New Year’s Eve of Destruction: The 307th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Hey folks, welcome to the 307th Dark Horse Podcast live stream. I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, you are Dr. Heather Heying. I was doing a little research before the show and it turns out today is the last day of the year. Yep. The eve of the first day of the year. Nope. We have the curtains drawn, but if you were to open them, you would see it is daylight out there. It's the last day of the year. New Year's Eve is coming up. I hope everyone is prepared. It has plans, reservations, whatever you need. You know in Hong Kong, it's already the new year. That is true. Is that true? Wait. How many time zones ahead are they? Like a billion? A billion. That's not even the next year. I don't know, but it's something between 15 and 20, I would think. Okay. Okay. Alright. Well, happy New Year to our viewers in Hong Kong. Yes, I would like that. Yeah. Alright. I'll go with that. that has come out actually, the thing you found is from a few years ago, but it's timely because it's only getting worse. And as a researcher from this year, about sort of things we may be ought to be keeping an eye on. Not that there is any shortage of things to keep an eye on. But first, as always, we pay the rent. We should do that. Yeah, we have three sponsors at the top of the hour, as always. This is when you hear our ads. And you can be sure that if you are hearing us read ads at the top of the hour on Dark Horse, these are sponsors who truly make products or offer services that we very much are enthusiastic about. And our very first sponsor this week is Nudewas. Brand Nudewas on this New Year's Eve. In Hong Kong. No. No, right. Where is it? It's some of its New Year's Eve somewhere. Here. Our first sponsor today is Brand Nudewas. And we are thrilled to have them. It's Sonna Space. Several years ago, I went digging into Sonna's, both traditionally infrared and phenomena arous of information. Then red light therapy became bipolar and the glut of products and claims became even more confusing. 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In fact, for a little bit, you can show my screen if you can show my screen. Awesome. See, 2026 is going to be amazing. Tech problems resolved all over the place. You know it is going to be amazing. Yeah. It is going to amaze. No, it's going to be fantastic. Fantastic. All right. I'm with you. And amazing. Hopefully in a good way. Okay. So here it is recently published in the journal Psychological Bulletin with a team out of Griffith University in Australia. A paper called feeds feelings and focus a systematic review and meta analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short form video use. Let me just begin by reading a few paragraphs out of the introduction and then I'll pull my screen back and then I'll also show results. But in the intro we have. That was the first time to read. Short form video consumption S. Fee V short form video consumption and its potential influence on attentional processing can be understood through the lens of groves and Thompson's 1970 dual theory of habituation and sensitization. This is one of these things that will seem obvious, but it's nice to sort of have the theoretical background. According to this framework, repeat the name of the framework. Dual theory of habituation and sensitization. Yep. From 1970. According to this framework, repeated exposure to highly stimulating fast-paced content may contribute to habituation in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving or deep learning. This process may gradually reduce cognitive endurance and weaken the brain's ability to sustain attention on a single task. Simultaneously short form video platforms may promote sensitization by providing immediate algorithmically curated rewards, potentially reinforcing impulsive engagement patterns and encouraging habitual seeking of instant gratification. Couple more paragraphs from the setup for the introduction. So, and they take on the question of effects on cognition and mental health separately. This is a review. This is a meta analysis of several existing studies, and they do seem to have, of, of done a good job of finding what's out there. They say the highly engaging, and so this is about mental health in particular rather than cognition, the highly engaging algorithm algorithm driven nature of short form video platforms is thought to encourage success of use by stimulating the brain. Dopamine is a very important tool for the brain to be able to use by stimulating the brain's dopaminergic reward system, which may reinforce habitual engagement through instant gratification and unpredictable content rewards. The continuous cycle of swiping and receiving new, emotionally stimulating content has been proposed to trigger dopamine release, creating a reinforcement loop that contributes to patterns of habitual use and greater emotional reliance on digital interactions. This habitual engagement may be associated with heightened stress and anxiety. They say, with regard to the tone of that paragraph, this is in the introduction. So, you could find a tone like that. This may happen. It's been proposed that, that those were things that were going to be tested in this review. Those are not the things that are being tested in this review with regard to the dope, like the mechanism of action, like dopamine, or a cycle interaction. But that is consistent with the work being done here. And then just one more paragraph from the introduction here. One more section. Such reliance on online interactions has also been correlated with lower life satisfaction. These associations between short form video use and mental health have been reported across youths, young adults, and middle age adults. Those some studies have reported no association between short form video use and mental health indices. And I include that just to indicate, like, given that there's been a bunch of work done. Why, you know, what, what purpose does this review told? And it is as, as will always be the case with the review. To precisely, to precisely curate, collate and analyze the net. The state of knowledge. Yes. And if I can just get my screen back for a bit to, because I don't need to share everyone all the methods. A couple of the things when the methods that I found interesting are that of the studies that they ended up using. 74% were from Asia. So this is a, this is pretty skewed culturally. And they did not, as far as I know, it's possible they did drill down on that. Give us any more granular data on where in Asia. But so three quarters of the data being reviewed here are out of Asia, 11% from North America, 11% from Europe. And then the remaining 3% from Africa and 1% from Central America, apparently South America had none. Unless they're just using Central America inappropriately. I don't know. And 52% of the studies, excuse me, included in this review. Did not name a platform just referring to short form video content broadly. And 48% actually identified TikTok as the one that they were looking at. But, but the, but the analysis includes Facebook, Instagram, the reals, YouTube shorts, all of the things that we would expect. Everybody seems to have adopted a version of rice. And there's a, there's a, there's some China specific platforms that we don't know the names of, but they're exact equivalent of say TikTok. Okay, so let's just look at. I'm going to scroll through and get to table what you can show here. Not very beautiful. This is not a table for the, for the record books in terms of visual appeal. But this is their summary of mean effect sizes for cognitive and mental health correlates of short form video engagement. And if we just at a broad brush level, look at the variable in the left column and see that the p values are almost entirely highly, highly significant. And the problem that the work has been done well, I think it was, but this is not my area of expertise. Nor do I have access to, to the data. So I, you know, I wouldn't even have been able to redo their analysis if I wanted to. They found no differences between what they're calling youths and adults with regard to there are effects. And actually, let me just. Effects presumably means lasting effects. Well, if you're going to ask specific specific questions from the table, I'm not going to be able to answer them. With regard to cognitive demands, they are finding attention, inhibitory control, language, and memory all affected by use of short form video content, reasoning, not working memory, not nearly a significant, but also affected. And then those are with regard to cognitive correlates. Reasoning is not affected. Reasoning is not affected. That's the end of the question. Yes. And then with regard to mental health correlates, they find affect not as highly affected, but still significant by both standards anxiety. Interestingly, and they were surprised by this, both body image and self-esteem are not affected. Their proposal for why that is the case is that there's so much diversity of content out there right now that you can easily find, you know, body positivity short form content that makes you feel great about yourself at any size, right? That sort of thing. But depression, loneliness, sleep, stress, and well-being were all negatively affected by the consumption of short form video content. However, and here this is a big however, and here if I can just pull my screen back for a moment or actually for good. There's a there's a big caveat, which is that the vast majority of the studies that they are reviewing here in fact 87% are correlational rather than group comparison. They're not doing much pairs. They're not doing before and after. The 13% were of some sort, but the vast majority of the studies are simply looking at people who do and people who do not consume short form video content and then presumably controlling for at least age and some other measures. That is going to vary. So that's actually it's huge highly likely that the people who resist consuming given how ubiquitous it is the people who resist this are likely not to be a similar group to those who consume it. And so who knows what's hiding. Yes, and specifically with regard to and then then you can ref as much as you want, but specifically with regard to the cognitive effects they write in their discussion. We regard to this problem of a match pairs design is always a better design with regard to knowing what you're looking at than simply correlational designs quote those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating low effort content or find it more difficult to disengage from continuous streams of short videos. And I just at all 2019 paper to support that claim. So again, this review is looking at separately a cognitive function and mental health function. And so specifically with regard to cognitive function, they say, hey, the correlational nature of most of the most of the analyses that we're looking at here may actually simply obscure the fact that you may have a baseline difference in cognitive capacity to begin with in the populations that do and do not consume large amounts of short form. Video content and of course the same may be true for mental health. And in fact, I would expect it to be the case that people who are already more anxious, more sleep deprived, less likely to be able to get to sleep and stay asleep may find themselves drawn to drawn to the kinds of content that easily gets you in and doesn't easily release you. So just to fill in for people who aren't used to thinking in this way, matched pairs, which you've mentioned is a way to correct for such biases. And basically what you do is you take two individuals who are alike relative to the parameters that you spot is important. And you put them together and you compare these two populations. So basically what you have is built in similarity between the two groups, the control and the treatment group. I don't think that's right. That's that that could easily be a correlational study. I tend to think of and I think there are a lot of ways that matched pairs can reveal itself, but I tend to think of an individual who is tracked before and after the. Oh, you can do it that way too. But that that's actually matched pairs. But if you if you're just trying to sort of control for as many variables as possible, but you get a population over here and a population over here. The fact that you may have, you know, exactly counted the same number of individuals in each group doesn't make it a match pair study. No, no, it's not it's not the same number of individuals, but let's say that you had an issue where the question was potentially dependent on age. You could take two populations and not control for age and not know whether the distinction that you were seeing was a result of the thing that you were testing or the result of the fact that you had, you know, a generational difference where you raised with the stuff versus where you're not. If you match for age, then you can eliminate that as a contributing factor because the point is your two populations are alike in this regard. Therefore, distinctions are not owing to that parameter. So you could. If you matched everyone for cognitive capacity in advance, right. Then you could know that the decreased cognitive capacity among those watching short from video was more likely due to the fact that they were watching the short from video. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I don't know if you were where you were going. Let's talk. Okay. So I wanted to just point out a couple of things here. One. This is a new version of what I suspect is quite a long standing problem. And I remember, you know, when you and I were kids, the three camera sitcoms, right. The three camera sitcoms pumped out this. Basically a come, you know, comedic commodity. And one phenomenon that was commented on by many people was that you would sit there, you would watch the thing you'd be enjoying it. And then the commercial would come on and you couldn't remember what you were watching. Right. I never heard this. Yeah. So anyway, the point is whatever is engaging you. Oh, my God, is it awful, especially when you come to understand that your enjoyment of it is being manipulated with things like that. You know, you're not like you can't figure it out. And it's not like it happened all the time. Yeah. The point was it was a relatively, especially if it was a sitcom that seems to me like that is a really clear indicator to run away. Of course, stop doing what you're doing. If all it takes is to be able to do something like that. If all it takes is one look over here to completely forget what you thought you were totally focused on. I 100% agree. And I think this is part of how we got here that we didn't notice these effects. We weren't thinking about them in as great a detail, at least the public wasn't aware of the hazards of these things. And these hazards have had to get pretty extreme for us to start all focusing on, well, hey, what is this actually doing to me? You know, as you know, I've been railing against Laftrack. Yeah, forever. It's one of the great evils because it actually literally manipulates your internal sense of what is funny. And we don't even know what funny is. Funny is a very important human universal. And here it's being manipulated by some guy in a booth who wants to take a joke that isn't funny and cause you to think that you're in a room full of people laughing, which is, you know, you can detect the absurdity of it. But when you're sitting alone, laughing along with people who weren't there, you know, to some thing that was done in a quiet studio. And again, as I've. Laughing along with people that don't exist. They did, but they were laughing at something else. Yeah. So. Laughing along with people who not only aren't sharing the experience you're having now, but never had the experience that you're having now, you're laughing at something hearing other people trigger your social response. So laughter is a social response circuit, which is real and which is, you know, it is both a unifying it. It's an in group out group assessment as we've talked about before. But the idea that you can get your in group out group laughter response triggered by hearing laughter of people who not only aren't present with you, but have never experienced the thing that you are laughing at is an extraordinary. Just a gosh, what I can't think of it's enough front to humanity, but it's they like we've been the next thing that we're going to be talking about is this again like just how how dare they and how stupid of us to let them grab our ancient circuits and manipulate them. Yep. And this happened in a in city is way because initially those sitcoms were done in front of a live audience and you and I grew up in LA. We sort of know how this worked people who were going to tour Universal Studios were given free tickets to a show this evening. So they're in town. They're excited. They're likely to laugh. There was a certain amount of manipulation of the audience to get them to laugh at the right moments, but it was at least organic. Yeah, no one you know walked around LA at least at that point. Maybe there's still parts of LA where this is true. People would be like come to the show tonight. Come on show. It's free. It was an actual like, oh, opportunistic cool. Come that's like these were. This is a decent cross section of Americans at least Americans who had money enough to travel to LA because it mostly wasn't entry. It was in those audiences, but sometimes yeah, I went once I think, but it was actually a great experience. It was actually a necessary experience. If you were going to be a consumer of television to see how this stuff was actually made and it was very eye opening right to see the behind the scenes one time was spectacular. Then so it was to cumbersome bar cheaper to do it with a canned laugh track, which is highly I think initially it started as they would supplement if a joke wasn't quite funny enough that they would supplement laughs. Well, so not the main point of what we're talking about, but to cumbersome also acting in front of a live audience and acting when you have as many takes as you need is a very, very different thing. So, you know, it's not not the screen actors often don't have mad skills, but live acting theater acting or acting in front of a live audience, even if it's being recorded is is a different and frankly much more human and deep set of skills. Yeah, it is and it's why Saturday night live back when it was funny was important is because you didn't know what was going to happen. People broke character. They, you know, got the giggles and you know it was exciting because it was because the production values couldn't be tightly controlled. Yeah. But then some things happen. I think there was supplementation of laughs, which is already cheating, right? That joke wasn't funny. So still in front of a live audience, but we've got right and then I was thinking about this the other day for some reason. The thing that I think may have really broken it. I would love to know their actual history was mash and mash well, here's the problem. Oh, no, you and I have been to the mash set where it was. It's no longer there's nothing there, but you know, it's in the in the hills outside of L.A. You know, close enough not in Korea is not in Korea, but I remember watching that show with my dad all the time being like, God, dad. Korea looks a lot like something. Sure does. But the thing is there was no practical way. It wasn't a three camera sitcom because it was done in an actual like military quasi military camp that they built for the purpose. So it was not possible and you couldn't get the audience there. There was no words for them to sit. So the point is they did it with Laftrack. And in that case, you had very talented people. That's not that's not saying it's the first, but I think it broke it because it was such a good show that to the extent that Laftrack was anathema to people. That show normalized it completely. Well, that's good enough for a match. Maybe we should get a Laftrack. I don't think so. But okay, so you had this long period of sitcoms that were terrible three camera sitcoms, totally formulaic all Laftrack. And then there was like rock. Do you remember rock? They did it in the front of a live audience when everybody else. Right. And it was kind of exciting. Right. Yeah. It was good. And the fact is it was all done without, you know, they didn't retake it was a throwback. And then the other thing that ultimately broke it was scrubs, which decided not to do it. So you're talking about breaking Laftrack. Breaking Laftrack. So scrubs decided not to have any laughs. They didn't have an audience. And it wasn't a three camera sitcom. So they delivered their jokes and everything was effectively deadpan. No, he was laughing. So you were either sitting there in your living room laughing or you weren't. Yeah. Which was good. And it was good. Yeah. Right. So anyway, there's some long history of our being manipulated in these extreme ways. And, you know, rebellions of various different kinds. And I think the, I mean, I think we can each detect in ourselves here. What's going on with the short form video stuff. Right. Like here's one I notice about myself, which I can't stand. If I'm watching short form video, I can be watching something absolutely breathtaking. And I'm still impatient for the next one. I can't wait the 30 seconds until it's over because I can see, you know, how impressive this person is doing their thing. And it's not like, yeah, I want to watch this and reflect on it for a moment or two. It's like, wow, that is amazing. I wonder what's next. And that, you know, that is. That's low quality stuff right there. Yeah. And then the fact that I can't remember. Add to that. So I think. I think I haven't watched very much. So I haven't had that experience. But what does get fed to me is typically nature stuff. And increasingly it's AI. Yep. And you and I can presumably tell at a deeper level than most people can. Most of the time. But 12 months ago, I feel like I could always tell and it was pretty rare. And now I feel like I can tell a fair bit. And almost every nature bit that is being fed to me, including from accounts that used to be high quality. Right. And now look at them ago, there's nothing coming out of your stuff that I believe. And I know that I can't tell exactly what kind of stuff is actually. And this is really important. It's actually a kind of cognitive poison because for you and me, everything we've ever seen an animal do is something an animal has done. Absolutely. And it allows you to extrapolate. And then sometimes there's a question like you see, oh, I see this is, I don't know what to do with this. I saw a video of a crow using a piece of plastic trash, a lid to something, to ski down a roof. It was labeled as AI, somebody, but I've seen video of an animal, this exactly this animal, doing this exact behavior. Not that individual, but that's the thing. No, but this is the thing. A species of crow, some species of crow. Some species of crow. I've absolutely do this. I've had students, back when I were professors, I had students study exactly this, find it in the wild, crows are incredible. And yeah, they ski. They'll do this. They have fun. Absolutely. And you know, but the problem is, so this is a perfect demonstration of the Cartesian crisis problem. Because now, it just so happens that I saw a video of the same behavior from before AI could have produced it. So I'm confident that this animal sometimes does things like this, an individual will do this. But if you didn't happen to have that experience, then the point is, oh, yeah, more AI slop. More AI slop. And Toby and I are, Toby, our 19 year old son and I had an experience this week, by the water. And there's a lot of interesting stuff out there. There's Rogers seals. They're not. Yeah. I call them the Rogers for reasons I don't even know. I think because there was one out there at some point named Roger and then I've other showed how you're like, you're all the Rogers. So we're out by the water. There's like a shallow area and then there's an island and then beyond that, there's like, you know, fast, moving straight up sand, sand on channel, 300 feet deep, really fast, moving water. And it's a season when we're seeing bucks around and we had recently seen this four point buck really, really beautiful animal. And we're out there and Toby's like, is that a deer in the water? And I'm like, no, it's going to be a gulverite and a log. And I get out the back. And I was like, nope, that's a four point buck swimming. He's going to hit his death if he hits the 300 foot deep, really fast, moving water. But like we're both watching with binoculars. And we both took crap video that you could totally fake. But he and I saw it, we know for sure that we saw four point bucks swimming in the Sailor C. And then he turned around and sort of didn't come right back to shore. The closest point, like we could tell what the closest line was. And he was like, no, I'm going to take a hypotenuse for you. Like, dude, I don't know where I'm going to see you again. Like, that was some serious errors. I don't know if you were showing off or crawling on the island. I don't know. But this is one of these things. Like, I know deer can swim. Yep. We had a mountain line on the island earlier this year where presumably it's swam in and presumably it's now swam off. But I've never seen a big mammal swim in this water before. And one that didn't belong in the water, like a Roger seal. But it was another one of these things, or if someone else, if I had seen the video that I took online, but like, I don't know, how would I know? How can I tell? Yep. That's real. Right. That's like a giant rack on a deer with only his head above water and he's swimming in pretty deep water. When Zach and I went to Panama with Michael Yon, we were in the Panama Canal and happened on to a Hallermunky that was swimming across. That's right. So, again, this A, you could fake that, B, this wasn't fake, C, I had lived in the Panama Canal for a year and a half and never once saw that. Right. I never saw any monkey swim. I know that they do. They can, but in any case, the problem is we are now going to become cynical about everything. And actually, this is going to sound like a non-sequitur. I've just been writing about thinking about the nature of evidence and the value of one-off observations of what we call anecdotes, especially in field science, especially when you're looking at animal behavior. And this is a point that Barbara Smuts, a great primatologist, who was also on the dissertation committee, wrote about with regard to her work on baboons many years ago. Like, yes, you hope for sufficient data taken with careful observational techniques that you can submit your data to physical analyses. But data taken with appropriate observational techniques of which you don't have enough to submit them to physical analyses are still valuable. And things that you just see when you're like on your way to or from the trooper, whatever it is that you're sure you saw, but you weren't even taking the data with careful observational modes. And you certainly only saw it once, so you can't submit it to physical analyses, still valid observations, still absolutely important. So this insane focus that we saw during COVID on randomized control trials, and it's the only pharmacist to go of scientific evidence that is valid, absolutely not. For one thing, if that is the only thing that you believe, you will stop trusting your eyes, because your eyes are rarely going to give you sufficient numbers of incidents, nor are you going to have been collecting those observations sufficiently that you can then do the stats on them. And if you decide the only thing that is real, that is scientifically valid, is something that has been submitted to rigorous physical analysis, especially in an RCT, a randomized control trial, then you are doomed to only believe experts and the experts will lie to you. Yeah. Like, it is like we need to believe in our own eyes, and therefore we need to at some level understand the difference between anecdote and observation and observation in small quantities versus in large enough quantities, just submit to physical analyses. But we need to also recognize that those less frequent kinds of observations are absolutely valid, because otherwise, you see a video like the one you did of Kro's skiing down a roof or, you know, if I had been shown by someone else, a Howler monkey swimming in the Panama Canal, I don't know. Who knows? Who knows? You saw it. I know. Right. So you're going to be agnostic about everything. I think we have talked about this before. I think the philosophy of science is broken because it was built around the simple sciences, and we don't know how to think carefully about complexity. Yeah. When I hear, you know, that an anecdote, an observation that you've only made once, can't have statistics done on it, but it's still valid. I think, of course, it's valid, right? Because there is an implicit hypothesis, let's say the hypothesis is that X animal does not swim. You observe one time that it does swim without having formalized that hypothesis. You never, you just, everybody knows that animal doesn't swim. You've seen it once. You have now falsified that hypothesis that it doesn't swim. So the point is that doesn't require statistics, nor does most of science. And the fact that we have become basically religious disciples of an order that fetishizes data and statistical analysis and p-values is literally making us stupid. And you know, you can see this in the madness surrounding novel medical interventions. You should, every time somebody proposes a novel medical intervention, the point is you're intervening in a complex system, there are going to be unintended consequences to the extent that nobody can tell you what they are. Sometimes they can't tell you any of them or refuse to tell you any of them. Sometimes they can tell you some, but who knows what they won't know for 25 years. The answer is you should have a strong bias against accepting that thing. Well, you need it to survive. Okay. But this is in some ways the ascendancy of pseudo-nuberacy of the people who've got the tools to and the tenacity to count things. End up at the top of the heap. And they say, well, we've got the numbers. Therefore we've got the stats there for trust us. And where we should all start is, what did you count and why? Did you count the right things? Even if you did count the right things, that is to say the right category of things, did you count them accurately? Did you count them under the right circumstances? Okay. Now even if you did all of that, did you apply the, you know, did you do that with the right experimental design or observational design? And even if you did all that correctly, then did you apply the correct statistics? Almost no one does because these are totally black box. Like, oh, I'm just going to hit a button on my physical program and hope that it spits out an answer, I like. So there's so many steps during which anyone who is claiming the mantle of expertise can have gotten it wrong. And we need to and we frankly almost all of us can learn to start asking those questions. What did you count? Why did you count? Did you count the thing that you say you did? And, you know, absent that, I'm sorry. The fact that you have a bunch of numbers doesn't mean anything. It's not sufficient. It's neither, it's certainly not sufficient and it's not even necessary to gain knowledge. Yes, it's not how, you know, the greatest discoveries were made. And in some ways, it's just as a laugh track in a sitcom, presages are current confrontation with much more sophisticated manipulative technologies. The number of scientists who are using a computer to apply statistics that they do not understand in hopes that they, you know, it's like pulling the slot machine lever. Oh, I'm going to get a statistically significant key value. If not, maybe I'll do some other statistical test and see if one pops up and if it does say that's another paper from my CV. Oh, do my data break the assumptions of the test? Some statistical programs will let you apply that test anyway, even if your data literally are not actually relevant to the test and yet they'll still spit out an answer. Right. And so you've got a whole see of people behaving this way. They don't know what the assumptions of the test are. And so they can't detect that they're even in violation because what they're really trying to do is put another paper on their CV. They don't actually even deeply care whether they've got the answer right. So the fact that we've got that is terrible enough, but the fact that we are going to elevate work done in that way above other things like incontrovertible observations that X happened and therefore X is possible. Yes. Does happen sometimes is, you know, it's an inversion of what science is and it's part of why I don't know Steve Patterson if you're out there, but we need somebody to rethink the philosophy of science so that it properly deals with complex systems as I think you know better than anybody. Okay. One other point I wanted to add, the analysis that you showed, as far as I can tell, has no developmental component. Well, and the fact that they didn't find a distinction in these, you know, massive studies that are correlational between what they're, they had three categories, actually youth, young adult and adults, middle age adults, was interesting to me. I would certainly predict a stronger effect with earlier exposure to short term video. Well, it depends. I could easily see that that would not show up. Yes. No difference between a 50 year old and a 12 year old if you measure the parameters of how they are being affected by these things in real time. But in real time, yeah. What you want to know is, and obviously take a long time to figure this out, but what you want to know is if the person who had this at 12 years of age is different cognitively than the person who didn't have it until they were 30 or 40 or 50, and I, let's just say, I feel absolutely certain that it will have profound developmental impacts on you. Because for one thing, obviously we're talking about addiction. People detect the addiction in themselves. They talk about it openly. Addiction is a real phenomenon here. To remind people, I don't remember how long ago it would have been, but at some point we talked about Zach's model, Zach, our son, began talking about what he was seeing amongst people in his friend group and his... When he was still in high school. Like, so we're talking about like three years ago. Three years ago. And what he observed, which you and I both thought was very clever and insightful, was that everything... So he used the example of a cigarette. And his point was it used to be that a cigarette was an amount of time. It took a certain amount of time to smoke a cigarette. He's not a smoker, but to a certain amount of time to smoke a cigarette. And it had to be... Therefore had to have that bandwidth to go do it. And so they were spaced out. I believe that his model actually had sort of three stages, for example. So with regard to tobacco, originally you also rolled it yourself. Right. So there's an activity in which you have to have the things and you have to have the calmness to roll your own cigarette. And then you just buy a pack, but you still take a moment. Still takes... But then we move into vaping. We move into vaping. And his point is that this has now become perfectly granular. And that he saw big impacts of the fact that you could literally take a hit off a vape rather than have three minutes or whatever it takes to smoke a cigarette. And that he said that content that was coming online was having the same sort of phenomenon that if you had a minute, you would reach for your phone and you would find something engaging. And with his point was all of the thinking that goes on when you are not occupied by something engaging is the important stuff of life. And that because this stuff is now so granular that you have an entire generation that doesn't have the experience of being alone with their thoughts and finding out where that goes, being motivated by the fact that they're bored to think something interesting that then engages them and leads to a project or whatever. So... Yeah. No, I've said this before, but I used to say to our children, I don't believe in boredom like you don't... If you think you're bored and figure out, you're like, this is your life, my goodness. Yeah. That's on you. That's on you. And there's so much. And this, you know, they're old enough. They were born in 2004 in 2006. There were no screens. That wasn't an option for them. And I was like, go outside, you know, build a thing, play with Legos, play with your animals, whatever it is, make something in the kitchen. But it's also true that all of us, I actually had this experience yesterday. I was waiting in line at the bank. And the bank was almost completely empty except the two tellers were occupied with two people who were doing very, I don't know what, but it was just taking forever. So I'm all alone in a bank on December 30th, a week that most people may even assume that the banks are just not even operational. The only four people in the bank are totally engaged with each other. And I can't even... You know, I like to observe people. There's really nothing to observe. So I'm standing there. Mostly inside of banks aren't interesting. And this one is no exception. I'm standing there. It's taking... I must have said standing first and only person in line for like 15 minutes. It took a long time. And I kept on resisting the urge to belong my phone. Like, okay, I'm trying to resist this urge because I'm in public. There's the capacity to engage, except there isn't. There's nothing to engage here. There's not even anything to read. Right. Right. I can't really... Like, I'm observing that one of the clients appears to have many stacks of $1 bills. Like, that's why this is taking so long. I'm trying to put together a story about what that might mean. You know, how does an older woman in coming into the bank at the end of the year with a giant stack of $1 bills? Has she been saving... You know, she'd pay for everything with cash. And then anytime it's a $1 bill that comes back, she saves it. And she's going to deposit it at the end of the year. That's, you know, one story I came up with. But that story didn't take 15 minutes. No. Right. So, you know, I only got two potential stories that I can come up with because two initial interactions that are happening in this bank. I'm like, okay. What do I hurt by doing this? Well, opportunity, perhaps. Right. Like, anytime you're doing this, something might come up that you miss and you will never know if you did. Frankly, inside a not interesting building that no one else is coming in or out of, I probably wouldn't have, but I sort of, I persisted because it became a point of pride, honestly. And I think this is a place where pride is useful. Like, nope, I'm not, not a person who pulls out my phone every time I'm standing in line. Sometimes I'm like, I'm willing to. It's not like I will never do that. But in this case, frankly, the longer it took and it just, you know, it dragged on and on. I could not figure out what could possibly be taking so long about either of these interactions. But the longer it took, the more insistent I became with myself, you will not succumb. Yeah. Like, you will not pull this thing out and do whatever I would have done on it. All right. So I think just as game theory puts you in a predicament that we can describe, but you don't necessarily detect it as it's happening, you know, the collective action problems where every individual is making a rational decision that results in an irrational aggregate. Yeah. I would say you ask, what is the cost of looking at your phone? And it occurs to me, the cost is so small, it's negligible. The aggregate, yes, aggregate cost of doing that every time you have a moment with nothing obvious to do and, you know, the bank is the perfect example. It's a boring place. Yeah. So it's not like you can do much, even the people watching is slowed to a crawl because I spent a lot of time considering their interest rate offers for home equity loans. Like, yeah, I'll let go. And then it goes up to 0.74 above prime after, well, I've done it. I'm there. I know everything that there is to know from this poster. Yeah. So, but anyway, I think, you know, probably this has a name somewhere in economics, presumably, but the idea of something where the individual cost is negligible, but the aggregate cost is in this case astronomical, right? Is something that you have to be aware of because each time you're calculating, what's the harm? Yeah. And I imagine, you know, circling back to Zach's observation and his example with with the guard to smoking, it can feel, you know, oh, you're a two-pack a day smoker. My God, man, you're going to die of lung cancer. Oh, I just occasionally take a hit off my vape pen. You know, it doesn't, because each and I don't even know what the language is. I don't know if hit or like I don't know what the actual language is for vaping is, but presumably the amount of, you know, frankly, horrifying, like vaping is way more toxic than smoking, but the amount, say you're only focused on nicotine, which is stupid if you're vaping, because it's the plastics and the everything else is so. What is it? Probably a thleam, but I can't remember what they've used to say in saying that anyone is doing that, but I don't, may have said here before, like I would vastly prefer our children to take up smoking cigarettes than vaping like so much more. Yep. Don't want them to, but right better. Right. But presumably if you're only focusing on nicotine, what's the amount of nicotine you get from every hit on a vape pen? Yeah, it's like on the, what, like the macro nutrient measures on food labels that the FDA requires. If it's below, say, I don't remember, but like below five calories, you can claim it's got zero calories. Right. It's that thing. Oh, these mints have no calories. Well, that's not true. If you eat a hundred of them, you've definitely, like if you eat one of them, you've consumed, you've consumed something that is affecting your digestive tract and putting it into a mode that is active as opposed to not active. There's a difference. There's a fundamental difference between fasting and not fasting. Even just, you know, nothing in, nothing including water, dry fasting, as we've talked about. But as soon as you put something in that requires processing at a nutritional level by the body, that processing is costing you something. And the idea of these mints have no calories. Now, that's not true. Can you get, like I appreciate that you're not claiming that a hundred mints is a serving, but I'd like to know what those, how those numbers change miraculously from say zero to ten once you're talking about having a hundred of them. And it seems like zero times zero mints versus a hundred mints might read on a label as zero calories versus ten calories. And of course, I'm just, I'm making up fictional mints here, but obviously zero times a hundred isn't ten. But the math of how things are reported, how things are required to be reported gives us this false sense of things in the individual form. Don't mean anything. And yet, on the aggregate, they can be extraordinarily important. Just extraordinarily important, exactly. I wasn't thinking we would go here, but I had a thought. Not surprising. The risk is it has a potential for spoilers, which I think we should be careful of. But I wanted to drop an idea on you. I don't know how many people are watching lura bits, but I hear it discussed frequently. Without giving away too much about what actually goes on in the show, I have the unsettling feeling that intentionally or not, it is actually mirroring a horror that we are already living. And that in fact, as much as there is something alien and origin involved in pleuribus, that the unsettling fact of what's going on with humanity is not very different from everybody in the room being coordinated through some device that is connected to an outside network. The alien could easily be read as metaphor in the show. Yeah. And I foresee it. And so I'm struggling a little bit with it. I'm enjoying the show, but I'm struggling a little bit with whether or not, let's say that, you know, if it's inadvertent, it just happens to be resonant because we're all living something for which the metaphor works. I don't think it's inadvertent. I hope not. Well, it could be inadvertent because this kind of feeling is everywhere. It could be intentional and artistic, or it could be manipulative and something else. Right? In other words, you know, one of the central tensions in the thing is that the horrifying state of humanity is not obviously horrifying. It's disturbing to us, normies, but, you know, it solves virtually every problem there is. And so anyway, I am concerned about... Sorry. How are you using normies in that creation? We resonate with the main character who is having a properly freaked out reaction. But being one of 12, 12 among 8 billion, it's not the normy condition. No, I don't mean normy in the show. I mean, a normal reaction to, you know, a wholesale change to humanity. Yeah. It's all norm. Yeah, but that's not normy. We all resonate with the main character because she's alarmed. Not all of the characters who are in her shoes are alarmed. And, you know, I think the best part of the show is that, you know, it's one thing to draw a cartoon sci-fi horror story in which the enemy is, you know, the Borg. You don't want to be part of the Borg, right? That's frightening. Even if the Borg thinks it's great. But the point is it's black and white. The idea of, you know, we solve all our problems and we're not unhappy. That is, it's different and it's rich in a way that I haven't seen anything else. But I do not like the idea of having our guards lowered over being unified through some force, especially as AI becomes this increasingly subtle intermediary. I think I mentioned to you. When I did my debate on AI, whatever the hell that was, somewhere in the Southwest, or in the area. I was trying to make the point. I was in a room full of college students who had come to hear this talk and I, there was part of me that was actually kind of pulled out of the debate because I wanted to talk to them because there's still hope for them. And I want them to understand what they're facing. And a room full of college students is just great. It is great. It is great. And it turned out to work well for the debate too. But my point to them was, look, you're headed towards a world in which every relationship you have is going to be intermediated by AI. And if you're smart, what you will do is you will take your most important relationships and you will forcibly exempt them. You will make them not intermediate. So that was my position. Months later, I encounter a totally predictable but nonetheless completely jarring thread in which a description is made of how people who are forming relationships for the first time are both consulting the AI about how to interact with this partner that they want to be with. And they're getting advice. And the shocking thing was apparently according to the person reporting this, the advice is excellent. And so the point is, oh crap. Now you're building a relationship in which it's not to deviate too far. But I do think it's interesting. We had a couple of conversations with the religious folks this year. And in a couple of them, the idea of, you know, father, son, and the Holy Spirit, I've always wondered what the Holy Spirit is, father, son, that's clear. What is the Holy Spirit? And the cool answer that I don't know if it's how well accepted it is. But the cool answer that I got back this year was actually the Holy Spirit is the bond between the father and the son, which scientifically we would call it the intersubjective space between them. But the idea that that is an entity unto itself, that in every dyad, there are three entities. There's you, me and us. Exactly. And that is a proper way to think about it. It actually is a useful, productive way to think about it. But the idea that the, the us relationship is going to increasingly have AI infused in it. And AI that, and there's my AI and there's your AI. You can just, here's what happens if you do form a relationship in this context. What happens when the AI changes or it disappears or you try to break free of it because you feel like, oh no, the relationship is not headed where I wanted because we're both consulting, hey honey, let's put those things down. Do you even have the skills to like navigate your own relationship if it's forged in the context of an AI advisor, you know, which goes back to, we've talked about Sierra No de Bergerac. Yep. But this is horrifying. And we are running this experiment, you know, it's just like, oh, that's a cool new technology. Actually, I wonder if it knows anything about romance, you know, really you're going to ask a creature that couldn't possibly do. I don't, I don't want to call it creature yet. I understand why you do. Well, you know, I'm, I'm trying to remind myself that it has the, the, the real danger will occur when it, the more creature like it becomes. Yes. As it becomes more creature like you. And I think, I think we, you know, back in the very beginning of our awareness of, of these LLMs, I put together some rules and one of them was, you have to treat this as a new species and it's not one, you know, you can, you can know a lot about even a tiger, right? It fears the way you do your tiger loves her cubs in some way like you love your kids. You can know a lot about a tiger. You don't know anything about this new species. Yep. So hard to know how to exert the proper caution, but that is what we ought to be doing. Yes, indeed. Well, do we want to go into something even, even as terrifying? How about? Yeah. We can do it briefly. I don't, you know, there's obviously a paper at the heart of it. I want to bring it up. Well, actually, let me just, so it's, it's this, it's a 2023 paper by Marlon. I'll, I'll show it in a moment, but let me just do a little summary from, it's a 65 page paper. You just turn me on to it this morning. I have not read the whole thing written by law professor called the nightmare of dream advertising published in the William and Mary Law Review in 2023. And what the author is doing is talking about what he is calling it. I guess the field is calling targeted dream incubation TDI targeted dream incubation, which builds, as he says, on well known and sometimes ancient practices of accessing that hypnotic state, that state, as you are falling asleep. And I actually don't know if hypnotic is also used to refer to the moment in which you're waking up and are not yet fully asleep. But always it is that, it is that going towards sleep moment. And he provides some examples. You know, of course, there's a lot of native cultures that have used dream, dream incubation for spiritual or healing processes, purposes. But he also talks about Salvador Dolly having specifically slept, taken naps with a heavy key in his hand, draped over, and the key was sort of hanging off the edge of whatever he was napping in. And there was a plate on the floor, such that as he would begin to fall asleep and his hand released the grip, the key would clatter to the floor and he'd wake up. And then in that moment, when he still had access to the hypnotic magic imagery, that's when he would create his crazy art. Incredible. So, you know, the idea we've all occasionally at least woken up with some of that imagery in our head and they're like, whoa, like that, that was amazing. What do I do with that? Well, Salvador Dolly apparently figured out a way to access it somewhat routinely, which I just love. I love that about him. Accessing targeted dream incubation again has been used for therapeutic purposes. In the Marlin 2023 article talks about, for instance, the targeted delivery of bad odors and combination of the smell of cigarette smoke during that hypnagogic stage creates an unconscious conditioning that reduced smoking in smokers who had that done to them in the following week, right, short term, right? But I can imagine that that would that could be quite effective. But now of course, marketers and advertisers are in on the game. And in 2021, the American Marketing Survey found that a majority of advertisers and marketers, whom the American Marketing Survey surveyed explicitly were planning to look into dream targeting by 2025. So that's, you know, now we're about to be past that moment when a majority of advertisers and marketers were like, let's get into this. Let's figure this out. So, Marlin is very long article starts the piece with three explicit examples. So let's just, let's just share those examples that he is, he is providing here. They are. So this is actually, you can show my, you can show my screen once I make this big enough for me to read it. Okay. So this is this article Marlin 2023 in the William and Mary Law Review, the nightmare of dream advertising. And his, his initial examples are three. It's beer, it's Xbox and it's fast food. Moulson Cours ran an experiment in connection with its 2021 Super Bowl advertising campaign, hashtag CoursBigGameDream. In a downtown Los Angeles building, 18 in-person participants, including celebrity singers, Zane Malik, along with thousands of social media users who participate online in exchange for free beer, were instructed to watch a dream, quote, stimulus film that when paired with a curated eight hour soundscape, induces relaxing, refreshing images, including waterfalls, mountains, and of course, course, end quote, about 30% of the in-person participants, five of 18, were part of their dreams were influenced as a result. So one example. Two. For the 2020 launch of its Xbox Series X video game console, Microsoft partnered with Dream scientists in the McCann World Group Marketing Agency to create, quote, made from dreams. The project involved participants, that is professional gamers, who were asked to play the video game console for the first time directly before going to sleep. When the parents, when the participants entered hypnagogia, that semi-lucid period between wake and sleep, marketing research is successfully used a dream recording technology to induce participants to lucid dream about their Xbox video gaming experiences. Third example that Marlon begins his long article with is Burger. For its 2018 Halloween promotion, Burger King introduced a hamburger called the Nightmare King. Featuring fried chicken, beef, bacon, cheese, and a green bun, Burger King claimed that the burger was, quote, clinically proven to induce nightmares, end quote, in those who ate it. To prove it, Burger King partnered with a sleep lab to run a clinical trial with 100 participants, half who ate the burger and half it did not. Results indicated that those who ate the burger and then went to sleep had nightmares at a rate 3.5 times higher than those who did not. Burger King attributed this to the quote, unique combination of proteins and cheese, end quote, as disruptive of rapid eye movement REM sleep. Man. So much. All right. So on the one hand, of course, of course, right? In some matter of fact, it's a simple matter of game theory. The advertisers who don't engage in this behavior are leaving an opportunity on the table now, you know, the protection here is that it doesn't work. If it didn't work, then it wouldn't matter whether or not you engaged in it or not. In fact, engaging in it would be a waste of resources, but assuming that it does work at any level, having this tool in your toolkit is something that will be unavoidable because those who don't avail themselves of it because it's obviously immoral will suffer and those who do avail themselves of it and see no problem will rise. So this is a classic case that demonstrates if you agree that this is, I think actually it's literally unholy for reasons I will get to in a second. But if you agree that this is an unholy breach of individual sovereignty or whatever it is, or of our basic human obligation to each other, then the answer is it has to be made illegal. Now I say that with trepidations, for reasons I will get to in a second. Well, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who watched us during COVID, the regulators are immoral, corrupt and ignorant. Yeah, it even goes beyond that. I, of course, 100% agree and that's sufficient to get there, but I think there's an even deeper problem. In any case, I will say one caveat, it is possible, and this is discussed in the piece, it is possible that it is already illegal on the basis that there was experimentation many years ago. I think before you and I were born, in fact, on subliminal advertising where they would do things like interspers a frame of a delicious looking glass of Coca-Cola or something in a movie that was so fast you couldn't detect that you had seen it, but nonetheless it caused people to get up to go to the conception stand-up by a cook. That was made illegal. So subliminal advertising is illegal. Now I find the idea that subliminal advertising is illegal absurdly quaint because there is so much invested, like every freaking advertisement is full of subliminal stuff. So there's just no, you can't stay ahead of the, in some ways, the insight that is generated, but it doesn't even have to be insight. Well, it feels to me like the particular piece of legislation, I guess, that you're referring to was technology specific, honestly. Like when, when film was film, and you could put a frame in, like you, you could splice in a frame. You can regulate it. Like there were, there were, there were, you know, there were units and having something be at a unit so small that we cannot be conscious of it or visibly or visually perceive it was made illegal. Cool. Great. No longer relevant. Right. No longer relevant because the technology has become so granular that the fact is this stuff is all around us all the time and in totally obvious ways. Right? At one level, you know, the gorgeous model in the passenger seat of the car that the advertiser wants me to buy is a manipulation of deeply human circuitry. And the fact is, even the model who was in the car doesn't look that good. Right? Whatever it is that she brings to the table as a gorgeous model. That was a guy. Oh, if it was advertised to me, sorry. Oh, right, right. No. But the model is augmented in ways some of which are physical. She's obviously made up. She's got a team of people. But then, you know, if it's a print ad, she will be modified to be preternaturally beautiful, whatever it is. All of these things are absurd violations of what it is to be human. They are betrayals of women, right? The idea that actual women have to compete with women who never existed is absurd. Women do this to themselves, making themselves up at extreme levels, surgery. All of these things tread into this territory where it raises the specter of a problem that I don't think we've solved, which is technology is now so powerful that in the hands of everybody are tools that have incredible capacity to manipulate. Okay. So what do you do about that? Do we want a gargantuan book of laws spelling out all of the things you're not allowed to do and a massive system in which we try to adjudicate these things? Oh my God, it would be a hellscape. On the other hand, if you don't have it, you're going to be confronted on every channel at all times by manipulators. And it isn't just a little guy who has this technology at their disposal. It's going to be all the biggest players who are going to be manipulating you. You're going to barely be able to have a thought that isn't going to be influenced. And so at some level, most of the solution can't come from the outside. Some of it has to. It's just too big. There's too much malice and power out there. Every individual, you, I, everyone watching has the capacity to protect, for instance, their hypnagogic state. So it can feel like, well, okay, I'm not going to go into a room where Cours is trying to induce me to think about waterfalls and cores. But if you've ever been watching a movie at home and have fallen asleep, then you went through a hypnagogic state while there was stuff streaming into your head from that movie. Better that, as far as we know, than if you were watching commercial TV in that hypnagogic state, and then the advertisements might have been coming in exactly as you were in that space between consciousness and semi-consciousness, subconsciousness. And we know, we absolutely know from these examples and many, many more how fragile is the wrong word, how like, unsecured your consciousness is at that point. Now, how open you are to suggestion about how very, very open you are to suggestion. And so if, if I think now, okay, well, then must protect my hypnagogic state and you have so many others as well, but must protect my, my, certainly my sleep state. I don't want noise coming in while I'm sleeping either. But must protect that, then make sure that you're not sometimes just out of boredom, out of whatever, falling asleep while you're watching some video, which may interspers with advertisements or falling asleep in front of the television of its commercial television. Like this, this is a place where, you know, how is, how is Burger King going to access your dream state? Well, they can only do that if you let them into your home, into your head at the point that you were falling asleep. And we absolutely have the capacity to keep that away. You know, yes, even if we are, is that true? Even if we are working three jobs and find ourselves in the subway and there's crap being piped into us, as we're falling asleep because we don't possibly have the capacity to get enough sleep at home, but we're also raising kids. No, like there are people for whom probably the advertisers and the marketers have a way in because their lives simply preclude their ability to control enough of their time. And I mean, actually Matthew Crawford writes about this in the world inside your, world inside your head, well, that's how you're right. I'll, I'll look it up. This extraordinary book, specifically about attention, the attention economy, the opens that book, which is some years old now, I believe, I believe he opens it with the experience of being in an airport now. And like you can't, you can't help, but have things come in that you don't want to come in. You know, the screens, the loudspeakers, there's constant calls to your attention, most of which are not just irrelevant to you, but actually are probably harmful to you. I also don't think, you know, for the moment you can protect your hypnagogic state to the extent that you can, that you have the luxury of isolating yourself while you're falling asleep. But I don't think that that's a long-term capacity. I think that's a temporary capacity, especially if the pleuribous unification of humanity through AIs that are there because for-profit corporations have constructed server farms and blah, blah, blah. The ability to discover how to trigger your dreams. I mean, I don't know how to make this point. When the glossy magazine gets an advertisement from the company that wants you to buy their car. Yep. They are accessing, if they're using a beautiful model, they're accessing your sexual circuitry. Your sexual circuitry is directly connected to your dream states. So they are already doing this, whether that's their thought or not. You know, I've forgotten it's been many years, but there was a time when every car sold, there was $800 or something worth of advertising per car. Change them out, designed to reach you to get you to buy this car rather than that car. And they were already trying to get you, so you couldn't stop thinking about the thing they wanted to sell you, which of course is interfacing with your dream life. So the point is technology is going to increase the degree of their access over time inevitably. So the hypnagogic state is a moment. But you're talking about access of all the conscious states in an asynchronous way, such that things get lodged and then come up at, you know, in dreams as you're following this state. You know, they get released, like a time release capsule, imprecisely at this point, who knows for how long? Right. It will get better and better as the point. And it's, you know, it's been bad since before you and I were born. People were already accessing those states. But I wanted to connect it to a couple of other things. I said earlier that I thought that this technology was unholy and that I thought that was actually literally true. Here's my defense of that. And actually, when I moderated the debate between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, Sam said something indignant about people who pray. And you know, obviously the universe is indifferent to your prayers. So basically these people are wasting their time and foolish. This is Sam's point. This was Sam's point. And I said, I don't think so. I can see a mechanism through which prayers work at which point he clutched his pearls and reached his fainting couch and all of the things that he would do. But here was my point. It's kind of prayer that apparently traditionally happened before bed, right? You pray to the universe to address some problem and then you go to sleep. Yep. Well, that does seem like very closely related to some of this dream stuff where you predispose yourself to have dreams of a certain kind. And to name the people whom you would like to be helped, to be remembered by God, which increases the chances that you will be remembering them in your own dreams and may yourself come up with a way to help them. Right. And it's not going to work if it's your Uncle Larry who has a brain tumor. Your dreams are very unlikely to come up with a solution to that problem, but most problems aren't like that. And so to the extent that one engages in priming their dream state before bed to think about things, you know, even maybe, maybe, you know, maybe you can't do anything about your Uncle Larry's brain tumor, but the fact that that is on your mind will cause you to do things relative to Uncle Larry that are good for your family, good for him. Good, you know, you will learn things from him because you're focused on the fact that he may not be around. So it has benefits for very material reasons that don't require there to be a supernatural force. So the point is our idea of what is holy is built around a universe that either has something supernatural in it. I've seen no evidence of such, but it could or that doesn't have it. And there's lots of subtle reasons that things have positive effects that aren't, you know, described anywhere, but they nonetheless work. And so the idea that anybody is going to try to intervene with your relationship with the universe by priming your dreams so that you salivate over some product that they would like to sell you is unholy in this regard. This is actually a place that was literally a sacred space you confronting the universe directly. And I mean, to be perfectly blunt about it, how fucking dare they? On the other hand, the game theory forces them to, which forces us if we don't want to be interfered with in this way to actually do something about it. And I am struck. I used to say that the problem with religions having evolved is that they weren't up to the challenge of modernity. And the example I typically used was the first commandment should be thou shalt not enrich uranium. Now you can disagree with me on that lots of people do. But the fact that enriching uranium isn't mentioned in any of these sacred texts is a byproduct of the fact that the wisdom about it couldn't have evolved, you know, a thousand years ago. And that we now need wisdom about it, but it's not in those texts. So we have to generate it. And go ahead. So I was just going to argue that what we actually need is like a novel bill of rights surrounding our, among other things potentially, but at least our personal sovereignty, our entitlement to be an uninterfured with human. That would say that actually at the very least, maybe we can't stop you from trying to figure out how to access our dreams, but we can say to the extent that you do so deliberately that you are immoral. And maybe the point is I wouldn't want to buy a product from a company that doesn't recognize that my dreams are my own, right? Something along those lines. I think we need a bill of rights because the rate, and I think AI is going to accelerate it greatly, the rate at which the power to do all kinds of unholy things is growing is so fast that, you know, it's hard to even say in what ways we will be accessed and manipulated five years from now. It is. Yeah. I wouldn't. I'm not in that prediction game. Yeah. But I don't, I mean, frankly, I think anybody who's predicting at this point is bound to be shocked. Yeah. Correction on my part, Matthew Crawford's excellent 2016 book is called The World Beyond Your Head. Right. And it's about attention and reclaiming, reclaiming your right to your own attention and the risks of not doing so. Yeah, which is actually exactly exactly what we're talking about. Exactly. All right. I think we're there with respect to that. Yes. Shall we get to kind of a summative wrap up? Sure. Because it is after all the last day of the year, soon to be New Year's Eve, which I think is going to be cool. I'm enjoying it so far. Yeah. All right. Well, okay. So shall I start? Yes. Okay. I was going to, I was trying to figure out where we are. And I have a kind of odd sense about this moment. It's one, it's been going on for some time, but it's new. It's something that has crept in since, since COVID, really. Which is that there's the fact that prediction has become almost impossible, that even those of us who have done a really good job of predicting things in the past are finding ourselves quite off kilter because the number of things that are in flux simultaneously is so high and the rate of change is so rapid. And the on the one hand, there is no place to go where you can even just get a daily recap of what the events are that we're all going to proceed from in thinking about how to navigate. You know, everybody's sourcing their own information. It's just, it's too much. So there's nothing, there's no place to stand in order to do the predicting and so much is changing behind the scenes. So there's just nothing to be done. So what is this moment? And the analogy, it's crude, but there is a historical problem, a little trick that the universe played on humanity. You and I have discussed this. The fact that the number of days in a year is not an integer number means that every time humans have tried to figure out how many days there are in a year, they've screwed it up, except in those cases where they didn't try to figure out the number, but what they did is they empirically built a clock structure where, you know, on this day of the year, the sun shines through this window and hits that nook. We know we've gone around again. Right. So, it's like, oh, how many days was that? It was a full cycle. It was full cycle. And you could count them and then you'd be a little confused because there's a, it's very simple. Yeah, it's not always the same or it is always the same, but, or it's often the same, but then it's at a different time of day on that day each year. Like why? Yeah, it's, it's, it, there's an imprecision. And anybody who tried to build the calendar from first principles without the empirical clock. Well, yeah, it's, it would seem like an imprecision. That's not actually an imprecision. It's a, it's a mismatch in perfection between the length of the day and the length of our orbit around the earth. The number of days and the, and the orbit around the earth. But anyway, point being many cultures, and if you screw it up, the, the degree of difference because it's less than a day is small enough that you don't notice that you've got the calendar that your calendar is off. If your calendar is there primarily so you know, when to plant and when to harvest and, you know, when the this and that's going to happen, you don't notice that you're off for many years because it hasn't, you know, there's enough fluctuation in the weather that the fact that your year is marching by a quarter day, it takes a long time for enough error to accumulate where it's like, and it doesn't really feel like winter yet, you know. So there are many instances in which there is a period that is established outside of the calendar in order to just, by brute force, correct a calendar that slowly marches. And so, basically like that. And you know, I didn't know what the names for these things are. Intercalary periods. So intercalary I guess outside the calendar periods. And I sort of feel like we are, it's not the calendar exactly that we are outside of, but we are outside of the period in our lives where we have any idea what to think of this moment. And in retrospect, this moment will mean something. But as we're living it, I think we have to have a kind of agnosticism about, well, every day. And as somebody who likes to think about what's going to happen and is having my models, I mean, I think I'm doing pretty well. I've predicted a number of things about AI interfering with interpersonal relationships and all this. And I guess do I have any idea on most fronts? What's coming? I haven't, you know, I've got guesses, but my confidence in them is very low. So anyway, first thing to say is I think this is one of these, it's analogous to an intercalary period. And there should probably be some wisdom about how you, you know, those things were always in cultures that had them used for special ceremonies and things. There was an understanding that they were important. It wasn't like people were, you know, looking at their watches and waiting for it to be over. It's, it's in the calendar, but I've always felt that this week between Christmas and New Year's exists outside of normal time as well, that so many, so many people have, are taking it off, are not doing their normal things, the expectations of what's due and how much, you know, how many things you have to do that you would normally do on a Tuesday or a Friday or whatever. It's often so it feels also like we are in that week that comes every year right now during which people are allowed, expected, even allowed, perhaps in some cases, expected to sort of, you know, step back and approach, approach their lives differently. Which then terminates in and now have New Year's resolutions. Actually, I wonder if it isn't literally that. In fact, you just raised this with me a few days ago, but, you know, the conspicuous fact that Christmas is not on the solstice, but it's really close. It's pretty much what an ancient might have landed on if they didn't have, you know, if you know, like, no historian here, but I think that it is, it is accepted that we don't actually think that December 25th was the birth date of Christ. I believe that is correct of Jesus. And so, you know, it's a way to accept a recognition, a celebration, an honor or ritual around the solstice, which is a fundamentally important day of the year. Right. But around the solstice and the imprecision of the calculation is resulted in being a number of days off. And you're right. The fact that the year doesn't start on the solstice is probably itself, an imprecise measure of where these things go, where, you know, we've now cemented it. But, right. But I think it strangely revives this intercalary period in a calendar that is now precise. Right. Which has kind of been an amazing fact to have brought that back and created a period where you sort of step out of your work calendar and things are happening and you're thinking about the future. And it happens to have been near the solstice, but not quite. So anyway, I think that is a good model for it. I wanted to point out, so obviously, the inability to predict things is a measure of the intensity of the Cartesian crisis that we're facing. And the Cartesian crisis is something I think has been ramping up for quite some time. But it's now at a fever pitch. And what you and I were discussing earlier about the inability to know whether video that we're watching is actually real. And of course, you know, today you can ask an AI, is this video real? And it can do a pretty good job of guessing, but the day when it won't know is coming soon, will it be this year? Don't know. But the rate of change from, you know, as people like to point out, the crazy video of the spaghetti eating guy with the extra fingers versus what AI can do now, producing a video of somebody eating that's very hard to recognize is anything but real. That rate of change is going to put us over that threshold so soon. And that creates new problems. But in this period of intense Cartesian crisis, we also have this sort of whiplash phenomenon, where an event takes place that so radically alters the direction we were heading. And we don't even get time to metabolize it before the next one happens. But, you know, Charlie died this summer. Was it September? I think it was close to fall, but it was in September. It was in September, I think. And events happen. Important people die unexpectedly. But the profundity of the change is that that set in motion in terms of just even where we are politically. He was a possible future for the conservative movement. And had the conservative movement ended up in his hands, I think we would have been in decent shape. I'm not a conservative, but I could applaud a conservative who had integrity the way Charlie did. And suddenly we're asked a drift by his disappearance, whatever the explanation for it might have been. So that feels like another feature of this moment is that everything is so tenuously connected that it's not like you have a civilization that's humming along, and suddenly something happens over here, and that changes things somewhat. It's like you don't have any idea the cascading effect of the loss of one person in an era where there's almost nobody likable in politics is profound. It literally cut a branch off the tree of possible futures that we will see it come back. Yeah, we're both so particulate and also all have shared fate in a way that has not felt like it was the case before. We are tied to one another inextricably while experiencing worlds through our media that have almost nothing to do with one another. Yeah, it's almost like and you know the feeling of unity is not out. Wish it were, but it's almost like we have all been cut a drift together. Right, it's like if we were smart about it, we would look around and we would notice that everybody else is a drift, and even if they think the completely inverse thing that we think that nonetheless the shared aspect of it is nobody knows what to think. You know, it's universal. But something I think, something intentional, it never wants us galvanized. It is intent on keeping us at each other's throats. It likes to divide us into two teams. It will divide us into more teams if it has to. But it would be marvelous to recognize that, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Other people who've been had their worldview poisoned in order to keep us at each other's throats. Their enemy is whatever is doing that. And you know, it should be galvanizing, but it's very hard to step back enough steps and realize that the person with whom you so vehemently disagree is not your enemy. They are subject to the same sia or whatever it is. And anyway, hopefully that will dawn on people. It'd be great if it happened this year. Before things get any crazier. I think I'm just, I'm slightly thrown by the invocation of the enemy of my enemy is my friend in this case because it feels like you could arrive at. Therefore, all of our friends are the overlords who are actually putting each other, putting us all at each other's throats. I may just be missing a sign in there. Yeah, I think I think you're missing a sign. My feeling is we don't know who those people are who are seeding our discord. But they have declared war on us pretty clearly. Right. But we've got two groups here that have been created by them. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The enemy of my, like it could just, it could be manipulated. Yes. Making it seem that if you disagree with me about trans or Ukraine or Israel, then then you're my enemy and the person who made me so certain on trans and Ukraine and Israel is my friend. And that's definitely not the lesson that we want to be taking. Yes, definitely not. Yeah, and then I agree with you. We'll be manipulated. Anything that can be used to get us at each other's throats will be used. And we mustn't allow that to happen. I did want to say something as we're on the cusp of a new year with things brewing in, especially the financial world, that I hesitate to do it because I want to be upbeat. But I also want people to be prepared. It's not fair to be upbeat when what you need is to be conscious. We are seeing a number of things that all speak to a financial calamity, looming, short term. And I would point specifically to, and I am no expert in this. I wish I understood it better. But the price of silver skyrocketing. Why is the price of silver skyrocketing? Well, the story, as I understand it, is that the price of silver has been artificially depressed. How do you artificially depress the price of a commodity that people can actually buy? Well, because we have two versions of the commodity. There's actual silver and there's paper silver. And paper silver can be printed. So to the extent that the price of silver wants to rise because silver is scarce, those who are in a position to create silver by printing it and selling it so that you own some silver in your portfolio, but it's not a real metal. Those people are in a position to drive the price down by creating the impression that there is supply where there isn't. And it's not tagged. There's no silver standard with paper silver. It's not inherently tagged to real silver. I believe it is over leveraged in an extreme fashion, which only ends up mattering. So let's say that you were looking at silver and, oh, it's artificially depressed. And I'd like to get it on profiting from it. Well, can you profit by buying paper silver? Short term. You can profit because if the price goes up, it doesn't matter which silver you have as long as you can sell it for whatever the price is. On the other hand, the danger, and this is what people, sophisticated people are talking about, is that there are going to be a tremendous number of defaults on the paper that does not have real silver as a backing. And if you own real silver, therefore, instead of, you know, the price can skyrocket and you can get nothing because your paper is not valuable because the person who owes you the silver is bankrupt. But if you've got real silver, is where you started, that can't help you. If you have got real silver, that can't happen to you, right? So what is, I think taking place is there is a battle between those who have spotted this looming catastrophe and are buying actual silver because they expect it to go up. They expect the stranglehold of those who can print it and artificially depress the price to be broken. And so ever more effort is being put into holding back that rising price by printing more, which is of course a positive feedback that is going to detonate. And what I have understood from these discussions, Michael Jan calls silver the blasting cap in the economy. And the point is silver is not a big player in terms of how the world runs, but it is in a position to set loose the bursting of bubbles, the repricing of things that are mispriced because of artificiality like this in the markets. And so anyway, I think to make a long story short, timing markets is a fool's errand. There does appear to be a lot of movement in the direction of silver. Silver is known to be mispriced as a result of this artificial depression scheme. And the ability to hold back the natural price forever doesn't seem to exist. So what I think we need to be concerned about, we in the public, is that there's a lot of other dominoes poised to fall. So Michael Burry has been talking about bubbles that is wildly mispriced corporations in the AI sector. Now how you price these things, I don't know. But there is some overarching game where you've got the technology that AI uses basically the software. You've got the technology that it runs on the processors. And then you've got the energy necessary to run it. And all of those things, you know, to the extent that you have marvelous processors and not enough energy to run them, this predicts, you know, wars for energy, predicts blackouts for normal people. So that is a difficult to price sector. And the claim is that it's well, because it's so new, because it's unprecedented, because this the combination of things that is reliant on does not exist before AI, I think. Right. The having everything in the world run on this, which is increasingly going to be the case. And having therefore the battle to fuel the engine that does the the thinking predicts all sorts of things. Kinetic wars being the result of a battle in AI space is not far fetched here. It also raises all kinds of questions about what are what are their energy, you know, are we going to get over the madness with fossil fuels presumably. Are we going to embrace a new nuclear era to fuel these things might even be a good thing if we use the proper technology, but the existing installed nuclear technology is very dangerous. A lot of that stuff needs to be decommissioned and you need to start with fourth-generation reactors and all of that. So again, very hard to price, but yeah, but you get to keep your mountaintops. Yeah. Other things. Right. Right. Which is important because whatever else may be true, climate change may have been a bill of goods that we've been sold, but the environmental destruction that comes from mining these things is terrible. As for, you know, all of the metals involved in in these technologies. But okay, so you've got artificial price manipulation with things like silver. It's true for other things like copper and gold, apparently, but silver is particularly egregious. You've got bubbles in the market where things have been mispriced and are headed for a big correction. And then you've also got fraught. And we have discussed with some folks who are in a position to evaluate these things. The fact that there appears to be an awful lot of major fraughts in the market in positions you wouldn't expect it. And so when Michael Yahn talks about silver as the blasting cap, this is how it could unfold. Right. Silver breaks free from its artificially depressed price. This causes a repricing of a bunch of things because those who have sold people silver that they don't have have to either get that silver or default. So you have a bunch of properties that, you know, big banks and things which may not be able to support the paper that they have outstanding, which then creates questions for all of the banks that we depend on. You know, will there be a bank run? What happens if there's a bank run? And the punchline to this awful narrative is I am concerned that the really powerful people who understand where we are and know where the bodies are buried are aware of all of the rotten timbers that the structure, that the financial structure is depending on knows where they are. So it knows that at some point they're going to give away. If that involves normal people being unable to access their money because their banks, because there's a bank run and bank shut down, that people, we may find ourselves ushered into a central bank digital currency as people are suddenly unable to live their lives because they don't have access to their money. And the FDIC that ensures their money could deliver them their cash in central bank digital currency form. The reason that that matters is because that's programmable money. And the ability to control us if our money is in a form that they can turn it off when we say things they don't like is extreme. So anyway, why would I say? Programmable money, which boy, I'm out of my depth here, but I feel like doesn't deserve the name money. If it doesn't have fungibility, if you can't buy anything that you have access to with an appropriate amount. Let us say currency actual money has one defect, which is that it doesn't contain any stigma. So if you make your money in organized crime, you can still spend it like everybody else. So you can engage in murder and price fixing and every other thing. Take that money and then you can go into real estate and your money is as good as anybody else. So that's a defect that it carries. No stigma. And then the defect of the central bank digital currency is exactly the inverse is that somebody else can stigmatize you because you said, hey, you know, that vaccine technology is dangerous. And the answer is, well, no, you can't say that because you're killing grandma. Sorry, your money is no good here or anywhere else. And I agree that it violates the most fundamental notion of what money is. Yeah. And what you just said seems like a very concise statement of the pros and cons of the two models that should be stated whenever I always forget central digital CBC. I always want to say CBC. CBC's are, is it CBC's? CBC's central bank, central bank, those are the evil guys. Yeah, no, I know, but I can also make it work as central digital bank currencies. Yeah. So I'm sorry to put that in your head because I never get it right. CBC's are I think we got there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess, you know, for the dark horse audience, I just want them to think you're not going to be safe. None of us are. But you can think about how to immunize yourself from something that ultimately I think has told us in so many different ways that what it really wants is the ability to control what we think and say. And if we're willing to surrender to that, we will be left alone to live our measly little, unimpressive lives. Obviously nobody wants that. Many will accept it. But making yourself immune is to the extent you're preoccupied with something. It's a good thing to preoccupy yourself with. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can't make yourself immune. Yeah. But the thing that I lost back there over the order of the acronym, CBDCs should be laid out compared to actual currency in the way that you just did with regard to them having the inverse costs that that that money has used that, you know, currency doesn't have a doesn't retain its history. And CBDCs can not only do inherently history, but can, can force a future and can limit the future of their own existence such that you cannot spend on what you might want to spend on. Yes, it's like we've talked about the turn key to talentarian state, which is a phrase that William Binney, the former NSA agent, formulated to describe the system where they erect this prison around you, but they don't turn it on. And so you're not aware that it's there because like, I don't know what all those structures are, but doesn't affect me. And then suddenly it does. And it's too late. And the CBDCs carry this potential in the, and the thing that I'm trying to convince people of is this would be that in one move. Right. CBDCs. Right. If they tried to, you know, if Trump announces the CBDC tomorrow, right, there will be a rebellion. It doesn't mean the rebellion will win, but lots of people are aware of how dangerous this is. Lots of us feel that we voted against such a thing when we voted for this person. If he announces it, oh boy, there's going to be a battle over whether or not that's a reasonable thing to do. On the other hand, if everybody's trying to figure out how the how they're going to feed their families and the answer is, well, the FDIC is willing to give you all your money back right now. And all you have to do is accept it in this form. And it's as good as anything else. People are going to do it. And the point is if they do it, it's game over. It's game over. If you reran COVID in the context of everybody having only CBDC, we're living in hell at that point. And we saw version of this in Canada. We sure did. And are still seeing it. It's amazing. I mean, Megan Murphy was debanked this year, I think. Yep. And the organizers of the truckers, Convoy, and even people who were merely participating, I believe it was extraordinary. And it seems that kind of just as in the US, but at a smaller scale, half-ish of the population in Canada didn't notice, doesn't care. Just as some number of, some large number of Americans with regard to authoritarian policies with the guard to COVID in the US didn't notice, don't care. Would like to forget that it ever happened. Yep. And this so pretend that it never happened, even. So William Binney talks about the turnkey totalitarian state. I've talked about surgical totalitarianism, where the idea is once upon a time, you know, the stasi needed everybody to be ratting on everybody else in order to maintain control in East Germany. Now you can mess with just the tiny number of people who make a difference. And everybody else would be like, I'm not hiding anything. And the point is, what do you need your privacy for? Right. What's the big deal? And we've already surrendered so much. So if the public understands it is not being targeted. And the only people who are targeted are people who you're depending on to tell you what the hell is actually going on. And the point is, well, you're not going to know what's going on. Actually, this is related to the one thing I wanted to say with regard to thinking ahead about sort of how to live our lives in the new year. There's a number of the sort of things that will be obvious to you and to regular viewers that it's coming from me. Things like, you know, I have more engagement with the physical world and fewer screens spend more time in nature, more in-person interactions, fewer online interactions, all of this. But your privacy is so critical. And that means, in part, becoming comfortable with yourself sufficiently alone that you don't start to scream literally or metaphorically and horror at the point that you are alone. So learning to become comfortable in your own solitude, you know, preferably. And being on a screen with big things, be the actual real people or bots or whatever, doesn't count. Like, just alone with yourself. And, you know, obviously, there are traditions, many traditions, some of which are called meditation that involve solitude. But it needn't be that. And, you know, for me, my preference is often, you know, is to be walking in nature. But it didn't be that either. Just to become comfortable with your own solitude. And to thus find some things out of that yourself, to develop your own private life, that is not meant for sharing. And to then also understand, you know, what things should be shared, but in a limited way, as opposed to, you know, the TMI of the modern era, that ability to be, to find yourself in solitude and to actually enjoy it, to seek it out, helps insulate from, you know, I don't know that it will help insulate from the CBDCs, but it will help insulate from some of the horrors that we talked about earlier today, with regard to, you know, online, online deviousness in the marketers and the advertisers who are constantly trying to draw your attention. That if, you know, if you, if you don't feel lonely when you're alone, you're much less likely to be dragged into something that isn't good for you. If you're much more likely to be resistant to the calls for your attention, if you think, you know, actually, I'm good. Like, I don't, I don't need, I don't need that. I don't need that thing right now. Like, I'm good as I am, where I am, who I'm with, if it's only myself. So figuring out how, how to become someone who is comfortable with yourself and does not need either the recognition of, or the interaction with something else, be it a real individual or very often online not, is empowering and will help you resist many of the devious forces. Exactly right. I have primary piece of advice, I was concordant with what you said, which is forge and maintain and invest in in-person relationships that are not intermediated by anything. And I almost wonder if that's not on the menu of possibilities. If you're not comfortable with yourself alone, sound of your own thoughts, you probably at least at a severe disadvantage in foraging relationships with other people. But I would say the two best things you can do are these two things, figure out how to be comfortable with yourself. If you've lost touch because you always do have that thing available to you, figure out how to deliberately put it down and remember what your own mind sounds like. And then forge relationships in-person with other people that if things go, hey, wire, it doesn't affect your connection. Yes, absolutely. Yep, really important. Is that it? I think so. Yep. All right. It's New Year's Eve. Quite. Therefore in thon says, the next time you see us, it will be a new year, 2026, because we're not coming back before the day ends, even when it becomes New Year's Eve sense of strict though, according to Brett's definition. It's hard to predict whether we'll be back before the end of the day. No, it's not. All right. It's sufficiently predictable. Brett might be back. I don't know. This is the last you're going to see me in 2025 live anyway. Check out our sponsors. Son of space. Son of space. Prima and Masa chips. All awesome. And during this perhaps, I think likely historic intercalerie period. Intercalerie? Intercalary. Intercalary. Intercalary. Intercalary. I think. Did you? So I saw the word, I like intercalary better. Yeah, but I don't know if that's how it's done. I think it's intercalary. We're going to start pronouncing it that way, see if we can pull people in our direction. In this in this end of year moment, which is about to end, in which the solstice and Christmas and the New Year all line up almost, but not quite, I think it's likely to be an historic intercalary in which this is due to the lack of integers and astronomy at some level. God's little prank. God's little prank. It's just a it's a it's a very good moment to to reflect and to consider what comes next. And we hope that you will be doing that and that we'll be sharing the New Year with us as well. And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food and get outside. Happy last day of the year and you're Zee when you get there.