Scott Adams | Reframe Reality for Happiness and Success

[00:00:06] Scott Adams, the man, the myth, the legend. Of course, everyone knows him from Dilbert, probably the most popular syndicated cartoon ever. It just perfectly summarizes the pain and agony of cubicle life and the workplace. And Scott's been there, done that, and he cartooned about

[00:00:29] it. He used the cartoon to escape that one career. Then he went on to political punditry fame when he amazingly predicted in early 2015 that Donald Trump would be not only the nominee, but quite possibly the president. How did he do that? He describes in the book, Win Bigley.

[00:00:49] He's also been on this podcast several times discussing politics and how he predicted it. It's very interesting because he has a background as a hypnotist and he thought Trump used hypnotism techniques to win. We talk about that a lot in the prior podcast. And also,

[00:01:04] I highly recommend his book, Win Bigley. He also, in one of our podcasts, we discussed another book of his that was really great, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. But this book, his latest book, Reframe Your Brain, The User Interface

[00:01:19] for Happiness and Success. This book really summarizes in a very simple way techniques for improving your life and your outlook on life in a really just systematic way. And when reading the book, I was thinking to myself, oh, I do this, I do this, I do this. But

[00:01:38] I always thought all these things were just a collection, a hodgepodge of things I was doing. And he describes it all in one kind of system that you could then apply to any situation. So Reframe Your Brain, it's all about these reframes, how to reframe

[00:01:55] the brain. You should definitely buy the book, but also we discuss it thoroughly on the podcast and we have a fun conversation. And then when I was booking this podcast, I've had Scott on a lot. I consider him a friend. We always have great conversations.

[00:02:09] And as many of you know, I haven't been on as active on social media in the past few years. And somebody told me, oh, Scott Adams is canceled. And I'm like, what, what, how did

[00:02:21] he, how did he get canceled? And so I looked it up. And sure enough, like I see many of these situations, some things he said were completely taken out of context. But

[00:02:33] I wanted to find out what the story was. So I asked him about it. And we talk about that. It's part of this podcast, it's part of this episode. So let me know what

[00:02:44] you think. Subscribe to the podcast if you can. Tell all your friends about it and enjoy. This isn't your average business podcast. And he's not your average host. This is the James Altiger show. Scott, how's it going? I haven't talked to you in a while.

[00:03:14] Lots of things have happened, apparently to both of us since last time we talked. How's Atlanta? Atlanta is pretty good. You know, it's tricky because I've never really lived outside of the New York City or the New York City area. And

[00:03:28] it's like a different universe outside of New York City. So and I don't drive. So I'm basically like in my house all the time. Yeah. Are you not going to learn to drive? I don't really, I feel like right now driving a car would

[00:03:42] just be a weapon in my hands. And eventually I would kill someone with that weapon. Well, I've got a friend who has a Tesla who illegally lets it drive itself everywhere. She falls asleep in it. So maybe you need one of those. Yeah.

[00:03:56] Yeah, I didn't know. You're saying it's illegal. So you're not allowed to do that? I think you're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel or you know, you're not supposed to fall asleep. That's the part I know for sure.

[00:04:07] I feel like that's starting to border into things that people worry about in terms of computers looking at us and then telling us what to do. Well, it is so driving home the fact that the human is the weak spot in the

[00:04:19] whole driving process. It's like why are we even involved? Like my GPS tells me to turn right and then my arms do what the GPS tells me to do. Like I feel like you could take me out of this equation, you know, self-driving cars,

[00:04:35] of course. But every time I drive, I think this is designed to support my ego. Like it makes no sense. I guess they're worried that maybe there might be, you know, one in a million spots where the GPS doesn't work or it doesn't recognize a moving object

[00:04:55] that's moving across the ground or it doesn't recognize a certain sign or a sign's been, you know, graffiti's on it so it doesn't see the stop sign. I don't know. Like maybe they're worried about the odd thing that could

[00:05:08] go wrong, but in a year or two those odd things will be eliminated. Yeah, the new way they're training the cars with just using video instead of rules is just mind-boggling. Yeah, just showed a million scenes and no set of drive.

[00:05:24] Do you think it'll ever be the case that, you know, already creativity is being impinged upon by AI? Like do you ever think it'd be the case that I could say, hey, give me a cartoon in the style of Dilbert. That's funnier than any Dilbert cartoon.

[00:05:42] Well, you know, I keep hearing people say, well, chat GPT, they did a test where people would see if they could determine the AI writing versus a human and people were terrible at it. They couldn't tell the difference.

[00:05:54] But my theory is that you could tell the difference if it were humor. Probably if it was eroticism. There's probably a whole bunch of kinds of writing that you would immediately identify as human or not human and humor is at the top of the list.

[00:06:09] You would know if a high end humorist wrote something, you would know it was not AI. Yeah, I guess that's true. I feel the same about like, I hate to say it because it sounds snobbish, but like literary fiction.

[00:06:23] I feel like when a writer has a strong voice behind their writing, it's hard for a computer to understand what that means. Yeah, the computer in theory, the way they do AI now, everything should be average. Is this looking at everything that everybody's done forever

[00:06:42] and it's not going to take the outliers. It's going to take something like the most common thing. And so I don't even know how it would be possible that AI would write better than the best human writers.

[00:06:52] So I have this, I have a provocative AI hypothesis that the best AI can never be better than the best human at that same task. Not counting speed, obviously speed we won't keep up with. But let's say you had an AI expert at just anything that humans

[00:07:12] are also an expert at the human expert would judge the AI, not the other way around. So if the AI disagrees with the best human expert, the human expert will say, well, you know, I'm right. So you must be less than me. So you're not quite there yet.

[00:07:28] I don't know if that's true, though, because I could think of some domains where humans will not be as good as AI. Like for instance, the law. So let's say just something as simple as traffic tickets.

[00:07:38] I got a traffic ticket and I want the AI to solve my problem. The AI knows every law ever written in the state that I'm worried about. So it'll probably have more knowledge to draw from than the average lawyer or even an expert lawyer.

[00:07:53] You know that logically that makes sense. But then as soon as the real world interferes, let me give you just one concrete example. Something I was once involved with many years ago, it was a legal situation in which the prevailing party managed to find an attorney

[00:08:10] who golfs with a judge. Now, was the AI going to do that for me? That's true. So AI can't hustle. It doesn't have human legs and arms and so on. So when there's when there's techniques that actually involve a human presence

[00:08:28] and what that human presence does, then the AI can't compete. But if it's just intellectual activity, I feel like in many domains, the AI could do it better. So certainly the AI could check case law faster. Yeah. So speed, it wins every time.

[00:08:46] But do you want an AI arguing for your case if you know it won't lie and it won't spin? Right. You want the human who will do everything that's necessary, even if it's a little bit sketchy as long as you don't go to jail.

[00:09:02] That's why I took it as something as simple as like traffic tickets. So yes, I don't want if it's a murder trial and involves arguing in court, I don't want the AI doing deals with the DA and so on.

[00:09:15] And or I don't want the AI and arguing the case in front of the court. But if it's something as simple as traffic tickets where it's just some and a mailing that has to be sent in and it's all negotiated through mail,

[00:09:24] then maybe I think I would trust the AI better. Let me throw another one at you. So here is a real world, real world traffic issue I had. I got a ticket for parking somewhere on the street and I went in and

[00:09:36] argued that the tree had grown up over the sign. So I didn't know there was no parking. The judge looked at it and said, you're the third one who's come in here with that same street and that same tree and cut it in half.

[00:09:49] I still I still got penalized, but cut it in half because it was only half my fault, I guess. Now would the machine have done that? No, that's true. So you're saying basically humans might not know, even though

[00:10:02] the AI has lots of case law, the AI is not going to know every special case in the real world that could could and realistically occur. Right. So the judge in that case had a sense of fairness, which the judge

[00:10:18] thought was more important maybe than the letter of the law, because what was more important than me getting the right result was that the system looked credible when I walked out the door. So what made it feel credible to me is that my complaint was heard.

[00:10:32] She goes, yeah, that's that's the thing. But we can't let you get off completely. So you pay half. And I thought, well, that's not. I mean, would the machine have done that? Would the machine have known how I feel? Right.

[00:10:44] Because that's how that's how that was based on. It was how I feel because the judge would have felt the same thing in my situation. The machine can't do that. What about like when I, you know, we discussed writing, but what about something like, like visual art?

[00:10:57] When I look at some of the output of mid-journey, it just seems so beautiful to me. And I'm not like a judge or critic of art at all. But some of it, like just depending on the prompt seems really amazing. Music might be the same thing. Yeah.

[00:11:11] My next provocative AI hypothesis is that AI music and visual art will be impressive, but we will not find it our normal form of art. And the reason would be this, that the reason you like art is

[00:11:27] not the reason you think you think you like it because wow, that's beautiful. Or you hear a song and you say that, that just, I love that. That feels good. But the moment I told you that it was not made by human, either

[00:11:39] the art or the song, you would lose the evolutionary instinct that you want to have sex with the person who made that painting or made that song. And even if you're, you know, even if it's your same gender

[00:11:53] and you're not interested in having sex with them or whatever in the situation, you still pick it up as a human, exceptional capability. And that's the only thing you respond to, you just don't know it. That is fascinating. Yeah.

[00:12:05] And maybe the way I was thinking about it was that let's take music. Part of the reason we might like a certain song is because of the raw emotion behind the singer. And there's real life experience that fuels that emotion and fuels that voice.

[00:12:20] But you're sort of saying that's not really what I like in music. That's it's just that I want to have sex with that person because of that raw emotion. And I know it's from a real person.

[00:12:30] Yeah, I'm simplifying a little bit, but take the case of Oliver Anthony. Do I have the name right? The gentleman with the. That's the Richmond, Richard and Richmond guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that. So you hear a song and there's a part of it where I was

[00:12:44] resisting listening to it because it wasn't my genre. But then I heard it and you get to that part where you're saying, you know, that the pay is bullshit and you just go, oh, like I could feel that.

[00:12:56] Like he transmitted he transmitted the feeling from his body directly into my body. That's like, you know, ultimate art. But suppose you had made a deep fake and you knew that a computer had generated that exact same sound.

[00:13:11] If I knew it was a computer, would I even feel it? And the answer is probably only a little bit. Yeah, sort of like when you watch a movie, you feel it. But the fact that it's not real makes you feel it in a compartmentalized way.

[00:13:25] It's an interesting theory because there's for many years now, there's been AI generated music like AI generated Mozart, that the experts can't tell the difference between this and real Mozart. And yet it's not like I'll spend all day listening to AI generated Mozart. I never will do that.

[00:13:42] I'll only listen to the real thing, perhaps for the reason you say there is no real rational answer in my head why I would do that. It's just that's what I would do. And maybe it's because of what you just said.

[00:13:53] Yeah, I spend maybe two weeks or so using AI to generate cool new art for my own podcast and I'd use it just to promote it. It'd be like pictures of me with big muscles or riding unicorns or whatever.

[00:14:08] And to me, I thought they were visually really good. So this was an upgrade to my podcast. It took about two weeks before my audience said, you know what we'd really like, we'd like to see the same picture of you every day holding

[00:14:22] a coffee cup because it's actually you. It's like it's real. Yeah. And I lost all interest in the AI art because after I'd seen 100 or so, they had a sameness to them, which was a lack of life, but still they were perfect.

[00:14:39] But I could almost feel the lack of life. When you look at AI generated writing, no matter how good it is, there's almost this uncanny like feeling the same thing you would, you would feel if you were in a VR for a long time.

[00:15:05] Like ultimately your brain would say, wait a second, this is not real. And you would feel sick. So probably your listeners seeing the AI sky Adams over and over again. And this is by the way why I wouldn't let AI read my ads on the podcast

[00:15:21] in my voice because I don't want the listeners to get sick of that voice while listening to my podcast. Even if it sounds exactly like me. I do think there's always going to be this uncanny valley thing going on.

[00:15:33] And I don't know if AI will ever overcome that. Yeah, I like to use the Japanese pottery example. When Japanese potters became so good that they could make a pot that looked like it was made by machine.

[00:15:47] Nobody wanted them because you wanted your master to leave some sign that a human had worked on it. So they started introducing intentional errors. To make it look like a master potter had made it because in Japan that's that's a big deal, a master potter.

[00:16:05] So I think we're going to look for the errors, the errors or the art. The thing I say about art, one of my most famous quotes that goes around online is that creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. But art is knowing which of the mistakes to keep.

[00:16:22] And the example I use that is that Dilbert has no mouth. So Dilbert became one of the more famous iconic cartoon characters, but he has no eyeballs and no mouth and no neck. And would AI know that people would like that when that's three errors?

[00:16:40] Or would AI say, well, there's no way I'm going to make, you know, a character without a mouth. That'd be the most basic thing you'd put on a character's face. I just left it out. It was an error that made it better.

[00:16:52] It's fascinating because I remember either talking to you about this or reading about this, that to some extent that made Dilbert in every man because everybody can picture their own sort of mouth or face or whatever in that place.

[00:17:05] Because if you ask somebody on the street, did Dilbert have a mouth? They would say, of course he did. They wouldn't even remember that he didn't. So they were because probably they projected something into that story that was theirs. Yeah, in general, there's a concept in in cartooning.

[00:17:21] It's got a name. I think it's something like completion or something like that. I may have that wrong. But it's the idea that people will imagine the parts you didn't draw. Yeah, if you can suggest it, they'll see it and they'll remember it

[00:17:33] like they saw it, but just won't be there as part of the art. This is the theory why books always seem to be better than the movies, because you've already cast and viewed the entire movie

[00:17:42] when you're reading the book, and it's much better than any real life movie could be. Well, it's also different. I had that problem when I animated Dilbert and I put an actor's voice. You know, Daniel Stern was the voice of Dilbert and that matched pretty much

[00:17:57] what I heard in my head, but everybody had already heard a different voice in their head and they said, no, that's not the voice I hear. So yeah, they get pretty picky about that. So I love this new book you have, Reframe Your Brain,

[00:18:10] The User Interface for Happiness and Success. By the way, when you say the user interface for happiness and success, did you really feel the need for a subtitle? Like I always ask authors, like subtitles always seem kind of boring to me. I get it with Reframe Your Brain.

[00:18:26] Yeah. Like then the user interface for happiness and success. OK, maybe I'll look at that or maybe I'll remember that. I don't know. Yeah, I wanted to make the connection that it was a mechanical process, not magic, you know, and so the computer interface.

[00:18:40] It turns out my timing was accidentally extraordinarily good, except for the part about getting canceled. But the book came out after people understood that AI could be created by simply word pattern combinations so that you could create something

[00:18:56] like intelligence from something like a bunch of words that people have used in certain patterns and combinations. And that's something that hypnotists have known forever, which is that the thing we think is our logic and our reason sometimes is.

[00:19:12] But most of the time it's just words that fit together. So people will say, well, if those words work in a sentence, that must be something like thinking and the beauty of a reframe, which is just a simple sentence you put in your head,

[00:19:27] is that it doesn't need to make sense. Same as AI is taking nonsense and turning it into intelligence. You can simply reprogram or optimize your head by putting a little sentence in there that has a different combination of words.

[00:19:40] So the way your brain works and AI taught us this is you have to have the words in the right order and the right words, and then you you formed intelligence. So that's what reframe is.

[00:19:50] And it made it easier to explain if people already knew what AI was. Yeah, it's interesting. And I want to get to all these different connections because there's a very deep aspect to this book, which is what is the connection

[00:20:01] between consciousness and who we are and the thoughts we think. And basically there's no connection because just by changing the words that's going on in your head, you could completely change your you know, what's going on in your life from from just a conversation

[00:20:18] at a party to your anxiety and depression and stress to your work life and so on. Your consciousness is still, I guess, the same. But all the thoughts and words you're you're using in your head. Like I'll just give a simple example from

[00:20:32] that's kind of almost a cliche example. But imagine someone is pretty well to do, but they're having a hard time in their life or having a hard time with their boss or whatever. One reframe is imagine your, you know,

[00:20:48] the poorest person living in a refugee camp in, you know, some third world country. And now you're suddenly in this brain, this person, this body of someone who's making one hundred and fifty thousand a year in a cubicle in the US. Your life would be incredible.

[00:21:04] So that's just that's a cliche reframing that works. So what one of the most popular reframes in my book is sort of similar to that. And then I say, imagine if you just spawned into existence right now and you didn't know anything about your past, you just poop,

[00:21:23] you woke up like you're in a video game and you said, all right, what resources do I have? What's my situation? And if you could start from that and say to yourself, that's a pretty good position to be in.

[00:21:35] You know, I would wake up in my current job in a nice house with this cute little dog. And I would say, I love that dog. This house is cool. I have an income. I get to talk to you, you know, and I'd say that's good.

[00:21:49] But a minute before I respond, I was worrying because I don't know, I had a leak in my kitchen or something. Yeah. Like, oh, it always happens plumbing again. So if you saw your life as the continuation of all that,

[00:22:03] you have a whole different idea than if you say, if I woke up into this life today, would I be happy about it? And my answer is yes. Yeah, things would be pretty good. When I when I read that, that reframing, you have a hundred or so examples

[00:22:16] of reframes in here. When I read that one, that I responded to a lot because I have done that for many years where simply similar, where when I wake up in the morning, I imagine I'm an alien from some third dimension universe. I've never been to this universe.

[00:22:33] And I have to immediately figure out what is going on. Who am I? What are the rules of physics of this universe? And I'm here for a mission where I have, I'm only here for 24 hours and I have to help this body somehow

[00:22:48] during the next 24 hours. So that's my reframing every morning. I try to do it every morning. It's like a little mini meditation. That's a fascinating look inside, you know, people's crazy heads. Like we're all crazy on the inside. Yeah. I like that little reveal. Here's one for me.

[00:23:05] When I first became, you know, well known as a cartoonist, I'd be working really hard, you know, long days doing two or three jobs. And I'd wake up in the morning and there was about a three seconds

[00:23:16] when I knew I was a human being, but I didn't know which one. And I'd wake up and I'd be like, I'm a human. How's this going to go? Who am I? Oh, I'm a famous cartoonist.

[00:23:31] And then my day would be fine after that because for three seconds I could have been anybody, but I woke up into a cool job like, wow, this is great. Yeah, that always made me happy. Let me ask you, is there anybody in the world

[00:23:45] you would rather be than you? Oh, man. This gets to my basket case theory. This is sort of a reframe on its own that everybody seems nice and awesome until you get to know their deepest secrets. And then everybody's kind of falls apart the more you know them.

[00:24:04] It's like, oh, I didn't know that you had that terrible addiction or this trauma that haunts you every single moment of your life or that you have this health problem that's going to end you in three weeks that I didn't know about it.

[00:24:17] So people carry around enormous secrets. So when you ask a question of who would I rather be? I feel like it's just it's a lateral move. Like I would just take on somebody else's set of problems.

[00:24:32] But, you know, if you ask me who's the person with fewer problems and more upside, I think you'd just be guessing. So I don't really think of the world that way. I never envy other people's lives.

[00:24:44] What if like so you kind of measure happiness and you describe it in the book here? I thought I both marked it, but maybe I didn't. You say it's a happiness is a function of how many times per day

[00:24:55] you have exercise, sex and it was a third thing. Work productive work. Yeah, productive work. So what if you knew the measurements score for everybody in the world on those three metrics and you found the person who was the highest? That would get you really close.

[00:25:15] Yeah, so just to restate that, I said that I can always judge my own happiness in a given day by whether I've done at least two of the three things. Either I had a really productive day.

[00:25:28] I got some really good exercise or had some intimacy, physical, sexual intimacy. Now, if I've done two of those things, I can guarantee I had a good day. If I do all three, well, I'm just I'm just killing it. I mean, I'm absolutely happy that day.

[00:25:42] But if I only get one of them, even if it's the most fun one, I'm going to feel empty. You know, it was great while it happens, but then I'm a little empty afterwards. So that was my little formula.

[00:25:52] But you know, even that formula, which works so well for me, I can imagine, you know, porting it into some other person and finding out that they, you know, they're grappling with sexual dysmorphia or some other problem that I've never, never encountered myself.

[00:26:08] So I just don't assume other people are killing it. I just assumed that I don't know their problems. What about, you know, aging? How would you reframe so you're older than you were when you were half your age, obviously, you're today, you're the oldest you've ever been.

[00:26:27] And aging to some extent. Sucks more than it's good. There are some benefits to aging that we know of and we can philosophize about, but the reality is in most cases, it's better to be younger than older. And how would you reframe the disappointments of aging?

[00:26:47] Well, I would first point out that if you talk to anybody who's older and say, would you like to go back to that, you know, teenage years, you're not going to get a lot of yes.

[00:26:56] You do not get a lot of yes to would you like to go back and be young again? People and then the studies of especially women, I think women are happiest after their 40. I think, you know, 40 to 60 women tend to be quite happy.

[00:27:11] But in my own experience, health is the only thing that determines how you feel age wise. And if you stay fit, you end up being wiser, having more assets. And then you're also healthy. That's the trifecta there.

[00:27:29] So when I was young, I had the health, but I also add way too much energy and the energy is not always good. Like you can't control it. And I didn't know how things would work out. So I had to worry every day, would I have enough money?

[00:27:44] Will I succeed? Will will I do anything worthwhile? But now those questions are largely answered. I love the best part of my life that I like is that I was always the Dilbury guy. Now, you can't take that away. You can cancel me.

[00:27:59] I could be disgraced, but, you know, I still experienced it. I'm still that person. So a lot of the mysteries are gone, which is amazingly satisfying. And I would imagine people have kids and grandkids and, you know, they have that whole situation working well.

[00:28:15] I would imagine they just love being older. Everybody I talk to my age, they might have some new problems, especially if they don't have a mate, you know, a widow, especially. But people like the age way more than you think,

[00:28:30] even with the physical infirmities, which we all have. Yeah, I guess that's true. I guess maybe people regret age only when they start really when the fast decline happens, if it happens. And then you really kind of get a sense that, oh, this is not good.

[00:28:46] So let's back up a second and just talk about this concept of reframing. And the idea is we have many hard things in our life or patterns that we get into that create negative thinking or anxiety or stress or fear or whatever.

[00:29:01] And you almost the idea of reframing or the concept is almost like. I don't want to say hypnotize, but you kind of look at a situation with a different lens, like we've given some examples. What's some other examples that you think really resonate with people?

[00:29:17] And again, you have lots of examples in your book. I've bookmarked it all over the place. Like, for instance, this one, this one's about stress. So the usual frame is my stress and anxiety are caused by events in my life.

[00:29:28] But the reframe, which is great, I won't care about any of those events on my deathbed. So like if some if some employee or colleague is not calling me back and I'm really upset about it, like, why you better call me back on the deathbed on my deathbed?

[00:29:41] I am not even going to remotely think about this. It's not. And so I really shouldn't think about it now. I guess it's not that important. Well, you can imagine yourself under your deathbed

[00:29:51] and the benefit is that at least for a while, it takes you out of that head where you had that immediate problem. So it not only relaxes you in the short term, but it is like a more permanent reframe. I'll tell you where I saw this more starkly

[00:30:06] when I'd first started cartooning, but I was still working my day job. And then my cartooning income started creeping up. And I realized that if I got fired or if I quit, I'd be fine. You know, I finally had an escape plan.

[00:30:19] From that point on, every day I went to work, all of the things would anger me and frustrate me. Completely didn't bother me a bit because I didn't have to be there. They were still the same. I still had to deal with them.

[00:30:32] I still had to overcome them. But none of them bothered me as soon as I realized it was optional to be there. What about for people where it's not optional? Right. So so I wouldn't say that's as much a reframe

[00:30:42] as that was your reality. You could have just quit at any point. And what about, let's say someone who's got 17 kids and three mortgages and their boss hates them, but they can't really find a new job or they feel like they can't find a new job

[00:30:58] and they're going to work in the morning and they just hate it. What's a reframe that they could use other than the fact that I don't really have 17 kids? Well, I first say that if you have 17 kids, you're killing it because, you know, the ultimate victory is

[00:31:14] some someone say would be spreading your genes, although I have a reframe for the people who don't want to do that. I would say that the reframe you should look at is that everybody who succeeds does it pretty similar ways, which means that if they don't have enough

[00:31:29] talent in their talent stack, go add something, some skill or talent that works well with what you already have and that will probably give you better opportunities now. And you'd also want to focus on systems versus goals. For example, if you have a goal of making more money,

[00:31:47] but you're not actually doing anything about it, you need a system. So a system might be every day I'm going to learn something from my talent stack or every day I'm going to work on my fitness a little bit because that

[00:31:59] helps you in every domain, including your career. So systems and talent stacks would be where I'd go for career stuff. I like this because the actual reframe then is instead of saying, oh, man, I suck in a mediocre because of this

[00:32:14] hard, this perceived horrible life situation I'm in. The reframe is, oh, I did at least one thing today to improve my skill set. That's really the important thing. So today was a successful day regardless of my boss and the mortgage and all this stuff.

[00:32:32] Yeah, and I would add to that. I'll call it the Band-Aid reframe I wrote about as well. When my young stepson would get, let's say, a cut or a bruise, it'd be he'd be wailing and I would wisely welcome and say, let me see that.

[00:32:45] I take a look at his little counter or whatever. Let's say that's a four minute situation. He'd be like, what do you mean? That'll hurt for hurts now, right? That's going to hurt for four minutes. And he's like, really? Four minutes?

[00:32:58] Like, yeah, based on my experience, that's about a four minute problem. As soon as he knows it's temporary and also knows when the end date is, even though I just made it up, his mental state completely relaxed.

[00:33:11] And then he just dealt with the fact that hurt a little bit by his mental state was completely solved by knowing it was temporary. So in the case of your person with a bad job and everything's not working out,

[00:33:22] like you said, if there's a little progress that day, they can hold on to that. But I found that when I was in my 20s and I had really a horrible situation. I had a little apartment with no window, you know, the shared bathroom down there, no friends.

[00:33:38] I didn't have a car. I was in the city that I didn't know anyone. And but I told myself this is temporary. Right? This is going to be hard, but it has an end time. I will build up enough skills so that I can't be denied.

[00:33:52] Right? And I was just working on skills every day. And eventually I had enough skills. So I had lots of options and I couldn't be denied. That is a powerful reframing. Again, I feel one, a lot of people have a similar type of refrain to kind of get

[00:34:08] through the day like I like my daughter has anxiety. Just like I feel I did when I was her age, like a lot of like sometimes situations get blown out of proportion in her head and she thinks disaster is

[00:34:22] about to happen. And so I always tell her I've been keeping track of all the times, all the disasters you've predicted are going to happen to you. And none of them come true. So just either assume that this one also probably won't come true or just start

[00:34:36] writing it down so you can see for yourself that your predictions are your really horrible predictor of your own future. And that it actually she has told me in recent years that that has worked for her. So that's a good refrain. I've used that as well.

[00:34:51] Another one that goes to that is the potato reframe. Now, the potato reframe works like this. The reason that we feel anxious or nervous is that we feel there's some threat to us either socially or in some other way. So if you thought you were completely unimportant,

[00:35:09] then your anxiety would go away because there's nothing to protect. And that's your ego talking that the ego is the part that's afraid of everything. So I use this example. If somebody told you to take a priceless painting across the street

[00:35:23] to the museum and just carry it across the street, just hold it in your hands and just walk across the street with it. You would be panicked because you'd have this 40 million painting. And you think even though this is easy, I'm just walking across the street

[00:35:36] like anything could go wrong because it's so valuable. But if I said here's a potato, can you walk this over to the restaurant? They asked for a potato for some reason. It's just a russet potato. You'd say, all right, you'd be

[00:35:49] tossing it up in the air as you walked across. This is a potato would have no special value. So the reframe is you're the potato. You're not the priceless art. Stop worrying that bad things will happen to you. You're not that important.

[00:36:06] And as weird as that is to tell yourself, you're not important. One of the other reframes is your ego, the part that says, oh, I'm on this precious thing which must be protected from all injury. Your ego is not your friend. Your ego is literally your enemy.

[00:36:22] It's the one that's keeping you from asking somebody out. It's the one that keeps you from getting on stage at a comedy club. It's the thing that keeps you from everything that's good in life. Is your ego saying this might not work out if I try it?

[00:36:37] I'm afraid of the harm, don't hurt yourself. So instead of seeing your ego as the thing to protect, see it as the thing that you need to push aside so that you can get the benefits of life.

[00:36:47] And I think we all know on some level that the thing that's going to get you is usually not the thing you see coming. Right? It's kind of rare that your biggest, you know, actual real problem in life was one that you saw coming for 10 years.

[00:37:02] It's usually the one that just where did that come from? You know, why did somebody hit me on the head with a bat when I walked down the street? I did not see that coming. So some of those might help.

[00:37:28] I want to go from big problems to small problems a little bit. So for a while, I lived in a situation where it was a very social environment and I'm just horrible at small talk and I would get socially anxious, just hanging out with people.

[00:37:44] And one reframe I tried a little bit was that, hey, I'm actually an anthropologist observing this situation. So it doesn't matter as much if I'm just, if I'm talking to people or just standing in the corner observing.

[00:37:55] But like what are and you give advice here about how to in this book about how to be more social and reframe. But what's a specific reframe for if you're like right in the middle of, let's say, a party and you just start,

[00:38:09] you have nothing to say to anybody and you're feeling anxious about it. So this is a two-parter, but it probably one of the most valuable things anybody listening is going to pick up from this. Part one is to understand that social interactions, especially small talk

[00:38:24] and meeting strangers and that sort of thing is a learned skill, not a natural skill. And the Dale Carnegie course teaches you exactly that skill. And I can teach you to you in 30 seconds, which is people are people like you when you ask questions and show genuine

[00:38:40] interest in them because everybody cares about themselves. So the Dale Carnegie approach is to just ask people basic questions that aren't too threatening things like, hey, what's your name? You know, introduce yourself. You know, where do you work? Why are you here depending on what the event is?

[00:38:56] You might say, are you a friend of the bride or the groom? You know, there's always a question like, you know, what's your place here without being too nosy. And you might ask, you know, you have kids,

[00:39:06] where do they go to school, got any vacations planned if you're just making small talk. Now, when I was a teenager, if somebody told me that would work, I would say so you're saying that I should just be blah, blah,

[00:39:18] blah with somebody and not really with any purpose. There's no information being transferred. Like, how do we come out better in this interaction? And one of the things you learn is that the interaction itself, independent of what you're saying, is the payoff.

[00:39:34] It's a payoff that you've connected with a human. You've given them something of value, which is your interest in your time. People love that because it makes them feel important. So if you imagine that you can easily develop those skills,

[00:39:49] just to walk into the place and say, hey, my name is Blake. You know, what's your name? What do you do? So once you develop that, you're in the top 10 percent of people who can handle a social situation. So now when you walk into it,

[00:40:04] you know that 90 percent of the people there are worse off than you are. That's the first reframe. They're worse off than you. Everybody is feeling awkward. Everybody is feeling they wish they knew what to do. Everybody's thinking, how do I stop talking to this one and mingle?

[00:40:19] Everybody's thinking, how do I break into this group? They're all the same. So here's the ultimate reframe. Once you've learned those really simple skills of how to engage people and make it more about them than about yourself, you know, you're not telling stories, you're listening to stories,

[00:40:35] you're asking questions to evoke stories. Once you get that simple technique, you walk into the party and you're not the one with a problem. You're the solution to 90 percent of the problems in the room. You see somebody that looks like they're suffering, walk right over to them.

[00:40:51] That person's suffering. You could tell they're socially awkward. Just walk right up to him and say, Hey, I'm Scott. How are you doing? You just solved their problem. They don't know what to say. Doesn't matter. You can solve that problem by asking them questions.

[00:41:04] They all know their name. They all know where they work. They know why they're there. Give them simple questions. And then eventually, if you ask the right questions, you end up with a connection. So it might go like this. So what do you work?

[00:41:16] Do you have any kids? Oh, yeah, where did they go to school? Oh, my kid went to school there. And then suddenly did they have that teacher? Remember, there was a hard teacher. Now you've got something to talk about. So once you learn that simple technique,

[00:41:30] you're the problem solver. You walk into the room like a king or a queen. And every person there is somebody who's a problem you can solve. Aren't they happy that you walked up to them? Total reframe. I love that reframe.

[00:41:43] It's advice combined with a reframe like be like the Del Carney course. And then the reframe is I'm going to this social situation and I'm going to be able to give the gift of my interest to anybody I feel like at this party. But also solving somebody's biggest

[00:42:00] immediate problem that they're standing there wishing they were talking to somebody and knew what to say. You also suggest to either talk correctly if I'm wrong. You also suggest either talk to the let's say the alpha of the party, the most popular person at the party,

[00:42:19] or someone like you just said, like someone like yourself who's just sitting in a corner and not like sort of the lowest person at the party. Maybe explain some of the rationale behind that. Yeah, if you walk into a room and

[00:42:31] everybody's already talking to people, they're already paired off and it's hard to break into a group. I suggested that if you see men talking, they might try to be alpha and maybe exclude you with their body language.

[00:42:45] They may not open up just because you walked up to them. But if you see an alpha woman in a group and you can tell that there's clearly somebody who knows everybody, if you can find that person a moment that

[00:42:57] they're not directly in the conversation, say they're walking somewhere, just intercept because if you can hook up with the strongest female character at a group, they'll introduce you. They'll talk about you to other people say, hey, have you met? So so meet a connector because connectors like connecting.

[00:43:18] It's part of their payoff. Oh, I introduce you to this person. That's what they get out of it. So you're not asking anybody for a favor. You're giving them what they want to do. Connectors like to connect. You know, it's funny how you have this.

[00:43:31] It's like you've created this one framework that, you know, this concept of reframing that where you apply it to many disparate life situations. But at the same time, there's been other like, for instance, the idea of looking at your problems and they're not important because I'm not

[00:43:49] important, this reframe is connected to like, let's say, Buddhism, where you remove the ego and that's how you solve all of life's problems. Or, you know, in this social situation, you're really just describing like, you say, Dale Carnegie's courses, but you've created this common language

[00:44:05] to kind of connect all these different situations that, you know, entire religions have created or evolutionary biologists. In the case of going to the alpha woman versus the alpha male, it's fascinating that you've kind of like systematized one approach that covers all these different life situations,

[00:44:23] even though they're completely different problems. Yeah, you know, I think just saying that there's a thing called a reframe just allows people to look for them. And once you read a bunch of them, you see a bunch of reframes like in this book

[00:44:35] or just in life, then you can start to make your own. And so I'm starting to hear from people say, oh, I tried this own reframe of my own. And when I hear it, I might say to myself, I don't think that would work for me.

[00:44:47] But that doesn't matter if it worked for them. You know, reframes don't have to be logical and they don't have to be factual even. They just have to work. So talk about this one in terms of enduring bad things.

[00:45:01] The usual frame is why can't my problems go away? And the reframe is everything has a right to exist, including this problem. Well, let's say, though, like it's a problem that's really inconvenient for you. Let's say the IRS just sent you a letter.

[00:45:18] OK, oh, you could the usual frame would be, oh, why is the IRS sending me a letter? The reframe in this case is, well, the IRS has a right to send me a letter. Yeah, well, here's the background on that.

[00:45:32] My belief is that all anxiety and fears and stuff are based on how you think things are or should be and then how they actually turn out. You know, the difference between and you're like, oh, it should have been this other way, but oh,

[00:45:47] and that just gives you mental consternation. But if you say the problem has a right to exist, then you've removed the conflict between what you're expecting and the actual outcome. You're like, well, I'm still going to do all the things I know I need to do to get

[00:46:02] good outcomes, but I did the right things and then there's still this problem. It just exists. It doesn't have to make my brain go on fire. It simply has to belong. It's just part of my universe. I got some good things.

[00:46:14] I got some bad things working through the bad things. But you don't have to also think of it as this huge difference between what you wanted and what you got. Just let it exist. Yeah, and I wonder though, sometimes the reframe is more challenging.

[00:46:30] Obviously there are reframes that are more challenging to come up with than others. Let's say, oh, because I got this letter, I can't take my wife on the wonderful vacation she was looking forward to. And now she's going to hate me, which of course is just an anxiety.

[00:46:42] Maybe not be true. But I wonder how you keep on reframing to kind of find a universe. You're basically looking for the right universe to live in with these reframes. And how can you keep on reframing to find that right universe? Well, it's trial and error.

[00:47:01] The beauty of the reframes are that if it's one that's not going to work for you, it just it just leaves on its own. You read it and then you don't think about it again. But if it's one that's really going to get to your core,

[00:47:14] you read it once and it just never leaves your head. That the best example of that is alcohol is poison. Now, I didn't think that that would be a terribly important reframe. I just mentioned it once in reference to how I'd, you know, personally stopped

[00:47:30] recreationally drinking. I didn't I wasn't an addict. I just thought, you know, it would be better if I just didn't. And dozens, maybe hundreds of people by now have gotten back to me to say they quit a lifetime of overdrinking. Not this is not for alcoholics.

[00:47:45] Addiction is a different problem. And they said that just that simple sentence, the alcohol is poison because poison has a bad connotation. And if you pair your alcohol with beverage or food, they have a positive connotation.

[00:48:01] If you if you pair it in your mind just using words, just words alone, it's poison that reframes your brain a little bit so it's easier to resist it. And I couldn't have believed that would be as effective as this.

[00:48:15] But it also tells you that these work without the logic connecting anything. You just associated it with poison. That was it. You know, this this has been your overall philosophy throughout all the years I've known you, which is that essentially humans are programmable

[00:48:33] and that we're kind of just this bag of bones that can be programmed like a computer and what do you think is just your personal opinion? Like what do you what do you think is actual consciousness or maybe consciousness doesn't really exist?

[00:48:51] Oh, man, I feel like consciousness is the part of your brain that's checking your predictions against your actual outcomes and that that's all it is. And that if you gave AI the ability to not only do things,

[00:49:06] but to predict how it will turn out and then evaluate how it turned out and then have to deal with the difference, that it would have consciousness. But AI does kind of have that ability. Like that's let's take an AI that plays a game.

[00:49:20] It thinks according to its AI that oh, this is the right move in this chess game. And if it loses, it readjusts the weight on its AI slightly so that the next game, it'll play a little bit better. Well, that doesn't sound like a immediate process.

[00:49:38] It sounds like a process that can happen and get you a result. But I'm talking about in the moment, I'm saying what's going to happen if I pick up this item? What's going to happen if I take a breath? So I'm always continually imagining

[00:49:52] what I'm doing, what the effect will be and then comparing it to what is. And I think that is our consciousness. I think that's all it is. That's different from saying the last time I built a house, one of my rooms was too small.

[00:50:04] So 10 years from now, if I build another one, you know, I'll make sure that room is bigger. Like that's not consciousness. That's just learning. And do you think do you think I mean, is there a scientific basis for any consciousness?

[00:50:19] Like right now, scientists again, this is this is sort of given free reign to every religion is that science just has no answer really to consciousness. So everybody else is allowed to throw in like, you know,

[00:50:31] every religion in the world is allowed to come up with their own theory of it. Yeah, I mean, I've got my own theory and so far it's it's it's worked out. In other words, nothing in the real world has

[00:50:44] gotten me in trouble because that's what I think consciousness is. But I think we're going to be blown away the same way we were blown away. They're looking at word combinations can create something like intelligence.

[00:50:56] As soon as we find out that the machine just has to watch itself working and compare its prediction to its outcomes, like in real time. And that that's consciousness. We are going to be underwhelmed with what consciousness is. I don't think it's magic.

[00:51:10] I don't think it involves your soul. I don't think it's the Holy Spirit. I think it's just a mechanical process. Yeah, and it kind of goes along with the idea that to some extent humans are largely programmable by words and environment and so on.

[00:51:26] And this is kind of the basis for hypnotism. Like this ref this approach of reframing is again almost some kind of self hypnosis. So you self hypnotized so you're not worried or stressed or anxious or or lacking success or whatever.

[00:51:42] What would be and we've talked about hypnotism before, but what would be an easy way I can try a hypnotic technique on other people? The reframes that's the reframes are meant that you could use them on

[00:51:55] yourself or you could just say the sentence to someone who hasn't heard it before. So hypnosis uses a number of techniques that the reframes kind of make portable. One is just association, like alcohol is poison.

[00:52:10] So if you're a hypnotist, you'd use the technique of associating a good or bad thing with a certain other behavior. For example, my mother had a doctor who was also a hypnotist and he tried unsuccessfully, but he tried to get her to quit smoking by imagining that

[00:52:28] whenever she thought of a cigarette, she thought of licking an ashtray. Now, it turns out that wasn't enough to quit her addiction. Hypnosis isn't really good for addiction, but that's the idea. You know, so that would be a typical hypnotist thing.

[00:52:41] Or if there was something that you were uncomfortable about, you could imagine hugging a cute puppy while also let's say you were afraid of flying, I might say, all right, imagine you're flying, but you have your dog with you, your dog's on your lap.

[00:52:57] How does it feel good to have that dog on your lap? And then you would associate the comfortable feeling of the dog with the flying until a little of the dog comfort bled over. It's not the only way to do it.

[00:53:09] But the idea is that hypnosis uses association, but it also uses the power of words. Words carry little programs with them like poison is a good example. There's just one word, but it carries like all kinds of emotional impact with

[00:53:23] it and a lot of our words do that. So the hypnotist is looking for the word, the imagination, the association and then the repetition of the things that are working. So there's maybe a dozen or so tools in the hypnotist toolbox,

[00:53:39] but a reframe captures the strongest parts of them and then freeze it from the hypnotist subject model so I can just hand it to you, type it to you, say it to you, it frees it from its little container.

[00:53:54] So I was afraid of flying my whole life and then everyone's got their 9-11 story. I was at the World Trade Center, I saw the first plane come in and after that, I completely could not fly like the slightest turbulence. My brain would go insane.

[00:54:10] And then I had this was my most visceral experience with what you're calling reframing. I had a reframe which completely like I love turbulence now because of this one simple reframe and it works. It was unbelievable to me how well this works.

[00:54:26] Have you ever seen the TV show Lost? Yeah, I know of it. I haven't watched all the episodes. So I watched it, I loved it, I loved all the characters and it starts off with a plane crash and then lots of adventures happen on this island where they

[00:54:40] can't get off the island. So whenever there's turbulence now, I pray that we crash because I'm going to land on the island and lost. Like I hope to crash and now I love it. I love turbulence. Now, so that's that's a perfect example of what you want to.

[00:54:59] This will be a compliment that sounds like I'm not heading that way. So that was a perfect use of a reframe, but it displays that the reframe doesn't have to be logical. Right. And you can't do reframes until you release yourself from the need to be

[00:55:15] logical because it's just the words doing what words do just like AI. Right. It's just a mechanical process. So you use I would call that a mechanical process, not a logical process. You simply put your brain in a positive place or an exciting place or a

[00:55:32] place that would give you curiosity, which is a very powerful thing to do. Curiosity will just move your attention toward the curiosity. So if it worked, it worked and you don't need to explain why it's not logical because you did it perfectly.

[00:55:47] You know, it's so interesting because you're right. It's not logical. Like I guess if I intellectually thought about it at that moment, I would know that was just a fictional island. I'm not really going to land on the island of lost and so on.

[00:56:01] And yet, but yet at that moment, I completely 100 percent believe that I'm going to land on the island of lost. Right. Yeah. The reason that that is easy to understand is like I mentioned before,

[00:56:14] you can watch a movie that you know is fiction, but you have real feelings. So so you basically created a movie, almost exactly a movie because it's based on a TV show. And then the TV show gave you a set of feelings that were better to handle

[00:56:30] than the one jet. So that's a perfect application. So what's another completely illogical refrain that works really well for you? Well, you mentioned the most irrational one, the that your problems have a right to exist. Here's another one.

[00:56:46] If you have critics, so you and I, we have your public figures, we end up getting a lot of trolls and critics. And sometimes they can really get under your skin. They can really bother you. And this is something I discovered when I went to restaurant

[00:57:00] and one of the employees had a complaint that decided he was going to pick it all by himself just every day standing in front of the entrance to the restaurant. This restaurant's unfair. And one day the staff was really being bothered by it and it was just getting

[00:57:15] under their skin. And they thought maybe it was actually affecting their business and their tips and everything. They were pretty bad at this guy. So after a few days, I thought he would quit. But he was like, really, he was going to be there every day.

[00:57:26] So one day I come in and I say, I see your your mascot is back. I was talking to my partner in the restaurant and she laughs. And then we started telling the other staff, yeah, this is mascot. We got a mascot.

[00:57:39] And as soon as we reframed him as a mascot, it became hilarious. And all of our concerns went away. And every day he showed up like, hey, mascot is back. And I found that I could use that online as well.

[00:57:52] Like Keith Holberman likes to come out of his, you know, from under whatever rock he lives under every few months to to attack me online, as going on for a long time. And what he does, I used to get mad.

[00:58:06] It's like, oh, Keith Holberman, how dare you say those things so untrue and unfair. And I'd like to fight back and, you know, it would just be nasty in this online. But now when I see it, I just retweet it.

[00:58:18] And I just say my mascot, you know, busy again or some version of that. And it just makes me happy. It that's interesting you bring that up because I have a similar situation where someone who's from the same network as Keith Overman also every few

[00:58:33] weeks sort of resurfaces and trashes me in some way. And this has been going on for about three years. And I don't respond or I don't retweet. I don't do that because I feel like that will give energy to his thing.

[00:58:45] And and it does bother me, though, what he's doing, because I thought this guy was a good guy and he's not and whatever. But maybe I need to work on reframing this somehow. Well, but you see that you're you explained it exactly perfectly.

[00:59:02] You had an expectation about that guy. He's not meeting your expectation. And this is closer to your brain to like have some conflict. But as soon as you say that guy's your your mascot, try it, you'll be surprised. Yeah, I will try that.

[00:59:18] But let's take the case of your restaurant. Now, what if it really was affecting their tips and affecting the business and people, you know, and even though they kept calling them a mascot, they saw their tips and business continue to decline as long as he was out there.

[00:59:34] What would the well, the thing is, it didn't look like there was anything that you could do about it. If there's something you could do about it, then you should you should do that instead, but it's free speech that he was on a public sidewalk.

[00:59:48] And we were all free speech lovers. So we weren't going to stop him. That just wasn't going to happen. And not that it would be legal to stop him anyway. But it never really was a thought. It was really about waiting until he got tired of it.

[01:00:01] So under those conditions, might as well waited out in comfort. I see. So if you weren't planning on shutting down the restaurant or beating this guy up or taking some other action in your just like you say, it's free world.

[01:00:15] You could stand on the court and do whatever you want. You might as well just figure how to enjoy life and continue as is without feeling upset. Yeah, it's a little bit like the band-aid example, the reframe. We do it was temporary. We just didn't know how temporary.

[01:00:30] So knowing it's temporary gives you some comfort from the start. I like having the book, you bring up the ultimate reframe, which is a very fascinating issue, which is the simulation hypothesis, the idea that we're just in a giant simulation.

[01:00:45] And at first it sounds ridiculous, but the concept is, you know, already humans at our very simple stage of development. Humans have only been sort of had the written word for, let's say five to 10,000 years and we're already creating entire virtual worlds

[01:01:02] that almost seem real and they're populated by avatars and whatever. So imagine if there was a civilization that lasted a million years already, they probably could make completely real simulations. And we might just there might be an infinite number of worlds in that

[01:01:21] civilization's universe because they've created billions and trillions of civilizations. So out of the trillions of universes out there, the odds are we're in a simulation. We're not in the real world. And that is the ultimate reframe because if we're in a simulation and it's

[01:01:36] even a simulation, we could somewhat control to some extent, have at it. Now, and I like to add that even though that's my preferred model of life, I act and predict as though I'm part of a simulation.

[01:01:50] But I have no way of knowing if that's the real world or it's just useful as a prediction. But one of the things that that model can buy you is an explanation, a potential anyway, of why affirmations appear to work for some people.

[01:02:06] I'm not going to give you a scientific explanation. But affirmation is the idea that you write down what it is you want to happen. You focus on it for a while and it makes it more likely to happen. Now, if we're a simulation,

[01:02:18] it's then all things are possible, even things that violate physics because we just be software. So if the simulation wanted you to violate physics, there wouldn't be anything to stop it. It would just be a little bit of code that would let you violate physics for a while.

[01:02:34] So affirmations and the simulation work together as two mental models that might not be any part of reality. But if you put them together, they give you a real powerful frame to live in, to use your explanation that it creates a world to live in.

[01:02:51] So when I live in a world with affirmations plus the simulation concept, then the affirmation is how I steer through infinite possibilities that are all available to me. And that's how I live every day. When I go to the mailbox,

[01:03:06] I expect something in there to change my life in a positive way. Just because there's nothing to rule about until I've seen what's in there. It could be anything. So it's just a good, optimistic way to go through life.

[01:03:21] And it appears to give me advantages by focusing on things that do seem to turn out more often than they should. And my life has just been crazy in terms of the things that have happened that are amazingly unlikely. So it predicts and so I use it.

[01:03:39] I always think of what you just described, like just the affirmations aspect as like the Honda effect, which is once you buy a Honda, you see more Hondas on the highway. And that's kind of this proven cognitive bias.

[01:03:52] And I always sort of feel like if you truly believe, oh, you know, I'm going to have the greatest day of all today and you and you have that affirmation and you believe it, then what will happen is like the Honda effect,

[01:04:04] you'll just start noticing things during the day that are more likely to lead to a great day as opposed to having a negative mindset where you just notice the things that are leading to a horrible day. So I've always kind of viewed that in that way.

[01:04:19] I did that experiment recently where I just woke up and said, I'm going to tell everybody it's going to be a good day for me today. And I had this greatest day. You know, I don't think we're fully cognizant and couldn't be of how subjective our reality is.

[01:04:34] I mean, you could actually change your without changing anything about your actual life. You can change it from a good day to a bad day, just exactly the way you described it by just by setting your filters on what you're going to notice and what

[01:04:48] importance you're going to put in those things. So I haven't really been on social media much in the past couple of years. I got a little burnt out when unlike you, I had some criticism and it just

[01:05:16] got too much for me and I just kind of took off. But, you know, obviously we've known each other a long time. I really love all your books. I love Dilbert. I've really loved all our conversations and we booked this podcast and someone

[01:05:29] mentioned to me and you mentioned several times in the podcast. Oh, didn't Scott Adams get canceled? And I'm like, well, hey, I don't care because I know Scott and we've always been good to each other. I'm going to be good to him.

[01:05:42] I want him out of my podcast. I want to hear about this book. And, you know, so what was it that I mean, I know now, but like what describe? What was it that got you canceled? Because I because I looked into it.

[01:05:53] It doesn't seem like it seemed like they were looking for an excuse to cancel you. They found one and it stuck. And so they got it wasn't the first attempt. It was just the first successful attempt. So here's what your viewers need to know as context.

[01:06:09] Number one, there's no such thing as news about public figures. That's true. Like if you don't want it, if you don't understand the basic that no news about public figures is ever true, then it gets confusing fast.

[01:06:24] Now, when I say it's not true, it's not that I didn't say exactly what I was quoted as saying that did happen. Well, a lot of the biggest hoaxes in the world happened when the video shows

[01:06:34] somebody doing exactly what they did, but some context was left out that completely changes what you think about it. And let me just add to that real quickly, which is that I'm not I'm by far not as public a figure as you.

[01:06:48] But every single time anybody has ever, ever, 100 percent I've ever written any kind of newspaper article about me or anything. There's always been complete lies and untruths in it. And so I always imagine if that happens to I'm not the only one that

[01:07:06] 100 percent of the time people write lies about it must happen to everybody. And I've heard that from other public figures that every single article ever written about them contains lies. So people I agree you should never that's why I never read the newspaper.

[01:07:19] I never watch the news because it's 100 percent there are lies in every news article. And look at the biography of Elon Musk. You've got one of the most respected biographers, Walter Isakson, who got one fact wrong, which he now admits

[01:07:37] that he got it wrong, which changed Elon Musk from somebody who might have been preventing a nuclear war to somebody who's a traitor to his country because of one fact they got wrong about, you know, was his were his satellites already on or not. And who asked him?

[01:07:55] Turns out it was the Ukrainians who asked him to turn them on. But he said if the president of the United States had asked me, I would have turned them on, but I don't work for Ukraine. Right.

[01:08:04] And, you know, so but if that story was just a little bit different, it changed him from saving the world to being one of the worst traders you've ever heard of. So just understand for the viewers, because you already understand that that's more normal than not normal.

[01:08:19] So now the second thing you need to know is that everything I said, I did say and I said that some version of white people should move away from black people. Now, the second thing you should know is that's obvious hyperbole because how would you even do that?

[01:08:36] You know, I'm not suggesting, you know, Jim Crow laws or, you know, going back to the past, there's no practical way to do that. So I was being intentionally provocative to try to draw as much attention

[01:08:48] to myself as I could so that I could do a reframe because I was planning to do it as part of the launch of the book before it got canceled. You know, we had a different launch date and I thought, I'm going to really make some noise here.

[01:08:59] I'm going to get people really mad. Then they'll come to me and I'll reframe it and I'll tell you what the reframe is in a minute, because it's the biggest problem in the world or America.

[01:09:10] And I think I can make a difference, but I'm going to have to get everybody really mad before I do it. So I started riffing off a rasmus in pole that showed that black Americans had a negative thought about being white.

[01:09:24] Now, without defending the accuracy of the pole, because it really didn't matter to my point, I was just using it as a launch pad because the point still stands without the pole so we can forget the pole. That was just an opportunistic way to introduce the topic.

[01:09:40] Here's the big picture. In the current world, we've got ESG, CRT and DEI. Most of your viewers are familiar with at least a few of those, but they all have the same problem. I don't know, DEI. Diversity, equity and inclusion, I think.

[01:10:00] So corporations have DEI managers who make sure that the hiring and everything reaches equity. ESG is environmental, social and governance, which tries to make sure that your company is promoting and being led by something representative of the public demographic.

[01:10:22] So that also has to do with the race and gender. And then CRT is the more academic version that has also as a common element with the other two, that there's an oppressed class, black Americans, and there's an oppressor

[01:10:40] class that although slavery is gone and Jim Crow is gone, the legacy and let's say the ripple effect of the systemic racism still exists and so we still have an oppressed class and oppressor class. And my point is this, if you're in this situation where you're identified

[01:11:01] by every element of society from the World Economic Forum with ESG to every corporation with DEI, they almost all have DEI managers now, to academia, academia, how do you say academia? With CRT, you thoroughly saturated the culture with the idea that one

[01:11:24] group is oppressed and the other group has their stuff and needs to give it back. And under those conditions, if you're the one that's labeled as the oppressor, you should get out of that situation. That's a dangerous situation to be in.

[01:11:37] I use the example of I've lost two corporate jobs and a TV show because I was a white man. And I'm not guessing I was told that directly in each case. In my banking job, my boss was white, said we don't have enough diversity.

[01:11:54] We're getting a lot of pressure from the outside. Newspapers are on us, so we can't promote you. And I said, for how long? Like, well, there's no end date. You know, it's going to take a long time to correct this. So I left, I quit.

[01:12:11] And being a white man in America, I had lots of options. So I just quit, got another job, went to the phone company, got on their leadership training program. So I was going to be like have a rocket strapped in my ass, as I used to say.

[01:12:26] That was saying, yeah, in a rocket strapped to his ass. And one day my boss called me in and said, same speech. And not again, white boss said, I don't know how to tell you this, but the word has come down.

[01:12:40] No promotions for white men, because we got to get some diversity going in senior management. And so that's when I started the Dilbert comic. You know, I mean, part time was like, well, I guess my corporate career isn't going to work out. So then Dilbert took off.

[01:12:53] I left my corporate career and I started a animated animated version on the UPM. After it was successful the first season, it got renewed. But it got renewed at a time when UPM decided to make a comedy block on Monday night.

[01:13:12] There was only African American designed and focused shows. Now Dilbert didn't fit in that, so I lost my time slot. And anybody who knows TV knows that when you lose your time slot, you lose your momentum.

[01:13:27] And TV shows are either going up or down, or it's when down, when it changed. It was going up when people could find it, it went down when it moved. Now is the end of it. When I got canceled more recently, when my comic was removed from all

[01:13:41] newspapers in the world and my books were removed, all of them from every shelf in the world, at least in terms of cancellation. I asked myself, would a black American have been canceled for saying exactly what I said? And I think everybody would agree. No, absolutely not.

[01:14:01] And in fact, would a Democrat have been canceled for saying what I said? Now, that's a little closer call. I don't know. But for your viewers who are not aware of it, for the last, I'd say, last at least eight years, maybe,

[01:14:17] I've been far more well known as a political figure than a cartoonist. And if you're not really following politics, you wouldn't know that a lot of people would put me in the top 20 of politically persuasive people. So we're just to mention your book, Win Bigly,

[01:14:37] described why in early, I think it was in 2015 even that you predicted even as early as then that Trump would win the nomination and quite possibly the general election in 2016. And you were one of the first people to predict it. Everybody thought you were crazy. You were right.

[01:14:54] You wrote the book Win Bigly about how Trump used basically hypnotism techniques that you recognized to win the presidency. So thank you. That's perfect context. So if you understand me as a past Trump supporter at the moment, I'm endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy.

[01:15:15] But if you understand me in that context and you understand that this is a season where players are being taken off the field by the other side as we get closer to a presidential election, then it makes a little more sense.

[01:15:28] But here's the reframe I was trying to set everybody up for. And it would have worked if my message had not gone viral, got outside my bubble. The reframe is this. If you compare the average of any two groups, you're in absurdity land.

[01:15:46] Now, it probably made sense historically. There was a time when that made perfect sense at the moment in 2013, even though systemic racism exists, I often argue with my audience, and some would like to say it doesn't, but obviously it doesn't.

[01:16:00] In my opinion, there's no way you can ignore it. But how do you deal with it? So here's the reframe. If you assume that you have to deal directly with the problem, you say the average of this group is different than the average of this group.

[01:16:13] Our goal is to have them the same. Well, we better take some stuff from this group and give it to this group. You know, taxes or whatever you're going to do. So what if you had a systems approach?

[01:16:24] You say, all right, maybe the cause is what white people did in the past or systemic racism in the present. But what is the best way to fix it? And this is the reframe. The best way to fix it is on an individual basis,

[01:16:40] meaning since there are no average people, there's no average black guy. There's no average black woman. There's no average white guy or anything else. We're all infinitely different. And every person needs a different package of solutions or help or assets to get to

[01:16:58] the next level. So instead of telling me that you need me to worry about the average of any group, which is created a situation where it's actually dangerous to be white if you're around black people who generally with the help of white

[01:17:13] women will try to get your stuff and transfer it so there's equity. You want to get out of that situation to be as good as you can, although there's no practical way to do that. But I want to make the point that the current approach is creating poison

[01:17:26] between relations of the races that doesn't need to be there. If you take it to an individual level and you say to be scoped, there's a specific young black person who needs some help. I would say, well, why help do they need?

[01:17:43] Is it advice? Do they need to know how to reframe something? Is there a connection? Is there can I mentor? Can I can I introduce you to somebody who has your solution? So if you take it down to an individual level, you have infinite resources that work.

[01:17:59] You know, my book is just one of them. And my other book, How to Fail at Almost Everything Is Still When Big, even more directly, is about ways an individual can make all of the obstacles of life, all of them, including systemic racism,

[01:18:17] be effectively eliminated so they can still be there. But you can slice through it because you've worked on yourself. Your own tools are strong enough that you're like a hot knife through butter. So you can try to make the averages change.

[01:18:32] But what are you going to do about it that doesn't make things worse? That's what we're saying. But if you say, how about every individual is infinitely different and they have available all the tools of success,

[01:18:44] but maybe they don't know it and maybe there's some things we can provide. So I'm working on also with Joshua Lisek, working on a student guide so to take the things that are a little more adult oriented, like my book and bring it into 30 lessons

[01:19:01] that you wish you knew when you were a teenager. Imagine learning systems over goals, talent stacks, imagine learning that maybe you shouldn't follow your passion every time, maybe that's optional. Imagine just learning the things that took me 30 to 66 years to learn but getting them when you're a teenager.

[01:19:24] How much is systemic racism going to bother you if I teach you that, hey, you're black, go to any one of these Fortune 500 companies. If you have the same skill set as the white people, you get hired every time.

[01:19:38] Not sometimes, not most of the time, every fricking time. So take your advantage, take your little stack of skills and go kill it. Now, because I don't have that advantage, if I go to that same job, I'm not going to be preferred. I know that.

[01:19:54] So instead I will start a company. I'll do my own thing. And if that doesn't work, I'll start a second one. And if that doesn't work, I'll start a third one. But in the process of even failing, I'm going to be picking up skills.

[01:20:07] I'm going to be networking with people. I'll have thicker skin. So I've got my own path and I'm not jealous of somebody else's path that's different. We both can succeed. We both have an open highway. It's just two different highways.

[01:20:22] Now, at some point, wouldn't it be great if it was one highway? Yes. You know how you get there? By each individual person doing the best they can. And taking advantage of the best tools. That's how you get to the point where people stop asking about the average

[01:20:39] non-existent black person and the average imaginary white person. As long as we're on that frame of the imaginary people. Can't get past it. Everything gets worse. And that's what we're witnessing. So the context that the news told you is that I'm a big old racist who

[01:20:57] doesn't like black people. The real context is I'm one of the only people you know who has worked with Black Lives Matter to try to make their message a little cleaner to see if there's anything Republicans can agree with. I thought body cams was a good thing.

[01:21:12] Back in the Black Lives Matter days, they were saying, hey, if we had body cams that would help. And I thought, well, why don't I help? I'd love to help with that. That's a very specific thing.

[01:21:22] I think the cops should all have body cams and maybe Republicans would help fund it. And then we could come together on that. But then I found out that Black Lives Matter was maybe had more of a political financial incentive, they weren't so much about problem solving.

[01:21:39] And so go ahead. Then let me add that my primary incentive for creating a workbook for kids is that the poorest kids have the most disadvantage. And specifically I'm introducing this term. I think black Americans have a glass ceiling that I call the imitation glass

[01:22:03] ceiling, and it's because of that narrative that there are oppressors and oppressed. How does any white person or Asian person, you know, Indian American, Hispanic, how do they succeed? Same way everybody does. They look at successful people and they try to pick out the characteristics

[01:22:19] of the habits that make it work. And they say, well, I'll do that. Oh, it's the people who work hard. OK, I'll do that. It's the people who went to school and built a bunch of skills. OK, I'll do that. But now imagine you took me.

[01:22:33] Magically, you turned me into a black American and you teach me from birth that the oppressors are these ones who have all the good jobs. Do I imitate my oppressor? I don't think I do.

[01:22:47] So I think if you put me in that same situation and I were taught the same things, that I would say, let me do anything except act like my oppressors because these guys are assholes. Like I just I can't be like that.

[01:23:00] So then you've got to you're you're cut off from the one thing that everybody else used to succeed, which is imitation. And so the workbook is for kids is a way to get past that to say, look, here are the things everybody does.

[01:23:18] If you're not doing this list, there's nothing else that can work. This works for everybody. Everybody who doesn't do this list of good things, they don't get good outcomes. And I think we're done here.

[01:23:31] If you're interested, we could show you how to be on this list of successful people. So in my own mind, of course, it doesn't matter to the public. I'm directly because of a great love for black people in particular.

[01:23:47] I actually love black people, which is weird to say. Like it's almost sounds racist saying that it almost sounds racist. I did I learned long ago or it's just a thought that if you say, oh, I don't have a problem with black people,

[01:24:02] like that just doesn't really sound true. Right? It just sounds like some of you say or I have a black friend. None of that sounds real. But if you can honestly say, I love black people, which I do individually. I've never had any problem with anybody in person.

[01:24:18] Then you can say, all right, I'm trying to help. I tried to help Black Lives Matter. I tried to help Colin Kaepernick when Colin Kaepernick was being destroyed by the right. My audience was mostly right leaning people and I defended him from the start.

[01:24:32] I said, do you not understand what a protest is? A protest is somebody making you mad because they inconvenienced you in this thing that you were just trying to enjoy your Sunday. That's what it was. It was a great protest.

[01:24:45] Now, you could argue about the things he's asking for, whether those are the right things to ask for, but as a protest is one of the best protests I've ever seen. Everybody knew about it. Everybody talked about it like things. Probably there are more police cams, body cams,

[01:25:01] because Colin Kaepernick existed. So I'm probably one of the best friends to the Black community, except I don't want to say it that way because then I'm comparing the average Black person that's not real to the average white person that's not real. I'm trying to lose that frame.

[01:25:19] So I'm going to try as hard as I can to stick to the personal success habits and techniques that will have a disproportionate effect on Black Americans. Good effect. Because they don't have the imitation opportunity. But if they see it in, let's say their teacher presents it,

[01:25:38] maybe the teacher looks like them. Perfect. That's a perfect situation. I also was thinking part of the context was this general concept that you're sort of making fun of the narrative that there's an average white person and an average Black person.

[01:25:56] But you basically said, if someone hates me or so, if someone doesn't want to be around me or imitate me, I probably shouldn't want to be around them. Like it was probably best for me to not be around them.

[01:26:07] And you're basically saying how the media is betraying the average person. If that average person, some portion of them doesn't like you, probably safest for you not to be around them. Right. Yeah. So literally nobody disagrees with the point when they hear it in his fullness.

[01:26:25] But when it just turns into a quick quote and then the news frames me. Once the news frames you, people don't really get out of that frame. Yeah. Once you've been called something, that's who you are in the rest of your life.

[01:26:38] And part of it is because of the marketplace. Like take all the newspapers that drop Dilbert. Obviously a lot like just like a lot of people who know Scott Adams, know Scott Adams as political commentator.

[01:26:48] A lot of people who just read Dilbert every day have no idea who Sky Adams is. They know Dilbert. They don't know Sky Adams. So but the marketplace suddenly every editor of every newspaper was being told

[01:27:00] by a small portion of their readers, hey, you can't have Dilbert in your newspaper anymore or you're going to lose business and an advertisers didn't want to advertise because they had a small portion of their interested consumers saying the same thing.

[01:27:17] And so that cost you hundreds of newspapers where Dilbert was syndicated. Were you upset? I know you've said in other podcasts, hey, I feel as free as I ever do right now. But at that moment, were you like, what the hell is going on around here?

[01:27:35] Yeah, I don't think anybody will ever believe me when I say this. But I swear to God, this is true. It was never unpleasant. And I can't explain it. I mean, every external objective factor, I should have been having a bad day. But it never happened.

[01:27:54] I just said, oh, here's a new set of things. I felt like I woke up in a new video game. And part of it is because it accidentally accomplished some things that I didn't know how to accomplish, like it solved my biggest problem.

[01:28:07] My biggest problem was I couldn't figure out how to retire. And literally because I was 65 and I was looking desperately for I won't say desperately, but I was looking hard. It was my main focus career wise is how do I wind down and retire?

[01:28:25] Now, I define retirement as still working, but only the stuff you want to do. So making a student guide that could make the world a better place. I'm not even thinking about the money.

[01:28:37] I mean, if I could give it away for I had to talk Joshua into even selling it. I was like, well, we should just give it away for free. Right? So I'm totally not on the the acquisition phase of my life.

[01:28:49] I mean, I just want to do things I like and add something to the world. So once I got rid of the whole publishing world and the syndication world and the other partners who tell you what to do.

[01:29:02] I realized I could sell my comic on subscription, so it's available on the X platform. You just hit the subscribe button on my profile. And you can see the comic there, but I've made it more spicy. So I couldn't do any controversial things.

[01:29:18] I couldn't use any even semi naughty words in a newspaper. But now I can do anything and the subscribers are expecting it to be edgy. So they're finding that it's also on the locals platform. So on locals, Scott Adams dot locals dot com.

[01:29:35] It's also a subscription, but I do also another comic called Robots, Read News and a bunch of political stuff there. So in the lot of live streaming. So I managed to go from a world that I was desperate to get out of

[01:29:49] into actually my ideal world, which is I have full creative control and it's not people who are complaining because they're signing up to see it. Well, what about what about though? Like, do you ever walk out of the house?

[01:30:03] Someone recognizes you and like spits on you or anything like that? Strangely enough, I had done so canceled just by being identified as a Trump supporter in 2016. Then I'd already like you're crazy. No, I'd already lost almost my entire social network. It was just decimated by that.

[01:30:24] So it wasn't much of a difference at all socially. And I believe only one person that I know of actually said maybe we shouldn't hang out. But only one and it didn't change my life. Let me tell you what does happen.

[01:30:42] I do a lot of work at Starbucks because I just like the atmosphere for work. And on a regular basis, maybe once a week, somebody approaches me at the table and usually bends down.

[01:30:53] It's often a man that says, excuse me, excuse me, are you are you Scott Adams? And I won't know which way this is going yet. Like this could go terribly wrong. And I'll be yeah. And then the person will say, big fans, glad we follow you forever.

[01:31:11] Keep up the good work. Yeah, don't worry about the cancellation. And then they go away. Like that my experience is that I turned into a superstar in ways I've never experienced before. I mean, I've been famous for 25 years and people love Dilbert.

[01:31:27] But there is a level of appreciation for not letting the machine kill me. Just surviving and surviving with a smile that people really respond to. Because everybody feels the machine is pressing them to. And when they see somebody who wasn't crushed,

[01:31:46] you know, the machine took the best punch they could. I took the best punch they have. I mean, you can't get a better punch than having your entire business eliminated, your legacy erased and being labeled as the biggest racist in the country. Now that's complete.

[01:32:04] Swear to God, it didn't bother me much. I never had a bad day. It's so interesting because again, I mean, I've seen all the discussions and as while preparing for this. And it really did seem like it was

[01:32:18] everything was taken out of context and it's just a shame. And look, you see it with a lot of people, but then it's like a lottery like who gets picked to be canceled? Because look, and and and I don't even have the mind.

[01:32:33] Like I don't have the mindset where I care, even if it was aimed at me like I am Jewish. I have a lot of Jewish friends. Everyone's so upset at Kanye West and Ice Cube, you know, for saying certain comments about Jews or implying certain things,

[01:32:48] perhaps about Jews. And and yet these are for me, these are two of the most talented people in history, the history of music, particularly I love like that music. And I would love to have them on the podcast, for instance. And whatever, I literally just don't care.

[01:33:07] Whatever it is they believe or say about Jews, just doesn't matter to me. And it's funny how many people just care about, again, things that were taken out of context, things that you don't really understand, you know, what's really happening and they just ignore,

[01:33:26] they instantly ignore everything else except this one thing that has blossomed out of nothing, literally nothing. And then they then they run their whole life based on that, on so many different issues. Well, you let's take the example.

[01:33:42] Do you think there's any chance that if you were in the room with the guy, he would treat you like a Jewish guy versus just a person? No, right. Zero chance. Right. Zero chance. Right. We don't act when we meet people, we do treat them as individuals.

[01:33:59] And then we act as if when we walk out the door and get on social media, we act like all the matter was the magic average person of the group. So you said some things, of course, I don't endorse,

[01:34:11] but he was talking about some kind of group effect that I don't think is real. But, you know, that's not for me to argue at the moment. But he's not going to take that into the room.

[01:34:23] Like, I don't think that affects who he's talking to at any moment. Yeah, I would imagine he treats them individually. Yeah. And I, you know, you can I could jump on the bandwagon. This is, oh, that's a problem with social media.

[01:34:35] But of course there's a lot of great things about social media. That's how we met, for instance, and how a lot of people meet. It's social, but it's also media and media has probably more downside than being social. But all right, thanks for shedding some light on that.

[01:34:49] And again, Scott, thanks. This book, Reframe Your Brain, blows me away because it puts into a system of systematized format so many things that I've done personally in my life. And has kind of given me the tools and powers to do it in other areas of my life,

[01:35:05] or at least reminds me how successful this reframing has been because it puts it into again, one system. And I like that. And I appreciate it. It's a great book, great stories, as always. Oh, so you like Vivek Ramaswamy?

[01:35:22] Who do you think is going to actually win the election? I might as well get your prediction so I could start betting now. You know, this was a tough one because when I when I predicted Trump,

[01:35:31] it was because I saw you had a set of persuasion tools that other people didn't recognize. So I had like a hidden variable that I could see. But in this election, you've got way other variables that are invisible.

[01:35:43] Number one is is Joe Biden even could be physically able to speak by election day. And I would say there's some chance not. I mean, you might actually be connected to tubes and we never see him again two months from now the way the way it's looking anyway.

[01:35:59] And then Trump, who knows what's going to happen with all the law fair attacks? Will any of them be successful? Does it affect the vote? But I like to use the best movie reframing. Like what would be the best movie? The most entertaining outcome.

[01:36:16] Elon Musk uses this frame all the time that the reality tends to follow the most entertaining path to the observer, but not to the people who are in it. Because it might be all bad for them. So if we take the movie idea,

[01:36:32] Trump is his third act, the point in the movie where the hero is in so much trouble, you can't even imagine how they could get out of this trouble. Well, that was January 6th. All right. Nobody could recover from January 6th because it was framed as an insurrection.

[01:36:48] Half of the country believes that the other half tried to overthrow the country by sauntering around in a building for a few hours and doing some paperworky things that the Supreme Court would have thrown away immediately if it ever come to that.

[01:37:03] But so but they believe it happened. So if you count that as his third act, what would be the best movie script for how he redeems himself if that's what's the most entertaining? And I hate to say it, but there's one thing that's just screaming

[01:37:21] for reality to manifest that and nothing. And that is proof that the election was rigged. Now, hold on. Let me be very careful. I'm aware of no evidence that would support the theory that the election was rigged. I'm aware of no evidence.

[01:37:37] However, we do live in a world in which every other of our respected institutions has been proven to be corrupt. Everything from the FBI to the CIA, to the media, to, you know, basically the whole thing. It's all corrupt.

[01:37:54] But we're asked to believe that despite everything being corrupt, the elections are the one exception and not just one, but all 50 states individually doing elections were all clean and pure. And not only that, but every precinct within those states was clean and pure,

[01:38:14] unlike 100 percent of the things there in every other domain from finance to you. So is it possible that something could come out that we had not seen yet that would prove Trump right? I don't know. I wouldn't bet on it. I wouldn't bet on it.

[01:38:33] But if you want to know what the most entertaining movie is by far, it would be some new revelation that the election was, in fact, rigged. But the interesting thing is in order for it to be big enough to somehow get the

[01:38:49] attention of media, since the media has the narrative that there is no rigging correctly or incorrectly, it would have to be really big facts that we couldn't ignore. Because while Trump was president and the same thing is happening in reverse,

[01:39:06] but while Trump was president every single day, people would tell me, oh, my gosh, they're going to release the smoking gun on Monday or tomorrow or whatever. And then he's going to be gone. He's going to be put in jail and gone for good.

[01:39:19] And then the same thing is happening now, like every day, oh, they're going to finally release this big thing from Hunter Biden's laptop and Joe Biden's going to spend the rest of his life in jail. And after the election, people were saying the same thing.

[01:39:32] Tomorrow, the secretary of state of this state is going to finally whistle blow and we're going to see what really happened. It never, ever happens. None of the things anybody's ever said about these things have ever happened.

[01:39:44] So that's why I tend to believe whenever anyone tells me, oh, it's about to come out now about X, Y and Z. I know it's never going to come out. So I sort of feel like that movie won't happen.

[01:39:56] Well, when when it was first alleged that there might have been some impropriety, I warned my audience often and loudly that even if someday we found something wrong with any part of the election, you could guarantee that 95 percent of the claims would be bullshit no matter what.

[01:40:14] So whether or not there was anything real, 95 percent of the claims would be unreal for sure. UFOs are the same thing, right? If we ever found a real one, it doesn't change the fact that 99 percent of them were bullshit. So anything's possible.

[01:40:32] It reminds me of like JFK Nixon. There's pretty much a lot of evidence now that in the 1960 election, there was some rigging most notably in Chicago. I mean, it's it's I don't even know if the Kennedy's denied anymore. Like it's there's just a lot of

[01:40:49] lost and written about it, a lot to discuss. Nixon was actually suing for 10 months after the election. He kind of kept it quiet. He didn't make a big deal out of it. And eventually he just gave up because there was no there was no point.

[01:41:01] And and and he didn't want to cause too much problems. But again, like it's not like this is the first time there's been an election rating 1876, you know, you had, you know, James Blaine and and gosh, the guy who actually did become president, that whole thing was rigged.

[01:41:22] So again, I don't know, even if we find something out, nothing will like you say, nothing will happen. So I wonder if that is actually the most entertaining solution. Well, just let me add another little conspiracy theory to the mix.

[01:41:38] Have you been curious why the Republicans who are so adamant that the election was not good have not done more to fix it? Does that does that seem curious to you? Because I have a theory for that.

[01:41:50] And the theory is that the Republicans are cheating in their states and they can't afford the lid to be taken off because it's dirty all the way. That's a possibility. I that could be true. I also think just Trump was really not a Republican and Republicans and Democrats

[01:42:08] just don't like Trump, like both parties don't like him. So and they I think they're hoping I think the Republicans were hoping kind of a Trump like, you know, a vicious sort of Republican like Ron DeSantis, who is one of them would win.

[01:42:23] But now it's looking like obviously the early stories are not the most entertaining winners. So like again, that could affect Ramaswamy. He might have been entertaining if he broke out in the convention, but he's breaking out a little too early, which spoils the movie theory a little bit.

[01:42:40] Well, I love having Vivek in the mix because if they take Trump out, they get the Hulk because the thing they don't see coming is if you add Trump's policies and you also had a strong personality,

[01:42:54] but you had the Vakes communication skills where he can take the pain out of the communication. Yeah, Trump says things that make your hair set on fire, both positive and negative, where Vivek tries to find that middle where

[01:43:09] it's hard to argue. It's like, OK, I'll give you that. So if they lose Trump, they're going to get somebody who can give you Trump policies without as much friction. You know, there would be less resistance to a Vivek than there

[01:43:23] would be to a Trump because Trump's created his own his own baggage there. So I don't know, I think he's like he's like a plan. He's almost like Harris is the thing that keeps Biden in office because you don't want that as

[01:43:39] your backup. You don't want the backup plan. Right. You know what strikes me as an interesting narrative in terms of this movie theory, like what would be the best movie? And this is not a political belief at all.

[01:43:51] But like RFK Jr. is interesting from a movie theory standpoint, because the last two times there was a one term president or a president who in his first term had a primary challenger. As far as I know, we're 1980, where Jimmy Carter was in his first term and

[01:44:09] Ted Kennedy was the challenger. And 1968, where LBJ was in his arguably first term and Robert F. Kennedy was the main candidate until he was assassinated. And so it was interesting. It's interesting to me, there's like that little historical narrative of Kennedy is connected to one term presidents.

[01:44:29] So that that feels a little movie-ish to me. But yeah, it's going to be interesting no matter what. I'll tell you my personal anecdote that makes me feel like I live in a simulation. A lot of people don't know that RFK Jr.'s voice problems.

[01:44:46] It's got a name. It's called spasmodic dysphonia. And I had the same thing for years. And as you can tell, I don't talk the way he talks now. I had a surgery to fix it. But I've got a problem with it.

[01:45:15] So it was coming into my headphones so I couldn't talk there for a moment. So what was I saying? Spasmodic dysphonia, he had the surgery. So people kept saying, hey, why don't you tell him what you did so he can fix his voice?

[01:45:30] So I did reach out and I tweeted about it and stuff. And he later contacted me and told me that I did inspire him to seek treatment. Now, he did a different treatment one as a faster recovery. But I don't think he could run for president

[01:45:44] without the at least 30 percent improvement, I think from his procedure. So I ended up having some tiny little connection to that story. That's interesting. It's so weird how it's all connected, like you know, if Robert F. Kennedy and marrying the actress who played

[01:46:07] Larry David's wife or curb your enthusiasm when his wife in real life left him for Al Gore. Like this is too many. Wait, wait, wait. Did that happen? Yeah. Al Gore is with his ex. Yeah, I didn't even know that. Oh, wow. Yeah.

[01:46:24] Yeah, she was a big environmentalist and ultimately spending a lot of time on the private jet flying around to environmental conferences with Al Gore. Dave became an item and he left Tipper Gore and she left Larry David. And just like on the show, the Cheryl Hines character

[01:46:42] also left Larry David. And in reality, Cheryl Hines, you know, is Oh, wow. R.F.K. Junior's third right. So and and just to complete it, I've been compared to Larry David so many times that he's actually been my he's been my Halloween costume more than once.

[01:47:04] So you're kidding. That's funny. But he probably would never give you a call, though. So I don't think so because you've been canceled. But anyway, Scott, thank you so much once again for coming on the show. The books reframe your brain.

[01:47:20] You can't buy it in the bookstore, right? Where can you buy it? Oh, you can now. It's available in Barnes Noble and Amazon has all the forms of it and a bunch of other places, but look for it online. Online is your best bet. All right, great.

[01:47:34] Well, thanks a lot, Scott. And thanks for going over all this stuff that's been going on with you. And I appreciate it. And you're always welcome on the podcast. Thank you. Thanks, James. Appreciate it.