Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 23, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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r with happiness. No, you're probably not getting that coffee mug. That's right. I like to start with a controversial tweet by a young man I started following recently, Jay Cartier, C-A-R-T-I-E-R. He says some nice provocative Twitter stuff. So here was his tweet today: "Happy wife equals miserable life because dedicating yourself to making someone happy is how you create terrible relationships.…

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people who had lived together for a long time and then they got married that it was no different. It's completely different. Has anybody had that experience? That the day you're married, everything changes and it's totally different? I don't know why. I mean, you could speculate.

You think Scott Adams and Andrew Tate have found some common ground? Well, do you think that Andrew Tate influenced me or that I influenced Andrew Tate? You tell me in the comments. Did Andrew Tate influence me or did I influence Andrew Tate? What do you think? All right, well, you'll figure that out someday.

All right. So I don't think "happy wife equals happy life" is a good idea, and I think it's the most clever thing that women ever came up with. I think men came up with it probably, but it has worked for women incredibly because I think there's like generations of men who think, well, if I could just make her happy, this would all work out.

All right, I've talked about this before, but I am endlessly fascinated by it, so I apologize if this is more interesting to me than it is to you. I saw Eric Weinstein asked this question on Twitter that I was asking at the same time, and I can't tell if he saw my question because it happened almost exactly at the same time. And the question was, can somebody explain why Soros does what he's doing, which is, you know, allegedly destroying the country by getting prosecutors in office who don't want to prosecute.

Now, what do you think happened when I asked that question? Do you think everybody gave me the answer and it was sort of the same answer? No. So is it Weinstein or Epstein? I'm not... I like to stay for the record that I will never get this "stein" right because my memory just doesn't hold randoms. It has to make sense. Sounds like Einstein. So when is it ever "esteen"? Is there anybody who spells it the same but pronounces it different? Is that a thing? Do you think anybody has the same spelling but pronounces it the other way? They do, right? I thought that was a thing. Yeah, it's not Epstein, Frankenstein. It's all very confusing to people like me.

All right, well, I apologize if I got that wrong. Probably did. But here's my question. For a while I thought it was just me, but because Eric Weinstein correctly pronounced it, I think, because he's more well-informed than I am and very, very smart, when I saw him agreeing that he's never seen anybody describe Soros's alleged motivations in a good way, like in a way that you could actually believe, I thought, oh, I guess I'm not crazy. I've never seen it, and I keep asking for it.

So here's what the answers were. And if there's one thing I can teach you that's really, really predictive: if you ask somebody why is something happening and they give you, let's say, one answer, and then you ask somebody else and they give you largely the same answer, the third person largely the same answer, it might be right, it might not be, but there's a good chance it could be. Everybody seems to have the same opinion. However, if you ask a question and everybody you talk to has a completely different answer, nobody knows. That's very consistent. You don't look at all these different, completely different answers and say, well, I think that one got it right. Even they might have, but generally it's an indication that just nobody knows.

So here are some of the answers I got for why Soros is doing what he's doing, which seems to many people to be bad for America and the world. One: pure evil. Pure evil. He needs no reason. Two: because he's Jewish and that's what Jewish people do to destroy the world. Yes, there are antisemites on Twitter. Quite a few of them, it turns out. When you ask that question, they emerge, and it's quite shocking. But yeah, the whole bunch of blood libel conspiracy theories. Just has something to do with being Jewish. All right, I reject that one, just in case you were wondering.

He wants to destroy the West. Why? It's about voting. So the whole D.A. thing is really only about voting and control. Why? He wants to destabilize the U.S. by seeding chaos, and it's working. A free and prosperous America stands in the way of his plan for global government. Or here's my favorite word salad: Soros believes that an open society model that humans are fungible and infinitely malleable and that human nature can be ameliorated through the managed application of the therapeutic culture. Do you recognize that as word salad? That didn't mean anything, did it?

Or it's Marxist. Right, there's another one. He's Marxist. The natural hierarchies like families are barriers, etc. But the answer that I got most commonly is that he's evil. That's the end of the story. It's evil. And some people said he's evil and you don't need to know more than that. You don't need to know his intentions. You don't need to know his internal thoughts. All you need to know is that the outcome is clearly evil and that you have to battle evil. So you would do the same thing no matter what he's thinking. What he's thinking doesn't matter if what he's doing is objectively evil. You just deal with it how best you can.

I feel like all of this is simplistic, and it does seem to me that it would be useful to know his motivations because if you do know his motivations, you might be able to negotiate them away. As in, well, the thing you really want is X. Maybe you're not getting it with the process you're using. Maybe X is something we like too. Maybe X is keeping people out of jail. We like that if they don't commit crimes. So there might be... I do think that understanding the motivation would be key to fixing the situation because there's something he wants, and you can't negotiate with somebody until you figure out what that is. You're not going to randomly satisfy somebody. All negotiations are "what do you want?" All right, how can I give you some form of that while also being good on my side? Right, you've got to understand the motivation.

So I was curious about the answers about evil, so I asked my audience in a Twitter poll: does evil exist? Does it exist as a force or is it just a word that we use to explain things after the fact? Yeah, once you see something bad happen, do you say, oh, that was evil? But it's not really explaining anything. It's just sort of a label we put on stuff. Eighty-two percent said evil does exist as a force. And some people said God exists and they believe in God, and therefore believing in God necessarily means that evil exists. So yes, so not only does it exist, but it is clearly evident in George Soros. And I'm saying a lot of people are agreeing with that.

Is anybody worried about that? I know you're pretty comfortable with that opinion, but do you feel like that might be suboptimal? Because if you stop there, like I said, if you stop with it's just evil, how are you going to negotiate that away? You can't, right? You can't negotiate evil. The way you'd have to kill them, and that doesn't seem like a good solution. I feel like you're not doing the work. Meaning I think you're quitting on this topic too early. You can call it evil and I won't even argue with you. I'm not going to argue because the outcome looks pretty evil. So but I think you need to know a little bit more about what's happening in his gourd.

Now, apparently some people say that in his own words he had once told Politico some years ago that what he was really trying to fix with these prosecutors who stopped prosecuting is that there were too many missing fathers in the poor families, and especially poor Black families, and that if you could stop sending the fathers to jail on things that maybe were not the worst thing in the world in terms of crimes, that at least the second generation would have a better chance of not going to jail.

What do you think of that idea? That in the short run you give up on prosecuting some people so you put up with more crime. That would be the obvious outcome of that. But those fathers who would have gone to jail now are home, and that keeps the kid from becoming a criminal later. That might be the worst idea I've ever heard in my life. I don't know if I've ever heard a worse idea than that. Do you think the dads that are going to jail are good dads? Do you think they're going to hang around just because they're not in jail? Is not in jail now your criteria for a sufficient dad? Well, there are a lot of qualities I'd like to see in the father, but really I'm just going to key on this one: didn't go to jail for the crime he did commit, and that's going to fix it.

So I don't know. Maybe he once said something like that in an interview, but does that sound real? That doesn't even sound real. It's like such a bad idea that you don't think it could have possibly come out of his mouth unless I'm misstating it, you know, because I heard it from somebody who is remembering reading it. So it might be that I'm just describing it wrong.

Here's my take. I think bad things happen, but there's always an obvious normal reason. So if a psychopath tortures somebody for fun, that was the example somebody gave me of evil. A sociopath tortures somebody before killing them for fun, for enjoyment. Would you call that evil? Yes, yes, right? We'd all call that evil. But if you wanted to understand and explain the situation, evil doesn't help. Doesn't help at all. But if you said, well, let's go a little deeper. This person has a... their brain is broken. They just have mental illness, so they're just not processing right. Well, now you have something you can work with, right? You could work with that. There might be something you should treat. Maybe you have to keep them away from other people or whatever. But evil doesn't give you anything to work with except pray, in a way, I guess.

I think you need to get down to what is the physical cause in the physical world to be useful, you know. So I think somebody's always tried to make money, stay in a jail, you know, work on their ego or their mental problems, or maybe they didn't foresee how bad things would get. Maybe. So there are a whole bunch of really, really normal reasons why everything happens. I don't need philosophical religious reasons because there are just ordinary reasons. Why does a starving person steal something? Evil? No, hunger. Why does a crazy person hurt somebody? Evil? No, crazy. Crazy explained the whole thing. You don't need anything else. Just brain isn't working. So the brain doesn't work. Nothing. Yeah, or drugs. Drugs could explain it as well.

So I'm not saying evil doesn't exist. So I'm going to agree with you that we have this word called evil. We would commonly recognize evil in the same places, you know. You and I wouldn't disagree too much what it looked like after it happened. But it doesn't help you fix anything. It's an inactive feel-good word. Ironically, it's a feel-good word because it makes you feel like you understand it, I guess. But you need to get to that next level, and I don't think we have that with Soros.

So I would... I'm completely wi

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th you. So let me be clear. I'm completely with... I think probably every one of you is saying that some of the things that Soros is doing needs to be completely stopped, such as letting people out of jail and not getting something in return. Right, so you could call it evil and I can just call it suboptimal, but we can work on it just as hard together. So it doesn't matter what you call it. So I…

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