Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes Episode #2909 Segments
MainContent Hypnosis & Influence

Back to episode — Episode 2909 CWSA 07/26/25

Context —

they got caught on the cam where everybody at the stadium gets to see them and then he ducked down because they were caught in the act and eventually very soon after that he resigned. The company that he resigned from is called Astronomer and they sell some kind of technology product that I don't understand but today they launched a commercial featuring Gwyneth Paltrow who used to be married to t…

← Previous segment →

context of almost a practical joke because you're sure they're going to talk about that drama but they never do. They make you think about it and it's why the thing is so damn clever.

So it's all tongue in cheek, but they get in their whole commercial and it's viral as heck because they did it so well. It's just really well done and it's the play of the day. People are impressed by it.

Well, according to the Daily Wire, Tim Pearce is writing that the Trump administration has located 13,000 unaccompanied minors who came across the border. That's the good news. They've located 13,000 of them. The bad news is that the total number who may have come over the border unaccompanied, meaning not with their biological parents, but probably with some adult who had sketchy intentions, that it may have been several hundred thousand. Hundreds of thousands of unattended children came across the border. Hundreds of thousands. And the administration has only found 13,000.

I've seen a bunch of people say that the government of the United States is unambiguously the biggest child trafficker and I say to myself really or is it more possible that a lot of kids are coming across so later they can get their parents across and maybe they're just coming to work. What percentage of those hundreds of thousands are being trafficked and or used for illegal child labor?

I watch this story and I keep waiting for some kind of confirmation where we caught this big ring that had a hundred thousand child sex slaves or something. And I think to myself, where is that story? Or is it all onesies and twosies, but there are hundreds of thousands of them? I don't know what to believe about this one. I do believe there is an enormous problem. What I don't know, are we talking about 50,000 victimized children, which would be an enormous problem, or are we talking about hundreds of thousands, which would be almost unimaginable. Well, it is literally unimaginable.

Well, you would not be surprised to hear that Ghislaine Maxwell or her attorney is raising the question of whether she should get a pardon because she's cooperating with the Department of Justice and apparently she's going to have her second conversation maybe today. And she has answered every question asked and seems not to be hiding anything.

But I guess I would ask how that works. Shouldn't you make the deal before you give them everything they want to know? And then I saw some people comment on the possibility that she would be pardoned and I guess it would be five years of her 20-year sentence if she were let out right away. And immediately there was a problem there which is that people are not, I'm going to say that people are not rational when it comes to the whole Epstein situation. They're not rational. So they would rather she got her full 20 years than they would find all the other, I mean imagine if she could tell you all the other guilty people and it's the only way you could find out which I think might be the only way you could find out.

If she were the only way you could find out who the other abusers were, the adult abusers, if she were the only way, you wouldn't give her a pardon. I understand that you think that would be the worst thing that could ever happen because she was so central to the badness that happened. And to imagine that she could ever get off easy is bothering you no end. But what if it was the only way you could find the two dozen other leaders or rich people who had been doing the worst possible things. What would you think would be the better thing for society? Well, I don't know, but apparently it hasn't been negotiated in advance. So maybe if they're just trying to do the thing where if they answer every question then she just hopes that the right thing will happen. We'll see.

But I've seen some people, I guess Newsmax host Greg Kelly has suggested that she might be a victim herself, a victim of Epstein. What do you think of that? Do you think that she could be seen as a victim?

Well, let me add my hypnotist take on this. Whatever it is that Epstein did, he seemed to be consistently able to get the people to do things that you wouldn't imagine people would do. Are you all on the same page there? That Epstein was able to get an ex-president of the United States to fly to his little naughty island like 26 times. Does that seem to you like something that anybody could have done? Not really.

Then there's the whole convincing people to do things which you could argue if they had been of age you could argue was consensual. But of course below a certain age there's no such thing as consensual. Not really. So how did he talk so many people into doing so many unbelievable things? So somehow he had some ability of persuasion that was not normal. Would you all agree with that? He might have been a blackmailer. He might have been just charismatic in person. I haven't heard anybody say one way or the other actually.

So how in the world did he get people who normally would not do anything like the things they're accused of, so many of them, to do things that you can't imagine? What about the money that he got? You know what about the fact that all these people even after, all right, here's the best way to say it. Even after people knew that he had been accused of and credibly convicted of sex crimes, didn't Bill Gates still meet with him a whole bunch of times, which obviously was going to get out. So there are a whole bunch of people in this st

Context —

ory who you would normally say to yourself, why would they do that? I'm talking about the victims as well as people who are accused of being perpetrators, but we only know that they were in his company. So I have a mixed feeling. On one hand, you have to punish the people who were adults who did things that are crimes. You can't just say, well, I got talked into it because he was so convincing. S…

Next segment → →