All right now you're actually looking at.

All right, so you probably don't realize that right now you're actually looking at something quite rare

because I am a millennial computer scientist book author standing on a TED stage and yet I've never had a social media account.

How this happened was actually somewhat random.

Social media first came on to my radar when I was at college, my sophomore year of college,

this is when Facebook arrived at our campus.

And at the time, which was right after the first dot-com bust, I had had a dorm room business, I had to shut it down in the bust and then suddenly

this other kid from Harvard named Mark had this product called Facebook

and people are getting excited about it so it's sort of a fit of somewhat immature professional jealousy I said I'm not going to use this thing.

I'm not going to help this kid's business. What's that ever going to mount to?

So anyways, I go along my life, I look up not long later and I see that everyone I know is really hooked on this thing and from the clarity you can get when you have some objectivity, some perspective on it, I realize this seems a little bit dangerous so I never signed up. I've never had a social media account since.

So I'm here for two reasons.

I want to deliver two messages.

The first message I want to deliver

is that even though I've never had a social media account, I'm okay.

You don't have to worry.

It turns out I still have friends.

I still know what's going on in the world.

There's a computer scientist.

I still collaborate with people all around the world.

I'm still regularly exposed serendipitously to interesting ideas,

and I rarely describe myself as lacking in entertainment options.

...