Episode 206 Scott Adams: Music as a Drug, My Immortality, BLM’s Bad Strategy, PragerU, Monkeying Up
Date: 2018-09-03 | Duration: 50:20
Topics
Music is mental programming President Trump’s business approach vs. the political approach McCain 2013 tweet calling Iran leader a monkey PragerU traffic loss caused by a single Facebook employee “Monkey up” is listed in an MIT hacker’s guide from the 1990s Whiteboard discussion: Success Strategies The damage being inflicted on the black community by the fake news MSM Ryan Gosling movie omits American flag being placed on the moon
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## Transcript
## [Simultaneous Sip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=5s)
Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. Do you know what that means? I think you do. It means you've all got to get in here, scramble to find your beverage, your cup, your mug, your vessel of liquids. It's time when we have a thousand users for the simultaneous sip. Watch that counter. As soon as it hits a thousand—oh, that was good. Simultaneous sipping.
If you've been watching my Twitter feed this morning, I know what you want to talk about. You want to talk about a tweet about music which I retweeted this morning from Alexander J.A. Cortes, who said: "Music is mental programming. Do not ever discount its power. It changes your psyche on a deep level."
## [Music as Mental Programming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=68s)
I retweeted that with my own comment and I said this is why I don't listen to music, literally. Now, when I say I don't listen to music literally, the pedantic people say, "Well, literally you don't listen to music?" I hear music incidentally because it's always in the environment—other people are playing it or it's on in the gym. But I don't make a practice of injecting myself with music on a regular basis. The reason is that music is designed to move you. Bad music probably doesn't, but mostly the music you listen to is stuff that made it to the top: the best people making the best music with the best production. It is designed to move your brain to put it in a mode.
If you use music medicinally, that's probably fine. In other words, if you have a playlist you use at the gym or when you're exercising, and the playlist gets your energy up and that helps you exercise, I would say that's a medicinal use of music. It's probably fine, especially if you're not paying attention to the lyrics too much.
But most music we listen to just because we like it. If you just like it, you're letting in all of the thoughts and the lyrics and the emotions of the author, and they may not be linked up with what it is you need to get done. How many people have you seen listening to music while trying to work, or kids listening to music while they're trying to do their homework? If you've ever tried to talk a kid out of their headphones while they're doing homework—this is more of a modern problem—you can't talk them down. You would almost have to physically beat a child to take music away from them in today's day and age because of the addiction.
Can you listen to music which has lyrics and is moving your brain and also concentrate and do a good job on your schoolwork or your job? Plenty of people are going to tell you yes because they like doing it. I'm not arguing that people like it; that's why they do it. I'm arguing that it's a drug. People can go to work when they're drunk; it happens all the time. People can do their job when they're drunk. I just don't recommend it.
The trouble with music as programming is that you can't always control it. There are certainly cases where you can use music medicinally to match the music to the mood you're trying to produce, and then you would be programming yourself to some productive place. But if you're just listening to music, you're taking it like a drug whether it's a good time to take it or not. You're taking it whether this song matches your mood or not. If the music takes you into an angry place when you shouldn't be angry, that's the worst use of music, and it's the common way we listen to it. We listen to just the songs we like and they're randomly going to influence you.
## [The Path to Immortality](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=318s)
You may have seen that I retweeted a story about a company that is already reproducing simulations of dead people. They can take photographs of people, mash them up, and create a 3D rotating object. I think other companies can have a CGI character speak in exactly the tone and voice of a real person. So now we have the voice and the look, and they're feeding off of information that's available on the internet about these dead people.
When I tell you that my legitimate, honest, not exaggerating one bit plan for many years has been to live long enough and seed the internet with enough of myself that I could be immortal—meaning that I will be recreated easily and I'll have something pretty close to a full personality because of the body of my work that's all public. If you were to look at all of the books I've written, the blogs I've written, the Periscopes I've done, at some point some AI can just go out and scrape all that stuff and put it together. You would have a pretty good picture of who I was, at least on average.
The problem, of course, is that people are not the same people that they were. I'm not the same as I was when I was twenty. I don't want that part to be immortal. I want something closer to my 60-year-old mind to be the permanent one because that's when you've learned the most. Pretty soon my mental processes predictably should decline, at least in my organic state, so I'd like to lock in whatever happens in the next few years for me.
## [Consciousness and Simulations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=441s)
Some people have said you can't reproduce consciousness, so even if you were reproduced, your consciousness wouldn't go with you. Here's my argument to that: every part of my current physical organic body is different from the cells I was born with. If my body has already been 100% replaced with a different body—and that's just objectively true, all of my cells have been replaced since birth—I still have the same consciousness, don't I? It seems that consciousness can change from one physical form to another because it already did.
Other people say, "Oh, but that's organic to organic and it's all based on your DNA." Some people say that a simulation cannot have consciousness. Do you have consciousness right now? Here's my argument for why a simulation can have consciousness: because you are one.
When I say you are one, do I mean that with 100% certainty? No. I mean it with 99.999999% certainty. If a simulation is possible, lots of them will be created. The odds of you being an original species versus one of the many simulations created by that species is vanishingly small. You don't have to ask yourself can consciousness exist in a simulation because it's you. In all likelihood, you are a simulation. Do you have consciousness? Sure you do; it's the impression you have of yourself. Could you create another simulation that believed and acted as though it had consciousness? Absolutely. In my opinion, that won't even be hard. Might take 20 or 30 years, but it's not the hard part of the deal.
Somebody brought up the thought experiment of the Star Trek transporter. If you were to create a transporter, would it destroy the original and only create a copy? What would that feel like? The person who was destroyed would end consciousness. Suddenly, at the other end of the transporter, a copy of you would wake up with full consciousness and all of your memories. Would it still be you? I say yes because, as I said, even the adult you is all new cells from the time you were born. If you could just speed up that process and create a "new you" more instantly, it would be all new cells but still based on your DNA and still has your memories. I say that's consciousness. No problem.
## [Trump’s Business Approach to Iran](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=689s)
I hear that Japan has discontinued buying oil from Iran, or they're in the process of doing that. Japan was apparently a pretty big customer. Does it seem to you that our president is very quiet about Iran? Doesn't it feel as though President Trump is unusually quiet about Iran? He is unusually quiet because everything is going his way.
I've never seen the variables line up the way they're lining up now. I'm not saying that's all because of President Trump; some of it is timing and luck. But even if you're in the right place at the right time, you still have to do the right things. It seems to me that the president's approach here is all business.
How is a businessperson being president different from a politician being president? Somebody just surfaced a 2013 tweet from Senator John McCain in which he was mocking one of the Iranian leaders for saying they wanted to put an Iranian in space. McCain actually joked that we've already put a monkey in space. Think about that. McCain, who was a politician, was trying to get a good result with Iran—because why would you want a bad result?—and he tweeted comparing the leader of Iran with an actual monkey.
In business, the political model is that if you have problems with another country, you treat their leaders like they're despicable. That's the typical political way to approach things: "Your leaders are bad people and we hate you and we're going to let you know we hate you." Now move to the business world. If IBM wants to do a deal with Facebook, IBM does not call Zuckerberg a monkey. Business people don't act that way. They can hate the other company, but if they need to do business with them, they're going to be polite. You're going to get the business done because that's the bigger issue.
Take President Trump's approach to North Korea. He's being a businessman: tough on sanctions, but he's saying, "Personally, Kim Jong-un and I get along. I think he's a good leader, but we need to get this business taken care of." How productive is that compared to insulting him?
What is President Trump's approach with Russia? All business. "Hey Putin, I like you personally. I think we could do business with him, but we're going to have to sanction you for some of these things you did." It’s just business; it's not personal. What is he doing with Iran? He's saying the situation with Iran is destabilizing, they're supporting terrorists, and we'd like to be friends someday. Is he insulting Iran? No.
When Japan says they're going to stop shipments from Iran, and the European countries say it's a little risky because the United States is mucking up the business here, it seems to me an insanely productive, smart approach. Take all of the emotion out of the Iranian situation and say: "Look, it's just business. If the Iranians want to do business, you've got to meet the minimum standard of people we can do business with, but it's not about you personally." We love the Iranian people. I think the Iranian people are far more pro-Western than the leadership is. It's an amazing approach, but it's all depersonalized. Look for what is missing, and what's missing is all the personal stuff and the threats.
## [PragerU and the Facebook "Error"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=1120s)
There's a story you probably know about PragerU. Apparently, their traffic got eliminated on Facebook, and it took them a while to figure out why. When they got to the bottom of it, Facebook said, "Oops, it was a mistake by one person who made a judgment call and that person was just wrong." In the meantime, they reinstalled the page.
I'm always okay with people correcting errors. If you're going to judge people—and judging people is risky business—I try not to judge people by their mistakes. I try to judge them by their response to the mistake. If you judge people by their mistakes, you would just hate everybody because we're all making mistakes all the time. But the way people correct their mistakes—whether they apologize, whether they come up with a new plan—is a lot more revealing about who they are.
Facebook has acknowledged the error, they have apologized, and they've done something specific to fix it. So far, Facebook: thumbs up. Admitting the problem, apologizing, and saying what you're doing about it—that's it, 100%. I have no complaints about how it was handled. But the question you have to ask yourself is: how often does it happen to left-leaning sites? I don't know if it has ever happened to a site that was just left-leaning but hadn't broken any rules. That problem has to be addressed. I'm going to give Facebook an A+ for how they handled the mistake, but we still have that question of why it seems to happen in one area more than others.
## [The Origin of "Monkeying Up"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=1367s)
Tim Pool tweeted today a copy of an MIT book, *The New Hacker's Dictionary* from 1990. He actually found the phrase "monkey up" as one of the many phrases in there. He has demonstrated for those who were wondering that it is a real saying. A lot of people said, "Why is DeSantis saying 'monkey up'?" But apparently "monkey up" is a thing, and in the '90s it was already written down as common enough that it was in a book.
When I heard "monkey up," I thought it was a mashup of "monkeying around" and "mucking up." To me, saying "monkey up" when you've got "muck up" and "monkeying around" just sounds like you mashed them together and anybody would know what you meant. It would be a perfectly acceptable mashup.
## [Whiteboard: Success Strategy and BLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=1490s)
I'm going to take you to the whiteboard. This is life strategy. I have simplified the world just for the point of making a point. Obviously, there are more people in the world, but I'm simplifying to make this easier to talk about.
If you were to imagine the world has a lot of Republicans, everybody would agree there are some people who identify as Republicans who are definitely racists—the bad kind of racists. Nobody would argue that point. If you are a Republican, you probably say it's a tiny percentage. If you're black, you're probably thinking it's a bigger mess because they support people like President Trump.
Can anybody succeed without any help? Is it possible to succeed in this world completely by yourself? Not really. Success is close to 100% dependent on other people being part of your journey: people to give you advice, hire you, or recommend you.
Now, let's say you're Black Lives Matter and you've decided to brand this side—who happen to have most of the power at the moment—as all racists. Are these people now available to help you on your journey? I don't think so. You took them off the table. Now, if you're black and you want to succeed in life, your pool of people who can help you is limited to other people who think like you. The reason there is such a thing as Black Lives Matter is because that pool doesn't have the power, connections, or money yet to be as helpful as this larger group.
You could be totally right about your opinion or totally wrong, and that has nothing to do with my point. If you want to succeed, treating all of these people like racists is the very worst thing you could do. Back in 1979, getting out of college, I had to deal with these same people: white people who had power and connections. Did I love all of them? Some of them I liked, but most of them I didn't. They had views I found abhorrent. They were jerks to me. They treated me like dirt.
How often does a young white male get treated like garbage by the people in their own group who have already succeeded? Pretty typical. I'm not going to say it's comparable to racism, but what I'm telling you is you suck up a lot of unpleasantness for success. You don't get to success unless you eat a mile of it from these people because these people have what you need.
I noticed many of you were having the same reaction I was having to Hawk Newsome, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter in New York. He was changing his approach to paint Trump supporters as racist. Most of us felt like our guts were falling out of our stomachs because many of us were quite serious about saying, "If you come over here, we've got stuff you need and we want to help." But Hawk took that off the table.
Honestly, it was heartbreaking. I saw such an opportunity that was lost. Who do you blame? I'm not ready to blame him because opinions are a result of our environment. Most of us are getting everything we know from news sources like CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. The black community is not watching a lot of Fox News. Can you blame somebody for absorbing this and saying, "Holy hell, these people are so bad I don't even want to talk to them"? It's a natural reaction.
I blame these media guys because their business model is based on getting people worked up. Their business model guarantees they'll look for a conflict because that's where the clicks are. We have this situation where the black community is locked out of the most fruitful path for success, which is to take advantage of the resources and connections that help white people. The black community has locked itself out because these media guys have told them to do it. This is the programming that is absolutely decimating the black community.
How hard would it be for the black community to say, "We've got a new president, let's keep an open mind. Here is a prison reform package. Let's work with the people who have the authority"? They can't because they can't even be in the same room with them. If the President invited a leader of Black Lives Matter to the White House, that leader would be excommunicated. You saw that pushback with Kanye just having a conversation with the president. The average person is locked in this little prison thanks to their jailers—the media.
## [The Persuasion of Black Lives Matter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=2350s)
Let me add some positivity. One of the things Black Lives Matter has gotten right in terms of persuasion is that the saying is very catchy. Some people disagree with it in the indirect way of saying "All Lives Matter," which tends to be a trap that makes people look like racists. But here's the cool thing: even when you're arguing against the motto, you're repeating the motto. The repetition of "Black Lives Matter" in your mind is convincing you of the central theme. Persuasion-wise, it's great.
## [NFL Protests and Flag Desecration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=2473s)
I've said the same thing about Kaepernick and kneeling for the flag. My opinion is that I wouldn't respect a flag that people couldn't protest. The fact that it offended so many people and was a protest in the "wrong place" is what made it work. As a protest, it was really good. They raised the profile of police actions against unarmed people.
Would you respect a flag that would jail you or kill you for desecrating it in protest? I would not respect that flag. The flag we have is so durable that you can burn it. You can't destroy the symbol. You can burn as many as you want; we'll just make more.
## [The Moon Landing Movie and the Flag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=2658s)
You've all seen the story of Ryan Gosling doing a movie about the moon landing in which they omitted the part where the American flag was stuck in the ground. As an American, it's offensive, of course. But it's done in the context of art, and it's in the context of commerce. They are trying to sell the movie in other countries. Would it play as well overseas if a central moment was American patriotism? Probably not.
I think Gosling made an "adult choice," meaning there was no right choice. If they put the flag in, it makes his commercial product less valuable overseas. Because we Americans think the flag was an emotionally important part, its absence is obvious. The people making the movie have a responsibility to the investors; it's a business.
It was an adult decision because there were two ways to do it wrong, and you just had to pick one of them. Is Gosling American? People are telling me he's Canadian. If he's Canadian, then it makes a little more sense. The director did it, but when you're a star of his stature, you have some sway. We'll see if their decision pans out. Americans think it was the wrong decision, and we're a pretty big market. It will definitely hurt how it's received in this country, but it might make it received better in other countries.
## [Dilbert TV Show and Hollywood Accounting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i19ipiLwDmQ&t=2966s)
Dilbert is on Amazon Video. Do I get a cut if you watch it? Nope, I do not. I'd like you to watch it anyway, but long ago I got squeezed out of the revenue stream. I don't make a penny on any watching of Dilbert on video. In theory I would, but the way Hollywood accounting is, they throw all their costs on it and it just makes my cut be zero.
All right, I think that's all I've got for now. I will talk to all of you later.