Making Sense - Sam Harris - #363

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:44.380 Well, there's a lot going on in the world. Iran recently attacked Israel to minimal effect,

00:00:53.600 happily. I think there's one casualty at this point. Anyway, there'll be more to say about

00:01:00.900 that soon enough. I will wait until I can do a proper podcast on the topic of Iran and what

00:01:08.120 to do about it. Today I'm speaking with Cal Newport. Cal is a professor of computer science

00:01:14.860 at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics.

00:01:20.680 Cal is also a New York Times bestselling author and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

00:01:26.780 He also hosts the Deep Questions podcast. And Cal's most recent book is Slow Productivity,

00:01:33.420 The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. And we talk about the book today. We generally

00:01:39.320 discuss information technology and the cult of productivity. We talk about the state of social

00:01:45.480 media, the academic in exile effect, free speech in moderation, the effect of the pandemic on

00:01:52.420 knowledge work. And then we get into his book. We talk about Jane Austen as an example of traditional

00:01:58.800 productivity, managing up in an organization, defragmenting one's work life, doing fewer things,

00:02:07.000 reasonable deadlines, trading money for time, how we will find meaning in a post-scarcity world,

00:02:13.340 the anti-work movement, the effects of artificial intelligence on knowledge work,

00:02:18.580 and other topics. And now I bring you Cal Newport.

00:02:28.920 I am here with Cal Newport. Cal, thanks for joining me again.

00:02:32.900 Sam, it's always a pleasure to talk with you.

00:02:35.220 So we're going to talk about your new book, Slow Productivity,

00:02:38.540 The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. But before we do, I first have to thank you. I

00:02:44.920 think I must have thanked you by email in the intervening year and a half since we last spoke.

00:02:51.560 But you, as you know, you were the final domino to fall that led me to get off Twitter. And,

00:02:59.840 you know, as I've said, really, every time I've touched this topic on this podcast and elsewhere,

00:03:05.540 I'm just embarrassed to have discovered what a great life hack that was. I mean, it was just,

00:03:11.220 it was diagnostic of how much a problem Twitter had become for me. But I just must thank you for

00:03:18.540 your influence and your wisdom on that front and your actual intervention. I mean, you just straight

00:03:24.440 up told me you thought I should get off Twitter in our podcast. And your voice was definitely in my

00:03:29.460 head when I finally pulled the plug. So thank you.

00:03:32.120 I mean, I, you're welcome. I enjoyed and found fascinating the reaction

00:03:37.120 to you leaving Twitter. I don't know if this is how you experienced it, but to me, it's what I

00:03:43.140 imagine it's like when your buddy at the bar stops drinking because people got mad that you left.

00:03:48.940 I can't imagine being mad about someone stopping doing something, but people is as if they took it

00:03:55.680 personally, as far as I could tell, like, what do you mean you're leaving Twitter? What's wrong?

00:04:01.260 I thought that was as instructive as hearing about what your experience has been like after you left.

00:04:07.260 Yeah, people did get mad. And, uh, you know, from the top down, I mean, Elon Musk was one of the

00:04:13.180 people who got quite mad. It was interesting. I mean, obviously much of the reaction I didn't see

00:04:18.440 because I was no longer on Twitter, but I got a lot of it in my inbox. You know, many people

00:04:23.740 immediately reached out, worried that I was suffering some kind of mental health crisis. I mean,

00:04:28.320 how do you delete your Twitter account apart from being in extremis? But, um, it's been

00:04:35.380 wholly good and, and has allowed me to, um, not just pay attention more to things I actually care

00:04:43.080 about, but just, it's allowed me to reflect on what my engagement with Twitter had become. And it

00:04:50.320 was, I mean, I think people's negative reaction to it is to some degree understandable because

00:04:57.220 my decision really wasn't just for me and my, my perception of, you know, what Twitter was,

00:05:03.720 you know, had done to my own mind. It, it, it is a, an implicit and even explicit every time I talk

00:05:09.420 about it, condemnation of what, what I think social media has done to most people on it. I mean,

00:05:14.520 I think, you know, there's some people who have, um, you know, fairly benign experiences on these

00:05:20.020 platforms, but for most of the, the so-called elites, you know, journalists and scientists and

00:05:25.500 public figures who are, who think they are condemned to use this so-called digital town square to

00:05:32.720 maintain their reputations and build their brands and all of that. I mean, it's, and to just stay in

00:05:36.900 touch with what's going on in the world, it has become so dysfunctional. And I don't think this,

00:05:42.600 I can't recall if this came up in our conversation, but one of the reasons why I left was not so much

00:05:49.240 my, um, the awareness of what it had done to me, but kind of the obvious evidence of what it was

00:05:56.460 doing to Elon, not, not as the owner of the platform, but just as his most, you know, most

00:06:01.940 prominent user. And I just saw, it was just kind of staring into the funhouse mirror of, of his life

00:06:08.200 derangement, which was, it was just quite obviously happening as a result of his addiction to the

00:06:13.260 platform. I then began to reflect on the way in which I was sharing in that symptomology, you know,

00:06:20.240 albeit somewhat differently, but still, I mean, once I pulled the plug, I, I just, it was like, I had a,

00:06:26.660 um, almost like a digital phantom limb syndrome. And I, in fact, it was like, it was analogous to

00:06:34.140 amputating a phantom limb. Cause I felt that what I was, the pain I was experiencing was happening in

00:06:42.020 a space that wasn't quite real ever. You know, you're the, the, the digital reputation you imagine

00:06:47.640 you're maintaining isn't quite, I mean, it is, you can't quite say it's not your reputation.

00:06:53.240 Obviously it is your reputation, but it is, it is a, almost a second presence in your,

00:06:59.080 in your mind and life, which doesn't totally map onto your life in real social space with real

00:07:05.200 people in the real world. Even with the same people who you might be fighting with online,

00:07:10.420 when you actually meet them face to face, those conversations are different. And so it just,

00:07:15.260 it was like amputating a phantom limb. And, um, I mean, I, I just can't say enough about what,

00:07:22.480 uh, a positive change has been. It's been quite incredible.

00:07:25.300 Yeah. Well, you know, I did some writing about this more recently and I had you in mind a little

00:07:29.840 bit when I was thinking about this, I wrote this New Yorker essay late last summer, early fall.

00:07:35.660 And one of the big questions I had in there is why did we come to believe that the right way to use

00:07:42.700 the internet to have discussions, the sort of surface ideas, the spread news, why did we think the right

00:07:49.120 way to do this was to try to get everyone to use the same global platform? And this is, we take this

00:07:54.420 for granted as like, of course, this is what you should do. We should have everyone use the same

00:07:59.020 global conversation platform. Cause if we're all on the platform, we all can see each other. But of

00:08:03.940 course the reality, and I sort of laid this out of the article is when you have 500 million tweets

00:08:08.920 being generated per day, and the average person is going to see 100 in their feed, what you have to

00:08:15.460 do is just incredibly aggressive curation, right? Because there's just, you can't have 500 million

00:08:22.440 people using the same platform and yet have a sort of globalized, centralized, zeitgeisty feed where

00:08:28.280 you're trying to surface a small number of trends for everyone to see. This requires incredible

00:08:33.040 curation, this sort of amazing cybernetic part algorithm, part human, part network theory powered

00:08:38.560 curation that Twitter uses. And it's of course that incredibly aggressive curation that makes this a

00:08:43.860 platform that just fuels outrage, that fuels the darker side of people. And one of the arguments I made

00:08:49.620 in that article is here's what works better. Small communities that have weak, tight connections

00:08:54.980 between them. You have lots of small communities online and they have overlapping membership.

00:08:59.740 We know from network theory, really interesting ideas can spread to these network of networks.

00:09:04.420 Really important news will spread to these network of networks. But most of your interaction

00:09:08.920 in this sort of digital vision is going to be with a small number of other people that have a sort of

00:09:14.020 emergent shared sort of community standard. It's much richer, much more personal. That's really

00:09:19.580 what the internet envisioned. Everyone is going to have the possibility to be connected to everyone

00:09:24.580 else. Not everyone actually needs to be directly connected to everyone else on the same platform.

00:09:29.280 So I've really been thinking about the folly of global conversation platform as one of the key

00:09:34.360 follies of the sort of 2010s internet.

00:09:36.800 Yeah, I think when we last spoke, you were pretty bearish on the major social media networks

00:09:43.320 because I think it was because you thought TikTok had successfully disrupted everything because

00:09:49.900 they weren't relying on the social graph that, you know, so you have Facebook and Twitter

00:09:56.740 that had a kind of first mover advantage where they got all of us to build out our social networks

00:10:03.100 in this common space. And that was really the, you know, that and some, you know, algorithmic gaming

00:10:09.880 of the system was really the basis of surfacing content. And, you know, as we all know, it privileged

00:10:17.520 outrage and kind of a negatively biased engagement. But what TikTok did is it just never even went in the

00:10:26.360 direction of establishing a social graph. It just used a pure algorithmic surfacing of entertainment.

00:10:32.660 And insofar as the social media platforms have had to emulate TikTok, maybe Twitter is still an

00:10:38.620 exception here, but certainly Facebook or Instagram. Do you still think that the writing is still on

00:10:44.460 the wall for the major platforms? Or do you think they're going to figure out how to still claim

00:10:51.640 the better part of humanity for the rest of our lives?

00:10:55.260 I still feel strong about that hypothesis. I mean, I think we see, for various reasons,

00:10:59.840 but we see the dethroning of Twitter as having that same central cultural status it had before.

00:11:07.280 TikTok, we see, for example, like my argument was about TikTok is without this entrenched advantage

00:11:12.560 of my social graph is in there. I've already spent years trying to set up follower networks that I

00:11:18.200 said the connection to TikTok would be very superficial and weak. And we are seeing that. I think last year,

00:11:23.720 for example, there was double-digit drops in TikTok users among the sort of 20, especially the upper

00:11:29.320 20s and in the 30s, that sort of demographic, sort of young adult demographics said enough.

00:11:34.380 And they really had no problem leaving because what's actually connecting there, it's a very

00:11:37.960 zeitgeisty platform that people can take or leave. I mean, Instagram is holding it there,

00:11:43.160 but I don't think it has that same, again, centrality that it might've had two or three years ago.

00:11:47.740 And the alternatives, independent media, so podcasting, email newsletters, these really

00:11:53.520 are ascendant in the last year, year and a half since we've talked. And that's the opposite of

00:11:58.040 the centralized platform model because this is independently produced information. People

00:12:03.880 discover these things almost entirely through point-to-point curated trust. Someone I know

00:12:09.560 forwarded me an email newsletter. I signed up. Someone I know told me about this podcast. I started

00:12:13.860 listening to this podcast. They mentioned another podcast. Now I listen to that one.

00:12:16.860 That distributed trust model of curation as opposed to a centralized algorithmic model,

00:12:21.700 I think really works well, and we're seeing that. So I remain bearish on the idea of a small number

00:12:28.920 of social platforms that dominate internet culture.

00:12:31.300 Yeah. One of the biggest changes for me, which I didn't anticipate, was that shutting down my Twitter

00:12:40.920 account changed my relationship as a producer of content, as somebody with a fairly large platform.

00:12:50.120 It changed my relationship to my own engagement with current events and the world of ideas and just

00:12:59.640 my audience. It just changed the time course of everything. So when you're on Twitter, you feel an

00:13:06.180 obligation to react to something that everyone is reacting to, or at least you have to consider

00:13:12.680 whether or not you should, right? So you're just, you know, something happens in the news and everyone

00:13:17.620 is forwarding a specific article or, you know, dunking on some response to current events. And

00:13:23.660 you, because you, it's just implicit, you have the platform, you have the massive audience, you're,

00:13:29.480 you're part of this conversation. What are you going to say about it? And no longer having that

00:13:34.920 outlet, the time course of my response to everything has slowed way down. And so, you know, now I have

00:13:41.440 this podcast and I podcast, you know, more or less once a week. And so I really have a, I have a better

00:13:47.400 part of a week to decide whether I should say anything about what just happened, you know,

00:13:52.820 in Ukraine or anywhere else. And, you know, most things, I would say 99% of things don't survive

00:14:01.220 that interval, right? It's just, there's no reason for me to react to the thing that happened four

00:14:06.300 days ago. And, you know, there has been memory hold for almost everyone at this point. And so it's

00:14:12.740 just changed my relationship to information, to the news, to my own sense of just how I needed to

00:14:19.540 think and talk about things. And I really wasn't anticipating that. It just, it was, you know,

00:14:25.540 there's probably something lost there. I mean, there are moments in public conversation where

00:14:31.320 it's probably an advantage to be able to say something immediately. And, you know, you're part

00:14:36.060 of that first, the first things that are getting said are something you're contributing to. But

00:14:41.700 I don't know, it just, there's so much more noise than signal there. And just the feeling of moving

00:14:47.360 through the day is so different when it's not being punctuated by dozens of interruptions, but,

00:14:54.800 you know, with just to see what was said or to decide whether you're going to say something about

00:15:00.700 this next thing that happened. It's just, I mean, honestly, it feels like I've just come out of

00:15:05.900 some kind of decade long flirtation with mental illness. I mean, I just, it's, it's not actually

00:15:13.000 too strong a way to put it. It's, it's just, it is a profound relief. I mean, it's a, and a humbling,

00:15:19.580 a humbling one really, really. Yeah. Do you find it surprising the number, I'm thinking journalists

00:15:25.880 in particular who very much dislike Elon Musk, right? So they, they have a, a sort of moral,

00:15:32.740 personal, ethical commitment to stop using his platform. And they'll still talk about,

00:15:37.780 I don't like what's happening on X. I don't like Elon Musk. And yet almost none of them have left.

00:15:44.260 I find that interesting. I think, again, I think there's something interesting in that where it

00:15:48.100 would, for a lot of people who are writing like in tech journalism, business journalism,

00:15:52.280 really dislike, clearly dislike Elon Musk, still can't bring themselves to leaving the platform,

00:15:58.960 platform, which, which again, I think speaks to something interesting about the way the platform

00:16:03.720 plays, especially people with some sort of public profile, the way it plays and how they, they

00:16:07.160 understand their, their influence on the world or their impact. But that's, to me, that's been

00:16:10.800 the more interesting observation of the post Musk period is actually how rare you still are,

00:16:17.600 which is, you know, I thought there'd be a lot more Sam Harris's, a lot more people saying,

00:16:21.400 yeah, I'm just leaving. People are having a hard time.

00:16:23.440 Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I do have to recognize that I'm immensely lucky to have already, already

00:16:31.380 have built my platform in, in the ways that I've built it so that I didn't feel that really I was

00:16:38.280 putting anything in jeopardy by just pulling the plug on my, my social media presence. I still have

00:16:44.440 a, a, a minor presence in, in the sense that, you know, my team puts out stuff on, on the various

00:16:49.160 platforms. It's just a sheer marketing, right? So there's, but those were always much smaller

00:16:53.080 accounts and because everyone knows it's not me, you know, people are much less interested in it.

00:16:57.240 So, you know, I mean, those are just maintained in a perfunctory way, but I think most people who

00:17:03.160 are still building their, their, their reputations as writers or journalists or, I mean, certainly

00:17:08.460 people in politics feel that they just can't forsake the opportunity to build an audience there or,

00:17:15.800 and they certainly can't pull the plug on a large audience already built if they're busy,

00:17:20.900 you know, whittling away on their various projects. I just see no other way to, to effectively market

00:17:26.820 them. I mean, I just think it's, everyone's been captured by it. And what's more, there, there is

00:17:32.260 just this sense that if you're not there, you don't know what's actually happening as soon as you need

00:17:38.880 to know it. I mean, especially if you're a journalist and I mean, the thing is that it's so distorting of

00:17:45.300 priorities and of, of real information. I mean, I see, I see so many people in the podcast space and,

00:17:51.920 you know, in the alternative media space pushed around by misinformation and conspiracy thinking.

00:17:57.720 And even when they're, you know, occasionally right about something, you know, I mean, occasionally

00:18:01.960 there's a conspiracy theory that really turns out to be true. It's just so everyone's priorities are

00:18:08.780 so upside down. And there's just this, what is engineered for this, this is now kind of outside

00:18:15.020 of mainstream channels. I mean, this wouldn't be true of the New Yorker where you write, but it's

00:18:19.780 just, you know, out in what I call podcast to stand and substack a stand. It has created this,

00:18:25.740 this new religion of anti-establishment thinking, where it's just the alternative explanation of

00:18:32.380 everything is the thing that we're now going to spend 90% of our time talking about. And it's just

00:18:39.420 so often wrong and misleading and deranging that, I mean, it really, it has made me increasingly

00:18:44.800 worried that we have, you know, politically, you know, in the, certainly in the aftermath of COVID

00:18:50.180 rendered ourselves almost ungovernable in how we talk about, you know, what you, what, or, you know,

00:18:58.280 attempt to have a conversation about what used to be the world of facts.

00:19:03.440 Yeah. Well, I mean, I think this is one of the more engaging human psychological experiences

00:19:09.600 is this idea of most people were thinking this, but then me and my group figured out that that is

00:19:15.140 true, right? That inversion, the, the inversion of the, whatever the, the empiricism structure

00:19:20.860 is incredibly engaging and it occurs every once in a while in reality. Like everyone was thinking

00:19:25.520 this and then we realized whatever DNA is a double helix and it's like amazing online culture,

00:19:32.240 especially algorithmic driven online culture has given a way to basically commodify that and spread

00:19:38.000 that. Like that we can, we can create, you can, you can build an entire like epistemology around

00:19:44.080 everyone thinks this is true, but it's really that, you know, everyone thinks this is bad for you.

00:19:47.860 It's good. Everyone thinks like this about this disease, but it's that everyone, you know,

00:19:51.000 thinks that, and you can build an entire epistemology around that. Like your entire world can be

00:19:54.900 that. And there can be a whole audience that's just going to reward that. The algorithm is going

00:19:58.160 to reward that. So I have definitely seen that as well. There, I mean, there's a, there's a well-known

00:20:02.540 effect among professors called the sort of academic in exile or academic in the wilds effect, which is

00:20:09.240 if you, if you take an academic and then they leave, they leave academia, you know, they go, they go

00:20:15.100 independent eight times out of 10, they go to some really conspiratorial places. And partially what's

00:20:22.960 going on here is, well, first of all, they're smart. So like it completely makes sense to them

00:20:27.400 that, uh, I could figure something out that other people didn't understand because I'm, I'm very smart.

00:20:32.080 But one of the purposes and like services academia plays is there's this checking mechanism. Everyone

00:20:37.580 else is smart too. And so when you're like, Hey, I think, look, here's this, this whole new way of

00:20:41.360 seeing it. The earth is hollow. You have all these other smart people being like, here's why you're

00:20:44.980 dumb. And they take you down. Right. But when you leave, you have this academic in exile. And this is

00:20:50.940 sort of like Linus Pauline with vitamin megadosing, right? It's much, much higher rate now in the age

00:20:56.580 of social media, because now when you leave, you can immediately algorithmically have constructed

00:21:01.220 an audience that cheers you on. And so now I think the severity of academic and exile effect is much

00:21:07.340 more pronounced and much more ubiquitous than it used to be that when you sort of leave academia to

00:21:11.460 start your podcast, it's not too long until, you know, there's world changing conspiracies that you're

00:21:17.740 uncovering and it could be medical and it could be governmental and it doesn't matter. And so I think

00:21:23.900 that effect is like one of the more interesting effects that's been happening is that you can get

00:21:27.340 a cheering section and the algorithmically constructed cheering section of people that you're

00:21:31.980 being rewarded for saying, I think this is the way it really happens. And, you know, you see this all

00:21:36.660 the time. I think I like podcasts to stand as a term, this idea of there can be a hundred studies

00:21:41.740 saying something, but if there's one study saying something different, the way you perceive that is,

00:21:46.080 well, everyone knows now that thing's not true. It's this interesting sort of sampling of evidence,

00:21:51.140 this sort of destabilization of Bayesian priors that is amplified and supported in sort of the world of

00:21:57.260 algorithmically discriminated or algorithmically disseminated information.

00:22:02.160 Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, this is a, you just described an effect that I've referred to,

00:22:09.280 I believe previously as watching people get radicalized by their own audience, right? I mean,

00:22:15.140 that cheering section has the effect of people notice the signal in their own audience and then

00:22:21.180 they begin to cater to that signal. And then there's just this, this ratchet effect where it

00:22:26.480 just gets, you know, crazier and crazier and there's more and more sunk cost reputationally for having

00:22:31.960 been the guy who was sure that there's so many examples of this in the midst of COVID that focus on

00:22:38.420 vaccines and medical conspiracies, etc. You're just, you go all in and then you, you know, you would have

00:22:45.440 to completely repudiate how you spent the last 12 months if you were going to have a, have a second

00:22:50.660 thought and anyone's going to talk any sense into you. Yep. So there's one thing that reliably

00:22:56.820 confuses people here around the norms of our online conversation and it's the analogy of Twitter being

00:23:07.840 the so-called digital town square and this notion that a commitment to free speech should more or less

00:23:17.600 bar the door to any kind of, you know, real moderation policy, right? Like what you want is a total free

00:23:25.960 for all where the best idea wins and sunlight is the best disinfectant, right? So we should be able

00:23:33.100 to entertain any notion at whatever scale for however long in proximity to any other world events

00:23:41.620 and any effort to put your thumb on the scale to de-platform Alex Jones or to try to clean up a

00:23:51.140 digital sewer that's introducing bias by definition and it's, and worse, it's actually just a

00:23:59.080 repudiation of, you know, free speech in, in the constitutional sense and it's, um, it's forsaking

00:24:07.520 the best error correcting mechanisms we have which are just let everything suffer collision with

00:24:15.700 everything else and see what wins, right? And so the, you know, people never, when they're championing

00:24:22.520 this, you know, commitment to something like free speech absolutism, they never take a moment to

00:24:27.960 recognize that there are places on online that are much closer to the absolute than Twitter ever was

00:24:33.840 and no one wants to be there. I mean, places like 4chan and 8chan, I mean, that's where you really get

00:24:38.660 your absolutes, right? Where you can just, you know, I mean, everything up to child pornography is,

00:24:44.140 might populate your, your feed. But there's also just this point that is also overlooked, which you

00:24:51.220 just referenced, which is the algorithmically boosted aspect of the speech, which changes the,

00:24:57.080 the nature of what speech is online. So perhaps you could just give me your thoughts on how you view

00:25:03.280 this tension between our commitment to free speech, our commitment to leveraging the wisdom of the

00:25:10.000 crowd insofar as it exists and to correcting errors at scale, but this need to not suffer the 4chanification

00:25:18.580 of everything in our digital lives. Yeah. Well, I think that town square, it's a town square analogy

00:25:25.080 that's causing the problem here, right? I mean, the, the concept of a town square, the sort of

00:25:30.040 central gathering place where people can democratically discuss depends on scale being

00:25:35.380 reasonable, right? I mean, we call it the town square. We don't call it the city or the state

00:25:39.580 square, right? Because it's, it's a place where the demos in Athens, we sort of, a relatively

00:25:44.960 constrained group of people who all know each other and have other ties to each other. You have other

00:25:49.240 social trust ties to each other. We live in the same town. I run the hardware store that you come

00:25:54.140 to, to buy your nails, them to come together. There's this free speech notion of, well, we don't want to

00:25:59.760 buy fiat in advance, say, here are topics that are off limits because how are we going to work

00:26:03.760 together to advance what we understand? Twitter is not a town square, right? When you have 500

00:26:08.520 million users, that's not a town square. It's an entertainment product. We have 500 million users

00:26:15.100 who are inputting lots of different possible bits of, of content that could be interesting.

00:26:20.280 We're going to run them through this cybernetic curation algorithms. This is what I mean by that is

00:26:24.720 there's algorithms involved, but it's also the expansion properties of the underlying

00:26:29.660 follower graph means that individual decisions to retweet or not retweet. These are human

00:26:35.180 decisions interacting with these digital networks can create these cascades of information spreading.

00:26:41.200 That's a lot about how trends arise. It's a really powerful actual curation mechanism.

00:26:46.140 It's unlike TikTok, which is purely algorithmic. On Twitter, it's cybernetic. You have these digital

00:26:51.420 networks with good expansion properties and 100 million people making individual decisions whether

00:26:56.660 not to click retweet or not, whether to quote tweet or not, which is a whole interesting sort

00:27:01.080 of computer science question. All of this aimed towards how can we take this giant pool of potential

00:27:06.360 content and choose the sort of small number of streams of content that are going to be relatively

00:27:11.560 globalized or interesting and engaging. That's not a town square. It's an entertainment product.

00:27:16.300 It's why in a New Yorker piece I wrote right after Musk took over Twitter, as I said, it's not the town

00:27:21.540 square. It's much more the Coliseum. That's much more the better idea. It's tons of people watching

00:27:26.280 carefully curated entertainment. In that context, of course, you have all sorts of thumbs on the

00:27:31.120 scale. The whole point is we're trying to put on this show. I think of the trending topics of the

00:27:36.860 day as the show on the Coliseum floor with all the huge crowds just watching and chiming in to see

00:27:42.080 the blood sport between, hey, Sam today is having a war with whoever. This is the entertainment for

00:27:48.100 today. It's an entertainment product. Of course, the thumb is on the scale because you're trying

00:27:52.500 to find something that just pushes the buttons right. Maybe there's some outrage, but not too

00:27:57.540 much. Maybe it's absurd, but not in a sort of 8chan, completely over the top, lols type absurd.

00:28:05.540 You're trying to program a television station. You're trying to program entertainment in a Coliseum.

00:28:11.560 It's not a town square. Now, if you have actual digital town squares, here's a place for a small

00:28:17.160 number of people who have other ties to each other are gathering to think things through and talk

00:28:20.840 things through. We've seen examples of those can have a wide variety of different community

00:28:25.200 standards, including standards where almost anything is going to go on this discussion

00:28:30.100 group. But it works because we're all whatever, lumberjacks from this part of the country, and we

00:28:35.200 sort of have other ties to each other. And so I think it's that town square metaphor that threw us

00:28:39.220 off. We took this entertainment product and somehow tried to make it seem like this was the Roman

00:28:44.140 Senate. Like this is where just like this reasonable, reasonable scaled group of people

00:28:49.340 were getting together to hash things out. And that's never what they were actually trying to do

00:28:52.400 there. It seems reasonable to have made this mistake, though. I mean, the structure you're

00:28:57.560 positing, like a network of networks online, that at least is implied on Twitter because you have the

00:29:04.320 people you're following and you have the people who are following you. And that's not all of Twitter,

00:29:09.000 right? It's just you're just tending to see what you're following and everyone who's following

00:29:15.380 you sees what you react to. And that's its own little space. Why is that so easily corrupted

00:29:23.880 by being in contact with the rest of the ocean of information?

00:29:28.780 Well, what ends up happening on Twitter is that more local interactions just get swamped out by the

00:29:33.940 ultra amplified content, right? And increasingly their feed is driven by this. So there's some

00:29:39.980 stuff in there from people you straight follow, but the feed is algorithmically sorted. And one of

00:29:45.320 the major criteria on which things are sorted for your feed is their engagement across the network.

00:29:50.480 So really what's happened is it's the content that has really gained this big boosting effect,

00:29:56.160 this sort of cascade of retweets leading to retweets. That's what's being programmed for.

00:30:01.180 And there's some conceptual regionalization. So if you're, if you follow a lot of a certain type

00:30:06.520 of people, you might be seeing what's really being amplified in that, that subgroup. That's true.

00:30:11.420 There's some, there's some of that going on as well, but it's a really large scale at which a lot of

00:30:15.940 this is happening. And especially when it comes to the most town squarey piece of this, which is

00:30:20.820 discussions of politics, discussions of policy, discussions of world events, the sort of the stuff we

00:30:26.020 think of as the grist of civic discussion. Those are incredibly large sub-networks in which

00:30:32.660 information is spreading. And that's where you really have the Coliseum effect. It's people

00:30:37.140 competing to get their turn on the Coliseum floor. They have their trident ready. And that's like that

00:30:44.080 most civic-minded aspect that we associate with Twitter. I think it's the most entertainment-centric.

00:30:48.400 Yeah. And the most corrupting of our conversation about important topics, because it really, because

00:30:55.760 one of the thumbs on the scale here is outrage. And I mean, outrage is a word we keep using in this

00:31:02.600 context. And it's, it seems to have been, I mean, at least in my hearing, it doesn't quite convey the

00:31:10.000 attitude that one sees so often online, which is, it really is kind of in-group sanctimony and out-group

00:31:18.220 contempt, right? You're expressing contempt for the out-group to your in-group. It's a

00:31:23.380 simulacrum of conversation. I mean, sometimes you're actually, you know, someone's responding

00:31:26.580 to somebody else, but it's almost always a bad faith response. It's a response that is meant

00:31:33.340 to be enjoyed by the in-group that despises the target of the remark in the out-group. And it's so,

00:31:41.320 it's just, it's so obviously driving us apart at the level of society. Again, not when you're

00:31:47.760 talking about how beautiful a full solar eclipse is, but you know, when you're talking about

00:31:53.220 politics or anything that is polarizing. Yeah. No. And, and, and I'm with you on this,

00:31:58.980 right? It does that. It does that. And you're auditioning, you're auditioning when you comment

00:32:03.320 on someone's tweet, you're auditioning for the algorithm. There's this sort of cybernetic

00:32:07.180 amplification effect. So everyone tries to one-up each other. I mean, I hear a lot from people,

00:32:11.840 you know, what they're really, they're worried about mainly is not the contempt from the other side,

00:32:15.240 but that the in-group policing, I think it's had a massive impact. We see it, you see it in

00:32:19.960 journalism, you see it in academia, you see it in sort of theoretical frameworks. You certainly see

00:32:27.020 it to some degree in politics. So it's interesting politicians, they're so used to that. It's almost

00:32:32.420 as if they, they're the one group that at least sort of understands the sociodynamics of, of

00:32:39.280 something like Twitter. Like this is sort of their lives is, you know, in-group policing, out-group

00:32:44.180 contempt, being okay with like, these people are upset. Who am I going to hitch my wagon to putting

00:32:48.800 their finger to the wind? But for most other people aren't used to that. And so it's a, it's

00:32:53.100 definitely an effect that makes you either cower or makes you conform. Look, I only get some taste

00:32:58.220 of this, like when I'm doing book tours, right? Because I'm not on social media. So I'm not subject to

00:33:04.200 people talking about me in, in these sort of contexts. When you have a book out, you, people

00:33:08.680 do talk, you get reviews and people come out to talk about your book or whatever. And I hate it.

00:33:13.440 And I couldn't imagine if that was just all the time, that if like all the time, that was the

00:33:18.060 world I was in is like every week I have to get like the two or three people that are like taking

00:33:22.340 their swing at me or whatever. I mean, that would drastically affect, I'm sure what I write about,

00:33:27.660 how I went through my life, just like the subjective wellbeing. Yes. I really, I was really hoping

00:33:33.560 for Elon to destabilize Twitter so much that it did essentially collapse. Like it would actually

00:33:39.860 be like a great civic duty that he would have done, but it seems to be holding on to some degree,

00:33:45.320 at least as far as I can tell, which is I think unfortunate. Yeah. Well, he's, he's destabilized

00:33:50.680 something and it's been his own brain, but yeah, it's just, he really is a cautionary tale at this

00:33:58.820 point. And, and, uh, that, that has always been my concern about his engagement with Twitter,

00:34:03.800 not so much what he was going to do to the platform. I, you know, I've, for the longest

00:34:07.300 time I remained agnostic as to whether or not he could actually significantly improve

00:34:11.860 it. I don't, it doesn't seem likely to me now, but I'm not really in touch with what

00:34:17.380 it's become, but it's just as, as for its effect on him, you know, one of the most productive

00:34:21.680 people in any generation, it's, um, it hasn't been good. Let's turn to your book because it's,

00:34:29.020 um, really, I mean, you've, you've written a series of books that have, um, targeted the same

00:34:35.880 kind of, of object here, which is a, um, a life well lived, right? I mean, the question is like,

00:34:41.980 how do we answer the question, what is life good for, right? I mean, the people, especially

00:34:48.000 when you get to a certain level of privilege and abundance and just sheer good luck, and

00:34:54.100 this is almost by definition, much of our audience, you know, for a podcast like this

00:34:59.640 or for a book like yours, and we're talking about people who have the time to think about

00:35:04.280 how to improve their lives in, and how to, to live more wisely and get to a place where

00:35:11.780 they, they more and more are not regretting how they use their time. I mean, they're, they're,

00:35:17.140 that does suggest, you know, at least a few degrees of freedom there in the kinds of choices

00:35:22.080 they make. You know, presumably, if you're listening to this podcast, you're not digging

00:35:26.260 a ditch in the sun under the lash of some tyrant, right? So you, you seem to be at least implicitly

00:35:33.940 and rather often explicitly asking these types of questions, you know, just like, what is the

00:35:38.980 point of all of this? What, what, what does winning the game actually look like? And in this

00:35:44.740 most recent book, you're talking about a new approach to productivity, which, you know,

00:35:51.940 you, you say is, it's a lost art. So you're suggesting that we were once much better at

00:35:56.400 this. Well, let's just start with your, your basic concept. What do you mean by slow productivity

00:36:02.280 and how have we lost touch with it?

00:36:05.540 Well, I agree with your characterization of the questions I think about, I would add something

00:36:10.320 else to it, which is, you know, as a computer scientist, as a digital theorist, I care in

00:36:17.120 particular how technology intersects with that story as well. Right. So, so in most of my writing

00:36:22.660 of the last decade, there's usually a unintended consequence of a technological development that

00:36:29.300 gets us out of touch or becomes an obstacle to living some life that's going to be deeper,

00:36:33.760 more meaningful. And we have to grapple with that and understand that technology, the opportunities,

00:36:38.600 the perils, and sort of navigate around it. Right. So even this book, like slow productivity,

00:36:43.860 the, the problem that I'm solving, there's actually a techno story behind it. Right. I mean,

00:36:49.120 so there's, there's a, an easier way of summarizing it, which is look, there's a key question that a

00:36:53.080 lot of people are in mainly, as you say, the sort of knowledge work world. These are people who are

00:36:57.260 doing pretty well, right? You have a job in which you look at a computer screen and you're an air

00:37:01.500 conditioner, right? So a lucky place to be, but that group of people, and these are the people,

00:37:06.480 these are a big group of my readers. A big question. A lot of them have is, okay,

00:37:09.680 how do I do my work? Well, how do I produce things I'm proud of, have impact, you know,

00:37:14.720 support my family and yet not let work just take over all of my life. And how do I avoid sort of

00:37:20.920 falling into burnout? I don't want to be like pre Twitter, Elon Musk, and just don't sleep and have

00:37:26.680 seven businesses and just get after it. Like, how do I still do stuff I'm proud of, but also spend time

00:37:32.000 with my kids, right? There's this big question. And the book looks at that question from both the

00:37:37.960 perspective of someone like creatives that have a huge amount of autonomy, and also from the

00:37:41.500 perspective of sort of a standard office worker who has less autonomy, how can they still sort of

00:37:45.920 navigate that knife stage? But there's a techno story behind how we got to a place where that

00:37:51.320 question became more and more relevant. And the story that I'm trying to tell in the first part of

00:37:56.200 the book is knowledge work itself, when that emerged as a major sector, which is really like

00:38:02.380 mid 20th century, had this issue of not really knowing how to define productivity. Because we

00:38:09.380 had industrial productivity was a quantitative concept. It's a ratio, it's model T's per paid

00:38:15.160 labor hour. Agricultural productivity is a quantitative idea. It's bushels of corn per acre of land. You could

00:38:21.200 measure this. Industrial manufacturing, agriculture, you had well-defined production systems.

00:38:26.200 So you could tweak something very specific and see how it impacted that number. Knowledge work

00:38:31.720 comes along under that works. Knowledge work is more haphazard and autonomous and ambiguous.

00:38:37.720 I might be working on seven things that are different than the eight things you're working

00:38:41.040 on. There's not one thing we're producing. There's no well-defined production systems we use

00:38:45.100 for our work as well. Organizing labor is very independent and individualized in knowledge work.

00:38:50.140 And so in response to that, the knowledge sector came up with this idea of, we will use visible

00:38:57.400 activity as a proxy for you doing something useful. So we'll all gather in the same building like we

00:39:04.400 would a factory. We'll work factory shift hours. And if I see you here doing stuff, I'm assuming that's

00:39:10.600 useful stuff. And if we need to be more productive, come early, stay late, right? I call that pseudo

00:39:14.860 productivity. The techno story is that worked okay. Not great, but worked okay until the front office

00:39:22.680 IT revolution of the late nineties and early two thousands. And then once we threw network computers

00:39:27.300 and then later mobile computing into the sort of office work sphere, pseudo productivity spun off the

00:39:33.360 rails, right? Because the personal computer came in and now suddenly the amount of different things you

00:39:38.780 could work on quadrupled. No longer do we have specialists to type and specialists to handle

00:39:44.660 communication. The amount of work you could do quadrupled. Low friction communication networks

00:39:49.020 made it really easy to ask people to do things. So workload skyrocketed. Email chat really changed the

00:39:55.520 game when it came to demonstrating visible effort. Now you could be doing this in an incredible fine

00:39:59.580 granularity at a frenetic pace. How quickly I respond to a message might be really important signal in

00:40:05.420 trying to show how pseudo productive I actually am. So my argument was the front office IT revolution

00:40:11.380 plus this older idea of pseudo productivity, they didn't mix. And it led to this increasing

00:40:17.620 exhaustion of knowledge workers as the amount of stuff they're working on increased. The amount of

00:40:23.000 their day dedicated to talking about work instead of actually doing work increased. The freneticism and

00:40:29.300 speed of their work increased. At the same time, they were getting more nihilistic. Like,

00:40:33.600 what am I actually doing here? I'm just doing all these visible signs of productivity. I'm sending

00:40:38.360 emails, I'm in meetings, but I'm not actually writing the marketing report. I'm not actually

00:40:41.880 programming the computer. And it led to the burnout epidemic. And so there's that underlying techno

00:40:47.220 story of technology plus that crude metric didn't work well. So we have to reassess what does it mean to

00:40:54.000 produce really good stuff? Can we do that in a way that doesn't make work really exhausting? So I have

00:40:58.140 that sort of personal angle. And then there's also this sort of deeper techno-social economic story.

00:41:04.240 And they're both circling, I think, the same issues.

00:41:06.760 Hmm. Well, what did COVID do to this picture? I mean, there's this profound change. I mean,

00:41:13.960 again, we're talking about knowledge workers almost by definition here. And perhaps you should bound that

00:41:20.340 concept for us a little more. But the rise of remote work in the aftermath of COVID and the seeming

00:41:27.960 durability of our commitment to that. I mean, there's just, I guess, many organizations are

00:41:34.200 still struggling with just how to get the balance right. But there does seem to be this hybrid level

00:41:40.260 of commitment to remote and in-office work for many organizations. And there are upsides and downsides

00:41:47.080 to that. But it does change this, at least the optics of pseudo-productivity. I mean, you're just,

00:41:53.280 if you're not seeing people, if you're not condemning people to have to be at their desk for 40 hours a

00:41:59.060 week, whether that's the best use of their time or not, because so much of their time is now remote

00:42:04.180 and you're not actually, you know, they don't get the credit for being at their desk because they're,

00:42:09.520 you know, there is no desk to be at much of the time. And then there's this phenomenon of,

00:42:13.820 you know, the quiet quitting that has been much discussed. How do you view what recent years,

00:42:19.380 you know, during and post-COVID have done to this conversation?

00:42:23.240 I think the beginning of COVID pushed this increasing issue people were having with the

00:42:28.460 unsustainability of pseudo-productivity. It pushed it over the edge. Because a couple things happened

00:42:33.560 when knowledge workers had to go remote right away. When we were shifting remote, we were already,

00:42:39.360 for the most part, at our max capacity for the amount of work that we could have on our plate

00:42:44.500 at the same time and have any chance of not drowning. And the reason why we're at max capacity

00:42:49.000 is because in knowledge work, we leave workload management up to the individual. Like for the

00:42:53.760 most part, that's up to you to figure out how to manage what you're doing and what you say yes to.

00:42:58.880 There's a lot of autonomy and ambiguity in knowledge work. So how a lot of people began to manage

00:43:04.480 their workloads is they would wait until the stress of their workload got high enough that it outweighed

00:43:12.400 their concern about the negative social cost of saying no to new work. This became the primary

00:43:18.040 governor mechanism by which so many knowledge workers managed their workloads. So of course,

00:43:21.820 this keeps you at a state of having a stressfully large amount of work. If you have to be stressed

00:43:27.440 before you begin to say, no, everyone has a stressful amount of work. Then the pandemic hit,

00:43:32.780 which automatically gave us like 25% more tasks overnight because we had to adjust unexpectedly

00:43:38.960 to, oh, we got to run our company. You had to wipe down your groceries.

00:43:42.780 Yeah. And just work itself. Like how do we deliver our services? If I remember this going on at the

00:43:49.360 New Yorker, like how do we move our whole production process to like a digital pipeline? It was just new

00:43:53.580 work came out of nowhere. The collaboration then also became less efficient because we lost all of

00:44:00.180 the, oh, I see your office door is open. So I'll poke my head in and be like, hey, well, what are we

00:44:05.280 going to do about this client? And it takes two minutes. Instead, we had to start scheduling Zoom

00:44:08.820 meetings. But the smallest granularity of these meetings was a half hour because it's hard to drag

00:44:13.940 anything smaller on your calendar. And so now we were making the collaboration, the overhead related

00:44:20.240 to work that became a lot less efficient. And then finally to compensate for the fact that I can't

00:44:26.200 see you doing visible activity. We just moved this over to being even more phonetic with digital

00:44:32.060 communication. Like I really now is important for me not to reply quickly. Like I have to reply very

00:44:39.660 quickly to Slack because like, this is maybe the only way I have right now to demonstrate that I'm

00:44:43.660 being pseudo productive. Right. So all these things happened overnight and people just said enough is

00:44:49.500 enough. And I actually argue, this is a piece I wrote a couple months ago. I argued that many

00:44:55.980 of these sort of spasmatic emergent grassroots revolution reform movements and work that we saw

00:45:02.500 throughout the pandemic period were in part people responding in a primal way to this. I've been pushed

00:45:09.900 over the edge with what's going on in knowledge work. So I think the knowledge work component of the

00:45:13.940 great resignation was a response to people saying enough is enough. I think quiet quitting

00:45:18.880 was a response for the younger generation who couldn't resign or switch down the half hours

00:45:25.100 and move to a cabin. So quiet quitting was a response. I think much of the fury around the

00:45:30.480 remote work wars that really picked up steam in 2021 and 2022 was also a sort of misguided response to

00:45:37.020 this deeper primal rejection of work has just become sort of intolerably frenetic and overloaded.

00:45:42.900 And I'm getting actually almost no real work done. Objectively, the remote work wars didn't make a ton of

00:45:47.280 sense, right? You had this thing that did not exist 16 months earlier. And now you had worker groups

00:45:54.140 talking about it like it was a Geneva convention. It was just like fundamental right that of course work is

00:45:59.840 supposed to happen at home. How could we ever take this away? This didn't even exist, you know, 16 months

00:46:04.720 earlier. I think part of that was just a generalized zeal for reform because when we took this already sort of

00:46:12.460 exhausting tempo and this nihilism of all we do is talk about work and rarely get work done. When we

00:46:17.900 pushed that over the edge in the pandemic, it broke a lot of people. And a lot of the unrest we saw in

00:46:23.760 the knowledge work sector throughout the pandemic, I think was people just responding to enough is

00:46:28.540 enough, but they didn't really know exactly what they were responding to. And I think a lot of those

00:46:32.080 efforts were sort of misguided energy. And we missed a lot of the opportunities we had to really make

00:46:36.580 better reform here. That's the context in which I was thinking about slow productivity.

00:46:41.060 Well, let's talk about the principles of achieving slow productivity. What is signified by the phrase,

00:46:48.720 and you frame your discussion around many interesting case studies, the main being John McPhee,

00:46:56.940 but you talk about Benjamin Franklin and Jane Austen and a bunch of scientists. And it's all,

00:47:03.220 it does suggest, I mean, that this is really your thesis. You talk about the ways in which

00:47:09.220 our engagement with new information technology has deranged our sense of what it is to be productive

00:47:17.500 and how we measure success. And so if you go far enough back in time, it's not a surprise that you

00:47:22.700 see examples of people who didn't have this technology, who were succeeding by the lights of

00:47:27.500 history in spectacular ways at a very different cadence with respect to how they worked.

00:47:33.220 You know, feel free to bring up any of the principal case studies you want, but we should

00:47:37.880 talk about your three stages here, do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality.

00:47:45.520 Yeah. I mean, and the reason, I mean, because it was a big decision, but the reason I chose to use

00:47:51.360 as the primary case studies, these sort of historical figures, there's really two aspects to that that I

00:47:56.560 think is important to sort of set the stage. One, I was wary of the uncanny valley effect.

00:48:02.820 I've seen this a lot when talking about sort of contemporary work. There's an uncanny valley

00:48:07.940 effect. If you say, look, I'm going to tell you about a company that exists right now that's doing

00:48:13.900 things differently or a specific employee at a marketing company and here's how they do things

00:48:18.200 differently. Their job is so similar to yours that the differences really begin to matter,

00:48:23.480 right? And people have a hard time getting past like, oh, but that's a client service firm and our

00:48:28.820 client. We have a timesheet firm and it's actually, I found that it's difficult for people to get past

00:48:34.020 that uncanny valley. It's too close. If it's too close to what they do, but not exactly what they

00:48:38.540 do, it becomes an unbridgeable or disorienting gap. So I said, why don't I look at what I call

00:48:43.500 traditional knowledge workers who are actually defined by, this could be the critique, but I'm

00:48:48.680 twisting the critique to be a benefit. They're defined by all the freedom and autonomy they had

00:48:53.020 to experiment with what's the best way to create value using my brain. I said, this is why these

00:48:58.460 people are important because they had all the freedom in the world to figure out what works.

00:49:02.520 So if we look at what they settled on, they're probably uncovering some useful universal principles

00:49:07.620 about the best way of creating valuable things using the human brain. Now, what we could then do

00:49:12.920 is once we isolate those principles, I can do the hard work of, okay, so how can we make that relevant

00:49:16.840 to someone who works in a cubicle? How can we make that relevant to an entrepreneur in 2024?

00:49:21.240 Yeah, there's a lot of work then to translate those principles to tactical things that make

00:49:25.760 sense to people today, but I thought that was the right way to do it. So those three principles you

00:49:30.560 mentioned were the three big things that came up. If you study historically people who were good with

00:49:36.300 creating valuable things with their brain, they didn't work on too many things at the same time.

00:49:40.920 They really avoided overload. Their pace was varied, hard periods, less hard periods. Also,

00:49:47.800 they would measure productivity on very large timescales. So many of the most productive

00:49:52.960 people in history, if you go back and look at a random month in their life, they seem incredibly

00:49:57.540 nonproductive, right? Because they didn't think about productivity in terms of like today needs

00:50:01.480 to be productive. They thought about it like the next 10 years, I want to produce something that

00:50:04.920 matters. And then finally, they cared a lot about craft, right? That was a sort of antidote to the

00:50:11.260 appeal of busyness, was to instead reorient their interest towards, I want to do something really

00:50:17.680 well, and I want to keep better at what I'm doing. All three of those principles, I argue, can be

00:50:21.780 first adapted to modern knowledge workers with a lot of freedom, and then can be further adapted even

00:50:27.640 to knowledge workers who are in a situation where they have less freedom.

00:50:31.100 We can get ideas from there that transmute into interesting, tangible advice for people in

00:50:39.100 various situations in our current moment. The purest case is the person who really is

00:50:44.540 his or her own boss and can just decide to create whatever they want, and then the analogy to

00:50:53.820 the historical people.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 15, 2024

#363 — Knowledge Work

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