In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, host Scott Adams talks about a robot dog that can choose the leader in a group of humans, and the dangers of having a robot in charge of a group. Plus, a robot that can pee on fire hydrants.
00:06:25.600You can't get people in the theater for terrible stuff.
00:06:28.900But I like the thinking of variety, and I wonder how you can extend that because it seems to me that almost everything would be better if you could be really high while you're doing it.
00:06:42.080Like, do you know how high I would have to be to go visit the pyramids and have a good time?
00:06:47.460If I were not, I'd be, you know, how long is the airline flight from here to the pyramids?
00:06:58.340You know, it's going to be like spend all day on an airplane and getting to the airplane and getting off the airplane and getting a cab and going to the pyramids.
00:07:07.220And then when I stand there, I'm pretty sure my entire impression would be, yeah, I thought it would be big.
00:07:26.580And I would immediately have the impression that I'd watched enough television shows about pyramids that I didn't really need to see it in person.
00:07:35.860So, I don't know how high I'd have to be to see a pyramid, but I don't think it's possible.
00:07:44.320The New York Post, coincidentally, was talking about the same thing.
00:07:48.200And apparently there's some movie theaters that are experimenting with pickleball in the lobby.
00:07:55.340Can you think of a worse idea than having the sound of pickleball in the lobby of your movie theater?
00:08:02.660You know, I assume there's only like one quart that they can fit in there.
00:08:07.400But pickleball is the most obnoxiously loud sounding game.
00:08:14.880That's the last thing you want to see when you're going to a movie.
00:14:31.380So, a lot of the news stories lack context.
00:14:34.200So, if I see a story that says Mississippi wants to get rid of its income tax, the first thing I look for is, what are you going to replace it with?
00:14:42.700Because it's not like they're going to do without money.
00:14:45.780So, according to Grok, they're going to replace it with a patchwork of higher gas taxes, sales taxes, lottery, something with more lotteries.
00:14:57.200But some of it, they hope, will be through growth, because once they're a zero income tax state, they think they'll get a lot of businesses moving in.
00:15:57.200Now, I don't know how he saw them, or maybe he just knows of them.
00:16:01.140So, he said, for example, where is the full FBI document of Carlos Marcello, where he said that he knew of JFK's assassination before it occurred?
00:16:15.300That would certainly suggest something's up.
00:16:19.520So, did you expect that the JFK files would be complete?
00:16:24.680My prediction was, if there was anything good in there, like really mind-blowing, that we'd never see it, but that we'd sort of move on, because we'd think, okay, they should release a lot of stuff, nothing new.
00:16:40.580And then we would just act like somehow we'd been satisfied with the truth.
00:16:47.020Of course, there was no chance we would see all the documents.
00:16:50.260So, I'm even surprised there are any documents that would be damning in any way.
00:16:58.600Well, interestingly, for you business nerds, Elon Musk announced that he merged his two companies, the AI company called XAI, and that is AcquiredX, the platform.
00:17:14.040So, it's an all-stock transaction, it's more of a merger, and the combination will value the AI part at $80 billion, and the X part at $33 billion, which is $45 billion, less $12 billion in debt.
00:18:50.540But, what's fun about this is the value of the combined entity, which suggests that Elon Musk, when everybody laughed that he overpaid for X, not only did he not overpay, because now it seems to be fully valued about what he paid for it, but, which is the most unusual outcome.
00:19:23.480He is directly, directly responsible for Trump getting elected.
00:19:28.780And that allowed him to do Doge, and Doge is the only thing that could possibly save America from its own, you know, debt crisis.
00:19:37.980So, if you look at the level of importance of his decision to buy X at what turned out to be, we thought it was an inflated price.
00:19:49.240But he's so good at this business stuff that he turned it into, he turned it into an asset, you know, like a growing, valuable business asset.
00:20:00.980Now, one of the things that the anti-Doge people were fond of saying, he's like, well, why are you saying he's so smart when he bought Twitter and lost all those billions of dollars?
00:20:14.460Well, how about now you all just shut up?
00:23:11.420You want the fewest number of your rules and government blocking, I guess.
00:23:21.820So, I think it's hilarious that what is called conservative stuff is just the thing that basically everybody who's not crazy is already in favor of.
00:23:37.300According to Wired magazine, McKenna Kelly's writing about this, Doge has a plan to rebuild the whole Social Security Administration code base.
00:23:51.080So, all the programs that run the Social Security program.
00:23:55.800And, of course, the headline is Risking Benefits and System Collapse.
00:25:06.740I said, can't AI just look at COBOL code and rewrite it in a modern form in minutes?
00:25:12.100You know, I keep reading all these stories about people say, my God, I'm a programmer and I used AI and I didn't even have to do any coding and it made an app that runs on Apple and it totally worked.
00:25:26.480And given the AI knows how to write in every language, why wouldn't you be able to just tell AI to look at the COBOL code, all gazillion lines of it, and, you know, take your time and then just say, can you write that more efficiently in a modern language?
00:25:47.320And you tell it which language, of course.
00:25:49.140And an expert who says that he works in that domain, so he's spent enough time to call himself an expert, says, nope, that wouldn't work.
00:26:00.340So, once again, once again, the critics of AI who keep saying things like, well, it's good for a demo, but it doesn't really do any of the things it's supposed to do.
00:26:17.660Like have an agent, you know, a little AI agent that can answer questions.
00:26:23.900The most basic thing you'd want your AI to do, answer questions, it just still hallucinates, so you can't even use it for that.
00:26:32.980But I thought, I thought the one thing it could definitely do, just definitely, was write code like a mofo.
00:26:42.520I thought you could just show it any code and say, well, we'd like this to be a little more efficient, so look for inefficiencies and fix that for me.
00:26:52.340And apparently, according to the one gentleman who says he's an expert and he wasn't guessing, said, no, that doesn't work.
00:27:00.120You would have massive inefficiencies.
00:27:05.360So, reproducing it is possible, but it would reproduce it so inefficiently that you'd have to, you know, almost better if you started over from scratch, I think.
00:27:15.480But then I say, are you telling me that AI can't identify inefficient code and then replace it?
00:27:25.440Because I would think that it could do that easily.
00:27:28.200If it knows how to write code, does it really not know how to identify inefficient code and then know how to replace it with efficient code, even if you gave it the right prompts?
00:27:39.440So, I think this will be a real good test.
00:27:44.040It probably borders on almost impossible to get this rewritten unless AI is helping a lot.
00:27:54.940But I'll bet you the Doge people being, you know, on the leading edge of a lot of AI and programming stuff, I'll bet they're going to make this work.
00:28:02.400But remember, if you're thinking that the new code will work perfectly, not on the first try.
00:28:16.740So, probably there will be a little bit of a bump in the system.
00:28:22.300But maybe before the end of the year, you'd see a whole new rewritten system.
00:28:27.180And what they learn from that could be something they can take to the rest of the government systems because they have just these unlimited number of, you know, IT systems that don't talk to each other.
00:28:44.640Well, according to American First Legal, the Trump administration has revoked the legal status of 530,000 illegal aliens.
00:28:54.160These are the ones that Biden flew in.
00:28:57.220So, they're not the ones who walked across the border.
00:28:59.540They were flown in intentionally by the Biden administration, over half a million of them, from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
00:29:08.480And now they must self-deport or face detention and removal.
00:29:14.700Now, I got to say that that makes sense to me because whatever it was, you know, whatever it was that the Biden administration was up to with flying in half a million people, they never really explained that to us, did they?
00:29:39.300Did the Biden administration ever say, oh, these are the special people who need asylum?
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00:31:02.220Well, here's what I call the least surprising story of the day.
00:31:20.800Here's the one that every one of you could have predicted.
00:31:24.900According to Zero Edge, Vladimir Zelensky, when he got the first draft of the deal for minerals, remember that Scott Bessent said there would be this 100-page document that would explain the deal they'd already agreed to,
00:31:40.860that would be some kind of mineral deal with Ukraine and the United States.
00:31:47.140And Zelensky says that Kyiv received a draft of the new mineral deal and says it's entirely different.
00:31:56.780It's an entirely different document than previous framework.
00:32:01.380He says Ukraine can't accept any deal that threatens its EU integration.
00:32:06.380So, don't you think you could have predicted that Zelensky was going to reject the deal?
00:32:15.560Now, everything that we heard from Scott Bessent and even the indications that Trump was making is that, oh yeah, we're talking to Ukraine, we're working on a deal.
00:32:27.840Well, apparently we just slapped together a deal and tried to shove it down their craws, but Zelensky's like, nope, haven't even seen this kind of a deal.
00:32:39.680So, that is the least surprising thing of the day.
00:32:43.280You absolutely could have predicted that that deal wasn't going to happen.
00:32:47.760And I'm going to predict it probably won't ever happen.
00:32:51.880I've got a feeling that there will be no, well, as long as Zelensky's in charge.
00:32:59.260Zelensky very much doesn't want a solution that isn't military.
00:33:05.440And this would have given, you know, some argument that, well, you don't need boots on the ground because you'll have this economic, you know, interest.
00:33:15.400But there's no way that Zelensky wants any of this to work.
00:33:19.160I don't know what he wants, but he doesn't want, you know, to give away land for peace.
00:33:27.880Putin has decided to call for the removal of Zelensky, which is weird because I think he's always wanted the removal of Zelensky.
00:33:36.640And he says that he can finish off the Ukrainian troops, according to the Defense Post.
00:33:45.720And he says, Putin says he wants a transitional administration to be put in place in Ukraine and vowed that his army would finish off Ukrainian troops, blah, blah, blah.
00:33:56.840Now, that's fair because Zelensky has said that he thinks Putin will die soon and then the war will end.
00:34:06.300But I saw somebody on social media on X saying that, if I remember the numbers, Putin's father lived to 88 and his grandfather lived to 86 or something.
00:34:45.460Well, the United Auto Workers president, who had previously had bad things to say about Trump, you know, all the usual bad things, according to the Wall Street Journal, now he loves, he loves what Trump is doing with the tariffs, the 25% tariffs on automobiles from other countries.
00:35:06.600Because that would be awesome for U.S. automakers.
00:35:12.360So, suddenly Trump switched the United Auto Workers.
00:35:22.220At least the president, which is probably all you need to do.
00:35:25.740So, those tariffs, how do you feel about tariffs today compared to how you felt just a few months ago?
00:35:35.500Does it feel to you like Trump has, first of all, educated us about what you can do with tariffs, but also that it looks like it's working?
00:35:48.080I think it's way too early to say it is working, but it looks like it is.
00:35:52.740Because, you know, we've got big companies are already deciding to move their operations to the United States.
00:36:08.660We've seen other countries, you know, I guess April 2nd will be the real test.
00:36:15.000That's when a whole bunch of tariffs go into effect.
00:36:18.640But I feel like Trump's totally out-of-the-box approach to the whole tariff situation, I feel like it's starting to come into focus.
00:36:30.300And that even if he's not, let's say, technically right about everything that is true about tariffs, I feel like he's going to make it work.
00:36:41.220Because he's using it like a club and like a tool, and it looks like he's capable of doing exactly that.
00:36:51.240Just use it as a tool to get what he wants.
00:37:20.380Like, I wonder if he did bring his wife, but it wasn't for something terribly sensitive.
00:37:26.440You know, maybe she was just in the area, and it was sort of a just meeting people kind of meeting.
00:37:32.700But I'd hate to think that it was a highly secure, sensitive, classified information military meeting with other countries, and he just brought his wife.
00:37:44.600So I'm going to say I have a little skepticism on that story.
00:39:45.320And when I say bribe, I don't mean in a bad way.
00:39:47.700I mean, they get something, we get something.
00:39:51.020But I don't think anything is going to cause Greenland to want to partner with the U.S.
00:39:57.220unless we can say directly and with some level of certainty that they're all going to make more money.
00:40:05.960So without that, I'm not expecting any self-determination to want to partner with us.
00:40:12.580They're going to want to make money in the real world.
00:40:15.660Well, I remember that story about Doge found that billion dollar annual expense that was only to make a dumb little survey that looked like a high school student made it.
00:40:43.140And it was used as one of the best examples of how easy it is to find fraud and how gigantic the fraud is and how ridiculous the expenses are.
00:40:54.660Everybody remember that story from yesterday?
00:40:56.860Well, according to Jessica Tarlov, I saw her on the five.
00:41:04.680It's just not true that there's any billion dollar expense for nothing but a survey.
00:41:09.640I think the organization exists and the funding is real, but that it's not just for that one thing, that it was for something larger.
00:41:21.100I think going forward, my take is that I'm not going to believe any of the claims of Doge.
00:41:29.380Because I feel like the Doge claims, if there's like a really good anecdote that somebody can understand, there is a tendency for them to believe it.
00:41:41.540And probably a lot of these cases are not as clean as that.
00:41:45.260Right. So remember the first time you heard that there was a billion dollars a year for nothing but a little survey that looks like you could have done it in 10 minutes?
00:42:01.260Oh, my God, I can't believe that that's happening.
00:42:04.600And what is usually true when you have that reaction to a story?
00:42:09.080What's usually true is that it's not true.
00:42:11.160Because the real world, as wacky as it is, probably isn't that wacky that somebody was getting a billion dollars a year to do a survey that nobody wanted.
00:42:25.240So I'm going to say that without knowing the details, I think Jessica Tarlov, she might be right on this one.
00:42:33.540So I'm not going to use any more Doge anecdotes.
00:42:36.800I do have great confidence that they're doing all the right stuff and that they're finding real fraud and waste and abuse and that everything's moving in the right direction.
00:42:46.800But I'm just not going to believe any more anecdotes.
00:42:54.680Is that the second or third time that I've said something in public about some anecdote and then turned down, well, that's not exactly true.
00:43:04.380So, no, I'm not going to fall for that again.
00:43:09.040Well, the Iranians, the military, posted, according to John Hayward of Breitbart, a video showing they have these vast underground missile cities.
00:43:21.760So gigantic underground facilities, somewhere in a mountain or something, that has just a gazillion high-end missiles.
00:43:30.020And apparently it's like the third time they've done a video to say, oh, yeah, if you come for us, we've got a lot of missiles that are going to come for you.
00:43:42.700But it would not surprise you that this was done right before Iran also had indicated to America that they're willing to talk, but only indirectly.
00:43:55.020So Iran is not willing to meet with an American and talk about anything, but they're willing to have, oh, indirect talks.