Welcome to the making cents podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed. And we'll only be here in the first part of this conversation in order to access full episodes of The Making Sense podcast. You'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-org there, you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcast track along with other subscriber, only content.
Don't we don't run ads on the podcast and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. 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've 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 you did punch. Wait 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 a simple as that. I have a lot to say about Twitter and by what I think it's doing to society.
T. 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 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 I 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 @mentions but I didn't appear to be that sort of person that 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 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 or 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
I feel.
Hey probably isn't the right word. It was more like discussed and despair. 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 and there might be a few exceptions to this, but I believe that very few of my enemies on Twitter or 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 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 deleted. 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 in several worried. It might have been having some kind of Mental Health crisis for 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 want to discover 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 especially 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 like 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 and it basically worked. So I wasn't seeing most of the hate, it 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 happened to, like a dumb tweet as well? 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 abandoned 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.
You want 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 is high-fiving anti-semites and election deniers or bonding with them over there, 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 responsible 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 like when I was defending cartoonists against islamist sensors and their dupes on the left. But now I somehow don't support it because I supposedly have Trump derangement syndrome will first have 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 Ilan from compelled speech.
The government shouldn't be able to foresee Lon 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 they get that social networks. And podcasts are different, but Twitter simply isn't the Public Square. It is a private platform and Ilan 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. In the first amendment protects this kind of speech, at least in the United States, but they're also shouldn't be a law in my view that prevents a digital platform from having a no Nazi
Policy in his 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 absolutist. Mm is just a fantasy online. Almost, no one really holds that position even when they espouse it.
The fact that Twitter is 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 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
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 Ilan. 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 he'll on 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 lives 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.
And 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 a few 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 an elon's hands Twitter now, seems too 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 with 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 could
Just, 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 site 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 hair gel was holding a
Razor 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 that will 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, rather than work to improve our institutions and identify real.
Experts. It's like we're witnessing the birth of a new religion of contrarian ISM 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.
Ins and experts again, far too often for good reason, that's a tragedy. And I 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 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 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.
Is 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 sub stack and tweet our way out of this situation.
anyway, what I look at my own life 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 and 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.
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 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 costs 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 caliph you weeks ago, as you'll hear he strongly recommended that I get off Twitter.
And you also hear that I was thinking about it but not quite ready to do it. I can't quite say the Cal convinced me to do it, but he was yet another voice in my head when I finally did anyway, we discussed much more than Twitter here, we talked 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'm 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 and in several boats at the moment and it's so what we're going to talk about how you accomplish that. But how do you, 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 faded question?
Yeah. Well, it's a more complicated answer than probably. I wish it would be. But usually, I'll
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 riding 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 and 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.
Another on the impact of technology on our lives, be in our working lives, our personal lives. And so, there is some concilium 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. Mmm, 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, you know, I would imagine most people listening to us now, which is to, for lack of a better framing the, 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, once the obvious way, that's the comfort with the technical
Round of these various Technologies and in general also just having lived a life where I am keeping my eyes towards Cutting Edge and 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, I don't know how to say this diplomatically, but I'm very comfortable in my writing going from more philosophical social critique.
To Veer in 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 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 us this fall back, we'll look. I have a PhD from MIT and theoretical computer science. So, I don't need my writing to
convince my audience that I'm smart
and I think that is actually freed me up. And that's
It'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, you know what, I'm publishing in a magazine or a book having to establish, what is my intellectual credibility? Said this other thing going on. So that cover that my academic career is providing me. I think is unlocked a lot more breath than what I can tackle with my non academic writing.
Yeah, that's really interesting. This goes to the question of status and
Are you get it and where you perceive others, get it and that that is just fascinating. You 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 what the moment somebody thinks you're Tony Robbins you can say no actually I'm a computer scientist over at Georgetown and what you mean, not to say that you ever have to say that but just the fact that you know, that people can connect the dots. You don't actually have to have the status
You know, fears or the egoic concerns that you're being pigeon-holed in some way that is doesn't fit your your self-image and your actual
expertise. Yeah. Well that's for sure happening. Anyways, my academic career gives me enough ego at concerns already,
right? So, I could, I could take a bit of a breather, you know, I can take a bit of a breather in this, in this other space,
but, but I mean, I'll just say, it's always struck me to degree to, which especially in idea, right?
There often. Is that reluctance? That will have an idea that clearly has practical implications. This is like Gladwell and effect but 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 with altars, you take genre Cinema and mix-and-match, the tropes and you have a
Out of Tarantino esque approach of let's let's go low and mix it with high and this is freaking fun over here and this is just mix it all together. I there should be some more spontaneity and joy and format I think in writing and everything seems a little bit dower these days where everyone is sort of just sombrely, taking their turn, you know, supporting some sort of dire conclusion. So I tried to inject a little bit more of that energy into my work.
Why is it? Do you think that giving advice and
In out the Practical implications of something seems to diminish the gravitas of the work or the, 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 the early 2000s where East Coast publishing coming out of the standard New York publishing houses. And
I'm looking specifically here at non-fiction 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, you know, Malcolm is my example, here are coming out of Journalism. They're coming out of professional writing and they would look upon advice writing as something to be more West Coast. This is a hey how sort of Silicon Valley, Tim Ferriss, hack culture, a completely that's a different
I love 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 Steven Johnson's. This was influential, you know, writing to me but it all pulled back before it got to advise. But at the same time, you know, I was a teenage entrepreneur during the first.com. Boom, in the 90s, I was also living and breathing advice advice guides time management, guide 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, a sort of the West Coast world would give, either either a Silicon Valley techie advice or sort of Hay House. Whoo, 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 seem separate and you also have your
own podcast to which is
You've joined the lowbrow ranks of all of us who have podcasts. I think there's now a last heard. I can't believe there's number. I think, the last number I heard was that there were four million Baht cast at the last number. I believed, I think was 1.2 million, but I do believe, I do believe I have since her that there are 4 million. I don't know if you, 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 podcast.
Well, you know, I said yesterday and talked, 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 and with that was a CDC recommendation where that came from, yes, with my podcast. Now, I'm just going straight straight advice, right? So it's, let's cut out all of the, the middlemen. It's questions and answers. Let's throw in questions. Let's throw in answers. I mean, I'll say another angle that I
It's in the way of just straightforward, pragmatic philosophy. Okay, I thought about this. Here's, some advice, is I the culture right now is one that is really concerned about caveat eating, right? So, and there's a kind of understand where this comes from, but there's this notion of be careful about giving a piece of advice, because it might not apply to everyone or they'll be different people in your audience with different particular circumstances for which it doesn't apply. If you can't properly caveat it, they might be offended. So there's a there's a
Concern about Cavite and it's one of the big messages I always preach about doing advice writing is the brighter shouldn't caveat. You need the audience to caveats. The audience can hear beep. Take your swing. Here's what I think. Here's take this or leave it. Here is a big idea. Let me make it, you know, a big powerful swing. You can copy on 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
Verse ation, 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, then I'm just being a jerk, you know, it's like why are you telling me this like why are you, why are you telling me your running routine when I'm in a cast, write it, then you're just being a jerk and so I think people often generalize that that reality from one-on-one interaction. When you're thinking about one too many interaction and then the whole program of giving advice seems nerve-racking because man, people could get a fitly if you think of the right.
Avianna. What about this? Or what? If doesn't apply to that person? And that's another part of it as well. I've learned just go for it. You know, 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 and people giving advice as they imagine that tweet. It's going to come back and that gives them gives them some
pause. Mmm. 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 but before we jump in, what's the the significance of theoretical in your attachment to computer science? When you say you're a theoretical computer
scientist, it means the type of computer scientists that can't get another
job. Like you you like you actually couldn't get hired at Google. Yeah. Because I don't program
or 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 we do math about things.
It's relevant to computers, but most of us are pretty bad at using
computers themselves. So, the theory of, is it true that you literally don't program or you 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 I'm not I don't program
as part of my career as a computer.
Scientist. I mean, I think the last time I actually program, the computer was a few years ago, I was making computer games for my boys.
Some area where they would come up with the idea and I
program but no, my job is a theoretical computer scientist involves no programming. It's math papers.
And so, you're designing algorithms, that can solve problems. You're trying to prove that certain problems can't be solved. Algorithmically Etc. Exactly, both those things. Yeah.
Analyzing algorithms mathematically or proven mathematically.
Lee, 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 entering did the 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 has this remarkable paper called on computable numbers, and their application to the Islip tongue problem, which is a German name, Hilbert gave to this
Big open problem, and he did a pretty simple mathematical / logical proof that prove 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, 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
Me people would, I mean, I'm thinking sort of counterfactual intellectual history here. How many people would we have? Could we have lost and still had the information technology Revolution, more or less on schedule, when you're, when you start culling the brightest minds of that generation. So like if we hadn't had touring and we hadn't had church and we hadn't had Von Neumann,
We hadn't had Shannon no matter what you pick your me you're going to, you will know the cast of characters, much better than I do. But I dimly imagine that we could if we had lost maybe 10 or 12, crucial people, we 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 or was there so much momentum at that point reaching back, you know, to Ava Lovelace and
And Babbage that we still would have had the information age more or less one. 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 because essentially, the momentum the momentum that was building was driven so fiercely by World War Two. I think would be very difficult for that. Momentum to have been halted. And have to remember, there was a, a
Really thriving and complex industry of analog computational machines coming into World War 2 and these were used a lot for artillery. Aiming calculating artillery tables trying to do you have like a Norman wiener style cybernetic human machine interface for better trying to shoot down planes with anti-aircraft guns. There was a huge amount of these machines existed. The idea of going from these analog electronic Computing machines, the digital machines there. I
I think the key figure would be Shannon and in particular, you know, 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 to AT&T phone system used to automatically connect call. So you didn't have to have a switchboard operator. He was early to the idea that you could use this
Little piece of equipment that's electromagnetics 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 bridge the cap, the digital. And then a lot of people began building digital computer. So, you know, Von Neumann. Of course had the big project going at Princeton and he really cracked the
Sure that we ended up using, but pin had their own situation, they have their own computer going. There's our own digital computer project or a 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. Hmm. What had been done? Analog and World War 2 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 is 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 years. Hmm. So yeah, I'm of the belief, you know touring, I love touring as a theoretician and touring, 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, right? And it's really kind of unrelated, he
He lay these mathematical foundations that were conceptually useful and he spent a year at The Institute for advanced study and girdle was their enjoyment was there in church was there and there's some cross-pollination of ideas there, but a lot of that was more philosophical in. Mathematical, you can still have the engineering Revolution, digital computer, she could still have that easily without touring ever being around. He actually became more useful for people like me and the starting to 60s when mathematicians begin studying computation touring was the guy
Light his early mathematical foundations, led to the whole field of theoretical computer science but you can have computers without that field. So I think that would have happened one way or the other be very hard to stop that Revolution.
Interesting. So I sent, I don't know when I sent my first email maybe 1995 96 somewhere in there but so you think without touring 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 or there's been a delay, the difference would have been in
The late 40s and by 1960, we're caught up, hmm?
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 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.
And public-facing text on. Mindfulness meditation, though I've never been a big practitioner, so I know the high-level Basics, right? But if not practiced hand at it, right, right.
Okay. Well, let's jump in. How is information technology changing us? Do you think my 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 in sight of my work on this question, over the last
You know, 10 years or so, was recognizing that the philosophical framework for understanding. Let's see, 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 person Electronics revolution, in particular, with the attention economy, Amplified smartphone based Revolution that began around 2007, they seem similar because in both cases were seen spheres in our life, where we're more distracted, if we can use that turn kind of
Obviously, now it seems the same and the office. I'm on slack, I'm an email all the time. I feel distracted at home. I'm on my phone all the time. A Twitter's capture my attention. It feels the same but you actually is very difficult to unify them and where I really began making traction and trying to understand these two effects was separating those 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 and work that the issue is
Advent of low friction communication tools, transform 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
Terry. Because if there are seven or eight on going back and forth conversations that are timely unfolded in email, you have to see those messages pretty soon. After they arrived at the conversation ping pong can actually happen at a fast enough rate and all those rapid inbox checks, or instant messenger checks actually is a huge drag on cognitive capacity are our brain takes a long time to actually switch cognitive context of this sort of fragmented back and forth. Has been a major productivity drag. So my Top Line argument about the world of work is he's new.
Analogies accidentally made us not only much stupider in a literal sense, but is a drag actually a drag on economic growth and productivity. That there's a real problem. Whereas in the 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 the weird unexpected side effects that that that portals up and creates these whirling dervish.
Issues 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? Mmm, so they're similar superficially were distracted but the source of that distraction and the impact and therefore the solutions is very
And I think between those two magisteria
interesting, why? I think when you initially made that division a few minutes ago between work and private life. Many listeners were anticipating. You it being a story of the good and the bad. So the bad is visited on private life. You know, 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 has is
mining our attention and amplifying device of content. But over on the work front, I think people were expecting to hear that our productivity is just an 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's the that is the source of my my anthropological Margaret Mead remove,
you know, from which I can actually observe what's
going on without being entangled at it myself. So now I've never had a traditional social media account. No Facebook, no Twitter Instagram, no Snapchat. I like to observe that world. I think I'm the last person. Perhaps, you know, of my age is, 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? What do you must be on these platforms? As a, 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's actually public, so you can go and look at individual people's Twitter feeds directly without having.
Actually be on Twitter yourself and tweeting. So Twitter is actually an easy one to study. You can you can go check out. What people are up to Tech. Talk was probably wrote a tick tock article for the New Yorker earlier this year. You know, that's a little harder. So I had to borrow accounts and then also watch videos you can see fine Tech talks it turns out you can find them post it online. You can watch various Tick-Tock videos but so different platforms yield different challenges when you're when you're trying to actually go in there and observe
right now. If
Not immediately obvious. It will soon be obvious that you're an enormously disciplined structured person. Why go to 0 with this? Why not just the minimal use or the the intelligent and disciplined use of Summer all of these
platforms? Well I you know and I pitched that when I talk to what people should do this, this philosophy of digital minimalism is not about going to zero.
This is 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&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 so what kept me at 0 is the fact that through circumstance I started at zero where most people casually signed up for the these networks when they were still exploratory and exuberant and interesting.
And fun for various contingent reasons, which aren't even that interesting. I did it. And so I was just used to not having them and then after they became ubiquitous that I had this interesting remove and over the years, people have made arguments. Well, you could get Advantage a, or Advantage be. It always seemed too small to me, you know, 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
Juice it's unlikely. The 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'm going to have a team.
Mmmmm that post 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 we'll talk about that, but you can 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, a poor was going to go to
Raelia and do a lecture series will then having social media accounts that could tell that 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 this is a hard
case. Yeah, I thought that my fourth book sort of been 2012. I do remember going to immediate my publisher Is Random House and
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,
there's a pretty new with oxytocin and and lattes and
it's actually, but now it's sort of part of my brand as well, right? 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
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. Like 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 full-time. Professor, I had young kids and so I was already in this mine.
Set of like, yeah, there's all sorts of stuff to be helpful I 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 winds, I can do that are 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 authors 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'm at this is just my mindset of good enough, the 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 box. There's a lot of things that could be doing. I don't do a lot of them by Publishers that 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.
Okay. You pretty much share journal in ears view of the situation. Is there any way in which you disagree with him? I am not. I haven't read enough of 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.
No, I mean I think he's brilliant and his approach was very, influential to me, you are not a gadget very influential because it introduced humanism into the discussion of these sort of techno impact. So he really he really comes at these consumer-facing Technologies from the perspective of what are their impact on Humanity, your Humanity as a person yourself definition, your weirdness, the corners that make you special and he really worries about the way that these these platforms force you to fit your way.
Get yourself into these interface drop down box elections, the way it it breaks in, you know, connection. He's a way more radical thinker than I am though. So there 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 / pragmatic program. So, why are we seeing these effects? What are the Dynamics? The
The socio techno dynamics that are causing these things we see and what can we do about it? The what can we do about it with linear? I think is either thought experiment e, 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 almost like we're playing a different. We're playing a different was going to say, play a different instrument but that also has a literal truth because he's, a, he's a
master of only place a thousand. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Placing thousands. He's got a longer dreadlocks and you do. Yeah, he's an older guy than me. Let's just, let's just call it straight. He's like a
cooler or punk rock, Tech known critic VR. Punk, just to 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 stood still surprised. Some people are missing 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? It may, I agree with you that Lanier's idea that we're going to pay everyone for their data in some amazingly, efficient way that I do.
Don't understand how that's going to work are already. And even if it would work, I'm like, I don't quite see the bridge from where we are to there. So what should we do and what and what do you, how do you think about your own digital work? Like your podcast and anything else you're doing is 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
This moron, the space and I had there's 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 had had this Trump driven turning up perspective, where mainstream media now, perceive the social media platforms as an evil empire. There was there was this shift and from the nerd gods are going to save us to the the nerd gods are going to destroy us and I got a lot of friction from them because my my
Roach these issues was much more personalized about about individuals and the reactions. These Technologies 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, it was going to be usefully done with legislation. I wasn't that interested in the good guy. Bad guy storylines either. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, an evil genius who planned Cambridge Analytical in a hollowed-out volcano and if we can
Him, whatever we can have Universal basic income. I mean, there's a lot of things were being connected together. Whereas, I come out, I came out at more, I come out at 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 linear. 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, I think the primary source 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 Walled Garden platforms. I think the, the internet unleashes its sources of Discovery and Innovation, enjoy 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 democratize. Distributed medium when we said, let's consolidate that the 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 re fragmenting back towards a more distributed Nish internet. I think the period of the social media Giants. Consolidating. Most internet traffic is a was a transient period whose Peak has
Past 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, you know, Complicated new, legislative package to be past, none of that really has anything to do with politics, its social techno Dynamics. And so I'm actually a more. This is daylight with me and learn are going to try to isolate that. I think he's more pessimistic about this. I'm Les. 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 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 we're heading back. We're going to swing back to a cycle that it's more distributed, and democratized and weird and ask actually
much better. So you're actually pretty bearish on these Consolidated monopolies maintaining their Monopoly.
Has to control over conversation. So your sounds like you think, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter even under Elon and 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, then inside their walls.
Yeah. And I think Tech talk is actually the thing to kick this off. So I had an article, I did a new
For peace on this about, it's called something like Tick-Tock in the fall of the social media Giants. But my argument is that the Giants is main defense was this competitive advantage of having these very large Network graphs that they are able to generate through first-mover Advantage. So, you have these large connections of users. The first of all, since you have interesting users and you have this Rich network of connections between them, they'll 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 a 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 parlor, if you go to True, social one of the big issues is
This is not enough interesting people there to generate enough potentially interesting content, but it's
also in their defense, they have all the interesting Nazis. Well, so if you're interested, interesting Nazis, that's
true, they have a better selection of interesting Nazis than Twitter. So, I'll give him that. But the other thing that Twitter has, I think this is underlooked, is actually all of these different follower relationships because Twitter, actually operates as a distributed, cybernetic curation algorithm. So, what the way Twitter surfaces,
These things that are really interesting. This is different than something like Tick Tock, which is purely algorithmic. It's actually the, the aggregate of all of these hundreds of thousands independent retweet decisions and because you have this, this nice power law, graph, topology and then 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. That course that has a lot of side effects, we can get into it.
But that's a again you have this big asset which is this graph parlor, gab, whatever, can't replicate that they just can't get enough people and enough connections. It just there's a first mover Advantage there. So what happened with Tick-Tock is they came in and said, forget that forget this idea that we're going to have some sort of competitive advantage in bed in a social graph. Instead, we're 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 talked about Facebook and Instagram and
Her nose, 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. Tick-Tock doesn't care about any social graph. It's all algorithmic. So when meta is starting to chase Tech talk because they have to get their quarterly earnings up. So an Instagram and 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 one point seven billion, people to manually specify a lot of people are their friends. They're leaving that advantage to play on, Tech talks 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 podcast their 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
Vive. 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 Tick-Tock. We have to chase algorithmic duration. 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 like an interesting service that there's a non-trivial amount of people who get some enjoyment out of
it. Mmm,
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 tick-tock is that by trying to play tic tocs game. It is giving up, its intrinsic Monopoly over Network effects and is essentially entering the the entertainment business. And then the question is well what's more entertaining? And then there's then they
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. Tick Tock, is the
Visigoths coming into Rome, you know. And if it's not, then 27, other Barbarian tribes are going to follow them. I mean, when Rome fell, it was tribe after tribe Group. After group, you know, all taking, they're all taking. They're swinging at an Empire that had lost its its Financial core that could protect it. It's, I think it's this the same thing and they have to the
Um, is they have to go after Tick-Tock? Because they're public and the losing users and Tech talk is eating their lunch, but I quote an executive, so in this one piece, I wrote an executive who left Facebook, to go to tick. Tock, and basically what he was saying, backing up my, my thesis here was, you guys are good. You guys been Facebook, here, your 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 Tick-Tock as an entertainment company.
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 Tick-Tock, of course. So people were asking after that article. So do I think tick-tocks going to be the winner like know that will also that has a two year. Half-Life Max. The point is there's 17 other tick-tocks coming behind it. Seventeen other Zeitgeist e 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 or tweeting on here, whatever. Then Everything is Everything is competition with everything else, you know? I mean eventually you could just have you know, ASMR pleasing flashing lights, you know, I had whatever. I mean you're playing you're in that ballgame at that
point. So I don't use tick tock. I don't I'm not on it and I don't actually consume it. I've seen, you know, a handful of videos on on YouTube I think but he was I get the format. But you're an algorithm guy. What? Why is their
Them so good. I mean it's just 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's
one study in particular at the Wall Street Journal commission was created hundreds of fake.
Tick-Tock and counseling can systematically if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-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 Sam Harris dot-org.
