Episode 1754 Scott Adams: Willpower Is Imaginary. Obesity Is A Knowledge Problem I Am About To Solve
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Russia "narrowed focus" to Donbas?
Xinjiang police files hacked/released
68,000 invalid signatures in Michigan?
Candace Owens knocks on BLM Cullors door
Obesity is an information problem
Whiteboard: Diet Knowledge
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Now, I believe I told you that I was going to teach you.
Ha, ha, ha.
That's the attitude.
That's it. That's it.
John says, under President Trump, the only way OPEC could hurt us was to lower oil prices.
Okay? We're jumping right in with the politics.
Let me run through some politics and then I'm going to deliver on my promise to show you that willpower doesn't exist and that obesity is an information problem, a knowledge problem.
Do you think I can do that?
I know some of you know I can, but many of you think that's not going to happen.
That's an overclaim.
That is something he can't do, first the news.
I saw somebody in the comments earlier on Locals think that I was not going to mention the school massacre.
Do you think that I would let a story that big go unmentioned?
Second story is about the New York Times has an update on Russia and Ukraine.
Russia has narrowed its focus to the Donbass region.
That's what the New York Times says.
Russia has narrowed its focus.
When is narrowing your focus the same as losing?
Is that just a wordplay?
Because you know what I do when...
When I want to make a billion dollars, but I make a thousand dollars instead, did I fail?
Or did I narrow my focus?
In fact, I believe that every time I fail at anything from now on, I'm going to tell people, failure?
Are you kidding?
No, I narrowed my focus.
In fact...
Can somebody write that down for me?
Because that's going to be my next Dilber comic.
I mean, seriously. How the hell does a cartoonist not have a pen?
Really? I don't have a pen within a hand's reach?
This is such a foul.
Let me teach you something about being a cartoonist.
You should never be more than one step away from a writing utensil and something to write on.
Because all day long you're thinking, oh, I should have written that down.
Five minutes later you've completely forgotten it.
So I'm not going to make that mistake.
I'm going to find something to write on.
And it doesn't matter what it takes.
I'm going to find some paper.
I know I've got a printer I don't need.
There we go. That worked out well.
All right, Wally.
Wally narrows his focus.
In approximately four to six weeks, you will see a Dilbert comic in which Wally narrows his focus.
Failure? No, no, no.
But his focus got narrowed.
So, I guess we've created a situation in which Putin can win while losing.
And he can lose while winning.
So both sides will be able to claim victory, which is the only way anything ends.
Right? The only way the thing was going to end is if both sides could claim victory.
Because we weren't really going to Totally destroy Putin.
I mean, did anybody think that was going to happen?
I mean, it was possible, I suppose, but nobody was predicting it.
So the only way it ends is if both sides have a complete story of victory, and now we have it.
Now Putin will say, well, I narrowed my focus and succeeded like crazy.
I captured that whole Donbass area, and I got my land bridge and I got everything I wanted there after I narrowed my focus.
And then the United States and NATO can say, it's a good thing we spent that $44 billion plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, because we got ourselves a Ukrainian victory.
We beat back the Russian army and showed them that they can never do this again.
So both sides have a victory now.
You know, the best possible war is when both sides win.
I hate those old kind of wars where you'd have a winner and a loser.
Do you remember those? That was such a bad way to go.
Today, we can fight an entire fucking war.
Both sides can win.
Here we are. Do you think the Russian public will think that Russia lost the war?
Nope. Nope.
They're going to believe they won the war.
Or as they call it, the special military operation.
That was refocused.
Well, there's some hacking situation going on in which somebody got a hold of a bunch of Chinese data on the Uyghur camps.
It's called the so-called Xinjiang police files.
So I don't know who did the hacking, but a whole bunch of photos and communications.
That, among other things, prove that these things exist and that they're used for political punishment.
Here's one of the crimes that could get you put into one of these prison camps, I will call it, as opposed to a voluntary vocational training center, which is what the Chinese government wants you to know.
Here's one of the things that could get you rounded up.
Not using your cell phone enough.
No, you heard it correctly.
Not using your cell phone enough for your own purposes can get you rounded up and put in the camp according to these documents.
Do you know why? Because if somebody doesn't use their cell phone enough, it is presumed that they've figured out some secure communications channel.
And if they have a secure communications channel, that is signs of working against the government or something, something, something.
It's a crime. You're going to the detention center for not using your phone enough.
So that's just one example.
But apparently if you say anything bad against the government or you read the wrong stuff or you prayed the wrong way or some damn thing, you could get picked up and put it in there.
So... Will this make any difference?
I don't think so.
Do you? Because did China really ever care what we knew about these things?
They only cared that we weren't doing anything about it.
And we're still not going to do anything about it.
I don't see any way that we're going to say, oh, we're going to sanction you, China, for these Uyghur violations.
I don't think it's going to happen.
So I don't know that this makes any difference at all.
It might make a difference in who knows what about what, but it should make any difference to the world.
Sadly, I don't know what it would take.
There doesn't seem to be anything that would make any difference.
China's just going to do what China does.
They just have too much power.
Or, they would say, not enough.
So there's a story about five Republican contenders running for governor in Michigan.
And five of them apparently were involved in as many as 68,000 invalid signatures on petitions.
So they were on petitions as opposed to votes themselves.
So the petitions would...
You have to get enough signatures to be qualified to be on the ballot.
And there are 68,000 of them that look invalid.
And... And I guess there were 10 Republican campaigns, and even five of them would be shorter than needed, 15,000 that they need.
Now, it seems like a, you know, some kind of a petition is going to be, obviously, way less secure than votes, but here's the thing I wonder.
I wonder if Republicans are going to cheat like crazy At least the ones that are just starting.
I wonder if they're going to cheat like crazy going into this congressional election cycle because they think they can get away with it.
How many Republicans running for office or their operatives thought to themselves, wow, I thought it was easy to get caught, but I guess those Democrats, they would believe, this is not my allegation, but they would believe that Democrats got away with it.
What happens if one party believes that you can cheat and get away with it?
Because they believe the other party did.
Not only do they believe the other party did, they believe they did it massively.
Wouldn't that make you more likely to do it?
So I wonder if there's going to be some kind of weird Republican backlash or counter-response where the Republicans go cheating extra much this time.
And what about the Democrats?
Do the Democrats believe that they cheated and won, and maybe that's why they won?
Do you think there are any Democrats who believe that?
That they actually won because of cheating.
And if they do, why wouldn't they do it again?
It seems to me that because there were so many allegations of cheating, and none proven by courts, none proven by the courts of any size, wouldn't that encourage it?
If people believed it happened and didn't get caught, whether that's true or not, you should make more of it.
Right? Everything that's rewarded, you get more of.
We'll see. Glenn Greenwald continues to be entertaining in the way he frames things.
He says, I guess he said this on maybe Tucker Carlson's show, that the media is, quote, priming people to believe that the perceived slump in the country is because you're too dumb to understand your own lives.
And even though what he's saying is something that you've heard in some way or you've thought probably, just hear him say it this way.
They're priming you to believe that the slump in the country is because you're too dumb to understand your own lives.
And I thought, yeah, that's exactly what's happening.
That is exactly what's happening.
They say the Democrats simply replaced Trump.
This is what Glenn Greenwald says.
The Democrats simply replaced Trump with the same ideology they governed with for eight years under Obama that caused people to run away from them as fast as they could, he said.
And now that people are doing that again, instead of asking, why is that happening?
They're getting poised to blame the electorate for being stupid, for thinking the economy is bad when actually it's good.
And ultimately, they'll just say that people were too racist to vote Democrat if they don't get elected.
That sounds like exactly what's happening.
I wouldn't disagree with one point on that at all.
Yeah, that looks like exactly what's happening.
And now that we know that the Clinton campaign and the Democrats were, in fact...
They were, in fact, behind the whole Russia collusion thing.
This looks completely plausible, that there's this massive gaslighting campaign to make the voters think it's their own damn fault or there's something wrong with their perception.
It's so... Let's say, flagrant, that it's almost invisible.
I mean, I guess that's the Nazi technique, right?
If the lie is big enough and you can't see it, because, hey, nobody would tell a lie that big.
Well, I guess that's the secret.
Rasmus in a poll said, how likely did cheating affect the outcome of the 2020 election?
So at the moment, 54% of the public...
Believes it's likely or somewhat likely that cheating affected 2020 elections.
More than half.
Now, do you remember when people thought that Trump was not persuasive?
Does anybody remember that?
Do you remember in 2016, people were laughing at me.
And they were saying, how can you say this clown is persuasive?
And I kept saying, oh, you just wait.
Yeah. You just wait.
You have no idea what kind of tools he's bringing to it.
And sure enough, at this point, he could convince the country of anything, I think.
Or 54% of the country, he could convince of anything.
Rasmussen also asked, how important will election integrity be in this year's congressional election?
Of course, 82% said important or somewhat important.
All right, so everybody thinks election integrity is important.
Will anything be done about it?
Nah. Nah. As far as we know, nothing, right?
Are you aware of any big effort by the government to make elections more secure?
At least anything that's passed, or anything that's actually going to happen.
I'm not. Are you?
Are there maybe some local things happening?
People have proposed things?
People have talked about things?
But as far as I know...
There's no global big thing to fix elections, is there?
Because everybody who ran an election, how do you believe they think they did last year?
If you were to talk to everybody who was in charge of elections in each area of each state, and you say, hey, give us a self-assessment of how things went, they'd say, perfect.
You should put me in charge again.
I nailed it. Most secure election of all time.
And there's nobody else looking, right?
So who else are you going to talk to?
The only people you're going to ask are the people who ran the election.
And the people who ran the election are not going to give themselves a failing grade.
Hey, how was the election, the part you were in charge of?
Well, if I had to be honest, I let a lot of fraud in.
You know, I should have tried harder.
A lot of fraud got in there.
So maybe we should change some things and get rid of people like me.
You know? It turns out I was the weak link.
I admit it. I confess.
I confess. Nobody asked before.
If they had asked before, I would have said.
But now that you've asked, I guess it was me.
I mismanaged everything.
It was full of fraud. No!
Nobody will ever say that.
No matter what happened in the part they managed, they're going to tell you, I nailed it.
You should hire me again.
I should definitely do this again.
I nailed it. So, Russia's cutting off the rail lines surrounding the Ukraine military.
So, at least part of the Ukraine military that's fighting in those most contested regions there...
It looks like there's a good chance that Russia's going to cut them off their supply chains and strangle them.
Now, you have to think that the Ukrainians are aware of this and would have some kind of response or they would strategically withdraw to a more defensive position or something.
Or something. I don't know.
But I don't trust any reporting coming out of there.
But it does look like the endgame is going to be Russia controls that part of what used to be Ukraine.
And then they'll negotiate, is my guess.
Did you all see the clip?
I think this was also on Tucker Carlson.
A clip of Candace Owens trying to knock on the door and get a...
An interview or talk to somebody at the Black Lives Matter so-called mansion that was purchased with money that people donated to Black Lives Matter.
And I guess BLM's co-founder, Cullers?
I mean, seriously, what are the odds that the founder of Black Lives Matter, or the one that's most famous anyway, that her last name would actually be Cullers?
Like, that's her actual name, Colors.
And she ends up being in charge of an organization that's mostly about our colors.
I don't know. That seemed weird to me.
But anyway, the funny part of this, and you have to see this clip, so you can see it in my Twitter feed or just Google it, Candace Owens and BLM. And so you see...
Ms. Cullors, the BLM founder, I guess sobbing would be the best word, or very emotional, crying, I guess you'd say, as she emotionally described how threatened she felt when her, I guess where she lived, was assaulted.
As a way she might describe it.
And that I think she has children or something.
And so she was quite worried and concerned.
And then on Tucker's show, he would intersperse it with the actual video of Candace Owens politely ringing the doorbell and asking if anybody's home.
The nicest person in the world.
Now, you'd have to know...
That Candace Owens, when she's doing her debating online, she's sort of a pit bull.
So if you think of her as a pit bull, you're missing maybe the bigger part of the story that makes it funny.
In person, she's one of the warmest people you'll ever meet.
Like she's just immediately so warm, right?
I had the pleasure of meeting her once.
And so her public persona is tough, just the way you'd want it to be.
But her private is just so warm.
And you see more the private version of her ringing the doorbell.
The kind that when you hear her voice, you think to yourself, well, that's a nice person.
Because she is. As far as I can tell.
I mean, from my brief encounter.
And... Uh-oh.
Uh... Yes.
Yes. Problem solved.
Problem solved.
All right. So, you just have to see the clip.
It's a wonderful juxtaposition of somebody acting nice and polite and somebody acting like they've been attacked.
All right. I made this claim on Twitter that obesity is an information problem, not a willpower problem.
Do you believe that I can make that claim stick?
Do you think that I can persuade you in the next, I don't know, ten minutes that obesity is an information problem primarily?
Aw, some of you have too much faith in me.
Well, I will. I am going to convince you if you were not convinced.
But I'm surprised that you know I can.
Because I probably wouldn't have tried unless I knew I could.
Alright, so there's a few of you who are, let's say, doubting that I can do it.
Let me start. Now remember, I'm trying to persuade you.
So if you don't mind, I will tell you how I'm persuading you as I do it.
Is that fair? Because otherwise, it could be a little heavy-handed.
So I'm going to tell you what I'm doing so you can opt out.
If you don't want to be persuaded, just don't watch.
So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to convince you that I'm qualified for the conversation.
And so the first thing I need to do to do that is to prove that I use my own techniques and I'm not obese.
So this is This is my shirtless torso.
It's a recent picture.
So that's what I look like at age...
I'm turning 65 in not too long, a few days.
So at age 65, that's what I look like.
I know, it's a Geraldo problem, right?
At a certain age, nobody wants to see you without a shirt.
I get it, I get it.
But all I'm trying to demonstrate...
Is that I use the method I'm going to teach you and that it works.
Here's the second thing.
I wrote a best-selling book.
Within it is a chapter, which people talk about all the time, which is how to fix their diet and fitness.
Now, so I've researched it, wrote a book, used the techniques, you can see the techniques on me, and then since the book came out a number of years ago, I have the benefit of the feedback.
So people have told me I've lost 80 pounds, I've lost 60 pounds, a lot of them.
A lot of people told me this, right?
So now you see that I've researched it and wrote a best-selling book on it.
I use the technique, and you can see the results.
Again, I'm not saying I should be on the cover of a magazine.
I'm saying that just using the techniques works for me.
That's not enough to persuade you.
So I'm going to say it worked for lots of other people, so now you know there's some social proof.
That is persuasion.
Now... For the final argument.
Let's make sure you can all see this.
And it goes like this.
Most of you, or I think most people believe, that they understand how diet works.
If I said to you, what is a good thing to eat versus a bad thing?
You'd say, well, a bad thing might be chocolate cake, and a good thing might be broccoli.
And I would say, A+. You nailed it.
You know something about diet.
If I said to you, is it better to eat more calories or fewer, all things being equal, nutrition-wise, I'd probably say fewer, fewer, if you're trying to lose weight or maintain weight, maybe.
So, you would probably get most things right.
In fact, I would say on the scale of no knowledge about diet to knowing everything that the most knowledgeable person in the world knows, you would be way up there.
Like, way better than the uninformed.
But one thing that you and the uninformed probably have in common Now, again, when I say you, I don't really mean every one of you, right?
Some of you know more than I do.
Some of you know less.
So you're all over the board.
But just allow me to speak in general terms for simplicity, if you don't mind.
I'm going to say that you, this is the hypothetical you, not specifically you, might be damn near a genius about diet.
And what you and the people who don't know a damn thing about diet have in common is obesity.
Right? Because knowing a lot, knowing a lot about diet doesn't do you a damn good.
It doesn't help. You have to get to the point where you really do know more than other people.
Like you really, really know more.
And here's what I mean by more.
More about how the brain works.
It's not good enough to know what has more calories.
It's not good enough to know that packaged stuff might be worse for you than fresh stuff.
It's not good enough to know that organic might be better for you than non-organic.
Most people in the general public know all of that stuff.
I'm talking about the stuff I'm going to teach you.
How many people know this?
That's the final, say, 10%.
That's the 10% that allows you to maintain your weight, lose weight, manage it completely.
And you have to know, number one, that willpower is imaginary.
There's no such thing as willpower.
Willpower is just something that is sort of a result.
It's more like seeing the end of the race.
It doesn't tell you what was happening.
It's just how you interpret it after the fact.
Oh, I didn't have enough willpower.
If you're trying to use your willpower, in other words, increase the amount of suffering you're willing to take, right?
Because that would be a rough definition of willpower.
How much suffering are you willing to take now for some longer-term gain, which you understand intellectually, but you're not getting that benefit right now?
That's willpower, right? If that's what you're trying to use, you're probably obese.
Because it doesn't work.
Your brain will eventually find a way to talk you out of hurting it.
This is one of the most important things you'll ever hear in your life.
If you do something that hurts yourself, such as give yourself some current discomfort, your brain will find a way to make you too busy to do that anymore.
It will injure some other part of your body so you can't do it.
It will give you a trauma that makes you distracted so you won't do it.
Your brain will talk you out of pain.
It will make you go somewhere where you're not getting that pain.
So if hurting yourself is how you're trying to maintain your good health, it won't work.
It won't work in the long run.
So you're going to have to master the mental part of diet, which is way beyond just what do you eat.
If what you eat and when is the only thing you're working with, you're not even close to enough knowledge to maintain your weight.
Here's just a...
A flavor of it. If you wanted the bigger picture of how to create a system, it's in this book, how to fill almost everything, and it still went big.
So I'm going to hit the high points just to make the argument that information is what you need, not willpower, right?
But the details of what information you need, there still will be more than what you see here.
Number one, what I call the pleasure unit theory.
It's the observation that people need a certain amount of pleasure in their life.
If you had no pleasure in your life whatsoever, but you could eat a cheeseburger, nothing's going to stop you.
That's a bit of knowledge that maybe you didn't know.
You do not have willpower if you don't have other pleasure in your life.
You need a certain amount of enjoyment, or you will just kill yourself.
You will injure yourself slowly or fast, but you will not put up with no pleasure in your life.
You can't do it. So, somebody who has no hope of any normal kind of pleasure, maybe they've become drug users.
Unfortunately. It makes it easier, right?
If you have no other pleasure in your life but you have food, how much food are you going to eat?
A lot. So the first thing you need to know is that you've got to find a way to get your whole life under control.
That's what will help your diet.
If you have dating options, it's easier to go on a diet, because you say to yourself, you know, if I go on a diet, I'm going to feel better, look better, have better sex, because I have all these options.
All I have to do is lose some weight.
But I suppose you didn't think you had any options.
You're going to eat. Because what else you got going?
So the first thing you need to know is this piece of knowledge.
Your diet is not about your diet.
It's about pleasure.
You need to get pleasure and you've got to find a way to get it.
Maybe you learn to enjoy a sport that you also get exercise.
Maybe you fix your social life.
Maybe you fix your dating life.
Maybe you break up with somebody who's toxic.
You need to fix something to get more pleasure or you don't have a chance.
It's just an easy way to get pleasure.
Number two, you can manage cravings.
If you think that how much you like a specific food is sort of baked into your DNA, then you have a knowledge problem.
You don't have a willpower problem.
You have a knowledge problem. Did you know, for example, that certain simple carbs will make you hungrier?
If you were eating poor, simple carbs, let's say white rice and potatoes and white bread, those are great things.
Like, I love, love those things.
They are addictive.
The more of those you eat, the more of those you want.
Did you know that? Did you know that if you simply cut out, let's say, one food that's a problem food, but didn't change anything else in your diet, you would have limited the amount of pain to basically imperceptible?
So for example, when I want to get rid of one problem food in my diet, sometimes I get addicted to Snickers candy bars.
I go through like a cycle where I have to weed myself off them.
All I have to do is make sure I eat everything else that I'm still eating, the same amount, so I'm never hungry, because I'm still just eating, like always.
It's just that one thing I don't do.
And then it's easy. You know, I think about it when I want it, so I'd sure like that.
Two months later, and it's about two months, the thought of having a Snickers candy bar sounds a little bit gross.
And even if I were to taste one, I'd be like, I don't even know why I liked these before.
It was true with Diet Coke.
It was true with a whole bunch of problem foods.
So if you only take one problem food at a time, And make sure that you're getting pleasure in different places.
You won't even notice that you've replaced that one food with something that's a little bit healthier.
So that's a knowledge.
Knowing that you can change your cravings by these micro-substitutions is knowledge.
It's not willpower. It takes away the need for willpower.
Knowing that willpower is imaginary is probably the most important thing, because if you're working on changing your cravings or upping your knowledge, you're doing the right thing.
If you're trying to...
Let's say you had squirrels in the attic, but you thought you had ghosts, because you hear the noise in the attic.
If you hire a ghostbuster No matter how many times they tell you they've cleared your house of ghosts, you're still going to hear the stuff in the attic because it wasn't ghosts.
If you're trying to lose weight with this thing called willpower, you're putting all your energy in the wrong place.
So it helps just to know it doesn't exist so that you know to look somewhere else.
It sounds like a small point, but it's actually the biggest point.
If you believe this is real, then you're waiting for Santa Claus.
And it doesn't matter how long you wait.
Santa Claus isn't coming because he's not real.
Sorry if anybody didn't know that.
All right, number four, figuring out how to find flavor.
Did you know that the way you slice something will completely change how you perceive it enjoyment-wise?
I've done this experiment a number of times.
I've done it on camera as well, in which you can take just a cauliflower.
Now, I know some of you don't like cauliflower, so just work with me that this is just an example.
If you were to take a chunk of cauliflower and try to take a bite out of it, It would not be very satisfying.
If you took that same cauliflower, sliced it thin, smushed it into some salt and pepper on a breadboard, and then ate it, it would be like a delicious chip that happened to be maybe a little too much salt.
But the point is, you can take things that aren't delicious and turn them into something delicious fairly easily.
Many of you have seen my avocado example.
Where instead of making guacamole and eating a bunch of chips and stuff that would, you know, cause you to, you know, just pack on the calories, I take a regular avocado, slice it in half, take out the pit, just score it with a knife so it's easy to scoop out, put some soy sauce and pepper on it, and just eat it directly.
It's delicious!
But if you just took like a, I don't know, a spoonful, Of avocado and just ate it?
You might like it.
I mean, I could do that.
But it's not going to be delicious.
So how do you find things that are generally good for you?
Now, avocado has a lot of calories, but it's a good kind of fat.
If you didn't know that, that was a disadvantage, right?
But most of you knew that.
Did you know that eating peanuts, even though they're fat, is highly correlated with losing weight?
Because some kinds of fats...
Are very satiating.
And even though you take a hit on calories while you're eating them, they cause you not to want to eat for a longer period of time than you otherwise would have.
Did you know that? Did you know that sometimes when you're sleepy, your brain interprets it as hunger?
Do you ever have those days where you just can't stop eating and you don't know why?
It's like, why am I so hungry today?
Well, usually you're eating simple carbs.
That's part of it. It's making you hungrier as you eat.
But the other part is maybe you're tired.
And that's making you feel hungry.
Did you know that? Now, suppose you knew everything that I mentioned.
If you read my book, you might have known most of them.
You can see now how many people didn't know those things, right?
Have I mentioned anything yet that you said, oh, I didn't know that?
Probably. Probably. Because I'm talking about the stuff that people in the top, I don't know, 5% know.
Not the people who are in the top 90%.
You know, the people who are way smarter than the average, they don't know that stuff.
You've got to get yet another level up and then everything's easy.
And the level up is not willpower, it's just knowledge.
And you're almost there now.
All right, here's some more. So experiment continually with the shape and cut and flavor.
Find out how to add a lemon and pepper and soy sauce or whatever to your food because they can make stuff delicious without adding a lot of calories.
Learn how to reframe.
How many of you know how to reframe?
Well, you sort of know what I'm talking about, but not really.
Let me give you a specific example.
I've reframed alcohol to be poison, meaning that when I think of alcohol, just mentally, I think, oh, alcohol is poison.
And it makes it easier not to imbibe it because I just talk myself into it not being a beverage.
It's not really a beverage.
It's not entertainment.
It's poison. Now, I shared that technique, not knowing that it would make any difference to anyone else.
And I can't tell you how many people have come back and said, I completely took alcohol out of my life.
Now, I'm not talking about addicts.
I'm not talking about alcoholics.
I'm only talking about people who had too much alcohol in their life and wanted less.
And a whole bunch of people say, you know, I lost weight, I gave up alcohol, and it was primarily just that reframe.
Just calling it poison. Just in your own mind, and that's it.
Now, if you don't think you can reprogram your own brain to change your preferences, and that's what that was.
That's a reframe that changes your preference from alcohol as entertainment to, whoa, why would I drink poison?
It is that simple.
It's just focus and repetition.
That's all it takes to end association, really.
Association, repetition, and focus can reprogram your brain.
So in that reframe example, it associates alcohol with poison.
That's the association part.
You focus on it, because otherwise, you know, nothing happens.
And then you repeat it.
That's it. That's the entire technique.
Did you know that? Well, most of you are not hypnotists.
Most of you have not studied persuasion enough to know that it is that simple.
That that little reframe should work.
Doesn't mean it'll work for everybody, right?
Everybody's individual. But yeah.
Yeah, that little reframe can completely reprogram a preference.
I reprogram my preferences for Snickers candy bars.
My preference for Diet Coke.
I got that out of my life.
I reprogram my preference for a whole bunch of stuff.
And it's all doable.
And you can too. And that little reframe is just one way to do it.
There are lots of ways to do it.
That's just one way. So simply knowing that you could reframe things and change your preferences is big.
Knowing that it's technique, and the technique is continuously experimenting with different flavors and foods, continuously learning, and continuously experimenting with reprogramming your own preferences.
So that's the technique part.
If you knew hypnosis, this would all be more obvious.
And if you understood a system versus goal approach, which is really the macro theme of I Had a Fail Book, if you understood that, then you would be able to work your way into the knowledge on your own.
In other words, if you knew systems versus goals, I wouldn't have had to tell you any of this.
You would have already been exploring your own systems, and you would have ended up in the same place.
Now, That is my presentation.
And this is based on an observation I made years ago.
I would go out to eat with friends, and everybody would order whatever they were ordering.
And you can look at the plates of the people, and you can see that the types of food they ate was perfectly correlated with my subjective opinion of their knowledge of diet.
Like, the more they knew...
The more likely they had a certain kind of food, and the less they knew about diet, the more they had other kind of food.
And I thought, that can't be a coincidence.
It can't be a coincidence that the knowledge is the thing.
It feels like it should be the willpower, right?
And then eventually you learn that willpower is not really a thing.
It's a way you rationalize something after the fact.
It's the way you perceive it.
It's a subjective interpretation of what's happening.
It's just not real.
You can't pick up a handful of it.
You can't get a bucket of willpower.
I can't give it to you.
Here's my final argument for why willpower isn't real.
Because you have it in some topics and not in others.
If willpower were real, consistently the people who have it would be able to resist everything.
Doesn't work that way.
The people who can resist eating are recklessly drinking or having too much reckless sex or something.
But people tend to be able to resist some things and not others.
It's not because they have willpower about one thing.
If they had willpower, they'd probably just have willpower.
But what we have is different urges.
My urge for certain vices, let's say alcohol.
I've never had a great urge for alcohol.
I've enjoyed it in the past.
I don't do it now. But I never had a great urge for it.
If I did, I probably would do more of it.
And I would say, oh, I didn't have enough willpower.
But there was no willpower.
I just had a greater urge.
So once you understand that people's actions are based on just their operating on greater urges, And some urges are greater than others, then you understand everything.
Willpower isn't real. Now, you say to yourself, but Scott, what about the people who can say, I'll give up something today to get something better in the future?
Isn't that pure willpower?
To which I say, nope, because I can change it with information.
Here's some information, hypothetically.
I'll take a picture of you today, I'll digitally age it to your future, and then I'll show you a picture of yourself in the future not too happy about the choices you made today.
And it will reprogram you.
It's information.
I didn't change your willpower.
I changed your information by allowing you to imagine What you would look like, reasonably, you would look like if you continue the path you're on.
Some people can't imagine as easily what that's going to look like and then bring that pain to today.
I appear to have willpower, but I think I have better imagination.
In other words, I can really, really imagine myself suffering in the future for a decision I make today.
Like, I can bring that imagination of the future, I can bring it all the way into my stomach today.
I don't think most people can do that.
Is that willpower?
No. No, it's just imagination.
And I can get you to imagine better as well.
Just tell you to focus on it.
I'm doing it right now.
Let's do it right now. Watch me do this.
And it won't change your willpower one bit.
I'm just going to change what you focused on for a moment.
Imagine yourself in the future, 10 years from now.
The difference is, did you allow your weight to get out of control, or keep it out of control, or did you maintain a good weight today?
Now imagine yourself 10 years from now, you're barely walking up the stairs.
Your sex life is gone.
Your self-esteem, gone.
Your energy, gone.
Just imagine it. That's you, ten years from now, if you fuck up now.
If you stick that, whatever that thing is in front of you, if you put that in your face and you chew it and you put it in your stomach and you keep doing that, that's you.
Just imagine it. All right, now I'm done.
That's it. That was technique.
Did I change your willpower?
Nope. Because willpower never existed.
I couldn't change what doesn't exist.
Did I change your knowledge?
Yes. Not in a scientific way, but I added to your current understanding a little bit extra about what future you could look like under two different scenarios.
And that little bit of information that you brought forward into your present changed what you know, How you process it, what you focus on.
And in a very small way, some of you just got a boost.
So that's technique.
So, I rest my case.
Obesity is an information problem that we imagine to be a willpower problem.
Does anybody have any pushback?
No. Because you're all convinced.
It turns out I'm good at this.
All right. On that note, I'm going to end it here, because I want you to think about this as the last thing at the end of this livestream, because that'll keep it in your mind a little bit longer.
All right. Just keep it in your mind.
Just keep the frame.
Willpower doesn't exist.
If you increase your information, you can get what you want.
