Episode 2575 CWSA 08/23/24 — Scott Adams Philosophy

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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2575 CWSA 08/23/24

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is doing to us are so bad it's just killing America to the point where I'm not sure we could even be a competitive country if we let ourselves be just destroyed by these forces. So the first step in doing anything about it would be acknowledging that it's a major, major problem. And I don't see Trump saying it and I don't see Kamala Harris saying it. Why is it that Tucker and I and RFK Jr. and pr…

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aren't necessarily talking about the mental part. Now add the mental part. So take the number of people who have a chronic illness, one of the ones that we didn't get 100 years ago, that's just something about modern living, and then add to that the number of mental illness situations that are modern that also we didn't have 100 years ago. You get almost everybody. You get almost everybody. Everybody has at least a mental problem that you wouldn't have had before and at least one chronic illness that you never would have had before. So yeah, it's that bad.

But remember, I always tell you that we make this mistake of thinking that the brain and the body can be looked at as separate machines that just have some connection. And I say no, no, no. They're not separate machines. They're all just one thing. Your arms and your legs are what keep your brain healthy because if you get up and your arms and your legs take you into a forest, suddenly your brain says, "Ah, I'm a little relaxed now. I'm in a forest." So separating your body from your brain gets you all the wrong analysis.

So here's something to back that up. At Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan, they found that mental health and chronic diabetes are strongly linked. Now you say to me, "Well, that's obvious, Scott. If you get diabetes, obviously you're going to be less happy." To which I say yes, that makes sense. But it turns out that the correlation works both ways, they think. So the study shows that your mental illness might cause your diabetes, but also your diabetes might cause your mental illness. But if your mental illness causes your diabetes and your diabetes causes your mental illness, you're kind of in bad shape if you get either one of those two things. So that's just more evidence that your brain and your body have to be considered one system.

All right. I don't know if you watched this. It was kind of one of these wonderful moments in live television, or was it live? I think live is when, I guess, Fox News cut Trump's feed off. I think they were watching him do a speech, so they cut it off and they went to the Gutfeld! show. And I guess Greg Gutfeld said on air, you know, since they cut off President Trump, he said, "You've got my number. Give me a call." So as Gutfeld is doing his show, his phone rings and it was Tru

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mp. Trump actually called him. He's on air. Like, "Give me a call." And next thing you know, he's on the phone live with Trump. He puts on the speakerphone and Greg has to tell him, you know, "The audience is here. Don't say anything embarrassing." And then the funniest part, the funniest part is that Greg had to do a show and it wasn't really the most convenient thing to have a half-hour conversa…

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Wisdom from this episode

"We make this mistake of thinking that the brain and the body can be looked at as separate machines that just have some connection. And I say no, no, no. They're not separate machines. They're all just one thing. Your arms and your legs are what keep your brain healthy because if you get up and your arms and your legs take you into a forest, suddenly your brain says, "Ah, I'm a little relaxed now. I'm in a forest." So separating your body from your brain gets you all the wrong analysis."

The brain and body are not separate systems with a loose connection; they are one unified entity. Movement from your limbs, such as walking into a forest, directly relaxes and benefits the brain, so analyzing them independently produces flawed insights.

"Mental health and chronic diabetes are strongly linked. The correlation works both ways. Your mental illness might cause your diabetes, but also your diabetes might cause your mental illness. If your mental illness causes your diabetes and your diabetes causes your mental illness, you're kind of in bad shape if you get either one of those two things. So that's just more evidence that your brain and your body have to be considered one system."

Mental illness and diabetes reinforce each other bidirectionally: one can cause the other and vice versa. This cycle shows why you end up in bad shape from either, and why the brain and body must be viewed as one integrated system.