Founder of the Hashtag: Chris Messina on How to Set Trends

Timing is such an important aspect of the opportunities that are available to you, like the hashtag. You know, had I tried to propose the idea for the hashtag like a year later, like after the iPhone had been around, it probably wouldn't have made as much sense, you know, or had as much value. It was a very specific window of time where the technology and the media that existed and the limitations of those two things conspired to create this opportunity to change the way

that we represent ideas in social media. Being in the right place, right time, just allowed me to help to promote the 10,000 people that helped to pay for that ad. So I put all their names in the Firefox logo. Someone will come at me with some kind of criticism or critique and I will essentially like take their sword and I'll like just pull it in closer to basically take whatever it is that they're saying and say, I feel this and I see it and it's still not enough.

You're not coming anywhere close to the way that I can destroy my own ideas. Added additional risks to your ability to win. I have to do more information I have to do more information I have to do more information If you could do me a huge favor and subscribe, that will really help us to make more content like this in the future. Hi, everyone. Today, we have the extraordinary pleasure of hosting Chris Messina, a visionary technologist whose innovations have fundamentally shaped our digital ecosystem.

In 2007, Chris did something deceptively simple that would transform global communication forever. He introduced the hashtag on Twitter. What seemed like a minor punctuation mark became a revolutionary tool that democratized conversation, allowing people worldwide to connect, organize, and amplify movements with just a few keystrokes. But Chris Messina is far more than just the hashtag inventor. He is a serial innovator who has been consistently ahead of many technological trends.

He consistently breaks down the traditional barriers in tech and knowledge sharing, advocated for co-working spaces, open source, as well as open generative internet before any of these things became mainstream. With significant roles at tech giants like Google and Uber, Chris has been the quiet architect of digital transformation. Today, we'll journey through the mind of a digital pioneer, exploring how unexpected innovations can emerge from curiosity,

how seemingly small ideas can create global movements, and what the future of digital interaction looks like through the eyes of someone who has already shaped it multiple times. Hi, everyone. I wanted to welcome you to this very exciting and special episode of the Icons podcast with Chris Messina. He has been an inspiration for me with all of his work around tech evangelism, most known for being the founder of the hashtag.

He has been at the forefront of so many movements in the way that we now live our lives have been founded and led by him. And so we wanted to dive a little bit deeper into his story, how he became who he is and what he's excited for in the future. So I'm so excited to welcome this most special guest that I've been in awe of, and I'm a bit nervous for this interview, but you've just been so lovely and approachable. And I'm really excited to have the audience get to know you a little bit better on a personal level.

Maybe you can tell us a little bit about where you grew up and your early story, childhood. Sure. Yeah, you know, I grew up on the East Coast. I grew up in New Hampshire. And New Hampshire is a pretty small place. It's very northeasternly. It's where I grew up. It was about an hour north of Boston. That was our biggest city that we would go down to, like, you know, concerts at the Hatchell and, you know, visit for more what we consider to be big city life, I guess.

I also grew up kind of, like, in the suburbs and it was a very white place. And it took me a long time. I mean, it wasn't until really I got out to San Francisco in, like, 2004 that I started to realize, like, how much homogeneity informed a lot of my thoughts about, like, privilege and access and just stuff that was completely opaque to me. Yeah. Then that in hindsight and retrospect, I realized contributed a lot to my kind of, like, quasi arrogance slash lack of self-awareness.

I was, like, resistant to systems and structures. But I was, like, safe and entitled in a way to speak out against them because I didn't really risk a lot. And actually, I thought about telling you the story, but it sort of represents, I think, as my ideas and thoughts about safety and participation and voice and communication and just participation in general have evolved, I think back to this experience that I had when I was in high school.

And for some reason, as high schoolers do, I was on this bridge near the woods where I grew up, Bedford, New Hampshire. And I was there with my girlfriend. And we were just, like, trying to get away from her parentals or anything like that. I don't even think we were, like, doing anything bad. We were just, like, talking, like, walking. And it was cold. And I remember it was, like, the winter. And we'd gone for this walk down this, like, train bridge, you know, covered with snow.

There was snow everywhere. And at some point, we'd, like, walked far enough across it that we realized we should probably go back. And I heard this noise down below underneath the bridge. And my girlfriend, like, got spooked. And I didn't know what it was. We thought maybe it was a dog or, I don't know, a bear or, like, something stupid. I was like, okay, well, I'll, like, throw a rock down there to, like, distract it.

And then we'll, like, go back to the car. And as it turned out, that noise that we had heard was actually a cop. And so this rock that I had thrown ended up, like, he thought that I was throwing a rock at him. And so he came up and essentially arrested me and called for backup and brought a canine unit. And it was, like, this whole big fiasco. And it was terrible. And eventually I got taken to the local jail. And my dad had to come, like, get me out.

And I remember the thing that he said to me when he saw me was, like, what would possess you to throw a rock at a cop? And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I had no, anyways, it was this whole moment. But in retrospect, if I had not been me, if I had not been, like, a white male in that situation, things could have gone much worse. And the fact that I was in this community and ecosystem of people where there's a certain set of understandings about how the world is and how power works,

I don't know that I would have continued to fight and to resist in different moments in the way that I did because I was completely unaware of all the privilege that I had to spend in taking those risks. And so, you know, just reflecting on that now, it's, I think, important for me to be aware that not everyone can take those same risks. And so it's useful to provide other people with scaffolding and ladders to then take risks where they see things that aren't working the way that they should or could for other people.

And so I think that's been kind of, like, the trajectory of a lot of the things that I've worked on from, you know, open source technology to, like, publishing tools and systems to essentially trying to work to remove certain types of power centers or gatekeepers to enable more people to participate. And the nature of the Internet is such that it's this infinite space that should allow plenty of space for people to explore and to try things out and to, like, you know, see what they think about things in a way that's safe.

And yet there's still an attitude of scarcity that's being imposed on that infinite space. And so I think that's why the work continues. I think that's such a great perspective to have is taking these moments that could be traumatizing. I mean, it was probably a little traumatizing. And transforming them into... It certainly wasn't my girlfriend. I mean, you thought it was like you were in the middle of the woods. It was like a bear or something.

I had no idea. I was like a stupid kid. Yeah. But you can... It takes, I think, a lot of reflection and wisdom to take these moments and to change your life philosophy. And think about your position of privilege and how it could have been a lot more traumatizing and a lot worse. And think about not only how you don't want to be in that situation again, but how you want to create a better world for more people. And it's so fascinating that that's been such a common thread behind all of your actions and movements.

I think I encountered and I discovered the experience of power, both having it and not having it, at a very young age. But my experience of it was very intuitive. It was felt. And it was also sort of observed and seen. You know, another example was how, you know, earlier in my life, again, like in grade school, I kind of got to the point where I was like really struggling with school because it was, it had been so easy for me to the point where it felt like, like, and actually this was in high school specifically.

I had started to, and I had found the internet as, you know, many of my peers had done around that time. This is like, you know, the mid-90s. And both the people and the connections that we made were of a level of depth and interest and curiosity that was not rewarded in school, at least as I discovered it. Now, I went to public school. And in public school, it was, I didn't have this term at the time, but it was a series of, like, status-seeking games where the goal was to, like, be really good at sports, to, like, be really good at school.

And then from school, you could, like, go to college. And then from college, you get a lot of money. And then from money, you could, like, buy a lot of things. And then that was, like, the whole American dream or something. And it just didn't really seem that compelling to me. And so for my junior year of high school, I actively tried to fail. I had been in all these honors courses. And I just, I thought, fuck this.

Like, I'm kind of done with playing these games. You know, I see these honors kids being such assholes to, like, the other kids, you know, in school. And I was always kind of, like, a social chameleon. And I moved between all these different groups. And I never identified quite with any of them. But I could kind of, like, be friends with lots of them. And I guess through that social isolation and alienation and then discovering community on the Internet, it was like, like, why are we treating each other this way?

This seems so strange. And what I discovered was that even after trying to fail, I mean, I would just kind of, like, turn in a test without putting anything on it. There was this great inflation where I would still get C's. And yet kids who are not honors classes and who I talked to about their classwork, they would get F's. And so what was it about me being in an honors course that kind of, like, pushed me up and forward?

Whereas a lot of the other kids who I was around weren't given the same, like, entitlement at all. And that struck me as just one of these other ways in which the system wasn't really, like, actually providing opportunity for people to, you know, succeed. Like, you had to have a certain kind of intelligence or a certain way of thinking about things, a certain type of, like, conformity to norms. And running up against that, I suppose, just caused me this kind of, like, breakdown.

At the same time, I also started to work for the first web design company in New Hampshire as a little, like, designer internee kind of, like, person. And it just seemed like, wow, this is the future. Like, anybody could just start at their own website. They don't need to get permission from anybody. They can say whatever they want. They can find audience. Or they can be rejected. But it's on the merits of what's put out there.

And in that era, there was also more just a sense that you needed to be anonymous on the Internet or pseudonymous. And so I was. And that also allowed me this separation to explore and try different identities in a way where both the way that I, like, you know, presented in this meat body was one way. And then also being in public school was another sort of identity that was, like, put upon me. And then in all these other contexts, it was, like, showing up as the way that other people expected me to be as opposed to finding or discovering, like, some sort of source of authenticity for things that I wanted to express or to share.

And I think I just became very disillusioned with, like, that system and that structure. Now, looking back, of course, that was, like, where I was in the world and how small that place was and the politics of that place. And the stories and narratives that reinforced certain ideas and practices about how people should be treated and who should get ahead and who shouldn't. But I didn't know any of those things. Those things, again, were illegible to me.

And so I guess I just think that growing up as a child of the Internet, the first kind of early Internet allowed me to see things very differently. I mean, it is very, like, Matrixian and, you know, kind of, you know, being red-pilled. But not in the sense that it's become. I think that there's still a hope for me that the Internet is not that far away from reality and that these things can be mutually beneficial and pro-social.

We just haven't worked hard enough to actually make that the case yet. Do you think that the Internet played a crucial role in that sort of wake-up call for you that if, let's say, you had been born 20 years prior, you had those same set of experiences, would you be a totally different person now? Timing is such an important aspect of the opportunities that are available to you. You know, when I think to, like, the hashtag, you know, had I tried to propose the idea for the hashtag, like, a year later, like, after the iPhone had been around for more than a year, it probably wouldn't have made as much sense, you know, or had as much value.

Like, it was a very specific window of time where the technology and the media that existed and the limitations of those two things conspired to create this opportunity to change the way that we represent ideas in social media. But, like, a year later, three years later, I don't think it would have, like, taken off. And, in fact, the number of people who have asked me or tried to propose kind of, like, either successors to the hashtag or other ideas by putting some other symbol in front of words to create some other type of, like, tag system, it was like the window was missed, was lost.

So, in a similar way, had I not grown up when I did, had I not gone through high school when I did, had I not, you know, been responsible for creating my high school's website and then getting suspended because I created a website for the Gay Straight Alliance, but they didn't understand what links were. And so, the fact that I put a banner ad for the Gay Straight Alliance on my high school's website made them think that I was announcing school policy because they didn't understand that these things were separate websites was an encounter with both, like, the confusion and also the novelty that the internet presented to the power structures that existed and to the way in which communication and information, like, was shared and spread.

And so, if I had come 20 years later, people, I mean, like, we are 20 years later now. So, like, looking at it now, people understand. I feel like the thing that's ominous, foreboding, and intimidating about this moment is that those who have been in power for a long time now both, I think, have a much greater respect for and understanding of the power of social media and of internet connected. publishing platforms as well as the ability to deploy artificial intelligence to manipulate the thoughts of, like, the mainstream.

And 20 years ago, the internet was still kind of like a media backwater where those of us who had different ideas or wanted to deviate from the mainstream could find each other, could, like, communicate. And also, like, do so in a way that felt, like, pro-social, optimistic, constructive, perhaps naive. And yet, we had, like, our own space, you know, where we weren't needing to get permission from the existing power structures or authorities to exist because we were irrelevant to them.

Now, that's not only the case. Now, I think, you know, you look at a platform like X and what Elon did in this, like, last election and, like, taking over, like, the America username and using it to promote, like, Trump. Like, there's a very clear awareness that these digital megaphones are now extremely efficient to run and can reach a mass audience and manipulate and, in some cases, coerce that mass audience to certain outcomes in ways that are illegible to them.

And so, having grown up in an era where we were building these things and we had some ideas about how we wanted the outcomes to go and that we didn't want power to centralize, a lot of the urges to centralize power have entered into those spaces. Yeah. And I think we're now trying to, like, figure out how that should or maybe how to continue to resist in a way that's effective. I think there's a very clear common theme behind the moments that you've described so far, like, in your early childhood to the way that you're thinking about the future and risks within tech and how we should be thinking about the future, which is that you've always questioned the status quo, these power structures, and looked out for people.

Mm-hmm. And I think there's a lot of people who have been thinking about the future, and they're trying to fight against it, even if it, when it wasn't to your benefit, and push and push and question the status quo and change and ask and look at all the benefits that we're reaping because you never stopped. Mm-hmm. Can you walk us through maybe another, one of those, like, first transformative experiences where you, like, raise your hand and you were like, this is not okay, or were like, okay, I'm gonna do something about.

Yeah. Yeah. And, like, I just want to acknowledge, like, that it feels really nice to hear you say that, and at the same time, I don't want to give myself too much credit because in a way. I'm giving you the credit. Yeah, well, I suppose you can. Because I didn't, I didn't, I didn't know. Like, there wasn't, there wasn't as much intention as you're making it sound like there was. In many respects, I think I've, I've become so much more aware of myself and my behavior and also what I was responding to, that in the moment, the way that I behaved was in response to some circumstantial stimulus or some adversity or something that I didn't understand, but, like, where it didn't, it didn't align with my intuition.

Right. And I think that my intuition is, like, very strong. Yeah. And my vision for the future is also very, or can be very clear. And so these things, when they're in alignment, allow me to both project into the future and what happens next is that I build scaffolding to, or, like, a pull to bring other people to that future. And language and narrative and story is the way in which I help people to then envision that future world.

And there's this dynamic between what is a very clear image in my mind to then the process of converting that image into words, which are then our statements and ideas that then I use to manipulate your brain to understand what's going on in my brain. And the closer that we get to understanding each other, the more likely it is that at least you will be able to see what I see. And then you can tell me whether that makes sense or whether it's useful or whether you want to move towards that or whether you're like, whatever, dude, like you're smoking crack, you know.

But anyway, so you were asking about this other moment. The other moment when I guess I raised my hand because, again, I didn't know any better was when I first came to Silicon Valley, specifically San Francisco in 2004. I come to San Francisco because I found that living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it was too small a place. And at the time, I mean, Pittsburgh had become actually a really lovely city. But then it was just kind of like small, quiet, and, you know, the universities were okay, but it had a very itinerant kind of like community of people.

It would just turn over kind of like every year. And so even though, you know, San Francisco is its own kind of itinerant place where people come and go and they don't stick around for, you know, lifetime necessarily, Pittsburgh just didn't have anything that was holding me to it. And so, you know, I had gone out to Portland, Oregon at some point during my college years, really loved it, but it was like kind of sleepy.

And in San Francisco, I had a friend who was a roommate and she had a room and I was like, okay, I'll just like come out and stay with you. Anyways, when I got out here, I was doing a lot of like, you know, web design consulting and just, you know, I didn't really know what I was doing, but I was working for myself. And I ended up getting involved with the Howard Dean presidential campaign, which was sort of like the predecessor to like Barack Obama in terms of being a digital candidate.

And Howard Dean was from Vermont. He was a doctor and he was also quite libertarian, which, you know, sort of I think appealed to my at the time coming up from New Hampshire. And we were using this new open source platform called Drupal, which was a sort of competitor to WordPress to launch and run the Howard Dean campaign. And specifically, there was a version of Drupal called Civic Space. I know we're just like going down this rabbit hole right now.

But the Civic Space software was political organizing software that was designed for anybody to use and anybody can contribute to it. And it was in contrast to proprietary or closed source software that, you know, any competitors might have been building and using. And it also happened that there was a launch of a new browser that was being planned. And I think it was in October or November of 2004. And that same software that we're using for that presidential campaign was also, it turned out, the software that we're going to use to organize the launch of Firefox.

And so I happened to be kind of working on both at the same time, doing the design for Civic Space, but then also volunteering for Mozilla, the launch of what was originally called Phoenix. But then due to trademark issues, they had to rename it to Firefox. And essentially just kind of like helping to organize this community of people to get the word out that there was like this new browser launching. And I mean, like in 2004, no one knew what a browser was.

I mean, essentially, and this is more relevant maybe in like 2009 to 12, but like the Internet from 2009 to 12 became Facebook, like the blue F. That was how most people around the world kind of got online and found their friends. In 2004, it was the blue E, which was Internet Explorer. And Internet Explorer was made by the evil empire, which was Microsoft. And Microsoft, although they benefited from having an open platform, they still owned all of the software that they created.

And they very much saw the Internet as a threat to their future dominance. And so they worked hard to try to create a proprietary version of the Internet based on a technology called ActiveX, which meant that every web page or every website that would be created would be created in Microsoft's technology. And then they would own it and they could decide, just like we're experiencing today, who could speak and who could not speak.

And Microsoft would be the ultimate toll keeper, toll gate operator. And so the launch of Firefox represented a fight against that hegemony, against that centralization of power. And it was coming from an upstart, open source, ragtag set of people that were volunteers building this new technology to enable anybody who wanted to, again, just like in my high school experience, wanted to publish to the web, could do so through this open technology.

And when it came time to put the word out that this browser was launching, there was a plan that the leadership had come up with to put an ad in the Wall Street Journal to announce this new software. Because, I don't know, the Wall Street Journal was where the money people were. I kind of wasn't really part of that conversation. But we ended up using the CivicSpace software to collect donations, essentially micro donations, $5 and $10.

and ran a campaign to pull enough money together to pay for this ad in the Wall Street Journal. We'd already raised a bunch of money from companies like Red Hat, which makes Linux, and IBM, actually, who also sponsored Red Hat and were against Microsoft. But we needed a little bit more just to, like, get it over the edge. And we thought maybe we'd raise $10,000, $15,000. And instead, we pulled together a quarter of a million dollars in 10 days.

And it was, like, this huge moment for the Internet coming together, essentially the Internet realizing that it was on its own team. And then it was, like, sort of fighting, you know, it's like the Red Sox and the Yankees. And now, all of a sudden, we had too much money because the Wall Street Journal ad wasn't that much money. But that allowed us to then take out an ad in the New York Times. And this was going to be a two-page ad.

But as it happened at the time, there were very few designers in open source. And so I kind of raised my hand to say, okay, well, I guess I can design this ad for you. And so I took it upon myself to create this ad that would announce, like, Firefox to the world. And I suppose that was the other, I don't know, one of the other moments where being in the right place, right time, just allowed me to help to promote the 10,000 people that helped to pay for that ad.

And so I put all of their names in the Firefox logo. And that was the ad that was printed. It's such a great story. And a couple of things come to mind, which is I think a lot of people, I don't think it's just right place, right time. But I think it's also gathering the courage to raise your hand in those types of moments when there could be a potential opportunity for you. And I imagine that it could be a range of emotions of fear, excitement, self-doubt, whatever it might be.

I don't know about that in that case, though. Like, in some ways, you know, one, we didn't really know what we didn't know. So, and also, again, given, like, the blindness around, like, you know, privilege and access that I had. Yeah. It's just like, we're in this moment where, oh, shit, like, we raised a bunch of money. We have to get this ad done. And I was, like, waiting for someone to, like, show up and, like, you know, be the hero to, like, do the thing.

Right. And there was no one there. And to ride to vacation. And so, for me, I guess it was, this has to get done. No one else is showing up. And where are we going to find a designer? And, you know, it's sort of more like being, I mean, I was never in the trenches and I never, you know, was in the military. But, you know, I imagine there's a clarity of thought when you're like, this thing has to happen. And so, you just throw your body at it and you just, like, push through it and you get it done.

And what was crazy about, you know, this example and the reason why I guess I frame it this way is because the design that I did, I was using Adobe Illustrator. And we were using these, like, pretty powerful, like, Power Macs back then. I mean, they were, like, very slow computers by today's standards. And the design that I created was so complex, like, the mask of all the different letters and all the stuff. And I, you know, I thought I knew what I was doing.

But it was so complex that it kept crashing the machine. So, I couldn't even edit the design. And so, they literally had to, like, get someone from, like, Adobe who, like, wrote the Illustrator software to, like, help with the design of this thing. Because I was such an idiot, you know, and not a professional trying to do something that professionals would presumably know how to do. And so, I think it's more a matter of, like, we were in this battle to save the internet.

And whatever it took was necessary to get it done. I think it's also worth pointing out that, like, I was there as a volunteer. So, like, I wasn't getting paid for any of this. Like, I was getting paid doing other things. And that meant that whatever I was contributing was purely out of, like, you know, sort of, like, agape love. It was just, like, take this from me. And if you throw it out, it doesn't matter. Because, like, I'm not getting paid for this.

This is just my contribution. And because everyone was in a similar, like, attitude. Although some people were probably getting paid somehow. That wasn't the motivation for me. The motivation was to achieve the thing that we were trying to get done. And so, fear was not really a relevant emotion. I think that's such an inspiring thing to hear about. It was the cause was so important that sort of all the emotions were not at the forefront at all.

And the part of the decision, you were like, this is my moment. This is important. This is our moment. You know? Exactly. Like, there's 10,000 people, like, relying on the designer of this thing. And we're going to make it happen. And I'm going to insert myself into this process to make sure that those 10,000 people are represented in this message. Because this message falls flat if it's just a piece of software being advertised in a newspaper.

They need to know that there's names behind this. That there's people behind this. That people want this to happen. And there are many ways to express this idea, this concept. You know, 10,000 people paid for this ad. So you know what Firefox is. But it made it a very different expression for each one of those people who also had raised their hands and put their dollars in to say that I co-sign this message. You know?

And that this is the internet, which is made of people. It's not a bunch of, like, randos and weirdos. Like, they're there too. But, like, there's also plenty of, like, normies who are also starting to use this new medium. And you should be aware that we have a certain sort of values and ideas about the future. And we are a legion. And that was the message. I think that's such a strong conviction that the whole team had and you have so strongly.

Because I think that to create this kind of systemic change is that that needs to be at the forefront. And that I think that what I personally have experienced is that when you feel so strongly about something and you have this whole team behind you or maybe you're fighting for it alone, that that's when you have the momentum to keep going. And I think where I really struggle is the fear and the unknowns and getting the courage.

Because I think I was raised in a completely different environment as you were, where it was very homogenous and it was in Tokyo. But at the same time, you hear, don't ever question the status quo, anything that you have that you are wondering why the thing is the way that it is. Don't ever ask why. And if you have a better idea, keep that to yourself. Because the ways of the past are the ways of the future, regardless of whether or not they work.

And so for me, there have been moments and times where I saw an injustice or I had a great idea that I knew would help in some small way from childhood all the way through before I left Japan. And I had so much fear because I knew that that would mean that I was going to be ostracized and rejected. And I think that it's so refreshing to hear the conviction you had and that fear wasn't even an emotion or failure or rejection.

It was that sort of blind faith and optimism that I think that I really struggled for a long time to adopt. But like, you know, it's also a case where having grown up, like I said, as a social chameleon. Yeah. I think I was already, to some degree, like ostracized and like othered. And whether I was like self-othered or other-othered, there was still this sense of alienation with the people that I grew up with and around.

And I didn't, I just couldn't understand the social dynamics and why people behaved and treated each other this way. Because it felt so foreign and like not pleasant to me. And I think that was, again, feeling into my intuition and my body, even though I wouldn't have known that that's what I was doing. Right. Like what's also like relevant, I guess, and not to be like a debutante about it, but like I kind of like grew up like as an artist.

Yeah. Like I was, I was, I was drawing and I was, you know, doing pastels and watercolors and I took a lot of art lessons. And the way of the artist is to be extremely sensitive to your environment in order to reflect the environment. And over time, mastery is learning when you want to impose yourself and your perspective on reality versus reporting what you see or what you feel. Right. And I think that was happening to me socially as well.

But I didn't have the language. I didn't have the ideas. I didn't have access to feel my feelings. And especially like growing up in New England, it's a very cold place, like quite literally. I find that weather not only changes moods, to quote Kurt Cobain, but that also the space that you occupy, the environment around you determines how people find and share warmth. And on the outside, a lot of New Englanders tend to be, you know, like not brisk is the word.

Some brusque, brisk, cold kind of like they create space. But when you're inside of their communities or their friendships or their families, you know, it's like the warmth of a hearth. Hearth? What's it called? Like a fireplace. And that once you get inside of those walls, then it's quite like open and generous. And that's not the case in all places in all cultures. And so I suppose, you know, for you, there was a reason for you to not just like be fearful of, but to be like mindful of what was at risk because you stood to lose something.

Whereas I think for me, I already lost or never had or never gained social connection or like belonging. And so therefore I could take these risks because I wasn't going to lose the things that other people would lose. And so there's a benefit in some ways to being a quasi like lone wolf like person. It meant that I was quite lonely in many ways. But it also, you know, there's this great story that my mom tells about me.

I guess when I was in kindergarten, I would play in the sandbox and oftentimes she would sort of observe me being off by myself, like playing with my trucks and, you know, like digging holes and doing whatever. And like I'd be totally alone. And invariably by the end of recess or however long it was, a bunch of or all of the kids would have come over to whatever I was doing because they liked what I was doing and how much fun I was having just doing the thing by myself.

And so I was never, according to her telling, which might be biased, a kind of person that needed that social validation from other people to feel good about what I was doing. And so because I could do that, I could then pursue whatever I wanted with far less concern over, you know, losing those connections. And so I have a great deal of both like empathy and compassion and sympathy for people that, you know, worry about social loss, social isolation.

For some people that like shame functions in society because it's effective, like losing access to your community. You know, we like to talk about like the saber tooth era and things like that. Like, you know, our social connections were so important because we were a communal species that by yourself, you were much less likely to survive. And yet frontiers people have to be able to be on their own and to pioneer with only themselves.

And so there's a negative aspect of lone wolves where if you are antisocial or your pain needs to be broadcast and felt by other people, that can lead to bad things. But if you're a pioneer wanting to explore and be kind of like the random seed, like I find a lot of inspiration in nature. And one of the most inspirational structures in nature is something called a rhizome. And a rhizome, an example of that would be a strawberry.

And so if you've ever, not that everyone's grown strawberries, but I happen to have a strawberry patch now in my garden. And if you've ever seen the way that a strawberry patch grows, essentially there's these little kind of exploratory, I don't know what to call them, like root structures almost that grow out. And they have within them the ability to propagate a whole new strawberry plant from that. It's similar to if you, it's not the same idea, but maybe same function.

If you cut the leg off of a starfish, it'll grow another starfish. And so in a way you have to have people that are willing to sort of be cut off from like the main body, or you have to have a rhizomatic structure that sort of branches out and then can reproduce the culture or the civilization. Because you can't have all, you know, your eggs in a single basket to mix many metaphors. Yeah. So anyways, like the fear that you're expressing is very real and valid because it comes from a social cohesion place.

And that same fear didn't work as well against me. When you were growing up in those moments when you felt isolation, were you ever bullied growing up? Yeah, sure. I think it's normal. I mean, it's not okay, but there's, I think this is like why I also think about it from a power perspective. Right, right. You know, in many cases, kids who bully are bullied themselves, either by their parents or by siblings. And so it's just sort of like turtles all the way down.

And I think for me, I don't know to the degree that it was like problematic like it is for some people. Right, right. I don't know that I internalized it. Right. It seemed probably more confusing to me. And again, why I was so frustrated by like the structure and the system that kind of either allowed people to behave that way or they would just, you know, automatically create hierarchies of popularity. Right. And, you know, another revealing story.

I think this was probably in sixth grade. I had a friend. His name is Jeff. He was a Korean kid and in a very white place. It was somewhat rare. And so he and I were like really close. We hung out all the time. We played Nintendo. He loved Nintendo. I loved Nintendo. And yet there was a moment where I felt the need to grow my popularity. And so I started to emulate like the popular kids and I became an asshole. And I kind of alienated Jeff and I like really broke that relationship because I thought what I was supposed to do was to like play and join in this like status game.

So that I would like have access or have friends or like whatever it was. And it wasn't me. And I can feel it. I can deeply feel it. But I went down that path anyways because it just seemed like, I guess, the way to belong. And then the belonging that I felt just felt so superficial and not valuable relative to like the friendship that I had. And I think the lesson and the learning that I got from that, I think partially it was maybe because something similar had happened to me where I had a close friend and he decided to become either more popular or went to a private school or whatever it was.

And so I was like, oh, like this is just what you do, you know. And so I guess I have, I don't know. I don't know if I want to say that I have compassion, but I can understand how those like structures occur. And I think that, you know, when you do have that sort of shame or social pressure, you can either choose to try to assimilate or you can choose to continue on your own path. I think I did try to assimilate. And then it just turned out that the clothes didn't fit and they were like scratchy and, you know, I just didn't want to wear them anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to go back to something that you said about being an artist soul. And one of my favorite questions to ask a lot of the artists and creatives that we interview, we asked this question to San Francisco Symphony pianist. And he gave a super interesting answer. Yeah. But curious to hear your perspective on, you know, I think in a lot of ways what you do, what you create, the status quo that you're always pushing and the new ideas that you're birthing.

I think you need to be extremely vulnerable and sensitive to the core of who you are and have your guard down to feel empathy and to feel for the heartbeat of what's going to happen next. But at the same time, you need to have a thick skin against rejection and criticism and to put yourself out there. How do you balance and navigate the struggle of staying open and vulnerable yet needing to have that thick skin? Part of it comes from being my own greatest critic.

And so to some degree, the degree to which other people will criticize me actually doesn't rise to like the level of cutting that I can do to myself. And so many times it's sort of, this both happens in a romantic and professional context. It's sort of like someone will come at me with some kind of criticism or critique and I will essentially like take their sword and I'll like just pull it in closer to basically take whatever it is that they're saying and say, I feel this and I see it and it's still not enough.

Like you're not coming anywhere close to the way that I can destroy my own ideas. And so if you're going to attempt to suggest something that's different, then let's go there. Like let's really be there. Right. But like don't come at me with some superficial partial analysis or some like whether it's like positioning or whether it's, you know, well, did you think about this? Or like what about this? And oftentimes I'll be like, yes.

In fact, I went down the whole path to validate that concept and that idea. And I've still arrived at this place. But let's, I'll walk you through it. So you can see like how this goes down that path. And I think it's, it's not, it's not meant to be about arrogance or to discount necessarily the other person only to recognize that the amount of time that any of us can spend thinking about anything or working on anything is obviously limited by our available tension and anything else that we might've seen or been exposed to.

And the amount of ignorance in the world, my own ignorance is like enormous and vast and infinite. And so therefore I'm always like kind of open to like the seed of something that maybe I didn't see or didn't consider. But I don't want to, but these ideas need to be like, like robust and worthwhile and to be able to withstand like external critique and criticism after they've already gone through the fire of my own criticism.

And so the number of people, it's so, it's so interesting because 2023 to 2024 has been this resurgence in arguing for like the hashtag. And you know, the hashtag is now like 16, 17 years old. It's been around for a little while. And I've heard all of the critiques and all the complaints, you know, over that period of time. And yet there's been a recycling of them recently on platforms like Threads and Blue Sky.

And in some respects, like I'm always open to have the conversation because I don't believe that like the hashtag is like the best idea of all time for all time in all contexts and all shapes and forms and sizes and what have you. You know, you know, there are a lot of, if you ever, not that I recommend it, but if you ever happen to go into a font and you look at all the characters that are available in any font, there are many characters that we do not use anymore that are just there.

Or they're from other languages or, you know, it's sort of like breaking a moment of emergency, kind of like, you know, situation where you have like an interobang or something, you know, that's like not relevant in English, but like maybe it's used in Spanish. The point is there's a lot of ideas in linguistics and typographics and glyphs that exist that express certain ideas that no longer are relevant and don't make sense anymore.

And so I'm not crazy enough to think that like the hashtag has to be this persistent thing that's going to live in culture forever. However, in the moment that we exist and in the moment where attention is a certain shape and duration, it happens to be very useful when you don't want to spend that much time thinking about the metadata of the data that you're producing. And so when people have come at me with these other ideas, like, I mean, there are so many swords in my guts from all these people telling me these things.

And I'm like, that sword is not original. Here it is, you know, from like 2014. I've already gone through that process. So if you want to talk about it again, let's do it. And I think that's, so that's why it's a little bit different than having like a thick skin. If anything, my thick skin is all the cauterized wounds that have been, you know, where I've been gutted before. Right. And I've had to defend these ideas.

Right. And to allow the ideas to die if they need to die. Right. And I've had way more ideas that have died. Right. Than the few that have actually worked. Sure. And I think it's almost this superpower that you've turned this into of almost going to war with yourself. Sure. Winning. Well, it's advocacy on behalf of other people. Right. And to try to like, the reason why the hashtag worked is because it's like a needle with a thread on the back of it.

And once, you know, it is, as they say, like sort of threading the needle, like it addressed a number of different tensions in the space at the time. And it traded off elegance in some respects for utility. And I think of this as what I call a complexity balloon, where there's a fixed some amount of complexity in a problem. And you can only squeeze the balloon and cause the complexity to go to one place or another. And so I chose one shape of the balloon to solve for.

Whereas if you solve for other parts of it, the complexity just moves elsewhere. And I think a lot of people struggle because they're only seeing their local part of the balloon. And they're not seeing the entirety of the environment. And the people, you know, who are at different levels of sophistication and awareness to be able to engage with the thing. It's like one of the reasons why I say that when I was thinking about coming up with a hashtag, the hashtag had to work when I was drunk.

Because basically we were using it for South by Southwest, where you do a lot of drinking. And so you're out at a bar and you're like trying to tell people what's going on. And you need to remember the metadata to put into your tweet so it can be funny or relevant to the people that you're trying to talk to. And so adding additional characters or like having a different interface or having something that's non-standard suddenly now reduces the amount of people that are able to participate in that expression.

And now the thing is less valuable for everybody. And so if you can sort of think about it from that perspective and apply the drunk test to whatever it is that you're working on, as well as bring it all the way up to like something that powers enormous advertising budgets and is on billboards and in movies and like all these other things. Great. You know, like that's where you find the elegance of, you know, and I suppose it is kind of like a, like a song.

You know, there are different parts of it. And there are some parts where you need to have like the quiet part and some parts, the loud part, and sometimes like the high pitched part. And it's all woven together as a tapestry as opposed to one simple solution. And so I think that that's, that's how these ideas come into fruition is like after some period of time and consideration from all of these different spatial angles.

Hmm. Yeah. My next question was going to be how the genesis of the hashtag became what it is. And I think that you touched on a lot of it already, but was the first time you conceptualized it at South by Southwest prior to that? Yeah. Um, it was, it was created, uh, as a result of the experience and it, you know, it's funny, right? Cause again, who are like, when you solve problems, who are, who's in the Venn diagram of people that you're solving the problem for?

Mm-hmm. And who's like outside the Venn diagram. Right. And the funny thing is that in, at South by Southwest in 2007, you know, some people for whatever reason decided to not go. Mm-hmm. And at the time, people who were using Twitter, uh, when you followed people, it meant that every single message that they posted the service would show up as a text message on your phone. Oh. And. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, you know, one, you have to be very judicious, but on the other hand, you've got a bunch of like early tech social people who are here in San Francisco who are following each other.

And like, it's great cause it's like accelerating serendipity and you're finding out events and things to do and what's going on and it's all that stuff. And then, you know, a large contingent, you know, like 65% of people like go to Austin to go to South by Southwest. And now you're three hours ahead and now you're spending, you know, your nights up late getting drunk and you're having like, you thought amazing texts that you're posting to Twitter.

And it turns out maybe they're not that brilliant, but they're blowing up people's phones back in San Francisco because we didn't have the concept of notifications or the ability to turn off notifications. And so there was this kind of like angry revolt that was like, why don't you guys shut the fuck up over there? And like Austin, like, you know, leave us alone. And yet that wasn't really addressing the problem. So Twitter needed a way to contextualize these posts.

And we didn't have GPS in the same way. We didn't have like, like location services like we do now. And so it was very hard to figure out how to add that additional metadata to these 140 character messages so they wouldn't blow up people's phones in San Francisco. And it just seemed to me that Internet Relay Chat called IRC, which is the predecessor to Slack, had kind of solved this problem by creating channels where you could like, you know, go into kind of a room.

It's like we're all in this room. We're in the shared space. Post your message in that context. And then the people who are there can follow it and be updated. And so that was great. IRC had a pound symbol in front of the channels. But in the case of Twitter, there was a question, well, what if you want to post to like multiple channels at the same time? Do you have to create multiple messages? And it seemed to be one, that's too much work.

And two, you know, again, you're kind of like walking between bars. You're like having a conversation. You don't have much time to like post. So why couldn't you just kind of have multiple channels in the same message and just reuse the text as the tag? And that seemed to like solve the problem. It was easy enough. Back then we had these Nokia feature phones with like physical plastic keyboards. And so there was an asterisk and there was a pound symbol.

And it was like, put the pound symbols right there. We'll just use that. So it was like all these different things that we were solving for and I was trying to solve for. And there were other people who were proposing sort of like different ideas to how to solve it. Many of them were like, well, let's just create like messaging groups, you know, that you can go to and you can join. And there'll be like administration and stuff.

And I was like that undermines the elegance of Twitter as a publishing medium. The whole idea is you just send a message to 40404 and then all your friends get it. And you don't have to think about the groups or the audiences. And so I essentially kind of like wrote up a proposal that laid out this idea several months after South by Southwest and after talking to many people. And, you know, I also like, you know, created mock-ups of what trending topics could look like and how the whole thing could be representative of the network.

And you could, I even went further. You could like mute certain keywords and hashtags. You could like follow just certain hashtags. You could follow a hashtag that a single, like that a person or a user had posted about. And so there's all these different ways to slice and dice content on the network that seemed to be solving for the complexity balloon as I shaped it. And so I presented it, you know, to the early Twitter community.

And mostly it was like crickets, you know, for a while. And then a couple of months later, there were these wildfires in San Diego. And it was the first real use case where like hashtags could be useful for getting information about something that was like a disaster that many people were experiencing who are not even like technophiles. And they could benefit from this because the cell networks hadn't gone down. Whereas like the Internet, like more or less was like not available or like whatever the situation was.

And then that use case for the San Diego Fire was written out by Wired. And that kind of got the ball rolling in terms of telling people how this could be useful and valuable to them. Super interesting. When you say that you put together a proposal and presented it to people, what did that actually look like in terms of getting your ideas out there? It was literally a blog post. I mean, like I had a blog, FactoryJoe.com.

Again, that was the pseudonym that I used in high school. Factory Joe. Yeah, because Factory City was a comic book that I was drawing in high school. And Factory Joe was like the main character. He was like the Winston Smith character from 1984. But like in this like Factory City world and Factory City was a place where everybody did their work based on like open source principles. But this is before I even knew what open source was.

And it was very strange. But yeah, so FactoryJoe.com was my blog. And I just like wrote 2000 about how I thought this thing could work. And I identified a bunch of the other competing ideas, the other proposals. We kind of used the scientific method. It was like what are people already doing? Like what can we learn from? How can we minimize the amount of information that people need to learn in order to use this new technology?

And because IRC existed and because TAGS also existed on a social bookmarking service called Delicious, these ideas were already in space. And, you know, as I got more into mixing cocktails, I realized that, you know, mixing cocktails is a form of cooking. And it really is a bunch of ingredients and ratios. And technology is the same. So once you have the ingredients, you can just mix and match them in different ways using different proportions.

And you can come up with like amazingly new things with a basic set of ingredients. Music is the same way. So once you kind of understand the primitives, then you can move them around and manipulate them to express new ideas or concepts. And so I feel like the hashtag was that. It was like we had tags. We had IRC and channel-based conversations in real time. We had these like feature phones, you know, before the iPhone with a software-based keyboard.

We had a feature called Track on Twitter that allowed you to follow any keyword. And so that was very useful for hashtags. And then I was just like putting all these things into like, you know, a mixer and sort of like shaking it, you know, and then like pouring the drink and then kind of like presenting it in a blog post with pictures so people understood what this was. It was almost like a white paper. Yeah, I suppose like the white paper has become the successor to the blog post.

Maybe because they're more portable, you know, as a PDF or something. Or because white paper sounds official. Like more corporate. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's based on the audience. So I was not appealing to a corporate audience. In fact, like when I went into Twitter's headquarters and I pitched the idea to Biz Stone, one of the co-founders, you know, he just kind of summarily said it was a stupid idea and it was too nerdy to ever work.

Was this before the blog post or after that you pitched it? After. After the wildfires? Before. Before the wildfires. So the blog post came out first on August 25th, 2007. And then, or August 23rd. And then, no, actually the tweet. So first I created a tweet that was like, hey, what do you guys think about using like pound for groups? As in, you know, hashtag Bar Camp. And Bar Camp was an event that I'd co-organized in 2005.

Put that out there. Didn't really get much feedback. And so I was like, all right, I got to like write this up more fully. And so then two days later I published the blog post. And then, because I lived at the north point of South Park and Twitter's headquarters was in South Park, I just kind of like walked down the street and then walked in the front door because they didn't have security. And I just kind of like stood there like looking around, like trying to like find someone I should talk to.

And then like Biz came up and was like, can I help you? And I was like, I think I solved your group's problem. He's like, oh. You didn't have like a meeting set up or like an intro or anything? I literally just worked in. Yeah. We'll see what happens. I mean, you know, again, this is like sort of like to my point about like the privilege and access that I've had. Yeah. Where I just, I didn't know any better. And I was just like, I'm just going to go talk to these guys, you know?

And literally like who do you run into? Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, also that's what the scale and size of, you know, these platforms were back then. Right, right. You know, and many people were skeptical of Twitter. They thought I was like stupid. I mean, it is, you know, a clown car that like drove into a gold mine kind of thing. But yeah, like Biz was like, no, that's stupid. Like I was at Google. Like we've solved this problem with algorithms.

We are going to solve the relevance problem on Twitter with algorithms. And so thank you for your nerdy idea. You and your nerdy friends can have it, but it's not something that we're going to, you know, really consider. We're barely able to keep the service up, you know? We're fucking the golden child right now. So I was like, okay, fine, you know? And so once again, it was like I was rejected, but I was like, okay, here's another sword, you know?

And I'll just like tape it. I'll walk out and I'll be like, so why was it rejected? I don't know. I think it's a good idea. And so then I talked to all the people who were building on the Twitter API and slowly convinced them that, you know, it wouldn't be that hard to like add support for this thing. And then slowly they were like, yeah, all right, I'll do it. Whatever. Like just leave me alone, you know, kind of thing.

Like just go away. Right. And then that started this like, you know, wellspring of kind of movement in that direction.

And then at what point did it ever become like a collaborative partnership with Twitter or was it just running off with your idea? No, it was mostly adversarial throughout the entire relationship. Interesting. Yeah, like, I mean, there was a time when Twitter tried to trademark the hashtag and own it and prevent Instagram from using it. And after having been rejected by them, you know, like the hashtag for a long time was like this anonymous thing that was just kind of out there for people to use.

And like my experience with open source, I kind of just wanted it to be part of the internet. Right. You weren't trying to sell it. No, I wasn't trying to do anything with it. No, I just wanted people to use it because I thought it was valuable, you know? And I also thought that the other things that I was working on in the decentralized social networking space was a lot more valuable and frankly complex and harder to achieve.

And so like this little hashtag thing, most of the engineers that I talked to also told me that I was stupid and it was like too basic. And, you know, and I as a designer, you know, as an imposter being in this, you know, engineering heavy space and not belonging at all, kind of like their word is being truthful and real. And so I kind of denigrated the idea and I just kind of like left it there to like, you know, grow if it could.

But it wasn't until Instagram came around as this new photo sharing platform and Twitter started to realize like, oh shit, like people are using hashtags on Instagram because it's a visual medium. And yet the hashtags are what are people using to describe the photos. And those photos now become like ad units, which then you can advertise against hashtags like, oh shit, like that's the way they're going to monetize. And then Twitter was like, oh, well, we have the hashtag first, therefore it's ours.

And it just, I just fucking like blew a gasket and, you know, had to stand up as like the defender of the hashtag is something that was made for and of the Internet and of the web. And it was not for Twitter. And in fact, Twitter had rejected it. And so therefore they could not take it back. And so there was this whole standoff for some period of time between me and them until finally they relented, probably because they couldn't have trademarked it anyways.

But no, it was always a bit adversarial. And it wasn't until Jack became CEO that in, I think, 2019 at Chirp, one of the Twitter developer conferences, that he finally like acknowledged me by name as being the contributor of this thing. So, yeah, no, it was not like a kumbaya kind of like, oh, we all love each other kind of situation. Yeah, because you would think that initially it was you were an employee who had proposed this.

And I was always like an idiot about money. Like I had like a deep money wound. And so it's like why I contributed to like the launch of Firefox as a volunteer. It's like why I like co-organized this bar camp event. It's like why I wanted co-working to be this thing that everybody could participate in as a global network. Like it felt like the best way for me to maintain my integrity was to not benefit monetarily from these ideas.

And I've developed a more nuanced, sophisticated slash sellout like approach now because it turns out that you can't feed your family with just ideas alone. But there was a period where I was very hopeful and optimistic that I could just be like a barter system. Right. Because I would have thought like that you would have not only received credit for it, but that there would have been some sort of compensation or reward attached to it.

And for this is to be like a public service. And also one that was not necessarily seen as positive by the people who were benefiting from it. Yeah, no, I mean, there is there is a great deal of resistance. And it just it's it strikes me that this pattern repeats in my life. And it's not that I'm always right. It's that I'm considering other factors that commercial interests are not aligned with. Right. And so that's it's.

But then they find a way to monetize. Sure. I mean, it's useful for many people. I mean, behavior is the hardest thing to change in people and especially at a mass scale. Right. And if you, you know, went up and knocked door to door and asked people to start prefixing words in the letters that they send in their emails with a little pound symbol for reasons, no one's going to do it. And so, again, like timing was important, but also the like early community set a bunch of norms and standards.

That then could propagate through the network as the network grew. So I think in the beginning there wasn't necessarily a thought that this is going to be commercially relevant or interesting because it's going to be nerds who used it and who wants to sell the nerds. And it turns out that nerds can be quite lucrative. But at the time that wasn't the thought. I don't think you could necessarily break it down into a formula of how to like galvanize a movement like this.

But for those who are interested in following your footsteps that have an idea or a plan and they're interested in executing it to become not just a policy but a movement and a lifestyle. How do you think that you'd approach it like step by step in this generation? I mean, this generation is so different. And the things that this generation has to contend with, it's harder because now everybody kind of like lives in this attention economy.

And so you have to be saying things that are like polarizing or aggressive or like, here's how I do this in my two steps or something, you know. And the way that I found success was by not pursuing success, was by defining a way that I wanted to work that aligned with how my guts feel and that didn't make me puke. And that's not always economically viable. And because I grew up with an unknown source of privilege that allowed me to pursue things without needing to worry too much about.

And I'm not saying that we were like rich or anything. It wasn't about the money. It was about like an approach to solving problems where I could be irreverent and stupid, frankly, and to not know things. But then by not knowing things, be willing to ask questions to then fundamentally reconsider how does the solution or idea that has been there for a long time make sense or not make sense in the era of the Internet?

How does the Internet change the basic calculations or the economics around this? That allowed me the space to then explore solutions that other people might not have been able to do because they needed to figure out how to make money, how to make the stock price go up, all these other considerations that actually lead to short-termism. And that's not what I was interested in. So, I mean, I guess in terms of a framework, like decide what you actually want to do and whether or not you're trying to solve for making money or whether you want to solve for affecting and changing culture because they require two different attitudes.

And if you don't have that clear, you're probably not going to succeed at it. So excited to welcome this extremely distinguished guest, ecosystem builder, and head of community in San Francisco, Christopher Floyd. He runs one of my favorite organizations in San Francisco, Founders Bay, along with Marianne Becker. And here to talk to us a little bit about all the amazing things and how you guys can be involved in person through different conferences, events, and get connected.

Christopher, so can you tell us a little bit more? First of all, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and I love what you're doing. Founders Bay, it's awesome. So we're based in San Francisco. We're a community of getting close to 80,000 members. That's huge, guys. You have to be a part of it. Yes, you have to be a part of it. So we're based in San Francisco, but our members are spread across the country, across the globe.

But we have a very high concentration of folks that are based here in the city. We do events constantly. We do large events, you know, 2,000 plus people. We also do smaller events. Basically, what we're trying to do is connect founders, investors, operators, and even just tech enthusiasts to each other. Give them an avenue to share ideas, collaborate, and kind of expand their networks. At founderspay.com. Thank you.

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What's your experience? Do you think you can explain for the viewers that are just getting to know what open generative internet is? Yeah. Open source? Yeah. So these are two different concepts, but they're related. So open source is a kind of methodology or, I mean, it's many things. It's like a community. It's a methodology. It's a set of practices for developing software where you share your work openly and you adopt a kind of a license, which is a legal agreement that specifies how people can use your work and for what purpose.

I'll give you an example of one of the licenses. There's a license called Apache, which comes from a very old server software, which actually runs most of the internet, actually. And the Apache license allows anybody who has the source code to use it. They just can't call downstream products or commercial products by the Apache name. And so essentially it's kind of a license that protects trademark while allowing other people to build whatever kind of products they want on top of that.

Now, the goal of putting your source code out there in open source is to allow for other people, one, to just inspect it to see how the thing runs. And then if they use that software, then they have greater assurance that it does what it says it does as opposed to like spying on you or something. But it also is intended to allow people to create what's called a fork or to split off a version of it so you can hack on it and kind of make some changes and change it to whatever you want to do.

And if it makes sense and if those changes would benefit the entire community, then there's a way to essentially take your changes and push them back upstream. And so that's the whole game of open source. The reason why it connects to the idea of a generative internet is because generativity is a characteristic of systems or processes that allow for unknown outcomes to occur once the thing exists. Now, that's very abstract and very strange, but nature is very generative.

You know, if, for example, you imagine a tree is growing up and then somebody decides to like put their like brick fence along the tree and the tree continues to grow, nature is generative in that it has ways to adapt to stresses in nature or trauma in nature to adapt to those adverse conditions. In a similar way, the internet is generative because of the way that it was originally designed to withstand atomic bombs.

The idea was that rather than centralizing infrastructure, you know, in one place, let's say all the internet connections would go through that one place. Well, if that one hub was bombed, then the entire internet goes out. And so the internet was designed to be decentralized so that if any one of the major hubs, I mean, it's quite bleak and dystopic, but that's why the internet does what it does, was such that if there was a bomb in any major city, the internet could route around that damage.

Just like neural tissues, essentially, I think. And anyway, so as a result, when you design these systems to allow people to reinterpret the purpose or to adapt your innovation or technology to other purposes that you didn't intend for, that's generative. Because it sort of allows for unanticipated outcomes without having to go back to a central authority to get permission to change it or to use it. So a lot of the things that I've worked on, whether it was the hashtag or whether it was the bar camp community or co-working,

were designed as these behavioral technologies or concepts that people could take and adapt to their local environment and make work with whatever resources they might have had. And so the idea was to create things that was like a concept or a practice or a set of ideas or values that can be applied. It's almost like when you're trying to glue two things together, you kind of need to scrape the surface first to create kind of an adhesive bond.

In a similar way, these generative ideas kind of allow you to take the core concept and then to layer it on top of whatever it is you've built and then create a seam or a connection between those things. So the way in which I kind of imagine that is like the bar camp event model is very basic. The idea is that anybody who shows up at a bar camp is a participant. They're not just like a passive receiver. And so they have to contribute by either hosting a conversation or a session or whatever it might be.

But you can't just like show up and take. You have to be a creator or a builder as well. And so that means that you can run these events kind of anywhere and in any topic. And so these events have like they are under the rubric of something called open space. And so once you have like a venue or an environment, people can just kind of like self-organize and talk about whatever they want to talk about. That works super, super well, even if you have like two rooms or like 20 rooms.

And so that's generative in that way. So essentially the idea is just to try to like build in that level of flexibility as opposed to overfitting to some well-known or familiar context that makes sense to you, but might not generalize to the broader ecosystem. Definitely. I think that you are someone who's always been ahead of their time. A lot of the things that you propose are things that as a community we didn't even know that we wanted or needed yet.

And I'm curious to learn a little bit more about what are the trends or things that you're excited about. Yeah. You know, it's a blessing and a curse to live in the future. Sometimes it's earlier in my life it meant that I was a very abstract thinker that would worry about these things that were like years off. And most people would be like, whatever, man, like this isn't a big deal. Like why are you so worried about it?

I'd be like, but it's going to happen. And then be like, yeah, whatever. I think over time I've learned to become more present in the moment and recognize like where people are at and then to create more or perhaps reduce the intensity or to dial down my urgency to arrive at that future state. It turns out that you kind of have to create this upward circle or cycle that allows people to personalize or to relate to whatever the future is that you're seeing or describing.

And then to like ratchet up kind of like one ladder rung at a time as opposed to like flying straight to the top, which is kind of how my brain works. And so to give you an example of that, I became very enamored with and excited with conversational AI and conversational technology in 2016, 2017. And that was because, you know, the way in which technology exists isn't predefined or pre-described in any, you know, like, you know, Bible or tome or some rule book or something that says technology has to look this way.

More often, we develop some kind of scientific method that allows us to either generalize or mass produce some innovation that allows many people to access it. And then we figure out new uses or functions for it. And, you know, Marshall McLuhan, you know, who's a great media theorist, observed, actually, was it him? It was him. I observed that a lot of new media formats tend to absorb the previous medium's content because people are figuring out what to do with it.

And so you kind of like take the thing that was there before, like newspapers, and then you turn them into blogs. But then eventually blogs become their own way of expressing voice and expressing authorship. And then they start to weave in multimedia or then video embeds. And they start to have their own characteristics that are unique and deviate from the previous forms. So in a similar way, it occurred to me that a lot of the ways in which we were interacting with social technology in the late 90s, like through AOL Instant Messenger, was a very natural way for people to interact with technology.

You know, just using, you know, words and conversation. But that the technology that existed in prior to 2016 was too slow, too brittle, too arduous, too clunky to use in a conversational way. We had the starting of kind of like little like conversational agents, but they were really brittle and they were very formulaic. And so you invariably, I mean, if you tried to like use Siri or something, you know, it would like fall apart because it was designed in a way that tried to map all possible conversations, which of course is not possible because language itself is generative.

Right. So we needed to come to a platform or a structure that would allow for infinite expressivity while still arriving at concepts. And it wasn't until we produced the transformer paper that allowed us to start to think differently about understanding, I guess, like language and how language functions. So in 2016, it seemed to me that the future of software would become more human and that we would want to be having conversations with our software and that the universal interface would be more similar to the way.

I mean, why do we call it an interface? It's because we have faces and we interact through them and we express so much through our faces and through our words that it's a nonviolent way to recruit other people, other humans that share our language or share our values. And so it's this amazing adaptation where we can literally be sitting here for like an hour talking back and forth using like phonemes and audio to change or affect the other person without cutting them up into small pieces or without like using violence or other force, which is how nature tends to resolve like conflict.

And so the fact that we can use these ideas means that the body can stay safe and yet we can express and understand a great deal just through like verbal expression. And so the failure mode of computers is that computers have no empathy. They don't understand us. And so when we express frustration, it doesn't care. It's just math. And so like it is no sense for our emotional state or how we're feeling. And so the idea of conversational AI and conversational software was to propose a way of using technology that felt more human, where the technology started to lean towards us as opposed to requiring us to lean towards it, to minimize or minimize rather our expressive capacity to make up for the limitations of computers.

Right. However, as usual, we were early. And so we tried to create these bots. We tried to create conversational agents. We tried to make it possible for you to express what you wanted and have a robot go and do things for you. But the computers, even then, one, weren't powerful enough. And two, we hadn't developed the LOM. And the LOM is amazing because what it does, essentially it creates kind of an Alan Wattsian grid of or map of all concepts in mathematical space.

And, you know, it's sort of like if you go to a, like, arcade or something where they have those quarter machines, it's like pachinko or something, where you, like, put a quarter in the top and it sort of, like, goes down and goes down until, like, and then it gets to the bottom and it pushes all the quarters off and maybe you win some money. And I think most often you get that also is based on the challenge of connecting technology innovation with culture that reverberates itself and repairs itself and is designed as a kind of, you know, memory system to perpetuate certain ideas.

Whereas technology sort of, like, cuts across and, you know, slices back and forth in a way that distorts culture and causes confusion and then causes people to replicate against some of those, like, status-seeking games or popularity contests that, you know, fucked me up in high school. So that's the context in which this technology arrives. And we also have to be thinking about how do we heal and adapt culture to this new, very powerful technological era that we're entering into.

And so I ended up at Google because I believed that the future of the web should be social. It should reflect people, not just documents and files, and that we needed a way to represent, to some degree, like humans in the system. And that was kind of the early era of social media. And unfortunately, or perhaps necessarily, we kind of went through, I would say, like the last 10 to 15 years, we created shopping malls of social context.

And social, you know, context in the shopping malls was commercially viable but somewhat dehumanizing and led to polarization because of the ways in which math was applied to understand how people were using these systems and to get them to use them more often and more frequently. And so now we have these great AIs, these algorithms that are really good at manipulating people to like stay engaged, whether or not someone wants to or not.

And that wasn't the goal. That wasn't the intention. But given capitalism and the stock market, those things had their own objectives and their own objective functions. And so when you push these things together, it's like the mathification of human sociality. And so it's like, of course, that's where we ended up. So my time at Google was meant to actually create more decentralization and more choice and more opportunity for people to build their own little social contexts and enclaves across the Internet and to not necessarily centralize in one place.

Because as it turns out, like when you have extreme context collapse, it becomes very hard for people to understand each other because the amount of context and information that needs to be conveyed to the other person efficiently is far greater than the bandwidth that our tiny little tweet-sized channels can offer. And so you might be someone from Montana with a very specific set of ideas about how important weatherizing your house and car is versus talking to someone in Florida that has very different concerns and understanding about the weather.

And so you end up in the same place and you're arguing for rules that determine how you guys should spend your resources. But you have completely different contexts. And so that's just the weather. That's just like a normal thing. Let's talk about like culture. Let's talk about education. Let's talk about sports. And now you've brought all these people into the same place and they presume that their way of life is being threatened by others who are saying different things and they don't have enough time or space to sort of sit with and understand each other person that is completely different and yet valid experience of life and reality.

And so that's kind of why where we are now requires that social media disaggregate and allow for people to go back to places that are geographically co-located and that you can have a coherent conversation. And so that's what we're trying to do. But it was because they didn't serve the core function of what a social network or platform is and should be. And I'm not saying that like Meta has figured that out, but they certainly follow human behavior much more so than like Google has ever been able to.

So anyway, so yeah, so I ended up working on digital art after that because I needed kind of like a palate cleanser. And then I went to Uber for a little while and I worked on their platform because I was excited about the idea of like cities becoming like the internet and vice versa, as ridiculous as that might sound. And then, yeah, and then I ended up co-founding a startup that was trying to build a conversational AI that would help address the problem that I just described.

Meaning that with the startup was called Mali, the idea was to have a conversational AI that would allow people to be able to explore some of these topics without shame or fear. You know, if it's one thing to like talk to a therapist and like go through that process, but therapy isn't always available to everybody. And so it seemed to me that AI would be a way to scale having this style of conversation that's like open, non-judgmental, and allowed people to even explore some darker thoughts or experiences that maybe they had in a way that would be actually like supportive of their healing.

And, you know, for many reasons that didn't work out at the time, but we're kind of back around to a place where that could be possible. Right. And so when I think about what's happening both now and into the future, one, I think these conversational agents are going to become very normal participants, like in most people's lives, in very subtle ways and also very overt ways. You know, I don't know what humanity was like before they took on pets, but there was probably a period where we didn't have pets and then we did have pets.

And in a similar way, there's a period where we don't have agents living in our lives. And now we do. And whether that's, you know, Alexa and Siri and like all those other kind of like, you know, speaker shaped agents, or more likely agents that interact with us through like our phones and through heads up displays or other contexts. One, those agents will learn about us. They will remember lots of things about us. They will have cultural context.

They will be able to teach us. They'll have infinite patience to listen. I mean, the people who are designing these things are the people that also designed Instagram and Facebook and TikTok. And so you have to think about how addictive those platforms are just as like a modern, faster version of television. And then imagine friendship and companionship and intimacy. And those are the resources and experiences that people will seek through these agents.

And so it raises an existential question to some degree about humans and how can humans evolve to meet that moment to become more compelling than these, you know, artificial entities. And it isn't necessarily that they have to like, you know, be competitive. Yeah. But certainly a younger generation will grow up with the ability to go on Discord and talk to any number of these, you know, bots or go to character AI or, you know, have any number of AI girlfriends or boyfriends.

And one, I mean, like it sort of presumes that people will become more non-monogamous in their relationships because you will have agents that you have some kind of intimate connection with. Right. No matter what that is. And it will be non-exclusive to your human connections. And the question is, of the judgment or shame that the humans like push on you versus the agents, which is more compelling to you and which one causes you to change your behavior or to reject one versus the other.

And I don't think it has to be mutually exclusive. But if human society doesn't recognize that that's where we're heading, I think a lot of people are going to find it very painful and difficult to convince their kids to not have those relationships. I think you covered a lot of great topics there. I think that a lot of the viewers who are listening who are fans of you have been inspired by your evangelism and by your unique point of view that you've developed on the Internet.

For those who are still trying to find their voice, whether they be creating blogs, content, podcasts, do you have any advice on how to find a distinct perspective and point of view? Yeah, it's a great question. And I want to be both like careful and mindful of one saying this is how to do it because there's not really like one way to do it. However, the thought that comes to mind is that the best way to learn like the great masters from an artistic perspective is to emulate their form and their style.

Until you can kind of at least get a grasp on what they were doing and how they saw things and how they express themselves through their form. And so, you know, when I was starting out doing web design, one of the things that I would do is I would like take screenshots of websites and I would figure out how to recreate them myself. You know, like HTML and things like that. How does that apply to like defining your voice or finding your voice?

Well, one technique is to adopt and play with and sort of play act, taking on the voice of somebody else or taking someone's blog post and then writing a rebuttal to it. None of these things have to be published publicly. The goal is simply to try to occupy someone else's form and space to try out their style and see how do they achieve something that is compelling or interesting to you? And can you get to something that's similar to it?

And once you've kind of like tried on all these different outfits and different forms and styles, is there a you that sort of comes through when you kind of like pull back and think about like what felt the most clear to you? It's also the case where like consistency and just like iteration and repetition allows you to become more comfortable and familiar with expressing truth. Truth is a tone that resonates in a way where there's no distortion.

And that is a very intuitive gut level experience. In the beginning, I can imagine that I was emulating lots of other forms and lots of other people's ideas and taking them on and then like espousing them and then getting those arrows and then being like, I don't really care about this. Like, why am I getting all, you know, annoyed or irritated by this thing? This isn't my issue. This is my problem. And so the more that I was able to learn to listen more to myself, which again is a felt self sense, not just like logic.

I think the clearer I became and the easier it was for me to express ideas. I noticed actually recently I wrote this long piece about the Arc browser. And, you know, Arc is this really interesting new approach to, you know, designing internet browsers. And given my background and experience with browsers, I was really excited to see kind of a new practice and concept brought to life. But the concept of Arc came out right before the LLM launched.

And as a result, that changed everything. And so I essentially was anticipating that the Arc that we had, many of us in the community, had come to really appreciate and enjoy, you know, its time on the internet was limited, I suppose. And it took me like a month and a half to like write this thing. And it started out really angry. And I was like really disappointed and really like sometimes that anger, sometimes that frustration, if I can channel it and like push it towards something and lead to like really good things.

And in this case, it wasn't happening. Like I was, I started to realize that that anger was like for me, it was either about my own frustrations with myself or with my own failures or where I hadn't stuck around long enough building the things that I thought should be built because I didn't believe in them because other people didn't believe in them. Right. As opposed to recognizing that I should have stuck with it.

And like I'm thinking specifically, there was a browser that I started in 2005 called Flock. And the idea was to build people into the browser, which now, of course, is part of the Mac operating system. And so they've kind of done it, but it took them 20 years. And so seeing ARC, I was also seeing myself and I wasn't resolving this antipathy that I was feeling about how I'd given up. And so I think once I was able to recognize that and let that go, then I could speak more clearly about what I thought was going to happen based on the facts of the future, as opposed to the subjective experience of the pain of the present.

And then I think what I produced was much clearer and could resonate further than starting with anger, which was a subjective experience, which I could tell that no one else would really resonate with because I was sitting on 20 years of frustration. I don't know if that makes sense, but like it took a long time to get to the place where my voice could come through that piece by recognizing like what was in that piece that was for me versus like what is it that I wanted to share more broadly.

Right, right. But I think that anger can be or that frustration can be such a powerful and useful emotion. Oh, it used to be like the primary thing that would cause me to write. Yeah. Because like I would see something on the internet and I wouldn't like it. You'd be passionate. And I'd be like passionate. And that galvanized, I think, a lot of people. Yeah. But that's also part of the polarization that required me at the time, I think, to minimize the other or to like be less generous with the other, which then allows people to come behind me because I'm like attacking them and there's force, but then undermines my own self-interest by becoming the thing that I most think I don't want to become.

Hmm. Hmm. And so it's, you know, like it's both like getting older and getting more boring, but also getting more sophisticated and more understanding are kind of things that are happening simultaneously. Yeah. And for those who stick around to like understand and sit with like the deeper points, there's like real value there and you can get much further, but it's less fun because you're not, you know, like you watch every action movie and then at some point there's like, oh, let's go like run like with the guns or with the knives or with like the things and bash the other side.

And you're like, that's a human way of expressing very shallow ideas. Yeah. Whereas like the hard part is governing, the hard part is actually being inclusive. The hard part is like not forcing violence upon the other in order to achieve the thing that you want for yourself or for the people that you represent. And I feel like I'm an old man now talking about these things, but like it's sort of, I think given my experience up to now, arriving at a place of generosity is different than where I started from.

And perhaps integrating the experience of having privilege requires then that I transmute that into a kind of generosity. And I would consider you to be an extremely generous and altruistic person because a lot of the movements that you've galvanized that have become lifestyles and mainstream ways that we live and operate in the world and on the internet, you haven't monetized. True. True. And you could have easily monetized.

But in many times it's more of a public service and a crusade that hasn't been easy. And so I think it's such a lovely perspective and such a lovely world that we get to live in with your ideas in it. Do you ever have any regret or think about, oh, I should have gotten a slice from it? You know, I get asked that question like periodically, especially people are like, oh, you could have like monetized the hashtag. And I'm like, like maybe.

Like I have many friends who are like millionaires and billionaires now because they did monetize their thing, you know, and good for them. Like it's awesome. You guys like succeeded at capitalism, you know, in the 21st century. Good job. You played, you gamed the system. Yeah. Yeah. And like, again, like I don't, I don't mean to be so, you know, like pejorative about it. That's not, that's not really the energy that I'm thinking of.

I think the more that I've been thinking about this, the more that in the next 20 years, what I imagine will probably happen, although this is both, again, naive and idiotic to like say and to think. But it's that we will eventually arrive at some sort of post-scarcity kind of experience. Yeah. In which case being supportive and generative and like willing to share as a first priority. Yeah. As opposed to, you know, withhold or extract creates more of the world that I want to be in.

Yeah. Like when I find people and I discover them and they're making things that are awesome and I want to like support them in that and like help them in that. And that to me is like creating, like I am then a tuning fork that helps them resonate with themselves. Right. Themselves. Right. And that to me is more generative and more generous and that creates more, I don't want to say like harmony, but certainly more experiences that feel really good and like soul fulfilling than trying to destroy or, you know, keep other people down or smaller.

Right. And I think that that's been like the arc of my life overall, even though it's like been very meandery. And so I have to then lean into faith in abundance happening and contributing some nudges towards that direction and to believe in it if I want other people to also move in that direction. Like the hashtag was not going to happen unless I started using the hashtag and looking like an idiot for some period of time to where people were like, oh, I guess, you know, what he's doing over there kind of makes sense.

You know, look, look at this dumb kid over there in the corner playing with his trucks. Like, oh, what an idiot. What an outcast. Let's join him. Actually, that looks like fun. Like, let's go do that. Yeah. I guess it feels to me that I have to really lean into faith within like myself of what I feel. And that what I feel about the future may or may not come to pass, but I have to act as though it will. And that's the only way for me to manifest that outcome.

It's so powerful. And I think that that is why you are almost so even more effective. It's this drive is so altruistic and there is a greater purpose to democratizing access. It's so much easier to like to just be authentic. I think that's why it's like buzzy. Yeah. But it's so hard to do and to find. And because you, like you can't, literally like the definition of being authentic is like you can't fake it. Right, right.

And so if you are faking anything or you're pretending to be something else while trying to be true to yourself, you're actually missing the point. You can be something else. You can play to be something else. And you can try at it. Like I was saying, you become like, you know, a master of the other master's work. Yeah. But at the end of the day, at some point, you have to come into harmony within yourself and what the truth of your existence is and means and move towards that.

And then other people may or may not join you in that. But your purpose first is to actually like get good with yourself and sitting with yourself regardless of what is happening around you. Yeah. And then I think that's where you become the most powerful. Absolutely. I think that you have been a pioneer in the tech world in terms of galvanizing movements. Whether it's open source, co-working, hashtags, and what you're working on right now in AI.

Do you think that there are some pearls of wisdom you can share in terms of taking an idea and then actioning it into a movement and staying consistent with that? I think that in the age when things are instant gratification and it's you try, you apply, that's it, it's over. How to sustain that sort of momentum when you really believe in something. Two things come to mind. One is that storytelling is essential. Storytelling is weaving threads into a structure that needs to be both like dynamic and adaptive but also inclusive of like experiences and new information.

We are living in one of the most interesting and confusing times ever where humanity is doing so many of the regressive things that it's been doing for thousands of years in terms of wars and bombing and scarcity mindsets and like this religion is better than that religion and so on. While at the same time having access to all the information within humanity except that we don't even know what the questions are to ask of it.

Right. And so to me storytelling is the way by which you include people in what is going on as opposed to allowing them just to be sort of like passive observer and to recognize that everything that they do and all the choices that they make actually do have an impact. And the other thing I think is that progress is not linear. It's, I mean, there have been so many times in my career and my life when I thought that whatever my contributions were, were kind of over and done.

You know, after I left my startup, you know, and left my relationship and left my community and left like everything had basically come to an end. And I just thought, you know, like I've had my time and my run in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and I'm just going to become like a nomad adrift on the ocean somewhere and like, you know, become a sailor or something. Like I really thought it was done. And I suppose either San Francisco wasn't done with me or I still had unfinished work, but eventually I came back and then all this AI stuff happened.

And, you know, and so when I thought that, you know, it's sort of like Eminem, you know, it's like, how am I going to top what my name is? Like, you know, like how do you top like the hashtag? And yet the more that I've anchored into myself, the easier is it for me to show up in different spaces and just be who and what I am. The more that I see people respond in a way that's like positive and self-empowering. And if I had not been able to weather those down moments, you know, that were really tough, obviously you and I wouldn't be having this conversation right now.

So I think it's both of those things, right? So the storytelling is the way that you knit and fold in the meaning of the challenging experiences that you have and you make sense of it. And then understanding that these stories will have ebbs and flows and that's like a normal aspect of it. So, yeah, I guess like the movement happens gradually and over time and it doesn't happen just because you say like, let's move in this direction.

You really have to kind of like weave it together and incorporate and bring people with you. And I think that's the way to build lasting and sustaining change. How do you convince people into your mission? Because, you know, you're not here just on a megaphone shouting your ideas through the Internet or into the void. You really bring community and you're a community builder and as a team work on something, whether it's, you know, Sisyphus, you know, going up the hill or there are people who are more receptive.

I think there's two ways. Yeah. One, I don't convince anybody of anything. So I think that's a losing battle. One, I do the thing first myself. And so I'm just like, I'm learning and I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to show you what I don't know. When it was with like the hashtag, I just had to do it. And for like weeks and months, I was like using hashtags wrong as I was trying to figure out how to use them. Right.

You know, and then with like co-working, we took an open source model to our business and we published all of our finances and we were losing money. Like it was a bad business. It was like terrible. And yet we were like, but the goal is to like teach you how to just take the first step. Right. And to like open your doors and create a little space in the back of your office that allows people to drop in. And gradually through the internet, which is the new thing here, we all create a network of global spaces.

Right. Where you can go to any city in the world. Right. And there will be a co-working space where you can find other people who are of the internet. Yeah. And connect with them. And that's the thing that we want. And so it was like putting it all out there so people could see it and they could decide, do I want to go on this journey with you or not? So that was part of it. And then the other piece, which has always been, I think, an implicit value of mine.

I don't know where it came from necessarily, but it's to be useful to other people. And so when I encounter people, my questions to them, like I want to know what they're doing and what they're trying to achieve or what question they're stuck on. Right. To see if maybe I have, you know, something available that could like help them with it. And maybe I am the embodiment of like open source, like where I'm just trying to solve problems in the real world.

Yeah. And I'm not a code repository, but I've seen a lot of things and I consume a lot of information. And if I can digest it in a way that can support and help other people, then that can help them keep going down their path and I can help them get unstuck. And so that's the other aspect. So it's not about convincing. It's like, let me try to support your success. Yeah. And if it's relevant, then maybe there's something that I'm trying to achieve that aligns with what you're trying to do.

And if those things are in alignment, then let's walk together for a little while and make a little bit of progress on both of our paths. Right. And that's, I think, how I've approached it. And I think you're walking the walk. Yeah. Yeah. Again, like being in the corner, you know, the sandbox. You're showing and you're living and you're the living embodiment of what you believe in. Sure. And in terms of what you're working on next and what's exciting for you in the future.

I mean, I think it's this. Maybe I've come to the point where, I mean, technology is still relevant. Yeah. But contextualizing it, I think, is even more important. Yeah. I look at the backlash against social media. Yeah. And feel some complicitness or complicity in bringing it to the world. Yeah. You know, not just me. There's a lot of people involved and there's a lot of, like, you know, economic machinery that was part of it.

But there's a lot of what we've talked about that isn't part of that story. Where there's less awareness of the individual agency that individuals have and how they use these technologies and integrate them into their lives that can have positive or negative impacts on themselves personally or on their relationships or on their kids or on their communities. And so being more aware of which questions to ask at each stage, I think, is probably the thing that I want to help to contribute to next.

Mm-hmm.

So it's a diversity ecosystem. The two things I really admire about you are you ask those level two questions on the why someone is doing something. Mm-hmm. And then you meet them where they are and you predict their needs to offer things to help them. And that's such an amazing quality of yours. I have one more question, which is, what do you think you want your legacy to be? It's funny. Sometimes, like, people will ask me, like, you know, so what do you want to put on your tombstone?

It's like, you know, hashtag dead.

It's true, I guess. Hashtag RIP. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

It's really interesting. You know, I don't think real change happens. I mean, change does happen, of course, at, like, large societal, cultural levels. But real felt change, change that is seen, happens much more at the level of, like, the individual. And it may seem or sound kind of trite, but I think the legacy that I'm most interested in right now is, like, supporting the people that are closest and nearest. To me.

And helping them to see the choices that are in front of them. It's one thing to, you know, build technology that has certain permission architecture, meaning that you're allowed to do some things and not other things. And then if that product becomes, like, mainstream or widely adopted, then everyone who uses it has to use the software more or less in the same way that the designers intended it to be used. There's a lot less choice in that.

It's a type of restrictive freedom. Whereas, you know, for example, right now I'm raising, like, a 14 and 20-year-old, you know, with my partner, Joe, and helping the kids see and think about social media and technology and then to relate to it the way that they relate to it. You know, it's kind of like, I imagine that my relationship with the internet and with technology might be similar to the way that my parents experienced television.

You know, I came up taking television for granted. It was just part of the environment. It was not magical. It was just there. And, like, you know, you put me in front of it on a weekend when I was, like, seven. And I'd watch, you know, cartoons. And I was like, okay. Kids growing up today, like, see the iPad and see the internet and see social media and see TikTok. And they take it for granted. Like, it's always been there.

And me and my generation, we represent kind of a bridge between the era, like, before the internet and after the internet. And the choices that were made to create it and construct it in a way that either removes sovereignty and freedom or adds sovereignty and freedom. And I think that it's important for me to understand whether or not those questions are even relevant to, like, the next generation. Do they even care?

Or do they just want to be entertained? And what level of participation do they want to have? Does it feel good or does it feel bad? And so the legacy at this point is more about can I understand the nature of the changes that we brought and wrought on society and culture at the individual level so that within 20 years there's a story and a narrative that allows people to make better decisions than the ones that we might have made?

And I don't know if that's possible. And I don't know if it's, like, toiling in irrelevance, but that seems really important to work on, you know? Like, because I don't have a time machine to go back in time to, like, work with myself. So I only have a time machine that goes forward that allows me to work on the future. And so therefore I have to be future-oriented but also humble enough to realize how little I know and yet how much I have to share between now and then.

Amazing. This was such a fantastic conversation. You dropped so many pearls of voice stuff. And it was great to get to know your story a little bit better on a deeper level. And thank you so much for being so open and vulnerable and generous. Yeah, well, thank you for indulging me deeply. That's amazing. Everybody, we had the pleasure of speaking with an icon and tech evangelist, founder of the hashtag. So excited to get a chance to get into your story and for you guys to all hear.

Thank you so much. Thanks. Great.