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Jan. 18, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
23:14
Episode 791 Scott Adams Excerpt: I Will Rewire Your Brains to Relieve Anxiety

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Alright, we're going to change topics right now.
I'm going to raise my hands in the air because later when I edit this, I might add it down to the first part with the politics and just keep the second part that's coming up.
In the second part, I told you I was going to cure some of you of anxiety-related problems.
Some of you may not believe that's true.
Some of you probably think it's probable.
Now, all of you are going to have a different experience.
And some will have a profound experience.
Some of you may cry.
Some of you may scoff.
A lot of you will just change the channel.
But let me go through the presentation, and you can leave whenever you feel you would like to.
I'll give you this following warning.
I am going to be rewiring the brains of the people who stay.
I'm a trained hypnotist.
Most of you know that. And what I'm going to be talking about has some basis.
Now, none of it is dangerous.
There's no risk of anything bad happening to you.
I promise you that. Likewise, for those of you who have been watching me for a while, there are two things that hypnotists do that have already been accomplished I wasn't trying to do that, at least in this context, but it happened.
One of them is credibility.
You have to have credibility in the hypnotist, your therapist, your doctor.
It helps. I have credibility to many of you because you've been watching me for a long time and you wouldn't be watching unless you thought I had some credibility.
So the first part is satisfied for most of you.
Second part is pacing.
This is what hypnotists do.
They match you in some way until you feel compatible with them, and then whatever message comes from the hypnotist feels like it's something very comfortable and familiar because you've already paced them or matched them in some way.
Now, unintentionally, it wasn't what I was trying to do, but those of you who have been doing the simultaneous sip, those of you who have been watching me for a while, have somewhat accidentally paced me.
Meaning that you feel some comfort with me.
That's requirement number two.
So the first two requirements of hypnosis have been satisfied.
I'm not going to put you into a trance per se, but I am going to have you go through a guided visualization, which I think you will find, in some cases, profound.
In other cases, you won't feel anything.
So everybody will have a different experience from this.
Alright, let me give you some background.
This is called the pre-talk.
In hypnosis, this is also part of the technique.
So I'm going to make you feel comfortable with what I'm going to do next as part of the technique.
Alright, here's some background.
I keep hearing from people, and maybe you saw it yesterday, that I had cured them of their Trump derangement syndrome prior to the election in 2016, or in some cases after.
And so many people have told me that independently that I thought, huh, there must be something to that.
So here people had a specific kind of anxiety, fear that the world would be destroyed by this orange monster.
And there's something I did, or some things I did over time, which caused people, and they're telling me, I'm not making this up, this is what they report to me, lots of people, lots of them, I lost their anxiety and felt comfortable with the president after they listened to me.
So that's one example of where I know, based on reports from lots of people, that they had a specific kind of anxiety that I cured.
But I heard an even more interesting example the other day, and it came from somebody who reported having a lifetime of anxiety, crippling Mental problem anxiety, the kind that really ruins your life.
Now, anxiety disorders take many forms.
You could be afraid of, and I may be using the language a little differently than maybe an expert in mental health would.
So take it as an approximate.
So anxiety would describe somebody who had a phobia, fear of the public, fear of danger, fear of this.
It might describe somebody who had OCD. OCD is kind of anxiety because you feel if I don't do this thing ten times or whatever the number is, some bad luck will happen.
So it's sort of this general anxiety fear.
Many of you probably are experiencing anxiety in the last several years that you had never felt before.
And there's something about modern life and about, I don't know, maybe it's about the The news business that gets people worked up.
Maybe it's our technology.
But whatever it is, there's a gigantic whole ball of different anxiety-related problems that people have.
So this one individual told me a few days ago that I had cured a lifetime of anxiety problems.
And I thought to myself, I did?
What was it I said?
And so I asked, what was it I said that cured a lifetime of anxiety problems that all the medical professionals couldn't make a dent in?
And this person told me.
And I started to connect it with other things I knew and develop an idea of what causes it.
Now let me give you some more background and I'll pull this all together.
I've talked, and of course you've seen it in the news, about how hallucinogens, specifically psilocybin that comes from hallucinogenic mushrooms, LSD and some other hallucinogens are being used by medical professionals to cure various anxieties from PTSD to all kinds of stuff and almost instantly.
In other words, one dose In some cases, is curing people of a lifetime of mental problems.
And there's so much of that, and there's so many stories of it, that it's considered one of the most exciting fields in mental health.
Now, if you read up, or if you've had the experience, as I have, of having any kind of hallucinogenic experience, I did mushrooms in my 20s, and I talk about how it was one of my most meaningful experiences.
And I read about other people's experience, and the most common thing that people say Is that they describe it as ego death.
Ego death.
Now, if you've never experienced ego death, and you've never experienced any kind of hallucinogenic experience at all, that doesn't mean anything to you.
If I said, hey, ego death, what does that even mean?
So everybody probably has sort of a personal experience that they tend to describe that way.
It's exactly how I described it.
Before I'd ever heard anybody else use those terms, it was exactly the words I used.
It's ego death.
Now, for our purposes, I'm going to define your ego as that part of you that makes you feel special.
The thing that makes you feel like you're special and important, that's your ego.
I'm giving you a very friendly definition, so no deep psychology here.
But the thing that makes you really feel special is your ego.
And let me tell you why this is important.
By an analogy.
Now analogies are not good for persuading, as I often say, but they're good for explaining a new concept.
So here's the new concept.
Suppose I said to you, I would like you to take this potato, just a regular uncooked potato, and could you walk it half a mile that way and give it to somebody?
Now, forget about why.
Why you need to deliver this potato, that's not important.
But if I say, could you take this potato and deliver it over there, and you've got the time and the inclination to do that, would that give you any anxiety?
Probably not. Because what's the worst that could happen?
You drop the potato?
Well, it's just a potato. You lose the potato?
It's just a potato. You get busy and you don't make it with your potato?
What's the difference? It's just a potato.
That person can get a new potato.
Potato has no value.
Now let's say I said instead of a potato, could you take this priceless painting by Picasso and just walk it down the street to where it needs to go to the museum?
Could you do that for me?
Now let's imagine it's a world where there's no crime, so you're not worried about crime.
You're only worried about the safety of the painting, and all you're doing is just carrying it half a mile that way and giving it to the museum.
How much anxiety would you have if you were holding a priceless, irreplaceable painting, and you're just walking down the sidewalk with it?
You'd be plenty worried because of the value of the painting.
You'd worry that a bird would do something, that a wind would come up and put some dirt on it.
You'd worry that you'd trip.
You'd worry that somebody would come along.
You'd worry that a car would splash water on it.
It would be your fault.
You'd have to pay for it.
You'd have all kinds of things to worry about.
And it's only because the painting is so valuable.
The potato was not.
So what you need to learn is to be the potato.
Don't be the painting. Be the potato.
Now, why is it that a psychedelic experience would give you ego death and would turn you from somebody who's trying to deliver a priceless painting into somebody who says, no care in the world, it's just a potato.
And here's my hypothesis.
The hypothesis is that when you have the ego death, you have nothing to worry about.
Because there's nothing to protect.
And I think that the way that you come about that is indirectly.
The way that you get to that is by being in the hallucinogenic experience.
You see your environment completely differently for the first time.
And yet, and here's the important part, you understand it.
You see your world as if it's brand new, but you still understand it.
And by the way, other people explain it the same way.
Now, once you've experienced that you could have a completely different set of subjective interpretations of your environment, what does that tell you about your old view of the world?
It was subjective.
It wasn't right.
More importantly, it wasn't important.
The way you always saw the world before that first time you saw it differently was never real.
And it was never important.
And if the way you see the entire reality is unimportant and you just feel that you're part of that larger reality and that it is subjective, you suddenly start to feel that you are not that important.
But here's the important part.
You never lose the sense that you need to take care of your life and your health and all that.
There's no danger. You simply take your unreasonable fear of protecting yourself and it comes down to a normal, well, I have to eat today.
I've got to sleep. If I cross the road, I've still got to look both ways.
There's no downside.
You still will be fully protective of yourself, but you will just learn that you're more like a potato than like a priceless painting.
Once you get that feeling that your ego is not important, what would you ever be afraid of?
Would you be afraid of the future?
No. There's nothing to be afraid of because there's nothing at risk but a potato.
So, I'm going to walk you through something, a set of thoughts, that will reproduce what a...
What a hallucinogenic trip would do.
So I'm going to give you, without the hallucinogens, and therefore without the risk that any hallucinogen might have, there's a small risk, but you won't have any of that, I'm going to give it to you without that.
All right? And bear with me.
It's going to take a little bit of setup, and then we're going to do it.
The first thing you need to know, and this will be helpful, is that There are different filters in the world, and you've probably experienced them.
For example, did you know that in quantum physics a particle that exists on the other part of the universe that has never been seen and never been measured in any way doesn't actually exist?
Did you know that? This is actual scientific truth.
Matter, the actual building blocks of our reality, we know don't actually exist except as probability until a human or a machine or an animal or something that can see something and detect something, until something is seen and detected, it doesn't actually exist.
Now all the things in your room around you exist in a sense because you're looking at them.
Somebody's measured it, touched it, looked at it.
But scientifically, we know, and by the way, there's nothing controversial in this.
This would be something every scientist would agree.
Matter doesn't exist until it's witnessed by a machine or a person.
What's that mean? Well, it probably means that there's some subjectivity to your perceptions.
Let me give you some other examples.
Religion. How many people are walking around that have different religions?
If somebody is, let's say, a Hindu, and they believe that they have reincarnated and are going to reincarnate, and they're standing in the same room with somebody who's a Muslim or a Christian, are they experiencing the same reality?
I would say no. I would say no.
If you believe that everything that's happening to you is God's will, that's not really the same reality as the person who thinks it's their own doing or the person who thinks they're in a simulation.
These are completely different subjective realities.
You also know, because you've been following me for a while, you know that in politics we can look at the same set of facts and see a different movie.
I call it the two movies on one screen.
You've seen it now a hundred times.
You see it every time anybody looks at a document.
I see this, a crime.
I don't see a crime.
I'm looking at the same document.
So you can see in real time, on the news, every single day, that people who are sincere, and they're not lying in every case, there are liars on the news, but they're not lying about their perception.
They are looking at the same stuff you are, but they're seeing a different reality.
Normal, completely common.
Once you understand that, you can start to release on your preferred version of the world.
Yeah, you've seen it with the optical illusions, like Laurel and Yanni, that you could hear the Laurel or the Yanni.
You've seen the ones where you can think a different word, and then the word you're hearing starts to sound like that word, but then you can think of a different word, and the sound you're hearing, that's the same sound, sounds like the other word.
You see lots of tests like that.
And again, it's showing you that your impression of reality is subjective.
Now here's another framing that will change your frame.
Instead of seeing the world as there's you, and then there's this reality that's sort of fixed and you're just looking at it, think of yourself as almost like The person in the robot's head.
Think of your body as a big old robot.
In this case, it's a moist robot or a biological robot.
But imagine yourself as a person in the control room inside your head.
You're looking out your eyes, and you're controlling this big robot that is your body.
Just think about that.
And then think about the fact that there are different filters, as I call them, on your perceptions And so sometimes your big robot body is hungry.
You know that you see the world differently when you're hungry.
Things bother you that wouldn't bother you.
You're angry about things you didn't need to be angry about.
But you're not really seeing those things.
You're seeing it through a filter of your own hunger.
And it makes you angry sometimes.
Likewise, if you're tired, that's a different filter.
Likewise, if you're an optimist, you're seeing the world through a different filter.
If you believe you live in a simulation, you're seeing the world through a different filter.
If you have a different religion, it's a different filter.
Once you start to understand that your filters are interchangeable and it has nothing to do with you, whoever is you, whatever is this thing called you, Your preferences, your experiences, your memories, whatever it is.
It can be all kinds of different things in terms of how it sees the world.
But you don't really change.
Not that much anyway.
What changes is your filter.
Take your filter down. Hey, this president is a big old monster.
Change the filter. Oh, he just operates differently.
Now I see it through a different filter.
This mental exercise of being able to see the world as a filter We'll depersonalize things and give you very close to your escape route.
But we're going to take you all the way there in a moment.
And it goes like this.
Are you ready? Here's the payoff.
In the next few moments, some of you, not all of you, because everybody's going to have their own experience, some of you are going to have a deep experience in the next minute or two.
Watch this. All right?
I want you to relax.
I'm not going to hypnotize you, but I'm going to take you through some guided imagery.
You don't have to close your eyes.
In fact, keep them open.
Keep your eyes open. Take a deep breath.
Loosen your shoulders. And now, I want you to imagine, not as if it's true, but just imagine, that everything you see in your environment, your room, the device you're looking at, the table, The objects, whatever you were using to drink, imagine them as if they're a virtual reality.
Imagine that you're not in a real reality, but rather you're in a virtual one.
Now it's a special one, because if you touch something, you can feel it.
But imagine that's just an illusion.
And imagine without touching anything, you just look around and you look at an object.
Pick an object in your room and And just look at it and imagine, instead of it being real, that it's a perfectly rendered virtual reality simulation.
Now watch how that makes you feel.
Just feel yourself in the moment, just looking at your environment.
Don't think of anything else.
Don't think of anything outside of your direct immediate experience.
Look at them. And imagine them as a virtual reality construct.
And see what happens.
Do you feel it?
Yeah, some of you are already feeling it.
Keep doing it. Stay in the moment.
Stay in the moment.
Future doesn't matter.
Just look at your objects.
Look around you. And imagine that they're not real, they're subjective.
They're just like a virtual reality.
Now, do that, and then repeat.
The first time you do it, some of you will have a profound experience.
You see in the comments, somebody says, goosebumps.
Somebody else, no experience whatsoever.
For those of you who have had a lifetime of anxiety issues, keep these thoughts in mind, because it's the setup as much as the exercise.
Think about life as filters.
Think about your ego as unimportant, worth protecting, but it's not the be-all, end-all.
Just see yourself in a simulated subjective reality and know that you can change the subjective reality if you need to.
You have control.
You can see in the comments somebody is crying.
Some of you, not all of you, some of you were just released from a lifetime of pain, a lifetime of anxiety.
Some of you just got released.
Some of you will be released later.
You'll think about this, and you won't be able to get it out of your mind.
And you'll repeat the exercise on your own.
You'll look around wherever you are.
You'll imagine it as a virtual reality.
And it will give you the same sensation that people have when they experience ego death.
And it will free you.
And that's all you need.
And I'll end it right there.
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