Ep. 372: Decoding TikTok’s Algorithm

31:04all right let's go back to the original question am i glad that tiktok in america is coming under american control well sure right this can't hurt and there's places where a foreign government maybe could mess with these architectures to screw with us especially at that last phase where you do some heuristic tweaking and the final ranking of candidates. But will this somehow allow us to fix TikTok in like a fundamental way? If we have the right people controlling the algorithm, can we make these platforms behave in the right ways? No, the answer is no. Machine learning algorithms deployed in this context will relentlessly learn how best to summarize the human condition and exploit us to get it to do whatever it is, whatever goal we have given them.

31:50this technique is going to exploit our dark sides just as much as our bright because it doesn't know the difference between them. When it comes to technology in recent decades, I think we have underestimated the degree to which we just sort of implicitly integrate our human values and how we operate in many areas of both our personal and civic lives. And as we start conceding more control of these things to technology, technology that cannot by definition share those values, we begin to learn how unsettling things get. We don't realize how much we depended on these just humanistic moral rules of thumb, these normative standards about what's good and bad.

32:29And so it's not so innocent to say, let's let an algorithm serve our news. Let's let an algorithm serve our entertainment. Let's let an algorithm be at the center of the town squares. An algorithm is very different than a person. And we don't miss what we have in human types of moralistic thinking. Until we take it out of our system. So that's my main takeaway about the TikTok situation. I'm sure there's lots of national security concerns and this and that. Privacy concerns, great. But we're far away from solving the problem of social media's dark impulses. It is baked into the mathematics of how these things execute.

33:03It is not an accident or a bad feature someone added late in the process that we can remove. All right. So we have a – I want to keep this conversation going. I want to get Jesse's reaction. We have some questions from listeners that are about this topic. And then I have a few recent articles about TikTok so we can kind of see like, well, what really is happening with this technology now? It ain't pretty, but let's all get there. So stay tuned. But first, we need to take a quick break to hear from one of our sponsors. I want to talk about our friends at Monarch. I have a theory about financial planning that I want to share here.

33:39It's based on my own personal experience. When it comes to financial things like your spending, but also like your 401ks, your stock investments, maybe properties you own, the places where you have money or you're spending money or trying to grow your money, the number one issue that matters is often visibility. What I mean by that is if you can easily get updated on how all of your financial assets and investments are doing, you're going to be motivated to keep going. Like you're going to see, oh, I want this number over here to grow. Let's make sure we keep investing. Let's invest more. Let's invest on the right track.

34:15Or if you see you're spending a lot of money clearly here on something that you don't really want to be like, oh, let me adjust that behavior right away because I'm getting that clear feedback. I'm getting that visibility into it. It also allows you to do things like I need to change my asset allocations for the year, like all this stuff that really helps you get the most out of your money. The more visibility you have into what's going on, the more you act. And the more you act, the better you're going to be. like the big mistake especially for people at my age who have so much going on in their lives how do you what's the money you're leaving on the table it's the money you're leaving on the table because you've been too busy to like invest it properly to get it out of your bank account and into this to reshift out the allocations to cut out this extra spending that you don't really need to do but you didn't know it was happening and thousands of dollars are going out the door that could have otherwise been put into something that was going to grow uh farther this is why i've never understood when people are wary of like spending a little bit of money on a service or advisor that can bring more visibility to their finances that really misses the forest for the trees.

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38:46so first of all jesse how do you rate my artwork on this one i think this was pretty good as my artwork goes i think it's great i mean you navigate that pen really well all right there we go with the coloring and well it must be because of all the teaching i do teach with the ipads now yeah so that's probably helping me um you're not a tiktok guy no yeah so when you got the bite dance papers is that how you got most of that information or did you know most of that before um so i i looked up i mean i know about this before i mean i know some machine learning so i know that the two tower system basically there's ways to do recommendations the original ways that were uh you know came out of the machine learning community just they don't scale when you replace thousands with billions it's just too computationally expensive so this sort of two tower approach is something where you can run it with really large amounts of data The papers get into, the one paper gets into the architecture.

39:40They call it the IFS information something system that they use for TikTok and also two other products. That really gets into their mixture of the two-tower recommendations and the real-time stuff, like what's popular. And it really gets into the architecture of how they do it, like in the nuts and bolts. And then there's another system that really gets into the weeds about how they very efficiently look up and manage the data. And there's a type of hash table called a cuckoo hash you learn about in computer science circles, and they've modified it. And they have all these interesting ideas they use.

40:10And that also got in on what they were using here. So almost certainly it's some mix of two-tower system plus integrating stuff that's popular plus just a really, really good distributed system design. So there's no magic there. There's no secret sauce to discover. I mean, I really think the reason why it performs better than other social platforms is just the platform. A lot of it is just what they're doing. One by one sequential short video serving. That's like the ideal circumstance for a recommendation system. Is it normal for technology companies to publish papers about what they're doing?

40:45They do a little bit. Yeah, it's interesting. They do a little bit. And so we see this and then they stop sometimes. It's like OpenAI stopped publishing papers. They used to. and then at some point like we don't want to publish papers meta ai's group publishes a lot like here's what we're up to uh anthropic publishes what they want to publish it's more like research papers studying like they want to be seen as like a real academic company but they don't get into weeds about how their systems work but yes you'll discover this at computer science conferences there's always a non-trivial fraction of papers that come from technology companies interesting based on their own data and like what they've observed and i don't know why I mean, I don't know if it's recruiting.

41:25I don't know if it's community oriented. I don't know if it like helps to research scientists. They want to publish, you know, it's interesting, but it's definitely true. They do publish this stuff. So if you have doctoral students that want to keep on writing papers forever, they can go to a private company and potentially still do that. Well, it's part of the problem is like the social media companies did this, like Twitter did this. So Twitter at first had an interface where if you were a professor, right, you could get a bunch of data to do research on. Like I want to do research on tweets and what they tell us about X, Y, and Z, right?

41:57There was an interface. You could get a license as an academic institution. It'd be like, yeah, I want to give me the last 20 million tweets that were on this topic. And then you could get them and then run research on them. And then at some point, Twitter turned that off. Like, no, no, our researchers will write papers on our data. You can't have access to it. and so partially it allowed them to have really good papers because now facebook do something similar with their social graph like only we have the data so you had to be at one of these companies to write papers about like their data and that gave them some control over what was published or not published because they get to approve every paper so they kind of figured out at some point like hey maybe this is not we don't want people writing about our stuff if we can't control what they're going to publish there's a lot of that going on or you can go be like a fellow at facebook or something and use their data but they get give you the thumbs up or thumbs down on anything you publish and there's like a whole period with facebook they don't do this as much anymore but there's a whole period where the original papers were coming out about the the mental health impacts of some of their products where they would put a facebook data you would have to have a facebook data scientist on your paper to get access to their data and the only papers coming out all had these like positive spins on everything and they all had facebook data scientists and then eventually like the field was like we're just going to do these papers without facebook and lo and behold like the outcomes were a lot more negative yeah yeah well give it a third party it's kind of like a new york reporter if they're like following some you know somebody around for months and then you don't really know what they're going to write yeah you don't they're going to write it's kind of scary yeah yeah so i know it's interesting how that works but that's what's going on so there's no magic i just this is a big thing in digital ethics is the role that ethics plays in the way we run systems and algorithms don't have ethics they don't have like an obvious way of having ethics inserted so then it it leads to these weird things i mean it's again it's not like people are tuning these algorithms to do bad things it's just these algorithms operate blindly recommendations it's machine learning i don't even like the word algorithms it's like machine learning systems approximate the underlying sort of processes and systems that explain the patterns they've given as training they don't know what they are they just build mathematical equations that have approximated those systems well enough to properly predict, you know, will this person like this thing?

44:12That's all it is. There's no values or ethics in there. And so you're, again, you're approximating the dark as easy as you are the good. We should be wary about that. It's going to be a big field. I think so. I think so. Digital ethics is probably going to be, yeah. The fact that you guys have the first program is pretty cool. Yeah, we're training up a lot of students that know CS and know ethics. They're trying to figure these things out. So, you know, we'll see what happens. All right, we got some questions here that sort of follow the same thread about TikTok and social media and algorithm recommendations.

44:41Let's see what you care about. Jesse, what's our first question? First question is from Kara. I truly do not live on the slope of terribleness. I use social media for about one hour per year. Do you think I have an ethical obligation to stop that usage because it is continuing even a little to these companies and maybe helping fuel others' addiction? So for those who didn't listen to last week's episode, the slope of terribleness is the model I use to explain the impact of social media platforms, especially curated conversation platforms on your sort of flourishing as a human. And basically the idea was it's not like these platforms have a constellation of problems and you want to steer yourself around them.

45:20It's better understood as a slope, and you start with the smaller problems, but the gravity of the slope is going to pull you continually to worse and worse problems until at some point hopefully you exert enough mental energy to arrest your slide. But that also takes up a lot of energy you could be doing and applying to something else. So your flourishing goes down, and then you waste a lot of energy so it doesn't go down further, and it doesn't make sense to stop using the platforms. That's what Kara is talking about. See last week's episode for more. Now, Kara, I'm going to say something maybe people in my field might not agree with.

45:50I'm not a big believer in the ethical sorting approach to thinking about our engagement with consumer products, for example. This idea that picked up steam in the last decade, first on the left and now on the right, that what we need to do is we have to sort of ethically rate people and organizations based on other things they've done. and then be very careful about this going to be our expression of our ethical values is like, well, I got to be very careful. Can I use a product by this company? Where are they in my ethical ranking? Can I like talk to this person or talk about this person? Where are they on my ethical ranking?

46:30And it's this idea that our sort of performative or visible ethics are based on who we interact with or who we associate with. So we have to constantly be self-policing and trying to assess so that we can be very careful that all of our interactions and engagements with the outside world carefully uh carefully match our sort of like internal ethical ideas i mean there's a you know there's a general principle there that makes sense but i think it's untenable in practice and i think it ends up you end up in sort of like capricious and tribal territory when you try to do this more broadly so sure if like there's a massively important principle that a company is like really violating you know there's like a company producing rollerblades but they use the bones of puppies to make the wheels you're like i i don't want to buy those rollerblades right but for the most part i think it's it's just not tenable to do this with all things in your life and it leads to tribalism and capriciousness so i that's not my approach to things my approach especially when it comes to technology is to have a value centric approach what do i value right about what do i value what do we value in terms of like our civic culture and that's what I want to assess things through.

47:38If this product is against, it reduces the things I value in my life without like a commiserate positive upside, then I don't want to use it. If this product is not just making my life worse, but really hurting like civic life or this or that, then I don't think it's a good product and I want to find another thing to use if I don't want to engage with it. Like in other words, is it hurting things I value myself? Is it hurting like these values, like values I hold true? And if so, I don't want to use it or I want to use it in a way that sidesteps those value violations. So this seems more functionalist or pragmatic.

48:17It's basically the approach of technology I give in my book, Digital Minimalism, but I think it's the right way forward. I don't need to assess everything this company has ever done. Is it good? Is it bad? And what does my tribe think? I just want to say, does it make my life better or worse? And if it's worse, sorry, buddy, I'm not using you. Hey, TikTok, you haven't made a compelling case why I have to use you. Your ads during the Super Bowl about it helped the vets bakery business or whatever, not convincing me. That's not what I'm seeing on here. I'm not helping vets sell cupcakes. I'm seeing the videos about the puppy bone rollerblading company, and it's kind of making me sad.

48:51So I don't need to use you. That's the way I think you should look at it. So if you're using social media like one hour per year, they have some hyper-focused functionalist use like, hey, this helps my company to do this each year when we have some announcement and so whatever, that's fine. The key is that's not making your life worse. And if we just have that assessment, a lot of companies that we might like ethically value is like, actually, I don't like them. I don't like Mark Zuckerberg. I don't like whoever. They're not going to do too well because deep down, Why don't we like them? It's because their products are making our lives worse.

49:25So you kind of end up in the same place. But I'm not a big believer of trying to ethically sort everything. I just think it's not a way to run a civil society. Use the stuff that makes your life better and be confident to use the stuff that doesn't, even if everyone else says it's important. All right, who do we got next? Next up is Jamie. My son uses TikTok to keep up on the news. A lot of people from his generation do the same thing. Is it good that they stay informed? So how else should they do this? I think staying informed is useful, especially as you go from your adolescence into adulthood.

49:58It's one of the good skills to learn. You should know what's going on in your world because that's important as an adult, especially in a participatory republic like the US. You need to know what's going on. TikTok is a terrible way to do that. And now we know why because of what we were just discussing in the deep dive. There's no human curation. the curation is being done by a blind machine learning algorithm which is just building approximations of the systems and processes that help explain the patterns it sees and that could have no correlation to things like truth or to civic value or to like inflaming darker impulses it doesn't care about any of that stuff it's like the world's most reckless newspaper editor you know it's like a psychopathic newspaper editor or who like really has like no empathy for humankind and doesn't really know what's going on and is drunk all the time and has some weird fetishes it's you know it's like the worst possible curation is algorithmic curation so they should keep up with news but here's the simple rule i want human curation because all of the things that we value human values human ethics these normative standards and guardrails we've had since the gutenberg printing press those are all there one degree or the other sometimes more rigorous than other times you know sometimes more strict than other times but they are there and unavoidable when it's human curation that could mean a lot of things it could be like various newspapers it could be websites that aggregate news like people like all sides for example which will be like here's an issue here's some publications on the left and on the right and some center and they're all covering it and you get a pretty good side podcast email newsletters i think these are all great right The goal here, because right now I can hear everyone's concern, there's often this sort of tribal concern.

51:45No, no, no. But what matters is bias because my side's right, the other side's wrong. And if they do that, they might be hearing from someone. I mean, everyone thinks that their side is very neutral and fact-based and the other side is crazy. And so it's not just get information from a human, but they're right humans. But a lot of stuff is biased. That's not my concern right now. My concern right now is not biased. My concern right now is not this person really doesn't like that person. You know, it's, you know, Jimmy Kimmel does not like Donald Trump. Greg Gutfield does not like Joe Biden, right?

52:15I'm not trying to get rid of, find neutrality. I just want humans in the loop. Let's just start there. You know, let's just start there. That like, actually there is deep down some sort of culturally attuned, you know, normative ethical frame. Let's just start there. It could be completely biased or political content, but even that is much better than letting an algorithm make these selections. So yeah, teach your son ways to stay informed that it's a human making the ultimate decision in talking. And then you can teach them about bias. Like, look, people have different points of view and different goals, right?

52:53And you can teach them about that. And I'm a big believer in dialectic content consumption. This would be a great thing to teach a kid is like if they're really into like this type of news source, like I don't know, it's like a young man who really likes listening like Joe Rogan to hear about things, right? And really connect with them. That's fine. But be like, look, let's take this issue. Hey, you heard this issue on Joe's podcast. You're kind of worked up about it. That's good. You're involved. You care about things. You know, here's another person who maybe comes at this a different way. Like let's listen to both.

53:18And when those things collide, you're like, oh, the world's complicated and interesting and all these sort of great things. None of that happens if it's just algorithms. So anyways, stay informed, but have human in the loop. Let's start there. Then we can solve the problem of all humans. Humans are super flawed. But again, I'll take a flawed, biased, political hack any day over the combination of transformers and neural networks that goes into the user tower in a TikTok recommendation formula. All right. What else do we got? Next up is Sean. You often discuss the architectural limits of LLMs. One way to overcome these limits and those of traditional computer processing is quantum computing.

53:57Is this a more promising route towards a phase shift in AI and even super intelligence? All right. So first of all, why am I placing this question in today's episode? Because today's episode is about social media algorithms. It's because what I want to do here is zoom out slightly on an application of the same underlying principle. So what was the underlying principle that's driving today's conversation? It's a principle that's at the core of my work as a digital ethicist, which is you have to understand technologies and how they work before you can start to make decisions about the role of those technologies in your life or in civic society.

54:30The more you actually understand about the core of a technology's operation, the more effectively you can bring whatever humanistic value matters at bear to figure out what to do about that technology. So this is sort of a broader example of that. There's a lot going on with AI where the underlying technologies are complicated. and when we don't try to understand at least a little bit about what's really going on we can get pulled left and right into all sorts of different corners so here's a great example because several people i don't know where people are seeing this jesse but several people in the last week i'm thinking about one example from yesterday i've been asking me about quantum quantum and ai so there must be something going several people in georgetown or some people just on the street no people i know okay like family members or friends so there must be i'm sure i'm missing some sort of like big thing that went viral somewhere but there's this idea out there like well quantum computing that's what's going to unlock super intelligent because you know these party poopers like me wrote these articles a couple you know a month ago that was unfortunately telling people hey guys these language models are not just going to keep scaling until super intelligence and by 2027 like they're not they've hit it they've hit a wall and scaling the technology isn't there anymore and the companies are stuck and a lot of people recognize this and it was kind of a disappointment for those who are betting their whole sort of self-interest and worth and and you know their whole philosophy of life on the idea of a cataclysm a technology cataclysm either positive or negative so they need to get that hype back alive and so they got it back alive basically like well quantum computers can do crazy stuff that regular computers can't so maybe quantum combined with ai will break through these scaling limits and then we'll have something like super intelligence all right so bad news again i hate to be the party pooper about this that's not going to happen quantum computers are not as a lot of people think just like a super powerful version of a regular computer that you can take anything you could do with a regular computer and now do it in a much more super powerful way if you move it to a quantum computer it's like going from a 386 chip to a pentium chip if you appreciate my 1990s intel references but that's not how quantum computers work quantum algorithms are a mix of computer science logic and actual quantum mechanics it's where you very carefully make connections between these quantum bits right in such a way that when they the wave functions collapse it has the equivalent of searching a large search space to collapse to an answer so that you can you can extract an answer from a search space all at once in a sort of constant time collapse as opposed to having to do a sort of linear search of the whole search space which could be computationally infeasible but there's only certain problems that you can set up quantum algorithms to work for so peter shore who was you know at mit when i was there he had this big breakthrough we're like hey factoring large prime numbers you could do this way and that matters like not to get too technical but rsa public key encryption is sort of the core way that we do key exchange for, say, secure commerce on the internet is based on having really large prime factors that are so large, you can't easily figure out what they are.

57:38So if you could figure out prime factors quickly, that would be a problem for a lot of cryptography. That's something you can do with quantum computers once you have enough quantum bits. There's also a certain type of search you can do, a different way of searching the search space that's really useful, especially for simulating a lot of chemical or physical systems. And quantum computers could then do that in a way, do these sort of physical simulations in a way that it would be hard for a regular computer to do but these are kind of the big use cases right now so no there's no obvious connection between the narrow things you can do right now with quantum and what we need to do to run like a generative ai model and to make matters worse it's incredibly complicated and expensive to try to make these quantum computers have enough bits to actually even do those problems on big enough input sizes because the more quantum bits you have the more error you produce and the errors add up and we don't know how to get to the many thousands of bits we need to handle like really big problems.

58:32And there's all sorts, they're working on it. It's a cool technology. But no, it's not coming anytime soon to suddenly break through the scaling barriers in generative AI. Now, yes, there are some like very specific things around Gen AI where you could connect to one of these capabilities, like some sort of like, you know, the search through uncertainty with the sample space of things that the model is going to look at. Like there's things in theory in some future a quantum machine could help with. But no fundamental, we're going to break through barriers in training these things or building these things.

59:03So no, quantum is not going to give us super intelligence. But the reason why I bring that up is when you understand that technology, it gives you a completely different valence on this recent emphasis on this issue. And it tells us, right? I think there's a great data point we suddenly learn as observers of technology and society. I think it is taking down the mask of a lot of people who are giving a lot of content online in particular about all of these coming AI apocalypses. The fact that they switched right away to like, well, quantum is going to do it says, oh, well, that's clearly nonsense.

59:40So I see all along you're just working backwards from a psychological need to need some sort of massive technology driven disruption to happen. And then you'll just try to fill in the blanks any way you can. It's like when you understand quantum and know that that's kind of a crazy thing to say, it reveals a lot about the people who are saying things a year ago that seem much less crazy. Like, well, they know a lot about AI and they're saying that, you know, in 2027, we might have humanity extinguished by superintelligence. We were taking that seriously, but now we can realize with this pivot to quantum that some subset of those people, it really is just fulfilling a psychological need of something disruptive because that will bring some sort of like meaning or focus to their life.

1:00:18So there we go. understanding technology helps us better understand our cultural interaction with technology quantum stuff is hard jesse yeah i had a couple friends at mit so so quick story so if you're a computer science doctoral student at mit you have to have a minor so you have to go take a few classes in something that's not computer science as part of getting your doctorate and i had one friend in particular but a lot of people did this i think they're like oh i want to do quantum algorithm so I'll take some courses in physics so that I can do, I'm a computer scientist at MIT. I know a lot about algorithms.

1:00:52I'll learn some quantum physics and then I can do quantum computing. And they completely failed because it turns out. They actually failed? Not failed in the sense that they failed the course, but they failed to make any sort of meaningful, to actually learn enough to do quantum computing work. Because it turns out, here's what I learned from them. To really work with quantum computers, you need to understand quantum mechanics. can't just go take a course on quantum mechanics you got to like learn all of physics and related math and end up at quantum mechanics you basically have to it's a multi-year like this has to be what you're studying it's like okay as i get towards like year four of my doctoral program i finally know enough stuff enough math and enough traditional physics to start doing the quantum mechanics you couldn't learn it in three classes kind of similar to what you're talking about the theme with brian keating yeah like how long these things take yeah and just focusing on one thing yeah jesse's referencing would have been a few days ago when they hear this right yeah last thursday my episode with brian keating who knows a lot about this type of math but as you'll see uh college and multiple postdocs before it took him a long time to really learn all this stuff so anyways as an aside quantum computing is really hard and really cool and it's going to do some cool stuff but it is not a miracle machine don't listen to anyone who says because i bet you the same people are We're saying quantum is going to give us super intelligence.

1:02:11We're saying LLM scaling is going to give us super intelligence. And I would bet you go back four years and they'd be talking about blockchain-based internet was going to be the future as well. There is something exciting about massive disruption, but it's hard. Transformative technology is hard. Most stuff is more complicated than it seems. All right, we have a case study here. Let me just set this up real quick. So again, we're deviating a little bit from the theme, but not really. So what I like to do with these case studies is talk about people who have used the type of advice we talk about on the show successfully in their own life, right?

1:02:44So what is the relevant advice on this show that would match what we're talking about today, which is about how these algorithms work and the dangers of algorithmic curation? Well, one of the big ideas I talk about is that an effective way to not have your life be captured by the digital, especially by the algorithmically curated world on your phone, is to make your life outside of your phone so deep that the stuff on your phone becomes a lot less interesting. If your life is weird and shallow and chaotic and uncertain, you're like, I might as well numb or distract myself with the phone. But when you construct, intentionally construct a life outside on your own terms that's deep, then suddenly becomes a lot easier to step away from things like the TikTok curation algorithm.

1:03:28So that's the case study I'm going to give you today is one about, as many of my case studies are, someone who figured out through trial and error how to actually start engineering a deep life. it's not specifically about technology but it's also all about technology because when your life is deeper you have much more say over what you let into your life and not let's do this case study do we have case study music yeah no let's hear that we need some music music

1:04:05all right here we go today's case study is from Kieran Kieran says a friend of mine introduced me to your work in 2021 and ever since then i've been a voracious reader of your writings and an evangelist of all things newportonian i've always been a bit of a renaissance man and within a few years of getting my master's degree in 1997 i had a pretty cool good double career going in classical music composition and computer consulting the it gigs paid better than the composing so i learned most i leaned mostly in the computer work taking semi-regular commissions to keep my artistic soul happy i had no conscious plan i just stumbled unintentionally through an enjoyable and lucrative 15-year stretch of contract-based self-employment.

1:04:42In 2012, just a few years after my wife and I bought a house and had our first child, I decided I was done with the dual career thing. Finally deciding to follow my passion, I set out to become the great composer. I should say Kieran capitalized great and composer here that I believe that I was destined to be. I told all my computer clients I was closing up shop, wound down all those projects, and cast my net for bigger and bigger music commissions. Long story short, that led to a steep decline in income, and as the primary breadwinner with a family and a big Toronto mortgage to pay for, I fell into a rapid downward spiral that left me completely burnt out.

1:05:21It took me a full year to recover health-wise and another two years to rebuild my networks and regain the trust I had broken in every facet of my professional life. I then vowed to work intentionally towards being happy and living the lifestyle I wanted rather than focusing on any particular aspect of my career. today I have a truly fantastic groove going most days I punch out at 3 p.m. whether in computers or music I spend the vast majority of my time in deep mode and I'm producing the highest quality work of my life I collaborate almost exclusively with people who let me work at my own pace my income is the highest it's ever been and I have a lot of quality time and energy left over to spend with my family as a great example of some core ideas of lifestyle centric planning which is at the core of my theories about how to cultivate a deep life So what Kieran did first is what most people think you need to do to build a deep life, which is have some sort of radical change.

1:06:11The way we think about it is the magnitude of the radicalness of my change directly corresponds to the magnitude of how much better my life will be. So if I want my life to be five times better, I need a five times more ambitious radical change I'm going to make. That often doesn't work. And why? Because what matters in your day-to-day satisfaction is not any one factor. It's many, many different factors that affect your day-to-day subjective well-being. I call those many, many factors your lifestyle. So if you go for one radical change, often what you're doing is a combination of getting the short-term fix of just doing something radical feels good in the moment, which is true.

1:06:49There's nothing to sneeze at. It's true. And then you're taking at best like one aspect of your life that's important to you and making it bigger. But you're ignoring all the other aspects of your lifestyle. So either those stay the same or what's more likely is you make this one aspect of your lifestyle better. But as a result, these other aspects get worse. And when you add it all up, you're worse than when you began. And that's what happened to Kieran. He's like, I like this inspiration of writing. I get a rush thinking about the idea of being a full-time composer. And I like doing creative work and pushing myself.

1:07:20So let me take that aspect of my lifestyle and put all my chips on the table there. The problem is it made these other aspects like your financial security, time with your family, these other aspects, your stress, your health, they all got worse. And you know what? That added up the net negative. So one radical change very rarely makes all the difference. So what he did instead was essentially lifestyle-centric planning where you look at your whole lifestyle and you systematically make changes. You assess them how they're going to affect all aspects of your lifestyle, and you're looking to move everything up.

1:07:51but at the very least not bring anything down and when he looked at his whole lifestyle he's like oh if i keep my computer consulting i can still do music and if i get better at my computer consulting instead of taking on more work i can raise my rates and now i can make more money and not have to spend it can spend less time he's done by three and i can bump up this need for creative pursuits and improving my craft i can bump that up like i can build up my ambition for the composition I'm doing. Now, I'm not bumping that up as much as just going full time into being a composer, but I can still improve that while keeping these other things higher, better as well.

1:08:28And in the end, he had a much, much better lifestyle. His life became deep because he cared about all aspects of his lifestyle, not just one. All right. So again, what does that have to do with TikTok? Kind of everything. Because once you take control of your life and make your life deeper, what's going to happen is the attractions of the diversions, the digital, the attention merchants wears is not going to be as impressive for you anymore. And it's going to be much easier to make these sort of intentional decisions. So there you go. Kieran, thanks for that case study. Let's see. We often try to do calls when we can as well.

1:09:00Do we have a call this week? We do. All right. Let's hear this.

1:09:06Hey, Cal. My name's Steven. We met last year, actually, when I brought you in for a recording on my own podcast, Two Dads, One Car. And thank you so much for that wonderful conversation. Since our chat, many of my recent guests have talked about how their kids need us even more as they get older and head into the high school years. And I think you shared that as well. Have you adopted any new practices recently to accommodate this extra pull on your time from your kids on top of your role at Georgetown? And of course, writing. So let me know. I continue to be a huge fan. Thank you so much, Cal.

1:09:39It means a lot. Cheers. Oh, it's good to hear from Steve. that was a cool show i think that episode's maybe on youtube it's like remember comedians and cars getting coffee yeah seinfeld yeah so this guy does something similar uh we drove around tacoma park and he sets up cameras in the car and they kind of interview if he came down i think from canada or something um cool interview so you should find that two dads in a car it's somewhere i don't know on youtube or something like that okay a good question i have a few thoughts about it including thoughts that connect this back directly to the technology themes we're talking about as well as some broader thoughts as well.

1:10:12So I have three boys. One of the things I'm, here's one of the changes I'm making to account for my boys are all in the age now where like dad time really matters. They're not really young and they're not out of the house yet. And like completely just with their friends. They're my hobby. And what I mean by that, that sounds trite, but there's actually something deep there. That is the priority over other things I might be interested in doing. Like there is a phase of life if you have multiple kids where the priority, you know, you have work you have to do, you know, provide for the family, but you keep that reasonable.

1:10:47You need to keep yourself healthy. And then it's your kids, right? I'm coaching three things right now, Jesse. I coach all the time, hours and hours. I am sore as we record this because me and the other coach of one of my kids' little league teams did a two and a half hour practice the other day. and when you're my age two and a half hours is a long time to be like hitting ground balls and catching balls and throwing balls like i am sore my my hamstrings are sore as i sit here uh i spend a lot of time i'm on the board of my kids school i'm giving a talk there next week um a lot of time with my kids doing things with my kids because you know that has to be that is my hobby that's what i mean by my hobby is like that's actually my priority when it comes to spending time and doing things outside of work and then that'll change again as you get older and your kids move on you got to fill that in with other things or you know things get sad before that point you have to have other things going on as well but uh that's the main thing i'm doing now is like that's priority one outside of the fundamentals of just making sure the lights are on and i'm not having repeated heart attacks but i think that matters now what do you do in that time well i think it's really important if we're talking about like kids coming up to high school age, do not let them be exposed to algorithmically curated values.

1:11:59Do not let them be on with unrestricted access to the internet. Do not let them be on things like TikTok. Do not let them be on things like Instagram. They're at an age where they need these sort of human values that those algorithms do not have. They need repeated examples of those values applied. And the only way to do that is to be there with them, doing things with them. Let me tell you about this thing we just did and what I noticed there. Here's why I like this person. Here's why I don't like this person. I really appreciate it. I think that person is really impressive. This person is. This book is really good.

1:12:31This book is not. What are you getting out of this book? All of those type of discussions when you're doing things involved in your kids' lives are your chance for helping them learn and understand the normative principles by which you live. You have to implant those values in them. They do not get those values from their phone. If you give them a phone, that becomes their main source of interaction with the world. You have put them into an upside down world in which it's all, there is no humanistic core. Don't put them in that world. They might come out of it okay. Most kids do, but a lot of kids don't.

1:13:03We know all about, we talked about the slope of terribleness leads you to all sorts of weird or bad places. So to me, that's like another key principle. I want to help be their filter and exposure to their world, the interpreter of what's going on in the world, what's interesting, what's not, what's valuable, what's not, what's heroic, what's not, who's impressive and who's not. I want to be that filter, not a two-tier, two-tower recommendation system running within Oracle's cloud infrastructure for TikTok. That doesn't have my values in mind. There's no values that I want my kid to have. So I think the technology issue here is key.

1:13:34You should be the curation algorithm in your kids' lives, at least in, you know, especially to a middle school and like upper elementary school, not technology, not these algorithms, right? It is not harmless. It is imprinting in their mind what values, what matters, and what doesn't. and the things that is in printing is almost certainly not going to be the things you want. So there you go. I connected it back to TikTok. Yeah. All right. We got a final segment here. I've got some articles. I haven't even read these yet, Jesse. It's going to be interesting. Right. We got some articles from like the last week about TikTok so we can better understand like what actually is happening.

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1:17:48Headway has over 50 million downloads and 2 million monthly users. that we kind of know it works. It's ranked number one in education on the U.S. App Store and frequently featured as the app of the day by both app and Google. So a lot of people have already discovered Headway's power to help you grow using some of the world's best ideas in just 15 minutes at a time. So go to makeheadway.com slash deep to find out more and use the promo code deep. deep that's make headway.com slash deep and use the promo code deep grow your way with headway all right jesse let's move on for our final segment all right god help us i got three articles here all about tiktok i haven't really looked at i'm assuming jesse these are all going to be uplifting and inspiring maybe a little bit intellectually sophisticated but we'll come away saying kudos to uh plaudits to the american ingenuity it's gonna make us just feel really good about culture that's what i'm assuming it's going to be something like tiktok helps school children understand the beauty of jane austen leading to impromptu presentation of emma that wows critics like this is the type of thing i think we're going to find so let's let's see what we got here i'm going to load up the first article here now put on the screen for those who are watching instead of listening tiktok child data protection inadequate canadian privacy officials say Oh God, we're not off to a good start here.

1:19:18All right, let's see here. TikTok's efforts to stop children using the app and protect their personal data have been inadequate. Canadian investigation has found hundreds of thousands of children in the country use TikTok each year, despite the firm saying it's not intended for people under the age of 13. Oh God, the kids are on TikTok. So we have this like algorithmic value-free curation and we're showing it to kids under 13. I do have a solution to this problem. Don't let your kids have a phone. Yeah. Okay. TikTok's not preventing them from going on. You know what can prevent them from going on?

1:19:52Not letting an 11-year-old have access to the internet. That's nuts. That's the solution. All right. Here we go. This one. Oh, God. I thought this one was going to make us feel better about the human condition. All right. What do we got here? Why people on TikTok think the rapture is coming and the world is ending this week. Oh, man. This article is from yesterday, Jesse. Oh my God. All right. I'm sure this is all going to be positive. The rapture is here. That is according to worshipers on TikTok. People are convinced that the end of days will take place between today and tomorrow. Tomorrow being the day we're recording this.

1:20:27So if you're listening to this, phew, crisis averted. They have decided to prepare accordingly. The phenomenon stems from the evangelical Christian belief that Jesus Christ will return to earth and ascend to heaven with only his true believers. Yes, the rapture. so it's a South African pastor claimed on a YouTube video you know that Jesus told him that this is when the rapture was coming but TikTok super amplified this it's a corner of TikTok called Rapture Talk where users are posting videos of themselves either discussing or preparing for the end of the world Christians on TikTok staunchly believe that chaos will erupt on earth when they're swept up in the clouds with Jesus Christ leaving earth according to Christians on TikTok is a glorious occasion and a great honor okay a couple points don't say Christians on TikTok.

1:21:12Say it's the people on Rapture Talk. But this is a bigger point about what I was talking about. Why is there no like reasonable human curated news source would give a ton of print to just like this random clip from a random church and be like, I don't know, some guy at some random church in South Africa said this. Like people say crazy stuff all the time. We better put this on the front page of our newspaper and put it on the news and be on the radio and the news. Like people are like, crazy but tiktok because it's just algorithms the algorithm figures out like you know this type of stuff does well with a lot of people so it shows it to a lot of people and then it gets into the trending thing and once it's in the trending thing it's going to show it to a lot of other people who might not have previously have shown they're interested in rapture talk stuff and it discovers they are and it takes off that's algorithmic curation it is crazy that this like particular little clip has gone wide and it never would in a human curated concept because how many people every day think you know have some prediction for when the earth is going to end but this is what happens we let algorithms do the curation all right we have one chance here jesse to be uplifted by the possibilities of tiktok let's see here uh here we go teens facing criminal charges after friend dies during tiktok surfing stunt oh god one of the teenagers was standing on top of a table tied to a car when the crash took place.

1:22:38Jesse, it's not good. All right. This is not making me feel good about TikTok's impact on the world. Let's hear a little bit about this. The incident took place in March when someone was driving at 35 miles per hour with her friend standing on the trunk and rear windshield of her car. The friend fell off. When you fall off things at 35 miles per hour on pavement, you can hit your head and that's what happened. The friend died. And then this has led to other, looks like this has led to other incidents of this. Why? Because the algorithm, the use of your recommendations, you know, is capturing some sort of like fundamental human tendency to like we like stunts that are outrageous and attention catching and potentially dangerous.

1:23:21And it catches our attention in a way that they get good watch time. And so it promoted it in a way that like you would never see this. You would never see this. You can probably bring this back. You would never see this again on a television show, in a newspaper. You wouldn't see people dedicating their podcasts like week after week. How cool is this? Look at this person, this kid standing on cars. Like that's crazy and it's dangerous. All of this is, I think, emphasizing the point that we got to in the beginning. When you're willing to sort of concede or give over these issues of curation of information to a mindless algorithm that really has no values in place, it leads to dark places.

1:24:00It leads to weird places. It leads to people dying or weird news, obsessing people or captures kids because, you know, how are they not going to look at that? This thing is completely hacking their brainstem. So we end here. Like, where do we end this? This look at the algorithms today. Algorithmic curation. And I got at this last week as well. Is not a good innovation. It really is only good if you have like a large stock position in one of these companies. I promise you as a user of these tools, there are other things out there that can fill your life with interest and entertainment and funniness and new ideas.

1:24:38There's tons of sources of that that are probably going to be better than watching kids standing on tables pulled by cars, leading them to fall and have life-ending brain injuries. There's better ways to be entertained. So there's really no reason for these things to have such a big cultural position other than the fact that they're very good at it and a small amount of people make a lot of money. So there we go. the algorithm is not some Frankenstein construction in which people put the wrong values into it, which we can fix if the right people run it. Algorithms, by definition, when it comes to recommendation systems, do not share our values.

1:25:14They do not know what values are. And to let them curate information on any sort of mass scale is a recipe for disaster. That is the solution to all these issues, not putting the right people in charge of algorithms, but allowing real people to say, I don't want algorithms making these decisions for me. Anyways, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.

1:25:41hi it's cal here one more thing before you go if you like the deep questions podcast you will love my email newsletter which you can sign up for at calnewport.com each week i send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply i've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

1:26:36Thank you.

1:27:04Thank you.