The Sh*t Show: discussing loneliness + end of year wrap up

It’s our last show for the year and we are looking forward to a break after an intense year of news! Why not do yourself a favour and join us, because we are going to tackle the issue of loneliness in our societies and its impact, as we welcome one of the world’s leading experts on the topic. With the festive season coming up, loneliness is an issue that impacts one in six people, so we’re going to dig into the science including the numbers and impact, why social cohesion is so important, we’ll split it out over demographics, as well as the difference between males and females, and most importantly, what we can do to overcome our loneliness challenges.

Then it’s onto 2025. We are going to discuss the major events that happened this year, many of which we’ve already forgotten about as the next extreme event or news cycle chaos hit. We’ll go through the major extreme weather events across the world and the impact on communities, we’ll talk politics as we’re nearly a year into the Trump Presidency and well, it’s been a rollercoaster in its own right, we will discuss the economy, AI, social media, and a whole lot more!

Our final guest for the year is Simone Heng. An award-winning author, Certified Speaking Professional, and Board Member for the Foundation for Social Connection, Simone helps organisations embed connection to drive performance, productivity and retention, and in the world of rapid AI advancement, her message is more important than ever. She first published the ‘Secret Pandemic: The Search for Connection in a Lonely World’, which was re-worked into ‘Let's Talk About Loneliness” and published by Hay House Publishing in 2023. This book has gone on to win six awards, including a silver Nautilus book award, and suffice to say, we’re delighted she is joining us. 

Not only is this another show you can’t miss, it’s also our last for 2025, so come and get your yearly recap, because it’s certainly been a big year in the news on many levels. It’s all happening this Friday 12th December 2025, 7am UK, 8am EU, 11am UAE, 2pm TH, 3pm SG, 6pm AEST. Streaming across various locations, and no doubt about it, we’d love your support. 

The Sh*t Show is a Livestream happening every Friday, where Andrea T Edwards, Dr. David Ko, Richard Busellato and Joe Augustin, as well as special guests, discuss the world’s most pressing issues across all angles of the polycrisis, working to make sense of the extremely challenging and complex times we are all going through, plus what we can do about it. Help us move the needle so we can change the name of the show to something more genteel when (or if) it is no longer a sh*t show. 

#TheShitShow #UncommonCourage

To get in touch with me, all of my contact details are here https://linktr.ee/andreatedwards

My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage

My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar

Transcript

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Truly have to wonder why more people aren't tuning in to listen to every. Word of the shit show. I mean, people are saying that it's a show that has four hosts. I don't know why you need four people. I mean, I could say what they're. Saying all by myself. Why do they need to have so. Many people on the show? They're just losers who want to save the world. It's sad, really. So sad. Anyway, back to the news about the. Beautiful blowing up of bad, bad people. On their bad, bad boats. As far as that goes, I think. We need to really ask ourselves why? Why would you not watch the show? After all, these people are the kind. Of people we want to keep out of America. They're so focused on stupid things like the truth and facts. Obviously they need to be stopped before. They get a chance to wake everyone. Up to the the Poly crisis. That's when everything goes wrong at the same time. Welcome to the Shit Show. My name's Andrea Edwards. My name is David Koh, coming to you from Berlin today, bottom left, you. Have me as usual, Richard Basilato. And my name is Joe Augustin. And as Andrea said, welcome to the Shit show. And we're doing our end of the year wrap up in the middle of what's being politely described as the poly crisis or the metacrisis or the special time when everything is going wrong everywhere all at once. Yeah, we've got a packed show today and I'm saying that of course with full awareness that we will not get to all of it because frankly we talk too much, we'll go deep, we'll get distracted, we'll make one point and somehow end up promoting David's new book. Again, on today's show we plan to cover geopolitics. We're looking at shifting US worldviews. This new western hemisphere first posture, the vibes based foreign policy, the immigration first framing and the national security strategy along the lines of Al. Allies are out and spheres of influence are in. Also, visiting the US might soon require the screening of five years of your social media history before you get to visit the land of the First Amendment. Then there's climate 2025 managed to be both horrifying and confusing. Underwater storms eating away the doomsday glacier. The Amazon pushing into a new hypertropical reality. And extreme events stacking up. Glacial outbursts, floods, mega floods, drought and cyclones that don't just hit, they overwhelm. And has anyone noticed how somehow the US bizarrely has dodged hurricane rainfalls this year with the Caribbean and Global south taking the impact instead, in 2025, it's the same planet, just under new management. We'll also dip in for a check for the end of the year economic mode. We'll talk about rate cuts, how banks are getting pushed harder on climate CR crisis and the lurking fear that the crypto bros are out there still trying to detonate confidence in the traditional financial systems. And of course there's AI where it's been a year of rapid acceleration, real job disruption and data centers guzzling power and water like a planet killing villain in a Marvel comic. Plus there's the broader cultural mess, press freedoms taking a hit, plastics and forever chemicals everywhere. And yes, the year of misogyny continuing to monetize itself in real time. Now, before we attempt to jump into all of this, we have one small favor to ask. If you're watching on the live stream, like and subscribe. Because if we're going to stare into the abyss together, we might as well take the algorithm with us. We also try to have diverse voices on our show to help us sort out the polycrisis. And our final guest for 2025 is Simone Heng. She's the award winning author of let's Talk About Loneliness, certified speaking professional and board member of the foundation for Social Connection. She spent years helping organizations and communities build real connection at a moment when loneliness is rising, social cohesion is fraying and technology seems to be getting better at everything except making us feel less alone. Simone, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Hello. Thank you for saying yes. And I know it's almost your last job of the year to come and join us. Tomorrow's the last day. I can't imagine anyone better to spend it with Andrea than you. Oh, thanks for darling. And then you're back off to Australia to see your mum, right? I just got back, actually. I'm off to Switzerland to see my second mum. You know, I studied in Switzerland when I was 18. So we've just done faux Christmas end of November in Australia and then real Christmas will be in Switzerland and then back here for New Year's. Not a long trip this time. Nice. So apart from what Joe said, do you want to. Do you want to share a little bit about your story? Yeah, absolutely. So I many, many Years ago, for 15 years of my life, worked in broadcast media and then about seven years ago now in 2019, decided that I was very disengaged with traditional media. And I look back now and I just think I left at the perfect time and I had always wanted to be a speaker. It's just I looked about 12 years old when I was in my 20s, so, you know, I just didn't think I was credible and I didn't have a message. And then I was really lucky that I stumbled across my message around combating loneliness through human connection. And that became my kind of topic that I go into evangelize organizations over. And I've been doing that now since 2019. It's crazy. It's gone like that. Yeah, I remember. I remember you right at the beginning of that journey. So it's been amazing to watch you fly. All right, so let's get into the topic of loneliness, which we think is. It's definitely a story, you know, as part of the poly crisis. Human connection, social cohesion. So we think it's a fantastic story to finish the year off, especially as we're entering the festive season. So I wanted to get you to start with your journey to becoming an expert in loneliness, you know, and social connection. How did it start? Yeah, so I was looking at a few topics that I wanted to study essentially. And at that time I was working at an organization in Singapore that was known to be quite toxic. And I was seeing how that toxicity was causing a lack of psychological safety and loneliness within teams. And when you don't have good collaboration, I could see how it was affecting the product in my personal life. My mom, who we just talked about, has like a super rare degenerative disease and she was having issues remembering central memories, things like my father dying in 2004, she couldn't remember. And I would see as we would lose more and more of her consciousness, how that would affect how she connected with other people. And the last factor that really got me researching was I went on air one night when I was on the radio and I was running a competition for a superhero movie. And I asked people to voice note into the radio station, if you could have any superpower in the world, what would it be and why? And this Gen Z girl I'll never forget, her name was Mei Xuan. She voice noted in and she said, I know it's not a fancy superpower or anything, but I feel like everyone's really cold to each other in this day and age. And I'd really love to be able to connect with people one on one. And that really struck me. I. I'm. I've done psychometric testing. I'm a very good one on one connector. I'm not so good in big groups, but I do make friends really easily. And I do connect on one with people really well. And so I was really puzzled as to why this was an issue. And that's when I started researching the loneliness crisis and the issues with human connection and polarization leading to lack of social cohesion, which I know we're going to talk about in a second. And I did that every single day for two and a half years on the side of my last two and a half years in radio at a four year contract. And so I would go on air in the evening from six and I would go to bed at midnight and then I would get up at nine and I would study almost an eight hour day, a seven hour day, the business of speaking as well as the topic. And then I was ready to go out and do all of this. And then the pandemic happened and so I was forced to just continue studying. But now I had more time because I wasn't on air. So it wasn't just studying, it was putting out and synthesizing what I was studying online. And then when the pandemic ended, I also wrote a book during, during the pandemic about the topic. And then when the pandemic ended, I was able to travel the world and, and speak into the message and got asked to be on the board and speak at Harvard. And all these crazy things happened as a result of that. But it really all began with seeing something changing in the culture, that gap, seeing it break my heart in my personal life, seeing it affect organizations. And so every way I looked at it, this issue was kind of hitting me in the face. And of course it's had many iterations post pandemic it had this iteration of like, how do we connect when our social muscles have atrophied. Now we're looking at AI and human connection and polarization. And a polarization. Human connection is a big one that I don't necessarily speak to organizations about, but I certainly talk about on social media. Yeah, yeah, no, it's been amazing watching your journey from through, through that whole process and watching it mature as well and your messaging mature. But you've also faced your own crisis of loneliness. So do you want. And I heard you talking about that on a British TV show just recently, one of the morning shows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which was really awesome. But so can you explain that and sort of what, you know, what you experience? Because I think it's, I think that's an important message for people to know. You're not just talking about something, you've experienced it yourself. Yeah, So I guess the first thing that I've just told you then is really about human connection, which I think is the inverse of loneliness. My loneliness experience, and I write about it extensively in my book, is when mum first became paralyzed. I left the uae, I was working on air in Dubai to go and care for my mum. It's very, you know, for me as an immigrant kid it was really drummed into us that, you know, family is your, your tribe, your. And my mother particularly conditioned us to believe that, you know, you must give up everything. Your filial piety is, you know, part of you. And so I was flying high in Dubai, gave up that job, unquestioningly went back to Australia to care for my mum and was just not prepared for the isolation of being a carer. I think if you're a very social person, you're very creative person, loneliness is an absolute killer. It will take all your creative juice, it will take your confidence. And so I cared for my mum for one and a half years and then we got her into a facility. I still perceive myself as her emotional caregiver for sure, even though now she's not cognitive really so she doesn't speak anymore, things like that. But that was, that was absolutely a terrifying experience, like emotionally terrifying because in that sort of vacuum of loneliness where you've left all your friends, when you're an expat overseas, you don't really have community anymore. The community you did have moved on with their lives, they never thought that you'd ever come back. And so I found myself dealing with these kind of very middle aged issues. But I was 29, my parents had us very late and as a result of them having us very late, I was going through things on my own that only I would think my friends now ask me about their parents. Parents are only now dealing with illness, paralysis, cleaning up their parents home, which I had to do on my own and I couldn't talk to people about it then. I just didn't. People were getting engaged and getting married. You know, someone's announcing their engagement to you, how do you say to them, I'm really happy for you but actually I'm in fight or flight. All I can think about is my mum's condition and the grief of mourning a life. And I don't think I realized it was grief at the time, but mourning a really beautiful life that I had built in the Middle East. So all of those factors, the grief, the upheaval, the caring situation for mum all culminated in a kind of deep loneliness that I. Not even when my dad died did I experience something like that. You know, it was very, very confronting. And, you know, I didn't have a partner or. Yeah, I mean, most of my friends, even losing their parents now they have a partner or they have children, they have some sort of close person that they can, you know, they can give that monologue to. Of all the terrifying things that you're seeing, and I really didn't have people that I could discuss those things with. But I bet you it's made you a hell of a lot stronger than you were before, right? I don't think I need to be any stronger. I think it's. I think it gave me. I. I think I was a badass before. I think it gave me depth. You know, you can be strong and shallow, but if you can be strong and have depth, you're basically unstoppable because you look at the world from like a, you know, higher. My. My basic view of the world, of. Of all of this is like, it matters, but it doesn't matter. So, you know, you. You publish a book, you become a speaker. All of this stuff because of the death that I've seen and the, you know, the amount of time I've spent in a nursing home watching people pass away and also watching my dad die in front of me. For me, it all matters, but it doesn't matter. Like, I live in the world and I do my stuff, but at the end of the day, on my last breath, I really know what I'll care about, and that's human connection. I'm not really going to care about all these material, worldly things. So I really, really love that it gave me that gift. Although at the time it didn't seem like a gift I wanted, but now it's a great gift. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. I like that. I like that you can be strong and shallow or strong and have depth. I think that's a really nice distinction. All right, so according to the World Health Organization, one in six people are lonely. And they say that strong social connections not only improve overall health, but also mean that we live longer. And we know that for women, connection is even more important. So it's a critical issue. So when you. You're now, I mean, you started in Singapore doing your research, and obviously you have the Asian perspective as well as the Caucasian perspective. So you don't just come at it from one angle, but when you sort of travel the world, what are you seeing governments doing globally, but also what are the highlights, the bright spots that you're seeing. So in Japan, Korea and England there's a minister for loneliness, but as Richard could tell you, who's actually based in the uk, it doesn't actually move the needle that much. So these ministers for loneliness and people placed in roles to combat loneliness, their office only has use if they have funding to execute things. Otherwise it's just like a placeholder. Do you know what I mean? And so, yeah, so we're seeing that with governments. We're also seeing, I think, connection and loneliness in the year 2025. Because, you know, I sit on the board for the foundation for social connection in D.C. they're responsible for a lot of the white papers, a lot of the research, and our scientific chair, she is behind the U.S. you know, the U.S. surgeon General Port all of this stuff. And what we're really seeing is our first issue was in America was disseminating information about how loneliness is affecting people. Five years on, everyone knows that. So now what is our next plan of attack? And it's difficult. If loneliness connection is perceived as a leftist topic in the world that is leaning now more right. How do we get the funding to be able to do things in the world? And that is something that I will spend a lot of time thinking over our Christmas break when my mind can have a break from like being in and doing. I can't wait to, to have time to think about some of those high level, high level things that need to be done for next year. Yeah, right. So you are definitely seeing that political impact. So, but what about a place like Singapore? Because I was talking to a psychologist recently and they were telling me what the Singapore government's doing, the investments it's making. It seems to be really committed. So obviously I just realized my cat's here, so it's probably going to start squawking soon. Social cohesion is a massive, massive priority in a country like Singapore. So how do, how does, when you look at what you're researching and the concept of loneliness within the, within the bigger story of social media social cohesion, you know, how, you know, how do we tackle that? Okay, so looking at Singapore specifically, we need better social cohesion because we have a plunging birth rate and we've seen what's happened in Japan and Korea. I love that. Lawrence Wong recently posted about loneliness on his Instagram. So it's become a much more mainstream topic here. But you know, we're also an incredibly digitally fast and smart city, probably one of the best in the world. And with that technology also comes more introversion. People I mean, Singaporeans generally, we are more, you know, we are more introverted compared to say Australia or even the Middle east where I, where I grew up. We're a collectivist culture. And this is what's also really fascinating research. Recent research suggests that people in collective activist cultures experience higher levels of loneliness than those in individualistic cultures like Australia or Switzerland where I lived. So this comes down to the fact that loneliness is actually about quality. So you can be surrounded by your aunties, uncles and your family. And certainly this has been my experience that I talk about in the book. And they can actually make you feel more lonely because their connection is not the connection you crave. Loneliness is the gap between the kind and amount of connection you yearn for and the kind and amount of connection you're currently having. So just because you live in a three generational household with grandma, mum and dad, uncle, auntie, whatever, and you are surrounded by people, your collectivist nature makes you feel obligated to them and less likely to express your loneliness versus an individualistic cultures where there's a high level cultural reward to express those feelings of I feel lonely, you know, I don't get along with my family, I'm not getting my connections met by my husband, all of these things. There's a high level of acceptance for that. And as someone who's lived all over the world, I can really, I can really see that sometimes in the behavior of all my friends from different communities. Oh, that's fascinating. So Joe, Joe or David, as our, our fellow Asians on, on the call, any thoughts on what, what Simone's just said? I think sometimes what happens is you're, you're, you're in this situation where there's an expectation of you around you. You have all the, the way things are right. And certain things you don't get into, you don't talk about. So in that way I can relate very much to that, that loneliness you can have, you can have all the activity around you, but you know that that person who can share that particular thought or depth about something, especially if it connects in some way to the family, the whole connect, the whole connectedness of the family makes it extremely difficult to say anything about anything because if, because you know, a comment about, I mean like if you have any kind of issues with relationship, I think if you bring it up in that kind of close environment, it actually is a harder thing to talk about. So, you know, it's, it's quite, it's quite, I mean, it's, it's counterintuitive when you think about it. Yeah, they're a group of friends. How can you be lonely? But I think it's, it's that sort of thing. It happens to me, actually. I, I felt similarly when I was in other places in the world as well, where they were large groups of social, social groups, and I didn't really belong or didn't really bond with anyone in there. So I would be in these active groups and I would feel lonely as well. Jo the other thing is this. There's also something called intellectual loneliness. You know, I've known Joe for years. He's a very, very intelligent man. And when you are wired differently from your peers or people around, you can experience, it's an actual thing, intellectual loneliness. And I think I experienced that for years in the entertainment industry because I kind of looked like everyone else. But my days, I wasn't spending my days thinking about the same things. And so, you know, I had to do this masking where I had to talk about frivolous things that I just, I knew was part of survival, but I didn't care about. And that feeling of being unsafe, seen and not understood, that contributes to loneliness. And I think every human being on the planet will experience that at least once before they check out of humanity and, and go to the next big beyond. I think we've all felt unseen and unheard at one time in our life, or a pang of, I don't quite belong. These people aren't really my tribe. And unfortunately for some of us, that can happen in, in their own. In your own family. Yeah. I want to say, I think, I think on the other side of it, what, you know, the, the flip side of kind of whether you're in a group and whatever it is, and it's. And the loneliness and expression of loneliness is the validation of loneliness most of the time, actually, especially in kind of like a, A group where you're supposed to be working together for something is invalidated as a betrayal of, you know, being in a group in that sense. So your emotions are never validated, and so you can never really express it. And that actually makes it worse. So, you know, just to be able to be in the group. And so I feel really lonely. And the people say, well, actually, why, why do you do that? You've got to be together and, and that sort of stuff, or to say, no, it'll be all right, don't worry about it. Kind of thing is our tendency to just reach for something which we think may be a solution or. A way. Of comforting in that sense, out of our sense of it, but without validating the actual sense itself first. And so what happens is you actually amplify that feeling of loneliness in the person because essentially you've not heard them. Yeah, I. I just. I just think when you, when you, when you think about the. The work we do trying to raise awareness around the biggest issues in the world, there's a lot of loneliness in that because a lot of people don't want to talk about it. Censorship is. People ask questions, hey, Andrea, what do you think about this? And I'm like, do you want me to tell you the truth or do you want me to pretend? You know, that's basically what I say now? Because when I tell them the truth, then they tell me to stop because I don't want to actually want to hear it. And that. That does make you feel pretty lonely because you've got. That's why I love this show. I get to talk, you know, about all this stuff that I care about. Right. You know, without anyone trying to censor me on. You know, we get trolls and stuff. But can we move it on to the demographic sort of shift? Because where we've obviously got a massive aging population, especially in most of the Western nations, but we've also got low birth rates. So is that part of this story as well? So you cut out for a tiny moment there, Andrew. Could I get the question again? Yeah. So we've got, you know, there's a big demographic shift, so we've got an aging population, massive boomer population, especially in Western nations, but we've also got aging populations in places like Korea and Japan and China. But also we've got low birth rates. So how's that impacting the sort of the loneliness, social cohesion sort of story? Is that. Is that part of it? I think what the data tells us is that in every demographic, loneliness is becoming more profound. But what I guess is interesting to researchers is the spike in younger generations feeling more lonely than, say, an older millennial or a Gen X. And there is some haphazard, I guess we can't definitively say. We could, on an incidental level, say, yes, it's to do with social media, xyz, but the World Health Organization, in their report that just came out earlier this year, does not outright say that. It says we need more data to find out why. But if you were to ask me for my own opinion as a thought leader on the topic, I do a bit of an experiment when I travel. You know, I'm on planes 40% of the year I'll go into your Tesco in the uk, I'll go into a Mango in Dubai and I will ask a Gen Z working in service for an item and I'll look for things like eye contact, spatial awareness, warmth, competence when they serve me. And it is a very different way of being in the world than the generations that we've seen before. And I would, I put it down to the being raised on devices, but I just want to emphasize that that's not officially in the World Health Organization report. That's just what I see. For example, I can ask for an item and I know the item, the blouse is behind the girl's head in the store and instead of just turning to look around the store, she'll go straight to the phone on a lanyard and she'll put the ask me to describe the item. I've just verbally described the item for you. You could have this look around but it, the phone is the default versus the physical environment. This is not me bashing Gen Z at all. I just find it fascinating because it's very different to what my response as a 41 year old would be to that question. The way, the way that solve that problem is different. So what that tells me is that there is a bigger level of comfort with the digital world than maybe the person connection to the in person environment. And the connection to the impersonal environment is really, really important because there is a lot of social cues that we don't get online and that are part of our biology that we evolved with that help us to make friends. And if we lose those, making friends, you know, is going to get more or more difficult. So that, those are my, my musings. Oh, it's so interesting. So what about the sort of, the sort of the older generation? Like if you think of any generation that you're most concerned about, would it be the Alphas and the Z's or what about the boomers? Because they're sort of, you know, sort of not. I mean the young. We've got a boomer here, the, a young boomer here. That's David by the way. But you know, like, you know, David's mom's in a, in, in a nursing home as well. Right. So we look at the migration sort. Of R, but on home. Okay. Oh, that's great. Amazing. Yes. A CARO comes along and we visit. Right, okay. But yeah, so is there any generation that sort of stands out? The, the percentage split between loneliness experienced, self reported loneliness experienced by people in my Mum's generation and Gen Z, I think it's only like one or two percentage points different. So they are. Yeah, they are not a huge amount more lonely than the younger generation. Gen X and millennials are feel that they're getting their connection needs more satiated than those two generations. I think it's interesting what you're describing. I was talking to, to a young man a couple days ago using sort of car design, automotive design and he was talking about how the car today basically cocoons you completely and the technology and everything else. And I think this leads somewhat to what you're describing. Everything about the technology is effectively make us less dependent on our human skills. Absolutely. So the idea of a good technology you bring out the best in technology is the technology actually takes away our need to have that human connection whether it's to the physical environment or to each other. I, I have an interesting, I have an interesting exercise I do now when I go to the supermarket if I'm in the mood, sometimes I'm not and if it's just a too busy supermarket but if there's one person behind the, the cash counter and, and everything else is the checkout machines, I go to, I go to her and my goal is to make her smile before I leave. Yeah. And I, I hope she feels happier for the rest of the day. But I certainly feel happier for the rest of the day because I've created a little bit of a bond. So I, I actively seek to do that whenever. Yeah, they're called micro connections. But I just want to zone in on what David was saying about technology. Look, here's a really simple example from the Asian context. Within APAC organizations, the younger generation now default to using ChatGPT to answer their questions. Now we already know in as Asian people, particularly Singaporean work environment, like there's a vulnerability in asking a question or saying that you have a problem and you can't achieve something. You don't want people to know that you have that vulnerability so you show face. But before you were forced to ask a colleague for help at the last resort you might be like, okay, I need to ask, I don't know what I'm doing now. With chat GPT you don't even have to ask the colleague, you just ask that. So that connection, that is a fantastic moment to bond. We bond over vulnerability really well and that could have started a connection within the office. Connection with the office improving, you know, engagement, collaboration, retention, that bond dissolves. We now no longer because of chat, we don't no longer now need to ask for help so we can become more individualistic, actually more self revolved. And I think we're going to see more and more and more of that. Oh, that's. That's not a. That's not a good thought. Yeah, well, it's happening. I mean, it's happening. The technology is there. It's very easy. Yeah, I fight against it. So I call my speaker agent, Priscilla, sometimes. There's things I could go to chat GBT for, but I'm like, no, no, I want to call Priscilla. I want to have the phone call. Yeah, yeah, yeah, David. I was going to say, I think that's, that's the point. And, you know, in our conversation with this Martin, this young man, you know, we came to appreciate that the difference between the defining the best in technology as doing the best that technology can and defining the best in technology as bringing the best in human. And we don't define the best in technology as bringing the best in human. And there's a robot restaurant, you know, kind of back to the days when Richard and I were writing about the unsustainable truth. And we talked about the Alzheimer restaurant, basically the restaurant that forgets your orders, basically where all the people you're serving have that. But there was also a robot restaurant where the restaurant you go in, then you're served by robots. But the other end of the robot is a person who is unable to leave the house. So you have actually. So the robot actually facilitated real human connection. And there's a screen on the robot and there's a human connection along with it in that way. So the design of it was literally to make that human connection with someone who is physically unable to be in an environment where he or she can have that human connection. And technology is not seen at all like that anymore, is seen as, how can we advance technology so that it can be superhuman? Of course, the problem, you know, we. We now have a technology world and we have a human world and they're, you know, kind of segmented away. And what happens is humans is used as the feedstock to the technology to improve the technology. Yeah, yeah, okay. I totally agree. I just like, it was, you know, the invention of the washing machine was supposed to liberate the housewife, right? And it didn't. It just created more work, ultimately by inventing new machines. And then you look in countries like India where the women used to gather on the river to wash their clothes together. They became more isolated when the washing machines came in and there was more pollution because they had to buy these little tiny sachets of washing powder because they couldn't afford the big tubs that the Western world had. So it was just compounding, you know. But ultimately it made life worse for the women, not better. So technology, yeah, it. The human side and the human connection, if you're taking that out, it's not a positive thing. So, samurai, I wanted to ask you about the differences between men and women when it comes to loneliness. You cut out again, Andrea. We've had a big storm coming through Singapore, so it might be missing with everybody's wi fi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The differences between men and women. Yeah, absolutely. So connection for women is often described as narrow and deep, if you look at the map of female connections. And for men, it's more shallow and wide. So they'll have a lot of what a female would consider acquaintances, people that don't be vulnerable with. They'll meet. You can often ask your boyfriend or your husband, like, what's the ex wife name of your friend? Martin? And he'll be like, I have no idea. We don't talk about that. Well, you've been friends for 10 years and you go out and you have beers, like, what do you talk about? Oh, we just talk about the F1. We're watching the F1 together and we talk about F1. So the, the issue with that now with the male loneliness epidemic. Right, what? We're what. Professor Galloway is touring the world right now with his latest book, talking into how young men are becoming vulnerable to people like Andrew Tate and all of that. And this is why there's a proliferation of, like, men's group and men's conversational circling groups is so that men can have a space in which they feel safe to be vulnerable. Because vulnerability equals depth in relationships, and it is deep connection in which you can be vulnerable that staves off loneliness. Shallow connection does not stave off loneliness. So you'll see. Oprah did a great podcast recently talking about what they call, like silver divorces or something. Divorces after like 40, 60 years of. Right. And there used to be a belief that the. When a man divorces a woman, that the woman's going to be worse off and the man's going to marry his secretary and everything's going to be great for him. Right? And what they've actually found in these kind of later in life divorces, because the women manage the household interactions for so many years, they have the social book of the house, they are organizing the dinners, the couple's holidays, all of that stuff. And then in addition to that, the women are also tending to, and investing in their female friendships and there are other external friendships to the marriage, but the men don't. So for the man, the definition truly is she's my best friend. For the women is like, yeah, he's my best friend plus, and, but. Right, so when that divorce happens, he does not have that social support. He loses his best friend without further support. Which is why we have something called the widower's effect, where it's very common shortly after the passing of a wife, that a man later in life will also pass. That social connection shortens our lifespan. And the loneliness, like the loneliness inflames the, the nervous system, which leads to shortened lifespan. Doesn't go the other way around, does it? Does it? You know, not that I, I'm sure that a broken heart is literally, you know, the most common disease related to loneliness is cardiovascular disease. Right, Makes sense. So when they say people dying of a broken heart syndrome, I'm sure, I'm sure couples that have been married for 60 years and die in there, you know, the, the man dies first in the 90s. You've been with that person for 60 years. Yeah, absolutely. But the data leans more to what I was saying previously. Yeah. I think the availability of alternatives is what, what is the, the difference there, there's the abundance of those relationships you can plug into. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but also conversely, when women don't have good social networks, they suffer. Right? Yeah, everyone. If you don't have good social networks. And when we use the phrase good social networks, I'm not just meaning not having any people. I'm also saying connected with people that aren't good for you, that it's, it's bad. Both options are bad. Surrounded by people who are not true friends and then not having anyone to be surrounded by. They're both not good for our health. Huh. Interesting. All right, so social media and gaming, obviously we need to, we need to bring that into the conversation. We've seen Australia's banning social media for under 16s, which. Such an interesting conversation about it. But, you know, and obviously, you know, I had two young teenagers during the pandemic who, one of them in particular really sort of went into gaming because that was his social connection. And he still does it, not, not excessively, which is great. So, you know, what's, what's the impact of social media and gaming when it comes to social cohesion? And I suppose we probably need to distinguish male and female again here because it's we they use it differently. Right, okay, well let's look at social cohesion. Right. When social media encourages polarization, you're going to have a lessening in social cohesion. So that's the first thing that I, my response would be if we're going to look at how it's pulling people apart and creating tribes and camps, the algorithm rewards and echo chamber of telling you your own opinion is correct and validating your own opinion. That's how the algorithm works. And it's emotionally charged, emotionally driven content that then allows you within your own classroom, amongst your own peers to feel like they are from another planet. And why do they not understand and why do they not know what I know and what's wrong with them? We see that across all generations of that social media can have a propensity to do that. I am a non scroller, so I don't, I post and ghost. It's terrible. But I just know too much about the data of what it does to you. And also this thing of look, social media is fun if you're killing it. Social media is fun when you are living life that you really love and you're happy with your own life, whatever that looks like. Social media is not fun. I think I stopped scrolling when mum got sick and I had left my life in Dubai and we, you know, we barely had Instagram at this time. This is like early Instagram days 2013. And I realized what it was doing to my mental health. You know, I'm watching people get engaged in marriage and I'm literally changing my mother's diaper. It just that cognitive distance, I just couldn't handle it. But it's been the best thing because I'm more productive because I don't scroll. But I also don't, I don't get my mental health hijacked by thinking I should be living anyone else's life. And I think for young people, pre 25, where the prefrontal cortex like matures, it's exceptionally dangerous. We've been hearing about this for ages now. Interesting about the social media ban and Anthony Albanese in Australia saying, you know, I want kids to go out and read books, I want them to go play football or whatever it is. That ties in a little bit to what I was saying about going to the Tesco. What is, what he's hinting at is giving people in real life opportunity to connect. And we know we get a better level of feel good hormones from connecting in real life than what we do from online connection. We do get some. But it's not the same. And so in the field of human connection, a lot of the time this analogy is used. Digital connection is the junk food equivalent of in real life connection. It gives you all the dopamine, all the feel good, like eating that Big Mac feels great. It doesn't give you the social nutrition that wards off loneliness long term. And it also, if that becomes an ongoing thing, it robs you of the social skills. So I actually had a girl, right, on my Instagram who is a young girl in Australia. When I posted about the social media ban, she said, you know, I don't think it's the right thing that they banned our social media. All of my best interactions have been online. And she 100% meant it. She. There was no part of this that she could see how that would sound. People who had an analog childhood that you would say to me that your online connections, Trump, have experienced in real life. And I found that really very fascinating. I said to him, so sorry that, you know, people have been kinder to you on the Internet than in real life. Really. I mean, I don't know if that was what she was alluding to. It shocked me a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And I think that that will become normal. I mean, to be dystopian, but I think that'll become normal. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Look, we've, we've just the parents who are here, right? We're just the way we've raised our kids, you know, like, we don't have phones on the table. I mean, they're upside down. We talk at dinner times, you know, but then I, I'll be with other friends and everyone's just got their head in there. Yeah, the teenagers don't talk. You know, it's like, oh, no, don't, don't, don't let this happen. But it's, I would love to recommend to any parent watching this, Jonathan Height's book, the Anxious Generation, actually was on Lawrence Wong's reading list. I mean, it's terrifying, but it's, it's a real great primer for people who have young children that they're scared about what's going to happen. The AI because we. He makes the argument, and I've always made this argument too, that you can kind of track the unregulation of social media and what, how it has changed the brains of young people, or even me, I was a young person when I started using it, how it's changed our brains, our attention span, the way we connect all of these things. And we can use it as kind of a primer for what will happen with this next chat with AI, which is also unregulated. Like crazy. Yeah, yeah. And that's the next topic. Right. So we've got to move on to AI because, you know, we're seeing a lot of stories around AI is convincing people to commit suicide. There's a lot of mental health issues all over the world and they're turning to AI because there's not enough experts to help them. And you know, you mentioned an example of AI earlier where it's stopping connection in. In Singapore business. So when you think about AI, what. What. What scares you and where do you get your hope? Lightning. If someone got lightning going. Yeah. Wow, that's loud. It's not here. The. Yeah, I have. I'm quite close to the window, so I think that's what it's coming from. Apologies. Yeah. I think when I look at AI, there's a talk that I do and the research I've been doing is on AI companions. So how AI companions will warp our sense of what connection is. They're also unregulated. This is like the you know, chat GPT, but also things like replica at risk of convincing young people who are vulnerable, who are very lonely, that they should take their own life. I think let's talk something that's a little bit less like sci fi and a little bit more just really, really basic. When we have an echo chamber created by AI powered algorithms on social media that we're using, even on ChatGPT. ChatGPT program to be nice to us, speak well to us, these AI companions even more so. And then we go out and we try and have a real friction filled, disagreeing connection with a real life human. We're trying to make a friend, we're going on dates. How on earth are we going to improve birth rates when it's already hard to connect with someone? And these AI companions are gonna even. Not even companions, even the chatgpt sets the bar so high in terms of agreeableness. How will you then navigate difficult conversations with your partner? How will you then stay long term in something enough to make a baby? So my biggest concern is that we have plunging birth rates as it is. I think AI companions and robust use of large language models could actually see that worsening. Wow. Yeah. I'm not a big fan of the AI agents. Joe, you were having a smile there and you are the AI man. Do you want to jump in? No, I think about what the art is about. Right. The Art is about trying to create the human experience, and if done well, it can be really good. I mean, I think that's the whole thing. Like, if you look at what happened with VO3, the whole, the video that's come out of VO3, one of the reasons why it's quite effective in creating human behavior is it even mimic some of those quirks, those little strange moments and what have you as well. I mean, it's not, it's not 100% human, but, you know, you can see where it's going, where the trajectory is. I, My, My smile came about because I was listening to the, to the, to the trend that is happening, which is the rise in single mothers, the rise in numbers of single mothers, women who decide to go and have kids by themselves and not, not, not to require the. The male counterpart in that process. It's not, I think, what the Singapore government is very much about, but in terms of. What I'm hearing a lot more about is that sort of thing. It's no longer the story that it used to be in terms of what single motherhood's about. And women do actively find. They're not just finding themselves in the situation, they're choosing motherhood in those circumstances. What I think really is the great problem that the world is facing, maybe I'm biased and this is actually. Is the trouble that men have. You know, that standard that you talk about, that higher standard. Right. I think men are being held to this impossible standard right now because of lack of exposure, I guess. You know, if you're talking about coming compared to the AI conversations you can have, you know, a lot of men are not gonna. Not gonna meet that standard. And frankly, they're not going to have the emotional abilities to try to, to do that. I mean, we're bad as. Even when we're trying hard, we're bad. Right? It's, It's. I don't agree with that, Joe. I think it is so difficult for men. I. I had a friend of mine say to me, he's divorced one and a half years, and he went back out with his buddy, who's also divorced, and they went back out to a bar or a club, and he said what he was hearing around him, said, simone, it is just not easy to be a man. Like, he was hearing women saying things like, you know, you. He's got to be tall, he's got to have hair, he's got to make money. And that, that is just so. It's so fascinating because from my point of view, if you're a high achieving woman. It's, it's, it's very, very like on the edge of impossible. Right. I think if, if I was dumber, maybe my life would be a bit easier. But I'm very intense. I'm neurodivergent and I'm noticing everything. And of course, men are built differently. They're not noticing everything, they're, they're a bit more, you know, they're wired differently. But when he said this as a guy and hearing from the guy's point of view and of course following Scott Galloway's work, I couldn't agree more because I have female friends who are, you know, still single like me, in their 40s. And for me it's never been about hair or height or, you know, anything like that. But that is the general consensus created by dating apps is like the guy, the algorithm. The guy doesn't have hair and he doesn't like have height. He gets pushed down and none of his merits, his kindness, none of those things are showcased on that sort of platform. So I think it is incredibly tough to be a guy, a guy these days. And Joe, you know, this whole thing about like, talking about the feelings, there's this AI agent, this AI companion that's really popular in China. And the agent I talk about, one of my speeches remembers the date of the girlfriend's real world girlfriends, period. And then every month on a menstrual cycle triggers like, how are your cramps, my love? And she's working crazy hours because China's got this economic downturn, right? And so she gets home from the factory and, you know, all she wants is someone who's frictionless, not complicated, doesn't apply pressure, says good morning and good night. And apparently once a month also asks her, you know, the, you know, how are her, her menstrual cycle cramps? How can a real man like, compete with that? That, that's insane. And I can tell you as well from experience, it doesn't work as a question to ask as well. Yeah, goes in a house of women. I think for both, both genders it's hard. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. I mean, I don't think it's one way or another. Right. I think, you know, I, I mean, I, I listen to young girls as well and what they say and I think, you know, us older women need to be helping them see things in a different way. But I also think men need to step in and be role models for the next generation of men. Because, you know, Joe, you're talking about the Single motherhood. And obviously you're talking within a Singapore context because you guys are late to the game, but in Singapore you're economically penalized. Oh yeah, it's very difficult to be a single mother in Singapore from an. Economics perspective, you know, stigmatized. Yeah, yeah, no, I, I, I've met a few struggling, like just getting housing and stuff. It's very difficult. But I know that your time is short, so I wanna, there's two, two more things I want to ask you, but the, the most important one is what are your tips and strategies to help it? Because, God, this is just the beginning of a conversation. We could go in so many directions. But to help someone who's feeling that they're really stuck in their loneliness and they want to get out of it, what would you recommend? What, what are some good ways to do it? So I'm going to tell you. Firstly, the worst thing you can say to someone who's chronically lonely in your friendship circle or in your family, like just be quite already, just go out and make friends. Like that. That is, it's like saying to a stressed out person, just calm down. It's, please don't do that. The lonely brain is not wired. So for anyone who's feeling really lonely, I just want you to take like the first next step. And that first next step could just be literally thinking of where you might be able to volunteer your time or thinking of what you really love doing. Okay. Do you like painting? Do you like fine wines? Do you like, I don't know, whatever it is that you're into. And then I want you to look online at a, a group nearby that does that. And I want you to try and bring yourself to join the activity because the activity will be a buffer between your social awkwardness most of the time. Chronically lonely people have also been isolated for a long time, so the social skills atrophy, just like it all happened to us during the pandemic. Okay. And so if you go and you like to paint and you do paint and sip, the activity provides a buffer for the conversation so that you don't feel you have to be the life of the party and you don't have to jump straight in. So just try that first. The activity helps to buffer the awkwardness, but at the same time, the likelihood of you making a friend with someone who has the same interest is also really good too. And be kind to yourself. People don't know enough about loneliness. It's really frustrating. The stuff that people, the fallacies that people write to Me on social media under my content about it. Like, people just, just don't know enough. So be gentle with lonely people in your environment and be gentle with yourself if you're lonely. Yeah, I like that. So paint and sip. I like the idea we should do that one day because then you'd also relax. Right. We should do that. Andrea, I love painting. Yeah, yeah. I'm not, I'm not a painter. That's one of my, my dad's skills. All right. Yeah, I know. That's kind of the point. Right. As you look forward to 2026. 6. I know you're about to go home and spend. Or go to Switzerland, spend some time reflecting. But what's your message to everyone as they approach it? Because obviously we're in a time of chaos, so we need to be stronger than normal. But as far as having a commitment to building their human connections, what's your message to everyone? I guess it is to be. And this is just. Overall, this is not just connection advice, this is just volatility in the world advice, which I think is quite universal even to your human connections, like stay loose, stay limber, flexible and adaptable. Now is not the time to calcify over your own opinions, to calcify about connection in your life. Like, now is the time to be loose and limber because it's. We have quite. From what I'm hearing and tracking, we have quite a 20, 26 that is upon us. I'm a very positive person. Even the pandemic, I was positive. But our world is, as you know, is very volatile. So just stay loose. Yeah. Oh, that's great advice. Anyone else just. We've got four minutes before she needs to go. Anyone else got any questions? My AI companion, also known as my dog Alex, who doesn't ask you about my menstrual cycle, but does give me all the other kisses and hugs that AI companions do. Yeah, yeah. Although I, I the. The. You know the concept of, of having your menstrual cycle in data in which is owned by a company that you don't have any control over, where they can measure you. Right. And then they want to introduce things like no abortion, girls. Don't put. Just don't put the information. So the AI companion. How are you today? And then it's in there. They're infer it. Don't worry about it. They'll infer it. They will be able to infer it. You don't have to put it in. Oh, yeah. David, don't go there. I'm not Joking. I'm not joking. I mean, this is what I did, you know, my job was to analyze data and take advantage of it. Yeah, that's true. They will infer it. I know. I, I, I, I can now, if you want to, I can work out how straight away. It's not, it's not difficult. Yeah. I think the skill, I think the skill moving forward in order to avoid or at least not become too lonely, it's also to learn to dance with what the world is, what the world is. The world is a certain way. And that gap that sometimes we can introduce because we have different expectations or we have disappointments, which we emphasize, maybe then go on social media and we see someone else with a much better situation. I think that compounds as well. I think there's some people who are not that lonely who find that they are extremely lonely when they discover they're supposed to be less lonely. Much like we have a whole cohort of ADHD people now who perhaps weren't ADHD before. You know. I think you need to discover your, I mean, this sounds crazy in a way, right? I mean, part of the loneliness, you know, is this, is this an ability for other people to validate you in that sense. And every time you say something, as Simona was saying, you know, just go out, just go out. Let's, let's go out and have a party or whatever it is. And the, and, and in some, in some sense you need to be able to accept yourself to take that step also because at some point you do need to go out and actually be someone up party or whatever it is. Yeah, look, I think the invalidating comments and the dismissive comments, certainly I experienced growing up in the immigrant community. These sorts of comments drive young people to go on these companions because the companions will listen. It's the perception that they will listen without interrupting or taking action. And that's also what worries me. So I guess if we want to improve that we become better listeners and we don't do what's cultural, which is the Asian advice giving. This doesn't happen outside the home so much, but within the home, you know, aunties I remember would never listen, but just, you know, tell you what to do. I still find that very triggering. If, if I'm connecting with someone and I have an opinion, I'll say, may I, may I have permission or consent to give you advice? I really try not to do it because it can, as, as Dr. David said, it can be so dismissing. You don't know what people are carrying. So why don't we all just learn to, like, be more quiet and listen things? Also arrogant, right? I don't know. I think it's very cold growing up with, you know, Singaporean family, both sides. Andrea, I would love. I don't think it's arrogance. I think it's just. No, no. I mean, we're part of professional associations and in that case, it's arrogance. It's not cultural. Yes. Yeah. My AI companion, an incredible pleasure and I wish you all whatever faith that you celebrate, have an amazing end of year break and thank you so much for having me. And Andrew, please come to my home. January. I'm going to message you after this. Yeah, all right, darling, we'll do it. Have a great Christmas. Thank you for having me. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, let us get us back up. One of the, you know, one of the things that she was talking about, we didn't have time to bring it up, is this idea of the lack of friction that, that's going to exist in, in people's lives. You know, if they've got the companion that's always on their side, their, their, their sort of voice. The, the idea of not have. So, David, I think you've got a bit of background. No. So maybe can you just mute when you, when you're not. Yeah. I don't know. The idea of like a friction, I mean, I think that's just going to make things worse. Did you, did you pick that up? Yeah, it's. It's what. It's a path of least resistance. This is what, what's going to happen. Right. I mean, even, even in nature, there's. If there's a shorter way and there's more permeations, water is going to go that way. That's just the way things are going to work. And if you're not in the path of that, you're going to be, you know, you're not, you're not going to make it. Is it like a friction, a good thing? Actually, the skill which I, which I resisted for the longest time was to become less. To be of less friction. I still think those around you will tell you that I'm still very capable of friction. It's. When I, when I read Dale Carnegie's book a long time ago, how to. How to Win Friends and Influence People, Right. It breaks it down. It's very simple. That is actually your guidebook, how to be Less of Free. It's to be welcoming, it's to be nice to press all the right buttons and actually is the way to the great success and happiness. People will like you. Right. I mean that was the kind of thing that, that it teaches. But it's, but you also, it also, you know, it's about saying you meet, you meet somebody who, you're just like, yeah, no, you have no place in my life. Right. And, and, and you make that decision. So this AI companion, there's, there's zero. Like you don't need to go and have anything else because you've got this, this thing that. Yeah, it's because of the job, the job description. I mean I, I think what we do need is a kind of a. I won't say right now we're being educated or the system is being designed to create a workforce. And maybe what we need to do is create a system. We need to change that fundamental system. Not to create a workforce, but to create a human force to upskill and understand a few things. Like in presentation I've been talking to, I've been doing some work right now, but trying to talk about, about communication, science communication. And at the highest levels, I see the same thing coming up over and over again. There are people who understand at the highest level that it is not just about the information, it's not about the knowledge. It is about the person on the other side. It's always about the person on the other side. And if we enter the world with that kind of education where we understand that it is about trying to help other people, if that, if that could be the thing, then your mission is different. If your mission, I mean why those AIs are so good at doing is because their mission is to help you get that result. Right. I mean if there was an arguing AI, it'll do that well as well. Right? But that's the mission. So the mission that we have is to be, to have some status in the world, some significance in the world, and many times to be significant. We're learning that oh, I have to be more significant than this other person or more significant than somebody else. I might to feel or to not feel that threat against my significance. I might have to rise up and show how significant I am. So I think we're not made as, as far as a society is concerned. I think we're not designed to be a giving society. We're not other centered because of the design, the inherent design to be competitive. But that's not consistent across all cultures historically. I, I think what it is, is, you know, when, when Richard and I wrote the Unsustainable Truth, we referenced what's his name? About how it became that, you know, the status and the situation is, you know, to be, to be rich, to be wealthy, to be successful is to have an income of $100 more than your brother in law. And that, that, that became effectively the way of measure. The point of it. Richard. Yeah, I can't remember his name either. But it tells you so much about human psychology. It really captures the whole element of what defines success and status. And but the point is that that was manipulated into that. Human psychology is much richer than that. But that was the essence of how it became the force to allow the consumption to happen, to allow the, you know, the human labor commodity to become a labor commodity to prevent us from ever reaching what Maslow describes as that self actualization, the ability to be who we are. Instead we are, we become an animal of need that's unable to satisfy our actual need, which is to be ourselves. Or we just prevented from doing that. Should we, should we move on to the yearly wrap up, Joe? Yeah, I think we should. This, this could go on forever, literally. I know, I know. And I think understanding human psychology is a really important job for all of us right now. Why do we do what we do? Why do we think what we think? Why do we behave the way we behave? So definitely spend your time getting to it. No, because we've got crazy minds. We do crazy things. All right, so we're going to get on to our yearly wrap up and we're going to try and go through this as fast as we possibly can because we want to get through some of the main things. So the first thing is times person of the year which here you go, the architects of AI. And so you know, basically we went from, you know, it was sort of a fringe thing to it's everywhere. Everyone needs it, every, every company uses it and every nation needs to build with it. So you know, they in, in the article and they always write an article why we chose and they say it comes with trade offs. The amount of energy required to run these systems drains resources. And this, this is an interesting one because it's not just the energy, it's also water use and it's also the pollution that comes out of these, which we've discussed before. It says jobs are going poof. We know that misinformation proliferates. It's one thing I want everyone to start looking out for. There's a lot of very, very short videos of scenarios you have never seen before. And it might be a safari on the savannah and A lion gives, gives a, gives a cub to somebody in the back of a van. And then that line that gets eaten by hyenas. Right. There's a lot of those sort of videos going around now. We've never seen these things before, but I want to say something that really concerns me about them. They're obviously AI One of the telltales at the moment is because they're short. What I'm concerned about is it's not, it's not going to be very long before we don't even see it anymore because all of, all of the videos are like that. So what we see, you know, so. Yeah. What did you guys think of that one? Well, I'm just. First of all, I'm going to take a moment to, to, to, to mourn that this is yet another thing that Donald Trump has not been able to win the Time Person of the Year. He's won it before, hasn't he? I'm not sure. I don't think so. I think he's famously made his own cover of Time magazines. I think that he puts up. I, I don't, I don't think. Has he been named the Time Person of the Year? Who was it last year? I thought it was him. Who was it? Was it. More than I know. More than I know, I have to confess. Yeah, I thought it was him last year. But anyway, we can, we can find out quickly enough. All right, the next one, the next topic is famous deaths. So I wanted to ask you guys, which was the famous death that had an impact on you? I think for me, I would pick two names, not so familiar because it, it does make you reflect on your age. Right. So growing up in Sweden, ice hockey was a big game. It's the only game that matters. And my team was always the Philadelphia Flyers from, from early childhood. And we haven't won the Stanley cup for, for 50 years since that famous game in 75. And the goalkeeper of that series passed away this year, Bernie Parant. And it makes you reflect that, you know, he was a young man when I was a child. And the great opposition at that time, the leading team of that era, the Montreal Canadiens goalkeeper Ken Dryden, also passed away this year and he went on to become quite famous later. He was a member of parliament in, in Canada and had a second career, so to speak. But those were, you know, childhood heroes. As a small child in the Stockholm suburb growing up, and the posters were on the wall. It makes you reflect on your own mortality. Most definitely. Yeah, definitely. We've got Deborah Here. Thank you. Yes, it's definitely. It's streaming on YouTube too. Jo. I was busy looking at who was named Time Person of the Year, so. Yeah, you're right. Donald Trump was up in 24, so I missed the question. A famous death that had an impact on you. Okay, give me a moment. I'll think about it. Sorry. All right, then, David, I'll ask you this. It's a bizarre one for many people. Michelle Trattenberg, right. So she was the sister of Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV series. And. And the most amazing thing about it is how they wrote her into the. Into the series. She just appeared one day and she. She was. She was sort of this secret person that, you know, these gods were after were. Were trying. Who were trying to kind of destroy the world, as it were. And what they had to do was to hide her. So what she did was she appeared on the screen without any explanation. The explanation came a lot later as this daughter who had been staying with Buffy's dad in that way, completely unmentioned, and just appeared. And it turns out, you know, this was kind of like a magical device, completely switched the mind of everyone so that everyone thought that she was always there. And I always thought that was amazing as a. As a piece of kind of TV scripting along. It's got. It's on a. For me, it's on a par with Doctor who, where the doctor regenerates. So if you need a new actor, you allow the doctor to die and regenerate comes back as another completely different sort of person. So it completely crosses over all these problems. How do you keep a series going for like 30 years? And in this case, how do you introduce a new character? He just completely changed my mind. I just never expected the Doctor of physics to mention Buffy. You got yours. I tried to look at the list in terms of well known personalities that really made an impact. One comment that came to mind basically is I thought he had died already, but Ozzy Osbourne passed this year, so hung on for quite a bit. But for me, it was more of a. Of a personal, personal thing where my wife's cousin passed away this year quite, quite unexpectedly. He had a. Had a. A series of. Of unfortunate medical incidents that led to complications. And then he was gone just like that. And leaving behind a few unsettled things. You know, every now and then you get. You get a reminder that you have to get your affairs in order. And this was. This is one of those. Because there was so many. There's so much so Many, so many entanglements that, that came out of it. So much that was coming out of it. And still, and still today some of the repercussions are still rolling along. Right, so that was a, that was, that was, that was something that, that, that, that got me because in, in, in my sense of, of, of his age as well. I, I had figured that he was younger than myself so it felt even more threatening or it was a rude awakening. But it turned out that he was not younger than me, just in much better shape. Right, right. Well I'm sorry, I'm sorry for the loss, the family loss. Yeah. Getting your affairs in order is certainly one. All right, so I'll go through a couple of famous people that died this year. So I found the list on people.com so Pauline Collins was in Shirley Valentine and she's a big one for me because she really defines. Like I was a teenager when that movie came out. Older teenager and you know, so just the concept of marriage and being an oppressed woman within a marriage and my parents had been divorced just not long before that so that was a big one for me. Diane Keaton obviously was, was got a lot of attention. Bill Kilmer and I think that's because he's part of our generation. And then of course Gene Hackman's death was very weird. Hulk Hogan who became a bit of a rabid Trump supporter towards the end. So he was, he was one and then Ace Freely who was the founding guitarist of Kiss. So that's all of our generation. And the spaceman, wasn't he? Yeah, yeah. And then you mentioned of course Ozzy Osborne which was, which was a big deal in my house because of my boys music. And the most important one for me of course is Jane Goodall in her 90s, still traveling, died away from home. What a phenomenal woman. No one should retire. If Jane keeps going, we should all keep going. So I, I, I look at her as an inspiration that we should all take forward to, to you know, contribute to the world. So yeah, so that's, that's the famous deaths this year. So the next topic is. So when we're doing wrap ups and even though this is a current news story, I think it's, I think it's basically a sign of what's happened this year. And this was of course the release of the U. S National Defense Strategy. Who would like to begin this conversation? Wherever you, wherever you are, you're going to have a perspective based on where you are, especially if you're in the UK and Europe, you know, if you're in Canada, you've got a perspective, everyone's got one. So yeah, I'll stop. I'll start with one perspective that I've sort of been monitoring all year just to sort of set, set the scene a bit. So it's Project 2025 and a lot of the conversation that's sort of been in the periphery of the news is about this idea that there's three major centers of power in the world and it's the U.S. russia and China. And that's sort of been in the conversation, but not at the front of the news all year. So for me, when I saw this, it was like, it was like that is now in the front. So who wants to start? Oh, you go first. No, go on, Richard. No, you, you go. I, I'm not sure I agree with the statement of three powers. I actually only think it's US and China matters. Russia is perceived to have power because they have the ability to launch a few missiles, but actually they don't really hold anymore power anymore because on the margin even their oil is kind of irrelevant here. Yeah, totally agree. There are a number of people who people number of places that can become real powers if they get their act together. Europe could be, but are not. And then you have a very strong Asian bloc around Japan that potentially could become a balancing act to those two powers. But at the moment it's only the US and China that matters. And the US new defense policy is basically a new world order that has probably been creeping up on us. But with Donald Trump at the helm, it accelerated very abruptly and has taken a great deal of people with very much surprise that this is basically the statement of intent for how US is going to be running their foreign policy. I think it's interesting when we look at that to come back to Joe's comments at the beginning of kind of the introduction of how the US apparently over this year has managed to avoid all of the kind of climate situations and all the rest. You look at China, why is China moving so fast towards is renewable energy shift is because it has had several years over 21, 22, 23 of the loss of hydroelectricity that has significantly impacted how the country is able to produce from droughts. And if you look at another area of influence that Richard and I had before was Iran with this kind of global terrorism, you know, it's just started to rain for the first time in a long time in Tehran and around the area. And that has really changed the ability for it to think between Influencing others and looking after itself in that way in what it is doing there. And I think the US in terms of policy, what was interesting is the national security policy that came out, you know, at the end of November, sort of started talked about in, in kind of December along and it was very clear. It wasn't so much about Russia, it was China and US and it was a state of war between China and US. And what was quite clear about it is that the purpose of the US is to be top. It doesn't matter what size the pie is, as long as it's top, then it would have achieved it. And what was also clear in his statement of Europe was that Europe is not a friend of America. America, or put it the right way, America is not a friend of Europe. America does not see Europe as being useful to it because it's too hooked up on the good of the whole rather than America being on top of the pie. So, so that leaves that relationship with Russia and China's interested in, sorry, US is interested in Russia because Russia holds a lot rush US has influence over Saudi oil, over Middle east oil, over US oil. Venezuela is bombing to bits because Venezuela and China provides that oil along that connection and Russia provides oil to China. So it's trying to win over that Russian connection and the Chinese in the meantime. The thing about this is really interesting in that way. If you take it over the longer term, you know, you think about what happened with the oil war in the 1970s when OPEC kind of came about and squeezed it, is that it brought about its own demise. It became much less relevant as a result and consequence of America's policy in this way is it will make America less relevant and eventually it will make America so isolated. You know, people are beginning, you know, they will find friends elsewhere. Yes, that that will automatically become sort of the default path for, for everyone associated with the US which is basically all countries in the world bar of you, you know, that have opted for self isolation or are economically so irrelevant they actually don't matter for everyone else. You will need to find a new path. The the era of US playing the global police force is gone. And that was actually a system that in many ways worked quite well as long as you could trust the police to do roughly the right thing. And that doesn't work anymore A because I actually think that the US feels that they can no longer present a bill to the world for being the global police. And that was kind of the beginning of the problem when we had the first Iraq war 35 years ago now, that actually was how we operated us went in and kicked Saddam Hussein out and then they sent a bill to the Saudis for having done so. And that kind of worked in a very transactional fashion as long as you could trust the police. And then it became difficult and impossible for us to present that bill and they have opted to take a different path and no longer sees themselves as a guarantor or as the self appointed global police. And that's a very, very new roadmap in the world. It's a new phase we're going through and people need to figure out how you go forward. Yeah. And accept the fact that things are going to be messy. Yes. Oh absolutely. Yeah. The operating world will be messy. I want to just sort of highlight some of the points that I pulled out of it. So first of all, you know, it's doing, doing business between countries is now transactional. It's not. There's no loyalty. And even if like politics in the US change, I think for a lot of the countries that are being burnt by this administration, America is going to have to spend a long time regaining that trust and really showing that there's institutional change to make sure it never happens again. So. And when I mentioned Russia earlier, this isn't because I think Russia is powerful. It's, you know, there's obviously, there's obviously something there with Russia when it comes to Trump. It's, it's a white supremacy message. The whole message migration thing, which is a mass, a massive concern when we look at the future that's coming. And mass migration is going to definitely be, be happening. It's already started. But obviously migration is welcome if you look like people like me, but if you don't look like me, my sort of skin color, you're not going to be so welcome. Obviously the focus on America can do whatever the hell it wants in the Americas. So the Canadians have come out pretty strong. You know, they're a vassal state. That's the way it's been positioned. One of the things is around this, I mean this is a lot of Project 2025 stuff. The spiritual message, traditional values, culture, family. It's basically Christian, Christian nationalism. So it will be about repressing women back in the kitchen, producing babies. You know, we got it, we got to grow that more, more than ever. It will elevate the culture wars. So the anti woke stuff is part of it. And yeah, so the burden sharing versus burden shifting. So the whole NATO going back into the hands of the European as from a leadership. But yeah, just nationalism on steroids. But if you look at what we need to do as a global society to overcome the challenges we face, this is everything that's opposite to that. Yes. Yeah, I think. Sorry, Richard, go. No, isolation doesn't work when you're facing global issues. Yeah. I mean, Japan went into isolation for a long time as an example. Right. Talk about that. I think, I think going back to Simona's comment about loneliness, I think, you know, nations feel lonely as well. And that validation aspect, recognizing it, rather than try to say, you know, you must do this and do that and all the rest of it. There's. This is actually quite important because what has happened is, has elevated the sense that everything has to be, you know, when Trump talks about the deal, you know, kind of, I'm great deal maker, I make the deal. And those sort of things is we know we, we no longer have the capacity to exist in the space where we do not agree and there are differences. So what you end up with is situation where we don't dare talk about things that we don't agree on as such. And there are very few things that we can agree on. And so conversation becomes very narrow and very thin. And so the whole kind of thing is. Then you become dominated. Sorry, I'm outside, I've got the traffic going on. I think it's gone past now. So your whole conversation becomes dominated by the one who's able to shout the loudest and force his way on through the current situation, which is the U.S. so we're all talking about the U.S. policy in this way at the moment. You know, we have not talked at all about kind of things that happen in other places and situations that we can see around where people are actually connecting and reaching along. We become fearful of all the dangers without recognizing that the dangers are always with us. It's how we can talk in disagreement that really makes a difference and between countries that's becoming even more and more important. All right, Frank saying this year's seismic shift is the U.S. europe, divorce. But the other thing, I know the other thing, David, is there's like this ignoring of. There's all these other parts of the world, you know, like Asia, you know, asean, you know, but so you bringing, bringing all that together. You know, it's not, it's not just that story. There's a lot of other stories. Absolutely. That there are a great many, you know, chapters to be written in how we progress here. I think in a really medium, long term perspective, I think you have to be very Very optimistic and bullish on Asia. It's the part of the world where you still have tremendous growth partly from population growth, albeit that the major countries are not having population growth. But the region as such has technological advance has been incredibly rapid over a long period of time and you have to deal with or you have to acknowledge the cultural aspect of this is a part of the world where people wear a car, you know. Yeah. But they also don't shout loud. That's not in their mentality. But as a long, long term investor, if I was, you know, 22 and I started investing now and you're giving your little fund list from your friendly pension provider, surely I would opt over the three big continents to invest in Asia. For me that's like it happens by default just because I cannot see the European continent and the American continent compete over the medium to long term. What about Africa? No, I, I think it's a lost cause in many ways. That's why. Yeah, yeah, I, I mean I, I think the demographic thing is important. What's again, Simona pointed to. Right. You know, I, I described the population pyramid to the friend about as like, you know, one of these fancy mineral water bottles which is kind of narrowly table. The top comes bulging out and then narrows back on the bottom when it reaches the bottom, you know, your table. And that's kind of how it is. And our conversation then drifted into how that's actually going to lift off completely and become like an air balloon. So the topic gets flattened along as it lifts off because you know, you no longer stretch because longevity is going to increase, increase along but the top ones die off. So it flattens off and the bulge continues and then it completely lifts off the ground. And if you, if you take that and you think about consequence and what it does to your investing is that there are going to be parts of the world where people have to draw out from their pensions and investments to keep themselves paying for all the medical costs to keep themselves alive and everything else. And those are going to be the places where the most of the investments have gone in, into. This is kind of the European and the American industries and those sort of things and the stock market stuff. The places where you actually have people really putting money in is going to be as Richard says, over in that sort of emerging world in that way, in that Asia part. So just from the tilt and the flow of money, you're going to find this flow just from the demographics going direction that Richard's talking about. So US stocks are going to find themselves with more people selling them than Asian ones, simply from a pure demographic sort of perspective that you're going to get. I think it's worth bearing that in mind. And as for Africa, you know, Africa has some real amazing possibilities, and Trump is trying to prevent them from happening, because Africa has the youth and today's world, together with AI and everything else, the knowledge and the materials, fundamentally to transform how our economy works. And it has an energy usage at the moment that allows them to conceive of a way of living well without the same energy demand, because they don't have that at the moment. And if you go along and you talk to them, they're quite happy where they are. So there's a real potential for big transformation. Now, of course, what Trump has said in the National Security Policy is that Africa is a mineral deposit that is ours, and that's worth thinking about, because in many ways it can be. And it's a old form of colonialization that is proposing, if you look at what the environmental and social kind of context of people talking about, they are actually largely treating Africa as being the source of, you know, kind of our carbon offsets and those sort of things. And it's looking to maintaining the local population in the way that we think they ought to be living in order for the forest to keep growing and all of those things. So it's a form of kind of climate colonization in that form as well. So they're being squeezed from all sides. And when you talk to the people there, you know, they're being forced by the governments through these channels to sell their land, to become living in cities, so that the cities become like the cities in, you know, kind of the developed world in that way to build the roads that actually have no use for them fundamentally without that kind of situation. So Africa holds, in some sense, a great promise and a great hope, but the richer worlds are adamant in making sure that potential is not realized, because if that potential realized, it spells the end of their hegemony. Yeah, yeah. So we're seeing a sort of an aggressive fight against it. Right. And. And also, they're not welcoming in, in those countries because their skin color doesn't suit the migration plans for those countries. Right. Yeah. Joe, did you want to jump in? I can hear a noise out here and nobody's home. So I'm just going to make sure we're not being robbed. So I'll be back in a minute. All right. No, I just said, for me, it's, It's. I think it's a. It's a largely what was said is true about the Western world's perspective on it. I think what China sees in Africa has been quite different. So I think China's made the strategic moves to engage Africa. They have many more investments and they've helped, they've helped up a lot, much that they helped a lot more. And in terms of their, their, if you like it to be economic diplomacy, I think they've done a really good job in that respect. So China has a foothold much more than a foothold in Africa and strategically as well. I mean, some would say a little predatory as well, because they're, they're, they're, they're, they're financed and created all these facilities and amenities which some of them have defaulted some of the payments, some of, some of the returns, some of the stuff has been defaulted on and now the Chinese own it, you know, so that's, some would, some will look upon that differently as well. But I think in terms of having an influence, positive economic influence on Africa, China is ahead of everybody else in the game. And since there's all that stuff that's needed there as well, I mean, China, China's also looking for a place to find additional resources and that's probably why they have made those investments. Absolutely. I, I, I, I would, you know, I absolutely agree what you're saying. I would actually add a point more holy as kind of like humanity in that way. You know, we have an economy that we don't think works at the moment. We have all these different models about it, and they all ultimately rely on kind of the sense of development through resources, development through kind of the money which is extracted in this form. And China is the same. It feels that it can only develop in that sort of mode because it's fully bought in into this sense of what our development is. We've just had conversation about how, you know, technology is. Technology development is about the advancement of technology to be superhuman or is it actually to bring out the best in human. And no country is actually thinking of that, except perhaps Japan, but that was probably Japan four or five years ago. Japan today is again back into the same thing. So if we really want, if we really want to think forward about what it is, and while I was talking about Africa as having that potential, is that it has the potential to think about the value of a nature which we leave intact and thereby forcing us to rethink how to bring out the best in human or to think how to bring out the best in human as opposed to avoid that and think, how do we solve our problems? Those two are completely different things. And quick plug to my book. And I've only realized this in the way I've been trying to promote it. I've been trying to promote it all wrong. Because the book is not about how we fix climate change. It is about how we have a different economy and an emergent economy that is much more like nature's, where we actually give back to nature the things we've claimed to force us to think. How do we really resolve ourselves, our being, you know, kind of our purpose in that way. So I think all countries at the moment, as we go on to 2026, all the regions are all thinking about how they resolve their particular problem. They're not really thinking about how do we allow ourselves to be the best in ourselves. I was going to move us on though. You want to say something? Go ahead, go ahead. Okay, go ahead, go ahead. I know we have a lot. Let'S move on to climate because there's a lot that's been going on. There's a lot that you would have forgotten. So first of up, first of all, 2025 has been tied with 2023 as the second hottest year on record. The only year that was hotter was 2024. And that's 125 to 150, 000 year record. So it's not cooling down, it's not a blip. Inside Climate News came up with the three big stories of 2025. The first is the Trump's administration's wholesale dismantling of environmental protections in America. The second is, which was, I think Joe or David was just talking about it, China's strategy for global influence is riddled with environmental destruction. And there's a lot of, lot of stories about this even in its own country. And the final point is AI is throwing climate change under the bus. So data centers are projected to require $6.7 trillion in financing globally to meet AI's demand for compute power. So as we've said, it's not just, it's not just energy, it's also water. And I was just looking at another piece where the fossil fuel industry is actually banking on AI as a, as a major growth engine now. So those three stories, anyone want to quickly jump on and then we'll go through the extreme events? I, I, I, I'll hook up on what you just said because I think it's incredibly important. We've talked about it before, we have mentioned it many times that actually renewables have made tremendous progress in the world in terms of generating new sources of energy. And still we keep using more oil and natural gas and coal is kind of there as well. The whole and more of the incremental demand we see for fossil fuels in the world is driven by AI. End of story. If we're taking AI out of the picture, actually our consumption of fossil fuels would have been declining by now because we are building so much renewable capacity. So if you are an oil executive and you don't think climate change is a problem, absolutely, this is your opportunity. Otherwise, your product is actually on its way to becoming obsolete because you need to find new sources for energy demand. And nothing we've ever seen historically compares to the demand that AI is forcing upon. I'd like to kind of add that. I mean, Jeevan's paradox, right back in the 1800s, I think it might be in 1870 or whatever it was, was that, you know, if you become more efficient so that you don't need to use as much energy at that time it was in coal, then you will find new uses for it. So it's like, you know, you've saved some money. You've saved, you know, $20 in your pocket for this month. You're going to use it in something else. And it may be through, you know, a dollar at a time or maybe some big spend that cost you $30 and leaves you in debt, but because you have that capacity, you're going to use it. And, and I think we. Yes, AI is an issue for all sorts of reasons, not, not just in terms of the loneliness that we create and what Chat GBT would do and so on, but we shouldn't just think that it is AI, and if we were somehow to stop AI, then there won't be something else that will come along. David, that. That argument is different in this context because there isn't enough energy available to drive AI based on its growth. So that's. It's actually. It's actually a different argument. I. I know what you mean by even if. No, I, I think. I think that's. There are different stages of the same argument in that sense, because we don't have to give that energy to AI, but we do. And that's the point. That's the essence about Givens Paradox. That's the essence about why do we wrap trees now with the old bulbs completely so that the tree doesn't look like a tree anymore? You know, a tree is darkness at night, but it's anything but that. And even during the day, they're lit in, in that way and we, we don't have to give the energy to that, but we do. Yeah. And if we have got the spare capacity for it, if we save some money by being more energy efficient, we're going to look to our wallet and we say oh, got that little bit of extra, so we're going to use that. So something will come along in that way and absolutely. AI is a more immediate thing in, in sense that it's already there. But pretty much across the world when you look at all the countries and the government, they are adamant, they must, they must have their own AI. Yeah. I mean, you know it's going to do exactly the same thing. Yeah. And, and that's where a lot of that growth in energy actually comes from is not the one AI. It's the fact that every country feels they must have their own. Yeah. Just, just the energy expectations of AI are just off the charts, you know. They are. Yeah. Okay, so I want to go through the extreme climate event. So I think that the, the, the bigger climate event that kicked the year off is obviously the, the fires in la and it's one of those things where you really notice we hear about the story but we don't hear about the story after the fact because they've, you know, who cares? It's, there's a new story coming up. Exactly right. But it was about a month ago I think in Time magazine went and did a, did a follow up story and, and you know it's, it's still a pretty crazy situation out there. Also in the early part of the year we had a drought which increase food insecurity in countries like Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mal, Malawi, Mozambique and Angola. And you know this is millions facing hunger. And then in West Africa there was also a drought. No, sorry. West Asia, Iran, Iraq and you know, the Euphrates Tiger Basin. So David was just saying it's finally right raining in Iran. So basically if it didn't rain by December they were going to have to move everybody out. We've had a lot of floods in Mexico this year. So in March, Mexico and the border region got pummeled. In East Africa we've had floods and landslides between May and March and that hit Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and across the rest of that region we've had a lot of glacial, glacial lake outburst, outburst floods which are called gloss if you haven't heard. So and this happened across Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan, India we had very bad monsoonal floods in early June and that was in Manipur, Assam, Meghala and Sikkim, sorry if I'm saying I'm wrong. We had a heat dome in the US in June in the north and Mideast and those things are only the heat for the last couple of years in Asia hasn't been as intense, but I'm sure it's coming back. Pakistan saw more floods in late June. We saw the Texas floods in early July when a whole bunch of those little girls at a school camp were, were washed away and killed. There was another glacial flood on the Nepal China border which took out the, the Friendship Bridge. What else in India? Pakistan. East eastern India and northern eastern Pakistan and northern India. In August to September we saw the devastating impact of those floods going through a big food growing region. People lost their homes, lives were lost. It was, it was very bad. Another extreme Mexico rainfall event in October, that Alaska event and the Pacific Northwest which wasn't predicted to land where it did, which was interesting because it was tied to the, the cuts by the Doge cuts because they're not putting those balloons up. So they actually weren't able to track. Hurricane Melissa obviously struck Jamaica and eastern Cuba and some other countries in the region. And the impact of that will be years in the making as long as another one doesn't came come through. South America. Seen extreme rainfall and some things like tornadoes. We saw massive floods in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand where you know, the, what was, what was the city in, in Thailand? Hat Yai I think it was, should never have been able to even have been flooded that way then. Then there was Cyclone Ditwa which obviously hit Sri Lanka. And I was reading 20% of the land in Sri Lanka has been flooded. 20% of the land. The only country that I've heard was bigger was Pakistan in 23, 40% of the land got, was flooded. And then we had the other event which obviously hit Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia and Vietnam which was this weird cyclone that formed in the, in the Gulf of Malacca. And we've all seen over a thousand people have died in, in just, just in Indonesia alone. They're talking about this very, very, very rare ape that they think it could have been. It's, it's on the verge of extinction. But they haven't been able to find these apes since us. Obviously lots of tornado, tornado outbreaks across the region and, and that that land that gets impacted by those tornadoes has grown. And of course the Philippines had a terrible year. More storms than is typical, finishing with a super typhoon. But I have heard that another big weather event is on the way and obviously it wipes out the agriculture, it wipes out homes. You know, it's massive destruction, loss of life. And you know, the Philippines is a country right at the front of climate impact. So these are the big events that we've heard about. What's happening now in those countries as they recover, we won't hear so much about. So was there any other big event that you've noticed or when you look through the list of the events, did you go, oh, I forgot about that one. It's actually, it's actually interesting that even the more prominent ones have gone by and have faded into memory. Like you know, when we, when we, even though we're doing so many stories about the U.S. i don't think about the fires there. And like in previous years when we've had fires in Australia, they haven't come to mind as well for me. And it's not a case of I don't care or whatever, but it's just the way our attention keeps, keeps being drawn away to other things. Right. I mean the fires in Australia, that was, that was terrible when you just saw that, the mass devastation and, and it's again a memory that's far away now. People don't think of it automatically when they think about maybe even going to Australia or even when they think about the fact that they come from Australia. Just the same way as those fires and floods in the US as well have, I think have faded into that self preserving amnesia that we have as a human race. It allows us to move forward. Didn't think they're going to be better days yet. So it's just, it's just an observation of how we are. I think we, I think optimism is built into us. We, we, Optimism is a feature rather than a bug, I think and it, it allows us to forget some of these things and not, and not think too much about that. I, I, of all the people to get wisdom from, I, I actually, I shouldn't, I shouldn't qualify it. I think he's showing himself to be a very wise person. Jimmy Carr, the comedian and he was talking about this thing about anxiety and I can't recall what the counter to that was, but I think it may have been regret. But the thought which I thought was very interesting was this thing about living in regret versus living in anxiety. It's just a matter of in the past and in the future and if we just focus on the middle or now, it, it makes a difference. Not not wanting to be glib about all the things that have happened in the Past. But I, I think that's something we can, we can try to work on, we can try to plan in terms of trying to create the best now possible. Yeah, yeah, I, I agree. I mean can't, we, can't, we can't all sit in constant fear about the future. We're all here, you know, we're still here. But you know, but one of the funniest one, one of the really funny stories I heard was people, people think because of Donald Trump being in power that God has intervened and that's why no cyclones or hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. but anyway, it was no, it was physics. There were still 13 named storms, five hurricane, hurricane, four major hurricanes, Erin, Humberto and Melissa all reached code degree five and it was basically large scale steering patterns in the, in the, in, in the atmosphere that basically pushed, pushed them all away. And sometimes the bigger storms drew in the smaller storms and that's also what took them away. But yeah, so David, I was going. To say, you know, to Joe's point, I think that's the, that's the thing about Dinau and bargaining, right? So denial is the past and the bargaining is the future and we like doing those. And with regards to the climate side, well, what I see a lot, what I've heard from, you know, in conversation to get directly with people and so on is more of this lean towards nature based solutions because you can invest in them and lots of money going into them and they carry very much the story that as long as you invest in enough nature based solutions, you can carry on using the fossil fuels. I think there's quite a lean towards us to say poor people in Africa needs the energy, they need the fuse to build the roads in the cities and people in India and places need the air conditioning and you have to have the fossil fuels. So if you can, if you can do enough nature based solution, then it will be okay, you can capture it all back and then you don't have a problem. I always question whether all these storms and things, when you do all these massive landslides and all the stuff of it, whether, and the droughts and floods and stuff, whether that actually works in that way. And I think there is a certain hubris as in I'm going to try and recover a peatland and I'm going to store the water necessary for it so that I can outlast the drought. In the meantime, I'm not allowing the water to be used by the village down the road and they can die. Are you saying that or so. Well, that's what's happening, right? Yeah. So the imbalance or the tendency to let survival or just the idea that we have to survive, we have to move forward be the reason or motive for things. I mean. Yeah, that's frequently the problem where we are self preserving and that's part of the issue. We. When it comes, when it comes to, in, in the, in the precise moment, in the, in the very moment where you decide to do something, you will usually choose yourself. And that's what happens. When it comes to a big scale issue as well. It's very hard to, it's very hard, it's very hard not to choose yourself. Yet at the same time, if, I think what's interesting is that if the, if you can, if you can, if you build community and you spread this, this, this community to extend to a further, further down. Like for instance in that situation where the, where the village down the road is also part of the community, then you begin to think in terms of, of survival. Survival, including them, because they're you, they're not somebody else. Interesting. All right, so should we, I was just going to say, should we move on to the global economy? David's had to go. Oh, not David. So I'll just. Richard's had to go because he, he lost a filling in his tooth. So he's got an urgent appointment at the doctor. So I'm going to hand it over to you, David. What do you see in 2026 when it comes to the global economy? When's the collapse coming? Oh, well, predicting collapse is always a difficult thing, I think. But I, I mean I, I think there's so much, the mentality is so strong in trying to support whatever is unsupportable at the moment is going to keep on going in, in that way. And as I was saying, you know, the. I, I do think, as I described before, you know, climate change is like carrying a bag of stones on your back all the time and it wears you down along. I think people don't quite feel that at the moment. We've just read out a whole list of things that have been happening with the climate. From the economy side, nobody pays attention. And from the investment side, what people are doing is they're investing in the AI on one side and the other side they're investing in the nature based solution that's talking and believing that somehow that would be all right so we can use more and more and accelerate that kind of, you know, creation of pollutants because we are accelerating the capture of the pollutants. You know, I think what's the question instead is a different one. It's not what happens to the economy. It is about how you want to invest in your own presence. And you can't have a presence without an audience. So you need to connect with other people in order to really be able to have that kind of economic presence in that way. So where you want to put your money is back to this thing I've been saying about you put it in a way so that you can build an income for yourself that doesn't depend on you having the job and doesn't matter how small that income is. You're not trying to replace it in any way, but you're trying to build up that connection with other people around you. Because if the economy collapses, that's what you need. What about the bank of England news this week? It's really interesting because it has two. It has, you know, it has the effect it wants and the effect it doesn't want. So what the bank of England said is that you now need to. To basically put capital aside in order for the potential hit you may take from your climate. And this for insurers, and this is for kind of banks and people like that. So where you're going to end up doing is you're going to end up doing two things. One is you're going to say, I need the capital, so I'm going to take the capital from something else, investing in something else, in order to do this, which is what his intention is. So you obviously would. The intention would obviously be to say you take it away from the things which are really bad for the climate, invest in this way. The other way of doing this is actually I'm going to invest in the places which don't have this accounting need in that way. And this is where the double materiality part is really important. The double materiality is the idea that I am materially impacted by something happening and it's doubled because I also cause what's happening. So that's the double materiality. And this regulation explicitly says we do not consider double materiality. So if you invest in AI, you have very little climate cost, you have very little capital you need to put in. And if you invest in other things, you have to actually show up more capital set against it. So the consequence is you're going to invest in the AI because you get the good returns, everyone else is investing in it and you don't have to put capital against it as climate capital. Now that's the unintended consequence of the kind of regulations that you have that explicitly ignores the aspect of double materiality. The potentially interesting thing about it is it actually raises the aspect of insurance in our lives, how much we depend on it. Insurers have the choice of facing this in the spirit of what is intended. So if I am a provider of life insurance, it's going to say you have to account for the additional cost due to the, the fact that people's lives are going to be affected and you're going to get more claims and those sort of things. That's good to protect those insured, but it will make the insurance less affordable. Because when a company adds more capital, you know, set more capital aside in order to kind of have sufficient to support the business, they are going to want the same return, so they're going to put your premium up against it for the same amount of claims. And it's basically an impossible situation of how our economy is not structured to face the challenges we're facing. Yeah, it just sounds all logical to me. Sorry, just all sounds illogical to me. Well, the unintended consequences are always logical, right? Because if they were logical, you wouldn't have thought about it. You would have thought about it and you wouldn't have done that. You know, there are unintended consequences that comes because you haven't thought about it. And there are unintended consequences that are illogical with how people respond in, in. A sense, I suppose I have thought about it and I'm wondering why the greatest economic minds in the UK are making decisions like this based on the evidence. Because like a lot of things in, in, in economics and, and finance, right. It's about the time frame. I think people have different time frames and because of different time frames, they have different objectives, different, different ways in which things look successful. And there's also this thing about when you, when you are. I've been, I've been watching a lot of content about farming recently as well. And, and, and, and the, the economy is to, to quite an extent also about farming. You're farming for a certain kind of result and then there is the, there is the, the weather that comes along, which can come in terms of economic forces and, and international geopolitics and stuff like that. There's also how the individual elements in the farming, how they react, right? You can plant the right seed, you can put them in the right kind of soil and just the wrong kind of thing comes along and it can interfere completely with that going through. So some of the stuff that is There in terms of economic setting, I. I do believe that they're trying to move forward and achieve those greater goals. I know that it's on the back of someone's mind. Much as I'm approaching this weekend, I have my health goals, and yet I know I'm going for a buffet tomorrow. I know I'm going to be doing things that are in contradiction to each other. I'm going to try to maximize my return on the buffet, and then after that, I'm going to try and maybe make some compensation along the way as well. But we have a tendency to have our attention sort of distracted by that as well. And the nature of politics, which is much more than economics, is that I'm usually not going to make the most prudent economic choice. What I'm going to do is sell the best political choice. That's definitely that. There's the other element, which Richard isn't here, but what he would say quite clearly is that, you know, the mandate of the bank of England is completely wrong, because the mandate of the bank of England coming to this is about the stability of the financial system in that way. So its point is that it cannot go down when you do things so that it cannot go down. You can create perverse incentives. And there's a comment I read about the Singaporean kind of monetary authority in the question of Bitcoin back a few years back in a kind of day, about whether it should try and, you know, regulate it to make sure it's okay and so on. People lose their. Won't lose their shirt on it. Then the comment was, you know, if you want to bet on something, you should be allowed to lose your shirt on it because that's the only way in which you won't lose your shirt on it. Yeah. And that's the issue with a lot of these regulations. And that's the issue with thinking about how can governments need to fix everything so that we don't have to feel, you know, kind of, we'll lose the shirt on this. And that foreign. It's almost like that going on to that resistance conversation we were having, that young people or most people are not experiencing resistance anymore because AI is telling us how wonderful we are. All right, Joe, I want to move on to AI. It's been quite the year. It's not a new technology. It's obviously been around for a while, but I noticed there's a bit of a soft sell going on. Sam Altman's been on the chat shows talking about how his kids have used AI in a positive way. So but you know, job losses, no sign of universal basic income coming in to sort of take care of people while those job losses are happening. There's a resonant computing manifesto that I just saw released an article in why it said it's time to save Silicon Valley from itself. And the byline Times I started the weekend reads last week with this article was basically talking about the tech bros and what, what they're up to. But anyway Joe, what do you reckon? I, I, I think the, the reckoning has been in slow motion and coming your way. Think of it, think of it as a, as a tidal wave that you can see coming from far away. AI is having its impact already in the jobs market for the younger people, right. I mean I've been hearing many stories from people who are very well qualified, very talented and they hustle. So they put out as many as a thousand applications out to companies without even getting an interview. Right. And a lot of this, and this is the part that will get revealed as more data comes out about this seems to be about the way AI is empowering the higher or middle management to do More to the point that it doesn't make sense to bring in from a headcount perspective to bring in newer talent as well. You don't want to bring in inexperienced people, have to train them and do your bidding. When what's happening is there's a, a very real opportunity to get much better quality work from a less trained and definitely much less expensive AI. So that's one aspect of it. So the youth are experiencing this problem right now. People who have spent time getting qualifications, learning to be qualified for work and to not find the actual work, that's one, one big issue right now. I think the other part about AI which is impacting business as well, and this is the part that that needs to be sorted out is how are you going to make yourself, how do you create a viable economy which is going to be based on a lot more AIs doing interactions with each other, right. So there's going to be tighter margins, you're going to expect that your customers are actually doing a lot more cross referencing and research and deal making actually is going to be something that happens much quicker as well. So you're going to have interesting outcomes in that, in the sense that learning curves are going to be steeper. But I think the results of experiments are going to come much faster. You're going to figure out that this is the wrong way to do it and a company will disappear. Rather than the iteration that usually happens where you, where you slowly work your way towards winning the next round. I think you're going to have your five rounds and you're out within a few seconds. That's the kind of thing that can happen, I think, in business. So that kind of thinking needs to come about. I know you're not very fond of the idea of failing fast, but it's failing faster still. And that's going to come from. I'm a fan of failing fast, just not in government. Well, the thing about government as well, and, and that, and that's something which I've, I've, I've noticed happens, I think happens in, in, in, in Singapore in the sense that they don't fail as slowly as other governments have failed. I mean, you know that. So, so they, they're failing fast, stir. But they still are taking their time a little bit in terms of government. So there is something about failing fast in government. You really need to be, you know, you really need to push something, try it out and get the data, get the feedback and really do something with it. Most times what happens is you get stuck in a political mire, right. The politics makes you have to keep going with something even though it doesn't quite make sense. So this is, I think played out in many western governments and in the uk, I think is very much in that area as well. Lots and lots of really good plans launched and nothing done about them. Right. And that's a, it's a feature of that. And the great thing about having nothing done about things like that, you don't actually, you haven't actually failed or you just haven't started, but you haven't failed at that project, even though these things would be good things. But back to AI, AI is going to be this really hard to control creature. I think it is going to lead us to that next level which is going to be about super intelligence. It won't be long, but it won't be as quick as we think it's going to be as well. One of the issues that they really are grappling with is this thing about incrementally as you're trying to move from one level to the next of thinking and thinking complexity. That curve is actually going. It's a very steep curve. So the. Well, not, I'm sorry, not a steep curve. Actually, I've got it wrong. It actually is a curve that's getting more and more flat, as in it's heading towards a plateau. It's in that kind of shape, because as you put more and more into it, you're only going to get a little bit, a little bit extra, a little bit extra, a little bit extra. So that push is actually what is. It's really hard to do. They can't just break through. They need to make some kind of fundamental change in the way things work for them to jump really to the next level. But what's interesting is when it comes to scaling and it comes to ability to use things, I think what's going to happen with AI is like what happened with cameras. We're going to get good at it, right? I mean, when cameras first came out, they weren't that easy to use and couldn't quite figure things out. And I'll talk specifically about video. Video used to be this field that people thought, well, I've got a camera now, I can do something with it. And in the early days of video, it wasn't quite as good. I mean, you know, you had all these people who, who got their video cameras and produced terrible videos, right? Now what's happened is because the video camera is just in your phone, everybody's got video. And over and over again, you see the exposure to it, you're going to get better at it. And I think AI is going to. It's going to get into a very, very great place creatively and in terms of output and in terms of what it can do, its golden age is coming. Now, this sounds terrible because of the price. The, the price on the other side is, is, is about those that can't move fast enough to make the changes that they need to. And some of that is going to be about, okay, this is the way the world is and with the way the world works. But, you know, as, as, as we were talking about it earlier, in terms of what Simone was saying about being flexible and being able to go with. I mean, I was thinking about moving with the wind as the wind blows. That's going to be one of the great skills. People need to move very quickly to say, okay, well, this isn't working right now. How do I move? And we're going to have to leave behind the idea that I've sorted this out. This is a sorted problem. I'm not going to try and sort it again because that's a big challenge. That's going to be the thing. I find that when I deal with, especially corporate clients, they figured out the game and they think, okay, now I know what the game is. I am going to keep on trying to play the same game and what you have to notice is the game is changing. It used to be, I think pretty much that you. And it's happened over time in corporations as well. It used to be about the very high level executive who knew everything, who was exceptionally talented. And then it went towards the idea of now you're talking about teams. You don't want to be the most, you don't want to be the smartest person in the room. You want to be the best organizer, you want to create the best teams. And that became something. And now what the reality is is that the best teams are no longer just human teams, they're hybrid teams. You want to create teams of people who are able to create teams using AI or teams of agentic AIs where when people talk about trying to organize some of their work, they talk about one person setting up an entire department. In terms of AIs, I have an agent that is in charge of marketing. I have an agent in charge of this other aspect of things, maybe even HR aspects. And I am actually as a person, one person able to do the work of a company. And that's the changing reality. So if you are playing the old game where it's not about that kind of scaling up, you are way behind the curve. I ask you two questions. So the youth entry jobs, right? So there's no path in the young people to start a job. So if you, if you don't start a job eventually there's a pipeline at the middle level where there's no people because there's no startup. So does that mean that the middle will eventually probably relatively quickly become redundant because they're going to have to train the AIs to do their jobs and then therefore they lose their jobs and therefore that just keeps going up and up and up and then there's no people at all left left in the organization. I mean to me that's the, if you, if you don't have people starting, then what's this? Where's the future? You know? Yeah, that's the incomprehensible or at least the part that people have difficulty putting their heads around it. And I just think if you look at human development over the last 50 years, AI is going to compress that, the pace of it. We're going to move from one idea to the next idea to the management or whatever. So if you see how AI has developed these past years, well, I mean it's really a good, a good example of how, how we can move through things much quicker and arrive at a new way of doing things, that just seems like the way it's always been done. Right. I mean, I, I was, I was actually trying to remember how bad AI was earlier this year and a couple of years before, and I really can't because I only feel and know what I see right now. So business as we know it. And, and this is the other thing about, about, about AI, it's going to affect you in a way that you won't even realize because you are going to be in the midst of it and it's going to be invisible to you. There's talk about how 90% of the world is going to be in the class known as the useless class. Right. And because what we're doing is constantly engaging with it and using it and we're constantly doing stuff, we are almost by default going to end up in that top 10% without even realizing where everybody else is. I mean, they'll be outside of it. And in terms of whether or not I agree with the term useless is a whole different thing. But I'm thinking in terms of maybe. I know the reference. Yeah, yeah, it's reference, right, that's being used. It's not an insult. Yeah, yeah. So in terms of, and the thing about that is it's all about what, what you do with that, right? You change. Do you just say, I don't know how I do, how to do this, or I can't compete in this area or I don't do this and therefore I am, I'm staying out of it, or do you actually come out and say, you know what, I should try this and see what happens? Right. So for me, my, my personal experience has been I've met a lot of corporate people who are very sure what AI can't do and are completely surprised by what it can do when they finally discover its potential. And because what they've, they've had is a, is, is a career that has been built around this, this protection of their roles and their abilities and stuff like that. Suddenly find themselves in a very vulnerable position. And if they're not, if they're not prepared to change the game that they're playing, they then they will lose this new game. Yeah. All right, so my next question, and this could be a stupid question, but I'm very happy to ask stupid questions. Super intelligence is not that far away. Current AI is the accumulation of all human knowledge that already exists. So, so the output is based on what exists. Is super intelligence the stage where it can start to think for itself or is it still Based on the accumulation of existing knowledge. Knowledge. The principle is the. The standing on the shoulders of giants. You are going to get to the point where you can start having your own thoughts that no one else has thought of before. Right. It is. AI will do that. I think AI will do that. AI can do that if you have the right kind of approach to it. Right. Right. Now, for instance, if someone says you can't do something totally original, I can prompt AI to come up with something that is totally original, and I can come up with 20 or 30 different things that are totally original from which. But it's still based on existing information just woven together, right? No, because the way I would come up with that is I would ask AI to tell me about all the things that are, and then say, okay, based on everything that is happening that we know that this body of work, what doesn't belong in this set, what's outside of this? And then you would force it to imagine by its prompt, because you'd be able to say, like, for instance, you step in the room and you have all the things you can see in the room, and you go like, okay, what's not in this room? And AI could be forced into thinking about it. And then once it begins to do that, you go like, oh, okay, now we're in that new space. So. Right. Super intelligence, it's hard to contemplate because by its nature, it's supposed to be beyond us. When super intelligence arrives, it will, by definition, be smarter than I am. I'm not talking about it being smarter. I'm talking about. There's no question. I'm talking about it. Whether or not it's still. Its intelligence will be based on the accumulation of all existing human intelligence, or will it start to create its own information? It will create its. It will create addition. So. So yeah, it's all. All computing right now, for instance, whether it's in the category of AI or. No, it's creating data. So there's new information being created all the time. Therefore, the future will not be based only on human intelligence. It'll be a combination, it'll be a hybrid. So it will be that intelligence that comes from. There's a kind of intelligence that comes from having multiple perspectives at one time, and we can't maybe keep that perspective. And computers can do a better job of that, actually. Yeah, but. So therefore, will it still be just the accumulation of all human knowledge, but just being interpreted in different ways and sliced and diced, or will it be coming up with its own original thoughts? And I've been listening to the AI Godfathers talking about it, and I, I'm still not clear on the answer, so. So I'm not expecting you to have the answer, Joe. No, but the way to think about David for me is about this is to contemplate what it might be. If you think about the idea of the skill of juggling, the skill of juggling. Human beings can juggle up to a certain point, and because we have certain limitations, we are going to be limited by those things. Right. But you can take this very basic skill and move it to the next level. And I think the same way, if we think about how thoughts work, thought is about sometimes juggling and holding different ideas at the same time. Right. So. And if you can accelerate that process and duplicate the process and create some kind of simile for that, you know, the potential is there. And I'm sure people are working on this as well. People are trying actively to understand how the brain works so that they can replicate it in a digital brain and, you know, hopefully do something that won't destroy the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's only. Oh, look, it's a, it's an interesting one. All right, so just a couple of quick points. So for me, this has been a really big year of misogyny and I find it, it's. It's so dangerous. Right? So look, when countries have true equality, their GDP is higher. When companies have true equality, their profits are higher. Equality is good for everyone. It's not a female issue. It's an everyone one issue, because everyone has more choices when there's equality. I grew up in the 70s. My dad was an artist, my mom went to work, my dad sat at home. You know, it was a very unique upbringing. You can imagine. We weren't, certainly weren't wealthy. Mum was a nurse. But. But what, what, what. What I saw growing up was somebody had the opportunity to pursue their passion, and that's, that's what equality always offers, male or female. When you take females out of the mix, or you take diversity out of the mix, or you take people who are just thinking differently, behaving differently, dressing differently, different sexualities, you take out a level of creativity, you take out ideas, you know, you take out possibilities. You know, one of the things in my book I write about is these women around the world, like in Afghanistan, who are yearning in their souls to, to do something, to be a doctor or physicist or whatever. And why would we want to. Why would we want to hold that back? You know, and so you know, last year Ellen Musk made his big. We need a small group of alpha males to save the world. The so called alpha males, which, you know, the Nerd Reich is very apt. Right. It's that sort of person in historically who got us into the situation we're in now. So they're not the ones that are going to come and savor. So we need the great men of the world and I call them the Manbassadors and we need the great women of the world and that's obviously a very matriarchal sort of the women who are just really solidly standing in their own two feet. We need to come together and we, we really need to build a better world because this anti wokeness, anti femaleness like put women back in the kitchen, it doesn't serve any of us. Another big thing that happened this year is the Press Freedom Incident Index came out and I'll just, I've got a chart here and it's deteriorating around the world. It's probably a bit hard to reach to read because it's quite small, isn't it? But for the first time the RSF has classified the state of press freedom globally as in a difficult position or difficult situation. Kadris have fallen to like 55. It's a really new low point. I just want to encourage everyone to read this report. While we hear a lot about the physical attacks in Gaza, an extraordinary amount of journalists were killed. But there's more, there's other things that really matter and a big part of it is economic pressure. So we're seeing what's happening in the us it's basically becoming very much a right wing media landscape. You know, CNN is on the chopping block. You know, it's one of the last remaining left wing voices. But we, we, we really need independent journalists in the world right now holding the, holding the power to account. It's even if you don't agree with the, with the media that it's important that they have their voice. Yeah. The challenge that I feel because I think America is leading the way in this thing, in this pushback. Right. Is that the same sort of feelings you've expressed about how what's got us here is not going to get us out of here? Right. Is true. From the other perspective as well. Right. Because there's definitely, in terms of the influence of the left and it, it just was getting a little ridiculous, I have to say, even as someone who, who tries to be inclusive, it was getting to the point where I go like, okay, look, I'm, I'm, I'm. We're, we're, we're trying to be inclusive here, but we don't, we don't have to do every single thing for that, for this not to be a, an inclusive environment, right? You don't have to keep pushing that hard. So there, there is, there is that same thinking there that isn't like, okay, that the same kind of thinking that got us here isn't going to get us out of here here. That, that's happening for them as well, which is why the switch has happened, which is why the push has happened the other way. And I was just thinking about how it's, it's hard to fight from the middle, right? I mean, because you, if you, if, if you're on either side, you can fight, but down the middle you go like, you know, let's, let's, you, the, the, the, the act of raising your voice down the middle is kind of a strange thing. People, people, people can't figure out what, what it means, right? As in if you, if you just stood up in the middle of room and you shouted, let's just not do anything. But you know, you know what you're saying, right? So you're absolutely right. So having Gen Z, Gen Z kids has been interesting because they talk to me about, you know, the pressure, you know, that they feel to get the right words and use the right genders and all that sort of stuff, right? So our kids have sort of really grown up in this. But the, but the beauty of what they've grown up in with is we never had him conversations like that when we were kids, right? So the idea of there was too much extreme on this end. Now there's too much extreme on that end. I think the left voice was pushing that message and I think the, actually the kids are sorting it out and kind of getting over it and moving forward, forward. So I don't think it's because the other thing is the right was exacerbating that message, making it a bigger issue as well. Because that right wing push it go, it goes back decades. You know, I was remember reading about this potential takeover of the Sierra Club and it was back in the 40s, 50s, and there was this guy who was down in the south of the US who recognized that if climate changed and this like 40s, 50s, right, if climate change has an impact, all these people from the southern countries are going to come over the border. And so he, he was like, he was like the guy that started this momentum. So this has been a group that have been building and building and building for a long time. And all these unique dynamics have come together with, which allowed Trump to be elected. And then we've got Elon Musk, you know, trying to get the right wing going, you know, so one of my years as we look ahead is the one thing I would ask people to look out for is gaslighting. We are being so gaslit, it's not funny, right? You know, so we got these tr. We, we, we. Like, to me, it's, the gaslighting is part of this story too, you know, so, you know, and the Charlie Kirk story was a classic example of it, you know, and it's so discombobulating that people don't really know what to do about it because you kind of like you got this truth in front of you that gets so twisted and turned that we actually don't know what's true anymore. And that's basically gaslighting, right? So, you know, so you got one party constantly speaking about violence and, and threats, and we're gonna, we're going to hang these people and they should be, they should be, you know, assassinated or all those sort of things. And then somebody does get killed on their side, and then all of a sudden it's because the other side have been saying these things which they haven't been saying. And so then that the other side goes, well, we better not say anything because if we start saying something, people are going to start blaming us. But they haven't said anything in the first place. So this, this is really happening a lot. And I think it's why people are sitting there going, what the hell is going on? You know, people are really confused. So if, if I was going to give one piece of advice to go into next year. Gaslighting is incredibly powerful and it's been used incredibly effectively, and it's going to continue to be used. But when you're sitting there sort of spinning from a, what you thought was the truth, and then someone's telling you there's another truth, you go back to your truth. You're probably, you're probably not too far off. What about, what about you, Joe? If you're giving people a tip to look ahead. So I, I, I, I know that that sounds like the solution to, to gaslighting, but that actually is how you stay in your, your, your own echo chamber, right? Because you, you know, you think about what a conspiracy theorist is about. They have a set of beliefs, right? So when you're coming in with alternate sort of Points of view, they, they can. They've been inoculated against that because they're very firmly committed to the ideas behind that. Right. So I think the. What was that? Oh, yeah, I got a video from my. From my wife, which I thought exactly kind of demonstrates this. And the story is about this woman who shows up at a psychiatrist and she says, the psychiatrist said, why are you here? I said, oh, my friend said I should come and see you. Why? Oh, because I think I'm dead. And they think I'm crazy. And the psychiatrist goes, okay, well, let me think about this. What do you think? Do dead people breathe? Do dead people have to breathe? And the woman goes, no, dead people don't have to breathe. And then the psychiatrist says, well, just hold your breath. And after a while, she of course, exhales and has to breathe. And then she goes. And he goes like, so what have you learned about that? And said, oh, what do you know? Dead people need to breathe. Yeah, right. Yeah, but so what you're saying by using that example is you're saying what I'm saying is wrong. What I'm saying it's. We need to be able to figure out where we are wrong, when we're wrong. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, because that is actually the, the deepest conspiracy theorists, the ones who are so convinced that all of it fits into that same theory. And that is like, this makes sense because of course you'd say that if you were this. So that, that is the, that is the greatest challenge, I think someone. And the way you overcome this, and which is what is very scary is actually the, the way you overcome it is just using. By using emotions. And when you can move someone around their beliefs by changing their state of excitement. And that's all been shown scientifically as well. And that's the real danger. You don't want to be manipulated that way. So one of the things you can try to do is, I'm going to say, be open to multiple truths. Be open to the possibility of it, but try to try to be also aware if someone is pushing very hard to use emotions to, to. To get you to forget about some, Some logic. That's usually a sign, but, but it, it's not. You know that I, I was talking to a, To a scientist yesterday, and she was saying as well that even on the other side of things, when you're talking about the truth as well, there is an obligation to manipulate. Because if what you're telling me is the truth, you have an obligation to manipulate me to believe the truth as well, right, isn't that you can't just let truth stand on its own. And if you don't do a good enough job of presenting the truth, you can't blame the human being who has to take the cues that you've given and say, oh, you know, he spoke the truth, but he didn't do it truthfully. Yeah, yeah. God, we live in such interesting times, right? This stuff shouldn't be complicated. All right, so obviously I'm going to read David's book over the holidays, but this is. This is the book I'm looking. I'm really planning to get into. You'd hate this. It's a big fat book, Joe, but Goliath's Curse. So this is Luke Kemp. He's a academic in the uk and it's the history and future of society. Societal collapse. So that's what I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into over the whole. I love big fat books like that. So, you know, it really just tickles me that you're the same person who likes to watch a good girly flick to chill out. And then you'll read this book as well, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Emily in Paris hasn't started yet, so. Yeah, people like, I'm gonna be watching. Sorry. People say, how the hell can you watch that? I mean, because it's in Paris and it's in Europe and I love it, you know, and the French characters make me laugh, so they remind me of my French friends. But Emily. I would watch that. I think. I think I'm prone to watch something that's entertaining. As human beings, we cannot resist an interplay of characters that they can be. And they can be nonsensical. As long as we can watch them and it doesn't affect us, we are quite happy to watch that. That is why if. If America did not affect the world as much, the White House would be a great TV show. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so what. What's gonna. What are you gonna do to distract yourself while we have a break? Well, I won't say distracting myself. I've got a. A pretty serious bit of homework to do. In January, I'm going to be talking to some academics about science communication. So I'm actually currently in the midst of interviewing thought leaders, speakers, you know, various leaders about. About the idea of science communication. So I'm actually figuring out or trying to understand what it is that someone who's perhaps newer in science communication doesn't quite get that the more Mature ones have figured out and try to figure out when those moments have been as well. Yeah, it's, it's, it's quite, it's been quite interesting because so far it's, it's, it's revealing to me that all the people that have found their successes as communicators have understood fundamentally that there's entertainment involved. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's part of the process. Yeah, it's a pretty large. Which maybe leaves a bad taste for the bad taste in the mouths of those people who are the purists. Yeah, there's Communication is a skill, just like taking a photograph is a skill. Some people just don't have it right. Well, or try to avoid it because they think it's some sort of, it's an impurity you want to keep out of the, you know, the dark arts that you already, you already sort of profess to do, you know. Yeah, I think, I don't think most people go into science because they're great, because they're great communicators. You know, it's not. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, it's the, our end of year show and I have to say I'm very much looking forward to having a break. Does it, does it is hard to stay on top of this stuff? I, I feel the energy draining away as we come towards the end of the year because I'm constantly on, on what's going on in the news. So we usually have a break and we wait until Chinese New Year before we kick off again because we're in Asia. Are you looking forward to having a break, Joe? I, Because I'm always running as in like I have different things running all the time. I actually don't have a full break. So being a caregiver, I felt myself relating quite to Simone earlier. When you're a caregiver, you have to try and look at your time versus that resource. So time wise, Friday has actually been a bit of a reprieve for me because it actually is something where I take leave from the usual things that I do and I do this show. So what's going to happen is for the next few Fridays where I don't have to do this show, I'll be doing my chores as a caregiver and so it won't be as much of a break. So for me, this, I like this because. Yeah, it is, it is. I think, you know, the, the idea of intellectual loneliness, I like that the, the way that was phrased because I think that's what it is. Right. We. We need to get together. We need to be able to speak our truths to each other, to people who are also receptive to it. And so this is going to be something I will, in a sense, I will miss. You know, I know that I will not be exercising this particular muscle for this time, but what I'll be doing in its place, kind of bizarrely is I'm going to be trying my hand at TikTok, doing TikTok lives. And I'm curious because TikTok is supposed to be really good at figuring out the audience and what the audience is interested in. So I'm going to try and talk about more intellectual ideas, concept and stuff like that on my live TikToks and see if I can engage an audience. That is what I. I think. I think. I think most people try to say that that audience does not exist on TikTok. I hope to prove them wrong, or at least I'll figure out exactly how. How much of a response is possible via that particular platform. So I'm going to try it out. And the only reason why I'm going to try TikTok Live is because it's the only platform that lets you do a Live that can float on above your. Your other sort of Internet stuff. So you can still scroll, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever it is, and still have that TikTok live running on the foreground. Interesting. Okay, you'll have to report back. All right. But I want to say thanks to everyone who's still here. David had to go as well, by the way. He was on a balcony in Berlin in the winter in a very, very big, thick coat. So I'm. I'm sure he's back inside rubbing his hands together. But thanks to Richard and David for. For being part of it, and thanks to you, Joe, and just want to thanks everyone who sort of listens in on the show. I know we got a very diverse group of people. A lot of people listen to it afterwards or in on different channels or whatever, but we just appreciate all your support. And we'll be back after Chinese New Year. Right. And in the meantime, I'm going to try and read or listen or watch less of the news and give myself a bit of a break because it does take a toll. Yeah. Okay. Well, if the world's still here in February, we'll see you again. Yeah, exactly. All right, see you guys. Happy holidays. Take care. Bye.