urse of the movie the antagonist, the hero, would prevail and then you would get this relief at the end. It's like ah. It would be like a dopamine relief. So not only did you watch a good movie with lots of good scenes, but because they depressed your dopamine with the bad news at the front, when they released it you're like, "Oh yeah, pretty good."

So here's how phones ruined that. If I'm looking at Reels or TikToks, you know the little videos that the algorithm that I want, if you look at a 15-second reel and you compare the dopamine you get from 15 seconds to any 15 seconds of a three-hour movie, any 15 seconds, which would be a better dopamine hit? The reel. Not sometimes. Every time. Because there's no 15-second slice of any movie that gives you much of a dopamine hit. I mean most of it's just connecting tissue. It's like we need to know this to move it along. Here's another car chase. Yawn. Another guy tied to a chair to be tortured. Yawn. Another sex scene to show you that the characters really, really do love each other. Yawn. Fast forward.

So how in the world can a movie compete when every 15-second slice is inferior to every 15-second slice when I'm looking through my phone? Now worse than that, there's another bigger effect. I used to be able to easily handle watching somebody's family get slaughtered in the first part of a movie. Now of course because it was fiction, but also for some reason my constitution in my brain could sort of handle some bad news. I was strong enough that I needed to artificially take down my mood just so I could artificially feel the difference when they raised it later.

But what happens in 2024 if you walk into a theater and the first scene is horrible damage and terrible things happening to somebody that you're going to care about later? You just don't want to watch it. I literally want to just walk out right away. It's intolerable. So I can't handle a big dopamine drop. And I don't know if it's because the environment has changed. It's more complicated. Something about my phone. But I cannot handle bad news in a movie because my brain is saying, "Why would you watch 15 minutes of somebody being tortured when every single flip of my phone is better than every second of every movie?" It's just there's no competition anymore.

I don't think movies can survive. I don't see any way that can happen. We keep talking about how AI is going to make it easy to make a movie. I'm going to give you the counter-prediction. AI will make movies useless and worthless. So once you take the money out of it, because let's say anybody can make a movie, nobody's going to want to watch that movie you made.

How many clips of AI have you seen as like examples of how AI can make a 15-second clip and it's so good? And I watched some of those 15-second clips. I go, "Oh, that's sort of interesting." But when was the last time you went to a movie and then gushed about these special effects? I don't remember the last time. But when St