Episode 1687 Scott Adams： More Fake News About Everything and Two Micro Lessons That Might Change Your Life
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Summary
Trump claims the New York Times rigged its reporting on the 2016 election in order to help him defeat then-candidate Joe Biden. What does this mean for the future of journalism? And what does it mean about the possibility that the Times was just fooled by their own reporting?
Transcript
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Well, I have a treat for you, because I know you woke up this morning and you said to yourself,
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this will be an ordinary day, and then you lucked, or perhaps it was skill, and came upon this
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live stream, which will change many of your lives. Now, if you wait to the end, I'm going to give
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you a micro lesson, two of them actually, that are designed for high impact in the shortest
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amount of time to actually reprogram some of you from your sadness and or PTSD into a happier
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version of yourself. And I can do it in about four minutes, two minutes a piece. And that'll be on
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the whiteboard, and that'll come. So that's just a teaser to make you stay. Normally, I put these
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behind a paywall, but my local subscribers have agreed with me that these would be important
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enough, or at least they agreed with my judgment, that it would be important enough to share them
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with the wider audience. And so, that's coming. Now, if you'd like to extend your experience
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into another realm, almost unimaginable, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass or a tank or
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gel or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid I like,
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coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. It's the dopamine at the end of the
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day. Yeah, it's the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. And
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doggone it, it's good. It's happening right now. Go!
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Now, if any of you have ever tried this with a placebo sip, where there's no actual beverage
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in your cup, it was better than no sip, probably. But next time, improve your game. Make sure there's
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a beverage in there. That's all I'm saying. I'm not going to name names. Well, Trump has said,
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quote, the New York Times just admitted and participated in an effort to rig the election
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for Joe Biden. Now, there's a statement that not long ago would have been considered unfounded.
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It might have been considered hyperbolic. Fact checkers would have said it wasn't true.
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What'd they say about it today? Well, if they have a dictionary, and they believe the reporting
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in the New York Times, they say, well, that's true. I doubt they actually say it just like
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that. But the New York Times reporting does fit the actual dictionary definition of something
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that's rigged for a specific purpose. It looks like it. Now, the part we don't know
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is intention. Am I right? I mean, we can't read the minds of the New York Times. Could they
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have been legitimately fooled, but then later came out of their fog? Could be. Could be.
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You can't rule out that people are legitimately brainwashed and then climb out of it after time.
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Could happen. But let's give this the really test, shall we? If you're new to this, the really test
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is you just use the word really in a sarcastic way after saying the statement that you're testing
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and just see if it works. Okay? I'll try it. So the New York Times wasn't trying to influence
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the election, despite their close ties to Democrats and the history of slanting their coverage for
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political purposes. But even though it would have been a very clever way to rig an election,
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and even though it worked perfectly, exactly as one imagined it would be, and even though
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all the people who would love to have seen the New York Times do such a thing, which allegedly they
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did, but we have no evidence of, is it possible that the New York Times did not succumb to all the
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pressures, political, financial, and otherwise, that was put upon them and act exactly as they have in
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the past in the fashion we should expect and predict? No, they were just fooled, and then they came out of it.
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Really? Really? They were just fooled by their own reporting. So they brainwashed themselves,
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but then they unbrainwashed themselves out later, and didn't believe their own reporting,
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or the 50 Intel officials, former officials, who said that the laptop was Russian disinformation.
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But it turns out it was a real laptop. Yeah, this one doesn't really pass the really test, does it?
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Meaning that Trump's assumption that all of this was intentional, you can't prove it, probably,
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unless there's some kind of written record somewhere. But it sure looks like it. Let's just say that.
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All right, here's another little test for truth that I like to call the elephant in the room test.
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And the elephant in the room test, as I've described before, and then I'm going to apply it to a new
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situation, is that if there are two people in a room, and one of them says, hey, there's an elephant
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in this room with us. Let's say there's no furniture, there's nothing else, it's just a bare room,
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two people in it. One of them says, do you see this elephant that's standing right here in front of us?
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And the other person in the room says, um, nope, I do not see an elephant. And then the first one
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says, uh, we're in a small room, just the two of us and an elephant. Surely you see the elephant.
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And then the other one says, I honestly do not see an elephant. Which one of them is hallucinating?
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The one who sees it is the one who's hallucinating. Maybe not 100% of the time, but as a rule of
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thumb, it's really, really reliable. The hallucinations are additions to scenery, not
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subtractions. People don't hallucinate not seeing something. Do you understand that? You don't,
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you don't, nobody walks into a room full of furniture and hallucinates that it's an empty
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room. I mean, maybe in the history of the world somebody has, but that's not a common
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thing. But we've seen with all the fake news that people believe about just about anything,
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that adding scenery, you know, adding an elephant to a room, 50% of the public will believe any
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elephant in any room, and they'll say they see it. So adding something to a scene is almost
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always the hallucination, not the one who doesn't see it. Now, is the filter understood? Because
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now I'm going to apply it. And remember that when I apply it, I'm also aware it doesn't work
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every time. Can you accept the humility I'm trying to inject here? That I'm not saying that
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this is some kind of 100% thing, but it's pretty darn reliable, and you're not going to like
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it. Can I prime you by saying you're not going to like what I say next? You're going to fucking
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hate it. Most of you. It goes like this. We're seeing some, some people talking about the data
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about the vaccinations, and that the vaccination itself, they claim, can be shown by various data
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data to be more dangerous than any officials have admitted. Now, would you say, first of all,
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that that is happening? That there are people who are saying the VAERS database is telling you
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something. Others say it's not. So you would agree that that's happening, that difference in opinion.
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There are those who say the excess mortality numbers. There was a gentleman on the war room
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recently who looked at the millennials' excess death rate, and his claim is that using public
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information, you can see that there's just a huge spike at about the time the vaccinations were
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rolling out, apparently. So his hypothesis is that it is clear from excess death that the vaccinations
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themselves have some mortality element that has not been fully disclosed to the public.
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Now, so far, I'm just telling you what other people have said. So we're not talking about what's true
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yet, just the claims. Now, also, other people have said they've looked at, I think, the Pfizer data and said
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that they found stuff in there that they believe also suggests that the vaccinations are more dangerous
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than has been claimed. So the context here is that there are multiple sources of data
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that would seem to suggest, and I'll use suggest, that the vaccination themselves had more danger
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than has been disclosed to the public. Does everybody agree with the context so far?
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I think you're OK with that, right? Now, here's where the elephant test comes in. And again, remember,
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the elephant test isn't 100% accurate. It's just really, really good rule of thumb. So everybody in
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the world who knows about data and virology and vaccinations, basically anybody who has an interest
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in it is looking at all of this data. Wouldn't you agree? There are lots of people looking at the
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same data. Would you also agree that with so many people with such a great interest, I mean,
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the greatest possible newsworthiness you could have, that there are lots of people who are looking
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at the same data and saying, I don't see it. Now, I'm not saying it's not there. The claim is very narrow
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that I'm making. That there are lots of experts who are capable. I'm not. I'm not capable of looking
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at the data. But there are lots of experts who are capable of looking at it. Some of them see the
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elephant, and some do not. So far, I've not made a judgment. Would you say that the setup is correct?
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The experts are looking at multiple data sources. Some are saying, I see all this danger,
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and it's very clear, and some are looking at the same data at the same time, and saying, I don't see it.
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Correct or not correct? Now, can I independently do a deep dive with all of my expertise and figure out
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which of these two groups is right? Well, if those two groups can't do it, why could I do it?
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Why would there be people disagreeing who actually have all the expertise in these areas?
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If those two groups are disagreeing, how the hell am I, with my complete lack of knowledge,
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going to do a deep dive and figure out who's right? I mean, that's not really a thing.
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So all we can do is look at the people who are looking at it. We can't look at the data,
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really, if you're being honest about it. You can't really tell by the data.
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But are the people credible? Do you believe the person who sees the elephant, or the person who's
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standing right next to him in the room, looking at the same room, and they don't see it? And there
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are lots of them. In this case, it's not one person who doesn't see the elephant. It's lots of them.
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Now, of course, people are saying follow the money and their other incentives, etc. That's fair.
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But there are so many people with an interest who don't have a financial incentive. They would see
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it, too. And I don't think it's happening. All right. So keep in mind, somebody says it's a bad
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analogy. All analogies are bad. The only thing I'm saying is that I use the analogy to make a general
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point. So if you don't like the analogy, you don't need it. Just take the general point.
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The general point is that hallucinations are almost always additions to the scenery.
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They're rarely a subtraction. Once you notice that, it becomes a lot easier to untangle what's real and
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what's not. That's why I don't believe in UFOs, by the way. UFOs are an addition to the scenery
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that you would expect a lot more people would have seen and gotten some good pictures by now.
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But, you know, I don't believe additions to the scenery, basically.
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There's a big story about Putin's palace. Now, of course, this fits perfectly into what you would
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expect for wartime propaganda. So can we believe that this story is true? Because it was in the
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media? No. But even the media suggests that they can't confirm that it's Putin's palace. But
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allegedly there's this, I don't know, 190,000 square foot gigantic palace on the Black Sea
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that Putin allegedly forced the oligarchs to buy for him and includes an underground hockey rink and
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all that. Everything you would imagine in a modern palace. But officially, Russia says that Putin lives
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in an 800 square foot apartment, which is an 800 square foot apartment. I wonder if there's anybody in
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Russia who believes that. Probably, right? Probably 25% of the people in Russia, because, you know,
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25% is the number I always jokingly say will believe anything. Probably 25% of the people in Russia are
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like, wow, that Putin sure lives an austere life. We think he only owns one suit, because he seems to
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wear the same suit all the time. So you see, he probably owns one suit and an 800 square foot
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apartment. So, but maybe not. The other possibility is that he's the richest human who has ever existed
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in the history of the universe. Or he lives in an 800 square foot apartment on $140,000 a year.
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It's one of those two things. I always laughed at the Warren Buffett myth. So Warren Buffett, you know,
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at one point, I guess he was richest man in America, but he's still up there. Warren Buffett has always
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been reported to have lived in his basically the same relatively modest home that he had always lived
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in. And I believe there's, you know, he's added to his modest home. So there's like a superstructure
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behind the modest structure. So this is a little bit bigger than it looks. But does that mean anything
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if you're Warren Buffett? How often is Warren Buffett not in the presidential suite of whatever
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high-end hotel he's at? Does Warren Buffett like spend much time at home? I feel like it's where he goes
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on holidays and, you know, to visit his wife and whatnot. But I don't think it would be accurate to say
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that one of the richest people in the world, you know, lives in that little home that he visits often.
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People have reported that he does, in fact, stay there. So that's a confirmed fact. But how many
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days a year does he not stay at somebody's mansion or, you know, or at the best facility that humans
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have ever created? Anyway, your challenge today is twofold. It's a two-part challenge. Is everybody up
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for it? Number one, I'd like you all to mock me for my lack of military expertise. You may do this
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now. Please begin. Begin the mocking. You've heard me say many things about the Ukraine situation.
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And I welcome you now to mock me for, and accurately, quite accurately, mock me for my complete and total
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ignorance of all things military. Go. Good. Good. General Dummy. Nice. General Adams, not mocking enough.
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Yes, General Adams. I think General Adams is a good general satirical direction. You don't know Schiff.
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Good. It's a callback. I like the callback. You've never even been in a fight, Scott. Good. Go after my cowardice.
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I think that's a good vein to mine. Productive. Private Scott. I'm not a general now.
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No. Wimp. Major Dunce. Major Misunderstanding. Not bad. A plus. My new nickname is Major Misunderstanding.
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Or General Adams. All right. So you're doing a good job of this. Major Clot. Another callback. I like that.
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The callbacks are all appreciated. All right. You're doing a very good job of mocking me for my lack of
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military expertise. Now, let's move on to the second part of the challenge. Remember, this is a two-fold
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challenge, and I must say, I must compliment you. Your mocking of my lack of military expertise is
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excellent. Gomer Adams. Nice. Gomer Adams. I like that one. Major Malfunction. General Disarray.
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Private Pekka. What? Pointy-ear General. Pointy-ear General. I'm going to give that top shelf.
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Lieutenant. Rear Admiral. Come on. Don't do that. Adams Doolittle. All right. Here's the second part of
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your challenge, now that you've successfully mocked me for my lack of military expertise.
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Part two. Explain why I'm the only person who predicted Russia couldn't defeat Ukraine in two
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days because the defenders would have access to high tank killing weapons.
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Okay. That took all the fun out of it. I'm just saying that sometimes you don't need to be an expert
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to see things that are just sort of glaringly obvious. Now, the assumption that I made is that
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they would have access to enough, and that part maybe I got lucky on, I'll admit, because I didn't know
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how much they had. I knew they had access to the good stuff, whatever the good stuff was, because they
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had such good friends. Friends meaning NATO in the United States. When you've got friends like NATO,
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NATO, you probably, and especially if Russia is involved, you probably have access to good
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weapons. And I had speculated that since nobody had ever seen a high quantity of the best kind of
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weapons against tanks, that common sense sort of says that even if they had air cover and coordinated
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artillery, even if they did everything right, it seemed to me that if you had enough drones and
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shoulder-mounted stuff, the defenders would still have the advantage. Now, I don't know,
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was that just a lucky guess based on my ignorance cancelling out my other ignorance? It could have been,
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to be honest, it could have been. But you do have to ask yourself why all the experts were wrong and the
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person that you just mocked for, incorrectly, correctly mocked for my lack of military understanding,
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got it right with reasons. I mean, I showed my work. I said, here's the reason, advanced military
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equipment that will surprise you how effective it is. I said it directly. Now, I also got completely
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wrong that Putin would actually attack. I said it was a bluff. And my reasoning for the bluff
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was that it seemed obvious it couldn't work. And I think I was half right. It's obvious. I mean,
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to me, it looked obvious that it couldn't work. So I thought it must be obvious to Putin. And that's
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where apparently I'm completely wrong. Now, I could also be completely wrong still if Putin ends up
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prevailing. At the moment, the experts that I'm seeing at least quoted in the news lately, and do a
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fact check on me. Is this correct? That the military experts are now saying that Putin does not have
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a sufficient source, force to take and hold Kiev. That's true, right? And that therefore they won't
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actually conquer the government. So can you fact check that? I haven't seen every military opinion.
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But I think the military is now saying they could destroy the city, but they can't really take it and hold it
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because they don't even have the right kind of forces to do that. Not even close. Like they have maybe 20%
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of what they need, something like that. Yeah, what are they actually holding now is a good question.
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I think I'm all over the place in my order of things.
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I saw a tweet by Nazir Afzal. He's a prosecutor, among other things. And he said this. He said,
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are you surprised that in the matter of Jeffrey Epstein and hundreds of high profile men sexually
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abusing hundreds of young girls and children, the only person convicted is a woman? Now, of course,
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that means only on top of Jeffrey Epstein himself. I assume that's implied. But
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just think about that. It's basically a crime committed allegedly by hundreds of men.
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And so far, the only person convicted was the only woman who wasn't, the only person who
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wasn't Epstein was a woman. Now, she was guilty as hell. So, you know, it makes sense that she'd
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be the first person to be convicted who isn't him. But I don't think we're going to see any
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other convictions. Do you? It looks like this has been successfully just taken away from the
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public's right to have any justice or knowledge about it. Why are we okay with this? There's
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literally nothing you can do about it, is there? Unless you wanted to make it like your life's work to,
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you know, start a big campaign to get everybody interested in finding the names of these people.
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But I don't know that anybody has that much power or passion or cares about it compared to all the
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other gigantic problems in the world. And so in a sense, it's sort of lucky for the accused that
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there are bigger stories at the moment. That always helps. But this is, it's kind of tells us a lot
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that we'll never know who was on the island besides Epstein. I mean, except for the few that we've heard
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about who flew in the plane. But that's all we know for sure. They flew in the plane.
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Breaking news. Breaking news. And I want you to listen carefully to this, because if you haven't
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heard this yet, this is breaking news. Breaking. A hundred former intel officials have determined
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that you can end war in Ukraine by spanking your taint with a wooden spoon. Several anonymous sources
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inside the White House have confirmed the story. And no court has ruled it false. And fact checkers
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and science agree. Now that's a lot of credibility. I mean, I would be convinced if one former intel
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official told me something. But if a hundred told me, well, that's pretty believable. I mean,
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could you imagine that like dozens of intel officials could tell you something that was just
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not true, like intentionally? Well, I can't imagine that. That could never happen, could it?
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So that's believable. And then there are several anonymous sources. And I don't know what's more
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believable than an anonymous source. I do. Several. The only thing better than an anonymous source in the
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White House is several. That makes it totally believable. If somebody, if one person tells you that there are
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several, why would you not believe that? And then no court has ruled that this is false. And as we
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learned in the elections, as long as the court hasn't ruled something to be true, it's not true. And if
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they haven't ruled it false, it's not false. And if the fact checkers and the science all agree, well,
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we've never seen the fact checkers be wrong. And I think you'd all agree that the science
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is settled. And once the science is spoken, that's all you need to know. Now, I'd like to explain
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something to the non-native speakers. If there are some people here who are confused by the word
00:26:40.640
taint, let me give you a history lesson. Taint is a, let's say, an evolved word from the poor grammar
00:26:51.000
in English that used to be ain't. So people used to say, and it's considered poor grammar,
00:26:58.200
this ain't true, meaning this is not true. It ain't. But when people say it ain't, that is often
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shortened by rural people in the United States to taint. My grandmother, for example, she would say,
00:27:17.300
taint true. But taint true. And she actually did use that. So the taint is actually defined in
00:27:26.080
modern usage as, and I have to say this carefully so I'm not kicked off of any platforms. So I'm
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going to say this in a G-rated way. The taint is defined as the part of your body that's between
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your genitalia and Congress. So everything that's between your genitalia and Congress,
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that's called the taint. Because it taint your genitalia, and it taint Congress, it's the taint.
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Now, that's just for the benefit for anyone who is not a Native American speaker.
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And by the way, if you want to get that confirmed, talk to any Native American speaker on this
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live stream who can confirm it for you. Because that's the kind of people they are. They like
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to help. All right. So let's see what else is going on. We've got Axios was accused of some fake
00:28:31.180
news by the other fake news. So the fake news said that Axios had some fake news, which has been
00:28:37.240
corrected to less fake news. And the story was that reporter Zachary Basu had written a story that
00:28:46.400
some Ukrainian had asked, earlier had asked the U.S. to, quote, go beyond traditional military aid and
00:28:56.100
provide the country with the funding, training, and weaponry to support a long-term resistance
00:29:00.880
movement. But the Ukrainians say, no, that's not a real letter. Nobody ever sent that letter.
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And the American government says, no, nobody ever sent us that letter. So Axios has updated it to
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say that the letter is disputed. Disputed by the people who sent it and the people who allegedly
00:29:20.060
received it. Allegedly all. So that's some fake news that may have been corrected. But I'll give
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Axios credit when the criticisms were leveled at them. They did keep the story and they added that
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it's disputed and, you know, evidence free. You know, if I've often said this, they have to judge
00:29:46.340
people by how they correct their mistakes or how they respond to mistakes. If you judge people by
00:29:51.360
mistakes, then we're all assholes. That's sort of the end of the story. There's, there's no redemption
00:29:58.080
because you just can't, you can't judge people by their mistakes. If you go through life like that,
00:30:05.860
you're just lost. I mean, civilization won't even hold together because we're all basically a mess
00:30:10.800
and we're all, we're all messing up a lot. So it's just not a viable way to judge people as by the
00:30:17.760
mistakes they make. But a very viable way is to judge them by how they respond. Do they say,
00:30:23.920
oh God, I'm so sorry, and mean it? And do they then tell you what they're going to do about it?
00:30:29.840
And then do they follow up and actually do that thing that they said they would do to not make
00:30:35.000
that mistake again? Now, if somebody does that, I like them better than if they hadn't made the
00:30:39.720
mistake in the first place. Because I can't judge somebody for making a mistake, even bad ones,
00:30:45.020
really. But you could totally judge people by how they handled it after the mistake.
00:30:51.560
And that's fair. Because that's technique. And it's available to everybody, right? It's not hard.
00:30:57.860
You apologize, you admit, you make good, you say what you're going to do differently,
00:31:03.180
and then you follow up on it. And you do it differently. Everybody knows how to do that.
00:31:06.940
So some can do it, some can't. Anyway, so I give Axios credit for the correction.
00:31:18.700
Apparently, California is experiencing crime tourism, according to a KABC story. And the story here,
00:31:28.600
and I saw Michael Schellenberger tweet this, who is running for governor of California as an
00:31:35.440
independent, the only person I've ever known to run for office with a complete vetted set of solutions
00:31:44.640
for the exact problems of the state. And by vetted, I mean, actually researching what works and what
00:31:51.360
doesn't, showing his work, stop doing the things that we know don't work, do the things that do work.
00:31:57.340
I mean, just basic. Basic, I don't know, strategic business way to approach anything.
00:32:05.420
Who knows if being non-political works? He's basically trying to win by extreme competence.
00:32:15.040
And I don't know if that's ever been done. Honestly. Think about that.
00:32:20.040
Who's ever tried to win a major election, let's say governor, senator, president, with extreme
00:32:27.240
competence? In other words, just demonstrating an ability to do a bunch of things successfully.
00:32:34.040
Has anybody ever done that? You're saying Trump, but, you know, Trump would be disputed as how much
00:32:40.580
is hyperbole and how much was real. But, you know, if you look at Schellenberger's work,
00:32:45.340
even his critics will say this is an impressive body of work.
00:32:52.800
Somebody says Cory Booker. I don't know too much about that.
00:32:56.640
Anyway, crime tourism, as Michael Schellenberger tweeted.
00:33:01.260
So law enforcement agencies have determined that there are criminal groups from South America
00:33:07.380
that are organized to come to California to do these sort of organized smash and runs
00:33:14.360
on private high-end residents. So they'll go to someplace when you're not home, you know,
00:33:20.000
a rich person's house generally, and break in. They don't worry too much about alarms,
00:33:25.440
I don't think, because they're going to be in and out. And they, I think they just go to the
00:33:29.620
bedroom mostly and look for jewelry, the easy stuff. They're not looking for furniture and
00:33:34.500
flat screens, TVs. They're looking for a quick hit of usually jewels.
00:33:38.820
And so this is the story. And I can confirm that according to my neighbor's video surveillance,
00:33:48.620
we all share our video surveillance. I mean, not electronically, directly, but, you know,
00:33:54.420
when something happens, we're very well organized in the neighborhood. So as soon as anything happens
00:33:59.560
at anybody's house, everybody sees the video of it. And apparently, the South American teams have
00:34:06.600
hit two of my neighbors. So this is a story that actually directly affects me. Literally,
00:34:15.060
this is not a joke. If I stood up and my window was open, I could throw a baseball and hit my
00:34:23.520
neighbor's house that was robbed by one of these South American groups. The other one, I'd have to
00:34:29.880
throw the ball twice, but it's in the neighborhood. Twice. This is just my neighborhood. I'm talking
00:34:36.980
about one block. Not really the same block, but effectively, the distance of a block.
00:34:44.760
Now, my house is never empty. Somebody's always here. So usually, they go for an empty house.
00:34:51.940
And at least I've got that going for me. But I also have the last house in the world that you'd
00:34:58.740
want to break into. You don't need to know the details. I'll just tell you that if you're looking
00:35:06.100
for a house to break into, you might want to prioritize mine last. Not only because there's
00:35:11.520
nothing in it of any value that you could carry out. Literally. Oh, this would be an interesting
00:35:19.680
question. What would be the highest value thing in my house that you could actually carry out
00:35:23.840
and, like, put in a car? Yeah. Yeah, like $400 worth of, you know, medicinal marijuana. That's
00:35:33.360
about it. My printer. If they steal my printer, I'm in good shape. I don't even think people
00:35:38.460
steal computers anymore, do they? I don't even know if it's worth it. So, anyway, crime tourism
00:35:45.880
is happening. Let's get to the good part, shall we? Shall we get to the good part? Let me tell
00:35:53.860
you the great thing about being my age. So here's the first inspirational thing of several
00:36:00.600
to come. People who are young are scared to death of being older. I was completely surprised
00:36:09.720
at how awesome it is in a lot of different ways that you don't see coming. You just don't
00:36:15.120
see it coming. One of the ways is that you know how it all turned out. Now, that's only
00:36:21.400
good if it turned out well in some way. Now, when I say when it turned out well, I use the
00:36:27.120
following standard for success, which is how many people you helped in a significant way.
00:36:35.480
And I don't think there's any other good standard because money doesn't, you know, really capture
00:36:40.540
it. If you had a great relationship with one person, well, that's great for the two of
00:36:47.680
you. But maybe if you could do something for some other people, that would be good. Now,
00:36:53.580
one of the things that I chose early in my career, I originally wanted to be a lawyer. In
00:37:00.400
high school, I thought that's where I was going. But at some point, I figured out that being
00:37:04.740
a lawyer is usually a zero-sum game. There's a winner and a loser. So society sort of breaks
00:37:13.020
even, you know, in a very general way. It's not a clean win. It's not an addition. Elon Musk
00:37:21.080
is just added, right? He didn't take anything from anybody. He just added stuff to the world.
00:37:28.200
That's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a person who only added and never had to take
00:37:33.040
something from anybody. So I didn't want to be in a militant kind of a job. So I became
00:37:38.080
a cartoonist. And then I write books that are designed to be useful. And then I also
00:37:43.080
do these micro-lessons, which are designed to be useful. Now, I've got over 200 micro-lessons
00:37:49.020
on the Locals platform that you have to subscribe to to see. These will be public because the
00:37:54.400
Locals people trust me to make a decision when to make stuff public. And what I'm going to
00:37:59.700
do is show you two reframes, which is simply a different way of looking at something, to help
00:38:05.500
you with any kind of past trauma or PTSD, and then any kind of feelings of despair or sadness.
00:38:14.200
Two separate lessons, two minutes apiece. Now, the math of this goes like this. There's no reason
00:38:20.880
to suspect that either of these two lessons would necessarily help any one of you specifically.
00:38:25.980
I guarantee that some percentage of you will have your lives changed in the next few minutes,
00:38:33.280
in less than five minutes probably. Guarantee it. It's just a law of large numbers and the fact
00:38:39.300
that I know these to be useful. Now, secondly, every one of you could probably benefit from
00:38:44.880
something on the list of over 200 of the micro-lessons. And you would respond to different
00:38:50.080
ones. But the math of it is you would probably have a life-changing experience to be exposed,
00:38:55.640
exposed to that much material, which is designed to be a high impact in a very short hit. I'll give
00:39:03.860
you two examples. Number one, let's say you've got some trauma in your life. And you say,
00:39:12.780
this trauma is affecting me into my whole life, and I'm worrying about it, and it gives me
00:39:17.460
all kinds of problems. And maybe it does. Maybe it does. But here's the best reframe that I've ever
00:39:25.100
found. Because like you, I've had problems in my life, sometimes very big. And I find this the most
00:39:32.860
useful reframe. And it goes like this. You had a big problem. Not everybody had one. You had a big
00:39:40.760
one. And you know that you survived. Oh, you took a beating, but you survived. So you know what you
00:39:49.000
can handle? Do you know what everybody else doesn't know? Unless they had that much trauma also? Do you
00:39:55.960
know what they don't know? They don't know what they can handle. And they're afraid. So a person who has
00:40:03.080
never had a really big problem thinks that maybe the maximum that they could handle without damage
00:40:10.120
is much lower. And because they are timid, and they will not go into higher risk categories. And
00:40:19.040
when I talk about risk, I'm not talking about physical risk. I'm talking about embarrassment,
00:40:24.020
failure, what other people think of you risk, maybe financial risk, that sort of thing. Not physical.
00:40:30.200
Stay away from physical risk. I'm not recommending that. But I call this the free money zone,
00:40:36.860
the zone between what ordinary people who do not have trauma guiding their lives, what they think
00:40:43.000
they can handle is their limit. That is not your limit. Your limit is fucking amazing. Your limit,
00:40:52.400
if you've experienced some serious shit in your life, your limit is almost unimaginable to most of the
00:41:01.920
world. That's your superpower. You can do stuff that other people are afraid of. I first noticed this
00:41:10.020
when I would see that veterans who had seen combat when they went into business were often unusually
00:41:17.360
successful. And it was just, I don't know if it's actually statistically true, but it's something I
00:41:23.520
noticed. That people who had gone through horrible experiences, and I'll bet, by the way, that you would
00:41:29.420
find this scientifically true. But I don't have any science for it. And the idea is that people have
00:41:34.840
gone through horrible things, just have a higher tolerance for everything. For everything. They
00:41:41.220
know what they can handle. They know what they can push through. They know when they're in the
00:41:45.600
deepest swamp, they say, I've swam through this swamp before. I've seen this swamp. This swamp is
00:41:53.120
nothing. You think this swamp is bad? You should have seen the other swamp. This one I'm going to kill in
00:41:58.600
two days. It took me 16 years to beat that other swamp. This one, two days. The people who don't have
00:42:07.120
that kind of problem in their life will never be able to handle that. That is micro lesson number one.
00:42:15.460
And this is a reframe for people who have despair in their lives. I'm not going to use the S word,
00:42:28.060
because I just don't want to put those words in your head. But you can put it in your own head. There
00:42:34.600
are some people whose lives are so bad, they say, I'm not sure my life is worth going on.
00:42:39.420
I'll bet a lot of people have had that thought in the past two years, especially. And I'll bet
00:42:45.900
almost all of you have had it at least once, maybe when you were a teen, etc. A lot of people go
00:42:51.320
through it. And I'll tell you a reframe that can take you out of it almost immediately.
00:42:56.660
Almost immediately. And it goes like this. Imagine you have one day to live. Now, you don't
00:43:10.760
have to convince yourself it's true. And believe me, that's important. Because if you thought
00:43:16.600
to yourself, well, you know, I know that's not the case. So it doesn't work. No, it doesn't
00:43:22.000
matter. This is purely a reframe. A reframe doesn't have to be true. It just has to work.
00:43:28.560
It's just a little mental hack. It's a trick. Don't get lost on whether it's logical. It
00:43:34.800
doesn't need to be. That's not an important element of it. If you can just say to yourself,
00:43:40.360
let me live today, like it was the last day. And if you can't convince yourself that it's
00:43:47.120
really the last day in any way that you can, you know, embrace this feeling, tell yourself
00:43:52.520
this. You have the ability to end it anytime you want. I don't recommend it. This is actually
00:43:58.360
a technique to make sure you don't, right? I want to be careful about this. I'm telling
00:44:03.020
you how to get out of those feelings. If you tell yourself that you have nothing to lose
00:44:08.620
because you only have one day, but you're perfectly healthy. Only your mind is messed
00:44:17.160
up. You're perfectly healthy, let's say. Let's hope. What would you do if nothing could embarrass
00:44:24.760
you? What would you do if you weren't afraid of anything? Now, again, I'm not talking about
00:44:31.400
physical fear that can kill you. I'm talking about social fear, fear of what other people think
00:44:37.760
of you, fear of failure. What if all of that went away? Because if you wanted to, you could
00:44:45.280
end your life when you wanted. It is kind of optional if you think about it. And again,
00:44:49.960
I'm telling you how to live your life, not end it. What about your feelings of self-worth?
00:44:56.300
All of those things become immediately useless if you only have one day to live. You do not worry
00:45:02.660
that you were embarrassed because you're dead tomorrow, mentally in this reframe. It is one
00:45:10.740
way to induce what I call artificial ego death, very similar to what the medical experts say
00:45:17.160
you would experience with, let's say, medically supervised use of psychedelics, such as mushrooms.
00:45:25.080
If you can induce a state of artificial ego death in which you can temporarily, and this
00:45:33.520
is how you start, just start with temporary, where you can temporarily imagine that embarrassment,
00:45:39.660
fear, self-worth, all the things that are gnawing at you, your sense of failure, will you make
00:45:46.660
it, who hates you, who doesn't, all the things that are just torturing you, those are all your
00:45:52.680
ego. Your ego is telling you you're important, and that therefore all the assaults on your
00:45:58.600
ego matter. As soon as you realize that you're not important, in this specific sense, because
00:46:06.500
in this artificial mindset that you create, just to hack your mind, you create this idea
00:46:12.800
that you only have a day to live, you inhabit it, and you say, if I only had a day to live,
00:46:17.760
I could go up to that person that I've been thinking about, and give them a flower, and
00:46:25.080
say, you know, I know you and I probably will never be a couple, but I'd just love to give
00:46:30.700
you this compliment. I just think you're terrific. And then you walk away. And you don't say,
00:46:37.740
I must date that woman, or I must marry that man. You just say, I really enjoyed giving them
00:46:45.000
a compliment. You might discover that literally everybody loves a compliment. I'm going to do a
00:46:52.480
separate micro lesson, but I'll give you a teaser, that if you learn how to compliment people without
00:46:58.420
being creepy, and I could teach you that, everybody likes it. You can make almost everybody want to be
00:47:06.940
your friend if you can learn to give a sincere, non-creepy compliment, which is pretty much just
00:47:14.620
technique, and I could teach you how to do it. Now, this technique, try it. You will not believe it
00:47:22.540
will work until you have tried it. I believe that if you try either of these two reframes, some number
00:47:29.400
of you will have a profound impact on your life. So while maybe only 1% of you, maybe 25% of you,
00:47:40.380
maybe 50% of you might find something substantially useful here. But all of you would find something
00:47:49.120
in the list of over 200 micro lessons. So that is your two micro lessons for the day. And on that note,
00:47:59.140
I'm going to end the YouTube feed. I'll be talking to the locals people a little bit more. And I hope
00:48:05.800
you found that useful. And I think you'd agree, this was the best live stream you've ever seen,