Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 24, 2026
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Episodes Episode #1783 Segments
MainContent Luck, Skill & Timing

Back to episode — Episode 1783 Scott Adams - The News Is Weird But So Are We. Come Join Us

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that weird? Do you remember when we were so smart that we had learned from the Carter administration what variables have to be in place to cause something called stagflation? So it's inflation at the same time you have low growth, which is the two worst things you could have. And we thought, okay, now we've seen this situation. We know that when these variables are in place, you'll get that worse…

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So maybe if he had to borrow money to do it, maybe he would have. I don't know. But this has the feeling of something that only a billionaire would do. You know what I mean? Because I feel like somebody would have done it already if you could do it without being a billionaire. Because it must be high enough risk that you'd have to be a billionaire to even bother taking a run at this. I don't know. We'll see. But good for him.

Now there's a story. I don't know how stupid the news business thinks the public is, but I think it's reached a new level in lack of appreciation for the public mind. Now I'm not saying they're wrong. Having a low opinion of the public's ability to think is not wrong. It's just sort of distasteful when you see it. And there's no better example than this story that says that, I think this was in CNN probably, that privately Rupert Murdoch knew Trump lost the election. But because Rupert Murdoch apparently allowed or encouraged, it's not clear, Fox News to talk about the election in an opinion way as if there were some questions to it, there's some thought that there's some kind of smoking gun here that Rupert Murdoch was pushing lies. Is that what happened? How could Rupert Murdoch or Fox News opinion people push a lie about the election when it's unaudited? How can you call it a lie when you simply don't know? And that's what they're selling to the public. They're selling to the public that if an election doesn't have an obvious problem that the courts have verified is a real problem, unless you have that narrow situation, then you can conclude that the election was completely fair without knowing anything about it. Because if you didn't know this, we don't have a way to audit elections. You can audit elements of the election like certain things. You can recount the ballots, for example. But you don't know what happens when your digits get into the computer systems. You don't know what the software is doing. There's no audit for that. So if you don't know what the software is doing, it doesn't really help you to count the pieces of paper because it turns into software at some point. It turns into data. And if you can't audit the data after the pieces of paper have turned into data, you haven't really audited.

And so you see major stories by serious people who will tell you that Rupert Murdoch privately knew Trump lost the election. Do you know who knew Trump lost the election? Nobody. Nobody. It was unknowable because at the time of the election there were no audits that had been completed and there's still no audits that have been completed that are total audits. You can audit elements of an election but not the entire thing. And this is sold to us like legitimate news. Can you imagine somebody saying that if we have no way to know if something is true or false and therefore the people who said maybe it's false, just maybe it's false, that those people are definitely wrong and should be condemned? No. You should condemn

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anybody who's certain. The idiots in this story are the ones who are sure either way. If you can tell me, if you can look me in the face and say I am positive this election was fair, you're an idiot. I don't even want to be in the same room with you. You're so dumb. Like nothing good could come from this conversation if you know the unknowable and you're saying to me right in my face I know the un…

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