Episode 1687 Scott Adams: More Fake News About Everything and Two Micro Lessons That Might Change Your Life
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
NYT admits it helped Joe Biden rig the 2020 election?
VAERS database hallucination
Mike Shellenberger on "crime tourism"
Whiteboard1: Reframe Your PTSD As A Superpower
Whiteboard2: Reframing Despair/Sadness
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Because I know you woke up this morning and you said to yourself, this will be an ordinary day.
And then you lucked, or perhaps it was skill, and came upon this live stream, which will change many of your lives.
Now, if you wait to the end, I'm going to give you a micro lesson, two of them actually.
that are designed for high impact in the shortest amount of time to actually reprogram some of you from your sadness and or PTSD And I can do it in about four minutes, two minutes a piece.
And that'll be on the whiteboard, and that'll come.
So that's just a teaser to make you stay.
Normally I put these behind a paywall, but my local subscribers have agreed with me that these would be important enough, or at least they agreed with my judgment that it would be important enough to share them with the wider audience.
And so that's coming.
If you'd like to extend your experience into another realm, almost unimaginable, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or gels or a stein, a canteen jug 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.
It's the dopamine at the end of the day.
Yeah, it's the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And doggone it, it's good.
It's happening right now.
Go!
If any of you have ever tried this with a placebo sip where there's no actual beverage in your cup, it was better than no sip, probably.
But next time, improve your game.
Make sure there's a beverage in there.
That's all I'm saying. I'm not going to name names.
Well, Trump has said, quote, the New York Times just admitted and participated in an effort to rig the election for Joe Biden.
Now, there's a statement that not long ago would have been considered unfounded.
It might have been considered hyperbolic.
Fact-checkers would have said it wasn't true.
What'd they say about it today?
Well, if they have a dictionary, and they believe the reporting in the New York Times, they say, well, that's true.
I doubt they actually say it just like that.
But... The New York Times reporting does fit the actual dictionary definition of something that's rigged for a specific purpose.
It looks like it. Now, the part we don't know is intention.
Am I right? I mean, we can't read the minds of the New York Times.
Could they have been legitimately fooled, but then later came out of their fog?
Could be. Could be.
You can't rule out that people are legitimately brainwashed and then climb out of it after time.
Could happen. But let's give this the really test, shall we?
If you're new to this, the really test is you just use the word really in a sarcastic way after saying the statement that you're testing.
Just see if it works, okay?
I'll try it. So the New York Times wasn't trying to influence the election, despite their close ties to Democrats and the history of slanting their coverage for political purposes.
But even though it would have been a very clever way...
To rig an election, and even though it worked perfectly, exactly as one imagined it would be, and even though all the people who would love to have seen the New York Times do such a thing, which allegedly they did, but we have no evidence of,
is it possible that the New York Times did not succumb to all the pressures, political, financial, and otherwise, that was put upon them and act exactly as they have in the past In a fashion we should expect and predict.
No, they were just fooled and then they came out of it.
Really? Really?
They were just fooled by their own reporting.
So they brainwashed themselves, but then they unbrainwashed themselves out later and didn't believe their own reporting.
Or the 50 Intel officials, former officials, who said that the laptop was Russian disinformation.
But it turns out it was a real laptop.
Yeah, this one doesn't really pass the really test, does it?
Meaning that Trump's assumption that all of this was intentional, you can't prove it.
Probably. Unless there's some kind of written record somewhere.
But it sure looks like it.
Let's just say that. All right, here's another little test for truth that I like to call the elephant in the room test.
And the elephant in the room test, as I've described before, and then I'm going to apply it to a new situation, is that if there are two people in a room and one of them says, hey, there's an elephant in this room with us.
Let's say there's no furniture, there's nothing else, it's just a bare room, two people in it.
One of them says, do you see this elephant that's standing right here in front of us?
And the other person in the room says, nope, I do not see an elephant.
And then the first one says, we're in a small room, just the two of us and an elephant.
Surely you see the elephant.
And then the other one says, I honestly do not see an elephant.
Which one of them is hallucinating?
The one who sees it is the one who's hallucinating.
Maybe not 100% of the time, but as a rule of thumb, it's really, really reliable that hallucinations are additions to scenery, not subtractions.
People don't hallucinate not seeing something.
Do you understand that? Nobody walks into a room full of furniture and hallucinates that it's an empty room.
I mean, maybe in the history of the world somebody has, but that's not a common thing.
But we've seen, with all the fake news that people believe about just about anything, that adding scenery, adding an elephant to a room, 50% of the public will believe any elephant in any room, and they'll say they see it.
So adding something to a scene is almost always the hallucination, not the one who doesn't see it.
Now, is the filter understood?
Because now I'm going to apply it.
And remember...
That when I apply it, I'm also aware it doesn't work every time.
Can you accept the humility I'm trying to inject here?
That I'm not saying that this is some kind of 100% thing, but it's pretty darn reliable, and you're not going to like it.
Can I prime you by saying you're not going to like what I say next?
You're going to fucking hate it.
Most of you. It goes like this.
We're seeing some people talking about the data about the vaccinations and that the vaccination itself, they claim, can be shown by various data to be more dangerous than any officials have admitted.
Now, would you say, first of all, that that is happening?
There are people saying the VAERS database is telling you something.
Others say it's not. So you would agree that that's happening, that difference in opinion.
There are those who say the excess mortality numbers.
There was a gentleman on the war room recently who looked at the millennials' excess death rate.
And his claim is that using public information, you can see that there's just a huge spike at about the time the vaccinations were rolling out, apparently.
So his hypothesis is that it is clear from excess death that the vaccinations themselves have some mortality element that has not been fully disclosed to the public.
Now, so far, I'm just telling you what other people have said.
So we're not talking about what's true yet, just the claims.
Now, also, other people have said they've looked at, I think, the Pfizer data and said that they found stuff in there that they believe also suggests that the vaccinations are more dangerous than has been claimed.
So the context here is that there are multiple sources of data, That would seem to suggest, and I'll use suggest, that the vaccination themselves had more danger than has been disclosed to the public.
Does everybody agree with the context so far?
I think you're okay with that, right?
Now, here's where the elephant test comes in.
And again, remember, the elephant test isn't 100% accurate.
It's just really, really good rule of thumb.
So everybody in the world who knows about data and virology and vaccinations, basically anybody who has an interest in it, is looking at all of this data.
Wouldn't you agree? There are lots of people looking at the same data.
Would you also agree that with so many people with such a great interest, I mean, the greatest possible newsworthiness you could have, that there are lots of people who are looking at the same data and saying, I don't see it.
Now, I'm not saying it's not there.
The claim is very narrow that I'm making.
That there are lots of experts who are capable...
I'm not. I'm not capable of looking at the data.
But there are lots of experts who are capable of looking at it.
Some of them see the elephant, and some do not.
So far, I've not made a judgment.
Would you say that the setup is correct?
The experts are looking at multiple data sources.
Some are saying, I see all this danger, and it's very clear.
And some are looking at the same data at the same time and saying, I don't see it.
Correct or not correct?
Now, can I independently do a deep dive with all of my expertise and figure out which of these two groups is right?
Well... If those two groups can't do it, why could I do it?
Why would there be people disagreeing who actually have all the expertise in these areas?
If those two groups are disagreeing, how the hell am I, with my complete lack of knowledge, going to do a deep dive and figure out who's right?
I mean, that's not really a thing.
So all we can do is look at the people who are looking at it.
We can't look at the data, really.
If you're being honest about it, you can't really tell by the data.
But are the people credible?
Do you believe the person who sees the elephant or the person who's standing right next to them in the room looking at the same room and they don't see it?
And there are lots of them.
In this case, it's not one person who doesn't see the elephant.
It's lots of them.
Now, of course, people are saying follow the money and their other incentives, etc.
That's fair. But there are so many people with an interest who don't have a financial incentive.
They would see it, too.
And I don't think it's happening.
All right. So keep in mind, somebody says it's a bad analogy.
All analogies are bad.
The only thing I'm saying is that I use the analogy to make a general point.
So if you don't like the analogy, you don't need it.
Just take the general point.
The general point is that hallucinations are almost always additions to the scenery.
They're rarely a subtraction.
Once you notice that...
It becomes a lot easier to untangle what's real and what's not.
That's why I don't believe in UFOs, by the way.
UFOs are an addition to the scenery that you would expect a lot more people would have seen and gotten some good pictures by now.
But, you know, I don't believe additions to the scenery, basically.
There's a big story about Putin's palace.
Now, of course, this fits perfectly into what you would expect for wartime propaganda.
So can we believe that this story is true because it was in the media?
No. No.
But even the media suggests that they can't confirm that it's Putin's palace.
But allegedly there's this, I don't know, 190,000 square foot gigantic palace on the Black Sea that Putin allegedly forced the oligarchs to buy for him and includes an underground hockey rink and all that, everything you'd imagine in a modern palace.
But But officially, Russia says that Putin lives in an 800-square-foot apartment, which is an 800-square-foot apartment.
I wonder if there's anybody in Russia who believes that.
Probably, right? Probably 25% of the people in Russia, because 25% is the number I always jokingly say will believe anything, probably 25% of the people in Russia are like, wow, that Putin sure lives an austere life.
We think he only owns one suit, because he seems to wear the same suit all the time.
So he probably owns one suit and an 800-square-foot apartment.
But maybe not.
The other possibility is that he's the richest human who has ever existed in the history of the universe.
Or he lives in an 800 square foot apartment on $140,000 a year.
It's one of those two things.
I always laughed at the Warren Buffet myth.
So Warren Buffett, at one point, I guess he was the richest man in America, but he's still up there.
Warren Buffett has always been reported to have lived in basically the same relatively modest home that he had always lived in.
And I believe he's added to his modest home, so there's like a superstructure behind the modest structure.
So it's just a little bit bigger than it looks.
But Does that mean anything if you're Warren Buffet?
How often is Warren Buffet not in the presidential suite of whatever high-end hotel he's at?
Does Warren Buffet, like, spend much time at home?
I feel like it's where he goes on holidays.
To visit his wife and whatnot.
But I don't think it would be accurate to say that one of the richest people in the world lives in that little home that he visits often.
People have reported that he does, in fact, stay there.
So that's a confirmed fact.
But how many days a year...
Does he not stay at somebody's mansion or at the best facility that humans have ever created?
Anyway, your challenge today is twofold.
It's a two-part challenge.
Is everybody up for it?
Number one, I'd like you all to mock me for my lack of military expertise.
You may do this now.
Please begin. Begin the mocking.
You've heard me say many things about the Ukraine situation, and I welcome you now to mock me for, and accurately, quite accurately, mock me for my complete and total ignorance of all things military.
Go. Good, good.
General Dummy, nice.
General Adams, not mocking enough.
Yes, General Adams.
I think General Adams is a good general satirical direction.
You don't know Schiff, good.
It's a callback. I like the callback.
You've never even been in a fight, Scott.
Good. Go after my cowardice.
I think that's a good vein to mine.
Productive. Private Scott.
I'm not a general now.
Wimp. Major dunce.
Major misunderstanding.
Not bad. A+. My new nickname is Major Misunderstanding.
Or General Adams.
All right, so you're doing a good job of this.
Major clot. Another callback.
I like that. The callbacks are all appreciated.
All right, you're doing a very good job of mocking me for my lack of military expertise.
Now, let's move on to...
The second part of the challenge.
Remember, this is a two-fold challenge.
And I must say, I must compliment you.
Your mocking of my lack of military expertise is excellent.
Gomer Adams. Nice.
Gomer Adams. I like that one.
Major malfunction. General disarray.
Private P.E.K.K.A. What?
Pointy-hear general.
Pointy-hear general.
I'm going to give that top shelf.
Lieutenant? Rear Admiral?
Come on, don't do that.
Adams Doolittle.
All right, here's the second part of your challenge, now that you've successfully mocked me for my lack of military expertise.
Part two, explain why I'm the only person who predicted Russia couldn't defeat Ukraine in two days because the defenders would have access to high-tank-killing weapons.
Okay, that took all the fun out of it.
I'm just saying that sometimes you don't need to be an expert...
To see things that are just sort of glaringly obvious.
Now, the assumption that I made is that they would have access to enough.
And that part maybe I got lucky on, I'll admit.
Because I didn't know how much they had.
I knew they had access to the good stuff, whatever the good stuff was, because they had such good friends.
Friends meaning NATO and the United States.
When you've got friends like NATO, You probably, and especially if Russia is involved, you probably have access to good weapons.
And I had speculated that since nobody had ever seen a high quantity of the best kind of weapons against tanks, that common sense sort of says that even if they had air cover and coordinated artillery, even if they did everything right, it seemed to me that if you had enough weapons Drones and shoulder-mounted stuff, the defenders would still have the advantage.
Now, I don't know.
Was that just a lucky guess based on my ignorance cancelling out my other ignorance?
It could have been. To be honest, it could have been.
But you do have to ask yourself why all the experts were wrong and the person that you just mocked for incorrectly, correctly mocked for my lack of military understanding, Got it right with reasons.
I mean, I showed my work.
I said, here's the reason, advanced military equipment that will surprise you how effective it is.
I said it directly.
Now, I also got completely wrong that Putin would actually attack.
I said it was a bluff.
And my reasoning for the bluff was that it seemed obvious it couldn't work.
And I think I was half right.
It's obvious, I mean, to me it looked obvious that it couldn't work.
So I thought it must be obvious to Putin, and that's where apparently I'm completely wrong.
Now, I could also be completely wrong, still, if Putin ends up prevailing.
At the moment, the experts that I'm seeing, at least quoted in the news lately, and do a fact check on me.
Is this correct? That the military experts are now saying that Putin does not have a sufficient force to take and hold Kiev.
That's true, right?
And that therefore they won't actually conquer the government.
So, can you fact check that?
I haven't seen every military opinion, but I think the military is now saying they could destroy the city, but they can't really take it and hold it, because they don't even have the right kind of forces to do that.
Not even close.
Like, they have maybe 20% of what they need, something like that.
Yeah, and what are they actually holding now is a good question.
All right. So, here's an interesting thing that happened.
I think I'm all over the place in my order of things.
I saw a tweet by Nazir Afzal.
He's a prosecutor, among other things.
And he said this.
He said, Are you surprised that in the matter of Jeffrey Epstein and hundreds of high-profile men sexually abusing hundreds of young girls and children, the only person convicted is a woman?
Now, of course, that means only on top of Jeffrey Epstein himself.
I assume that's implied.
But just think about that.
It's basically a crime committed allegedly by hundreds of men, and so far the only person convicted was the only woman who wasn't...
the only person who wasn't Epstein...
It was a woman. Now, she was guilty as hell, so it makes sense that she'd be the first person to be convicted who isn't him.
But I don't think we're going to see any other convictions, do you?
It looks like this has been successfully just taken away from the public's right to have any justice or knowledge about it.
Why are we okay with this?
There's literally nothing you can do about it, is there?
Unless you wanted to make it like your life's work to, you know, start a big campaign to get everybody interested in finding the names of these people.
But I don't know that anybody has so much power or passion or cares about it compared to all the other gigantic problems in the world.
And so in a sense, it's sort of lucky for the accused that there are bigger stories at the moment.
That always helps. But this is, it kind of tells us a lot that we'll never know who was on the island besides Epstein.
I mean, except for the few that we've heard about who flew in the plane.
But that's all we know for sure.
They flew in the plane. Breaking news.
Breaking news, and I want you to listen carefully to this, because if you haven't heard this yet, this is breaking news.
Breaking. A hundred former intel officials have determined that you can end war in Ukraine by spanking your taint with a wooden spoon.
Several anonymous sources inside the White House have confirmed the story, and no court has ruled it false, and fact-checkers and science agree.
Now that's a lot of credibility.
I mean, I would be convinced if one former intel official told me something.
But if a hundred told me, Well, that's pretty believable.
I mean, could you imagine that, like, dozens of intel officials could tell you something that was just not true, like, intentionally?
Well, I can't imagine that.
That could never happen, could it?
So that's believable.
And then there are several anonymous sources, and I don't know what's more believable than an anonymous source.
I do. Several.
The only thing better than an anonymous source in the White House is several.
That makes it totally believable.
If one person tells you that there are several, why would you not believe that?
And then, no court has ruled that this is false, and as we learned in the elections, as long as the court hasn't ruled something to be true, it's not true, and if they haven't ruled it false, it's not false.
And if the fact-checkers and the science all agree, well, we've never seen the fact-checkers be wrong, and I think you'd all agree that the science is settled, and once the science is spoken, that's all you need to know.
Now, I'd like to explain something to the non-native speakers.
If there are some people here who are confused by the word taint, let me give you a history lesson.
Taint is a, let's say, an evolved word from the poor grammar in English that used to be ain't.
So people used to say, and it's considered poor grammar, this ain't true, meaning this is not true.
It ain't. But when people say it ain't, That is often shortened by rural people in the United States to taint.
My grandmother, for example, she would say, taint true.
Taint true. And she actually did use that.
So the taint is actually defined in modern usage as, and I have to say this carefully so I'm not kicked off of any platforms.
So I'm going to say this in a G-rated way.
The taint is defined as the part of your body that's between your genitalia and Congress.
So everything that's between your genitalia and Congress, that's called the taint.
Because it taint your genitalia, and it taint Congress, it's the taint.
Now, that's just for the benefit for anyone who is not a Native American speaker.
And by the way, if you want to get that confirmed, talk to any Native American speaker on this live stream who can confirm it for you.
Because that's the kind of people they are.
They like to help. All right.
So... Let's see what else is going on.
We've got Axios was accused of some fake news by the other fake news.
So the fake news said that Axios had some fake news, which has been corrected to less fake news.
And the story was that reporter Zachary Basu had written the story that That some Ukrainian had asked earlier, had asked the U.S. to, quote, go beyond traditional military aid and provide the country with the funding, training, and weaponry to support a long-term resistance movement.
But the Ukrainians say, no, that's not a real letter.
Nobody ever sent that letter.
And the American government says, no, nobody ever sent us that letter.
So Axios has updated it to say that the letter is disputed.
Disputed by the people who sent it and the people who allegedly received it.
Allegedly all. So that's some fake news that may have been corrected.
But I'll give Axios credit.
When the criticisms were leveled at them, they did keep the story, and they added that it's disputed and, you know, evidence-free.
You know, I've often said this.
They have to judge people by how they correct their mistakes or how they respond to mistakes.
If you judge people by mistakes...
Then we're all assholes.
That's sort of the end of the story.
There's no redemption.
Because you can't judge people by their mistakes.
If you go through life like that...
You're just lost.
I mean, civilization won't even hold together, because we're all basically a mess, and we're all messing up a lot.
So it's just not a viable way to judge people as by the mistakes they make.
But a very viable way is to judge them by how they respond.
Do they say, oh, God, I'm so sorry, and mean it?
And do they then tell you what they're going to do about it?
And then do they follow up and actually do that thing that they said they would do to not make that mistake again?
Now, if somebody does that, I like them better than if they hadn't made the mistake in the first place.
Because I can't judge somebody for making a mistake, even bad ones, really.
But you can totally judge people by how they handled it after the mistake.
That's fair, because that's a technique, and it's available to everybody, right?
It's not hard. You apologize, you admit, you make good, you say what you're going to do differently, and then you follow up on it, and you do it differently.
Everybody knows how to do that.
So, some can do it, some can't.
Anyway, so I give Axios credit for the correction.
Apparently, California is experiencing crime tourism, according to a KABC story.
And the story here, and I saw Michael Schellenberger tweet this, who is running for governor of California as an independent, the only person I've ever known to run for office with a complete vetted set of solutions for the exact problems of the state.
And by vetted, I mean actually researching what works and what doesn't, showing his work, stop doing the things that we know don't work, do the things that do work.
I mean, just basic.
Basic, I don't know, strategic business way to approach anything.
Who knows if being nonpolitical works?
He's basically trying to win by extreme competence, and I don't know if that's ever been done.
Honestly. Think about that.
Who's ever tried to win a major election, let's say governor, senator, president, with extreme competence?
In other words, just demonstrating an ability to do a bunch of things successfully.
Has anybody ever done that?
You're saying Trump, but Trump would be disputed as how much is hyperbole and how much was real.
But if you look at Schellenberger's work, Even his critics will say, this is an impressive body of work.
Somebody says Cory Booker.
I don't know too much about that.
Anyway, crime tourism, as Michael Schellenberger tweeted.
So law enforcement agencies have determined that there are criminal groups from South America that are organized to come to California to do these sort of organized smash and runs on private high-end residents.
So they'll go to some place when you're not home, you know, a rich person's house generally, and break in.
They don't worry too much about alarms, I don't think, because they're going to be in and out.
And I think they just go to the bedroom mostly and look for jewelry, the easy stuff.
They're not looking for furniture and flat screens, TVs.
They're looking for a quick hit of usually jewels.
And so this is the story.
And I can confirm that according to my neighbor's video surveillance, we all share our video surveillance.
I mean, not electronically, directly, but when something happens, we're very well organized in the neighborhood.
So as soon as anything happens at anybody's house, everybody sees the video of it.
And apparently, the South American teams have had two of my neighbors.
So this is a story that actually directly affects me.
Literally, this is not a joke.
If I stood up and my window was open, I could throw a baseball and hit my neighbor's house that was robbed by one of these South American groups.
The other one, I'd have to throw the ball twice, but it's in the neighborhood.
Twice. This is just my neighborhood.
I'm talking about one block.
Not really the same block, but effectively the distance of a block.
Now, my house is never empty.
Somebody's always here. So usually they go for an empty house.
And at least I've got that going for me.
But I also have the last house in the world that you'd want to break into.
You don't need to know the details.
I'll just tell you that if you're looking for a house to break into, you might want to prioritize mine last.
Not only because there's nothing in it of any value that you could carry out.
Literally. This would be an interesting question.
What would be the highest value thing in my house that you could actually carry out?
Like put in a car.
Yeah, like $400 worth of medicinal marijuana.
That's about it. My printer.
If they steal my printer, I'm in good shape.
I don't even think people steal computers anymore, do they?
I don't even know if it's worth it.
So, anyway, crime tourism is happening.
Let's get to the good part, shall we?
Shall we get to the good part?
Let me tell you the great thing about being my age.
So here's the first inspirational thing of several to come.
People who are young are scared to death of being older.
I was completely surprised at how awesome it is in a lot of different ways that you don't see coming.
You just don't see it coming.
One of the ways is that you know how it all turned out.
Now, that's only good if it turned out well in some way.
Now, when I say when it turned out well, I use the following standard for success, which is how many people you helped in a significant way.
And I don't think there's any other good standard because money doesn't really capture it.
If you had a great relationship with one person, well, that's great for the two of you.
But maybe if you could do something for some other people, that would be good.
Now, one of the things that I chose early in my career, I originally wanted to be a lawyer.
In high school, I thought that's where I was going.
But at some point, I figured out that being a lawyer is usually a zero-sum game.
There's a winner and a loser.
So society sort of breaks even in a very general way.
It's not a clean win.
It's not an addition. Elon Musk is just added, right?
He didn't take anything from anybody.
He just added stuff to the world.
That's what I wanted to be.
I wanted to be a person who only added and never had to take something from anybody.
So I didn't want to be in a militant kind of a job.
So I became a cartoonist.
And then I write books that are designed to be useful.
And then I also do these micro-lessons, which are designed to be useful.
Now, I've got over 200 micro-lessons on the Locals platform that you have to subscribe to to see.
These will be public because the Locals people trust me to make a decision when to make stuff public.
And what I'm going to do is show you two reframes.
Which is simply a different way of looking at something.
To help you with any kind of past trauma or PTSD. And then any kind of feelings of despair or sadness.
Two separate lessons.
Two minutes apiece. Now the math of this goes like this.
There's no reason to suspect that either of these two lessons would necessarily help any one of you specifically.
I guarantee that some percentage of you will have your lives changed...
In the next few minutes.
In less than five minutes, probably.
Guarantee it. It's just a law of large numbers and the fact that I know these to be useful.
Now, secondly, every one of you could probably benefit from something on the list of over 200 of the micro lessons, and you would respond to different ones.
But the math of it is you would probably have a life-changing experience to be exposed to that much material Which is designed to be a high impact in a very short hit.
I'll give you two examples.
Number one, let's say you've got some trauma in your life, and you say, this trauma is affecting me into my whole life, and I'm worrying about it, and it gives me all kinds of problems.
And maybe it does.
Maybe it does. But here's the best reframe that I've ever found.
Because like you, I've had problems in my life.
Sometimes very big.
And I find this the most useful reframe.
And it goes like this.
You had a big problem.
Not everybody had one.
You had a big one.
And you know that you survived.
Oh, you took a beating, but you survived.
So you know what you can handle.
Do you know what everybody else doesn't know?
Unless they had that much trauma also.
Do you know what they don't know?
They don't know what they can handle.
And they're afraid.
So a person who has never had a really big problem thinks that maybe the maximum that they can handle without damage...
Is much lower. And because they are timid, and they will not go into higher risk categories, and when I talk about risk, I'm not talking about physical risk.
I'm talking about embarrassment, failure, what other people think of you risk, maybe financial risk, that sort of thing.
Not physical. Stay away from physical risk.
I'm not recommending that.
But I call this the free money zone, the zone between what ordinary people who do not have trauma guiding their lives, what they think they can handle is their limit.
That is not your limit.
Your limit is fucking amazing.
Your limit, if you've experienced some serious shit in your life, your limit is almost unimaginable to most of the world.
That's your superpower.
You can do stuff that other people are afraid of.
I first noticed this when I would see that veterans who had seen combat when they went into business were often unusually successful.
I don't know if it's actually statistically true, but it's something I noticed.
That people who had gone through horrible experiences...
And I'll bet, by the way, that you would find this scientifically true, but I don't have any science for it.
And the idea is that people who have gone through horrible things just have a higher tolerance for everything.
For everything. They know what they can handle.
They know what they can push through.
They know when they're in the deepest swamp...
They say, I've swam through this swamp before.
I've seen this swamp.
This swamp is nothing.
You think this swamp is bad?
You should have seen the other swamp.
This one I'm going to kill in two days.
It took me 16 years to beat that other swamp.
This one? Two days.
The people who don't have that kind of problem in their life will never be able to handle that.
That is micro lesson number one.
It dovetails into micro lesson number two.
This is a reframe for people who have despair in their lives.
I'm not going to use the S word because I just don't want to put those words in your head.
But you can put it in your own head.
There are some people whose lives are so bad they say, I'm not sure my life is worth going on.
I'll bet a lot of people have had that thought in the past two years especially.
And I'll bet almost all of you have had it at least once.
Maybe when you were a teen, etc.
A lot of people go through it.
And I'll tell you a reframe that can take you out of it almost immediately.
Almost immediately.
And it goes like this.
Imagine you have one day to live.
Now, you don't have to convince yourself it's true, and believe me, that's important.
Because if you thought to yourself, well, you know, I know that's not the case, so it doesn't work.
No, it doesn't matter. This is purely a reframe.
A reframe doesn't have to be true, it just has to work.
It's just a little mental hack.
It's a trick. Don't get lost on whether it's logical.
It doesn't need to be.
That's not an important element of it.
If you can just say to yourself, let me live today like it was the last day.
And if you can't convince yourself that it's really the last day in any way that you can embrace this feeling, tell yourself this.
You have the ability to end it anytime you want.
I don't recommend it.
This is actually a technique to make sure you don't.
I want to be careful about this.
I'm telling you how to end those feelings.
If you tell yourself that you have nothing to lose because you only have one day, but you're perfectly healthy, only your mind is messed up, you're perfectly healthy, let's say, let's hope, what would you do If nothing could embarrass you, what would you do if you weren't afraid of anything?
Now again, I'm not talking about physical fear that can kill you.
I'm talking about social fear, fear of what other people think of you, fear of failure.
What if all of that went away?
Because if you wanted to, you could end your life when you wanted to.
It is kind of optional if you think about it.
And again, I'm telling you how to live your life, not end it.
What about your feelings of self-worth?
All of those things become immediately useless if you only have one day to live.
You do not worry that you are embarrassed because you're dead tomorrow, mentally, you know, in this reframe.
It is one way to induce what I call artificial ego death, very similar to what the medical experts say you would experience with, let's say, medically supervised use of psychedelics.
Such as mushrooms.
If you can induce a state of artificial ego death in which you can temporarily, and this is how you start, just start with temporary, where you can temporarily imagine that embarrassment, fear, self-worth, all the things that are gnawing at you, your sense of failure, will you make it, who hates you, who doesn't, all the things that are just torturing you, those are all your ego.
Your ego is telling you you're important, and that therefore all the assaults on your ego matter.
As soon as you realize that you're not important, in this specific sense, because in this artificial mindset that you create, just to hack your mind, you create this idea that you only have a day to live, you inhabit it, and you say, if I only had a day to live, I could go up to that person that I've been thinking about, And give them a flower.
And say, you know, I know you and I probably will never be a couple, but I'd just love to give you this compliment.
I just think you're terrific.
And then you walk away.
And you don't say, I must date that woman, or I must marry that man.
You just say, I really enjoyed giving them a compliment.
You might discover that literally everybody loves a compliment.
I'm going to do a separate micro lesson, but I'll give you a teaser, that if you learn how to compliment people without being creepy, and I can teach you that, everybody likes it.
You can make almost everybody want to be your friend if you can learn to give a sincere, non-creepy compliment, which is pretty much just technique, and I can teach you how to do it.
Now... This technique, try it.
You will not believe it will work until you have tried it.
I believe that if you try either of these two reframes, some number of you will have a profound impact on your life.
So while maybe only 1% of you, maybe 25% of you, maybe 50% of you might find something substantially useful here.
But all of you would find something in the list of over 200 micro-lessons.
So, that is your two micro-lessons for the day.
And on that note, I'm going to end the YouTube feed.
I'll be talking to the locals' people a little bit more.
And I hope you found that useful.
And I think you'd agree, this was the best livestream you've ever seen, or ever will, until tomorrow.
