Hey everyone, quick note. The episode you're about to hear, it's a conversation recorded a while ago Before the horrific events in Israel and Palestine, but it's about learning to use social media in a way that doesn't ruin your mind And so it helped me a lot this month. That's what we're airing it today After short break a conversation with Ezra Klein where I ask him the question, is it possible to use the internet right now in a sane way?
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Whatever you want to do. I don't particularly want them on. Okay, this week I'm a high-jacking show from, I'm not sure who, to ask a question that I personally have been trying to figure out, I miss having headphones. Hold on. I feel like otherwise I'm just worried I'm off like, all right, we'll do it together. Okay, this week I'm a high-jacking show from who I'm not sure. To ask a question that I personally have been trying to figure out, I might end up asking it more than once this year.
I hope you benefit from it too, but that's your business. The question is just, how exactly am I supposed to use the internet right now in a way that's any good for my brain? I have a job that entails staring at screens a lot. One where I can justify the idea that using websites like Twitter is, quote unquote, for work, which is just a very strange state of affairs.
We've accidentally created a world where we get a lot of our news and information from websites that are designed to addict us, usually by hurting our feelings in specific and predictable ways. I can't quit the internet called Turkey, like cigarettes or iPhone games, but lately I've struggled as I felt more and more like, maybe there's a sort of scar on my brain that the internet seems to pick at or open when I'm just trying to read about some breaking news development.
So I've struggled with this. One of my favorite writers and podcasters is Ezra Klein. I've been following his works since I got into journalism in 2008. He started out as a blogger. He co-founded the website Vox and was its editor in chief. These days he writes for the New York Times where he also hosts the podcast the Ezra Klein show. I love this show.
Over a few episodes, you might get a deep story about climate technology and open-minded but high-presistant take on psychedelic therapy and then an interview with Tom Hanks about Tom Hanks' current view of America.
Anyway, Ezra is not like an internet usage guru, but he's smart and he makes his warrant show. And because his show feels calm and outside of the insanity that is online right now, I wanted to selfishly use the fact that I have my own podcast to ask him to come here and teach me how to use the internet because I feel like I've forgotten. That's our intro.
Great. So, okay, first of all, I have an impression of you from afar, which is that despite having used the internet for many years, you may be sane. Do you feel that way? Like, does that feel trudy-o? Some days, I think my internet usage is pretty sane. Okay. Has it always been sane or did you have to teach yourself how to use it, Sanley?
I think like a lot of people, I've had really discreet phases of my relationship with the internet, but two all kind of focus on it. So, one, when I got into it, I thought it was so great. I mean, really, and still do, right? But I remember my dad bringing home a Macintosh computer. I remember us getting a 28K modem, then a 566, and like, oh man, the 56 is so fast. And you get that, like, beep, beep, beep, beep, right?
The stuff that by the people I work with now don't remember because it never happened and it seems weird that you heard your computer connecting to the internet. Yes, but I was really like, I was pretty early. I remember the first thing I ever did on the internet. I was a big video gamer when I was young and electronic gamer monthly, if you remember, this magazine.
They had put in the magazine that if you went on the internet, which I don't really know about at that point, you could see online a picture, another picture of this upcoming Mortal Kombat game. And I had my dad who worked at the University of California at Irvine. I had him take me to his office because they had the internet at the University, and we could look at this picture.
So my career kind of flowered on the internet. And what I loved about it then was this sense that you could always be immersing yourself in information. You never had to be bored. You could be reading a million articles all the time. And that informational abundance to me was like the central feature and the central advantage of it. And I was very utopian about it. And I remember in 2010 this book coming up by this guy Nicholas Carr called the Shalows. Yeah, I remember.
And I was like, I was like, I'm just making a stupid. There was a raft of those books. And I have to say when they came out, I was just like, what are you guys talking about? This is amazing. I was so mad about that book that I had never read. Right? I had really strong opinions on it. I felt like I was getting smarter on the internet. And that's ridiculous. You know, what would what wouldn't be good about being in the middle of this information for all times?
And over time that curdled and I then read this book when it was reissued in 2020 for its 10th anniversary edition. Okay. That's like, oh no, this book is completely correct. And like much more correct now than it was. And I think a long way. I actually think it did flip. Like we went from having the informational boost was was great to the informational boost became too much. And I date that sort of to be algorithmic social media.
Yeah. Very high levels of analytics within media organizations. I mean, I've run some media organizations. I've been your nerve centers. In the time I've been doing this, we went from knowing very little about what the audience was doing to a lot. And that meant you could try to manipulate the audience much more closely. And I think if you didn't realize it's what you're doing, that was I think when you get too deep into analytics, typically what you're doing.
And I do think it got too much. And the thing that then flipped for me was my focus in terms of my relationship with the internet was not on how much information can it give me. But what type of attention is it affording to me? What do you mean when you say that? The big thing that has changed in the way I think about all this is that I'm much more focused now on the quality of the attention I'm able to bring to different things.
I think that is actually the core of my work. And the idea that there is the information I don't want to say I take it for granted. But I don't have any more what I sort of call like the matrix theory of the mind. What's the matrix theory of the mind? The next thing to the mind is that if only you could have that little jack in the back of your neck and into it would come the information.
How in the matrix they can plug it into the jack and then it's like now they know kung fu and frankly, how do I'm keeping it? A lot of people have the matrix theory of the mind. And the matrix theory of the mind is this idea. You just download information into your brain and then you know it. That's what a book is doing. That's what when you hear these guys like Sam Beckman freed and others who famously say, there should be no books.
It should be a blog post like books are too long. Like what they're saying is that they're not information dense enough. Like you can just get the jest and then you're there. And I've come to a thing that's not what any of this is actually about. That the time you have to spend with information wrestling with it being attentive to it. That's where you draw connections where you come to insights where parts of you come into relationship with parts of it and something new emerges.
And if you do creative work like that's what you're looking for that kind of emergence of something new. And that's about the attention, not just the information. The same piece of text or movie or music read in a fractured way for me, you know, over 32 days in 15 or 17 minute chunks before I fall asleep. And that same book or same piece of culture consumed on an airplane. Right? Right. Right. No distractions or in a movie theater.
My relationship to that what I will get out of it, what I will create from it in my own head are completely different. And what I feel for me is way more under attack is that attention. And so where like once I was very interested in the internet as this carry of information, now I'm much more jealous trying to create these attentional spaces that I think are conducive to being a thoughtful sane human being. And I think the internet has become more and more of an enemy on that.
I think that for all of its wonders and there are many and most of my work is digital. I think it is now something you have to defend against at least as much if not more than you can just happily benefit from it. So many followers just like don't even know where to start.
I think that's right. Like I think it fits with my experience which is that like what I notice when I don't like the way I'm using the internet, what I notice is just like it gives me all of these feelings but an inability to just like sit and think through any of them. I was talking to somebody who said, I hear what we were talking about something controversial. And I don't think it was that controversial.
But they were like, you know, my problem with the internet right now is that I can tell what I can tell what my opinion is supposed to be before I have had time to make up my opinion. And I was thinking that was true but that also there's like another off ramp which is like if you're mad about that then there's this other little hallway of opinions which are all kind of atrocious that you can walk down.
But the thing that they share in common is just like the ability just like sit with something and think about it doesn't work because you're always mid-argument there. Even if you're not typing arguments like there's something about the state of like particularly Twitter and not threads yet but maybe thread soon where every single sentence is part of just like a cage match. It's not at all like reading a book even though both things are made out of sentences.
And I don't know why it took me so many years to understand that and I don't know how much of it is that it changed or I changed I know it's both but I can't actually tell. So a couple thoughts. So one I think it's really important for people in our line of work to say one what we are saying is Twitter is bad versus the internet is bad. Yes. Right a lot of that sounded to me like you're just talking about Twitter like maybe a bit of Instagram or social media or threads a bit or whatever.
It's almost entirely Twitter but what I would say before you want is that the problem is Twitter I read essays that are not on Twitter that are written entirely to an imaginary audience on Twitter. I have conversations in real life with people who I know at bars where I'm like you're talking to Twitter right now like is Twitter really in the room right now where it's just like it is so colonized.
So I think it's really important to understand is like gone it's like surveillance but from each other do you know what I mean so I love this I'm so glad you said this. What you just said really gets it something that's become central of my think about all this which is I've kind of become a martial mcluanite. Yes, he said the medium is a message. He's in Manhattan the movie. Yeah, one of what might forget which and I studied him in a class that I failed in college.
There's everything I know and that people have started talking about why you failed it. None of the sticks were on the final. So what does it mean to be mcluanite right now? So medium is a message what does he mean I find that to be a completely like opaque saying so hold on I'm going to grab. Do you mind if I just grab something on my phone real quick. Yeah, of course I didn't even bring my phone in because I have a same relationship with the internet.
Alright, let me just pull this up real quick because I'll get a better quote. So the so the famous medium is message I find that quote really opaque I never connect it for me, but there's something else mcluan says in the same book understanding media that I love.
So he says our conventional response to all media namely that it is how they are used the counts is the numb stance of the technological idiot for the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.
And that thing you were just saying that you have this sneaking feeling that the people around you they're not just using Twitter they're becoming Twitter yes right that they it has become it has somehow colonized away they think they think in Twitter they talk like Twitter they look at the world and are like looking for little
280 character quips to make about it at the time and it's true for everything right like that's it's not just media in the way we think of it it's also when you go to a place instead of looking at it you're looking for what would be a good photo to take of it yes I just better weekend with Instagram people and there are lovely people they were using their phones a lot I was like why didn't they and I was like oh their brains are
looking for pictures my brain is looking for arguments so that the medium is a message what he's saying there is what I think is like better describe by that other quote is that the thing we look at when we are using any kind of medium is what is a content in it like is this a good tweet or a bad tweet a good op ed column or bad op ed column a good photo or a bad photo and then you get
into this very individual responsibility way of thinking about medium as well if your experience on social media is bad it's because you are bad at social media you're following the wrong people you should use a list like whatever it is but no the point that McLean makes that Neil Postman then makes is kind of student after him and am using ourselves to death is like an amazing book and much more accessible than McLean is that these mediums change you the
fundamental way they affect society is that while you're looking at the content you're actually absorbing the rules and structure and ways of indicating and relating of the medium and it is that set of underlying rules like that way the medium acts upon you that's much much more important and so
one way to think about this is in attention right which is again like kind of my obsession in it what is a fundamental message of frankly all social media but but we'll use Twitter or threads here whatever as the as the example which is shorter faster more yeah and once you take that as a message right like what did Twitter do it shrunk thoughts down to originally 140 characters like that's the entire innovation of the thing and then gives you a lot of them yeah right that
things should be that quippy that crew like that blunt everything you have to say should not be longer or complicated than a bumper sticker right that's the real message of it it doesn't matter if the bumper stickers are good or bad it's that it should all be bumper sticker and you should think like a bumper sticker and if you want that kind of attention great right but if you don't then it's actually not good to spend a ton of time there so what's
you saw I think sometimes about these these theorists is that they're working really with TV which is emerging at this time and they're worried about and amazed by and it like has calm eyes the whole world and we think much more televisionly now and they're thinking about the ways of the TV is going to change who can run for
president and what kinds of things can be said and how information but their point is it it is going to change the way we look at the world like TV will change us not just your what we watch on it there's a great Neil Postman thing which is like the stuff that is
Drek on TV doesn't matter at all the actual problem of TV is the stuff people think is good that once you get to the idea that news should be entertainment that Sesame Street should be education even if you love the news and you love Sesame
Street and I show my consistency street all the time yeah you have still crossed a Rubicon you didn't even realize you were crossing but now everything should be entertaining that's the point of using ourselves to death that like the entertainment logic of television colonizes all these other spaces in life and then without even recognizing it we become intolerant of them being boring and eventually get to Donald Trump right who is a show man who becomes president because for whatever his
was he's never boring he's always interest he's TV and Twitter merged yeah I mean that's literally what the guy is yeah so so this is like I think that the intuition you have and there's something that I felt too that everybody is becoming more like Twitter is like exactly right but it's completely generalizable we all become more like any medium we use often and so then I think that like the first step towards having a decent relationship is what mediums do you want to be
more and less like right because where you spend your time is what you're going to be like I had a conversation with my therapist where we were talking about drugs and he said that he was saying that he he does a lot of addiction stuff we were talking about a pharmaceutical drug that we're doing a story about and Fedamine and he was saying that when people talk about their tendency to use certain drugs one of the things they don't think about is that you don't just like pick up
alcohol could like alcohol you don't start smelling weed because you like weed that there are certain personality types that are attracted to certain chemicals his point was that like and Fedamine even though it like can focus the mind it's also a confidence booster and so if you have like a hole in your confidence you might suddenly decide that you also like need to focus a lot more and that those things are worth looking at but I think the other thing about
social media the social media platforms were like drugs that they're addictive they're also like drugs in that they will offer you something that seems to fill a hole in you and then we'll expand the hole and make you want it more but I think like Twitter what sucks about Twitter since we are talking about Twitter is that a lot of the things I like about how my mind works which is that it looks for information it finds conversation interesting it wants to get at other
people's experiences like Twitter's like hey kid come here I got that stuff for you and then it gives you something completely different it gives you like a fight about things that are actually maybe important but being expressed in the worst possible bad faith way it gives you like like yesterday this is criticizing people who I have respected and Meyer and and people who I don't but like someone I hope you missed this someone was in midtown and they were a D. I
consultant which is like was germane to some people but some random says it was in midtown and there were some men eating at a Chipotle at their like lunch break and they took a picture of the men sitting at different tables dressed the same looking their phones and he captioned it something like what a dystopian bummer and then there was like a vast debate on Twitter morally shaming this D. I consultant this sort of like conservators were like look D. I
people are scumbags and then the progressives were like we have agreed it is a social value that you do not take pictures of strangers and that is wrong I don't like to take pictures of strangers I resent that I even watched this fight happen I don't know what I said even hearing about this
fight as you as you Twitter as you are telling me about it like you sound like a crazy person I know I made a podcast about it for like seven years and I enjoyed it and it didn't feel like a ways to my life I don't think it was but like what are we talking about there are people who are so much
smarter than me who were arguing with each other about a picture of three white men at Chole who hopefully went about their day having no idea that they sparked a national conversation amongst the brightest minds in this country look I don't want to be the guy who walks
into an interview with you on a podcast I love listening to and is like the Thear this interview is bad to be I think the Twitter conversation is over I think if you're there you know you shouldn't be right and you've known it for a long time and those stuff we all do that's bad for us
but if you're a member of the media still running around Elon Musk's Twitter adding value to Elon Musk's Twitter because you cannot find another possible way to do your job or occupy your time or find a way to get ahead of dopamine when you're you know standing near a
urinal or standing in a checkout line I think you know that you shouldn't be there anymore right and we're still talking about it and like it's fine but I don't have anything more to say about Twitter except leave it's a toxic place run by a toxic person and
everybody knows it now and the fact that there are glimmers of good things there and certainly were more in the past like we're done you can't solve it he owns it now yeah like it's done yeah just leave yeah you have to build something new find something new to do
but the internet still big and still has a lot of like I think the core question of attention in the internet is a really good one I mean I think it was a really interesting question of should we want do I want I won't create a we that doesn't really exist do I want threads which I do a little bit of stuff on to take off do I actually want a Twitter alternative to exist do I want to be on a lot of things the modern internet says do I want my children to ever use TikTok like
currently know yeah but you know will I be able to do anything about that who knows and and I really think like I want to push this away from individual platforms and say that I think in this culture like all across something that just I've come to feel really strongly about is it we don't talk about attention well but attention is the core it is the fundamental texture of your entire life right what is I forget who this line is attributed to do but your life is a sum total
of what you pay attention to yeah I was not taught in any thoughtful like meta conscious way about attention in school like I think a lot of the discussion of it now is kind of weak but paying attention to how your attention feels when you're in different spaces is like a really good thing to do that we're not taught like I have a long running down pretty de meditation practice that I think is why I'm kind of more cognizant of this and myself than I used
to be but it's why I find the Twitter thing like everybody knows retention feels like shit on Twitter like everybody knows it it's why all these people who are on it forever like called the Hellside yeah if you call if you call the thing you're on the Hellside like maybe you should be like I just out of certain but I don't know what we're like what do you need to hear yeah I'm more of a was a long time caller now I'm a first time listener on Twitter but
I think if anything we're going to shame me away this would be it I feel like there's not you don't it's like someone who's looking for a sign and has found it that was the beginning of my conversation with Ezra Klein in case you're listening to this and feeling like hearing me consider a bit not commit to getting out Twitter is like watching an idiot in a horror movie wander into the same dark basement again and again this conversation did work on me
I'm finally probably several years too late off of Twitter it feels amazing the noise recedes faster than you could ever imagine but as for Ezra I was curious to know more about how he got here how he arrived at his ideas about how to think of his own attention as something he might want to guard or even shape our conversation continues after the break Ezra talks about his biggest regret from his time running box calm and explains how he unhooked himself from Twitter
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so can I ask you about Vox actually I'm curious with this so when you mind understanding Vox when you help you were co-founder of Mr. Title I'm a co-founder and was the first editor in chief yeah so when you started the site I was like oh they're starting a website that explains things
carefully it was like that sounds very useful and like not like in an era where everyone was kind of like my brain is suggesting a metaphor I don't want to use like giving another one give me another one I was going to say girls gone wilding for internet and what was your
experience of trying to run a site like that in an era where the internet was pushing most people in another direction there are two things that were happening across purposes so Vox was fundamentally an explanatory do site and the way I would sort of define that then and now was it was focused on
contextual information about news so often time the reason Twitter is good for news is it often times the actual piece of news can fit in 140 characters right that the new piece of information about the world is quite small but the model of the world that you need to fit that information into
for it to make sense is quite large yeah and what we're trying to do in Vox was build formats and approaches they could do that and I could sort of go on for a very long time about all the formats we did and tried and the ones it worked and the ones that didn't but that that I think actually
worked um the thing was and the thing that I have the most regret about not just for us but for that whole era of digital media was the Lucy and the football relationship with Facebook and what was happening then was there was so much traffic coming in from Facebook that the assumption
throughout the media this was true for us it was true for Buzzfeed it was true for Vice was true for everybody including the big sites right you know the legacy media was that if you could just attain this huge scale there was suddenly becoming possible through the mixture of viral Facebook posts
yeah and SEO you know what time is this Super Bowl kind of stuff but also you know to use a better example we had a what we call the card stack but explanatory piece about ISIS that had over time like 10 million views I remember it and it was just sort of like here's what ISIS is yeah it was
like a huge amount of work on what was ISIS by exact beach him who's who's a box and it's a great journalist and so I mean you could really use this for good yeah like by God like we've gone in all of this attention to something that we're really proud of about that's helping people
understand this you know core piece of geopolitical context and information but so this is view that and the sense that we can somehow turn all the scale into money and if you could do that then you can keep hiring you know better and more journalists and sending them you know on more travel
and so on and that last thing never happens you mean you had the audience not the money or you never scaled to the point where you know Facebook never put the money they took the money right and so to some degree did Google and there are all these things like Facebook incident articles and Facebook
video like everybody had that pivot to video for a while remember that because they expected they could monetize a video they couldn't monetize a video in any real way so like Facebook I think did tremendous damage to the news industry for years and years and years and I'm not saying they did it
even exactly purposefully what I would say is the interest for very very badly aligned and and a lot of things probably didn't work out but but yeah so it pushed everybody in the direction of doing more scale place and for us so that you know some scale plays were explanatory but explanatory work is
slow and it's hard going and you can only do that much of it you know but you can do these quick hits that would like blow up and do really really well so it pushes you to have a in your balance more and more of those in in the in the mix and quick heads being like planting yours like opinion
or take or like you have to be opinion or take like check out this video right think of the up or the period on the internet or there's a period of the Washington Post when we created a site that was just sort of visuals called no more that was really built to get these viral you know I'm
you as cool like charts and stuff things we liked but it was decontextualized and it was my idea right so I take full I take the head on that one and then everybody was sort of pushing more towards these things that would do well
on social media and I don't think I was ultimately healthy for the industry and if I could go back and undo any one decision I made as a media kind of executive in my time doing that it's that I wish I had seen you needed a counter trend of business strategy like from the beginning
but okay not to you know like you have to look for the great damage you done to the internet but like had you counter programmed like when when there's a giant title wave of money going one way like if you just been like no it wasn't real money when it was the problem it was
VC money oh god coming in anticipation of real money yes when the real money didn't come the VC money drained out and when I say you needed a counter business strategy I just wish that we had started with subscription like as one of the things we did or started with membership which box
now does very successfully and there's a bunch of things like that out there now I mean the truth is immediate business I think is realized that what it really is is the same business it was before a mix of subscription advertising sometimes donations and grant funding just a worse version of
that business because the big platforms have taken up a bunch of the advertising money and you don't have local monopolies anymore which you did as a as a newspaper right and so it's just you know it's a similar business but but somewhat worse I don't think it's a great situation but we were
you know there were years where I think everybody kind of pillaged the intentional comments and you know that's a like we all have to answer for that a little bit but I think we also have to learn from that a little bit that it didn't it didn't work like people don't like the media
more now our businesses aren't better now the thing you really need is the people's experience of coming to you for the service that they're you know hiring you for which is to inform them about the world or entertain them or whatever they have to ultimately really like that experience and
if they really like it ultimately you know they often will pay for it but they have to like it and liking something is not the same thing is clicking on it liking something is not the same thing as sharing it liking something and having a relationship to it is a much deeper and weirder and softer
and harder to predict thing that I think in a lot of ways we got out of practice on with on the internet like we started looking for these easier highs and easier relationships but they ended up not being you know things that were
solid there's this there's this one spot on like I think Blinker Street in Manhattan where if you for a while anyway if you're walking on the street this guy would stop you and you'd be like hey man I'm sorry I'm just I'm trying to find this place is like the best Italian restaurant in in Lermany
and Dunor it is and I felt for this twice I would start to give directions to be like it's right here buddy and then he'd like point he was out there like pretending to be a lost tourist to kill you into going into a restaurant after tricking you and I would always get like livid the fact that it happened twice maybe anger but I was like this is a bad strategy you've tricked me I'm mad I'm not eating your spaghetti right now man but that's kind of what the
internet felt like from like whenever Facebook and Twitter showed up till I'd like to pretend it stopped but where it's kind of like your attention your attention is constantly being hijacked you don't get the thing you were just you have a worse feeling at the end of the transaction than you did it
almost has to be advertising supported because after the end of being like enraged or confused or like down if someone's like give me a dollar you like of course not like there's no reason I think we're in the wreckage of that Arabian I think it's over now to a large
I'm not saying nobody tries that kind of thing anymore but I don't think it's really out there working and I think what comes next to the extent what comes next is that there's a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that and I think that's a good idea and an era that will have defined features isn't clear yet.
Okay so I want to ask you did you I want there to have been because I'm an narrative radio person I suspect there may not have been but was there like a moment for you when it comes like your relationship to the internet and your decision to try to manage your attention did you have like a
moment like this or was it more of a gradual thing more gradual unfortunately for you I would say in general the Trump era yeah and part of it is it to me Trump seemed so obviously like Twitter had created a golem that it maybe think about what was
really happening on the platform right that I had had the observation that people seem to be worse versions of themselves myself very much included there and not everybody but that's my generalized observation and that the things the platform awarded were often really bad and then
like here's this guy exemplifying the worst of it the way everybody was acting on Twitter became more like him including the people opposing him like I remember Elizabeth Warren going through a period of almost having like a Trumpi like Twitter presence and like sad exclamation point and
you began to feel this thing was infecting everybody and particularly in my in my corner of the media and and that began to and I was running an organization at that point and I was like this is not good I think that yeah something which is feeling really wrong and at some point I felt
like that had to be taken seriously and so something I started doing I like stop tweeting and I guess I do have a start about this so I stop tweeting this was more than a year ago now I think and and I'd been on and off at that point for a while and was it hard to stop tweeting not really
and I didn't do a big like you know clink your glass at the front of the room be like everybody yes like I am no longer out you know like I think that's you know then you know who does maybe I'll come back at some point right I didn't want to like close the doors on myself but I had been
thinking about this line from Jenny O'Dell's wonderful book how to do nothing where she talks about what if she's this thing where she says what if we spent more time talking to people who had the context to understand us and less time trying to create things for people who have
no context for what we're saying and that got in my head and so what I started doing was I create a little newsletter but not a substack not a mail chip it was just that I wrote words in a Google Gmail compose window and I sent it to 200 people I knew personally like
people who like I would have over dinner or if I saw them on the street I would give them a hug and it was a bit about what was going on with me and then some links to stuff I was interested in and then just was like what's up with you do you feel weird to do that it did feel a little bit weird and
in the same way that it would be unthinkable to just call somebody you know on the phone yeah yeah yeah it did feel a little weird but had you decided to scream at the president on a message board that would have been normal totally normal and the react the responses I got to it were so deep
people told me about things happening in their lives they alerted me to things it was really good for me to see I was never even able to respond properly to what I would get from this like every two to three weeks thing I sent 200 people and the it was such a deeper experience and I was
like oh this has been such a for me personally such a mistake that even if you think these things are good to fully neglected creating all these small explorations to have gotten so obsessed with the idea of scale like I have I had I don't know what it is now I think it's gone down to say
kill different bots but I had three million Twitter followers and it was so much less interesting what would happen there then sending an email that emailed to 200 people but it's also like there's a there's a social media like not even programs like human ego program part of
I imagine you're right it certainly exists in mine I remember times where people were waiting on texts for me and I would tweet something and in my mind I was like well this is just reaching so many more people which is one of the more obnoxious lots I've had and I've had several
you know but like there's this thing your brain says which is like why write a message to 200 people who care about you who you care about when you could blur some garbage out to three million people and I think it takes a lot to even if people would recognize that statement is true
they wouldn't behave like they recognize that statement is true I think that there's a way in which the a set of changes that happen on the internet and particularly like the development of social media may led to a lot of us asking the question of who are we reaching as
opposed to what am I doing right you begin to develop the like this outside gaze on yourself constantly and it was weird I mean the early internet I mean I was blogging like and I started a blog I didn't think I'd reach anybody is 2003 there were like barely I mean there
were some blogs but it wasn't a big deal at that point I did it because I wanted to because I was in college and bored and I wanted to write stuff on the internet that was it like that was a whole thing and then over time it it is this some of us have jobs around the internet but but there
is this kind of movement from you know what they call like intrinsic motivation like I want to do this to extrinsic motivation like I think I could get something from doing this and I'm seeing it from the outside and that infected I keep using the word infected but infected a lot of
people for whom like that didn't even make any sense yes like everybody began I I think actually weirdly now a lot of people who have jobs where they like kind of are influencers act less like influencers online than people who don't to have now just like bought
into the aesthetic yes and just sort of like treat their Instagram or whatever as if like a hundred thousand people are watching it when just like their friends and family it's so easy and I constantly do there's there's people and like this is not the person part of my
personality most right but there's like people that I will in my mind make fun of where I'm like you're you're sort of like like the same way it's embarrassing to watch someone make like if you've ever seen someone like a public restaurant make like their hot face in the mirror
to themselves it's like embarrassing to watch watch me in a public restaurant it was on take talk but like the feeling of like someone is performing for an audience that doesn't exist is really embarrassing I don't know that it's that much less embarrassing to be
performing for an audience that does exist like the feeling of like but we all or most of us I certainly find myself doing it and then I can only see how bad it looks when someone else does so here here I want to like acknowledge something that might be
happening I think for people it's like yeah easy for fucking you to say like PJ vote famous podcaster and as a client New York Times columnist like you already have an audience and you already have these big platforms and that's on the one hand fair right I think
there's been a certain amount of like I could afford to not be on Twitter yeah and I also want to say like I don't think it's true this is like an argument I'm always having like inside my own industry and I'm somebody who's done a lot of hiring my industry so I think I have some credibility on it like people social media accounts are typically a reason like they don't get higher not a reason they do yeah in my experience like and the reason is that if they're doing really well on social media
a lot of the times it's like they for those exact reasons they're not doing as much of the actual work people are looking for as we know we were looking for different jobs have been I've been involved in and the I this loops back to what you're saying the reason I bring it up here is that um
the audience isn't stupid and what they want isn't trashy and they actually need the people they are starting to follow in this place or that place to do great work yeah and so the question of like where your attention and like where you're able to come to like deeper thoughts or deeper art
or whatever it might be I don't think it's an accident that podcasting which is like this very and certainly was a couple years ago loose baggy authentic medium rises up in this exact same point because I think people can tell when you're not being real with them and maybe they're
there and they're clicking on things because like they're subject to the same you know tendency to to you know get like tossed around the internet is all of us are but the people they create relationships with and the things they end up really liking are pretty deep I've always been at
every point in my career impressed by how much the audience actually knows what's bullshit and what's not and I think that people have gotten a really thin vision of the audience like both who they are and what they like because you can measure you can measure you know the likes
on something or the retweets or the reshairs or whatever and the experience somebody has where they you know listen to a podcast and don't immediately send it to 50 friends but just sit there and think huh huh that's actually a really deep interaction right the
thing where they see something you wrote and it actually leaves them unsettled so they don't have anything they can do with it they can't like it because like they didn't quite like it they want to send it to everybody because they're not sure they agree but now they're
like wrestling with it yeah like that's actually really deep and I think that what a lot of things online analytics wise have allowed us to do and this is not just social media this is like all kinds of analytics is measure a very kind of thin relationship with the audience and neglect a thicker one and you think that what is working about podcasting right now is that all the stuff that doesn't get measured but that we're looking for is more often or better served by thoughtful conversation.
I think there are a lot of kinds of podcasts so I want to say it all has to be a thoughtful conversation but I think podcasting will be really harmed by the development of really really granular analytics. I think the fact that Apple has kind of maintained dominance of the market the podcasting market without ever developing really good analytics tools has been really good for podcasting and it's meant podcasting has stayed pretty weird yeah pretty strange.
After one more short break if the internet is something most of us have to consume that we can't just be absent from what would more mindful consumption look like or put less hoydilly toy toly what are you supposed to look at on your phone when you don't think I'm not a god to him said monk answers after some ads. Music Music Music Music Music Music Once you sign up as a member, you'll get access to exclusive deals, delicious recipe ideas, and first dibs on their newest cuts and products.
And this year, the holidays are easier than ever because butcher box is offering our listeners a free turkey plus $20 off their first order. Sign up today at butcherbox.com slash C13 and use code C13 to get $20 off your first order. So just in like an actionable way, you found social media sobriety perhaps I think easier than I might. But like, what did your life start to look like when you were like, I'm lashing my attention so I don't ruin my own mind?
Like, you wake up in the morning, do you sleep with your phone under the pillow? No, I sleep with it, you know, kind of right on my chest so that I'm warmed by it overnight and then like, I'm like, immediately, I don't have, I'm not a life hacker guy anymore. Like you, that was me, like, I got kids, man, like, you know how I'm woken up in the morning, it's not by the phone, it's by a two year old screaming. Right. So it's a total, it's a total madhouse.
And the things that have become more important to me over time is I don't spend a lot of time looking at things that I'm not creating work on anymore. I just can't. So my reading, like, I'm way less generally up on the news than I was a decade ago and way deeper on the things that I'm actually doing an interview on or doing a column on that than I was, I print as much out as I possibly can.
I feel kind of stupid about it because I mean, I could just read this on my iPad, but when I'm doing prep for a show now, I just print everything because I can just get more out of an article by reading a bunch of them on paper and marking them up with a pen. Then I can sort of reading it and then a notification comes in or it's like, you know, I'm flip over to Chrome to look something up that that kind of, I'm trying to create spaces of attention that are much thicker.
I spend a lot of time just reading books like books are great. They are an unsurpassed technology for thinking, not just for learning, for thinking that I get most of my best ideas while I'm reading a book about something else. It like opens up an associational space for me. But there's like no exactly trick to this. It's just creating space to be in relationship with material for an extended period of time.
And I'm really lucky that my job, that is literally my job, not everybody has that space. But this is, I mean, one reason it was not that hard for me to quit most social media is that I didn't, it doesn't feel to me like I quit it. It feels to me like there have always been these different places I could be. And I just spend way more time in the ones now that feel like they give me more good ideas. Yeah. It's all one job.
I mean, if social media was the way I learned about the world and it felt better doing this for me, it's been more time there, it just doesn't. And what do you do like, this is the first other question, but like, what do you do when you are the year now? Like what do you do when you're like, I have dead time, do you think, do you just let yourself think, do you force yourself to think? Like what do you do when your brain wants to look at a glowing panel of glass? Oh, I totally look at my phone.
I absolutely stare at my phone, but so the most often thing I go to when I am just staring at my phone because I have a couple minutes is music reviews. I have like the pitch fork music reviews page in a like a tie along my phone because I like reading about music reviews. And I like the kind of attention and I listen to the music while I'm sitting there. I mean, I really like music. So I mean, that's what you're hearing here. I like my sub-stack reader.
I have the times and vox in the Wall Street Journal and a couple other, you know, publications there. I mean, I read the Kindle on my phone a lot. I read, I don't. Earlier in the internet, I thought it was crazy that we could be looking at articles all the time, just all the time. Yeah. It never occurred to me that eventually that would be to read articles instead of social media would be like some kind of big, attentional project.
There's still no downtime for me either, but yeah, it just doesn't, it doesn't really occur to me that I would want the experience of mostly being on social media now. I can't describe it better than that. I haven't found on Facebook for a very long time. I occasionally look at threads right now. I kind of like that it's sort of chill over there. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people complain that there's not fighting that they can get to the end.
And I think it's great and the fact that it's not that compulsive for me to look at is part of what I like about that project. It's funny talking about this because I think the conversation as I imagined in my head is like, wasn't it so hard to quit this like super addictive substance? And it's almost more like, wasn't it hard to quit hitting yourself in the head with a rock? And you're like, I don't think I like hitting myself in that. I really like books.
I mean, the thing I'm trying to actively spend more time reading right now is magazines. I really love magazines. I love them in print. I love New York magazine. I mean, what an amazing product they do. I like a bunch of sort of weird journals. I think magazines are sort of of all of them a really neglected technology and they're typically better in print. They're really well curated. So I've just subscribed to a bunch more stuff and get it at my house.
And I don't, I'm not, I wouldn't even say I have in my own telling great attentional habits. It's just not doing a thing I hate, but then also everybody who asks me about it also seems to hate like reading social media stuff that makes me feel bad. Yeah. That doesn't feel like a huge jump. It would be better if I didn't look at my phone as much as I do like I struggle with my phone relationship. But I at least mostly look at things that don't make me feel terrible on it.
It's so, it's, I don't know if I wish that you said that it was hard so that I would feel like there was a thing you did that I could follow. I think maybe you're just a little bit better at paying attention to what causes your brain pain or creates sort of mental outcomes that don't seem valuable.
Because I noticed since I started working on search engine, it's much, I still spend too much time on social media, but it's easier to spend less time because every week there's a bunch of boxed answers who are like trawling around looking for stories. And if I'm looking at the exact same cesspool as them, I probably won't find anything. Whereas if I'm just reading a book, they're not reading, I might have something to say that's valuable. Yeah, I feel that very strongly.
I mean, look, I thought your two-part series on fentanyl was so good. How? Thank you. I thought that was just an amazing piece of work. I was very inspired by it. And you didn't get that because social media said fentanyls import, right? Like you had to think, right? You had to, I think a really hard thing in creation is being transparent to yourself.
And one of the things I don't like about a lot of digital media now is it's like such a cacophony and it's so easy, including like very much for me too, to never hear what it is I think and I'm thinking about because so many other voices are in my head. And so I don't know where that came from, but I think that like the practice of how do you hear yourself think is, I don't know, it's one that I worry about a lot.
And the things that are helpful for it are sort of really outside a lot of this conversation. Like the single best thing for my digital habits is to get enough sleep. Interesting. If I get enough sleep, I'm going to be pretty good in terms of where I'm putting my attention that day. And if I don't, I'm going to want that stimulus hit of weird shit and I'm going to not have the energy to read a real book.
And like sleep really decides a lot of how the next day goes for me digitally, but it has nothing to do really with like what's actually on my phone. It's about how I'm managing other things in my life.
It's so funny that you said that because first of all, I figured that out for myself, like, I don't know, do recently, but also sometimes now when I do go on Twitter and I see someone behaving like Kuku bananas, I will go and just look at their first tweet in the morning and their last tweet at night and I'll be like, four and a half hours, you really need vlog. It's like the only way I can get insight into what might be going on with some people. Yeah, like sleep, like are you connecting?
I mean, I have this whole thing that like you don't want to life hack. You want enough sleep, but you want to connect with people you love. You want to connect with yourself and you want to try to have like healthy eating and exercise habits. And if you do those four things, I think in general, and like you've the health to do all that, you know, that takes care of a lot. That was my conversation with Esther Klein. So to summarize some advice, I found pretty helpful.
Your life is the sum of what you pay attention to, so choose wisely. How you think will be shaped by the platforms you use, even when you're not using them. Read books, use your printer, connect with people you love, not people who don't understand you, and get some sleep. I want to apologize to my parents who have given me a good chunk of this advice for over three decades. And thanks again to Ezra. His podcast, the Ezra Klein Show is really wonderful. I couldn't recommend it more.
And he had a couple more reading suggestions that have guided his decision to hop off some of the internet's danker hellholes. We will share them in the newsletter, which is always you can find on PJ vote dot com. That's our show this week. I hope it helped you. It certainly helped me. To see these ads, a listener has an unusual request. We got an email from a listener named Phil in Glasgow, Scotland, who has a problem that he thought reading the search engine credits might help him with.
I'm going to let Phil explain. Hello, my name is Philip Alexander Stewart and I am from Glasgow City in Scotland. I don't often hear the Scottish accent on podcast, particularly a Glasgow accent. Not that my name is particularly strong because I've lived in England for many years. And as a result, my accent is quite watered down. But even then, I do find that my accent is holding me back in my career. And people say they don't understand me when I think they can.
So to that end, I thought I would ask PJ vote if we could record the end credits of search engine. So here we are. Search engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jackson Productions. It was created by PJ vote and Shruti Pyramaneni and is produced by Gallic Graham and Nojon. Theme, original composition and mixing by Arman Pizarin, show up by Olimos. Our executive producers are Jenna Weissberman and Leah Restennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Prello and John Schmidt.
And the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Ron Morande, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clouzer, Mora Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Haley Schuff. Our agent is Orin Rose and Bam at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Appendium NYC. Follow and listen to search engine with PJ vote now for free on or to see app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.