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The Michael Shermer Show

My Final Lecture: What I Learned About Living a Good Life

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4921 Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the final minutes of the final lecture of Dr. Shermer’s final semester at Chapman a student asked what practical lessons for life he might share with them. Dr. Shermer offered as much as he could think of off the top of his head, but since he has researched and written a fair amount on this topic over the decades he sat down and wrote out a final lecture here, not only for his students but for anyone who is interested in knowing what tools science and reason can provide for how to live a good life and how to deal with entropy, problems, setbacks and obstacles, aka normal life. Here are the ten lessons…

  1. The First Law of Life
  2. To Thine Own Self Be True
  3. Be Antifragile
  4. Be Self-Disciplined Because Action is Character
  5. Don’t be a Victim
  6. Don’t Eat the Marshmallow
  7. Directing Your Future Self
  8. Be Your Own Financial Advisor
  9. Build Strong Social Networks
  10. Find Your Meaning and Purpose in Life

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show

0:18.2

Hello everyone. It's Michael Sherman and it's time for another episode of the Michael Sherman Show. This one is brought to you by Brilliant. You can access and read about Brilliant at brilliant.org

0:24.4

and if you go to brilliant.org slash skeptic,

0:27.2

you get a 30 day free trial and the first 200 of you

0:30.2

will get 20% off your annual subscription in addition to the 30-day

0:33.8

free trial. Why would you want to do this? Because brilliant is the online

0:37.5

platform that presents short courses crafted by award-winning teachers,

0:41.6

researchers, and professionals from MIT, Cal Tech, Duke,

0:45.6

Microsoft, Google and more.

0:48.2

For example, you can just touch the app on your phone.

0:51.8

It opens right up to a bunch of different courses that you can take.

0:54.8

For example, there's courses on college science classes, including those on scientific thinking,

1:01.6

classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism,

1:04.1

quantum objects, quantum computing, chemical reaction, and computational biology.

1:09.7

And that's just in one category under statistics and finance you can take courses and probabilities and statistics apply probability random variables and my favorite casino probability

1:21.5

And if you are your children need refreshers for that upcoming SAT or any of the other prep courses that you have to take for like the GRE, You can do it right here on brilliant. You can

1:34.4

bone up on algebra fundamentals, algebra one and two, geometry fundamentals, geometry one and two,

1:39.9

and probabilities and statistics, which I think is one of the most important things you could study.

1:43.8

For example, under statistics, probability statistics, you just touch on that app.

1:48.0

I got one here that pops up statistics fundamentals.

1:51.2

Here's an introduction. You just touch on the app here. What do I want to look at? Okay? About deception. That's a good one. Let's see what some of the problems are of how a deception is employed using statistics.

2:04.3

Statistics are powerful tool because it uses data to convey an important information.

...

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