Nov 4, 2026 · 41 min · 10 segments
Hello, Matriarchs! If you're sick of AI popping up everywhere, join the club. Honestly, at this point, it's getting a little creepy. Between AI-generated influencers and the growing obsession with…
Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because I read this article in The Atlantic.
There was a follow up that was recently written like back in September or August.
But the original article was about how readers like reading has declined tremendously and people aren't reading novels, let alone, you know, finishing an entire article.
But, you know, I often wonder how accurate that is because I've always thought reading is subjective.
Like people are some people are going to love it and some people are not in the same way that some people love film and some people don't.
And so I wonder, like, do you think that that's a contributor to why readership has gone down in the last like five years? Yeah.
But I do think a lot of technologies that we've, you know, really embraced and used very heavily in our lives are partly for what accounts for this.
I mean, half of the job is, you know, what everybody thinks of when they think of CIA, the clandestine service, but the other half is the kind of work that I did over my career, which is analysis.
You know, you have to be able to read and ingest and understand a lot of information and to be able to make correct assessments about what that information is telling you.
Part of it is how the brain does digital reading is a little bit different than from physical books and that sort of thing.
But probably the main takeaway for these days is that it's the short form that's sort of destroying our ability to carry information.
It's getting to the point of any thoughts in our hands, right? And it might be easier to see with video.
Lately, they've been saying that short form video, TikToks, YouTubes, are particularly to blame, even short article that you read on your phone, because it's force feeding stuff at you, very short bursts, and you don't have time to remember one before another one, which probably has nothing to do with what you just saw.
Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because I read this article in The Atlantic.
There was a follow up that was recently written like back in September or August.
But the original article was about how readers like reading has declined tremendously and people aren't reading novels, let alone, you know, finishing an entire article.
But, you know, I often wonder how accurate that is because I've always thought reading is subjective.
Like people are some people are going to love it and some people are not in the same way that some people love film and some people don't.
And so I wonder, like, do you think that that's a contributor to why readership has gone down in the last like five years? Yeah.
But I do think a lot of technologies that we've, you know, really embraced and used very heavily in our lives are partly for what accounts for this.
I mean, half of the job is, you know, what everybody thinks of when they think of CIA, the clandestine service, but the other half is the kind of work that I did over my career, which is analysis.
You know, you have to be able to read and ingest and understand a lot of information and to be able to make correct assessments about what that information is telling you.
Part of it is how the brain does digital reading is a little bit different than from physical books and that sort of thing.
But probably the main takeaway for these days is that it's the short form that's sort of destroying our ability to carry information.
It's getting to the point of any thoughts in our hands, right? And it might be easier to see with video.
Lately, they've been saying that short form video, TikToks, YouTubes, are particularly to blame, even short article that you read on your phone, because it's force feeding stuff at you, very short bursts, and you don't have time to remember one before another one, which probably has nothing to do with what you just saw.
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