hi everybody I'm Nicola tangan the CEO of the Norwegian so wealth fund and

today it's an honor to welcome Jack

dorsy one of the most Visionary entrepreneurs in the world Jack is the co-founder and COO of block and also the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter so

uh Jack you really put the stamp on the world welcome thank you so much thank

you

if we go back and and kick off with uh Twitter who is now of course uh named renamed X um where did the idea come

from uh it it was a long time in the making um

when I was a kid I was I was always fascinated by um how cities worked just how these things that were so large to me at the time actually like functioned

and I got into um maps and just I would obsess over them and stare at them and try to understand what was happening in anyone particular neighborhood or area

and that led me to um programming because my dad brought home a computer one time and I wanted to draw a map on the screen so that I could start playing with it

and I you know I taught myself how to do that I figured it out and little by little I worked my way to a a field called dispatch

so dispatching taxi cabs and ambulances and police cars and it was a way to put information on the map um information about the city

and I eventually ended up working at the largest firm in New York and had this very rich map of everything happening in New York City but it was missing one thing which were the people and what they were doing where they were

and that's really the question that started Twitter was um if I could see and visualize what the people were doing and what they were thinking or where they were going uh it would help me understand the the city a little bit more

and it took probably about 10 15 years for the right time and the right technology to to really make the idea um something worth pursuing

but in 2006 it did and I was working at a a podcasting company that kind of lost its way because it suddenly became competitive with apple when Apple decided to get into podcasting

and um we had this great team we started a hack week I brought up the idea for this thing that you could update from your phone and other people could follow it and see what you're doing and what you're thinking and where are you're going

and we I was given another programmer in two weeks and we built it and we fell in love with it

and little by little we took more and more resources of the other company and we eventually spun out and took um Venture Capital

what what was your vision at the time what did you think it could become

I didn't really have a vision I I wanted to play with it

I mean ultimately I wanted to understand what was happening in the city that was the original question and I thought this was a way to answer the question

but um I just wanted to use it I wanted to be able to see what my friends were doing I wanted to share what I was doing

um SMS was just becoming big in the US you all in Europe had it for 10 years prior

but the us because of our different protocols for carriers Verizon and AT&T GSM versus CDMA we didn't have text messages that actually um worked together so we didn't have text for quite some time um

but when we did that was the technology like oh you can uh I could have this cheap little Nokia device and I could send a message and it would fan out to all the people that cared about what I was saying or what I was doing that was super cool

and we um we just launched it and we invited our friends and they invited their friends and so on and so forth

and then it continued to roll and we decided as people were using it that there's something that resonates here there's something interesting and now it's up to us to like really pull the thread on what that is

and what's interesting about Twitter is it wasn't really us who determined where it went it was the people using it

we saw them try to converse with each other and um address one another

and I took three days over breakfast and I wrote or three hours and I I wrote some code anytime someone tried to address someone else it would be linked and it would be filtered into a replies tuab is what I called it

and that started conversation on Twitter and this public conversation

whereas I originally was thinking oh this is just a way to update my friends of what I'm doing see what they're doing but people wanted to talk and they invented the syntax the at symbol to talk

and then they invented another syntax the hash for grouping um topic group grouping tweets by topics

and then they invented another thing called the retweet which is rebroadcasting someone they're following to to their following U to the people following them

so little by little as we observed what people were doing with it we made it easier it spread and it made the service much bigger because more and more people got value out of it

and uh it was just an interesting way to co-create with the people that are using your product and I learned a lot from it

that's amazing so the way um the way it developed um what does it tell us about people's needs what does it tell us about people generally uh

I I think um people don't want to just consume they want to help participation means creation and um and they want to they want to leave some Mark um

they may not intend to do that but when you use something like Twitter you develop this feeling for it and you want want it to last you want it to succeed

and you you become very emotional about any changes that are made that you think go against the way it should be or the way it's used

and we saw so many of those when we tried to do a thing that we thought was important the network just like threw up on it and uh and said it was wrong

and as we observed what they were trying to do we had much better insight into what Twitter wanted to be um

and as we got more new audiences and audience types we would you know that density of information would would grow even further

so when did you realize that he was really taking off

when Obama was elected 100 days after he took office he got up in front of the country and did the State of the Union 100 days after

and uh we had a number of uh senators and Congress people on Twitter already and I was watching the speech

and the camera panned around and there were people on their phones

and in that moment I got a tweet my pocket bust I pulled on my phone I got a tweet from my senator from Missouri I'm from Missouri and she was tweeting about Barack Obama giving his first address to the nation

I like whoa like um fast

I'm watching this thing unfold in front of me and I'm feeling it physically in my pocket

and uh it just really shortened the distance between something that can be very abstract and feel far away which is how our government operates and works to now being in my hand um and having this sense of like wow this tangible Humanity

someone typed this out it buzzed my phone and and now I'm reading it and I saw it in you know they thousands of miles away

what did you feel then

oh I felt excited

I got back to work right away because I was like oh man this is a this feels great

I mean that that's what you want in in terms of building any product you want to see people use it in a way that you can see that there's value and you can feel it it feels electric

and um you feel like tingly and you're like oh I'm I'm I'm G keep going I'm G keep going

when you see how important social media platforms have become in election campaigns um what are your Reflections around that

these things aren't important by themselves we make them important and we choose to by giving them attention um give them importance and um

it it spoke to a gap that I think existed before Twitter which was everything was entirely scripted it was behind a media wall um

the information that you got was through another point of view typically a corporate point of view corporate media point of view paid for by advertisers and seen on television or radio or whatnot um

podcasts were the first to in in my experience to really break that wall but they weren't talking about newsworthy stuff at that point they were just doing like interviews and and whatnot and they they mature it eventually

but but Twitter kind of pierced through it very very quickly and it pierc through that that wall of abstraction media abstraction

and um I think for elections again our political process our government can be extremely abstract and when you have something thing that you know is 90 nine times out of 10 coming from the person's thumbs directly which is connected directly to their brain it's authentic it's unfiltered um

and it's open to your interpretation instead of being filtered by someone else's interpretation

so it was less about Twitter providing that it was more like that was the need and that was the um the desire and anything at that time that could fill that would have taken off

I think we had a lot of luck we had a great product because it was simple it was straightforward it was easy to use and it was accessible

but it also was the right time like the the frustration with the media wall was at a Peak at a high and it was there there were cracks in it and people wanted more of that they wanted more authenticity they wanted more directness they wanted more realness um

it's very concentrated right so I believe 10 10% of people generate 80% of the content

80% of the organic non-re reply content like there are repes too and um that's not often counted in that number

so me just sending out a tweet yes you're right but I think the real power of Twitter is the conversation underneath it

and um it's not necessarily about you know what is the news of the day direct from The Source it's like what are people talking about it what do people think about the news of the day that that that's the power and and that um is is extremely large

and then there's the yeah like Twitter acts has a bunch of influential people on it and people want to listen to them and such that these tweets were being broadcast on television

and we were unable to count the impressions of CNN or Fox putting a tweet up um but we knew the reach was much larger than our analytics and our measurements accounted for so that was that was pretty interesting pretty special

now two years ago um alen musk bought it and renamed it X anything um you regret not doing with Twitter before it became X

I mean there's a lot of things I would do differently in retrospect um

I think we became we we I I wasn't there at the time running the company but we we um race to uh monetization way too quickly and we force fitted a monetization path that created a bunch of issues for us which was advertising

Google had an advertising business at scale uh Facebook had one that was growing

um Twitter's goal at that point was to grow and go public being public meant you had Revenue so we copied the model of the day model of the internet which was advertising

and that just set up a bunch of issues um in terms of growth in terms of um competition in terms of how we were valued um

it didn't really Express Twitter's True Value that model and I wish we took a little bit more time to figure out a better model or the we um that we uh had multiple at once

the second thing is in the early days Twitter felt like a protocol it felt like a HTTP it felt like SMTP

yet we owned every single part of the stack and I think that was a mistake

because I I don't think a company can necessarily control this without having some sort of choke point that makes it open to manipulation of some way

so if you have a open protocol for social media which I think Twitter could have been instead of just a company it could have been both um

you have a a lot more freedom and you have a lot more agility to do the things that the platform actually needs to do and the protocol needs to do

but if you wrap all that up in one company um you have a you create a lot of issues for yourself um

including heads of government and advertis ERS wanting to dictate content policy um or get the numbers of journalists who are uh critiquing them or shut you down because you won't take content down in their country um

if it was a protocol instead that was owned by the public and you're building a business on top of that you couldn't do those things um

this is where I learned a lot from Bitcoin

do you think uh it could have existed without advertising

oh yeah yeah definitely

and financed in what way

there's tons there's subscription there's Commerce um

the uh you know because because the internet didn't have was not born with a native currency protocol advertising was the way to subsidize free um free services and it would it it was taken as a given that these internet businesses had be advertising businesses in the early early days

Netflix showed a different path um obviously others eBay showed a different path

but for an information tool like we were advertising was it it was the way to get the biggest Network because you could offer it for free and subsidize it

but the but the reality is the people that are using it are truly the product and your customer is the advertiser and your customer is dictating where the product should go

you are still a large owner uh in X mhm what do you think they should do with X now

uh experiment as much as possible

I mean like keep pulling the thread on what people want to use it for um

I'm a big believer in like I I I think it's uh I think it's less about free speech I think it's more about do we get to choose how the algorithms are programming us because the algorithms are definitively programming us

and uh it's very very hard to tell what an algorithm is going to do and predict what it's going to do and that's where the danger comes in

but if I can choose what algorithm filters my tweets and what I get to see and I have instead of like an app store an algorithm store um where I get to put these on my my timeline then I have a lot more agency in the content and the experience

and I think it ends up creating a much healthier relationship with the technology and I'm not just speaking about Twitter this is for for YouTube and for financial Technologies um

we are being programmed uh these algorithms know our preferences better than us that's only going to increase

how do we increase agency at the individual level it's by choice it's by being able to turn off the algorithm it's by being able to choose different algorithms it's being by being able to make my own algorithm

so Jack what kind of algorithms are you are you thinking of here

well I mean a simple one like if I were um more left or right leaning I could choose a more right or left leaning algorithm

if I hated politics and I only wanted to focus on science and um Arts I could choose an algorithm that filtered everything out but those things um

I could go deeper into that I could only do physics I could only do quantum physics

and you might say well you can do that through taxonomies and categories but there's just too much information at this point um for those to really be useful

you have to get into the algorithmic aspects of it and really effectively create these agents that go off and fetch you information that you're truly interested in and um and deliver it back to you and take feedback on whether it was useful to you or not if you learned something from it or not or you interacted with it or not

right now most of these internet companies and most of these internet services the algorithm is driven towards one thing which is maximizing Impressions to maximize advertising Revenue

that is not that is not maximizing my experience my learning of the world or um aligned with my goals as an individual

but if it shows you what you have shown to be interested in is that not a good thing

oh it's a great thing but I I want to be able to choose that and you can build a great business around that um

you can sell the algorithms you can subscribe to them you can put more directed topical advertising on these algorithms because they actually are programmed in a way that you're actually interested in the outcomes

they're not just random um and they're not trying to guess they know

so like uh I I think it lends itself to a much better business but you have to have companies and individuals who are willing to let go of the secret sauce which is the algorithm and and democratize it a little bit more

how will um generative AI change the way we use this

I think we're seeing the sense to that right now like I I think um

I think we're at you know the edge of one horizon I think the next Horizon for these for these tools is probably around agent systems and and software that I task to do things for me and they work with other agents uh on the on the internet um to complete those tests

so I'm I'm more interested in that um

I think the generative AI stuff um especially the large language models have the ability to obviously create a bunch of information and it becomes important like what is real what is reality what is truth what um what is fictional

and these tools are going to get so good that like you won't be able to tell and we'll truly feel like we're in a simulation

because it looks like and we perceive that anything literally can happen or could happen or did happen because these tools are so really real istic and feel so authentic um

so I think the the only way around that really is you know to just have more information and better filters which leads to agents and and and that they' be directed by Me by the individual and and do more of that work

so I'm less interested right now around llms and generative AI because I do think we've we've hit some Horizon on it and more interested by how you take this uh intelligence and make it mobile uh and and make it something that like people can send off and and actually it can do work for them

given what we talked about in terms of algorithms and generative AI what are the implications for journalism

I mean I'm I'm I'm not a journalist but like I think uh having more information more perspective and um getting better tools to get more information and better information and distill it only helps your Craft um

I I think it you know it does become more and more challenging because you again have to sift through what's real and what's fake

but you know people have been lying since the dawn of time and the dawn of language and uh journalists have to figure out what's the lie and what's Truth uh and they need different perspectives

so I think the only thing that changes here is velocity nothing else velocity and breath

what do you think about content moderation

I think the best content moderation is an algorithm and I should be able to determine my own algorithm and what I see and what I don't see

I think there should be a corpus of content that exists that only the author of it can delete and they have the sole right to do so um

but I have the right as an individual to filter out what I don't want to see or filter up what I do want to see

but that's all dependent upon whether I get to choose the algorithm if a corporation is choosing it for me based on um advertising maximizing advertising Revenue then it's not truly serving me not not useful

I guess this leads us to um to Blue Sky and uh you helped create this decentralized social platform which is called Blue Sky so um could you take us through the the thinking here

yeah about um three years before I left uh Twitter um I uh I realized that like what we were talking about earlier a company cannot be all parts of the stack for social media

it'd be better if we were built on top of a protocol that was shared between multiple companies

and what am I what's an example here HTTP the protocol that runs the web um the protocol that we're using to talk right now and record this podcast it's a common understanding and that um in agreement that this is how we transmit data in a very particular way

and then you have browsers on top of it I'm using Safari you might be using Firefox or Chrome um

these are built by different companies these companies can build business models on top of that but they're using the same protocol and they don't control the protocol they they can't influence the direction of it as a single entity it has to be done through this consensus model um

so if we have that for the web if we have that for email if we have it for file transfer for video why not have it for social media

why not build a protocol that any company whether it be Facebook or Google or X um or open source tools can use around this concept of social media

and that was the idea and we we called it Blue Sky um

and it we took about a year to find a leader for it we found a leader uh and this woman named Jay and she built a team and uh actually built it and built the protocol and built a client and um you know it's it's working

there's another one uh another individual from Brazil I don't know who this person is it's a pseudonym he created this um this other protocol called Noster n o s had a different take on it uh which was he kind of looked at every single one of Twitter's fail failings as he saw it and built his own protocol

and what was interesting about that protocol I found it um about a year and a half ago was that um not only did it address what I perceived on every one of our problems but it was completely open in terms of the development model

Blue Sky was effectively this Corporation building the API and building the protocol Noster was just a bunch of individuals building the protocol and building the clients on top of it

and I resonate a lot more with that um because I think the at the protocol level it has to be done not through a corporation but through a collection of uh interested and obsessed individuals and that's what Noster was

So eventually I stepped off the Blue Sky board and um and really focused a lot of my efforts which amounted to funding the ecoystem around Noster

Noster is still very small because it's a lot more technical at the moment but I have a lot of Hope for it because of the way it's built

it follows the way that Linux was built it follows the way that Unix was built it follows the way that the C programming language was built versus these other like Cathedral type models which achieved perfect tried to achieve Perfection but actually no one ended up using um

because they were built by these companies and these companies had these particular agendas and there was no real Drive individual Drive behind them

so blue sky is a very different model than Noster I think the Nostra model lasts longer and wins but it's good to have multiple experiences

and there's others there's Maston and there's Matrix and um there's a what uh meta is doing with threads like all these all these things are kind of competing with each other but one of them

wi why is Blue Sky growing so fast now you think

I think people are running away from X rather than running to something on Blue Sky um

and that's not a great uh way to build a product to unfortunately um

we want people that are running to us for a particular thing that they couldn't do before

now blue sky has built something that um I wanted it to build and I'm excited about which is is this algorithm store being able to choose your own algorithms

so that is a reason why people will run to it eventually and I think why people run to these Services eventually because they get more agency and more control um

but it's not something that people care about right now what they care about right now is not being in X for whatever personal reason um

and again that that that sort of behavior kind of comes in waves um

you have to you have to want to stay there for a reason you can stay there because you have moved your entire community over which is rare

but when we have these different factions of Social Services if x represents the right and blue sky represents the left and they can't actually talk with each other there's going to be crossover naturally

because people are going to keep their accounts because they want to hear what the other side is saying it's just natural

only way to solve this one protocol different views different algorithms on top this can be the right this can be the left different business models this one works this one doesn't work as well but we need a common protocol and that's that's the whole idea

what's going to make Noster a takeoff time

I I think it's uh I think it's better technology I think is a much healthier developer ecosystem um

I I don't think it's just social media like blue sky is trying to be it's it's more of this ecosystem of apps with a common protocol um

so people have built um twitter- like things they built spreadsheet- like Google Sheets like things they built GitHub like things and it's really amazing

because um what it what it does is it allows you to really prove authenticity because it's a public private key pair system it's not a email and password

I have a public key and I have a secret key and I maintain the secret key and every message I send on Noster um I'm signing with my secret key so you know it's actually coming from me and my device

which is very unlike a Twitter or a Facebook where you don't actually know it could be intercepted it could be the company doing it um on the Pres in the worst case on the person's behalf um

but because I control my key you know anything I write or anything I post is coming from me directly

five years from now what does social media look like

I I hope that it's a lot more um agent driven um I hope that it has a lot more agency in being able to choose how I filter content how I promote content um

I hope that all content exists permanently effectively um because it's it gives us the greatest learning opportunity

and um I think there's business models that are more aligned with the interests of the IND individual and not just a company um

so and there's going to be a lot more bots on it and I think they'll be helpful not distracting or uh providing you know um misinformation but actually useful

where do you think uh regulation of online platform is going

I don't know

I I the the problem I I see there's a bigger problem which is I think regulation generally is becoming more and more fragmented and and um it's really really hard on companies to build for a fragmented regulatory environment

California has a very different regulatory understanding than the European Union

and you look at like internet regulation states are now considering internet regulation

Australia just banned um social media for anyone under 18 it's the responsibility of the social media a platform to make it so

and that's different from Europe and that's different from the US and that's different from the entire rest of the world

so now you have to have a team that's dedicated just to Australia for this one restriction

and if the rest of the world follows with their own specific regulatory uh aspects then you can't build a company

it's just you can't build a company that serves the world you can only build companies that serve very particular markets and that goes against the spirit of the internet

so this is why I think again Protocols are important is protocols don't have to correspond to these regulations they're they're not owned by any one company they're not owned by any one individual they're Untouchable by a government

you look at Bitcoin um as again the biggest scaled example of this um

that's how you get around these issues and uh and and and to me that's that's the biggest that's the biggest concern

let's talk about um Bitcoin you um started something called block tell us what is block

we originally started a company called Square um and change the name to block because we have multiple business businesses now and if you make a square three-dimensional it's a block um

so block is focused on uh um economic empowerment building tools to empower people into the economy

we started with sellers so enabling sellers to accept credit cards was our beginning

and then we added another business called Cash app which allows people to easily move money between two people or businesses with their mobile phone instantly

that is becoming more and more a bank in the form of an app um

and today uh we have two massive ecosystems at scale square and cash app that serve Sellers and individuals and uh give them very simple Financial tools to um do things that they want to do do in the economy or let you send money to their friends and family or get a debit card um go to an ATM uh set up a e-commerce shop um or do customer relationship management

when do you think these things are in five years time

well the the the other thing that we um wanted to do is like our business is constrained right now by that fragmented regulatory environment

for us to launch Square in any Market or for us to launch cash app in any Market we have to have a partnership with a local bank we have to pay attention to different regulatory um approaches within that Market within that country and it's a very very heavy cost um

so we have to weigh that cost versus building new features for the markets that we're currently in and what allows us to move faster

if the internet had a protocol for moving money around enter Bitcoin Bitcoin is a protocol for moving money around

if Bitcoin is used not just as a store of value but as a currency to move money around between people or between businesses and people or businesses and businesses as that becomes more and more a thing which I do think it becomes over the next five years then we can launch up we can launch cash app and square in every single country that has the internet

and that allows us to serve more people better faster um

and because Bitcoin is open it's not controlled by one company it's not controlled by any one government uh it's completely transparent people can see what it does

and we can solve all the problems that we would task with governments and uh companies to solve um by doing it transparently and by doing it openly um because again it's the internet and it goes to internet principles

so I'm hoping these Financial systems take on more internet principles and we can truly be an internet company instead of going Market by market by market which is just a really slow way to build for the world

you can't build for the world you can only build for these particular markets that you happen to be approved in

and again you're you have to be approved by another company you have to be approved by um by these things that don't have your interest or even their customers's interest at heart

so what needs to happen uh for Bitcoin to function more effectively

I think think it it's happening right now like more and more people see that it's valuable every time that number goes up people get more interested in it

I don't believe in Bitcoin and its final stage is just a store of value but I think it's a necessary part of the path to get to um I think the next big one which is remittance across border

moving money between businesses moving money between people across borders which is happening in um many countries outside the United States and Western countries today because there's no other options um

and then it gets to currency

as people get more comfortable with it as they see that it's not going away Bitcoin is over close to 16 years old right now um it's never gone down it's never had a security uh issue it has no leader it has a completely open road map and it's determined by a consensus development model

these are all really incredible ways to trust as a currency um

so as it becomes more understood and it feels like it's going to last I think people will trust it more and more as like oh this is the way I'm moving money to my family now and this is the way I'm buying coffee now and this is the way I'm buying computers or whatever um

it's a deflationary currency so it doesn't encourage spending it does encourage savings but I think it has a really interesting path um and provides a lot of interesting business models for the internet

if Bitcoin existed before we started Twitter we'd be in a much different state and I think we'd be in a much better State and we wouldn't have all the issues that you see with social media today

because it's not a tax on the system it allows for a a business model that's aligned with the people that are using it every single day

uh why would social media be better if you had Bitcoin

because you you could get to Commerce right away you could get to subscription right away you didn't have to get permission from Visa Mastercard

you didn't have to wait for the security of such uh uh payments on the internet um by virtue and by the grace of EA MasterCard to build it um

it's built into the internet um and it works at massive scale

so if we had that tool and we had Commerce at that scale um we could build a pretty phenomenal business

that's like all all communic is exchange of value Commerce is exchange of value

if you pair currency with communication you ease Commerce and you ease um buying and selling of things

and the internet wants to create efficiencies there but the biggest friction in that creation of efficiency were the payment networks and the banks and the way we currently deal with with money

so Bitcoin upends all that and changes it and provides a completely different path which is in my view far more exciting and allows us to build a much bigger business more valuable business

Jack what are the implications for uh the payment systems and um companies like MasterCard and visa and so on

you know visa and M Visa at least like started in a very unique way and I'm sure you're aware of this aware of the story with dhawk and started as a co-op and it kind of started like a a protocol and uh

little by little we' got more and more corporate and change

and I think um if visa and MasterCard were to adopt open protocols for moving money around the internet they could still build a really phenomenal business

because these Technologies are hard and when you build on protocols what you're what you're what people value is convenience and removing friction and they'll pay for it um

and there's much evidence in this on the web and on email um and we can do it with uh with payments too

there's a lot built on top of payments and built on top of money they can build a phenomenal business P that doesn't require you owning the payment Network itself um

so being able to um see beyond the current reality and let go a little bit and have a common protocol that every company can use increases the total addressable Market it increases the number of transactions you can see and you can participate in it increases the number of people who can participate

and if you have something that's creative on top of it you you build a phenomenal business that's world changing

so I there's so many lessons in the internet and all those lessons have to do with open protocols and um anyone who ignores these lessons I think is not long for the world um as a company um it's just a matter of time

the internet is still very very very young but it will uh it will teach all of us especially as more of these agent systems come out and we realize that like these agents are working on our behalf by virtue of us having a highly hyperconnected internet that they can roam freely upon

and if there's any friction along the way they're not going to become valuable

I'd love to spend a bit of time on being an entrepreneur what do entrepreneurs have in common

well they're all different they all have different paths um

I think like if I think about that word and the the concept it's um my experience my path I never wanted to be a CO I never wanted to build to company I never wanted to be an entrepreneur

I could care less about it I wanted to build I wanted to build and I wanted to be you I wanted to use what I built and I want other people to use what I built and I

realized somewhere along the way that in order to sustain the thing that I built I needed money and that's where building a business came in

so I had to learn about building a business and running a business and being a CEO

but the spirit of all that is you do whatever it takes to make it work

I learned how to program because I needed to understand how to build things on my computer in front of me

I um I needed to learn how to be a CEO I need to learn how to raise money I needed to to learn how to hire people how to fire people how to build cultural Frameworks how to build uh systems investment Frameworks um uh feedback mechanisms

all these things that I had no desire to do or to build I had to do and learn because it was the only way to take the idea to the The Next Step

it was the only way to uh enable um more and more people to use the thing that I wanted them to use and and to mature it

I've heard you say that entrepreneurs are a bit like artists what do you mean by that

I think it's expression art is expression

it's knowing when to end something it's knowing you know what the chapters are and uh where the piece begins and where it ends and that's very much a product that's very much a business

like you could do everything and it becomes this mess that no one knows what to do with or

you draw the lines and draw the the box and the shape and the inputs and the outputs and suddenly becomes something that is an expression of an idea that's successible and that's manageable and someone can actually use and

um and and doing that and determining what those boundaries and those lines are and what the end in the beginning is is very very challenging um and that that's where I think the art part of it comes in

even though like business people aren't necessarily consider that the the founding of a company the founding of an idea when it starts as an idea not I'm building a business to do XYZ but an idea and how do I sustain the idea that's when I think the art the art comes out

and not everyone starts that way there's some entrepreneurs Who start like I want to build a Healthcare company I need to go find a problem to solve y yada yada and they do something interesting

but I think the truth truly interesting and truly world changing things are more ideas and then like how do I make the idea bigger and building a business around it uh was the way to do that

how do you deal with rejection

rejection yeah

well I uh I kind of take on this mindset that everything I encounter everything I experience as a teacher and they have some lesson for me

and it's up to me whether I decide to learn from it or not

and then there is no rejection it's just like well I choose to learn from this or I don't

and if I don't then it feels terrible and I it's a waste of effort and I feel bad

if I do I own it I'm better because of it so there's no rejection

so I just choose to learn from every single person that's put in front of me every single mistake every single challenge every single encounter I have there's it's a teacher

and like what is it trying to teach me no matter how small or how big it is it's trying to teach me something

and if if I ignore it um or if I decide not to learn from it that's that's the that's the reaction that's that's the diminishing thing

but if I choose to learn something from it even if it's tiny I own it and there's no hard feelings at all

where did you learn these mindsets

experience just doing it um not wanting to feel bad um

I took a lot of meditation as well um

and uh one of the things you learn in this practice called The Impossible now is that you know you you spend all this time observing Pleasure and Pain in the body

and You observe the pain and You observe your reaction to the pain and then you realize it's a reaction to the pain

and when you understand that and you understand that the pain is temporary and you're having this reaction of suffering over something that's temporary you're like what am I doing I'm I'm choosing to suffer over this thing that eventually will go away um

so I can change the reaction because it is a reaction I I get to decide that reaction

and it's a very very physical this meditation is a very very physical practice and it's the hardest thing I've ever done mentally and physically because you're in actual real physical pain

but at some point You observe this pain and You observe your reaction and it just clicks and the pain dissipates it's amazing

and um how often do you meditate

I was I was doing a 10day silent Meditation Retreat every year for 5 years before covid

and then uh I I there was 10 days of like you don't speak you don't uh all you do is meditate from 4 in the morning till 9:00 p.m no phone no communication no exercise whatever um

so during Co all the center is closed and I haven't gone back yet

but I I meditate every day for like an hour when I get up or attempt so

uh pain pain is good what's the optimal pain level

anything that teaches you something new teaches you about yourself teaches you about your capabilities

is this a very lonely journey

I guess it could be of like um again that's a feeling right that's a decision you make

I I choose to be diminished by this reaction to um being lonely or what is this experience trying to teach me like what what am I supposed to learn from this

I I think all these things are ultimately decisions but it takes time to realize that and it takes time to hone the tools to act on the decision

is this how you come up with your lists the dos and the don'ts

yeah um perhaps you want to explain these lists

yeah every day I I write down what I want to accomplish and what I don't want to do um

I think we often focus on what you do want to do and and we focus on these very large goals and if I've learned anything it's to make the goal very very small and repeat it and iterate it as quickly as possible so you see momentum

like if you wanted to meditate um a lot of people start with this like new year's resolution New Year's is coming up right New Year's resolution I'm going to meditate for one hour a day they do it one time never again

if instead you say I'm I'm GNA meditate for a minute every single day for two weeks one minute I can definitely do one minute and I stick to it and I don't go past one minute I do only one minute one minute um

and then after that one minute I did it so now I'm going to move it to 5 minutes and then I'm going to move it to 10 minutes and then I'm going to move it to 20 and then I'm going to move it to an hour

and that progression makes it not feel like work it makes it feel like an understanding like I'm I'm getting it and um

so it's it's really important to write down the small goals that you have for the day and then more importantly what you don't want to do because we never focus on like I'm not going to do this I'm not going to get distracted by politics or like TV or whatever

so J what's been on what's been on your list today what's been your to-do list today

I'm learning uh more about quantum physics right now so I'm I'm doing some study and uh

one of the things I want to do is spend like again I move from like 30 minutes to an hour every day of reading and watching videos around quantum physics

and um I'm also doing some language learning I'm learning Italian um so an hour with that as well

and then I'm doing some programming learning as well um to keep my skill High uh and in the field of AI and agents as well

so I dedicate one hour to that and three hours of learning in the morning when I want to do the hard stuff so that the rest of day feels like a win um

those those are the things on my list

and what is on your don't do list

don't get distracted by the news cuz it's kind of all fog of War right now um

don't get distracted by the politics don't get distracted by entertainment at the moment because I really I I want to learn how to learn better I want to learn how to learn faster and and deeper

so I'm I'm experimenting with like these three different subjects at once in order to figure out what the patterns are in my own learning um so that I can uh achieve like some novice or Mastery skill and multiple things U much faster

uh and what do you think is the key to FAL learning

observing for quite some time and then doing but I think people skip the observing phase too often

I don't think people are good listeners I don't think people have H in their ability to observe the world and observe nature and observe how things work um

and I think they try to act too soon and um

I think the observation part is critical and I think it mirrors what we do as babies as we're acquiring new skills we spend a lot of time observing and we're just inated and immersed in all these things happening around us

and then around age two or three we get the ability and the tools to do but it's come from a place of massive immersion

and I think as adults we skip the immersion part and we skip the observation part and we try to do and it gets to the thinking and the thinking removes the ability to like truly act in an intuitive way based on all the information that's constantly coming into your into your system

Jak why do you eat only once a day

I I like to uh back to learning I like to learn by going to extremes so I've tried every single diet you can imagine um

I got very interested in my health and maintaining my health span and uh one of the things someone was doing that felt interesting was they had this one meal a day thing

and um I tried it and I only ate dinner and then I only ate breakfast and I only tried lunch

and what was amazing is like I got all this time back and it felt like a superpower

all these people spent all this time eating breakfast and eating lunch and dinner and all this ritual around it and I had all that time back I had literally two or three hours back to do something else or to have a real conversation that's not interrupted by food

and then uh I realized I didn't need that much food like we're we overeat we definitely overeat especially in the United States

so I was just looking at like what needs are and what desires are and separating those those two things

and I felt like my health increased my energy increased and I gave myself all this time back to do things that I really wanted to do

and and when I did eat it it tasted amazing I I regained taste and I regained appreciation for food not just as entertainment but as like sustenance

what is your advice to young people uh

observe observe everything like take everything in get love information love receiving information

don't worry about reacting to it don't worry about memorizing it don't worry about doing anything with it at all just be open

and when you need to do something with it it'll come

very good Jack it's been a it's been an honor having you on here big thanks for sharing your thoughts truly truly fascinating

thanks am million thank you so much