Adam Has a Podcast Episode 16; Paradigm

*intro* A paradigm is defined as a typical example or pattern of something, a model, perhaps. It may be even safe to say that a paradigm is another word for an expectation, or a set of expectations. But when expectations become so set in their ways, the art of diverting expectations becomes a very powerful tool in the creative's toolbox. This is where a paradigm shift comes into play. A paradigm shift is when you have a fundamental change in the approach or underlying assumptions of something. So if you set up expectations like, there's this girl, and I just can't find any words to describe this girl without being disrespectful. You set up the expectation that you're gonna gonna come up with some kind of poem or sonnet to encapsulate her beauty, to come up with some kind of analogy or synonym. But David Guetta takes this paradigm shit to the next level with his song, Sexy Bitch. Because he says, there are no words to describe this girl without being disrespectful. So there's nothing I can do besides shift the paradigm and call this bitch what she is, a damn fine, sexy bitch, and it works. It works so well. It works so good that now paradigm shifts in and of themselves can be sold and marketed to people. You need to shift your paradigm. You need to jump out of the matrix. You need to do this to achieve that. That's simply a paradigm shift. People are trying to shift your expectations of what your goals should be by saying, you need to follow my step-by-step guide to be a millionaire or else you won't be successful. They're trying to sell you the idea of them making you into a millionaire Meanwhile, all that's really happening is you're buying their class to tell you a bunch of information that was freely accessible so then you could then make them a millionaire. So they shifted the paradigm and they say, well, we're all getting rich, so you see this one person getting rich off of everybody else. And you say, well, they must have had it figured out. I should go buy his book. And then you buy his book and then you realize, oh, man, it's just everything else that I've heard 10,000 times before just written by this guy now. And that's not always a bad thing. Sometimes people come up with some really good reinterpretations of things that that have been out there before. And they actually do have something pretty cool to contribute. And, you know, you do have some people that really take an earnest approach to influencing people online. But those are the exception and not the rule, the rule, the main line line that I really see is I see a lot of these just pieces of shit out here. Mainly one of them that really pissed me off was there's this one dude who was traveling around Asia. He could speak like mad languages. And I was like, man, this dude's kind of cool. He's doing like, it's like fun, like everybody feels like connected. It It feels like a community thing. Like people are like surprised that this white boy like, you know, can speak such perfect Mandarin Chinese. I thought that was cool. I thought I was like, wow, that's some fun content. Dude got a following, got a little bit of steam behind him. Two months later, I see him in like a U. US. Army ad. And that's where I draw the line. soon as it starts becoming just blatant propaganda, I don't want to be part of your paradigm. I don't want to be part of your plan, I don't want to be part of your nothing anymore. Because I see, I see right through it and I see sometimes too, not everybody's like that. But I, man, that guy with the stuff and the things really got me on that one.. I was like, rooting for him. And, uh, whe. She turns around and starts chilling for the U.S. government, which's not a bad thing. I mean, make your money any way you can, but I'm not, I don't I'm not one of those people that enjoys that thing, particularly. And you're like, well, why the fuck are you even talking about this whole paradigm shift in the first place? Well, I have trouble sleeping. I have always had trouble sleeping. It's just not a sleeper. My dad doesn't sleep well at night. Just my siblings. Don't sleep well at night. It's not a nighttime kind of sleeper. I never really took anything for it until I turned 18 because I figured, well, I want to let let my brain fully develop. And then I started smoking weed at like 16, 17 So I was like, well, apparently that whole let my brain fully develop thing has gone right the fuck out the window. So let me try antidepressants. And slowly, I found out that I'm allergic to most SSRIs. So we switched gears a little bit and started trying to tackle the problems that might be contributing to the depression rather than trying to tackle the depression itself. So they put me on a sedative. And, well, I asked for the sedative. I've been asked because they kept putting me on fucking shit that was ramping me up after the SSRIs. They tried putting me on like ADD medication. I was like, I don't need to be up. I need to be down. And so they finally, after I was like, dude, down, they told, they gave me some down stuff. And that shit worked wonders. I couldn't fucking go to sleep at 10 o'clock at night every single night. It's beautiful. I eat regularly when I'm on it. I call it myLet's Stop arguing with myself about eating now, pill because it literally just like, I sometimes would just like will go the whole day and I'll be like, I don't want to eat. But then if I take that medicine, it fucking throws that whole thing off and I'll wake up and I'll be hungry and then I'll eat my lunch and my dinner and then I'll be hungry again. So it really helps in a lot of different ways, but, um.. Man, it makes me sleepy. It makes me sleepy. It zombifies me. It makes my brain. fire at like half capacity. And that is needed at times. But having your brain firing in a half capacity when you're like at 10% is only 5%, you know? Sometimes you don't need that taken to be taken down so much. But I'm over here trying to do the podcast and all of this other stuff and I'm also trying to like fix my schedule at the same time. And I found, I'm like, whoa, I ran out of time. Like suddenly I'm out of time now. And I realized, oh, dude, all that time that I wasn't sleeping before, I was up doing stuff. I was up like writing or drawing or building a website or trying to record a version of some podcast. I was I was at least up and doing stuff, but now I'm asleep. And I'm getting my full eight hours every night. I get up to 12 sometimes, because it really knocks me out, lets me go into that deep sleep that I normally can't act access, but.. Dude, it's Saturday, August 31st. And I'm supposed to be recording these, like, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, at the latest. If I'm doing it the week, like, if I'm doing it the week of, I try to do it early in the week so I can edit it and listen it to it over, but.. Whenever I take this sedative fucking whoof, dude, I don't I don't I suddenly don't want to do the podcast anymore. And it's really funny because it's actually an aypical anti-sychotic. Is that a joke written into my life somehow? that when I take an antipsychotic, suddenly I don't feel like being a comedian anymore. Huh. Now, that is funny. But also, at the same time, you can look at it like, well, no wonder you don't have a drive to do anything. It's dumb and you down, dude. It is. Basically, it blocks neurotransmitters from firing. So this is gonna go off the rails a little bit, but technically, if I am allergic to serotonin in and of itself, then blocking serotonin from firing would have a beneficial effect on my body because then I wouldn't be attacking myself. But that's probably not the reason. The reason is probably because it blocks the neurotransmitters from firing. So I don't do things out of pleasure seeking behavior. I do them out of a logical behavior because, like, if I smoke a cigarette, when I take that medicine, cigarettete won't work because it blocks dopamine and a cigarette triggers dopamine. So if you're taking something that triggers dopamine while also taking something that blocks dopamine, they cancel each other out and you're just wasting a cigarette. So you don't really do pleasure seeking behaviors. You do things out of logic because then I guess when you accomplishlish a task out of logic, it must provide a different hormone or neurotransmitter that's not being blocked. I noticed I'll do stuff like the dishes. The dishes will be fucking done all the time when I'm on this medicine. You know, laundry, eh, 50-50 But that's always been one of those things that you can just like forget about, especially if you have enough pairs of underwear, this is a life hack for anybody right now. Have at least two weeks worth of underwear. That way you can go at least two weeks. without doing laundry. And if you're a real, you know, life hacker, dude, get a month's worth of underwear, you doing you're doing fucking laundry like once a month. That is if you have enough other clothes to like supply the month without going over. Or rewearing. I don't mind rewearing clothes sometimes, especially when it's jeans. I used to have a whole thing where I was like, I can only wear one pair of clothes for one day. And then, like, in senior year of high school, I was like, man, why the fuck do I do that? And I needed to shift my paradig. So I wore the same pair of pants every single day for a week just to see if anybody would fucking notice. And then there was one day, like midweek, like Wednesday, where I stained, I got sauce on my pants or something, when I was like, fuck, the experiments ruined now. Everybody's going to be able to notice because, well, before it didn't have a sauce stand now I'm wearing the same thing with sauce stain day after day. They're going to be able to notice. And by the end of the week, I started asking people, nobody nobody had a fucking clue. And I was like,W, really? Like, even with the sauce stain? Like, nobody, they were like, why did you point that out? And I was like, "'Cause I'm running an experiment here. I need to know. And what I found out was that people don't pay as much attention as you might think that they're paying, Which, Hmm. On one hand, is cool. You can do whatever the fuck you want without worrying about that fictitious, like, judgment that you're like, oh, no, these people are going to notice. No, they're not. But on the other hand, sometimes I do funny shit on purpose and people don't notice. And I get a little upset about about it. I'm like, ah, I wish more people were a little bit like, uh, aware of their surroundings. Like, I'm clumsy., And you know, it's, uh, weird is as I like, go from not taking the medicine to taking the medicine. There's like this flux period where I get like overly clumsy. And this has happened so much that I've just like learned to ride it and just roll with it. So I have this like really like funky form of physical comedy that's come about, but it's really just because I'm like clumsy and I'm trying to not fall over, you know, and I'm I'm trying to like recenter by mass. But it ends up being funky sometimes. I end up being pretty agile, but. This was all a huge diversion from what I was talking about, a diversion of your expectations from what you thought I would talk about, boom, bringing it back to the fact that I'm kind of in the middle of a debate with myself, which will, I don't know, sort of bring about a paradigm shift. It would be really interesting to me if, like, listeners could actually hear when I started taking my medicine again. So sometime around I think the podcast right before I had Joe on as a guest is when I started taking it. And I had it, I was taking it it with Joe and then the one afterwards I was on it. So it would be really interesting to me to see if like listeners can hear a difference in like how I am talking or like how I'm telling stories. Like if they can hear a paradigm shifting. But on the other hand, it brings up a question of like. I think that a lot of comedians also end up having this question too of like, man, if I get better, will I still be as good? Will I still be as funny if I'm not, you know struggling with something? Is it the struggle that makes me funny and like entertaining? Or am I just funny and entertaining as a function of who I am? And now we're going to kind of get to see like me try to balance all of these factors out. Because the medicine certainly helps, and it makes me feel better about general things going on, but also, like I said, that flux period in between not taking it and taking it makes my brain super foggy. And even when I'm on it, my brain gets super foggy, so I have to consciously overcompensate to be like in the moment and active while I'm on it. It like really zombifies you. So I'm like, is the benefit of being able to eat, do my dishes, sleep on time, and get like actual restful sleep worth it over like eating irregularly sleeping irregularly but also being productive and maybe like a little bit I don't know if I would call it manic because it's controllable. It's a very controlled burn. But nonetheless, it is an extra burn from what the typical person would normally do. And that goes into things like genetics and stuff too. Like am I the typical person that actually requires eight hours of sleep every night? Or I heard a study a while ago that they were like certain people that only required six hours. They had some funky fucking name for it. I can't remember. It was catchy as all hell, but.. Am I one of those people that just requires less sleep? And that makes me think of that dude who lives in China, who says, or Vietnam, who says he, like, hasn't slept since the war. And it's been like 60 years since he just like hasn't slept a wink and like people have studied him and they said that, yeah, it doesn't, can't really say he's not sleeping. Um. Maybe that guy has some kind of like spirit technique that I'm learning to unlock, you know? It definitely, when I do stay up late at night, it is like, sometimes it feels like I'm being fueled with chi. Chi is a good word to use because it makes you think of martial arts. And it really is like you do certain muscle movements to like, you know, warm up your body or certain breathing techniques to help you get more energy. And if you, you know, are using that breathing technique to get more energy at bedtime, of course you're going to be awake all night long. But that's the thing about the medicine is it kind of takes that choice away. You can't. The thing I say about this is you can't, you can't force yourself to stay awake on it. The first few times I took it, I was very surprised. I was like, I'll be able to stay awake through it. And it just, and it takes like building a tolerance to it and taking it time and time and time again to like learn how to stay awake when you take it, but it is such a strong sedative. It just shuts your brain down. and that is needed sometimes. You know, sometimes like me me personally, I need to shut my brain down. But I don't think I need to be shutting my brain down all the time to the point where I can't really do things anymore. But also you got to look at it like,, well, are the things that I'm doing really like totally sane things to be doing? And pitching to your computer for at least an hour a week is, well, I would have called it insane 10 years ago, but now we have online therapy and people do it all the time. So. Maybe it's not insane. That's another thing. I think I've said it before, but it's very hard to be a sane person in a very insane world, and we live in a very crazy world nowadays. And it's a world in which, you know, paradigms can be sold. People know how crazy it is, so they try to sell you out of it and they say, you know, get out of the Matrix or like, uh,. I don't know what other things that they say, man, besides the Matrix thing, uh they're star seeds, maybe. Like the aliens, like, they think that they're aliien kin. And that even goes into, like, the furry kin people, the people that think that they're furries or like the werewolf kin, people that think that they're werewolves. It's a lot of kin out there, and they're pretty creepy. But that is people's freedom of expression, that they're, you know, they can as long as they can sleep at night, good for them. But I can't sleep at night, which is why I take medication. But can I not sleep at night just because I'm bothering myself with so many other people's problems that aren't my own? And I'm, like, trying to fucking solve everybody else's math problems and do their tests for them. Is that why I can't sleep at night? So maybe that needs to kind of take a personal direction and say, well, what can I do? And that's when the medicine comes into play and I really do focus on those physical things right there in front of me, like, yo, let me go do laundry, let me eat, let me do my dishes. And those metaphysical things, like, let me work on a website, let me do something creative, let me do a podcast. doesn't really work. And, um maybe it's it's like something else entirely going on. And I'm just, like, in the middle of it, so I can't even see it. Like, it's that kind of thing. Like, the fucking... flight path for the flight school being right over my house. Like, I can't see it, but I certainly get bothered by it a lot and all the time. Is that my problem, though? That I'm in that flight path? Or is it the flight paths problem? Because they could fly anywhere in the sky. But they're just, I'm close to the airport, they're taken off, coming back. It's like I'm in an inevitable spot right here. So one of the things that I could do is I could change my spot, go to another spot. But sound is bound to happen. It's inevitable. We all are just vibrating with sound, no matter what. Even when you try to get most quiet as possible,, you know, I'm sitting up late at night. It's It's quiet as can be. You still have your crickets and for some reason, my hearing is super sensitive, so I can hear everybody's smoke detector beeping and off in the neighborhood. Just two block radius and just beep and crickets. And that's as quiet as you can get. Even in the most quietest of moments, even when you don't got the smoke detector beeps and you don't got the crickets, your ears will create their own frequency to compensate for the silence. And I think I remember hearing something where there was this like super soundproof room where it's like the quietest place in the world and people can't hang out in there for too long without going crazy because they'll hear the sound of their own blood pumping. And I really want to hang out in that room. I think that would be a huge paradigm shift for me because I always hear my blood pumping. So it actually go into a place that's actually silent and hear like a huge difference between how much noise my body is actually creating in like the outside world. I think that would open up my eyes to being like, oh, wow, I am pretty sensitive. And I've actually had a few paradigm shifts happen to me where I didn't really think that I was doing too much, but then I had a couple friends come out and say, man, I'm one of them, Joe, you heard him on the last podcast. He was like, man, I'm proud of you. You keep going. I had another friend. He was like, dude, you're emotionally intelligent. You got this shit. And I didn't really think of myself as like doing much because I'm just sitting here and recording and it's fun and easy. So maybe for me, I needed to shift the paradigm and make it a difficulty. And so I started taking a sedative and with the sedatorative, it made my subconscious kind of take over and said, well, this used to be something that was fun and imposed a challenge to me to make it more difficult to see if it would still be fun and And yet, the clock's running down Sundays tomorrow, and I'm still sitting here without a doubt trying to just hammer this out and have a good time. And yes, the first part, David go out a part with the sexy bitch, that was the joke from 2018 that I've been trying to work on. I said You know what? That's the beauty of these things is I don't know. Did it hit? Did it not hit? The audience isn't here right now. So I don't get that instantaneous feedback. I need to just roll it with it, believe in it. And that's that paradigm that people try to sell you. Because they see a lot of people, they don't, you know, we're fumbling about, maybe we're not believing in ourselves. So they want to be that person that says, give me five bucks and I'll tell you how to believe in yourself. And then you give them five bucks and they go, you just believe in yourself. And then you're like, oh, I'm out five bucks. I should have just believed in myself to not pay that guy five bucks. And then I would have believed in myself more. Both ways, the paradigm can shift. You either give the dude five bucks, and you're like, man, I should have believed myself into not giving that dude five bucks, or you don't give him five bucks, and you're like, yeah, now I'm gonna go spend this five bucks on something else. I knew I was right to not, you know, spend my five bucks on that guy. You still get to believe in yourself whether you spend the five bucks or not. But one is just regrettably believing in yourself after the fact, and one is just following your gut. That's the other. And I've always been trying to follow my gut my entire life. I learned about, like people can listen to their gut at a young age. And I was like, yo, how? It's not talking to me. I need to, when it growl, like when it growls, is that it? Is that like my gut? What does it do? How is it in intuitive gut? I always wanted an intuitive gut. And now that I have one, I have stomach aches all the time. And I'm like, dude, this sucks. Why did I want an intuitive gut? The paradigm shifted from a want to a have, and now I don't really think too much of it, but it is a pretty cool thing that I've always wanted and intuit what you've got, you know, what's right and what's wrong but that's something that you've got to build within yourself and you don't really have an intuitive gut until you try to actually start paying attention to the gut. And actually, a lot of things kind of end up working out like that where you don't really understand it until you start paying attention to it. And then the more you pay attention to it, the more you understand understand it. It seems kind of like, well, duh, but it's not always that obvious. And that's where, you know, those big paradigm shifts really come into play. Because sometimes we, like, really overcomplicate simple things and it takes that kind of paradigm shift to come in and rattle your cage a little bit to make you realize, oh, dude, I was overcomplicating this simple thing. And sometimes things are a lot harder than you would have imagined them to be. And then the action of doing that thing is sort of the paradigm shift in and of itself. You realize, oh, Wallace was a lot harder than I thought. Do I keep going or do I just put it down now that I realize that it was hard? And in part, I kind of feel like that's where I am right now. Like, I on one hand, overcomplicated this for myself. Totally convoluted. I don't know what the fuck I was thinking. But on the other hand, I thought that this was all Easy peasy, lemon, squeezy, super duper easy. Now that it's hard, am I going to fold or am I going to actually just play the hand?. Whether it, you know, I play blackjack. So whether it's a bust or not, whether you break or not, will you play that hand? And I always fucking hit on a hard 17. You know what I'm saying? You got a jack and a seven. That's a hard 17. You* hit. You're either going to fucking get as close to 21 as possible, or you're gonna go over. And that's the fun of blackjack for me. But that's putting it into the frame of gambling, and is this really a gamble sort of 50-50 kind of, maybe, probably. I think a gamble is when you're uncertain of the, oh, come, I'm uncertain. I think there's enough of a degree of uncertainty where I can consider this a gamble. But I wasn't really thinking about it too complexly like that. I thought it was simple. And so I kind of, in thinking that it was simple, overcomplicated it for myself, and I posed myself with this big challenge, and right now, I have a hard 17. and it's 12:50 p.m. on Saturday, August 31st. Do I fold on this hard 17 or do I hit? Hit me baby one more time. Yeah, whatever. What the fuck is it? Why did I overcomplicate this? There's another thing that I'm like, oh, dude, I practiced this voice all the time, I don't want to use this voice. So silly. I'm overcomplicating it. I need to shift the paradigm. But that's the thing about taking this medicine all the time is sometimes it makes easy things overly complicated and that is a drawback from its benefits, and it fogs up my brain. So do I really want to be fighting against the fog all the time and like kind of working from a lack? Or do I want to be more than enough? Over over the top. Both have their pros and cons. And this is where I always go back to there is that middle road once again, though, where you're just balanced. But the thing about this medicine is you can't really breach that balance. So you're either on it or you're off it. So... I kind of have to make a decision of like fucking white knuckle it, you know, grind my teeth and just like. whatever, if I don't sleep, I don't sleep and just try to get through life and try to do it. Or do I, it's like a comfort. Do I put on the the bathrobe? and do I just, you know, lay down in the comfort thing? It is really much like a comfort thing because it feels like you take it and then like, okay, cool, I don't have to worry about the things that I normally worry about. Like, what should I eat for dinner? Oh, that doesn't matter. I'm going to eat dinner. Like, I think too much about the what I'm going to eat for dinner to the point where I don't eat dinner. And the medicine just fucking knocks that part of the brain out for some reason. But that part of the brain, I guess I'm also using to monologue and be creative and come up with stuff. So is it really, you know, a benefit to be handicapping that part of the brain? And, this is where, like, psychology is such a cool field because you're playing around with the chemistry of your brain trying to get it to do the thing that you want it to do. But, you know, sometimes too, you like, you got to think about it. Is this something that I just, I just need to go through? Like, in order to figure shit out? Like, am I just trying, am I actively stopping myself from figuring things out because I think it's too complicated. I'm overcomplicating it. And that's why I enjoy those paradigms where people are like, you got this. It's easy. You know, that's why I always say keep it easy, because I'm trying to shift the overall paradigm that everybody deserves an easy life and it's not make it easy, it's keep it easy, because it's already been easy and it'll keep getting easier. Like, imagine it as if your hardest days are also your easiest days as long as you just survive them. And once you get past that hard day, the next day is not going to be nearly as hard or it might not feel nearly as difficult as the day before. So it helps to kind of reframe your mind from thinking, oh, this is so difficult, this is so unendurable to, oh, well, yesterday was hard and today's easier than yesterday or yesterday was easy and now today is easier because yesterday was easy enough so now we can get through today, just like this sense. That's why I say keep it easy, because I want everybody to have an ease in their life. And that's a paradm I' trying to I'm trying to push along. Because if you think about it as you are already having it, that makes it easier for you to then obtain it, which is one of those things that the manifestors say that you kind of be like, you talking like one of those TikTok witches. But on the other hand, that is a pretty good psychological trick to make yourself more likely to look for the opportunities because you're already believing that they're there. It's like I said one time to my friend, if you're always looking for a dollar in the street, you're bound to find a dollar in the street eventually. And then we walked outside of my apartment and there was a dollar in the gutter and I went, look, like, almost instantaneously.. It's little shit like that that helps you kind of put the building blocks in place to obtaining your goals. And anybody that's willing to help you put a building block into your foundation is good on them. But you you also, you know, if you have an open work site, you got to look around for those dudes stealing tools and knocking out blocks, saying, that guy did a bad job, you should hire my team. Because there are people like that. And that's why you got to be careful with like where and how your paradigm is being shifted and who's actually just trying to sell a paradigm shift and is it like like a legitness and who's just grifting? Because we really do live in a world where grifters just can get away with it so easily nowadays and they're so commonplace and they're catfish and they do all these things to hide there, who they really are. Even if they're using their own face, they're like catfishing with their own image. And it's just. Gotta be careful out there. But hopefully this podcast help you add a few blocks to your foundation. Hopefully you're keeping it easy out there and peace