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

Summary

DarkHorse Podcast #307

"New Year’s Eve of Destruction: The 307th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying"
Date: December 31, 2025
Hosts: Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

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Episode Overview

In this reflective New Year's Eve episode, evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying use their "evolutionary lens" to analyze radical changes and emerging threats to human cognition, privacy, autonomy, and society at large. They dive deep into recent research on the mental and cognitive effects of short-form video, the manipulation of dreams by advertisers, the perils of AI in daily life and relationships, and looming financial uncertainties. The episode oscillates between concern, analysis, and hard-earned practical advice for navigating an increasingly unpredictable world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Deluge of Change and the "Intercalary Period"

[89:09 - 95:20]

• Prediction is Harder Than Ever
  The hosts muse about living through an era of "intercalary" time—a period outside the usual patterns where so much is in flux that even seasoned forecasters are off-kilter.
  • "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..." (Bret, 89:09)
• Societal Disintegration and Shared Fate
  The sense of shared but fragmented fate is noted—everyone is adrift, subject to information silos, without robust communal grounding.
  • "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." (Heather, 99:52)

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2. Short-Form Video: Eroding Minds and Well-being

[13:24 - 47:29]

• Meta-Analysis on Cognitive/Mental Health Effects
  Heather presents findings from a comprehensive meta-analysis on short-form video (SFV) use (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, etc.):
  • SFV use strongly correlates with negative impacts on attention, inhibitory control, memory, and overall well-being. Depression, loneliness, sleep disturbance, and stress are all negatively affected.
    • "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..." (Heather, 19:01)
    • "Depression, loneliness, sleep, stress and well being were all negatively affected by the consumption of short form video content." (Heather, 20:44)
  • Caveats: 87% of studies are correlational, not showing causality; preexisting mental/cognitive struggles might attract people to SFV rather than result from it.
    • "Those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating low effort content..." (Heather, 22:26)
• Developmental Impacts
  Bret underscores concern: what will the impact be on those exposed from a young age?
  • "I feel absolutely certain that it will have profound developmental impacts on you because for one thing, obviously we're talking about addiction." (Bret, 48:15)
• Impatience, AI Slop, and the Loss of Trust in Reality
  Both hosts lament the personal experience of becoming more impatient, less able to enjoy or recall moments, and the skepticism sown by AI-generated "nature" content.
  • "If I'm watching short form video, I can be watching something absolutely breathtaking and I'm still impatient for the next one. I can't wait the 30 seconds until it's over..." (Bret, 34:01)
  • "Almost every nature bit that is being fed to me...I now look at them and go, there's nothing coming out of your stuff that I believe..." (Heather, 35:34)

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3. Laughter Tracks, Manipulation, and Erosion of Authenticity

[26:05 - 47:05]

• Sitcoms and the Long History of Manipulation
  A nostalgia-infused critique of artificial laughter tracks in sitcoms—analogous to newer, deeper manipulations online.
  • "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." (Bret, 27:34)
• AI Short-Form Content: The New Laugh Track
  The manipulation is now more pervasive and insidious—as AI shapes not just what is seen/felt, but even undermines evidence, field observations, and our sense of reality.

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4. The Collapse of Scientific Literacy and Excessive Reliance on Statistics

[41:18 - 47:05]

• Statistics as Religion
  The hosts bemoan the "fetishization" of P-values and randomized trials, at the expense of valid single observations and field science.
  • "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." (Bret, 43:09)
• Need for Better Philosophy of Science
  Calls for the development of new frameworks that can handle the complexity and nuance of real-world data beyond mechanistic experiments.

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5. AI and Relationships: Intermediation, Trust, and Autonomy

[57:51 - 66:10]

• Emerging AI Mediation in Relationships
  Bret recounts a debate and subsequent revelation that young people are building relationships with AI as advisor/intermediary, which can erode necessary life and emotional skills.
  • "You're headed towards a world in which every relationship you have is going to be intermediated by AI...if you're smart, what you will do is you will take your most important relationships and you will forcibly exempt them." (Bret, 61:56)
• Cyrano de Bergerac & Holy Spirit Metaphor
  The hosts draw on classic narratives (Cyrano and the Christian Holy Spirit) to frame the importance of the unmediated "intersubjective space" between people—which is threatened by AI.
  • "There's you, me, and us." (Heather, 63:57)
  • "But the idea that the. The US relationship is going to increasingly have AI infused in it..." (Bret, 64:15)
• AI as "Creature": Unknown Dangers
  Treating AI as a novel species about which we know nothing—caution is essential.

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6. Manipulation of Dreams: Targeted Dream Incubation and "Unholy" Advertising

[66:22 - 88:46]

• "Targeted Dream Incubation" (TDI): Marketers in Your Sleep
  Heather summarizes a 2023 law review paper about advertisers (Coors, Xbox, Burger King) using scientifically-informed techniques to influence consumers’ dreams:
  • "Coors ran an experiment...‘Big Game Dream’...stimulus film that when paired with a curated eight-hour soundscape...induces relaxing, refreshing images including waterfalls, mountains, and of course, Coors." (Heather, 68:32)
  • "Burger King claimed that the burger was clinically proven to induce nightmares in those who ate it." (Heather, 70:57)
  • Implications: The sanctity of the "hypnagogic state" (moment between wake and sleep) is now under assault from commercial interests.
    • "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...on subliminal advertising..." (Bret, 73:31)
  • Subliminal influence and manipulation have always been present, but technological advances make them exponentially more powerful and intimate.
• Moral & Legal Outrage
  • "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 ...it has to be made illegal." (Bret, 72:07)
• Personal Agency: Guard Your Mind
  Protecting mental privacy—not falling asleep with media playing—is one practical way to resist this incursion.
  • "Must protect my hypnagogic state...make sure that you're not sometimes just out of boredom, out of whatever, falling asleep while you're watching short form video, which may intersperse with advertisements..." (Heather, 78:36)
• Sacredness of the Dream State
  • "Our idea of what is holy is built around a universe that either has something supernatural in it...or that doesn't have it. ...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...is unholy in this regard." (Bret, 84:05)
  • The hosts propose a modern "bill of rights" defending mental sovereignty.

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7. Financial System Dangers & Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)

[101:53 - 117:27]

• Silver, Market Manipulation, and the Risk of CBDCs
  Bret details why a "blasting cap" event in the form of a silver market default could precipitate a financial crisis. An engineered bailout could usher in central bank digital currencies—with programmable features allowing the state unprecedented control over individual lives.
  • "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." (Bret, 116:37)
• Pros and Cons of Money vs. CBDCs
  Currency’s lack of stigma is a "flaw" criminals exploit, but CBDCs' programmability allows for dystopian social control.

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8. Life Advice for a Dysfunctional, Vertiginous Future

[118:58 - End]

• Cherish Solitude and In-Person Relationships
  Resilience begins with being able to enjoy your own company ("find yourself in solitude and…enjoy it") and to nurture personal, unmediated in-person connections.
  • "Your privacy is so critical. And that means in part becoming comfortable with yourself sufficiently alone..." (Heather, 118:58)
  • "The two best things you can do are these two things. Figure out how to be comfortable with yourself...and then forge relationships in person with other people that if things go haywire, it doesn't affect your connection." (Bret, 122:51)
• Practical Steps for 2026:
  • Spend less time on screens
  • More direct engagement with the physical/natural world
  • Reject excessive digital mediation
  • Guard your mind against unwanted influence (especially in vulnerable states)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "How dare they. And how stupid of us to let them grab our ancient circuits and manipulate them." (Heather on laugh tracks and dream incubation, 29:24)
• "You can't make yourself immune [to systemic dangers], but...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." (Heather, 121:46)
• "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...and then forge relationships in person with other people that, if things go haywire, it doesn't affect your connection." (Bret, 122:46)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Section | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------------|-------------------| | Short-form video meta-analysis | 13:24 – 47:29 | | Sitcom/laugh track manipulation | 26:05 – 47:05 | | Crisis of scientific literacy | 41:18 – 47:05 | | AI’s effect on social relationships | 57:51 – 66:10 | | Targeted dream advertising | 66:22 – 88:46 | | 2025 wrap-up & "intercalary" reflections | 89:09 – 95:20 | | Financial instability & CBDCs | 101:53 – 117:27 | | Practical advice for 2026 | 118:58 – end |

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Episode Tone

The conversation is warm but intellectually urgent, filled with dry humor, banter, and the hosts’ trademark blend of skeptical inquiry and practical philosophy. Jokes about “becoming masa chimps” and live reads aside, the spirit is one of encouragement for conscious, self-directed living amidst chaos.

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Summary Conclusion

Bret and Heather’s end-of-year dialogue is a clarion call: humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of psychological, technological, and financial risks that threaten individual autonomy and social cohesion. The only viable response is to cultivate authenticity, privacy, and humane relationships—especially in forms that cannot be mediated, manipulated, or monetized. With skepticism toward facile solutions and an embrace of uncertainty, the hosts urge listeners to return, as much as possible, to the basics: honest observation, lived human connection, and vigilant guardianship of mind and self.

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Transcript

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Foreign. Welcome to the 307th Dark Horse Podcast livestream. I am Dr. Brett Weinstein. You are? Dr. Heather Hying. I was doing a little research before the show and it turns out today is the last day of the year. Yep.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

The eve of the first day of the year.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Nope. We have the. 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

You know, in Hong Kong, it's already the New year.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

That is true. Is that true? Wait, how many time zones ahead are they?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Like a billion?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

A billion? That's. Then. Then it's not even the next few.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

I don't know, but it's something between 15 and 20, I would think.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Okay. Okay. All right, well, happy New Year to our viewers in Hong Kong.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah, something like that.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. All right, I'll go with that.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

It's New Year's Eve somewhere, so if you're drinking, that explains it.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Here it is. But not in Hong Kong.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right. It was New Year's Eve in Hong Kong, so they already know what it's like.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. So if you want the sort of recap, big picture stuff, hang out and we'll get there.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But first we are going to be talking about some research that has, 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

We should do that.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah. We have three sponsors at the top of the hour, as always. This is. This is when you hear our ads. And. 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

In Hong Kong.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

No, no.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right. Where is it? It's some. It's New Year's Eve somewhere here.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Our first sponsor today is brand new to us and we are thrilled to have them. It's Sauna Space. Several years ago I went digging into saunas, both traditional and infrared and found a morass of information. Then red light therapy became popular and the glut of products and claims became even more confusing. Is the product effective? How long does it take to heat up? Does it emit harmful electromagnetic radiation? To the last question, the answer is almost always oh, it turns out yes. No, I already read that. The only product I found then it's a few years ago, long before Sauna Space was a sponsor of ours, the only product I found that clearly lived up to its scientific and health claims was Sauna Space. Now we are so lucky to have them as a sponsor. Sauna Space combines red light and near infrared with deep radiant heat which provides deep. I repeated that I wrote this last night while I was talking to other people. Which provides deep radiant heat for whole body results at home. I'm just going to read it as. As I wrote it.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

No one will notice.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

This is not a harsh LED panel. There's no LEDs involved, nor a giant wooden box. Sauna Space's Firelight spectrum is a proprietary sun like spectrum that was developed over a decade of research and development. The incandescent bulbs that are made right here in the United States, designed and made right here in Missouri, in fact are flicker free, glare free and long lasting, staying consistent for over five years. SaunaSpace has two flagship products. The Glow, which I have been using for years. It is a single large light that can be used at the side of the desk or bedside and helps alleviate. Did I say bedsight?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

You said bedsight, which everyone will be able to work out what a bedsite is.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But I think I'm in need of a sauna right now. Can you do the rest of this on your own?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Probably not. Well, but I could try.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

No, I'm going to stick it out. I'm going to stay here. The Glow is a single large light that can be used at the side of the desk or bedside and helps alleviate screen fatigue and the ill effects of blue light. Helps with skin mood, energy and sleep concerns. The Glow also works as spot relief for sore backs, tight shoulders or cramps, muscle cramps. The Firelight Sauna, which I've just started using, is a full body sauna that promotes sweat and provides red light and near infrared therapy in an all in one experience. It's portable. It's more portable than most saunas.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

It's portable if you want. Yeah. You wouldn't take it with you on a vacation, right?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But. But you actually could. So it's a, it's like this actually beautiful canvas tent which, which you and Toby built. It didn't take too long. It's pretty intuitive and you know, unlike most saunas that you know once it's in place there's, there's no moving it. It's portable, beautiful and powerful. You get medical spa level results right in your home. The Firelight Sauna gives you deep detox PA and better sleep. Your skin gets rejuvenated. You get an energy boost, enhanced cognition, stress relief and an immune boost. And it helps with healing and recovery. The Firelight Sauna offers fast sessions with no preheat necessary. You flip the switch and start sweating in minutes. Sessions last 15 to 25 minutes half the time of usual saunas. The Firelight Sauna is I already said this but a beautiful canvas sauna that is lightweight and plug and play fits into a spare room or corner. You can start small with the glow that single bulb that I talked about first which is the. I keep on getting ahead of myself because I haven't read this before, I only wrote it. You can start small with the glow, the single full spectrum red and infrared light incandescent or go all in with a Firelight Sauna. All Sauna space products are built with integrity. Handmade in Missouri with clean and sustainable materials. Organic cotton, bamboo, sustainable unfinished basswood and medical grade stainless steel. No toxic glues or plastics. No off gassing. The grounding mat, an optional silver lining upgrade blocks, environmental EMEFs including Wi Fi and cell signals to enhance heal and you get a 100 day home trial and outstanding customer care. So take your wellness to the next level with Saunaspace. Dark Horse listeners can get an exclusive 10% off site wide offer when you shop at Sauna Space Darkhorse. That's Sauna S A U N a Space Darkhorse. Let's say it again. S A U N a Space Darkhorse discount will be applied automatically at check out.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

And I will say as one of the people who put the thing together, the fit and finish on this thing is incredible. Yeah. The, the attention to detail is amazing and it really. You can just feel how high quality everything is. Yeah.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And I had a long conversation with one of Sauna Spaces top people a couple weeks ago and she was easily able to answer all of my questions, direct me to relevant research and you know the, the, the research and development that went into this is clear both in talking to the people involved or at least one of the people involved and in just the proof is in the pudding.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

In the products it is.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

All right.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Not your turn.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

It's not?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

No. All right.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Whoa. Got it.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

It's masa chip stirring. There we go. Our second sponsor today is Masa Chips. Masa makes delicious chips with only three simple real whole ingredients. Organic nixtabilized corn, sea salt, and 100 gram grass fed beef tallow. Masa chips are made the way that all of our food used to be made. They're fried in 100% beef tallow. No seed oils ever. You can taste the difference and your body can feel the difference. America's health is declining fast. Chronic illnesses, obesity, autoimmune diseases have exploded. What changed? One thing that changed is that all chips and fries used to be used to be cooked in tallow. But in the 1990s, corporations switched to cheaper seed oils, which includes soybean, canola, sunflower, and corn, among others. Seed oils are often labeled vegetables, vegetable oils, as if that makes them healthy, while in fact, seed oils are linked to metabolic health issues and inflammation. And today, seed oils make up 20% of the average American's daily calories. Big food companies also use artificial dyes, stabilizers, and other toxins. Masa chimps.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Be a masa chimp.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

The chimps running masa chips. Masa chips will never do any of that. No seed oils, artificial dyes, or additives, ever. Beef tallow is nutrient rich, nourishing, and makes food taste incredible. Masa chips are crunchy and delicious, and after you eat them, you feel satisfied, satiated and energetic. Masa also supports American farms and regenerative agriculture. Choosing real food heals us and our environment, which in turn makes us even more healthy. Try masa chips with salsa or goat cheese or a spicy pepper jam. We've done all of those. They're delicious. Smother them in beans and cheese or just eat them straight out of the bag. My favorites are their original and lime flavors. And Zach surprised himself when he realized that he really loved their churro flavor. They've also got white corn, blue corn like this, and cobanero flavors. Ready? To give Masa a try, go to masachips.comdarkhorse and use code darkhorse for 20% off your first order. That's masachips.com darkhorse and code Darkhorse for 20% off your first order. And if you don't feel like ordering online, starting in October, Masa has been available nationwide at sprout supermarkets. Stop by and pick up a bag before they are gone. They are so good.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

I am hoping that we have seen the the birth of a new slogan. You remember, be a pepper. Drink Dr. Pepper. Right. Well, be a Masa chimp. Come on. It's natural. And given the nature.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

2025 and what is sure to be the nature of 2026, I think this is perfectly in keeping.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Embrace your inner Masa chimp.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Exactly.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Or your outer. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if it's an inner or outer. But there's, there's, there's our. All right.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Our last sponsor, it turns out for this episode, is Prima, which makes remarkable ancestral protein bars, which are no longer just for ancestors, if you know what.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

I mean, because they don't eat so much anymore.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

If you're sufficiently far in the ancestral.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Then, yeah, some of them do. I mean, we're ancestors.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

We don't know there's been so much.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

We are ancestors because we have produced children, therefore, and we still eat.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Exactly. But then there's a certain degree of ancestralness and we don't know what they do, whether they do anything. But it's, it's. I'm digressing.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

They don't eat.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

This is a hypothesis. It could be that where they are, the food is excellent. I'm just saying, okay, we eat. We've been doing so for hundreds of millions of years. Our diets have changed a lot since those early days. For better and for worse. Real food, food that your grandmother would recognize as food, food that she would have served, served to you from her own kitchen is best. But often our lives and lifestyles mean that we need something faster, something packaged, something that will nourish us and keep us going until the next time we can sit down to another one of grandma's home cooked meals. Problem is, the available options are mostly garbage. Most of the protein bars on the market are made with seed oils, refined sugars, and artificial flavors and colors. Not so with Prima, the first ancestral protein bar, which has been crafted with many of nature' finest ingredients. Prima is all about transparency. Not only do their products contain no seed oils, refined sugars, or artificial flavors or colors, Prima works hard to source the highest quality, most nutrient dense ingredients that we have been eating for a very long time. Prima bars have raw honey, sea salt, organic cacao, coffee, coconut, agave, vanilla, ingredients that some of your ancestors would actually recognize. And the grass fed beef, tallow and Prima contains fatty acids that regulate insulin sensitivity and are high and are a healthy alternative to the industrial seed oils used by other companies. Prima bars come in four flavors. Mocha, salted caramel and cacao. Their newest flavor, cookie dough. There should have been a pause. And their newest flavor, cookie dough. And here's the really surprising thing. There are 16 grams of protein in every bar from a special blend of grass fed collagen peptides and grass fed whey protein concentrate. Toby, our 19 year old son, worked long hard days on several farms last summer, often leaving the house well before 6am and not returning until after 9 at night. Farming is hard work and he needed to keep his energy up. When our box of Prima bars arrived, he took them and he told us. I found Prima bars very useful while working on the farm because I often don't have an appetite while I'm working, but I knew that I needed to eat. I like these bars, especially the cacao flavor and they are very high in protein, relatively high in calorie and easy to eat. If you know you're going to want food on the go and need something easy and transportable, but highly nutritious and delicious as well, try Prima bars. And now for our dark horse audience, Prima is offering 20% off their fantastic bars. Go to eatprima.com darkhorse to get 20% off. That's E-A T P-R-I-M A.com darkhorse To get 20% off, try Prima ancestral protein bars today.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Awesome.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

All right, where shall we begin?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Let's start with the cognitive and mental health effects of short form video consumption.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

I'm guessing they're all positive.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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 Chef 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

You know, it is going to be amazing. Yeah, it is going to amaze.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

No, it's going to be fantastic.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Fantastic. All right, I'm with you.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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 Feed 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 of these things that will seem obvious, but it's nice to sort of have the theoretical background according to this framework.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Could you repeat the name of the framework?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Dual Theory of Habituation and Sensitization.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Habituation and sensitization yep, from 1970.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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 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 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 excessive 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. 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 in 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, given that there's been a bunch of work done, why, you know what, what purpose does this review hold? And it is as, as will always be the case with the review, to precisely, to precisely curate, collate and analyze.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

The net, the state of knowledge.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yes, and if I can just get my screen back for a bit too, 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 they did drill down on that, give us any more granular data on where in Asia. But. So three quarters of the data being reviewed here are out of Asia. 11% from North America, 11% from Europe, and then the remaining 3% from Africa and 1% from Central America. Apparently South America had none. Unless they're just using Central America inappropriately, I don't know. And 52% of the studies, excuse me, included in this review did not name a platform, just referring to short form video content broadly on. 48% actually identified TikTok as the one that they were looking at. But, but the, but the analysis includes Facebook, you know, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, all of the things that we would expect.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, everybody seems to have adopted a version of this.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And there's a, there's a, 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 what 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. 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, assuming 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Effects presumably means lasting effects.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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 those are with regard to.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Cognitive correlates, reasoning is not affected, reasoning.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Is not affected, they're fine. 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 here, this is a big however and here if I can just pull my screen back for a moment or actually for good. There's a big caveat, which is that the vast majority of the studies that they are reviewing here, in fact 87% are correlational rather than group comparisons. 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

So that's actually, it's huge, highly likely that the people who resist consuming, given how ubiquitous it is, the people who resist this are likely not to be a similar group to those who consume it. And so who knows what's hiding there?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yes, and specifically with regard to. And then, then, then you can riff as much as you want. But specifically with regard to the cognitive effects they write in their discussion with regard to this, this problem of a match pairs design is always a better design with regard to knowing what you're looking at than simply correlational designs. Quote, those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating low effort content or find it more to disengage from continuous streams of short videos. And they quote an ionitis et al. 2019 paper to support that claim. So again, this review is looking at separately at 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, 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

I don't think that's right. That could easily be a correlational study. I tend to think of, and 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Oh, you can do it that way.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Too, but that's actually matched pairs. But if you're just trying to control for as many variables as possible, but you get a population over here and a population over here, the fact that you may have, you know, exactly counted the same number of individuals in each group doesn't make it a match pair study.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

No, no, it's not. It's not the same number of individuals. But let's say that you had an issue where the question was potentially dependent on age. You could take two populations and not control for age and not know whether the distinction that you were seeing was a result of the thing that you were testing or the result of the fact that, that you had, you know, a generational difference. 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

So you could, if you matched everyone for cognitive capacity in advance, right. Then you could know that the decreased garden of capacity among those watching short form video was more likely due to the fact that they were watching the short form video.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I don't know if you were. Where you were going.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Let's talk.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Okay, 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 com, you know, comedic commodity. And one phenomenon that was commented on by many people was that you would sit there, you would watch the thing, you'd be enjoying it, and then the commercial would come on and you couldn't remember what you were watching. Right.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Oh, I never heard this.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. So anyway, the point is, whatever is engaging. Oh, my 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 reflect.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Wait, is this real? Yeah, I can't imagine that being the case.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

You're watching a thing and you can't.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Remember what it was because a commercial.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Comes on and you don't remember what. You were just supposedly focusing. Yes.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 thing. 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 something that was done in a quiet studio. And again, as I've.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Laughing along with people that don't exist.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

They did, but they were laughing at something else.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

So who.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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 like, it's an in group, out, group assessment as. As we've talked about about 4. 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

It's an affront to humanity, but it's like we've been.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah. 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Come to the show, it's free.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Why wouldn't you? 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 Angelenos in those audiences.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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. 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. Is a different and frankly, much more human and deep set of skills.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 gonna 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 happen. I think there was supplementation of laughs, which is already cheating. Right. That joke wasn't funny.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

So still in front of a live audience, but we've got.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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. In the hills outside of la, you know, close enough.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Not in Korea.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Not in Korea.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But I remember watching that show with my dad all the time being like, dad, Korea looks a lot like Southern California.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

It sure does. But the thing is, there was no practical way. It wasn't a three camera sitcom. Right. 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Well, if it's good enough for mash, maybe we should get a laugh track. Should we get a laugh track?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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, 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. 3.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

So you're talking about breaking laugh track.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Breaking laugh track. So Scrubs decided not to have any laughs. They didn't have an audience and it wasn't a three camera sitcom. So they delivered their jokes and everything was effectively deadpan. Nobody was laughing. So you were either sitting there in your living room laughing or you weren't, which was.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And it was good.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Authentic. Right. So anyway, there's some long history of our being manipulated in these extreme ways and rebellions of various different kinds. And I think, think the. I mean, I think we can each detect in ourselves here what's going on with the short form video stuff. Right. Like here's one I notice about myself which I can't stand. If I'm watching short form video, I can be watching something absolutely breathtaking and I'm still impatient for the next one. I can't wait the 30 seconds until it's over because I can see, you know, how impressive this person is doing their thing. And it's not like, yeah, I want to watch this and reflect on it for a moment or two. It's like, wow, that is amazing. I wonder what's next. And that, you know, that is, that's low quality stuff right there.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

And then the fact that I can't.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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, and increasingly it's AI.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yep.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Are like, I now look at them and go, there's nothing coming out of your stuff that I believe and I know that I can't tell.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. And it's actually. And this, 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

And it allows you to extrapolate. And then, you know, sometimes there's a question, like, you see, oh, I. This is. I don't know what to do with this. I saw a video of a crow using a piece of plastic trash, a lid to something to ski down a roof. It was labeled as AI somebody. But I've seen video of an animal. This. Exactly. This animal Doing this exact individual.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But no, but a species of crow. Some species of crow, some species of corbids absolutely do this. I've had students, I, back when we were professors, I had students study exactly this, find it in the wild. Crows are incredible. And yeah, they, they ski like they'll, they'll do this.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

They have, they have.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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, will do this. But if you didn't happen to have that experience, then the point is. Oh yeah, more AI slop.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

More a slop. Yep. And Toby and I are. Toby, our 19 year old son and I had an experience this week where we buy the water and there's a lot of interesting stuff out there. There's Rogers seals, they're not. Yeah, I call them the Rogers for reasons I don't even know.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

I think because there was one out there at some point that I named Roger and then, and then five others showed up.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Like you're all the Rogers. So we're out by the water, there's like a shallow area and then there's an island and then beyond that there's like, you know, fast moving straight of sand, san Juan Channel, 300ft deep, really fast moving water. And, 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, is that a deer in the water? I'm like, no, it's going to be a gull riding a log. And we get out the binoculars like nope, that's a four point buck swimming. He's going to. If he hits the 300 foot deep, really fast moving water. But like we're both watching with binoculars.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And we both took crap video that you could totally fake. But he and I saw it. We know for sure that we saw four point bucks swimming in the Salish Sea. And then he turned around and sort of didn't come right back to shore. The closest point, like we could tell what the closest line was. And he's like no, I'm going to take a hypotenuse route. 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 for, for girl on the, on the island. I don't know. But this is one of these things. Like, I know deer can swim.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yep.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

We had a mountain lion on the island earlier this year where presumably it swam 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, another one of these things. Or if, if someone else, if I had seen the video that I took online, been like, I don't know, how would I know? How can I tell? Yep, that's real.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

That's like a giant wreck on a deer with only his head above water and he's swimming in pretty deep water.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

When Zach and I went to Panama with Michael Yan, we were in the Panama Canal and happened onto a howler monkey that was swimming across.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

That's right.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

That Right.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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 primatologist 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 controlled 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 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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 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. I don't know.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Know.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Who knows?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Who knows?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

You saw it. I know.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yes.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

And you know, you can see this in the. 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. You need it to survive.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Okay, but this is in some ways the ascendancy of pseudo numeracy, 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?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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, did you do that with the right experimental design or observational design? And even if you did all that correctly, then did you apply the correct statistics? Almost no one does because these are totally black box like, oh, I'm just going to hit a button on my 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 neither. It's. It's certainly not sufficient and it's not even necessary to gain knowledge.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yes, it's not how you know 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Oh, did my data break the assumptions of the test? Some statistical programs will let you apply that test test anyway, even if your data literally are not actually relevant to the test, and yet they'll still spit out an answer, right?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

And so you've got a whole sea of people behaving this way. They don't know what the, 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?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

That's right.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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, it's part of why. Yes, 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, the analysis that you showed, as far as I can tell, has no developmental component.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Well, and the fact that they didn't find a distinction in these, you know, massive studies that are correlational between what they're. They had three categories, actually. Youth, young adult and adults, middle aged adults was interesting to me. I would certainly predict a stronger effect with earlier exposure to short term video.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But in real time. Yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yes.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Friend group when he was still in high school. So we're talking about three years ago.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 took a certain amount of time to smoke a cigarette. And it had to be. You therefore had to have that bandwidth to go do it. And so they were spaced out.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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, you know, in which you have to have the things and you have to have the, you know, calmness to, you know, roll. Roll your own cigarette and then you just buy a pack. But you still. Still takes a moment. Yep, still takes. And. But then. But then we move into vaping.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

We move into vaping. And his. His point is that this has now become perfectly granular and that he saw big impacts of the fact that you could literally take a hit off a vape rather than have three minutes or whatever it takes to smoke a cigarette. And that he said that content that was coming online was having the same sort of phenomenon, that if you had a minute, you would reach for your phone and you would find something engaging. And 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

So, yeah, no, I've said this before, but I used to say to our children, I don't believe in boredom. If you think you're bored, figure out this is your life. My goodness, you're bored.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

That's on you.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

That's on you. And there's so much. And they're old enough. They were born in 2004 and 2006. There were no screens. That wasn't an option for them. It was like, go outside, 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 30, a week that most people may even assume that the banks are just not even operational. The only four other four people in the bank are totally engaged with each other. And I can't even. I can't. You know, I like. 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 must have been 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, I'm. There's. There's the capacity to engage, except there isn't. There's nothing to engage here. There's not even anything to read. Right, Right. I can't really. Like, I'm observing that one of the clients appears to have many stacks of $1 bills. Like, that's why this is taking so long. I'm trying to put together a story about what that might mean. You know, how does, 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? You know, 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, you know, one story I came up with. But that story didn't take 15 minutes.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

No.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Right. So you. 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 you, you. 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

The aggregate event.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yes. Aggregate cost of doing that every time you have a moment with nothing obvious to do. And you know, the bank is the perfect example. It's a boring place.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

So it's not like you can do much. Even the people watching is slowed to a crawl because I spent a lot.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Of time considering their interest rate offers for home equity loans. You know, like. Oh, and then it goes up to 0.74 above prime after. Okay, well, I've done it. Like I'm there. I know what. I know everything that there is to know from this poster.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yep. But anyway, I think, you know, probably this has a name somewhere in economics, presumably. But the idea of something where the individual cost is negligible but the aggregate cost is in this case, astronomical. Right, right. Is something that you have to be aware of because each time you're calculating, what's the harm?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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 going to die of lung cancer. Oh, I just occasionally take a hit off my vape pen. It doesn't you. Because each. And I don't even know what the language is. I don't know if hit or like, I don't know what the actual language is for vaping is. But presumably the amount of frankly horrifying, like vaping is way more toxic than smoking. But. But 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?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Polyethylene. I can't remember what they've used.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

It's so insane that anyone is doing that. But I may have said here before, like, I would vastly prefer our children take up smoking cigarettes than vaping, like so much more.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yep. Don't want them to, but way better.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Right, but. But presumably, if you're only focusing on nicotine, what's the amount of nicotine you get from every hit on a vape pen? Yeah, it's like on the. What like the macronutrient 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, 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. I appreciate that you're not claiming that 100 mints is a serving, but I'd like to know how those numbers change miraculously from, say, 0 to 10 once you're talking about having 100 of them when it seems like, you know, 0 times 0 mints versus 100 mints might read on a label as 0 calories versus 10 calories. And of course, I'm just. I'm making up fictional mints here. But obviously, 0 times 100 isn't 10. But the math of how things are reported, how things are required to be reported, gives us this false sense of things in the individual form don't mean anything, and yet in the aggregate, they can be extraordinarily important.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Extraordinarily important, Exactly. I wasn't thinking we would go here, but I had a thought.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Not surprising.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 Pluribus, 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

The alien could easily be read as metaphor. As metaphor in the show.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

I don't think it's inadvertent. I hope not.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Well, it could be inadvertent because this kind of feeling is everywhere. It could be intentional and artistic, or it could be manipulative and something else. Right. In other words, you know, one of the central tensions in the thing is that the horrifying state of humanity is not obviously horrifying. It's disturbing to us normies, but, you know, it solves virtually every problem there is. And so anyway, I. I am concerned about.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

I'm sorry, how are you using normies in that. In that creation.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

We resonate with the main character, who is having a properly freaked out.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But being one of 12. 12among 8 billion. It's not the normie condition.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

No, I don't mean normie in the show. I mean a normal reaction to, you know, a wholesale change to humanity. Yeah.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Alarm. Yeah, but that's not. That's not normie. That's.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

We all resonate with the main character because she's alarmed. Not all of the. 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, you know, the Borg.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Right.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

You don't want to be part of the Borg. Right. That's frightening. Even if the Borg thinks it's great. But the point is, it's black and white. The idea of, you know, we solve all our problems and we're not unhappy, that is. It's different and it's. 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Wherever the hell that was, somewhere in the southwest, Arizona.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And a room full of college students is just great.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

It is great.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

So great.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 intermediated. 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Entity unto itself, that in every dyad there are three entities.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

There's you, me, and us.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right, Exactly. And that. That is a proper way to think about it. It actually is a useful, productive way to think about it. But the idea that the. The US relationship is going to increasingly have AI infused in it and AI that.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And there's my AI and there's your AI.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 Cyrano de Bergerac, but this is horrifying. And we are running this experiment. It's just like, oh, that's a cool new technology. Gee, I wonder if it knows anything about romance. Really? You're gonna ask a Creature that couldn't possibly.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Oh, do we. I don't, I don't want to call it creature yet. I understand why. You do?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Well, you know, I'm, I'm trying to remind myself that it has the.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

The real danger will occur when it, the more creature like it becomes.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yes.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

As it becomes more creature like.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

And I think, I think we, 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, 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

So hard to know how to exert the proper caution. But that is what we ought to be doing.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yes, indeed. Well, do we want to go into something even, even as terrifying? How about.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, we can do it briefly. I don't, you know, there's obviously a paper at the heart of. You want to bring it up?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Well, actually, let me just. So it's, 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 from I. It's a 65 page paper. You just turned me onto 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, 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 Dali 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 of. On the floor such that as he would begin to fall asleep and his hand released. 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Incredible.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Incredible, right? So, you know, the idea, we've all occasionally at least woken up with some of that imagery in our head and like, whoa, like that. That was amazing. I wonder what I could do with that. Well, Salvador, 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 Marlin 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 short term. But I can imagine that that could be quite effective. But now, of course, marketers and advertisers are in on the game. In 2021, the American marketing Survey found that a majority of advertisers and marketers whom the American Marketing Survey survey surveyed explicitly, we're planning to look into dream targeting by, oh, 2025. So that's, you know, now. Yeah, 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, 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, Marlin 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. Coors Big Game Dream in a downtown Los Angeles building. Eighteen in person participants, including celebrity singer Zayn 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, chorus, end quote. About 30% of the in person participants, 5 of 18, reported that their dreams were influenced as a result. That's one example. 2. 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, I.e. professional gamers who were asked to play the video game console for the first time directly before going to sleep when the parents and when the parents when the participants entered hypnagogia, that semi lucid period between wake and sleep. Sleep marketing research has 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 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 who 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

REM sleep, man.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

So much.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

All right, so on the one hand. Of course.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Of course.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right. As a matter of fact, it's a simple matter of game theory. The advertisers who don't engage in this behavior are leaving an opportunity on the table. Now, 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, 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Well, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who watched us during COVID Yeah, regulators are immoral, corrupt and ignorant.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 caused 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 supplemental 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Well, that it feels to me like the particular piece of legislation, I guess that you're referring to was technology specific. Honestly, like when, when film was film and you could put a frame in like you, you could splice in.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right. Frame, you can regulate.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Because like there, there were, there were quanta, there were, you know, there were units. And having something be at a unit so small that we cannot be conscious of it or visibly or, or visually perceive it was made illegal. Cool. Great. No longer relevant, right?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 of kind. Good, right. Whatever it is that she brings to the table as a gorgeous model.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

That was a guy. Oh, if it was advertised to me, sorry.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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. 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 are, 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, 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 the 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And so at some level, you know, most of the solution can't come from the outside. Some of it has to. It's just too big. There's, there's too, 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 Coors. Yeah, 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, from that movie. Better that, as far as we know, than if you were watching commercial TV in that hypnagogic state and then the advertisements might have been coming in exactly as you were in that, that space between consciousness and semi consciousness subconsciousness. And we know, 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, how open you are to suggestion about how very, very open you are to suggestion. And so if, if I think now, okay, well then must protect my hypnagogic state and you know, so many others as well, but must protect my, my, certainly my sleep state. I don't want noise coming in while I'm sleeping either, but must protect that. Then make sure that you're not sometimes just out of boredom, out of whatever, falling asleep while you're watching short form 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, 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 on the subway and there's crap being piped into us as we're falling asleep because we don't possibly have the capacity to get enough sleep at home, but we're also raising kids. No, like there are people for whom probably the advertisers and the marketers have a way in because their lives simply preclude their ability to control enough of their time. And I mean, actually Matthew Crawford writes about this in the world inside your world, inside your head, 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 help but have things come in that you don't want to come in. You know, the screens, the loudspeakers. There's just, there's constant calls to your attention, most of which are not just irrelevant to you, but actually are probably harmful to you.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

I also don't think, you know, for the moment you can protect your hypnagogic state to the extent that you can, that you have the luxury of isolating yourself while you're falling asleep.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Sleep.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

So the hypnagogic state is a moment, but you're talking about access of all the conscious states in an asynchronous way, such that things get lodged and then come up at, you know, in dreams as you're falling asleep, they, you know, they get released like a, like a time release capsule imprecisely. At this point, who knows for how long.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right. It will get better and better is the point. And it's, you know, it's been bad since before you and I were born. People were already accessing those states. But I wanted to connect it to a couple other things I said earlier, that I thought that this technology was unholy and that I thought that was actually literally true.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

True.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Here's my defense of that. And actually, when I moderated the debate between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, Sam said something indignant about people who pray. And you know, obviously the universe is indifferent to your prayers. So basically these people are wasting their time and foolish.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

This is Sam point.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

This was Sam's point. And I said, I don't think so. I can see a mechanism through which prayers work, at which point he clutched his pearls and reached through 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 go to sleep.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yep.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

So, and, and to, to name the people whom you would, 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 way to help them.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 may, 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, aren't 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, I am struck. I used to say that the problem with, 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. From now.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

It is. Yeah. I wouldn't. I. I'm not in that prediction game.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. But I don't. I mean, frankly, I think. I think anybody who's predicting at this point is bound to be shocked.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah. Correction on my part. Matthew Crawford's excellent 2016 book is called the world beyond your head.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And it's about attention and reclaiming. Reclaiming your. Right. Right to your own attention and, And. And the risks of not doing so.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. Which is actually exactly. Exactly what we're talking about.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Exactly.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. All right. I think we are there with respect to that.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yes.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Shall we get to kind of a summative wrap up?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Sure.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Because it is, after all, New Year's Eve, the last day of the year. Soon to be New Year's Eve. Eve, which I think is going to be cool.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

I'm enjoying it so far.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

All right, well, okay, so shall I start?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yes.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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. New. It's something that has crept in since. Since COVID really, which is that there's the fact that prediction has become almost impossible, that even those of us who have done a really good job of predicting things in the past are finding ourselves quite off kilter because the number of things that are in flux simultaneously is so high and the rate of change is so rapid. And the. On the one hand, there is no place to go where you can even just get a daily recap of what the events are that we're all gonna 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 on this day of the year the sun shines through this window and hits that number nook.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

We know we've gone around again.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

That's a full cycle. How many days was that? It was a full cycle.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

It was full and you could count them and then you'd be a little confused because there's. Yeah, it's not always the same, or it is always the same, but.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Or it's often the same, but then it's at a different time of day on that day each year. Like why.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, there's an imprecision. And anybody who tried to build the calendar from first principles without the empirical clock.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Well, yeah, it's. It would seem like an imprecision. It's not actually an imprecision. It's a. It's a mismatch in perfection between the length of the day and, and the length of our orbit around the Earth.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

The number of days and the. And the orbit around the Earth. But anyway, point being, many cultures, and if you screw it up, the, the degree of difference, because it's less than a day, day is small enough that you don't notice that you've got the calendar, that your calendar is off if your calendar is there primarily. So you know when to plant and when to harvest and you know when 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. 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

It's. It's in the calendar. But I've always felt that this week between Christmas and New Year's exists outside of normal time as well. That so many. So many people have. Are taking it off, are not doing their normal things. The expectations of what's due and how much, you know, how many things you have to do that you would normally do on a Tuesday or a Friday or whatever often. So it feels also like. 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 and, you know, which then sort of terminates in. And now have New Year's resolutions.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Actual. I wonder if it isn't literally that. In fact, you just raised this with me a few days ago, but, you know, the conspicuous fact that Christmas is not on the solstice, but it's really close. It's pretty much what an ancient might have landed on if they didn't have, you know, if you like.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

No historian here, but I think that it is accepted that. That we don't actually think that December 25th was the birth date of Christ.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

I believe that is correct.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Of Jesus. And so 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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, where, you know, and.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

We'Ve now cemented it, but.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 happen to have been near the solstice, but not quite so. Anyway, I think that is a good, 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, now at a fever pit. 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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. 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?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

I think it was close to fall, but it was in September.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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, there he was, 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 everything you. 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. It's almost like. And, you know, the feeling of unity is not out there 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, 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. That. And, you know, it should be galvanizing, but it's very hard to step back enough steps and realize that the person with whom you so vehemently disagree is not your enemy. They are subject to the same psyop or whatever it is. And anyway, hopefully that will dawn on people. It'd be great if it happened this year.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Before things get any. Any crazier, I think I'm just.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

I. 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, I think. I think you're missing a sign. My feeling is we don't. We don't know who those people are who are seeding our discord, but they. They have declared war on us pretty clearly. Right.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But we've got two groups here that have been created by them. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The enemy of my. Like, it could just, it could be manipulated.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yes.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Making it seem that if you disagree with me about trans or Ukraine or Israel, then then you're my enemy and the person who made me so certain on trans and Ukraine and Israel is my friend. And that's definitely not the lesson that we want to be taking.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yes, definitely not. Yeah. And that's, and I agree with you, we'll be manipulated. Anything that can be used to get us at each other's throats will be used and we mustn't allow that to happen. I did want to say something as we're on the cusp of a new year with things brewing in, 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, 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 the price of silver has been artificially, 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 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

It's, there's no silver standard with the, with paper silver. It's not inherently tagged to real silver.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 can sell it for whatever the price is. On the other hand, the danger, and this is what people, sophisticated people are talking about, is that there are going to be a tremendous number of defaults on the paper that does not have real silver as a backup lacking. And that 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But if you've got real silver is where you started, that can't happen.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Got real silver, that can't happen to you, right? So what is, I think taking place is there is a battle between those who have spotted this looming catastrophe and are buying actual silver because they expect it to go up. They expect the stranglehold of those who can print it and artificially depress the price to be broken. And so ever more effort is being put into holding back that rising price by printing more, which is of course a positive feedback that is going to detonate. And what I have understood from these discussions, Michael 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, 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. So what I think we need to be concerned about, we in the public, is that there's a lot of other dominoes poised to fall. So Michael Burry has been talking about bubbles, that is wildly mispriced corporations in the AI sector. Now how you price these things, I don't know, but there is some overarching game where you've got the technology that AI uses basically the software. You've got the technology that it runs on the processors, and then you've got the energy necessary to run it. And all of those things, you know, to the extent that you have marvelous processors and not enough energy to run them, this predicts, you know, wars for energy, predicts blackouts for normal people. So that is a difficult to price sector. And the claim is that it's wildly.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And because, because it's so new, because it's unprecedented, because this, the combination of things that it is reliant on does not exist before AI I think, right?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

The, the having everything in the world run on this, which is increasingly going to be the case. And having therefore the battle to fuel the engine that does the thinking predicts all sorts of things. Kinetic wars being the result of a battle in AI space is not far fetched here. It also raises all kinds of questions about what are what 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 existing installed nuclear technology is very dangerous. A lot of that stuff needs to be decommissioned and you need to start with 4th gen reactors and all of that. So. So again, very hard to price.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But yeah, but you get to keep your mountaintops, among other things.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And oceans.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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, in these technologies. But okay, so you've got artificial price manipulation with things like silver. It's true for other things like copper and gold apparently. But silver is particularly egregious. You've got bubbles in the market where things have been mispriced and are headed for a big correction. And then you've also got fraud. And we have discussed with some folks who are in a position to evaluate these things 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 because. Because those who have sold people silver that they don't have have to either get that silver or default. So you have a bunch of properties that, you know, big banks and things which may not be able to support the paper that they have outstanding. Which then creates questions for all of the banks that we depend on. You know, will there be a bank run? What happens if there's a bank run? And the punchline to this awful narrative is I am concerned. 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, to live their lives because they don't have access to their money. And the FDIC that insures their money could deliver them their, 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. Like is extreme. So anyway, why, why would I say programmable money?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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, if, if it, if you can't buy anything that you have access to with an appropriate amount.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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. Sorry, your money's no good here or anywhere else. And I agree that it violates the most fundamental notion of what money is.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah. And what you just said seems like a very concise statement of the pros and cons of, of the two models that should be stated. Whenever I always Forget Central Digital CDBC, I always want to say CBDC CDBCs are. Is it CBDC?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Central Bank. Central bank. Those are the evil guys.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah, I know. But I can also make it work as central digital bank currencies.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yep.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

So sorry to put that in your head because I never get it right. CBDCs are. I don't know. I think we got there.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 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, to preoccupy yourself with.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yeah, well, I mean, you can't make yourself immune.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

But the thing that I lost back there over the order of the acronym CBDCs should be laid out compared to actual currency in the way that you just did with regard to them having the inverse costs that, that, that money, as you said, you know, currency doesn't retain its history. And CBDCs can not only do inherently maintained history, but can, can force a future and can limit. Limit the future of their own existence such that you cannot spend on what you might want to spend on.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yes, it's like we've talked about the turnkey totalitarian state, which is a phrase that William Binney, the 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, that I'm trying to convince people of is this would be that in one move, right?

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Cbdc.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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 reran Covid in the context of everybody having only cbdc. We're living in hell at that.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And we, we saw a version of this in Canada.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

We sure did. We and are still seeing it. It's amazing. I mean Megan Murphy was debanked this year, I think.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yep. And the organizers of the truckers convoy and, and even people who were merely participating. I, I believe it was extraordinary. And, and it seems that kind of just as in the US but at a smaller scale, half ish of the population in Canada didn't notice, doesn't care. Right. Just as some number of, some large number of Americans with regard to authoritarian policies with regard to Covid in the US didn't notice, don't care, would like to forget that it ever happened.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yep. And this pretend that it never happened. Even so William Binney talks about the turnkey totalitarian state I've talked about surgical totalitarian 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Need your privacy for?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Right. What's the big deal? And we've already surrendered so much. So if the public public understands it is not being targeted and the only people who are targeted are people who you're depending on to tell you what the hell is actually going on. And the point is, well, you're not going to know what's going on.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Actually this is related to the one thing I wanted to say with regard to thinking ahead about sort of how to live our lives in the new year. There's a number of the sort of things that will be obvious to you and to regular viewers that it's coming from me. Things like, you know, I have more engagement with the physical world and fewer screens, spend more time in nature, more in person interactions, fewer online interactions, all of this. But your privacy is so critical. And that means in part becoming comfortable with yourself sufficiently alone that you do don't, 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, with fake things, be they actual real people or bots or whatever, doesn't count. Like actually just alone with yourself. And you know, obviously there are traditions, many traditions, some of which are, are called meditation, that involve solitude. But it, it needn't be that. And, and you know, for me my preference is often, you know, is, is to be walking in nature, but it needn't be that either just to become comfortable with your own solitude and to Thus, find, find some things out about yourself to develop your own private life that is not meant for sharing and to then also understand, you know, what things should be shared, but in a limited way, as opposed to, to, you know, the TMI of the modern era. That ability to be, to find yourself in solitude and to actually enjoy it, to seek it out, helps insulate from. 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. Attention that if, you know, 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. If you're much more likely to be resistant to the calls for your attention if you think, you know, actually I'm good, like, I don't, I don't need, I don't need that. I don't need that thing right now. Like, I'm good as I am, where I am, who I'm with, if it's only myself. So figuring out how, how to become someone who is comfortable with yourself and does not need and 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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, I would say the two best things you can do are these two things. Figure out how to be, 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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Yes, absolutely.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Yep. Really important.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Is that it?

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

I think so. Yep.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

All right. It's New Year's Eve. Quite. Therefore, 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 sensuous strict. Though according to Brett's definition, it's hard.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

To predict whether we'll be back before the end of the day.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

It's not.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

All right. It's sufficiently predictable.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Brett might be back. I don't know. This is the last you're going to see me in 2025 live.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Anyway.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Check out our sponsors. Sauna space. Sauna Space, Prima and Masa Chips. All awesome.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

And.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

And during this perhaps I. I think likely historic intercalari period. Intercalary. Say it again.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Intercalary.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

Intercalary, I think. Did you. So I saw the word. I like intercalary better, but I don't know if that sounds.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

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.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

God's little prank.

[Dr. Heather Hying]

God's little prank. It's. It's just a. It's a. It's a very good moment to. 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.

[Dr. Brett Weinstein]

Happy last day of the year and New Year's Eve, when you get there.