r word. Carrot. See, that didn't work. There was only one word that could possibly describe that moment.

Well, today is going to be a little bit mind-blowing, I promise you, and we're going to build into it. So watch how this is not just a series of little snippets, but by the end you will say to yourself, my God, it formed a symphony. At first I thought it was just going to be the oboe and then a little timpani, but suddenly I realized it all came together into a symphony. That's what's going to happen today. That's how good it is.

Starting with a question that had been really on my mind lately, and I wondered if it is just me. And watch what happens when I ask this question, because I did it on Twitter. Watch what's going to happen in the comments. Is it my imagination or have people changed because of the pandemic? I mean basic personality changes, big stuff. Go watch the comments. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Now some people say no, but oh my God, did I get a lot of response to that. A lot of hypotheses about why that might be the case.

Now hypothesis number one has to be, what's the top hypothesis? If I've taught you anything, it's just in your mind, right? The top hypothesis until it's replaced by something better, which is likely to happen. But your first thought should be that's just in your mind. All right, now that's just healthy thinking. I'm not telling you it's just in your mind. I'm telling you that would be a healthy way to approach anything unusual. That's probably in our minds. But let's see if we can tease it out a little bit.

Here's a couple of things that smart people said, and I'm going to put them together. One of the things that Naval said, Naval Ravikant, for those of you new to the live stream or haven't heard his name before, smartest person in the world maybe. I mean I don't know that for sure, but if you were to just judge by things he has said and done, maybe the smartest person in the world. All right, so you can go Google him and find out yourself. But Naval, I'm pretty sure it was Naval. Do me a fact check because I'm doing this by memory. I think he said toward the beginning of the pandemic that one of the things he predicted is that it would accelerate everything that was going to happen anyway. So instead of ten years, things would happen in one or two.

Now how was his prediction? How was that prediction? It's Naval Ravikant, R-A-V-I-K-A-N-T, creator of AngelList, etc. So how was this prediction? Did the pandemic speed up everything? It sped up vaccinations. It sped up commuting, you know, going away. It sped up online buying. It sped up DoorDash and food delivery. It sped up a lot of things. And I think there are probably various technologies that got a kickstart.

I could speak for myself. I would say that there are things that I had put off that I brought forward just because I had time because we were locked down. So even the upgrades I did to the live stream are things that probably would have taken longer, but I accelerated them because of the pandemic.

Now there might be other things that slowed down, like in the short run the supply chains, but in the long run inflation got worse fast. Just the whole international relations changed fast. Deaths were, yeah, even death was accelerated. It's like everything was faster. So I would say that was a darn good prediction.

Now I'm going to combine this with something I heard recently that Brett Weinstein and I think Heather Heying were saying, and I wish, tell me the name of their new book because I'm such an idiot. I just looked at it and then I forgot to write it down. In the comments just say the name of their new book. Apparently it's pretty good. I hear good things about it. A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide. Thank you.

But I don't know if this is, I think this might be from the book, but an interview I heard him talk about how humans are the most adaptable of really anything that's alive at this point. Now that makes sense, right? That we adapted to all kinds of weather and all kinds of diets and all kinds of everything. And now we're finding this, that we're adapting faster and faster than we ever had to because the rate of change in the external world is so fast that we're trying to keep up with the changes that are happening in the environment.

So we've gone from the most adaptive creatures to having to super-adapt. And then the pandemic hits and suddenly the pandemic breaks all the laws. All the rules are different. Like everything you took for granted is in play now. Everything. Now you've got a super adaptive species who's trying to figure out how to adapt, but we don't know what the hell is going on. What are we adapting to exactly? Like everything's changing. All right, I'll adapt to that. Well that's changing. Okay, I got used to that. Okay, that changed.

So we're basically in this state of insane flux because we're so adaptive, but that doesn't work if the environment is changing faster than you can adapt. And that's where we're at the moment. What would you expect to happen? What happened?

Here's just my personal hypothesis. I'll just throw it in the pile. I think, and a lot of you said some version of this, I think people were revealed for who they were all along. I think that everybody became more of what they already were. Everybody became the extreme of what they started from. If you had a little bit of a weight problem, what happened to you? A lot of people gained weight. If you were a fitness person, and I would say I would be in that category, or even if your mind was oriented toward that way, what happened to you during the pandemic? You got fitter.

I'm at my peak fitness right now. Like I don't want you to have to imagine this, but naked I look better than I've looked at any time in my life and I'm pushing 65.

And a lot of people would say the same thing. There are a whole bunch of you on here who would say the same thing. Leave out the naked part because we don't need to think about that. But the point is that, let me say that, lazy people became lazier. Just not along as I say these things because I know you're going to agree. Lazy people became lazier. Cheaters cheated more. Cheaters cheated more. People who were, let's say, achievement oriented, and again that's the category I would be in, like I'm always thinking about trying to make something happen, achievement oriented people were even more so. They went into hyper mode. Smart people became brilliant. People who were growing a little grew a lot. Things that were failing slowly failed fast.

You know the little stores on Main Street in my town, it's like they got razed away like leaves during the pandemic, but they were going to fail anyway. It just wasn't going to be that fast.

So here are some other things that happened which would explain in many ways why we're so different. I think that people who were nice became more nice. The people who were biased toward helping people and empathy saw a crisis and they said I was born for this. Literally born for it. Because if you were born as a sort of empathy kind of a person, well a crisis is actually what you are born for. You know, not in a literal way, but you know what I'm talking about. You're designed perfectly for a crisis because you care about people, so you jump right in and help.

So the people who were likely to help were very helpful. The people who were likely to be worthless probably became more worthless than ever. Everything became more extreme.

But the other things that you have to throw in the mix is what happened to porn consumption during the pandemic. I don't have data but I'm going to take a guess. Anybody want to take a guess without the benefit of any data? Probably through the roof. Through the roof.

I talked about the series on HBO I think called Euphoria. It's about young people and you know working through the culture that's too much drugs and too much porn and all that. And one of the things that the series, which really tries to hit something close to reality for people in that age group, it talks about how it's an entire generation that only learned sex from porn only and no other source. Because by the time your high school or your parents got around to it you'd already consumed so much that it wasn't likely your opinion was going to get changed too much.

So apparently even two young people looking to hook up is going to look like porn or it's going to look like their imitation of the best they can do to look like what they've seen because we're an imitative species. So what's that doing to people? Well something. I mean I'm not even going to give you an opinion. You know how that's good or bad. You can make your own opinions. But it's definitely different. If you don't think that'll change your brain, let me ask you, you all think that porn changes your brain, right? Like it actually rewires you. You all get that, right? It's only a question of how much you do. If you don't do much it's not much of a big deal. If you do a lot it would just turn you into it and you become it. You merge with it basically. So there's that.

Then there's the whole commuting thing. What happened when people were forced to no longer be with their second family? For a lot of people, people had two families, didn't they? They had the work family and then they had the home family. And then the work family went away. What happens if you're buying stocks and you're not diversified? Anybody? You're buying individual stocks and you're insufficiently diversified, meaning not enough different stocks, you're going to get wiped out sooner or later. Maybe not right away, but if you're not diversified you're gonna get wiped out. You have a 90% chance.

So there are a whole bunch of people who had their social life diversified, meaning you could have a bad day with your spouse but at least you'd go to work and there's your friends. Or you could have a bad day at work but at least you could go home and your spouse is nice to you. What happens when you just take away all the diversification of your social life and then what used to be this rich social life becomes your family members? I'm sorry to say this but there's nobody you can get sicker of faster than your own family members, right? And they're the people you love the most. Yeah, you still care about them the most. Love them. No change in that stuff. That's pretty much baked in. But oh my God, what stress to put on marriages.

I think that in the same way that all the small businesses got wiped out by the pandemic, I think a lot of relationships got wiped out by the pandemic. I mean I think the pandemic just, and I don't know that we see the full result of that. That's going to work through the system. So almost everything was faster.

And here's what's happened. I feel like, let me tell you my impression of what's different. So here's what's different for me. You know I talk a lot about the simulation, too much, but how it feels to me is that I can see the machinery of reality in a way that I couldn't see before. Or that let's say maybe I knew about the machinery of reality intellectually, just sort of philosophically, but I couldn't see it. I feel at this point I can see it. It's almost like there was a machine that had a solid front and now it's a glass front. The machine is exactly the same as it was but now I can see the mechanisms. And I believe that you're having that experience too. And it feels as though society itself just had its software rebooted and we all went to a higher level of awareness.

I'm going to make that case with the headlines today. So here's the theme. The theme that I just developed is that the headlines themselves, you can see the machinery behind them like you've never seen before. Let me run through some examples.

Kyle Becker, who I tell you all the time you should follow him on Twitter, he's got a great sort of great reframings and lots of scoops and stuff on the news, and he gives us this a little bit of context about the January 6th situation. He says the Democrats contested presidential elections three times since 2001. They even argued voting machines were suspect. There were riots in D.C. at Trump's inauguration. The amount of memory holing these left-wing news networks do is truly impressive.

Now you see the machinery, right? When I read that you say oh that's a Rupar. In other words the entire January 6 narrative only works because, as Kyle points out, they leave out the context. If you put the context in, if you reverse Rupar it. Now I'm not sure that all of you would see this as instantly even a few years ago, but now it's just automatic, isn't it? You just see the machine.

Here's some more examples. Lindsey Graham apparently said about Trump potentially pardoning the January 6 rioters, he said quote, I think it's inappropriate. So Lindsey Graham thinks it would be inappropriate if Trump became president again to pardon those people.

Here's Joel Pollak giving you some context. He says I want to hear him explain why the guy with the buffalo horns got four years while an FBI lawyer who doctored an email to deceive a FISA court in the Russia collusion probe got community service.

Now you probably haven't heard it so clearly and well stated before, but you could see that machinery, couldn't you? We could already see that these were political prisoners. It's just Joel helps us put it in context there, but you can see