All Episodes
Previous Next
May 7, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
48:51
Episode 959 Scott Adams: Join Me in My Fortress of Garagitude
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
*Dramatic Music* *Dramatic Music* *Dramatic Music* *Dramatic Music* Hey everybody, come on in!
It's time for the evening edition of No Causing with Scott Adams.
No Causing with Scott Adams
Thank you.
I told you before this little lockdown started that I never liked a lot of good disaster be wasted.
Of course, that's the oldest saying in the books, but how many of you took it to heart?
I had a few objectives for this lockdown.
One was I was going to learn some new skills.
I had been already practicing the drums, but I wanted to see if I could take it to another level.
And I was working on my biceps.
Somebody asked me if it was photoshopped.
So I just decided to focus on this one body part because I never had a good bicep.
So it's not like everything else is good, but I thought, hey, I'm going to have 60 days locked up.
I'm going to have a biceps when I get out.
So I did that, and most of you know that I put my content on the Locals platform.
So there's a subscriber platform.
I've got lots of different stuff there.
So that's like a new line of business in a sense.
I hope that all of you are doing something similar.
I mentioned it on Twitter.
So if somebody says we built a house, very good.
Learn to cook?
Well, that would be good if you did that.
So all of you should try to come out of this with a skill.
The AirPods are connected, or at least they should be.
You can all hear me, right?
So I let the abs go to heck because Christine actually likes me heavier, which is very convenient.
So she actually asked me to gain weight.
So give up a little on the abs to get a little bit on the arms.
See what that looks like for a while.
Try it out. So here's my advice to you.
Here's a little life advice.
And I know most of you already do this, but all I'm going to add to what you already know to do is how extreme to do it.
And one of the reasons that I took up the drums, especially later in life, is that I have absolutely no musical ability whatsoever.
So the first thing I could do by taking drums I could fill in a blank spot in my social understanding of things, which is a little bit about how music works, which I never had any interest in before.
Secondly, my fiancée, Christina, is a gifted musician, and he gives me something to talk about, and we can compare notes on musical things, and it's like a whole new topic of things to talk about.
So that's fun, too. But actually, the biggest reason that I did this is to work on my dexterity, just, you know, my actual coordination, and to exercise a part of my brain that I'd never exercised before.
So this is another lifelong practice, that if there's a part of your brain that you don't use, just sort of excited a little bit.
And so this is completely outside of my talon zone, my experience zone, and that's part of what's appealing about it.
So it keeps me sharp.
Makes me learn a new thing, keeps me interested.
The other big benefit, and I talk about this with skill stacking, is that if you add two skills together, it's more than just twice as good to add that second skill.
Because it sometimes makes you think of new connections that you wouldn't have thought of before.
And one of the things I wanted to explore is the connection between music and persuasion.
It should be no surprise to you that music can be persuasive because it can literally change your mood and it can do it in the moment.
So since music is persuasive, but if you don't, let's say, control it and manage it, it's persuasive randomly.
Could you learn something by learning music that would have some crossover with persuasion?
Now these are exactly the kind of things you accidentally discover when you start layering skills on, which is, really?
What does cooking have to do with mountain climbing and then suddenly there actually is something in common?
I can't think what that would be right now, but you get my point.
So here's the theory that I've been working on.
And by the way, when I learn a new thing like this, unless I'm doing it for money and I'm really serious about getting to that confidence quickly, I prefer to learn it as inefficiently as possible.
And I know that sounds weird, but rather than get an instructor, you know, obviously I could pay somebody to sit next to me and I would get better faster.
But I don't want to do that.
I want to just learn the rules, which is, this is how you read the sheet music.
And I want to know that, you know, how to hold the sticks, what everything sounds like, and the basics.
But after that, I want to sort of figure it out myself.
You know, there's layers and layers and layers of drumming, seemingly infinite layers of things that you wouldn't even know are things.
You know, just the technique and how to play in ways that make you feel different things, etc.
So, here's what I'm finding.
I'm finding that I think there's something about pattern and then disruption of pattern that is very related to persuasion.
And I don't quite have a working theory on this, but it's something like this, that your brain is a pattern recognition machine.
And so music has a very special hook to your brain because music is pattern.
And if it were not pattern, you would not recognize it as music.
So you've got a pattern-recognizing machine, and then you've got this sort of input, which is the music.
And I think, and I'm just working on this sort of very early hypothesis, it seems as though there's something about your brain recognizing there's a pattern and then having it violated and then wanting a pattern again, and just as you're wanting it, it comes back.
So there's something about teasing you with repetition, mixing it up, and then teasing you back with repetition.
So it's sort of like getting you in the groove, mix it up, get you back in the groove, mix it up.
Indeed, drumming is exactly that.
In fact, there are two parts of drumming and they're exactly those two things.
There's just the The pattern and suddenly you're interested.
It's like, what? So I got your attention.
So attention is almost entirely a violation of pattern because you can't pay attention to everything in your world.
You just get used to the pattern.
Oh, my chair is always there.
The light is there. The floor is there.
So it's the violations of the pattern that get your attention.
And therefore, music has those two parts.
So the other part that's not the repetitive beat It's called F-I-L-L-S. That's where you break the pattern and you might go...
Now, it turns out that the fills can be just about anything.
And that was one of the things that was hardest for me to learn.
Because I thought, okay, tell me the rules for the fill.
And my drum teacher was like, well, you could do this or that.
And I'm like, okay, I know you could do those things, but what's the rule?
You know, is it always three and then one?
Do you have to use a certain set of drums in a certain order?
It turns out there's just no rules, as long as you keep with the timing of the music.
So you have to stay with the timing.
But otherwise, it's just as good as...
Now, is any of this real?
I mean, is there really a...
Connection between persuasion and pattern recognition and music?
I don't know. But I know that it's fun to think about and there are a thousand connections that you don't expect that can hit you at any moment.
Let's talk about things that are happening.
I saw the best dad joke on the internet today.
Do you know Paul Graham?
Founder of Y Combinator.
Very smart, successful investor type.
And he tweeted this.
He said, I got a haircut just before quarantine started, but I'm starting to think I should have gotten two.
Now, you would recognize that as sort of a dad joke.
And I don't think he was trying to make it anything else.
I'm a big fan of dad jokes.
I think it's a genre, and as long as you know that's what you're getting, same with puns, right?
You know, puns are some say the lowest form of humor, but if you know that's what you're doing, you know, that's your genre, well, you know, that could be fine.
So here's my point.
The joke is funny for this rule that I keep teaching you, and every time you see another example of it, It'll be more real to you.
And it's this. The thing that makes something funny, usually, there could be exceptions to this, but it's like the closest to a universal rule of humor.
It's something that almost makes sense, but doesn't.
In other words, your brain wants it to make sense but it knows it doesn't and it tries to reconcile it and that little disconnect between it making sense almost but not is what causes your reflex, the left reflex.
So that's why the Paul Graham joke works so well because there's like a broken logic to it.
It's like, well yeah, if If you need twice as many haircuts, why don't you just get them in advance?
Oh wait, that doesn't work.
And so when you realize that it doesn't work, that's the laugh.
I would argue, and I have before, that politics is largely replacing humor as an entertainment source.
So there used to be more humorous movies and TV shows, but they've largely been replaced by reality.
But not every reality.
Not everything is funny.
But the reason that Trump is so hilarious to some of us, those of us who can't It's funny to those of us who are not afraid of him, basically.
So if you get that you're in on the joke, he's in on the joke, he knows other people know he's in on the joke, and the joke is on other people, if you get that, it's hilarious.
But here's why it works.
When Trump calls George Conway Moonface, it just shouldn't be happening, right?
Your understanding of the world is suddenly broken.
It's like, he's the president of the United States and he just called somebody moon-faced in public.
Wait, we're not done yet.
It happens to be the husband of one of his closest advisors.
And then your brain just goes, I don't know what I'm seeing.
My brain can't make sense of the fact that he's trashing the husband Of one of his closest long-time advisors, Kellyanne, and he's not supposed to be calling people Moonface, and none of it makes sense, and then you laugh. So, the reason that Trump has replaced humor is that he breaks logic all the time.
He just does what you're not supposed to do, and I frankly find it hilarious, but I do understand that other people are troubled by it.
Have you ever seen the show VEEP? V-E-E-P? It was Julie Louis-Dreyfus, and she played on Showtime, I think, for HBO, I forget, Showtime.
She played a vice president, and it was a comedy, but a running joke through the entire series, which was quite great, by the way.
If you get a chance to binge watch it, totally worth it.
But a running joke Is that she was a female vice president and she swore like a wounded sailor.
And she would swear in like ways that you didn't even know could be dumb.
Like even things that I've never thought of.
Curses that I don't know if they made up in the writing room or I just haven't been on a merchant seamen ship or something.
I haven't been exposed to apparently all of the filthy things that you can say when you're mad.
But that's what made the show work.
Because again, it didn't make sense.
Why is a person in that job talking like that?
So look for that when you try to be humorous yourself.
All right. I'm laughing again.
At the president's deft move on this coronavirus task force thing.
So you know the backstory. He said he wanted to disband it maybe at the end of the month.
There was a big outcry because people said, no, you fool.
The task force is all we have.
And we need that.
Give us that task force.
Now, of course, it was never as if the functions were going to go away.
It wasn't as if Fauci was going to stop answering phone calls.
You know, I think everybody probably still gets paid about the same as whatever they were doing before.
But they would just, you know, would have presumably been distributed to other areas and then kept doing what they're doing.
But there was an outcry, so the president gets all this criticism for maybe ending the task force, and what does that magnificent bastard do?
You can hate him all you want for any number of other reasons, but when he does stuff like this, you just have to shake your head and say, I didn't even see that coming.
I did not see that play.
He decides, when they ask him about it, that he'll reinstate the task force But wait for it.
This is just the best thing ever.
He decides that he's going to reinstate the task force, but he may change the people on it over time.
Okay, that makes sense.
It's still the same task force, even if you exchange some people here or there, right?
Fair enough. And then he adds that their mission will change to more about opening up the economy.
Now, if you haven't caught this move, What exactly is a task force if not the people and the mission that they have?
And he just said, I'm going to give the task force back to you.
The only thing that will be different are the two things that make it a task force, which is who's on it, potentially anyway.
And he didn't say he was going to remove everybody, but that's like the main thing.
Who's on it? And what's the mission?
That's what makes it a task force.
So he's basically said, yeah, I'll give you what you want, and then he has the complete option to change it, and he just told you he was going to.
But it gets better.
This is the deft move.
He framed it as like they're so popular.
He used the word popular.
He brought them back, and I'm going to add this word, like an encore of a popular act.
And I thought to myself, oh my god, that's so good.
They were so popular that you decided to bring them back for an encore.
That is really good, isn't it?
Wouldn't you admit that that simple framing of, no, I didn't make a mistake and correct me because everybody told me I was dumb, because that easily is what their frame would have been?
He's like, no, it was so popular.
Man, I had no idea how popular it was, so I brought him back for an encore.
I think you have to appreciate that.
All right. Here is my better argument for why I think we should not rely on testing to save us.
And it goes like this.
And these are rules you've heard before from me, but now I'm going to apply them to the situation so you see how they work.
One is that whenever you have a situation where there's a huge upside potential gain, if somebody does something, let's say illegal or shady, there's a huge amount to gain, usually money, and there's lots of people involved, that could all take advantage of this same opportunity so you don't have to worry about maybe there's one honest person because there's so many people that somebody's going to take advantage of it because there's a big upside and then here's the key almost no chance of going to jail when you have that situation huge upside lots of people involved no chance of going to jail you always have fraud not sometimes not that one time Always.
So that's my rule. Now, look at the situation where the government was trying to get all these 100 or so different testing companies and manufacturers to tell them the truth, what they could and could not do, and the government sort of had to believe them because there wasn't that much they could check.
So what do you think those 100 companies promised?
Do you think that they promised what they actually thought they could do?
Or did they exaggerate a little bit, like 10 times as much as they could probably do?
Because there was no penalty.
And whoever said that they could do the biggest number was going to get the most attention.
So if you thought you could do 10,000 units a month, you'd be dumb not to say 100,000.
Say, yeah, we're positive we can do 10,000, but I'm very confident we can get to 100,000.
We'll ramp it right up there.
Even if you don't know how you would do that.
The only thing that makes sense is to promise it.
Because suppose you don't deliver.
Well then you still sold 10,000 units a month.
You're still ahead and you probably got more attention because for a while they thought you were going to make 100,000.
So you go like to the top of the list to get funded because you're bigger.
The bigger ones will get more funding.
So of course it's a 100% chance That there's massive fraud in what these companies told the government they could do, because why wouldn't they?
There's no penalty.
All they have to do is say, we tried.
I mean, I swear I thought we could do 100,000.
We just hit a roadblock.
Huge upside, no downside, lots of people involved.
No way the government got good information from that group.
Next. The public is largely confused by what the politicians and experts have been telling them about the tests.
They're confused because there are different kinds of tests used for different purposes.
So it all ends up sounding like one big thing.
And then when the president says stuff like, all the states have sufficient testing to accomplish phase one, That sounds to you, your uncritical brain, it sounds like, okay, they've been working hard to get testing, and now the federal government is saying that there is enough testing for phase one.
Why wouldn't there be enough testing pretty soon for phase two?
Because it sounds like they've got things rolling now, right?
This is what your brain is saying.
And so probably we have either very close, or maybe the tests we need, To test our way out of this.
Because we've heard that testing is the key, right?
All the smart people say so.
Must be true. But here's what you miss.
And it took Bill Gates to explain it for me to say, oh God, is that what's happening?
And it goes like this.
If you're going to try to test your way out of it, as opposed to simply, you know, doing what you can in the hot spots, it's very different.
Trying to test your way out of something is a lot of testing.
And here's the key. It has to be almost immediate.
And people have to be able to get two or three tests, even if they don't have symptoms.
So if you want to test your way out of it, you're talking 20 million tests a day or something like that, and they all have to be the instant kind.
We don't have anything like that.
What we have is the bare minimum that somebody can get tested.
They mail it away. Three days later, it might come back.
In the meantime, you've walked around in your community spreading it.
Oh, I guess you should have been quarantined three days ago.
Now, I'm sure there are other ones, too, that are faster.
But don't be fooled, because test is not test.
There's all these different ones.
There's the serology, the testing for the antibodies are completely different tests than the others.
So there's that.
And here's the other way that you know that testing will not get us to the other side.
You've got 50 governors, smart people, Democrats, Republicans, and you've got tons of leaders, the president, the task force, lots of experts.
Here's something that none of them are telling you.
Well, they're not saying.
I'm not saying there's truth to it.
They're not telling us.
Has any governor said, for example, if we just wait X number of weeks, whatever X is, by then we'll have all the testing we need to be able to really test everybody and then just test our way out of this thing and do the contact tracing with the testing,
of course. So, has anybody said And remember, there's 50 governors, all these experts, there's the president, there are a lot of people who should know how close we are to having enough tests to test our way out as opposed to just test the few people who come into the office, which is good enough for the phase one.
The reason that nobody has said, you know, you idiots, if you just give us two more weeks, we'll have all the tests we need, is because nobody has any idea that that could possibly happen.
We are not close to, let's say, the Bill Gates-described standard of being able to test so much that you can actually get on top of the virus and really basically just beat it.
We're not even close.
Nor will we be Maybe unlikely, in my opinion.
Now, none of us know what we don't know.
So it could be that there might be some kind of company that's in a garage that's just invented something that won't ramp up like crazy.
Maybe. But we don't know that.
So if you don't know that magic will happen, somebody suddenly appears and solves your problems, you can't really make it a plan.
Ben Shapiro had this very well written tweet, I think I mentioned this before, I tweeted it, in which he was describing the fact that we have no articulated plan.
Now I would say we do have an articulated plan in the sense that when you don't articulate anything different, status quo, it's kind of the plan.
Ben used the literary term deus ex machina.
I think it's pronounced machina, it's not machina, right?
Deux ex machina.
Now, somebody will correct me in the comments, but is it Greek or Latin?
Latin or Greek, which is it?
But it's an old saying from the old days of plays when they were bad at writing plays.
Somebody says Greek, so let's say it's Greek, and they would write these Greek plays, And the stories were poorly written so that they get to the end of the play and the hero had a problem that just couldn't be solved.
And there was nothing that happened in the play so far that could sort of help that happen.
So the device that they used, the writing device, so it looks like it's Latin but maybe it was used by the Greeks, I don't know.
So the mechanism that the writers used is this deus ex machina, which was basically God from the machine, is what it means.
And basically, just some super character would just appear at the end who had nothing to do with the story up to that point, and would just solve the problem.
And so, in modern day script writing, it would be considered an obvious writing mistake to require a dues ex machina machina at the end.
Because that means you wrote it so poorly, you couldn't solve the story without introducing a new character at the end, which is just lame.
I am the magic person that appears at the end.
So, that's what Ben was making that comparison.
to our coronavirus plan and I like it.
It's a good one, except not everybody knows what that term means.
And it's good because what exactly are we counting on that will be any different than today?
What would be different tomorrow from today?
We won't have a vaccine tomorrow.
There doesn't seem to be any therapeutic that's going to blow us away because we would know about it.
If there were any of the, I don't know, how many therapeutics are being tested, if any of them were like really good, we would totally know about it.
And they would have already stopped the test, and it would be a big news story.
So you can be pretty sure that none of them are a home run.
Maybe some of them reduce virus or something.
You saw that remdesivir doesn't even change your death rate.
I mean, that's not much of a therapeutic.
So, anyway.
I think that the plan at this point is that we will gingerly tiptoe in the next few weeks, see what happens, and herd immunity is the play.
But I don't think anybody in government can say that out loud, right?
They really can't say out loud, well, we're going to see if everybody just gets it, a lot of people will die.
So... Intruder alert.
Yeah, that is Snickers.
She's outside now. All right.
The app is making my hands moving so fast.
Somebody said it's just a hoax anyway, right?
Well, nobody ever said that coronavirus was a hoax except the people who thought it was like the virus, like the regular flu.
Is there anybody who still thinks it's only like the regular flu?
Now that we know that the regular flu was never 50,000 or 80,000 a year, that that was just made up, that the actual real number of people who died from the flu, the regular flu, basically close to zero.
A few thousand a year. That's it.
Your dog is barking back.
Alright, does anybody have any questions?
I want to see if my earbuds work for this.
Let's see if Alex has a question.
Alex, you're going to be surprised by suddenly being connected to the world.
I don't think so. Hey Alex, can you hear me?
Good, how are you? Good.
I'm not sure that my earbuds are working.
Do you have a question for me? I didn't have a question.
I love all your periscopes, and it kind of gives me a little bit of faith in humanity when I get to see your smiling face two times a day.
Well, good. I'm glad I helped in that small way.
But thanks for saying aye.
Yeah, thanks, Scott. Alright, well, I don't think I have much else to talk about, but I would encourage you all To take this opportunity to do what you can to improve your skills.
The slaughter meter is still at 200%.
Think about this.
What is President Trump's one area where he actually beats Democrats every time?
What's the one thing he beats Democrats at every time?
Handling the economy, right?
It's the one thing that forever people said, ah, we don't like this, we don't like that.
But, you know, it's actually pretty good for the economy.
And if over the next few months, the way it looks like it's going to go, is the president will be busy himself trying to ramp up the economy, he's really going to be in his sweet spot, if you think about it.
Because I don't think anybody will blame him for ruining the economy.
He's not going to take the hit for that.
But people are going to say to themselves, who do I want to revive this thing?
If I'm going to do CPR in this economy, who do I want to do that?
Do I want the guy who's done it before, who knows how to breathe energy into a thing, or do I want the guy who needs CPR himself?
If you know what I mean.
Now, have any of you...
Yeah, it's the economy. If you just straight line this out, which is a huge mistake, right?
If there's anything you would ever learn, that making a straight line prediction is just dumb because there are too many things that will change in a complicated situation.
And so the slaughter meter is a dumb measurement because it imagines nothing will change, but of course it will.
Nobody saw the coronavirus coming, right?
So, it isn't useful for prediction, but it's sort of a fun device to say if everything went like this, how would it end?
And I would say that, given that we're not going to want to play around with the economy, the voters are going to have a strong preference for the person they trusted the most, and they might put everything else off.
I mean, I think the voters are going to say, you know, in a normal situation, I'd be caring about this and this and this and this and this.
But at the moment, I really care about the economy, and if we don't get that fixed, all the other stuff is going to break.
So it's going to turn out to be basically a one-variable election.
I'm exaggerating, but you know what I mean?
It's going to come down to who can handle the economy best.
And if Trump has goosed the stock market, you know, another, let's say another 10% by November, it's just a base clearing home run.
Because nobody is going to want to take a chance on ruining the economy when they just have a little taste of what that feels like.
You know, their appetite for risk is going to be very low.
All right. It's a plandemic.
Yeah, I've been trying to ignore.
There's some plandemic thing people keep sending me, and I know it's stupid, so I don't want to look at it, but I know I'll have to because everybody's going to ask me about it.
Did I see the Duke U prediction for a quick recovery?
I did not, but here's what is so different about this situation.
I called my local bike repair store and I wanted to get a chain put on a bike.
And bike stores, bike repair stores, are open because they're essential, because it's transportation.
And I thought I could take my bike in and maybe get a new chain on it.
And it turns out that the wait time at my local bike repair is two months.
They have so much business.
And then I said, well, do you have any, you know, certain kind of bike I was interested in?
And they're like, we have, like, no inventory.
They sold all their damn bikes and they've got a two-month waiting list for repairs.
And how many other companies are in their situation?
Because there must be a whole bunch of startups that made money.
They make things for coronavirus testing or whatever.
Everybody makes paper products.
A lot of the grocery business.
Amazon.com made a killing.
DoorDash probably did well.
So it's a weird kind of economic problem in which some number of people just did better.
I don't think that's ever happened before, right?
Have we ever had a severe economic downturn, including the depression, in which something like half of the people made money, right?
Because all the people who just got their regular paycheck, but they had to work at home or whatever, and that's a lot of people.
Fortunately, it's a lot of people.
They got their regular pay, and they didn't spend any money for three months.
There should be a lot of spending coming back online faster than we've ever seen it happen before.
So I'm very much in the fast recovery camp.
Somebody in the comments says that Timmy says that he sells hot tubs and they're all sold out and waiting for the factory to make more.
Yeah. So, I mean, Netflix doing great.
I mean, there's just a lot of people who made a ton of money I wasn't one of them.
I'm getting pretty well beaten up in this, but I'll be fine in one run.
Somebody just hired a tree service.
Yeah. All right. So anyway, I think the economy will come back fast, is my guess.
And think about how much money Walmart made.
Somebody said, yeah, how much money did Walmart make?
Think about that. All right.
So he says, do I have any ghosts, UFOs, or paranormal stories?
Yes, I do. Would you like to hear a good paranormal story before bed?
I know you do.
I know you do. All right, here he goes.
When I was studying to be a hypnotist, I was in her early 20s, and there was somebody in the class who was also studying to be a hypnotist who said that she was a psychic and that she did psychic readings and she could see the future.
Now, of course, I'm a pretty skeptical guy.
So, I thought, huh, yeah, you're a skeptic, you're a psychic, I'll bet you are.
Why don't you come over?
Make some predictions. We'll see how you do.
Now, my excuse was that my hypnosis professor, if you could call him that, had told us that one of the types of people you can identify that tend to be good subjects for hypnosis are people who claim to be psychics.
Now, he said he didn't know why.
It's just something he'd noticed over time.
If somebody claimed to be a psychic, they could be hypnotized very deeply, very quickly.
It was just an anecdote.
So I said, hey, well, if the teacher says that works, you say you're a psychic, why don't you come over?
I'll practice on you. I'll hypnotize you.
And bring your tarot cards.
So she brings her tarot cards over to my place.
And I said, all right, let's do a little test.
So I hypnotized her.
So she was on the other side of the room.
Smallish room, but she's on the other side.
There's nobody else there. It was just my own place.
Nobody else there, for sure.
And her eyes are closed and she's laying on her back on the other side of the room.
So she can't see anything.
If she did, I'd know. She'd have to turn toward me to see my direction.
And I said, I'm going to pick some cards out of your tarot deck.
Shuffle them. I'll pick them.
And you tell me what card I picked.
And so she said, all right.
So I picked a card, and I forget the weird little tarot cards.
It's like a joker doing this or somebody doing this.
So anyway, I picked a card, and I said, what card did I pick?
And she describes in great detail the wrong card.
So I thought, I knew it.
Fraud, fraud, fraud.
But I didn't tell her she was wrong.
I just said, all right, we'll do another one.
So I said, I want another one.
Describe this one. And she describes it again with great confidence, but wrong.
I'm like, alright, 0 for 2.
I picked five cards in a row.
She got all five of them wrong.
So there's no such thing as psychics, right?
But here's the thing.
She got all five of them right.
Just out of order.
Not making it up.
She got all five right, but out of order.
Out of 70 whatever cards in a tarot deck.
Now, I don't know what the odds of that are.
What are the odds of that?
Pretty darn low, right?
So, then I started regressing her to her previous life.
Now, I don't believe in prior lives.
I'm just going to tell you the story.
So, she described in detail one of her prior lives.
And she was a guard at a World War II concentration camp.
And in her hypnotized state, she knew who she was, but she didn't know her own name or what she looked like.
But she knew she had some kind of ID or photo or something.
So in her hypnotized state, she pulled out the photo and the ID and described in detail who she was in World War II. Now, you know, it's not like I believe that.
I'm just saying what she said.
And so I led her through a number of questions about the psychic state.
She explained that she got the cards out of order because in the psychic state she can't tell the difference between things that are going to happen and things that have already happened.
I thought, well, that's interesting.
I mean, it's kind of complicated for I suppose that gives her more ways to be right, but her story was that time doesn't exist in the psychic realm, so what has happened and what will happen, that's only a difference that we recognize, but she didn't.
Okay, sure, whatever.
So I started asking a few more questions, got kind of excited, asked her about Atlantis, and she had an answer to that.
I didn't let her finish an answer.
I sort of talked over her.
You've probably seen me do that with my guests on here.
I'm sort of an interrupter.
And I interrupted her.
And then she said, slow him down.
And I said, who are you talking to?
And she said, your spirit guide.
Now here's the funny thing.
As soon as she said, slow him down, and I recognized that she was talking to someone else in the room, I felt every goose bump and every hair in my body just went brink, and I could feel an entity behind me, a benevolent entity.
And she described my My spirit guide, she called it.
And she described it as someone who is present and had been with me a long time and was very fond of me and considered me, I think, a young soul.
And so, as an old soul, my spirit guide was, you know, trying to give me a little boost.
And here's the funny thing.
The moment she said that my spirit guide was in the room, I had a vivid memory of a dream, or was it, that I had when I was maybe 10 years old.
I was in my bunk bed, top bunk, and I rolled over in bed, middle of the night, so that I was facing out toward the room and I could feel a presence.
And I opened my eyes, and there right in front of my face was an old man's face.
You know, an old man standing there, just right in front of my face.
And of course my eyes went, oh, strange old man in my bedroom.
And as I watched him, and he was not scary, he was benevolent.
And he faded while I watched him and just disappeared.
Years later, when the psychic said that my spirit guide was in the room, that picture, out of nowhere, popped into my head, and I connected those two stories.
And I said to myself, I don't believe any of this stuff.
But if I do have a spirit guide, I think I've already met him.
And that was probably the freakiest thing that ever happened to me.
Now, after this, Because I could actually feel the presence.
After this, she made a number of predictions.
She told me when my car would break down, and it did.
How do you predict when somebody's car is going to break down?
I mean, cars can go pretty far without breaking down.
Could have been a coincidence.
Then I told her I was going to play soccer, and she told me I was going to get a knee injury.
And I was like, oh, don't say that.
And by the way, I've been playing soccer for years and years and years and I've never had a knee injury.
So it would be pretty weird if this was like the one day I got a knee injury.
Now, did I get a knee injury because it was in my head and I did something to cause it?
I don't know. Maybe. Could be.
Could be. But this was one of the many experiences I had on my journey to understanding our reality in terms of filters.
I no longer believe that we humans evolved to have the kind of brains that could understand reality because we never needed to.
We can all live in our own reality.
You can believe the psychic was real.
I can believe she wasn't.
And yet our lives are exactly the same.
So we can live in different realities And we know this for sure because it's happening right now.
And so I don't look at that and say it was true or it wasn't true.
It was a filter.
If it had predicted what was going to happen, and indeed it did, on several occasions she accurately predicted things that were seemingly unlikely.
Maybe not that unlikely.
Maybe she was just good at doing a cold read.
So I can keep my filter which is that it was probably love or maybe it's maybe I have selective memory about it it was coincidence I can keep that and she can keep hers that it was every bit of it was real and we can live in the same world so if you release on what is true Which is really hard,
because you have to essentially subjugate your own ego, because your ego wants to know that you figured it out.
Your ego wants to feel like, yeah, I know reality.
These other people don't.
These clowns, they're all confused.
Me? Yeah, I figured out reality.
So you have to get your ego out of the way to finally understand that you don't know anything about anything.
But sometimes a filter is more predictive than another one, and that's the best you can do.
So that is the thought which I will leave you with today.
And I will see you in the morning.
Tonight you can have an amazing night of sleep.
Really one of the best.
Maybe not the best, but a really good one.
Well, maybe not every one of you, but many of you are going to have a great night tonight.
So relaxed, feeling optimistic, things are heading in the right direction.
I'm going to leave you with that thought.
▲
Export Selection