Episode 1233 Scott Adams: The News is Boring so I Will Take You to a Higher Level of Awareness Instead
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Whiteboard1: Levels of Awareness
Whiteboard2: Constellation of Symptoms
Whiteboard3 - Change World, Change Brain
Flurbs and Ploop Theory
Physically reprogramming your brain
Reframing received criticisms
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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I wanted to do a little experiment this morning to see what normal people are like.
I regard many of you to be normal people, and so I said to myself, what would it be like to be like you?
And what I mean by normal people is people who have sleep, for example.
People who go to sleep and sleep a good eight hours.
And I thought to myself, I'm going to give that a try.
Because I'm good for four hours and I just hate sleeping.
So I thought, I'll sleep a regular amount of sleep because it's a holiday and what the heck.
I feel terrible.
I don't know how you people sleep so much.
I feel like I literally have a hangover from sleeping something closer to maybe six or seven hours.
And your clock is five minutes fast.
Well, for those of you just joining, I didn't actually intend to be live already.
I'm so hungover from too much sleep.
I don't drink alcohol.
But I'm hungover from too much sleep and I just hit the wrong button.
So, that's enough of the explaining.
If you would like to enjoy today to the maximum amount, and some people are going to be really mad if they miss the simultaneous sip.
You realize that people will be mad if I do this right now, don't you?
Okay. I'm really going to have to wait until 7.
Because if all the people who always wait, or 10 a.m.
Eastern, if all the people who wait miss the simultaneous sip, they're going to be pissed.
I have unfortunately...
I've trained thousands of people around the world that their day will start correctly if they do this little ceremony.
So I'm going to have to wait, if you don't mind.
But before then, I will take some questions, if you have any.
Has anybody had any Christmas experience that sounded even a little bit like Christmas?
Am I the only one who felt that we didn't really have Christmas this year?
Right? It didn't feel like Christmas at all.
We did decorations.
I saw presents.
I saw Santa Clauses.
But not once did it feel like Christmas.
Can anybody explain that?
Is it because our routine was just different enough?
You know, we didn't do enough going to stores.
We did it all online.
There wasn't enough family traveling.
Is that all it was?
Because didn't it feel like it was a lot more than that?
It felt like there was something happened that just took Christmas away.
I know I'm not the only person who felt it.
So, I've been kind of in this weird daze for the whole week.
I don't know what day of the week it is.
And it's definitely not Christmas, but it is Christmas, but it isn't.
So, yeah, let's talk about Kamala Harris and Kwanzaa.
So, for those of you just joining, I'm waiting until the appointed moment for the simultaneous sip.
So, Kamala Harris...
And I guess it was her husband who was doing a little video in which she was talking about her love for her childhood tradition of Kwanzaa.
Now, I have no idea what Kamala Harris' actual childhood looked like, right?
So I don't have any idea whether this is real news or fake news.
But it's funny news, if you call it news.
And the funny news is that apparently Her background is both black from Jamaica and Indian from India, right?
So she has a dual background.
But I saw a picture of her family during her youth, and they were full-on Indian culture.
So she was basically raised in the Indian culture, but she's claiming now that Kwanzaa was one of her big loves of her childhood.
And I'm thinking to myself, Maybe.
Maybe. I'm not saying that she didn't also have a love for Kwanzaa, but it was pretty funny to see her and her family all dressed in their Indian traditional garb, and then next to the story about her love of celebrating Kwanzaa.
And I think most people said to themselves, maybe.
Maybe. Maybe.
I mean, you could have two completely different cultures and respect them equally, I guess.
But have you ever seen it?
Have you ever seen anybody who just picked two completely distinct cultures and just said, we'll do them both?
Probably. Actually, there are probably lots of examples of Jewish Americans who do all the Jewish stuff, and then they do all the Santa Claus stuff for the tradition part.
So probably that does happen.
So I'm not going to say that she doesn't do it, but I thought it was a funny story because it makes her look like a hypocrite.
What time is it? It's time.
It's time for the simultaneous sip.
That's right. And if you came in early, you got a little extra.
But those of you joining on time, well, you're going to get the real deal now.
And all you need to enjoy it to its maximum extent is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the holiday gift of the world.
It's called the simultaneous...
I don't even know what it's called.
I overslept. It's called the simultaneous, if it happens now, go.
Oh, wow.
That was good.
So, I've decided the news is just all so ugly and stupid, it's barely worth talking about.
So, apparently, Congress did something incompetent.
That's it. Congress did something incompetent to screw the people for no good purpose other than politics, I guess.
Do you know what the news will be tomorrow?
So that was today's news.
I'm just going to use my psychic powers and predict.
Tomorrow, Congress will do something that screws the public but is good for them, they think, politically.
And then, wait, watch this.
That's just tomorrow.
I can do this further.
I'm going to go all the way to next week, folks.
Watch this. It's next week, psychic powers, Congress is incompetent, they're doing things that screw the people, For political purposes.
Now wait, wait, wait. One year.
One year. We're going to go deep.
One year from now.
All my psychic powers?
Got it. Locked in.
Congress is incompetent and doing something stupid to screw the American people for political purposes.
Now, I'm going to go out on a limb, and I'm going to put a lot of my personal reputation on those predictions.
You just watch.
You think I'm going to be wrong, but you're going to be surprised.
I'll bet I'm dead on on that.
Yes, I'd like to do some more predictions from the future, if I may.
This will be my most difficult one.
Concentrate, concentrate.
In the future, the Pope will denounce violence...
And say we should be better to the who?
Is it the rich?
No, no, it's coming in clearly.
The Pope says we should be better to the disadvantaged and the poor.
Pretty good, huh? Well, you don't know if that will actually come true.
But by the end of the year, you're going to say to yourself, I think he nailed it again.
Look at that. He got the Pope's prediction dead on.
He nailed the Congress.
Oh yeah, he got that one right.
How about this one?
Take a deep breath.
Psychic powers online.
Joe Biden will continue to make verbal gaffes that make you wonder if his brain is still all connected to its own parts.
We don't know, but I feel good about that.
I feel good about that prediction.
Alright, let me take you down a little road here that I think you're gonna enjoy.
Because the news is boring and so let's ignore all of it because nothing's happening there.
Here's a little framework for you that I put together this morning.
This is how I kind of see the world.
And let's see where you are on this.
I call this the levels of awareness, where at the lowest level, let's say you're a little kid, and you're four years old, and adults tell you something is true.
And if an adult tells you something is true when you're four years old, you say, well, it's probably true.
They haven't lied to me yet.
But then you learn about that whole Santa Claus thing.
I hope there are no kids.
Are there any kids watching? Put the earmuffs on the kids.
If the kids are watching...
Kids, earmuffs.
When you learn that Santa Claus isn't real, then you go to the next level where you learn, well, maybe sometimes adults can say things that aren't true.
That's your next level of awareness.
The one after that is that, oh crap, they don't do it once in a while.
They do it a lot.
Adults don't just lie sometimes.
They lie a lot.
In fact, the only thing that will predict whether an adult will tell the truth or a lie is whether they can get away with it.
Yeah, that's the only thing that predicts.
If they can get away with it, it's probably going to happen.
So once you reach this level of awareness, you're in full cynicism.
Cynicism, and it's kind of a depressive place to live, and I know that place because I lived there for a long time.
Eventually, I, of course, became cocky as I gained more knowledge about the world and got older.
I was probably a teenager by this point, where I realized that, hey, I could be right, and other people that I trusted, even experts, could be wrong.
And it's like a big awareness change.
You say, wait a minute. Even though I'm, let's just pick an age and say, even though I'm 17, or maybe you're 25, or whatever you are, even though I'm young, I'm pretty sure I can detect That I'm right on this particular question.
I'm not right every time, but there are these occasions when I'm right and even the experts are wrong.
When I say you're wrong, I don't mean just you personally, but you, backed by your experts, could all be wrong on really big stuff.
I'll give you some examples.
And then I would argue that most people are here, if you're watching this live stream, you're probably at least up to here.
Because I know you're not here, or here or here.
But you're at least up to here.
And I would say that where I want to get you is here.
To the point where you realize the full subjectivity of reality.
Oh yes, there is a real right and wrong at some base level of reality.
But it's not really available to us.
You can't know if you're right.
Sometimes you can know you're wrong, but you can't know you're right.
Now, let me give you some examples in which I have experienced this full flow, if you will.
And by the way, the one where no one is right would be compatible with, it's not the only thing it's compatible with, but it's compatible with simulation theory.
The idea that we're a big simulation and that there's some subjectivity to our reality and that there might be a base reality, an objective reality, but we don't have access to it.
Our brains are not designed to even see it or understand it.
Now... Oh, this is a good comment.
I'm seeing the comments. I'm saying that a whiteboard and glasses make one an expert.
Well, that's not far away.
I got the glasses, I got the whiteboard, I got a live stream.
If that doesn't make me an expert, I don't know what does.
So let me give you some examples of subjective reality that informed my path here.
One of them was when I joined corporate America.
Some of you know this story.
And as a corporate employee, I would experience many absurdities in my daily life.
And unlike the rest of you, I decided to take those absurdities and frustrations of office life and turn them into a world-famous comic strip called Dilbert.
Now, here's a part that probably a lot of you don't know, and most of you are not going to believe.
And so I'm not even sure if I believe it, but I know there's a strong correlation.
So if you're too young to remember this, Dilbert's now over 30 years old, but in the early days of Dilbert in the 90s, there was a trend of just absurd...
Management consultant trends.
Just crazy stuff.
Where there would be some consultants who would come in and they would train the staff in these weird practices and beliefs.
And it was just so obviously a bunch of BS. But nobody really was talking about how management was largely astrology and guessing and a scam game.
Because managers needed to do something to make it look like they were managing.
But the job of managing often doesn't have many moving parts.
If you're a really good manager, after you've hired and trained your staff, not a lot to do.
If you've trained your people and you've hired them and you're fully staffed, there's not much to do.
So if you're a manager, you have to make it look as though you're putting in the work.
So managers learned that since things were going to go well on their own, you know, if they were in the right industry with the right kind of market, and they had good people working for them and making stuff, they would become more profitable next year than this year.
But the trick was that the manager needed to look like it was the manager's work that made the difference.
It wasn't the worker's, because the manager needs to get a raise and promoted and everything, right?
So they want to make it look like they did something that was connected to To all this good news that was going to happen on its own.
And so they would create these programs of leadership, this and this workshop that, and they would say, yeah, because we did this workshop and this leadership, that's what caused all these good profits.
Now, do you remember what it was that changed all that BS? Like, it was really bad in the 90s.
Those of you of a certain age, Backed me up on this.
If you're 30, you missed this whole thing.
So you have to take it from anybody older who's watching this.
There was this crazy, just ridiculous amount of management BS. And there was one book after another.
Best-selling book about how to find your excellence and how to do the right thing.
So you're seeing all the yeses coming through in the comments.
Do you remember what stopped it?
There was something, a counterforce.
There was a big counterforce in society that just took all of that gigantic industry BS leadership stuff and just stopped it.
What was it? It was Dilbert.
It was me.
It was accidental.
It was nothing I set out to do.
But because Dilbert was so...
Let me say this without acting like an egomaniac, because it's just part of the story.
So there's some things you just can't communicate without sounding like an egomaniac jerk, so just deal with it okay?
Because Dilbert was, it's hard even to say, insightful.
Can you say that about yourself?
It's necessary for the story, so just deal with it.
I know it's obnoxious.
But Dilbert was sufficiently insightful that it just dismantled an entire industry.
If you were to track, and I've actually seen this graph, by the way, if you were to track the business book market, You would see that in the early 90s it was just like a rocket.
It was like business books were like selling and business books and leadership and how to manage and how to be a successful CEO. And then Dilbert hit.
Boom. Boom.
Boom. Right to the floor.
So the peak of Dilbert coincides exactly with the peak of the business BS, and it just drove it to nothing.
Because once it was clear that it could be mocked, people were a lot more circumspect about doing crazy stuff.
Because they realized they would actually be mocked In public, in a big way, because I, in fact, mocked all of those weird practices, and I basically mocked them out of existence, because a lot of that stuff just doesn't even exist anymore.
All right. Now, I would say it would be fair to say that the entire industry of this management leadership stuff turned out to be a completely ridiculous BS. I kind of was a big factor, and I feel like I can say that, a big factor in destroying that illusion.
It was an illusion that I largely destroyed, almost single-handedly.
And there are other illusions similar to that.
There's another one that I've worked on for a long time.
I don't think I've quite destroyed it.
But the financial advice industry...
I've tried for years to get people to understand that none of that's real.
The whole financial advice industry is just a fraudulent industry.
But it's a multi-trillion dollar industry.
So if you don't actually dig into it a little bit, you don't really believe it's all fake.
You think, well, that's gotta be real.
I know so many people personally.
You might say to yourself, I know people who are in that industry.
They seem like nice people. It's my neighbor.
My neighbor does that.
It's a fraudulent industry.
The whole thing is. The whole advice part of it is ridiculous.
Do you know what the entire financial industry should be?
The whole industry.
All of the advice part of it, where somebody's a professional telling you what to do.
The whole industry. Do you know what it should be?
It could be an app.
Yeah. I tried to write a book on the financial industry years ago.
I tell this story sometimes.
And the reason I didn't write the book on how to invest, and this is not a joke, because the whole book would only be one page.
If you actually did it right and got rid of all the stuff that you don't need to know and it's BS, And it's only presented so somebody can figure a way to scam you out of money.
If you take away all the scams, the whole practice of finance is one page.
And that's not an exaggeration.
It's not even a little bit of an exaggeration.
One page, never two.
You don't need a half a page more.
One page, everything you need to know.
Now, that's why I didn't write a book, because you couldn't make it a book if you did it honestly.
And I didn't want to write another dishonest investment book because that's what all the rest are.
So you can't actually publish the book.
It's one page.
Now, am I being cocky and saying that I wrote a one-page investment book that was as good as a book?
Well, I can tell you that CBS Money reprinted it and it became hugely popular.
I can tell you it's still on the internet.
I think if you Google my name and something like 10 investment advices or something, it still pops up.
Burton Malkiel...
Yes, thank you.
In the comments, somebody is telling me that Burton Malkiel's book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which is one of the most famous investing books in the world, which largely did what I'm trying to do, and did it first, of course.
He's the Really the most famous first economist, Princeton guy, who said, you know, all of this investment advice isn't real.
All you should do is just put it in a well-diversified fund and just let it sit there and you will beat the experts every time.
And he demonstrated that that was true.
So he's considered one of the most important voices in all of economics.
Very famous economist.
He wanted to write the same thing that I wrote in my one page to update his famous book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street.
And he contacted me and said, I was going to write this, but you basically captured it all on one page.
Can I just put your one page in my book?
And I said, sure.
Now, I don't know what made it into the book.
I never followed up.
But I say that only for those of you who are watching this and saying, I'm not really buying that the cartoonist wrote some important economic piece.
If you don't know, I have a degree in economics.
I have an MBA. So I have a little background in that work.
Now, I saw a comment I wanted to comment on, but I won't.
This is all by way of telling you, That there are two fields that I have entered with no experience and dismantled.
I would say that I dismantled the management leadership BS industry with Dilbert.
I wasn't trying to. That just worked out.
I would say that I at least helped Bert and Malkiel dismantle the investment and vice industry that is largely an illusion and a bunch of...
It's just a fraud, basically.
So, you've also read my book, Win Bigly.
Many of you have.
And you know that I've successfully, if you like that book, you think it's successful, dismantled a lot of what we understand about facts and the news and our whole understanding of reality.
If you haven't read that book, you don't know what I'm talking about.
But the point I'm trying to make is that I have a track record of coming into a field that I don't have any background of or don't have much and dismantling it.
You know, basically showing you that it was a fraud.
I'm going to do that again.
And I'm going to tell you that everybody who criticizes me for that, because I'm going to do it for you in a moment on the other side of the whiteboard...
Everybody who criticizes me for it says the same thing.
They say, what kind of expert are you?
Why should we listen to you, cartoon boy?
And the point is, I apparently have developed, accidentally, a weird expertise of debunking fields that I don't know that well.
It wasn't anything I set out to do, but if you look at the track record, It's starting to look pretty clear that you can debunk fields that you have no experience in.
Let me give you an example of how you could do it.
I'm going to give you an example of how you personally could debunk a field that you don't know anything about.
Bigfoot is real.
Go. Right?
You don't have to be some kind of scientific expert, because you kind of know Bigfoot isn't real, right?
You don't have to be an expert in the field to recognize BS. If your neighbor tells you that they invented a fusion reactor for unlimited clean energy in their garage, and they're not even a scientist.
It's just something they worked out.
They just figured it out.
And now it's clean, unlimited energy, and they built it in their garage.
Well, you're not a physicist.
Could you debunk that?
Yeah. Yeah, you could debunk that.
Here's how you would debunk it.
No, you didn't. No, you did not build a fusion reactor in your garage.
And you're not even a scientist.
You don't have to be an expert in the field all the time.
Sure, there are plenty of things that you really would need to be an expert to debunk.
So in, let's say, a scientific field, if there was a scientific claim that you couldn't tell one way or the other just by observing it, yeah, you'd have to be an expert.
You'd have to be a really big expert to debunk that.
But you don't need to be an expert to debunk things that are clearly and plainly false.
The financial industry is that.
The management, leadership, training industry is largely that as well.
Those are things where you didn't need any expertise.
None at all. You could just look at it and say, uh, I don't feel as if I'd even need to read a book on this one.
This one's sort of right out there.
You know what I mean? Alright, let me give you another example.
I've been pestering the The psychology industry online, you know I've been, if you've been watching recently, you know I've been challenging those who say that narcissism is real.
And, of course, we're hearing narcissism all over the place, and there's this alleged epidemic of narcissism.
And people are thinking it's because, oh, it's because people take too many selfies and social media is turning us into narcissists, etc.
But, I'm going to take a different approach on that, as I have been on Twitter, too much criticism, etc.
Here's what I see with no expertise.
Are you ready? So how much expertise do I have in the field of psychiatry and psychology?
Zero. I mean, I've taken courses.
I've read about it all my life.
I am a trained hypnotist, which is maybe a little sliver of some of that field.
But do I claim any expertise in the field of psychology or psychiatry?
No. None.
But is that going to stop me from doing what I'm going to do next?
Nope. Because sometimes you don't need to be an expert to know that your neighbor who's an idiot did not really make a fusion reactor in his garage.
I don't need to have a PhD to do that, right?
That's how obvious some stuff is.
And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to break it down to you.
For some of you, this is going to break your brains.
For the rest of you, some of you are going to say, yeah, I knew that.
But some of you, your brain is just going to get broken right now.
And I apologize in advance for what I'm about to do to you.
So I've been reading up on just the last few days On various symptoms and mental health conditions.
Now, as you know, there are lots of mental health conditions that have names.
You can say, well, you've got this OCD or OCPD. You've got your depressions and your bipolars.
You've got your schizophrenics.
You might be on the spectrum.
Your anxieties.
You name it, right?
So you've got all these things that have names on them.
ADHD, whatever.
I'm not sure which of these are actually mental illness versus just a mental situation.
Right, now, each of these have a whole bunch of symptoms.
And they have constellations of symptoms.
So most of these things that have a name have a number of different symptoms.
So I wrote on the board some example symptoms.
This is by no means complete.
This is just a little sample.
And there's nothing special about the symptoms I chose.
These are just example symptoms and have lots of symptoms.
And here's what I observe with no understanding of psychology or psychiatry, no background whatsoever.
I'm just looking at it.
Here's what I see. I see the psychologists say, all right, all right, all these different things have a variety of different symptoms, but the ones we see a lot, let's say we're going to pick out these guys, this group here, just these symptoms, and maybe some others, right?
But I'm going to label this, and I'm going to give this little group a name.
And I'll use just a fake name.
I have to get this closer so I don't rip my microphone out.
We'll call this the Flerbs.
Flerbs. Just something I made up.
Alright, so if you come into my office and you say, I've got some anxiety and depression and fear of losing things, I'm going to say to you, looks like you've got a bad case of Flerb.
But then you say to me, but I also have obsessive thoughts, which wasn't really in my definition, and I say, yeah.
You know, comorbidities are very common.
It's very common. So we see this a lot.
People will have mostly a bad case of flurb, but it's very common that they'll also have a little bit from some of these other places.
And then somebody else will come and write a PhD thesis, and they'll say, you know...
If you have this group, and I'll borrow this one into the Flerb category, and we'll just say that this group is a bad case of, let's say, ploop. You've got a bad case of ploop, which is just something I made up.
Now you come into me in my office and you say, I got my obsessive thoughts.
I can't handle some criticism.
I feel really depressed about it.
I go, hmm, sounds to me like you've got a bad case of ploop.
And then the guy says, ah, but are you sure it's ploop?
Because the last guy said I got a bad case of flurb.
Do I have flurb or do I have ploop?
Doctor says, ah, I've been at this a long time, sonny.
I'm the expert, and it looks like you got a bad case of ploop.
And then I come back and say, you know, I left down a few symptoms.
I've also got some anxiety and fear of loss.
So now, do I have ploop with a few comorbidities, or do I have ploop plus flurb because I have all of these?
Oh, it's worse than that.
According to other people, I don't have empathy.
Now, if you've watched the news this week, literally this week, the scientific community has said, oops, it turns out this thing where we said that sociopaths don't have empathy.
We were wrong.
Even sociopaths have empathy.
We were just wrong.
They choose things that are bad for people anyway, but they have complete empathy.
I don't know if it's as complete, but they have empathy.
So it turns out that everything we knew about one of the main symptoms of a whole constellation of different mental illnesses probably wasn't ever true.
Probably everybody had empathy.
I don't know about the psychopaths, but sociopaths have empathy.
So now you throw this one on there.
Now I say to my psychologist, do I have ploop or flurb?
Because I've got all the symptoms of ploop and flurb, but I've also got this no empathy thing, and that's hanging out there, and my psychologist says, don't worry about it.
I know it doesn't seem to fit the exact definitions, but you definitely have ploop, you definitely got a bad case of flurb, And it's not unusual to have some comorbidities that would include maybe one or two other symptoms from some other thing.
Very common. Do you see where I'm going with this?
The entire field is just complete categorization BS. Now, ask yourself, why is it that anybody would need to put a name on any collection of symptoms When that collection is never stable.
It's never really only these things.
In fact, it's rarely just those things.
Most commonly, it's a grab bag of symptoms and nobody has any idea what to do about it.
So the reason that these get names is because people in the business want to collect up something and write a paper on it.
And then maybe have a major or a class about it.
The categorizations have everything to do with commerce.
It has nothing to do with people.
You don't have something called ploop or flurb.
You don't have a disease because somebody wrote a paper and said, I think if I throw these three in here, I can show some data that says that they often travel together.
Yeah, they often travel with other stuff too, but I can make a paper on that.
I can publish it.
I'll be famous as the one who developed the theory of ploop.
I'll be the ploop guy.
That's my PhD right there.
And I can sell this, and by the way, it gets better.
Would you take a pill for a collection of random symptoms?
Hey, I made a pill, and what's it to treat?
We don't have a name for it.
But if you take this pill, we think it might handle some of these things.
How good is the marketing?
Is that a good marketing approach?
I've got a pill.
It might do something for some of these things.
Compare that to this.
I've got a pill. It'll take care of your bipolar problem.
It's marketing. Half of this, it feels like, is just somebody who wanted to make a name for themselves and have a study.
Somebody wanted to make a pill that could treat a specific thing, not some general bunch of symptoms.
There's an industry that needed to refer to it.
There are scientists who need to be able to describe things.
I'm starting to believe that the entire categorization of what names we put on stuff It has nothing to do with the patient.
It seems to have to do a lot with commerce and how we like to think of things, how we like to package them.
And now, if this were useful, then I would have a different opinion.
In other words, if you went to the doctors and said, I've got ploop and only ploop, and they gave you the ploop pill, and they wanted to make sure they didn't accidentally give you the one for flurb, well, that would be pretty handy, right?
You'd say, I don't want to get the flurb pill when I've got a bad case of ploop.
But what happens in practice?
Is there a pill that only handles ploop?
Nope. There's a pill that they say, you know, this pill is pretty good for ploop, and we found we have good effects when we got flurbs, and even when we don't have a name for it, and you've got some three of these, same pill.
Same pill. How many of you are having your heads exploding right now?
Now, I'm not going to say that the...
The medications don't work.
I'm not going to say that psychiatry doesn't work or that psychology doesn't work.
I would say there's evidence that at least some part of it works.
I don't know what is real and what is not, but I'm not disparaging the entire field of psychology or the entire field of anything.
I'm just saying that I don't think you have to be an expert to look at this and say, This doesn't look exactly the way it's being presented to us.
All right? So, somebody says, same pill, different dosage.
Yeah? How many of you are seeing this and saying to yourself, holy cow, I think he's onto something?
And how many of you are saying, I don't think you're onto something.
You don't have any experience in this field and Why would you be making fun of it?
So I'll tell you the comments.
Some people are saying they're laughing because it's true.
Somebody says the side effect from taking the pill for flurb is that you get a bad case of ploop.
True. True.
I'm not seeing anybody disagree with me.
Some of you are actually saying it's old news and saying that it's obvious and it's old news.
I don't know how obvious it is.
All right. So...
Look at the comments from the other people if you were a little bit doubtful.
There seems to be a universal agreement that I have described something quite accurate here.
Okay? Well, actually, I'm actually kind of blown away about how many people are agreeing with me.
So I didn't think this would go over as well as it did.
I'm kind of surprised about that, honestly.
So here's what I would suggest.
I feel as though maybe there's a theory of our brains that is missing.
And I've had this conversation recently, and I want to see what you think about it.
I've heard it said that if you have some of these conditions, whatever name you want to put on it, Your brain, you have a certain brain with a certain structure, and therefore the only thing that's going to help is probably a drug, because you've got a physical problem.
When you say it's a mental problem, it's easy to imagine it's something about this amorphous, non-physical thing called your mind.
But Most people who have a little bit of understanding of the world understand that there's a physical problem with the brain because the physicality of the brain is what causes your thoughts, right?
It has to have a certain structure in chemistry to produce a certain set of thoughts.
So if you're thinking to yourself, well, there's nothing I can do behaviorally, there's nothing I can do with my environment or my lifestyle that's going to change it, because how do you change something that's in your brain?
And here's the most important thing that I think humanity needs to understand.
Your brain is programmable.
You can physically change the structure of your brain By the things that you do.
Now you have to know how to program.
If you just randomly go through your life, you will randomly program your brain.
Maybe that doesn't help you too much.
But you can rigorously decide how to program your brain, and when you do, it physically changes.
Physically. Everything that you learn becomes a physical change.
If you have a trauma, that's a physical change.
That's why it's so hard to get rid of PTSD, because it's physically in there.
It's not a memory, per se, like a concept.
It's a physical change.
That's why it's persistent.
So, what could you do to physically reprogram your brain?
Could you physically retrain your brain to help with some of this mental illness stuff?
Certainly not all of it.
I mean, there's got to be things that are just beyond our ability to You know, handle with any specific tool.
Maybe you need lots of tools.
But let me give you a model here of how to approach this.
I wasn't planning on doing this today, but I'm going to change some of your lives.
Just for fun. Because the news is boring.
So since the news is boring, I'm going to change some of your lives.
This will work, I would guess, something like 10 to 20% of you will never be the same after this.
That's true. Most of you will just say, oh, this was entertaining, or it wasn't.
But about 10 to 20% of you will never be the same after the next five minutes.
Because I've seen this happen, so I'm not really guessing.
I know this will be the case.
And all I'm going to do is reframe something.
I'm going to tell you things you already know are true.
I'm just going to organize it differently so that you can see them differently, even though you know all the parts.
That's called reframing.
Very powerful if you do it right.
It goes like this.
This is you. And even though I'm a world-famous cartoonist, sometimes stick figures are the way to go.
So that's you. And you want to reprogram this thing into your brain.
It's in your head. It's your brain.
There's your brain. And you want to reprogram it because it's not making you happy.
It's giving you some problems.
How do you do it? Here's how most people do it.
I'll try to arrange my thoughts.
Not so easy, is it?
You can't really just think your way to a different brain.
If you could, we'd all be doing it.
Now, there are some ways you can actually think your way to a different brain.
So in some ways you can.
For example, if you forced yourself to focus on something positive or to learn something, those things would be maybe mental processes.
Not so much the learning, but the focusing on something would be kind of a mental process.
So in some small way, yes, you can reprogram your brain just by thinking.
But mostly, you have to do it this way.
You've got to do something in the outside world.
This is a very bad picture of a globe...
Of the world. Globe of the world.
There's South America there.
A little bit of Europe. Let's give us a little Hawaii there.
So if you want to do something to reprogram your brain, here is the reframing that will change the lives of 10 to 20% of you right now.
You have to change something in the world to reprogram that little wet thing inside your skull.
That's how it's done.
Did that seem like a big deal?
For 80-90% of you, you just said...
10-20% of you just said...
What? What?
It's the first time you're thinking of it this way.
Let me give you an example.
You feel bad.
Get out of the house, get in your car, go someplace that changes your mood.
That is a change in the world.
That happened outside of you.
There was a car, change of scenery, change how you feel.
Let's say you go do a thing over and over again.
Going and doing a thing is a change in the world.
You've got to change the world to change your brain.
So the way to think of your brain and reprogramming it is that there's an interface for your brain The actual mound of cells and chemistry in your skull.
There is an external interface, like a chessboard.
And if you go to the external interface outside your head and move the chess pieces just right, it reprograms your head permanently.
So look for those ways that you can reprogram your external life.
For example, let's say you've got a fear of a thing, whatever it is.
Speaking in public, you don't like to be touched.
You don't like a certain kind of stimulation.
Now, in some cases, you probably can't get past that.
But here's what I would at least try.
Graduated exposure. Have you ever heard that?
There are a number of cases where graduated exposure works.
And basically, if there's a thing you can't do, you kind of creep up on it by doing it a little bit until you can get used to it.
So let's say it's impossible for you to be in a crowded place or, let's say, a social place.
You just don't want to be in a cocktail party.
The way to deal with that is to manipulate the external world.
So you put yourself in a situation where you can practice small and then pull back as soon as it's uncomfortable.
So you do two minutes of talking to three people and then you pull back.
And the next time you do five minutes of talking to three people and then you pull back.
Until talking to those three people for five minutes is easy.
And then you do it for ten minutes.
So that's graduated exposure.
Now, I'm not saying that that works for any one of the symptoms.
I'm saying that if it does make sense for you, that's something you can manipulate in the external world.
So the big aha for those of you who have any kind of mental problem you're working for is that almost certainly...
There's a way to at least make it better.
I'm not going to say any of this will cure any particular mental problems.
That would be way too big a claim.
I'm saying that you could probably chip away at a lot of this stuff by manipulating the outside world.
Here's the way to think of this.
Have you ever had a bad mental problem at the same time you had good sex?
Chances are, not so much, right?
If you're lucky enough that you've had good sex in your life, you know the experience of feeling great and having no mental problems at that moment, but just at that moment.
And so if it's true that what you're doing, having your great sex, changes your chemistry, at least temporarily, you already know the experience of using the external world, in this case, another human being, To change your mind.
So the moment you realize that changing how you feel is always a function of changing something external, you have a way to fix almost everything.
Now, if you have serious mental problems, they're going to be beyond any kind of lifestyle change.
So I don't want to oversell it.
I'm just saying that there's a whole constellation of, let's say, things that act like a There are new problems in 2020.
Doesn't seem like everybody's depressed in 2020, right?
Have you noticed that basically everybody has anxiety in 2020?
Everybody's got a self-esteem problem.
You know, the whole list of mental problems.
Even people who would have called themselves not mentally ill 10 years ago are kind of looking at themselves now and saying, I might be a little mentally ill.
I got some problems.
Every single time, the solution is the same.
Never, never will the solution be in your head.
The solution is somewhere out there.
Gratitude is one of the ways to reprogram your brain.
If you're in a negative space, try gratitude.
Simply finding a person in the real world, give them a call, send them a text, and say how much you appreciate them.
I do this around Christmas pretty much reflexively now, because I like it.
I'll just pick somebody at random, not random, it's somebody I've actually thought a good thought about, contact them out of the blue, and say, you know, all this time I've been very grateful for About something you taught me or grateful about the time we spent or something you did for me.
Just out of the blue. Do you think that that doesn't reprogram your brain?
It does. It does it pretty quickly.
Gratitude is one of those things that's built into us as some kind of a I don't know.
It's part of our software, I guess.
And if you activate it, it has a predictable effect on the nature of your brain.
So let it fly.
Just let it fly. I saw a tweet by Roly Poly, Twitter user Roly Poly.
And I think his exact tweet was that compliments are a way of distributing happiness.
I think I got it close.
I'm trying to quote it exactly.
Compliments are a way of distributing happiness.
And that's exactly the way I think of them.
But it's two-way.
It's a two-way happiness.
When you give somebody a compliment they weren't expecting, I'm not talking about the ones that are sort of expected.
Your spouse comes out dressed for the evening in sort of a compliment situation.
Oh, you look great. I'm not talking about those.
Those are good. You should do those.
But I'm talking about the one that just comes out of nowhere.
You were not expecting a compliment today, and you just got one.
Have you ever had that experience?
You open your email and there's nothing but a compliment?
Somebody actually sent you an email and wasn't asking for anything.
It was just a compliment.
Has that ever happened to you?
If it has, you'll remember it.
It would feel like it's a small thing, but it almost doesn't matter who sent it or even what they said.
If somebody sends you an unsolicited compliment, It'll go through you like lightning as an adult.
As a kid, maybe less so, because you get compliments as kids.
As adults, it's rare to get a compliment.
I get them because I'm in the public, but for most of you, you could go weeks without a freaking compliment.
And it's like life blood.
So my point is, if you want to feel happy for yourself, give somebody else a compliment.
If you don't think that works, You'll be surprised.
Just keep in mind that whenever you're in those few situations that you know you can be happy, you just had great sex, you won the lottery, you're out in nature, you took a great trip, if you can be happy in those situations, it means that the outside world is available to you as an interface to program your brain.
That is all I want to tell you.
Now, some of you, I've...
I do listen to all of your criticisms of my live stream, by the way.
And I find them helpful.
Here's another reframing for you.
How do you like being criticized?
You hate it, don't you?
Don't you hate getting criticized?
Everybody hates it.
It's not something you can enjoy.
Here's a reframe for you.
Every criticism you receive...
Just play this sound effect when you get it.
Ready? Cha-ching!
Yeah. Every time somebody criticizes you, you just made money.
Do you know why I say that?
Because you just made money.
It's true. If somebody criticizes my live stream, and I'll tell you the biggest criticism I'm hearing, it's not the biggest one, but it's the one I hear the most, is that my shelves are boring.
Right? How many of you have told me since I did this that my shelves are boring?
A lot of you, right?
Now, do I feel good that you're telling me that there's something about my thing that I do every day isn't good?
No. Nobody likes to be criticized.
It's not like you can enjoy it.
But how do I receive it?
Do I receive it as, oh, I guess I suck.
I could, right?
How easily could I receive a criticism like that as, God, I'm an idiot.
I'm an idiot. Why didn't I see it?
Obviously those shells need something on them.
I'm an idiot. That'd be really easy, wouldn't it?
I don't. Here's how I hear it.
Cha-ching! That's the sound of a cash register, me making money.
Cha-ching! Cha-ching!
Because when you criticize me for my background, I know exactly what to change...
To do a better job.
Because you told me.
That's like money. If somebody hands you a thing that will definitely make you money, what is your feeling about it?
Do you feel, oh, I hate it when people give me a thing that makes me make money?
I'll bet most of you think exactly that.
You think, I hate the criticism.
Not me. Years ago, and this happened about the time I was doing the Dilbert comic, when people would criticize my comic, I would hate it, of course, but then I would say, oh, a lot of people are saying the same thing, so I'll change it.
And then I would make that change, and that made me rich.
I literally got rich by being criticized and understanding the criticism as cha-ching, cha-ching, Every time I hear one, I say, wait a minute, you just told me how to get richer.
And the same applies if you're not trying to get rich.
I know you're not all ambitious in the same precise way.
But suppose you just wanted a better social life.
I'll tell you the best advice somebody gave me was the cruelest thing anybody ever said to me.
Years ago, I had a female friend many years ago, and we would chat often.
And one day, my female friend told me how negative I was and what a bummer it was to sort of listen to me because I was sort of complaining about stuff all the time.
Now, I was not aware that I was a big complainer.
So this is maybe, I don't know, 25 years ago or something.
I thought I was not a big complainer.
I had no idea. I thought I was a person who talked about my day and talked about the funny parts of it and anything that caught my interest became, you know, a story.
So in my mind, I had no idea.
No idea that I was having an effect on other people with my negativity, because I thought I was just telling about my day.
Once I learned that, do you know how powerful that was?
I was able, because it was something I could change, I would just become aware of the ratio of negative things I said to positive.
And then I borrowed a technique from my tennis player friend John.
John probably had one of the most successful social personalities I've ever seen in my life.
And you see people like that and you say to yourself, why is that person so well-liked by basically everybody, and why am I not?
And I thought, maybe it's technique.
Maybe it's not just that he has a natural personality that people like, which he did, but he also had technique.
And he actually taught me his technique.
One day when we were just talking after tennis.
And the technique was this.
That if he has anything negative that he wants to express, he either changes it into the most positive way he can say it, or he pairs it with a positive thought.
So that he never goes out of balance with more negative than positive.
No negative thought comes out without being paired.
And I thought, well that's like an easy formula.
I can do that.
And again, this is a change in the outside world.
Because things you say are the outside world, right?
It's no longer just in your head.
You're affecting other people, and then those other people are affecting you.
How do you think John's life was when the way he affected other people is making them feel positive?
Right? Don't you think that made his mental health a lot better?
Because everywhere he went, He would be influencing people to become positive, just by his own positivity.
That positivity would come back to him, and he'd think, I love spending time with those people.
They were so positive.
But they weren't.
They were only positive because John made them positive.
He paced them.
In other words, he paced the wrong word.
Basically, his energy led their energy, and they matched his I watched it happen a million times.
Wherever he was, he would turn people into more positive people just by his example.
So since it was so easy to copy, literally you just say, oh, I'm saying something negative, so I'll just add a balancer.
It's easy to do.
And so I started doing that.
So the point is, the most brutal thing Criticism I've ever had, like something that really stuck in my head and really hurt.
I mean, it stung.
Cha-ching! It was probably the most important change I've ever made to my social toolbox.
I would say that that one change really, really changed my life in terms of whether people want to spend a minute with me in person.
And that's the reframe.
So the next time you get criticized, whether personally or whether professionally, say to yourself, cha-ching!
Just try it.
Like, actually say that little sound.
Cha-ching! Not figuratively.
I'm not talking figuratively.
I mean actually saying that cha-ching when you hear it.
And you'll be amazed. That will just be like a trigger.
In hypnosis, there's a technique called a trigger or a key.
You just pair a thought with some kind of stimulus or other word or whatever.
You just pair something together and then they become forever paired in your memory.
So there you go.
I wasn't planning on doing this, but for 10 to 20% of you, you just had it paid forward.
So I would say that what my friend John did for me, without even trying, I mean he wasn't trying to fix me, he was just being himself in a way that was actually very effective, the way he was being himself.
And I learned from that, and I just paid it forward.
So 10 to 20% of you, your life's just substantially changed.
It really did. Most of you, maybe you learned something, and that would be good too.
And there might be some of you for whom you know somebody who needs this.
And so your benefit is that you fix a spouse by exposing them to it, etc.
So you can actually fix your own situation by fixing other people.
I'll tell you, I was in a conversation just this week with somebody who told me that someone in their social circle had mentioned their weight.
Imagine that.
Imagine somebody in your social circle mentioning your weight.
Ouch, right?
It's pretty bad.
Especially if you were already worried that you had a few extra pounds, so you already had some self-esteem issues, and then somebody actually says it out loud.
Ouch, right?
What do you think happened?
The person in this story went out, completely changed her diet program, probably changed her exercise and took it up a little bit, I'm not sure about that, Dropped a bunch of pounds and went from being a little less self-confident because, frankly, did have more pounds than she wanted.
I don't think I noticed, but in her own mind, she wasn't where she wanted to be.
I don't think you would have noticed necessarily, but we have higher standards for ourselves.
And took her game up a lot.
A lot. And probably permanently.
So this was somebody who took this just horrible thing and turned it immediately into the most positive thing ever.
Because unfortunately, we are a world in which your looks and your health make a lot of difference.
You would love it if that were not the case, but it is the case.
In the real world, those things matter to how people treat you.
So this one person took this criticism that was biting and terrible and probably will be scarred for life, because it was pretty bad, and turned it into the kind of positive that's just life-changing.
I mean, I actually watched somebody turn bad news into good news in a way that was frankly just awe-inspiring.
And I felt very glad to know this person and very proud.
All right. So that is what I wanted to tell you for today.
And maybe tomorrow there'll be a little bit of news that isn't terrible.
Somebody says, how can I fix my balding problem?
I actually have an answer to that.
You know, I know that you're joking.
So somebody asked, what can I do about going bald?
I literally have an answer for that.
And I'll tell you the story.
Maybe you've heard it before. So years ago, you can tell that I've follically challenged myself and started losing my hair very young.
So it's always been an issue because it happened, you know, especially because it happened earlier than it happens for most people.
So I was once getting a suit tailored.
And I happened to be in the suit buying place and the The gentleman who was helping me, he was doing the measuring and helping me with my suit, and I was trying it on.
We were just chatting. And I don't remember why, but I think he said I look good in the suit or something, you know, as a salesman would.
And I said something self-deprecating, joking around.
I said something, yeah, but, you know, it's too bad I'm short and bald or something.
And And he gave me the best life advice I think I've just about ever had.
And at the time, I was the trained hypnotist, and he was the guy working in the suit shop, and he gave me the best hypnosis trick to make my loss of hair not matter that I've ever seen.
And it was this.
Make sure that you go to the gym, you know, build up your physicality to the point where people don't notice you're bald.
Now, what's your first reaction to that?
Do you think you could build up your physicality, you know, your muscles and get your body in good shape to the point where people don't notice you're bald?
Do you think that's a thing?
Well, let me tell you. He gave me that advice, and after he gave me the advice, I had already noticed that he was really strapped himself.
He was a really fit guy, and you could tell even he was wearing a suit, but even in his suit, you could tell this guy was ripped.
And after he told me this, do you know what I noticed?
He's bald. Didn't even notice.
I had worked with this guy up close.
He was literally measuring my suit.
And until he told me he was bald, I didn't even know it.
And it wasn't that my brain didn't see it.
It's that he had shifted my attention From the top of his head, where there wasn't much going on, to the rest of his body, and his body was magnificent, if I may say so, of another man.
His body was magnificent, even in a suit.
He was so well-developed that you could tell his chest and his arms were really well done.
And I said to myself, that actually worked.
That actually worked.
And so it wasn't long after that that I started, you know, just buzz-cutting what I had left, and went to the gym.
Dan Bongino, thank you very much.
Dan Bongino, there's an example.
I assume he's, is he losing his hair, or is he just cutting short?
I don't even know. But you look at Dan Bongino, and is the first thing you say to yourself, there's a bald guy?
No. No.
I don't even know if he's actually losing his hair or he just cuts it short.
But either way, you're not going to look at Dan Bongino and say, there's a bald guy.
That's the last thing you think.
You're going to think, damn, what is he doing with his exercise?
Joe Rogan, another example.
Do you look at Joe Rogan and say to yourself, there's a bald guy?
Nope. You look at him and say, what the hell is he doing with his fitness?
I want to do some of that.
Michael Jordan, bald guy?
Nope. So, to the answer to your question, yes, you can actually make your baldness go away.
Three examples right there.
Made their baldness go away.
And I think that this technique is one you can generalize to a lot of stuff.
You don't need to fix all of your flaws if you can make people look somewhere else.
Right? Two ways to fix a flaw.
One is to actually fix it, and one is to make people not care.
Which is just as good. If nobody cares, stop being a flaw.
So, I don't think you expected me to have an answer for that, but there it is.
And that is your live stream for today.
And I've got a few more minutes here on Periscope.
A little extra. Oh, somebody says it's the best Periscope ever.
Well, I don't know about that, but I always try to make them the best ever each time.
I actually literally tried to do that.
Is there a reason you don't drink alcohol?
Yeah, alcohol is poison.
Now, I say alcohol is poison in an answer to that question because that's a technique.
I tell myself alcohol is poison because if you tell yourself it's entertainment, you're going to want some.
So how you label things will over time, not right away, but over time when you label things consistently, it will reprogram your brain.
It's the same technique I use for not overeating.
Because if you tell yourself that cake and dessert are food, you're going to eat them.
Because what do you do with food?
You eat it. So I don't define stuff like sweets and cakes and desserts and stuff.
In junk food, I don't define that as food.
I define that as entertainment that has, unfortunately, a cost.
So when I want to eat, I eat things I call food.
You know, your broccolis, your clean proteins, etc.
And when I want to entertain myself, I say, well, one way to do it would be to eat this crap, and another way to do it would be to do something that I like just as much that doesn't hurt me.
And then it's easy to say, well, if it's just entertainment, I'll do one that doesn't make me fat.
So the label that you consistently put on things will actually program your brain over time.
You just have to be consistent about it.
So the reason I say it's poison is that it's lots of fun.
I have just as much fun being drunk as other people, but I also have a reaction to alcohol that I don't like.
And I don't like how I wake up the next day.
I don't like the lasting effect over the weekend.
If my alternative is to smoke some weed, where I feel great when it happens, and then I wake up in the morning and I'm better rested...
If you do weed, you wake up in the morning feeling better than if you had not smoked weed.
Like, a lot better.
It's not even close.
And if you drink alcohol, you have, you know, a good hour of fun followed by not so much fun the next day.
So, to me, it's not a good cost-benefit trade-off.
I do expect that someday, between now and the time, the rest of my life, I will drink again.
You know, there will be a time when I have a drink, for whatever reason.
But I like to think of it as poison and not entertainment.
