Episode 1708 Scott Adams: Today I Will Take Your Brain On A Mushroom Trip Without Any Mushrooms
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Skeptical Republicans and trusting Democrats
Bill Maher, most useful citizen award
Do SAT scores correlate with family income?
Ali Alexander to talk with federal grand jury
Whiteboard: Prophesy vs. Plan
Mushrooms and reality
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
And what a special morning it is, better than all the other mornings.
And we've had a lot of mornings, am I right?
Let's say we take 365, we'll use that as our standard, multiply by 15 billion years, and the number is?
Anybody? Anybody? I know a lot of you didn't take higher level math, so you can't do that math in your head.
Like me, I can't do that math in my head either.
But if I could, wouldn't that be impressive?
How about that? That would be a show.
Way better than this one.
But how would you like to take it up a notch?
Anybody? This is the show of shows.
This is the one that will blow your freaking minds.
This is the show that you will remember forever.
And to make this...
Really, more of a spiritual journey.
Let's enjoy a cup, a mug, a glass, a tanker, a chalice, and a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with the beverage that you believe will take you to the next level.
I think, for me, that's coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine hit of the day.
A little bit of oxytocin.
I wouldn't leave that out.
And it's called the Simultaneous Sip.
And wow, is it going to be good this time?
You ready? You ready?
You ready? Go.
Yeah. That was as good as I promised.
Maybe a little better.
Maybe a little better. All right.
The funniest news today is there was a survey by The Economist and YouGov.
And... They asked which media organizations are trusted by Democrats and also by Republicans.
Now, we cannot trust any data.
I think we've all learned that.
And of the data we can trust the least?
Polls, surveys.
Now, I'm exaggerating a little bit.
Now, the only thing I want to tell you is that I don't know if any of this data is correct or this survey is valid, but we're going to act like it is because that's going to be more fun.
Agreed? If we act like it's real, it's going to be way more fun.
So here's the data that's totally real.
There was a huge difference...
In the Democrats and the Republicans, in terms of who they trusted.
Now, not in the obvious way.
Obviously, the Democrats were trusting CNN more than Fox.
Obviously, the Republicans liked their Breitbarts more than their MSNBCs, right?
So some of that's obvious.
And of course, the survey showed that exactly like you'd expect.
But here's the weird part.
Republicans also don't trust their own side.
And it's pretty striking.
So the Republicans definitely don't trust CNN. But do you know who else they don't trust?
Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart.
Basically nothing. They basically trust nothing.
Who are the smart ones?
Let's just look at the last, oh, I don't know, five years.
We'll just take the last five years, keep it current.
Who are the smart ones?
The ones who didn't trust anything?
Or the ones who trusted the news?
Like, who got the better record for the last five years?
You know, I know because I'm setting you up a little bit, because I know the audience.
Are you sure? Are you sure?
Are you sure? It feels like that to me, right?
It feels like the people who were the most skeptical were also the most right, with some notable exceptions.
There are some things that you were skeptical of that I still think might be right.
Who knows? So we don't agree on all the skepticism.
But if you were just to take a record with some hits and misses, the people who doubted everything...
Came out pretty well.
Am I wrong? But has anybody done the following thing?
And could anybody?
Is it even possible? Has anybody ever taken, let's just say an apples to apples comparison, as best you could in this case, CNN to Fox News?
You know, let's call them peers, roughly speaking.
They would be peers. Not in size.
Fox News is bigger.
But in type, roughly peers.
Now, has anybody ever made a list of, let's say, again, the last five years, because current matters more than anything else, the last five years, the number of stories that each of the networks got wrong.
Now, could you even make such a list?
Now, under the CNN list, you'd have everything from Russian collusion to blah, blah, blah.
But wouldn't you also have some things on the Fox News list?
Because the nature of the news business is everybody gets stuff wrong.
Right? But I don't know of any case...
Have you heard of a case where Fox News left legitimate news out of the news?
Have they ever been accused of that?
I haven't heard of that. CNN gets accused of that.
So there are definitely some differences going on there.
But I would not judge CNN... Nor Fox News, nor any other news, by the fact that they got some stories wrong.
Is that fair? Can we all agree that getting some even major stories, even getting major stories wrong, you have to kind of factor that into that's just the news business.
How can you possibly get them all right all the time?
That's not a thing. So if you're just being reasonable, you know they're going to get some big stories wrong, no matter what kind of resources or intentions they put on it.
But would the lists look similar?
You know, if you made the list and you had some way to be objective about it, would there be, you know, three or four things under the Fox News list, three or four big things under the CNN list?
Would they look alike, sort of the same?
And then you'd get down to the trivial stuff and, you know, were these the opinion people or the news people?
So it would get murky but also unimportant after the first five or so.
And then you'd have to ask which ones are important.
Is the Jussie Smollett case important?
You could argue it is.
But you could also argue it isn't.
So if one had some big stories that were wrong, whichever side, and the other had maybe more stories that were wrong, how could you ever compare them?
So I would just say that you should...
Have some humility about whether or not you can tell your own side is wrong, which is actually something that most of you are already at.
Because the big takeaway from this data, which is totally credible, is that Republicans are far more likely to be skeptical of all authority.
And to me, it looks like that's the right play.
More right than the other side.
I think it's a mistake to be an absolutist about it.
You know, if you're just going to say everything's false, well, you know, I'm not going to take that path.
But you can't criticize its track record, I don't think, if you don't have data to support it, because anecdotally, it would look like the doubters have the edge for the last several years.
Bill Maher continues to be most valuable player.
You know, I think I should start giving out the most valuable player award for just Americans who are being useful citizens.
And it would have nothing to do with, you know, any of your past.
So it's not about anything you did up to this point, but how did you do this week?
You know, did you have a good week?
Bill Maher, because he has the ability to call out his own side as well as what you might say is the other side.
I don't know if he would say it that way.
But since he can call out people of all groups, I think he's just doing a service that's probably one of the most important things happening right now in terms of our consciousness.
There are just a few people.
Just a few who can kind of cross over and take the message through the bubbles.
And so he's doing it again.
He was apparently on overtime on his show.
He was asked a question and he said he was happy about Elon Musk taking over a stake in Twitter because he thought it would be good for free speech and said something I've said, a lot of you have said, that Twitter is a private company, meaning that the government doesn't own that Twitter is a private company, meaning that the government doesn't So since it's a non-government entity, they're not really bound by free speech in the usual way.
But as Bill Maher points out, it's functionally the same as banning your speech if you get banned on Twitter.
It's like for all practical purposes, like what's the point of having a constitution if you can find workarounds of this magnitude?
It sort of makes a joke of the constitution.
So I'm completely on that page.
Completely on that page.
And I would hope... Most people are on that page.
But he's certainly helping people to get on that page.
So I give him most valuable player award, good citizen.
Again, forget about anything else he did before this week, because that's not part of the MVP award.
This week, great citizen.
And he even gave some examples of how discussion about the Wuhan lab was banned on Twitter, being the potential source of the pandemic.
And again, and then Bill Maher also being useful in helping people think by not saying that the virus came from the lab, saying that we can't rule it out, which is the only thing you can say at this point.
So again, that's like just such a useful opinion.
So I said I'm going to correct myself.
I'm issuing a correction.
Correction. It's a rare thing.
So make sure you pay attention when I tell you I was wrong about something.
So the college freshman who humiliated Brian Stelter at whatever that event was, it was a disinformation conference, and then the freshman pointed out CNN's list of disinformation and sort of embarrassed Brian Stelter in having to answer to that, which he just appointed the question.
And I said at the time that it looked like the question was written by a professional.
Meaning that the student would be more of a setup.
Yeah, the student was on Tucker Carlson last night, so that's why I'm updating my opinion.
Apparently the freshman writes for his college newspaper.
So that fact, that fact alone...
Suggests I'm going to reverse my opinion.
So my opinion is that a student couldn't have written it.
It was just too well written.
But he has now a record of working for the school paper.
And so I'll say, oh, okay.
That does suggest he has some writing talent.
And so I'm going to say a book.
Yes, you are hearing my dog screaming in some kind of urgency.
And I might have to leave here to find out what that is, if she does it again.
Are you okay with that?
We have enough dog lovers here, right?
If I hear her bark again, I'm going to have to go.
I think she's barking at the cat, but you'd all understand if I take a minute to do that, right?
So let me know if you hear it again.
So here's another example of Democrats believing whatever they're told.
True or false, Republicans were very early to say, it sounds to me like this Black Lives Matter organization might be more about making money than it is about helping black people.
Am I right? That was pretty much the Republican point of view from the start.
Now, let's make a careful distinction, because these things get taken out of context.
I don't think any Republican was saying black lives don't matter.
I didn't hear that. So nobody was disagreeing with the general idea that everybody should be treated as equal in every way that matters to Black Lives Matter.
So just the general concept that we should all be treated as valuable human beings, everybody was on that page.
But now we know that the organization itself, just the small group of people whose names were attached to it, It's starting to look like a little bit of sketchy stuff happened.
And what's important about this story is it's coming from the Huffington Post.
So the Huffington Post is running stories essentially calling out black...
Okay, there's my dog again.
I've got to go take care of this dog thing.
I will be right back.
I can't find her.
So she either fixed her problem...
If I hear it again, I'm going to have to go take care of that again.
All right. So there's another non-story in CNN about Don Jr.'s texts to Mark Meadows on November 5th, so right after the election.
And Don Jr.
was passing along some legal strategies...
For overturning the election.
So CNN is treating this like a huge scandal and there's something really important that happened, etc.
Let me turn on my security cam so I can see the dog if she's outdoors.
She may have gotten out.
Oh damn it.
That's what happened. Open gate.
That would suggest that my dog is at the front door where she shouldn't be.
So what is the most reliable rule of technology?
What?
That if you have video cameras all around your house, and there's one that you need to look at, it'll be the one that's not working.
Now, the camera works.
I look at it every day, multiple times.
But because it's important, like I really, really want to see this right now, because I can't go look, and my dog might be out there because I got out of the gate.
It's the one thing that's not working.
All the other cameras are working.
How does that happen? So,
yeah, one of the things, when I design my house, I put in all kinds of really cool automation.
None of it ever works.
Almost nothing that's automated in this house works when it needs to.
It all works sometimes. Alright, so I've got somebody taking care of the dog thing.
That should take care of itself.
So the CNN story is hilarious because Don Jr.
is being, let's say, attacked by CNN for doing the most normal thing that anybody ever did.
So this is what Don Jr.
is accused of. Someone sent around some suggestions for how to legally pause the process, I guess, long enough to check things out, or potential ways to have alternate electorates or something like that.
Given that the list was, by design, things that should be legal or could, you know, maybe tested, maybe they wouldn't stand the legal process, but they had a legal theory behind them.
Now, is it illegal to send around somebody else's ideas that are labeled as legal things to consider?
Legal things to consider.
And then they discard them and don't do them.
Or I don't think they did.
Maybe they did. I can't remember.
So... Why does Don Jr.
always get in trouble for doing what all business people do?
Which is, remember he got in trouble for taking a meeting with the Russian?
Because she might have some information about Hillary Clinton?
And my argument was always, that's what anybody would do.
Anybody who had any experience in business at all, the first thing you'd do, because it was just downstairs.
The entire effort involved in going to the meeting was taking the elevator in his own building.
It was in his own building.
It was somebody he knew.
Like a personal connection.
So who wouldn't take that meeting?
Because it sounded like it could be something good.
If it turned out that it was, you know, that the information came from a Russian spy, then maybe you get the FBI involved.
But you're not going to call the FBI on something that's almost certainly going to be bullshit.
Who does that?
I wouldn't. Would you?
If you were almost sure that it was really just a meeting downstairs and somebody new and, you know, you're just sort of humoring them a little bit, well, you know, maybe.
Maybe there could be something.
Would you call the FBI ahead of time?
Or would you find out what the information was?
And if it sounded sketchy, then call the FBI? Right?
Uh... So every time Don Jr.
does exactly what every smart person does in every business setting, everywhere, all the time, on every topic, CNN can make it a scandal.
So the most obvious thing anybody does on any topic is take some ideas that somebody has and pass them around, and then people discard the ones that are clearly problematic, and then they maybe try one that's the best of the bunch.
Like that... Where's the problem exactly?
It's not illegal to have bad ideas that you discard, is it?
They're treating them like they were bad ideas that they accepted.
But a bad idea that you discard is an example of somebody doing exactly what everybody should be doing.
Floating up a bunch of ideas and discarding the bad ones.
That's not a problem.
That's a feature.
All right. So CNN's got more reports on, and everybody does, I guess, about more civilian attacks, and there's some intercepted audio of apparently Russian military talking about killing the civilians, meaning that they were doing it intentionally.
Now, let us do a little check-in with the skeptics.
How many of you would believe a Russian-language audio that the Ukrainians have provided?
So the source is the Ukrainians.
So the Ukrainians have given you an audio that sounds like Russian-speaking people saying exactly what you'd expect them to say if you were Ukraine and you wanted people to know that the Russians are doing terrible war crimes.
Do you believe it or don't believe it?
Of course, I said it in a way to set you up not to believe it, right?
But I did that intentionally.
A lot of you don't believe it. I would say this.
I would say it's not credible, but I'm leaning toward it maybe being true, but I wouldn't ask you to believe it.
Yeah. See, here's the problem.
The problem is that the source can't be trusted at all.
It is literally the least credible source of all sources.
The enemy during a war.
It's the least credible source.
An enemy during the war should be lying as hard as they can.
The only requirement during war that makes sense is that your lies are believable or they have an impact or they have some military benefit.
That's it. Ukraine has no obligation to tell the truth.
Do you agree? Do you think that Ukraine under the current situation has some obligation to the rest of the world to tell the truth about what's going on?
I don't think so. Because we're adults, right?
If we're adults and we see that they're in a war, we should not believe anything that either side says.
I certainly don't believe the Russian version.
That would be ridiculous. But, you know, skepticism is warranted.
Now, I do think that it would be going too far to say it's false.
It would not be going too far to say you don't know one way or the other because the source has no credibility.
But no matter whether this story is true or not, can we agree that atrocities pretty much are guaranteed?
Pretty much. Because it's a war.
Of course there are atrocities.
Of course civilians are being killed.
Of course they're not being so careful.
Of course. You don't need these anecdotes to tell you what you already know that can't be avoided.
That has to be true.
It's a war. MIT has decided to reinstate the SATs, and I guess the ACTs, as part of their requirements for getting in.
Interestingly, I wasn't aware of this, but apparently there are studies that say that the SATs, the people who are not in favor of them, they say that the only thing that they correlate really well with is the income of the person who took it.
That they don't correlate so well with, I guess, future success.
And that the thing that does correlate well is the grades you got in high school, I guess.
So if you got good grades in high school, you'd probably get good grades in college.
It's fairly predicted. But the SATs are not.
But MIT must disagree, or they just like a brand that says you have to be this smart to get in.
So one of those two things.
And what do you think?
Does it make sense to say that the SAT scores correlate with family income more than future success?
I'm not sure I'm buying that.
I feel like all of the variables are too bi-directional and confounding and stuff.
I just don't know that you can suss that out.
If I had a choice of hiring somebody who did well on the SATs versus someone who did not, I think I'd take the one who did.
Now, if I had their school performance...
And the school performance was opposite of the SATs, which seems kind of rare to me, but maybe.
I think I might weight the school performance higher, because you can imagine they had a bad day on the SATs or something.
But, I don't know.
SAT comes...
I think I'd trust the SATs.
I do think that there might be like a 20% racism baked in and anti-poor person, anti-poor person in general, built into the SATs.
That seems true. But sort of directionally, I think they're reasonably accurate, I would imagine.
So Ali Alexander, I guess he was the founder of the protest on January 6th.
And he's going to talk to the, I guess, the committee that's looking into it.
Oh, the federal grand jury subpoenaed him.
He's going to talk to them.
And I thought it was interesting how he responded.
So here are some things.
So he created the Save America March on January 6th.
He denied talking with the White House about security groups or coordinating plans with the Proud Boys.
So he denied that.
He says, I don't believe I have information that will be useful to them, but I am cooperating as best I can.
Now that's kind of perfect, isn't it?
If you're in this situation, this is just a perfect statement.
I don't believe I have information that will be useful to them, but I'm cooperating as best I can.
That's a nice matter-of-fact statement.
It doesn't provoke.
It just says, just matter of fact.
That's a really good take on it.
They said, quote, I did nothing wrong, and I am not in possession of evidence that anyone else had plans to commit unlawful acts.
Okay, a good, clean denial.
Don't you like a specific and clean denial?
And that seemed like I don't see any weaseling in that, right?
Now, I'm just talking about the messaging.
I have no idea what's in anybody's head or what actually happened that day.
But in terms of messaging, this is really good.
And then he goes on.
He goes, quote, I denounce anyone who planned to subvert my permitted event, a nice contrast there, subvert his permitted event and the other permitted events of that day on capital grounds to stage any counterproductive activities.
Again, that's really well done.
Just in terms of communication in public relations, very clean, nicely done.
But then the New York Times says it's an indication that the inquiry could reach into the Trump administration.
Maybe. We'll keep an eye on that and see what's up.
Now, I promised you in the title, and how many of you stayed around for this?
Okay? We've got a weekend-sized group.
I'm going to give you a mushroom-like experience, but without any mushrooms.
Now, everybody asks, what's it like when people have not done any kind of psychedelic-esque people have?
It's a horrible job trying to explain it, because it defies explanation.
If you could explain it in words, you wouldn't need to do it.
You could just read a book about it.
So it is, by definition, impossible to explain.
And I'm sure everybody has something that's a little bit unique, right?
That their own experience is a little bit unique.
So I'm going to give you just a little taste of something that will get you in sort of that mindset a little bit.
I'm going to bend your assumptions about reality just a little.
And I'm going to start with a story.
And the most provocative first sentence of a book that could ever be.
I once hypnotized a psychic.
Wouldn't that be a good opening line for a book?
I once hypnotized a psychic.
True story. Now, the psychic claimed to be a psychic.
You know, that was her claim.
And the reason I did it was because psychics are notoriously easy to hypnotize.
Anecdotally. Don't know if there's any science to that.
And I was a trained hypnotist and I was practicing.
Now, one of the things that she said, once she was under hypnosis...
Well, she explained to me that in the psychic realm, if there is such a thing, that the arrow of time was not one-directional.
In other words, she could not tell if she was predicting something that was going to happen or she was telling you something that had happened that she couldn't know about.
That those two things were identical.
She could only see them, but she couldn't put a timer on them.
And I thought, isn't that interesting?
Now, I'm not telling you I believe in psychics.
I'm just telling you what the experience was.
And you can make your own conclusions about this.
What I'm really doing is just priming you.
I'm just putting your mind in a certain mindset.
Just opening up the, let's say, your imagination.
So the only thing I'm going to ask for you is that you imagine it.
I won't ask you to change your mind about anything.
We're just going to do some magic.
And one of the things that mushrooms did for me, in the one example that I took them, and by the way, I don't recommend any drug for anybody, right?
That's for your doctor and you to figure out.
But one of the things you find out is that some of your most basic assumptions about reality may be not so right.
And you might not find out a better assumption about reality because you took a psychedelic, but you might come out of it thinking that the impression of reality you used to have is not so stable.
And that could actually be useful because it means you're not locked into whatever is bothering you.
If you're locked into a mental loop, the mushrooms can just tell you, you know, you don't have to be there.
And maybe that's enough. And then you just lose the loop or lose that frame.
So I want to talk about a prophecy versus a plan.
Prophecy means that you see something in your mind in the future.
Now, if you prophesize it, that just means you see it, right?
It doesn't mean you're doing anything about it.
Now, what would be the difference between that and a plan?
Right? Well, a plan would be something where you say, okay, I see where I'm going, but I also see that I'm going to need these steps.
And without the steps, you know that the vision isn't going to happen.
So you'd say those are very different, right?
There's a big difference between just having a vision of something versus having a plan to get there.
Now, a third thing that's different from those two is imagination.
Suppose you just like to imagine yourself in the future.
It's not a plan.
It's not a prophecy. You just like to spend time in your imagination.
You know, someday, wouldn't that be cool?
Well, imagine if this happened.
Imagine if it happened. Now I'm going to tell you a true story about me.
From a very young age, probably teenager or so, I like to imagine something in particular.
Now, there were a number of things I like to imagine.
I like to imagine I could fly.
I'd imagine myself flying over the town, etc.
And I like to imagine that when I was young, I like to imagine that I would become a famous cartoonist.
And I would just imagine what that would be like.
Oh, wouldn't that be great if my job was just, like, drawing cartoons?
And what if it really worked out?
I'd be thinking...
Now, I can't say that I had a plan exactly.
It felt like a prophecy sometimes, but what I was actually doing was just imagining it.
I was just taking a pleasant thing to imagine and then imagining it.
Now, this is the point where I'm going to tell you why I'm really talking about this.
Some people watching this, not the majority, but some of you, let's say out of 100, Any hundred, a few of you are going to have a profound experience.
Not all of you, but you get to play along as well.
And the profound experience is that you believe that there's this big difference between imagining something, having a vision or a prophecy, whatever word you want to put on it, or just seeing it, you don't know why, well, it's just there, and planning to get somewhere.
Also, from about my teenage years, I had this cool, imaginary thought that someday, it didn't matter how the sequence of events happened, I would be asked to visit the President of the United States in the Oval Office, and he would ask my advice on something.
And there wasn't any reason for it.
It was just like a pleasant, cool thing to think of.
And so I've been thinking of that since I was a teenager.
Now, some of you know that happened in 2018.
I was in the Oval Office chatting with Trump.
And I told you he asked my opinion about who he'd end up running against.
I said Kamala Harris.
He said Joe Biden was his guess.
He was a better guesser than me.
So that's why I can tell you the story.
I know he wouldn't mind...
You know, that's the one thing I can tell you.
Because he wouldn't mind that I told you that he knew years in advance what was going to happen.
I mean, he called it. So, in that special case, I think I can tell you what happened.
So, in truth, that actually happened.
Now, did I do anything intentionally to make that happen?
I don't know. I do know that I was always interested in politics as a hobby.
I do know that I was drawn into this live streaming stuff, and I do know that I started tweeting.
I do know that when Trump came on the scene, I thought he was more interesting than other people in the persuasion world, and it fit with what I already knew, and so I wrote about it.
One thing led to another, and there I was.
Literally in the Oval Office.
It was just the damnedest thing.
Now, the two examples I gave you aren't even the only ones.
I mean, if they were the only ones, it would be a good enough story by itself.
But consistently, I find that things I simply imagined for fun, literally just to feel good, Before I go to sleep, usually.
It was a trick I would do trying to fall asleep.
Instead of thinking of the past, and instead of thinking of the real future, like my to-do list for tomorrow, I never think about the past, I never think about the to-do list.
I imagine something that would just really be cool someday in the future.
And I don't try to imagine something tomorrow...
Because that's too easy to falsify.
Like, your brain won't let you imagine something that you think, that's not going to happen tomorrow.
But if you say, you know, in years from now, some years from now, this cool thing might be happening.
You can embrace that.
Now, here's the tip that's going to change some of your lives.
You cannot stop thinking about something.
You don't have the power.
Brains don't work that way.
You can't say, stop thinking about the elephant.
Don't. No, don't think of that elephant.
Stop thinking about the elephant.
The more you say stop thinking about the elephant, the more you think about the damn elephant.
You can't stop thinking about things.
But what you can do is fill up your shelf space.
You can fill your mind with something pleasant, and then there's just not as much room.
Oh, yeah, the bad thing will get in, and it'll keep chipping away.
It's going to keep opening the door.
It's going to keep trying to pry up the window.
It's going to be trying to get in from every angle.
But hold it off.
If you get a strong enough positive imaginary, this is the key, imaginary future image that's really pleasant, you can live in it And keep the cooties out.
You know, you can keep the monsters out.
And the longer you do it, the less power the monsters have.
Because here's the most important thing you need to know about a brain.
What it thinks about, it thinks matters.
It doesn't think about the things that matter.
What it thinks about is what matters.
If you understand that, you understand the most basic thing about the brain and how to reprogram it.
That's how a hypnotist can reprogram you.
Just the basic truth.
Whatever I make you think about is what matters.
If you think that the things you think about are because there are good reasons, sometimes.
I mean, if it's a national emergency, yeah, there's a good reason.
But most of the stuff you think about, it's because you're thinking about it.
It's not because it's important.
That's the most important thing.
So simply make yourself think about more minutes of something else.
Because the more minutes you can make yourself think about something else, the fewer minutes to that other thing, and it just starts to shrink.
And you can just shrink it, shrink it, shrink it, shrink it.
And the beauty of this is that you can take control over your mind and your life, because thinking about something really cool that might happen to you in the future is something everybody can do.
You can do it a lot. You can do it all the time.
You can do it while you're stuck in line.
You can do it while you're driving. You can do it while you're trying to fall asleep.
Think of that cool thing, or several things.
It doesn't even have to be one thing.
It could be a variety of cool things.
Just imagine them. The more clearly you imagine them, remember, the visual part of your brain is the important part.
So you've got to imagine it in vision.
Don't imagine it in words.
Don't imagine it just in sound.
You could add smell. Smells good.
Imagine a smell that's very powerful.
But just visualize yourself there.
Feel the people. Feel the handshakes.
Feel the looks. Just feel yourself in that future.
And that becomes the thing that's important.
And everything else will start to fade.
Now, if you're lucky and you thought of something that's cool and maybe possible, You may have discovered that you live in a simulation or that reality doesn't work exactly the way you thought.
That wouldn't be a big surprise, would it?
Suppose you found out that reality wasn't quite wired the way you thought.
It's still mostly intact, but there's something about it you didn't know.
That wouldn't be surprising, would it?
We find out surprising things about the nature of reality fairly often.
So here's one that's going to blow your mind.
People who take mushrooms, sometimes, not every person, but this is the sort of thing you might understand.
There's no difference between a plan, a prophecy, and your imagination.
There's no difference.
And here's why.
If you imagine something long enough...
You end up gravitating toward the things that make it happen, and it's unconscious.
You can't tell the difference between imagining it and having a plan for it, because in both cases you're imagining it, and in both cases a bunch of steps happen and it happens.
You can't tell the difference between having a prophecy In the case that the prophecy is something that you would also enjoy, something that you would like imagining.
So when your prophecy matches what you would like to imagine, your prophecy is going to act like an imagination.
It's going to drive you subconsciously to do the things, learn the things, associate with the people, care about the things, notice the things that get you to the same place.
These are the same.
When I teach you, as I have in my book, How to Fail Almost Everything and Still Win Big, that a system is better than a goal, and this is the point where you say, but Scott, you say goals are for losers, you should have a system.
Do you know what a system is?
Right there. That's a system.
Every day... Fill up your shelf space as many times as possible with a positive, imaginary future that's far enough away that your brain isn't going to say, that's not going to happen tomorrow.
Well, you know, five years from now.
Three years from now.
Who knows? How do you get there?
This is why I don't say have a goal.
Because step one might not be the thing, and maybe the goal will change, and maybe you're imagining more than one thing, and why would you assume that one of the things you imagine is the one you want?
So imagination is more like a system.
It allows you to get not just this goal, but it might turn out that one of your other imagined goals or imagined realities is the one.
Now, in the comments...
How many of you just had your mind blown?
Because I just told you how to get everything you want, how to get rid of the bad thoughts, how to program the good thoughts, in the simplest possible way, in a way that's not only easy, but you'll enjoy every part of it.
You'll enjoy it.
And all you have to do is your imagination, activate especially your visual sense, And the more clearly you can imagine it, and the more often you imagine it, and especially if you give yourself enough time to get there, you're going to find that it feels like magic.
That's the problem with explaining affirmations.
People ask me all the time, you say you used affirmations and you got these seemingly amazing results.
Like, how does that work?
Like, what in the world would writing down what you want 15 times a day while visualizing it, how in the world could that make an actual thing happen?
This is how. Not only this is how, it could not happen.
The mechanisms I'm explaining here, you can see for yourself, I think with no argument whatsoever, That these are functionally the same.
In my life, they absolutely have acted the same.
That if I can imagine it, I'm drifting toward it.
And if I don't imagine it, I don't drift toward it.
And it just works every time, all the time, on every topic.
No exceptions. Now, some of you just lost some mental illness.
Not most of you.
Some of you. And some of you just found a way to get everything you want.
And on that note, this being the most valuable livestream you've ever seen, and a highlight of your life, I'm going to close it with one extra bonus sip.
Your beverage might be a little cool, but that doesn't make this less cool, does it?
No, it doesn't. It does not.
So join me now for the bonus sip, and after that, we'll have a good weekend.
Oh, good.
Oh, good. So good.
Thank you, YouTube. By the way, I have lots of micro-lessons on the Locals platform, subscription.
