#2344 - Amjad Masad

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What's up? What's up, man? Good. So having this big counter-strike tournament in town, does that give you the Joneses? Totally, totally. It's like, so your guy, Jason, was telling me about it, because in addition to driving, he also flies the helicopter. And he told me the Red Bull guys were flying off, and there's this big tournament. I looked it up, it was like, oh, counter-strike. So I used to be a bit of a pro player myself. So how do you get out of pro playing? Because the problem with playing games is that it's essentially like an eight-hour-a-day thing. It becomes a giant chunk of your life, right? And I would imagine if you're playing pro, it's even more of a commitment. You know, I take a different view on games. You know, a lot of people kind of view it as a sort of somehow like a negative thing, especially for kids. Actually, I got my four-year-old Nintendo Switch early on. We're playing together because I feel like for me, it helped me a lot with like strategy thinking, with reaction time. I think like gamers tend to be, can think really fast and... Have you seen the studies that they've done about surgeons? No, tell me. Surgeons that play video games regularly are much less likely to make mistakes. I totally believe it. Something in the neighborhood of 25%, is that what it is, Jamie? Something like that? But so much so that I would say you should teach video games to surgeons. Like it should actually be like a required thing, like cross-training. Right. Isn't the Army also recruiting from gamers today as well? That's what I heard. I would imagine like drone pilots, right? I mean, that would make a big difference, especially if you can get them used to like the same controllers. Totally. Because those controllers kind of become a part of your hand. You know exactly where all the buttons are. Right. If you're a kid that's playing fucking Counter-Strike or whatever it is, call of duty every day. Totally. I would imagine that just becomes dexterity. Yeah. What is the thing with surgeons? It's nuts, right? It might be higher than 25%. It was a very particular kind of surgery though, too, but it was like, I mean, they're almost using controllers. Yeah, but this, that they were making less mistakes. I don't think it's entirely negative because I love games. I love playing them, but I love them so much that I don't play them because I know I don't have any time. It's Quake is your favorite game, right? Yeah. So you're here to 27, 37% decrease in errors. That's wild. 27% faster task completion time. That's nuts. And so those guys grew up playing video game or did they get them on video games? It says more than three hours per leak. I think they were still playing when they were doing the study. Yeah. So like that, I mean, imagine something that, like a pill you could take, that would give you a 37% decrease in errors and a 27% faster task completion. That would be an incredible pill. Yeah. Like you would make every surgeon take it. Did you take your video game pill before you do surgery? Hey, man, don't operate on my fucking brain unless you take your video game pill. You know, that's, you know, next time I need to have a surgery or whatever, I'm just going to ask the doctor if they're a gamer. How much do you game, bro? But you and Jamie and I were talking about the one thing, and maybe that's kind of showing our age a little bit, but the one thing that's kind of like a little weird slash, I don't know, somehow like a little dystopian is the whole streaming situation, where like kids are not like playing the game, they're like watching someone play the game. Yeah, that's not good. And it's like this zombifying thing where like they'll spend hours just watching people. Yeah, just TikToking. It's essentially like TikTok but video games, right? Because TikTok is kind of this mindless thing. You're just scrolling through mindless things. And now you're mindlessly watching someone else play a game. Yeah, it's almost like someone is like that there's this strange thing with technology where like someone is living life and doing things and you're like sort of, it's almost voyeurism or something like that about it. You know, David Foster Wallace, the guy from Infinite Jest, wrote an essay on TVs. And he committed suicide before the emergence of mobile phones and things like that. But he was very prescient on the impact of technology on society and especially on America. And he was also addicted to TV. And he talked about how it activates some kind of something in us that is something in human nature about voyeurism. And that's the thing that television and Tik Tok and things like that activate. And it's like this negative, addictive kind of behavior that's really bad for society. I definitely think there's an aspect of voyeurism. But there's just a dull drone of attention draw. There's a dullness to it that just like sucks you in like slack-jawed. It is watching nonsense over and over and over again. That does just enough to captivate your attention, but doesn't excite you, doesn't stimulate you, doesn't necessarily inspire you to do anything. That is the first fly we've ever had in this room. Boom. I was going to kill it. You're a nice person. That's evil people would have killed that fly right away. But it's just this thing where it doesn't do a lot. It's not like, have you ever done Disney World? Yeah. Did you ever do Disney World in Florida where you do that, there's the Avatar ride? No, I just went to a California one. Okay. The Avatar ride is Flights of Freedom? Flights of Passage. Fights of Passage? It's a VR game, a ride rather. You put on a VR helmet and you get on this motorcycle looking thing, you're essentially riding a dragon. It's unbelievably engaging. It's incredible. It's the best ride I've ever been on in my life. Yeah, that's cool. You're flying around, you feel the breeze, you're on this thing and the sounds are incredible. That's engrossing, it takes over you. Simulating, yeah. But that's not what you're getting from TikTok or streaming. You're getting this, this dull, so it's sustainable. Yeah, I wonder which is worse, this or like opium habit or something. I know people that have done opium that are functional. Yeah. They can take pills and I'm sure eventually their life falls off the rails, but it's semi-functional when they're on these things. They can hold down a job and show up every day and they're just like semi-functional opiate. There's a dude, I watched like a YouTube video, but like he's known for having this contrary opinion on drugs that you can like control it, like you can do these drugs. What does he look like? I don't know. I think he's a black dude. Oh, Carl Hart, Dr. Carl Hart. He was here? Yeah, he's been here a couple of times. He's great. What do you think of his ideas? I think it's entirely biologically variable. I know people that cannot drink. They drink and then they're gone. They get like hamster eyes, like get these black eyes where they're like their soul goes away and then they're just off to the races and picking up hookers and doing cocaine and they find themselves in Guatemala. Oh, shit. They're just nuts. They can't drink. I can drink.