Episode 1787 Scott Adams: Today I Will Rip The Cover Off Reality And Show You What's Really Going On
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 2 minutes
Words per Minute
147.08896
Summary
Scott Adams shares his worst idea, and why it s actually one of the most brilliant ideas you ve ever heard. It s about a network of trails that take you around the country on your bike, scooter, and wheeled cart.
Transcript
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thing that civilization has ever offered up. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams and you're lucky
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enough to be here for it. Either live, wow, or recorded, still amazing, still amazing and has
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some advantages too. Such as you can put me on fast forward and listen to me at 1.25 to 1.75
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speed, which I've been told optimizes for my sleepy presentation. But if you'd like to consume
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it in a different way, you'd like to be part of something, you'd like me to keep you company while
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you exercise or maybe keep you company while you're getting ready for your day or avoiding your boss or
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doing a boring thing on a spreadsheet on your computer, oh, you know who you are. If you're
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using me that way, then it doesn't matter what I say so much. It just matters that I'm chattering
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in your ear and keeping you company and I'm your invisible friend. So whether I'm your invisible
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friend or the person who's telling you the most unusual takes on reality, either way,
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you're going to take it up a notch with a simultaneous sip and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass
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or a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your
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favorite liquid. I like coffee. Now join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine
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here of the day, the thing that makes everything in this reality and every other one excellent.
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It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now. Go.
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If your coffee was too hot, just blow on it. That's the kind of tips you come here for.
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Well, I'd like to tell you my best worst idea. Would you like to hear it? My best worst idea.
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This is something that I was pretty sure was one of my best ideas. I mean, I felt pretty strongly
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about it. I found out yesterday it's my worst idea and it goes like this. I saw a map of abandoned
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railroad tracks in the United States, places that no longer have a railroad, but, you know,
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they still have the right of way exists. And I said, and by the way, this isn't my, you know,
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I'm not the first person to think of this. There's an actual effort, an organization raising money to
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do this called Rails to Trails. And I said, hey, with all these e-bikes and other e-conveyances
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like scooters and carts and whatnot, why don't we build a network of interconnected paths that have
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no regular vehicles on, no cars, and you could come to America and for the price of practically
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nothing as long as you had time, travel around and you'd build out tourist industries along the
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ways. And you'd be able to basically connect everything in America or you'd get pretty close
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to it in a way that would be way more fun than taking a bus or riding a plane or whatever.
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And I thought, imagine all the people who would come to America just to see the natural beauty
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and traverse it from one place to another. And let's say you make sure that the most important
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monuments and tourist sites are all part of the network. Now, tell me, isn't that the best idea
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you've heard in a long time? It would be clean, clean industry. It would attract the right kind of
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money and people. It would make it look like it was a great place to live. Come on. That's one of the
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best ideas you've ever heard. That's actually one of the worst ideas you've ever heard. I'm going to
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tell you in a minute. So here's why it's the worst idea in the world. I didn't know this.
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Turns out I'm not such a lawyer. And I thought, I thought you could acquire the rights for these
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rail lines. You know, somebody must own them that would be happy to sell them. And that's almost true.
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So it turns out you can go to the people who own the right-of-ways and you could say, can we buy this
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right-of-way that used to be a train track? And they can sell it to you if they want to.
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So that part works. They're not doing anything with it at the moment. It has no value. So they
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just sell you the right-of-way. You use it for the bikes. Boom. So far, so far, it's still the best
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idea you've ever heard. It's actually the worst idea. I'm going to get to that. Here's the part I
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didn't know. The train tracks all go across, or mostly, private property. At some point,
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the government said to the people who owned that private property, you know, that private
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property of yours is right in the place that we'd like to put a train track. So we're taking
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it. We're stealing your private property, but it's for the greater good. So I'm not complaining
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about that. It's eminent domain. It's part of the system. If it happens to you, you hate
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it, but, you know, you could argue this for the greater good. Now, it turns out that all
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those private owners who were forced to give away their property for the, or sell it, I
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guess, for the greater good, the way the contracts are written is if the trains no longer need
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it, it would revert back to them because it's their property. And now the bicycle people
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are trying to say, hey, instead of reverting back to the landowner, why don't you just give
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it to us and we'll use it for, why don't you sell it to us? So the landowner doesn't get
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the money when somebody buys the right-of-way because they're only buying the right to it.
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They're not buying the land. So basically, it's this huge, huge land grab, effectively,
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of private land, in effect. So, I mean, it's the right-of-ways, you could argue. But, so,
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I thought it was a great idea, but when you get down to what it does to private land ownership,
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it feels a little bit wrong to do it that way. If it's voluntary, you know, if somebody
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can find a way to make enough money from it, then that would be different. Well, the Dilbert
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comic was banned for Sunday, was banned in the LA Times in a number of other papers. Would
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you like to hear the comic that was banned in the LA Times? Of course you would. So, it
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was a Sunday comic in which Wally was trying to take time off for his cramps. And you'll
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see how that went as soon as I can find my own comic. And here it comes. All right. So,
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you won't be able to see it, but I'll read it to you. It's just Wally with a jacket on talking
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to the boss. And Wally says, and this is a Sunday comic, so it's a longer form. Wally
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says, I need to go home sick today. I have cramps. The boss says, in your legs? Wally
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says, no. Boss says, um. Then the boss says, is this a woke thing? Then Wally explains, he
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says, I identify as a birthing human. To be honest, I'm only doing it for the benefits, but I believe
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my scheme is allowed under our current guidelines, is it not? And in the last panel, Wally's
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walking away, and the boss is grimacing, and the boss says, jerk. And Wally says, see you
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tomorrow, bigot. He's got a smile on his face. Now, so I got banned from newspapers for that
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joke. Now, my editor, to his credit, anticipated this. And this would have run, it would have
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run earlier, but it would have been too close to some other things that got banned in newspapers
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recently. I think, was it the Dave comic? Oh, I think the other ones got banned where I
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introduced a new character named Dave, who appears to be black, but the joke is that he identifies
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as white, because it ruins their diversity targets. So he's just sort of playing with
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the system. So, again, is this an insult in any way to black people or anything? No. It's
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literally the opposite. The Dave character is kind of a cool character introduced, you know,
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should have been introduced long ago. You know, if anything, it took, you know, decades too
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long. So, in both cases, I don't even come close to showing disrespect for anybody. Would
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you agree? Do you see any disrespect for the, let's say, the trans community in my Wally
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joke? There's none. It's literally a joke about Wally. I have a character who has nothing
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to do with trans, who uses every mechanism to, you know, find a way to not work. That's
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what the character does. So, when there's a new trend or something that comes across the
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workplace, then I bash it against Wally, and I have Wally figure out how to use that new
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trend to get out of work. Now, Wally did the same thing with COVID and working at home,
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right? So, whenever there's a new thing, he finds the way to use it to work less. So,
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I get an impassioned, you know, very long message on Instagram from someone in the trans community,
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I think it was, and saying, you know, he'd been a fan of mine forever, but I'd gone too
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far and was insulting him. And I think, have we gotten to the part where even mentioning
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somebody is gone too far? Here's the way this should have been interpreted. The way the topic
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was identified in my comic is as the canvas. So, the topic was just the canvas, and then
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I did something that was just about my characters. So, what's wrong with saying that the canvas
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now includes the trans topics? Because what you're seeing actually is the opposite of something
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disrespectful. You're seeing me incorporate it as normal. That's what you want. You want people like
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me, who write about stuff, and decide what is appropriate to write about and what isn't.
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You want people like me to treat it as matter of fact. The moment I treat it as that's the special
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part, well, then you've got a bone to pick with me. But if I treat it like it's just the canvas,
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and then the joke is actually about Wally, that's exactly what you want. You just want it to disappear
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into the background, and then everybody's happy. So, be careful what you wish for.
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Here's the weirdest little story. I wondered if I was going to say this, and I've said some version
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of this before, but I saw an interview with Lex Friedman and Donald Hoffman. If you haven't seen it,
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look for it. It's a podcast. Lex Friedman does a great job, by the way. His podcast, highly
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recommend it. He has great guests, and he asks some of the best questions. Probably some of the
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best questions you'll ever see a podcaster ask. Tim Ferriss is great, too. There are a lot of great
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Jim Altusher. There are some people who jump out as being the best question askers. So, you want
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to look for them. Anyway, when I saw that interview, it sort of freshened in my mind something that I
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just, I can't not tell you about. So, here's a little story from, you need some background.
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23 years ago, I published, or I wrote a book, and it got published, that largely destroyed my career.
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It was called The Dilbert Future. Now, have any of you read it? Now, let me tell you why it destroyed
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my career. If you weren't there, you probably didn't know. Now, it's a book that, you know,
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has some Dilbert comics in it, but it's, you know, mostly text, and I make a bunch of humorous,
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but sometimes serious humorous predictions. Some right, some wrong, and, you know, a lot of it
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would be subjective, whether it was right or wrong. But the weirdest part, and in many ways,
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the reason I wrote the book, was to fit this in here. I talked about affirmations and stuff,
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but there was a chapter toward the end called A New View of the Future, and I made some predictions
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in there that ruined my career the following way. My diehard Dilbert Reader fans were almost,
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probably at least 80% of them were in the technical fields, some kind of STEM field.
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And one of my predictions offended that group so much that it just destroyed, you know, licensing
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and book sales almost immediately. And let me tell you what the prediction was.
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And so I wrote it down so I could give it to you exactly, not from memory. It was prediction
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number 63, and I said, the theory of evolution will be scientifically debunked in your lifetime.
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Now, the key word here is scientifically. So the prediction was that science itself, not
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me, not religion, not God, not Christians, you know, not intelligent design people, but rather
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science itself, in my lifetime, I actually say your lifetime, but it's already here, that
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in your lifetime, the theory of evolution will be scientifically debunked. Do you know what
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happened to me when I predicted that? It almost ended my career, but it did probably cut my
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earnings potential by 75%, something like that. Now, I didn't see that coming, honestly. I thought
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it would just be interesting, some people would argue. I didn't think it would actually just destroy
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my career. But in terms of, you know, what Dilbert was doing, if you were to track it, you can see that
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that's the point where every time I was mentioned online, for at least a decade, the comments were
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filled with people saying, he doesn't believe in evolution, he's an intelligent design creationist.
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And then, because they hated me for that, they said I was also a Holocaust denier, and that I was in
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favor of rape. Those are the things said about me. And there was a story about me being a sock puppet,
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which is also out of context. There was something that looked exactly like that if you didn't know
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the context. So basically, I got destroyed because I made this prediction 23 years ago.
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I was listening to Lex Friedman interview Don Hoffman, and Don Hoffman says
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that the evolution is probably closer to a user interface for something that we don't understand
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that's happening beneath it. Now, I made even weirder predictions in this same chapter.
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I said that there were some assumptions that we make about reality that were going to be challenged
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in the next hundred years. And I said specifically, prediction 64, I said the next hundred years will
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be a search for better perception instead of better vision. And that's what Hoffman has said,
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that's where we are. So here's what I meant by that. And I'll use Hoffman's analogy, or is it metaphor?
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I don't know what it is, about us seeing user interfaces. Over the last, say, 20-some years, 30 years,
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most of us have been looking at screens. And if you're looking at a screen, you're looking at a user
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interface that's hiding a bunch of complexity like those zeros and ones. But for 30 years,
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the quality of the screen keeps improving, right? So now we have 4K TVs, and the iPads I'm looking at
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are really good. But that just improved our vision. It didn't allow me to know anything about the zeros
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and ones that were underneath it. I could just see the user interface better. And so my prediction was
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that we were trapped in improving the user interface, but we weren't learning anything about
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the nature of reality, and that we would figure that out. Donald Hoffman's book called
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Did I write it down? It's called... Oh, damn it. Did I really not write that down?
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I actually looked it up to write it down and then didn't do it. So somebody in the comments,
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you know what I'm talking about. Oh, the case against reality. There it is. The case against reality.
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So he also says that space-time as a way of understanding things is dead. Do you know who
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is space-time? You know, sort of the father of space-time? That was Einstein, right? So Hoffman
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is saying, he said in the Lex Friedman interview, and I guess he probably says this in his book,
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that just as Einstein supplanted... What's his name? Newton. Yeah. Just as Newton's ideas were replaced
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by Einstein's, because Newton's ideas only work in a certain range of situations, but Einstein's worked
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in a greater range of situations. So it sort of replaced it. And what Hoffman claims is that this...
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And I think he's presenting it as not just his opinion, but that the physicists themselves would agree
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with it. Sort of a... That the mainstream is coming around to the idea that space-time doesn't exist.
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That space-time is just another interface. All we did was get down to another user interface.
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We're not anywhere close to reality. And everything we knew about particles and just basically
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everything we know about science is probably just a user interface, and we're not even close
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to understanding what's under it. Now, here's the thing, is that Hoffman says that scientists now
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believe that, and that they've done enough math and science to demonstrate that they know it's not
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real. They haven't yet figured out what is. Now, here's what I said in the same book, that the assumptions
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that were going to come under challenge were the following. Time goes forward, objects move,
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gravity exists, and that cause and effect require some kind of physical contact.
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That's basically an idiot's description of space-time. So I actually predicted that Einstein's theory
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that involves space-time would be overturned in your lifetime. And it was. So, I'm going to make a claim
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that you should reject on its surface, except that I'm pretty sure it's true.
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But you should object because it's so distasteful.
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would be shown to be wrong, specifically because
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But it could have been ten times bigger, I suppose.
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There are three ways to adjust your user interface.
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and you really don't know what's going on down there.
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Maybe you're the one who got all the right answers.