you make any breakthroughs in artificial intelligence today? I didn't. I really didn't do anything. So it almost doesn't matter how smart I am. I just have to be able to take care of myself and that's it.

The one percent of smart people who have always been with us are still doing what they always do. They invent the future and then we live in it. So it doesn't matter if the average person can memorize a poem. Somebody else said the other thing the kids can't do today — ever since the invention of writing, they haven't been able to memorize ten thousand word poems. I thought to myself that is so perfect. Because you know when the invention of writing came along, somebody probably said, all right, look, with all of this writing, kids are no longer going to be able to memorize 10,000 word poems like they can easily. So let's get rid of the writing, Gramps.

Yeah, Rush Limbaugh said ten percent carry the rest. It's way less than 10 percent if you're talking about the people who've invented the future, right? You know, Elon Musk isn't in the 10 percent. He's in the one percent.

So my argument will be this. I believe the smartphones have made us different and they've made some people smarter in some ways, but it also probably changed their attention span. Did that hurt us? It depends. It might hurt some people in some weird ways. What I imagine is that the average person can scroll through a screen way faster than the ancients could have. I feel like they optimized for insane amounts of information.

So what does a kid optimize for in the boring past? In the boring past we were optimized to survive boredom. That's all I remember of my youth: pain and boredom. That's it. Pain and boredom. That was my entire youth. I was either in pain or I was bored. I only had two reactions. So it was horrible.

Now kids are full of so much stimulation. Do you think that a kid today is more or less able to handle complexity? I don't know. I mean, I'm just throwing out some suggestions. They might be more. It's possible less. It's possible less. But I think more. I think more because they handle complexity every day with their interfaces and social everything. But they may be giving up some interpersonal skills. They might be giving up some concentration. But do they need it?

What would be more important? Let me ask you this. Which skill would be more important in 2023? The ability to really focus deeply on a single subject for a long time, or the ability to quickly skim all kinds of useful information quickly using your smartphone? I know I see people learning like crazy because they have phones. Don't you know somebody who Googles everything? You're in the conversation, like one minute into it they're Googling just to fact check you or to add a thing or to find out a new thing.

You know that didn't exist before. There's no way smartphones aren't making us a lot smarter in some ways while at the same time taking something away. So I think we could confirm that we're changing. I don't know if it's bad yet. Might