enius came over to me and he said, can I help you? And I looked at him and I said in my strongest, clearest voice, yes. I was going to give him the easiest transaction of his day. Do you see this computer? This is your best one, right? Yes. Right. Wrap it up. Here's my credit card. That's how I thought things would go. Instead it went this way. Can I help you? Yes. Great. And then he walked directly over to another young couple who were not a young couple and said, how can I help you? And then he helped them.

So now you're saying to yourself, but Scott, probably he misheard or you misheard or something. You know, it's the easiest thing to fix. You just walk up to one of the other geniuses who's not busy and say, oh, might have been some miscommunication but I still need some help and I see there are plenty of geniuses so I'm still in good shape. So I walk up to the first genius and I realized that I've been away from people for too long. I was so pissed off. Not only is Apple, as far as I can tell, intentionally crippling my computer and totally upending my operation that I do in front of live people every day, but now they've apparently introduced some level of incompetence into their genius system.

And I looked at the very next guy and I had to stop myself and leave the store because I realized I was going to go off on him for no reason at all. He hadn't done anything. And I realized I'm not, I can't be around people anymore. People just piss me off too much. And are you going to say to me, was it a DEI situation? Well, not that I know of, right? I mean the employee in question was among the diverse population but that doesn't mean it was, you know, that's what was going on. But I do assume that Apple has been destroyed by the same DEI that the other big companies have been. So my presumption is that DEI destroyed their high level of service. I don't know if that's true but it would be the reasonable prediction.

Well, on other topics, apparently Wells Fargo has fired what they call mouse jigglers. There are people who have some kind of technology to move the mouse when they're not at their desk and it makes it look like they're working if you're monitoring them electronically. And they're called the mouse jigglers. Now if you don't think there's going to be a Dilbert reborn comic in which Wally is a mouse jiggler, well you don't know me. There will be some mouse jiggler situation will be going on there.

All right. So yesterday on my show I asked the provocative question, why do we have voting machines at all given that they're not cheaper, faster, more reliable, more credible or anything? And nobody could make an argument for it. Well that went a little bit viral on X and then I saw Real Clear Politics picked it up. So the question is there now. Do you think that anybody will answer the question? Let's make your prediction. Do you think anybody who knows what they're talking about, whether they're from one of the companies that produces machines or just somebody who's knowledgeable, do you think somebody will say, oh, there's an obvious reason, and then they will tell me the reason that we use voting machines when they're not cheaper, faster, more reliable? And then I'll say, oh, that was very non-obvious but now that you say that reason I can see why that would be important. Do you think that's going to happen? That's what should happen, right? It's the most important question in the world because if we don't get our elections right the country fails. There's a whole ripple effect. So the most important question in the world and now it's public, got a lot of attention. So now I'll get the answer, right? Have you seen the answer yet? No, there's no answer. I haven't seen one. If anybody sees an answer to that please, please alert me.

But I'll tell you, asking the right question is the most dangerous thing in the world because until you ask the right question people's minds aren't quite focused on the thing maybe they should be watching. Yeah, it's a big question. Sort of a magic trick to even have those machines in there and somehow they've convinced everybody that there was a reason and maybe there is but it's kind of interesting that nobody in the country is aware of what that reason might be.

All right, there's a study that says that gratitude can make you feel less lonely. So there's a big old study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and they did a, I think they did a meta study of studies and they spent a bunch of money and took a bunch of time and they found out that showing gratitude makes you feel less lonely. Do you know what they could have done instead of a meta study? They could have asked me. Now I keep finding out the hypnotists are apparently 50 years ahead of science and I mean that actually literally with no exaggeration whatsoever. Hypnotists apparently are learning things that are like 50 years ahead of science because I could have told you this. Why gratitude releases oxytocin. Oxytocin makes you feel less lonely. I knew that. Did you know that? Did you know that gratitude releases oxytocin and did you know that oxytocin makes you feel less lonely? They didn't have to study this at all. I knew it. You just had to ask me. Yeah, gratitude, oxytocin, oxytocin makes you feel less lonely. I made sure I checked with ChatGPT just to make sure I wasn't insane but yes it confirmed that's true.

Here's another one. There was a study where they found that people would feel less pain if they were in virtual reality and they were looking at an avatar that was muscular. I think it means their own avatar, like a muscular version of themselves, but I'm not sure that's necessary. Could be just a muscular avatar but it would be better if it was a muscular avatar of yourself, more muscular than you are. And it said it reduced pain by 16%. You know who knew that without doing a test? Hypnotists. Yeah, I think it was a long time ago the first time I saw that you could make people save more for their retirement if you showed them an altered picture of themselves so they could see themselves looking old. If somebody can imagine themselves in a different situation such as old then they'll change their behavior. That's been known forever. Now does that extend to pain management? Yeah, every hypnotist could tell you that pain management is one of the things that hypnosis does well. It's one of the first original things.

So yes it's completely obvious that if you looked at yourself looking differently you would have an effect on your body that would be psychological and that includes pain management because there's a psychological element. But generally speaking the way you visualize yourself makes a difference. Now here's how I use this in everyday life. I imagine myself as more physically fit than I am, which is to say I imagine that if I took off my shirt and looked in the mirror it would look better than it actually does when I take off my shirt and look in the mirror. So I always set my visual, basically my avatar. So I always have an avatar of myself except the avatar of myself is a better version and I do that intentionally. And I've told you this for years. You should always set your self opinion above whatever you think is real because we have an ability to sort of stretch ourselves into our impression of who we are. You become the person you imagine. It's just sort of an automatic process. So if you imagine yourself being a big loser every day you probably will do more losing.

You've heard of the power of positive thinking. The power of positive thinking is basically imagining an avatar of yourself succeeding in the future and what happens, every study, every personal experience, everybody will tell you if you imagine yourself being successful or especially at something specific you're more likely to get it. It's what affirmations are. That's why affirmations have lasted a long time. People feel it works. So yeah, you could ask me if you would have asked me, do you think this would work? I would have said yeah, probably. I don't think you even have to study it.

Here's another one. Apparently another research found out that people who have grandiose narcissism, which is one of the two types, very different from the other kind. Grandiose is where you just want to get credit for doing great things and maybe you think positively of yourself. And a study found that people with the most grandiose narcissism, in other words the best opinion of themselves and their place in the world, they perform better on intelligence tests when under stress thanks to a broader distribution of visual attention. Now the broader distribution of visual attention, that's, there's another word for that, but I've talked about this with persuasion before. So yes it is true that if you imagine things are going to go your way you will simply notice more things and you'll be smarter just by imagining things are going to go your way. In other words optimism makes you smarter.

Now I would say that grandiose narcissism is just a form of personal optimism. The reason, and I often label myself a grandiose narcissist because I always think in gigantic terms. I wake up every day thinking I can change the world every day and always have. Even before I was a public figure I always thought today I can do something that maybe will change the world. And I've never lost that feeling that I'm going to do something that changes the world and I have done a few things that changed the world in some ways. So now we know that there's a good form of narcissism. It just makes you smarter. It makes you work harder to do good things because you want to get credit for having done good things. I love credit for good things.

And when people, and you might remember there was a time when I said narcissism is fake, there's no such thing. That was before I realized there's two completely different ones and they ju