 couple of questions recently about delay discounting. This is a really, really, really big topic and we're just going to kind of keep it short today just to get you introduced into what it is so you can kind of have at least an overview of it. It's a very, very hot field because there's a lot of reasons why it's hot. Ultimately, delay discounting is something that's a nice description of a lot of behaviors and it covers a lot of species as well. So it's very valuable. It has a lot of practical application when you start thinking about self-management type issues and things like that. So let's back up and talk about what delay discounting is. It's really simple. Delay discounting is literally where you take a stimulus that's a reinforcer and the farther that reinforcer is from you. And I don't mean physical distance, I mean temporal distance like in time, right? So the farther that reinforcer is away in time, the less it's valued. So the longer the delay to the delivery of the reinforcer, the less value you have of the reinforcer, right? So we discount the delay. It's like, I'll give you $5 today for some work or I'll give you $5 in six months for the same work. You're not going to want to do the work. So there's one of the more practical examples quickly. Money today versus you know, you put that money away and you keep putting it there. You're putting it there. You're not going to touch it. Let's see. I'm how old am I right now? 40, you're 70. Shit. I don't, 42-ish or 43. Math isn't working at the moment. So anyway, 42 or 43 right now. I'm putting money away to touch when I'm in my late 60s. Hmm. That's a big delay, right? So it's a long delay. So I need to do something to bring the value of that reinforcer up to now, right? So I need to bring it to me today in order to make it more reinforcing to save. Interestingly enough, the company that I do have my retirement accounts through, they send me a lot of updates about, hey, you're achieving this. Congratulations. If you don't spend another $100 towards your retirement this month, you'll never be able to travel. They give you warnings like that. These big colored charts, it's beautiful. But it's all about kind of reducing that delay. And there's a whole bunch of the, sorry, reducing the discount. So when you think about self-management, you think about the smaller sooner versus the larger later, right? So that's the problem, right? So when that is the self-management problem is people will choose the smaller sooner reward or reinforcer over the larger later reinforcer, right? You want to wait, you want to hold off on something for it to grow, for the, or to earn the value of whatever it is. But man, it's sure easier to take that $100 today and just put it in my pocket. You know, I can go do all sorts of stuff. If you watch some of my other videos, you might even recognize the fact that I eat chips. So I could easily spend my money on chips, those sorts of things, right? So I want to spend my money on chips, but I really should really put it away. But it's hard to do. Why? One of the, one of the descriptions of that behavior of delay discounting basically shows that. Now the cool thing about delay discounting that I find interesting and some of my former colleagues find interesting is that it's not just with humans, alright? So this is something that's a robust effect. It happens on multiple species and it's well described and it's well researched and it is a genuinely hot topic. There's things you can do to interrupt the delay discounting. I don't want to get into that literature right now. It's too broad. We'll come back to that with another more detailed video on specific literature. Let's see what else I'm going to say about it. There's lots of applications specifically. And then drug use is an example. How does that affect delay discounting? There's all sorts of wonderfully interesting questions about delay discounting. So just keep in mind when you hear about it, they're literally just talking about the further something is away, the less valuable it becomes. And it's usually applied in a self-management setting and it's related to that smaller sooner versus larger later stuff. So hope that's a good enough introduction to delay discounting. And Dr. Kohl, if you're watching, please don't pick on me too much. I know you could talk about this for 17 days and you never know. I might just hire you to do it. Like, subscribe, share.