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April 25, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
50:09
Episode 934 Scott Adams: Learn the True Story About Wuhan, What pairs Well With Fish Tank Cleaner?
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Time Text
Come in here. Come in here.
Come in here if you dare.
You'll hear a story so dark, so awful, that you may never be the same.
Tonight, the true story of a place called Wuhan in a place called China.
Not long ago, people believed that Wuhan was a plain city in China.
Some thought it was a large city in China.
But it was not.
Oh, it was more than that.
It was so much more than that.
And we pieced together the clues.
Number one.
Wuhan, it turns out, is the main center of fentanyl production that is shipped to the cartels.
And then the cartels turn it into fentanyl and it kills Americans by the tens of thousands.
That's Wuhan, Wuhan, the center of all fentanyl.
But is that the only thing that Wuhan is famous for?
No. No, it is not.
Wuhan is also a place where horrible weapons are being researched in secret laboratories.
It is a place where the virus, like no other virus, none of this world, appeared first.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
And what about the food?
Is it regular food?
Or is it demon food?
Small animals, bats, marsupials, ripped to shreds, their bodies slain and spread around the market for anyone to just come and eat and eat.
No. Wuhan is not just a city in China.
That's the cover story.
Wuhan is.
I think I have made the case.
A portal to hell!
You think those 20 million Chinese phones have suddenly got deactivated?
Do you think they're still in this dimension?
No. That was the price.
There was a price to pay for stopping the plague that came out of the portal from hell.
And that price was a sacrifice.
$20 billion.
Chinese citizens in Wuhan were sucked back into the portal, into hell forever!
And that is the story of Wuhan.
Let's see.
Alexa, turn on studio.
Ah, that's better.
So let's talk about all the things.
Excuse me while I grab my notes.
I've got two whiteboards to get past.
Yeah, double whiteboards.
That's right. You're going to be right.
Microphone back on.
Back in action. All right.
Did you see the President's Task Force press conference today?
It was a little bit short, a little bit brief, took no questions, which was perfect.
So I think the President nailed it today with his press conference.
He'd already answered too many questions earlier in the day.
So he kept it short, and I liked it.
What I really liked about it is that when Stephen Hahn and the FDA had Came up and started talking about, I guess today, they approved an at-home test.
What? An at-home test.
Now, you can't get it unless your doctor orders it, so there's not enough to go around.
But doesn't it make you wonder, what is the obstacle to take the home test, which exists?
I guess there are 100,000 of them already made.
It's approved, FDA approved, and they just...
I think they mail it to your house, you do the sample yourself, swab your nose or something, and then you just mail it back, FedEx, and then you have an answer in like a day.
And it sounds great.
But my question is, in the context of an emergency, what is there that we can't get done in 30 days?
I'm just curious.
If we wanted to ramp this home testing thing up from 100,000, To, you know, 10 million or whatever.
And we wanted to get there really quickly.
Probably need more than that.
Probably need, I don't know, 100 million.
What would it take to go from where we are to 100 million of them fairly quickly?
Because I can't think of anything that we couldn't get done in about a month.
And he said it would take maybe four months to ramp up and that was only going to be another 100,000.
So just a drop in the bucket.
So... It can't be because of lack of money, because this would be so important, that if you could ramp it up and all you needed was more money, well, we could get the money almost instantly, right?
It can't be about physical facilities, in terms of rent and real estate, because, again, it's an emergency.
So if we needed to find 25 warehouses to Quickly turn into little factories to make this.
I feel like we could do that in a week, right?
Because everything's just sort of sitting around idle.
People would step up.
They'd say, yeah, you can use my building, whatever.
So what is it that's holding it up?
Is it just supply in terms of some of the raw materials?
Is it the swabs and the little cotton tips, the little containers?
Is that all? Because I'm trying to think...
What in the world would take four months in an emergency?
Because this could actually be the most important thing.
If you could test everybody at home and have an answer in a day, I feel like you'd be on top of the virus pretty quickly.
So just in curiosity, I would love more visibility on what it is that's holding it up, and maybe there's some way we can help.
Who knows? Stefan also said that there are a whole bunch of therapeutics, and some of them sounded pretty promising.
You know, everything sounds promising until it isn't.
I think at this point, our hopes and dreams for something as simple as hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin plus zinc, if it works at all, of course it would be in the early stages, But if it works at all, I feel like we'd know it by now.
We wouldn't be wondering.
We'd say, oh yeah, it's just so obvious.
We're going to stop the trials because it's just so obvious.
It wouldn't be fair to deny it to anybody while we're waiting.
So I think even if the three-pack, if it really was making a difference, I feel like we'd know.
So I would bet against it at this point.
So I'm still putting my odds at 60% that hydroxychloroquine is not the answer.
But there are so many other therapeutics that are being worked on that it looks like I don't think we've ever seen such creativity.
And, you know, I said a few days ago that we're going to see the next two weeks will be the most amazing two weeks, maybe, of human history.
That's a lot to say for any two-week period.
But in terms of how much is going to get invented in the next two weeks, or even the beginning of completely transforming the systems that form our civilization, the next two weeks are just going to be off the hook.
And we're going to see all kinds of stories about therapies of the type you never even thought could be a thing.
Things to boost your immune system, things to protect your lungs, things to stop it from spreading.
I mean, it's going to be crazy in the next two weeks, in a good way.
So CNN is...
If you haven't watched CNN today and tonight, oh my God, it's interesting.
Because CNN is pretending, or they've talked themselves into it, or they believe it.
I actually can't tell. That President Trump said in public that, you know, maybe we should consider some kind of imbibing of Clorox and Lysol.
Now, CNN is playing a very clever game with this because they're preventing their viewers from seeing the full context, which would totally explain it away.
So that's the first thing to do.
The other thing they do is they use a variety of words for what they allege Trump did or said that actually didn't really happen.
So they sometimes use the word he used, which is injection, but sometimes they say drink as if he actually said people should drink any of these substances.
No, he didn't say drink.
That's purely made up.
So they're using drink sometimes and also ingest.
Now, do you think ingest suggests that a medical professional is carefully administering it with a syringe?
No. When you hear ingest, it sort of suggests that the president maybe was thinking people should drink it, which didn't happen, right?
So they're playing a very clever game with their words to describe what he's doing, and they're using them sort of almost, you know, somewhat randomly.
And you'll never see anybody at CNN answer this question, which is, who really thought the President of the United States was suggesting Lysol and Clorox to scrub the virus out of people's body?
I mean, really?
Is there anybody at CNN who interpreted it that way?
I totally get the point.
That the president was unclear.
And I completely accept that that could be a problem for somebody who's extraordinarily dumb.
How dumb?
Well, let me give you an idea of how dumb CNN believes the public is.
And by the way, I don't think they're wrong.
So I'm not going to disagree.
But this is how dumb CNN thinks their audience is, and some of them might in fact be this dumb.
They believe that some people might actually hear what the president said.
And here's the funny part.
They think that without them continually reporting on this, that there would be enough people who heard the president say it, and their own interpretation would have been without anybody telling them how to interpret it.
Yeah, this is the magic trick they do.
If the public had just seen the president talking and there had never been any news coverage, nobody ever wrote a story about it.
They just watched it live, just as it happened.
What would the public's opinion of that be?
This is the entire opinion they'd have.
Huh, looks like he's just brainstorming a little bit.
I didn't really understand that part.
Now, what's for dinner?
That's it. That's it.
Nobody in the public would have even registered...
That he said something that could even be a problem.
Because it was just in a list of things he was brainstorming about.
You don't know what's practical, what isn't.
Sounds like it could be a thing.
He's using, you know, he's not using medical words.
He's using layperson words.
Anyway, so the president put that out there and now CNN is pretending that he really somehow meant that.
So, of course, they did a follow-up question with the president.
And I thought to myself, thank goodness.
The president is just going to clarify this.
And he'll just say, no, no, no.
I wasn't talking about ingesting those things.
I was saying that those are the things, you know, the bleach and the isopropyl alcohol you're using on the outside world.
And then I was also talking about the light therapy that is injected into the trachea with the ventilator tube.
That's a new thing. And I was just saying that if the light is a disinfectant, is there a way to basically scrub the lungs and disinfect them with maybe this light therapy?
Yeah, you're right. I said it a little bit awkwardly, but of course I didn't mean to suggest anybody would use exterior cleaning products on their body.
That would be crazy. So that's what I thought he might say.
How'd that go? It turns out, if you've been following the news, the approach that I just outlined was not exactly the path he took.
I can't say I saw it coming.
Didn't see it coming. What he said was that he was responding to reporters in the audience and he was being sarcastic.
What? It was like he wasn't even answering the question that was asked.
It was like...
And I don't think there was one person in the world, be they supporter or be they critic of the president, I don't think there was one person in the world who believed him.
Well, you said he was sarcastic, right?
And so I'm thinking...
Alright, we can't read his mind, but let's just speculate.
What do we think he was thinking when he said an answer that was the most ridiculous answer that not even his most ardent supporters can buy in?
And they're like, I believe that all over the country there were people having the same experience, Trump supporters.
They were saying, alright, I got you on this.
You were taking it out of context.
I got you back. I will go on social media and I'll tell those people what really happened just as long as you...
Wait, what did you just say?
What did you just say?
And then you have to rethink the whole thing.
You're like, okay. Why would you say that?
Don't know. Never will know, because it was an internal thought he had, and something happened.
Let me speculate.
Because this is for entertainment only, right?
So I'll speculate. Do you remember when Trump answered the famous Rosie O'Donnell question in the first debate in the primaries?
And I told you that the beauty of the Rosie O'Donnell answer is that it was ridiculous because Didn't really address the question.
I mean, not in a serious way.
But then he ran out the clock and everybody laughed and sort of made fun of the way he answered it.
And somehow it completely eliminated the criticism.
Like the criticism just evaporated because his answer was so much more interesting than the criticism.
And then we just sort of moved on.
And then he became president against all odds.
And I remember that was the moment that I literally stood up and said, I wonder if he can do that again.
Meaning, is this a reproducible thing?
Can he just own somebody in real time, like that hard, with doing something just ridiculous?
And it turns out he can.
He can do it a lot.
So here's my speculation.
I wouldn't, you know, die on this hill being true.
But it makes sense to me. I think he said to himself, what is my alternative?
Think about it. What was the other thing he could have said?
If he had said any version of what I said, that's all we'd be talking about.
We'd be running his clip, and they'd show what he explained, then they'd show what he said, and then they'd leave stuff out so it'd look like he didn't say what he explained he said, because they would take the context out.
Then the pundits would lie.
They would say, no, you didn't say that.
You really said this. I heard it with my own ears.
What would it get him? If he had told what I think is the truth, which is that he was talking about disinfecting the lungs directly with either UV light or it could have been a gas, because it turns out that there are some situations in which there's something like hydrogen peroxide gas or something.
So there are therapies that Suggested by smart people, scientists and doctors and stuff, that involve some kind of gaseous stuff pumped into your lungs to do something.
So the president was speculating.
But imagine trying to explain that.
It would just be a complete nightmare and a distraction because that's all he'd be doing.
It's like, no, I meant this.
And then CNN would say, no, you didn't.
Look at the quote we took out of context.
That's proof that you didn't mean that.
Now you said something crazy about drinking Clorox and we caught you in a lie about it.
Bam! He didn't have an alternative route.
So my point is, the president was completely trapped.
Because simply talking about the topic was bad for him.
The more they talk about it, the more they've got a tape, the more they can compare what he said, look for these tiny details that are different.
It would just be non-stop pecking him to death on this topic.
So like the Rosie O'Donnell trap where his campaign was over, he was in a corner.
There's no way he's getting out of this question.
And then he does, right in front of your eyes, like Houdini.
And so we saw him being trapped by the media.
And then he says, I was being sarcastic.
And then they say, I really don't know what to do with that.
Do you see the weird genius of it?
And again, I don't know if that was his thought process.
So I can't tell you for sure it was genius.
But I will tell you that he has extra tools.
And among his extra tools...
Is the fact that he will use nuclear-grade bullshit to run out the clock.
So I believe he just ran out the clock and said something so ridiculous that they didn't even know what to do with it.
Just like the Rosie O'Donnell comment is so ridiculous that a standard news person or pundit can just sort of report it.
Because you don't even know what to say about it.
It's just so weird.
Because it's so obviously not true, and you know it's not true, but as long as he acts like he means it's true, there's no follow-up question, right?
What's the follow-up question once he says it's sarcasm?
There's no follow-up question.
That's the end of it. And then he goes on to something else after he runs out the clock.
And I'm thinking to myself, I don't know how planned it was.
I just know that he managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat and turn what was, you know, best case scenario, it looked like it was going to be a terrible, terrible thing.
And he turned it into a slightly less terrible thing that's just sort of weird that I think we'll forget about in a week.
So, I don't know.
Or he just thought people would believe it.
I don't know. We don't know what he was thinking.
But it was pretty funny.
All right, so this is how dumb CNN thinks you are.
So Anderson Cooper was talking about this story, and he was talking about how you don't want somebody to hear about these exterior cleaning products and then try to use them themselves.
So the worry is that somebody would try to be their own doctor and administer these deadly poisons that are meant for household cleaning.
But then Anderson Cooper has somebody on who starts talking about that UV light therapy that is inserted into the trachea to disinfect the virus.
And then Anderson, because he's sort of on a roll, he decides to say that this could be dangerous to suggest that UV light inserted into the lungs or the trachea that it might work because what if somebody at home Here's that and they take their own UV light and they shove it down their own trachea into their own lungs and then hurt themselves.
Did it sound like I just made that up?
Because I didn't just make that up.
Anderson Cooper was actually worried that if somebody thought this special far UV light was good for the coronavirus that they might shove it down their own throat and So far that they would be injured by shoving a light down their throat.
And while I would not want anyone to do such a thing, I have to wonder if we would miss that person.
Would we miss that person?
You know, if there was a family member of yours who, you know, of course you love your family, but if a family member of yours died and By trying to shove a UV light down his or her throat until he gagged to death or possibly electrocuted himself or herself, would you say to yourself, I'm sure going to miss Carl?
Or would you say, well, that was going to happen one way or the other?
I mean, the timer was on.
Carl, I don't think Carl was going to live to 80, if you know what I mean.
Carl was going to find a way.
It just happened to be today.
It was the UV light that got him.
He did pretty well.
I mean, it was one of those, you know, long ones.
He got about three quarters down, and it was just the last inch that perforated his bottom of his lungs.
But otherwise, it was a near miss.
Could have worked. All right.
One of the things I wonder if the virus models have calculated is, do you think that the virus models have calculated how good young people are at staying away from old people?
Have you ever seen a young person who really wanted to spend some time with an old person?
It happens.
I'm not going to say it never happens.
But if you're a young person, How much work are you putting into spending time with old people anyway?
And when you do, do you say to yourself, I'm sure glad I'm spending time with these old people because that's what I wanted to do today.
I wanted to spend a bunch of time with some old people.
Now, I think more likely people will say, are you telling me I have an excuse not to visit grandma?
Really? I don't have to visit grandma?
This is the best day ever.
And I can just say, Grandma, it's not me.
It's the orange man.
Orange man bad says, I can't come visit you.
Oh, I want to.
Aww. Aww.
Well, I just don't think that the models have factored in just how airtight that separation is going to be if you give the young just a little bit of an excuse.
Just a little bit of an excuse.
Alright. I'm going to teach you Some more of the secrets of life.
Are you ready for that? First of all, there's some math of the, the math of life, I'll call it, the math of the external world.
If you don't know this kind of math, and I'm using the word math pretty, you know, liberally, If you don't understand these things, it's going to be hard to succeed in life.
And I'll just quickly mention what they are.
If you don't know how to diversify your portfolio, or even how to diversify your life, You're going to be in trouble because diversification just always works.
In my case, I diversify my bosses.
So I don't have a boss who could fire me because if I only had one boss, that would be terrible.
So I have lots of customers.
So lots of my customers can fire me and I still have a job.
So diversify your bosses, diversify your customers, diversify your portfolio.
It's one of the most important pieces of math of life you'll ever learn.
If you put together your talent stack, I talk about this all the time, it's not just that if you add one talent to the one you have, it's not that you have twice as much.
The math of life is that you have something like three or four times as many options.
And every time you add something, it's like your options double.
So the math of talent stacks is that they just multiply very quickly every time you add a talent.
Here's something else.
In terms of luck and the odds, go where there's luck.
Go where there's lots of energy, where there's an industry that's taken off, where it's a happening place, if you have the option.
You know, we don't all have the option of travel.
But if you get the chance, go where the energy is.
When I left college, I sold my car for a one-way ticket to San Francisco.
Why? Because there was a lot of energy there.
Lots of options, lots of stuff.
And so some of that energy I could take advantage of.
You need some kind of a strategy for making money.
Here are two.
One strategy is to sell large things like houses or office buildings or Or commercial jets.
You know, just selling really big ticket items and then taking your percentage.
You can get pretty rich that way.
Another way would be to sell something that's less expensive, but it can be reproduced easily, such as a Dilbert cartoon or any kind of a license agreement, any kind of a book, that sort of thing.
So it doesn't have to be one of these two things, but you should have a strategy of life that if it works out, It's uncapped.
It can just grow to the moon.
What you don't want to do is sell your time because the math doesn't work.
If you're selling your time and getting paid by the hour, there's really a limit to how much money you'll ever have because your time cannot be infinitely more expensive.
Networking with other people is one of those things that increases your odds of success.
By factors of five every time you meet somebody.
That's probably an exaggeration.
But every time you meet one person, it connects you to all of the people they know.
So the math of networking is meet one person and you sort of somewhat adopt their network because you can always ask that one person for help and that person will say, oh yeah, I know a guy.
Let me connect you. So the math of networking is really strong.
The math of compounding, If you just add a little knowledge to your life every day, I try to learn something every day, even if it's minimal, that compounds.
So in the same way that money and interest compounds, so too does knowledge.
So not just in the talent stack way, that's a special way, but any kind of knowledge, it compounds because the knowledge...
Starts forming connections and patterns that will allow you to take from one field and say, you know, that reminds me of what the Yukon tribesmen did, and, you know, I'll use that when I build my network.
So you're looking for patterns around the world, and the more of them you see, the more you can put together.
Then just risk management in general.
So, you know, there's lots of et cetera here and miscellaneous.
But these are the big things, right?
So these are the external things you've got to get right.
But on the other side of the whiteboard is the fun stuff.
If you've got the math of life right, the next thing you need to do is reprogram your brain to optimize it so that you're an optimized instrument in this thing we call life.
So I was asked in a prior periscope To give you a little lesson on hacking your brain.
And I'll do this very quickly.
I know it looks complicated, but it's really not.
It's not. So think of it this way.
Think of it in terms of brain hacking is there's power and then there's design.
So this is just how much energy your brain is producing.
You think of it as like horsepower or wattage.
And to have a powerful brain, you've got to take care of your diet and your exercise and your sleep.
You want to challenge yourself to learn new things and add variety to your life so you're not, you know, bored about looking at the same stuff.
And it's good to have a purpose to energize yourself, alright?
So, in my case, you know that I've been trying to teach myself the drums.
Because that, for me, is a big challenge because that's so outside my realm of any kind of natural talent.
But I do that intentionally because I'm trying to power my brain.
So I'm always paying attention to these.
Now, the biggest mistake people make, in my opinion, maybe in their whole life, yeah, this might be the biggest mistake people make in their whole life.
And you're not going to believe it, but I'll tell you.
And that is to think that diet and exercise are the things that you can put off because you're busy.
You know, those are the things you're like, well, I'll just eat some fast food.
It's faster. I'll skip the gym today.
But if you get these things right, every other part of your life is easier.
You know, your job, your romantic life, your health, your brain actually will function better.
Just everything's better.
So if you don't start here, You're going to be in bad shape.
Alright, so then the next part is design, and this is the fun part.
You should read a book called Habit.
There are several books.
You can just Google it. So learn how to build habits.
Building a habit is doing something in a repetitive way that gives you a reward, and there's a payoff.
So like Pavlov's dogs that would salivate When the bell was rung, because I knew that some food was coming, you can actually train yourself like a dog to do the things that you wanted to do simply by giving yourself a reward.
So I've said before that if I exercise, I always make sure that after my exercise, I've scheduled some downtime where I'm just relaxing, having a protein shake, cup of coffee, protein bar, looking at my Twitter, whatever.
Stuff I want to do.
So it's just this really good feeling of being done exercising, and you're just, you know, chilling out.
So build in little rewards for the things you want to make habits.
And read my book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Went Big, to learn how to build systems to make all this stuff easy.
Ideally, you want to build systems that make it easier to do things right, How can I make exercise a habit?
Because if you get that right, everything else is going to work out.
Eventually you're going to say, Well, I go to the gym every day.
Maybe I'll try that other machine.
Or maybe I'll talk to Bob and see what he's doing.
Maybe I'll try what he's doing.
So you end up doing everything right in the long run just by trial and error and learning how to exercise properly.
But you've got to get the habit thing right.
That's what the How to Fail book will tell you.
Alright, so here are the other things.
Contrast. Oh, did I leave off the most important one?
I did. Association.
So that's the concept behind building a habit.
So if you associate, hey, every time I do this, I get a reward.
You've associated a reward.
And I've used this technique of associating a reward with a behavior.
You can change your preferences.
Literally, you can change your preferences, which would effectively make you a different person if you had different preferences.
Show the full board.
There you go. Sorry, that's about right.
And so anytime you want to make yourself like something that you don't want to like, associate it with something pleasurable and eventually you'll just train yourself.
Contrast is the idea that you use contrast all the time.
So you would say, for example, well, what's the worst thing that could happen?
And if you think the worst thing that could happen is unlikely and it's over here, Then what does happen that's more likely just doesn't seem so bad.
So you probably will recognize the times to use contrast.
But if you use it willfully, you can fool yourself into liking something that you didn't like as much simply by thinking of something that contrasts with it in the way that helps you go that way.
So you want to focus whatever you focus on.
The act of focusing on something causes you to tune your mind to notice opportunities.
I was walking down the street yesterday, and I found a $20 bill laying in the grass next to the sidewalk.
And you might ask yourself, how long has that been there?
It's a sidewalk.
How many people didn't see a $20 bill laying on the ground?
But it was old and withered.
But I've always expected to find money.
Since I was a kid, one day I found a bunch of money by the side of the street.
So I told myself when I was a kid to always look for money.
And so I do.
So if I'm just walking somewhere, it's just a lifetime habit, I'm always looking for money.
And you would be amazed how often you can find money lying on the ground if you're looking for it.
If you're not looking for it, apparently you don't see it, because I saw a $20 bill lying there, and I don't know how many people walked by before that.
So I spend lots of time literally picking up free money, because if you focus on anything, it tunes your filter to just see more of it.
So that's a hack.
Framing is important.
For example, when I say, I told you the trick of, instead of seeing yourself as, you know, this creature in the world that's oppressing you, don't think of yourself as a victim.
That's one frame.
Think of yourself as somebody who's going to win.
And another frame is to imagine that you're a creature inside a robot body, and this is just a game you're playing.
And when you're moving your big robot body, this isn't you.
This body is not me.
The me is inside me, and I'm just telling this what to do, and it's just like a video game.
And that's a frame that you can use to avoid stress, because it just puts you in a whole different world.
You're like, oh, I'm just operating a video game.
All right. Now, it doesn't have to be true.
It just has to be an imaginary world that you can put yourself into to get an effect.
In other words, you could hack your brain by simply changing your frame You don't have to believe it.
That's the important part.
You simply have to spend time thinking in that way to get the result.
Ego death is very important.
Your ego is what usually holds you back because you're afraid of being embarrassed.
You're afraid of being rejected.
You're afraid of getting fired.
And your ego is what makes you afraid because your ego tells you you're important.
The moment you realize you're completely unimportant, Because the universe is just particles bumping around.
Then you can get past those fears.
So these fears will hold you back until you learn to kill your ego.
You might use psychedelics to do that.
Shelf space is the idea that whatever you spend time thinking about crowds out the other thoughts.
So if you have a natural inclination to think negative thoughts...
There's nothing you can do to stop negative thoughts directly.
You can't say, stop thinking about that.
That doesn't work. That would not be a brain hack.
But you can fill up all the space with your own thoughts.
So you can actively say, alright, I'm going to think about X. Think about X. Think about X. And you find some kind of pleasant hypothetical thought.
I would often think about being invited to the White House for decades.
I would think, alright, what would I do That would cause me to get invited to the White House.
Now, because we must live in the simulation, I eventually got invited to the White House, which is weird.
You know, what are the odds of that?
But it doesn't matter if it's likely or unlikely.
It doesn't have to be something you think might happen.
Just think of what would be the most fun thing that could happen, and just live in that world for a while, especially if you're trying to go to sleep.
It'll just crowd out the bad thoughts.
And eventually you learn to Those bad thoughts will atrophy after a while because if you don't reinforce them, they will shrink over time.
It might take years, but they will.
Optimism is what you fill your shelf space with.
The power of positive thinking is extraordinarily powerful because if you're a positive person, people want to be around you.
You're going to take the right kind of risks.
You're going to not be crushed by failure because you say, oh, you know, I'll make it next time.
Optimism is partly, I think, something that's natural in some people, but it is my experience that you can totally hack this one.
This is one of the most hackable elements in the whole situation.
You can simply act like an optimist and you get the same results and eventually you become one.
So I would say that I spent years pretending to be an optimist and now I am.
Because it's just my reflex to say, oh yeah, that's some bad news, but what about all this stuff?
There's going to be some good stuff.
So you simply build a habit of optimism.
You simply say an optimistic thing or you think an optimistic thing as a rule.
If anything negative comes out of your mouth, this is one of the rules I try to follow as best I can.
If I have to say something negative, and we all have to sometimes, I try to come up with something positive, and it's just my rule.
So that's a brain hack.
Say something negative because you couldn't avoid it, boom, add a positive thing.
Fills up your shelf space.
You want to also travel, and optionally, psychedelics, because the more experiences you have, the more you understand that your point of view is subjective.
So if you travel, you meet other people who see the world so differently, and yet they can survive and have families and good lives.
And you say, wait a minute, why is it that all these people are seeing a completely different reality?
They've got a different religion, their beliefs, it's all different, and yet they get along fine.
Their life is fine.
You really have to experience that to understand how subjective your experience of life is.
And, of course, the talent stack is a way to hack your brain because you're adding talents that are unique.
I'm sorry. You're adding talents that stack well together.
They just work together well.
That makes you unique.
And that literally is changing the structure of your brain.
But if you have the right talent stack, they will also form connections that would not be obvious.
Now, an obvious connection would be, let's say, you're good at engineering.
And then you learn to be a public speaker.
Well, it's obvious that those two just go together, but that's all they do.
They just work well together.
But suppose you learned physics and programming.
You probably would have more opportunity to say, you know, nobody's ever done this in programming before, but in the world of physics, they solve a problem this way.
I wonder if I could...
Learn something from physics and then take it over to this other field, even as an analogy to sort of brainstorm and then come up with a solution.
So a talent stack will allow you to have accidental connections that can be very valuable.
And here's the fun part.
These are actually like physical changes in your brain.
Everything you learn is a physical change in your brain, otherwise it wouldn't be maintained.
You need to learn persuasion, the whole topic, because it allows you to see it and recognize it and then act more effectively.
So this is more of a catch-all.
Visualizing is very important.
You want to visualize exactly what it is that you want.
If you want something specific, just think about it and visualize it.
You could call this affirmations, the act of Writing down and visualizing your goal 15 times a day.
You write it down 15 times a day and visualize it.
Very important because your brain is a visual engine and so if you get your visual focus on, and this is really related to focus as well, so if you've got a visual element to your focus, it improves your focus and you get all those benefits.
I also recommend having stories of you, which is To cobble together the stories of your life that in your opinion would represent you.
And you have the option of forgetting the stories that would be inconvenient or you wouldn't like what that did to you.
Now of course those bad stories may well be part of your current personality.
But you can choose to sort of craft yourself into the version you want to be by simply deciding which stories define you.
I told you that my stories had me winning against all odds.
And indeed, I experienced it.
In my real life, I seemed to win against all odds.
Fairly consistently.
Way more than any kind of statistical probability would suggest.
I assume it's just, you know, psychological and it could all be explained somehow.
But... Make some stories of you that turn you into the person you want to be.
And then, of course, setting your priorities is how you tune your brain to decide what's important and manage everything else.
Hacking techniques. If I thought about it, I could probably think of a half a dozen or a dozen more.
But these are the ones I use.
And I would say that you're not going to get some gigantic benefit on day one.
These are the things that you should find a way to use all of your life.
When I became a trained hypnotist, and I could see the actual mechanical, let's say, reality of your brain, that The way hypnotists work is they don't have a belief system.
That's important anyway. So, hypnosis is just a set of techniques that have been figured out over time, and the hypnotist knows, well, when I do this, I get this kind of outcome.
And that's really, that's what it is.
It's very much like programming.
So, you know, if you're programming a computer, you don't say, well, what will be the motivation for Of the hardware when it sees my code.
It doesn't have motivation, it just executes the code.
And a hypnotist learns that the human mind is just like that.
The human mind artificially assigns reasons to things, but the reasons aren't real.
They're rationalizations after the fact.
The reason that the brain did it is because Some software was introduced.
That's all. Your brain just did what the software told it to do.
And then after that, you say, well, the reason I did this is because my priorities and my philosophy and all that, but it's not real.
All right. Somebody just said in the comments, this is an amazing chat group except for all the trolls.
True enough. I'm just looking at some of your comments to see if any of this was good for you.
It looks like some of you got something out of this.
Good. Yeah, Norman Vincent Peale was the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, that President Trump was influenced by, as was I. And I will see you tomorrow.
You know where to find me.
Now I don't want to turn it off because I'm getting compliments now.
So hold on for a second.
I have to read the compliments.
Because as much as managing your ego is important, and I'm very much about being able to turn it down to zero, but it's also good for your motivation and your energy if you do something well and somebody notices it.
So I'm actually just sort of enjoying...
The fact that people were happy about what they saw today.
Very motivating. I told you that the one metric in your life that you should track is your energy.
So follow your energy.
It's the most reliable guide for where to go.
And doing this, the reason I do these periscopes is because I follow my energy.
There was no plan beyond that, except I would learn some stuff, I guess.
But I do enjoy this tremendously.
Alright. You're going to have a great night's sleep tonight.
You're going to be thinking about all the things.
You'll probably try some of these techniques before you drift off.
If there's one that you could do that would be the most important to get to sleep, it's the shelf space one.
Think about shelf space and then consciously fill it with the coolest thoughts you can think of.
Don't worry about what you're doing tomorrow.
Don't do the last...
Don't think about tomorrow's day.
That's the worst thing you can do.
Think about some purely imaginary fun thing that might never happen but wouldn't it be cool if it did?
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