Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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Back to episode — Episode 2605 CWSA 09/22/24

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ll on the he had a typo and he spelled a word wrong oh you're missing the show. You are missing the show if it's the grammar you're worried about anyway. Best writer in the public sphere in my opinion. So Boeing as you know Boeing's been having a hard time with its Starliner and its various aircraft and stuff and you know some of its equipment's not working late and cost overruns and stuff like t…

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rial Revolution didn't take much time but it was this rare time when we became industrialized so you could imagine the GDP would be zooming during something like that. You could imagine the GDP would be unusually zooming during a internet dot-com takeoff and you could imagine that the age of robots and nuclear power and AI would be one of those periods. So we might be into a 10-year period where a 4% GDP which I would consider impossible under normal circumstances yeah you don't just get the 4% GDP that it basically it doesn't happen but you could if something really unusual is happening by itself in the environment such as AI and robots electric cars self-driving cars these are once ever things. There will only be one time when everybody wants to get rid of their car for a self-driving car. There was only one time everybody wanted to get rid of their regular phone for a smartphone right. These don't come along. So you know luck is more important than skill for a lot of this economic stuff and it could be that whoever is president next could be president when there's this economic boom like we've never seen and we could be over 4%.

Now you need the 4% growth but you'd also need not a lot of unemployment. So if the robots and the AI take too many jobs well we've got a whole new problem and it's a big one. So could we navigate that? Maybe you can navigate that by building new cities because the people who don't have jobs you say hey why don't you move to this new city that Trump is building on federal land and they're looking for lots of workers and you don't have a skill but you know we'll train you we'll teach you how to do this stuff because you'll just be carrying things or mixing concrete or something so we'll just teach you how to do that. So you could imagine that we could you could imagine some way that the unemployed would get quickly redeployed.

Now the fact that we're bringing in all of these migrants and part of the story that you don't hear a lot about is that I think a lot of them are being employed and I don't know enough about that. So here's my question. Are there so many companies that need low-end employees and can't get them that something like I'll just make up this number so this is a question not a statement would it be true that 80% of the migrants who were coming in through asylum so they technically would be legal do 80% of them just get a job working on a farm or an assembly line because we didn't have enough people to do those jobs or is it 20%? Because if only 20% of them are coming in and getting jobs that is a disaster at a level that I can't even comprehend. If 80% of them are coming in and although they don't make much money and you know 10 of them have to live in an apartment but they got jobs is that the case? If 80% of them have jobs it's a whole different situation and it also suggests that if we curbed immigration we might find a way for people who lose their jobs to find a way you know not in the lowest of the low end jobs ideally.

So then the other thing would be re-engineering the government. As you know and Thomas Massie points this out the way the government does budgets are they say how about making a cut in this budget and then all hell breaks loose because there's somebody who's protecting every budget so you can't really cut any budgets. The way a business would run would be they'd say every department tell me how much you need and you're going to have to argue your case every year and then you add them all together and that's your budget. But the government just says we're going to need 5% more than last year because of inflation and there's more people we're taking care of and then so let's say the Democrats say that then the Republicans say no way but we need to spend billions more on the military and the Democrats say no way and then the two of them get together and they say how about this why don't we just run up the debt and you get

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your billions I get my billions I get reelected you get reelected because it's good for our states and we'll just push that can down the road and that's what happens. So our budgeting process is not even a budgeting process. So it's like how did you repair your broken engine on your car? I took up knitting. Wait what? I took up knitting. That doesn't even seem like you're in the right domain. I m…

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