In this episode of The Scott Adams School, we have guest Professor Joshua Lysak in the house! We talk about the best thing that has ever happened to you, coffee, and why you should be drinking it.
00:02:25.760All right, you guys. So again, welcome to the Scott Adams School. This is separate than coffee with
00:02:32.960Scott Adams. Okay. So all of Scott's videos and streaming, you will find them on YouTube. You'll
00:02:39.520find a lot more on his locals page, which is scottadams.locals.com. I definitely urge y'all to
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00:02:53.560with some of the subscribers who are amazing. And we also have some guests that are going to be coming
00:02:58.400on. We already have those plans. So you're going to love that. A reminder that the Gilbert calendar
00:03:05.560for 2026 was restocked. You can buy that on amazon.com. Okay. Oh, I have so many videos of
00:03:13.500Scott with his Amazon orders. It would just be so fun to put those all together. But anyway,
00:03:18.540the 2026 has been restocked. So grab that there, get one for a friend. If you didn't have a chance to
00:03:23.720get one already, I see a lot of you already got it. And the Scott Adams School was Scott's wish for
00:03:30.600us to carry on. We're not trying to be Scott. We could never be Scott. It is literally just to
00:03:36.580keep some growth going, some discussion going, to encourage everyone listening to just chill and
00:03:42.840have a good time with us. Don't take it so seriously that it's not the same exact format of
00:03:49.780Scott. Okay. It's something different that he wanted us to do. We love having you here. And he
00:03:55.700has asked Owen Gregorian. You hear his voice and you hear him on Spaces. He's joining us as one of the
00:04:03.700hosts, of course. And we have our beautiful Marcella with a beautiful smile. And he is one of our hosts,
00:04:12.340of course. And we today have a special co-host and guest professor. You guys love him. It's
00:04:20.100Joshua Lysak in the house. Fan favorite. Is Joshua frozen? Is he frozen? Oh, there you are.
00:04:28.740I was like that. I was going over to X to share it because the thing about the thing about Rumble
00:04:32.800Studio is anytime you're trying to do anything else on your smartphone at the same time, it shuts down
00:04:37.580everything. So I went to share the stream with my people. I was feeling so special. Like you were
00:04:43.640listening to me, like you've never heard such amazingness in your life. I was like, he's
00:04:48.040very intense. I was literally locked in. Yes. Behind my Rumble Studio. Yeah. After we cover the reframe
00:04:55.620of the day, folks, we're going to be getting into something I like to call portmanteau persuasion,
00:05:00.360something that Scott Adams was very successful at running on us all going back to the 1990s.
00:05:06.400Portmanteau persuasion. You are absolutely going to want to stay for that. Probably about halfway
00:05:11.260through the episode. I think we'll get to it. Other than that, you know, make sure you got your
00:05:15.880reframe, your brain, hardcover, softcover. I've got the softcover. I think it's going to be page 94 of
00:05:22.040the softcover. Marcella was saying that like page 63 of the hardcover. Page 63 of the hardcover,
00:05:28.680you guys, and page 74 for your Kindle and your paperback. And Marcella, we asked Marcella to pick
00:05:35.960a reframe today and I think it's perfectly perfect. It's chapter three and it is the mental health
00:05:43.880chapter. And Marcella has honed in on internet, on the internet. Okay. So do you guys have time to
00:05:50.900grab your reframe, your brain, hardcover, page 63, Kindle and paperback page 74. And let's take it
00:05:59.300away. Marcella will just hit mute while you read. Okay. Google get your books, you guys. There'll be
00:06:05.740tests. Just kidding. So the reframe I picked is from Scott Adams book is internet insults, which
00:06:16.740yeah, it's, it's apropos for today and for the last few days for, for all of us. But I wanted to read
00:06:27.980it and I wanted you to read it along with me and learn along with me. How I see reframes as most of
00:06:36.640you do is a reprogramming of your brain. So let's go ahead and reprogram your brain right now.
00:06:42.880Internet insults. Every day on social media, trolls and critics attack me over my appearance,
00:06:52.660age, intelligence, personal life, character and talent. I become an accidental expert on how to
00:07:00.820reframe deep insults into my own entertainment. And I recently came upon a reframe that helps a lot.
00:07:07.300Usual frame. An insult is damaging to my mental health. Reframe. An insult is a confession that
00:07:20.500your accuser can't refute your opinion and or has personal problems of some sort. This reframe won't
00:07:28.340fit every situation. But people who enjoy good mental health are not spreading much time insulting people
00:07:34.840on social media, or anywhere else. Likewise, when people have a strong argument, they stick with facts.
00:07:43.780You only get triggered to insult someone when your argument has been dismantled, and you feel the need to act out.
00:07:51.200On X, I use the reframe this way. Critic. Of course you have that opinion, dill weed. It's because you're an uninformed and stupid.
00:08:04.460Me. I appreciate your confession. Then I excuse myself from the conversation without explaining what I mean by
00:08:15.460confession. Sometimes I mean my critic has lost the debate because they resorted to personal attacks.
00:08:22.020In that case, I claim victory. I scamper away to happiness. Other times the personal attacks are not associated with an argument.
00:08:33.840In those cases, I mean the confession to be about the person's poor mental health. I'm no mental health expert, but insulting
00:08:44.960strangers is rarely a sign of good mental health. When a critic, parenthesis, a jerk, enters fight mode by hurling a personal insult at you on social media,
00:08:57.280they expect an insult in return, or perhaps a blocked account. What they don't expect is a puzzle. When the heck does it mean when someone says they appreciate a confession you never offered?
00:09:08.520It instantly changes the tone of the exchange and puts you in charge because you know what you mean and your critic wants to know because it's about them. Don't tell them. Walk away. That's how you win.
00:09:23.300I'm also testing. Sorry. I'm also testing another reframe. I borrow from an ex-follower that goes like this.
00:09:30.880Usual frame. An insult hurts because it means someone dislikes or disrespects you.
00:09:38.520Reframe. A stranger's opinion of you, even if it gets published in the New York Times, is little more than their personal diary entry.
00:09:48.920No one cares what you write in your diary. That's between you and yourself. If you choose to make your opinion public, that doesn't suddenly make it matter.
00:10:01.200Think of all the dark thoughts you keep to yourself. Do they matter to anyone else?
00:10:10.120Nope. Saying a dark opinion in public doesn't suddenly make it matter. It's still just a diary entry in different form. Boring and unimportant.
00:10:20.360For completeness, I must explain why you might see me engaging my critics more than my reframe suggests would be wise.
00:10:28.400I direct energy to a critic when they make a defamatory and untrue claim of fact that would live forever as truth on the internet unless I deal with it.
00:10:38.820In those cases, I want any future sleuths to know the false claim is disputed and why.
00:10:46.560So I create an interesting body of semi-abusive content to draw attention away from the false claims to my often funny debunking of it.
00:10:56.860For example, a prominent attorney on X accused me of being wrong on my pandemic commentary because I tend to trust institutional data, quote unquote.
00:11:11.800I saw a need to remind his followers that I'm the creator of Dilbert comic and have been mocking institutional data for more than three decades.
00:11:21.680Sometimes I think no one on the planet distrusts institutional data more than I do.
00:11:27.840A recurring theme of my daily live streams involves reminding people to distrust data and any source and why.
00:11:37.280The attorney's post got a lot of attention and amplified existing misconceptions about me that were, in my opinion, an obstacle to my good intention of being a useful public voice.
00:11:48.220So I sprayed some insults in his direction on X, along with some debunking, to make sure as many people saw the correction as saw the initial claims.
00:12:00.220Fake news can get 20 times the attention of a correction.
00:12:05.060So I tried to solve for that problem by creating more of a spectacle and sometimes being more of a jerk than observers feel it's appropriate.
00:12:15.920My situation is unlikely to be relevant to people who are not public figures.
00:12:21.160I only mention it because my actions will seem inconsistent if you don't have the contact.
00:12:28.340I was just talking about this with Shelly and Shelly's cousin Bree before we started the show,
00:12:37.760that I would sometimes send a tweet or a post to Scott and be like, oh, look at what this person said.
00:12:47.420And he, you know, and he would just be like, well, block them.
00:12:49.840But I also explained that Scott had a way of letting us know if somebody makes it personal or, like he said, if they're trying to change the course of history that could live on the Internet forever, correct it.
00:13:04.900But perhaps mock them a little bit about it first so they can see your response and then block them because he was just like, you don't need to engage with that person or even allow them.
00:13:15.820And I just thought it was so funny because I remember Scott would just be like a like that, you know, hey, thanks for your confession, you know, and block, you know, give them just enough time to read it and block.
00:13:28.600And I think that my take on that is it's OK sometimes just to block.
00:13:34.020You can mute, but you can block because we are living, you know, so publicly on here.
00:13:39.860And listen, I go off half cocked all the time, you know, because I'm reacting to something before calming down.
00:13:48.120And I do have to calm down and I have calmed down.
00:13:50.440You'll never believe it, but you're going to see it.
00:14:30.820And I've done the same thing sometimes because sometimes people would accuse me of stuff and I'm like, what, what, what are you talking about?
00:14:36.960Like either they are saying something where they clearly have no knowledge of anything about me.
00:14:42.300And it's like, they're so far off base that I don't know how to respond.
00:14:45.920I'm like, you know, you, you clearly just haven't been paying attention and you're just going off half cocked with no information with something that makes no sense.
00:14:56.680And, and, you know, when Scott explained that day drinking reframe where he's like, people really are just like drunk posting on X on a regular basis, it made a lot of sense to me.
00:15:07.720And I started using that sometimes, but it was always kind of fun to see Scott go off on his critics.
00:15:14.180You know, Shelly, not this Shelly, but the other Shelly.
00:15:59.680If I, if I can, I want to jump in here on a couple of things.
00:16:02.680And so most of you know, I'm the contributing editor to Reframe Your Brain.
00:16:07.500And I had a number of conversations about this particular section and other sections, obviously, with, with, with, with Scott.
00:16:14.180And so in order to, let's say, write anything effectively, you have to understand we're edited or revise it or allow it to fully pan out in print to communicate everything that you want to communicate.
00:16:27.680You have to ensure that you are being effective and covering all the bases.
00:16:32.680There's another section a little bit later on about how to be a fake in a good way that covers some of the stuff that I said to Scott, we need to address this somewhere in here.
00:16:43.000And what I want to bring up is that particular reframe starts with insult, with insult, not with disagreement.
00:16:52.220And oftentimes in our online culture, we will often misconstrue disagreement with an insult.
00:16:58.820And just because someone is disagreeing with you, it does not mean that they're insulting you.
00:17:05.260Also, and this is a particularly painful yet useful lesson.
00:17:09.780Someone could be insulting you and providing criticism slash critique.
00:17:29.360I would read nonfiction books for adults being homeschooled at the time.
00:17:32.900I was rather odd in that way, but there was a quote in there that I remember from.
00:17:36.960I was probably 11 years old or 12 years old at the time, and which I read and it said, you can be right, but wrong at the top of your voice.
00:17:46.780First of all, it's fantastic relationship advice that if you want to win, then you lose even when you win.
00:17:52.680But also your critics can be right, but wrong at the top of their voice, or let's say all caps.
00:17:59.040So that particular reframe is specifically addressing personal attacks, not criticism, not expose, not exposure.
00:18:11.920I think there's somebody recently who absolutely botched this reframe in public, and it made the bad situation worse.
00:18:20.760So given that she's already put herself out in the discourse, I'm going to leverage her example as an example.
00:18:26.800And that would be Jordan Peterson's daughter, Michaela Peterson, or whatever she goes by now.
00:18:33.000And in this particular case, she was attacking incels and gripers and other such terms he was using to describe her critics.
00:18:45.820And she basically, and I'm not going to quote her, but the gist of it was, you're only saying these things about me because nobody wants you, nobody likes you, and you're a loser, effectively, something like that.
00:18:56.800And it was, first of all, it was, it was a sort of a counterattack that was not a counter to an attack.
00:19:09.160The conversation started with deep disagreement with her, I understand, on a number of points that are, let's say, objective or logical.
00:19:17.860This is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong, this is legal, this is illegal, this is just, this is unjust, this is moral, immoral, ethical, unethical.
00:19:52.700And I thought, Jordan Peterson's daughter makes a virulently anti-feminist message that women should not be allowed to vote until they're 23, uniquely.
00:22:17.800The Huberman technique is when they come to cancel you, when they attack you, when they criticize you, say nothing whatsoever about it at all.
00:22:51.320Like, the history will be written by your enemies if you don't say anything against it.
00:22:59.560And I only say that because we're entering the world of AI.
00:23:03.360So, if Grok is getting X and they're projecting all the comments and you're actually not refuting it in writing, like you said, like the Huberman approach, which in his matter, it might be.
00:23:56.840The usual frame to reframe concept is a completely different agenda, perspective.
00:24:06.280So, the usual frame is not, or rather the reframe, in this case, it's your counter to the news about you that's going to be recorded and remember by chat GPT or Grok or Wikipedia or whatever, is not, that's not true.
00:24:19.420I was coaching somebody who's a highly public figure the other day.
00:24:22.920She was responding to an accusation, and she wrote two novellas in response to, like, two-sentence posts from a journalist.
00:24:37.120It's just all the things that she's not.
00:24:38.240And I said to her, consider deleting all of this.
00:24:44.460You're coming across like you're pleading, like you're defensive, like you're reacting, and your enemies will go, oh, she's vulnerable here.
01:00:41.400So, tomorrow you guys will cover some news.
01:00:43.660It'll be Friday, and Saturday you'll have O and On for Spaces.
01:00:48.340So, please look for my repost of the show after the show, and you guys put your portmanteaus in there, and we'll tag Joshua, and he can give you a little critique or praise or whatever we need.
01:01:03.200And don't forget, try the word K, and, oh, if somebody is insulting you and you have nothing to say.