r whatever gender flavor you like, what are the odds it wouldn't change your personality? Because without being a doctor it feels to me like the odds would be zero. Any change to your hormonal structure almost certainly is gonna have an effect on who you are at some fundamental level.

Well I've never seen this many yeses. That was okay. How many — so I'm wondering if this is mostly men because it's hard for me to tell the genders of the people who were responding. But I worry that it's all men because I worry it's confirmation bias. But if the women are seeing it then I'd feel a little more suspicion that this is something that needs to be dug into a little bit deeper. But just in general, changing your hormonal structure should change how you think. If it doesn't I'd be surprised.

So let's talk about the constitutional or the strategy for impeachment. It looks like the Republicans' primary strategy — I don't know if we can tell for sure. Oh, somebody mentioned the prednisone. Yeah, when I was on prednisone just a few weeks ago I was quite aware of a personality alteration. I was definitely a different person for the few weeks I was on it. So that's the same point.

So it looks like the Republican strategy for impeachment is rather than to argue the details, which would be a gigantic mistake and it's the mistake that they've been taking from the start, it looks like especially with Alan Dershowitz on the team they're gonna argue that it doesn't matter what the details are because there's nothing that's alleged that's impeachable.

So if the Republicans are planning this approach I like it a lot. I like it a lot. And what it would look like — and here I'm just playing the game through, I'm not suggesting that I'm predicting this — but one way that they could go is that the Republicans controlling the Senate will say we're going to open up with discussions on whether or not any of the allegations fit the constitutional test of even being something appropriate for impeachment before talking about whether it happened or didn't happen, who said what, who did a quid pro quo. We didn't. And what you're expecting, what left-leaning parts said before getting to any evidence, just say here are the two charges and here's the basis for them. Does the Constitution say this is impeachable? And the answer is no, not even close.

So I think that's going to be a good strategy. And what I would expect is this. I would expect that the Republicans will hear the constitutional arguments and then they'll put it to a vote. Now can they have two votes? Can they vote and say okay, let's say that against all odds, let's say that the majority of the Senate — and I don't think this could happen — let's say they voted and said yeah on the question number one of whether these charges if they're true charges would be impeachable, we say yes. That's possible, right? But then separately they'd have to have some other vote I guess to determine whether the charges are actually true. So that would be a separate thing. I don't think they'd have to get into the facts. I think they'll probably just dismiss it after the constitutional argument, which by the way would be the best way to defend the Constitution. Best way to defend the Constitution is to not let them talk about the details because if you let them talk about the details you're going to be missing the whole point and it becomes exactly what the founders didn't want it to be, a purely political process.

Even though we know the outcome, why would you not try to defend the Constitution while you could if you're a Republican senator by saying, you know, let's say that the victim — here's the Constitution. So let's try to revive the Constitution a little bit.

There was a disturbing video of a crowd in Baltimore who were sort of attacking a policeman who had a suspect on the ground. You may have seen it. It's a viral video now. So the police officer was trying to get control of a perp on the ground and other people were coming up and it looked like they were kicking the policeman etc. And so there's of course a call for those people who were assaulting the policemen to be punished. And you say to yourself, well good luck with that because these were random people who kicked the policemen and ran away. Like what are you gonna do? But it's on video. All right. But still what are you gonna do? It's hard to identify people just because you have it on video, right?

Well not anymore. Remember I told you yesterday there's a tool, an app called Clearview AI. It was the front page of the New York Times because it's a gigantic controversy about privacy and whether this is going to go too far and it's going to cause a dystopian everything. We're losing all our privacy. So those issues are important, all worth talking about. I think the ACLU is getting involved. I mean it's really becoming this big deal. But here's my point. That app, all it needs in all likelihood, all it needs is a screen grab from the video of the crowd and a couple of screen grabs that get the faces and law enforcement will probably have immediately the social media and real names of the perpetrators in the crowd because they have the technology now. They probably won't have to ask people. They probably won't have to ask the public. They probably won't have to go door to door. They probably won't need any witnesses. They probably just take the security camera video, run it through the Clearview AI app, it's gonna spit out their names. Think about that. I've been, man it's a new world.

All right. I know what you want to talk about. Yesterday at the end of my Periscope, those of you who were here, I ran you through an exercise to reduce your anxiety in life, whatever the source of your anxiety is, whether it's an actual mental problem, something temporary, or something you're worrying about. And I wanted to reinforce that so I'm going to give you a little bit of reinforcement on top of that. This is a cumulative process. The first time you're exposed to it you might not have a deep feeling of change. Some of you actually did. I heard from a lot of people yesterday who told me that the exercise immediately released their anxiety. Now I assume that's temporary but if you can find a way to temporarily release your anxiety and do it as often as you can because that's how you get to eventually a place where you have a stable lack of anxiety. And I'll give you some more tricks and tips on this in a moment.

But I did want to tell you that based on the feedback it was completely successful. Now completely successful doesn't mean it worked with every person because I told you it wouldn't. You're all different. But completely successful in that a lot of people said it changed something. It changed something deeply meaningful to them. So I'm gonna do it again.

And the big thing I introduced — and by the way I cut out just the part of my Periscope from yesterday and made a separate clip that's just the last part of the Periscope so you can just see the anxiety solution technique. So that's on YouTube right now. Just search "Real Coffee with Scott Adams" on YouTube. It'll pop right up. So just look at the quick one if that's all you want. What I talked about on that and it won't make as much sense unless you saw the other video. So I saved this for the end. If you need to see it in order, see that first, come back to this.

I talked about seeing the world through different filters and I'm going to give you some more filters so you get a deeper understanding of how this concept works. One of the things that people ask me about is how do you deal with the fact that you know you're gonna have some bad news in the future. You don't know the details but you know for example that somebody's gonna die before you do. You know that there will be various problems in life. And I'm gonna give you a technique that I use.

I've had a lot of pets and I've had a lot of pets who passed and I get very attached to my pets. And so when a cat dies for example it's a big deal. The cat for 19 years, there was my constant workplace companion and when she passed it was a big deal. I have now a dog, most of you know Snickers, who's at that age where if she's got another two years in her — I hope she has more but you know the average for that breed would be a couple more years. She seems to be perfectly healthy now. But here's how I deal with the fact that when she passes it will be like losing a limb. Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that analogy before. I've heard people who won't get a second dog after the first one because the trauma of losing it is so extreme that they can't go through it again. I see a lot of you talking about the pain and you see on social media people posting their painful situation if they have an animal that's about ready to pass.

So let me tell you the filter I put on this. If you focus on the loss and the badness of it you will feel anxiety and you will feel bad. But you do have the option of reframing this. And let me tell you how I reframe it for my pets and how I reframe it for Snickers so that I don't spend the next two years worrying about how I'm gonna feel when her natural life comes to an end. And here's how I reframe it. I reframe it as a privilege and an honor for me, the ability to be there at the end of her life. My dog Snickers is going to be an honor. It's going to be a privilege and I wouldn't have it any other way. And when I think of it that way it changes how I process it. Now I know I'm going to feel terrible when the day comes but until then I'm just honored. I actually feel a sense of duty at a very deep level and commitment. And I felt the same way with my cats in their final moments of life. I felt honored that I could be part of it. So I give you that.

Let me give you a couple of other filters. Have you ever worried that there's something big that you need to do that's really giving you anxiety? Let's say you're trying to buy a house but you've never done that. You're like how do people buy a house? How do they afford it? How do they work out all the details and the repairs and the contracts and all this? Or are you thinking about moving and you think how do people do this? Like moving is, let's say to another state, it's a big deal. You think about getting married. You think about having families. You think about and any one of these things you think about they seem like really hard if you've never done those things. They seem really hard.

Here's the filter I put on that. There are a lot of idiots in the world and they can do all of those things. The world is built for people of average capabilities. So if you're average or above average — and most of you are probably above average if you're listening to this Periscope especially — and just tell yourself there are millions and millions of idiots who figured out how to buy a house, millions of idiots who learned how to move to another state, millions and millions of idiots who had kids, got married, changed jobs, millions of idiots learned to do a job that you wish you were smart enough to do. Guess what? You are smart enough to do it because millions of idiots did it. The million idiot filter on life immediately removes your anxiety about things you haven't done before.

Now if the only people who had done the thing you want to do were geniuses, well I guess you should worry about that. You know, unless you're a genius. Like, well the only people who can pull this off are geniuses. Do you know how many people pulled off buying a house? Not just the smart ones. All right. So that's a filter I like to use. It immediately makes me feel comfortable because almost anybody can do these things that look scary.

Here's another one. You've heard this one before. The Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. Throughout history when humans can see a problem coming from far away we have a hundred percent track record of solving it. For example we're all going to run out of food because our population is growing. Well we figured out birth control. We figured out fertilizer. We figured out better farming methods. We got food. We're gonna run out of water. Because, well turns out we drilled for more water and we built more canals. We figured out how to get more. We're certainly gonna run out of oil and nope, we figured out how to frack. We figured out how to make windmills and stuff.

So if you look at something such as the threat of climate change — I think a lot of you on this Periscope are not worried about it but let's say you were — remind yourself the society is genius at solving problems it sees coming from far distance. This will be no exception. Whatever problems come from climate change, could be little, could be locked in. I'm no scientist and I don't believe anybody can really predict that stuff. But no matter what you think about it the worst-case scenario is that it is a problem but we're really, really good at solving this stuff. We have companies coming online that can scrub the CO2 out of the air if it ever becomes necessary. And then others, if you say wait we can't be scrubbing the CO2 out of the air because it's plant food, it's plant food, you'll destroy the earth by scrubbing all the CO2 out of the air. No you won't. You'll just unplug them. If you get too much CO2 just unplug it.

So don't worry about these big problems that we can see coming from miles away. Those are the ones we solve every time. The ones you need to worry about are the ones that came out of nowhere. You know, you didn't see it coming. So we're very consistent about that.

All right, here's another one. Sometimes when I feel really down — and it happens, I have to admit it. Hasn't happened in a long time but in my past there have been times when I just felt beaten down by life and sometimes you just don't want to wake up the next day. Here's a filter that I put on my life that I find really useful. Curiosity. It turns out that we humans are really motivated by curiosity, some more than others. It's the reason that a good author will put at the end of a chapter a little mystery. It's like and then someone knocked at the door. And it's the next chapter. You look, ha ha, I can read a whole other chapter about another character before I find out who was knocking at that door. So it turns out that curiosity is a tremendous motivator for people.

And here's a filter I put on things when I'm feeling depressed and down and my purpose for life seems to be extinguished temporarily. I say this: I wonder how this is going to turn out. And I just treat it as a curiosity. What if I'm just watching this life like a spectator? I also combine this with the no free will filter. Now I believe that we don't have free will because I think physics, the laws of physics don't stop when you get to your skull. Whatever is happening inside your skull is also subject to the laws of physics. So whatever causes and effects are coming into your head there's only one thing that's going to come out of that because of the structure and the exactness of your brain and its architecture.

So sometimes when things are not going my way I just sit back and say what if I just watch. Now I still do all the things that I would do. I still brush my teeth, go to work, get my car. I still do everything but instead of saying I'm deciding to do this I say I'm not deciding to do this. I don't have free will. I'm actually a spectator in my own life. I'm just watching. I'm watching myself brush my teeth. I'm watching myself go to work. I'm just watching. And I wonder how does this game end? What happens tomorrow given this current situation? Where am I going to be next week? And what you'll find is that can immediately take you out of your depression and into a mode of curiosity and a mode of just feeling like you're a spectator and you don't have to have great distress because things are going the way you wanted them to go. Instead you can say well they were gonna go that way. There's no free will. I'm just along for the ride. I wonder how it turns out.

Now until you try it you might not believe that that will take you into a different mindset but my experience is that it does.

Here's another filter on life. God. I told you that one of the reasons that hallucinogens might be so effective for curing the whole range of mental problems, most of them anxiety related I think, is that it takes your ego, the hallucinogens take your ego out of your worldview. And once you feel that you personally are not that important or that you're just part of the whole then you stop worrying so much about what you and your ego are going to experience tomorrow because you're just not that important. You're not the main character of the universe. It's just little you and you'll be fine.

And another way to get there is by belief in a higher power, belief in a God of one type or another. Because the God model, the way most people practice it is that God is great and you're not. It kind of puts you in your place. Believing in religion puts you in your place. It takes your big ol' ego — well I'm pretty special — and it just says no you're not. God is special. You're just a follower. Yes, it teaches you humility by giving you a contrast to something that needs no humility, right? A omnipotent power, humility would make no sense at all because it would just be a lie. So when you compare yourself and contrast is one of the great principles of managing your psychological state and persuasion and everything else. Anytime there's a contrast it helps focus you and understand things in their place. So believing there's a God who is great puts you in your place. So I think that could be a good filter.

And here somebody just said exactly what I was going to say next. Alcoholics Anonymous uses this technique. So if you go into an AA meeting to try to quit alcohol or drugs — there's a drug version of it — they recommend that you sort of put yourself in the hands of a higher power. Now they're not too specific about you have to be a Christian. You don't have to be a specific kind of belief but whatever you believe is the higher power. If you're not a believer you could say well the higher power is physics. I don't have free will. I just release myself to free will. Or if you believe in God you say I just release myself and let God work through me.

Now that's a filter. We don't need to decide whose religion is right or if God even exists. You don't need to. It's a filter that works because the Alcoholics Anonymous process apparently from everything I've learned is one of the few things that does work. And I think that the active part of the process is removing your ego by putting yourself in the hands of a higher power. The other thing that that does to remove your ego is part of the process, part of the steps — yeah and again somebody knows more about this than I do, just chime in — but part of it is essentially apologizing to all the people you hurt which again is ego. It's all ego. If you go into any kind of a rehab situation you give up all the other parts of your life. You're stripped down to just your biological entity. You're put into your place. Your ego is removed or at least reduced. So that's one filter: belief in the higher power.

Here's another filter: optimism. The way you should see optimism, in other words simply just telling yourself that there are some good things ahead because you can dwell on the bad stuff and it can change your whole mental state. Or you can do what Tony Robbins suggests in his own way and I'm going to suggest in my own way, same idea, that your brain is only capable of thinking about so much at any single time. We're not really good multitaskers. If your brain is focused on one thing it doesn't have much left for other things. You know you can find out if there's a train coming at you while you're doing your taxes but mostly you have a certain amount of shelf space, I call it, in your brain. You have some control, actually a lot of control, over what's on the shelf.

If you don't take control of it and you just say well I'm just gonna wake up today and go on with my life, all I'm gonna do today is whatever comes up. I'll do my tasks. I'll do my job. You know I know what I'm supposed to do. Your shelf space will fill up without your control. It will just fill up with whatever thoughts are gonna bubble up. What kind of thoughts tend to bubble up if you don't manage your shelf space? The good ones? Now you could probably confirm this from your own experience. If you are idle and you don't have much to think about do you automatically drift to happy thoughts? Sometimes. But far more often the negative is what bubbles up because we're designed that way. Humans are designed to find problems and then fix them. We're not designed to dwell on things that are going well.

Look around your atmosphere or your environment. How much of your environment are you actively processing? Very little of it because it's going well. I've got a table over there that's not bothering me at all. It requires no attention at all. It's not in my consciousness. So actively learn to fantasize and imagine positive outcomes in a variety of ways so that whenever you feel your shelf space is starting to get a little room in it, fill it. Fill it consciously, directly, intentionally. Fill it. Never let your shelf space fill itself. You control that. You get to think about what you want to think about. I mean if you have some terrible tragedy it's gonna be hard to keep it out of your head but for most of us our just daily life you can fill that thing with anything you want.

In my twenties, trying to crowd out bad memories of my childhood which was pretty horrific, I would fill it with work. So I would just work myself to exhaustion, fall asleep and then get up early in the morning and work myself to exhaustion again. And it really worked. Now not everybody can work themselves to exhaustion for a year after year but I filled my shelf space and whenever I felt it starting to fill on its own I would very actively crowd it out with optimism.

You see President Trump operating on this principle and he got it. He came to it honestly and really exactly the same way I did through the impact of Norman Vincent Peale who wrote the book "The Power of Positive Thinking." Coincidentally or not was the Trump family pastor or minister, I forget which is the right word, at their family church where they went to church. They saw the king of positive thinking, the most famous positive thinking promoter in the United States ever. And you see Trump do it all the time. He's very much filling his shelf space with optimism and ours too.

Here's another technique. If you want to work on your ego put yourself in situations in which you embarrass yourself often and survive. How many times have you seen me embarrass myself right here on Periscope and then the next day, well I'm back again. Here's my coffee. Tastes good. Have you ever seen embarrassment changed my behavior or even my attitude? Probably not. And I wasn't always that way. I used to be easily embarrassed and it would ruin my whole day, ruin my week, ruin my month. The feeling of embarrassment like aha I'm reliving it in my mind that time I did that. But how many times if you see me have to like blow my nose on camera because you know I just had to. How many times I was rewatching one of my Periscopes. I watched some of them just to see if what I'm doing to make sure I'm doing what I want to be doing and I'm replaying it. I realized that I went on this extended discussion of Iraq but I kept referring to it as Iran. And when I watched it I was like oh I can't believe I had this extended discussion of the wrong country just because my mind mixed up the words. My first thought was just sort of a flash of anger. I was just mad that it happened so sort of mad at myself but I never once felt embarrassed. Not even a little. And it takes a lot of practice to get there.

So I recommend putting yourself in situations — maybe join Toastmasters where you have to talk in front of people. Do something that's outside of your comfort zone. Just embarrass yourself and then find out, just track it. Wake up the next day. Hey food tastes the same. Same friends. Nothing really changed. So the embarrassment filter is a good one. Just practice embarrassing yourself until it just doesn't feel painful anymore. It's very doable.

Here's another filter that's more similar to the one that I talked about in my prior Periscope. Every now and then I like to imagine that I'm in a video game. Now that's very much what I was telling you to visualize. Visualize that you were sort of in a virtual reality rendered environment. What that does is it puts you in the moment because you're forced to think about your immediate situation because you're imagining it rendered and that takes your ego and things because you're not focusing on yourself and your needs for a while. So it helped a lot of people relax.

But here's another way I think of it. There are days when I say to myself today was just like a video game and I feel like I captured a resource or I learned something that allowed me to go up to the next level of the game. And here are a few levels which I would like to suggest that some of you have already passed through. One of those levels toward the bottom is understanding that people are fundamentally irrational. Now I wrote my book "Win Bigly" to reinforce that idea. If you are going through life thinking that other people are rational you will be frustrated and unhappy every day because people are not rational. And if you try to imagine that they are, your understanding of what should happen next won't match what happens next because you'll say well here are my 10 good reasons why you should agree with me and then you think well now you'll agree with me but then you don't because we're irrational. So expecting people to act rationally is a formula for stress and anxiety.

So the first time that you move up a level in this — let's call it the video game of life — you can't move up a level until you get that and you really have to get it. And I don't mean saying that sometimes other people are irrational. I mean that it's the base code of our existence. It's our operating system. We operate on confirmation bias and the subjective kind of reality. Which leads me to the next level. It's one thing to say that people are irrational but it's next level in terms of a video game. It's next level thinking to say that maybe our entire reality is subjective. Which doesn't mean there isn't something real but understanding that our human evolution was never directed at giving us understanding of reality. We did not evolve or at least there's no reason to believe we evolved to understand the nature of reality. Wasn't important. A clam can reproduce without understanding reality. A cat can reproduce without understanding nearly as much as we understand. Understanding reality and like really understanding it completely optional and maybe even unproductive for evolution. So we did not evolve with that capability and indeed you can see that we don't have it. Just observe how people act.

So once you really realize that we're all in a different movie, that we're looking at the same thing and seeing a different reality, you've got a different religion than somebody else. Once you understand how subjective our experience is you move up to the next level, right? So the first level is understanding that people are fundamentally irrational and the level after that is that that irrationality is related to the fact we're not even seeing the same world. We exist in it and we interact but we keep getting confused and tense in our interactions because we don't understand why you're not seeing what I'm seeing and the reason is different realities.

And then here's the next level above that because I believe a lot of you have already passed through those two levels. The level above that is to understand that your brain is programmable and not just a little bit. You all know that you can learn something and that's in a sense that's programming your brain but it's much deeper than that. You can fundamentally change your preferences. Yes you can change your preferences. I have experimented with this over the years. I'm not going to give you examples because I don't want to get into the details but I have actually experimented trying to like something I didn't like and to see if I could do it until I loved it. And I've also experimented taking something I loved, let's say eating Snickers candy bars, and turning it into something I didn't like. And I can succeed. It's completely doable. You can rewire your preferences.

Now you have to understand that if you think the only thing you can do is add memories or maybe you can add a little skill you don't get to go to the next level. You have to understand that you can change your basic personality if you know how to do it. That's the highest level. I've done it a whole number of times. I've watched other people do it. So and it takes a little trial and error to do it but what we're talking about today is exactly that. It's reprogramming your brain.

Let me give you my favorite example of programming a brain. I've been watching Christina, my fiancée, learn, well not learning but recovering her piano skills from when she was younger. She took piano lessons when she was younger and I've watched her recently go from somebody who had some basic piano skills and knew how to play the piano better than most people but you know just sort of a good piano player to last two weeks she learned one of the most complicated Chopin — what would you call it? I don't know — pieces that you've ever heard in your life. And if you don't play the piano, Chopin apparently is extra hard. Extra hard in terms of where your fingers go at what time. It's just really hard.

If you hear somebody playing the piano on say a rock song they're doing something called an accompaniment. By the way I just learned this. So if somebody is playing an accompaniment with other instruments or the singer in a band that's relatively easy piano playing because that's sort of bing bing bing bing bing bing. You know somewhat simple patterns. That's all you need to accompany a band. If you're a solo artist and you're playing Chopin both of your hands are operating completely independently. Each of your fingers is operating independently and you're putting together hundreds, thousands, I don't know how many notes are in a Chopin piece. Thousands but at least as many hundreds, right? And I'm walking b