u'd say I want you to tell the people in the other room that this was actually a fun and exciting task. You know, lie to them in other words. Because everybody believed it was boring. But both groups were asked to lie.

So the people who were paid twenty dollars to lie lied because they were asked to. And then later when they were asked their opinion about the blocks, it was about the same as it was before. They thought it was boring before. They lied and said it wasn't boring. They got twenty dollars and later they still thought it was boring. So their opinion was unchanged. The people who were offered one dollar also lied because they were asked to. But when they checked with them later, the one dollar people had, by a large percentage like 30 some percent or so, had decided that it was actually not that boring. They'd actually convinced themselves it was interesting. About a third of them.

Do you know why? And there's a solid hypothesis behind it that can be reproduced at will. And the thing is that the twenty dollar people thought that the reason that they were lying was they were being paid for it. Oh you're asking me to lie. I got twenty. That's serious money in those days. So I know I'm lying. I'm just getting paid for it. The people who got one dollar, one dollar wasn't enough to lie. Most people will not lie for a dollar. So when they lied for a dollar they had to explain it later to themselves. And the way they explained it was well it wasn't really lying because it actually was more fun than maybe I first thought it was. You know it was actually kind of interesting really. Actually I enjoyed it a lot. I was alone with my thoughts and it was a good time.

Now here's what you should learn from this. These people's brains were rewired for a dollar. Instantly or nearly instantly. You know we're talking about within hours or days. One dollar rewired a third of the people there instantly. One dollar. All they did was get somebody to say something that was opposite of what they believed and a third of them talked themselves into it within a day. Okay, now is that experiment, does it blow your mind that it is so powerful, cognitive dissonance, and that it's so easy to trigger it? Does it blow your mind? It doesn't blow mine because this is something I've known for decades, right? These studies have been replicated for decades.

Once you understand how powerful this is then everything you see in politics and social media starts making sense. So part of the reason that I can withstand social media silliness and it doesn't make me crazy relative to other people, everybody gets a little crazy, is because I see it this way. I see it as people literally walking around in a fog and not knowing it. If I saw them as legitimate players who were mad at me or had a real opinion of me that was low, maybe it'd bother me. I don't know. But I don't see the world that way. I see it as people just literally blind and just bumping into stuff. And I'm like oh just stand out of the way. Let you blind people bump into stuff. Just stand back a little bit and let it happen. That's how I see the world. I see social media as blind people bumping into stuff. I don't see them as having even real opinions. I mean I literally don't think their opinions are even real. It's just something they heard. It was assigned to them by the media. Somebody paid them a dollar and it reversed. But everything's like that.

Everything. As soon as you think well those poor bastards, I'm sure glad that doesn't happen to me. Huh? Aren't we happy that that doesn't happen to us? It only happens to other people? No, no, no. It happens to you and you don't know when it happens to you. That's the nature of it. The nature of it is you can only see it in other people. That's why you have the illusion that it's only happening to other people. But they can see it in you. But it gets worse than that. Most of the time when they see it in you they're projecting. Well I don't know if it's most of the time. It would depend who you are. But you can't tell the difference between when they really see some inconsistency with what you're doing and whether they are experiencing just more cognitive dissonance and so they imagine you're the one who's with the problem