F (14:24)
I want to, I want to toss out a explanation for the division in the country. All right. And it's one you haven't heard before. I tested it out on my Man Cave live stream last night. Got a good response. So I'm going to try it again. And it goes like this. If you, if you talk to somebody in person, how likely are you in 2023 to want to get into a political conversation? I'm going to answer the question for you while I watch your answers. Probably close to zero. Because you know that in 2023, if you get into a political conversation with somebody whose views you don't already already know. Now, if it's somebody who's really close to you and you already know their views and you're just saying something you know they're going to agree with, that's fine. But you would not enter a, let's say, a cocktail party without knowing the people and launch into a political conversation because your odds of, you know, they're being on your side are, you know, 25 or something. So people will stay away from the person. All right, now let me turn that into a mechanical process. So now I described it on a social, conceptual level. Now I'm going to turn it into a machine. What, what would be your experience if you got into a political conversation and it turned ugly? You would produce cortisol. Your body would produce cortisol, and that makes you feel bad because it'd be tense. So tension makes you feel bad and trains you not to do it. So that's why we don't do it in person. Now let's go to social media. When I see a tweet from Rob Reiner and I think, you know, I bet I could make my followers laugh with this clever cutting rejoinder, and they'll send my little, you know, little post and I'll get a bunch of, you know, positive reinforcement Retweets and hearts and I'll get a bump of dopamine. So when I'm in person, I don't cause division. I just get along with everybody because I don't want cortisol and that's my only option. Well, the risk, right? I mean, maybe I could find somebody like minded, but I'm not going to take the risk of a cortisol like cluster bomb that I created for myself. But online is nothing but dopamine. So I'm like, don't mean addicted, it's just an addiction. So the division in the country is not an in person division. We all know that. We all know the division is fake because we only do it online. If you put me in person with anybody, you could drop me into a crowd of the most rabid Democrat anti Trumpers, and if they didn't ask me any political questions and let's say they didn't recognize me, I could get along fine. I wouldn't have the slightest problem. In a, in an event where every single person was a progressive, I wouldn't have any problem. I could easily get along with them, make permanent friends. But as soon as you put me online, I'm just a dopamine fiend. So when we're talking about the division, if you want to talk about the division, conceptually and who said what, you get nowhere. You don't get any understanding what's happening. You know, if you ask most people what's causing the division, what would they say? Well, the other side, duh, I'll tell you who's causing the division. It's those people I'm getting my dopamine hit. Insulting the people that I'm getting my rocks off from insulting, they are the cause. But I might as well enjoy it. I might as well enjoy mocking them because I didn't cause it. Like, I'm not, it's not me, but of course it's you. You're getting your dopamine hit, they're getting their dopamine hit. It's dopamine. So as long as there's a dopamine reward for division, you get more of it. But as soon as you walk out the door to the real world, you can't get that hit is simply not available to you. So you go into a different chemical cost benefit analysis. You go, well, I don't want any cortisol and that's the only thing available because I get in some stupid fight that I don't need. So every time you fall into the trap that the people on the other side of you politically are broken problem monsters, and they must be defeated. Just remember, that's your addiction talking. That's your addiction talking. It's just like if you were on fentanyl and you had an opinion that the fentanyl had given you, like, oh, it doesn't really hurt me, you know, whatever the fentanyl tells you to think. Right. So the parrot, it's, it's just the dopamine that's making you talk. Once you realize this is a reframe, by the way, by the way, if you didn't know, I wrote an amazing best selling book that you can buy right now in all its forms. Pretty soon we'll have the hardcover in days. So here's the reform. The reframe is you're addicted to dopamine. There is no division in the country. And, you know, when I said the Desantis people are coming after me with like, weird, you know, just flailing claims about Vivek that don't pan out, in my opinion. I don't feel bad about them and I don't feel that they're my enemies because, you know, I would be perfectly happy with a President Desantis. They're definitely not on the other team for me. But at the moment they're acting out. And the acting out to me looks like they're, they're desperately searching for dopamine because they're having a, they're having a negative, well, probably a dopamine disadvantage because their candidate's not killing it right now and Vivek is. So if you see it as some people having a dopamine emergency, that they were all happy that, oh, I picked the right one this time. Imagine, I mean, I guess I have to imagine it because I didn't do it. Imagine if I thought Desantis was going to carry me over the line to victory and then it just all fell apart or it looks like it's falling apart, you wouldn't feel good and you'd probably act out. And that's what we're seeing. So just remember, you're an addict. You're not somebody who has division with anybody in your country.