It Wasn't A Hoax After All

Summary

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The Rest Is Science — "It Wasn't A Hoax After All"

Host: Goalhanger
Guests: Professor Hannah Fry & Michael Stevens (Vsauce)
Date: July 26, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens dive into the myth—and possible reality—of the world ending in 2012, spurred by the Mayan calendar. Using both scientific reasoning and playful skepticism, they re-examine what the "end of the world" could mean, ultimately exploring how technology, media, and community have radically changed since 2012. The discussion becomes a compelling meditation on perception, confirmation bias, digital transformation, and the cyclical versus linear view of time.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The 2012 Mayan Calendar "Apocalypse"

• Setting the Stage
  • Hannah reflects on the minor role 2012 end-of-world worries played in her own community versus its meme status elsewhere.
  • Michael recounts 2012 pop culture—end-of-the-world-themed commercials, music, even a "2012 End of the World" belt buckle (04:01).

Explaining the Mayan Calendar

• Michael narrates how the Mayans, or possibly the Olmecs, developed a highly sophisticated, base-20 calendar system.

• The Mayan belief: Past worlds ended after 13 Baktuns (~5,125 years). Our current "fourth world" would, by that logic, end December 21, 2012 (07:45).

• Quote:

  “If the previous world lasted 13 Baktuns, maybe this one will too. That means it will end on 21 December 2012.” – Michael (07:45)

• They debunk the myth: Mayan texts actually reference dates well beyond 2012, and the culture was optimistic about “continuation” rather than obsessed with endings (11:03).

Cyclical vs. Linear Time

• Quote:

  "For almost all of human history, time hasn’t been this linear thing... It was cyclical, right? Birth and death... you know, spring and summer, night and day." – Hannah (14:16)

• Michael and Hannah compare Mayan and ancient views of time to modern, linear obsessions with progress and apocalypse.

• Stonehenge and solar cycles: More about celebrating continuance than fearing apocalypse (13:29).

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2. Did the World "End" in 2012 ... In a Different Way?

• Michael proposes—tongue-in-cheek, but pointedly—that while the planet didn't explode, 2012 marked a dramatic shift in how we live.
• Confirmation Bias in Action: Michael admits to reverse-engineering stats to "prove" 2012 was a turning point as an exercise in confirmation bias (17:17).
• Quote:

  "This entire project was an exercise in biased researching and confirmation bias... how can I somehow prove that 2012 was a special year?" – Michael (16:48)

Technological and Societal Transformations

• Smartphone majority: 2012 saw smartphone ownership in the US & UK exceed 50% (18:51).

• Social media majority: For both Americans and Brits, 2012 was when over half had joined a social platform (21:03).

• Digital media sales overtook physical media in 2012 (21:57).

• Most Americans got their news digitally—2012 was the tipping point (27:30).

• Linear TV viewership peaked in 2010–2011, after which viewing "as a group" declined (34:53).

• These stats build Michael’s "new world" hypothesis: 2012 as the moment the majority immigrated digitally—no longer an aberration but the norm.

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3. The Fragmentation of Culture and Loss of "Monoculture"

• Discussion transitions to the loss of shared, synchronous experiences; e.g., the finale of MASH (1983) drew 52% of Americans, an unmatched cultural moment (33:09).

  • Now, even the biggest streaming event is only known by a fraction of viewers.

• Quote:

  "There are fewer Tom Cruise's... more Michael Stevens." – Michael (38:15)

• Hannah contends this fragmentation is a return to humanity's pre-modern, community-based structure—now clustering by interest instead of geography (41:58).

  • "This idea of localized communities is a very human thing. The only thing is now we are localized by topic, not by geography." – Hannah (41:58)

• Michael draws on anthropological studies (The Dawn of Everything, Deirdre Barrett’s Supernormal Stimuli) to discuss the freedom of association that existed before modernity.

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4. Digital “Heterotopias”: More Human, Less Humus

• Michael introduces the concept of “heterotopia”: the digital world as an “other place.”

• Quote:

  “…Our immigration to this heterotopia, this other place, has given us new ways to be active, new ways to… associate with people. So it's made us more… human, but less humus, where humus means dirt. Like the physicality is gone.” – Michael (44:19)

• Both agree: Online interaction scratches some primal itches, but lacks embodied, “earthy” connection. “Touching grass” becomes a literal and metaphorical solution (48:22).

• Michael predicts future technological leaps in physical travel and a nostalgic resurgence of “linear” entertainment (e.g., scheduled TV viewing) for their communal qualities (48:53).

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5. Risks: Echo Chambers, Polarization, and Societal Division

• Hannah posits that, rather than more connection, rising ease of association could push people to isolate with only those who share their views—fueling polarization, even civil unrest (51:01).

• Polarization stats: In 2012, 50% of Americans lived in “landslide counties”; since 2003, partisan preference (more than race, wealth, etc.) predicts cultural values (53:32).

  • Michael’s hope that 2012 marked a spike in polarization is dashed: it started in 2003 but intensified after (53:40).

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6. AI and the Softening of Extreme Views

• Hannah shares early research indicating conversations with large language models (LLMs) may reduce polarization, helping people moderate their viewpoints, feeling less judged and more open (54:20).

• Quote:

  "[Interacting with an LLM] appears that it's nudging people from both extremes... slightly more together." – Hannah (54:20)

• Michael proposes a future episode on AI, noting people instinctively trust LLMs’ neutrality—sometimes to a fault (55:47).

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7. Conclusions, Predictions, and Reflections

• They agree: Whether or not 2012 was literally the “end of the world,” it was a digital migration, a hinge in how we live and connect.

  • “I think 2012 was a turning point. I think that the world as we knew it did end in 2012.” – Hannah (57:07)

• Michael offers a nuanced view: The migration isn’t utopian or dystopian, just different. The challenge is to balance freedom with friction—community with contact (58:06).

  • “We kind of need both. We need to be apart, but also apart. We need the freedom to escape, but we also need to be forced into friction and disagreements.” – Michael (58:06)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “If the previous world lasted 13 Baktuns, maybe this one will too. That means it will end on 21 December 2012.” – Michael (07:45)
• "For almost all of human history, time hasn’t been this linear thing... It was cyclical, right?" – Hannah (14:16)
• "This entire project was an exercise in biased researching and confirmation bias..." – Michael (16:48)
• “Social media became a majority thing... it became the world that we lived in.” – Michael (21:03)
• “There are fewer Tom Cruise's... more Michael Stevens.” – Michael (38:15)
• “We used to have little clusters... but now we are localized by topic, not by geography.” – Hannah (41:58)
• "...it’s made us more human but less humus, where humus means dirt. Like the physicality is gone." – Michael (44:19)
• "[Interacting with an LLM] appears that it's nudging people from both extremes... slightly more together." – Hannah (54:20)
• "We kind of need both. We need to be apart, but also apart. We need the freedom to escape, but we also need to be forced into friction and disagreements.” – Michael (58:06)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Origins of the 2012 Apocalypse Theory: 04:01–11:03
• Mayan Calendar, Cyclical Time, and Debunking: 11:03–16:09
• Confirmation Bias Exercise/Statistical “Proofs” of 2012: 16:09–27:30
• The Fall of Linear TV and Cultural Monoculture: 30:02–38:41
• Rise of Fragmented Communities & Heterotopias: 41:58–44:19
• Dangers of Echo Chambers and Polarization: 51:01–54:20
• AI and Opinion Moderation: 54:20–57:07
• Final Thoughts & Predictions: 58:06–58:41

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Memorable Moments

• Michael’s Mayan calendar “world-building” with his body as a map (05:54).
• Revealing his name’s anagram: “I’m the cave devil’s sand” (10:32).
• The sense of nostalgia for shared national moments like the MASH finale (33:09).
• The tongue-in-cheek “evidence” piling up for 2012 as the pivot point—smartphones, digital sales, and more (20:57, 21:57, 27:30).
• The philosophical reflection on “touching grass,” digital community, and lost physicality (48:22).

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Final Takeaways

• The belief that the world ended in 2012 is both a myth and, in a sense, an apt metaphor: that year marked a societal and technological transformation in how we connect, communicate, and experience culture.
• The shift is double-edged: it brings new freedoms and communities, but at the cost of physical togetherness and the risk of increased polarization.
• LLMs may offer surprising hope in moderating extreme views—if we foster “friction” alongside “escape.”
• The future is open-ended: the next “Baktun” will be defined by how society chooses to balance digital novelty with timeless human needs.

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the rest of science. I'm Hannah Frey.

[B]

And I'm Michael Stevens. Now, Hannah, do you remember all the fear around the world ending in 2012?

[A]

I mean, I wouldn't say it was particularly prevalent in my community, but I mean, there's always sort of people getting a bit concerned, aren't they?

[B]

Yeah, they're always concerned about things. But the 2012 one really stuck out. There were great memes. It became a whole thing. Like General Motors made commercials where their silverados drove around in post apocalyptic places. And the Jell made commercials that aired here in America. Not here, I'm in New Zealand, but they aired commercials in America where a team of people made a sacrifice of Jell o pudding to the Mayan gods to stop the end of the world from happening.

[A]

Remind me, what was the big concern? How were people worried it was going to end?

[B]

So supposedly, on December 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar would end. And so the Mayans, they built this calendar that was really mathematically very interesting because it's so old, it felt kind of magical. And if you looked at it, well, if you didn't look at it very closely, you could claim that it ended in 2012. So what did they know that we don't? Is the end of the world coming? And like, it could be pinpointed to 21 December 2012.

[A]

It was a smart civilization. They knew some stuff, they did, but

[B]

they didn't know when the world was going to end. Because as we all know now, the world did not end in 2012. But what today's episode presupposes is, maybe it did.

[A]

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[B]

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[C]

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[D]

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[A]

What a cliffhanger.

[B]

All right, so first of all, let's talk about the origin of the entire thing. In the first place. I moved to London in 2012, all right? So we were both in the same country at that time. We were both in the uk And I remember everyone buzzing about it, but it was sort of a joke. There were books and music, there were entire albums that were all themed around the end of the world is happening. I even have a belt buckle. I bought a belt buckle off of a street vendor in London that says 2012 into the world. I don't have it with me. I wish I did. I will, I will send you a photo of it. I thought, okay, either this is a great way to say goodbye to the universe or it's going to be really funny next year. And of course, I didn't really believe the world was going to end. But here's. Here's where it all began. The Mayan civilization existed in Mesoamerica, in the Yucatan Peninsula. From there all the way southwest to the Pacific Ocean, from like 22,000 BC all the way to 1697. In 1697, they all decided, yeah, this was pretty good, let's move somewhere else. Just kidding. The Spanish empire colonized the Mesoamerican region. There was a lot of fighting and bad things. And the last Mayan city fell in 1697.

[A]

And the Spanish, the Spanish had steel, of course, which we've spoken about before. While the Mayans were fighting with obsidian.

[B]

The. You're right, the Mayans did Not have steel, but they did have a really cool calendar. To be fair, it may not have completely been theirs. It may have come from the Olmecs, who preceded them, that were kind of in the little. I keep thinking of it as the armpit of Mesoamerica, but it's not at all. It's actually like the top of the foot of Mexico anyway.

[A]

It's like the crook of the elbow, maybe.

[B]

Well, no, it's more like if Mexico's my arm.

[A]

Yeah. Make world maps with your body, my friend.

[B]

And you've got like, the Tabasco down here, the Yucatan Peninsula up here. The Olmecs were here, the Mayans were here. They were chilling out. Look at all of them.

[A]

Can I just say, surprisingly beefy guns there, Michael. I enjoyed that.

[B]

Are you. If this surprises you, I don't know what your expectations for me were, but the point is, Mayan mythology stated that the gods created three other worlds before this one. And this one was good, so they kept it. But the first three they didn't like. And the Third world, the last one before this one began, lasted 13 Baktuns. A Baktun was a unit of time that the Mayans created that lasted 394 years approximately. So 13 of them were 5,125 years, more or less. You know, if you've watched the podcast for a while, you know that we've talked about time and calendars and how no one really knows what time it is. But people who wanted to predict the end of the world, they certainly were confident and they said, now wait a second. If the previous world lasted 13 Baktuns, then maybe this one will only last that long as well. And as it turns out, the Mayan creation stories give a creation date for the world, which in the Gregorian calendar was 11 August, 3114 BC.

[A]

I feel like there's a lot of that. That raises a lot of questions. The idea that it's like, actually on the 11th of August, very specific. There just all of creation came into being. You know, where was the first. How. What happened?

[B]

Well, that's the. That's what's so great about the Mayan calendar. It was, like, really specific. It was base 20. They discussed dates not just by saying, oh, you know, in the beginning, or a thousand days is a year to the Lord. They just said things like, here's this exact number, and you can do the math with it and go, wow, okay. So the world began on August 11, 3114 BC. If this fourth world lasts as long as the one before it, then it should last 5,125 years, which means it will end on 21 December 2012.

[A]

Now, in a lot of ways, no, in a lot of ways, I think that it would have been a good time for the world to end, certainly if you're British, you know, it was, the Olympics had just been held in Britain. We'd had the, the Diamond Jubilee that year as well, of, of, of Elizabeth. It was, our economy was doing all right, was sort of recovering from, from, from the financial crash. It was before Brexit came along. I think that was when that was really the glory days. That was really, that was really when we peaked. I got a dog, you know, that was. Oh, no.

[D]

Really?

[B]

Well, yeah, I mean, I, I, I completely agree. So I feel really fortunate that I moved to the UK in 2012. Like, I remember flying in and I, I, I got to Heathrow and it was full of people wearing purple suits who were there to help me. They, they told me exactly what train to take and because they were, they were, they were there for all the tourists coming in for the Olympics and I got to go to some Olympic events and there was all the excitement around the Diamond Jubilee. It was really, really great. But hold on a second. Did the Mayans actually say that this world, the fourth world, ours will only last 13 Bachtoons like the one before? They never did. They never, ever did. But in 1966, a guy named Michael D. Stevens. No, Michael D. Coe. Michael D. Stevens is me. I just wanted to say it was really cool to read.

[A]

What does the D stand for?

[B]

Mine stands for David.

[A]

I sort of desperately wanted it to be something really unusual, but you know

[B]

what I actually ask Danger.

[A]

That's what it should have been.

[B]

I Googled myself yesterday, funny enough, and Google's AI Gemini, like, tried to answer my question and it said, oh yeah, Michael Stevens from Vsauce. And in parentheses, Michael J. Stevens. And I'm like, no, no, no.

[D]

What?

[B]

I'm not Michael J. Stevens. Where are you getting that?

[A]

I am. I think you should change it, Change your name to Michael Danger Stevens. I think that's what the D should stand for.

[B]

I think I won't, because Michael David Stevens is an anagram of I'm the cave devil's sand. You can take all the letters in my name and rearrange it to that sentence.

[A]

That's good. And that's good.

[B]

Michael Danger Stevens. I haven't checked, but it's probably not as cool. Yeah, you can't spell cave devils with. With only one bee. Come on, Hannah.

[A]

I know. Sorry. Carry on. Okay. Michael. Michael D. Ko. Go on.

[B]

Yeah. Michael D. Ko. So, in 1966, he wrote in his book the Maya quote, there is a suggestion that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the 13th Baktun. Thus, our present universe would be annihilated when the great cycle of the Long Count reaches completion. And people read that, and it kind of grew in popularity as, like, a thing. People knew the X Files did an episode about it, and it started getting referenced in songs. And I think people kind of thought it sounded cool and decided not to look any deeper into it because there was no suggestion from the Mayan at all that our current world would be only exactly 13 B' actun long. In fact, if you look at what they wrote, you can find that they talk about dates way far in the future. They talk about things that happen in the year four thousand and so on. In fact, their entire culture was very much about looking for promises of continuation, that things were going to keep going. They were definitely not looking for the end, which is like a kind of more of a. A more recent or Western obsession. Ooh, the end of the world. When's that going to come? I think it's going to come soon. Oh, that's exciting. And that, you know, we globbed on to that. I love that idea, too, because I think it made me think about Stonehenge and how if it helped people notice the winter solstice. That was a really powerful thing to observe because every day for the last few months, the days have been getting shorter and shorter. The sun is spending less and less time shining on you, and that could be terrifying if you were an early human. But then there's this day where it's like, oh, this was the. It's going to get better from now on. The time the sun is going to be up longer tomorrow. You know, hallelujah. They wouldn't have said hallelujah, but they would have said whatever. You know, it could have been really exciting. And so, I mean, that was.

[A]

I suddenly realized I don't know nearly enough about Stonehenge. Is it. I know that it's sort of about the solstice and sort of paganism and so on, but what happens? How does it mark the winter solstice?

[B]

I'm not sure there's any agreement completely on this, but it might be that some of the stones align with the sun on that day, of course, day to day. The sun's position in the sky at the same time is, no, not that different. It all adds up to something pretty significant. But I don't think there's enough of a consensus on exactly why Stonehenge was made. It probably had multiple purposes over time. But if we imagine that it was related at in any way to, to observing, marking, or predicting cycles in astronomy, then it kind of makes sense. There's like, celebrating the cycles, not the ends, not the apocalypse. And that, I think, is what the Mayans were doing too.

[A]

I really like that idea, actually, that for almost all of human history, time hasn't been this linear thing. We haven't seen it as like, you're moving forwards. We currently have this insane obsession with the future in a way that people just didn't exactly as you described. It was cyclical, right? Birth and death cycle, spring and summer, you know, night and day. And I think that actually, especially when death was so much more regular part of life, I think that actually it's really easy to get trapped into the modern way of thinking. But that wasn't true, right? Just people did not think about time as a linear thing.

[B]

That's right. It is a historical anomaly. To think of time so linearly and to think about time as a thing that contains a past that is different, that is a foreign country, that is an incredibly modern idea, and it's not even hard to see why. It wasn't even that long ago that the tools you used every day were exactly the same tools your grandparents used. But today, the tools, the technology, the television shows that my Gen X wife watched are completely alien to millennial me. Like, we may as well be from different planets and we're not that different in age. Whereas it used to be that, like, you just had the cycles of seasons and you always cut the wheat the same way, you traveled at the same speeds. Explosion in change that marked, ooh, the past was really different and the future therefore will be really different. That's really a modern idea. And so, of course, in 1966, you've got people writing about, oh, the end of the world. It was predict. And it became this huge thing. And then nothing happened.

[A]

Nothing happened.

[B]

The world continues to exist, and it has been for 14 years since. But in another way, I think there's an argument to be made that the world did end in 2012, or at least a new world began, a fifth world. And here's, here's the evidence I have to support this. Okay, no, the Earth is still here. Humans did not go extinct, but the world before 2012 was a very different one than the world.

[A]

Since this is an extraordinary claim, Michael, this is going to require extraordinary evidence.

[B]

It does. And spoiler alert, I don't have it. In fact, this entire. This entire project was an exercise in biased researching and confirmation bias. You're like, okay, how can I somehow prove that 2012 was a special year? Some of them are pretty convincing. Others, I just. I tried to finagle the way I was wording it to make 2012 work, but I think it's really. I think it's really interesting to see how this all happens.

[A]

Okay, so you've started backwards here. Basically, you've started with, I want to prove that the world ended in 2012. What evidence can I collect? Okay, this is great. I like this as a sort of psychological experiment in confirmation bias. This is good.

[B]

Exactly. It's great because first of all, what do you do? You can Google search significant events in 2012 or statistics that make 2012 look important, and you find a bunch. Google doesn't say, well, it's not any more important than any other year. No, it goes, you wanted that. Here you go. And so you're immediately getting confirmation of exactly what you want to find. So I think some of these are actually pretty legit. For example, when was it in the United States, in the UK that we crossed the threshold where the majority of people had a smartphone?

[A]

Right. That is a new era.

[B]

Not when were smartphones invented? When did it become if not having one meant you were in the minority? We had moved to a world where the majority. The norm is having a smartphone.

[A]

Wait, what year did they come out? What year were they released?

[B]

It depends on how you define a smartphone.

[A]

Let's say iPhone. Let's say the iPhone.

[B]

The first iPhone was announced in January of 2007.

[A]

Okay, so it comes out in 2007. More than half.

[D]

Hmm.

[A]

I mean, look, the point here is that 2012 is the turning point, Right? So I'm going to guess 2012.

[B]

You're right. You are exactly correct.

[A]

That's incredible that it took five years for that to happen.

[B]

It took five years. I mean, when you look at these kind of statistics, you notice that there are. There's a lot of people who adopt quickly. And if you're a young person especially, it's kind of everyone, you know, but there are especially older people that adopt things so much more slowly. It does take longer than you think for things that feel ubiquitous to actually even become a majority thing. So in 2012, smartphone penetration crossed that 50% mark. Different question. When, in what year were half of Americans and Brits on social media at least one platform?

[A]

Okay, let's think. Right, so Facebook was started in, like, 2002. I think 2003. Roundabout then.

[B]

Yeah, I joined in 2004.

[A]

Yeah, something like that.

[B]

Because I was a college student and it was only available to us.

[A]

Hey, me too. Same.

[B]

What was some of the early social networks there was?

[A]

Friends reunited. Remember that one?

[B]

Facebook was founded in 2004.

[A]

Founded the other four. Right. Okay.

[B]

Um, in fact. In fact, not to brag, but I'm pretty sure I'm like Facebook user number 9,000 or something. I'm not even kidding, because I. It started in 2004. I entered college in 2004. And you needed a. Not only a dot edu email address, but you needed to be in college at one of just a few institutions to get in. And I went to UChicago, which was included. So I joined. And yeah, a few years ago, I was able to look this up. Maybe you still can. You can look up your actual number of when you joined. And I was. I was definitely, like, under 20,000.

[A]

Oh, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool.

[B]

That was pretty cool. When do you think the majority of people. So more than half of Americans and Brits were at least on one social media platform. I'm also including MySpace.

[A]

So I think here. I think it's. I mean, it's not 2012, is it? Is it 2012?

[B]

It's 2012. Okay. So as you can see, this is an inflection point. This is a threshold being crossed. No, social media and smartphones didn't start in 2012, but it became the norm. It became the world that we lived in. Now, you couldn't say it was a minority or a niche thing anymore. All right, but then here's something different. At what point did digital media sales surpass physical media sales?

[A]

Are we talking here about sort of movies, songs, that kind of thing?

[B]

Yeah, we're talking about buying songs, movies, any kind of multimedia, digitally, either, you know, one off or through a subscription. When did that in total bulk dollars surpass physical media sales? DVDs, CDs.

[A]

Michael, is it 2012?

[B]

It's 2012.

[A]

I'm noticing a pattern going on here.

[B]

Right. We immigrated to the digital world.

[D]

Wow.

[B]

Slowly over time, but it became where most of us were in 2012.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Side note, most of us. By us, I mean people in the Western world. Okay. This is actually a really fun statistic. I'd like to See what you. What you think it might be the case that half of Americans had a smartphone by 2012. When did half of the humans on the planet Earth have a cell phone, a smartphone?

[A]

So the thing is, is that actually I think it probably happened quite quickly. So, I mean, I've spent quite a lot of time in Kenya, for example. And the thing about sub Saharan Africa is they sort of leapfrogged technology. You know, like, they may not have had credit cards, but they did have mobile money. Right. Mobile phones. And I think smartphones too, are, I think, way more prevalent than you might expect. I have a feeling in the back of my mind there's a statistic which is more people around the world have access to a smartphone than to a toilet.

[B]

The way I heard it was that more humans on earth own a smartphone than a toothbrush. And in many ways, a smartphone is just how you connect not only with other people for your own safety, but also for work. But a toothbrush is kind of like, you know, you can get by in the modern world without a toothbrush.

[A]

Agree.

[B]

Before you can get away with not having Internet connectivity. And for a lot of the world, a smartphone is Internet connectivity. They don't have like a computer room or a big gaming PC or something, or even a laptop. Smartphones are so much more portable. But when was it that the entirety of the human population alive was majority smartphone owners?

[A]

It has happened, I reckon later than the Western world. I reckon 2016, 18 later. Is it? Go on.

[B]

2023.

[D]

Really?

[A]

Yeah. Wow, that is interesting. 2023 was the halfway point. And now more people have smartphones than toothbrushes.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Wow, that is a steep curve.

[B]

Now social media became a majority thing. And this one's almost more important to me. Cause it feels like, okay, yeah, having a smartphone. What do you do with it, though? Maybe you just text people. But when it comes to actually belonging to an online social network, when did the human population cross 50%? 50% of us, more than half of us, were suddenly living part time online in social networks on the Internet.

[A]

So I do know that there was a point when Facebook was running out of customers. Running. They were sort of chasing growth because it goes back to what you were saying about the sort of obsession with time as a linear thing, that the future should be different from the past. And so they started adopting this strategy of essentially creating Internet connectivity in places like sub Saharan Africa purely so that they could get new customers. They were like, if we invest in the infrastructure, more customers will be there. There's more eyeballs Facebook can be the homepage of the Internet, essentially. So I know that that's what they were deliberately doing. And I think if there was sort of an aggressive drive for it. So it happened in 2012 for the Western world, social media. Do you know what? I think it's later than the smartphone thing. I think it's, I think it's like 2024 is my guess.

[B]

It was before 50% smartphone penetration. Yeah, 2020, wow. When that kind of makes sense because you don't need a smartphone to be on social media. You can, you can have a Facebook account that you only access once a week in an Internet cafe.

[A]

Yeah, true. So.

[B]

So yeah, 2020 is when we estimate that our species became a majority part time online superorganism. Now those facts are cool, but they kind of like show just how shaky my whole the world as we knew it ended in 2012 argument is that I have to be like, well, if you don't count everyone, if count the United Kingdom and America, 2012 comes out to be a special date. But that's fine. Today we're, we're just, we're just yapping.

[A]

Okay, I, I'm okay, I'm okay with this though, because I think on these, on these topics that you're describing, essentially it's like there, it's an unstoppable train. And I think that the biggest pins fall. Like, you know, when America falls with a new technology, often the rest of the world will come with it. Just, it's sort of a matter of time. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm okay. I'm okay with the fact that this is like, this is a really key turning point. You've persuaded me. My confirmation bias says yes.

[B]

All right, one more question on this topic. And it is, when do you think it was the case that we crossed a threshold where more than half of Americans got their news digitally?

[A]

Is it 2012?

[B]

It's 2012, yeah. Now that means that they may have just been reading the New York Times, but they were reading it digitally online. It doesn't mean that they were getting it all from social media. That didn't happen until later. In fact, I don't even know it's still a majority yet. But yeah, it was a huge, it was a huge jump. Okay, so. So we can actually go on and on with little statistics like that. The last one I wanted to mention doesn't really fit, but it's so close. I'm gonna put another log on my fire while you think about this because now you know the answer is not 2012. When was peak viewership of linear television? Here's what I mean. Watching things on a screen that were being broadcast to you that you were watching at the same time as everyone else. So that means cable television counts. That means broadcast television counts, but not streaming. When did that peak that people were watching stuff for the most part of the day all together?

[A]

Okay, well, I'm going to be thinking about that one over the break. Join us after for the answer.

[B]

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[C]

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[B]

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[E]

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[A]

Welcome back. We're pondering this question. I mean, viewing figures would be a sort of a kind of a cul de sac here because you're not talking about one particular show had a really high viewership. And I mean I'm pretty sure that like a Super bowl quite recently that holds the record for the most people watching simultaneously or the Queen's funeral or something. And so then I think it's much earlier. I think it's, I think it's much earlier than the digital revolution. Or maybe, maybe I don't. Maybe I just think it's the 90s. Maybe. I think it's the 90s.

[B]

Okay, well, that's not, that's not a bad guess because I think that there are two things to consider. One is bulk number of viewers and the other is percentage of available eyeballs watching. So look at something like the, the finale of the television show mash.

[A]

Right? Okay.

[B]

Okay. That was huge. In fact, it was, it was watched by so many people. I'll tell you. When did it happen? It happened in 80s on February 28th of 1983. The television show, the long running television show MASH ended and its last episode was a two and a half hour special. Fantastic show, by the way. I think like, the writing is just incredible. I could sit here and quote MASH to you for the whole rest of the story.

[A]

I know almost nothing about it. Right. I don't really know what the cast is. I don't know. I couldn't pick out anyone who was in it out of a lineup. But I do know what happened in that finale.

[B]

Exactly. I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of where I think we're gonna go in this conversation. Yeah, you, you still are kind of a part of it.

[A]

It infiltrated popular, the popular psyche. Right. It's. And it's still there. Even though it happened before I, before I was born or certainly before I was conscious.

[B]

And it's still, it's still a really good show. In fact, funny enough, I've never actually talked about this, but when I was first making Vsauce videos in the very early years of Vsauce, I was watching a lot of mash and a lot of the episode ideas came from things that I was inspired to think about because of mash. Like there's an episode where Hawkeye Alan Alda creates this like, fake person in order to get things like, done. He says, oh, you know, I forget who it was. Like a sergeant he made up. It's like, oh, Sergeant said it's okay. And then it turns out that like, people need this fake character to exist because it gives them hope. And so he has to stage a whole like, Death of the Sergeant because he can't keep the lie going. But he doesn't want to ever tell people that that person didn't exist. And I'm like, wow, sometimes there are lies that we need. Anyway, I love the show and a lot of other people did because in 1983, so many people tuned in to watch the final episode simultaneously. By the way, this isn't like a thing where they like, oh, I'll stream it next week. No, they all had to tune in. Stop what they were doing. 52% of Americans alive on that day were watching the MASH finale.

[A]

That's incredible. That is incredible.

[B]

That's incredible.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

To be fair, more people watched the, the Chiefs Eagles, super bowl, Super Bowl 59, I believe it was. But that's only because the. The American population has gotten so much larger than it was in 1983, that even the most viewed American broadcast is still. Was still viewed by a smaller percentage of available people than the MASH finale was. But then if you look at, if you look at the percentage of people watching an individual program, of course it goes down. After 1983, there are so many more options. Cable television comes around. Home media viewing with, you know, VHS and later DVD becomes a thing. People can timeshift what they watch. They're not all watching it at the same time. Basically, after Seinfeld and ER in the 90s, linear television, where everyone watches together has just plummeted. When was the peak? And let me describe what I mean by this. By peak, I mean there was a time where if you surveyed people and asked them, how many hours do you spend per day watching linear tv? A shared storytelling amongst you and your. Your. Your. Your fellow citizens. When did people watch the most linear TV? Every day? You said the 90s, and you're wrong.

[A]

I'm wrong. Is it late 80s?

[B]

Nope.

[A]

Is it later?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Is it linear TV? Really?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

When?

[B]

2010?

[D]

No.

[E]

Really?

[B]

Well, keep in mind that we had American Idol in the early 2000s. There was a real golden age of television at that time. So Breaking Bad was a show that a lot of people watched as appointment viewing because you couldn't really easily stream it. For the 2010, 2011 television season, for the first time in decades, viewership of linear TV was lower. And then in 2012, our magic year, it continued going down. So I could say 2012 was when it stopped being an aberration and became this is the way it's going two years in a row now, it's dropped, and it has dropped ever since. Now we're all watching out of time with each other, out of sync with each other, and we have so many more options that nowadays you can just be like, oh, hey, have you heard of Squirtle Town? And someone's like, no, I literally have not even heard of that show. And you're like, oh, I spend every night watching it. And we're really spread apart. Whereas decades ago, if you just randomly knocked on someone's door, one out of three of them were watching Mary Tyler Moore. See, the thing is, the Cosby show was a thing that you could bring up at work, and everyone had watched it, literally. But today, if I'm even like, hey, so what do you guys think of Succession More than half of the people are like, haven't seen it.

[A]

So I think that I think about this quite often actually, partly because I still make linear tv. I'm clinging on, baby. Well, okay, I think two things about this. One is that I think some people get quite down on linear TV and like, oh, well, no one's watching it. No one's watching it. And actually I just don't think that that is true. Because when you compare who is watching linear TV to who is watching stuff on the Internet, right? It's like vastly different. So, you know, I'll have a program, I'll put a program out on BBC2 or whatever watching live. Couple of million people will watch it live. Imagine if I did a stream on YouTube, you know, imagine if I did a YouTube stream and I got 2 million people logging on to sort of to watch it. Would be wild. I mean, Even the biggest YouTubers like would struggle to pull in numbers like that. So I think for starters, it's sort of the kind of basics baseline that you're thinking about when it comes to describing linear TV is always in the past. You know, vax are like the past being different to the future and not what else is out there. But the other thing I think though about that idea that all of our attention is sort of fragmented. There's no single town square anymore, no single sort of cultural touch point that has embedded itself into all of our psyche simultaneously. I think that celebrities are really different to what they were before. I think there's some people who 10 years ago, 15 years ago, apparently in 2010 would have been household names, right? Would have been mega, mega, megastars. And now actually, I mean, they're still living the same life, right? They're still making the same shows, still doing the same things, still getting to do all the stuff. But like they get to live a life that is more private because they're not getting mobbed the entire time. There's not the cultural cut through that you get in quite the same way.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. It feels like there are fewer Tom Cruise's and there are fewer Mel Gibsons and Marlon Brandos and there are a lot more Michael Stevens.

[A]

Yeah, okay, everyone's become you, Michael. But people who are like phenomenally well known to a smaller to it, to their own group of people. It's not like you're small actually, but

[B]

you know, like when I'm recognized in public, it's by like one, one person. And their friends are all like, who? And they all have to like learn who I am, because there was one. But that's how fractured they are. Even within the friend group, only one of them knows what Vsauce is. Right, so there's. Today we've got an enormous amount of like culture celebrities, but very few blockbuster monoculture celebrities like a Michael Jackson. Now to be fair, the entire notion of a monoculture is controversial because there are still moments that we all share in some way. I think Taylor Swift is arguably for the, for, for, for a lot of the world as someone that we're all familiar with. Look at the launch of Barbie and Oppenheimer. Okay, that was, that was a thing we all shared. The Titan submarine imploding or at least disappearing. That like brought us all together. And sports continue to bring us all together. The most viewed broadcasts are sporting events. There's something there. I don't even know what it is. Tell us in the comments what you think. Well, what does it mean? That it's more like news events that bring us together at the same time. But it used to be fictional stories, it used to be MASH and ER and Seinfeld and Friends. And now it's what's going to happen, who's going to win? Who's going to slip up in this political debate. People tuned in to watch the Hillary Trump debate in huge numbers agree that they don't tune in all together to watch Big Bang Theory.

[A]

See, this is, this is the thing I think, I actually think the blockbuster celebrities, the Michael Jackson's, the Taylor Swift's, right. I think that they have always existed throughout history, you know, like Byron or, I don't know, Gilgamesh or whatever, like all of these people in history that have the kind of cut through these megastars. I don't know why I use that as an example, but anyway, that's hilarious.

[B]

I'm just imagining someone going, oh my gosh, Teresa, that's Gilgamesh. Quick, let's get a stone carving together.

[A]

Yeah, and anything like walk and talk, guys, walk and talk. But I think it's more like the sort of people who are not megastars who are, you know, like Angela Rippon. Right. Maybe. Or like Michael Parkinson. Right. Like people who were household names and yet were not, I don't think megastars like ordinary people doing a job in the public sphere. The thing is, is that actually going back to your Stonehenge comment from earlier, I do sort of think that what we're doing is returning to a much more natural state of being compared to the history of humanity. Right. Because what we used to do is we used to have little clusters. We used to have little communities, and then there'd maybe be a megastar here and there where the news would get real cut through. You know, a king dies, that news would get real cut through. Everybody would know about it. Maybe something sporting, if the equivalent is old wars. Right. Wars and football and kind of simultaneous way to like, act out your natural violence. You'd sort of hear about all of that. But. But actually this idea of like, localized communities is. Is a very human thing. The only thing is now we are localized by topic, not by geo geography.

[B]

You basically just said my conclusion.

[A]

Oh, I'm really sorry.

[B]

No, I love it. I love it because we're so much alike, Hannah. Because, yeah, I've. I've looked into this kind of stuff for years and I just got sick of the whole, like, no. Our attention spans and we're all just looking at screens and I'm like, I get it. But there's more to it than that. And I think that in a lot of ways we are returning to the way we used to be before the modern world happened. That not only are. You're right, we're in smaller groups, but also we have in a lot of ways that freedom of association that we lost in the modern world. The dawn of everything. Fantastic book to read. And. And Deirdre Barrett wrote Supernormal Stimuli. She speaks also about this, which is that people used to be way more free in a specific way before land ownership. You're in nomadic groups that are small. If you have a problem with people in your group, you just go. And in the dawn of everything, this is discussed really deeply, that freedom. People had to just do their own thing. And that lasted a long time. I mean, even into the modern world, the. The pilgrims were like, hey, we want to have church in a different way. There's other land we can go to where you cannot do anything about it.

[A]

See you, Europe.

[B]

That's not true anymore. Good luck. If you want to go form a new country where you do religion in some way that's completely disallowed by any other government. Where are you going to go today? We almost have that in some different form now, where you can say, you know what? I'm really into extreme body modification. Hey, look, I'm already on a forum. I'm already within a subreddit or a Facebook group where everyone is more like me, and I was able to find them and escape. And I can be here and yet no one can stop me. It doesn't make me Feel isolated. So we've changed.

[A]

You know what's nice about this, Michael, is that I don't know whether our lovely listeners slash viewers have noticed that we've started doing this thing where you prepare an episode and I have no idea what's coming up and vice versa. I don't know if they've noticed, but that idea that I just stole Michael's conclusion was not rehearsed, Devon Foddy.

[B]

No, it wasn't. Yeah, we're doing a thing where we. I don't know what Hannah's gonna do in the next episode, but, you know, I look forward to it and I will react appropriately. However, even though I think that in a lot of ways social media, the Internet, digital lives, our immigration to this, like, different world, it's. It's not a utopia, but it's also not a dystopia, I just think of it as a heterotopia. It's another place, our immigration to this heterotopia, this other place has given us new ways to be active, new ways to, to, to learn about the world and associate with people. So it's made us more like, like more human, but less humus, where humus means dirt. Like the physicality is gone. Yeah, I can, I can share stories with people who think the way I do and I can agree and we can, we can, you know, commune in a certain sense. But I can't smell them, I can't hug them, I can't see the pores on their skin when they just do little micro expressional reactions to what I say. I can't. Like, a lot of my communication with them will be disentrained from time. It'll be, oh, they sent me a message. I'm going to read that when I have time. And I don't know what the consequences of losing that are, but it used to be that not only would you. Could you say stuff and your body language and the temperature of the room and all of this was shared between you and who was listening, but it also kind of disappeared. Like, exactly what I said was, was only in our memories after it was said. But now what that person on the forum said to me last week, I've got a screenshot of it. It's right there with a timestamp and everything for everyone to see me to, to look at that, that's a big change. And I don't know how I feel about that. I don't know how that makes us different now than, of course, we were when we were pre modern people. But that documentation it's called the documentality of society is definitely a new thing, not a return.

[A]

What was it you said? More human, less human.

[B]

Humus means the earth. In fact that's probably where the word human comes from. It comes from like we are from the earth, we are from dirt, right? We are. Humus. That's like a really nice kind of. It's a kind of dirt kind of soil.

[A]

Is it related to the chickpea snack or.

[B]

It might be. I wish, I wish it didn't sound so much like hummus. Humus is spelled with just one M.

[A]

Here's the thing about it, right? I think that's such a good description.

[B]

Sorry, I just want to interrupt because I need to say this too. Humus is the Latin word for ground or earth. And so by immigrating to these digital heterotopias, we have become more human in the like pre modern sense of having the freedom of association in smaller groups, but at the same time we've lost the grounding and the earth of it, the physicality.

[A]

See this is the thing, right, I think that ends up making so many of us so unhappy because, because we know, I think that doom scrolling that being in these online communities, when you're in them, it feels like it's scratching the itch that you need to scratch, right? It's sort of, it's doing the thing that our species adapted for with a cognitive social species. It's like it's thinking and socializing in this way, but because it's only the mind part, because you are tapping into sort of an alternate, what did you call it? A different version of reality, a heterotopia.

[B]

Heterotopia, an other place.

[A]

Because you're tapping into this heterotopia, I think that your body, you know, then ends up realizing that it's missing something. You know, all these tech bros are talking now about like oh, touching grass, right? And they sort of say it in a very flippant way. But you know what I think? Touching the earth, right? Physically touching the earth, I actually think there's something in it and I think that that's something that you can't replicate in the digital world.

[B]

I, I completely agree. And so I'm going to make a prediction. I think that we will see a lot more in person association in the future within our lifetimes. It's mainly going to be accomplished by some huge technological innovation in travel. It'll probably be something like, oh yeah, we found a way to not just take an airplane, but literally go suborbital. And be able to go from, you know, New Zealand to London in like half an hour. Then people will be able to say, hey, I'm really into this one really specific thing, or I like this one kind of specific book. I can. That community that loves, that can all get physically together and we can interrupt each other and hear each other's voices and be embodied together. I think that's going to happen in our lifetime. I also think that Linear Entertainment is going to come back. And this is. This is. It's not going to come back and replace streaming, you know, video on demand, but I think it'll come back. And this is based purely on the fact that I was in LA recently in a house where I wasn't logged into any of my streaming services and I had to watch tubi and I had to watch logged out YouTube where I. Where I didn't have my premium account. So ads were appearing and I actually came to love the commercial breaks. And I even made a rule that I can't pause because that wasn't the way things were when I was a kid. I'm like, I'm going to have commercial breaks and I'm not going to be able to pause it. And the connection it made between me and the program was really strange. I had never been so committed to something. I couldn't pause it and look at my phone. If I needed to go to the bathroom or get a snack, I had to wait for the commercial break. It felt like me and the story were together as opposed to I'm in control of you. To not have control made me so much more vulnerable and present for the show. I don't know. I loved it in a way that I think we're going to all embrace.

[A]

You, Michael, are an optimist. I love that idea. My concern is that the exact opposite might happen. That rather than people changing their geography to get with the other people they like, I think I rather fear that people may decide that the people they don't like can't share their geography. I'm talking civil war. Anyway, that's one of those two. One of those two.

[B]

One of those 2. Exactly. It's going to be one of those two. And I have an unfortunate piece of evidence that kind of supports what you just said. And it's the fact that we are doing this. We are geographically sort of relocating ourselves because that has become easier to do along ideological lines. And in 2012, 50% of Americans, and ever since then, it's gone up. 50% of Americans found themselves living in A county that voted for one presidential candidate over the other by 20 points or more. They're called landslide counties. So we stopped living surrounded by a diversity of people that we kind of had to learn to live with and also like, kind of made our own beliefs stronger because we were having to coexist with people who disagreed with them. That is eroding away. And I don't know how we solve that, because, yeah, if I can get together with people that I agree with, who's going to force me to, to get a little bit of diversity now and then and get around people who really just don't understand the movies that I like do not have the same values as me. Yeah, I'll say. The thing that really made my whole 2012 project fall apart was that I really hoped that political polarization somehow, like, really took off in 2012, but it just didn't. 2012 has. There's nothing special about polarization in 2012. I'll tell you though, it really, really took over American Society in 2003. Okay, so for, for a long time, Pew Research has been doing this American values survey. It's 48 questions about what you value, what's the role of family, the role of government, all these things. And they would track how different people's values were based on their education, their income, their race, their religiosity. When they started doing this in the 80s, all the way from then until 2003, the number one predictor of a value difference in America was race.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But in 2003, that changed. And suddenly the biggest predictor that you were going to have different values than someone was what political party you preferred.

[A]

Haha. It's definitely the case.

[B]

That was big. And then when they surveyed again in 2012, the difference was astronomical. It used to be that they were all still pretty clumped, but political party preference was the top. Now it's every race, income, education, gender, they're all different by maybe 2, 3 percentage points. Political party, 30 percentage point difference. I mean, it's, it's huge. And so, yeah, something is, is still going on. And I don't know how that's going to work with the way we consume information together or apart, if it's gonna get better or worse.

[A]

The one thing I've seen recently that actually does make me feel quite positive about that is some evidence around the way polarization is changing large language models. So you've had this era, the 2012 being the tipping point of people on social media, of people finding their own individual communities of these Bubbles happening of people spiraling down into more and more and more extreme content. And people were really concerned that if you were talking to large language models, you end up getting the exact same effect. But actually, and there's like the evidence is really emerging on this, but it's, it, it's looking pretty robust that actually you get the exact opposite effect that people when they are talking to a large language model, not only do they not feel judged or, or sort of insulted or looked down on because of their political views, but actually they end up asking the questions that they want to ask. And, and it appears that it's nudging people from both extremes, by the way, not from one extreme, but from both extremes slightly more together than we were before. And it's an effect also actually, sorry, forgive me, because I can't remember the name of the author, but there was one study really looked amazing, which is where they sat people with quite extreme views down and then they had a conversation with the large language model and they changed their opinion. But not only that, they went back and spoke to them again a few weeks later and, and their opinions had remained softened from, from earlier.

[B]

Well, we'll, we'll do a whole episode because I know exactly what you're talking about. I've had this experience and I've seen it from other people where if they talk to someone, a human they disagree with, they're easy, they're able to just psychologically say there's something wrong with you. Yeah, but if, if a language model is, is, I mean, it can be tuned to do the opposite. It can just say, you're right and let's, let's exacerbate your current feelings. If, if it provides that necessary friction for us to really shape out what it is, we really believe we do get pushed into a more reasonable perspective that is aware of its own subjectivity and that we're, you know, not everyone agrees with us. So gosh, there'll definitely be a role played there. I think in a way people look at AI as being just like so smart these LLMs. They think, they think that they are like omniscient basically almost to a fault where someone will say, oh, Well, I asked ChatGPT and it didn't say that. That's true. And it's like, oh my gosh. But it's wrong. However, they just trust it. They don't think it has a personality or ulterior motives. They just think that it's like either right or wrong. I don't know that's going to be a significant influence on this whole topic in the future.

[A]

Let's definitely do an episode on that one. But I think. You know what? I end up being persuaded. I am persuaded by your arguments here. I think 2012 was a turning point. I think that the world as we knew it did end in 2012. I agree with you.

[B]

And a whole new world began. I mean, look, I'll end with this. I'll say in 2012, Facebook went public. All right? So social media became this, like, very mainstream, not private thing. Also, what else started in 2012? Tinder. Okay. I think. I think it's. It's certainly true that 2012 stands out as an important year for this migration to digital heterotopias, but the process has been a slow one that's happened over time, and we still don't really know where it's taking us. I think it's taking us together, but whether it does that or takes us apart in bad ways is completely up to us.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

Like, this is. This isn't a great, like, bumper sticker slogan, but we kind of need both. We need to be apart, but also apart. We need the freedom to escape, but we also need to be forced into friction and disagreements. So if we keep that in mind, I think it'll guide us well.

[A]

Okay, well, I'm just writing down your predictions here for the future, and we will see if they come true in the next baktoon.

[B]

That's a lot of time.

[A]

That's a lot of time. We've got a while.

[B]

Sometime in the next 394 years. We'll see what happens.

[A]

We'll see what happens. All right, well, thank you very much, as ever, for joining us. Send us your thoughts, your ideas to the rest of [e-mail] and we'll see you next time.

[B]

See you then.