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Back to episode — Episode 2942 CWSA 08/29/25

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ut in the Department of Defense cloud system? Well, so now that we know that Secretary Hegseth is working with Microsoft to make sure they don't use any more of those Chinese nationals, see if they can fix that. I guess the Trump administration is looking at tightening up our visa rules, visas where people from other countries under their visa are in the United States for extended periods. But ap…

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some credit. I know a lot of people are saying they won't be happy until that owl-wannabe CEO gets fired. Doesn't she remind you of an owl? Like maybe she's a furry. No, she's not. But she reminds me of an owl. I don't know why. The glasses, I guess. So good work. Robbie Starbuck gets another big win.

According to Remix, Ukraine may have destroyed as much as 20% of Russia's oil refining capacity. So 20%. There are not many things that you can affect by 20% without it being obvious. Allegedly there are now some gas shortages in Russia. I'm not sure you can trust that though. Might be, you could easily imagine there was one gas station that didn't have gas one day and that turned into a bigger story. So I don't know if it's widespread. But interestingly, the Russian refineries that are getting taken out by the Ukrainians have technology in them that is American and there's no other place to get it. So they built their refineries using American parts partly that they can't replace. So they're trying to get sort of lower quality Chinese components to rebuild. And I guess Russia did a major attack on Kiev last night, bigger than normal or ever or something.

Here's what I think. If it's true that Ukraine has taken out 20% of the refinery capacity, the question would be what would be the collapse point? The point where Russia really just has to seriously rethink their idea of being in a war. 20% feels close to a tipping point, but if I had to guess, I'd say 40%. I think if they lose 40% of their refineries that they're going to have to make peace because they can't lose them all. And if they go from 0 to 20 to 40 and that happens in just say a matter of a few weeks, which it looks like it could, if it went to 40, then Russia would know that it could go to 80 and then they're really screwed. So I don't know if what they would do is maybe upgrade their own attacks on Ukraine so that at least it's mutually assured destruction or something like that. I don't know why Ukraine has any energy left. What, like is there some reason that Russia can't destroy all of the energy infrastructure in Ukraine? Because when I see pictures of Kiev and the lights are on and people are acting like things are kind of normal that day, I think to myself, really? So you've got Russia has been at war for years with all these good missiles and they haven't taken out 100% of the energy infrastructure in Ukraine. Why? It seems like that would be the most obvious thing to do. Are they unable or is it actually a bad idea? I'd love to know the answer to that. So that's my prediction. If Kiev can take out 40% of Russia's refineries that Putin would talk peace. 40%.

You're all competing against the experts. I love it when people tell me that my opinion on things like wars in other countrie

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s is invalid because I'm not an expert. What exactly has been the track record of experts on anything? Anything. You name a topic. Tell me how well the experts did on that topic. Now show me the podcasters who had everything right. There'll always be some for every topic. It seems like there's always some podcaster who just got it all right from the start and all the experts got it wrong. I guess…

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