The 2012 Maya Apocalypse Myth & Confirmation Bias

Did the world really end in 2012? Not with fire, meteors or an ancient Mayan prophecy, but Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens ask whether something just as profound took place instead. Together they unravel how one of the biggest myths in history took hold and why the Maya were unable to accurately predict the apocalypse. But they also delve into why, according to Michael, 2012 was the year an old world was discarded and a new one began to emerge. It was, afterall, the year a novel technology became unavoidable and we began to abandon a shared culture for millions of fragmented realities. Along the way they also explore the science of confirmation bias, why humans are fascinated by the end of the world, and whether technology has made us less connected...or reconnected us in a different way. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science. Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:02Speaker 01

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

• 0:09Speaker 00

  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?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  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-O company 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.

• 0:45Speaker 00

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

• 0:48Speaker 01

  So supposedly, on December 21st, 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 the 21st of December, 2012.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  It was a smart civilization. They knew some stuff.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  They did, but 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?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Our bodies are incredible machines, worrying away, making more and more DNA to build the proteins that keep us alive.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  In fact, in the last minute, your body has made over 200 million new cells and enough DNA to stretch to the moon and back.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  To the moon and back? That's so much DNA that if you compared it to the size of the cell it fits into, that would be like squeezing the London Underground into a suitcase.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  By the age of 50, you have copied almost 6 trillion miles of DNA. But every time that your body copies DNA, it risks making mistakes. And over time, those mistakes can accumulate, and that collection of errors can lead to cancer.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  But incredibly, Cancer Research UK scientists can spot these errors. And by finding them, they've helped double UK cancer survival over the last 50 years, and are driving even more discoveries that could tackle over 200 types of cancer.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/restiscience.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Observe. The North American dad. 50s. Great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup, required compatibility and availability varies, 18 plus.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  What a cliffhanger.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  All right. So first of all, let's talk about the, 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, end of 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

• 4:40Speaker 01

  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, 2000 B.C. 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.

• 5:21Speaker 00

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

• 5:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Like, it's like the crook, the crook of the elbow, maybe?

• 5:53Speaker 01

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

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Make world maps with your body, Michael.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:09Speaker 00

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

• 6:13Speaker 01

  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 baktoons. A baktoon 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, the, if you, if you've watched

• 6:55Speaker 01

  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, if the previous world lasted 13 baktoons, then maybe this one will only last that long as well. And as it turns out, the, the Mayan creation stories give a creation date for the world, which in the Gregorian calendar was the 11th of August, 3,114 B.C.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  I feel like there's a lot of, 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?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  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, ah, 1,000 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 11th, 3,114 B.C. If this fourth world lasts as long as the, the one before it, then it should last 5,125 years, which means it will end on the 21st of December, 2012.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  In a lot of ways.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  We'd had the, the Diamond Jubilee that year as well, 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 the.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Oh, no, really? Well, yeah. I mean, I completely agree. And so I feel really fortunate that I moved to the UK in 2012. Like, I remember flying in, and 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 baktoons, like the one before? They never did. They

• 9:42Speaker 01

  never, ever did. But in 1966, a guy named Michael D. Stephens? No, Michael D. Co. Michael D. Stephens is me. I just wanted to say, it was really cool to read.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  What does the D stand for?

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Mine stands for David.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  I sort of desperately wanted it to be something really unusual.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  But you know what? I, I actually asked-

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Danger. That's what it should have been.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  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 B-Sauce," and in parentheses, "Michael J. Stevens." And I'm like, "No, no, no, what? I'm not Michael J. Stevens. Where are you getting that?"

• 10:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  That's good. That's good.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  And Michael Danger Stevens? I haven't checked, but it's probably not as cool.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  You can't spell cave devils with, with only one B. Come on, Hannah.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  I know, I'm so sorry. So sorry. Carry on. Okay, Michael, Michael D. Co. Go on.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, Michael D. Co. 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 Bakhtun. 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.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Because there was no suggestion from the Mayan at all that our current world would be only exactly 13 Bakhtun long. In fact, if you look at what they wrote, uh, you can find that they talk about dates way far in the future. They talk about things that happen in the year 4000 and so on. Um, 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, um, a more recent or, or Western obsession. "Ooh, the end of the world. When's that gonna come? I think it's gonna come soon. Ooh, that's exciting."

• 12:26Speaker 01

  And that, you know, we, we globbed onto that. I, I love that idea too, because I think it made me think about Stonehenge. And how if it helped people

• 12:38Speaker 01

  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 gonna get better from now on.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  The term.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  The sun is gonna be up longer tomorrow. Yeah, 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-

• 13:16Speaker 00

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

• 13:29Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, in any way to, to observing, marking, or predicting cycles in, in astronomy, then it kind of makes sense. They're like celebrating the cycles, not the ends, not the apocalypse.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  And, and that I think is what the Mayans were doing too.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  I really like that idea, actually, that for, 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, spring and summer, you know, night and day. And I think that actually, especially when death was so much more a 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, as a linear thing.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  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, it's, 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.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And you always cut the wheat the same way, you traveled at the same speeds. Explosion and change that marked, "Ooh, the past is, 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 predicted and it became this huge thing." And then, nothing happened.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Nothing happened.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  No, the, the earth is still here. Humans did not go extinct. But the world before 2012 was a very different one than the world since.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  This is an extraordinary claim, Michael. This is gonna require extraordinary evidence.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  It does. And spoiler alert, I don't have it. In fact, this entire, this entire project was an exercise in biased researching and, uh, 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.

• 17:17Speaker 00

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

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's great. Because first of all, what do you do? You can Google search, um, significant events in 2012. Or statistics that make 2012 look important. And you find a bunch. Google doesn't say, "Hmm, 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 and the UK that we crossed the threshold where the majority of people had a smartphone?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Right. That is a new era.

• 18:15Speaker 01

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

• 18:25Speaker 00

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

• 18:28Speaker 01

  It depends on how you define a smartphone.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Let's say, let's say iPhone. Let's say the iPhone.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  The, the first iPhone was announced in January of 2007.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Okay, so it comes out in 2007, more than half. Hmm. I mean, look, the point here is that 2012 is the turning point, right? So I'm gonna guess 2012.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  You're right. You are exactly correct.

• 18:54Speaker 00

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

• 18:58Speaker 01

  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?

• 19:37Speaker 00

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

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I joined in 2004.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that, me too.

• 19:51Speaker 01

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

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Hey, me too. Same.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  What was some of the early social networks?

• 19:59Speaker 00

  There was Friends Reunited. Do you remember that one?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Facebook was founded in 2004.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Founded in 2004. Right, okay.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  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. Um, because I, it started in 2004. I entered college in 2004 and you needed a, not only a, 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 U Chicago, 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.

• 20:43Speaker 00

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

• 20:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:57Speaker 00

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

• 21:03Speaker 01

  It's 2012.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so as you can see, this is a this is an inflection point. This is a 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?

• 21:36Speaker 00

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

• 21:42Speaker 01

  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?

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Michael, is it 2012?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  It's 2012.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  I'm noticing a pattern going on here. Right.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  We immigrated to the digital world.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 22:05Speaker 01

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

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Side note, most of us, by us, I mean people in the Western world.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Okay, this is actually a really fun statistic. I 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 cellphone, a smartphone?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  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 and I think smartphones too, are are, I think, way more prevalent than you might expect. I 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 than to a toilet.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  The way I'd 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.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Agree.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  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? It has happened.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  I reckon later than the Western world. I reckon 2016, 18?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Later.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Is it, go on?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  2023.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Really?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 00

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

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Wow, that is a steep curve.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Now, social media became a majority thing. And this this one's almost more important to me because it feels like, okay, you're 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.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  See, 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 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 so that they can 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 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.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  It was before 50% smartphone penetration. Yeah, 2020.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, true.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  So so, yeah, 2020 is when we estimate that our species became a majority, part time, online super organism. 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 you just 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, okay?

• 26:38Speaker 00

  I'm 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.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  I'm with you. I I 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.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  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?

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Is it 2012?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  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 it was a huge it was a huge jump. Okay, so so we could 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 going to 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.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  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 altogether?

• 28:31Speaker 00

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

• 28:47Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Dentist appointments, MOTs, routine checkups help us to spot faults early before we need a root canal or breakdown at the side of the road. And cancer screening is the same idea.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  It's about aiming to spot cancer early before symptoms show and when treatment works best. The UK's Breast, Bowel and Cervical Cancer Screening Programs, developed with Cancer Research UK, save thousands of lives every year.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Today, Cancer Research UK is backing innovations that could transform the future of screening. Picture a smart bra that could one day detect breast changes as it's worn, making screening more accessible.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  And AI trained on a database of over 10 million mammograms that helps doctors spot early signs of cancer.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Research like this saves and improves lives.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required. Compatibility and availability varies, 18 plus.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  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

• 31:00Speaker 00

  you're not talking about one particular show had a really high viewership. And I mean, I'm pretty sure that like, you know, 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.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Right, okay.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  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

• 31:56Speaker 00

  80s.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  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 our time.

• 32:16Speaker 00

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

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of where I think we're gonna go in this conversation.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  You, you still are kind of a part of it.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  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, he says, oh, you know, I forget who it was, like a sergeant he made up. He'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, he doesn't want to ever tell people that that person didn't exist.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  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. Fifty-two percent of Americans alive on that day were watching the Mash finale.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  That's incredible. That is incredible.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  To be fair, more people watched the, um, the Chiefs Eagles Super Bowl, uh, 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

• 34:45Speaker 01

  and later DVD becomes a thing. People can time shift 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.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  When was the peak? And, 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.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  I'm wrong. Is it late 80s?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Is it later?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Is it? Linear TV, really?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  When?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  2010.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  No, really?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yep. 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

• 36:30Speaker 01

  out of time with each other, out of sync with each other, and we have so many more options that, that nowadays you can just be like, oh, hey, have you heard of, um, Squirtle Town? And someone's like, no, I literally have not even heard of that show. And you're like, oh, I, I spend every night watching it. And we're, we're, 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.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  See, the thing is-

• 36:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  So I think, I, 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, um, 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 BBC Two or whatever. Watching live, a couple of million people will watch it live. Imagine if I did a stream on YouTube.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  You know, imagine if I did a YouTube stream and I got two 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 baseline that you're thinking about when it comes to sort of describing linear TV is always in the past. You know, facts 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, um, 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, to what they were before.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  I think there's some people who, um, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, apparently in 2010, would have been household names, right? Would have been mega, mega, mega stars. 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, 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, that you get in quite the same way.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. It feels like there are fewer Tom Cruises. And there are fewer Mel Gibsons and Marlon Brando's and there are a lot more Michael Stephenses.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Everyone's become you, Michael. But people who are like phenomenally well-known to a smaller, to, to, to their own group of people. It's not like yours is small, actually, but you know.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  But 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.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  So there's, today, we've got an enormous amount of like cult 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, for, for, for a lot of the world, a 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.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  It, there's, 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 gonna slip up in this political debate? People tuned in to watch the Hillary Trump debate in, in huge numbers.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  That they don't tune in all together to watch Big Bang Theory.

• 41:02Speaker 00

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

• 41:20Speaker 01

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

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, anything like walk and talk, guys, walk and talk. But I I think it's more like the um the sort of this uh the sort of people who are who are not mega stars, you know, like Angela Rippon, right? Maybe you don't know who Angela Rippon is, or like Michael Parkinson, right? Like, people who were household names, um and yet were not, I don't think, mega stars, 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 in 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

• 42:13Speaker 00

  communities, and then there'd maybe be a mega star here and there where the news would get real cut through. You know, a 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? Sort of like wars of football, kind of simultaneous way to like act out your your 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 geog- geography.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  You basically just said my conclusion for this episode.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm really sorry.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  No, I love it. I love it because we're so much alike, Hannah, because, yeah, I've 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.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  See, a Europe.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  That's not true anymore. Uh, 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 gonna 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 um 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 um no one can stop me, it doesn't make me feel isolated. So we've changed.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  You know what's nice about this, Michael, is that um I I don't know whether the 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, everybody.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't. Yeah, we're doing a thing where we, but I I don't know what Hannah's gonna do in 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 um new ways to be active, new ways to to to learn about the world and associate with people.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  So it's made us more like, like more human, but less humus. Where humus means dirt, like the physicality is gone. I can I can share stories with people who think the way I do, and I can agree and we can we can um, 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 disentrenched from time. It'll be, oh, they sent me a message, I'm gonna read that when I have time.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  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 and the temperature of the room and all of this was shared between you and who was listening, but it it 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 and for 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

• 47:19Speaker 01

  pre-modern people. But that documentation, it's called the documentality of society, is definitely a new thing, not a return.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  What was it you said, more human, less humus?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Humus means um 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 that, a really nice kind of, it's a kind of dirt, kind of soil.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Is it related to the chickpea snack or um?

• 47:50Speaker 01

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

• 47:59Speaker 00

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

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Sorry, I I I just want to interrupt because I need to say this too. Humus is the Latin word for ground or earth. And so uh by 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.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  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, it's 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 a different version of reality.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  A heterotopia.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Heterotopia.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  An other place.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  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 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 um you can't replicate in the digital world.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  I I completely agree, and so I'm gonna 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 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 that community that loves that can all get physically together, and we can

• 50:21Speaker 01

  interrupt each other and hear each other's voices and be embodied together. I think that's gonna happen in our lifetime. I also think that linear entertainment is going to come back. And this is, this is, it's not gonna come back and replace um uh streaming, you know, uh video on demand, but I think it'll come back. And this is based purely on the fact that um I was in L A 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

• 51:06Speaker 01

  pause, because that wasn't the way things were when I was a kid. I'm like, I'm gonna have commercial breaks, and I'm not gonna 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 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 I loved it in a way that I think we're going to all embrace.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  You, Michael, are an optimist.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  I love the 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 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.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  One of those two, 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.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  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

• 53:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  So 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.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Haha, that's definitely the case.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  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, every race, income, education, gender, they're all different by maybe two, three 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 going to get better or worse.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  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's looking pretty robust, that actually you get the exact opposite effect, that people,

• 55:50Speaker 00

  when they are talking to a large language model, not only do they not feel judged 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 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 that really looked amazing, which is where they sat people with quite extreme views down, and then they had a conversation with a 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 their opinions had remained softened from from earlier.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  We'll do a whole episode on this 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.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  But if if a language model 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 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, that 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.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  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, that's going to be a significant influence on this whole topic in the future.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Let's 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.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Like, 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.

• 59:15Speaker 00

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

• 59:23Speaker 01

  That's a lot of time.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  There's a lot of time. We've got to work.

• 59:26Speaker 01

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

• 59:28Speaker 00

  We'll see what happens. All right. Well, thank you very much for, as ever, for joining us. Send us your thoughts, your ideas to the rest of science at gohanger.com. And we'll see you next time.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  See you then.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:00:17Speaker 05

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 1:00:41Speaker 06

  Stonefire Naan is made with real buttermilk and ghee. It's the perfect flatbread for any occasion.

• 1:00:46Speaker 07

  I put out Stonefire Naan with dips at every dinner party.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  I make Naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over.

• 1:00:52Speaker 06

  I use Stonefire Naan to reward the humans who do my bidding.

• 1:00:56Speaker 07

  Right. It's perfect for camping trips. Dance for it, feeble mortal. Sorry, is he talking to me or? Dance.

• 1:01:06Speaker 06

  From our tradition to yours, Stonefire.

• 1:01:09Speaker 07

  Together we Naan.