Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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MainContent Cognitive Reframing

Back to episode — Episode 2759 CWSA 02/23/25

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of 1,400 people? I think he told his managers to do whatever they need to do to get rid of 1,400 people and then they did what they needed to do. I don't know how much scalping there was. And do you think he did it without lowering morale? Oh I would think that the other people were a little bit nervous and they lost their friends who worked with them. Yeah of course it lowers morale but Jeff Bezo…

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on and the person knows it so it's going to stay that way because that's the way your other private conversations stay right? Here's what I don't count on but I'm smarter now so I do. If you're a celebrity 100 percent of your messages get screenshotted. 100 percent. And they're always sent around. If it's something that can embarrass you it'll be published guaranteed. Now I'm not talking about your best friends necessarily but you know even your old lovers and stuff could be doing the same thing. So it's a real wakeup call.

So if you're Elon Musk, clearly he knows at this point in his life, clearly he knows that everything he says is getting screenshotted. Don't you think everything? Do you think that when he replies or boosts somebody on X you don't think that person takes a screenshot immediately and sends it to their friends? Hey look I got a boost. I'm also sort of kind of a celebrity and even I do that. It's like hey did you see this? Because it means something. It's meaningful right? It's not nothing. It's definitely something. So no matter how jaded you are you still think it's kind of just kind of cool you know. Doesn't change your life but hey this is cool. Somebody that you respect agreed with you in public. Nice.

So my lesson here is there is no privacy. There is no privacy. And the more well-known or controversial you are it just goes to zero. But here's the thing. Having now read the baby mama's messages and also Elon Musk's responses I think it's obvious that Elon knows he's never private because if you look at the quality of his responses they are things which if they got public and they did you'd say okay that was totally reasonable. That's just a reasonable thing to say in that situation. Friendly and reasonable.

Now that's somebody who learned the hard way that everything he writes is public one way or another. It's either going to be shown to somebody's friends or their family or somebody. So it was just sort of fun to watch the difference because the baby mama in this case said a few things that I don't know if she wanted those to be public right. That was somebody who thought maybe her messages were still private sometimes. But you see Musk's very straightforward ordinary common sense stuff.

The other thing I've learned not from the Elon Musk situation but I've learned from other celebrities recently where their messages are public, there are a lot of people who are really bad at dirty talk. Now I'm not talking about Musk in this case I'm talking about other people. But have you noticed that you never really see other people's dirty talk? Like I don't. I mean I never see a guy's dirty talk because it's not directly to me and women don't really do it. So to me it's like this invisible world. Like everybody thinks they can do it but it's actually a skill and very few people can. Sometimes the best that guys are doing are stuff like can you come over here I want to put it in you. What? That was your best dirty talk? Of course sometimes it works if they're professional athletes or something.

Anyway Governor Newsom asked Congress for about 40 billion in LA wildfire relief. You know LA Times is reporting this. Clara Harder. And it seems like the right number. 40 billion. Like based on things I've heard that's not even as high as it could be but seems like the right number. But it's so depressing to know that DOGE can be going crazy finding things to cut and cutting things and then one match in California could eat all of those savings. And yeah that fire wasn't caused by a match as far as we know but one fire and all the savings basically just absorbed. That is seriously bad.

Now Rick Grenell says that there will probably be conditions on the funding. We don't know if the funding will be granted. It's just been requested. But if it is granted or any portion of it, part of it might have a condition of defunding the California Coastal Commission. So apparently they make it really hard to build anything on the coast and Trump thinks they need to go away. Maybe that's a plus.

Well there's a story that Zelenskyy has according to Resist the Mainstream bent the knee and that he's ready to agree any moment. Maybe it already happened but allegedly any moment now Zelenskyy is going to sign a document that says that he agrees that the United States will be in a partnership to exploit the rare earth minerals in Ukraine for the mutual benefit.

Now I wouldn't hold my breath that anything's going to get signed on that today because we've already gone through one round of you said you do it no I didn't I'm going to take all your funding. And I think one of the things that happened was that Trump got really mad at Zelenskyy. This is the reports from behind the curtain. And threa

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tened to remove all American support if he didn't agree to the mineral deal. Now I don't know about the details of the mineral deal but he had to agree to a mineral deal or Trump was just going to pull the rug out. And what I love about this is that Trump doesn't bluff. I absolutely believe that if Zelenskyy had said no no no there's no way we're going to do the mineral thing I believe that Trump…

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