko conspiracy theories.
00:25:57.000I can see the map of that model being laid out before us.
00:26:01.000Do you think that's where we're heading?
00:26:03.000And do you think that there's a chance that your journey of atonement can begin to challenge such gargantuan centralizing forces?
00:27:32.000In your phrase, which sounds like the kind of thing that a coder would come up with, single point of failure, I would sort of see that more as, all of us are fallible.
00:27:41.000Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs not between nations, creeds, races, or people, but through every human heart.
00:27:50.000The inevitability of individual fallibility has to be addressed at the outset through the models we create.
00:27:57.000And for me, there's something about the internet that is reflective of our potential to evolve.
00:28:03.000That we are, that somehow omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence are represented in the internet.
00:28:10.000And if you allow that kind of power to be seized in the same way that land was seized
00:28:15.000a couple of hundred years ago, the way that finance was seized a hundred years ago,
00:28:20.000then this will be unprecedented centralized control.
00:28:23.000So it's great to hear that the solutions you're suggesting are precisely the kind of solutions I think could work.
00:28:30.000When you heard... Can I just ask you this?
00:28:32.000It seems like a question a lot of people want the answer to.
00:28:34.000What was your emotional reaction when you heard that Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter, Jack?
00:29:27.000Unfortunately, I think what he saw within that week of being on the board, I don't know if he was technically on the board, He realized a different answer, which was, I want to take this private.
00:29:39.000And that was my hope for it as well, because I just don't think it can exist and persist as a public company, given all the incentives that that puts upon it.
00:29:50.000Unfortunately, it was just really bad timing.
00:29:55.000And the ad market, the digital ad market crashed.
00:30:00.000All the COVID correction that like zoomed these companies up like Zoom, like Amazon, like Apple, like Google, like Facebook, like Snapchat, suddenly that floor fell away.
00:30:14.000And every single company around them, especially within ads, just dropped in value massively.
00:30:20.000And That timing and that, you know, that decision to buy before that happened, I think, unfortunately set up a series of events that, you know, didn't feel great.
00:30:34.000I don't think... it became ultimately pretty reactive, in my view, and it put upon him a pretty immense constraint and burden.
00:30:45.000To reduce the cost of the company as quickly as possible.
00:30:50.000There was a lot of debt put upon the company and solving for that is not easy.
00:30:55.000And I think that created an urgency that just created a bunch of reactive decisions.
00:31:00.000None of which I necessarily disagree with over the long term.
00:31:21.000I believe that he will figure things out.
00:31:24.000And I believe, and I want to do as much as possible to help Remove some of that burden because he is another single point of failure.
00:31:33.000He is another person controlling these policies and these features and how we engage with these experiences.
00:31:39.000And my hope and my desire is that we can build technologies like Bitcoin and Nostr, which are truly open protocols, and Twitter can build on top of them and remove a bunch of the liability they have.
00:31:50.000Remove a bunch of the constraints that are going to be put upon them by foreign governments and our own government and the private market and Wall Street in the future.
00:31:58.000So I think there's a path of intersection.
00:32:03.000I think it makes Twitter even stronger.
00:32:05.000And I think if there's anyone to do it and anyone to see value in that, I think it's Elon.
00:32:42.000Is it not going to be necessary on the economic level to regulate and decentralize these companies that have this vast amount of power in order to facilitate that?
00:32:57.000If companies like Apple and Google, and Facebook of course, have the Amazon, have the amount of influence and power, are able to avoid in many cases paying domestic tax, are able to break down unions, is there not a requirement that beyond what you're suggesting for providing alternative open source platforms, that we also have to break down these structures on an economic level?
00:33:22.000Is something this vast Not always going to be a tool for centralization and globalism.
00:33:28.000Doesn't it have to at some point legislatively have to be decentralized?
00:33:37.000I don't know if that's necessarily it's it's not my preferred answer.
00:33:40.000My preferred answer is that we built something that solves a bunch of those problems and that people choose it because it solves their problems.
00:33:47.000And these models such as the App Store centralization and Apple's stranglehold on what apps are in the App Store and what apps are not and, you know, how much you pay to Apple for that privilege.
00:33:59.000Currently it's 30% of any revenue that goes over the App Store.
00:34:04.000If we can build alternative models on the free web, on these free protocols, and they actually have quality developers and quality apps upon them, which I have no doubt they will, because they did before these structures existed, then the market is chosen.
00:34:20.000And that regulation of an app store, potentially to break it up, is kind of for for not uh it may have mattered for a few short years but ultimately I believe the you know the market and the people will choose the the outcomes that are needed for them as long as they have the right technologies to do so and that those technologies are open and free and permissionless most importantly.
00:34:42.000Do you feel that that fundamentally becomes political?
00:34:46.000This model of communication, this model, this advance in technology has already redefined the way that politics takes space.
00:34:56.000I can't believe that there's not a connection between the type of regulation and legislation that's being proposed almost at a global level, albeit through a few different bureaucratic agencies, whether it's the EU, the UN or the five countries that I just listed, which insignificantly include the United States, to me must be a response to the capacity for decentralised,
00:35:17.000radical, independent movement in media and indeed politics. Just a couple of examples of
00:35:24.000the anomalies that I imagine these new regulations are there to prevent are Brexit in
00:35:29.000our country, Trump in your country and indeed the emergence of RFK. I can't believe that the
00:35:36.000people that are responsible for this legislation aren't predicting that the way that media space
00:35:42.000and political space is altering could lead to truly radical political movements. It could
00:35:48.000lead to opt-out communities where people say we don't want to pay your taxes, we're not repaying
00:35:53.000your debt, we're going to transact in this decentralised currency, we're going to
00:35:57.000communicate through these modalities, we don't consider ourselves part of Canada or France or
00:36:02.000England or America or whatever nation. We're part of a new separate alliance.
00:36:06.000There's nothing to suggest that the nation-state is the zenith of all possible political evolution.
00:36:13.000When we're talking about radical change politically, culturally, ecologically, What does that mean?
00:36:18.000You know, everything has to be on the table.
00:36:20.000You can't say we want radical change, but we have to have our flags stay the same.
00:36:53.000Florida looks completely different from California, which looks completely different from Texas, and people are choosing to vote with their feet and to go to a governance that they ascribe to.
00:37:04.000And I think that's going to happen more globally.
00:37:07.000And I think it's, to your point around nation-states, like, you know, this concept of a micro-nation-state that actually has an understanding of what its people are feeling on the ground because it's in, it's within that community, versus today where we have decisions being made, many by unelected officials.
00:37:27.000A lot of these regulators are unelected, they're appointed, um who have so many abstractions between themselves and the actual people so much so many levels of indirection that they can't possibly make policies that that solves for all so is there a
00:37:53.000I just think the trend is in the opposite direction.
00:37:55.000And now, fortunately, we have the tools to actually make that possible.
00:37:58.000And I think that's a trend that's been happening over time.
00:38:01.000All of these things that we're seeing, what you said earlier about Twitter starting as this little thing and then being used potentially by governments all around the world to influence, That rhymes with every single technology we've ever built, whether that be television, radio, newspaper, the printing press, like, all of these have the similar models.
00:38:24.000And all we can do is make the technology more and more resilient, more and more in the hands of the individual.
00:38:31.000And ultimately, I think the biggest problem to solve is one of discovery.
00:38:41.000That is what ultimately was centralized in the late 90s with the rise of Google and Facebook and Twitter and AOL and all these companies, is that we got the discovery problem really, really good.
00:38:55.000And it was so good that people, waking up, we were the first consideration.
00:39:02.000If I have a question, of course I'm going to Google.
00:39:10.000And if we solve that, if we make that decentralized, which I believe we can, it upends so many different things and so much of what has happened in the world, especially with technology and its relationship with the individual, which I do believe is predatory.
00:39:28.000It's a predatory relationship where they are looking to ultimately control attention and freedom itself.
00:39:34.000It's interesting that many abstract ideas like BF Skinner's ideas on behaviouralism, nudges, you know, in our country, the UK, during the pandemic, there was a nudge unit that was designed to offer, essentially to get people to take medications who weren't really in the demographic that were most affected by, you know, by COVID.
00:39:53.000Now the potential to manipulate consciousness is so, as you say, it's so plausible that it must be, and indeed by your words and by your reckoning, has become predatory.
00:40:04.000I'm struck, Jack, by the corollary between technology and mysticism I'll explain that in a very parochial and anecdotal way.
00:40:15.000When I was first introduced to Twitter, my major honour from Ross, he's a TV presenter in our country, hosts all the big shows, he's our lemon or whatever.
00:40:24.000He was like, look at this thing, Twitter!
00:40:25.000You can just talk to people, it's mental!
00:40:40.000But it was later, his wife, Jane, that said, you know, if you went to a pub, and like when you first went to that pub, everyone was really nice and convivial and, hey, come in, have fun, sit down.
00:40:50.000And then you went back to that pub a year later and everyone's like, hey, you, why don't you go fuck yourself?
00:40:55.000You know, like that's kind of what happened to Twitter.
00:40:57.000It turned into this sort of place of darkness, and gossip, and cruelty, and nastiness, and oppositionism, and sort of so weighed down in ugliness.
00:41:10.000That was almost before it became, I believe, a sort of tool of the kind of centralized interests, be they state or private and corporate, that felt like it could relieve us from. Like we can directly
00:41:24.000You know, Trump I think became so notable because he became the master of it. He was a person,
00:41:29.000sort of had the skills to sort of go, I'm going to bypass all your bullshit. People are going to
00:41:32.000believe me rather than you. It's over. And in a sense, it like Musk's acquisition of your platform
00:41:38.000is, it feels like a legitimate inheritance because he also seems to understand it in some intuitive,
00:41:46.000essential way, as you described earlier. He's an organic user, I think was the phrase you used.
00:41:52.000But it seems that what we're experiencing is the realization of something that would have
00:41:57.000once been purely miraculous, and yet it is being colonized by the type of forces that colonize
00:42:05.000So we are at an epochal moment and I think the signs of that are everywhere.
00:42:09.000Bureaucratically and legislatively, what's happening with the EU and the questions we've touched upon.
00:42:13.000But also in other news stories, and if you've got anything to say about my previous rant, bear it in mind, as I offer you this question from our chat.
00:42:19.000This is a Locals member, and if you want to join us on Locals, press the red button and join us there now.
00:42:24.000It is a decentralised community as far as I understand, I bloody hope it is.
00:42:52.000I feel we will never get the information unless someone like RFK is elected president.
00:42:59.000Because his one promise is that the government will tell the truth, to be transparent.
00:43:02.000Obviously there are limitations to that for public safety, but that is refreshing.
00:43:10.000I don't know any other way to answer that question than to understand what we've seen, what we haven't seen, what we think about it, and to bring other governments around the world into that same fold.
00:43:23.000Yeah and it seems now a lot of people know a lot of our community think oh this is a distraction it's being promoted now to keep our eyes off of stuff that's happening at a political level but I've been interested in this stuff for a long time I'm friends with like Jeremy Corbell who talks about it a lot and I've spoken to some pretty high profile incredible journalists who say that these are legitimate whistleblowers and that the CIA and deep state agencies are not happy about this stuff coming out and they're having a role with it it's not sort of like the kind of uh False flag operation that we've become sort of attuned to spot in these days.
00:43:55.000Just like Leah, I want to sort of circle back on something I was saying a minute ago about the sort of incredible potential and how like what the the optimism around Twitter when it was created that it seemed like some sort of mercurial alchemical magical power that we all held in our hands that meant we could
00:44:14.000connect and be funny and share culture around the world that ultimately becomes this sort of
00:44:19.000weapon and is subject to all this controversy and hate speech and all these kind of things
00:44:23.000that have sort of swirled around it. I can't help but think in part, given some of the
00:44:29.000things you've said about what your plans are for the future, what your intentions are,
00:44:32.000how important transparency is to you, decentralisation, your sort of fundamental principle that
00:44:37.000you don't want there to be any authoritative figure that can be held up before
00:44:41.000Congress in the way that you were, that that in itself means that there's a flaw in the model.
00:44:45.000I can't help but feel that you are now, in a way, devoting your life to creating alternatives to these corruptible models.
00:44:59.000I think the model that Twitter started in the early days and like when the magic that we felt and that I think you felt was it was like tapping into global consciousness.
00:45:15.000I could be anywhere in the world and I could actually see people's thoughts.
00:45:19.000I could see how they're thinking and that felt so amazing.
00:46:02.000Not everything is going to happen immediately.
00:46:05.000But slow and deliberate wins the race.
00:46:08.000And as long as we continue to build open models that are truly owned by the people and not just individuals, not just individual institutions and governments, Um, they can't be compromised.
00:46:23.000By definition, they cannot be compromised.
00:46:25.000Yeah, so you don't, in a sense, that's like handing it over to God, the universe, something beyond the fallibility of humankind.
00:47:00.000Blue Sky, tell us a little bit about Blue Sky, like, which is, I understand, the new thing you're working on.
00:47:06.000Two years before I left the company, as I said, I realized a bunch of what was working and what wasn't working as a corporation.
00:47:16.000When you see the service versus the company, and I was very much focused on the service and what it could do for the world, I realized we needed to build a protocol.
00:47:24.000We needed to build an open source protocol that was not owned by us, and we funded A individual who had built a protocol.
00:47:34.000It's completely independent from Twitter.
00:47:36.000We gave them 13 or 14 million dollars to build this up.
00:48:42.000But I just believe in what he's created so much and how How good it is for the world that I wanted to make sure that he could focus entirely on it.
00:48:51.000And there's a whole huge community now that are building upon it.
00:48:55.000Unfortunately, the biggest client for it in iOS, Apple just forced them to remove one of the most significant features of this platform, which was being able to send Bitcoin to one another for free.
00:49:09.000So for any post, you could actually what's called zap a post and you could get Pennies, you could get 25 cents, you could get $15.
00:49:18.000The internet has never had micropayments.
00:49:22.000This is what we've been dreaming about for 40 years.
00:49:26.000If Twitter was started after Bitcoin, we would not be dependent upon the ad model.
00:49:31.000We would not have many of the constraints and the issues and the burdens that we grew up with.
00:49:37.000Because the internet never had a payment model that was native to it, such as Bitcoin, The ad model rose.
00:49:43.000And that's where I think a lot of the predatory practices came from.
00:49:49.000I want to provide another option around.
00:49:51.000That's really interesting because it seems that while I earlier in a more pessimistic way pointed out that I can see the mapping and conditions of a centralised, authoritarian,
00:50:03.000global model that will undergird its authority by saying it's for your
00:50:07.000security and to protect you from misinformation, disinformation, and corrupt and bad actors out there.
00:50:13.000Also, you can see, necessarily, the alternative, the, if not utopian, certainly a model that is more
00:50:22.000Individual transactions without some mediating model, independent media, communities that do not share the same
00:50:29.000geographical space but are timelessly connected, the ability, as you indicated
00:50:33.000earlier, to almost read one another's thoughts.
00:50:36.000So there is the possibility for, you know, like, almost what we're seeing in the authoritarianism
00:50:42.000is the shadow cast by this new possibility, by the light of this new possibility.
00:50:48.000Which I feel is deeply connected to spiritual practice in a more traditional sense.
00:50:53.000Now, I know that a lot of... Well, I saw one mainstream media story that said that you were basically mad now because you'd grown a beard and were only eating one meal a day and were having salt shakes and ice baths.
00:51:05.000Now, it's not jars of urine, but you... I want to check your fingernails are short before we go much further with this conversation.
00:51:27.000I mean, I know you have a meditation practice.
00:51:29.000I've always been interested in how I work, and I want to improve it every day.
00:51:36.000I was doing one meal a day like 10 years ago, and I was doing ice baths like seven years ago.
00:51:42.000I think I was pretty early with a lot of these things, and I did Five years in a row of Vipassana meditation, so the 10-day silent retreat, and all these things I learned from.
00:51:54.000And I'm so grateful for the ability to experiment with these practices.
00:52:03.000I've never felt healthier, and I've never felt clearer.
00:52:21.000And I've taken that on for almost all my life.
00:52:24.000I want to experience it myself and come up with my own conclusions and that those conclusions match others and that I can build upon them.
00:52:34.000I found a community of people, including Jay, who feel like that, and do question a lot, and do have a bunch of pushbacks on the systems that we're talking about.
00:52:50.000Maybe not as vocal in their everyday, but certainly within their music.
00:52:55.000We bought Jay's company, Tidal, Because we see an opportunity to fix what's broken with musicians and specifically the contracts are put on, how they get paid, how they don't get paid, how they reach their fan base.
00:53:19.000And I think as you consider AI and what AI is doing in terms of removing mechanical work, There's going to be a lot more people trying to do what you're doing, for instance.
00:54:25.000These are kind of ridiculous questions that are going to break down this revolution that we're working on.
00:54:31.000I like that thing you said, don't trust, verify.
00:54:34.000I just want to ask you this, it's pretty speculative and almost impossible to ask, but with your personal experiences where you're clearly investigating consciousness, Do you intuit that there is something unique about consciousness that cannot be replicated through technology?
00:54:48.000While technology might be able to create intelligence through pattern recognition, consciousness is separate.
00:54:54.000It is the crucible for information and intelligence and might even precede matter.
00:55:01.000As a person who understands both the coding that creates these machines of vast intelligence and as a practitioner of meditation, Do you have a personal awareness of the distinction between consciousness and intelligence?
00:55:17.000To your first point, to your first question, I believe we build technologies to... The technologies we build are really rebuilding our understanding of consciousness and our understanding of the human experience.
00:55:31.000I think all of the capabilities that we're building in technology, we're born with.
00:55:36.000And maybe these technologies help us unlock them.
00:55:39.000And if we see them as replacement instead of assistant and a way to reflect what we're born with and how to, you know, potentially, I know, I, I know you meditate a lot.
00:55:51.000I know you've, you've found unlocks in your own consciousness and you found powers, whether they be small or large, um, in, in your view that you may have always thought you had, but kind of forgot or have been abstracted away.
00:56:14.000There's so many of these occurrences that we quickly label and move to the side to then focus on what we are told is important that we lose sight of what is truly important which is what we're born with and I believe that technology can bring us back to that.
00:56:30.000I don't think it's always seen that way.
00:56:32.000It's seen as something that's scary and again as a replacement but It's only going to replace us if we choose to make it replace us.
00:56:41.000When you undergird these ideas with a materialistic model, then it becomes about commodity and replacement becomes possible.
00:56:47.000But when you have a spiritual model, and by spiritual I simply mean that which is not material or measurable, discernible through the senses, and yet, as you say intuitively there, they become tools, they become an advancement on fire, the wheel, or flint axes, rather than a replacement for human beings, and love, and personal connection, and the divine felt experience of nature within yourself right now in this moment, the presence of God, Mate, we do this festival called Community that's between the 14th of July and the 17th of July.
00:58:24.000Now this, we started off talking about RFK and how his candidature could be significant at a time where centralising forces are coalescing, looking to censor, surveil, shut down debate, find ways in order, they say, to prevent hate or child pornography or things that all of us would think should be curtailed and stopped.
00:58:42.000Wherever possible, they're using that to close down free speech and free communication.
00:58:47.000That's why we both, you and I, believe that the candidature of RFK is important.
00:58:53.000Now, I was speaking to RFK and his wife earlier this week and I've ludicrously, and now I realize stupidly, agreed to do this pull-up challenge to raise money for his campaign.
00:59:06.000Now, I already know that RFK is better than me At pull-ups, because I've seen him with his top off and he looks like a gnarly old man, all sort of like, sun-kissed, and like, some mad old farmer's body.
00:59:20.000And now we're going to do a pull-up competition, which he's going to win.
00:59:24.000The website is kennedy24.com forward slash Paul for Kennedy.
00:59:28.000We've got to get to $100,000, which is a small number for some people, Jack.
00:59:32.000I wondered if you'd be willing to make some sort of digital donation to that if we do it.
01:00:04.000Although from a spiritual perspective, Jack, I've got questions.
01:00:07.000We'll go deeper on that when we get the time.
01:00:09.000Jack, thank you so much for joining us and for providing such a transparent Open and human appreciation of the position we're in.
01:00:19.000I think people don't know what it's like to find yourself in a position of incredible power and that you end up dealing with a variety of vectors.
01:00:28.000And certainly I understand differently more than I ever have done.
01:00:32.000Oh yeah, imagine if you've got the complexity of running a company, you're dealing with the American government.
01:00:37.000One thing I thought I've heard once was, you know when they made that documentary about O.J.
01:01:08.000Thank you, Russell, and thank you for giving me the space and also, again, everything you're doing for independent media and independent thought.
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