Is there a sane way to use the internet? 59:59

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 why we're airing it today. After a 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? Search Engine is brought to you by PolicyGenius.com.

Thank you.

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All right. Do you want me to have the headphones on or I don't need them, right? Whatever you want to do. I don't particularly want them on. Okay. This week, I'm hijacking the 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 mic. All right. We'll do it together.

Okay, this week I'm hijacking the 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 cold 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 work 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, an open-minded but hype-resistant take on psychedelic therapy, and then an interview with Tom Hanks about Tom Hanks' current view of America.

Anyway, Ezra's not like an internet usage guru, but he's smart and he makes a smart 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, just, I have an impression of you from afar, which is that despite having used the internet for many years, you may be sane. Yeah.

Do you feel that way? Like, does that feel true to you? 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 sanely? I think like a lot of people, I've had really discrete phases of my relationship with the internet. But two I'll kind of focus on. So one, when I got into it, I...

I thought it was so great. I mean, really, and still do, right? But I, I mean, I remember my dad bringing home a Macintosh computer. I remember us getting a 288K modem, then a 566, and like, oh man, the 56 is so fast, and you get that like, beep, boop, boop, boop, right? Like, 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. Because 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. Yes.

They had put in the magazine that if you went on the internet, which nobody knew 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 the 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 out by this guy, Nicholas Carr, called The Shallows, which is all about how the internet is making us stupid. There was a raft of those books, and I...

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 I was like, that's ridiculous. You know, what wouldn't be good about being in the middle of this information flow at 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. I was like, oh no, this book is completely correct. And like much more correct now than it was then.

And I think along the way, I actually think it did flip. Like we went from having the informational boost 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 near their nerve centers. Yeah.

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. Even if you didn't realize it's what you were 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

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 matrix theory of the mind is that, you know, if only you could have that little jack in the back of your neck and like into it would come the information. Oh, like how in the matrix they can like plug in a little jack and then it's like now they know Kung Fu and French and like how to shape it. A lot of people have the matrix theory of the mind, right? And the matrix theory of the mind is this idea really that you just download information into your brain and then you know it.

Yeah. Right, that that's what a book is doing. That's what, when you hear these guys like Sam Bankman-Fried and others who famously say, like, 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 gist and then you're there. And I've come to think 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 are

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 a same piece of culture consumed on an airplane, right, where I have 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 carrier of information, now I'm much more jealously trying to create these attentional spaces

that I think are like conducive to being like 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. I have so many follow-up questions, I 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, 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 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 to 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 threads 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 a couple thoughts. So one, I think it's really important for people in our line of work to

to say when what we are saying is Twitter is bad versus the internet is bad. Yes. Right? A lot of that sounded to me like you were 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 go on 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 in the room right now? Where it's just like, it is so colonized. One's ability to speak even to oneself without feeling that one will be misunderstood 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 at something that's become central to my thinking about all this, which is I've kind of become a Marshall McLuhanite.

And I didn't know a lot about Marshall McLuhan, who's like this mid-century media theorist. Can I tell you everything I know about Marshall McLuhan? Yes. He said the medium is the message. He's in Manhattan, the movie. Yeah, one of them. I forget which. And I studied him in a class that I failed in college. That's everything I know. And that people have started talking about him before. That's probably why you failed it. None of those things were on the final. So what does it mean to be a McLuhanite right now? So medium is message. What does he mean? I find that to be a completely, like,

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 sane relationship with the internet. All right, let me just pull this up real quick because I'll get a better quote. All right, so the famous mediumist message, I find that quote really opaque. It never connected for me. But there's something else McLuhan 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 that 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 it has become, it has somehow colonized the way 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. All the time. And it's true for everything, right? Like, it's not just media in the way we think of it. It's also when you go to a place and instead of looking at it, you are looking at

Yes. I just spent a weekend with Instagram people. And they were lovely people, but they were using their phones a lot. And I was like, why do they need to... And then I was like, their brains are looking for pictures. My brain is looking for arguments. So the medium is a message. What he's saying there is what I think is better described by that other quote is that...

The thing we look at when we are using any kind of medium is what is the content in it. Like, is this a good tweet or a bad tweet? A good op-ed column or a bad op-ed column? A good photo or a bad photo? And then you get into this very individual responsibility way of thinking about mediums. 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. Like, no.

The point that McLuhan makes, that Neil Postman then makes as kind of student after him and Amusing Ourselves to Death is like an amazing book and much more accessible than McLuhan, 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 communicating 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 of thinking about this is in attention, right, which is, again, like kind of my obsession in it.

What is the fundamental message of, frankly, all social media, but we'll use Twitter or threads here, whatever, as the example, which is shorter, faster, more. Yeah. And once you take that as the 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 crude, like that blunt. Everything you have to say should not be longer or more complicated than a bumper sticker. Right. 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. But if you don't, then it's actually not good to spend a ton of time there. So what's useful, I think, sometimes about these theorists is that they're working really with TV, which is emergent at this time. And they're worried about and amazed by and, like, has colonized the whole world. And we think much more televisually now. And they're thinking about the ways of the TV is going to change who can run for president.

precedent and what kinds of things can be said and how information but their point is that it is going to change the way we look at the world like TV will change us not just through what we watch on it there's a great Neil Postman thing which is like the stuff that is dreck 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

that Sesame Street should be education. Even if you love the news and you love Sesame Street, and I show my kids Sesame Street all the time, you have still crossed a Rubicon that you didn't even realize you were crossing. But now everything should be entertaining. That's the point of amusing 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 you get to Donald Trump, right, who is a showman who becomes boring.

Because for whatever his flaws, he's never boring. He's always interesting. He's TV and Twitter merged. Yeah. I mean, that's literally what the guy is. Yeah. So this is like, I think the intuition you have, and it was something that I felt too, that everybody's 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 we're

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... Which ones? All of them. He was saying that he does a lot of addiction stuff. We were talking about a pharmaceutical drug that we're doing a story about, amphetamine. 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 pick up alcohol because you like alcohol. You don't start smoking weed because you like weed. There are certain personality types that are attracted to certain chemicals. His point was that amphetamine, even though it can focus the mind, it's also a confidence booster. And so if you have a hole in your confidence, you might suddenly decide that you also need to focus a lot more and that those things are worth looking at. But I think the other thing about social media is

The social media platforms are like drugs in 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 will 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, yesterday, this is criticizing people who I have respect and admire and people who I don't, but, like,

Someone, I hope you missed this. Someone was in Midtown and they were a DEI consultant, which is like was germane to some people. But some random citizen 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 at their phones. And they captioned it something like, what a dystopian bummer.

And then there was like a vast debate on Twitter morally shaming this DEI consultant. The sort of like conservatives were like, look, DEI 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 should have done. I resent even hearing about this fight happening. I'm sorry to give you Twitter. As you were 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 waste of 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 in a chalet who hopefully went about their day having no idea that they sparked a national conversation amongst some of 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 theory of this interview is bad. Like,

I think the Twitter conversation's over. I think if you're there, you know you shouldn't be. Right. And you've known it for a long time. And there's 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 a hit of dopamine when you're 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 salvage it. He owns it now. Yeah. Like it's done. Just leave. Yeah. You have to build something new, find something new to do.

But the internet's 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 there's 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, no. But, you know, will I be able to do anything about that? Who knows? Yeah.

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 that 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, but your life is a sum total of what you pay attention to. 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 now and pretty deep meditation practice that I think is why I'm kind of more cognizant of this in myself than I used to be. But it's why I find the Twitter thing, like everybody knows her attention feels like shit on Twitter.

Like, everybody knows it. It's why all these people who are on it forever, like, call it the hell site. Yeah. If you call, if you call the thing you're on the hell site, like, maybe you should leave. Like, I just, at a certain point, I don't know what we're doing. Like, what do you need to hear? Yeah. I'm more of a, was a longtime caller, and now I'm a first-time listener on Twitter. But I think if anything were 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 but not commit to getting on 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 Vox.com and explains how he unhooked himself from Twitter. Search Engine is brought to you by Greenlight. A new school year is starting soon. My partner has two young kids, both of whom use Greenlight. And honestly, it's been kind of great.

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So can I ask you about Vox, actually? I'm curious about this. So when you, my understanding of Vox, when you helped, you were a co-founder, was your 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. I 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. I'm like, give me another one, give me another one. I was going to say girls gone wilding for internet attention. 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 were two things that were happening across purposes. So Vox was fundamentally an explanatory news site. And the way I would sort of define that then and now was it was focused on contextual information about news. So...

The reason Twitter is good for news is that oftentimes the actual piece of news can fit in 140 characters, right? 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. And what we were trying to do in Vox was build formats and approaches that 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 that worked and the ones that didn't.

But that I think actually worked. 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

that the assumption throughout the media, this was true for us, it was true for BuzzFeed, it was true for Vice, it was true for everybody, including the big sites, right, you know, the legacy media, was that if you could just attain this huge scale that was suddenly becoming possible through the mixture of viral Facebook posts and SEO, you know, what time is the Super Bowl kind of stuff. But also, you know, to use a better example, we had what we called a card stack, but an explanatory piece about ISIS, right?

that had over time like 10 million views as 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 Zach Beecham who's at Vox and is a great journalist. And so, I mean, you could really use this for good. My God, like we've gotten 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 there's this view that – and the sense that we can somehow turn all this 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 but not the money or you never scaled to the point where you thought you would? No, Facebook never put the money. They took the money. Right. Right.

And so, to some degree, they did Google. And there are all these things like Facebook incident articles and Facebook video. Like, everybody did that pivot to video for a while. I 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 interests were very, very badly aligned. And, yeah.

And a lot of things probably didn't work out. But yeah, so it pushed everybody in the direction of doing more scale plays. And for us, 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 in your balance more and more of those in the mix. And quick hits being like...

slanting towards like opinion or take or like... It doesn't even have to be opinion or take. Like, check out this video, right? Think of the upworthy period on the internet. Oh, God, yeah. 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 mean, it was 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 hit on that one. And everybody was sort of pushing more towards these things that would do well on social media. Yeah.

And I don't think that 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, let you off the hook for the great damage you've done to the internet, but like,

had you counter-programmed, like, when there's a giant tidal wave of money going one way, like, if you'd just been like, no. It wasn't real money. What do you mean it wasn't real money? That's the problem. It was VC money. Oh, God.

Oh, God. Coming in anticipation of real money. Yes. And 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 Vox now does very successfully. And there's a bunch of things like that out there now. I mean, the truth is the media business, I think, has 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 newspaper. And so it's just, you know, it's a similar business, but somewhat worse. I don't think it's a great situation anymore.

But we were, you know, there were years where I think everybody kind of pillaged the attentional 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 work. Like, people don't like the media more now. Our businesses aren't better now anymore.

The thing you really need is the people's experience of coming to you for the service that they're 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 as 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 the internet. Like we started looking for these easier highs and easier relationships online.

But they ended up not being, you know, things that were solid. There's this...

There's this one spot on, I think, Blinker Street in Manhattan where, for a while anyway, if you're walking down the street, this guy would stop you and he'd be like, hey man, I'm sorry, I'm trying to find this place that's supposed to be the best Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan. Do you know where it is? And I fell for this twice. I would start to give him directions and be like, it's right here, buddy! And then he'd point. He was out there pretending to be a lost tourist to shill you into going into a restaurant after tricking you.

And I would always get, like, livid. The fact that it happened twice made me angrier. But I was like, this is a bad strategy. You've tricked me. I'm mad. I'm not eating your fucking 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 is constantly being hijacked. You don't get the thing you were promised. 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 enraged or confused or let down, if someone was like, give me a dollar, you'd be like, of course not. There's no reason. I think we're in the wreckage of that era of the internet. I think it's over now to a large degree. I'm not saying nobody tries that kind of thing anymore, but I don't think it's really out there working anymore.

And I think what comes next, to the extent what comes next will be 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 a narrative radio person, I suspect there may not have been. But was there, like, a moment for you, when it comes to, like, your relationship to the internet and your decision to try to manage your attention—

Did you have like a rock bottom, like 3 a.m. getting invested in a fight that didn't make sense, whatever? Like was there a moment where you really looked and said, I don't 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 that to me, Trump seemed so obviously like Twitter had created a golem that –

It made me think about what was really happening on the platform, right? That I had had the observation for a while 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 rewarded 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 Trumpy-like Twitter presence and, like, sad exclamation point. And you began to feel this thing was infecting everybody. And particularly in my corner of the media...

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 was just feeling really wrong. And at some point, I felt like that had to be taken seriously. And so something I started doing, I like stopped tweeting. And I guess I do have a story about this. So I stopped tweeting. This was more than a year ago now, I think. And I'd been on and off at that point for a while. And was it hard to stop tweeting? Not really. Yeah.

And I didn't do a big, like, you know, clink your glass at the front of the room and be like, everybody. Like, I am no longer on, you know, like, I think that's, you know, then, you know, who knows, 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 a...

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 created a little newsletter, but not a sub stack, not a MailChimp. It was just I wrote words in a Google Gmail compose window, and I sent it to 200 people I knew personally, like people who 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?

Did it 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 now. 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 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

I was never even able to respond properly to what I would get from this like every two to three weeks thing I sent to 200 people. And it was such a deeper experience. And I was like, oh, this has been such a – for me personally, like such a mistake.

that even if you think these things are good, to have fully neglected creating all these small explorations, to have gotten so obsessed with the idea of scale. Like I had, I don't know what it is now. I think it's gone down to say kill different bots. But I had 3 million Twitter followers. And it was so much less interesting what would happen there than sending an email out to 200 people.

But it's also like there's a social media, like, not even programmed, like human ego programmed part of, I imagine, your brain. It certainly exists in mine. I remember times where people were waiting on texts from 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 thoughts 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 blurt some garbage out to 3 million people. And I think it takes a lot to, even if people would recognize that 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, led to a lot of us asking the question of who are we reaching as opposed to what am I doing, right? You began to develop this outside gaze on yourself constantly. Yeah.

It was weird. I mean, the early internet, I mean, when I was blogging, like, and I started a blog, I didn't think I'd reach anybody. It was 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 the whole thing. And then over time, it is this...

Some of us have jobs or are on the internet, but there is this kind of movement from what they call 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. Right? Like everybody began. 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, who have now just like bought into the aesthetic. Yes. And just sort of like treat their Instagram or whatever as if like,

100,000 people are watching it when it's just like their friends and family? And it's so easy and I constantly do. There's people and like this is not the part of my personality I'm most proud of but there's like people that I will in my mind make fun of where I'm like you're sort of like like the same way it's embarrassing to watch someone make like if you've ever seen someone in like a public restroom make like their hot face in the mirror to themselves it's like embarrassing to watch Don't watch me in a public restroom. It was on TikTok. Yeah.

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 I want to acknowledge something that might be happening, I think, for people. It's like, yeah, easy for fucking you to say, like PJ Vogt, famous podcaster, and Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist. 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 in my industry. So I think I have some credibility on it.

Like people's social media accounts are typically a reason like they don't get hired, not a reason they do. Yeah. In my experience. 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 were looking for in different jobs I've been involved in. And the...

This loops back to what you're saying. The reason I bring it up here is that 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. And so the question of where your attention and where you're able to come to 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, you know, get like tossed around the internet as 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, right?

Like, both who they are and what they like. Because you can measure, you know, the likes on something or the retweets or the reshares 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, okay.

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 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 a thoughtful conversation? Yeah.

I think there are a lot of kinds of podcasts. So I don't want to say it all has to be a thoughtful conversation. But I think podcasting would 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, like pretty strange. After one more short break...

If the internet is something most of us have to consume, that we can't just be abstinent from, what would more mindful consumption look like? Or put less hoitily-toitily, what are you supposed to look at on your phone when you don't want to just sit and think? I'm not a goddamn Zen monk. Answers after some ads. Search Engine is brought to you by NetSuite.

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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 lassoing 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 I can look immediately. I don't have – I'm not a life hacker guy anymore. Like, 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 madhouse. Yeah.

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 than I was. I

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 than 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 a 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 and

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

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, I'd spend more time there. It just doesn't. And what do you do, like...

This is a personal question, but like, what do you do when you are at the urinal? 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. 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 pitchfork...

music reviews page in a, like a tile on my phone. Cause I like reading about music reviews and I like the kind of attention and I listen to the music while I'm sitting there. Um, 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 and the wall street journal and a couple other, you know, uh, publications there. I mean, I read the Kindle on my phone a lot. I, I, 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. It never occurred to me that eventually that would be – to read articles instead of social media would be like some kind of big intentional project. Like 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 been 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, me too. A lot of people complain that there's not, you know, that they can get to the end and I think it's great and, um,

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 just, 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 liked hitting myself in the head with a rock. I really like books. I mean, the thing I'm trying to actively spend more time reading right now is magazines. Yeah.

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 that 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... 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've 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 podcasters 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. Oh, 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 fentanyl's important, right? Like, you had to think, right? You had to... I think a really hard thing in creation is being transparent to yourself, right?

And one of the things I don't like about a lot of digital media now is that 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 am 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, you know, how I'm managing other things in my life. No, it's so funny that you say that. Because first of all, I figured that out for myself. Like, I don't know.

too recently, but also sometimes now when I do go on Twitter and I see someone behaving like cuckoo 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 to log on. 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 you don't want a life hack. You want enough sleep, 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 have the health to do all that, like, you know, that takes care of a lot. That was my conversation with Ezra 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, as always, you can find on PJVote.com. That's our show this week. I hope it helped you. It certainly helped me. After 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'm a

I don't often hear the Scottish accent on podcasts, particularly a Glasgow accent. Not that mine 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 PGVote if we could record the end credits of Search Engine. So here we are.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by PJ Vo and Shruti Panamaneni and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

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