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Jan. 18, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
50:24
Episode 791 Scott Adams: The News First, Then I Will Rewire Your Brains to Relieve Anxiety
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
For some of you, this will be the best day of your life.
You don't know it yet.
But that's the fun part.
Sometimes life sneaks up on you.
We're going to be talking about the headlines in a minute.
And after that, I'm going to show you some techniques for getting rid of your anxieties of all kinds.
Won't work for every person, but for some of you, it'll probably be life-changing.
So stay tuned for that. But first, oh yes, first, you've got to have a little thing called a simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen drug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go! Now that's the kind of sip to get your weekend going.
So, I've told you before how weird my life is.
My life is so weird.
It's hard to imagine what it's like to be me.
Let me tell you my experience in the last 24 hours.
I got my televisions fixed and my house had some technical problems.
And so I decided to watch some television.
So I turned on one show and I'm watching Fox News and I'm watching The Five, my favorite show.
And I turned on the TV and they're talking about me.
You know, Greg was mentioning something that I'd mentioned.
And I thought, how weird, I'm turning on the television, and the television's talking about me.
And then later, I saw an article somewhere on the internet, and it was in Forbes magazine, and it was about the value of mushrooms as hallucinogens that could help people with a whole variety of mental issues.
And I thought, well, this is an interesting article, because I have an interest in this.
I'll talk about it a little bit later.
So I'm reading the article, and the article's about me.
I mean, it's not the entire article about me, but I'm one of about five people mentioned in the article who have brought up this topic as something meaningful.
And I thought, how weird.
I turn on the television, and it's about me.
And then I read an article, one of the few articles I was interested in, enough to actually read the whole article.
And it's about me. This morning, about five minutes ago, somebody was nice enough to tweet me a video in which MMA champion, one of the greats of all time, Conor McGregor, his coach, a guy named John Cavanaugh, is talking about training Conor McGregor.
Now, you all know Conor McGregor, right?
One of the most famous athletes of all time.
If you don't follow MMA, maybe you haven't heard the name.
But within that world, he would be the superstar that everybody knows.
And John Cavanaugh, when asked about his training, he says that they're going to use systems instead of goals, and then he name-checks me.
So apparently, I'm some important part Of Conor McGregor's training.
Is that a weird world?
Imagine waking up to that.
How strange. So I'm very, very happy for anybody who finds value in that stuff, these systems being better than goals.
And now I'm a bigger fan of Conor McGregor than ever before.
So I'd like to see him win since he's using, at least to some small extent, He's using something that I promoted in my book, Catafailed Almost Everything, and still went big.
I think it's over my shoulder there.
Alright, let's talk about some of the news, and then at the end, I'm going to cure a number of you of some anxiety problems.
If you don't think that's real, stick around.
Because I know some of you don't.
Others of you are saying to yourself, I've been watching this guy for a while, And I didn't believe any of the other things he predicted until they happened.
And I didn't believe the effect it would have on me until it did.
How many of you joined me in the simultaneous sip today and actually raised a glass?
Or in many cases I'm hearing, John, I know your wife is watching.
Sometimes they do the simultaneous sip without a cup in their hands.
Did you think that you would ever be addicted to the simultaneous sip?
Probably not. And that was a very small example of your brain being rewired in a way that's just fun.
Nobody gets hurt. It's just fun to do the simultaneous sip.
After I talk about some news, I'm going to rewire your brains again.
And you are going to be amazed in some cases.
Other cases, everybody's different, so you'll all have a different experience.
Let's talk about the news first.
New York Times had a big article today about an app called Clearview AI. And it's an app that runs on the phone, I guess, mobile devices.
And law enforcement is using it to identify faces to get the identification of somebody just by their face.
Now apparently what the app has done is it has Scraped.
That's sort of a technical word, scraped.
In other words, it went into other databases and grabbed faces.
Apparently, there's access to Facebook data, at least the photos that are available.
Venmo has a bunch of faces and some other sources.
So this app has an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude more.
Available faces in this database than even the systems that law enforcement was already using.
So law enforcement already could identify a face in some cases if they had you in their database.
But until this app came along, you couldn't just take a picture of a dead guy on the street and his name would pop up.
They didn't have that.
So there are actually a whole bunch of examples around the country where police Literally, they'll find a body with no identification, snap a picture of it, and any kind of social media or internet presence pops up immediately.
So they've apparently solved a whole bunch of crimes with this.
Now, people of course are worried about the privacy aspect of it, and I think the founder, when he was interviewed, I kind of, not kind of, I totally agree with his take.
I think somebody else was interviewed for it.
And that is that privacy is sort of a thing of the past.
There really isn't any chance that this won't be a universal kind of product.
So, they're just providing a service that solves a whole bunch of crimes, and it's a technology you're probably going to see anyway.
You know, there wasn't any way around it.
But, wow! Just think about that.
Now, the future uses that people talk about but are not yet the actual uses, so at the moment it's sort of focused on law enforcement.
So they're the ones who get the contracts to use this thing.
But people are saying, what happens someday when you've got the goggles on and you can just tell everybody's identity just walking through a crowd?
What kind of abuse would there be, etc.?
So those are all issues that Society needs to grapple with.
But wow! Just the fact that that exists and it works and it's solving crimes is pretty amazing.
It's called Clearview AI. The teams for the impeachment, defense and prosecution, if you can call it that, loosely speaking, have been formed.
It looks like the Democrats have on their team a bunch of people who I haven't heard of.
And some I have that don't seem too impressive.
So that's what the Democrats have.
Now, maybe they're great, because like I said, I haven't heard of them.
So they might be terrific.
I don't know. But it turns out that the Republicans have wisely lined up their own team, and they have the ultimate kill shot on the team.
So Alan Dershowitz is on the I just saw an interview with him.
He would say he's on the side of the Constitution.
So in his view of his job, he's not defending this president.
He's defending all presidents.
Because this is such an important thing.
It'll reverberate through time.
It would affect any president.
Dershowitz says, and I think it's completely credible when he says it, that he would give exactly the same defense for a Clinton, for a Democrat.
It wouldn't matter who it was, because it's not about the person, it's not about even the situation, it's about the Constitution.
But here's the fun part.
Remember, the Senate can kind of make up its own rules, and they can decide whenever they want to, after hearing, I think, the open arguments, then they can decide whether they want more witnesses.
Do you know what Dershowitz is going to do to this thing?
Dershowitz is going to be, presumably, part of the opening statements.
After Dershowitz says, even if everything that is alleged about the president is true, the Constitution does not recognize this as impeachable.
What will the Republican-led Senate do after Dershowitz One of the most renowned, respected, knowledgeable, experienced experts on constitutional law, after he says, yeah, it wouldn't matter what the details are.
Everything that they've alleged falls into the category of not impeachable.
Here's why. And I heard a brief explanation on one of his interviews.
So the abuse of power charge, for example...
is not one of the intended impeachable offenses.
Indeed, apparently there's a history, a written, documented history of the founders discussing whether that should be part of impeachment.
And they expressly discussed it and specifically declined to put it in the Constitution.
It was a decision.
So you don't have to worry about the gray area.
There's no gray area.
It was discussed. It was documented.
They decided clearly not to put it in the Constitution because they didn't want that to be one of the things you could be impeached for.
And that's their case.
That's the end. After Dershowitz speaks, Mitch McConnell can say, all right, let's make this a two-stage process.
And I think this would be very fair.
Stage one. Are the things that are alleged, we don't even have to worry about they're true or untrue.
We don't have to worry about the way you're spinning it.
You don't want our version or their version.
If it's all true, would it be impeachable?
We just heard our experts say, no.
Let's first vote on that.
That if these allegations are true, would it be impeachable?
Before we dig into witnesses and finding out if it's true, I think once he says it's not impeachable, you could just end the whole thing.
Or at least you could vote to end the whole thing, and you would have all the cover you needed.
So one of the things about Nershowitz is, if you watch him long enough, I've been watching him for a long time, and I'm actually blown away every time he talks.
I'm blown away at the The skill.
Dershowitz never wastes a word.
Now he's really good at hitting the news, you know, two-minute hits.
So he can put more content in fewer words than anybody you've ever seen.
I mean, he's really amazing.
So I think he's the kill shot.
I don't think anything else is going to matter.
Dershowitz is going to just lay it out.
He's going to clean the table, and there's not going to be left anything else to discuss after he's done, I think.
Anyway, that's an option. Senator Martha McSally insulted CNN's Manu Raju.
Manu Raju asked her a question as she was walking down the hall, and she said, you're a hack.
I'm not going to answer your question.
You're a hack. Now, of course, the CNN hosts were deeply offended and wanted an apology and think that's inappropriate.
But I have to say, this has got to be some of the blowback from the last debate and the way they treated Bernie.
I mean, it kind of felt...
Remember I said the other day it felt like a turning point?
It felt like the point where people no longer...
Accepted that the news is anything like news, but rather it's just part of the political process.
The funniest part was watching, I just watched a little clip of Jeffrey Toobin, one of their legal experts, and he was defending the accusation that CNN makes up its news.
And he said, unambiguously, that's not true.
I'm paraphrasing.
He didn't use these exact words.
But he was defending the accusation that CNN is fake news.
And I thought to myself, if you're on TV defending whether your news channel is actually making up the news, you've already lost.
Here's what you never want to do on air on your own news network.
Defend the accusation that you're making up the news in general.
He's not defending that there was one particular thing that was right or wrong, but rather that the entire network does or does not just make up the news.
Just invent it.
And if you're defending that, that's a weak position.
I think I would have rather maybe stayed away from that if I were him.
So there's a new hit piece, book, book, By two Washington Post reporters.
Do I need to say more? There's an anti-Trump book written by two Washington Post reporters.
Can I just stop there?
Anything else we need to say?
I don't think so.
I think that's the whole story.
Because everything else you hear about this has no credibility whatsoever.
But, here's their allegation.
Apparently in 2017, I think it was, President Trump was alleged to have been angry at his generals about not winning in Afghanistan and not winning at all.
And this is what the two totally credible Washington Post reporters, I say with a twinkle in my eye, totally credible, because the Washington Post, of course, is an anti-Trump organization.
He's alleged to have said, quote, you're all losers.
Do you think that President Trump Looked at a room full of the greatest generals in American, you know, at least currently in American history, and said to them, you're all losers.
You don't know how to win anymore.
The commander-in-chief told the meeting attendees, allegedly, according to the Post's quote of the book.
The president's tirade continued, with Trump telling the military officials, I wouldn't go to war with you people.
You're a bunch of dopes and babies, he told The Room, according to the Post's excerpts.
And then apparently after that is when Rex Tillerson insulted the president, saying he was a moron, and eventually Tillerson got fired.
Now, do you believe that those were his exact words?
Okay, I don't.
Now, they could be.
I think it's entirely possible that those are somewhere in the general neighborhood of his message.
I think that's very believable.
I think it's very believable that he thought his generals could be more, let's say, winning-oriented than they have been, especially in Afghanistan.
That all makes perfect sense.
But do you think he looked at them and said, you're all losers, you're a bunch of dopes and babies?
To which I say, maybe.
Somebody said maybe at the same time I did in the comments.
Maybe. Suppose he did.
How do you feel about it?
How do you feel about it?
Suppose that's exactly what he said.
He said to the generals, you're all losers, you're a bunch of dopes and babies, I wouldn't go to war with you.
What if he did say that?
Do you care? I don't.
Not really. I don't really care.
What happened since then?
That happened in 2017.
What has been our experience with the military since then?
Winning. A lot of winning.
Seems like to me.
So, it's possible he gave them some tough love.
I don't know if that's true or not.
You certainly couldn't take that as true.
But I'm not sure it matters in any real way.
Dan Bongino tweeted out, that's how I saw it, a campaign ad by somebody who's...
A Democratic, no, it must be a Republican competitor to Ilhan Omar.
So somebody who's competing for Ilhan Omar's seat.
And it is one of the most amazing videos or ads you've ever seen.
I turned it on just because Dan Bongino said it was great.
He had like little fireballs in his tweet.
I thought, oh, that's a lot of little fireballs.
Dan, that must mean something.
So I turn it on, and I'm hooked in the first five seconds.
It's kind of a long ad, but five seconds in, I was so hooked, I went into a separate room so I wouldn't be disturbed until I got to the end.
Now, I'm not going to say it's the best political ad I've ever seen in my life, because the stuff that Brad Parscale is...
Creating is pretty darn good.
And I praised Bernie Sanders in his last campaign.
He had a great commercial, one of the best.
So there have been some great campaign commercials.
But when I saw this, this is in the top three.
I mean, it's really, really good.
So you'd have to see it yourself to know what I talk about.
But here's the cool part.
She's very qualified. Well, the cool part is that she's an American born in Iraq.
So she had experience with a lot of the Saddam Hussein reign.
Now she's an American.
She's running for Congress.
And here's the amazing part.
Her charisma?
Oh, my God.
Her charisma.
One of the things we talk about with AOC, and I would say with Ilhan Omar, you could dislike their policies, or you could like their policies, but independent of their politics, their charisma just jumps off the page.
You could dislike Ilhan Omar all you want.
I know a lot of you are Republicans.
You probably do. But you've got to say, you've got to give it to her.
She is really charismatic.
When Ilhan Omar is on the screen, I do stop and watch.
Because she's got that X-factor, that thing that makes you want to pay attention.
It's not her looks.
It's not any one thing.
It's the whole package. Anyway, the woman who is running for Ilhan Omar's seat, her first name is Dahlia.
And I'll tell you her last name, but not until later.
Because there's a story there.
So Dahlia has a voice and a presentation that reminded me of my favorite actress on a series called The Expanse.
How many of you have seen the sci-fi show The Expanse?
And there's a character there who plays the, I don't know, she's the president of Earth or Mars, I can't remember, president of Mars?
And she's got this really interesting Iranian accent.
So she speaks English, but she's got an Iranian accent.
And it's the kind of accent you could listen to all day.
I mean, it's just delicious.
You're just listening to this actress.
Every moment she's on screen, again, charisma.
In movie terms, she chews up scenery.
When she's on screen, you stop what you're doing and you listen to every word.
It's like listening to music when she talks.
It's just beautiful. And this competitor to Ilhan Omar, Dahlia, she has that voice.
You know, a version of that.
And you listen to it, and you're like, oh my god, do I want to listen to more of that.
Apparently it's an Iraqi accent, and it's just beautiful.
It's just a beautiful voice.
I mean, really powerful.
So it's got power, it's got passion, and man, does she have charisma.
I would love to know how she was discovered.
Now, she's got all kinds of experience across different fields, so she's got the full non-loser-think experience because she's been through different domains.
And I did not think that it would be possible to have an able competitor to Elon Omar, but there it is.
That is a really strong politician.
All right, so look for that.
Oh, here's the punchline.
And I hate to say this, because I only have good things to say about her as her...
Yeah, I only have good things to say about her.
Somebody's telling me she's Iranian.
So is her accent also Iranian?
Because Iraq is her experience, but she may have some Iranian blood.
I don't know. It doesn't matter. But here's the unfortunate part.
This is her last name, Dalia.
Al Aikido. Now, when I pronounce it, you say, well, that's a nice last name.
Al Aikido. I like that.
Sounds good. Here's the problem.
When you see it written, it looks like Al-Qaeda.
Now, it doesn't look like it.
But your brain just goes there automatically because it's Al-Akida.
It's just a little too close.
So that is the simulation just messing with us because she's got that much talent and then she has that last name.
I hope that doesn't stop her.
You know, I've told you how the Republic has morphed into more of a social media is driving politics now.
Here's a good example of that.
I'm looking through my Twitter feed, and I see a tweet by Congressperson Tim Burchett, a Tennessee congressman.
And the Tennessee congressman tweets this to President Trump.
He says, keep pushing development of fast reactors.
Using 95% of nuclear waste for fuel is a game changer.
So he's talking about Generation 4, you know, new types of nuclear power.
And I thought to myself, whoa!
This is great. There's a congressman tweeting at the president.
Obviously, he understands the importance of this field.
And I thought, this is great.
So I thought, I should follow this guy.
So I go to follow him, and I noticed he follows me.
So he was already following me, and he might be listening to this, for all I know.
He's also following Mark Schneider.
Who you know as our favorite advocate for Generation 4 and nuclear power.
And so I'm pretty sure that some of his, at least some of his, let's say, whatever formed his opinion probably came from a variety of sources.
But I think Mark Schneider probably helped inform this guy, this congressperson, who is now informing the president.
And when you see this, It just gives you chills.
Because you see something close to like a curated democracy or best idea wins democracy.
The good ideas are the ones that bubble up.
And so you can see these good ideas bubbling up from social media.
You know that Congress just heard from Michael Schellenberger, and he was using the phrase, green nuclear deal.
And you see all these ideas.
They're basically coming from Mark Schneider.
He's been promoting them.
I boost his signal.
Mike Schellenberger is boosting his signal.
I boost Mike Schellenberger's signal.
And now there's a congressperson boosting the signal to the president exactly the way it's supposed to look.
All right? That's just some good news.
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 edit 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've 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.
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 through 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, 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.
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 a 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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