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April 23, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:16
Episode 930 Scott Adams: Bedtime Stories of Heroics and Failures. Plus Your Questions.
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Time Text
Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for Bedtime Stories with Scott.
It's one of your favorite times of the day.
It's right up there with the morning.
The morning being your other favorite part of the day.
Drumming? Well, I'm working on my paradiddles.
I know that sounds bad, but that's actually a drummer term.
Yes, working on my paradiddle.
Let's see, it goes like this.
Okay, needs work.
Well, well, well.
I thought I would begin with a demonstration of artificial intelligence.
Now, the way this is going to work is I have a hypothesis that I could write a program that would pass the Turing test.
Now, the Turing test, most of you know, is a test that if you were talking to, let's say, a computer that was behind a curtain and you couldn't tell if it was a human or a computer, and let's say you were communicating by text so that you can't tell anything by the voice, could you tell That you are getting a message from a real person or a computer.
So if you can't tell if you're talking to a real person, that is passing the Turing test, named after Turing.
So in a moment, I'm going to give you a demonstration in which I will play the part of the computer.
Now, like a computer, I won't actually know what you're saying, but I'm going to have a conversation with you As if you're having an actual conversation with me.
So you can play along at home, and here's how it works.
I will be your talkative friend.
I'll tell you that I'm gonna tell you a story, but I'm gonna leave moments when you can talk to me.
But rather than being some dumb old AI program, even though I won't know what you're saying, don't put it in the comments.
Say it out loud.
It's funnier if there's somebody else in the room.
Say it out loud as if you're answering me or you're talking to me.
And I will simply respond.
And you'll be amazed how good this is.
Hold on, hold on. Just hold that thought.
See what I did there? It was like I was talking to you, right?
Because that's how a real person would talk to you.
What? Yeah. See what I did there?
I acted like I was talking to you.
Now, that's what it's going to look like.
So I'm going to tell you a story, but I'm going to pause every now and then, and I'm going to act like you said something to me.
So it's funnier if you actually say something, as long as there's somebody else with you.
It might be funny if it's just you and your dog or something, but...
It'd be way better if there's somebody else in the room.
So this is a story I like to call...
What? Yeah.
Yeah, you probably haven't heard this story.
Maybe you've heard it. I don't know.
But just hold on.
Hold that thought. Let me just tell you my story.
I'm sure you have good stories too, but let me just tell you the story.
By the way, did you do something with your hair?
You look... I don't know.
Did you lose weight? Yeah.
Don't be modest.
You've been walking, haven't you?
Been taking walks? Yeah.
It's great, isn't it?
I know. You probably...
Same with me. You wish you could do more of it.
But, you know, when the coronavirus stuff is over...
I hope we can keep that habit up.
Yeah, and also going to the gym, right?
So this is a story I call The Golden Egg.
No, it's not about cooking.
It's about, well, I'll tell you.
So The Golden Egg is my first success story in life.
And it happened when, I don't know my exact age, but I'm thinking maybe nine years old-ish, give or take a few years.
And we would have an annual event in my tiny town of Wyndham, New York called the Easter Egg Hunt.
And, you know, very much like other towns do it traditionally.
And the eggs would be colored and hidden in a farmer's field that had many, many ups and downs and places to hide things in the field.
And then the local kids would go there and we would go to try to find the eggs.
But here's the fun part. The eggs had a...
A cash amount written on them.
So the eggs that were the most plentiful might be, I don't know, 10 cents or something.
Whatever it was. But the most, I think the most important egg was the golden egg.
And there was only one of them.
And it was this big farmer's field and it was filled with kids.
You know, I don't know how many, maybe 100 or more.
It was a small town, but probably a few hundred.
Yeah, well, it was Wyndham is the name of the town.
Have you heard of it? Yeah, it's, well, yeah, it's not near anything.
It's in upstate New York.
So do you want to hear more of this story, or am I boring you?
I will. Okay, just hang in there.
All right. So I dreamed every year that I was eligible because you could enter the Easter egg hunt from the age of, I don't know, probably as young as you could walk around and carry a little basket, but then you would time out at a certain age.
Maybe it was nine.
I'm hoping my brother is watching this and later he'll say, no, you got those details wrong.
But here was the deal.
Year after year, I would go and I would dream.
I mean, I would visualize winning the golden egg.
Now when I say winning, I mean being the lucky one who found it.
Because there was no skill involved.
It was just a giant field and you just had to get lucky.
And, you know, what were the odds that I would find the one and only golden egg?
And so I'd go there and I'd look hard and pretty soon somebody else would find the golden egg.
Year after year, I'd go there with my heart was set and somebody else would find the golden egg.
And finally, it was my final year.
It was the last year I'd be eligible.
And the hunt was on and we were running out of time and the golden egg had not been found.
And I thought to myself, could this be it?
Could this be the time that the universe conforms to my wishes?
Will this be the time That I, I know, maybe I'm being a little dramatic, okay?
But would this be the time that I would be the one, the lucky one out of, I don't know, a hundred kids, maybe more, to find the one golden egg?
My last chance.
And the time ran out.
The time was, it was out.
And that was it.
Nobody found the golden egg.
It was my last chance.
Dejected. And then one of the organizers said, hold on, hold on.
Somebody has to find the golden egg.
So we're going to narrow down to the zone and tell you a little bit more specifically where it might be in that general area.
And I thought, I'm still alive.
Still alive.
I can find the golden egg.
And so...
The whistle sounded, and we kids just ran into that area and started pouring through all of the grass tufts and whatnot.
And there it was, the golden egg.
And I found it in overtime of my final year.
And I gotta tell you, there are lots of things I've wanted over my life.
You know, like anybody, I want this, I want that.
But there were few things I've ever wanted as much as finding that golden egg.
And to find it and to realize the thing that I had been visualizing for so long was life-changing.
It was actually life-changing.
Because even then, I was able to calculate the odds, I mean, roughly speaking.
And I knew...
That something weird had happened and that somehow I had beaten tremendous odds.
And I thought to myself, what if that's the way it always is?
Right? Because I was a kid.
What if that's the way it always is?
Let me give you another story so you can get a sense of the things that influenced me.
One day, it was around the same age, maybe a little after that, there was a contest on the back of a cereal box.
And the contest asked you to draw a picture of, I think it was the Old Faithful geyser, and send it in and you could win something.
And the top prize was, I think, a color TV, which was a big deal back then.
But there were a bunch of second prizes, which were cameras.
And so I showed my mother and said, hey, I'm going to enter this contest.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to win. And my mother said, you know, I'm glad that you're optimistic.
You know, you're just pretty good drawing, but a lot of kids are going to be entering.
And the odds of you winning a contest on the back of a cereal, very low, very low, or worse to those effect.
And I said, Yeah, I hear what you're saying, but I feel like I'm going to win, not the top prize, but I think I'm going to win a camera.
So I sent in my drawing, and I want a camera.
Now, I don't know what the odds were, but I want a camera, and it wasn't a very good drawing.
Here's another weird thing that happened to me.
In college, My first day of...
Yeah, I think it was my first day of freshman year.
And there was another freshman who was actually an older guy who was going back to school.
I think he was in his early 20s.
And he was a big, hulking guy with gigantic arms.
I remember he had these huge, like, almost simian arms.
And one thing led to another, and somehow we're just making a conversation.
It turns out he played tennis.
And I also play tennis.
And so, being the cocky 18-year-old that I was, and he being the cocky 20-something that he was, we ended up trash-talking each other about how badly we would beat each other in tennis should we play.
Now, what I didn't know at the time is that he had actually played, I think, the number one position, or at least he was on a major college team before that, because he'd been in college years before.
And so he was actually like a college-level first-string tennis player.
I was a guy who played tennis.
So I wasn't even really in his general category of tennis goodness.
But do you think that stopped me from trash-talking him that I would beat him in tennis?
No. No, it did not.
It did not stop me from trash-talking.
And for the life of me, I do not know what got into me because I knew at the time that we weren't even close.
It would be sort of like, you know, challenging Tiger Woods to a golf game and thinking you had a shot.
But the trash-talk continued and we finally played.
And I will summarize the match this way.
Sometimes I rise to the challenge.
Sometimes. Sometimes I'll hit a junk shot that maybe somebody isn't used to seeing because they're a much better player.
And it comes off my racket differently because I wasn't that good a player.
And sometimes I'm unusually quick.
Not so much anymore, but when I was 18, I was deceptively fast.
And maybe I was way, way more mentally tough than my opponent.
And maybe, although I was not yet a trained hypnotist, maybe I got in his head.
And maybe he didn't play his best that day.
And maybe the way I knew that I'd had a good day, against all odds, and he had had a bad day, was when he wrapped his tennis racket around the end pole and beat it into a pretzel.
That's how he expressed his unhappiness at losing a tennis match He was pretty sure he was going to win.
Now, I can't explain why I won.
I guess he was out of practice.
I got in his head a little bit.
One thing led to another.
Lost the momentum.
Bada bing. All right.
How many of you tried talking to me when I was talking?
No, I'm not intoxicated.
Whoever's asking that. But thanks for asking.
Now let me tell you one of my greatest failures.
My most hubris is ugly.
We're going to block you for that.
So, a number of people have said to me recently, and of course this was the setup to that.
They've said to me, Scott, I turn you off because you're too narcissistic.
To which I say, oh, apparently you are not aware of the full context.
The full context being that I often teach you that your ego should be a tool.
And it's not who you are.
Likewise, if I brag about something that went well, it's not who I am.
It's just the character I'm taking on to tell you the story.
If I do something that...
Shows I failed miserably at something, which I've got some stories about that if you want to hear them.
It doesn't mean that I'm the person who failed.
So I'm neither the person who succeeded, nor am I the person who failed.
And if you imagine that I'm telling you that I am, then that's a little bit on you because the context is missing for you.
You should always learn to dial up your ego when you're putting on a show, right?
So if the audience is looking at you, crank up your ego.
That's how you get the right energy and the charisma.
That's why it's more interesting, etc.
But there are plenty of situations in which that's the very worst thing you could do.
Then you want to dial it down, right?
Would you like to hear a story that didn't go my way?
I wrote an entire book about that.
So I'm literally a guy who wrote a book about all of my failures because there were so many of them.
You spelled his name wrongly.
Okay. It's easier to give good advice, but not as easy to follow on your own.
Okay, I don't know what that means.
So you want to hear a story of utter failure.
Okay. I think I've got some examples of that.
Let me call this the first dance.
Stop me if you've heard this.
When I was probably 14, I had the first dance in my little high school, my little town, and I wanted to ask the cutest girl in the class to a slow dance.
And I'd never done this before.
Now, if you can remember back to when you were 14, imagine the terror of having to walk across the gym floor To ask the prettiest girl in the class to dance when you're 14 and a slow dance.
It's pretty nerve-wracking, right?
So you can imagine my state of mind, Put myself into the moment.
I said, I'm going to do this.
And time stood still as I was walking across that great distance, which was just the width of a basketball thing, because she was with the mean girls.
So there were three of them that sort of were the mean girls.
I don't think they called themselves that, but if any of them were watching this periscope, that's what I thought you were.
But, of course, the mean girls often are also the prettiest girls, the way it works.
So imagine there are three of them.
The one that is the target of my affections is in the middle.
But I've got to do whatever I'm going to do in front of an audience of the three mean girls.
So you have to know that there was an audience to know how big the pressure was.
And so I walked across the gym as time stood still.
It was like I was moving through water and I got there and I said, I won't say her name, but I said, huh, name, would you like to dance?
And she said, what?
Now, what is the worst thing she could have said?
Because it forced me to say it again, but once I had the attention of all three mean girls.
So now the glaring attention of the three mean girls is at me.
And I said, would you like to dance?
And she said, now?
And I said, yeah, now?
And she said, I'm too hot.
And when she said, I'm too hot, did I think I was done?
No, no, because I'm spunky.
I'm the kind of guy who doesn't give up.
So when she said, you know, I'm too hot, I didn't put my tail between my legs, I didn't turn around, I didn't give up.
I'm still alive.
Still alive. And so after she said, I'm too hot, I said, well, maybe you could take off your heavy down jacket.
And she looked at me, and she said, and I'm too tired.
And I turned around, and I walked away, All the way back across the tennis court.
Oh, that was actually a basketball court.
And time stood still again because I knew they were probably laughing at me at that moment in time.
And I got to the other side and I said, someday, as God is my witness, I will take this great tragic humiliation and I will turn it into, if God Nothing will stop me.
I will take this bad energy and I will turn it into a little story on Periscope in 2020 during the coronavirus, is what I said to myself.
Because I don't lose.
I don't lose.
Sometimes the clock runs out before I've won.
Sure. But is that my fault?
No, I don't own the clock.
But I never lose.
No matter how long it takes, I'm gonna win.
And so, I just turned that terrible story into an entertaining little vignette.
Yes. Yes, that really happened.
Would you like to hear...
Would you like to hear the most embarrassing story that ever happened to me?
And if Christine is watching this, she'll cringe.
But if you want to hear it, if you want to hear the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me, it wasn't that one.
Oh, there's a better one.
But only if you want to hear it.
So I don't see anything in the comments, but there's a little delay.
Well, I'm going to guess...
I'm going to guess that you might want to hear this.
You know, I don't think I would tell this story except that we're trapped in the coronavirus.
It feels like all the rules don't apply.
So this is a story I never would have told.
So, oh, can I tell this story?
I'm at mid-teens and I'm in a movie theater in Wyndham, New York.
I'm next to a girl, and some handsy things happened, so I'll just keep it that.
I'm a teenager.
I'm in a movie theater.
The movie was Diamonds Are Forever, and it was, I think, the first movie I saw that there was a little nudity.
And remember, this is before the internet.
So I'd never really seen a movie where a live human being showed a little bit of something.
I'd just never seen it.
At the same time, I wasn't the only one getting a little handsy.
And although everybody was fully garbed, I realized As there was especially, let's say, provocative point in the movie that by the worst coincidence,
lined up at about the same time as some handsy activity, I realized that I was going to have an event, shall we say.
Send the kids to bed, will you?
Send the kids to bed. So I'm like a teenager, and I realized that I might need to go to the men's room because something's gonna happen and I can't hold back.
And I think only the guys can relate to this.
There's something that you could call, let's say, the countdown.
The countdown is when you start hearing the countdown and you say to yourself, you know, there's nothing I can do To stop the countdown from getting to zero.
We're past the point of the fail-safe.
Something's gonna happen and I'm fully clothed.
Everybody's fully clothed in this story.
But I say to myself, my best chance is if I can get to the men's room before the countdown reaches zero, I can avoid the worst embarrassment of it.
And so, I quickly got up and started to walk up the aisle to see if I could get there before the countdown ended.
And here's what I didn't count on.
It turns out the walking action does not decrease the amount of your excitement if you're in a certain condition.
It actually adds, shall we say, a degree of friction you weren't counting on.
So that when I calculated how long it would take to walk up the theater, and oh, there's a detail I forgot to mention.
In my small town, I would know personally everyone in the theater.
Oh yeah, yeah.
I would personally know everyone in the entire theater because it was a small town.
And I was sitting up front and I stand up and I say to myself, I think I can make it To the back and the restrooms.
And I can hear the countdown in my head.
It's like eight, seven, six.
And I won't pantomime the whole thing.
But in the middle of a crowded theater, the event happened.
While I was trying to walk up the rest of the aisle in front of Everybody I knew in the town.
True story. Most embarrassing story.
I don't think I should have told that.
I'll probably delete this right after we're done.
Yeah, there was a Bond girl in the movie and it didn't help at all.
All right, I'm going to take some questions and see if anybody has any.
That note, that should scare everybody away.
All right, David, do you have a question?
David, do you have a question?
Okay. Nice to talk to you, Scott.
Thanks. I've been trying to get in on these questions for a long time, so this is really exciting.
Don't blow it. This is your chance.
It is. All right, make it good.
So you've talked a lot about...
Well, just recently you were talking about the narrative...
Where you decided to tell yourself the story that you just always win.
Correct. Right? So you could really, I guess, program yourself with any story, right?
So like, I grew up in a Christian household and then I stopped going to church and only recently started going again because I thought regardless of whether or not it's true, I thought it was just a powerful belief system for the human mind operating system.
Oh, what were you going to say?
Oh, nothing. Did you have a question?
I'm just wondering if you could...
I guess...
Can you do that, I guess, with any belief system?
Can you...
Yeah, I think so. My experience is that you can change filters.
I like using the word filter because that tells you that you can't really understand the true nature of the world, but you can put different filters on it for different purposes.
So yeah, people change religions.
People change belief systems.
I've changed my belief system a bunch of times.
So yeah, you can definitely do that.
Thank you. Like I can see where simulation theory, you know, be helpful there.
It's going to work out for you.
It looks like the simulation. Yeah, it's, you know, the simulation theory doesn't have to be true or false.
It just has to be a filter that's useful or not useful.
And one of the tricks that I use all the time is to imagine that I'm not my body.
But rather, I'm the little controller inside my head, and I'm inside a robot body.
It's amazing how often that works.
I used it today, actually.
It's a little technique to get you going when you're just feeling lazy, and you're like, okay, if I were a robot, could I lift my arm?
Oh, yeah. Look at that.
I could do that. And then the next thing you know, you're up and moving.
It's my little trick. All right.
Thank you for the question. Thank you.
Let's see. If you don't hit this just right, that tiny little X, it doesn't work.
All right. How about Charlie?
Charlie? Charlie, do you have a question?
I'm good. How are you?
Paul, the technique about I'm not my body is something I do all the time and I'm so happy that you said that because you know the pinky trick that you talk about?
Yes. I feel like it's part of that.
It's along the same lines and where your mind can control a very small piece of you and then eventually you realize that your body is just the means of existing in this world.
It may not necessarily be that your existence in this dimension and in this world is Part of it has to be your physical self, but you can control yourself from the mind, and you're not necessarily always your body.
Yeah, it's a fun mental exercise, because if you imagine that you were playing a video game, and let's say the video game was a little character, the one you're operating to fight somebody or whatever, if the character in that game had a problem in his world It wouldn't bother you, even though you're the one operating the little character.
And so it's the same trick where you say, well, what if I'm the character in the video game?
Or your body is the character.
So would it bother the little controller inside your head?
Would that little guy be bothered if there was something bothering your external body, short of actual physical pain?
Let's say your physical body got embarrassed about something.
Would it bother the little you on the inside that's just operating your body like a robot?
No. You're not even the same person.
There's just something that happened in the external world, but it didn't affect you.
You're the little mind inside the robot body.
It's a beautiful thing, and I wanted to ask you one more thing.
Do you think that it's possible to have a psychological placebo?
And the reason I ask it is because, could it be that even if the, like what they call the Trump pills, or whatever you want to call those hopeful medications or treatments, Do you think that it's possible that there could be a psychological placebo that he may have been really helping people out just by having hope, even if it doesn't work?
Well, I do think that it had a purpose, yes, very much.
So it allowed people like me.
It helped me think that there was some way to get past it.
Now, as other options developed, it was obvious that you didn't need that specific way to get by it.
There are probably several different paths from everything from testing the blood serum to, you know, vaccinations, whatever.
But when we didn't have any idea what to do about it, it was nice that you had a little, you know, hope to hold out.
Now, it's been increasingly clear for the last, I don't know, I'm not expecting good news from these tests, but part of the problem is that they're fake tests because they pretend to compare across different tests,
but the tests that I think are working are the ones where they pair the hydroxychloroquine with zinc and azithromycin.
Whereas other tests don't pair it with zinc.
And since that is the presumed way that it works, you know, with the zinc, I'm not sure that the new tests are telling you what you think they're saying.
So I don't trust him.
But, so I'd say there's maybe a 40% chance the hydroxychloroquine works at best.
40% chance.
I think that the hopefulness might have worked, though.
Like, I myself was in the same...
I live in New York, and I was on the same page.
I was like, I hear so many deaths happening, and you just want to look for something positive.
And I feel like there was something good.
Whether works or not, there was some hope.
And I think that...
I don't know. All right.
So, thanks for the call.
To you, too. Thank you.
I just saw somebody in the comments ask me if I knew that there's a hotel in my hometown of Wyndham called Cuomo's Cave.
And I think I've actually stayed at it when I visited my parents.
I think I actually stayed at Cuomo's Cave.
Pretty sure I did. Alright, let's see who else has a question for me.
Let's go with Tom.
Tom? Tom, do you have a question for me?
Tom, do you have a question for me?
You can see it trying to load and then reload.
Can you hear me, Tom? Oh, yeah, Scott.
Can you hear me? Yes.
Do you have a question for me? Well, first of all, I just want to say thank you for devoting so much time to your audience for these periscopes.
They're terrific. I got to share a little bit about that empty slate with one of my kids who's going through college.
I told him your story about how you were leaving college and your slate was empty and it was an opportunity to move on.
I think a lot of us are going to find a time now where our slate's going to be a little bit more empty or we're going to get to reevaluate things.
Oh, we lost the connection.
It's too bad, because I like where that was going.
Yeah, you know, I think the number of innovations and inventions are just going to be nuts.
So there's definitely some good stuff coming, even with all the bad.
How about Perry Izakami?
That's an interesting name.
Perry? Perry, are you there?
I can hear you. Do you have a question for me?
Kind of. I wanted to comment on something that I used of yours just in the last 24 hours and to see if maybe you have a comment or something that can help me prevent getting to the point that I was at.
I talked to you before.
I'm a nurse. I'm a public health nurse, but I'm fine at nursing, but I get so much anxiety and Whatnot about the things that I'm not good at, right?
So I have built up a ton of...
I mean, I didn't sleep at all last night because I was worried about a meeting that I had to run in front of doctors that are...
And I wasn't prepared and I just kept thinking, oh my God, if I don't find this certain thing at my desk tomorrow morning, I'm not going to be able to put this meeting on.
And like I said, I didn't sleep all night and then finally on the way to work, I tuned you in and I really seriously considered, I have to put myself in my brain.
I am the master of organizing or working out how this is going to happen today.
This morning. And I delayed a meeting so that I could work on it.
I got to the office, found within four minutes, found what I needed to do.
I was like on auto drive when in the last few days has probably been the hardest few 48 hours of my family's life through this COVID thing.
It's been really tough with the I was a kid and I had tears and everything here at the house and it's like once I put my mind into that mindset that you explained where I am visualizing me just being a master of my body To just go through the motions.
I got so much shit done in only one hour.
I got about three hours of work done.
It looked awesome.
The meeting went off well.
And then after that, One thing after another, just constant demands of me, I lived up to by supervisors and the hub of all the COVID stuff that they'd call and say, and they were like, oh my gosh, you are just like Gumby, you could be pulled anywhere and you're being useful.
When I felt worthless, 24 hours ago, I was in tears.
I was in tears and didn't sleep all night.
So worried that they were going to see my failures, my insecurities that I know I'm not good at.
Isn't that an amazing little trick?
It just takes you right out of the fake world of anxiety.
You just imagine you're operating the robot and suddenly you're just getting stuff done.
But I knew that before.
I don't know why I keep falling into it and I'm so scared they're going to find out.
That I'm failing in this area in the computer.
You know, one of the most important things I ever learned, because when I first got into the workforce, I was surrounded by people who seemed to have all these skills that I had not yet developed, and so I felt just permanently ignorant and inferior, and I didn't know what all the buzzwords meant and stuff.
But it doesn't take long to figure out that most people are bluffing.
And that everybody's just sort of faking it.
And once you learn that everybody's faking it, at least a little bit.
I mean, at least in terms of how they present themselves.
Nobody is presenting a genuine view of their capability.
Once you realize that, and you also realize that the bar for good performance is not as high as maybe you think it is.
It's almost hard to fail in today's workplace.
As long as you put the work in and you have some amount of competence and you do a good try, it's hard to fail.
The longer that you try things and they work out fine, the more you can believe that.
Because now you've had the experience of, the more times you have the experience of you're sure it's not going to work out, and then an hour later you're like, oh, that went fine.
But at the same time, I'm going to embarrass myself to the extreme here, in front of my supervisor.
If I am not prepared, I used also your lesson about putting yourself in embarrassing situations and thought, then what?
What's the worst that can happen?
And I played it out.
And it totally calmed me down.
Yeah, the worst that could happen is you command ahead.
That's actually the worst that could happen.
Because in the real world, nobody says, you're fired because that PowerPoint slide was missing a bullet point.
It just doesn't happen in the real world.
In fact, it's the rarest thing in the world that anybody does any kind of a presentation And there's anything that happens other than compliments, even if it's not good.
I mean, people are just kind, so they say, oh, that's great.
Yeah, thank you. So there's not much to lose, and you learn that eventually.
Well, thank you. All right.
Well, congratulations, too.
Sounds like you're on the way to...
It's like a big level up.
It's like you won this level in the video game, and you get to advance to the next level.
So you might have a different challenge coming, but it sounds like you've got this one.
So time to advance to the next level.
And thanks for the call. Now, isn't that good to hear?
Let's see what Mike has to say.
Mike, hey, do you have a question for me, Mike?
Yes, I can. Go ahead.
So I got a question about the simulation.
Okay. So the idea is, I guess, so step one is I guess we have the neurons in our brains, right?
They work a certain way, so we're sort of deterministic machines, right?
Yeah, unless we're simulations.
Right, but in theory, if you were a scientist within the simulation, that's what you would find, right?
Yes. Okay. So then the simulation idea is like you would model something like that.
Like you would have like a computer model of these neurons.
They would be represented in code and then you would execute that.
And that deterministic information processing is what would produce our, I guess you could say consciousness?
Is that? Well, it depends what you call consciousness.
Well, that's kind of what I meant.
I could give you my opinion of what consciousness is, if you'd like.
So here's my definition.
It's sort of my own working definition.
I think consciousness is the process of predicting what's going to happen in the very next moment and then comparing it to what actually happens.
So if what you think is going to happen happens, such as if I hold this pen and drop it into my hand, What I think is going to happen is, oh, exactly that.
And when things happen exactly as you expect, they start to fade from your conscious mind because they don't matter, such as if you walk outside, you don't expect the trees to attack you, so you can just take them out of your consciousness.
Right. The things which, just let me finish this point, the things that become most Cause the most friction in your consciousness, if you call that, is when things don't work the way you wanted them to, and you're trying to figure out why and how to adjust.
So I think it's just that feedback system of trying things and comparing them to what you thought would happen in the moment.
And that's it.
That's consciousness. Okay.
Yeah. And then you can imagine, for example, I'll let you finish.
Let me finish this. We observe that animals seem to have different levels of consciousness.
And I think if you imagine an animal can't predict its own future very far, like a cat can basically see what's in front of it, a dog can maybe expect you to come home, but they can't really predict the future.
So I think that the better you can predict and visualize the future, The more you have the experience of consciousness.
So it's only our ability to predict that gives us consciousness.
Go ahead. What was your follow-up question?
Got it. Okay. Now I have like a couple things, but I don't want to waste everyone's time.
I guess I would say then, do you think a computer program then that makes a prediction and then evaluates that, does that feel something then?
Like I'm sort of thinking in this from like the, I guess you could say phenomenological standpoint, like the mind-body problem.
So if a computer software thinks it's real and thinks it felt something, did it feel something?
Well, ask yourself, if you think you're happy, are you happy?
So basically, if it's your internal description of what happened, that's probably good enough.
So I think a piece of software can internally describe itself as having certain qualities, and that's it.
All right. I appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott. All right.
Thanks for the call. Let's take another one.
Let's take Egg Master Flex.
No, I'm not going to take you because your name is weird, Egg Master Flex.
How about Nicholas? Nicholas, are you there?
Nicholas.
Nicholas, hey, do you have a question for me?
Go on Sam Harris's podcast again.
Well, of course, that's not up to the guests.
That's up to the hosts.
I'm generally...
You okay?
Yeah, it froze for a second there.
I think we're good now.
I would go on any podcast that was...
You know, big enough that I had a little bit of an audience and wanted to talk to me.
So, of course, I would go.
But it's never up to the guests.
And I think, to be fair, there are certain kind of guests that maybe wouldn't seem like repeat guests.
I might fall into that category.
But, yeah, I mean, I would do it if he asked.
And I'd also love to see you on the Portal, the Eric Weinstein's one.
Yeah, that... That would be interesting.
I'm not sure I can keep up with Eric, though.
He's operating at a different level, so half the time I can't keep up.
All right, thanks for the call.
Sounds like his computer was freezing up.
He sounded frustrated.
How about Julio?
Julio? Julio?
Come at me, Julio. Julio, are you there?
I can. I can.
What's your question? All right.
Greetings from a fan from Brazil.
Many of the books that you've written have changed my life in some ways.
Thank you for that. So, you have taught me with Win Bigly to fairly well predict the future in Brazilian politics so far.
If I were to believe this, what would you suggest that I do to start leveraging that somehow?
Well, nobody can really predict the future.
I've had some remarkable predictions, but I also don't have any reason to believe that the next five years I would have more remarkable predictions.
So it's one thing to be right, and it's a completely different thing to say you can reproduce it.
So, if you ask me, how can you make money with your new prediction ability, I would say, that's what people say right before they lose a lot of money.
So, believing that you can predict the future is the best way to lose money.
But, if you wanted to make sure you didn't, you'd diversify and have a diversified portfolio, etc.
Now, that said, we're all human and I often make small bets Based on the fact I think I can predict.
So my best advice is to make small bets and convince yourself you're really good at this and probably never make a big bet unless you can really afford to lose it.
So I wouldn't bet anything you couldn't afford to lose and I would experiment and see how well you do.
Now, one of the ways that I'm doing this is I signed up for Predict It, you know, the online betting service, so that I could actually have a record Because it keeps a running history of how good you are at predicting.
So, you know, do I have false memory?
Do I remember that I was better than I thought?
Or better than I remembered?
Whatever. And predict it does that for you.
So, if you think you can see the future, You might actually be able to do it, but you can test it and predict it.
When I say see the future, I mean just you have better tools to predict where things are likely to head.
So it's more about likely.
It's not like a photograph of the future.
Did that help? Oh, I lost them.
All right. That's all for tonight.
I'm gonna go eat some dinner.
You're gonna go have a great night's sleep.
I mean, really great.
If you haven't tried that trick of imagining you're the little operator inside the robot body, you really have to try it.
It's a strong frame.
And I will talk to you in the morning.
We'll have some fun then.
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