This is a headgum podcast.

Have you been feeling like society has been getting dumber lately?

I mean, Republicans have gone to war with learning itself,

firing thousands of scientists and intimidating university researchers,

as though learning facts about the world around us with some kind of terrorist assault on the homeland.

And unfortunately, stupidity is an area of bipartisan agreement because the Democrats have also

been acting dumb as shit. I don't know what you call a party that tried to run an unwrapped

mummy for president and figured no one would notice, but smart ain't it. But you know, I've also

felt dumber in my day-to-day life, too. I pull up directions on my phone before I go somewhere a mile away that I've been to a hundred times. I'm so distractible, I struggle to follow the plot of a 30-minute sitcom, and I've lost countless hours to scrolling the stupidest content ever made on my phone, even though I know I don't actually

want to and I'd rather be doing something better for my brain.

I mean, we didn't used to live like this, did we?

Sometimes it seems like just a few decades ago, all of society was just a lot smarter than

we are now.

And sure, a lot of that is just nostalgia and the

default belief that the past was always better. It's a super easy error to slip into. But is it

possible that we as a species, as a society, are getting dumber? Well, the answer empirically

measured is yes. Look at this graph. According to recent tests, the ability of people generally to read and to think and to do basic math is trending down.

This phenomenon is happening in most rich countries, but it's especially strong right here in the U.S.

I mean, this is simply a

mind-boggling trend line. Humanity had been advancing in our intelligence for millennia,

and now we are falling back. So we have to ask, why is this happening? And the answer,

and I really hate to admit this, looks like it might be related to the very internet and

...