sation with the AI while you're getting stimulated.

Now here's what's funny about it. As soon as I bring up this topic, most of you just went nuts. I don't even have to see you to know half of you just went, "I can't handle it. There's a sex toy and it's going to have AI and it's going to replace people." And that's the fun part of the story. The fun part of the story is watching the public reaction to one individual who has the skills to create not only the sex toy but the AI interface such that he might be replacing human reproduction.

Now if you don't think that this has a genuine possibility of destroying humankind, you're missing the show, because it does. It actually could be a replacement for human sex. It could. Now not for everybody, of course, but for the 80% of people who are not exactly optimizing their sex life, this could be quite a risk to civilization itself. Anyway, you have to watch the just freaked-out comments and you have to watch all of the comments to the comments because Brian is hilarious in how he is dealing with the comments. So you got to watch that show.

All right, there's a report from University of Sydney that AI can write a poem and edit your video and now it can make you funnier. Do you think that AI can now make you funnier? They did a test of a caption contest where they had the AI help people write captions for cartoons and then they had them graded and the ones where AI helped were better.

Now here's what's missing from that. Do you know how an average person does in a caption contest where you're adding the funny caption to a comic? The average person on a scale of 1 to 10 is producing something like a one or a two. Let's say 10 is commercial-grade humor. The average person can do a one or a two. If you add the AI, AI is good with wordplay. It'll give you a wordplay dad joke that's definitely better than a one or a two. It might be all the way up to a five. Might be a five out of 10. But it is nowhere near commercial-grade humor. And in my experience I've played with a bunch of AIs just to see what they know about humor. They don't even know how it works. If you ask them to even describe why something's funny, you get the worst descriptions you've ever seen. So it's not even close on humor.

All right, here's some more things that maybe you could have just asked me, but science is confirming that loneliness can kill and middle-aged Americans are particularly vulnerable. Why do you think middle-aged Americans are the loneliest versus let's say Europe? Do you think it's density? Is it just that we have the option of living alone so we take it? Whereas if you didn't have the option, you know, you had to have roommates or you had to live with your family or you had to live with your parents or something. I feel like it's because we have the option. Oh, maybe divorce. Yeah, maybe divorce as well. Yeah, probably divorce. I'll throw that in as well. We have different norms about divorce here. It's probably that. Yep.

But I would say that loneliness does in fact qualify as one of our biggest health problems, along with our food supply being completely poisoned. And I don't know that anybody has an idea for dealing with it. So let me tell you. Here's how you deal with loneliness and it's the only way. You create natural ways that people can be in groups to do group activities. Nothing else works. Once you're an adult, you don't just make friends. "Hey, you seem nice. Let's be friends and we can hang out." That almost never happens in the real world. What does happen is you join a bocce league and then you get to know some of the other bocce players and then you say, "Hey, I've got a bocce court. Come over and play. You know, practice at my place." And then you can do something. But you have to have at least some activity in common or it just doesn't work for adults.

The number one way that adults make friends is the parents of their children's friends. That's like the number one way. And that works great, by the way. So if you don't have that going for you, it's hard to make friends. So more activities. We need something that would get normal people out of the house and in any kind of a group doing any kind of a thing.

More evidence that weight training improves your anxiety and depression in old people. How many times do you have to see a study that shows that exercise is better than therapy and meds? It's just every time. Now you know I always tell you don't believe studies because studies are sort of a coin flip. But if all of the studies are in the same direction and it's been years, well that probably does mean something. So I'm pretty sure that weight training does improve anxiety and depression.

And by the way, my biggest BS filter is that if science claims something but you don't observe it in person, it's probably not real. But you do observe it. Anybody who's ever done weight training knows they feel better when they're done. Do you agree? Is that observably, obviously true to all of you that when you do exercise or weight training your mental state is just immediately improved? It's kind of obvious.

Now how many of you have had this experience? There'll be somebody in your circle who says, "I'm very depressed and I'm thinking of getting professional help." And then you say, "You know, before you do that, and that might be necessary, I don't want to poo-poo the professional help, but before you do that, would you consider doing the thing that works every time, which is exercise?" "Well I'm thinking of, you know, this or that therapist." I feel like you didn't even hear the sentence I just said. Did you hear me say that if you just exercise you might get more benefits than that thing that you're planning? So I'm looking for a recommendation now. I feel like you didn't even hear the words that came out of my mouth. Have you had that conversation where people can't even hear it? So I think there must be something about being in that situation where you also can't hear obvious solutions. Not complete solutions, but something that would help. Anyway, just an observation. People can't hear that advice.

Here's another one. Should have asked Scott. They did a study of weight loss for obese women that were not very active and they said some of them eat a big breakfast. They all ate big breakfasts but some of them ate a lot of carbs and some of them a lot of carbs and protein and the others did a strict low-carb diet. What do you think was better? The big breakfast high in protein and carbs or the strict low-carb diet? They could have asked me because if you do protein first you always do better.

So here's what I wrote in my book *How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big*, that's now second edition, you can get it, is that what matters with diets is whether you can stick to them and everything else doesn't matter. It's also true with exercise. If you say what matters with exercise is that I do it, and what matters with the diet is that whichever one I pick I can make it work. So it's the psychological part that we get wrong, not the how to do it right. You could figure out how to exercise. It's not the hardest thing in the world. You could figure out how to eat right. But the doing it, the motivation, the actual mental part is the hard part. So that's the part I teach in *How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big*. I teach you how to beat the mental part and then the physical part becomes almost trivial if you get the mental part right.

But here's what I tell you. If you can't do anything else right, if you're hungry, look for a protein. That's my trick. So that's the mental trick. If you're hungry, look for protein. If you think that hungry means whatever you put in your mouth satisfies your hunger, you won't do well because carbs tend to be more available. So if you just convince yourself the hunger equals protein or good fats, you know like a good avocado is good too, you'll just do better. Just protein first. Protein, protein, protein. If you can afford it, of course.

Here's another one. Maybe you should have asked me. Turns out they did a big study about gender dysphoria in young people and turns out that the puberty blockers and hormone treatments for gender transition is not backed up by any kind of quantitative science whatsoever in terms of whether the people are happier after it's done. How many people are surprised by that? Could have asked me.

And by the way, if the science had said the opposite you would still handle it the same way. You get that, right? So there apparently there's no strong evidence or not even weak evidence that these early interventions for the gender dysphoria is likely to turn out well. But suppose they did have evidence. Suppose hypothetically, just as a mental experiment, suppose the science indicated that two-thirds of the kids who wanted to transition as kids were glad they did. Now that's not the case but just imagine if it were the case. Would that be a strong case to transition children? No, no, no. That absolutely would not be a strong case to transition children. If one-third of them would be worse off and children can't make decisions, it just makes sense to wait. You know, because you can't make that decision for them. That's the hard part.

So I think even if the science were the other way, still would make sense to wait. Now I get that you know there's some argument if you started early you'd get a better outcome but I don't think that's a strong enough argument. So you could have just asked me about every one of these things. About the weight training I would have told you. About the diet, protein. I would have told you about maybe it's not a good idea to transition kids. I would have told you that. And about the AI that can write humor, I would have told you that that's fake and it can't write humor. So there are four scientific studies that literally, literally you could just have asked me.

Now I think you could have asked most of you as well. Yeah, how many of you are surprised by any of that? No, none of you, right? I'll bet there was not one thing I said that you didn't also know before the science.

All right, here's the funniest story. So the California Senate Judiciary Committee, so now they've approved a bill. So I guess this has to be voted for but it would entail to create some kind of mechanism to figure out which descendants of slavery live in California because they want the Black residents of California who are, but only the ones descended from some kind of slave situation in America, they want them to be eligible for reparations. But first we have to figure out if they can be identified. So the first thing they're going to do is see if they can use a genetic kind of process to check the genes of Californians to find out who's eligible.

Now here's the fun