David Byrne's American Utopia

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for coming.

Thank you for... Thank you for leaving your homes.

My name's David Byrne.

Thank you.

I can't take any credit for that. I had no choice in the matter.

I read something, well, kinda surprising and amazing the other day.

I read that babies' brains

have hundreds of millions more neural connections than we do as adults

and that as we grow up, we lose these connections.

So I wondered to myself, what does this mean?

Does this mean that babies are smarter than we are

and that as we grow up, we get stupider and stupider

until we reach a... a plateau of stupidity?

Which is where most of us are now.

Well, what happens is...

we keep the connections that are useful to us,

and, yes, there's a process of pruning and elimination,

and we... we get rid of a lot of the others

until the ones that are left define who we are as a person,

who we are as people.

They define how we perceive the world,

and the world appears to make some kind of sense to us.

And maybe round about that time,

we start asking ourselves various questions like, who am I?

What do I want? How do I work this?

What are those people doing over there? Should I be doing that?

Are they looking at me? Are they like me?

Should I go over and talk to them?

Huh, maybe not.

Try to figure this out.

Wondering if there's... you know, wondering if there's a logic to it.

Wondering if it's supposed to make some kind of sense.

Thank you!

Thank you.

You know...

meeting people is hard,

but I know... I know we have to do it.

These people over here,

they all met through apps.

Totally working for them.

These people over here don't need apps.

They're just supremely confident.

Well, some of them might be bluffing.

Some of them might be putting up a front,

but that doesn't matter cos it's all working for them.

Meanwhile, I'm, well, you know, observing.

Trying to figure this out.

Objectively...

Objectively, I could never figure out why,

why looking at a person should be any more interesting

than looking at any other thing,

like, say, a bicycle or a beautiful sunset

or a, ooh, nice bag of potato chips.

But, yeah, looking at people? That's the best.