In the first half of Sunday's show, author and motivational speaker David Essel exposed the myth of positive thinking. Self-realization, and the real "secret to success" requires much more than positive thinking, affirmations or vision boards, he argued. While a positive attitude is helpful it can't lead to major achievements and change alone-- "your thoughts are not going to attract a million dollars, the perfect body, or the greatest lover you could ever imagine," he remarked. In addiction recovery, you don't have to be optimistic, but as long as you do the work, your attitude starts to change, he cited.

Positive thinking will account for only about 20% of a person's overall success-- it's not the magic bullet that some people have portrayed it to be, he continued. The 80% of the effort is often the "work" that people are reluctant to do. "What am I shying away from that I don't want to face? That's going to help me break through and lose these 100 pounds, make $50,000 more a year, find the love of my life, or forgive my partner so we can fall back into love?" Essel pointedly asked. He detailed stories of various people who turned their lives around through specific efforts on their parts such as Joe Cirulli who went from homeless to millionaire, and Scarlett Lewis, who lost her son at the Sandy Hook rampage, and learned to forgive the shooter.

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In the latter half, comparative mythologist David Talbott and Australian physicist Wallace Thornhill updated their lifelong investigation of "the Electric Universe" that offers a revolutionary view of the cosmos, our solar system history, the nature of the Sun, the behavior of comets, and stellar and galactic evolution. Talbott is convinced that the ancients saw things in the sky we don't see today. It was only a few thousand years ago that the ancients described a period of planetary upheaval and catastrophe, with lightning bolts or discharges flying between the planets, and the great warrior figure Mars (related video), the primeval sun god Saturn, and the great comet Venus coming so close to the Earth that they appeared as towering forms, he continued.

Thornhill has concluded that electrical forces are responsible for the formation of the universe, and that ancient myths and symbols depict electric discharge phenomena. He posited that our solar system was quite different in the past-- planetary objects didn't collide with one another but were repelled, as they exchanged plasma discharges or "cosmic thunderbolts." Earth's gravity is determined by the electric charges on the planet's surface, and there is evidence that it's dramatically changed over time, Thornhill suggested. "The dinosaurs...were so huge, if they were in present day gravity, they could not lift themselves off the ground," he added.

News segment guests: John R. Lott, Stan Deyo