Tim Kendall: Former Facebook Exec, Former President of Pinterest, and Former Wrestler

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I'm Geicawasaki and this is Remarkable People. This episode's guest is the remarkable Tim Kendall. In my humble opinion, Tim's greatest claim to fame is probably that he worked as an intern for me. That said, since then Tim has held somewhat important positions at other companies. You may have heard of Facebook and Pinterest, and he was much more than an intern at both. He is the person who helped Facebook figure out how to make money. His title was Director of Monetization. This was way before the current monetization strategy of enabling foreign governments to influence American elections. He was the Head of Product and then President of Pinterest, where he made the company Focus. Lately he has appeared in the film the Social Dilemma, which is something you should watch on Netflix if you're concerned about the future of the world, your kids included. He is currently the president of Moment, a company that fosters physical, emotional and social health by improving people's relationships with their phones. He is one of the most qualified people in the world to analyze addiction to social media. He has an undergraduate and MBA degree from Stanford. As an undergraduate, he was on the wrestling team. For those of you who don't know much about collegiate wrestling, let's just say that it attracts people who are extremely gritty and intelligent and dedicated. In this sport, there are few externalities or outside factors to blame. It's you versus your opponent on a mat, and wrestlers know that there's no mlb, NFL, NBA lucrative contract at the end, but nevertheless, they persist. In other words, wrestlers are the kind of people you'd want on your side. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. Yes, you got that right. Remarkable is sponsored by Remarkable. I have version two in my hot little hands and it's so good. A very impressive upgrade. Here's how I use it. 1. Taking notes while I'm interviewing a podcast guest. 2. Taking notes while being briefed about a speaking gig.

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Drafting the structure of keynote speeches. 4. Storing manuals for all the gizmos that I buy. 5, Roughing out drawings for things like surfboards, surfboard sheds. 6, Wrapping my head around complex ideas with diagrams and flowcharts. This is a remarkably well thought out product. It doesn't try to be all things to all people, but it takes notes better than anything I've used. Check out the recent reviews of the latest version. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is remarkable people. And now here's the remarkable former intern, Tim Kendall. I think I'm two for two with interns because it's you and Mark Benioff.

I didn't know that. Wow. Oh, dude, I got a way for you to be two for two.

No, I think I'm two for two already. So was that a good start for your career? And you can honestly tell me, no.

I think it was. I think it was terrific. I think it was terrific. It's funny, a friend of mine, one of my closest friends, said to me recently, in the past couple weeks, and I think it's around the film and maybe just around how we're trying to position Moment, the company that I run. He said, it really makes sense that you started your career with. With Guy, because you really are a pretty talented marketer.

So did he mean that in the sense of so you can cover guys weaknesses?

He did not. He did not. He just. And I think that's. I don't know, that's my view on the, you know, the first job out of. Out of. Out of college and look, you may not. Well, I know you remember that at Garage, we did. We were really the first money into Pandora. Yep. And we were. You may not recall that you and I were supposed to go meet with a company called Confinity on a Friday afternoon, and we both decided not to do it. And that was PayPal.

So are you saying that I could have been Peter Thiel?

I think you could have been Peter Thiel's chairman or something.

Now you've sent me on a downward spiral. There's another 2 billion that I missed.

All right, so, you know, I do always remember the story that you tell about Yahoo calling you for the CEO job. You're saying I live in Seacliffe now? Sunnyvale is kind of far to drive. And this is like early days, right? This was Mike Moritz who called you like day early.

Yes. You're killing me, Tim.

I'm sorry. It's funny, I think 10 years ago in my career I would have said, you drive as far as you have to win and get the biggest Job you can. And now, I don't know, I don't feel that way anymore. I think I actually really admire the decision.

Two billion here, two billion there, Tim. It adds up. How many kids do you have?

I have two. I've got a four year old girl and a six year old girl.

Okay, we're going to come back to that. So my first tough question for you. Are you ready?

Yeah.

Why isn't garage listed in your LinkedIn profile?

I don't. You know what I noticed recently, by the way? I've been on these. I'll get to the explanation. I'll answer your question directly. I noticed that, you know, I go on these panels sometimes either associated with the film, the social dilemma or associated with device addiction. And I've noticed that, you know, I think one of the power moves now is to take your education off your bio.

Oh, really?

I don't know. I go on these panels and no one has their education. I'm the only. I feel like I'm the chump. That's. I have a college degree and it seems like everyone else has said, look, that's, that's, that's less interesting. And by the way, that was 20 years ago. I don't remember exactly what's on my bio. I don't think I have a bunch of early things in my career in my bio.

Okay, okay.

You know, if it makes you sad, it's not worth it. It's not worth taking it off.

Okay, I'll get over it. I'll get over it. Okay, so next question. You worked at Facebook and Pinterest. What's the Tim Kendall golden touch? How do you figure out what to go work for as a startup? Because I mean, you're two for two there.

Yeah, my wife is three for three. So you really shouldn't talk to me. You should talk to her about the magic touch. But yes, she. This will be a one minute digression, but she went to Loud Cloud out of college as a recruiter and then in 2001 joined the iPod recruiting team with Tony Fadal. There's literally a picture of 30 guys who are all the engineers on the ipod and one woman at a go kart track celebrating the launch of the ipod. And the girl in the corner is my wife. And then Scott Forstall recruited her to run software recruiting for the iPhone. And then in 2007 she went to Facebook, which is where I met her, and she ran engineering recruiting. And then when Pinterest was five people, well, before I got there, Ben Silverman Called my wife and said, I need you to come run HR recruiter early and an HR person early. So she started a Pinterest a few months before me. And then she was having so much fun. She said, maybe you should come in and talk to Ben and Evan for a while. So I guess. I guess I would say, I think my wife is the one who has the magic touch. But I would say in the Facebook case, I don't know. You know, we were just talking about Garage Guy. When we were at Garage, we looked at so many companies and we really did see some really good companies, became real outsized winners. Pandora being one of them, PayPal being one of them. And then we saw a lot of clowns. Right. Oh, God. And I say that because I do think that I learned a gradient there that absolutely helped inform later on almost an intuitive sense for what. What could get big fast and be sustainably important and what couldn't.

So all success goes back to Garage, basically.

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Remember visiting you once at Pinterest, Okay. And you were president and you were wearing a shirt that said Focus. So tell us the story of that shirt and that sort of perspective back then.

Yeah, well, the story is that all these companies have these sprints that they get into these thematic sort of lockdowns. And we were in one. And the theme of that sprint, and I think Ben was the one who named it, this theme was Focus. And it was about doing fewer things, but doing them better than many things. Let's do few things well. And so that was Focus was the theme. And for my team at the time, I thought, well, let's all wear for the next couple weeks, let's wear this. Let's wear Focus on our shirts. And so we did that. And then a gentleman on the team, a guy named Matt Crystal, and I started this back and forth of this escalating, well, I'm going to wear mine for two months. Well, I'm going to wear mine for three months. And then it got out of hand and I said, well, I'm going to wear it until we have 100 million users. I think at the time maybe we had 50 or something like that. And then every time I got in front of the company, I got into this bad habit of saying, I'm going to wear it till we get to 100 million in revenue. And, you know, that was going to be another year and a half or two years. So I ended up really wearing it for the rest of the time I was there. I think I wore the same shirt that said focus on it. I mean, I had about 40 of them, so not the exact same shirt. Okay.

I was, I was going to ask.

The natural follow up. No different shirts, but the same saying. I think I wore it for four plus years every day.

So it was your black hoodie.

It was my black hoodie. I think when you're a leader at a company and the company starts to get bigger, you have fewer and fewer things at your disposal to help influence people. And I was Inspired. Mark in 2009, which if you go back in history, that was a pretty pivotal year for Facebook on a bunch of different fronts. And he sort of knew that at the beginning of the year. And I remember the first week in January, came to work and he said, this is a serious year. And so I'm going to wear a tie every day. And it was this really, I don't know what I learned was this really powerful way to send a non verbal signal and a powerful way to lead that didn't involve talking or doing actually. Right. You just wear something. So that's the focus shirt story. So.

So now, of course, the $64 million follow up question is, are you wearing a shirt that says delete?

Delete? Maybe I should. I haven't figured out what, what to do. Maybe I should wear a shirt that just says less. Because I think that when it comes to the phone and on. Honestly, when it comes to a lot of things in, in our world and in our life, I think we often think the answer is more. And the older I get, I think a lot of times the answer is less.

So send me a less shirt if you make one.

I will, I will.

Now that we're starting on that path, some questions about social media. So starting off, do you think that the Russian interference truly changed the outcome of the 2016 election?

I do. I think there's a real chance that interference that influence and misleading information on Facebook now could impact the election in four weeks, eight weeks.

Do you think it's because it's changing people's minds or getting conservatives to go out and vote? Who wouldn't have?

This is just my intuition. I haven't studied the data on this and the meddling that took place in 2016 in any detail, but I think it's the latter. Right. I think it's about voter suppression and voter motivation.

Do you think that Facebook, Twitter, social media platforms are kind of a science experiment that went wrong and now we can't put the genie back in the bottle?

I think it's a reasonable explanation. I think it's a reasonable interpretation. It's pretty generous in the sense. Well, I think that's maybe a fair characterization for the first couple years. And then I just think the data and the research over the last several years in terms of the impact of divisive language, hate speech, addiction, conspiracy theories, all this stuff and the way it propagates on these platforms, I just think that characterizing it as a science experiment gone wrong sort of lets them off the hook. And maybe it was okay to let them off the hook the first couple years, but they're all big kids now. They're adults, and they're fully grown companies, and they need to be accountable for the impact that they have on the world.

You recently compared the techniques that Facebook used to the techniques of big tobacco. Is it really that heinous?

I'm glad you brought this up, because I think that comparison can certainly get framed in a bunch of different ways. And you make a bunch of assumptions about the intentions of leadership at Facebook and these other companies. I wasn't alive in the 40s or the 30s, but I suspect that tobacco companies were going to tobacco farmers and saying, you know what? We would really like that leaf to have a little more nicotine than it does today. And I'm not sure that either person, the farmer or the big tobacco person at that point had sort of mal intent. Right? They were just trying to give someone a product that they liked and make it work better. What I struggle with with Facebook and others is that, look, photo tagging is kind of a brilliant feature, right? You find out the minute that a photo gets uploaded that, oh, wow, guys, in this photo. And you go back to the site and you look at it. And then, by the way, you spend way more time than simply just looking at that photo. I think that at a certain point, the features that these companies have built and the algorithms that they've put in place start to really prey on human weakness. And what I mean by that is that people enter a realm of compulsion and a realm of making choices in the short term that are not in their best interests in the medium and long term. And in fact, they regret them in the medium and long term. And to put it in really simple terms, I get on Instagram and I'm just trying to check one thing, and then an hour goes by, and then I wake up, and by the way, I regret it, and I'm pissed at myself. That's the definition of addiction. Addiction, literally the definition is making the inability to make good short Term choices or choices in the short term that align with your objectives in the medium and long term.

Are you saying that social media companies are worse than Big Tobacco in malevolent intent?

No, I'm not. I'm not saying that.

You're not saying they're better?

I think in 10 or 20 years, we'll see. I have really high confidence that in 10 years, they're not going to be shown to be any more upstanding than Big Sugar. And what I mean by that is I think the food industry, I think Big Food and Big Sugar is responsible for the fact that one in three people are diabetic or have pre diabetic symptoms. Okay. And that may be a more digestible analogy because we all have to eat food. Food is a necessity. We all have to connect socially. Our social lives are a necessity. But we don't all need to eat refined sugar, and we certainly don't need to eat the amount of refined sugar that we do as a country today. And in fact, it's making us, a lot of us really sick. And so that's my contention is that when you have a business model that's predicated on getting more attention to do better financially, and you have an algorithm that sort of has unlimited. An unlimited ability to figure out ways to do that, I think even people with the best intentions are going to end up making a service that's addictive.

Do you think it's a fair statement to say that Facebook and social media platforms truly profit from hate?

They do.

You do.

Wow. Now, Guy, I want to be really clear. I don't believe that there is somebody in the control room saying, crank up hate. But there is an algorithm that is figuring out in an unsupervised way what content is going to get Guy to spend a little bit more time on the service today than he did yesterday. We have a candidate set of things. We can show him that Porsche video that he liked.

Oh, you know me so well.

And he loved that a few days ago. But we could also show him this incendiary piece of content. And we know that. We know we have an expected time spent associated with this piece of content. And it's. It's fringe content. Look, it's not inciting violence directly. It's an opinion. It may be untruthful, but the algorithm tells us that we're going to get Guy to spend a few extra minutes today versus yesterday. And so it serves it to you. Now, in that case, nobody said, hey, show more hate content. It's good for business. But that's what happened. And I would analogize it to the election in 2016. Facebook didn't say tilt the election. In fact, even after the election, when Mark was asked, he thought it was ridiculous that anyone would assert that Facebook had any influence on the election. And then a few months pass, it gets investigated, and, in fact, they probably swayed the election. And what it highlights is not. Is not that Mark has ill intent. I think what it highlights is that he doesn't understand in sufficient detail how his service works.

Do you think he's had the breakthrough now that he does understand how his service works and what the downside of it is?

I think it's certainly possible that he's caught up. But my fear is that he may still be behind.

How could he be behind? I mean, he's not dumb. And if 20 million people tell you you're drunk, you catch a cab.

I understand that. I think it's a really tricky spot where. And you hear them citing free speech in the First Amendment a lot. I think it's a really slippery slope. And Twitter's on it now. And I'm not sure Facebook feels like they want to get on it where they start to contextualize and decide what content is okay and what content is not.

Now, typically when you use the term slippery slope, it's a negative sort of metaphor. So you're saying that Twitter is on a negative slippery slope. That's going to mean they have to control more and more, and it's going to become a bigger and bigger problem.

It's just going to be harder and harder for them. And I think they're going to get. They're going to get criticized, and they're going to be unpopular, certainly with Republicans. Right. They're already getting accused of this because they're labeling Trump's tweets. But then the Republicans are claiming, well, you're not. You're not labeling any of these Democrats tweets that are inciting violence. So they start to get in this arbitrary role that I think Facebook is trying to stay out of.

So what's your recommendation for Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg?

Facebook used to have. We used to spend lots of time criticizing Facebook for privacy issues. Data was leaking everywhere. People were pissed. The FTC was threatening to regulate and fine, and they finally fined them in 2019. Give them a $5 billion fine, and they imposed a whole bunch of penalties if they didn't comply with X, Y, and Z. We don't seem to have any privacy issues anymore. We've got a lot, we're certainly hearing about a lot fewer. And my perspective is that I think that if some rules are put in place, accountability is put in place and some penalties are put in place, they're tremendously talented, there's tremendous technology know how within all those companies. And I just think that if they're forced to, they can direct the resources and solve some of these problems. I think they can start by drawing some lines around what is hate speech? We've already taken off speech that incites violence, but what is hate speech? Start to define it, draw the gradient, and then start either contextualizing it or removing it. The last thing I'd say is I think the advertising business model, and if you saw the movie, the Social Dilemma, I think it makes the point very eloquently. That's probably the root cause of the issue because the incentives. When you are in the advertising business and you have a company as large as Facebook and then you have this incredible algorithmic AI at your disposal, it's very difficult, I believe, to really solve these issues because your incentives just are, they're, they're not there. Because my objective function is to get Guy to spend more time on the service tomorrow. It's, I don't have a societal goodness objective function. I don't have a harm minimization function. All I have is a time maximization function.

And do you think that that's how the system should work? That companies have social responsibility?

No, I think they have to have social responsibility. Your other intern, Marc Benioff, I think is starting to shout louder about this stakeholder capitalism idea, which is, hey, we can't just look after ourselves and advertisers. If Twitter, Facebook, I got a user here, I got a user here that has mental well being, I have to look after and I got a user here that lives in a society that needs to function.

But I would say using Big Tobacco and Big Sugar as examples, you could make the case that at some point Big Sugar will wake up and say, we're getting all Americans sick and they're dying, so we have to stop this because our customers are dying. But that does not seem to have entered into their awareness. So why should this enter into the awareness of social media?

I guess that's why my view is that we can't wait for the executives to wake up. I think that we as people in this country can look at our own behavior and understand exactly what's happening and decide and make different individual choices, make different family choices. And then I think the government is going to need to step in.

Would you say that for the random person listening to this podcast, therefore, an actionable item is to vote with your feet and close your Facebook account. And if enough people do that, Facebook will say, huh, this is really hurting us. We have got to stop hate speech. We've got to stop misogyny, racism, whatever. Do you think it'll reach that point?

What I would say is that doesn't feel realistic to ask people to do that, given just the dominance of our. The preponderance of our life is on these social networks. I do think what you can do with your feet is use it a lot less. That's what we advocate at moment, is just look, taking a really close look at how much you use these services and saying, do I need to be on these things? Ten years ago, social networks, the average time spent in the US was 12 minutes a day, and now it's two and a half hours. We did okay in 2010 when we were spending 12 minutes a day on it. And I don't think we were in the dark on things. And so is it realistic to go back to that? No. But I do think that people need to have a reckoning with their own usage. I think in terms of families, I talk to a lot of parents with kids, and I would say the majority of them complain to me about their kids, but don't want to have the hard conversation about their own usage.

So we come back to the T shirt, which is less, right?

Yeah, that's right. But I would tell you that the majority of parents don't want to. They just want their kid to use it less. I saw these stats the other day that are just fascinating to me in terms of, like, parental modeling to kids. So 80% of parents think it's critical that kids wear bike helmets.

I can see where this is going. Yeah.

Percent do it themselves, the adults. So how many kids wear bike helmets? 40%. And it's the same with life jackets, life jackets. Almost 90% of parents say it's critical. 40% do it. 60% of kids. And it's interesting. You know, we talked about Big Sugar. I've talked to a lot of endocrinologists about how you get a family with a child who has diabetes to eat differently. And they say the only sustainable model is you got to get the whole family to shift. You can't just change the kid's diet. It will always regress.

So you have advocated for regulation, penalties, etc. But. And I'm going to show you a deep prejudice here. So When I watch Politicians in Action, it seems to me that these 70 year old people who barely know how to use a computer are Talking to these 19 year old interns who got the internship because their mother or father donated a lot of money and what they call you into Congress and they're going to ask you a question like Mark Zuckerberg, can I take my data with me? And Mark says yes, you can already do that. But they don't realize the nuance of, I mean, you can take some of your data but not what you really mean in the sense of like a cell phone number, transport ability.

I guess I go back to privacy in the sense that I think some group needs to develop. And look, I, it resonates with me that lawmakers are not up to speed on this. I, you, you probably didn't see this, but I testified in front of a congressional committee yesterday.

That's why I asked. Yes.

And you know, I wasn't blown away by. Depth or expertise and you know, I watched the same hearings that you watched with Mark and I think we, I think all of us were alarmed. So I guess I'm hopeful. Look, I think there are a lot of smart people in this, in technology who are starting to spend more and more of their time advocating and working with the government and giving their own ideas and thoughts and frameworks. I mean, when I talk about this stuff, I really do feel out of my depth because what do I know about this stuff? And it's probably fair criticism if someone were to say that I just can't really see how the companies will do it themselves. So then, then who's left? Well, it's their constituents, it's advertisers and it's users. And I do think if either group got serious and banded together, they would have some leverage. But I don't, you know, the user thing is probably unrealistic, given again how addictive this is. And then. So that sort of leaves us with regulation or penalties.

What about advertisers? A few weeks ago these advertisers said we're stopping advertising because of the hate. Do you think that moved the needle at all?

That was in July. So we won't know, I guess, right, until Q3. I bet it didn't move it at all. And I also think that's sort of an empty threat. Right. A month is just what it shows you, I think, is that they probably couldn't afford to do any more than a month because they're so dependent on the ecosystem. On the Facebook ecosystem, you saw influencers and celebs do this for. They got really bold. They did it for 24 hours. They're really serious about standing up for justice.

I, I have to admit, I love when these influencers and famous people, most of whom I've not heard of because I'm too old and they say, I'm closing my Twitter account, it's okay. You know, that's like a gnat hitting a windshield, right? Or like, who cares?

Right? And they open, they typically open it back up a week later.

Yeah, yeah. You're one of the more qualified people in the world to answer this question. So Mark Zuckerberg at some point was made into this, this hero that, yeah, he started this great company, blah, blah, blah. And now he's being demonized. So what is the true Mark Zuckerberg? Is he, at this point? You know, I think many people would say this guy is immoral or maybe amoral. It's all about the money. He doesn't care about the welfare of democracy. Can you give us some insights into Mark Zuckerberg?

I don't believe he's immoral or amoral. I don't think it's about the money for him. I actually think it is about positive change in the world. Look, there's a friend of mine framed it pretty well. There's bias on both sides. They have this positive bias internally, which is that they believe that their tool is net good. And so they see the goodness, they latch onto those stories and then they dismiss the negatives as either distortions or corner cases. So they live in sort of this, their own reality distortion field. And then I think outside of the company, we're probably guilty of cherry picking all the negative and then imposing this motive on them. Right? That they're, well, look at this, they must be bad people. And I think the explanation is that they think they're a force for good, net good. They think that they're working on these problems as quickly as they can. And I think they think that people like me are probably being sensational and exaggerating the consequences. And I guess my view is that I think where they are negligent is in taking an objective, balanced look at the impact and understanding how their technology possibly in an unsupervised way, created that impact. Okay, so, and I'm not trying to just be kind and say, oh, they don't have bad intentions. I think it's a, it's a very, it's a tricky place that they're in. But I don't, I never got the sense When I was there and I just, I don't believe that they're, you know, in an ivory tower, twisting their mustaches, saying oh, we're just messing with the world to make more money for ourselves. I don't think that's what's happening. And, and I don't know this, but I think that probably is the case at this Big Food and at Big Tobacco for a while. Right. There was certainly a point at which that flipped and it was really hard to ignore the data. And I think we're gonna get there with social media just in terms of its impact on society, but also guy its impact on mental health. Right now we've got a lot of correlation, right? We've got 10 to 14 year old girls, suicide rate was three decades ago, was on the decline. It's tripled since 2010 and incidents of self harm in that same cohort, girls 10 to 14 has quintupled. So we've got a lot of correlation happening and I think that the causal links are going to start to come out and then I think that there will be a point in time where it's like, look, are you going to, are you going to continue to be on board with this being a force for good? Are you going to have a reckoning?

Do you have any regrets about helping make Facebook successful?

I don't. Yes, I have one regret. I wish I knew then what I know now about the advertising business model paired with just an incredibly powerful and addictive AI driven algorithm. I wish, I just wish sort of I understood the ramifications of what's now being called the attention economy, which is that we really are mining. Reed Hastings said on an earnings call, I think a year or two ago, he said he was being asked about competition for Netflix. You're worried about Disney plus? You worried about. No, I'm not worried. The things that we compete with are sleep and people's relationships. The point is that I wish I had known the degree to which an advertising driven service like this was going to erode pretty fundamental aspects of a stable society, but also really, really impact people's lives at an individual level in terms of just their, their health and well being.

And if you had known back then what you know now, what would you have done differently?

When I was hired, it wasn't a, it wasn't a given that the, that advertising was the business model. The job was. Go figure out what it is. If I'd known then what I know now, I would have pushed myself and I would have pushed others to explore Explore other possibilities. I mean, I think the problem with advertising is it's just, it's so misaligned over time with the, with the well being of the user.

It's going to be interesting the reaction to your statements. Now some people are going to say, oh, he, what a great person, he's come to realize what he did, etc, etc. And another group of people are going to say, what a hypocrite. I mean, he's the guy who invented the drug and now he's saying the drug has done bad things. But look at me, I'm a billionaire. Do you get that kind of reaction?

Yeah, and I think it's fair. I think that criticism is fair. But look, all I can control is today forward. I've put more than $10 million into Moment, which is really working right now. We don't charge anyone for anything right now. We're just giving away services and tools that help people work against these forces. And I'm dedicating a considerable amount of time to try to advocate and increase awareness. And so I sort of think that's all I can do at this point. But I completely understand the criticism. Most of the money that I made was from Pinterest. It wasn't from Facebook.

Yeah, how can that be?

It just all depends on when you sell, right?

Yeah, I guess so, duh. Look at me, I'm the dumbass who left Apple twice. So yeah, what am I gonna say?

Yeah, well, I told my wife when I think it was in 2008, I told her to sell all of her Apple. So she likes to remind me, remind me of that.

Facebook and Twitter, they just get hammered, right, because of all this. But nobody ever says Pinterest is a bad company. And arguably Pinterest is serving up ads. And Pinterest may know even better what I'm into because they see the, the Mercedes board, they see the Porsche board, they see the surfing board. I mean that's really, that's really guy actively curating interests, which arguably is much better data than what Facebook or Twitter have. So how come nobody ever criticizes Pinterest?

I don't see Pinterest as a social network. It's really an individualized service. And almost, almost. You know, it's a search engine, but it's also a recommendation engine. I see it as much more akin to Amazon. And you don't really. I mean, it doesn't sell products, but certainly it's a pathway and it's a gateway to buying all sorts of things. Yeah, I just don't see it as a social network and I think that's probably why it isn't as readily criticized.

I don't think there are too many political discussions on Pinterest. That's what they're true.

Right. They have not had to combat basically because the nature of the service there isn't. They don't have the misinformation challenges, the conspiracy theory challenges, the hate speech. I mean, that's not to say none of that's there. When I think about big, you know, I'm trying to use this term big social because I think that's what it is. I think it's Twitter and I think it's YouTube and I think it's Facebook and it's Instagram. I don't think that if we're being surgical, I don't think Google search is a, is a big one on that list. It's not social and I don't think it's. It's creating the same kind of harm. But YouTube's wreaking havoc.

Do you use any social media at all right now?

And how I do, I try to limit my usage to. And this is what I tell people. I don't think it's practical and maybe not optimal to get off of it. I just think it's about imposing limits and trying to stick with those and trying to see the impact that it has on your sort of emotional well being and how you feel every day. So I use Facebook from time to time. I'm a pretty regular Instagram user mostly because the interest that I have. I like surfing. I'm really interested in foiling. So foil board surfing and windsurf foil. I'm sure you're finding this with surfing. I'm sure you're finding this with cars. It's just incredible lifestyle content on Instagram. And so I would be missing a big swath of an area that I'm really interested in if I just deleted it. I love the food analogy. I don't think if you want to eat healthier in your life, I don't think that means swearing off dessert. I just think it means being a little more reasoned and balanced about when you have dessert and how much dessert you have.

What? As an aside, now that you mentioned foiling, I happen to know Jeff Clark fairly well.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah, so. And he's big into foiling now. So if you ever want to meet Jeff Clark. Yeah, just let me know. He's a really interesting guy.

Yeah, I'd love to.

All right. All right, I'll make That happen for you?

I'm surprised you haven't tried the. The E foiling, because that's kind of the entree.

What is e foiling?

So it's a. It's a surfboard with a foil underneath.

Yeah.

But then an electric propeller.

Oh, Tim. The day I need an electric propeller is the day I give up surfing. I mean, that is.

But it's kind of like a guy. Think about it as training wheels. You're not going to use it forever, but you have to figure out the balance point of the foil so that then you can give me 30 seconds. The reason you want to learn how to surf foil is that you can surf on any wave. A crumbly wave with a surf foil is amazing. You could go to a shitty beach break and have a great time. Surf foiling.

I. I don't want to be that Asian on a surf foil with an electric motor that. No, it's just a bad confluence.

You only use the motor. You only use the motor to learn how to balance on the foil, and then you get rid of the motor.

Yeah. People will be calling me Guy Lenny.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

What is your social media policy for your family? Although your daughters are pretty young, but.

Yeah, yeah.

What happens when they're 12 and says, mom and Dad, I want iPhone 21?

I think it's going to be hard. Look, I think the families that I admire on this issue, they have an active dialogue with each other. The parents are just as serious about their usage and looking at their usage as the kids, and they set up norms and boundaries, you know, including. Look, we're not on our phones from 5pm to 7pm at all, right? We're focused on each other. We're focused on the family unit, and we don't bring our phones into our bedrooms at all. That's one example. The other thing is that there's a great initiative called Wait till eight, which is sort of this codified agreement. Wait till eighth grade.

Yeah. Oh, eighth grade. I thought you meant eight years old. Okay, eighth grade. Okay.

Now it's. It ends up being kind of 14. Wait till 8th to give them a smartphone through which they could access all these services. I think that makes a lot of sense. And. But it. Look, it's. It's not trivial. You have to, you know, when your kid is in first grade through sixth grade or whatever, you got to get all the parents to agree because otherwise it doesn't. It doesn't work unless you can get the parents of all the kids in your class in that cohort to agree it typically falls apart because one or two or three will be on it and then that's, that's the dominoes fall.

Now let's say that, and I'm not saying this is true of my kids, but let's say your kids are primarily watching funny videos. Skateboard accidents, kook slams, funny tick tocks and all that. Their idea of using their phones is to watch funny YouTube. Tick tock. Is that a bad use? What specific aspect of social media do you think is bad for kids?

I think it's on a, on a very wide continuum and I would never say something, I probably would say conspiracy theories and hate speech or bad. But other than that, I probably wouldn't label anything as good or bad. What, what I tell myself about my own usage is what's the outcome? What's the psychological outcome? What's the experience? My experience. And by the way, I've done what you're describing on TikTok's incredible. God, it's just, it's, it's riveting and I've gotten sucked in. But I, I know the impact is I don't feel good at the end of a session and I, I have to believe, and there is some evidence on this that it impacts my attention span that like bursty 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 11 seconds like that. I think cognitively cannot be good. There's a study and you could, I could share it with you and you could put it in the show notes that came out in the last year that looked at social media usage and then looked at brain size.

Oh no.

And gray matter in particular around the amygdala. So in the, in, in the lower part of the animal brain. And there is a really clear correlation. So what the researchers assert is that we literally, we are changing our brain as we use these sorts of things. I recommend people get up to speed and read about the impact and be self aware. Right. Understand what you think the impact is. Like, you know, we learn with alcohol as an example that it's pretty fun when you have a lot of drinks in the moment. But, but we know we've, we've gone through the feedback loop and so now we make better choices.

Tell us about moment and why people, people should want to use it.

Yeah, yeah. So moment is really, it's a broad mandate. I mean we are trying to get, we're trying to help people transform their health and the two focus areas right now are their emotional health and actually their social health. So their emotional health is really done through this and it's about helping people look at their relationship with their phone and then change it to be one that's much more deliberate and conscious. Because when people do that, they're happier, they're healthier, and their relationships get better. And then on the social health side, we're trying to really imagine what would a social network look like that wasn't about maximizing time spent and wasn't about having hundreds of friends, but instead was about, how can we help Guy stay in better touch with his five closest friends? How can we help Guy really invest in those relationships? Because when Guy's on his deathbed, I mean, you know this from the writing you've done. One of the biggest regrets is that I didn't invest enough in my closest relationships. And so I actually fundamentally believe in the next few years I think they're going to be services. And it's tricky, right? How do you build this service in a way that's not weird? It's sort of like dating services in a sense, which is that I think people thought dating services were super weird 15 years ago. And now if you're single, you're crazy if you're not on them. I think there will be services that help you and I really look after our closest relationships and make sure that we're investing in those and sustaining those.

So, Tim, believe it or not, I'm on the board of a company that does exactly that. And the name of the company is Privy, P R I V Y. And it is a double opt in, sort of the best of Instagram, iMessages and Slack. So if you took the best of Slack, iMessages and Instagram made it double opt in. And so the way I work is I have a group called the Kawasaki Family. There's only seven people in it. I had to invite them, they had to accept. There's no advertising, there's no algorithm. Everybody sees everything. And the business model has to become everybody pays three bucks a month because there will be no advertising. It's threaded. You can thread the responses. You can also delete something you sent and you can also edit something you sent, which blows away imessages.

Yeah.

So I'll send you some information about that. Okay, so now absolute last question is Stanford is eliminating 11 varsity sports, including wrestling. So I guess the $70 billion endowment won't allow them to support these secondary sports. So why don't you endow the wrestling program?

I have been in touch with them and I am going to support them. And I've supported them before, you know, this because you're. You're philanthropic. You got. You got to kind of stack rank things. You have to make value judgments. And believe me, I'd love to see Stanford men's wrestling back or I'd like it to stay. And I think there's a path that may even include Stanford women's wrestling, which I think would be wonderful. But we're big donors to Ashton Kutcher's company, Thor, which is focused on software that really helps sex trafficking or helps prevent sex trafficking. These are really. These are victims that have no voice. And it's an epidemic problem in the United States and internationally. And I think Stanford men's wrestling is great, but when you start to become philanthropic, you actually have to make value judgments between those. Those two things. And so we're going to support Stanford wrestling. But if I wanted to endow Stanford wrestling, it would mean I couldn't help nearly as much programs like Thor and others.

That's a great answer. You know who asked me to ask you that, right?

Joff. I can feel his. I can feel his frustration with me early.

After meeting you and Joff, I came to the conclusion that.

If you're a.

Basketball player or a football player at the D1 level, you're thinking about the pro contract and fame and fortune and all that. But if you're a D1 wrestler, you're not doing it for the endorsements and the money and all that. Is there a more challenging sport? I mean, it truly is person against person, man against man, woman against woman. And so I. One algorithm could be you invest in wrestlers because they have really worked their ass off.

Yeah.

And not for the instant glory.

Right.

So wrestlers.

Right. Eric Schmidt, I took a course from him in business school, and one of the things that he said, the group that he really likes to hire from, which is bigger than the wrestling cohort, is the military, because he just finds that it's just a terrific combination of discipline, motivation, smarts. I kind of like that. And I've worked with a number of people. Don Fall is the one who I work with closest at both Facebook and Pinterest. And he was. He was in the elite, elite special Forces. And yeah, he was such a talent.

I like that theory. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in a sense, people, there's obviously mixed feelings about the military, but I don't know about you, I'm glad. I live in a country when I see someone in a military uniform, I'm not scared. I mean, I feel more at ease and more secure and more safe when I see a Uniform, not less.

Yeah, yeah, I. I'm with you. And I feel grateful to them because I do think it's a real. It's a noble. It's a noble sacrifice. Yep. Yeah.

And I especially love the 500 who signed the letter a couple days ago. So, Tim, I mean, this has been fantastic. Thank you very much. And I'm going to check your LinkedIn profile, so you better add garage.

All right, I'll get on. I have one favor to ask you.

God, done.

What I love. I have Remarkable One. Yeah, I've ordered Remarkable Two.

You want me to expedite your order?

Yeah, I don't get mine till, like, November.

I'll take care of that, too.

I'm lusting after the latest one, like, right now.

I'll show you. I am working off a Remarkable Two, and as I go down through my list of questions, I mark them off and I write notes. So, yeah.

So much I don't know who they are. You obviously know them because you help them, but that's.

Oh, God, they're gonna freaking die when they hear this on the podcast. So, Tim, thank you very much. I hope to continue to have contact with you. And when you make that less T shirt, I need an xl.

We'll do it.

I hope you enjoyed this interview with Tim Kendall as much as I enjoyed conducting it. I loved his insights into big social like Big Sugar. And his comments about Mark Zuckerberg are insights that few people could provide. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. I'd like to thank Geoff Baum, the other wrestler from Stanford that I know. He brought Tim Kendall to our company and he also helped me come up with questions for this interview. I'd also like to thank Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff C. Who helped me wrestle with the issues of creating a podcast. Remember, wash your hands, wear a mask, don't go into crowded social conditions, and listen to Dr. Tony Fauci. Mahalo and aloha. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. This is remarkable people.