Everything We Dont Know About the Mind

At a glance

Aperture spends two hours and fifty five minutes on a single proposition, stated in the first ten seconds and never abandoned: consciousness leaves out more than it takes in, and the things it leaves out are exactly the things that would relieve us if we knew them. Fourteen essays follow, each one built around a question the science has not closed. What a lucid dream actually is and how to have one. Whether there is a self that persists through time. What Pixar got wrong about the inside of a child's head. Why a traffic jam can form on a circular track with no obstacle on it. Why we dream, why we laugh, why we love, why we are nostalgic, why we prefer our heroes broken.

The essays are not held together by a thesis so much as by a method. Take a thing everyone assumes is understood, find the seam where the explanation stops, then walk every competing theory of the gap and score each one on what it fails to explain. The dream section runs five theories and rejects four. The laughter section runs four and rejects three. The self section builds the case that the self is a story the brain writes on demand, then turns and argues the two best objections to its own conclusion before answering them.

What it puts in front of you is specific and countable. Fifty five percent of adults have had at least one lucid dream, twenty three percent have them monthly, under one percent are proficient. Sixty five degrees Fahrenheit is the ideal sleep temperature. The worst traffic jam in history ran two hundred and fourteen miles outside São Paulo on 11 June 2014. One billionaire in a sample of a few thousand people accounts for close to ninety nine percent of the sample's wealth, while the heaviest person alive would account for under half a percent of its weight. Only ten to twenty percent of human laughter follows anything resembling a joke, and we are thirty times more likely to laugh with someone else in the room.

It closes where it opened, on the question of who is doing the asking, and answers it with a memory rather than an argument: what makes you you is the specific set of things you remember, and nostalgia is the feeling of that set holding together.

Consciousness as the fundamental reality (0:00)

The essay opens on a list rather than a definition. Consciousness is our awareness, our understanding, our ignorance, our daily. Then the claim that organizes everything after it: consciousness leaves out more than it takes in, and because of that it leaves out important things, things that would relieve us if we knew them. A higher awareness would feel better. We would be more at peace. The deep down truth of things is screened by our own consciousness.

The screening is not metaphorical. Our sensory organs pick things out. Eyes see only certain wavelengths, ears hear only certain frequencies, and so we have to build instruments and tools to see what we cannot, expanding our understanding and with it our ego.

At 0:48 the essay pivots to why humans got here at all. We became the dominant species on Earth by a long shot, and the reason given is the innate ability to network with each other. The thought experiment: if humanity were wiped out and restarted, like loading an old save file, communities would still form. Structures within society are inevitable because of the variety of brains. Some people are good at critical thinking, some are more artistic, and all of us come wired with some innate features. Other creatures form societies that evolve too. What makes us different is that we are customizable characters. We can mould ourselves into whatever kind of person we want to be.

Then the hard wall, at 1:33. We cannot know for certain that animals or any other life on Earth is conscious, or can function the way we do. The essay puts it in the first person to make the point bite. I know that I have my own thoughts and feelings and emotions, but how can I know for certain that you or anyone else does. There is no way I can go into your head and see things one hundred percent from your perspective. I cannot know what you are thinking, or whether you can think in the first place. This is the problem of other minds stated without the label, and the essay never resolves it. It uses it as the floor.

At 2:04 comes the instruction that the first segment exists to earn. To truly understand the universe, to understand and actually experience life, you have to give yourself up. There is no point in sustaining bliss and being permanently at an all time high. The life you are living is what you have put yourself into, what ego you have formed, only you do not want to admit it. You want to believe it happened to you. Day to day you play non bliss in order to be able to experience bliss. You put yourself into bad situations and let in the negative experiences just to feel some kind of satisfaction when it goes the other way. Then the compressed version, at 2:44, four clauses that could be a Zen koan: self implies other, white implies black, death implies life. You can feel your existence as fundamental rather than as an accident.

At 2:52 the essay breaks for its sponsor, and does it in character rather than in a jump cut. The bridge is that the mind needs regular checkups just as the body does, and the best way to get one is through a credentialed therapist. The read is for BetterHelp, and the narrator makes it personal: there was a time he struggled badly with impostor syndrome making videos for this channel, time with his therapist let him understand why he felt that and how to overcome it, and he is in a better place and more confident now. The mechanics are given plainly. Answer a few questions, usually within a few days you are assigned a credentialed therapist, switching is free if the fit is wrong, and sessions can run by phone call, video chat or messaging. Then, five minutes in: back to our story.

You are the fundamentals of existence (5:00)

The creator's own second chapter marker lands here, and the argument restarts at the bottom. At the basic level, at the lowest level imaginable, you are the fundamentals of existence. The same thing that makes you is the same thing that makes up everything else. If you can step back from what you believe, if you can step back from what your sensory organs have turned you into, you start to see things for what they actually are.

Which produces the question the whole segment turns on, at 5:18, and it gets asked four separate times before the segment ends: do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world?

Love is offered as the first piece of evidence, and the definition is unusual. Love is only possible due to the lack of self. You give up all your secrets. The walls you built to keep people at an arm's distance lower one by one until you are a completely open book, until all your pages have been read and the rest of the pages are blank, waiting to be filled with this new found love.

At 5:39 the sports analogy, which is the best compression in the segment. In basketball or soccer or football you are constantly giving the ball to someone else. The point of the game is to have the ball in your hands for the least amount of time, to constantly be passing it, to shoot it, to get it out of your hands. That is what keeps the game going. Life is the same way. If you define yourself as only being what your ego is, as the things you do voluntarily, then you are the victim: some higher power put you here and you did not ask for it. But what about the things you do involuntarily? Do you beat your heart, or does it just happen to you? You do those things even though you do not know how.

Words stop working at this point, and the essay says so before reaching for Alan Watts at 6:13. Everyone is fundamentally the alternate reality. Not God in the traditional sense but God in the sense of being the self, the deep down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not. A mind that can ask who am I, why am I here, what is the purpose of all of this, tends to forget.

At 6:34 the essay collects its own thread. Consciousness leaves out critical information. A consciousness that can view the world and take in sensory information tends to forget what is behind those eyes. A mind that has not gone deep enough to find where those questions come from, because the same place those questions come from is the same place the answers lie. The brain controls everything, and so in order to go to the extremes of the universe, to places we can only dream of going, we must first dive deep into something that is entirely inside us.

Rolling the clock back to the Big Bang (7:00)

The proof offered for the "you are the world" position is cosmological, and it is deliberately staged as a reversal. Take the Big Bang. There are hundreds, thousands of theories about how we came into existence, but go with this one. Start from the belief that you are strictly you, that your human body is all you are and all you have ever been, a small speck of dust in a vast sea of galaxies, stars and planets. Irrelevant.

Now roll the clock back. Things get smaller. The universe was more compact. The atoms that make you up are the building blocks of the universe, of the hot gas clouds that formed stars, that allowed solar systems to form, that allowed planets like Earth to form. Keep rolling the clock back and you were around at the very instant everything came into existence. That is you too. When everything was infinitesimally small, you were there.

But we define ourselves as being only us, mere humans walking on a planet we did not ask to be put on. Every one of us somehow made this happen, and we go on pretending we did not. It is a question of how we define ourselves. At 7:55 the question returns for the second time: are you the victim, or are you the world? And the answer is delivered with the essay's own eye roll built in. As cringy as it may sound, everyone you meet is just a small packet of the universe, a present, whether pleasant or not, packaged together from billions of years of engineering and architecture on a universal scale. Instead we define ourselves as something completely separate from it, something not connected whatsoever, which is a foolish view. We tend to search for how the universe came into being, but we are just the universe trying to understand itself.

To get to that conclusion, at 8:24, requires a reframe. We are not as different as we all think. Your name is given to you at birth. Your ideas and personality are collected from the world, scraps and bits and pieces that cling to you like a magnet. So what part of you is you? We are all different manifestations of consciousness and all fundamentally the same thing. Different egos, different personalities, but step back and drop the ego and we are all connected.

At 8:50 the forest image, which is the segment's best figure. View the universe as a forest. Every one of us is a twig, a leaf, a branch, but together we form life. Our origin, our roots, are connected, just as the roots of trees form a vast network that brings a massive forest to life. Humanity's roots all come from the same place.

Then the physics, at 9:05. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one form to another. Many of us carry the fear that it is all going to come to an end, and yes, your life will end, but your energy will not. It will continue onward forever. Our consciousness has convinced us otherwise. We form a thought process, almost as though we have been hypnotized, that we are all there is and all there ever will be and that it is all going to end. That leaves us unsatisfied and unhappy. But the universe is continuous, and you are technically the universe, so you continue too. Your death is not the end of you. It is the death of your ego.

Ego death, first hand (9:41)

Here the essay does something it does not do anywhere else in three hours: it reports its own experience. Many people experience the same thing while still alive, in ego death, which tends to be induced through psychedelic drugs, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, the list goes on. And at 9:50: while working on this video I actually experienced it myself, and although not intentional it provided clarity in a way I have never before experienced.

The definition is then made precise, because the word is used loosely everywhere else. This is not ego in the vernacular sense of a person's self worth. It is the philosophical ego, and its death is the complete loss of subjective self identity. Everything you believe you are disappears. You are void of emotion, of connection to anything around you, of connection to what makes you you. The idea of being a person stops making sense. The words I, me and myself have zero meaning.

At 10:20 the structural claim. The world can normally be sorted into two categories: myself and not myself. During ego death that line is blurred. I am completely gone. There is only the awareness of existence. The lifetime accumulation of your thoughts and emotions is put on pause.

The cliff image arrives at 10:34 and is the most vivid thing in the first quarter. It is as if you are on a cliff approaching an infinite void beneath you. Your life is continuous and exists all the way up the mountain until you reach the edge. Beneath you is the unknown. Ego death is jumping into that void, leaving behind everything you have ever known. It is as if you have stepped out of your body into a separate entity. You start to see things for what they actually are.

And then the linguistic trapdoor, which is where the segment earns its philosophy. Things do not actually exist. "Things" is just a noun, a fragment of speech, and speech is another instrument we created to try to understand the world. Our senses let us go about our daily lives and traverse the world, but they do not offer explanations, so we have to make the explanations up ourselves. During ego death you disconnect from all of that and have a heightened awareness, genuinely as though you are experiencing a level of consciousness no person can understand.

At 11:23 the reporting problem. You reach a level that words cannot explain. The instruments we made to understand our place in the universe shatter completely. Explaining it in terms of "I saw" or "I felt" does not seem reasonable, because our languages are instruments built to explain what someone experiences, and during ego death there is no someone, there is no me. So how do you describe it? The best the essay manages: your slate was wiped clean, your character save file was corrupted, but you are still in the game.

Because of that, ego death can be terrifying and enlightening at once. It is constricting and freeing, white and black. It is like defining what life is by experiencing death. At 12:00 the principle underneath it, which is the same principle as the bliss argument from 2:04: we cannot be more sensitive and welcoming to pleasure without being more sensitive and accepting of pain. You are flying and sinking at the same time, pulled from below and above and in every direction at once.

Going through it, the narrator reached a moment of acceptance. Ego death, while often extremely anxiety inducing, offers a glimpse into a reality free of that anxiety, a life free of your personal flaws, your daily thoughts, your responsibilities. It feels as though time is frozen, and wherever your mind wanders is free to judge things as they truly are. At 12:34, the line that recurs later in the segment on the self: you are the observer and the observable.

The conclusion surprised him, he says, because it was the same conclusion he had reached making an earlier video: nothing in life really matters.

Entropy, tunnels, and the hourglass (12:42)

The last movement of the segment ties the emotional claim to a physical one. Fear in general comes from not being able to make peace with the chaos that is the universe, from not being able to cope with the idea of entropy, that everything tends towards disorder. Forming an ego is disorderly in the same way. You go further and further down your own tunnel and stray further from everyone else. Experiencing ego death is breaking out of that tunnel, pulling back, and understanding that the network of tunnels encompassing every human on Earth all eventually return to the same place.

At 13:11 it becomes first person and final. When I die, when my ego is completely gone forever, when my physical body breaks down and no longer resembles the form it is in today, I will still somehow be here. Right now I am an hourglass. The sand is slowly leaking to the bottom and eventually it will all be there. That is the end of the line for me. But when that day comes, the universe will stop by, take the hourglass, flip it over, and whatever made me me will become something entirely different.

The segment signs off at 13:38 on the least mystical sentence in it, which is also the honest one: we are all just a temporary collection of atoms, and whatever you and I subjectively believe we are will not last forever, but objectively we will. For now, just enjoy the ride.

How to lucid dream (13:46)

The second chapter opens in second person and does not tell you where you are for forty seconds. Imagine you are flying, feeling cold air on your skin, flooded by light. You look down and see a sandy beach peppered with palm trees, and you decide to go there. Suddenly you are on the beach drinking a piña colada. But you are alone, and would it not be nice if somebody was there with you, and then suddenly your best friend appears. It is comforting and warm, a feeling you know you have been craving because work has been a struggle recently. You are grateful for their encouragement and for the piña colada, which is your favourite drink after all. You take a deep breath and enjoy the beauty of the moment.

It is not a vacation. It is not a game or a VR headset. It is a dream, a dream you know you are in, a dream you can control. The beach, the dream, the friend. You made it all happen, because you are lucid dreaming.

The definition, at 14:34: lucid dreaming occurs when a sleeper is aware they are in a dream and can exercise some control over the dream's environment. In a regular dream we are aware of objects and events within the dream but not aware that we are dreaming, and we cannot distinguish being asleep from being awake.

The history and the honest gap, at 14:52. Lucid dreaming is not new. It has been reported throughout history but only scientifically documented since 1975, and a great deal is still unknown: why it happens, how to induce it, and what effects it might have on us individually and as a species. (The 1975 date is Keith Hearne's eye signal experiment, the first time a sleeper communicated out of a dream in the lab, later developed by Stephen LaBerge at Stanford.)

At 15:09 the neural sketch. Some scientists believe lucid dreaming comes from increased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Unlike non lucid dreams, which can occur any time we are sleeping, lucid dreaming happens during the rapid eye movement cycle, described here as our fourth and final deepest stage of normal sleep.

What it is like from the inside (15:27)

The question everyone who has not had one asks. Lucid dreamers describe feeling as though they are playing a virtual reality game where they have some control over aspects of the scene and setting. These dreams can leave lasting impressions stronger than the ones we get awake. Most of us have woken from a dream we cannot fully remember and felt somehow changed by it, and with lucid dreaming that change is much more visceral. Some lucid dreamers talk about their dreams in religious terms, like an out of body experience. Some say it feels like being temporarily abducted by aliens and transported to a different planet, like being inside your own personal video game.

At 16:15 the aspect the essay finds most interesting, and it is not the flying. It is the emotional revelations. In a lucid dream you might be introduced to elements of yourself you would not see otherwise. You might see yourself more sympathetically, kinder, braver or more sensitive than you would like to admit or take credit for in reality. In that sense lucid dreams offer introspection many of us hesitate to attempt awake.

The envy is admitted at 16:50, along with the scale of it: there is a subreddit with more than four hundred thousand members dedicated to the subject. Then the numbers that make the rest of the section necessary, at 16:57. Only twenty three percent of the population experience lucid dreams on a monthly basis. Fewer than one percent are what scientists call proficient lucid dreamers, people who can easily sink into and manipulate their lucid dreams. The good news is that a majority of adults, fifty five percent, claim to have had at least one lucid dream in their lifetime. So if you have not had one yet, the odds are in your favour.

Paving the way: the induction protocol (17:26)

The essay gives an actual procedure rather than a vibe, and it is worth keeping the numbers.

First, optimize your bedroom for sleeping, because good sleep hygiene is key. Sixty five degrees Fahrenheit, eighteen Celsius, is considered the ideal sleep temperature. Keep the room relatively quiet and dark. Invest in blackout curtains, sleep masks or other accessories to reduce light, and consider earplugs or a sound machine to block disruptive noise.

Second, at 17:45, what researchers call reality testing. This means checking in with your environment and confirming whether you are asleep or awake. Dream environments can look familiar but there are always minor inconsistencies compared to reality, and performing these checks awake builds the skill of noticing when you are in a dream. Reality testing is specifically helpful when something odd happens in waking life. If a strange animal crosses the street in front of your car, take a moment, think about the fact that you are awake, that the animal is real, and that this odd moment is happening in your life. Developing that critical frame of mind awake should carry over into the dream state.

At 18:34 the two cheap physical checks. Press your fingers against your palm and feel the resistance of your hand: in a dream your fingers might go through your hand, and at that point you know you are not in reality where scientific laws apply. Or take note of being awake when you are reading, because written words often appear jumbled in dreams.

Third, at 18:58, the timing trick, which is the wake back to bed method. Wake yourself after five hours of sleep and simply tell yourself to remember that you are dreaming when you go back to sleep. Research has found this is most effective if you stay awake for thirty to one hundred and twenty minutes before sleeping again.

Fourth, at 19:13, the dream journal. Recording dreams helps us recognize dreams more easily, since many of our dreams or elements of them repeat. Write down what you remember the moment you wake, or record a voice note on your phone to rattle off the bits and pieces that come to mind.

At 19:33 the essay notes what has grown up around all this. As interest has grown and these tips have proliferated online, an entire industry has formed. There are now sleep masks and headbands you can buy that produce noises, flash lights or vibrate to inject stimulation into your dreams, which are the same methods researchers use on lucid dreaming subjects. There are online tutorials, some helpful and some from people simply looking to capitalize on the craze.

And at 20:04, the supplement. The drug alkaloid galantamine has been used in research and home settings to encourage lucid dreams. One study showed that participants who took the drug after being woken up and practising visualization were more likely to have a lucid dream than participants who received a placebo. Galantamine is already available over the counter as a supplement, and many lucid dreamers say it helps them stay in the dream longer and have more control over its elements. Some view using drugs as cheating, as they would with any performance enhancing substance in sport, but proficient lucid dreamers stress that whether you use a supplement or not you have to practise the other methods. Simply popping pills will not get you there.

Once you are in: expect, do not will (20:48)

The control technique is counterintuitive and stated precisely. Once you are lucid dreaming you want to use the moment to control where the dream goes and assert influence over what happens, and this works better if, instead of willing something to happen, you simply expect it to.

Back to the beach. You want a beautiful sea turtle to come climbing out of the water. Instead of insisting the turtle will show up, expect it to be there, and once you do a sea turtle or something close to it will probably appear. That expectancy effect can make things appear: if we say "I will find the dog behind the couch," then when we look behind the couch the dog will be there. Experienced lucid dreamers can also open doors in their dreams and envision what they want on the other side, so you can open a door and transport yourself from the sunny beach into the middle of outer space.

At 21:40 the honesty check that this section keeps returning to. Most of what we know about lucid dreams comes from the early stages of research and from those who can have them. We still do not have a great understanding of the neural underpinnings of lucid dreams or the brain processes that make them happen, and at this point we do not have a reliable way to induce them.

The benefits, and the risk (21:58)

Even with so much unknown, the benefits are listed with their evidential status attached. At the very least a lucid dream can act as a kind of wish fulfilment, taking us to places or putting us in situations we have always wanted to experience. Lucid dreaming can help us shed the stress of daily life. It has been clinically shown to be a potential treatment for pervasive nightmares. Data shows it can foster creativity. Even athletes employ lucid dreams to work on and refine motor skills. Most of all, lucid dreams let us interact with and explore parts of our unconscious that we cannot reach in regular dreams or awake.

At 22:46 the essay turns its own case over. Skeptics worry that lucid dreaming can have a negative impact on mental health, not only because it can disturb sleep but because it can blur the lines between reality and fantasy. And the reality testing tactic is the specific culprit. While it might help some people distinguish waking from dreaming, it might also make others question whether they are awake or asleep, which would be disorienting and could lead to a feeling of dissociation where they feel disconnected from their thoughts, feelings and sense of identity.

Inside the lab (23:30)

The experimental setup is given in enough detail to follow. Researchers invite proficient lucid dreamers into their labs. Once the participants are asleep, researchers measure activity levels in the prefrontal cortex and other areas. The participants are told to use left and right eye movement once they are in a lucid dream and aware that they are dreaming, which lets the researchers see exactly what brain activity is happening at that moment. This is the trick that makes the whole field possible, and the reason it works is stated later, in the dreams segment: eye muscles are free to move during REM sleep even while the rest of the body is paralysed.

At 23:54 the result with the largest implication. Studies tell us that the events we experience in our dreams produce effects on our brains similar to what would happen if we experienced them during waking hours. If that is true, then dreaming of doing something is the equivalent of actually doing it. The essay immediately puts a limit on it: that might be a stretch for going to Mars or breathing underwater, but if it is a meaningful conversation with someone or tasting a new delicious food, maybe we could take the feeling and carry it into reality. Lucid dreaming might not just be about experiencing our dreams differently. It might be the key to understanding our own consciousness.

Mary Arnold-Forster and dual consciousness (24:34)

The oldest source in the segment. English aristocrat and writer Mary Arnold-Forster wrote one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of lucid dreaming in her book Studies in Dreams, describing her attempts to fly. She proposed that humans have dual consciousness. One is our primary self, which analyses our circumstances and applies logic to our experiences, and which for most of us is dormant during sleep. According to Arnold-Forster, this primary self wakes up in lucid dreams and brings memories, knowledge and reasoning from waking life along with it, plus the awareness that we are asleep.

At 25:09 the essay grades her. The idea of dual consciousness may not be scientific enough today, but researchers would agree that lucid dreams involve increased self awareness and reflection. They give us the ability to think more deeply about our lives because we get to actively live outside of them. When we sleep we are still who we are and our brains are the same, but they are unconscious, so lucid dreams provide a point of comparison that isolates the regions of the brain involved in heightened self awareness and agency.

Which produces the clinical payoff at 25:48, and it is the strongest practical argument in the segment. If we can understand what is happening in a brain that appears to be unconscious but is really aware, we can better treat brain injury patients who are unconscious. Doctors could establish those patients' levels of consciousness and treat them accordingly. If scientists can establish a neural signature of self awareness by studying lucid dreamers, they can make more accurate diagnoses and prognoses.

The segment closes at 26:00 by demoting the flying. What these ideas tell us is that lucid dreams are really about self awareness, so even if you cannot manage to get into one you can still learn from them. Try to be more connected to your unconscious self, maybe not through a lucid dream but through something more accessible, like meditation or other therapies in waking life. Like all things, lucid dreaming takes practice, and we have to approach the desire with a sense of calm, because when we try to force it into existence we lose the potential to find it at all. So maybe start with curiosity, not just about what it would feel like to fly, but about what might be lurking in our own brain that we have not found yet.

The illusion of self (26:06)

The third chapter opens on an object. The narrator was scrolling through old pictures and found one from when he was a little kid. He took the picture, held it up to his face in front of a mirror, and realized: I look nothing like that kid. They do not have the same physical properties. Their thoughts, ideas and beliefs are different. They certainly do not have the same memories. But still, he knows it is him. His brain sees the picture and creates a story line. I was there, I am here, and I will be somewhere else in the future looking back and doing the same exact thing.

That, at 26:39, is the idea of self: the idea that there is something deep within us that remains fundamentally the same even when everything else changes. That we can grow bigger, create new memories, lose old memories, change our thoughts and beliefs, and yet deep down something remains fundamentally unchanged.

At 27:03 the essay notes that this idea has baffled pretty much everyone, scientists and philosophers alike, for centuries, because it is as easy to describe as it is impossible to explain. As humans we experience a lot of different senses. We feel things, see things, hear things. We have thoughts, we have feelings, we have the ability to learn. But all of these are separate experiences. So at what point do all of these sentient properties become you?

The scroll continues at 27:36, through elementary school, middle school, high school, and everything after. All the photos look completely different. Thinking back to those times and the decisions made then, he would not make most of them now. And yet, without a shadow of a doubt, at 27:57: my brain convinces me that I am still me.

I and me (28:00)

The distinction the whole argument runs on. The words I and me are more than pronouns. They are the two ways we describe the self.

When we say I, we are talking about a being who is consciously aware of the present moment. I am reading this line on a script right now.

When we describe the self using me, we are usually referring to a personal identity, who we think we are. Me reflects who we are through the lenses of our past, our present, and our plans for the future.

And then the two hits that dismantle it. We colour our memories based on what we need to be in the present. And our plans for the future are always changing. So at 28:37: how can there be a consistent being if everything that forms it changes?

Memory is not a recording (28:40)

The load bearing claim of the segment, and the essay does not soften it. We like to think of memories as simply playing back a video in our head of what happened in the past, but that is not what memories are. Memories are our brain's reconstruction of past experiences. We create these memories to fit the present narrative, based on what we know now, how we describe "me" now, and our present needs and goals.

The example, at 29:01, is short and damning. If you now think of yourself as a kind person, you are more likely to remember all the times you have been kind to people rather than the times you have been unkind. We form narratives about ourselves around how we want to be seen by others. We convince ourselves we will act and behave a certain way to fit that narrative, even when we are often mistaken.

So at 29:22, if we cannot trust our memories to give an accurate description of who we were in the past, how can we have a self that exists through time? At 29:34 the essay presses harder. Are we not just creating new selves every time this narrative completely changes? And note the word "completely." It is not that the narrative continues down a different path. It changes completely, such that what was no longer is. And if what was can no longer be, then we cannot say there is a self that persists through time. Rather, the idea of self is one that is constantly recreated by our brains when the need arises.

At 29:58 the term lands: this is what we refer to as the illusion of self.

Then, immediately, the clarification that keeps it from being nonsense, at 30:02. Contrary to what you might be thinking, this does not mean we do not have a self. It means the self does not exist the way we think it does. At 30:12 the positive account: our bodies are made up of a bundle of perceptions, sensations and thoughts, and our brains try to make sense of the randomized nature of our being by creating a linear story line. You were there, now you are here. That story line is what we describe as the self. It is the brain's way of making sense of the randomness that is human existence.

At 30:33 the essay states what it takes to be the decisive point. When most people think of a self, they think of something that can exist outside the brain, and that is simply not possible. The self is a sensation of continuity and unity created by the brain. Anything other than this is wishful thinking that humans are more than a sentient bunch of molecules.

The soul, and the one tradition that denies it (30:57)

The wishful version has a name: the idea that deep down we have a soul, an immaterial essence, the driving force of individual existence. In most religions of the world this is true. But not Buddhism.

At 31:06, anattā is the Buddhist doctrine that teaches against the idea of a self. It teaches that there is no underlying permanent substance and no soul, and that everything we experience is simply perceived by our senses, not by an I or a me. And it draws the ethical consequence, which is the part usually left out: since there is no I, material wealth cannot belong to me, so we should not crave these things or hold on to them as though they were worth more than a few good sensations.

Back to the mirror (31:32)

The narrator drops the other pictures, picks up the childhood one again, holds it in front of his face and stares at the mirror again, and as the existential crisis floods his mind he asks the test question. If I had not been told that was me, would I have known? If I had seen this picture randomly, without any context, would I have been able to tell it was me?

The answer, delivered flat: definitely not.

So at 32:10, how can I say there is a self that existed in that kid that still exists in me? How can I say our experiences are linear, that we are the same person? The truth is you are not the same person that existed before and you are not the same person that will exist in the future. Or at least, and the qualifier is the essay's own: there is no evidence to prove it.

At 32:19 the two sided response. This thought is both terrifying and exciting. It is terrifying because it runs against everything we know about ourselves. If there is no self, then there is no self will, and if there is no self will there is no morality, no right or wrong, no good or evil, just a bunch of molecules interacting with the stimuli they are presented with.

But at 32:40 it is exciting because it liberates you. You do not have to think it is me against the world, because there is no you to begin with. You will no longer think life is unfair because bad things happen to you. You will see bad things happening to you simply as things happening. Whether good or bad, it does not really matter. You will no longer be scared of death, because nothing can die that never was. You will understand that death is simply a natural occurrence.

If it is not real, why do we have it? (33:11)

The illusion of self, the essay says at 33:11, is one of the most powerful and consistent illusions we experience. It is there from when we are toddlers up until the day we die. So if it is not real, why do our brains create these story lines? Why does the illusion exist?

The answer offered at 33:28 is functional and evolutionary. As living things our goal is to survive and thrive. We learn, we adapt, we grow. And one of the most important building blocks of survival is competition. Without competition we would all be satisfied with where we are and have no desire to strive for anything at all.

At 33:37 the link is made explicit, and it is the segment's sharpest inference. Without the illusion of self there is no competition, because competition is built on the idea of a single entity outdoing another. If there is no single entity, just sentient chemical reactions, there is no competition, and without competition things do not work the way they do now.

Two objections, answered (34:06)

The essay then does something rare in a video essay: it argues against itself, twice, on the record.

Objection one, at 34:20: the pure consciousness event. Some people who meditate can reach a state of complete quietness and emptiness, described as a pure consciousness event. This is an empty state of consciousness: no thoughts, no technical mental processes running, just a deep seated sense of I ness, an independent identity. Many people use this state as an argument for the existence of a self.

Two things are wrong with that school of thought, at 34:44. One, there is no scientific evidence to back it up, and we cannot determine what is what simply by judging people's personal experiences. Two, and this is the better half of the answer: the feeling of emptiness is itself a mental process, your brain telling you that you are free of thoughts. It is still brain activity.

Objection two, at 35:07: the ghost problem. Some people argue that if there is no self, how can we trust the judgments of anyone? If a ghost came out today to tell us there are no ghosts, how do we believe them? For you to pass judgment on consciousness you need to be an objective observer, and being an objective observer means you need to have a self who observes all, like you are a god or something. Which negates almost every argument you are trying to defend.

The answer, at 35:36, is to reject the analogy rather than the logic. The illusion of self is not a ghost telling us there are no ghosts. It is a figure we call a ghost telling us that they can feel, touch and smell, that they can interact with living things, and therefore that they cannot be a ghost. It is not just postulating the absence of a self, it is showing the reality of its absence through scientific research. We do not need a self to tell us there is no self. We only need the evidence.

At 36:02 the evidence is restated as the picture. When I hold up the photo of myself as a kid to my face, it is clear that everything has changed. I know I am still causally related to who that kid was, but there is no evidence to prove there is something in that kid still in me that has persisted through time.

The limit case: Alzheimer's (36:21)

The existential crisis produces one more move, and it is the segment's most serious one. He puts down his own pictures and picks up pictures of his grandmother. She is much older now. She does not really speak much, but she still talks, and she still remembers what the world was like when she was younger.

But what about people her age who suffer from advanced Alzheimer's, at 36:35? People who cannot recognize their own loved ones, who cannot remember anything from the past. Do they still have a self? When does a person stop being a self? If you no longer have any memories of the past or plans for the future, what then is the self? What does the word "me" refer to?

The conclusion drawn: if the very components that make the self can easily be altered or wiped away completely, then the idea of a persistent existence through time is not possible.

At 37:08 the practical dividend, which is the reason the whole argument was worth making. Only when we disregard the idea of self can we begin to understand why people seem to go completely off script. We often judge people by the idea of them we have created in our head, when in reality we are all just a bunch of competing impulses and urges swaying us one way and then the other. The idea that there is no self existing through time explains why we sometimes act in ways inconsistent with the story we tell both to ourselves and to others.

The final definition, at 37:37: the illusion of self is a collection of our memories of the past, our desires in the present, and our plans for the future. It is our psychological profile. It is not a supernatural entity that exists independently. It does not transcend death. It does not exist through time.

And the sign off, at 37:56, six words long: we were not and we will not be. We simply are.

The psychology of Inside Out (38:00)

The fourth chapter opens by pointing out that you cannot get at a child's mind by remembering. You have memories of being a child, but that is not an accurate representation. It is an older you reflecting on the past, and your childhood memories are likely different now from the experiences that formed them. If you have a child you might notice some real childhood feelings returning briefly. You recognize them in your kid. But these moments are fleeting, and you quickly come back to the adult world.

Which is what makes the film interesting. Pixar's Inside Out aims to give us a look into the inner workings of a child's mind, and at 38:26 the essay concedes it works emotionally. For most of us fortunate enough to have seen it, it is quite moving. You might have cried a bit watching it, or held back tears with all your might because you did not want to cry in front of a child.

But the question at 38:43 is a different one, asked in two halves. Does Inside Out accurately reflect the child's mind and offer anything real to help children navigate their problems? And: does the movie mislead kids about their own standing?

The plot, reconstructed (38:54)

The essay walks the film in order, because the argument depends on the details.

An eleven year old girl named Riley moves from a quaint house in Minnesota to the busy city of San Francisco. She is excited at first, but the reality of how much her life is changing hits her hard. Her first problem is that her new home does not meet her expectations: it is small and dusty, nothing like what she left behind. Worse, the family's moving truck is delayed, separating her from all her familiar items and furniture. With nothing to cook with, at 39:19, Riley and her mom decide to grab a pizza slice, and to her horror the pizza is covered with broccoli.

The biggest challenge is that her new school is intimidating, so intimidating that she cries in front of the other kids on her first day in class.

At 39:34, Riley's emotions, represented by living characters, are struggling to keep up with all the changes she has been thrust into. Fear, Disgust, Anger, Sadness and Joy lead the control panel of Riley's mind, and we spend more time with the emotions than with Riley and her parents.

The central conflict unfolds at 39:51 when Sadness touches and changes Riley's core memories, which makes them sad. Joy tries to turn these memories joyful again but ends up getting lost in the process, along with Sadness and the core memories, and so begins Joy and Sadness's mission to get the core memories and themselves back to the control centre. This leaves the other emotions in charge as Riley's personality islands begin to collapse in the absence of her core memories, at 40:11. Those floating islands represent personality sources such as friendship and family.

When Joy and Sadness manage to return to the other emotions, the controls are broken by Anger. At 40:28 Riley is left depressed, sitting on a bus, attempting to run away to Minnesota. Joy then realizes her mistake: she caused Riley's problems by not allowing her to express her sadness. She rights her misguided actions by handing the controls over to Sadness. Riley gets off the bus and returns to her parents in tears, telling them how she feels, and setting everything right.

What the film gets right (40:47)

The lesson is real, and the essay says so before it starts taking things apart. Emotional harmony is important for our mental health, and allowing ourselves to have feelings when they arise naturally is very healthy, especially in our formative younger years.

At 41:00 it goes further and credits the film with a cultural critique. The story reflects and criticizes our cultural bias that values feelings of joy over sadness, much the way we prefer extroversion to introversion and optimism to pessimism. We internalize these values and try to hide our sadness by covering it up with false joy. Riley tries to hide her true feelings from her parents. She does not want them to know the move is having a big impact on her. Her mom also pressures her to put on a happy face for her dad, who is under a lot of pressure at his new job.

So the story successfully delivers a central message about emotional harmony inside a fantastical representation of a child's mind. But at 41:36: does it appropriately capture the inner workings of the child's mind? Not exactly.

What it gets wrong, in three counts (41:43)

Count one: memory. The way memory works in the film is largely inaccurate. Memory is much more malleable than the movie's playback model portrays. Our memory in general is a lot messier. Our memories are unreliable accounts of what happened in the past, distorted over time, and whenever we try to recall a memory it gets corrupted further from the original imprint. (This is the same claim the previous chapter used to dissolve the self, thirty seconds of screen time earlier, and the essay is consistent about it.)

At 42:04 the essay pauses to give the film credit on a specific point: the movie accurately reflects memory when Sadness changes the emotional character of Riley's core memories. Our feelings towards our most cherished memories do change based on how we feel and who we have become. As an adult, if you are separated from a loved one, your memories of them could be filled with a sense of loss where they were once a source of joy.

Count two: core memories and personality islands. At 42:28, while it is fair to have a cleaner version of memory for the audience's sake, the account of core memories is misleading. These memories are not linked to our personality islands as in the movie. We do have important memories for our sense of identity, but they do not affect us the way the film portrays. And the evidence given at 42:43 is two pieces, both empirical: people who suffer from severe amnesia do not have dramatic shifts in their personality, and twins separated at birth often share personality traits despite not sharing similar memories. Many of our personality traits come from genetics and our environment.

Count three, at 42:58, and the essay calls it the most significant: the film is missing a character. A critical character to the function of a human being. Central cognition.

At 43:11: between Riley and her emotions there is nothing. In reality there is supposed to be a middle one, the central cognition that allows us to assess perceptual data and make choices for the sake of our own well being. It is a part of our conscious experience completely absent in Riley and in every other human character surrounding her.

The dual process account (43:28)

The essay then gives the psychology it is holding the film to, and dates it. This account of the real life mind comes from psychology theories first presented in the late 1950s and still used in cognitive psychology today. It establishes the mind as having two systems.

System 1, at 43:36, is instinctive and unconscious. It is where we make automatic decisions without deliberation and where our emotions are processed. We have no conscious experience of the functioning of System 1, only of its output.

System 2, at 43:53, is intentional, effortful and conscious. It is our central cognition. We use it to think when our System 1 processes will not suffice. Whenever you have to make a tough decision, you rely on System 2.

And at 44:02 the essay refuses to make System 2 the hero. There are moments when we want System 1 to take over, like when we need to run to safety or pedal a bike. Deliberating with System 2 in those moments can get you killed or make your task impossible.

At 44:15 the anatomy. Central cognition exists in our prefrontal cortex, alongside our working memory and executive control centres. In Inside Out that would align nicely with the command centre the emotions occupy.

The relationship, at 44:28, is the part the film had no room for. In reality central cognition and emotions are often competing with each other, but there is no necessary hierarchy that determines who wins. Sometimes emotions drive action and sometimes cognition takes control. It is like a disorderly scrum. At 44:43, when we are tired after a long day, our emotions often win, and we do not even try to use central cognition in those moments. Most of us can relate to having snapped at somebody making demands of us when we were just trying to get to bed.

Why the omission matters (44:55)

By neglecting central cognition the film implies an emotional determinism of our behaviour, which the essay judges probably unhelpful for kids trying to understand themselves. It potentially adds to the already confusing sense of self that comes with growing up. The movie does not acknowledge their ability to deliberate and make decisions outside of an emotional reaction.

At 45:17 the stakes are stated plainly: to navigate the world successfully we need to make good use of System 2, otherwise we are at the mercy of the world and our instinctual reaction to it. Central cognition has a big role to play for kids and adults alike.

Why Pixar did it anyway (45:30)

And then the essay does the fair thing, which is to explain the omission as a craft decision rather than an error. To develop the concept of Inside Out, filmmaker Pete Docter worked closely with neuroscientists and psychologists. Pixar was not naive about the mind when it signed off on the film. Accuracy took a backseat to other priorities: it needed to make a good story for kids and adults.

At 45:45 the general principle. Complexity can add depth to film, but more often than not it makes the story hard to follow, and for children's films complexity is an even greater concern. You can easily lose a younger audience with too many characters to follow and convoluted motivations. Pixar rearranged the processes of the child's mind to have a limited number of protagonists working towards a specific goal while facing a healthy amount of resistance.

At 46:10 the essay actually runs the counterfactual, and this is the best passage in the chapter because it shows why the accurate version breaks the film. Adding central cognition as a character would have been more accurate but would have made the story more complicated and less straightforward. The new character could play Joy's boss, but that introduces a new set of problems. First, the focus would move off the emotions and onto central cognition. Then it becomes hard to separate the internal world of Riley's mind from the external world, because central cognition is a conscious process, and Riley cannot be consciously aware of the internal adventure taking place, since that world represents her unconscious mind. If Riley were aware, the reality portrayed in the film would fall apart.

At 46:47 the only route left: perhaps the only way to be more accurate would be to show Riley's central cognition deliberating on her choices with her emotions overriding her at times. But that adds another layer that makes the journey of the emotions less consequential.

And then, at 47:02, a genuinely elegant reading of what Pixar actually did. In a way, the emotions being sentient is itself a way of representing central cognition. They are able to deliberate amongst themselves with Joy taking the lead, which lets them have a conscious thought process contained within the unconscious mind, avoiding Riley's awareness.

At 47:17 the same defence is applied to the second count. Linking core memories to personality islands is not accurate, but it is beneficial to the story: it gives the adventure big stakes. If Joy and Sadness fail, the personality islands are gone forever, which has huge consequences for Riley. As the audience we root for the protagonist because failure would be disastrous, and if the core memories were not that important we would not have nearly as much investment in them.

The verdict at 47:40: while Inside Out is not a perfect mapping of a child's mind onto a set of relatable characters, its deviations make a lot of sense given the demands of storytelling, and the film still manages a very poignant message about the value of our emotions.

The chapter closes at 47:55 with a prediction, made before the sequel was out. Inside Out 2 is coming out soon, and for the sake of staying true to the original themes you will not be seeing central cognition or a more accurate account of memory. Still, considering the impact of the first film, there will be new important lessons about emotions that we all need to remember, and for those lessons to get across and ring true they will need the focus you only get with a good story.

Traffic is a mind problem, not a road problem (48:21)

The fifth essay is where the compilation reveals its actual method. Having spent forty eight minutes inside the head, it goes outside and finds the head there too.

It opens on a date. In the summer of 2014 the world was in a festive mood as another World Cup was about to get under way, but on Wednesday 11 June 2014 the city of São Paulo, one of the main hosts of the World Cup, was anything but festive. Entire parts of the city remained shut as cars sat on stretches of tarmac as far as the eye could see. The effects extended well beyond the city as the entire country of Brazil felt them.

At 48:47: the jam was said to have been over two hundred and fourteen miles long, the worst traffic jam in history. Disputes about the economic implications of hosting a World Cup, worker deaths and countrywide protests were ultimately what led to it, and São Paulo is notorious for being one of the most congested places on the planet anyway.

At 49:04 the essay scales it down to you. You and I may not have been in a historic jam, but we have all been stuck when the cars barely seem to move, the lights barely seem to change, and before you know it a five mile drive has taken over two hours.

The costs, at 49:28, are given as a chain rather than a number. In 2018 alone, traffic congestion is said to have cost the US economy around eighty seven billion dollars. Congestion also increases fuel consumption and by extension emissions. It wastes time we could have spent being where we wanted to be. Instances of road rage rise, which contributes to more driver error, which means more accidents, which means more traffic. Traffic is demanding on body and mind and deteriorates the quality of life of everyone involved. You either arrive at the office to angry bosses or home to a cold dinner.

The human factor (50:08)

At 50:08 the thesis. What makes traffic jams interesting is that beyond the quantifiable metrics, the flow of cars, the volume of traffic, the number of lanes, there is another spontaneous factor much harder to predict or measure: the human factor. Each vehicle is being manoeuvred by a human driver, at least for now, and so the intricacies of traffic are expressions of the intricacies of human behaviour. It all defaults back to the driver.

Which is why, at 50:38, Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote an entire book about traffic, calls New York City traffic a giant applied psychology lab.

The helmet experiment, at 50:49. Vanderbilt refers to an experiment conducted in England by traffic psychologist Ian Walker, in which bicycles were rigged with sensors that calculated the distance and speed of vehicles driving past. Three conditions. In the first the rider wore a helmet. In the second he did not. In the third he tried to appear female by wearing a wig and a dress.

The results, in order. When the rider appeared to be wearing a helmet, cars felt more comfortable driving close by. When he was not wearing a helmet, they gave him a bit more space. When the rider seemed to be a woman, they gave him even more space.

Vanderbilt calls these judgments "beneath the subconscious": drivers were making assessments about the competence of the rider and the likelihood of an accident on very little and often inaccurate evidence. The essay puts the question back to the audience. Are riders wearing helmets always more experienced? Does wearing a helmet make you safer? Physically yes, but psychologically it could cause you to act differently and take risky manoeuvres you otherwise might not. This is risk compensation, and it runs through the rest of the segment.

Too many signs, at 51:47. You might think the more regulated traffic is, the safer it is, and the more signals and signs you see at intersections, the more careful drivers will be. Not the case. If there are too many signals, drivers find themselves in a false sense of security. The apparent abundance of caution that traffic lights portray causes drivers to drop their guard in the riskiest parts of the road, which often leads to more accidents.

At 52:19 the origin story, which is a good one: this unintuitive idea was actually discovered because of an electrical failure in a traffic light. The observation and the theory that emerged from it are credited to Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who developed the idea of shared space. Instead of adding more signs, street markings and crosswalks, you remove them, the very things you think were making you safe. No kerb separating the street from the sidewalk. No sidewalks to begin with. Cars and pedestrians all together. Drivers find themselves less confident than they were before, because there is no separation, nothing splitting those in cars from those on bikes or on foot. It makes drivers more cautious, which saves lives by preventing accidents and traffic rather than increasing it.

Rubbernecking, at 53:08. Rubbernecking is when an accident in one lane causes drivers in other lanes, or even on other roads, to slow down while passing to watch things unfold, because we are nosy and like to get into other people's business. Beyond the physical obstruction the accident causes, this is added slowdown caused purely by psychological reasons. If just a few cars slow down, cars behind them are forced to slow, the ripple effect leads to widespread congestion, and before you know it you are bumper to bumper. At 53:47: that is exactly why in some countries accident sites are quickly covered with portable boundaries to prevent people catching an unnecessary glance.

But Vanderbilt suggests there is more to this mundane activity. He thinks drivers sometimes pause not just to see what is going on but to reflect briefly on their own mortality, on the possibility of something like this happening to them as well. Everyone thinks they are a good driver until they are not.

Nonlinearity, at 54:15. Another curious aspect is the nonlinearity between the amount of traffic and the congestion it produces. If only one percent of all drivers were to use public transportation, that could lead to a reduction in traffic of more than twenty percent.

At 54:30 the scheduling argument. Although not a bottleneck in the traditional sense, the convention of nine to five office hours has a lot to do with congestion, because in daily routine traffic forms at similar times: everyone is on similar schedules, everyone heading to work at roughly the same time, which has been notoriously bad for economies. With the recent pandemic and the wave of companies moving work online, you have to wonder what the long term implications of this new flexibility will be. Most offices will still operate from physical spaces, but even a slight reduction in the daily number of commuters could have a drastic effect on congestion and improve economies while doing so.

And at 55:13 the counterpoint, which is the same risk compensation finding again. Some studies have emerged stating that while there were indeed fewer accidents by volume during the pandemic, a higher percentage of them were fatal. Drivers were guilty of feeling safer and were therefore less alert on emptier roads, which led to more speeding. The psychological implications of feeling safe on the road can cause a chain reaction of decisions that ultimately make you less safe.

The circular track (56:04)

At 55:41 the essay lists the ordinary causes: roads not wide enough to accommodate necessary volumes, unplanned infrastructure, or a massive countrywide protest as in São Paulo. Then it asks whether controlling those would mean the eradication of traffic forever.

It would not, and the demonstration at 56:04 is the best piece of hard science in the whole three hours. In one of the more remarkable experiments, by some Japanese physicists, you can see cars travelling in a circle completely devoid of any traditional bottleneck. All they have to do is turn left. That is literally it. They are driving on a closed circular track. No intersections. No distractions. They are also asked to maintain a steady speed and a steady distance, which is traditional traffic advice, so the experiment is not rigged to make the drivers fail. They are just being asked to drive normally.

And sure enough they start fine. But at 56:36, after the experiment runs for a brief period, the human factor steps in. Some drivers have difficulty maintaining a steady speed or distance. They are either too close to the vehicle in front or the one behind. To correct, they brake or accelerate, and as with most human drivers they end up overcompensating, because better safe than sorry. That causes the driver behind to stop as well, and the results of all these reactions are further compounded by the reaction times of each of the other drivers. A sudden braking in front of a driver causes him to brake, which causes the driver behind him to brake as well. An erratic brake emerges out of nowhere, and with it a congested flow of traffic. Before you know it you are stuck in traffic where there should not be any.

At 57:26 the name: this is a phantom traffic jam. Out of nothing physical whatsoever, a traffic jam self generates using only our reaction times, and often it dissipates as organically as it emerges.

At 58:00 the one mitigation that does work, stated as a theoretical: the ripple effect could still be absorbed by maintaining a long enough gap between vehicles. The more space between you and the car ahead, the more time you and the cars behind have to react and brake smoothly while still moving.

Forecasting, and the technology that may make forecasting moot (58:28)

If you cannot prevent traffic, maybe being aware of when it will occur is the next best thing. Right now most of us use Google Maps to estimate traffic in a region. If you have ever used your phone as a GPS you have seen areas show up red as congestion forms. Google uses Android phones to crowdsource data about the number of vehicles in a region and how fast they are moving, and if you have used an Android phone you have contributed to the pool. But it is not forecasting a jam. It is telling you that one has already formed, which is useful and not a solution.

At 59:06 the newer approach. Forecasting methods are being developed with machine learning and AI. Cameras mounted on signals and busy intersections feed data to a control centre that regulates traffic signals across a region. This allows two things: predicting traffic with as much as ninety percent accuracy, and reacting to emerging congestion by temporarily closing off certain roads and opening others. At 59:32 it is being tested in one of the most congested regions in the world, India, but the tests are still small scale and these systems have yet to see large scale implementation.

And at 59:49 the possibility that these forecasting systems become obsolete before they are even rolled out, because of self driving cars. What is at the core of the most unavoidable jams? The human factor. It is the inability of human drivers to maintain a steady speed and distance, and self driving cars take that element out of the equation. Beyond preventing fatal accidents, the essay's own view is that the major way self driving cars will change roads for the better is by preventing congestion. If cars can communicate amongst themselves, lanes could be merged automatically. Blind spots would no longer exist with 360 degree cameras. We could even get rid of signals and traffic lights, since cars would communicate about when to stop and go, which would reduce a lot of the clutter in our cityscapes.

At 1:00:36 the transition problem, which the essay treats as the real risk. The move to one hundred percent self driving cars could be extremely difficult. The roads in the near future will not be the automated utopia we are dreaming of. They will be a bit of both, human driven cars and self driven cars, each adapting to one another. If we are so busy building infrastructure for driverless cars, we could forget about the very people who are supposed to benefit from it. A self driving car's job will not only be to drive itself and communicate with other self driving cars, but to adapt to the unpredictability of a human driver, however many of them are still remaining.

The essay closes the segment at 1:01:19 by widening it out. Transportation has always been tied to civilization. Our ability to cooperate in large numbers, which is what led to the rise and sustenance of our civilization, has a lot to do with the ability to cover large distances sustainably, and a large portion of that distance has been covered on roads. Getting from A to B has a remarkable effect on our perception of the world and the decisions we take. Traffic makes the world seem like a larger place than it needs to be. People spend a disproportionate amount of valuable time on the roads, time they will never get back. They also do not meet each other as often, and a lot of the world's wonders remain untouched and unexplored. Making sure that we explore them involves understanding traffic jams, and by extension the minds of the humans that cause them.

Why do we dream (1:02:13)

The sixth essay takes the question the lucid dreaming chapter deliberately left open and works it properly. Why do we dream is one of life's great unanswered questions, and given that we spend around six years of our lives in a dream state it is no wonder people want to understand it. There are theories, and the essay will get to them, but there is no clear consensus. No one really knows for sure. Or do they.

Dreams are strange, and for many of us they hold great significance, so much that we like to share them with others at length, if we can even remember them, and try to interpret their secret and hidden meanings. So do they actually hold any real meaning?

The biology first (1:02:47)

Before the bigger questions, what happens in the brain. While sleeping we go through different cycles of the five stages of sleep, divided into REM sleep and non REM sleep. REM simply means rapid eye movement. The first four stages are non REM sleep, restorative and for the most part dreamless, and as we move through them brain activity slows.

But at 1:03:15, about ninety minutes after we finally fall asleep, we hit stage five, REM sleep, and this is when the dreaming really gets going. In this stage the body is for all intents and purposes paralysed. Heart rate goes up, blood pressure rises, and brain activity returns to near waking levels.

At 1:03:32 the mechanism, and it is specific. The paralysis in REM sleep is caused by the release of glycine, an amino acid, from the brain stem onto the brain's motor neurons. It is suggested that this paralysis is nature's way of preventing us from acting out our dreams, which is probably for the best.

At 1:03:45 the emotional hardware. The limbic system is a fairly primitive part of the brain that deals with emotions and is very active during REM sleep. It is made up of the amygdala, mostly associated with fear; the hippocampus, heavily involved in the formation of long term memory; and the cingulate gyrus, involved in our physical reactions to situations. Break down the roles of these structures and you can start to paint a picture of why dreams often take the bizarre and scary forms they do. Couple that with the fact, at 1:04:13, that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with logic and self control, is not really active during REM sleep, and things start to make sense.

But understanding it is not enough to prevent nightmares, and at 1:04:30 the essay follows the mechanism into its failure mode: sleep paralysis. When you fall asleep your brain does not completely shut off, and to prevent you acting out your dreams it releases chemicals that leave you paralysed. That paralysis is supposed to lift as soon as you wake. Sometimes it does not, and that is sleep paralysis. You wake up, you are aware of your consciousness, but you cannot move. It feels as though there is a massive weight on your body preventing you from actually waking up. It is most often caused by disrupted REM sleep, so some people may believe they are still dreaming when they are in fact awake, and because of this some of your nightmares can leak into the real world. While undergoing sleep paralysis you will often see things standing in the corners of your room, or on the ceiling, or even closer. Luckily this usually goes away pretty quickly.

Freud, and the unfalsifiable problem (1:05:47)

At 1:05:26 the essay asks whether biology is really the whole answer, whether there is no secret window into our psyche. Everyone at one time or another has wondered what their dreams mean. Some believe dreams have no meaning and serve no function. Others believe they are one of the most important things human biology has allowed to happen.

You cannot go further without Freud, whose theories of dreams are probably the most well known in the world. They focus on the content of the dreams themselves as an explanation of the function of dreaming. Freud theorized that dreams represented a window into the unconscious mind, a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges and memories beyond our conscious awareness. The bulk of the iceberg, submerged deep underwater. Most of the contents of the unconscious mind are supposedly unacceptable or unpleasant, representing feelings of pain, anxiety or conflict. When we are sleeping the forces that keep these feelings in check are weakened, allowing us to live out our desires and even our fears through dreams.

At 1:06:30 Freud's therapeutic claim: by exploring dreams, people could increase self awareness and gain insight into their unconscious self, which would then help them deal with problems in their day to day lives. He also argued that the true meaning of our dreams is hidden within their content, and that interpretation is needed to understand how they relate to our unconscious fears or desires.

And then, at 1:06:53, the essay's verdict, which it will repeat in different words for four more theories. Many of you watching might even agree with this despite the fact that there is absolutely zero evidence to back this account. It is pretty much unfalsifiable.

At 1:07:08, Carl Jung, twentieth century Swiss psychiatrist, also believed dreams allow us to tap into the unconscious, but argued it was a collective unconscious we access through dreams: a theoretical repository of information shared by everyone, in which certain symbols in dreams have meanings similar for all people regardless of culture or location. This could explain why so many of us share variations on common themes, like falling, being chased, or our teeth falling out.

At 1:07:40 the state of the practice. Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams, and even today it plays an important role in various forms of psychotherapy, which is surprising given that there is only a little evidence that interpreting dreams has a positive impact on mental health. The essay offers a mechanism for why the practice survives anyway: evidence shows that people tend not to attribute equal importance to all dreams. Motivated reasoning comes into play. People are more likely to view dreams that confirm their waking beliefs and desires as meaningful, compared to dreams that contradict them.

The three common dreams, interpreted for fun (1:08:12)

Flagged as entertainment rather than science, and the flag is explicit.

Falling, at 1:08:19. This could be a warning from your subconscious, and is common in people having a major life problem with work or relationships. It could indicate insecurities, instability or worries. You might be feeling overwhelmed and out of control in some situation in waking life. It could also reflect a sense of failure or inferiority.

Naked at work or school, at 1:08:42. Typically suggested to represent vulnerability and anxiety. Research has demonstrated that this dream is common in people who have accepted a promotion, gone off to a new job, or who are coming into public view. Others argue it means you may be hiding something and are afraid others can see right through you.

Being chased, at 1:09:04. Despite the nightmare feel, it can be considered a positive message, a prompt from the unconscious encouraging the dreamer to face a problem they have been avoiding. It is suggested that who or what is chasing you, and how far away they are, is important.

The neurobiological theories, and the studies that break them (1:09:38)

At 1:09:38 the essay moves to the theories that came from better understanding of brain function, and it is not enthusiastic about the first one. The activation synthesis theory is not quite as intriguing as the psychoanalytic approach. In fact it is pretty boring. This theory simply rejects the idea that dreams mean anything at all, which is disappointing. Dreams could be merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories, and activation synthesis suggests that humans create dream stories after they wake up, in a natural attempt to make sense of the absurd.

At 1:10:14 the holes. The main one is that there is vast documentation of the realistic aspects of human dreaming, and evidence that dreams reflect real life events that are important or prominent for the dreamer.

The divorce study, 2006, at 1:10:32. A study asked women who were going through a divorce to report the degree to which their former spouses were on their minds over a five month period. These same women were awakened during REM sleep on three nights and asked to provide a detailed account of their dream content. A positive correlation was found between the degree to which the women thought about their former spouses during waking hours and the number of times those spouses appeared as a dream character.

The maze study, at 1:11:00. Researchers demonstrated that dreaming can help solve complex mental tasks. Participants were much better, ten times better in fact, at getting through a complex three dimensional maze if they had napped and dreamed of the maze before their second attempt. This strongly suggests that certain memory processes happen exclusively during sleep, and that our dreams are not only a signal these processes are taking place but seem to be crucial to better performance.

The inference at the end of it: unconstrained by reality and the rules of conventional logic, the dreams your mind can create have the potential to lay out limitless scenarios, to work through problems and produce solutions you may not have considered while awake.

Continual activation theory, at 1:11:49. This proposes that the conscious and unconscious mind must remain continually active in order to maintain proper brain function. In this context dreams function to consolidate working memories into long term memories, and dreaming is simply an incidental result of the brain's need for continual activation. If the brain's activity falls below a certain level, such as during sleep, it is stimulated to maintain activity through dreams.

Expectation fulfilment theory, at 1:12:17. This explains dreaming as a way to release emotional arousals that were not expressed during the day. Doing so frees up space in the brain to deal with the emotional arousals of the next day and allows instinctive urges to stay intact. The action we wanted to take is completed in metaphorical form, and this prevents a false memory being created, because we perceive the action as a dream instead. So dreams are metaphors for unfulfilled arousals and expectations. Because sleep does not involve the same stimulation as waking life, dreams draw on memory instead of motor or sensory activity, and it is this process that apparently generates the unusual imagery, narratives and thought patterns we experience. (The theory is Joe Griffin's.)

Its verdict, at 1:13:08, is the same one Freud got. This explanation has received validation anecdotally through people's personal experiences, but, same old story, it is essentially unfalsifiable. Interpretation of dream events is subjective, so we are not able to put the theory through rigorous scientific testing.

And then the honest summary: I could go on with the theories for days, but you get the point. No one really knows. It is very difficult to disprove most theories.

Lucid dreaming, revisited as evidence (1:13:28)

The essay returns to lucid dreaming here, not as a how to but as a possible probe into the function question, and it adds the facts the earlier chapter did not have.

The term lucid dreaming was coined by van Eeden way back in 1913, although people were writing about this kind of experience as far back as the 1800s. It describes a state in which the dreamer is aware they are asleep and sometimes has the ability to control events and actions. It most commonly occurs during late stage REM sleep and essentially allows your conscious mind to control something your unconscious mind normally controls. Lucid dreamers report being able to fly, taste, smell and touch pretty much anything they want, and about fifty five percent of people have experienced the state at one time or another.

At 1:14:02 the method, and now with the reason it works. Participants were asked to perform specific ocular movements if they became lucid while dreaming. By ocular movements, the essay clarifies, I mean moving your eyes, that is literally it. This is possible, and it is ingenious, because eye muscles are free to move during REM sleep. By determining exactly when the sleeper was lucid dreaming, researchers were able to take recordings of brain activity during the state.

The findings, at 1:14:42. The evidence shows brain activity that represents a mixture of both waking and normal REM sleep. The brain undergoes a specific altered state of physiology during lucid dreaming that constitutes a hybrid state of consciousness. Studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex, as well as the frontal, parietal and temporal zones, become activated, and these areas are responsible for higher order cognitive functioning including working memory, cognitive flexibility, planning, inhibition and abstract reasoning.

At 1:15:00 the uses. Some advocate boosting creativity and confidence, reducing stress, and lucid dreaming as a possible therapeutic technique for nightmares, PTSD and other mental health disorders. Others view the practice as more spiritual and approach it the way they would meditation, with the intention of increasing a person's sense of the vastness of reality.

And then, at 1:15:27, the claim the essay is least willing to accept, and it says exactly why. It has been suggested that some advanced meditation practitioners are able to become conscious of what is beyond the dream state, the deep formlessness of delta sleep. This is questionable at best and in need of much further study. Given our current relatively limited understanding of the brain, it is hard to understand how it could be possible to be conscious of deep sleep, because the brain in that state is far more synchronized and deeply unconscious than in almost any other state of consciousness. But hey, who knows.

At 1:15:57 the alternative explanations for lucid dreaming itself, listed without a favourite. It may be that lucid dreamers are in a daydream like state of semi wakefulness. Or they are dreaming normally but have a memory of the dream and believe they were conscious and directing it when they were not. It could be a sleep state dissociation in which the person is both awake and asleep in the dream state at the same time. The essay allows that it is even possible people are not reporting true experiences, then says it personally does not think that is what is going on.

Which leaves the honest open question: if lucid dreaming is as real as the evidence suggests, does dreaming serve any of the purposes already discussed, accessing the unconscious, acting out instinctive urges, solving problems, or is it simply electrical impulses keeping the brain from shutting down? How does being a conscious witness affect how dreams play out? Does it hinder or help? Is it a state of heightened reflective consciousness that humans are meant to access so we can enlighten ourselves about our life, our world and our purpose? Or does lucid dreaming stand alone, serving an entirely different function?

Precognitive dreams, and the arithmetic that kills them (1:17:08)

At 1:17:08 the essay takes on the strongest anecdotal case for dreams meaning something. Precognitive dreams are dreams that appear to predict the future through a sixth sense, and there are famous examples.

The Titanic, at 1:17:21. When the Titanic sank in 1912, hundreds of people came forward with reports of psychic dreams about it sinking. It was even possible to validate at least nineteen of them, including a date stamped letter. Several people apparently cancelled tickets and decided not to travel based on their dreams.

Are all nineteen of these people psychic? No, and at 1:17:40 the essay does the arithmetic instead. There are seven and a half billion people on this planet, each having an average of five dreams per night whether you remember them or not. Those dreams support multiple common dream themes, including events like sinking ships and airplane crashes. When all of this is considered, it is highly likely that many thousands of people will dream about a sinking ship on any given night. Probably tonight too.

Then, at 1:18:08, the extra ingredient that makes the Titanic case worse rather than better. Add a bit of unconscious insight and media suggestion. The Titanic was the world's largest ship, on its maiden voyage, and it was in the headlines before it even undocked. The media had called it unsinkable. The power of suggestion is immense, and it is no surprise that all this news attention, plus some nerves about taking a huge trip, infiltrated more than a few dreams. So the next time you dream about an event that has nothing to do with you and it comes true, it is probably just a coincidence. Probably.

Lincoln, at 1:18:46. But what about dreaming of your own death, which is deeply personal and probably not subject to extensive media attention. That is exactly what happened to Abraham Lincoln. Two weeks before he was shot dead in 1865, Lincoln had a dream about a funeral at the White House. When he asked who was in the casket, they replied: the president, he was killed by an assassin. Clearly he did not listen, because at the time he was assassinated he had given his bodyguard the night off.

At 1:19:05 the explanation the essay prefers, which keeps the dream meaningful without making it psychic. If the premonition dream is about something close and personal to you, some might argue that your subconscious mind is accessing a piece of information you were not consciously aware of in your waking state. You just missed it. The brain has so much to process every second you are alive that it only makes sense some information is lost. So it is less psychic power and more inner feelings or intuition that you are experiencing through your dream. Which takes us neatly full circle back to the question of why we dream: if you do not believe in psychic abilities manifesting in dreams, then precognitive dreams are essentially the window into our unconscious.

At 1:19:42 the dissent is recorded. Some disagree and suggest that when matches occur on such a reliable and frequent basis it cannot be entirely down to coincidence. Some of these people turn to a mix of philosophy and physics, and to follow those theories it is necessary to assume that the future consists of many possibilities, and which one becomes reality is determined by the choices we make. The butterfly effect shows up yet again.

The chapter's conclusion, at 1:20:12, is a compromise and it is the right one. Common sense would tell us that dreams likely serve purposes, plural, rather than a single one. How we choose to understand our dreams and why they happen is largely a product of time and culture. The function of dreams may have even changed as humans have changed. What once acted as a rehearsal system for evading predators is now serving to help us navigate the social and technological complexities of modern life and its stresses.

And at 1:20:40 the practical instruction, which is the only one the whole chapter is confident in: dreaming is vital. The link between dreaming and REM sleep is undeniable, as are the benefits of REM sleep for our health and well being. So do not stifle them. They are only trying to help you. Sweet dreams.

YOLO is 2,400 years old (1:20:53)

The seventh essay opens on a rap song and ends on a poem by Lincoln, which is a route only this channel would take.

In 2012 Drake made a song titled The Motto, and what most people remember from it is YOLO. YOLO tells you to live in the moment, enjoy the life you have today and not worry too much about tomorrow, because at the end of the day you only live once.

Drake popularized it but he was not the first to use the phrase, and he was certainly not the first to come up with the idea of enjoying the pleasures of today without worrying about tomorrow. At 1:21:19: this idea has been around since the fourth century BC, as what philosophers call hedonism, a school of thought created by Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates. Hedonism is the idea that the end goal of all our actions in life is to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, and Aristippus believed the only good cause worth pursuing was one that would ultimately bring you pleasure.

The bargain we are taught instead (1:21:40)

In today's society we are taught that the way to succeed is to suffer today so you can enjoy tomorrow. Save for the rainy day. Once we get out of college we are encouraged to find a job, work hard at a nine to five for many years, live modestly and save as much as possible so we can enjoy our retirement fifty years later.

At 1:21:57, Aristippus did not believe any of that. He did not believe in delayed gratification and always advocated for people to simply get pleasure from what is present and available. He was completely against suffering in the present in order to get something that only might be pleasurable in the future. So instead of telling students in college to study hard for their exams so they can land a good job after school, Aristippus would encourage them to fraternize, drink and party lavishly, because these are the pleasures readily available to them.

The essay then argues both sides of that, in order.

Against, at 1:22:32: you can see him as stupid and lacking foresight, because if you squander everything you have on the pleasures of today you will quickly run out of resources and all that pleasure will turn to pain. From people losing everything because of an addiction to people living in poverty as a result of their own laziness, we have seen the results of solely focusing on present pleasures.

For, at 1:22:53: there is some wisdom to the school of thought, because truly tomorrow is not promised to any one of us. What is the point of working hard at a nine to five for fifty years, ignoring all the pleasures of the time, only to die a few years before retirement? And say you do make it to retirement. The sad reality, at 1:23:08, is that one in four people will have a disability by the age of sixty, and the older you get the chances increase drastically. Knowing that, is it still foolish to think we are all better off just enjoying the pleasures we do have in the present?

At 1:23:25, Socrates and other philosophers at the time certainly believed so. A lot of philosophers hated the idea of hedonism because saying the end goal of the entire human existence is simply to pursue pleasure and avoid pain just sounded vain. And at 1:23:42 that opposition, combined with the rise of Christianity in ancient Greece at the time, meant this extremely rash idea of hedonism died with Aristippus.

Epicurus redefines the word (1:23:51)

Many years later Epicurus, considered the father of modern day hedonism, redefined what hedonism was, and to do that he had to start by redefining a single word: pleasure.

At 1:24:04, for Aristippus, pleasure was a state of ecstasy and excitement, that amazing feeling you have after biting into your favourite food or after the first sip of coffee in the morning. For most of us that is how we define pleasure.

But not for Epicurus. At 1:24:17, for Epicurus pleasure was a state of tranquility. Instead of encouraging people to indulge in constant gratification, Epicurus believed the true meaning of pleasure was to kill the fear of both death and God, because only then would you be able to fully enjoy what this life has to offer.

And there is a second, subtler difference. While Aristippus simply encouraged people to pursue pleasure, Epicurus believed that all human beings do everything to gain pleasure and avoid pain already. He did not encourage it, because according to him that was our natural state anyway.

The defence of that point, at 1:24:49, is the babies argument. Epicurus asks everyone to look at how babies view the world around them. They do not really understand how the world works yet, but they do understand two things: when something feels good and when something feels bad. When something feels good the baby is joyful and happy. When something feels bad the baby cries, because it wants that pain to stop and wants to return to the pleasurable state.

At 1:25:10 the obvious objection: if we are all solely pursuing pleasure, what about selfless acts, things done because they are virtuous or valuable for other people and not ourselves? In hedonistic terms, the answer is that those things make people feel heroic, which ends up being processed in the brain as a pleasurable feeling. So at the core it is still pleasure they are chasing, just not the kind we might be thinking about.

At 1:25:40 the taxonomy, and it is worth keeping because it is the most useful thing in the segment. According to hedonistic teachings there are two types of pleasure.

Moving pleasure is when you are in the process of satisfying a desire. When you are hungry you eat, when you are thirsty you drink, when you need a timeout you take a nap.

Static pleasure is the tranquility you feel once you are done satisfying those needs. The adrenaline has finished coursing through your veins and you are left with a sweet feeling of satisfaction. In that moment you feel a sense of tranquility, and you keep feeling it until it is sadly replaced by pain, because according to Epicurus there is no in between: the absence of pain is pleasure, and vice versa.

Three arguments against hedonism (1:26:19)

Even with this more modest framing, a lot of people still disagree, and the essay says exactly why: the idea that pleasure is the only source of intrinsic value.

One, at 1:26:32: the things that are not pleasurable and matter anyway. If pleasure is the only intrinsic value, what do we make of finding meaning in life, achieving great things, building and maintaining long lasting relationships, becoming a legend in a particular field, or even something as simple as living religiously or upholding a set of moral beliefs? A hedonist might argue those things hold no value of themselves and are only valuable because we get pleasure from them. But upholding religious beliefs is not always pleasurable. Most times it restricts the kind of pleasure you can get. And still it gives people a sense of fulfilment that for them is better than the pleasure they are forsaking.

Two, at 1:27:15: the fact that people fight for causes that cost them. If self pleasure alone were the aim of human existence, the people who benefit from the wrong in our society would never fight against it. People would never fight for the common good when it might affect them negatively. Yet every day we see people put their own desires aside to help others. People get excommunicated from their families and rejected by those they love because they chose to speak up and fight for what is right, even when the issues do not affect them directly. If we were all chasing our own pleasures that would never happen. We would all be too busy enjoying our broken society because it benefits us, and not worrying about trying to change it for someone else.

Three, at 1:27:55: the worth of reality. If pleasure is the ultimate goal then it should not matter whether that pleasure is real or imagined. And if people always intrinsically pursue what is pleasurable, then given an option for unlimited pleasure they should never choose anything else.

At 1:28:17 the test: Robert Nozick created a thought experiment giving people two options, asking them to choose between being plugged into a pleasure giving machine for the rest of their lives, and living their current reality with the pain that exists in our world.

People always picked this reality. Because in the end, living a life that is not real is pointless and meaningless. Even with the option of the most pleasurable thing in the world, people would rather have pain that is real. Whatever real means.

Lincoln's poem, and the mix (1:28:53)

The essay then supplies its own counterexample to the whole framework, and it does it with a piece of nineteenth century verse it will use again in the final chapter.

Twenty years after he left his childhood home, Abraham Lincoln came back only to see the entire place in ruin. Looking at it with tears in his eyes, he said: my childhood home I see again, and am saddened with the view, and still as memories cloud my brain, there's pleasure in it too.

That beautiful mix of pleasure and pain is something the hedonistic view of the world simply does not account for.

At 1:29:15 the everyday version. When you are graduating high school you are excited for the adventures awaiting you in college. You will probably be leaving home for the first time and will finally be alone, able to enjoy what the world has to offer. That feeling is pleasurable. But the feeling is also painful. You will miss your high school friends and the simplicity of childhood. You will miss your parents, your siblings and the community you grew up in. And though these painful thoughts cloud your brain, there will be pleasure in it too.

At 1:29:45 the trap, which the essay names as the reason hedonism is frowned on today. Pleasure is an insatiable desire. If you get hungry and fill your belly, it only takes a few hours before you are looking for something else to eat. It is an unending pursuit, so if it becomes the entire reason for your existence it can quickly become difficult to control. At 1:30:06: this is how most people become addicted. It starts out as just a fleeting pleasure, and before you know it the reason you are doing those things stops being the pursuit of pleasure and starts being an unquenchable and uncontrollable thirst. A trap that is very difficult to come out of, and one that many people stay stuck in for the rest of their lives.

The chapter closes, at 1:30:25, by salvaging the useful half. Tomorrow is not promised, so we might as well make the best of today. Making a conscious decision to enjoy the little everyday pleasures can help us lead a happier life. If your car breaks down and you have to walk to school, do not be in haste. Embrace the journey. Walk with a friend, make jokes with them, always leave each other on a good note. Craving a cup of coffee, head to your favourite coffee shop and order your favourite drink. You have earned it. You do not have to wait until you are retired before you start reaping the fruit of your labour. Take those vacation days. The promotion can wait a few more months. Stay on that call with your friends for an extra hour. Missing an hour of study probably will not make you fail. Because even if seeking pleasure might not be the ultimate goal of human existence, it is certainly a worthwhile pursuit.

The black swan (1:31:23)

The eighth essay opens with the single best cold open in the compilation, and it is two words long.

You are a chicken.

Yes, you. You look around and sometimes wonder why your owner takes such good care of you. At first you are not sure. You are skeptical. What if he sends you to the slaughterhouse? You have never been there, but you know very well none of your friends have ever come out of that place. So you remain on high alert for when that fateful day might arrive.

But it never does. Days go by, then weeks, months, even years. At 1:32:02 you are now convinced your owner loves you more than any of these other chickens and would never do anything bad to you. Each passing day is additional evidence that you will live for the next. A thousand days go by like this. A thousand beautiful days. Until of course the thousand and first day, when the illusion of safety breaks and you end up on someone's dinner plate.

You should never have crossed the road.

At 1:32:15 the essay extracts the lesson, and the lesson is about the shape of the evidence rather than the outcome. Imagine how betrayed the chicken must have felt. Given the thousand days worth of evidence, the chicken's trust in its owner was, ironically, at its highest level at the exact moment it was slaughtered. Perhaps if it had not been so foolish as to believe it was special or unique, it might at least have been spared the feeling of betrayal. That one final day completely changed the outlook of the chicken's life. That one piece of evidence outweighed the previous thousand days, and it is not even a contest. (The bird is Bertrand Russell's, borrowed and sharpened by the author the essay is about.)

At 1:32:47 the definition. This is a black swan: a single event or observation that comes as a surprise, with disproportionate consequences, radically changing our outlook about something. At 1:32:58 the etymology: people used to think swans could only be white until they saw a black swan, which reshaped the way people thought about what is out there.

At 1:33:06 the source. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable to study this phenomenon and shine light on how vulnerable we are to black swans, and how we are becoming increasingly more vulnerable with each passing day. In it he talks about some fundamentals of epistemology that limit our ability to understand black swans before they happen.

Mediocristan and Extremistan (1:33:36)

But first, why our modern society, as technologically advanced as it is, is the perfect nesting place for a black swan event. The essay runs Taleb's two experiments back to back, and the numbers are the whole argument.

Experiment one, at 1:33:36: weight. Say we are going to weigh a few thousand people, and at the extreme end of that sample we include the heaviest person in the world. So long as that person is subject to biological constraints like the rest of us, it does not really matter how much he or she weighs. Say two thousand pounds. How much does that account for in the total weight of all the people we weighed? At 1:33:51: the answer is probably less than half a percent. Even an outlier like a two thousand pound person does not overwhelm the average. At 1:34:04 Taleb calls this ecosystem Mediocristan, to refer to how the mediocre measurements of the average person do mostly represent all measurements quite well.

Experiment two, at 1:34:13: wealth. Same experiment, different quantity. Gather a few thousand people and include just one of the three thousand or so billionaires in that list. How much does that billionaire account for in the total wealth of all the people in the sample? At 1:34:32: an overwhelming majority, almost always close to ninety nine percent. Contrary to the first scenario, here the outlier overwhelms everything else. At 1:34:36 Taleb calls this world Extremistan, since it rewards a few people extremely well but leaves basically nothing for the others.

At 1:34:36 the reason for the asymmetry, and it is a good one. Taleb says the modern world is composed of circumstances geared towards Extremistan rather than Mediocristan, because money for all intents and purposes is just a number in someone's book. The vast majority of money is completely digital. It is not subject to the laws of physics or to biology in a way that would constrain it to minimal variance. Sure, most people do not make that much money, but a few people can make a lot of money.

At 1:35:06 the generalization. Consider musicians: most musicians do not sell that many albums, but a few artists sell quite a few. You can conduct the same thought experiment with book sales, scientific publications, shoe brands and so on. The point is that the modern economy is very much a winner takes all system that rewards a very small number of people with a disproportionately large portion of the pie. If it were more like the weight example, you would not expect the outliers to be so wild, and the fact that they really are so wild goes to show how unpredictable the environment we live in really is. At 1:35:41: the forecasts we take for granted today often fail to take into account the true nature of this unpredictability.

The cemetery (1:36:15)

The essay anticipates the pushback, which is that billionaires put in the work day in and day out and are therefore entitled to the fruits of their labour. It grants a lot of it: indeed most of them probably worked really hard, and some of their innovations might later pave the way for a better future for all of us. The essay says explicitly that it is not discounting that.

However, at 1:36:15, the system is not rewarding them proportionately. And more importantly it is hard to say how much of their success is the fruit of their labour and how much of it is due to pure chance. If you were to run a few simulations under Extremistan type circumstances, you would inevitably get a few Jeff Bezos like outliers.

We may be biased into thinking we understand what causes Bezos like outliers: think out of the box, start a revolutionary company, work extremely hard for a few years, then smell the roses happily ever after. We have all read the autobiographies. We have all watched the documentaries.

At 1:36:38, then: when was the last time you read about a person who did all of those things and failed? When was the last time you saw shelves of books about people who failed? Chances are, never. Those stories never quite make it. There is an epistemic bias in all of this, Taleb says.

And at 1:36:58 the line the essay quotes almost verbatim from him, and it is the best sentence in the segment. Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so, because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call. This is despite the fact that advice about what not to do is often more useful than advice about what to do.

The sociopolitical version: 9/11 (1:37:23)

But that is just the economy, one facet of society. We also do not understand the sociopolitical aspects. Take 9/11, which is certainly a black swan event. After it happened, tons of experts came out and said they had known for years it was about to happen. So why did they not say anything?

At 1:37:38 the essay names the tell: this retrospective distortion of the understanding of a problem is one of the hallmarks of a black swan event. None of them really knew. If they had, cockpit doors would have been bulletproof long ago, pocket knives would never have been allowed in a cabin, and the TSA would have been invented much earlier. These things were only instituted after 9/11. If you had suggested such policies in 1991 you would probably not have been taken too seriously, or you would have been shown a spreadsheet suggesting airlines do not have the money for bulletproof doors. But inevitably they did.

At 1:38:10 the twist, which is the segment's most uncomfortable idea. Thankfully the likelihood of a 9/11 style event is much lower now than it used to be. Countries around the world are more prepared, more vigilant. However, that also makes the precautions somewhat lose their relevance.

And at 1:38:21 the essay reaches for Yuval Noah Harari, who in Homo Deus cites a paradox about knowledge: knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless, but knowledge that changes behaviour loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

Despite the measures we have taken for a black swan like 9/11, that does nothing to improve our odds against a future black swan. If anything it might lure us into a false sense of security and worsen our chances of coping with the impacts of the next highly improbable event. Which is, note, the exact same structure as the traffic segment's finding about too many signals and empty pandemic roads: a safety measure that lowers vigilance can make the system less safe.

The ludic fallacy (1:38:55)

At 1:38:55 the cognitive error. We tend to convince ourselves that we understand risks once we have understood a game of dice or blackjack. But trying to approximate the risks of real life with the same methods used in a closed loop artificial game is simply oversimplification, a mistake we commit daily. At 1:39:12 Taleb calls this the ludic fallacy. We learn simple games and immediately conclude that the stock market works the same way, even though one of these things lives in Mediocristan and the other lives in Extremistan.

The evidence, at 1:39:23: if the markets were well understood, do you think something like GameStop or AMC would ever have been allowed to happen? Short squeezing is not a particularly new phenomenon, and yet even a non black swan event such as this one left the smartest hedge fund managers scratching their heads and practically chasing bankruptcy. This false sense of understanding makes black swans that much more dangerous.

Monoculture and single points of failure (1:39:48)

At 1:39:48 the essay gives Taleb's argument about why our exposure is rising, and it is a media argument. Whereas in the past people might have been studying different kinds of literature and diving deep into locally developed sets of ideas, today arguably the most read book is Harry Potter. That is not to say Harry Potter is a bad book. It goes to show that we are much less in tune with each other's differing ideas, for better or worse, and for the most part everyone is dealing with generally the same ideas.

Couple that with the rising complexity and reach of technology, and when something fails it fails for more people than ever before. The example at 1:40:23: the Pakistani government tried to shut down YouTube in Pakistan and ended up shutting down YouTube worldwide. We do not understand these things. That is just one way for technology to fail, but it shows how interconnected everything is, and while interconnection is often touted as a plus, given sufficiently poor luck it can spell doom for us all.

The Carrington event, which is not even a black swan (1:40:42)

At 1:40:42 the essay's most concrete warning, and it is careful to classify it correctly. Coronal mass ejections are regular bursts of radiation from the Sun that scientists on Earth know about and expect. The largest on record is the Carrington event in 1859. Its effects were mostly felt by telegraph operators, some of whom had equipment burnt by the sudden surge. Most of the world went on without a hitch.

At 1:41:06, if a Carrington class event were to occur today, with all the grids, electric cars and equipment we now have, the damages would be in the trillions of dollars and repair could take decades, if it were possible at all. With each passing day, with each little transition into an electric future, we become more vulnerable to such an event.

And then the classification, which is the point: this is not even a black swan event. At 1:41:27, in 2012 the likelihood of a Carrington class event in the next decade was calculated to be around twelve percent. Despite that high probability we are not particularly prepared, given the esoteric nature of the risk: seemingly low probability, high impact. Despite all the mounting evidence, scientists will have a very hard time convincing governments to make modifications to power grids to avoid catastrophic failures.

At 1:41:59 the inference that closes the argument: if that is how little we care about an event we know is bound to occur eventually, imagine how unaware we are of a true black swan.

Butcher or butchered (1:42:16)

The chicken comes back for the ending, and the essay uses it to make a point about relativity of knowledge. Were the chicken somehow spared by a miracle, it would never trust another human being ever again after the betrayal it endured. Few are ever so lucky. Meanwhile, for the owner, the chicken's death comes as no surprise. It is a routine event, and therefore no black swan at all.

At 1:42:16: the idea of a black swan is therefore relative to the knowledge one possesses. Hence our objective is to try to be in the position of the butcher, not the butchered. And at 1:42:27 the line from Taleb that states the strategy: I worry less about advertised and sensational risks, more about the vicious hidden ones.

Then the ending turns the whole thing around, at 1:42:40. The idea of a black swan also incorporates good things, wildly unlikely positive outcomes of chance, otherwise known as life. The odds of being born are one in four hundred trillion. And the essay immediately catches itself breaking its own rule: to be fair, I just unfollowed my own advice, such a thing cannot really be predicted, can it? For all we know and for all we do not, being born is an unimaginably unlikely event that nobody really predicted.

So at 1:42:55: if you are alive, whatever that means, in the end we are actually all the black swans we have been trying to avoid the entire time. Ironic, is it not.

Game theory, or life as a game you cannot leave (1:43:06)

The ninth essay opens by insulting a specific kind of person, which is to say most of the audience. Are you the type of person to analyze every second of the interaction you just had with someone for hours on end, or are you normal?

Either way, at 1:43:25, you probably do not think all that hard about every single detail of the decisions you make in social situations, but there is an entire scientific field that applies to social situations and decision making. Game theory can be used to analyze both economic and social situations. It is essentially the science of strategy, and just like the reality it is trying to model, it can get really complicated. And although game theory is relevant to games as we typically understand them, such as poker, most research in game theory focuses on how groups of people interact.

What counts as a game (1:43:49)

The definition has to come first, and it is not the one you expect. When it comes to game theoretic analysis, a game constitutes any interaction between multiple people where each person's payoff is affected by the decisions made by others.

The essay then tests the definition on three cases, which is the right way to teach it.

Sudoku, at 1:44:12. In the traditional sense, sure. In game theory, no. Sudoku is not a game because how you decide to complete the puzzle does not affect any other player. There is only one player in the game: you.

Tic tac toe, at 1:44:29. Two players can play, each box filled by one player affects the other, and winning requires both players to respond optimally to what the other is doing. So yes, it is a game.

Two shop owners, at 1:44:42. You could have a situation where two shop owners choose from a finite number of positions where to strategically place their shops for maximum profit. They are each affected by what the other does, since they may be going for the same market, and there is certainly a win lose situation. So even though placing your shop may not sound like much of a game, in the eyes of game theorists it certainly is. (This is Hotelling's law, which is why the two petrol stations in your town are on the same corner.)

Game theorists try to model games in a way that makes them easy to understand and analyze, and the essay is honest about the "easy": a lot of games end up having similar properties or recurring patterns, and more often than not things get pretty complicated.

The five conditions (1:45:27)

At 1:45:23 the two main focuses: cooperative games and non cooperative games. Then, at 1:45:27, the five conditions most game theory models involve, listed in order because each one is a place the model can break.

1. Each player has two or more choices, or sequences of choices. Think of these as typical moves in a game, like moving a chess piece.
2. All possible combinations of decisions or plays result in a clear outcome. Basically, you can win or lose.
3. It is clear how you can win or lose, and participants will gain or lose something depending on the outcome.
4. The players know the rules of the game as well as the payoffs of the other players, meaning everyone is aware of what is desirable to the other players as well.
5. The players are rational and sensible people. Rational here means strictly that when faced with two alternatives, they choose the option that provides the greatest benefit.

And the crucial gap, stated immediately after: while players know the rules and their opponents' options, they do not know their opponents' actual decisions in advance, so players must choose options based on assumptions about what their opponents might choose.

At 1:46:23 the payoff structures. Some game theory scenarios are zero sum games, meaning one player's win is another's loss and vice versa. Others allow mutual gains and losses. These games can involve multiple strategies: you can try to minimize the maximum losses another player can cause, and make decisions based on probable outcomes.

At 1:46:46 the essay stops explaining and starts demonstrating, with a rule attached: if life is indeed a game, the first rule is to be skeptical of other people's suggestions, because if it is a game then someone else is competing, and so there is definitely going to be competition and sabotage.

The prisoner's dilemma, worked (1:46:59)

The setup, with the actual numbers. Two criminals are caught red handed and arrested. Each has two choices: stay quiet, or testify against their friend. On arrest they are separated and offered a deal. Testify against your friend and we will let you off easy with one year in prison and give the other person ten years. If both stay quiet, the cops cannot prove the more serious charges and both criminals spend only two years behind bars. If they both testify against each other, both get five year sentences.

At 1:47:34 the intuition and its collapse. At first glance keeping quiet seems like the best strategy: if they both did it they would both be out after two years. But right before they are about to testify, one of the two thinks: what if I stay quiet and the other guy rats me out? Without knowing what the other person will actually decide, that is a reasonable worry.

The smartest solution is to react in a way that is beneficial regardless of what the other person does. At 1:47:59 the concept: a Nash equilibrium is a state in which no one person can improve given what the others are doing. It means you are picking the best response to a particular strategy from your opponent.

A quick analysis of the prisoner's dilemma reveals they would both most likely testify, which is the Nash equilibrium for this problem, because regardless of what the other person does, testifying leads to a maximum sentence of five years with the potential for a one year sentence, whereas if you do not testify you could end up with the ten year term. It is easily the safest thing to do given that neither party knows what the other will do.

At 1:48:36 the sting: even though both criminals are better off if they just stay quiet, the individual incentive wins over the group interest. Testifying is better because you know you will be in trouble if you stay quiet and your friend testifies. But if you can think of that, your friend can too, so he knows you are likely going to testify given that it is the safer option for you, and you know he is likely going to testify for the same reason, and you know that he knows that you are likely going to testify. You see the loop that is forming.

At 1:49:08 the classification, which is the useful part. These problems are examples of non cooperative games, meaning the two prisoners cannot convey their intentions to each other. If they were able to talk we would be in a cooperative setting, and that would affect the likelihood of certain outcomes: it would become much easier for them to agree beforehand that they are both going to stay quiet.

Three more game shapes (1:49:29)

Coordination games, at 1:49:29. A coordination game is one in which everyone benefits from working together. There is no incentive for either party to cheat, since cheating results in a worse outcome than cooperating. A good example is driving on the correct side of the road. You win nothing by driving on the wrong side of the road. But sometimes you lose without even playing.

The principal agent problem, at 1:49:51. The principal agent problem is when one person is allowed to make decisions on behalf of another person. In this situation the first person is likely to prioritize their own interests and pursue their own goals. And, the essay adds without slowing down, well, yeah, that is the basis of modern politics.

Biology, at 1:50:04. Game theory can also be applied to biology, and in fact its application there has allowed biologists to answer a lot of questions about evolution, which is remarkable since game theory was never designed for this. At 1:50:19 the specific case: it helped scientists explain biological altruism, where an organism acts in a way most favourable for the overall species even if that action is harmful to itself. A bird might warn the rest of the group about the arrival of a predator. Doing so risks its own life, since it essentially announces itself to the predator, but this trait can later help that bird, assuming it survives, when other birds return the favour and warn it.

The regress problem (1:50:44)

At 1:50:44 the essay finds the place where game theory eats itself, and this is the passage that ties the chapter back to the compilation's real subject. These concepts might help you anticipate some of the strategies others are using to get one over on you, but who really knows what they are thinking? The concept of guessing others' moves is what makes the game so tricky. While each player is likely to be certain about only their own move, they still have to speculate about other players' decisions, and more importantly about other players' conceptions of every other player's decisions.

Essentially you are no longer making a decision based on what you think is right. You are anticipating what your opponent thinks is right and simply reacting to it. But then again, your opponent is doing the same exact thing. So who is really making the decision here? Whose mind is the actual decision being made in?

At 1:51:27 the regress is laid out one level at a time. Each player must know their own chance of coming out on top, guess everyone else's chance, and also guess what everyone else is guessing about their own chances of winning. Not only that, but you also need to guess what other players are guessing about your guesses about them. And now, the essay admits, look, we are confused again.

The limits (1:51:47)

At 1:51:47 the honest ledger. Although game theory has many benefits, it would be impossible to properly apply it in all situations. There will be times when rationality does not offer the right solutions, or where mutual benefit is not the most ideal outcome. When you come up against those you have to not only recognize them but decide whether using game theory is even the most helpful way to deal with the situation, and by then the moment could already be gone.

And at 1:52:14 the assumption the whole apparatus rests on, which is also its weakest point: the assumption that everyone is going to be rational, a basic premise of game theory, is a really risky one. Humans can be extremely unpredictable and emotional, and this makes the guesswork near impossible.

Real cases (1:52:27)

Apple and Samsung, at 1:52:27. They are involved in an endless game of advertising. It is not as though either company needs to advertise, and advertising can get extremely expensive, so why not forgo it altogether and use the money for research and development? If both companies did this we would probably have better phones by now. But Apple banks on the possibility of Samsung advertising and gaining an edge in the market, and Samsung does the same, and that possibility soon turns into a certainty you and I have come to accept. The essay flags it: this is an extremely simplistic example that bypasses many other variables, but you see the basic concept.

Littering, at 1:53:10. Another everyday example is the treatment of public goods and property. If everyone decides to be a good citizen and not litter, society benefits as a whole. But you are inevitably going to come up against one or more people who go rogue and behave selfishly by littering. That leads to society as a whole bearing the cost of cleaning up, all while making not littering a less worthwhile decision, because if the road is already littered, the work of not littering is that much less meaningful. (This is the tragedy of the commons, and the essay notes it applies to every big important decision we are supposed to be fixing, with a promise of more on that later.)

At 1:53:47 the final caveat. As interesting as it is, game theory can still only analyze simple situations with well defined constraints, and you must remember that any model is a subset of reality no matter how good it is. It is essentially intellectual guesswork.

And the chapter's close, at 1:54:02, which is the compilation's recurring move of turning a technical point into a personal one. The bottom line is that we are all constantly in the game, and it is pretty much impossible not to be. Our lives are endlessly and unavoidably impacted by the actions and decisions made by others, so you might as well play the game the best you can. And that interaction you spent hours analyzing after the other person had already long forgotten it, maybe it is not such a bad thing after all. We are just trying to win the game of life, and the reason to win is so that you can be free of it.

Why we prefer our heroes broken (1:54:27)

The tenth essay opens with a confession and asks not to be destroyed in the comments for it. I do not like Superman.

At 1:54:40 the reasoning, which is structural rather than aesthetic. The problem has always been that he is too strong. One of his primary powers is invulnerability, which is a tension killer: the conflict is never whether Superman will save the day, only how. This apparent infallibility extends to his personality as well. He is a character utterly without flaws, and the biggest strike against him is that he is too compassionate, which can sometimes land him in trouble. That, the essay notes, is the answer you give in a job interview when asked what your biggest weakness is. It is not really a weakness.

At 1:55:08 the consequence: this relentlessly upright persona and general do goodery make Superman feel distant. His character is, pardon the pun, completely alien to the narrator's own experience. And at 1:55:21, to be honest, to me Superman is boring.

The preference is for messier characters. Batman, Wolverine and Deadpool feel so much more human. They are flawed, they can make mistakes, and sometimes they do bad things for the wrong reasons.

And at 1:55:36 the box office proof that this is not an idiosyncratic taste. Over the last two decades anti heroes have become increasingly popular. The top three highest grossing R rated films of all time are 2019's Joker, followed by both Deadpool movies. So why have so many of us turned our backs on characters like Superman and Captain America?

Defining the anti hero is harder than it looks (1:56:04)

We all know an anti hero when we see one. They are dark, gritty, usually a bit reckless, and they make questionable life decisions. But the term itself is difficult to define. Anti heroes as we know them today are a relatively new concept and the parameters are fuzzy at best.

At this most basic level the anti hero is a subversion of the hero trope. They are whatever a hero is not, which in a technical sense means giving them characteristics normally reserved for an antagonist. They might drink and curse, have an abrasive personality, or rail against authority.

At 1:56:36 the problem with that definition: it is negatively defined. Its meaning is rooted solely in its opposition to something else, so it does not tell us what an anti hero is, only what it is not. And it is further complicated by the fact that the characteristics constituting a hero vary over time and between cultures.

At 1:56:55 the reason heroes are culturally indexed. Heroes in the truest sense are meant to represent the ideals of a society. They stand as living personifications of the values citizens should strive to emulate. But those ideals and values naturally evolve alongside the beliefs and needs of the population, and the same applies to anti heroes: traits seen as un heroic or anti heroic change based on cultural context.

The Sawi and the hero of the Gospel (1:57:17)

The proof of that claim is the best anecdote in the essay. In 1962, Canadian missionary Don Richardson travelled to Western New Guinea in Indonesia to try to convert members of the indigenous Sawi tribe to Christianity. He encountered some trouble when his potential congregation identified Judas, not Jesus Christ, as the hero of the story.

It turned out the Sawi people placed a higher value on trickery and deception than on sacrifice. They saw Jesus as little more than an unwitting sucker who had been duped by the true hero of the narrative.

Moral consistency as the real axis (1:57:45)

A better way of defining heroes and anti heroes, the essay proposes, might be to judge them on their moral consistency.

Heroes by their nature are morally consistent. They have a strict set of dedicated principles they follow that guide their actions. Anti heroes are morally ambiguous. They operate in grey areas and are more fluid in their decision making. And crucially, at 1:58:12, this ambiguity can manifest either in the anti hero's own personal ethics or in the way they are perceived by society. Not every anti hero needs to be an edgy homicidal maniac cracking one liners as they shish kebab bad guys with katanas.

In fact the classic anti hero archetype looks a lot less like Deadpool and more like your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.

At 1:58:27 the essay knows what you are thinking and argues it anyway. When Peter Parker is first bitten by a radioactive spider and gifted with superhuman abilities, he does not want to become the savior of New York. He is insecure, anxious, and wavers in his convictions, even allowing a criminal to escape as an act of revenge against a boxing organizer who cheated him out of his winnings. Over the course of his career Peter quits multiple times, always questioning whether or not he is capable of overcoming the challenges given to him and living up to his responsibilities. None of these are qualities we normally associate with heroes. Peter is inconsistent, and our perception of him does not align with the image we have built up in our heads.

At 1:59:12 the other end of the spectrum. Anti heroes like Wade Wilson's alter ego Deadpool are heroes who do the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for the right reason. Deadpool is firmly in this camp, particularly in the comics, where he is a mercenary first, concerned solely with how any given situation benefits him. Even in the films his story begins as a revenge trip: yes, his objective is to take down a cartel of human traffickers manufacturing and selling mutants into slavery, but he is only doing this as retribution for his own disfigurement. His motivation is not to break up the smuggling ring or free the captives. He just wants to fix his face. To say Deadpool's morals are loose is generous. He is entirely self interested, recklessly individualistic and more than a little murder happy, and if he ends up saving the day it is typically an unintended byproduct of his actual goals.

At 2:00:08 the takeaway: anti heroes are hard to pin down when it comes to assigning moral judgments, either because their own ethical code is so nebulous or because we as a society have difficulty reconciling their personal traits with our expectations of what a hero should be.

Why we like them: moral absolutism and its enforcers (2:00:31)

So why are we attracted to moral ambiguity? At 2:00:31 the first answer, which is the obvious one: perhaps because we find it reflective of our own experiences. Very few of us live in a world of simple black and white morality. We recognize that life is more complex than good versus evil, right versus wrong, hero versus villain. People are complicated. Our decisions are nuanced and subject to interpretation. No one is purely a villain, or even a hero for that matter.

And then the second answer, which is the real argument of the chapter, at 2:00:53. Our culture is dominated by institutions built on the foundation of moral absolutism, the philosophy that human action is inherently right or wrong regardless of intention or consequence. The justification is a belief in an all encompassing and objective morality: every individual's behaviour is judged according to the standard and determined to be moral based on how closely it conforms.

At 2:01:18, political and religious institutions are the clearest example. They create extensive sets of laws and regulations by appealing to the authority of a higher power, whether that power is a divine being or a constitution. The benefit is consistent standards that can be broadly and reliably applied to any situation, which helps maintain societal order while safeguarding institutional power. However, when these laws are violated, punishment is necessary regardless of individual circumstances.

The test case, at 2:01:46, is a classic and the essay uses it well. Take a man who steals medicine in order to care for his sick child. Although his motivation is pure and the act itself noble, theft is still illegal. If he is caught he faces imprisonment, if not worse depending on who is in charge. While creating a reliable and predictable framework for evaluating behaviours, the problem with moral absolutism is that it is inflexible and does not allow for subjective interpretation. Instead it promotes the idea that there is an objective morality by which every act can be judged.

At 2:02:16 the move that makes the whole essay work. In becoming symbols of societal ideals, traditional heroes serve as the physical embodiment of these absolutist systems. More than that, they act as enforcers, ready to use violence in order to combat perceived evils and protect the established moral order.

At 2:02:31: this is why I do not like Superman. Ironically enough, the Man of Tomorrow is a champion of the status quo. He, Captain America and others like them defend social and political structures as they already exist, regardless of their flaws. And the essay is scrupulous here: to his credit, I do not think Superman would punish someone for stealing medicine for their sick child, but he definitely will protect the systems that originally put that person in that position.

The outsider (2:02:55)

By intention, moral absolutism creates a societal binary: those who conform and those who do not. Anti heroes are part of the second group. Their innate moral ambiguity naturally places them in opposition to mainstream culture, landing them in the realm of the outsider. These individuals find themselves shunned or outcast due to character flaws or other traits seen as deviant.

At 2:03:16 the pattern in the roster, and it is specific. It is not surprising that most anti heroes come from marginalized backgrounds. Deadpool is widely considered to be pansexual. Wolverine suffers from PTSD and alcoholism. Spider-Man comes from a poor family and was a nerd before being a nerd was cool.

These characteristics place the anti hero in direct conflict with normative culture, forcing them to make a choice: conform or face the consequences. Because of this, anti heroes often find themselves battling for the right to simply exist as they are.

Which produces the structural difference at 2:03:46. This leads them to seek wider societal change, whereas regular heroes are inherently change resistant, willing to violently uphold moral norms and standards. Anti heroes, by their very existence, demand change. They function as a living rebuttal to the predominant philosophy created by institutional authorities.

The cowboys got there first (2:04:03)

At 2:04:03 the genealogy, and it is not a superhero one. This is a convention that began not with superheroes but with cowboys. In the 1960s and 70s a new type of Western, called the post western, began capturing the attention of global audiences. These movies featured morally ambiguous protagonists who were largely distrustful of existing institutions and set out to buck the system.

At 2:04:23 the contrast. This stood in stark contrast to classic Westerns, which featured simple moral narratives where a handsome white hatted stranger wandered into town to defeat the black hatted outlaw and win the affection of the local school teacher. Post westerns turned conventions like these on their head, challenging the traditional values put forth by earlier films.

At 2:04:40 the cause. This reflected a larger cultural shift happening in America and Europe. The rise of the counterculture movement, along with the chaos of the Vietnam War and other global crises, contributed to a mass feeling of uncertainty, and many people began to question whether the ideas of previous generations were still valid. Post westerns captured those sentiments and served as a form of social criticism. By featuring flawed, conflicted characters struggling to find their place in the world, they presented a more realistic depiction of the lives of everyday people.

At 2:05:12 the rhyme with now. Distrust in our political and social institutions is at an all time high. Very few of us have any confidence that our leaders are capable of solving complex problems like economic instability, food scarcity or climate change. This has produced a collective sense of doubt and unease increasingly reflected in our heroes, or rather our anti heroes. At 2:05:40, films like Deadpool, Logan and Joker functionally serve the same role as the post westerns, changing the beliefs championed by earlier generations of heroes.

And then the cycle, at 2:05:48, which is the essay's most interesting historical claim. The superhero stories of the eighties and nineties largely represented a return to the classic Western tropes, including black and white systems of morality. This came at a time when the West was running on the high of economic prosperity and the end of the Cold War. At 2:06:03, figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher advocated for a revival of traditional values, which in turn gave rise to a new form of absolutist morality. And it is no coincidence that Reagan, himself a retired actor with a few Westerns under his belt, frequently wore a cowboy hat.

But it is easy to claim that your moral world view is the right one when everything is going well. At 2:06:25, flash forward a few decades and you have 9/11, the war on terror, the 2008 Great Recession and the covid crisis. Crisis after crisis has challenged the fundamental ideas that shape our culture and revealed monumental cracks in the structures meant to guide our lives.

At 2:06:38 the conclusion: the popularity of anti heroes represents a shift in our collective thinking. We like them because they offer an alternative to the ethical ideals advocated by the institutions that have failed us. We identify with the struggles of anti heroes because we too reject contemporary values and want to see them replaced with something better.

Which raises the closing question at 2:06:59. The age of the anti hero will one day end, probably sooner than later, and it is hard to know what will replace it. Will we once again return to an era of strict absolutist morality, or will we be able to invent something better, something more nuanced and capable of dealing with life's ambiguities? Whatever it is, let us just hope it comes with a few less Superman.

Seven words for love (2:07:23)

The eleventh essay opens on a list of things the narrator loves, and the list is deliberately incoherent: sunshine and rainbows, the warmth of summer and the chill of winter, the smell of hot coffee in the morning and the coziness of a bed at night, travel and crazy adventures.

At 2:07:38 the dictionary attempt. Love is a mix of emotions, behaviours and beliefs associated with strong feelings of affection, protectiveness, warmth and respect for a person or a thing or even an idea. But can we really define love? How do we explain a word you can use to describe what you feel for everything from people to cars to intangible ideas?

At 2:07:57 the solution the essay adopts, and it is the structure of the whole chapter. To fully understand what love is we have to look at the ancient Greeks, who instead of one all encompassing word used seven different words to explain love in its many forms. The essay then walks all seven, in order, and each one gets its own definition, its own examples, and its own problem.

Eros: passionate love (2:08:10)

Eros means passionate love, and it is the most common type of love we see in the world today. It is fuelled by a desire for pleasure. It is love at first sight, seeing someone's physical appearance and immediately getting attracted to them without knowing their first name. Most romantic relationships start like this. It is passionate, it can even be a bit obsessive.

But love like this is confusing, at 2:08:32, and it is the age old question of love versus lust. Both lust and eros come with intense physical attraction and a strong desire to be close to the person even if you just met. Some people differentiate them by the length of time they stay around: if it was a fleeting emotion it was lust, but if it lingered around like the best man at a wedding then it was definitely love.

But is that really true? And if it is, then is love simply lust that has stayed around long enough? If lust simply becomes love, how long does the switch take? At what point does lust become love?

At 2:09:10 the biology, offered as the answer. According to science and human biology there are three stages to falling in love.

Stage one is lust, driven by testosterone in men and estrogen in women.

Stage two, at 2:09:21, is attraction, which is when lust becomes love: when we start feeling a sense of a high on seeing them or speaking to them or even just thinking about them, a high similar to what you would get from drugs or alcohol, a sense of euphoria when we are around them. At 2:09:38 the chemistry changes over: testosterone and estrogen are replaced by dopamine, making us happy and excited, adrenaline triggering our fight or flight, and norepinephrine keeping us alert. This is why falling in love feels like an adrenaline rush, like you are driving at 120 miles per hour with no brakes. Your palms are sweaty, your knees are weak, your arms are heavy, your heart is racing. Love is this feeling.

Philia: friendship (2:09:59)

Sometimes love does not start with lust. It starts with friendship: knowing someone well enough that you can predict their reaction to every situation. Philia is intimacy. It is authentic, kind, warm, encouraging. Love is the best friend you have known since you were a child. It is always wanting the best for the other person. Selfless goodwill.

And at 2:10:21 the diagnosis, which is the sharpest social observation in the segment. In today's world philia is dying. We have millions of followers and subscribers but very few friends. We have a multitude of people seeing the perfect view of our lives, everything we want them to see, but no one who is welcome to see what is behind the curtains. Philia is a sense of camaraderie. It is calling someone brother or sister even when they are not related to you by blood. Love is loyalty, sacrifice and vulnerability. Love is a choice.

Ludus: playful love (2:10:46)

Love is not always serious. Love is not always permanent. And when it is fleeting, love is not always lust. Ludus describes a love built on infatuation, flirtation and fun.

Sometimes love is simply having a crush on someone and acting on it. It is going out for drinks with a friend and acting like a romantic couple for the night only. It is random kids pushing each other on swings in the playground, basking in the joy that their friends are having alongside them. It is going to the club and dancing with strangers, or singing karaoke in a room full of people you have just met. Sometimes love is casual, exciting, fun. It does not need obligations or implications to be love. Love does not need physical attraction to be love. Love does not even need friendship to be love. Love simply is.

Storge: familial love (2:11:44)

At 2:11:31 the essay tests the standard account and finds it wanting. We often say love involves commitment, time, mutual trust and acceptance between two people. But is that really the case, because none of this exists between a mother and her child, and love does.

The truth is that sometimes we can love someone even when we do not like them. If you have any siblings you will understand the concept a lot. At 2:11:44 the Greeks called it storge: unconditional familial love, the kind of kinship love that only exists between family members. And family does not mean you have to be tied by blood: lifelong friends who become family, adopted children, stepparents. When we consider someone our family we often develop a need to protect them even when they might not be the nicest people to hang around with.

At 2:12:14 the essay calls storge strange, and explains why. Most times when we love someone we are drawn closer to them. We want to spend all our free time with them, go on adventures, laugh, smile, cry, do everything with them. But sometimes love is wanting to go home even when you might not talk to the people there very much. It is simply a sense of security, like a weighted blanket.

Then, at 2:12:33, the best line in the chapter, and it is a joke that is also a definition. This love is being able to give someone a kidney without hesitation, but not your phone charger. Even when in truth only one of those is easily replaceable.

At 2:12:41 the extension beyond people. It is the same for sports teams and fans. Every year you cheer for your team, every year they break your heart, and yet the very next year you glue back the millions of pieces and wear the badge with pride, chanting "this year will be our year." Because love is unconditional. It is not dependent on who the person is or what they can give to you. Love is a one way ticket. It is loving someone even when they might not have the ability to love you back.

Philautia: love of oneself (2:13:20)

At 2:13:11 the authority: Aristotle once said that all friendly feelings for others are an extension of a man's feelings for himself. If you do not love yourself you can never truly love others. Which is why philautia, the love of oneself, is something we should not take for granted.

Love is not just what you can do for others, it is also what you can do for you. So go out and give yourself a treat once in a while. You do not have to have achieved anything or crossed any milestone before you celebrate yourself, just as others do not necessarily have to do anything before you love them, so you do not either.

At 2:13:54 the list, and it is the most practical passage in the chapter. Love is when you can stop comparing yourself to others, when you forgive yourself for your past mistakes and stop judging yourself for things beyond your control. Love is when you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and are proud of the person staring back at you. Love is leaving toxic relationships and not feeling obligated to stay no matter who they are or how important they have been to you in the past. It is choosing yourself over and over again and protecting yourself the way you would protect anyone else. Love is being kind to yourself in your thoughts, in your words and in your actions. Because only when we truly love ourselves can we be able to love others.

Pragma: enduring love (2:14:24)

Love lasts for a lifetime. Love is to have and to hold, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death do us part. Love is committed and compassionate. It is accepting each other's differences and learning to compromise. Love is taking out all the broken pieces and putting them together again instead of throwing them all out. Love is everlasting, rooted in romantic feelings and compassion.

Which sets up the question the chapter has been building to, at 2:14:47. So is love a feeling or a choice?

The essay argues both horns first. If love is a choice, why do we never know we are falling in love with someone until we already are? Why can we never say to ourselves "I want to fall in love with this person" and just do it? On the other hand, if love is a feeling then there is no basis for wedding vows, no basis for the promise that we will love each other forever, because feelings come and go and usually they are beyond our control. The only way we can judge that love will remain forever is when we decide that it will.

At 2:15:17 the answer, and it is the chapter's thesis: well, it is both. Falling in love is a feeling, but staying in love is a decision. It is telling them you love them even on the worst days. It is saying to them "I do not know how we will get through this, except that it will be together." Love is being vulnerable even when we do not feel like it. Love is holding the roses without being scared of getting pricked by their thorns. Love is an amazing feeling in the beginning, but for love to last a lifetime it has to evolve into a commitment of never letting this person go, for as long as they let you.

Agape: universal love (2:15:51)

The seventh. Agape is giving to charity and helping strangers in need. It is empathy towards humanity. It is fighting for change even when you might not be directly affected by the issues. It is altruistic, selflessly caring for humans, animals and even Mother Earth itself. Love does not expect anything in return for its actions. Love itself is the reward. Love serves as the foundation for societies and communities, without which we cannot thrive.

Is love biological or cultural? (2:16:17)

At 2:16:17 the scientific dispute. Some believe love is a basic human emotion like anger or sadness or joy. Others believe it is simply a cultural phenomenon, something we are drawn towards as a result of societal expectations and pressures.

The essay rejects the second, and gives an argument rather than an assertion: if love were simply a cultural phenomenon it would not exist in all cultures of the world, and the fact that it does suggests there is something innate about love, something biological about its experience.

At 2:16:47 the function question, asked in three candidate answers and left open. If love is fundamental to the human experience, what is the point of love? Why do we love? Is it for parents to be able to bear with our kids long enough for them to attain maturity? Or is it for mates to remain together long enough to raise the next generation of humans? Does love exist to create a sense of community and camaraderie necessary for a herd community like ours to exist?

At 2:17:12 the essay concedes it does not know, then substitutes evidence for the answer. We might never know why love exists or what ultimate purpose it serves, but we do know how important it is. At 2:17:19: the longest study on happiness showed that the people who end their life happy are not the richest, or the most healthy, or the ones who never made a mistake in their lives. The happiest people are those surrounded by the most love. Love from spouses, love from children and grandchildren, love from friends, love from religious organizations and communities.

Loneliness, as the control condition (2:17:40)

To understand how important love is, the essay juxtaposes it with the pain of loneliness, and this passage is the most specific description of loneliness anywhere in the three hours. Not having that someone to share your inner monologue with, because your thoughts are too petty or intense, random or full of anxiety or too scary to share with just anyone. You cannot rant, you cannot scream, you cannot fully express your feelings of obsession over your favourite passions or rage about your most heartbreaking moments. Constantly having to filter your thoughts through the lenses of politeness and political correctness. Being looked at but not being seen. Being heard but not being listened to. It is dreadful, and we have all been there.

At 2:18:17 the reproach: if love is so important, why do we not make it the centre of our lives? Why do we chase everything else? And about love we say "stop searching and it will find you." The truth is that love does not always find you, and sometimes you have to search it out.

Aristophanes, and the myth the whole chapter is arguing with (2:18:32)

So to those chasing love, listen. In Plato's dialogue the Symposium, Aristophanes the playwright explains love the way many of us chasing love think of it.

At 2:18:40 the myth. In the beginning humans were all androgynous, with double the parts we have now, including two faces turned in opposite directions. This physical form made humans so powerful that they became a threat to the gods, so Zeus cut them in two, one male and one female, and ever since every human has longed to be rejoined with their other half, like two pieces of a puzzle, two halves of a whole.

At 2:19:04 the essay reads the myth as diagnosis rather than as doctrine. Although this is just a myth, it opens the curtain on why we love the way we do. We often fall in love with people we think would complete us, people who so perfectly fit together the pieces of our heart's puzzle, people who complement our shortcomings and give us hope for the things we are most insecure about. We live in part with the hope of completion. We all have a deep rooted need to blossom, and we can only hope this person is the rain at the end of summer.

But at 2:19:29 the correction, which is where the chapter lands. The truth is we are already complete. In us are the two parts of a whole. So when people say "stop searching for love," do not take that as a message to stop trying. Take it as a lesson to stop searching for completion in another person. At the end of the day, only when you truly love yourself and completely understand the weight that carries can you love others the way they deserve to be loved. It all starts and it all ends with you.

Why we laugh (2:19:53)

The twelfth essay opens on a scene and withholds the point for a full minute, which turns out to be the joke.

The narrator was having dinner with two friends recently. They are a couple, and as they sat down to eat he could tell there was tension between them. They were not speaking to each other for the first ten minutes of the meal and gave short answers to all his questions.

After a moment of pure silence, at 2:20:08, something strange happened. His body started to tremble ever so slightly. He turned his head away from his friends and coughed. He was doing whatever he could to conceal what was actually happening. He did not want them to know that he was laughing.

At 2:20:23 the framing that makes the question real. We know a lot about human behaviour. We eat for energy to keep us moving. We blink to keep our eyes moist and sweep away dust particles. We breathe to bring more oxygen into our blood and expel carbon dioxide. We yell to get the attention of someone or a group. We cough to clear our throats and airways of germs, mucus and dust. We shiver to warm up and we sweat to cool down. We understand a lot about why humans do the things they do.

But at 2:20:46, one behaviour that is not so easy to pin down is laughter. Why do we laugh? What purpose does it serve? And why do we seek it through friendship and humour?

At 2:20:55 the reason the question is hard, which is that the phenomenon is not one thing. We laugh when we hear a joke or a friend says something clever. When we are surprised by something. When there is tension in the air and we know we really should not be laughing. Have you ever been in a fight with someone and you both start laughing, or, more likely, only one of you laughs and it makes things a whole lot worse? Some people laugh all the time and some only laugh when physically tickled. Some of us laugh at pain and suffering and others laugh through tears. There are many routes to laughter and they are all very distinct, which is why it is difficult to explain why we do it.

Theory one: superiority (2:21:29)

The subject has not been widely discussed, the essay notes, but several philosophers devoted brief consideration to it.

Plato had a low opinion of laughter and of the humour intended to inspire it. In fact he narrowly interpreted it as a malicious act: we laugh at those who think they are greater than they really are. In this interpretation laughter serves as a way to point out the self ignorance of others, which is why Plato described laughter as a form of scorn.

At 2:21:57 the essay finds the modern version, and it is a good catch. You can see this variety of humour online when people mock famous CEOs such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Pointing out how the self made genius Elon started his business with nothing but twenty dollars in his pocket and the rest of his family's fortune, or how Jeff Bezos risked it all to start Amazon, and by "all" I mean his parents' life savings. Underlying these jokes is the suggestion that these CEOs are not as great as they think, that they had a big head start in life and so do not deserve to think so highly of themselves.

At 2:22:25 the institutional history. Like Plato, medieval Christian institutions also condemned laughter. For the Christians laughter was a sign of a lack of self control. They hated it so much that at 2:22:33, when the Puritans ruled England in the mid seventeenth century, they outlawed comedies. Imagine being burned at the stake for telling your mate why the chicken crossed the road.

At 2:22:44, Hobbes and Descartes also described laughter as a feeling of superiority, but for these two it was about exerting our intellectual superiority over others or over our past selves. Like when people mock anti vaxxers and flat earthers. Or when they mock pro vaxxers and round earthers. Or when that cousin at the dinner table says The Big Bang Theory is the funniest TV show and you laugh sarcastically because you think they only said it to make everyone think they are smart.

At 2:23:10 the verdict, which sets the pattern for the whole chapter: it is fair to say we all do at least occasionally laugh from a sense of superiority, but does that cover all, or even most, of the instances we laugh? Obviously we do not think this way anymore, or at least not quite as pervasively. At 2:23:20: laughter is still taboo in some social settings, like during a sermon or at a funeral, but we appreciate laughter more now and even value it. For over a hundred years we have been watching people make us laugh in film and television. We go to live standup comedy shows and sketch performances. We seek it out and are not ostracized from society for doing so. So why do we appreciate it now? What does it do to us that we find satisfying?

Theory two: relief (2:23:50)

At the turn of the century, the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, helped establish relief theory. Freud proposed that we laugh as a way to release nervous tension: all the energy we use to repress emotion becomes pent up and is released in the form of a laugh. This would help explain why the narrator laughed nervously at a tense dinner with his friends, or why a joke about a sensitive topic can have us rolling on the floor.

And then the essay does something clever, at 2:24:14: it demonstrates the theory by telling a joke and only afterwards revealing that it was one.

The joke: this reminds me of a time my brother got so mad at me that he took fifty bucks out of my wallet on the table, went to the PS station and left town. Twelve years later he reached out to me for the first time since leaving. He said he was so relieved to hear my voice and was coming back to visit. With tears in my eyes, I said I was so relieved to finally be getting my fifty dollars back.

At 2:24:35 the reveal and the analysis. Admittedly that was not a true story, it was a joke intended to demonstrate relief theory. I set up an emotional experience by establishing that my brother was returning home for the first time in twelve years. That energy was then released when it was revealed that my biggest concern was getting back my money.

At 2:24:52, Freud believed this also explains why we find humour about sex funny, because of how much we as a society repress our sexual desires. The release of repressive energy is so intense with the sex joke that they often get the best results, a room full of laughter.

But at 2:25:09 there is still something missing, and the essay's objections are empirical rather than logical. If we laugh from a release of repressive energy, then would not the most repressed individuals love humour? Should not people who practise abstinence be really tickled by a raunchy innuendo? What about parents of a four year old, should they not find their child's potty humour hysterical? In reality, people who enjoy sexual and aggressive humour the most are those who are the most expressive about sex and violence. If that is the case, then what makes us laugh does not have a strong or necessary connection to what we repress.

At 2:25:56 the counterexample, which is a real joke by a real comedian: take this line from the late Mitch Hedberg. "I like the escalator, man, because the escalator cannot break. It just becomes stairs." This joke does not release any repressed emotions. We typically do not have strong emotions built up in relation to escalators, unless your shoe has gotten stuck in one. So why is it funny?

Theory three: incongruity (2:26:15)

One of the dominant theories today, pushed by numerous philosophers over the past two hundred years, is incongruity theory. Simply put, it explains humour as something perceived that deviates from an established expectation. Basic joke structure works this way: you have a setup to establish an expectation and then the punchline deviates from it.

At 2:26:37 the essay grants that incongruity theory seems to explain most instances of laughter, and gives two of its own: the time it saw a larper in line at the bank, or a squirrel put his head through a bagel hole.

However, at 2:26:49, there are many instances that were incongruous and not funny at all. I was once walking near a cute looking chained up dog. As I passed by I felt a sharp pain in my leg. Confused, I looked down to notice the chained up dog was biting my ankle. The dog let go and my leg was bleeding. The situation was technically an example of incongruity, but I was not laughing. I was horrified.

At 2:27:09, Kierkegaard explains this by saying that the tragic violates our expectation as well as the comic, so for something to be funny it also cannot be painful or destructive.

At 2:27:19 the patch and the problem with the patch. Incongruity theory was modified further by philosopher Michael Clark to include the condition that the person must enjoy perceiving it for it to be funny. But the theory is still too inclusive: we enjoy many deviations from our expectations that do not make us laugh. Sometimes they are simply bizarre or grotesque in a manner we enjoy, like when we watch a horror film, or the way the Romans enjoyed the gruesome spectacle of the Colosseum.

Theory four: benign violation (2:27:47)

With many finding incongruity theory less than satisfying, a new general theory of humour was conceived in 2010. The authors of benign violation theory contend that all instances of humour must contain a violation that is benign, or harmless.

At 2:28:02 the taxonomy of violations. Violations can be both physical and cognitive. Physical violations are things like being tickled, or threats to our physical body. Cognitive violations are things that violate our personal dignity, societal norms, linguistic norms and moral norms. Humour arises when these are violated and we realize the violation is harmless.

At 2:28:21 the example, and it is another true one. A friend came over for dinner the other day. I was roasting vegetables in the oven and my friend asked if the vegetables were burning. That is when the fire alarm went off, and we both laughed. Why was this funny? The fire alarm alerts us to a physical violation, the possibility of fire. We know, in light of our previous conversation, that the violation is benign: our vegetables have just been in the oven too long and there is no actual fire.

At 2:28:49 benign violation theory is credited with accounting for most instances of humour. But can it account for all the things that make us laugh?

Provine's finding, which reframes the whole question (2:28:55)

The best evidence in the chapter, and it does not come from a theory of humour at all. Dr Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, put forward the idea that most laughter is not triggered by formal jokes but by everyday communication.

In a study he conducted, Provine and some graduate students listened in on average conversations in public, and at 2:29:08 what they found was surprising: only ten to twenty percent of laughter came from anything resembling jokes. The rest came from everyday communication.

We have to conclude, then, that most laughter is not triggered by things that are funny. Most of the time laughter can be separated from humour.

At 2:29:27 the thing every previous theory left out: the social element. We are thirty times more likely to laugh with other people than we are alone. How many times have you watched a sitcom with people around you and laughed, and then watched that same show alone in near silence? At 2:29:44, love it or hate it, this is the exact reason sitcoms throughout television's comedy history had laugh tracks. The shows were trying to simulate the social experience of laughter, and studies have shown that they actually worked: on average, people laugh more at a show when there is a backing track. So the next time your cousin brings up The Big Bang Theory for the umpteenth time, tell them to watch the show again without the laugh track, so the producers are not telling them when to laugh just so they can feel smart.

At 2:30:14 Provine's functional claim. Laughter has an evolutionary purpose that is social. Laughter eases tension in a group with the purpose of bringing about unity. Which explains the cold open: at the tense dinner with his friends, it makes sense that the narrator's instinct was to laugh. More than anything, he wanted to unify the three of them as they sat in silence.

At 2:30:33 the supporting evidence. Studies have outlined that in close relationships laughter makes people feel closer, more connected and more satisfied. It may be cliché to say, but there is truth to the phrase: couples that laugh together last together.

The dark side (2:31:10)

At 2:30:55 the essay turns the theory into a practical question. In light of all the theories and studies, how should we go about trying to make people laugh? If we use benign violation theory to construct a joke, we know that to make a group laugh we need to poke fun in a well intended way.

But at 2:31:10, what if part of your audience does not think your violation is harmless? What if they are hurt or offended by your joke? When our jokes target groups of people by race or gender, they might seem benign to those outside the targeted group. What about those within it? If the evolutionary purpose of laughter is to unite a group, what are the ethical considerations with jokes that divide?

At 2:31:33 this is named the dark side of humour. As much as it can make people feel like they belong, it can also exclude others from the group. That is why we have the expression "inside joke." It is this side of humour that Plato described as scorn, and though there is much more to humour than Plato's cynical take, he did consider a specific use of laughter that is real and malicious.

Which leaves the question at 2:31:53: when we make a joke, should our aim be that everyone finds the violation harmless, and is that even possible? In the end all we can do is ask ourselves whether our aim is to unite people for the greater good or to exclude others, and if the latter, whether it is really worth it.

And then, at 2:32:12, the essay ends a chapter about the ethics of exclusion with a joke that is an act of exclusion, which is either a lapse or the most sophisticated thing in it. This reminds me of a time I felt excluded by my peers. Out of nowhere they started mocking me for wearing jeans and a coffee stained sweater. They were suddenly put off by me yelling "that's what she said" when the mood called for it, and they really could not stand the way I whistled when I thought someone was hot. Worst funeral ever.

What if Black Panther was real (2:32:31)

The thirteenth essay picks up the anti hero chapter's argument and runs it as a geopolitical thought experiment.

Who is your favourite superhero? There are so many to choose from that it can be tough to pick just one, but for millions of people the answer is undoubtedly Black Panther, portrayed on the big screen by the beloved Chadwick Boseman.

At 2:32:40 the scale of it. Black Panther was an instant global phenomenon. Millions of moviegoers the world over flooded into theatres, some more than once, to escape into the colourful afrofuturist nation of Wakanda and watch the daring exploits of King T'Challa. At 2:32:57 it was at the time the most successful solo superhero movie ever released, beating out classics like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, and today it remains one of the most celebrated cinematic achievements in the entire Marvel franchise.

At 2:33:12 the wish the essay is going to spend twelve minutes puncturing. We love the king of Wakanda so much that many of us have found ourselves wishing both he and the nation were real. How exciting would it be to live in a world where superheroes actually existed, where a rich and powerful African nation possessed technology light years ahead of anything currently available?

At 2:33:33: sorry to burst your bubble, but the reality would likely be much different than anything depicted in the MCU.

Why the film works, and why reality would not (2:33:53)

The diagnosis of the film's success is a narrative one. We love T'Challa because we see his journey. We go with him from his lowest point, when he loses his father, to him becoming king, tracking down a group of international arms dealers and battling his long lost cousin Erik Killmonger for the heart of his nation.

But how would you feel if a foreign king you had never heard of suddenly revealed that he had superhuman abilities, and more than that, that his country controlled greater technology and more wealth than any other nation on the planet? Would you still love Black Panther then?

At 2:34:18 the essay says the question is more complicated than a simple yes or no, especially given the complex issues of race, colonialism and cultural identity surrounding Wakanda, and it credits the film with handling them: Black Panther tackled these issues head on, offering audiences a candid examination of some of history's greatest injustices.

At 2:34:27 the film's own central conflict, restated as politics. At the start the Wakandans are adamant about maintaining their isolationist politics, believing it the best way of protecting their nation from the chaos of the outside world. This view is challenged at 2:34:48 by the arrival of Killmonger, who seeks to upend the status quo. After defeating T'Challa in ritual combat and assuming control of the throne, Killmonger delivers a speech to the Tribal Council in which he recounts the struggles of Black Americans and asks pointedly: where was Wakanda?

At 2:35:03 the essay answers the question from the lore. While the rest of the African continent was swallowed whole by Europe during the age of imperialism, Wakanda stood idly by. It watched as neighbour after neighbour fell to foreign invaders and did nothing as entire populations were enslaved and their land plundered for its resources. At 2:35:20 Wakanda continued to hide in the shadows as further injustices were committed against Black communities in the form of policies like segregation and apartheid, and offered no assistance when it came to overthrowing these repressive systems.

So while it is likely that many Black people around the world would welcome the sudden entrance of a hyper advanced African nation onto the world stage, others might share Killmonger's sentiments and harbour varying degrees of resentment.

The regional politics (2:35:46)

At 2:35:46 the awkwardness begins, especially regionally. Wakanda's vast fortune and technological supremacy would immediately position it as the head of the African Union, dramatically reorienting the continent's balance of power, to say nothing of the rest of the planet.

At 2:36:03 the demands. African leaders might demand that Wakanda share its advanced technology, or even its wealth, to make up for historic failures. Those not of African descent would probably be suspicious and maybe even fearful of the sudden change to the existing geopolitical order, even more so after learning that the country in question is led by a king with superhuman abilities, the nature of which would likely remain a highly guarded secret.

At 2:36:26 the PR problem. A massive campaign would have to be launched to try to portray T'Challa as a magnanimous and peaceful ruler, but undoubtedly the idea of a literal god king leading the world's most technologically sophisticated military would be too much for many people to accept.

At 2:36:39 the constitutional objection, and it is the sharpest thing in the chapter because it is the one the film cannot answer. Critics would be quick to point out the lack of democratic representation in Wakanda, as well as the obvious problems of having a hereditary monarchy. At 2:36:50: sure, T'Challa may be a benevolent leader, but what about the next guy? What would happen if a long lost relative who did not share T'Challa's humanitarian worldview somehow took control of the country? It would not be too hard to imagine a scenario where a conquest driven warrior king sought to expand Wakanda's borders. (Which is, of course, precisely the plot of the film.)

At 2:37:07 the conclusion for Wakanda specifically. T'Challa, and in fact the entire nation, would become a highly divisive topic among world leaders and individual citizens, in a similar way to nations like Saudi Arabia and Russia today. This could lead not just to anti Wakandan protests but to possible assassination attempts, as both disgruntled governments and fearful citizens aim to remove this new threat.

The Boys, as the documentary version (2:37:28)

At 2:37:28 the essay points at the show that already ran this scenario. This exact premise serves as the basis for the Amazon series The Boys, a superhero parody in which a band of vigilantes attempts to take down an Avengers style group called the Seven. The Seven are a tyrannical and corrupt team of superhumans who use their powers to serve their own selfish desires while enriching their corporate benefactor, Vought International. Their exploits consistently lead to the injury and death of innocent bystanders, but this collateral damage is covered up by Vought, which markets the group as saviors of humanity. The Seven's recklessness fuels public resentment, and a ragtag assembly of superpowerless vigilantes known as the Boys forms to try to assassinate them.

At 2:38:07 the essay's reading: The Boys is representative of a very real fear ordinary citizens have of the ultra powerful. It is safe to assume most people would be suspicious of an elite group of individuals with genuine superhuman abilities.

The rest of the roster (2:38:18)

At 2:38:18 the scope widens, and this is the move that makes the thought experiment serious. It is important to remember that T'Challa is not alone in the Marvel universe. There is a whole ensemble of characters ranging from certified good guy Captain America to the genocidal Thanos. So if Black Panther exists, so should the others, and with that comes a whole slew of new problems.

At 2:38:33 the structural problem. By their very nature superhumans create an imbalance in society. There is them, people capable of flying faster than fighter jets or chucking cars as though they were whiffle balls, and then there is the rest of us, barely able to make it through our morning commute.

At 2:38:48 the political consequence. This inequality of ability would lead to widespread fear and resentment. Chief among people's worries would be the belief that these individuals might use their powers to establish a new social and political order. And at 2:39:01, to help prevent this we would likely see the formation of anti superhuman organizations, factions that would push for legislation to level the playing field, or at least establish a legal framework to protect ordinary citizens.

At 2:39:14 the film that used exactly this as its plot. Marvel's 2016 Captain America: Civil War uses the idea as its central conflict. Following the disastrous fallout from Avengers: Age of Ultron, the United Nations attempts to rein in Captain America, Iron Man and the rest of the crew in the form of the Sokovia Accords, legislation that places the Avengers under UN control and effectively ends any form of independent autonomy. This leads to a rift in the group, as half support the independent oversight while the rest believe it to be a potentially dangerous obstruction. At 2:39:44 the film concludes with the Accords still in place and half the team forced into hiding.

At 2:39:50 the real world reading. Civil War explores the anxiety felt by many people regarding the recent rise of powerful extra governmental organizations. What do we do when entities like the Avengers impose their will on a country and its citizens? Who is responsible for the repercussions when the Hulk accidentally takes down an entire skyscraper? It is not a question with easy answers, but the Sokovia Accords are an example of how real life governments might attempt to create safeguards against potential catastrophes caused by superhumans.

At 2:40:20 the escalation, which is where the essay stops being about comics. Civil War also clearly displays the impulse of international leaders to try to control this power, as they would with biological weapons or nuclear technology, and of course that would not stop at legislation. In a world with superheroes, militaries, governments and even private entities would attempt to recruit or manufacture armies of their own superpowered soldiers. Entire industries could develop in the rush to create the next Hulk or Captain America.

At 2:40:46: the sudden rush for superhuman superiority would trigger a new global arms race, as geopolitical rivals sought to fill their ranks with the strongest, smartest and deadliest individuals science can create. It would be the Cold War all over again, but this time with superpowers instead of nuclear power.

At 2:41:03 the essay names it terrifying, and then does the thing that justifies the whole chapter: it points out that this is not hypothetical for long. Advances in gene therapy, robotics and other cutting edge fields have begun to open the door to a new world of human enhancement. In the next few decades we may become capable of giving individuals abilities previously reserved for the realm of fiction. Superhero stories may one day be viewed not as far out fantasies but as foretelling our very own real future.

At 2:41:29 the reason this is destabilizing in a way most technologies are not. The problem with these kinds of technologies is that they rewrite the rules of what is possible. Societies operate based on the assumption that human beings have certain limitations, and if those limitations are surpassed it will force us to reevaluate how our civilization functions on a fundamental level.

Gilgamesh, and why we wanted them in the first place (2:41:46)

Which makes it worth understanding why exactly we are so obsessed with superheroes in the first place. And the answer the essay gives is four thousand years old.

While modern incarnations stem largely from the realm of twentieth century science fiction, the idea of powerful champions battling monsters and saving innocents dates back to the very beginning of human history. At 2:42:03, the Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest surviving pieces of recorded literature, and it is basically a superhero story. It tells of a legendary king with super strength, prophetic abilities and unparalleled fighting skills, who goes on a series of quests culminating in the search for immortality. Over the course of his adventures Gilgamesh slays demons, travels to the underworld and undergoes a series of trials, but ultimately fails in his goal of learning the secrets of eternal life. Though initially despondent, his defeat leads him to accept his human limitations and instead learn what it means to live a good life.

At 2:42:37 the influence. The story is a template for the epics that filled ancient literature. Gilgamesh's character provided direct inspiration for the demigod Hercules and heavily influenced the Greek poet Homer, whose work is filled with seemingly superhuman protagonists.

At 2:42:52 the function, which loops the chapter back to the anti hero essay's claim that heroes personify a society's ideals. These early heroes were created to serve as models of their society's virtues, instilling the values of bravery, fortitude and honour in citizens. And just like the superheroes of today, these characters were not perfect. Each had tragic flaws that routinely led to disaster for themselves and those around them. Their strength was not in being able to perform astounding feats or slay countless enemies, but in their ability to face their flaws and learn from them.

At 2:43:18 the formula: the archetypal plot structure of these stories, known as the hero's journey, provides a clear formula for personal growth. By leaving a place of comfort, encountering obstacles and confronting our weaknesses, we are able to change for the better and hopefully return as a more complete version of ourselves.

At 2:43:35 the film read through that lens. At the end of Black Panther, T'Challa is able to reconcile his political beliefs with those of his cousin. Although he rejects Killmonger's call to wage war against former colonial oppressors, he realizes that Wakanda's period of isolationism must come to an end.

And the close, at 2:43:50: heroes like Black Panther and Gilgamesh serve as role models we are meant to look to for inspiration. They represent the best in us and provide examples of how we might overcome difficulties in our own lives. We love superhero stories because they give us hope that we too are capable of great deeds, and because they serve as a reminder that every single one of us has the ability to change the world. So what if Black Panther was real? We may never know. But you.

Nostalgia (2:44:18)

The fourteenth and final essay opens on an empty street, and it takes a full twenty five seconds to reveal what it is describing.

You look out the window into the empty streets. No sounds of kids running around. No noise of busy streets littered with cars and pedestrians. The city is silent. The pigeons do not even group up anymore, because there is no one to feed them. You ask yourself: where am I?

At 2:44:33 your alarm rings. It is nine in the morning, time to resume work at the office for the day, and with a sad face you walk to your desk, open your computer and sigh. I miss the old days, you say to yourself.

At 2:44:43: this is nostalgia. It is the burning desire to go back to the past, to live the life we once had, or perhaps only a romanticized version of it. We want experiences, places, things, people and even ourselves to go back to being what they once were.

At 2:44:56 the mechanism, which is the same reconstructive memory the self chapter used. We remember our childhood memories without all the awkwardness. Our first love without the reason we are no longer with them. Our first kiss without the terrible acne we had. We remember a romanticized version of our past, one without the flaws, one where we know what is going to happen next, and one where we can tell what consequences our actions will have before we take them. It often happens when we see, hear or even smell something that reminds us of the past.

At 2:45:22 the best example, which is also a warning. People often leave relationships because it was not a good experience for them, but a few months down the line they start missing the connection. They feel like maybe it was not as bad as they remember. Their memories begin to filter out all the bad that happened, and they are left with nostalgia about a romanticized version of what the relationship was. Often they go back only to get hurt all over again.

Nostalgia used to be a disease (2:45:56)

At 2:45:52 the essay concedes that nostalgia can be pleasant and can also cause a lot of emotional distress, and then gives the history of the word.

The seventeenth century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who came up with the name, classified nostalgia as a mental disorder. No one could understand why anyone would want to dwell in the past without that being the case, and for a long, long time that is what nostalgia was.

Until one lunch in 1999, at 2:46:11, in Southampton, England. Constantine Sedikides had recently moved to the University of Southampton and was having lunch with a colleague. He explained that he was generally doing well, but that a few times a week he was hit with nostalgia for his former home at the University of North Carolina. He longed for the time with his friends, the basketball games. He longed for his old life.

At 2:46:35 his colleague, a clinical psychologist, made an immediate diagnosis: depression. Just like the seventeenth century Swiss physician, this psychologist could not fathom why anyone would want a time that was already gone, a life they had already lived.

But Sedikides knew this was not true. At 2:46:50 he denied being depressed, explaining that he did not feel any pain, and at 2:46:56 comes the quotation that changed the field. "I told him I did live my life forward, but sometimes I could not help thinking about the past, and it was rewarding. Nostalgia made me feel that my life had roots and continuity. It made me feel good about myself and my relationships. It provided a texture to my life and gave me strength to move forward."

At 2:47:13 the consequence. This was the start of a drastic change. Everything we knew about nostalgia was about to take on a new form. Perhaps it was not as bad as we thought, and might not be bad at all. Through Sedikides' research the word nostalgia has slowly lost its negative reputation. But not entirely.

Bittersweet, in both directions (2:47:28)

Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion. On one hand it brings us comfort and makes us feel loved and connected when we remember all the times our loved ones cared for us, or a time in our life when everything was going right. On the other hand it makes us feel sad that those things are gone and scared that we might never experience them again.

At 2:47:50 the essay returns to the Lincoln poem it used in the hedonism chapter, and here it is the centrepiece rather than an aside. A great example is when Abraham Lincoln visited his childhood home after twenty years. He arrived and found the place in ruin. Saddened by what he saw, he wrote this: my childhood home I see again, and saddened with the view, and still as memory clouds my brain, there's pleasure in it too. Because although it saddened him to see that he would never be able to experience those emotions again, remembering the times he spent in the house and the happiness it had brought him when he was younger brought happy thoughts to his memory.

At 2:48:18 the split, and it is the most useful distinction in the chapter.

Positive nostalgia makes you thankful for what you have had and gives you the desire to keep moving forward. Perhaps you might even be able to recreate that amazing feeling, or experience something better in the future.

Negative nostalgia, at 2:48:30, makes you feel like your life was better in the past. You might even start to beat yourself up for choices you made, because you think whatever decisions you made are negatively affecting your life today. You get stuck in a cycle of thoughts about the past that leaves you frustrated, defeated and stuck.

At 2:48:50 the diagnosis and the remedy, and it is the only actionable advice in the chapter. When things like that happen, it is often because you have not taken the time to process that experience. It has happened, but you did not give your brain enough time to mourn it and move on from it. You put up a wall, you seal it away, as many of us do. However, once you can truly process the experience and come to terms with what came from it, you will stop experiencing the negative nostalgic feeling associated with that particular memory.

Why nostalgia is different from every other emotion (2:49:18)

At 2:49:18 the structural observation, and it is genuinely a good one. One of the best things about the feeling of nostalgia is that it is all about you, and people love themselves more than anything else. Most human emotions we feel are felt as a result of external forces. We get sad when something does not go our way. We get disappointed in people when they do something unexpected that we would rather they had not. We get angry at people when they do something to agitate us.

But nostalgia, at 2:49:39: nobody does anything to us. Often we cannot even pinpoint the trigger. All we know is that a few times a week we remember our old life with friends, family and times we shared with loved ones, and as memories cloud our brain, there is pleasure in it too.

Nostalgia as a product (2:49:54)

That does not mean outside forces cannot trigger it. As we all know, advertisers have discovered the power of nostalgia and use it to their advantage all the time. At 2:50:05: that is why you have Disney remaking all of their best cartoons. They are trying to make people nostalgic so they flock to the cinemas, trying to recapture a moment of their previous lives.

But unlike trying to make someone feel happy or sad for a character in a movie, trying to make someone feel nostalgic is very tricky and can often backfire. At 2:50:22 the three examples, all of them failures: the Lion King live action movie, the first Sonic the Hedgehog trailer, and more recently Tom and Jerry. All three tried to make people nostalgic and failed completely, because nostalgia is a very complex emotion.

The question the whole compilation has been asking (2:50:39)

And then, in its final movement, the essay returns to the question that opened the first chapter almost three hours earlier.

The question who am I has plagued humanity for millennia. At 2:50:41: every five years every single atom in your body will have been replaced by a different atom. Your thoughts, opinions and feelings about things will also have changed. Sometimes where you live and your friends may have even changed. So who are you? Is there one true aspect to your being that stamps you as being one of one? What part of us acts as the random seed hash that is tied to our existence?

At 2:51:05: the best philosophers, scientists and psychologists have had a go at the question, all to no avail.

And while nostalgia certainly does not answer the question, at 2:51:16, it helps us calm the anxiety it causes. We can say that what makes you you are your specific memories about the past, all of which tell you how you have changed and become the person you are today. They tell you that you are a continuous being, one whose existence grows linearly with time.

Which is, note, precisely the story the third chapter spent twelve minutes calling an illusion. The compilation does not resolve the tension. It ends inside it.

At 2:51:29 the use. When we are feeling like a failure, like we do not have any purpose in life, like we have no value or meaning, we can tap into our nostalgic memories for comfort, to calm our worrying minds and to remind us that we do have intrinsic value, that we are not failures with no purpose. We have friends, family and healthy experiences we can cling to.

At 2:51:48 the timing. Nostalgia usually happens when there is a major life transition: going off to college, moving to a new city, travelling across the world, getting married. It is as though our brains are trying to grab hold of who we were even as we are still learning who we are and discovering who we want to be.

At 2:52:05 the moment of writing, and the essay is candid about it. Right now people are feeling nostalgic more than ever, and honestly that is exactly what a year on lockdown will do to you. We begin to feel nostalgic when we see live performances we went to in the past, large family gatherings we used to detest, and even little things like the noise of a busy grocery store or kids screaming on airplanes. Then, at 2:52:27, the aside: maybe not the last one.

The mechanism it proposes: because we are limited in our ability to go out and create new experiences, our brain is rerunning the old ones again and again to give us that sense of warmth and connection many of us are missing.

At 2:52:42 the internet's contribution. The internet has modified everything we used to do as a society. Mobs have morphed into cancel culture. We no longer have to be physically present at work or school. And at 2:52:52 we now even have a dedicated day to feel nostalgic: social media calls it TBT, or Throwback Thursday, when people post nostalgic photos of themselves and of a time period, to sit back and reflect on what once was. At 2:53:03 we also have Snapchat, Facebook and Google Photos bringing us memories of pictures we took a few years ago. Having all these memories flood not just our minds but our phone screens, without the ability to make new ones, and you can see why people are feeling nostalgic now more than ever.

At 2:53:22 the last example, and it is the one that makes the mechanism testable. We also see nostalgia in sport. For years there has been the heated debate of who is the greatest of all time. At 2:53:29, in the NBA you often hear LeBron versus Jordan, but in reality, even if LeBron James ends his career with more titles than Michael Jordan, MJ will always still have the nostalgia factor on his side. He is many people's childhood, and no one will ever argue that their sports idol, the one they watched while growing up, is not the greatest.

At 2:53:48 the consolation. With enough time the modern day greats turn into old legends and slowly but surely get outshined by new and rising talent. The arguments we have today will be the same arguments we have in the future, only with different people and different nostalgic factors.

At 2:54:03 the ending. Nostalgia is a very interesting emotion because we all in some way want to feel it, even if it brings us both happiness and pain. Often the best memories are the ones we remember with both happiness and sadness. On days when we feel our worst it makes us feel sad, angry and even scared that we might never get those things or those feelings again. But even on those days, nostalgia has the power to bring us hope and make us realize that we all have a story that is still being written.

And at 2:54:29 the compilation signs off on four questions and one statement, which together are as close as it comes to a thesis. Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us? What does it really mean to say time passes? Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge, and nostalgia helps us remember how far our curiosity can take us. From where we were, to where we are, to where we will be. Nostalgia will be there all along the way.

Key takeaways

• Consciousness screens, and the screening is the subject. The opening claim, that consciousness leaves out more than it takes in, is the premise every one of the fourteen essays inherits. Each chapter finds a thing everyone assumes is understood and locates the seam where the explanation stops.
• Fifty five percent of adults have had at least one lucid dream, twenty three percent have them monthly, and under one percent are proficient. That last number is why every lab study of lucid dreaming has to recruit from a tiny population, and why we still have no reliable way to induce the state.
• The induction protocol, in full: 65 degrees Fahrenheit, blackout curtains and earplugs, reality checks while awake, waking after five hours and staying up 30 to 120 minutes, a dream journal, and expecting rather than willing the sea turtle to appear.
• Memory is reconstruction, not playback, and both the self chapter and the Inside Out chapter turn on that fact. We build memories to fit the present narrative, which is why thinking of yourself as kind makes you remember the kind things. If the components of the self can be altered or wiped, a self persisting through time is not possible.
• The Illusion of Self argues against itself twice before finishing. The pure consciousness event is answered by noting that the feeling of emptiness is itself brain activity, and the "ghost telling you there are no ghosts" objection is answered by rejecting the analogy: we do not need a self to tell us there is no self, only evidence.
• Inside Out is missing a character, not a detail. Between Riley and her emotions there should be System 2, central cognition, seated in the prefrontal cortex alongside working memory and executive control. Without it the film implies an emotional determinism of behaviour. The essay then shows why the accurate version would collapse the film: central cognition is conscious, so Riley would have to be aware of her own unconscious.
• The Japanese circular track experiment is the cleanest result in the whole three hours. No junction, no signal, no obstacle, drivers asked only to hold a steady speed and distance, and the jam appears anyway from overcorrection and reaction times, propagating backwards up the queue and dissolving as organically as it formed.
• Safety measures that reduce vigilance make systems less safe, and this shows up in three separate chapters. Too many traffic signals produce more accidents. Emptier pandemic roads produced fewer crashes and a higher fatality rate. Post 9/11 security lowers the odds of a 9/11 and does nothing for the next black swan, which is Harari's paradox: knowledge that changes behaviour loses its relevance.
• Mediocristan and Extremistan have different physics. The heaviest person alive is under half a percent of a sample's total weight, because biology bounds him. One billionaire is close to ninety nine percent of the same sample's wealth, because money is a number in a book. The modern economy runs on the second, which is why it is where black swans nest.
• The Carrington event is the counterexample to Taleb's own frame, and the essay says so. A twelve percent chance in a decade, calculated in 2012, of a coronal mass ejection that today would cost trillions and take decades to repair. Not a black swan at all, and still nothing is done, which is the essay's argument for how blind we must be to the real ones.
• YOLO is Aristippus of Cyrene, fourth century BC, and Epicurus rewrote it by redefining pleasure as tranquility rather than ecstasy. Nozick's experience machine is the argument that kills strict hedonism: offered unlimited pleasure, people choose real pain instead.
• Both dream theories and laughter theories are scored on testability rather than plausibility. Freud, Jung and expectation fulfilment all fall to the same objection. Activation synthesis falls to two actual studies. Of the four theories of laughter, benign violation survives best, and Provine's field data reframes the question entirely: only ten to twenty percent of overheard laughter follows anything resembling a joke, and we are thirty times more likely to laugh with company than alone.
• Heroism is culturally indexed, and the proof is the Sawi reading Judas as the hero of the Gospel in 1962 because they valued trickery over sacrifice. The anti hero is better defined by moral inconsistency than by grit, which is why the classic case is Spider-Man rather than Deadpool.
• Traditional heroes are enforcers of moral absolutism, which is the essay's real reason for disliking Superman. He would not punish the man who stole medicine for his child, but he will protect the system that put the man in that position. The anti hero's popularity tracks institutional failure, which is why the 1960s post westerns and the Joker era rhyme.
• Falling in love is a feeling, staying in love is a decision. The seven Greek words are Eros, Philia, Ludus, Storge, Philautia, Pragma and Agape, and the essay's diagnosis is that Philia is the one dying: millions of followers, very few friends.
• Nostalgia was a diagnosable mental disorder from 1688 until one lunch in Southampton in 1999. Sedikides was told he was depressed for missing his old life, disagreed, and turned the condition into a resource. The distinction that matters is positive nostalgia, which makes you thankful and moves you forward, versus negative nostalgia, which is usually an experience you never gave your brain time to mourn.
• The compilation ends inside a contradiction it does not resolve. Chapter three argues that the continuous self is a story the brain writes on demand. Chapter fourteen concludes that what makes you you is your specific set of memories, which tell you that you are a continuous being. Both arguments are made well, and the final answer is a question: do we exist in time, or does time exist in us?

Chapters

The creator set five chapters across nearly three hours, marked in bold below. Because five markers is not a usable map for a fourteen part compilation, the finer entries between them are derived from transcript position and are accurate to within roughly a minute.

• 0:00 Countdown
• 0:48 Why humans took over: networking, and the variety of brains
• 1:33 The problem of other minds: how would I know you think at all
• 2:04 Give yourself up, and why you play non bliss in order to feel bliss
• 2:52 Sponsor break: therapy, impostor syndrome and BetterHelp
• 5:00 Consciousness: The Fundamental Reality
• 5:18 Victim of the world, or the world
• 5:39 The basketball analogy: get the ball out of your hands
• 6:13 Alan Watts, and the God you are pretending not to be
• 7:00 Roll the clock back to the Big Bang and you were there
• 8:50 The forest, the roots, and why energy cannot be destroyed
• 9:41 Ego death, experienced while making this video
• 10:34 The cliff, the void, and the corrupted save file
• 11:44 Why language shatters: there is no someone left to report it
• 12:42 Entropy, the network of tunnels, and the hourglass
• 13:46 How to Lucid Dream
• 14:34 What a lucid dream is, and the 1975 documentation
• 15:27 What it feels like, and the emotional revelations
• 16:57 The numbers: 55 percent, 23 percent, under 1 percent
• 17:26 Sleep hygiene: 65 Fahrenheit, blackout curtains, earplugs
• 17:45 Reality testing, and pushing your fingers through your palm
• 18:58 Wake back to bed: five hours down, then 30 to 120 minutes up
• 19:33 The lucid dreaming industry, and galantamine
• 21:10 Expect the sea turtle, do not will it
• 21:58 The benefits, and the dissociation risk
• 23:30 In the lab: eye movements as a signal out of the dream
• 24:34 Mary Arnold-Forster and dual consciousness
• 25:48 The clinical payoff: diagnosing consciousness after brain injury
• 26:06 The Illusion of Self
• 26:39 The photograph held up to the mirror
• 28:00 The I and the me
• 28:40 Memory is reconstruction, not playback
• 29:58 The illusion of self, defined
• 30:57 The soul, and the Buddhist doctrine of anatta
• 32:19 Terrifying and liberating: nothing can die that never was
• 33:28 Why the illusion exists: without a self there is no competition
• 34:20 Objection one: the pure consciousness event
• 35:07 Objection two: a ghost telling us there are no ghosts
• 36:21 The limit case: grandmother, and advanced Alzheimer's
• 37:37 We were not and we will not be. We simply are
• 38:00 The Psychology of "Inside Out"
• 38:54 Riley's move, the broccoli pizza, and the five emotions
• 39:51 Core memories, personality islands, and the bus
• 40:47 What the film gets right about emotional harmony
• 41:43 What it gets wrong, one: memory as playback
• 42:43 Two: amnesia patients and twins separated at birth
• 42:58 Three: the missing character, central cognition
• 43:28 System 1 and System 2, from the late 1950s
• 44:55 Emotional determinism, and why it is bad for kids
• 45:30 Why Pixar did it anyway: Pete Docter and the demands of story
• 46:10 Running the counterfactual: the accurate film would collapse
• 47:55 A prediction about Inside Out 2
• 48:21 Traffic: the 214 mile São Paulo jam of 11 June 2014
• 50:08 The human factor, and New York as an applied psychology lab
• 50:49 Ian Walker's helmet and wig experiment
• 51:47 Why too many signals make drivers worse
• 52:19 Hans Monderman and shared space: remove the kerbs
• 53:08 Rubbernecking, and drivers contemplating their own mortality
• 54:15 Nonlinearity: one percent onto transit cuts traffic by over twenty
• 55:13 Emptier pandemic roads, fewer crashes, more deaths
• 56:04 The Japanese circular track, with no bottleneck at all
• 57:26 The phantom traffic jam
• 58:28 Forecasting: Google Maps, and ninety percent accuracy in India
• 59:49 Self driving cars, and the mixed road problem
• 1:01:19 Traffic makes the world larger than it needs to be
• 1:02:13 Why do we dream: six years of your life
• 1:02:47 The five stages, and glycine paralysis ninety minutes in
• 1:03:45 The limbic system, and why dreams take frightening forms
• 1:04:30 Sleep paralysis, and nightmares leaking into the room
• 1:05:47 Freud's window into the unconscious, and zero evidence
• 1:07:08 Jung and the collective unconscious
• 1:08:12 Falling, naked at work, and being chased
• 1:09:38 Activation synthesis: dreams mean nothing at all
• 1:10:32 The 2006 divorce study and the 3D maze study
• 1:11:49 Continual activation, and expectation fulfilment
• 1:13:28 Lucid dreaming as evidence: van Eeden 1913 and the hybrid state
• 1:15:27 Can you be conscious of deep sleep? Questionable at best
• 1:17:08 Precognitive dreams: the Titanic's nineteen validated reports
• 1:18:46 Lincoln's dream, and the bodyguard he sent home
• 1:20:12 Dreams probably serve many purposes, not one
• 1:20:53 YOLO: Drake in 2012, and the fourth century BC
• 1:21:19 Aristippus of Cyrene against delayed gratification
• 1:23:08 One in four people will have a disability by sixty
• 1:23:51 Epicurus redefines pleasure as tranquility
• 1:25:40 Moving pleasure and static pleasure
• 1:26:32 Three arguments against hedonism
• 1:28:17 Nozick's experience machine, and why nobody plugs in
• 1:28:53 Lincoln's poem: there's pleasure in it too
• 1:29:45 The trap: how a fleeting pleasure becomes an addiction
• 1:31:23 You are a chicken
• 1:32:47 The black swan, defined
• 1:33:36 Mediocristan: the 2,000 pound outlier that changes nothing
• 1:34:13 Extremistan: the billionaire who is ninety nine percent of the sample
• 1:36:15 Survivorship bias, and Taleb's cemetery
• 1:37:23 9/11, and the retrospective distortion
• 1:38:21 Harari's paradox: knowledge that changes behaviour loses relevance
• 1:38:55 The ludic fallacy, GameStop and AMC
• 1:39:48 Monoculture, and the day Pakistan turned off YouTube
• 1:40:42 The Carrington event, and the twelve percent we ignore
• 1:42:16 Be the butcher, not the butchered
• 1:42:40 One in 400 trillion: we are all the black swans
• 1:43:06 Game theory: what actually counts as a game
• 1:44:12 Sudoku is not a game. Tic tac toe is
• 1:45:27 The five conditions every model assumes
• 1:46:59 The prisoner's dilemma, with the actual numbers
• 1:47:59 Nash equilibrium, and why both prisoners talk
• 1:49:29 Coordination games, principal agent, biological altruism
• 1:51:13 The regress: whose mind is the decision made in
• 1:51:47 Where game theory fails, starting with rationality
• 1:52:27 Apple against Samsung, and the littered road
• 1:54:02 We are all constantly in the game
• 1:54:27 A confession: I do not like Superman
• 1:55:36 Joker and both Deadpools: the top three R rated films
• 1:56:04 Why the anti hero is so hard to define
• 1:57:17 The Sawi tribe, and Judas as the hero of the Gospel
• 1:57:45 Moral consistency, and Spider-Man as a classic anti hero
• 1:59:12 Deadpool: the right thing for the wrong reason
• 2:00:53 Moral absolutism, and heroes as its enforcers
• 2:02:31 Why Superman is a champion of the status quo
• 2:03:16 The anti hero as outsider, and who gets cast as one
• 2:04:03 The post westerns got there first
• 2:05:48 Reagan, Thatcher, and the return of absolutism
• 2:06:38 What replaces the age of the anti hero
• 2:07:23 Seven Greek words for love
• 2:08:10 Eros, and the age old question of love versus lust
• 2:09:10 Three stages: testosterone, then dopamine and adrenaline
• 2:09:59 Philia, and why friendship is dying
• 2:10:46 Ludus: love that is casual, fleeting, and not lust
• 2:11:44 Storge: the kidney you would give, and the charger you would not
• 2:13:20 Philautia, Aristotle, and loving yourself first
• 2:14:24 Pragma, and the question: is love a feeling or a choice
• 2:15:17 Falling in love is a feeling, staying in love is a decision
• 2:15:51 Agape: love that expects nothing back
• 2:16:17 Is love biological or cultural
• 2:17:19 The longest study on happiness
• 2:18:15 Loneliness: looked at but not seen
• 2:18:32 Aristophanes, Zeus, and the search for your other half
• 2:19:29 We are already complete
• 2:19:53 Why we laugh: the tense dinner, and the cough
• 2:20:46 Every other behaviour is explained. Laughter is not
• 2:21:29 Plato's theory: laughter as scorn
• 2:22:33 The Puritans outlaw comedies
• 2:23:50 Freud's relief theory, demonstrated with a fake story
• 2:25:09 Why relief theory fails, and Mitch Hedberg's escalator
• 2:26:15 Incongruity theory, and the dog that bit my ankle
• 2:27:47 Benign violation theory, 2010, and the fire alarm
• 2:28:55 Provine: only 10 to 20 percent of laughter follows a joke
• 2:29:27 Thirty times more likely to laugh with company
• 2:30:14 Laughter as social glue, which explains the cold open
• 2:31:33 The dark side: the inside joke as an act of exclusion
• 2:32:31 What if Black Panther was real
• 2:33:53 Would you love a foreign king with superhuman powers
• 2:34:55 Killmonger's question: where was Wakanda
• 2:36:39 The hereditary monarchy problem: what about the next guy
• 2:37:28 The Boys, and the fear of the ultra powerful
• 2:38:33 If Black Panther exists, so does everyone else
• 2:39:14 Civil War, and the Sokovia Accords
• 2:40:46 A superhuman arms race, and why it is not hypothetical
• 2:41:46 The Epic of Gilgamesh was a superhero story
• 2:43:18 The hero's journey as a formula for personal growth
• 2:44:18 Nostalgia: the empty street, and the nine a.m. alarm
• 2:44:56 We remember the past without the acne
• 2:45:56 Johannes Hofer classified nostalgia as a disorder
• 2:46:11 Southampton, 1999: Sedikides is diagnosed with depression
• 2:47:28 Bittersweet, and Lincoln's ruined childhood home
• 2:48:18 Positive nostalgia and negative nostalgia
• 2:49:18 The one emotion nobody does to you
• 2:49:54 Disney, the Lion King, and nostalgia that backfires
• 2:50:39 Who am I: every atom replaced every five years
• 2:51:16 What makes you you are your specific memories
• 2:52:05 A year on lockdown, TBT, and phones full of memories
• 2:53:22 LeBron, Jordan, and the nostalgia factor
• 2:54:29 Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us

Notable quotes

"Consciousness leaves out more than it takes in, and due to this it leaves out important things, things that would relieve us if we knew them." (0:03)

"There's no way I can go to your head and see things 100% from your perspective. I can't know what you're thinking, or if you can even think in the first place." (1:33)

"Do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world?" (5:18)

"The point of the game is to have the ball in your hand for the least amount of time, to constantly be passing it to someone else." (5:39)

"We tend to search for how the universe came into being, but we're just the universe trying to understand itself." (8:18)

"Your death is not the end of you. It's the death of your ego." (9:39)

"It's as if your slate was wiped clean, your character save file was corrupted, but you're still in the game." (11:44)

"You are the observer and the observable." (12:34)

"The universe will stop by, take the hourglass, flip it over, and whatever made me me will then become something entirely different." (13:30)

"Instead of insisting that the turtle will show up, expect it to be there." (21:10)

"My brain convinces me that I am still me." (27:57)

"Memories are our brain's reconstruction of the past experiences. We create these memories to fit the present narrative." (28:44)

"We don't need a self to tell us there is no self. We only need the evidence." (35:53)

"It does not transcend death. It does not exist through time. We were not and we won't be. We simply are." (37:50)

"Between Riley and her emotions there's nothing." (43:11)

"Central cognition and emotions are often competing with each other, but there's no necessary hierarchy that determines who wins. It's like a disorderly scrum." (44:30)

"Everyone thinks they're a good driver until they aren't." (54:13)

"A traffic jam self generates using only our reaction times, and often it dissipates as organically as it emerges." (57:30)

"Many of you watching might even agree with this despite the fact that there is absolutely zero evidence to back this account. It is pretty much unfalsifiable." (1:06:53)

"Participants were much better, ten times better in fact, at getting through a complex 3D maze if they had napped and dreamed of the maze before their second attempt." (1:11:00)

"It's highly likely that many thousands of people will dream about a sinking ship on any given night. Probably tonight too." (1:18:04)

"The absence of pain is pleasure, and vice versa." (1:26:17)

"Even with the option of the most pleasurable thing in the world, people would rather have pain that's real. Whatever real means." (1:28:45)

"Given the thousand days worth of evidence, the chicken's trust in its owner was ironically at its highest level when it was eventually slaughtered." (1:32:15)

"Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so, because people who fail don't seem to write memoirs." (1:36:58)

"Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless, but knowledge that changes behaviour loses its relevance." (1:38:26)

"I worry less about advertised and sensational risks, more about the vicious hidden ones." (1:42:27)

"If you are alive, whatever that means, in the end we're actually all the black swans we've been trying to avoid the entire time." (1:42:55)

"You are no longer making a decision based on what you think is right. Rather you're anticipating what your opponent thinks is right and simply reacting to it." (1:51:13)

"We're just trying to win the game of life, and the reason to win is so that you can be free of it." (1:54:10)

"To me, Superman is boring." (1:55:21)

"Ironically enough, the man of tomorrow is a champion of the status quo." (2:02:34)

"Anti heroes, by their very existence, demand change." (2:03:52)

"This love is being able to give someone a kidney without hesitation, but not your phone charger. Even when in truth only one of those is easily replaceable." (2:12:33)

"Falling in love is a feeling, but staying in love is a decision." (2:15:17)

"Being looked at but not being seen. Being heard but not being listened to." (2:18:15)

"Only 10 to 20% of laughter came from anything resembling jokes. The rest came from everyday communication." (2:29:08)

"We're 30 times more likely to laugh with other people than we are alone." (2:29:30)

"Nostalgia made me feel that my life had roots and continuity. It made me feel good about myself and my relationships. It provided a texture to my life and gave me strength to move forward." (2:46:56)

"As memories cloud our brain, there's pleasure in it too." (2:49:45)

"Even on those days, nostalgia has the power to bring us hope and make us realize that we all have a story that is still being written." (2:54:22)

"Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us?" (2:54:31)

Where it stands

The essay's own habit is to score theories on testability rather than plausibility, so it is fair to apply the same standard back to it. Most of what it reports is solid, and a few things are not.

Strongest ground. The nostalgia research is the most robust claim in the three hours. Constantine Sedikides' Southampton lunch is documented, and the programme it started has produced a real body of work reclassifying nostalgia from disorder to resource. Robert Provine's field observation that only ten to twenty percent of overheard laughter follows anything joke shaped, and that we laugh far more in company than alone, is genuine data and it does reframe the whole philosophical literature on humour. The circular track experiment is real, published by Sugiyama and colleagues in 2008, and the phenomenon it produced is a well characterized traffic wave. Hans Monderman's shared space work, Ian Walker's helmet study, Nozick's experience machine, the 1975 lucid dreaming eye signal, and the dual process account of mind are all reported accurately.

Where the numbers are softer than they sound. "Every five years every single atom in your body will have been replaced" is a popular figure rather than a measured one. Turnover varies enormously by tissue, and some structures, including tooth enamel, the crystallin proteins in the lens of the eye, and the DNA in some cortical neurons, are effectively never replaced. "The odds of being born are one in four hundred trillion" is a widely circulated internet figure with no rigorous derivation, and the essay half admits it by immediately noting that such a thing cannot really be predicted. "One in four people will have a disability by the age of sixty" is in the right neighbourhood for common disability statistics but is given without a source. The nineteen validated Titanic premonitions trace back to the parapsychology literature rather than to a mainstream study, and the essay's own arithmetic rebuttal is the correct treatment.

One internal contradiction on sleep. At 15:09 the lucid dreaming chapter calls REM "our fourth and final deepest stage of normal sleep." At 1:02:56 the dreams chapter calls REM stage five of five. Neither matches current staging, which uses N1, N2, N3 and REM, and in which N3 is the deep slow wave stage while REM is not deep at all in that sense. The essay effectively corrects itself at 1:15:27, when it argues that being conscious of deep sleep is implausible precisely because the brain there is far more synchronized and deeply unconscious than in almost any other state, which is true of N3 and not of REM.

Where physics is being used as metaphor. The argument at 9:05 that your energy will continue forever, and that you are therefore continuous with the universe, is conservation of energy doing work it cannot do. Conservation says the quantity is preserved. It says nothing about the persistence of a pattern, an identity or an experience, which is what the passage wants it to underwrite. The Big Bang argument at 7:00 has the same shape: the atoms in you do trace back, and that is a fact about matter rather than about you.

One drug worth a caution. Galantamine is described as available over the counter as a supplement, which is true in the United States and not in many other jurisdictions, where it is a prescription Alzheimer's medication. It is a cholinesterase inhibitor with real cardiac and gastrointestinal effects, and the lucid dreaming evidence base for it is small.

On Freud. "Absolutely zero evidence" is stronger than the situation warrants. The fairer version, and the one the essay itself lands on a sentence later, is that the framework does not generate falsifiable predictions, which is a different and more damaging problem than being contradicted.

On sourcing and dating. The Sawi reading of Judas as the hero of the Gospel comes from Don Richardson's own missionary memoir, so it is a single sourced first person account of a 1962 encounter, and it carries the framing of the person who was trying to convert them. The claim that Joker and the two Deadpool films are the top three highest grossing R rated films of all time was true when that segment was first published and has since been overtaken. The Inside Out chapter predicts what the sequel will and will not include, which dates it to before June 2024, while this compilation was published on 18 October 2024. Being a stitched collection of previously released essays, the rigour genuinely varies from chapter to chapter, and the most careful writing is in the traffic, dreams and black swan segments.

The unresolved tension, which is not a flaw. Chapter three spends twelve minutes establishing that the continuous self is a story the brain writes on demand, then chapter fourteen concludes that what makes you you is your specific memories, which tell you that you are a continuous being growing linearly with time. The compilation never reconciles them, and it does not pretend to. It ends on the question instead, which given the subject is the honest place to stop.

Resources mentioned

People

• Alan Watts, quoted at 6:13 on everyone being fundamentally the alternate reality
• Mary Arnold-Forster, author of Studies in Dreams and originator of the dual consciousness account of lucid dreaming
• Keith Hearne and Stephen LaBerge, whose eye signal work is the 1975 documentation the essay refers to
• Frederik van Eeden, who coined the term lucid dreaming in 1913
• Pete Docter, who developed Inside Out with neuroscientists and psychologists
• Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
• Ian Walker, the traffic psychologist behind the helmet, no helmet and wig experiment
• Hans Monderman, Dutch traffic engineer, originator of shared space
• Sigmund Freud, for The Interpretation of Dreams and for relief theory of laughter
• Carl Jung, for the collective unconscious
• Joe Griffin, for expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming
• Drake, for The Motto and YOLO
• Aristippus of Cyrene, student of Socrates and founder of hedonism
• Epicurus, who redefined pleasure as tranquility
• Robert Nozick, for the experience machine
• Abraham Lincoln, for the funeral dream, the assassination two weeks later, and the poem about his ruined childhood home
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, source of Mediocristan, Extremistan and the ludic fallacy
• Bertrand Russell, whose inductivist bird the chicken parable descends from
• Yuval Noah Harari, for the knowledge paradox in Homo Deus
• Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, as examples of survivorship bias and of laughter as scorn
• John Nash, for the Nash equilibrium
• Don Richardson, the missionary whose Sawi congregation read Judas as the hero
• Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, on the revival of absolutist morality
• Aristotle, on friendly feelings as an extension of feelings for oneself
• Plato, for the Symposium and for laughter as scorn, plus Aristophanes and Zeus
• Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, on laughter as intellectual superiority
• Søren Kierkegaard and philosopher Michael Clark, whose patches to incongruity theory still leave it too inclusive
• Mitch Hedberg, for the escalator joke that relief theory cannot explain
• Robert R. Provine, whose field study found only 10 to 20 percent of laughter follows a joke
• Chadwick Boseman and Christopher Nolan
• Johannes Hofer, who named nostalgia and classified it as a disorder
• Constantine Sedikides, whose 1999 lunch at the University of Southampton began the modern research
• LeBron James and Michael Jordan, on the greatest of all time argument

Ideas, theories and terms

• The problem of other minds and personal identity
• Ego death, LSD and psilocybin mushrooms
• Entropy and conservation of energy
• Lucid dreaming, REM sleep, the sleep cycle and slow wave sleep
• Sleep hygiene, reality testing, the dream diary and galantamine
• Sleep paralysis, glycine, the limbic system, the amygdala, the hippocampus and the cingulate cortex
• Disorders of consciousness, which is the clinical prize for a neural signature of self awareness
• Reconstructive memory, bundle theory, the soul, and anattā in Buddhism
• Amnesia, twin studies and Alzheimer's disease
• Dual process theory, the prefrontal cortex, working memory and executive functions
• Risk compensation, rubbernecking, the traffic wave and the Sugiyama circular track paper
• Activation synthesis, dream interpretation, motivated reasoning and falsifiability
• Precognition and the butterfly effect
• Delayed gratification
• Black swan theory, survivorship bias, epistemology, coronal mass ejections and the Carrington event
• Game theory, the prisoner's dilemma, zero sum games, minimax, coordination games, the principal agent problem, Hotelling's law, evolutionary game theory, altruism in animals and the tragedy of the commons
• The antihero, moral absolutism, the revisionist Western, the counterculture of the 1960s, the Vietnam War and the Great Recession
• The seven Greek words for love: Eros, Philia, Ludus, Storge, Philautia, Pragma and Agape
• Testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, adrenaline and norepinephrine, plus Helen Fisher's three stage model
• Theories of humor, benign violation theory, the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on humour and the laugh track
• Afrofuturism, the Scramble for Africa, segregation and apartheid
• Gene therapy and human enhancement
• The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, Heracles, Homer and the hero's journey
• Nostalgia and Throwback Thursday

Films, shows, books and characters

• Inside Out and Inside Out 2, from Pixar
• Superman, Batman, Wolverine, Deadpool, Spider-Man and Captain America
• Joker, Deadpool, Deadpool 2, Logan and The Dark Knight
• Black Panther, T'Challa, Erik Killmonger and Wakanda, from Marvel
• The Boys and Vought International
• Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Iron Man, the Hulk and Thanos
• The Big Bang Theory
• The Lion King, Sonic the Hedgehog and Tom and Jerry, from Disney and others, as nostalgia bait that backfired
• Harry Potter, cited by Taleb as evidence of a global monoculture

Events, places and organizations

• The 2014 FIFA World Cup and São Paulo
• The Titanic
• The September 11 attacks and the TSA
• The GameStop short squeeze and AMC
• The blocking of YouTube in Pakistan
• The English Interregnum, when the Puritans closed the theatres
• The Colosseum
• The African Union and the United Nations
• The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest study on happiness
• Apple and Samsung, locked in a permanent advertising equilibrium
• Google Maps, Google Photos, Snapchat and Facebook
• r/LucidDreaming, the subreddit with over 400,000 members
• BetterHelp, the sponsor read at 2:52
• Aperture, the channel, and the video itself