Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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you are. And if you'd like your experience to go to levels which, well, it's hard to even imagine, all you need is a cup, a mug, or a glass, a tanker, a Chelsea-style canteen, a jungle 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, the thing that makes everything bett

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er. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.

Ah. Well, happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there. I hope you're having a good day, and that sip was for you.

Well, there isn't a whole lot of interesting news, but some of it's fun. So Daniel Penny, the hero Marine from the subway situation, his legal defense fund is up to 1.5 million dollars as of this morning, and that is enough to get him probably a good defense. So good job everybody who donated. I donated. I never donate to stuff like that, but even I donated to this one. So I think Cerno deserves some credit because I think he might have been the main promoter of this. So good for him.

Have you wondered what's going to happen to all the malls, the shopping malls that are all being abandoned? Some of them are being turned into residential things, but apparently now they're turning some of the empty anchor stores into pickleball courts. Pickleball apparently is such a big thing now that they can't find enough places to play it. Turns out that playing outdoors doesn't work. Do you know why? Do you know why you can't? Do you know what pickleball is? It's like a wooden paddle with a Wiffle ball, but it's like a tiny tennis court. Nope, there's a different reason. It's not because of the weather. It's not because of the wind exactly, although that's a factor obviously, but it's not that's not the reason. It's the noise. The sound of that Wiffle ball hitting the wooden paddle is shockingly loud, and you can't be the neighbors. So if your neighbor puts in a pickleball court, you're not going to be happy if it's outdoors. So yeah, they're putting them indoors in malls. But this is because pickleball is one of those few things that everybody can play. It's probably a positive. I mean it's a weird little story, but it's probably positive. A lot more people getting together.

Well, I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about TikTok damaging teenagers. So there was a test where somebody pretended to be a 13-year-old to see what kind of content got served up, and it started out kind of innocently, but before long there were videos about self-harm. I won't say more than that about them, but you know what I'm talking about. And there's pretty good evidence that using TikTok makes teenagers sad and depressed. So now we've gone from "oh, TikTok has a danger that they'll get your personal data." So remember, that's all anybody talked about. Yeah, it's your personal data, look at your personal data. And now they've grudgingly moved over to, well, maybe the bigger risk is that the algorithm is causing self-harm to some teenagers. That's a pretty big problem. And they're still ignoring the biggest risk. I don't know what to do. Like, I've pulled all my hair out already, so there's nothing I can do. What would it take for me to convince the average public or the media that the big risk is that China can push one button and change our opinions in America? That's a real thi

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ng that exists now. It's not hypothetical. They actually have a button called "heat" where they can boost any message just by pushing the button. You don't think that anybody in China can think of something they could boost that would hurt America? Of course they can. Of course they can. Now I'm not saying that we have evidence they've used it, but that's true of nuclear weapons too. China has nuc…

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