Real Coffee with Scott Adams - May 22, 2020


Episode 989 Scott Adams： I Tell You How to Find Meaning For Your Life


Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

154.4421

Word count

3,183

Sentence count

198

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

What would you do if Donald Trump had shut down the country two weeks earlier? And what would the media be screaming about if Bernie Sanders had won the 2020 Democratic nomination? Today's episode is a mashup of some of my favorite moments from the past week.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.860 Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. 0.97
00:00:04.780 Bum, bum, bum, bum.
00:00:07.700 Kevin, good to see you.
00:00:09.340 Come on in.
00:00:10.540 Everybody, gather around.
00:00:12.980 This might be the biggest day of your life.
00:00:16.900 I say might.
00:00:18.320 I don't know what the odds are.
00:00:19.920 But it might, right?
00:00:21.420 There are a lot of you here.
00:00:22.920 For some of you, it's going to be the best day of your life.
00:00:26.420 It just follows.
00:00:27.340 Well, today you're going to learn the meaning of life for yourself.
00:00:34.800 People may have different meanings, but while we're waiting for people to stream in here
00:00:40.320 so they can get the full goodness, first, some updates.
00:00:46.120 Have you seen that the news has turned pure loser think?
00:00:50.300 One of the chapters in my book, Loser Think, is mocking people who say
00:00:55.460 that something good should have happened sooner.
00:00:59.420 Because everything good should have happened sooner.
00:01:03.220 And that's going to be the story of the coronavirus.
00:01:06.400 So it looks like the Democrats are going to settle on this specific chapter of loser think.
00:01:13.560 It's funny that I have an actual chapter, a chapter in a book called Loser Think,
00:01:18.880 and the Democratic strategy is to embrace it.
00:01:22.260 They probably don't know it's a chapter in a book called Loser Think.
00:01:25.460 I don't think it would matter if they knew.
00:01:29.220 But, yeah, so they're going to say, if it had been done sooner, it would have been better.
00:01:34.420 Do you know what we all know?
00:01:36.900 If it had been done sooner, it would have been better, no matter what it is.
00:01:40.640 It doesn't matter what it is.
00:01:41.940 It would have been better if it had been done sooner.
00:01:43.400 I mentioned earlier today that what the world needs is an app that lets you do really quick
00:01:50.640 three-second videos that you splice together automatically to make a lesson.
00:01:55.860 Because lessons come in tiny little chunks.
00:01:58.860 Whether you're telling somebody how to change a spark plug or anything, just little chunks.
00:02:04.320 It turns out that there is one called Ario, A-R-I-O, and I guess it's an app for training.
00:02:12.860 It looks like a big corporate kind of enterprise kind of an app.
00:02:19.120 So it's a pretty serious app.
00:02:20.260 I don't know if it works for individuals, but at least for companies that are looking
00:02:24.560 to quickly train people up.
00:02:27.660 You know, somebody in the field can just, apparently, just take it out and say, blah, blah, blah,
00:02:32.480 blah, put in some text and words and video, and suddenly you've got an instant tutorial.
00:02:38.580 So that's fun.
00:02:40.520 Did you hear that Don Jr. mentioned on Twitter that he's going to be joining the Locals platform
00:02:50.320 where I have moved much of my stuff.
00:02:55.000 So that's a big deal.
00:02:57.220 It's not every day that Don Jr. joins a social media platform.
00:03:03.620 And, of course, a big part of the reason is that it's not subject to anybody's algorithm.
00:03:10.520 I'm going to give you one great thought, followed by another great thought, and then I'm going
00:03:22.280 to close it with another thought that's great, and then I'm going to give you the meaning of
00:03:26.740 life.
00:03:27.300 Are you ready?
00:03:28.880 One that will make your head explode, one that will just make you feel good, and another
00:03:34.160 one that makes you feel good.
00:03:35.640 Here's one that will make your head explode.
00:03:38.140 Joel Pollack tweeted this.
00:03:40.520 I told him it might be his best tweet, because this will just blow your mind.
00:03:48.700 I love it when somebody takes something you've been looking at forever and then just turns
00:03:52.900 it around, and you go, oh, I didn't know that was on the other side of that thing I've been
00:03:57.640 looking at forever.
00:03:59.140 And look what he did here.
00:04:00.140 So this is Joel Pollack.
00:04:02.980 He says, if real Donald Trump had shut down the country two weeks earlier, and remember,
00:04:10.320 that's what everybody's jabbering about.
00:04:12.260 It should have been earlier if it had only been two weeks earlier, blah, blah, blah.
00:04:15.760 So what would have happened?
00:04:17.340 So as Joel says, if Trump had shut down the country two weeks earlier, South Carolina and
00:04:23.160 Super Tuesday would never have happened.
00:04:25.700 Bernie Sanders would have been the Democratic nominee for president, and the media would
00:04:31.460 be screaming about how Trump had interfered in the 2020 election.
00:04:40.340 Right?
00:04:41.920 Isn't that like the smartest thing you've seen that you've heard today?
00:04:44.860 I swear, sometimes if you just watch the regular broadcast news, you're just getting dumber
00:04:51.700 as you watch it.
00:04:52.900 But how come nobody thought to actually play back the tape?
00:04:59.120 Why was it Joel, who was like the first person who thought of this, like, well, if you want
00:05:05.760 to go back two weeks, let's rewind the tape.
00:05:09.460 Let's take a look.
00:05:10.500 If that's what you want, let's go take a look at what that looks like.
00:05:15.720 That was a really clever insight.
00:05:19.460 All right.
00:05:19.900 Joel's got a new book coming out, and I'm going to talk to him about that when we schedule
00:05:24.160 that, too, so that'll be fun.
00:05:28.060 So this is a quote from Naval Ravikant.
00:05:32.140 And it's just a smart little true statement, very optimistic.
00:05:37.680 And it goes like this, technology destroys jobs and replaces them with opportunities.
00:05:45.560 Ah, I like that.
00:05:48.040 Because if you don't have a job, a job's a pretty good thing.
00:05:52.800 But if you do have a job, what's even better is your own thing.
00:05:59.260 So technology, it might take your job, but it also makes it possible for you to do your
00:06:05.980 own thing.
00:06:06.500 And I think a lot of people figured that out during the coronavirus.
00:06:10.600 So Naval, that was the exact perfect message for the times. 0.72
00:06:17.820 So look for your opportunity.
00:06:20.140 There's plenty out there.
00:06:21.020 And the president has promised, and before we do our micro lesson on the meaning of life,
00:06:28.940 the president has promised more good news coming in the coming weeks and fairly soon
00:06:34.480 about therapeutics and vaccines.
00:06:37.120 Do you remember when the president was saying, I think we'll have a vaccine by, I forget what
00:06:42.980 he said, but everybody said, well, that's crazy.
00:06:45.120 You're not going to have a vaccine by, you know, September, October.
00:06:48.980 That's kind of crazy.
00:06:51.100 But, and I think Fauci was saying, it's more of a 12-month, 18-month situation.
00:06:59.120 But I think the president's thinking, and of course, I can't read his mind, so I'm going
00:07:03.560 to make an assumption here.
00:07:04.600 I think the assumption is that he just trusted American ingenuity, and he trusted that in
00:07:13.280 the context of an emergency, that Americans would just do what needed to be done, because
00:07:19.040 we always do.
00:07:20.500 It's actually a pretty good bet.
00:07:22.920 And I was, you sort of philosophically, I'm completely with the president on that point,
00:07:29.760 that however fast you think something can get done, we're going to beat that.
00:07:35.580 And we'll probably beat it by a lot, because it's the top priority, and we're pretty good
00:07:40.240 at this stuff.
00:07:41.460 So, I'll just give you that little bit of optimism.
00:07:44.600 I think you're going to see mostly good news.
00:07:48.160 Of course, you know, the deaths are going to continue, and that's the tragedy.
00:07:52.640 But on top of that, you're going to see an increasing amount of good news coming out, and it's
00:07:58.440 going to feel good.
00:08:00.600 All right.
00:08:03.720 So, how many of you would like to have a little lesson on the meaning of life?
00:08:11.320 And so it will begin right now.
00:08:14.200 All right, this is your micro lesson on the meaning of life.
00:08:18.780 Now, this is going to be an individual meaning, not a meaning that applies to everyone, because
00:08:24.360 you can take care of yourself, in terms of the meaning that you find out of life.
00:08:28.440 There's not much you can do for other people.
00:08:30.400 They have to figure it out themselves.
00:08:32.180 So, this is your personal journey, and how to find meaning in your life.
00:08:38.740 And it's a two-white-board situation.
00:08:42.580 That's how good it is.
00:08:43.840 That's a lot of goodness.
00:08:44.940 I don't know if you can take it.
00:08:46.660 So, here's the basic idea, the starting point, and then we'll get to some more detail on the
00:08:52.000 other side.
00:08:52.440 If you were to live an ideal life that was compatible with your biological self, what
00:08:59.360 would it look like?
00:09:01.420 And here is my contention, that you will have the sensation of, and for all practical purposes
00:09:10.600 you'll have, meaning in your life if you stay on this line, which is the line of selfishness.
00:09:19.100 And the idea here is that you're born a baby, and there's nothing you can do about it.
00:09:25.980 You didn't ask to be born, and if somebody asked you to help out, you couldn't do it if
00:09:30.780 you wanted to.
00:09:31.780 You are 100% selfish baby.
00:09:35.240 Now, as you get older, if you're doing things right, maybe when you're a teen, you can start
00:09:42.220 to help out a little bit.
00:09:43.280 You're a little less selfish.
00:09:44.860 Maybe by the time you're a parent, you don't have to actually biologically have children,
00:09:49.240 but you're an adult, and you find yourself giving back as much as you're getting.
00:09:53.920 You know, you're giving back a lot.
00:09:55.620 Could be to your family, could be to anybody, your company, whatever.
00:09:59.060 Eventually, once you've got everything that you need, and you've taken care of the people
00:10:04.720 who are around you, you enter some kind of a, I'll call it a mentor mode, where you're
00:10:09.740 sort of a senior member of the tribe, you know, you're a tribal elder, essentially, and
00:10:15.980 you're just trying to be helpful.
00:10:18.020 And then the last thing you do, at least in our culture, the last thing you do, the moment
00:10:24.680 your life is extinguished, is you give away everything you have.
00:10:29.520 So all of your material possessions just go away at the moment of death.
00:10:34.940 So this is a purely unselfish moment, because you're literally dead.
00:10:41.180 So you start 100% selfish, and you try to stay on the line to get to the point where you
00:10:47.620 can be so unselfish that you die perfectly.
00:10:50.880 A perfect death is you've given everything.
00:10:54.920 There's nothing left to give.
00:10:56.680 If you do that, or even if you feel you're on the line to do that, so for example, you're
00:11:03.420 just in school.
00:11:05.660 Are you doing the right thing if you're a teenager, and you're just doing well in school and paying
00:11:11.580 attention?
00:11:12.080 Yes.
00:11:13.000 Very rarely do young kids ask about the meaning of life, because they're actually biologically
00:11:20.460 doing exactly what they need to be doing.
00:11:22.660 So if you find yourself compatible with your biological nature for that point of life, you
00:11:29.300 will feel meaning.
00:11:30.420 If you're learning, and then giving as much as you're getting, and then eventually becoming
00:11:36.140 more purely unselfish, you will feel meaning in your life.
00:11:41.920 Now, how do you do this, though?
00:11:44.680 That's the hard part, right?
00:11:46.220 How can you be sure that you can take care of yourself well enough, which is really the
00:11:51.620 key?
00:11:52.480 If you don't take care of yourself first, you're not going to be in any kind of position to
00:11:57.200 be helpful.
00:11:58.180 So you have to be selfish in the beginning until you've acquired enough safety, knowledge,
00:12:04.340 financial assets, network, family, whatever, to be safe yourself.
00:12:08.440 And then you can start branching out.
00:12:12.560 The basic belief behind this is that we evolved to take care of ourselves first, because that's
00:12:20.080 what survival would require.
00:12:22.260 But secondarily, as soon as we take care of ourselves, we broaden that to the family, the
00:12:27.660 people close to you, your tribe, and then, of course, civilization.
00:12:32.580 So, how can you be helpful, and make sure you're staying on that line?
00:12:41.460 Well, let's say you wanted to be an author of this simulation.
00:12:46.140 If you're new to this, I like to call our reality a simulation, because it feels like it.
00:12:50.640 You don't have to believe it's a simulation for any of these purposes.
00:12:54.120 It's just fun.
00:12:55.420 So when I talk about authoring the simulation, what I'm talking about is not necessarily changing
00:13:00.580 base reality, because we don't have any access to base reality, even if it changed, we might
00:13:07.340 not know the difference.
00:13:08.640 Because we did not evolve to be able to know reality.
00:13:12.780 We evolved to live in these little worlds that we manufacture ourselves.
00:13:17.040 So to the extent that you can manufacture your own world, you become the author of the simulation
00:13:24.140 you're working in, you're living in and working.
00:13:26.380 Now, the process for doing that, I'm going to give you the general outline, but then each
00:13:33.360 of these items you'd have to work on individually.
00:13:36.420 So this would be how to understand your world the best in a way that helps you get to that
00:13:43.120 great line where you're becoming more useful all the time.
00:13:49.240 All right?
00:13:49.400 So I broke it into three categories, but before you can even get serious on this, you need
00:13:56.600 to understand the beginning point, that these are filters, not necessarily reality.
00:14:03.840 And what I mean by that is, imagine if you would, you go to the grocery store, and I like to
00:14:08.320 use this example.
00:14:09.540 You're standing in a grocery store, and next to you is somebody with a different religion.
00:14:13.700 And on top of that, they also believe everything that the opposite political party from you,
00:14:21.480 whichever that is, they believe the opposite.
00:14:25.020 Are they living the same reality that you are?
00:14:28.240 Probably not.
00:14:29.520 They might be worried that the leader is going to do something horrible, and you're not.
00:14:34.700 So you live in a world where there's no risk for all practical purposes.
00:14:38.400 That's what you experience as your reality.
00:14:42.040 Again, independent from any base reality.
00:14:44.940 It's just what you experience as your reality.
00:14:47.400 Once you understand that we're all walking around in these manufactured realities, it frees
00:14:54.220 you to author your own reality.
00:14:57.400 If you feel you're a victim of reality, and it's just, well, I'm just the output.
00:15:02.640 I'm not the input.
00:15:04.240 I'm not the variables.
00:15:05.520 I'm just what got squirted out at the end.
00:15:07.400 If that's your view of life, that's exactly how your life will go.
00:15:11.640 If you believe that it's you who manufactures this filter on reality, and then can live in it,
00:15:18.520 you could turn yourself into, let's say, a Buddhist, if that was compatible with your thinking.
00:15:25.700 And you could live in that world, sort of a Buddhist reality.
00:15:29.840 You could become a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent.
00:15:33.880 You can author your own reality.
00:15:35.880 Now, does that alone help you be more successful, live better, be healthier, have better relationships?
00:15:45.260 Well, not by itself.
00:15:46.760 You need some technique.
00:15:48.000 Here are the things which I recommend that you understand are your priorities.
00:15:52.220 If you have not developed people skills, the odds that you will be successful enough to eventually give back, and therefore have meaning in your life, because you're learning and getting more powerful all the time.
00:16:05.660 In order to do anything useful in life that gets to the mentor stage anyway, that really is a well-lived life, you're going to have to master people skills.
00:16:17.340 I just listed some example ones here.
00:16:20.300 So everything from working on your shyness, which you can work on as a technique.
00:16:24.840 I've talked about that before.
00:16:26.540 Your networking, your conversation, your public speaking, learning how to criticize people without hurting their feelings, how to manage them, etc.
00:16:33.560 So it's a long list, but you know what it is.
00:16:36.340 If you're not actually working on that list, meaning you're not reading a book on something on this list, you're not taking a class, you're not practicing something, then you're not quite getting ready to be an author.
00:16:52.440 You're still in sort of taking it as a comes mode.
00:16:57.700 I've talked too much about the talent stack, but it's so powerful that if you're not developing your skills that layer well together, in your case, it's not the same skills for everybody.
00:17:09.060 It's just whatever is the combination that makes you powerful and unique and valuable in the market.
00:17:14.600 If you don't have a skill stack and some people skills, you're just not going to be successful.
00:17:20.740 I mean, you could.
00:17:22.360 I mean, it's possible that people without people skills can be successful, but it's less likely, which gets us to the last thing.
00:17:31.620 You should understand the math of life.
00:17:34.680 I'll call it the odds, but it's really sort of the math of life.
00:17:38.600 If you understand the math of life, you have basically a strategy.
00:17:43.560 I don't like to use the word strategy, so I prefer to say, do you know the odds?
00:17:48.560 Do you know that if you do this thing, you'll have better odds than this thing?
00:17:52.980 Here are just some examples of it.
00:17:55.040 I talk about how it's very typical in the business world to try 10 different things before one of them works.
00:18:02.540 If you didn't know that, you'd give up after three.
00:18:06.240 But if you knew it was almost sort of built into the texture of civilization, I don't know why, but it's a good rule of thumb that you probably try 10 things and one of them is likely to catch on.
00:18:19.020 You try three things, well, your odds are less.
00:18:22.160 So understanding that about the world is important.
00:18:25.420 You should understand that if you sell your time, there's a cap on how much you can make.
00:18:32.420 Even if you're a lawyer, there's a cap.
00:18:34.540 So maybe you should start your own business if you want an uncapped potential.
00:18:39.740 The math of talent stacking is that just because you have, let's say, 10 talents and you add one, you don't go up just 10% in power.
00:18:49.700 You might double in power.
00:18:51.120 So once you understand the multiplicative geometric benefit of adding skills, you have a strategy just built into your normal thinking.
00:19:04.660 Understand about diversification, especially if you're investing.
00:19:09.520 Don't put all your eggs in one basket, as they say.
00:19:12.260 And follow the energy to go where there's the most luck, most stuff happening.
00:19:16.620 If you go wherever there's the most stuff happening, the most people, you have more chances for luck.
00:19:23.460 That is the outline for finding meaning in your life.
00:19:30.180 Now, of course, the details of how you fill out your various categories and stacks here will be personal,
00:19:37.440 and maybe you're all on your own path.
00:19:39.600 But the idea is that if you're following that path from completely selfish to completely unselfish,
00:19:50.040 you will have an internal feeling of meaning.
00:19:55.880 And that feeling will be just you being compatible with your most basic biological self,
00:20:02.380 because you were born to take care of yourself first.
00:20:06.120 So if you're doing that, especially when you're young, you'll feel like you're doing exactly what you ought to be.
00:20:12.720 And kids do.
00:20:14.220 Kids generally feel like they're doing exactly what they should be doing.
00:20:17.740 Learning, playing, growing.
00:20:20.940 So just keep on that path, and you'll feel that feeling of completion and a feeling of meaning.
00:20:31.040 So that's all for tonight.
00:20:33.040 That's your micro lesson, and I will see you, you know when.