Making Sense with Sam Harris - #304 — Why I Left Twitter

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Sam Harris explains why he deleted his Twitter account. He then speaks with Cal Newport about the fragmentation of modern life. They discuss the history of computer science, how information technology has changed our lives, the effects of social media, the business model of the Internet, the power of TikTok, the future of Twitter, winner-take-all dynamics in podcasting, conspiracy thinking, the way technology drives cultural change, email and the loss of productivity, the cognitive cost of context switching, deep work, the benefits of controlling one's time, the problem with the advice to "follow your passion," and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Well, I deleted my Twitter account the other day. On Thanksgiving, actually. And I've been thinking about doing this for a long time, in fact. It was a very simple decision, in the end. I'd been on the platform for 12 years and had tweeted something like 9,000 times. That's about twice a day on average. So I wasn't the most compulsive user of Twitter, but it did punctuate my life far more than it should have. It was the only social media platform I ever used, personally. I don't run the accounts I have for Facebook and Instagram, and I never look at them.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I just came to believe that my engagement with Twitter was making me a worse person. It really is as simple as that. I have a lot to say about Twitter, and about what I think it's doing to society, but I left it because it suddenly became obvious that it was a net negative influence on my life. The most glaring sign of this, and something which I've been concerned about for a few years, is that it was showing me the worst of other people in a way that I began to feel was actually distorting my perception of humanity. I know people have very different experiences on Twitter, and if you're just sharing cute animal videos or giving self-help advice, you probably get nothing but love coming back at you. But when you touch controversial topics regularly, as I do, especially when you're more in the center politically and not tribally aligned with the left or the right, you get an enormous amount of hate

and misunderstanding from both sides. I know there are people who can just ignore everything that's coming back at them. I think Bill Maher and Joe Rogan are both like this. They just never look at their at mentions. But I didn't appear to be that sort of person. I could ignore everything for a time, but I actually wanted to use Twitter to communicate, so I would keep getting sucked back in. I would see someone who appeared sincerely confused about something I said on a podcast, and I'd want to clarify it. And then I would discover for the thousandth time that it was hopeless. So Twitter for me became like a malignant form of telepathy, where I got to hear the most irrational, contemptuous, sneering thoughts of other people a dozen or more times a day. But the problem

wasn't all the hate being directed at me. The problem was the hate I was beginning to feel. Hate probably isn't the right word. It was more like disgust and despair. panic disgust and despair okay twitter was giving me a very dark view of other people and the fact that i believed and still believe that it's a distorted view wasn't enough to inoculate me against this change in my attitude even some of the people who are most committed to attacking me on the platform i know that my impression of them was distorted by Twitter. I mean, there might be a few exceptions to this, but I believe that very few of my enemies on Twitter are anywhere near as bad as they seem to me on Twitter. There's just no way around it.

Twitter was causing me to dislike people I've never met. And it was even causing me to dislike people I actually know, some of whom used to be my friends. Rather than say anything about why I was leaving on Twitter, I just deleted my account, which I now realize made my leaving Twitter open to many interpretations. And within a few minutes of deleting my account, I began hearing from people who appeared genuinely worried about me. They saw all the hate I was getting, and they thought it must have driven me from the platform. And several worried I might have been having some kind of mental health crisis.

The truth is, when I left Twitter, I wasn't seeing that much hate directed at me, because I had blocked so many people. I used to never block people, but when I discovered that the platform had become basically unusable, I installed a browser extension that allowed me to block thousands of haters at once. I had probably blocked 50,000 people on Twitter in my last week on the platform. It was like a digital genocide. I was seeing a specially idiotic or vicious tweet directed at me, and I would block everyone who had liked it. And at the time I thought, well, this is brilliant. Anyone who liked that tweet is by definition beyond reach. There is no reason why these people ever need to hear from me again, and I certainly don't need to hear from them.

reason why these people ever need to hear from me again. And I certainly don't need to hear from them. And it basically worked. So I wasn't seeing most of the hate that was being directed at me. I was seeing some of it, but it was totally manageable. But then I asked myself, how did I become the sort of person who is blocking people by the thousands, who just happen to like a dumb tweet, as though that one moment in their lives proved that all further communication on important issues was impossible? How did I begin to view people as intellectually and morally irredeemable? How did I begin to view myself as totally incapable of communicating effectively, ever, about anything, with these people? How did I give up all hope in the power of conversation?

Twitter. I've also heard that many people are interpreting my leaving Twitter as an act of protest over what Elon is doing to the platform. In particular, his reinstating of Trump. It really wasn't that. I do think Elon made some bad decisions right out of the gate. And Twitter did get noticeably worse, at least for me. But I'm actually agnostic as to whether he will eventually be able to improve the platform. I doubt he'll ever solve the problem I was having,

but he might make Twitter better for many people, and he might make it a viable business. He certainly has the resources to keep at it, even if advertisers abandon Twitter for years. So my leaving Twitter wasn't some declaration that I know, or think I know, that Elon will fail to make Twitter better than it currently is. I have no idea what's going to happen to Twitter. Rather, the lesson I was drawing from Elon was not that he was making Twitter worse by

making capricious changes to it. The lesson was how one of the most productive people of my generation was needlessly disrupting his own life and damaging his reputation by his addiction to Twitter. And this has been going on for years. Elon's problem with Twitter is different than mine was because he uses it very differently. He spends most of his time just goofing around, but he is now goofing around in front of 120 million people. So when he's high-fiving anti-Semites and election deniers, or bonding with them over their fake concerns about free speech, he doesn't appear to know or care that he's increasing their influence. In many cases, he might not have any idea who these people are.

Of course, in others, like with his friend Kanye, he obviously does. There is something quite reckless and socially irresponsible about how Elon behaves on Twitter. And millions of people appear to love it. I should probably address the free speech issue briefly. There's a lot more to say about this, but before I left Twitter, I was noticing that people seemed really confused about what I believe about free speech. And Twitter being Twitter, it proved impossible for me to clear up that confusion. Many seem to think that I used to support free speech unconditionally,

clear up that confusion. Many seem to think that I used to support free speech unconditionally, like when I was defending cartoonists against Islamist censors and their dupes on the left. But now I somehow don't support it, because I supposedly have Trump derangement syndrome. Well, first, I've always acknowledged that there's an interesting debate to be had about the role that social media plays in our society. And I'm not going to resolve that debate here by myself. But the fact is, no one has a constitutional right to be on Twitter. In my view, the logic of the First Amendment runs in the opposite direction. It protects Twitter's new owner, Elon, from compelled speech. The government shouldn't be able to force Elon to put Alex Jones back on the platform, any more than it should be able to force me to put Alex Jones on my podcast.

Of course, I get that social networks and podcasts are different, but Twitter simply isn't the public square. It is a private platform, and Elon can do whatever he wants with it. If we want to change the laws around that, well, then we have to change the laws. I understand and fully support the political primacy of free speech in America, and I'd like the American standard to be the global norm.

That's why I think there shouldn't be laws against Holocaust denial, or the expression of any other idiotic idea. And the First Amendment protects this kind of speech, at least in the United States. But there also shouldn't be a law, in my view, that prevents a digital platform from having a no-Nazis policy in its terms of service, because these platforms need effective moderation and standards of civility to function. They are businesses started by entrepreneurs, supported by investors who want to make money. They have employees with mortgages.

They have to survive on ad revenue or subscriptions or some combination of the two. Without serious moderation, digital platforms become like 4chan, which is nothing more than a digital sewer. I'm told that even 4chan has a moderation policy. Hell itself probably has a moderation policy. So-called free speech absolutism is just a fantasy online. Almost no one really holds that position, even when they espouse it. The fact that Twitter's terms of service might have been politically slanted or not applied fairly, I totally get

why that would annoy people, and I suspect Elon is improving that. But this simply isn't a free speech issue. No one has a right to be on Twitter. Again, if we want to change the laws around that, we're free to. I'm not sure how that would look, and it seems like it would have some pretty bizarre implications, but that's what we'd have to do. So, my argument for keeping people like Trump and Alex Jones off Twitter is a terms-of-service argument, and directly follows from the deliberate harm they both caused on the platform in the past. Here are two men who knowingly used Twitter to inspire their most rabid followers to harass specific people,

not just on Twitter, but out in the world. The fact that they might not have tweeted, please go harass this person, is immaterial. They knew exactly what would happen when they singled out specific American citizens for abuse and spread lies about them at scale to a fanatical mob. They could see the results of their actions. For years, people were getting doxxed and stalked and having their lives ruined for years. Nothing about this was hidden. Elon apparently agrees with me about Alex Jones

and said he would never let him back on the platform. But he doesn't agree about Trump. Well, that's fine. I simply recommended that he have a terms of service in place for when Trump proves, yet again, that he is exactly like Alex Jones. And then I hope Elon will enforce his own terms of service. But the crucial point is that this isn't a case where sunlight is the best disinfectant. This isn't a question of opposing bad ideas with good ideas. This is not a case

where what used to be misinformation is suddenly going to become new knowledge and we'll all be embarrassed that we first rejected it. This is a case where two men with enormous cult followings weaponized obvious lies for the purpose of ruining people's lives. It is not authoritarian or fascist for me to hope that a private platform like Twitter would decline to enable that behavior in the future. But we do have a larger problem to deal with. It's still not clear what to do about the social harm of misinformation and disinformation at scale. Algorithmically boosted speech isn't ordinary speech, and many people don't see this. We have built systems of communication

in which lies and outrage spread faster and more widely than anything else. Scale matters. Velocity matters. Lies that get tens of millions of people to suddenly believe that an election was stolen because they've been amplified by a digital outrage machine have a lot in common with shouting fire in a crowded theater. Contrary to what most people think, it's legal to shout fire in a crowded theater. But wouldn't we want the owner of the theater to remove a person who was doing that again and again and again? I'm not claiming to fully understand what we should do about all this. I've done several podcasts on and around

this topic, and I'm sure I'll do many more. Because the problem isn't going away. But being a so-called free speech absolutist at this point is nothing more than a confession that you haven't thought about the real issues. It's like being a Second Amendment absolutist who can't figure out why people shouldn't be able to own cluster bombs or rocket launchers for home defense. cluster bombs or rocket launchers for home defense. Technological change matters. We've been given new powers, and we're not quite sure how to wield them safely. And now, in the case of Twitter, we have a lone billionaire who is just turning the dials however he sees fit. Again, I recognize that he is totally free to do that. But I also happen to have an opinion about which changes will be for the good and which won't. And I get that many people are still seeing this all through the lens of COVID.

In some ways, I am too, just from the other side. As I've said many times before, I view COVID as a failed dress rehearsal for something far worse. And I worry that we didn't learn much from it, apart from how bad we are at cooperating with one another, or even at having a fact-based discussion about anything now. And I do blame Twitter for much of that. But I also get that in Elon's hands, Twitter now seems to many people like a necessary corrective to all the ways in which our institutions failed us during the pandemic. It's like finally we've got someone powerful enough to call bullshit on the New York Times. In that respect, Elon is Trump 2.0. I understand that COVID changed everything for a lot of people. The CDC and the WHO and many other public health institutions

seriously lost credibility when they needed it most. I get that many of our scientific journals have been visibly warped by woke nonsense. I understand that COVID has been a moving target, and what seemed rational in April of 2020 was no longer rational in April of 2022, and many people and institutions couldn't adjust. I understand that the effects of school closures were terrible in most cases. I get that many of our policies around masks proved ultimately ridiculous. Of course I understand that the sight of politicians being utter hypocrites during the various lockdowns was infuriating. People literally couldn't hold funerals for their

loved ones who died in isolation, while Governor Hairgel was holding a fundraiser at French Laundry. I totally agree that having a pharmaceutical industry driven by bad incentives and windfall profits is dangerous and reduces public trust in medicine. I know that the lab leak hypothesis was always plausible and never racist. I get that the risk-benefit calculations for the mRNA vaccines change depending on a person's age and sex and other factors. And I've spoken about most of these things many times on this podcast. But the deeper point is that all of this confusion and institutional failure does not even slightly suggest Institutional failure does not even slightly suggest that we'll be able to navigate the next public health emergency with everyone just, quote, doing their own research and tweeting links at each other.

And this is where I've been at odds with many people in the alternative media space. than work to improve our institutions and identify real experts, it's like we're witnessing the birth of a new religion of contrarianism and conspiracy thinking, amplified by social media and the proliferation of podcasts and newsletters, and now the whims of the occasional billionaire. The bottom line is that we need institutions we can trust. We need experts who are, in fact, experts, and not just vociferous charlatans. And many of us have lost trust in institutions and experts. Again, far too often for good reason. That's a tragedy.

And I've spent a lot of time on this podcast analyzing that tragedy and worrying about its future implications. However, many people are now behaving as though nothing important has been lost. In fact, they're celebrating the loss of valid authority, as though the flattening of everything and the embarrassment of the so-called elites is a pure source of entertainment. These people are frolicking in the ruins of our shared epistemology. And one of the people doing the most frolicking is Elon. The fact that our collective loss of trust has often been warranted doesn't suggest that we aren't paying a terrible price for it, or that the price won't rise very steeply in the future. When it comes time to

decide which medicines to give our children, or which wars to fight, there is simply no substitute substitute for trust in institutions and experts. The path forward, therefore, is to create the conditions where such trust is possible and actually warranted. In the media, in government, in pharmaceutical companies, everywhere that actually matters. That is not a path where we just tear it all down. That is not a path where we just promote any outsider, no matter how incompetent and malevolent, simply because he is an outsider. We are not going to podcast and substack

and tweet our way out of this situation. Anyway, when I look at my own life, and when I look at the controversies and fake controversies that have caused me personal stress and damaged relationships, when I look at the analogous moments in the lives of friends and colleagues and former friends and colleagues, when I look at what makes it so difficult to communicate about basic facts

in our society, so much of this conflict and confusion appears to be the result of Twitter. And the truth is that even when Twitter was good, it was making me a more superficial person. Its very nature is to fragment attention. Of course, that sometimes feels great. I was following hundreds of smart and funny people, and they were often sharing articles in other media that I really enjoyed. Twitter was a way of staying in touch, or seeming to stay in touch, with what's happening in the world. And that's one reason why so many people are addicted to it. in the world. And that's one reason why so many people are addicted to it. But even this began to seem like a degrading distraction. Even the best of Twitter was an opportunity cost, because it diverted my attention from more important things.

Twitter was making it harder, not easier, to do what I truly value. To read good books. To write. what I truly value, to read good books, to write, to meditate, to enjoy my family, to work on this podcast. And now that I've stepped away from it, I feel that it was definitely a mistake to spend so much time there. And as it happens, the cost of such distraction is the topic of today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Cal Newport. Cal is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and a writer who explores the intersections of technology, work, and culture. He's the author of seven books, including A World Without Email,

Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. Many of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and they have been translated into over 40 languages. Cal is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. And I spoke to Cal a few weeks ago. As you'll hear, he strongly recommended that I get off Twitter. And you'll also hear that I was thinking about it, but not quite ready to do it. And you'll also hear that I was thinking about it, but not quite ready to do it. I can't quite say that Cal convinced me to do it, but he was yet another voice in my head when I finally did.

Anyway, we discuss much more than Twitter here. We talk about everything from the history of computer science to the fragmentation of modern life and what to do about it. I hope you find it useful. And now I bring you Cal Newport. I am here with Cal Newport. Cal, thanks for joining me. Sam, it's my pleasure. Describe what it is you do generally. You are a man who is rowing in several boats at the moment. And so we're going to talk about how you accomplish that.

But how do you describe what you do should you find yourself seated next to a voluble person on an airplane and they ask you the fated question? Yeah, well, it's a more complicated answer than probably I wish it would be. But usually I'll say my day job, so to speak, is I'm a computer science professor at Georgetown University and actually study algorithms. So computer science related math. I'm also a writer though. And I've been writing since I was 20 years old. That's when I signed with my first agent and worked on my first book deal. And so I've written seven books. I'm working on my eighth right now. I'm also a contributing writer at The New Yorker. And in recent years, really most of my writing has focused one way or another on

the impact of technology on our lives, be it our working lives or our personal lives. So there is some consilience here that I'm a computer scientist academic who writes public-facing about the impact of a lot of the type of technologies we work on as researchers on society, on culture, on our own lives. Yeah, so we're going to talk about some of your underlying concerns there. I'll remind people your books, among your books, are Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and a world without email. And these converge on a topic that is of growing concern to certainly me and my set, but I would imagine most people listening to us now, which is, for lack of a better framing, the fragmentation of modern life. better framing the fragmentation of modern life. And I guess one could step back and argue that it's always been fragmented or that it's been fragmented over the course of many, many years. But I think most of us feel like we're living with a level of fragmentation that's fundamentally new.

And so I want us to talk about that and try to figure out whether or not that's true. But before we jump in, how has your background as a computer scientist informed your thinking about this issue? There's a couple ways I think these two worlds have come together. So one's the obvious way. That's the comfort with the technical background of these various technologies. And in general, also just having lived a life where I am keeping my eyes towards cutting edge in technology, watching the internet develop, watching the impact of the internet, having that technology mindset. There's a subtle way, though, that it's also impacted my writing, which is,

and I don't know how to say this diplomatically, but I'm very comfortable in my writing going from more philosophical social critique to veering the other direction and saying, let's get pragmatic. Let's talk about advice. Let's talk about specific strategies. A lot of writers are very wary about doing this. This is the sense, especially in the New York publishing world, that giving advice is lowbrow and that you won't be considered smart. I've always had as this fallback, well, look, I have a PhD from MIT in theoretical computer science, so I don't need my writing to convince my audience that I'm smart. And I think that has actually freed me up.

And that's been a sort of unfair advantage I've had in this field is that I'll go straight for the jugular on specificity. And then the next day go completely philosophical because I don't care so much about what I'm publishing in a magazine or a book, having to establish what is my intellectual credibility, except this other thing going on. So that cover that my academic career has provided me, I think has unlocked a lot more breadth than what I can tackle with my non-academic writing. Yeah, that's really interesting. This goes to the question of status and where you get it and where you perceive others get it. And it's just fascinating. You really do have an intellectual alibi because you could be as simple and lowbrow and as broad and as useful as you want to be in any given moment.

And the moment somebody thinks you're Tony Robbins, you can say, no, actually, I'm a computer scientist over at Georgetown. And not to say that you ever have to say that, but just the factic concerns that you're being pigeonholed in some way that doesn't fit your self-image and your actual expertise. Yeah, well, that's for sure happening. And anyways, my academic career gives me enough egoic concerns already. So I can take a bit of a breather in this other space. But I mean, I'll just say it's always struck me to a degree to which, especially in idea writing, there often is that reluctance that we'll pull back right at the point of, and here's what you might do about that because then that would mark this as a different type of book. And I love playing with those conventions. I mean, when I'm in my more self-aggrandizing moods, which are only occasionally, I think about what you see in cinema with auteurs who take genre cinema and mix and match the tropes

and you have a sort of Tarantino-esque approach of let's go low and mix it with high. And this is freaking fun over here. And this is just mix it all together. There should be some more spontaneity and joy and format, I think, in writing. Everything seems a little bit dour these days where everyone is sort of just somberly taking their turn, supporting some sort of dire conclusion. So I try to inject a little bit more of that energy into my work. Why is it, do you think, that giving advice and spelling out the practical implications of something seems to diminish the gravitas of the work or the intellectual inquiry that is generating that advice?

Well, I have this theory about East Coast, West Coast publishing. So this is a divide that seemed to happen in the 90s and then going into the early 2000s where East Coast publishing coming out of the standard New York publishing houses. And I'm looking specifically here at nonfiction writing and idea style writing, writing that's in the realm of advice would make sense here, right? In the East Coast world, a lot of these writers, and I'm using Malcolm as my example here, are coming out of journalism. They're coming out of professional writing, and they would look upon advice writing as something that would be more West Coast. This is a Hay House or Silicon Valley, Tim Ferriss hack culture. That's a different style of writing that they're separated from.

And so you got this big separation where I grew up and all the big idea writers of the 90s going to the early 2000s, the Gladwell, the Stephen Johnsons. This was influential writing to me, but it all pulled back before it got to advice. But at the same time, I was a teenage entrepreneur during the first dot-com boom in the 90s. I was also living and breathing advice, advice guides, time management guides, strategy guides, Brian Tracy, Stephen Covey, David Allen, all of that world. And I was just immersed in that. And I love that as well. And those two worlds were very separate. The West Coast world would give either Silicon Valley techie advice or sort of Hay House, woo-woo, self-help style, traditional advice. East Coast was more idea

writing, came out of more of journalism. And there was a wall between them. They just seemed separate. And you also have your own podcast too, which is, you've joined the lowbrow ranks of all of us who have podcasts. I think there's now, I last heard, I can't believe this number. I think the last number I heard was that there were 4 million podcasts. The last number I believed, I think, was 1.2 million, but I do believe I've since heard that there are 4 million. I don't know if you have any actual propositional knowledge as to how many podcasts there are, but it is quite an amazing picture of what's happening out there, if there's anything like that number of podcasts. Well, you know, I said yesterday in a talk I was giving

that I think we were contractually obligated during the pandemic that if you didn't already have a podcast that you were required to start one. I don't know if that was a CDC recommendation where that came from. Yeah, so with my podcast now, I'm just going straight advice.

Right. So it's, let's cut out all of the middlemen. It's questions and answers. Let's throw in questions. Let's, let's throw in answers. I mean, I'll say another angle that I, that gets in the way of just straightforward, pragmatic philosophy. Okay. I've thought about this. Here's some advice is, uh, the culture right now is one that is really concerned about caveating. And I kind of understand where this comes from. There's this notion of be careful about giving a piece of advice because it might not apply to everyone.

Or there'll be different people in your audience with different particular circumstances for which it doesn't apply. And if you can't properly caveat it, they might be offended. So there's a concern about caveating. And it's one of the big messages I always preach about doing advice writing is the writer shouldn't caveat. You need the audience to caveat. So the audience can hear, take your swing. Here's what I think. Take this or leave it. Here's a big idea. Let me make it a big, powerful swing. You can caveat it.

You can say, this is nonsense, or I get it, but it doesn't apply, powerful swing, you can caveat it. You can say this is nonsense or I get it, but it doesn't apply for me because of the circumstance. The audience can usually caveat it and the writing is stronger. If you just take a big swing, this is very different than conversation, which is what most people exposure is to interaction. Whereas if I'm talking to an individual and I'm giving them advice that clearly doesn't apply to their situation, you know, then I'm just being a jerk. You jerk. It's like, why are you telling me this? Why are you telling me your running routine when I'm in a cast? Then you're just being a jerk.

And so I think people often generalize that reality from one-on-one interaction when they're thinking about one-to-many interaction. And then the whole program of giving advice seems nerve-wracking because, man, people could get offended. If you didn't give the right caveat, what about this? Or what if it doesn't apply to that person? And that's another part of it as well. I've long learned, just go for it. The audience is smart. They'll adjust the advice to apply to their life or not. But that's another thing I think that gets in the way right now of

people giving advice is they imagine that tweet that's going to come back and that gives them some pause. Yeah. Well, the difference between one-to-one and one-to-many is going to show up again in our discussion about social media and what it's doing to all of us. But before we jump in, what's the significance of theoretical in your attachment to computer science when you say you're a theoretical computer scientist? I mean, it means the type of computer scientist that can't get another job. Like you actually couldn't get hired at Google? Yeah, because I don't program. So theoretical computer scientist, it's a broad category that captures a few different subfields, but it's basically pen and paper and math. So we do math about things relevant to computers.

Uh, but most of us are pretty bad at using computers themselves. So, so the, the theory of, is it true that you, you literally don't program or you're just, you're just not somebody for whom that's your main game? Well, I mean, I know how to, for my previous training, I was a computer geek as a kid and, you know, was taking university computer science classes while I was in high school. So I know how to program, but I don't program as part of my career as a computer scientist. I mean, I think the last time I actually programmed the computer was a few years ago. I was making computer games for my boys. So they would come up with the idea and I'd program. But no, my job as a theoretical computer scientist involves no programming. It's math papers.

And so you're designing algorithms that can solve problems or you're trying to prove that certain problems can't be solved algorithmically, etc.? Exactly. Both those things. Yeah. Analyzing algorithms mathematically or proving mathematically no algorithm can solve this problem and these conditions. Which, by the way, people don't realize this is the theoretical computer science goes back to Alan Turing before there were computers. So Alan Turing did the first conceptual work about this notion of just a step-by-step algorithmic approach to solving a problem. He was thinking about this before there was actually electronic computers.

And he has this remarkable paper called On Computable Numbers and Their Application to the Einstattung Problem, which is a German name Hilbert gave to this big open problem. And he did a pretty simple mathematical slash logical proof that proved that most problems, and he formally defined what this means, most problems can't be solved by algorithms. So the very beginning of theoretical computer science predates computers, and it was Alan Turing proving that there's many, many more things that we can define than we could ever hope to solve with a computer. Yeah, yeah. I hadn't thought to go down this path, but I'm just interested. How many people would, I mean, I'm thinking of sort of counterfactual intellectual history here. How many people could we have lost and still had

the information technology revolution more or less on schedule when you start culling the brightest minds of that generation. So if we hadn't had Turing, and we hadn't had Church, and we hadn't had von Neumann, and we hadn't had Shannon, I don't know what you'd pick here. I mean, you will know the cast of characters much better than I do. But I dimly imagine that if we had lost maybe 10 or 12 crucial people, we could have waited a very long time for the necessary breakthroughs that would have ushered in the age of computers. Is that accurate? Or was there so much momentum at that point, reaching back to Ava Loveless and Babbage, to Ava Loveless and Babbage that we still would have had

the information age more or less when we got it? I think we would have it more or less on the exact same schedule. I think we could have gone back in time and killed off every figure you just mentioned and probably wouldn't have changed much.

Essentially, the momentum that was building was driven so fiercely by world war ii i think it'd be very difficult for that momentum to have been halted and you have to remember there was a a really thriving and complex industry of analog computational machines coming into world war ii and these were used a lot for artillery aiming calculating artillery tables trying to do if we have like a Norman Weiner style cybernetic human machine interface for better trying to shoot down planes with anti-aircraft guns.

There was a huge amount, these machines existed. The idea of going from these analog electronic computing machines, the digital machines, there, I think the key figure would be Shannon. And in particular, he wrote this remarkable master's degree while he was at MIT, this remarkable master's degree where he was studying mathematics at MIT, but had interned at Bell Labs. And so he was seeing the electronic relay switches that the phone system, the AT&T phone system used to automatically connect calls so you didn't have to have a switchboard operator, he was early to the

idea that you could use this physical piece of equipment, it's electromagnets and connections, to implement logic. And you could then take propositional logical statements expressed in Boolean algebra and implement them as a circuit. That probably was the most important idea of any idea because we had a lot of analog electronic computation going, that bridged the cap to digital, and then a lot of people began building digital computers. So, you know, von Neumann, of course, had the big project going at Princeton, and he really cracked the architecture that we ended up using. But Penn had their own situation. They had their own computer going. There was their own digital

computer project. There were several going on in Europe. So there was a lot of momentum towards this. So once that idea was had that we can do digitally what had been done analog and World War II was happening, you had a lot of momentum towards it. So the only piece I'm interested in that counterfactual is if Shannon had not written that thesis at the age of whatever this was, 26, remarkable, it's the 1930s. If he had not written that thesis,

how much longer would have taken for someone else to figure it out? I bet the answer is a couple of years. So yeah, I'm of the belief, you know, Turing, I love Turing as a theoretician and Turing did some fantastically original mathematical work. I also think though, in common culture, he gets too much credit for modern digital computing. There's this notion of he went to solve the enigma code and invented the first computers to do so or something like this. And it's really kind of unrelated. He laid these mathematical foundations that were conceptually useful. And he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study,

and Gödel was there, and von Neumann was there, and Church was there. There's some cross-pollination of ideas there. But a lot of that was more philosophical and mathematical. You can still have the engineering revolution digital computers. You could still have that easily without Turing ever being around. He actually became more useful for people like me. Starting in the 60s, when mathematicians began studying computation, Turing was the guiding light. His early mathematical foundations led to the whole field of theoretical computer science. But you could have computers without that field. So I think that would have happened one way or the other. It'd be very hard to stop that revolution. Interesting.

So I don't know when I sent my first email, maybe 1995, 1996, somewhere in there. So you think without Turing and the rest of the pantheon, I wind up sending that email around 1998 and we're more or less where we are now? Yeah. Or there had been a delay. The difference would have been in the late 40s. And by 1960, we're caught up. Okay, so actually, I have another question. As far as your background, do you have any experience in meditation or psychedelics? Have those been part of your developmental path? path? Meditation, I am more familiar with. Psychedelics, I have no experience with. I've dabbled in and out of meditation. I've read some of the standard, you know, Jon Kabat-Zinn

public-facing text on mindfulness meditation, though I've never been a big practitioner. So I know the high-level basics, but am not a practiced hand at it. Right, right. Okay, well, let's jump in. How is information technology changing us, do you think? I know that's an enormous scope to that question, but this is very much what you've been focused on. I guess if there's any facet of this dark jewel to enter first, I think we should focus on social media first, but be as broad as you want initially. How have we changed our world and how is our world changing us with respect to the internet and all of the tools it has birthed? Well, I think it's important to make a distinction between the professional and the personal sphere. This is the big, I would say, structuring insight of my work on this question over the last 10 years or

so was recognizing that the philosophical framework for understanding, let's say, the workplace, front office, IT revolution, email, personal computers at the desk is different than what's required to try to make sense of what happened with the personal electronics revolution, in particular with the attention economy amplified smartphone-based revolution that began around 2007. They seem similar because in both cases, we're seeing spheres in our life where we're more distracted, if 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 time. I feel distracted.

At home, I'm on my phone all the time. Twitter's capturing my attention. It feels the same. But actually, it's very difficult to unify them. And where I really began making traction and trying to understand these two effects was separating those two worlds. And so at the very high level, the very top level summary of what I think is going on in those two worlds is that in work, the issue is the advent of low friction communication

tools transformed the way people collaborated in a bottom-up emergent fashion. So not top-down plan, but bottom-up emergent fashion. It introduced ad hoc back-and-forth messaging, digital messaging as the primary means of collaboration. This had a whole lot of unexpected side effects, mainly affecting the way that the brain operates when doing cognitive work. It created an environment in which constant context shifting was necessary, because if there's seven or eight ongoing back and forth conversations that are timely unfolding in email, you have to see those messages pretty soon after they arrive. So the conversation ping pong can actually happen at a fast enough rate.

And all those rapid inbox checks or instant messenger checks actually has a huge drag on cognitive capacity. Our brain takes a long time to actually switch cognitive context. So this sort of fragmented back and forth has been a major productivity drag. So my top line argument about the world of work is these new technologies accidentally made us not only much stupider in a literal sense, but as a drag on economic growth and productivity, that there's a real problem. Whereas in the world of our personal lives, there, I think, issues of behavioral addiction become more relevant. There, I think, engineered distraction, the idea of trying to maximize engagement and the weird unexpected side effects

that that twirls up and creates these whirling dervishes of unexpected consequences that have these huge impacts on health or the health of the body politic. That's a different type of thing that's happening there. All of that comes from the consequence of what happens when we consolidate the internet to a small number of privately controlled platforms and play the game of how do we maximize engagement. That turned out to have a bunch of dangerous side effects to society and how we live. So they're similar superficially, we're distracted. But the source of that distraction and the impact and therefore the solutions is very different, I think, between those two magisteria. Yeah, interesting. Well, I think when you initially made that division a few minutes ago between work

and private life, many listeners were anticipating it being a story of the good and the bad. So the bad is visited on private life. We're taking our smartphones with us to the dinner table. Our kids are buried in screens. Society is unraveling based on the perverse business model that is mining our attention and amplifying divisive content. But over on the work front, I think people were expecting to hear that our productivity is just enormously better based on these tools, but that's not where you landed. Let's take that piece second, and let's start with social media and private life. If I'm not mistaken, unless something's changed, you don't use any social

media, right? Right. That is the source of my anthropological Margaret Mead remove, from which I can actually observe what's going on without being entangled in it myself. So no, I've never had a traditional social media account, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Snapchat. I like to observe that world. I think I'm the last person perhaps of my age who's also a writer who's never had an account. But to me, it's really important that there's at least someone out there who's trying to observe these roles with a little bit of distance. So how do you observe them apart from just the effects on friends and colleagues who stagger away from their Twitter feeds complaining about everything?

You must be on these platforms as a lurker just seeing what's going on. Yeah. So when I'm working on a particular book or article, I'll go onto a platform. And so for some of these platforms that will require borrowing an account, for things like Twitter, Twitter is actually public. So you can go and look at individual people's Twitter feeds directly without having to actually be on Twitter yourself and tweeting. So Twitter is actually an easy one to study. You can go check out what people are up to. TikTok was probably, I wrote a TikTok article for the New Yorker earlier this year. That's a little harder.

So I had to borrow accounts and then also watch videos. You can actually find TikToks. It turns out you can find them posted online. You can watch various TikTok videos. So different platforms yield different challenges when you're trying to actually go in there and observe. Now, if it's not immediately obvious, it will soon be obvious that you're an enormously disciplined, structured person. Why go to zero with this? Why not just

the minimal use or the intelligent and disciplined use of some or all of these platforms? Well, you know, and I pitch that when I talk to what people should do. This philosophy of digital minimalism is not about going to zero. The reason why I'm at zero is because I started there. So it's a different situation. So what I've been saying no to is the addition of social media into my life. So someone will say, look, 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 for me to actually extend the energy to join this. So what kept me at zero was the fact that through circumstance, I started at zero where most people casually signed up for these networks when they were

still exploratory and exuberant and interesting and fun for various contingent reasons, which aren't even that interesting. I didn't. And so I was just used to not having them. And then after they became ubiquitous, I had this interesting remove. And over the years, people have made arguments, well, you could get advantage A or advantage B. It always seemed too small to me. There's nothing there that was compelling enough to say, okay, I definitely want to sacrifice this time. And I was always very wary about what it was going to do to my attention. So I think if I right now had a very aggressive social media presence that I was trying to reduce, it's unlikely that reducing the zero would be the right answer. But as someone who's

always started at zero, nothing has been compelling enough to actually push me to add a little bit in. Right. Although you're an author of many books, you write New Yorker articles, you've got a podcast, it would be quite natural for you to use some or all of these channels as marketing channels. And you could also do that in the way that I do most of my social media in that I don't do it at all, right? I mean, I have a team that posts things on platforms that I never even see. The only thing I'm engaged with, I think, in some respects, predictably to my detriment, is Twitter. And, you know, we'll talk about that. But you could approach all social media the way I approach Instagram, which is I literally never see it, right? And yet something in my name is going out on Instagram to

promote something that I'm doing, whether it's this podcast or the Waking Up app, or if I was going to go to Australia and do a lecture series, well then having social media accounts that could tell the good people of Australia that I'm headed their way, that proves pretty useful. So I'm a little surprised that no one has, certainly none of your New York publishers have browbeaten you into doing something like that. Well, they used to. You're just a hard case. Yeah. There was my fourth book. This would have been 2012. I do remember going to a meeting at my publisher's random house in New York City in the skyscraper.

And they brought in their social media specialist to be like, okay, let's walk through your social media strategy. I remember thinking, oh, this is not going to go well. They're spritzing you with oxytocin and lattes. Essentially. But now it's sort of part of my brand as well. So the fact that I'm removed from this is part of that makes sense. Okay. This gives us an interesting perspective, but I'll say because I was never a full-time writer, I was already in the mindset of there's tons of things that would be useful to my writing career that I just can't do. I mean, when I was writing books that maybe people would have thought were more in the business space, the thing to do if you want to be a very successful business author

is you need to speak 50 to 100 times a year. Most of those authors do a one-year-on, one-year-off rotation. They speak 50 to 100 times one year. They write the next book the next year. And I just had no interest in that. I was a professor, a full-time professor. I had young kids. And so I was already in this mindset of like, yeah, there's all sorts of stuff to be helpful. But look, I'm trying to figure out how to do this while I have other things going on. So I was already in this mindset of not in any benefit mindset, but in terms of what are the big wins I can do that aren't going to take up too much time. But also my theory on social media and writing is social media does really help sell books,

but not so much the author's accounts. So I'm sure social media has been very useful to my book sales because it is a person-to-person medium that people can use to talk about my books. I read this book. I like this book. And it really can help sales. If I'm talking about my own book on social media, it's always been my theory that the impact there is more limited. Announcements are useful, but I have an email list.

You know, I mean, this is just my mindset of good enough. That's sort of a satisfying mindset. You know, like this works. I'm writing. I'm thinking clearly. I'm worried about polluting my cognitive space.

People seem to find my books. There's a lot of things I could be doing. I don't do a lot of them. My publishers have made peace with that. We still seem to move a fair number of copies and I'm happy with that. But no, I hear you. I've heard these before,

but a lot of these benefits when you really nail down is like, yeah, that's nice, but it's not critical. Yeah. You pretty much share Jaron Lanier's view of the situation. Is there any way in which you disagree with him? I haven't read enough of either of you on this topic to know if there's any daylight between you. Is there? Yeah. I mean, I love Lanier's work. I mean, I think he's brilliant and his approach was very influential to me. You are not a gadget, it's very influential because it introduced humanism into the discussion of these sort of techno impacts. So he really comes at these consumer-facing technologies from the perspective of what are their impact on humanity,

your humanity as a person, your self-definition, your weirdness, the corners that make you special. And he really worries about the way that these platforms force you to fit yourself into these interface drop-down box selections, the way it breaks in connection. He's a way more radical thinker than I am, though. So there is a lot of daylight, but there's a lot of daylight mainly just in the way that we almost have different programs going on here.

I think his is a philosophical program about humanity in the age of digital reduction. And mine is more of a expository slash pragmatic program. So why are we seeing these effects? What are the dynamics, the socio-technodynamics that are causing these things we see? And what can we do about it? The what can we do about it with Lanier, I think, is either thought experiment-y, like his ideas for rebuilding the internet around micro payments for data or just let's just throw out this philosophy so he's a more radical thinker he's smarter than me so so i think it's it's almost like we're playing a different we're playing a

different i was gonna say playing a different instrument but that also has a literal truth because he's a he's a master of all he plays a thousand yeah yeah he plays a thousand so he's got longer dreadlocks than you do yeah he's a cooler guy than me let's just let's just call it straight he's like a cooler more punk rock techno critic vr punk just a kind of a cool guy i'm not what will you guys share the concern which i certainly share that the underlying business model of the internet has harmed us in ways that would still surprise some people. I mean, some people have not paid enough attention to what has come to be known as the consequences of the surveillance economy to know just how much of what they don't like about life online and even increasingly life in the real world has been driven by this bad

advertisement business model. What do you think we should do about that? I agree with you that Lanier's idea that we're going to pay everyone for their data in some amazingly efficient way, I don't understand how that's going to work. And even if it would work, I don't quite see the bridge from where we are to there. So what should we do? And how do you think about your own digital work, like your podcast and anything else you're doing and putting out into the world? How do you try to navigate in the space of possible business models? Well, this was definitely a place where I generated some friction, especially with the 2019 book, Digital Minimalism, which was the book that was more on this space. And there was a lot of friction, I would say, with journalists in particular, because by 2019, there had been a sort of turning a perspective, right? So we'd had this Trump-driven turning a

perspective where mainstream media now perceived the social media platforms as an evil empire. There was this shift from the nerd gods are going to save us to the nerd gods are going to destroy us. And I got a lot of friction from them because my approach to these issues was much more personalized about individuals and the reaction to these technologies in their lives. And the real push there was for systemic, probably legislative change. And I didn't see a lot except for on the margins. I was going to be usefully done with legislation. I wasn't that interested in the good guy, bad guy storylines either.

interested in the good guy, bad guy storylines either. Mark Zuckerberg is an evil genius who planned Cambridge Analytica in a hollowed out volcano. And if we can stop him, whatever, we can have universal basic income. I mean, a lot of things are being connected together. Whereas I came at it more from a cultural Zeitgeist style perspective, which to me actually gives me a lot of optimism. Because the basis of my argument about the internet is, like Lanier, I'm a huge internet booster, have very fond memories of sort of pre-consumer web internet and the promise of the internet in its early days. of issues. Yes, that business model, but that business model wouldn't have so much teeth if it wasn't for the cultural reality that we have temporarily consolidated so much of what is internet traffic to a small number of very large wild garden platforms. I think the internet unleashes its sources of discovery and innovation and joy and connection and entertainment and

distraction. It does that best when it's distributed and fragmented and niche and weird. That it's the internet is a set of universal protocols that anyone with any computer who's plugged into any nearby network can talk and therefore join in. It's a very democratized distributed medium. When we said, let's consolidate that to three companies and they'll have their own private version of the internet running in giant server farms, that's where we got a lot of problems. I think for a lot of reasons, we are refragmenting back towards a more distributed niche internet. I think the

period of the social media giants consolidating most internet traffic was a transient period whose peak has passed and is now starting to fall apart. So I actually think we're heading towards a much better internet. And none of that really required a villain to be slain. None of that really required a complicated new legislative package to be passed. None of that really has anything to do with politics. It's social technodynamics. And so I'm actually, I'm more, this is daylight with me and lenara if we're gonna try to isolate that i think he's more pessimistic about this i'm less i actually think it was a the unstable configuration here was one in which the internet was being consolidated

by a small number of companies that required a huge amount if we're going to use sort of physics terms it's like a huge amount of input energy in the system to hold this unstable configuration the rest state is much more distributed and i think think we're heading back. We're going to swing back to a cycle that's more distributed and democratized and weird, and that's going to actually be much better. So you're actually pretty bearish on these consolidated monopolies maintaining their monopolistic control over conversation. So it sounds like you think Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, even under Elon, I mean, we can talk about that in a moment because that's its own unique case now. But it sounds like you think these are going to,

if not completely unravel, they're going to unwind to the point where much more is happening outside their walls than inside their walls. Yeah, and I think TikTok is actually the thing that kicked this off. So I had an article, I did a New Yorker piece on this about, it was called something like TikTok in the fall of the social media giants. But my argument is that the giants' main defense was this competitive advantage of having these very large network graphs that they were able to generate through first mover advantage. So you have these large connections of users. So first of all, it says you have interesting users and you have this rich network of connections between them that follow relations, like relations, friend relations.

And as long as they were focused on, we are going to, I mean, the whole job of these companies, of course, is we're going to generate engagement. And as long as their engagement was being generated from these social graphs, it was an impregnable position. It was very difficult to dislodge them. So you look at something like Twitter, why is that so successful for those who use it at being a source of engagement is you have not just a lot of interesting people, but that's part of it, right? If you go to Parler, if you go to Truth Social, one of the big issues is there's just not enough interesting people there to generate enough potentially interesting content. Although in their defense, they're interested in interesting Nazis, that's true. They have a better selection of interesting Nazis than Twitter, so I'll give them that. But the other thing that Twitter has, and I think this is underlooked, is different than something like TikTok, which is purely algorithmic. It's actually the aggregate of all of these hundreds of thousands independent retweet decisions.

And because you have this nice power law graph topology and that underlying follower graph, what you get is this rapid amplification of things that are interesting. It's a bunch of human decisions plus a network structure that does a really good job of surfacing stuff that captures people's attention. Of course, that has a lot of side effects we can get into it. But again, you have this big asset, which is this graph. Parler, Gab, whatever, can't replicate that. They just can't get enough people and enough connections. There's a first mover advantage there. So what happened with TikTok is they came in and said, forget that. Forget this idea that we're going to have some sort of competitive advantage embedded in a social graph. Instead, we're just going to use algorithms. Anyone can generate content.

It goes into one big pool. We have an algorithm that looks at that pool and selects what's best. And we talk about Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and those algorithmic terms, but we really underestimate the degree to which actual human created links in a social graph play a huge role in how those algorithms work. TikTok doesn't care about any social graph. It's all algorithmic. So when Meta is starting to chase TikTok because they have to get their quarterly earnings up, so on Instagram and in Facebook, they begin to add less social graph-based curation and more purely algorithmic-based curation. They're leaving the castle walls. They're leaving the

first mover advantage they had built up on, we have the social graph and no one ever again is going to get 1.7 billion people to manually specify a lot of people are their friends. They're leaving that advantage to play on TikTok's turf. Without that advantage, they are competing with anyone else who's trying to offer engagement and they're vulnerable. their friends. They're leaving that advantage to play on TikTok's turf. Without that advantage, they are competing with anyone else who's trying to offer engagement, and they're vulnerable. And I think there's a lot of other sources of interesting engagement once they no longer have that advantage. There's podcasts, there's streaming, there's apps, there's games, there's niche networks. I think they're vulnerable. And so the only player there who could potentially survive this is Twitter, because they are for now, all of their value proposition still comes from their underlying social graph.

And by going private, they can resist the investor pressures that push meta to say, we have to chase TikTok and we have to chase algorithmic curation. So, so I mean, Twitter probably has the best chance of surviving as not the town square, which I never thought it really was. That's a different topic. But as an interesting service that there's a non-trivial amount of people who get some enjoyment out of it. Interesting. So to summarize what you just said, the reason why meta, to take the largest example, could lose its monopolistic power here in the face of TikTok is that by trying to play TikTok's game, it is giving up its intrinsic monopoly over network effects and is essentially entering

the entertainment business. And then the question is, well, what's more entertaining? And then you suddenly have a lot of competition that you didn't have when you were just trying to leverage the social graph that you have and no one else has. Yep. TikTok is the Visigoths coming into Rome. And if it's not them, there's seven other barbarian tribes that are going to follow them. I mean, when Rome fell, it was tribe after tribe, group after group, all taking their swing at an empire that had lost its financial core that could protect it. I think it's the same thing.

And they have to. The problem is they have to go after TikTok because they're public and they're losing users and TikTok is eating their lunch. But I quote an executive. So in this one piece I wrote, an executive who left Facebook to go to TikTok. And basically what he was saying, backing up my thesis here was, you guys are good. You guys being Facebook here, you're a social company. This is what you figured out how to do really well.

Build, maintain, and extract value from a social graph. Like you are not an entertainment company. TikTok is an entertainment company. You're not going to play this game well. You don't have any expertise here. It's not in your DNA. And so you're in danger if you come over here. And the problem with TikTok, of course, so people were asking after that article, so do I think TikTok is going to be the winner? Like, no, that has a two-year half-life, max. The point is there's 17 other TikToks coming behind it. 17 other zeitgeisty, incredibly engaging things. As long as the game

is just make me look at this phone. It doesn't matter that there's a social graph here. It doesn't matter that my cousin's on here. It doesn't matter that the three sports stars I like are tweeting on here or whatever. Then everything is competition with everything else. I mean, eventually you could just have ASMR, pleasing flashing lights, whatever. I mean, eventually you could just have ASMR, pleasing flashing lights, whatever. I mean, you're in that ballgame at that point. So I don't use TikTok. I'm not on it, and I don't actually consume it. I've seen a handful of videos on YouTube, I think, so I get the format.

But you're an algorithm guy. Why is their algorithm so good? I mean, maybe it's goodness is being exaggerated to lay people like me. But the rumor is it's got this magically powerful way of serving up content to people that drives dopamine in a way that no one else has quite managed. Well, it's an interesting question because we don't know exactly, but we have some insight into what the algorithm does. There was one study in particular at the Wall Street Journal Commission that's really useful where they created hundreds of fake TikTok accounts and they could

systematically try to prove what was going on. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org