Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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es you actually love it. Now imagine that idea taken to fixing a whole bunch of other society's problems. I'm gonna throw out an idea where design can fix a whole range of problems in society. I'm not saying that this is the best idea in the world. I'm saying it'll make you think about design as a solution in a way you haven't done before. Somebody in the comments is saying array for engineers. E…

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rming, what's the big expense for indoor farming? The big expense is labor and this town would have lots of inexpensive labor so that part's covered. And energy because it takes a lot of electricity to keep the lights on and everything in your building and to keep the temperature right. But if you're located next to a nuclear power plant your energy is cheap or it could be if that's how you designed the whole thing.

So now you've had cheap food and it's the good kind. It's not fast food. It's just good food that you were growing there. You've got cheap water, you've got cheap energy, you've got cheap housing. And you could imagine this concept taken to everything else. You know maybe you put in a hospital there so that you've also got good healthcare. Maybe use it to test new healthcare solutions etc.

Somebody says what incentive? What incentive for what? It would be a commercial enterprise. The nuclear industry would be happy to participate because they would not only be creating energy for the town but they'd be selling it outside the town. So I think everybody wins. They'd have a place to put their plant, somebody to sell it to etc. And everybody would have jobs eventually because it would be a perfect hiring pool.

All right so I'm not saying this is the greatest idea in the world. I'm making a general statement that design will save the future and design specifically will take the cost of living a quality life from so high that ordinary people can't afford it down to the level where ordinary people can afford it. And that's an engineering design question.

All right but more importantly I think that these design places could be way more fun to live in and more satisfying. I'd like to use the example of my college dormitory experience. One of my best living situations was a college dormitory which on paper should have been the worst because I didn't have a house, I had a little room etc. The reason that my college experience was the best living situation I've ever had is because it was designed from scratch to be exactly that. I loved not having to shop for food, prepare food, do dishes. I would just walk a few steps away to the cafeteria and they'd do all that for me.

So having a central cafeteria might be a really good way to lower costs for a community. You don't even need a kitchen. And the other thing that was good about college is that transportation was free because I could walk everywhere that I needed to walk. There wasn't anywhere I needed to go that I needed a vehicle. They designed it so I had free transportation.

The other thing that I had for free is entertainment because it was designed to be a place where people would naturally meet and they're naturally the same age, they have the same interests, they're all in college. You had unlimited entertainment because you were in the right place with the right people doing some kind of common stuff.

So design the way it's been applied to college, the same concept of design — not the same model but the idea of designing — could be brought to the real world outside of college and I think you would have the most awesome poor town you ever had. And what I call it poor town, I'm being a little bit ironic. It would be something specifically for poor people to move there and be able to regain their life. Maybe there's even classes and education and stuff so they can really rebuild.

So anyway that's the idea. I'll put that out there just to percolate. And I will talk to you —

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oh let me say one other thing. If you haven't used Interface by WhenHub it keeps getting better and better all the time. That's my startup's app. And Joshua Lisec who was my guest here yesterday is on that as an expert on ghostwriting and getting published. One of the most frequent questions I get is how to edit, how to be published, how to write a book. And so now you have an expert who from $50…

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