In the 17th century, a medical student in Switzerland named Johannes Hofer identified a strange but serious new illness afflicting people living far from their native country, particularly soldiers and students studying abroad. And whatever the cause, maybe it was a parasite or an unknown pathogen of some kind, symptoms were pretty stark: sufferers took on a lifeless and haggard countenance, and lost their interest in eating cheese.
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00:00:55.320You know, one of the side effects of doing the Real History series is now I'm tempted now to begin every show with a historical anecdote, especially since when you read enough history, you start to realize that a lot of the bad ideas were actually pretty reasonable in hindsight.
00:01:10.880So here's a story about one of those allegedly bad ideas that you probably haven't heard before.
00:01:17.220So in the 17th century, a medical student in Switzerland named Johannes Hofer identified a strange but serious new illness afflicting people living far from their native country, particularly soldiers and students studying abroad.
00:01:30.380And whatever the cause, maybe it was a parasite or an unknown pathogen of some kind, symptoms were pretty stark.
00:01:35.960sufferers took on a lifeless and haggard countenance. They lost their interest in eating
00:01:41.240cheese, which is a big deal for these people, for anyone really. Sometimes they thought they
00:01:46.960were hearing voices or seeing ghosts. They also lost track of time and confused past and present.
00:01:53.540And in his dissertation, Hofer noted that he couldn't figure out how to cure the disorder,
00:01:57.880but various remedies were attempted. According to Harvard University, doctors would induce
00:02:01.740vomiting. They would administer toxic laxatives. They'd give patients opium. They'd stick leeches
00:02:09.640on their bodies to drain their blood. Hopefully they're not doing all these things at the same
00:02:14.020time. And they'd serve emulsions, usually containing sedatives and narcotics intended
00:02:19.580to knock the patients unconscious. In 1733, a Russian army officer came up with his own
00:02:24.140preferred method of treating this disorder when he buried one of his soldiers alive when he began
00:02:30.940showing symptoms. Now, all these approaches, however, turned out to be highly counterproductive.
00:02:36.660And that's because the disorder that Hofer identified, as it turns out, was not actually
00:02:40.600caused by a parasite or an unknown pathogen. Instead, it was caused by loneliness and isolation.
00:02:47.400100% of cases were solved by just shipping the patient back home. Hofer coined the term
00:02:54.100nostalgia to describe the disease, which, of course, is not a disease at all. And today,
00:02:59.880there's broad agreement in the medical community that nostalgia is not, in fact, a public health
00:03:04.940emergency. The scientific consensus is that nobody should be buried alive or suffer any
00:03:10.400other horrific punishment disguised as treatment, no matter how badly they're overcome with
00:03:14.760nostalgia, which is actually a little surprising given that the medical community today medicalizes
00:03:19.860everything. So maybe they'll swing back around to that eventually. And really, I've come to the
00:03:24.500conclusion that maybe they should. Maybe we need to revisit this scientific consensus.
00:03:29.880Because, you know, as you may have noticed, nostalgia has officially reached catastrophic levels in this country.
00:03:37.120We need to declare a pandemic, bring back the press conferences with Fauci, shut down the country until we figure out what the hell's going on.
00:03:46.200Nostalgia has overtaken entire generations, especially my generation, millennials.
00:03:53.120And the signs of millennial nostalgia obsession are everywhere. We're all familiar with them.
00:03:58.260rebooted TV shows from the 90s, endless remakes and sequels, newer shows that are built on
00:04:05.440nostalgia like Stranger Things, podcasts dedicated entirely to re-watching old shows like The
00:04:11.320Office, Disney adults, consumer products from the 90s making a comeback, fashion trends cycling
00:04:19.740through again, and on and on and on. But if you think it hasn't reached pandemic levels,
00:04:24.080a point where we may need 15 days to stop the nostalgia spread.
00:04:28.980Take a look at this local news report out of Texas about the revival of Pizza Hut,
00:04:33.740or at least the old Pizza Hut, supposedly.
00:04:36.640A franchise owner who owns around 100 franchises has converted a third of them to this new format,
00:04:42.060and he's presumably going to convert a lot more in the near future.
00:05:45.420When you finally find something that tastes how you genuinely remember it tasting, you can't let it go.
00:05:53.260People come from two and three hours away, and I'm not making that up.
00:05:56.100More restaurants are serving up nostalgia.
00:05:58.580Franchises like Burger King and KFC returned to old school logos and packaging in recent years.
00:06:04.580At Pizza Hut, they even brought back Pac-Man.
00:06:07.960Yes, they're saying the new Pizza Hut looks and tastes just like it did 30 years ago.
00:06:11.800And first of all, just as a factual matter, we all know that isn't true.
00:06:16.180The quality of the product has declined, and you're not going to change that by painting the roof red and installing vinyl booths and Pac-Man.
00:06:26.040And we talked about this before, but one of the biggest changes when it comes to the quality of the food and in the pizza industry generally took place when all the pizza joints started getting their cheese from the same source.
00:06:36.680Prior to that, restaurants like Pizza Hut would grate their own cheese in-house.
00:06:40.340Today, a company called Loprino controls about 85% of the market for pizza cheese.
00:06:44.680They secured a patent for quality locked cheese, or QLC, in 1986, which is basically bioengineered mozzarella that's created via some Frankenstein practice in the factory, then flash frozen and shipped out.
00:06:58.660And you can see the inside of one of their cheese facilities here.
00:07:02.200So no matter where you get your pizza, whether it's Pizza Hut or Domino's or the frozen food aisle at the grocery store, the odds are overwhelmingly high that the cheese comes from the exact same place.
00:07:12.000And given that's one of the three main ingredients of a pizza, it means that all the pizza ends up tasting basically the same.
00:07:17.960Now, of course, the cheese isn't the only thing that's changed since the 1980s.
00:07:22.300Take a look at this Pizza Hut ad from 1982.
00:19:34.680You know, millennials are overwhelmed with nostalgia for things that, in many cases, when judged on their own merits in a clear-eyed and objective way, weren't actually all that great.
00:19:48.680Just as one example, consider the reboots we mentioned earlier to, you know, all these iconic 90s shows.
00:19:54.240Several years ago, Netflix launched its Full House reboot, which I think was called Fuller House, and the show was canceled after a few seasons.
00:20:01.660the audience generally found that it lacked the charm of the original series. They didn't really
00:20:05.300like it. Nobody cared. No one remembers it now. You know, I think it went off air three or four
00:20:09.320years ago. It's like it didn't exist. But if we're being totally honest about it, the original
00:20:13.360series was not exactly an artistic masterpiece. I mean, it was cliched. It was corny. It was
00:20:21.020poorly acted. It's not terribly well-written. It was kind of a punchline for most people at the
00:20:25.860time when it was on the air. There's no Full House episode you can point to and say,
00:20:32.360this is a classic of the form. This was great art. No, it's like pretty bad for the most part.
00:20:40.800But millennials miss shows like Full House, not because the shows were always great or even good,
00:20:47.740but because they miss the culture that these shows and movies and music and blockbuster stores
00:21:48.920that these events led to a lot of problems and resentment, but I actually think you can identify
00:21:55.020a different cause. One that, like the Great Recession, began nearly two decades ago.
00:22:01.040So all of this nostalgia points towards and longs for a time when we had a shared cultural
00:22:08.020experience, a monoculture. We've talked about this a few times in recent months.0.71
00:22:11.640There was a time when we all existed within the same culture. We all had basically the same
00:22:18.120cultural experience. But those days are over. One of the biggest movies in the box office right
00:22:25.960now is the Michael Jackson movie. And this is another remnant of a culture that no longer
00:22:33.740exists. Michael Jackson was, whatever else you want to say about him, was a superstar of a kind
00:22:40.340that simply does not exist anymore and cannot exist because we don't have enough of a shared
00:22:45.920cultural experience for a superstar like that to come into being in the first place.
00:22:52.800And so that's the thing that people miss. They cling to these avatars, these mascots
00:22:57.960of the monoculture, but it's the monoculture that they actually are pining for, not the
00:23:02.980things themselves. Now, I've laid out my theory as to when the monoculture died and was supplanted
00:23:08.260by what we have today, which is a fractured culture, a culture split into a billion tiny
00:23:12.960pieces and anti-culture. And I've previously identified 2007 to 2008 as the time when the
00:23:19.480shift happened. A lot of things hit at the exact same moment in history. Smartphones, the recession,
00:23:25.820as we just mentioned, the Obama era. And these things arose from a culture, but the culture
00:23:33.100didn't survive them. Within a few years, the culture as we knew it would be gone. But as I've
00:23:38.460thought more about this and read more into it, I think we can get more specific because there was
00:23:43.080something else that happened around this time, about a year later, that may have been more than
00:23:48.740anything else, the most devastating and ultimately fatal blow to the monoculture. So let's zoom out
00:23:56.780a little bit and go back to the beginning of social media in the early 2000s. Social media
00:24:01.620often gets blamed for killing the culture, destroying the culture, which I understand,
00:24:07.560and I've indicated similar things plenty of times, but it kind of misses the point to some degree
00:24:13.360because in the early days, social media wasn't just more rudimentary than it is now. It was
00:24:20.300fundamentally different. It was a different kind of thing. It was designed to do something
00:24:25.260that it doesn't do at all anymore. In fact, it does the opposite of what it was originally
00:24:28.780designed to do, you could argue. At the time, it was a way to connect and interact largely
00:24:33.640with people that you know in your real life. Now, this is a concept that's totally alien to
00:24:39.460young people who grew up on post-2010 social media, but it's true. Originally, kids, social
00:24:46.680media was like, think of it like a giant group chat with your family, friends, and classmates.
00:24:53.060That's what it was. For example, take a look at what MySpace looked like in 2008.
00:24:57.320And at the very top of the webpage, it says, MySpace, a place for friends. You're prompted to find friends on MySpace. And at the bottom of the page, it states, view profiles and add friends to your network. You can browse some content related to movies and musicians, but otherwise it's presenting itself as a platform where you primarily interact with people you know in real life.
00:25:18.540Now, it did also give you seemingly personal access to, you know, famous people and celebrities, which at the time was revolutionary.
00:25:27.780It gave us kind of access to public people that had never existed before.
00:25:33.880But generally speaking, it was you went on MySpace and you and you got connected with the people that, you know, along the same lines.
00:25:41.440Here's Facebook in 2007, quote, Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.
00:25:49.360And then below that, it reads, get the latest news from your friends.
00:26:11.380You could follow pages for celebrities where you could find information about their upcoming
00:26:15.220appearances and tour dates or something like that, and maybe feel like you had some kind of
00:26:19.440connection with them. But that was about it. You know, there was no parasocial component whatsoever.
00:26:26.240But then a change happened in 2009 that was actually one of the most consequential shifts
00:26:31.940of this century. One of the most, one of the shifts that will define this century,
00:26:38.940and it's hardly ever discussed. And that is that Facebook switched to an algorithm-driven news
00:26:46.620feed. And within a few years, every other social media company, eventually streaming platform,
00:26:54.700followed. And now feeds are personalized by this invisible and mostly mysterious algorithm.
00:27:03.320Social media very quickly stopped being a place to connect with real life friends and family.
00:27:07.640it became your own universe serving you content no matter where it comes from or who's posting it
00:27:15.340that the algorithm thinks you'll engage with. Now I wasn't able to find many news reports from 2009
00:27:21.740on this topic but I did because I mean at the time when it happened it wouldn't have seemed as
00:27:25.500this it wouldn't have seemed like an earth-shattering world-shaping change but it was
00:27:30.720in hindsight. I did come across this contemporaneous report from a random grandmother who was upset
00:27:36.760about what she was seeing and i have to say she was ahead of her time watch hi grandma mary here
00:27:44.700and i'm talking today about the changes in facebook what's going on do they have to change
00:27:51.860things all the time how about us older people who just like things status quo keep them as they are
00:28:00.320So what we have now is the live feed and the news feed.
00:28:05.420And I'm here on my granddaughter's site here, Andrea, and I'm just going to demonstrate on this site.
00:28:11.140So the live feed, what they've done is you used to have a little highlights area over on the side.
00:28:19.080And what they've done now is the live feed is that highlights area.
00:28:23.840It's what it thinks, I'm sorry, the news feed is the highlights area.
00:28:28.700darn it i'm getting confused the news feed is like what the highlights area used to be
00:28:36.360so the news feed is kind of what they think are popular like the certain things people have0.94
00:28:43.020commented on or things that you might think are interested to interesting based on your previous
00:28:50.680use and i don't know how it's tracking that but who knows uh who knows what data is out there on
00:28:57.400us you know kind of crazy so the news feed the problem with the news feed is you're gonna miss
00:29:03.920some stuff you're not gonna see updates that are happening so what is gonna be more and more
00:29:09.440important here is your lists and how you're grouping your friends so you're making sure
00:29:15.080you're not missing things and that's here on the side now you can see you can create lots of
00:29:21.040different groups and I've and my granddaughter here has one for moms she's you know a mom
00:29:28.140so she wants to see her mom friends and see what they're doing so so that's a video from uh
00:29:35.440like 15 years ago it has like 300 views that my producers found somehow I don't know how but we
00:29:41.420you know we we uh we dig deep on this show to uh get you get you get to paint the picture for you
00:29:48.580But her complaint is that Facebook introduced an algorithm-driven news feed where they show you content that they think that you'll like.
00:29:56.320They show you popular posts that get a lot of engagement instead of, say, a status update from a relative that nobody has liked.
00:30:03.440And as you just heard, the only way to opt out of the system was to manually switch to the live feed and create various lists of people that you care about.
00:30:09.360similar to the system X uses now where you have to manually toggle away from the for you tab to
00:30:14.880get rid of the algorithm wasn't user-friendly and that was by design Facebook wanted people
00:30:19.380to gravitate towards content that was not necessarily relevant to their personal lives
00:30:23.500they wanted they wanted it was it was no longer about staying connected with people that it was
00:30:28.320no longer about connecting with friends right and that's why by 2013 Facebook's front page looked
00:30:35.340somewhat different, quote, it says, quote, connect with your friends and the world around you.
00:30:43.480That was the new pitch. Instead of talking only to people that you knew, talk to anyone. And by
00:30:48.780extension, anyone could talk to you. That's how influencers were created. It's how Facebook became
00:30:54.360a trillion dollar company. Corporations started popping up in the news feed. They pay a lot of
00:30:59.140money for the privilege. This was one change by Facebook and then Instagram and Twitter ultimately
00:31:05.080TikTok, all followed. And it's one that perhaps more than any other single factor, I would argue,
00:31:13.380led to the destruction of the monoculture. It allowed various different subcultures,
00:31:17.960which would have been isolated and irrelevant on their own, to gain massive influence on
00:31:21.760our culture and politics. It connected everyone with a custom curated stream of content
00:31:27.320designed to appeal to their specific interests, actually to shape their specific interests and
00:31:33.960then appeal to those interests as opposed to the kind of general interests of the culture at large.
00:31:40.600And now, as we've all seen, the change has made us incredibly susceptible to manipulation from
00:31:45.800political entities, corporations, advertisements, etc. And our social feeds are increasingly fake
00:31:51.940and manipulated. You know, we live now in a culture almost entirely shaped by the algorithm,
00:31:58.320which is to say that we have no culture. I mean, this is, at the end of the day,
00:32:03.760this is how, this is the primary, this is the window that almost everyone is looking through
00:32:11.120to see the world around them. It is the algorithm. You couldn't possibly overstate
00:32:17.300the significance of it. This is the primary way that people learn about the world,
00:32:22.100connect with people, express their viewpoints, all of it is being done, is being filtered through
00:32:29.820an algorithm. Now, when I made this point the other day, I received this criticism from
00:32:35.800Michael Brendan Doherty at National Review Online. Actually, he makes a good point. He says,
00:32:40.780quote, although I'm often nostalgic for it and wonder if I could have succeeded more in it,
00:32:45.080I'm not sure we should mourn a time when six companies, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corp,
00:32:49.760GE, Sony, and Disney basically viewed themselves as programming the entire culture.
00:32:55.080Now, I'm sympathetic to the broader point, which is that it's obviously not ideal for six companies to have that kind of cultural influence.
00:33:02.460The problem is that today, rather than having a culture programmed by six entertainment companies or six companies, it's now programmed by three, basically, big tech companies.
00:33:18.540and it's done through algorithms and increasingly AI.
00:33:25.240So weirdly, while the monoculture has been exploded into a billion pieces,
00:33:28.400our cultural experience has also been narrowed in a sense.
00:33:33.360It kind of goes back to the Netflix thing where it seems like they're giving you more options.
00:33:38.400They're actually giving you fewer options.
00:33:40.700It seems like you're in this infinite space now.
00:33:43.800You're actually in a narrow hallway and you don't even realize it.
00:33:48.540That's why now, you know, if you interact with a piece of content about a certain subject, your whole feed will be inundated with that subject for two weeks.
00:34:00.680Like the algorithm's only goal is to keep you staring at the screen.
00:34:03.540It doesn't care at all what you watch or why.
00:34:06.260So if you watch something, the algorithm says, oh, you like that?
00:37:02.240The sound of it, the look, the feel, everything comes rushing into your mind.
00:37:06.900You know exactly what it looks like and feels like and sounds like.
00:37:11.380If I say 2010s, there might be a vague, you might have a vague idea of certain things like, oh, yeah, skinny jeans and hipsters, maybe sort of at the beginning.
00:37:19.980And then a couple other things, but it's not nearly as vivid.
00:37:22.760And then you get to the 2020s, the decade we're in right now, and there's no, doesn't really have any defining cultural characteristic at all. I mean, we're more than halfway through the decade. What are the movies, music, style, and trends of this decade that it will be remembered for?
00:37:39.440right if in 2035 if someone is throwing a 2020s party um and they tell you to come dressed up
00:37:50.500like it's the 2020s what what what was that what's that gonna mean no it's like we fell into some
00:37:55.460kind of cultural black hole and some people would say the culture froze earlier like at the turn of
00:37:59.840the millennium um but i don't think that's true you know the 2000s definitely had their own feel
00:38:04.140If I refer to an early 2000s comedy or an early 2000s music, you kind of know what I mean. The shift happened later at the end of the 2000s into the 2010s, and I think that this shift, so it started with the existence of social media, but not that alone, because social media, when you were just connecting with your friends, it was a way of participating in the shared culture.
00:38:28.260a way of sharing the shared culture. That's what my space was in 2006. But that was the start of
00:38:37.320it. And then it was the smartphones that came along. So now you can carry this stuff around
00:38:40.660your pocket with you all the time. And then finally, the algorithm. And this decision by
00:38:45.880Facebook, I think is the genesis of the entire transformation. That's not to say that some other
00:38:50.720company wouldn't have done the same thing and led to the same result. It's not about Facebook
00:38:53.880specifically. TikTok and Twitter would have taken us down a similar path, but Facebook was the first
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00:42:10.140Although few people realized it at the time, Facebook was changing the purpose of social media.
00:42:16.460If you remember, social media was sold to us as a kind of new media that empowered ordinary people to challenge established orthodoxies and big media.
00:42:25.760A lot of people still describe it that way, especially former big media stars who moved their platforms to the Internet.
00:42:31.300Glenn Reynolds wrote a book about it, notably titled An Army of Davids.
00:42:36.640And to some extent, that's true, I guess.
00:42:38.620We've done our fair share of shifting the Overton window on our show and through movies and that sort of thing. However, there's a lot of evidence that the algorithm is now increasingly so inorganic. I mean, it was never organic. It's an algorithm. But it's becoming increasingly artificial and manipulated.
00:43:02.360So consider this from the New York Times, quote,
00:43:32.360has received almost $875,000 from the Republican National Committee
00:43:35.860and the National Republican Correctional Committee since late 2023,
00:43:39.680including a payment of $35,840 in February.
00:43:43.460On its website, Creator Grid says it connects Republican candidates
00:43:45.820with the Internet's most powerful conservative influencers,
00:43:49.400but other political social media agencies scarcely appear in FEC records.
00:43:53.040In part, that's because much of the money to the creators
00:43:55.520originates from nonprofit advocacy organizations
00:43:58.120that are not required to report their spending,
00:43:59.880rather than from campaigns or political action committees.
00:44:05.220Now, before 2009, it's true that a handful of major corporations controlled this type of influence
00:44:10.320and they used their power to function like a kind of hidden hand that dictated the course of world events.
00:44:16.640The news media united to destroy Richard Nixon,
00:44:18.880who had just won 49 out of 50 states in the 1972 presidential election
00:44:22.320in a coordinated takedown that wouldn't be nearly as effective today.
00:44:27.840And we know that because they tried it on Trump.
00:44:29.880If X existed during Watergate, people would wonder about the CIA connections of those Washington Post journalists.
00:44:36.400They'd point out that Nixon was raising questions about the U.S. government's possible involvement in Kennedy's assassination.
00:44:43.360And the narrative would collapse, just like the various Trump hoaxes that ultimately fell apart, leading to Trump's re-election.
00:44:49.460But at the same time, just because these major corporations abused their influence, which they did, that obviously doesn't mean that any replacement is automatically better.
00:45:01.000Prior to 2009, there was the official narrative and then whatever you and your social circle chose to believe.
00:45:06.100Post-2009, there's the official narrative and a million other narratives from all over the world.
00:45:12.200And if no one in your real life social circle buys into the other narrative, you prefer, then you can go online and engage with strangers who do.
00:45:19.460And the more you interact with them, the more the algorithm will bombard you with the same content over and over again.0.91
00:45:27.260The result has been the rise of demented fringe ideologies like transgenderism, a significant increase in political violence and hysteria, breakdown of friendships and community.0.97
00:45:39.660The mass adoption of cell phones and broadband Internet accelerated the trend, yes, but they weren't the root cause.0.99
00:45:46.860You know, all the nostalgia we see today in truth is not about red cups at Pizza Hut or, you know, late fees at Blockbuster. People are not exactly pining for a more inconvenient analog lifestyle. They're pining for a world that is not shaped by faceless, mindless algorithms.