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April 9, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:40
Episode 901 Scott Adams: I Feel a Sensational Simultaneous Swaddle Coming on. Don't Resist!
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Time Text
Put your phones on silent.
You know what time it is.
Yeah, yeah you do.
It's time for the evening simultaneous swaddle.
That's where you get your blanket on.
Oh yeah. Feels comfortable?
Calms you down from these stressful times?
It's a way to get off the news.
I'm trying to wean you off the news so that you can slip into a comfortable, great night's sleep.
And you know you're addicted.
You're addicted to it.
Because your days are better.
All right. Now, I'd like to thank all the people who made news today that had nothing to do with the coronavirus.
Because they don't know about you.
But I wouldn't mind talking about something else for a while.
First in the news, Linda Tripp has passed away just hours ago, I guess.
And she was called the Clinton sex scandal whistleblower.
She died at the age of 70.
And I would like to read this sentence to you from the Daily Mail.
This is a British publication.
And I want you to fill in the last part of the sentence.
Now, I swear I'm not making this up.
Everything I tell you about this, totally legitimate.
And I just want you to guess how this sentence ends.
I'll just read you the first part.
This is from the Daily Mail today.
Quote, Linda Tripp's secret conversations with Monica Lewinsky led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 after she blew the...
Finish the sentence.
Linda Tripp's secret conversations with Monica Lewinsky Led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 after she blew the...
After she blew the...
The rest of the sentence is, after she blew the whistle on their affair.
Because she was a whistleblower.
Oh! Oh, the sentence was talking about Linda Tripp.
Okay, okay, I got it now.
Got it. All right. You probably know by now that Bernie Sanders has dropped out.
He's dropped out of the race, but he's keeping his delegates.
That's not exactly a good loser, is it?
I'm going to drop out of the race, but I might keep my delegates.
I'm not going to give me my delegates.
So it's not a clean win for Biden.
And of course, by now you've all seen the President Trump quote.
And I say this a lot, but it always bears repeating.
President Trump doesn't even know how to be uninteresting.
You know, love him or hate him, you know, he annoys you, you know, you love him, whatever, no matter what you think of him.
I just don't think it's in his character that he can be uninteresting, like in any context, anywhere, in any room, under any situation.
Everything he says is just like, wait, what?
And this is another one.
So his reaction when he heard the news, he was talking about it.
He said, quote, I don't know why President Obama hasn't supported Joe Biden a long time ago, Trump says.
He feels something is wrong.
He feels something is wrong.
It does amaze me that President Obama hasn't supported Sleepy Joe.
He knows something that you don't know, that I think I know, that you don't know.
Now, you have to admit, if you had said, okay, we're going to have this moment when you're going to say something in public,
and I want you to get the best writers in the world and bring them and I want you to get the best writers in the world and bring them together and try to come up with a sentence or two that's so provocative and so screws with your head that people can't stop talking And you'd have the best writers in the world and they'd be like, well, suppose he says this, now that won't work.
And I don't know if you could, I don't know if the best writers in the world Could have come up with something that's more provocative than the way I think he just sort of came up with it on the spot.
I mean, that really is a gift, you have to admit.
Love it or hate it, you just can't turn away.
It's just so interesting the way he does it.
Now, of course, one of the many things he does right in holding your attention, I've talked about before, it's an author's trick and a writer's trick, which is you create curiosity.
And you see the president do that all the time.
He says, well, you'll find out later.
He likes to have little surprises.
He likes to tease you that there might be a surprise coming.
So he knows how to keep you interested by not giving you the answer.
Because anybody standard, like a normal politician who didn't know how to do this stuff so well, a normal politician would have just made an accusation.
Right? A normal politician would say, Well, Joe Biden's a socialist too, or he voted against that thing, or he was for this war or something.
That's how any normal politician would have approached it.
He would just say a fact.
But a fact gives you no curiosity.
There's no curiosity. It's just, yeah, of course you say that, because you're on the other side.
I'm going to hear this a million more times.
It doesn't stick at all.
But Trump puts it in the form of like a puzzle, a riddle.
It's a quiz. It's sort of a quiz and a riddle.
It's sort of a story with a cliffhanger.
You don't know quite what the answer to the story is, but you feel you have a notion, and it might be the same notion he has.
Now, I've told you before that two of the strongest forms of persuasion are pacing and leading, and so in this case, the president is sort of pacing the public, Because the public feels almost exactly the way he's framing it, which is, I think I know why Obama's not endorsing him.
I'm not going to say it out loud, but I think I know.
So he knows how to completely connect with his supporters in a way nobody's ever really done before, I don't think, from the presidency.
And then the other trick, which I've talked about less, but it might be the most powerful one, is when he tells you what you're thinking as you're thinking it.
Have I ever, I don't know if you've heard me say that before, but a powerful way to instantly connect with somebody in a way that allows you to be influential with them, because that connection just like locks in, and you can do it very quickly.
And the technique is, You tell somebody what they're thinking accurately.
I mean, if you do it wrong, then it doesn't work at all.
But if you can accurately guess, because you've just been around a while and you know how brains work, if you can guess somebody's unique thought, and the trick is it has to be a unique thought, not an obvious one.
You know, guessing that somebody's hungry before lunch is not going to get it done.
So you want to reach in and guess somebody's really specific thought.
And if you can do that, you just go click, and the two of you lock in, and then there's an opportunity or a channel open for persuasion.
And you see the president doing this in this way because he says it directly.
He knows something that you don't know that I think I know that you don't know.
So he's basically talking about what's in our heads and everybody else, right?
What's in the public's heads.
And he kind of nails it without actually saying it, which is, we all think we know.
We're not sure if you know what I know or if I know what you're thinking, but I feel like we all know we're thinking the same thing.
So anyway, he hit every note you can hit in Persuasion.
And it was funny as well.
Here's some good news.
I'm full of good news today.
One of my neighbors who couldn't finish college because of the coronavirus stuff is home with the family, is doing some shopping because she's in that young, healthy, relatively healthy category.
And so she was nice enough to get me some groceries a few times so far.
And today she was at a store for other purposes and saw toilet paper for sale.
On the shelf. Let me say that again.
My town had toilet paper on the shelf.
Now, I'm not talking about industrial toilet paper.
I'm not talking about stuff you wouldn't want to get near the tender bottom of yourself.
I'm talking about the good stuff.
12-pack. Charmin.
Yeah, that's right.
Solid gold. And so she said, would you like me to, you know, get some for you?
And I was texting, and I was like, I couldn't type it fast enough.
Yes! Yes!
Buy it! Buy it!
And she said, do you want one or two?
I was like, one or two?
One or two?
I didn't even know that was an option.
And I started weeping while typing, two, two.
I think there might have been a limit.
Which, by the way, will be the secret to getting everybody enough, is if the big box stores, when they do get new supply, and it looks like it's happening, if they limit, you know, two per customer or something like that.
So I think that's what's going to happen.
Now, let's talk about predictions.
How many of you remember when I predicted when the toilet paper supply would start to replenish?
I said it would be about a month.
From the first day that your stores got empty shelves.
And I did like back of an envelope calculation to, you know, guesstimate the average of how much people hoarded.
But then you have to calculate in that people are home more, so they're using more stuff at home.
Then calculate in that the businesses probably were working double time to produce more.
So calculating all that, and I think I said about a month from the time that your shelves First emptied.
How close did I get?
In my town, I think I nailed it.
Right? I think, well, you don't know, but about a month from the last moment that you could buy these products in my town is today, I think.
It's just about a month.
So that was just the back of the envelope calculation, but looks like that's going to come through.
We have to wait and see if...
Let me know...
Let me know if any of you have experienced that yet.
All right. Let's see.
You know, one thing that this coronavirus situation has done, and I think after it's over, there are going to be all these unintended benefits that are really going to rack up.
And one of the interesting things about it is it created this little test lab where there were lots of ambiguous situations that people in public were competing, in a sense, People were competing to have the best take on it and the most accurate interpretations,
the best predictions. And so there are lots of elements and parts of the story of the coronavirus pandemic, but in each of those little sub-stories, in each of those little sub-plots, there are people like me, people in public, Pundits and famous people and politicians and celebrities making all kinds of predictions and statements about them.
And so in a very condensed period, like we've never seen before, we got to see people's minds at work in public, and then we fairly quickly got to see who was more right than other people.
Somebody says your polyps sound bad.
You know, you're right. The last few days I can feel that there's some difference.
So you're right. Anyway, so I think one of the good things that comes out of this is you're going to find out who's good at this stuff.
And I'm going to tell you a little bit more about my predictions so you can see how I stack up with the public predictions.
All right. So there's a prediction from the experts that say the U.S. will reach its peak use of resources that most will need on around Saturday, which is pretty close, right?
It's the weekend. And I don't see the task force being panicked.
It looks like they figured it out, like we found enough, we moved enough around, we flattened the curve enough.
They were pushing on it from every direction, from finding new ones to figuring out how to retrofit things to quickly building new ways to build them and everything.
But it's beginning to look like we're going to get past the peak of it without the grotesque shortages that would kill people from their lack.
Now, I just saw a message just before I got on.
Somebody said in a particular hospital that they were reusing stuff and may have caused infections and maybe somebody actually could have died from that.
It's hard to know exactly what caused what in these situations.
But if you were to look at it overall, there's no doubt there were individual bad situations, but if you were to look at it overall, it kind of looks like We got it done.
I mean, it's still too early, but it's starting to look like Team Humans, and Team America specifically, it's kind of starting to look like we got it done, which would be spectacular.
Now, of course, the skeptics will say it was all a big hoax and there was nothing to do.
So the reason that you did so well is that there was no problem in the first place.
And we'll never be able to solve those two different movies that'll play forever.
But here's the way I'd put it.
Can it be said, let's say things go the way the optimist would like them to go.
We get through Saturday and we don't run out.
And then, even though the problem is going to continue for weeks, we get on top of the supply problem and we basically, give or take a few special cases, basically we just don't run out of stuff from this point on.
Could it be said, if you think about yourself in the future and you're looking back at it, you're a historian, could it be said that we were unprepared?
Now your first thought is, hell yes, we were unprepared, because we had to scramble so hard to get all these things.
But let me just put this thought in your head.
That would make sense if you had only one big problem.
If you had one big risk, you should be really prepared specifically, and in the most maximum way, for that one risk.
But what if you live in a world In which you have untold potential risks, everything from pandemics to asteroids to unexpected wars to EMF bombs to who knows what, revolutions, mass psychosis, global warming, pick your emergency.
I would contend That what it means to be prepared in a world of tremendous uncertainty and a variety of dangers to which you could not possibly prepare for all of them.
That what it means to be prepared is to have systems in place that are very flexible and adaptable.
And when a new threat comes in, which is always going to be different from the last one.
You know, your next threat is never quite like the last one.
You know, this virus isn't like the other ones exactly.
So, being prepared in the future might not be a case of being prepared like a goal.
Like, my goal is to be prepared for this thing.
Because what if there are so many things and some of them you can't even imagine?
You can't even think up the trouble that's coming toward you.
It's just something you never saw before.
In that case, and I think that does describe the future, in that case, isn't your best form of preparation a tremendous ability to communicate?
Incredible colleges and education system to produce the kinds of scientists and researchers and doctors that you need for a variety of situations.
We have these systems for governing that apparently were up to the task in terms of the fact that we knew who was in charge.
Okay, Mr. President.
He immediately used his powers to create a team.
That team used the powers of emergency and the influence of the president's office and all that, the military, everything.
All of these systems, it's like systems on top of systems on top of systems.
And how'd they do?
Well, our biggest problem is that we're sort of ossified with all these regulations and red tape.
If our system could not immediately self-correct and cut through the red tape when an emergency required, then I would say you're not prepared.
But what if your system is so flexible that the moment there's a need, oh, we've got to get rid of all these regulations.
They made sense before.
In a luxury time, they made sense.
But right now, we've just got to get rid of them.
If you could just slice through them, Which I think is what the administration did.
It looked to me like the administration just sliced through regulations everywhere they saw them, like a samurai.
So were we prepared to get rid of regulations?
Yes, yes. We had a system in place that quite efficiently identified and then removed obstacles.
We also have the internet.
I would say that the contribution of just individuals as they communicated on the internet, and even the leadership that was shown on the internet, I'm talking about the Mark Cubans, etc., the people who just...
Stepped up and added something useful.
And there were a lot of ideas and connections and buyers and sellers finding each other and ideas that needed to be fleshed out with more people.
So the internet is this amazing system.
And in my opinion, specifically Twitter.
I'm a little biased, but I think Twitter is sort of the brain Of civilization.
And because it exists, all the best ideas could sort of find the right place and get filtered in a way that we could have never done before, you know, prior to Twitter.
So if you look at everything from our political systems, even our financial systems, the fact that we have such a mature banking system and that Mnuchin could go in there and he had a full toolbox.
Mnuchin had a full toolbox.
What tool did Mnuchin want to use that was not available to him?
None, right? Maybe you can think of one, but I can't.
Because the economy of the United States was robust, Mnuchin goes in there and says, all right, it's an emergency.
I've got to push the buttons for emergencies.
And all the buttons are there.
They're all there. Because we were already in a depression because we had good systems.
So I would say that we're probably, you know, it's human nature that you beat yourself up for your mistakes and you don't give yourself enough credit for the things you do well.
But I think where we're heading with this, if we do get past the peak without running out of stuff, I'm optimistic now, I think we really have to pat ourselves on the back.
And I'm talking about humanity in general.
Because there are a whole bunch of systems that really delivered.
That they adapted.
The systems themselves were almost like living creatures.
Because none of the systems were, on day one, adapted to the task.
But, you know, let's just take one example.
You know, Twitter is not adapted to the task on day one.
But it takes 10 seconds for a hashtag to appear, and suddenly Twitter is morphing into exactly the tool for this disease.
It's almost like you could think of creating a hashtag in Twitter as almost like an antibody or a white blood cell.
Because let's say the body human is attacked.
So something about humanity is attacked, whether it's a pandemic or something else.
What's the first thing we do?
When humanity is attacked, the first thing we do is, somebody makes a hashtag, right?
The hashtag then attracts all the attention, and it trends, and then people know where to go, and then it connects everybody, and then all of the resources of the world, all the different systems, start spinning up.
Because of this little hashtag.
So this hashtag is like the antibodies that get formed on Twitter.
They start spreading on Twitter, which connects all the systems and pushes them into operation.
And then people can find each other and make connections.
They know what's important and what's not.
Imagine if you had to depend on just the news.
Imagine this pandemic came and there was no social media.
And you just had to depend on the news.
That's scary, isn't it?
That's really scary.
So the thing that's sort of invisible to you is the stuff that happens gradually.
And what's happened gradually is we've, you know, most of us have sort of grown up with this evolving internet world.
So you lose track of how different it is from, you know, any time before that.
And one of the differences is it's almost alive.
As soon as the problem was identified, it turned into a hashtag.
It reformed Twitter in real time and created like this little brain of society that was focused on this one problem.
Then all the systems were activated and each of them morphed into a new system.
Every system, think about it, every system in the world, probably, every system in the world just morphed into a new system.
In just days. While we watched, because we needed it.
Most incredible thing you've ever seen in your life.
I hope that we all remember it in the way that we should.
Let me give you some of my most unlikely predictions.
You've heard these before, but if there's anybody new, it's always good context.
So, I've been saying for years that you should make predictions in public.
And then you can see if you're good at it.
Because people will remind you if you missed it.
And if you do, you should tell people you got it right.
So here are my most unlikely predictions.
Well, of course, you know, I famously predicted that Trump would win in 2015.
So that sort of put me on the map for predicting stuff.
But here are some of the really weird ones I predicted.
When we didn't know who the Vegas shooter was, And people were saying it was probably ISIS. I said it was not.
But that's not the fun part.
The fun part is that when ISIS took credit for it, I still publicly said, nope.
And then people reminded me, you know, ISIS doesn't take credit for things that they didn't do.
I think there was one example where they might have.
But basically, once they take credit for it, it's ISIS. But I held tight, and of course it was not ISIS. So that was one for me.
When the Cuban Embassy allegedly had a secret sonic weapon, and all the experts and all the news was reporting it was a secret sonic weapon, and I said, never going to find that secret sonic weapon that doesn't exist.
Have we found the secret sonic weapon?
That doesn't exist.
We have not. And I think that at this point, the experts probably agree that it's not any kind of a weapon, whatever it was.
And of course, you know, I was one of the first to say, stop the flights from China.
I was one of the first public people to say, of course masks work.
How could masks not work?
It doesn't make any sense. Now, a lot of people realized it.
But, you know, there was sort of a funny thing happening when it first came out that the experts, you know, Surgeon General and the World Health Organization, CDC and everybody, when they were all telling us that masks wouldn't help, I feel like there was this phenomena that happened all over the place, which is that a whole bunch of smart people said to themselves, but not out loud, as soon as they heard this, they thought to themselves, is that right?
Is that right? Because that doesn't feel right.
Like, how can it not help at least a little bit?
And they would make their silly arguments about touching your face and you'd be like, yeah, but that doesn't feel right.
But I don't think anybody wanted to say it out loud because literally every expert just said, no, don't do it.
They don't help. So what are you going to do?
Are you going to go in public and say out loud in public I disagree with every scientist and expert who's weighed in based on my skill as a cartoonist.
Is anybody dumb enough to do that?
Well, yeah, I did that.
That's exactly what I did.
I bucked every expert and scientist in the world who all of them know far more than I do because it was obvious that they were just wrong.
So you'll count that on my list.
I think, by the way, I made it easier for other people to say it in public.
Because, you know, when the first idiot goes and doesn't get killed, you go, oh, well, the first idiot didn't get killed, maybe I can go too.
And so here's where I'm heading on this.
Oh, and I also predicted that splitting ventilators would be a thing.
And as of today, the Surgeon General just put out some guidance that said it's a last resort, but it's an approved last resort, which makes sense, right?
If you had any other way to do it, you wouldn't do it that way.
And then here's another one.
So my public estimate for the final death toll...
We'll probably be well off of the actual number, but maybe the closest one in the country.
So I might have the closest estimate while still being off a bit.
So mine was under 5,000 net, meaning after you saved people who didn't get in car accidents for two months, count them in, etc.
Counting everything in, that would be closer to 5,000, that we would do such a good job.
It looks like the...
Official estimates are 60,000 as of today, but that's gross.
So if you just netted out the ones that were saved, it's probably going to be half of that.
So somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 would be effectively the predicted net.
My guess was 5,000.
I think the 30,000 is probably going to come down a little bit.
So if the experts were saying 100,000 or 200,000 and maybe a million, And I said 5,000 and it comes down to, you know, net 15,000 or something.
I'm going to say I had the best prediction.
We'll see. But here's the weirdest one.
Let me do a little fact checking with you because you know how it's easy to have selective memory?
It's really easy to have selective memory and like imagine that you predicted things you didn't predict.
So I need your help on this.
Who in the public, who talks about politics, what public person said before I did that Biden was mentally incapable?
Do you remember anybody saying it in public?
Like actually saying, oh, I'm watching this and it looks like his brain is not functioning.
Did anybody say that that you heard, that you heard, before I did?
Somebody says everyone.
Well, everyone has said it since.
Yeah, everyone's said it since, but I might have been the first one to say it publicly.
Maybe Mike Cernovich.
Yeah, I mean, so I'm not going to claim that I said that first, but I was among the first.
And wouldn't you say...
That a year ago, it wasn't as obvious, but now everybody can see it.
So I would say that everybody who is on record as having said, you know, a year ago, I was kind of calling this out already, all those people are right.
Yeah, Tucker was on it early, for example.
But my weirdest prediction is, and I tweeted it today, and I know you're never supposed to reveal a conversation, a private conversation you have with the president, but this is a special case and I'm only revealing this one little nugget because it's fun and because the president wouldn't mind.
And it was that when he invited me to the Oval Office to chat in 2018, so this is August 2018, So just think about how long ago this was.
It's August 2018, and he asked me my prediction for who would get the nomination, and I said Kamala Harris, and he said Joe Biden.
So in August of 2018, President Trump called the, and I think we can assume that Biden will get the nomination unless he falls apart, but Trump called it.
He called it correctly, confidently.
He was pretty confident about it.
And he called it in August of 2018.
That's pretty good, right?
I have to say.
Now, my prediction seemed to be going poorly when Kamala Harris suspended her campaign.
So you might say to yourself, well, Scott, after ISIS has taken credit, that's when you can say you're wrong.
Oh, no. That's not how I roll.
I don't care if ISIS took credit.
I'm still going to say it wasn't ISIS, as with the Vegas shooter.
And just because Kamala Harris stopped running for president, that didn't mean she wasn't going to get the nomination.
No. If you recall, I was quite insistent that my prediction would stand.
Now, as of today, the news is reporting that he's hinting so strongly That he's going to pick her as vice president, that at this point it might be surprising if he didn't.
Because he's just sort of talking about her in a way that makes you think he's not doing a good job of hiding his intentions.
Now, let me say as clearly as possible, It's not a done deal.
Because first of all, I'm not even sure that Biden gets to pick his own vice president at this point.
I feel like the deep state is just going to assign him a vice president so that the usual people are in charge once he gets in office, or let's say even he has to drop out before he gets in office.
The vice president would be the obvious one to take over the top of the ticket.
If Kamala Harris is the one who was picked, I would say we're no more than 60% likely at this point, if I had to put the odds on it.
But it's still my prediction.
She would become the vice presidential pick for a candidate that even the Democrats realize is not capable to hold the job.
And even Biden has suggested that he knows it too, because he's talked about getting somebody younger for the obvious reason.
And it feels as though Unless something changes, it feels like the obvious path of this is that for all practical purposes, Kamala Harris will be the nominee, whether officially or not.
In a practical matter, I think people will be voting for the Vice President.
So, would you say my prediction of Kamala Harris as the nominee would be wrong?
Under these circumstances, if you were the vice presidential pick, well, my critics will say, yes, it's wrong.
And I will, of course, say, yeah, it's technically wrong.
It's technically wrong.
And somebody says, you are out of touch.
Guess what happens to people who say, you are out of touch.
They become out of touched.
No, you're out of touch.
No, you're out of touch.
Again, the rule is you can disagree with anything I say.
You just can't say something about me.
Don't say, I'm out of touch.
Just tell me what I don't know.
That works too. All right, somebody's saying, yes, still wrong.
Now, if I didn't know what you meant by that, I'd probably block you for that, but I know what you mean.
So I see a lot of you who are rejecting the prediction.
So just remember this when you come back to mock me.
Should I be wrong?
Should I be wrong?
I will look you in the camera and I will admit I was wrong.
You don't have to remind me.
Right? You don't have to remind me.
I'll admit it. And I promise you, I will admit it if she does not get the vice presidential nod.
All right. Let's see.
Here's a...
Well, I kind of said this before, but I feel like when this is over, whenever that happens, I feel like we're going to be proud.
I feel like humanity is going to feel like It did well.
Of course, the tragedies that come out of this and the discomfort and pain are all terrible and cannot be minimized.
But I think we're going to be proud when we come out of this.
I think it'll work that well.
All right. Let's see what else is going on here.
I also think that the unintentional benefit from this pandemic...
We don't like your message.
What message? The accidental benefit will be decoupling from China.
Because I think public opinion was sort of beginning to lean in that direction of, yeah, maybe China is not our friend.
But I think the pandemic changed people's emotional feeling about China and the whole relationship.
And so I would say at this point we came out way ahead.
Yeah, the pandemic's going to cost us how many trillion?
Two or three? Two or three trillion?
But I think we still come out ahead in the long run if we cut the cord with China and bring our stuff home.
I think we can make up three trillion.
Because remember, what's the full economy?
Does anybody know the full economy?
Is it a five trillion dollar economy?
Somebody help me out with that.
But I think if you take that $3 trillion and spread it out over X years as one does, I think just the benefit of getting China out of our supply chain and bringing that work home, we may end up making back the whole $3 trillion in the long run.
All right. So I've predicted that there will be an oxytocin delivery service if we have to keep up this social isolation.
Because, you know, humans go a little squirrely if they don't have physical touch.
And physical touch releases a chemical in you called oxytocin.
It's the thing that makes you bond with people.
It's the thing that gives you a feeling of well-being.
It's the thing that calms all your stress and makes all your problems go away.
You've probably noticed that you could have all the problems in the world.
But if you're with your loved one and you have a good time together...
Suddenly, all the problems in the world don't seem so bad.
So that's the oxytocin in you.
Now, since we all have this social isolation, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
Somebody in the comments is saying our economy is five to six trillion.
I'm seeing six trillion. So the point stands.
A six trillion dollar economy could probably get back three trillion over 25 years, You know, just by the benefit of not dealing with China anymore, potentially.
So, oxytocin.
So what's going to happen if we keep getting starved of oxytocin, besides the fact that we'll be unhappy and crazy?
I think you might see people who already have been tested to have recovered and have antibodies.
They may do that business that you've heard of, I think it still exists, where people actually get paid to hug people.
And they just go and they cuddle with you for a while if you don't have anybody in your life.
It's usually a woman. I don't think it has to be.
But I'll bet you you're going to see that business spring up.
Because think of, you know, once we have a bifurcated population where some people have recovered and they have the antibodies but other people are so vulnerable they could die.
The people who have the antibodies that are confirmed to have recovered will be like super beings who can, you know, deal in both worlds.
While the people who haven't yet caught anything and don't have a vaccination will be, you know, cowering in our caves.
So I think some of them will actually, it will be like, you know, ordering DoorDash.
I think people will order hugs.
Like, actually, literally, you'll go on your app and you'll say, I just need 15 minutes of spooning.
And somebody will come to your house and spoon you for 15 minutes and you pay them by the app.
Could happen. So I would like to create for you, for tonight, an artificial oxytocin high.
So that chemical that normally is only produced by close physical contact can also be, to a slightly lesser extent, can be artificially generated by a brain hack.
Do you believe it? Do you believe there's a brain hack or a trick That can kind of close the circuitry in your brain that initiates your oxytocin.
Because remember, it happens basically in your brain and your own body.
Even though the other person is involved, it's not like they're shooting chemicals from their body into yours.
Your experience is a subjective one.
And your feeling of the subjective experience is what makes your brain chemistry do a certain thing, which triggers your oxytocin that flows into your body and your mind and makes you feel awesome.
So if there were some way to close that little circuitry and activate your oxytocin without the benefit of a person there, wouldn't that be cool?
It turns out there is.
And I've taught you the trick, but until you see lots of examples of it, you don't completely get the beauty of it.
And the trick is that our mind is an association engine.
It's a pattern recognition engine sometimes, but it's also an association engine.
So if, for example, I took this bottle of water, That's a bad example because it's too common.
Let's say I took this little tripod that's a little bit less common than a bottle of water.
And every time I showed it to you, I fed you a delicious meal, your favorite meal, like the best food you've ever had in your life.
But no other time do you ever get to see this.
It's the only time you'll ever see it.
Over time, simply seeing this without the food Would start to make you happy in the same way that the delicious food did.
So your brain just automatically pairs things whether you like it or not.
Now you knew this of course because that's the whole concept behind.
You hear a song that was your song when you were in a relationship and it makes you sad because it reminds you of that.
So you know that songs can trigger a relationship.
You know that lots of other things can trigger these associations.
So if you would like to get a little oxytocin And who wouldn't?
Here's what you need to do.
The first thing you need to do is reproduce a sum of the physicality.
That's what this blanket's for.
This blanket is chosen scientifically, sort of, meaning that it's just the right feeling and softness.
Because when I have it on me, I get a feeling of softness and a little bit surrounded.
It's actually sort of hugging me.
Now, if you think that being hugged by a soft blanket is so completely different than being hugged by a human being, well, of course it is, but it's not that different because your body is an association machine.
And when you associate the feeling of, wow, that is soft and warm and feels good on my body, It's going to trigger some of the same chemistry and mental processes, and just by memory and association of the real thing.
So some of it's physical.
There were tests of little monkey babies that didn't have mothers, and if they gave them a warm water bottle, they actually were pretty happy, because just the physical warm water bottle felt sort of like a person, felt sort of like a mommy.
So, reproduce the physical comfort of a human hug.
So you might want to be near the fireplace.
If you have a pet who's good at snuggling, well, put on a blanket, sit by the fireplace, get on your comfortable rug, spoon with your big old dog or your cat on your chest.
And these feelings are similar enough To things that you feel when you're with a real person, that it can trigger them, at least partially.
And then the other thing you want to do is you want to manage your mental shelf space and put things on it that create oxytocin and make sure that there's no space on the mental shelf for any bad thoughts to get in that work against it.
So if you just don't bother managing what you're thinking, Well, thoughts will just sort of occur to you in a semi-random way, and some of them will be bad.
So don't do that.
So once you're in your soft, comfortable, warm place, hugging your cat or dog or whatever you're doing, this assumes you don't actually have a human that you can be hugging, then close your eyes and think about the person you most would want to hug.
Put yourself in this situation.
Now here's the trick.
Run through all five senses in order.
Say to yourself, okay, I can visualize what that looks like.
That's your eyes.
I can smell it, you know, the perfume, the scent.
I can feel it just in your imagination, but you're also feeling your soft blanket, the fire, your pet perhaps.
Maybe you've got a body pillow.
By the way, if you haven't tried a body pillow, You should, because it's almost disturbing how good it feels.
So if you have one, try that.
So imagine, if you will, and fill up your mental space with just thoughts where you cycle through all of your sensations, you know, your hearing, your touch, your scent, your taste, if it makes sense.
If there's something that you often would eat or taste with this person, So you just run through it and you make sure that you're concentrating as much as possible on the thought of what it feels like to be with that one you would most like to cuddle.
It works best.
It works best if it's somebody that you have an actual relationship with or you can remember it and you have good feelings about it.
Not somebody you broke up with, ideally, but something that's only positive.
So I will be daydreaming of Christina, as I often do while I'm hugging my pillow.
And, of course, the rest of you, I know how hard it is for all of you, but I want you to take a moment to feel sorry for me.
Not only can I not be with my fiancé, but by terrible luck, She is the most attractive human being in the multiverse.
Now, it'd probably be easier not to see her if she were not so darn lovely, and if I didn't love her so much, and if she were not so incredibly attractive.
But that's my personal hell.
But I do get to spend time with you.
That's not nothing. And tonight, when you go drifting off, You're going to remember the oxytocin trick, and you're going to feel almost like a tingle.
You're going to feel, some of you, not all of you, and not all the time, but some of you are going to feel it when you get in the zone, and you can feel the warmth, and you're just comfortable, and you're thinking about that person you most want to hug, and you feel like a little tingle.
It'll be like a little, almost like a blush that comes across some part of your body.
It could be different. Everybody's a little different.
So you might feel a sort of in your head or your neck.
You might have a little tingle on your arms.
But that's how you know you're in the zone.
And tonight, you could have one of the best sleeps of your life.
And you wake up feeling a little bit better than normal.
You might not know why.
But it's a little thing called oxytocin.
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