Joel Pearson

Could you interchange the word comfort with certainty?

Not completely, but the comfort question is, I think it's a really interesting thing to think about.

So you can kind of map out a journey that our society has been on trying to bring more and more comfort to our lives.

And then the last few years, you've seen a backlash against that where people are now, you know, we realise it's not always good for your health to have this comfort and temperature controlled, whatever food you want at the press of a button.

And, you know, it's not good for humans to have that 24-7.

So people are doing, you know, ice baths and saunas and long hikes and trying to put themselves in situations where they have discomfort.

And there's interesting data in terms of the brain that doing uncomfortable things is actually good for the brain.

It changes a particular part of your brain.

And it's kind of this transferable skill that we see that people who live longer have a larger, that part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex is larger in them.

It tends to be more active and grow when people take on hard challenges like running marathons or meditating every day.

And there seems to be some adaptability that you could do it for a physical thing and it would actually give you benefits for a non-physical thing like mental thinking.

But no, but it is a design feature that people intentionally put into tech.

So one of the classic cases was like why Uber was so successful when it launched was, you think back before Uber, you ring up and call a taxi and you just stand there waiting and you have no idea how, you know,

It's coming in one minute, 10 minutes, half an hour.

Then Uber launches this thing and you go, oh, I can see a little car thing coming.

I know exactly when it's coming.

There's no uncertainty.

And people, that feels very nice for people.

Yeah, and it's part of a bigger thing, bigger movement we're seeing at the moment.

So there's this cognitive atrophy.