Episode 3115 - The Scott Adams School 03/16/26

0:00All right, are we going live? Is it saying in three, two, one? I saw it on X. Thank you. All right. No countdown. Steven's there. Good morning, Steven. Good morning, everybody. It's Monday. It's gonna be a great week. I can feel it. Can you guys feel it? I can. It's already a great week. It is already a great week. Just the pre-show with these three people here with me has made my week great. So we're off to a good start. I like the weekdays. Welcome in, everybody. Just gonna give you a chance to filter in. Do you have your reframe your green books with you for extra credit? We're gonna do a reframe. Joshua Lysek is our guest professor today. We are thrilled every time he's here. I know you guys are too. And Owen and Marcella have picked out some great news stories

1:00for us to discuss in this second half of the program. So I think, do you think we're all in here? You guys, do you think everyone got in? I think so. I see healthy numbers on all the platforms. Healthy. All right, you guys. We are something we have to do first. Grab your vessel. But if you'd like to enjoy this simultaneous sip, you know it doesn't take much. Oh, you need. Is a cup or a mug or a glass? A tank or chalice or something? A canteen jug or a flask of vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. Like me some coffee. Enjoy me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dope, it means here, the day, the thing that makes everything better. Simultaneous sip. Go. That's the way to start the day. Tiger juice. Anytime Scott made like an extra noise or a little whatever, I just laughed every time.

2:03I'm sure you guys did too. Tiger juice, it is. Tiger juice. Welcome. My name is Erica. Welcome to the Scott Adam school. Our guest professor joining Marcella and Owen and myself is Joshua Lysick. Your favorite, am I? Good morning, Joshua. Good morning, Erica. Thanks for having me on. Of course, we love it. Anytime. So you just stop the screen sharing. We're screen sharing. What's happening? Oh, how's that? I don't see it. How about now? There we go. Okay, Rumble Studio. Thank you. It's much better. Much better. Okay, guys, reframe your brain. So if you have it with you, the paperback is page 86. The reframe is called take some chances. I'm just going to quickly read it. We'll discuss it for a few minutes. Okay. So I felt like this was appropriate. There's been a lot going on. And this one I'm doing kind of personally for me.

3:04So I hope you enjoy is one of, I know it's one of our favorites. Okay, take some chances. I talked about conquering embarrassment in the success reframes chapter because immunity to shaming is one of the most useful business and professional skills you can acquire. If you are lucky enough to succeed anything meaningful, bad people will appear from nowhere and shame you for the way you did it. That's guaranteed. People who are immune to embarrassment have more options in life. And those options are often the high pay off kind. But hardening yourself against shame and embarrassment also has an immediate benefit in maintaining your mental health. No one feels good when they also feel shame. That's why it makes sense to reframe it out of your life. As I mentioned early, a reliable way to become immune to embarrassment is to intentionally put yourself in the embarrassing situations. For example, volunteer to give a speech, sing karaoke in front of coworkers, experiment with your fashion and hairstyle, chat up an attractive stranger, that sort of thing.

4:06Don't try to avoid embarrassment, invite it. You'll get some good stories out of it and each mini shame toughens you up for the next one. So take some social risks, flame out in front of witnesses, repeat. You'll be amazed at how quickly you can murder your ego by ignoring its screaming needs. The usual frame is avoid embarrassment, the reframe, invite embarrassment, and use it as a club to kill your ego. If someone asked you to deliver a priceless work of art across the street, you might balk at the suggestion. If you were to slip, trip, get robbed or assaulted, that priceless art might get damaged. How comfortable would you be carrying it? It makes sense to be on high alert to focus on protecting the valuable art. That pressure creates a feeling of anxiety. Now suppose I asked you to deliver an ordinary potato across the street. If you drop it or damage it, no big deal. It was only a potato. Think of yourself as the potato and not the priceless art.

5:07Only your ego makes you think you are worth protecting and being worth protecting is what makes you anxious. If you can abandon the notion that every speck of harm that comes your way must be avoided at all costs, you can better relax the usual frame. I am a priceless work of art that must be protected. The reframe, I am a potato that is easily replaced. Be the potato. I love this so much and I really feel like I do my best to live this way and to keep this in my mind. And I really don't get embarrassed. I never really feel bullied. Like when someone's bullying me, like I know they're trying to bully me and I'm like, I don't care. Like I just don't care. Because I know my intentions in who I am. And so the other stuff is just noise. And also living, my opinion living in a day and age with like social media, like X, for example, could be really brutal.

6:10You have to just be tough and you just have to let things roll off of you and not be embarrassed. And I think a lot of you have really, really good things to say, you have really good thoughts and opinions. And maybe you're holding yourself back because you're afraid someone might think what you're saying is stupid or what if they don't like what I say, I better clam up and not do it. And I think Scott would challenge all of us to do that thing, start small if you have to, but do that thing. Like if someone's laughing at you and you think you're gonna feel embarrassed, like who cares? Like they're not gonna be thinking about that thing for the rest of their lives. Like you can let it go, they can let it go. We've all seen people do things that could be considered embarrassing. And do you care? Like it's not like you think differently of the person or don't like them. So I just wanna ask the group here, I'm gonna toss it to Joshua first. Like is there anything you've done that you were afraid of being embarrassed and you pushed it out of your way

7:11and how did you handle it? Yes. So in 2017, I gave a TED Talk via the TEDx platform. And there were a few ways that I sort of prepared myself for that. So first and foremost, the TED platform is sort of the world's most significant platform for public speaking that anyone, quote unquote, can attain and reach. And everyone has a favorite TED Talk. Many of the people watching right now, you've probably seen Simon's Next Famous TEDx Talk, start with why that ultimately became the best selling book. And everyone seems to know who he is in the personal development space, Simon's Next, but also started with a TED Talk. Many people might also be familiar, particularly amongst my generation younger with the internet marketing guru named Tai Lopez. He also got to start with a TED Talk. Many of the famous people that have books on New York Times and Solar lists, months after month after month, they got their start from a TED Talk. I knew this going into the experience

8:12and how significant it was going to be to add legitimacy to personal brand perception, especially being a ghost writer by trade nonfiction book, ghost writer. If people don't really know who you are, I decided to do the opposite to market myself as to what everyone else was doing. And so I knew how significant that this is going to be. And therefore, how bad it would look if I botched it. Okay, so here's what I did to prepare. I think one of the reasons the ego can get rather noisy in a high-stake situation is the what-if concern. What if this happens? What if I do this? What if I say this? What if it doesn't go? What if what if what if and we just sort of spiral into that doom? And then the what if I what if I go out there and I forget and then you're in the moment and then the lights are on and you can't see the audience and the lights are so bright, knowing what the what a stage experience is like. The lights are so bright, you literally can't see anything. And it's like you know that hundreds to hundreds of thousands of people are all looking at you

9:15and you can't see any of them. That can be terrifying. So here's what I did to prepare for. I decided to train my physiology to prepare. This is the best advice I can give for men and managing one's ego. Because when you physiologically prepare or the rest train yourself, you are not going to be overwhelmed. You're going to be in main, even keel and cool. So what I did is I decided I was going to memorize my TED Talk bird for word. It ended up being about 17, 18 minutes on the longer side, certainly. But I decided I was going to memorize it word for word. Every little thing that sounded organic, even the us and the ums, I was intentionally starting into my speech. Like it's in the script. It's in the transcript of the speech that I wrote. It's all in there. Even though if you watch it, it looks like it's organic delivery. Everything is rehearsed. But where I rehearsed is key. It would, I rehearsed it in the summer time. I eventually would deliver in November. I went to, I kid you not,

10:16I went to a local mosquito-infested swamp. And I run a little tiny, little spit of land in the middle of the swamp. I rehearsed, I practiced my speech. So I was physically, very physically uncomfortable. There's mosquitoes buzzing everywhere. You hear them. There's swamp. It's rather long walk to get there. I did not rehearse it anywhere else, by the way. I only rehearsed it in the very uncomfortable dismal swamp. And often passed sundown, where it was dark. And I couldn't see much of anything. So when I go out there on stage to deliver it, it's relatively comfortable. It's a relatively easier physical space in which to be delivering the speech. And it relatively was a relief. Oh, I'm doing it now. There's no mosquitoes. I can actually see things. There's no frogs croaking or what's that? Things moving out on the swamp and whatnot.

11:17And it's a climate-controlled environment. So the way to sort of skip over the ego and just don't even worry about addressing it directly and head on and the things that it says, which is what if, what if, what if, what if. Simply maneuver your way around that by physiologically preparing yourself for the environment in which you'll need to deliver whatever the delivery looks like. And of course, in my unhumble opinion, I'm going to dial the ego up a little bit. It is a fantastic TED Talk. And even nine years later, I am very proud to send it off to people. You can go. I live a lot right now. I'm significantly healthier than I was at that time I had been vegan for a while. And after 10 years of chronic veganism, I'm no longer suffering and during that experience. So fortunately, I would say I look better now. But the delivery and what are still so good that I will still share the video with people if they want to see this highlight of early Joshua Lysik lore. We'd love to see it. Will you post it for us after on your page?

12:19Sure. That would be amazing. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. I'm sure the mosquitoes are all the wiser for your practicing out there. Marcella, listen, girl, I know you are a Jaco Devote. So you must be very sharp on these types of things. So are you ever worried about embarrassment or your ego? How do you handle it if you are? So I was thinking of something that Mark and Jason just said in an interview that I wanted to share with you guys. The reminds you of this is that he talked about the great men of history had little to no introspection, meaning that they just went. They just go, go forward, go. And I think part of that too much thinking about things doesn't lead you to action. So this kind of reminds me of that. You just have to proceed and do it and then not think of being scared but think of the outcome

13:21and not the process. I think that's another reframe. So that's where I would focus on. Where I lost my embarrassment is when I start teaching and having 40 kids in front of you that don't care what you have to say are doing drugs or just like had the worst of parents and all that. And grabbing their attention was my, like I just focused on that and being able to get to having them not stab me. And so that you lose your embarrassment very quickly when you're teaching people. And that's where I lost my embarrassment. I think we need to talk about the school system after this, but okay, California. So Owen, like tell us what you do. You're also very well spoken and confident. And do you, I know also from what I know and what we've talked about, you're also a great father.

14:22So I'm sure you try to pass these things onto your kids. So how do you handle the fear of embarrassment or fear itself or if someone was bullying you what do you do? Yeah, well, I mean, it's definitely when I was very young had these embarrassment issues and some embarrassing situations. And I think it was basically just trained out of me. I don't even know how much of it was voluntary. Like I remember in junior high, I had a speech class in the very first one. It was just so awful. Like it was the worst delivery you could imagine. Like I just almost like you forget your whole speech and you don't know what to say. Like it was just terrible. And I still have that as like a scar in my memory of being embarrassed. And certainly I got better at it after that. But I think a lot of it was just basically forced experiences maybe starting in college with ROTC and the Army where you would get rotated through leadership positions

15:24and you'd have to like deliver an operations order or call the Jody March or whatever it is where you have to say things. And I would say that was probably a great transitional experience because it's kind of like with training wheels because you pretty much know what you have to say. So the only real challenge is you're up in front of 100 people and you have to say it. But like they can't react. They're at attention or at ease. And like so it's basically a static audience. It's almost like you're talking to mannequins and they have to do whatever you say when you give them orders. So like there's really nothing, there's no way it can go wrong really because you have to prepare. They make you do your operations order. And so you know exactly what you have to say and you just read it or say it or whatever and it gets done. And so I was basically forced to get comfortable a little bit with public speaking through that process. But I was still probably pretty rough in terms of just overall public speaking and things like that. And when I, in my second job in consulting,

16:27the guy I was working for, the partner I was working for, said, hey, you're too quiet. I'm gonna send you to this Dale Carnegie course. And I'll pay for it, but you have to go. And so I'm like, all right, fine. I mean, I didn't really have much of a choice, right? And so I went to this thing and it was incredible. It was really good. And I know Scott Adams went to the same course because he's talked about that. And the magic of that is that they do force you to do public speaking, but again, they give you a structure. They kind of teach, okay, you're gonna give a two minute talk. Here's exactly what to say or here's, you know, you can pick a topic, but here's the structure of it. Here's the intro, here's the middle, here's the end. This is what you have to do. And then the other part of it is no one in the audience is allowed to critique it at all. You're not allowed to say anything negative. The only thing you can say is positive feedback. So it's just a totally supportive, totally positive environment. And I think the whole structure of it gets people out of their shell. You get more comfortable with it just through practice

17:28by getting up in front of people you don't know and getting a talk, but you know at the end of it they're gonna say something good about it. They're just gonna point out what you did right. And so you can work on improving in an environment where there's no critical nature to it. There's no negative feedback at all. And that really did make a difference. I was no longer as quiet and I don't think anyone would necessarily describe me as a quiet person now. But I still am, I would say an introvert and probably quiet most of the time when I'm around my wife and things like that. But it made a big difference and I think it really helped my career from that point forward. And then from there it was probably just going through all these client experiences where I was expected to be the expert. So of course I had to talk a lot and I had to lead them through all these processes and sometimes they were very stressful. Sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes things aren't what you expect and you might have difficult people you're dealing with. And I had some clients that swore at me and I had clients that were ready to tear down

18:28every idea I had that were Harvard MBAs. And I had to engage with them and convince them that I was right when they thought they knew better. And that particular client, because it was basically all Harvard MBAs and the culture of that client was they were required to disagree with you if they didn't agree. And you had to respond to the challenge. And if you didn't win the argument, then you lost. And if you didn't win early on, apparently I would have been probably booted out of there. And I got through that and I survived it. And I was able to deliver everything we were supposed to deliver and basically outsmarted a bunch of Harvard MBAs. And that gave me a lot of confidence from that point forward. I mean, honestly, every challenge after that, it was like, yeah, this is easy. Yeah. I don't know, it's nothing like what I've been through. Well, that's like what Scott wrote in the reframe. Like just start doing the things and each time, like you feel that little bit of embarrassment and you push it away, you're just toughening yourself up. And the next time it won't be like that

19:29and the next time and the next time and the next time. And before you know it, you've pushed it away. And I think I want to turn it over to Joshua for his lesson for us, but I just want to challenge everybody. Thank you, Owen. And you guys should know that Owen is actually really frickin' funny. I've known him for a very long time and don't let that stone cold look on his face, that expressionless face for you. He's very funny. He has a good sense of humor. He can be a little wise-ass himself. So it's good that you know that he's just like all of us. So I just want to say you guys, maybe pick something this week that would maybe terrify you or make you afraid and just do that thing. And if you want to involve us, like you could post it either on locals or you could tag us on X, like maybe you want to sing karaoke. Maybe you want to show us what you're learning on the guitar or give us a little mini-speech or show us a drawing or give an idea that you never gave before. Do it, you know what I mean? Just do it.

20:31I'm not going to mock anybody for trying to step out of their fear of embarrassment. I think go for it. And the more you do it, the more comfortable you will become. So thank you, Scott, for that. So let's some quick interstitial step while Joshua is preparing now to give us a lesson. And we're going to turn the floor over to Joshua. We have the way for joining us today. We're less than the sipping and just the light. So it's a little bit easier to see. I want to show all of you the easiest storytelling framework and it's this perfect day to be sharing this lesson with you because we're talking about public speaking presentation, ego and managing it, dial it it up and down and whatnot. So when any time you are giving a public presentation or you are, let's say, called upon to share an anecdote

21:32or what do you think? Or any type of being put on the spot, this framework will prove useful to you by telling a story. It's also immensely useful when you are prompting, let's say you're prompting AI to give you a better story or you're prompting yourself or you're teaching children how to tell more effective stories on the fly. And it goes, wow, that sounds really good. How did you, how did you pull that off, right? This is a way of making it look like you've rehearsed your story but you're just coming with it on the fly. That's what I love about templates frameworks is it shows the audience, whether it's one or two people or it's tens of thousands, it shows that you know what the heck you're talking about. When you can ride something up off the fly and it sounds like it's fully prepared, that's the power of this particular template. And I recognize that this template exists because I was teaching my almost eight year old son,

22:34we were going through some of the work, and let's say non-finetic spellings, specifically like who is obviously not spelled like W-O-O, it's W-H-O, obviously, right? And what emerged here was a pattern that I recognized works really well and so I want to teach it to all of you here at Scott M. School and give a brief off the cup demonstration to how well this works. So many of us have heard the, let's say, this sort of instructions, directions. Who, what, when, where, why, how? We've all heard that, right? That's sort of ubiquitous. Well, the good news is you already know what the storytelling framework is, the easiest one ever, because you already know who, what, where, when, why, how? Like, everyone knows these, right? Everyone's nodding. Those of you at home was staying on your devices. Yes, everyone knows these words. Who, what, when, where, how?

23:35Well, it turns out that these are your instructions for implementing the easiest storytelling framework. So let's use a very simple example here, kind of looking around. It's like, I'm gonna give me a who, just any hypothetical who. Any hypothetical, give me a now, just a round of now. The postman. Okay. All right. So, it's like mad, what's that? It's like mad lips. A bit, yes. But you have your template here that you can immediately tell something. So you could say, the postman, and then what's the postman doing? Let's say, Erica, what, what? He's singing. All right. So the postman is singing. Where is he singing at? In his truck. The postman is singing in his truck. Now, when, when did this happen? Or perhaps what time of day is it? Can you give me any of those details? Just one. It was at like 3.45 today. All right. The postman was singing in his truck at 3.45 today.

24:37Notice how precise that is. And it is a little bit like mad lived, but it actually makes sense. Unlike the mad lives, it's supposed to be funny. This is wildly precise and specific. Oh, this sounds like it's gonna be good. Like what you're describing almost is the inciting incident. It's a bit of a one act play. And it sounds like you have gone through several drafts of this already, even just from spontaneous. Okay. The postman was singing his truck at 3.45 today. Why was he singing? He was happy. He was happy. Okay. So the postman was singing in his truck at 3.45 today because he was happy. All right. Now, the how dimension, this, I'm gonna put a little bit of an asterisk. We're gonna put an asterisk next to the how because there are multiple dimensions. We're gonna do this little aura. This is a little aura symbol, okay? Around how? Got to see the aura. See it. Yeah, you see the aura. Okay, that's the aura of how. Because when I teach this to my son,

25:37he might originally have gone through this and he was happy. How? Because he was having fun. How do you know he was having fun? How could you tell? So see the questions, the question is how it could be asked in different ways. How come? How did you know? How did that come about? The how allows, and that's the way that has the aura and the asterisk, so you're not exactly saying every single time, how it's a sort of a starter phrase, hence why it's an asterisk. And teaching this especially to children or people who are learning the art of storytelling-based persuasion or hypnosis, which I'm a certified practitioner of and do this professionally. This is a fantastic way to quickly build and sort of parable that you interject suggestions into when meeting with your client or with your patient.

26:37And it just turns out that who is symbolizes themselves. It's either themselves, the patient, the client, or it's the character that's meant to symbolize them and then what they do in the story and to complete fully the story. One of my mentors said that the best, most useful lessons in life are not taught. They're caught. I mean, people simply just receive them with that necessarily you intended to do that. And they're often best caught through stories. So you can intentionally make people believe what you want them to believe by telling them the correct story, which is both empowering and terrifying, depending on what your moral compass would dictate. So we now have both of us singing in his truck at 345 this afternoon because he was happy. So it's like, how come he was happy? How do we know he was happy? How is that an unusual occurrence at all? Let's say, you could have five more paragraphs. You could have five books.

27:40People are asking Erica to put Josh on full screen so they can read the screen. I saw that you guys, I'll try. Let me see if it's not going to be pretty, but see, it's going to put me. Okay, maybe I need to talk. Maybe they'll do that little thing automatically. I let's say. Let's see, is it going to come up? Is it going to sometimes if the person who's talking it'll automatically throw that person's concept up on stage. But the easiest storytelling framework again is who, what, when, where, why, how? And you can start with any dimension. So you could just pick a random character so you can do, you know, when you need the poo, what was, what was he, what was he doing, where was he doing it, when was he doing it? When you the poo was, was fishing down at the creek last night. It's something, it's an evening routine he does with Christopher Robin and their little friend Piglet. Okay, and then, okay, that's like a set up.

28:41But you're not, once you get past the set up, you need to give us the how. So the how is going to be, let's write. The how is going to be sort of, and how this came about. How is it different? How do we def, defy expectations? You see, the how is a lot of fun. So in this case, with our hypothetical postman story, let's, let's play with how a little bit here. So how, how is this different? How is this unusual? How do you know he was happy? You want me to tell you? Yeah, hypothetically, just running with this, okay. Okay, because he was singing a song that it was his last day on the job, and he was retiring because something about a book he wrote with Joshua Lysik just hit the charts and was doing really well. Fantastic, excellent. And then, so what, what song was it? He made it up. It was just like, I'm retiring today. And he was like skipping around.

29:42It was great. And if it's different, if it's a different kind of story, we could have it be, he was singing, I don't care by Iggy Pop, as he was crashing over all the mailboxes by the side of the road. Sure. Yep. And that's a different kind of story, rather funny. You see how the, how explanation allows us to go off in a number of different directions and can tell a specific type of genre story. You know, you could have, you could turn it into a Western. You could turn it into a murder mystery. You could turn it into a sci fi fancy. But the, the setup is so key. And we see this with first, usually first time, novelists, debut, memoir authors, where they will, they will not give you a setup. They'll try to recount details. They'll give us the autobiography of their, of their life. So I was born here at this place. So these kinds of parents and that gives your autobiographical details and then they'll really zoom in, wink, wink on early life section, let's say.

30:45And again, who, who really cares? Okay, that's not getting you much of, of anywhere. So even in the age of AI, when I'm brought in to work with someone on their memoir or their, their autobiography, I will focus in on the how dimension, meaning what kind of story is it that you wanted to tell? What, what sort of lessons do you want to communicate? How do you want to be remembered? How do you want to add value to people's lives? How do you want people to recommend your book to others? And it's like, oh, you mean I have to be useful? Oh, yes. Sorry, it's got, Adam's here. And therefore, depending on what the how they want to communicate is, then we'll focus on this setup of it. What's the inciting incident of your life that set you into your how? So to speak. So then the first chapter might be one of the most important or significant or life-altering episodes of their life. And we communicate it in these dimensions. Who, when, where, and why? And then the rest of the book now teaches out the how, let's say.

31:47So if you're writing a book, Joshua, you might start with that kind of a setup for the first chapter. It's all about this build up. Yes, you could think of it as the inciting incident or the lead up. And if there's not going to be a full story after it, you want to tell a short little mini story or a one-act play or relating something, I could even communicate that by teaching how to give, let's say, a panic-free speech in front of tens of thousands of people. And it's, I was preparing to give a TED talk. And I did so at the humid-maxed swamp late at night when I couldn't see anything around me, especially not the mosquitoes that were buzzing around me. And the reason I did this was to physiologically prepare for how nervous I might actually feel when I gave the TEDx talk. And then when I did, in fact, do that, there were no nerves.

32:51It was, in fact, relief. And I gave one that quickly went viral and has been stacking views ever since. And there's my one-act story, just from easiest storytelling framework. How do you decide which details of these different aspects to include? Do you kind of follow the check-ups gun idea that if you include something that there's some reason you included it? Usually it's to create a multi-sensory simulation in people's heads. The best told stories, I'm not going to say the best stories. The best told stories are ones that can go from your mind into someone else's mind with minimal detail being lost and maximum detail being retained. So that's sort of a knowledge transfer, right? So if you get these five dimensions, you, in effect, have it. You can imagine me in front of you rehearsing my TED talk in a swamp late at night. And I can't see anything.

33:52And there's different dimensions of that, right? And so you can imagine the scene. You can visualize it. You can with your mind's eye. You can hear aspects of it in nine's ear. You can feel aspects of it. And then the why is, oh, well, that makes sense. Why are you telling me this? Why are we doing this? What's the purpose for this? Get to the point. What's in it for me? That's communicated by the fifth dimension, which is why. And then what's unusual about this? How did it turn out? How did it go? My son, his stories, when we practice almost daily, and his stories will be like, let's see, I was playing. Let's see. So we got to who and then what? I had a playground this past weekend. It had been a while since I had seen my aunt, let's say. So now we have the five dimensions. And then I would ask, how did it go? It was fun. How did you know it was fun?

34:54Well, because, and then he tells a three-minute anecdote. So the how it is a repeatable question. But I included that with my little TEDx example here of how the talk went. How did it turn out? How did all the stuff that I told you before with the setup? How did it actually go? Now, this can become a full, fledged book just from this one little anecdote with these five points and just a couple of sentences. You can unfold it out from here. So you can sort of scale this up or scale this down, depending on how much time that you have. So I could expand, for example, on who it was that I pitched this TEDx talk to. Perhaps I was nervous about this. In the what example? I could talk about how, and I'd given you these details earlier, which so I had sort of followed the expanded version of this, an unfolded longer version, scaled up version of this. When I originally told you this anecdote,

35:54this is a scaled down version, which I communicated in roughly three to four sentences. Whereas the first time I told you earlier in the show, it was closer to three to four minutes. So three to four, and also if I wanted to teach this, it's the exact same story. I could expand it into a three to four hour workshop, following all the dimensions of this within it without any deviation. That's why I loved this, and I called the easiest storytelling because anytime you tell a story, what's the easiest way to do it? Whether it's three to four sentences, three to four minutes, or a friggin' workshop three to four hours, you come back to these six things every single time, and you just add more details to each of them, to expand it, given how much time you have allotted. I love that, you guys. That's so helpful. I think even, I'm thinking about a story I just told somebody, and I was like, going through it, I'm like, did I tell it this way? And I feel like I sort of did. I could have done some tweaking on it for sure, but I think if you hit those elements, I already pictured, I pictured you standing in this marsh

36:57with chest waiters that has suspenders on them, and I pictured you standing there with a piece of paper and mosquitoes swarming all around you, and sweat pouring off of you, and just Joshua talking. That's literally what I pictured when you told me that. Fantastic. So now you have sort of ownership of the story. It's yours, like locked into your mind. This is why everyone always says, the book was better than the bee about everything, because the author, the novelist, aka the literary hypnotist, which is what all novelists are, the literary hypnotists. They create a simulation for you that allows you to, with your own detail, fill in how the characters look, what they look like, how they interact with another, what does the environment look like? And then when the director and other characters do that, they sort of gave you their version of it. And it's like, well, that's not how it's like this novel. That's not what they did, but everyone else is interpreting it, which is why the book is always better, because the book was your own private trance of you doing all of this,

37:57given the prompts, the author gave you prompts. You mean like LLM, yes, basically the brain works like artificial intelligence, which is what it's modeled after. Wow, Joshua, thank you so, so much for teaching that. And you guys, you can always follow up with Joshua and ask him questions on his ex, and he's always available to us, which is so amazing. Thankfully, so, I pleasure. Thank you. You guys practice it when you're treating, too, maybe make some posts with those kinds of thoughts in mind. I want to quickly turn it over to Owen and Marcella so we can hit some news before we just embark. So go ahead, you guys, I don't know who's going first. Go for it, Marcella. All right, the news we all needed, the new Supreme Leader is maybe gay. I don't want him to sue me. Trump, sorry, Segway, Segway in the news.

38:59Trump laughed off a bum shell until the Iran's new Supreme Leader probably is gay. The New York Post is the one reporting this, so who knows, in a stunning twist amid the skilling to your intentions with the Iran president, Trump brief last week that the US intelligence believes the country's new Supreme Leader, Mustafa, Kamini is like, gay, wasn't last week. Owen, weren't you talking about him being erectile dysfunction? ED, this is a problem. Yeah. There's a rumor at least that he was treated in the UK for that at some point. So there you go, and it was funny to President Trump, so you can, I think you can visualize him laughing at the old office over this. I think it would be great for Iran to have a gay Supreme Leader. I think that would be awesome. They could just throw him off the building themselves. Well, that's one outcome, but I mean, you know, it might be part of them turning into more of an open society, you know?

40:00Oh, right, yeah. Maybe a D.I. leader. The rumor I heard was that he might be having surgery in Moscow. So that's the other rumor. It's still fog of war, I don't know if it's true, but apparently Israel is claiming that they know where he is. They didn't specifically say where, but then even that article said, by the way, there's this report that he might be in Moscow getting surgery for his wounds from whatever attack he was struck by. So we're talking erectile dysfunction, gay, and missing a leg. This is like not good. I bet he's single to every girl out there. Because it's what I've died in the movie if he's single. Is it a wife or a man that he's looking for? We're very confused. Well, his wife did die. I hope you muted yourself. Yeah, I don't, I don't know if we really know what's going on there. I think there's still a lot of to be with myself with my keyboard.

41:01That's interesting. It's still a lot of fog of war around all of this, but interesting that we haven't seen him. He hasn't been sighted. There are rumors that he's missing a leg and that he's just figured and that he's having surgery in Moscow. And apparently that he's gay. All right. It's a lot, a lot going on with him. In the next story that I think Owen can take on, but I'll just start it with DHS funding issues, the airport nightmare. There was a picture of people at 3.30 in the morning and one of these main airports that were like in huge lines. The DHS, the Democrats already take on this whole 2080 or 1080 issue where they side with not funding the HS, the Senate on Friday tried to pass the funding bill, but they're stalling because of ICE. They don't, they want guard rails. Whatever that means, guard rails over ICE and how they proceed in other states.

42:04And basically, they're not going to allow DHS to be funded, which is TSA, which is also the US Coast Guard and ICE as well. So the main issue is that since it's been since February 14, that TSA agents have not been paid. It's not a good combo to have terrorist Islamist terrorists out there wanting to take over or do a terrorist act. And while TSA agents aren't being paid and some of them have walked out, which is why the big lines in the airports. If you're flying, I don't know if Josh was flying recently or any of you, but it's going to be chaos at the airport. Owen. Yeah, I mean, I think to me persuasion wise, if I look at it from that filter, I think the Republicans have the advantage because every time we have another attack, whether it's this ROTC instructor that was killed by an ICE-as-linked person

43:05or this Michigan synagogue that was rammed into the car and apparently that one. And it's also, I think the latest story on that is that that person's brother is linked somehow to the Hezbollah rocket launches. And so every time another story comes out, I think it makes Democrats look like they're just putting us all at risk. And so if I were the Republicans, I wouldn't be compromising right now. I would just be insisting that we need to fully fund all this stuff and that this is the wrong time to be playing games with national security. But I do think maybe the theater would go on a little longer. Things are probably at least minimally functioning. And I think the core functions like the FBI are fully funded. But certainly at some point, we need to make sure we have ICE and TSA and all the other functions fully operational. So I think they're playing with fire on the Democrats side because there could be a really bad attack at any point. And they're going to be holding the bag. They're going to be the ones that are blamed for it if we get to that point.

44:10Joshua, any thoughts on flying right now and what's going on? I haven't seen a whole lot as of like about a couple of weeks ago. I think I've averaged one set of trips every other week since like sometime in November. I hadn't noticed any disruption, although I was expecting some. But as of a couple of weeks ago, it had still been pretty normal, but we might have seen some ramping up since it's probably highly dependent on which airport you're in and whether or not you have the TSA pre-check and all that other stuff. Oh, all right. Well, let's let's hope the Democrats do the right thing. Well, let's pry. OK, next story. Oh, when do you want to go or do you want me to? Yeah, well, the Supreme Court is apparently agreeing to hear a case on the Colorado dispute about climate change. It's this case, SunCore Energy versus the County Commissioners on climate lawsuits.

45:11I think the author is arguing that the lawsuits are falsely claiming that industry disinformation is, you know, well, it's basically that there's a bunch of false information being put forth. So it looks like we may have some kind of Supreme Court ruling as it relates to climate lawsuits. So that's going to be an interesting one to follow. You know, not sure how that'll turn out. I think the article was certainly saying we should just throw out all these cases and just not have these climate lawsuits. But we'll have to see how the Supreme Court interprets all these things. I could hear Scott talking about the climate models right now. And the BES, we have adored maybe they'll talk about climate models like this. Well, it certainly might be relevant. And I think in the past, we've seen stories that say that there's like activists that will coach the judges and like quote unquote educate them about all these climate model things and basically set them up to rule the way

46:14they want them to. And I'm hoping the Supreme Court is going to be able to resist that and be more objective or ask the right questions and, you know, not take this activist point of view. So we'll have to see what they do. But and another maybe not related story. But apparently the Antarctic sea ice is back to normal that it's I'll come back to the normal place. And it was low for a while. And now it's back. So another sign that the climate models might be off. Right. And then I have another story about the Antarctic that apparently there's some kind of gravity hole over an hour. Oh, yes. Under Antarctica, there's like a gravity. And nobody can really explain why there's this gravity hole in Antarctica. There's lots of conspiracy theories around it that it might be some kind of alien thing or some kind of Egyptian pyramid ancient technology thing. But apparently there's some kind of unexplained gravity hole over Antarctica. All right, Joshua, you're nodding your head.

47:14What do you think about this gravity hole and Antarctica? This gravity hole? Yes. So there is this, this will be a nice, a nice little time on YouTube. If you look up new, new, new Swabia on YouTube, you will find all manner of delicious conspiracy theory videos about how the Nazis built a secret base there. Then the United States and other allied forces, they wage this significant naval conflict against the Nazi colony in Antarctica. Oh, shit. There's this whole delicious story. You also look up Operation High Jump, Operation High Drump in New Swabia. And it turns out that from Antarctica, the reason that there's a gravity differential is because the Nazis have used ever since then and they still exist. So goes the story. This is not Joshua. Goes the story. They have engaged in interstellar travel

48:15with their flying Nazi saucers and have a base on the moon. And there was a, there was a, there was a, the first interstellar war in the 1950s that occurred between the among the Soviet Union, the Antarctic Nazis and the United States. And people think this is real. I love the moon base conspiracy theory. Everyone is reading about that. We're apparently on the dark side of the moon. They've taken a bunch of pictures, but then they're all classified and secret. And somebody said they were brought in to look at them and then they were like, what the hell is all this? And it's like all these structures and buildings and like really, you know, intricate or elaborate structures that couldn't have been just natural formations. And that just seems really entertaining to me that, you know, right there in the dark side of the moon, you can't ever see it, of course, because it's on the dark side and it never faces the earth. But apparently there's in theory, supposedly, allegedly, a bunch of pictures of these alien structures and things that the other side, you could see them.

49:17Oh, man. This reminds me of, wasn't it recently, there's a picture last week of Mars and there's an item that they don't understand in what it is. It looks foreign to Mars and they're questioning NASA and all sorts of things. Did you see that? I don't recall that one, but I've seen plenty of things like that. I think there was one recently where they said, there's some kind of laser coming from deep space that they can't explain, but then, you know, they did provide some explanation of how it could happen and say there's, you know, if a bunch of big objects collide, they can create radio emissions and it might look like that. And I think that's generally how these things go is that when you get some unexplained thing, there's usually a theory that explains it without any weird stuff happening, but it's fun to think about. Well, Steven on YouTube said, don't laugh, it's true. I know I was there. They gave me a ride on their Nazi saucer. They let me turn on the headlights. So we do have someone who's verifying the story. How do you know what the headlights are on a saucer?

50:18They told them, whoever they are, told them. They. Yeah, well, my favorite conspiracy theory, though, is the time-traveling Trump. And I post a story about that in the movie where there's, you know, this, well, I think the update was, there was some kind of hieroglyphic or painting in a cave or some old thing like that that apparently had the word Trump written on it and it had, you know, ancient characters in it. But there's also this whole book, like Barren's Trump Adventures, or so I forget the name of it as well. It's awesome, and all that. Yeah, and there's a whole thing about how Trump has gone forward in time to fix, or backward in time to fix the past so that we don't have some calamity. And there's a whole, you know, it's, I think, I first saw it on like 4chan or something and it would, but it was just so entertaining. It just makes me smile whenever I see it. It's a fun one. Do we know it's not true? As I say, maybe. Non-zero chance, you'd say there's a non-zero chance. Right.

51:19Maybe a chance. I mean, if you, if you were a time traveler, wouldn't you make money in the stock market as somehow and come back as a billionaire? Well, maybe money is not the secret. Maybe it's the time traveling and controlling the future. Right. You want power? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So non-zero chance. Back to the Hormuz, the Trump is pushing a Hormuz coalition to break Iran's oil, like blockade. President Trump is ramping up. Back to the news news. Is ramping up to pressure to reopen the state of Hormuz, as you know, this is like a main deal for crude oil that passes through there. Iran has blocked tankers from that Gulf nations, like Saudi Arabia. So Trump is trying to get together other countries to help pay for it and also help, not just pay for it, but help secure it.

52:21China, he's asking China, he's asking Japan, South Korea, France, you can NATO to be allies, to send warships, and to help escort commercial ships. He's even indicated so he had a, President Trump had a plan trip to China on January 31st. He is now claiming that he is no longer going to go to China during that time, unless China starts helping. And one country that's already indicated that they are unwilling to help in the coalition is Australia, which Stella feels very strongly about that. She wanted to get involved. Yeah. So I tend to think some countries will come around because I think everybody has an interest in having the oil flow through the straight of Hormuz, including China and in Russia, but really everybody. And so I think to me, this does look like it might be a pretty

53:23genius plan to say you're going to have some kind of international security around this. Because I don't think it would work at all if you just said the United States is going to stay here and try and defend this or something. But if you had all the countries around the world, all participating, then that could really change the picture where it's saying, any time anyone might get attacked by Iran, it's almost like they're attacking the whole world. And they would bring the whole world's wrath upon them. So I think it is a good plan. I don't know if it was originally part of the plan, but it does seem like a great way to handle it. Well, he brings up the 90% of Chinese crude oil goes through there. So it's not like an exports as well. So it's not like it doesn't affect China. China has been neutral on the war. It has not shown they've been always backing Iran before, but have remained neutral. And this would actually force them, force their hand to not be neutral anymore.

54:26Trump is negotiating, playing his cards. One of them is not going to China when he's supposed to. The other one is Carg Island was hit last week. The military targets were hit, but he is claiming that he will be hitting the oil targets now of Iran there. And if he does hit the oil targets, which they haven't wanted to, because they want it to keep how the US has indicated they wanted to keep the populace of Iran on the side of the US and just take out the leadership. But they are thinking of doing it if Iran keeps putting minds, doing things, undermining, you know, so. And then in the other big news. I'll come to that. I guess that's all I'll say about that at this point. Yeah. I hope we don't have to go that far. I know. And Josh, where does your take on Hormuz to change the name?

55:26Yeah, I don't know enough about the geopolitics to speak with any type of confidence or certainty or correctness. Generally, when I look at any sort of international stories, and this can be helpful, one might think, does this impact my life in any direct or indirect way? That's possible. It's very possible that it might. Now here this, knowing more about this event and perhaps it does affect me, will it change my behavior in any way? Does knowing this change my behavior in any way? If I spent some time researching this, would that change my behavior in any way? And that does answer changes story to story. There are some global affairs that do, in fact, change our behaviors. I have a colleague who was planning on international trip to Southeast Asia this month. But given the Qatar airways and all of the stuff going on with conflict and divide,

56:28there had been planned a series of connecting flights through that part of the world and given Department of State travel recommendations that weren't necessarily things that she was sent. She started doing her research. Wow, this looks pretty bad. She starts looking it up. She starts doing her research. Oh shoot, I better not actually go. So it changed her behavior. So this is why there's two levels of internet research doing your homework reading the news straight if I'm most or anything else. Does this directly affect my life in any way? That's the first question to ask. And there's sort of investigating a little bit to see that if it does, OK, and if it does, level two, does it change my behavior in any way? Or am I just going to do what I did? And I can't affect it. No, nothing's going to change regardless. That's sort of a sense-making tool that I learned first from Michael Gimmerin,

57:30who would be a good guest on the Scott Adams school, in my opinion. He has all manner of fantastic reframes and lessons and insights to share. But I picked that up from Michael. It's a way of sort of allowing yourself to expand your time, effort, energy, and mental resources on changing what you need to change. Kind of like the serenity prayer. You familiar with serenity prayer? It's like applied to global news and information. That's a great filter, though, for people who tend to get really anxious. Like the news can really sway their mood and how they feel is just to put that frame on it, what Joshua just said. And it just might help. And like he said, yeah, it might affect each one of us differently, so it depends on you. We only have two minutes left. I know, Marcelo, did you want to jump in? Go ahead. OK, I think I'm the sportscaster on this program. U.S. wins again in the World Baseball Classic. They're going to the finals.

58:32That's pretty coming up. It's kind of controversial, you guys, the U.S. won. They went against the Dominican Republican. They won two to one. There was issues. Allegedly, the Dominican Republic is claiming that the umpire made certain two different calls that were wrong. And they're now claiming that we need an AI robot empire to go and do the referring or whatever you want to call it. And so yeah, so there's less jobs now. But we won, regardless if there was any kind of, you know, issue, we won USA, USA, and then we also won in the Olympics, in the hockey with, what is it, Paralympics? Oh, Paralympics. Paralympics, there we go. Yes.

59:32About the baseball, I would just say, you know, they're probably worse than bad calls. I just was looking at a clip, but it definitely looked like something was called a strike when it wasn't. But what I would say about that is like, I've been through so many years of baseball with my son. And just the ump's call is final. I mean, if they do have a little bit of a process of review, I think where the ump's can get together and decide if they made the right call and something, but if they make the call and they say that's the call, then that's the call, right? And that's just part of the game. And my son was a catcher. And that was very relevant because like what a catcher does, how he moves, how he moves his glove can influence how the ref sees the pitch. And so if you move your glove in a certain way, it might make it look like a ball when it wasn't. Or if you move your glove in another way, it might look make a ball look like a strike. And so that's part of the strategy is learning, okay, how should I move? How should I put my thing? And so as far as I'm concerned, the United States won.

1:00:33We won USA. I mean, it's official. It's official. It's in the books. Yeah, team. Okay, so just I want to say a major thank you was always to you, Joshua. We love when you're here. The chat's so happy you were here and they're thanking you. And so are we. So y'all tomorrow, it'll be the three of us, maybe a fourth from part of the show, not sure yet, but the three of us will be back Wednesday. Returning is BJ Ditchter. We'll be doing news of BJ and Thursday. You may have heard first time on the show. And hopefully it'll he'll be a returning guest is Walter Kern. You at forum, we got them. So Thursday, Walter Kern joins us. Okay, so we look forward to all of that. Let's have a closing sip to Shelley to Scott to all of us, but to Scott, we say thank you for providing this platform for us to stay together and be a family.

1:01:37And I hope everyone's continuing to be useful and we will see you tomorrow, you guys to Scott. Be useful, everyone. Just got very well. Thank you. Thanks, Joshua.