Good morning, John. The year was 2016, when suddenly everybody started to talk about dumpster fires a lot. We even made a shirt—a 2016 dumpster fire shirt. We were so glad to be leaving that flaming pile of garbage in the past. And then we had 2017 and 2018 and 2019 and, oh my God, 2020 and then 2021 and 2022 and now, we've had 2023. Dumpster fires all the way down. And there are a number of things that make me very worried about 2024. Like, very. Like, very, very.

I am worried that artificial intelligence will make it even harder for young people to find a place in the American economy. A thing that is already very difficult to do considering a broad set of policies and systems that make sure that wealth goes to older people and not younger people. I'm worried about a rise in nationalism and nativism that has made things worse for a lot of people, including increased a lot of global conflicts that has resulted in the number of people dying and wars increasing for the last 3 years. And I'm fairly certain that it is going to increase again in 2024. I am certain, unlike a lot of my social media feed for some reason, that Donald Trump will be on the ballot in November and his mere existence there is way too close to him being president again—which is absolutely possible! I'm worried about a general attack on higher education which is absolutely enabled by that industry's inability to control its cost! Instead of talking about that, we just talk about culture war nonsense and I'm worried that the reason that we're doing that is the exact same reason as why there's more nationalism, which is the complete disintegration of our media landscape. And I am convinced that that has happened because platforms like TikTok and Facebook and YouTube are way more interested in getting people to spend more time on their platforms than they are in anything else, and the thing that is most sticky to most people is moral outrage. And I am worried that the people who are most harmed by any disruption, natural or man-made, are the ones who have the least. And I hear far too little about the cycles that perpetuate inequality quality, both globally and where I live.

So like this video is somewhat inaccurately titled. I said that I was gonna be optimistic and that I have spent more than half of it discussing why I'm terrified. But, here are three optimistic thoughts.

First: I don't think that we are letting generative AI have its way with us the way we did with content platforms. With Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and even TikTok, we're just sorta like, "Yeah, do it to me! Whatever! I like it! Let it--let whatever happens happen!" At the beginning of those things, there was so much optimism and very little push back, but the people and companies who produced the words and the art that these models were trained on are pushing back against that, in part because they did not give these companies permission to train their models on their art and words. I think that's gonna slow this thing down and I think slowing it down is probably good. Some people certainly disagree with me about that, but I think we've had a lot of shocks recently and I think it'd be good if there were more time between now at the next big giant shock.

Thought #2: Economically, uh, this has gone better than than I think anybody expected. Like, everybody sort of at the beginning of last year thought this was gonna be the start of a pretty big recession and that just didn't happen. The U.S. has had a stronger economy and labor market than pretty much any other developed country and it's also reined in inflation better than any developed country. And I understand that that doesn't mean that things are going great for everybody, but the fact that inflation has somewhat gotten under control means that we can lower interest rates again which will encourage investment which hopefully will mean more homes, and it will also mean more people able to sell their homes and get new interest rates somewhere else. Now that's not gonna fix the housing crisis, but it's directionally correct.

And Thought #3 is the big one and probably the one I'll get the most push back against, but since 2016, when the dumpster fire narrative truly began, we've been through two really massive shocks. First was the mass adoption of these many to many content platforms. Now, I know that that happened a lot before 2016. I've been on YouTube since 2007, but there was sort of a moment when everybody was suddenly there. And a lot of those people were new to the internet and how it worked and didn't maybe have some of the defenses that people who have been here for a long time have. I 100% believe that in the future we will look back on the advent of these content platforms as as significant a shift as the advent of the printing press. I might be wrong about that, but in general, the biggest shifts in humanity come along with shifts in communications technologies, whether that's the ability to speak, whether that's storytelling and plays, whether it's radio, whether it's the printing press. Revolutions and communications technologies always lead to societal upheaval.

And the second big shock is that we have been living through a pandemic that has killed millions of people, has disabled countless others, and that has resulted in a lot of people spending a lot of time isolated socially. And social isolation is very bad for people. Now, all that sounds like bad stuff, but here's the optimistic take on that: I think considering those twin shocks, which are huge, most people have actually handled this fairly well. Like it's very bad and very intense and yet I think there's some signs that we might be healing a bit. Like for a while, it seemed like the combination of the social isolation and fear of other people, plus like the outrage bait of social media platforms trying to keep you on them, resulted in a fair number of people in the population thinking that it was their job to suck. This might sound like a bit of a weird stat to pull on, but in the last year, incidents of disruptive passengers on airplanes went down 80%. I think that might not be a terrible metric for how society is doing as a whole, like I think maybe we should track that along with GDP. And meanwhile, a very good sign I think, is that people are posting less. They're not leaving Twitter for Threads, they're leaving Twitter for their group chat with their friends or they're leaving Twitter to go for a walk.

I think almost 10 years on, some immunities might be kicking in here a little bit. Now, obviously, there are a lot of people still posting through it, but there is some signs that people are just doing it less. People are not very forgiving of themselves, but they are even less forgiving of other people and their species as a whole. Like here is a thought that I will often catch myself having. "I can't believe that human beings—mammals who evolved to live inside of small group societies where any loss of status might literally result in death—are so bad at using many to many content platforms that have existed for less than 10 years and are largely optimized around the whims of like 12 weird guys in California." Like brain, cut us some slack! We invented agriculture like 5 minutes ago.

I don't think that I'm ultimately optimistic about humanity, like, I think we could really go either way, but what I am is forgiving. I think I'm a lot more forgiving of humanity than most people. We are the weirdest thing in the known universe, and like my least optimistic and most forgiving take about that is, "It's very hard to be this weird."

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

Surprise. I've changed clothes. I'm gonna be in Southern California in a couple of weeks doing my one-man stand-up comedy cancer show, which is a real thing. I'll be in Oxnard, Brea, San Diego, and downtown Los Angeles. That downtown Los Angeles show will get recorded and then eventually released in a way that I cannot yet discuss. But if you're around Southern California, this will be, I think, the only times I will ever do this show again so maybe the last time I'll ever do stand-up again because while I love it, I don't think I want to do it professionally. Seems like a thing that could definitely break your brain.