Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes Episode #2502 Segments
NewsReaction Media & Fake News

Back to episode — Episode 2502 CWSA 06/11/24

Context —

u can schedule when your texts arrive. Again, Steve Jobs not impressed. It can also record phone calls, but it tells the person they're being recorded. So these are very small things. But then I found out it also has a suite of AI stuff it can do. So I went from, huh, I'm glad I sold my Apple stock because it looks like there's nothing here, all the way to, oh boy, do I want to upgrade my phone ba…

← Previous segment →

uld be wrong. It could be that people just adjust to the new technology and it's no big deal. But it sure looks like it's going to be everybody talking all the time everywhere because it's so good. It's so useful anyway.

So I saw the Community Notes fact-checking Elon Musk, which I love more than anything in the world. Let me tell you, if you want credibility in your platform, be the owner of the platform, say something on the platform, and have your own platform fact-check you in real time. Now that's credible. You can put up with, well, maybe you got this one wrong. I don't know if he did. He might. I think he might be right about this, Musk. But you can really put up with people making a mistake if they do so, long as they're showing their work. Not only just showing it but having it automated. Not automated, but a system that would completely fact-check you the moment you get out of bounds. That is so good. That's one of the most hopeful things you'll ever see about the world, is seeing Elon Musk fact-checked by X.

So what it did was it said, you said the assumption. So Elon said that ChatGPT could maybe get your private stuff. And the fact-check was, the assumption made here misrepresents what was actually announced, blah blah blah blah. You control when ChatGPT is used. And I guess the idea is it's not built into the operating system. Now, I don't know if any of that's true. You should see everything about this announcement as the fog of war. I would just assume everything that you think is true, just hold off a little bit on that. We're not really knowing what we're seeing. This is almost like a life form has been formed, and we don't really know what this is for yet.

Spotify is apparently gearing up to do massive censorship of people they don't like on politics. Oh, I guess who? Wonder who that will be. Will it be the left or will it be the right? Huh, I wonder who they're going to suppress during the political season. All right, we all know.

So apparently they're saying it out loud that they're going to censor. But what they say they're censoring, of course, is all the bad stuff. Oh, it's a good thing we have these good people at Spotify who are going to censor all the bad, wrong information. No, I just assume it's like every other censor. They're just going to say that whatever the other team says is a lie and whatever their idiots say is true, and then they'll censor you accordingly.

Now, I have a question. Is my belief unsubstantiated that Spotify has been suppressing me? And that I have a cap there, same as YouTube. So I have the same odor of there's something going on here at Spotify as I do with YouTube, which I don't have with Rumble. So Rumble traffic just grows as I become more known on Rumble. That's the normal way it should go. How could it possibly cap on a service with a billion users and it caps at some little level? I don't even think that's possible. So I don't trust them.

Other people not to trust: Kyle Bass was talking about on X. I guess The Economist, that's a publication, they confirmed everyone's suspicion. Elon Musk said this as well. And everybody who's in the book business already knew this. That the bestseller list that the New York Times has is not real. Meaning that humans decide what's on the list. Now, they're not going to ignore the actual sales numbers, but they're not slavishly devoted to the sales numbers. They just pretend they are. And they get to pick the winners and the losers.

And I experienced that in real time with my first number one bestseller that was selling more than any book in the country for weeks before it became a number one bestseller. So they were putting another book in front of mine for whatever reason. I don't know what reason it was, but it definitely wasn't based on sales because the publishers can see the sales. The publishers know what the number one book is, and then they look at the New York Times and it doesn't match. And that's been true forever.

And then the concern, of course, is that the conservative-leaning books are the ones that they're keeping off the list. I would say that that's a matter of obvious, and I don't think The Economist needed to study that. Put this in the category of, you could have just asked me. Yeah, just ask me. Once you know that the New York Times list is

Context —

curated by humans, it's not just sales, then you already know that they're going to pull out the books that they don't like, and they're going to be conservative. So you didn't really have to study that. That was kind of obvious from the setup. I would go further on this story and say that I think this is true: that for a long time, publishers and also authors, we kind of look at the Amazon numbe…

Next segment → →