Episode 1334 Scott Adams - I'll Change Some of Your Lives For the Better Today. Coffee and the News
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - MLB will call tickets vs Georgia voter ID - Corporate control of government - Aggressively obeying a bad law - A federal, non-binding vote standard - Reparations solution - Solution for in-person voter ID ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Hello everybody, come on in. Yeah, it's time. That's right, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best time of the day, even
View segment →on a holiday. And if you'd like to enjoy this to the maximum potential, and I know you do, all you need is a copper mug or a glass, a tankard, a tall style, and a can, a jug or flask or vessel of any kind without a hole. Put your beverage in it. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasu…
View segment →all kinds of news today. Let's start with the bad news and the good news. The bad news is that rapper DMX is on life support for some kind of an overdose. The good news is I didn't know he was alive. So it turns out the rapper DMX was alive. I was pretty sure he was already dead. But he's on life su…
View segment →everything in one story. Have you noticed that? You know, you have lots of different stories about politics, but every now and then there'll just be one story that just sort of combines everything bad into one thing. And it turns out to be the Georgia voting law. So let's talk about that. So as you…
View segment →ing why should I pay money for your problem? And then you're done. That's a good argument. Why should I pay money for your problem? Are you paying money for my problem? You know, so you have an argument at least. But corporations have no argument. And here's how I would do it. I would say corporati…
View segment →ust monitoring the comments as they're going by. Yeah, there's literally no argument against that because the technology already exists. The entire price of it is trivial. Like the cost is almost nothing. I mean it rounds to nothing. It's so cheap. It's instant. It solves the problem. Why not? Well…
View segment →They have less air conditioning. I didn't see that mentioned but don't you think the air conditioning, just the forced circulating of air, wouldn't that make a difference if it's an airborne virus? If you have less AC wouldn't that give you less problems? I don't know. They're younger of course, mu…
View segment →or now. So don't worry if this seems like too much of a simplification and you say to yourself but you're leaving something out. It doesn't matter for a reframing. You're trying to keep it simple so that people can hold it in their minds. So if I get this about eighty percent right that's all you ne…
View segment →nvironment and test all these little hacks you'll have a subjectively better life, some number of people just heard that and said huh, I'll give it a try. And for those people they just became authors. They don't know yet but they're going to find out. So this is one of the things that keeps me int…
View segment →about something that will never be in the news. They'll never, it will never be in the news. So if you think you know it because you saw a news item then it's not that. No anyway I shouldn't have teased you about that but the point is I just want to give you this general caution that just about ever…
View segment →Hello everybody, come on in. Yeah, it's time. That's right, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best time of the day, even on a holiday. And if you'd like to enjoy this to the maximum potential, and I know you do, all you need is a copper mug or a glass, a tankard, a tall style, and a can, a jug or flask or vessel of any kind without a hole. Put your beverage in it. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's gonna happen right now all over the world. Ready? Go.
Excuse me for a moment while I say ahhh. Ah yeah, that's good. That's good.
Well, we've got all kinds of news today. Let's start with the bad news and the good news. The bad news is that rapper DMX is on life support for some kind of an overdose. The good news is I didn't know he was alive. So it turns out the rapper DMX was alive. I was pretty sure he was already dead. But he's on life support from an overdose. Apparently I just saw the future. But we wish him well and his family well.
Listen, I feel as if this Georgia voting law stuff somehow captured everything in one story. Have you noticed that? You know, you have lots of different stories about politics, but every now and then there'll just be one story that just sort of combines everything bad into one thing. And it turns out to be the Georgia voting law. So let's talk about that.
So as you know, some corporations are giving them a hard time for changing their voting laws. Allegedly, according to Major League Baseball and Coca-Cola and Delta, these changes in the laws will make it more racist and harder for Black people especially to vote, and people of color, low-income people in particular.
Now this is an interesting take because the biggest issue is about the requirement for a legitimate identification. You would think maybe a basic thing to ask for in an election: can you identify yourself as a citizen? But no, big companies say that's kind of racist. Yet Major League Baseball, as James Hurston pointed out in a tweet, Major League Baseball requires a photo ID to pick up your tickets from will call but boycotts Georgia for voter ID laws.
Now why does Major League Baseball require ID to pick up tickets? Why do they do that? What's the point of it? Because if you can just have somebody sign a piece of paper that says I am who I say I am, why is that not good enough? And who exactly would cheat on will call picking up tickets? Because wouldn't the real person just come in behind them and say, "Uh, where are my tickets?" And then they check and they say, "Oh, somebody's sitting in your seat. We'll send somebody to get them out of your seat because it's obviously you."
So I can't think of literally anything, any process in the world in which you need a photo ID less than picking up tickets, where they can check immediately if you're the wrong person. Because for the next three hours you're sitting in the wrong seat and it's got a number on it and you could just go look and say, "Hey, you're in the wrong seat." Literally nothing requires an ID less than picking up will call tickets.
Now of course you always have to ask yourself, maybe the real reason is just it's easier, right? It might just be easier. You hand them your ID and then they're looking at the name. But if you were to say your name, you'd go up and say, "Hi, my name is... what? My name is Bob Circle." "Can you spell that?" "Yeah, B..." And every transaction would take 10 minutes. "Can you spell that again? I'm looking in the wrong place." Versus here's my ID. You go, "Ah, Scott Adams. It's got Adams. There you go."
So the point is funny, but I would imagine it has less to do with identification and maybe more to do with it just being faster. That's just a guess. But it's a good point. We have a world in which you need ID for all kinds of things, and they're all less important than voter ID.
All right. Do we want a political system in which the corporations run the government directly? Because that's what's happening. It's bad enough that the big corporations have influence. They've got money and donations and they've got lobbyists and stuff. And we're already concerned that big corporations are too involved in making government decisions. But now they're doing it somewhat directly, just saying we won't do business, we'll boycott if you don't change your laws, etc.
And you have to ask this question. It's one thing for a company to pursue its own self-interest with donations and lobbying and stuff like that. We kind of accept that. You know, we complain about it, but we kind of accept it if there's some transparency. It's better. But do you want them directly to boycott somebody to change a law? I'm not sure we want that. But we're sliding into it.
However, it looks like the corporations may have picked the wrong state to take a stand. And I tweeted this this morning. Of our 50 states, there are lots of states where you can just kick Republicans all day long. It's like, hey, there's a Republican. Let's go kick him. Anybody want to join me? Yeah, let's go kick the Republican. We'll do it all day long. I'm not entirely sure Georgia is one of those states because they seem to be having an attitude about it. They don't like to get kicked.
So what we're seeing is a response in which they want to remove the monopoly. I guess there's some special legal rights that Major League Baseball has. And then the state is saying, well, let's take those away if you want to play hardball. It works both ways. So the state is actually just going after Major League Baseball. Just take them down. Trump is after them, of course. Republicans are after them.
I have a real question about how many Republicans are going to be drinking Cokes and Diet Cokes this week, but I think less. I think there will be fewer Republicans drinking Diet Coke. I don't know if that makes a difference to somebody as big as that.
But by the way, would you like to know how to quit your Diet Coke or Coke habit? I can tell you how I did it, and it's easy and hard at the same time. It's easy to know how, but it's about two months that are kind of hard. All you do is only do that one thing. Just stop drinking Diet Coke. Don't try to quit anything else at the same time. Just the one thing. Because if it's only one thing missing in your life, you can distract yourself with other stuff. But you don't want to be going on a diet at the same time you're trying to quit your Diet Coke habit. That's just too much. Just pick that one thing and say for two months I won't have a Diet Coke.
And what's going to happen? Let me tell you what's going to happen. Yeah, you might drink more coffee. I did that and it helped. Here's what's going to happen. For the first week you're gonna crave that Coke or Diet Coke if you have a habit. I had a really bad habit, 12 a day. But if you wait two months, this is my promise to you, if you wait two months without drinking a soda, soda will feel disgusting to you in two months and you'll never want one again. So the hard part is two months. But it's not like cigarettes. I hear, I've never quit cigarettes, but I hear that when you quit cigarettes you go a long time still wanting one. Is that true? Can anybody confirm that?
Whereas a Diet Coke, it actually turns disgusting. The thought of putting what looks like a science experiment in your mouth, because it doesn't really register even in your mind as food or beverage exactly. It's almost like a lubricant or a chemistry experiment. But boy, when you're hooked on it, it's just the best thing in the world, as I was.
So if Coca-Cola would like to play hardball with Georgia, I would like to tell you how to drink less of their product, and it's pretty easy. And by the way, I'm not an expert on the health impact of soda, but I don't think it's a lot that's going to be positive, right? I don't have the data to say that it's negative. A lot of people say that. I don't have that data. But I'm sure it's not helping you. I'm sure it's not a health food. I feel safe in saying that.
All right. So, and then I think Mike Cernovich was pointing out that the county that was going to get a hundred million dollars of economic benefit from the Major League game voted for Biden. So the county that's hit hardest by Major League Baseball pulling out of the All-Star Game is Democrats and Biden voters. So got what they voted for.
I would like to say that this is a weird issue that we're all concerned about because in my opinion baseball is the most useless of all sports. Now I know, I know some of you love your baseball and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. We're all different, right? So you can like one thing, I could like another. But I would point out that there's a saying in America, I think it's an American saying, that something is so boring it's like watching grass grow. Have you ever heard that? It's so boring it's like watching grass grow.
Baseball is the only spectator sport in which 99% of the time that's all you're doing. You're actually just watching a big field where the only thing that's happening is the grass is growing. Now you can't see it, but it's the only thing happening. So I don't know why people like baseball. I've never understood it. I like playing it, but watching it, it's mostly statistics with uniforms.
So the governor of Georgia points out to, he points out that New York, he was responding to Schumer who was giving him a hard time about their voting laws in Georgia. So Governor of Georgia Kemp says New York has nine days of early voting. Georgia has a minimum of 17, it's like with an additional two Sundays as an option for every county. New York requires an excuse to vote absentee. Georgia does not. They're lying and they know it, talking about Schumer.
Now what does it mean? What does it mean when we're all fighting over a topic where as far as I can tell literally none of us understand it? Let me be at the top of that pile. I don't understand the Georgia voting thing. Do you really? Do you really? I mean we understand the top line of it, right? We understand that the Democrats are calling it racist because the change will make them less likely to win. So they're lying and saying it's racist, but really they care about winning. The Republicans are saying no, we're making it fair and secure. But of course they're lying. It's true, it's true, but that's not why they're doing it. They're doing it to win.
Now can the Republicans make rules changes just to win? Well the Democrats did. It's legal. It's completely legal to change the rules within the laws of the state just to win. The Democrats did it and won the presidency. So the Republicans learned. They learned the rules. Oh wait, we can just change the rules to give ourselves an advantage and then we can argue some about why we did it.
So let me be really clear about what's going on. It's Democrats and Republicans lying, and then we're acting like that's not happening. They're just both lying. They're both changing the laws to get an advantage for their side. There's no good team here. They're completely disreputable, both sides completely non-credible.
Now that said, the Republicans have the stronger argument because security and making Georgia's rules comparable to other states in the same way that they handle security, they have the strongest argument. But they're still lying, right? You can still be lying and also have the strongest argument. There's no conflict, right? So they're lying about why they're doing it, but they do have a good argument.
So here we are in the public trying to understand these things and we don't. We don't know the details really. Kind of none of us do. We know, we think we do. We know one or two things and we're making our decisions based on that, but we don't really know what's going on there. None of us have read the law or hardly any of us. So we're mostly fighting for things we don't understand and don't know if we want. That's where we're at.
I've told you before that one of the only ways to get rid of bad laws is to obey them but obey them aggressively. Like just really obey them. Because if you obey a bad law it breaks the system. And here's an example. I tweeted this morning that I'm coming around to the point of view that requiring identification to do anything in this country is racist for the reason that the voter ID people were arguing against it, which is there are more Black citizens who have no ID. So that's the claim. I don't have data on that but that's the claim.
But why doesn't that apply to just everything? Why are we limiting that to voter ID? So one of the things that Georgia could do would be to float some legislation which would require that no company can ask for ID. They can ask for somebody to sign a paper to say I am really who I say I am, but you can't ask for any ID in the state of Georgia. Just make it a law. Just make it a law.
Now I think you'd have to have some exceptions if there's some federal thing, right? But where the state has control, couldn't they say you're not allowed to ask for ID in the bank and just let the banks pout about it? And you just play it straight. You act like you really mean it and say no, I think it's kind of racist if you're asking for ID in the bank because that closes down all the people with no ID.
Now the bank would say, well but they don't have much money anyway. And I'd say racist. That's not the point. The point is not how much money they have. The point is you're being a racist. That's the only point. So yeah, forget about the fact that people with no ID don't have any money to put in the bank. That is beside the point. That's we're just playing the same rule. Take the same set of rules and say if it's racist you just can't do it. It doesn't matter why you're doing it. It doesn't matter that you've got your good reasons. Racist is racist and that's the beginning and the end of the conversation, right? You can't have a reason. It's just racist.
So what would happen if all the banks and then Coca-Cola and everybody else just couldn't ask for ID in any context, not even their own employees getting into the building? So let's say that you said it would be illegal for anybody to show an ID even to get into the building as a visitor. They'd be a little concerned about that.
All right. Here's what I'd like to see to fix this whole states having different laws. Of course the Constitution, I understand, requires that the states are in charge of the elections so they can kind of do whatever they want as long as the state itself wants to do it that way. But here's what we should do. We should have a national standard, a federal standard for states that is non-binding. It would do only one thing. It would tell you and I whether any individual state is either below the standard or above it. That's it.
So in this case if Georgia was above the national standard in terms of doing it right, you'd say well there's nothing to see here. The national standard says do it at least this well and they did it that well. It's the end of the story. So it would just simplify for the public so that we don't have to look into every state and figure, oh this one does it this way and this one is this way. You just have a national standard and you say are they above it or below it and that's it. If they're below it then everybody gets to criticize it. If they're above it, shut up.
But we shouldn't be asked as citizens to analyze every state and figure out is it more about security or more about racism. We don't have that capability. Just give us a standard. Make it non-binding. It's just information. And then we wouldn't have this problem. We'd know what we're talking about.
If we had a functioning press. And we really don't. I mean that's not hyperbole, right? At one point that sounded like hyperbole. We don't have a functioning press, but now it's just flat out true. You look at this story and you know because the whole country is arguing about these Georgia voting laws but the press is worthless. They just don't even treat it like it's a factual question. You're not seeing a bunch of analyses of if this change helps or hurts. Nothing like that. You're just seeing somebody yelling racist and somebody yelling we need voter security. That's it. And none of that is even on point because they're both just trying to win the election.
So having no functioning press, it really hurts in these situations.
This next thing kind of highlights it. There's a study that declared that AOC is one of the least effective members of Congress, which is interesting because the way they measured it was on how much legislation they can all get through. But I don't know if that's the way to measure an AOC because I think that her influence is on the whole body. It's not legislative specifics. So I guess she got basically nothing made into law so she was one of the least effective in actually changing laws. But I would say one of the most effective in the world, or the country anyway, in getting her message across. So certainly she pushed the Green New Deal and all that stuff.
I've told you before that I now self-identify as a Black citizen of America. Now I have to say this every time I mention it. It's not a joke. Not a joke. As long as we have the right to self-identify and I've always agreed with it, I've never disagreed with anybody self-identifying any way they want. I've always been in favor of it. So I'm going to take that same right, if you will, or at least it's an option, and say that I'm a Black American. And it has several benefits. Number one is that I have an affinity for that group for reasons I've described before. But I could also be more useful. Sometimes it's easier to fix things from the inside, right?
So what would be the single hardest thing for Black America to get done that they also want to get done? Reparations, right? Reparations would be the hardest thing to get done because there'd be so much resistance. But I think I can help. And the way I'm going to help is by saying tax the major corporations but tax them intelligently.
Here's why you tax the corporations for reparations. You tax the corporations because they put themselves in a situation where they can't say no. They can't say no. They're trapped being woke. Once they realize that they have to be woke or their own employees will chew them to death and the customers will chew them to death, then you just have to propose it and they're going to have to say yes.
If you say, I'm sorry Amazon.com, did I hear you right that you're not in favor of reparations? You know hypothetically if they decided to oppose it, they can't oppose it. But do you know who can oppose it? You can. I can. Individuals can oppose it all day long because they're just saying why should I pay money for your problem? And then you're done. That's a good argument. Why should I pay money for your problem? Are you paying money for my problem? You know, so you have an argument at least. But corporations have no argument.
And here's how I would do it. I would say corporations, you will be required to train anybody Black who wants to be trained. That's it. Just, you know, if you're a big enough company you probably have to limit it to maybe Fortune 500 or something. You just say this: if a Black citizen comes in and says I'd like to be trained for a job in your company, you have to do it. That's it. That's the whole thing.
So every single Black person can go to any corporation, say you know I think I'd be good in the warehouse or learning to code or whatever it is that I think I can do, and you have to train me. Reparations.
Now here is the beauty of it. I believe you can make an argument that it pays for itself. I think you could. You couldn't make that argument as easily if individual citizens are paying the taxes for the reparations because it's just a harder argument to make. But a corporation training people to work in its own industry might actually pay for itself and certainly for the economy as a whole because it would employ more people, blah blah blah, so on.
So on behalf of my new self-identified group, Black America, I give you this piece of productive work, which is if you want reparations, tax corporations and do it that way. Make sure that they have to train anybody who asks for it.
All right. Here's how to solve the voter identification problem, just for the in-person stuff. There might be a way to do it for not in person too but it'd be harder. Use the facial recognition app when you're there. But if somebody doesn't have ID you ask them to sign a document that says they can use the app to determine their ID.
So a person comes in, they have no ID. The person working there says show me your ID. They say I don't have one. They say well you've signed this form that gives me permission to hold up my camera and go. Because that's all it takes. It's actually that fast. If you haven't seen, if you've never seen a facial recognition app work, it'll scare the hell out of you. It'll scare the hell out of you the first time you see it.
I saw one. I saw the app work on me once just as a demo and it's instant. It's this fast. Click. Oh you're Scott. It's that fast. You could do that easily without even holding up the line. It's actually faster than showing your ID. The time it takes you to reach into your pocket and take out your wallet and fiddle with it and show your ID is about 10 times longer than click, oh Scott.
So just looking at a comment there. That was weird.
Okay, so we have the technology that at least in person, you still have the mail and vote issue and let's treat that separate at the moment. But you could solve all of the ID problems just by having people say yeah I'll let you use the facial recognition app on me. Now everybody who has ID has no risk of the facial recognition. It wouldn't be on all the time. You'd have to agree to it and you wouldn't because you have ID.
Now seriously, tell me what that doesn't solve. Anybody normally when I'm reading the comments, as soon as I present an idea there's all the injections just sort of flowing in. There are no objections. Think about that. Think about the fact the most critical group in the world, I mean you guys are pretty skeptical which I like. I like it when you challenge me on the ideas and the facts. But I'm not even seeing a counter argument. I'm just monitoring the comments as they're going by. Yeah, there's literally no argument against that because the technology already exists. The entire price of it is trivial. Like the cost is almost nothing. I mean it rounds to nothing. It's so cheap. It's instant. It solves the problem. Why not?
Well I think the answer is that this was never about solving the problem, right? As we started, if anybody cared about solving the problem the tools are right there. But it just shows you that that's not really what's happening. What's happening is you've got two sides that are trying to game the rules to win an election. That's all that's happening. Everything else about fairness and racism and it's nothing to do with it. It's just about somebody trying to win the election.
All right. I saw an article about why Africa is not having such a problem with the coronavirus relative to the other countries. And Andre's back house after I tweeted it. I thought it was pretty good and worth reading. And Andre's just put a comment that the quality of it was in the data I guess was so low that you should just ignore the whole thing, which maybe you should.
But here are the things that Africa has going for it. Low obesity. They have less air conditioning. I didn't see that mentioned but don't you think the air conditioning, just the forced circulating of air, wouldn't that make a difference if it's an airborne virus? If you have less AC wouldn't that give you less problems? I don't know.
They're younger of course, much younger. That makes a big difference as people pointed out. Their record-keeping might be flawed so there might be a lot more infections than we know. They don't test as much. There might be a lot more. But if they were having bad outcomes we would at least see more excess deaths and apparently they're not.
But some of the other speculation is that blood type makes a difference and apparently there are some studies that say the blood type in Africa is advantageous. And some other indication that if you had any Neanderthal DNA you might have worse outcomes. I've got a good dose of Neanderthal DNA. You could tell probably. But Africa does not. So Africans have little or no Neanderthal DNA. So that might be part of it.
But I would like, and then somebody also threw in there that they're taking ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. I would like to call on that. I don't know. So I'm going to say this without the benefit of data but if I had to place a big bet I would bet that although it's true that Africa would use more hydroxychloroquine and more ivermectin, then it's not the difference that you know if you see the pictures of just Africans living their life and I say to myself what percentage of all the people in that picture took a hydroxychloroquine today just in case? I feel like it's not many. Do you think the average village in Africa, there are many people in that village were taking hydroxychloroquine daily? I mean you could do a fact check on me but anybody who suspects that that's the big answer, I don't think so.
Yeah I understand why for malaria. Just to clarify, the theory would be that they're taking it anyway for malaria prevention and therefore it gives them some protection against this hypothetically. But I don't think the percentage of people is very high. Is it a typical village in Africa, what percentage are taking hydroxychloroquine? I would guess closer to zero but that's just a guess. So fact check me on that. But I don't think that's going to turn out to be a factor in the long run.
But here's something fun to do that you should actually do. You should actually do this. Google these two terms and then compare. Google Africa people images. Just those three words. Just Google that and you'll get a bunch of images of group pictures of people in Africa. Now do the same thing but pick an American city. I picked Houston. So I googled then Houston people images. Now you get a bunch of group shots of people in Houston. Compare.
I think almost every Houston group picture had at least one super spreader right in the picture. If you look at African images all day long, and I spent some time doing it, I was just paging African images, African images, do you know how many obese people I saw in all of my looks? None. Zero. There are zero fat people in the pictures. Obviously there are fat people there but you can look all day long on the pictures and you don't find a fat person in Africa. I know they're there but they're not in the pictures.
In Houston every single picture had an obese person in it or almost. Now as I said before we knew that obese people have worse outcomes but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the super spreaders. We know now that obese people have more lung capacity. They get more infections and especially the older ones apparently are the ones who spread. If you look at the Houston pictures there's one of them in every picture.
The way you should count an obese person over 50 is like five infections in your head. You're thinking one, right? You think well that's one guy who might get it and have a bad outcome so that's one. You don't count it as one. That's a super spreader. That one might be a thousand people who get the infection, right?
Somebody's asking about Polynesians. That's a good question. That's a good question. How the Polynesians are doing. I'd like to know the answer to that.
All right. Over on the Locals subscription platform one of the big questions were could I teach people how to view sleep as a skill. In other words can I teach people how to get to sleep? And the answer is yes. Yes I can do that. That is well within my skill set. So next few days I will have a lesson on Locals about how to view sleep as a skill. And I can tell you that the people who do see it as a skill pretty much succeed, right? It is very susceptible to technique. A lot of things are not but sleep is very, very manageable by technique. You just have to know what technique to use and almost nobody does for some reason. It's the easiest thing to do that people are not aware of how to do it. It's weird. But I'll teach you.
All right. Yesterday I tweeted something and it was a thread and it turned out to be so popular that I'm just going to talk about it here. I talked about reframing. And I tweeted that here's a reframe which is just a different way of looking at something that will change some people's lives forever. Does that seem like a big claim? Do you think that in what follows in this tweet thread, do you think I'm going to accomplish this claim that this simple way of thinking about something differently will change people's lives forever? Does that sound like too much? It's not. It's not. And this easily will change some people's lives forever. Not most. Most people are not changed by most things. But some people will be changed forever by this and you might be one of them. So listen to the rest.
And here it is. Here's the thing that you should reframe. Your mind is the outcome of genetics, traumas and hacks. And that's it. That's the idea. That the thing you think of as your mind is partly your genes, what you're starting with, but after that it's the traumas that happen to you. They end up designing your brain and then modified by what hacks you do. Now define hacks as just programming your own brain. Now a hack would be something you do intentionally to reprogram your brain.
So I said if you don't learn to hack or program your brain, the default is that you're a little more than genes and trauma. Now is that an oversimplification? Of course yeah. So you'll see what I'm doing here is an intentional oversimplification.
Now this is what you need to know about reframing the way you look at things. A reframe is not necessarily and doesn't need to be about making something more accurate. The weird thing about reality is that sometimes an inaccurate view of reality is more functional. Sometimes an accurate view of reality is exactly what you need. But there are lots and lots of situations where an inaccurate view of reality is better. Now I won't give you examples. I'm just going to make that claim for now. So don't worry if this seems like too much of a simplification and you say to yourself but you're leaving something out. It doesn't matter for a reframing. You're trying to keep it simple so that people can hold it in their minds. So if I get this about eighty percent right that's all you need. So forget about being pedantic. Of what you're saying but is it really just genes and traumas? Isn't it also some positive? Forget about that. Just keep it simple.
Your brain is your genes, your traumas, the bad things that have happened to you, and the things that you do intentionally to make it better.
Let me give you some examples. One example of a brain hack is education. So you get some education. It physically changes your brain to be more productive and you did it intentionally. All right so we all agree that's a simple thing to do.
And another hack is intelligent skill stacking. Putting skills together in an intelligent way that they become greater than the value of the individual skills. So those are some examples.
Here are some more. Associating self rewards with habits you want to deepen is a hack. You're literally programming your brain by rewarding yourself for this thing you want to do more often. Learning to put things in context is a hack. Practicing optimism is a hack. If you make it your system, your habit to routinely learn and test new hacks, you become the author of your own mind. And because your experience of reality is subjective you become the author of your own experience. Your experience of life is subjective, right? Life itself might be objective. Probably there's probably something there. But the way you experience life is purely subjective and you can change that.
And so I summarize by saying be the hack not the trauma. Now when I say that your brain is formed by traumas in part, what I'm talking about is let's say there was a bully who always teased you about your looks. Well that could scar you so that you would always be concerned about your looks. So that trauma of the bully just becomes part of your permanent personality because it actually rewires your brain. A hack does the same thing but you're doing it intentionally to create a good outcome.
All right. So if you learn to sort of continually scour your environment for a little psychology tricks, hypnosis tricks, affirmations is an optimism hack basically and a focus hack. If you make it your sort of lifetime practice to look for ways to hack your mind and then test them out, you will be the author of your own experience. Otherwise you're just going to be the recipient of the experience. Otherwise the world will program you. The world is going to program you if you don't do it yourself. So you will become just your traumas. Be the hack not the trauma.
Now that's the whole message, right? Some number of you, not very large or not half, but some number of you just heard that and said what? Because what this does, and this is the power of a reframe, if you reframe something correctly it changes behavior. You're not trying to just change how somebody thinks about it. You're trying to make them think about it differently to change an outcome, a behavior.
If I told you that hey if you just scour your environment and test all these little hacks you'll have a subjectively better life, some number of people just heard that and said huh, I'll give it a try. And for those people they just became authors. They don't know yet but they're going to find out.
So this is one of the things that keeps me interested, right? I got to tell you almost every day, some, well really every day I think somebody contacts me that sometimes I know and sometimes I don't, to tell me that their entire life has been improved by some reframing that I presented. So they're tremendously powerful. Just tremendously powerful.
All right. I was thinking of starting a new Twitter account, a second one just for artists so that they can curse at me without knowing why. Because artists are very, very mad at me and people have asked. Because I've been sort of playing around with this tech I guess. The theme I've been playing with that artists don't understand reasoned arguments so they just swear at you if you have one.
And so every time somebody comes at me and is just pure troll, you stupid cartoonist, you do everything wrong with no reasons, then I checked the profile. It's musician, visual artist, writer. It's always one of the arts, right? And I thought to myself that my only comeback for that would be I won't try to make art if you don't try to think rationally. The trouble is I have to give this to you because I can't use it myself because in a way I'm kind of an artist sort of. I mean I don't even call myself an artist because even I look at my art and I say well I'm not sure that's art with a big A. Sort of art with a small a. So I can't really use my own comeback. But if you're not involved in art use it yourself. I won't try to make art if you don't try to think rationally.
And without being unkind to artists I think that there is something like it's almost like an autism spectrum thing but different. I saw somebody say that in the comments but I was going to say that anyway. It's almost like artists are on some kind of their own spectrum where there's complete rationality and engineering on the right and then there's a complete lack of rationality and it's more imagination and stuff on the left. And I don't think that the people on that end of the spectrum who are dealing with imagination the same as if it's fact, I don't think they should even be in conversations with engineers. What good does that do? What good does it do for an engineer who is strongly in the facts to have a debate with somebody who uses imagination just like it's a fact like there's no difference? And I don't think they know it. I think they think they're using facts but yeah arguing with artists is the least useful thing you can do unless you're just doing it for fun.
All right. There is a story that I want to tell you so badly that I can't. It's one of the biggest stories I've ever seen but I can't tell you about it and I don't know if I ever will. But so one of the strange things about my life is that I sort of got pulled behind the curtain. So you get to see the stuff that's really happening that's not in the news. And once you get enough exposure to the things that are really happening behind the curtain you're never the same. Like it's really shocking how different the public's opinion of what has happened or will happen is from any kind of reality. It's just completely separate. You know most of our political conversations are not even grounded in the base reality. We just don't know it.
So behind the curtain there's some stuff that it's just shocking. It's just shocking. Yeah, the reason I can't tell you is part of the story, right? And I saw some people in the comments trying to guess. You won't be able to guess it. So it's not something you'd be aware of. The whole point of the story is it's something that you don't have any awareness of. That's the story. If I told you then you would have awareness of it and bad things would happen to me. So I'm not going to tell you.
No, not because it's classified. No it has nothing to do with any like state secrets or anything. Well I can give you an idea what it's related to. It's related to what you believe or what information you have available to you. So let's say it's an information related phenomenon that if you told me that it was possible to witness what I've witnessed in the past week I would have said that is not possible. I would have thought that it was just the biggest conspiracy theory until I watched it with my own eyes.
Now it's very rare that you can observe something and know what's really happening. I just happened to be by weird coincidence I was put in a position where I could see something clearly. But I don't think anybody else, well few people can. They're probably I don't know 100 people in the country who noticed but they're not talking either. And it's definitely one of the biggest stories in the country. You'll never hear it either and it won't, it probably won't matter. Like it won't affect you but it's definitely one of the, yeah no you, I know what you're, I'm seeing your guesses in the comments and I am reading them and it's not the one you think. So I know you're assuming it's that but it's something else that's just huge.
All right. No nothing about angels. That's a good guess though. I like that guess. Somebody said maybe I saw angels. I love that guess but that wasn't it. No not aliens. No just information. Let's just say there's something you believe not that you believe to be true. How do I say it so it's not a fake news thing? There's just an information, something disappeared. That's the best I can tell you. It would be as if aliens had landed on Earth and it didn't make the news. That's how big it is. Literally it's that big. It would be as if aliens landed on Earth, actually landed on Earth. Yeah. And just so I can call you Alex B and some other people I see your guesses. Trust me you can't guess it.
All right. If it's in the news some of you have seen some news. If it's in the news you're already wrong. I'm talking about something that will never be in the news. They'll never, it will never be in the news. So if you think you know it because you saw a news item then it's not that. No anyway I shouldn't have teased you about that but the point is I just want to give you this general caution that just about everything you think is real in the news has another layer. Doesn't mean that everything you know is wrong but there's always another layer. And once you've seen enough of those other layers you're never the same. You're never the same.
No it's not Trump related.
All right that's all I got for now and I will talk to you all tomorrow. Bye for now.
hello everybody come on in yeah it's time that's right it's time for coffee with scott adams the best time of the day even on a holiday and if you'd like to enjoy this to the maximum potential and i know you do all you need is a copper mug or a glass a tanker telstra style and a candy jugger flask of vessel of any kind without a hole put your beverage in it i like coffee join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine of the day think makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip and it's gonna happen right now all over the world ready go excuse me for a moment while i say rip ah yeah that's good that's good well we've got all kinds of news today let's start with the bad news and the good news the bad news is that rapper dmx is on life support for some kind of an overdose the good news is i didn't know he was alive so it turns out the rapper dmx was alive i was pretty sure he was already dead but he's on life support from an overdose apparently i just saw the future but we wish him well and his family um listen i feel as if this georgia voting law stuff somehow captured everything in one story have you noticed that you know you have lots of different stories about politics but every now and then there'll just be one story that just sort of combines everything bad into one thing and it turns out to be the georgia voting law so let's talk about that so as you know some corporations are giving them a hard time for changing their voting laws allegedly according to the major league baseball and coca-cola and delta these changes in the laws will make it more racist and harder for black people especially to vote and people of color low-income people in particular now this is an interesting take because the biggest issue is about the requirement for a legitimate identification you would think maybe a basic thing to ask for in an election can you identify yourself as a citizen but no big companies say that's kind of racist yet the major league baseball as james hurston pointed out in a tweet major league baseball requires a photo id to pick up your tickets from wilcall but boycotts georgia for voter id laws now why does the major league baseball require id to pick up tickets why do they do that why what's the point of it because if you can just have somebody sign a piece of papal paper that says i am who i say i am why is that not good enough and and who exactly would cheat on will call pic picking up tickets because wouldn't the real person just come in behind them and say uh where are my tickets and then they check and they say oh somebody's sitting in your seat will son send somebody to get them out of your seat because it's obviously you so i can't think of literally anything any process in the world in which you need a photo id less than picking up tickets where they can check immediately if you're the wrong person because for the next three hours you're sitting in the wrong seat and it's got a number on it and you could just go look and say hey you're in the wrong seat literally nothing requires an id less than picking up will call tickets now of course you always have to ask yourself maybe the real reason is just it's easier right it might just be easier you hand them your id and then they're looking at the name but if you were to say your name you'd go up and say hi my name is mrs what my name is bob circle can you spell that yeah b and every transaction would take 10 minutes can you spell that again i'm looking in the wrong place versus here's my id you go ah scott adams it's got adams there you go so the point is funny but i would imagine it has less to do with identification and maybe more to do with it just faster that's just a guess but it's a good point we have a world in which you need id for all kinds of things and they're all less important than voter id all right do we want a political system in which the corporations run the government directly because that's what's happening it's bad enough that the big corporations have influence they've got money and donations and they've got lobbyists and stuff and we're already concerned that big corporations are too involved in making government decisions but now they're doing it somewhat directly just saying we won't do business we'll boycott if you don't change your laws etc and you have to ask this question it's one thing for a company to pursue its own self-interest with donations and lobbying and stuff like that we kind of accept that you know we complain about it but we kind of accept it if there's some a little bit of transparency is better but do you want them directly to boycott somebody to change a law uh i'm not sure we want that government but we're sliding into it however it looks like the corporations may have picked the wrong state to take a stand and i tweeted this this morning of our 50 states there are lots of states where you can just kick republicans all day long it's like hey there's a republican let's go kick him anybody want to join me yeah let's go kick the republican will do it all day long i'm not entirely sure georgia is one of those states because they seem to be having an attitude about it they don't like to get kicked so what we're seeing is a response in which they want to uh remove the uh what is it the monopoly i guess there's some special legal rights that the major league baseball has and then the state is the state is saying well let's take those away if you want to play hardball it works both ways so the state is actually just going after major league baseball just take them down trump is after him of course republicans are after them i have a real question about how many republicans are going to be drinking cokes and diet cokes this week but i think less i think there will be fewer republicans drinking diet coke i don't know if that makes a difference to somebody as big as that but by the way would you like to know how to quit your diet coke or coke habit i can tell you how i did it and it's it's it's easy and hard at the same time it's easy to know how it's but it's about two months that are kind of hard all you do is only do that one thing just stop drinking diet coke don't try to quit anything else at the same time just the one thing because if it's only one thing missing in your life you can distract yourself with other stuff but you don't want to be going on a diet at the same time you're trying to quit your diet coke habit that's just too much just pick that one thing and say for two months i won't have a diet coke and what's going to happen let me tell you what's going to happen yeah you might drink more coffee i i did that and it helped here's what's going to happen for the first week you're gonna crave that coke or diet coke if you have a habit i had a really bad habit 12 a day and but if uh if you wait two months this is my promise to you if you wait two months without drinking a soda soda will feel disgusting to you in two months and you'll never want one again so the hard part is two months but it's not like cigarettes i hear i've never quit cigarettes but i hear that when you quit cigarettes you go a long time still wanting one is that true can anybody confirm that whereas a diet coke it actually turns disgusting the the thought of putting what looks like a science experiment in your mouth because it doesn't really it doesn't register even your in your mind as food or beverage exactly it's almost like a lubricant or a chemistry experiment but boy when you're hooked on it it's just the best thing in the world as i was so if coca-cola would like to play hardball with georgia i would like to tell you how to drink less of their product and it's pretty easy and by the way uh i'm not an expert on the health the health impact of soda but i don't think it's a lot it's going to be positive right i don't have you know the the data to say that it's negative a lot of people say that i don't have that data but i'm sure it's not helping you i'm sure it's not a health food i feel safe in saying that all right so um and then i think mike cervich was pointing out that the county that was going to get a hundred million dollars of you know economic benefit from the major league game voted for biden so the the county that's hit hardest by the major league baseball pulling out of the all-star game is democrats and biden voters so got what they voted for i would like to say that this is a weird issue that we're all concerned about because in my opinion baseball is the most useless of all sports now i know i know some of you love your baseball and i'm not saying there's anything wrong with that we're all different right so you can like one thing i could like another but i would point out that there's a saying in america i think it's an american saying that something is so boring it's like watching grass grow have you ever heard that it's so boring it's like watching grass grow baseball is the only spectator sport in which 99 of the time that's all you're doing you're actually just watching a big field where the only thing that's happening is the grass is growing now you can't see it but it's the only thing happening so i don't know why people like baseball i've never understood it i like playing it but watching it it's mostly statistics with uniforms so the uh governor of georgia um points out to uh he points out that new york he was responding to schumer who was giving him a hard time about their voting laws in georgia so governor of georgia kemp says new york has nine days of early voting georgia has a minimum of 17.
it's like with an additional two sundays as an option for every county new york requires an excuse to vote absentee georgia does not they're lying and they know it talking about schumer um now what does it mean what does it mean when we're all fighting over a topic where as far as i can tell literally none of us understand it let me be in the top of that pile i don't understand the georgia voting thing do you really do you really i mean we understand the top line of it right we understand that the democrats are calling it racist because the change will make them less likely to win so they're lying and saying it's racist but really they care about winning the republicans are saying no we're making you fair and secure but of course they're lying it's true it's true but that's not why they're doing it they're doing it to win now can the republicans make rules changes just to win well the democrats did it's legal it's completely legal to change the rules within the laws of the state just to win the the democrats did it and one won the presidency so the republicans learned they learned the rules oh wait we can just change the rules to give ourselves an advantage and then we can argue some about why we did it so let me be really clear about what's going on it's democrats and republicans lying and then we're acting like that's not happening they're just both lying they're both changing the laws to get an advantage for their side there's no good team here they're completely disreputable both sides completely non-credible now that said the republicans have the stronger argument because security and making georgia's rules comparable to other states in the same way that they're they they handle security they have the strongest argument but they're still lying right you can still be lying and also have the strongest argument it's not there's no conflict right so they're lying about why they're doing it but they do have a good argument so here we are in the public trying to understand these things and we don't we don't know the details really kind of none of us do we know we think we do we know one or two things and we're making our decisions based on that but we don't really know what's going on there none of us have read the law or hardly any of us um so we're mostly fighting for things we don't understand and don't know if we want that's where we're at um i've told you before that one the only way to get rid of bad laws is to obey them but obey them aggressively like just really obey them because if you obey a bad law it breaks the system and here's an example um i tweeted this morning that i'm i'm coming around to the point of view that requiring identification to do anything in this country is racist for the the reason that the voter id people were arguing against it give which is there are more black citizens who have no id so that that's the claim i don't i don't have data on that but that's the claim but why doesn't that apply to just everything why does that why are we limiting that to voter id so one of the things that georgia could do would be to to flow some legislation which would require that no company can ask for id they can ask for somebody to sign the paper to say i am really who i say i am but you can't ask for any id in the state of georgia just make it a law just make it a law now i think you'd have to have some exceptions if there's some federal thing right but you could uh but where the state has control couldn't they say you're not allowed to ask for id in the bank and just let the banks about it and you just play it straight you act like you really mean it and say no i think it's kind of racist if you're asking for id in the bank because that closes down all the people with no id now the bank would say well but they don't have much money anyway and i'd say racist that's not the point the point is not how much money they have the point is you're being a racist that's the only point so yeah forget about the fact that people with no id don't have any money to put in the bank that is beside the point that's we're just playing the same rule take the same set of rules and say if it's racist you just can't do it it doesn't matter why you're doing it it doesn't matter that you've got your good reasons racist is racist and that's that's sort of a that's the beginning in the end of the conversation right you can't have a reason it's just racist so what would happen if all the banks and them and coca-cola and everybody else just couldn't ask for id in any context not even their own employees getting into the building so let's say that you said it would be illegal for anybody to show an id even to get into the building as a visitor they'd be a little uh concerned about that all right here's what i'd like to see to fix this whole states having different laws of course the constitution i understand requires that the states are in charge of the elections so they can kind of do whatever they want as long as the state itself is you know wants to do it that way but here's what we should do we should have a national standard a federal standard for states that is non-binding it would do only one thing it would tell you and i whether any individual state is either below the standard or above it that's it so in this case if georgia was above the national standard in terms of doing it right you'd say well there's nothing to see here the national standard says do it at least this well and they did it that well it's the end of the story so it would just simplify for the public so that we don't have to look into every state and figure oh this one does this way and this one is this way you just have a national standard and you say are they above it or below it and that's it if they're below it then everybody gets to criticize it if they're above it shut up but we shouldn't we shouldn't be asked as citizens to analyze every state and figure out is it more about security or more about racism we don't have that capability just give us a standard make it non-binding it's just information and then we wouldn't have this problem we'd know what we're talking about uh if we had a functioning press and we really don't i mean that's not hyperbole right at one point that sounded like hyperbole we don't have a functioning press but now it's just flat out true you look at this story and you know because the whole country is arguing about these georgia voting laws but the press is worthless they just don't even treat it like it's a factual question you're not seeing a bunch of analyses of if this change you know helps or hurts nothing like that you're just seeing somebody yelling racist and somebody yelling uh we need voter security that's it and none of that is even on point because they're both just trying to win the election so having no functioning press it really hurts in these situations this guy's kind of highlights it uh there's a study that declared that aoc is one of the least effective members of congress which is interesting because the way they measured it was on how much legislation they can all get through but i don't know if that's the way to measure an aoc because i think that her i think her influence is you know the influence on the whole body it's not a legislative specifics so i guess she got basically nothing made into law so she was one of the least effective and actually changing laws but i would say one of the most effective in the world or the country anyway in getting her message across so certainly she pushed the green new deal and all that stuff um i've told you before that uh i now self-identify as a black citizen of america now uh and i have to say this every time i mention it it's not a joke not a joke as long as we have the right to self-identify and i've always agreed with it i've never disagreed with anybody self-identifying any way they want i've always been in favor of it so i'm going to take that same the same right if you will is it right or at least it's an option and say that i'm a black american and it has several benefits number one is that you know i have an affinity for that group for reasons i've described before but i could also be more useful sometimes it's easier to fix things from the inside right so what would be the single hardest thing for black america to get done that they also want to get done reparations right reparations would be the hardest thing to get done because it'd be so much resistance but i think i can help and the way i'm going to help is by saying tax the major corporations but tax them intelligently here's why you tax the corporations for reparations you tax the corporations because they put themselves in a situation where they can't say no they can't say no they're trapped being woke once once they realize that they have to be woke or their own employees will will chew them to death and the customers will chew them to death then you just have to propose it and they're going to have to say yes if you say um i'm sorry amazon.com did i hear you right that you're not in favor of reparations you know hypothetically if let's say they decided to oppose it they can't oppose it but do you know who can oppose it you can i can individuals can oppose it all day long because they're just saying why should i pay money for your problem and then you're done that's a good a that's a good argument why should i pay money for your problem are you paying money for my problem right you know you so you have an argument at least but corporations have no argument and here's how i would do it i would say corporations you will be required to train anybody black who wants to be trained that's it just you know if you're a big enough company you probably have to limit it to maybe fortune 500 or something you just say this if a black citizen comes in and says i'd like to be trained for a job in your company you have to do it that's it that's the whole thing so every single black person can go to any corporation say you know i think i'd be good in the warehouse or learning to code or whatever it is that i think i can do and you have to train me reparations now here is the beauty of it i believe you can make an argument that it pays for itself i think you could you couldn't make that argument as easily if individual citizens are paying the taxes for the reparations because it's just a harder argument to make but a corporation training people to work in its own industry might actually pay for itself and certainly for the economy as a whole because it would employ more people blah blah blah so on behalf of my new uh self-identified group black america i give you this this piece of productive work which is if you want reparations tax corporations and do it that way make sure that they have to train anybody who asks for it all right um here's how to solve the voter identification problem just for the in-person stuff there might be a way to do it for not in person too but it'd be harder use the facial recognition app when you're there but if somebody doesn't have id you ask them to sign a document that says they can use the app to determine their id so a person comes in they have no id the person working there says show me your id they say i don't have one they say well you've signed this form that gives me permission to hold up my camera and go because that's all it takes it's actually that fast if you haven't seen if you've never seen a facial recognition app work it'll scare the out of you it'll scare the out of you the first time you see it i i saw one uh i saw the app work on me once just as a demo and it's instant is this fast click oh you're scott it's that fast you could do that easily without even holding up the line it's actually faster than showing your id the time it takes you to reach into your pocket and take out your wallet and fiddle with it and show your id is about 10 times longer than click oh scott so just looking at a comment there that was weird okay so we have the technology that at least in person you still have the mail and vote issue and let's treat that separate at the moment but you could solve all of the id problems just by having people say yeah i'll let you use the facial recognition app on me now everybody who has id has no risk of the facial recognition it wouldn't be on all the time you'd have to agree to it and you wouldn't because you have id now seriously tell me what that doesn't solve anybody normally when i'm reading the comments uh as soon as i present an idea there's all the all the injections just sort of flowing in there are no objections think about that think about the fact the most critical group in the world i mean you guys are pretty skeptical which i like i like it when you challenge me on the ideas and the facts but i'm not even seeing a counter argument i'm just i'm monitoring the comments as they're going by yeah there's literally literally no argument against that because the technology already exists the entire price of it is trivial like the cost is almost nothing i mean it rounds to nothing it's so cheap it's instant it solves the problem why not well i think the answer is that this was never about solving the problem right as we started if anybody cared about solving the problem the tools are right there but it just shows you that that's not that's not really what's happening what's happening is you've got two sides that are trying to game the rules to win an election that's all that's happening everything else about fairness and racism and it's nothing to do with it it's just about somebody trying to win the election all right i saw an article uh about why africa is not having such a problem with the chronovirus relative to the other other countries and uh andre andre's back house after i tweeted it i thought it was pretty good and worth reading and andres just put a comment that that the quality of it was in the data i guess was so low that you should just ignore the whole thing which maybe you should but here are the things that africa has going for it low obesity um they have less air conditioning i didn't see that mentioned but don't you think the air conditioning just the the forced circulating of air wouldn't that make a difference if it's an airborne virus if you have less ac wouldn't that give you less problems i don't know they're younger of course much younger that makes a big difference as people pointed out their the record-keeping might be flawed so there might be a lot more infections than we know they don't test as much there might be a lot more but if they were having bad outcomes we would at least see more excess deaths and apparently they're not but some of the other speculation is that blood type makes a difference and apparently there are some studies that say the blood type in africa is advantageous and some other indication that if you had any neanderthal dna you might have worse outcomes i've got a good dose of neanderthal dna you could tell probably but africa does not so africans have little or no neanderthal dna so that might be part of it but i would like and then somebody also threw in there that they're they're taking ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine i would like to call on that uh i don't know so i'm going to say this without the benefit of data but if i had to place a big bat i would bet that although it's true that africa would use more hydroxychloroquine and more ivermectin then it's not the difference that you know if you see you know the the pictures of just you know africans living their life and i say to myself what percentage of all the people in that picture took a hydroxychloroquine today just in case i feel like it's not many do you think the average village in africa there are many people in that village were taking hydroxychloroquine daily i mean you could do a fact check on me but anybody who suspects that that's the big answer i don't think so yeah i understand why for malaria yeah just to clarify the the the theory would be that they're taking it anyway for malaria prevention and therefore it gives them some protection against this hypothetically but i don't think the percentage of people is very high is it a typical village in africa what percentage are taking hydroxychloroquine i would guess closer to zero but that's just the guess so fact check me on that but i don't think that's going to be turned out to be a factor in the long run but here's something fun to do that you should actually do you should actually do this google these two terms and then compare google uh africa people images just those three words just google that and you'll get a bunch of images of group pictures of people in africa now do the same thing but pick an american city i picked houston so i googled then uh houston people images now you get a bunch of group shots of people in houston compare i think almost every houston group picture had at least one super spreader right in the picture if you look at african uh images all day long and i and i spent some time doing it i was just paging paging african images african images do you know how many obese people i saw in all of my looks none zero there are zero fat people in in the pictures obviously there are fat people there but you can look all day long on the pictures and you don't find a fat person in africa i know they're there but they're not in the pictures in houston every single picture had an obese person in it or almost now as i said before we knew that obese people have worse outcomes but that's not what i'm talking about i'm talking about the super spreaders we know now that obese people have more lung capacity they get more infections and especially the older ones apparently are the ones who spread if you look at the houston pictures there's one of them in every picture the the way you should count a obese person over a 50 is like five infections in your head you're thinking one right you think well that's one guy who might get it and have a bad outcome so that's one you don't count it as one that's a super spreader that one might be a thousand people who get the infection right um somebody's asking about polynesians that's a good question that's a good question how the polynesians are doing i'd like to know the answer to that all right um over on uh on the locals subscription platform one of the big questions were could i teach people how to view sleep as a skill in other words can i teach people how to get to sleep and the answer is yes yes i can do that that is well within my skill set so next few days i will have a lesson on locals about how to view sleep as a skill and i can tell you that the people who do see it as a skill pretty much succeed right it is very susceptible to technique a lot of things are not but sleep is very very manageable by technique you just have to know what technique to use and almost nobody does is for some reason it's the easiest thing to do that people are not aware of how to do it it's weird but i'll teach you all right yesterday i tweeted something and it was a thread and it turned out to be uh so popular that i'm just going to talk about it here i talked about reframing and i tweeted that here's a reframe which is just a different way of looking at something that will change some people's lives forever does that seem like a big claim do you think that in what what follows in this tweet thread do you think i'm going to accomplish this this claim that this simple way of thinking about something differently will change people's lives forever does that sound like too much it's not it's not and this easily will change some people's lives forever not most most people are not changed by most things but some people will be changed forever by this and you might be one of them so so listen to the rest um and here it is here's the thing that you should reframe your mind is the outcome of genetics traumas and hacks and that's it that's the idea that the thing you think of your mind is partly your genes what you're starting with but after that it's the traumas that happen to you they end up designing your brain uh and then modified by what hacks you do now define hacks as just programming your own brain now a hack would be something you do intentionally to reprogram your brain so i said if you don't learn to hack or program your brain the default is that you're a little more than genes and trauma now is that an oversimplification of course yeah so you'll see what i'm doing here is an intentional oversimplification now this is what you need to know about reframing the way you look at things a reframe is not necessarily and doesn't need to be about making something more accurate the weird thing about reality is that sometimes an inaccurate view of reality is more functional sometimes a accurate view of reality is exactly what you need but there are lots and lots of situations where an inaccurate view of reality is better now i won't give you examples i'm just going to make that claim for now so don't worry if this seems like too much of a simplification and you say to yourself but you're leaving something out it doesn't matter for a reframing you're trying to keep it simple so that people can hold it in their minds so if i get this about eighty percent right that's all you need so forget about you know being pedantic the of what you're saying but is it really just genes and traumas isn't it also some positive forget about that just keep it simple your brain is your genes your traumas the bad things that have happened to you and the things that you do intentionally to to make it better let me give you some examples uh one example of a brain hack is education so you get some education it physically changes your brain to be more productive and you did it intentionally all right so we all agree that's a simple thing to do and another hack is uh intelligent skill stacking putting putting skills together in an intelligent way that they become greater than the value of the individual skills so those are some examples here some more associating self rewards with habits you want to deepen is a hack you're literally programming your brain by rewarding yourself for this thing you want to do more often learning to put things in context is a hack practicing optimism is a hack if you make your system your habit to routinely learn and test new hacks you become the author of your own mind and because your experience of reality is subjective you become the author of your own experience your experience of life is subjective right life itself might be objective probably there's probably something there but the way you experience life is purely subjective and you can change that and so i summarize by saying be the hack not the trauma now when i say that your your brain is formed by traumas in part what i'm talking about is let's say there was a a bully who always teased you about your looks well that could scar you so that you would always be concerned about your looks so that trauma of the bully just becomes part of your permanent personality because it actually rewires your brain a hack does the same thing but you're doing it intentionally to create a good outcome all right so if you learn to uh to sort of continually scour your environment for a little psychology tricks hypnosis tricks affirmations is a is a optimism hack basically and a focus hack if you make it your sort of lifetime practice to look for ways to hack your mind and then test them out you will be the author of your own experience otherwise you're just going to be the recipient of the experience otherwise the world will program you the world is going to program you if you don't do it yourself so you will become just your traumas be the hack not the trauma now um there's that's the whole message right some number of you not very large or not half but some number of you just heard that and said what because what this does and this is the power of a reframe if you reframe something correctly it changes behavior you're not trying to just change how somebody thinks about it you're trying to make them think about it differently to change an outcome a behavior if i told you that hey if you just scour your environment and test all these little hacks you you'll have a subjectively better life some number of people just heard that and said huh huh i'll give it i'll give it a try and for those people they just became authors they don't know yet but they're going to find out so this is one of the things that keeps me interested right i got to tell you almost every day some well really every day i think somebody contacts me that sometimes i know and sometimes i don't to tell me that their entire life has been improved by some reframing that i that i presented so they they're tremendously powerful just tremendously powerful all right i was thinking of starting a new twitter account a second one just for artists so that they can curse at me without knowing why because artists are very very mad at me and people have asked because i've been sort of playing around with this tech i guess the theme i've been playing with that artists don't understand reasoned arguments so they just swear at you if you have one and so every time somebody comes at me and is just pure troll you stupid cartoonist you do everything wrong with no reasons then i checked the profile it's musician visual artist writer it's always one of the arts right and i thought to myself that my only comeback for that would be i won't try to make art if you don't try to think rationally the trouble is i have to give this to you because i can't use it myself because in a way i'm kind of an artist sort of i mean i don't even call myself an artist because even i i look at my art and i say well i'm not sure that's art with a big a sort of art with a small a so i can't really use my own comeback but if you're not involved in art use it yourself i won't try to make art if you don't try to think rationally and without being unkind to artists i think that there is something like it's almost like an autism spectrum thing but different i saw somebody say that in the comments but i was going to say that anyway it's almost like artists are on some kind of their own spectrum where there's you know complete rationality and engineering on the right and then there's a complete lack of rationality and it's more imagination and stuff on the left and i don't think that the people on that on the end of the spectrum who are dealing with imagination the same as if it's fact i don't think they should even be a conversations with engineers what good does that do what good does it do for an engineer who is strongly in the facts to have a debate with somebody who uses imagination just like it's a fact like there's no difference and i don't think they know it i think they think they're using facts but yeah arguing with artists is the least useful thing you can do unless you're just doing it to for fun all right um there is a there's a story that i want to tell you so badly that i can't uh it's it's one of the biggest stories i've ever seen but uh but i can't tell you about it and i don't know if i ever will but so one of the strange things about my life is that um i i sort of got pulled behind the curtain so you get you get to see the stuff that's that's really happening that's not in the news and once you get enough exposure to the things that are really happening behind the curtain you're never the same like it's really shocking how different the public's opinion of what has happened or will happen is from any kind of reality it's just completely separate you know most of our political conversations are not even grounded in the in the base reality we just don't know it so behind behind the curtain there's some stuff that it's just shocking it's just shocking yeah for the reason i can't tell you is part of the story right and uh i saw some people in the comments trying to guess you won't be able to guess it so it's not something you'd be aware of the the whole point of the story is it's something that you you don't have any awareness of that that's the story if i told you then you would have awareness of it and bad things would happen to me so i'm not going to tell you uh no no not because it's classified no it has nothing to do with um any like state secrets or anything uh well i can give you an idea what it's related to it's related to what you believe so or or what information you have available to you so let's say it's an information related phenomenon that if you told me that it was possible to witness what i've witnessed in the past week i would have said that is not possible i would have thought that it was just the biggest conspiracy theory until i watched it with my own eyes now it's very rare that you can you can observe something and know you know what's really happening i just happened to be by weird coincidence i was put in a position where i could see something clearly but i don't think anybody else well few people can they're probably uh i don't know 100 people in the country who who noticed but they're not talking either and it's definitely one of the biggest stories in the country you'll never hear it either and it won't it probably won't matter like it won't affect you but it's definitely one of the yeah no you i know what you're i'm seeing your guesses in the comments and i am reading them and it's not the one you think so i i know you're you're assuming it's that but uh it's it's something else that's just huge all right no nothing about angels that's a good guess though i like that guess somebody said maybe i saw angels i love that guess but that wasn't it um no not aliens no just information let's just say there's something you believe not that you believe to be true how do i say it so it's not a fake news thing there's just an information something disappeared that's the best i can tell you it would be as if aliens had landed on earth and it didn't make the news that's how big it is literally it's that big it would be as if aliens landed on earth actually landed on earth yeah and and just just so i i can call you alex b and some other people i see your guesses trust me you can't guess it all right if it's in the news some of you have seen some news if it's in the news you're already wrong i'm talking about something that's uh that will never be in the news they'll never it will never be in the news so if you think you know it because you saw a news item then it's not that no anyway i shouldn't have teased you about that but the point is i just want to give you this general caution that just about everything you think is real in the news has another layer doesn't mean that everything you know is wrong but there's always another layer and once you've seen enough of those other layers you're never the same you're never the same no it's not trump related all right that's all i got for now and i will talk to you all tomorrow bye for now
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well we've got all kinds of news today
let's start with the bad news and the
good news
the bad news is that rapper dmx is on
life support
for some kind of an overdose
the good news is i didn't know he was
alive
so it turns out the rapper dmx
was alive
i was pretty sure he was already dead
but he's on life support from an
overdose
apparently i just saw the future
but we wish him well and his family
um listen
i feel as if this georgia voting law
stuff
somehow captured
everything in one story
have you noticed that
you know you have lots of different
stories about politics but every now and
then there'll just be one story that
just sort of combines everything bad
into one thing and it turns out to be
the georgia voting law so let's talk
about that
so as you know some corporations are
giving them a hard time for changing
their voting laws
allegedly according to the major league
baseball and coca-cola and delta
these changes in the laws will make it
more racist
and harder for black people especially
to vote and people of color
low-income people in particular now
this is an interesting take because the
biggest issue is about the requirement
for
a legitimate identification
you would think maybe a basic thing to
ask for in an election can you identify
yourself as a citizen but no big
companies say that's kind of racist
yet
the major league baseball as james
hurston pointed out in a tweet
major league baseball requires a photo
id
to pick up your tickets from wilcall
but boycotts georgia for voter id laws
now
why does the major league baseball
require id to pick up
tickets
why do they do that
why what's the point of it
because if you can just have somebody
sign a piece of papal paper that says i
am who i say i am why is that not good
enough
and and who exactly would cheat
on will call pic picking up tickets
because wouldn't the real person just
come in behind them and say uh where are
my tickets
and then they check and they say oh
somebody's sitting in your seat
will son send somebody to get them out
of your seat because it's obviously you
so
i can't think of literally anything any
process in the world
in which you need a photo id less
than picking up tickets where they can
check immediately if you're the wrong
person because for the next three hours
you're sitting in the wrong seat
and it's got a number on it and you
could just go look
and say hey
you're in the wrong seat
literally
nothing requires an id less
than picking up will call tickets
now
of course
you always have to ask yourself maybe
the real reason is just it's easier
right it might just be easier you hand
them your id
and then they're looking at the name
but if you were to say your name you'd
go up and say hi my name is mrs
what
my name is bob circle
can you spell that
yeah
b
and every transaction would take 10
minutes
can you spell that again
i'm looking in the wrong place
versus here's my id
you go ah scott adams it's got adams
there you go so
the point is funny but i would imagine
it has less to do with identification
and maybe more to do with it just faster
that's just a guess but it's a good
point we have a world in which you need
id for all kinds of things
and they're all less important than
voter id
all right
do we want a political system in which
the corporations
run the government directly
because that's what's happening
it's bad enough that the big
corporations have influence they've got
money and donations and they've got
lobbyists and stuff and we're already
concerned that big corporations are too
involved
in making government decisions but now
they're doing it somewhat directly
just saying we won't do business we'll
boycott
if you don't change your laws etc
and
you have to ask this question
it's one thing for a company to pursue
its own self-interest with donations and
lobbying and stuff like that we kind of
accept that you know we complain about
it but we kind of accept it if there's
some a little bit of transparency is
better
but do you want them directly to boycott
somebody to change a law
uh i'm not sure we want that government
but we're sliding into it
however
it looks like
the corporations may have picked the
wrong state to take a stand
and i tweeted this this morning
of our 50 states there are lots of
states
where you can just kick republicans all
day long it's like hey there's a
republican
let's go kick him
anybody want to join me yeah let's go
kick the republican will do it all day
long
i'm not entirely sure
georgia is one of those states
because they seem to be having an
attitude about it
they don't like to get kicked
so
what we're seeing is a response in which
they want to uh remove the uh
what is it the monopoly
i guess there's some special legal
rights that the
major league baseball has and then the
state is the state is saying well let's
take those away
if you want to play hardball
it works both ways so the state is
actually just going after major league
baseball just take them down
trump is after him
of course republicans are after them
i have a real question about how many
republicans are going to be drinking
cokes and diet cokes this week
but i think less
i think there will be fewer republicans
drinking diet coke
i don't know if that makes a difference
to somebody as big as that
but
by the way would you like to know how to
quit your diet coke or coke habit
i can tell you how i did it and it's
it's it's easy and hard at the same time
it's easy to know how it's but it's
about two months that are kind of hard
all you do
is only do that one thing
just stop drinking diet coke
don't try to quit anything else at the
same time just the one thing because if
it's only one thing missing in your life
you can distract yourself with other
stuff but you don't want to be going on
a diet at the same time you're trying to
quit your diet coke habit that's just
too much
just pick that one thing and say for two
months
i won't have a diet coke and what's
going to happen
let me tell you what's going to happen
yeah you might drink more coffee i i did
that and it helped
here's what's going to happen
for the first week
you're gonna crave that coke or diet
coke if you have a habit i had a really
bad habit 12 a day and
but
if uh if you wait two months this is my
promise to you
if you wait two months without drinking
a soda
soda will feel disgusting to you
in two months
and you'll never want one again so the
hard part is two months but it's not
like cigarettes i hear i've never quit
cigarettes but i hear that when you quit
cigarettes you go a long time still
wanting one is that true can anybody
confirm that whereas a diet coke it
actually turns disgusting
the
the thought of putting
what looks like a science experiment in
your mouth
because it doesn't really
it doesn't register even your in your
mind as
food or beverage exactly it's almost
like a
lubricant or a chemistry experiment
but boy when you're hooked on it it's
just the best thing in the world as i
was so
if coca-cola would like to play hardball
with
georgia i would like to tell you how to
drink less of their product
and it's pretty easy and by the way
uh i'm not an expert on the health the
health impact of soda
but i don't think it's a lot it's going
to be positive
right i don't have
you know the
the data to say that it's negative a lot
of people say that i don't have that
data
but i'm sure it's not helping you i'm
sure it's not a health food i feel safe
in saying that all right
so
um
and then i think mike cervich was
pointing out that the county that was
going to get a hundred million dollars
of you know economic benefit from the
major league game voted for biden
so the the county that's hit hardest by
the major league baseball pulling out of
the all-star game
is democrats and biden voters so got
what they voted for
i would like to say that this is a weird
issue that we're all concerned about
because
in my opinion baseball is the most
useless of all sports
now i know i know some of you love your
baseball and i'm not saying there's
anything wrong with that we're all
different right so you can like one
thing i could like another but i would
point out
that there's a saying in america i think
it's an american saying
that something is
so boring
it's like watching grass grow have you
ever heard that
it's so boring
it's like watching grass grow
baseball is the only spectator sport
in which 99 of the time
that's all you're doing
you're actually just watching a big
field where the only thing that's
happening
is the grass is growing
now you can't see it
but it's the only thing happening
so i don't know why people like baseball
i've never understood it i like playing
it but watching it
it's mostly statistics with uniforms
so
the uh governor of georgia
um
points out
to uh
he points out that
new york he was
responding to schumer who was giving him
a hard time about their voting laws in
georgia
so governor of georgia kemp says new
york has nine days of early voting
georgia has a minimum of 17.
it's like with an additional two sundays
as an option for every county
new york requires an excuse to vote
absentee
georgia does not
they're lying and they know it talking
about schumer
um
now
what does it mean
what does it mean when we're all
fighting over a topic
where as far as i can tell
literally none of us understand it
let me be in the top of that pile
i don't understand the georgia voting
thing
do you really
do you really
i mean we understand the top line of it
right
we understand that
the democrats are calling it racist
because the change will make them less
likely to win
so they're lying and saying it's racist
but really they care about winning
the republicans are saying no we're
making you fair and secure but of course
they're lying it's true
it's true
but that's not why they're doing it
they're doing it to win
now can the republicans make rules
changes
just to win
well the democrats did
it's legal it's completely legal to
change the rules
within the laws of the state
just to win
the the democrats did it and one won the
presidency
so the republicans learned
they learned the rules oh wait
we can just change the rules to give
ourselves an advantage and then we can
argue some about why we did it
so
let me be really clear about what's
going on
it's democrats and republicans lying
and then we're acting like that's not
happening
they're just both lying they're both
changing the laws to get an advantage
for their side
there's no good team here
they're completely disreputable
both sides completely non-credible
now
that said
the republicans have the stronger
argument
because security and making georgia's
rules
comparable to other states in the same
way that they're they they handle
security
they have the strongest argument but
they're still lying
right
you can still be lying and also have the
strongest argument it's not there's no
conflict
right so they're lying about why they're
doing it
but they do have a good argument
so here we are in the public trying to
understand these things
and we don't we don't know the details
really kind of none of us do we know we
think we do we know one or two things
and we're making our decisions based on
that but we don't really know what's
going on there none of us have read the
law or hardly any of us
um so we're mostly fighting for things
we don't understand and don't know if we
want
that's where we're at
um
i've told you before that one the only
way to get rid of bad laws
is to obey them
but obey them aggressively
like just really obey them because if
you obey a bad law
it breaks the system
and here's an example
um i tweeted this morning that i'm i'm
coming around to the point of view that
requiring identification to do anything
in this country is racist
for the
the reason that the voter id people were
arguing against it give which is there
are more black citizens who have no id
so that that's the claim i don't i don't
have data on that but that's the claim
but why doesn't that apply to just
everything
why does that why are we limiting that
to voter id
so one of the things that georgia could
do
would be
to
to flow some legislation
which would require that no company can
ask for id
they can ask for somebody to sign the
paper to say i am really who i say i am
but you can't ask for any id in the
state of georgia just make it a law
just make it a law now i think you'd
have to have some
exceptions if there's some federal thing
right but you could uh
but where the state has control
couldn't they say you're not allowed to
ask for id in the bank
and just let the banks
about it
and you just play it straight
you act like you really mean it and say
no i think it's kind of racist if you're
asking for id in the bank
because that closes down all the people
with no id
now the bank would say well but they
don't have much money anyway and i'd say
racist
that's not the point
the point is not how much money they
have
the point is you're being a racist
that's the only point
so yeah forget about the fact that
people with no id don't have any money
to put in the bank
that is beside the point
that's we're just playing the same rule
take the same set of rules and say
if it's racist you just can't do it it
doesn't matter why you're doing it
it doesn't matter that you've got your
good reasons
racist is racist
and that's that's sort of a that's the
beginning in the end of the conversation
right you can't have a reason it's just
racist
so what would happen if all the banks
and them and coca-cola and everybody
else
just couldn't ask for id in any context
not even their own employees getting
into the building
so let's say that you said it would be
illegal for anybody to show an id even
to get into the building as a visitor
they'd be a little uh
concerned about that all right here's
what i'd like to see
to fix this whole states having
different laws
of course the constitution i understand
requires
that the states are in charge of the
elections so they can kind of do
whatever they want as long as the state
itself is you know wants to do it that
way
but here's what we should do we should
have a national standard
a federal standard
for states that is non-binding
it would do only one thing
it would tell you and i
whether any individual state is either
below the standard or above it
that's it
so in this case if georgia
was above the national standard in terms
of doing it right
you'd say well there's nothing to see
here
the national standard says do it at
least this well and they did it that
well it's the end of the story
so it would just simplify for the public
so that we don't have to look into every
state and figure oh this one does this
way and this one is this way you just
have a national standard
and you say are they above it or below
it and that's it if they're below it
then everybody gets to criticize it if
they're above it
shut up
but we shouldn't we shouldn't be asked
as citizens to analyze every state and
figure out is it more about security or
more about racism we don't have that
capability just give us a standard
make it non-binding it's just
information and then we wouldn't have
this problem
we'd know what we're talking about
uh if we had a functioning press
and we really don't i mean that's not
hyperbole
right at one point that sounded like
hyperbole we don't have a functioning
press but now it's just
flat out true
you look at this story and you know
because the whole country is arguing
about these georgia voting laws but
the press is worthless they just don't
even treat it like it's a factual
question
you're not seeing a bunch of analyses of
if this change you know helps or hurts
nothing like that
you're just seeing somebody yelling
racist and somebody yelling uh we need
voter security that's it and none of
that is even on point because they're
both just trying to win the election so
having no functioning press
it really hurts in these situations this
guy's kind of highlights it
uh there's a study that declared that
aoc is one of the least effective
members of congress which is interesting
because the way they measured it
was on how much legislation
they can all get through
but i don't know if that's the way to
measure an aoc
because i think that her
i think her influence is
you know the influence on the whole body
it's not a legislative specifics so i
guess she got basically nothing
made into law
so she was one of the least effective
and actually changing laws but i would
say one of the most effective in the
world or the country anyway
in getting her message across so
certainly she pushed the green new deal
and all that stuff
um i've told you before that uh i now
self-identify as a black
citizen of america
now
uh and i have to say this every time i
mention it it's not a joke
not a joke
as long as we have the right to
self-identify and i've always agreed
with it i've never disagreed with
anybody self-identifying any way they
want i've always been in favor of it so
i'm going to take that same
the same right if you will is it right
or at least it's an option
and
say that i'm a black american and it has
several benefits number one is that you
know i have an affinity for
that group for reasons i've described
before but
i could also be more useful
sometimes it's easier to fix things from
the inside right
so what would be the single hardest
thing
for black america to get done that they
also want to get done
reparations
right
reparations would be the hardest thing
to get done
because it'd be so much resistance
but
i think i can help
and the way i'm going to help is by
saying
tax the major corporations
but tax them
intelligently
here's why you tax the corporations for
reparations
you tax the corporations because they
put themselves in a situation
where they can't say no
they can't say no
they're trapped
being woke
once once they realize that they have to
be woke or their own employees will will
chew them to death and the customers
will chew them to death
then you just have to propose it and
they're going to have to say yes
if you say um i'm sorry
amazon.com
did i hear you right
that you're not in favor of reparations
you know hypothetically if let's say
they decided to oppose it
they can't oppose it
but do you know who can oppose it
you can
i can
individuals can oppose it all day long
because they're just saying why should i
pay money for
your problem and then you're done
that's a good a that's a good argument
why should i pay money for your problem
are you paying money for my problem
right you know you so you have an
argument at least but corporations have
no argument and here's how i would do it
i would say corporations you will be
required to train anybody black who
wants to be trained
that's it
just you know if you're a big enough
company you probably have to limit it to
maybe fortune 500 or something you just
say this if a black citizen comes in and
says i'd like to be trained
for a job in your company you have to do
it that's it that's the whole thing
so every single black person can go to
any corporation say you know i think i'd
be good in
the warehouse or learning to code or
whatever it is that i think i can do and
you have to train me
reparations
now
here is the beauty of it i believe you
can make an argument that it pays for
itself
i think you could
you couldn't make that argument as
easily if individual citizens are paying
the taxes for the reparations
because it's just a harder argument to
make but a corporation
training people to work in its own
industry
might actually pay for itself and
certainly for the economy as a whole
because it would employ more people
blah blah blah so on behalf of my new uh
self-identified group black america i
give you this
this piece of productive work
which is if you want reparations tax
corporations and do it that way
make sure that they have to train
anybody who asks for it all right
um
here's how to solve the voter
identification problem just for the
in-person stuff there might be a way to
do it for not in person too but it'd be
harder
use the
facial recognition app
when you're there
but
if somebody doesn't have id
you ask them to sign a document that
says they can use the app
to determine their id
so a person comes in they have no id the
person working there says show me your
id they say i don't have one
they say well you've signed this form
that gives me permission to hold up my
camera and go
because that's all it takes it's
actually that fast if you haven't seen
if you've never seen a
facial recognition app work
it'll scare the out of you
it'll scare the out of you the
first time you see it i i saw one uh i
saw the app work on me once just as a
demo
and it's instant
is this fast
click
oh you're scott
it's that fast
you could do that easily without even
holding up the line it's actually faster
than showing your id
the time it takes you to reach into your
pocket and take out your wallet and
fiddle with it and show your id
is about 10 times longer
than
click
oh scott
so
just looking at a comment there that was
weird okay
so we have the technology that at least
in person you still have the mail and
vote issue and let's treat that separate
at the moment but you could solve all of
the id problems just by having people
say
yeah i'll let you use the facial
recognition app on me now everybody who
has id
has no risk of the facial recognition it
wouldn't be on all the time
you'd have to agree to it and you
wouldn't because you have id
now seriously tell me what that doesn't
solve
anybody
normally when i'm reading the comments
uh as soon as i present an idea there's
all the all the injections just sort of
flowing in
there are no objections
think about that
think about the fact
the most critical group in the world i
mean you guys are pretty skeptical
which i like i like it when you
challenge me on the ideas and the facts
but i'm not even seeing a counter
argument i'm just i'm monitoring the
comments as they're going by
yeah there's literally
literally no argument against that
because the technology already exists
the entire price of it is trivial like
the cost is almost nothing i mean it
rounds to nothing it's so cheap
it's instant it solves the problem
why not well i think the answer is that
this was never about solving the problem
right
as we started
if anybody cared about solving the
problem
the tools are right there
but it just shows you that that's not
that's not really what's happening
what's happening is you've got two sides
that are trying to game the rules to win
an election that's all that's happening
everything else about fairness and
racism and
it's nothing to do with it it's just
about somebody trying to win the
election
all right i saw an article uh
about why
africa is not having such a problem with
the chronovirus relative to the other
other countries
and
uh
andre andre's back house after i tweeted
it i thought it was pretty good and
worth reading and andres just put a
comment that
that the quality of it was in the data i
guess was
so low that you should just ignore the
whole thing
which maybe you should but
here are the things that africa has
going for it
low obesity
um they have less air conditioning i
didn't see that mentioned
but don't you think the air conditioning
just the
the forced circulating of air
wouldn't that make a difference
if it's an airborne virus if you have
less ac wouldn't that give you less
problems i don't know
they're younger of course much younger
that makes a big difference
as people pointed out their the
record-keeping might be flawed so
there might be a lot more infections
than we know they don't test as much
there might be a lot more but if they
were having bad outcomes
we would at least see more excess deaths
and apparently they're not
but some of the other speculation is
that blood type makes a difference and
apparently
there are some studies that say the
blood type in africa is
advantageous
and some other indication that if you
had any neanderthal dna you might have
worse outcomes
i've got a good dose of neanderthal dna
you could tell probably
but africa does not so africans have
little or no neanderthal dna
so that might be part of it but i would
like and then somebody also threw in
there that they're they're taking
ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine
i would like to call on that
uh i don't know so i'm going to say this
without the benefit of data
but if i had to place a big bat
i would bet that although it's true
that africa would use more
hydroxychloroquine and more ivermectin
then it's not the difference
that you know if you see you know the
the pictures of
just you know africans living their life
and i say to myself what percentage of
all the people in that picture
took a hydroxychloroquine today just in
case
i feel like it's not many
do you think the average village in
africa
there are many people in that village
were taking hydroxychloroquine daily
i mean
you could do a fact check on me
but anybody who suspects that that's the
big answer
i don't think so
yeah i understand why for malaria yeah
just to clarify the the the theory would
be that they're taking it anyway for
malaria prevention
and therefore it gives them some
protection against this hypothetically
but i don't think the percentage of
people is very high is it
a typical village in africa what
percentage are taking hydroxychloroquine
i would guess closer to zero but that's
just the guess
so fact check me on that but i don't
think that's going to be turned out to
be a factor in the long run
but here's something fun to do that you
should actually do
you should actually do this
google these two terms and then compare
google uh
africa people images just those three
words just google that and you'll get a
bunch of images of group pictures of
people in africa
now do the same thing but pick an
american city i picked houston
so i googled then uh
houston people images
now you get a bunch of group shots of
people in houston
compare
i think almost every houston group
picture had at least one super spreader
right in the picture
if you look at african uh images all day
long and i and i spent some time doing
it i was just paging paging
african images african images do you
know how many obese people i saw in all
of my looks
none
zero
there are zero fat people in in the
pictures obviously there are fat people
there but you can look all day long on
the pictures and you don't find a fat
person in africa i know they're there
but they're not in the pictures
in houston
every single picture had an obese person
in it
or almost
now
as i said before we knew that obese
people have worse outcomes but that's
not what i'm talking about i'm talking
about the super spreaders we know now
that obese people
have more lung capacity they get more
infections and especially the older ones
apparently are the ones who spread if
you look at the houston pictures there's
one of them in every picture
the the way you should count a obese
person over a 50 is like five infections
in your head you're thinking one right
you think well that's one guy
who might get it and have a bad outcome
so that's one
you don't count it as one that's a super
spreader
that one might be
a thousand people who get the infection
right
um
somebody's asking about polynesians
that's a good question that's a good
question how the polynesians are doing
i'd like to know the answer to that
all right um
over on uh
on the locals
subscription platform
one of the big questions were could i
teach people how to
view sleep as a skill
in other words can i teach people how to
get to sleep and the answer is yes yes i
can do that
that is well within my skill set so
next few days i will have a lesson on
locals
about how to view sleep as a skill
and i can tell you that the people who
do see it as a skill
pretty much succeed
right it is very susceptible to
technique a lot of things are not
but sleep is very very manageable by
technique you just have to know what
technique to use and almost nobody does
is for some reason it's the easiest
thing to do
that people are not aware of how to do
it it's weird but i'll teach you
all right yesterday i tweeted something
and
it was a thread and it turned out to be
uh
so popular
that i'm just going to talk about it
here i talked about reframing
and i tweeted that here's a reframe
which is just a different way of looking
at something that will change some
people's lives forever does that seem
like a big claim
do you think that in what what follows
in this tweet thread
do you think i'm going to accomplish
this
this claim
that this simple way of thinking about
something differently
will change people's lives forever
does that sound like too much
it's not it's not and
this easily will change some people's
lives forever not most
most people are not changed by most
things
but some people will be changed forever
by this and you might be one of them so
so listen to the rest
um
and here it is here's the thing that you
should reframe your mind
is the outcome of genetics traumas and
hacks and that's it that's the idea
that the thing you think of your mind is
partly your genes what you're starting
with but after that it's the traumas
that happen to you they end up designing
your brain
uh
and then modified by what hacks you do
now define hacks as just programming
your own brain
now a hack would be something you do
intentionally
to reprogram your brain so i said if you
don't learn to hack or program your
brain
the default is that you're a little more
than genes and trauma now is that an
oversimplification of course yeah so
you'll see what i'm doing here is an
intentional oversimplification
now this is what you need to know about
reframing the way you look at things
a reframe
is not necessarily
and doesn't need to be
about making something more accurate
the weird thing about reality is
that sometimes an inaccurate view of
reality is more functional
sometimes a accurate view of reality is
exactly what you need but there are lots
and lots of situations where an
inaccurate view of reality is better
now i won't give you examples i'm just
going to make that claim for now so
don't worry if this seems like too much
of a simplification and you say to
yourself but you're leaving something
out it doesn't matter for a reframing
you're trying to keep it simple so that
people can hold it in their minds so if
i get this about eighty percent right
that's all you need
so forget about you know being pedantic
the
of what you're saying but
is it really just genes and traumas
isn't it also some positive forget about
that just keep it simple your brain is
your genes
your traumas the bad things that have
happened to you
and the things that you do intentionally
to to make it better
let me give you some examples
uh one example of a brain hack is
education so you get some education it
physically changes your brain
to be more productive and you did it
intentionally all right so we all agree
that's a simple thing to do
and
another hack is uh intelligent skill
stacking
putting putting skills together in an
intelligent way that they become greater
than the
value of the individual skills
so those are some examples here some
more associating self rewards with
habits you want to deepen is a hack
you're literally programming your brain
by rewarding yourself for this thing you
want to do more often
learning to put things in context is a
hack
practicing optimism is a hack
if you make your system
your habit to routinely learn and test
new hacks
you become the author of your own mind
and
because your experience of reality is
subjective
you become the author of your own
experience
your experience of life is subjective
right life itself might be objective
probably there's probably something
there
but the way you experience life is
purely subjective
and you can change that
and so i summarize by saying be the hack
not the trauma now when i say that your
your brain is formed by traumas in part
what i'm talking about is let's say
there was a a bully
who always teased you about your looks
well that could scar you
so that you would always be concerned
about your looks
so that trauma of the bully just becomes
part of your permanent personality
because it actually rewires your brain
a hack does the same thing but you're
doing it intentionally to create a good
outcome all right
so if you learn to uh
to
sort of continually scour your
environment for a little psychology
tricks
hypnosis tricks affirmations is a is a
optimism hack basically and a focus hack
if you make it your sort of lifetime
practice
to look for ways to hack your mind and
then test them out
you will be the author of your own
experience
otherwise you're just going to be the
recipient of the experience otherwise
the world will
program you the world is going to
program you if you don't do it yourself
so you will become just your traumas
be the hack not the trauma
now
um there's that's the whole message
right
some number of you not very large or not
half but some number of you just heard
that and said
what
because what this does
and this is the power of a reframe
if you reframe something correctly it
changes behavior
you're not trying to just change how
somebody thinks about it you're trying
to make them think about it differently
to change an outcome a behavior
if i told you that hey if you just scour
your environment and test all these
little hacks you you'll have a
subjectively better life
some number of people just heard that
and said
huh
huh
i'll give it i'll give it a try
and for those people they just became
authors they don't know yet but they're
going to find out
so
this is one of the things that
keeps me interested right
i got to tell you almost every day some
well really every day i think somebody
contacts me that sometimes i know and
sometimes i don't to tell me that their
entire life has been improved by
some reframing that i that i presented
so they they're tremendously powerful
just tremendously powerful
all right
i was thinking of starting a new twitter
account a second one just for artists
so that they can curse at me without
knowing why
because artists are very very mad at me
and people have asked
because i've been sort of
playing around with this tech
i guess the theme i've been playing with
that artists don't understand reasoned
arguments
so they just swear at you if you have
one and so every time somebody comes at
me and is just pure troll you
stupid cartoonist you do everything
wrong with no reasons then i checked the
profile it's musician visual artist
writer
it's always one of the arts right
and
i thought to myself
that my only comeback for that would be
i won't try to make art if you don't try
to think rationally
the trouble is
i have to give this to you
because i can't use it myself because in
a way i'm kind of an artist
sort of i mean i don't even call myself
an artist because even i i look at my
art and i say well i'm not sure that's
art
with a big a sort of art with a small a
so i can't really use my own comeback
but if you're not involved in art
use it yourself i won't try to make art
if you don't try to think rationally
and
without being unkind to artists i think
that there is something like
it's almost like an autism spectrum
thing but different i saw somebody say
that in the comments but i was going to
say that anyway
it's almost like artists are on some
kind of their own spectrum where there's
you know complete rationality and
engineering on the right and then
there's a complete lack of rationality
and it's more imagination and stuff on
the left
and
i don't think that the people on that on
the end of the spectrum
who are dealing with imagination the
same as if it's fact
i don't think they should even be a
conversations with engineers
what good does that do
what good does it do for an engineer
who is strongly in the facts
to have a debate with somebody who uses
imagination just like it's a fact like
there's no difference
and
i don't think they know it i think they
think they're using facts
but yeah arguing with artists is the
least useful thing you can do unless
you're just doing it to for fun
all right um
there is a there's a story that i want
to tell you so badly
that i can't
uh it's it's one of the biggest stories
i've ever seen
but uh
but i can't tell you about it and i
don't know if i ever will
but
so one of the strange things about my
life is that um i i sort of got pulled
behind the curtain
so you get you get to see the stuff
that's that's really happening that's
not in the news
and once you get enough exposure to the
things that are really happening
behind the curtain
you're never the same like it's really
shocking
how different the public's opinion of
what has happened or will happen is from
any kind of reality it's just completely
separate
you know most of our political
conversations
are not even grounded
in the in the base reality we just don't
know it
so behind behind the curtain there's
some stuff
that it's just shocking
it's just shocking
yeah for the reason i can't tell you
is part of the story
right
and uh
i saw some people in the comments trying
to guess you won't be able to guess it
so it's not something you'd be aware of
the the whole point of the story is it's
something that you you don't have any
awareness of
that that's the story if i told you then
you would have awareness of it and bad
things would happen to me
so i'm not going to tell you
uh no no not because it's classified no
it has nothing to do with
um any like state secrets or anything
uh well i can give you an idea what it's
related to it's related to what you
believe so
or or what information you have
available to you so let's say it's an
information related phenomenon
that
if you told me that it was possible
to witness what i've witnessed
in the past week i would have said that
is not possible
i would have thought
that it was just the biggest conspiracy
theory until i watched it with my own
eyes now it's very rare
that you can you can observe
something and know you know what's
really happening i just happened to be
by weird coincidence i was put in a
position where i could see something
clearly
but i don't think anybody else well few
people can
they're probably uh i don't know 100
people in the country who who noticed
but they're not talking either
and it's definitely one of the biggest
stories in the country
you'll never hear it either and it won't
it probably won't matter like it won't
affect you but it's definitely one of
the
yeah no you i know what you're
i'm seeing your guesses in the comments
and i am reading them and it's not the
one you think
so i i know you're you're assuming it's
that but
uh it's it's something else
that's just huge
all right no nothing about angels
that's a good guess though i like that
guess
somebody said maybe i saw angels
i love that guess but that wasn't it
um
no not aliens no just information
let's just say there's something you
believe
not that you believe to be
true how do i say it
so it's not a fake news thing
there's just an information
something disappeared
that's the best i can tell you
it would be as if
aliens had landed on earth
and it didn't make the news
that's how big it is
literally it's that big it would be as
if aliens landed on earth actually
landed on earth
yeah and and just just so i i can call
you alex
b and some other people i see your
guesses
trust me you can't guess it
all right if it's in the news
some of you have seen some news if it's
in the news
you're already wrong
i'm talking about something that's uh
that will never be in the news
they'll never it will never be in the
news so if you think you know it because
you saw a news item then it's not that
no
anyway
i shouldn't have teased you about that
but the point is
i just want to give you this general
caution
that just about everything you think is
real in the news
has another layer doesn't mean that
everything you know is wrong but there's
always another layer and once you've
seen enough of those other layers you're
never the same
you're never the same no it's not trump
related
all right that's all i got for now and i
will talk to you all
tomorrow
bye for now
