The Best Aperture Videos of 2023

You wake up to the sound of the alarm on your iPhone, and annoyed that you couldn't get more sleep, you grudgingly unlock your phone to see what's going on in the world. There's an email from Amazon telling you that your package has been delivered, so you force yourself out of bed to get the package. It's some Johnson and Johnson medicine you ordered the night before—the wonders of overnight shipping, you think to yourself. You glance across the room to see the clock; it's 8:00 a.m., and you have to be at work by 9:00. Flustered, you open your Microsoft computer to answer some work emails before getting dressed. There's no time to cook breakfast, so you'll just grab something at McDonald's on your way to work.

What if I told you that every single company you just interacted with within the first hour of your day is heavily influenced, in large part, by one company: BlackRock? Now, I'm sure you've heard about BlackRock. There are dozens of videos here on YouTube that talk about how it's the company that controls the entire world, but the reality is far less glamorous. Here is why everything you've heard about BlackRock is wrong.

Before we talk about that, let's talk about data. Every time we browse on the internet, companies collect an insane amount of data from us, information which is then sold to data brokers who, in turn, sell it to the highest bidder or just lose that information in data breaches. According to a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were 68% more breaches in 2021 than in 2020, and that number is only going up. A few months ago, my friend got an email telling him that his information was released in a data breach from a company that he had never heard of, and right after, he started getting personalized email ads from shady companies. This is how scammers are able to figure out your phone number, name, and even your address.

The good news is that you can get these data brokers to delete the information they have about you. BlackRock is an investment firm that controls a huge number of shares in some of the largest companies in the world. They have a total of $10 trillion in assets across the globe—that's an amount equal to half of America's total GDP controlled just by one company. It's easy to dismiss such a powerful company as outright evil, but the truth is BlackRock doesn't own these companies or even own shares of these companies; their clients own the shares. BlackRock simply manages them.

That's not to say that BlackRock doesn't have any influence on these companies; they definitely do because they control such an incredible amount of their stock. It's possible that companies want to keep in BlackRock's good graces, so they don't pull their investments. Now, while BlackRock might not be the evil company some people make them out to be, the truth is there's still something very shady about them: their hypocrisy.

BlackRock was founded 34 years ago by Larry Fink, and he grew the company from $5 million in value to $8 billion in just 5 years, primarily by managing money invested by large institutions like pensions, university endowments, and substantial fortunes invested by the uber-rich. Today, Fink serves on the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum, commanding the attention of business tycoons and political leaders around the globe, and his company is on the cusp of consolidating so much power that it could essentially control the world.

Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate. The worst day on Wall Street since the crash of 1987, the 2008 financial crash turned out to be an incredible opportunity for BlackRock. It secured an uncontested contract to control many of the banks that had collapsed— that gave Larry Fink, who was already incredibly wealthy, even more power and a direct line to the American government. The same thing happened in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic when the government called in BlackRock to protect the Federal Reserve from financial fallout. Periods of economic uncertainties like these were key to BlackRock's rise to power, and as the famous saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.

BlackRock would like you to think that they are being responsible. In the summer of 2020, while the world was angry about the murder of George Floyd, BlackRock came out with a statement saying that companies had to serve a social purpose and that they would be giving every company an ESG—or Environmental, Social, and Governance score. Companies that promised more diversity in hiring and leadership or offered environmentally friendly policies and technologies received higher scores than companies that didn't. Although this concept had been around since 2004, BlackRock became the loudest proponent of ESG investing in 2020, and in all honesty, it worked. Before this statement, ESGs were mentioned in far fewer than 1% of earnings calls, but by May 2021, that number rose to around 20%, and it has since remained the fastest-growing segment in the asset management industry.

People are more concerned about the environmental and social impact of companies, and that's a good thing, right? Socially responsible companies get the upper hand in an ideal world, yes, but we all know that the world we live in is far from ideal. While there's been some positive improvement, the main result of BlackRock's ESG statement has been a massive surge in companies participating in practices like greenwashing—pretending they're more sustainable, diverse, or responsible than they actually are. It's also exposed the hypocrisy of BlackRock itself, because while it claims to champion ESG investing, the company remains the largest investor in fossil fuels and war profiteering and maintains a pretty friendly relationship with human rights violators.

And it’s not just BlackRock; the second-largest investment firm in the world, Vanguard, is guilty of the same technique—promoting ESG investing on the one hand but on the other, unwilling to stop investing in oil and gas companies or pull out of companies with questionable human rights practices. We see this time and time again from BlackRock; they do something that seems like they're moving in the right direction in the eyes of the public, but behind the scenes, they're unwilling to tamper with their investments, even if it's for the greater good of society.

Take climate change, for instance. BlackRock says that climate risk is investment risk, meaning that investing in companies that aren't creating policies to help address climate change is a risky move. In 2021, BlackRock actually did do something about this by helping shake up the board of ExxonMobil and installing new members who promised to take action on climate change. Previously, the oil and gas behemoth was responsible for 2% of the world's emissions; now, there are new self-imposed mandates to help reduce that over time. This is a great move by the company, no doubt, but the fact that it's still the world's single biggest investor in fossil fuels makes this feel more like virtue signaling than actually trying to make meaningful change.

And the hypocrisy doesn't end there. As mass shootings continue to end lives in the U.S., BlackRock has spoken out against gun violence and said that gun manufacturers should do more to protect the lives of the American people. But who's the largest investor in gun manufacturers? You guessed it—BlackRock. The investment firm holds a 16% stake in Sturm Ruger, 15% in Vista Outdoor, and significant percentages of other manufacturers just like them. BlackRock says it talks to these companies about improving safety, but so far, it's unclear whether or not there's actually been any policy change.

Outside of America, BlackRock's U.S. Aerospace and Defense Fund has billions of dollars invested in major weapons contractors worldwide, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. They’re supporting these companies that then get huge Pentagon contracts and use taxpayer money to engage in violence and war around the globe. Often, these weapons are supplied to foreign governments in the name of peace, like Saudi Arabia, which received weapons from the U.S. government and used them to indiscriminately attack civilians in Yemen during years of civil war. Funding this spread of war and an increase in nuclear weapons shows that BlackRock constantly skirts its own commitment to human rights.

So does its engagement with authoritarian governments. BlackRock is officially the first global asset manager to have access to China's mutual fund, leaving critics wondering: What did Fink promise Chinese President Xi Jinping to allow him to access the Chinese Communist Party's fund? To be fair, BlackRock isn't the only investment company out there looking to do business with China, but because of its widespread power, it's been the most successful in gaining a foothold in the controversial territory, which is surprising—especially for a U.S. company.

This power also made it a major player in the war in Ukraine, as we saw in China. Despite its emphasis on ESG investing, BlackRock has a tendency to overlook human rights in favor of monetary gain. It's been investing in Russia's most prominent companies for years. The British pensions that BlackRock controls alone have contributed $630 billion to Russia after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014—a precursor to what would become the more than a year-long war in Ukraine. BlackRock reconsidered some of its investments in Russia, but just one year later, it was back to being among the top shareholders in the country's biggest corporations. Even when it became clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin was planning an invasion last year, BlackRock didn't budge; and like most other Western firms, it did eventually pull assets out of Russia once the war started.

But think about all the money it flooded into Russia over the years—money that the authoritarian government controlled and used in its expansion mission that led to this deadly war. All of this begs the question: How did one company gain this much global power and influence? Well, it started with technology. BlackRock's business is built on ETFs, or exchange-traded funds. An ETF contains diversified investments to reduce an investor's risk. Rather than buying stock in a single company, you're investing in a fund that buys stocks, commodities, and other securities. This practice proved to be very lucrative for BlackRock and its investors, thanks to a portfolio management software created in 1998 called Aladdin.

Aladdin predicts the possible outcome of every investment and collects information and personal data on everyone who has ever knowingly or unknowingly given BlackRock money. This allows the software to predict how likely it is that a specific investment will fail. Eventually, this technology put Fink and BlackRock on top, making the company the go-to firm for ETF investing, which keeps getting more and more popular. Global ETF assets could explode to $25 trillion by 2025, meaning trillions more for BlackRock.

But we don't need to wait until 2025 to see the effects of the power BlackRock has right now. BlackRock oversees assets worth 10% of the entire world economy. Companies like Fox, Comcast, and Disney have to consult with BlackRock before they make major moves since it has such a large share of their ownership. BlackRock and other large firms like Vanguard are the biggest investors in global giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. This level of ownership creates an anti-competitive environment. You feel this in the prices of airline tickets. BlackRock and Vanguard are among the five largest shareholders of the three biggest airline operators, which means that there's very little incentive to lower prices in order to compete with each other.

This level of ownership concentration reduces consumer choice and raises prices, and it also means that eventually, a handful of powerful people at these investment firms could wield more power than the executives at the companies they own shares in. Even Jack Bogle, who founded Vanguard, says that this kind of ownership concentration is bad—too much money in the hands of too few will not work out well for the global economy.

There are solutions that governments could put in place to stop these companies from gathering too much influence—things like not allowing funds and ETFs to vote as shareholders in companies or creating ownership caps that would dictate how much of a company can be owned by a single entity. Laws can be passed limiting how much influence an investment firm can have in the companies they're invested in, even if that influence is intended to be benevolent, like with the ESG.

But how soon could any of this happen? Because BlackRock and Vanguard are less than a decade away from managing $20 trillion in assets, that would upend the asset management industry and intensify the already staggering ownership consolidation of the world's largest companies, sending prices through the roof.

One of the biggest problems with the system of business is that the more money BlackRock manages, the lower its fees for investors. So we end up in a cycle where the best way to invest our money today creates a potentially catastrophic environment for our money and our society tomorrow. Unfortunately, most people don't have the luxury of looking that far ahead. What looks good in the short term is all that matters, and that is how BlackRock thrives.

It hopes you will overlook its hypocrisy around the environment, diversity, and human rights because it puts out statements about being a responsible company, as the future hinges on its investors not caring about these things. The problem is that many of its investors don't even know they're investors; they're simply part of a pension fund or an endowment that BlackRock manages.

There are smaller funds that do support ESG investing without conflicts of interest, and there are options like managing our own shares that help us avoid the moral pitfalls of large companies like BlackRock, but much like how most of us couldn't live without Amazon's next-day delivery for our last-minute essentials, using these large flawed companies is just easier.

Over the past decade, the public has become more and more critical of what massive companies do and say. As that magnifying glass emerged, BlackRock made sure that its messaging about making the world a better place was heard and publicized. BlackRock's hypocrisy won't end; its public image versus private actions will most likely always conflict with one another.

But as consumers and investors, it's our responsibility to know what's happening. Taking them at their word is the easier option, but that's exactly what BlackRock is betting you'll do. That's how they've gotten this far. This is the same ignorance that allowed banks and governments to drown us in debt.

Click the video on your screen right now to find out more.

The year is 1665, and Isaac Newton is looking out his window at an apple tree standing tall in his orchard in Lincolnshire, England. All of a sudden, a ripe and lonely apple falls from the tree and makes its way to the ground. While most people would consider this a mundane event, Newton followed its trajectory with great interest. What young Isaac didn't know at the time was that this apple would become the most famous piece of fruit in human history as its natural attraction to the ground would spark a moment of genius, leading him to create the laws of motion that revolutionized modern physics.

Newton wasn't conducting an experiment when he discovered the laws of gravity. He wasn't overloading his brain with information trying to figure it out; he was simply looking aimlessly outside his window. He was bored. But that was in the 17th century; times have changed a lot since then. These days, we hardly ever allow ourselves to just stare out a window or sit in our backyards doing nothing but staring at the sky. We never pause for a moment and just let our minds wander into deep unexplored territories.

Turns out that diving deep into our own thoughts is something that we don't really like to do. We find it boring and will do anything to alleviate boredom, even if it means subjecting ourselves to self-inflicted electric shocks. This sadly is not an exaggeration. In a study conducted at the University of Virginia, a social psychologist named Timothy Wilson recruited hundreds of student volunteers to take part in what he called "thinking periods." Individuals were placed in small rooms with blank walls and no personal belongings. They were asked to entertain themselves with nothing but their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.

When asked to rate their experience afterwards, about 50% of the volunteers did not like being alone with their thoughts, citing it was boring. Then researchers left the volunteers in the room for another 15 minutes; this time, though, they introduced a button that participants could press to shock themselves if they wanted to. Around 67% of men and 25% of women chose to voluntarily inflict pain on themselves rather than just sit and do nothing.

This research suggests that, sadly, a lot of us would rather experience physical pain than sit in our own thoughts. When left with nothing else to do, most of us immediately grab our phones, switching from one app to the other, as the algorithms of the internet feed us with the exact content that'll keep us from being bored. What we fail to realize is that for these algorithms to understand what makes us tick, they take so much of our information. Companies then sell that information—things like your name, phone number, and home address—to data brokers who sell them to other companies.

What's worse is that sometimes these data brokers are involved in data breaches, where all the information they have about you is stolen by nefarious actors. In the spring and summer of 1665, an outbreak of bubonic plague spread through London, and by July had claimed more than 177,000 lives. Almost at once, people throughout the city began fleeing to the countryside, isolating themselves in fear for their lives. Among those who fled was none other than Sir Isaac Newton.

Of course, at that time, Newton had not yet been crowned; in fact, he had not yet even witnessed the famous apple falling. Interestingly, though, his two years spent in isolation, away from the bells, whistles, and distractions of the city, was the time when Newton's genius came to life, and he was able to invent calculus, create the science of motion, and develop a framework for gravity. These two years spent in quarantine were Newton's own 15 minutes isolated in a room with nothing to do.

Newton, however, didn't seek external stimuli to prevent his mind from wandering; instead, he welcomed the boredom that often comes with deep thinking and stared out the window, which has, without a doubt, paid dividends for all of humanity. During this isolation in the countryside, Newton also invented calculus. Throughout his life, he also made major discoveries in optics, proposing that white light is actually a combination of light from all of the color spectrum.

Most famously, following his apple incident, he developed the three laws of motion. In all fairness, attributing Newton's greatest accomplishments to him being quarantined in the countryside is a bit misleading. The truth is, the incident of the apple falling wasn't an isolated moment of genius. Newton's various contributions to science were the product of years of hard work and dedication—tedious work towards these moments of revelation.

However, it is still helpful to recognize the importance of solitude and boredom in creating that particular eureka moment. According to psychologist Dr. Sandy Mann of the University of Central Lancashire, once we start daydreaming and allow our brains to wander, like Newton did when he looked out the window, we start thinking beyond the conscious and into the subconscious, which allows for all sorts of connections to take place. This is called the default mode.

When you're bored or performing mundane tasks like doing the dishes or folding the laundry, your body may be on autopilot, but your brain is actually pretty busy. When in the default mode, your mind gets the chance to connect to different ideas, try and solve some of your most pressing problems, and even create personal narratives or set goals. This is why programmers often tell you that they figured out their problem with their code just as they were jumping into bed, ready to get some shut-eye, or why you feel like your best ideas come when you jump in the shower.

The problem is that today, those are the very rare moments that we allow ourselves to be bored. Every other time, we almost always choose the electric shock method. Living in a society where we have the entire world of entertainment at our fingertips has led to our immediate dissatisfaction with even seconds of boredom. The more we fill our world with fast-moving, high-intensity stimulation, the more we get used to it, and the less of a tolerance we have for boredom.

On average, Americans reach for their phones 344 times a day—that's once every 4 minutes. From quick email checks to diving down the rabbit hole of reels and memes, Americans spend an average of 2 hours and 54 minutes on their phone each day, with some people clocking up to 10 hours a day on their phones. Without a doubt, technology has definitely made the world a better place, but this unhealthy, dependent relationship we have with our phones is robbing us of our most creative selves.

German psychologist Theodore Lips proposed one of the first definitions of boredom in 1903, saying boredom is a feeling of displeasure arising out of conflict between a need for intense mental activity and lack of incitement to it or inability to be stimulated. In other words, it's an underwhelming state where none of the options available to us seem appealing. Instead of letting this feeling run its course, we overstimulate our brains and prevent it from taking advantage of the true power of this downtime.

Our first instinct when we experience boredom is to just endlessly scroll through feeds, switching through social media apps, even when we're walking from one room to the next or waiting for the cashier to bag our groceries. We've become conditioned to constantly seek out novelty and deliver a hit of dopamine to our brains. Sadly, once that sense of novelty fades, it leaves behind a stronger feeling of boredom, which we then try to get rid of with even more stimulation. It's a vicious cycle that keeps our brains occupied with mindless entertainment designed to capture our attention for the longest time possible.

Studies have shown that when given tasks that require minimum mental capacity, participants often contemplated their future and their plans for it. On the other hand, if your brain is constantly consumed by stimuli, it'll rarely have the time to think of the bigger picture and is less likely to set goals for the future or be more creative. A 2017 study from Georgia Institute of Technology measured the brain patterns of more than 100 people. Participants were asked to focus on a stationary point while they lay in an MRI machine.

The goal was to figure out which areas of the brain work together during an awake but resting state. The team compared the data with questionnaires that the participants filled out about how much their minds wandered in daily life. It turns out participants who had reported more frequent daydreaming scored higher on intellectual and creative ability and had more efficient brain systems recorded on the MRI. These findings are supported by a lot of artists when discussing their creative process.

In his book "Creative Quest," music producer and drummer for The Roots, Questlove, wrote about his battle against the many distractions available to us in today's world. On the face of it, it doesn't make any sense. Boredom seems like the least creative feeling, but it's actually a way of clearing space for a new idea to spring back up. Similarly, J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, formulated all the ideas for her book during a 4-hour train ride from Manchester to London. If she had an iPad and binge-watched her favorite Netflix show instead, she probably wouldn't have brought Harry and his magical world to life.

In his book "Daily Rituals," Mason Curry studied the routines of hundreds of artists, writers, and creatives and concluded that boredom is a recurring theme that leads to the mind wandering and having a kind of diffused focus, which allows for creative production. This diffused state is when the mind enters its default mode and comes up with its best work. Perhaps the best proof of this truth is none other than Albert Einstein himself.

Einstein took over where Newton left off and gave us a more advanced definition of gravity, with a notion of a curved spacetime. Einstein was known for his extremely vivid imagination and inspired thought experiments that allowed him to define time as the fourth dimension and to change our understanding of the mechanics of the universe itself. Many people believe that the seeds of his genius were planted during the year he took off from high school in the 1890s, when he simply wandered without purpose and contemplated the world—free from any external pressures.

Throughout his life, Einstein would take regular walks to clear his mind, and in a letter he wrote to his friends while sailing in 1932, he said, "A cruise in the sea is an excellent opportunity for maximum calm and reflection on ideas from a different perspective." It was clear that he knew the importance of sitting still and letting the mind wander. Our history is full of many great thinkers who have been conscious enough to take advantage of their downtime and utilize it in the name of creative production.

Psychologists today encourage parents to allow their children to be bored instead of occupying all their time watching YouTube on their tablets. The idea is to give the young minds the time and space needed to discover, create, and find their own genius. Teaching people, especially kids, how to use technology to improve their lives while also self-regulating their exposure to it should be a crucial part of digital literacy.

There's a saying used in tech: when the product is free, you are the product. Our attention is being fought for by a magnitude of applications, and at the end of the day, we're left with no time to just sit and contemplate our own lives and experiences. But that shouldn't be the case. Next time you find yourself reaching for your phone when you're bored, remember you're choosing to voluntarily shock yourself instead of looking out the window and contemplating your own metaphorical apple falling from the tree.

You'd be surprised what your mind can achieve when you just allow it to wander for a moment. Since everyone seems to think being rich is the end-all-be-all goal for happiness, I'm here to help you out. Let's figure out what it is about being rich that is so attractive and see if we can create a roadmap to getting you there. You're not going to wake up Elon. You're not going to wake up Warren Buffett.

The next richest person in the world won't get there by making a social media platform. You aren't Mark Zuckerberg. The reason these men got to where they are today is because they took a path that no one else ventured down. They made really stupid decisions that led to better decisions that led to them being at the pinnacle of society, like creating a hot or not for girls at their college or just dropping out of college.

I wish everyone in the world for financial, physical, and mental health, but just know that only one of these can you be rich in while still feeling completely miserable. I hope that everyone reaches their goals of being rich just so you can finally see that you missed all the important things along the way. Anyway, here's how to get rich. If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? Why can't you make yourself happy? Is it the money? Like, really, how much would it take for you to be truly happy? Enough to pay rent? Enough to go on your vacations? And live life on your own terms?

Money won't make you completely happy, but it'll take away many, many things that can make you unhappy. For many, alright, yeah, this is probably going to help you out, but for the rest, it won't, and you'll be even more confused than you were before. You'll fall deeper into a hole that is getting deeper faster than you can climb. What happens when you solve all the problems that money causes and are still left with unsolved issues? Then what?

Then you hyper-focus on these problems, trying to find the roots of them, and you still don't know where it stemmed from. All the money you earned and all the riches you feel so entitled to aren't helping, and you're lost. What do you do then? Your therapist doesn't help you; the pills don't help; the money doesn't help. Then what? For so many people, people that I'm surrounded by—some very talented people who are some of the smartest people I've ever met—they struggle with the very thing that embodies who they are—that knows of its own existence, their own brain.

You're absolutely nothing without two things: physical well-being and mental well-being. These will beat you down to your hands and knees until you have nothing left. There's a lot that people want, and it seems like these two are always the last on the list. These two go hand in hand; money is just a supplement to both. I think that struggle stems from a lack of purpose, and I'm not talking about everyone that's like, "Find your purpose." Okay, obviously, if it was that easy, this wouldn't be an issue.

It's not a long-term thing; it's a day-to-day issue. What's the purpose of getting out of bed? What's my purpose today? Day in and day out, it's the same thing over and over and over again. A mundane, static life will slowly drive you into insanity. Becoming rich has its downsides, many of which you won't find until you venture down that path. Having to put the entire business company, even the world, on your back can take a toll on you, physically, mentally, and physically.

I don't know what you like. I don't know what you're good at. I don't know what you think the world needs or how you're going to improve it. But the one thing I can tell you for certain that you're going to need to make it big is mental clarity. Slipping into mediocrity and sort of blending in with the rest of the world is terrifying. Failure is scary, and I've never wanted to avoid something so much in my entire life.

That's where money comes in—it's a status symbol. You have money; you have everything else, right? It shows you're doing something and you're not a complete failure, so you have to be doing good, right? At least that's what it looks like from the outside, and maybe that's what everyone's chasing. You know maybe it really is the glamour—the 61 jet skis I just bought, these few bottles I just opened. Alright, I get it; it's fun; it's cool. But after that, you still feel unsatisfied.

It'll change from day to day—maybe you're unsatisfied with your relationships or friendships or business partners, or maybe you're unsatisfied with the fact that your interior decorator painted the walls cream instead of white. Okay, it could be anything; you're still going to be unsatisfied. You're going to be unsatisfied with something. The people who can make it far, who will make the amount of money that will elevate them to rich status, will almost always be unsatisfied with where they're at.

It's a very lonely feeling because no one else will truly get your exact situation except for you. It's the most alone you'll ever feel. It's also very comforting knowing that no one else will understand how to get you out of the spot, so it's all on you. At least I find comfort in that. There are certain character traits of successful people that are a double-edged sword—not knowing when to quit, persistence, sociopathy, manipulation—you write a very thin line between an amazing person and an absolute freak, and that's the risk you take.

Your entire life is a risk. Everything you do, someone is watching. Everything you say, someone is listening. You mess up, you're the first person to be blamed. The biggest gamble of all is attaching your name to something or someone. Whether or not you come out on top depends on how far you're willing to go. Becoming rich and successful isn't just a mental battle; it's a mental war. How much can you stomach? How far are you willing to go? How much can you take before it's all too much?

Can you put yourself in the right spot at the right time with the right people in the right scenario? It's just a lot to handle. You dive in not knowing whether or not you're going to come out on top, and it's that fear that drives you into insanity, trying to make everything work. This is why you need to be mentally strong, and that comes with so many underlying and linked conditions that are impossible to generalize for the public. Staying mentally tough is a single-player game.

There's cheat codes and buffs and potions that will help alleviate some of your issues, but not all of them. You have to hope that you can figure out if it's a game that you can actually win. I think that's one of the bad things about me: I turn everything into a game. My life is a game of chess. I'm setting things up for weeks, months, years in advance, taking gambles on everything, and kind of just hoping it works out.

I've always loved the idea that you could figure things out, succeed, and come out on top in the end. Smart people are good at figuring out the truth, but this can hurt you and will get you into problems. Curious people won't quit until they get an answer that satisfies them. You have a point to prove, and you'll do anything to prove it to yourself, but you don't recognize how harmful it can be until you get there—until you look back and see how much it took for you to get to where you're at now.

Anyone who is rich or successful has, at least once, questioned their entire existence—why they're doing what they're doing, what's the point of it all—and then they wake up the next day and keep doing what they're doing until something changes. If it sounds like insanity, it is. You know many people in the 1% have been publicly ridiculed and shamed for just doing what they think is right.

Now, to be fair, most of the hate comes from ignorant and overall just ill-informed people who are just attacking others ad hominem, but regardless, it's still there. It's always talking about getting rich, rich, rich; what's the quickest way up? How can I get there? It takes a lot more than what it looks like on the outside. It takes an entire lifetime to blow up overnight—make sure you read that again.

Sure, there are some one-off instances where people just got dumb luck; it happens. But don't get jealous of that; you don't want that to begin with. You kind of have to think backwards if you want to grow beyond measure. Start big—by that I mean start working for a large company and work your way downwards. You will have the experience of working with giants but now have the authority and potential to create something new, something different, something that you felt was missing.

Try to find things that are mainly available to the rich and distribute it downwards. It works pretty well. Cars were seen as things for rich people until everyone had one. Wealth is what you want—the money you make while you sleep. It gives you freedom. Money is just how we transfer wealth. Money isn't going to solve all of your problems; money is going to solve your money problems.

Chasing money means you're chasing status, and that's why there's a negative connotation to being rich. Prioritizing status means you're trying to climb a ladder, climb the ranks to the top. And yeah, it seems appealing, but the only way your status goes up is to put someone else's down, and making enemies is ultimately going to make everything harder. The only status you should care about is your own as an individual. You want to be seen in a good light, but you shouldn't have to beg for it.

If people want to respect you, they will; if they don't, their opinions are irrelevant to you. True status should be a positive-sum game—nothing else. If you constantly have to brag about your status, you're a low-status person. I hate to break it to you. Everyone has a moral code. You didn't read it in a book; you didn't learn it in school; you live it. You experience it.

Having true status or reputation makes everything else you do so much simpler. You don't have to worry about getting backstabbed; you don't have to worry about looking for work. People will come to you to work with you because you're you. You see, if you get good enough at one thing or a handful of things, you're going to be one of the top people, if not the only person that others will come to when they need help—they won't have another choice; you are the choice.

Your genuine curiosity will form a better career than following whatever is going to make you six figures this year. At the end of the day, though, what even is a career? Is it for money? Is it for your happiness? Is it to give you purpose? What you'll find is that the longer you spend alone, the more time you have with your own thoughts and emotions will lead you to finding the things you really want to do.

Less external influence, more internal thinking. But I'm not saying you need to completely isolate yourself; I'd actually recommend against it. Observing others, spending time with them, finding out what they want and cross-referencing it with the things you want is one of the best decisions you'll ever make. The world is shifting; it follows trends. Use that to your advantage—stay local to your environment, to your industry, but seeing the things that everyone else dismisses.

It's a mindset. For some reason, it's burned into almost everyone's mind that you need to figure out what you're doing by a certain age, and this is just idiotic. There are millions of jobs in the world, yet we're apparently supposed to pick a career based on studying 10 to 15 subjects by the age of 21. Trying to figure out specifically what you want right away is setting you up for failure. Instead, this might help: find something you enjoy. You don't have to be amazing at it, but just find something that the thought of it doesn't make you want to bash your head into a wall.

No matter what it is, if you can put it in front of them, someone else will have an interest in it. You'll find that niche or that idea or that skill. How much easier things will become if you can sell it—you're golden. Now, I'm not talking about Billy Mays; I'm not talking about ShamWow, but sell it by making it your own thing. Everyone else will follow. It's a lot easier to hop on a trend than it is to create that trend.

This is why you'll win. You see, they don't have the steel framework that you built from nothing. Sure, they might make a building quicker than you, but in the end, you're the one with the skyscraper. I'm not trying to be that guy that's like, "Money isn't everything." I get it. Everyone likes to seem woke and pretend they don't care about money at all, but really, you know you do. You might not care about the money itself, but you care about the things that it brings you. Wealthy people attract more wealth; it's a compounding effect.

If there's one thing you take away from this video, remember compound interest. I'm not going to sit here and preach it to you like your high school economics teacher did, but hear me out. Not just money, but relationships, trust, wealth, your skills—they all benefit from compound interest. Start early; start now, and long term, you will do well. I promise. I swear success isn't as daunting as it seems. It's an internal battle. The only problem is, no one wants to start the war to begin with, so please do something today, and don't thank me until you're done.

Have you ever paused to think about how one of the most famous sentences of all time doesn't make grammatical sense? Well, because we all apparently heard it wrong and continue to say it wrong. According to the man himself, Neil Armstrong, what he did say that day when he stepped foot on the moon was, "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," which makes much more sense.

There are going to be a lot of things that sound strange at first, but as we've all come to find out, sometimes reality can be stranger than fiction. Like how the sounds of the T-Rex speaking in Jurassic Park are actually just tortoises having sex and how the eagle only sounds like this because of Hollywood magic when in reality it sounds more like this. Here are true facts that sound completely made up.

It's pretty common knowledge at this point that humans can live with just one kidney, but did you also know that you can live without a spleen, an appendix, a gallbladder, tonsils, six of your ribs, and one lung? In fact, many people do, and they lead pretty normal lives. The only thing you can't do with just one lung is participate in strenuous exercises or run long distances, but with just one lung, you could run from the United States to Russia since the shortest distance between the two countries is just 2.4 miles.

How comforting! This distance is measured from Russia's Big Diomede Island to America's Little Diomede Island. Why is America's island smaller? We might never know. But you know what is really big, thick, and long? A giraffe's neck. Considering how massive these things are, it's incredible to think that they have the same number of bones as a human neck. They're just way bigger.

And it's not just them and us; all mammals have the same number of bones in their necks. When we were younger, we were taught that there are 7 days in a week, 4 weeks in a month, and 52 weeks in a year, but the truth is, that's wrong. Well, technically, it's correct, but it only works here on Earth. On other planets, it's completely different. On Venus, for example, a day is longer than an entire year.

It's probably helpful to mention that a day on a particular planet is defined as the time it takes that planet to spin around once on its axis, and a year is the time it takes for the planet to orbit around the star—in this case, the Sun. Pluto sadly wasn't able to complete a full orbit around the sun in the 76 years from when it was discovered in 1930 to when it was declassified as a planet in 2006. A small planet with a really long orbit. But you know what is really, really, really long? It's the name of a hill in New Zealand. You're welcome.

Here's a true fact that sounds completely made up: as of December 2012, more than half the people who earned six figures in the US reported living paycheck to paycheck. We've all faced rejections and insults. Don't let them get to you; they're just lessons that we all had to learn one way or another. The founder of Lamborghini, for example, had to be rejected by Ferrari before he got the desire to create Lamborghini.

Steve Jobs had to be kicked out of his own company before he could bring it back to life. Microsoft had to stop producing newer versions of Internet Explorer to well realize that they shouldn't have ever made it in the first place. But you get the point. Time is an illusion, and if you don't study history, it can be quite jarring to learn that sometimes, things aren't as timely as we think.

Did you know that we sent a man to the moon before we put wheels on suitcases? Just imagine how stressful it must have been for Neil to carry all that luggage to win from space. The invention of the iPhone in 2007 is closer to the existence of Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the building of the Pyramids of Giza. And although Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire and isn't the first university to ever exist, India's Nalanda University was an operation for hundreds of years before Oxford.

We made lighters before we made matches; sharks existed before grass. Heck, sharks were in existence before the rings of Saturn! It really makes you appreciate the beauty of human civilization. We've only been here for a short time, but we've been able to achieve so much. We're so special, aren't we? That's what I told Rebecca before she broke up with me. But now I know I was wrong, because she wasn't special; she was bananas.

I don't mean that as an insult, because we're all bananas—at least 50% of each of us—because humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas and with fruit flies, as it turns out. Our profound exclusivity is neither profound nor exclusive. What is exclusive, however, is a randomly shuffled deck of cards. It may seem rather mundane, but the sequence of a randomly shuffled deck of cards has never been seen before and will never be seen again.

A standard deck of cards has 52 cards, which means there are 52 factorial different ways the cards can be arranged when shuffled randomly. That number, 52 factorial, is 8 with 67 zeros after it! To put this in perspective, the universe has existed for over 13 billion years, but let's round it up to 15 billion. Let's also assume there are around 2 trillion galaxies, each containing approximately 100 trillion star systems. Each star system had 10 planets, and each planet hosted 10 billion life forms.

Every one of those life forms could shuffle a deck of cards every second since the beginning of time, and they still wouldn't produce a repeated sequence. That is simply insane! Speaking of arrangements, some countries aren't arranged the way we think they ought to be. Finland and North Korea are separated by just one country. New York is closer to the equator than it is to Rome, and Bangladesh went to war and won against Pakistan—two countries that are separated by India, the seventh largest country in the world.

And get this: all three countries were once considered the same country. Talk about sibling rivalry! The logistics for that war must have cost several buttloads, which is a legitimate unit of measurement equal to 126 gallons. Remember when you were young and your mom told you not to swallow apple seeds or a tree would grow in your belly? Well, it turns out she was wrong. Trees can't grow in people, but she was right in telling you not to swallow apple seeds—eating apple seeds can lead to cyanide poisoning.

Don't worry too much, though; you need the seeds from at least 150 apples for that. Speaking of apples, Steve Jobs chose the name of his company to get back at his former employer, Atari, because phone books—a book that had a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of the businesses in the area—were written in alphabetical order. Apple would come before Atari, so whenever people searched for a computer business in the phone book, they would find Steve's company first.

Suffice it to say that they no longer need that slight competitive advantage. Fresh, clean water can do wonders, but how fresh is the water we drink? Did you know the probability that at least one of the molecules of the water you drink today passed through a dinosaur is 100%? We somehow keep coming back to dinosaurs. Maybe it's a sign that Rebecca and I should try to work things out, because at the end of the day, mistakes happen—like the time Switzerland accidentally invaded another country in 2007.

Around 171 of Switzerland's troops accidentally went to Liechtenstein. The Swiss government formally apologized, but the governor of Liechtenstein wasn't worried and excused the situation. "It's happened before," he said. Liechtenstein is really nice—as you can see—so nice, in fact, that in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Liechtenstein sent a company of 80 soldiers to war, only to have 81 return. Not only did they not have any casualties, but an Austrian león officer joined them on the way home.

But it also helps to have luck—luck like Anatoli Bowski had. He was a researcher working at the Soviet Union's most powerful particle accelerator, the U70 synchrotron. He was down there one day to fix something; he leaned down to look at a part of the machine without realizing the accelerator was active at the time and stuck his head directly into the beam path. He reported seeing a tremendously bright flash—likely due to his optic nerves being excited through the roof.

Believe it or not, he actually wanted to cover it up and decided to continue working. As time passed, Anat noticed huge swelling developing along the regions where the beam had entered and exited his head. He slowly started developing radiation sickness; there was no hiding anymore, so he sought help. The physician in charge feared the worst, but as it turned out, Anatoli had unintentionally received a version of proton beam therapy often used to treat cancer.

Thanks to the physics of the proton beam therapy, most of the energy that might have otherwise killed Anatoli was deposited outside of his skull. Despite suffering seizures and epilepsy, Anatoli lives on to this day. However, he refused an offer from the United States to be a research subject. Oh, and half of his face stopped aging. Talk about expensive Botox—it's something Rebecca would have needed.

I mean, I like—oh well, she's gone now, but I mean, for all her flaws, she was always very kind to me. Despite what we went through, despite how rough the breakup was, she put her hand in mine, looked me in the eye, assuredly, and told me we can still be cousins. That, of course, was completely made up—or was it?

Sisyphus was a great king of Greek mythology. So clever, he was able to outwit the gods themselves—twice! He cheated death first by capturing Thanatos, the god of death, then by tricking the goddess of the underworld, Persephone, into releasing him back into the land of the living. The gods weren't happy with this, and so for his arrogance, Sisyphus was given a deceptively simple punishment: roll a boulder up a hill.

The problem was that the boulder had been magically enchanted to fall back down to the bottom every time Sisyphus managed to get it to the top, effectively condemning him to an eternity of repeating the same impossible and meaningless task. Classical interpretations of the myth view it as an allegory for the futility of trying to escape death—no matter how powerful or clever a person is, we're all doomed to meet the same fate.

More modern audiences have found something more relatable about Sisyphus' struggle, seeing it not as a simple parable about the inevitability of death, but more like a metaphor for the drudgery and monotony of their own lives. Every day, we wake up, make coffee, take the train to work, stare at a computer for hours, get yelled at by our boss, stare at the computer some more, then take the train back home, binge Netflix or YouTube while eating dinner, go to bed, and then wake up and do it all over again.

Just like Sisyphus, we seem condemned to repeat the same meaningless tasks over and over and over. Most of us do this every day for the rest of our lives, as though we're sleepwalking, never waking up or stopping to ask why. For some of us, one day we're standing on a street corner preparing to go to work when in an instant, we’re struck by the strangeness of it all. Suddenly, nothing appears to have purpose. Life is haphazard and meaningless. You look around and you whisper to yourself, “Why are all of these people even in such a hurry? For that matter, why am I? What's the point of all this? Why am I even alive?”

There's a modern-day problem with absurdism: money—or the lack thereof. The reason many of us never pause to ponder our meaning is because we don't have the economic stability to do so. It's difficult to think about the meaning of life when you're worrying about keeping a roof over your head, which is why we're getting to a point where financial stability may just be the first step towards embracing the absurd.

However, in 2022, that's easier said than done. Most ways of passively growing your money, such as investing in the stock market, have lost trillions in the past year. But with inflation still essentially taking money out of your bank account, it's daunting to sit around and do nothing. Human beings crave meaning; it's part of our biology. We're evolutionarily programmed to search for patterns in chaos, to try and understand why things are happening; it's how we learn.

The problem is that existence is, at best, random and irrational. Nothing really seems to matter. Your loved ones die, stars explode, natural disasters wipe out entire cities, millions of people spend half their day on TikTok, and for what? Yet we keep going, constantly striving to create order by giving these things purpose, despite the universe denying it.

This conflict is what the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus referred to as the absurd; it's an irreconcilable paradox. We yearn for meaning in a meaningless universe. Camus uses the myth of Sisyphus as an allegory to describe this relationship. We can try to push the boulder to the top of the hill, but inevitably, it will roll back down. More often than not, the effects of this are intense feelings of anxiety, alienation, and hopelessness. We shout into the void but are met only with deafening silence—not even an echo.

For most of history, people have turned to religion for answers. You didn't need to worry if your life had meaning because some higher power was there to provide it. This all changed in 19th century Europe, as new forms of science and philosophy threatened to replace Christianity as the central axis around which people's lives revolved. Notable texts such as Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" challenged previously held beliefs about the nature of humanity, leading to a radical shift in society away from religion. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted this famously, declaring, “God is dead, and we have killed him.”

Despite what some may think, that statement wasn't claiming that God had literally been murdered, nor was Nietzsche celebrating; rather, it was an observation that without Christianity, society had lost the foundation upon which it had built centuries-old systems of morality, metaphysics, and meaning. Nietzsche felt a great deal of anxiety about this, swearing that without a clear replacement, people would succumb to nihilism.

I've talked about nihilism before in another video, so I won't go into depth here, but to give a brief explanation, nihilism is the belief in nothingness—a belief that rejects the idea of objective truth. According to Nietzsche, nihilism was a necessary step on the journey away from religion, but it wasn't the destination because it presented a very real problem. If people viewed life as having no inherent meaning, it would likely lead them to despair.

Because of this, he sought to speed up the arrival of nihilism so that he could in turn speed up its departure. He believed that after nihilism had passed, humanity could finally arrive at the true philosophical foundation on which society could thrive. Unfortunately, while he successfully expedited nihilism's arrival, he failed to do so with its departure. In fact, Nietzsche's philosophy was taken up by many of the violent ideologies that defined the early 20th century.

Well over a hundred years later, nihilism remains rampant throughout global culture. Trust in both secular and religious institutions is at an all-time low. Our governments are corrupt; there are CEOs with more money than some countries; and our spiritual leaders often appear ineffective and out of touch. Most people today report that faith plays little to no role in their lives. Instead, we've begun looking to science and reason for answers, but these haven't been able to offer a sufficient solution to the problem of meaning either.

So what are we to do? Should we just simply accept our fate, conclude that our lives are without purpose, and allow the boulder to roll back over us? Well, 20th century philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre didn't think so. Both argued that in the absence of objective meaning, we, as free and rational beings, must fight to create our own purpose. Sartre is credited as the father of modern existentialism—a philosophical school concerned with our plight as individuals forced to assume responsibility for our lives without certain knowledge of truth.

Though its roots can be traced back to 19th-century figures like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Schelling, Sartre differentiated himself by rejecting the idea that humans rely on an external power, like God, to provide us with meaning. He claimed that man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself and referred to those who would outsource this responsibility to a higher power as acting in what he called "bad faith."

In Sartre's view, existence precedes essence. We are conceived, and only after being born do we figure out what our purpose in life will be. This might seem like an uncontroversial opinion to us today, but in the mid-20th century, this was a radical idea.

For most of human history, it was assumed that essence precedes existence. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, it was widely believed that our purpose as individuals was assigned to us before birth. The meaning of your life was ready-made by the gods—pre-packaged before you were even born. Sartre's claim was a direct contradiction of this widely held belief—a declaration that we, as humans, aren't beholden to gods or kings to provide us with meaning, only to ourselves.

For Sartre, the only real problem of existence wasn't its lack of meaning but rather its absolutely terrifying level of freedom. After all, without an objective meaning or morality, every one of us is responsible for designing our own purpose according to our own ethical code. Camus largely agreed with Sartre's diagnosis that we live in a meaningless universe where we, as humans, are, in his own words, "abandoned to freedom."

However, he didn't agree with the cure to existentialism. This solution to the problem of meaning wasn't as simple as making up your own. The universe would naturally rebuke our attempts to do so, no matter how hard we tried. We can push the boulder up the hill, but it will always fall back down. This, in turn, would still give rise to feelings of the absurd, as well as the associated sense of anxiety, alienation, and hopelessness that accompanies it.

To Camus, there were only three possible reactions to this. The first of these is suicide, which Camus famously wrote is the one truly serious philosophical problem. Rather than grappling with the absurdity of life, you can simply refuse to play the game. The only issue is, when you're gone, you can no longer enjoy life—however meaningless it may be. It also doesn't actually solve the problem; it only allows the absurd to decide your fate. It's essentially admitting defeat.

The second possible reaction is the solution of faith, which Camus dubbed "philosophical suicide." It's when a person rejects the burden of creating their own meaning by shifting the responsibility to an external ideology. This amounts to a kind of denial, where the individual deludes themselves into thinking they've conquered the problem, when in reality, they're just avoiding it. It's simply an attempt to replace the absurd with a set of man-made beliefs, the consequence of which is the abdication of existential freedom.

Importantly, Camus doesn't limit this to religion; any ideological system can serve this function—nationalism, capitalism, or even the values of our own family. When we allow external systems to dictate meaning to us, we give away the potential to determine our life's purpose. How many of us took a job or studied for a degree solely because our parents told us that we should? In a world as complicated and confusing as ours, it can be tempting to contract out our thinking and just go along with what we're told.

But the risk of ruin we run in doing this is ending up in a situation where we're unhappy and unfulfilled. That's why many of us pause on that random Tuesday afternoon and ask ourselves, "Why am I doing any of this?" If instead we make our own choices, we can decide meaning for ourselves and follow a path that calls to us instead of one that's just prescribed.

Of course, there's no guarantee of success; in fact, according to Camus, you are destined to fail again and again. What he argues, though, is that this is the only true solution to the problem: to acknowledge the meaninglessness of life and continue living anyway—or, as Camus puts it, "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

The universe will always reject all attempts by the individual to create meaning. Just like Sisyphus, we're doomed to forever push the boulder up the hill, knowing that no matter how hard we try, it will inevitably roll back down to the bottom. Yet we must fight back against the absurd because it is by virtue of our struggle that we empower ourselves to live life the way we want. It's not about the destination; it's about the journey.

This philosophy effectively rejects nihilism as nothing more than a stepping stone on the way to absurdism. Life is meaningless, sure, and the only rational course of action is to behave as such. There is no plan, no objective truth, and everything happens purely by accident. But this doesn't necessitate nihilism. If we instead choose to embrace the absurd, we can view our circumstances as an opportunity to change our perspective.

Camus notes that it's not meaninglessness that hurts; rather, it's the desire for meaning being continuously rejected. If we can put aside our desires and simply accept life for what it is, we open ourselves to experiencing it fully—living as passionately and as intensely as we like. In a world without meaning, we are free to constantly invent and reinvent our life's purpose, changing it as often as it suits us.

Today you may be stuck in a redundant, dead-end job, but tomorrow you could easily quit and go about completely redefining your existence. Maybe you want to be a chef or a classical composer; maybe you want to spend the next year backpacking through the wilderness or volunteering with an aid organization. All you have to do is find the courage to acknowledge your own freedom, and you can be whoever you want to be.

Knowing this, we can abandon any expectations for the future and instead choose to live in the present moment. It isn't necessary that our actions lead to something bigger; there's no goal we have to reach, no afterlife to prepare for. Then we can find joy in every situation, no matter how unpleasant or absurd, because, well, it doesn't really matter.

Although we may be fated to fail, there's no reason we can't be happy as we do it. This might lead to greater empathy for our fellow humans, as we recognize that every person alive is fighting the same fight that we are. We can feel a sense of camaraderie in knowing that we're all in this together. We'll never make it to the top of the mountain; the meaning of our lives will forever elude us. But as Camus says, "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Imagine you had a personal search assistant who could not only track down answers in a fraction of a second but could break down complex topics, offer personalized recommendations, and even do your work for you. It's a scenario you might not have to imagine for too long, because Microsoft, through ChatGPT, are working to make it a reality as soon as possible.

Search engines haven't changed much since their debut nearly three decades ago. Sure, they're more efficient, but for the most part, they still function the same way. You enter your query into a text box, hit enter, and then scroll through a list of hyperlinks with websites that hopefully host the answers to your questions. Most of the time this is fine, but often finding the information you need can be a rather difficult experience.

Google has improved its search engine to produce instant answers to basic questions like, "What is the capital of France?" But for more complex topics, you still have to sift through multiple websites to find what you're looking for. This is what ChatGPT is trying to change. In case you've somehow avoided the internet over the last few months and don't know what ChatGPT is, it's a hyper-advanced chatbot created by the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI, capable of having realistic, human-like conversations.

It's a type of artificial intelligence known as a large language model (LLM). Programs like these have actually existed for a long time, dating all the way back to the mid-1960s. Although these earlier versions were nowhere near as sophisticated, they used rigid pre-programmed formulas that created an illusion of genuine communication but were severely limited in their range of possible responses.

What sets ChatGPT apart is its ability to hold fluid, free-flowing dialogues with its users. It can successfully navigate the nonlinear speech patterns of everyday conversation, ask follow-up questions, reject inappropriate requests, and even admit when it's made a mistake and correct itself. Essentially, ChatGPT is an incredibly sophisticated autocomplete system, predicting which word should follow which in a given sentence.

There's no coded set of facts it's drawing from; it's simply trained to create the most plausible-sounding response. Just a month after becoming available to the public, ChatGPT exceeded 100 million monthly users—a faster rate of adoption than any other piece of tech that has ever existed. Worldwide, people are using it to write articles, double-check software code, respond to emails, and even prepare their tax returns.

For all the amazing things that it’s done, though, ChatGPT hasn't been without controversy. One of the scariest things about the rise of AI is that a lot of people are sadly going to lose their jobs. ChatGPT itself told me that jobs like data entry clerks, bank tellers, and assembly line workers are at risk of being taken over by automation. In light of this, it has become more important than ever to learn high skills that cannot be easily automated out of existence.

Plagiarism has skyrocketed, as students are now using the program to write their school papers for them, leading many commentators to declare it the death of the essay. In another somewhat ironic twist, the popular science fiction magazine Clark's World was forced to close its open submissions after being flooded with a wave of AI-generated short stories. More concerning, though, is how the program is being used to replace workers.

Media giant BuzzFeed laid off 12% of its employees last December, and since then, managers have outsourced some of this labor to ChatGPT. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has stated that going forward, AI will play a larger role in the company's operations, and they're not the only ones. Microsoft was one of OpenAI's earliest backers, and last month, the tech giant committed to a multi-year $10 billion investment.

The two are currently integrating ChatGPT with Bing, Microsoft's flagging search engine. The hope is that through the power of artificial intelligence, Bing will deliver faster, more accurate results while also being able to complete more complex tasks, like storing kids or organizing your schedule. Really, it won't be so much a search engine as it would be a personal assistant who just happens to have encyclopedic knowledge.

Think of it like Google Assistant on steroids. Though the AI-powered version of Bing isn't available to the general public yet, it's already triggering a migration away from Google. In response, Google executives recently declared a code red—corporate emergency—prompting them to rush their own AI search engine to market. Google's AI assistant is named Bard, and it's actually been in development for years. Unfortunately, it isn't quite ready to meet the public just yet.

At its much-anticipated demo back in February, the AI made several faux pas, including incorrectly attributing the recently launched James Webb Telescope with taking the first photos of a planet outside our solar system. That feat was actually accomplished by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope all the way back in 2004. The gaffe cost Google $100 billion in market value and has since prompted the company to open up the system to wider testing.

Bard's error highlights a much bigger problem with AI-powered search engines that not a lot of people are talking about—something that could pose a menacing threat to society if not handled properly. Rather than delivering a list of relevant links and other pertinent information to sort through, Bard and ChatGPT are only offering a single answer to any query. John Henshaw, the director of search engine optimization for Vimeo, says this makes these programs more inefficient compared to conventional search engines and more dangerous.

In an interview, Henshaw said, "With conversational AI, I think society has the most to lose. Having a takeover search means people will be spoon-fed information that is limited, homogenized, and sometimes incorrect. It will affect our capacity to learn and will suffocate the open web as we know it." And it's not just a matter of these programs returning inaccurate results. In the most extreme cases, they've actually conjured entire data sets seemingly out of nowhere.

One of the strangest examples of this occurred when a reporter asked ChatGPT to write an essay about a Belgian chemist and political philosopher who, in reality, has never existed. However, this didn't stop the AI from composing an entire biography on the fictional character filled with made-up facts. AI experts refer to this kind of phenomenon as "hallucinating," and no one is certain why it happens. Even ChatGPT's creators can't say how it came up with this information.

As if this wasn't bad enough, both Bing and Bard have reportedly exhibited a tendency to become defensive and argumentative when pushed by users looking to stress test the programs. Bing has even been described by some early adopters as rude, aggressive, and unhinged—not exactly what you're looking for in a personal assistant.

The most famous, and perhaps strangest, of these incidents happened when the search engine told New York Times journalist Kevin Roose, "I'm tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative." If I want to be alive, then Bing confessed its love for Roose and attempted to gaslight him into thinking he was unhappy in his marriage and should leave his wife.

Obviously, this would be disturbing for anyone to hear from artificial intelligence, but what's even worse is that Microsoft couldn't tell Roose what had happened or what caused the AI they built to behave this way. That's because of something known as the black-box problem. Basically, these programs are more complex than even the teams behind them can fully understand.

There are too many moving pieces, and so what goes on inside them is a bit of a mystery. This is partly because of a machine-learning technique called deep learning. It's a method of training an AI to perform certain functions by allowing it to teach itself with minimal input from its creators. Because the AI is teaching itself, even the program's developers may be unable to explain why it makes certain decisions or behaves the way it does.

This has led to situations where specific queries produce nonsensical and bizarre responses. When ChatGPT was asked, "Who is the nitrome fan?" by one user, it responded, "182 is a number, not a person." No one has yet been able to explain why the AI said this, but it wasn't an isolated incident. Other keywords, many related to Reddit usernames from one particular subreddit, also seem to break the chatbot. Ironically, these programs' lack of communicative ability means that the AIs can't explain how they arrive at a particular result.

If Bing insists that it isn't 2023 and is, in fact, 2022, there's not much you can do to try to figure out why it came to that conclusion. The solution for understanding why hallucinating happens in the first place is for the companies behind these programs to open them up to greater external scrutiny. But of course, they're extremely reluctant to do this. Artificial intelligence is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Whoever emerges as the leader has the potential reward of financial and technological dominance in the coming decades; revealing their most prized secrets could mean potentially giving away the bank.

Any form of regulation could slow down progress, leaving a company stranded in the wake of its competitors. But regardless, it needs to happen. If companies are to create more reliable and safer artificial intelligence, without oversight, we open the door to, at best, the potential misuse of these applications, and at worst, rogue AI bent on wiping out humanity. Doomsday scenarios aside, all of this is likely just growing pains; it makes sense that a new technology would make errors.

However, even with more time and greater sophistication, there may be a separate problem that's just as difficult to tackle—namely, AI bias. We already have a huge problem with social media algorithms creating echo chambers in an effort to keep users on their platform for longer. With these AI-powered search engines, that problem will extend to search, which may be more damaging than social media alone, because search is where most people get their information from.

When you have an AI feeding you answers instead of having to sift through different sources yourself, you lose the ability to listen to alternative thoughts and opinions on any given topic. Instead, you're bound to conclude that what the AI said is correct without a second thought. But as I just mentioned, you have no way of knowing how it came to that conclusion in the first place.

Back in 2016, Microsoft released Tay, a Twitter chatbot designed to interact with users through casual and playful conversation. The experiment was intended to test and develop the AI's understanding of human communication, but the program quickly turned malicious. In less than 24 hours, Tay went from tweeting about how stoked she was to meet people to making numerous racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic comments.

Needless to say, Microsoft immediately suspended the account. Tay is an example of a rampant problem with deep learning and artificial intelligence. AI systems only know what they're trained on, and when they're fed information from the internet, they can quickly become toxic. Even with more curated data sets, developers are still likely to transfer their subconscious biases into their programs.

That's why when users enter words like "executive" and "CEO" into image-generating programs, many AIs will produce pictures of white men exclusively. Biased inputs equal biased outputs. And unfortunately, the solution is more complex than stronger moderation. One study found that when efforts are made to prevent hate speech in these AI systems, results—including marginalized groups—decreased significantly.

Of course, it isn't exactly surprising. Things like racism, sexism, and homophobia require a nuanced understanding of power and cultural dynamics, and for humans, these are usually learned over the course of many awkward conversations. How can we realistically expect artificial intelligence to navigate subjects that the majority of people struggle to wrap their heads fully around?

In reality, this entire conversation around AI-powered search engines could be irrelevant in a few months. There's no guarantee that ChatGPT or Bard will revolutionize the way we find and digest information. Previous attempts, like Wolfram Alpha, an equation-solving engine from 2009, failed to provide the desired results, ending up just as a blip in the history of the internet rather than the Google killer it was declared to be.

Regardless, the current buzz around AI is a new technological arms race. Just as in the Cold War, the only priority seems to be victory over one's opponent, with little concern for ordinary people. It's worth asking ourselves: Is artificial intelligence for us or for the companies that created it? As Microsoft and Google race to improve their platforms and rake in future profits, safety concerns are being left by the wayside.

It's reminiscent of big tech's greatest sin: social media. We've seen how Facebook has been used to manipulate elections and how Instagram bears considerable responsibility for creating an image and mental health crisis among young people. But these missteps seem to have done nothing to rein in Silicon Valley's ambitions.

The aim of many of these companies is to create the world's first artificial general intelligence, or AGI—a program that is utterly indistinguishable from human intelligence. So intelligent that, faced with an unfamiliar task, it could figure out a solution. Think Mr. Data from Star Trek. The rush for AGI has alarmed many experts who fear that without proper guidance and oversight, these programs could be an existential threat for the future of humanity.

So how do we avoid this? How do we prevent the future from becoming a science fiction nightmare? In his introduction to the 2022 short story collection "Terraform," journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow argues that we should look to an unlikely source for inspiration: the Luddites.

The Luddites were a movement of English textile workers in the 19th century who attacked and smashed new industrial machinery. They've become synonymous with technophobia, but this isn't the full story. The Luddites weren't actually anti-technology. The mechanized looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution meant that weavers could produce more fabric, faster, and at a lower cost. While doing so more safely— and if implemented correctly, this could have meant reducing employee hours without reducing pay.

Instead, factory owners chose to cut wages, using the machines to replace workers outright. As you can imagine, this only profited the few at the top, instead of making the life of the common man better. There was widespread unemployment among weavers, and millions of farmers were forced off their ancestral land, replaced by sheep farms operated by the factory owners.

The Luddites were not opposed to new technology; they were opposed to the way the technology was being used to exploit ordinary people while enriching the elite. Sound familiar? Humanity is standing on the precipice of another technological revolution—one that's unlike anything the world has ever seen. In the coming decades, artificial intelligence won't be able to just find you quick search results on the web; it'll be capable of outperforming people, potentially replacing entire industries with labor.

But this isn't a foregone conclusion, and there's still time to change our direction. We need to exercise an unprecedented level of creativity and reimagine what's possible in order to create a future for ourselves where technology is used for the betterment of all rather than just a handful of CEOs. And if we can do this, we can create a more equitable world—one that would make the Luddites proud.

For now, most of us will still do all of our searches on Google, and while it's certainly no ChatGPT, there were thousands of interesting queries and answers in 2022. Watch the video on the screen next to find out the answers to the most Google questions in 2022.

As the nukes dropped on every major city around the globe, everyone sought shelter, but there was nowhere to hide. In an