Stay Free - Russel Brand - Reframe Your Brain with Scott Adams

00:00:00.000 Hello there, you Awakening wonder.

00:00:01.000 Thank you so much for joining us today.

00:00:03.000 As you know, once the government demonetize you, your support becomes absolutely invaluable.

00:00:10.000 Thanks for joining us.

00:00:10.000 We've got a fantastic interview, an extended interview, in fact, with Scott Adams, who you might know from Dilbert, you might know from his recent You might know because of his excellent and interesting books.

00:00:22.000 I'm going to be talking to him about all of that.

00:00:24.000 Click the link in the description.

00:00:26.000 And if it's within your means, press the red button.

00:00:28.000 Become a member of our Awakened Wonders Locals community.

00:00:32.000 His show, Real Coffee, is on Locals.

00:00:35.000 He wrote the book, Reframe Your Brain.

00:00:37.000 You can see this conversation in its entirety on Locals.

00:00:40.000 You can see it now.

00:00:41.000 There's an extra half an hour that you're going to just love.

00:00:44.000 But let me welcome now, Scott Adams.

00:00:50.000 Scott, I'm actually very grateful and excited to meet you.

00:00:54.000 Well, thank you.

00:00:56.000 I'm pretty excited myself.

00:00:57.000 I'm a big fan.

00:00:59.000 I really enjoyed your... You know the Trump book on persuasion?

00:01:03.000 Obviously you do.

00:01:06.000 Yeah, Winn-Biggly. 1.00

00:01:08.000 Of course.

00:01:09.000 I really enjoyed that book.

00:01:11.000 I was fascinated by it.

00:01:13.000 Of course, I suppose leadership Leadership remains a fascinating subject, I suppose because leadership and persuasion are the ability to, through charisma perhaps, or through other means, and perhaps you'll explain them to me, create

00:01:32.000 Realities that people will willingly or even unconsciously participate in.

00:01:38.000 Tell me what you think specifically Trump exemplifies.

00:01:43.000 In the book you talk about him being sort of some like indigenous or native or a natural genius when it comes to the art of persuasion.

00:01:53.000 What do you mean by that and what are examples of that?

00:01:57.000 Well, he seems to have the full toolbox of persuasion, which if you didn't study it as a field, as I do, I'm a trained hypnotist, you wouldn't recognize.

00:02:07.000 So for example, the number one tool of persuasion is fear.

00:02:12.000 So he started out in 2015, the illegal people who may be criminals are streaming across the border and, you know, Chinese could eat our lunch and basically scaring you. 0.98

00:02:23.000 The other thing he does is visual.

00:02:26.000 The second biggest thing you can do is create a picture in people's head, because we're visual creatures.

00:02:32.000 So when he says we need better border security, he doesn't talk about a concept.

00:02:36.000 He talks about a wall.

00:02:37.000 So you imagine the wall in your head, the wall that you want to see.

00:02:41.000 He says it's big and beautiful, doesn't over-specify it, which is also a hypnotist trick.

00:02:46.000 If you over-specified it, people would not see it.

00:02:49.000 They'd say, oh, I'm not seeing that wall.

00:02:51.000 But if you say it's a big, beautiful wall, then people imagine the big, beautiful wall of their own preference.

00:02:57.000 That's pure technique.

00:02:58.000 He also says it's going to have a door in it.

00:03:02.000 Now, that's making you think past the sale, because you already have to accept there could be a wall for there also to be a door.

00:03:10.000 And then he tops it off with, and Mexico's going to pay for it? 0.57

00:03:14.000 Now, that's the funniest, make you think best, the sale I've ever seen.

00:03:19.000 Because if he can make you argue about how ridiculous it is that Mexico would pay for the wall, you've already uncritically accepted that there might be a wall.

00:03:29.000 It's a car salesman's trick.

00:03:31.000 The car salesman says, how do you think you'll use this car?

00:03:35.000 Or do you think you would feel better in the red one or the white one?

00:03:39.000 So if you're thinking about the details, they've made you think past the sale.

00:03:43.000 He uses that all the time.

00:03:45.000 But his real magic is the nicknames.

00:03:48.000 And he comes up with nicknames that are not only visual, like Low Energy Jeb, It's a concept, but when you see him, it changes how you see him.

00:03:59.000 And I always say that when I first saw Jeb Bush, you know, come on the scene, I thought to myself, wow, he's got exactly that executive, calm, cool, you know, probably would be great in an emergency because he wouldn't get too excited about it, you know.

00:04:15.000 And then the moment that Trump says he's low energy, That's all I could see, because he made a comparison between his own energy and Jeb, and from that moment on you could only see it.

00:04:26.000 But the other magic he does is he picks a nickname that will be almost certainly reinforced by future events.

00:04:36.000 So when he says low-energy gem, you know there's going to be a video where somebody says, there he is, he's looking low-energy.

00:04:42.000 You could probably find that for anybody.

00:04:44.000 But then when he says Crooked Hillary, you think to yourself, ah, there's no way she won't be at least accused of something that would fit into that frame.

00:04:55.000 So he's the master framer.

00:04:56.000 He creates the frame, and then you buy it.

00:04:59.000 My favorite one lately is the perfect phone call.

00:05:02.000 He's used it twice.

00:05:05.000 Where he talks about his call to Ukraine, where he was impeached, and his call to the, I guess, the Attorney General, was it, of Georgia?

00:05:14.000 And in both cases, he got in trouble for something he said on the call.

00:05:17.000 Well, he says, it's a perfect call. 0.99

00:05:19.000 Now, he said it so many times, and you laugh about it when you hear it, because it's a little bit extreme to say it's perfect.

00:05:26.000 But it's also in your head.

00:05:28.000 So every time one of those stories gets the headline, I look at the headline and in my head goes, perfect call!

00:05:36.000 Even though I don't believe it, you know, I mean, I'm not persuaded by just those words.

00:05:41.000 The words just pop up in your head.

00:05:42.000 And that's the secret behind a reframe and behind hypnosis and a lot of AI as well.

00:05:48.000 It seems like what you're saying, and I would say it's alluring and it's an attractive proposition, is that there are kind of universal principles in communication.

00:06:02.000 that don't alter, whether they're within the realm of hypnosis or neuro-linguistic programming.

00:06:08.000 They are just certain indefatigable facts that if people use them, you know, I like to think,

00:06:14.000 "No, no, I'm very sophisticated. I know how to discern information. I'll know if someone's

00:06:18.000 trying to dupe me or lead me up the garden path." But this is sort of, in a sense, an inability to

00:06:25.000 acknowledge my own hardware and my own unconscious biases and the way that the part of me that's

00:06:30.000 beyond me is likely to behave.

00:06:33.000 Firstly do you think that Trump is doing this instinctively almost as a genius might in the way a genius athlete or like sort of the way that Marlon Brando might pick up a glove and on the waterfront and just sort of thumb it unconsciously creating an organic naturalness or The way that Willie Mays might strike a ball, and I know nothing of baseball, so I would use football if it was left to me, but I know who the audience are.

00:07:02.000 Or do you think that this is something that he's learned through sales?

00:07:04.000 Because in a sense, these are sales techniques.

00:07:07.000 I often see how the culture has evolved, often around people that I admire, even mentors of mine, that at their point of origin would have been much more

00:07:15.000 focused on the world of sales and pitching that now have migrated into a more overtly spiritual space,

00:07:22.000 I would say. In a way, some of the principles hold true. I know that thing of two

00:07:28.000 suggestions and then two verifiables and then a suggestion. I recognize what you're saying about

00:07:33.000 that stuff. It seems like I'm making these notes and thinking, "Yeah, man, this is how I should

00:07:36.000 be communicating. This is how we should all be communicating if our job, and God, has it not become

00:07:41.000 our job now more than ever, to present a version of reality that's more appealing than our

00:07:46.000 opponents'. If Trump is a genius of it, say, if that is indeed what you believe and somehow a native

00:07:52.000 genius of it, is it stuff that everyone does badly and even his opponents do it badly? Can you talk

00:07:58.000 us through a few examples of their crap versions of it as well? 0.98

00:08:03.000 Well, the universals would include repetition. 0.97

00:08:07.000 The more you repeat something, the more people think it's true.

00:08:09.000 That's what he does with the perfect phone call.

00:08:12.000 He just keeps saying it until you can't not think it when it's paired with the topic.

00:08:17.000 So he's got that, but he has all the sales techniques of thinking past the sale, et cetera.

00:08:21.000 Those are not natural.

00:08:23.000 Those are learned behaviors, I'm pretty sure, because you wouldn't think to do it, you would think to just describe why you should buy it.

00:08:29.000 If left to your own devices, you'd say, This car has many good features.

00:08:33.000 It's affordable, but he goes to imagine it in your garage.

00:08:38.000 That's learned behavior.

00:08:39.000 I don't think you'd pick that up on your own.

00:08:42.000 His minister of the church he went to every Sunday when he was a kid, his family, was the author of the book, The Power of Positive Thinking.

00:08:51.000 Whose name is escaping me for some reason.

00:08:53.000 I can never remember his name.

00:08:54.000 But he was the most influential, positive thinking person of his time.

00:09:00.000 The book was an enormous bestseller.

00:09:03.000 Influenced me a great deal.

00:09:04.000 I was that age as well.

00:09:06.000 But imagine going to church and having somebody who was considered the most influential person in the country.

00:09:14.000 So much so that the author was blamed Or accused of being a hypnotist, because he was so influential.

00:09:20.000 So I think that Trump probably got it from his father, who was probably selling real estate projects as well.

00:09:26.000 So some of it he picked up, and some of it I think he is a natural.

00:09:30.000 But he goes for fear somewhat automatically.

00:09:34.000 And association, he's good at associating something negative with something positive.

00:09:40.000 One of the reframes in my book uses this technique, the same one he uses, and the reframe is alcohol is poison.

00:09:48.000 Now, that's not true, per se, because it's just a definition.

00:09:52.000 Could be a beverage, could be a form of entertainment, could be a liquid.

00:09:55.000 But if you just pair it with the word poison, it lets you more easily, you know, say no to a drink.

00:10:02.000 Doesn't work for alcoholics, it does work for people who just want to cut down.

00:10:06.000 So that reframe actually is the one that I hear the most from.

00:10:10.000 Probably twice a week, I hear from somebody, a stranger who says, I stopped drinking entirely with one sentence.

00:10:17.000 So that's how powerful this stuff can be, and Trump is a master of it.

00:10:21.000 In actuality, I am in recovery.

00:10:26.000 And this idea of compounding concepts is significant even in the, I don't know if it's more sophisticated or simply different, but the idea of abstinence is predicated, of course, on the notion that it is the first drink that's the problem, not the ninth or the 10th or that you'll ever be able to drink safely.

00:10:46.000 And in this instance, the compound is to equate even drinking at all with an annihilation of your life.

00:10:52.000 And in fact, any kind of behavioral adjunct pivot progression

00:10:57.000 would have to be predicated upon a vision of some description.

00:11:02.000 And in the case of like a 12 step person like me, it's I now equate the use of a recreational drug,

00:11:09.000 even or, you know, street drugs, or even a sort of a socially acceptable

00:11:13.000 and legal drug like alcohol with personal destruction.

00:11:17.000 And that like that is a, you know, it's a form of conditioning has taken place

00:11:21.000 and ultimately sort of in this instance, a beneficial one.

00:11:25.000 I wonder if, you know, obviously comment on anything you want to mate,

00:11:29.000 but like, I wonder if you think that part of what Trump has been able to do in addition to his evident

00:11:35.000 and obvious rhetorical skill, and I've always thought it was a failing of his opponents

00:11:38.000 not to sort of acknowledge and register and enjoy that even when opposing him,

00:11:43.000 because it sometimes looks like they don't inhabit the same sort of universe as everyone else 1.00

00:11:48.000 when they just sort of say he's stupid or whatever. 0.96

00:11:51.000 I I wonder if there's something, one, that he engages with people emotionally in a way that's sort of somehow anomalous or at least rare in an age of bureaucrats and managerial politicians that are somewhat visionless. 0.97

00:12:10.000 And this idea of vision, this idea of being able to give an authentic vision.

00:12:17.000 to an audience. And given that we're living in a time of obvious conflict where the culture is,

00:12:24.000 in a sense, it feels to me, and again tell me what you feel, and I know I'm throwing a lot

00:12:28.000 at you here but I feel like you're tracking it, like that the culture is trying to centralise

00:12:32.000 and control perception. The culture is aggressively saying, "This is what reality is,

00:12:39.000 Don't allow that information in.

00:12:41.000 This is the information that you have to believe.

00:12:43.000 If you don't believe this information, you are the worst kind of nefarious individual.

00:12:48.000 Do you think, how do you believe we can penetrate, challenge, attack, control, overcome that?

00:12:55.000 Well, the tough part is you never know who your enemies are.

00:12:58.000 Because I feel like whoever's behind the shadow banning and maybe some cancellations that are more political than content related, you don't really ever know who's behind it.

00:13:12.000 So if you look at my situation, the Washington Post was sort of the flagship that got the other newspapers to cancel me.

00:13:19.000 But the Washington Post is well known as, let's say, well connected with the intelligence outfit in the United States.

00:13:28.000 So the question I ask is, is the fact that the Washington Post is so associated with Democrats and also the intelligence group, which are also associated with the Democrats, is it a coincidence that no Republicans cancelled me?

00:13:42.000 So when we're talking about free speech and how do you penetrate the narrative, there's also some amount of dirty tricks and secret players that are really hard to know who your targets are.

00:13:55.000 So it's hard to fight back when you don't know who you're fighting against.

00:13:58.000 That's what I feel like all the time.

00:14:01.000 But to answer, the only way I can imagine there would be a difference is people like Trump who can break through because he's just too hard not to cover.

00:14:11.000 You can't ignore him.

00:14:13.000 R.F.K.

00:14:13.000 Jr.

00:14:14.000 is running for president, he says, in large part because it's the only way he could have free speech.

00:14:20.000 If he's not a presidential candidate, he could get kicked off the platforms for what they would say is telling untruths.

00:14:30.000 So it's going to be personalities who can take a hit.

00:14:34.000 RFK Jr.

00:14:36.000 is, you know, being hated by his own family.

00:14:38.000 He's in physical, you know, risk of assassination.

00:14:43.000 And you just made me do that.

00:14:45.000 That's how it works. 1.00

00:14:48.000 Damn it. 1.00

00:14:49.000 Vote for me, Mayor of London. 0.99

00:14:54.000 By the way, that's that's one of the tricks to just do is they try to get somebody to copy them in a meeting.

00:15:00.000 But anyway, I think it's going to take personalities who don't mind getting cancelled.

00:15:06.000 So they tried to take me out, but I'm still talking.

00:15:09.000 They tried to take Tucker out, but he's still talking.

00:15:12.000 So I think that some of it's going to be people who just were willing to take the hit and could still get some attention.

00:15:21.000 You'll see people like Oh, shoot.

00:15:27.000 I'm terrible at remembering names when I'm on video.

00:15:30.000 Tell us and we'll work it out together.

00:15:31.000 The first one was Norman Peel.

00:15:33.000 That was the preacher and the writer of that Positive Thinking book.

00:15:37.000 I didn't get that myself.

00:15:38.000 James, who's producing the show, put it up.

00:15:40.000 And this one we'll work out together as well.

00:15:44.000 Greenberg, Greenwald.

00:15:46.000 Glenn Greenwald, yeah.

00:15:48.000 So he's one of the superstars of telling you what's really happening behind the scenes.

00:15:53.000 Yeah.

00:15:53.000 But is it a coincidence that he has to do it from outside the country?

00:15:57.000 Yeah.

00:15:58.000 Like, those are the kind of questions that I ask.

00:16:00.000 It's like, do I have to go to another country?

00:16:02.000 Yeah.

00:16:02.000 Just for freedom of speech?

00:16:05.000 And I saw today, you know, Mike Benz.

00:16:07.000 He's another person on the Axe platform who talks about the intelligence agencies, you know, maneuverings behind the scenes, as if he's opening the hood so we can see.

00:16:17.000 And I think it was today he was tweeting that he's expecting, you know, just a massive personal attack and probably some form of lawfare against him.

00:16:25.000 And I think he's right.

00:16:27.000 So, I don't know where this stuff comes from.

00:16:29.000 I don't know who the personalities are behind it, but something looks coordinated, even if it's not.

00:16:35.000 It has that appearance.

00:16:36.000 It appears, too, that what was once regarded as the, I would say, liberal left and the assumption that built into that were ideals that grew out of the civil rights movement that are pretty righteous and laudable.

00:16:56.000 Somehow this...

00:16:58.000 set of interests has become curiously authoritarian in the name of liberty, safety, convenience.

00:17:07.000 I'm seeing these odd pacts emerge between sort of big tech and sort of neoliberalism

00:17:14.000 that are creating curiously in a way that I could never have imagined.

00:17:20.000 Alliances on what might once have been termed the other side of the aisle, but you've mentioned

00:17:25.000 Glenn Greenwald, and let's mention him once more.

00:17:30.000 In a way, personally, and I wouldn't expect you to know this or even care, I used to be

00:17:36.000 regarded as a kind of conventional lefty sort of Hollywood type person, but I was always

00:17:42.000 actually anti-authoritarian and sort of pro-individual freedom and pro-community freedom.

00:17:50.000 I was also interested in community and care about society and have values and principles.

00:17:55.000 And then as my content became more vocally anti-establishment, as I started to speak out against electoral democracy, its corruption, legacy media, how they simply amplify state and corporate state message at that, rather than interrogating it, how they spend no resources

00:18:11.000 on investigating issues that really seriously affect people and significant resources on

00:18:15.000 bringing down dissent and controlling potential dissidents. I started to be called like right-wing and a

00:18:20.000 right-wing conspiracy theorist and like I've spoken to a bunch of people that I guess

00:18:26.000 Conservative.

00:18:26.000 And I find them absolutely delightful, I'd have to say.

00:18:30.000 But I still feel that what's emerging, potentially now, is something new.

00:18:34.000 And I cite often Martin Guri's book, The Revolt of the Public, which is a sort of, in a way, a companion piece to that famous book, Here Comes Everyone, that simply explores how The way that communication technology has altered has meant that the establishment can no longer keep up with the diversification and dissemination of information and has necessarily become authoritarian in order to countenance these new threats, these new information threats.

00:19:01.000 And in order to legitimise what they're doing, which is basically state censorship, they've had to invent new categories, misinformation, disinformation, and create

00:19:11.000 enemies that would warrant, this is why you see people being called Nazis and the most egregious

00:19:16.000 and awful things that you can accuse anybody of, racist, and the list, we can all add

00:19:20.000 to that list of course, because they need to legitimize the end goal, shut down dissent,

00:19:25.000 control dissent invoices, because any dissent invoice, now anyone with a phone is a potential

00:19:31.000 threat.

00:19:32.000 Martin Goury talked about that in The Revolt of the Public, that the old models are dying, so they have to find ways of controlling the emergent new model.

00:19:41.000 And in a sense, Trump was, you know, one of the first people that effectively used these new forms of communication technology, famously through Twitter as it then was.

00:19:52.000 And I wonder what you think about these likelihood of new alliances with people with a broad base of social philosophy and ideology.

00:20:00.000 I wonder what you think about the possibility, and again I suppose to your point about who are these people that are controlling it.

00:20:07.000 I guess I would say that it's the nexus of interests that exist between, like for example with this new online safety bill in the UK, demonstrates that the UK government and the EU and all of the Five Eyes countries are introducing legislation that enables their government in unprecedented ways to utilise big tech so that, and I guess it's like a deal they're doing really, of we're not going to shut you guys down and your ability to profit and advertise if you allow us to Yeah, you know, my take on this is that I see the world as a big old dopamine machine.

00:20:51.000 So people are chasing dopamine.

00:20:52.000 I used to say, follow the money and it explains everything.

00:20:56.000 But money is just a holding place for dopamine, right?

00:20:59.000 You can keep it in your money until you're ready to buy the jazz ski, and then you get your dopamine.

00:21:04.000 So, when you're looking at why is it this weird connection of people who don't even seem to be on the side they used to be on, I think it's because the philosophical layer, the why we do things, has always been fake for the people in power.

00:21:19.000 The people in power want to keep their job, keep their influence, keep their dopamine high, you know, have more babies than the other people, so basically win.

00:21:27.000 So, whatever it takes to win is what they're going to promote, and it doesn't have to make sense, it doesn't have to be consistent with what they've ever done, it doesn't have to be ethical, it doesn't have to be moral, because they're just chasing dopamine.

00:21:39.000 So, once you see the world as a dopamine chase, everything makes sense.

00:21:44.000 It's just very unpleasant to think of it that way.

00:21:47.000 Yeah, it does seem pretty, obviously literally endocrinal and therefore animal and unconscious and beyond individual freedom and beyond any kind of freedom you might conceive of.

00:21:57.000 Hey, you said that Trump would win in 2016, famously, when people were considering it to be a preposterous and implausible outcome.

00:22:09.000 So what do you think about 2024?

00:22:13.000 In 2024, almost anything could happen.

00:22:16.000 We're in a weird situation where I do worry about his physical security.

00:22:21.000 I do worry that 91, what looked like to me, political charges, is not the end of it.

00:22:29.000 And it looks like there's no level of obviousness that they're trying, well, they're not trying to be less obvious anymore.

00:22:37.000 The latest charges in New York, Look to me like they're not even trying to be legitimate.

00:22:45.000 It looks to me like it's just purely political.

00:22:48.000 And I don't know if most of the country will either understand banking and insurance issues to know how blatantly, obviously political it is or not.

00:22:58.000 But they're not trying to hide anything.

00:23:00.000 I think complexity is the friend of the The power mongers, because they can hide anything in complexity, say, well, you don't understand legal tax accounting things, bad, orange man, bad.

00:23:14.000 And then, you know, trust us, orange man, bad accounting, you don't understand.

00:23:18.000 And they could take anybody down with that.

00:23:21.000 So, I would expect that if Trump survives these charges, all the ones we know about, I think they'll just be new ones.

00:23:29.000 I think they'll just invent new ones until they can find some way to take him out.

00:23:34.000 They'll obviously go after all of his lawyers, anybody who would talk to him, anybody who would support him.

00:23:41.000 If you say anything nice about him, even though I'm endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy, I like somebody younger for the next era.

00:23:52.000 Even then, because I say positive things about Trump's skill set, they'll try to take me on as well.

00:23:59.000 Now, the thing about free speech is the people trying to suppress it are, of course, the people in power, because people in power are the ones who are most, let's say, threatened by free speech.

00:24:10.000 So they don't have to take everybody out.

00:24:12.000 They only have to take out the notables.

00:24:15.000 Because if they take out the people who are really good at communicating and have some chance of breaking through into their base that doesn't hear the other arguments, those are the dangerous ones.

00:24:25.000 They don't need to take out everybody who has a social media account and complains online.

00:24:31.000 They're not moving the needle.

00:24:33.000 They only have to take out the few that are making a difference.

00:24:36.000 And I think they've strategically picked pretty well so far.

00:24:40.000 Really?

00:24:40.000 Do you think that is what's happening?

00:24:43.000 Well, it's hard to look at the group of people who have been cancelled lately and not notice that they're the best communicators.

00:24:53.000 That's hard not to notice.

00:24:55.000 That is pretty interesting.

00:24:58.000 May I ask you a little bit about your own experience of cancellation?

00:25:02.000 Are you comfortable to talk about it?

00:25:04.000 Sure.

00:25:05.000 What is it that you sort of, like I saw you say that white people should stay away from black people because there was so much tension being generated and it wasn't safe.

00:25:21.000 What did you mean and how do you think it was misused especially?

00:25:29.000 Well, everything that public figures say gets taken out of context, because there's always a bigger context.

00:25:35.000 So, the bigger context is that in the United States and other countries as well, we're suffering under these things called ESG and CRT and DEI.

00:25:45.000 Now, they all have in common the idea that there's an oppressor group and an oppressed group.

00:25:52.000 The oppressors are the rich old white guys, mostly, but white people in general. 0.66

00:25:58.000 And the oppressed are black people and people of color, but black people in particular, because of the legacy of slavery and ongoing systemic racism. 0.85

00:26:09.000 And so the idea is that if you're in the group that has been labeled the oppressor, and the other group has been told that you've oppressed them and you have their stuff, And they should get it back.

00:26:21.000 That's the worst place you should be.

00:26:23.000 So if you can escape from that situation, you should.

00:26:27.000 You should run away from it.

00:26:28.000 It has nothing to do with anybody's DNA.

00:26:30.000 It has nothing to do with anybody's culture.

00:26:33.000 So it has nothing to do with even the color.

00:26:35.000 It has to do with the fact that we've decided to organize our society in a way that we're trading people, not only in school, But all the way through their corporate life and through the media, that one group of people are the bad people and they have your stuff.

00:26:51.000 That is a really dangerous situation.

00:26:54.000 Now, it's hyperbole to say, get away, because we live in a big world in which getting away isn't really a practical thing.

00:27:01.000 So I was hoping people would see that as hyperbole.

00:27:05.000 But if you take it seriously, it sounds like a sounds like a whole different thing.

00:27:09.000 Yeah, I suppose in a sense it appears to me that elite interests have always been able to dominate.

00:27:18.000 I mean, what is power other than the ability to dominate and control reality, whether that's the perception of reality or the economics of reality themselves?

00:27:28.000 And yeah, there is a sort of a reductivism in many of the dominant narratives around

00:27:35.000 how we should sort of almost re-segregate society that don't seem to have a very, what

00:27:41.000 do I want to say, congenial vision for our future.

00:27:46.000 I.e. there is not a very optimistic appraisal of our ability to live together beyond our

00:27:54.000 demographic distinctions.

00:27:57.000 And that really, really worries me because I think it is ultimately advantageous to the

00:28:03.000 very same groups that benefit from prohibiting free speech.

00:28:08.000 When you said that thing before that ultimately it is dopamine, that's the sort of, you know,

00:28:12.000 like beneath even the level of the individual, the kind of element.

00:28:16.000 The element that we're moving on.

00:28:19.000 I wonder if you feel that in using that type of framing and that type of analytic we can look at what's happening when the more vilified Trump becomes the more popular he becomes.

00:28:32.000 Superficially it would seem that people are so mistrustful of the legacy media and detest the state so deeply and this is something I spoke to Glenn Greenwald and I spoke last week And he said that people hate the state and they actually hate the media now.

00:28:51.000 It's like there is a hatred that's almost a tipping point.

00:28:55.000 And that, in a way, an anti-establishment figure, for whatever you think of Trump, whether you're pro-Trump or anti-Trump person, it's pretty plain the establishment don't want him there.

00:29:05.000 It's pretty plain they're going to considerable lengths to prevent him becoming an incumbent political force, at least.

00:29:15.000 I wonder, What type of ways might this undercurrent, this emotional undercurrent, be harnessed, corralled, motivated, activated for anti-establishment movements elsewhere?

00:29:33.000 And if you agree with the basic analysis that he's become an anti-establishment icon?

00:29:38.000 Well, that's a tough one.

00:29:39.000 So how could you harness the anti-establishment powers like Trump?

00:29:43.000 Yeah.

00:29:43.000 Or other places?

00:29:44.000 Yeah.

00:29:45.000 Well, it's a singular character.

00:29:47.000 You know, you'd have to find somebody who just, by luck, had similar characteristics and, you know, a billion dollars so they could, you know, weather the storms and didn't need to have a day job and all kinds of things.

00:30:00.000 And they'd have to be a certain age.

00:30:02.000 I mean, there's things I would say at my current age that I never would have said as a younger man, because right now I'm risking a few extra years of my remaining life.

00:30:13.000 So that's a smaller risk than 40 years of life.

00:30:17.000 So I'm in a lower risk situation, as is Trump, because he's a certain age.

00:30:24.000 So, he can simply do and say things that other people are not free to do.

00:30:28.000 So, that's the kind of freedom you could imagine other places would have, older people. 0.75

00:30:34.000 But I don't recommend people over, I don't know, 75 being in office.

00:30:38.000 It's not the greatest idea.

00:30:40.000 So, that's not the greatest plan.

00:30:42.000 Here's what I think is happening.

00:30:44.000 The future is fully unpredictable.

00:30:47.000 And at the moment, everything looks bad.

00:30:50.000 Would you agree?

00:30:50.000 It just looks like the entire fabric of civilization is coming apart.

00:30:56.000 It's unraveling in every way, everywhere.

00:30:59.000 But here's the positive to that.

00:31:03.000 We had to break it.

00:31:05.000 The system that was going forward was not the system that we could have forever.

00:31:09.000 It has to be broken.

00:31:11.000 Everything was corrupt.

00:31:12.000 We just didn't know it as well as we know it now.

00:31:15.000 We didn't know that the news was as fake as Trump taught us.

00:31:19.000 Once we started looking for it, you could see it everywhere.

00:31:22.000 But until he alerted you to it, you thought, well, maybe a few stories are sketchy, but mostly they're playing it straight down the middle.

00:31:30.000 They're not.

00:31:31.000 Everything is rigged.

00:31:33.000 Everything is crooked.

00:31:34.000 And we might be at a point where just breaking everything is the right move.

00:31:38.000 So when I hear things like Matt Gaetz might cause chaos in the Congress with his latest moves about the Speaker, I think to myself, chaos.

00:31:48.000 That's exactly what you do before you build a house.

00:31:53.000 You destroy the house that's there, because you can't really just fix the one that's there.

00:31:57.000 You just got to bulldoze it.

00:31:59.000 The first step of building is destruction.

00:32:01.000 So we may be entering a transparently beneficial destruction period.

00:32:08.000 But we're also nimble enough in 2023, and there are enough smart people and hardworking people, that we can actually adjust to incredible shocks.

00:32:19.000 I mean, we got through COVID.

00:32:21.000 That was quite a shock.

00:32:22.000 We've gotten through world wars.

00:32:24.000 We're very resilient.

00:32:25.000 We've also gotten through, you know, we're going to run out of food, but we didn't.

00:32:29.000 We're going to run out of oil, but we didn't.

00:32:31.000 The ozone hole is going to open up and fry us.

00:32:36.000 It didn't.

00:32:37.000 Year 2000 is going to end us all.

00:32:39.000 It didn't.

00:32:40.000 So we're really good at seeing problems way ahead of time and then adjusting appropriately.

00:32:46.000 So my most likely prediction for the United States is that there will be corrective forces because there always are.

00:32:53.000 Things don't go in one direction forever.

00:32:55.000 That's just not a feature of human experience.

00:32:59.000 Things do reach a point that's too far.

00:33:02.000 This week, for example, we're hearing there was a member of Congress who had a carjacking.

00:33:09.000 There was a journalist who got murdered in his home in Philadelphia.

00:33:13.000 So the stories of crime in the cities Are certainly going to cause a change to the massive, you know, let's say unmitigated immigration into the cities.

00:33:27.000 So we're reaching a breaking point, but not for the wrong reason.

00:33:32.000 We're probably reaching a breaking point because you have to use reality to fix people's brains if they're living in an illusion.

00:33:39.000 If the illusion is we can be kind to everybody and it'll all work out, well the massive immigration into New York City is the physical disproof of that.

00:33:49.000 So you probably need a physical disproof to change people's minds.

00:33:53.000 And the minds are what needs to be changed right now.

00:33:56.000 So we might be heading toward a lot of destruction, but creative destruction.

00:34:02.000 I feel often that the amount of effort, bureaucracy, corruption, legislation, militarisation of the police forces, anti-protest laws, new censorship bills, increasing surveillance, cultural machinery that appears to be utilised to divide people from one another, collectively to be taken as a scale of endeavor that must

00:34:26.000 be matched by a kind of latent and unexpressed belief that real change is possible and burgeoning

00:34:33.000 and that there will come a point where people are willing to overlook cultural

00:34:38.000 differences if the right messages can reach them/us and recognize that ultimately we have

00:34:44.000 more in common than one another than the small sets of institutions and interests that benefit

00:34:51.000 from this ongoing state of crisis and decay that you describe. Also I agree with your

00:34:58.000 necessity of destruction being a precedent or a precursor to real change in a kind of almost

00:35:07.000 Vedic Shiva the destroyer creator way because I also feel sometimes that whilst it

00:35:15.000 appears to be an archetype that most cultures lean into, the idea of a golden age, the

00:35:22.000 idea of Eden, the idea of a time where we were more awake. It feels to me that...

00:35:29.000 There is a heaviness in our materialism.

00:35:32.000 There is a heaviness in our individualism.

00:35:34.000 The rationalism has voided the space between us, has robbed us of the potential charge that can exist between individuals and create the kind of charismatic healing that great individuals can bring about and perhaps great social movements can.

00:35:49.000 So I sometimes take heart In how hard they work to prevent change from happening that in a sense like you know I'm sure this is something that you're familiar with it seems like your kind of wheelhouse those miraculous moments where suddenly tulips are no longer prized where sort of economic bubbles burst where new realities just penetrate immediately and people sort of simultaneously awake as if there's some new perfume has reached something dormant within them so

00:36:19.000 That's how I keep myself cheerful, Scott.

00:36:23.000 I wonder if you might tell us a little more.

00:36:25.000 I know that your Alcohol Is Poison is part of your Reframe Your Brain, at least some of the ideas that you cover within your new book, Reframe Your Brain.

00:36:34.000 What else is in there, mate?

00:36:35.000 Well, Reframe Your Brain has tricks for basically making yourself more successful and happier in a bunch of situations.

00:36:44.000 Let me tell you one that's really good if you're nervous.

00:36:47.000 You know, let's say you're real nervous about where things are going.

00:36:50.000 And let's say there's some things in your past that are really, really bothering you.

00:36:54.000 You know, your baggage, something you're guilty about, whatever.

00:36:57.000 Here's a good little mental trick.

00:36:59.000 Just imagine that you're in a video game That your reality is actually just a video game and you're in it, and you just respawned, and you just came alive, and you're in the life that you observe, but you have to figure it out from here.

00:37:13.000 And you say to yourself, alright, I'm just born now, so the time started today, and if I do this exercise, I say, okay, what am I?

00:37:22.000 I'm a male, I'm alive, I seem to be perfectly healthy.

00:37:26.000 I look in the mirror, I go, I could be a lot uglier.

00:37:29.000 Not good. 0.82

00:37:29.000 I could be a lot worse. 0.82

00:37:31.000 And then I look around and I go, oh, check my bank account.

00:37:33.000 Looks pretty good.

00:37:34.000 Looks pretty good.

00:37:35.000 What's my job?

00:37:36.000 Not bad.

00:37:37.000 Not bad at all.

00:37:38.000 Do I have friends?

00:37:39.000 Do I have some family I love?

00:37:41.000 I do.

00:37:42.000 Do I love my dog?

00:37:43.000 And you can take, if you just forget the history, because history is imaginary anyway, you know, the future doesn't exist.

00:37:52.000 History doesn't exist at all.

00:37:53.000 You can't grab a handful of it.

00:37:54.000 You can't rub it on your face.

00:37:56.000 It's gone.

00:37:57.000 So if you just do the video game reframe, I just respond, would this be a good day or a bad day if I woke up into this life?

00:38:05.000 And suddenly, a lot of things that were bothering you, that were monstrously big problems, don't seem so much.

00:38:11.000 You're just sitting here in your life and saying, huh, I think I can make this work.

00:38:16.000 We're gonna leave my conversation with Scott Adams, writer of Reframe Your Brain.

00:38:20.000 There's a link in the description connecting you to that.

00:38:22.000 And if you wanna see the rest of it, and I'll tell you what, it's worth it.

00:38:24.000 It became a very organic and brilliant conversation.

00:38:27.000 If you wanna see it in its entirety, click the red button right there and become an awakened wonder.

00:38:32.000 If you press that awaken button, you get access to all sorts of additional content and we're gonna be providing even more.

00:38:37.000 We are building this movement around you.

00:38:40.000 Once the government step in and demonetize you, that's it now, that's it.

00:38:44.000 That's it.

00:38:45.000 Boots on the ground.

00:38:46.000 Fully in.

00:38:47.000 That's us, baby.

00:38:48.000 The rest of the conversation is fantastic.

00:38:50.000 You really will love it.

00:38:51.000 It's really worth pressing that red button and becoming a member of our community like Matty Otter, Mark Lester and Limba Timber.

00:38:57.000 Thank you for joining us.

00:38:58.000 Thank you for supporting us.

00:38:59.000 I value you.

00:39:00.000 I care about you.

00:39:01.000 I appreciate you.

00:39:02.000 So join us tomorrow.

00:39:03.000 Not for more of the same.

00:39:04.000 We won't give you that, but for more of the different.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - October 06, 2023

Reframe Your Brain with Scott Adams

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