All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 28, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
32:55
Episode 643 Scott Adams: How to be Happy, #Chexit, Bedbugs, Perdue Pharma, Omar
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody!
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
As luck would have it, that's me.
And you already know who you are, so put us all together, and it would be almost time for the simultaneous sip.
It's a wonderful ceremony in which your dopamine gets spiked, and you'll be happy all day.
I'll teach you some more tricks for happiness in a moment.
But first, prepare for the simultaneous sip.
You're going to need a cup or a mug or a glass of stein, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, that's good.
I'm going to talk about some stuff in the news and then I'm going to teach you how to be happy.
Actually, literally teach you how to be happy in a way that's pretty easy to do.
Many of you will find your life entirely changed after today.
Actually, literally. A lot of the people who are watching this live, I don't know what percentage, but some percentage of you, your entire life will change in the next few minutes.
So wait for that.
But first, some things in the news.
I was feeling grateful that Antifa exists today.
Because even though Antifa doesn't have a central leadership, they are organized in the sense that they communicate.
And that's going to be very important if we ever have an actual fascist takeover of the government.
So you've got this anti-fascist group, and they communicate so they can coordinate.
And then you might have a fascist government someday.
There might be a fascist government that tries to take power in the United States.
So it's going to be really good to have all the Antifa people coordinated so that when the time comes for action, they can all get out of the way so that the Republicans who have firearms can take care of the fascists.
I think that's going to be useful because the last thing you want is to send your Antifa with their clubs and masks After the government, it's just not going to go well.
But if we had an actual fascist takeover, you would want Antifa to efficiently get out of the way, because the serious firearms would come out.
They would be owned mostly by Republicans, and Republicans would take care of business.
Now, I'm not a Republican.
I'm just saying.
That if you had, let's say, a fascism problem, and you needed to take care of it, who would you want to do it?
A Republican with a gun, a truck, and an American flag, or an Antifa member with a mask and a club, and maybe he takes Uber?
Which one do you want? One of those groups just needs to get out of the way as quickly as possible, so I'm glad that Antifa is so well organized.
President Trump made one of the biggest persuasion mistakes I think that I've ever seen.
Certainly the biggest one I've ever seen from Trump is a pretty big one.
And it was the issue of the bedbugs.
So you know the story. New York Times writer Brett Stevens was called a bedbug by some college professor, and then Brett Stevens went after him and complained to the guy's boss.
I don't care about any of that.
But just know that there's a story.
About the New York Times had some bedbugs in the office and Brett Stevens got pulled into this because somebody called him a bedbug.
Trump, who is no fan of Brett Stevens, weighs in and does this tweet in which he says there are no bedbugs at his Doral Country Club, as had been reported in the past, but that Brett Stevens is full of them.
Now that is a huge Huge persuasion mistake.
Very untypical.
For those of you who say, hey, you're always saying the president does the right stuff all the time.
I don't. I don't.
That just is not a true statement.
I quite often will criticize him for various things.
This one really sticks out, and here's why.
It was clever.
And sort of funny, well, it was funny, the president's tweet.
So that part's good.
It's clever. It's funny.
He called that an enemy.
We enjoyed the show. But what he did was he raised in our consciousness a story that I don't think any of us knew.
I mean, some of you might have known that there was some story about one bungalow And one person who may have had some bedbugs by now, of course, is taken care of.
It's nothing to worry about.
So there wasn't an actual problem.
And the president is claiming there was no problem, which, you know, I don't know how technically accurate that is, but I'm sure there's no problem now.
So at the moment, Doral is, I'm sure, completely fine.
Why in the world would you make the public put that thought in their head and pair the name of your resort with a specific kind of a problem that you wouldn't want anybody to be thinking about?
So it was just a horrendous persuasion mistake.
All right. You've seen the stories about Minnesota Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar She's denying allegations of an affair with a married Washington D.C. consultant.
I don't care.
I don't care.
Why is that a story?
Can we just stop making stories about people having sex with the wrong people?
Can we just stop?
What is my opinion of Ilhan Omar's fitness for government based on her alleged sexual activities?
I don't care.
I just don't care. So, there's that.
All right. Wouldn't you love to see some kind of a browser add-on That whenever you're reading a news article, it adds a credibility score.
Now, of course, there's a question of who gets to decide on the credibility, but I think you can work that out.
So imagine every time you saw a story, it was like a credibility B+. Put on the source or maybe even the writer.
That would be helpful. How about this?
A browser add-on that whenever you're reading a story on a certain topic and it's within a news silo, That it automatically gives you links to the other story from opposing political view.
So in other words, if you're reading a Fox News story about whatever, Russian collusion, that there's also a link prominently shown to go see what the other people say about the same story.
Wouldn't that be useful? Somebody was saying don't add credibility scores, but I believe there might be a way to do that that doesn't offend people.
But you wouldn't have to do that.
You could just show bull stories and let people decide.
Somebody says allsides.com does that.
I don't think they do that with a...
I'll have to look into that.
I don't want to say what they do or don't do, but maybe that's a thing that could happen.
And I was thinking that the social media platforms would like it because it could potentially double their traffic.
If people are used to staying in their silo and only reading the one news story on the one topic from their one source, wouldn't it double the traffic if they saw prominent links to another competing story?
They might click. So I think the social media platforms would like that.
Purdue Pharma is the latest to get in trouble for opioid addiction responsibility, shall we say.
And there's reports that they're negotiating a $10 to $12 billion settlement.
It's a private company, and they're accused of pushing opioids on the country.
What I like about the story...
Is simply that the United States, the government and the legal system has decided that the opioid problem is a big deal and we're going to go at it from every possible angle.
I like that. So we got that priority right.
I got a question for you.
Is the wall being built?
Does anybody know if the wall is being built?
Because I'm pretty sure if I went to CNN, they would say, no, there's no wall being built.
There's just some existing wall being, you know, fixed up, which is just normal business.
But if you went to Fox News, would they say that wall is being built like crazy?
Look at all this wall.
Can you believe that the simplest story you could ever imagine...
Is there a wall being built?
Doesn't that seem like that's a yes-no question?
Is there a wall being built?
But I think there is, right?
It feels like there's a wall getting built.
I think there is. There's a story about Israel developing anti-drone technology.
Apparently they have some kind of technology that can electronically take control of up to 200 drones coming toward them in a swarm.
Think about that.
A swarm of drones all programmed to attack and Israel has some technology that can just take over the brains of all the drones.
Tell them information about where it came from.
Which is not good for the people who sent it, and land them safely and take control of them.
I don't know how well that works, but it's impressive, and it might be good news.
I noticed that Google is moving production of its Pixel smartphone out of China and to Vietnam.
That's a pretty big deal.
Google being a big company, moving the production out of China.
I wonder how many others will do the same.
I've been reading some stories about China's intentions in the world.
And you've probably seen that too.
I don't know what to believe.
So the story that we're seeing a lot is that the Chinese leadership has an explicit plan to weaken and if not destroy the United States in every way possible, from fentanyl to trade to building up their military to dirty tricks, I guess, cyber stuff.
Is that real?
Is it? Because I don't really know.
It feels like the sort of thing that could easily not be real.
And by that I mean, I know that there are books talking about China's total war strategy, but does that mean everybody who's important in the government, including President Xi, buys into the idea that China should be weakening the United States in every possible way?
Do they? Maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know. We're certainly hearing that from others.
I just tweeted around an interview Kyle Bass is doing with some Chinese dissenter who got away and he predicted somebody getting killed in China correctly.
You know, he said that guy is going to get murdered by the government and he was dead in a year.
So he's got some credibility.
I just don't know what is real.
I don't know if anybody does.
It makes me wonder. So, there's not much news today, so that's the news.
I wanted to teach you how to be happy.
I've spent my life trying to turn into a formula how to be happy.
And I did that in my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
But I'm going to give you the quicker synopsis for those who don't know how to be happy.
And as obvious as this will be to some of you, for many of you, this will be the first time you've ever seen it explained this way.
Let me explain happiness.
So happiness here is at the top.
That's your goal. We'd all like to be happy.
In order to be happy, there are three chemicals in your body and your brain that need to be at the right level.
Now, I'm going to grossly oversimplify the chemical nature of human beings.
There are certainly lots more than three chemicals involved in keeping you happy.
But, As a general statement, if these three are where they need to be, you're probably going to be happy unless there's some terrible problem in your life that, you know, is unsolvable.
So, did I spell serotonin wrong?
I may have spelled it wrong.
Tell me if I spelled that wrong.
Anyway, so...
These chemicals can be boosted through lifestyle.
If you don't know that, you don't understand how happiness works.
Most people that I talk to are under the mistaken impression that happiness is something you can think your way into.
In other words, if you put some happy thoughts in your head or you don't have any problems, there's somehow a mental process.
Your happiness is not a mental process.
If you think it is, you can't help yourself.
You're going to be lost forever.
So whether you have a mental problem that keeps you low in these things, which is typical, you know, depression, anxiety, OCD, there are a number of mental conditions which are at least associated with lower levels of these things.
If you treat happiness as a physical process The end result of which is you feel happy, then you have a mechanism to do something about it.
If you think it's a mental process, there's nothing you can do about it.
You are a victim of your environment.
But if you understand that you can do things in your life that will boost these chemicals, and then these chemicals in turn will make you feel good, then you have a mechanism.
And for each of these things, let me explain these things.
So oxytocin is the chemical that makes you feel connected to people, makes you feel in love, makes you feel bonded, and that's mostly from social interaction, especially touch.
You can get it from sex, hugging.
I think you can get it from your pets, you know, playing with your cat or your dog.
And you can get it from a massage.
Yeah, and children can get it from their parents, from touch.
But these other things, dopamine and serotonin, are sort of lifestyle-related.
And if you get a system for all of this stuff, a system for your diet and exercise and sleep, You're going to have a lot more of it.
How many people do you know who believe they're unhappy, but all they're doing is they're doing this stuff wrong?
They're doing the lifestyle stuff wrong, and they think, hey, I'm unhappy.
There's something wrong with the way I'm thinking.
There's something wrong with my brain.
Probably not. There's probably, and when I say probably, I'm going to say 80% of the time, For 80% of you, the feeling of not being happy or fulfilled, all of those feelings, are because you don't have a system in place to work toward improving these over time.
So for diet, for example, I talk about this in my book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
It should be a lifelong process of learning about diet and experimenting with what works for you.
In my case, if I eat too many bad carbs, if I eat too many bad carbs, I'm unhappy.
Every frickin' time.
Every time. If I have a burrito for lunch the rest of the day, I'm not happy because my energy will crash and I can't be happy when I have a sugar crash.
So learn about diet by making it a lifelong system to chip away at it and experiment.
Learn that protein is good for you.
Learn that simple carbs are bad for you.
Always. Always.
Don't have cheat days.
If you have a cheat day, you don't understand how anything works.
There's a longer explanation for that, but don't have a cheat day.
Exercise, again, my book, How to Fail, teaches you how to create habits and how to organize your life so it's more likely that you'll do something active every day.
It doesn't matter what you do, but be active every day.
You will find that if you get exercise right, most of your days are better.
Everybody who has an exercise routine will confirm what I'm saying.
On days that you exercise, you feel happier.
It's pretty much a one-to-one thing.
So learn to do that. Get enough sleep.
A lot of people... Think that sleep is somehow out of their control.
Sleep is something you absolutely control.
Now again, these are 80% true statements.
20% of the people may have some medical problem.
They've got something they don't need to deal with.
But for 80% of us, go to bed the same time, wake up the same time every day, Don't put your, you know, don't watch TV in bed.
Don't do things that get you excited.
Don't watch a scary movie before you go to bed.
You know, there are some very basic things, which all you'd have to do is Google some articles about how to sleep.
Follow the steps.
There aren't that many of them. Every article on how to sleep would be pretty similar.
Learn a system for sleep.
If you're the kind of person who likes to stay up really late on weekends, but then during the week you've got to go back to your 8 to 5 life, You're just killing yourself.
You don't have much chance of being happy if you think that you can mess with your sleep and still be happy.
You can't. You can have a good evening, but your week is not going to be happy.
Make sure you get some nature, meaning get outside.
Sun is important, but it seems to be important to your chemistry to just interact with nature.
So get out of the house, get around some trees, get around some grass.
That helps. Do what you can to improve your social life.
I recommend the Dale Carnegie method of learning how to talk to people, learning how to be good to people.
Here's the big trick for a good social life.
You ready? It's hard for me to believe I have to tell you this.
But probably the vast majority of you don't know what I'm going to say next.
And it will change your life.
You ready? If you don't have a good social life, that's your fault.
Totally. It's your fault.
Because you don't know the technique.
Having a good social life is technique.
Now, I can't get into all of it.
The Dale Carnegie courses will teach you.
But you should know how to talk to strangers.
You should know how to talk to people and have good conversations.
But the main thing you need to do to have a good social life is give more than you get.
That's it. Think generously.
And people will say, well, that's somebody I want to hang around with.
That person just asked me if they could do me a favor.
I barely know. That's somebody you want to spend some time with.
Invite people to your place.
Set up an outing yourself.
Buy somebody lunch.
Solve a problem for somebody.
Offer to help. All right?
Social life is completely under your control Stop thinking that people will like you for who you are on the inside.
Nobody cares who you are on the inside.
They can't see it. They can't see the inside of you.
They only know what you do.
They can't read your mind.
So do things that are generous.
If you do that, you will have a social life.
It might not be the first day, but you're going to have one.
So get out in the real world, get involved in some groups where there are people, go make yourself a social life.
I find that it's useful to have a purpose in life.
A purpose, the best way to find one is to be useful to society and to other people.
If what you're doing all day is good for no one but you, you will not feel like you have a purpose.
And that will eat at your chemical state.
It will decrease your happy chemicals.
So find a purpose.
It's easy to find a purpose.
Figure out what you're good at, or at least you can become good at, and you're willing to do.
Then try it.
If it doesn't work, try something else.
Most of you have watched me try to be useful for the Blight Authority, Bill Pulte's thing, trying to clean up the inner cities, as well as Bill Pulte's philanthropic efforts.
I've been trying to be supportive of that, and a number of other things I try to be helpful on.
Those things give me meaning.
When I have quiet moments, I think about those things because I say to myself, yeah, I'm doing stuff that might not help.
I don't know if it'll make a big difference, but at least I'm doing things that make sense, could work, are part of a solution, perhaps a little bit helpful in these different ways.
Somebody says loving your family.
Correct. You could build a sense of purpose around your family.
Now there's a trap there, because that usually means around your children, because the children leave eventually.
So you want to be able to find ways to find meaning that are not dependent on one or two people.
I also find that when I'm learning and growing, in other words, I'm getting better at something, I feel more fulfilled.
And my body chemistry feels better.
So it doesn't matter what you're learning or growing at.
Could be your career, could be something useful in some other way.
And it could be just learning the things that you need to take care of yourself.
Could be just learning that.
But build your talent stack, add talents all the time.
You should never be, here's my advice, you should never be in the state of not learning.
Period. Now, you might be so busy that you have to reduce the time that you're spending learning something to a small part of your day.
That would be normal. But never have a day where you didn't learn something.
You can Google something.
You can read an article.
You can talk to somebody who knows more than you do.
You can use my app, Interface by WenHub, and call an expert to learn something you needed to know.
But try to learn something every day.
You'll be amazed what that does to you.
You'll have a sense of moving in the right direction.
Alright, so, in summary, happiness is not some internal mental process that you can just think your way to a better happiness.
It is a chemical state.
If you get your body chemistry right, mostly these three chemicals are the ones you hear about, you will have a feeling of contentment and happiness.
To get those chemicals right, science is very clear what works.
Got to get your diet right, your exercise, your sleep.
Got to get out in nature, touch some people, improve your social life.
Avoid stress. I didn't talk about this one, but it's obvious.
I do not watch movies that are dramas.
I do not watch movies that are scary or have bad endings.
I won't even watch a comedy if it has a bad ending.
I don't expose myself to fiction which is negative.
Because even if you think you're entertained, and you are, you're adding stress to your life.
You just don't know it.
I avoid stressful people.
If you are toxic, I'm just not going to talk to you again.
That's it. Do I feel bad when I cut people out of my life and I don't talk to them again?
A little bit, but not as bad as I feel when I'm with them.
The horror is spending time with toxic people.
The horror is not the embarrassment or the discomfort or the awkwardness of getting rid of them.
You have to get rid of toxic people.
And learn and grow and that will give you a purpose if you're being useful to the world.
Yeah, the news can be quite toxic as well.
I'm addicted to the news at the moment because a lot of the Trump news is entertaining.
It's literally funny and nobody's getting hurt most of the time.
Sometimes it, you know, devolves into bad stuff.
Do I make an exception for Game of Thrones?
Yeah, I kind of do.
I do. But when I watch Game of Thrones, I don't feel tension or stress.
It's well made and it's funny and it takes me into a different world and it doesn't seem like a real world.
So I don't take that too seriously.
I would say if you're watching Lord of the Rings, which you would say is a drama action, a lot of people getting killed, Lord of the Rings is just sort of a fantasy fun thing, so I wouldn't worry about that.
I would never watch a Quentin Tarantino movie again.
I've watched his movies and they just make me feel bad, period.
They're well made. Apparently Quentin Tarantino is an amazing filmmaker.
All the critics agree.
But a lot of his films make me feel bad, so I don't watch them.
Same with Spielberg.
Spielberg is on the top of my list of directors to avoid.
Now, if he does a comedy movie or something lighthearted, I would certainly watch that, because he's a great filmmaker.
But if he does something like...
Anything about the Holocaust, for example, Schindler's List, it's going to be so well made that it brings you into this horrible world and it's like you were there.
I'm still scarred by movies I've seen years ago and some of them are Spielberg's.
So, that's your happiness formula.
The main point is to understand that it's a chemical reaction.
And that you control your chemistry by your lifestyle, and specifically you can develop systems over time where maybe you don't know too much about diet, but you can learn it.
Don't know too much about exercise or systems, you can learn it.
And that just changed some percentage of those watching this.
Their lives just completely changed.
I guarantee you. Now, I don't know what percentage it is.
It could be 1%. It could be 10%.
It could be 30%.
But for a lot of you, your life just completely changed.
Because for the first time, you're seeing a completely practical path to get from wherever you are to how you want to feel.
And once you see that this works, and the only way to see it is to actually practice it, start paying attention to your diet, your sleep, and your exercise, and also your touch, and your nature too.
Start paying attention to what you did that day, and then pay attention to how you feel about your day.
Once you notice there's a one-to-one correlation between doing those things right that get your chemistry right and having a good day, you're all set.
That's what you need. You need that realization to make it real.
And you have to do it and try it to be able to actually feel that it makes a difference.
All right. I'm just looking at your comments.
Now, I hear every day from people who say their life was completely transformed by thinking of their life in terms of systems versus goals.
The goal would be to be happy, but how?
How? You need a system to get there.
So as soon as you remember that the goal doesn't tell you how to get there, the systems do.
Then you've got a formula for working your way through life to a better solution.
All right. I'll take a picture of the whiteboard here.
I will put that. That will be part of the YouTube posting.
So everything I do here on Periscope gets posted on YouTube within a few hours, and we'll post the photo on this.
It'll be at Real Coffee with Scott Adams on YouTube.
Somebody says, isn't it true that some people don't need daily relations?
Well, there are people who are introverts.
I would consider myself one of them.
People who find that spending a lot of time with other people can be draining.
Other people find that spending a lot of time with other people can be more fulfilling and energizing.
But even if you're an introvert, you can't escape nature's requirements.
In other words, your chemical situation has a lot in common with somebody who's not an introvert.
And so even the introverts do need human contact.
They just need less of it and a certain kind, and they've got to control it a little better than other people.
I will put the photo of this on the blog, so that will be part of the process.
My blog is moved to at scottadamsays.com.
All right. Somebody says, make that segment its own YouTube video, please.
Maybe. I'll think about that.
▲
Export Selection