Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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Episodes Episode #2939 Segments
MainContent Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2939 CWSA 08/26/25

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big deal because it's very unusual for the party that has the presidency to also win the midterms in the House. It just it's automatic that it goes the other way because the public doesn't like it when one party has too much power basically. However, this might be the exception because things are going so poorly for Democrats. And the Cook Political people, they're predicting a Republican victory…

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because we won World War II and won World War I. Although there might be some disagreement about that from the Russians and maybe some others, but that's Trump's version that we're winning all these wars and that the Pentagon should be called the Department of War.

All right, here's why that's a terrible idea. And I'm very surprised that Trump doesn't have the same opinion I'm going to tell you right now. Words matter. You all know because I talk about it too often, my reframe about alcohol where I say alcohol is poison and then people with that one sentence in their head can stop a lifetime of overdrinking. Now maybe it doesn't work for alcoholics, but people who just wanted to get alcohol out of their life, it works really well. Now, why does it work? It only works because of the words in the sentence. Words are how you program a brain. That's why large language models are just combinations of words and that once they figure out the pattern, you've got something that acts artificially intelligent. But I would say I'm not sure that's artificial because the way your own brain is organized is that the things you think are your logic and your thinking are really just words and the way they fit together and the frequency of them. You just believe that you're doing something that you think is thinking, but you're doing what the large language model is doing. You're just looking for the repetitive strongest patterns and then just

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following them. So my point is if you name your Pentagon the Department of War, the odds of having a war go way up. Now that's a hypnotist lesson right there. If you said it's the department of making peace with everybody, people would just sort of think that's what they do. And then they would organize all their thinking and their budget and their activities around making peace with people. If y…

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