Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 9, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes › Episode #2402 › Segments
MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2402 CWSA 03/03/24

Context —

d have been. How many of you did not know that you can make the models do anything including match the past? It has no predictive value. None. Yeah some of you do but if you don't do this for a living or you don't listen to somebody like me who did it for a living which is projecting the future as funny as that is you would never know. If you're an ordinary person you don't know that a meta-analy…

← Previous segment →

est of us how in any scenario we're not doomed. In any scenario. Because I'm not aware of one. I honestly can't think of any way we're not doomed. So have you ever heard, have you ever seen Jamie Dimon say look there is a way out. You'd have to let's say cut government 20%. You'd have to get GDP up to six which would be crazy at the same time. You'd have to manage inflation so maybe you'd want more than usual but that cuts into your debt a little bit. So if you do these three things you might be able to reduce the rate of growth enough that we can survive. Don't you want to see that? How about Warren Buffett? Can Warren Buffett explain to the public oh yeah there is a way out. It would be very very hard but if we do the hard things we can actually do it. I don't think there's a hard path. I believe there's none. I believe there's none.

And the smartest people even the ones who are in the same team you know in theory as the administration even they can't tell you any kind of scenario in which we survive. Which makes me wonder if there is a secret plan. Do you think there's a secret plan? Because I'm trying to think of what would be big enough to pay off our national debt. Well how about if we put Russia out of the energy business and then we took their market share. You got really quiet didn't you? What if the Ukraine war is the only way we can pay off our debt? In other words there's no way that the normal growth of the economy will pay it off but if we just owned energy we just owned it you know you couldn't even buy energy unless you're buying it from us. You know maybe other people too but you definitely have to get it from us too. There just isn't enough. If we owned Russia and we owned their gas station we could probably pay off the debt with GDP growth. You know we would be robbing Russia to do it. I mean literally we'd be robbing them but you need a lot of money. And actually I'm not even sure if Russia has enough. Would that even be enough if Russia stopped spending money on itself and just gave it all to us? I don't think it's enough right.

How about the growth of the robot economy? Will we go to a super cycle in which the robot growth is so big it's bigger than cars, bigger than computers, bigger than the internet? Maybe. Might. But would that be enough to get us under debt? I don't know. Again can Elon Musk explain to us in the best case scenario if we mine an asteroid and robots are big and AI is big is that enough? I think not. Probably not. And I wonder that the real play is that the government knows that money is going to go away. I wonder if the real play is that the people who really know what's going on think that our money will just go away and they'll just be crypto or something else or we don't need money or the government gives us a coupon or something. I know but certainly they know the answer to that all right.

Gaza is a mess and the US is helping out. We dropped 66 bundles air dropped of 38,000 meals. We dropped into Gaza on the beach there 38,000 meals. There are over a million people starving and they probably need more than one meal a day to be healthy. Is this just, are we just trying to make it look like we're doing something? I mean I'm glad we're doing something but and then I also don't understand why would you give them food in Gaza. How does that even make sense? Isn't the entire thing that Israel is trying to accomplish is to drain out all the citizens so they can kill whatever's left and then someday people can go back? Shouldn't you put 100% of the food just under the city limits and say free food you just have to come here to get it and then do what they need to when everybody's out of the city? So I don't know. War is terrible. Yeah everybody's bad. That's my everybody's bad. I'll just keep it at that.

Well the number that Hamas puts out for the death toll is at 30,000. We should not believe numbers like that because it's coming from a sketchy source but I remind you that all numbers

Context —

come from sketchy sources. All of them. And we do come to believe some even if they're not true. So I think this 30,000 number as non-credible as it is is going to enter our consciousness as the narrative and they're pushing hard and I think they can push it hard enough to enter it as the narrative at 30,000. If it becomes a narrative again not the truth truth but simply what people imagine is the…

Next segment → →