Good morning John, it is likely my last video of 2015. 2020...2? 2022? Juicy Crust Pinskidan, it's gonna be 2023.

John I'm very grateful to you for sharing some thoughts about my books. I remember when the second was coming out and I was like talking to media about it and stuff and people were like "What's this about?" And I'm terrible at that.  So I said like the first book I kinda wrote to try and like share more clearly what the internet is actually like and this book though, the second one is more like what I think it's gonna be like. And it is legitimately weird to watch as various parallels hit. I just think that fiction writing and reading is a really good place to find insight. Because when I think about Elon and Twitter, it's very hard not to get caught up in a lot of the details and a lot of like my biggest concerns about society. But when I'm thinking about Peter and Altus, it's like  "oh yeah, yeah, I get that, I know all about that."

It's very easy to manufacture whatever reasoning you need to do the thing and get the thing that you are hungry for and there's not that many things that people get hungry for. It's like food is one of them, water, air, joy, sex, meaning, love. It's a pretty short list. And so it makes perfect sense for there be a character who will do literally the opposite of what he has spent his whole public life championing in order to get status 'cause it brings him meaning and he desperately wants that.

We are very bad, like research shows this. We are very bad at arguing with ourselves. We almost always end up believing what we want to believe. And that's a super fun thing to say about other people, but it's less comfortable to say about ourselves, but it is true of all of us. And it's a good think to look at as we head into a new year, with things changing very fast. One thing I've learned about me is that I'm very good at becoming whatever an internet platform wants me to be. I just had a two go viral on Mastodon. I had the top two of the day...on Mastodon! I got good at Youtube and then Twitter and then TikTok and I like spending time in those places. They bring me joy, they bring me connection, they bring me meaning, they bring me attention.

So it's so hard to trust my instincts about whether it's good to spend time in those places and what to do while I'm there. Because I'm arguing with myself and myself wants to do it. So I don't know, like, should I do what we did for like the first ten years of this and just like vibe with what I think is interesting and fly towards the light like a moth. Or should I constantly be second guessing myself and wondering whether my like pro-social biology is being hacked by algorithms for anti-social aims that are resulting in epidemics of misinformation and disconnect and loneliness.

I guess, John, I need to do both, which is annoying because it's work! It's not just like job work either, it's like personal work. It's work I have to do on myself to understand my motivations. Gotta understand my responsibilities. That's a no, I don't want to. I don't want to do that. It sucks a little bit to feel conflicted about the things that bring you joy and how do we make progress unless we talk about problems, right? Like there isn't a way.

But I do honestly that there is damage done by never being able to see anything without also simultaneously critiquing. Like there is critique there, there's space for it, but you can also love it. All of the people I love, there is- they have space for critique, including myself.

Everything has room for improvement but nobody thinks that like room for improvement is synonymous with evil. Ahah, right? What I think I'm trying to get at is that I need to use the internet and-and internet platforms in ways where I think I'm engaging with problems than creating problems. More focused on doing work than on deepening conflict.

But I need to err on the side of being really quite sure, if it feels like it might be a little bit good, might be a little bit bad, I'm arguing with myself and myself is the person who's about to get a lot of attention and notoriety and status by tweeting or saying the thing that I'm not sure if it's good or bad. Are you? Are you not sure? Or do you just not want to look too hard at it? Yeah, I thought so.

John, I will see you in 2023.