Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes Episode #2661 Segments
MainContent Luck, Skill & Timing

Back to episode — Episode 2661 CWSA 11/16/24

Context —

for doing a bad job. So of course things go wrong. Of course it's the wrong incentive again. This is what Democrats are bad at spotting. Republicans are better at looking at the entire machine and the incentives that are driving it. So that's why they're better system designers. And so Sacks points out this is a system design problem and there's no accountability for just massive amounts of govern…

← Previous segment →

ipation of him doing changes? Is because his character is I'm not going to quit. There's the character. If you know he's not going to quit you're going to make adjustments before he gets there because he's coming and he's not going to quit and you're not going to talk him out of it with your bureaucrats. And this time he brought a whole pirate ship full of people who don't quit. Do you know what Elon Musk does? Doesn't quit. And you all know that he doesn't quit. Character, right? Character is fight, fight, fight. Character is that no matter how far you got pushed down after that devastating loss in 2020 you get back up. You do it again. Character.

Now am I going to defend every sex choice he ever made or every insult he ever made? No. And I'm not going to criticize it either because I don't care. But the part of his character that I do care about just made me a whole lot safer from nuclear war, right? So I feel like the reason I'm worked up about it is we're seeing the greatest display of character solving problems that you've ever seen. What since who? Since who? This is like a once ever. You're not going to see this again in your lifetime. You'll never see this. His character is solving massive problems all over the place.

Do you think anybody else could tear down the government with Elon Musk and get him to partner with him? Do you think anybody else would have Bernie Sanders saying you know what you're definitely right about this? Do you think anybody else would have the Democrats completely destroy Trump, hollow out the Republican party and fix it, and then he defeated the Democrats and he's forcing them to fix themselves? He's dismantling the entire censorship regime. He probably will with Elon and Vivek's help figure out how to solve our financial death spiral. He almost certainly will put us in a position where our energy and our AI startups are competitive and maybe better than that. He almost single-handedly will probably fix our international trade situation. I suspect he's going to do a lot on the border. We've never seen anything like this. And his character—it's just if you focus on the wrong parts. The let's say it's the not the active ingredients. That's the way to put it. You know you look at a product as active ingredient, a medication, then it's a bunch of inactive ingredients. Well that's like Trump's character. The inactive ingredients are he insults Rosie O'Donnell. That's inactive. It doesn't bother you. The active part is he just stopped two nuclear wars. That's the active part. He'll fire somebody if he needs to. Biden didn't fire anybody. Trump will fire people. That's the active part.

All right and he's doing great. So the golden age is here.

Jonathan Turley writes about there were four Californians who had some kind of insurance scheme. They had some luxury vehicles that I guess they wanted to collect the insurance on instead of doing whatever else they would do with them. So one of them dressed in a bear outfit and pretended a wild bear was destroying all three cars and that it was on—they made sure it was on security video. So they took their security video to their insurance companies and said how about some insurance payments because look at this bear that destroyed our luxury cars. And the insurance company said, you know that looks exactly like a person in a bear costume. And sure enough one of them had purchased a bear costume. It was dressed as a bear. And do you know how they figured out it was a man in a bear costume instead of a bear? It was simpler than you'd think.

Context —

He didn't shit in the woods. No, he used the indoor plumbing and then they're like, well no bears shit in the woods. You're not a bear. So that's how you tell. So thank you to Jonathan Turley for that important story. Ladies and gentlemen, today is Saturday and it's time for us to have a great weekend. The holidays are coming. I'm sure already probably most of you have ordered your Dilbert calend…

Next segment → →