Sam Harris

and dishonesty that is going to... I mean, the reason why I got off is not because I couldn't recalibrate and find equanimity again with all the nastiness that was coming back at me, and not that I couldn't ignore it for vast stretches of time, but I could see that I kept coming back to it hoping that it would be something that I could use, a real tool for communication.

And I was noticing...

that it was insidiously changing the way I felt about people, both people I know and people I don't know.

Mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter, which just seemed insane to me.

And then that became a signal I felt like I had to take into account somehow.

You're seeing people at their worst, both friends and strangers.

And I felt that it was, as much as I could sort of try to recalibrate for it,

I felt that I was losing touch with what was real information because people are performing, people are faking, people are not themselves, or you're seeing people at their worst.

And so I felt like, all right, what's being advertised to me here on a, not just a daily basis, you know, an hourly basis or, you know, an increment sometimes of, you know, multiple times an hour.

I mean, I probably check Twitter

you know, at minimum 10 times a day, and maybe I was checking it 100 times a day on some days, right, where things were really active and I was really engaged with something.

What was being delivered into my brain there was subtly false information about how dishonest and...

you know, just generally unethical, totally normal people are capable of being, right?

It was like, it is a funhouse mirror.

I was seeing the most grotesque versions of people who I know, right?

People who I know I could sit down at dinner with and they would never behave this way.

And yet they were coming at me on Twitter.

I mean, it was essentially turning...

ordinary people into sociopaths right it's like people are just um you know it's and there are analogies that many of us have made it's like it's like one analogy is road rage right like people behave in the confines of a car in ways that they never would if they didn't have this metal box around them you know and moving at speed and it's it's you know all that becomes quite hilarious and and um

you know, obviously dysfunctional when they're actually have to stop at the light next to the person they just flipped off.