Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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ecrets, right? If he had boxes that were full of, let's say, sensitive conversations with a foreign adversary or for an ally or maybe something that we'd found about a foreign adversary, we would have heard that. We just wouldn't hear the details of it, right? What's the one thing that could be in the boxes that even the government wouldn't even say anything about? Aliens. Aliens. There have to be…

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I haven't found yet, and then I never watch any content. So the amount of content made watching content impractical. Would you agree? You understand what I'm saying, right? It's like going to the Cheesecake Factory and they've got the 50-page menu and you're sitting there with somebody who's not good at making decisions about food. Don't go to the Cheesecake Factory. DoorDash. Do not go there with somebody who's not good with decisions. You're going to be there a long time. Would you like to see my impression of going to the Cheesecake Factory vegetarian page? All right, seafood, vegetarian. I'll do the same thing I did last time. Good. And decision made. And here's me for the rest of the 15 minutes. That's me eating at the Cheesecake Factory with anybody.

So where was I going on that? Oh, AI movies. I think when AI can make movies, everybody's going to make an AI movie. Would you agree? The moment you can make a movie just by typing in some text, there's going to be so many AI movies. How are you ever going to watch anything? Do you think any of these AI movies are going to be good? Probably not. I mean, it's based on human patterns and only one in a thousand movies are good, so it's not going to be better than one in a thousand. But you know it's going to be different. There will be a billion of them, right? When you go to look for a movie, there will be a billion movies, like actually a billion. And how many of those will be good? Maybe none. Maybe one in a thousand. How long are you going to look for the good ones? How much time are you going to spend looking for the good one?

Now here's even a deeper analysis of this. Years ago I made the mistake of trying to become a script writer for movies. So I was going to make a Dilbert movie and I read some books and studied up on the structure of scripts. Unfortunately that process ruined movies for me forever, because once you know how a script has to be written in order to make it onto the screen, you realize it's a formula. And if you don't use the formula, you're not going to get it made. Nobody's going to fund it because they need the formula. That's what works. But once you see the formula and you're like, oh, it's a three-act play, I get it. This is the first act. We have to go through somebody got hurt. Something bad happened. All right, then third act. And then you know that the B plot interferes with the A plot. You know that anything you see that's called out in the first act has to be important in the last act or else they wouldn't call it out in the first act. And once you see the whole process and the structure, it doesn't look like art anymore. And when it stops looking like art, it loses all of its punch. So I would say that, and other people have had the same experience I've talked to them, the moment you can see the gears, you lose all your love of the movies. I don't know how people make movies and watch them because they just should know too much. Maybe they watch them for a different reason, to see how well they're made or something. I don't know. But once there are tons of AI movies and they're all using the same formulas that humans use and there's billions of them, I think this will destroy movies as an art form. I just don't think movies will be a thing. Reels might be a thing but not movies. And of course when I say that, it's more like radio. You know, radio lasted forever even though television was supposed to get rid of it. So there will be probably some AI movies and other movies, but movies as a major cultural phenomenon should shrink to a niche.

All right, Democrats really don't like free speech. You know everybody says that, but when you see these numbers it's shocking. So Pew Research or the Pew group or whatever they found that Democrats and Demo

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crat-leaning independents are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support the U.S. government taking steps to restrict false information. Now this isn't just free speech. It's specifically about false information. So 70 percent of Democrats and leaning Democrats think the government should restrict what is in their opinion false information, and 39 percent of Republicans sa…

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