Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 2, 2026
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Back to episode — Episode 2597 CWSA 09/14/24

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be based on my personality. Like literally they named me because I had said publicly anybody who wants to use my personality for AI, it'd be a good idea and you have full rights. So they had actually planned to do that and they were going to make their robot basically my personality. Now after I got cancelled I'm pretty sure they changed those plans because they don't talk about that anymore. And…

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want to use my personality and put it in the robot and not give me credit in any way. Totally okay. I'm okay with that. So we'll see.

There's a study written about in SciPost that says at least with mice, if the grandfather mouse works out and then there's two generations of mice that follow, the grandchild mouse will have better cognitive abilities because the grandfather worked out. So the more exercise the grandfather mouse got, as each generation was born, the grandchild generation was cognitively superior in much the way that the grandparent became by exercising. Because exercise is good for your cognition, I guess.

Now suppose that got replicated in humans where you would know that if you exercised efficiently your grandkids would be smarter and more successful. It's not confirmed with humans, but if it worked in mice there's a good chance. And to me this, if it's true, it raises the possibility that one of the weirdest things I've ever thought about evolution might be true. This is just for fun, by the way, so you don't need to jump on me for my lack of scientific understanding. This is just for fun. I'm not trying to change anybody's minds.

But I've always said to myself if evolution is indeed the explanation of how we got here, and if we're a simulation it's not, but if it is, I've never quite bought the fact that you could get all the way here with nothing but the survivors. You know, the survivors have qualities that get passed on. It didn't seem like enough. Obviously it's part of it. It would certainly be part of it, might be most of it. But I always had this assumption that what you want the most when you're alive might get passed down to your children and actually might express itself eventually genetically.

So if you can do something as in your lifetime that changes the permanent, I don't know if it's genetic or chemical structure of a grandchild, that would suggest that what you wanted creates evolution. In other words, your mental state would be the driver of your evolution because you'd want t

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o be healthy so you would exercise. And that wanting for yourself to be healthy gets passed down to the next generation. So in a sense you could say, well, it's the exercise that caused the grandkids to be smarter. But you don't exercise unless you decided to and you said I would be a better creature, whether I'm a better mouse or a better human, if I exercised. So your desire to exercise could ge…

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