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Aug. 29, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:37
Episode 645 Scott Adams: Talking About Politics, AI, and Brain Hacking
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What a day, what a day.
Get my foot of stool over here and we're all good to go.
Hey everybody, it's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
Yes, yes, yes, it is the best time of your day.
Yeah, it does make everything better, you're right.
And it doesn't take much to participate.
No, it doesn't. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of stein, a chalice, a tankard, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Here it is.
Are you ready? It's time for the simultaneous sip.
Best part of your day. The dopamine hit that makes everything better.
Ready? Go!
Aww! Sublime.
Yes, there will be a whiteboard talk after we get through some of our fun political stuff.
So I'm noticing that the anti-Trump press is trying to push every door open, trying to test every line of attack, and their newest one is kind of clever.
If you haven't noticed yet, the newest line of attack is to ask Trump supporters on the air, do they think President Trump lies?
Now, what are you going to do if you're a Trump supporter and somebody says, I just have this one question, has the president ever lied or does he lie?
And the poor Trump supporter ends up saying, well, your network lies and other people lie.
And they end up looking unprepared, let's say.
And they are unprepared because you're not really expecting that question.
It's one thing, and this is the way the press has been doing it before.
Prior to this, the press usually asked, is this one thing true?
And then you can quite easily argue, no, that one thing is being misinterpreted.
So that's easy for the Trump supporter to support.
But when they say, has the president ever lied?
Like ever? What the hell are you going to do that doesn't make you look like a turnip?
Well, what do you do? It's an excellent trap.
And I don't know if they sort of chanced upon it when I saw Cuomo doing it to...
I forget who.
But it was quite effective.
Well, somebody said the easy answer is no.
But you know there are something like 11,000 fact-checking problems.
I don't think even Trump supporters believe...
that any politician has ever told the truth all the time.
Here's how I would answer that question.
Scott, does the president ever lie?
And I would say, you know, I think every politician stretches, you know, their version of events.
So they all do it.
He uses more hyperbole than most people.
But if you look at it, you would see it's well-intentioned.
And it's directionally where we would like to be led.
Or it's irrelevant.
So yes, politicians do like to shape the truth.
This president's not different from any other president or any other politician or every other pundit or indeed every other press person you've had on the air.
Everybody's giving you their version of the truth.
Sometimes people are wrong and that gets called lies.
Sometimes they use a little hyperbole and that gets called lies.
But you know, I'm not here to put words on it.
The fact is we're dealing in a realm in which the truth has largely been discarded by everybody.
So that's the way I'd go about it.
So the big disappointment for the Democrats, as you all know, was expecting that the Russia collusion situation would take the president out of the job.
And then it turns out that Mueller came out and said, we didn't find much.
We didn't find much here.
So here's what I'm starting to think might happen with the IG report.
So those Republicans who were quite happy when Mueller found nothing that seemed actionable, or at least nothing that was going to be actionable, And Republicans said, yay, now watch for the IG report, which is going to make all of these characters we know,
the Comeys and the McCabes and whoever else we're demonizing today, is going to make them all go to jail and pay for it, and their fraudulent, treasonous activities will all be uncovered.
Or not.
So here's what I'm going to add to the conversation.
I'm not so sure the IG report is going to be that damning.
It's going to be damning because it'll talk about a lot of stuff and, you know, somebody always makes some kind of mistake.
So I'm not saying that everybody will get off free.
I'm just saying that if you're expecting people to go to jail, probably you're going to be disappointed.
So I would say the odds would suggest that there might be some awkward, embarrassing stuff, some stuff you'll talk about, some things for the pundits to chatter about.
But I'll bet you nobody's going to jail.
I'll bet you no clear and obvious plot to overthrow the government is discovered.
It will probably be a whole bunch of people doing what they thought made sense in their own view of the world.
Probably that's all it is.
So don't be disappointed if you don't see much out of the IG report.
Yesterday you saw me ask the provocative question, why is it that we, the citizens of the United States, do not know the answer to this question?
Is Trump building a wall?
Right? So I asked that yesterday.
It's like, do you know? Is there actually a wall being built?
I mean, Trump says yes.
The news says no.
And then we see pictures of Wall being built.
What's going on? Now, Fox News actually covered this story the same day that I said, why don't we know?
Now, here's how Shepard Smith covered it on Fox News.
He said that 60 miles of fence have been reconstructed, meaning that there was already some kind of a barrier there, and that the only fence that's been built, period, It is upgrades of existing fence.
And therefore, President Trump's promise to build a new wall has not happened.
Now, let me ask you this.
If you were in charge of the border, where would you apply your money first?
Let's say it was your job to build a wall.
Where would you put it first?
Would you build your wall first where there is no wall?
Or would you build your wall first where there was a wall because it was an important place to put a wall, but the wall wasn't good enough?
Which of those two places would be the best place to put your money?
Let me say them again.
A place where there was already an inadequate wall because it was a perfect place for people to get across the border.
Or a place where nobody was much trying to get across the border because it was hard to get to that remote desert place or whatever.
There was something naturally about it that wasn't so good for crossing the border.
Which would be the place you start?
The place you start is by fixing the broken wall.
Because the reason there was a wall there in the first place is because it was possible to build a wall and it was important to have a wall there.
I'm not sure that that distinction between fixing walls that were inadequate and building new walls is quite the way Fox News and Shepard Smith presented it.
I think the facts were accurate.
I'm not questioning the facts.
I'm just saying that what was missing is the context.
That the smartest, best place to make a difference with a wall is where you already had one because you needed one.
It just wasn't a good enough wall.
Of course that's where you'd go first.
Now there's a problem of questioning, does he have any extra money to do any extra wall?
I don't know. I don't know.
That would probably be, so you saw that the president was criticizing Fox News recently.
What was the phrase he used?
They're not working, Fox News is not working for us anymore?
And CNN tried to turn that into, hey, are you saying that Fox News was, like, working for the campaign?
No. It's one of those ambiguous sentences.
It doesn't mean you get a paycheck.
It doesn't mean that you're taking my commands.
It means it just doesn't work for me anymore.
If I put on a shirt and it's out of style, I would say, I don't know, this shirt just doesn't work for me anymore.
That doesn't mean my shirt is an employee.
It doesn't mean my shirt takes orders for me and does what it needs.
It just doesn't work for my situation.
The president was complaining that Fox News is being more critical, and that doesn't really work for him as well as it should.
So he's putting a little pressure on them?
Because he's a big old dictator?
No, because he is transparent.
When something bothers him, he mentions it.
All the time. Doesn't matter who it is.
If something bothers him, he mentions it.
That doesn't make you a dictator.
All right. How about the question of whether Mexico will pay for the wall?
Again, Shepard Smith basically dismissed that as, he was very dismissive, shall we say, about Trump's famous claim that Mexico would pay for the wall.
On the same day that the news is showing, I think, or at least the same week, that the news is showing footage of the Mexican National Guard or police, their military, armed professionals in Mexico, Actually fighting with and having an altercation with African immigrants who are trying to come up the southern border of Mexico.
Why is Mexico spending so much money to put human troops on their southern border?
It's because Trump and the United States has pressured them to do it because those people would otherwise traverse Mexico and cross our southern border.
So Mexico is paying, seems to me, a lot of money to put human beings there to stop other human beings from crossing.
Do you know how Mexico could save some money?
Anybody? Anybody?
Raise your hand. How could Mexico save some money on their own, just their own money?
I'm not talking about anybody else's money, just Mexico's own budget.
What would be a way to control your border without having to put a standing army on every inch of it?
Thinking, thinking.
What could you do?
Some kind of a non-human solution for a border area?
A wall? A wall?
Who's going to pay for that wall?
Will Costa Rica pay for Mexico's wall?
Will Honduras? Will Africa pay for Mexico's wall?
Will the United States pay for Mexico's wall?
Probably not. I think Mexico is going to be looking pretty hard at building a frickin' wall.
Maybe not today. Maybe they'll say, well, let's put our troops on the southern border and see how this goes.
Maybe this is a temporary problem.
Maybe in a year we won't need to do this and we'll be glad we didn't build a big expensive wall.
But time is on Trump's side.
As long as Mexico is draining their own budget to keep their military on the border in place of a wall, they're wasting money.
Mexico, I guarantee it, there has been at least one conversation at senior Mexican government level.
I guarantee there's been at least one conversation in which somebody said, you know, it wouldn't be so expensive to guard our southern border.
I'll get rid of this troll.
It wouldn't be so hard to guard our southern border if we had a wall.
And you know what? You know where would be a good place to put that wall?
Maybe put it on our northern border.
Because the people aren't going to cross the southern border if they know they can't get across the northern border because they're not trying to resettle in Mexico.
They're trying to pass through Mexico.
So, you could say that Trump did not get Mexico to pay for the wall, but you can't show me footage of Mexico paying for their own wall and tell me they're not paying for a wall.
They're just doing it the expensive way.
Don't blame Trump if Mexico wants to pay extra to make it a human wall.
That's not his fault.
All right. There's a...
The latest poll, CNN was showing that Trump would lose in a direct matchup to any of the top, I think, six Democrats by some ratio of like 50-some percent, you know, low 50s for whichever Democrat runs against Trump in the general election, and Trump would get about 40% of the vote.
Does that seem convincing to you?
No, because at this moment we have the mental advantage Of imagining that whoever it is that runs against Trump looks the same on election day as they look to us today in their primaries.
Do you know who's not going to look the same on election day?
I'll tell you who's not going to look the same as they look today.
Trump will look the same.
My guess is that whatever you think of Trump today is exactly what you'll think of him on election day for most people.
But whoever gets the nomination...
He's going to turn into a different person by Election Day, because Trump will turn them into that different person.
And, you know, politics will do that.
Now, let's look at the leaders.
You've got Biden, who I don't believe there's anybody in the country who thinks he's going to be the nominee.
There are people who will still say things such as, well, he is leading in the polls.
But I don't believe anybody on either side thinks that he can win, and therefore his entire pitch that he's the one who can win looks ridiculous, honestly.
Yesterday in public he forgot, or appeared to forget, I won't read his mind, but he appeared to forget President Obama's name.
Did you see that one?
When he said, you know, and blah, blah, blah, President, my boss, I think he actually forgot Obama's name.
Now, again, if you were looking at any one of these events, it would mean nothing at all.
You put them together and it might still mean nothing at all.
He's always been a gaffe machine.
But if you look at his entire vibe, plus his age, plus the entirety of the situation, it looks like it's time to be kind.
I find it impossible now to even make jokes about this, because when you're making jokes about Biden at this point, you're sort of making jokes about senior citizens in general.
And, you know, as much as it's fun to make fun of people for whatever reason, you know, sometimes it's fun, but it's not kind and it's not useful.
And, you know, maybe I'm too old to find it funny to make fun of old people.
So I'm not going to make fun of Biden.
I'm just going to say he's not going to be the nominee.
And I hope that however his exit is engineered by those who love him, by those who love him, and I hope they're the ones who do it, I hope it's the people who love him most handle the situation, because it needs to be handled.
And I'm not saying this because I don't want him to run against Trump, because he would get crushed by Trump.
I mean, he would really get crushed.
It wouldn't be fun. Wouldn't be fun.
You know that, right? It's not going to be fun if it's just total destruction of the other candidate.
And you know that's coming, if it's Biden.
Now, let's take Bernie.
Unlike Biden, Bernie looks like he has all of his faculties.
Would you agree? Bernie's...
How old? I can't remember.
But Bernie, for his age, appears to have all of his faculties.
But he's still Bernie.
And I think he's got sort of a cap on how high his support can go.
And I think that X number of Democrats are going to say hell no on the socialist part of what Bernie is bringing.
Now, Bernie is the most important Democrat in the sense that he's changed the entire, you know, Democrat field.
You know, they've had to catch up with him.
They've had to, you know, they've had to be compatible with him when they can.
But I just don't think he's electable, and you can feel that in the way even Democrats talk about it.
You don't really see even the news talking about Bernie as a likely candidate.
It's almost as if that hypothetical is unworthy of discussion.
If that's the case, it shows a complete lack of interest by, let's say, established Democrats versus the ones who are excited.
Now let's get to, so it won't be Bernie.
Now let's talk about Elizabeth Warren, who I believe has 1% African American support.
I've been saying that the whole Pocahontas thing is weak and old and there's just not enough substance to it, so it's not much of an attack.
It's fun, it's funny, it's an interesting news story, but it's not representative of her character in 2019.
It doesn't represent her intelligence, doesn't say anything about her policies.
I was saying it feels empty.
And then you hear that she has 1% African-American support, to which I say, am I reading this wrong?
Is it possible that your generic white guy looks at this situation and says, ah, she thought she was Native American and she wasn't?
End of story.
But does the African American community in the United States look at that story of somebody trying to, the way it's framed is that she's trying to appropriate somebody's ethnic heritage for advantage, Again, you'd have to ignore the fact that she wasn't aware she was doing it in order to turn that into a negative.
But does that look worse?
If you're African-American, I don't know.
I suspect they're just sort of not paying attention to her as a candidate.
But if you only have that much support, where would your support go if Biden drops out?
Remember, Biden has absorbed the vast majority of African-American support for the primary process.
What happens if he leaves?
Do you think that Biden's support by the African-American community will go automatically to Bernie?
I don't think so.
Because I don't think Bernie's been killing it so far with the African-American vote, has he?
You look at his rallies and Bernie's rallies look pretty white, don't they?
Am I wrong about that?
Fact check me on that. So I don't think it's going to Bernie.
And if Elizabeth Warren has 1% now, whatever it is about her that makes her less appealing, I don't think it goes to her.
You know where I'm going on this, don't you?
Kamala Harris is the natural recipient of Biden's black support.
It's going to skip Bernie, and it's going to skip Warren.
Suddenly, Warren, if Biden drops out, or even if he just stops being spoken of seriously, I think Harris is going to be in the top two.
Once she makes it in the top two, it's up to her.
I've said that she's probably one of the worst campaigners I've seen.
She's also been invisible.
Right? We don't really hear from her.
Every now and then she'll do the most boring tweet you've ever seen in your life.
It just looks like it was written by an automaton or something.
It has no x-factor, no heart, no nothing.
They're the emptiest, most vacuous tweets.
And that's it. We don't even see pictures of her giving a speech.
We don't see her crowds.
We don't see anything.
There is an advantage to that, meaning that she's not ruined by the process.
The heat is not on Harris.
And if the heat ever gets on her, we'll see if she can perform.
Now, I've said she does perform well when she's, let's say, being a senator and she's grilling somebody at a congressional testimony.
She looks pretty strong.
So I feel as though she's capable of taking her game up.
But I've also said that she has completely failed to do that, which would suggest, well, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe she can't take her game up.
But I believe... I believe if Biden drops out and the black support skips Sanders and skips Warren, as I think there's a good chance it will, suddenly Harris is going to be looking like second or tied in the top three.
As soon as people think of Harris as a possible winner, I believe she's going to absorb all of the undecideds.
I think people are going to say, all right, we need a person of color.
We need a senator, not a mayor.
We need a woman.
She's going to be automatic in a whole bunch of votes.
We'll see. Now, the X factor here, the part that I don't know, is whether Warren, I'm sorry, Harris, Warren and Harris, those names are too similar, don't you think?
Like, I store those two names in the same part of my brain, so I'm always confusing Warren and Harris, just the names, the words themselves.
But Kamala Harris, I don't know how she's perceived by the black community.
And I don't know how she's perceived by women.
But you could expect that she would get some, you know, just automatic votes.
All right. Uh...
I've got some really interesting topics I'm going to talk about here, unlike what I've done so far.
Let's talk about Mattis.
So James Mattis has a book out, there's some excerpts out, and of course the fun parts are where he's criticizing President Trump.
So let me read Apart from the book, this is James Mattis' book, in which he is sort of criticizing Trump.
He says, and I quote, a polemicist's role is not sufficient for a leader.
Okay, you good with that?
A polemicist's role is not sufficient for a leader.
This is Mattis speaking.
A leader must display strategic acumen.
That incorporates respect for those nations that have stood by us when trouble loomed.
Returning to a strategic stance that includes the interest of as many nations as we can, make common cause with, we can better deal with this imperfect world we occupy together.
Absent this, we will occupy an increasingly lonely position, one that puts us at increasing risk in the world, Mattis wrote.
And then he talked about his resignation, and he said...
Quote, concrete solutions and strategic advice, especially keeping faith with our allies, no longer resonated.
Now, I had a good impression of Mattis before I read this.
Didn't you think Mattis was sort of a straight talking Yeah, it looks like word salad.
It looks like he had to arrange words to make an argument because the argument wasn't there.
If I were to take his argument and put it into words that people understand, and I don't use words like polemicist or acumen or something got incorporated or something loomed, Or that we needed common cause, blah, blah, blah, strategic advice, keeping the faith.
These are all sort of nonsense, generic words that don't really mean anything.
Which president would you prefer?
The president who could look at an ally and say, yeah, I know what you want, but we're not going to do that.
Do you want that president?
Or do you want the president who looks at the ally and the ally says, no, don't do that.
And then we say, oh, okay, we don't want to make an ally upset.
Which president do you want?
I don't see the argument here for the president who's going to do what other countries want us to do.
That's pretty much giving away our sovereignty.
If we want our country to be run for the benefit of our country, that requires a president who tells our allies to go pound salt sometimes.
Not every time, but sometimes.
I feel like that's the president I want.
Not just this president, but every time.
Do you want the president who's going to go along with the PAC? Doesn't feel like the president I want.
And what about President Trump's chumming up to Putin and Kim Jong-un and even President Xi?
Would you rather have a president who doesn't talk to our adversaries, but does do whatever our allies want?
I don't think so.
Would you want that president?
That sounds like exactly the president I don't want.
I want the president who will talk to our enemies, Because that could be helpful as part of the process.
And I want one who will go against our allies when it makes sense for the United States.
I feel like Mattis is shooting blanks here because he's describing a world that I prefer and he quit from it to which I say he doesn't look like a guy who could work with Trump.
He looks like a guy who didn't have the tools.
I hate to say that.
Because, you know, Mattis has been a great patriot and a tremendous, you know, public servant and soldier and warrior and all that.
So I have great respect for him.
But he does not look like a personality you would want in the same room with Trump.
I'm just not sure they could work together.
So I don't see a big problem there.
Lawrence O'Donnell got embarrassed because he reported some poorly sourced story that turned out to be fake news about some Russian billionaire co-signing a loan for Trump.
Just completely untrue.
But the funniest part is I watched the clip.
In which there was a double screen and Lawrence was explaining to Rachel Maddow and it was the first time she'd heard it.
So that's the fun part. So Rachel Maddow didn't know the story yet and Lawrence O'Donnell is telling her the story and says that his reporting or his one source, he said it was just one source.
So he was sort of broadcasting that wasn't reliable yet simply by saying it was one source.
But But he said that, you know, when he said that the billionaire Russian co-signed the loan, you should see Rachel Maddow's expression.
And she goes, really?
Even she couldn't believe it.
Now, she played along, and I can't read her mind, right?
So I don't know exactly what she was thinking.
But my impression of it was that she didn't believe it.
Or at least, even if it were true, it was in the category of unbelievable statements.
So either one of those would have given a similar reaction.
But I'm going to give some credit to Rachel Maddow, because I'm pretty sure she was skeptical about the claim.
It looked like she was, and that was the right reaction.
You can love or hate Rachel Maddow, but she's very smart.
She's very smart.
You can't take that away from her.
Speaking of smart, there's a clip of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.
Billionaire guy talking to Elon Musk.
They're on stage and they're talking about whether computers will ever be smart like people.
And they disagreed.
Elon Musk said computers are already chipping away at what we used to think only humans could do.
They could beat humans at chess every time.
They can beat them at the game of Go, which is even more complicated, every time.
And Musk was making the case.
That they will actually just surpass humans, and there's no doubt about it.
Jack Ma said, cleverly, that he's seen people invent computers, but he's never seen a computer invent a person.
So a person can make a computer, but a computer can't make a person.
Therefore, humans always have that sort of superiority.
To which I say...
There's no such thing as a person who ever made a computer.
That's never happened.
No person has ever made a computer.
Civilizations have made computers.
Groups of people working overtime have developed parts of things which, when put together, can be assembled into a computer.
But no person's ever made a computer.
Has a computer ever made a person?
Yeah, they're simulated, but they have.
In fact, there's about a trillion to one chance that a computer made you.
Now, there might have been a human or an intelligence of some sort who pushed the button and said, hey, computer, make me a simulated civilization that thinks it's real.
And then the computer did the rest.
So can a computer make a human?
Probably already happening.
When I say probably already happened, that a computer has made a human, I mean you.
I mean you are very likely a simulation.
According to simulation theory, there's a, you know, trillions to one chance that if any civilization ever could make a simulation of a human that thought it was real, or a simulation of any creature that thought it was real, that it would probably happen lots of times.
And maybe even the simulation would make its own simulation.
So there's a very high likelihood that a computer has already made a person.
Not just a person.
Probably trillions of people.
And they don't know that they were made by computers.
Probably. Speaking of...
And then when I tweeted this, I got some pushback, and one of them was interesting.
One was a software developer who said on Twitter, I'm a software developer, and basically I can tell you that a computer can only do, you know, the simple logic that people give it.
It can't think.
To which I say, number one, Well, you're thinking, and you're probably created by a computer, so there's that.
But secondly, a computer programmer is typically not somebody keyed into the creative process.
I have a unique window on this situation because I've been a computer programmer.
So I know what it means to program a computer.
I've made a number of programs earlier in my career.
I've invented games and done things for corporate use.
So I have been a computer programmer.
I've also spent most of my life as a creative person.
If you tell me I can't make a computer do what a creative person does, you are so wrong.
Oh my God, you're wrong.
It's the wrongest you could ever be.
You can create a computer that will create things.
Here's what you're missing.
Let's pick one of you and make you the Dilbert cartoonist.
Alright, you take over my job tomorrow and you just do my job.
Can you do it?
Probably not. Probably not.
Now, let's see. How about you make some paintings?
I'll just say you.
You personally. Go make some paintings that are so good they'll hang in the Louvre.
They'll be world masterpieces.
Go ahead. Go do that. You can't.
So when you say humans are creative, that's just not true.
That's just not true.
Humans can't create.
That's not a capability of humans.
Here's what humans can do.
We can assemble things that already exist in our minds.
So when I create, all I'm doing is taking things I've seen, add some techniques, some formula.
There's actually a formula for humor I talk about a lot.
I combine it, and then I say, well, did that work?
How does it feel? Nah, that's no good.
So I try something else. How does that feel?
Oh, yeah, that made me laugh.
I'll go with that. A computer can do all of that.
It's just A-B testing with a framework.
And then you see, did people laugh or did they not?
If they laugh, you do more of it.
If they don't, you throw it away.
Now, the reason that you think people are creative is because we have 7 billion people and many of them are creating things.
Every now and then, entirely by chance, we like some of it.
And we say, well, look at that.
Look what Rembrandt created there.
Rembrandt created something that I like.
So therefore we're better than machines.
You're not. You didn't paint that.
You didn't make any Rembrandt stuff.
You're just going to your job in your cubicle.
A computer can do everything you can do.
Can a computer do everything Rembrandt can do?
Yeah, Ken.
It just has to do seven billion tries a day, every day, and some of those tries, other human beings will say, hey, look at that one.
The computer randomly cranked out that picture.
I don't know why, but I love it.
A computer trying to make art would do so much better than humans so quickly, it would be ridiculous.
Anyway, wait for that.
I saw a fascinating discussion on evolution, in which some evolution doubters were talking about why they doubted it.
Now, let me stop right here.
One of the three doubters seemed to have a religious, biblical interpretation of things, sort of a God explanation.
But the other two did not.
So the other two doubters of Darwin were not doubting it in favor of a religious interpretation.
They were just doubting it on mathematical, logical terms.
And their argument was this.
If you've got this long string of DNA and there's a, let's say, a letter that represents every spot along it, you've got to have just the right organization of letters to create something that lives.
Almost all of the combinations are unlivable.
In other words, any one change to what makes a person a person probably kills it.
And they were saying that while it is possible, you could have a random mutation that would amazingly take a living animal from the one that happens to work to one of the few out of trillions.
I think it was 10 to the 77th odds that you could get a random mutation that would actually work.
It would be a living animal.
So the argument was that the universe isn't old enough, even with all 15 billion years, the universe isn't old enough for those odds to have given us the world we observe.
And also that there's a sudden acceleration in new species during what is a very short period of history.
And that is also not explained.
Here's what's wrong with that.
Here's what's wrong with that.
So as much as I think you're expecting me to say, aha, we have disproved evolution, there's something terribly wrong with the argument that says that we don't have enough time in our universe for these odds to play out.
Now, first of all, I just don't know if that's true.
Do we? Do we not have enough time?
I don't know if that's knowable.
I don't believe that's knowable.
But here's the problem. That would make sense if there were only one universe, once.
If we are the only universe that has ever existed, it's only happened once, there are no other dimensions, there are no other simulations, there were no other cycles in which the universe burst into existence, expanded to a point, and then gravity shrunk it back in and it became a singularity again.
How many times has this universe or a version of it been created from the Big Bang?
Because our ability to measure time only can go back to the Big Bang and then it stops.
How many Big Bangs were there?
Could there have been a trillion times a trillion times a trillion Big Bangs?
There's nothing that makes that impossible, right?
So even if the odds of us existing are 10 to the 77th, the odds of this long line of markers on the DNA had to be exactly right for a creature to turn into another creature, How do we know how many times this universe has been created?
Maybe all the other times it didn't work.
Now the thing that people get wrong is that they forget that our ability to exist and to ask the question, how did we get here, would only happen if you happen to be the one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion that happened to work.
So it would be entirely rational and believable that we would exist Even though the odds look impossible.
So I didn't buy the argument that there's not enough time, because there could have been, yeah, there could have been multiple dimensions, there could have been multiple big bangs, and when I say multiple, there could have been trillions upon trillions upon trillions.
Like, real multiple.
It could have been a trillion to the power of a trillion.
Remember, there's no law that says time had to start.
In all likelihood, whatever's going on is perpetual.
And where are we in the perpetual cycle?
Well, there's always as much behind you as there is in front of you if it's infinite.
All right. Let's say somebody told me that computers will never have souls, to which I said, neither will people.
There's no such thing as a soul.
You can't find a soul.
That's not a thing.
You can't get a bucket full of soul.
So you don't need your computer to have a soul because people don't have them either.
Somebody said computers will be able to compute, but they'll never be able to think.
Well, that's just word thinking.
That's just putting a different word in there.
They'll absolutely be able to think.
You just have to tell them to.
Nobody's ever programmed a computer to randomly think.
But if you wanted to, even I could do it.
Like, I'm pretty rusty with my programming, but even I could say, all right, here's a little code, connect some things that you have not connected before, see what they look like, project them into the future, draw a picture with those things you've put together, analyze it, tell me if you like it, give me an opinion of whether it would work.
You could program thinking into a computer fairly trivially.
Somebody says, wrong, Scott.
Whoever said, wrong, Scott, probably must be new.
But they will not be old because they've been blocked.
Anybody who says, wrong, on my Periscope gets blocked.
Because you have room to give a reason.
If you give a reason, even if it's just hinting at your reason, you don't have to be complete, that's fine.
But you can't say, Scott, you're wrong, and that's it.
That gets you blocked.
All right. Let's talk about hacking your brain.
So here's the fun part.
I was waiting for the end. So yesterday I did a video on how to be happy.
I talked about the things you can do with your lifestyle and habits to boost the chemicals in your body that make you happy.
So I posted that in a I stripped out just the part about the happiness equation, and I pinned that to my Twitter feed.
So if you want to send that around or see it again, it'll sit at the top of my Twitter feed, and it's also going to be on my blog.
So I took out just the happiness part, so you can see that alone.
But I wanted to expand on that with some lessons on how to hack your own brain to be happier.
Now, as most of you know, I'm a trained hypnotist, and I've been working on learning persuasion for decades.
And there are things that hypnotists understand about how to program a brain that most of you don't.
And secondly, you don't understand that you can program your own brain so you can be your own hypnotist without necessarily having all the skills of a hypnotist, because it's fairly simple.
Let me walk you through it.
So here's some brain hacks.
And these are the primary tools you can use to control your own brain.
All right? So this is how to program your own brain on a regular basis.
It's not something you do once.
It's something you do every day as a system to reprogram your brain from wherever you don't want it to be to wherever you'd like it to be.
And here are the tools. First of all, you want to manage your mental shelf space.
And what that means is your brain can only handle so much.
So be the only person who determines what's on your shelf, the stuff you're thinking about.
If you have negative feelings, crowd them out with more powerful feelings that are the kinds you want.
If you keep remembering something that's making you unhappy and you're just going through your day and this memory keeps popping up, Think of a sexual fantasy.
Think of something great that's coming up.
Just put your shelf in front of you and just fill it with thoughts that are more powerful than whatever it is you're trying to not think about.
So don't try to not think about it.
Instead, move your thoughts to a different place.
Fill all of your capacity.
With work, with social life, with kids, whatever it is, take on a hobby, read a book, just take your brain somewhere every time you've got something you need to get away from.
I do say you should avoid things that you can't fix.
So thoughts you can't fix, just...
Just avoid them. Positive self-talk.
This is sort of the Tony Robbins approach, but Tony Robbins, of course, gets this from a long history of positive thinking people and hypnotists, and it has a long history of being useful.
Tell yourself that things are going to go right and that you're good at things and you know how to figure stuff out.
Even if you're not good at something, tell yourself you're the kind of person who can figure stuff out.
Because you are. If you got this far, you are the kind of person who can figure stuff out.
So keep telling yourself that like it's a program that's running in your head all the time.
I never turn that off.
I tell myself all the time, I could do that.
I could do that. I could do that.
I could figure that out. That would be hard.
I'd probably get hurt if I tried to do it, but I could do that.
And I even take that into dangerous situations.
If you have to be somewhere that's dangerous, your first choice is don't go anywhere that's dangerous, right?
So choice number one, do not put yourself in danger.
But sometimes you just end up in a dangerous part of town, in a dangerous situation.
Here's what I tell myself when I'm in a dangerous situation.
Man, those other people are in trouble.
I'd hate to be my enemy.
I could kill everybody in this room.
I'm the most dangerous person here.
I'll bet they're worried about me.
They have no idea what I'm up to.
Also, if you get challenged by...
Here's a little bonus tip.
Every now and again, you'll get challenged by somebody dangerous, somebody who's looking for a fight, maybe you're in a bad part of town, and they'll get in your face and they'll start talking shit to you.
If you want to scare them, don't talk.
Just stay silent. Stay confident and silent.
Because you want them to get in their mind the idea that you're not a talker.
And that whatever you planned might involve a weapon in your pocket.
It might involve that you've got a friend who's standing behind them.
I like to look at people and not give them any tip what I'm thinking.
Just look at them. Because it scares people.
They need to see your reaction to know what they're dealing with.
Any reaction gives them information, so I give them no information.
People do not like having no information in a dangerous situation.
I'm getting all the information I need because somebody's talking and acting, and it's telling me a lot about who they are and what they can do.
I'm giving them nothing back because I don't want them to know anything.
And it's very disturbing to be in a dangerous situation and to have a variable that you don't know anything about.
So just there's a little tip for you.
Habit. There's a book called Habit, which I have on my shelf.
The Power of Habit is the full title.
The Power of Habit.
Read it. It teaches you how to develop habits that become your programming.
If you do something over and over again, it becomes part of your mental wiring.
You can actually hack your brain into good habits simply through repetition.
Yes, Charles Duhigg is the author, correct.
Here's something that you're not going to believe.
I promise it's true.
You can change your preferences.
Now some of you are going to say, oh yeah, I've already done that.
So some of you will confirm it in some ways.
What you don't know is how easy it is.
It's really easy.
You can change a lot of your preferences, maybe not all of them, but I have actually experimented with this.
I've done long-term experiments to see if I could make myself really like something that I didn't like and vice versa.
I've programmed myself into liking things and then, just for fun, programmed myself out of it.
It's amazingly easy.
And the main trick is association.
So, for example, I used to not like the TV show American Idol, a million years ago.
But I watched it with my then wife, and because I enjoyed the situation, I started loving the show.
So I had a preference against the show, which turned into a great preference for the show, simply by associating the show with something else I liked a lot.
This works every time.
Just associate the thing you don't like with something you do that's more powerful until the thing you like bleeds over into the thing you weren't so crazy about and they become paired.
Very easy. I give the example of when I go to the gym, I always make sure that when I'm done, I go and I get a delicious protein shake, which is, you know, good for me anyway, to have protein within 30 minutes of exercising.
But I like it.
I like sitting down after I've exercised.
I like having my protein shake, checking my phone, and just having some me time.
It's some of my favorite time.
Because of that, I make the process of exercising, which is not naturally fun.
More enjoyable, because I've associated it.
You should take all the things you want to manage in your preferences and change their associations until you associate what you want with good things you already like, and that will push you in that direction.
It doesn't happen in one day, but it does happen in a few weeks.
It's pretty fast, and if you do it for a year, it's pretty locked in.
And triggers and association are related.
The association is the trigger.
So if you think about it, you can change your preference.
All right. Somebody says they're lit off some indica.
Well, you should not smoke indica.
It's the morning, at least where I am.
You should be in the sativa, my friend.
The indica will make you sleepy all day.
Affirmations. Affirmations are the process of repeating in your mind some objective that you want.
Now, because I prefer systems over goals, people get confused and they say, wait, repeating the thing you want in your mind and visualizing it, isn't that like a goal?
Without a system? To which I say, no, the system is the repeating it.
Because the repeating it is what causes your brain to create filters that allow you to notice things and act upon things that maybe you wouldn't have noticed and wouldn't have acted upon.
So using affirmations can help you program your brain.
Somebody says, Jack Herrera is your daytime friend for marijuana.
Yeah, that one's...
Well, I won't say anything about that right now.
I think I might do a...
I was thinking of doing a separate periscope on how to smoke marijuana if you're a medical marijuana user, because I don't recommend it for recreational use.
Someday I'll do that. Avoidance.
If you fill your shelf space and avoid unpleasant thoughts, they will reduce in power through atrophy.
So the avoidance is very similar or related to the shelf space.
Just focus on the good stuff and the bad stuff will shrink in importance.
And then I also advise you to learn and increase your talent stack as much as you can over time because...
That also programs your brain for recognizing connections.
I don't remember if I thought I was going to say this or I actually said it when I was talking earlier, so I'll say it again.
So you remember Watson and Crick figured out the shape of the double helix, you know, the DNA stuff, and it was Crick Who I learned just recently had been a code breaker in World War II. So a guy who had two skills.
One, he was a scientist.
And two, he had been a code breaker.
The code breaker broke the code on DNA. It took a code breaker.
Now, if he had not been a code breaker by training, would his brain have been tuned Somebody says he was on LSD, that would have helped too.
Would his brain have been tuned to the idea of patterns in terms of codes?
Probably not. So anytime you can learn a second thing that works well with your other thing, you've more than doubled your power.
So learning two things gives you what you already had plus the new thing, but it doesn't just double your power because you have two things plus all the things that are new that are the overlap or the combination of some things from those two things.
So adding a second skill does more than double It's sort of like 250% better.
And if you get that math right, it really helps.
That's what the talent stack is all about.
All right. So repetition, thinking positive things, changing your preferences by association.
These are the tools of a hypnotist, and they're the ones that you can easily apply to yourself.
If you are not managing your business, I think?
There may be something out there that's just there, but your experience of life, for sure, is a subjective experience.
And that subjective experience is very much within your power over time.
Whatever you do on one day might not make that much difference, but if you develop habits over a long term, you learn to fill your shelf space with provocative ideas, you learn to build a talent stack so you can combine and contrast ideas, and you build associations and triggers in your own mind that get you to where you want to be, and you've got affirmations that are running in the background all the time telling you what you want.
You'll start noticing things you wouldn't have noticed before.
Somebody says, can hypnosis help with depression?
I don't know the answer to that question, because I don't know that it's been studied.
Here's what I do know.
I'm certain that a hypnotist can boost your body chemistry.
I don't know that this has been tested, but I'm going to say, based on everything I know, I think there's a fair...
I would say my confidence on this would be 95%.
I'd say there's a 95% chance that a good hypnotist working with the right person, and of course that matters.
Hypnosis doesn't work the same with every person.
20% of the public can have a really strong effect from hypnosis.
The rest can have weaker effects, but some effects.
So if you have the right person, somebody who is susceptible to what's called the phenomenon, that's a hypnosis term of art, it just means that they can actually feel and experience something as if it's real, just from suggestion.
If you have that kind of person, and they're suffering from depression, And part of that could be influenced by boosting their serotonin or dopamine.
A skilled hypnotist working with somebody who's in that 20%, who can feel and experience things as if they're real, could be hypnotized to feel and experience something which naturally boosted your serotonin and dopamine.
For example, I could tell you that you're in a beautiful forest that you really enjoy and the sun is shining on you and you feel just perfect and you're walking through the forest and you're full of hope and everything looks great and good things are happening in that forest.
That's just a sample. But the point is that 20% of the people would have a physical experience.
Their body would start to conform To what that experience would be like if they were in the real world having the experience.
So you could make somebody feel hot.
You could make them feel cold.
You can change their heartbeat, their pulse.
You can really change a number of chemical situations and electric situations in people's body through hypnosis.
So, to answer your question...
Could you fix somebody's depression through hypnosis?
I don't know.
I don't know that it's been tested.
But my strong intuition with 95% confidence is that at least 20% of people could have more of those chemicals that tend to be on the low side when you have depression.
So I'll say that with a fair degree of certainty.
But whether that's a cure, I don't think that's been tested.
Some of these say they meditate daily, and it's a direct route to fix depression.
I don't know. I've not seen studies on that either.
I hear lots of good things about meditation, and it's something I did in my younger days, and I found great value to it until I learned hypnosis.
Hypnosis is a more direct and stronger version of hypnosis, in my opinion.
They're different. Meditating is not hypnosis.
They're different things. But hypnosis does better what meditating does.
In fact, one of the things hypnotists learn is self-hypnosis.
So I can count to 20 and put myself into a meditative state pretty quickly.
And I do that sometimes.
All right. Do you hypnotize yourself?
Yes, I do. I use all the tricks that you just saw, which largely come from the field of hypnosis, but I also use a trick I learned as a hypnotist to rather quickly put me in that state.
So it's a trigger I've developed over time.
All right. Somebody said, I've tried hypnosis, but my will was stronger, so I couldn't be put under.
No, what happened was you don't know what hypnosis is.
That's all. So somebody said, my will was too strong and I couldn't be put under hypnosis.
That's not a thing. That's somebody who didn't want to be hypnotized.
That's all that is. If you want to relax and listen to somebody, you can sit in a chair and relax and listen to somebody talk.
That's being hypnotized.
If you have some mental process that says it wasn't working, that's a false message.
You were being hypnotized.
You just didn't feel like it.
That's different. All right.
That's all I got for now. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
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