Here is Everything We Don't Know (Extended)

[Music] this is green this is red and this is blue but how can you tell what you're seeing as blue is the exact same thing as what I see as blue we've named the colors to give us a way to communicate and reference them but in reality there's no way of knowing what you see is the same as what another person sees even with the small steps and the giant leaps we've made as a species there's still a lot to learn about Earth life and The Human Condition there's still everything we don't know on the 26th of February 2015 one picture of a dress divided the internet you are seeing white and gold where are you looking at I oh just Chang white no you're kidding well some sol it as gold and white others solid as blue and black and ever since then there's been a number of repetitions of the same experience experiment either using the same sense in this case sight or even other senses like hearing in the famous Yan or Laurel debate Laurel these experiments remind us that there's no way for us to tell that you and I sense the same things what I call Red might just be what you call Blue and there might be someone out there who sees human beings with purple teeth but just refers to it as white 71% of the entire Earth is covered by water humans are made up of about 60% water potatoes 80% watermelons 93% and cucumbers 95% it's very clear that water is essential for life on Earth but we really don't know that much about water not even about the very oceans we came from in fact we've only explored 5 to 10% of the Earth's oceans the rest well who knows what's down there it's even scarier when you realize that fish like the blob fish and the barreled eye fish belong to the slim percent of things that we've already discovered the deeper you go the crazier things seem to get what's at the bottom of the ocean for the most part we just don't know but back on the surface countries that are bordered by water use something called coastlines to mark their territory the coast is the land along the Sea and the boundary between the coast and the sea is known as a coastline so how long is the US Coastline or any other Coastline in the world the answer is well again we don't really know coastlines constantly curve and cut in and out even the smallest deviations from a straight line can add distance and over time these small distances add up some of these features are massive like Bas While others are minuscule now measuring each and every little crevice isn't really efficient so surveyors cut corners and straighten rough edges and easily manageable lines if you do a quick Google search of the measurement of any coastline you'll find a lot of different answers they all cut Corners just differently Humanity as a species though well we've done really well for ourselves when in a pinch we invent something to push us through we made clothes when the weather was harsh shelter so we could be safe from Wildlife to rest and recuperate weapons to hunt for food money to replace pure bartering what about fire was fire a discovery or an invention and music music has been described by scientists as a relatively recent invention by humans it's believed that music helped our ancestors to bring together a close-knit community but did humans really invent music or did we just discover that certain sounds sound nice with other sounds birds sing whales sing even tree frogs have a nice rich Barone sometimes so can we really say man invented music if we did then what is the true definition of music I guess we'll never know on the list of man's greatest inventions has to be Tools in fact for a really long time scientists were pretty sure that this is exactly what made us human we were the only animals who through the use of such a variety of tools were able to expand and grow so quickly except we aren't the only ones who use tools a lot of animals mainly primates use tools for all kinds of reasons a study by Jane goodle on African and chimpanzees would change the definition of man forever in the research it was discovered that these chimpanzees use tools to gather food brush their teeth and even more so in response would this mean we must now redefine man or redefine tool they use tools for the exact same things we would do we accept chimpanzees as human well of course not this begs the question if using tools doesn't then what makes us human and the same same research it was also discovered that chimps had individual personalities and were capable of rational thoughts like emotions and sorrow they gave pats on the back hugs kisses and even just messed around with each other just for fun they developed affectionate bonds with family members and with other members of the community and some of these bonds lasted for over 50 years if emotions rational thought and affectionate actions do not then what makes us human in the past it was thought that humans were the only animals who were self-aware however in the past 30 years extensive research has proven that many other animals are to in fact in 2012 a group of neuroscientists created the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness which states that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate Consciousness non-human animals including all mammals and birds and many other creatures also possess these neural substrates if Consciousness sentient wakefulness and the ability to feel and experience do not then what makes us human we really just don't know all we know is that one day we weren't today we are and one day we will be no more we don't know what happened before we existed and neither do we know what will happen after we die if a person dies and comes back to life it's refer to as a near-death experience because we see death as a finality but what if it isn't what if one of the beliefs of Humanity's many religions is true even the Earth itself can be very weird and sometimes you just see formations that make no sense like who built Stonehenge and why the same goes for the pyramids some people think the gods of Egypt made the pyramids others are convinced it was made by human effort but in reality we just don't know the human mind is everything all of man's greatest inventions theories and discoveries have all come from a human mind we first conceive of an idea in our mind before we can ever create it in the real world but perhaps we don't yet know or understand exactly how powerful the mind can be the placebo effect gives us a glimpse I made an entire video about the placebo effect but basically doctors appear to give a patient treatment but in actuality they don't however this fake treatment registers in the brain perceives it as real and kicks starts the healing process basically the Mind heals the body because it thinks the body is getting treatment even if it isn't in research on social cognitive and effective Neuroscience it was discovered that self-affirmation helps to maintain a positive self viw and helps to restore your self- confidence and self-worth simply by telling yourself nice things it is indeed possible for your mind to convince your brain and body that you are those things and these are just the things we know the mind is capable of think about everything we don't know there are a lot of things we know about animals dogs are sweet and loving cats can have an attitude and the lion is apparently the king of the jungle even if it lives in a savannah not everything makes sense and we really don't know as much as we think we do going to space is one of man's greatest achievements however what space exploration has clearly shown us is just how small we are in the grand scheme of things there are at least 2,500 other solar systems that have discovered but that number could go up to the tens of billions we just can't know for sure that's just in our galaxy The Milky Way and the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies that are out there it's so incredibly massive that you just can't help but think are we alone in the universe and if we aren't why hasn't anyone said hi we have ideas but as always we don't know and we really can't prove most things a very fundamental Al question for nature is what exactly is the universe made of and why is there stuff in it to begin with we know that almost all matter is made up from indivisible atoms but why why do atoms exist and where do they come from when we die what exactly do those atoms become everything else at this point you've listened to me talk for about 7 8 minutes time is persistent for everything with mass time never stops we all know that yesterday is in the past today is the present and tomorrow is the future but what exactly is time and where does it come from even more confusing is did humans discover or invent time there are so many things about the world that we just don't know and while some are deep questions like we've talked about others are more well trivial while watching the video of this person yawning you probably also yawned so even more importantly why is yawning contagious when we're happy we laugh when we're sad we cry but why for a long time it was believed that laughter was a social tool to show one another that we're enjoying what's currently happening it was an evolution tool used to help enhance connectivity in societies but if that was the case then laughter should be unique to us humans or at least primates but it's not other social animals like dolphins and even rats laugh so why do we laugh also why do we cry it's as if crying has emotional healing powers crying activates our parasympathetic nervous system and helps her return our bodies to a normal fully functional State it's a good thing for your body so why do we associate it with such sad things we often cry after something bad has happened not really while it's happening is it a process that evolves solely for our brains to process emotionally painful things then again we cry for happy reasons as well so scratch everything I just said why are some people right-handed and others are left-handed why isn't everyone ambidextrous wouldn't that have made a lot more sense we can have theories for many many things but they remain just that theories in actuality proving theories as a fact of nature is a lot harder than you'd think many scientific theories are superseded with time considered obsolete or simply wrong we used to think that Earth was the center of the universe then one day we realized it wasn't then again not everyone could accept the fact that their view of the universe was so wrong I mean there's a theory that as recently as World War II the Germans attempted some advances under the impression that the Earth was Hollow so it is very possible that mostly everything we do know about the world right now is wrong honestly it probably is we simply don't know everything about everything and that's okay all we can do is keep asking questions and keep learning about the world around us trying to uncover each of its Mysteries one stone at a time hopefully answering the most important question of them all what does existence truly mean if a tree falls down in the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound how do you know taking it one step further if you hear the tree hit the ground but don't see it why do you trust your sense of hearing this might seem like a ridiculous question but the truth is that despite our total Reliance on them our senses deceive us all the time you hear this audio and some of us hear Yan while the others hear Laurel Laurel you think you hear your friend laughing in the other room only to come out and see it's just the TV a stick that looks bent in the water turns out to be straight when you pull it out you spend what seems like hours walking through a dark and creepy Forest but then wake up and realize you were just dreaming the world is a strange place and for all the knowledge we've managed to gather as a species there's still a lot more that we don't here is everything we don't know too I think therefore I am you've likely heard this phrase before coined by 17th century French philosopher Renee deart the simple declaration serves as the foundation of all modern philosophy it's a statement of knowledge an assertion that if I know nothing else I at least know I exist while this may not seem like a revolutionary idea at first glance it's actually quite significant philosophers since the time of Socrates have wondered whether or not it's possible to know anything because it always seems that the more questions we ask the fewer answers were left with the cart himself was renowned for his astonishing ability to doubt everything no matter how trivial no matter how seemingly obvious he treated all of his ideas with a radical level of skepticism believing that doing so would eventually lead him to the truth this skepticism led him to ask a question that science still hasn't been able to answer how do I know I'm not dreaming right now or even more frightening how do I know that my mind isn't being deliberately mled by some Evil Genius think of it like the movie The Matrix it's possible that at this very moment you're hooked up to a giant machine that is feeding you all the sensory data you're currently experiencing you aren't really watching this video it's just the machine making you think that are while unlikely technically it is possible and there's no way we can disprove it this is why some people argue that we live in a simulation do we or don't we we just don't know deart argues that our inability to rule out this scenario forces us to doubt everything we think we know a state of radical skepticism in which we can't trust anything we experience or think fortunately Dart offers us a way out even if we are forced to doubt everything the one thing we cannot doubt is the fact that we're doubting if we can doubt then we can think and if we can think then there must be a mind doing the thinking so while we may never know whether or not the world around us is an illusion or if we even have physical bodies we can rest easy in the knowledge that we have Minds that we exist right well not so much later philosophers from kard to haiger criticize dart's claim arguing that the existence of thoughts does not necessarily imply the existence of a thinker Frederick n even went so far as to say that the idea that there is something called thinking is itself an assumption all we can really say then is that something is happening what that thing is we just don't know if you're rolling your eyes at this point it's understandable to most people this all sounds like a bunch of over intellectualized nonsense with no bearing on the actual world even if we do live in The Matrix I still know that 2 + 2 equal 4 that the sun is going to rise tomorrow and that the Earth beneath my feet is solid well hold up on the last Point part of the reason why it's so difficult to say whether we truly know anything is because we live in a dynamic Universe where nothing is ever stable everything in existence is always moving and always changing including the Earth itself even as you watch this video The Very face of the planet is evolving plate tectonic theory is a relative newcomer to science first pioneered in the 1960s our understanding of how the Earth shifts and moves is still fairly Limited we've discovered certain things like the fact that the Earth's Rocky crust is in the form of plates that sits on top of a mantle of liquid magma as this magma circulates and turns it pushes the plates around knocking them into each other and creating earthquakes volcanoes and mountains what this means is that contrary to what we think the ground beneath our feet isn't solid it's constantly changing and if it is how can we say we know it tomorrow an earthquake could reshape our continents and so the best we can ever have is a rough approximation of what we think it used to be not what it actually is maybe I'm just trying to Strongarm a metaphor here but it seems like whenever we investigate what we think we know our ideas start to crumble it's an interesting Quirk of reality really the simpler a question is the harder it can be to answer it's for this reason that many people fear death because we simply don't know anything about what happens after it yet I cannot help but think that the fear that we don't know anything about death PR supposes that we know what life is because in reality we don't know either well it's easy for us to tell the difference between living in non-living materials say like an apple versus a rock but when we try to pin down a precise definition of life things get complicated all life forms whether a plant or animal bacteria or fungus are composed of cells and are able to meet certain basic fundamental conditions these include responsiveness metabolism energy transformation growth and reproduction for instance when you smell food you respond by feeling hungry eating a sandwich then starts your metabolic process which allows you to convert calories into energy this energy is then used to do things like grow muscles or attract a meate but this is what life does not what life is the main problem is that the primary feature of life is that it's always changing and definitions by their nature are meant to be static perhaps if we knew where life came from we'd have a better sense of what exactly it is unfortunately we don't know this either of course one day science will figure this stuff out the secrets to life the Earth and everything else will be unlocked all it takes is more advanced technology more sophisticated methods and we'll be able to know the answers for certain won't we here's the thing though science isn't ever 100% certain when researchers at the European Organization for nuclear research otherwise known as CERN announced the discovery of the higs boson in 2012 they did so by stating that their observations had passed the crucial threshold of five Sigma certainty to most people this term is nothing more than academic jargon but Sigma in this context is the statistical unit of measurement used to determine how probable it is that a given result is correct the higher the value the more likely a particular finding is true with 5 Sigma being the gold standard representing a 1 in a million chance that a given observation is inaccurate though there's still a chance you may think I'm splitting hairs here after all one in a million is as good as true isn't it well no a 2011 experiment conducted by CERN reportedly found that a series of nearly massless ghost particles called neutrinos had traveled faster than speed of light this was of course impossible as the finding violated Einstein's principle of Relativity yet the experiment passed with a Six Sigma confidence meaning that it had a staggering 1 and a half billion chance of being false and yet it was for later experiments all fail Direct replicate the original results and the first experiment was written up as a fluke science is very good at explaining what is happening and how it happens but not really why it's happening pass any scientific Revelation through a series of why questions and you'll always get to a point where we just don't know take gravity for instance when an apple falls from a tree and hits Isaac Newton on his head we know its gravity we can even measure it as 9.8 m/ second but when it comes to explaining why this happens almost 350 years later we're still clueless every other physical force in the universe electromagnetism strong and weak nuclear force has a corresponding subatomic particle yet we still don't know what the particle responsible for gravity is physicists have theorized the existence of something called a graviton that similar to the hix boson requires massive amounts of energy to detect in fact it's predicted that it would take a mass spectrometer to the size of Jupiter operating at 100% capacity to identify one but why is a graviton so hard to find why is it that physics behaves like this and is it possible that it could work differently the notion of alternate physics is most commonly associated with the Multiverse Theory the idea that there isn't a single universe but an infinite array of different universes we don't know if this is true of course but if it is then it's possible that among these countless variations there exists other types of physics maybe in another Universe gravity isn't so difficult to measure maybe instead electromagnetism is the Rogue Force confounding their scientists but it isn't just other universes that may operate under alternative sets of physical laws even our own universe may be subject to alternate forms of physics that we've yet to discover in 2022 researchers at Columbia University programmed in AI to study video footage of different physical phenomena and then search for the minimal set of variables that described its observations the footage included things like a pendulum a lava lamp and a fireplace when the AI returned its results the researchers found that they could identify some of the variables that the artificial intelligence had defined but not others the belief is that the AI was applying novel sets of physical laws currently unknown to humans unfortunately since the program can't communicate what it's thinking the exact variables remain a mystery however it does raise an interesting question if we were to meet an alien species is it possible that they might use alternate laws of physics Ted shang's Nolla story of your life the inspiration for the 2016 film arrival explores this idea fair warning there's spoilers ahead in the story humans make first contact with aliens after dozens of spaceships suddenly appear in orbit but rather than wanting to take over the planet it seems that the Extraterrestrial visitors just want to talk to get the conversation going both humans and the aliens work together to slowly decipher one another's language as well as the respective approaches to physics it quickly becomes apparent that the scientific and mathematical Concepts that are Advanced to us like calculus are Elementary to them surprisingly though the reverse is also true the aliens deploy strange seemingly convoluted methods to describe basic principles like velocity while both methods provide accurate results each is highly specific to the species that develop them eventually it's explained that the aliens don't perceive our universe as causal instead they witness all events as happening simultaneously this accounts for their weird set of physics Chang's story of your life raises interesting questions surrounding Concepts like time perception Free Will and subjectivity forcing its readers to wonder if there's such a thing as objective reality how do we know that the reality we experience is independent of our own Consciousness this problem has plagued philosophers since Antiquity Plato in particular is known for having proposed the idea of the realm of form forms a non-physical immaterial plane from which the physical world manifests science actually functions on a similar principle assuming that there is an objective reality that exists beyond our senses which can be observed and measured despite our best efforts though no one has ever confirmed the existence of an objective reality in fact given that everything we know has to come first to us through our senses and therefore our own subjective perception it's impossible to prove an objective reality we'll just never know in his book The spell of the sensuous philosopher David Abram argues that the very idea of an objective reality isn't representative of the universe we live in in actuality Abram says we exist in the realm of inner subjectivity a term he borrows from the German philosopher Edmund hustel this form of reality rather than being a separate and isolated phenomenon is created by the collective experience of all its participants the universe doesn't exist as an object of our subjective perceptions instead it arises out of our very interaction with it if this idea sounds a little out there consider quantum mechanics where our mere observations literally affect the state of matter just by measuring a photon of light or able to change it from a wave to a particle so maybe there's no such thing as objective reality maybe all that exists is our Collective inner subjective experience there's simply no way of knowing plunging into the depths of uncertainty is never Pleasant that's why humans came up with reason and Science in the first place we want to feel as though we know things it gives us a sense of control and an otherwise chaotic unpredictable and sometimes dangerous Universe for the majority of my life I was agnostic about most things if there wasn't what I deemed to be rational scientific proof to support an idea I just didn't believe it but the more I learn the more I realize how limited my own experience is and just how much we as a species don't know ordinary matter accounts for just 5% of the entire universe the rest of it 95% of everything that exists is a complete and total mystery we just don't know it seems naive if not outright arrogant to close myself off to new ideas just because they don't fit within my current understanding of how things work tomorrow the Earth could shift Life as we know it could completely change and everything that science has taught us could turn out to just be a fluke but rather than meeting this dilemma with fear or outright rejection of scientific principles we should take it as an opportunity to learn Andra ing uncertainty as a means of Transforming Our perception to me this seems like the only rational path forward because as it turns out everything we don't know is well everything Tim Cook of Apple Sundar Pai of Google Elon Musk Jeff Bezos the president of the United States when you think of the people controlling the world these names come to mind but the truth is while these people have a significant influence over our Lives four companies secretly control the world and only a handful of people hold significant power in those companies these are the people who have the potential to change your life for better or worse without you ever realizing what's happening I made a video talking about how Black Rock controls the world and unsurprisingly they are one of the four companies we'll discuss today altogether these four companies manage almost $24 trillion worth of assets they have the most influence over the United States as monetary policy and operate with very little oversight which means they're afraid to do almost anything they want and their power doesn't end in the United States these companies also own a significant state in the vast majority of European companies that are listed on the US Stock Exchange now you might think this is an exaggeration how can four companies control so much wealth but it is true and the information is available once you just look for it from the largest retail stores like Walmart and Home Depot to Transportation companies like GMC and Boeing pharmaceutical companies like Mark fiser Johnson and Johnson and media companies like Disney Viacom News Corp NBC CBS Time Warner and AT&T they influen the banking system as they're involved in every decision made at the largest financial institutions like Bank of America JP Morgan Goldman Sachs and City Group in the United States the US Federal Reserve the country Central Banking institution has board members who represent these four investment firms Global financial institutions like the international monetary fund and the World Bank are influenced heavily by these companies so who exactly are these four companies before I answer the question when researching this topic I was bombarded with a lot of data the largest of the four companies Black Rock was founded in 1988 by Larry Fink like the other three firms black rock is a fiduciary which means that a person has placed trust in them to act in their best financial interest Black Rock does this primarily through mutual funds collection of assets that invest in stocks bonds and other Securities like real estate Lu Rock currently has 70 offices in 30 countries around the globe and holds $10 trillion in assets the company is currently worth 20 trillion which is half of the US's yearly gross domestic product or GDP this is the measure of value created by country by producing goods and services the other three companies are Vanguard State Street and Fidelity Investments Vanguard manages 7.6 trillion in assets and is the world's largest issuer of mutual funds at the end of 2022 it had 203 us funds and 227 international funds which served its 50 million investors vard's founder John Bogle created the index investment Fund in 1976 now known as the Vanguard 500 Index Fund you might be wondering the difference between an index and a mutual fund an index fund is a type of mutual fund that is passively managed as opposed to other mutual funds which are actively managed so when bogul invented this Index Fund he created a formula to track Returns on the market and invest accordingly St street is owned by Vanguard now but is the second oldest continually operating US Bank its predecessor Union Bank was founded in 1792 State Street manages $3.9 trillion in investment assets along with Vanguard and black rock it is one of the prominent three index fund managers that dominate Corporate America Fidelity Investments manages 4.3 trillion in assets it was founded by Edward Johnson thei in 1946 and has remained a family-owned and operated business ever since Fidelity was the first major American Finance firm to market mutual funds to everyone VIA mail and door-to-door sales before they opened their doors the mere idea of investing had been reserved for wealthy individuals hearing that alone you might be wondering what exactly is wrong with these companies they all sound like industry Pioneers who have done incredible to stay in business for so long and while that is entirely right it's only half the story to figure out the other half let's start with what these companies tell us they do each of these firm helps everyday people invest their money and whether you're a multi-millionaire or an hourly worker looking to create a small investment fund for your family they've helped democratize investing and often investing with them can seem like a good idea especially lately because in today's world we're not just worried about making money we're concerned about making money and helping move Society forward that's where ESG investing comes in ESG which stands for environmental social governance is a type of investing that consider social and environmental factors so basically what is the company you're investing in doing about environmental issues like climate change all four of these firms adverti their commitment to ESG as you would expect some people have mocked these Firm Stance on ESG calling it woke investing in response companies like Black Rock have responded by saying it's not woke it's capitalism the way they see it climate change poses a risk so investing in companies that further the effects of climate change is also a risk on the flip side investing in companies trying to mitigate that risk is good business to give them all the credit they they've put their money where their mouths are in 2021 Vanguard Black Rock and State Street successfully shook up the board of Exon Mobile by installing new members who promised to take on climate change and black rock let the state of West Virginia a huge coal producer a lot of the investment firm du to their pledge to invest in Net Zero companies but when you peel back the curtain it's not as wholesome as these firms would like to make it sound especially when it comes to ESG investing every single one of these companies is about as hypocritical as they get Vanguard specifically praises its own ESG investing while also owning 86 billion in Coal companies making it the world's largest investor in the industry black rock is the top investor in fossil fuels and deforestation war profiteering and doing business with human rights violators look no further than Black Rock deal with the Chinese government The Firm became the first company to have access to China's vast mutual fund Market followed by Fidelity this left many Skeptics wondering what did they promise president xiin ping with this deal these two companies will be pouring more and more money into the Chinese companies which are primarily controlled by the Chinese government a growing adversary of Western democracies even more controversial are the firm's investments in Russia all of these companies had assets invested in Russian companies and once the war broke out in Ukraine they all responded at least publicly by freezing those Investments or pulling out of them all together whether or not those assets will stay out of Russia longterm is questionable regardless years and years of investments from these or companies undoubtedly helped fund Putin's invasion of Ukraine no matter how you slice it these companies are riddled with conflicts of interest and Ukraine black rock is one of the leaders trying to advise the country on rebuilding once the conflict is resolved this might seem benevolent but not all that Glitters Is Gold in reality black rock is simply capitalizing on a war that their funds helped finance so they can make more money closer to home than the others the Johnson family which founded and runs Fidelity also runs a venture capital arm that competes with Fidelity's Investments which means the family benefits while Fidelity investors get a crappy deal for example from 2011 to 2012 f-prime Capital family's Venture Capital arm invested $1 million in ultr genix pharmaceutical Incorporated before I went public this investment prevented Fidelity's mutual funds from making the same Play Because if it did it would have violated us Securities laws so the family-owned fund got the better stock value while the public funds which invested in the company at a higher rate kind of got screwed essentially these companies which have immense power and control in our world tell us a manicured PR statement about what they're doing but in reality the story is much more complicated and [Music] problematic none of their success would have been possible without the various proprietary Technologies they developed to help their investing strategies the prime example is black Rock's Aladdin technology which began the trend of using technology to minimize the risk of inves in it manages 20 trillion in assets and predicts the outcome of every single investment while getting information and personal data on everyone who knowingly or unknowingly gave Black Rock their money this technology and others like it are perfect for investors theyve help to lower the cost of managing the investment while improving returns this type of technology is what makes companies like Black Rock and others grow it gives them an edge it allows them to apply their investing strategy companywide it'll enable investors to diversify their portfolios more effectively Technologies like this democratize investing allowing anyone of any level of wealth to benefit from a sound investment strategy this is why over 80% of all assets invested over the last decade have gone to these four companies but at what cost and if these companies continue to revolutionize Advance their Technologies and control more and more investor assets then what R risk of ownership concentration if Black Rock Vanguard Fidelity and State Street continue increasing their influence over the biggest companies across every industry competition is just going to decrease they'll be competing with themselves which isn't competing at all this leads to less consumer choice and higher prices and we can see this already happening in the airline industry over the last 14 years airfares have increased by as much as 7% because there's less pressure to compete Black Rock and Vanguard are among the five largest shareholders of the biggest three operators but this isn't just about the companies it's about the people who run and own them the people who make the decisions pull the levers and hold so much power you can't imagine starting with Larry thinkink the founder chairman and CEO of Black Rock he started out at a new york- based Investment Bank where he rose to manage the firm's Bond Department unfortunately his career there ended when he lost his Department in 100 million after an incorrect prediction about interest rates this led him to focus his next venture on investing in risk management and black rock was born he founded the firm in 1988 and grew it from 5 million to 8 billion in just 5 years Abigail Johnson CEO of Fidelity Investments didn't grow the company she leads from the ground up she's the granddaughter of Fidelity's founder Edward Johnson second she started as an analyst and portfolio manager at the company before being promoted to the president of Fidelity's Asset Management division in this position in the early 2000s like an episode of succession Johnson unsuccessfully attempted to remove her father as CEO over disagreements about how to lead the company it wouldn't take too long for her time to come though as in 2014 she was named CEO State Street CEO Ronald Oley has ties to Fidelity having previously served as the president of asset management and Corporate Services there before entering his current role the world of Finance is a lot smaller than you think in Vanguard uniquely is owned by his clients or instead by the funds they invest in his president and CEO Mortimer J Buckley started his career as an assistant to the company's founder John bogul bogul the guy who essentially invented the index fund may not like the direction his business is going in he's warned of ownership concentration saying that too much money is in too few hands undoubtedly Asset Management has made Mr Bogle a very wealthy man but perhaps he sees beyond that maybe he understands the power he and others like him have over every industry they invest in and every investor who entrusts them he may be issuing a warning to us all but it's not one we're likely able to do anything about because these four companies are just too influential a Global Financial system meant to empower individual investors has empowered to select few instead so while we get distracted by celebrities faces on the front of magazines or flashing by in our social media posts these company leaders are behind the scenes pulling the levers and secretly deciding the financial future of our world whether we like it or not the worst of them all is Black Rock watch this video next to understand why you wake up to the sound of the alarm on your iPhone and annoyed that you couldn't get more sleep you grudgingly unlock your phone to see what's going on in the world and there's an email from Amazon telling you that your package has been delivered so you force yourself out of bed to get the package and it's some Johnson and Johnson medicine you ordered the night before the wonders of overnight shipping you think to yourself you glance across the room to see the clock it's 8 a.m. and you have to be at work by 9:00 flustered you open your Microsoft computer to answer some work emails before getting dressed there's no time to cook breakfast so you'll just grab something at McDonald's on your way to work what if I told you that every single company you just interact with within the first hour of your day is heavily influenced in large part by one company Black Rock now I'm sure you've heard about Black Rock there are dozens of videos here on YouTube that talk about how it's the company that controls the entire world but the reality is far less glamorous here is why everything you've heard about Black Rock is wrong before we talk about that let's talk about data every time we browse on the internet companies collect an insane amount of data from us information which is then sold to data brokers who in turn sell it to the highest bidder or just lose that information in data breaches according to a report from the identity theft Resource Center there were 68% more breaches in 2021 than in 2020 and that number is only going up a few months ago my friend got an email telling him that his information was released in a data breach from a company that he had never heard of and right after he started getting personalized email ads from Shady companies this is how scammers are able to figure out your phone number name and even your address the good news is that you can get these data Brokers to delete the information they have about you black rock is an investment firm that controls a huge number of shares in some of the largest companies in the world they have a total of $10 trillion in assets across the globe that's an amount equal to half of America's total GDP controlled just by one company it's easy to dismiss such a powerful company as allout evil but the truth is Black Rock doesn't own these companies or even own shares of these companies their clients own the shares Black Rock simply manages them that's not to say that black rock doesn't have any influence on these companies they definitely do because they control such an incredible amount of their stock it's possible that companies want to keep in Black Rock's good graces so they don't pull their Investments now while Black Rock might not be the evil company some people make them out to be the truth is there's still something very shady about them their hypocrisy Black Rock was founded 34 years ago by Larry Fink and he grew the company from 5 million in value to 8 billion in just 5 years primarily by managing money invested by large institutions like pensions University endowments and substantial fortunes invested by The Uber Rich today fin serves on the Council on Foreign Relations and the world economic Forum commanding the attention of business tycoons and political leaders around the globe and his company is on the cusp of consolidating so much power that it could essentially control the world let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this Market deteriorate the worst day on Wall Street since the the crash of 1987 the 2008 financial crash turned out to be an incredible opportunity for Black Rock It secured an uncontested contract to control many of the banks that had collapsed that gave Larry thinkink who was already incredibly wealthy even more power and a direct line to the American government the same thing happened in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic when the government called in Black Rock to protect the Federal Reserve from Financial Fallout periods of economic uncertainties like these were key to Black Rock's rise to power and as the is saying goes with great power comes great responsibility and black rock would like you to think that they are being responsible in the summer of 20120 while the world was angry about the murder of George Floyd Black Rock came out with a statement saying that companies had to serve a social purpose and that they would be giving every company an ESG or environmental social and governance score companies that promised more diversity in hiring and Leadership or offered environmentally friendly policies and Technology received higher scores than companies that didn't although this concept had been around since 2004 Black Rock became the loudest proponent of ESG investing in 2020 and in all honesty it worked before this statement esgs were mentioned in far fewer than 1% of earnings calls but by May 2021 that number Rose to around 20% and it has since remained the fastest growing segment in the asset management industry people are more concerned about the environmental and social impact of companies and that's a good thing right socially responsible companies get the upper hand in an Ideal World yes but we all know that the world we live in is far from IDE deal while there's been some positive Improvement the main result of black Rock's ESG statement has been a massive surge in companies participating in practices like greenwashing pretending they're more sustainable diverse or responsible than they actually are it's also exposed the hypocrisy of black rocket itself because while it claims to Champion ESG investing the company Remains the largest investor in fossil fuels and War profiteering and maintains a pretty friendly relationship with human rights violators and it's not just black rock the second largest investment firm in the world Vanguard is guilty of the same technique promoting ESG investing on the one hand but on the other unwilling to stop investing in oil and gas companies or pull out a companies with questionable human rights practices we see this time and time again from Black Rock they do something that seems like they're moving in the right direction in the eyes of the public but behind the scenes they're unwilling to tamper with their Investments even if it's for the greater good of society take climate change for instance Black Rock says that climate risk is investment risk meaning that investing in companies that aren't creating policies to help help address climate change is a risky move in 2021 Black Rock actually did do something about this by helping shake up the board of Exon Mobile and installing new members who promised to take action on climate change previously the oil and gas Behemoth was responsible for 2% of the world's emissions now there are new self-imposed mandates to help reduce that over time this is a great move by the company no doubt but the fact that it's still the world's single biggest investor in fossil fuels makes this feel more like virtue signaling than actually trying to make meaningful change and hypoc y doesn't end there as mass shootings continue to end lives in the US Black Rock has spoken out against gun violence and said that gun manufacturers should do more to protect the lives of the American people but who's the largest investor in gun manufacturers you guess it Black Rock the investment firm holds a 16% stake in Sturm Ruger 15% in Vista outdoor and significant percentages of other manufacturers just like them black rock says it talks to these companies about improving safety but so far it's unclear whether or not there's actually been any policy change outside of America black Rock's us Aerospace and defense fund has billions of dollars invested in major weapons contractors worldwide like locked Martin raon and General Dynamics they're supporting these companies that then get huge Pentagon contracts and use taxpayer money to engage in violence and War around the globe often these weapons are supplied to foreign governments in the name of Peace like Saudi Arabia which received weapons from the US government and use them to indiscriminately attack civilians in Yemen during years of Civil War funding this spread of war and an increase in nuclear weapons shows that black rock constantly skirts its own commitment to Human Rights so does its engagement with authoritarian governments black rock is officially the first Global asset manager to have access to China's mutual fund leaving critics wondering what did thinkink promis Chinese president Xi Jinping to allow him to access the Chinese Communist party's fund to be fair Black Rock isn't the only Investment Company out there looking to do business with China but because of its widespread power it's been the most successful in gaining a foothold in the controversial territory which is surprising especially for a US company this power also made it a major player in the war in Ukraine as we saw in China despite its emphasis on ESG investing Black Rock has a tendency to overlook human rights in favor of monetary gain it's been investing in Russia's most prominent companies for years the British pensions that black rock controls alone have contributed $630 billion to Russia after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 a precursor to what would become the more now than a year-long war in Ukraine Black Rock reconsidered some of its investments in Russia but just one year later it was back to being among the top shareholders in the country's biggest corporations even when it became clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin was planning an invasion last year Black Rock didn't budge and like most other Western firms it did eventually pull assets out of Russia once the war started but think about all the money it flooded into Russia over the years money that the authoritarian government controlled and used in its expansion mission that led to this deadly War all of this begs the question how did one company gain this much Global power and influence well it started with technology black Rock's business is built on ETFs or exchange traded funds an ETF contains Diversified Investments to reduce an investors risk rather than buying stock in a single company you're investing in a fund that buys stocks Commodities and other Securities this practice proved to be very lucrative for Black Rock and its investors thanks to a portfolio management software created in 1998 called Aladdin Aladdin predicts the possible outcome of every investment and collects information and personal data on everyone who has ever knowingly or unknowingly given Black Rock money this allows the software to predict How likely it is that a specific investment will fail eventually this technology put think and black rock on top making the companies the goto firm for ETF investing which keeps getting more and more popular Global ETF assets could explode to 25 trillion by 2025 meaning trillions more for Black Rock but we don't need to wait until 2025 to see the effects of the power Black Rock has right now Black Rock oversees assets worth 10% of the entire world economy companies like Fox Comcast and Disney have to consult with black rock before they make major moves since it has such a large share of their ownership Black Rock and other large firms like Vanguard are the biggest investors in global giants like Google Facebook and Amazon this level of ownership creates an anti-competitive environment you feel this in the prices of airline tickets Black Rock and Vanguard are among the five largest shareholders of the three biggest Airline operators which means that there's very little incentive to lower prices in order to compete with each other this level of ownership consolidation reduces consumer choice and raises prices and it also means that eventually a handful of powerful people at these investment firms could wield more power than the executives at the companies they own shares in even Jack Bogle who founded Vanguard says that this kind of ownership concentration is bad too much money in the hands of too few will not work out well for the global economy there are solutions that governments could put in place to stop these companies from Gathering too much influence things like not allowing funds and ETFs to vote as shareholders and companies or creating ownership caps that would dictate how much of a company can be owned by a single entity the laws can be passed limiting how much influence an investment firm can have in the companies are invested in even if that influence is intended to be benevolent like with the ESG but how soon could any of this happen because Black Rock and Vanguard are less than a decade away from managing 20 trillion in assets that would upend the asset management industry and intensify the already staggering ownership consolidation of the world's largest companies sending prices through the roof one of the biggest problems with the system of business is that the more money Black Rock manages the lower its fees for investors so we end up in the cycle where the best way to invest our money today creates a potentially catastrophic environment for our money and our society tomorrow unfortunately most people don't have the luxury of looking that far ahead what looks good in the short term is all that matters and that is how Black Rock thrives it hopes you will Overlook its hypocracy around the environment diversity and human rights because it puts out statements about being a responsible company as future hinges on its investors not caring about these things the problem is that many of its investors don't even know their investors they're simply part of a pension fund or an endowment that black rock manages there are smaller funds that do support ESG investing without conflicts of interest and there are options like managing our own shares that help us avoid the moral pitfalls of large companies like Black Rock but much like how most of us couldn't live without Amazon's next day delivery for our last minute Essentials using these large flawed companies is just easier over the past decade the public has become more and more critical of what massive companies do and say as that magnifying glass emerged Black Rock made sure that it's messaging about making the world a better place was heard and publicized black Rock's hypocrisy won't end is Public Image versus private actions will most likely always conflict with one another but as consumers and investors it's our responsibility to know what's happening taking them at their word is the easier option but that's exactly what black rock is betting you'll do that's how they've gotten this far this is the same ignorance that allowed Banks and governments to drown Us in debt click the video on your screen right now to find out more lift off from a tropical rainforest to the Edge of Time itself James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the Universe on December 25th 2021 NASA launched the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope the James web Space Telescope Hubble has provided and continues to provide us with some of the most magical pictures of our universe but the jwst is projected to be 100 times more powerful than Hubble built over 30 years the JWT is designed to capture more light and detail than Hubble ever could this will let astronomers gather more information and allow them to dig deeper into the history of the universe than ever before about 6 months after its launch the jwst delivered the most detailed image of the universe ever taken known as web's first Deep Field the image isn't just star studded it's Galaxy studded in this image you see galaxies that span an enormous distance and maybe an even greater duration of time the distances we're dealing with here are so large that it would take Millions maybe billions of years to travel to them even at the speed of light when we look at these images we're looking into the past this pale Red Dot for example is a Galaxy that appeared 13.1 billion years ago go we know this because that's how long it has taken the light from it to reach us but for all of its size do you know how much of the night sky that everything in this entire image would cover just about the width of a grain of sand held at arms length there were hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe and some scientists even put that number in the trillions these galaxies in turn have hundreds of billions of star systems much like our own and these star systems have planets orbiting around them what are the chances that there wouldn't be another planet with life in some Far Away Galaxy what are the chances that in this incredible vastness of space we're all alone you see no matter how difficult it is for life to exist and no matter how rare it is the universe is so big that there should be Millions if not billions of planets able to support life you can Define whatever requirements you want for Life temperature distance from a star number of moons presence of water number of asteroid impacts and so on purely by chance there should be many planets with life on them and surely some of that life would be intelligent enough to reach out to us right it's not like the laws of physics chemistry or biology are exclusive to Earth they're not but if there is life on other planets if there's nothing special about Earth where's everybody else where are all the aliens Rico fery asked this question in a lunchtime conversation with his colleagues in 1950 fery was a Nobel Prize winning physicists considering the existence of space fairing civilizations truth be told humans haven't been around for that long and if in our short existence on this planet we've considered branching out to Mars or some other world it's reasonable that another civilization might have thought the same thing if a civilization has been around long enough and it's sufficiently technologically advanced it should try to Branch out to other planets in search of resources at the very least it should try to reach out to them to communicate that hypothesis though stands in in contrast to reality which has given us no evidence for life other than our own on this planet the great silence as it's called persist today the mismatch between our intuition that the Universe should be teaming with life and its apparent emptiness is known as the fmy Paradox so where are the aliens just this morning jet fighters raced a loft over right Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton Ohio to intercept a reported saucer returning Pilots swore that it was a light that could not have been a reflection and that it evaded them at a very high rate of speed well even though we've always been fascinated with aliens we haven't officially been looking for them for very long seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the most famous organization actively looking out for alien life in the universe and it only formally began in the late 1950s some of its significant efforts include sending radio signals to outer space and listening for ones that may be sent our way of course this only covers int intentional signals SEI is one of the first organizations to intentionally send radio waves but our technologies have been emitting radio waves through SpaceTime ever since they were invented this includes everything from mobile phones televisions FM AM radios and even the earliest radio transmissions in the late 1800s for all we know our alien counterparts are laughing over Charlie Chaplain movies right now but if you think about it our radio signals may not have even reached potential intelligent life yet as we mentioned at the start of the video the distances we're dealing with in space are pretty literally out of this world even if we consider the oldest Transmissions from over a 100 years ago when radio waves were first sent out they would have only traveled a tiny portion of space if today at this very moment our earliest signals were to reach our so-called Galactic neighbors and they were so intelligent and capable that they recognized our existence and decided to reach out immediately it would take another 100 years for the reply to reach Earth barring a breakthrough in in physics that allows them to break the speed of light before we ever know if our earliest attempts to reach out were successful most of us would be faded memories what if life exists not 100 light years away but 50 or even 20 light years away well in that case aliens would have had enough time to receive and reply to our signals by now so why haven't they one answer would be that aliens simply don't exist which let's be honest is rather boring so let's assume they do exist The Logical question would be then why haven't they reached out to us to answer this question we need to place alien civilizations into three advancement categories less advanced than us equally Advanced or more advanced if they're less advanced than us it's likely that they simply don't have the technology to reach out to us it's also important to know what science to look out for for 2 billion years after life started to evolve it would be unobservable if another civilization were to look out for the same things we're looking for right now then there's the possibility that they're equally Advanced as we are and if that's the case they might be paranoid about contacting us because they're uncertain about what they're dealing with and this is in line with what Steven Hawkings said that reaching out to alien life would be a big mistake because they might come Fort our resources and our planet they might carry pathogens we can't fight off they might have Colonial intentions the list goes on given how we've treated other human beings because of differences we created in our own minds it's fair to say that it would be a mistake to assume that an extraterrestrial species would greet us with kindness the third possibility is that the aliens possess far superior intelligence humans are no longer attractive to them it might be a difficult pill to swallow considering how human Centric we are but hear me out if the universe is teaming with life if there's nothing special about us then there's not much point in them reaching out to us much less spending precious resources visiting us Colonial intentions would likely be less important to a civilization that can for example harvest the power of stars we'd be like the ants of the universe to most people ants might be interesting when they first see them and they can be intriguing but then interest subsides and we walk past millions of ants every day without paying any attention to them sure some biologists might still be interested but most of us simply ignore them we could apply a similar line of reasoning to a superior alien civilization the exact reason a nearby alien civilization might exist namely the abundance of life is also why we haven't felt their presence on a more cynical note they might not have visited us yet because they prefer an ambush rather than a hello the Dark Forest hypothesis states that the universe is full of cunning civilizations that would rather forego the risk of contacting anyone else and observe from the darkness whether to reach out is up to them but as this hypothesis suggests just because we haven't been contacted doesn't imply nobody is listening of course this is assuming they haven't already visited us on July 26th 2023 David grush a Former Intelligence officer testified under oath that non-human biologics were recovered by a highly secretive UFO recovery program run by the US government now I know we've had many so-called sightings of alien spacecraft and a lot of grainy video footage to go along with it but this is the first time someone whose credentials have been verified has gone under oath and said things that could easily land him in jail if proven false skepticism is needed extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence nevertheless even if David's claims are real there's still a general lack of evidence if one alien spacecraft can reach Earth so can hundreds or thousands more if they visited us once there's no reason to believe they won't do so again at a civilization level a government coverup can only go so far especially when there's a strong likelihood that a civilization reaching out to us would be far more advanced than us having said that though we come back to our starting point where are the aliens and if they're so common why haven't we been bombarded with visits well one of the more widely accepted theories is that of the great filter it's a hurdle in the evolution of a civilization that typically leads to its Extinction it could be anything an asteroid impact a massive volcanic eruption an incurable virus runaway artificial intelligence self-destruction the list goes on the idea is that most civilizations that go through the great filter fail and are inevitably destroyed if that's what's happened so far in the universe that would explain the great silence our civilization alone may have passed this Intergalactic test thus We Exist when others don't but that's only half the story you see the scenarios I spoke of only make sense if you assume we've already passed the great filter what if we haven't what if the great filter isn't behind us but waiting for us in the Years ahead maybe we exist not because we've passed the great filter but because we've yet to go through it asteroid impacts have happened in the past but could also hit us in the future nuclear Annihilation is only a button or two away we've seen some devastating viruses take their toll and runaway intelligence well we're on our way the great filter could be any of these things or it could be none it could be something else entirely something our human centered Minds cannot even imagine part of the in with alien life involves answering one question and it's how special Are we almost everything about the fmy Paradox is a projection of that the things we look for how we look for them how we expect them to behave it's a self-centered egotistical Pursuit that is ironically very human but this human- centered curiosity might end up costing our civilization dearly as Steven Hawkings said maybe seeking out extraterrestrial life is a terrible idea for all we know know the great filter is just that our curiosity maybe it's the courage to ask where are all the aliens maybe we shouldn't know we could be dealing with something genuinely otherworldly in the vast unknown of space who dares wins not this Galactic race we don't maybe the great filter is not a catastrophe that will happen to us maybe it's one we seek hopefully the James web Space Telescope has some answers or at least newer questions for us watch the video on your screen to understand why the JWT is so [Music] important as the nukes dropped on every major city around the globe everyone saw shelter but there was nowhere to hide in an instant civilization as we knew it was destroyed every server library and entity that stored information about who we are what we did and how we lived was gone only a handful of of children worldwide survived all kept in the deepest bunkers we could find no adults could make it everything about Humanity before the blast would be lost entirely in around five generations sure there are Tales Mysteries and legends but no historical record of life before the final world war there's no way our descendants thousands of years from now can know who we were the story might sound a little far-fetched but the reality is for all we know this could have happened already maybe except for the new nuclear part because no evidence suggests that man-made nuclear weapons existed before Oppenheimer but the rest of it could be true because there's so much we don't know about the history of our world and humans at one point we knew more until the [Music] fire in 48 BC the Library of Alexandria located in Alexandria in what is now Egypt burned down historians estimate that at one point the library held over half a million documents from Assyria Greece Persia Egypt India and other nations sadly as the page is turned into ashes the most significant assembly of information about the ancient world disappeared there are a lot of theories about who started the fire Julia Caesar is one of the most routinely accused people he was driving his soldiers into Egypt when an Egyptian Fleet in Alexandria cut him off Legend has it that Caesar ships were outnumbered so they set all the ships in the harbor to fire this fire then spread and destroyed parts of the city including the library another theory blames the fire on one of the Muslim conquerors of Egypt calar The Story Goes that the Scrolls were burned for fuel for thousands of hot baths in the city but there's some skepticism about why a Muslim would burn Jewish and Christian texts since they're also the holy texts in Islam most likely it wasn't a dramatic fire that started in the harbor or an attempt to make fuel but a series of events that happened over time to destroy the library culminating in a fire but who burned it isn't the real question we have what knowledge was in there that we missed out on is a better question what insights did historians and philosophers have about Humanity that we'll never know these are the more essential questions questions that we might never truly know the answer to beyond the Library of Alexandria what about all the information never written down in the first place the reality is that most of human history has been lost at time and as a result so many people have come up with their own conclusions about what we were but before discussing those there are things we need to know about our past prehistoric humans might not have had tools like we do today but what they had in abundance was a really good understanding of math and Engineering that's why structures like the Great Pyramid in the Library of Alexandria could exist in the first place humans first appeared about 300,000 years ago while Earth was in the middle of the last ice age it was a harsh environment to come into existence in as a result human populations were tiny and grew slowly the Stone Age our most ancient time lasted until about 3,000 BC this era was marked by the use of tools and most importantly solid transformation of our culture from hunting and Gathering to farming and food production humans in the Stone Age lived in caves or very simple huts and tepes they learned to control fire to keep their homes warm scare away predators and cook their prey like woolly mammoths deer and bison these early humans were also the first to leave behind art in the form of etched people animals and signs on the wall of caves or carved into items with time their tools evolved from rough dull shapes to polish pointed items that served as Spears and arrows and eventually they started settling more prominently in villages and began farming we know this from the appearance of polished hand axes and other tools used to till Farmland as they settled advancements were made in home construction poetry sewing and weaving as human civilization expanded something interesting also happened human activity reached a Tipping Point where hunting and farming began to impact the natural world the proportion of plants to animals was relatively stable until about 4,000 BC since then humans have been affecting our environment at an increasing Pace in 3300 BC came the Bronze Age which lasted until about 1300 BC this is where tools really took off metal was introduced which not only led to the production of better tools but also better weapons and with better weapons came many different things to fight about organized government law and religion in this time humans also started using Advanced tools like a potter's wheel and began creating textiles instead of just wearing animal skins to keep themselves warm and perhaps most famously this was the beginning of written history Egyptian hieroglyphs the first known recordings appeared then we entered the Iron Age from 1300 BC to 900 BC humankind had a lot going on we saw the introduction of heating and forging iron which led to the mass production of tools and weapons four room homes some with Stables or domesticated animals showed up there's also evidence of early sitting planning with blocks of houses and Water Systems running between them agriculture art and religion all became more sophisticated and finally we developed writing systems and written documentation at the end of the Iron Age we moved into the early historical period where the documentation of human history pretty much became more widespread this is basically everything we are sure of about the ancient world much of which we learned through fossils but fossils can only tell us so much how did these people live what were their daily routines like like what were their favorite foods Small Talk Big Dreams we sadly don't know when so many people have made theories what might humans have been like before recorded history started much like the Greeks made up myths of powerful Gods to explain their daily lives and emotions people have been developing theories about the history of humankind forever theories like the original Eve a human who birthed literally or figuratively the rest of humankind it could be possible because in the 1980s DNA sequencing demonstrated that this eve might have existed as recently as 120,000 years ago then skulls found in East Africa provided suggestions about what she might have looked like and where she might have lived people became obsessed with the idea of this real life Eve no longer just a figure from The Bible but a woman who was the ancestor to us all this idea made its way into pop culture grasping people worldwide and what about the possibility that our distant ancestors were much more advanced than we give them credit for it's always been assumed that humans in the upper Paleolithic period from 50,000 to 15,000 BC were bands of foragers never establishing any sort of tradition or organization within their groups but recently evidence of princely burials and Grand buildings have appeared burials were found across Western Eurasia they weren't full cemeteries but isolated Graves of individuals or small groups bodies placed in specific postures and sometimes decorated with ornaments the idea that a band of foragers would bury some but not all of their dead in the ceremonial away had never been considered similarly stone temples dating back to this time were discovered in Turkey some over 5 m high and weighing about 8 tons the temples had raised pillars and were linked by stone walls and each post contained a unique sculpture carved with images of the world ancient humans were living in such structures imply the coordinated activity of humans it takes a lot of communication and teamwork to build something so significant we always assumed little happened in the Paleolithic Era but perhaps there was more of a society than we thought maybe ancient humans in this time weren't moving about in small groups never settling into tradition or Community perhaps they had leaders and dynasties the evidence is murky but who's to say one way or the other theories about our ancient ancestors are constantly changing for instance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries people in Europe and North America thought that primitive humans weren't capable of full Consciousness like they were still Savage in some way now no scholar would claim that yet some experts still dismiss distant humans imagination or skepticism of their world others have always taken seriously the idea that humans were our intellectual equals why wouldn't they have some sort of political system or burial ceremony it's almost impossible to know and the questions don't stop with our human history what about the history of our planet what came before us that was never recorded could there have been a civilization before humans created the one we live in today to have civilization you need a food surplus which frees up most people to specialize in doing things other than producing food you need farming and you also need to require specific minimum population density or you wouldn't have enough individuals to run this theoretical civilization is there any way we could know if something like this existed fossils could easily miss an industrial civilization that lasted only 100,000 years which for the record is 500 times longer than our current industrial civilization has been around since any ancient civilization would have needed energy and the capacity to exploit fossil fuels and other power sources as we do scientists can theoretically look for worldwide effects that leave traces of this perhaps there would also be naturally occurring evidence like remnants of certain fossil fuels there could also be non-natural evidence like a product that compares to our plastic use and you might think that we haven't found any signs of this but you would be wrong in that there's been the discovery of a thermal maximum event that occurred about 55.5 million years ago and lasted for about 100,000 years we found chemical signals and traces of a warming that looks similar to the chemical signals and traces of our current world it led to a global temperature rise of 9 to 14° F could this be evidence of a pre- i age industrial society according to scientists who explored the issue probably not but it is important to ask because we'll never discover anything if we don't ask what did ancient languages sound like as they rolled off people's tongues what did they do when they encountered other who spoke differently than them were they afraid or did they have a way to translate what emotions did people have when someone died was it the same grief that we have experienced what about relationships did mothers fight with their teenage daughters did people long for a sense of romantic love there's only so much we can gather from skeletal remains and fossils we'll never know what these societies were like because Society is so much more than the remnants it leaves behind after it falls and that's why an event like the burning of the Library of Alexandria is so poignant it's the cautionary tale of the danger of the deprioritization of Institutions that preserve and share knowledge the term Alexandria has become shorthand for ignorance winning out from the French Revolution to the late 20th century Alexandria is a common term to describe the destruction of libraries and archives that are abandoned and forgotten so yes books were burned in Alexandria but perhaps the actual crime was people not caring enough about their preservation in the first place attacks on knowledge can come from violence like in the Holocaust or China's cultural revolution but it can also come from the apathy towards institutions like we're witnessing today in Iraq and Mali Islamic extremists have targeted libraries in the United Kingdom more than 800 public libraries have closed over the past decade due to a lack of resources from the government now tech companies are taking control of our archives as we move deeper into the digital era but there's little regulation around what these powerful companies can do with our knowledge and history in the end it's going to be our experiences that tell the story of our world do we want to leave it in the hands of a few to decide what stories get kept and which get burned I expand on this idea in this video big Tech is destroying ownership click on your screen to watch that next Vier paused to think about how one of the most famous sentences of all time doesn't make grammatical sense well because we all apparently heard it wrong and continue to say it wrong according to the man himself Neil Armstrong what he did say that day when he stepped foot on the moon was one small step for a man one giant leap for mankind which makes much more sense there going to be a lot of things that sound strange at first but as we've all come to find out sometimes reality can be Stranger Than Fiction like how the sounds of the T-Rexes speaking in Jurassic Park are actually just tortoises having sex and how the eagle only sounds like this because of Hollywood magic when in reality it sounds more like this here are true facts that sound completely made up it's pretty common knowledge at this point that humans can live with just one kidney but did you also know that you can live without a spleen an appendix a gallbladder tonsils six of your ribs and one lung in fact many people do and they lead pretty normal lives the only thing you can't do with just one lung is participate in strenuous exercises or run long distances but with just one lung you could run from the United States to Russia since the shortest distance between the two countries is just 2.4 mil how comforting this distance is measured from Russia's Big diamet Island to America's Little diam Island why is America's Island smaller we might never know but you know what is really big thick and long a draft's neck considering how massive these things are it's incredible to think that they have the same number of bones as a human neck they're just way bigger and it's not just them in us all mammals have the same number of bones in their neck when we were younger we were taught that there are 7 days in a week 4 weeks in a month and 52 weeks in a year but the truth is that's wrong well technically it's correct but it only works here on Earth on other planets it's completely different on Venus for example a day is longer than an entire year it's probably helpful to mention that a day on a particular planet is defined as the time it takes that planet to spin around once on its axis and a year is the time it takes for the planet to Albert around the star in this case the Sun Pluto sadly wasn't able to complete a full orbit around the sun in the 76 years from when it was discovered in 1930 to when it was Declassified as a planet in 2006 a small planet with a really long orbit but you know what is really really really long it's the name of a hill in New Zealand you're welcome here's a true fact that sounds completely made up as of December 2022 more than half the people who earned six figures in the US reported living paycheck to paycheck we've all faced rejections and insults don't let them get to you they're just lessons that we all had to learn one way or another the founder of lamori for example had to be rejected by Ferrari before he got the desire to create Lamborghini Steve Jobs had to be kicked out of his own company before he could bring it back to life Microsoft had to stop producing newer versions of the Internet Explorer to well realize that they shouldn't have ever made it in the first place but you get the point time is an illusion and if you don't study history it can be quite jarring to learn that sometimes things aren't as timely as we think did you know that we sent a man to the Moon before we put wheels on suitcases just imagine how stressful it must have been for Neil to carry all that luggage to Wi from space the invention of the iPhone in 2007 is closer to the existence of Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the building of the Pyramids of Giza and although Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire it isn't the first University to ever exist India's nenda University was an operation for hundreds of years before Oxford we made lighters before we made matches sharks existed before grass heck sharks were in existence before the rings of Saturn it really makes you appreciate the beauty of human civilization we've only been here for a short time but we've been able to achieve so much we're so special aren't we that's what I told her Rebecca before she broke up with me but now I know I was wrong because she wasn't special she was bananas I don't mean that as an insult because we're all bananas at least 50% of each of us because humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas and with fruit flies as it turns out our profound exclusivity is neither profound nor exclusive what is exclusive however is a randomly shuffled deck of cards it may seem rather mundane but the sequence of a randomly shuffled deck of cards has never been seen before and we'll never be seen again a standard deck of cards has 52 cards which means there are 52 factorial different ways the cards can be arranged when shuffled randomly that number 52 factorial is 8 with 67 zeros after it to put this in perspective the universe has existed for over 13 billion years but let's round it up to 15 billion let's also assume there are around 2 trillion galaxies each containing approximately 100 trillion star systems each if each each star system had 10 planets and each planet hosted 10 billion life forms every one of those life forms could shuffle a deck of cards every second since the beginning of time and they still wouldn't produce a repeated sequence that is simply insane speaking of Arrangements some countries aren't arranged the way we think they ought to be Finland and North Korea are separated by just one country New York is closer to the Equator than it is to Rome and Bangladesh went to war in one against Pakistan two countries that are separated by India the seventh largest country in the world and get this all three countries were once considered the same country talk about sibling rivalry the logistics for that war must have cost several buttloads which is a legitimate unit of measurement equal to 126 gallons remember when you were young and your mom told you not to swallow apple seeds or a tree would grow in your belly well it turns out she was wrong trees can't grow in people but she was right in telling you you not to swallow apple seeds eating apple seeds can lead to cyanide poisoning don't worry too much though you need the seeds from at least 150 apples for that speaking of apples Steve Jobs chose the name of his company to get back at his former employer Atari because phone books a book that had a list of names addresses and phone numbers of the businesses in the area were written in alphabetical order Apple would come before Atari so whenever people search for a computer business in the phone book they would find Steve's company first suffice it to say that they no longer need that slight competitive Advantage fresh clean water can do wonders but how fresh is the water we drink did you know the probability that at least one of the molecules of the water you drank today pass through a dinosaur is 100% we somehow keep coming back to dinosaurs maybe it's a sign that Rebecca and I should be tyrano work things out because at the end of the day mistakes happen like the time Switzerland accident acally invaded another country in 2007 around 171 of Switzerland's troops accidentally went into lickstein the Swiss government formally apologized but the governor of lonstein wasn't worried and excused the situation it's happened before he said uh lonstein is really nice as you can see so nice in fact that in the austr Prussian war of 1866 lonstein sent a company of 80 soldiers to war only to have 81 return not only did they not have any casualties but an Austrian liaison officer joined them on the way home but it also helps to have luck luck like Anatoli Bowski had he was a researcher working at the Soviet Union's most powerful particle accelerator the u70 synchrotron he was down there one day to fix something he leaned down to look at a part of the machine without realizing the accelerator was active at the time and stuck his head directly into the beam bath he reported seeing a tremendous tremendously bright flash likely due to his optic nerves being excited through the roof believe it or not he actually wanted to cover it up and decided to continue working as time passed anat noticed huge swelling developing along the regions where the beam had entered and exited his head he slowly started developing radiation sickness there was no hiding anymore so he sought help the physician in charge feared the worst but as it turned out Anatoli had unintentionally received a version of proton beam therapy often used to treat cancer thanks to the physics of the proton beam therapy most of the energy that might have otherwise killed inat toldi was deposited outside of his skull despite suffering seizures and epilepsy anatol lives on to this day however he refused an offer from the United States to be a research subject oh and half of his face stopped aging talk about expensive Botox it's something Rebecca would have needed I mean I like oh well she's she's gone now but but I mean for all her flaws she was always very kind to me despite what we went through despite how rough the breakup was she put her hand in mine looked me in the eye assuredly and told me we can still be cousins that of course was completely made up or was it picture this you're in a work meeting attempting to troubleshoot a problem that your team has been struggling to figure out you suggest something a solution equal parts and geni and elegant your co-workers are impressed and shower you with praise all except for one person who for some reason looks upset afterwards this person confronts you claiming that they had mentioned the same solution to you during a private call last week accusing you of intellectual theft it was my idea you shout back what if I told you that both of you are technically correct that your brain stole your coworker's idea and convinced you that it was yours scary right this is cryptomnesia the reality that most of our thoughts aren't really ours also known as inadvertent or unconscious plagiarism cryptomnesia is a memory error in which people mistakenly believe that a current thought or idea is a product of their own creation when in reality they have encountered it previously and then forgotten it's a form of cognitive bias that uses the brain's own tendency to inaccurately recall information in such a way that it benefits us it can be something as simple as unintentional stealing a coworker's idea or as complex as accidentally recreating someone else's art in the fall of 1970 George Harrison formerly of The Beatles released his first single as a solo artist My Sweet Lord was an instant hit soaring to the top of the charts around the world and becoming the number one single in the UK for 1971 but what Harrison didn't realize was that he had unwittingly plagiarized the song Central Melody soon after its release a suit was filed against Harrison accusing him of copyright infringement my My Sweet Lord bore a striking resemblance to the late Ronnie Max song he's so fine and Max former production company wanted a cut of the royalties What followed was one of the most notorious legal episodes in music history Harrison found himself caught up in court battles for the next 5 years and litigation related to the case would plague him until the late '90s during the court proceedings Harrison admitted to being familiar with the Ronnie M Trak but said that he hadn't deliberately stolen it though the judge overseeing the case affirmed Harrison's claim he still found the former Beetle guilty of inadvertently copying of what was in his subconscious memory and ruled in favor of Max production company the case set new legal precedents for future copyright suits and proved an enormous blow to Harrison personally who struggled to write new music for some time after the debacle in his autobiography he later confessed to having thought why didn't I realize when he heard the two songs compared side by side Harrison isn't the only artist to do this either other examples include author Robert Lou Stevenson reusing material he' read comedian Dan Cook retelling jokes and singer Demi Lavado lifting samples from his small Indie band surgeons have even published entire papers on supposedly new techniques that in actuality they learned during training but how does this happen how is it possible that we can recall information that we've somehow simultaneously also forgotten this was the question posed by American psychologist Alan Brown and Dana Murphy in 1989 when they conducted what's become known as the seminal scientific study into Crypton IIA in a series of deceptively simple experiments groups of students took turns coming up with examples for different categories of things such as Sports musical instruments and four-legged animals months later participants gathered again and were instructed to recall what items they themselves had mentioned previously then a few months after that they met for a final time and were asked to come up with new examples during each of the later tasks nearly 75% of participants listed at least one item that was mentioned by someone else in the group these weren't cases of simple confusion either people also occasionally misattributed their own ideas as well though instances of this were comparably rare interestingly the pattern of responses also indicated that plagiarism occurred more often in written tasks when compared to oral and perhaps unsurprisingly ideas that were expressed more frequently were especially likely to be stolen overall plagiarized answers accounted for 7 to 9% of all responses the experiment itself was borrowed from previous Research into another kind of memory error known as Source Amnesia in which a person forgets the origin of a particular piece of information the difference between Source Amnesia and cryptomnesia is that the individual remembers that there was an original Source they just can't remember what that source is but with cryptomnesia they completely forget that there ever was a source and believe that they themselves were the originator of the thought in question a possible explanation for this unconscious plagiarism is that the brain has simply committed a mental error incorrectly categorizing information by mixing up two different forms forms of memory one type known as semantic memory is what we more generally refer to as knowledge it includes things like the definition of the word semantic that Paris is the capital of France or the year that man first landed on the moon chances are you don't remember where or how you learned this information you just know it the second type of memory is known as autobiographical memory and Deals directly with the circumstances of our experiences it records the exact context in which events happen to us bringing back details such as the precise location who was present and the time of day cryptomnesia is a case of your brain Mis categorizing information rather than an event being remembered as an autobiographical memory it is saved as a purely semantic one just the raw information is retained the larger context is lost Fame neurologist Olive Sach said of the phenomenon it is startling to realize that some of our most Cherished Memories may have never happened or may have happened to someone else I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses which seem entirely my own have Arisen from others suggestions which have powerfully influenced me consciously or unconsciously and then been forgotten more recent Studies have successfully replicated Brown and Murphy's original findings confirming just how easy it is to induce cryptomnesia even when participants were offered monetary reward for correctly attributing ideas they still occasionally claimed other people's suggestions as their own effectively demonstrating that cryptomnesia is something we don't do intentionally for personal gain these different variations of the experiment have managed to uncover certain conditions that are likely to increase instances of the phenomenon for example the next in line effect demonstrates how people who come immediately after you in a brainstorming session are more likely to accidentally steal your ideas in fact brainstorming sessions in general run a high risk of falling victim to unconscious plagiarism part of the reason might be exactly because of the collaborative environment nothing seems to increase instances of idea theft more than an open invitation to improve upon existing proposals add this to the fact that brainstorming sessions usually have a high degree of disorganization and chaos and you can see why it's easy for people to misremember who came up with what other factors such as stress multitasking and the amount of time that has passed between the event and the associated information being recalled also contribute to the likelihood that you might unintentionally engage in intellectual robbery cryptomnesia is worrying in its own right the notion that you could mistakenly commit plagiarism at any given time is enough to make most people second guess even their best ideas however when you consider this alongside the influences of things like the internet and social media it can scare anyone into pulling a George Harrison and simply stop creating while researching this video I just did a quick search on YouTube to make sure someone else hadn't made the exact same video just to be safe today we're constantly being bombarded by content we consume so much in a day that it has become practically impossible to recall every Tik Tok video or Instagram story you watched no matter how hard you try even for the people who avoid these platforms or limit the amount of time they spend on social media its effect is still inescapable the result is that we're more likely than ever to commit cryptomnesia the problem is so widespread that cognitive psychologist Ronald T Kellogg has observed how contemporary authors increasingly borrow even from their own work in order to meet the intense demands of Publishers it's gotten so bad that writers are stealing from themselves and in a culture where creators are expected to turn out seemingly endless quantities of new material basically overnight who can blame them when there are so many people whose livelihoods are built around the expectation of constant creativity and when all of us are exposed to incessant streams of quick easily forgettable media how can we possibly avoid inadvertent plagiarism but the worst consequence of cryptonia isn't legal battles or even that an artist might have their life's work taken from them rather it's that it might be silencing the voices of entire populations humans tend to adopt and likewise steal the ideas of people that they relate to false claims of originality occur at a significantly higher rate when the individuals involve share the same sex race or socioeconomic group this suggests that we're psychologically primed to favor in therefore Advanced ideas from those who look like us regardless of the value of those ideas this unconscious bias can serve as a form of group think and sideline ideas but forward by people who we don't identify with in the worst cases this effectively serves as a form of intellectual discrimin ation against anyone who doesn't fall into the mainstream demographics while unintentional the effect can be nearly the same as if those people hadn't been allowed in the room in the first place as though this weren't nefarious enough it turns out cryptomnesia doesn't just increase the probability that you will ignore ideas from people you don't identify with ironically it makes it more likely that you will steal their ideas as well alongside the experiments of alen brown and Dana Murphy other psychologists investigating cryptomnesia in the 1980s observed a phenomenon that they dubbed social cryptomnesia in a series of studies researchers asked participants about their attitudes towards things like equal rights environmentalism and World Peace most expressed positive opinions of these values at least initially but when participants were reminded of the groups who first campaigned for these causes such as civil rights green and anti-war activists the reported favorability dropped significantly despite participants having adopted identical views as these groups it seemed that they had forgotten their contributions not only that but these groups were seen as radical or deviant despite their beliefs being essentially the same as their participants more recently in 2017 a study was carried out by Swiss researcher fabrio buta investigating the effect of social kryptonia in relation to minority groups in Butera's experiment groups of women were asked to express their agreement or disagreement with statements on gender equality equality support for issues like equal salary the right to vote and freedom to divorce was overwhelming yet this support diminished when the phrase as proposed by feminist movements was added to the statements suggesting underlying Prejudice this despite every one of these issues having been fought for by suffragists and other feminist movements throughout the 20th century though they may have shaped the popular discourse of today most people seem to have largely forgotten about their contribution the danger then of cryptomnesia is twofold not only are we biologically predisposed to ignore the ideas of people who don't look like us but in cases where we do adopt those ideas it's unlikely that we'll give them credit the effect is a pathological undervaluing of minority activists thinkers and artists leaving them in danger of being forgotten in spite of their contributions nearly everyone knows the name George Harrison and if you don't you definitely have heard of The Beatles but I doubt you've ever heard of Ronnie ma if proper recognition isn't given to the people who deserve it it only serves to to prop up existing power structures while perpetuating discrimination in other words it helps maintain the status quo but how do we combat our bias how do we stop ourselves from falling into the Trap of cryptonia one easy way is by going back and consciously reviewing material research has shown that this can reduce rates of cryptonia by 2/3 this kind of deliberate introspection where you occasionally ask yourself where you've acquired certain information or beliefs can help decrease derivative thinking what's even better we can actually use this knowledge to help change people's views of minority groups uta's 2017 study on social cryptomnesia also found that when participants were made aware of the disconnect between their beliefs and their attitudes towards the feminist that first fought for those same beliefs their opinions of the group improved we'll never be able to completely eliminate cryptomnesia but with a bit of mindfulness we can avoid its worst consequences and perhaps even use this knowledge to help change people's minds for the better that is if we don't forget at the end of the Korean War The New York Times published a gripping story detailing how returning American soldiers may have been converted by communist brainwashers the story became widely popular that some troops were allegedly confessing to war crimes While others adopted the Communist ideology and even refused to return home the fear of brainwashing or brain Warfare both terrified and fascinated the American public at a time when political tensions rising in the early years of the Cold War the CIA was convinced that the Soviet Union had developed a drug or technique to control mines and as a response they launched a top secret program called MK Ultra MK ultra's main purpose was to conduct covert experiments centered around behavior modification human test subjects were exposed to electroshock therapy hypnosis polygraphs radiation and a mixture of drugs potions and chemicals to see whether any of these would be successful in controlling the human mind while the the CIA believed that all these experiments could be potentially useful there was one drug that stood out and became MK ultra's Obsession in the 1950s and 60s the alleged race for manipulating the human mind had just begun and the drug at the heart of it was discovered by accident in 1938 Albert Hoffman a researcher working for a Swiss chemical company called Sandos accidentally formulated a psychoactive hallucinogenic that would alter the course of history Hoffman initially wanted to synthesize a chem compound that would stimulate the respiratory and circulatory system by combining lysergic acid with other molecules on his 25th attempt he inadvertedly created lysergic acid diolide or lsd2 while this new discovery was useless to his research at the time Hoffman noticed that there was something interesting about this new compound the animals that were exposed to it showed strange levels of excitement and behaved peely not thinking too much of it though Hoffman sheld his new discovery for 5 years until the results of his testing pequ his interest again and he decided to synthesize it in his lab once more while in the final stages of synthesizing LSD during the height of the second world war in 1943 Hoffman accidentally absorbed some of the substance he soon experienced restlessness dizziness and a state of extremely stimulated imagination that prompted him to abandon his work for the day and go home the next morning he returned to his lab with a burning desire to discover what had affected him the previous day after ruling out all of possible contaminants he came to the conclusion that he must have somehow ingested LSD and that what he experienced was similar to the animals he observed in his lab 5 years prior to verify this hypothesis Hoffman decided that there was only one thing to do self experiment so on April 19th 1943 Albert Hoffman embarked on the world's first Acid Trip 40 minutes after taking the drug Hoffman began feeling dizziness anxiety Visual distortions and sudden urge to laugh while riding his bicycle home he also reported that everything in his field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen through a curved mirror when he finally reached the safety of his home he collapsed on his sofa LSD psychedelic effects locked him in a frenzy of hallucinations that manifested in a continued animated motion driven by Inner restlessness hoffin was so frightened that he thought he was going to die but soon the effects subdued and the horror softened giving way to a feeling of good fortune and gratitude magnified by an unprecedented display of colors and shapes behind his closed eyes everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh Light the world was as if it was newly created he wrote the following morning all my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity which persisted for the entire day today April 19th is celebrated by recreational LSD users as bicycle day because of Hoffman's colorful ride home an acid and psychedelic are two terms that are forever linked thanks to Hoffman psychedelic is a combination of the Greek word psyche which means Vine and delos which is to reveal clinically a psychedelic experience refers to a class of compounds that induce a mind manifesting state in its users sending them on a journey that often provides unique insights and emotions that they were otherwise oblivious to this feeling can last for up to 12 hours and can be very dramatic most individuals report a distorted sense of time an altered sense of self and dramatic changes in feelings and Sensations some experience Anesthesia where their senses intertwines add another dimension to their perceptions of the world such as tasting music seeing sounds and hearing colors an acid trip is a journey into one's own mind and can provide its users with deep and profound realizations but it can also be very unsettling with the ability to push the Mind into dark and unexplored places that could have some horrific effects scientists believe that LSD influences The receptors in the brain responsible for regulating serotonin which is a chemical that carries messages between ner of s and plays a key role in regulating mood happiness and sexual desire among other things while there was and still is no research that connects LSD with mind control in the late 1940s the CIA received reports that the Soviets were engaged in intensive efforts to reduce LSD believing it to be the key to controlling an individual's mind so when the US government found out that Hoffman had created this mind altering drug they approached his employer Sandos and paid 240,000 to purchase the world's entire Supply what follow was reported by investigative journalist Steven kiner as the most sustained search in history for techniques of Mind Control the CIA in MK Ultra began Distributing LSD to hospitals clinics prisons and other institutions asking them to carry out research projects on patients and prisoners so that they could understand what LSD was how people reacted to it and how it could potentially be used as a tool for mind control Whitey buer a prisoner who volunteered for the program in exchange for a shorter sentence was told that the drug was being tested as a cure for schizophrenia as part of the experiment he was administered LSD every day for over a year he later realized he was a guinea pig in an experiment aimed at testing the long-term effects of LSD and understanding whether it could make a person lose their mind Boger wrote about his experience that he was closely monitored by physicians who repeatedly asked him leading questions such as would you ever kill anyone that eventually drove him to the brink of his Insanity the experiments were The Most Extreme Trials conducted on any human being by any US agency and Boger claimed that he was never the same after he was continually haunted by auditory and visual hallucinations violent nightmares and anxiety so severe that he couldn't even sleep the CIA and MK Ultra believed that LSD had the potential to blast a person's mind which would open up the opportunity to reprogram it to either help extract people from the alleged Soviet mind attacks or more likely to make their enemy an enemy of himself during the Cold War the race for mind control was believed to be the most crucial of Victories so the CIA and MK Ultra basically had a license to Kill from the US government they had the authority to requisition humans from all over the country and around the world and subject them to all kinds of abuse even if it were fatal enemy agents captured in Europe and East Asia were subjected to all sorts of tests from electroshock and sensory isolation to temperature extremes these weren't designed to understand the human mind but to rather destroy it in order rebuild it again from the ground up perhaps the most notorious experiment of that era was Operation midnight climax government employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA safe houses where LSD experiments took place the prostitutes dosed the men with LSD while CIA officials watched their minds unravel through a two-way mirror as all this was underway the agents themselves were also getting high and indulging in some unscrupulous Behavior the agent heading the program George White later wrote of course I was a very minor missionary actually a heretic but I toiled wholeheartedly in The Vineyards because it was fun fun fun where else could a red-blooded American Boy lie kill and cheat steal deceive rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest ultimately after dosing countless people MK Ultra concluded the LSD was too unpredictable to be used for mind control and the program was asked following an inspection of its unorthodox and unethical methods throughout its course the program allegedly involved more than 150 experiments with many casualties and lives permanently ruined the actual number remains a mystery because most of MK ultra's files were destroyed ironically the drug the CIA hoped to be their key to mind control ended up freeing people's minds sparking an anti-government Rebellion dedicated to destroying everything the CIA held dear the movement focused on protesting the Vietnam War in addition to advocating for equal rights and environmental awareness as the spread of LSD grew it became the unofficial symbol for this movement it was harled as a means for people to connect to Nature and bring about positive changes in society counterculture activists rebelled Against The Establishment and its participation in mind expansion experiments that acid was thought to provoke pressure created by the movement is also widely credited for the creation of the Clean Air Act in 1963 which was the United States's first and most influential environmental law to regulate emissions it also played a major role in conceiving the first Earth day in 1970 which helped bring environmental concerns to the Forefront of youth culture sadly although the movement sparked a lot of positive change its overuse of acid coupled with the US government's War on Drugs divided the nation and eventually hindered the positive experimentation of the solu agend and so after the US Food and Drug Administration concluded that LSD was The Most Dangerous Drug to have ever been created possession of the Psychedelic was made illegal in 1968 still there is no doubt that the counterculture movement at at the time wouldn't have prevailed without it making LSD one of the most influential drugs in human history more than 80 years after its Discovery LSD is still somewhat of a mystery the fact that it's illegal in many countries makes it hard for scientists to conduct appropriate research to determine its long-term effects that being said the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies or apps began to conduct basic safety studies and in 2014 researchers initiated the first scientific studies on human subjects in decades while acid's ability to control minds is still in question researchers have hinted that the use of psychedelics could help people to stop smoking deal with PTSD fight depression and even help terminally ill patients deal with their fear of death the uses of LSD in Psychotherapy have also Intrigue scientists and psychoanalysts the drug was found to assist patients in uncovering previously repressed memories from their subconscious while also stimulating their imagination in a way that lowered their customary defenses and made them more accepting of the treatment as's therapeutic applications could be the beginning of a new era of openness scientists keep testing its effects on the human mind but despite these new studies we still don't have conclusive evidence on its long-term effects krie Grant an American actor popular in the 1950s took over 100 doses of LSD claiming that it allowed him to connect with the subconscious while Breaking Free from the usual disciplines one imposes on themselves similarly Sid Barrett a founding member of Pink Floyd experienced waves of inspiration while using LSD that propelled the band to fame at the end of the 1960s but the same forces that Unleashed Barrett's imagination led him down a path of self-destruction as an overuse of the drug slowly drove him to Insanity becoming a shell of the man he once was Albert Hoffman wrote that his psychedelic experiences left him with feelings of estatic love and unity with all creatures in the universe however he also did not shy away from the fact that the unpredictability of its effects was the major danger of LSD the good mood and positive expectations of a trip could quickly turn to horrendous depression if the setting isn't properly controlled and monitored closely from being a tool for mind control to becoming the symbol of Freedom today LSD has undergone yet another Public Image shift with some involved with Silicon Valley advocating micro doing to boost creativity with this new Revival of the Psychedelic in this era of Technology one can't help but Ponder on Hoffman's words upon his discovery of the drug I did not choose LSD LSD found and called me in 1946 a 41-year-old hairdresser named Janice schot came to A Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester New York to be treated for scleroderma a rare connective tissue condition she had escaped the violence against Jews in Belarus during the second world war and was hoping to begin a new life in the United States what shot didn't know was that she would become one of the 18 people the US government secretly injected with plutonium from 1945 to 1947 as part of the Manhattan Project none of them ever found out the Manhattan Project was the code name given to the American L effort to research and build a functional Atomic weapon during World War II it recruited thousands of scientists worldwide and took place across multiple continents the result of these efforts was the construction of the world's first atomic bombs which were later dropped on the Japanese cities of heroshima and Nagasaki ultimately ending the second world war the mobilization for the program began in 1939 when the president of the United States Franklin D Roosevelt received a startling letter from Albert Einstein with an Urgent Message physicists had discovered that uranium had the potential to generate unprecedented amounts of energy they could be used in creating the world's strongest and most devastating bomb what was more urgent in Einstein's letter was that he suspected that Nazi Germany was already stockpiling this radioactive element in hopes of creating a weapon of mass destruction after the Japanese attack on P Harbor in December 1941 the United States joined the war alongside the Allied Forces and in 1942 the Manhattan Project was officially born bringing forth an atomic Revolution shrouded by secrecy Espionage and a whole lot of controversy while nuclear research had begun in the US before its involvement in the war the manh hadn't project stood out because it wasn't purely theoretical its purpose was clearcut build an atomic bomb before the Germans within a year it became the number one priority during the war it got all the funding all the resources and all of the green lights the research was mainly centered around the fision of uranium 235 and plutonium 238 which split and release heat and atoms with smaller atomic numbers when enriched with an extra Neutron the Project's goal was to produce a chain reaction from splitting these atoms to release enough energy energy to trigger an explosion despite its name the Manhattan Project took place all over the US Canada England the Belgian Congo and parts of the South Pacific but its most famous research facility was the Los Alamos National Laboratory located in the remote mountains of Northern New Mexico as the war advanced in Nazi Germany faltered in Europe the focus of the project turned to Japan after the first atomic bomb called the gadget was successfully tested around 240 km or 140 mi from Los Alamos a iranium bomb called little boy and a plutonium bomb called fat man were dropped on the Japanese cities of hoshima and Nagasaki more than 200,000 people were killed instantly almost all of them civilians at its peak the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 workers and by the end of the war the US had spent $2.2 billion to produce little boy and Fatman while the research and development of the bombs is in itself controversial especially with many scientists condemning it there is another aspect of the program that is just as controversial or even more so as often forgotten at that time the Project's Personnel faced many issues handling recently discovered elements such as plutonium that had unknown health risks so without regard for human life and safety the US government turned to human experimentation the leaders of the Manhattan Project understood the urgency of measuring the impact of radiation on the human body body and in 1942 established a division whose purpose was to protect the health of workers and the public from radiation they were also tasked with studying potential hazards to establish tolerance Doses and develop methods of treatment ironically the medical term of the Manhattan Project concluded that in order to do all this controlled human experiments were necessary so between 1945 and 1947 18 subjects were unwittingly injected with plutonium several others were exposed to uranium ponum and americ the experiments were conducted at the Manhattan Project Affiliated hospitals all over the US knowing that plutonium might be carcinogenic or even fatal to the unsuspecting subjects Janet shot never knew that plutonium was in her veins the dose she was administered was 56 times the amount of radiation an average person absorbs in their lifetime all of that straight into her veins all at once Janet lived the remaining 29 years of her life in excruciating pain suffering from a cancer that ultimately led to her death just like schot none of the other test subjects were informed of the substances they were being injected with and in order to further understand the appalling nature of these experiments it's important to highlight some of their stories e Cade was the first victim on March 24th 1945 he was brought to the Army hospital in Oakridge Tennessee after fracturing bones in a car accident Dr heimr friedel one of the initial doctors assigned to to the Manhattan Project wrote to Dr LS hempleman the director of Health at Los Alamos that he found the primary subject for the first human plutonium experiment he gave Cade the code name hp12 with HP standing for human product on April 10th 1945 Cade was administered 4.7 microG of plutonium which frle suspected was nearly five times the human body's limit samples of his teeth and a biopsy of his bones were taken shortly afterwards and Kade was released the doctors didn't expect him to live for more than 10 Years yet they did what they did with eyes wide open 8 years after the injection Kade died of heart failure similarly Albert Stevens received a plutonium injection in California only a month after Kade he was misdiagnosed with terminal stomach cancer which later turned out to be just a benign ulcer Stevens was never informed that he didn't have cancer but was instead given a dose of plutonium to 238 doctors reportedly knew that the dose was potentially carcinogenic but still administered it which ultimately led to Steven's death also from heart failure just like Janet schot Ela Charlton Coden name hp3 was also administered to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester in 1945 3 weeks later she received a plutonium injection of 4.9 micrograms Charlton was discharged in December but she was regularly hospitalized after that until her death almost 40 Years Later by Cardiac Arrest as well but perhaps the most questionable and horrendous case of all of that was of semian Shaw a 4-year-old suffering from terminal bone cancer he was flown from Australia believing that he would be receiving the best available treatments for his condition what he received instead was a death sentence in the form of a plutonium injection at California's UCSF Hospital in 1946 what is most shocking about Shaw's case is that he was immediately flown to Australia afterwards with no follow up on his case and no radioactive data collected he died 8 months later the remaining human test subjects all share similar stories where they either died from the toxic effects of radiation or were impaired by lifelong illnesses what's worse is that human experimentation was justified under the claim that all patients chosen were terminally ill which simply wasn't true a lot of those do were misdiagnosed and repeated errors in procedure research and documentation were made calling into question the efficacy of the experiments themselves the Manhattan Project leaders claimed that these experiments were necessary to advance the science of nuclear physics however as we saw what the cases mentioned the follow-up research wasn't thorough enough and many of the samples ended up being contaminated or destroyed so they basically ruined people's lives for absolutely nothing even after the Manhattan Project achieved its intended goal and World War II ended human experimentation continued well into the cold War there's evidence of several large- scale projects all throughout the US that failed to inform their subjects of the health hazard of their experiments one of the most shocking was intentionally exposing a school for disabled and special needs children in Massachusetts the radioactive iron and calcium in a government sponsored study between 1953 and 1957 uranium injection experiments were also conducted on another 11 patients at Massachusetts General Hospital scientists concluded that uranium localized in the kidneys at a much higher rate than previously thought sadly despite the experiments results and the human lives lost the occupational standards for Uranium didn't change making these human sacrifices unjustified and unnecessary in the early 1990s the Albuquerque Tribune exposed the nature of the experiments and the identities of the test subjects all of them had already died not knowing that they were dosed by the doctors that they trusted to cure them J Robert oper bimer the Los Alamos laboratory director and the scientist aptly dubbed the father of the atomic bomb reportedly knew the nature of these experiments but expressed that he didn't want them conducted in his laboratory there is even evidence that he personally approved plutonium and uranium shipments to be used for human experimentation the secrecy that revolved around the project makes it difficult to trace the chain of command but there is enough evidence to show that all the health and medical directors of the Manhattan program Were Somehow invested in this research they knew what was underway with many even cheering it on the families of the victims were eventually compensated by the government and a total of 4.8 million was paid in Damages a little more than $9 million today the US government also adopted new laws in 1997 preventing secret scientific testing on humans Janet schott's nephew said that the money didn't help his family get over the issue his aunt left belus to avoid persecution and came to America only to be injected with a radioactive element that would ruin the rest of her life and lead her to her grave today the Manhattan Project is faled by us officials for the crucial role it played in ending the second world war but the controversy that surrounds it is still prevalent the hoshima and Nagasaki bombs leveled two cities in a matter of seconds wiping out entire populations and the testing that led up to those events resulted in early death or lifelong pain for over a dozen unsuspecting civilians as with all wars the innocent ended up paying the heftiest price many also argue that the success in developing the first atomic bombs led to the age of the Cold War and the race towards the development of nuclear weapons that are now a threat to humanity after sending Roosevelt his urgent letter Einstein later came to regret his decisions had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb I would have done nothing he famously said when testing the gadget right outside Los Alamos Oppenheimer quoted Hindu scripture foreseeing the immediate threat of nuclear weapons across the planet now I am become death the destroyer of worlds one week later the first atomic bombs were dropped and the world as we know it changed forever it was the pseudo peace that existed following the second world war worth a human sacrifice have you ever donated money to a charity or taken your clothes to the Goodwill store how did it make you feel amazing right most of us at some point in our lives have either donated or will donate money clothes food shelter and our time to others and we do these things not because there's an immediate reward for it more often than not we feel best when we give to people who cannot reciprocate or at least not in the same capacity this altruistic feeling that makes us give to one another even when there's nothing to receive was described by ancient Greeks as philanthropia the love of humanity coined around 2,500 years ago this term was first used in the myth of Prometheus in the story The Titan God Prometheus saved Humanity from Zeus's destruction and earned the title of philanthropist tropos or Humanity loving character although that's the term we now mostly use to describe this phenomenon the love for Humanity isn't an exclusively Greek concept the idea of benevolence towards one another has its roots deeply planted in ancient civilizations throughout the world from the Middle East to Egypt to the city of Rome it was also propagated by Babylonian communities as early as the third millennium and is at the core of all abrahamic religions and many others across the world in Egyptian sacred writings such as the The Book of the Dead it was made clear to the people of the ancient world that a successful passage into the Afterlife depended on a lifetime record of benevolent acts towards people who were suffering while many of us today do not follow any of these ancient teachings or believe in an afterlife anymore the messages they taught have stayed with us through Millennia so when capitalism and accumulation of wealth began rising in the West in the 1700s it wasn't surprising to start seeing Rich philanthropists pop up whose lives became characterized by the voluntary act of giving a large sum of their wealth to promote the common good this type of lavish giving the one we most associate with philanthropy today was rather popularized by Rich bangers such as George Peabody who is now considered the father of modern philanthropy peot was an American Merchant Banker who came from poverty after amassing his fortune in the early 19th century he never forgot his humble beginnings and dedicated the later years of his life to charitable work it's believed that he gave away around 8 million of his 16 million Fortune to Charities his incredible benevolence paved the way for later generations of Rich philanthropists sadly what we have today isn't what pebody envisioned when he gave away half of his net worth what started with the notion of lending a helping hand charitable work is no longer at the core of philanthropy in today's world tax evasion and personal gains have tainted the hands of the world's wealthiest givers and have caused a huge wealth Gap that only seems to be growing creating an ever expanding Rift between the social class how did we turn that amazing feeling you get giving money away to charity into a corrupt scheme for billionaires and large corporations to understand this we have to go back to the end of the 19th century Andrew Carnegie an American industrialist paved the trail for philanthropic work to be used as a tax evasion strategy Carnegie opposed federal income taxes and argued that he was better off allocating those funds to Charities rather than the government at that time philanthropy by the ultra Rich funded Social Services the government couldn't afford as a result Senators worried that taxing the wealthy on these charitable amounts would reduce their contributions and increase the burden on the government a logic that still prevails to this day the government's solution to this problem was a tax exemption on income for money donated to charity this legislative move allowed for New Wealth Management strategies pioneered by Carnegie who founded a charitable trust that took advantage of the tax exemptions before long wealthy industrialists and bankers started following incarn footsteps protecting their fortunes from substantial taxes under the cover of charitable trusts in 2014 Nicholas Woodman the founder and CEO of GoPro took his company public and was suddenly worth 3 billion to celebrate his newly acquired Fortune Woodman announced that he would be donating a whopping 500 million worth of GoPro stock to a foundation bearing his name the truth is not as generous as Woodman would want you to believe you see the GoPro CEO took advantage of a loophole that would allow him to donate his money without actually donating it this is done through something called a Donor advised fund Donor advised funds are essentially charitable investment accounts in which owners can claim tax deductions upfront without legally being required to distribute the money to Charities right away as long as the money is transferred into these funds under the roofs of charitable work owners can avoid paying higher taxes without donating any of it to Charities or foundations the point of these funds was originally to encourage more resources to get to communities where they're most needed sadly the way the laws are structured allows tax deductions without any requirement for that money to ever reach those intended communities it's no surprise then since 2007 the number of daffs in the US has tripled and while the amount of money donated every year keeps increasing the actual amount going to communities barely is from the 466 billion in the United States in 2020 only around 35 billion made its way to qualified Charities a huge sum of money yes but not nearly as much as the rich would want you to believe that they give away the reality is that these billionaires are entitled to spend their money however they wish we can argue the ethics of becoming a billionaire another day but let's say they got there on their own Merit they aren't required to give anything the main problem isn't that they don't give but that they claim to give more than they actually do it's the need to be seen as a hero without doing anything heroic last year musk announced that he would be donating 5.7 billion worth of Tesla shares to Wi undisclosed charity however to this day no single charity has reported receiving the funds from musk's donation with many experts hypothesizing that he suddenly dumped the cash in a daff financially speaking offloading 5.7 billion worth of Tesla stock allowed him to claim a tax deduction of 30% on his income that's about 570 million saved on taxes so it seems that the only benefit beneficiary from musk's charity is musk himself first on the tax deductions and second on the public praise he received because he theoretically donated so much money just months before that Elon tweeted that he would donate 6 billion to end world hunger if the UN could show them a plan on how they would spend the money the UN responded by saying that 6 billion won't solve world hunger but could potentially save 42 million people on the brink of starvation from pulled income funds to private foundations to daffs philanthropy today is only magnifying the issue of income inequality and adding to the already substantial Gap in wealth but that's not even all the word philanthropy does not only mean giving to Charities anymore now it is also used to describe giving to groups that promote social or Civic causes and these groups can keep their donors completely Anonymous which basically gives billionaires the power to weaponize their philanthropy for political gain in her book dark money Jane Mayer documents how the Uber Rich have used their charitable foundations to invest in ideology like Venture capitalists leveraging their fortunes for maximum strategic impact mayor argues that these foundations only support causes that benefit their financers by campaigning against regulations and sewing misinformation in the heart of the masses the odland foundation for example LED numerous anti-environmentalism campaigns the Bradley Foundation funded by $1.6 billion waged aggressive campaigns against teachers unions and traditional Public Schools since the donations to these foundations are tax deductible donors aren't accountable for the public use of their money which only adds to their power and influence and because these donations can be completely Anonymous it also rids the billionaires of any iota of responsibility for their actions the sad reality of our society is that this isn't something new rich people have always depended on favorable political conditions to build and preserve their wealth Mega philanthropists know that their money can influence governments far more than they'd ever be able to even if they were to run for office themselves this is why when Bill Gates was asked whether he'd run for president he said I could have as much impact in my role as a philanthropist as I could in any political role I don't have to raise political campaigns I don't have to try to get elected I'm not term limited to 8 years to be fair Bill Gates and his foundation have dedicated immense amounts of money to battle Health crises such as malaria and the reduction of child morality While most of his work remains true to the original definition of the word the love of humanity there are still some shady things he's done in the past a few years ago Gates was able to heavily influenced the passing of a bill for Charter Schools despite voters voting against it three different times after millions of dollars spent on campaigns that influenced the community into changing their decision the bill passed the fourth time almost immediately Gates began subsidizing Charter Schools until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional but with that bill stop Gates no he simply used his influence with lawmakers to fund a new bill to allow him to circumvent the Supreme Court's decision so he could keep funding these Charter Schools this is a great example of how wealth can influence public policy plutocracy or placing the power of society in the hands of the wealthy can undermine our laws and leave us vulnerable to the whims of the rich whether they have good intentions or not the lives of the populace should not be in the hands of a few no matter how wealthy they are we should all have a say in matters concerning our lives regardless of our socioeconomic impact the giving pledge which was launched by Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010 has more than 200 ultrich signatories who have pledged to donate at least half of their wealth towards the betterment of humankind this is an excellent achievement and one that must be praised giving such large amounts of money can never be easy and so the effort must be acknowledged at the same same time we must also look on the other side of the coin and the power that these billionaires ever so greedily hoed in the process and his book Winner Takes all a nedas argues that rich people who have lobbied for an economy of Injustice have at the same time marketed themselves as Our Saviors and the solution to all of our problems however in doing so they subtly hide the fact that they cause most of these problems themselves CEO of Wayne Enterprises by day hero of Gotham by Night the the Sinister of Truth is this as long as there are so few people with so much money and power the rest of us will have no say we need to go back to the original meaning of philanthropy where the love of humanity was the only driving force not money power or control we need to close the loopholes in the system that give people an advantage by donating money without having to donate anything at all until then we'll have to settle for the supposed Heroes with agendas to come and save us from the very problems they brought upon [Music] [Music] us what began as a regular training session on the afternoon of the 5th of December 1945 would soon become one of the greatest Mysteries of the human world Flight 19 a group of five US Navy Torpedo bombers set out from their base off the coast of Florida on a routine training Mission with clear winter Skies up above and all the necessary precautions taken from down below Flight 19 and its 14 crew members took to the air to fly across one of the most treacherous bodies of water known to man the Bermuda Triangle within a few hours all five Planes together with their 14 crew members vanished a few hours later when afternoon became evening and the skies became gray the US Navy realized that something must have gone wrong with Flight 19 and so they sent out another aircraft to find the men or at the very least signs of their crashed planes sadly the very same fate was to befall the rescue aircraft upon entering into the airspace above the Bermuda Triangle the rescue plane with 13 men aboard disappeared Into Thin Air it's been over 75 years since the incident and no one has been able to find the remains of any of the 27 crew members that were lost or the six aircraft that disappeared at the tail end of the first world war in March 1918 the USS Cyclops was on its way back from a voyage to Brazil the USS Cyclops was the biggest US Navy ship at the time it was nearly 550 ft in length and on this trip it was carrying around 11,000 tons of Manganese and a crew of 306 people the ship had been voyaging for 8 years at the time without any issues however on that fateful day as the ship was sailing back to Barbados to resupply before going home to Baltimore it entered into the Bermuda Triangle in what is now one of the most strangest occurrences of modern history the USS Cyclops disappeared completely leaving behind no trace of its wreckage or the bodies of any of the 306 crew members that were on board this was after the ship sent a message to the Naval Base that read weather or Fair all well there was no mention of anything out of the ordinary no time for the crew members to send out an SOS message nothing just like that the entire ship the 11,000 tons of Manganese and all the crew members completely vanished numerous ships were sent out to locate Cyclops but all returned Negative they couldn't even find the remains of the ship or any of the officers on board it's been more than a century since the USS Cyclops went missing and to date its remains are still missing the cause of The Disappearance is still a mystery how does the biggest ship in the US Navy's Arsenal just disappear without any trace a ship that was 550 ft long and carried 11,000 tons of manganes and a crew of 306 people how do 306 men die without anyone leaving behind an SOS message how do 306 bodies disappear into the see never to be seen again no trace of blood no bones nothing how can a 100 years pass and nothing has resurfaced nothing has washed ashore nothing has been discovered this is the mystery of the Remuda triangle Humanity's most treacherous sea or is it the Bermuda Triangle is the section of the Atlantic ocean that is bordered by Miami Bermuda and Puerto Rico this patch of sea is considered by many to be a mysterious place where many ships planes and people disappear without any trace and in reality many have tens of planes dozens of ships and hundreds of people have all mysteriously disappeared never to be seen again but what exactly is going on in the Bermuda Triangle is it really something mysterious or is there a scientific explanation for everything that happens there to find out we have to go back to the ear record of strange sightings in the area the first record we have of any seemingly Supernatural thing happening in the Ruda triangle is from Christopher Columbus while sailing through this patch of the Atlantic Ocean in 1492 Columbus wrote in his log that his Compass began malfunctioning and that what he saw in the distance light like a fireball rising and crashing into the sea although there have been lots of explanations that help demystify what Columbus might have been seeing most people simply choose to believe that what he saw and experienced must have been Supernatural and you might think oh how would you believe him he didn't have access to the scientific methods we do now and while you might be right to an extent the truth is that if you look for facts to back up this line of thinking even with all of our knowledge about the world and our advancements in science and technology you will find them from thousands of ghost ships sailing across the sea without any crew members on board to mystery cases of time traveling while passing through the Bermuda Triangle this place is one that dances majestically on the line between what is real and what is not there are many theories that people have used to try and explain what is going on in the Bermuda Triangle from Aliens to a wormhole to the lost city of Atlanta sucking people from underneath everything from evidence-based scientific hypotheses to religion lore and mysticism have been POS ulated the most popular scientific explanation however is the theory that it's electromagnetic interference that causes issues with compasses went in and around this area the theory claims that the Bermuda Triangle has a very high pool of the Earth's natural magnet which could cause issues with compasses and other sophisticated equipment on planes and ships this could explain what went wrong with Christopher columbus' equipment while sailing through this area it could also explain the conversations recorded by the pilots of Flight 19 who could not come to to an agreement on which way it was that they were flying minutes before radio silence but what about the people who claim they time traveled while passing through an electromagnetic fog the most popular of these testimonies is one made by Mr Bruce gon who has written a book detailing his account in his book Gan said that while flying in a light aircraft throughout the region he was faced with a cylindrical shaped cloud that sucked him in in an instant he saw himself on Miami Beach around 100 Mil from where he started Gan claimed that this 100m journey took mere seconds and that he didn't notice any atmospheric or landscape changes throughout when you hear this story you might instantly think he's just cooking up a fairy tale so we can sell some books but that skepticism turns into plausibility when you realize that the people at the base station corroborated his story according to them the plane went off the radar and reemerged in Miami within seconds just like gon described did he time travel teleport no one knows scientists have since debunked the existence of a wormhole and have said that there is no way that he could have traveled through time however no one has been able to provide a definite explanation as to what exactly happened that day it's for this reason that a lot of people still cling on to the idea that there is something truly mysterious going on in the Bermuda Triangle you see there have been explanations to debunk theories but there hasn't been any any conclusive evidence to explain what's really going on so people are left thinking well if they aren't sure it's that then how can we be sure it's not this after all the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence most of the world's oceans are still a mystery to us although the ocean has been mapped by things like satellite and sonar humans have only physically explored around 5% of our Waters the rest is still a mystery to us maybe not a mythical mystery but a mystery nonetheless and that's why people are quick to believe things like mermaids and Krakens exist the ocean in its vast emptiness Echoes things that are difficult for the human mind to comprehend and as humans once things are difficult for us to understand we come up with stories to try and make sense of these things once these stories are formed in our minds it's difficult to get rid of them especially when there's no evidence Beyond Reasonable Doubt to convince you otherwise the triangle is one of those stories we've told ourselves there is no evidence that suggests shipwrecks and plane crashes occur more frequently in this body of water than in any other well-traveled part of the ocean now you might say well it's not just the accidents it's the fact that these vehicles just disappear leaving no Trace behind but the truth is even that's not unique to the Bermuda Triangle there are currently over 3 million ship wrecks in the world and only 1% of these wrecks have ever been found in fact the Rema triangle was not coined by researchers or scientists or even seafarers it was coined by the writer Vincent goddess who first used the phrase in 1964 Vincent goddess was a paranormal writer who made a career out of ignoring natural explanations and inventing Mysteries where none exist the US Board of geographic names does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an official name and it doesn't have any official file on that area there isn't even a map that helps to point out the the boundaries of this place when I was younger I was obsessed with the idea of the Bermuda Triangle after going through the rabbit hole of threads and YouTube videos at 3:00 a.m. I decided that one day I would take my bags and travel out to the Sea Into the Heart of the triangle where no other person is brave enough to go and then I got older and found out that the Berita triangle is not some sacred place where no one dares to enter it's actually a very normal part of the sea that people travel through every day dozens of ships and airplanes pass through the Bermuda Triangle every day vessels heading to America Europe and the Caribbean apply this route often enough and most of them go through unscathed yet because of the small percentage of accidents that occur in this region which is no more than anywhere else in the ocean we believe that there must be something bigger going on something we're just not aware of the reason many people still believe in the lore of the Bermuda Triangle and in other mythical Tales is one of the most fundament Al human conditions the need to feel like a part of something bigger something greater something more than human deep down in all of us there's a feeling that the world is more than what we can see and experience it's the same feeling that makes people believe in the existence of alien life and religious deities even when there's no physical evidence to support that belief and really can you blame us when you're blessed with the ability to think logically about why things are the way they are you are also cursed with the disability of trying to make sense of everything and not accepting that sometimes we just don't know these are the words of one Albert Einstein his love for music is well documented there are many pictures of him indulging himself in the tunes of his violin seemingly oblivious to the rest of the world as anyone who has ever loved music would know our musical tastes have a lot to do with what we think and who we are of course on first read Einstein's account sounds nothing more than a metaphor for visualization but could it be more could someone possibly see music could there be anything more to the conscious experience in 1812 a physician by the name of George Tobias Ludwig Zach was writing about the nature of albanism having the condition himself color was a recurring Topic in his analysis of albinism and as such in discussing in his own experience he mentioned that colored ideas appeared to him they were intimate and recurring and couldn't be reckoned with usual sight according to sax sax is now regarded as the first medically documented case of synesthesia a neurological condition in which a sensation in one of the senses evokes a sensation in another the term quite literally means a cross mingling of the senses exactly opposite to the more familiar word anesthesia which means no sensation this cross mingling could theoretically happen between any two or even more senses it's no wonder then that there are more than 80 types of sthesia known till now sax himself seemingly had multiple forms of synesthesia reporting that numbers days of the week time periods letters notes of music all of these elements adopt those colors these introduced themselves to the mind as if a series of visible objects in dark space formless and noticeably of different colors this is most likely a case of ordinal linguistic personification where as the name suggests ordered sequences tend to have personalities and colors to each element of the sequence this type of synesthesia tends to co-occur with graphine color synesthesia the most common form of synesthesia where numbers are associated with colors there are many other types of synesthesia such as lexical gustatory synesthesia where hearing certain words causes certain tastes or audio tactile synesthesia where hearing certain sounds sounds can lead to a sensation of touch in parts of the body oddly enough there's even a type of synesthesia where swimmers thinking watching or performing a certain swimming stroke perceive a color that they consistently associate with that swimming stroke there have also been surgeons with what's called Mirror touch synesthesia where they're able to feel the pain of the patients they're observing while CPR was being administered I have died many times says Dr Joel selinus a neurologist who possesses this condition however the most all- inspiring case of synesthesia probably took place when a man was able to visualize colors when he saw numbers the only catch is he was colorblind and the colors he was visualizing had never been seen but how credible are these accounts considering Sax's colorful landscape was also attributed by some to congenital eye defects common in people with albanism couldn't all these just be hallucinations or simply psychedelic experiences under the influence of a drug or some other sign of an overreaction the science is very clear on that front while synesthesia like experiences have been created with the help of psychedelic drugs synesthesia is a consistently reproduced condition meaning those that have it will recall the same exact colors the same exact taste same exact Sensations with nearly 90% plus accuracy even when they're tested years apart and without warning this pattern of consistent experiences has so far been the most reliable way to test whether someone has synesthesia or not mind you consistency here does not mean that the same letter will always be correlated with the same color for all Sines people who have synesthesia individual to individual these correlations may vary even if they may have the same type of synesthesia but for the same individual the correlation stays remarkably precise so precise in fact that they can tell apart shades of color that are only slightly different so if the letter a is an orange-ish red for you it may not be the same for another cete but it will always be orange-ish red for you this quality is also why the musical cetes tend to have perfect pitch because they can superimpose the sound with a very intricate visual map and confirm what is what cetes also score higher on memory tests especially with numbers and names because they're most remembered as multi-property objects each with unique associations perhaps the most compelling evidence that synesthesia is not an occasional random hallucination is the fact that the brains of cetes are physically different from those that are not cetes display consistently higher connectivity in their brains than non Sines especially in between Visual and auditory regions the visual regions were also better connected to the frontal prial region a region crucial for color association with numbers or letters the amount of connectedness also reflected the strength of the synesthetic experience the stronger the connections the stronger the synesthetic experience research has also revealed that cetes generally have more white matter this intrinsic increased network connectivity LED scientists to agree that there is a genetic component to synesthesia and sure enough about 40% of all synesthetes have a first-degree relative with synesthesia and many synesthetes recall having synesthesia as long as they can remember an interesting way to test whether you might have a graphine color sinesia which is numbered to color synesthesia is to look at this picture try to identify the twos as quickly as you can people who have synesthesia react quicker on a test like this because the twos and fives are naturally seen in different colors to them like this which makes it much easier to identify they are able to see the twos in different colors without necessarily having to hunt for them like nonen AES so they're not staring at a number and then thinking of the associated color it's an automatic response one syes cannot turn off and that can be a problem right even with the five senses most of us are able to use sometimes we feel overwhelmed by the world around us so to be over stimulated all the time with a barrage of sensory inputs would be pretty uncomfortable or so you would think CES by and large consider their abilities as gifts rather than curses most cetes are completely unaware that others don't see the world the way they do for some sound has always had color color has always had taste and taste has always had sound it sounds strange but you'd be surprised how many of your favorite artists are Sines from musicians like Lord and Fel Williams to novelists like Vladimir Nabokov from theoretical physicists like Richard finan to painters like Vincent Van go all are said to have had sinesia their conditions are as versatile as their crafts common amongst all however is the fact that their contributions have all been incredible Feats of creativity this convergence of creativity and synesthesia is no coincidence idents in fact synesthesia is up to seven times more common in artists and people involved in Creative professions it's no surprised then that CES perform better on tests of creativity and originality than the average person but of course as with any condition it's not all sunshine and rainbows some kids who have the condition display poorer reading comprehension than their peers and often have a hard time following lectures Solomon sharvi was a Russian journalist who was also diagnosed with the condition he could recall unusually long lists of information without error but said that the automatic and nearly permanent retention of every detail due to sthesia made it very hard for him to grasp abstract Concepts or make sense of what he was reading still synesthesia is generally considered a positive and most people that have it do not think of it as a disorder it's staggering how the same world you and I experience can actually be so different compared to so many different people I had no idea that such a condition existed before I was introduced to the this tool just a few days ago it allowed me to see what my name looks like to a sin in her video violinist composer and sin Caitlyn Hova recalls finding out in college that not everyone saw music as she did the prevalence of cetes within the general population is remarkably High contrary to what it may seem as many as one in 20 people can have some form of synesthesia and you probably know a lot of them you just don't know that you know them but now you know that you don't know that you know them you get the point in what follows Caitlyn goes on to play an incredible piece on her violin to Showcase what she sees when she plays it which really makes me wonder how relatively colorless our realities are in comparison or are they you see we all visualize things we may not see colors for every note on an instrument or have perfect pitch but we do visualize it happens all the time when we're trying to process large amounts of data or trying our hand at more artistic Ventures we're trying to see something totally abstract one of the more interesting studies regarding synesthesia is the bubak Kiki effect take a look at this image which one of the shapes looks like it's called buba and which one is called Kiki an overwhelming majority of the initial participants chose the image on the right as BBA and the left as Kiki even across languages even children as young as 2 and 1/2 years old have demonstrated this effect while these findings are not seen in every community the consensus suggests that the bubak Kiki effect is a CU to pre-existing synesthesia like associations present in all of us it would reinforce the idea that the neural hyperconnectivity that is responsible for synesthesia is seen in pretty much all babies most of us simply lose those connections as we grow older and that's the beauty and tragedy of synesthesia all at once that we all have it but most of us lose it Caitlyn ends her video by asking what could have happened if if we were all more conscious of others experiences and how different our senses might be from one another how we solve a math problem how we make sense of complex Concepts how we enjoy music sharing these things can make learning so much more fun what does it mean to know you have the correct answer she asks what is that feeling is that feeling a color as a student of the Sciences I find myself wondering time and time again how scientists realize some of their most mind-bending unintuitive truths about the universe how are they so confident in their findings aside from the degrees and credentials what does it truly mean to know something what is that feeling of Harmony that creative connection and why does it soothe our hearts whether we can describe these things or not you and I have felt them maybe in a painting or in a ballad or in a book but we've all felt them answering these questions could help uncover the colors in our mundane but elegant reality and and allow us all to experience a richer Consciousness all whilst using an ability that deep down we all possess this video was sponsored by the daily upside a free business and finance newsletter delivered every single [Music] weekday nowadays it seems to be a common theme amongst almost everyone to go out and shop our way to happiness you know just to take care of of ourselves after all nothing says mental health like impulse buying that will dig us deeper into debt than we ever thought possible don't you feel that you're above this age-old system of enticing customers into buying more stuff after all we are in the age of minimalism and all that good stuff right how many times have you found yourself annoyed by an ad in the middle of something you were watching and promis to yourself that there was no way such an annoying Interruption can actually convince you to buy something you don't even even want and then you go and buy it anyway well if these things weren't working we wouldn't see them be used forever so clearly there is a method to the madness and you might be surprised by just how meticulous this method can be sometimes of course you and I know some of the basic stuff like placing commonly bought items at the end of a store so that customers have to walk through most of it and therefore be exposed to other products to get to the ones they really need that's why they usually put milk in the back of the store it's a common item that most people need and so they're going to make you see as many items as possible before you get to what you need then there are buy one get one free offers which clearly boost revenue and make us buy more stuff in exchange for very marginal discounts exposure and billboard ads also do some of the marketing heavy lifting but you already knew that what you didn't know however is just how deeply our Psych is being studied to understand patterns and predict customers choices well before the customer is aware of them themselves this is neuro marketing well it all starts with how humans perceive things humans for whatever reason perceive relatively and not absolutely what this means is that our perception is based on stimulus that is already present you can see this play out every day for example if someone near you unlocks their phone in a well-lit environment and lights up the screen the change in brightness of your surroundings is barely noticeable if you do the same thing in say a movie theater it can sometimes be startlingly bright even though the brightness around you changeed by the same amount in both cases your perception of them is vastly different similarly we also perceive loudness relatively if you are already in a loud environment the addition of another sound say a glass breaking may be barely noticeable but in a quiet environment even the same sound can feel much much louder known more formerly as Weber's law this idea of relative perception has been a core principle of astronomy and music theory alike since they both have something to do with how we humans perceive things well now it has one more application and that has to do with our perception of price firstly this means that whenever the price of a commodity either goes up or down how a customer feels about that price change depends on the original price of the commodity companies can use this information to marginally keep increasing the price of a product over iterations provided that they do so in increments that are just below our perception threshold this applies more generally to markets around the world where people also perceive the price of a commodity based on how much disposable income they have this is the reason why some products that do very well in America despite increases and price don't work very well in countries like China but it goes deeper than that disposable income and original prices have fairly obvious relevance in this topic however our minds can even be tricked by seemingly irrelevant numbers as well studies were conducted where participants were asked to gauge how much they would pay for a certain product however before they were allowed to make their minds up they were asked to think of the last few digits of their social security number it turned out that the participants with higher Social Security numbers were willing to price the item High higher despite being in no way related to the commodity itself this process also known as anchoring caused the participants to be more generous with their bid in his book Brain fluence author Roger douly hypothesizes that this may be the reason why counters now commonly seen in fast food chains are used Beyond just letting the customer know when his or her order is ready these counters almost always counting large numbers primes them to be okay with paying just that little bit more a more common method of anchoring is also to say things like normally you'd have to pay such and such for a product like this but not with us sometimes the anchoring is even more obvious for example do you remember how much the iPhone cost when it came out in 2007 it was over $499 and in some places even higher that's a tall order especially if you consider that it was for a product that many people were not really famili Amar with even in today's standards with Hardware that is orders of magnitude better some phones including Apple's own iPhones are cheaper than that so why did marketing genius Apple do such a thing they possibly just use the demand curve to the best of their ability first set the price as high as you can since every Market has a certain percentage of people that can pay even the inflated prices assuming they like the product once you have exhausted that demographic drop the prices significantly which is exactly what Apple did by the time the iPhone 3G came out some retailers were selling it for as low as [Music] $199 by this point there were enough people owning iPhones that people started familiarizing themselves with the product and by dropping the price so much apple made it seem like they were giving the phone away on a massive discount the initial $5 to $600 price was seemingly just an anchor that made the eventual price seem like a total steal there is one more thing you know how Apple always prices things a dollar less than the big number like $499 instead of just 500 and $999 instead of just 1,000 well I used to think that when we pay $4.99 for something we feel as though we were paying 400 and something as opposed to just flat out 500 we feel closer to 400 than to 500 however this is not entirely true for things that are priced at whole numbers our minds like to think that a fair price would also be a whole number increments below it meaning something that has a list price of $20 probably registers as deserving 17 or $18 meanwhile if something is priced at $1 19.95 our brains think a deserving price would be $1 19950 or 1930 so despite the fact that1 1995 is lower than the $20 price tag surprisingly enough you would have much happier customers if you were to accept just a few less cents a University of Florida studyed tested this idea where participants were asked to estimate the actual price of things put on auction the three prices were 4,988 5,000 and 52 realistically speaking they're all very close to each other the group that was tasked with estimating the price of the $5,000 thing estimated the lowest prices of them all even the $52 group at just $12 or 0.24% more were willing to pay more for the same item it's all in your head truly companies also sometimes Place products that they know won't sell well just to make other products seem more desirable again humans like relative improvements remember that these marketing decoys help offers look much better than they actually are in the book predictably irrational the author Dan arieli mentions an experiment where participants were offered two offer sets the offers were as follows offer a included a $59 Internet only subscription or a $125 internet and print subscription offer B also included a $59 Internet only subscription but included both a $125 print subscription and a $125 internet and print subscription in offer B it wouldn't make much sense to just choose the print subscription at $125 price point when you could also get the internet subscription for essentially an extra $0 and this was clearly shown in the results want to guess which one generated the most Revenue the offer B set generated nearly 45% more Revenue compared to offer a the customers didn't choose anything they didn't choose before namely the option to purchase the printon subscription but just its presence made the other two offers look much more desirable instead of competing with other companies using decoy products companies can essentially micro compete within their own products and generate more Revenue it's all a game then there are smaller tricks that the companies employ on a regular basis one is to slightly increase the font size of the products you once sold the slight change is barely perceptible but subconsciously we register it as something more worthy of our attention another is to offer customers better but not necessarily overwhelming choices this is where services like Amazon have truly cemented their position Amazon has the resour sources not only to sell a lot of products but also to organize them in the right way and only present to the customers what they're most likely to buy other companies can sometimes overwhelm the customer with too many flashy options especially during Black Friday sales which confuses them and makes the purchase seem that much harder to make these are still things you and I can see and put our finger on companies go much further than that to make the customer feel safer to spend more old factory Association is one of the ways in which this is a accomplished all Factory is the sensation of smell According to some reports as much as 75% of all our sensation has got to do with smell it's no wonder then that the memories that have an old factory component are held the strongest and are recalled much easier as well the smell of McDonald's for example is something that the company puts as much effort into as anything you might see on the menu there is a very good reason for it of course the feeling of familiarity is crucial to to the brand of McDonald's especially considering going to McDonald's is something that the company hopes to become a generational tradition people go as children and eventually end up taking their own children to McDonald's that there are reports that McDonald's infused the smell with the cleaning liquid IT staff uses to clean the store a similar theme follows all majored Industries we've all heard about the new car smell or the new sneaker smell these are all essential elements of a company's effort to construct a recognizable image one which we may not even see Singapore Airlines regularly voted as one of the best airlines in the world also uses this marketing strategy they're known to give passengers hot towels at the start of every flight but even this seemingly innocent gesture is working to sew the brand image deeper and deeper into our minds the company has its own brand fragrance Stefan fidan Waters and it is infused into those hot towels that passengers use needless to say the flight attendants are wearing it too and so is the cabin interior of course it can go both ways Starbucks reportedly removed some of the sandwiches from its menu because they smelled too much like eggs and took away from the coffee heavy Starbucks smell customers know and love one may question whether doing these things is even ethical well there are two sides of the coin as with any debate on the one hand marketers might argue that using these techniques they are better understanding what their customers want and giving them a better shopping experience on the other hand this opens us up for attention sabotage something which has been happening rather frequently with social media platforms already one thing is for certain though we have far less control over our purchasing decisions than we thought we buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like and the things you own end up owning you the voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right hand wall the instrument the telescreen it was called could be dimmed but there was no way of shutting it off completely the telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously any sound that Winston made above the level of a very low whisper would be picked up by it moreover so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plat commanded he could be seen as well as heard there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment this is an excerpt from the fame dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell in this book which is dubbed as one of the most influential in the past Century Orwell talks about Winston Smith a dutiful servant of the state who starts having second thoughts about the system that surrounds him constant surveillance from the telescreens secret mics everywhere posters full of propaganda and when all those fail fellow citizens waiting to rat you out without a moment of hesitation Winston like everyone else in the novel was living in a world where he was allowed a private moment and only the most superficial meaning of the word what he wasn't allowed to have however was a private thought as those thoughts establish a more menacing presence in his head Winston is flooded with the overwhelming realization that the world in which he lives is livable everything in society was geared to notice even the smallest signs of unlawfulness even a thought crime it was a dystopia well and truly published in 1949 one would imagine that this novel would bear more resemblance to those times than ours to the regimes of Stalin or musolini and it certainly does the outright control of the masses the yet the sales of 1984 have skyrocketed in recent times of course certain countries ban its sale and I'll let you guess which ones those are but really why why have the Sal skyrocketed recently has the time Orwell really spoke of truly arrived perhaps the most attention widespread surveillance has gotten in recent memory are the Snowden leaks of 2013 Edward Snowden and NSA computer security consultant had leaked files showing the NSA largely overreached and abused its powers powers that were granted in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks instead of just asking for Intel on criminal suspects investigations revealed that the NSA asked giant tech companies for data on bystanders people for example who called people who called people who called the subject for every Target that the NSA looked into they sweeped up data on 10 bystanders a lot of whom were just citizens of the United States the NSA was also revealed to have collected data about the telephone records of millions of American customers from the company Verizon Defenders argued that it wasn't private information just the type of information that was found in someone's telephone bill you know how many calls were made when the calls were made this type of data is often known as metadata or data about the data instead of recording the contents of the phone conversation these records simply only stored details about the phone call and that may seem useless to some but here's the thing if it were useless they wouldn't be expending resources trying to collect it this type of data can be used to create a very detailed profile of someone just like scrolling down someone's Facebook page there's also the Pegasus program that has caught the eye of the media lately a state-of-the-art spyware developed by an Israeli group that can hack into even the latest mobile os's Pegasus infects targets phones using a number of vulnerabilities instead of attacking just one some of pegasus's hacks are zero click meaning they require no interaction from the user it can allegedly render whatsapp's now famous end to-end encryption completely useless the group that built the spyware claims it was built to help combat Terror and crime yet the most notable use of the spyware was in 2019 when the Saudi government used it to hack into the phone of the journalist Jamal kasagi who they eventually murdered it was also the spyware used to hack into Jeff bezos's phone in fact it was formerly discovered in 2016 when a sketchy link was sent to a human rights activist who instead of opening the link sent it to investigators upon retrospective analysis it's thought to have existed since 2013 upon the release of the news about widespread and unconstitutional use of facial recognition technology by different companies across different countries people sometimes try to confuse the cameras by wearing sweaters with patterns designed to fool the machine learning programs little did they know that facial recognition had gotten so good they don't even need to see your face this new technology thought to have developed in China apparently can identify People based on the way they walk it takes up to 50 different parameters that can be used to distinguish your walk and allow the computers to identify people from as far as 50 m away you would have guessed it by now this technology too is being developed with the promise of preventing CME but how it's actually used is anyone's guess at this point these are just some of the many surveillance programs that are not just being developed but marketed and used actively around the world at least in 1984 Winston was fully aware of all the programs the state had to offer today we don't even know most of it yes Snowden brought a revelation of documents in terms of the spying programs but that's just one facet of the larger landscape despite the outc cry from those damning reports change has been hard to come by we constantly see news of surveillance programs cracking down on the civil liberties of its own citizens even tech companies forced to Bow their heads to any and all requests for data and some that do so willingly if you don't even know who and what is watching part of your life how can you even decide what to do about it if you look back at the forecast of surveillance by George Orwell well it turns out that he was an optimist really it's not really the act of being watched that's particularly disturbing rather it's the paranoia of feeling like you're being watched when you can NE prove it to be true nor false if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear they say however a government that cares today about criminals May tomorrow care more about their political adversaries a government that today cares about political adversaries May tomorrow care about academics the list goes on and on that being said it's not all doom and gloom the thing with the economy as it currently stands at least in much of the western world is that the act of profit making can really be used to weaponize any interests the good and the bad in this instance after the general realization of what was going on people consciously started choosing products that emphasize privacy now whether those privacy privileges are actually able to protect us is another question altogether privacy has successfully been converted from a human right to a desirable feature apple is one of the first companies to take that mantle in the tech industry releasing a slew of privacy features that almost get as much stage time as a new processor or camera it's also worth noting that the situations in which these abusive powers are granted in the first place they generally take place after a terrorist attack at a time when people are more likely to be outraged and emotional that's when there's little to no opposition to such requests for power the enro is on our civil liberties generally don't take place overnight they take place in slow almost indistinguishable strides that is what 1984 is really talking about to give the reader the ability to extrapolate into the future when seemingly innocent requests for information slowly turned into widespread surveillance these surveillance programs almost never have oversight or chaperoning unless of course a whistleblower decided to leak it all take Facebook's algorithms for example in inent request for data to make the platform more profitable in exchange for the option to keep Facebook free for everyone a lot of the Privileges that we have today surrounding our choice to delete all of our data and to control how it's shared is the result but sometimes it seems to go a bit far how often do you have a private conversation about a topic only to end up being recommended Services about that topic later on and I'm not talking about your Google searches or your public posts these are private messages of course the iron is in the fact that even Facebook's own CEO probably doesn't feel very safe about the widespread surveillance in our world this is a picture of Mark Zucker Bird taken a few years ago which shows him at a desk with what appears to be his own laptop Mark has both the webcam and the mic of his laptop taped up it's something that has become common practice across users of Technology most notable after the release of the Snowden files but if Mark Zuckerberg doesn't feel safe in his own office a person who likely has executive access to some of the deepest darkest secrets of our world's technology what does that say about all of us now you might say well nobody's forced to use any of these Services well no not technically but realistically does anyone really have a choice the everyday Joe has to join Facebook because his colleagues are all on it he has to join Instagram to maintain a functioning social life even the people that claim not to use social media use it F their businesses the idea is the same and with each additional user the shared utility of these platforms Rises and with that rises the inclination to join and reveal more and more about our private lives there's also an element of thought or lack thereof in all these platforms and that was another Hallmark of 1984 ridding the masses of almost any ability or even desire for critical thought the things that dominate on social media are almost exclusively devoid of any crucial thought all platforms are pushing for the shortest most click Beady things they can find to give people that addictive surge of dopamine and then keep them on a short leash Instagram is also routinely under scrutiny for its algorithms a research study about its algorithms was stopped writing its tracks with a threat of legal action to which the smaller research institution had to ablage it's no wonder wonder that the comparison with 1984 really falls apart in today's time today everyone has a television not because they were forced to have it but because they go out and buy it themselves and what people want is not to turn it off but to keep it on as long as possible of course we shouldn't get too ahead of ourselves the fact of the matter is you and I can have that discussion we can at least debate whether it's right or wrong whether anything is done about it in the end is another topic altogether but at least the conversation can take place that in itself is a hopeful sign that our world is not quite there yet in truth despite a resemblance that is hard to overlook or well is not speaking of our time or any time in specific he is talking about the innate desire of those in power to remain in power and almost equally an innate desire to rebel against that it's a tug of war which will remain Timeless just like his book as long as we know about it and are able to talk about it we have a fighting chance so go ahead go ahead and think that's not a thought crime yet

Channel: Aperture

Views: 3,472,672

Keywords: aperture, yt:cc=on, stoicism, philosophy, self improvement, the greatest stoic quotes, powerful stoic quotes, philosophy lecture, ryan holiday stoicism, inspiration, personal development, psychology facts, social media, the dangers of social media, tiktok, youtube, treat, thinking, deep thoughts, documentary, educational documentary, everything we don't know, life questions, enigma, secrets of life, conspiracy, secrets, education, aperture explained, everything we don't know too, everything

Id: _aL_hY8DjMU

Length: 181min 58sec (10918 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2023