YouTube Transcript:
The Dark Lives of Disney Adults
Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.
Share:
Video Transcript
Scroll through Disney content on Tik Tok
and you'll see them everywhere. Adults
on rental scooters clutching slushies,
completely overwhelmed by meeting
cartoon characters. Or what about this
viral clip of a 28-year-old from Ohio
meeting her favorite character, Goofy,
for the first time. She's in floods of
tears at the prospect of finally meeting
a person in a costume. These are the
Disney adults, and their behavior is
exactly what you'd expect from young
children. In fact, walk around a Disney
park today and you might expect excited
children running about screaming with
excitement. But instead, what you get is
young and middle-aged adults wearing
fancy dress, pretending that they're 10
years old again. Only about 37% of
Disneyland visitors live in households
with kids. The rest are just grown-ups
without children, treating their love
for Disney like a personality trait.
Disney's obviously aware of this and
noticed that this was happening and
pivoted hard. Now there's adult only
afterhour events where you can sip
champagne while riding Space Mountain.
There's an unprecedented 110 plus venues
across the park serving alcohol and an
even upmarket food and wine festival.
Because what Disney figured out and it's
kind of genius is how to trigger
nostalgic childhood feelings in our
adult brains. They pump specially
engineered scents onto Main Street. A
vanilla and baked goods mixture that's
been tested to trigger memory. The
castle and other decor painted a neutral
pastel shades that crawl researchers
call warm nostalgia. The employees go
through this incredibly intensive
training where they have to learn to
never break character and to always
maintain this continuous fantasy where
the outside real world ceases to exist.
The park really promises something
powerful. Simplicity. A clear division
between good and evil. Problems that
resolve in minutes. A world where
believing in magic might actually fix
things. Where the news doesn't even
exist. where your biggest concern is
which character breakfast to book and
what ride to go on next as time just
disappears into the background. Disney
is an emotional support system for
people who can recite the words to The
Little Mermaid or Frozen, but might
actually struggle to make eye contact at
dinner. And this is just a microcosm of
something happening pretty much
everywhere across society. Culture is
becoming infantilized and the concept of
adulthood is dying. And we are
witnessing the process of idiocracy
happening in real time. Not long ago,
adulthood was a privilege, a mark of
respect, and something to be embraced.
And the fact that it's not anymore is
having huge consequences for everyone.
And to understand this, let's talk about
the term adulting first. This suggests
that growing up is some kind of
temporary performance rather than just
what you are. People are starting to
post about successfully scheduling
dentist appointments like they've
conquered something monumental. Paying
bills becomes content worth posting to
your story. Rachel Weinstein was a
therapist in Portland, Maine. And she
kept noticing something interesting.
Clients in their 20s and 30s would
mention almost apologetically things
they'd never learned. How to sew a
button, how to cook an egg, how to
discuss difficult topics. These were
people with degrees and careers. So, in
2016, she started the adulting school.
People signed up in their masses to
learn how to make friends, cook, and
carry out basic home DIY. The concept
spread to universities. Berkeley began
offering 90-minute weekly sessions on
cooking and budgeting while Michigan
State and others created their own
adulting workshops. The funny thing is
Jenzian millennials aren't stupid. In
fact, they're the most highly educated
and qualified generations in human
history and seemingly contribute more to
the economy than any other. But for the
first time in history, there's a massive
gaping lack of practical life skills and
common sense, the kind that people used
to learn through osmosis. The death of
adulthood isn't just reflected in
everyday behavior. It's reflected in how
our language has evolved, too. Think of
the word triggered. It used to describe
someone's response to PTSD, but now gets
deployed whenever someone encounters
mild discomfort. Then there's self-care,
which actually started as a radical
concept from black and Latin feminist
writers talking about survival and
oppressive systems. And this somehow
morphs into buying bath bombs and
skipping work emails. Everything is
self-care if you squint hard enough.
Watching reality TV is self-care.
Ordering takeout is self-care. Ghosting
your friend's birthday party is
self-care because crowds are just too
much right now. And what about
bedrotting? Spending entire days in bed,
scrolling through Tik Tok, ordering Door
Dash, binge watching Netflix sometimes
for 12, 14, 16 hours straight. Even all
of this has been rebranded as self-care.
Staying in bed all weekend is just
protecting your energy. What used to be
concerning behavior is now a wellness
trend with millions of views on social
media. And then there's the word toxic
which became the universal descriptor
for anything uncomfortable. Toxic
workplaces, toxic friends, toxic
boyfriends, toxic girlfriends, toxic
family dynamics. The words got so
overused is completely lost its power.
When you watch clips from old TV, you
realize that people were much more
philosophical and articulate in their
speech. They never resorted to buzzwords
to describe complex ideas and emotion.
Check out this 1966 BBC video of
children discussing their predictions
for the year 2000 and how articulate and
smart they come across and how eerily
accurate their predictions actually are.
One kid says the world will be
overpopulated and risks nuclear war.
Well, I think that there'll be so it'll
be so overpop populated there will be
wars, all nuclear explosions and everything.
everything.
Another speaks about automation and
people being out of work.
There is going to be all this
automation. people are going to be out
of work and a great population. I think
something has to be done about it.
Perhaps most haunting of all, one says
people will be treated as statistics
more than as actual people.
I think it'll be um people will be
regarded more as statistics than as
actual people.
As we can see from this clip, people
looked radically different back then,
too. Remember this viral image of Shan
Connory in 1964? He looks like he could
sit in board meetings and negotiate
international treaties. Thomas Brody
Sangster in 2024 looks like he needs
permission to stay up past his bedtime.
Generations of adult kids or kiddos are
now simulating whole new economies that
are flipping business models on their
head. LEGO is a company that has always
been quick to catch on to new trends and
they introduce their adults welcome
branding in 2020 with their revenue
increasing to 10 billion within a few
years. You can now buy Lego sets that
cost a whole monthly paycheck. Think of
Hello Kitty. This character is literally
50 years old. She's been around since
1974, but somehow the creators managed
to reinvent her for a completely new
generation of adults. Then there's the
whole blind box craze that's absolutely
exploded and is now worth billions from
practically nothing. PopMart, the
Chinese company behind many blind box
brands and characters, basically created
an empire around not knowing what toy
you're buying. It's a cute, friendly
form of gambling. These companies have
become brilliant at reading the room.
They figured out that adults desperately
want to feel something. And apparently
what we want is to feel like 8 years old
again. And yet this is a subject that's
hard to find accurately reported
information about because the media
always spins this into a political
narrative. Which is why you should check
out ground.news/moon
as ground news gathers stories from over
50,000 sources from around the world
every day. For example, let's check out
this story about how studies show a
decline in human intelligence where
researchers from the University of Texas
concluded that the mere presence of
smartphones reduces our available
cognitive capacity. With ground news, we
can see the story is being covered by 27
total news sources. Four are left
leaning, three right leaning, and four
are in the center with a bias
distribution of 36% left, 36% center,
and 27% right. We can then compare all
the headlines to do a biased comparison
of all these stories where we can see
some left-wing sources use this
information to explain internet trolls
views on gay people. And we can also see
how the right claims this might be
coming from a digital media revolution.
You can then even click each source and
actually compare the headlines yourself
as ground news allows you to really see
the political agendas behind your media
consumption like we can see with their
blind spot feed where you'll find news
stories that have little to no reporting
by one side of the political spectrum.
And their my news bias dashboard will
even give insights into your reading
habits to see where you're getting your
news from and if you have any blind
spots. So check them out today at ground.news/moon
ground.news/moon
to get 40% off unlimited access this
month. It's for these reasons that in
2024, kiddos officially overtook
preschoolers as the biggest toy buying
demographic on the planet. And of
course, look, there's nothing
dramatically wrong with adults buying
the old nostalgic toy or enjoying things
from their childhood. As a one-off,
these things are great. But when entire
corporations are pivoting their business
models because grown-ups have become
their primary customers, that tells us
something bigger is going on here. And
in some cases, this obsession with toys
and childish interests has become
downright disturbing. The Tik Tok
account for Teletubbies, a show for
toddlers, started making content for
adults, participating in Tik Tok trends
with suggestive imagery and music. Oh,
and an underwear brand even launched a
Teletubbies range. Like, that's not
weird at all. Some of this is part of
the age regression community that has
multiplied lately with adults buying
cribs, sippy cups, and dummies marketed
as stress relief and sensory aids. What
started as legitimate therapeutic
techniques has morphed into something
much stranger with entire marketplaces
selling adult baby products. And they
say art imitates life. And if you really
want to see how dramatically our
artistic culture is being infantilized,
just look at movies. They perfectly
illustrate how the west is progressing
from the intellectual, the complex, the
experimental, and the philosophical to
something engineered for immediate
gratification and mass consumption with
absolutely no depth or meaning. Let's
take Stanley Kubri's 2001 A Space
Odyssey from 1968. The film opens with a
very long scene of apes discovering
tools. There's zero dialogue, no
explanation, just classical music and
slow immersive visuals. You have to sit
there for a while and think and process
the scene. The whole movie asks massive
questions about consciousness and
humanity's future, all while giving you
absolutely nothing in terms of clear
answers. And people back then loved it.
They would pack out cinemas to watch
this stuff. 30 minutes of one long
continuous scene. This wasn't just some
niche art film. In fact, it's one of the
most successful films of all time.
Audiences saw it multiple times trying
to understand it. People have written
essays about it and had lengthy
arguments about what the ending meant.
It's the inspiration for people like
Christopher Nolan and the confusion of
the movie was part of the appeal as the
meaning of the film was subjective based
on the viewer. And so let's fast forward
to now and things just couldn't be any
more different. Film producers like
those behind Disney and the Marvel
universe have figured out this formula
where every single moment is engineered
for immediate gratification with entire
teams AB testing on how to trigger your
dopamine response to CGI effects.
Everything is choreographed for maximum
dopamine with emotional scenes that last
just long enough to register before
getting undercut with jokes. constant
visual spectacle. Characters explaining
the plot to each other in case anyone
got confused. It's why Martin Scorsese
has been such an outspoken critic of
these films as so many of them are just
essentially the same story. Good guys
fight bad guys, universe saved, roll
credits with major stars, CGI, and
billions invested with psychological
manipulation to keep you watching. And
any films that dare to be obscure are
rarely even commercial successes
anymore. If you look at the top films of
the 1990s and the early 2000s,
especially compared to today, and you'll
just notice this massive gap in depth
and meaning. Instead of films like
American Beauty being at the top of the
box office, we just now get recycled
Marvel and Star Wars films. The Avenger
movies particularly are the pinnacle of
this new formulaic film industry. Their
three-hour dopamine delivery systems,
and it's kind of genius, as every 30
seconds, something is designed to make
you feel without asking you to think.
There's a fake quip here with some major
al star. Then there will be a huge
explosion over there, fan service
moment, and just loud continuous
spectacle on repeat for 3 hours. Star
Wars has also gone on a similar
direction under Disney, and it's
probably even worse. Yet, all of these
films seem to be incredibly effective
for what they do. It's why they're the
only films that get hundreds of millions
of funding anymore. But they're also
exhausting in this weird way. You just
leave feeling overstimulated, but empty,
like you've been in a casino all day.
And this transformation from 2001 to
Avengers captures what happened to the
arts. We went from wanting experiences
that expanded our minds to needing
entertainment that shuts them off. From
quiet reflection and patience to panic
if nothing happens for 30 seconds where
people need to continually check their
phone for the next dopamine hit if the
film doesn't have another explosion in.
Something deep has changed in how we
process reward and satisfaction. Our
dopamine receptors have been hijacked.
And we've spoken about this on this
channel for years now, but it's just so
scary how much this really has changed.
As our dopamine systems no longer work
the way they're supposed to. When our
ancestors heard a rustle in the grass or
spotted movement in the trees, dopamine
sharpened their focus and prepared their
bodies to respond. It was the brain's
way of saying this matters. Pay
attention. The chemical helped them
remember where they found food, which
path led to water, and what sounds meant
danger. For almost all of human history,
those dopamine heads came from real
events with real consequences. And
genuine accomplishments triggered
genuine rewards. You couldn't just
manufacture endless novelty. Sure,
prehistoric humans found ways to amuse
themselves between hunting and sleeping,
but nothing like scrolling through brain
rock clips all day, getting food from
Uber with 100 plus chemicals mashed into
it, all while seeing more beautiful
women in an hour that a king a few
hundred years ago would see in a
lifetime. And so now we're essentially
running stone age software in a digital
world. And companies like Disney have
made billions from hijacking this as
they were one of the first to weaponize
this vulnerability in human psychology.
But it's easy to understand how this can
be hijacked for content. But how is this
spread to everything? Well, there's one
theory about why companies benefit so
much from the death of adulthood. And
that comes from the French philosopher
Bernard Stigler. He argued that consumer
capitalism isn't as effective with fully
formed adults. And think about it,
mature adults can wait, think
critically, delay gratification. They
fix broken items instead of buying new
ones. Children, on the other hand, are
kind of perfect consumers, especially
when they have adult money, as they live
entirely in the present moment. They
want things immediately. They're always
emotional, easily influenced, and highly
responsive to bright colors and loud
noises. This is why there's so much
money to be made from advertising to
kids. All the kid content on YouTube
breaks in so much more money than
regular content. And Bernard saw this as
society creating people who are
perpetually incomplete, not broken.
Exactly. But insecure, restless, and
always needing the next thing. In other
words, kiddos are the perfect customer
base. And companies have been actively
exploiting this with what they neatly
call persuasive design. They study the
science of addiction or persuasion and
apply to games and social media apps to
get people hooked. Shockingly, they're
specifically targeting children with
these techniques. Psychologists and
children's advocates recently called out
the tech industry for using
psychological manipulation tactics on
kids. They know that teenagers' brains
are still developing, making them
especially vulnerable to this type of
stimulation and ultimately addiction.
There's been national inquiries into
this in countries like the UK, but
nothing truly happens. And yet, the
death of adulthood is a huge benefit for
companies and a huge cost to our health
and well-being. Every time we choose the
easier, faster, more stimulating option,
we're training our brains to expect
instant gratification. The brain is like
a muscle, and if you don't use it
properly, it weakens. That's a big
reason why our attention spans are
collapsing. People often say humans now
have shorter attention spans than
goldfish. Now, this isn't actually true,
but the myth persists because it feels
true. When you can't sit through a movie
without checking your phone constantly,
when you have to skip songs after 5
seconds, when you need food to be rammed
with additive chemicals, sugars, and
fats, of course, then it makes it seem
like our attention spans are shrinking.
And what really is measurable is how our
media has contracted. The average shot
length in movies has plummeted from
about 12 seconds in 1930 to around 2.5
seconds today. Modern films cut so
frequently that modern movies now
contain over 1,100 shots compared to a
few hundred in older films. And if you
think this was just because it was
harder to film more shots back then,
let's go look at music where we see a
similar pattern. Song intros has shrunk
from 20 seconds in the 1980s to just 5
seconds today. Between 2013 and 2018
alone, the average Billboard Hot 100
song got 20 seconds shorter. The strange
thing is how all of this happened
gradually and then just suddenly. Each
change seem reasonable on its own. Why
shouldn't a movie have more dynamic
editing? Why shouldn't a song get to the
point faster? It's reasonable until it's
not. But there's an elephant in the room
that we just haven't yet discussed, and
that's the actual economics of trying to
be an adult right now in the West. In
1970, the average age for a first birth
was about 20 years old. and couples
could realistically plan their lives.
Back in 1960, the median home cost $11,900,
$11,900,
while the median income was $5,600,
which meant basically a house cost about
2 years of income. Today, of course, the
median home prices climbed to 5.6 times
the median household income. And in
places like California, you'd need an
annual income of $237,000
just to qualify for a mortgage on a
mid-tier home. The number of under 35
still living with their parents has
rocketed because many simply can't
afford to move out. Living with parents
is naturally going to make you feel like
less of an adult. So cultural
infantilization is to some extent a form
of psychological and economic adaption,
but one that's become self-destructive
and we've completely lost control of it.
Studies now show that younger
generations are burning out at 25.
Previous generations weren't hitting
peak stress until much later in life
when they had mortgages and kids to
worry about. The concept of burnout
wasn't even widely used until recently.
It originated in 1974 from
psychotherapist Herbert Freudenbudger
who used this to describe heavy
narcotics use. Today, the signs of
burnout are written all over people's
faces. Some call it the generation za,
that blank thousand-y expression that
was once associated with disassociation
due to acute stress and traumatic
events. It was even first documented in
World War I and World War II soldiers
who'd seen too many horrific things in
combat. And you know where else you'll
see that stare? Casinos, which also
feast upon our dopamine. Walk through
any casino floor and you'll see rows of
people with that same vacant expression.
Blank faces crowding around roulette
tables. People sitting alone at slot
machines, windows blacking out the
entire place. the whole infrastructure
meant to block out any sense of time
where everyone looks washed out and
tired but is unable to leave. Obviously
drifting in and out of reality. That's
what the effects of over stimulation
looks like. So here it is. We've learned
how to stimulate the brain artificially.
We manufacture that stimulus at a
societal level. We feel it to ourselves
all the time and we've gotten ourselves
completely hooked on it. So where are we
heading from there? Well, have you seen
the movie Idiocracy? We mentioned it
regularly on the channel and even made a
whole video on the topic. It came out in
2006 by Mike Judge and everyone thought
this movie was just a simple comedy
about how stupid people might become in
the future. Now it feels less like a
satire and more like a real documentary
filmed in advance. The movie shows a
world where corporations have completely
taken over. Everyone's addicted to junk
food and mindless entertainment and
people have basically forgotten how to
think for themselves. The most popular
TV show is called My Balls. literally
just a guy getting hit in the groin
repeatedly. That's what passes for
entertainment and it probably would
today too. The film was so accurate in
his corporate satire that Fox Studios
barely even promoted it and only
released in seven cities as they were
terrified of offending their advertisers
who were scared of waking people up to
the reality of how dumb we're getting.
Idiocracy isn't the only movie that saw
this coming. Funny enough, Wally came
out in 2008 and showed humans who have
become so dependent on technology that
they literally couldn't even walk
anymore, needing a constant screen and
food at all times. They flow around in
chairs staring at the screens consuming
mindless entertainment while robots do
everything for them. And it's honestly
one of the most eerie predictions I've
ever seen in a movie. And then there's
Black Mirror, which doesn't even pretend
to be set in the distant future. Most
episodes are set in the near future
dystopia that feels uncomfortably close
to our present reality. social credit
scores, virtual reality addiction,
people rating each other on apps like
tea. Half of these things already exist.
What all these stories have in common is
they don't show some alien invasion or
nuclear apocalypse. They show us
defeating ourselves, rewiring our
psychology, and praying on our dopamine
to completely make us numb and
apathetic, all through convenience,
through comfort, through the gradual
surrender of everything that makes us
human. It's why we'll never see another
movie like 2001 Space Odyssey ever
again. There will no longer be
Renaissance art, and it's going to lead
us to one of the most boring apocalypses
imaginable. A slow death by a thousand
tiny conveniences. Each one makes life
just a little bit easier until we become
soft, helpless, unable to do anything
for ourselves. And maybe then AI will
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
Works with YouTube, Coursera, Udemy and more educational platforms
Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!
YouTube
←
→
↻
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
YoutubeToText
←
→
↻
https://youtubetotext.net/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc