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Content:
News and interview with author Carmen Simon
Politics, Rivian Electric Trucks Apple, Tesla FSD, Governor Hochul, Matt Gaetz Peter Navarro, Political Prisoners, Kristi Noem, Violent Crime Stats, MSNBC Polls, Arizona Election Paper, Georgia Election Integrity, Trump Gag Order, President Trump, FEC Testimony Blocked, College Protester Funding, Prosecutor Matthew Colenagelo, America's Government, Tax Cattle Citizens, RFK Jr., Maxine Watters, Bill Gates, Dr. Carmen Simon, Biological Attention Markers, Scott Adams
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's Cold Coffee with Scott Adams, and I'm pretty sure there's never been a better time in your whole life.
Today, not only our regular show, but toward the end I'm going to do a Interview with author Carmen Simon, and you're going to want to see that to learn more about how to be a more effective communicator and persuader, with her new book called Made You Look, available now for order.
All right.
If you'd like to take this experience up to a level that nobody can even understand, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tanker, gels, a Stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen now.
Go.
Oh, that's so good.
Gets better every time, I think.
Well, I'm going to start a movement, and I hope you'll all join me.
I think this is very important.
I realized recently, I just learned, that the name New York Yankees is racist.
And I'm going to start a movement to make them change their names to something less offensive.
Now, if you don't know the background, Yankees is actually a Dutch slur.
So apparently the Dutch were the original settlers in New York City.
And the Dutch often have names that sound like keys or Jan.
And so it was a Dutch slur to call them the Jan Keys or the New York Yankees or the damn Yankees if you want to be super racist.
And so as someone who has a non-zero amount of Dutch blood in me, I insist that the New York Yankees change their name to something far less Less offensive.
I would say, and they could keep the general concept.
It's just, you can't be Yankees.
I was thinking Yankers.
What do you think?
The New York Yankers?
No?
All right.
Let's just, let's just brainstorm.
That's just my first idea.
Don't, don't get too committed to that.
You might know that Jack Dorsey, after he left what was Twitter, Was working on a, what could have been a competitor to Twitter called Blue Sky, some kind of open, I think it was some kind of open source kind of thing.
But he's left the board of that company and he's endorsing X-Platform, and he calls the X-Platform a freedom technology.
I don't know if that's endorsing it, but kind of endorsing it.
Yeah.
In other news, Apple and the electric car truck company Riven.
R-I-V-E-N.
Is that how you say it?
Riven?
Or Riven?
Is it Riven like driving?
I'm driving my Riven, or is it Riven?
So that you're driving your Riven, which is... Ugh!
I hate to hear that come out of my mouth.
I'm driving my Riven?
Ugh!
No, but if I'm driving my Riven... Well, that's a good time.
We don't know why Apple and Riven are talking, but as some people have noted, you could probably buy Riven for $10 billion and Apple's doing a buyback of their own stock for $110 billion.
So they've got $10 billion laying around if they want to buy themselves a fully made car company.
You know, I don't know if you've spent any time up close with the Riven, but, uh, You know, there's one in my driveway almost every day.
And it belongs to Husway.
And it's sort of a cool looking vehicle.
It's got a good look to it.
I can kind of imagine that Apple, you know, being the design company that likes good design, they might like it.
It does have a look.
I'll say that design-wise it looks pretty good.
I don't know anything about the dependability or how much the drivers like it or any of that.
Honestly, at this point, I don't know how anybody can compete with Tesla, because Tesla has such an advanced bite on the self-driving.
How many of you are having the problem I'm having right now?
Which is, I'm sort of in the market for a new vehicle, but I'm thinking, when will be my last combustion engine?
Because I think that once I go electric, which I assume I'll go someday, I don't think it'll ever go back.
So I'm actually thinking in terms of, should I get my last gas engine and just sort of enjoy it for its, you know, nostalgic feel?
You know, get like a Bronco or something?
Or should I just go to the Tesla Y and get the self-driving?
So I think the, uh, it's kind of a tough choice.
Because whichever way you do, you're going to regret it.
Right?
If I don't get the gas engine, I'll think, oh, I wish I had, you know, another year with a gas engine.
And if I don't get the electric, I'm going to wish I had the self-driving car.
But I'll tell you what I wouldn't buy right now.
There's no scenario in which I would buy a Riven.
Because if you could have an electric, You're going to want the Tesla network for charging.
I don't know if the Riven is compatible with that yet or if it will be or what.
And secondly, you've got to have the self-driving part.
The self-driving part is going to be 50% of the value of the damn car.
And if there's only one company that can do it capably, I think they're going to own everything.
I mean, if you think about the fact, I was just watching a video of a Tesla self-driving car.
And it not only drove the entire way to the destination, but it picked down a parking space and parked in it.
It picked out its own parking space and then just parked perfectly in it.
So, I mean, how are you going to compete with that?
Yeah.
I mean, Tesla is probably right at the edge where they can make a case to lower your insurance costs by 50%.
Do you think that the $100 you spend per month on the self-driving software will pay for itself and lower insurance costs?
I think it will.
Eventually.
Not yet.
But yeah, I think it'll be like free money because it'll just lower your insurance costs eventually.
Or maybe they'll just track the percentage of time you're using self-driving compared to regular driving.
And give you some kind of discount.
You know, the more you do self-driving, the more of a discount you get at the end of the month.
Something like that.
Well, Bill Ackman, investor Bill Ackman, had an idea for retirement.
He said, give $7,000 per baby, and then you just wait.
Yeah, it would have nearly $48,000 saved for retirement when they turn 25.
But what's the difference when you turn 25?
Here's what I worry about.
That the inflation will eat up that $7,000 till there's basically nothing left.
I'm not sure that idea works anymore.
I don't know if the math works.
Once you add the inflation rate, which is likely to go up, I think it's going to chew it into nothing.
I don't even know if money will be worth something when a kid born today retires.
I mean, what are the odds of that?
What are the odds that a child born today will ever spend something like money?
Like as a retired person, not as an adult, but as a retired person in 65 years, you think somebody is going to be using money?
I don't think so.
I think money will not even be a thing by the time they retire.
I'm not sure.
Well, Boeing called off its planned launch of the Starliner, so they got this rocket ship that was going to go today, but they called it off two hours before liftoff.
I think the problem was that they didn't have all the whistleblowers on it yet.
I'll just let that sink in a little bit.
They had to delay it because they couldn't get all of the whistleblowers on it.
Okay.
Yeah, I'm just trying to start my own Conspiracy theories, that's all.
Just trying to start them.
Well, here's speaking of hoaxes.
Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, is getting some criticism because she said the following thing.
She said, she was talking about getting more educational opportunity to poor neighborhoods, and especially she was calling out the black neighborhoods in New York.
And she said that young black kids in Bronx don't know what the word computer even means.
They don't know what a computer is.
Wait, what?
The governor of New York thinks that black kids don't know what a computer is?
What?
Now, of course, the people on the right picked that up as, you racist!
How racist could you be?
Now, is that racist?
No, it's not racist.
It's hyperbole.
If Trump had said exactly these words, what would I say about it?
If Trump had said exactly what she said, I would say, he doesn't mean it literally.
He doesn't literally mean they don't know what the word computer means.
She's simply saying they don't have access to good technology, which is completely true.
Am I wrong to say that if Trump had said this, we would have supported him and said, he's just exaggerating.
You know what he means.
He means they need more computers.
Yeah.
So I'm going to give her a break on this.
I think that's fake news.
It was, you know, not the best choice of words, but it's pretty obvious she's using hyperbole.
She doesn't actually believe that black people don't know what computers are.
Even children.
She doesn't really believe that.
I mean, I'm not a mind reader, but I'm pretty sure she doesn't believe that.
It would be ridiculous.
So here's my take on the meta overall strategy for the Democrats.
And see if you can find this trend.
I'll talk about it as we go.
But it looks like they try to hide their bad behavior in complexity.
Have you noticed that?
Which is something I don't see the Republicans do as much.
So let me, I'll give you some examples.
The election claims.
So I'm going to tell you later about some election claims, you know, claims that there was some irregularity.
When you read the election claims, have you noticed that it's really confusing?
Because you got several states, you got Arizona, and something about Pennsylvania, and there's something about Wisconsin, but there's something about Georgia.
So first of all, you're confused about what state.
And then there's a whole bunch of claims that are like, oh, the paper was wrong, the custody, the ballots, there was a locked door.
It is so detailed and confusing.
There's somebody on Rumble who's just yelling fart a hundred times in the comments.
I don't think I have a way to block that.
So enjoy yourself.
Go nuts.
I assume you're drinking.
So that's the election claims.
Election claims are too complicated for the public to understand.
So you can't get activated to do something about something or vote differently when you're overwhelmed with complexity.
A confusopoly, if you will.
Now what about the lawfare on Trump?
If the only case We're the Stormy Daniels case.
We would probably get engaged and we'd understand it and we would understand that it's complete bogus BS.
I'll talk about that more.
But because there are 91 counts and there are four of them and we're not all lawyers and we're all confused about which story goes to which, it's really hard to know, did Trump do something or not do something?
I'm going to cover up the comments From everybody but locals.
I've got a troll there that I can't... Oh, let me see if I can get rid of him.
Let's see if this is fixable on my end.
Yeah, no, I don't have... So... Yeah, so there's just one troll out here who's trying to ruin the experience for everybody.
Hey, troll.
We've all seen it now 50 times.
Could you do something else?
Something potentially unhealthy for yourself?
Go eat some snacks?
Yeah, do something that's bad for your health.
That's what we recommend.
All right, back to my point.
The Democrats' complex strategy.
How about the funding of the protests?
Do you notice that the protests are complicated?
And then when you try to find out who's funding them, it's complicated.
Because there's groups, but then there's a group The funds the group, and then there's somebody behind that.
So they make it as complicated as possible, so you can't quite tell.
Yeah, I got to cover that up.
This could make me too angry.
Gosh.
So I won't be able to see the comments from anybody except locals, because there's somebody in rubble who's just pissed me off.
All right.
But you can see each other.
I'm just not going to watch them.
So I'm only watching the locals people, their comments.
All right.
What about the censorship octopus that Mike Benz always talks about?
You know, the big blob?
There are like literally hundreds of these entities censoring people around the world on behalf of the United States.
It's too hard to understand.
We just don't know how that all works.
It's a big old octopus.
So you can't do much about it.
What about Ukraine?
The whole Biden, Ukraine, CIA, weapons labs, Putin, NATO.
It's too complicated.
It's too complicated.
You just can't figure it out.
So, I think that that's the general reason that Democrats are holding on to power, is that people can't understand what's going on.
And I'll give you some detail on each of those stories as we go.
Meanwhile, Matt Gaetz was trying to get into prison to talk to Peter Navarro, who is, as you know, a political prisoner of the Nazi-like regime in power.
And I think that's fair.
I think it's fair to call the Biden administration a Nazi-like regime if they have political prisoners, if they're trying to put people in jail for their politics, and they're overtly racially discriminating, overtly, against white people.
I would say that that would be, that's pretty Nazi-like in its own way.
Anyway, so Matt Gaetz, a member of Congress, was told by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons that he couldn't talk to Peter Navarro, and the reason was, quote, Peter Navarro is too notorious to be interviewed by a member of Congress.
Too notorious to be interviewed by a member of Congress.
Does any of that sound legitimate to you?
No!
He's a political prisoner and they don't want him talking.
So you've got censorship on top of fuckery, on top of political prisoners, in our absolute criminal Nazi regime that's in power.
Kristi Noem is having some more fun.
She's trying to explain why her book said that she met Kim Jong-un, but when asked, she will not confirm it.
Rather, she's backing up to Even Jesse Waters asked her, you didn't have a conversation with him at the DMZ, did you, talking about Kim Jong-un?
And Noam said, I don't have conversations about my conversations with world leaders.
So her claim is, well, I'm not going to say I didn't talk to Kim Jong-un, because I talked to a lot of leaders.
And you know, maybe, maybe I did talk to him.
Maybe I didn't.
I'm not saying.
But I took it out of the book.
I took it out of the book because I don't talk about the people I talk to who are world leaders.
Let's just say that Megyn Kelly is not buying that story.
Maybe a lot of you are not buying that story.
It's possible.
It's actually possible that it's true.
I wouldn't say it's super believable.
But is it possible that she ever had a... I don't know.
Anything's possible.
This seems unlikely.
I think her political future has been destroyed by that book.
I hope she sells a lot of books, because it definitely ended her chances of being VP.
Meanwhile, Corinne Jean-Pierre got behind the podium, spokesperson for Biden, and said that violent crime is at a nearly 50-year low.
Violent crime is at a 50-year low?
Really?
Does that even sound like it's possible?
I don't even know.
Like, nothing is real anymore.
Literally everything is just made up.
I don't think the news even tries anymore.
They're not even trying.
It's just, what did this one claim?
What did the other one claim?
There's just no There's just no attention to any kind of reality.
Meanwhile, MSNBC has two new polls that were just released showing that President Biden is ahead of Trump by as much as five points.
So do you believe that at the same time there are polls that say that Trump is well ahead, like well ahead, like 12 points, that they're coincidentally right on time?
You got two new polls?
Two new polls.
All right.
Let me make sure.
Participants.
All right.
It looks like we've got Carmen's in the waiting room.
So it looks like that's working.
So we should be able to have our interview at 15 minutes before the hour, with author Carmen Simon, who's got a new book that you will be very interested in.
All right, so you got these polls.
Does anybody think that these polls are real?
Or was it just necessary for Biden to have some polls that look good, so they just told their toadies, go give us some polls that make us look good?
Because it doesn't look real to me.
But I also don't necessarily think the other polls are real.
Is polling even real?
I mean, I just don't even know at this point.
How can they be polling the same thing and be off by 17 points?
Can it be true that Trump is up 12 but also down 5?
17 point difference?
I mean, I don't think you can believe anything at this point.
It's almost as if they're trying to make polls look not real.
It's almost like it's an attempt to make you not believe any polls.
Why would they do that?
Why would somebody want you to not believe the polls before an election like this?
It's probably exactly what you think it is.
If they can make you not trust any of the polls by giving you wildly different poll results, Then when Biden wins unexpectedly, they'll say, well, haven't we been telling you that the polls are not reliable?
They have to debunk the polls before they steal the election.
Now, I'm not saying that I know that that's going to happen.
I'm saying that we all expect it to happen and it would look exactly like this.
So the fun part about this election season is that we've learned all of their patterns.
We know how they work.
So this is exactly on time and exactly on message.
Oh, guess what?
Suddenly the polls are super, super undependable for the first time in history.
Yeah, it looks like the whole too big to rig.
Trump says he needs to have a victory that's too big to rig.
It looks like they're going to make sure that there's nothing too big to rig by making sure that you don't know what it was supposed to be.
If you don't know what it was supposed to be, you won't know if it's not supposed to be the answer that they give you at the end.
So, I would say this is highly suspicious.
Highly.
Well, what else is suspicious?
Rasmussen Reports on X is my main source of, let's say, allegations about the past election, 2020.
Here are a few things that Rasmussen Reports likes to remind us of on a regular basis.
Now these are claims.
I can't verify the truth of these.
They're just claims.
In Arizona, this is talking about the 2020 election, there was only one official ballot paper.
So there's only one paper that was approved to be used in Maricopa County.
Yet 10 types were discovered by volunteers.
There were 10 types of paper.
Only one is legal.
How in the world do the people who print the ballots Not be aware of what the one approved paper is.
How is that?
And how can you tell it's the wrong paper by looking at it?
How in the world can the volunteers just hold it in their hand and know it's the wrong paper?
And know it's one of 10 different?
So nothing about this makes sense to me.
I don't know how you can tell it's the wrong paper.
I mean, could you tell 10 different flavors of paper?
I mean where the where the volunteer is going.
Yeah this is a brand new kind of paper right here.
This one, you know, the first eight that I categorized as totally different paper, but we're not done.
Yeah, this one tastes a little different.
I think this is a different kind of paper.
So my first question would be, can volunteers really tell counterfeit ballots?
Have you met the public?
Have you met the public?
So my other assumption is, the only way you could tell that the ballots were non-conforming is if they're way off.
They must be so different.
Somebody says watermarks.
Hmm.
I don't think it was watermarks because they would have said there was a watermark problem, but they're saying it's paper.
So the paper must have been so off that you could tell by holding it in your hand.
That's, that's pretty far off.
That's, well, that would be the allegation anyway.
And that, uh, the 10 types were discovered and that amounted to over 200,000 nonconforming votes.
They shouldn't have been counted, which is way more than the margin of victory.
For Biden.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, here's just a few things.
Just a few things that we know about the Georgia election 2020.
We know that a forensic audit was blocked.
We know that 100 drop boxes lack surveillance videos.
20,000 ballot images vanished.
13 election routers vanished.
10 Dominion tabulators vanished.
140,000 ballots are still locked up and you can't look at them.
And 148,000 mail ballot signatures are unverified.
Hmm.
That seems suboptimal.
It seems suboptimal.
Yeah.
All right.
Fart Boy is still there, so we'll just leave you, leave you block.
Meanwhile, there's the new Trump gag order.
And Trump said, this judge has given me a gag order and said, you'll go to jail if you violate it.
And frankly, you know what?
Our Constitution is much more important than jail.
It's not even close.
So Trump is basically saying, yeah, I'm gonna call your bluff.
Take me to jail.
Now, I say this a lot, but Trump reads the room better than any politician has ever read the room.
Like, he can feel the zeitgeist and then just surf it.
And he is correctly feeling that what his supporters want is for him to push this as hard as he can push it.
It is what we want.
Now, that's different from saying it's a good idea.
I think I would stop short of saying it's a good idea to go to jail, but it's definitely a good idea to push it if you're trying to make your base happy about it.
The thing we like about him is he doesn't give up.
It's sort of the thing that he's accused of the most.
You know, hey, let this election go, you know, you lost.
But it's hard not to like somebody who will never give up.
That's just an inherently attractive quality in a human.
Really?
You just never give up?
And not only does he never give up, but he's on the verge of winning the election.
At least, if you believe some set of polls.
So that's always impressive when somebody pushes that hard, fights every fight, pushes every door open, doesn't give up.
It's just an equality.
It's just a good quality.
We like it.
We're drawn to it as a leadership quality.
Meanwhile, I like that Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo is just routinely called corrupt.
Corrupt Prosecutor Colangelo?
I guess that would be an opinion, until it's proven.
So they bring in this Trump employee, who was the one who did the accounting for the business records, the one who actually decided what category things were and did the actual And said it was his job to decide how things were categorized and Trump never touched it and had nothing to do with it.
The entire case depends on Trump being aware and consciously deciding to make a change that the courts may decide was illegal.
Now the one most credible person, the person who knows the most, the person who personally made the changes, says Trump had nothing to do with it.
No connection at all.
That's the entire case.
So the case is over, but it just keeps going.
Like nobody told the prosecution they should just go home.
If the person who decides what category it goes in, the expense, says I did it myself, nobody else was involved, and there's no other witness, there's literally just one person who did the job and says I did it alone.
That's the whole case.
It's completely gone.
Do you know why you don't understand that case?
It's like, there's something about the statute of limitations, and there's something about it's not illegal unless there's a second thing that was the crime, and the first thing was trying to cover up the crime, but it's so complicated because the crime that you're covering up doesn't even have to be something you've been convicted of.
It could be an alleged crime, that they believe is a crime, and then the other thing was to cover it up, but only if the only reason you were doing it was to cover it up for political purposes, and if there was any other reason you were doing it, it was fine, and it's all complicated. I don't understand it.
So that's how they get away with it. If this situation were simplified, the public wouldn't put up with this.
Even Democrats wouldn't put up with this, if they could see it in its simplest form.
The simplest form is, we're making up some charges.
We're making up charges.
That's the simplest form.
They're just making up some shit to see if it'll stick.
And it didn't.
It's not even close.
They're not even in the zip code of a conviction.
Do you think Democrats know that?
Only the ones really watching.
The rest just know that Trump has 91 indictments.
That's all they know.
Apparently Stormy is going to be testifying today.
Will she testify that Trump gave her a gag order?
Yes?
No?
Alright, that's your dad joke for the day.
Dirty dad jokes.
All day long.
Let's see.
And then Byron York is talking about this rigged trial, as many of us believe it is.
Let's see, so I guess Trump's team wanted to bring in an ex-head of the FEC, the Federal Election Commission, to say that what Trump did was totally illegal.
And apparently he's not being allowed to testify.
Why would that be?
So the witness doesn't have direct evidence about anything in the Trump case, which might be how the judge gets away with this.
But he does have direct evidence as being the head person who decides what the law is in the federal election, or he was.
He would be the number one person to say, under these situations, This expense is totally allowed because whatever.
So the guy who would say this isn't, the person who would be the expert to say whether something was or was not illegal is not allowed to testify.
The one person who would know more than anybody else, except maybe the current head of that job, that it's illegal or not, and they're not going to let that person in.
Now that's a rigged trial.
That is a very rigged trial.
Now, I had trouble explaining it to you because I kind of quickly looked at the story before I came on today, but imagine if you will... Did I lose Carmen?
Oh, I did.
All right.
Well, I'm not sure if that'll work or not.
Oh, no, I do have you.
I think I still have her.
All right.
So the Harvard protesters were awakened today by Some Patriots, as they're called, blasting the National Anthem.
So all the people in their little tents got awakened early in the morning.
I hope they're morning people, because they got awakened really early in the morning to go to their job of protesting.
But here's the thing, you know, we keep talking about who's buying all these tents and why are all these people getting the same matching tents?
Like, who's behind it all?
And I have an answer for you.
You think it's George Soros who's funding it?
I know some of you said that.
Maybe.
I think it might be the parents of these protesters.
I think they all live at home.
And their parents said, hey, have you seen the news?
No, what's in the news?
I was playing games.
I didn't see.
Oh, terrible things.
Terrible things.
Really terrible.
Man, if I were younger, I'd be out there protesting.
I'd be on that campus.
What are you talking about?
Oh, I'll tell you, in my day, if this were me, I'd get myself a tent and I would go live right in the middle of the campus until Israel gives you everything that they want, or the college does.
And the kids would say, wow, yeah, that's a good idea.
I hate hearing all this news about what Israel is doing.
I think I'll get a tent.
I can't afford a tent.
And then the parents say, look, I care about this issue too.
I don't have time to protest.
You have plenty of time because you just live at home and don't work.
But how about, just a spitball in here, how about if I were to buy you a tent and then you could move out and you could move into the quad in your tent And move out of the house.
So I think it's mostly parents who are trying to get their kids out of the house by telling them they should go protest.
They buy them the tent.
No, I'm making this all up.
I think it's actually coming from Soros and Rockefeller and Pritzker and a few other rich Democrats.
And by the way, we do have, I think, confirmation That the college protests are the summer hoax?
You know, we're all waiting for the big summer hoax.
Who's going to hit the streets?
And who's Soros going to fund to be a pretend protest?
This is it.
Now, how much do you love the fact that we all called it ahead of time?
Literally for two years ahead of time, all of us were saying, all right, what will the summer before the election hoax be?
What will be on the streets that's completely artificial?
Well, here it is.
And you can identify it by who funds it.
You can identify it by the fact that the news really ignored who was funding it for a long time.
But they're on it now.
But if you're a casual news watcher, what do you know about the funding of the protests?
Nothing.
Nothing.
If you're not really deep in the weeds of the news, you don't know that the main Democrat funders are funding this thing.
For why?
Well, it might be so that they can get enough action going that they can cancel the election or do something drastic.
But it's certainly the summer hoax.
And it's another complex web of things we don't understand.
Apparently Alvin Bragg's lead prosecutor, that Matthew Colangelo, I mentioned before, he was paid $12,000 by the Democrat National Committee to be a political consultant.
Does that sound suspicious?
Because it sounds a lot like the Democrats are paying him to go after Trump.
That's what it looks like.
Doesn't mean it's true.
Could be.
Coincidentally, he's such a good political consultant that for the first time ever, they decided to give him a bunch of money.
Or it's exactly what it looks like.
The prosecutors are funded and elected by Soros, and then the Democrats get to tell them what to do and sometimes pay them to do it.
So yes, the justice system is completely broken.
Why does the average person not complain?
Because it's complicated, and they don't really understand it, and they don't know anything about this case, and they don't know the DNC may have paid somebody for some political consulting, and they don't know how it all fits together.
They don't see the big picture.
It's all complicated.
So, Elon Musk said in a recent get-together public event, he said that, you know, America America could end without free speech.
But here's what I think.
I like free speech, but I don't think America is going to end if you don't have it.
Because I don't think we've ever had it.
Not really.
And I don't think the country's ever been a democratic republic since I've been alive.
As far as I can tell, I'll probably tell you this every day, our government is just a criminal enterprise, like all other democratic countries eventually become.
The trouble with democracy is that as long as people have freedom, the rich people will use their freedom to take full control of the government.
Which is what happened.
It's exactly what happened.
So, if you have a democracy slash republic, you can pretty much, you know, just wind the tape forward until the rich people have all the control.
And here we are.
Exactly where you'd expect based on the design of the system.
Now, if the design of the system was such that rich people couldn't donate, and maybe just couldn't do anything, and you would watch them very carefully to make sure they weren't doing clever donations in indirect ways, maybe you could make a democracy work.
But in the current design, you guarantee that the rich people take control.
Probably right away, and probably always have been in control.
So the wars will be driven by the people who make money from wars, and the You know, climate change will be driven by people who can sell you solar panels, and it's exactly what it looks like.
A gigantic criminal enterprise.
But let me tell you where they went too far.
It's one thing to be called a tax cattle.
You know, basically we're livestock that pay taxes to other people so they can use our money.
But where I think they went too far is poisoning our food supply and making us pay for it.
Now, that alone would be enough reason to vote for RFK Jr.
Because he's very much on the poisoned food supply.
And he's not letting go.
And I really, really appreciate his patriotism and service to the country.
Win or lose, it's awesome.
So, I think they've gone too far with our criminal enterprise, and like the Mafia, they need to take care of their public a little bit better.
It's one thing to be part of a criminal enterprise, but you've got to take care of the criminals.
Right?
We're all in this together.
It doesn't work if you kill us all.
So please don't kill us with your poison food and poison pharma.
I don't think America is going to end because I think we've always been a criminal enterprise in my lifetime.
It worked out fine.
So the dark truth is that a criminal government is actually very effective.
Putin, for example.
Total criminal government.
Very, very stable.
Romney is admitting that the reason TikTok is going to get banned, or there's so much effort to do it, is strictly—well, he didn't say strictly, but mostly because TikTok was so pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel.
Now, we knew that, right?
Didn't we all know that it was because of Israel?
I was just checking the comments to see if the troll's gone.
But he's very dedicated, so we'll cover him back up.
So I can still see all the locals' comments, but only from locals.
All right, so I guess it was exactly what it looked like.
All right, I'll do a couple of quick stories, and then we're going to do an interview if I can connect with Carmen and Simon.
We'll test the Rumble Studio technology here to add a guest.
Anyway, Maxine Waters says that there's a bunch of right-wing organizations that are training up in the hills somewhere.
Now, I got really worried about those right-wing organizations that are training up in the hills in case Trump loses.
I guess they're going to do their armed revolution.
And I think that they're probably white supremacists.
And I've decided to form a posse to go hunt for the white supremacists, or as she calls them, right-wing organizations, that are hiding in the mountains.
And you can identify them by their khaki pants.
So when you go hunting for the white supremacists that are up in the mountains forming their secret armies, once you see a whole bunch of guys in khakis and baseball hats, that's them.
That is them.
And I assume that most of them were once in the U.S.
military, but probably left as soon as they found out that the military was looking for all their white supremacists, because that's why the military couldn't find any.
As soon as they started looking, all the white supremacists quit the military immediately, to be not detected, and they went up into the mountains, where only Maxine Waters knows they live.
But I believe everything she says, so I'm forming a posse to go get those damn guys, And we're going to have to stop this ourselves.
Who's with me?
Nobody?
All right.
Maybe I'll do something else.
RFK Jr.
says that Bill Gates uses philanthropy as a front to amass vast personal profits.
Now, you might know that I've challenged many of you publicly many times to explain to me how he's making money.
From any of us.
Well, RFK Jr.
just answered my question.
Here's the question.
Quote, talking about Gates, he gets tax deductions for giving money to the WHO.
OK, that's not making money.
That's just giving your money away.
All right.
He gains control of the WHO.
Arguably, but I thought the WHO was controlled by China, so I know, is it Bill Gates or is it China?
The WHO finances the health ministries in virtually every country in Africa, so he can say, Gates can say, as a condition of getting that money, this is what the WHO does.
And you have to show that your people are vaccinated, and then the vaccines are something that Gates owns a part of, so he makes money.
So, let's see, pulling all this together, because it's complicated, isn't it?
All the bad stuff hides in the complication.
There's a World Health Organization that makes sure that funds certain countries for their health care.
And if they don't vaccinate, they can't get the money.
So Bill Gates gets control of the World Health Organization.
This is RFK Jr.' 's take on it.
And then he gets a tax break for that, but he still pays money.
I mean, he still ends up out of pocket money, even though he makes a tax break.
But that he can influence them to buy his vaccines and then he makes all his money back.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
But it's a little bit of a mind-reading problem, isn't it?
So the mind-reading problem is that you have to read his intention.
If his intention is he's trying to save these countries and give them health care that they wouldn't have otherwise, then he's doing a real good job of it.
Now that would depend.
On the vaccines being a good idea.
I'm pretty sure he thinks it's a good idea, whether it is or not.
So I don't think you can read his mind to know that that's what's going on there.
All right.
I'm going to bring on my guest.
Let's see if this technology works.
Let's see.
We'll be testing to see if I can promote to moderator.
No.
Participants?
Let's see.
You got your microphone off?
Huh.
All right, let's try something else.
Going into duo mode.
So, the question will be whether I can find the user interface to bring her up to... I can promote to moderator, but that's not a choice.
Hey, there you are!
All right, turn on your microphone.
Your microphone's off.
Hello.
All right, I can't hear you because your microphone's off.
Okay.
Try again.
How about now?
And how about this?
I've got you muted.
Let me unmute you.
No, that's not working.
I can't hear you.
I can't hear you.
Your microphone.
How about now?
So, apparently you don't know what I'm saying, and I'm saying I can't hear you.
I can't hear you.
On my system, it says your microphone's off.
It says your microphone's off.
You have no idea what I'm saying right now, do you?
I do.
Oh, you do?
Yes.
Alright, I can't hear you, Carmen, because my computer is telling me that your microphone is off.
It's on mute.
Can you see a microphone icon toward the bottom of your screen or something?
I do, but it shows that it's not muted.
All right, so it's not working.
We'll try another minute here to get this working.
I don't know if she's got a bad microphone.
This is the first time we've tried it.
By the way, this is a beta test.
So the reason that this is not all worked out in advance is that this is the working it out.
This is the trying to make it work right here.
So you're all part of the experiment.
We're using the Rumble Studio.
How about now?
There's nothing.
Still nothing?
Nothing.
Because I tried.
So I'm using the technology of MIME.
Okay.
I have one too.
So she has a microphone, but there's a button.
You don't see a button to turn it on?
So scroll your page down to see if there's another choice that comes up.
It might be at the bottom of the page.
Let me try this.
Hold on.
How about this one?
Oh, there we go.
Yeah?
Alright.
Is that good?
So I can hear you now, but are people going to get a double?
I wonder if I need headphones for this.
Is there an echo?
I'm not hearing an echo.
And how about the users on Locals?
Do you hear an echo?
You hear both?
Yeah, so it sounds like we are being heard.
Well, let's try to do this then.
No echo and we have audio.
All right, how about that?
All right, so that was my user interface problem.
I think I was blaming you for not finding the right button.
On my system, it showed mute, but it actually was my computer.
I had to turn up my sound.
So I think everybody was hearing you except me, right?
This is about the neuroscience of attention, and now it looks like we have quite a bit of attention.
Part of your technique is putting an error in it.
All right, let's talk about this.
You have a new book.
I do.
It's called Made You Look.
Made You Look.
Just out now and you can buy it.
And I'm going to give the people a quick idea in my own words that are all wrong before you correct me, okay?
So one of the things you do, if you can see in this book, see this person hooked up to all these sensors and looking at a screen on the computer?
That's what Carmen does, puts these little sensors on their body and their head, EEG, ECG, GSR, facial coding, eye tracking, and you have them look at mostly slides, like business presentation slides, or is it other things as well?
It could be a presentation, it could be a website, it could be a video, anything that in somebody's view should capture attention, which is what the essence of the book is.
And the reason you even need attention in the first place is because quite often people remember better if they pay attention.
I'm saying quite often because it is possible to remember something without consciously paying attention to it.
We're all here in the business of communication, and usually you like to get credit for things that you made people look at.
So attention influences memory, and in turn, memory influences decision-making.
And the world moves around, and all the great things that you just talked about happen because people remember and decide.
And attention is at the root foundation of that.
So the thing that surprised me as I was looking through your book is how many categories of attention there are.
In other words, you can, you know, there's the, give us a few ideas, like attention isn't just simply looking at stuff, right?
Give us a little sense of how complicated that is to determine attention.
It is true.
There are a variety of ways in which the brain pays attention.
We pay attention with our brain.
And in fact, as I'm looking at the comments, I'd love to know what typically attracts your attention speaking to our audience.
And what would you like more attention to?
And as you're reflecting on those on those questions, just know that typically when you pay attention to something.
You pay attention in space and quite often that attention can be very focused like for instance when you have dinner with somebody at a restaurant and you try to be polite and you're only focusing in on that one person.
I'm even seeing this habit now where people are putting their phones with the face down just to Indicate that now everything is in focus and that focus is very sharp.
So that's selective attention.
But at some point from an evolutionary perspective, we know that it would not serve us well if we were so laser focused.
We have to widen our focus and we have to distribute our attention.
So that you can see there are some creepy crawlies hiding in the bushes and your survival may be in danger of sorts.
So it is possible to divide attention, but in that process, then you're missing some of the sharpness from the selective attention, but you have additional advantages.
So those are attention in space.
It's also possible to pay attention across time and that sustained attention.
This is what people associate with attention span.
And there is a myth that I'm sure that you've heard debunked before.
There is no such thing as a short attention span.
As a scientist, it bothers us greatly when people say, well, are you noticing that these days the attention span is getting shorter?
And the answer is no, it is not getting shorter.
The brain hasn't changed much.
No, it hasn't changed much in the past 35,000 years.
We're capable of paying attention.
In fact, to test this, we can ask our audience members here, what's the longest amount of times you have binge watched on a TV show?
And I guarantee that if they're genuine with us, their answers are not going to be in the seconds, their answers are not going to be in the minutes, their answers are going to be in the hours.
So is the whole thing that as long as we're interested, we have infinite attention?
We can stay definitely focused, and as long as the stimulus is interesting and or important.
Because sometimes you have to pay attention because something is critical, not because it's the most interesting thing you've ever seen.
Let's give the audience some takeaways, so they can get some of the functional, useful, how's it going to make your life better.
So, based on your data, and now you have a pretty big database, Of human beings looking at visual things and having certain physical, biological reactions.
Yes.
All right.
So, in theory, you could give us some ideas of what things you found out work better than other things for attention.
Can you break it down into some tips?
Yeah, definitely.
Let's consider some tips.
And in the book, we go beyond the multitude of attention types and we look at the intersection of two ways in which we pay attention.
By asking the questions, where is the brain looking?
And you can look externally or you can look internally.
And who's doing the looking?
Because sometimes you decide to look on your own, but sometimes somebody makes you look, as per the title of the book.
So let's consider some techniques on when you force somebody to look.
Let's just say that you want your children to pay attention to you.
You want your customers to pay attention to you.
You want your boss to pay attention to you.
So you're forcing the looking and you want them to look externally.
And, of course, you can manipulate physical properties of a stimulus.
Like, for instance, if you make something louder, of course, you'll pay attention if something was silent before that, or if you make something brighter or bigger if something was not so bright or not so big before.
So, as long as there's a contrast, here's a hard number that I like to use.
The brain will pay attention to a physical property of a stimulus if there is enough contrast between two items, and that contrast has to be in the 30 to 40 percent range.
In other words, for instance, a company that may not be differentiated enough is because the product that it offers compared to the competition is not that much different.
The brain cannot perceive the contrast.
So as you're reflecting on your own message, ask this question.
Sometimes it's not easy to answer.
Am I different by at least 30% from somebody else?
So contrast could be a good technique in terms of forcing somebody to look externally.
You don't always have to make them look externally.
You can also make them think.
I really like communication that guides you internally, and you reflect for a moment.
So, for instance, I was seeing this ad for an Alzheimer's organization, and they were showing the person that critically needs care, but the focus was not on that person, it was on the person that gives the care, because sometimes we forget that those people are being taken care of by somebody else.
And it just gives you that small moment of thinking and the joy of getting it.
So as you reflect on your own communication, are you giving others the joy of getting it?
The joy of getting it.
So you can get attention by tweaking their emotions or by tweaking their contrast, which is more of an intellectual thing.
So there's ways to get at them intellectually, by contrast, but also biologically, by what excites them.
And yes, and also you can think of it in terms of being a bit more provocative.
I mean, even hearing the conversation that you had with the audience before you and I started talking, there are a lot of provocative things that are being said.
Like, for instance, if you were to insist on the phrase poison pharma, that's not a combination of words that you typically hear.
Mixed together.
And unfortunately, what happens, especially if you operate in the business space, people are often way too cautious and they baby other people's brains.
And they don't want to challenge the status quo.
They don't want to impose any tension.
And just like with that contrast in some perceptive power, like for instance, something is bigger by 30% than something else.
You can't have a contrast in emotion.
In other words, not all emotions are going to get attention and be memorable.
You really have to have a much stronger stimulus.
And I'm noticing these days, as I've been doing a lot of these neuroscience studies, you showed the cap earlier.
That it does take a stronger and more intense stimulus for the brain to focus and stay with you for a while.
Have you picked up any changes in what it takes to get somebody's attention?
And now you said that we have good attention spans if we're interested enough, but does the average person looking at, let's say a PowerPoint slide deck, do they have the same brain that we did 10 years ago?
I'm noticing that the threshold for stimulation has changed.
So even though the brain itself is still the same organ, the way that we build our habits is to now crave more and more stimulation.
So we will stay with you for a while if you give us something, like even our attempts to fix the microphone, for instance, it just creates this paucity of stimulation.
So people very quickly can reach for their phone.
We're only a click away from being turned off.
And if you're not the source of strong stimulation, then the brain is very adept and has a lot of choices these days.
So here's the funny thing.
For those of you who are watching, the audience, when you saw me struggling to get the technology working and it looked like it wasn't going to work and maybe I'd have to bail out and everything, what I was thinking during that period was not, oh no, Everything's going wrong.
What I was thinking is, there's no way you're going to turn this off.
I was thinking, you're going to have to wait at least to see if I can make this work.
Because you know you wanted to see me fail.
Like, you know, in public.
Because I always say that danger is the thing that keeps people interested.
So you have to have some, like, somebody's going to go off the rails.
Somebody's going to say something that gets them cancelled or something.
So when you and I were trying to make this work, The whole time I was thinking, oh, this is kind of perfect.
I wasn't having a care in the world because it was either going to work or not work, but one way or the other it was going to get a lot of attention.
And so I was just sort of conscious of that, that it was working, even though it was a disaster.
Like the disaster worked just the way I wanted it to work.
And turning what you just said into a practical guideline for everyone, consider this a method of priming.
So one of the reasons why people don't pay attention is because they're not ready to pay attention.
And we observe this in business all the time.
Let's just say that you have a sales presentation that has 20 slides and what's something very critical for your product appears on, let's say, slide 18.
By slide 18, you may have done something that would have diverted your audience's attention away.
So right before that slide, you need a primer.
You need something, something that says to the brain, now something important or interesting, or ideally both is about to happen.
Let me ask you that.
Do you want to prime right before the thing you're priming for, or can you prime like, like 10 minutes before?
I love that.
I love that question.
And the answer depends on what we were just talking about in terms of the intensity of the stimulus.
Because if I use that phrase that you're using in terms of poison pharma, that is a loaded phrase that will last a while in terms of intensity.
If it's something that's a weaker stimulus, like for instance, you may just use a gratuitous photo of somebody naked, that may just last there for a few fractions of a second, and then it's just gone.
So if you have something intense, you can rely on that primer.
And what do I mean by priming?
Is inviting the brain to react to something based on what it just experienced.
And you can have a perceptual primer, you can have a semantic one, like we were doing with the phrases that you're using, that affective one or emotional one.
So give us some examples, because we always use examples.
Well, so for instance, let's just think of a semantic one as one that gives you the joy of getting it.
So I was just looking at an ad not too long ago, and you just mentioned the phrase dad joke.
This ad was created by Durex, you know, the condom company.
And it only had words on it.
I love ads that only have words because they really have to make you think.
And the word said, I don't need a condom.
And the conclusion was our favorite dad joke, and this comes from the Durex company.
I don't need the, I don't need a condom.
Okay.
It took me a while to get it.
All right.
But it does.
So it takes just a moment.
And then you think about it's our favorite dad joke and it gives you that small aha moment.
And by the way, with the, with the EEG signal, we can calculate the Eureka effect.
So we know where to look in the brain and what brain waves to analyze in order to see if the brain has just experienced that aha moment.
Yes.
But bring it back to the priming.
On the Durex example, I get that that's memorable, but is that priming?
What's the priming part?
That would be the priming.
If let's just say I was in a business presentation and I wanted to get the brain ready, so because that was just such an incongruous moment, so something that maybe people did not expect, now I'm ready for what happens next.
I'm willing to sacrifice one stimulus in favor for what happens immediately after.
And that's an example of a semantic one, because you have to think about the meaning, and also an affective one, because it's a bit more intense than your typical business stimulus.
So is priming, in this sense, it's more than just giving you, let's say, a foreshadowing of the specific content, but rather it's just gonna, is it just rebooting your brain so you're open to anything?
Exactly.
So you're in a ready state.
The reason we pay such little attention quite often in business context, and we forget most of the things that we're exposed to, forget our lives almost as quickly as we live them, is because we are not in a state that is ready to receive.
Would it be fair to say that people sort of get an inertia of thinking?
In other words, they're thinking in their logical, drive this train right down the tracks, and you got to derail the train before you can get to think that anything besides the train going down the tracks is going to happen.
Exactly.
Yeah, so in terms of practical guidelines, if you think about this notion of habituation, which is what you just said, if you're showing people, let's just say that you're in a business context, and slide one will have some text and charts, and slide two will have more text and charts, and slides three will have more text and charts.
After a while, your brain starts learning to predict what happens next.
What's the likelihood that the next slide is also going to have some text and charts?
But if you jolt the brain out of its habituation with one of these primers we're talking about, so whether it's something perceptual or whether it's so now you don't have a chart in text, you just have an intense photo, for example, and then you go back to your typical stimulus, the brain has to be jolted somewhat in order to, Reminded that you cannot predict the next moment.
Nice.
So unpredictability.
So I'm trying to relate this to my hypnosis background.
So there's something about making people uncertain and confused, which makes them ready for any certainty that you as a leader or a hypnotist give them.
So you want them to make them think they don't know what's going to happen or they're not in control.
And then you give them the answer because everybody wants certainty.
So if they think they have certainty, they don't need any.
But if you scramble them, they're going to be looking for certainty and then you give it to them just in time.
Is it similar to that?
That's the hypnotist take.
Definitely similar.
And I like how you're associating with this.
And of course, the moment that you give the brain a modicum of uncertainty, you can guarantee some attention because we cannot afford to not know what happens next.
If you think about the brain, the most important thing is what happens next.
And the reason we enjoy that which is familiar and that which is predictable is because we can better say, this is what will happen next.
The moment that you introduce that element of surprise, and surprise, by the way, is always biologically bad for the brain, because what is surprise but a failure to predict?
Then, of course, we're attentive because the difference between what the brain expected and what happens in real life is how the brain learns.
I think this is a very important practical guideline for all of us to reflect on because as you think about the content that you create or the way that you want to grab other people's attention, I often wonder how do I create those moments where people think something is going to happen and in fact something else does?
Surprise, yes.
And surprise is different from novelty, by the way, because sometimes people treat those elements interchangeably.
But novelty is something that you haven't seen or experienced before.
Surprise is something that you have experienced before, but did not expect.
Like, for example, you have an eggshell and suddenly it opens and a baby elephant comes out of it.
You have seen the eggshell, you have seen the baby elephant, but perhaps not combined together.
Now another thing I saw in the book that interests me in particular, because it's based on something I used to do when I gave presentations in my corporate days, before I give a presentation on the boring subject in the world, which was like the budget, like just impossible to keep people awake during that, I would hand out Tic Tacs.
Yeah, the little lozenge thing, the tic-tac.
And everybody will take a tic-tac.
So that's the first thing I learned.
You say, pass these around.
Everybody takes one.
Like, nobody says no to a tic-tac.
That's weird.
But it also gets them physically moving.
And to keep somebody awake, if they're chewing, they'll stay awake.
People don't fall asleep while their mouth is moving.
And so I found that you could actually keep people a little bit more awake By making them move while you were talking to them, and the movement is just eating them the tic-tac.
So you said, yours was a deeper, complex thing, but you said something about getting people moving as part of the process.
I like that the reminder one of the hottest trends in neuroscience right now is this notion of embodied cognition, because the scientists are recognizing more and more that the way we come to know things and perceive things and talk about politics or talk about the boardroom and the bedroom.
Is not by simply looking around us and building some mental representations that are abstract.
What we know and what we perceive and what we remember and what we decide on comes at the intersection of the brain and body interacting with the environment.
Therefore, embodied cognition.
So whether you give people the tic-tac-toe chew, or what we would recommend in business is inviting people to physically take notes.
I'm hoping that this conversation is useful to you, and maybe you have jotted a few things down.
The more you physically write, not electronically write, the stronger the attention and the memory for those segments.
If you have customers, invite them to an experience center if your products afford you to do that.
But yes, getting the brain and body in motion will definitely contribute to your attention and memorability factor.
Here's a practical tip based on that.
When I would study back in my school days, I would try to take the same information in as many ways as possible.
So I'd read it, but I'd also rewrite it.
Sometimes I'd draw a picture.
Because the process of turning the idea into a picture really solidifies it because you'll remember the picture and then you'll work backwards to what it was.
But I would also sometimes sing it or hum it.
I'd be like, you know, two plus two equals three and I'd be drawing and stuff.
So I would try to get as many physical bodily Connections to the stuff.
And it really made a difference.
I think so.
It's a smart technique.
I wish more people use it for themselves.
Um, if you're here in a session like this, because you want to coach others, perhaps even your children teach them how to keep the body in motion.
We are at a strange point in our society because we're used to having so many things come to us.
Like the food comes to you.
You no longer have to do that.
Your friends come to you.
You can meet them online.
But the moment that you put the body in motion, the brain is put in motion as well.
And the opposite is true as well.
You keep your body still, then your cognition slows down also.
That makes sense.
So, um, you know, the, the, uh, the, the amount of information in this book is kind of, uh, it's amazing.
So I'm gonna have to spend a lot more time looking at it, but there were in the end, there's like a whole checklist.
of things that you could have done in your presentation to have made it better, and I won't read them all.
But you've done something that, as far as I know, has never been done, which is you've captured the biological markers for attention.
And it seems to me that there's some AI companies that's going to give you a billion dollars for that, because nobody else has it, right?
If you could teach your AI to make you a PowerPoint slide or a video, And then one of the databases they had access to was, how does this affect people biologically?
Where do I put the image?
How often do I mix it up?
When do I surprise them?
When do I give them novelty?
That's all something an AI could do if it had the data.
If they had the data, and you're absolutely right.
We're sitting in a good position to have some biological markers for attention, for working memory, for motivation to keep watching, because it's one thing to watch something and pay attention for two minutes.
It's another.
We know it's possible.
But it's another to pay attention for 30 minutes for hours on end.
So you have to be motivated enough and have the biological endurance to do that.
They're looking at how much the brain enjoys the experience and how alert and awake it is.
And we do that by going beyond self reports, because you could ask your audience what attracted your attention?
What kept you going?
What did you like?
What did you not like?
And people will tell you, but quite often those self reports are unreliable.
So as AI models get trained, Are they getting trained on survey data that quite often relies on memory that is fallible?
So it's good to use these kinds of signals and also debunk some myths.
Like, for instance, it surprised me that complexity is actually more of an attention grabber than simplicity is.
Well, that's a double-edged sword.
I don't know if you heard my earlier presentation, but you can also hide all your fuckery in complexity.
So it's a place to diversify somebody's attention until they can't find the needle in the haystack.
But I could also see how complexity would attract you, because you want to unravel it.
It's like, oh, what does this mean?
I'm going to spend a little time unraveling this.
I can see how it could work both ways.
So true.
And I really like your viewpoint.
And I think, especially from a scientific perspective, it's good to define the terms because there's complexity, there's complication, and there's chaos.
And often, I think in the latter two, you could probably hide a few more things.
But complexity, as long as you present to the brain some items that are not only large in volume, but also diverse and interconnected, And you add some meaning to this complexity that keeps the brain going and you manage that complexity well, then the brain synchronizes a lot better with a complex stimulus than with a simple and quite often simplistic one.
So if we turn this into a practical guideline, I would say complexify in a manageable way versus simplify your communication.
Got it.
So give us, let's say, what would you say If you were going to give somebody, say, the best operational tip, what's the one thing out of everything you learn from the studies, the sensors you put on people and your data, if you're going to make a PowerPoint or a video or something, what's the one thing you're going to make sure you absolutely do?
Here's something that you can reflect on as we reach the end of the conversation, and it will make you think.
It will not necessarily be easy to implement, but it will be very helpful.
I found through all this research that one concept that comes up again and again is this notion of fractals.
Are you familiar with fractals?
If you insist on some elements that maintain their properties at any level of magnification, like if you look at a tree, The shape of the tree is represented in any kind of tree branch.
It has the same shape as the bigger tree.
And if you look at a smaller branch, yet it still maintains the same properties as, let's call it, the father tree.
Or if you go to the grocery store, look at a head of broccoli.
You'll see that the broccoli itself has some properties.
And then as you zoom in, every single single little head of broccoli has some same properties, or a cauliflower.
It's cauliflower all the way down.
And as you reflect on your communication and the way that you want to attract attention and remain memorable, pick a theme, something that repeats at any level of magnification.
And the moment that you have that set of properties and you keep going again and again and again, repetition, by the way, is a sort of priming.
Then as long as you make it that it's cauliflower all the way down, it doesn't matter if you're speaking to your audiences for two minutes, For two weeks, for two years, if you come back to the same theme and you make friends with fractals, you will be able to keep people's attention for a long time.
I think politicians do this very well.
So fractals is a tough word to wrap my head around, but let me ask you if I did it right.
So today when I did my live stream before we talked, I said I had a theme that is that the Democrats were hiding things in complexity.
And then I gave five different stories where there were some complexity and maybe some bad stuff was hidden in there.
Is that a fractal?
That is definitely a fractal because if you were to then expand on those themes, we could be here for another five minutes.
We could be here for another five hours and it would be the same set of properties, the same set of swirly equations.
So for instance, so yes, pick your theme and some supporting points.
And as long as you're very consistent with those and you believe in them and they have great impact on society too, that's always very, very helpful.
Then you can keep the brain going for a while because you're giving it the best of both worlds.
You're giving it some familiarity because it's the same repetition at any level of magnification.
But with each elaboration, you can add some of those elements of surprises.
You can complexify and you can keep the brain motivated to stay with you for a while.
I'll tell you, my biggest pet peeve is when somebody wants to explain something to me and they're waiting to give me the answer at the end.
And my brain can't handle that.
So it'd be like, you know, Josue, my builder handyman here, he'll say, can you have a minute?
He'll say, you know, over by the eaves, there's this board that covers the thing, and then there's the corner.
And I'm like, where's this going?
Where's it going?
And the answer is, you know, there's a leak.
And I can fix the leak.
So what I want to hear is, I can fix the leak.
And then after I hear that, Every detail he gives after that is now salient.
It's like, oh, okay.
So I'm understanding because the boards come together.
That's why there's the leak.
But if you start with, okay, the boards come together.
I'm like, I have no structure.
I have nothing to pin it to.
So is that close to what you're talking about?
I really like what you're saying in terms of elaboration, because that's what builds up the complexity.
And especially in business, in our personal relationships as well, you have to earn the right for that elaboration.
Right.
In your relationship with the plumber, that may be a little bit different, because if your plumber had been Elon Musk, and he started with the details at first, and something that maybe initially didn't make sense, because your relationship is probably different, he has earned the right to elaborate first, and then give you the... No, I'd be like, Elon, no, get to the point, get to the point.
But I think what's important for people to recognize is that sometimes we are, let's say, in a business context, and they may have heard the guideline, well, tell a story, because a story is just so attention-grabbing and memorable.
And that's not the case.
You have to earn the right for those details, and you have to earn the right for the story.
Sometimes you do have to start with a conclusion, depending on your rapport.
So if you start with a conclusion, you need to back it up, but it should also be like a surprising conclusion.
In other words, it should have some novelty as well, such as, I'm going to show you over the next 40 minutes that everything you knew was wrong.
Would that be a good one?
Yes, so you can start with something that challenges the status quo, challenges a personal norm, challenges the way that you're thinking in some way.
Not that many business people know how to do this, by the way.
They want to start by not discarding accuracy.
They want to be precise and correct.
You're talking about those budget meetings.
You don't want to disregard accuracy in a budget meeting.
But why not?
In the book, by the way, you'll learn about this notion of exaggeration and discarding accuracy whenever you can.
In a way, that's mindful and playful.
So as you think about your hooks, for instance, sure, some unusual stats could do the trick.
But what about an unusual photo or something that you did not see, you did not predict, like we were talking earlier?
I'll just tell the viewers that several years ago you helped me build a presentation, a slide deck that went with my public speeches.
I was giving corporate speeches, and I had an experience with that that was so uniform.
I'd give my talk, And usually it was a group of people who were there because they wanted to hear me.
So, you know, they were a friendly crowd.
Everything would go great.
And then afterwards, maybe I'd sign some books or say hi to people.
And people would come up to me and I swear to God, every group said the same thing.
Who made your slide deck?
Like, who did that?
Because it was so, so different than anything that I'd ever done or even seen, really.
So I can confirm that the science that you were putting into it even a few years ago, before you did this book, was already completely lighting brains on fire.
Like people were just like, like, what did I just see?
And they would talk about it and they would come, they would act.
That's the ultimate test, getting somebody to act.
And they all acted the same way.
Where did you do this?
How did you do that?
And, you know, I would tell them that you helped me, etc.
So I recommend this book, Made You Look, Carmen Simon, PhD.
And thank you so much for joining us, Carmen, and making us smarter.
And anybody who reads this book is going to do a lot better in your presentations and getting people's attention and basically your life in general.
So even if you're not in this kind of business, You might be interested for the academic, intellectual, why does something work and something doesn't.
It's really a fascinating drive inside the brain.
It feels like taking a trip inside a brain.
That's what it feels like.
Thank you so much for all the kind words and thank you for all the attention that we got here in the chat box.
And keep in mind that if you do attract attention, you can stay on people's minds.
And when you do, you will live longer.
All right, great.
Thanks for joining, and I'll talk to you later.
And everybody, thanks for joining, and I'll see you tomorrow at the same time, same place.
