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April 29, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
45:48
Episode 511 Scott Adams: Political Lies, Mass Hysteria, All the Racist Comments, Dopamine
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
Cuz? Cuz why?
I'll tell you why.
Cuz it's time for a coffee with Scott Adams and the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
All you need There's a glass or a mug or a cup.
Some kind of a chalice or a stein or a thermos or a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, yeah. That's some good stuff right there.
All right, well, so the news is still kind of slow, but there's some fun things happening and in no particular order.
You may remember a character from the 2016 campaign that I called The Mole.
Now, The Mole was sort of a hypothetical person That I imagined was working on Hillary's social media campaign because her social media game was so bad, it looked like it had to be a Trump supporter who was pretending to give her advice because the advice was so bad that it just had to be like a secret agent, a mole, planted in the campaign.
And today I saw that Beto O'Rourke has announced a plan to fight climate change With a price tag of $5 trillion.
Now, when I see a candidate running for president coming up with a plan that's going to cost you $5 trillion, and that's just for one thing, that's just one policy, I've got to ask myself, is he really running for president?
Or is he...
He's not even running for vice president with that kind of a plan.
So anyway, it looks like the mole has a new job working for Beto, coming up with ridiculous plans.
Ian, Beto, how about universal health care?
It's only going to cost you $50 trillion.
Sounds good. I'm going to go with that.
Healthcare doesn't cost $50 trillion, but it's funny.
All right. So, the dumbest senator in the world, Senator Wyden.
Now, I say he's the dumbest senator in the world without actually having surveyed all of the senators.
But of the senators who appear on television, I always have the same impression.
You know, you judge all the senators that you see on TV, all the politicians, and you say, oh, that one's pretty smart.
Even if I don't agree with their opinions, you can tell they're smart.
Nancy Pelosi, for example.
I don't agree with her opinions, but there's no question she's very smart.
Elizabeth Warren. Don't agree with her opinions, but there's no doubt she's really smart.
Kamala Harris, don't agree with her.
Very smart. Cory Booker, brilliant guy.
You know, he's probably got the highest academic credentials.
Or you look at, what's his name, Mayor Pete, brilliant guy.
Then there's Senator Wyden.
Every time he, am I even pronouncing his name right?
Every time he comes on television, I just think, am I looking at the dumbest guy I've ever seen in politics?
Now, I'm not saying his IQ is low, because I don't know that.
Yeah, Ron Wyden.
But every time he's on TV, it's W-Y-D-E-N. Every time he's on TV and he's talking, independent of whether I agree with his opinions, I just listen to him and I think, are you the dumbest guy ever?
In the entire Congress?
Now Swalwell's, somebody says, how about Swalwell?
Swalwell is a different situation because I don't believe he believes anything he's saying.
You know, he's in a political contest and the truth is not really an effective tool.
So I don't think you can say that Swalwell is dumb.
You can say you don't like his ideas.
And by the way, Swalwell is my representative in my area.
I've met him several times.
And I don't get any impression he's dumb, but don't agree with a lot of things he says.
Anyway, so Ron Wyden, senator, has, even today, he's tweeting about the Charlottesville find people hoax like it's real.
As if it hasn't already been debunked as thoroughly as it could be.
Now, the version that he says is real, this is his tweet.
After Charlottesville, Trump called those neo-Nazis and white nationalists shouting anti-Semitic slurs, quote, very fine people.
Now, that has been debunked by...
CNN, Jake Stapper, it's been debunked by Wikipedia, PolitiFact, the Fact Checkers, Washington Post, Vox, USA Today, at least one editor for the Wall Street Journal.
Now, I tweeted a separate tweet, in which I, well actually it was this tweet, So I retweeted Ron Wyden's incorrect fake news.
He's the dumbest senator in the world because he's the only person who missed all of the headlines.
Oh, Snopes just doesn't talk about it.
Somebody's asking me about Snopes.
They just don't mention it, as you could imagine that they wouldn't.
And I think I told you, I forget if I told you yesterday...
That Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, he retweeted a Breitbart article, Joel Pollack's article, in the context of showing...
It was an article about how CNN's Jake Tapper described the fine people, quote, And it conflicted with a lot of, pretty much all of the CNN reporting up to that point.
So it was a Breitbart article, Joe Pollock, and it was talking about a CNN event.
So it was a Breitbart article talking about CNN. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia retweets it.
Because, as many of you know, several of us, and some of you watching probably right now, were involved in trying to get Wikipedia to correct the record so that it would have the second part of the President's quote in which he said that he condemned totally the white supremacists, or the neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
So, Wikipedia was the first, let's say, major media site.
I don't know if you'd call them a media site.
But they were the first that were not obviously a right-leaning site.
The first ones to actually recognize that this was fake news and to add the full context.
Now, they don't call it fake news.
They just add the context so you can tell yourself that it's fake news.
You can see it. And Some people got on Jimmy Wales for retweeting Breitbart because that's a right-leaning site.
And I quickly noted that it was...
A right-leaning site agreeing with a left-leaning site, which was the whole point.
This is one of those few cases where the left-leaning site and the right-leaning site were on the same page, at least about the truth of this hoax, which was that it wasn't true.
And Wikipedia was on that same page.
So it made perfect sense.
It was actually the perfect thing for a Wikipedia representative to retweet because it showed that both the left and the right are now agreeing With where Wikipedia got first, not first before the sites on the right, but first before the sites on the left.
Anyway, so I'm using a President Trump persuasion technique, and I don't know if anybody caught this, but in my tweet I said, the world's dumbest senator, talking about Ron Wyden, doesn't notice that all the major press outlets debunk the fine people hoax this week.
Do you recognize the persuasion technique?
I'll read it again.
Find the persuasion technique that's in this.
So my tweet says, world's dumbest senator doesn't notice that all the major press outlets debunked the fine people hoax this week.
How many of you can tell?
Not the name calling, that's not the active part.
Thinking past the sale?
Right. Yeah, it's the all.
Because the tweet is designed to make people who are inclined to disagree with it, to make them argue about whether all is accurate.
If I can make them argue about whether literally every single major media site debunked it, And in the process, they will convince themselves that many of them did.
The New York Times printed an article, an interview with a fine person, but that was back in 2016, but it's resurfacing.
And they're going to find out, okay...
It is true that Jake Tappers quoted the entire, you know, the active part of the transcript.
That's true. It's true that the Washington Post did.
It's true that Fox did. And so they're going to go down and convince themselves that maybe I'm incorrect that every major media outlet did it, but most of the big ones took a swing at it.
You know, there's at least one opinion person, one editor, one One representative, one contributor from most of the major outlets now, at least, you know, one voice that has been printed or published or was on air, that said clearly that the president said, I'm not talking about that group.
I condemn them totally.
Somebody says, "Would I trust Jake Tapper to draw Dilbert again?" For those of you who don't know the background, Jake actually drew a week of Dilbert a few years ago for charity, and we gave some money to a Wounded Warrior charity.
Now, let me be very clear.
I like Jake Tapper, like, as a person.
I think he's a great guy, super talented, across all kinds of different fields.
You know, he's written fiction, he knows history, he's great on the air.
So talent-wise, tremendous, and personality just as a person, but I think he has all the right instincts.
He said the correct interpretation of the Charlottesville hoax.
So you could disagree with him as much as you want, and I have lots of points in which I might.
But he did get this right.
He did say it on the air.
Contradicting pretty much all of CNN who says it the other way.
And he's tremendously talented.
And I think that he's actually interested in the truth.
So I don't have anything bad to say about Jake.
Even when we disagree on content.
Alright. What else was I going to talk about today?
So... I'm looking at my own notes so I can tell what I was going to talk about today.
Why is my phone so...
This user interface is so bad, it's not looking for anything.
Yeah, let's talk about...
Oh, all the racist comments.
So, thank you for reminding me.
When I write the title of these periscopes, and then as soon as the periscope starts, I can't see the title anymore?
So... Anyway, so I want to talk about...
Do you remember the trick that allegedly the FBI used?
Allegedly... To get those FISA warrants about Russia collusion.
Now the story goes, and I'm not so sure you can trust any of the reporting on this topic, no matter where it comes from these days, but the story goes that one of the ways that the FISA application to spy on various people associated with the Trump campaign,
directly or indirectly, That part of what they did was they created the Steele dossier, and then it was leaked to the press, and then I think it was Isikoff.
But anyway, the press wrote stories from the content of the Steele dossier.
And then when the FISA application was being put together, the FBI said, we have two sources.
We've got the Steele dossier, but we've also got the story in the news.
But the story in the news was put there by the FBI, or put there by whoever leaked the Steele dossier.
Now, that allowed them to pretend that there were two sources when there was only one source.
So remember that trick, because it's not the first time you'll ever see that.
Now, what the press does...
Is they'll take something that President Trump says that's just a normal thing with normal language, which if it were to be understood in its ordinary form, it wouldn't be provocative.
But because the press twists it and turns it and takes it out of context and edits out the parts that are inconvenient, they turn it into racism.
So then what does the press...
Report as the proof of President Trump's racism.
What the press reports is their own mistakes.
So in other words, the press takes one thing after another and a context.
I'll give you some examples.
So we've already talked about how the fine people thing was fake news for two years because they just edited out the part where the president says, I condemn totally the neo-Nazis and the white nationals.
They just leave that out and turn it into a completely opposite story.
They did the same thing with, or a similar thing, in terms of it being fake news, with the birther issue.
The birtherism issue, they've decided to tell the public it's a case of obvious racism.
It's not a case of obvious racism because it's the most common political attack In political history, the most common thing that anybody does to attack an opponent is if it's available to them, they say you're not eligible to run for office.
They'll say you haven't lived in the district long enough.
They'll say this is your guest house.
They'll say this is where you get your mail, but you're not really a citizen.
They'll say that Canadian Ted was born in Canada.
So the president literally used exactly the same technique Against Ted Cruz.
Why? Because it was available.
It was easy. It's the most common, normal, easy thing to do, to say, I'm not sure my opposition, I'm not even sure that they can legally run for this office.
Most common thing to do.
Now, what did the media do?
The media started spinning that as if it's obvious racism, when it's obviously not.
Because the president didn't mention race.
He just mentioned lots of questions about the birth certificate.
Whether he believed they were true or not is somewhat irrelevant because it's the most common political accusation that anybody makes.
If it's available, you always do it.
And so now when some other thing comes up, such as, let's say, the shithole comment, So the Shea Hole comment was something that was said in a small group, which when you take it to a larger group, in other words, when it leaks and it becomes part of the press, the way it feels is completely different.
Just changing the context from something said in a small group of people you're not expecting to blab or you hope they don't.
It's a bad expectation.
And when you see it larger, it all looks worse.
For example, take just about every conversation that you've had with friends about politics.
Imagine if your private conversation with your friend, in which you don't believe you're saying anything outrageous, imagine if those exact words were simply broadcast to the world, and then the world hears them as if you said them in public.
Because the way you talk casually is so different from the way that you would talk to the public that all you need to do is change the context, and it sounds awful.
That's a trick that the press does, because the public is not sophisticated.
They cannot hear the comment that is now a public known fact, what was said.
They can't mentally translate that back to what it must have sounded like when it was said in a small group.
That's what the press does.
The Sheol comment was about countries that have low socioeconomic situations.
Maybe their education system isn't that good.
Everybody in the small group knew exactly what he was talking about.
Which was countries that aren't doing so well and may not be producing as many potential immigrants who would be a positive for the country in terms of economics.
It has nothing to do with race, except by coincidence, right?
So the press turns that comment about the socio-economic situation in the country, they turn that into, well, it's obviously a racist statement.
And how do they prove that the Shehul comments are a racist statement?
Well, they go to the FISA application and they say, you know, sure, it's a little bit ambiguous.
I can see how you're saying it's only about the country, not about the people.
But the way we know it's about the people, really, is because, look at this other comment about birtherism.
So if you look at the other comment and you say, well...
If you saw any one of these by themselves, I can see how you might say it's ambiguous.
But you have to look at all these other examples that are also made up.
All of the examples, the proofs, are more fake news.
Individually, every single one of them is just made up.
So, the news has created this amazing...
A structure in people's minds in which they will believe anything that's ambiguous to be a sign of definite racism, not because of the thing they're looking at, but because of all the other hoaxes that form this structure that people say, well, if all those other things are true, this other thing is probably true too.
But in fact, all of them have been seeded by the press the same way the press The same way the FBI ceded the Steele dossier with the press so they could say, look, it's in the press, it's in the Steele dossier, two sources, two sources, not four, two.
So, anyway, so that's the source of the great hysteria.
So speaking of hysterias...
I saw a tweet by Tony Heller today, famous climate skeptic, and he was talking about a book written in the 1800s about mass hysterias.
And his point was that climate change could be better understood as a mass hysteria than some kind of accurate science.
Now, independent of whether that take is spot on, Or completely off.
I will reserve judgment.
I will agree with the central point, which is, if you're looking at climate change and you have not studied mass hysteria, you are not qualified to have an opinion.
Even if you are a top scientist in the field, You're a top climate scientist, and you really, really know your stuff, and you're working in the field, and you've written papers, and you've peer reviewed, even if you're really deeply into it.
That person, if they don't also know the science of psychology about mass hysteria, they are not qualified to have a credible opinion on climate change.
Because climate change is a science question, right?
But it's not only the science of chemistry.
It's not only the science of physics.
It's not just climatology.
It's not just tree rings.
It's not just ice cores.
It's not just all of those things alone.
It is also the science of psychology.
Because it's how we process this stuff that gets us to whether or not we're right or we're imagining things.
So if you were a scientist who knows all of those climate-y sciences, but for some reason, and I imagine this would be rare, but if you knew nothing about the frequency of mass hysterias, how they're created, how easily cognitive dissonance happens, how common it is, and how wrong science can be even when it's completely right...
If you're not up on that science, the psychology science, I don't know if you're qualified.
I'm sure there will be lots of people who are qualified that would know enough about those sciences.
But if you don't, you're not qualified.
Now, the things which I would call mass hysterias are certainly Trump derangement syndrome, as somebody said in the comments, is an obvious mass hysteria.
I would say that the embassy...
The thought that there's a sonic weapon that's been pointed at two of our embassies, despite the fact that there are real medical problems, I think that's clearly a mass hysteria in my opinion.
Now, we're still waiting for the ultimate confirmation of that, but it's certainly shaping up that that was a mass hysteria.
So, the vaccine debate.
Yeah, I don't know if the vaccine debate is a mass hysteria.
It might be. I'd have to think about that a little bit.
I mean, that's really a question of just some people not believing some science, you know, and accepting the anecdote or having a different risk assessment, because it's not as if vaccines are completely safe.
So the people who say vaccines are not safe are not completely wrong.
We don't really know if vaccines have a little bit of risk, which I think everybody agrees, or more than that.
We don't really know. So I'm not sure that quite fits cleanly into the mass hysteria because it's a different risk assessment.
Maybe some bad thinking there.
There's something else going on there.
All right. You can't be a vaccine expert unless you understand mass hysteria.
I would say that's close to true.
All right. Now, the Washington Post humorously declared that President Trump, according to the Washington Post's database, President Trump has told now 10,000 lies since taking office, I think. 10,000 lies.
So I wondered to myself, huh, I wonder how many lies have been told in the press about the president.
So I figured, well, I'll just do a Google search on the ones that we know are lies.
So I did a Google search on, you know, within quotes, fine people and Trump, and I got over a million.
Over a million times, the press has talked about The fine people hoax.
And I'm going to guess that 95% of that was told wrong.
In other words, lies.
And then I did a search on Russia collusion, again in quotes, with Trump.
And there were over a million.
One of them was over a million.
One was 1.4 million.
And then I said to myself, I'm going to write a funny tweet, which I'll show the Washington Post tweet that says the president has 10,000, and then I'll paste in a screen grab to show that there are over a million lies about the president for the fine people hoax and a million about Russian collusion.
And here's what I did. I said, okay, one of them's a million, the other was 1.4 million.
I'll add them together, and I got 3.4 million, and I sent off my tweet.
Now, some of you might be ahead of me here, some of you a little bit better at math, and you may have just detected that I added 1 plus 1 and got 3.
So I deleted that tweet when I realized that I added 1 plus 1.4 and got 3.4.
Not my finest moment.
I'm not proud of that.
I'm not proud of that at all.
So I deleted it and I thought, ah, screw it.
I'm not going to fix it and retweet it.
It'll just make people ask more questions.
So remember I've told you before that one of my superpowers is an inability to be embarrassed?
Perfect example.
Am I embarrassed that I added 1 plus 1.4 and got 3.4 and that I did it in public?
Nah, not really.
Not even a little.
I'm not even a little embarrassed about that.
Let me switch topics from politics to dopamine.
Many of you probably know what dopamine is.
You know that dopamine is that little chemical that your brain...
Well, I guess your brain is part of producing it.
Your brain and your hormones are producing that make you feel good.
So basically, if your dopamine is working, you're probably feeling happy.
And if your dopamine is low, you're probably not feeling happy.
And I realized, I was reading an article about it, and I realized that I've organized my life around dopamine.
And I wonder how many of you have done the same.
And what I mean by that is I've figured out all of the things that create dopamine, and then I've styled my life to create a lot of it.
And I thought I would go through some of the things which create dopamine.
So it turns out that exercise...
Creates dopamine. Now, if you needed a better reason for exercising, I don't know what it would be.
What is the point of life other than being happy while we're here?
Maybe there's an afterlife.
That'd be great. But at the very least, wouldn't you like to be happy while you're here?
And when people talk about, hey, you should exercise, It seems like we don't push the dopamine part.
When we say you should exercise, we say, do it for your health, do it for your looks, do it for your stress.
And those are good reasons.
Those are really good reasons.
But maybe we should hit the dopamine thing a little bit more.
Maybe we should say, you know, exercise releases dopamine that literally makes you happy.
Now, I have noticed that connection so strong that I can actually tell how long I can go without exercising before I will be hard to be with.
In other words, I can sort of turn into angry Scott in about two days.
So if I go two days without exercising, which would be rare, because I'm pretty dedicated to doing something active every day, But once in a while something comes up and you go two days.
If you go two days without exercising, you can tell your dopamine is low.
Your dopamine is low if you haven't exercised.
So knowing that should be, and getting people to track that, to pay attention, just pay attention.
How do you feel the day you exercise after you're done?
Just remember, was that a good day or was that a bad day?
So it's very important to remember so that you can build up in yourself the habit that, oh, this is how I get dopamine.
I'll go get me some dopamine by going to the gym.
So that's one way. So exercise is one.
And most of the obvious things, I think there's some music for some people creates dopamine.
I don't like to use music for my dopamine because music is a form of mental pollution.
And by that I mean your brain can't do too many things at the same time.
So if you're using part of your brain to play music, meaning that you're repeating it, you're thinking about it, you're repeating lyrics in your head, you're somewhat randomly programming your brain instead of intentionally programming it.
So if you're listening to a bunch of sad news, it could make you sad.
If you listen to music that makes you feel stressed, I don't know what kind of music would do that, but the point is that the music is jacking your chemistry without you necessarily anticipating or wanting it to happen.
So, if you have a creative job, I think you'd have to experiment with this because there's probably a lot of personal difference.
But for me, music is a negative, even though it does create dopamine.
So I do like listening to music in the sense that I can feel it making me feel good.
So I'm not different from other people in that sense.
When I listen to music, if it's something I like, it makes me feel good.
And I'm sure that there's a dopamine connection there.
But it also makes me repeat music in my head until half of my brain is not working.
Now, if your brain can handle all that, and you can still do everything you want to do, and music makes you happy, well, why not?
But you should at least question it.
Alright, but here's the...
Here's the part of the dopamine hit that I found most interesting, and it's the reason that I wanted to talk about it.
And I don't know if most of you understand this, but science now knows that one of the best ways to create dopamine is by small accomplishments.
Think about that. So if you've organized your life into a series of small accomplishments, your dopamine is going to be pretty good.
Let me give you an example.
The first time I noticed this, when I was working my corporate jobs, and sometimes I would get assigned the most The most trivial, stupid task of making a PowerPoint presentation for something of not much importance in the corporate world.
So that would be my job. And I'd have to spend two days making a PowerPoint presentation with a bunch of slides for whatever purpose.
And what I found was I really enjoyed those days of work.
Meaning that I knew I had accomplished nothing of actual value in the real world.
This is the fun part.
I knew my PowerPoint presentation wouldn't change anything about the profitability of the company.
It just didn't really change anything in the real world.
But it made me feel really good.
I mean, I had the sensation where you'd actually tingle and get excited when you'd look at your slides.
You're like, yeah, I nailed that slide.
Look at that. I got 10 good slides.
Whoa! Let me rearrange them.
Yeah! And I would find that doing a PowerPoint presentation, while I wasn't interacting really with the real world, It was satisfying in a way that it should not have been.
And apparently the science supports this, that if you have the feeling of these small accomplishments, hey, I did a page on a PowerPoint slide deck, you'll get a little boost of dopamine.
Now, I looked at how my life is organized.
Here's how my life is organized.
I do, at least on average, I've got to do one comic strip every day.
If I finish one comic strip, I've done a good day's work.
So I have a job where I can have a discrete, finished success every single day.
And I'm sure that that helps my dopamine.
Because I never go...
I've published, or had published, a Dilbert comic every day for 30 years.
I think it's 11,000 comics or something like that.
Every single one of them gives me a little dopamine hit.
And that's lucky.
I also have been doing these periscopes pretty much every day for several years.
Every time I finish one of these periscopes, I get a little hit of dopamine.
Because it was a discrete task.
That I had as my objective for that day.
I finished it. I don't need to go back to it.
It's done. And I feel that sense of accomplishment.
So that's two things that give me a dopamine hit every day.
And there's also, many of you have noticed, if you have jobs in which you're working on conceptual things all day, let's say you're working in the advertising business, and you're measuring things, and you're going to meetings, and you're talking about what the ad would be, and you're negotiating with people, you're never really going to feel, at least in the average day, you're not going to have any sense that you did anything.
You'll know in a conceptual way, yeah, I went to work, I had conversations, it feels like it moved the ball forward, it was probably all worth doing, but nothing got completed.
I didn't get any dopamine from that.
And when people are in that situation, they'll go home on the weekend, and they'll clean their garage, and cleaning the garage feels really, really good.
Because you needed a discrete task that you could just finish.
Sometimes cleaning the house, sometimes just doing a little task, doing some errands that have been bothering you for a while.
It feels good.
So here's where I'm going with this.
I would bet that most of you and most of the world, that you organize your lives Around just, I guess, your schedule.
You just say, all right, what's on my schedule?
I'll just do the things on my schedule.
And I would suggest that maybe a more productive, effective way to look at your life is in dopamine opportunities.
And if you have a schedule...
But you don't have in your schedule things that you know will be discrete successes, no matter how minor.
Could be just cleaning the house.
But you need to have those in your daily life, or you're going to be dopamine-deprived, and that's going to affect your happiness and your effectiveness everywhere.
I'm pretty sure that it's not an accident that my life has evolved to have lots of dopamine-producing events.
Yesterday, I got a massage.
Professional massage.
It's purely a dopamine event.
I watched Game of Thrones last night.
Purely a dopamine event, although it was pretty stressful.
Game of Thrones just turned into an average zombie movie.
Game of Thrones is, in my opinion, one of the greatest things that's ever been Produced, entertainment-wise.
Yeah, I know everybody has a different opinion on it, but in my opinion, one of the greatest things ever produced.
And this season, it just sort of turned into a zombie movie.
But I think they'll improve.
So let me ask you this.
In your life, can you look at places where you could insert some discrete...
Discrete dopamine opportunities.
It could be that you say, I go to the gym every day at lunchtime, or before work, or after work, whenever it works, so that you just build that in.
It could be that you say, this is the day I do X. But whatever it is, look at those discrete opportunities and get your dopamine.
I thought I would put that out there for you.
Somebody says, you don't mention endorphins from exercise.
Yeah, when I say dopamine, I'm sort of simplifying.
So that's a good note there.
So I don't mean that dopamine is the only thing happening that makes you happy, but it's good to just talk of it that way, because if you get your dopamine right, probably everything else is fine too.
All right. Do I use my virtual reality headset much?
The answer is no, in part because you fairly quickly run through the content that's available that's good.
So it's like everything else.
If you were to look at the body of music, You know, 99% of it is stuff you don't want to listen to, but if you find the 1%, it's great.
So you can kind of quickly run through all of the good content in VR because it's set up with like a subscription so that you're always looking at new content, but it doesn't come very quickly.
At least not good content.
But the other thing is it gives you nausea.
So you can get nauseous.
You can feel like you're sick and your inner ear is off after like 10 minutes or so.
So you actually have to deal with the fact that it makes you a little bit sick.
Now I think that that's something that is likely to be correctable.
In the future, it feels like there's going to be some kind of fix that makes that go away.
You feel nauseated.
Okay, thank you. What's the best VR headset?
I don't know. I've only used the highest, I think.
So you have a VR headset for sale?
Not yet, but I probably should.
Now, speaking of dopamine, I'm also, with Christina's help, changing out, and Christina's sort of leading this effort, changing out all the lighting in my house.
So I'm changing it from the warm kind of tones that make me feel relaxed and want to take a nap.
I'm changing those out for brighter light bulbs in the 5000 range, if that means anything to you light bulb experts.
So it's the whiter light.
And I've been experimenting. I'm going to show you something.
So I'm at my desk that you see all the time in my office that has windows, but they face north.
So there's no direct light coming through the windows.
I only get very indirect light coming from the north.
But when I sit at this desk, I find it hard to stay here.
I kind of want to leave this place as soon as I can, because you notice it's hard to tell with the lighting on here, but it's a little dark where I am.
Yeah, I think it's lumens.
5,000 lumens is what I was talking about.
So it's a little dark here, and it changes my mood.
Now I'm going to switch the camera so that you can see the opposite view.
So this is the opposite view.
And it's a little hard to see.
Let's see if I can lighten that up a little bit.
Eh, it's a little hard to see.
But you can see that there's a high top, bar height table in front of my window.
Now when I sit there, it's hard to tell from this view, but when I sit there, I'm sort of bathed in the indirect light from the outdoors.
And just the difference of walking across the room And being in this natural light, which is actually much brighter than it looks like in this.
So this is the worst demonstration ever.
What I just showed you was actually the bright light, but it looks, because of the camera artifacts, it looks like it's dark.
This looks like it's bright, but I'm actually in a pretty dark space right now.
So this just has to do with the contrast.
Anyway, the point is that simply walking Twelve feet in the same room changes my energy level substantially.
I mean, it's really, really noticeable.
Yeah, so noticeable that It almost feels like you took a drug just to walk across the room.
It's that different. And the different feeling that I get in the rooms that have already been converted to the brighter white light is very different.
You feel your brain is working better.
You feel more awake.
And I would not have chosen these lights because before I thought they felt a little industrial.
But here's the mistake I was making.
I was always thinking of these white industrial lights as being the fluorescents.
Because if you work in an office, it's almost always fluorescent.
And the fluorescents, they do keep you awake, but it's not a good light.
There's something about it that just isn't amazing.
And so now I've got regular light bulbs or LEDs and whatever that are 5,000 lumens.
It's a nice white light.
And I find that it really helps me stay awake and alert.
So I would suggest that since everyone is different, that you experiment with that.
So here's my suggestion for the day.
If you can find a place Where you can spend a little time in bright white light and a little time in yellow or light or even a darker space.
Just see how it feels.
See how long you can work on something like your laptop in one versus the other.
Huge difference. Huge difference.
All right. That's all for now.
Somebody says, so the 5000, I'm using the wrong terms, so it's 5000k not lumens.
So it's not 5000 lumens, but just look for the box on your light bulbs.
It'll say 2000, 5000, whatever it is.
5k is frequency.
So the experts are telling me that the frequency of the light is what you want to look at, and 5000 is a good place for that.
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