Making Sense - Sam Harris - #304

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:38.840 well i deleted my twitter account the other day on thanksgiving actually and i've been thinking

00:00:53.760 about doing this for a long time in fact it was a very simple decision in the end i'd been on the

00:01:02.980 platform for 12 years and had tweeted something like 9 000 times that's about twice a day on average

00:01:11.160 so i wasn't the most compulsive user of twitter but it did punctuate my life far more than it should

00:01:19.520 have it was the only social media platform i ever used personally i don't run the accounts i have

00:01:25.560 for facebook and instagram and i never look at them anyway the long and the short of it is that

00:01:32.060 i just came to believe that my engagement with twitter was making me a worse person it really is as simple

00:01:39.020 as that i have a lot to say about twitter and about what i think it's doing to society but i left it

00:01:46.780 because it suddenly became obvious that it was a net negative influence on my life the most glaring

00:01:53.200 sign of this and something which i've been concerned about for a few years is that it was showing me the

00:01:59.060 worst of other people in a way that i began to feel was actually distorting my perception of humanity

00:02:06.180 i know people have very different experiences on twitter and if you're just sharing cute animal videos

00:02:13.300 or giving self-help advice you probably get nothing but love coming back at you but when you touch

00:02:20.300 controversial topics regularly as i do especially when you're more in the center politically and not

00:02:27.320 tribally aligned with the left or the right you get an enormous amount of hate and misunderstanding

00:02:33.080 from both sides i know there are people who can just ignore everything that's coming back at them

00:02:38.400 i think bill maher and joe rogan are both like this they just never look at their at mentions

00:02:44.720 but i didn't appear to be that sort of person i could ignore everything for a time but i actually

00:02:52.200 wanted to use twitter to communicate so i would keep getting sucked back in i would see someone who

00:02:59.900 appeared sincerely confused about something i said on a podcast and i'd want to clarify it and then i would

00:03:06.300 discover for the thousandth time that it was hopeless so twitter for me became like a malignant form of

00:03:15.520 telepathy where i got to hear the most irrational contemptuous sneering thoughts of other people

00:03:23.420 a dozen or more times a day but the problem wasn't all the hate being directed at me the problem

00:03:32.300 was the hate i was beginning to feel hate probably isn't the right word it was more like disgust

00:03:41.520 and despair okay twitter was giving me a very dark view of other people and the fact that i believed

00:03:50.080 and still believe that it's a distorted view wasn't enough to inoculate me against this change in my

00:03:57.060 attitude even some of the people who are most committed to attacking me on the platform i know

00:04:02.860 that my impression of them was distorted by twitter and there might be a few exceptions to this but i

00:04:09.660 believe that very few of my enemies on twitter are anywhere near as bad as they seem to me on twitter

00:04:16.960 there's just no way around it twitter was causing me to dislike people i've never met and it was even

00:04:24.340 causing me to dislike people i actually know some of whom used to be my friends rather than say anything

00:04:31.020 about why i was leaving on twitter i just deleted my account which i now realized made my leaving

00:04:37.580 twitter open to many interpretations and within a few minutes of deleting my account i began hearing

00:04:42.500 from people who appeared genuinely worried about me they saw all the hate i was getting and they thought

00:04:48.380 it must have driven me from the platform and several worried i might have been having some kind of

00:04:52.420 mental health crisis the truth is when i left twitter i wasn't seeing that much hate directed at me

00:04:59.340 because i had blocked so many people i used to never block people but when i discovered that the

00:05:05.340 platform had become basically unusable i installed a browser extension that allowed me to block thousands

00:05:11.440 of haters at once i had probably blocked 50 000 people on twitter in my last week on the platform

00:05:19.820 it was like a digital genocide i was seeing especially idiotic or vicious tweet directed

00:05:26.740 at me and i would block everyone who had liked it and at the time i thought well this is brilliant

00:05:33.240 anyone who liked that tweet is by definition beyond reach there is no reason why these people ever need

00:05:41.280 to hear from me again and i certainly don't need to hear from them and it basically worked so i wasn't

00:05:47.540 seeing most of the hate that was being directed at me i was seeing some of it but it was totally

00:05:53.400 manageable but then i asked myself how did i become the sort of person who is blocking people by the

00:06:02.160 thousands who just happened to like a dumb tweet as though that one moment in their lives proved that

00:06:10.480 all further communication on important issues was impossible how did i begin to view people

00:06:16.920 as intellectually and morally irredeemable how did i begin to view myself as totally incapable of

00:06:24.520 communicating effectively ever about anything with these people how did i give up all hope in the power

00:06:32.780 of conversation twitter i've also heard that many people are interpreting my leaving twitter as an act

00:06:41.920 of protest over what elon is doing to the platform in particular his reinstating of trump

00:06:48.640 it really wasn't that i do think elon made some bad decisions right out of the gate and twitter did get

00:06:57.380 noticeably worse at least for me but i'm actually agnostic as to whether he will eventually be able

00:07:04.340 to improve the platform i doubt he'll ever solve the problem i was having but he might make twitter

00:07:10.840 better for many people and he might make it a viable business he certainly has the resources to

00:07:16.280 keep at it even if advertisers abandon twitter for years so my leaving twitter wasn't some declaration

00:07:24.320 that i know or think i know that elon will fail to make twitter better than it currently is i have

00:07:31.500 no idea what's going to happen to twitter rather the lesson i was drawing from elon was not that he was

00:07:37.840 making twitter worse by making capricious changes to it the lesson was how one of the most productive

00:07:44.200 people of my generation was needlessly disrupting his own life and damaging his reputation by his

00:07:51.920 addiction to twitter and this has been going on for years elon's problem with twitter is different

00:07:57.820 than mine was because he uses it very differently he spends most of his time just goofing around but

00:08:04.620 he is now goofing around in front of 120 million people so when he's high-fiving anti-semites and

00:08:12.600 election deniers or bonding with them over their fake concerns about free speech he doesn't appear to know

00:08:19.000 or care that he's increasing their influence in many cases he might not have any idea who these

00:08:24.720 people are of course in others like with his friend kanye he obviously does there is something

00:08:31.760 quite reckless and socially irresponsible about how elon behaves on twitter and millions of people

00:08:40.400 appear to love it i should probably address the free speech issue briefly there's a lot more to say

00:08:47.420 about this but before i left twitter i was noticing that people seemed really confused

00:08:52.500 about what i believe about free speech and twitter being twitter it proved impossible for me to clear

00:09:00.280 up that confusion many seem to think that i used to support free speech unconditionally

00:09:04.740 like when i was defending cartoonists against islamist censors and their dupes on the left but now i

00:09:12.680 somehow don't support it because i supposedly have trump derangement syndrome well first i've always

00:09:18.660 acknowledged that there's an interesting debate to be had about the role that social media plays

00:09:23.340 in our society and i'm not going to resolve that debate here by myself but the fact is no one has a

00:09:31.140 constitutional right to be on twitter in my view the logic of the first amendment runs in the opposite

00:09:37.400 direction it protects twitter's new owner elon from compelled speech the government shouldn't be able

00:09:46.580 to force elon to put alex jones back on the platform any more than it should be able to force me to put

00:09:53.460 alex jones on my podcast of course i get that social networks and podcasts are different but twitter

00:10:00.480 simply isn't the public square it is a private platform and elon can do whatever he wants with it

00:10:07.460 if we want to change the laws around that well then we have to change the laws i understand and fully

00:10:14.140 support the political primacy of free speech in america and i'd like the american standard to be the

00:10:21.460 global norm that's why i think there shouldn't be laws against holocaust denial or the expression of

00:10:27.200 any other idiotic idea and the first amendment protects this kind of speech at least in the

00:10:33.000 united states but there also shouldn't be a law in my view that prevents a digital platform from

00:10:41.060 having a no nazis policy in its terms of service because these platforms need effective moderation

00:10:47.340 and standards of civility to function they are businesses started by entrepreneurs supported by

00:10:55.440 investors who want to make money they have employees with mortgages they have to survive on ad revenue

00:11:02.620 or subscriptions or some combination of the two without serious moderation digital platforms become

00:11:10.680 like 4chan which is nothing more than a digital sewer i'm told that even 4chan has a moderation policy

00:11:18.300 hell itself probably has a moderation policy so-called free speech absolutism is just a fantasy online

00:11:28.640 almost no one really holds that position even when they espouse it the fact that twitter's terms of

00:11:36.740 service might have been politically slanted or not applied fairly i totally get why that would annoy

00:11:42.380 a lot of people and i suspect elon is improving that but this simply isn't a free speech issue

00:11:49.160 no one has a right to be on twitter again if we want to change the laws around that we're free to

00:11:58.800 i'm not sure how that would look and it seems like it would have some pretty bizarre implications

00:12:03.960 but that's what we'd have to do so my argument for keeping people like trump and alex jones off twitter

00:12:12.220 is a terms of service argument and directly follows from the deliberate harm they both caused on the

00:12:19.180 platform in the past here are two men who knowingly used twitter to inspire their most rabid followers

00:12:28.620 to harass specific people not just on twitter but out in the world the fact that they might not have

00:12:36.960 tweeted please go harass this person is immaterial they knew exactly what would happen when they singled

00:12:45.040 out specific american citizens for abuse and spread lies about them at scale to a fanatical mob they could

00:12:54.300 see the results of their actions for years people were getting doxed and stalked and having their lives

00:13:03.040 ruined for years nothing about this was hidden elon apparently agrees with me about alex jones and said

00:13:10.960 he would never let him back on the platform but he doesn't agree about trump well that's fine i simply

00:13:16.880 recommended that he have a terms of service in place for when trump proves yet again that he is exactly

00:13:23.560 like alex jones and then i hope elon will enforce his own terms of service but the crucial point is

00:13:29.360 that this isn't a case where sunlight is the best disinfectant this isn't a question of opposing bad

00:13:36.320 ideas with good ideas this is not a case where what used to be misinformation is suddenly going to

00:13:43.160 become new knowledge and we'll all be embarrassed that we first rejected it this is a case where two men

00:13:50.860 with enormous cult followings weaponized obvious lies for the purpose of ruining people's lives

00:14:00.100 it is not authoritarian or fascist for me to hope that a private platform like twitter would decline

00:14:11.060 to enable that behavior in the future but we do have a larger problem to deal with it's still not clear

00:14:19.500 what to do about the social harm of misinformation and disinformation at scale algorithmically boosted

00:14:26.100 speech isn't ordinary speech and many people don't see this we have built systems of communication

00:14:34.480 in which lies and outrage spread faster and more widely than anything else scale matters velocity

00:14:44.260 lies that get tens of millions of people to suddenly believe that an election was stolen

00:14:50.780 because they've been amplified by a digital outrage machine have a lot in common with shouting fire

00:14:57.160 in a crowded theater contrary to what most people think it's legal to shout fire in a crowded theater

00:15:03.840 but wouldn't we want the owner of the theater to remove a person who was doing that again and again

00:15:10.460 and again i'm not claiming to fully understand what we should do about all this i've done several

00:15:17.860 podcasts on and around this topic and i'm sure i'll do many more because the problem isn't going away

00:15:25.800 but being a so-called free speech absolutist at this point is nothing more than a confession that you

00:15:32.020 haven't thought about the real issues it's like being a second amendment absolutist who can't figure out

00:15:38.720 why people shouldn't be able to own cluster bombs or rocket launchers for home defense technological

00:15:44.720 change matters we've been given new powers and we're not quite sure how to wield them safely and

00:15:53.280 now in the case of twitter we have a lone billionaire who's just turning the dials however he sees fit

00:15:59.920 again i recognize that he is totally free to do that but i also happen to have an opinion about which

00:16:06.560 changes will be for the good and which won't and i get that many people are still seeing this all

00:16:12.340 through the lens of covet in some ways i am too just from the other side as i've said many times before

00:16:20.400 i view covet as a failed dress rehearsal for something far worse and i worry that we didn't learn much from

00:16:28.800 it apart from how bad we are at cooperating with one another or even at having a fact-based discussion

00:16:35.420 about anything now and i do blame twitter for much of that but i also get that in elon's hands

00:16:42.520 twitter now seems to many people like a necessary corrective to all the ways in which our institutions

00:16:47.940 failed us during the pandemic it's like finally we've got someone powerful enough to call bullshit

00:16:54.020 on the new york times in that respect elon is trump 2.0 i understand that covid changed everything

00:17:02.800 for a lot of people you know the cdc and the who and many other public health institutions

00:17:08.800 seriously lost credibility when they needed it most i get that many of our scientific journals

00:17:15.840 have been visibly warped by woke nonsense i understand that covid has been a moving target

00:17:21.640 and what seemed rational in april of 2020 was no longer rational in april of 2022 and many people

00:17:28.640 and institutions couldn't adjust i understand that the effects of school closures were terrible

00:17:35.040 in most cases i get that many of our policies around masks proved ultimately ridiculous of course i

00:17:42.720 understand that the sight of politicians being utter hypocrites during the various lockdowns was

00:17:49.360 infuriating people literally couldn't hold funerals for their loved ones who died in isolation

00:17:56.240 while governor hair gel was holding a fundraiser at french laundry i totally agree that having a

00:18:04.080 pharmaceutical industry driven by bad incentives and windfall profits is dangerous and reduces public

00:18:12.560 trust in medicine i know that the lab leak hypothesis was always plausible and never racist i get that the

00:18:21.120 risk benefit calculations for the mrna vaccines change depending on a person's age and sex and other factors

00:18:28.880 and i've spoken about most of these things many times on this podcast but the deeper point

00:18:37.280 is that all of this confusion and institutional failure does not even slightly suggest

00:18:44.640 that we'll be able to navigate the next public health emergency

00:18:47.920 with everyone just quote doing their own research and tweeting links at each other and this is where

00:18:55.680 i've been at odds with many people in the alternative media space rather than work to improve our

00:19:01.440 institutions and identify real experts it's like we're witnessing the birth of a new religion

00:19:08.640 of contrarianism and conspiracy thinking amplified by social media and the proliferation of podcasts and

00:19:16.160 newsletters and now the whims of the occasional billionaire the bottom line is that we need institutions we can

00:19:23.920 trust we need experts who are in fact experts and not just vociferous charlatans and many of us have lost

00:19:32.640 trust in institutions and experts again far too often for good reason that's a tragedy and i've spent a lot of

00:19:42.640 time on this podcast analyzing that tragedy and worrying about its future implications however many people are

00:19:50.080 now behaving as though nothing important has been lost in fact they're celebrating the loss of valid

00:19:57.520 authority as though the flattening of everything and the embarrassment of the so-called elites is a pure source of

00:20:05.840 entertainment these people are frolicking in the ruins of our shared epistemology

00:20:14.320 and one of the people doing the most frolicking is elon the fact that our collective loss of trust has

00:20:22.080 often been warranted doesn't suggest that we aren't paying a terrible price for it or that the price won't rise

00:20:30.160 very steeply in the future when it comes time to decide which medicines to give our children

00:20:36.640 or which wars to fight there is simply no substitute for trust in institutions and experts the path forward

00:20:47.120 therefore is to create the conditions where such trust is possible and actually warranted

00:20:54.880 in the media in government in pharmaceutical companies everywhere that actually matters

00:21:03.840 that is not a path where we just tear it all down that is not a path where we just promote any outsider

00:21:12.560 no matter how incompetent and malevolent simply because he is an outsider we are not going to podcast

00:21:20.400 and substack and tweet our way out of this situation anyway when i look at my own life

00:21:27.440 and when i look at the controversies and fake controversies that have caused me personal

00:21:32.160 stress and damaged relationships when i look at the analogous moments in the lives of friends and

00:21:38.400 colleagues and former friends and colleagues when i look at what makes it so difficult to communicate

00:21:45.360 about basic facts in our society so much of this conflict and confusion appears to be the result of

00:21:53.840 twitter and the truth is that even when twitter was good it was making me a more superficial person

00:22:01.680 its very nature is to fragment attention of course that sometimes feels great i was following hundreds of

00:22:09.600 smart and funny people and they were often sharing articles and other media that i really enjoyed twitter

00:22:15.360 was a way of staying in touch or seeming to stay in touch with what's happening in the world and that's one

00:22:21.920 reason why so many people are addicted to it but even this began to seem like a degrading distraction

00:22:29.600 even the best of twitter was an opportunity cost because it diverted my attention from more important things

00:22:35.440 twitter was making it harder not easier to do what i truly value to read good books to write to meditate

00:22:45.920 to enjoy my family to work on this podcast and now that i've stepped away from it i feel that it was

00:22:52.560 definitely a mistake to spend so much time there and as it happens the costs of such distraction is the

00:23:00.000 topic of today's podcast today i'm speaking with cal newport cal is a computer science professor at

00:23:07.040 georgetown university and a writer who explores the intersections of technology work and culture he's the

00:23:14.480 author of seven books including a world without email digital minimalism and deep work many of his books

00:23:22.240 have been new york times bestsellers and they have been translated into over 40 languages cal is also a

00:23:27.920 contributing writer for the new yorker and the host of the deep questions podcast and i spoke to cal a

00:23:34.000 few weeks ago as you'll hear he strongly recommended that i get off twitter and you'll also hear that i was

00:23:41.120 thinking about it but not quite ready to do it i can't quite say that cal convinced me to do it but he

00:23:48.400 was yet another voice in my head when i finally did anyway we discuss much more than twitter here we talk

00:23:55.600 about everything from the history of computer science to the fragmentation of modern life

00:24:01.600 and what to do about it i hope you find it useful and now i bring you cal newport

00:24:14.080 i am here with cal newport cal thanks for joining me uh sam it's my pleasure describe what it is you

00:24:20.640 do generally you are a man who is rowing in in several boats at the moment and it's so we're

00:24:26.480 going to talk about how you accomplish that but um how do you how do you describe what you do

00:24:31.840 should you find yourself seated next to a voluble person on an airplane and they ask you the fated

00:24:38.240 question yeah well it's a more complicated answer than probably i wish it would be but usually i'll say

00:24:43.920 my day job so to speak is i'm a computer science professor at georgetown university and actually

00:24:50.960 study algorithms so computer science related math i'm also a writer though and i've been writing since

00:24:58.720 i was 20 years old that's when i signed with my first agent and worked on my first book deal and so

00:25:04.640 i've written seven books i'm working on my eighth right now uh i'm also a contributing writer at the new

00:25:08.960 yorker and in recent years really most of my writing has focused one way or another on the

00:25:15.360 impact of technology on our lives be it our working lives or our personal lives so there is some

00:25:20.400 consilience here that i'm a computer scientist academic who writes public facing about the impact

00:25:26.640 of a lot of the type of technologies we work on as researchers on society on culture on our own lives

00:25:33.600 yeah so we're going to talk about some of your underlying concerns there i'll remind people your

00:25:38.160 your books uh among your books are deep work digital minimalism and a world without email

00:25:46.080 and these uh converge on a topic that is of growing concern to certainly me and my set but um you know i

00:25:55.920 would imagine most people listening to us now which is to you know for lack of a better framing the the

00:26:01.600 fragmentation of modern life and i guess one could step back and argue that it's always been fragmented

00:26:10.240 or that it's been fragmented over the course of many many years but i think most of us feel like we're

00:26:16.640 living with a level of fragmentation that's fundamentally new and so i want us to talk about

00:26:22.080 that and try to figure out whether or not that's true but before we jump in how has your background as a

00:26:29.120 computer scientist informed your thinking about this issue there's a couple ways i think these two

00:26:37.760 worlds have have come together so one's the obvious way that's that's the comfort with the technical

00:26:43.280 background of these various technologies and in general also just having lived a life where i am

00:26:49.520 keeping my eyes towards cutting edge and technology watching the internet develop watching the impact of

00:26:55.280 the internet having that technology mindset there's a subtle way though that it's also impacted my

00:27:01.360 writing which is and i don't know how to say this diplomatically but i am very comfortable in my writing

00:27:09.120 going from more philosophical social critique to veering the other direction and saying let's get pragmatic

00:27:15.840 you know let's talk about advice let's talk about specific strategies a lot of writers are very wary about doing

00:27:22.080 this this is the the sense especially in the new york publishing world that giving advice is lowbrow

00:27:28.880 and that you won't be considered smart i've always had as this fallback well look i have a phd from mit

00:27:34.320 in theoretical computer science so i don't need my writing to convince my audience that i'm smart and i think

00:27:41.120 that has actually freed me up and that's been a sort of unfair advantage i've had in this field is that

00:27:46.400 i'll go straight for the jugular on specificity and then the next day go completely philosophical

00:27:51.520 because i don't care so much about you know what i'm publishing in a magazine or a book having to

00:27:57.040 establish what is my my intellectual credibility except this other thing going on so that cover that

00:28:02.480 my academic career has provided me i think has unlocked a lot more breadth than what i can tackle with my

00:28:07.120 my non-academic writing yeah that's really interesting this goes to the question of status and and

00:28:13.040 where you get it and where you perceive others get it and that is just fascinating you you really do

00:28:18.400 have an intellectual alibi because you could be as simple and lowbrow and as broad and as useful as

00:28:24.080 you want to be in any given moment and the moment somebody thinks you're tony robbins you can say no

00:28:30.880 actually i'm a computer scientist over at georgetown and what you would not to say that you ever have to

00:28:35.840 say that but just the fact that you know that people can connect the dots you you don't actually have to

00:28:40.560 have the the status you know fears or the egoic concerns that you're being pigeonholed in in some

00:28:49.040 way that is doesn't fit your your self-image and your actual expertise yeah well that that's for sure

00:28:55.600 happening and anyways my academic career gives me enough egoic concerns already right so so i could i

00:29:02.400 could take a bit of a breather you know i can take a bit of a breather in this in this other space but

00:29:07.040 but i mean i'll just say it's it's always struck me to degree to which especially in idea writing

00:29:13.220 there often is that reluctance that will will have an idea that clearly has practical implications this

00:29:19.760 is like gladwellian effect but we'll pull back right at the point of and here's what you might do about

00:29:25.980 that because then that would mark this as a different type of book and i love playing with those

00:29:29.340 conventions i mean when i'm in my more self-aggrandizing moods which are only occasionally i think about what you

00:29:36.480 see in in cinema with with auteurs who take genre cinema and mix and match the tropes and you have

00:29:42.960 a sort of tarantino-esque approach of let's let's go low and mix it with high and this is freaking fun

00:29:49.660 over here and this is just mix it all together i there should be some more spontaneity and joy and

00:29:55.820 format i think in writing everything seems a little bit dour these days where everyone is sort of just

00:30:00.480 somberly taking their turn you know supporting some sort of dire conclusion so i try to inject a

00:30:07.180 little bit more of that energy into my work why is it do you think that giving advice and spelling out

00:30:13.540 the practical implications of something seems to diminish the gravitas of the work or the or the

00:30:23.580 the intellectual inquiry that is generating that advice well i have this theory about east coast west

00:30:30.200 coast publishing so this is a a divide that seemed to happen in the 90s then going into the the early

00:30:37.660 2000s where east coast publishing coming out of the standard new york publishing houses and and i'm

00:30:43.380 looking specifically here at non-fiction writing and idea style writing writing that's in the realm of

00:30:50.460 advice would make sense here right in the east coast world a lot of these writers and i'm using

00:30:55.960 you know malcolm as my example here are coming out of journalism they're coming out of professional

00:31:00.160 writing and they would look upon advice writing as something to be more west coast this is a hay

00:31:07.120 house or sort of a silicon valley tim ferris hack culture a complete that's a different style of

00:31:13.600 writing that they're separated from and so you got this big separation where i grew up and all the big

00:31:19.240 idea writers of the 90s going to the early 2000s the the gladwell the stephen johnson's this was

00:31:25.120 influential you know writing to me but it all pulled back before it got to advice but at the same time

00:31:32.320 you know i was a a teenage entrepreneur during the first.com boom in the 90s i was also living and

00:31:38.400 breathing advice advice guides time management guides strategy guides brian tracy stephen covey david allen all

00:31:45.780 of that world and i was just immersed in that and i love that as well and those two worlds were very

00:31:51.820 separate so the west coast world would would give either either uh silicon valley techie advice or sort

00:31:58.060 of hay house woo woo self-help style traditional advice east coast was more idea writing came out of

00:32:05.640 more of journalism and there was a wall between them they just seemed separate and you you also have

00:32:10.180 your own podcast too which is uh you you've joined the lowbrow ranks of all of us who have podcasts

00:32:16.980 i think there's now i last heard um i can't believe this number i think the last number i heard was that

00:32:23.500 there were four million podcasts the last number i believed i think was 1.2 million but i i do i do

00:32:28.920 believe i i have since heard that there are four million i don't know if you you uh have any actual

00:32:34.560 propositional knowledge as to how many podcasts there are but um it is quite an amazing picture of

00:32:40.320 of what's happening out there if there's anything like that number of podcasts well you know i said

00:32:45.340 yesterday in a talk i was giving that i think we were contractually obligated during the pandemic

00:32:51.080 that if you didn't already have a podcast that you were required to start one i don't know if that

00:32:56.560 was a cdc recommendation where that came from yeah so with my podcast now i'm just going straight

00:33:01.500 straight advice right so it's let's cut out all of the the middlemen it's questions and answers

00:33:07.340 let's throw in questions let's let's throw in answers i mean i'll say another angle that i that

00:33:13.160 gets in the way of just straightforward pragmatic philosophy okay i've thought about this here's some

00:33:18.020 advice is uh the culture right now is one that is really concerned about caveating right so and

00:33:26.340 there's i kind of understand where this comes from but there's this notion of be careful about

00:33:30.300 giving a piece of advice because it might not apply to everyone or there'll be different people

00:33:36.120 in your audience with different particular circumstances for which it doesn't apply and

00:33:39.660 if you can't properly caveat it they might be offended so there's a there's a concern about

00:33:43.780 caveating and it's one of the big messages i always preach about doing advice writing is

00:33:48.760 the writer shouldn't caveat you need the audience to caveat so the audience can hear be take your swing

00:33:55.340 here's what i think here's take this or leave it here's a big idea let me make it you know a big

00:34:00.960 powerful swing you can caveat it you can say this is nonsense or i get it but it doesn't apply for me

00:34:06.560 because of the circumstance the audience can usually caveat it and the writing is stronger if you just

00:34:10.420 take a big swing this is very different than conversation which is what most people exposure is

00:34:15.960 to interaction whereas if i'm talking to an individual and i'm giving them advice that clearly doesn't

00:34:20.760 apply to their situation you know then i'm just being a jerk you know it's like why are you telling

00:34:25.440 me this like why are you why are you telling me you're running routine when i'm in a cast right

00:34:29.160 then you're just being a jerk and so i think people often generalize that that reality from one-on-one

00:34:35.600 interaction when they're thinking about one-to-many interaction and then the whole program of giving

00:34:39.580 advice seems nerve-wracking because man people could get a fit like if you didn't give the right

00:34:42.980 caveat what about this or wolf doesn't apply to that person and that's another part of it as well

00:34:47.320 i've long learned just go for it you know the audience is smart they'll they'll adjust the

00:34:52.320 advice to apply to their life or not but that's another thing i think that gets in the way right

00:34:56.440 now of people giving advice is they imagine that tweet that's going to come back and that gives them

00:35:00.740 gives them some pause yeah well the difference between one-to-one and one-to-many is going to

00:35:07.220 show up again and in our discussion about social media and what it's doing to all of us but but before we

00:35:14.300 jump in what what's the the significance of theoretical in your attachment to computer

00:35:21.540 science when you say you're a theoretical computer scientist i mean it means the type of computer

00:35:26.380 scientist that can't get another job like you like you actually couldn't get hired at google yeah

00:35:31.800 because i don't program right so so theoretical computer scientist it's a broad category that

00:35:36.460 captures a few different subfields but it's basically pen and paper and math so we do we do math

00:35:42.200 about things relevant to computers uh but most of us are pretty bad at using computers themselves so

00:35:49.420 so the the theory of is it true that you you literally don't program or you're just you're

00:35:54.280 just not somebody for whom that's your main game well i mean i know how to for my previous training i

00:36:00.800 was a computer geek as a kid and you know was taking university computer science classes while i was in

00:36:06.980 high school so i i i know how to program but i i'm not i don't program as part of my career as a

00:36:12.940 computer scientist i mean i think the last time i i actually programmed the computer was a few years

00:36:17.640 ago i was making computer games for my boys so we were they would come up with the idea and i'd

00:36:22.400 program but no my my job is a theoretical computer scientist uh involves no programming it's math papers

00:36:28.360 and so you're designing algorithms that can solve problems or you're trying to prove that certain

00:36:34.020 problems can't be solved algorithmically etc exactly both those things yeah analyzing algorithms

00:36:40.740 mathematically or proving mathematically no algorithm can solve this problem and these conditions which

00:36:46.200 by the way people don't realize this is the theoretical computer science goes back to alan turing

00:36:51.440 before there were computers so so alan turing did the the first conceptual work about this notion of just

00:36:58.220 a a step-by-step algorithmic approach to solving a problem he was thinking about this before there

00:37:03.480 was actually electronic computers and he has this remarkable paper called on computable numbers and

00:37:08.920 their application to the einschlitdung problem which is a german name hilbert gave to this big open

00:37:14.320 problem and he did a pretty simple mathematical slash logical proof that proved that most problems and he

00:37:22.800 formally defined what this means most problems can't be solved by algorithms so the very beginning

00:37:27.980 of theoretical computer science predates computers and it was alan turing proving that

00:37:31.400 there's many many more things that we can define than we could ever hope to solve with a computer

00:37:36.080 yeah yeah um i hadn't thought to go down this path but i'm i'm just interested how many people

00:37:43.560 would um i mean i'm thinking of sort of counterfactual intellectual history here

00:37:48.820 how many how many people would we have could we have lost and still had the information technology

00:37:58.220 revolution uh more or less on schedule when you're when you start culling the brightest minds of that

00:38:06.100 generation so like if we hadn't had turing and we hadn't had church and we hadn't had von neumann and

00:38:13.200 we hadn't had shannon and i don't know what you pick here i mean you're gonna you will know the

00:38:17.180 cast of characters much better than i do but i i dimly imagine that we could have if we had lost

00:38:23.160 maybe 10 or 12 crucial people we would we could have waited a very long time for the the necessary

00:38:30.640 breakthroughs that would have ushered in the age of computers is that accurate or or was there so

00:38:37.180 much momentum at that point reaching back you know to ava loveless and babbage that we still would

00:38:46.140 have had the information age more or less when we got it i think we would have it more or less on the

00:38:51.960 exact same schedule i think we could have gone back in time and and killed off every figure you just

00:38:57.740 mentioned and probably wouldn't have changed much because essentially the the momentum the momentum

00:39:04.600 that was building was driven so fiercely by world war ii i think it'd be very difficult for that momentum

00:39:09.380 to have been halted and you have to remember there was a a really thriving and complex industry of

00:39:16.020 analog computational machines coming into world war ii and these were used a lot for artillery aiming

00:39:22.160 calculating artillery tables trying to do if we have like a norman wiener style cybernetic

00:39:27.520 human machine interface for better trying to shoot down planes with anti-aircraft guns there was a huge

00:39:33.640 amount these machines existed the idea of going from these analog electronic computing machines

00:39:40.360 the digital machines there i i think the key figure would be shannon and in particular you know he

00:39:48.120 wrote this remarkable master's degree while he was at mit this remarkable master's degree where he was

00:39:54.000 studying mathematics at mit but had interned at bell labs and so he was seeing the electronic relay

00:40:02.380 switches that the phone system the at&t phone system used to automatically connect calls so you

00:40:07.540 didn't have to have a switchboard operator he was early to the idea that you could use this physical

00:40:13.240 piece of equipment that's electromagnetics and connections to implement logic and you could then

00:40:19.300 take propositional logical statements expressed in boolean algebra and implement them as a circuit

00:40:25.860 that probably was the most important idea of any idea because we had a lot of analog electronic

00:40:31.400 computation going that bridge to cap the digital and then a lot of people began building digital

00:40:37.600 computers so you know van neumann of course had the big project going at princeton and he really

00:40:41.820 cracked the architecture that we ended up using but pen had their own situation they had their own

00:40:46.900 computer going uh there's their own digital computer project there are several going on in europe so

00:40:51.080 there was a lot of momentum towards this so once that idea was had that we can do digitally

00:40:57.140 what had been done analog and world war ii was happening you you had a lot of momentum towards

00:41:04.200 it so the only piece i'm interested in that counterfactual is if shannon had not written

00:41:08.060 that thesis at the age of whatever this was 26 remarkable it's the 1930s if he had not written

00:41:14.000 that thesis how much longer would have taken for someone else to figure it out i bet the answer is

00:41:18.540 a couple years so yeah i'm of the belief you know turing i love turing uh as a theoretician

00:41:24.880 and turing did some fantastically original mathematical work i also think though in common

00:41:31.560 culture he gets too much credit for modern digital computing there's this notion of he went to solve

00:41:36.880 the enigma code and invented the first computers to do so or something like this and it's really kind

00:41:41.440 of unrelated he he laid these mathematical foundations that were conceptually useful and

00:41:47.660 he spent a year at the institute for advanced study and girdle was there and von neumann was there and

00:41:53.180 church was there and there's some cross-pollination of ideas there but a lot of that was more philosophical

00:41:57.260 and mathematical you can still have the engineering revolution digital computers you could still have

00:42:02.480 that easily without turing ever being around he actually became more useful for people like me in the

00:42:07.980 starting the 60s when mathematicians began studying computation turing was the guiding light his his

00:42:13.860 early mathematical foundations led to the whole field of theoretical computer science but you could

00:42:18.620 have computers without that field so i think that would have happened one way or the other be very hard

00:42:23.620 to stop that revolution interesting so i sent i don't know when i sent my first email maybe 1995 96

00:42:29.880 somewhere in there but so you think without turing and the rest of the pantheon i wind up sending

00:42:36.240 that email around 1998 and we're more or less where we are now yeah or or there had been a delay the

00:42:42.260 difference would have been in the late 40s and by 1960 we're caught up okay so actually i have another

00:42:50.640 question as far as your background do you have any experience in meditation or psychedelics have those been

00:42:58.500 part of your developmental path meditation i am more familiar with psychedelics i have no experience with

00:43:04.960 i've dabbled in and out of meditation i've read some of the standard you know john cabot zinn public

00:43:13.980 facing text on on mindfulness meditation though i've never been a big practitioner so i i know the high

00:43:20.180 level basics right but i'm not a practiced hand at it right right okay well um let's jump in

00:43:28.540 how is information technology changing us do you think i know it's an enormous scope to that question

00:43:37.700 but this is very much what you've been focused on i guess if there's any facet of this dark jewel to

00:43:44.580 enter first i think we should focus on social media first but um be as broad as you want initially how

00:43:51.740 how have we changed our world and how is our world changing us with respect to the internet and all of

00:43:57.440 the tools it has birthed well i think it's important to make a distinction between the professional and

00:44:04.760 the personal sphere this is the big i would say structuring insight of my work on on this question

00:44:12.440 over the last you know 10 years or so was recognizing that the philosophical framework for understanding

00:44:18.280 let's say the workplace front office it revolution email personal computers at the desk is different

00:44:24.220 than what's required to try to make sense of what happened with the personal electronics revolution

00:44:29.080 in particular with the attention economy amplified smartphone based revolution that began around 2007

00:44:34.620 they seem similar because in both cases we're seeing spheres in our life where we're more distracted if

00:44:41.640 we can use that term kind of ambiguously now it seems the same in the office i'm on slack i'm on email all the

00:44:47.000 time i feel distracted at home i'm on my phone all the time twitter's capturing my attention it feels the

00:44:51.840 same but you actually it's very difficult to unify them and where i really began making traction and

00:44:56.280 trying to understand these two effects was separating those separating those two worlds and so at the very

00:45:02.300 high level the very top level summary of what i think is going on in those two worlds is that in work

00:45:09.720 and work that the issue is the advent of low friction communication tools transformed the way people

00:45:17.400 collaborated in a bottom-up emergent fashion so not top-down plan but bottom-up emergent fashion

00:45:23.480 it introduced ad hoc back and forth messaging digital messaging as the primary means of collaboration

00:45:29.880 this had a whole lot of unexpected side effects mainly affecting the way that the the brain operates when

00:45:37.300 doing cognitive work it created an environment in which constant context shifting was necessary

00:45:43.000 because if there's seven or eight ongoing back and forth conversations that are timely unfolding in

00:45:48.500 email you have to see those messages pretty soon after they arrive so the conversation ping pong can

00:45:53.660 actually happen at a fast enough rate and all those rapid inbox checks or instant messenger checks

00:45:58.860 actually is a huge drag on cognitive capacity our brain takes a long time to actually switch cognitive

00:46:04.200 context so this this sort of fragmented back and forth has been a major productivity drag so my top

00:46:09.560 line argument about the world of work is these new technologies accidentally made us not only much

00:46:15.840 stupider in a literal sense but as a drag actually a drag on economic growth and productivity that

00:46:20.620 there's a real problem whereas in the the world of our of our personal lives there i think issues of

00:46:27.680 behavioral addiction become more relevant there i think engineered distraction the idea of trying

00:46:34.760 to maximize engagement and the the weird unexpected side effects that that that twirls up and creates

00:46:41.140 these whirling dervishes of unexpected consequences that have these huge impacts on on health or the

00:46:47.340 health of the body politic that's a different type of thing that's happening there all of that comes

00:46:52.480 from the consequence of what happens when we consolidate the internet to a small number of privately

00:46:56.860 controlled platforms and play the game of how do we maximize engagement that turned out to have a

00:47:01.680 bunch of dangerous side effects to society and how we live so they're similar superficially we're

00:47:06.920 distracted but the source of that distraction and and the impact and therefore the solutions is very

00:47:12.780 different i think between those two magisteria yeah interesting well i think when you initially made

00:47:18.200 that division a few minutes ago between work and private life many listeners were anticipating

00:47:24.140 you it being a story of the good and the bad so the bad is visited on on private life uh you know we were

00:47:31.680 we were taking our smartphones with us to the dinner table our kids are buried in screens society is

00:47:37.800 unraveling based on the perverse business model that has is um you know mining our attention uh and

00:47:45.320 amplifying divisive content but over on the work front i think people were expecting to hear that our

00:47:53.280 productivity is just enormously better based on these tools but that's not where you landed uh let's

00:48:02.420 let's take that piece second and um let's start with social media and private life if i'm not mistaken

00:48:09.100 unless something's changed you don't use any social media right right that's the that is the source of my

00:48:15.680 my anthropological margaret mead remove you know from which i can actually observe what's going on

00:48:21.260 without being entangled in it myself so no i've never had a traditional social media account no facebook no twitter

00:48:28.100 no instagram no snapchat i like to observe that world i think i'm the last person perhaps you know

00:48:34.360 of my age who's also a writer who's never had an account but to me it's really important that there's

00:48:39.580 at least someone out there who's trying to observe these roles with a little bit of distance

00:48:42.520 so how do you observe them apart from just the effects on friends and colleagues who stagger away

00:48:48.440 from their twitter feeds complaining about everything what you must be on these platforms

00:48:53.940 as a as a lurker just seeing what's going on yeah so when i'm working on a particular book or article

00:48:59.880 i'll go onto a platform and so for some of these platforms that will require like borrowing an account

00:49:06.040 for things like twitter twitter is actually public so you can go and look at individual people's

00:49:11.140 twitter feeds directly without having to actually be on twitter yourself and tweeting so twitter is

00:49:16.260 actually an easy one to study you can you can go check out what people are up to tick tock was

00:49:20.440 probably i wrote a tick tock article for the new yorker earlier this year you know that that's a

00:49:25.380 little harder so i had to borrow accounts and then also watch videos you can actually find tick

00:49:30.720 tocks it turns out you can find them posted online you can watch various tick tock videos but so

00:49:34.960 different platforms yield different challenges uh when you're when you're trying to actually go in

00:49:39.980 there and observe right now if it's not immediately obvious it will soon be obvious that you're an

00:49:46.920 enormously disciplined structured person why go to zero with this why not just the minimal use or the

00:49:57.480 the intelligent and disciplined use of some or all of these platforms well i you know and i i pitched

00:50:05.020 that when i talked to what people should do this philosophy of digital minimalism is not about going

00:50:11.480 to zero the reason why i'm at zero is because i started there so it's it's a different situation so

00:50:17.200 what i've been saying no to is the addition of social media into my life so someone will say look

00:50:23.020 you should use twitter for x y and z i'll look at x y and z and say none of that is compelling enough

00:50:28.380 for me to actually extend the energy to join this so so what kept me at zero is the fact that

00:50:34.000 through circumstance i started at zero where most people casually signed up for the these networks

00:50:40.100 when they were still exploratory and exuberant and interesting and fun for various contingent reasons

00:50:46.100 which aren't even that interesting i didn't and so i was just used to not having them and then after

00:50:52.080 they became ubiquitous that i had this interesting remove and and over over the years people have made

00:50:56.180 arguments well you could get advantage a or advantage b it always seemed too small to me you know there's

00:51:01.280 nothing there that was compelling enough to say okay i definitely want to sacrifice this time and

00:51:05.260 i was always very wary about what it was going to do to my attention so i think if i right now had a

00:51:10.600 very aggressive social media presence that i was trying to reduce it's unlikely that reducing the zero

00:51:15.220 would be the right answer but as someone who's always started at zero nothing has been compelling

00:51:19.020 enough to actually push me to add a little bit in right although you're an author of many books you

00:51:25.040 you write new yorker articles you've got a podcast it would be quite natural for you to use some or all

00:51:32.160 of these channels as marketing channels and you could also do that in the way that i do most of my social

00:51:38.800 media in that i don't do it at all right i mean say i have a team that posts things on platforms that i

00:51:45.300 never even see the only thing i'm engaged with i think um in some respects predictably to my detriment

00:51:52.500 is twitter and um you know we'll talk about that but you could approach all social media the way i

00:51:59.020 approach instagram which is i literally never see it right and yet something in my name is going out

00:52:06.260 on instagram to promote something that i'm doing whether it's this podcast or the waking up app or

00:52:11.540 if i was going to go to australia and do a you know a lecture series well then having social media

00:52:16.720 accounts that could tell the good people of australia that i'm headed their way that proves

00:52:21.380 pretty useful so i'm a little surprised that no one has certainly none of your new york publishers

00:52:27.060 have um browbeaten you into doing something like that well they used to you know now it's yeah i there

00:52:35.220 was a my fourth book so it would have been 2012 i do remember going to a meeting at my publisher

00:52:41.260 random house and in new york city in the skyscraper and they brought in their their social media

00:52:46.720 specialist to be like okay let's walk through your social media strategy i remember thinking oh this

00:52:51.620 is not going to go well they're spritzing you with oxytocin and and uh lattes and essentially but

00:52:58.900 now it's sort of part of my brand as well right so the fact that i'm removed from this is part of

00:53:04.740 that makes sense okay this gives us an interesting perspective but but i'll say

00:53:08.580 because i was never a full-time writer i was already in the mindset of there's tons of things

00:53:13.760 that would be useful to my writing career that i just can't do i mean when when i was writing books

00:53:18.740 that maybe people would have thought were more in the business space the thing to do if you want to

00:53:24.000 be a very successful business author is you need to speak 50 to 100 times a year like most of those

00:53:29.660 authors do a one year on one year off rotation they speak 50 to 100 times one year they write the next

00:53:35.820 book the next year and i just had no interest in that i was a professor a full-time professor i had

00:53:40.980 young kids and so i was already in this mindset of like yeah there's all sorts of stuff to be helpful

00:53:44.600 i but look i'm trying to figure out how to do this while i have other things going on so i was already

00:53:49.460 in this mindset of not in any benefit mindset but in terms of what are the big wins i can do that

00:53:55.420 aren't going to take up too much time but also my theory on social media and writing is social media

00:54:00.540 does really help sell books but not so much the author's accounts so i'm sure social media has

00:54:05.940 been very useful to my book sales because it is a person-to-person medium that people can use to

00:54:11.600 talk about my books i read this book i like this book and it really can help sales if i'm talking

00:54:17.500 about my own book on social media it's always been my theory that the impact there is more limited

00:54:22.280 announcements are useful but i have an email list you know i mean this is just my mindset of

00:54:27.980 good enough that's sort of a satisfying mindset you know like this works i'm writing i'm thinking

00:54:34.440 clearly i'm worried about polluting my cognitive space people seem to find my books there's a lot

00:54:39.600 of things i could be doing i don't do a lot of them my publishers have made peace with that we

00:54:42.800 still seem to move a fair number of copies and i'm happy with that but no i hear you i've heard these

00:54:48.320 before but a lot of these benefits when you really nail down is like yeah that's nice but it's not

00:54:53.400 critical yeah you you pretty much share jaron lanier's view of the situation is there any way

00:54:59.160 in which you disagree with him i you know i'm not i haven't read enough of of either of you on this

00:55:06.380 topic to know if there's any daylight between you is is there yeah i mean i i love lanier's work

00:55:12.320 you know i mean i think he's brilliant and his approach was very influential to me you are not a

00:55:17.420 gadget very influential because it introduced humanism into the discussion of these sort of techno

00:55:22.520 impact so he really he really comes at these consumer facing technologies from the perspective

00:55:28.600 of what are their impact on uh humanity your humanity as a person your self-definition your

00:55:34.140 weirdness the the corners that make you special and he really worries about the the the way that

00:55:40.040 these these platforms force you to fit your way yourself into these interface drop down box selection

00:55:46.000 the way it it breaks in you know connection he's a way more radical thinker than i am though

00:55:51.200 so there there there is a lot of daylight but there's a lot of daylight mainly just in the way

00:55:55.420 that we we almost have different programs going on here i think his is a philosophical program

00:55:59.660 about humanity in the age of digital reduction and mine is more of a expository slash pragmatic

00:56:07.440 program so why are we seeing these effects what are the dynamics the the socio techno dynamics that

00:56:14.360 are causing these things we see and what can we do about it the what can we do about it with

00:56:19.000 laner i think is either thought experimenty like his ideas for rebuilding the internet around micro

00:56:25.280 payments for data or just let's just throw out this philosophy so he's a more radical thinker he's

00:56:31.600 smarter than me so so i think it's it's almost like we're playing a different we're playing a

00:56:36.160 different i was gonna say playing a different instrument but that also has a literal truth

00:56:39.320 because he's a he's a master of all he plays a thousand yeah yeah he plays a thousand so that's

00:56:44.180 he's got longer dreadlocks than you do yeah he's a cooler guy than me let's just let's just call it

00:56:48.860 straight he's like a cooler more punk rock techno critic vr punk just a kind of a cool guy i'm not

00:56:57.480 what will you guys share the concern which i certainly share that the underlying business model

00:57:03.140 of the internet has harmed us in ways that still would still surprise some people i mean some people

00:57:10.280 have not paid enough attention to what has come to be known as the the consequences of the

00:57:15.600 surveillance economy to know just how much of what they don't like about life online and even

00:57:22.360 increasingly life in the real world has been driven by this bad advertisement business model

00:57:30.380 what do you think we should do about that i mean i agree with you that lanier's idea that we're going to

00:57:37.080 pay everyone for their data in some amazingly efficient way that i don't understand how that's

00:57:43.580 going to work or and even if it would work i'm like i don't quite see the bridge from where we are

00:57:48.160 to there so what should we do and what and what do you how do you think about your own digital work like

00:57:55.200 your podcast and anything else you're doing and putting out into the world how do you try to

00:58:00.800 navigate in the space of possible business models well this was definitely a place where i generated

00:58:06.480 some friction especially with the 2019 book digital minimalism which was the book that was more on this

00:58:13.060 more on this space and and i had there was a lot of friction i would say with journalists

00:58:17.260 in particular because by by 2019 there had been a sort of turning a perspective right so we we'd had

00:58:23.940 this trump driven turning a perspective where mainstream media now perceive the social media platforms

00:58:31.400 as an evil empire there was there was this shift and from the nerd gods are going to save us to the uh

00:58:37.360 the nerd gods are going to destroy us and i got a lot of friction from them because my my approach

00:58:42.780 to these issues was much more personalized about about individuals and the reaction to these technologies

00:58:48.200 in their lives and the real push there was for systemic probably legislative change and i didn't see a

00:58:53.840 lot except for on the margins that was going to be usefully done with legislation i wasn't that

00:58:59.860 interested in the good guy bad guy storylines either you know mark zuckerberg is you know an evil genius

00:59:07.560 who planned cambridge analytica in a hollowed out volcano and if we can stop him whatever we can have

00:59:14.440 universal basic income i mean there's a lot of things we're being connected together whereas i come

00:59:20.180 at i came at it more i come at it more from a cultural zeitgeist style perspective which to me actually

00:59:24.840 gives me a lot of optimism because the basis of my argument about the internet is like lanier

00:59:29.580 i'm a huge internet booster have very fond memories of sort of pre-consumer web internet and

00:59:35.760 the promise of the internet in its early days i think the primary source of issues yes that business

00:59:41.380 model but that business model wouldn't have so much teeth if it wasn't for the cultural reality

00:59:45.720 that we have temporarily consolidated so much of what is internet traffic to a small number of very

00:59:52.180 large wild garden platforms i think the the internet unleashes its sources of discovery and innovation

00:59:59.200 and joy and connection and entertainment and distraction it does that best when it's distributed

01:00:05.080 and fragmented and niche and weird that it's the internet is a set of universal protocols that anyone

01:00:10.940 with any computer who's plugged into any nearby network can talk and therefore join in it's a very

01:00:17.220 democratized distributed medium when we said let's consolidate that the three companies and they'll

01:00:22.400 have their own private version of the internet running in giant server farms that's where we got a lot of

01:00:26.200 problems i think for a lot of reasons we are refragmenting back towards a more distributed niche

01:00:33.740 internet i think the period of the social media giants consolidating most internet traffic

01:00:39.080 is a was a transient period whose peak has passed and is now starting to to fall apart so i actually

01:00:45.860 think we're heading towards a much better internet and none of that really required a villain to be slain

01:00:52.300 none of that really required a you know complicated new legislative package to be passed none of that

01:00:58.440 really has anything to do with politics it's social technodynamics and so i'm actually i'm more this is

01:01:04.580 daylight with me and linera if we're gonna try to isolate that i think he's more pessimistic about

01:01:08.460 this i'm less i actually think it was a the unstable configuration here was one in which the internet was

01:01:14.880 being consolidated by a small number of companies that required a huge amount if we're going to use sort of

01:01:19.860 physics terms it's like a huge amount of input energy in the system to hold this unstable configuration

01:01:24.100 the rest state is much more distributed and i think we're we're heading back we're going to swing back

01:01:29.820 to a cycle that's more distributed and democratized and weird and that's going to actually be much better

01:01:34.920 so you're actually pretty bearish on these consolidated monopolies maintaining their monopolistic control

01:01:43.180 over conversation so you're it sounds like you think facebook and instagram and twitter even under

01:01:50.740 elon i mean we we can talk about that in a moment because that's its own unique case now but it sounds

01:01:55.820 like you think these are going to if not completely unravel they're going to unwind to the point where

01:02:03.060 much more is happening outside their walls than inside their walls yeah and i think tiktok is actually the

01:02:10.000 thing to kick this off so so i had an article i did a new yorker piece on this about it was called

01:02:14.620 something like tiktok in the fall of the social media giants but my argument is that the giants's main

01:02:21.160 defense was this competitive advantage of having these very large network graphs that they were able

01:02:27.640 to generate through first mover advantage so you have these these large connections of users so first

01:02:33.680 of all it says you have interesting users and you have this rich network of connections between them

01:02:38.340 the follow relations like relations friend relations and as long as they were focused on

01:02:43.500 we are going to i mean the whole job of these companies of course is we're going to generate

01:02:48.360 engagement and as long as their their engagement was being generated from these social graphs it was

01:02:54.560 an impregnable position it was very difficult to dislodge them so you look at something like twitter

01:02:59.820 why is that so successful for those who use it at being a source of engagement is you have

01:03:05.080 not just a lot of interesting people but that's part of it right if you go to parlor if you go to

01:03:10.780 true social one of the big issues is there's just not enough interesting people there to generate

01:03:14.900 enough potentially interesting content but it's also although in their defense they have all the

01:03:19.340 interesting nazis well so if you're interested interesting nazis that's true they have a better

01:03:23.500 selection of interesting nazis than twitter so i'll give them that but the other thing that twitter

01:03:28.600 has i think this is underlooked is actually all of these different follower relationships because

01:03:33.140 twitter actually operates as a distributed cybernetic curation algorithm so so what the way twitter

01:03:41.220 surfaces these things that are really interesting this is different than something like tiktok which

01:03:45.780 is purely algorithmic it's actually the the aggregate of all of these hundreds of thousands independent

01:03:51.580 retweet decisions and because you have this this nice power law graph topology and that underlying

01:03:57.520 follower graph what you get is this rapid amplification of things that are interesting it's a bunch of

01:04:03.060 human decisions plus a network structure that does a really good job of surfacing stuff that captures

01:04:09.180 people's attention that of course that has a lot of side effects we can get into it but that that's a

01:04:13.280 again you have this big asset which is this graph parlor gab whatever can't replicate that they just

01:04:21.280 can't get enough people and enough connections it just there's a first mover advantage there so what

01:04:25.280 happened with tiktok is they came in and said forget that forget this idea that we're going to have

01:04:30.220 some sort of competitive advantage embedded in a social graph instead we're just going to use

01:04:33.560 algorithms anyone can generate content it goes into one big pool we have an algorithm that looks at

01:04:38.340 that pool and selects what's best and we talk about facebook and instagram and twitter and those

01:04:42.980 algorithmic terms but we really underestimate the degree to which actual human created links in a

01:04:49.600 social graph play a huge role in how those algorithms work tiktok doesn't care about any social graph

01:04:54.100 it's all algorithmic so when meta is starting to chase tiktok because they have to get their

01:04:59.880 quarterly earnings up so on instagram and in facebook they begin to add less social graph based

01:05:05.840 curation and more purely algorithmic based curation they're leaving the castle walls they're leaving the

01:05:11.420 first mover advantage they had built up on we have the social graph and no one ever again is going to

01:05:15.920 get 1.7 billion people to manually specify a lot of people are their friends they're leaving that

01:05:21.640 advantage to play on tiktok's turf without that advantage they are competing with anyone else who's

01:05:26.940 trying to offer engagement and they're vulnerable and i think there's a lot of other sources of

01:05:31.580 interesting engagement once they no longer have that advantage there's podcasts there's streaming

01:05:35.920 there's apps there's games there's niche networks i think they're vulnerable and so the only player

01:05:41.500 there who could potentially survive this is twitter because they are for now all of their value

01:05:47.160 proposition still comes from their underlying social graph and by going private they can resist the

01:05:53.800 investor pressures that push meta to say we have to chase tiktok we have to chase algorithmic curation

01:05:58.340 so so i mean twitter probably has the best chance of surviving as not the town square which i never thought it

01:06:04.300 really was that's a different topic but as a an interesting service that there's a non-trivial amount

01:06:09.780 of people who get some enjoyment out of it interesting so to summarize what you just said

01:06:15.060 the reason why meta to take the largest example could lose its monopolistic power here in the face of

01:06:26.340 tiktok is that by trying to play tiktok's game it is giving up its intrinsic monopoly over network effects

01:06:34.880 and is essentially entering the the entertainment business and then the question is well what's more

01:06:40.860 entertaining and then there's then you suddenly have a lot of competition that you didn't have

01:06:45.780 when you were just trying to leverage the the social graph that you have and no one else has

01:06:51.840 yep tiktok is the visigoths coming into rome you know and if it's not them there's seven other

01:06:57.320 barbarian tribes are going to follow them i mean when rome fell it was tribe after tribe group after group

01:07:02.820 you know all taking their all taking their swing at an empire that had lost its its financial core

01:07:08.980 that could protect it it's i think it's the same thing and they have to the problem is they have

01:07:13.640 to go after tiktok because they're public and they're losing users and tiktok is eating their

01:07:18.840 lunch but i i quote an executive so in this one piece i wrote an executive who left facebook to go

01:07:24.580 to tiktok and basically what he was saying backing up my my thesis here was you guys are good you guys

01:07:31.600 being facebook here you're a social company this is what you figured out how to do really well

01:07:36.300 build maintain and extract value from a social graph like you are not an entertainment company

01:07:40.720 tiktok is an entertainment company you're not going to play this game well you don't have any

01:07:44.600 expertise here it's not in your dna and so you're in danger if you come over here and the problem

01:07:50.580 with tiktok of course so people were asking after that article so do i think tiktok is going to be the

01:07:54.720 winner like no that'll also that that has a two-year half-life max the point is there's 17 other

01:07:59.980 tiktoks coming behind it 17 other zeitgeisty incredibly engaging things as long as the game

01:08:06.120 is just make me look at this phone uh it doesn't matter that there's a social graph here it doesn't

01:08:11.340 matter that my cousin's on here it doesn't matter that the the three sports stars i like are tweeting

01:08:15.460 on here or whatever then everything is everything is competition with everything else you know i mean

01:08:20.660 eventually you could just have you know asmr pleasing flashing lights you know whatever i mean you're

01:08:27.100 playing you're in that ballgame at that point so i don't use tiktok i don't i'm not on it and i don't

01:08:32.260 actually consume it i've seen you know a handful of videos on on youtube i think but i guess i get

01:08:38.440 the format but you're an algorithm guy what why is their algorithm so good i mean it's just maybe

01:08:44.860 it's goodness is being exaggerated to lay people like me but the the rumor is it's got this magically

01:08:50.980 powerful way of serving up content to people that drives dopamine in a way that no one else has quite

01:08:59.940 managed well it's an interesting question because we don't know exactly but we have some insight into

01:09:06.100 what the algorithm does there was one study in particular the wall street journal commission

01:09:09.700 that's really useful where they created hundreds of fake tiktok accounts and they can systematically

01:09:14.060 try to prove what's going on if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - November 28, 2022

#304 — Why I Left Twitter

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