New Year’s Eve of Destruction: The 307th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
On this, our 307th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss short form video (SFV), advertisers coming for our dreams, and a review of where we are, and where we are headed. Short form video has negative impacts on both cognitive capacity and mental health in youth and adults; in the context of recent research, we discuss laugh track, philosophy of science, and how tiny actions that appear to have no harm can be very harmful in the aggregate. Then: humans have a long history of accessing our ...
Hey folks, welcome to the 307th Dark Horse podcast live stream.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Haing.
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.
Therefore, it's the last day of the year.
New Year's Eve is coming up.
I hope everyone is prepared, 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.
Then that's not even the next year.
I don't know, but it's something between 15 and 20, I would think.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
Well, happy new year to our viewers in Hong Kong.
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah.
All right.
I'll go with that.
Yeah.
It's New Year's Eve somewhere.
So if you're drinking, that explains it.
Here it is, but not in Hong Kong.
Right.
It was New Year's Eve in Hong Kong, so they already know what it's like.
I hope 2026 is treating all of our listeners in Hong Kong very well so far.
We're going to finish today by talking a bit about 2026 and about 2025.
Yeah, so if you want the sort of recap big picture stuff, hang out and we'll get there.
But first, we are going to be talking about some research 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 some research from this year about sort of things we maybe 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 new to us, brand new to us on this New Year's Eve.
In Hong Kong.
No.
No, right.
Where is it?
It's New Year's Eve somewhere.
Sure.
Our first sponsor today is brand new to us, and we are thrilled to have them.
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now, we are so lucky to have them as a sponsor.
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I'm just going to read it as I wrote it.
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Did I say bed site?
You said bed site, which everyone will be able to work out what a bed site is, but.
I think I'm in need of a sauna right now.
Can you do the rest of this on your own?
Probably not what, but I could try.
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I keep on getting ahead of myself because I haven't read this before.
I only wrote it.
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It is.
All right.
It's not your turn.
It's not.
No.
Whoa.
Got it.
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Exactly.
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I don't know.
Yeah.
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If you're sufficiently far in the ancestral, then yeah.
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There's been so much speculation.
We are ancestors because we have produced children, therefore, and we still eat.
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Awesome.
All right.
Where shall we begin?
Let's start with the cognitive and mental health effects of short-form video consumption.
I'm guessing they're all positive.
All positive, as it turns out.
This is the surprise.
No, really, shouldn't even joke.
So hat tip to our friend James Lindsay, who quote tweeted a Twitter user named Adit Sheth, who is posting this paper.
I'm not going to show the tweet because I'm going to talk about the paper here.
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 I wanted to read.
Short-form video consumption, SVV, 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, Dual Theory of Habituation and Sensitization.
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.
A couple more paragraphs from the setup from 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 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-driven nature of short-form video platforms is thought to encourage successive 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.
And I will 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 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 dopaminergic 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-aged adults, though 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 purpose does this review hold?
And it is, as will always be the case with a review, 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, because I don't need to show everyone all the methods.
A couple of the things from the methods that I found interesting are that of the studies that they ended up using, 74% were from Asia.
So this is pretty skewed culturally.
And they did not, as far as I know, it's possible that 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 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 the analysis includes Facebook, Instagram, Reels, YouTube shorts, all of the things that we would expect.
Everybody seems to have adopted a version of this.
And there are some China-specific platforms that we don't know the names of, but the exact equivalent of, say, TikTok.
Okay, so let's just look at, I'm going to scroll through and get to table one you can show here.
It's not very beautiful.
This is not a table 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, assume 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 the data.
So I wouldn't even have been able to redo their analysis if I'd wanted to.
they found no differences between what they're calling youths and adults with regard to there are effects.
They find, actually, let me just.
Effects presumably means lasting effects.
Well, if you're going to ask specific questions from the table, I'm not going to be able to answer them.
With regard to cognitive domains, they are finding attention, inhibitory control, language, and memory all affected by use of short-form video content.
Reasoning, not.
Working memory, not nearly as significant, but also affected.
And then, and those are with regard to cognitive correlates.
Reasoning is not affected.
Reasoning is not affected, they find.
Yes.
And then with regard to mental health correlates, they find affect not as highly affected, but still significant by most 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 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 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 matched pairs.
They're not doing before and after.
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.
But that is going to vary.
So that's actually 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 there?
Yes.
And specifically with regard to, and then you can ref as much as you want, but specifically with regard to the cognitive effects, they write in their discussion, with regard to this problem of a matched 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 they quote an INAS et al. 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 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 as 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 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.
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 matched pair study.
No no, it's not.
It's not the same number of individuals.
But uh, 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 a generational difference.
You know, were you raised with the stuff versus, were you 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 um, if you matched everyone for cognitive capacity in advance right uh, then you could know that uh, the decreased cognitive capacity uh among those watching short-form video uh, was more likely due to the fact that they were watching the short-form video.
Yeah exactly exactly um, I don't know if you were where you were going, let's talk okay, um.
So I wanted to just point out a couple 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, 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 And you couldn't remember what you were watching.
Right.
Oh, I never heard this.
Yeah.
So anyway, the point is whatever is engaging you.
Oh, by God, is it awful?
Especially when you come to understand that your enjoyment of it is being manipulated with things like laugh track.
Now, laugh track didn't used to be the way.
It used to be that these things were funny.
Wait, is this real?
I can't imagine that being the case.
Oh, yeah.
You're watching a thing and you can't remember what it was.
A commercial comes on and you don't remember what you were just supposedly feeling.
Yeah, it's not like you can't figure it out and it's not like it happened all the time.
But the point was it was a relatively, especially if it was a sitcom that I mean, it 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 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 is 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 laugh track 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 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 ever 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.
Laughter is a social response circuit, which is real and which is, you know, it is both a unifying and 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 affront to humanity.
But it's like we've, and the next thing that we're going to be talking about is, 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 an insidious 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, and walking 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.
Come on.
It's free.
So it was an actual like, oh, opportunistic.
Cool.
I'll come.
This is a decent cross-section of Americans, at least Americans who had money enough to travel to LA because it mostly wasn't Angelinos 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 too cumbersome, far cheaper to do it with 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 too 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 that 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 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.
But then some things happened.
I think there was supplementation of laughs, which is already cheating, right?
That joke wasn't funny.
It's 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.
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 hills outside of LA, you know, close enough to.
Not in Korea, is it certain?
Not in Korea.
I remember watching that show with my dad all the time being like, God, Dad, Korea looks a lot like Southern California.
It 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 nowhere for them to sit.
So the point is they did it with laugh track.
And in that case, you had very talented people.
I'm not saying it's the first, but I think it broke it because it was such a good show that to the extent that laugh track was anathema to people, that show normalized it completely.
Well, if it's good enough for MASH, maybe we should get a laugh track.
Should we get a laugh track?
I don't think so.
But okay, so you had this long period of sitcoms that were terrible, three-camera sitcoms, totally formulaic, all laugh track.
And then there was like rock.
Do you remember rock?
They did it in front of a live audience when everybody else.
Right.
And it was kind of exciting.
Right.
Yeah.
And it was a good show.
And they, and the fact is it was all done without, you know, they didn't retake.
It was, it was a throwback.
And then the other thing that ultimately broke it was Scrubs, which decided not to do it.
If you're talking about breaking laugh track.
Breaking laugh track.
So Scrubbs 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.
Nobody was laughing.
So you were either sitting there in your living room laughing or you weren't.
Yeah.
Which was authentic.
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 noticed 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.
Like, 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.
Like I now look at them.
I go, there's nothing coming out of your stuff that I believe.
And I know that I can't tell.
Yeah.
And it's 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, you know, sometimes there's a question like you see, oh, 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, exactly this animal, doing this exactly.
Not that individual, but that's a species of crow, some species of crow.
Some species of crowds.
Corbetts absolutely do this.
Like I had students, back when we were professors, I had students study exactly this, find it in the wild.
Crows are incredible.
And yeah, they ski.
Like they'll, they'll do this.
They have, they have.
And, you know, so, 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.
Yep.
And Toby and I, Toby, our 19-year-old son and I had an experience this week where we're by the water.
And there's a lot of interesting stuff out there.
There's Rogers, seals.
They're not.
I call them the Rogers for reasons I don't even know.
I think because there was one out there at some point named him Roger and then five others showed up.
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 fast moving straight of sand, no San Juan 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?
I'm like, no, it's going to be a gull riding a log.
And I get out the back and he's 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 a four-point buck swimming in the sailor's sea.
And then he turned around and sort of didn't come right back to shore at the closest point.
Like we could tell what the closest line was.
And he's like, no, I'm going to take a hypotenuse for it.
I'm like, dude, I don't know if we're ever 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 lion on the island earlier this year where presumably it swum in and presumably it's now swum off.
But I've never seen a big mammal swim in this water before, one that didn't belong in the water, like a Roger, a seal.
But it was another one of these things where if someone else, if I had seen the video that I took online, I'd be 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 Jan, we were in the Panama Canal and happened onto a howler monkey 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, but 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 chromatologist who was also on my 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 statistical analyses.
But data taken with appropriate observational techniques of which you don't have enough to submit them to statistical analyses are still valuable.
And things that you just see when you're on your way to or from the troop or 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 statistical analyses, still valid observations, still absolutely important.
So this, you know, this insane focus that we saw during COVID on randomized control trials, like it's the only form of statistical 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 statistical 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 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 to submit statistical analyses.
But we need to also recognize that those less frequent kinds of observations are absolutely valid because otherwise, you know, you see a video like the one you did of crows skiing down a roof.
Or if I had been shown by someone else a howler monkey swimming in the Panama Canal, like, I don't know.
Who knows?
Who knows?
You saw it.
I know.
Right.
So you're going to be agnostic about everything.
I do want to say, 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.
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.
Yes.
And, you know, you can see this in the madness surrounding novel medical interventions.
Yes.
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.
Now, if you need it to survive, okay.
This is in some ways the ascendancy of pseudonumeracy, 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, therefore 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 correct, 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 boxes.
Like, oh, I'm just going to hit a button on my statistical 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 it?
Did you count the thing that you say you did?
And 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 the greatest discoveries were made.
And in some ways, it's just as laugh track in a sitcom presages our 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, am I going to get a statistically significant p-value?
If not, maybe I'll do some other statistical test and see if one pops up.
And if it does, hey, that's another paper for 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 sea 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.
That's 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.
It 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 massive studies that are correlational between what they're, they had three categories, actually youth, young adult, and adults, middle-aged 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.
In other words, that there's 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.
In real time, yeah.
What you want to know is, and it will 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.
Yes.
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.
Well, he was still in high school.
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 it took a certain amount of time to smoke a cigarette.
And that, and it had to be, you 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 each of his examples.
And 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 takes a moment.
Yep.
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 of 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 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're done.
If you think you're bored, figure out, like, this is your life.
My goodness.
You're bored.
That's on you.
That's on you.
And there's so much.
And this, you know, this, they're old enough.
They were born in 2004, and 2006.
You know, 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 other four people in the bank are totally engaged with each other.
And I can't even, I can't, you know, I like to, I like to observe people, but 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 mean, I must have standing first and only person in line for like 15 minutes.
It was, it took a long time.
And I kept on resisting the urge to pull out 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 MIDI 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, how does an older woman coming into the bank at the end of the year with a giant stack of $1 bills, has she been saving?
She paid for everything with cash.
And then anytime it's a $1 bill that comes back, she saves it and she's going to deposit at the end of the year.
That's one story I came up with.
But that story didn't take 15 minutes.
No.
Right.
So I've only got two potential stories that I can come up with because two potential interactions that are happening in this bank.
Like, okay, what, 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 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 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.
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.
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, 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 levels, like you know like oh, and then it goes up to 0.74 above prime after going, okay well, i've done it, like i'm there, I know what I, I know everything I that there is to know from this poster yep, but anyway I, 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 right, is something that you have to be aware of, because each time you're calculating yeah, what's the harm?
Yeah, and I imagine you know.
Circling back to Zach's observation and his example with with regard to smoking, it can feel, you know oh, you're a two pack a day smoker, my god man, you're gonna die of lung cancer.
Oh, I just occasionally take a hit off my vape pen.
You know it, doesn't you?
Because each and I don't even know what the language is, I don't know of hit or like I don't, I don't know what the actual language is for vaping is but um, presumably the amount of you know, frankly horrifying, like vaping is way more toxic than smoking.
But um, the amount, say you're only focused on nicotine, which is stupid if you're vaping, because it's the plastics and everything else is.
So what is it polyethylene?
I don't know, like I can't remember what they've used, so insane that anyone is doing that.
But um, I may have said here before, like I would vastly prefer our children take up smoking cigarettes than vaping, like so much more.
Yep um, don't want them to, but way better right um, 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 it's it's, it's like um, 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 like oh, these mints have no calories?
Well, that's not true.
If you eat a hundred of them, you've definitely can 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.
Yep, 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, oh, these mints have no calories.
No, that's not true.
Can you get like I?
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 10, once you're talking about having a hundred of them.
Uh, when it seems like you know zero times you know, zero mints versus a hundred mints might read on a label as zero calories versus 10 calories, and of course i'm just i'm making up fictional mints here, but obviously zero times a hundred isn't 10.
Yeah, but the 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 in the aggregate they can be extraordinarily important.
Extraordinarily important exactly.
Um, I wasn't thinking we would go here, but I I had a, a thought.
Um, 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 Luribus, 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 in origin involved in Pluribus, 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 this show.
Yeah.
The alien life force.
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, 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 um so anyway i i am concerned about i'm i'm 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 among 8 billion is not the normie condition.
No, I don't mean normie in the show.
I mean a normal reaction to a wholesale change to humanity is alarm.
Yeah, but that's not normie.
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, you know, a cartoon sci-fi horror story in which the enemy is the Borg.
Right.
You don't want to be part of the Borg.
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, wherever the hell that was.
Somewhere in the southwest.
Yeah.
I was trying to make the point.
I was in a room full of college students who had come to hear this talk.
And 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's so 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, you know, it's not to deviate too far, but I do think it's interesting.
We had a couple of conversations with 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.
Right.
There's you, me, and us.
Right, exactly.
And that that is a proper way to think about it.
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 Syrino de Bergerak.
But this is horrifying.
And we are running this experiment.
You know, it's just like, oh, that's a cool new technology.
Gee, I wonder if it knows anything about romance.
You know, really?
You're going to ask a creature that couldn't possibly?
Oh, do we, I don't, I don't want to call it creature yet.
I understand why you do.
Well, you know, I'm trying to remind myself.
But it has the real danger will occur when it, the more creature-like it becomes.
Yes.
As it becomes more creature-like.
And I think we, you know, back in the very beginning of our awareness 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 know a lot about even a tiger, right?
A tiger fears the way you do.
Mother 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.
Yeah.
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 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.
You want to bring it up more?
Well, actually, let me just, so it's this, it's a 2023 paper by Marlon.
I'll show it in a moment, but let me just do a little summary.
It's a 65-page paper.
You just turned me on to it this morning.
I have not read the whole thing.
Written by a 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, what 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 hypnagogic state, that state as you are falling asleep.
And I actually don't know if hypnagogic 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 going towards sleep moment.
And he provides some examples.
Of course, there's a lot of native cultures that have used dream incubation for spiritual or healing processes, purposes.
But he also talks about Salvador Daly 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 hypnagogic imagery, that's when he would create his crazy art.
Incredible.
Incredible, right?
So, you know, the idea we've all occasionally at least woken up with some of that imagery in our head.
And you're like, whoa, like that, that was amazing.
I wonder what I could do with that.
Well, Salvador Dali 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.
Again, this Marlon 2023 article talks about, for instance, the targeted delivery of bad odors in combination with 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 could be quite effective.
Sure.
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 Marlon, in this very long article, starts the piece with three explicit examples.
And so let's just share those examples that 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, Marlon 2023, in the William and Mary Law Review, The Nightmare of Dream Advertising.
And his initial examples are Three, it's beer, it's Xbox, and it's fast food.
Molson Coors ran an experiment in connection with its 2021 Super Bowl advertising campaign, hashtag CoorsBig Game Dream.
In a downtown Los Angeles building, 18 in-person participants, including celebrity singer Zane Malik, along with thousands of social media users who participated 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, cores, end quote.
About 30% of the in-person participants, five of 18, reported that their dreams were influenced as a result.
That's one example.
Two, for the 2020 launch of its Xbox Series X video game console, Microsoft partnered with dream scientists and 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 participants entered hypnagogia, that semi-lucid period between awake and sleep, marketing researchers 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 King.
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 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.
As a matter of fact, it's a simple matter of game theory.
Yeah.
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, 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.
Yeah.
Regulators are immoral, corrupt, and ignorant.
Yeah, it even goes beyond that.
I 100% agree, and that's sufficient to get there.
But I think there's an even deeper problem.
But 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 intersperse 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 cost people to get up to go to the concession stand to buy a Coke.
That was made illegal.
So subliminal advertising is illegal.
Now, I find the idea that subliminal advertising is illegal, like 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 film was film and you could put a frame in, like you could splice in frame.
You can regulate.
There were quanta.
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.
Like 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, right.
No, different ad.
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.
But 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 Coors 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're 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.
How open you are to suggestion about how very, very open you are to suggestion.
And so if I think now, okay, well then must protect my hypnagogic state, and so many others as well, but must protect 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 short-term video, which may intersperse with advertisements or falling asleep in front of the television if it's commercial television.
Like this is a place where, you know, 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 where 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 Head, the World Outside Your Head.
I'll look it up.
This extraordinary book, specifically about attention, the attention economy.
He opens that book, which is some years old now.
I believe he opens it with the experience of being in an airport now.
And you can't help but have things come in that you don't want to come in.
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 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 pluribus 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, 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.
Huge amount 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 in dreams as you're falling asleep.
They get released like a time release capsule, imprecisely at this point.
Who knows for how long?
Right.
It will get better and better is the point.
And 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 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.
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 is 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 for his fainting couch and all of the things that he would do.
But here was my point.
It's a 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, you know, 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, 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 uninterfered 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 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.
Yeah.
All right.
I think we are 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.
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 COVID, really, which is that 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 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 just, it's too much.
And so there's nothing, there's no place to stand in order to do the predicting.
And so much is changing behind the scenes that 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.
That's a full cycle.
How many days was that?
It was a full cycle.
It was a full cycle.
And you could count them, and then you'd be a little confused because there's a...
It's very old.
It's not always the same, or it is always the same.
Or it's often the same, but then it's at a different time of day on that day each year.
Like, why?
Yeah, there's an imprecision.
And anybody who tried to build the calendar from first principles without the empirical clock it would seem like an imprecision.
It's not actually an imprecision.
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 orbit around the Earth.
But anyway, point being, many cultures, and if you screw it up, 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 when 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, 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, everything.
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.
But nonetheless, 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 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 people 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 off.
And 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 their lives differently, which then sort of 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.
Yeah.
It's pretty much what an ancient might have landed on if they didn't have, you know.
And I'm like, no historian here, but I think that it is accepted that we don't actually think that December 25th was the birth date of Christ.
Correct.
I believe that is correct.
Of Jesus.
And so, you know, it's a way to accept a recognition, a celebration, an honor, a ritual around the solstice, which is a fundamentally important day of the year.
Right.
But around the solstice, and the imprecision of the calculation has resulted in it 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.
We've now cemented it, but.
Right.
But I think it strangely revives this intercalary period in a calendar that is now precise.
Right.
Right.
Which is kind of 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 changes that that set in motion in terms of just even where we are politically, like, you know, 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, you know, cast adrift 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 effects of the loss of one person in an era where there's almost nobody likable in politics is profound.
You know, it literally cut a branch off the tree of possible futures that, you know, I don't know 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.
Like 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 there.
I wish it were, but it's almost like we have all been cut adrift together.
Right.
It's like if we were smart about it, we would look around and we would notice that everybody else is adrift.
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.
And but something, I think, something intentional, does not, 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 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 psyop or whatever it is.
And anyway, hopefully that will dawn on people.
it'd be great if it happened this year yeah um before things get any uh any crazier i think i'm just i'm 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 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 if 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 into making it seem that if you disagree with me about trans or Ukraine or Israel, 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 I agree with you.
It will 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 in 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 could 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 happen.
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've understood from these discussions, Michael Yan 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.
It predicts blackouts for normal people.
So that is a difficult to price sector.
And the claim is that it's wildly.
Because it's so new, because it's unprecedented, because the combination of things that it is reliant on does not exist before AI, I think.
Right.
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 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 other 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 used the proper technology, but the uh existing installed uh nuclear technology is very dangerous.
A lot of that stuff needs to be decommissioned and you need to start with fourth-generators and all of that so again, very hard to price, but yeah, but you get to keep your mountaintops yeah, among other things right oceans 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 is, for you know, all of the metals involved in uh, 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 uh, 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 fraud, and we have discussed, uh with some folks who are in a position to evaluate these things, the fact that there appears to be an awful lot of major frauds in the market in positions you wouldn't expect it.
And so when Michael Yan 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 um, because those who um 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.
I'm 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 way.
if that involves normal people being unable to access their money because their banks, because there's a bank run and banks 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 insures 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, am I 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, you know, you can engage in, you know, murder and price fixing and every other thing.
Take that money and then you can go into real estate and your money's as good as anybody else's.
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.
I'm sorry, your money's 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 CDBC.
I always want to say CBDC.
CBDCs are, is it CBDC?
CBDC.
Central bank.
Central bank.
Those are the evil guys.
Yeah, I know, but I can also make it work as central digital bank currencies.
Yep.
So I'm sorry to put that in your head because I never get it right.
CBDCs 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 money, as you said, currency doesn't have a, doesn't retain its history.
And CBDCs can not only do inherently maintain history, but 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 turnkey totalitarian 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 it's like, I don't know what all those structures are, but it doesn't affect me.
And then suddenly it does and it's too late.
And the CBDCs carry this potential in them.
And the thing that I'm trying to convince people of is this would be that in one move.
CBDCs.
Right.
If they tried to, you know, if Trump announces the CBDC tomorrow, right, there will be a rebellion.
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 hell 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 re-ran COVID in the context of everybody having only CBDC, we're living in hell at that point.
And we saw a 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.
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 U.S., but at a smaller scale, half-ish of the population of Canada didn't notice, doesn't care.
Just as some large number of Americans with regard to authoritarian policies with regard to COVID in the U.S., didn't notice, don't care.
Would like to forget that it ever happened.
Yep.
And this would like to 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.
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.
Then 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 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 in 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 fake things, be they actual real people or bots or whatever, doesn't count.
Like actually just alone with yourself.
And obviously there are traditions, many traditions, some of which are called meditation, that involve solitude, but it needn't be that.
And for me, my preference is often to be walking in nature, but it needn't be that either.
Just to become comfortable with your own solitude and to thus find some things out about yourself to develop your own private life that is not meant for sharing.
And to then also understand what things should be shared, but in a limited way, as opposed to 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, 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 online deviousness and the marketers and the advertisers who are constantly trying to draw your attention.
That if you if you don't feel lonely when you're alone, you are much less likely to be dragged into something that isn't good for you.
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 need that.
I don't need that thing right now.
I'm like, I'm good as I am, where I am, who I'm with, if it's only myself.
So figuring out 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.
My primary piece of advice is 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, the sound of your own thoughts, you're probably at least at a severe disadvantage in forging 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 haywire, 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 Fonces, 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, Sansu Stricto, according to Brett's definition.
It's hard to predict whether we'll be back before the end of the day.
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, Sana Space, Sonaspace, Prima, and Masa Chips.
All awesome.
And during this, perhaps, I think likely, historic intercalary period.
Intercalary?
Intercidian?
Intercalary?
Intercalary, I think.
So I saw the word intercalary.
I like intercalary better, but I don't know if that's better.
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 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 in astronomy at some level.
God's little prank.
God's little prank.
It's just a very good moment to reflect and to consider what comes next.
We hope that you will be doing that and that will 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.