Ep. 372: Decoding TikTok’s Algorithm  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 372: Decoding TikTok’s Algorithm - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/716b0271-8961-4e98-acbf-e7f71046b0fd ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Format + Engineering Explain TikTok's Edge** - TikTok succeeds because short videos produce massive, fast feedback and ByteDance optimized real-time retraining. - The platform mixes user profiles with trending items to quickly discover new interests. Transcript: Cal Newport So why is TikTok so uniquely successful if that's an architecture that like other systems use? Spotify probably uses something like that. Some other social platforms are using something like this. So why is TikTok work so well? Well, we kind of have an answer to that as well. There seems to be a few things going on here, right? One is just what that service does. So short form video is a best case scenario for building one of these recommendation systems, right? All it does is deliver you stuff. It doesn't have to deal with TikTok, doesn't have to deal with other complicating factors that other social services have, like your friend graph and who you follow and trying to like Mix in the stuff you said you're interested in with the stuff the algorithm thinks you're interested in. TikTok basically ignores that because everyone uses the for you tab. That's what we're talking about here. And so it's just pure. We're just showing you things that we think you'll like. Nothing else matters. Second, because they're short, you get a lot of feedback. An average TikTok user might go through 30 plus videos in a typical session, each one generating feedback about what they like and don't like. So you have a huge amount of data with which to get better and better at making these recommendations. Now compare that to like Netflix, where I might watch one series and one movie in a given week. It's a much, much slower data cycle, right? And I'm not going to try, by the way, if I'm on Netflix, I'm not going to try most of the stuff you recommend. I'm probably going to end up watching something someone told me about anyway. So I get very slow stream of data if I'm a service like Netflix. But TikTok is optimal because you only can look at what they show you. So you're giving them feedback on every single recommendation they get. All right. So that's part of it. The format is super well suited for these type of systems to work really well. The other part of the advantage is actually architectural. It's a really smart and powerful distributed system that ByteDance actually built for their products like TikTok. So one of the things that they do that's really impressive is they can update. They update the training of the user tower almost in real time. They don't just train these two towers once, then go deploy it. Now let's go use it. As you're using the app, you're getting more data. You're generating more data about yourself. Which videos did you watch and how long did you watch them? Well, they built a system. This is really pretty amazing from a distributed systems point of view that can essentially be constantly trying to retrain your part, the user tower piece, using this new data so that It can sort of respond in real time. This is really hard to do, but the way they do it is with this massive distributed system where it's fragmented among all these different systems. There's probably a system near you that's working on it. In the U.S., most of this is an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure board, so there's probably some local machine doing it and then they they transfer over the new train parameters to the production Model that's actually making recommendations uh really frequently and there's this whole fault tolerance system they have built up so that if this gets partitioned the system can Still run it's really hard computer engineering but it allows them to continually update how it labels you and what you care about, like almost immediately in reaction to the stuff You're doing. This is what gives TikTok, for example, it's amazing cold start capability, where if you're a new TikTok user, you just start watching things and swiping and within 10 minutes, like How is this already showing me stuff that I really care about? It's because they built this architecture that can retrain parts of the towers in real time alongside of what you're doing. The other thing we know they've done in their system is that it's not a pure user-based, history-based recommendation system. They have a parallel system that's doing nothing but studying what's popular. Hey, what's doing well on our network, maybe worldwide, or what's doing well in our network in a particular region or among like a general group of users, and they mix this in. They call this the short-term profile versus the long-term profile, which is the user description. They join these two things together. So when they're trying to figure out what to show you yeah there's a bunch of candidates that really match your expressed interest but there's also candidates that maybe are a looser Fit to your expressed interest like a reasonable fit but a much looser fit but are trending are really popular right now and so those get mixed in and then so you can get shown not everything You're being shown is just here's the best match to what you've shown interest in before it's also like hey this thing is really popular right now. People like it. It roughly overlaps stuff you care about. Let's throw that into the mix. And then this becomes a feedback mechanism that allows you to see things that aren't like an exact fit for things you've seen before. And maybe you like it and it begins, you watch it for a while and it allows the model when it's describing you to sort of learn about other interests you may or may not have. So it's why you get this mix. I mean, you know this when you use TikTok, you get this mix of, oh, this is straight shot matching to one of my clear interests, but also like, oh, this is weird and kind of compelling, but Kind of off the wall. And maybe half of those things you see, you end up watching them that it's, it's it putting in this sort of real time popular stuff as well. So they have sort of a secret sauce for mixing those two things together. So basically it's just no big new ideas. It's just a very well executed system. It's a system that was built at the highest level in a format, short video, one byby-one algorithm recommendation, that is perfect for this type of recommendation system. You put those two things together, and the whole thing seems pretty eerie. Like, my God, it learns me so fast. It knows more about me than I thought I knew about myself. And it works really well. All right. So that's what Oracle is going to find. There's no magic in there. These are a well-implemented distributed system. ([Time 0:19:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5061ddbc-d4f6-4895-9f66-7987b80718fd)) - **Algorithms Learn Us, Warts And All** - Machine-learning recommenders model user behaviour blindly and will capture both bright and dark human impulses. - They do not embed ethical guardrails or human values by design. Transcript: Cal Newport So what does this teach us? Well, modern recommendation architectures like the one run by TikTok are not digital newspaper editors. They're not things that we can easily configure to reflect particular values or interests or philosophies. The machine learning techniques used in these two tower architectures are completely agnostic to what they're trying to describe. It could be videos. It could be data from a science experiment. It could be descriptions of shopping behavior, movie watching behavior. These algorithms do not care. They've just been optimized in a relentless training model for I am assigning list of numbers to things. Are close to the numbers for this thing over here, the user, and the system tells me that's good, then I think my numbers are good. And if the system tells me they're bad, then I adjust how I do it until the system tells me it's good. There is no intention in here. There is no visibility into how things are being described or what matters or what the values are. It's just trying to win this training game of, I don't know in advance as the two towers, you know, who this user is or what they like. So I better have described them in a way that ends up matching the things that they liked. The way these systems actually work in terms of if we want to think about what are they actually doing. If you talk to a machine learning or data scientist, they'll say, yeah, what these techniques do, you give them enough data. What they're trying to do mathematically is build approximations, mathematical approximations of whatever underlying process or systems best describe the patterns it's fed in Its training data. This is why if you feed a bunch of information about, you know, traffic times or something into one of these models, and it gets good at predicting what's going to happen at given times, It has approximated maybe some sort of reality about the underlying traffic system. Like, you know what? There's a lot more cars between 4.30 and 6.30 because that's when traffic lets out from buildings. It sort of learns these underlying, approximates these underlying systems and processes so it can do better at predicting what's going to happen. So when it comes to serving content like videos that feature other people to other people, this method of curation, I believe, is something that should give us some pause. And the reason is, if we think about this historically, humans have always been a little uneasy and a little wary about the production of mass content. We worry about it because we know content has a real impact. People talking to other people and mass content since the beginning of the printing press has had both good and, you know, bad impacts. Just look at like the witch trials that happened all throughout Europe and eventually making its way to colonial America. A lot of this came out of some, you know, printing that got people thinking about this or that. We worry about the power of content. And the reason is, is the human psyche has dark elements. We have a hardwired affinity for hatred or violence or dehumanization, an attraction to the grizzly, an attraction to the purient. You know, we have a lot of dark parts in our brain and we try to appeal to our better angels, especially when it comes to mass content. So we have all sorts of guardrails we put up. If I'm editing a newspaper, if I'm a producer for a television program, if I'm producing a podcast, what I'm going to say or not going to say to accomplish my goals, we're careful about It. We're careful about it because we know there's a lot of stuff in the human brain, a little more primitive, we don't want to appeal to. We integrate human values into how we curate content. And when we don't do that, we get really upset or worried about it. I mean, this was like World War II propaganda. What was that if not basically a group saying, throw those guardrails aside. What matters is our goal is more important. And then we look back at like World War II era propaganda. We're like, ah, this is not great. We don't be like, hey, what great communication? We're like, no, no, no. We don't go there even if it could help our cause. We're careful about it. We have human values. These type of recommendation architecture don't share our values because they don't know what values are. They don't know what they're doing. They're just producing numbers to win a game of getting positive or negative zaps from a machine learning algorithm so when we ask a system like this hey do a good job of recommending Stuff it's like great i will do what i'm mathematically supposed to do which is build these mathematical approximations of the underlying systems and processes that help explain The patterns i've seen that means it's going to be building models of the dark impulses it's inevitable it's going to build models about like what the the the the affinities for hatred Or dehumanization or violence or purience or whatever it is that we're sort of we we're we're embarrassed to admit that we're wired for these algorithms have no embarrassment they Just say like there's a thing here we show stuff that appeals to this it does well. You get basically not a digital newspaper editor, but a digital propagandist of the worst kind. That's what happens when you allow blind mathematical models to start doing content curation. And I think that territory, this is what we should worry about. There's not something here we easily tweak. We're not replacing one country's values with another. There's no knobs to turn about different properties we want or don't want. Machine learning based recommendation algorithms, architectures, again, just to summarize, they are just going to, they're going to model the systems at hand blindly to win the Game of finding matching interest. ([Time 0:25:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aa087b7f-d7e3-431c-9211-07704104538a)) - **Ownership Changes Won't Fix The Core Problem** - Don't expect changing ownership or operators to fix the fundamental harms of algorithmic curation. - Treat governance and national security changes as insufficient to address value-free recommendation dynamics. Transcript: Cal Newport 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. ([Time 0:31:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9fa5aa16-4371-47f2-8c5f-cbd0f1ceb5b5)) - **Choose Tools By Value, Not Tribe** - Evaluate tech by whether it increases the things you value, not by tribal ethical sorting of companies. - If a product reduces your flourishing without sufficient upside, stop using it. Transcript: Cal Newport Let'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. It'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 okay I'm going to say something maybe People in my field might not agree with. I'm not a big believer in the ethical sorting approach to thinking about our engagement with like consumer products, for example. Is we have to sort of ethically rate people and organizations, you know, based on other things they've done and then be very careful about, uh, this is going to be our expression of our Ethical values is like, well, I gotta 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, on my ethical ranking? And 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 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 don't want to buy those rollerblades, right? But for the most part, I think it's just not tenable to do this with all things in your life and it leads to tribalism and capriciousness. So 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. If 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. It'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. ([Time 0:44:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/54c4afed-5ec1-4ea4-82ff-44c55abd72d5)) - **Prefer Human Curation For News** - Teach young people to get news from human-curated sources like newspapers, newsletters, and podcasts. - Prioritize human curation first and then teach bias and dialectic consumption. Transcript: Cal Newport I think staying informed is useful, especially like as you go from your adolescence into adulthood. It's one of the good skills to learn is like you should know what's going on in your world, right? Because that's important as an adult, especially in like a participatory republic like the US, like you need to know what's going on. Tech talk 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 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, 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. No, no, no. But what matters is like bias because, you know, 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 like their side is very neutral and fact-based and the other side is crazy and So like it's not just get information from a human but like the 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? I'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. ([Time 0:49:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6b3189fa-ccd5-4d44-8fab-b5fe0316d11e)) - **Quantum Won't Be An AI Shortcut** - Quantum computing targets narrow problems and won't suddenly unlock general AI or superintelligence. - Expect no near-term miracle crossover between quantum and large-scale generative AI. Transcript: Cal Newport You often discuss the architectural limits of LLMs. One way to overcome these limits and those of traditional computer processing is quantum computing. Is 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. The 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 on. Several people in Georgetown or several 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 intelligence. 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 mechanics. It's where you very carefully make connections between these quantum bits, right, in such a way that when the wave functions collapse, it has the equivalent of searching a large search Space that collapsed to an answer so that 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. So 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 like simulating a lot of like chemical or physical Systems. And quantum computers could then do that in a way, do these sort of like 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 this 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 how to get to the many thousands of bits we need to handle like really big problems and there's all sorts They're working on 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 like fundamental, we're going to break through barriers and what, you know, training these things Or building these things. ([Time 0:53:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cd3e254d-5b13-4dd6-928c-fa9e232ea581)) - **Composer Rebuilt Life With Lifestyle-Centric Planning** - Kieran switched from full-time composing to lifestyle-centric planning after burnout and income loss. - He rebuilt income by optimizing consulting rates and deep work, reaching better output and work-life balance. Transcript: Cal Newport Do we have case study music? Yeah. No, let's hear that. We need some music. All 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 into 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. In 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 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. It 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. The 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 satisfaction is not any one factor. It's many, many different factors that affect your day-to 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. That'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. So 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, you know, 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, but 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 and. And 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. ([Time 1:03:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39c69ab2-42e2-465d-a93c-3b5fd6931401)) - **Be The Curator For Your Kids' Media** - Don't give adolescents unrestricted access to algorithmic apps like TikTok or Instagram. - Act as the primary curator of their media exposure and model civic values in person. Transcript: Cal Newport So 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 to, you know, provide for the family, but you keep that reasonable. You 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 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 hamstrings are sore as I sit here. I spend a lot of time. I'm on the board of my kids' school. I'm giving a talk there next week. A lot of time with my kids, doing things with my kids because that has to be – that is my hobby. That's what I mean by my hobby. It's like that's actually my priority when it comes to spending time and doing things outside of work. And then that will 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 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. Do 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. This 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. We 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. ([Time 1:10:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b017a7cd-8bbc-420a-91cb-3bfb1daeef33)) - **Algorithmic Curation Amplifies Harmful Viral Content** - Real-world incidents show algorithmic curation can amplify harmful trends, conspiracies, and dangerous stunts. - These outcomes illustrate that curation by ML at scale can be socially destructive, not merely noisy. Transcript: Cal Newport 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. How are people using this right now? It's not going to be pretty. But before we get there, let me take another quick break to talk about a sponsor. The holidays are approaching. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, all of them. You can get what you need to personalize your home for these holidays with Wayfair. We're talking, you know, decorations and inflatables, but also like stuff inside like accent pillows or like maybe hosting some sort of big dinner for these various holidays and you Can make your holiday events a breeze with quality cookware that will wow any guest, etc. As long-time listeners know, my favorite Halloween to decorate for is Halloween and Wayfair has been one of my go-to sources for the props and decorations and interior accents I need To make my grand schemes for Halloween haunts work. True story. I always look each year like, hey, what is what are the new props that Wayfair has? This is true, Jesse. They introduced this year a new prop that, man, I could have used last year. So, you know, I did a UFOfo themed haunt last year and one of the hard things we had was actually trying to fill build a good like the crash ufo at the beginning scene of our narrative scenes Well wayfair i just discovered they have a new ufo themed prop that's a nine foot inflatable ufo so it's nine feet tall and the ufo is up top and then there's like a abduction you know the The coming down from it. And then at the bottom, there's like someone down the bottom that's about to be pulled up into the UFO. Oh, it would have been perfect. It would have been perfect. So, you know, again, Wayfair knows what they're doing. Now, here's the thing. Wayfair is huge selection of home items in every style. It makes it easy to find exactly what's right for you. And their prices are always fair. Like whatever budget you're looking for, whether it's like, Hey, I just want like a, um, something on the lower end for use, like in a, like a kid's party or like a higher end thing. That's going to be like an impressive piece of furniture that you'll have in your house for, for, you know, years to come. They have what you need at whatever budget point you're looking for. And with free and easy delivery, even for big stuff like tables or sofas, there's no limit to what you can get from Wayfair. So get organized, refreshed, and ready for the holidays for way less. Head to wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W-A Wayfair, every style, every home. I also want to talk about an app that I think is really smart. Called Headway. Headway is a daily app that keeps your brain sharp with key ideas from the world's best nonfiction. It has 1800 summaries across more than 30 nonfiction categories from productivities and happiness to money and beyond. With Headway, each session you do takes 15 minutes, making it easy to stay mentally active, whether you're commuting or taking a break, or it's like you're switching from one task over To another. So it's made for people who want to keep learning and evolving even on busy days. You can think of Headway as your personal growth guide, right? A way to take in useful information in an otherwise busy life, give you personalized recommendations that can expose you to new ideas that make a difference and all done with an award-winning Design. So it's like very easy to use. It is the delight to use this app. Headway has over 50 million downloads and 2 million monthly users. 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. These are some of the world's best ideas in just 15 minutes at a time. So go to makeheadway.com/deep to find out more and use the promo code deep. That's MakeHeadway.com/deep and use the promo code deep. Grow your way with Headway. All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment. All right, God help us. I got three articles here all about TikTok that 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 will come away saying kudos to plaudits to the American Ingenuity. It's going to 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 see what we got here. I'm going to load up the first article here now. I'll put it 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. All 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? Not letting an 11-year 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. So if you're listening to this, phew, Christ is 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 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 say 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 ([Time 1:14:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/864784df-474d-4f7b-8c1a-b2aecab9b547)) - **Kids Are On TikTok Despite Age Limits** - Canadian investigators found hundreds of thousands of children use TikTok despite age restrictions. - Cal's blunt solution: keep young children off the internet rather than relying on platform protections. Transcript: Cal Newport I'll put it 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. All 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? Not letting an 11-year have access to the internet. That's nuts. That's the solution. ([Time 1:18:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/52fa3012-d489-4eb6-bf68-2835bdd42509)) - **Rapture Talk Went Viral On TikTok** - A TikTok corner called Rapture Talk spread end-of-world claims from a South African pastor. - Algorithmic amplification made niche prophetic claims trend far beyond their original reach. Transcript: Cal Newport 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. So if you're listening to this, phew, Christ is 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 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 say 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, no, it's crazy. 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. ([Time 1:19:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a76e2c3d-a9c3-4592-9275-65763c820582)) - **Copycat Stunts Led To Death And Charges** - Teens replicated a dangerous TikTok stunt (standing on a car) that resulted in a death and criminal charges. - The platform's reward for outrageous content can drive copycat behavior with lethal outcomes. Transcript: Cal Newport 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. Jesse, 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 and 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 U.S. City recommendations, is capturing some sort of like fundamental human tendency to like we like stunts that are outrageous and attention catching and potentially dangerous. And 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. You're like, that's crazy and it's dangerous. ([Time 1:21:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/da4429f6-2a7e-43be-8b5e-86c30a6efc65))