Episode 1716 Scott Adams: Elon Musk's Plan B for Twitter, How To Avoid Anxiety
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Anxiety and insomnia
Elon Musk's Plan B for Twitter
CA 32 hour work week legislation
FL math books with CRT?
Learning what you need
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
I woke up this morning, like I do every morning, whether it's a holiday or a weekend, whether I'm healthy or sick, happy or unhappy, because I like to be here for you, because I like it.
If I didn't like it, I probably wouldn't do it as much, right?
So, I like being here, and that is the first benefit you get this morning.
Don't you prefer being with people who want to be there?
If you think about it, if there's one requirement you ask of people to be around you, just one thing, just enjoy being there.
That's it. It's not really hard.
Just show me you enjoy being in the room with me and I am so happy to be around you.
That's all it takes. Now that is a little tip for the day.
You say to yourself, how can I make the world a better place?
Just show me you're happy to be in the room.
That's all. Now, how would you like to take that advice, multiply it by 100, before we're done here today?
That's what's going to happen. And it's all going to start around the time of the simultaneous sip.
That will be the launch pad, really the beginning of something so special, so amazing, that you might even forget it's Easter for a minute.
Oh, then you can return to your religious beliefs.
But for a moment, for a moment, you're going to have a profound spiritual experience right after the simultaneous sip.
And all you need for that would be a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, except for a cave with a big rock in front of it, which I understand is not so good for containing its contents, if you know what I mean. Happy Easter!
Bra, bra, bra! Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
It's the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit.
Go. Yes.
Jesus is not the only person who has risen.
I believe that my spirit has risen, too.
Feeling quite good. How about you?
Anybody feeling better than you did 10 seconds ago?
A little bit, right?
You started feeling whatever you were feeling, wherever your baseline was, and then a simultaneous sip happened.
Probably, I don't know, Somewhere between 5% and 37% improvement just that quickly.
So you're somewhere in that range.
Here's something that I've been hearing a lot.
How many times have you heard a conversation that goes roughly like this?
I have a lot of anxiety.
Not yourself.
Somebody else is talking.
I have a lot of anxiety.
Anybody heard that lately?
Is there anybody in your life who has told you that they're having anxiety?
Well, it seems to be some kind of giant epidemic that's coming across the country.
Now, do people with anxiety sleep well?
They do not.
They do not. And the reason that they don't sleep well is because...
Why is it that people with anxiety don't sleep well?
Well, it's the anxiety, right?
The anxiety causes them not to sleep well.
Now, what would be something that might cause you to have anxiety?
Well, I'll tell you one thing that really can limit your ability to function well.
It's not getting enough sleep.
So there are people who complain that their anxiety is preventing them from sleeping, but also their sleeping is preventing them from getting over their anxiety because they're so not well rested that they're anxious.
And you put those two things together and they just keep getting worse and worse until you're depressed.
Now, what do people who are anxious and can't get to sleep do when they're not getting to sleep?
It's 2022, and it's 11 p.m., and you're thinking, wouldn't it be great if I were asleep about now?
But you can't sleep, so what do you do?
Probably take out your phone, start looking at some viral videos, maybe check some text messages, right?
And so if you've figured it all out now, the anxiety causes lack of sleep.
The lack of sleep causes you to use the smartphone.
The smartphone causes you to become anxious, which causes you to lose sleep, which makes your anxiety worse.
There's really only one thing you can do if you have bad anxiety.
You need to distract yourself with the phone.
So one way to cure your anxiety is to distract yourself by using your smartphone, which gives you anxiety and keeps you from sleeping.
Have I made my point?
I'm going to tell you a story that sounds unrelated, and then I'm going to bash them together.
I'm going to marry them right in front of you, and they're going to have a baby idea.
Seems like a completely unrelated story.
Here it goes. I've been eating especially clean lately, meaning far fewer additives, more natural, and feeling really good.
So the clean diet is definitely, every day I just feel a little better, just physically, I can tell.
But one day, I guess my cockiness at how well things were going with my diet caused me to eat an entire bag of chips because I don't know if anybody ever told you this, but chips?
The ones with the little ruffles in them?
It doesn't have to be the ruffles brand, but the ridges?
They're really good.
Has anybody told you that?
I mean, they're really good.
And I have pretty good willpower.
I pride myself on being able to have some discipline in a variety of areas, but nobody's perfect.
And with all of my powers, have I mentioned how good potato chips are with the Little Ridges?
Oh, my God! They're so good that they do the commercial where you can't have just one, right?
But that applies to the other brands as well.
You can't really eat one chip.
Do you know how many times I've literally tried to do that?
I've actually tested it.
I'll walk over, I'll take out the one chip, and I'll eat it, and I'll say, oh, it's like exploding with pleasure in my mouth.
I'm so happy.
I'll never need another chip as long as I, well, one more chip isn't going to kill me.
Two chips. There's really a difference between two chips and one.
Am I right? Not really.
Not really. If I said somebody ate two potato chips, would you say, oh, that's so different than the person who ate one potato chip?
No difference. And is there really a difference between three potato chips and two?
I don't think so. And what if you get up to a larger number, like 50 potato chips?
If you've eaten 50 potato chips in a row, is it the 51st potato chip that's going to make the difference?
No. No.
But it'll be delicious. So there is actually no reason to stop eating potato chips until there are none left.
That's logic. So I was following that logical path that day, from first chip to bottom of the bag, and this was after eating really cleanly for a few weeks.
Guess how I felt?
Not only immediately when I was done, but the next day.
The entire next day.
It just completely threw me off my healthy path.
Probably had mental impact.
Probably had energy impact.
I actually looked different in the mirror with my shirt off.
I took my shirt off, I'm like, I thought I'd been making some gains lately, but not really.
One day later...
The chips have had their time to work through the system and the salt, I guess.
I look the same, so it lasted one day.
But the amount of impact that one deviation had was just so noticeable, but only because my palate had been cleaned by a good diet.
Now, suppose my diet had always been sketchy.
Sometimes it was good, sometimes it wasn't.
During the day I might have a healthy thing, but eat something less healthy at night.
I never would have noticed that the potato chips kicked me in the ass.
Because everything else would be kicking me in the ass also, so I would just get lost in the noise.
So it's quite an experiment to eat clean for two weeks, because most of you could pull that off, right?
I mean, it's really hard to eat clean forever.
You know, I've tried.
It's really hard. But you could do it for two weeks.
Almost everybody could. And just see what happens.
You will be amazed how hard it is to have something unhealthy in your body after two weeks of not.
Just immediately, you're like, oh, what the hell?
Why did I do that? Even things like simple carbs that you thought were harmless.
It's like, ah, some french fries.
If you're eating clean, those french fries will really have an impact on you and not in a good way.
Although they'll be delicious.
They might be twice as delicious if you haven't had them in a while.
All right. So here's my big putting it all together there.
So the people who have anxiety have not figured out that the things they do influence the way they feel.
And how consistent that is, if you look at your life, the people who can't figure stuff out, like they've got a problem and they can't solve it, they have somehow missed the central lesson in life, that the things you put into your body have an influence on how you feel.
And as dumb as it is to even say that, because when I say it, every one of you say, well, obviously, obviously the fuel you put into your body makes a difference.
But people don't realize how much.
I think everybody understands the things you do to yourself have an impact, but they don't know how much.
It's the how much that matters.
And that's what the potato chips story was about.
If I had not taken out the other distractions so I could see what just the potato chips did, I would have no idea, no idea how damaging that was to me.
I just thought I would have felt bad all day for a variety of reasons that I would never be able to understand.
So when you meet somebody who's successful, here's a little hypnosis for you.
I'm going to hypnotize you right now by telling you something that you're going to remember that will then be reinforced in the future.
All right? So it only works if you're willing to let it work.
But every time you encounter somebody who's successful in any realm...
The question you gotta ask yourself is, does this person believe that the things they put into their body have an influence on their performance?
And watch what happens. Now, it won't be 100%, you know, not every person, but you're going to see something like 80 to 90% of the successful people are very strongly, keenly aware in a way that informs all of their actions that the things they're doing to their body influence their happiness, their anxiety, their health, their fitness, their capability, their energy, everything.
Everything. How many of you have at least once since you've been watching me, and I mention it all the time because I've got a big birthday coming up, so I'll be 65 in a month or so.
How many of you have wondered how I can get as much done as I get done and stay, let's say at least mentally, a little bit young?
Do you ever wonder? And...
The reason is that I'm really, really careful about what I put in my body and what I put it through.
Now, I don't get enough sleep, so that's something I'm working on, but that has more to do with just current events.
It has nothing to do with...
So I don't have a problem sleeping.
I have a problem finding enough time to sleep.
Which is a whole separate problem.
So I'm completely aware of my need to sleep more.
And probably I'll take a long nap as soon as we're done here.
But the people who make it a lifestyle to understand that everything they're putting in their body is making a difference that they can notice.
It's the difference you can notice That's the part that makes the successful people stand out.
Because they just know that you're an instrument.
Sort of like a race car.
Imagine the best race car driver in the world, but the car is poorly maintained.
You could never win anything.
But if you had the best maintained car, probably you don't have to be the best driver in the world to win the race, if you have the best car, best maintained.
So... There you go.
Can Elon Musk win in his goal to buy Twitter?
Well, he's mentioned a plan B and we know that the board has a poison pill and maybe the government will try to stop him and maybe there'll be various pressures put on him in various different ways to make him back off.
But if you know anything about Elon Musk's past business adventures, there's not a lot of quitting in him, is there?
Do you remember the time that Elon Musk quit?
He tried to do something, and then it was hard, and so he quit.
Well, I don't. I don't know.
I feel like... Regular people give up once in a while, but it feels like nothing makes them quit.
Certainly not being near bankruptcy, certainly not having to work 20 hours a day, certainly not...
You can imagine the pressure that was on him when he was near bankruptcy after being rich.
But it doesn't seem to stop him.
So can we imagine that Elon Musk would simply be dissuaded because it's difficult?
I don't think so. Does anybody believe that he'll stop whatever he's trying to do?
Because it was difficult.
I don't think so, right?
So you're not going to scare him away.
So let's assume that whatever happens isn't him saying, you know, I took a run at it, but I got other things to do.
Probably not. I feel like he's already, you know, got his teeth into it, and it's pit bull time.
Like, he's not going to let go.
Whatever happens, it's not going to be because he let his jaw loose of the target.
So here are some things that I've learned in the last day because I don't know really anything about this area of mergers and acquisitions.
So smart people say that if you sue the board of directors for rejecting the offer, you're not going to get away with that.
And here's why. Because the board of directors is only responsible for picking management.
They're not responsible for the decision.
And I thought to myself, damn it, that sounds like that's probably right.
So if management makes a decision, I suppose you could say the board should have replaced them or something, but they'd have to have a strong reason, and I don't think we've seen that.
And here's the real killer.
You can't even assume anybody's doing anything wrong at Twitter, the board or the managers or anybody, unless...
They have no argument for rejecting the offer.
All they really need is a good argument.
And the board of directors is not responsible for knowing who has the better one, really.
They're responsible for picking management, but they're not really responsible for double-checking management's decisions on everything.
It's more of a longer term.
Is this manager capable?
That sort of thing. So...
It seems unlikely that management of Twitter could not make an argument that Twitter would go up on its own with or without Elon Musk to the amount that he's willing to pay.
Do you think that they would have any trouble making that argument?
Because it's an argument that's made all the time.
Oh, yeah, we're putting into place our advertising strategy.
It hasn't been fully rolled down.
But wait, when that's rolled down, look at our internal documents.
Our internal documents have been saying for a long time that as soon as our new ad platform rolls out, I don't know if they have a new ad platform.
I'm just making up the part about the ad platform.
But they're going to say something.
Then you say, oh, this management plan we've rolled out, you can see that even on paper we say we're going to double our stock price in five years.
Why would you take a 20% instant gain when you could have, you know, double it in five years?
It's better. So, it should be fairly easy for management to make the case that you're better off just sticking with the stock the way it is.
But, suppose...
Elon Musk decided to just make it really hard on the board of directors.
Could he just make everybody's job hard enough by bringing everybody into discovery, bringing them all into the process?
Because probably he wouldn't have to do too much explaining.
And if he did, his lawyers would do it.
But you wouldn't want to be running a company and having to fight off the biggest lawsuit of the world from somebody who's not used to losing.
So it could be that he just makes it so unpleasant to be a board member or a manager at Twitter that they just say, you know, we've just got to do something besides fighting in court against the richest guy around, so let's just give him what he wants.
So maybe he could wear him down.
I doubt it. That doesn't seem likely to me.
I don't think he can sort of pressure them that direct way.
But... What if the only thing he asks is for the board and management to allow the stockholders to directly vote on whether the offer should be accepted?
So there's a word for that, but we don't need the technicalities.
So it's a thing. You can do that.
The board and the company can put the vote out to the people, and the people can vote, and if everybody says that's what it's going to be, then that's what it is.
Whatever the vote is, that's what happens.
Now, let me ask you this.
Do you think that Elon Musk could successfully sue if they don't put it out for a vote?
Ah, now that's a different standard, isn't it?
Because it's one thing to say, oh, we definitely know that Elon Musk's offer makes more money than continuing the way we are.
Nobody really knows that.
So the benefit of the doubt, I think, is always going to be with management.
Because it should be, probably.
But what if he says, all I'm asking is that you let the shareholders decide what's good for themselves?
How in the world...
Do you argue against that?
Because it's not that big of a distraction compared to all the lawsuits.
The lawsuits would be a big distraction.
But if they just put it out to a vote, that's somewhat routine.
I assume you hire somebody who manages that for you.
So it's pretty straightforward.
Twitter could just, you know, queue up that process, pay some entity to do it.
Pretty simple. I think that's much harder.
Now, again, remember, I don't know this field of law or economics at all.
So I'm just sort of using the best guess and thinking it through, seeing if we can second guess what's going to come.
It seems to me that Elon Musk will be successful in forcing it to the shareholders as a vote.
What do you think? Do you think he will be successful in forcing the vote...
I think he might be the most influential person in the world right now.
Yeah. Yeah, I think he can.
Remember, he doesn't have that problem of either being on the left or on the right.
He's so ambiguous.
Because he's all in on electric cars and climate change and solar power.
But he doesn't tolerate fools, which makes the right think that he's on their side.
Yeah. He's just not into nonsense unless it's funny.
The only nonsense that Elon Musk appears to tolerate is stuff that makes you laugh.
And how do you hate that? Which is part of why you're so influential, because you can't look away.
He's got the Trump technique of being so interesting in a funny way, an entertaining way, that you can't look away.
And the people you pay attention to are the most influential.
You don't pay attention to them because they're influential.
They're influential because you paid attention to them.
It shouldn't be that way, but that's how your brain is wired.
Whatever you think about the most is the most important to you.
By the way, I've said that before, and every once in a while somebody will say, my God, you just simplified everything.
That's it. Whatever you pay the most attention to, for whatever reason, Could be you have OCD. Could be somebody who's forcing you to look at it, such as the fake news.
But for whatever reason you got there, it doesn't matter how you got to paying attention to it.
Once you pay attention to it, suddenly it's a big, important thing in your brain, even if it isn't.
Even if it isn't. All right.
So, Elon Musk has talked about a plan B. Do you think the plan B... Is getting the shareholders to vote, or is he talking about a Plan B if it doesn't even get to that?
Because maybe even that could be blocked.
What would be... Let's just think logically.
Elon Musk's stated purpose for wanting to buy Twitter Is that it's the lever to free speech in a practical sense, not a legal sense.
But in a practical sense, it's the strongest lever for free speech and it's not working right.
He wants to fix it.
So his goal is gigantic, because fixing free speech, as he said directly and often, if you don't have free speech, democracy itself and capitalism and everything that we hold to be useful just doesn't work.
So he's trying to fix the most important part that sort of lubricates everything.
Do you think he's just going to say, oh, I took a run at it.
I guess free speech is gone.
Sorry about that.
Here's what's interesting.
If you were a normal person and you tried to take over Twitter and it didn't work, you'd probably just get interested in something else, right?
You'd just go somewhere else, because it didn't work.
Isn't that what normal people do?
But if your overarching goal is not to own Twitter, I don't think Elon Musk cares anything about owning Twitter.
I think he wants to fix the free speech thing.
To me, it looks genuine.
I mean, you could be wrong, right?
You can't really read minds.
But on the surface, and really even under the surface, it looks like he really actually wants to fix free speech.
So if he can't do it by buying Twitter, what is plan B? What is plan B if he can't fix free speech because of Twitter?
Let me tell you what it's not.
Starting a competing network.
It's not that. No.
It's destroying Twitter.
Which he could do.
He could destroy Twitter.
Do you know what he'd have to do?
He'd just ask all the conservatives to stop using it.
That's it. It'd be gone tomorrow.
Because the reason Twitter works is it has both sides.
Twitter works because it grew up in a day before the two sides were so polarized that it seemed impossible to be on the same network.
Now, if you started any network today, it would either be the conservative one or the liberal one.
So all Elon Musk would have to do is say, all right, Twitter, if I can't buy you, you need to go away because you're hurting freedom of speech.
And the way you're going to go away is I'm just going to ask conservatives, of which I'm not.
I mean, you could say, I'm not a conservative.
But if you are a conservative, why in hell would you be on that network?
You should starve it to death.
You should kill it. It would be gone in a week.
Because it would go down...
Well, it wouldn't be gone, so let me back up on the hyperbole a little bit, because sometimes you take me too seriously.
And should, because if I'm not clear, you have every right to do that.
He could probably drive the stock price down 30% by just threatening to do it.
Actually, he doesn't even have to do it.
He could say plan B is to encourage anybody on the right to stop using it.
He could just say it, and the stock would go down 30%.
Because do you know what the left believes about the right?
That they'll do anything like that.
The left believes the right will do exactly that kind of thing.
And they would also understand that Twitter would lose all of its power if it's just the left talking to the left.
It's got to have that battle to be a functioning company.
So my take is this.
That plan B might be different ways to buy Twitter.
But I think the real plan B is if he can't buy Twitter under any of those ways...
That he's going to drive it out of business, and then they're going to reconsider selling it to him.
Maybe at a lower price.
Because if he takes the stock price down 30%, and he's got a perfectly good argument and reason for doing it, and he's telling you exactly what he's doing, and he's showing you his work in public, and it has a public good purpose behind it, which is helping speech, I think he does have the power to drive them down 30% and just keep his boot on them as long as he wants.
And I don't think the management could survive that permanent fight.
On the other hand, it's election season coming and nobody wants to get off Twitter and we're all addicted, so even Elon Musk cannot beat our Twitter addiction, which I think might be closer to the truth, actually.
But does the left know that?
The left might say to themselves, oh, my God, he's going to put Twitter out of business, and that's our main lever to power, because Twitter influences the journalists, and then the journalists have to write things that Twitter approves of, basically.
So, all right.
Next category, I don't think Putin is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
I've been thinking about this for a while.
They've had a lot of controversial winners in the past, But I don't know.
I'm not going to bet on him. I don't think Putin is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
Now, I'd love to tell you I'm not 100% sure.
I'm not 100% sure.
But if I had to bet...
I mean, I wouldn't bet he's not in the top five.
But, I mean...
He is denazifying Ukraine.
He says...
And apparently you can win a Nobel Peace Prize just for what you say you're doing in some cases.
You don't even have to do anything.
You can just say you're doing it.
And that's good enough sometimes.
But I don't think you'll make it into the top spot.
I think maybe top five.
Top five. So the Wall Street Journal editorial board...
Is talking about California.
They're floating in California, my wacky state, to limit the work week to 32 hours.
In other words, making it illegal to work more than 32 hours unless you're paid, like, overtime, time and a half or something.
What do you think of that idea?
What do you think of making it harder for everybody to get anything done?
Well, I have a mixed opinion.
Mixed opinion. And let's call it the Bill Gates photo session theory.
I once talked to a photographer, a professional photographer, who was photographing me for some article.
And I always ask the photographers who else they photographed, because they have good stories about famous people they photographed, etc.
And it's so hard to read your comments and tell the story at the same time.
So... Oh, about how much work you can get done.
So if you go from a 40-hour workweek to a 32-hour workweek, do you think productivity will change?
The bottom line is it depends on the job.
Bill Gates used to say to the photographer...
The photographer would say, you know, I'm going to need about an hour to get the lighting right, make sure that we're getting lots of pictures so we can pick the right one, because this is going to be for the cover of a magazine.
And it's at least an hour, so allocate about an hour to the photo shoot.
And Bill Gates would say, you have ten minutes.
And the photographer would say, whoa, whoa, I can't do anything in ten minutes.
Ten minutes, my camera won't even be out of the bag.
Seriously. This is for the cover of a major magazine.
We only have one shot at this.
This cannot be done in ten minutes.
And then Bill Gates says, you have nine minutes now.
No, no, no, no, no.
It can't be done. It can't be done. It can't be done.
You have to give me a few more minutes.
And Bill Gates will be like, eight minutes?
Click, click, click, click, click, click.
I don't know if I'm getting anything.
Click, click, click, click, click. And we're done.
And he'll get up and walk out.
Now, do you think that they don't get a good picture that they use on the cover of the magazine?
They do. Every time.
Every time. So what does Bill Gates know that the photographer doesn't know?
That if Bill Gates makes him do it in 10 minutes, he'll do it in 10 minutes.
Do you know how many times I've seen that played out?
Because it's one of the things that...
I hate to say it, but if you're sort of in the public eye, you often have to limit people's time because they're trying to get a piece of your time.
And I do it all the time.
And it works pretty much every time.
Whatever people say they absolutely need to get a job done, you can say some fraction of that, just like Captain Kirk...
You know, it's like the Star Trek.
You know, Scotty, give me warp six.
I cannot give you warp six, Captain.
I can only give you warp four.
If I give you any more than warp four, we'll pull apart.
It's not made for warp six, Captain.
And then the Captain will say, give me warp six, Scotty.
And then somehow, Scotty figures out how to give him warp six.
So... When you look on the surface, when you say, hey, if you limit the work week to 32 hours, that's going to be a lot less than you accomplish.
It's going to be really bad for capitalism.
But it kind of depends on the job.
I can tell you that there's no job I've ever had that I could not have reduced from 40 to 32 hours.
Pretty much anything I've ever done, if I had to, right?
It's the only problem if I add writing a book or something, and then there's not much I can do.
But yeah, any kind of thinking cubicle job, you could probably do it in 32 hours.
But, as somebody said, does somebody think that a Tesla factory worker can produce the same number of cars in 32 hours as 40?
Well, probably not.
So if it's an assembly line situation, yeah, you just pay more for less productivity.
So that's not good.
So it depends highly on the job.
I don't see how it could ever be practical to have a four-day work week.
It seems like that should always be optional.
Let me give you another story.
When I worked as a salad chopper, Yeah, that was a job.
I think I was in college and I was working at a big resort in the back kitchen.
And we would have to prepare, you know, tons of salad because everybody came in at the same time in the resort.
And so we would just be in an assembly line of chopping lettuce and chopping vegetables and stuff.
And I think there were maybe five of us.
And one day, one of them quit.
And so the boss came in and she said, here's the deal.
I could hire somebody else, and then we'll be back to full staff, five people, and then you would be doing the same amount of work you're doing now, and it would cost me the same amount of money.
But it would be some extra work to hire somebody.
However, if you'd like, you can do the extra work among yourselves any way you want, work longer hours, work harder, just figure it out, and I will take that extra employee's pay, and I will distribute it equally among the rest of you.
Have you ever heard of that? Talk about something that you remember forever.
Like, you'll remember that forever.
Now, she was the owner of the company, right?
So she and her husband owned the resort.
So she could do what she wanted.
So she liked running, and that was the operation that she ran.
She ran in the back kitchen. And, oh, somebody says it happened to their dad, yeah.
Interesting. Yeah, and I got to tell you, those of us who remained, we were good employees.
You know, we were the ones who showed up and did the work.
And it wasn't hard.
I got to say, I never even noticed.
The difference between four people and five people doing the work, I never noticed.
I guess, you know, mentally I thought I'd better work harder or something, but I don't think I worked an extra hour, and I don't think I sweat an extra, you know, drop of sweat.
So, yeah, you can absorb things pretty quickly.
It's surprising.
Here's the dumbest story of the day.
Dumbest story of the day.
Here's the dumbest story of the day.
Florida has this rule about, or law, that says you can't put critical race theory stuff in school textbooks.
And so a number of textbooks have just been rejected by Florida because they did have critical race theory mentions in them.
And here's the weird part, they were math books.
So there were a bunch of math books submitted for approval that were rejected Because somebody in Florida said there's too much critical race theory mentioning in the math book.
Now, why is this the dumbest story in the day?
Well... As Axios writes, so Axios reports on this, and they say, worth noting, the education department described the review process as, quote, transparent, but did not name the rejected textbooks nor provide examples of passages that failed to meet the criteria.
What? What the hell kind of story is this?
I'm keeping it PG because it's Easter.
What kind of a news story tells you that there's a controversy over critical race theory in math books and doesn't give you an example?
Wasn't the first thing you wondered was, what would be an example of a racist math book?
Two plus two equals three because you're poor?
How does that even look?
I have to give credit to Axios, because I did read this story in other publications that shall remain nameless, and they didn't call out the fact, because I was looking for it and couldn't find it, but only Axios calls out the fact that the entire heart of the story, which is, can you give me an example of this supposedly racism-related math book?
You really, really need an example for this story.
This story doesn't really...
Doesn't work without the examples, does it?
Now, maybe they're good examples.
I wouldn't be surprised.
You know, there could easily be word problems that inject some social opinion in there.
Could be. But I kind of want to see the examples.
I can't judge this story.
Am I supposed to be angry about this?
Or am I supposed to be, you know, angry that they were blocked?
How in the world am I supposed to have any opinion on this?
This is ridiculous.
We're seeing examples over on YouTube.
Jimmy has five racist classmates.
One gets expelled. How many racists are left?
The only thing I can think of is exactly that.
Because what is in the math book except word problems, right?
It's got to be something like there were four white people and three people of color in the class...
If three people randomly are expelled, how many racists were expelled?
What else is it?
Come on. I mean, seriously.
Is there a foreword or introduction to the book that gets into critical race theory?
Maybe. Maybe.
Because every possibility you can think of is sort of ridiculous.
So you can't rule anything out.
If all the possibilities have to be ridiculous, there's nothing left.
So, oh well.
So that's the dumbest story of the day, the day, the day.
All right, here's my last little advice because it's Easter and because I want you all to be happier and more successful.
This will be a weird little reframing that will change some of your lives.
Now again, when I do this, some of you are just spectators and you watch other people's lives get changed.
And some of you will actually be the ones whose lives are changed and you might not know who you are until you hear the topic.
And here's the topic. Things that are learnable but you might not know it are the things that you see other people do and you say, oh God, I wish I could do that.
How does that person do that?
And you think to yourself, they must be born.
Just born with that ability.
If you believe that, you're really missing out on your best opportunities.
Let me give you some examples. Do you think that some people are good at small talk and some people are not, and it's just sort of the way you're born?
A lot of people think that.
They think that small talk is something some people could do and some people can't, and it's just sort of baked in.
But it's not.
It's 100% learnable.
The Dale Carnegie course, among others, can teach you how to do it.
I teach you how to do it, and my book had failed almost everything and still went big.
I steal it from Dale Carnegie.
I give them credit. But it's just a simple technique.
Now, I'm not going to teach it to you here, but it's basically just showing interest in people and asking questions.
That's the essence of it. It's so simple.
Not only is small talk learnable, It might be the most easily learnable thing you've ever met.
There's no layers.
It's just showing interest in people and asking questions that make sense.
It takes you about five minutes to master the skill of asking questions that make sense.
And then you're done. And then everybody thinks you're awesome and you're good at talking and they love spending time with you.
They don't realize that they didn't ask anything about you.
They just remember That it was fun talking to you.
Why was it fun? Because you got to talk about what you wanted to talk about.
You got to talk about yourself.
And they acted interested.
If you act interested in what somebody's talking about and it's about themselves, they think you're their best friend.
So, how about making friends?
Is making friends something that's...
Just some people can do it.
I don't know how. It's like magic.
They've just got the charisma.
No. No, it's learnable.
It's 100% learnable.
And easy.
Easy to learn. It's not so easy to implement, but it's all doable, right?
You have to put a little effort into it.
But to learn how to do it, let me give you an example.
Did you know, for example, science backs this up, if you want somebody to treat you as a friend, if you share a secret with them, they automatically start defining you as a friend.
Because you did what only friends do.
Now, the trick is don't share a secret that's going to get you in trouble.
Share like a little one with the assumption that it's not going to be kept a secret because nothing ever is.
We're in a post-secret world.
You just can't assume anything's a secret.
But if you give them something that's relatively harmless, you can turn somebody into a friend.
Now, that's not the only technique.
But it's not much harder than that.
You do the Dale Carnegie thing of asking questions and showing interest.
You share a secret.
And then the only other thing is you share an activity.
That's about it. That's it.
Have you noticed that most of the people you're friends with is because you bet in some kind of association or group or activity?
That's all it is. You put people in groups, and they gravitate toward each other.
You know, people who just have natural interest in each other.
And then you put a little bit of technique, learn how to make small talk, learn how to invite them over and host.
Oh, learning how to host. Now, there's something that's completely learnable.
When I became an adult, I wanted to learn how to host people, which unfortunately meant, at the time, learning how to serve alcohol in various ways.
So I learned how to serve a whole bunch of different alcohols in various ways.
Later I learned not to drink alcohol.
But before I learned not to drink alcohol, It was very handy to know how to do a social event.
So very, very learnable.
How about avoiding embarrassment?
I've done some micro-lessons on that on the Locals platform.
Not how to avoid the thing that triggers it, because that happens naturally, you can't avoid that.
But how to care about it.
You're just like, oh, that was fun.
I am literally at the point where when I embarrass myself, like in a really bad way, I think it's awesome.
I just laugh at it.
It's like, oh my god, that's really embarrassing.
That is awesome. And you can actually get there, and some of it is practice, some of it is technique, some of it is how you reframe things.
But it's all learnable, and you wouldn't think so.
How about love life and dating?
Do you think you could just learn how to be better at dating?
Yeah. Yeah.
Totally. Absolutely.
Do you think you could learn how to get somebody to say yes to a date?
Yes. Yes.
Completely learnable. If you think it's not, look into it.
How about fitness?
Do you think people are just naturally fit and some people aren't?
Well, some people who are not fit would like to believe maybe that some people are naturally more fit.
And, of course, there's a wide difference in people's physicality for all kinds of reasons.
But there's not really anybody who can't get fit unless they have a serious medical problem.
That's completely learnable.
And I would argue, and certainly this has been reinforced recently, I would argue that the thing you need to learn To be good at fitness is learning how to learn about fitness.
Just learning how to learn.
If you just keep your filter open And you experiment and A-B test and say, well, I got bored with this exercise.
I'll try this. I'll hang around with people who know how to do this.
I'll ask them some questions.
It also makes good small talk.
By the way, one of the very best things for small talk is asking people about their fitness or sporting activities.
They love to talk about it.
And you often find a commonality there.
So fitness is one of those things that you should treat as an information problem.
That's what I teach you in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Went Big, my gigantically influential book.
If you treat it as an information problem, you will succeed guaranteed.
If you treat it as a willpower problem, it's like, ah, I've got to push myself to hurt myself, you will almost certainly not succeed.
Because people don't like to hurt themselves.
So if you keep hurting yourself, you'll find a reason not to do it.
I got too busy to exercise.
But if you use it as an information problem, you will learn how to, for example, use putting on your footwear to motivate you to actually work out when you didn't feel like working out.
It's a little trick that's in my How to Fail book.
And there are just a bunch of other little tricks that once you learn them, It actually becomes easy to exercise.
So it's an information problem.
Very learnable. If it were a willpower problem, I don't think you could learn it.
Can you learn to have more willpower?
I'm not even sure willpower is a real thing.
But you can learn information.
So reframe it as information and you'll succeed.
Same with diet. Diet is completely an information problem which we accidentally feel like is a willpower problem.
Or how much you like ice cream problem.
It's not. It's an information problem.
It's a learning problem. So you can learn how to eat things that are delightful and you will enjoy and that are good for you.
You just have to learn it.
It's not willpower. How about being more likable?
Would anybody like that?
How would you like to be not the person that people go, I think I'd like to fill my drink Nice talking to you.
Or would you like to be the person that everybody's interested in?
Totally learnable.
Learn how to tell some interesting stories.
Learn how to show interest in other people.
Learn that people care about people more than objects or concepts.
If you're doing small talk, don't talk about the concept of the Constitution versus Marxism At most, that's a tweet.
That's not a conversation.
Not if you want somebody to like you.
I mean, you do find nerds who love talking about nerdy things, but you know that when you see it, and that's fine.
If you both love it, yeah, go nuts.
But watch people's eyes if their eyes are starting to close.
Talk about people. The best person to talk about is the person you're talking about.
You talk about that person you're talking to.
Talk about their family, their relationship, their boss.
People. That's all people want to hear about.
They want to know what people do, people are weird.
People. Suppose you had a dream last night and you thought it was really interesting.
Who wants to hear about your dream?
Nobody. But the exception would be a quick summary.
I do think it's interesting when people say, I dreamt I stabbed you last night.
I want to hear about that.
You know, the details, not so much.
Or if somebody says they had a sex dream about you, well, yeah, you want to hear about that, don't you?
Of course you do. But you don't need the details of, yeah, somehow I was in an elevator, but really when it opened, my classmates were in seventh grade, and they were standing on a prairie, and then the prairie turned into a department store.
Like, no, no, no.
This is a learnable skill.
Here's what to learn.
Don't tell people about your dream.
Here's another one. Last night, I had the best meal.
This potato was just seasoned just right.
It was just delicious.
I don't think I've ever had a better potato.
No. No.
No. Do not talk about something you tasted.
No. Because the other person can't taste it, and they've tasted their own food.
Sometimes they liked it.
Never tell people about your food.
It's bad enough that you post it on social media, but at least it has a visual appeal.
Yeah, I can see why people post food on social media.
I get it. But if you're telling a story, you don't even have the picture.
Imagine how much you don't like it when you see a food picture on social media, and then imagine it was only described.
It was just text.
How hard is it to learn what's boring?
How about asking you about your job?
Hey, Bob, how's work?
Well... I gotta tell you, can you believe that the RGB system went down exactly, exactly, when we need to submit the PDQ? And then the PDQ, it's the old technology.
And I tried to talk to Larry, and Larry is saying, no, it's the new technology.
I'm saying to Larry, what do you call new?
This is like five years old, and this technology...
No.
No. No.
If somebody asks you how your job is...
This is the correct answer.
It's great. Hey, what are you doing later?
Do not talk about your job.
In fact, just to make the point, I knew somebody who will remain nameless, a top executive, who was in charge of the syndication for Peanuts and Dilbert and lots of interesting things.
And when he would be on the flight, if somebody would try to engage him in conversation and say, so, what do you do for a living?
He would say he worked in insurance.
Because otherwise he had to talk about these interesting people he knew for six hours and he wanted to read his book.
So, talking about your job is just deadly.
But know it. It's something you can learn.
There's no skill whatsoever...
I'm sorry. There's no natural ability...
That matters in any of this.
This is all learnable.
And so what I'm trying to tell you is there's a whole bunch of stuff you think you can't learn.
Other people have some natural advantage.
They don't. Sometimes they get to it by luck or imitating their parents or something.
So they get to it in a weird way.
But you can get there, too.
Just learn it. Here's my inspirational tale.
That I've always thought about all my life.
I don't even remember who told me this.
But somebody long ago told me a story about somebody who was probably my age at the time.
And the person was described as very not attractive.
So definitely nothing to look at.
But was hugely successful with women.
And that was the essence of the story, that somebody who really had nothing going for them physically was just hugely successful.
Do you know how this person was successful?
Somebody said, great personality.
Maybe. But how did that great personality arrive?
Do you think that person was born with it?
Here's what I think.
And this is the part I didn't tell you in the story.
This person was really good at dancing.
So he could go somewhere where there were women.
He could grab a woman and go out and dance.
And he could lead. And he could spin her around.
And do you think that he was born with the ability to do that?
Nope. Nope.
Nope. He simply learned how to dance.
A very critical skill if he wanted to compensate for the fact that he didn't have much going on physically.
So did it work? Absolutely.
So could he learn to be popular in dating?
Yup. Yup.
He just learned a specific skill and it just took him right to the top of the heap.
Now, he also had another skill.
He would let women know...
How much you liked them. Now, you say to yourself, well, that doesn't seem hard.
It is. It's hard to do it non-creepy and in a way that the woman actually appreciates.
There is a skill to complimenting, which was another micro-lesson that I did, how to compliment without sounding creepy.
It's a skill. So if you can dance...
And you can compliment a woman so she really feels like that was like the best compliment she got today.
And it rings as true.
That's the important part.
It has to ring as true. But if you can pull that off, you can make a woman feel amazing.
And they'll remember how they feel before they'll remember how you looked.
They'll remember how they feel.
So that was largely his trick.
Now, of course, he probably had some other, you know, micro tricks within that.
Maybe he knew how to persuade.
Maybe he learned sales.
Maybe he... I don't think he was nagging.
Somebody's mentioning that.
I don't think he was doing that. Now, this person might not even exist, and if I knew of them, maybe I wouldn't be as impressed as the person who told me the story.
Maybe it has morphed in my mind over time.
But one of the things I tell you is you should always have a story that is like your operating system.
So that when something comes up, you can go to your story.
So if something comes up like, hey, you want to be more popular with other people.
Well, my story is I can learn that.
That's my story. Because my story is this guy that I don't know who it is and maybe he doesn't even exist.
But that's my story.
Oh, you can overcome incredibly things you wouldn't think you could overcome by just learning skills.
And they're not even hard skills.
So, remember these tips for today.
Everything you do to your body makes a big difference.
If you want to succeed, do good things to your body and learn how.
And if you want to really, really take it up a level in life in terms of your enjoyment and your effectiveness, just understand that all of those skills are learnable.
And as soon as you think somebody has natural ability, well, they might, but you can learn to do the same thing.
With a minimal amount of learning.
It's not even hard. So, because this is Easter, and the news is almost non-existent, because it's Easter, I thought I would leave you with something that feels good, so that today you can go forth and make other people feel happy as well.
There are some funny memes going by on the Locals platform.
