Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 23, 2026
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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 861 Scott Adams - Sipping the Crisis Away. Join Me!

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nd you should look at people's predictions and then see how they did and you should do it for yourself and you should say it publicly. Because if you don't say publicly here's my prediction and then publicly I got it right or publicly I got it wrong, it's too easy to forget the ones you got wrong if you know what I mean if you don't put it out there so other people could remind you. I would like…

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d but let's not start a war with them but they're not our friend. I think Trump was early on that.

I look at all the comments. They're starting to come in now. I'm very proud of you because there aren't many things you can do during the emergency that you just know it's the right thing to do but taking a long walk every day is definitely the right thing to do.

Now if you're going to, somebody's mentioning Nassim Taleb. Now to be fair I blocked him a long time ago for not understanding this. Now he's a smart guy and I'm sure if you heard his side of it it would sound differently. It would sound maybe better than the way I'm going to characterize it. But he was always the main proponent of the argument that even if there was just a small chance that climate change was real you should still put massive resources against it because a one percent chance of doing that much damage to the earth is just too big. So he sort of did a math approach to it and there's some principle and he put big words to it and big names and I looked at it and I said that's just great thinking there. If you only had one problem, if we lived in a world with exactly one thing that could take down the entire economy, yeah you should spend all your money on it. You should really make sure you don't have that one percent chance.

But what if you have more than one problem that could take out your whole economy? If we had put, but here's a thought experiment for you. Let's say that on day one when AOC and those who supported her came up with the Green New Deal, on day one, and let's say we the country said you know sounds pretty good, sounds pretty good, let's do that Green New Deal. Now the one thing we know about it is it would be a massive change. Whether you like it or don't like it everybody would agree it's a fairly massive change to the economy. How would you like to be going through a massive restructuring of the economy at the same time as a pandemic? And how much money would you have? How much resources would you have? Would you be in the same shape? Well it kind of depends wouldn't it? But the point is if you live in a world where you might need an asteroid defense system, you might need a whole new pandemic recovery thing, and maybe there's a risk with climate change that you should be throwing a lot of money at, if you have multiple take-down-the-economy risks, the idea of massively spending resources on just one of them, it doesn't make so much sense anymore.

Now can you think of anybody else in the world who said publicly and often for the past I don't know ten years you better not spend all of your money on climate change because pandemics could be expensive too? Specifically I've been specifically saying for probably ten years, I don't know if I checked it maybe it's five but a long time, that you've got to look at pandemics. You've got to look at literally asteroids. You know should we put a trillion dollars into building a network of satellites that can see f

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ar enough that we can send an atomic bomb and change the direction of a meteor coming in our direction? Maybe. Maybe there is a very small chance we'd be wiped out by a meteor but you know maybe so. In a world with multiple risks you've got to be smarter about your risk management. Somebody says you are making excuses for what? I don't even know what that criticism is. Oh maybe I think I know how…

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