I'm interested in the internet having a native currency. The best manifestation of technology for that is today Bitcoin. I'm interested in open protocols for social media. The best manifestation of that that I found today is Nostr. I imagine that there's some equivalent for artificial intelligence in the open source world that has not fully emerged yet, but all these technologies can intersect one another.
I'm learning how to learn better because I think that's the thing that compounds the most. You know, it's a good time to reflect on how we learn as humans as well and how we can improve that. And if I can do that for myself, I can probably do that for my organization as well.
All right, welcome to the show. Today we have a true pioneer in technology, Mr. Jack Dorsey. He is best known as the co-founder and the two-time former CEO of Twitter. Jack has revolutionized how the world communicates with 140 characters or less, and he's also the visionary behind Block, the parent company of Square. And he champions financial innovation and driving our financial future built on Bitcoin. He went from coding dispatch systems as a teen to shaping all of our global conversations and value transfer. And honestly, Jack's journey is nothing short of extraordinary. So I'm grateful and excited today to dive into the mind of a tech trailblazer whose work has helped define our digital age. Jack, welcome to Hosting Bitcoin. How are you?
Pretty good, pretty good. Did you have a chance to meditate this morning?
Yeah, I did. It wasn't as long as I'd like, but I had a bunch of meetings this morning early.
Are you usually able to keep up with your practice unless you're traveling? And if you don't, what's kind of your standard protocol when you're meditating?
I'm able to usually keep up with the mornings. Like ideally, you would want to meditate twice, once you wake up and once you're ready for sleep. But the evening one is always a little bit hard. But I've learned that even if I do five minutes, as long as I'm doing it every day, it's meaningful. And I follow a Vipassana practice, which is just really observing what's going on when you close your eyes and you're just observing everything going on in your body, your mind. And it's very, very, very simple, but also very hard to keep that focus. It's just training your mind to focus more and more and more.
What do you think is different? Because I know you've been doing it for many years and I'm about 10 years into an hour a day, but I'm curious what I have to look forward to if I can get up to 20 years and two hours a day. How's that change for you?
I don't know. I think everyone has a different path, right? So it's a question of the practice and what your goal is and what you're trying to seek out of it. For me, it's always been about how do I hone my focus and my attention and be a better observer of everything that's going within me and going on around me as well.
When you're bringing that into the context of meeting a ton of people, running several large companies, how do you feel like it impacts your decision-making either throughout the day or over the long course of time?
Everything to do with focus. A company is about prioritizations and making sure that we understand what's most important, what's next most important, and so on and so forth. And if we don't, we're just going to do too much and we won't be able to do anything at all in fact. And that's really important that we maintain that focus. But it really comes down to that. That's how it translates when you're applying it to a company.
I mean, you said we've all got our own personal experience and our own personal journey with this. What are some of the things that have come up for you most recently that you feel like you're currently working toward? You can be as personal or as general as you'd like to be, but just generally, what do you feel like you're working on most at this point?
I'm learning how to learn better. Like, I'm really fascinated by how we learn, how I learn, and how I can increase that skill because I think that's the thing that compounds the most. So it's interesting, we're in this time of AI where we're building these learning models, and I think it's a good time to reflect on how we learn as humans as well and how we can improve that. And if I can do that for myself, I can probably do that for my organization as well.
Do you feel like having tools like AI has given you sort of an accelerator in your own learning, or has it made you a little bit more complacent in what skills you've developed for yourself?
Oh no, only an accelerator. But I think that's a decision we make. I think everything in front of us, every situation, every person, is a teacher, and it's a decision as to whether we learn from it or not. And you can approach a technology like AI and you can decide not to, or just be treated as a surrogate and be lazy about it, or you can choose to enable it to push you in different directions.
When you're thinking about prioritizing what you give your time and energy and focus to, there's no shortage of opportunity that we've got. And you've chosen to focus, as far as I can see, mainly on Bitcoin payments and decentralized social media like Nostr. How do you put those ahead of things like working on AI, or do I have the mix wrong and you're really doing it, I just don't know about it?
Well, one, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I'm interested in the internet having a native currency. The best manifestation of technology for that is today Bitcoin. I'm interested in open protocols for social media. The best manifestation of that that I found today is Nostr. And I imagine that there's some equivalent for artificial intelligence in the open source world that has not fully emerged yet, but is there somewhere. But all these technologies can intersect one another and it's just a question of how we use these. I think AI certainly will need a payments foundation and it will need a protocol for moving money around the internet. Bitcoin can be that. It'll need a protocol for communicating. Nostr can be that, especially with humans that are more remote. So all these things can actually cooperate and positively reinforce one another. I don't think it's either or for me.
Was there a moment when you started to shift your focus toward working on things like Bitcoin and Nostr, or was it just a sequence of little incremental shifts?
Incremental shifts. I think that's life. Like everything compounds into something new. At least that's been my experience.
What led you to the realization that you were the right fit to be working on it?
I don't know if I am the right fit, but I'm working on it. I never thought about it that way, but I'm working on it.
Maybe a better question would be what qualities within yourself or what in your personal background led you to be drawn toward this area?
I don't know. I'm just curious and interested about it. I don't think there's anything specific or unique about me, but this is what I want to see in the world, what I want to use in the world, and it's as simple as that for me.
I think focusing on Bitcoin in particular is a very intentional choice because there is a wide world of other things that we could be working on and a very noisy crypto space around it. We're very much aligned in that way with Abundant Mines, just working on Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining specifically. But why did you make the choice to build exclusively for Bitcoin and not offer protocols and products that integrated with some of the other things in that space?
Again, it wasn't about Bitcoin. It's about making sure the internet has an open protocol for money transmission. It has a native protocol, and Bitcoin has all the properties and attributes that I would want from that protocol and currency. And it feels like, I mean, the biggest thing is it doesn't have a CEO. It doesn't have a single leader. I can't name any other project that has that property, and I think that's critical for money, that there's no single entity owning it. And the developer community around it is incredible and very principled. So that's what aligns me.
You've been a CEO for a long time now and worked on many different projects. How do you feel like your leadership style has changed, and has it had anything to do with being exposed to quote leaderless organizations like Bitcoin? Has that impacted how you approach companies like Block now?
Well, I've never really wanted to be a leader or a CEO. Like, that's not how I grew up. That wasn't my desire. So I've always been more interested in the open source models than I have the corporate models. I just think they ultimately scale better and there's proof points everywhere. Look at Linux, look at Bitcoin. However, the way to get some of these ideas out is to build a corporate structure. So you have to learn what you have to learn. And I've just, I'm more a hacker than anything else. I do whatever it takes to make it work and we figure out the next step and we learn that, we go next step, next step, next step. So I've never really thought about leadership style or what those principles are. I've only thought about what's the next thing I need to make work and what gaps do I have to fill in order to make that work and then go from there.
What pulled you into, you mentioned it a little bit, what pulled you into doing this in the vehicle of public companies to start out with? If you knew that it wasn't something you necessarily wanted to do, was it just kind of a reluctant, this is how you have to do it to get it done?
Well, no. I talked about the idea of Twitter in another company that I was working at and during a hack week. So right there, there was a moment when I could have gone off and done this by myself or worked with this group of people that I loved and I knew that could help a lot, and I chose the latter. But that came at a cost. Like, now it's part of this company, it's got people invested in it, it's got people with equity, and the flywheel just goes. And it was a fast way to scale. I don't know if it was the best way to scale, but it was certainly a fast way.
So do you think of yourself rather than a leader or an executive, more as just the head builder?
No, I'm there. Like, I don't really think of myself. I think about the project and I think about what we're building and I want to make sure we have the right team to do that. So I'm focused on what we need to do next and what gaps we have and how to fill them.
Where did naming yourself the Blockhead come from?
Well, the company's name is Block and someone has to head it technically, so they fit. And it's a little, I don't know, it's a joke, but it's cool.
So we're directly involved in the mining space, specifically with collocating for smaller retail and small business miners. And I know you've been working on building not just facilities but a new kind of ASIC chip as well as a fully integrated miner. I'm curious if you've got any updates on what Block is doing in the mining space through the Proto department, and if you've got any interesting projects coming up that you'd love to share.
No updates above and beyond our blog. I'd encourage you all listening to this, go to the Proto blog. We want to build a mining chip system and rig in the open. It'd be as open source as we can make it. Obviously, there's some components that come from companies that we don't have control over those particular parts, but the whole goal of this is to build a mining system that anyone can take and they can get a full rig or they can design their own system around it. And the team has focused a lot on reliability, on performance, and on customization. So we'll be able to deliver something that can fit into any application that you need it to. If you're doing energy recapture, if you're doing just a standard mining rig, if you're building a hot tub and want to recapture the heat for the hot tub, like all these things will work. If you're doing the space heater and you want to do a more consumer thing like that, flexibility has not been in the market yet, and we want to see how creative people can get with these components. And then the more energy we see around there, the more Bitcoin becomes secure. It's not just about finding the Bitcoin, it's securing the network as well. That's part of the role of the miner.
So right now, as far as I know publicly, the only people that are able to use it or that currently are using it are Core Scientific with a large batch. But is your intention eventually for this to go to anybody and everybody, like you said with a hot tub and a single mining unit running?
Yeah, I believe we have some beta customers out there that are doing just that. It's small, but we have some interesting units in the field that are testing different applications because we need this feedback to make the best chip and the best system. So the team strategically reaches out to people who are doing interesting and differentiated things that we can learn from.
What made you, because the entire publicly traded Bitcoin mining market is smaller than the market cap of Block, how did you evaluate making the decision to go into a market that's likely not going to be bigger than the current company? And what was kind of the motivation to get into mining itself versus other parts of the protocol or the network?
Number one, the need. If we want Bitcoin to succeed, we need to remove single points of failure and centralizing efforts. The mining hardware is one of those. You have effectively one company who's building all this hardware. They're out of China, and that is a single point of failure that can really damage the network. Second is that we have an opportunity around taking a lot of market share from this competitor because a lot of the miners we've talked to have significant reliability issues, don't have the ability to customize for what they want and their applications, and are just not happy with the performance. So I think we can win on quality because we can be actually customer-focused instead of just building something that people see a market opportunity. Like, we've really talked with people and gotten deep on what the needs are, and our products will reflect that. So even if the opportunity is not as large as our overall company or say something like Cash App or Square, it's very, very meaningful and there's a lot of profit potential as well within mining.
We all know that mining is a really competitive industry. You don't get to survive or succeed in mining for very long if you're not pretty on top of every aspect of it. What do you think will set not just miners that are doing self-mining but companies involved in the mining space, the good ones, from the ones who don't make it?
Miners in particular, or like suppliers for mining hardware, anybody in the industry. And I ask that because you can take multiple points. You can be a self-miner and develop your own ASIC. You can do collocation hosting and develop energy resources. But I'm curious from a holistic, kind of lateral thinking view, what do you think are the successful strategies at least over the next decade, since this is quite different than it was 10 years ago, people just running it on their laptops?
I mean, I think number one is, again, this all depends on your business, but to have a real customer focus is always critical. Like, who are we serving and why? If we're just mining, it feels like it's a strategy between finding the right and efficient power sources and then having flexibility in your data centers to maybe do things inclusive of AI computation. So having that sort of flexibility, knowing that you have these giant warehouses and you have access to significant power, having a strategic sense of how to make that better and also the flexibility feels like the only winning combination.
I'd agree with you. And it seems like to me, mining is this really interesting puzzle piece in many different businesses, whether you're talking about data centers generally or energy resources. It's not necessarily the whole strategy, but an interesting component to almost any strategy. I'm curious what your opinion is as well, because this was just a protocol and software piece that you could run on your laptop. Now we're talking about industrial facilities and starting to get into nation-state mining. What do you think is the impact, positive or negative, on individual nation-states actually starting to secure the network? Is that a positive for decentralization of the network? Is that a threat ultimately? How do you look at governments getting involved in that space?
