Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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the average of a group. It's more about an average sort of situation. And yet you say everyone is the same Dale. Can you look at the calendar for me? Certainly. What's today? July 24th. What season is that? Summer. So are you pretending to be angry about something that you know isn't true because it's the summer and it's just summer news baby? Dale go back to where you came from. Gladly. And pause…

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e the easiest to manipulate? Well hypnotists and magicians have known it forever. So have fraudulent psychics.

I remember the amazing Randi, amazing Randi a magician who used to debunk frauds and he was famous for saying that it was easier to fool a scientist than an average person because the average person is not confident in what they know so they'll look at something and say I don't know that looks sketchy to me. I don't know the details but it looks sketchy to me.

You fool a scientist with a magic trick and the scientist will say something like this: well I can see no way that that could be a trick so probably you're talking to spirits, right? So in other words you can be trapped by your own discipline and say all right well I've considered every possibility that's not talking to the dead and here's the dead talking to me.

So I'm going to have to rule out all the other possibilities because I can think of no hypothesis that would be an alternative hypothesis given all the controls that you put on here. You know given the fact that I got to check the room and given the fact that I really really made sure there was no magic trick and then those ghosts were talking. I heard it with my own ears. So I have to conclude from a scientific perspective having totally controlled the environment and then seen the results of the experiment I have to conclude that the dead do talk to us and I saw it myself.

Now you take a non-scientist and put them in that same situation and they're sitting in the room and the psychic is like oh your grandmother is talking to you and the ordinary person says I don't have time for this seriously and they get up and they walk out. Because the ordinary person is just going to say I don't really have to do a lot of research on this. It looks like it's kind of like what a lot of you did with the pandemic.

I think it's the funniest thing that the experts got everything wrong. I mean it feels like the experts just got everything and the non-experts got a lot right. Not everything probably but a lot. And what were the non-experts — what was the rigor that the non-experts were putting into it? So you're telling me that this is the only virus in the history of humanity that does not give you natural immunity? Just this one, huh?

And at the same time that the virus doesn't give you natural immunity which is weird there's a pharma company that spun up a solution in one year after saying it couldn't be done in 30. One plus one that's okay I'm not very smart but one plus one I think that's two.

And that was like the public and the scientists were saying but what about that randomized controlled trial paid for by the people who want the answer to come out one way? What about that? So you can see that the scientists were trapped in their professions, right? They had to use the tools of their profession to understand reality and the tools of their profession were corrupted by the other people in their profession. So they used corrupted tools. You know the study using the data that was bad. And then they had great confidence because their entire life would be meaningless and their life would be ridiculous if they had been scientists in a world where studies don't mean anything, right?

You the scientists can't live in a world where they realize they've dedicated their whole life to a field in which the data just doesn't mean anything. So therefore when scientists were presented with data of course they checked to make sure it was peer-reviewed and stuff like that. They said well it's probably convincing because it's data.

So there is a reason that the professional class is the easiest to fool. Now if you said to me I want you to discover some new information that nobody knew before I would talk to the scientists. I would not talk to the average person. Would you agree? Discovering new things yeah let the experts work on that. They're going to get there faster than I am by guessing.

But once they come up with their solutions and their policies and you know here's what we ought to do that's when the public is really a little bit curious. Oh so you haven't discovered a new thing rather you've discovered that this thing this thing called the virus is the only thing that doesn't give you natural immunity. All right that biased nature that should not have been incredible.

All right, RFK Jr. I love what he's saying so much I'm just going to read it to you. Can I go with a great tweet of his but it's from RFK Jr. Quote the White House had deployed an army of federal agencies including the CIA, FBI, DHS and IRS and many others to threaten Facebook, Google and Twitter with withdrawing their Section 230 immunity which is an existential threat.

So yes we had free speech but you had the agencies of the government telling the platforms for our free speech that if they didn't restrict our free speech they would lose their Section 230 immunity which would allow them to be sued for misinformation on their platforms so they would be out of business pretty quickly.

All right so RFK Jr. paints the picture where the government does use this trick of threatening the 230 status of the platforms to make the platforms be their — all right so we now have a very direct and documented connection of the government making the platforms that are about the free speech — there's no question about that now right? Everybody agrees that is established as a fact. The government used threat and coercion to turn the platforms into their bitches to make them do what they wanted.

Now the platforms if you looked at the communications it sort of looks like the platforms are happy to do it. It looks like they also have an incentive to get rid of bad actors. They also would like to have no Chinese trolls on their platform. So there's the Venn diagram of what's good for the platform and what's good for the country is pretty extensive, right? Neither the platform nor the country wants China to be influencing your opinions on social media.

But when it gets to that free speech part that's where we go different directions. Public wants free speech. Government might think there are some cases where that's a bad idea. And so they threaten the platforms. Effectively they create a way to squelch speech without looking like the bad guys because you can't you don't see their fingerprints until all this documentation comes out.

All right so RFK Jr. goes on those companies cannot exist without immunity. That's that Section 230 thing. And they were told that if they did not censor the president's opponents and critics of these policies they would lose that immunity. I'm editing a little bit but then he goes on with the intelligence agencies many of them although not all of them are now serving the purpose of enriching the military-industrial complex and expanding its power.

For some military contractors here's the kill shot. My uncle JFK, my uncle recognized that the function of the CIA had devolved into providing the military-industrial complex with a constant pipeline of new wars in order to enrich military contractors and expand the power of the intelligence apparatus. That's so well said. Wow.

And then he ends with my primary platform is unraveling the war machine and the national security state that is bankrupting and destroying the middle class. My God he tied it to the middle class and he made it work. In our country the ultimate objective is to protect democracy and restore the American middle class. He's just so good. These Kennedys could just do this can't they? The Kennedys are they just have the gift of gab or something?

But I haven't seen anybody ever tie the military-industrial complex to the decline of the middle class. But you can see it. You can see it. Your brain connects them as soon as he says it. It's just brilliant.

Now I'll say again RFK Jr. and I'll throw DeSantis in there too. Super capable. We're so lucky that they exist.

All right along those lines I saw a tweet saying that BlackRock was going to make a trillion dollars rebuilding Ukraine after the military-industrial complex and their backers made a trillion dollars destroying Ukraine. That our economy is literally designed to

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destroy countries for profit and then rebuild them for profit with that profit coming from the taxpayers in the middle class. Sure feels like it. No I don't know how much of that is intentional but this is one of those cases and I usually don't say this. I usually say that we just got here because the variables turned the way they did. I usually don't go for the conspiracy theory. But it's hard f…

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