Episode 1233 Scott Adams： The News is Boring so I Will Take You to a Higher Level of Awareness Instead
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 13 minutes
Words per Minute
155.54604
Summary
Kamala Harris and her husband talk about their love for Kwanzaa and how it reminds them of their Jamaican and Indian heritage. Is this a hypocrite or a hero? Also, I m hung over from a hangover and my clock is 5 minutes fast.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Yes, I am an organizational mess this morning. I overslept. I wanted to do a little experiment
00:00:12.660
this morning to see what normal people are like. I regard many of you to be normal people,
00:00:19.560
and so I said to myself, what would it be like to be like you? And what I mean by normal people
00:00:26.220
is people who have sleep, for example. People who go to sleep and sleep a good eight hours. And I
00:00:34.760
thought to myself, I'm going to give that a try, because I'm good for four hours, and I just hate
00:00:41.760
sleeping. So I thought, I'll sleep a regular amount of sleep because it's a holiday, and what the heck.
00:00:48.640
I feel terrible. I don't know how you people sleep so much. I feel like I literally have a hangover
00:00:55.580
from sleeping something closer to maybe six or seven hours. And your clock is five minutes fast.
00:01:07.720
Well, for those of you just joining, I didn't actually intend to be live already. I'm so hung
00:01:15.040
over from too much sleep. I don't drink alcohol, but I'm hung over from too much sleep, and I just
00:01:21.480
hit the wrong button. So that's enough of the explaining. If you would like to enjoy today to
00:01:26.500
the maximum amount, and some people are going to be really mad if they miss the simultaneous sip.
00:01:32.400
You realize that people will be mad if I do this right now, don't you? Okay. I'm really going to
00:01:38.220
have to wait till seven, because if all the people who always wait, or 10 a.m. Eastern, if all the people
00:01:44.240
who wait, miss the simultaneous sip, they're going to be pissed. I have unfortunately trained thousands
00:01:53.580
of people around the world that their day will start correctly if they do this little ceremony.
00:02:00.760
So I'm going to have to wait, if you don't mind. But before then, I will take some questions,
00:02:08.060
if you have any. Has anybody had any Christmas experience that sounded even a little bit like
00:02:16.660
Christmas? Am I the only one who felt that we didn't really have Christmas this year?
00:02:24.240
Right? It didn't feel like Christmas at all. We did decorations. I saw presents. I saw Santa
00:02:32.700
clauses. But not once did it feel like Christmas. Can anybody explain that? Is it because our routine
00:02:42.240
was just different enough? You know, we didn't do enough going to stores. We did it all online. There
00:02:47.900
wasn't enough family traveling. Is that all it was? Because didn't it feel like it was a lot more than
00:02:54.140
that? It felt like there was something happened that just took Christmas away. I know I'm not.
00:03:02.360
I know I'm not the only person who felt it. So I've been kind of in this weird daze for the
00:03:10.540
whole week. I don't know what day of the week it is. And it's definitely not Christmas. But it is
00:03:17.300
Christmas. But it isn't. So yeah, let's talk about Kamala Harris and Kwanzaa. So for those of you just
00:03:28.080
joining, I'm waiting, I'm waiting until the appointed moment for the simultaneous sip. So
00:03:32.640
Kamala Harris, and I guess it was her husband, was doing a little video in which they were talking
00:03:38.920
about their, she was talking about her love for her childhood tradition of Kwanzaa. Now, I have no idea
00:03:46.440
what Kamala Harris's actual childhood looked like, right? So I don't have any idea whether this is real
00:03:54.400
news or fake news. But it's funny news, if you call it news. And the funny news is that apparently
00:04:02.060
her background is both black from Jamaica and Indian from India, right? So she has the dual background.
00:04:11.960
But I saw a picture of her family during her youth, and they were full on Indian culture.
00:04:19.240
So she was basically raised in the Indian culture. But she's claiming now that Kwanzaa was her big
00:04:27.760
love, one of her big loves of her childhood. And I'm thinking to myself, maybe, you know, maybe,
00:04:35.360
I'm not saying that she didn't also, you know, have a love for Kwanzaa. But it was pretty funny to see
00:04:43.400
her and her family all dressed in their Indian traditional garb. And then next to the story
00:04:49.880
about her love of celebrating Kwanzaa. And I think most people said to themselves, maybe,
00:04:57.340
maybe, I mean, you could have two completely different cultures and respect them equally,
00:05:05.780
I guess. But have you ever seen it? Have you ever seen anybody who just picked two completely
00:05:12.900
distinct cultures and just said, we'll do them both? Probably, actually, probably, there's there
00:05:18.380
probably lots of examples of Jewish Americans who do, you know, all the Jewish stuff, and then they do
00:05:24.440
all the Santa Claus stuff for the tradition part. So probably that does happen. So I'm not going to say
00:05:30.000
that she doesn't do it. But I thought it was a funny story, because it makes her look like a hypocrite.
00:05:34.980
What time is it? It's time. It's time for the simultaneous sip. That's right. And if you came
00:05:41.200
in early, you got a little extra. But those of you joining on time, well, you're going to get the
00:05:46.860
real deal now. And all you need to enjoy it to its maximum extent, there's a cup or a mug or a glass,
00:05:53.320
a tank or a chalice or a steiner, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your
00:05:58.260
favorite liquid I like, coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the holiday gift
00:06:06.580
of the world. It's called the simultaneous... I don't even know what it's called. I overslept.
00:06:12.580
It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Go.
00:06:23.740
So I've decided the news is just all so ugly and stupid. It's barely worth talking about.
00:06:31.940
So apparently, Congress did something incompetent. That's it. Congress did something incompetent to
00:06:41.020
screw the people for no good purpose other than politics, I guess. Do you know what the news will
00:06:48.820
be tomorrow? So that was today's news. Let me tell... I'm just going to use my psychic powers and predict.
00:06:54.860
Tomorrow, Congress will do something that screws the public, but is good for them, they think,
00:07:01.580
politically. And then wait, watch this. That's just tomorrow. I can do this further. I'm going to go
00:07:08.260
all the way to next week, folks. Watch this. It's next week, psychic powers. Congress is incompetent.
00:07:14.860
They're doing things that screw the people for political purposes. Now wait, wait, wait. One year.
00:07:20.840
One year. One year. We're going to go deep. One year for now. All my psychic powers. Got it. Locked in.
00:07:30.080
Congress is incompetent and doing something stupid to screw the American people for political purposes.
00:07:37.140
Now I'm going to go out on a limb, and I'm going to put a lot of my personal reputation on those
00:07:44.060
predictions. You just watch. You think I'm going to be wrong, but you're going to be surprised. I'll bet
00:07:50.160
I'm dead on that. Yes, I'd like to do some more predictions from the future, if I may.
00:07:57.660
This will be my most difficult one. Concentrate. Concentrate.
00:08:03.820
In the future, the Pope will denounce violence and say we should be better to the who? Is it the rich?
00:08:16.840
No, no, it's coming in clearly. The Pope says we should be better to the disadvantaged and the poor.
00:08:25.220
Pretty good, huh? Well, you don't know if that will actually come true. But by the end of the year,
00:08:31.480
you're going to say to yourself, I think he nailed it again. Look at that. He got the Pope's prediction
00:08:38.340
dead on. He nailed the Congress. Oh, yeah. He got that one right. How about this one?
00:08:47.560
Take a deep breath. Psychic powers online. Joe Biden will continue to make verbal gaffes
00:08:58.560
that make you wonder if his brain is still all connected to its own parts. We don't know. But I
00:09:08.880
feel good about that. I feel good about that prediction. All right. Let me take you down a
00:09:14.520
little road here that I think you're going to enjoy. Because the news is boring, and so let's
00:09:21.800
ignore all of it, because nothing's happening there. Here's a little framework for you that I put
00:09:28.580
together this morning. This is how I kind of see the world. And let's see where you are on this. I
00:09:34.700
call this the levels of awareness, where at the lowest level, let's say you're a little kid,
00:09:39.300
and you're four years old, and adults tell you something is true. And if an adult tells you
00:09:46.800
something's true, when you're four years old, you say, well, it's probably true. They haven't lied to
00:09:52.060
me yet. But then you learn about that whole Santa Claus thing. I hope there are no kids. Are there any
00:09:57.920
kids watching? Put the earmuffs on the kids. If the kids are watching, kids, earmuffs.
00:10:05.180
When you learn that Santa Claus isn't real, then you go to the next level, where you learn, well,
00:10:17.600
maybe sometimes adults can say things that aren't true. That's your next level of awareness.
00:10:25.120
The one after that is that, oh, crap, they don't do it once in a while. They do it a lot.
00:10:31.800
Adults don't just lie sometimes. They lie a lot. In fact, the only thing that will predict whether
00:10:40.720
an adult will tell the truth or a lie is whether they can get away with it. Yeah, that's the only
00:10:48.540
thing that predicts. If they can get away with it, it's probably going to happen. So once you reach
00:10:56.000
this level of awareness, you're in full cynicism. All right? Cynicism, and it's kind of a depressive
00:11:04.840
place to live. And I know that place because I lived there for a long time.
00:11:11.240
Eventually, I, of course, became cocky as I gained more knowledge about the world and got
00:11:17.920
older. I was probably a teenager by this point, where I realized that, hey, I could be right.
00:11:26.000
And other people that I trusted, even experts, could be wrong. And it's like a big awareness
00:11:34.380
change. You say, wait a minute. Even though I'm, let's just pick an age and say, even though I'm 17,
00:11:41.940
or maybe you're 25, or whatever you are, even though I'm young, I'm pretty sure I can detect
00:11:49.300
that I'm right on this particular question. I'm not right every time. But there are these occasions
00:11:56.400
when I'm right, and even the experts are wrong. When I say you're wrong, I don't mean just you
00:12:01.760
personally. But you, backed by your experts, could all be wrong on really big stuff. I'll give you some
00:12:10.160
examples. And then I would argue that most people are here if you're watching this, if you're watching
00:12:15.640
this live stream, you're probably at least up to here, because I know you're not here, or here or
00:12:21.260
here. But you're at least up to here. And I would say that where I want to get you is here, to the
00:12:28.320
point where you realize the full subjectivity of reality. Oh, yes, there is a real right and wrong
00:12:34.840
as some base level of reality. But it's not really available to us. You can't know if you're
00:12:43.680
right. Sometimes you can know you're wrong, but you can't know you're right. Now, let me give you
00:12:50.960
some examples in which I have experienced this full flow, if you will. And by the way, this one,
00:12:58.460
the one where no one is right, would be compatible with, it's not the only thing it's compatible with,
00:13:05.120
but it's compatible with simulation theory. The idea that we're a big simulation, and that there's
00:13:10.820
some subjectivity to our reality, and that there might be a base reality, an objective reality, but
00:13:20.060
we don't have access to it. Our brains are not designed to even see it or understand it.
00:13:25.120
Now, oh, this is a good comment. I'm seeing the comments. I'm saying that a whiteboard and glasses
00:13:33.920
make one an expert. Well, that's not far away. I got the glasses. I got the whiteboard. I got a
00:13:41.140
live stream. If that doesn't make me an expert, I don't know what does. So let me give you some
00:13:47.400
examples of subjective reality that informed my path here. One of them was when I joined corporate
00:13:57.160
America. Some of you know this story. And as a corporate employee, I would experience many absurdities
00:14:05.140
in my daily life. And unlike the rest of you, I decided to take those absurdities and frustrations of
00:14:12.840
off his life and turn them into a world-famous comic strip called Dilbert. Now, here's a part
00:14:20.180
that probably a lot of you don't know, and most of you are not going to believe.
00:14:26.460
And so I'm not even sure if I believe it, but I know there's a strong correlation. So if you're
00:14:33.260
too young to remember this, Dilbert's now over 30 years old. But in the early days of Dilbert in the
00:14:39.400
90s, there was a trend of just absurd management consultant trends, just crazy stuff, where there
00:14:48.220
would be some consultants who would come in, and they would train the staff in these weird practices
00:14:53.060
and beliefs. And it was just so obviously a bunch of BS. But nobody really was talking about how
00:15:02.360
management was largely astrology and guessing and a scam game. Because managers needed to do something
00:15:10.320
to make it look like they were managing. But the job of managing often doesn't have many moving parts.
00:15:16.840
If you're a really good manager, after you've hired and trained your staff, not a lot to do.
00:15:23.020
All right? If you've trained your people and you've hired them, and you're fully staffed,
00:15:28.180
there's not much to do. So if you're a manager, you have to make it look as though
00:15:34.100
you're putting in the work. So managers learned that since things were going to go well on their
00:15:39.940
own, you know, if they were in the right industry with the right kind of market, and they had good
00:15:44.140
people working for them and making stuff, they would become more profitable next year than this
00:15:49.760
year. But the trick was that the manager needed to look like it was the manager's work that made the
00:15:56.120
difference. It wasn't the workers, because the manager needs to get a raise and promoted and
00:16:00.400
everything, right? So they want to make it look like they did something that was connected to all
00:16:05.640
this good news that was going to happen on its own. And so they would create these programs of
00:16:10.820
leadership, this and this workshop, that. And they would say, yeah, because we did this workshop and
00:16:16.860
this leadership, that's what caused all these good profits. Now, do you remember what it was
00:16:24.620
that changed all that BS? Like, it was really bad in the 90s. Those of you of a certain age
00:16:31.440
backed me up on this. If you're 30, you missed this whole thing. So you have to take it from
00:16:37.840
anybody older who's watching this. There was this crazy, just ridiculous amount of management BS. And
00:16:44.800
there was one book after another, best-selling book about how to find your excellence and, you know,
00:16:50.900
how to do the right thing. So you're seeing all the yeses coming through in the comments.
00:16:55.320
Do you remember what stopped it? There was something, a counterforce. There was a big counterforce in
00:17:04.300
society that just took all of that gigantic industry BS leadership stuff and just stopped it.
00:17:13.480
What was it? It was Dilbert. Yeah, it was me. It was accidental. It was nothing I set out to do.
00:17:23.960
But because Dilbert was so, let me say this without acting like an egomaniac, because it's just part of
00:17:31.980
the story, right? So there's some things you just can't communicate without sounding like an egomaniac
00:17:37.980
jerk. So just deal with it, okay? Because Dilbert was, it's hard even to say, insightful. Can you say
00:17:48.720
that about yourself? It's necessary for the story, so just deal with it. I know it's obnoxious. But Dilbert was
00:17:56.740
sufficiently insightful that it just dismantled an entire industry. If you were to track, and I've
00:18:04.560
actually seen this graph, by the way, if you were to track the business book market, you would see
00:18:09.880
that in the early 90s, it was just like a rocket. It was like business books were like selling and
00:18:14.920
business books and leadership and how to manage and how to be a successful CEO. And then Dilbert hit.
00:18:22.340
Boom. Boom. Boom. Right to the floor. So the peak of Dilbert coincides exactly with the
00:18:31.280
peak of the business BS. And it just drove it to nothing. Because once it was clear that it could
00:18:39.100
be mocked, people were a lot more circumspect about doing crazy stuff. Because they realized they would
00:18:46.260
actually be mocked in public in a big way, because I, in fact, mocked all of those weird practices. And I
00:18:54.940
basically mocked them out of existence. Because a lot of that stuff just doesn't even exist anymore.
00:18:59.820
All right. Now, there is a, so I would say, it would be fair to say that the entire industry of this
00:19:09.340
management leadership stuff turned out to be a completely ridiculous BS. I kind of was a big
00:19:16.940
factor, and I feel like I can say that, a big factor in destroying that illusion. It was an illusion
00:19:24.600
illusion that I largely destroyed, almost single-handedly. And there are other illusions
00:19:33.340
similar to that. There's another one that I've worked on for a long time. I don't think I've quite
00:19:37.760
destroyed it. But the financial advice industry. I've tried for years to get people to understand that
00:19:46.820
none of that's real. The whole financial advice industry is just a fraudulent industry. But it's a
00:19:53.640
multi-trillion dollar industry. So if you don't actually dig into it a little bit, you don't really
00:19:59.500
believe it's all fake. You think, well, that's got to be real. I know so many people personally.
00:20:06.660
You might say to yourself, I know people are in that industry. They seem like nice people. It's my
00:20:10.780
neighbor. My neighbor does that. It's a fraudulent industry. The whole thing is. The whole advice
00:20:17.680
part of it is ridiculous. Do you know what the entire financial industry should be?
00:20:25.200
The whole industry. All of the advice part of it, where somebody is a professional
00:20:29.280
telling you what to do. The whole industry. Do you know what it should be? It could be an app.
00:20:34.500
Yeah. I tried to write a book on the financial industry years ago. I tell this story sometimes.
00:20:40.840
And the reason I didn't write the book on how to invest, and this is not a joke, because the whole
00:20:46.540
book would only be one page. If you actually did it right, and got rid of all the stuff that you don't
00:20:52.560
need to know, and it's BS, and it's only presented so somebody can figure a way to scam you out of money.
00:20:57.840
If you take away all the scams, the whole practice of finance is one page, and that's not an exaggeration.
00:21:06.720
It's not even a little bit of an exaggeration. One page, never two. You don't need a half a page more.
00:21:14.700
One page, everything you need to know. Now, that's why I didn't write a book, because you couldn't make
00:21:21.000
it a book if you did it honestly. And I didn't want to write another dishonest investment book,
00:21:26.260
because that's what all the rest are. So you can't actually publish the book. It's one page.
00:21:32.040
Now, am I being cocky and saying that I wrote a one-page investment book that was as good as a book?
00:21:42.360
Well, I can tell you that CBS Money reprinted it, and it became hugely popular. I can tell you it's
00:21:49.840
still on the internet. I think if you Google my name and something like 10 investment advices or
00:21:59.400
something, it still pops up. Burton Malkiel, who wrote one of the most famous investment books and
00:22:06.600
actually just broke the mold about... Yes, thank you. In the comments, somebody is telling me that
00:22:13.300
Burton Malkiel's book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which is one of the most famous investing
00:22:19.260
books in the world, which largely did what I'm trying to do, and did it first, of course.
00:22:25.340
He's really the most famous first economist, Princeton guy, who said, you know, all of this
00:22:31.880
investment advice isn't real. All you should do is just put it in a well-diversified fund and just let
00:22:38.880
it sit there, and you will beat the experts every time. And he demonstrated that that was true.
00:22:43.680
So he's considered one of the most important voices in all of economics, very famous economist.
00:22:52.180
He wanted to write the same thing that I wrote in my one page to update his famous book, A Random
00:22:58.280
Walk Down Wall Street. And he contacted me and said, I was going to write this, but you basically
00:23:03.520
captured it all on one page. Can I just put your one page in my book? And I said, sure. Now, I don't know
00:23:12.700
what made it into the book. I never followed up. But I say that only for those of you who are
00:23:18.340
watching this and saying, I'm not really buying that the cartoonist wrote some important economic
00:23:24.760
piece. If you don't know, I have a degree in economics. I have an MBA. So I have a little
00:23:29.560
background in that work. Now, I saw a comment I wanted to comment on, but I won't.
00:23:37.680
This is all by way of telling you that there are two fields that I have entered with no experience
00:23:46.160
and dismantled. I would say that I dismantled the management leadership BS industry with Dilbert.
00:23:55.540
Wasn't trying to. It just, that just worked out. I would say that I at least helped Burton Malkiel
00:24:03.060
dismantle the investment advice industry that is largely an illusion and a bunch of, it's just a
00:24:09.360
fraud, basically. Okay. So you've also read my book, Win Bigly. Many of you have. And you know
00:24:17.940
that I've successfully, if you like that book, you think it's successful, dismantled a lot of what we
00:24:24.880
understand about facts and the news and our whole understanding of reality. If you haven't read that
00:24:32.180
book, you don't know what I'm talking about. But the point I'm trying to make is that I have a track
00:24:37.020
record of coming into a field that I don't have any background of or don't have much and dismantling
00:24:46.360
it. You know, basically showing you that it was a fraud. I'm going to do that again. And I'm going
00:24:53.380
to tell you that everybody who criticizes me for that, because I'm going to do it for you in a moment
00:24:57.840
on the other side of the whiteboard. Everybody who criticizes me for it says the same thing.
00:25:04.480
They say, well, what kind of expert are you? Why should we listen to you, cartoon boy? And the point
00:25:10.640
is, I apparently have developed, accidentally, a weird expertise of debunking fields that I don't
00:25:17.980
know that well. It wasn't anything I set out to do. But if you look at the track record, it's starting
00:25:26.480
to look pretty clear that you can debunk fields that you have no experience in. Let me give you
00:25:33.740
an example of how you could do it. I'm going to give you an example of how you personally could
00:25:38.500
debunk a field that you don't know anything about. Bigfoot is real. Go. Right? You don't have to be
00:25:48.900
some kind of scientific expert, because you kind of know Bigfoot isn't real. Right? You don't have to
00:25:57.040
be an expert in the field to recognize BS. If somebody tells you that, if your neighbor tells
00:26:02.720
you that they invented a fusion reactor for unlimited clean energy in their garage, and they're not even a
00:26:09.820
scientist. It's just something they worked out. They just figured it out. And now it's clean,
00:26:15.080
unlimited energy, and they built it in their garage. Well, you're not a physicist. Could you debunk that?
00:26:23.000
Yeah. Yeah, you could debunk that. Here's how you would debunk it. No, you didn't. No, you did not
00:26:29.560
build a fusion reactor in your garage. And you're not even a scientist. You don't have to be an expert
00:26:38.880
in the field all the time. Sure, there are plenty of things that you really would need to be an expert
00:26:44.640
to debunk. So in, let's say, a scientific field, if there was a scientific claim that you couldn't
00:26:50.420
tell one way or the other just by observing it, yeah, you'd have to be an expert. You'd have to be
00:26:55.400
a really big expert to debunk that. But you don't need to be an expert to debunk things that are
00:27:01.580
clearly and plainly false. The financial industry is that. The management, leadership, you know,
00:27:09.460
training industry is largely that as well. Those are things where you didn't need any expertise.
00:27:14.380
None at all. You could just look at it and say, uh, I don't feel as if I'd even need to read a book
00:27:22.360
on this one. This one's sort of right out there. You know what I mean? All right, let me give you
00:27:27.960
another example. I've been pestering the psychology industry online. You know, I've been, if you've been
00:27:38.420
watching recently, you know, I've been challenging those who say that narcissism is real. And of
00:27:48.060
course, uh, we're hearing narcissism all over the place and there's this alleged, uh, epidemic of
00:27:53.500
narcissism. And people are thinking it's because, oh, it's because people take too many selfies and
00:27:58.740
social media is turning us into narcissists, et cetera. Um, I'm going to take a different approach on
00:28:05.200
that as I have been on Twitter, too much criticism, et cetera. Here's what I see with no expertise.
00:28:13.220
Are you ready? So how much expertise do I have in the field of psychiatry and psychology? Zero. I mean,
00:28:22.040
I've taken courses. I've, I've read about it all my life. I am a trained hypnotist, which is, you know,
00:28:27.800
maybe a little, little sliver of some of that field. But do I claim any expertise in the field
00:28:34.720
of psychology or psychiatry? No, none. But is that going to stop me from doing what I'm going to do
00:28:44.720
next? Nope. Because sometimes you don't need to be an expert to know that your neighbor who's an
00:28:53.680
idiot did not really make a fusion reactor in his garage. I don't need to have a PhD to do that.
00:29:02.200
Right? That's how obvious some stuff is. And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to break it down to
00:29:07.780
you. This, for some of you, this is going to break your brains. For the rest of you, some of you are
00:29:14.120
going to say, yeah, I knew that. But some of you, your brain is just going to get broken right now.
00:29:19.040
And I apologize in advance for what I'm about to do to you. So I've been, I've been reading up on
00:29:25.920
just the last few days on various symptoms and mental health conditions. Now, as you know,
00:29:32.900
there are lots of mental health conditions that have names. You can say, well, you got this OCD or
00:29:38.420
OCPD. You've got your, you've got your depressions and your bipolars. You got your schizophrenics and
00:29:45.440
your, um, you got your, you're on, you might be on the spectrum, uh, your anxieties, your, you name
00:29:52.760
it. Right? So you've got all these things that have names on them, ADHD, whatever. I'm not sure which
00:29:58.520
we, which of these are actually mental illness versus just a mental situation. Right now, each of these
00:30:05.920
have a whole bunch of, uh, symptoms and they have constellations of symptoms. So most of these things
00:30:15.360
that have a name have, uh, a number of different symptoms. So I wrote on the board some example
00:30:22.300
symptoms. This is by no means complete. This is just, just a little sample and there's nothing special
00:30:28.640
about the symptoms I chose. These are just example symptoms and have lots of symptoms. And here's what
00:30:35.480
I observe with no understanding of psychology or psychiatry, no background whatsoever. I'm just
00:30:42.900
looking at it. Here's what I see. I see the psychologists say, all right, all right, all these
00:30:50.440
different, uh, different, uh, things have a variety of different symptoms, but the ones we see a lot,
00:30:57.260
let's say we're going to pick out these guys, this group here, just these symptoms and maybe some
00:31:05.280
others, right. But I'm going to label this and I'm going to give this little group a name and I'll
00:31:11.940
use just a fake name. I have to get this closer. So I don't rip my microphone out. We'll call this
00:31:23.140
Flurbs, just something I made up. All right. So if you come into my office and you say, I've,
00:31:28.680
I've got some anxiety and depression and fear of fear of losing things, I'm going to say to you,
00:31:34.180
Hmm, looks like you got a bad case of flurb. But then you say to me, but I also have excessive,
00:31:41.480
obsessive thoughts, which wasn't really in my definition. And I say, yeah, you know, comorbidities
00:31:47.500
are very common. It's very common. So we see this a lot. People will have mostly a bad case of flurb,
00:31:54.440
but it's very common that they'll also have a little bit from some of these other places.
00:32:01.060
And then somebody else will come and write a, write a PhD thesis. And they'll say, you know,
00:32:06.540
if you have this group and I'll borrow this one out of the flurb category.
00:32:11.800
And we'll just say that this group is a bad case of, let's say, ploop. You've got a bad case of
00:32:24.800
ploop, which is just something I made up. And now you come into me in my office and you say,
00:32:31.180
I got my obsessive thoughts. I can't handle some criticism. I feel really depressed about it. And I
00:32:35.860
go, hmm, sounds to me like you've got a bad case of ploop. And then the guy says, ah, but are you
00:32:45.860
sure it's ploop? Because the last guy said, I got a bad case of flurb. Do I have flurb or do I have
00:32:51.080
ploop? Doctor says, ah, I've been at this a long time, Sonny. I'm the expert. And it looks like you
00:32:58.540
got a bad case of ploop. And then I come back and say, you know, I left down a few symptoms. I've also got
00:33:04.840
some anxiety and fear of loss. So now do I have ploop with a few comorbidities or do I have
00:33:13.040
ploop plus flurb? Because I have all of these. Oh, it's worse than that. According to other people,
00:33:22.060
I don't have empathy. Now, if you've watched the news this week, literally this week,
00:33:30.960
the scientific community has said, oops, it turns out this thing where we said that sociopaths
00:33:39.160
don't have empathy. We were wrong. Even sociopaths have empathy. We were just wrong. They choose
00:33:49.540
things that are bad for people anyway, but they have complete empathy. I don't know if it's as
00:33:55.060
complete, but they have empathy. So it turns out that everything we knew about one of the main
00:34:00.380
symptoms of a whole constellation of different mental illnesses probably wasn't ever true.
00:34:08.100
Probably everybody had empathy. I don't know if it was psychopaths, but sociopaths have empathy.
00:34:15.480
So now you throw this one on there. Now I say to my psychologist, do I have ploop or flurb?
00:34:21.180
Because I've got all the symptoms of ploop and flurb, but I've also got this no empathy thing,
00:34:26.300
and that's hanging out there. And my psychologist says, don't worry about it. I know it doesn't seem
00:34:31.120
to fit the exact definitions, but you definitely have ploop. You definitely got a bad case of flurb.
00:34:36.940
And it's not unusual to have some comorbidities that would include maybe one or two other symptoms
00:34:43.380
from some other thing. Very common. Do you see where I'm going with this?
00:34:48.660
The entire field is just complete categorization BS. Now ask yourself, why is it that anybody would
00:35:02.700
need to put a name on any collection of symptoms when that collection is never stable? It's never
00:35:09.440
really only these things. In fact, it's rarely just those things. Most commonly, it's a grab bag of
00:35:18.460
symptoms, and nobody has any idea what to do about it. So the reason that these get names is because
00:35:25.440
people in the business want to collect up something and write a paper on it, and then maybe have a
00:35:33.680
major or a class about it. The categorizations have everything to do with commerce. It has nothing
00:35:40.500
to do with people. You don't have something called ploop or flurb. You don't have a disease because
00:35:49.040
somebody wrote a paper and said, I think if I throw these three in here, I can show some data that says
00:35:55.400
that they often travel together. Yeah, they often travel with other stuff too, but I can make a paper on
00:36:02.320
that. I can publish it. I'll be famous as the one who developed the theory of ploop. I'll be the ploop
00:36:09.720
guy. That's my PhD right there. And I can sell this. And by the way, it gets better. Would you take a pill
00:36:18.360
for a collection of random symptoms? Hey, I made a pill. And it's what's it to treat? Well, we don't have a
00:36:28.680
name for it. But if you take this pill, we think it might handle some of these things. How good is
00:36:36.400
the marketing? Is that a good marketing approach? I've got a pill. It might do something for some of
00:36:43.440
these things. Compare that to this. I've got a pill. It'll take care of your bipolar problem.
00:36:50.380
It's marketing. Half of this, it feels like, is just somebody who wanted to make a name for
00:37:01.120
themselves and have a study. Somebody wanted to make a pill that could treat a specific thing,
00:37:06.800
not some general bunch of symptoms. There's an industry that needed to refer to it. There are
00:37:12.960
scientists who need to be able to describe things. I'm starting to believe that the entire
00:37:19.460
categorization of what names we put on stuff has nothing to do with the patient. It seems to have
00:37:28.620
to do a lot with commerce and how we like to think of things, how we like to package them.
00:37:36.040
And now, if this were useful, then I would have a different opinion. In other words, if you went to
00:37:42.220
the doctors and said, I've got ploop and only ploop, and they gave you the ploop pill, and they wanted to
00:37:49.040
make sure they didn't accidentally give you the one for flurb, well, that would be pretty handy,
00:37:53.460
right? You'd say, I don't want to get the flurb pill when I've got a bad case of ploop.
00:38:00.400
But what happens in practice? Is there a pill that only handles ploop? Nope. There's a pill that
00:38:08.860
they say, you know, this pill is pretty good for ploop, and we found we have good effects when we've
00:38:14.880
got flurbs, and even when we don't have a name for it, and you've got some three of these, same pill.
00:38:21.800
Same pill. How many of you are having your heads exploding right now?
00:38:30.660
Now, I'm not going to say that the medications don't work. I'm not going to say that psychiatry
00:38:37.160
doesn't work or that psychology doesn't work. I would say there's evidence that at least some part
00:38:43.760
of it works. I don't know what is real and what is not, but I'm not disparaging the entire field of
00:38:51.420
psychology or the entire field of anything. I'm just saying that I don't think you have to be
00:38:58.240
an expert to look at this and say, this doesn't look exactly the way it's being presented to us.
00:39:07.300
All right? So, somebody says, same pill, different dosage. Yeah. How many of you are seeing this and
00:39:16.780
saying to yourself, holy cow, I think he's onto something? And how many of you are saying,
00:39:23.260
I don't think you're onto something? You don't have any experience in this field, and why would
00:39:29.800
you be making fun of it? So, I'll tell you the comments. Some people are saying they're laughing
00:39:35.440
because it's true. Somebody says the side effect from taking the pill for flurb is that you get a
00:39:41.860
bad case of ploop. True. True. I'm not seeing anybody disagree with me. Some of you are actually saying
00:39:49.640
it's old news and saying that it's obvious and it's old news. I don't know how obvious it is. All
00:39:55.640
right. So, look at the comments from the other people, if you were a little bit doubtful. There
00:40:01.040
seems to be a universal agreement that I have described something quite accurate here. Okay?
00:40:13.580
Well, actually, I'm actually kind of blown away about how many people are agreeing with me.
00:40:17.500
So, I didn't think this would go over as well as it did. I'm kind of surprised about that, honestly.
00:40:25.900
So, here's what I would suggest. I feel as though maybe there's a theory of our brains that is
00:40:35.760
missing. And I've had this conversation recently, and I want to see what you think about it.
00:40:41.560
I've heard it said that if you have some of these conditions, whatever name you want to put on it,
00:40:48.760
your brain, you have a certain brain with a certain structure, and therefore the only thing that's going
00:40:54.340
to help is probably a drug, because you've got a physical problem. You don't have a, when you say it's a
00:41:03.120
mental problem, it's easy to imagine it's something about this amorphous, non-physical thing called your
00:41:09.340
mind. But most people who have a little bit of understanding of the world understand that there's
00:41:17.020
a physical problem with the brain, because the physicality of the brain is what causes your
00:41:22.960
thoughts, right? It has to have a certain structure and chemistry to produce a certain set of thoughts.
00:41:28.580
So, if you're thinking to yourself, well, there's nothing I can do behaviorally, there's nothing I can do
00:41:34.520
with my environment or my lifestyle that's going to change it, because how do you change something
00:41:41.440
that's in your brain? And here's the most important thing that I think humanity needs to understand.
00:41:49.740
Your brain is programmable. You can physically change the structure of your brain by the things
00:41:59.520
that you do. Now, you have to know how to program. If you just randomly go through your life, you will
00:42:04.680
randomly program your brain. That's not, maybe that doesn't help you too much. But you can rigorously
00:42:10.500
decide how to program your brain, and when you do, it physically changes. Physically. Everything that you
00:42:18.580
learn becomes a physical change. If you have a trauma, that's a physical change. That's why it's so hard
00:42:25.060
to get rid of PTSD, because it's physically in there. It's not a memory, per se, like a concept.
00:42:31.840
It's a physical change. That's why it's persistent. So, what could you do to physically reprogram your
00:42:39.980
brain? Could you physically retrain your brain to help with some of this mental illness stuff?
00:42:47.760
Certainly not all of it. I mean, there's got to be things that are just beyond our ability to,
00:42:53.180
you know, handle with any specific tool. Maybe you need lots of tools. But let me give you a
00:42:58.720
model here of how to approach this. I wasn't planning on doing this today, but I'm going to
00:43:04.100
change some of your lives just for fun, because the news is boring. So, since the news is boring,
00:43:11.860
I'm going to change some of your lives. This will work, I would guess, something like 10 to 20 percent
00:43:17.300
of you will never be the same after this. That's true. Most of you will just say, oh, this was
00:43:22.440
entertaining or it wasn't. But about 10 to 20 percent of you will never be the same after the
00:43:27.480
next five minutes. Because I've seen this happen, so I'm not really guessing. I know this will be the
00:43:34.560
case. And all I'm going to do is reframe something. I'm going to tell you things you already know are
00:43:40.060
true. I'm just going to organize it differently so that you can see them differently, even though you
00:43:44.880
know all the parts. Okay? That's called reframing. Very powerful if you do it right. It goes like
00:43:51.160
this. This is you. And even though I'm a world-famous cartoonist, sometimes stick figures are the way to
00:44:01.220
go. So that's you. And you want to reprogram this thing into your brain. It's in your head. It's your
00:44:08.180
brain. So there's your brain. And you want to reprogram it because it's not making you happy. It's
00:44:14.900
giving you some problems. How do you do it? Here's how most people do it. I'll try to arrange my
00:44:22.900
thoughts. Not so easy, is it? You can't really just think your way to a different brain. If you
00:44:31.640
could, we'd all be doing it. Now, there are some ways you can actually think your way to a different
00:44:36.760
brain. So in some ways you can. For example, if you forced yourself to focus on something positive or
00:44:44.100
to learn something, those things would be maybe mental processes. Not so much the learning, but the
00:44:50.880
focusing on something would be kind of a mental process. So in some small way, yes, you can reprogram
00:44:56.500
your brain just by thinking. But mostly, you have to do it this way. You've got to do something in
00:45:04.040
the outside world. This is a very bad picture of a globe of the world. Globe of the world. There's
00:45:13.980
South America there. A little bit of Europe. Let's give us a little Hawaii there. So if you want to do
00:45:20.860
something to reprogram your brain, here is the reframing that will change the lives of 10 to 20%
00:45:26.680
of you right now. You have to change something in the world to reprogram that little wet
00:45:34.520
thing inside your skull. That's how it's done. Did that seem like a big deal? For 80 to 90% of you,
00:45:43.400
you just said, 10 to 20% of you just said, what? What? It's the first time you're thinking of it this way.
00:45:54.540
Let me give you an example. You feel bad. Get out of the house, get in your car, go someplace that
00:46:01.320
changes your mood. That is a change in the world that happened outside of you. There was a car,
00:46:08.400
change of scenery, change how you feel. Let's say you go do a thing over and over again.
00:46:15.840
Going and doing a thing is a change in the world. You've got to change the world to change your brain.
00:46:21.580
So you think the way to think of your brain and reprogramming it is that there's an interface
00:46:29.460
for your brain, the actual mound of cells and chemistry in your skull. There is an external
00:46:38.020
interface like a chess board. And if you go to the external interface outside your head and move the
00:46:44.900
chess pieces just right, it reprograms your head permanently. So look for those ways that you can
00:46:53.500
reprogram your external life. For example, let's say you've got a fear of a thing, whatever it is,
00:47:02.580
speaking in public, you have a, you don't like to be touched. You don't like a certain kind of
00:47:10.060
stimulation. Now, in some cases you, you probably can't get past that, but here's what I would at
00:47:16.540
least try. Graduated exposure. Have you ever heard that? There are a number of cases where graduated
00:47:22.320
exposure works. And basically it is, if you've got, there's a thing you can't do, you, you kind of
00:47:28.140
creep up on it by doing it a little bit until you can get used to it. So let's say it's impossible
00:47:33.900
for you to be in a crowded place or let's say a place, a social place. You just don't want to be
00:47:42.640
in a cocktail party. The way to deal with that is to manipulate the external world. So you put yourself
00:47:50.760
in a situation where you can practice small and then pull back as soon as it's uncomfortable. So you do
00:47:57.920
two minutes of talking to three people and then you pull back. And the next time you do five minutes
00:48:04.500
of talking to three people and then you pull back until talking to those three people for five minutes
00:48:10.380
is easy. And then you do it for 10 minutes. So that's graduated exposure. Now, I'm not saying that
00:48:15.900
that works for any one of the symptoms. I'm saying that if it does make sense for you,
00:48:21.460
that's something you can manipulate in the external world. So the big aha for those of you who have any
00:48:29.420
kind of mental problem you're working for is that almost certainly there's a way to at least make it
00:48:35.440
better. I'm not going to say any of this will cure any particular mental problems. That would be way
00:48:39.840
too big a claim. I'm saying that you could probably chip away at a lot of this stuff by manipulating the
00:48:45.520
outside world. Here's the way to think of this. Have you ever had a bad mental problem at the same
00:48:54.160
time you've had good sex? Chances are not so much, right? If you're lucky enough that you've had good
00:49:02.020
sex in your life, you know the experience of feeling great and having no mental problems at that moment,
00:49:09.580
but just at that moment. And so if it's true that what you're doing, having your great sex, changes your
00:49:18.220
chemistry at least temporarily, you already know the experience of using the external world, in this case
00:49:25.100
another human being, to change your mind. So the moment you realize that changing how you feel is always a
00:49:36.180
function of changing something external, you have a way to fix almost everything. Now if you have
00:49:43.540
serious mental problems, you know, they're going to be beyond any kind of lifestyle change. So I don't
00:49:49.020
want to oversell it. I'm just saying that there's a whole constellation of, let's say things that act
00:49:55.280
like they're new problems in 2020. Doesn't seem like everybody's depressed in 2020, right? Have you noticed
00:50:03.780
that basically everybody has anxiety in 2020? Everybody's got a self-esteem problem? You know,
00:50:10.900
the whole list of mental problems, even people who would have called themselves not mentally ill
00:50:17.160
10 years ago are kind of looking at themselves now and saying, I might be a little mentally ill.
00:50:24.140
I got some problems. Every single time, the solution is the same. Never, never will the solution be in your
00:50:33.140
head. The solution is somewhere out there. Gratitude is one of the ways to reprogram your
00:50:40.260
brain. If you're in a negative space, try gratitude. Simply finding a person in the real world, give them
00:50:48.180
a call, send them a text, and say how much you appreciate them. All right, I do this around Christmas
00:50:54.440
pretty much reflexively now, because I like it. I'll just pick somebody at random, not random,
00:51:01.380
somebody I've actually thought a good thought about. Contact them out of the blue and say, you
00:51:06.860
know, all this time I've been very grateful about something you taught me or grateful about the time
00:51:13.640
we spent or something you did for me, just out of the blue. Do you think that that doesn't reprogram
00:51:19.240
your brain? It does. It does it pretty quickly. Gratitude is one of those things that's built into us
00:51:25.580
as some kind of a, I don't know, it's part of our software, I guess. And if you activate it, it has a
00:51:32.480
predictable effect on the nature of your brain. So let it fly. Just let it fly. I saw a tweet by
00:51:42.060
Roly Poly, Twitter user Roly Poly. And I think his exact tweet was that compliments are a way of
00:51:51.560
distributing happiness. I think I got it close, trying to quote it exactly. Compliments are a
00:51:57.720
way of distributing happiness. And that's exactly the way I think of them. But it's two-way. It's a
00:52:04.760
two-way happiness. When you give somebody a compliment they weren't expecting, I'm not talking
00:52:09.500
about, you know, the ones that are sort of expected, you know, your spouse comes out dressed
00:52:16.580
for the evening and, you know, sort of a compliment situation. Oh, you look great. I'm not talking
00:52:21.580
about those. Those are good. You should do those. But I'm talking about the one that just comes out
00:52:25.880
of nowhere. You were not expecting a compliment today and you just got one. Have you ever had
00:52:30.980
that experience? You just, you open your email and there's nothing but a compliment. Somebody actually
00:52:36.060
sent you an email and wasn't asking for anything. It was just a compliment. Has that ever happened
00:52:42.460
to you? If it has, you'll remember it, right? It would feel like it's a small thing, but it almost
00:52:48.740
doesn't matter who sent it or even what they said. If somebody sends you an unsolicited compliment,
00:52:53.980
it'll go through you like lightning as an adult. As a kid, maybe less so because you get compliments
00:53:00.220
as kids. As adults, you can get, it's rare to get a compliment. You know, I get them because I'm in
00:53:06.520
the public, but for most of you, you can go weeks without a freaking compliment. And it's like life,
00:53:12.840
life blood. So my point is, if you want to feel happy for yourself, give somebody else a compliment.
00:53:19.960
If you don't think that works, you'll be surprised. Just keep in mind that whenever you're in that,
00:53:28.020
those few situations that you know you can be happy, you just had great sex, you won the lottery,
00:53:33.900
you're out in nature, you took a great trip. If you could be happy in those situations, it means
00:53:39.500
that the outside world is available to you as an interface to program your brain. That is all I
00:53:48.200
want to tell you. Now, some of you, I've, I do listen to all of your criticisms of my live stream,
00:53:55.120
by the way, and I find them helpful. Here's another, here's another reframing for you. How do you like
00:54:03.060
being criticized? You hate it, don't you? Don't you hate getting criticized? Everybody hates it.
00:54:12.100
It's not something you can enjoy. Here's a reframe for you. Every criticism you receive,
00:54:20.060
just play this, play this sound effect when you get it. You ready? Cha-ching.
00:54:25.200
Yeah. Every time somebody criticizes you, you just made money. Do you know why I say that?
00:54:33.980
Because you just made money. It's true. If somebody criticizes my live stream, and I'll tell you the
00:54:41.980
biggest criticism I'm hearing, it's not the biggest one, but it's the one I hear the most, is that my
00:54:46.360
shelves are boring. Right? How many of you have told me, since I did this, that my shelves are boring?
00:54:54.440
A lot of you. Right? Now, do I feel good that you're telling me that there's something about my
00:55:01.100
thing that I do every day isn't good? No. Nobody likes to be criticized. It's not like you can enjoy it.
00:55:10.320
But how do I receive it? Do I receive it as, oh, I guess I suck? I could. Right? How easily could I
00:55:20.540
receive a criticism like that as, God, I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot. Why didn't I see it? Obviously,
00:55:27.480
those shelves need something on them. I'm an idiot. That'd be really easy, wouldn't it? I don't.
00:55:34.560
Here's how I hear it. Cha-ching. That's the sound of a cash register, me making money.
00:55:39.720
Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Because when you criticize me for my background, I know exactly what to change
00:55:46.900
to do a better job. Because you told me. That's like money. If somebody hands you a thing that will
00:55:57.040
definitely make you money, what is your feeling about it? Do you feel, oh, I hate it when people give
00:56:05.680
me a thing that makes me make money? I'll bet most of you think exactly that. You think, I hate
00:56:13.000
a criticism. Not me. Years ago, and this happened about the time I was doing the Dilbert comic, when
00:56:19.880
people would criticize my comic, I would hate it, of course. But then I would say, oh, a lot of people
00:56:26.480
are saying the same thing. So I'll change it. And then I would make that change. And that made me
00:56:32.240
rich. I literally got rich by being criticized and understanding the criticism as cha-ching,
00:56:43.020
cha-ching. Every time I hear one, I say, wait a minute, you just told me how to get richer.
00:56:49.160
And the same applies if you're not trying to get rich. I know you're not all ambitious in the same
00:56:55.820
precise way. But suppose you just wanted a better social life. I'll tell you the best advice somebody
00:57:03.420
gave me was the cruelest thing anybody ever said to me. Years ago, I had a female friend many years ago,
00:57:12.300
and we would chat often. And one day, my female friend told me how negative I was.
00:57:19.160
And what a bummer it was to sort of listen to me, because I was sort of complaining about stuff
00:57:25.480
all the time. Now, I was not aware that I was a big complainer. So this is maybe 25 years ago or
00:57:34.240
something. I thought I was not a big complainer. I had no idea. I thought I was a person who talked
00:57:39.900
about my day, and talked about the funny parts of it, and anything that caught my interest became,
00:57:46.080
you know, a story. So in my mind, I had no idea, no idea that I was having an effect on other people
00:57:53.080
with my negativity, because I thought I was just telling about my day. Once I learned that,
00:57:59.580
do you know how powerful that was? I was able, because it was something I could change, I would
00:58:05.260
just become aware of the ratio of negative things I said to positive. And then I borrowed a technique
00:58:12.460
from my tennis player friend, John. John was one of the most, probably had one of the most successful
00:58:19.940
social personalities I've ever seen in my life. And you see people like that, and you say to yourself,
00:58:26.080
why is that person so well liked by basically everybody? And why am I not? And I thought,
00:58:33.180
maybe it's technique. Maybe it's not just that he has, you know, a natural personality that people
00:58:39.320
like, which he did. But he also had technique. And he actually taught me his technique. One day when
00:58:45.780
we were just talking after tennis. And the technique was this, that if he has anything negative that he
00:58:51.460
wants to express, he either changes it into the most positive way he can say it, or he pairs it with
00:58:59.380
a positive thought. So that he never goes out of balance with more negative than positive. No negative
00:59:06.300
thought comes out without being paired. And I thought, well, that's like an easy formula.
00:59:12.040
I can do that. And again, this is a change in the outside world. Because things you say
00:59:17.240
are the outside world, right? It's no longer just in your head, you're affecting other people.
00:59:22.720
And then those other people are affecting you. How do you think John's life was when the way he
00:59:29.080
affected other people is making them feel positive? Right? Don't you think that made his mental health
00:59:35.760
a lot better? Because everywhere he went, he would be influencing people to become positive just by
00:59:42.420
his own positivity. That positivity would come back to him. And he'd think, I love spending time with
00:59:48.200
those people. They were so positive. But they weren't. They were only positive because John made them
00:59:55.260
positive. He paced them. In other words, he paced the wrong word. He basically, his energy led their
01:00:03.820
energy. And they matched his positivity. I watched it happen a million times. Wherever he was, he would
01:00:10.200
turn people into more positive people just by his example. So since it was so easy to copy, literally
01:00:16.680
you just say, oh, I'm saying something negative. So I'll just add a balancer. It's easy to do. And so I
01:00:23.080
started doing that. So the point is, the most brutal criticism I've ever had, like something that
01:00:31.140
really stuck in my head, really stuck in my head, really hurt. I mean, it stung. Cha-ching. It was
01:00:38.920
probably the most important change I've ever made to my social, let's say social toolbox. I would say
01:00:47.040
that that one change really, really changed my life in terms of whether people want to spend a minute
01:00:55.380
with me in person. And that's the reframe. So the next time you get criticized, whether
01:01:04.040
personally or whether professionally, say to yourself, cha-ching. Just try it. Like actually
01:01:13.760
say that little sound, cha-ching. Not figuratively. I'm not talking figuratively. I mean actually saying
01:01:23.020
that cha-ching when you hear it. And you'll be amazed. That will just be like a trigger. In
01:01:29.040
hypnosis, there's a technique called a trigger or a key. You just pair a thought with some kind of
01:01:36.220
stimulus or other word or whatever. You just pair something together and then they become forever
01:01:41.300
paired in your memory. So there you go. I wasn't planning on doing this, but for 10 to 20% of you,
01:01:49.840
you just had it paid forward. So I would say that what my friend John did for me, without even trying,
01:01:59.500
I mean he wasn't trying to fix me. He was just being himself in a way that was actually very effective,
01:02:05.300
the way he was being himself. And I learned from that and I just paid it forward. So 10 to 20% of you,
01:02:12.960
your life's just substantially changed. It really did. Most of you, maybe you learned something and
01:02:20.380
that would be good too. And there might be some of you for whom you know somebody who needs this.
01:02:26.060
And so your benefit is that you fix a spouse by exposing them to it, etc. So you can actually fix
01:02:32.880
your own situation by fixing other people. I'll tell you, I was in a conversation just this week
01:02:39.340
with somebody who told me that someone in their social circle had mentioned their weight.
01:02:47.860
Imagine that. Imagine somebody in your social circle mentioning your weight. Ouch, right? It's pretty bad,
01:02:59.420
especially if you were already worried that you had a few extra pounds. So you already had some
01:03:03.960
self-esteem issues. And then somebody actually says it out loud. Ouch, right? What do you think
01:03:11.940
happened? The person in this story went out, completely changed her diet program, probably
01:03:20.920
changed her exercise and took it up a little bit. I'm not sure about that. Dropped a bunch of pounds
01:03:26.800
pounds and went from being a little less self-confidence because she frankly did have
01:03:33.740
more pounds than she wanted. I don't think I noticed, but in her own mind, she wasn't where
01:03:39.780
she wanted to be. I don't think you would have noticed necessarily, but we have higher standards
01:03:44.240
for ourselves. And took her game up a lot, a lot, and probably permanently. So this was somebody who
01:03:55.100
took this just horrible thing and turned it immediately into the most positive thing ever.
01:04:02.220
Because unfortunately, we are a world in which your looks and your health make a lot of difference.
01:04:08.340
You would love it if that were not the case, but it is the case.
01:04:10.920
In the real world, those things matter to how people treat you. So this one person took this
01:04:17.920
criticism that was biting and terrible and probably will be scarred for life because it was pretty bad
01:04:23.340
and turned it into the kind of positive that's just life-changing. I mean, I actually watched somebody
01:04:30.940
turn bad news into good news in a way that was frankly just awe-inspiring. And
01:04:37.600
I felt very glad to know this person and very proud. All right.
01:04:44.960
So that is what I wanted to tell you for today. And maybe tomorrow there'll be a little bit of
01:04:54.260
news that isn't terrible. Somebody says, how can I fix my balding problem? I actually have an answer
01:05:01.100
to that. You know, I know that you're joking. So somebody asked, what can I do about going bald?
01:05:06.040
I literally have an answer for that. And I'll tell you the story. Maybe you've heard it before.
01:05:10.920
So years ago, you can tell that I've follically challenged myself and started losing my hair
01:05:18.140
very young. So it's always been an issue because it happened, you know, especially because it
01:05:23.220
happened earlier than it happens for most people. So I was once getting a suit tailored and I happened
01:05:31.860
to be in the suit buying place. And the gentleman who was helping me, he was doing the measuring and
01:05:38.600
helping me with my suit. And I was trying it on. We were just chatting. And I don't remember why,
01:05:43.500
but I think he said, I look good in the suit or something, you know, as a salesman would.
01:05:48.160
And I said something self-deprecating, joking around. I said something, yeah, but, you know,
01:05:55.340
it's too bad I'm short and bald or something. And he gave me the best life advice I think I've just
01:06:06.000
ever had. And, you know, at the time I was the trained hypnotist and he was the guy working in
01:06:13.420
the suit shop. And he gave me the best hypnosis trick to make my loss of hair not matter that I've
01:06:23.060
ever seen. And it was this. Make sure that you go to the gym, you know, build up your physicality
01:06:30.140
to the point where people don't notice you're bald. Now, what's your first reaction to that?
01:06:36.580
Do you think you could build up your physicality, you know, your muscles and get your body in good
01:06:41.100
shape to the point where people don't notice you're bald? Do you think that's the thing?
01:06:47.000
Well, let me tell you, he gave me that advice. And after he gave me the advice,
01:06:53.040
I had already noticed that he was really strapped himself. He was a really fit guy. And you could
01:07:00.920
tell even he was wearing a suit, but even in his suit, you could tell this guy was ripped.
01:07:07.680
And after he told me this, do you know what I noticed? He's bald. Didn't even notice.
01:07:16.140
I had worked with this guy up close. He was literally measuring my suit. And until he told me he was
01:07:21.940
bald, I didn't even know it. And it wasn't that I, that my brain didn't see it. It's that he had
01:07:29.560
shifted my attention from the top of his head where there wasn't much going on to the rest of his body.
01:07:36.920
And his body was magnificent, if I may say so, of another man. His body was magnificent, even in a
01:07:43.520
suit. He was so well-developed that you could, you know, you could tell his chest and his arms were
01:07:49.000
really well done. And I said to myself, that actually worked. That actually worked.
01:07:57.660
And so it wasn't long after that, that I started, you know, just buzz cutting what I had left and went
01:08:04.560
to the gym. Dan Bongino, thank you very much. Dan Bongino, there's an example. I assume he's,
01:08:12.540
is he losing his hair or does he just cut it short? I don't even know.
01:08:15.360
But you look at Dan Bongino and is the first thing you say to yourself, there's a bald guy?
01:08:22.440
No, no. I don't even know if he's actually losing his hair or he just cuts it short.
01:08:27.060
But either way, you're not going to look at Dan Bongino and say, there's a bald guy.
01:08:32.120
That's the last thing you think. You're going to think, damn, what is he doing with his exorcism?
01:08:37.700
Joe Rogan, another example. Do you look at Joe Rogan and say to yourself, there's a bald guy?
01:08:42.300
Nope. You look at him and say, what the hell is he doing with his fitness? I want to do some of that.
01:08:53.620
So, to the answer to your question, yes, you can actually make your baldness go away.
01:09:01.260
Three examples right there. Made their baldness go away.
01:09:04.620
And I think that this technique is one you can generalize to a lot of stuff.
01:09:09.020
You don't need to fix all of your flaws if you can make people look somewhere else.
01:09:17.420
One is to actually fix it, and one is to make people not care.
01:09:26.580
So, I don't think you expected me to have an answer for that, but there it is.
01:09:34.620
And I've got a few more minutes here on Periscope.
01:09:43.120
Oh, somebody says it's the best Periscope ever.
01:09:46.440
Well, I don't know about that, but I always try to make them the best ever each time.
01:10:03.000
Now, I say alcohol is poison in an answer to that question because that's a technique.
01:10:08.940
I tell myself alcohol is poison because if you tell yourself it's entertainment, you're going to want some.
01:10:16.200
So, how you label things will, over time, not right away, but over time, when you label things consistently, it will reprogram your brain.
01:10:24.680
It's the same technique I use for not overeating because if you tell yourself that cake and dessert are food, you're going to eat them.
01:10:40.040
So, I don't define stuff like sweets and cakes and desserts and stuff and junk food.
01:10:48.480
I define that as entertainment that has, unfortunately, a cost.
01:10:54.000
So, when I want to eat, I eat things I call food.
01:10:58.220
You know, your broccolis, your clean proteins, etc.
01:11:01.320
And when I want to entertain myself, I say, well, one way to do it would be to eat this crap.
01:11:08.320
And another way to do it would be to do something that I like just as much that doesn't hurt me.
01:11:12.500
And then it's easy to say, well, if it's just entertainment, I'll do one that doesn't make me fat.
01:11:20.140
So, the label that you consistently put on things will actually program your brain over time.
01:11:28.220
So, the reason I say it's poison is that it's lots of fun.
01:11:32.500
I have just as much fun being drunk as other people.
01:11:35.960
But I also have a reaction to alcohol that I don't like.
01:11:42.840
I don't like the lasting effect over the weekend.
01:11:46.500
If my alternative is to smoke some weed where I feel great when it happens,
01:11:53.160
and then I wake up in the morning and I'm better rested.
01:11:57.240
If you do weed, you wake up in the morning feeling better than if you had not smoked weed.
01:12:05.920
And if you drink alcohol, you have a good hour of fun followed by not so much fun the next day.
01:12:14.880
So, to me, it's not a good cost-to-benefit trade-off.
01:12:18.140
I do expect that someday, between now and the time, the rest of my life, I will drink again.
01:12:24.420
There will be a time when I have a drink for whatever reason.
01:12:27.520
But I like to think of it as poison and not entertainment.