Get embodied

[0:00] Matt: It comes like a fleeting memory. Whatever you grab just turns to dust. Like eye contact with strangers.

[0:20] Michael: Hey, hey, yo. That's all I got.

[0:25] Matt: You're going to be like Shaggy.

[0:28] Michael: I'm going to be like Ed McMahon on Johnny Carson. Yes, Yes.

[0:34] Matt: I don't know that I ever watched Johnny Carson. No, you. You predate me by a few years.

[0:39] Michael: I know it. That was kind of like. I think.

[0:42] Matt: Do you remember watching it?

[0:44] Michael: I mean, I say yes, but I also don't know, like, how much of it was.

[0:48] Matt: Yeah.

[0:48] Michael: Clips I've seen or, you know, reruns or whatever, you know, So I definitely

[0:53] Matt: remember, like Jay Leno and David Letterman.

[0:55] Michael: Oh, yeah.

[0:56] Matt: And then Conan o'. Brien. Yeah, but not Johnny Carson.

[0:59] Michael: Yeah, yeah. But maybe I have it. I don't know. In my mind I have. It's like parents watching or something like that. I don't know. I don't even know. Whenever David Letterman took over, did David Letterman took over for Johnny Carson or is it Jay Letterman?

[1:10] Matt: I think so. David Letterman and then Conan got it and then lost it and now it's Jimmy Kimmel.

[1:17] Michael: Yeah.

[1:18] Matt: So anyway, TV's dead. Who cares?

[1:21] Michael: To the shores.

[1:22] Matt: To the shores. Yeah, TV really is dead.

[1:29] Michael: Yeah.

[1:31] Matt: Isn't that funny?

[1:33] Michael: I think the only thing I've watched on. Well, I guess it's called Peacock. I'll watch some things on that.

[1:38] Matt: Right.

[1:39] Michael: I don't think of it as. Was it ABC or NBC? Forget. Yeah, but, yeah, I don't watch any of. Yeah. I don't even know what TV is anymore.

[1:50] Matt: Right.

[1:50] Michael: The category.

[1:51] Matt: Different.

[1:51] Michael: Yeah.

[1:52] Matt: I was wondering recently if. So, my across the street neighbor, she and her husband are in their mid-70s, probably, I'm guessing. And I had a kid now two years ago, she just turned two this last weekend, which was really fun. But my across the street neighbors who've lived there for 50 years or something, they bought that house when it was new and they had kids, but their kids never had kids. So she doesn't have any grandchildren. So she's just smitten with my young daughter and she's bringing. She has all this stuff she saved, saved from her kids.

[2:27] Michael: Oh.

[2:27] Matt: And now she's giving it to my daughter because she doesn't have any grandkids to give it to. And I think she saved it, thinking, I'll give this to my grandkids someday. And so now we're the benefactors of it. And a lot of it is stuff that I remember reading when I was a kid. And I have some of those old books that my mom Saved for my grandkids. But I was flipping through one of these books with my 2 year old and there's a picture of an old, you know, a tube television which looks nothing like what we think of as a TV today.

[3:00] Michael: Totally.

[3:00] Matt: And I was wondering, I don't know if we talked about this or not, but like, if you asked, like if I asked one of my teenage. My teenagers, what sound does a phone make?

[3:12] Michael: Oh, yeah.

[3:13] Matt: Like, I'm not sure what they would say. Whereas we'd go something like, you know, that's. That's the sound a phone makes. Right. But now they would think that. So, like, I wonder if I asked, one of them showed them a picture of a tube tv. If they know what it was, they probably would because it's depicted enough in pop culture. If you watch Silo or shows like that, that show older things, I'm sure they would know what it is. But it's just so interesting how the form of things changes so dramatically that you can't even really. If you're not around for the change. You would never draw a connection.

[3:52] Michael: Yeah.

[3:53] Matt: Like, I don't think you'd ever draw a connection if you were shown an iPhone for the first time in 1993 and were told this is a phone.

[4:03] Michael: Yeah.

[4:04] Matt: You'd be like, in no way does that fit the category of phone for me. So that's really interesting.

[4:12] Michael: Yeah. Even now, I mean, just technically, it's not really even a phone. It's a computer.

[4:17] Matt: It's a computer. Yeah.

[4:19] Michael: That has some phone features that can

[4:21] Matt: make calls, which almost everybody gets annoyed at that feature.

[4:24] Michael: Oh, totally. I got.

[4:25] Matt: Everybody wants calls.

[4:26] Michael: I don't take any calls. I think I just have. I think you and my family as the only ones that I accept.

[4:33] Matt: Well, I don't even call you.

[4:35] Michael: I know, but just like this. Emergencies, you know.

[4:37] Matt: Right.

[4:37] Michael: That's the only reason I have that on.

[4:39] Matt: Right.

[4:40] Michael: I don't know what kind of emergency you'd have, but I just thought, why not?

[4:44] Matt: I'm above emergencies. I'm too good for emergencies.

[4:48] Michael: Yeah.

[4:48] Matt: It's a Chuck Norris quote in there. Some. Somewhere. R.I.P. r.I.P. chuck Norris, by the way.

[4:54] Michael: Oh. That's why there's been. Okay. I saw people kind of talking about. I was like, wow, Chuck Norris is kind of making a resurgence.

[5:06] Matt: Yeah. What a legend.

[5:08] Michael: Like, he was like, for real. Action star.

[5:10] Matt: Yeah.

[5:11] Michael: It wasn't just the old school kind.

[5:13] Matt: Yeah. Chuck Norris can swim on dry land. All these great ones floating around.

[5:20] Michael: That's great.

[5:22] Matt: Oh, man. Well, so the phone thing is kind of an interesting segue into this sort of series of studies that I was pointing at, that I thought was really interesting and I wanted to bring up, because we've talked about this many times in the past, both on and off the podcast, which is the difference between reading comprehension when you read a physical book versus when you read something on a digital format, whether it's an ebook or a computer or an iPhone or an iPad, something like that. And we talked about this, I think, just three weeks ago. Do you remember we were talking about the difference between walking into a library and going to google.com?

[6:04] Michael: yeah, yeah.

[6:04] Matt: It's like you walk into the library, you feel the very immediacy of sort of the importance or the. The value proposition of all of the minds and hands and people, blood, sweat, and tears that were involved in producing these artifacts. And when you're online, you're so divorced from that. Everything, nothing, and nothing is sort of meaningful and meaningless at the same time.

[6:31] Michael: Yeah.

[6:33] Matt: And so I ran across this, really a tweet explaining these series of studies. Apparently there was some kind of retroactive analysis on 54 different studies with 170,000 participants, and they found that there's very real comprehension differences between reading something on a physical piece of paper and reading it in a digital format. And I've had that same hypothesis for a long time already. But they gave some really interesting data points as to why that is. And they said that when you read something on a piece of paper, your brain builds a spatial map of the text, the same way that you build maps in your brain when you walk a trail or you navigate a city block, navigate through a city in your car without directions, you're building up this spatial awareness, and it's not exactly a conscious thing. It's like when you're reading something on paper, you have this tactile experience where you're flipping the pages and there's the weight of the page and the texture, and you're feeling the weight move from the right hand to the left and the book change weights as you're progressing through it. Every word that you read, every paragraph and thought has a location. And you're not tracking that consciously, you're tracking it bodily. You're using your hands, you're feeling your touch, the weight, all of these things to build this spatial map. Whereas when you read something online or on any digital format, apparently you just don't make those spatial maps because you're in an abstract area with no real boundaries and no link to anything embodied within you. And they said that reading something on a piece of paper promotes or, or triggers natural deep breathing patterns, whereas reading something in a digital format interrupts breathing patterns altogether. That's weird. Yeah. Kind of strange, but I can. It's like I was reading this and I got excited because this is. I feel like there's so many tie ins to real life. Because for a long time I've had this suspicion that social media. It's not a suspicion. I think it's fairly well documented these days. But social media is causing anxiety in people. I notice it in myself. But I've noticed recently that that anxiety doesn't necessarily come on from social media itself. It's almost like from my device itself. It's like sometimes I have the feeling. Yeah. When I pick it up, like I'm going into the ether, you know, I'm going into nowhere. I'm going into disembodied, disindividuated space. And there's something about that where I have this sometimes this negative reaction to it. And then I was thinking about the whole spatial map thing and I was like, isn't it so true that now that we all have Siri and Google Maps and Apple maps and Apple CarPlay and if we want to go somewhere, we just say, hey, Siri, here's where we want to go. And it pulls up the directions, it reads the traffic, it gives us the best route for that time of day and those conditions, and we get there. Fantastic. Right? Side effect. I barely know how to get anywhere anymore. That's so true.

[10:08] Michael: It's the same thing with phone numbers. Back in the day.

[10:10] Matt: Totally. We used to memorize phone numbers and it was almost like part of being a good friend of someone. You sort of cherished knowing people's phone numbers because it meant something about your friendship with them. But now. And I used to sort of pride myself on being able to get around, you know, without MapQuest or whatever. But these days I barely know how to get around the city. I mean, I do, right? But I just lean on this so often because it is so convenient that I don't have to think about how to get around. I don't have to think about alternate routes or contingencies. I don't have to use or build or pay attention to building a spatial map in my head. As I'm getting around, I'm offloading that to this abstract layer that has no tie in to my embodied experience. And so you just don't remember it? Why, you know, why would you?

[11:10] Michael: Yeah, well, I mean, you kind of see this Just in general within relationships is people act differently when it's through the Internet than they do when they're embodied in front of somebody. Like, there's a certain niceties that people play out when you're in. When you're in front of someone physically, totally. So it does make a lot of sense to me is like, there's something about that. I think you said the best is going into the ether. It's like, there's no real consequence in the space. If Neo's in the Matrix and they're fighting, it's like, oh, is that air you're breathing?

[11:49] Matt: Yeah, just respawn.

[11:51] Michael: You just respawn and there's no consequence, really.

[11:56] Matt: A couple of other things that I thought were interesting. One is that when you read in a digital space, it interrupts your brain's sequencing of the way you remember information, which makes total sense because there's no connection to the here and now into real physical space. And so you don't. You don't. You don't sequence things the same way as you do when you read something physical. Oh, there was one other thing I wanted to say. I had it. Oh. And when you read digitally, you tend to stop early. You tend to read less of the article or the thing you're reading than if you read a physical piece of paper. And if it is true that, like, for example, physical reading promotes natural breathing, natural, deep breathing, it means you're in more of a meditative and focused state. Whereas if you're in that abstract ether, your mind can go anywhere, any place, all the time. You know, you stop to look up a word or click a link to see a source or whatever, and before you know it, you never finished it.

[13:06] Michael: Yeah.

[13:07] Matt: Also interestingly, listening to an audiobook is more like. Reading a physical piece of paper has more of the same effects. However, it has a 28% drop in retention than reading something physical. But they attribute that to multitasking and the pacing of the narrator. The way the person reads may not suit a person, which that's totally true. It's like when I'm listening to an audiobook, if I really want to read a book, I'll always get the book and read it. If I don't care so much about the book, I'll get the audiobook so that I can do it while I'm doing the dishes or out on a walk or whatever. But I definitely remember less.

[13:48] Michael: Yeah, that's funny, because it's almost like intuitive or anecdotal that that's. That's Just kind of how I interact with all those mediums. You just said it's like. Yeah, well, I really enjoyed like that part. I was like, of all those different types of mediums. But I think that's the, I think the kind of, the point that you're making is that we're losing the physical aspect of our reality more and more.

[14:19] Matt: Well, I think so many people tend to, I think rightly and intuitively attribute these sort of effects to the rise of short form content, whether it's Instagram Reels or TikToks or tweets, especially when tweets used to be limited in their character length. Like we were being conditioned for paying less attention and paying attention for shorter periods of time. And I think there's something true to that. But I feel like this research is pointing to something a little bit deeper, which is the whole abstract nature of the Internet is geared toward paying less attention. It's geared towards more distraction. It's geared towards. It's not that it's geared towards, it's the way we interact with it. I don't know that it could be different.

[15:07] Michael: Yeah, well, because I used to, everywhere I went, I always had probably four or five books with me all the time. And just because I didn't know what I was going to read or if I was going to have time to read.

[15:18] Matt: And I feel like the last time we went on our yearly trip, you bought like 12 books.

[15:23] Michael: I know. And so, you know, there's this part that, you know, if I'm standing in line, sometimes I might pull out a book and read. But it was like, it was, it was a lot more difficult. I had to be a lot more intentional in doing that. But if I'm in sitting in line, I can just pull my phone and read something. There's less, there are less commitment, there's less friction. You know, whenever you just can pull out your phone and read. But like a book, there's a little bit more friction. Okay, well, I can't stand up and do this. I probably need to sit down or lay down. You know, there's all these requirements to actually engage with it.

[16:00] Matt: That's funny. I'd rather read standing up than laying down.

[16:03] Michael: Really?

[16:04] Matt: Probably.

[16:06] Michael: Yeah. So it's, it's funny like, because it, it's not just the mediums themselves, and I think that's the point that you're making, or the article is making too, is what kind of friction do the different mediums, I guess, require, where a phone in line is a lot less friction. So Things that have less friction have less sticking power. Like a friend that you've had for many years is like, you know, there's a lot more friction in relationships. And so you. There's a lot more meaning and a lot more depth, but with someone you just met, it's like. It just kind of like flits away, you know, because it's.

[16:49] Matt: There's less friction. That's what you're saying?

[16:50] Michael: Yeah, because I think that's where. That's where, like you. I think that's where you get depth is when you have more friction. I mean, I think of like in business is. Is. That's kind of where I've learned the most, is when. Where the most friction is. If there's not that much friction, then I really don't learn about that. You know, if I opened my first store, which was, don't get me wrong, it's really hard. But then I kind of thought, it's like, oh, wow, I've got this figured out, my second store. And I was like, oh, fuck.

[17:18] Matt: Well, the less friction something has, the less you have to pay attention to it. I mean, the smoother it goes. It's like the less you have to monitor it. But I don't know, I'm really fascinated with the. This idea of embodiment that I heard somebody talking about how it's statistically much more dangerous to talk to someone on the phone while you're driving than it is to talk to someone else in the car with you. And we all kind of know that, right? Like, if you. If you're on a cell phone call in the car, even if you're hands free, you know that you're not being as safe as you could be, but you don't feel that way when you're sitting there with somebody in the passenger seat.

[18:10] Michael: Yeah.

[18:11] Matt: And the hypothesis put forward was, you know, what is that? Well, when you're with someone in person, like you and I are in person now, we're not only sharing sort of headspace, which is so fascinating that we can do that, that humans can push air through these two cords in our throat and vibrate the molecules. And then that's how we share headspace. But we do. But we're also sharing physical space. And so our attention is also unified. Whereas if you're ever on a zoom call, you know, your attention is nowhere near unified to the rest of the people on that call. They're distracted by things that you can see in their background, plus a bunch of stuff you can't see in their Background, plus a bunch of stuff they have pulled up next to you that they're looking at that you can't see and know nothing about. You know, and so your. Your mind is also, like, in questioning space. I'm questioning where this other person is. And I think the same is true when you're on a phone call. It's like I have to make up for the massive blank space in my understanding of this person and their attention to the conversation we're having. And part of me is curious about that. Part of me is just sort of scanning for understanding. Was that tone in the voice because of something that happened that I couldn't see or couldn't hear? Or was that response to me? And you're constantly questioning things, whereas if you're in the same room as somebody, all that quiets down and you can just be in that space with that person. Which I think explains why it isn't dangerous to have a passenger in the car. You know, certainly passengers can be distracting.

[20:05] Michael: My.

[20:06] Matt: My brother will remember many a time when I was 16 and tasked with picking him and his friend up from elementary school. And they would. It was sport for them to annoy me as much as possible. And at least on one occasion, I stopped the car and I said, get out, and I left him, made him walk home. We grew up in very rural small town Texas. It was fine.

[20:34] Michael: That's great. I can just picture you doing that.

[20:36] Matt: They hadn't even made Texas Chainsaw Massacre yet, so people didn't even think to do that.

[20:40] Michael: Yeah.

[20:42] Matt: Anyway.

[20:43] Michael: No, I love this. I mean, I feel like there's, like, a lot of pieces coming together for me that are kind of intuitive and. And just like when you said being in person calms everything else down, it's like, because you're able to kind of, like, read the room better. Like on a phone call, you can't read the room.

[21:00] Matt: No.

[21:00] Michael: And so you have to pay attention a lot more to, like, tone or inflection or whatever it might be.

[21:06] Matt: Yeah. That person's voice is your only proxy to a whole other reality that you know nothing else about.

[21:13] Michael: Yeah.

[21:16] Matt: Whereas when we're in the same room, we're reading the room together.

[21:18] Michael: Yeah.

[21:19] Matt: We're relying on each other to notify the other person if there's something that should be paid attention to outside of the conversation. You know, it's like, how many times have we been sitting here recording this podcast? And then all of a sudden, because of where. From where you sit, you can sort of see, I guess, like the entry hall area. It's like one of my older kids will come home and walk in and I can't hear because I got my headphones on. But I can see in your eyes that your attention shifts.

[21:44] Michael: Yeah, totally.

[21:45] Matt: I don't have to get anything from your voice. I can tell there's someone behind me

[21:49] Michael: now and they're about to kill you.

[21:51] Matt: But if we were on zoom, that'd be much more difficult.

[21:54] Michael: Yeah. Well, just even meetings in general. Like, we do a Monday zoom meeting with our upper management, and the amount of paying attention that happens is definitely less than whenever we're in person.

[22:07] Matt: Totally.

[22:08] Michael: Because if you're. If you're in person and you're not paying attention, everyone knows. And it's sort of like. But if you're on the zoom call for some reason, unless you have to, like, scan each person individually because you don't have the same sort of like. I don't know why that is. You don't have, like. It's. The peripheral doesn't really work as well. I don't know what.

[22:27] Matt: Because nothing is peripheral.

[22:28] Michael: That's true. It's all flat.

[22:29] Matt: It's all focal. Focal.

[22:33] Michael: Yeah. I don't know. But it just. It is different. We. We do interact in a way that's less. There's just less friction.

[22:47] Matt: Well, so to broaden that back out to physical reading versus Internet reading,

[22:55] Michael: and

[22:55] Matt: I'm suspecting that it goes beyond reading. It probably also has to do with things like watching video or watching something in real life. You know, like going to a football game versus watching one in real life. But when you're reading something physical, you're reading a physical book. It's like, think about the way that you do certain things when you're reading that book. I might be reading a book, and I get to some part. Let's say it's a nonfiction book and it's talking about some concept that I know it's talked about before. I can't quite remember. I might flip back to the index and find where they talked about this one particular topic before, which is really kind of similar to clicking a link on a article online. Right. It's like, I'm going to dive into some sources here. But when you're doing that with a book, think about that book in your hands as you're doing that. You have one finger wedged in the part of the book where you were, and you're holding that section with your thumb, and you're flipping with your right hand. It's like you are still physically attached to to the place that you were. Whereas once I click a link to go somewhere else, I'm gone. It's like, how many people do we know that have currently 150 tabs open on their Chrome browser? It's like once you leave a tab, you really don't go back, but when you're physically inserted, you physically insert yourself in that section of the book, you're going to go back, even if it's just to put a bookmark in there to remember or whatever. But I look in the index and I go, oh, yeah, they talked about that. On page 54, I take the section of the book that was marking my place, I move it into my right hand. Now I use my left hand to flip back to where that was. I read the previous source material and now I have three spatial markers rooted in real life, pointed to that concept that I have now held, found and held with my hands. And it just makes so much sense to me that that would be such a more powerful. What's the word? It's like an index in your mind of that experience.

[25:06] Michael: It's like different reference points that you have physically represented.

[25:09] Matt: Whereas I click the link to go to a reference point on an Internet article. And now I'm bombarded with ads and cookie notifications and all this shit from the new website. And then I read that and I'm like, oh, this is shit. And I might click on something else or I might like get a pop up and be like, oh, that's right. I was wanting to buy that thing from this one place.

[25:27] Michael: And then you go off to this

[25:28] Matt: other place and you're just, it's. You're Alice in Wonderland. The Red Queen says here you have to run as fast as you can just to stand still. That's the Internet.

[25:42] Michael: This is fascinating. So today I had done some research on air traffic controllers.

[25:48] Matt: It's so funny after that LaGuardia crash.

[25:51] Michael: Oh, no, this is just like how information is indexed. And air traffic controllers, they call them slips and it has information of what's going on with that plane.

[26:04] Matt: I've watched videos. Yeah, it's really fascinating.

[26:06] Michael: Yeah. And it's like they end up computer, like programming it and software. But the.

[26:11] Matt: But they used to use physical pieces of paper, but they slip cards.

[26:15] Michael: Yeah, but they went back and they. All the engineers or the air traffic controller guys, like went back and like started using the slips again. Just because it was like a visual reference to what's happening right here and right now.

[26:28] Matt: Right.

[26:29] Michael: And some of the reasons I was looking at that just like, what, what information is important? That's something I was kind of like researching and. But it's just funny, like they just naturally went back to it because they actually worked better with that system that they did.

[26:43] Matt: That's fascinating. I'd love to see. Was that an article or it was

[26:47] Michael: just a deep dive research I did with an agent.

[26:50] Matt: Yeah, gotcha. I'd be curious if we could find some resources for that because that's fascinating. I mean, I have had this growing. I don't know if it's a theory or a hypothesis or just speculation, but that as the online world is flooded with more and more content and the origin and credibility of that content is more and more dubious and in question, people are going to get really hungry for physical things and for real people and for ideas that come out of real people's flawed heads and physical experiences like reading books on paper or maybe even journaling on paper or maybe, you know, a resurgence in things like film photography. I still keep thinking about that conversation we had about indexicality a couple of weeks ago. You know, the idea that you take a picture on a. You take a photograph on film. You have captured the actual light which was necessary to be in the room when you took the picture. And when you develop the picture, you're recasting that light into your eyes when you look at it later. It's like a one to one connection between the moment of capture and the moment of observation of the artifact, which is just not true of any digital media. And I think we're going to get hungry for the real.

[28:24] Michael: Well, I mean, I did the same thing. There was two or three years where I read everything digitally on Kindle and it was amazing. I could take all these books with me everywhere I went. It's so easily inaccessible. But it was funny. I just kind of remember and still do because there's one book that I read every year that's digital and sometimes I don't know when the end of the chapter is. And that's really kind of like, okay, how much further do I have to go? How, how much longer is this book? Even though it has page numbers on the bottom, it's just not the same as being able to like, physically like, oh man, I've got, you know, this, this much I'm showing by my fingers. And it's, it's, it's just a different experience of that. And then if I'm, if I'm in a book that I don't really like and it's, it's a digital book, I'm less. I'm more likely to discard it than I am if it's a physical book.

[29:20] Matt: Right.

[29:21] Michael: And that's. And I just. So as you're talking about, I'm just seeing a lot of like, just my own observations.

[29:27] Matt: Well, not to mention a physical book is like, if you have a physical book, you have it. It's in your space, you know, and unless you go to great, you know, pains to hide it from yourself, it's like you're going to run into it every once in a while. Going to, oh, that's right, that's that book. Right? It's like, oh, right, that's that book that one person gave me that one time because they thought that I would like it. But really I. I kind of like questioned their perception of me because they, it made me think that they thought I was this kind of person or whatever, you know, and then. But you're like, well, maybe I should just pick it up and look at it. Yeah, but things that are digital, you actually have to take pains to discover that you have them. I mean, especially like, it used to be in the early 2000s when disk drives had megabytes. I remember when you could get like a 2 gigabyte optical drive on a computer. And that was crazy. The other day, my mom was like, hey, my iPhone's running out of storage. Can you help me figure out why? And we went and looked and I was like, oh, well, because you have 46,000 photos on your iPhone, it's not like she's downloading photos. She took all these photos. But who knows what's in there? You'd really have to try hard to figure out what's in there.

[30:49] Michael: Oh, man. Yeah.

[30:51] Matt: But it used to be when we didn't have much space, it was like, I remember once every couple of months I would go through my whole hard drive and delete stuff so I could make room. So I was intimately familiar with everything that was on my computer because I would order organize it all the time. Now it's in my downloads folder. Probably it might be in iCloud or Dropbox or Google Drive or who knows, you know, if I need it, I'll find it. I don't know where it is.

[31:23] Michael: Or just even the photo albums, you know, pretty much like you got rid of your photos and you just put the most important ones even in your photo album.

[31:33] Matt: Right? Yeah. An album was something that you curated. It wasn't a word that meant all the photos.

[31:39] Michael: Totally. But it's so. It's and it's also so special because you sat down and you physically went through them and. Yeah, and I love that. But like, yeah, I don't even know how if our kids were to go back and say, hey, what were mom and dad like? Let's look through their photos, you know, at the end of a lifetime. Now that, that big 2006, I guess, really is whenever we started doing that pretty regularly. But there's 10 jillion billion of them. It's like, I guess facial recognition is.

[32:10] Matt: They're not even photos. There's like screenshots in there and like boarding passes and like, it's so full of shit that the, even the idea of like, let's look through dad's, you know, photos on his app and have nice memories, it's like, yeah, that's not going to work out too well for you.

[32:29] Michael: That's the truth. So

[32:33] Matt: unless we redevelop a taste for doing things like our parents used to do when we were kids, which was like my mom for decades, at the end of every year would buy a photo album and put her favorite photos from that year in there and write little captions and dates and then on the outside write the year. And she's got a bunch of these things at her house. But it's like, how much effort does that take? Like 100 times more than it would take for me to create an iphoto album. Like, she had to go procure things, which meant she had to get into her car. Nowadays it's like Amazon in Austin, three hour delivery. But she had to go out and buy things and go take the film to a store to get developed, wait for that to happen, wait for that to come back, then pick the pictures she wanted, then put them into the album, remember what has happened that day, write the caption. It's like so much more in terms of time. But I also suspect it's so much more rewarding for her and for everyone downstream of that who looks at it. It's rewarding for me in my 40s to go home and look at the albums of the curation among our life, you know, and I've had, you know, significant others that love to look through them, to like, see what was, what was this person like when they were a child? And.

[33:58] Michael: Well, it's interesting because I think my kids experience this in one way is that they still do paper yearbooks and every so often, maybe once or twice a year, they'll go back and look through them.

[34:09] Matt: Yeah.

[34:09] Michael: And I think that's just Fascinating.

[34:11] Matt: I'm glad they still do that.

[34:12] Michael: Yeah. And it's like, there's all these memories, and there's. And it's curated.

[34:16] Matt: I just had to order two of them.

[34:18] Michael: Yeah, they're expensive.

[34:19] Matt: And I can say, like, I think the yearbook cost $20 when I was in high school.

[34:26] Michael: Yeah, it seems about right. 20, 30? Yeah.

[34:27] Matt: Yeah, it's 130.

[34:30] Michael: Holy. Well, that's a. That's a. Oh, sorry. You got me pissed off. The student photos are stupid.

[34:39] Matt: Are they? Oh. Oh, did they still do that?

[34:41] Michael: Still do that? And they charge.

[34:43] Matt: Oh, yeah.

[34:44] Michael: Like a hundred bucks for these photos that are crap.

[34:48] Matt: Well, it's not only that they're crap. It's like, why would I pay you for a photo of my own kid? I take 10 a day.

[34:54] Michael: You know, it's just a racket.

[34:57] Matt: It's a relic from a previous time. I don't know why we're still doing it. And it is interesting that they can charge a premium for it because nobody's willing to stand up and say, this is stupid. We should stop doing it. I mean, have you, though. Have you gone to, like, the school board meeting?

[35:12] Michael: Well, we'll probably. We usually, like, get six or something like that. Because I remember when I was a kid that was so special. You only had so many. So who am I going to give this picture to?

[35:23] Matt: I have a bunch of girl I like. Yeah, totally. Oh, what am I going to write on the back?

[35:27] Michael: Yeah, totally.

[35:29] Matt: Have fun this summer. See you around.

[35:34] Michael: Yeah. I always tried to write something random on him, something that didn't make any sense.

[35:39] Matt: You're one of those guys. I had one of those guys in my life, Augie.

[35:44] Michael: Yeah, he sounds like one of those guys.

[35:49] Matt: He also introduced me to the music of U2.

[35:55] Michael: Yeah. That's so fun. I mean, it's. Music's the same way. Like, it's a. There's so much of it. It's everywhere. You don't have to make any. My son and I were talking about that. The song about the different. What is it called when you. Underground music.

[36:13] Matt: I think that works. Underground music.

[36:14] Michael: Yeah. And so, like, Pearl Jam had this one where it had. He was. He's saying, sitting on the dock of the bay and. And I got it. And I was like, one of my prized possessions, because nobody else has this. You have to be really, like, in the know to. To get it, you know?

[36:29] Matt: Right.

[36:30] Michael: And. And I just remember there's a few of those that were, like, super. But there's nothing that's special in music.

[36:35] Matt: Anymore.

[36:36] Michael: They try to do some like, I'm only going to release 100 of these, so you got to trust me that there's only 100 of this song or something. But even in that, it's still. It's not. There's not like it was a. Yeah, just. It just still doesn't seem very, like, special or unique because it is digital.

[36:59] Matt: Well, I mean, I think we remember when NFTs were all the rage.

[37:03] Michael: Oh, yeah.

[37:03] Matt: And we were starting to talk about, like, tokenizing things digitally. And fungibility was talked about all the time. And there was sort of this idea that the thing that gives things value is their scarcity. So if we can make the authentic source of something digitally scarce, then we can transmute value into the abstract digital space. And I'm wondering now, I mean, it is true that something being scarce does give it value, but I'm wondering if there's something deeper than that. It's like, you know, the books in the library don't have value because they're scarce. My mom's photo albums, one of a kind. It's not why they're valuable. It's like there's real value to waking up into consciousness as a real human being with a flesh, a fleshly body and going and doing things that's valuable. And it isn't scarce because there's 8 billion of us, if you believe China and the numbers that they're putting out, which these days I'm not sure I do. That's a whole new rabbit hole of mine. There's something almost like more beautiful and valuable about the individual experience of waking up into being human that outvalues everything else. It's like I was thinking the other day about. I don't know why this thought popped in my head, but I was thinking about that movie, the Patriot.

[38:49] Michael: Mm.

[38:50] Matt: You remember that movie? Mel Gibson. And it opens with Mel Gibson on his, whatever, property in his house with his family. And he goes into his shed. And I haven't probably seen the movie since it came out, so I'm not sure how right or wrong this is, but I remember he's trying to make like a rocking chair. Or maybe it's a regular chair, maybe it's a rock less chair, I don't know. And he's got it right. And it's like today's the day he's gonna sit in it for the first time. And he sits in it and just breaks immediately. And he's just pissed. And he throws it onto a pile and you can see this is not the first time he's tried and failed at this. But there's just something so special about that experience. Like picking up a. It's like, do you remember how cool was it the first time you whittled a piece of wood, wood with your pocket knife? It's like to hold something in your hand and to have effect on it. And then you learn to make something with it. Maybe it's a treehouse. Then you learn carpentry or cabinetry, or you learn how to fix your car. It's like these experiences are so deeply human and deeply satisfying. There isn't an equivalent to that online, I don't think. I think the only equivalent to that online so we have discovered so far is something like virality or follower count or, you know, these crazy numbers at scale that you can never produce in the real world, you know, unless you have a massive organization. Like back in the old days, you know, like a newspaper could distribute information at scale, but any given person couldn't. And now any given person can open up their phone and make a TikTok and get into the eyeballs of 15 million people.

[40:44] Michael: Well, what is it? Because, I mean, I love technology. I love AI. I love the things that are happening right now. I'm really enjoying it. On one side, I feel like we're kind of saying that these are all have negative impact on humanity, which I don't experience in one regard, but I. But I feel like I understand our argument that we're making. It makes a lot of sense to me and I have, you know, firsthand knowledge or firsthand experience of these things. But what is it about this new world of AI and you know, digital everything? What is it that's. That's, that's appealing about that?

[41:32] Matt: I'm with you. I love technology too. I've been fascinated with it since I was a kid. I love the world we live in. And I wouldn't go back. That's not true. I would go back to the 90s if I could. I would definitely go back to the 90s.

[41:48] Michael: The 90s were pretty good,

[41:51] Matt: but I think that, that there's something universal about a nostalgia for the past. What's the movie? The. Midnight in Paris.

[42:08] Michael: Oh, yeah, it's great.

[42:09] Matt: The whole theme of that movie is that every generation has their nostalgia from the past. And that's why as you get older, your nostalgia grows and you start to say, if you're living in the 50s or 60s, you can't listen to Elvis. That's sinful. And these days, what's the Equivalent, it's like, then it was punk rock, and these days it's, I guess, AI Music or just AI in general or whatever. But I think that the deeper truth is that these are just the specifics of our own longing for the past. Because I think part of what it means to be human is to constantly and simultaneously long for the future and the past is to long for something which is outside of this moment. And I think that the core of that longing is actually a misunderstanding, because what we are longing for is actually something that's outside of time altogether. But I think when we sit in the current moment, we long for something better in the future, and we long for something that seems better in the past. And Midnight in Paris is a beautiful exploration of that idea. But the C.S. lewis quote also comes to my mind when he talks about beauty and nostalgia. And he says. He quotes Wordsworth, or is talking about Wordsworth, because Wordsworth, I think, was known for being nostalgic in his poetry. And he says if Wordsworth were to go back to even those times in his own past, the things that he was nostalgic for, the things he called beauty, he would find, were only themselves a remembering of something in the past from that moment. I think it's that we ultimately long for something which we are unconscious of because it predates our experience in this world. And we're longing for something that we are conscious of and yet cannot reach, because we are in this world and it is not. And so what do you do with that? I don't know exactly. But I think maybe what I'm talking about is not necessarily the tools of our time, but the. Or the universal longing for things which we cannot have. But I'm talking about the difference between waking up into a real day and picking up a real physical object and doing something with it, whether it's making a chair or cleaning your house or going on a walk or having a beer with a friend and touching them, hugging them, looking into their eyes with the real light, the same light that's in the room. It's like it's being in this real world in between the longings. I think the difference between our modern tools is we have such ubiquitous access to an exit ramp from that reality.

[45:30] Michael: Hmm.

[45:32] Matt: That exit ramp doesn't go. It goes. Or it goes. You know, it makes all these noises at us, and we pick it up, and all of a sudden our mind is transported away from reality, away from the room and the light and the sweat and the touch and the feel and the broken chair and the sun and the wind blowing through the trees and the cold water and the. All of this. Transported away from all of that. Transported to where? No one knows. You don't know. I mean, it's. You're in the Matrix, right? Your real body is asleep. Your mind is somewhere else. And your real body isn't asleep. It's just on autopilot. You know, you're standing in line, looking at your phone. You're moving up when you should. You know, you're putting the. The grocery divider behind you like you should. You're not paying attention to the person behind you or the person in front of you or the checker, cashier. It's like I'm not even really paying attention to my phone. I'm just like, swipe, swipe. That's interesting. Click. Not interesting. Where. Wait, where was I? Why did I do this?

[46:48] Michael: Well, maybe you and I have had this conversation, but I had this conversation earlier this week about sort of the ideas of order and chaos and that. I kind of feel like we're moving back into a shaking up of that chaos. Like, the enlightenment kind of gave us more of like, we kind of know what we're doing. For the most part, from the enlightened to now, everything's categorized. It's reason, it's science. Believe in the science. You hear all these tropes now, and

[47:21] Matt: it's like, I believe it's trust the science. Trust the science trademark.

[47:25] Michael: Oh, yeah. But the more that you start this new world that we're moving into and I think AI is going to really disrupt that is like, do you really know what you think? You know?

[47:38] Matt: It's the Cartesian Crisis.

[47:39] Michael: The Cartesian Crisis, yeah. So I think that's kind of. I think that's kind of where we're headed. And I think our kids generation are sort of the ones that are being sacrificed at that alter because. Well, just because it sort of has come to this point where it's like everything is already figured out. So there's nothing too figured out. There's no frontier, there's no manifest destiny. There's no west to conquer. And no one's really.

[48:07] Matt: That's just the hubris of the baby boomers. Yeah.

[48:10] Michael: But then there's this, like, you know, it's like. And then you don't see anybody really excited about this whole space thing. It's not capturing the imagination. It's kind of like, well, we've kind of already figured things out. It's. It's. Everything's fine. I've got Everything right here at the, at the, in my, in my hand, in the tips of my fingers. But I think that's going to be, that's going to lead to like a really disappointing. It's going to really lead to like kind of a very disappointing wake up call at some point.

[48:44] Matt: Well, I would say we're already there. I mean that's what we learned in the last five years that almost everything we thought we knew, we don't actually know. I'm seeing something a little bit different. I feel like in my kids, my Gen Z kids, they seem to have a much more skeptical take on things. When I ask them, what are your friends? What is your social group, your peer group? Not just your friends, but what do people around the school think about this issue or that issue? And they're kind of like, I don't really know, I don't care. I don't think they know what they're talking about. They're loud about this and they repeat these things. But they'll even say that they'll repeat these things, these things that they heard somewhere.

[49:25] Michael: Yeah.

[49:26] Matt: But they don't really take it as like that's not meaningful just because someone says something.

[49:31] Michael: Well, I think that that kind of proves my point is sort of like, like why would I go and try to discover whether that's true or not?

[49:41] Matt: You know, it's almost like a nihilism.

[49:43] Michael: It's a nihilism. Yeah, I see. And I think that's kind of where we're at right now because it's like, well, there's nothing really to discover. There is no God, there's nothing to do or to. Because AI or it's like there's a lot of skepticism I think in our kids generation about AI or so it seems to me. But it's like, because what's the possibilities? What's out there? And I feel like I had, dude, I was like leaving. I was like, I wanted to leave and go somewhere like what are the possibilities out there?

[50:20] Matt: Right.

[50:21] Michael: And I could like, I could do anything or I thought, you know, and, and so I don't, I don't see that same. I just, I just feel like there's a kind of a rude awakening coming to like, oh, I'm just sort of like nihilistically living my life. And that's something that you can't sustain for very long. Like you need something to aim at, something to, to move towards.

[50:50] Matt: Well, I don't know how to fit this into the generational and I'm not really sure what you meant by, like, we're sacrificing our kids at the altar of that.

[50:57] Michael: Well, maybe like we are sacrificed, but. But this common.

[51:01] Matt: They are being.

[51:02] Michael: They're being sacrificed. Yeah.

[51:04] Matt: Well, they are the first our kids generation, which I will say is Gen Z. I think I got an Alpha.

[51:10] Michael: You got an Alpha?

[51:11] Matt: I do have an Alpha, but I got an Alpha. They are the first generation born digital natives. So it is a great experiment. I mean, we really don't know how that's going to affect them. But I think I'm seeing more dismissal. Well, I'm seeing more dismissal from dogma and the sort of trust the science idea. Like, we know we figured it out. We didn't dismiss that Gen X, Gen Y, which became millennials. I believed that wholeheartedly. It's like if it's in a textbook, it's true. And I feel like Gen Z is. They're not taking that position. They might be sort of more plugged into the Matrix than anyone who's ever lived so far, but I think they are also a little bit disillusioned with it, you know, and I think as they start getting into their 20s and 30s, they're going to start recovering some of the older ways of doing things. Yeah, and I would suspect doing some things like giving up their phones altogether in somewhat large groups and resorting to living in the real world. Because I think that they. They can already see as young teenagers that it's just not serving them. They're not reaping any benefit from it. They're spending all their time doing it. And what has it gotten them? Yeah, nothing. You know, we'll see about Gen Alpha. I mean, we'll see about humanity. But haven't we always been at that place? Yeah, it's always been we'll see about humanity. You know, the Cold war, World War II, World War I, every war before that, every culture before that. I mean, is it. Maybe that's part of what it is to be human is to live in existential crisis, to be constantly wondering, what does it mean to be human? Are we going to destroy ourselves? Because that question is constantly pertinent. Like, we think it's like unique right now from the vantage point in 2026, it's like, oh, is this it? Are we really going to destroy ourselves this time with AI? But that was no different than the Cold War or the Manhattan Project and development of the atom bomb, and probably no different than the concerns of all kinds of cultures in the past, because that is the nature of the human Heart. You don't have to have AI or the atom bomb to wonder if you're going to destroy yourself totally. You don't need very much for your heart to whisper. Is this the time that you go too far with this? Whether it's doing something crazy, risky physically, it's mostly a male thing, you know, or over consuming something, or. Maybe engaging in some kind of disease prone habit. I'm being very unspecific about my examples here, but it's like I think we all are familiar with that still small voice that says, is this when you destroy yourself? And is it so surprising that that would be playing out at a sort of like global, global cultural level? And you can replace the tools with any other set of tools and the human heart is still the same.

[55:01] Michael: Well, where do you think we're headed? Are you optimistic, pessimistic? A little bit of both. Lay out your vision.

[55:19] Matt: Well, I believe so. I will say on one hand, I was saying earlier that I suspect that where we're going is going to really increase the appetite in a lot of people for something real. And we already know that us humans are prone to that kind of appetite. It's why vinyl records started outselling CDs in the early 2000s. That's why tapes started having a resurgence after that. I think if you pay attention, you'll notice that there's quite a few Instagram ads right now for organizations that organize in person meetup events. I think you're going to see a return to more traditional dating and mating tactics because I think that the whole online dating thing has really soured a lot of people. And with that you're going to see a return of more traditional gender roles. But all of that, because I think that the promise of the information age, which paradoxically made it less possible to know what was true, We're going to become more hungry for something real. And I would say that I think one definition for God is that God is the realest thing. And so the more hungry, hungry we are for something real, the more hungry we are for God. And I think that the fruits of that will be very positive both, you know, for the future generations and for our country and for the world. That said, the word pathology comes to mind. And you might think of pathology as a, like a disease that enters your body. But when I think of pathology, or maybe more specifically the word pathological, it's sort of akin to the word perverse. And another part of what it means to be human is that we can have very good desires, but Those can become perverted and pathological. The term perverted is particularly powerful because what do you think of when you think of the term pervert? It's like somebody who's expressing something made for the highest human experience and reveling in pushing it in the mud. That's perverted. I mean, it's almost too deep of a word to really speak about without almost kind of blushing or feel like you're being taboo, you know? But the human heart does have a tendency to do that, to take what was meant for good and turn it into something that is perverted.

[58:45] Michael: Mm.

[58:46] Matt: And the rate at which we have the tools to do that, the access, it's like we have that exit ramp from reality. We can pervert and pathologize ourselves and those around us and those at great distances from us instantly at all times of the day, save only for the fact that we have to sleep, you know, so it's like. That's a little terrifying. I mean, you know, the. The Kevin Bacon effect.

[59:21] Michael: Yeah. Talking about this eight degrees of separation. Or six.

[59:25] Matt: I think it was six degrees of separation. This game started in, like, the 90s, and it was only a fun game because we didn't have the Internet, so you actually had to, like, have watched movies and no actors, you know, and then the Internet came along and the game's no fun anymore. But apparently statistically. So let me just say a bit more about it in case there's a Gen Z person listening. The idea was that you would play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, so somebody would name an actor and you would have to, in six steps, get to a movie Kevin Bacon was in. And I can't do this for you. I can't perform this for you, but I might say Tom Hanks. And then you'd be like, tom Hanks was in this with this person. This person was in this with this person. You want to get to Kevin Bacon. And it's funny because Kevin Bacon was kind of a B list, slash A list actor, back and forth, was in a ton of movies. He's kind of like. He was the sort of Nicholas Cage of today.

[60:23] Michael: So it's six degrees of Nicolas Cage now. Yeah.

[60:26] Matt: But actually, statistically, you are only any given person. Any is only 5 degrees separated from any other person on the planet. And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has this idea that every man is responsible for everything that happens in the world, which is kind of a nutty thing to say, because we learn when we're very young to say, not my fault, but if I'm only 5 degrees separated from any given person on the planet. I can affect change in any given person's life. I don't even have to go 5 degrees. I could go 4 degrees to get to their brother or sister or mom or dad or lover or teacher or whatever. Three degrees I can get to one of the person. You know, it's like the closer you get to that inner circle, the more those people overlap. And so it's like, You know, maybe the speed of access that I'm worried about pathologizing us isn't actually that even. Even that new. It's not even necessarily because of the Internet that that's true. It's just because of the way that our. Our natural human relationships work. So maybe I shouldn't be as alarmed as I. Maybe I'm more alarmed than I should be because I'm attributing it to the massive proliferation and exponential growth of technologies that admittedly no one understands. I mean, even the top people at OpenAI and Anthropic say they don't understand it.

[62:17] Michael: Yeah, I'm hearing a lot more people in that sphere say that we are at the singularity as far as, like, AI creating AI creating AI. Yeah.

[62:30] Matt: I don't know which person it was, whether it was. It was Nvidia, what's his name, CEO Jensen Jinsen, saying, we've achieved AGI. But I've gotten to this place now where, I mean, I guess I'm kind of like Gen Z. It's like, I read it, I see that, and I'm like, I don't know if he said that or if AI is saying that or someone else is saying that. And there's all these parody accounts. And it's like, I gotta go Grok. I could ask Grok, but Twitter is just people saying things and then 75 people saying, Grok, is this true? That's all Twitter is now. So I don't necessarily believe anything anymore. And I don't have the energy to go check a bunch of things. So I just kind of passed over it. It's like, well, I mean, we could be or we couldn't be. It's either impossible or inevitable. So I'm not really sure what me understanding it does to the situation.

[63:32] Michael: Yeah, well, I think for me, and probably not so technical in this area, but, like, I think it's important because I feel like that's something that we're the ones who steer that. And I've always loved persons of interest. So he was one of the first to create this computer that was, you know, basically AGI. And he was in charge of sort of guiding it into, you know, consciousness, if that's what it really was. And so I think there's a part that's sort of like we need to participate in the world of AI because it's like I kind of see it more on the inevitable part of that and that we need people to steer this in the right way and to interact with it. Because I think of what we've seen in the past where you know, you have certain AI companies manipulating the AI into showing the founding fathers as different races and sexes and stuff like that. And it's just sort of like, it's like that's not really what, what happened or even in our movies right now. I saw, I mean there's probably just some parody, but I don't think it's too far off from the truth as, as you know, Bridgeton, you know, portraying the 1800s, it's sort of like that's not really what the hunting hundreds look like. But do we start to believe that kind of stuff? It's like, okay, well it's just a movie. It's like, okay, that's fine. This is a movie. And I enjoyed the movie. I watched that, that whole series, you know, and I liked it. But you know, or even like there was a, there's this new movie. The reason I brought that up is because there's new portrayal of the 1800s where like a lesbian couple and it was a black and a white lesbian couple and, and it's like it's fine as a movie and stuff like that, but I think people start to actually believe that that's what the 1800s were like. And it's like it's just not true. They definitely didn't have all that the niceties that we maybe sometimes paint them as. You know, it's like that was hard living even for the rich compared to modern day standards.

[65:47] Matt: Totally.

[65:47] Michael: And it's like what do we start believing about our history?

[65:51] Matt: Rockefeller didn't even have a refrigerator.

[65:53] Michael: Totally. You know, and dentistry like you even for Rockefeller was, was rudimentary for what we have today.

[66:01] Matt: George Washington died of a cold because they bloodlet him as a solution.

[66:07] Michael: So I just kind of wonder too is like even with our, with our media, whether it be movies and stuff like that. And again I love, I love a lot of these things I'm kind of criticizing right now because I see it as a movie but, but if you don't understand the history or what it was actually like during that time, you can kind of start to just accept that that's what it was like unconsciously.

[66:31] Matt: Well, make a case for why it's important to know that the way. To know the way things really were.

[66:38] Michael: Well, I mean, for me, one base case for this is to understand, like, how the human population, the human species, moves into the future. And the basic part of that is coupling and producing kids. And that's how we've ended up where we are right now. And that's probably one of the most important things of our species is that idea. And that is like the furthest thing from most people's minds. That's like an afterthought. And maybe our modern conveniences have allowed that to be more common. But. But that is like such a basic foundational element of what it means to be human is to. Is to have kids and move it, move some. Something moves into the future. And I don't see that we have that same urgency or understanding or cultural norms around that idea. It's like, even if it is. Means coupling between a man and a woman, it doesn't mean necessarily having kids. Like, that's. That's not probably in the top 50% of the things that you do if you marry somebody. That's just sort of like, oh, if I choose. And then it's just like. So I think those are the types of things that we've kind of lost and our media has kind of taken away from us in that sense.

[68:11] Matt: Well, that's really interesting, because earlier we were talking about the universality of enough nostalgia and longing for something in two directions that you can't have, because what you're longing for is out of time, outside of time, and how maybe you replace all the tools. There's sort of a relativity there. But I would say that the 1950s and 60s, with the advent of modern birth control, Allowed for the development of a human psyche that was never possible before.

[68:56] Michael: True.

[68:57] Matt: So it allowed for a position. Like you said, well, I'm going to. I'm a heterosexual male, and I'm going to. To get together with a heterosexual female. But we're not gonna have kids. That statement would not have made any sense pre, what, 1950, 1960.

[69:16] Michael: Yeah. Or it would have been less. Very uncommon.

[69:20] Matt: I mean, you could say it, but, like, what are you gonna be abstinent? Why get together then? Right. But now you can say that.

[69:30] Michael: Yeah.

[69:31] Matt: And you can mean it, and it can come true. And so I don't think humanity ever had to consider the idea of a culture being below Replacement rate until we invented the protection of our own pleasure. And is it all that surprising that that invention is going to wipe us out if we don't unlearn the promise of free sex?

[70:04] Michael: I wonder if you can even draw this back to the original conversation we're having about books and digital is raw

[70:14] Matt: dogging versus wrapping it up.

[70:18] Michael: Yeah, well, just like the. Just the idea of like, like, you know, technology, you know, it separates you from. And again, birth control is technology and

[70:29] Matt: it separates you from what the intent of sex is.

[70:32] Michael: Yeah, that's.

[70:34] Matt: I mean, that's a great analogy. It's like.

[70:37] Michael: So everybody got there and read a book.

[70:38] Matt: Did you read the book? Well, on my Kindle, yeah. Yeah. You didn't read it? Do you have sex with her? Yeah, I used a condom.

[70:45] Michael: Yeah.

[70:46] Matt: What's that line? Kindle. What's that line from Austin Powers? Shaggy Rotten Baby Austin. Did you use protection? Yeah, my nine millimeter right there.

[71:00] Michael: But it is fascinating because I just kind of even to tie that back to technology is not just digital. It's like there's things that we have created that have been both beneficial to humankind and also negative. You know, nuclear energies is that way. Or nuclear bombs, you know.

[71:17] Matt: Well, maybe to your point about being involved with AI, it's like all of these things are either good or bad, depending on how we decide to use them.

[71:28] Michael: They're tools.

[71:28] Matt: Yeah, they are tools. And even Maxwell's silver hammer can come. Maxwell silver hammer banging on his head. It's a Beatles song.

[71:39] Michael: Oh, okay.

[71:44] Matt: But the point is that, yeah, even a silver hammer can be a murder weapon. So can the candlestick. It may be one of the biggest murder weapons of all time turns out to be contraceptives in the final analysis, it may be that

[72:07] Michael: so funny because it's so common now that I feel like what you're saying and what I'm saying right now it seems so Neanderthal. Ish.

[72:17] Matt: Well, let me explain what I mean when I say that. That contraceptives might turn out to be the biggest murder weapon of all time. The United States, Japan, China, Germany, France, these are ones I know off the top of my head, are below replacement rate right now. And if that doesn't change,

[72:43] Michael: all of

[72:43] Matt: those, all of the people, the family lineages in those places will die. I mean, we're all going to die regardless. But what I mean is the humanity will die out in those places. And that will happen a lot more quickly than you think, because population collapse isn't just less people, it's less people. To take care of the people that need taking care of. It means less people, less young people, specifically in the short term. Less young people in the short term means there's not people able bodied enough to take care of the people who are dying, which means they die quicker. There's not people to take care of the infrastructure that support culture. And in these, in these days, no one knows how to do anything. And we need that culture to be supported. Meaning the roads, the supply chains, the grocery stores, all of these things, the water treatment facilities, we need these things to be maintained because if they go offline, people die. And you know that if you live in a place like Texas and you get a bad freeze and the power goes out for six days, people die. Okay, so we stop having kids. People die. It happens quickly. But there's also something else that's really sort of concerning when you start really thinking about it, which is that aside from physical barrier contraceptives like condoms and diaphragms, if you go looking, look into IUDs, look into birth control pills, there's some newer male birth control pills. You could look into those too.

[74:32] Michael: Wait a minute. You said do your own research?

[74:34] Matt: Yes. Do your own research, go looking. And what you will discover is that we don't really know how these things work. And the inserts, the packages will say, well, it may be that it blocks contraception. It may be that contraception happens, but it makes the environment inside the womb inhospitable. It may be that contraception happens, but it makes the egg not healthy or makes the sperm disabled. We don't really know. We just know that 98% out of 100, 98 out of 100 times, pregnancy does not occur. And then do do the uncomfortable thought experiment of asking yourself when life begins. And I think at least I have come to the conclusion that it's possible. I don't know how likely, but possible that a great many people don't exist. That would have existed had we not invented this protection of our own pleasure and our own control over our own futures.

[76:03] Michael: Yeah.

[76:04] Matt: And that's sort of a scary thought.

[76:10] Michael: Well, I mean, just even I think of like Allison's experience with birth control, like when we first got married, like, it was like, horrible. Like she took one. It was just. I mean, it her up.

[76:23] Matt: Well, I mean, even if that's the thing, it's like, hey, young woman, we're gonna make you chronically ill, but don't worry, you can have sex and won't get pregnant.

[76:34] Michael: Yeah.

[76:34] Matt: It's like, I mean, There's a lot of women who have said no thank you to that trade off after trying it.

[76:42] Michael: Well, there's also. It's not just that. It's like, okay, yes, this one you had really adverse effects. Well, maybe this one's not.

[76:47] Matt: Let me try this other one.

[76:48] Michael: Yeah, and it's like, it's like, okay, well, maybe it doesn't have like intense adverse effects, but it has some sort of effect. It's having some sort of effect on your body, you know?

[77:00] Matt: Yeah.

[77:00] Michael: And yeah. So I think just more of like, because I'm not necessarily, I'm not against any of that. It's just that, I don't know, we don't really know what we're doing to ourselves as a, as a human psyche. And the way we start to perceive things, once you start taking away consequences or friction, kind of like we were talking about the. At the beginning, it's like it, it starts to kind of fade into the background and you no longer pay attention. Like where, you know, with a digital book, it's like, you don't really have to pay as much attention to as if you're going to read a physical book.

[77:33] Matt: Yeah.

[77:35] Michael: And. And some of that's like, oh, this is the modern world is great. And I'm like, yes, it is. I agree with that. Like, totally on board with that. But I'm also like, what, what am I? What's the trade off for this? And so that's one thing I don't know even like, with what I'm working on right now is what's the trade off? Okay, so everything is available to you. Well, what's the trade off? It's like, well, maybe you're not as intimately involved with it because before there was friction and it made you be involved with it. And I think that's the hard thing to sort of like, to sort of navigate is what kind of friction is good? What kind of friction do we need to leave in the system? Like, I don't have to go. My main work is not physically demanding. I have to go and actually create friction in order to have that physical workout. It's like I have to choose it. It's not just a part of my daily routine where most people 100 years ago or so, maybe more now, 100 years ago is not the same. 100 years ago when I used to say that they had to walk to work or there was a lot more physical interaction.

[78:48] Matt: Right.

[78:49] Michael: And so it's just, it's just interesting. Like, like I. We have to choose friction more and more.

[79:04] Matt: I'm not sure that that's exactly the right way to say it. I. I think you're right, but I don't think it's about choosing friction. I think it has something to do with the story of Pinocchio.

[79:18] Michael: Okay,

[79:23] Matt: You know, what does Pinocchio want?

[79:29] Michael: Be a boy.

[79:29] Matt: He wants to be a real boy.

[79:31] Michael: Yeah. Which creates friction, Right? Totally.

[79:36] Matt: What does that mean? He wants his strings cut. He wants to stand on his own two feet. He wants to speak of his own accord, not be attached to accord. And we all implicitly understand that metaphor because we all, I think, desperately want to be a real boy, be a real girl. But what happens when you set out on that journey? Oh, you find your own voice. And then you realize that you don't know the truth. And then sometimes when you do know the truth, you don't tell it.

[80:21] Michael: Yeah.

[80:21] Matt: And it deforms you. And so you have to go through the experience of learning that. And ultimately, that's an embodied experience. That's not a information download. It's not a, hey, go read the tweets or ask the AI. It's like, no, you're gonna go to. Where does Pinocchio go? Fun island or whatever. And you're gonna get swindled and manipulated and lied to and turned into a donkey and sold into slavery. That's gonna be the consequence of you being a naive real boy. And so, yeah, friction. But it's deeper than that. It's not just friction. It's living as a real person in the real world. And I don't think we necessarily need to choose friction itself. We just need to choose to be in an environment where growth can happen. I mean, you plant a seed in the ground, it has to push its way to the light.

[81:23] Michael: Or like a chick and an egg. You can't open the egg up for the chick, or else it'll die. It'll die because it's part of the process.

[81:29] Matt: You have to let the chick peck its way out. I mean, isn't that what we're all doing? We are pecking our way out. We are pushing up out of the soil, toward the light. We are striving against what? Against our own inadequacy. Against our own weakness and frailty. Naivety. Nihilism. Toward what? Yeah, toward the light, toward the truth. Toward that which we secretly long for. And so, yeah, I would say it's not that you have to choose friction. It's that to remember that you want to be real.

[82:15] Michael: Well, I don't want to get Semantical. But I mean, because I mean, like, friction. I just.

[82:19] Matt: It.

[82:19] Michael: It makes sense in. In what you're saying too. It's like. It's like. It's not choosing friction, but it's like if you choose to pursue truth, friction is a consequence.

[82:28] Matt: Yes.

[82:29] Michael: You know, so it's like, you know, again, it's like you want to open your own business. Okay, great. It's going to be the hardest thing. You're going to have a family. It's gonna be the hardest thing you're ever gonna do. It's like friction is embedded in pursuing something.

[82:42] Matt: Yeah.

[82:42] Michael: Being intentional. Anytime you're intentional, you're going to be like. Like, it's like the whole. This whole world comes against you and say, oh, that's really cute. But if you want to, like, live in a frictionless world and just kind of disappear, it's like there's a lot less friction in that world. It's like.

[83:05] Matt: It's like, allows you to disappear totally. And maybe one of the things that we've learned in the last five years and maybe one of the things I see in my kids right now when they say they just sort of dismiss people, like they don't know what they're talking about, or they're just repeating things. And I'm like, what do you think? And they're like, I don't really know. I don't think they don't know. I think that they detected that if I think it's ridiculous to wear a mask, I'm gonna be ostracized. And so I'm just gonna wear the mask. And I'm using the mask as a symbol of everything that happened.

[83:40] Michael: Totally. It's great.

[83:40] Matt: In 2021, 22, 20, 20, 21, and 22. And a lot of us learn that lesson that it's. There is too much friction in choosing to go. To not go the way of no friction. And so we're just like, well, okay, I'll just stay home. I'll just stay inside. My phone's entertaining. I'll just look on my phone. I won't say what I really think, you know, because that gets me in trouble. I want out of that world.

[84:18] Michael: Yeah.

[84:19] Matt: And I think I want out of

[84:21] Michael: that world a lot of times.

[84:22] Matt: Yeah. Well, I think if enough of us do, because that isn't the real world. And all it takes is enough of us to say, that's not the real world, to where enough other people are like, yeah, you're right. That's not the real world. I want to live in the real world. In the real world, when my mother or my daughter gets sick, I take care of them. I don't say, you're going into quarantine. That was nuts. That's not the way we behave in the real world. You don't put a mask on a four year old for eight hours a day. Obviously that's going to stunt their growth and their learning and kill their social relationships and, you know, all of this. That's nuts. We all knew it was nuts and yet we went along with it because something told us that the cost of objecting was higher than we wanted to pay. And we said, yeah, you're probably right and it'll be short term. That was a sidebar rant, but it

[85:26] Michael: was definitely, like, on topic, though. I mean, that's. It's like we just. Yeah, I'm trying to, like, go back. I feel like I learned so much in the last five years is sort of like an escalation of like, Michael, you do not know what the. You think. And I had to kind of come to terms with a lot of things that I thought I knew and even, even things that I. I knew I knew. And it was challenged. But like, you say, like, there was that friction that sor. Like, oh, well, if you actually believe that, then this is the way that you would. That you would operate in the world. And I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want to do that.

[86:06] Matt: Right. Well, it just occurred to me that we used to watch a show called Boy Meets World.

[86:11] Michael: I never saw that.

[86:11] Matt: You never saw that? No generational gap again. But what's funny to me is that that show title makes sense from like a 90s perspective. There is such a thing as a boy and there is such a thing as the world. And they're different and they meet, and that's going to cause conflict and friction and clash, and both are going to learn and change as a consequence of it. It's like you can just sort of intuit that from the title, but I don't think there's any shows now called something like that because the world isn't a defined concept anymore, and neither is a boy. And neither is the idea that those two things should meet and be in contradiction in any way. It's like we want to. We want to insist that nothing should ever or is ever in contradiction. Contradiction is just a misunderstanding or at worst, heterodox heresy, in which you should probably be sent to a gulag.

[87:09] Michael: Well, I mean, the Oscars is a great example of that in order to win an Oscars, you have to fulfill a certain criteria.

[87:14] Matt: Right.

[87:15] Michael: It's like, wait a minute. I thought the Oscars was about art. Art, yeah. Which artists in general are always, always not meeting a criteria.

[87:25] Matt: Like, that's subverting expectations and. Yeah. Stepping on taboos and.

[87:29] Michael: Yeah. It's like, you don't want to see blood. Here's a lot of it.

[87:32] Matt: Right.

[87:32] Michael: You know, it's Quentin Tarantino.

[87:34] Matt: We don't want to see blood. Quentin Tarantino's like, hold My beer.

[87:38] Michael: Yeah. You know, it's like, it was always about subverting whatever the status quo was, but then also now you have our highest whatever institutions requiring that you subvert to the status quo.

[87:52] Matt: Yeah.

[87:52] Michael: And it's like, what the fuck is that? That's so.

[87:55] Matt: That was so jarring.

[88:02] Michael: Well, yeah.

[88:03] Matt: That's probably a good place to leave it. I would. I just want to say cheers.

[88:07] Michael: Read a book. Read a book.

[88:08] Matt: Cheers to the real world.

[88:09] Michael: Totally. Let's do that.

[88:11] Matt: Let's live there.

[88:14] Michael: Love you guys.

[88:16] Matt: Cheers to you all out there. Love you.

[88:31] Michael: That.