Disturbing History - Episode 1000559

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors, Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. Look at your hand. No, seriously.

Look at it right now. Chances are pretty good that there is a device within arm's reach of you at this very moment. A sleek rectangle of glass and metal that contains more computing power than every computer that existed on Earth in 1969 combined. A machine capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge, connecting you instantly with anyone on the planet, and capturing the entire. higher visible spectrum of light. And what do you use it for? Scrolling.

Endless, mindless, hypnotic scrolling. Welcome back to the Disturbing History Podcast. Tonight we need to have a conversation. Not about ancient civilizations, serial killers, or the dark secrets buried in our past. Tonight we need to talk about something far more insidious. Something that is happening to you, to me, to nearly every human being on this planet right now,

At this very second, we need to talk about the new mind control. And before you roll your eyes and assume this is going to be some tinfoil hat rant about government satellites beaming thoughts into your skull, let me be very clear about something. The control mechanisms I'm about to describe to you are not secret. They are not hidden. In fact, the people who designed them have openly discussed how they work, written books about their methods, and given TED talks explaining exactly how they engineered your behavior, without your knowledge or consent.

The most disturbing part of this story is not that you are being controlled. The most disturbing part is that you know you are being controlled. You can feel it happening to you, and yet you cannot seem to stop. Think about the last time you picked up your phone. Maybe it was five minutes ago. Maybe it was 30 seconds ago. Do you even remember why you picked it up? Or did your hand just reach for it automatically?

Like a reflex. Like scratching an itch you did not even know. know you had. Think about the last time you intended to check one thing online, just one quick thing, and then looked up to discover that 45 minutes had vanished, gone, evaporated, and you could not tell me, could not tell yourself what you had actually learned or accomplished in that time. Think about the way a single notification sound can hijack your attention, derail your train of thought, and create a nagging anxiety until you check what it says. Even when you know, you know, No, you absolutely know, that it is probably nothing important.

This is not an accident. This is not a bug in the system. This is the system working exactly as designed. Tonight, I am going to take you on a journey through the evolution of pop culture and mass media. From the earliest experiments in crowd psychology to the algorithmic nightmare machines that govern our digital lives. I am going to show you with documented evidence and historical fact how the most brilliant minds of the last century have dedicated themselves to a single project, figuring out how to capture, direct, and monetize your attention. And I'm going to explain why, for the first time in human history, we may be

witnessing something unprecedented, not just control of information, not just manipulation of opinion, but the actual rewiring of human consciousness itself. The question is not whether this is happening to you. The question is whether there is anything left of the real you underneath. To understand how we got here, we need to go back more than a century to a young man named Edward Bernays, who would single-handedly invent the modern world of manipulation. Edward Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891. His family moved to New York when he was a child, and he grew up in a household where intellectual ideas were treated like currency.

This was partly because his uncle happened to be Sigmund Freud, the man who invented psychoanalysis and mapped the landscape of the unconscious mind. Bernays understood something that few people of his era grasped. He understood that human beings do not make decisions based on logic, reason, or their own best interests. Human beings make decisions based on emotion, instinct, and forces within their own psyche that they do not understand and cannot control. And he understood that if you knew how those forces worked, you could make people do almost anything. His first major triumph came in 1929. The American Tobacco Company had a problem.

Women were not smoking cigarettes. It was considered socially unacceptable, unladylike, a violation of cultural norms, and the tobacco industry was leaving an enormous amount of money on the table. They hired Bernays to fix it. Now, a traditional advertiser might have created advertisements showing women smoking, explaining the benefits of tobacco, trying to logically persuade female consumers to take up the habit. But Bernays was not a traditional advertiser.

He was something new. He was what he called a counsel on public relations. Bernays reached out to a psychoanalyst and asked a simple question. What do cigarettes mean to women on an unconscious level? The answer came back that cigarettes were symbols of male power. They were torches of freedom, phallic symbols that represented the penis and the power that went with it. So Bernays staged an event. During the 1929 Easter Day parade in New York City,

he arranged for a group of fashionable young women to march down Fifth Avenue while smoking cigarettes. He contacted newspapers beforehand and told them that a group of suffragettes would be lighting torches of freedom as a protest for equality. The newspapers covered it extensively. The story went national, then international. Within weeks, the social taboo against women smoking in public

began to crumble. Within a year, cigarette sales to women had exploded. Bernays had not changed any laws, had not spent millions on advertising, had not made a single logical argument about the benefits of smoking. He had simply tapped into deeper desires, associated his product with a powerful emotional narrative, and let the human mind do the rest. He had manufactured consent. Bernays would go on to write a book by that title,

and in his 1928 work called propaganda, he laid out his philosophy with chilling clarity. Listen to what he wrote. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. Read that again.

The invisible government which is the true ruling power. This was not a conspiracy theory. This was not an accusation. This was Bernays describing his own job, his own life's work, and the field he was creating. He was proudly announcing that, yes, there are people whose job it is to manipulate you without your knowledge. And yes, those people hold more real power than elected officials.

And he was just getting started. Bernays went on to work for major corporations, political campaigns, and even the United States government. He was instrumental in convincing Americans to support World War I through propaganda campaigns. He helped United Fruit Company engineer a coup in Guatemala by manipulating American public opinion to support what was essentially a corporate takeover of a foreign nation. But perhaps his most lasting legacy was the transformation of American consumer culture itself. Before Bernays, the prevailing philosophy of business was that you made useful products

and explained their utility to potential customers. After Bernays, the game changed completely. Now the goal was to connect products to emotional needs, unconscious desires, and identity itself. You were not buying a car. You were buying freedom, power, sex appeal, social status. You were not buying cigarettes. You were making a statement about who you were.

You were not buying a product at all. You were buying a version of yourself. This insight, this transformation of commerce into identity construction, would prove to be the foundation upon which all modern manipulation rests. And it was just the beginning. If Edward Bernays figured out how to hack the human mind, television figured out how to industrialize the process. The first commercial television broadcast began in the United States in the late 1940s.

By 1950, there were about 4 million television sets in American homes. By 1960, that number had exploded to 52 million. In a single decade, this glowing box became the center of American domestic life. Think about what that meant. For the first time in human history, the same images, the same sounds, the same narratives were being pumped simultaneously into the majority of homes in an entire nation. Every evening, tens of millions of people would sit in their living rooms, their attention captured, their minds open,

receiving the same carefully constructed messages. And those messages were constructed very carefully indeed. The economics of television created something unprecedented, the attention market. Television networks did not sell programs to viewers. Television networks sold viewers to advertisers. The business model was simple. Create content, compelling enough to capture eyeballs, then rent those eyeballs out to companies that wanted to influence them.

This seems obvious to us now, but it represented a revolutionary shift in the relationship between media and audience. The audience was no longer the customer. The audience was the product, and the implications of that shift were profound. If your business model is selling attention, then the quality of content matters less than its ability to capture and hold viewers. If your business model is delivering audiences to advertisers, then you are not in the entertainment business or the, the information business. You're actually in the behavior modification business. Television programmers began to develop an intuitive understanding of what captured human attention. Conflict, drama, fear, novelty, sex, violence, emotional intensity of any kind.

The programs that succeeded were not necessarily the most informative or the most artistic or the most beneficial to viewers. They were the most compelling, the hardest to look away from. The term for this would later be called brain candy, content that provides no nutritional value but triggers the pleasure centers anyway. And television was extremely good at providing it, but it was the advertisements themselves that represented the true culmination of Bernays's vision. 30-second commercials became intensely researched psychological operations. Advertisers employed focus groups, surveys, and eventually brain scanning technology to determine exactly which images were, sounds and associations would most effectively implant their message in viewers' minds. The Super Bowl, America's most watched annual television event, became famous not just for football,

but for the premiere of new commercials. Think about the absurdity of that. People were excited to watch advertisements. The manipulation had become entertainment itself. Meanwhile, the news changed too. The line between information and entertainment began to blur. News programs discovered that fear generated ratings. If it bleeds, it leads became the unofficial motto of local television news. Stories were selected not for their importance, but for their emotional impact. Complex issues were reduced to simple narratives with clear heroes and villains. And viewers watched, hours and hours and hours of their lives, spent in front of the glowing box. By 1990, the average American was watching seven hours of television per day.

Seven hours. That is nearly half of waking life spent in a state of passive reception, absorbing messages designed by people whose explicit goal was to influence behavior. But even this level of exposure was not enough for what was coming next. The Internet was supposed to change everything. And it did. Just not in the way the utopians predicted. In the early days of the World Wide Web, there was a prevailing optimism about what networked computing would mean for humanity. Information wanted to be free. The gatekeepers of traditional media would be circumvented.

Everyone would have a voice. The wisdom of crowds would emerge. Democracy would be strengthened as citizens gained access to unlimited information and the ability to connect directly with one another. Some of this actually happened. The internet did democratize publishing. It did create new communities. It did provide access to information that would have been impossible to obtain in early

eras. But something else happened too. Something the optimists did not predict. The internet created an attention crisis. Think about the economics. In the world of television, there were only three major networks. They had captive audiences. If you wanted to watch something, you watched what they were showing. Competition for attention existed, but it was limited. The internet created unlimited competition. Suddenly there were millions of websites, billions of pages, and essentially infinite amount of content competing for human attention. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

And human attention remained finite. There are only so many hours in the day. There's only so much anyone can look at. This created an entirely new field, the science of capturing and retaining attention online. The techniques developed rapidly. Researchers discovered that certain colors attracted more clicks. certain words and headlines generated more engagement.

Certain layouts kept users on pages longer. The entire discipline of user experience design emerged, ostensibly to make websites more user-friendly, but actually beneath the surface, to make them more addictive. And then came the notification. The notification is so ubiquitous now that it seems like a natural part of digital life, but it was designed very deliberately

and its effects on human psychology are profound. A notification is an interruption. It breaks into your attention, demands an immediate response, and creates a micro-stress response in your nervous system. Is it important? Is something wrong? Do I need to respond?

Your brain releases a small amount of cortisol, the stress hormone, and a small amount of dopamine, the reward chemical. This combination is powerful. stress plus reward, anxiety plus relief. The same cocktail that keeps gamblers pulling the lever on slot machines. And every time you check a notification,

every time you respond to that little ding or that red number on an icon, you are training your brain. You are strengthening neural pathways that make you more responsive to interruptions, more anxious when separated from your devices, more dependent on that little hit of stimulation. The people who designed these systems knew exactly what they were doing. Near Isle literally wrote the book on this. His 2014 work called Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products, lays out the exact psychological mechanisms used to create addictive technology.

The book describes something called the Hook Model, a four-step process of trigger, action, variable reward, and investment that is designed to create unconscious habits. The trigger is the number. notification, the email, the red badge on the icon. The action is checking the app. The variable reward is the unpredictable content you find, sometimes interesting, sometimes not, like a slot machine. And the investment is anything you put into the platform, your posts, your connections, your data, that makes you more likely to return. This is not speculation about how these systems might work. This is explicit documentation of how they were intentionally designed. and it was about to get much, much worse.

In 2006, a designer named Aza Raskin invented something called Infinite Scroll. Before Infinite Scroll, web pages had pagination. You would view a page of content, and when you reach the bottom, you would have to click a button to see the next page. That click was a moment of friction, a moment of choice,

a moment when you could decide whether to continue or to stop. Infinite Scroll eliminated that moment. Now when you reach the bottom of the content, more content simply appeared. No click required. No decision necessary. The feed just kept going, and going, and going. Raskin later expressed profound regret for his invention. In interviews, he has described Infinite Scroll as one of the most destructive design patterns ever created.

He estimated that Infinite Scroll wastes about 200,000 human lifetimes every single day. 200,000 lifetimes. every day. But from the perspective of the companies implementing infinite scroll, it was not a bug. It was a feature. Because the business model was still the same as television, selling attention to advertisers. An infinite scroll captured more attention than any design pattern that came before it. Think about your own behavior. Think about the times you have picked up your phone to check one thing, started scrolling, and then looked up to discover that 30, 40, 60 minutes had vanished. You did not decide to spend that time scrolling.

You did not consciously choose to consume that content. The choice was made for you, or rather, the possibility of choice was designed away. This is the key insight. Modern technology is not designed to give you choices. It is designed to eliminate them. Every friction point removed is a decision point eliminated. Every seamless experience is an experience where your agency has been subtracted from the equation. from the equation.

And the result is behavior that feels automatic, involuntary, almost mechanical. You are not using the app. The app is using you. Social media took everything we have discussed so far and weaponized it against the deepest structures of human psychology. Human beings are social animals. We evolved in small tribes where our survival depended on our place in the social hierarchy. Being excluded from the group meant death. Being accepted, valued and admired meant survival and reproduction.

These instincts are hardwired into our brains at the deepest level. We cannot simply decide not to care what others think of us, any more than we can decide not to feel hungry or not to flinch when something moves toward our face. Social validation is a primal need, and social media is a machine that exploits this need with ruthless efficiency. The like button was introduced by Facebook and two, It seems so simple, so innocuous. A way to show appreciation for content without having to write a comment.

But its psychological effects are anything but simple. When you post something on social media and receive likes, your brain releases dopamine. The more likes, the bigger the hit. But here's the crucial part. The timing is variable. You do not know when the likes will come or how many you will receive. This variable reward schedule is the same mechanism that makes slot machines so addictive. It is literally the most effective technique known to psychology for creating compulsive behavior,

and it gets worse, because social media also introduced the possibility of social rejection at unprecedented scale. Before social media, if someone did not like something you said, you might not even know. Social feedback was limited to face-to-face interactions. Now, your thoughts, your photos, your life are posted publicly, and the absence of validation is itself a form of rejection. Few likes means few people care. No comments means you are being ignored. Studies have shown that the anticipation of social media feedback activates the same brain

regions as anticipation of other rewards like food, money, and sex. The craving for likes is not metaphorical. It is neurological. But perhaps the most sinister feature of social media is not what it does to individuals. It is what it does to truth. The content you see on social media is not random. It is not chronological. It is not even necessarily chosen by the people you follow.

It is selected for you by an algorithm. And that algorithm has one goal. Keep you engaged. Engagement in the language of social media companies means time spent on platform. The more time you, you spend scrolling, watching, reading, clicking, the more advertisements can be served to you. The more data can be collected about your preferences. The more valuable you become is a product. So the algorithm learns what keeps you engaged. It runs millions of experiments,

tests countless variations, and identifies with increasing precision exactly what content will capture your attention and hold it. And what captures human attention? outrage captures attention, fear captures attention, conflict captures attention. Content that triggers strong emotional responses, especially negative emotional responses, generates more engagement than content that is calm, nuanced, or thoughtful. A 2018 study by researchers at MIT analyzed the spread of true and false news stories on Twitter. They found that false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories. False stories spread faster, reached more people, and generated more engagement at every level.

This is not because people are stupid or because they want to believe lies. It is because false stories, especially outrageous ones, trigger stronger emotional responses. They are more surprising, more fear-inducing, more anger-provoking. And the algorithm does not care about truth. The algorithm cares about engagement. The result is an information environment that is systematically biased, toward extremity, conflict, and falsehood. Not by design, not through any human conspiracy, but through the emergent behavior of systems optimized for engagement. We have

built machines that learn through trial and error how to manipulate human emotions. And then we let those machines shape what billions of people see and believe every single day. Former Facebook executive Chalmouth Pala Hopatia said in 2017 that the short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. He said, I feel tremendous guilt. But the machines keep running. While we have been focused on screens, an equally sophisticated science of manipulation has been developing in the physical world. Walk into any major retail store and you are walking into a carefully engineered psychological environment.

Every detail, from the floor tiles to the ceiling height, to the placement of products, to the music playing overhead, has been researched, tested, and optimized to influence your behavior. It starts with the entrance. Most retail stores place essential items, the things you actually came to buy, at the back of the store. This forces you to walk past countless other products, increasing the likelihood of impulse purchases.

grocery stores typically place bread, milk, and eggs as far from the entrance as possible for exactly this reason. The layout is designed to slow you down. Wider aisles encourage browsing. Strategic placement of displays forces you to navigate around obstacles, extending your path through the store. The longer you spend in the store, the more you buy. Product placement is a science unto itself. Eye-level shelves are premium real estate. Products place there sell significantly better than products on lower or higher shelves. This is why companies pay retailers slotting fees, essentially rent for prime shelf position. Expensive brand name products go at eye level. Cheaper alternatives go on the bottom

shelf where you have to bend down to see them. End caps, the displays at the end of aisles generate massive increases in sales even when the products displayed are not actually on sale. The mere placement suggests a special offer. triggering purchasing behavior even when no real value is being provided. Colors matter. Red and yellow trigger hunger and impulse buying, which is why fast food logos use them almost universally. Blue and green suggests trust and calm,

which is why banks and health care companies favor them. Store designers use color psychology to influence mood and behavior throughout the shopping experience. Sint matters. Certain smells can increase appetite, reduce stress, or create feelings of comfort. Some stores pump artificial scents through their ventilation systems. The smell of baking bread in a grocery store is often artificial, designed to trigger hunger and increase food purchases.

Music matters. Slower tempo music causes shoppers to move more slowly through stores and spend more money. Studies have shown that wine stores playing French music sell more French wine, while stores playing German music sell more German wine. shoppers are not consciously aware of this influence. And then there is pricing. The 99 cent ending on prices is not an accident. It is called charm pricing.

And it works because our brains process numbers from left to right. We perceive $2.99 as closer to $2 than to $3, even though the difference is trivial. Retailers have known this for over a century. Bundle pricing, $3 for $10, works even when buying $3 provides, no discount over buying individually. The suggestion of a deal triggers purchasing behavior, regardless of actual value. Loyalty programs create sunk cost fallacy. Once you have accumulated points with a retailer, you feel compelled to continue shopping there to avoid wasting your

accumulated investment, even if competitors offer better prices or products. Sale pricing has become so ubiquitous that many products are never actually sold at their listed retail price. The original price exists only as an anchor, making the sale price seem like a better deal than it actually is. Some retailers have been sued for this practice, but it continues because it works. None of this is secret. Retail psychology is a well-documented field with academic journals, conferences, and professional consultants. The manipulation is industrialized, professionalized, and utterly normalized. And you walk through these carefully engineered environments thinking you are making free choice.

based on your own preferences. There's a widely cited claim that the average human attention span has declined to eight seconds, supposedly less than that of a goldfish. This specific statistic is probably not accurate. It appears to have originated from a Microsoft Marketing Report and has no clear scientific source. But the underlying phenomenon is very real. Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark analyzed data from Twitter,

Twitter, Google, movies, and other sources to study how long topics maintain public attention. They found clear evidence that collective attention spans are shrinking. Topics that once would have dominated public discourse for weeks now flame out in days or hours. Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, has conducted extensive research on attention in the digital age. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Her studies using computer monitoring and wearable sensors found that the average time people spend on a single task before switching has declined from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to roughly 47 seconds in 2012.

More recent measurements suggest even further decline. 47 seconds. That is how long we can focus on one thing before our attention darts elsewhere. The implications for deep thinking, complex problem solving, and the, the kind of sustained concentration necessary for meaningful work are profound. Reading a book requires hours of sustained attention. Understanding a complex issue requires the ability to hold multiple ideas in mind simultaneously while working through their relationships.

Having a meaningful conversation requires full presence and engagement over time. All of these capacities are atrophying, and this is not happening by accident. Every technological system we have discussed, the notifications, the infinite scroll, the variable rewards, the algorithm optimized content, all of these are designed to capture attention in short bursts. They are training our brains to expect constant stimulation, constant novelty, constant switching. The brain is plastic. It changes in response to experience. Neurons that fire together, wire together. and we are wiring our brains for distraction.

Some researchers have begun to use the term acquired attention deficit to describe what is happening. Not a disorder in the traditional sense, but a systematic degradation of attentional capacity caused by environmental factors. We are not born this way. We are being made this way. To understand what is happening at a biological level,

we need to talk about dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries signals between neurons in the brain. It is often described as the pleasure chemical, but that is not quite accurate. Dopamine is really about anticipation, motivation, and wanting. When you experience something pleasurable, dopamine is released. But here is the key. Even more dopamine is released when you anticipate that pleasure.

The craving is stronger than the satisfaction, and when rewards are unpredictable, when you do not know if or when the pleasure will come, dopamine release is maximized. This is why slot machines are so addictive. This is why checking email or social media can feel so compulsive. The variable reward, the possibility of something good, keeps dopamine flowing. But there is a catch. The brain seeks balance.

When dopamine is released repeatedly in response to a stimulus, the brain compensates by reducing its sensitivity to, dopamine. You need more stimulation to get the same response. This is tolerance. And when the stimulus is removed, you experience the opposite state. Lower than baseline dopamine. Dysphoria, restlessness, craving. This is withdrawal. The cycle of tolerance and withdrawal is the hallmark of addiction. And by any reasonable definition, billions of people on this planet are now addicted to their devices. Dr. Anna Lemke, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, has written extensively about what she calls the

dopamine nation. She argues that we have created an environment of unprecedented dopamine stimulation, from social media to pornography, to video games, to online shopping, to on-demand entertainment. And this environment is fundamentally incompatible with human well-being. We are not adapted for this level of stimulation. Our reward systems evolved in an environment of scarcity, where dopamine spikes were rare and signaled genuinely important events. Now we can trigger those spikes at will over and over with the device in our pocket. The result is widespread anadonia, the inability to feel pleasure from normal activities. Life without the phone seems boring, gray, unsatisfying.

Reading a book cannot compete with scrolling. A walk in nature cannot compete with a video game. A real conversation cannot compete with the endless novelty of social media. We have raised the baseline of stimulation so high that ordinary human experiences no longer register as pleasurable. And we wonder why rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness have skyrocketed in recent years. Everything we have discussed affects adults, people whose brains were largely developed before the smartphone era. But what about children whose brains are developing inside this environment? The evidence is deeply troubling.

rates of teenage depression, anxiety, and suicide have increased dramatically since around 2012, which corresponds precisely with the mass adoption of smartphones and social media among young people. This correlation has been documented across multiple countries and appears across different socioeconomic groups. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, has compiled extensive evidence linking social media use to the mental health crisis, among young people. His research suggests that the effect is particularly strong for girls, who tend to use social media more intensively

and who are more vulnerable to the social comparison and appearance-based content that dominates platforms like Instagram. One study found that Instagram's own internal research concluded that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. The company knew its product was harming children, and continued to operate it anyway. But the effects go beyond mental health.

There is evidence that intensive use of digital media during childhood affects brain development itself. Studies using brain imaging have found differences in brain structure between children who use screens heavily and those who do not. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for executive function, impulse control, and delayed gratification, appears to be particularly affected, Reading comprehension scores have declined significantly in recent years, even as educational attainment has increased.

Children are spending more years in school but reading less well than previous generations. The ability to tolerate boredom, which sounds trivial but is actually fundamental to creativity, deep thinking, and self-regulation, is disappearing. Children who are never bored, who always have a screen to distract them, never develop the capacity to sit with discomfort and generate their own entertainment. We are conducting a massive, uncontrolled experiment on an entire generation of human beings, and the early results suggest we are doing something terrible to them. Here is something that should terrify you.

The majority of information you consume across all media is controlled by a tiny number of corporations. In 1983, 90% of American media was owned by 50 different companies. By 2011, that same 90% was owned by just six companies, six corporations controlling what most Americans saw, read, and heard. Those six corporations are Comcast, Disney, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS. Each of them owns hundreds of smaller media entities. Television networks, movie studios, publishing houses, news organizations, theme parks, streaming services. The internet was supposed to decentralize media to break the monopoly of traditional gatekeepers. In some ways, it did.

Anyone can start a blog, create a YouTube channel, or build an audience on social media. But the platforms themselves have become the new gatekeepers. And those platforms are controlled by an even smaller number of companies. Google handles over 90% of all search queries worldwide. Facebook, along with its subsidiaries, Instagram and WhatsApp, dominates social networking. Amazon controls nearly 40% of all online retail in the United States and provides cloud computing infrastructure to much of the internet. These companies do not just distribute content. They shape it. Their algorithms decide what gets seen and what gets buried.

Their policies determine what is allowed and what is banned. Their economic incentives determine what kinds of content are rewarded with visibility and monetization. And their primary goal is not to inform you, entertain you, or serve your interests. Their primary goal is to capture your attention and sell it. We have replaced a system where a few corporate executives decided what you would see with a system where algorithms make that decision. And those algorithms are optimized for engagement, not truth, not quality, not your well-being. This is not a conspiracy in the traditional sense. There is no smoke-filled room where evil executives plan to enslave humanity.

But the outcome is similar. A small number of entities, driven by profit motives, exert enormous influence over what billions of people think and believe. The invisible government that Bernade described a century ago has not disappeared. It has become more efficient, more pervasive, and more invisible than ever. Perhaps the most profound change is not what we consume, but who we become. Social media has created a new imperative. The construction and performance of identity for public consumption.

We do not simply live our lives. We curate them. We present them. We market them. Think about the last time you experience something beautiful. A sunset. A meal. A moment with someone you love.

Did you experience it fully in the moment? Or did part of your mind immediately start composing the post? Framing the photo. Crafting the caption. This constant awareness of the audience, the performative self is historically unprecedented. Human beings have always managed their social impressions to some degree, but we have never before had a tool that broadcasts our curated identity to hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously, that provides quantified feedback in the form of

likes and comments, and that creates a permanent, searchable archive of our self-presentation. The effects are predictable. Social comparison runs rampant. We compare our messy, complicated real lives to everyone else's carefully edited highlight reels. We see people who appear happier, more successful, more beautiful, more loved. And even though we know intellectually that we are seeing a constructed image, the emotional impact is real. Authenticity becomes paradoxical. We are pressured to be authentic on platforms designed for performance. The result is performed authenticity, carefully crafted vulnerability designed to generate engagement. Real authenticity would mean not caring about the audience response,

but the entire system is built around audience response. Identity becomes fluid and external. When your sense of self is constantly reflected back through the responses of others, when your value is quantified in followers and likes, the internal sense of who you are begins to dissolve. You become what you perform. and what you perform is determined by what generates engagement. Some theorists have described this as the collapse of the private self.

There was a time when most of what you thought, felt, and did was known only to yourself in a small circle of intimates. Now the pressure is to externalize everything, to share every thought, to document every experience, to make the private public. What happens to the self when there is no private sphere? What happens to identity when it exists primarily as a performance for an audience?

We may be finding out. Social media promised to connect us. In some ways, it has. We can maintain contact with friends across distances. We can find communities of people who share our interests. We can witness events happening around the world in real time. But there is mounting evidence that social media is actually making us more lonely, not less. A 2017 study found that,

that young adults who use social media most heavily had significantly higher levels of perceived social isolation than those who used it less. Other research has found correlations between social media use and loneliness, depression, and anxiety. How can a tool for connection make us lonelier? Several mechanisms appear to be at work. First, social media displaces real social interaction. Time spent scrolling is time not spent in face-to-face conversation. The effortless pseudo-connection of likes and comments substitutes for the effortful real connection of showing up,

being present, and engaging deeply with another human being. Second, social media creates comparison and envy. We see others who appear to have more friends, more fun, more love. Even when we know these images are curated, the comparison hurts. An envy is corrosive to genuine connection. Third, social media encourages shallow, interaction. A like takes less than a second. A comment takes a few seconds. A thoughtful letter or phone call takes minutes or hours. The economics of attention push us toward the quick and superficial.

Fourth, social media creates parisocial relationships, one-sided relationships with people who do not know we exist. We follow celebrities, influencers, and content creators. We feel we know them, but they have no idea who we are. This simulation of intimacy without reciprocity is ultimately unsatisfying. The loneliness epidemic predates social media, but social media has not solved it. If anything, it has made the problem worse by providing a simulation of connection that feels real enough to substitute for the real thing, but is not nourishing in the way genuine human connection is. We are more connected than ever, and more alone than ever. That is not a paradox. It is a consequence of the kind of connection we are creating. We have always lived in a world where people

disagreed about facts, but we used to share a common basis for determining what was true. Now, even that shared foundation is crumbling. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The combination of algorithmic content curation, social media echo chambers, and the weaponization of disinformation has created an environment where people increasingly live in separate realities. The algorithm shows you content similar to content you have engaged with before. If you click on one conspiracy theory video, you will be shown more. The system is not trying to radicalize you. It is trying to keep you watching. But radicalization is a predictable consequence. Social media allows us to curate our information environment, to exclude dissenting

voices. We unfollow, unfriend, or block anyone who challenges our beliefs. We join groups where everyone agrees with us. The result is epistemic bubbles where wrong beliefs are never challenged and extreme views are normalized. Meanwhile, bad actors have learned to exploit these systems. State-sponsored disinformation campaigns, politically motivated fake news, conspiracy theories designed for engagement. All of these flood our information environment. And the platforms, optimized for engagement rather than truth, spread them efficiently.

The result is not just that we disagree about politics or values. The result is that we disagree about basic facts, about what events actually happened, about what words were actually said, about what reality actually is. Studies have shown that correcting misinformation often does not work. People who believe false claims frequently do not update their beliefs when shown evidence. In some cases, correction attempts actually strengthen false beliefs. a phenomenon called the backfire effect. We have built an information environment

that systematically advantages falsehood over truth, extremity over moderation, and emotion over reason. And we are seeing the consequences in our politics, our public health, and our social cohesion. When people cannot agree on basic facts, democracy itself becomes impossible. Democracy requires deliberation, compromise, and the ability to change minds through argument.

None of that works when every fact is contested and every source is considered biased. Let us be very clear about something. The addictive properties of modern technology are not an accident. They are not an unintended consequence. They are the explicit goal of design. Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, said in 2017 that the company set out to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible. He described how features like the like button were designed. designed to give you a little dopamine hit, to encourage you to upload more content, to keep you

engaged. He said, it's a social validation feedback loop, exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. Exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. That's not my characterization. That's the characterization of someone who helped build these systems. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist who become one of technology's most prominent critics, describes smartphones as slot machines in our pockets. He has testified before Congress about how technology companies use persuasive design techniques borrowed from the gambling industry. Pull to refresh, the gesture where you swipe down to reload your feed mimics the motion of pulling a slot machine lever. And like a slot machine, the reward

is variable. Sometimes you get new content. Sometimes you do not. This variable reward schedule is precisely what makes the behavior so compulsive. Notification systems are carefully designed to maximize urgency. The red color of notification badges triggers alertness. The sounds are calibrated to be hard to ignore. The timing is unpredictable, which maximizes checking behavior. AutoPlay features on video platforms eliminate the friction of choosing to watch another video. The next video just starts. Before you know it, hours have past. Default settings are designed to maximize data collection and engagement, not to protect your privacy or your attention. Users have to actively opt out, and most people never do.

All of this is document. All of this is intentional. All of this is designed by highly paid professionals whose job is to capture your attention and keep it captured. You are not weak-willed for finding these systems difficult to resist. They are specifically engineered to be difficult to resist. Billions of dollars in some of the smartest minds of our generation have been devoted to the project of making you pick up your phone. So what happens to a society that spends hours every day in these engineered environments? What happens to our capacity for thought, for concentration, for wisdom? The evidence suggests we are getting worse at thinking. A phenomenon called the Flynn effect documented that IQ scores increased steadily throughout the 20th century.

Humans were getting smarter. or at least better at the kinds of tasks measured by IQ tests. But recent research suggests the Flynn effect has reversed. IQ scores in several developed countries have begun to decline. The reversal appears to have started around the turn of the millennium and accelerated in recent years. This is correlation, not causation. We cannot prove that technology is responsible for declining cognitive performance.

But the timing is suggestive, and the mechanism is plausible. If we are training our brains for distraction, if we are eroding our capacity for sustained attention, if we are outsourcing memory and navigation and calculation to our devices, then cognitive decline is exactly what we would expect. Critical thinking requires the ability to hold multiple perspectives in mind, to evaluate evidence, to resist emotional appeals, to follow complex arguments. All of this is hard. All of this requires sustained cognitive effort, and all of this is exactly what our information environment discourages. We consume information in fragments. We form opinions based on headlines without reading articles. We react to everything immediately,

emotionally, without reflection. The algorithmic environment rewards simplicity over complexity, certainty over nuance, outrage over understanding. Content that makes you think is at a disadvantage compared to content that makes you feel. And so we think less. We feel more. We become more confident in our opinions while understanding less about the issues. We become more tribal, more reactive, more manipulable. This is not accidental.

This is the logical endpoint of systems designed to capture attention at the expense of everything else. I've spent this episode describing a problem. Let me spend a few minutes on what we might do. do about it. Awareness. You cannot resist manipulation you do not recognize. The fact that you have listened to this episode that you're thinking about these issues is itself a form of resistance. The manipulation works best when it is invisible. Making it visible is the first step. Friction. The systems are designed to be frictionless, seamless, effortless. Every barrier removed is a choice removed. So add friction back. Put your phone in another room. Delete social media apps from your

phone and only access them from a computer. Turn off notifications. Make it harder to engage in the behaviors you want to change. Alternative practices. The dopamine system that makes technology addictive can be redirected. Exercise, meditation, creative work, face-to-face social interaction, time and nature. All of these provide genuine satisfaction that does not require tolerance escalation. Build practices that nourish rather than deplete. Protect children. Adults can make informed choices about their technology use. Children cannot. The developing brain is particularly vulnerable to the effects of these systems. Delay smartphone access. Limit screen time. Create phone-free spaces and times. Demand change. The companies that built these systems

respond to public pressure, regulation, and economic incentives. Support legislation that protects privacy, requires transparency about algorithmic systems, and holds companies accountable for harms. Vote with your attention. Support media and platforms that prioritize your well-being over engagement metrics. And finally, community. Individual willpower is not enough to resist systems designed by armies of engineers. We need social support, shared, norms, collective action. Find people who share your concerns. Create phone-free gatherings. Build communities based on genuine connection rather than algorithmic curation. I started this episode by asking you to look at your hand, at the device probably within reach.

Let me end with a different image. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine your great-great-grandchildren. Imagine the world they will inherit. Will they be able to read a book for hours lost in the world of ideas? Will they be able to have a conversation without checking their devices? Will they be able to distinguish truth from falsehood, to think critically, to focus deeply? Will they be free? The decisions we make now, individually and collectively, will determine the answers to those questions. The technologies that shape our minds are not forces of nature. They are human creations. They can be created differently. They can be regulated. They can be resisted. But only if we choose to resist, only if we recognize what is happening to us,

only if we decide that human flourishing matters more than engagement metrics, that truth matters more than virality, that our children's minds matter more than quarterly earnings. We are not doomed, but we are at a crossroads. The screens can be tools that amplify human potential, or they can be cages that confine it. The choice is still ours, but the window for making that choice is closing. Every scroll, every click, every hour of attention you give to these systems is a vote. A vote for the world they are creating. A vote for the humans they are shaping.

What kind of humans do you want your grandchildren to be? That is the question. And it is a disturbing one. Thank you for joining me on the Disturbing History Podcast. This has been an episode I've wanted to do for a long time, Because this is not ancient history. This is not a story about something that happened to other people in other times. This is a story about what is happening to us right now, in real time.

And the ending has not yet been written. Until next time, stay awake, stay critical, stay human. Good night.