How to Keep Your New Year's Resolutions

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. And today we have a special treat. I don't talk about psychology or even counseling or self-improvement all that much. As you know, if you listen to this podcast, talk a lot more about social justice and political things and things that affect Christians from a social and cultural angle.

Why This Conversation Matters for Christians and Habit Change

But today, and I think this actually does fit in with the cultural social angle, we're gonna talk to John David Haskins, who has written a book I read over the Christmas break, if you will, on screen addictions and pornography.

But really just more in general, quitting habits. And just real brief background on why I read this. I saw a thread on Twitter from John David Haskins on, I guess, X now, they call it X, on screen addictions.

And it was a thread. I kept reading it. And it was basically an advertisement for his book. But I thought, you know, I would like to be less on X. I'm seeing this on X. But I'm like, I'd like to be less on X, especially on my phone for 2025.

And I was preaching a sermon on New Year's resolutions. And I thought, yeah, this would be a good book to seem like easy reading and just, you know, see what he has to say. And I read it and I thought, this is actually pretty good.

Like this is, you know, he says some things in there and I'll get into that as we talk, but that I haven't seen emphasized as much in even some of the biblical counseling. And I've, of course, been to seminary and I've taken a lot of grad level courses on biblical counseling and so forth.

But there's just some really good practical advice. And then there was some hints that John David Haskins left in the book, that he was a Christian. And I thought, okay, I should get him on the podcast because I think there's some practical, useful advice here.

So anyway, John Haskins, I appreciate you. Do you want me to call you John David Haskins? I know that's what you go by. Like how do people call you?

Family and friends call me John David. I introduce myself as John. If it's John David, it's John Haskins. I answer to both. If it's all of them, I answer that too.

Yeah, well, I know, like you said, you're living in Texas now and in the South, so many people have like a hyphenated name. So John David or my niece, both my nieces actually have hyphenated names. And so, so anyway, so I'll call you John David then.

You don't have to call me Jonathan Edward. That's way too of a mouthful. But hey, I just, thank you first of all for writing this book. And if people want to find out more, I should say from the outset, they can go to johndavidhaskins .com and it's called I Can't Believe How Easy This Is.

And there's a picture of a cell phone on the cover.

There you go.

You got a copy of it. I have a digital copy. So, you know, let's maybe start at the beginning here. You are not a trained professional. We don't have the certifications, but you told me that you get results and you have testimonials in your book.

You're also fairly new to this. And so I'm intrigued, what led you down the path of trying to help people improve their lives and have maintained discipline in these kinds of things?

From Porn Addiction to Coaching and the Subconscious Mind

Yeah, man, no, that's a great question. So I got started in it because in early 2020, I would have just kind of started getting my feet wet in Twitter, Twitter at the time X now. And I was following a few people in what we call money Twitter.

So like, here's how to make money online. You read tweets, you got threads about it. And I followed Jose Rosado, who's a guy based out of the Dominican Republic that's been in money Twitter for quite a while.

And he's a reputable source. Like he knows what he's doing. He gets people results. He's got a successful business. And he had a tweet that was promoting a course called the ebook printing machine. And his premise was, if you've solved a problem that other people need help solving and you write a ebook that details that process, you can sell five copies a day at 20 bucks a pop and you'll make $100 a day.

And back then I was working as a part-time sort of almost full-time employee at a used sporting goods sales or used good sporting goods store. And I thought to myself like $100 a day would be life changing money.

Like that's more than I make going to work, right? It was $10 per hour, eight-hour shifts. And so I was in this sphere of the internet where people are talking about making money or then also kind of manosphere adjacent, right?

It was more red pill happy at that time or we would have called it the red pill but the manospheres evolved past that.

Now it has.

So the content that I was consuming on that side would have been like how to be a better husband, how to be a better father. And when I got introduced to these concepts of like making money online, I'm unmarried, I don't have kids.

So I wasn't gonna preach on those topics because I didn't have real world experience in that. But I had just recently broken a porn addiction. And because of that, then some of the things that I had done, they were different than advice that you normally get when you Google or when you search how to quit porn, if you look it up on Google, if you watch all the YouTube videos on it.

Because at the end of the day, the majority of the advice boils down to just don't watch it. And when you're dealing with an addiction, it's more complex than just don't watch it or just don't think about it.

And my book goes into why that advice is so bad and counterintuitive. So I first created or wrote an ebook is about 20 ,000 words on the things that I had done at the time to break my porn addiction. And I remember I got my first book sale while I was sleeping for about 12 bucks when I had less than 400 followers on Twitter.

This was around May or June, 2020. And then over time, I started to get connected with other coaches who are in this coaching industry, right? Which is kind of info product adjacent or self-improvement adjacent.

The self-improvement industry is a huge industry right now. Everybody's getting courses, everybody's reading books, everybody's looking at coaches. And at the time, I didn't realize that coaching went beyond just like fitness coaching or even sports coaching.

When I thought of a coach, I thought of someone who did high school sports. I didn't realize that there are people hiring relationship coaches or people hiring business coaches, that there are people hiring online fitness coaches.

Like none of this stuff made sense to me. I didn't realize that it was an industry. But I got connected to it because I was thrown into an engagement group chat on Twitter with other people that were coaches.

More so relationship coaches and marriage coaches. And they started to encourage me and tell me that I could do coaching. They're like, you can get clients. They will pay you for your knowledge and for your skills.

And really anything, they'll just pay for the accountability. And I knew that that was just a no brainer because accountability when breaking an addiction is a really big part of it. Especially considering, if you pursue an accountability partner who's also struggling, you run into a blind, can't lead the blind type of situation.

So I signed on my first client in April of 2021 and got him results quick. And then the floodgates open to that point. You get one client, I got my next one and so on and so forth. And over the course of coaching clients, my exposure to what really worked started to increase.

And also my understanding of the psychological component also expanded because I was operating under my main thesis at the time. My main idea at the time was when you watch porn and also when you have sex, your lateral orbital frontal cortex, part of your prefrontal cortex shuts down.

And it's the part of the mind that's responsible for logical thinking and rational decision-making. So the basis of my thought process was if you're able to keep your prefrontal cortex engaged, you're going to greatly decrease the likelihood that you go and pursue porn.

And I started to experiment with that in my own process of quitting. And I would do that by incentivizing how good it would feel to stay free as opposed to the momentary pleasures of indulgence. I remember distinctly, there was one time I even did that.

I remember I was looking at porn and I was telling myself in my mind and even out loud some things like, I'm not actually attracted to these women because at a core value-based attraction, I'm attracted to women who want to be a wife, who want to be a mother, who are Christians, who have godly values.

And I quite literally turned myself off in that moment. And I was like, what am I doing? This is so out of alignment for what I actually want. And then I also, I recount a moment where, and I think it was July.

Yeah, it was July, 2019, where I had a moment where I was going to watch porn. And for the first time in my life, when that thought of I shouldn't be doing this came into my mind, I distinctly remember thinking to myself, I won't feel any different afterward, why bother?

And that was the first time that I was like, I was in an active session or an active relapse and I got out of it. And I remember going to bed that night, like finally having hope that I could quit because I said no and I said no successfully that one time.

That was then the precursor that led to me writing the ebook. And then I started doing the coaching and then from the coaching, as I had time to research and continue studying, the component of the subconscious mind was introduced.

Because while engaging the prefrontal cortex was helpful, what I find to be really incentivizing was starting to work things at a more emotional level. Because you can interface with the mind and there's a lot of good that comes with that, specifically interfacing with the conscious mind.

If we didn't have a conscious mind, we wouldn't be able to interact and discern that we're having an online video conversation as opposed to the fact that you're not sitting right in front of me. Because this simulated reality feels an awful lot like an in-person discussion.

We've got all the visual cues, we've got the auditorial cues, we even have some of the emotional cues that would simulate that, but the conscious mind is able to interject and go, hey, this is happening over video.

So that prefrontal cortex engagement was more conscious minded and while effective for a time, you're susceptible to relapse and you're susceptible to the types of relapses that will get you stuck again, right?

Because the beliefs exist at a subconscious level. Anyways, I can dive more into that, but the wrap up of how I got into it was I was told that if you have solved a problem successfully that other people need help solving, you can create content, you can create courses, you can coach people through that.

And then as I work with coaching clients, I'm a perfectionist. If there's a way to do something better, if there's a way to do something quicker, I'm gonna figure out what that way is. And that way led me to working with the subconscious mind as opposed to these strategies to keep the prefrontal cortex engaged.

There's a time and a place for that, but if you want sustainable results, if you want long-term results, you have to interface with the subconscious mind.

I love your honesty with all this because like so many people, if I asked that in your line of work, they'd probably be like, oh, I just wanted to help people, which I know you do, but you're basically from the beginning, you're like, man, I just wanted to make money.

I wasn't making any. I love that, that honesty there. Well, and now you're doing this full time and you're not just, obviously you didn't just write a book, you're also doing coaching with people or I don't know if you call it that, but you're having sessions, right?

Where you help them counsel. I wanna start here if it's okay. And this is because I have a Christian audience, obviously, I told you I'm a Christian and I've been around the block a little bit on counseling and I'm very familiar with the integrated counseling debates over whether or not we should have psychology and tools from the psychological world or observations from the psychological world integrated with Christian counseling and all of that.

And I wanna just explore that for a moment and then maybe we can get to some more practical strategies here. But you said, so there's two things you said. You talked about the subconscious mind and you also talked about the prefrontal cortex.

And so obviously these are physiological terms. The subconscious, I don't know if that's actually physiological, that's more, I guess, what, psychological or that's...

Go ahead.

The conscious mind and the conscious mind split is more of a model that certain people use to better understand the way that the mind experiences things both experiences reason and logic and experiences emotion.

So it's less that there's a part, it's less that there's a part of the brain that we would call the subconscious and more that the subconscious is a model that best explains the fact that there are things that we know and there are things that happen and there are processes that we undergo that happen outside of our conscious awareness, right?

So our conscious awareness is anything that we hold at our center of attention. And while I can hold this conversation at the center of attention, I still know how to ride a bike. I still know how to drive a car.

I still have an imagination. I still have memories. And those are things that are going to continue to exist and persist, but they're stored somewhere else. So it's more of a psychological model that helps to explain what for a long time has been difficult for people to explain.

So this is where I wanted to ask you specifically about the Bible's teaching on these things and whether or not you think what you're saying dovetails with biblical teaching. Because obviously, you know, Romans 12, one and two, that's a big section of scripture for biblical counselors.

I mean, it says that we're supposed to be renewed. We're supposed to renew our minds. And often, I mean, these terms aren't used in scripture. It's an ancient, you know, collection of documents. And, you know, they use a lot of different terms and, you know, categories that may be even parallel, but they're just, you know, not the same as today.

So do you see that category in scripture of the subconscious mind? Is there another term that you see used in scripture? Do you see teaching on, you think renewing your mind has something to do with that?

Yes, so when we look at, I was actually thinking about this recently. I thought it was so interesting that when you read through scripture, you'll see verses that'll refer to the spirit and verses that'll refer to the soul.

I think we tend to think of those as interchangeable or as synonyms, but the spirit is referring to, it seems to refer to something close to the heart, but then also a layer deeper, right? Where we know that we have our heart of hearts, the thing that holds our deepest desires, our deepest wants, and other types of things.

And the way that I relate to the subconscious mind would be a lot closer to those biblical terms, heart, or those biblical terms, spirit. I think especially spirit. So it's, again, it's less that it's a part of the mind, like a part of the brain, and more so that it's one of our many faculties that a lot of people have fallen out of touch with.

And then also you have lots of scriptures that'll refer to it, but then the methodology of communicating with it or the methodology of reaching it, if you want to extrapolate biblical ways to do that, you kind of have to read between the lines.

And I find that the way that the apostle Paul communicates, especially the way that he communicates from Romans 6, 7, and into 8, is a really effective means because Paul's writing is so interesting in that he's really smart.

And he's proposing a lot of intellectual reasonings for faith and for salvation and for grace, but then you're almost always reached with a point of, you just have to accept it, right? Especially that's a big point in Protestant Christianity is you accept the gift, freely give it, and that's how you acquire grace, that's how you acquire salvation.

But these are concepts and these are ideas that in no way, shape, or form makes sense to the conscious mind or to our logical reasoning. You even have things, I think it's Philippians 4, 9, and I might launch some of my references, my scriptural references, but he says that the peace of Christ given to us is a peace that surpasses our understanding.

So that suggests that there are things that go on in our mind that are going to not hit at this conscious, logical level of reasoning, especially us modern day Christians. I think there are verses that support how significant it is that we have faith because we're of those in the category who have not seen, but believe, and because we believe, now we see.

And this is language where we can intellectualize it or we can look at it as a type of philosophy, but there's something in the mind, there's something that was created in us that's innate to our humanity, that's innate to our nature, that allows us to have these religious experiences, even faith itself.

The fact that while things are going wrong, I can still maintain trust in faith and God who's going to provide for me, that that isn't a thing that humans, when you consider things just from a logical or a reasoned perspective, that shouldn't be possible.

But the fact that I'm okay, despite things not going right at different stages in my life, the fact that I have peace, like sure, there's that lingering, that skepticism in the mind that goes, but how do you know?

But then there's that other part of me that's much deeper that knows, I'm protected, I'm covered, I'm okay. Things are going to work out, even if it doesn't work out how I want it to. So you're not going to find the word subconscious mind in scripture, but there are things that we can look to and we can point to, where if you want like 100 verification of these things, I don't think we're going to find it.

But if we are going to read between the lines or piece things together, it is obvious to me that there's a model, there's something going on that I believe we have the ability to access and that I believe we have the ability to study and to learn so that we can help other people.

Yeah, it's interesting, you mentioned maybe a split between spirit and soul. I know this is, I mean, I'm not sure if these words necessarily are words you've heard before, but in theological language, there's been a debate over dichotomous and trichotomous they call them, debating whether there's like three parts to man or two parts, is there a material and immaterial or is that immaterial part split into two broad sections?

And it sounds like you'd be more maybe fitting in with a trichotomous model. I wanted to maybe follow up with this, in the book of James, James chapter two, I believe it is, or actually James chapter one is what I'm thinking around verses 14 and 15.

James says that when we fall into sin, when we're tempted, right? It starts with these desires that we have that literally they drag us away. Some translations put it that way, like we're dragged away by these lusts, these strong desires.

And I've had to do some thinking about this because of the debate lately in Christianity over homosexual orientations or desires, or there's so many different words they'll use, temptation. I think concupiscence was a new word for me, but that's a word that Jared Moore introduced me to and this whole understanding of concupiscence from Augustine and many other church leaders of the past where they basically say you can have disordered desires.

You can have desires that, you can warp yourself or you can have experiences that warp you, but there's sin. You've sinned, someone sinned against you, but ultimately then you have these disordered desires that in sin kind of remains in there.

And so this would, I suppose, also be applicable to pornography and other sexual desires that are not in keeping with God's plan because he wants men and women to marry and to be only sexually attracted in a certain sense, at least to that, not that they can't recognize beauty, but they want them, the sexual attraction should be to your spouse.

So all that to say, I'm setting it up, but on this desire level, that's where I thought maybe this subconscious thing fits in with there's things I know, even stupid things. I really want pizza and I didn't get pizza and I didn't even think about wanting pizza, but after I've eaten a meal and I'm like, I really wish I would have had pizza.

I wasn't thinking about it, but there is this desire in operation or these expectations. Is what I'm saying tracking with what your understanding of the subconscious level and what the subconscious wants?

Like, am I speaking the same language or am I talking about something different?

Desire, Concupiscence, and the Battle Between Flesh and Spirit

Yeah, you're speaking the same language in the sense that, so to expand upon what the subconscious mind is, we find that our most innate parts are stored in the subconscious mind, right? Because we're not always going to be consciously aware of these things.

Things like our identity, our values, our beliefs, the programmings of our behaviors and the fundamentals of our behaviors are stored somewhere. I think we can both agree. I think most people can agree that those things must be stored somewhere because of the complexities of the mind.

Again, we know things to be true. We know things to be experientially true or true through knowledge, acquired knowledge, but we must keep that somewhere because I don't always have to relearn this. I don't always have to relearn that I'm attracted to women.

I don't always have to relearn that I like pizza. I don't always have to relearn even the fact that there are things that are good for me and there are things that are bad for me. It might take a few times around the block to really have it sink in, but it's held somewhere.

So desire, our desires are ones, they're going to be in there. And you can kind of have a sense where you split between, like we have a sin nature, we have fleshly desires, but then as we undergo the process of sanctification, we can kind of conscious mind understand that our logic, the sanctification process as our wants and desires over time becoming more godly.

And if you were to think, you could say that your sinful desires, your fleshly desires are going to be more in the subconscious mind. And then your knowledge of what godly desires are would be held in the conscious mind.

But then we also have a level where, especially us as Christians, where we know that in our inmost parts, we want to do what is right. The apostle Paul talks about this at length in Roman seven, right?

The evil that I do not want to do, I do. And the good that I want to do, I don't do. That again is an experience that is best explained with having some kind of model that splits between knowledge and splits between emotion.

You can also go to say that logic is a feature of the faculties of the conscious mind and emotion is a feature of the faculties of the subconscious mind. So when we look at desires, we're going to have sinful desires, we're going to have godly desires that are present in both of those faculties.

But when we're dealing with some type of perversion or some type of deviance or some type of thing that is wrong that we cannot explain why we're turning to, such as the case of addiction, such as the case of porn addiction, or just any sin that we know we shouldn't do but we keep persisting, you're then dealing with what Christ might say is a matter of the heart.

What I might say is a matter of the subconscious mind because again, we're using words and we're using different words to explain something that is just a feature of our humanity. So when you find yourself wanting pizza and when you find yourself wanting pizza at times that it really doesn't make sense to want pizza, that desire is coming from somewhere.

It's got to be somewhere inside of you. And because it's somewhere inside of you, if you want to call it in the heart, if you want to call it in the spirit, if you want to call it in the subconscious mind, that the language checks out or the experience checks out with how I relate to these models or how I relate to these types.

There's probably people listening right now who want pizza that didn't want it before just because we kept talking about it.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it's just because they keep hearing the word and it brings to mind this image and experiences they've had before. And you mentioned Christ, I think about Christ saying that out of the heart of man comes all these evil desires.

And it's not what goes into the man, but what comes out of the man. And so with that in mind, when we're talking about screen addictions, that there's a dopamine hit, I guess you get, and people can cultivate this over time or pornography, video game addictions.

I put those all kind of in a similar category, even though they're somewhat different. There's this, you're deceiving yourself, I guess, into thinking something is real when it is not. You're engaging in a lie at a sub, you would say a subconscious level.

There are these strategies and you talk about some of them to remind yourself this, like you say at one point, think about the image, I think, and make it black and white in your mind, minimize it and then swipe it away, whatever you're interested in, whether it's pornography or something else.

I don't find that specific strategy in scripture. What I do find in scripture though, is that your willpower should come into play here somewhere where you stop sinning and you have a change in direction.

Like that's the basis of, that's what repentance is. And you do something more positive. So, I mean, does that, do you see what you're doing as, at least for Christians, ways to repent? Like ways to, like this is a practical way that you can, your willpower can come into play here and stop what's going on.

And so like it dovetails, it complements, what scripture teaches on this.

Willpower, Repentance, and the Limits of Negative Self-Talk

I would say that it assists the process because when, so something like willpower, willpower is a feature of the conscious mind. Willpower can also be fickle. Willpower can be unreliable. Willpower can be overly dependent on motivation and willpower in my experience breaking addiction and in the experience of my clients, willpower is the thing that they rely so heavily on that falters when they need it most, whether because their prefrontal cortex is shut down or whether because their emotions get in the way or whether because their desires get in the way.

So, but willpower is still a thing that we must exercise, right? Because when we read through the book of James, it's very apparent that works are not nothing. Works are again, a feature, works are again, a product and that's what's important.

That's what us, you know, that's what Protestant Christianity really focuses on is that works are, works come from faith, right? Works, our faith that works is dead, but works are a product, right? And we can relate this to things like the fruit of the spirit.

They are called fruits and not the nine noble virtues that we all ought to strive for. There are things that we know as evidence of our Christian faith. That being said, because we exist in an objective reality, because of our human experience, we know that at times there are things we must do even though we don't want to do it, whether because we know it is the right thing to do or because we know it is the good thing to do for us.

I've been focusing in on what James says in his book that a man who does not do what he knows he should do for him it is said. I think that's a really interesting piece here. And it shows me that I've been thinking about my own life recently.

But when looking at this biblical model of repentance, what we find is a lot of people, or actually let me start here. Repentance is not dependent on our feelings of being repented. Repentance is what God does for us.

Whether we feel forgiven or not does not define, does not determine the fact that we are forgiven. It is, again, it's a process. Ask for repentance, recognize that you are forgiven and in recognition of forgiven, go and send no more.

Go and make some type of change. Our feelings are going to muddy the water. If we don't feel forgiven, we're not going to act forgiven. So then this is where a deeper understanding must come in play and recognizing that, or trusting rather that we are forgiven.

And because we are forgiven, we are then empowered. We are then able to change our ways. We're then able to course correct. But that doesn't necessarily make it easier. So when I look at these subconscious strategies or these subconscious models, my thought process is in assisting the biblical experience or in which the biblical experience being the uncontested truth of the experience of our reality, it has been, how can we make that easier for us?

If there is something that we can interact with in our mind or in our heart or in our emotions that are going to make it easier for us to change our ways, I believe those are worth exploring. And I believe at a fundamental level, so long as it's not contrary to what scripture says, that those are things that are worth employing.

So if there's something we can do so that we don't have to engage in this monstrous struggle of employing willpower in the moments that it matters most, which are often the moments that it fails us, then it's worth exploring that.

So we find that we need to use willpower when what we want to do is not, or sorry, we find that we need to use willpower when we don't want to do the thing that we know we should do. That's kind of that brute force, that split second decision that I'm going to go to the gym even though I don't feel like it.

I'm going to close the browser even though I don't feel like it. I'm going to do the thing I should do though I don't feel like it. My thought process is, but what if he felt like doing it? And emotions are very real, but emotions are also fickle and our emotions are influenceable.

Our emotional states are subject to suggestion and they're very susceptible to suggestion. So this is then when I can branch the discussion into the power of words as a lot of what I do with people, especially in coaching or in a more professional sense or counseling, whatever you want to call it, again, models of our understanding of what that thing is, then our language is a very powerful tool.

We know that life and death is in the power of the tongue. And we also know that we have to focus on things that are good. If we can use our language to help us focus on things that are good so that it impacts us at a deeper emotional level, which I relate to being a subconscious level, then those are things that we should explore.

And for the Christian, backing that with the truth of what scripture says and incorporating doing what scripture says at an emotional level, that is where I have people telling me that change was so easy, they can't believe it.

Yeah, so this is actually fascinating to me. And I think this is probably the big hook. Maybe you've seen that in the responses that people, when they hear you talk about this, think I got to find out more about this.

And sometimes you'll even, I think you did an interview with a guy talking about hypnotism and talking like hypnotic strategies, which obviously a lot of stereotypes about this that wouldn't fit what you're doing, but they're like speaking to yourself at a deeper level and trying to, you know, changing these desires is what you're after.

I still see willpower and I'm sure you do at play in this. Like you have to read the book. You have to, yeah, obviously you have to get the ball rolling. And, but it's different than like some guys I know who literally have been able to quit habits because like they were, they're just like, I don't want to do that anymore.

And obviously there's, with the want there, there's a deeper desire, but they were like flip the switch. They were able to just say, right now I'm not going to do that habit. It doesn't, for addictions, it doesn't usually come that easy.

There's some people that can do that, but a lot of people, when you're in the moment, as you said, that's when it fails you. Like, yeah, I wanted to an hour ago, but now I don't know, it seems pretty good to engage in this vice.

I want the nicotine or whatever it is. So all that to say, like the two big strategies I saw in your book at speaking to this subconscious or this desire level element that we have with us are rooting it back to identity and to like who you see yourself as, who you should be for the Christian, obviously that's who we are in Christ, but to the dad who just found out, hey, I have a son on the way.

He cleans up his life because he's now a dad. There's an identity. And then the other thing that you talk about that stood out to me is you don't just focus on a negative, like I'm not going to do that.

Like in the moment of temptation, like I'm not going to do that. You tell yourself there's like something positive. Like I'm going to do this and you reach for a goal. So maybe expand on those. And if there's another major heading that you wanna add, those are the two I saw in your book.

Maybe talk about that for someone who's listening right now who's struggling with an addiction of some kind.

Identity, Positive Desire, and Power Phrases for Change

Yes, so this actually ties in perfectly to what I started to say with the power of words. Are words, language is something that exists for us to be able to exchange information. Think of your mind as a computer and then think of language as the code.

We're able to use code to create new programs so that we do something new. Language is what we use to update the software. There's not an awful lot we can do to change the hardware, but there's a lot we can do to change the software.

And like all computers, there's code that they respond to and there's code that they don't respond to. I cannot create an incorrect code to get a correct outcome. In fact, the incorrect code is either going to break the system or most likely do nothing.