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Good morning, everybody. Come on in here. I want you to flow in here like you're a. You're attacking a foreign country that really has it coming. And while you're doing that, I will get ready to give you the highest quality podcast you're going to see today, because not everybody's working on a Sunday. But darn it, some of you are, and I definitely am. You ready for this? Who's ready? Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams. And you've never had a better time. But if you'd like to take a chance. Yeah, you want to take a chance on elevating your experience to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains. Well, for that, all you need is a cup of mugger, a glass of tanker chalice, a stein canteen, jugger flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine hit of the day thing makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and. Sorry, I accidentally picked up the incredible 2026 Dilbert calendar like it's some kind of commercial or something. Instead of the coffee cup, what I meant is the coffee cup. Here it comes, the simultaneous sip. Go. Well, that won't happen to you because you can only buy this calendar at Amazon. But you knew that. You knew it. You knew it. All right, well, let's jump into the news. It'll be so good. Did you know? So this is so Trump. Trump's going to his helicopter. I think he was. And one of the reporters asked him if you would reconcile with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, the same way he did with Elon Musk. What do you think he said? Well, he said, sure, why not? I get along with everybody. Is that the perfect answer? I get along with everybody. Because you want to argue with them, right? You're like, you don't get along with everybody. What about. What about. Oh, okay. Well, I guess you do kind of get along with them, but what about. What about. So, first of all, it makes your hair catch on fire if you don't think it's factually true, but it's close enough to be factually true that, you know, I will allow it. But I love the fact that he has created this Persona for himself where he can absolutely maul somebody in public verbally, and then five minutes later, he can say, yeah, why don't you come on over, we'll have dinner, we'll Be best friends and that everybody goes, oh, okay, I get it. It's part of the show. It's just part of the show. Once you realize it's part of the show, you can just lean back and enjoy it the way it was meant to be. So, yes. Do we want Trump to dislike Marjorie Taylor Greene? No. We want her to be a productive part of society, a patriot. Would you not want her on your team? Think about it. Now, I get that she disagrees with you on some policy stuff. Right? Right. Or maybe she doesn't, but you wouldn't want her on your team. Think about it. If you were picking teams for anything, you wouldn't want her on your team. Yeah, of course you would. So would he. So he plays it just right in the way that Trump can. So hurricane season is winding down and Axiosa is reminding us that there have been. How many named hurricanes have made landfall in the US in the mainland? Anyway, how many hurricanes this year? Do you know the number? The answer is zero. Now, there usually aren't that many. Like a normal year, it might be two, but we're talking about two major storms that would cost billions of dollars this year. None. Do you think that all the news is talking about is how climate crisis has been avoided and maybe it was never real in the first place? No, that's not going to happen right away, but we're heading in that direction. I will tell you again how to run the entire country. You ready? If you want to take charge of the whole country and you didn't have a elected position, you're not a billionaire. You just want to figure out some clever way where you, and I mean you like, specifically you, could take over the whole country. There is a way to do that, and this hurricane situation reminded me of it. I've talked about this before. In the corporate world, the way we think of things is that there's a. A line of executives, and somebody reports to somebody, reports to somebody. So if you see one of those executives giving a PowerPoint slideshow to maybe that executive's boss, you think to yourself, well, that executive given. Giving the presentation, is in charge of that domain and is giving a presentation to someone who's in charge of him, you know, because he's got to get approval or something. So it looks to you like the normal corporate structure is working the way you think. However, having worked in the corporate world and having put together quite a number of slides for other executives or just executives, here's something I learned that everyone who's been in that same Position probably learned the same way. Whoever comes up with the best slide, or you could replace slide with idea or framework or reframe or way to look at something or relevant data. This will all be the same. For my purpose, that person's actually in charge. Let me plump this out a little bit and you'll see what I'm talking about. If I wanted to run the world and wasn't already, I'll just let that sit there for a while. If I weren't already, the way I'd do it is I would try to figure out what the top 10 climate variables are that people would agree. All right, if that's changing, there must be a problem with climate and humans behind it. And I would get the top 10. And then I would create an ongoing. What do you call it? A dashboard. A dashboard. So that's sort of a corporate talk. A dashboard would be usually one page on a screen that very quickly tells you some set of information that makes sense together. So I would say, all right, let's figure out the 10 things you should look at for climate change. And hurricanes would be one of them, but you'd also have the temperatures, you'd have the, the, the water level at certain places. So I don't even know if they're 10, maybe they're 5, but I think they're at least 10. So you'd have. So you would be the one who pulls together this dashboard and then you just put it on X. What would happen if you did a good job, what would happen? People would pass it around and they would say, whoa, I'm smarter now because, Because I know that these ten things are important. I know the order in which they're important. Because you would also rank them from which one's the most predictive. Right. Maybe which one is the most dangerous but most predictive as well. And then if you did a good job, people would want to bookmark it and they would ask you to update it when there's new information. And it would take on a life of its own almost immediately. Do you know why you could totally disrupt this mature science area without actually having any science background? Do you know why that would be so easy? Because no one else is trying. There's no one even trying. Do you know of anybody who put together the. Are really easy to read? Everybody agrees, yeah, these, these 10 things are the things we should be watching. No. And part of the reason that nobody's doing it is that the people who have access to it, the information that would make that dashboard, are probably not getting the results that they wanted to get. So if they were a little bit more, let's say, capable at describing what's actually happening in the world, their capability would destroy their own. They're in their own industry because they would end up proving that. Maybe you didn't have to worry so much about this stuff, but since I'm not a climate scientist, I would not be bound by that. I could just tell you what you need to know as best I could do it. So I just start publishing it. Then what happened when it started working? What. What happens when people start recognizing, all right, we need an update on this climate story. No matter what the story is, wouldn't it make sense to have the climate dashboard referenced as just part of the story? Could be a story about the coral reefs, but also. Let me show you. The dashboard could be a story about the hurricanes, but, you know, proper context. Let me show you, you know, the console. So once you did this for climate, you don't think people would ask for it for crime? You don't think people would ask for it for other big topics? They would. And if you were the one who could do it best and had a reputation for, you know, being a straight, pretty soon you would be the one who decides what information is relevant to this domain and what isn't. You might be right, you might be wrong, but it's not objective. There would be a lot of subjectivity in deciding what's even on the list, and then there'd be a lot of subjectivity in deciding how to measure it properly, etc. And that would be enough subjectivity. I say that it would put you essentially in control of the entire domain. Nobody would necessarily know it. They would just think that you were a useful person who had something to say about the data, but you would actually be running the whole show because you would determine what data anybody saw, and if you became credible, they'd kind of have to reference your data every single time they did anything important in that domain. So that's how you do it, people. You become the PowerPoint slide expert. And if you become known as the only person who can describe this complicated thing in a very transportable viral way, you're going to run the whole show. There you go. I wonder if there's any backward science. Oh, here we go. Cambridge University Press found that there's a study that watching less TV could cut your depression risk by up to 43%. Does that make sense to you? Sort of, yeah. You. You could see how watching less TV would. Oh, no, you don't? No, it's backwards. What do you do when you're depressed? You watch more tv. Do you know why? Well, part of being depressed is you didn't have an awesome thing to be doing instead. Would you be depressed if, let's say, I don't know, the president invited you to the Oval Office? No. You'd be all excited. You'd be excited. Watching TV is sort of the default. I got nothing going on in my life. I might as well turn on the tv, see if there's a game. No. So it might also be true that watching TV makes you a little more depressed. But I guarantee you that being depressed is going to make you reach for that clicker faster than not being depressed. All right, I can't remember how much or if I talked about this before, but I'm sure I did. So this is from a story back in April and New York Post. I saw, I saw the New York Post talking about it today, and it was Bill Maher who was talking about way back in April when his friend and, I guess, Hollywood, Hollywood partner, Larry David. Not partner, but, you know, another person who works in the entertainment industry. So Larry David was not happy when Bill Maher went to dinner with Trump. And so Larry David wrote a humorous piece, an op ed about my dinner with Adolf. So he did a funny piece mocking, essentially mocking Bill Maher for imagining that there was a, you know, good reason to ever have dinner with Hitler, meaning that he was, you know, calling Trump Hitler. What did Bill Maher say about this now that he's had several months to marinate on this situation? He said that Larry David was being dumb and unhelpful. Dumb and unhelpful. And then Bill Maher went on to do what he's been doing lately, which is explain that you should always talk to people. And what Trump does. And I, the example with Marjorie Taylor Greene is a perfect example. What Trump does is that he's willing to talk to everybody. And Bill Maher is now a complete, complete convert. Maybe he always was to, you can talk to anybody you want. And we're better off if we talk than if we don't talk. Now, you can imagine I'm 100% in agreement with Bill Maher. However, there was a specific quote that apparently Bill Maher used when he talked to Piers Morgan at about the same time as the, you know, he was Talking about the 20, the dinner with Trump. Listen to this quote, quote. But I think the minute you play the Hitler card, you've lost the argument. Now he was talking about the op ed by Larry David. I think the minute you play the Hitler card, you've lost the argument. What does that sound like? How many of you remember my debate? But it wasn't really a debate with Sam Harris at around 2016 that became super viral. And probably just about every one of you heard it, right? Did you hear me say that at the beginning of the debate? Because I think it was like 60 seconds into my talking to Sam Harris, probably a minute. You know, of course I'm remembering it, so I may be remembering it wrong. He brought up Hitler, compared Trump to Hitler. And I said, we're done here. I said some version of basically, you know, that's the end of the debate. Whoever brings up Hitler, you just lost. And then years go by, because that was probably back in 2016 or so. Now, remember, I keep telling you that what defines, not defines, but a difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats try to tell you what to think. You know, this is moral, this is immoral, this is right, this is wrong. And Republicans try to tell you how to think. Which one is Bill Maher doing in this example where he says, the minute you play the Hitler card, you've lost the argument? That's telling you how to think. That's not telling you what to think. So you can see the transition. Right? And when he looks at Larry David, Larry David is just Hitler, No Hitler. Hitler, no Hitler. Doesn't that just seem stupid? I mean, that's basically what. What Bill Maher was saying. It just looks stupid. Yeah, so. So this is also what Bill Maher said on the same topic. And he said. And also I must say, you know, come on, man, Hiller, Nazis, nobody, nobody has been harder about and on and more prescient, I must say, about Donald Trump than me. Bill Morris says, I don't need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is. Just the fact that I met him in person didn't change that. And the fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either. So what is it? When he says met him in person and reported honestly on it, that's process again. He's totally right on process. So watching Bill Maher try to navigate this situation and try to get a foot in both worlds is really fascinating. And I give him a lot of credit because it's a pretty rocky road. You know, having been down that road in a more extreme version myself and finding out what happens when you say anything positive about the way Trump does business, I know how tough that is. And he's going through. He's taken on some water. I guarantee it. This is not easy. So I'm going to. In the past, you've seen me sometimes say some good things about Bill and sometimes be critical. Today, I'm going to be completely supportive. Not of his opinions, he's allowed to have different opinions, but of his apparent focus and how he's essentially training his audience the way I'm trying to train mine into how to approach a problem. And not so much what the answer is, the answer is up to you, but how to approach it. Well, you want to do that, right? Right. All right. Well, along those lines that I've often said this is sort of a related topic, that having Elon Musk on what I would call the common sense side of things. I wouldn't call him, you know, Republican or anything like that, but he's squarely on the common sense side of things. And I was thinking today how many things Elon Musk has changed and how in the process of that, he's also teaching us how to think and how to act. He's kind of teaching us how to be engineers. Not the actual skill of engineering, but how an engineer would approach a problem. If any of you notice that, that if you simply watch how Elon Musk approaches any problem, and I would argue that maybe the all in pod guys, they do the same thing. If you simply observe them over time, you learn how to approach problems and you would say to yourself, oh, that's, that's like that time, I don't know, Chamath did this or that. Or it's like the time that Elon did this, that. And then you can take that model and build it, you know, put it into your own world. Tremendously valuable. But on top of that, I saw that RFK Jr. Was saying at some event that he believes that Elon Musk rescued free speech by buying what was Twitter. Would you agree with that statement? That he rescued free speech by buying Twitter? I. I think so. I think that's completely fair. That would put him, if you buy that as a true statement, and I do, that would put Elon in the founding fathers category. Like with. Without, you know, the. The time of course, is different. But that would put him squarely right in the middle of saving the Republic. And I. And I think he gets complete credit for that. But back to my overarching theme. He didn't just say free speech is good. Hey, everybody, why don't you practice some free speech? Nope. He showed you how to get it. He showed you how to get there. Sometimes you got to buy the company. Now, he could do it, you couldn't. But he showed it. He showed you how to rescue free speech. And in this case, he did it through a. I guess I'd call it a free market approach. And so you can learn that if you, if you use the free market appropriately, you can get to where you want to get, which is free speech, in a way that teaches people how to think, hey, the only way you're going to have real free speech is if there's a free market platform that lets you say what you need to say without getting canceled. And then he proved it by building that platform, you know, modifying a platform, then that's just the beginning. Just. He was talking today about his chip design, that Tesla will be the biggest chip designer in the world in a fairly short period of time. He has also taught you how to start companies at some kind of record speed that we've never seen before. And now he's decided that Tesla has to be the big. Hey, let's get rid of a counterbalance. Counterbalance you're going to disappear from. I think you're on the YouTube platform, but that's, that's the second time I've seen that comment. So you're going to disappear now, maybe today, but we're going to get you then. So. So this is just, you know, a little, one small part of what Musk and Tesla are doing. But he'll probably teach you that America can build chips. So. So you're going to learn a whole bunch about manufacturing and chip design and all that, just because he's doing it and he's transparent about how he's doing it. Then there's the. I saw a clip, I think he was on Joe Rogan talking about the economics of homelessness. And a lot of people don't understand the homelessness isn't so much just about giving people homes. They wouldn't want to live in those homes if you gave them to them because they're mentally insane or they're on drugs or whatever, whatever else. And he also pointed out, I didn't know this, that the economics of homelessness in California is that there's this whole industry of people get paid to take care of the homeless as long as they don't solve their problem. If they solve their problem and these people were no longer homeless, which is sort of undoable, then they wouldn't get there collectively. A million dollars a year to keep the people alive but homeless. So if you followed the money, you would completely understand why there's so much homelessness. And that would be a way to think about it, wouldn't it? It's not the answer. It's a way to think about it. So if you change from, hey, if only we give these people homes, you know, then they would be on their way. They could do the rest. That way of thinking is a complete failure because it doesn't recognize that the whole industry is propped up by people trying to steal your taxpayer money and give you nothing in return. Once Elon explains that we're trapped in this little system where the people who are running it are making a lot of money, as long as they don't solve the problem, then everything makes sense, doesn't it? Now, that doesn't mean that we immediately have a solution, but at least you'd be solving the right problem, right? That's a big difference when you see the problem clearly as Elon, you know, explains it to us. Then I saw Elon talk about how the only, only the interesting simulations, because, you know, he believes that we're part of a simulation, as do I, that reality is a simulation. He points out that only the interesting simulations would survive. And, and then he gives the reason, because if we had a boring simulation, we'd stop doing it because it wouldn't be doing anything for us, just boring us. So the interesting ones are the only ones that can survive. And therefore it's logical to assume that they're the only ones that do. And I've got a version of this. So this is part of his explanation of why the world seems so interesting, I think, or why you could predict something based on how interesting it is. I do it. I have a version of that, but it's different, which is I believe that reality follows the three, the three act movie form. Now that's something I've been saying since 2015, I think. And here's why I think it follows a three act movie form. It's because we've all been trained in the three act form. If we had not been trained in it, I don't know that it would happen. But you take a bunch of human beings and you put them in a situation, let's say Trump is nearly jailed and impeached. That would be a classic movie third act, where, okay, there's no way he can get away from that. And then if I said, but what would it look like if it were a movie? And we would all have the same answer, which is, well, he would somehow not go to jail. Somehow the impeachment wouldn't take hold. And somehow he would win re election because that would be the most satisfying movie. Sure enough. Sure enough, that's what happened. Now, I think that we live in a simulation and our expectations collapse reality. And so if enough of us are simply expecting things to go a certain way, that it actually collapses reality in that direction. Now, I, I wouldn't bet my life on it that my interpretation is correct. But just so you know, so also I've noted that, you know how we all understand NGOs now, we didn't know what an NGO was a couple years ago, and that's because of Elon Musk. And it's because of Doge. And Doge even exists only because of Musk, the, the concept of Doge, which has taken root in the government. So if you look at all the things that just Elon has done, there's the one I've mentioned. And of course, Mike Benz is, you know, I champion of the NGO explainer class. But I don't know if you'd even know about it without Elon Musk. But let's see, he's. I think that Elon Musk is the most important person in the climate crisis conversation because he can basically describe a world where you use solar power to get everything you want. They might be solar panels in space, but he already told you how to do it. We have all the technology we need to put solar panels in space and have all the energy we want. And he can show you how. He's got the neural, lengthy interplanetary travel. He's figured out how to get around our energy shortage. He talks about how the robots will be free doctors. So he's solving health care. He's giving America dominance in the most important industries. Right? You want to live in the country that is dominant in the most important industries. Well, he gives us that. We're dominant in the most important industries. Half of that is him. You got the starlink and then that. But I think that all of these have one thing in common that can't be underestimated. If you, if you look at the collective work that Musk does and how he's good at explaining to us what, why he's doing it, why it's good for the world, how he does it. He's teaching us how to think. Now, how many of you have felt that? Like you actually feel that? Oh, he's not just teaching us about his company, although he's doing that too. He's teaching us how to think about these situations and then apply some kind of an engineering framework. To it, which usually ends up to be the right one. All right.
