do-do-do-do-do hey everybody come on in and grab your coffee coffee with Scott
Adams goes way better with actual coffee time for a simultaneous if grab your mug
cup or a vessel mmm that's good stuff oh
we can do it again I know I see some of you weren't ready okay grab your grab
your vessel simultaneous sipping it's gonna be good
oh let's let's bunch it up we're gonna do simultaneously sipping followed by a
virtual high five ready get your cup mmm
high five okay and he smoked in my area well the
other day it was it was whiteout conditions here you couldn't see the you
couldn't see the mountain that is my primary view yesterday it cleared up
about 80% so I've been checking in with my friends and contacts in the North Bay
some of you might know that Charles Schultz house where his widow Jeanne
Schultz lived burned down which was a tragedy like one of the bigger tragedies
in terms of non loss of life obviously that was a bigger tragedy all the people
who are dying up there but in terms of a historical site if you're a cartoonist
that's about the saddest day you could ever imagine I've actually stayed at
that every guest house though so the the Charles Schulz homestead where he spent
most of his life burned down and not too long ago I stayed in the guest house
there yes I'm okay so far I don't think the the flames are going to reach what
might happen all right so what we're going to talk
about today is based on this article so in Politico there's an article about
power of trumps positive thinking what we're going to talk about that now I
discussed this in Wynn Bigley my book which will be out October 31st I've got
a chapter on this and it's based on the fact that Donald Trump's Minister when
he when he was a kid was norman vincent peale one of the most successful
self-help type authors in american history in fact you could say he was
sort of the self-help guy when I was again and his books which note which did
influence President Trump he says so we're about essentially thinking your
way to success so he was the first person who told me because I also was
exposed to his work when I was a kid he was the first one who told me that that
you could change your situation simply by the way you thought in other words if
you change the way you thought you could also change your environment essentially
now when I say change your environment that means could mean getting rich and
you know moving to a different place or whatever but the idea is that the power
of the mind was under was underappreciated and if you simply
thought optimistically you could just think yourself into good situations now
Norman Vincent Peale was so influential on president Trump that he actually
officiated at Trump's of first marriage and one of the interesting things about
norman vincent peale is that beyond being a minister and beyond being the
positive thinking guru of all time he was also accused of being a hypnotist
that's right he was so influential so persuasive that in his time people
thought he might be a hypnotist now is it a coincidence the President
Trump has this weird optimism that never seems to turn off even when everything
is going against him as the article talks in the article in Politico it
talks about how any normal politician would have just put his tail between his
legs and run away with the various scandals and problems that President
Trump had along the election campaign trail but he just shook it all off you
just shook it off you just said well I'll just go be president in anyway and
that worked out for now I want to tie a few ideas together but the first thing I
want to tell you is that look at look at the pattern the the interesting thing
about Trump ascending to the presidency is that people aren't even sure if he
was the greatest business person in the world but yeah he succeeded wildly and
nobody thought he had the right credentials to be President
at least not in the classic terms and yet he succeeded there too so when you
see somebody exceeding succeeding beyond all expectations I've often said that's
a sign of a master persuader but it also is probably a sign of somebody
influenced by a norman vincent peale like personality and so for someone to
reach that far and succeed against those odds is very unusual and it takes a
certain mindset to do it now the Politico article of course I
tried to figure out how to make this bad and so their spin on it was well is it
just positive thinking or has he talked himself into a delusion and he doesn't
know the difference between reality and and what he's imagining about his
success in the future yeah and you have to stretch pretty hard to get
but the best way to understand the things he says that don't sound true is
that he's literally thinking his way into a new reality and the the facts are
not as important as you think what's important is what happens next
is far less important what has already happened let me put this another way the
past doesn't exist let me say that again the past doesn't exist it doesn't exist
it's only in our minds so if so if President Trump says bla bla fact and
you say that's not true that's not what happened
the truth is that doesn't exist either way with the bad the past doesn't exist
now and so a master persuader says what does exist let's work with that
what does exist is my imagination and if I imagine a better future is that gonna
help now I think at this point there's enough you know valid scientific
research to show that having a positive attitude and confidence or even
pretending to have those things does help your performance all right so in a
very normal way it helps have a positive attitude so there's there's I don't
think there's any question about that that's left in the scientific community
but I think this just for fun we're going to extend the thought a little bit
and bringing the idea of affirmations now you some of you know I've written
about affirmations and it's the idea that you just focus on a certain thing
you want to happen and you repeat it in your head and you visualize it over and
over in my life I've done a number of affirmations and I've written about this
at length but very unlikely things happened when I
used affirmations for example I used affirmations to try to become a famous
cartoonist when the odds of that were so small I mean the odds of becoming a
famous cartoonist as a goal it's just so small but it happened and it happened at
a time I was doing the affirmations and focusing on it now I'm not going to tell
you that affirmations cause magic to happen but I will give you this context
humans did not evolve to understand reality you can see that in the election
right you can see that half of the country thinks they're living under a
hitler-like dictatorship and in the Trump regime half the people think we're
entering the Golden Age where the economy is doing great and you know
we're all happy and things are looking good those aren't even the different
same reality but the facts are the same you know the underlying if there is some
objective reality that hasn't changed but we're all putting their own
interpretation on it so you're seeing a religion that I don't see you're seeing
a politician I don't see you're interpreting why things are happening in
ways I don't see so we have different movies running in our heads all the time
now in this in the scenario where none of us really understand reality because
we didn't evolve to we never needed to understand reality it wasn't important
to reproduction you know a clam doesn't understand reality but it can make more
baby clams if if there's such a thing as a baby clam and if you look at all the
animals the animals could reproduce just fine but I don't think my cat my dog and
I had to share the same view of what reality is okay so understanding reality
is absolutely unimportant now it is important if you walk in front of a
truck and the truck kills you so I'm not saying that reality doesn't affect your
life I'm just saying that we all have completely different movies in
heads and in that scenario there may be some kind of steering mechanism in other
words there may be some way that you can guide yourself through this movie of
yours maybe you're just writing the script the way you want to see it and I
would suggest that just as a possibility based on my weird experience with
affirmations now oh then let me tell you a few more affirmations that worked out
for me I also did an affirmation that I would have a number one number one New
York Times bestselling book this was before I ever wrote a book so I had
never written a book and when I wrote my first one I did affirmations on the idea
that it would be a number one New York Times bestselling book now I don't have
to tell you that that's pretty rare you every author wants to be a New York
Times bestselling author number one but I was you know my book became a number
one New York Times bestseller as many of you know my story about losing my
ability to speak and for about three years I did affirmations to say that I
Scott Adams will speak perfectly and I couldn't speak for about three years I
had a bizarre the vocal disorder but even though the the disorder was
considered incurable when I first got diagnosed I found a cure all right now
other people found it too but most people didn't you know I found the one
doctor in the world who had figured out a semi experimental surgery I had the
surgery he didn't work for everybody but it works for me and I won't tell you my
whole history but there are a number of times there were a number of times that
I did affirmations on things that just seemed impossible what are the odds you
would become one of the top cartoonists in the world just because you
you were saying that you wanted to even that's pretty weird what are the odds
that you'd become a number one bestselling author with no experience
writing pretty low right what are the odds that you would have an incurable
problem that you would not only cure but on the other end of it you would come
out better so the voice that you're hearing right
now is not actually my original voice it's an improved version because you
know I did a lot of vocal training until I could produce a better sound so the
surgery is what cured the voice but on top of that I did a lot of vocal
training so I know how to just produce better sound with my equipment so I
actually came out of hand and in fact a lot of people comment on these
periscopes one of the things they say is you know I like your voice which nobody
ever said before trust me so in my life I've seen the power of positive thinking
which did start with norman vincent peale with me the same as I did with
President Trump so while other people were seeing president Trump and saying
just crazy stuff
what I saw was norman vincent peale what I saw was affirmations lived out
loud it didn't matter to me that the things he said were not true about wait
for it or not true about wait for it the past so any fact-checking that didn't
fit the past I discounted because the past doesn't exist right and I have the
same mindset that the past doesn't exist I'm not a I'm not a slave to the past
I'm not a victim to the past in fact I am so much not a victim of the past that
the years ago I developed the idea that if you got a letter in the mail the
contents of the letter would be variable in a Schrodinger's cat
kind of a way until you look at it so my view of reality is a reality doesn't
harden until until it happens until then everything's on the table there
nothing's ruled out until you observe it and even then sometimes you it changes
you know we saw the the situation with the Vegas gunman we all thought we do
the information and then it'll the reality just all changed it happens all
the time so in my reality the facts are very malleable they're not fixed you
know past doesn't exist and what might happen tomorrow everything's in play so
that's just sort of a a world view so that world view has allowed me to enter
different fields and through the power of positive thinking largely do things
that any reasonable person would have told me not to do let me give you
another example into in 2015 I risked my entire career and reputation for the
rest of my life by making a prediction that Donald Trump would win in the
landslide this is when everyone thought he was a clown this is 2015 long before
even his best supporters were starting to get on board there were a few like
Ann Coulter I think Mike Cernan bitch yeah there were a handful of us who were
early but I made a big big gamble with my career not only that I would be right
but that I would essentially be changing careers you know at my age not not
changing entirely but moving into a new field that I had no experience with now
I've done this before I moved into writing with no experience I moved into
cartooning with no experience I've got a I started some restaurants with no
experience they they failed but not because of my lack of experience there
were there were other factors and now I have a startup that's just
about ready to do something amazing I'll share that with you later so all of
these things had one thing in common I wasn't really qualified for any of them
but they all work down now there are plenty of things that haven't worked out
so so it also helps to try lots of stuff but weirdly the biggest things I tried
the things were the biggest potential payoff were the ones that weren't they
were also the ones I did the most affirmations about so when you see
President Trump with this unnatural optimism
you know his you know if you ask him how was it how was the White House going and
all the people are reporting it's chaos it's you know things are a mess and if
you ask him he's like it's great never been better
you know think things could get any better that economy that's great we're
gonna make some jobs we're gonna do all this and you say to yourself well is
that just a bunch of BS you see being a con man now because he knows this isn't
quite true because he is he just you know is it just is he crazy
he doesn't know it's not true so people are wondering why does he say these
things that don't seem to match with what I and all the other observers are
seeing well why does he do this and now you're starting to understand the reason
he does it because he's a creating the future
you think he's describing you think he's describing what the way things are when
he says the economy is like better than ever before or jobs are coming back and
then the fact checkers say no actually there's not many jobs coming back and
well actually the economy was strong before the fact checkers are missing the
entire show this show is the president is describing the future by pretending
it's the it's the present that's the power of positive thinking that's how
it's done all right it's right in a norman vincent
peale playbook you just simply think your way into a more positive
world you see that he's done it with his his own career you know he got out of
these incredible bankruptcies he got in of all these scandals during the
campaign this man has escaped more fatal traps
than anyone you've ever seen I mean truly fatal traps and and he walks
through them like like he's asbestos and fire and and I would suggest that when
you interpret that as hey how come he can't he can't see the facts why is he
full of BS why is he trying to con us when we know that we know the past
doesn't match what he just said well I'll remind you again the past
doesn't actually exist and you're not bound by it sure it can inform you and
sure you need to know what the past was and sure you need to avoid trying to
make the same mistakes yeah there's some small utility to the past but if you're
bound by it if you're shackled by it if you're a slave to the past you miss all
the good stuff Donald Trump is not a slave to the past you are an example
pussy gate when the pussy got gate thing erupted that was the past coming back
like a like a chain around his neck and every one of us watched that show and we
said my god he got so far and then the chain command came out from the ground
from the past and grabbed him and when you saw the
chain grabbed him by the neck the pussy gate scandal you know you said to
yourself it's over the past got it but do you know what Donald Trump said now
President Trump I'll tell you what he said he said what I would have said he
said to a norman vincent peale what is said he said what Donald Trump said he
said past doesn't exist and then he made his own he simply made the past
not matter he did that to you you thought it mattered and then he
showed you it didn't it was like the greatest magic trick ever played they
said it wasn't magic it was technique right
he simply willed the past into oblivion he did that
notice how President Trump is is so often talking about the future you know
make America great again that's the future build a wall in the future bring
back the jobs in the future everything is about what he's going to do but at
the same time he's telling you everything is great everything was
working well the economy is working well now you say to yourself isn't it bad
that what he's saying doesn't match exactly what we're seeing no it is
technique he is literally thinking the economy to a higher level and I'm not
even joking about that a little bit you are watching one of the world's greatest
affirmations reality shaping personalities of all time maybe the most
effective reality shaper of all time Steve Jobs was up there but he had more
of a company view versus you know Trump now has a world view and you're watching
him turn the economy into an optimism engine you're watching him use that same
reality shaping optimism when he's dealing with North Korea and with Isis
think about what those people what the ISIS people are thinking when they look
at him when he's so positive that they're gonna be wiped out and he's
created momentum and just recently and just recently you saw a thousand Isis
fighters surrender instead of fight to the death
when you when you see Isis start to surrender instead of fight to the death
that means he's in their head it means that they don't see their their plan as
being the winning plan they already see him as the eventual winner
and what people laughed when he labeled Isis
you know evil losers and I said no that's more important than you think all
right he is branding the future and making
everybody walk right into it so when you see the president ignoring the past
which is usually what the facts are facts are the past right so the fact
that happens at this moment boom it's already the past all right it's because
the the president is now a new thing so that's one of the signs of a master
persuader someone who who sees reality as malleable because to a large degree
it really is reality does change with our expectations let me say that in a
way that doesn't sound like I'm talking about magic in in the economy if people
expect the economy to do well then businesses invest because they say
everybody expects it to do well next year I think it will do well because we
all expect it so then they invest now what does that make happen well it makes
the economy do well because everybody invested that's what makes an economy
run so his shaping of the future in our
minds his relentless positivity isn't a crazy man in a in a standard world in
the in the two-dimensional view of the world where most people are stuck they
see a world that's fixed and then they see this guy who doesn't seem to be
connected to it at least in terms of how he describes facts he seems to be sort
of off on his own his own thing you know with making up his own facts and making
up a you know a magical world in his mind and if you live in the 2d world
that's sort of what you see and it looks dangerous and it looks you don't
understand it and you don't know how this could be helping it doesn't look
like other presidents have done it except maybe Reagan a little bit and so
it's a little off-putting but if you understand that what he's doing is he's
moving us collectively to a different mine
set and that mindset makes everything happen right
it makes the economy hum it makes people have peace instead of war it you know it
does a lot of things anyway so that was what I was going to talk about today and
wrap this up pretty soon read the political article that I tweeted about
you can find it in my my my tweets and I'm gonna sign off now and talk to you
later remember don't win small if you can buy
my book win Bigly and pre-order it now bye
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