Scott Adams | Reframe Reality for Happiness and Success

28:36Work, productive work. Yeah, productive work. So what if you knew the measurement 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. Yeah, so just to restate that, I've said that I can always judge my own happiness in any given day by whether I've done at least two of the three things. Either I had a really productive day, I got some really good exercise, or I 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 killing it.

29:16I mean, I'm absolutely happy that day. But if I only get one of them, even if it's the most fun one, I'm going to feel empty. It's great while that happens, but then I'm a little empty afterwards. So that was my little formula. 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. So I just don't assume other people are killing it. I just assume that I don't know their problems. What about, you know, aging?

29:54How would you reframe? So you're older than you were when you were half your age, obviously. Today, you're the oldest you've ever been. 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? 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 teenage years? You're not going to get a lot of yes. You do not get a lot of yes to would you like to go back and be young again.

30:36People and then the studies of especially women, I think women are happiest after they're 40. I think 40 to 60, women tend to be quite happy. but in my own experience, health is the only thing that determines how you feel age-wise. If you stay fit, you end up being wiser, having more assets, and then you're also healthy. That's the trifecta there. When I was young, I had the health, but I also had way too much energy. The energy is not always good. 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? Will I succeed? Will I do anything worthwhile?

31:23But now those questions are largely answered. The best part of my life that I like is that I was always the Dilbert guy. Now you can't take that away. You can cancel me. I could be disgraced. But 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 they have that whole situation working well. 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, if they're widowed especially. but people like the age way more than you think, even with the physical infirmities, you know, which, which we all have.

32:10Yeah, 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, this is not good. 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 and you almost the idea of reframing or the concept is almost like i don't want to say hypnotized but you you kind of look at a a situation with a different lens like we've given some examples what's some other examples that you think really resonate with people and and again you have lots of examples in your book i've bookmarked all over the place.

32:56Like 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. 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, well, you better call me back on the death, on my deathbed. I'm 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 on your deathbed. And the benefit is that at least for a while, it takes you out of that head where you had that immediate problem.

33:33So 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 most starkly. 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. I finally had an escape plan. From that point on, every day I went to work, all of the things that 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. I still had to overcome them.

34:09But 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 as that was your reality you could have just quit any point and what about let's say someone who's got 17 kids and three mortgages and their boss hates them but they and they can't really find a new job or they feel like they can't find a new job 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? Uh, well, I first say that if you have 17 kids, you're killing it because you know, the, the ultimate victory is some, some would say it would be spreading your genes.

34:53Although I have a reframe for people who don't want to do that. Um, I would say that the reframe you should look at is that everybody who succeeds does it pretty similar ways, which means that, uh, if they don't have enough 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, 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 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 um i suck and i'm mediocre because of this horror 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.

36:08Yeah. And I would add to that, uh, I'll call it the bandaid reframe. I wrote about as well. When my young stepson would get a, let's say a cut or a bruise and he'd be, he'd be wailing. And, uh, I would wisely walk up and say, let me see that. You know, I'd take a look at his little cot or whatever. Let's say that's a, that's a four minute situation. He'd be like, what do you mean? You know, that'll hurt for a lot. It hurts now, right? That's going to hurt for four minutes. And he's like, really four minutes. It's 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.

36:47And then he just dealt with the fact that it hurt a little bit. But his mental state was completely solved by knowing it was temporary. So in the case of you're a person with a bad job and everything's not working out, 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, a shared bathroom down the road, no friends. I didn't have a car. I was in the city that I didn't know anyone. But I told myself, this is temporary. This is going to be hard, but it has an end time.

37:24I will build up enough skills so that I can't be denied. And I was just working on skills every day. eventually I had enough skills so I had lots of options and I couldn't be denied that that is a powerful reframe and again I feel one a lot of people have a similar type of reframe to kind of get get through the day uh 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 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.

38:07So just either assume that this one also probably won't come true or just start writing it down so you can see for yourself that your predictions are, you're a really horrible predictor of your own future. And that it actually, she has told me in recent years that that has work for her. So that's a good reframe. I've used that as well. 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, then your anxiety would go away because there's nothing to protect.

38:48And that's your ego talking. 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 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 like anything could go wrong because it's so valuable. But if I said, here's a potato, could you walk this over to the restaurant? They asked for a potato for some reason.

39:22It's just a russet potato. You'd say, all right. You'd be tossing it up in the air as you walked across. This 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. 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 this precious thing which must be protected from all injury. Your ego is not your friend. Your ego is literally your enemy. It's the one that's keeping you from asking somebody out.

40:02It'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. I'm afraid of the harm. Don't worry 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. 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. It's kind of rare that your biggest actual real problem in life. was one that you saw coming for 10 years.

40:38It's usually the one that just, where did that come from? 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.

41:04I 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. 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, 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 like, let's say a party and you just started, you have nothing to say to anybody and you're feeling anxious about it.

41:49So 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 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 it to you in 30 seconds, which is people like you when you ask questions and show genuine 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.

42:25Things like, hey, what's your name? You know, introduce yourself. Where do you work? Why are you here? Depending on what the event is, you might say, are you a friend of the bride or the groom? There's always a question like, what's your place here? without being too nosy. And you might ask, you know, do you have kids? 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 had told me that would work, I would say, so you're saying that I should just be blah, blah, blah with somebody and not really with any purpose. There's no information being transferred.

43:01Like, 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. It's a payoff that you've connected with a human. You've given them something of value, which is your interest and your time. People love that because it makes them feel important. So if you imagine that you can easily develop those skills just to walk into the place and say, hey, my name is Blake. What's your name? What do you do? So once you develop that, you're in the top 10 % of people who can handle a social situation. So now when you walk into it, you know that 90 % of the people there are worse off than you are.

43:44That'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? 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 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 the problem you're the solution to 90 of the problems in the room you see somebody that looks like they're suffering walk right over to them that person's suffering You can tell they're socially awkward.

44:32Just walk right up to them. Say, hey, I'm Scott. How you doing? You just solve their problem. They don't know what to say. Doesn't matter. You can solve that problem by asking them questions. 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 where do you work? Do you have any kids? Oh, yeah. Where do they go to school? Oh, my kid went to school there. and then suddenly did they have that teacher remember there was that hard teacher now you've got something to talk about so once you learn that simple technique 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 are you aren't they happy that you walked up to them total reframe i love that reframe it's advice combined with a reframe like be like the del carnegie 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.

45:33But also solving somebody's biggest immediate problem that they're standing there wishing they were talking to somebody and knew what to say. You also suggest to either talk, and correct me 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, or someone like you just said, someone like yourself who's just sitting in a corner and sort of the lowest person at the party. Maybe explain some of the rationale behind that. Yeah, if you walk into a room and everybody's already talking to people, we're already paired off and it's hard to break into a group.

46:13I suggested that if you see men talking, they might try to be alpha and maybe exclude you with their body language. 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 they're not directly in a conversation you know say they're walking somewhere just intercept because if you can 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 what's so so meet a connector because connectors like connecting it's part of their payoff oh i introduced 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 it's like you've created this one framework that you know this concept of reframing that where you apply it to 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 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 uh you know in the social situation you're really just just describing like you say dale carnegie's courses but you've created this common language 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, you know, one approach that covers all of these different life situations, even though they're completely different problems.

48:01Yeah. You know, I think just saying that there's a thing called a reframe, uh, 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 or just in life, then you can start to make your own. And so I, I'm starting to hear from people who 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, but that doesn't matter if it worked for them. 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, the usual frame is, why can't my problems go away?

48:40And the reframe is, everything has a right to exist, including this problem. Let's say, though, it's a problem that's really inconvenient for you. Let's say the IRS just sent you a letter. 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. 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.

49:23But, oh, 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 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. I got some bad things. I'm 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.

49:59Just let it exist. yeah and i wonder though if sometimes the reframe is is is more challenging obviously there are reframes that are more challenging to come up with than others like 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 maybe not be true but uh you know i wonder how you keep on reframing to kind of find a 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?

50:36Well, it's trial and error. The beauty of the reframes are that if it's one that's not going to work for you, 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, you read it once and it just never leaves your head. 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 recreationally drinking. I didn't, I wasn't an addict. I just thought, you know, it would be better if I just didn't.

51:11And dozens, maybe hundreds of people by now have gotten back to me to say they quit a lifetime of over drinking. This is not for alcoholics 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. 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, but it also tells you that these work without the logic connecting anything.

51:56You 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 and that we're kind of just this bag of bones that could 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? 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, but to predict how it will turn out and then evaluate how it turned out and then have to deal with the difference, then it would have consciousness.

52:51But AI does kind of have that ability. Like let's take an AI that plays a game. It thinks according to its AI that, oh, this is the right move in this chess game. And then 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 an immediate process. 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 what I'm doing, what the effect will be, and then comparing it to what is.

53:32And I think that is our consciousness. I think that's all it is. that's different from saying uh the last time i built a house uh one of my rooms was too small 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 uh do you think do you think i mean is there a scientific basis for any consciousness 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 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 uh it's worked out in other words nothing in the real world has you know got me in trouble because that's what i think consciousness is but i think we're going to be um blown away the same way we were blown away that looking at word combinations can create something like intelligence 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 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 and it kind of goes along with the idea that to some extent humans are largely programmable by words and environment and so on And this is kind of the basis for hypnotism.

55:05Like this approach of reframing is, again, almost some kind of a self-hypnosis. So you self-hypnotize so you're not worried or stressed or anxious or lacking success or whatever. 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?

55:55The reframes. Doc knew was also a hypnotist and he tried unsuccessfully, but he tried to get her to quit smoking by imagining that whenever she thought of a cigarette, she thought of licking an ashtray. Now it turns out that wasn't enough to quit her addiction. A hypnosis isn't really good for addiction, but that's the idea. You know, so that, that would be a typical hypnotist thing. Or if there was something that you were uncomfortable about, you could imagine, you know, 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.

56:31Your dog's on your lap. Doesn't 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. 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 it's just one word but it carries like all kinds of emotional impact with it and a lot of our words do that so the hypnotist is looking for the 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 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 so um 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 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 have you ever seen the tv show lost yeah uh 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 can't get off the island so whenever there's turbulence now i pray that we crash because i'm gonna 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 um this will be a compliment that sounds like I'm not heading that way.

58:38So that was a perfect use of a reframe, but it displays that the reframe doesn't have to be logical. And you can't do reframes until you release yourself from the need to be 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 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.

59:23You 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. But yet at that moment, I completely 100 % 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, you can watch a movie that you know is fiction, but you have real feelings. 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 than the ones you had.

1:00:07So 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, that your problems have a right to exist. Here's another one. if you have critics, so you and I, we're 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 owned a restaurant. And one of the employees had a complaint and decided he was going to pick it all by himself. Just every day, standing in front of the entrance to the restaurant.

1:00:44You know, this restaurant's unfair. And one day, the staff was, you know, really being bothered by it. and it was just getting under their skin. And they thought maybe it was actually affecting their business and their tips and everything. So they were pretty mad 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. So one day I come in and I say, hey, I see your mascot is back. And I was talking to my partner in the restaurant, and she laughs. And then we started telling the other staff, yeah, this is a mascot. We've got a mascot.

1:01:15And 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. Like Keith Olbermann likes to come out of his, you know, from under whatever rock he lives under, every few months to attack me online. It's been going on for a long time. and what he does i used to get mad it's like oh keith olverman how dare you say those things so untrue and unfair and i'd like to fight back and you know it would just be nastiness online but now when i see it i just retweet it 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 olverman also every few weeks sort of resurfaces and trashes me in some way.

1:02:12And it's 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. 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. You had an expectation about that guy. He's not meeting your expectation. And this is causing your brain to have some conflict. But as soon as you say that guy's your mascot, try it. You'll be surprised. Yeah, I will try that.

1:02:54But let's take the case of your restaurant. Now, what if it really was affecting their tips and affecting the business?

1:03:04And even though they kept calling them mascot, they saw their tips and business continuing to decline as long as he was out there what would well the thing is there 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 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.

1:03:37So under those conditions, might as well wait it 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, and you're just, like you say, it's free world. You can stand on the court and do whatever he wants. You might as well just figure out 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 so knowing it's temporary gives you some comfort from the start i like how in the book you bring up the the ultimate reframe which is a very fascinating issue which is the the simulation hypothesis the idea that we're just in a giant simulation and at first it sounds ridiculous but the concept is you know already you know 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 that almost seem real, and they're populated by avatars and whatever.

1:04:43So imagine if there was a civilization that lasted a million years already. They probably could make completely real simulations, and there might be an infinite number of worlds in that 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 refrain because if we're in a simulation and it's even a simulation we could somewhat control to some extent, you know, have at it. Yeah. You know, 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, but I have no way of knowing if that's the real world or it's just useful as a prediction.

1:05:32But one of the things that that model can buy you is an explanation, a potential one anyway, of why affirmations appear to work for some people. 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, then all things are possible, even things that violate physics, because it would 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.

1:06:10So 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. 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, 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.

1:06:51It could be anything. So it's just a good optimistic way to go through life, and it appears to give me advantages by focusing on things that do seem to turn out more often than they should. 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. 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. and I always sort of feel like if you truly believe, oh, I'm gonna have the greatest day of all today and you have that affirmation and you believe it, then what will happen is like the Honda effect, 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.

1:07:51So I've always kind of viewed that in that way. 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. I don't think we're fully cognizant and couldn't be of how subjective our reality is. 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 setting your filters on what you're going to notice and what importance you're going to put on those things.

1:08:42so i haven't really been on social media much in the past couple years i got a little burnt out when unlike you i had some criticism and it just 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 mentioned to me, and you mentioned several times in the podcast, oh, didn't Scott Adams get canceled? And I'm like, well, A, 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.

1:09:18I want him onto my podcast. I want to hear about this book. and you know so what 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 it doesn't seem like you should it seemed like they were looking for an excuse to cancel you they found one and it stuck and so they got it yeah it wasn't the first attempt it was just the first successful attempt um so here's what your viewers need to know as context number one there's no such thing as news about public figures that's true. If you don't understand the basic that no news about public figures is ever true, then it gets confusing fast.

1:10:00Now, 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 happen when the video shows somebody doing exactly what they did, but some context was left out that completely changes what you think about it. Let me just add to that real quickly, which is that I'm by far not as public a figure as you, but every single time anybody has ever, ever, 100 % of the time, 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, I'm not the only one that 100 % of the time people write lies about.

1:10:45It 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. I never watch the news because it's a hundred 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, you know, Walter Isaacson, who got one fact wrong, which he now admits 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, were his satellites already on or not and who asked him.

1:11:31It turns out it was the Ukrainians who asked him to turn him on. But he said, if the president of the United States had asked me, I would have turned him on. but I don't work for Ukraine. 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. 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.

1:12:06Now, the second thing you should know is that's obvious hyperbole, because how would you even do that? I'm not suggesting Jim Crow laws or 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 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. We had a different launch date. And I thought, I'm going to really make some noise here. 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.

1:12:42Because it's the biggest problem in the world or America. 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 Rasmussen poll that showed that black Americans had a negative thought about being white. Now, without defending the accuracy of the poll, 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 poll, so we can forget the poll. That was just an opportunistic way to introduce the topic. Here's the big picture. In the current world, we've got ESG, CRT, and DEI.

1:13:24Most of your viewers are familiar with at least a few of those. But they all have the same comment. What's DEI? I don't know DEI. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, I think. 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. So that also has to do with race and gender. And then CRT is the more academic version that has also has a common element with the other two, that there's an oppressed class, black Americans, and there's an oppressor class that although slavery is gone and Jim Crow is gone, the legacy and the, let's say, the ripple effect, the systemic racism still exists.

1:14:28And 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 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've thoroughly saturated the culture with the idea that one 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.

1:15:13I use the example of I've lost two corporate jobs and a TV show because I was a white man. I'm not guessing. I was told that directly in each case. In my banking job, my boss, who was white, said, we don't have enough diversity. We're getting a lot of pressure from the outside. Newspapers are on us, so we can't promote you. I said, for how long? Well, there's no end date. It's going to take a long time to correct this. I left. I quit. 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 that was saying yeah in iraq rocket strapped to his ass and one day my boss called me in and said same speech and not again white boss said uh i don't know how to tell you this but the word has come down, no promotions for white men because we've got to get some diversity going in senior management.

1:16:21And so that's when I started the Dilbert comic. You know, part-time, I was like, well, I guess my corporate career isn't going to work out. So then Dilbert took off. I left my corporate career and I started an animated version on UPN. After it was successful the first season, it got renewed. but it got renewed at a time when UPN decided to make a comedy block on Monday night. 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. And TV shows are either going up or down.

1:17:06Ours went down when it changed. It was going up when people could find it. It went down when it moved. That was the end of it. When I got canceled more recently, when my comic was removed from all 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. 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, I've been far more well-known as a political figure than a cartoonist.

1:17:57And 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. uh so we're just to mention your your book win bigly uh described why in early i think it was in 2015 even that you predicted even as early as then that trump would win um the nomination and quite possibly the the general election in 2016 and you were one of the first people to predict it everybody thought you were crazy you were right you wrote the book win bigly about how trump used It's basically hypnotism techniques that you recognize to win the presidency.

1:18:41So thank you. That's perfect context. So if you understand me as a past Trump supporter, at the moment I'm endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy. 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. 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're comparing the average of any two groups, you're in absurdity land. Now, it probably made sense historically.

1:19:24There was a time when that made perfect sense. At the moment, in 2013, even though systemic racism exists, I often argue with my audience that some would like to say it doesn't, but obviously it does. 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. Our goal is to have them the same. Well, we better take some stuff from this group and give it to this group. taxes or whatever you're going to do. But if you had a systems approach, 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?

1:20:10And this is the reframe. The best way to fix it is on an individual basis. 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 the next level. So instead of telling me that you need me to worry about the average of any group, which has created a situation where it's actually dangerous to be white if you're around black people who generally, with the help of white women, will try to get your stuff and transfer it so there's equity.

1:20:53You want to get out of that situation if you can, although there's no practical way to do that. But I wanted to make the point that the current approach is creating poison between relations of the races that doesn't need to be there. If you take it to an individual level and you say to me, Scott, there's a specific young black person who needs some help. I would say, well, what help do they need? Is it advice? Do they need to know how to reframe something? Is there a connection? Can I mentor? 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.

1:21:35My book is just one of them. And my other book, Caterfield, Almost Everything is Still Win Big, even more directly, is about ways an individual can make all of the obstacles of life, all of them, including systemic racism, 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, but what are you going to do about it that doesn't make things worse? That's what we're seeing. But if you say, how about every individual is infinitely different, and they have available all the tools of success, but maybe they don't know it.

1:22:22And maybe there's some things we can provide. So I'm working on also with Joshua Lysak, working on a student guide. So to take the things that are a little more adult oriented, you know, like my book and bring it into 30 lessons that you wish you knew when you were a teenager. You know, imagine imagine learning systems over goals, talent stacks. Imagine learning that maybe you shouldn't follow your passion every time. Maybe maybe that's optional. You know, imagine just learning the things that took me 30 to 66 years to learn, but getting them when you're a teenager. How much is systemic racism going to bother you if I teach you that, hey, you're black?

1:23:07Go to any one of these Fortune 500 companies. If you have the same skill set as the white people, you get hired every time. Not sometimes, not most of the time, every freaking time. time so take your advantage take your little stack of skills and 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 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 in the process of even failing i'm going to be picking up skills. I'm going to be networking with people.

1:23:46I'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. 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 non-existent black person and the average imaginary white person. As long as we're on that frame of the imaginary people, you can't get past it.

1:24:25Everything gets worse. And that's what we're witnessing. So the context that the news told you is that I'm a big racist who 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. 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. I think the The cops should all have body cams and maybe Republicans would help fund it.

1:25:03And then we can come together on that. But, you know, then I found out that Black Lives Matter was maybe had more of a political, financial, you know, incentive. They weren't so much about problem solving. 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 ceiling. And it's because of that narrative that there are oppressors and oppressed. How does any white person or Asian person, Indian American, Hispanic, how do they succeed?

1:25:50Same way everybody does. They look at successful people and they try to pick out the characteristics or the habits that make it work. And they say, well, I'll do that. Oh, it's the people who work hard. Okay, I'll do that. It's the people who went to school and built a bunch of skills. Okay, I'll do that. But now imagine you took me. magically you turn 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 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 don't i can't be like that.

1:26:37So 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, the workbook is for kids is a way to get past that, to say, look, here are the things everybody does. If you're not doing this list, there's nothing else that can work. This, 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. If you're interested, we can 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.

1:27:23I actually love black people, which is weird to say. It almost sounds racist saying that it almost sounds racist say it but i did i learned long ago or it's just the thought that if you say oh i don't have a problem with black people like that just doesn't really sound true right it just sounds like something 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 uh individually i've never had any problem with anybody in person uh then you can say all right i'm trying to help i tried to help Black Lives Matter. I tried to help Colin Kaepernick.

1:27:59When Colin Kaepernick was being destroyed by the right, my audience was mostly right-leaning people. And I defended him from the start. 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. Now, you could argue about the things he's asking for, whether those are the right things to ask for. But as a protest, it's one of the best protests I've ever seen. Everybody knew about it. Everybody talked about it. Probably there are more police cams, body cams, because Colin Kaepernick existed.

1:28:41So 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. and I'm trying to lose that frame. 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, maybe the teacher looks like them. Perfect. That's the perfect situation.

1:29:19I also was thinking part of the context was this general concept that you were sort of making fun of the narrative that there's an average white person and an average black person. But you basically said, if someone hates me or 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. And you're basically saying how the media is portraying 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 is fullness.

1:30:01But 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. Once you've been called something, that's who you are for the rest of your life. In part, it's because of the marketplace. Take all the newspapers that dropped Dilbert. Obviously, just like a lot of people who know Scott Adams know Scott Adams as political commentator, a lot of people who just read Dilbert every day have no idea who Scott Adams is. They know Dilbert. They don't know Scott Adams. But the marketplace, suddenly every editor of every newspaper was being told by a small portion of their readers, hey, you can't have Dilbert in your newspaper anymore or you're going to lose business.

1:30:44and advertisers didn't want to advertise because they had a small portion of their interested consumers saying the same thing. 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? 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.

1:31:30I 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. My biggest problem was I couldn't figure out how to retire. And literally, cause I was 65 and I, you know, 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, you know, wind down and, and retire. 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.

1:32:12I'm not even thinking about the money. 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. So I'm totally not on the acquisition phase of my life. 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 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 uh spicy so I couldn't do any controversial things I couldn't use any even semi-naughty words in a newspaper.

1:32:59But now I can do anything. And the subscribers are expecting it to be edgy, so they're finding it. It's also on the Locals platform. So on Locals, scottadams.locals.com. It's also a subscription, but I do also another comic called Robots Read News and a bunch of political stuff there, and a lot of live streaming. So I managed to go from a world that I was desperate to get out of 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 though, like do you ever walk out of the house, someone recognizes you and like spits on you or anything like that?

1:33:45Strangely enough, I had been so canceled just by being identified as a Trump supporter in 2016. You already thought you were crazy. No, I'd already lost almost my entire social network. It was just decimated by that. 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 I do a lot of work at a 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 it's often a man and says excuse me are you Scott Adams I won't know which way this is going yet this could go terribly wrong and I'll be yeah and then the person will say big fans you know glad you know we've been following you forever you know keep up the good work yeah yeah don't worry about the cancellation and 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 but there's a level of appreciation for not letting the machine kill me, just surviving and surviving with a smile that people really respond to.

1:35:16Because everybody feels the machine is pressing them too. And when they see somebody who wasn't crushed, even though the machine took the best punch it could, I took the best punch they had. 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. I 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 while preparing for this, and it really did seem like everything was taken out of context, and it's just a shame.

1:35:58And 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 I don't even have the mind, like I don't have the mindset where I care, even if it was aimed at me. Like I'm 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 perhaps about Jews. And yet, for me, these are two of the most talented people in history, the history of music. Particularly, I love that music. And I would love to have them on the podcast, for instance.

1:36:41And whatever. I literally just don't care whatever it is they believe or say about Jews. It 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 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, let's take the yay example. Do you think there's any chance that if you were in the room with yay, he would treat you like a Jewish guy versus just a person?

1:37:27No, right. Zero chance. Yeah, right. Zero chance. Right. We don't act when we meet people, we do treat them as individuals. And then we act as if when we walk out the door and get on social media, we act like all that mattered was the magic average person of the group um so yay said some things of course i don't endorse but uh 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 um but he's not going to take that into the room 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, but of course, there's a lot of great things about social media.

1:38:13It'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 downsides than being social. But all right. Thanks for shedding some light on that. And again, Scott, thanks. This book, Reframe Your Brain, blows me away because it puts into a 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, 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.

1:38:54Oh, so you like Vivek Ramaswamy. Who do you think is going to actually win the election? I might as well get your prediction so I could start betting now? Yeah, this was a tough one because when I predicted Trump, it was because I saw he 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. Number one is, is Joe Biden even going to be physically able to speak by election day? And I would say there's some chance not. I mean, he might actually be connected to tubes and we never see him again two months from now, the way it's looking anyway.

1:39:35And then Trump, who knows what's going to happen with all the lawfare attacks? Will any of them be successful? Does it affect the vote? But I like to use the best movie reframe. What would be the best movie? The most entertaining outcome. 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, Trump, 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.

1:40:15Well, that was January 6th. All right. Nobody could recover from January 6th because it was framed as an insurrection. 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. But they believe it happen. 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 for reality to manifest that in nothing, and that is proof that the election was rigged.

1:41:04Now, 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. 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 basically the whole thing. It's all corrupt. 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, unlike 100 % of the things that are in every other domain, from finance to you name it.

1:41:57So 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. 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 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's happening in reverse, 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 put in jail and gone for good.

1:42:55And then the same things 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. Tomorrow, the secretary of state of this state is going to finally whistleblow and we're going to see what really happens. It never, ever happens. None of the things anybody's ever said about these things have ever happened. 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.

1:43:28So I sort of feel like that movie won't happen. Well, when it was first alleged that there might've 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 % of the claims would be bullshit no matter what. So whether or not there was anything real, 95 % 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 % of them were bullshit. So anything's possible. It reminds me of JFK Nixon. There's pretty much a lot of evidence now that in the 1960 election, there was some rigging, most notably in Chicago.

1:44:18I mean, I don't even know if the Kennedy's denied anymore. Like, there's just a lot of, a lot's been written about it, a lot's been discussed. 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 point. And he didn't want to cause too much problems. But again, it's not like this is the first time there's been election rigging. 1876, you had James Blaine and, gosh, the guy who actually did become president. That whole thing was rigged. So again, I don't know. Even if we find something out, nothing will – like you say, nothing will happen.

1:45:05So I wonder if that is actually the most entertaining solution. Well, just let me add another little conspiracy theory to the mix. 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 seem curious to you? Because I have a theory for that, 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. That could be true. I also think just Trump was really not a Republican and Republicans and Democrats just don't like Trump.

1:45:45Like both parties don't like him. So and I think they were hoping I think the Republicans were hoping kind of a Trump like, you know, officious sort of Republican like Ron DeSantis, who was one of them, would win. But now it's looking like obviously the early stories are not the most entertaining winners. So, 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. 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 had Trump's policies, and you also had a strong personality, but you had Vivek's communication skills where he can take the pain out of the communication.

1:46:37Trump says things that make your hair set on fire, both positive and negative, where Vivek tries to find that middle where it's hard to argue. It's like, okay, 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. There'd be less resistance to a Vivek than there would be to a Trump because Trump's created his own baggage there. Um, so I don't know. I think he's like a, he's like a, uh, a plan. He's almost like, uh, Harris is the thing that keeps Biden in office because you don't want that as your backup. You don't want the backup plan.

1:47:17Right. Uh, you, you know, you know, what strikes me as an interesting narrative in terms of this movie theory, theory, like what would be the best movie? And, and this is not a political belief at all, 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, were 1980, where Jimmy Carter was in his first term and 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.

1:47:57And so it's interesting to me. There's like that little historical narrative of Kennedy's connected to one-term presidents. 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, 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, uh,

1:48:42Oh,

1:48:47I've got a problem with it. Um, so it was coming into my headphones, so I couldn't talk there for a moment um so what was i saying uh spasman dysphonia he you had the surgery so people kept saying hey why don't you tell him what you did so he can fix his voice so i did reach out and i tweeted about it and stuff and he later contacted me and told me that uh i did inspire him to seek treatment now he did a different treatment one that has a faster recovery but i don't think he could run for president uh without the at least 30 improvement i think from his procedure so i i ended up having some you know tiny little connection to that story that's interesting uh it's it's so weird how it's all connected like uh you know with robert f kennedy and and marrying the actress who played uh larry larry david's wife on curbue enthusiasm when his wife in real life left him for Al Gore.

1:49:50Like, it's just too many miles. Wait, wait, wait. Did that happen? Yeah. Al Gore is with his ex? Yeah. I didn't even know that. Oh, wow. Yeah. 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, So the Cheryl Hines character also left Larry David. And in reality, Cheryl Hines, you know, is, is. Oh, wow. RFK Jr.'s third wife. 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.

1:50:40So. You're kidding. That's funny. but uh 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 uh uh the books reframe your brain you can't buy it in the bookstore right where can you buy it oh you can now it's a 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 it's your best bet all right great well thanks a lot, Scott, and thanks for going over all the stuff that's been going on with you, and I appreciate it, and you're always welcome on the podcast.

1:51:16Thank you. Thanks, James. I appreciate it.