Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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Episodes Episode #2475 Segments
MainContent Cognitive Reframing

Back to episode — Episode 2475 CWSA 05/15/24

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t a joke. And it'll happen in just a few minutes. In the next five minutes some of you are going to have the biggest problem of your life solved. Not all of you, but some of you. It'll be kind of exciting. Wait for that. Well, Peter Zeihan tells us that American companies can now petition the government to apply for U.S. protective tariffs if China says they have to transfer their technology. So…

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Now, did you really need a study to know that? That if somebody is operating a dangerous motor vehicle at 80 miles an hour and they're looking at their phone, do you need to do a scientific study to find out if there's something wrong with that person's priorities? Maybe their empathy? Well, I think it's a little more complicated than being psychopaths. I think some people just have a different relationship with risk. Isn't that fair to say? How do you know you're measuring psychopaths who don't care if they get you killed in a crash versus somebody who just has a high tolerance for risk and they think they're good at texting and driving at the same time? But it feels, it looks the same.

But I will tell you that anybody who makes a phone call in Starbucks is definitely a psychopath. And what I don't understand, I know that they think, "Oh, it's a public place," but you look around the public place and you see all these people on laptops clearly trying to concentrate. How do you not know that making a loud, long cell phone call in that environment makes everybody want to stab you? How do you not know that? You'd have to be a psychopath.

All right. I think I'm just going to go ahead and do it. I'm going to cure a bunch of you. So I tried a reframe with my audience yesterday and I think the other day as well, in which if you get ruminating and you're thinking too much in your head, that you simply use two words: "Get out." And you treat yourself like you have two lives. So here's the reframe. And by the way, I checked this morning and my audience, by an overwhelming number of comments, said they tried this and it completely helped their mental health instantly. Let me say it again. Just, I don't know how many people, dozens, dozens of people this morning just before I went live here, I do a pre-show with my subscribers, and I asked them if they tried the technique and I'll describe it again, but they said they did. And just dozens of people said it instantly helped them.

So here's the technique. You know how when you're in your head you're living in an imaginary world? You know, you're thinking about what happened, which doesn't exist, the past, and you're thinking about what might happen, which doesn't exist, the future. So you actually, when you're in your head, you're living in a world that doesn't exist. But there's an external world where you're touching things and doing things and doing chores and exercising and working and doing things. The external world is real. So what I found is that these two words, "get out," will immediately take you out of your internal world, your imaginary world, and put you into the real one. And you just remind yourself, no, get out of the imaginary world, get into the real one. Get out. Get out.

And those two words will actually become a trigger or a key that helps you do the thing that you want it to do. So you associate words with actions, especially as it relates to your own body, and those will become sticky. It doesn't take long. You just have to say something and associate it with a feeling or a situation. It gets sticky really fast. So I want you all to try this and you're going to be amazed. The next time you're too much in your head and you've got recurring thoughts or whatever, just say out loud, "Get out. Get out." And you're not talking just about getting out of your head. You're talking about getting out of the house. Just stand up and walk outside. If it's cold, stand up and walk around the

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house. But the "get out" is a reminder that you are two people. You're not one person. There's one of you that lives in the completely imaginary world of your mind, and the other one lives in the real world. But the only one that has a problem is the imaginary one. So you can starve the imaginary one of its energy by just saying, "Get out. I choose to walk through this doorway and now I'm in the r…

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