tom yes you were telling me about andy kaufman yeah i was always a big fan of andy kaufman were trying to get my show yeah you know when he was alive i was a big fan of his and i enjoyed i was fascinated by him when i would see him on the mike douglas show and i would see him on the tonight show and he just i couldn't understand it and i was annoyed and and also fascinated by what he did and i always thought well at this that right around that time i was approaching kind of years later that i can look back and go oh this is brilliant you know because at the time when i would see things it was just look stupid or looked annoying yeah things like that that you know it in trying to understand why the heck is he making you know a comedy that doesn't look funny yeah but sad sometimes it was because he was saying something there was one bit i remember where he's pretending to be a talk show host so he has these people that he invites on his talk show and i would people don't necessarily know to notice that the host a talk show as usual their chair is higher up than the guest and on his show it was like eight feet higher than the guy so his desk would be looking up and he looking down  that and that was that was kind of funny we got to do that here on our radio show we can do it on a radio ok i'm going to get the taller chair you're going to have to look up to me yeah i think i am right now your hair is looks like a little taller than like this i have this white one in you're the black one and then  ready we're talking about reality what do we talk about real well i i mean you know you once told me a story about andy kaufman about why his comedy was so messed up yes and the story goes this is according to his friend bob's mood co writer bob zimmer to he he said that andy kaufman when he was a little boy had this really favored grandmother and his favorite grandmother he would go visit all the time and he was very close to this grandmother and then one day suddenly the grandmother died and the parents did not do the right thing they thought that this was too too much for a little kid to deal with so they said  your grandmother went away and so they did just they just kept this up and he would always grandma she's away she went away and then it just but they didn't tell him and he kept getting more upset because he was so close to this grandmother he said well how come she hasn't written to me and he doesn't want to contact me and and then she got he got more and more upset well why isn't she wanted to talk to me why didn't she want to communicate with me i were very close you know right there and so that after a while the parents  something wrong and they fessed up to and they said well you remember when we said she had went away we he she really died and that kind of messed him up for the rest of his life because he you seem to have learned the power that you get from making reality be different than what it really is because he was so affected by that that that he learned that lesson and that's what he was obsessed with so he has his many of his performances then you're saying were all about trying to show you that you know what you think you're seeing isn't really what you're seeing yeah or that you know the way you expect things are always different than that's reality isn't the thing that you believe it is yeah our they can be you know to to let you know that what you might expect to be happening here may not be what you all to me the experience from this experience that you're having so sometimes and if we just go with this you know sometimes that realisation is painful so here's a saw one about reality not being what it seems t l c down to it the if you boil down you put it into what is love it's deception that's what love is alternately and that's why we want it right so i think that that's make sense so you know i think this is an interesting topic though because reality isn't what you think partly because thinking is of near over reality right thinking you know the minute you you label something then you know you see your time yeah i've got this idea of what it is but you of course could be being different than i've ever seen you before but i won't see it because i still think oh i know you right you can't capture reality no matter how you do right happened at one time i was working as a sound guy for t v show that was interviewing  and she was saying that when you do somebody's biography you can't put everything in there you can't put their best friend from third grade you can't put their this person that was back then what you leave out of somebody's biography is what makes it what it is and so you're always doing a shell representation of whatever you're talking about even to even when you've got five hundred pages right yeah and so so everything that we think throughout our day is always limiting our realities so what do you do about that i'd say the first thing you could do is you should have beer because there right off the bat you're establishing that i'm going to limit my reality right i'm going to even limit my thinking about yeah well yeah so that's that's i think a valid thing to do well hey would you buy me a beer yes we're back we're talking about the realities and we've discovered that if we want to embrace the idea of not being real then i like drinking is a good way of approaching it sure sure sure ok well that's good now so do you think that people deep down have a desire to actually touch reality to actually be real to really understand themselves and and you know the complexity that their lives really are i had say that people probably if they're if there were if things aren't aren't are working for them they consider that to be real if they think oh this works for me this i must be in reality you know things are not working then they feel like well gee if i had things more real than maybe things would be better for me right right so and the more pain they're in then they really want to examine it more so in fact pain therefore is helpful for trying to expose reality rather than the yeah and pleasure yeah but if you're living in a place where you all i'm enjoying myself but i don't need to deal with reality and then you many of the times those people are going to fight like heck to try to avoid and we see that often a lot of times people will say i don't want to hear about that i don't i don't want to examine the inner workings of the situation that i have in the system that i may have i have with me because i i think are working for me and i don't want to mess up things by understanding them as if i understand them then and then i'm taking the chance that things are going to be less than what i think they're there or you or you tip the balance in some way yeah and then i have less ability because i feel like i well i think humans want to things that are really terrifies adults as we grow up as adults thinking that we understand the system around us and you might say as a psychologist that as an adult we wanna know how things work around us because we want to be over to predict the future well enough to keep ourselves and our families safe right so that's what happened so the idea that we might have that our understanding of the system around us exactly so but then that is just her refined with the idea that we may not have the tools that we have around us to be able to predict the future well enough or to keep ourselves safe is just awful for so if we wanted a theme song for you know this checking out you know how about whatever land all right there so reality reality fantasy yes our belief about reality well that pretty much the same yeah how can you tell the difference well the best way is to go with the people around you because if you go if you go with the with what everybody around you believes his reality you'll be just as messed up at that as them but that at least yell feel better and you'll get the support from them you know you get the support right where this is why peer pressure matters so much because as long as you go along with it then everyone's happy with you and you feel like you're fitting into the reality and you understand it yeah because nobody really bases their opinions or their dia's about reality on hard cold facts ultimately we all are looking to other people to validate everything that we know as if everybody in the world came up to you tomorrow douglas and said two plus two equals five you would change your viewpoint to match with that of everybody in the world that's actually true y so they're classic experiments by solomon ashe for example where he'd have a big poster board of different length lines right you know three lines you know and a is the longest and b is the middle and is the shortest and you've got five people in front of you and all of you are asked to judge which one is the longest and the first few times everyone of course says the right one right but then after a while the first person says you know that c is the longest when it clearly isn't and then the next person says the same thing in the third person says the same and you can actually watch the guy down on the end because the first five people are plants you know puzzling and he stares at it really carefully and he gets really confused and then i have there are certain point you know when all five people have said the wrong one you can watch him give up and just go well yes and you know no one's putting pressure on him right to do it he's just there in a group if everyone says you know you know two plus two is five you're going to agree that's how knowledge gets transferred between human and right that's why we are so able to absorb new things so if i say that this is the best radio show you've ever listened to and you love the tom doc show and you say the same yes go ahead i love the tom and doug show and it's the best thing for you and it's  waiting to listen to then now that we've said that you agree with us at home yeah you're going to say that's a pretty good show well ok so i've got a song to round out this this episode talking about  are constructing reality for you ok and this is a song called playing in traffic you have anything you want to say about that song i like the i like to know you treat me when your is sleep at night and that would make me feel so good and make me know i'm right thank you that was playing in traffic part of the reason he got that name is because when i was a kid my father always used to say go play in traffic or i actually sick i remember this i had suggested that title and as soon as i said that you brace the title oh yes you had  personal relationship to that title so here's an interesting thing was my father i always assumed that you know when i was as a five year old when my father told me to go play in traffic he was just trying to get rid of me like you know any father normally would right the traffic is is the opinions the uninformed opinions of the people around you you have to embrace yourself in the uninformed opinion of other people and that's the traffic that we should embrace and that's the thing that we should so that we're more likely to hold ideas that are the same as everybody else i think that's what he met so my daughters you know always decorate a room at christmas time usually it's your room you know and then after christmas i go and i tear down all those decorations because you know i'm a grinch but one that i've left up now for a couple years is a picture lauren made of rudolph the red nosed reindeer and  it says you know life sucks for rudolph until he figured out how to fit in conformity gets you everywhere yeah but now there's something for us all to learn out of the mouths of babes all right so we want you to conform back to us next week here on the tom dog show and we'll try to conform to your ideas of what you think we should be which is this show so there you go enjoy h directions to the time day show number one clean surfaces number two apply time and show on both surfaces for large surfaces used to shows three align you press the press together firmly tom and doug show will set