 So I'm going to tell a quick story. This is my amateur theory about amateur theory to address the question of the epidemic of stupidity. As background, two things. One, I was convinced by Adam Curtis's documentary way back when that we are in a non-linear war that basically information warfare is cheaper than bombs and bullets. And it turns out that Russia was really good at non-linear warfare and appears to really suck at warfare on the ground as we're learning in Ukraine. But I was convinced a while ago by hypernormalization. It's the name of the documentary that we're sort of in this battle. And I also believe that separately that people, humans, are really smart. Like people are really smart. And some people who seem really dumb, it turns out when you ask them about baseball or quilting or something they really give a shit about, they have memorized everything. They know their stats. And people who are poor are really smart. Most of us wouldn't last a couple of days in a favela or a slum someplace. We would die very, very quickly because there's so many things you have to do just to keep alive and stay alive and be safe in places where there's constant danger. And most of us live in little cocoon sort of bubble wrapped lives where there's very little actual danger present as long as sort of the cash keeps flowing through our system to keep all the barriers up. But for me, I think that a lot of the stupidity we see has been around a lot, but it's strategy. To me, another piece of amateur thesis is that the story of human history is a fight in the cockpit over the joystick of control over whatever country or entity you happen to live in. And the parties that make it into the cockpit, which are very few because usually we have elites who are fighting over the joystick, they each think they're about to lose. They each think the other side is going to kill them off and knife them in the back. It is a desperate struggle. And the winners in retrospect always thought they were about to lose. And it's just nasty. And every now and then they run the airplane into the ground and kind of wipe out their society and bad things happen, either because they made stupid decisions within the system and destroyed it. Like Mao and Stalin killed like 20 some million people individually through really stupid decisions. Just look at the Four Pest campaign in China, where they basically starved possibly 10 million plus people because they eliminated all the sparrows which had been eating all the insects. So I think of our stupidity or our processions of stupidity as part strategy because stupid people who are fearful are easier to manipulate and there's a whole bunch of political parties that have gotten really, really, really smart. Sociology, psychology, anthropology, group dynamics and all that kind of stuff. And they're like, hey, if we can keep people scared and afraid, they will grab, they will seize any narrative that floats by. And we have lots of really great narratives that will make them even more afraid. And that's what's happening. So we are in this world where then fold into this some new technologies that have shown up that lower the cost of communicating to Zipiti Duda. Basically, there's a fixed cost of getting online, which is a device of some sort and then a connection of some sort. And beyond that, everything else, the cost is your time. Information freely is super conducted around the world. And worse, the platforms, not email, but the major platforms, Facebook, et cetera, their business model is addiction and stalking, basically data mining our stuff and invading our privacy. They want addiction. So the platforms are not designed to help moderate, modify or change all of this. And they're designed to float like cute cats and people's morning toast, bread, avocado toast and whatever else through, which makes us in some sense, sort of stupider. And then my whole quest started 35 years ago when I realized I hated the word consumer because our world has been consumerized. And when we're treated as mere consumers instead of as citizens, we lose that sense of standards and rules and order. We lose that sense more importantly of interdependence and so this notion that we are in this little sucker together and that we need to sort of figure out how to make the world better together or we're all screwed because this thing doesn't naturally drive itself. We actually need to steer together rather than be fighting in the cockpit over the joystick. And I hate that I revert so often to the fight over the joystick metaphor, but I do because I just see it happening so often all the time. And I see actively the things that are happening on the street as strategy. And Steve Bannon to me is a brilliant strategist and he's pretty much on my evil spectrum on my naughty list, but he is really, really, he's one of those people who's figured out a lot of these social dynamics and is busy coaching leaders around the world on how to use them. And it's working so well that in country after country, we are evenly split. And a piece of this is what legislation do you create that'll buy you a victory even if your stances are unpopular? And so Citizens United basically says money doesn't matter in politics, so guess what? We're just going to pour insane amounts of money into politics and that's going to help us win. And it does. So all these things happen because the ground rules that we've said are too easy to corrupt and because we've lost touch with each other and can't figure out that we're together. One of the tools here is what I call denial of discourse attacks, which is, hey, I know that, you know, Ken, when you say we would like to like people deserve a place that the way to keep people from their place at the table and to keep winning the battle is to deny them the ability to talk to do denial of discourse and to make the arena for discourse so messy or painful or irritating or dangerous that nobody will dare tread into it, which means that when Lindsey Graham is incensed that somebody would say something against Brett Kavanaugh and impugn his character, when Lindsey Graham looks like he's about to explode, that is theater. That is pure and intentional theater to win a seat on the Supreme Court for a guy who very likely was a sex abuser as a young guy who was certainly a drunken bro, et cetera, et cetera. But that's just a little scene in the theater of this strategic battle that's playing out at very high levels all over the place all around us. And my answer to all of this is we need to figure out how to trust each other again. That's why the unfinished 2020 talk that I gave is called Trust is the only way forward. I say some of this there. I'll post a link to that talk here. And I think that everything I just said is a fabulous example of scope creep because I'm sort of saying that the question we're looking at involves all these large-scale social and political and economic dynamics in the world. So that's my amateur theory of why we're facing an epidemic of stupidity. I don't know that I think that it's perceptual, it's temporary, but it's intentionally driven. It's like there's a bunch of people who are feeding us bread and circuses because being fearful and stupid makes you really, really pliable.