Episode 1638 Scott Adams: Come Watch a Hypnotist Reframe Reality Right in Front of You. Talk About Headlines...
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 9 minutes
Words per Minute
144.5582
Summary
Coffee with Scott Adams is the most amazing hour you'll ever spend in your entire life, and today it's going to take it to a whole new level. In this episode, Scott explains why cognitive dissonance is so common, and why it could be the key to understanding reality.
Transcript
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Good morning everybody. Welcome to the most amazing hour you're likely to ever spend
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in your entire life. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams and normally it's tremendous.
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On an average day it's better than anything you've ever experienced. But today even the normal
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Coffee with Scott Adams experience is going to go to a new level. It will. Yeah. And if you'd like to
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get it started off right, and by the way, you might need a little swaddling for your brain.
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Find a nice warm blanket, unless you're exercising. If you're running on the beach right now
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and you hear me laughing in your ear as you're running on the beach and you're saying, damn it,
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he's making me laugh when I'm running on the beach. I think he's talking about me and I am. So keep
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running on the beach. But the rest of you get a nice warm blanket because you're going to need to
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swallow your brain. Swaddle it. But first, how about a simultaneous sip and all you need is a
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cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker, a chalice, a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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Fill it with your favorite liquid. A beverage, some would say. And join me now for the unparalleled
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pleasure, the dopamine to the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better. And I mean
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everything in every reality better. It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now. Go.
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Well, would you like to see the matrix? You know, some people think that we live in a simulation
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and if this were a simulation, it would be subject to resource constraints, wouldn't it?
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If we were any kind of computer simulation, the one thing you could be reasonably sure of
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is it would have some kind of limits because everything has to have a limit, just logically.
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And so, could we ever spot the limits of our own simulation as evidence that that's what we're in?
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And here's the frame that I'm going to give you for today's entire episode. And it goes like this.
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Did you ever wonder why cognitive dissonance is so common? Or to put it more generally,
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why people have completely different views of reality? And it doesn't just apply,
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doesn't just apply, to the news. Don't you know that sometimes you'll be talking to your friends
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that you've known forever, and you'll have completely different memories of events in which you both were there.
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What's up with that? Why do we have memory, but our memory is so close to fantasy
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that sometimes you can't even unentangle them? Why do we so often live in what seems like
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completely different worlds? And here's the answer. It has to be that way because of resource constraints.
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Cognitive dissonance isn't a flaw. It's a feature. You couldn't program the simulation
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without that requirement. Here's why. Imagine creating a simulation, and by the way,
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if those of you who have programmed, back me up on this.
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All right. If you were creating a simulation in which every character's actions
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had to be known to every other object and item in the entire universe,
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because they might someday interact, and someday you might hear about something that somebody else did,
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If our memories were perfect, it would have to be consistent.
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So if you tried to build an artificial world in which everybody's story,
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their narrative, if you will, or their subjective reality,
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if they had to be consistent in all ways with all other stories,
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the resources would be astronomical, to the point where it's unimaginable that it could be programmed.
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But could you build a world in which people believed they were seeing an accurate view of the reality,
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but in fact the accuracy was only a trick of the mind?
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So, watch, if you will, the predictive power of the simulation hypothesis.
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Do I tell you that the simulation is the true way to see the world?
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The only thing I can tell you is that some ways of looking at things
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And that's probably the closest you can get to something that's real, if anything is.
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There can never be a major story that has only one interpretation.
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But let's say, in general, that the headlines will always tend toward two interpretations,
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even when it's not just a Democrat-Republican thing.
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You saw that a lot of, let's say, the black population and the Republicans
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But every story has to have multiple interpretations.
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Because that's the only way you could program the simulation.
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Let's talk about a few things that are happening now.
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One is the continuing of what I call the roganization of the news.
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The roganization of the news is another indication that we live in a simulation.
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That we're reusing themes because it's just simpler.
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So the way we see the news used to be through a Trump filter,
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So if we talk about vaccinations, we talk about Joe Rogan.
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You know, the government taking away our rights, Joe Rogan.
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Now, some of it is just you get something in your mind and it sticks,
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In the same way, it made sense that we talked about everything through a Trump filter.
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But think about how that simplifies the programming.
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It's a big simplification if you were going to program a simulation.
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and before you fact check me, I'm going to fact check myself when I'm done,
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they don't want to be on Spotify, the streaming service,
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if that Joe Rogan is on there with his misinformation about health-related things.
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But now, then we heard that Barry Manilow joined,
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and then we heard that Peter Frampton was on board,
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So the Barry Manilow part of the story was completely fake.
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in which he said he's always been an Apple guy,
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Is Peter Frampton saying he doesn't want to be on Spotify?
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Or is he saying that he's not even talking as a creator anymore?
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Because I don't know the last time he published any music.
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Is he just saying that he didn't use Spotify before
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Now, if that's true, if I'm interpreting it correctly,
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and again, we're all going to have different stories.
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So that would leave Joni Mitchell on the side of Neil Young.
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And if you take Joni Mitchell's music off of Spotify,
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but in case you want to put that in the headlines,
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Yeah, I mean, I just published the podcast wherever,
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which probably gets roughly as many listens as Neil Young,
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And I'm embarrassed to be on Spotify, honestly,
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now that I know that Barry Manilow is still on there.
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than people who have never listened to Joe Rogan.
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Now what's going to happen when the next one pops up?
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I won't give you the whole background of what that means.