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May 17, 2025 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
38:59
Episode 2842 CWSA 05/17/25

God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, President Trump, Bruce Springsteen, TDS Research Act Funding, Netflix Targeted Ads,Train Track Solar Panels, Biden's Hur Interview, Jake Tapper, Budget Bill Deficit, SALT Tax Deduction, Medicaid Work Requirement, State Dept. DEI, James Comey, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.

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Time Text
We're going to have a show for the ages.
Or not.
There we go.
Just want to see your comments.
Bye.
*clap clap clap*
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and it's the best thing that ever happened to you.
But if you want to take it up to levels that no one can understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice, a stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day that makes everything better.
It's called a simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Oh.
Hmm.
Good.
Well, I've got to warn you that I'm so tired I've been hallucinating.
And there's a non-zero possibility that I will actually fall asleep.
During the show.
And I mean that seriously.
So if you see me fall asleep, you don't need to call 911.
I'm just really, really tired.
And if I start hallucinating or talking like Joe Biden talking to Special Counsel Her, don't worry about that either.
I just need a nap.
So usually on Saturday, Owen Gregorian does his Spaces event after I'm done, but he's got a conflict, so he'll be doing that on Sunday.
So if you're looking for these Spaces after the show, it'll be on Sunday, not Saturday this week.
All right?
Well, let's check the world of science.
MIT says it...
No longer stands behind a student's AI research paper.
So some student, an economics graduate, who is no longer with MIT, did this paper that got a lot of attention because he said that AI had been used in the material science lab and led to all kinds of gains and discoveries.
But the scientists who used it were sad that it worked.
Turns out none of that was true and wasn't based on any science at all.
It was completely made up, apparently, because there were no sources.
And the author of the paper is no longer at MIT.
So there's that.
In case you were worried that Trump wasn't doing anything, he's insulting Taylor Swift.
So Trump posted on Truth.
Has anyone noticed that since I said, I hate Taylor Swift, she's no longer hot?
Which caused Bill Maher and other people to be trying to sort out, wait, does he mean she's no longer attractive hot?
Or her career is no longer Zooming.
It doesn't matter.
It's funny either way.
The fact that Trump would spend one second on this particular topic is once again just hilarious.
I can't get enough of that.
But he also had some words for Bruce Springsteen because Springsteen was doing a concert in another country.
And he was criticizing Trump.
And he says that in The Truth Social, which was a long, long one, he said that Springsteen is dumb as a rock.
And, oh my God, I was hallucinating when I wrote down this note.
I was going to read the sentence, but the sentence doesn't make any sense at all.
Oh my God.
This did outprune of a rocker?
Okay, that's definitely not what he said.
His skin is all atrophied.
Now, that part he did say.
I think it's so funny that Trump goes after a political opponent by talking about his skin being atrophied.
That's pretty good.
Anyway.
Daily Mail is reporting that there's going to be, possibly, there's a bill being introduced by a Republican from Ohio, Warren Davidson, the Trump Derangement Syndrome Research Act.
And the bill is to try to get some research into the phenomenon of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
So that we can understand the causes and maybe the solution.
Well, here's one of those things where maybe you should just ask Scott.
Scott, what do you think is the cause of TDS?
I've got the answer to that.
It's fake news.
If you remove the fake news, do you think there would be any TDS?
No, they wouldn't.
It is entirely a phenomenon of fake news, which then gets into social media as well.
But you don't need to study this, Representative Davidson, although I think it's hilarious that you proposed it.
All right.
And they say it won't cost taxpayers a dime.
Good.
Well, Netflix, As unleashed, according to interesting engineering, an AI-powered bin roll ads.
So the AI will determine your mood somehow, which is weird and eerie, and it will push ads to you based on your, I guess, your personality and how they think you feel that day.
I don't know how they figured that out, but I guess AI will be doing it.
So, did you have any questions about TDS?
Of course, it's obvious that the news coverage is what caused TDS.
And if you weren't convinced of that, then why does Netflix think it can manipulate you by their ads?
It's the same thing.
If you're a captive audience and you're staring at a screen...
They can make some percentage of you do just about anything, including buying products and going crazy.
Well, the Border Patrol saw a 44% spike in applications after Trump got elected.
The Post Millennial is reporting on this.
But here's the part that is not funny, but it's funny.
Can we agree on that?
So the next thing I tell you is not funny at all.
There's nothing funny about it, except it's kind of funny.
So we're going to do some contrast.
The contrast is that when Trump is the president, there's a 44% spike in applications for the Border Patrol.
But apparently under Biden, the morale of the Border Patrol was so bad.
That they actually hired something called a suicidologist in 2021.
So under Trump, people are scrambling to try to get jobs.
And under Biden, they were trying to keep them alive so that they didn't hate their jobs so much they would kill themselves.
There's nothing funny about that.
Stop laughing.
There's nothing funny about that.
I told you.
All right.
There's nothing funny about this next story either.
Did you hear about the accused serial killer in Florida who was given a chance to say his last words before he was executed?
And his last words were, President Trump, keep making America great.
I'm ready to go.
How long did he think about what his last words would be?
And at what point did he decide he was going to say, keep making America great, Trump?
I don't know.
Well, there goes another Trump voter.
There's nothing funny about that.
Nothing funny about that.
All right.
There's a new bipartisan bill that's being introduced, Fox News is talking about it, that would allow the military to shoot down drones that are over our military bases.
Apparently, in the last year or so, there have been 350 drone sightings over military bases, which I guess we think most of them, or all of them, or some percentage of them, were enemies Spying on our bases.
So at the moment, it's not legal to just start blazing away.
I don't know what kind of weapon they would use, but if this passes, and it's bipartisan, so pretty good chance it will, the military will be able to knock them out of the air.
It'd be good practice.
Here's the worst idea that Switzerland ever had.
It looks really good in the video, but it's got to be the worst idea I've ever heard.
So Switzerland is putting solar panels on train tracks, but these are active train tracks.
So, you know, the in-between part of the rails?
You got all this space, and it's just sitting there.
So Switzerland decided, I think it's still in trial.
To put solar panels between the rails, and they've got them so that the train doesn't touch them.
Now, problem number one, if you have solar panels, they're really a lot more effective if they're facing the direction of the sun.
If they're facing straight up, you're already giving up, what, 30% of all your efficiency?
Number two, I don't know if you know this, but trains can cause some vibration.
Are you aware of that?
In fact, there are very few things that cause more vibration than a train going over a solar panel.
I can't believe that they're not going to have the biggest maintenance problem in the world.
And then number three, I don't know what things are like in Switzerland.
But in the United States, if you put a bunch of solar panels on the ground, people would just break them with rocks.
No reason.
Just because they could.
So you've got a problem with maybe vandals breaking them.
Unless Switzerland doesn't have any vandals, I don't know.
Maybe they're special that way.
But no, I'm not...
I'm not thinking that this will sweep the world.
I think Switzerland's got some problems going.
Well, China says that their humanoid robots won't take your job or anybody's job.
They'll simply boost the efficiency of the current employees.
It's not going to replace them.
It's just going to boost their productivity.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that they will do nothing but boost your productivity?
Well, I would say that depends a great deal on what job you're talking about.
If you're talking about a job that's literally just carrying things from one place to another, maybe that will replace your job.
But if it's a lot of variability and you need a person there to figure out if the robot's doing the right thing, Well, then maybe it won't take your job.
Reuters is reporting on this.
Well, have you heard yet the audio of Biden being interviewed by special counsel, Herr?
So we'd seen the transcripts, but we had not heard him talking.
And it's as bad as you imagined it.
Biden didn't remember the year that his son died.
And then even when he was told he got it wrong again.
And he started rambling about his dead son, which wasn't even the answer to the question, I don't think.
And you could see why Special Counsel Herr said that there was no point in prosecuting him because he would just look like a...
You know, a forgetful old man.
It's pretty bad.
So, here's what I want to add to the fact that Democrats are acting like, well, how could we have possibly known?
I mean, we didn't hear the Hervin audio.
Well, I'm going to add to that.
How could they possibly have known?
And also...
Was there even one Democrat who pointed out, even one, that Biden ran on the fine people hoax, which wasn't even real?
Do you recall even one Democrat saying, well, your entire campaign theme is based on a lie?
No!
That's all you need to know.
If they can't even point out that the entire campaign was built on...
One of the most easily debunked hoaxes, then obviously they don't care that he was mentally retarded.
I mean, they wouldn't care about that at all.
And now Jake Tapper is modifying his message a little bit to say that he needs to have some humility about the fact that he didn't catch it.
He didn't catch it early.
Does anybody believe anything that Jake Tapper is saying about this topic?
Unbelievable.
Well, Harry Enten, the data guy on CNN, was talking about a new Reuters-Ipsos poll that shows that Trump's popularity had gone down quite a bit, but seems to have recovered.
In late April, he was eight points underwater, but he's already recovered almost all of that.
He's up seven points to a negative one net of favorability.
And as Harry Enten says, this is not the picture.
I think a lot of people were thinking that we would be painting in late April.
I think a lot of people expected his approval to keep dropping, but in fact it rose.
Now, that's almost entirely based on People were afraid of the tariffs, right?
And then after he said, oh, we'll take down the tariffs or give China 90 days or something, then everybody said, oh, okay.
I think it was mostly based on that.
I don't think the timing would have included his Middle East trip, which was a big success.
Well, you've heard of the Big Beautiful Bill.
That is the budget bill that Trump's trying to get passed.
Apparently, it's already been voted down by the first committee by 2116.
Now, that's a committee vote.
That's not the whole Congress.
So I guess they'll have to go back and negotiate and change things.
Now, the budget, of course, is a complete failure by the Republicans and by Trump.
Because it does not address the deficit in any meaningful way, and that's the only thing that matters.
Everything else is optional, but the deficit will kill us.
So they've decided not to do anything about that.
These ticking points seem to be the SALT deductions.
That's the state and local tax deductions.
So the blue states, mostly, like California and New Jersey and New York, Have very high state taxes.
It wasn't long ago, before Trump, when you could deduct those from your federal taxes.
So, I mean, it was a deduction, not a subtraction.
But there was a big conversation about whether those should come back, and if they do, at what level.
I don't know if you know this, but my taxes, I'm pretty sure went up when Trump did his first tax reduction.
Because if you're in California and you lose your state and local tax deduction, which, by the way, I don't see why we deserve it.
Why do we deserve some kind of special treatment?
Because our state is so poorly run that our taxes are high.
Why does that give me the right to a deduction?
It never made sense.
So I never really argued against it.
But I think when I lost my SALT deduction that I ended up paying more even though my tax rate went down.
So Trump actually raised my taxes.
I think.
I'm pretty sure he raised my taxes.
Anyway, there's also some conversation about Medicaid.
And the weasel Republicans are trying to add some kind of work requirement.
So you have to be in college or you have to be doing some public service or have a job or you won't get Medicaid.
But they don't want that to kick in until 2028 after the presidential election.
I don't know if you could be more lame than that.
You know, they come up with an idea that would kick people off, but it's a clever idea because it only kicks off people that you think are lazy or not contributing.
But 5 billion people would lose their Medicaid under this work requirement.
But they push it to 2028, where probably it'll be reversed before then.
So that's like not even trying.
Not even trying.
According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. oil production, I was kind of expecting this, is going to decline in 2026.
Not a ton, but it won't go up.
And I guess the shale companies are slowing production because the price of oil is down.
And we might be reaching peak oil in terms of what we have to...
To get out of the ground anyway.
I don't know about that peak oil part.
So if you thought that low oil prices were a good sign, they're a good sign in some ways.
Putin won't have as much money to wage his war.
But in other ways, it's just going to cause people to drill for less oil.
And then prices will go back up.
So oil is kind of hard to evaluate because it's got the negative and the positive at the same time all the time.
According to Wall Street Apes, there's a story here about Ted Cruz, who was talking to the chief diversity officer of the State Department.
And apparently they had a hiring policy, and Ted Cruz was getting to the bottom of it.
It included an email that was sent out from the chief diversity officer saying that white men, straight white men, and being Christian was a disability, and those people can't be hired.
So, that was as bad as you thought it was.
Unbelievable.
A disability, being a white man.
This was the State Department.
It's not even a private company.
I mean, what can you do except just shake your head?
I feel all those South African whites who are coming here to get away from South Africa.
I feel if they knew how bad things were here, they might have gone back.
I don't know.
Anyway, Syria is now talking to Israel about joining the Abraham Accords.
And Trump has allegedly brokered that.
Do you think that's going to happen?
Do you think Syria and Israel are going to start getting along and Syria will join the Abraham Accords?
Maybe.
Maybe.
I wouldn't rule it out.
So that might be some good news coming.
All right.
So I didn't want to talk about James Comey and his 86-47, but it's just all over the news.
You know, my opinion was that it was innocent because 86 just means get rid of food.
That's the definition that Grok will give you.
But a number of you said, Scott, you don't understand.
In my world, you said, It means do violence.
You know, kill somebody.
And I thought to myself, what the hell world do you live in?
Now, I will give you, I will give you, that if you were in the back room of a mafia situation, and the mafia boss said to you, hey, Scott, I need you to 86 veto.
That would mean kill him.
Can we all agree on that?
That if the context were a dangerous context, let's say you were in the military and you were talking to a sniper, and you were giving your sniper some instructions.
All right, we see these guys standing on that wall over there?
86 of them.
So I think we can all agree that 86 depends entirely on the context.
And if there's one thing I know, when you want to get some violence and kill somebody, the way you communicate it is with seashells.
You organize them in seashells on the beach.
So that's how you know it was really violence.
Because the seashells.
Context.
Context, people.
But I guess Comey's already been talked to by the Secret Service.
The smart people say he's not going to be in any trouble.
Because he already deleted the post and said, oh, I didn't realize that there's a violent meaning to that.
Not on restaurant shows.
Is that a good argument?
That Gordon Ramsay hasn't said 86, so therefore it's not a restaurant thing?
It's literally the definition of it.
Go to any AI.
Grok will help.
And just say, what is the definition of 86?
And it will say it came out of the restaurant industry.
Now, but I'm acknowledging that if you were in a different context where people do get killed and that's normal for that context, that if you used it in that context, it probably wouldn't mean kill somebody.
But no, the normal context is not kill somebody.
It just seems to be a secondary context.
And I will acknowledge that.
Anyway, he's not in any risk.
You won't be arrested.
Because there's a non-violent, more common use for it.
As long as that's true, you don't have to worry about it.
He doesn't have to worry about it.
But I will give you this.
I do think the Republicans just want to pounce on it.
Because if Trump had said it, they would have said it's mafia talk.
You know, Trump's doing that mafia talk.
And we would say, are you kidding?
That's not mafia talk.
It's just talk.
So if you want to go after Comey and act like he was doing mafia talk, have fun.
Just have fun with it.
But don't drag me into it.
Because to me, that issue is done.
So the Supreme Court...
The Supreme Court was looking at that issue of whether it would be legal.
Well, no, it wasn't looking at that.
But it was considering the Alien Enemies Act and birthright citizenship.
And it made a ruling that had nothing to do with either of them directly.
So the Supreme Court kicked back to a lower court the question of how long you would give notice.
Do these alien enemies before you pick them up and deport them?
Now, I'm no border security person, but is it a good idea to give notice to your alien enemies before you pick them up?
And how much notice do you give?
Yeah, there you go.
There's the Grok definition going by in the comments.
And I saw somebody suggest, all right, well, if you have to give them 72 hours of notice or something like that, can you do it all at once?
Can you just announce, hey, if you're in that Trenda-Ragua gang, we're telling you now publicly, it's your 72-hour notice.
You better get out of here.
Now, maybe, maybe you can do them all at once.
Or do you have to do them individually, like with their name?
Juan, I'm here to tell you, you've got 72 hours.
Then wouldn't Juan kind of disappear?
Or can you tell them after they're captured?
So I don't know anything.
I don't understand this story at all.
So it's going to a lower court to decide how much notice you get if you're a target of the Alien Enemies Act.
So I think the Supreme Court, somebody said punted.
Yeah, they just decided not to be part of the solution.
Maybe that was the right answer.
Well, Moody's has downgraded the credit rating of the U.S. I think it's the last one that did it because the other credit agencies have already done it.
And it's because of our debt.
Too much debt.
And then they looked at the new budget proposal and said to themselves, well, that's not going to help.
So there you go.
That should cost us a lot of money for nothing.
Over in Gaza, there's a question about whether Israel succeeded in taking out the head of Hamas, which his last name would be Sinwar.
Now you might say, but wait, they already took out Sinwar.
Well, apparently he had a brother.
So Senoir's brother was the head of Hamas, and they bombed something that they believed he was in, but they say it's going to take a while to know if they actually got him.
I don't know why that would take a while, because it seems like if they didn't get him, wouldn't Hamas want to brag about it?
Ah, you missed.
I don't know.
But I guess the Israelis are doing what they're calling Operation Gideon's Chariots.
It involves a lot of bulldozers and tanks and stuff.
And they're going to push deep into Gaza and back by heavy artillery.
And they're going to occupy the entire strip and rescue the remaining hostages.
Well, I don't know how much rescuing they're going to do, but they're going to basically occupy the whole thing.
Now, I've got a question.
I've seen lots of pictures of Gaza since the war started.
Have you seen any pictures of anything in Gaza that looked like a habitable home?
Because I haven't.
Haven't they destroyed 100% of the habitable homes?
So, where do the non-combatants go?
I mean, I assume that was, you know, the plan to make sure that they didn't have any incentive to stay.
But I've never seen a single image in Gaza since, you know, recently anyway, where there was a home that could be occupied by a real person.
I explained the 86th, but what about the 47th?
That's President Trump, 47th president.
Timo Sinoir.
That's always funny, seeing in the comments.
He's not the original Sinoir, he's Timo Sinoir.
Anyway, it looks to me like Trump is staying out of the Gaza situation, giving himself a little distance because nothing good is going to come out with that reputationally.
You know, Israel is pursuing what they see as in their national best interests.
They might be right about that.
But you don't want to get tired by that same brush.
You don't want to look like you're helping, because there's nothing good for our country that's going to come out of that, except a bad reputation for being in favor of that much war.
So I think Trump is still saying something like, stop fighting, end the war.
But I don't know how much he means it.
Because Israel has no intention whatsoever of ending the war until they've gotten everything they want.
And they probably will.
Remember I told you there was some advisor in Iran who had claimed that Iran was ready to deal and they would maybe limit their uranium enrichment.
In return for the dropping of the sanctions.
And I was mocking that a little bit because he wasn't an elected official and it just seemed like just some guy talking.
Well, Iran says that basically nothing's going on in terms of negotiating.
So that wasn't real, at least in terms of the leadership.
So there was no any kind of anything.
So, Trump has said that they've sent a proposal over to Iran.
Iran's leader says, there's no proposal from the U.S. We don't have anything.
We don't have anything written down.
So, everything that we're hearing about the negotiating in Iran, apparently it's all fake.
Whatever Trump is saying about ongoing negotiations, nope.
Nothing like that happening.
According to Iran.
So I don't know if that means that there are secret negotiations.
But it kind of looks like there are no negotiations.
And we're not even close.
And there's not really much chance that that's going to turn into a peace deal anytime soon.
So I wouldn't think that Iran is going to be some big victory for Trump anytime soon.
And then according to The Hill, At least one expert on Russia and Eurasia said it's clear that most observers that Putin is not interested in serious negotiations or a ceasefire, according to Maria Snagovaya.
She's some kind of expert in that area.
And then some people say that if Trump were to meet with Putin privately, which...
Trump is suggesting he'd like to do.
That it would not produce any kind of a peace deal, but it would raise Putin's profile.
So it'd be good for Putin to meet with Trump, but there's no way it's going to turn into a peace deal, because Putin seems to have no interest in that whatsoever.
I would agree, and I've been saying it for some time, that Putin is clearly signaling that he doesn't want a peace deal.
He just wants to keep doing what he's doing.
So I wouldn't expect any kind of Ukraine peace deal.
But Emmanuel Macron says that Europe is putting together some new package of Russia sanctions coordinating with the United States.
Zero Hedge is reporting this.
And we'll see if that makes any difference.
Do you think there are enough sanctions left that we haven't already done that are going to bring Putin to his knees?
It doesn't feel like it.
What exactly are they going to do?
Are they going to say, well, Europe is going to have no energy this winter?
I mean, I think Europe kind of has to buy from them because it's not like they have another source that would give them the volume that they need.
So I don't expect anything to happen in Ukraine, anything positive to happen.
Well, according to interesting engineering, China is using their AI, DeepSeq, to make decisions in the battle, during a battle, 3,600 times faster than humans.
Does that scare you yet?
Imagine going into a battle where there are robots and drones and whatnot, a lot of automation, and it's being completely run by the AI.
And the AI is making instant decisions that humans can't keep up with.
That's some dangerous stuff, but that's what's coming.
And I'm sure the United States has to match that.
Even if we thought, oh no, it's too dangerous for the machines.
For the machines to be making decisions, I think we just have to.
Because if our adversaries are using AI to make instant multiple decisions, we're going to have to have that capability, even if we think it's dangerous.
So, there's that.
All right.
So, I think I may have mentioned, or did I, that I'm really, really tired and trying not to hallucinate.
So I'm going to end it here.
I'll remind you again that usually on Saturday, Owen Gregorian does a spaces after this show, but that will be Sunday this week, so it'll be tomorrow because he's got a conflict.
And ladies and gentlemen, that's all I've got for today.
Happy Saturday.
And I'm amazed that I stayed awake this long.
Oh, surprisingly.
And I'm going to say, Goodbye privately to the locals people, but I don't have much content for you guys.
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