Tim Kendall

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, 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.
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, 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 college wrestling, let's just say that it attracts people who are extremely gritty, 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. 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. One: taking notes while I'm interviewing a podcast guest. Two: taking notes while being briefed about a speaking gig. Three: drafting the structure of keynote speeches. Four: storing manuals for all the gizmos that I buy. Five: roughing out drawings or things like surfboards, surfboard sheds. Six: 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.

Guy Kawasaki:
I think I'm two for two at interns because it's you and Marc Benioff.
Tim Kendall:
I know that! Wow! Dude, I got to wait for you to be two for two.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, I think I'm two for two already. So was that a good start for your career? You can honestly tell me no.
Tim Kendall:
I think it was terrific. It's funny, 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 Guy because you really are a pretty talented marketer."
Guy Kawasaki:
So did he mean that in the sense of you can cover Guy's weaknesses?
Tim Kendall:
He did not. He did not. I think that's, I don't know, that's my view on the first job out of college. Look, you may not... Well, I know you remember that a Garage we did. We were really the first money into Pandora.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yep, yeah, we were.
Tim Kendall:
You may not recall that you and I were supposed to go meet with a company called Infinity on a Friday afternoon, and we both decided not to do it, and that was PayPal.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you saying that I could have been Peter Thiel?
Tim Kendall:
I think you could have been Peter Thiel's care man or something.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now you've set me on a downward spiral. There's another $2 billion that I missed. All right.
Tim Kendall:
I do always remember the story that you tell about it Yahoo calling you for the CEO position. You're saying, "Oh, I'd live in Sea Cliff now. Sunnyvale's far to drive." And this is early days. This was Mike Moritz, who called you, about a day early.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes. You're killing me, Tim.
Tim Kendall:
I'm sorry. It's funny. I think ten years ago in my career, I would have said, "You drive as far as you have to to win and get the biggest job you can." Now, I know I don't feel that way anymore. I actually really admire that decision.
Guy Kawasaki:
$2 billion here, $2 billion there, Tim, it adds up. How many kids do you have?
Tim Kendall:
I have two. I've got a four-year-old girl and a six-year-old girl.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, we're going to come back to that. So my first tough question for you, are you ready?
Tim Kendall:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why isn’t grads listed in your LinkedIn Profile?
Tim Kendall:
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 I go on these panels sometimes either associated with the film The Social Dilemma or associated with device addiction, and I've noticed that I think one of the power moves now is to take your education off your bio.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, really?
Tim Kendall:
I don't know. I go on these panels and no one has... I feel like I'm the chump that's, “I have a college degree?!” It seems like everyone else has said, "Look, that's less interesting."
By the way, that was twenty years ago. I don't remember exactly what on my bio, but don't think I have a bunch of early things in my career in my bio.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Tim Kendall:
If it makes you sad, it's not worth it. It's not worth it at all.
Guy Kawasaki:
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, I mean, you're two for two there.
Tim Kendall:
Yeah, my wife is three for three so you really shouldn't talk to me. You should talk to her about the magic touch.
This will be a one minute digression, but she went to LoudCloud out of college as a recruiter. Then, in 2001, joined the iPod recruiting team with Tony Fidel.
There's literally a picture of thirty guys who were all the engineers in 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. Then Scott Forstall recruited her to run software recruiting for the iPhone. Then in 2007, she went to Facebook, which is where I met her and she ran engineering recruiting.
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." They had to hire a recruiter early and an HR person early. So she started 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 would say I think my wife is the one who has the magic touch.
I would say, in the Facebook case, I don't know. We were just talking about Garage. Guy, when we were at Garage, we looked at so many companies. We really did see some really good companies. We became real outsized winners, Pandora being one of them, Paypal being one of them, and then we saw a lot of clowns.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, God.
Tim Kendall:
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 could get big fast and be sustainably important and what couldn't.
Guy Kawasaki:
So all success goes back to Garage, basically?
Tim Kendall:
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
I remember visiting you once at Pinterest, and you were president and you were wearing a shirt that said "Focus". So tell us the story of that shirt and that perspective back then.
Tim Kendall:
Yeah. Well, the story is that all these companies have these sprints that they get into, these thematic lock downs, and we were in one. The theme of that sprint, and I think Ben was the one who named it, this theme was focus. It was about doing fewer things, but doing it better than many things. Let's do a few things well. So the focus was the theme.
For my team at the time, I thought, “Well, let's all wear, for the next couple of weeks, let's wear focus on our shirts.” So we did that, and then a gentleman on the team, a guy named Matt Crystal and I started this back and forth, this escalating “Well, I'm going wear mine for two months. Well, I'm going to wear mine for three months.”
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 fifty or something like that. 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 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 – well, I had to have to had about 40 of them, so not the exact same shirt.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I was going to ask.
Tim Kendall:
The natural follow-up is: no different shirts, but the same saying. I think I wore it for four plus years every day.
Guy Kawasaki:
So it was your black hoodie.
Tim Kendall:
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. I was inspired by 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 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."
It was this really, I don't know… what I learned was this really powerful way to send a nonverbal signal and a powerful way to lead that didn't involve talking or doing, actually. You didn’t actually have to do something, you’d just wear something. So that's the focus shirt story.
Guy Kawasaki:
So now, of course, the $64 million follow up question is, are you wearing a shirt that says ‘delete’?
Tim Kendall:
Delete! Maybe I should. I haven't figured out what to do. Maybe I should wear a shirt that just says ‘less.’
I think that when it comes to the phone, and honestly, when it comes to a lot of things 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
So send me a less shirt if you make one, okay?
Tim Kendall:
I will.
Guy Kawasaki:
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?
Tim Kendall:
I do. I think there's a real chance that interference could influence, and misleading information on Facebook now could impact the election in four weeks, eight weeks.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think it's because it's changing people's minds or getting conservatives to go out and vote to wouldn't have?
Tim Kendall:
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. I think it's about voter suppression and voter motivation.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that Facebook, Twitter, social media platforms are a science experiment that went wrong, and now we can't put the genie back in the bottle?
Tim Kendall:
I think it's a reasonable explanation. I think it's a reasonable interpretation. It's pretty generous in the sense that... Well, I think that's maybe a fair characterization for the first couple years.
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 and it propagates on these platforms, I just think that characterizing it as a scientific experiment gone wrong lets them off the hook. Maybe it was okay to let them off the hook the first couple of years, but they're all big kids now, they're adults. They're fully grown companies, and they need to be accountable for the impact that they have on the world.
Guy Kawasaki:
You recently compared the techniques that Facebook used to the techniques of big tobacco. Is it really that heinous?
Tim Kendall:
I'm glad you brought this up because I think that comparison can certainly get framed in a bunch of different ways. You make a bunch of assumptions about the intentions of leadership at Facebook and these other companies.
I wasn't alive in the Forties or the Thirties, 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." I'm not sure that either person, the farmer, or the big tobacco person at that point had mal intent. They were just trying to give someone a product that they liked and make it work better.
What I struggle with with Facebook and with others is that, look, photo tagging is a brilliant feature, right? You find out the minute that a photo gets uploaded that, “Oh, wow, Guy’s in that 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. 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. In fact, they regret them in the medium and long term.
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. By the way, I regret it and I'm pissed at myself. That's the definition of addiction. Addiction, literally, the definition is the inability to make good short term choices or choices in the short term, middle line with your objectives in the medium and long term.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you saying that social media companies are worse than big tobacco in malevolent intent?
Tim Kendall:
No, I'm not saying that.
Guy Kawasaki:
You’re not saying they're better.
Tim Kendall:
I think in ten or twenty years we'll see… I have really high confidence that in ten years they're not going to be shown to be any more upstanding than big sugar. What I mean by that is, I think big food and big sugar is responsible for the fact that one in three people are diabetic or have pre-diabetic symptoms.
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. In fact, it's making us, a lot of us really sick.
That's my contention. When you have a business model that's predicated on getting more attention to do better financially and you have an algorithm that has 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think it's a fair statement to say that Facebook and social media platforms truly profit from hate?
Tim Kendall:
I do.
Guy Kawasaki:
You do? Wow.
Tim Kendall:
Now, Guy, I want to be really clear, I don't believe that there's 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, you know me so well.
Tim Kendall:
He loved that a few days ago, but we could also show him this incendiary piece of content, and we know we have an expected time span associated with his piece of content, and its 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. 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. 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. Then a few months pass, it gets investigated, and in fact, they probably swayed the election.
What it highlights 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think he's had the breakthrough now that he does understand how his service works and what the downside of it is?
Tim Kendall:
I think it's certainly possible that he's caught up, but my fear is that he may still be behind.
Guy Kawasaki:
How can he be behind? I mean, he's not dump, and it's like if twenty million people tell you you're drunk, you catch a cab!
Tim Kendall:
I understand that. I think it's a really tricky spot, 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, typically, when you use the term slippery slope, it's a negative 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?
Tim Kendall:
It's just going to be harder and harder for them and I think they're going to get criticized and they're going to be pulled, they're going to be unpopular certainly with Republicans, right? They're already getting accused of this because they're labelling Trump's tweets, but then the republicans are claiming, "Well, you're not labelling 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
So what's your recommendation for Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg?
Tim Kendall:
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; Gave 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're certainly hearing about a lot fewer.
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 knowhow within all those companies.
I just think that if they're forced to, they can direct 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 picture 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, is very difficult, I believe to really solve these issues, because your incentives just… they're not there. “My objective function is to get Guy to spend more time on the service tomorrow. 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.”
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that that's how the system should work? That companies don't have social responsibility?
Tim Kendall:
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 on Twitter or Facebook. I’ve got a user here. I’ve 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."
Guy Kawasaki:
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." That does not seem to have entered into your awareness. So why should this enter into the awareness of social media?
Tim Kendall:
I guess that's where 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 make different individual choices, make different family choices, and then I think the government need to step in.
Guy Kawasaki:
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?
Tim Kendall:
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 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 twelve minutes a day, and now it's two and a half hours. We did okay in 2010, when we were spending twelve minutes a day on it. I don't think we were in the dark on things.
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 talked to a lot of parents with kids, and I would say the majority of them complained to me about their kids, but don't want to have the hard conversation about their own usage.
Guy Kawasaki:
So we come back to the T-shirt which is ‘less,’ right?
Tim Kendall:
Yeah. I would tell you that the majority of parents don't want to... They just want their kids to use it less. I saw these stats the other day that are just fascinating to me in terms of parental modeling to kids. So eighty percent of parents think it's critical that kids wear bike helmets.
Guy Kawasaki:
I can see where this is going, yeah.
Tim Kendall:
Only five percent do it themselves, the adults. So how many kids wear bike helmets? Forty percent. Life jackets? Almost ninety percent of parents say it's critical. Forty percent do it; Sixty percent of kids.
It's interesting we talked about big sugar. I've talked to a lot of endocrinologist about how you get a family with a child who has diabetes to eat differently, and they said, “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.”
Guy Kawasaki:
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 the seven-year-old people who barely know how to use a computer are talking to these nineteen-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 transportability.
Tim Kendall:
I guess I go back to privacy in the sense that I think some group needs to develop. It resonates with me that lawmakers are not up to speed on this. You probably didn't see us, but I testified in front of a congressional committee yesterday.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's why I asked, yes.
Tim Kendall:
I wasn't blown away by depth or expertise. I watched the same hearings that you watched with Mark, and I think all of us were alarmed. I guess I'm hopeful.
Look, I think there are a lot of smart people 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? That'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 who's left? Well, it's their constituents; its advertisers and its users. I do think if either group got serious and banded together, they would have some leverage, but the user thing is probably unrealistic given, again, how addictive this is, so that leaves us with regulation or penalties.
Guy Kawasaki:
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?
Tim Kendall:
That was in July, so we won't know, I guess, until Q3. I bet it didn't move it at all. I also think that it's an empty threat.
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 twenty-four hours. They're really serious about standing up for justice.
Guy Kawasaki:
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." Okay, get out. That's like a nat hitting a windshield. Like, "Who cares?"
Tim Kendall:
Right? And they typically open a backup a week later.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. You are one of the more qualified people in the world to answer this question. So Mark Zuckerberg, at some point, was made into this hero. He started this great company, blah, blah, and now he's being demonized. So what is the true Mark Zuckerberg?
At this point, and 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?
Tim Kendall:
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. They see the goodness, they latch on to those stories, and then they dismiss the negatives as either distortions or corner cases. So they live in their own reality distortion field.
I think outside of the company, we're probably guilty of cherry picking all the negative, and then imposing this motive on them: “Well, look at this! They must be bad people” 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.
I think they think that people like me are probably being sensational and exaggerating the consequences. 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.
I'm not trying to just be kind and say, "They don't have bad intentions." I think it's a tricky place that they're in, but I never got the sense when I was there, and I don't believe that they're in an ivory tower twisting their moustaches saying, "Oh, we're just messing with the world to make more money for ourselves." I don't think that's what's happening.
I don't know this, but I think that probably is the case at this big food and big tobacco for a while. There was certainly a point at which that flipped, and it was really hard to ignore the data. I think we're going to get there with social media just in terms of its impact on society, but also guides impact on mental health. Right now we got a lot of correlation.
We've got ten to fourteen-year-old girls suicide rate three decades ago was on the decline. It's tripled since 2010. Incidence of self-harm in that same cohort, girls ten to fourteen, has quintupled. So we've got a lot of correlation happening, and I think 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 continue to be on board with this being a force for good? Are you going to have a reckoning?"
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you have any regrets about helping make Facebook a success?
Tim Kendall:
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 understood the ramifications of what's now being called the attention economy, which is that we really are mining for people’s attention.
Reed Hastings set on an earnings call I think a year or two ago he said... He was being asked about competition for Netflix. “You worried about Disney Plus? You're 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 health and well-being.
Guy Kawasaki:
If you had known back then what you know now, what would you have done differently?
Tim Kendall:
When I was hired, it wasn't a given that the advertising was the business model. The job was to 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 other possibilities. I mean, I think the problem with advertising is it's just, it's so misaligned over time with the well-being of the user.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's going to be interesting the reaction to your statements now. Some people are going to say, "Oh, what a great person? He's come to realize what he did, et cetera, et cetera." 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?
Tim Kendall:
Yeah and I think that criticism is fair. Look, all I can control is today forward, I've put more than $10 million dollars 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.
I'm dedicating a considerable amount of time to try to advocate and increase awareness. I 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
How can that be?
Tim Kendall:
It just all depends on when you sell, right?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, so duh. Look at me, I'm the dumbass who left Apple twice. So what am I gonna say?
Tim Kendall:
Well, I told my wife when - I think it was in 2008, I told her to sell for Apple. So she likes to remind me of that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Facebook and Twitter, they just get hammered because of all this, but nobody ever says, “Pinterest is a bad company.” Arguably, Pinterest is serving up ads, and Pinterest may know even better what I'm into, because they see the Mercedes board, they see the Porsche board, they see the surfing board. I mean, 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?
Tim Kendall:
I don't see Pinterest as a social network. It's really an individualized service and almost, it's a search engine, but it's also 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't think there are too many political discussions on Pinterest, that's the thing.
Tim Kendall:
That too. They have not had to combat basically because the nature of the service. 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... 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 big one on that list. It's not social and I don't think it's creating the same kind of harm, but YouTube's wreaking havoc.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you use any social media at all right now and how?
Tim Kendall:
I do. I try to limit my usage too... 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 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 interests that I have. I like surfing. I'm really interested in foiling, so foil board surfing and winds surf foiling.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Tim Kendall:
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. 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. If you want to eat healthier in your life, I don't think that means swearing off dessert. I think it means being a little more reasoned and balanced about when you have dessert and how much dessert you have.
Guy Kawasaki:
As an aside, now that you mentioned foiling, I happen to know Jeff Clark fairly well.
Tim Kendall:
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, and he's big into foiling now. So if you ever want to meet Jeff Clark, just let me know. He's a really interesting guy.
Tim Kendall:
I'd love to.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right. I'll make that happen for you.
Tim Kendall:
I'm surprised you haven't tried the eFoiling, because that's the entree.
Guy Kawasaki:
What is eFoiling?
Tim Kendall:
It's a surfboard with a foil underneath, and then an electric propeller.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, Tim, the day I need an electric propeller is the day I give up surfing. I mean...
Tim Kendall:
It's like a guide. 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 thirty seconds. The reason you to learn how to surf foil is that you can surf on any wave. A crumbly wave with a surf foil is amazing. You can go to a shitty beach break and have a great time surf foiling.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't want to be that Asian on a surf foil with an electric motor. That is just a bad confluence of...
Tim Kendall:
I understand. You only use the motor to learn how to balance on the foil and then you get rid of the motor.
Guy Kawasaki:
People will be calling me Guy Lenny.
Tim Kendall:
Yeah, that's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
What is your social media policy for your family? Although your daughters are pretty young. What happens when they're twelve and say, "Mom and dad, I want iPhone Twenty-one."
Tim Kendall:
I think it's gonna 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 as about their usage and looking at their usage as the kids.
They set up norms and boundaries, including, "Look, we're not on our phones from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm at all. 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 Wight, which is this codified agreement, wait till eighth grade.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, eighth grade. I thought you meant eight years old. Okay, eighth grade, okay.
Tim Kendall:
Now it ends up being fourteen. Wait till Eight to give them a smartphone through which they could access all these services. I think that makes a lot of sense.
Look, it's not trivial. 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 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 the dominoes fall.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now let's say that, and I'm not saying this is true to my kids, but let's say your kids are primarily watching funny videos, skateboard accidents, Kook slams, funny Tik Toks and all that, their idea of using their phones is to watch funny YouTube Tik Tok - is that a bad use? What specific aspect of social media do you think is bad for kids?
Tim Kendall:
I think it's on a very wide continuum, and I would never say something's bad. 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 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... Tik Tok's incredible! God, it's riveting, and I've gotten sucked in, but I know the impact is, “I don't feel good at the end of a session,” and I have to believe, and there is some evidence on this, that it impacts my attention span, that bursty, five seconds, ten seconds, eleven seconds. That, I think, cognitively cannot be good.
There's a study, and 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, no…
Tim Kendall:
Gray matter, in particular around the amygdala, so in the lower part of the animal brain, and there is a really clear correlation. So what the researchers assert is that 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, understand what you think the impact is. We learn with alcohol as an example, that it's pretty fun when you have a lot of drinks in the moment, but we've gone through the feedback loop and so now we make better choices.
Guy Kawasaki:
Tell us about Moment and why people should want to use it.
Tim Kendall:
Yeah, yeah. So Moment is really - it's a broad Band-Aid. I mean, we are trying to help people transform their health, and to focus areas right now are their emotional health and, actually, their social health. So their emotional health is really done through this. 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.
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.”
I actually, fundamentally, believe in the next few years, I think they're going to be services. It's tricky, how do you build this service in a way that's not weird? It's like dating services in a sense, which is that I think people thought dating services were super weird fifteen years ago. 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
So Tim, believe it or not, I'm on the board of a company that does exactly that. The name of the company is Privy: P-R-I-V-Y, and it is a double opt in, the best of Instagram, iMessages and Slack. So if you took the best of Slack, iMessages, and Instagram, made it double opt in.
The way I work is, I have a group called the Kawasaki family. There's only seven people in it. I have to invite them, they have to accept. There's no advertising. There's no algorithm. Everybody sees everything. 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. I'll send you some information about that.
Okay, so now absolute last question is: Stanford is eliminating eleven 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?
Tim Kendall:
I have been in touch with them, and I am going to support them. I've supported them before. You know this because you're a philanthropic.
You’ve got to stack ranked 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.
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 victims that have no voice, and it's an epidemic problem in the United States and internationally. I think Stanford Men's Wrestling is great, but when you start to become philanthropic, you actually have to make value judgments between those two things.
We're going to support Stanford Wrestling, but if I wanted to endow Stanford Wrestling, it would mean I couldn't help it nearly as much programs like Thor and others.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a great answer. You know who asked me to ask you that, right?
Tim Kendall:
Jeff? I can feel his frustration with me.
Guy Kawasaki:
Early after meeting you and Jeff, 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. One algorithm could be you invest in wrestlers, because they have really worked their ass off and not for the instant glory. So wrestlers.
Tim Kendall:
Right. Eric Schmidt, I took a course from him. In Business School, one of the things that he said the group that he really likes to hire from, which is bigger than the wrestling group is the military because he just finds that it's just terrific combination of discipline, motivation, smarts, etc. I like that, and I've worked with a number of people. Don Fall is the one who I worked with closest at both Facebook and Pinterest and he was in the Elite Special Forces, and he was such a talent.
Guy Kawasaki:
I like that theory. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's obviously mixed feelings about the military, but I don't know about you. 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.
Tim Kendall:
Yeah, I'm with you, and I feel grateful to them, because I do think it's a noble sacrifice.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yep. I especially love the 500 who signed the letter a couple days ago.
Tim, I mean, this has been fantastic. Thank you very much, and I'm going to check your LinkedIn profile so you better add Grads.
Tim Kendall:
All right. I’ll get on it.
I have one favor to ask you…
Guy Kawasaki:
Good. Done. What?
Tim Kendall:
I have reMarkable One and I've ordered reMarkable Two...
Guy Kawasaki:
You want me to expedite your order?
Tim Kendall:
I don't get mine until November.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll take care of the Two.
Tim Kendall:
I'm lusting after the latest one.
Guy Kawasaki:
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.
Tim Kendall:
It's terrific. I don't know who they are. You obviously know them because you helped them and advised them, but.
Guy Kawasaki:
They're going to 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 shirt, I need an XL.

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 Jeff Bob, 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 Sieh, 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.