Scott Adams: How To Accomplish Impossible Things By Reframing Your Brain

Most of the successful people that I know practice some form of active thought control. That means that they consciously choose the beliefs that they want to practice and then they go out and find evidence for that. My guest today, Scott Adams, calls those frames. If you know that name, Scott Adams. He is a best selling author of the book Win Bigly and also how to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. He's also the creator of the Dilbert comic strip and he's the host of Coffee with Scott Adams, which is actually one of the most influential live streams in the world. There are people who say that he can swing elections and bring awareness to causes that he believes in because of the size of his audience, but also because of his ability to persuade an audience. Part of his persuasion toolkit is the ability to create and strengthen frames. Frames are simply the way that we see the world or a way of interpreting the world. And in this conversation, Scott talks about how he uses frames to both persuade himself and persuade other people. This includes building audiences, getting them to pay attention to things that he wants to cast light on. And it also means self persuasion, getting himself to do things that are more in alignment with the life that he wants to create. Scott's most recent book is called Reframe youe Brain. And when I read it, I took it as like a practical 12 rules for life. You know that book by Jordan Peterson? Except this is like 180 different reframes that can make a significant impact in your life. But what I really took away from it is that we can kind of program ourselves on how we want to see the world. And we can do that intentionally as a way to almost program reality, to bend in the direction that is more in alignment with the life that we want to create. I've been a fan of Scott's work for a good nine years now. He's had a meaningful impact on the way that I see the world. And it is a privilege of mine to bring you this discussion with Scott Adams. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Well, hi everybody. It's time for one of the highlights of civilization. It's capitalism.com and today I'm going to be joined by the person that we ripped off the simultaneous sip from. It's Scott Adams. So, Scott, will you join me with a cup, a mug, a glass, a chalice, a tank, or to sign a canteen jug or flask, fill it with your favorite liquid and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. The simultaneous sip Go.

I will.

I've switched to water for the afternoon.

Well, I cheated. I cheated. I've actually been off coffee for some time, but I thought we'd make an exception for Scott Adams. Scott, I want to ask you, before we go too deep down the rabbit hole, you have been live streaming every day for, like, nine years now.

I haven't. I think I missed maybe a day or so when I had a travel that was, you know, taking all morning in the flight or something. But other than that. Yeah. And actually it's closer to twice a day because I do an evening program for the people who subscribe on locals, and I do that almost every day.

I have to ask, when you set out to build an audience via live streaming, did you envision that it was going to continue on every day for a decade plus, or was this something that you just decided to do for a short time to see if it would be fun? I want to understand the mentality of how you went about building the platform that you have now.

So the great thing about my career, or job, if you want to call it that, is I can kind of do whatever I want. So if I decide I'm going to write a book or do a live stream or whatever, I just try it. And I use roughly the same process for everything, which is I've always got several things brewing that maybe I stuck a toe in or, you know, I tried one step or I talked to one person or I did one thing, and then I just see which things give me energy. So what I'm looking for is something that I have enough interest to start, but then it just draws me in and takes over, and maybe it gets a life of its own, and the energy comes from maybe audience or other people. And that's what happened with the livestream. So it started out with me literally hearing that there was this app that was called Periscope back in the old Twitter days, and it was on my phone. So I said, what happens if I turn this on? So I turned it on, and I think three or four people came on. And I thought, well, this is very cool. I. I just have three or four strangers who are listening to me. So I just did it the next day or so, and I had 12. And then you just kept going. And then, you know, the technology changed, but I had an audience by then. So really the process is I tiptoe in and I wait for the energy to drag me. That's the way I write a book. It's the way I do everything. And it worked. In this case, what you don't see, which makes it look more magical, is all the things I started that didn't have that energy and I ultimately pulled back. So you only see the winners. There's a survivor's basis bias there.

That's. That's an interesting perspective that you're starting a lot of things and you're prioritizing the ones that continue to give you energy. Because a lot of times people will look at the platform that you've built or the following that you have, which you've been building over the last decade, and try to reverse engineer how Scott did it or how Gary Vaynerchuk did it, or how whoever insert your favorite influencer or content creator here trying to reverse engineer the strategy. But what I'm hearing you say is that you try a lot of different things. The ones that give you energy are the things that have staying power and are probably going to work for you and your skill set rather than reverse engineering what somebody else did in order to achieve that amount of success. Is that a fair summary?

That's a fair summary, but I would like to give a, let's say, more attention to studying other people's processes. So I've often said that if there was only one thing you wanted to get right from the time you're, I don't know, 10 years old, for the rest of your life, pay attention to what people who succeed are doing. It's not always the same thing, but you can get, like a toolbox of things to try that, that may, you know, you may use different tools on different situations, but if you don't see the whole toolbox, you're. You're just going to be, you know, toolless, and that's not good.

So where do you strike that balance between finding and studying what is working for other people that you admire, while also creating room for you to consistently pursue the things that are giving you energy. Where do you find that crossover?

Well, I never stop looking at other people's techniques. So people like Elon Musk, you look at it and you say, all right, what did he do? Okay, he bet everything he had three times. And I think, okay, that's not for me.

You can't take everything everybody does and just apply it. But you can find people who tried five things and one of them worked, let's say a venture capitalist. And I say, I could try five things. Like, I could do that. So you just look for the parts that work and you never turn it off. But in terms of a Specific project. It really selects me. So right now I have, I don't know, half a dozen things I'm working on that may or may not be worth mentioning, but some of them will drag me and others will make me hit a plateau. And I'll say, well, I'm going to take the one that has all the.

Energy that makes sense. Now, Scott, one of the things that your work has helped me understand about myself and about the world is that all of us are operating with a certain level of a filter or a frame through which we see the world, and that those frames are programmable, they're changeable, they're malleable. The way that we view reality is. Is a set of filters or beliefs that we use to interpret the rest of the world. And you talked about this in win bigly about how we have different filters through which we receive all of the information being thrown at us. But in reframe your brain, you're talking about how we can consciously choose them and align them to more of an outcome that we want. Does your training as a hypnotist give you that understanding? Or where did you start to see reality break and see that it is subjective based on the way that we filter the information in our brains?

It was probably had more to do with a mushroom experience than anything else. When you have the. And, you know, I've only. I've only done it once, but. And it was many years ago, and I remember thinking, hey, I understand everything in my environment in terms of how it works. You know, a chair is still a chair. You know, door is still a door. I know how to use it. But for some reason, it all looked new, like I'd never seen a chair before. But I knew what it was. And that's the experience I had at least under mushrooms. And what that told me is I could have a completely different worldview and it would function perfectly. And I thought to myself, oh, no, what if everybody has a different worldview? And that what I had as a, let's say, you know, mushroom experience, what if somebody is just having that as their normal life? I wouldn't know the difference.

Right?

You know, maybe. Maybe when they look at a, you know, nature, they see something a little more spectacular than I do, which I could only get maybe under a substance. So once you realize how amazingly fluid your view of reality can be and still work perfectly, it's hard to imagine that we all have the same view in our heads when there's no way to check what I think versus what you think.

Well, Something that I've observed in some of the most successful people that I know is that most of them practice some form of active thought control or said differently. They almost choose the belief that they want to foster and then they go and find evidence for the belief that because that belief gives them energy or positivity or aligns them closer to what they want to see in the world or the outcomes that they want to have. And so I'm curious if that is in alignment with what you talk about in your work, about looking at reframing the way that you see the world so that it gives you a different outcome.

So reframing has been around forever. You know, psychologists and therapists use it. What I'm adding to it is compiling them and then adding a bunch of my own. So I do use the hypnosis experience and my experience with persuasion in general to know which ones are the good ones. And plus there are a bunch I've used over my career with other people. And then they get back to me and say, oh, that reframe really changed my life. So, but, but here's the fun and, and maybe just mind blowing thing by coincidence. And it wasn't planned. I couldn't have planned it. AI became a thing. It became, you know, what it is. At the same time my book was coming out. Now that was just coincidence, but it allowed people to see what I was seeing through a different window. When you learn that you could produce something that looks like intelligence to us from nothing but the patterns of words that have been spoken before, you finally understand what a hypnotist learns on day one, basically, which is that words program your mind and that the words are not just things you do while you're thinking, they actually are your thinking that the, the patterns of words are your intelligence. Now you think that you have something beyond the words. You think, well, but no, my logic, my reason. Well, you know, there's not much evidence we use that most of the time a few professionals can figure out how to do that. Right. The rest of us think we're doing it. We're not. We're just doing word combinations. One of the ways you can see that, you know, besides seeing AI produce intelligence with nothing but that, is that if you ask somebody their political opinion in Today's environment, especially.

95% of the time, what comes out of their mouth will be whatever was also spoken by their news sources. Yeah, it's very rare that somebody has an actual independent opinion. And the reason is that those words that they heard or read got into their brain, and that is their intelligence. Now, it's not an insult. I'm not just saying it happens to one side and not the other. It's a universal thing. And as a hypnotist, that. That really goes right to my core beliefs that you can reprogram people with just choice of words. Now, if you've only known of hypnosis from, let's say, a bad movie, you're saying to yourself, but what about that watch? I got to do the watch thing too, right? Or is it about your tone of voice? Do you have to talk in a hypnotic way? And turns out there's literally nothing but your choice of words. Now, it's surprising when you become a hypnotist, you end up with really, that's just it. I just have to use the right words, and I can reprogram somebody's brain, and you can. And so let me give you an example. If somebody's listening to this, they're like, yeah, I need an example. My favorite one is alcohol is poison. Now, there's an earlier one that was sugar is poison. Some people use that effectively. I didn't know about that one when I created alcohol is poison. And you say to yourself, let's not even really innovative, or it's not even that different from what maybe other people have said. But the words themselves, if you just repeat them, will actually help you quit alcohol. It did for me. And so I said it in public. And I've heard from maybe hundreds of people who quit alcohol completely and they say it's just those words. I just say that when I'm in a situation, and rather than say, why would I want to put this in my body? It's poison. In the old days, you would have said to yourself, huh, I'm thirsty. That's a beverage. I drink beverages when I'm thirsty. You see how easily words become your thinking. You don't think that's what's happening, but because you called it a beverage, you drank it, I call it a poison. And it's easy not to. It's actually that easy.

And one of the things that you point out in, in your new book, reframe your brain is, is you talk about alcohol is poison or not, or maybe don't really know. There's evidence kind of all over the place. But the most helpful thing for you when you decided you don't want to drink it anymore is to adopt that frame. And that basically removed the desire for you. So is this an example in which you consciously are making a Decision about the end goal that you want to be aligned with and then reframing the thinking in order to make that more effortless.

Yeah. One of the most important things I say in my book, reframing your brain, is that it doesn't have to make sense to your conscious mind, because your conscious mind can be sort of irrelevant in a lot of cases. If it works, it works. And this example, Alcohol is poison, is a perfect example. It doesn't need to be literally true. It's just that the word causes you to act differently. That's all it is. And a lot of politics is exactly that. Somebody's decided on a favorite word and then that replaces their sense of reason.

Yeah, you. This is very interesting to me that the team sport aspect of politics and the team that people tend to align with tends to influence how they view policy, how they view the performance of a politician. And you mention how most of us think that we reach our conclusions rationally, but in reality, we pick a side, we pick a team, and then the media determines whether or not or what information we're going to receive through that filter. This is something that you and I have talked about offline a couple times. The one that bothers me, that I just, I, I can't understand is some people's obsession over this enemy that is called the World Economic Forum. You have this, this boogeyman that people have this story about, and I think they've created false memories about, and they've created like this evil enemy that is driving all the nefarious activities that they think are happening in the world. And this, this idea that they've kind of adopted a side and now they interpret reality through that. Why do you think we are so prone to picking a side or casting an enemy or choosing the, the, the sporting team, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians that we're aligned with, and then we so easily accept whatever information we get from that team.

Yeah, that's A hypnosis class 101 is that we make our decisions first and then we rationalize them after and we're not aware of it. And it's universal. It's not dumb people, it's smart people. It's everybody. We just make our decision and we explain why. Now, that's not true for, like, balancing your checkbook or, you know, finding your way to the store, like easy stuff like that. But for the big, you know, the, the big philosophical political questions, we decide first. Now, you, you pointed out that we tend to agree with our team, and I think it's probably just biological you know, it's, it's, you know, if you go to prison, even if you're not a racist, you join the team that's going to keep you alive, you know, so joining the team, that's more likely to keep you alive and prosperous. I think it's just biological. So pretty much everything we do is either mating instinct or survival, and then we reason backwards and come up with some reason why we did it. But then you've also got, as you mentioned, the media is putting the words in your head. So that solidifies what you were biologically wanted to do. You wanted to agree with your team. You always want to agree with your team. You hate it when you disagree. And so they put some words there that allowed you to do it, and now you have common words and that turns into common thinking.

So you talk about Donald Trump almost every day on your live stream, often from a persuasion perspective. I'm just curious now, do you think that that is his strategy of. Of, I would call it divisiveness of, like, calling people out or shutting people down when they disagree? Is that part of a creation of that team atmosphere in order to create a certain level of influence? What is your analysis of that in the context of creating that team atmosphere?

I'll tell you, one of the things that Trump gets right is he understands the show. That's what I call it, the show. He's not just a politician, he's a showman. And he takes both of them seriously, which is why he's the force that he is, because we really respond to the show. And when he says things that are sort of, we wish we'd said it, or it's, you know, it's incredibly funny because it's insulting of somebody we don't like. It just bonds us. We just become bonded to the person who made us laugh. So making people laugh is a really good way to get them on your team because they like to laugh. It's, it's purely. It's literally a dopamine hit. So when I watch Trump, since I don't have Trump derangement syndrome, I can agree with him or disagree with him, but in every case, I'm just sort of, you know, looking at him and having a good time, because it's always funny, you know, even the things I don't like, I go, oh, I'm going to have to, you know, answer to somebody asking, why do you do that? And I'm like, ah, but it was funny, so I'm okay with it as long as.

Yeah, that makes sense if you can take your ego or your side out of it and just look at it as theater, it's a different interpretation than if you are taking it so personally. And, and in fact, my favorite reframe that you have in your newest book was this idea of being able to take your, your ego out of something and allow yourself to be embarrassed. The reframe was the difference between boredom and embarrassing yourself. So this almost a desire to put yourself in a position where you could be embarrassed personally. It was an anecdote to boredom, which I, which really just fractured a filter in my brain. And I hope that you could share a little bit about that difference. It was so unique and helped me view what I call boredom from a completely different perspective. So would you share that in your own words?

There's no such thing as boredom. There's only you not embarrassing yourself enough. You're not taking enough chance.

Yeah, and I heard somebody else had a another reframe that I forget who it might have been. Tim Ferriss that everything that you value in your life in terms of the decisions you've made, you know, like the job you got, the person you asked down, etc, all the ones that worked out were all uncomfortable. And that 100% of everything you will ever value goes through that filter, you got to be uncomfortable and then you hope it works out and then you look back and say, wow, glad I did that. Let me give you some examples. I can't tell you how many times people say to me, I'm thinking of quitting my job. You know, what do you think of it? And I always say the same thing. I've talked to a lot of people who have changed jobs. Sometimes fired, sometimes quit. I've never met one who wanted to go back.

Now. But there's this real unpleasant feeling about quitting a job or getting fired is worse. But everybody ends up being happier. It's probably 95% something like that. So yeah, if you just, if you just know that discomfort is more like finding a diamond on the ground than it is to something you want to run away from. It just really changes everything. For example, embarrassing yourself in front of other people is really the main thing that people care about. The first time I gave a speech, paid speech, when Dilbert became famous, somebody said, hey, do you want to talk, talk to a bunch of engineers here? And I said, well, I don't really do that. They said, but we'll, you know, pay you an insane amount of money. And I, well, I'll do that. So I went up and I did it, and the feedback was, it was bad.

Which you can imagine is really embarrassing. But, you know, I don't really suffer embarrassment like a normal person. So what I did was I looked at how much money I made and I said, I wonder if I could do that better. And then I just tried to do it better, and eventually I was one of the highest paid speakers, and my reviews were incredible because I figured out how to do it. But that was literally.

A fortune. A fortune just from the speaking circuit that I wouldn't have had if embarrassment had held me back. But simply walking through it and toward it instead of away from it was huge. Likewise, when I became a cartoonist, you submit your materials for rejection, but I wasn't afraid of rejection. So I went through the awkward period and got to where I was when I want to write a book. The first time I read a proper book, you don't know if anybody's going to like it. You put a year of your life into writing this book. I mean, it's really, really hard to write a book. You know, if anybody's watching this and you think, well, you're just sitting there typing, how hard could it be? It's really, really hard.

Yes, it is.

It's super hard. And, you know, you do that without knowing if people are going to laugh at it and just say, oh, this is one star. It's terrible. You don't know. So I no longer stop doing things because I would be embarrassed. So what? I started doing the live streaming.

My. My voice was sketchy, you know, I mean, it was just terrible. And I was aware of it, but I was also aware that I could probably push through it and. And did. So. Pushing through the awkwardness is almost everything you'll ever value in life. So when you feel that thing that you're saying no to, because the awkwardness, you should say no. The worst case scenario, is this going to be a funny story? Because, you know, I have funny stories about the time I tried something and it failed miserably. And they're all just funny now, right? That's the entire impact they have on my future life. They're funny stories, nothing else.

I think a lot of people, when they feel that twinge of embarrassment or the hesitancy to move forward, at least right now with my generation and my peers, they go into deep psychoanalysis of trying to find out what traumatic event in their past is making them feel embarrassed or hesitant to do something, and then they spend two years trying to unpack something that doesn't really matter. When they could just go be embarrassed for a little bit. And I loved your reframe in the mental health section of the book where you talk about trauma and you reframe us as simply being a random group of loosely bundle of wires. And that is basically programmable. You're. You're a random bundle of wires and you can assemble them in any way. I was hoping you could comment on that.

Yeah, I. I'm a skeptic on knowing that your past trauma caused your current problems. I believe that we assign our current problems to past traumas. But how many people had some imperfect childhood? You know, everybody's got something they can say, oh, I think it's because this. I used to think that I was afraid of water because I had this experience when I was a kid. My father held me up to see something on a bridge, you know, just to see a barge going under it. And I thought he was going to throw me off because I was, you know, 4 years old or something. And so I thought, that's why I'm afraid of water. But as I became older and understood the world better, I thought, no, those are just two things that happened.

One didn't cause the other. And if you imagine the causes, then you also could imagine you're trapped. Well, this thing happened. It turned me into this. But now that's who I am. But how about just disconnect it and say, how about who I am is what I do? That's another reframe. Who you are is not your thoughts. Nobody cares about your thoughts. I care about what you do. Right. If you draw a comic, you're a cartoonist. It doesn't matter what you were thinking. You drew a comic so you can become whatever you want to be, you know, within the realm of things you can do just by doing it. You want to be a kind person that people like, do kind things that will get right. You want to be an athlete, do exercisey, sporty things. It really comes down to that.

When trying to initiate a change or when you want to become a more kind person or a more athletic person or start a business in order to get that off the ground and start making those changes, we often feel like there's this big mountain in front of us that we have to do in order to become that person or to do those things that reinforce that self image. Which is why I really liked one of the reframes around testing small. Taking the smallest action possible, allowing yourself to see where there is natural momentum and energy. This is a theme that comes up a Lot for you. You mentioned how it kind of guides the new things that you test. How does it guide when you want to make a change in your life or to become a different type of person?

Well, it works for every change, so it doesn't matter what the change is. You, you just tiptoe in and see what happens. So when I'm writing a book, for example, one of the things I'll do is I'll think about it for a long time. And then if I have enough energy, I might mention it to somebody else. And if they say, wow, that's a good idea for a book, then I think, oh, well, okay, I got a little more energy because somebody else likes it and they'll think, maybe I should come up with a title, just a working title. I'm not committed to it. So I come up with a title and then it starts to take form. And then maybe I write a first sentence and see if I can do a paragraph like of an opening of a book. If I can't write the first paragraph, obviously there's no book. But if I write the first paragraph and I want to write a second paragraph, I'd rather write the second paragraph than get up and have lunch or go pet my dog. Well, now I've got something because it's, now it's bringing me energy. Then I'll go to my, let's say, agent before I get canceled. And I'd say, what do you think of this idea? And if the agent's says yes, then I go, oh, I guess I should get serious about this. Then the agent talks to a publisher again, it's not written yet. And the publisher says, oh, absolutely, we would publish that book if you write that. Now I've got all this energy, but I still have to see if I can put it on the page. So I write a. Write a chapter, obsess over it, and say, if I wrote more like that, would this be a book I could be happy about? And if the answer is yes, then the energy is all there.

It's interesting to hear you say that because it's different than my perception of you, because my experience of you is that every day at 9am my time, you're live for nine years, you know, hell or high water. And it seems like there's a relentless commitment to action no matter what. So it's helpful to hear you say that Sometimes you just test an idea and are okay abandoning that idea. If there's no natural momentum or energy there, you don't pursue that or follow that so is it fair to say that you are comfortable abandoning things that do not have that natural momentum that is calling you anymore?

Yeah, I think you're, you, you're conflating two things. One is discipline, and I'm super disciplined, which is. I don't know where it comes from. It's either genetic or maybe it came from my parents or something. But it's a superpower. Right. You know, I can practice things longer than other people can practice, so I can sort of take the pain of practice. And it's. That kind of discipline is super important. So getting up every, every morning early, you know, like this morning, 4:30 in the morning, to prepare for the show, I actually enjoy every bit of it. I would do it for fun because I like looking in the news, I like talking about it. It's actually fun. So that kind of discipline is easy. But the sec. The related question is when do you know when to quit? Yes, and that's always an energy question for me. I mean, you could imagine a specific case where there's some money involved or some other exterior thing, but for any kind of project that I'm doing that I have to put immense amount of energy into it. I've got to feel that, that coming from somewhere. So I'm always testing for energy. That's. That's the whole process.

So if. When you are really disciplined in something and you are committed to something, are you committed to it for a certain period of time? Is there a time in which, you know, it's time to wrap this up? When does energy outdo your discipline and vice versa? You know what I'm asking?

Yeah. I'll give you an example. I tried to learn to play the drums, and for about three years, I couldn't make anything that sounded like anything. I'd just be hitting these things. And I kept thinking, why doesn't this sound like anything? It doesn't sound like even drumming. And. But eventually I got to the point where it sounds a little bit like drumming. Now that was a case where I pushed through after putting a lot of time into it and realizing it just wasn't happening. But I still had the energy because I liked it. So liking it made the difference. There wasn't any money on the line, you know, that would have changed everything. But then I put. Took up the guitar. Yes. I thought, oh, if drums worked out, let's see if I can do the guitar. And I soon found that shaping my hands and these little shapes was not only going to literally change the shape of my hand, which I didn't know that would happen. Apparently you actually. It distorts your hands so your, your fingers can spread more if you play long enough. And I thought, I'm not sure I want that to happen, you know, because I protect my hands for my work. And. And so I ended up giving up.

But when I. I moved my guitar into another room, I put it where I have to walk past it every morning, and it's right next to the amp and all I have to do is plug it in. So this morning, like most of the mornings for the past week, I walk by, I pick it up, and I play it for 10 minutes and I finally got my fingering for the, you know, the. Some notes that I just couldn't get. And who knows, maybe it'll turn into something, maybe it'll not. But I do enjoy it. So the energy is there. So it continues. If I hated it and I'd spent this much time, I would definitely quit.

I appreciate that. That's a. I really appreciate that balance between both being disciplined, but also allowing yourself to pursue that energy. Scott, I want to ask you about how you use reframes for influencing other people. So the good base of the book is reframing your own brain and choosing the frames that are most helpful for you. But I want to know how you use reframes to influence other people. Can you. I know you've done it as a hypnotist, but you also have a platform. Can you consciously choose frames in which other people, like customers, investors, followers, will interpret and experience you differently in a way that brings you closer to where you want to be? Can you consciously do that with other people as well?

Yeah. And I'll give you a famous story from Steve Jobs. You probably heard of this story when Steve Jobs went back to Apple after he'd been. No. Maybe it was the first time he's there. But anyway, when he was hiring a president, he thought he needed a president and he hired Scully from Pepsi. And if you're already the, you know, the president of, I think president or CEO, I forget of Pepsi. That's like an amazing job. So he had to talk somebody out of an amazing job for this. What was a little bit unpredictable computery world that, you know, it was by no means a guaranteed Apple success. And reportedly the way Steve Jobs did it was with a reframe. And after Scully basically said, no, I've already got a good job, or words to that effect. Steve. Steve allegedly said, well, I guess the question is, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or change the world with me.

Right?

And they report that. That's when Scully said, oh, damn it. And he just said, I'm in. Or some version of that. I'm summarizing it. And that's a reframe. So basically, you make somebody come out of the little box they're in. You move them to a box, which is valid. I mean, Steve Jobs didn't say anything. That's a lie. He believed everything he said. It's just a different way of looking at it. There was. There was another one that Steve Jobs did when there was the antenna gate problem, if you remember that. The first. It was one of the first iPhones, or maybe the first, maybe the second. If you held it with your hand and touched a certain part of the phone on the side, it was where the antenna was internally, and it would interfere with it. And so he actually built a phone, a handheld device that didn't work in your hand. Now, imagine the size of that problem, A handheld device that just doesn't work when you put it in your hand. And I've never even seen a worse product problem than that. And the way you solved it was some time went by, I guess they had to think about it. And he does this call with the reporters, and he says, and I'm paraphrasing here.

All smartphones have problems. We want to make our customers happy. Here's what we're going to do for you. And then we talked about a workaround. Now, when he said, all smartphones have problems, do you know what that did to the news cycle? The news cycle went from Apple made a product that's handheld that you can't hold in your hand. Oh, my God, that's the worst frame in the world. Because you're thinking, what's more basic? And as soon as he said all. All smartphones have problems, the next day, all the news said, you know, that's not that unusual with this new technology. They all have problems. And it was a frame that was true, and it was actually the correct frame. Because by giving Apple the grace to figure that out and get to the next level, we got the smartphones that we have today. So it was a good frame. It was an honest frame, and it was just different. And that was so effective that when I wrote a blog post about it, I heard in the Jobs biography that he passed it around and he was showing people that his reframe had worked just the way he wanted to, because I called it out that way.

This is reminding me of Example that I saw years ago on one of your live streams that it was an example of, I think we called it pre framing. And there was a video clip that you shared of an elderly man bumping into a police officer. And the police officer did this. And then there were two headlines that you showed. One said, racist cop flashes white power signal to man at a Black Lives Matter rally. And the comments were all just, you know, vitriol and nasty. And then the other headline was kind officer checks on old man to see if he's okay. And it was the same video with two different headlines that pre framed what you were going to see. And that, to me, was the first time that I realized that you could tell someone what they're going to see or interpret and it would change how they received the information. And what I'm basically hearing you say about using frames to influence others is once you give them a perspective of how to see something, they can't unsee it. And they will interpret future events or future data through that filter. And it can shape the narrative around neutral events. Am I summarizing you fairly?

Yeah. The first narrative anybody hears is always going to be the important one. You know, first impressions. But if somebody has two frames, then they've got a chance of picking the one that's more effective. So the more ways you can look at the same situation, the more likely you're going to find a frame frame that works. So it's all about knowing that there's more than one, you know, and so whenever I'm in a situation, the first thing I say is, well, is there another way to look at this? You know, if I were somebody else, how would I look at it? If I turned it upside down, what's it look like if I reversed it? If I said everything's wrong, what's it look like if everything's right? So it's a little different from the situation where there's. There's fake news, but which. There was some of that in that example you gave. But I. Most people on the Internet have seen the audio.

Example where there's green needle and something else, but if you read the word, it sounds like that's the word that you hear. But if you read a completely different word at the same time you're hearing the audio, that's always the same, it sounds exactly like a completely different word. Now, when I heard that you could do that with two different words, I thought to myself, there must be something weird about those two words. But then I saw it done with 12 words. 12 completely different words in the same sound. And it would be like. The sound would be, you know, I had scrambled eggs. And if you're reading I had scrambled eggs, it sounds exactly like it. Not a little bit, you know, not like your dog making you sound. This sounds like a person talking. Not like that. Sounds exactly like it. And then you read the next word, and you hear the same thing. And the next word is, I changed the oil on my car, which sounds nothing like the first one. And then you listen to it. It's like, I changed the oil in my car. And you're like, how could that be? How could there possibly be two things completely different that sound exactly the same? And the only difference is the one you're reading at the time you listen to it, and there were 12 of them, all different. Now, that tells you how subjective your experience is and how priming as. As you're saying, the. The priming you to hear it is so important. So that's certainly the biggest reason that we have a different idea of what's happening in politics. Somebody primes you, and then you just see it like that for the rest of your life.

Yeah, it's kind of reality fracturing when you realize how subjective our experiences are. And that can be a little disorienting. In fact, I live in Austin, Texas, and this is basically the psychedelic Mecca of the world. And if people do a little too many of them and they lose sense of their own reality because they've realized that reality is sort of bendable in this way, that they can be very disoriented after a while. So I'm curious. Once you could kind of see behind the curtain and realize that we're all kind of making up reality and we can frame it however we want, how do you consciously choose how to reframe how you want to see the world? What do you do in order to be conscious about that process?

I've kind of had to settle for the fact that nothing is real. But some things work. Hmm. Meaning you can't. You can never tell what's real. It just isn't an ability a human will ever have. But you can tell if you get the result you want it. So if I go to the gym and exercise five times a week, and then my muscle looks bigger, that's as real as I can get. Everything else that can't be tested or engineered or turned into a product or dropped on your foot, you know, those things, you have to always question whether they were ever real to begin with.

That's fair. I Didn't expect that direction, but that is. I appreciate that. Scott, I wanted to wrap by asking you about audience building. They don't talk about this a lot publicly, but it comes up a lot in business and entrepreneurship, which is our audience. And we will look at audience building. It is essentially the group of people that you influence in order to make a buying decision or a decision about where to put your attention. And this is perfectly in context of how we frame things and how we position our marketing or our product or our personal brands to a group of people. You've got one of the more engaged and bigger followings on the X platform and also on your consistent livestream. How do you think about building the audience of people that you can then influence in the direction that you want to make an impact?

Well, you might be surprised to hear that I haven't paid much attention to building my audience. I mean, I do the easy, obvious stuff that people do, but since I had, you know, a different source of income, I was doing it for making the world a better place and I enjoyed it as well. So I'm not an expert on audience building because I haven't really focused on it.

However, you've done a pretty damn good job. But you've done a pretty damn good job.

Let me give you one rule that has served me really well. And if you only want to remember one thing that will just, you know, forever work, is that people don't look at people like me who write and talk in public to hear something new all the time. Sometimes they want to hear what they already thought was true, but they want somebody to say it better than they were thinking it. So in other words, I can put it into words in a better way than your brain had put it into words yet. And people really respond to that because it makes them feel smarter, because now they've got a real good way that they can repeat it. But it also hits them like, oh, this guy's, you know, he, he hears me, he knows me. So let me give you an example this morning. This is a little political. Not to get political, but I posted this. You could call this a reframe. I said that the people who are supporting Trump, like lower crime and border and economics and, you know, not wasting money overseas, and the people who support Democrats are people who still think the news is real.

Now, that's. Now that's not a frame you'll ever hear. The normal frame is, you know, some people support these things, some people support the other things. But as soon as I said the biden people believe the news. Then I got this gigantic response. And that response was not, oh, I never thought of it that way. The response was, I was thinking it that way. But you just put it in words. Nobody had ever done that before that. The real problem is not even always policy. The real problem is that we don't have any truth. And the Republicans are a little farther along in knowing that everything is bs. You know, they don't believe their own news sources, which is different. You know, on the right, you'll see people say, you know, I don't, I don't believe Fox News either. Like I'm trying to figure it out on my own. On the left, they're far more likely to believe, you know, CNN and MSNBC because they're all in conformance. So if everybody that you watch is saying, and it looks pretty real.

So I guess that's the, that's all I had to say about that.

As you were saying that I was imagining my parents and grandparents generation that still believe the news is real. It just, it's just dependent on who's in office if it's going to be for them or against them. So, so what that reminds me of is this idea of we all kind of still default to teams and sometimes you fall out of favor with one part of the team and you gravitate over to another one. But we're still kind of subject to that team atmosphere in which we are receiving the information which comes back to the frame and the filter through which we're receiving that.

All right, watch what I do now to your, your listeners, I'm going to use a, a high ground maneuver, but also a reframe. It goes like this. If you believe that whatever you hear is real, you're sort of at the Santa Claus level of awareness. You know, where a kid hears from a parent, or let's say lots of parents, they're like, oh, Santa Claus must be real. Everybody keeps telling me, eventually you learn that things can be lies. And that's when you go to the next level of awareness. You don't know who's doing it, but you know, it can be at some point, as we talked, people, you know, gravitate to a side and then they start believing that the, the things people say on their side are mostly true and the things on the other side are mostly false. And then you're up, you're at a higher level of awareness, but the level of awareness you want to get to, so you're not a total victim. You is, you have to understand none of it's true. It's because the system doesn't allow them to tell you the truth because people wouldn't sign up to watch it. It has to be provocative.

Has to be spun, has to be framed so it's positive for your side no matter what it is. And that's not exactly truth. That's, you know, framing and spinning and propagandizing and stuff. So once you realize that your own side is doing it just as hard as the other side, then you get to go to the next level. Now what?

The high ground maneuver.

If anybody had heard this framing for the first time, you don't want to say no, I think my side's actually always right because it doesn't even sound smart. Once you hear that both sides are wrong and the business model of the industry requires them both to be wrong, they could make money by being right. Basically then people understand, oh yeah. And it takes them to the higher level. So some number of people watching this just elevated. Not all of them, just some.

And the difficulty of that is that it requires a different level of personal responsibility to intentionally decide what, what frame or filter you are going to accept as true. If you can outsource that to other people. It's just, it's intellectually lazy, but it's easy.

But it's safer.

It's. It's safer and it's riskier to take the responsibility to be conscious about it. What your work has helped me to do is to identify where the filters and frames are in, are controlling what I interpret and be more thoughtful about how I interpret those things that I can be more in a creative process for how I author my life. So I just wanted to say thank you for giving me that level of self awareness.

Well, glad to help.

Scott. I'm a fan of your work. I've been a fan for a long time and I have a theory that I'll be a fan for a long time. I really appreciate hanging out with us here on the show.

That's the only thing that is guaranteed to be true in every reality.

Great to see you, Scott. Congratulations on the new book reframe your brain. I loved it and look forward to seeing the next one.

Thank you so much for having me.

One reframe that has helped me help a lot of people in business is reframing a million dollar business as simply four products at 25 sales a day at a $30 price point. That is a reframe. $1 million business is something that people have a lot of story around. They have A lot of thoughts around that. They think that that is hard. But when I reframe it as four products at 25 sales a day at a $30 price point, all of a sudden it is just a system to be managed. It is simply different inputs that we have to solve for and that process takes about 12 months. If you are early in your journey, I'd like to invite you to go through a free course and a free newsletter that I put together. It's called the road to 1 million and you can get it@capitalism.com million. This is going to walk you through how to set up your product line, how you're going to get it to 25 to 100 sales a day, how to stand out in the marketplace and how to eventually take that to $1 million business. Once again this is free. This is my way of helping people get off the ground and into the game so that they get more out of these companies conversations. So go over to capitalism.com million and you can get the free course in the newsletter that'll walk you through my processes for building a million dollar business by getting four products to 25 sales a day at a 30 price point. As always, thank you for being here. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran with capitalism.com I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments of this video or you can shoot me an email@ryanapitalism.com thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next episode. Take care everybody.

And now a quick word from Jared, one of our members in the 1%.

I was bankrupt and crippled to making a million dollars in a year. And then I grew that business and kept growing it. So like my whole world changed financially very quickly. It was amazing how fast it was able to transition and like turn once things got rolling. Ryan in capitalism.com pretty much taught me everything I knew about E commerce and specifically branding was the biggest thing that I think capitalism really does well and they focus on teaching their students about building a brand and just teaching business to people. Like everything he teaches is stuff that he's done. You know, it's not like from theory that you're going to learn. So it's like all stuff that he's done. So I think the biggest thing that capitalism.com helps you with is that you're getting to learn from somebody who's done the exact thing that you want to do which is the most important thing in the world. Like that's how you fast track your results. So if you want like the fast lane and to get your results really quickly. You go to capitalism.com and you have them show you what to do so you don't make all the mistakes. And you get there really quick though. And it was the best money I ever spent because I went from bankrupt and crippled and all this other stuff to a million dollar a year business in one year, which is exactly what he teaches. And I was like holy crap, this stuff works. So it was a very healthy exit and was able to let me focus on many other things in my life and not have to worry about that stuff anymore.

If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the Capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over@capitalism.com inc. That's capitalism.com incident.