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June 1, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:05:01
Episode 550 Scott Adams: How to Reprogram Your Brain, and Other People as Well
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Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Andrew, how are you?
Stanley, come on in.
Grab your beverages.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of the day.
It's the part of the day that makes all the rest of the day go better.
You know that's why you're here.
You're here for the dopamine.
It came to the right place.
And if you are prepared, I think most of you are.
If you're prepared, you've got a cup or a glass or a mug, maybe a stein or a tagger or a chalice, possibly a thermos, maybe a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, so good.
I don't know who invented coffee, but they need the Nobel Prize in coffee.
That doesn't make sense, but I'm very tired.
I'll teach you later in this periscope how to get more sleep.
I should teach myself. First of all, let me give you an update on my ongoing experiment.
With blocking all trolls.
So the idea is, I started a bit ago, instead of interacting to trolls and people who insult and start with crazy attacks on you, instead of reacting to them because I thought it was fun, and it was fun.
It was totally fun.
It would also ramp me up in a way that I wanted to see if over time, The fun I was getting of interacting with the trolls was having maybe a bigger cost, and it was invisible to me, because I really was enjoying it.
No kidding. I absolutely loved the energy.
I loved the fight, the competition.
I liked it. I just like winning.
Because most of the trolls are not that smart.
So usually you can get over on them pretty well, and you're doing it in front of other people.
So you've got an audience.
That's everything I like.
But I want to experiment with just blocking them ruthlessly on the first offense.
So no interaction. One offense, bong.
You're gone forever. Not mute.
Not mute. Mute is like being agnostic.
I don't mute. Well, that's not true.
I do mute people who I know to be mostly good people who had a bad day or they're just spamming me too much, but that's an exception.
And the results so far are spectacular.
I have to say that my mental health is conspicuously improved.
Now, most of you don't have as many trolls as I do, so you wouldn't have the same amount of impact.
But, man, very successful.
All right, let's talk about some other things.
Laura Ingram is...
In trouble for allegedly, allegedly defending, this is what bad people say, if you talk about somebody, that will be called defending them.
So, Laura Ingram is accused of defending someone who she didn't defend, she just talked about.
And it was part of a group of people that she was talking about.
Who were banned on social media.
One of them, whose name I'm not even going to say, I won't even say, was accused of being a white supremacist.
And I thought to myself, huh, I don't know too much about this character.
I think I'll read, what is it about this character that, you know, is this true?
Because I've never met one.
And when I say I've never met one, I mean I've never met one in my recent adult life.
I think when I was younger, you'd find people who literally had white supremacist thoughts.
But I can't think of anybody I've met in, I don't know, ten years who had any kind of a thought like that.
And so I read what this character, who was labeled A white supremacist, what are his views?
And it turns out, there's no real word for what this guy is.
And again, you don't even need to know who it is.
But when you read his opinion, he's literally the opposite.
He's a white inferioristist.
I'm not going to tell you who it is.
But when you read what he believes, he believes that white people will not be competitive with some other group that I'm not even going to name.
But he believes that if we don't block some other group from coming into the country, we won't be competitive.
We meaning, in his view, white people.
So he's literally someone who thinks that white people can't compete.
Is that a white supremacist?
You would think that the minimum requirement to be a supremacist is you have to think your group is better.
If you unambiguously, clearly, and consistently say your group can't compete, I don't know, what do you call that?
A bigot. Definitely a bigot.
I'll go with that. Racist?
Sure. Sure.
Racist, biggie, all of those things.
But supremacist?
Nationalist? Yes. White nationalist?
Probably. I think all of those words are perfectly acceptable.
And I condemn this individual totally.
So let me say this as clearly as possible.
I'm not defending this guy.
This is a guy who doesn't deserve any defending.
So the person I didn't name, when my words are taken out of context later, let me say he's not anybody that I would defend.
He's probably all of those bad things, but he's the opposite of a supremacist.
If anything, he's got low self-esteem.
So that was just interesting.
There's an article in The New Yorker.
The New Yorker being a high intellectual kind of a publication.
And... The publication is talking about how people are easily fooled by things.
So it's an article about people who are easily fooled to believe things that aren't true.
And somebody tweeted to me and said they mentioned the fine people hoax.
I'm like, finally! Finally!
A high-end magazine, The New Yorker, is finally writing a piece where they expose the fine people hoax.
It took a while, but I figured there would be more high-end publications coming around to the truth.
But it turned out to be exactly the opposite.
When I read it, there were some psychologists at Princeton, Betsy Levi-Pellick, who just received a MacArthur Genius Grant.
So it's a Princeton University psychologist who is also a certified, meaning she's got a MacArthur grant, genius.
That's actually the word they use on the grant.
She's actually called a genius, and the context is how easily people are fooled.
And she believes the fine people hoax.
So it's just used as an example of something.
But it's mind-blowing that somebody who's an expert at identifying illusions believes the most easily debunked illusion in the world.
It's literally on video.
You can just watch it.
You can read the transcript.
It's the simplest, most easily debunked thing in the world.
All right. So that was interesting.
There was another shooting incident, and I'm not going to name the person.
I'm not even going to name the location.
And by the way, I need some fact checking on this.
I was watching Fox News coverage first when the shooting happened, the recent one, and they did not mention the name of the shooter.
Is that true all over now?
Is it true that all of the media is not naming this year?
Does anybody have a confirmation of that?
Has anybody seen his name?
Don't mention it. If you've seen his name, I do not want to see it here.
In fact, I'll block you. If you mention it in the comments and you know his name, I'm going to block you, just so know that.
I think we've gotten to a smarter place.
Now, I don't think that that's the one thing that's going to make it to stop happening, because maybe we have to take it to the next level and not cover it as news.
How many of you, or somebody says they've seen it, man, God, that bothers me.
You know, it's a free country, free speech, so certainly news organizations have a right to publish it.
But overseas, is that where you saw it?
You saw it in the Daily Mail?
Okay, so maybe BBC gave it out.
So there may be a different standard in the United States.
Well, if our primary United States outlets don't use his name, I would say that's progress.
All right. But there's a question that I ask myself.
Is the problem with gun violence that doesn't look like it's solvable along normal political lines?
It seems to me That we're not really close to having any kind of a change with guns that would actually make any difference to this kind of crime.
And I wonder if this is one of those cases, and I'll give you some other examples, in which technology can solve the thing which politics could never solve.
Let me give you some other examples.
There's a debate about whether climate change is a big deal or not such a big deal.
Can't be solved. It seems like we'll never agree on whether it's a big deal or not a big deal, but technology can make the question irrelevant because Generation 4 nuclear and even Generation 3 nuclear, which we can do right away, is the right path no matter what you believe.
So if you think climate change is a problem, go nuclear as hard as you can.
If you think it's not a problem, go nuclear as hard as you can.
Because as economic reasons, it's good for the poor, it's good for the economy, it's good for everything.
And the risk is minimal.
So, yeah, they are shutting down nukes.
But the point is, we do have a solution.
We still have to be smart enough to use it.
I predict we will be smart enough.
It might take a little work to get there.
But that's an example. Here's another example.
I think I had another example.
Oh. This is more of a question than an example, but it's maybe an example.
It seems to me that we've found a way to identify people who are self-radicalizing.
It would be easy to do that, right?
Somebody who's looking at ISIS sites, people who are typing messages that have some kind of pro-terrorist thing in them.
It seems like anybody who's got a digital footprint The government should be in a position to detect them.
Some of them might be using encrypted apps or whatever, but even then, I sort of think maybe we have a backdoor even into the encrypted apps if they're American-based companies, or even if they're not.
So it seems to me that we may have already not 100% sold, but gone a long way toward deprogramming Radicals who are being radicalized by themselves, essentially, online.
I think we figured out a way to deprogram people in real time.
Now, I can't prove that because it's sort of the absence of information.
I'm not watching lots of terrorists being radicalized in the United States.
And then on top of that, suppose I do get radicalized.
I think, based on the fact that I'm not seeing a lot of terrorist attacks in the homeland, and you have to assume that ISIS would love to have lots of terrorist attacks in the homeland, ISIS has no reason Not to do terrible things, because they're losing anyway.
It's not like they're winning. So they must not be able, and that suggests that we have technology and systems in place that are more effective than maybe you guessed at knowing what people are doing and stopping them.
So here's the question I ask myself.
Could there ever be a technology solution For identifying and stopping crazy mass shooters who are not terrorists.
So there's no sense that these people care about terrorism.
They just want to kill a bunch of people.
They're just crazy. Is there any technology that would identify them before they did it?
I don't know the answer to that, but let me brainstorm a couple things.
Maybe you have some other ideas.
Could you create a mental health detector?
Could you? Could you, if we, and I'm not saying this is practical, so we're just going through a brainstorming process right now.
If you could force everybody, and we're not, but if you could force everybody to have an MRI every six months, could the MRI ever learn to detect dangerous, violent thoughts forming that could actually turn into violence?
Maybe, because we now have technology that can read your actual thoughts and form the picture in your mind.
If you didn't know that, you got a big surprise coming.
Technology can now, if they put you in a dark room and say, imagine a coffee cup, we have sensors we can put on your brain that will see the coffee cup you're imagining in your head.
Did you know that?
We can do that now.
Now what happens if that technology improves?
Suppose we can do it passively.
What happens when you can do it passively?
Let's say you're just walking through a doorway into the mall and the frame of the mall has a scanner in it.
It's faster and you don't need permission.
It just scans you all the way through.
Could we build scanners someday?
We're not there. But could we build scanners to actually identify Violent intention in your brain.
Somebody's saying, what could possibly go wrong?
So if you're saying it's not practical, it's illegal, it's a violation of privacy, those are all true.
I'm not suggesting this is a practical idea.
I'm just talking about the field of things that are in play.
Maybe somebody could find a way to satisfy our legal privacy personal rights and still get the information.
Maybe. I'm not smart enough to do it, but the technology is suggestive that we might be able to directly detect it.
Alright, let's go to another idea.
So this is a separate idea.
Suppose you couldn't buy a gun unless you had a robust social media presence.
Think about it. You can't buy a gun unless you have a social media presence and you've got some number of friends.
I don't know what the number is, 25, 50.
It would be easy to have 25 friends on Facebook.
It would be easy to have 25, mostly Facebook, let's say.
Yeah, let's limit it to Facebook.
We'll keep it for that. So let's say you have to have a Facebook account to buy a gun.
Now, would that be a problem?
Probably. A lot of people would resist, but let me just fill out the thinking.
Now, for those of you who are saying, it's Second Amendment right, it's absolute, can't do anything to infringe, I hear you, so you don't have to tell me that again.
I understand that your interpretation of the Constitution is you just can't do anything to infringe the right to own God.
I get that. We're just walking through the possibilities, right?
Because there might be something that you would say, oh, okay, That's so harmless.
I can see that.
So just let me see if I can feel my way to something that is not offensive to your sense of freedom.
Because I'm completely cognizant of that.
Here's a thought. Suppose you had a system in which if...
Let's say...
I'll just pick a number randomly.
Let's say if 10 of your Facebook friends...
Hit a secret button to report you as potentially dangerous, meaning with a weapon, you know, crazy shooter kind of dangerous.
Have you noticed that a number of these crazy shooters were at least suspected by their friends and family?
There were friends and family who did...
You know, kind of get that these people might be a little dangerous.
Now, somebody had a system where you could report somebody anonymously.
Your friend. You could say, my Facebook friend is acting a little dangerous, in my opinion.
Boop! Now, the person who was reported would not know who reported them.
It'd be anonymous. If one report comes in, the police would say, eh, could be a troll, could be anything.
If perhaps three of them come in from different sources, there might be some threshold where the police say, okay, that's three separate reports that the same person might be a little dangerous.
Maybe we pay them a visit.
But paying the visit might not be enough.
So I'm thinking there could be some kind of a detector, which is human beings.
So the human beings would be like the drug-sniffing dogs that would detect there's some reason to be concerned, but it's not until the police get involved that it makes a difference.
Now suppose, and again, all I'm doing is suggesting things.
Some people are saying there is a red flag law.
I think that's slightly different from what I'm saying, but...
But bear with me. So I'll say, if three people report somebody as being dangerous, the police are authorized to monitor their social media traffic.
And they have some algorithms, which they figure down over time, that people who do this and this and this are very likely to become shooters.
So then you'd have human beings who said, ooh, this is dangerous.
Then you'd have your technology that would say, yep, all the behaviors are dangerous.
Then maybe there's another escalation in which, again, this is just brainstorming.
So let me put this out there.
Suppose the police came and said, we know you have X guns because you bought them recently and you're on our database.
You need to put a tracker on No, let's say you need to put a gun lock on your gun.
Or something that maybe, I don't know, limits the number of rounds.
Maybe you have to have some kind of a technology that gives you three rounds, which would be enough if somebody comes into your house.
As a burglar, it wouldn't be enough if you wanted to go kill people at an office.
So none of these ideas are good.
So those of you saying, no, no, no, not all of your ideas are bad, I know that.
I'm simply brainstorming.
Could there be a technology that would accurately identify bad people?
There would be some false positives.
Any kind of a system like that would guarantee that somebody who was not going to be a shooter still got their rights infringed.
Now let me ask you this.
Would you be willing, suppose you could live in a world I'll make up some numbers just for a hypothetical, so we'll see in the comments what you say.
Suppose I could, and I know this is not possible, but just hypothetically, suppose I could eliminate mass shootings with some kind of a system.
I could eliminate them.
But the price of that elimination is that 0.01% of gun owners would have limitations put on their gun ownership.
I don't know what those limitations look like.
Could be a technology that tracks them.
Could be their communications are monitored.
Could be their location is monitored.
Could be something like that. But could you live in a world where 99.99 people who own guns have no restrictions beyond what we already have?
But for that.01, they definitely lose a little bit of rights.
Could you live with that? You know, those of you saying no, I respect it as a matter of principle.
I do. I suspect...
No, somebody says you sound liberal.
I used to say I was left to Bernie until he went bad.
I'll talk about him.
So, pretty much every law that we pass in this country makes something a little less free for somebody else.
And you have to ask yourself, how much of a little bit of less free are you willing to put up with to eliminate or vastly reduce mass casualties?
Think about it.
Speaking of Bernie...
I have famously said for a long time that politically I call myself left of Bernie, except I'm better at math, so I know his programs are impractical because he can't pay for them and it would destroy the economy, etc., But I like the fact that he has a vision of free education.
He has a vision of everybody having access to good health care at a reasonable price, etc.
So I like his visions.
I've liked a lot about Bernie, especially his honesty, compared to other politicians.
I'm sure he's got his issues.
But I have to admit, until this week, Even though I didn't think he would be a good president, I respected him.
I respected his determination.
I respected how he's moved our minds to sort of different priorities.
I respected a lot about him.
And indeed, the last time he ran, I said that his campaign ad was the best ad of the entire election.
And it was. It was a masterpiece.
Do you remember the one with the Simon and Garfunkel song and everybody was screaming toward the picturesque speaker at the shore, which was Bernie?
But he just put out his new campaign ad.
In which he actually pushes the fine people hoax again.
And I think to myself, every bit of goodwill you had just went out the door when you became a racist.
Because let's be honest, it is sort of racist to push that at this point.
Now, I'm using racist in the way that Bernie would use it, which is it doesn't mean you're necessarily a classically racist, but you've identified some group to demonize.
Bernie has identified Republicans as a group to demonize because of their support of this president.
And I don't know how you can get around it, even though he is a white guy.
It looks racist to me because he's demonizing the group.
I don't think you can get out of it just because of your ethnicity.
All right. Let's see.
How about... Bill Maher said, talking about Joe Biden last night, switching the topic, Bill Maher said, I do worry, I do worry.
Maher said about Biden, like I've said about age, it's individual.
Some people look pretty good.
Joe doesn't look good.
It looks like he's on a coin, which is a pretty funny line.
So this is Bill Maher, who's concerned not only about Joe's age, and I have to say, he does seem too old to me.
Been saying that for a while.
And then Bill Maher pointed out that he worries that Joe Biden will be touching a little girl the way he did a few days ago, a week before the election.
So, in other words, Bill Maher has correctly identified that Joe Biden couldn't possibly win against Trump, not under current conditions.
Something big would have to change for him to win.
I don't think he has a chance.
And I think the people on the left are really realizing this and it has something to do with what's changing in the rankings.
You'll see Elizabeth Warren is coming up because even she would be more electable I don't think she could get elected, but she would be more electable.
Let's talk about Kanye West was on Letterman's show, and I'm going to use this anecdote to launch into my little topic about how to program your own mind and how to program other people.
This is actually going to be maybe some of the most useful things you've ever heard in your life.
So I'll start with Kanye on Letterman.
So Kanye mentioned that he's never voted in his life.
I, too, have never voted.
One of the benefits I say you get by intentionally not voting...
Oh, I'm sorry. I have voted.
I just don't vote now.
So I voted for Jimmy Carter a long time ago.
I guess that's what taught me I shouldn't vote.
I'm too dumb to vote. I learned that by voting for Carter.
So Kanye has not voted even more than I've not voted.
Now, I do it intentionally.
Because it's a trick I use to keep me from having a team mentality and just agreeing with my team all the time.
Kanye is one of the most famous people who is not on the side you think he should be on.
You say, hey, Kanye, you're black, so why are you not a Democrat?
Why are you not hating on President Trump?
Well, it turns out that not voting, as predictable as I think it would be, It helps Kanye, probably.
Probably. It's not the only thing that goes into his decision making.
But not voting probably helps him a lot in being able to see the good in both sides.
And sure enough, that's what he's sort of famous for in addition to his, you know, incredible career.
He's also famous for being a Trump, at least personally, supporter as opposed to a policy supporter.
And he can cross lines, partly because he's an artist, but partly too.
It definitely helps, it's not the full picture, but it definitely helps to not vote.
Now, I think all of you should vote for different reasons.
It invests you in the system.
It makes the system work.
But just personally, I'm a person who talks about politics in public.
It's better if I don't.
But here's what I'm getting to, the interesting part.
So Letterman responds to Kanye saying he's never voted by saying, quote, then you don't have a say in this.
So Letterman's saying, if you don't vote, you don't have a say in politics.
Is that logical?
That's not logical.
But I'll bet a lot, I'm seeing it in the comments, somebody's agreeing with it.
Exactly, says Richard.
Richard says, exactly.
Before you agree with that, I have to warn you, I'm going to be mocking it in a moment.
Could you point to Where in the Constitution does it say that if you don't vote, you lose your right of free speech?
Did I miss that line?
Can somebody point to that part of the Constitution where people who don't vote lose their freedom of speech?
I haven't seen it.
Is there a law? Did somebody write a law that says if you didn't vote, you've lost your right to talk about things in public?
I don't remember seeing that.
Nowhere. And somebody made an interesting comment, I'm going to steal here in the comments, said proxy voting.
I'm a proxy voter.
Meaning that at least 1,500 people have told me, I mean I've actually did a poll online so I know it's over 1,500 people, told me that I caused them to vote for Trump.
Because of the way I explained his persuasion framing.
Now, if I don't vote personally for a party, it doesn't bind me to a party, but I still influenced at least 1,500 people.
My guess is closer to 100,000, because when you do a Twitter survey, you're just getting some small portion of people who even answered the question.
Probably I influenced 100,000 people.
So, I certainly voted.
I think I voted about 100,000 times more than you did.
Just saying. So these things are not as simple as you think.
But here's my main point. There are things which we learn, and this is going to dovetail into my topic about programming your brain.
We are programmed in our youth to believe things that are nonsense.
I remember when I was in sixth grade, my sixth grade teacher said, come up to the board, you know, one at a time.
We were asked to come up to the, it was a blackboard at the time, and write down something you would be willing to die for.
And I still remember, I went up and I think I wrote, freedom.
So I'm in sixth grade, and I wrote that I'd be willing to die for freedom.
And I thought, man, I'm a star.
I'm kind of, you know, I'm making my classmates look sort of small because I don't know what they said they'd be willing to die for, but I said freedom.
I would be willing to die for freedom.
Here's what's wrong with that.
I was 12 years old.
My brain isn't even formed.
Can I make a decision about dying for freedom at 12 years old?
I was just brainwashed.
In retrospect, when I look back, it's obvious that my answer was just brainwashing.
If you'd said, give me the reason, you know, 12-year-old Scott, can you give me the reason that you would die for freedom?
I didn't have one.
I had literally been brainwashed, and I couldn't tell the difference between the brainwashing and something that seemed completely reasonable.
Now somebody's saying it's the right answer.
Had I been an adult, had I been an adult, I might have given the same answer.
I might have said, as an adult, I would die for freedom.
But, as an adult, I would at least have something like a reason.
I would say, for example, well, our species has evolved so that men have more dangerous lives because part of their role is to do dangerous stuff such as protecting and defending and fighting off intruders and stuff like that.
And I'm part of the class of human beings who are somewhat expendable And if I have to die for the freedom of people who will be having babies and putting forth my genes, then I'm willing to do that because I've evolved into a mindset that makes me a creature that is willing to die for my tribe.
So, in other words, there could be some adult way of understanding that.
Which you could say was logical.
But here's my point. At age 12, I didn't have any thinking like that.
I had literally just been brainwashed that I should die, literally die, for a reason I didn't even understand.
Not at 12. And when Letterman said that if Kanye didn't vote, he doesn't have a say, that's not thinking.
That's not adult thinking.
Adult thinking is, of course you do.
You have a right to vote, you have a right to free speech, they're just different things.
Letterman was stuck on a child brainwashing, I don't know, would you call it a meme?
A belief. So as an adult, he still had a child brainwashing leftover piece in his brain.
And I'm going to teach you how to make those.
Productively. That little bit of brainwashing that Letterman still maintained as an adult.
If you brainwash yourself, you can actually change your brain into a more effective or less effective, if you do it wrong, creature.
So I'm going to teach you that in a moment.
Let me give you an example from my dog Snickers.
If you have ever tried to train a dog with treats, You've learned a lot about human beings.
Because humans are not that different from animals when you're training them.
Meaning that there's a cause and effect.
Hey, I'll do that for a treat until a habit is formed.
My dog Snickers was trained, somewhat accidentally, that if I hand her a treat with my fingers in my hand, it's delicious.
Because when I train her, I use delicious treats in my hand that I give her by hand.
And she has learned that if she eats her regular food and her dish, that's boring old dry food that nobody would do a trick for.
She trained herself, accidentally, I guess I trained her, but I didn't know I was doing it, that she won't eat her dry food from the dish unless I first pick some up and hand it to her as a treat.
She will stand next to a full dish of food while she's hungry and won't eat it Until right in front of her, I pick it out of the dish, take it from the dish while she's watching, and hold it in front of her.
Transferring that same food, that dry food, into my hand, turns it into a treat.
And then she's like, whoa, it's hand food now.
Come on, give me some of that hand food.
Now, Snickers, exactly like David Letterman, is just trained.
Letterman's statement that you don't have a say if you didn't vote, there's no logical connection to that.
It's just, hey, if it's in your hand, it must be a treat.
That's all the thinking Letterman was doing.
If it's in your hand, it must be a treat.
But he didn't know it. And by the way, Letterman's a smart guy, right?
I'm not saying he's dumb. I'm saying that the way human brains work is they form associations, and the associations overwhelm your logical faculties.
So I'm going to teach you how to program your own brain, and also how to program other people.
Now, this will be a conceptual level, right?
But it'll be enough to get you going and how to understand it.
And then maybe you can dig down a little bit.
Maybe I'll talk more about it.
If you want to follow up on it, my two books cover all of this material.
How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big teaches you how to form systems, essentially how to program yourself.
And then Win Bigly is how to program other people.
It's how to persuade other people.
But between the two of them, you'll see the framework that I'm giving you now, but also a lot more detail.
So here are some rules on programming your own brain in no particular order.
Number one, what you focus on will become important to you.
And when it becomes important to you, you will notice opportunities that you didn't notice before.
So this is the concept behind affirmations.
Affirmations are you either repeat to yourself or you write down, say, 15 times a day.
It doesn't matter how you do it.
It's just the focus that matters.
It doesn't matter if you're typing it.
It doesn't matter if you're writing it. It doesn't matter if you're humming it, chanting it, thinking the words.
Whatever it is, If you're focusing on it, it's going to cause your brain to be programmed over time to start noticing things that can get you that thing.
So if you said to yourself, I'd like to have a career as a police dispatcher, just a random weird thing.
Let's say that was your goal. I want to be a police dispatcher, but I don't know how to do it.
So you start focusing on it, thinking about it, chanting it.
And then one day you're going to say, what?
What did I just hear?
I think I just heard somebody say that they were a police dispatcher.
Oh, let me go ask you a question.
And then you find out how to be a police dispatcher.
You can literally tune your mind to notice opportunities that were there all along, but they weren't programmed into your filter.
So concentration and repetition of a very specific end state It gives you a different brain.
It actually re-engineers your brain to make it a sensor to pick up opportunities that you couldn't see before.
So that's your first trick. The things you focus on in terms of your intentions and your ambitions, that tunes your brain to get them.
What doesn't tune your brain to get what you want is every now and then somebody says, what do you like?
And you say, well, yeah, I'd like...
Sure like to win the lottery.
Or, you know, I'd like to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
But then you don't think about it again?
You don't do anything about it?
The other thing that focusing on your goal does is it makes it a priority in a way that it wasn't before you spent all your time thinking about it.
So if something is a priority, you'll put more work into it, you'll take more sacrifice, you'll arrange your schedule for it, etc.
So making something more important to your own brain is reprogramming it.
You can take something that you think is a pretty good idea and talk yourself into thinking it's a great idea just by focusing on it, obsessing on it, writing it down, thinking about it.
That's how you tune your brain.
That's just part of what we're doing.
So that's rule one.
Focus and intention.
By the way, the word intention, I got that from Mark Benioff, who founded Salesforce.
It is worth many billions of dollars.
He's a special kind of a mind.
Anyway, in a good way.
Here's another tip.
Mental shelf space.
Your brain can handle just so many things as a point of focus and just so many things you can think about during the day.
If you don't fill it up with things you want to think about, it will fill up with other things.
And those other things might be bad thoughts.
They might be counterproductive.
They might make you sad. They might make you sick.
And... So, one of the things that I recommend is to always fill your own shelf space and don't let it get filled accidentally.
If you don't fill your own mind, it will get filled because you can't not think.
It is impossible to turn off your thoughts.
I mean, in a practical sense during the day, you can't turn off your thoughts unless you're pretty drunk.
So fill it up with as many good thoughts as you can.
One of the things I try to do on this Periscope is I try to give you some things that will make you feel good, some things that will teach you something.
If you learn something, you get this little dopamine hit or some kind of pleasurable hit.
I don't know if it's dopamine per se.
But learning something useful gives you a little ah.
So fill it up.
Just pack it.
If you have trouble sleeping, I'm going to give you a thought that you may wish you never heard.
Because I might be reprogramming you here in a moment.
This might actually be so powerful that I'm almost hesitant to say it.
I'm going to make a direct suggestion.
If you don't want to hear this, you probably want to turn off the sound.
I'll tell you what. I'll raise my hand when I'm done saying it.
Okay? Okay. So if you don't want to hear...
Here's what I'll do. I'll keep my hand up while I'm saying the thing that some of you might not want to hear.
Alright? If you want to be better at sleeping...
Okay, here it is.
When my hand goes down, you can turn the sound back on.
If you'd like to be better at sleeping, here's a thought.
Here's a thought. Here's a thought.
I used to tell myself this at night.
If I couldn't sleep, I would say, if I can't get to sleep, I haven't worked hard enough.
Try that.
If you're having trouble sleeping at night, tell yourself while you're laying there unable to sleep, if I can't sleep tonight, I probably haven't worked hard enough.
Now, when I say work hard enough, I mean both exercise and, you know, the kind of work that your brain does, you know, brain work.
And hand down. All right, so those of you who had the sound off, it's such a powerful thought that I actually have an ethical barrier there because that thought is so strong.
When you first hear it, it might mean nothing.
But if you start thinking about it, it's going to reprogram your brain, and you're going to act in a way that I think is productive, but that's up to you.
All right, here's another thought.
Brains are association machines.
They are not logic machines.
Our brains can do logic, sort of, sometimes, some people.
We have the minimal ability to be rational and But we're not good at it.
Mostly, we are association machines.
So, when I'm training my dog, I say, if you do what I want, you get this delicious treat.
So the dog associates the treat.
And there's no thought pattern.
If you asked the dog why the dog is doing it, if the dog could think like a human, they would say, well, I'm just making this human happy.
It's how I get a treat.
But it's not like that.
That's the rationalization after the fact.
We are simply association machines and pattern recognition machines, as somebody's saying in the comments.
So if you want a new kind of behavior, you should treat yourself like a dog.
Meaning, give yourself a treat.
So, I wrote about this in How to Fail.
One of the habits that I've developed is that when I work out, I always have a delicious protein shake and always give myself a little time in the snack bar at the gym to read the news and just enjoy my downtime.
It's like my little, very enjoyable...
Private, quiet time after I've just exercised, so my body feels good, my mind feels good, I have this delicious flavor that's good.
And it's not the only reason I exercise.
I don't exercise just because I have a nice treat at the end.
But it's part of a package of things I do to make exercising palatable and easy, and I work at it over time to make sure that it's part of my habit.
So always give yourself some kind of treat for something that you want to get yourself to do.
So you're actually programming yourself like a dog, and you are this simple.
You don't want to think you're this simple, but you are.
Give yourself a treat.
You're just an animal.
Treats work. Next, the other way we're association machines is this is something I learned from my hypnosis instructor, and I put it in my book, and a lot of people have said this really, really made a difference.
There are those days when you don't want to exercise, but you know you should.
You have the time, you know you should exercise, but your body just can't do it.
Or really, it's your brain.
Your brain can't talk you into exercising.
So if you can't talk yourself into doing something big, like exercising, talk yourself into the smallest thing you can do that will get you a little bit pregnant, meaning something that will get you on a path toward changing your mind.
So don't go from, I don't want to do it, to I do want to do it.
It's too big. You can't do that.
It's too far. Go from, I don't want to do it, to, well, I can do this.
And this is put on your exercise clothes.
When you put on your footwear for exercise, you know, your sneakers, your tennis shoes, whatever, when you put them on, if you're like most people and you don't wear them every day, just putting on your exercise clothing will cause an association, just like the dog and the treat.
The association will instantly...
Reprogram your mind into exercise mode.
You have to try this to know that it's real.
Now, I'm not saying it's like, you know, it'll turn you into a zombie who can't make decisions.
I'm just saying that we are association machines, and if you can't get to the gym, change your association.
Put on the clothes that are associated with the gym, and watch how quickly That takes you down the path.
Now the next thing you do is if you...
Somebody says, it's real, I just did it.
A lot of people have gotten back to me and said, oh yeah, that totally changed my exercisability.
Just that one little trick. Now the next thing you should do is give yourself permission to do the smallest workout in the world.
Here's the smallest workout in the world.
And by the way, I do this workout, the exact one I'm going to explain, maybe six times a year.
The smallest workout in the world is you put on your gym clothes, and in my case I go to a gym in my car, and I go to my car, and then I drive to the gym, and I sit in the parking lot, and I can't get out of the car.
I'm actually too tired. Today it's just not going to work.
And then, here's the important part.
I drive home. That's it.
That's the shortest workout in the world.
I just walked to my car, and then I walked back from my car that was in my garage.
That was my entire workout, plus putting on my workout clothes.
Now, if you say to yourself, I am now a failure because I wanted to exercise and I did not, you're in the wrong mindset.
Those of you who know where I'm going, you're already ahead of me.
The right mindset is that you have a habit.
And your habit is you're going to do what you can to get to the gym X days a week.
If you maintain...
If that bell rings again, I might have to shut this off if Christina doesn't get the door.
But if...
Damn it, lost my train of thought.
Uh... Oh, so the point is that what you should be shooting for is a system and a set of habits about exercising.
If you can fix your brain to have a set of habits, which is, okay, I always do this, I know how to get myself in the mood by putting on my clothes, etc., and then I'm going to drive to the gym even if I don't feel like I can work out.
Allow yourself to just drive home and call it a victory because it is.
The victory is that you kept your habit intact.
That's it.
Get your system to work.
Because if only six times a year I drive to the gym, sit in the parking lot, and then say, all right, it's just not happening today, and drive home, I never call that a bad day.
I call that complete success because it tells me my system is so strong, it will actually get my lazy-ass body to the gym across town when I really don't want to.
It's that strong. So that's what you want to shoot for.
If you ever have that experience of going all the way to the gym, walking in the front door and saying, not today, and turning around and walking out the door, just know that I think you're awesome.
If you can ever have that day, you are killing it.
And by the way, I would challenge you to ask any exercise expert to validate what I'm telling you.
Ask your exercise expert.
If you go to the gym once in a while and just turn around and walk back home, will your exercise expert say that you were a failure that day?
Guaranteed not. Not.
Your exercise expert is going to say you are a superstar because you went all the way to the gym With a body that didn't want to work out.
And tomorrow you'll go to the gym and you'll work out.
So developing habits, however you can do it through repetition, through giving yourself a reward.
We are association and sort of habit machines.
So use associations to create habits and let the habit reinforce itself.
Here's another thing.
That humans do is they create fake reasons.
We're not really rational creatures, and you can see that on every political conversation.
The conversations about politics sometimes are about different, let's say, ethical standards, sometimes about different information, but most of the time we have the same standards for ethics, largely, and we have the same information.
And we still disagree on what we're seeing.
We're seeing two movies on one screen, as I say.
And we live in a world in which fake reasons for our own actions are common.
If you say, why do you support candidate X? Somebody will give you a reason.
But once you're a hypnotist and you learn, you know, persuasion, you realize that the reasons that people give for their actions are made-up, concocted, fake reasons that they're just papering over the fact that they don't have reasons.
They have a feeling.
I feel like I'm on this team, and so I'm biased toward thinking their candidate and what they do is all good.
That's the real reason.
But if you ask them, they'll say some bizarre-sounding rational reasons like, well, I've decided that the economy will go up 2.2% because historically, blah, blah, blah.
So people are full of fake reasons.
Once you realize that you can program yourself with a fake reason, you have a new tool.
You can actually convince yourself to do the right thing with fake reasons.
I call it the fake because.
And by the way, science backs this.
So we know that if people give a fake reason, that even other people will respond to it like it made sense.
And the book Influence gives examples of studies that show that.
So, if you don't have a good reason to do something that you know you ought to do, let's say working harder, all right?
So, let's say what you want to do is work harder on some specific objective.
Give yourself a fake reason.
I'm going to work harder because it's part of my exercise routine.
I'm going to work harder because it'll help me sleep.
I'm going to work harder because I want to impress my parents.
I'm going to work harder because I think it'll help me in mating.
It doesn't matter why.
Give yourself a fake reason.
Even one that you know is a little sketchy.
The weird part about this is I think most of you are resisting probably.
If this is a new topic to you, You're probably resisting.
You're saying, why would I lie to myself?
That's the phrase somebody's used.
Lie to myself? How is that going to work when I know it doesn't make sense?
Here's the strange part.
It does work just as well if you don't believe it.
You don't even need to believe it.
You can say to yourself, that's irrational, but I'm just repeating it to myself.
I'm doing it for the afterlife.
I'm doing it to win an award.
Whatever. It doesn't matter. Just give yourself a reason.
You will find that that fake reason is an organizing principle, even if you know it's fake.
It's one of the greatest powers you can learn is that we're not rational beings, but we can be programmed with this pseudo-logic to get someplace you know you want to go.
Repetition, of course, is important.
I've mentioned that in everything I'm doing.
So whether it's filling your shelf space or developing a habit or going to the gym or giving yourself a treat or focusing on something, it doesn't matter what it is.
No matter what it is, Do it a lot.
The more you repeat, it's the repetition that makes it part of the programming of your brain.
You should use visual imagination to help you get what you want.
You want to try to imagine in your brain the outcome you want as specifically or as generally as you can.
It's probably better if you see all the variations of how you can get what you want.
When I was young, I used to visualize that I would be presenting something, I didn't know what, in front of large audiences.
Now, think about that.
I didn't do anything in my life for my entire college, etc., that would prepare me in any direct way to be a public presenter of anything.
But I focused on it my whole life and thought about it and thought of standing in front of a crowd, usually on the stage, but technology allows me to do it this way, and here I am.
Is it a coincidence? Probably not, because you'll find many, many cases, you know, I don't have a study to support it, but the people who focus on something and visualize it, and the visual is the part I'm emphasizing here, Our visual sense is our dominant mental process that we're conscious of.
And if you can put into a visual the thing you want, so much more powerful in reprogramming your own brain to be the filter you want it to be, you want to do that.
It's more powerful to have a vision of You in front of a group, then it would be to have a concept such as, I would like to have a one-to-many relationship in which my economic well-being is related to the number of people in my audience size.
Right? That would be a perfectly rational goal that would have no ability to program you.
Okay? Here's another example, and I'm modeling this right now.
I showed you in my Periscope yesterday that I've decided to monetize the YouTube feed of this.
When this gets downloaded, it gets uploaded into YouTube in an hour or so.
Look for the phrase, Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
Just Google that and you can find it easily.
But that small amount of monetization, which I showed you, is literally a few hundred dollars per month.
It feels to me like a treat.
Just like my dog gets a treat for doing a trick, I get a few hundred dollars for doing a periscope, and I really feel good about it.
And I tell myself, Scott, there's no way that this small amount of money, compared to my vast wealth on It will have any impact on me.
I mean, I like to think maybe it would get bigger someday.
That would be great. But it doesn't need to.
I mean, I'm doing fine.
So the fact that my logical brain says that this little bit of monetization, this little bit of money that people give me on Patreon, these minor donations people make, $1, $5, that people make on my own app, Interface by WinHub, allows you to donate.
Those things absolutely program me.
So you people who are saying, hey, I would like to encourage you to do more of this stuff, it works.
I swear to God, people who give me a dollar, and that's actually the most common donation, is one dollar, or one dollar a month on Patreon or on my app, Interface by WinHub.
That dollar absolutely Changes how I feel.
Because I get a notice for every donation.
I get an email or a notice on Patreon.
And I can look at it, and I look at the name.
I see that a person, a real living person, took their time to find the app, figured out how to donate, pushed the button, and gave me a dollar.
And I look at that person's name, and I get this little dopamine rush.
For a dollar! For one dollar!
I get a dopamine rush, and it causes me to have more enthusiasm, to put a little more energy into this, to care more.
All right, so you are programming me the same way my dog gets programmed by me.
All right, so those are the ways to program yourself.
Any behavior that you want to do, associate it with something positive and associate it in your mind.
Let me put this in concrete terms.
A lot of people have trouble sleeping.
Here's how you use all these techniques to sleep better.
I mentioned before that if you can't sleep, there's a phrase to say to yourself, but I'm not going to say that now.
That was only for the people who wanted to hear.
Here's some other tricks.
The experts on sleep will tell you, don't do anything in your bed except sleep and have sex.
That's really good advice because you are an association machine.
You're not a logical machine.
You're not a person who starts out with a lot of energy and gets tired.
You are that, but that's not the important thing here.
You don't go to sleep just because it's time to go to sleep.
You go to sleep because the situation is right.
And if you train yourself that you watch TV or read a book or something before bed, that's what you'll be training yourself to do.
You'll be training yourself to stay awake doing those things.
If you train yourself that sleep is nothing but sleep, you can be asleep much faster.
They also teach you that if you can't sleep, let's say...
If you can't sleep and you know that it's not happening, don't try to sleep.
Because then you've associated sleeplessness with your bed.
Never ever associate sleeplessness with your bed if you can do it.
The only thing you want to associate with your bed is sex and sleep.
That's it. So, the experts say that if it's 2am and you can't sleep, get out of bed.
Walk around. Don't have coffee.
Don't wake yourself up. Don't look at a screen if you can avoid it.
But just wake up. Just walk around.
And then, 15 minutes later, try it again.
And if that doesn't work, maybe walk around another 15 minutes.
But don't spend a lot of time not sleeping in your bed.
Because not sleeping in your bed is training you to be in bed and not sleep.
Somebody's prompting me about the dark.
Yes. Complete darkness will trigger your body and mind to sleep.
Light will do the opposite.
So the more you can darken your room, the better.
Darken it, darken it, darken it.
So that's an association, but it has a very real biological cause and effect.
So always do that. I have black and white shades in my bedroom.
So, and then mental shelf space.
I know a lot of people who can't sleep because they start thinking about all the things they have to do the next day.
Do you know how? And I think women have this problem more than men, although that might just be a sexist generalization because I see it in movies and on TV. But regardless of gender, I'm not going to assume that it's more women than men.
Maybe that's just socially people say that.
I don't know if that's scientifically true.
But the point is, if you're worrying about all the things you have to do tomorrow, you're going to have trouble sleeping.
But it's hard to not think about things, right?
How do you not think about something?
Shelf space. You can't not think about something.
The only thing you can do is fill your space with something more interesting.
So think of something that's more interesting than what you're doing tomorrow.
Ideally, something imaginary, you know, going to the beach.
Maybe you're thinking about your great future.
Maybe you're thinking about sex.
Maybe you're thinking about your favorite hobby.
Think about something to fill your shelf space with So that you can't think about the things that are giving you sleepless thoughts.
So those are some of the techniques, not all of them.
I think that that's probably all you need to know for now.
Yeah, somebody's saying prayer, and I would not be surprised if prayer worked.
I've never tried it, but I'm sure it's great.
All right. I hope you like this.
Let me know in the comments.
Actually, I'm going to turn it off now.
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