# Transcript: How can AI help in the current mental health crisis?

## Description

What is the cause of these problems, and what role do social networks, AI, and the ongoing cognitive and hybrid war play in them? Can we use AI to gradually improve the situation and build long-term technological protection for our minds?



Who is Jan Romportl



Jan Romportl is an artificial intelligence expert, founder of the startup Elin.ai, consultant, and technology partner at Presto Ventures. In the past, he founded and led Dataclair.ai – the Artificial Intelligence Center at PPF and O2 Czech Republic – until mid-2022.He addresses pressing issues in mental health and the online world using artificial intelligence. He has many years of experience in university research and teaching AI, human-machine interaction, speech technologies, and philosophy at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. In his free time, he runs, practices taekwondo, dives, and is a private pilot. He is also an enthusiastic collector of historic Atari computers.

## Transcript

**[00:00:00]** Subtitles created by JohnyX http://johnyxcz.org

**[00:00:30]** Good morning. Good morning to all of you who made your way here to the Badgenta Experience Center.

**[00:00:40]** Good morning to all of you watching us live from companies, coworking spaces, and other places like libraries.

**[00:00:50]** Welcome to another classic Brain and Breakfast, which I hope will be as inspiring as the previous ones.

**[00:00:58]** Besides being inspiring, it will also be interactive, so please take your mobile phone in hand

**[00:01:08]** and scan this QR code or go to www.slajdu.com hashtag Brain

**[00:01:19]** and if you are watching us live, you have Slajdu right under the window with this presentation.

**[00:01:28]** As I said, it will be a bit interactive. I’ve already launched the first question for you, a traditional one,

**[00:01:36]** which we haven’t changed much in eleven years. The question is whether you have attended a breakfast before or if this is your first time with us.

**[00:01:46]** It’s a warm-up, just so you can test your digital skills

**[00:01:55]** and vote for us. So, I’ll continue now.

**[00:02:01]** I want to sincerely thank Magenta. Magenta Experience Center is hosting us here,

**[00:02:11]** whether it’s the classic breakfasts or the business breakfasts Brain and Breakfast.

**[00:02:16]** So thank you very much, and I’m very happy. Unfortunately, those of you watching live

**[00:02:23]** won’t feel it much yet, but Frutissimo, our longtime partner, has returned to us after many years

**[00:02:32]** and so we have a delicious breakfast prepared by Frutissimo.

**[00:02:38]** And thirdly, for those watching live, during the broadcast

**[00:02:46]** this QR code will occasionally appear. It leads to our newsletter CETA Red Button,

**[00:02:53]** which is behind this whole ensemble and many other activities.

**[00:02:58]** If you want to sign up for our newsletter and don’t subscribe yet,

**[00:03:05]** this QR code is exactly the way to do it.

**[00:03:09]** I’ve prepared a little something for you and launched a new poll.

**[00:03:17]** So take your mobile phone again, and since today’s breakfast topic is related to artificial intelligence,

**[00:03:26]** and we’ll get to it quickly, before I invite Honza Rompertl, Hi Honza, I’ve set this up for you,

**[00:03:35]** come and jump in here.

**[00:03:42]** I welcome you, I’m glad you accepted the invitation because your relationship with artificial intelligence is not just technical,

**[00:03:48]** you have many perspectives on it, and since I’ve heard many interviews,

**[00:03:53]** I really appreciate this one a lot.

**[00:03:55]** I just wanted to take a look at how you voted,

**[00:04:01]** because the relationship ranges from one star, "I’m afraid AI will destroy us,"

**[00:04:07]** to "AI will solve all the world’s problems," and we’re currently at about 3.2,

**[00:04:14]** which means we’re somewhere in the middle, neither here nor there.

**[00:04:18]** So I’m handing you this symbolic baton and look forward to your talk. Enjoy the presentation.

**[00:04:24]** Thanks a lot, take care for now.

**[00:04:32]** ...

**[00:04:36]** That we more or less don’t really know, which is probably the right answer,

**[00:04:40]** because in reality, no one really knows, and I don’t either.

**[00:04:43]** So when someone tells you they know how AI will develop,

**[00:04:47]** you can be 100% sure they’re bullshitting you.

**[00:04:50]** We simply don’t know right now.

**[00:04:52]** So around three, it seems just perfect on average to me.

**[00:04:55]** Thanks a lot for the invitation, and for those watching remotely,

**[00:05:00]** I'll just mention that if I sit here awkwardly,

**[00:05:03]** it's because I have a cast on my leg, since my leg is broken.

**[00:05:07]** So you probably didn't see me on camera, my elegant entrance with crutches is far away,

**[00:05:11]** so if I happen to fall off this chair and don't get up for a while,

**[00:05:15]** you'll know why.

**[00:05:18]** At the same time, I'll try to keep this talk less formal.

**[00:05:24]** Of course, I have some slides prepared, but usually,

**[00:05:27]** I never prepare what I say in advance when I speak.

**[00:05:30]** So I have some slides, we'll see, we'll go with that.

**[00:05:33]** Another thing I thought about was how to make sure

**[00:05:37]** this lecture doesn't just sound like I'm constantly talking about our startup,

**[00:05:42]** which deals with the topics we're trying to cover here.

**[00:05:47]** Then I thought, screw it, I'll just describe it as it is,

**[00:05:51]** if the startup is involved, fine, if there's theory around it,

**[00:05:55]** there will be theory, if there are some doom and gloom things,

**[00:05:58]** there will be doom and gloom things.

**[00:06:00]** We'll see, I'll figure it out somehow.

**[00:06:02]** At the same time, a bit of a disclaimer: I know some of my opinions

**[00:06:06]** that will come up, including on mental health,

**[00:06:10]** especially regarding the younger generation, might surprise many people,

**[00:06:16]** since people see me as a techno-optimist,

**[00:06:19]** but I will actually show those opinions here.

**[00:06:21]** I have quite conservative views on these matters and I'll explain them somehow,

**[00:06:26]** and of course, I expect to get some pushback in the discussion,

**[00:06:29]** and when we do the follow-up on Zoom in a few weeks,

**[00:06:32]** I'm pretty sure it will turn into quite a storm of opinions.

**[00:06:36]** But I'll try to describe it somehow.

**[00:06:39]** I think you can already see the presentation,

**[00:06:44]** the slides, I should move on, you probably see it now.

**[00:06:46]** Yeah, you see it somewhere behind me, right?

**[00:06:52]** Or, yeah, great, perfect, yeah, over there, good.

**[00:06:54]** It's a TV, I shouldn't be looking at it now.

**[00:06:57]** Yeah, so I want to talk now about an area

**[00:06:59]** that really interests me and has interested me basically since

**[00:07:04]** I started dealing with these things professionally.

**[00:07:07]** That means, since I stopped being, I don't know, a confused teenager,

**[00:07:10]** I'm interested in two topics.

**[00:07:15]** One is the topic of artificial intelligence, the other is the topic of cognitive sciences,

**[00:07:18]** human thinking, human psyche.

**[00:07:21]** And somehow over the last twenty-something years,

**[00:07:25]** I've been working on artificial intelligence, so yes, I've been working on AI

**[00:07:27]** long before ChatGPT was created.

**[00:07:29]** And at the same time, I confirm that I have witnessed

**[00:07:32]** that artificial intelligence existed long before ChatGPT,

**[00:07:35]** so if anyone needs some old-timer testimony from the old days,

**[00:07:39]** here it is.

**[00:07:41]** And now it's great that I manage to somehow connect these two topics.

**[00:07:46]** So what I'll be talking about here is the connection between artificial intelligence,

**[00:07:50]** cognitive sciences, and some parts of psychology and psychiatry.

**[00:07:55]** So we're dealing with the area of mental health.

**[00:07:58]** Now I'll narrow it down a bit to the mental health of Gen Z, Generation Z.

**[00:08:03]** That means young people, young individuals.

**[00:08:06]** Just roughly imagine people between about 14 and 24 years old.

**[00:08:12]** So if I say Gen Z, nicely in Czech, you can probably imagine what that is.

**[00:08:16]** Some other euphemisms like snowflake generation and similar,

**[00:08:20]** we'll get to that somehow.

**[00:08:22]** If I were Gen Z, it would really irritate me if someone called me a snowflake,

**[00:08:25]** so I don't want to irritate anyone, so I won't use that term.

**[00:08:28]** And on the contrary, I'll explain that being a snowflake

**[00:08:31]** is not their fault, but our fault.

**[00:08:33]** Absolutely, clearly, and completely this thing.

**[00:08:36]** So be aware, when you call someone a snowflake,

**[00:08:40]** you're actually talking about yourself, not about them.

**[00:08:43]** Unless you yourself are a snowflake.

**[00:08:46]** The stories that you all surely know,

**[00:08:49]** here they are, in English it's tiny, so you might not even see it,

**[00:08:53]** more important than what's written about each person,

**[00:08:57]** is that this slide is meant to show you there's really a lot.

**[00:09:02]** It's meant to show you, look, here it is.

**[00:09:04]** This is something that when people do those classic corporate presentations,

**[00:09:07]** when I talk to corporate people and they want to show there's a lot of something,

**[00:09:10]** they download like two hundred logos of different companies from the internet,

**[00:09:13]** put them on a graph and say, this is the landscape, for example Big Data,

**[00:09:17]** this is the AI landscape.

**[00:09:19]** So I'm telling you, this is the Gen Z landscape,

**[00:09:21]** mental well-being and mental health problems.

**[00:09:24]** That means there is a huge amount of things.

**[00:09:27]** like basically hardcore addictions, through eating disorders,

**[00:09:32]** through problems with sexting, huge amounts of anxiety, depression,

**[00:09:38]** all the way to antisocial behavior,

**[00:09:43]** antisocial behavior, misogynistic behavior,

**[00:09:49]** mutual hate.

**[00:09:52]** We could talk about these individual people here for quite a while,

**[00:09:54]** but there’s no time for that, so this is the landscape

**[00:09:57]** and I’ll now try to get to some more specific...

**[00:10:00]** to some more specific data.

**[00:10:03]** The claim I’m making here now is

**[00:10:06]** that mental health, and now we can say mental health

**[00:10:09]** of the whole population, is significantly worsening,

**[00:10:12]** but that’s a hard claim to defend

**[00:10:15]** and I’d probably upset more people with it, so let’s limit it,

**[00:10:18]** so we can also look a bit more at the data.

**[00:10:21]** So the claim is that the mental health of Gen Z

**[00:10:24]** is significantly worsening.

**[00:10:27]** And then someone might say, OK, and I add to that,

**[00:10:30]** that social networks are mainly to blame,

**[00:10:33]** the dynamics of social networks.

**[00:10:36]** Everyone says, hold the horses, that’s just complicated,

**[00:10:39]** it’s like saying smoking causes cancer and stuff like that.

**[00:10:42]** By the way, it very much resembles

**[00:10:45]** the discussion about social networks now, which reminds me of the debate from the 70s to 90s

**[00:10:49]** about whether smoking is harmful or not.

**[00:10:52]** We can look now at some data.

**[00:10:58]** Even here in our Czech region,

**[00:11:01]** I’ll start with more of a marketing study,

**[00:11:04]** which I found recently in one study,

**[00:11:07]** recently done by Czech BHV,

**[00:11:10]** which somehow focuses on marketing around Gen Z and such.

**[00:11:13]** The output of that study was,

**[00:11:16]** that 90-something, I don’t have braille and can’t see exactly, so I don’t know the exact number,

**[00:11:19]** 96% of Gen Z say

**[00:11:22]** that mental well-being is among their

**[00:11:25]** top priorities, a crucial thing.

**[00:11:28]** If you went back 30 years

**[00:11:31]** and asked 18-year-olds what their priority is,

**[00:11:34]** number one, how many would say mental well-being?

**[00:11:37]** People didn’t even perceive this as an issue back then.

**[00:11:41]** They would simply say, I don't know, having money, having a family,

**[00:11:44]** saving the world, something like that. But probably few people would say,

**[00:11:47]** that it would be mental well-being.

**[00:11:50]** That just wasn't the case. But at the same time, the study shows,

**[00:11:53]** that 77% of respondents declare they are not succeeding in achieving it.

**[00:11:57]** No wonder, if you say your goal is to catch a rainbow,

**[00:12:00]** you'll spend your whole life saying you failed to catch it.

**[00:12:03]** But it also shows how much the gap is widening here.

**[00:12:06]** If you ask previous generations,

**[00:12:09]** and ask what their top priority was,

**[00:12:13]** people would say something and they actually achieved it.

**[00:12:16]** Many would say, wow, now that I think about it,

**[00:12:19]** yeah, I earned some money, had some work, actually have a family.

**[00:12:22]** Pretty good, actually fine.

**[00:12:24]** So here we see a huge divide.

**[00:12:27]** Still, it's a marketing study, so we shouldn't draw extreme conclusions.

**[00:12:30]** But then let's look at McKinsey Health Institute,

**[00:12:33]** which about two years ago conducted a large survey

**[00:12:36]** on around six thousand children across Europe.

**[00:12:40]** According to country data, roughly 20 to 30% of Gen Z respondents

**[00:12:43]** report poor or very poor mental health.

**[00:12:49]** I jumped ahead a bit.

**[00:12:56]** These are relatively hard data.

**[00:12:58]** Also, you might have heard, last October the National Institute of Mental Health here in Czechia

**[00:13:01]** released a press statement,

**[00:13:04]** based on a study among elementary and possibly secondary schools.

**[00:13:06]** One strong finding is that

**[00:13:11]** about 30 to 40% of ninth graders suffer from some form of mental health issues,

**[00:13:14]** especially anxiety and depression.

**[00:13:21]** And when we say 30 to 40% of ninth graders suffer from depression,

**[00:13:24]** it's not just a seasonal sadness like autumn leaves,

**[00:13:27]** or 'she dumped me, I'm just sad now'.

**[00:13:31]** No, it's basically a clinical or preclinical condition.

**[00:13:34]** It's not something you can just walk off in nature,

**[00:13:37]** or talk through with friends.

**[00:13:40]** So it's quite alarming.

**[00:13:42]** However, these studies are still self-reported data,

**[00:13:45]** meaning how people describe their own condition.

**[00:13:49]** This also somewhat applies to these graphs here.

**[00:13:54]** However, it's good to look at the one that is probably from your perspective,

**[00:13:59]** well, there, just the first one.

**[00:14:03]** It shows, simply put, different types of mental problems

**[00:14:09]** in the young Gen Z generation over the last,

**[00:14:14]** I don't know how many, about 15 years or so, maybe more,

**[00:14:18]** you suddenly see a huge rise in all these issues sometime after 2012.

**[00:14:24]** So it's quite good to start asking what began happening in 2012.

**[00:14:29]** Why did this start to happen?

**[00:14:31]** I already know that all the critics, who are now just grinding their teeth,

**[00:14:34]** looking at me, will say, yes, but that's because,

**[00:14:37]** the topic became destigmatized.

**[00:14:39]** People suddenly learned about it and these are self-report data,

**[00:14:42]** meaning they all had it before,

**[00:14:45]** they just started going around saying they have these problems,

**[00:14:47]** so the data is distorted.

**[00:14:49]** Maybe yes, maybe no.

**[00:14:51]** We'll look at that too.

**[00:14:52]** Or they start saying, yes, but because four years before there was an economic crisis,

**[00:14:55]** these are kids who blah blah blah, there were always some crises,

**[00:14:58]** there always were, but we don't see this here.

**[00:15:02]** The second one is a graph that tells a more interesting story,

**[00:15:05]** especially the, I think, red line,

**[00:15:09]** which goes straight up like a hockey stick, that's not our revenue,

**[00:15:12]** not our income, or filling up progress bars.

**[00:15:15]** It's the risk for girls

**[00:15:18]** of developing some moderate to severe,

**[00:15:22]** for example, moderate to severe mental disorder,

**[00:15:26]** as they say, a disorder, meaning a mental problem,

**[00:15:30]** correlated or plotted on a graph against the number of hours

**[00:15:33]** they spend daily on social media.

**[00:15:37]** So this is a warning, here we're no longer talking about screentime as such,

**[00:15:39]** meaning 10 hours at the computer,

**[00:15:42]** here we're talking about how much of that screentime is social media.

**[00:15:45]** Now look, girls who spend maybe 6 hours a day on social media

**[00:15:48]** have almost a 40% risk of developing, for example, depression.

**[00:15:53]** And now you might say, 6 hours, no one can do that, oh my God.

**[00:15:57]** Well, just look at your children's screentime,

**[00:16:00]** just out of curiosity.

**[00:16:03]** I actually did this as part of, for example, our startup,

**[00:16:07]** Basically like user research, I talked to dozens, dozens,

**[00:16:10]** like 50, 60 teenagers, from early, fresh twenty-somethings,

**[00:16:16]** and they, like, reported themselves,

**[00:16:19]** hey, well, I'm on social media about 3 hours a day.

**[00:16:22]** Show the screentime.

**[00:16:23]** Yeah, actually it was 6 yesterday.

**[00:16:24]** Well, actually 7 before that.

**[00:16:26]** One girl says, hey, mine's 12.

**[00:16:28]** I say, no, no, no, you're lying, no, 12, yes, 12.

**[00:16:32]** OK, maybe an hour of that was podcasts on YouTube,

**[00:16:34]** but the rest was basically split between TikTok, Instagram, yeah,

**[00:16:39]** and this absolutely shocked me,

**[00:16:42]** how normal it is to exceed 6 hours a day.

**[00:16:45]** Here they are.

**[00:16:46]** You might ask, why are the boys different?

**[00:16:50]** That's a good question, a big question, no one really knows.

**[00:16:53]** Definitely there's some form of different social dynamics between girls

**[00:16:57]** and boys, let's be honest.

**[00:17:00]** Also, some sexual harassment towards girls happens much, much more,

**[00:17:05]** like an order of magnitude more often than towards boys.

**[00:17:08]** That doesn't mean it doesn't happen to boys, but it's a completely different level.

**[00:17:12]** So roughly similar proportions of these things happen here.

**[00:17:15]** What isn't highlighted here, and it's good to say,

**[00:17:17]** but I don't have data, maybe it's somewhere,

**[00:17:20]** is that boys get targeted in online games.

**[00:17:23]** So what girls get here, boys get from the fact

**[00:17:26]** that they play 8 hours a day of Valorant, Fortnite, and similar games,

**[00:17:30]** so they develop something like, in some cases,

**[00:17:33]** a kind of post-traumatic heart condition, or just,

**[00:17:36]** imagine you're a 12-year-old soldier,

**[00:17:39]** constantly exposed to simulated war danger,

**[00:17:43]** but if you played solo like I did at home, it's fine.

**[00:17:47]** But they play in a community that judges them for it,

**[00:17:50]** and can do the worst thing to them,

**[00:17:53]** which is social death.

**[00:17:55]** For young people, social death is worse than physical death.

**[00:17:58]** Just being excluded from the tribe, like go away, you won't be with us.

**[00:18:01]** So this is like steroids delivered probably to your homes,

**[00:18:05]** if you have kids.

**[00:18:07]** But still, these are self-reported data.

**[00:18:10]** Here I'll look again at what I actually have.

**[00:18:12]** And these are no longer self-reports.

**[00:18:15]** They either exist or they don't.

**[00:18:17]** So here you'll see, when all these, you know,

**[00:18:22]** there are three kinds of lies.

**[00:18:24]** A blatant lie, a white lie, and statistics.

**[00:18:27]** So for those of you doing data science, like we did for a long time,

**[00:18:29]** you know how the data points are, you always group them somehow,

**[00:18:33]** the numbers, and it somehow works out.

**[00:18:35]** So if you want to show that the situation is improving,

**[00:18:39]** you average all these values

**[00:18:41]** and you find what is generally shown over the long term,

**[00:18:44]** that the suicide trend is declining somehow.

**[00:18:47]** Who is driving that downward trend? I don't know,

**[00:18:49]** just old men, like me, for example.

**[00:18:52]** But if we break it down into these cohorts,

**[00:18:54]** even if we didn't want to,

**[00:18:56]** even if we were completely closed-minded,

**[00:18:58]** we have to look at those who are increasing,

**[00:19:02]** the teenage girls, ages 10 to 19.

**[00:19:04]** And if we narrow it to 10 to 14 years,

**[00:19:07]** it shoots through the roof for that 10 to 14 age group.

**[00:19:10]** This basically shows the rise since 2014,

**[00:19:16]** how the number of suicides has developed

**[00:19:18]** in individual age groups.

**[00:19:21]** By the way, you see that everything

**[00:19:23]** that is somehow increasing,

**[00:19:25]** are women aged roughly 10 to 30.

**[00:19:28]** Everything else is more or less declining.

**[00:19:30]** If you average teenagers, you get that average

**[00:19:32]** that everyone always shows you,

**[00:19:34]** and they say, hey, nothing is happening,

**[00:19:35]** it's just the same.

**[00:19:36]** It's the same as it was.

**[00:19:37]** It's not the same, because otherwise,

**[00:19:38]** this wouldn't be happening with teenage girls.

**[00:19:40]** And what else can be manipulated much worse?

**[00:19:44]** Hospitalizations.

**[00:19:46]** Because when someone comes to the doctor and says,

**[00:19:48]** hey doctor, I'm really feeling mentally bad,

**[00:19:51]** and the doctor will prescribe you Deprisma.

**[00:19:52]** It's great that this is happening.

**[00:19:54]** And I definitely support it, the secrecy.

**[00:19:57]** And I think it has saved a large number of human lives.

**[00:20:00]** So it's about destigmatization.

**[00:20:02]** So instead of someone quietly keeping this to themselves and then committing suicide,

**[00:20:06]** it's much better that they go and say it somewhere,

**[00:20:08]** because they won't be seen as strange for seeking help from a psychiatrist or psychologist.

**[00:20:14]** So you could say that a lot of these numbers arise because of destigmatization.

**[00:20:21]** But hospitalization is no longer a matter of destigmatization.

**[00:20:25]** Hospitalization is a systemic issue.

**[00:20:27]** There, the doctor is incentivized not to hospitalize you for some reasons, unless it's truly necessary.

**[00:20:32]** So beds haven't really multiplied either.

**[00:20:36]** That means the number of hospitalizations is a pretty good proxy for how serious the situation really is,

**[00:20:41]** not just how people talk about it.

**[00:20:43]** So here you can see how it has increased since 2003, for example.

**[00:20:49]** There are also the labels.

**[00:20:51]** 91% increase in hospitalizations for intentional self-harm over the last decade,

**[00:20:58]** let's say a decade and a half.

**[00:21:00]** So again, we should pay some attention to this,

**[00:21:03]** because this is not just about destigmatizing the issue.

**[00:21:07]** Okay, I can try to draw attention to myself, so it's just weird.

**[00:21:13]** But being hospitalized for a while is not something you decide yourself,

**[00:21:18]** as a patient who is destigmatized.

**[00:21:21]** And the last graph looks very similar.

**[00:21:25]** And this is a similar view of the same data.

**[00:21:31]** So these data I showed, and we can go further.

**[00:21:36]** I don't want to go down an argumentative rabbit hole here,

**[00:21:39]** to position myself against all opponents.

**[00:21:41]** Of course, you can find arguments against this data as well.

**[00:21:43]** Yes, but here is one possible interpretation.

**[00:21:46]** What if, by chance, bla, bla, bla, bla.

**[00:21:49]** Okay, we can be, and again there will be opposing work,

**[00:21:52]** I don't want to go that route, I need to get to what to do next.

**[00:21:55]** So let's say in dubio pro reo, when we have some doubts,

**[00:21:59]** it's still safer to do something than to do nothing at all

**[00:22:03]** and say it's just some glitch in the data.

**[00:22:05]** So if it doesn't cause harm at the same time.

**[00:22:08]** Another good question again, this is from the same McKinsey study,

**[00:22:13]** which included a survey asking if you as parents would find out this from your children.

**[00:22:18]** Maybe yes, maybe no, but in most cases, those kids simply wouldn't communicate this with you.

**[00:22:23]** Who do they communicate with? Probably with their friends.

**[00:22:26]** How capable are their friends of advising them on this?

**[00:22:29]** Almost zero.

**[00:22:31]** That's completely, it's not the right level.

**[00:22:34]** It's quite good that they have a better chance to turn to therapists or doctors.

**[00:22:39]** That's pretty good.

**[00:22:41]** But again, what is the availability and capability of that care?

**[00:22:44]** Just think about it, try to book an appointment with a psychotherapist.

**[00:22:49]** See how long it takes here.

**[00:22:51]** And it's not just here, it's worldwide.

**[00:22:53]** And if you say, I need a child psychologist, I'll tell you right away,

**[00:22:57]** there aren't many, because simply there aren't.

**[00:23:00]** Every year, more retire than new ones appear.

**[00:23:03]** So better times are not really near.

**[00:23:05]** Maybe in 20-30 years it might improve, but we have to deal with it now.

**[00:23:08]** So here we have a fairly fundamental problem.

**[00:23:12]** And even if you find out, how does that help?

**[00:23:15]** If you somehow find out,

**[00:23:18]** that your daughter suffers from anorexia and suddenly has a body mass index of 11,

**[00:23:25]** it's probably not because she goes to the gym a lot or exercises.

**[00:23:28]** What do you do? Cook a lot of soup for her to eat it all,

**[00:23:31]** or scold her, or where do you take her?

**[00:23:34]** What will you do? Hard to say.

**[00:23:37]** It's terrible, absolutely catastrophic, a dark, demonic scenario,

**[00:23:43]** that just appears here.

**[00:23:45]** Now let's look at how...

**[00:23:50]** Okay, just from the data you might have seen earlier,

**[00:23:53]** you might ask what happened since 2012 and onwards.

**[00:23:58]** Is it possibly correlated with the emergence of...

**[00:24:02]** Somehow starting to function.

**[00:24:04]** When did Facebook appear, when did someone tell you about Facebook?

**[00:24:07]** Somewhere around 2009, 10, 11, 12.

**[00:24:10]** But Facebook alone isn't quite it.

**[00:24:13]** What is it then? Smartphones.

**[00:24:16]** Simply devices. I would call them experience blockers.

**[00:24:21]** They block experiences from the natural real world, as you normally get them.

**[00:24:26]** Similar to drugs. Different types of addictive drugs are also experience blockers.

**[00:24:30]** Different types of behavioral patterns are also experience blockers.

**[00:24:34]** For example, if you, I don't know, lock your child at home,

**[00:24:38]** You won't let him among children to keep him safe, that's an experience blocker.

**[00:24:41]** So-called helicopter parenting means you're constantly hovering over the child

**[00:24:45]** and don't want to leave them unsupervised, that's helicopter parenting,

**[00:24:48]** an experience blocker. It's a pretty bad thing you can do to a child.

**[00:24:53]** So I don't want to say social media is the only source of this problem,

**[00:24:59]** because another important source of what we currently see in Gen Z

**[00:25:04]** is over-parenting and helicopter parenting,

**[00:25:08]** which started to diverge somewhat since the 1980s.

**[00:25:13]** But I won't go into that here, because it would probably upset too many people.

**[00:25:17]** Nevertheless, this is part of the issue, so it's good to be aware

**[00:25:22]** of the most common causes of death among children and young people today.

**[00:25:26]** Traffic accidents and suicide.

**[00:25:28]** What do we do about it? We drive them everywhere by car

**[00:25:31]** and at the same time leave them unsupervised on social networks.

**[00:25:34]** Basically in a jungle for which this hardware never evolved.

**[00:25:38]** So it's like leaving them unsupervised on social media and saying,

**[00:25:41]** Take your laptop, your gold chain, and go to Rio de Janeiro, to the favela.

**[00:25:46]** It'll be fine there. There are people who will tell you what to do.

**[00:25:50]** That's roughly what happens 6, 7, 8 hours a day.

**[00:25:56]** And now it's really hard to show causality through associative analysis.

**[00:26:03]** We could get into that here too.

**[00:26:06]** I'd rather try to flip it and look at some

**[00:26:12]** neuropsychiatric dynamics of it.

**[00:26:20]** How the human brain works when on social media.

**[00:26:23]** I'm not saying this will give us clear causal insight,

**[00:26:26]** but it will describe it from the other side.

**[00:26:29]** Here, some start pointing fingers at some part of the world with data.

**[00:26:34]** You can disagree, that's fine.

**[00:26:37]** I'm not able to argue that, so I'll take the other side now

**[00:26:40]** and say, let's look at what happens when you, not just your children,

**[00:26:43]** but you specifically, are exposed to the dynamics of the online world,

**[00:26:48]** which is happening to you here.

**[00:26:50]** So imagine what kind of beings we are as Homo sapiens.

**[00:26:53]** We are hypersocial apes who grew up deeply embodied

**[00:26:59]** in a certain type of environment, a biological environment.

**[00:27:02]** The biological environment was stable for most of our history,

**[00:27:05]** the environment of hunters and gatherers, somewhere in the savanna or jungle, somewhere.

**[00:27:09]** Some kind of tribal structure.

**[00:27:11]** Everything you learned, you learned face to face

**[00:27:15]** from a person you knew in some way, who told you something,

**[00:27:20]** That communication was synchronous and embodied.

**[00:27:23]** Synchronous embodied communication.

**[00:27:25]** That means you're talking to someone face to face, like we are here,

**[00:27:29]** maybe right here in this room.

**[00:27:31]** And all the hardware we carry with us until now,

**[00:27:34]** has basically remained unchanged.

**[00:27:36]** It definitely hasn't changed in the last ten thousand years.

**[00:27:38]** Maybe it changed compared to the first homo sapiens about two hundred thousand years ago,

**[00:27:42]** but we carry computational hardware inside us,

**[00:27:45]** equipment adapted to the world that existed ten thousand years ago.

**[00:27:49]** I think to the world that emerged around,

**[00:27:52]** say, the agrarian revolution,

**[00:27:55]** we could no longer adapt hardware-wise,

**[00:27:57]** so we had to undergo social adaptation.

**[00:27:59]** So we adapted socially and mentally to a world

**[00:28:02]** that is no longer hunter-gatherer.

**[00:28:04]** But we still run that adaptation on hardware

**[00:28:08]** that was designed for previous ways of functioning.

**[00:28:13]** But we are capable of it.

**[00:28:14]** It's like Windows 95, for those who remember.

**[00:28:18]** It was basically a poorly disguised DOS.

**[00:28:20]** It was like, let's somehow adapt

**[00:28:23]** what was there before and build on it.

**[00:28:25]** The change came with XP, for example, here.

**[00:28:28]** So we are not yet at XP.

**[00:28:30]** We are roughly like Windows 95 adapted to the world after the agrarian revolution,

**[00:28:37]** kind of like a well-maintained 95 for the world after the industrial revolution,

**[00:28:42]** and a blue screen of death for the world that is now opening up to us.

**[00:28:47]** For most of our current history, a combination of hardware,

**[00:28:51]** which evolved here over millions of years, and social adaptation,

**[00:28:54]** which is like software and software, able to run at some speed,

**[00:28:58]** was enough. But for what has been happening in the last few, several decades,

**[00:29:00]** even social adaptation is no longer enough.

**[00:29:02]** Simply put, the cycle of changes we are exposed to,

**[00:29:05]** we are not able to adapt to.

**[00:29:07]** What we invented is technological adaptation.

**[00:29:09]** So we adapt to changes caused by technology with technology.

**[00:29:12]** And it's not even about good or bad, it's just a fact.

**[00:29:14]** It's our only way to adapt to it.

**[00:29:17]** Because otherwise, well, we can't rewire our brains.

**[00:29:20]** Maybe, but we really don't want to.

**[00:29:22]** Socially, it's just not possible, so the only way is technological.

**[00:29:25]** The thing is, that technology is a bit, if you ask,

**[00:29:28]** isn't it what you call here, driving labor out with a stick?

**[00:29:31]** I'd say, yes it is, but what can you do?

**[00:29:33]** It's just like when you go.

**[00:29:36]** Or when you run.

**[00:29:37]** When you run, every step is just delaying the fall

**[00:29:41]** caused by the previous step.

**[00:29:43]** Okay, that's life.

**[00:29:45]** Life is navigating between the Scylla of cancer and the Charybdis of dementia.

**[00:29:48]** One of them will get you sooner or later.

**[00:29:50]** Either uncontrollable loss, uncontrollable growth,

**[00:29:54]** or uncontrollable decay.

**[00:29:56]** One or the other will take you sooner or later.

**[00:29:58]** Between plus and minus, that's how you're alive.

**[00:30:00]** It's an unstable state. At some point, it just tips and it's over for one reason or another.

**[00:30:06]** Now let's talk about this hardware, in the last 15 years we've technologically

**[00:30:13]** added a huge remote sensorium.

**[00:30:15]** That means the source of information we absorb is incredibly and dramatically higher.

**[00:30:21]** Every day you absorb more information than maybe your medieval ancestor did in their entire life.

**[00:30:29]** So where does the brain's adaptation come from? You try to manage somehow.

**[00:30:34]** Anyway, I don't want to go into what blinks in my head for time reasons,

**[00:30:40]** but what hits you on social media, or even if you just watch the news every day,

**[00:30:49]** reading who was killed by a rocket from Russia in Ukraine today,

**[00:30:54]** whether it hit or missed near Kursk, or what tsunami happened where.

**[00:31:00]** This alone starts causing some chronic anticipatory stress in you.

**[00:31:08]** What does anticipatory stress mean? Or like this, we've mentioned the word anxiety a few times here.

**[00:31:15]** What is anxiety? Anxiety is basically anticipatory fear.

**[00:31:20]** Fear is an immediate emotional reaction to a perceived threat, real or imagined.

**[00:31:25]** Or you're afraid because something is happening now, a tiger is coming at you, or someone is after you,

**[00:31:30]** or you have to do something risky somewhere, that's fear.

**[00:31:34]** It triggers a physiological reaction in you that raises your alertness.

**[00:31:39]** Evolutionarily, it increased your chances of handling the situation.

**[00:31:42]** Those who didn't have it died out, removed from the gene pool.

**[00:31:47]** Anxiety is the same, it's basically the same emotional physiological reaction,

**[00:31:53]** but anticipatory, meaning for something that is yet to come, expected.

**[00:31:56]** That's actually good, because when the mechanism works well,

**[00:31:59]** having a bit of anxiety about what's coming can motivate you,

**[00:32:03]** it raises adrenaline. So what's the problem?

**[00:32:05]** It's when it's anticipatory, because stress is relatively good if it's short-term.

**[00:32:09]** And if with my own actions, I'm able to somehow resolve it.

**[00:32:14]** And at the same time, if it's not completely unpredictable.

**[00:32:17]** If it's relatively predictable stress, and it's short-term,

**[00:32:21]** and I've learned that I can handle it with some of my own actions,

**[00:32:26]** then it's good, it's like having a workout at the gym.

**[00:32:29]** With every action, I actually become stronger.

**[00:32:32]** What's worse is unpredictable stress, and even worse,

**[00:32:34]** is when the stress is chronic.

**[00:32:36]** That means chronic antidepressant stress is when,

**[00:32:39]** you wake up in the morning with a stone in your stomach,

**[00:32:42]** from some random, intangible things that probably during the day...

**[00:32:46]** And it eventually spreads into a state where you don't even know,

**[00:32:51]** why you have anxiety, why you're anxious.

**[00:32:54]** Now imagine this can happen purely from,

**[00:32:59]** just looking at your newsfeed, just reading the news.

**[00:33:02]** And imagine the demonic machinery behind this flow of information,

**[00:33:09]** how social networks have surrounded and wrapped it,

**[00:33:13]** which are by design made to steal your attention,

**[00:33:17]** to maximize the time you spend on those social networks.

**[00:33:22]** And then the media mix and information mix they present to you,

**[00:33:26]** is created by artificial intelligence.

**[00:33:28]** At the time Facebook was created.

**[00:33:30]** Machine learning prepares a media and information mix for you,

**[00:33:36]** to maximize your dwell time, meaning to keep you there as long as possible,

**[00:33:40]** and to make you click on ads as much as possible.

**[00:33:43]** So this is what we are exposed to.

**[00:33:46]** Never in the history of human biological evolution have we been exposed to this,

**[00:33:50]** nor have our social adaptations been exposed to this,

**[00:33:53]** so now maybe technologically.

**[00:33:55]** Imagine, if you are in some way a user of social networks,

**[00:34:00]** you might experience moments of chronic anticipatory stress.

**[00:34:05]** What happens with chronic anticipatory stress?

**[00:34:08]** It causes long-term high levels of cortisol in the brain.

**[00:34:12]** You may have read about it if you suffer from anxiety or someone around you does,

**[00:34:17]** there is such a dynamic.

**[00:34:19]** First adrenaline rushes in, then quickly drops,

**[00:34:21]** then adrenaline rushes in again, then quickly drops.

**[00:34:23]** But with each adrenaline rush,

**[00:34:25]** cortisol has a much slower dynamic.

**[00:34:28]** Why does this happen?

**[00:34:31]** There are many different reasons.

**[00:34:34]** Cortisol has many positive effects on the body,

**[00:34:37]** but these are positive in the hunter-gatherer setup.

**[00:34:40]** A person running around in nature who is either eaten by a tiger or not,

**[00:34:45]** who either heals from a broken arm or leg,

**[00:34:48]** which is splinted with sticks, or does not heal.

**[00:34:51]** So cortisol plays a role in that world.

**[00:34:53]** It also plays a role for us.

**[00:34:55]** It all works, but here the pendulum swings the other way.

**[00:34:59]** One interesting thing about cortisol

**[00:35:02]** is that it carries an evolutionarily acquired function,

**[00:35:09]** which is that when you have long-term high cortisol levels,

**[00:35:13]** it basically breaks down synapses in some way,

**[00:35:18]** and forces you, due to certain biological reasons,

**[00:35:21]** to discard previously functional world models,

**[00:35:24]** which were in your head and guided you.

**[00:35:27]** A functional world model might be,

**[00:35:29]** I’m doing quite well, I have friends,

**[00:35:31]** I’m relatively healthy, good-looking, something like that.

**[00:35:35]** And you can live with that.

**[00:35:37]** Sometimes there’s a setback, someone scolds me,

**[00:35:39]** someone excludes me, someone dislikes me.

**[00:35:42]** OK, that’s life.

**[00:35:43]** That’s a pretty good world model,

**[00:35:45]** which increases your fitness,

**[00:35:47]** helping you manage in that world.

**[00:35:48]** Another pretty good world model might be,

**[00:35:50]** well, democratic institutions are actually fine,

**[00:35:52]** they work for us, yes,

**[00:35:54]** there’s bribery here and there, some mess over there.

**[00:35:57]** But on average, it’s not so bad.

**[00:36:01]** Another pretty good world model is,

**[00:36:04]** we as a society are doing quite well here.

**[00:36:06]** It’s not perfect,

**[00:36:10]** many people are struggling, but on average it’s good.

**[00:36:13]** Another world model might be, well, the Earth is round.

**[00:36:16]** Another world model might be,

**[00:36:18]** covid vaccines don’t contain nanobots,

**[00:36:20]** which Bill Gates supposedly invented,

**[00:36:22]** to control your brain.

**[00:36:23]** That's also a model of the world.

**[00:36:25]** So what does cortisol cause in the long term?

**[00:36:28]** You simply have to discard the world models

**[00:36:30]** that you have at that moment.

**[00:36:31]** Why? Because we are descendants of people

**[00:36:33]** who, as it turned out in the past,

**[00:36:35]** had an evolutionarily advantageous strategy

**[00:36:37]** in a hunter-gatherer environment.

**[00:36:38]** So basically, when you were constantly hungry,

**[00:36:40]** constantly under attack,

**[00:36:42]** and everything was always bad,

**[00:36:44]** you had to do something really dramatic.

**[00:36:46]** I don't know, maybe the chief seemed fine,

**[00:36:49]** but after a while, you had to kill him,

**[00:36:51]** because there was no other way.

**[00:36:53]** Cortisol forced you.

**[00:36:55]** But we inherited this mechanism

**[00:36:57]** and still have it today.

**[00:36:58]** So you can already see step one,

**[00:37:01]** chronic anxiety from the constant flow of information

**[00:37:05]** and the dynamics of social networks.

**[00:37:07]** And step two, cortisol, which we have,

**[00:37:09]** erodes like toluene,

**[00:37:11]** erodes the world models

**[00:37:13]** we learned in childhood

**[00:37:16]** or found to work well,

**[00:37:19]** so they just get eroded.

**[00:37:20]** Why?

**[00:37:21]** Because it triggers a mechanism

**[00:37:23]** designed to

**[00:37:25]** most likely preserve your genetic line

**[00:37:28]** in a hunter-gatherer environment.

**[00:37:30]** So, what I just said.

**[00:37:32]** Cortisol forces the human mind to abandon existing functional world models.

**[00:37:35]** This happens gradually.

**[00:37:37]** And now, as I said,

**[00:37:38]** these can be in the area of individual models

**[00:37:44]** related to understanding oneself

**[00:37:46]** and one's own mental health,

**[00:37:48]** and they can actually be societal.

**[00:37:50]** We can, for example, talk about conspiracy theories.

**[00:37:52]** They actually have a very similar mechanism here.

**[00:37:55]** So believing that the earth is flat,

**[00:37:58]** is very similar to

**[00:38:00]** believing that even though you weigh 45 kg,

**[00:38:02]** you are still fat.

**[00:38:04]** And it's not like,

**[00:38:06]** you have to make fun of it,

**[00:38:08]** like you can't possibly believe

**[00:38:10]** that the earth is flat.

**[00:38:11]** And you can't possibly believe

**[00:38:12]** that even though you weigh 40 kg,

**[00:38:13]** you are still fat.

**[00:38:14]** No, they just believe it.

**[00:38:15]** No, no, they believe it.

**[00:38:16]** The brain simply interprets the world so that

**[00:38:19]** this is given,

**[00:38:20]** this is a functional model of the world for that person.

**[00:38:23]** Now, these functional models,

**[00:38:25]** that were valid until then,

**[00:38:27]** the brain is a machine for predicting the world.

**[00:38:30]** Completely.

**[00:38:31]** We are rewarded with dopamine for successfully predicting the world.

**[00:38:33]** So when I say,

**[00:38:36]** I put this here

**[00:38:37]** and it doesn't fall to the ground,

**[00:38:38]** that's a prediction

**[00:38:39]** my brain makes,

**[00:38:40]** and it's great.

**[00:38:41]** And I got dopamine,

**[00:38:42]** which confirmed my model of the world,

**[00:38:44]** that this is how it works.

**[00:38:46]** So I have to have some models of the world.

**[00:38:47]** But if I discarded the functional ones because of cortisol,

**[00:38:49]** I have to replace them with some new ones.

**[00:38:52]** And what new ones?

**[00:38:55]** So I go around, discovering models like children.

**[00:38:57]** They knock things down, they just find out,

**[00:39:01]** how the world works.

**[00:39:02]** That's why I need to be exposed to an experience stream,

**[00:39:05]** just a flow of experiences in the natural real world.

**[00:39:09]** Because their brain wiring simply expects this.

**[00:39:13]** It has been developed over a million years,

**[00:39:14]** so it expects real life experiences

**[00:39:18]** in the world they move in.

**[00:39:20]** It expects to scrape their knees,

**[00:39:22]** to spin on a bike,

**[00:39:23]** fall and scrape their knee.

**[00:39:25]** That someone somewhere will hurt them emotionally

**[00:39:27]** and just say, we're playing hide and seek, you're not playing with us.

**[00:39:30]** And if we remove this from the flow of experiences,

**[00:39:34]** what will we build?

**[00:39:36]** We will build an underdeveloped mechanism that is there.

**[00:39:40]** These world models have to somehow appear in the brain.

**[00:39:46]** So if COVID anxiety forces you

**[00:39:50]** and you just sit at home and now your child is being mocked at school,

**[00:39:54]** because they forgot their mask,

**[00:39:56]** and you physically feel terrible,

**[00:39:59]** now you are alone with that child.

**[00:40:00]** And they cry because they were laughed at for not having a mask.

**[00:40:04]** What else does that say?

**[00:40:05]** Oh, I see, so that's how it is.

**[00:40:07]** So Gates actually wants to destroy the people who are everywhere here

**[00:40:12]** and starts in this demonic way.

**[00:40:15]** And suddenly the world starts to make more sense, clearer contours.

**[00:40:20]** But you need to confirm that world model.

**[00:40:24]** It doesn't just happen because someone tells you,

**[00:40:26]** I don't know, Lance like the Flogiston fire,

**[00:40:30]** which is something, and you say, yeah sure, the Flogiston fire,

**[00:40:32]** that's a world model, sure.

**[00:40:34]** And you need to go through the dopamine loop

**[00:40:38]** to confirm that world model.

**[00:40:39]** That means your world model tells you, hey, the earth is flat,

**[00:40:44]** I'm just ugly, depressed, something, something.

**[00:40:49]** And at the same time, I don't know, Fiala is trying here

**[00:40:54]** to do something and at the same time the whole thing is controlled by the lizard pope and Gates

**[00:40:58]** and the Illuminati and the world elites.

**[00:41:00]** So these are the things that come to my mind,

**[00:41:03]** but it's not like this idea just nested itself out of nowhere

**[00:41:07]** and at that moment I said, great, a new model of the world.

**[00:41:09]** I need to do what I just described,

**[00:41:12]** I need to run that loop multiple times in a row.

**[00:41:16]** I make a prediction about the world, the world validates it, and I get dopamine

**[00:41:20]** and in this so-called reinforcement learning,

**[00:41:23]** in the whole concept called predictive coding,

**[00:41:26]** it's a kind of unifying theory about the human mind,

**[00:41:28]** so I simply validate the idea that I don't know,

**[00:41:32]** that the earth is flat.

**[00:41:34]** Now imagine how we would have validated that idea 25 years ago.

**[00:41:37]** You would have come to a pub and said,

**[00:41:40]** Franta, the whole world is actually controlled by global elites and the Illuminati,

**[00:41:46]** and also the Pope controls it.

**[00:41:48]** Basically, it's all controlled through the lizards.

**[00:41:50]** They would look at you and say, you know what, fuck off.

**[00:41:54]** Just go away, it's not worth listening to, no point.

**[00:41:58]** And you'd say, oh my god, well, that wasn't much dopamine from Franta.

**[00:42:03]** So maybe my model of the world isn't that widely shared,

**[00:42:06]** so let's go back to classic hate,

**[00:42:08]** just Hradec against Pardubice, Sparta against Slavia, we'll find something.

**[00:42:11]** Great, good, something like that.

**[00:42:13]** This was the state that maintained social stability

**[00:42:16]** for decades in the new communication world.

**[00:42:19]** That's roughly how it worked.

**[00:42:21]** And now imagine you suddenly do that research.

**[00:42:24]** You look at the internet, now you see some scientist

**[00:42:27]** saying that vaccines cause autism,

**[00:42:30]** this and that, now things start to fit together,

**[00:42:33]** you start connecting the dots, and now you try to make a prediction about it

**[00:42:37]** and you say, well, from my research I found out

**[00:42:40]** and now you create something about what your model of the world says.

**[00:42:44]** And suddenly the world in the form of social stability,

**[00:42:47]** goes yay, yay, yay, likes, likes, likes.

**[00:42:50]** 80% of the likes are from bots, but that doesn't matter.

**[00:42:52]** It's dopamine, it's dopamine.

**[00:42:54]** And the whole system was designed that way by design.

**[00:42:57]** When you look now at those confessions,

**[00:42:59]** those from Zuckerberg's early people, well, VR, sorry,

**[00:43:03]** so it's like a total devil button, we realized that later.

**[00:43:06]** We apologize, we're packing up our millions here

**[00:43:09]** and we're just going to clear out of this world.

**[00:43:12]** So the whole model,

**[00:43:14]** to maximize ad clicks,

**[00:43:17]** is designed as a dopamine reward hacking system.

**[00:43:21]** Now imagine if you enter a world,

**[00:43:23]** where you need to validate something,

**[00:43:25]** your brain is basically broken by cortisol,

**[00:43:27]** and you need to validate a new model of the world.

**[00:43:30]** And boom, whatever you find,

**[00:43:32]** you will always find on social media

**[00:43:34]** a rewarding mechanism

**[00:43:37]** that validates any

**[00:43:40]** nonsensical model of the world that could exist,

**[00:43:42]** which is toxic for you, your surroundings, and society.

**[00:43:45]** So this is simply the dynamic

**[00:43:48]** that we are spinning more and more here.

**[00:43:50]** So the models of the world can then look like this.

**[00:43:54]** It's not that the person is a snowflake.

**[00:43:58]** The first thing that happens is

**[00:44:00]** that cortisol normally erases the functional models of the world

**[00:44:05]** and replaces them with new models of the world through toxic dynamics.

**[00:44:09]** And you can't help the model of the world.

**[00:44:11]** That's the only thing you see about the world.

**[00:44:16]** Even you, when you look at me and I look at you,

**[00:44:19]** you don't see a 3D reconstruction of the image

**[00:44:21]** captured by the retina in your eyes.

**[00:44:24]** You see a short-term prediction of what the world around you probably looks like,

**[00:44:28]** created by your visual cortex.

**[00:44:30]** So what you see now is not reality.

**[00:44:32]** It's a short-term prediction.

**[00:44:34]** This is why various optical illusions and hallucinations occur,

**[00:44:36]** you don't see visual reality.

**[00:44:38]** You see a statistically generated prediction of

**[00:44:42]** how the world around you looks based on a billion noisy sensory inputs,

**[00:44:47]** which supply you with that information.

**[00:44:49]** That's what you see. And that's the only thing you see.

**[00:44:51]** You simply have no other world than the one your model creates for you.

**[00:44:55]** And when this model gets hijacked in this way,

**[00:44:58]** it's very bad.

**[00:45:00]** So here you can see what it means,

**[00:45:04]** if you are, say, a teenage girl,

**[00:45:07]** who constantly views the world through the mind of a hunter-gatherer,

**[00:45:12]** a hunter and gatherer, looking at a world created in this way.

**[00:45:16]** So here we have the first part of AI that makes it worse, as I mentioned.

**[00:45:21]** That's the targeting mechanism trying to flood you with dopamine,

**[00:45:24]** to keep you there.

**[00:45:26]** And it floods you with dopamine for absolutely anything you do.

**[00:45:29]** And it gives it to you immediately.

**[00:45:31]** That means it's not so-called delayed gratification,

**[00:45:33]** meaning a delayed reward, but an instant reward.

**[00:45:37]** At the same time, you compare yourself to something created this way.

**[00:45:42]** That's one thing.

**[00:45:43]** This causes enormous anxiety from so-called social comparison,

**[00:45:49]** social comparison, especially for teenage girls.

**[00:45:54]** In this case, for example.

**[00:45:56]** Added to that is FOMO, Fear of Missing Out.

**[00:45:59]** Meaning, like, everyone is on Erasmus, over there in Lisbon,

**[00:46:02]** and I'm just here, and everyone is having fun,

**[00:46:05]** and I'm like an idiot studying for exams in Prague.

**[00:46:08]** It's raining and everyone else is having a good time.

**[00:46:10]** So I have to check Instagram to see how they're doing,

**[00:46:12]** because I have Fear of Missing Out,

**[00:46:14]** but every time I look, I leave with a tiny splinter stuck in my cognitive system,

**[00:46:17]** in my emotional system.

**[00:46:21]** And if I say it well, I'm no longer a teenage girl, so I'm safe.

**[00:46:23]** So let me maybe introduce this a bit.

**[00:46:26]** If any of you still use Facebook, like us older people,

**[00:46:29]** we have Facebooks, right?

**[00:46:32]** It's everywhere, on TikTok.

**[00:46:34]** These are AI-generated so-called super stimuli.

**[00:46:36]** This...

**[00:46:40]** And now imagine, I don't know,

**[00:46:42]** maybe some of you have parents,

**[00:46:44]** probably do, and they are on Facebook.

**[00:46:47]** Maybe.

**[00:46:50]** So you share something with your mom on Facebook,

**[00:46:51]** where she is, and then someone there, I don't know,

**[00:46:54]** writes her something.

**[00:46:58]** And this will normally be like every second post,

**[00:47:01]** it will look like this.

**[00:47:02]** And it will like and say,

**[00:47:04]** yeah, look, that's a beautiful cake.

**[00:47:05]** Yeah, look, this is beautiful.

**[00:47:07]** And it won't have the slightest clue,

**[00:47:10]** that it's just a barren wasteland.

**[00:47:12]** That it's basically a parched desert for it,

**[00:47:16]** something that doesn't exist.

**[00:47:17]** It's just triggering a dopamine loop.

**[00:47:21]** And this is the new reality,

**[00:47:23]** that we will very soon start to face.

**[00:47:25]** So far, artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning

**[00:47:28]** only targeted the composition of the content you have,

**[00:47:32]** to hijack your reward-making mechanism.

**[00:47:35]** From now on, we are starting to realize

**[00:47:37]** that the content itself is already generated

**[00:47:40]** by the newly hyped generative AI,

**[00:47:44]** which, by the way, has probably been here for about 10 years,

**[00:47:46]** but no one noticed.

**[00:47:47]** Yeah, because until then it worked well,

**[00:47:49]** but it has been around for a long time.

**[00:47:51]** So if generative AI has become a single-click,

**[00:47:55]** script-kiddy thing, meaning that any idiot can

**[00:47:58]** generate photorealistic things of anything,

**[00:48:01]** then we are opening another Pandora's box,

**[00:48:03]** which is connected to

**[00:48:05]** targeting mechanisms on social networks,

**[00:48:08]** it will not only hack your content composition,

**[00:48:13]** but it will also offer you the content itself,

**[00:48:15]** as exactly these AI-generated super stimuli.

**[00:48:18]** This might be some trick,

**[00:48:20]** to get your click on their page

**[00:48:23]** and just those toxic online marketing nonsense.

**[00:48:27]** But there's huge money in it, that's why it happens.

**[00:48:29]** But this will concern political marketing,

**[00:48:32]** this will concern further enrichment of world models,

**[00:48:36]** that you have at your disposal.

**[00:48:38]** And if this gets going,

**[00:48:40]** that means it will be photorealistic video,

**[00:48:42]** which you can't tell apart from normal,

**[00:48:44]** so you can just start thinking about

**[00:48:47]** what it will do to your hunter-gatherer cognition,

**[00:48:50]** which simply accepts whatever someone tells it as true.

**[00:48:53]** Whatever it sees somewhere, it accepts as true.

**[00:48:55]** So we have long discarded the part

**[00:48:57]** that whatever someone tells you is true,

**[00:48:59]** and now we're discarding even the part that whatever you see is true.

**[00:49:01]** So here is a fairly fundamental beginning

**[00:49:05]** of a full-blown mental health crisis.

**[00:49:07]** We see it in Gen Z,

**[00:49:09]** especially manifesting in the problems

**[00:49:12]** I described earlier,

**[00:49:13]** meaning suicides, anxiety, some snowflakishness.

**[00:49:17]** And in millennials, Gen X, and boomers, it simply shows up as,

**[00:49:21]** like, it's quiet, quiet, people just don't say it.

**[00:49:25]** Yeah, they don't say it.

**[00:49:26]** Look, I've actually suffered from anxiety my whole life.

**[00:49:29]** They don't even really know what it is.

**[00:49:30]** It's just the new normal.

**[00:49:31]** So it's like when something hurts all the time,

**[00:49:33]** you get used to it, you remove it, yeah.

**[00:49:35]** But you still judge the world through the prism of that anxiety.

**[00:49:39]** Yeah, so what we see,

**[00:49:41]** like the tip of the iceberg of the mental health crisis

**[00:49:44]** in older people is a turn toward conspiracy theories.

**[00:49:47]** Yeah, it has exactly the same dynamic.

**[00:49:49]** It's not some separate phenomenon

**[00:49:53]** happening somewhere.

**[00:49:55]** It's just the visible iceberg of the fact

**[00:49:57]** that a huge number of people live in chronic,

**[00:50:00]** anticipatory stress, their brains flooded with cortisol,

**[00:50:03]** and they create new false models of the world through the dynamics of social networks,

**[00:50:07]** which in themselves aren't entirely harmful, and on top of that you have hybrid influences

**[00:50:11]** from the bad guys trying to pour oil on the fire.

**[00:50:17]** So by the way, Russia doesn't have to get here with weapons,

**[00:50:21]** it will be enough if it continues doing what it does.

**[00:50:23]** We will basically fall apart ourselves, and you see what kind of dynamic that has.

**[00:50:28]** This, I borrowed from Jonathan Haidt,

**[00:50:30]** one of the things, now let's go back to Jens,

**[00:50:33]** One of the things that actually marked an entire generation here,

**[00:50:36]** is that childhood based on play, meaning play-based childhood,

**[00:50:40]** was replaced by childhood based on the phone, meaning phone-based childhood.

**[00:50:45]** What happened at that moment is, maybe you've heard,

**[00:50:50]** that as a child, the brain size is roughly complete

**[00:50:56]** around the age of five.

**[00:50:58]** Since then, not many new neurons are added to the brain.

**[00:51:01]** What does start happening in puberty is,

**[00:51:03]** that some fibers begin to myelinate and pruning starts,

**[00:51:08]** which means trimming.

**[00:51:09]** And roughly a third of those synapses, not that they die,

**[00:51:12]** they just retract, the synapses simply disappear.

**[00:51:15]** This is also a side effect that happens in classical machine learning,

**[00:51:18]** in machine learning.

**[00:51:19]** We create a large deep neural network,

**[00:51:21]** train it, it soaks up information like a sponge, like a child's brain,

**[00:51:24]** we train it, and then, to generalize,

**[00:51:27]** we start randomly dropping some synapses from the neural network,

**[00:51:30]** and suddenly it starts to outperform the previous version.

**[00:51:33]** This means the child's brain has an extreme ability to absorb things,

**[00:51:39]** much greater than an adult brain,

**[00:51:41]** but for most performance-based intelligent tasks, it is simply worse.

**[00:51:45]** Why?

**[00:51:46]** Because it is not pruned and there are no myelinated

**[00:51:49]** shortcuts between different distant brain areas.

**[00:51:52]** This means the child's brain is basically like an infinite sponge,

**[00:51:59]** absorbing things.

**[00:52:01]** And our brain has already gone through this phase,

**[00:52:03]** which basically happens during puberty.

**[00:52:05]** What happens in puberty,

**[00:52:07]** is absolutely brutally imprinted into those synapses.

**[00:52:11]** That's why puberty is both great and also quite dangerous.

**[00:52:16]** And actually, what you imprint into the brain during puberty,

**[00:52:21]** I would give as an example,

**[00:52:23]** like when you want to sign somewhere, I don't know,

**[00:52:25]** you just see some bricklayers,

**[00:52:30]** and you just get drunk, come from Voslav,

**[00:52:32]** and say, ha, I'll sign there, that will be fun.

**[00:52:35]** So you sign there, but when can you sign there?

**[00:52:38]** When the concrete is too runny, too fresh, you can't write on it,

**[00:52:42]** you just scribble something and it dries up.

**[00:52:45]** When it's too hard, you also can't write on it,

**[00:52:47]** because it's too stiff.

**[00:52:48]** Only at exactly the right moment,

**[00:52:50]** somewhere between runny and hard,

**[00:52:52]** what you write in it will stay there forever.

**[00:52:54]** That's exactly the mindset of those teenage kids,

**[00:52:57]** who are right in the process of myelination and pruning,

**[00:53:00]** which is just beginning.

**[00:53:02]** And normally you go and expose them

**[00:53:05]** to that toxic mechanism.

**[00:53:06]** It's not like handing out cigarettes and saying,

**[00:53:10]** come on, have a smoke, that's harmless.

**[00:53:12]** It would be like handing out heroin on the streets.

**[00:53:14]** And then arguing about it,

**[00:53:16]** saying look, the kids are happy, right?

**[00:53:18]** So where's the problem?

**[00:53:20]** And the data, well, the data can be fixed.

**[00:53:23]** That's how this dynamic works.

**[00:53:26]** But what's really important?

**[00:53:28]** Here it looks like I'm saying social networks

**[00:53:30]** are all terribly bad.

**[00:53:33]** A huge difference compared to cigarettes and drugs is

**[00:53:38]** that social networks also have enormous positive value.

**[00:53:41]** So just for the record, I say,

**[00:53:43]** yes, I know and I acknowledge that social networks have

**[00:53:45]** huge positive value.

**[00:53:47]** Also, when they first appeared, I was a total techno-optimist,

**[00:53:51]** a complete enthusiast for social networks.

**[00:53:54]** My debates are publicly available,

**[00:53:56]** recorded somewhere on YouTube,

**[00:53:57]** where I argue fiercely with opponents of social networks about

**[00:54:00]** how important it is to be on social networks,

**[00:54:02]** how important it is to give them to people, to children,

**[00:54:05]** that it's really crucial to let kids on social networks at the earliest age,

**[00:54:08]** because that's the new world, they need to learn in that world,

**[00:54:11]** it will be their new interface with the world.

**[00:54:14]** And that's how I argued fiercely with various people about 8 years ago.

**[00:54:21]** And now I apologize to those people for arguing with them like that,

**[00:54:25]** because I was stupid and confused at the time,

**[00:54:28]** because it didn’t register with me at all.

**[00:54:30]** Maybe I was irritated that sometimes they opposed social networks

**[00:54:33]** for the wrong reasons, which bothered me.

**[00:54:37]** When you protest something for really bad reasons,

**[00:54:40]** I don’t think that compensates for the fact

**[00:54:43]** that you’re actually doing a good thing.

**[00:54:45]** Motivation is also quite important.

**[00:54:47]** But the effect is just like this,

**[00:54:52]** for example, I made a mistake with my son, who is 12 today,

**[00:54:56]** when he was 7, I gave him a smartphone early on.

**[00:54:59]** I would never do that now.

**[00:55:01]** Fortunately, he is such that

**[00:55:03]** for the first four years he had it,

**[00:55:05]** it was always forgotten somewhere, dead battery.

**[00:55:07]** He just didn’t use it at all.

**[00:55:09]** But I would never do that with my seven-year-old daughter,

**[00:55:11]** because I know what it is, I pull her away from cartoons after half an hour.

**[00:55:15]** That’s a brain that’s open to being hacked in some way.

**[00:55:20]** But at the same time, I remember knowing

**[00:55:24]** that social networks have extreme positive value.

**[00:55:27]** So how to do it then?

**[00:55:29]** This is an extremely important question,

**[00:55:31]** because realistically, what’s happening,

**[00:55:33]** even if we wanted to,

**[00:55:35]** we simply can’t manage it in any way.

**[00:55:38]** Turning off social networks, turning off the internet

**[00:55:40]** is basically equal to the collapse of our civilization.

**[00:55:44]** That would mean a blackout,

**[00:55:46]** and the blackout would cause the death of 90-95% of people in the world

**[00:55:49]** within a few years.

**[00:55:51]** That’s simply not what we want.

**[00:55:53]** The only path we have and can afford

**[00:55:56]** is a path based on top technologies

**[00:55:58]** and coexistence with top technologies.

**[00:56:00]** Why? It’s not because I’m a techno-optimist,

**[00:56:02]** I’ve gotten over that,

**[00:56:04]** but simply because the world,

**[00:56:06]** we as humanity are now facing such rapid adaptation of the world,

**[00:56:09]** So evolutionarily, it's been dead for thousands of years,

**[00:56:12]** we don't cultivate it.

**[00:56:14]** We've exhausted the social aspect, and the only adaptation ability

**[00:56:17]** to the changing world we have is the technological one.

**[00:56:20]** That means it's through coupling,

**[00:56:22]** connecting our brain with some external entities,

**[00:56:25]** and these external entities, now I'm finally getting to it,

**[00:56:28]** after 50 minutes of rambling,

**[00:56:30]** these external entities should in some form be

**[00:56:33]** based on artificial intelligence.

**[00:56:35]** Here we get to what

**[00:56:37]** my two colleagues and I are actually trying to do here as co-founders,

**[00:56:40]** one is Petr Stanislav,

**[00:56:42]** the other is Jiří Horáček, maybe you know Jirka Horáček,

**[00:56:45]** he's a fairly well-known psychiatrist, neuroscientist,

**[00:56:47]** head of a psychiatric clinic,

**[00:56:49]** to actually create something like, by the way, Czech

**[00:56:54]** is really hard, actually harder than English,

**[00:56:57]** because in English I just say digital buddy,

**[00:57:00]** like buddy, and here digital friend just sounds stupid,

**[00:57:03]** or digital companion sounds good too,

**[00:57:06]** but digital companion sounds like we're doing something else.

**[00:57:09]** So honestly, I don't know, I gave the presentation in English,

**[00:57:13]** I think those phrases are just for the new world,

**[00:57:17]** which kind of pushes Czech to the side.

**[00:57:21]** Nevertheless, it's basically a digital companion guide,

**[00:57:26]** something that, coupled with your mind, should compensate

**[00:57:31]** and help cushion the Achilles' heel that you see,

**[00:57:37]** imagine it actually, Elin, imagine it,

**[00:57:40]** I might even have it here somewhere,

**[00:57:43]** it's probably Elin who wrote it for us.

**[00:57:45]** Just imagine Elin AI, something like AI braille,

**[00:57:49]** which you put on so that what braille does,

**[00:57:53]** like a piece between the world and you,

**[00:57:56]** distorts how the world looks.

**[00:57:59]** And what it distorts metaphorically in that world are social media,

**[00:58:03]** the online semiosphere,

**[00:58:06]** basically the symbols and their flow and function in the online world.

**[00:58:10]** So how it translates to you how the world works is extreme,

**[00:58:13]** it's like having 15 channels, maybe more,

**[00:58:15]** This is an extremely distorted world.

**[00:58:17]** So just like you put on braille

**[00:58:19]** to navigate well and see how the world probably is,

**[00:58:23]** our goal is to create an AI agent,

**[00:58:27]** which will basically be your personal body, guide,

**[00:58:33]** a companion in that world in such a form,

**[00:58:36]** that it will help you correct the distortion

**[00:58:41]** of what you perceive on social networks.

**[00:58:43]** Of course, the best thing, if someone asked me,

**[00:58:46]** what helps best, well, the best help is to just turn it off,

**[00:58:50]** walk away, go for a run or go to the forest,

**[00:58:53]** something like that, that helps the most.

**[00:58:55]** We know this can't work in the long term.

**[00:58:58]** We have to create a society that is global and highly connected,

**[00:59:03]** and as homo sapiens, we just can't keep up.

**[00:59:06]** At the same time, as homo sapiens, we want to function in the world with some dignity,

**[00:59:11]** not just as some waste controlled

**[00:59:18]** That means one of the few things left to us

**[00:59:22]** is the area of so-called human cognitive enhancement.

**[00:59:26]** That means improving human cognitive abilities.

**[00:59:29]** This kind of cognitive enhancement has also existed for some years.

**[00:59:33]** It was mostly done through nootropics, psychedelics.

**[00:59:37]** Alcohol is basically also a cognitive enhancer.

**[00:59:41]** So things like modafinil, if you take it,

**[00:59:44]** it lowers creativity but increases focus.

**[00:59:47]** Alcohol does more or less the opposite.

**[00:59:49]** So I don't recommend taking modafinil and alcohol together,

**[00:59:52]** thinking you'll be more focused and more creative.

**[00:59:54]** Other drugs serve that purpose.

**[00:59:56]** So this is one type of cognitive enhancement.

**[01:00:00]** Some invasive cognitive enhancement walkers would try things like masks, Neuralink, and similar stuff.

**[01:00:06]** We would literally be cyborged with hardware.

**[01:00:08]** Ten years ago, I would have cheered, now I'm quite stressed about it.

**[01:00:12]** A middle path is pairing a human with an AI entity on a semiotic, semantic basis.

**[01:00:23]** That means on the basis of a language interface.

**[01:00:26]** And that's what Elin is trying to do.

**[01:00:28]** So we have some way to create a prototype, something, something, something, but imagine,

**[01:00:34]** our goal is anything the user actually sees in the online world.

**[01:00:39]** So far, it could be a newsfeed, or someone is hating on them on social networks,

**[01:00:44]** or simply receives some dark messages somewhere.

**[01:00:48]** Every secret action, even if it doesn't directly cause a tragedy like

**[01:00:54]** a predator simply wants a young girl to engage in some online grooming,

**[01:01:00]** to send him naked photos, and she sends them.

**[01:01:03]** That is simply a tragedy.

**[01:01:04]** Or somehow predators can show screenshots,

**[01:01:09]** in situations where you have eating disorders, they actually feed off that,

**[01:01:14]** manipulating you and forcing you to eat even less,

**[01:01:17]** and to send them photos of yourself,

**[01:01:20]** while you are basically dying live.

**[01:01:22]** These are clearly obvious, mega-toxic things,

**[01:01:26]** that threaten anyone living in that period of concrete

**[01:01:29]** between the completely soft and completely hard in this world.

**[01:01:33]** But it can also be especially the small splinters,

**[01:01:36]** that you encounter ten thousand times a day.

**[01:01:39]** Every message, you open Novinky.cz,

**[01:01:41]** and every message, unless it's really about,

**[01:01:44]** I don't know, firefighters pulling out

**[01:01:49]** some layer of a canal in Tachov region,

**[01:01:51]** every message leaves a small splinter in you.

**[01:01:53]** Somehow. In some way.

**[01:01:55]** And you get used to it being the norm.

**[01:01:57]** But when this integrates and accumulates

**[01:02:00]** over a huge amount of time, it is extremely toxic

**[01:02:03]** and leads to what I told you before.

**[01:02:06]** So it can be either that the world is deeply distorted

**[01:02:09]** and it's like if I had 20 diopters,

**[01:02:11]** took off my glasses, that's what happens

**[01:02:13]** to conspiracy theorists,

**[01:02:15]** people who self-harm.

**[01:02:19]** Simply an extremely distorted world.

**[01:02:21]** Or it can also be that you have

**[01:02:23]** like 1.5 diopters, 2 diopters,

**[01:02:25]** you don't want to wear glasses, you take them off,

**[01:02:27]** and your head keeps hurting afterwards.

**[01:02:30]** Something like that, metaphorically,

**[01:02:32]** is the usual contact with the internet.

**[01:02:34]** And we are trying to create AI.

**[01:02:36]** AI that we try to place

**[01:02:38]** between you and the world,

**[01:02:40]** to actually replace

**[01:02:42]** the missing link in your brain,

**[01:02:44]** which evolution simply didn't equip us with,

**[01:02:47]** because it didn't have time to equip us.

**[01:02:49]** So this is basically our goal.

**[01:02:54]** Ideally, we'd want

**[01:02:56]** it not to be for everyone anymore.

**[01:02:58]** Because how do you give something like that to a person,

**[01:03:00]** I don't know, just a guy like me,

**[01:03:02]** who simply says he has no anxiety,

**[01:03:04]** only snowflakes have it,

**[01:03:06]** and babies just have it.

**[01:03:08]** And even if I had it, no stupid robot

**[01:03:10]** would advise me on it.

**[01:03:12]** So that's very difficult.

**[01:03:14]** So especially with Gen Z,

**[01:03:16]** the phenomenon is extremely visible.

**[01:03:18]** And at the same time, thank nature,

**[01:03:20]** at least there's some detabooing.

**[01:03:22]** When you talk to average Gen Z people,

**[01:03:24]** they say OK, maybe we're fucked up,

**[01:03:26]** but we can imagine

**[01:03:28]** working with it somehow.

**[01:03:30]** People my age are fucked up too,

**[01:03:32]** but on average they don't admit it.

**[01:03:34]** So, here just a little

**[01:03:36]** peek at what it looks like.

**[01:03:38]** These are actually our colleagues,

**[01:03:40]** who are dealing with this for us now.

**[01:03:42]** These are recent screenshots

**[01:03:44]** from typical

**[01:03:46]** pro-anorexia communities.

**[01:03:48]** So here on the far left,

**[01:03:50]** there are so-called bodychecks,

**[01:03:52]** meanspo, bonespo,

**[01:03:54]** deathspo.

**[01:03:56]** Spo means inspiration.

**[01:03:58]** So bonespo is inspiration through this.

**[01:04:04]** He posted the second screenshot.

**[01:04:06]** That's roughly how it starts.

**[01:04:08]** Someone just does this to you

**[01:04:10]** on social media and triggers

**[01:04:12]** the next level,

**[01:04:14]** like sending you

**[01:04:16]** down some rabbit holes.

**[01:04:18]** What’s in the middle is

**[01:04:20]** a predator actually contacts you normally,

**[01:04:22]** lurking for you

**[01:04:24]** on that social network,

**[01:04:26]** like you post photos saying things like

**[01:04:28]** sure, skinny girl, but she writes

**[01:04:30]** I am sorry, I’m still fat.

**[01:04:32]** Then she starts getting

**[01:04:34]** these kinds of direct messages,

**[01:04:36]** where they say, yeah, yeah, but you’re right,

**[01:04:38]** you’re fat, but if you cut down to 900 calories a day

**[01:04:40]** and send me

**[01:04:42]** photos showing your progress,

**[01:04:44]** obviously naked, you’ll feel better.

**[01:04:46]** So that’s another reality.

**[01:04:48]** Then there’s the usual

**[01:04:50]** fat phobia, shaming.

**[01:04:52]** These are just a small sample,

**[01:04:54]** like narrow subgroups

**[01:04:56]** of self-image,

**[01:04:58]** a worldview

**[01:05:00]** related to eating disorders.

**[01:05:02]** So that’s just one tiny area.

**[01:05:04]** In general,

**[01:05:06]** body shaming is much bigger,

**[01:05:08]** and beyond that,

**[01:05:10]** we have a billion other issues around us.

**[01:05:12]** Sexual harassment,

**[01:05:14]** online grooming, which falls under that,

**[01:05:16]** trolling, hate speech, antisexual behavior,

**[01:05:18]** misogyny, basically Andrew Tate,

**[01:05:20]** who teaches today’s

**[01:05:22]** teenagers how to treat women properly.

**[01:05:24]** It's like just buying a

**[01:05:26]** Lambo, beating a woman, and then something else.

**[01:05:28]** That's the norm now, so they

**[01:05:30]** have no sex before their first polyp,

**[01:05:32]** they watch porn and then watch

**[01:05:34]** Andrew Tata. So that's something

**[01:05:36]** you inscribe into the concrete that's

**[01:05:38]** just before the table. So what you write there

**[01:05:40]** stays there forever. And we're waiting,

**[01:05:42]** for this generation to take over

**[01:05:44]** control of the world.

**[01:05:46]** So

**[01:05:48]** the interesting things

**[01:05:50]** are basically still ahead of us now.

**[01:05:52]** And one last thing, I probably don't have 39 seconds left,

**[01:05:54]** so I'll take at least two more minutes.

**[01:05:56]** What I just described,

**[01:05:58]** you probably noticed it's not just

**[01:06:00]** about individual help for people,

**[01:06:02]** but the whole

**[01:06:04]** society is starting to move. If

**[01:06:06]** no one trusts anyone,

**[01:06:08]** what does it matter?

**[01:06:10]** If someone asks, do you believe

**[01:06:12]** Americans landed on the moon? I definitely do.

**[01:06:14]** But why do I believe that?

**[01:06:16]** Because it's still just a story

**[01:06:18]** that's told, but

**[01:06:20]** it still seems

**[01:06:22]** more plausible and to me

**[01:06:24]** a more likable story than the story

**[01:06:26]** that the moon is just a sticker

**[01:06:28]** held by

**[01:06:30]** some Illuminati at the top and that Australia doesn't exist,

**[01:06:32]** because the Earth is flat.

**[01:06:35]** Actually, it's quite a strong conspiracy theory

**[01:06:37]** that Australia doesn't exist and all the people

**[01:06:39]** living there are actors hired by the American government,

**[01:06:41]** playing this role.

**[01:06:45]** And I'm not joking.

**[01:06:47]** Then try joining those communities.

**[01:06:49]** And if you just say you've been to Australia,

**[01:06:51]** the first thing they'll do is start hating on you,

**[01:06:53]** and the second,

**[01:06:55]** the more sensitive ones,

**[01:06:57]** who don't start hating on you,

**[01:06:59]** will try to explain that airlines

**[01:07:01]** operate fake flights,

**[01:07:03]** that take you to South America,

**[01:07:05]** which somehow exists, and that's fine,

**[01:07:07]** it's somehow okay in that place.

**[01:07:09]** And they play it off as if that's Australia,

**[01:07:11]** and that you are the victim.

**[01:07:13]** Now just imagine,

**[01:07:15]** if something bad happens to you in life,

**[01:07:17]** and it happens over a long time,

**[01:07:19]** you lose your worldview, and these people are kind to you

**[01:07:21]** and explain that it's just hate.

**[01:07:23]** And just like that, you're in it.

**[01:07:25]** And the dynamic is exactly the same.

**[01:07:27]** I absolutely hate it,

**[01:07:29]** when a large group of these people are called deplorables.

**[01:07:33]** It hurts me deeply.

**[01:07:35]** And it's our idiocy

**[01:07:37]** and our total narrow-mindedness

**[01:07:39]** and backwardness to function like this.

**[01:07:41]** What happens there,

**[01:07:43]** is just some kind of

**[01:07:45]** diverted dynamic

**[01:07:47]** of cognitive functioning,

**[01:07:49]** that we all have inside us.

**[01:07:51]** What’s in the head isn’t a machine

**[01:07:53]** for finding the truth, it’s a machine for finding

**[01:07:55]** unopposable stories.

**[01:07:57]** We are simply in a story-sphere,

**[01:07:59]** which has certain stories.

**[01:08:01]** We think those stories

**[01:08:03]** describe how the world works well.

**[01:08:05]** They are in a sphere that describes different stories.

**[01:08:08]** And the whole history of humanity

**[01:08:10]** is marked by deadly conflicts

**[01:08:12]** between people who believed one story

**[01:08:14]** versus people who believed other stories.

**[01:08:16]** And that's what we're brewing here

**[01:08:18]** like an extreme pressure cooker right now.

**[01:08:21]** And in the past, at least there was a problem,

**[01:08:23]** when someone hated someone else

**[01:08:25]** and wanted to tell them so,

**[01:08:27]** they actually had to go somewhere.

**[01:08:29]** They had to get up and go to that country

**[01:08:31]** and shout it there.

**[01:08:33]** That took energy, it was quite brave.

**[01:08:35]** Maybe someone did it, but usually it didn't end well.

**[01:08:37]** It wasn't exactly a role model

**[01:08:39]** who would do that.

**[01:08:41]** And today, that takes zero energy.

**[01:08:43]** So what happens

**[01:08:45]** when people feel anxiety, helplessness,

**[01:08:47]** and loss of control over the world,

**[01:08:49]** they normally look for,

**[01:08:51]** automatically, it's not a choice,

**[01:08:53]** because that's how the brain works.

**[01:08:55]** They normally look for compensatory mechanisms.

**[01:08:57]** So these are the three pillars.

**[01:08:59]** Anxiety, helplessness, and loss of control.

**[01:09:01]** And here are some articles,

**[01:09:03]** I don't know, I just randomly picked these,

**[01:09:05]** from Frontiers in Psychology,

**[01:09:07]** maybe something from Springer,

**[01:09:09]** I don't know exactly what I have there, I can't see,

**[01:09:11]** but it named exactly

**[01:09:13]** Compensatory Control and the Appeal of Structured World

**[01:09:15]** conspiracy theories.

**[01:09:17]** Cognitive Inflexibility Predicts Extremist Attitudes.

**[01:09:19]** Compensatory Control and its Implications

**[01:09:21]** for Ideological Extremism.

**[01:09:23]** These are just things. What is Compensatory Control?

**[01:09:25]** It's the thing triggered by the three

**[01:09:27]** pillars I described earlier.

**[01:09:29]** So like to me

**[01:09:31]** it absolutely makes no sense

**[01:09:33]** and it's harmful for people

**[01:09:35]** to hate on someone just because, like, dude, you simply

**[01:09:37]** voted for Trump? What is that?

**[01:09:39]** Trump is a Russian agent. By the way, that Trump

**[01:09:41]** is a Russian agent is a conspiracy theory.

**[01:09:43]** Just like QAnon exists.

**[01:09:45]** It's just that if you read

**[01:09:47]** Dan Ariely's book Misbelief,

**[01:09:49]** he has a chart like this, political spectrum,

**[01:09:51]** ultra-liberals,

**[01:09:53]** or just left,

**[01:09:55]** conservatives, and all the way on the far left

**[01:09:57]** is 'Trump is a Russian agent.'

**[01:09:59]** It's simply a conspiracy theory.

**[01:10:00]** And I don't know where you stand, I don't even want to say where you stand politically,

**[01:10:03]** but that's a story that might, on average, pop up more easily among us

**[01:10:08]** than that Kamala Harris is a pedophile who eats children for dinner or something like that.

**[01:10:13]** But it has exactly the same dynamic.

**[01:10:17]** It's just that if you don't use that compensatory control, things start happening to you.

**[01:10:22]** And I think, of course, the best solution to this situation

**[01:10:29]** is extremely mindful interpersonal kindness and understanding.

**[01:10:34]** That's the best solution. No AI will work that well.

**[01:10:38]** But this would require an indescribably huge effort,

**[01:10:45]** which is completely utopian to think could exist.

**[01:10:48]** That's why I think that where everyone individually has this option,

**[01:10:52]** to stop hating and calling someone a loser,

**[01:10:55]** or instead to have a conversation with someone about why they vote for Trump,

**[01:10:59]** when you vote for Kamala, rather than just yelling at them,

**[01:11:04]** 'You’re a stupid jerk for voting for Trump.'

**[01:11:07]** Because you’re very sensitive, but I think

**[01:11:13]** who votes Democrat and someone says, 'But I vote for Trump,'

**[01:11:17]** even that very nice and mild pro-LGBTQ and whatever,

**[01:11:23]** who says, 'You bastard, how can you vote for Trump?'

**[01:11:25]** I thought you were normal.

**[01:11:27]** And that's the normal dynamic we see everywhere,

**[01:11:30]** except in ourselves.

**[01:11:31]** We see it in everyone around us, interestingly, but measured against us,

**[01:11:34]** and we never see it in ourselves.

**[01:11:35]** Because all of us here are victims of it.

**[01:11:38]** I'm not saying there aren't evil people in society.

**[01:11:41]** There are, there are simply repulsive psychopaths,

**[01:11:44]** predators, luckily some of them are now in prison,

**[01:11:47]** who are parasites.

**[01:11:49]** For example, they make money from YouTube videos,

**[01:11:52]** because they spread these conspiracies.

**[01:11:54]** And many people, whom I honestly feel sorry for,

**[01:11:57]** just bought into it.

**[01:11:58]** That's really chutzpah.

**[01:12:00]** It's something that makes me sick.

**[01:12:02]** Only these people have always been here.

**[01:12:04]** There has always been 1% psychopaths in the population.

**[01:12:06]** And it's very important,

**[01:12:08]** that our system,

**[01:12:11]** I'm quoting Koukolík here,

**[01:12:13]** from the group of deprived,

**[01:12:15]** he states about 1%,

**[01:12:16]** half of them are in prison, half of them are in politics,

**[01:12:19]** or simply in caregiving professions, for example.

**[01:12:28]** Our previous arrangement,

**[01:12:30]** which worked until about 15 years ago,

**[01:12:33]** somehow allowed us to maintain a democratic society

**[01:12:36]** relatively open, with its flaws,

**[01:12:38]** it's a living organism,

**[01:12:40]** that constantly fights external influences, always fights.

**[01:12:43]** And these people were always there.

**[01:12:45]** Only now we have to try to adapt

**[01:12:48]** to a new vector of attack from this,

**[01:12:50]** from this evolutionary virus,

**[01:12:52]** which is simply,

**[01:12:54]** and what helped me in the end,

**[01:12:56]** was to realize,

**[01:12:58]** why this type of psychopath is there,

**[01:13:00]** why they always are?

**[01:13:01]** Exactly because,

**[01:13:03]** they are like viruses needed in your childhood,

**[01:13:06]** which you need to kickstart.

**[01:13:08]** Evolution worked as evolution only because

**[01:13:10]** that there was selective pressure.

**[01:13:12]** That there were always bad guys.

**[01:13:14]** That's the one thing.

**[01:13:16]** Just different viruses, anything.

**[01:13:18]** Changes in the environment and so on.

**[01:13:20]** And I try to take this part,

**[01:13:22]** for example the psychopathic, destructive parts of society,

**[01:13:25]** simply as a form of evolutionary pressure,

**[01:13:28]** without which life wouldn't work.

**[01:13:30]** It's just something that affects us as a society,

**[01:13:32]** meaning society as a living organism.

**[01:13:34]** And this is simply the external virulent bacteriological pressure,

**[01:13:40]** that acts on your body.

**[01:13:42]** And if you, as your body, were never exposed to any viruses,

**[01:13:45]** if I hermetically sealed you now, you would die of something else.

**[01:13:48]** Most likely, you'd die from an autoimmune reaction.

**[01:13:50]** So I try to see this in my own way,

**[01:13:53]** not to say it's a positive thing,

**[01:13:55]** but as a fact of the world, something not worth crying over,

**[01:13:58]** that this is simply happening in the world.

**[01:14:00]** But it's worth using the technological layer

**[01:14:04]** to implement adaptation of the whole society and us as individuals.

**[01:14:08]** Why through technology?

**[01:14:10]** Well, because at this speed we really have no other choice.

**[01:14:13]** That doesn't take anything away from the appeal,

**[01:14:15]** like just turn off your phones, don't give phones to kids.

**[01:14:19]** By the way, if you want to know, I am absolutely for banning phones in schools.

**[01:14:24]** And there is only one thing in life, the only, only thing,

**[01:14:27]** I have ever agreed with Čunek on, and that is the ban.

**[01:14:30]** Everything else is incredibly wrong in my opinion,

**[01:14:32]** but this, for me, is right.

**[01:14:35]** And I'm even willing to lightly argue about this.

**[01:14:39]** Okay, I think I'll end it now due to time,

**[01:14:41]** since the light is off there, I hope it's not eleven o'clock.

**[01:14:45]** Thank you.

**[01:14:57]** Yeah.

**[01:14:58]** I have to...

**[01:14:59]** That's probably some postman.

**[01:15:00]** Come a little closer.

**[01:15:01]** Wait, I'll move you.

**[01:15:03]** That's a bit more complicated.

**[01:15:05]** I got used to the fact that I was at that meeting with the president in Lány on Monday,

**[01:15:09]** so I quietly hopped around there.

**[01:15:11]** You expelled yourself there.

**[01:15:13]** And the president is probably used to war invalids,

**[01:15:17]** so it was great.

**[01:15:20]** Anyway, thank you very much for your lecture.

**[01:15:25]** As I kind of suspected, there are quite a few questions.

**[01:15:30]** So the first thing I want to say to all of you,

**[01:15:33]** is thank you for them,

**[01:15:35]** feel free to keep asking,

**[01:15:37]** but we won't get to all of them.

**[01:15:39]** But, as is traditional, after the Brain Breakfast on September 4th,

**[01:15:46]** so in about 14 days,

**[01:15:48]** we'll have a follow-up, a digest session.

**[01:15:50]** That means we'll get to all these questions there,

**[01:15:53]** and I'll get to it,

**[01:15:55]** because I've invited other interesting guests,

**[01:15:57]** to make the discussion really nice.

**[01:16:00]** Anyway, you got advice

**[01:16:03]** on what it should be called in Czech,

**[01:16:05]** it's a digital partner.

**[01:16:07]** Yeah, it shouldn't just be a partner, it should be.

**[01:16:09]** And Martin asks, thanks Martin for the question,

**[01:16:12]** I'd like to hear where and how Generation X parents messed up.

**[01:16:18]** I think the first part where they messed up

**[01:16:21]** is helicopter parenting.

**[01:16:23]** Luckily, it's not so much in the Czech Republic,

**[01:16:26]** although it does show up here too.

**[01:16:28]** This is mainly a question in Anglo-American countries.

**[01:16:31]** And if you ask an average Gen Xer,

**[01:16:38]** at what age they had the so-called Liberation Age,

**[01:16:41]** meaning the age when a child first went somewhere

**[01:16:44]** to do something on their own without adults,

**[01:16:47]** maybe with a group of kids.

**[01:16:48]** I grew up in Most as a boy,

**[01:16:50]** and I remember I just went there,

**[01:16:52]** and they told me I must never cross Skupovka,

**[01:16:55]** the street.

**[01:16:56]** Of course, the first thing I did was,

**[01:16:58]** that I walked through it.

**[01:17:00]** I just went into the shade there.

**[01:17:02]** And if you ask people a bit older,

**[01:17:06]** people my age and a bit older,

**[01:17:08]** the Liberation Age is usually said to be around

**[01:17:10]** 6-7 years old, for example.

**[01:17:11]** And if you ask people then from Gen X and older,

**[01:17:15]** it's maybe 12 years and up.

**[01:17:17]** That means constant supervised fun,

**[01:17:20]** always having to be in some place,

**[01:17:22]** which also doesn't work.

**[01:17:24]** It's like permanent adult supervision.

**[01:17:26]** That's the first problem.

**[01:17:28]** The first problem we probably really made recently,

**[01:17:31]** in the last few years, is really

**[01:17:33]** that we, with good intentions,

**[01:17:40]** experience blockers in the form of mobile devices,

**[01:17:43]** which are by design made to

**[01:17:45]** steal attention from the moment

**[01:17:48]** when the concrete should be imprinted with what

**[01:17:50]** it expects to be imprinted with.

**[01:17:52]** That means synchronous embodied communication,

**[01:17:57]** and we blocked that.

**[01:18:00]** And we blocked it with good intentions,

**[01:18:02]** thinking,

**[01:18:03]** hey, the world will be very electronic, right?

**[01:18:05]** So I made exactly this mistake.

**[01:18:07]** So we have to give children deprived of childhood

**[01:18:09]** the interfaces

**[01:18:11]** that they will later use as adults.

**[01:18:14]** Jesus, I didn't realize how stupid an idea that is.

**[01:18:16]** How twisted that argument is.

**[01:18:18]** Because look, I would say about myself,

**[01:18:20]** that I'm really,

**[01:18:22]** as they nicely say in Czech, digital savvy.

**[01:18:24]** I really know how to use computers well,

**[01:18:27]** I have no problem with any interface,

**[01:18:29]** starting from touchscreen to virtual reality.

**[01:18:32]** And yet, I got my first computer in fifth grade, an Atari 800.

**[01:18:35]** and my first connection was dial-up internet,

**[01:18:38]** when I used to go to my dad's work around the age of fifteen.

**[01:18:41]** So I never encountered this interface during my childhood,

**[01:18:45]** and I would say that's exactly why I can function properly with it.

**[01:18:50]** So the idea of buying tablets for schools, buying this and that, and the hate,

**[01:18:55]** and let's hate on people who want to ban phones outright

**[01:18:58]** just phones in school,

**[01:19:00]** I believe the effort is well-intentioned,

**[01:19:03]** because the assumption is,

**[01:19:05]** that we need to teach kids about the world,

**[01:19:07]** but that assumption is wrong.

**[01:19:09]** We need to give kids space between roughly seven and twenty years old,

**[01:19:15]** so that what has been imprinted in the last at least two hundred thousand years or more

**[01:19:19]** and what the hardware structures are prepared for,

**[01:19:23]** can be inscribed into that hardening concrete of their brain.

**[01:19:25]** And once that concrete hardens, the person can handle absolutely everything.

**[01:19:29]** Absolutely everything.

**[01:19:30]** Even if brain-computer interfaces existed here,

**[01:19:32]** they would still manage just fine with them.

**[01:19:34]** But if we break this stage, then no.

**[01:19:36]** So we messed it up with good intentions.

**[01:19:40]** Are the data you showed from America, Europe, or where are they from?

**[01:19:46]** These are specifically from the Anglo-American world,

**[01:19:50]** where the situation might be slightly worse,

**[01:19:52]** because helicopter parenting started there earlier.

**[01:19:56]** For example, I think you won't find a carousel on any public playground in the entire US.

**[01:20:00]** Because it's considered too dangerous.

**[01:20:04]** But by the way, the carousel is an extremely important thing,

**[01:20:06]** because throughout human history, groups of people

**[01:20:11]** who never met in life gained trust by

**[01:20:13]** being able to go hunting together and so on.

**[01:20:16]** They gained it by sharing a common rhythm,

**[01:20:19]** through ritual dances and similar activities.

**[01:20:22]** There are also experiments where you take groups of people,

**[01:20:25]** for example students, and let them dance to music.

**[01:20:27]** Completely random, sampled students,

**[01:20:29]** let them dance to rhythmic music,

**[01:20:31]** and take another group of students, give them headphones,

**[01:20:33]** play the same music but slightly shifted, like offbeat.

**[01:20:37]** So they were each dancing to a slightly different rhythm.

**[01:20:40]** And then you start doing those devilish,

**[01:20:42]** psychological-behavioral-economic experiments,

**[01:20:45]** which focus on cooperation and honesty.

**[01:20:48]** So either everyone gets something if everyone pulls together,

**[01:20:51]** or if one person screws over the others,

**[01:20:53]** he gets 50 and the others get nothing.

**[01:20:55]** So guess what.

**[01:20:56]** The first group, which bonded through

**[01:20:58]** embodied rhythmic sharing of physical reality,

**[01:21:01]** cooperates much better.

**[01:21:03]** They simply connected with strangers that way.

**[01:21:05]** While the second group, which has asynchronous communication,

**[01:21:08]** did not connect like that.

**[01:21:10]** And our whole life, especially Gen Z,

**[01:21:12]** has simply merged into a world

**[01:21:16]** of asynchronous disembodied communication with zero costs.

**[01:21:20]** That means building trust for things like,

**[01:21:22]** wanting to date someone.

**[01:21:24]** That's basically impossible because I don't know how.

**[01:21:26]** Yeah, interesting. Thank you very much for this, among other things.

**[01:21:30]** Jana asks.

**[01:21:32]** How to handle the threat of social exclusion of a child from a group,

**[01:21:36]** when we protect them from social sharing

**[01:21:38]** and don't give them a smartphone?

**[01:21:40]** I have a personal experience.

**[01:21:42]** My son doesn't have one and won't get one,

**[01:21:45]** but try telling that to a larger, wider population.

**[01:21:51]** Well, he won't be the only one without a smartphone.

**[01:21:55]** Just say sorry.

**[01:21:56]** There is no smartphone.

**[01:21:57]** Use it or lose it.

**[01:21:58]** Just manage somehow normally.

**[01:22:00]** There will be some friends, right? Without a smartphone.

**[01:22:02]** And just don't support it.

**[01:22:04]** Ideally, if you have some parents around

**[01:22:07]** who are also willing to say,

**[01:22:08]** no smartphone, goodbye.

**[01:22:10]** You know where I broke my leg, for example?

**[01:22:12]** We were on vacation and just for a few evenings in a row,

**[01:22:14]** we banned the kids from using smartphones.

**[01:22:16]** And then we found out, we were just watching,

**[01:22:18]** they were playing volleyball there.

**[01:22:19]** I never knew in my life that they play volleyball.

**[01:22:21]** They were running around somewhere in the park.

**[01:22:22]** In the end, it turned out, the last unpermitted,

**[01:22:24]** they told me, hey, come play volleyball.

**[01:22:26]** So I said, okay.

**[01:22:27]** So it's good, it has its own,

**[01:22:29]** as they say, we want bruises, not scars.

**[01:22:32]** We want scratches, not injuries.

**[01:22:35]** So my first fracture was actually quite good,

**[01:22:38]** at least I slowed down a bit.

**[01:22:39]** That means, for me, it's really good,

**[01:22:41]** when parents can agree

**[01:22:44]** and just come to school,

**[01:22:45]** there's some enlightened principal who says,

**[01:22:47]** just ban it, don't be a jerk,

**[01:22:49]** ban the phones.

**[01:22:50]** They just can't be used, there are lockers, they get locked.

**[01:22:52]** And okay, if someone has a nosebleed

**[01:22:54]** or a fever or something,

**[01:22:55]** they come to the teacher and say,

**[01:22:57]** sir, can you unlock it for me?

**[01:22:59]** Okay, you can, sure.

**[01:23:00]** It gets unlocked and they call home awkwardly.

**[01:23:02]** But that space means,

**[01:23:03]** the kids will have a full 8 hours

**[01:23:06]** to have synchronous embodied communication.

**[01:23:08]** And sure, they turn it on at home,

**[01:23:10]** okay, fair enough, but they realize

**[01:23:11]** that synchronous embodied communication

**[01:23:13]** is actually quite nice.

**[01:23:15]** Here are a few questions.

**[01:23:18]** Lukáš, thanks.

**[01:23:19]** From what age and especially how exactly

**[01:23:21]** do you teach kids to open up about this topic?

**[01:23:24]** About the mobile phone?

**[01:23:25]** Like what you were actually saying.

**[01:23:29]** Well, age-wise, kids for a big part of their childhood

**[01:23:33]** simply don't have sufficient cognitive ability

**[01:23:35]** decide what they should do about themselves.

**[01:23:37]** That they would of course prefer

**[01:23:39]** to just sit around and maybe eat chocolate if they had the chance.

**[01:23:41]** And by the way, most children, if not guided,

**[01:23:44]** would rather go out and explore.

**[01:23:47]** It alternates and is called in English,

**[01:23:49]** what we call Czech attachment, maybe some kind of bonding.

**[01:23:52]** A healthy child in their own...

**[01:23:54]** From a certain point when they feel,

**[01:23:56]** that they won't just pick up any random bat

**[01:23:58]** and eat it,

**[01:24:00]** they start to discover that they can go out alone without their mother

**[01:24:03]** or without the attached adult into the world.

**[01:24:06]** They undertake things always on the edge...

**[01:24:09]** That is risk-seeking behavior.

**[01:24:11]** On the edge of risk, excitement,

**[01:24:14]** and then retreat back to the safe base.

**[01:24:17]** That means they must have a safe base

**[01:24:20]** and space to explore the world alone.

**[01:24:23]** Burdening them with it being so strict...

**[01:24:27]** We should find enough strength in ourselves

**[01:24:30]** to not communicate everything to the children.

**[01:24:34]** Simply say, you don't have a phone.

**[01:24:36]** At our place, they simply don't have a phone,

**[01:24:38]** just like we don't drink cola in childhood

**[01:24:40]** or no one smokes,

**[01:24:42]** so similarly, there is no phone.

**[01:24:44]** But at the same time, give them some space.

**[01:24:47]** And don't constantly hover over them.

**[01:24:49]** I think that's almost the most important thing.

**[01:24:51]** And then somewhere in puberty.

**[01:24:53]** For example, I openly communicate this to my son.

**[01:24:56]** Moreover, he is somewhat a tester of LNAI,

**[01:24:59]** so I have that there...

**[01:25:02]** It's very individual.

**[01:25:04]** When to allow children, daughters aged four and six,

**[01:25:08]** access to social networks?

**[01:25:10]** Never.

**[01:25:14]** And that's actually a very interesting thing,

**[01:25:17]** because I also think about it,

**[01:25:20]** It's one thing when someone builds in Minecraft,

**[01:25:24]** then there's Fortnite,

**[01:25:26]** then there's this,

**[01:25:28]** and all these other things.

**[01:25:29]** And personally, I kind of mentally separate them a bit.

**[01:25:32]** I accept that social networks are kind of very bad,

**[01:25:35]** I accept that when Kuba creatively creates in Minecraft

**[01:25:39]** and then shows me that he made something,

**[01:25:41]** I think, okay, this is interesting,

**[01:25:43]** instead of drawing, he made this,

**[01:25:45]** sometimes.

**[01:25:46]** How do you actually perceive this?

**[01:25:48]** Because there's also the question of

**[01:25:50]** which social networks you think are the most toxic

**[01:25:53]** and how it is with some of those games?

**[01:25:56]** I think games are pretty okay.

**[01:25:58]** On the contrary, if someone wants to...

**[01:26:00]** It's very interesting,

**[01:26:02]** why boys play more computer games than girls.

**[01:26:05]** I think maybe girls should play more computer games.

**[01:26:08]** But computer games that aren't multiplayer.

**[01:26:11]** There simply isn't that social element.

**[01:26:13]** So dangerous are games

**[01:26:15]** that are massive multiplayer online games.

**[01:26:17]** But dangerous, dangerous.

**[01:26:19]** My son at Advanc also plays Fortnite.

**[01:26:21]** I play Fortnite with him.

**[01:26:23]** But why does Fortnite give you that?

**[01:26:25]** Because when he finishes Fortnite,

**[01:26:27]** they just gather in Plzeň

**[01:26:29]** and go with the boys to the playground downtown.

**[01:26:31]** And I don't know where they are.

**[01:26:33]** They say they're going to the playground.

**[01:26:35]** They don't say which playground.

**[01:26:37]** I don't find out. I don't know.

**[01:26:39]** And that's part of it. That's how I grew up.

**[01:26:41]** That means he has a way to metabolize Fortnite.

**[01:26:44]** And someone will hate on him for playing in a team.

**[01:26:46]** Now they should have

**[01:26:48]** a five-crown exception.

**[01:26:50]** That means, win five times in a row.

**[01:26:52]** And he messes it up. And they hate on him there.

**[01:26:54]** So he says, never mind.

**[01:26:56]** He packs it up and just goes to the field with the guys.

**[01:26:58]** That's really good.

**[01:27:00]** Only, social networks, I don't think

**[01:27:02]** are good for kids at all.

**[01:27:04]** It's just...

**[01:27:08]** What I showed you was Twitter.

**[01:27:10]** There, censorship completely ended.

**[01:27:12]** And you'll find this there.

**[01:27:14]** So this is that.

**[01:27:16]** But Zuckerberg,

**[01:27:18]** has a completely mistaken view of the world.

**[01:27:20]** He keeps going on about

**[01:27:22]** perfect AI content filtering

**[01:27:24]** on Instagram.

**[01:27:26]** Even if Instagram was full

**[01:27:28]** of happy people,

**[01:27:30]** beautiful, satisfied, happy girls,

**[01:27:32]** and great stimuli,

**[01:27:34]** after that lecture, it's clear to you

**[01:27:36]** what it will do.

**[01:27:38]** So even if I just keep looking

**[01:27:40]** at photos of everyone

**[01:27:42]** being very satisfied, it will end up

**[01:27:44]** more or less the same.

**[01:27:46]** So that kind of...

**[01:27:48]** You can go on Instagram, but you can't look

**[01:27:50]** at any gore stuff.

**[01:27:52]** That doesn't work. Just don't go on Instagram.

**[01:27:54]** That's really

**[01:27:56]** the best solution.

**[01:27:58]** And if you're already there, at least install Elina.

**[01:28:00]** That would be the second best solution.

**[01:28:02]** I hope.

**[01:28:04]** But it's far behind the first best solution.

**[01:28:06]** That's when you just...

**[01:28:08]** And now the question comes.

**[01:28:10]** Well, they just cry at home.

**[01:28:12]** Please, just everyone, you know.

**[01:28:14]** If they're under 13,

**[01:28:16]** be absolutely uncompromising.

**[01:28:18]** Just totally uncompromising.

**[01:28:20]** You can simply say, look, this is normally,

**[01:28:22]** it's illegal, there's age-gating,

**[01:28:24]** the legal age for Instagram is 13,

**[01:28:26]** which is really low, it should be at least 15.

**[01:28:28]** Say no, no, no.

**[01:28:30]** And by the way, what do we as

**[01:28:32]** parents do? We try to ease our own

**[01:28:34]** anxiety and pressure from the fact that our child

**[01:28:36]** is throwing a tantrum,

**[01:28:38]** so we shift it onto them.

**[01:28:40]** We relieve ourselves by allowing it.

**[01:28:42]** And we create a real mess in their head

**[01:28:44]** through this long process. And how do I know this so well?

**[01:28:46]** Because I made that mistake.

**[01:28:48]** So...

**[01:28:50]** Maybe a follow-up question, how do your kids do?

**[01:28:52]** How much time do they spend on phones or computers?

**[01:28:54]** Do they have social problems, and so on.

**[01:28:56]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:24]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:26]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:28]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:30]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:32]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:34]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:36]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:38]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:40]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:42]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:44]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:46]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:48]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:50]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:52]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:54]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:56]** How do you handle it?

**[01:29:58]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:00]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:02]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:04]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:06]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:08]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:10]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:12]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:14]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:16]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:18]** How are you doing?

**[01:30:00]** I hope he doesn't have that inclination for a dopamine rush, so we made the mistake of giving him the phone too early.

**[01:30:07]** Four years ago, he was always forgetting it somewhere, not turning it on, battery dead, stuff like that.

**[01:30:11]** I was almost proud that he had a phone and used it, amazed at how I managed it.

**[01:30:16]** Now he plays Minecraft, there's some risk, because raising kids is just a mess.

**[01:30:25]** I don't know, I don't have any good advice.

**[01:30:27]** So yes, he's there. I know he does something on YouTube, probably commenting on things.

**[01:30:34]** I know he's not on any social network.

**[01:30:36]** The reason I know is because I strictly enforce parental control on his phone.

**[01:30:42]** That means if he exceeds an hour and a half a day, it starts to yell at him, and I check his screentime.

**[01:30:47]** And I see that most of that hour is, I don't know, mostly in Minecraft, for example.

**[01:30:53]** Honza, your time is up.

**[01:30:56]** Honza, thank you. Thanks for your lecture.

**[01:30:59]** I would really like to get some feedback from you.

**[01:31:04]** It's a bit quiet here today, so I assume we'll have some time to reflect.

**[01:31:11]** So please try to write us one word that came to mind after Honza's talk.

**[01:31:18]** And of course, give us a star rating so we know how you liked this breakfast session.

**[01:31:23]** You can do it right on the slide, if I feel it's working now,

**[01:31:27]** or under the live stream.

**[01:31:32]** Okay, I'll move on now.

**[01:31:35]** It's good to meet physically and talk with someone about what we heard today.

**[01:31:44]** I will definitely recommend this video, this live stream, to many friends,

**[01:31:49]** I'll send it to school and then we'll discuss it, because this is exactly the topic we're dealing with now,

**[01:31:53]** with my son's transition to middle school. How to handle phones, what will happen there, and how others manage it.

**[01:31:58]** Make a circle with your people, your close ones, people from work.

**[01:32:03]** We definitely have questions about your aha moments, so reflection is very valuable.

**[01:32:09]** As I mentioned a bit at the start, we also offer that.

**[01:32:14]** On September 4th at 8:30, I invited guests who were at previous Brain&Breakfasts,

**[01:32:21]** or will be at Brain&Breakfasts in the upcoming periods.

**[01:32:24]** Eva Nečasová AI for kids, I think a very interesting insight.

**[01:32:28]** Pepa Holík, social media addiction, and the overall influence of social networks on how we function.

**[01:32:33]** And Karolina Presová, who definitely gave a lecture on how to relax and disconnect.

**[01:32:39]** Plus, many, many others are reaching out to me who are simply interested in this topic,

**[01:32:43]** triggered by it, whether as parents, at work, or anything else.

**[01:32:47]** So if you want to join this discussion, please connect on the redbutton.edu platforms.

**[01:32:54]** I just want to say that besides the classic Brain&Breakfast breakfasts, we also offer business ones,

**[01:33:01]** which get straight to the point on current topics being addressed in companies

**[01:33:08]** and somehow reflect, whether in the area of technology,

**[01:33:12]** which we are very close to today, or in the area of people, which we are also close to.

**[01:33:16]** The next breakfasts will be on September 2nd and 3rd.

**[01:33:20]** On the 2nd, Martin Šafařík will talk about building habits.

**[01:33:23]** On the 3rd, we will look at customer needs.

**[01:33:26]** This is specifically for companies, specifically for business.

**[01:33:30]** The classic breakfasts continue as well.

**[01:33:32]** We do a lot at Red Button, which is why there was that QR code,

**[01:33:37]** so you can access the content.

**[01:33:40]** One of them is a book.

**[01:33:42]** Yes, books still exist nowadays,

**[01:33:45]** so the book of the month for August.

**[01:33:48]** So definitely, if you enjoy books and want some recommendations,

**[01:33:53]** check out hankajadavan at www.rbkniha.cz

**[01:33:57]** you'll find plenty there.

**[01:33:59]** And I can only invite you to the next breakfasts,

**[01:34:06]** which will be about happiness at work,

**[01:34:09]** we'll build on that a bit.

**[01:34:11]** Michal Šrojer, who is the founder,

**[01:34:14]** the first chief happiness officer in our country,

**[01:34:16]** my good friend, founder of the happiness at work movement,

**[01:34:19]** will share his journey and the ten years

**[01:34:23]** he has experienced in this topic,

**[01:34:26]** and will also try to predict

**[01:34:29]** what awaits us in the future.

**[01:34:31]** So if you're interested in how to function at work,

**[01:34:33]** how results are achieved, and how to improve this,

**[01:34:37]** I'll look forward to seeing you on September 19th, either here at Manženta

**[01:34:41]** or via the Red Button Edu platform. See you then.

**[01:34:45]** Thanks a lot, Honza, thanks to all of you,

**[01:34:47]** take care, bye and goodbye.

**[01:34:50]** Goodbye.

**[01:35:03]** www.hradeckesluzby.cz