ter the fact. But when he's in it, not so good. Not so good.

Well, there's a big study out saying that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of serotonin. Specifically this news is half fake news. And maybe some of it is real. Here's the fake part. The headline said depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance. The detail of the study said not that. Right? So the first thing you have to know is that the headline "depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance" has nothing to do with the story. That's not the story. The story doesn't even involve that. The study found one chemical, serotonin, which experts believed was somewhat critical in this process, wasn't important. So knowing that one chemical that we thought was the main one is not the main thing does not mean that it's not a chemical situation. Am I right?

So it's fake news about fake news. Like the fake news is that serotonin was part of it, but then they fake news that by turning it into all chemical. I don't think they've — what they've certainly not done, what they've certainly not done is shown that depression is not a chemical — some kind of a chemical state. Is serotonin something that can be supplemented? Yes. Well, supplemented or stimulated, I don't know the right word for that, but yes. That's what some drugs do specifically, I believe. Yeah, we are nothing but a chemistry experience experiment. So to say that depression is not related to our chemical state feels like it couldn't possibly be true. Granted there's one chemical we've ruled out, but it's still just chemicals. You know what it'd be like? It'd be like you go to the beach and you scoop up some sand and you say, well I've proven that there's no sand in the beach because I've got this little handful here. What about that other sand? You might say.

All right. So this brings us to the question of, as everything does, everything comes back to Tom Cruise and Top Gun. If it doesn't come back to Joe Rogan and it doesn't come back to Tom Cruise and Top Gun, we don't care about it. It's not important. But do you remember — many of you remember the famous Tom Cruise thing where he was saying that psychiatry is, you know, they're just drugging us up with these unnecessary drugs. And everybody laughed at him. Poor Tom Cruise. Well, not so funny now, huh? Not so funny now. Because his claim that the people who were being drugged incorrectly wasn't helping appears to be more correct than not correct now.

Here's the part that somebody said, but wait Scott, he's part of Scientology. Scientology doesn't have the answer. Scientology isn't going to help your depression, is it? Are you sure about that? Would you debate me on the value to the individual of Scientology? You better not because I'm gonna win that debate. Scientology is a lot of things and the criticisms about it, you know, the Lear remedy stuff, I'm not talking about that. So I'm not talking anything about the organization and what it does or does not require its people to do and what it does or does not do for revenge. You know, that's all been well addressed. So I'm not defending it or attacking on those things. Separate topic.

But have you heard of this thing they do called auditing? They hook you up to this little galvanic response thing and they ask you a bunch of questions and allegedly you're gonna find some kind of traumas that you had when you were little and then you resolve them and then you're better. Do you believe there's any science to that? What do you think? Do you think there's science to the auditing process? Yes and no. Yes or no. It's basically hypnosis with a device and the device is what is convincing you with science. So the point of the device is to convince you that it's a legitimate process. Suppose it does. Suppose you are convinced that it's legitimate because people pay for it so they must think it's legitimate. They pay for it. What would happen if you think it's legitimate and you pay for it, thus convincing yourself that it's, you know, confirmation bias and everything else. So now you've talked yourself into it working and then the process says we found this trauma and now we've removed it and you're clear. And then this process which you believe is true, but let's say it's not just for discussion. What happens if you believe it's true? What if you believe it made you happier? You're happier, right? There's no such thing as believing you're happy and being wrong. If you believe you're happy, yeah, you're happier.

So can hypnosis convince you to have a different level of happiness? Yes. Do you know how it does that? Do you know how a hypnotist could make you less sad, more happy? Now, not if you have brain damage or you have some real organic problem. I'm not talking about the hard cases but edge cases, you know, the people who are too tense, too anxious, that sort of thing. You know, they're in the gray area there. They could be saved but you know they just need a little help. Believing it's going to work is about half of the process. So if you walk into a Scientology auditing session believing it's going to work, probably work as far as you can tell. And that's the only thing that matters subjectively. If you walk out feeling better, it worked. It's only trying to work on your brain. If it worked in your brain, it works.

So everything I know about hypnosis strongly suggests yeah, it might be a placebo effect. You're right. It strongly suggests that the auditing probably works for some percentage of users. I wouldn't say 100%, maybe 30%. Wouldn't that be amazing? I don't know if it's 30%. That'd be my guess. My guess is that auditing works really well for 30% of people. Just a guess. Would you call that useful? Well that would be better than a lot of drugs. Thirty percent? That'd be amazing if you could make 30% happy when they were unhappy before. Oh, that'd be amazing. So it could be the placebo effect but that's just hypnosis, right? It's just, you know, you just strengthen the placebo effect by, you know, here's my machine, here's my science, here's all the people who say it works, you know, social endorsement.

So if you think that Scientology doesn't work in terms of making the people who are doing it happier, I think all the evidence is against you. If you say that it's not based on actual science I'd say, oh well that's true. Doesn't mean it doesn't work because actual science also includes psychology, right? If I can change your psychology I fixed you. So if you think you're happy, you're happy.

All right. So Tom Cruise continues to be a national treasure times two or something.

How about this? So I keep telling you to follow a Twitter account called Machiavelli's Underbelly. Just search for it on Twitter, you'll find it. And this in