Sam Harris on Social Media & Leaving Twitter | Dr. Sam Harris & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | - This may seem like a divergence,
00:00:04.100 | but I and many other people are very curious
00:00:07.540 | about a recent decision that you made,
00:00:09.620 | which was to close your account on Twitter.
00:00:13.580 | You still have an Instagram account, I noticed.
00:00:19.160 | - But I never, I mean, my team manages that.
00:00:21.900 | I've never.
00:00:22.740 | - It's a lot friendlier over at Instagram.
00:00:24.220 | I've been there a lot longer.
00:00:25.060 | - I've never even seen it, so.
00:00:26.700 | - Oh, it's pretty good, actually,
00:00:27.740 | considering, imagine what would happen if you did de-page it.
00:00:30.580 | They're doing a good job with it.
00:00:32.980 | But your decision to close your account on Twitter,
00:00:36.140 | I think, grabbed a lot of eyes and ears,
00:00:37.980 | and there's a lot of questions about why.
00:00:40.460 | It was a very large account.
00:00:41.940 | It correlated with a number of things
00:00:45.580 | that, for the outsider, people might be wondering about,
00:00:48.800 | new leadership, new people who had been booted off,
00:00:54.300 | brought back on, or at least invited back on,
00:00:57.140 | and so on.
00:00:58.420 | You are certainly not obligated to explain your behavior
00:01:01.900 | to me or anybody else, for that matter.
00:01:06.060 | But I'm curious if you might share with us
00:01:09.100 | what the motivation was for taking the account down,
00:01:13.820 | and how you feel in the absence of,
00:01:16.740 | I mean, your thumbs presumably are freed up
00:01:19.860 | to do other things.
00:01:20.700 | - Yeah, I was getting like an arthritic right thumb,
00:01:23.460 | I think, and I think it's.
00:01:24.900 | - If you don't mind sharing,
00:01:25.980 | I think there's a lot of curiosity about you
00:01:28.740 | and your routines.
00:01:29.980 | You've been very generous in sharing that, your knowledge,
00:01:32.960 | but also kind of like what makes you tick,
00:01:37.980 | what motivates pretty big decisions like that.
00:01:40.660 | It wasn't a major platform for you.
00:01:42.740 | - Right, yeah.
00:01:43.700 | Yeah, it was the only social media platform
00:01:46.200 | I've ever engaged.
00:01:47.700 | Like you said, I have an Instagram,
00:01:50.100 | I have a Facebook account,
00:01:52.340 | but I never use those as platforms, right?
00:01:54.540 | I was never on them, I've never followed people,
00:01:57.380 | and I've never, and all the posting has just come from,
00:01:59.740 | it's just marketing, you know, from my team.
00:02:01.940 | But Twitter was me, I mean, you know, for better or worse.
00:02:06.220 | And I began to feel more and more for worse.
00:02:09.940 | And it was interesting because it was very,
00:02:14.540 | you know, I've talked about it a lot on my podcast
00:02:17.500 | about just my love-hate relationship
00:02:19.780 | with Twitter over the years.
00:02:21.140 | Many good things came to me from Twitter,
00:02:23.920 | and I was following a lot of smart people,
00:02:26.420 | and it had become my newsfeed
00:02:29.820 | and my first point of contact with information each day.
00:02:33.580 | And I was really attached to it just for that reason,
00:02:35.900 | just as a consumer of content.
00:02:38.480 | And then it was also a place where I was,
00:02:42.860 | I genuinely wanted to communicate with people
00:02:45.980 | and react to things.
00:02:47.060 | And, you know, I would see some article
00:02:49.220 | that I thought was great, and I would signal boost it,
00:02:51.180 | you know, to my, the people following me on Twitter.
00:02:54.640 | And that was rewarding.
00:02:56.560 | And I was, I could literally help people on Twitter.
00:02:58.900 | Like, I mean, there was a, there were, you know,
00:03:00.640 | there are people who I've raised lots of money for
00:03:03.960 | on Twitter just by, you know, signal boosting their GoFundMes.
00:03:06.720 | And so I was engaged in a way that seemed productive.
00:03:10.360 | But I was always worried
00:03:14.960 | that it was producing needless conflict for me
00:03:20.280 | and was giving me a signal in my life
00:03:23.880 | that I was being lured into responding to
00:03:27.380 | and taken seriously that was out of proportion
00:03:30.540 | to its representation of any opinion or set of opinions
00:03:34.940 | that I should be taken seriously.
00:03:36.620 | So I was noticing that, and again, this evolved over years.
00:03:41.020 | I mean, this long before,
00:03:42.660 | long predated recent changes to Twitter.
00:03:48.160 | But I was noticing that many of the worst things
00:03:51.880 | that had happened for me professionally
00:03:54.360 | were first born on Twitter.
00:03:56.200 | I mean, just like, you know,
00:03:57.040 | some conflict I got into with somebody
00:03:59.400 | or something that I felt like I needed to podcast about
00:04:01.840 | in response to on Twitter, it's just so much of it.
00:04:06.240 | It's either, it's Genesis was Twitter
00:04:08.480 | or it's the further spin of it
00:04:15.080 | that became truly unpleasant and dysfunctional
00:04:19.260 | happened on Twitter.
00:04:20.100 | Like it was just, Twitter was part of the story
00:04:21.980 | when it was got really bad.
00:04:23.420 | And I've had, you know, vacations that have gone sideways
00:04:27.620 | just because I got on Twitter and said something
00:04:29.460 | and then I had to produce a controversy
00:04:31.260 | that I had to respond to.
00:04:32.140 | And then I had to do a podcast about that and blah.
00:04:34.180 | It just, and it was just, okay, this is a mess, right?
00:04:37.420 | And so at that point, you know, I have friends
00:04:41.660 | who, you know, also had big Twitter platforms
00:04:43.520 | who would say, you know, why are you, you know,
00:04:46.880 | why are you responding to anything on Twitter?
00:04:48.600 | Just tweet and ghost, you know, just due to heaven.
00:04:52.280 | Joe Rogan sat me down and tried to get, you know,
00:04:55.760 | give me a talking to, as did Bill Maher.
00:04:57.760 | And both of them engaged Twitter in that way.
00:05:01.120 | I mean, I think they basically never look
00:05:02.880 | at their ad mentions.
00:05:04.040 | They never see what's coming back at them.
00:05:05.360 | They just, you know, they use it effectively
00:05:07.560 | the way I use or don't even use Instagram or Facebook.
00:05:10.440 | I don't even see what's going out there in my name.
00:05:13.720 | And so I could essentially do that
00:05:15.980 | for myself on Twitter, presumably.
00:05:18.060 | And I did that for some periods of time,
00:05:21.300 | but then I would continually decide, okay,
00:05:24.220 | now it's all balanced again.
00:05:25.700 | Maybe I can just communicate here.
00:05:27.020 | 'Cause it was very tempting
00:05:28.980 | for me to communicate with people
00:05:30.340 | because I would see somebody, you know,
00:05:33.060 | clearly misunderstanding something I had said on my podcast.
00:05:36.980 | And I think it's like,
00:05:39.480 | why not clarify this misunderstanding, right?
00:05:41.520 | And my efforts to do that almost invariably produced a,
00:05:46.520 | this, I mean, sometimes it was a kind
00:05:50.800 | of a meandering process of discovery,
00:05:54.680 | but often it was just kind of a stark confrontation
00:05:58.160 | with what appeared to me to be just lunacy
00:06:02.040 | and malevolence on a scale
00:06:03.840 | that I never encounter elsewhere in my life.
00:06:06.200 | Like I never meet these people in life, right?
00:06:09.660 | And yet I was meeting these people
00:06:12.100 | by the tens of thousands on Twitter.
00:06:14.300 | And so the thing that began to worry me about it,
00:06:17.580 | and again, I understand that people
00:06:20.580 | have the opposite experience.
00:06:23.260 | I mean, depending on what you're putting out
00:06:25.100 | and what's your, you know,
00:06:25.940 | the kinds of topics you're touching,
00:06:27.900 | you could have just nothing
00:06:28.900 | but love coming back at you on Twitter, right?
00:06:31.920 | But because I'm very essentially in the center politically,
00:06:36.600 | and because I'm, you know, this is now on my podcast,
00:06:39.480 | this is not in the Waking Up app,
00:06:42.020 | I'm often criticizing the far left
00:06:44.920 | and criticizing the far right.
00:06:47.320 | I'm basically pissing off everyone some of the time, right?
00:06:50.400 | And it's very different.
00:06:51.240 | If you're only criticizing the left,
00:06:53.420 | no doubt you get hate from the left,
00:06:57.360 | but you have all the people on the right
00:06:59.280 | who just reflexively and tribally
00:07:01.780 | are expressing their solidarity for you, right?
00:07:06.180 | And who are dunking on your enemies for you,
00:07:09.820 | and you know, when your enemies come out of the woodwork.
00:07:13.340 | And if you're only criticizing the right,
00:07:15.660 | I'm sure you get a lot of pain from the right,
00:07:17.420 | but you've got the people on the left
00:07:18.900 | who are tribally identified with the left
00:07:20.780 | who are just going to reflexively defend you.
00:07:24.140 | If you're in the center, criticizing the left
00:07:27.220 | as hard as anyone on the right ever criticizes the left,
00:07:31.900 | and you're also criticizing the right
00:07:34.200 | as hard as anyone on the left criticizes the right,
00:07:37.500 | you're getting hate from both sides all the time.
00:07:39.880 | And no one is reflexively and tribally defending you
00:07:44.180 | because you pissed them off last time.
00:07:46.260 | You're like, you might be getting hate from the left now,
00:07:48.180 | and the people on the right agree with you,
00:07:50.160 | but they can't forget the thing you said about Trump
00:07:52.260 | on that podcast, you know, two podcasts ago.
00:07:55.720 | So they're not going to defend you.
00:07:57.380 | And so I basically created hell for myself on Twitter
00:08:01.700 | because it was just a theater of--
00:08:06.740 | it was just pure cacophony most of the time.
00:08:09.820 | And what I was seeing was--
00:08:12.660 | I mean, there's no way there's this many psychopaths
00:08:16.140 | in the world, but I was seeing psychopaths everywhere.
00:08:18.400 | I was seeing the most malicious dishonesty and, you know,
00:08:23.700 | just goalposts moving and hypocrisy.
00:08:26.580 | And I mean, it was just--
00:08:28.460 | I mean, some of it's trolling, and some of it's real confusion,
00:08:31.060 | and some of it is psychopathy.
00:08:32.300 | But it's like, it was so dark that I
00:08:37.900 | worried that it was actually giving me
00:08:40.900 | a very negative and sticky view of humanity that was--
00:08:50.060 | I mean, one, it was--
00:08:51.420 | I think it is inaccurate.
00:08:53.900 | But two, it was something I was returning to so much.
00:08:57.820 | Because again, I was checking Twitter, you know,
00:09:01.420 | at least a dozen times a day.
00:09:02.820 | And I'm sure there were some days where
00:09:03.900 | I checked it 100 times a day.
00:09:05.100 | I mean, it was-- again, it was my main source of information.
00:09:07.700 | I was constantly reading articles
00:09:09.380 | and then putting my own stuff out.
00:09:13.580 | That it became this kind of funhouse mirror
00:09:15.380 | in which I was looking at the most grotesque side of humanity
00:09:20.780 | and feeling, you know, implicated in ways
00:09:26.100 | that were important because it was just--
00:09:28.660 | it was reputationally important or seemed to be important.
00:09:32.940 | I know a lot of these people.
00:09:34.660 | These weren't just faceless trolls.
00:09:36.420 | These are people with whom I have had relationships,
00:09:40.020 | and in some cases, friendships, who because of what, you know,
00:09:44.460 | largely Trump and COVID did to our political landscape
00:09:47.660 | in the last, you know, half a dozen years,
00:09:52.020 | were beginning to act in ways that seemed, you know,
00:09:56.020 | starkly dishonest and, you know, crazy-making to me.
00:09:59.740 | So I was just noticing that I was
00:10:01.380 | forming a view of people who I actually
00:10:03.900 | have had dinner with that was way more
00:10:06.380 | negative based on their Twitter behavior
00:10:09.700 | than I think would ever be justified by any way
00:10:12.340 | they would behave in life with me, you know?
00:10:15.020 | I mean, that's like--
00:10:16.420 | I was never going to have a face-to-face encounter
00:10:18.860 | with any of these people that was
00:10:20.740 | this malicious and dishonest and gaslighting and weird, right,
00:10:25.780 | as was what was happening hourly on Twitter, right?
00:10:30.180 | And so I just began to become more sensitive to what
00:10:35.980 | this was, you know, just the residue of all
00:10:39.100 | of this in my life and just how often the worst thing about me
00:10:45.660 | in my relationship with the people in my life,
00:10:47.500 | you know, just talking to my wife or my kids,
00:10:49.980 | was just the fact that I had been on Twitter at some point
00:10:54.060 | in the-- you know, previously, in the previous hour,
00:10:56.980 | and there was some residue of that, you know,
00:11:00.700 | in my interaction with them.
00:11:02.020 | You know, I was like, what are you stressed out about?
00:11:03.900 | What are you annoyed about?
00:11:05.060 | What are you pissed off about?
00:11:06.740 | What can't you get out of your head?
00:11:09.780 | What is the thing that you now feel
00:11:11.340 | like you need to spend the next week of your life focused on
00:11:15.020 | because it went so sideways for you?
00:11:18.340 | All of that was Twitter, you know?
00:11:20.940 | I mean, literally 100% of that was Twitter.
00:11:22.820 | And so I just-- at one point, it was actually on Thanksgiving
00:11:26.980 | day, I just looked at this, and I just--
00:11:29.020 | I mean, there was very little thought went into it.
00:11:31.380 | I mean, literally, I mean, you know,
00:11:33.460 | there was more thought involved in, you know,
00:11:36.100 | whether I wanted coffee when you asked me when I showed up here.
00:11:39.380 | I mean, it was just like, at a certain point, I just saw it,
00:11:41.900 | and I just ripped the Band-Aid off.
00:11:43.580 | And yeah, so--
00:11:45.540 | and to answer your other question,
00:11:46.940 | it's been almost wholly positive,
00:11:50.260 | as you might expect, given the litany of pain and discomfort
00:11:54.180 | I just ran through.
00:11:55.180 | But I mean, it's also--
00:11:59.420 | it's surprising to recognize how much of a presence
00:12:03.820 | it was in my life, given the sense of what is now missing.
00:12:08.060 | I mean, it's like, there's--
00:12:09.220 | it was-- there's no question there was--
00:12:11.380 | there's kind of an addictive component to it.
00:12:13.340 | And when you see--
00:12:14.260 | like, when I look at what Elon's doing on Twitter,
00:12:16.580 | forget about his ownership of it.
00:12:18.100 | And I'm not-- you know, I've got a lot
00:12:20.740 | to say about the choices he's making for the platform.
00:12:24.580 | But just his personal use of it is just so obviously
00:12:29.260 | an expression of--
00:12:30.620 | I mean, I don't know if addiction is the clinically
00:12:34.380 | appropriate term, but his dysfunctional attachment
00:12:41.020 | to tweet to using the platform.
00:12:43.140 | Forget-- again, forget about changing it and owning it.
00:12:45.900 | But just the degree to which it is pointlessly
00:12:50.180 | disrupting the life of one of the most productive people
00:12:54.380 | in any generation.
00:12:59.140 | I-- that was also instructive to me.
00:13:02.140 | Because I know Elon, and I just--
00:13:04.140 | you know, he's from a friend's eye view of the situation.
00:13:11.100 | It's so obviously not good for him
00:13:13.500 | that he's spending this much time on Twitter.
00:13:16.620 | That I just brought that back to me.
00:13:19.020 | It's like, well, if it's not--
00:13:20.340 | if this is what it's doing to Elon,
00:13:21.900 | and he's got all these other things he could be doing
00:13:24.140 | with his attention, how much of my use of Twitter
00:13:27.140 | is actually a good idea and optimized to my well-being
00:13:31.220 | and the well-being of the people around me.
00:13:34.660 | So anyway, it was--
00:13:35.980 | there was an addictive component to it, I think.
00:13:38.420 | And so when that got stripped off,
00:13:41.940 | I do notice that there's--
00:13:44.220 | I mean, there are times I pick up my phone,
00:13:46.860 | and I realize this is like the old me picking up
00:13:48.980 | my phone for a reason that no longer exists.
00:13:51.540 | Because it's not that much--
00:13:53.180 | I have a Slack channel with my team,
00:13:54.660 | and I've got email, obviously.
00:13:56.100 | But it's like that is not much of what
00:14:00.380 | I was doing with my phone, really, in the end.
00:14:02.420 | And so it's just my phone is much less
00:14:04.780 | of a presence in my life.
00:14:05.820 | And so it's almost wholly good.
00:14:08.340 | But yeah, I think there is some danger in--
00:14:15.340 | or some possible danger in losing touch
00:14:19.340 | with certain aspects of culture.
00:14:20.900 | Which again, I'm not even sure--
00:14:22.220 | I mean, there's this question of how much is Twitter real life,
00:14:24.860 | and how much is it just a mass delusion?
00:14:27.540 | I don't know.
00:14:28.820 | But insofar as it actually matters
00:14:30.900 | what happens on Twitter, or insofar as I was actually
00:14:35.980 | getting a news diet, which I'm not
00:14:37.780 | going to be able to recapitulate for myself,
00:14:40.060 | or I'm just not, in fact, going to recapitulate for myself,
00:14:43.500 | even if I could, if any of that matters,
00:14:46.980 | I haven't discovered that yet.
00:14:48.540 | But it's-- yeah, I mean, there's--
00:14:50.340 | it was taking up an immense amount of bandwidth,
00:14:52.340 | and it's impressive.
00:14:53.420 | I mean, I think I said I--
00:14:55.740 | it was like I amputated a phantom limb, right?
00:14:59.420 | Like, it was not a real limb, but it
00:15:01.180 | was this continuous presence in my life that--
00:15:06.780 | that-- it's weird.
00:15:09.020 | It actually relates to the concept of self
00:15:10.820 | in surprising ways.
00:15:11.900 | Because I felt there was a part of myself
00:15:15.420 | that existed on Twitter.
00:15:17.500 | And I just performed a suicide of that self, right?
00:15:21.220 | Like, that's-- this is ending right now.
00:15:23.580 | You know, there's no residue.
00:15:24.840 | There's nothing to go back and check.
00:15:26.380 | There's just-- it's gone.
00:15:27.940 | And I didn't even--
00:15:28.740 | I didn't go back and look at my--
00:15:30.300 | like, what's interesting to consider is that, you know,
00:15:32.540 | I'd been on Twitter for 12 years.
00:15:35.980 | I don't keep a journal.
00:15:37.020 | I mean, Twitter-- my timeline would
00:15:39.020 | have been a kind of journal.
00:15:40.140 | I could have gone back to a specific hour
00:15:41.860 | and a specific day and looked at what
00:15:43.180 | I was paying attention to.
00:15:44.060 | I mean, that could have been an interesting record of just who
00:15:46.640 | I've been for a decade, and probably a pretty humbling
00:15:50.020 | record of who I've been for a decade in terms
00:15:53.420 | of the kinds of things that captivated my attention.
00:15:56.220 | But I didn't even--
00:15:58.620 | you know, I didn't even think to go, you know, nostalgically
00:16:02.020 | just look at any of that or see if any of it
00:16:03.940 | was worth saving or archiving or thinking--
00:16:06.180 | I just-- just delete, you know?
00:16:08.780 | And it was-- and so my actual sense of who I am
00:16:15.160 | and my engagement with my audience, my--
00:16:20.160 | you know, the world of people who could potentially know me,
00:16:23.400 | like, what does it mean to be-- to have a platform?
00:16:26.600 | You know, where do I exist digitally?
00:16:29.240 | My sense of all of that got truncated in a--
00:16:34.840 | in a way that is much less noisy.
00:16:39.680 | I mean, it's amazing how much can't get
00:16:43.560 | fucked up now in my life.
00:16:45.560 | Like, it's like, with Twitter, almost anything could happen.
00:16:50.040 | Right?
00:16:50.520 | Like, the next tweet was always an opportunity
00:16:53.960 | to massively complicate my life.
00:16:56.400 | There is no analogous space for me now.
00:16:59.040 | And, you know, so what I'm going to say on your podcast,
00:17:01.400 | what I'm going to say on my own podcast,
00:17:03.080 | what I'm going to write next, that's much more, you know,
00:17:09.980 | deliberative and the opportunities
00:17:13.940 | to take my foot out of my mouth or to reconsider all--
00:17:16.740 | you know, whether any of this is worth it.
00:17:18.620 | Is it worth-- is this the hill I really want to die on now?
00:17:22.260 | It's much more--
00:17:24.140 | can be much more considered.
00:17:25.540 | And I mean, I think all of that's to the good.
00:17:29.780 | But even more important than that is there's not--
00:17:33.740 | I'm not getting this continuous signal that is always
00:17:37.500 | inviting a response, whether on Twitter or on my own podcast
00:17:40.700 | or, you know, anywhere else.
00:17:44.340 | And it's just much less noisy.
00:17:47.620 | I mean, life is much less noisy and cluttered.
00:17:51.380 | And that's-- you know, that is--
00:17:53.140 | it definitely feels better.
00:17:54.940 | It just-- it's 100% better.
00:17:58.220 | [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:18:01.580 | (upbeat music)