Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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Back to episode — Episode 1745 Scott Adams - Later And Better Than Usual

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's waterproof so I can swim with it. Now do you know how much pain in the ass I've had trying to keep my little door opening card? It's the worst thing. I'm always losing it. I probably demagnetize one of those door opening hotel cards one out of three times that I travel. I probably put it in the wrong pocket with my phone and demagnetize it probably one out of three times. And then you get to yo…

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ay rich people were tapped, that's not exactly what happened because we just created money out of nothing and spent. But who pays for the inflation? Who pays for the higher taxes? Who pays the deficit down? It's people who have money, right? Poor people don't pay anything, I mean relatively speaking. So rich people are going to shoulder the burden of all the inflation, let's say 95%, and all the higher taxes 95%, etc.

Now I'm not complaining. I'm explaining. I'm explaining that it appears that the Biden administration has found a stealthy way to turn us into a socialist country. That's what it looks like. Scott, more poor are being created by inflation. Yes, yes. So I'm not saying that more poor people aren't created. I'm saying just again this is just a math question. It's not even an opinion. This is math. That the rich people have the money, so if somebody's going to pay taxes, it's got to be from them, right? That's where the money comes from. So again I'm not saying it's good or bad or anything. That's just what's happening. And it's funny that we don't talk about it that way. You would expect that at least Fox News would be saying that we turned into a socialist country because or at least more of what we've always had a lot of socialism over where we want to be.

Somebody says I have my car, my stocks, my golf membership. None of this affected me. What do you mean you have stocks and you were affected by the market downturn? I think you mean you're holding your stocks, which would be actually that would be a good opinion. So I haven't looked at my stocks. Normally I would look at my portfolio every day, but I've literally not opened the app. I have no idea what my net worth is. I don't know what — I don't know, and I'm not gonna look. I'm not gonna look until the headlines say something like the stocks are starting to reach their old highs. Then I'll start looking again. Because the practice of investing — here's a little tip for you. I don't think you've ever heard it in quite these terms. Mostly if you studied economics maybe you did. But the act of investing is primarily about managing your own psychology. You got that? It's a little bit about knowing what to invest in, but that's not hard because you could just put it in an index fund and be done. Just walk away. So it's not hard to know what to invest in. Just diversify. You get a low cost fund that tracks a big basket of stocks and that's it.

So knowing what to buy is easy. Knowing when to buy it is hard. Knowing when to sell it or if to sell it is hard because those are questions of psychology. So investment is not about knowing what to invest in. That's easy unless you're trying to guess on certain companies. That's gambling. So gambling is hard if you're trying to pick individual companies that will win. That's hard. But it's easy to invest. Just put it in an index fund and walk away. So how do you manage your psychology? The number one way you do it is by not looking at it. It

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took me 50 years to be able to do this. For 40 years or something I probably couldn't do that for about 40 years. But now again like I finally learned to not look at it. Because if you look at it, you know what you're gonna think. Oh, I'd better be selling this thing right away before it all disappears. Now if you imagine if you made terrible investments, maybe that's true. I don't know. But if y…

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