irmations, for example, without knowing any scientific reason why that should make any difference whatsoever. But maybe it's a way you can program the simulation. Maybe you can author your own future because we live in a fairly subjective reality, no matter what you think.

So wouldn't you say that if somebody had publicly stated that they believed in the simulation, you'd expect them to have an unusual effect on the world and to be unusually successful in whatever ways we wanted to define that? Fair enough. Just keep that frame in mind as I go through the stories today. That's going to be the meta arc over the smaller stories. People who believe we live in a simulation, do they have more impact on the world?

Yesterday I was watching what turned out to be the finals of the NBA basketball, Warriors versus the Celtics, and the Warriors came out on top. But you don't have to be a sports fan to appreciate this element of the story. Would you agree that there are sort of two things that determine the winner when you get to the NBA finals? Because by the time two teams get to the finals, they're really good, and those are two teams that on any given day one could beat the other. So generally speaking, that's a true statement.

Now, often it's said that the difference is size. So when you get to the finals, there's just so much physicality and bumping into each other that the biggest team that's willing to bump the hardest has a big advantage. So size is a big thing, and the Celtics had a bit of size and youth, I believe, over the Warriors, who were seasoned and a little bit injured this year and a little bit older. So the physicality argument said the Celtics were going to win. And at least in one of the early games or two, it looked like that was going to be the story. Just bigger was better. There's just nothing you can do about it. Bigger is better, especially if you're going to put your full energy into it.

Bigger is often not better if you're on the practice court. This is something that Don Nelson discovered. The smaller players would beat the bigger players in practice games. But when he got to the finals, the big players would play harder and that was it. They would just shut down everything. So the Celtics should have won if size were the only factor. But you also have talent and superstars and people who can change the game. You know, you've got Steph Curry on the Warriors, and he can basically just change the nature of any game like a Michael Jordan could have. So that's another factor.

But the other biggest factor is the psychology of the two teams. And here I think that Steve Kerr, because I've been watching him for a long time, is kind of a genius on the psychology. And here's just some of the things that I see him do. One of them is that he supports the team, especially the superstars. So you would see if, like, Draymond Green, who's one of the more vocal and best players in the NBA, he got real mad and demanded that the coach show a replay, which they have only a few rights to do, so you don't want to use up your replay rights. But he demanded the coach do it. And watching the way Kerr responded to Green was really interesting because the moment that Green demanded it, Kerr said yes. And I don't think he necessarily would have. It doesn't look like that would have been his independent decision. But the way Kerr manages Green's psychology is sort of amazing.

Because you can imagine Green is a tough character because he's always arguing with the refs. He's a really big personality on the field. But Green is the one who manages the team's psychology. So there's this trickle-down. When you're on the court, you can see Green really being the one whose energy changes everybody else's energy. If he's having a good game, he just makes them have a good game, right? He gets the ball to the hot person. I mean, he's really just, you watch him in real time, just completely controlling the psychology of his own players. And then they control the psychology of the game, and then they win. And you can see the trickle-down. It's Kerr to Green to the team. It's not Steph Curry. Steph Curry is just the best player. But Green is the one who manages the psychology on the field, you know. And then having the best player is a big part of it, of course.

So there was, okay, you're way ahead of me on this story. This story has a wrinkle that's coming up. Last night on the Warriors bench, now they're playing an away game, right? So they're in their enemy opponent's building in Boston. And on their bench they have a visitor. Steve Kerr, the guy who I think is just one of the best managers of psychology I've ever seen, has as his one visitor on the bench Tony Robbins.

Tony Robbins. Now if you don't know how funny that is, let me give you some background. Tony Robbins has been famous for doing his personal growth, personal improvement seminars and books and stuff for decades. And the reason that he's so famous and he can do this for decades is because it works. That's it. Now you expect somebody like that to have some kind of scandal take you down. I think he's had some minor ones that he's managed to brush aside. But he's really good, and the things that he says are based on the same things I've studied. So he's an expert on persuasion, and he also has a direct line back to the top hypnotists, literally hypnotists of history. So he was actually mentored by one of the most famous hypnotists. And I don't think he necessarily uses that word, but it's one of the things he's added to his talent stack, you know, beyond the energy he brings and all of his own ideas and stuff. But he's got a talent stack that includes hypnosis.

Now one of the things that hypnotists learn, just part of being a hypnotist, is that reality is completely subjective, almost like you live in a simulation, almost like you live in the simulation. And I think that's one of the reasons that I think this is a simulation. Because if you study hypnosis, one of the things you learn is that people make decisions first and then they decide why they made the decision second. And you can't even be a hypnotist until you understand that. That's like a basic understanding that everybody sees the world backwards or upside down or inside out, whichever it is. As soon as you see it the way it is, you can manage it more effectively.

If I believe that people thought about things and then made decisions, I would treat people differently. I would write differently. I would express myself differently. I would do everything differently. But I don't believe that. There's no evidence of it. And once you learn it, it's hard to unlearn. People make decisions first for reasons they don't understand, and then they say it's because it will save money in the long run. But that's sort of after the fact. Now that's not every single decision. There's some that the objective parts of the decision are just hard-coded and everybody would make the same decision. But for a lot of the important things like what job do you have, who do you marry, do you have kids, all of those things are completely irrational decisions that we rationalize after the fact. Mostly we're just acting on our mating instincts and trying to act like we didn't. In fact, that's the best explanation of human beings. Everything we do is some expression of our mating instinct, and then we're trying to make it look like that's not what we're doing. And part of that is convincing ourselves that's not what we're doing. That's not what I'm doing. I dressed really well today, you know why? Because I like how it makes me feel.

Whenever I hear somebody say that, the way they're dressing, women say this more than men, but I'm dressing for myself. I dress for the way I feel, to make myself feel good. I always think that's someone who doesn't understand the basic nature of reality, that we're all just expressing our mating instincts and some people are aware of it and some are not.

Now imagine if the only thing that was different about you is that you knew that and nobody else did. Imagine being born into a world in which you alone understood that everybody was acting on their mating instinct. They just weren't aware of it, but you knew it. You would be like the one-eyed king in the land of the blind. You'd have almost a superpower of understanding what people are going to do and why they did it. And other people would be like, how did you know that was going to happen? Like how did you know this person was interested in this person? And I'd be like, well, look how they dressed today. I'm done. That was the mating instinct. They knew they were going to see this person one-on-one. And so it would look like you had magic powers if you just understood that the world is backwards from the way you're taught it is.

So Tony Robbins understanding that world and knowing that we live in a backwards world and therefore understanding which tools to use to improve a backwards world, if you're following the chain here, is hugely successful. Tony Robbins is really, really, really successful personally, but also has been credited by all kinds of leaders for helping them. So imagine how much Tony Robbins probably helped the Warriors in their psychological game. Because the Warriors came out and were psychologically impenetrable. Because they got behind early. I mean, they just started getting slaughtered in their away game for the first quarter. And then they didn't do anything except come back hard and win. They came back so hard they just stomped the Celtics.

So the older, beaten-up team with the play