In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, Scott Adams talks about Bitcoin, inflation, AI, Bitcoin, and the future of robots. Scott Adams is a bitcoin and AI analyst who writes for the Wall Street Journal, and is a regular contributor to the Financial Times. He is also the host of the popular financial podcast, "Coffee With Scott Adams".
00:01:51.680let me let me just say you're so good at sipping impressive all right what's in the news oh here's
00:02:02.000why the stock market might be looking good um there's a new inflation report and inflation is uh well below
00:02:12.000what was expected and estimated so 2.8 the uh core inflation um versus they thought it might have been
00:02:22.6403.5 because it had been 3.4 so do you believe that or do you think there'll be some kind of adjustment
00:02:33.360later remember all data is fake or out of context or short term is different from long term or there's
00:02:43.600some kind of anomaly in it so don't get too excited but if this were real it would uh convince the fed to
00:02:53.120lower interest rates right maybe well here's a update on uh what happens if you have a piece of content
00:03:05.120that uh elon musk boosts now unfortunately it was not in my ex account it was someone else had made a clip
00:03:14.160of uh something i did on the show and elon liked it enough to repost it and it's up to 20 million views
00:03:23.920so that's what happens when elon hits two buttons um speaking of elon he was at uh appearing by video at
00:03:33.760the all-in summit um and uh had a few things to say that were were pretty interesting um he said that if ai
00:03:44.160and robots don't solve our national debt we're toast now do you feel comfortable knowing that the only way
00:03:53.920we're going to survive is if ai and robots somehow can figure out how to solve our national debt
00:04:00.960is that something you'd bet on hmm i think the ai and the robots will solve our national debt
00:04:10.160i you know i can't tell if he believes that's you know like a likely scenario because in theory it
00:04:18.400could boost our you know economic everything by by amounts we can't imagine right now so you know you
00:04:26.560could follow the argument but would you bet on it the ai and robots would somehow create enough
00:04:37.120economic whatever that we wouldn't just spend more if we made more if the government got let's say
00:04:44.400greater tax income do you think they'd pay down the debt i don't know so maybe um
00:04:56.880but uh i don't want to bum you out but i'm getting more and more worried
00:05:03.200that uh ai will never be sufficient to run a general purpose robot that there'll always be lots
00:05:09.840of robots but they'll be doing one thing like vacuuming your floor or you know being on an assembly
00:05:16.480line or making coffee you know there's gonna be there'll be a ping pong robot there already is there's
00:05:22.320a badminton robot there's there might be maybe a shirt folding robot but i don't think we're ever
00:05:31.680going to get to a general robot where you could for example just show i had to do something and it
00:05:38.960could it could work out you know the things that you didn't show it directly you could just figure out
00:05:45.920well you know probably i'd have to do this to get this done i i'm starting to think that it's not
00:05:52.480going to happen here's why if weren't we weren't we talking about the uh the robots would be introduced
00:06:02.880right now you know within the next couple of months a year a year back or a year and a
00:06:10.240half back were we not saying that the ends of 2025 we'd have what we need for you know the robots but
00:06:18.560i don't really see the general purpose robots and still whenever there's a demonstration the damn
00:06:25.760robots doing exactly one thing for 25 or 30 years i've been seeing news reports about somebody built a
00:06:35.600robot that would do exactly one thing it doesn't really look like we've made gigantic progress
00:06:43.200now the physical body of the robot looks like there's a lot of progress progress but i don't think
00:06:50.160i'm seeing anything in our current versions of ai or even the way we do ai or the way we train it
00:06:56.720i don't see anything that would create a robot quality ai even if we kept training it and training
00:07:06.000it and there's some indication that we're hitting some kind of a training plateau already so is there
00:07:14.880some unlimited amount of new training material that our current models could get us to a robot that could
00:07:22.400just sort of live with you and figure stuff out same as you it doesn't look like it it doesn't look
00:07:29.440like it and and don't you believe that if we were going to have that in another year which is i think the
00:07:38.560current estimate if we were going to have that you know the real general robot don't you think that we
00:07:46.080would already see demos that would just blow your mind right because there's a long you know cycle
00:07:53.600lead time before you're actually in the market and you can make them in scale and everything so if they
00:07:59.920were going to be for sale one year from now the demos you would already be seeing would be you know fully
00:08:08.640functional so i don't know maybe maybe not
00:08:17.520and according to joe wilkins writing for futurism there's some data that shows that ai use is actually
00:08:25.120now declining at large companies now i don't know if that's really a useful number because you would
00:08:31.840expect that there would be something like a whole bunch of excitement and people would overbuy it
00:08:39.680and then over time they would say hmm wasn't quite doing what i wanted it to do and so it'd fall off a
00:08:45.920little bit the excitement would dry up and then people would start finding legitimate uses for it and then
00:08:52.480it would start growing back so not too surprising that there would be sort of a pullback after the initial
00:09:00.400stuff i don't know if that's telling us anything or even if the data is real
00:09:07.520another uh elon musk thing he said at that all in uh summit um
00:09:16.640that the bigger goal than the moon is mars and you know he talked about wanting to um make mars
00:09:24.800completely self-sustaining in around 30 years now the argument that he makes is that there's there are
00:09:36.000always natural disasters and every planet will eventually be destroyed by something whether it's
00:09:42.720an asteroid or we we nuke it ourselves so we have to have at least one other space escape point and that's
00:09:52.320what mars would be but it raises one question with me would the easiest place to build a new non-earth
00:10:04.240civilization be just in space in orbit around the current earth because that way you could get back to
00:10:12.160earth you could have supplies from earth at the same time building up your you know 30 years at whatever
00:10:19.840it takes to be self-sustaining um just as a satellite and then if you saw something coming like uh oh
00:10:28.240there's a meteor heading toward earth you might say uh it might be time to orbit another planet
00:10:36.720you know orbits on different planet but wouldn't it be easier to preserve life in orbit
00:10:43.760uh because you could go back and forth so often while you're getting to the point of full self-sufficiency
00:10:52.720no i don't know maybe there's some reason that mars is the right answer
00:11:00.240well here's some science that i probably could have told you how it was going to turn out
00:11:05.440emily uh caldwell's writing for the ohio state university apparently a keto diet
00:11:12.080was linked to a 70 reduction in depression symptoms in college students but because it was a kind of
00:11:21.440study that they didn't do a control group you know there was no placebo control group sort of thing
00:11:28.800wouldn't you imagine that if you said to a bunch of college students hey i've got a proposition for
00:11:35.200you what is it we're gonna put you in a scientific study and they'd be like oh no i yeah that sounds
00:11:43.120icky i go wait you haven't heard the details we're gonna fix you delicious food you won't have to shop
00:11:52.240prepare it uh or clean up like we'll just basically deliver you stuff on disposable dishes and it will be
00:12:00.320delicious and healthy and by the way keto has lots of good stuff in it so you don't have to worry about
00:12:06.000you know not having good stuff and uh and then we'll have contact with you and we'll be checking in
00:12:13.360with you don't you think that that would almost guarantee that people would have less depression
00:12:21.120because don't you think just being less lonely and having a purpose just the the being as part of
00:12:28.160the research that alone no matter what they were researching if they gave you lots of points of
00:12:35.440contact and you thought you were doing something useful and then you also had the uh the placebo effect
00:12:43.920of believing well this looks like healthy food it's certainly going to fix many of my problems
00:12:48.960you put all that together and it wouldn't matter what the nutritional value of the food was
00:12:55.600i would expect people to say they had fewer depression symptoms just because of the way they
00:13:01.840were treated you're basically treated like kings and they didn't probably didn't have to pay for their
00:13:08.560own food so i'm assuming that the food was free so if you have free food and people fussed over you
00:13:16.720and asked your opinion and you weren't as lonely yeah if the food was no more healthy than the other
00:13:25.120food you had you'd probably feel a little less depressed
00:13:30.640but i also think eating right is good for your brain so i do believe that it's healthy well apple had
00:13:40.240some announcements they're making a thinner better phone with better cameras and stuff but the big news
00:13:47.920if you can call it that is that apple is going harder into health sensing stuff so they they got some
00:13:57.760stuff built into their ear pods now um they can uh it can well basically all of their stuff their watch
00:14:07.040their air air buds and their phone are all gonna have lots more health related apps but also live
00:14:15.360translation in five languages so that's not health related but how cool is that that you got to be alive
00:14:25.440at the time when humans could actually put a little earbud in an ear and it would translate in real time
00:14:34.480five different languages i'm just just hold that in your mind for a moment that you're alive
00:14:42.000when that became a just a consumer product it's not even special so yeah you can buy it at the store
00:14:49.600um but i guess they can also now measure everything from your sleep to your ovulation to your sleep apnea
00:14:59.200your temperature your vitals your heartbeat your hypertension yeah so apple's gonna save your life
00:15:10.480well the uh the maha make america healthy again they have a commission that released a
00:15:19.840a big strategy yesterday to approve children's health because as you know children have many chronic health
00:15:28.080problems that we didn't used to have in say my childhood and they're still trying to figure out why
00:15:34.640um but as part of that they've got more than 120 initiatives um including advancing research on
00:15:44.960autism more on that in a minute pesticides vaccine injury water quality and all the other stuff 120
00:15:52.480initiatives that's a lot of initiatives is that even manageable if i told you that something was
00:16:00.320happening and there would be 120 initiatives would you say to yourself wow that's good that's a lot of
00:16:07.360initiatives that can only go right with that many initiatives i mean even if a few of them went bad
00:16:15.600you still might have 80 90 great initiatives or do you say to yourself with the dilbert filter
00:16:22.960uh the hypothetically uh the hypothetically the most number of initiatives that any entity can handle would be about
00:16:33.360five and anything beyond that would just become a cluster you know so well i hope um but on the other hand
00:16:44.080you know to be uh less skeptical on the other hand there probably are at least 120
00:16:53.200environmental risks that are going to require somebody to work full-time to figure out what's
00:16:58.720what on just that one risk so yeah i could say it 120 um
00:17:07.120anyway just the news is reporting on that
00:17:11.600so would you be surprised i know this will shock you i know that a judge blocked something that trump
00:17:20.160wanted to do no no really no i'm not making that up there was a judge who decided that trump wasn't
00:17:29.040allowed to do a thing that was just part of his normal job does it feel like groundhog day that just
00:17:37.120every day you wake up and is there another story about another judge blocking another trump thing that
00:17:43.520he just wanted to do which he totally has a right to do yes and now the judge is blocking the firing of
00:17:51.280that fed governor lisa cook um i'm not even going to look into the details of that story because i imagine
00:18:00.720it'll get appealed and i imagine that in the end the president can do the things that are the job of the
00:18:07.760president so another probably just uh just a bump in the road probably
00:18:17.440well another one of those uh smuggler boats has been destroyed but this time the navy was nice enough
00:18:24.800to let the humans get off first and the drugs get off so they captured a bunch of
00:18:30.800drugs and then they uh very uh very impressively blew up the boat blew up the uh smuggler boat
00:18:41.120and sunk it and uh in other news um the post millennials reporting on some of this that over uh 600
00:18:51.280suspected sinaloa cartel members were arrested by the dea in a 23 state sweep
00:18:58.480600 cartel members now what is the first question you ask yourself when you hear that 600
00:19:11.280cartel members just from one cartel there are more than one cartel about 600 of them were arrested in 23 states
00:19:20.240what's the first question well my first question is how many are there is 600 did we get most of them
00:19:34.240is that like well good news we got 95 of them or or did they get two percent of them or one percent
00:19:44.640doesn't it really matter what percent they got have i ever told you too many times that if the only thing
00:19:52.880they tell you is the number or the percentage but they don't tell you both if they only tell you one or
00:19:59.360the other somebody's trying to bullshit you so it's making me wonder if we're supposed to think that we're
00:20:07.520much safer now because 600 have been picked up or if we knew that there were really 20 000 of them would
00:20:16.240you feel much safer so i feel like we're being managed a little bit uh it's possible that we have no
00:20:25.280idea how many there are but uh an estimate would be useful
00:20:29.200well apparently uh ice is uh going into chicago to uh do its job arresting people and uh
00:20:42.880it's going to be called operation midway blitz and that part apparently is totally legal as far as i
00:20:50.880know because it's the fed's job to do exactly that if uh so they're not dealing with crime in general
00:20:57.760that's just the uh they're dealing with the immigration problem
00:21:04.240and let's see what else is happening according to the guardian there was uh
00:21:12.160there was an airport where was this he throw part of the airport he throw was evacuated because they
00:21:18.560thought there was some kind of uh some kind of poison gas or something so people were falling
00:21:24.640ill 21 people fell ill but when they looked into it and they analyzed all the air and everything
00:21:31.760they determined that there was no hazard whatsoever and that the best guess is that it was a psychogenic
00:21:40.640illness meaning that it was all in their heads now do you believe that 21 people could be so ill that
00:21:49.760you know they became a statistic they must have reported to somebody or must have been detected
00:21:55.760somehow but 21 people falling ill do you feel there's any chance that could be just in their heads
00:22:04.080the answer is yeah easily that's not even hard yeah you you could reproduce this effect
00:22:11.680fairly easily you would just get a few actors to go into a public you know crowded space and say
00:22:20.960you know i could barely breathe what is that and then everybody would smell it like i smell something
00:22:26.560too it's got me too yeah it would be about that easy you couldn't get everybody so you know it'd be
00:22:35.280fewer than 20 percent you know might be affected by something like that but that would be enough
00:22:42.400that you would wonder if some major contagion just broke out so no it's really easy for that kind of
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00:23:49.760details please play responsibly so how many of you are following the news about the new whistleblower reports
00:24:00.880about uh ufos and uh there's a big meeting i guess a congressional hearing there were some witnesses came in and had some amazing stories of ufo spotting and encounters
00:24:16.880uh one of them included a glowing orb thing that they thought was some kind of alien spaceship or at least nothing we know about
00:24:26.880about and apparently a they have video which they showed is grainy i know you're surprised it's grainy
00:24:35.360but yeah it's blurry and grainy and black and white can you believe it and it's a ufo i mean
00:24:43.200how how could those two things possibly happen at the same time i mean really what are the odds that something
00:24:49.760grainy and grainy and blurry and black and white would be the only way that they'd get a picture of a ufo
00:24:58.080okay but now they've got a picture of what they call a hellfire missile i don't know how they know that
00:25:05.520um allegedly intercepting it but bouncing off it basically not not affecting it