Episode 2900 CWSA 07⧸17⧸25
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 31 minutes
Words per Minute
133.74968
Summary
In this episode of the show, Scott Adams talks about a new drug that could replace therapy with AI, psychedelics, and a new robot that could deliver things to people on the sidewalk. Scott Adams is a comedian, writer, podcaster, and podcaster. His work has appeared on Comedy Central, NPR, and the New York Times, and he is a regular contributor to the Onion.
Transcript
00:00:19.580
Let me get my comments going, then we've got to show.
00:00:40.900
And I can't do it right side up because it's got a cord in the way.
00:01:05.200
And welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
00:01:08.900
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time.
00:01:12.720
But if you'd like to try desperately, oh, my phone fell over.
00:01:19.240
To elevate this experience to levels that no one can understand with their tiny, shiny human brains.
00:01:26.720
All you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
00:01:40.640
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
00:02:00.980
Well, let's check the world of science to see if we can save them any money.
00:02:12.460
According to Cornell University, Sarah Magnus Sharp is writing, that they did some studies and found out that the secret to keeping your New Year's resolution is that you have to like the process as much as the goal.
00:02:40.560
If you don't like this system, you're not going to get to the goal.
00:02:50.640
If you choose an exercise that you hate, you're not going to get in shape.
00:02:57.480
But let's say you follow the disgraced cartoonist advice and you find some exercise that you enjoy and you reward yourself for it.
00:03:10.300
I used to like going to the gym because I like the social element of it and I would give myself a healthy snack when I was done and I was addicted to the process.
00:03:23.200
So, yes, the reason that some people achieve their goals is that they enjoy the process.
00:03:36.100
Well, yes, the Atomic Habits guy wrote about a few things that I also wrote about first, which he admits.
00:03:49.360
Anyway, let's see if science has any more surprises for us.
00:03:55.200
Oh, here Eric Dolan is writing about there were psychedelic retreats for people with PTSD.
00:04:05.720
And they found that if they did psychedelics, it helped them with their PTSD.
00:04:17.440
At least once a week, there's a new study where somebody gave somebody some psychedelics and discovered that it helped their mental situation greatly.
00:04:30.300
It either solved their depression or their PTSD or some other major mental problems.
00:04:37.560
Have you ever seen a story about people responsibly using hallucinogens where it didn't work?
00:04:48.480
I feel like it works every time they test it, no matter what the domain is, as long as it's something about mental health.
00:05:00.440
Now, there must be situations where it goes wrong for some people.
00:05:05.000
So don't take any, don't get any medical advice from me.
00:05:09.360
I'm just noting that every time this story is in the news has the same ending.
00:05:20.800
If we, we could replace, I believe, all therapy with AI as your therapist,
00:05:30.360
just telling you to responsibly take some hallucinogens, maybe, maybe that's all you need.
00:05:46.300
They showed a video of, there's some company in San Francisco, I don't know what company,
00:05:51.100
that's testing a little robot on wheels, you know, not, not the guy that looks like a person,
00:05:59.140
but a little robot on wheels for delivering stuff in urban environments.
00:06:10.080
They're testing it in L.A. to see if I can deliver things on the sidewalk.
00:06:16.760
But they had to do a test where they put mannequins on the sidewalk like homeless people
00:06:27.160
And then they had to test the robot to see if it would go around the bodies,
00:06:40.100
But we're just assuming from the video that what they were testing was if the robots could go around the humans.
00:06:48.380
What we didn't see is if they're testing the robot to kill the humans, then go around them.
00:07:01.140
But it might be the first step in the robots destroying all humanity.
00:07:06.660
Speaking of that, perplexity, the AI company that I've said good things about in the past,
00:07:17.520
I don't know if it will survive because it's not one of the top three.
00:07:23.380
If you're not in the top three, I don't know if the government will even let you be successful.
00:07:29.880
But perplexity has rolled out its own browser called Comet.
00:07:37.020
And I saw one report on TechRadar by John Anthony DeSoto who tested it, and he was impressed.
00:07:44.680
Now, the reason that an AI company would want to make its own browser is so the browser could act as your agent
00:07:53.100
and do a bunch of stuff while you're doing whatever you want to do.
00:07:57.140
So, as John Anthony points out in his article, that when you first start using it, it doesn't seem like it's a big time saver
00:08:09.280
because you tell it to do something, and then you sit there and watch to make sure it did it.
00:08:14.220
So it takes about, you know, it's not really that much of a time saver because you're prevented from doing something else
00:08:21.960
because you're watching to make sure it worked.
00:08:24.480
But as he points out, you eventually reach a point where you realize, wait a minute, this usually works.
00:08:30.820
So I'll just tell it to make some reservations or whatever, whatever you're telling it to do.
00:08:36.040
And I'll do some work on something else in the meantime.
00:08:40.200
And apparently that is a big wow experience because when you get back to it and it did what you wanted, it saved a lot of time.
00:08:52.580
I've been saying this for probably 20 years or more in public, and people always fight me on this.
00:09:10.480
I believe that humans want to maintain privacy as much as possible.
00:09:18.560
Everybody likes privacy, mostly about themselves.
00:09:22.900
We don't care about privacy for other people, but we like it for ourselves.
00:09:29.180
But in order to use and really get all the benefit from these AI agents, they're going to need to have your passwords.
00:09:38.240
And they're going to need to know all about you because the things that you want them to do,
00:09:46.560
it's going to require a lot of knowledge about you, your name, your address.
00:09:52.180
In some cases, maybe your social security number, if you're telling it to deal with something financial or banking or whatever.
00:10:00.180
How many of you would feel comfortable giving your own AI if they told you, oh, it's totally secure, we'll never look at it at the company level?
00:10:11.880
How many of you would feel comfortable with an AI that has your password for anything important?
00:10:27.720
Because if you did, think of all the time you would save.
00:10:37.140
Because I'm continually signing up for things that are auto-pay or debugging some problem with my bank or there's a credit card that got stolen.
00:10:49.900
Just always, I'm just always dealing with bank and IRS stuff.
00:10:54.400
How many of you would trust your AI to have access to all of that stuff?
00:11:04.500
Not a single one of you, and certainly not me, would feel comfortable with it.
00:11:09.660
Now, here's the part that I've been predicting.
00:11:17.820
Once you realize that privacy was always an illusion, you're going to let it go.
00:11:27.600
The only thing that protects your privacy in a world where the government can get access to anything that they want,
00:11:41.360
It could be a reason they made up, because they're law-faring you.
00:11:47.540
The only thing you have that protects you is your boringness.
00:11:56.400
The only protection you have is being boring and not being interesting to the government,
00:12:03.600
not being interesting to hackers, not being interested to people at banks and other places
00:12:12.900
The only reason that all of you have not been victimized is that you're boring.
00:12:21.220
There is somebody who can get access to everything you have, the government.
00:12:32.660
But the moment you do a freak-off, you know, sort of ditty style, well, suddenly they're accessing your phones and your computers
00:12:57.760
So, I'm not saying that you should give up your privacy, and I'm not saying I would enjoy it if it happened, if I lost mine.
00:13:08.100
But I bet you, once we realize that privacy went away a long time ago, or maybe you never had it,
00:13:17.120
that you'll just say, you know, I don't really have any serious privacy
00:13:23.360
because my government can get whatever they want, if not hackers.
00:13:28.520
But I could use these AI agents to make my life ten times easier.
00:13:39.260
And again, I'm not saying you should or that you'll like it.
00:13:45.720
Claudia was leaving for her pickleball tournament.
00:13:50.420
She was so focused on visualizing that she didn't see the column behind her car on her backhand side.
00:13:55.360
Good thing Claudia's with Intact, the insurer with the largest network of auto service centers in the country.
00:14:02.120
Everything was taken care of under one roof, and she was on her way in a rental car in no time.
00:14:06.580
I made it to my tournament and lost in the first round.
00:14:17.140
Well, SoftBank, the company's SoftBank, according to Digital Trends,
00:14:23.160
Trevor Mogg is writing that they've developed AI agents to make each worker like a thousand-armed deity.
00:14:31.600
So, the head of SoftBank, Son Mayashi, Masayoshi,
00:14:39.220
he said that they now have this technology that would allow the AI to make its own agents,
00:14:47.200
and you could have potentially one person could have, you know, a million AI agents doing stuff for you.
00:14:56.040
But I say, I don't believe this is a fruitful direction,
00:15:01.440
because if you had one AI agent and you told it to make some hotel reservations,
00:15:07.920
it wouldn't be a big burden on you to check and make sure it did it right,
00:15:14.080
But if you had a million agents that were doing things on your behalf,
00:15:25.540
And would you feel comfortable that if you didn't supervise it,
00:15:29.400
the AI was going to go and do it correctly the way you want,
00:15:35.180
I feel like there will be a natural limit to how many AI agents anybody will ever want working on their behalf,
00:15:43.220
because you've got to check their work all the time.
00:15:45.540
So, maybe three might be your limit, not a million.
00:15:50.280
Well, Delta Airlines, according to Fortune magazine,
00:16:00.220
they're eliminating set prices for their flights
00:16:03.240
in favor of having the AI determine how much you personally will pay for a ticket.
00:16:13.860
and it's being tested on a small percentage of their customers.
00:16:25.240
to find out that the price you were paying for your airline ticket at Delta
00:16:30.320
was determined by the AI figuring out the most you were willing to pay?
00:16:38.060
I can't think of anything that would make me hate the company more than that.
00:16:44.100
Because how would the AI determine how much you're willing to pay?
00:16:58.060
and you're making frequent flights to spend time with them.
00:17:05.760
that this person is going to book those frequent flights
00:17:09.820
because there's obviously something on the other end
00:17:14.860
And so they raise the price for you to see your dying parents.
00:17:22.480
I feel like this person is going to pay a little more for a ticket
00:17:26.500
So there must be something on the other end of that flight
00:17:33.480
because it could have possibly charged me more than other people
00:17:38.480
where I wouldn't want to go in with a machine gun
00:18:05.740
for California's ridiculous high-speed rail project.
00:18:13.900
but it managed to build basically no high-speed rail at all.
00:18:26.740
there's no way they're going to keep wasting this money.
00:18:41.980
I didn't even know they were still working on it.
00:18:46.660
I thought that project was killed a long time ago.
00:19:06.080
but we might be able to get it done for $128 billion.
00:19:13.360
That's like every project I did in my corporate days.
00:19:22.480
for various technology purchases that we needed.
00:19:31.980
All right, we need to replace this internal storage device.
00:19:41.260
of the best company that was qualified to do it,
00:19:52.500
And then what would happen after I signed the deal?
00:20:04.180
you immediately learned that you needed to spend more
00:20:22.420
that's a little underpowered for what you need.
00:20:29.300
And then it's too late to start all over again,
00:20:38.040
Well, the vendor knows exactly what you're going to do.
00:20:44.440
things do go the way that this high-speed rail went,
00:20:56.720
the people who said they could do it for $33 billion
00:21:10.520
Well, unless you want to go all the way down the state,
00:21:18.240
And then all the other people involved do the same thing.
00:21:37.140
Everything gets approved at an artificially low price,
00:21:43.240
But apparently the federal amount was only $4 billion.
00:21:54.580
it shouldn't make any difference at all to whether it gets built.
00:22:04.520
But do other countries have the same problem where they can't get stuff done?
00:22:09.700
Well, it turns out that the UAE is planning to build an underwater bullet train,
00:22:26.540
there would be this cool underwater train experience,
00:22:31.260
and they would make it so that the underwater view is amazing,
00:22:36.140
so that you're looking at amazing underwater stuff as you go.
00:22:48.060
Because it feels like in the Middle East that things are getting done.
00:22:54.040
Maybe not that big city of Aum or whatever it is, Saudi Arabia.
00:22:58.580
I think Saudi Arabia is having that cost overrun thing too,
00:23:06.960
We'll see if the UAE can do what California cannot do times 10.
00:23:13.540
If you watched the Sean Ryan broadcast podcast with Gavin Newsom,
00:23:20.620
you saw that Gavin Newsom was angry at Trump for, among other things,
00:23:29.500
And the problem that Gavin Newsom has with his nickname New Scum
00:23:48.320
to the situation where you call Gavin Newsom New Scum,
00:23:55.140
but it has a downhill impact on the children being bullied.
00:23:59.600
And I think you need something to distinguish the two,
00:24:07.040
because you don't want the father and the children to be suffering under the same nickname.
00:24:11.560
So what I recommend is that Gavin be called Old Scum,
00:24:16.460
and maybe his children would just be New Scum, sort of like Junior.
00:24:33.720
If I were his kids, I don't know how old they are.
00:24:37.940
If I were his teenage kids, and people were calling me New Scum,
00:24:44.840
I would insist that my father be referred to as Old Scum,
00:24:55.180
The gold standard of online casinos has arrived.
00:25:00.280
bringing Vegas-style excitement and a world-class gaming experience
00:25:05.620
Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting,
00:25:11.380
you can have access to our exclusive library of the best slots
00:25:16.320
Make the most of your downtime with unbeatable promotions and jackpots
00:25:19.940
that can turn any mundane moment into a golden opportunity
00:25:25.820
Take a spin on the slots, challenge yourself at the tables,
00:25:28.540
or join a live dealer game to feel the thrill of real-time action,
00:25:34.500
Why settle for less when you can go for the gold
00:26:01.080
And the job approval, according to the New York Post,
00:26:10.140
So they're now at 19%, only 19% of registered voters
00:26:18.160
approve of the way Democrats and Congress are handling their job.
00:26:41.900
So I'm going to predict that Democrat congressional approval
00:27:02.360
Well, Newsmax is reporting that Columbia University
00:27:21.260
So Columbia has decided to try to get their $400 million back
00:27:39.160
Well, here's a list of things they're going to do.
00:27:44.600
the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
00:27:57.880
They will accept that organization's definition
00:28:45.700
Doesn't everybody sort of have that right a little bit?
00:29:07.540
And if you compare the current Israeli policies
00:30:20.740
will be in charge of the definition of the word.
00:30:30.600
to use words the way you would like them to mean.
00:30:33.980
And if other people have a different definition for it,
00:31:00.020
Israel has too much control in the United States.
00:31:10.680
it's the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance,