All Episodes
Previous Next
May 18, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
36:43
Episode 981 Scott Adams: A Glimpse of the Coming #GoldenAge For the Economy and Humans Too
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, it's time.
It's time for No Coffee with Scott Adams because it's too late at night.
But it is time to find out more about the Golden Age.
The Golden Age is coming. Yeah, it turns out that this coronavirus was like the third act It's the thing we had to get past.
And I'll lay it down for you in a moment.
We're going to keep the theme alive that, at least for the rest of Sunday, we're going to have positive thoughts.
All positive thoughts.
Are they real? Are they realistic?
Doesn't matter. For today, we're going to wrap ourselves in a cocoon of positive thoughts.
And I've got a whiteboard to take it home.
How would you like to see the whiteboard?
Alright, here's the setup.
The setup is this.
For all of the time that I have been alive, things have been based on basically something that evolved from, I don't know, the 30s?
The house that many people live in, if you live in a house type of a structure, was probably designed, I don't know, how much different is it than a hundred years ago?
But our lives have changed completely.
So we're living in a world that was designed for other people.
It's a big thought.
We are living in a world designed for other people.
People who are not alive anymore.
Our design ideas of what a house is, how we live, what a community is, what a city is, what a street is, what a school is.
That is a system and a bunch of systems that work together that were designed for other people.
We don't live like those people.
We're not those people. Those people died decades ago.
But what was preventing us from building something for us?
Why were we putting up with these incremental little tweaks to somebody else's civilization that we just happen to be living in?
Well, we put up with it because it's hard to change things.
Things have an inertia, they just keep on going.
It's hard to change anything.
But also our minds were not in that place.
Because did you know you were living in somebody else's world?
Did you ever once have that thought?
Did you get up in the morning and look around and say, you know, everything I'm going to experience today was designed for somebody who died a hundred years ago.
The road was there, maybe cars weren't there, but basically you're living in somebody else's world.
And the coronavirus just changed that.
Because one of the things that the coronavirus did...
That I think will be the least appreciated effect is that it changed how we think about everything.
When you had to rethink everything from scratch, how do I go to school?
How do I commute? How do I work?
How do I even interact with my own family?
When you have to start from scratch and rethink everything, suddenly it becomes clear to you that you are living in someone else's world.
Completely. And you had bought into it like that was okay.
It was sort of like, you know, some animal takes over another animal's den and just moves in, but they're not really an animal that lives in the den.
You know, it would be like being a, let's say, a tiger that climbs a tree and sees a bird nest there, and then goes and lives in the bird nest.
Tigers don't belong in birds' nests.
They don't fit. But if the tiger was, let's say, asleep in its mind, you know, just didn't know much about its reality, it might say, well, I guess tigers live in a bird's nest now.
It wouldn't know the difference.
And that's the world that you've been living in your entire life.
You've been a tiger in a bird's nest, and until the coronavirus, you thought maybe that was okay, because it was just what you were used to.
So, now having been forced to rethink everything, So, once again, somebody's confused about analogies.
Let me pause to clean this up.
No, I've never said analogies are worthless.
They're worthless for persuasion, specifically.
They're great for describing a new concept, which is the way I just used it.
If I go to persuade you, and I try to persuade you with an analogy, watch how it doesn't work.
That's the lesson. It won't work.
You can see it for yourself.
If I ever try, it's not going to persuade you.
I promise. But as an explanation of something new, they're great.
Alright, here's what's going to change.
Guaranteed. We are living in the legacy systems.
All of our systems are legacy, meaning it's something built for a prior time.
Here's the way this can get fixed.
And this is the way you would design anything if you knew how to design.
So you wouldn't...
Whoever said, change my world, baby.
You made me laugh. So the way you would design anything if you really knew how to design things is that first you would live with a family.
You would actually embed yourself with a variety of different families.
And you would actually watch what they do during the day because you're going to try to ultimately design a new place for them to live with new systems from scratch.
So first you see what they actually do.
And let's say you see one of the parents comes down.
Let's say it's mom. Mom comes down.
She starts to leave the door and she forgot her keys.
So she's got to walk all the way upstairs again.
She gets her keys. She comes all the way back down and she forgot her wallet.
She has to go all the way upstairs again, get her wallet, come all the way back down.
Now you're the observer, and you're saying, okay, what's wrong with this system?
Okay, how about if we're going to design a community from scratch, how about you never need keys?
How about it's just biometrics?
So you don't have to ever go back and get your keys.
How about if we don't have physical money and credit cards?
What if it's just also biometrics, or it could be...
It just could be your phone.
So what if you just get rid of all those things that made mom annoyed for those five minutes?
And then you keep watching, and it's everything from the way they do homework.
So let's say the kids are home, and there's no place to do homework, and they're laying on their beds doing homework.
Now, a lot of kids like to do their homework on the bed, but it's the worst place to do it.
You should be sitting up properly, and you should have a table, and you should have a proper light away from the other noise.
So the researcher says, hmm, couldn't do homework.
But even more, maybe why go to school at all?
Maybe there should be one or two places, spaces in the home, in which you've got a big enough screen and some headphones, and a kid or two could take classes.
And it's actually optimized as a room for learning.
That's just what it does.
It's not a TV room.
It's a learning room.
Now these are just ideas.
The point is, That if you don't start your process by actually spending time and recording what people do, how could you possibly design a better system?
Now, do you think that home builders do this?
Do you think that there's a major home builder who's studying things from the bottom up to build a perfect house?
I don't think so.
Here's what I think a home builder does.
I think a home builder says, what sold well last time?
What are our competitors selling that is selling well for them?
And then I think they build the house that they know how to build, because, you know, that's important.
You don't want to take five years figuring out how to build the house.
You want to build the house you know how to build that's very similar to the ones that people are buying.
Try a little something, see if anybody buys more of those, test your way through it.
But I'll tell you what they're not doing.
They're not starting from scratch.
To ask, how do people live in 2020 and beyond?
But they could. So let's say that you've done that and now you know how people live and what a proper house needs to have.
Next would be what I'll call ideal room designs.
Why do we have a million different looks for every room?
Because I guarantee you that there are some room designs that are close to universally right And some that just aren't as good.
Why don't we standardize on some rooms, you know, standard bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, etc., living room, that can be easily furnished.
But here's the thing.
Everything from the light to the colors to the textures to how easy it is to maintain it and everything, you consider all of these things and then you make each room like it's a separate product.
Alright, so a bedroom Would be a product.
And if you wanted to live in a home, you could say, I'll buy three bedrooms.
And then you could put them together in an arrangement, maybe not an infinitely different arrangement, but a few set structures.
So you'd have perfect rooms, and then you'd get your systems engineers involved to not just design a home, because that's what we've done before.
If all you're doing is designing a home, And you plop it in the middle of other homes that were also designed just to be homes.
You haven't really designed the system.
So you need your systems engineers to come in and say, okay, what's the ideal size for a community?
Won't make it too big, won't make it too small.
What are we going to do about energy?
How are we going to make this thing green?
What's the best engineering for that?
Should we put it around a generation 4 nuclear power plant?
How do we do this?
You probably want to have your own banking.
Is there any reason a new community built from scratch couldn't just have an automatic digital bank and just everybody has that bank?
They could have other banks too, but if you're living in the community, the homeowners association or the town or whatever just has some software And it's your bank.
So it's just a software bank.
Maybe you'd have software insurance too, and you might have software that's sort of the backbone of this whole thing, you know, running it.
You'd have to make sure that you had the right kind of transportation.
I'll just throw out some wild ideas.
If you were going to build a community today from scratch, would you build each home so it could accommodate a drone landing on the roof?
Maybe the drone is just delivering small packages and stuff.
But would you consider that in your original design that probably drones will be delivering small stuff so you don't have to drive to the store?
Maybe so. Maybe you'd have underground walkways, underground transportation.
But anyway, the engineers would figure that out as well as everything from health care to security and figuring out what kind of nature to put around it.
Now, I'm going to start I'm going to start deleting anybody, I'm going to block anybody who mentions communism or socialism.
Because there's nothing in anything you're going to see that is even remotely like that.
So if anybody starts saying, that's communism, you're taking my freedom or whatever, I'm just going to block you because you're not ready for this.
Alright, so those are the first three.
Phases. All very doable, I think you can see.
And then here's the fun part.
Start building home kits.
Should be Lego-like, meaning that you can snap them together.
Should be so easy that you could hire your Uber driver to assemble your house for you.
Now, not specifically an Uber driver, but the point is unskilled labor.
Should be able to take these blocks and say, oh, here's the directions, here's the YouTube video for today's work.
This block goes, okay, there's only one place I can go.
Boom. No cutting would be involved.
No cutting. No sawing.
No resizing. Everything would be the right size because, let's say, the floor panels are all squares.
So you might have different size rooms depending on your needs, but they would always be true to the one foot square.
So you never have to cut them.
You just add another square or not, but you never have to cut anything.
You'd make it low maintenance and you'd make it one level because you could assemble one level more easily.
Now, I don't know how exactly you would do the foundation part to make sure that it's got everything it needs, but I think engineers could figure that out.
And even the plumbing and the electrical could be just different components where you say, oh, okay, I need some electrical here, so you snap on a different kind of So, that would be the basic idea.
Now, you wouldn't build it yourself, necessarily.
Like I said, it could be built by unskilled laborers, so you could have your landscaper take the weekend and help you or whatever.
So you wouldn't have to do it yourself.
Then, once you've got some kits, you find some places to test them.
It could be in a brand new location.
It could be where some urban blight has been cleared, a la Bill Pulte, you know, the Blight Authority.
You've heard of this, where large swaths of broken down, you know, stuff in the inner cities has been removed and it's just available.
Why not try something there?
You'd probably have to relax the codes, and I think the coronavirus helps us there, too.
Because if you relax some of the building codes, you could do a lot more, obviously.
And I think that we saw so many codes and regulations being relaxed during the coronavirus that we just sort of feel like that's a thing now.
It didn't feel like it was a thing before, right, to get rid of any red tape?
But now we just got rid of massive amounts of red tape and had to, and we all lived through it.
And now your mind is a little primed, and you're thinking, well, why don't I get rid of some more red tape?
That worked out pretty well.
So there is something about being in the right time and the right place, which is happening right now, I think.
And then we should also think about the design of the communities in terms of who lives there, which might be more important to your overall happiness than anything else.
Let me give you a provocative thought that I had today that's going to blow your mind.
You ready? This might be the one thing you remember out of this periscope.
I promise it will make your brain hurt.
Here it is. Do you think that drug addicts Have a drug problem?
Or do they have some kind of a self-control problem?
You probably think it's one of those, right?
It's either a drug problem, as some people would say, or it's about the individual.
There's something they need to fix for themselves.
Those are probably the two ways that people look at it, or a combination of the two things.
Let me give you a new frame.
Drug addicts Are allergic to other people who are not drug addicts.
The danger for a drug addict is the other people.
Because who brings drugs into a place where addicts would otherwise be by themselves?
Not addicts.
Well, let me say it in a cleaner place.
Obviously an addict sometimes gets drugs.
The point is this.
If you had a city or a community that was nothing but addicts, who would build a liquor store there?
Nobody. Because you couldn't make any money.
So if a world was only addicts and there were no non-addicts, the addicts themselves would have no problem.
Because they wouldn't be, you know, they wouldn't Be building their own liquor store.
There would be no place to buy it because the only people who buy it, or should be buying it, are the other people.
So if you think about it, the weird situation of addicts is that they need to be away from regular people.
At least until they've got things under control.
So if you built a place where it was only addicts, they wouldn't have the problem of dealing with regular people and their And there are liquor stores and their ways.
Now you might also build communities for families or seniors or singles.
There might be a variety of ways to do it, maybe some mixed use.
You could see some situations where, you've already seen this, where some college-age students are living with senior citizens because it's really a good combo.
The young person can help them with some stuff.
The old person has a nice house, but it's sort of empty.
So we're already seeing that.
That's a trend. Maybe you could build a community with that taken into consideration.
Alright, so here's the bottom line.
Everything about our legacy lifestyle, from school to how we live to how we eat, everything, is now under question.
And I think that people are going to get real serious about designing from scratch.
And you can imagine the magnitude of this kind of a change.
Because the thing that we don't get right with housing is we don't really build it to the person.
And the person, well, let me show you this while I'm talking about it.
So the golden age is going to come because we're going to have super low interest rates, which is real good for construction.
All of our assumptions about how we live has changed because of the coronavirus.
There's this entrepreneurial gigantic wave that's coming Largely because everybody had to rethink all their assumptions.
And suddenly they said, maybe working for that old boss that just fired me is not a safe job anymore.
So I think you're going to see just a huge wave of entrepreneurial action.
But most importantly, I think we're going to learn that our happiness as creatures in this universe...
Depends very much on programming our bodies and our brains with our environment.
And what I mean by that is, if you can build a low-cost situation which is designed well, but allows you to get your vitamin D, because the need for sunshine is built into it, it allows you to get your quiet time, because we need that.
It allows you to sleep well with darkened rooms that aren't too loud.
If it allows you to be safe, let's say it's got really good security.
If it allows you to be less bothered, less anxious, less stressed, every one of these things are things which your physical surroundings can control.
They can control you with color, sound, the availability of good food, good nutrition, and just the impact it has on your wallet.
Every one of these things programs you.
If you want to be happy, you first have to understand that you're being programmed by your environment, and then the second thing you need to do is learn to program your environment So it programs you.
That's the part that's missing.
And we're so close to unlocking the golden age by realizing it.
So let me say it again.
If you're just letting the environment program you, you're just taking it as it comes, you're just living in somebody else's world, which is what we've been doing, a world that was designed for people in the 30s who have long since died.
But if you want to take part into something amazing, you have to realize the simple truth about the world.
You can change your environment, and if you do it right, it programs you the way you want it.
That's the interface.
Change your environment, and then it programs you.
The simple example is...
Let's say you weren't getting enough vitamin D. Whatever you think that does for you, science is pretty adamant that that's a big deal.
So you build a community where your physical surroundings will just accidentally give it to you.
Let's say you know that taking a nice walk in the outdoors every day Makes you feel better.
By the way, have you tried this?
A lot of you have been taking walks since the coronavirus started.
Have you noticed how much better you feel when you take a long walk?
Right? I mean, you can really feel the difference.
And it's because you've used your external environment to reprogram yourself internally.
Now, once you learn that that's sort of the key to life, changing your externalities to reprogram yourself, Then the golden age is unlocked.
And you get to go to the next level.
So we will be, I believe, in a wave of innovation to reprogram our environment so that when you sit down, you're sitting in a good place.
It's not giving you germs.
It's not making you unhealthy.
It's not stressing you.
We will figure out how to build a civilization that That for the first time, the first time was designed for you.
That's the golden age, my friends.
So that's what's coming.
Want to hear some other fun stuff?
I know you do.
So, as we're watching...
Yeah, somebody's saying UV light, exactly.
You probably would want to put some UV light into your home of the future, get those viruses right out of there.
That's just one example.
Alright, so you know how we're not trusting any information about the coronavirus?
It seems as though everything you find out turns out to be wrong later, and now there's some question about asymptomatic shedding.
Apparently, we don't exactly know that asymptomatic shedding is a real thing.
Apparently, we're just kind of sure it might be.
Now, that's a pretty big deal.
It's a pretty big deal.
Wouldn't it be nice to know that?
The other thing that apparently we don't know for sure, and I think I told you the other day, Ann Coulter was all over this.
So apparently we don't know that that virus came from the Wuhan lab, according to Mike Pompeo recently.
I guess he went from really darn sure we got plenty of evidence that virus came from the lab, all the way to we don't really know where it came from.
That's a pretty big distance, isn't it?
From, yeah, it came from that lab to, yeah, to be honest, we have no idea.
No idea. Pretty big difference.
The Chinese ambassador to Israel, who was newly assigned, was just found dead in his home.
How often do Chinese ambassadors die at home?
Does that seem a little sketch to you?
Is there any part of you that says, Chinese ambassador dies at home in Israel?
Maybe? Maybe?
Okay. So I was wondering today how many intelligence agencies are watching me?
And I'm pretty sure the United States keeps an eye on me.
And I know of a few others that I'm pretty darn sure are keeping an eye on me.
But I was wondering, what would be the criteria for some intelligence agency in another country to keep an eye on you?
Now, obviously, if you're in politics or the military, that would be obvious.
But don't you think that they probably watch at least some people who are not politicians or in the military just because they think there might be something they can learn there?
And I'm wondering, how could anybody watch American politics and watch it closely enough so they know who all the players are?
If anybody watched me for the last few years, don't you think they would have intelligence assets watching me by now?
Just to figure out what the hell I'm doing.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know what the odds of that are.
My guess, just based on things I've seen and heard, is maybe four of them that I know of.
But I'm just guessing.
So Jake Tapper was talking about President Trump's, quote, unprecedented smear campaign.
So he was talking about how, I guess Don Jr.
made some kind of a joke on Twitter about pedophilia and Joe Biden.
Now, of course, Joe Biden has never been accused of that, and Don Jr.
immediately said, duh, you should be able to tell like it was a joke.
So it's not any kind of a serious accusation.
I know what you're thinking. He sniffs hair, but that's different.
So the two examples were That President Trump accused a TV news person of possibly murder.
And I thought, because he didn't name who the person was, Jake didn't, and I thought to myself, Did Trump accuse a news host person of murder?
And I thought, oh yeah, Joe Scarborough.
He didn't actually say Joe Scarborough may have murdered somebody, but there was this issue of a dead body in the office or something in the past.
And Trump did suggest...
That there's maybe a story here.
He didn't say...
He didn't say directly that Scarborough was a murderer.
So here's what's so funny.
CNN has just been running one hoax after another for the last four years, I guess.
Everything from the fine people hoax to the Russia collusion hoax to the drinking bleach hoax, the Ukraine hoax.
There's one hoax after another.
And then when the Trumps turn it round, and they're like, well, okay, after four years, the thing we've learned after four years is there's no limit to what you can say about the other team.
There's no limit.
If you look at what they've been saying about Trump for four years, you'd have to say, where's the limit?
There's no limit.
You could just make up anything now.
Anything. Oh yeah, he works for Putin.
Okay. Oh yeah, he's been spending time with children.
Alright. Let's just put that out there.
See if anybody believes that.
So, what's hilarious about this is that anybody can complain about the other side making stuff up.
We are so past The point where it means anything to complain that somebody is making stuff up.
Because it's just all made up.
It's all made up. Anyway, that was fun.
And my last page of notes doesn't have anything on it, so there's that.
Somebody says birtherism started it.
Well, did it?
Because I don't know.
Birtherism... Did it?
I don't know. Well, thank you.
Somebody says they enjoyed this tonight.
I hope it did put you in a better mood.
Somebody says, Joe is not the nominee.
It'll be Harris and Obama with Obama as Vice President.
I don't think so.
No, I don't think so.
Who put Greta on the Corona panel and why?
Well, wasn't it CNN's panel?
And why is apparently she's interesting?
You know the trick of doing something a little bit wrong intentionally?
When CNN put Greta Thunberg on the coronavirus panel, do you think CNN was just dumb And they're like, oh, she's an expert.
We'll put her on the panel. Nobody will know the difference.
Or do you think they were smart because they knew it was just a little bit wrong and it was going to draw people in?
I'm going to go with smart.
And obviously I have plenty of credentials of criticizing people when I think they're not, in the media especially.
I'm going to say that the Greta Thunberg thing, if I'm being consistent with my ongoing theme, which is I will separate the technique from whether it's morally or ethically appropriate, because that's your decision.
I'm not going to tell you it's morally or ethically appropriate.
Who am I? I'm not your pope.
So you can work on the moral-ethical stuff yourself.
It doesn't mean I'm ignoring them.
It just means that I'll make my decision, you make your decision on that.
But if we're just talking about technique, was it good technique for CNN to put Greta Thunberg on a panel where it doesn't quite make sense why she's there?
And the answer is, yeah, absolutely.
Don't you think that she got more eyeballs because of that?
I'm sure she did. I'm sure they did.
So I would call that a success.
I'm not going to mock CNN every time they do something that works.
If it works, it works.
Somebody says it's only a little bit wrong.
Well, yeah. Actually, I think it is a little bit wrong.
Let me do something that I know you all hate.
I have the same opinion, Greta, as I do some of the celebrities who weigh in on politics.
If they're just a tourist, and it's just some celebrity or something, and they're just coming in to say something and go back to their life, I don't have a lot of respect for that.
Although everybody gets to say their piece, so I don't disrespect it.
It's sort of a nothing.
But for those people who actually commit, and Greta is one of those people.
She's committed.
I can disagree with everything she says and still respect it.
Because there's a degree of commitment there that is more important than being right, in my opinion.
Because it's a big world and we all have different opinions.
I don't know which ones are right.
How do I know?
If we've just watched a year of all the experts being wrong about everything, what do I know?
So being right maybe is a goal too far.
But certainly being interesting matters.
Getting people to engage on it matters.
And I would say that Greta has...
I think she earned her place on the panel.
I'm going to say that.
Because no matter what you think about her anything, her scientific knowledge or anything, no matter what you think of anything, she is committed, she's passionate, she brings an audience, she represents a generation that's going to be impacted by this, and I think her opinions might actually be newsworthy.
So, you know, maybe you didn't expect me to go full pro-Greta, which is completely different from agreeing on what she wants to do with stuff, but I absolutely welcome her voice, as well as anybody on the other side who's got an opposing opinion, so long as they mean well and they're passionate and they're willing to duke you down in public and try to make the world a better place somehow.
So that's all.
Yes, I know some of you are rubbed the wrong way by her.
But there's plenty to like.
And today we're just going to do optimism.
Somebody says, you lost me.
She's a tool.
Well, people don't like it when I don't go after people.
Have you noticed I don't usually go after people?
That's very intentional.
Because I think going after people is maybe the lowest level of politics.
I'm sure there's something lower than that.
There are lots of times when you want to go after the person.
And for me, if the person means well, I won't take that.
So if somebody means well and they're putting in the work, I'm good with them.
Every time. So that's my rule.
You can have a different rule. Alright, that's all I've got for today.
And I will see you in the morning.
And we'll have more good fun then.
Hope you enjoyed it today.
▲
Export Selection