Episode 1706 Scott Adams: Watch Me Connect Politics, AI, The Simulation and Twitter Into One Story
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
151.67157
Summary
In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, host Scott Adams talks about psychedelics, and why they might be the next big thing in the world of drugs and mental health, and how they might not be as bad as you think.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of the entire civilization.
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and if you didn't think it could get any better, surprise, it's whiteboard day.
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Yes, we will have a whiteboard in which I'll connect the seemingly different fields of politics, artificial intelligence,
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And in order for you to be primed and ready for that, this mind-blowing experience that is the simultaneous sip and coffee with Scott Adams,
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you're going to need to get ready, and all you need to be ready for this amazing, amazing experience is a cupper mugger,
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a glass of tanker, a gel, a canteen jugger, a flask, a vessel of any kind, filled with your favorite liquid.
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
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Well, if you have, and you've bought more than one thing, you may have run into a situation I run into often.
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As in, I think I'm buying a big old bag of something, and it shows up like it's a free sample.
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You know, you buy a chair for your living room, and it shows up, and it's like a, it's a Barbie chair.
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You're like, you know, that looked like a real chair.
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Well, this brings me to my recent purchase, which should have been about this tall, about this wide, the big one.
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But when you look at the little picture, it looks exactly the same.
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And so I suggest the following human interface improvement for Amazon.
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Jeff Bezos, if you're listening, I suggest this.
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In any situation in which there might be any potential ambiguity about the size and scale of an object,
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it is not good enough to include it only in the description, which you must click.
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You must also have a human hand in the picture, preferably the same human hand.
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Because if this had a human hand in it, I would know exactly how big it was every single time.
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So, please, user interface developers at Amazon, who are, by the way, some of the best in the world.
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But that one thing, that one thing bites me in the ass about one time in five, probably, literally.
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You know, lately, if you've been watching my live streams, you know that I've been adding quite a bit to civilization.
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I've had insightful comments ranging from, oh, I don't know, geopolitics.
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You know, one of my many sort of fields of expertise.
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The supply chain, where I've, you know, wasn't an expert until just a few weeks ago.
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And, of course, the global economy, something that, you know, people like me know everything about.
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So, while I've made these tremendous contributions to society, it seems that the only thing that got picked up by the media that I did in the last two weeks was the following tweet.
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In which I tweeted, Madonna is transforming into Jar Jar Binks, and no one is talking about it.
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Yes, of all the things I offer to this world, my many nuggets of wisdom, only one left the little bubble, which is this live stream, into the larger world to make a dent.
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Madonna is transforming into Jar Jar Binks, and no one is talking about it.
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In an ongoing trend, which you should watch very carefully, you've heard me say this before, but the more that it happens, the story gets bigger, right?
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Which is that mushrooms are becoming mainstream almost instantly.
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There's something about 2022 that's happening that is hard to explain.
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But now the Washington Post has a story that your headline says, psychedelics may ease cancer patients' depression and anxieties.
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You know, quote, these drugs were banned decades ago.
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My clinical trial suggests they might have a meaningful positive effect in treating mood issues.
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I don't think those of you who have had no, let's say, experience with mushrooms, I don't think you know how big this is.
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This is just about the biggest story in the world.
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You know, obviously the economy and war and viruses are big stories.
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But in terms of our, let's say, our subjective experience of life, this is the biggest story.
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I mean, I'm not sure anything's going to be the same after this.
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And you don't have to get everybody on mushrooms.
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You just have to get the right people on mushrooms.
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How many of you think Putin has done mushrooms?
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You don't find yourself in this situation if you had.
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And again, people who have experience with this are saying, oh yeah, I get what you're saying.
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And those who don't have experience are saying, I don't even understand what that means.
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Like, how do you know he hasn't done mushrooms?
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Do you know how I know Putin hasn't done mushrooms?
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Like, he'd be playing the, yeah, exactly, he's an ego killer.
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Russia, especially with Putin at the helm, has, is suffering almost a personality disorder.
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That they have to own Ukraine, and they have to subjugate people, and they have to be awesome.
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They have to protect their egos, and Russia's history, and, you know, the Russian people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And then you start thinking, well, what would make everybody happy?
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And if I made everybody happy, would that work out for me too?
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And by the way, I don't recommend that you try mushrooms.
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Because this is a public forum, and who knows who's watching.
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I'm going to give you a little tip that may completely change the lives of some of you.
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And I'm going to make my claim really small, so that it's not some ridiculous over-claim.
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My claim is I'm going to give you a reframe that might solve, I don't know, 1%, maybe less, maybe fewer.
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I think about 1 out of 100 of you might just walk away from this live stream saying,
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So, I'm setting myself up for a pretty high bar.
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I'm going to start with this assumption, and then I'll give you the idea.
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The assumption is this, and I want to see if you'll agree with the starting premise.
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That all of us were biased by the belief that other people's brains are processing things somewhat similar to ours.
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I think you largely believe that we think they process like us.
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Now, the no's I'm saying, I think you're maybe interpreting the question a little bit differently.
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Because we do know that people are different at the same time we think they're not, right?
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So, we do hold two beliefs that are opposites at the same time.
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We hold the belief that people think like us, and that we act on it.
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We know people don't think the way we think, right?
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But you act like it, even though we know it's not true.
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And I'm going to be talking to people who feel they have low self-esteem,
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Is there anybody watching who would fall into that category?
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You have low self-esteem, and you believe other people are judging you.
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The yeses just start popping up on the locals' platform.
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specifically for people who live in, let's say, their reality
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or they feel worthless, and they feel other people judging them.
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If you can train yourself to stop judging other people,
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you have to just keep reminding yourself not to do it.
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The trick that I use is that I literally believe that everybody has the same value
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because there's no such thing as some metric for judging your value.
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You could say, who's more valuable for having a baby?
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Well, women, you know, of a certain age and certain health situation.
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But are they more valuable than everybody else?
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But I don't fundamentally believe that anybody's worth more than anybody else.
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The law doesn't judge you that way unless you break the law.
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So if you could learn to simply talk yourself into not judging other people,
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In theory, in theory, if you stop judging other people reflexively
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and just train yourself, just don't think that way.
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you're going to stop worrying about what they think of you.
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Because you can hold in your head two thoughts that don't make sense together.
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and the other is that everybody thinks differently.
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But as soon as you see other people thinking like you do,
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and then you imagine that they have the same view as you,
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if you have a bias toward thinking people do or should think the way you think,
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Is there any downside of simply trying to judge other people less
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as your own solution to how you feel about other people thinking of you?
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no, you should be more judgmental about people's worth?
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Now, remember, I'm not telling you that you should embrace their choices.
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You can still disagree with their choices, of course.
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We're all the same, value-wise, in terms of value.
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And I would say that as awesome as I often feel I am in some narrow areas,
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because I have good self-esteem about some specific things that I do or have done,
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but of all the things you could do in the world,
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what percentage of all the things that a person can be good at am I good at?
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just think of your friend or maybe even somebody famous,
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Like, oh, that's the person who's really got it together.
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They can do this, and they can do that, and they're this and that.
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Like, if you look at it mathematically, nobody can do anything.
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So to imagine that somebody else's 0.001 effectiveness in life
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I mean, I guess it is mathematically, but not in a real way.
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Do you remember the story of author Alex Epstein,
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And I guess the Washington Post had come up with some kind of angle,
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maybe because they don't like a book that is, let's say,
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That they might try to suppress that kind of a book,
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They don't try to suppress a book that's bad, do they?
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Bad in the sense that you won't want to read it.
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Nobody's going to write a whole article about a book nobody's going to read.
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There wouldn't be a hit piece on it unless they were afraid of it,
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in terms of it threatening the worldview which they present.
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So what followed was Alex Epstein quite brilliantly
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organized a number of Blue Check and other people on Twitter,
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I mean, I know Alex Epstein just from, you know, digital contacts.
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So the fact that he was taking the fight to the Washington Post
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which is organizing enough people to embarrass them,
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including any allegation that when he was 18 years old,
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he wrote something that somebody thought was racist.
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for that kind of thing to exist, those accusations.
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is this telling us there's any kind of shift in power?
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the people who have some credibility on Twitter
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So Peter Thiel saw the potential of Facebook really early.
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Reid Hoffman, who was part of that PayPal group,
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which is effectively, you know, an online resume,
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major influence on what became social media networks.
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And now Elon Musk, one of the PayPal originals,
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that three of the people from this one company,
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which is often talked about as being special in some way,
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That's one of the most impressive untold stories,
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here's what it looks like from the outside, right?
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in a way that you can't stop using the product.
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But the reason you think art is mysterious, and
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Like, I've just turned it into a formula, and I
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So, and everything else that I've done that has
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the human mind is interfacing with products, somebody
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who's so clever about these things, he or she might
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That's kind of who I want to have their finger on
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So I think we might be in good shape thanks to good people
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trying to make the world better and maybe making some
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Perfectly acceptable as long as it's transparent and as
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long as, you know, he has the country's best interests in
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So, on that note, on that note, I'd like to say goodbye to
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I'm going to talk to the locals people a few more minutes and