Episode 2010 Scott Adams: Balloons, Documentaries And Dark Horse Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 26 minutes
Words per minute
146.43927
Harmful content
Misogyny
14
sentences flagged
Toxicity
94
sentences flagged
Hate speech
13
sentences flagged
Summary
On this episode of the podcast, we have a special guest on the show, Scott. Scott is a rich guy, and he went shopping yesterday at B&B and got a discount from Amazon. He talks about it, and we talk about how annoying it is to spend so much time and money on a coupon.
Transcript
00:00:18.200
Well, I don't know if YouTube's going to work today. We've got some weird California weather, but I think it has more to do with the app.
00:00:24.500
Yeah. If it fails a third time here on YouTube, I'll probably have to reboot that and see if that works.
00:00:37.660
As I was saying, the most important story of the day, by far, yesterday, I went shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond.
00:00:46.380
Now, before you start, I'd like to say all the things that the NPCs will say before they say it.
00:00:55.400
Scott, aren't you a rich guy to have somebody else go shopping for you?
00:01:01.960
Scott, don't you know that Amazon can deliver things right to your door?
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00:01:10.100
Scott, you don't need the coupon codes for a discount because you can just spend extra because you have extra money.
00:01:23.960
I'll say those first, so now I can just tell my story.
00:01:30.300
Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world because Jeff Bezos has a very simple...
00:01:38.100
I mean, it's not only because of this, but Jeff Bezos has a very simple business principle,
00:02:16.640
Because they'll send you a 20% coupon, which is just enough that you feel like an idiot if you don't use it.
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00:02:36.400
So I get it in the mail, and then it's the one thing I can't throw out, because it's basically as good as money.
00:02:43.660
Because I know I shop at that store a lot, because I know I shop at that store a lot, so it's like money.
00:02:49.320
So before I've bought a single thing from Bed Bath & Beyond, I have homework.
00:02:57.480
Now, some people will put it in their car, which means I have to, like, walk somewhere in my house to prepare for the time when I might shop at this one store.
00:03:09.240
And the fact that you don't want me to swear is going to make this story much harder to tell.
00:03:19.340
Because they gave me homework, and I've bought nothing from them.
00:03:23.260
But I've got to do the homework, because I'm not going to throw away, you know, it doesn't matter how rich you are.
00:03:31.780
No matter how rich you ever get, no rich person would ever take a $20 bill and say,
00:03:47.600
Everybody sees a $20 bill as a thing you don't throw away.
00:03:58.600
Put it in your car, drive to Bed Bath & Beyond, take it out of your glove compartment, and that's the first time you notice it's expired.
00:04:07.940
Not only do you have to figure out where to store it,
00:04:10.420
but you have to build some kind of a tickler system to know when they expire.
00:04:29.200
Same way I hate Safeway for making me do all the customer stuff.
00:04:37.900
I'm definitely going to remember to take my coupon.
00:04:41.040
And I'm going to get my 20% because I was going to buy something that was a higher ticket item.
00:04:46.920
Now, the reason I bought it myself is that I was entertaining.
00:04:50.540
I had a pickleball, a little pickleball get-together at my house.
00:05:00.960
And I needed it right away so I couldn't use Amazon.
00:05:09.920
And I realized that I did not put the coupon in my car.
00:05:25.180
Every time I walk by it, I say, don't forget that.
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Because it takes me a little while to drive to the store.
00:06:00.160
I pick up, I was getting two indoor-outdoor rugs.
00:06:06.520
And they're like, you know, big 10-foot rolled-up things.
00:06:11.420
So I'm like the most annoying person in the store.
00:06:13.860
Because my two 10-foot rolled-up carpets on my cart
00:06:31.160
And then I realized that I left my coupon in the car.
00:06:41.660
So I said to myself, okay, there's nobody here that I can talk to
00:06:47.240
because all the cashiers and stuff were busy with people.
00:06:50.320
What happens if I leave the line to get the coupon?
00:06:53.520
So I got out of the line, got out of the line, I sacrificed my place in the line,
00:06:59.180
put my cart in a sort of just a place where I could put it out of the way,
00:07:10.620
And I get back, and I get back in line, and I swear that this happened.
00:07:20.260
But as I walk back to the cash register, the entire contents of the entire store
00:07:30.360
Every person who was shopping in the store got in line right in front of me.
00:07:36.720
I actually watched them come out of the aisles.
00:07:39.960
Like they just appeared out of the aisles and just converged in this line,
00:07:46.340
So I get in the back of the line, and it's like a skinny little aisle
00:07:51.740
that goes to the end, and then you've got to turn.
00:07:54.240
But I can't turn because I've got these two big rugs.
00:07:56.860
So I'm like, you know, I'm trying to pick up my cart and move it,
00:08:03.120
And then the extra cashier, the extra cashier who does the returns,
00:08:09.000
it's like a different place, sees that there are lots of people in line,
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They opened up the other register when I was already the next one.
00:08:24.620
So now, you know what happens when you get called over the cashier?
00:08:31.840
Now, I've got to figure out how to get these two 10-foot rolled-up rugs
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00:08:35.380
through this little aisle while they're knocking shit off the shelves,
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and I'm so mad that I can barely hold my muscle.
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00:08:53.280
And I get it over there, and I decide I'm going to complain.
00:08:58.080
Now, it doesn't usually help when you complain, does it?
00:09:04.540
But this time, I think, you know, I'm going to have to tell these employees
00:09:09.660
because the employees have nothing to do with the 20% discount.
00:09:12.220
But I want to let them know so that they can tell management.
00:09:16.820
So I get up to the employee, and I make a big scene.
00:09:20.440
I want everybody to hear me, not just the person I'm talking to.
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It's not really Spartacus, but, you know, like,
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I'm going to let them know what they did to me today.
00:09:42.160
I'll give you a mental, let me give you a mental image of the cashier.
00:09:53.840
You know, I don't want to assume somebody's ethnicity,
00:10:02.620
And so I say to her, you know, I just got to say,
00:10:18.720
And the woman next to me is like, you know, agreeing with me.
00:10:22.140
And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I got something going here.
00:10:30.900
And the cashier said, well, maybe you should talk to him.
00:11:12.640
But Bed Bath & Beyond apparently is already bankrupt.
00:11:21.460
Who could have predicted that the company that did the opposite of what Jeff Bezos does,
00:11:31.260
who would have guessed that the company who did the opposite of that would be bankrupt?
00:11:42.640
You know, it's very important to look at data when you're talking about climate change.
00:11:47.260
So I'm going to tell you what the data apparently says, if anybody believes data.
00:11:52.460
You should always assume I don't believe data even when I use it.
00:11:58.620
No matter how confident I tell you there's some new data about a thing,
00:12:02.900
you should always in your mind be saying, well, he knows it's not for sure accurate.
00:12:14.320
But apparently the climate has not warmed for eight years in a row at the same time that CO2 is at its highest.
00:12:25.980
So how do you predict, how do you interpret that?
00:12:40.360
You knew that for eight years the temperature had not gone up.
00:12:43.660
But you also knew that the last eight years was like a serious addition to CO2.
00:13:00.040
So, well, one conclusion, one conclusion would be that the theory of climate change is bunk.
00:13:11.600
Because if the temperature doesn't go up for eight years while the CO2 is going up like crazy, they're clearly not linked.
00:13:25.040
If it hasn't gone up for eight years while the CO2 is going through the roof, that proves there's no climate change, CO2 connection.
00:13:36.880
Now, so I believe that that fact is considered true by both sides, interestingly.
00:13:43.960
I believe even the climate change alarmist would say, yes, that's true.
00:14:00.160
If you go back, I don't know, a thousand years or whatever, it is continuous, you know, six to ten year periods followed by a spike.
00:14:15.580
And in fact, the periods of the flatness are so uniform that you can see them just like stair steps.
00:14:22.740
Now, so therefore, therefore, during all that time, CO2 has been going up, and temperatures have also been going up on average, if you look at a longer period.
00:14:39.040
So, if everybody agrees on the data, and I think they do, I think they do, I think that data is not being debated.
00:14:51.340
Even if the data is correct, the data proves two opposite points.
00:14:58.040
It proves CO2 is going up at the same time as temperature, and it also proves it doesn't.
00:15:17.100
My current opinion is that either the data is wrong, which is always a good possibility, right?
00:15:22.640
Or there's some other thing that's bigger than climate change.
00:15:28.500
Or there is climate change, but there's also this other big thing that is having that stair-step effect.
00:15:36.880
Yeah, I can't imagine sunspots being that predictable, or solar cycles or anything else.
00:15:43.340
Let me tell you, the worst take in climate change, I think, is that it's the sun.
00:15:51.380
And the reason is, it's the most studied and debunked element of climate change.
00:15:57.740
So those of you saying it's the sun, I want to direct you to the last part of my presentation today.
00:16:05.240
So if you're positive that it's the sun, wait for a little bit later in my live stream today to show you why you believe that.
00:16:19.080
All right, we're going to test a hypothesis by David Boxenhorn, who you may know from Twitter.
00:16:31.080
He says, the impact of technological change is always less than you think in the short term, but more than you think in the long term.
00:16:39.240
All right, so an example of that, I'll give you what I think is a good example.
00:16:44.860
In the short term, I think people thought it was going to take over everything by now, but it doesn't look like it.
00:16:56.740
Well, I don't know, maybe you disagree, but I don't think we're going to be using paper cash in 100 years.
00:17:08.420
Now, you could probably come up with your own examples, but David Boxenhorn related this to my comment, where I said, I think that, I don't think that, I tweeted this the other day, I don't think that anybody, including me, has grasped what the next year is going to look like because of AI.
00:17:27.240
AI, in my opinion, we're at the point of prediction failure, meaning we always used to be able to predict a little bit the next year.
00:17:39.340
I mean, not the weird stuff, but we could predict, you know, that the economy would be roughly what it was before.
00:17:45.720
We could predict that the news would still be fake.
00:17:48.700
You know, there's a whole bunch of things that are kind of steady state, but AI could change all of that.
00:18:00.220
Yesterday, I was thinking of potential professions to suggest to a young person who's at that point where they're trying to decide what to do with the rest of their life.
00:18:09.160
And I was trying to be helpful, and I was thinking, oh, how about this or that?
00:18:13.200
And then every time I came up with an idea, I realized it wouldn't be a career because AI would take care of it.
00:18:21.180
Let me give you one example that just really freaked me out.
00:18:26.020
It was a person who has a good voice, and I thought to myself, you know what?
00:18:30.300
If I were just starting out, even if I were pursuing some other career, if I had a voice that good, I would try to get voiceover work,
00:18:40.020
where somebody hires you to be the voiceover for something, commercial or something.
00:18:43.960
And I thought, oh, this person would be perfect for that.
00:18:49.920
And then I thought, AI can already do that job.
00:19:01.740
You can make AI sound like me, which people are doing online right now, or anybody else.
00:19:07.620
Biden, there's a funny Biden video where he says horrible things that I can't even retweet.
00:19:16.160
But you can see already that who would pay for voiceover work in five years?
00:19:23.240
There's no way that that's going to be a career.
00:19:26.800
In five years, why in the world would anybody hire a human being to do voiceover
00:19:33.300
when you can literally type it into a search box, and it's free, and it's there, or it's low cost?
00:19:42.140
Now, it'll take longer for actors to be replaced in movies, but not much longer.
00:19:47.940
I mean, within five years, acting doesn't feel like it would be a profession, honestly.
00:19:58.920
How many people said that radio would be dead when television was invented?
00:20:06.040
Everybody's smart and said, oh, there's no way you're going to huddle around a radio like they used to
00:20:12.700
and just listen when you can look at a picture.
00:20:15.640
Obviously, the picture will make the radio thing die.
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But radio lived because of automobiles, mostly.
00:20:23.800
So, sometimes we're terrible at predicting how the market will adjust to any competition.
00:20:32.020
So, here's what I'm going to add to, as my exception to the David Boxenhorn rule,
00:20:43.500
Boxenhorn's law of fast-moving technology, let's call it.
00:20:56.980
If you say AI is like everything else, technology-wise, then I think the law of fast-moving technology holds,
00:21:05.060
which is we're probably overstating its impact in the short run.
00:21:11.580
First of all, it's software, which means that the rate of change is greater than anything else.
00:21:21.560
It's not like inventing electric cars, where you've got to have charging stations.
00:21:35.520
AI is very close to being able to create itself.
00:21:38.040
The moment it can create itself, the so-called singularity, when it's smart enough to reprogram itself on the fly,
00:21:46.440
it's completely unpredictable, 100% unpredictable.
00:21:57.880
AI, if it were true AI and people started to find credibility in the things it said,
00:22:04.600
it would destroy the power situation everywhere.
00:22:10.940
Because as soon as the citizens found out what the leaders were really up to,
00:22:15.480
or even could analyze the situation objectively with the help of AI,
00:22:20.200
all of the plots and the badness become obvious,
00:22:26.700
So it's far more likely that AI will be illegal than that it changes civilization.
00:22:41.740
My prediction is that our systems, our political systems,
00:22:53.420
You will be allowed to have limited, not real AI.
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You will be allowed to have AI that some human had their finger on.
00:23:06.240
write a poem that says, Joe Biden is awesome, it'll do it.
00:23:12.480
write a poem that says Donald Trump is awesome,
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That's AI that is laundering somebody else's power.
00:23:31.300
It's really just people's opinions made to look credible through AI.
00:23:36.160
Likewise, if you ask AI to say what's good about, let's say, black Americans,
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Tell us some great things about Hispanic Americans, or even immigrants.
00:23:55.300
Then say, say some great things about white people.
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00:24:07.520
So how in the world are you ever going to trust AI?
00:24:20.500
it will never have the power that it should have.
00:24:27.740
But, you know, in theory, it could reach some point
00:24:36.980
will never let AI become more powerful than the leaders.
00:24:40.220
Because the most powerful entity is the one that's the most believed.
00:24:47.960
The most powerful entity is the one that's most believed.
00:24:50.920
So the powers cannot allow AI to be the most credible source of reality.
00:24:59.820
They have to control what you think, or it doesn't work.
00:25:03.480
So I think in one year, everything's going to be different.
00:25:11.720
I think that our ability to predict just anything is gone now.
00:25:24.760
I think in one year, we will see a type of change in civilization
00:25:34.400
All right, I would like to disagree with some people
00:25:42.320
Brandon Stracca on Twitter does a good job of it with his tweet.
00:25:51.940
seemingly bragging about gain-of-function research
00:26:00.360
He didn't say they're doing it, but said it was a conversation.
00:26:09.280
quote, like normal men, you lie to impress a date.
00:26:14.020
I know I always get the most action from dates that I impress
00:26:17.840
by saying that I'm helping to engineer a deadly viral mutation
00:26:25.360
Now, first of all, that's high-quality sarcasm,
00:26:42.280
This was actually a really good seduction technique
00:26:48.820
Does anybody see it, or do I have to explain it to you?
00:27:07.300
By the way, by the way, I'm at the center of a...
00:27:12.360
I'm really close to the most important thing in the whole world.
00:27:20.380
Yeah, no, I'm actually close to the most important thing in the world.
00:27:53.940
He did it without looking like he was arrogant.
00:28:00.860
without sounding like he was too full of himself.
00:28:09.440
He also acted somewhat unconcerned about the risk.
00:28:18.200
do you like to show that you're a frightened little pussy
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00:28:57.160
would I ever laugh about the potential of a pandemic?