- This may seem like a divergence, but I and many other people are very curious about a recent decision that you made, which was to close your account on Twitter. You still have an Instagram account, I noticed. - But I never, I mean, my team manages that. I've never.

- It's a lot friendlier over at Instagram. I've been there a lot longer. - I've never even seen it, so. - Oh, it's pretty good, actually, considering, imagine what would happen if you did de-page it. They're doing a good job with it. But your decision to close your account on Twitter, I think, grabbed a lot of eyes and ears, and there's a lot of questions about why.

It was a very large account. It correlated with a number of things that, for the outsider, people might be wondering about, new leadership, new people who had been booted off, brought back on, or at least invited back on, and so on. You are certainly not obligated to explain your behavior to me or anybody else, for that matter.

But I'm curious if you might share with us what the motivation was for taking the account down, and how you feel in the absence of, I mean, your thumbs presumably are freed up to do other things. - Yeah, I was getting like an arthritic right thumb, I think, and I think it's.

- If you don't mind sharing, I think there's a lot of curiosity about you and your routines. You've been very generous in sharing that, your knowledge, but also kind of like what makes you tick, what motivates pretty big decisions like that. It wasn't a major platform for you. - Right, yeah.

Yeah, it was the only social media platform I've ever engaged. Like you said, I have an Instagram, I have a Facebook account, but I never use those as platforms, right? I was never on them, I've never followed people, and I've never, and all the posting has just come from, it's just marketing, you know, from my team.

But Twitter was me, I mean, you know, for better or worse. And I began to feel more and more for worse. And it was interesting because it was very, you know, I've talked about it a lot on my podcast about just my love-hate relationship with Twitter over the years.

Many good things came to me from Twitter, and I was following a lot of smart people, and it had become my newsfeed and my first point of contact with information each day. And I was really attached to it just for that reason, just as a consumer of content. And then it was also a place where I was, I genuinely wanted to communicate with people and react to things.

And, you know, I would see some article that I thought was great, and I would signal boost it, you know, to my, the people following me on Twitter. And that was rewarding. And I was, I could literally help people on Twitter. Like, I mean, there was a, there were, you know, there are people who I've raised lots of money for on Twitter just by, you know, signal boosting their GoFundMes.

And so I was engaged in a way that seemed productive. But I was always worried that it was producing needless conflict for me and was giving me a signal in my life that I was being lured into responding to and taken seriously that was out of proportion to its representation of any opinion or set of opinions that I should be taken seriously.

So I was noticing that, and again, this evolved over years. I mean, this long before, long predated recent changes to Twitter. But I was noticing that many of the worst things that had happened for me professionally were first born on Twitter. I mean, just like, you know, some conflict I got into with somebody or something that I felt like I needed to podcast about in response to on Twitter, it's just so much of it.

It's either, it's Genesis was Twitter or it's the further spin of it that became truly unpleasant and dysfunctional happened on Twitter. Like it was just, Twitter was part of the story when it was got really bad. And I've had, you know, vacations that have gone sideways just because I got on Twitter and said something and then I had to produce a controversy that I had to respond to.

And then I had to do a podcast about that and blah. It just, and it was just, okay, this is a mess, right? And so at that point, you know, I have friends who, you know, also had big Twitter platforms who would say, you know, why are you, you know, why are you responding to anything on Twitter?

Just tweet and ghost, you know, just due to heaven. Joe Rogan sat me down and tried to get, you know, give me a talking to, as did Bill Maher. And both of them engaged Twitter in that way. I mean, I think they basically never look at their ad mentions.

They never see what's coming back at them. They just, you know, they use it effectively the way I use or don't even use Instagram or Facebook. I don't even see what's going out there in my name. And so I could essentially do that for myself on Twitter, presumably. And I did that for some periods of time, but then I would continually decide, okay, now it's all balanced again.

Maybe I can just communicate here. 'Cause it was very tempting for me to communicate with people because I would see somebody, you know, clearly misunderstanding something I had said on my podcast. And I think it's like, why not clarify this misunderstanding, right? And my efforts to do that almost invariably produced a, this, I mean, sometimes it was a kind of a meandering process of discovery, but often it was just kind of a stark confrontation with what appeared to me to be just lunacy and malevolence on a scale that I never encounter elsewhere in my life.

Like I never meet these people in life, right? And yet I was meeting these people by the tens of thousands on Twitter. And so the thing that began to worry me about it, and again, I understand that people have the opposite experience. I mean, depending on what you're putting out and what's your, you know, the kinds of topics you're touching, you could have just nothing but love coming back at you on Twitter, right?

But because I'm very essentially in the center politically, and because I'm, you know, this is now on my podcast, this is not in the Waking Up app, I'm often criticizing the far left and criticizing the far right. I'm basically pissing off everyone some of the time, right? And it's very different.

If you're only criticizing the left, no doubt you get hate from the left, but you have all the people on the right who just reflexively and tribally are expressing their solidarity for you, right? And who are dunking on your enemies for you, and you know, when your enemies come out of the woodwork.

And if you're only criticizing the right, I'm sure you get a lot of pain from the right, but you've got the people on the left who are tribally identified with the left who are just going to reflexively defend you. If you're in the center, criticizing the left as hard as anyone on the right ever criticizes the left, and you're also criticizing the right as hard as anyone on the left criticizes the right, you're getting hate from both sides all the time.

And no one is reflexively and tribally defending you because you pissed them off last time. You're like, you might be getting hate from the left now, and the people on the right agree with you, but they can't forget the thing you said about Trump on that podcast, you know, two podcasts ago.

So they're not going to defend you. And so I basically created hell for myself on Twitter because it was just a theater of-- it was just pure cacophony most of the time. And what I was seeing was-- I mean, there's no way there's this many psychopaths in the world, but I was seeing psychopaths everywhere.

I was seeing the most malicious dishonesty and, you know, just goalposts moving and hypocrisy. And I mean, it was just-- I mean, some of it's trolling, and some of it's real confusion, and some of it is psychopathy. But it's like, it was so dark that I worried that it was actually giving me a very negative and sticky view of humanity that was-- I mean, one, it was-- I think it is inaccurate.

But two, it was something I was returning to so much. Because again, I was checking Twitter, you know, at least a dozen times a day. And I'm sure there were some days where I checked it 100 times a day. I mean, it was-- again, it was my main source of information.

I was constantly reading articles and then putting my own stuff out. That it became this kind of funhouse mirror in which I was looking at the most grotesque side of humanity and feeling, you know, implicated in ways that were important because it was just-- it was reputationally important or seemed to be important.

I know a lot of these people. These weren't just faceless trolls. These are people with whom I have had relationships, and in some cases, friendships, who because of what, you know, largely Trump and COVID did to our political landscape in the last, you know, half a dozen years, were beginning to act in ways that seemed, you know, starkly dishonest and, you know, crazy-making to me.

So I was just noticing that I was forming a view of people who I actually have had dinner with that was way more negative based on their Twitter behavior than I think would ever be justified by any way they would behave in life with me, you know? I mean, that's like-- I was never going to have a face-to-face encounter with any of these people that was this malicious and dishonest and gaslighting and weird, right, as was what was happening hourly on Twitter, right?

And so I just began to become more sensitive to what this was, you know, just the residue of all of this in my life and just how often the worst thing about me in my relationship with the people in my life, you know, just talking to my wife or my kids, was just the fact that I had been on Twitter at some point in the-- you know, previously, in the previous hour, and there was some residue of that, you know, in my interaction with them.

You know, I was like, what are you stressed out about? What are you annoyed about? What are you pissed off about? What can't you get out of your head? What is the thing that you now feel like you need to spend the next week of your life focused on because it went so sideways for you?

All of that was Twitter, you know? I mean, literally 100% of that was Twitter. And so I just-- at one point, it was actually on Thanksgiving day, I just looked at this, and I just-- I mean, there was very little thought went into it. I mean, literally, I mean, you know, there was more thought involved in, you know, whether I wanted coffee when you asked me when I showed up here.

I mean, it was just like, at a certain point, I just saw it, and I just ripped the Band-Aid off. And yeah, so-- and to answer your other question, it's been almost wholly positive, as you might expect, given the litany of pain and discomfort I just ran through. But I mean, it's also-- it's surprising to recognize how much of a presence it was in my life, given the sense of what is now missing.

I mean, it's like, there's-- it was-- there's no question there was-- there's kind of an addictive component to it. And when you see-- like, when I look at what Elon's doing on Twitter, forget about his ownership of it. And I'm not-- you know, I've got a lot to say about the choices he's making for the platform.

But just his personal use of it is just so obviously an expression of-- I mean, I don't know if addiction is the clinically appropriate term, but his dysfunctional attachment to tweet to using the platform. Forget-- again, forget about changing it and owning it. But just the degree to which it is pointlessly disrupting the life of one of the most productive people in any generation.

I-- that was also instructive to me. Because I know Elon, and I just-- you know, he's from a friend's eye view of the situation. It's so obviously not good for him that he's spending this much time on Twitter. That I just brought that back to me. It's like, well, if it's not-- if this is what it's doing to Elon, and he's got all these other things he could be doing with his attention, how much of my use of Twitter is actually a good idea and optimized to my well-being and the well-being of the people around me.

So anyway, it was-- there was an addictive component to it, I think. And so when that got stripped off, I do notice that there's-- I mean, there are times I pick up my phone, and I realize this is like the old me picking up my phone for a reason that no longer exists.

Because it's not that much-- I have a Slack channel with my team, and I've got email, obviously. But it's like that is not much of what I was doing with my phone, really, in the end. And so it's just my phone is much less of a presence in my life.

And so it's almost wholly good. But yeah, I think there is some danger in-- or some possible danger in losing touch with certain aspects of culture. Which again, I'm not even sure-- I mean, there's this question of how much is Twitter real life, and how much is it just a mass delusion?

I don't know. But insofar as it actually matters what happens on Twitter, or insofar as I was actually getting a news diet, which I'm not going to be able to recapitulate for myself, or I'm just not, in fact, going to recapitulate for myself, even if I could, if any of that matters, I haven't discovered that yet.

But it's-- yeah, I mean, there's-- it was taking up an immense amount of bandwidth, and it's impressive. I mean, I think I said I-- it was like I amputated a phantom limb, right? Like, it was not a real limb, but it was this continuous presence in my life that-- that-- it's weird.

It actually relates to the concept of self in surprising ways. Because I felt there was a part of myself that existed on Twitter. And I just performed a suicide of that self, right? Like, that's-- this is ending right now. You know, there's no residue. There's nothing to go back and check.

There's just-- it's gone. And I didn't even-- I didn't go back and look at my-- like, what's interesting to consider is that, you know, I'd been on Twitter for 12 years. I don't keep a journal. I mean, Twitter-- my timeline would have been a kind of journal. I could have gone back to a specific hour and a specific day and looked at what I was paying attention to.

I mean, that could have been an interesting record of just who I've been for a decade, and probably a pretty humbling record of who I've been for a decade in terms of the kinds of things that captivated my attention. But I didn't even-- you know, I didn't even think to go, you know, nostalgically just look at any of that or see if any of it was worth saving or archiving or thinking-- I just-- just delete, you know?

And it was-- and so my actual sense of who I am and my engagement with my audience, my-- you know, the world of people who could potentially know me, like, what does it mean to be-- to have a platform? You know, where do I exist digitally? My sense of all of that got truncated in a-- in a way that is much less noisy.

I mean, it's amazing how much can't get fucked up now in my life. Like, it's like, with Twitter, almost anything could happen. Right? Like, the next tweet was always an opportunity to massively complicate my life. There is no analogous space for me now. And, you know, so what I'm going to say on your podcast, what I'm going to say on my own podcast, what I'm going to write next, that's much more, you know, deliberative and the opportunities to take my foot out of my mouth or to reconsider all-- you know, whether any of this is worth it.

Is it worth-- is this the hill I really want to die on now? It's much more-- can be much more considered. And I mean, I think all of that's to the good. But even more important than that is there's not-- I'm not getting this continuous signal that is always inviting a response, whether on Twitter or on my own podcast or, you know, anywhere else.

And it's just much less noisy. I mean, life is much less noisy and cluttered. And that's-- you know, that is-- it definitely feels better. It just-- it's 100% better. (upbeat music)