So the opening pitch, should we give up on seeing evidence as determining the truth?

Um, well, hopefully people can hear me.

Thank you very much for the kind introduction, and it's a great pleasure to be here.

Um, should we give up on evidence, um, finding the truth? Well, no, uh, I don't think so.

Um, so probably like most of you, I think truth matters, and, um, to get to that truth, we usually have to give reasons for why we think something is the case or not.

Um, so if I tell you that, um, there's milk in the fridge and you come home and there's no milk in the fridge, then kinda matter that I lied to you, or that these mushrooms are good to eat and they turn out to be death caps, uh, it matters.

Uh, so truth obviously matters, and, um, when we are coordinating around facts, we're using language to do so.

Back to you, Adrian Sun.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can apply a generational lens to this decline in speaking.

Well, the generational lens can be applied to any change in language and it's a perennial issue in radio programs like this one that people are complaining about the young.

And it's the case pretty much everywhere in the world that language and the way we use language naturally changes.

And so that means that as you get older, you look back at people who are your age and you say, they're not like me and they don't use the right words or they're not talking the right way.

So first thing I would say is that what looks like a blank stare to one person might just be sort of the cultural baseline for another person.

And if you learn the norms of your own generation, it's not as if...

Younger people are a bunch of zombies walking around with no capability for interaction.

I understand that Scandinavians as a population make a lot less small talk.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can apply a generational lens to this decline in speaking.

Well, the generational lens can be applied to any change in language.

And it's a perennial issue in radio programs like this one that people are complaining about the young.

And it's the case pretty much everywhere in the world that language and the way we use language naturally changes.

And so that means that as you get older, you look back at people who are your age and you say, they're not like me and they don't use the right words or they're not talking the right way.

So first thing I would say is that what looks like a blank stare to one person might just be sort of the cultural baseline for another person.

And if you learn the norms of your own generation, it's not as if...

I understand that Scandinavians as a population make a lot less small talk.

One of the things about actually playing, you know, an actual game is that, as you say, you can do it for an hour or two and then you're out again.

That's right.

And I think one of the things that Nguyen starts with is this idea that what you can get from games is a great diversity of different types of activity that you can tap into.

And it helps you to sort of explore your own agency in such a way that it's kind of therapeutic in a sense, ultimately.

it can lead to improvement in you figuring out who you are, what you want, what you want to do.

So it's sort of got that flavor in the book.

What I think got to me a little bit was this idea that many people will start out with that sense of nausea or kind of confusion about what they really want in life.

There are so many areas of life in which we are absolutely forced into measuring and counting things like doing our tax return or, you know, knowing what speed we're going in a car or all these kind of things that we actually sign up for extra metrics in our life is kind of slightly bizarre, isn't it?