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May 11, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:15
Episode 967 Scott Adams: I Teach You How to Reprogram Your Brain Using the Simulation Filter
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Hey everybody, come on in.
Thank you.
This is the place.
You know, in the morning when we do these periscopes, it's all about enjoying the beverage.
But in the evening, it's about enjoying the knowledge.
That's right. The insight, the awareness that you'll be And gaining right now?
It's going to be incredible.
Now I hope you all saw my video that I made last night, teaching you the user interface to reality.
If you look at the comments, you can see that it was well received.
Just about 100,000 views since yesterday.
And it's on fire.
And the podcast I refer to in that same Periscope is Screaming Up the Charts on iTunes.
Well deserved. So, I thought I would extend the concept, since that went over well, and I'm going to teach you today a little technique for reprogramming the simulation.
Oh wait! Did I say reprogramming the simulation?
Because when I tweeted it, I said reprogram your brain.
Is that different?
I'm not sure.
If you reprogram your brain, have you reprogrammed the simulation?
Well, let me ask you this.
Have you noticed that we live in a country in which there are two completely different worlds living simultaneously?
In one, the president is a big orange monster destroying everything.
In another, he's sort of a god-king, or at least very entertaining.
These are not the same worlds, and yet we seem to be able to still reproduce, still exist.
So you tell me, Those different mindsets who are experiencing entirely different realities, is that their reality?
Have they reprogrammed their own simulation?
Well, I'm going to take you on a little bit of a mind trip today.
I'm first going to reinforce the concept of the simulation for anybody who needs a little bit more of a nudge.
To accept it as a useful tool.
Then, I'm going to teach you how to use stories to reprogram your brain?
Or is it the simulation itself?
Maybe we can't tell.
So, it goes like this.
The simulation is not meant to be a reality which replaces whatever your prior version of reality was.
It doesn't replace anything.
And it doesn't even need to be true.
Because the base assumption is that our little human brains don't have nearly enough processing power to know what's true anyway.
That's why we can walk around in these different movies.
We each think we have a truth.
But it's sort of generated by our brain to keep us sane.
That's why the Republicans and the Democrats have different little bubbles and they just walk around them.
There's no larger truth that seems to affect them.
They stay alive, they go through their lives, and it seems to work that they're in different little bubbles.
So the first thing you must accept is that you can live a life in which you can create a bubble That's better than the bubble you're in.
Will that be the true bubble?
Will that be the bubble that's the right one and everybody else has the wrong bubble of reality?
Probably not. Probably not.
Because what are the odds that you would be the one who figured out reality and nobody else could?
It seems far more likely that we live in our own constructed, somewhat subjective worlds.
I happen to live in one that's pretty darn good.
I seem to find a way to enjoy myself just about all the time.
Some people are living in a bubble, and they could be in what looks like my same world, except they're struggling and everything looks like it's going the wrong direction.
Is there a larger truth to it all?
Don't know. Don't know if we could ever know.
But I do know that you can reprogram your At least your subjective reality.
And I'm going to teach you how.
So, don't think about the simulation as true or false.
Think about it as fun.
It's a fun exercise.
It's an alternative way to think of the world.
And every time you can think of the world in an alternative way that still works, it should take you to a higher level of awareness that You shouldn't be so sure about your view of the world if there are so many interpretations that can all work.
So just for fun, I'm going to say simulation evidence to get you a little bit closer to enjoying the utility of thinking of this as a filter on reality.
It doesn't have to be true.
It just has to have utility.
Something will make you happier.
Maybe it predicts better.
See for yourself. So don't get too hung up on evidence.
This is not like scientific evidence or core evidence.
It's just stuff that's compatible with the idea.
First of all, the basic idea is that there will always be more simulations than there will be real universes.
That has to be true if you look at the entire arc of time.
That might not be true at the moment, but if you were to look at the entire arc of time, of course there will be more artificial worlds than originals, because originals take time, but as soon as somebody can make an artificial world, whether that's in 10 years or 50 years, they'll make more than one.
And so there will probably be far more artificial worlds over the entire arc of time, And you don't know where you are in that arc.
What are the odds that you're at the point where you're the first original species and you're not one of the billions or more of simulated realities that come after?
So the math is compatible with you being more likely to be a simulation.
Is it true that history...
Has always been here, which would suggest there's some kind of deep reality and we have a notion of what that's about.
Or is history created only when we need it, when we need an observation?
When you dig a hole in the backyard, does the dinosaur bone just appear when you're digging?
Because if this is a simulation, that's the way it would work.
Because there wouldn't be enough processing power to create the universe and all the possibilities.
So instead it would do what a regular computer programmer would do today.
They would build a limited world.
You wouldn't be able to get out of it.
It wouldn't have as much detail as the entire universe would need.
It would only add detail when you were observing it.
So in other words, the world would come into focus only upon observation.
And there's some suggestion in physics Maybe that's actually what's happening.
So, is history created on demand?
Well, consider the idea of spooky action at a distance.
If you've never heard of this, after this is over, Google, spooky action at a distance.
And you'll find that if you separate two entangled photons, you can put them anywhere in the universe, and if one is observed, it changes the state of the other Instantly.
Now, we have no rules of physics that can explain how that can happen.
How could observing this photon in one part of the universe instantly, which is faster than the speed of light, because there's not enough time to transmit it by the speed of light, it actually happens instantly, that when you observe one, the other one comes into some kind of a defined state.
Now, is that an example of creating history?
Because how could something happen on the other side of the universe without any time passing?
The only way it could happen is if maybe history is somehow affected.
Now is that a good example?
I don't know. Probably not.
But I'll bet that you could find in physics examples where it seems the history is being created by the present.
I think the double slit experiment might get you close to that too.
But fact check me on that.
Alright. If it were simulated, you wouldn't be able to get to the outside and look in, and in fact we can't.
The speed of light is a boundary, so we can't get to the edge of the universe and ever look in, just the way you would make it if it were a computer program.
It simplifies things.
You don't need a big bang.
You don't have to explain how everything came from nothing, because that's how software works.
The software seems to come from nothing.
It's just an arrangement of zeros and ones on some kind of a structure.
So a lot of thorny questions that are hard to understand, hard to explain, just sort of become easy.
It's like, well, the software was written that way.
How do you explain this spooky action at a distance?
Well, it was just something we couldn't reconcile with the software, so we just made it so.
We just made the code say, If one thing is observed, the other thing happens at the same time.
Sure, it's not very neat.
It's a little sloppy. But, you know, that's the way software is sometimes.
Sometimes you just have to paper things over.
Isn't it nice that there's a perfect balance of physical laws and everything and that we happen to be the humans who always win?
Well, of course, there's some kind of survivor reason that that could be true.
The reason that we're even talking about it It's because we're the winning species.
If we were not the winning species, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
But isn't it convenient?
Very much like if you were to design it for, let's say, putting your personality into it so that you could play it like a game, this is what you would do.
You would make sure that it didn't destroy itself while you were playing, so it would have some kind of amazing balance.
And your species would be the dominant one, because why wouldn't it?
And then, of course, we would not be made of anything.
If we were a simulated world, we would never be able to find what we're made of.
Now you're thinking to yourself, we know what we're made of.
It's like electrons and photons and particles and quarks and charms.
Maybe you don't know, but physicists know.
It's all that stuff, those elemental stuff.
But here's the thing.
What are those things made of?
Yeah, I get that there are quarks and leptons and stuff like that, but what are they made of?
Well, eventually you get into just word weird salad, like, you know, well, it's energy.
But what's energy? What's energy?
It's the movement of stuff?
What's the stuff? So you end up getting into nonsense if you keep drilling down.
If you keep saying, but what's that made of?
You get to really just a nonsense situation.
So we can't actually determine we're made of anything, which is suspiciously what a simulation would discover.
It's like, I can't find out what we're made of.
If you're worried that evolution doesn't explain everything, you don't need to be if we're a simulation.
We're just software.
And you don't need any aliens, which would certainly explain why we haven't made first contact or seen any signs of life.
Now you could also explain this by It just hasn't happened yet.
But if we're a simulation, there's no reason for other planets to have aliens.
There's no reason. Just the way if you were playing a video game, you wouldn't create planets that you're never going to visit within the context of the game.
It would just be a waste of time.
So, are any of these evidence per se?
No, not really.
I wouldn't call it evidence, but it's fun.
It just tells you that the The simulation filter holds up.
It's sort of robust.
That's the only thing I want you to get out of this.
You don't have to believe it's true.
You just have to have a sense of what it is.
And then, once you have a sense of what it is, you say to yourself, well, if that's what it is, let's just say, what if?
What if we're a simulation?
What would that imply?
Well, one thing it might imply is that you might be able to hack it.
You might be able to find a way to, within the rules of the simulation, get a better result.
Now, I've got a little insight for you that I learned from being a famous cartoon guy.
There are a lot of people who are really, really successful, and just because of my weird life, I get to meet a lot of them.
And if you ask them privately, They will tell you that it feels as though they can hack the simulation.
Now, they won't use those words, but they will tell you quite often that their life has suggested that they can simply make things happen that shouldn't be possible.
It's very common.
And so it seems that there are people who believe they can hack the simulation and have.
I believe that as well.
And when I say I believe it, I mean it's a convenient and useful frame or filter for looking at the world that makes me happy, and it also seems to be predictive.
Now, if we're a simulation, you would also expect there would be some kind of a challenge built in, some kind of a game, some kind of a purpose.
Because it's hard to imagine that anybody would go through the trouble of building a simulation without putting in some kind of a mission, a goal, an objective to it.
So do we know what that is?
Maybe. Could be that the purpose is to Ever increase our awareness to just go up to higher levels of understanding of our situation until maybe there's some kind of godlike ending to the game.
But imagine, if you will, that we're a simulation built with some kind of game rules, and as we figure out the simulation, we get to advance in levels.
So you can imagine that there are certain things that would be introduced into the game for the purpose of of challenging our understanding of our situation and giving us a shift in consciousness.
Something like a coronavirus which just comes out of nowhere and is going to have the effect of massively changing human awareness.
The very way we feel about our place in the world, how we relate to each other, how we work together, how we communicate, Who we trust, who we don't.
We'll be reassessing every single part of civilization.
From the ground up, we'll be reassessing everything.
All of our priorities, all of our assumptions, all on the table.
I'm even starting to wonder, was it always true that we could just make money out of nothing?
Like we just did.
Now, of course, it's a special case where it's almost impossible to have inflation.
So maybe in the case where it's impossible to have inflation, because there's not enough demand, maybe you could just print money.
Did we just learn that in a special case, we could literally print trillions of dollars and there's no...
There's apparently no...
There's no downside to it.
Now... I don't know.
Does it come back and bite us in the ass later?
I'm actually confused about this.
Because the stock market is acting like there's no penalty to it.
So I would just say that there are a whole bunch of things that we've assumed to be true that we no longer assume to be true.
A lot of it has to do with what experts have told us.
And then I think we're going to have a big awakening about privacy.
And you might not like it, but I think that the ultimate outcome of that is going to be that people will give up more privacy than you think they ought to.
So I don't want to have that conversation.
But just to say that there's going to be these massive consciousness shifts.
Now, here's the fun part.
If you are a software, if you are a simulation, And if you can reprogram yourself, I would say that this is how it works.
Your brain is a pattern recognition machine.
It just automatically sees patterns, often incorrectly, but it sees patterns, patterns, patterns.
It's not a logic machine.
It can do a little bit of logic, but it's mostly a pattern machine.
So stories are how you program a pattern machine.
Because you want to put in stories...
To become the new patterns that are better than whatever the other patterns were.
Because you're sort of operating on the software that's in there.
It's just working on habit and pattern.
Introduce a story that will upgrade some of that.
Let me give you an example.
Do you see this lovely mask?
This was sent to me by...
A viewer who might be watching this right now.
Her name is Young Jacob.
And Young sent me a nice note with this mask that apparently she made.
This will all tie together in a moment.
And so Young told me this.
She said she'd read all of my books and especially my tips on goals versus systems.
So that's from this book.
Had it failed almost everything and still went big.
And upon learning the systems being better than goals idea, which Young says was a game changer for her business and her parenting, and went on to thank me and etc.
Then she sent me and Christina a pink version of this, which are the coolest masks that I have, so I'll actually be using this.
So thank you. Young Jacob, who, and I guess your real estate business is doing well, thanks to that.
Now, that was a story.
This is a story that one person just turned into code, because there's a really good chance that Young is either watching this live or will watch it on replay, and not knowing that this was coming, Is saying something along the lines of, I can't believe this is happening right now.
Because I read his book.
I used his ideas.
It changed my business and my parenting for the better.
I sent him this thing and now he's talking to me on this screen.
Young Jacob learned the user interface for reality.
What she just did...
Doesn't seem like it's easy to do, does it?
And she did it effortlessly.
After learning, the very tips that I've been telling you are useful for reprogramming your reality.
Now, what she did is she created a story that's now part of her permanent structure of her brain.
Now, the next time she thinks to herself, hey, there's a thing that There's a thing that's a little bit hard.
I wonder if I could do it.
This story will be part of that history that says, yeah, because that other thing worked out.
Give it a shot.
What's the worst that could happen?
So she now has a little bit of an inventory of a success story.
I likewise have a whole inventory of stories that collectively form what I call my personality, and collectively they become my reality.
So I have a completely artificial, let's say, subjective reality formed by the sum of my life stories.
You too should look to find ways that you can add stories to your history because those stories directly affect the pattern matching of your brain.
And when you can match the pattern matching of your brain to a new story...
It can kind of clamp on easily and become part of your permanent code.
So, do some things that you know will work out.
Find some minor challenges.
Try some things that won't hurt you.
Maybe be nice to somebody, see how it works out.
Do a kindness to somebody.
This is what Young did.
She used a technique that I actually write about in my books, reciprocity.
So she did something for me Without being asked.
It was actually very nice. It's a really good mask.
And I actually needed one.
So it was like sort of perfect.
And in return, she got a shout-out and a story.
So she understood that about the way the universe works.
If I do this for somebody, I get a little bit back.
So, go find your story.
Find the thing you can do that can build your inventory of things that work for you.
I'll tell you another one of my stories.
So, one of my stories that I try to keep going in my head is that I can win against all odds.
And indeed, through my life, I've had just ridiculous Success are things I shouldn't win at because I don't have any experience.
You've witnessed some of them.
So here's one of the stories that just fits into that inventory.
Years ago, I lived at apartment buildings, at some tennis courts.
They had a tennis tournament for the people who lived there.
And they somewhat randomly paired us up.
It was going to be a mixed doubles tournament, meaning men and women playing on the same teams.
And I was paired with a young woman who had never played tennis.
So I was in a tennis tournament, and I got paired with somebody who had never hit a tennis ball.
Not once. And that's my doubles partner.
Now, I of course said to myself, I think I'm going to win this thing.
She'd never played before.
But here's the positive part.
She was a college athlete, basketball player.
So she was a well-trained, well-coached athlete in general, which meant that she had all the physical coordination you would ever want.
All the hand-eye, she had height, you know, she was strong enough because she was an athlete, etc.
And so I said to myself, we're going to win this.
And I told her where to stand, you know, I had her play the net mostly, and I said, you're just going to learn basically one thing.
You're just going to go up the net every time, and you've just got to get close enough that you can bang the ball down when it floats over.
If it gets to me, I'll hit an aggressive shot, because I was better than the other two people on the other side, and there'll be a weak return, and then you go and slap it down.
Now, of course, you can imagine that we lost badly the first several points.
Because they just slammed it at what they imagined was the weaker player, and they were right.
And the first few times she gets hammered, it's just pretty intimidating.
It's like, ah, ah! But each time, I used my then-growing powers of persuasion.
And she was, of course, getting very down on herself and negative.
And I told her, no, we got this.
We got this. You were so right.
You're almost there. Just make this one adjustment.
You're 90% there.
Just tap it down the next time you see it.
And, you know, three more points we'd lose.
We're down a game. And she'd be, oh, you know, maybe we should just quit.
You know, I'm not even hitting a ball back.
And I'd say, no, we're almost there.
Watch this. We're going to get the next couple of points.
Before you knew it, she'd win a point.
You know, maybe by luck, it would just hit the side of the racket and fall on the other side.
But we get a point.
And her confidence started to come in, and she started to get into her natural athletic vibe.
And the next thing you know, we took it all the way to the finals.
The first day she'd ever played tennis, and we were chewing our way through the rankings.
Now, we ended up losing in the finals, but we got to the finals.
And it was against all odds.
I mean, it couldn't have been more ridiculous.
We shouldn't have had any right to even be in the tournament, much less make it to the finals.
So, even though we didn't get the final thing, it wasn't important.
It was just a fun tournament.
But it's part of my inventory of stories that I remind myself that I can win against incredible odds.
And that's the story that seems to form for me Over and over again.
Now, somebody says, Scott, was I a 4-0?
Yes, I was approximately a 4-0 at that point, and she was approximately a 0.
Somebody says, a lot of us have inventories of failure.
So here's what you do.
The stories that you think about the most...
We'll be the ones that influence you the most.
Focus is the most important thing you can do.
Focus and repeat, focus and repeat.
So play back your success stories as much as possible.
And also play back future success stories.
I like to literally imagine future successes and replay them in my head a million times.
And sometimes The success plays out just the way you imagined it.
It's really freaky.
So that's fun too.
Because their stories don't even have to be all ones that have actually happened.
I'll give you the perfect example.
Here's my most powerful story.
I have one story that rules my other stories.
Every other story that forms my personality and my subjective reality...
Is the weaker version of this one.
And I call it the Prisoner Island story.
And this is who I think I am.
Not because I was necessarily born this way, but because I've programmed myself to be this person.
And it's a source of great strength and confidence.
And the story goes like this.
And again, it's a future story.
It doesn't have to be a real one.
It's like a fantasy story.
Well, actually, I hope it's not my future, but it's a fantasy story.
It goes like this.
There's an island of prisoners where all the bad people go.
And, of course, they're tough, and they're murderers, and just the worst bunch of people.
And for some reason, I get blamed for something, and I'm convicted, and they drop me off on the convict island.
On day one of the convict island, because I'm not as large as a lot of the other prisoners, I get beaten up mercilessly.
On day two, just as bad, I get beaten up, almost killed.
On day three, they're using me for a toy.
On day four, there's practically nothing left of me.
Come back in a year, I'm in charge of the island, And I've killed every one of them.
That's my story.
Because it doesn't matter how much badness happens the first week.
Because I didn't go to the island for a week.
I went there to rule the island.
First week didn't go well.
Second week, I'm going to find a way.
By the third week, people are going to start dropping.
By the fourth week and the fifth week, people are going to start saying, maybe we should be on your side.
If you come back in a year, I'm running the island.
That's my story. Now, of course, I'll never be dropped off on a prison or island, but I take that story with me as my Core identity, because every situation you put me in, I just got dropped off at the island.
Like, yeah, I know today might be bad.
Guess what next year's going to be for you?
So that's my story.
Find a story like that that works for you.
Doesn't have to be real. Could be one of those.
If it's compatible with your personality, that's best.
That one fits me. I don't know why.
But go build up your story inventory.
That is how you program yourself.
That is your tip for today.
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