Episode 3026 CWSA 11⧸22⧸25
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 14 minutes
Words per Minute
140.53632
Summary
On today's show, Scott Adams talks about the latest in the ongoing saga of the Somali fraud scandal, the temporary protected status for Somalians, and the best coffee you'll ever drink. Plus, a special guest appearance from Owen Gregorian, host of the podcast Spaces.
Transcript
00:00:02.720
We're about to begin what can only be described as the best coffee with Scott Adams you've
00:00:13.280
Let me make sure all your comments are zipping by here.
00:00:33.940
Oh, it's because the brand-new 2026 Dilbert calendar was sitting on top of my notes.
00:00:42.740
Well, as long as I'm talking about it, I don't know if you've noticed, but we're running out
00:00:50.860
If you haven't ordered yours, you'll be really mad if you wait too long.
00:00:55.100
So, it does look like we have a really good chance of selling out, which is good for me
00:01:01.900
and not ideal for the last person who tries to get one.
00:01:18.180
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
00:01:25.420
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time.
00:01:30.520
But if you want to take a chance, if you want to take a chance of elevating your experience
00:01:36.200
up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you
00:01:41.400
need for that is a cuppa, a mug, or a glass, a tank, or a chalice, a stein, a canteen jug,
00:01:53.300
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes
00:02:16.800
Well, so today will be one of the best shows I have ever given you because, just by chance,
00:02:23.500
there's a whole bunch of persuasion-related, Trump-related things happening, and they're
00:02:29.820
all delicious, and they'll all teach you something.
00:02:33.280
Well, we're going to start with, oh, by the way, after the show, immediately after this,
00:02:38.300
Owen Gregorian will be hosting another Spaces event on the X platform.
00:02:52.680
But you can ask questions, and you can participate, and you'll love it.
00:02:57.780
Anyway, President Trump has issued an order to temporarily terminate what's called temporary
00:03:13.260
So I guess they had some kind of special characterization because the Somalians were assumed to be in, you know,
00:03:25.780
And that allowed a lot of Somalians to come over here.
00:03:29.920
And do you remember, was it just yesterday or the day before yesterday?
00:03:37.520
Remember when I was saying that whenever you see a news story and it has any of these keywords,
00:03:44.020
it means some Somalians have stolen your tax money.
00:03:47.480
Like, you don't want to see Minnesota, any kind of government program, anything about tax dollars.
00:04:00.100
If you see any of those words in the news, and they're together, some Somalians are running some kind of scam on you.
00:04:08.700
So there were so many of them, I think, that I started losing the ability to tell them apart.
00:04:19.400
Well, Christopher Ruffo, you know him if you're on the political right and you follow social media.
00:04:28.000
Christopher Ruffo and I guess some people he works with, I don't know exactly the entity,
00:04:36.020
we broke this Somali fraud story and called on President Trump to revoke the temporary protected status for all Somalis.
00:04:52.500
By far, this is the coolest thing about the Trump administration.
00:05:04.900
We talk about can people read the room, meaning know what people are thinking.
00:05:09.480
But he actually reads, like literally reads, the people in the room.
00:05:15.260
So Christopher Ruffo and his posts on X, and I'm sure he's had direct communications with people in the administration,
00:05:26.140
He puts in the work based on what he and some other people have decided would be the important thing to work on.
00:05:43.080
They just sort of recognize this gap in the way we run the country.
00:05:48.540
And he must have said, you know, I'm doing a little mind reading here because I can't know what they're thinking.
00:05:53.980
But it seems to me that these were some patriots who said, no, we're not going to put up with this.
00:06:12.280
Just the fact, does it make you feel good that somebody could identify a problem, put the work in, and then it gets solved?
00:06:36.500
Well, you already know by now Marjorie Taylor Greene has resigned, effective early January.
00:06:44.760
So there's so much to say about that because everybody took sides, blah, blah, blah.
00:06:50.900
But I'll say a bunch of things about it in no particular order.
00:06:55.780
Some say that it was because she disagreed with Trump on a number of what she might call MAGA-related issues, and that she was more MAGA than Trump was in the end, and then they could no longer work with each other.
00:07:13.380
So Trump has said he wanted to primary her, and there's not much chance she probably could have got elected if she got primaried and the president was against her.
00:07:25.740
So a lot of smart people said, well, did she really quit, or was she not going to be in office after the next election cycle anyway, so she's just getting ahead of it?
00:07:41.940
Other people said, oh, is it just a coincidence that her benefits are vested, and now she's got health care?
00:07:51.920
Well, that would be a perfectly good reason for retiring from any job.
00:08:08.800
So – but let me give you a few other ways to look at this.
00:08:13.140
Mario Knopfel on X had a take that was – that she just pulled off the smartest political move of her career.
00:08:25.160
How many people think that this wasn't running away?
00:08:29.420
She just saw an opportunity for the biggest move of any politician ever, and so she took it because she's smart.
00:08:37.500
And she said, whoa, this will never happen again.
00:08:50.940
He said that she quit because she's playing the long game.
00:08:53.900
And losing in a primary with Trump destroying her is not really a good long-term strategy.
00:09:09.000
Now, you could argue what the top is, but you know what I mean.
00:09:11.500
To go out before she's badly bruised, when she still has full name recognition and all that.
00:09:17.800
And she has every opportunity in the world now.
00:09:21.440
I mean, I think she's got a book out, but I don't know if that's new or it's been out for a while.
00:09:26.780
Obviously, by now, she would be looking at offers, probably lots of them.
00:09:37.380
Do you think anybody's offered to say, well, how would you like to be our next Matt Gaetz?
00:09:46.920
So, the world of opportunities for her just opened up.
00:09:51.740
Did she become more powerful or less powerful because of resigning?
00:10:00.840
If she just goes off and works on her construction business or family construction business,
00:10:06.940
then that would be perfectly respectable, patriot, took a shot at improving things,
00:10:15.660
decided it wasn't for her, wasn't making enough of a difference,
00:10:23.520
So, that's sort of the worst case scenario, is that she just has a normal life now.
00:10:33.960
Well, the other possibility is that she becomes a Tucker Carlson-like, Matt Gaetz-like,
00:10:42.880
Ben Shapiro-like person whose influence just magnifies because she'd be good on TV.
00:10:55.760
So, now she suddenly has the opportunity to be way, way more influential.
00:11:03.460
And even President Trump might someday want to go on her show and answer some questions.
00:11:17.540
So, we don't know if any of that's going to happen.
00:11:21.400
But if you think that she's operating from loss or operating from weakness,
00:11:32.780
And she has lots of options, so you just don't know where she's going.
00:11:45.320
I think it's more likely that she'll come out of this more powerful.
00:11:54.440
Whether you like her or not, I know it's always a mixed bag,
00:11:58.560
but would you agree that she'll come out of this more powerful, not less?
00:12:13.860
We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans.
00:12:17.000
We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice.
00:12:20.040
And we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes.
00:12:24.280
Because at Desjardins Business, we speak the same language you do.
00:12:28.760
So, join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us
00:12:37.520
In a somewhat related but not really, I saw user Matt Van Swal on X.
00:12:57.960
And he noted that in Charlotte, North Carolina, that there were – he says hundreds of construction sites are completely empty.
00:13:07.220
And he believes the reason is that ICE came through and took all the employees.
00:13:13.400
How would he know, or how would anybody know, if there were hundreds of construction sites that were empty in Charlotte, North Carolina?
00:13:21.800
It sounds like maybe a little bit, a little bit of hyperbole or a little bit of – not projection, but would he know that?
00:13:32.180
Now, I do believe that it's observable, that you would observably see that a lot of sites were closed.
00:13:45.840
Do you make of it that it would be a mistake, or was a mistake, to send away all the people who know how to build stuff?
00:13:55.800
I already know what you're going to say in the comments.
00:13:58.820
Shall I summarize your comments without even reading them?
00:14:08.040
Why did you start a construction company that depended on non-American workers?
00:14:23.020
But, I would argue, we are all part of this big old economy.
00:14:27.820
And, if it were this problem once, you might say, well, that construction owner guy made a mistake.
00:14:43.780
That's going to be magnified all over the country, right?
00:14:49.440
And, then, the real question is, it kind of depends how long it lasts, right?
00:14:54.440
But, if you said to me, Scott, Scott, answer me this.
00:15:02.300
Yeah, there might be a few days where they have to hire American-born workers and replace all the foreign-born people who got deported.
00:15:21.880
I would say, two weeks to convert from foreign-born to American-born workers in these good jobs.
00:15:35.060
I would definitely take a two-week total national disruption if, at the end of it, we had, you know, American-born workers and that's what we wanted.
00:15:56.780
What if it is six months and then half of the people who are in the construction business go out of business?
00:16:05.220
So, did we even create a path for the construction industry to survive?
00:16:17.660
So, I would feel very different if there was simply a disruption in the economy versus destroying the entire construction industry in a way that almost can't go back.
00:16:32.600
And do we know which one of those is going to happen?
00:16:43.560
I think the general feeling, and I'm going to say something that sounds a little biased here because it is.
00:16:52.040
The general feeling is that for people who are not close to the employment market, which is a lot of us,
00:17:00.420
I don't think people understand how woefully undertrained American-born workers are.
00:17:10.280
I don't think you know how hard it's going to be to get them trained up to the point that they can match the work of the foreign-born people.
00:17:25.860
The fact that it's hard shouldn't stop you from doing it if you want to get to that end point.
00:17:37.220
How many of you feel confident that you do know and that you've got a good idea in your head,
00:17:42.740
oh, this is going to be three weeks of pain and then everything will be back to normal and better than normal
00:17:50.060
because it would be American-born workers and maybe that's what you want.
00:17:55.840
Are you confident that you know where this ends up?
00:18:11.060
You know, sometimes, and this might be one of those times,
00:18:14.160
sometimes you have to just jump to the next rock without knowing if there's going to be another rock there.
00:18:24.320
And I don't know that there will ever be another time when the construction companies will be forced to hire American.
00:18:36.060
So if we lose this opportunity, well, maybe it doesn't come around again.
00:18:41.680
So I wouldn't disagree with your plan if you thought that we should just do it and suffer the consequences.
00:19:00.200
Well, the other big story is that Trump met Zoran Mamdami.
00:19:07.600
And you probably know that instead of fighting it out like some of you thought that they would,
00:19:15.920
they ended up, at least Trump did, acting very friendly, like everything went great.
00:19:25.600
Now, I would note the Zoran, at least in the Oval Office meeting that was on video, he was his usual smiley self.
00:19:41.700
He looked like, I don't know where this is going.
00:19:49.540
Am I going to be like some of those other leaders who didn't know that you were going to hijack me when I went into the Oval Office?
00:19:59.760
So Trump had this gigantic advantage over him that Trump knew where Trump was going.
00:20:07.140
And he knew that he was going to keep it friendly.
00:20:15.540
So I think he was a little bit, not a little bit.
00:20:18.500
I mean, how many times has he been in the Oval Office?
00:20:24.420
Basically, I've been in the Oval Office more than he had until that day.
00:20:28.660
So it did look like Zoran was Ashok the intern, didn't it?
00:20:41.140
Trump is sitting in a chair and Mondani is standing.
00:20:54.740
So Trump goes in with all these power symbols, and he makes Zoran just sort of stand there and not know what to do.
00:21:15.980
Have you noticed that Trump is consistently able to be the most interesting person in every story, especially if the story has some control over?
00:21:26.740
How in the world could Trump become the most interesting person in this story?
00:21:39.460
He literally is more interesting than Trump, just in this narrow domain.
00:21:44.560
Do you think Trump wants to bring in a guy who's got as much game as Trump does, ish, not as much, but that he's operating at that highest level of persuasion?
00:21:57.160
Do you think Trump wanted to bring him in and sort of make him the star?
00:22:06.400
So if you were Trump, how could you guarantee that without looking like a giant dick, you could also claim all the attention?
00:22:17.060
Well, how about acting like he's Zoran's best friend and playing opposite of type to the point where it's all you want to talk about?
00:22:25.680
Well, wait a minute, I didn't think Trump would do this.
00:22:28.780
Wait a minute, would that other leader he do this?
00:22:33.340
Wait a minute, is it just because he likes New York?
00:22:36.640
Wait a minute, you see where I'm going on this?
00:22:40.220
Trump made Trump the interesting person in this story.
00:22:50.880
There's no normal politician who could have out-Zoran'd Zoran at the peak of his being interesting.
00:23:10.380
He just high ground him like he wasn't even there.
00:23:13.640
So Trump made himself the star of the event and makes you insanely curious about what did they actually say behind closed doors?
00:23:30.580
Or was it just like a spontaneous thing where he sort of liked Zoran and thought, you know what?
00:23:40.360
But it's the not knowing that makes it interesting.
00:23:44.820
So if you don't understand the level of talent that Trump brought to that one, just that one event, you're really missing a great show.
00:23:59.200
It's not normal to be that skillful in this unique situation, which he's never been in before.
00:24:12.100
So here's one reason that you might have predicted that they would get along.
00:24:21.900
And I've told you this before, so it won't be the first time you've heard it, but it would be the first time maybe you used it to predict.
00:24:47.480
Doesn't matter if it's some subset of talent within one of those things.
00:24:54.760
And even if the person's on the other team, he will call them out for their talent.
00:25:01.720
So knowing as you do, and I've told you this before, that he's drawn to talent, he calls it out, he follows it, he tries to incorporate it, he tries to be around it.
00:25:13.340
And what would you have predicted that would be his response to Zoran in person?
00:25:23.740
If the only thing you knew is that he loves talent and it completely changes how he operates, you put him in the room with a super talented person.
00:25:32.020
I'm talking about the kind of talent that only a few people in the world have.
00:25:40.540
You put him in the room with that and he's always smiling.
00:25:49.560
I'm seeing that word in the comments, respectful.
00:25:52.000
So he goes immediately into respectful mode and then everything works out.
00:25:57.960
Two high level people showing respect to each other.
00:26:00.820
And Zoran Mamdani quite wisely showed full respect to the office, which is all Trump requires.
00:26:12.200
But if he shows full respect to the office, well, now you've got two people who can talk.
00:26:21.220
Trump joked when one of the – it might have been CNN – asked Mamdani, did he think that Trump was a fascist?
00:26:29.960
And rather than let Zoran try to answer that, which might be a problem, Trump jumps in and interrupts.
00:27:00.380
He took that little problem, just took it off his plate, and made it forever and ever a problem again.
00:27:06.920
There will never be another time when Zoran has to answer that same stupid question.
00:27:11.700
Well, you called him a fascist before, but now you want federal money.
00:27:23.980
Now, does that obligate Zoran to sort of owe Trump?
00:27:54.860
There are different episodes of the show, but it's always the show.
00:28:03.020
And what could have been a better show than the one he put on yesterday
00:28:07.220
by surprising us that they're, you know, acting like best friends?
00:28:13.240
I mean, a fist fight might have been more fun, but, you know, that wouldn't have been appropriate.
00:28:18.500
So, he knows how to put it on the show, and he did.
00:28:21.720
And then Trump also said that they had good chemistry.
00:28:27.940
And he said, quote, it's always nice to have good chemistry with people.
00:28:35.140
And if he has good personal chemistry, he can get along with anybody.
00:28:39.840
And by the way, do you remember when I used to say that Trump had a pirate ship?
00:28:46.620
And one of the things I liked about him, especially in the first election,
00:28:50.520
is that he would assemble people who were his supporters that you wouldn't think would be on the same ship.
00:28:56.560
And so, I call it a pirate ship, because it's all these weirdos.
00:29:00.760
And weirdos, I say, with love, not with insult.
00:29:09.420
And I always thought, that is the strongest frame you're ever going to see.
00:29:14.040
Because once you've established that you're the only one who can have any kind of pirate,
00:29:24.380
If you're trying to pick teams, and you've established that you'll not only work with a pirate,
00:29:30.960
you'll make them head of a cabinet position, that's a real strong power.
00:29:38.800
So, yeah, the pirate ship mentality, if you're treating the pirates as a positive,
00:29:45.180
like, I don't care what you did before, RFK Jr.,
00:29:48.440
I don't care if you ate a whale's head, or I don't know what he's accused of doing.
00:29:53.520
But as long as you can do this thing for me, and for the country, we're going to do this thing.
00:30:06.680
I saw a body language expert looking at Zoran in the Oval Office,
00:30:11.920
and thought that he was being very reserved, but also seemed to be relaxed.
00:30:27.900
I think both of them knew how to put each other at ease and did a good job of it.
00:30:31.460
But, you know, let's say, and Trump said about Zoran that he couldn't have been nicer.
00:30:39.720
And I thought to myself, that is just a superpower, isn't it?
00:30:47.600
You know, even if it's the President of the United States,
00:30:50.860
if you're nice to him, who knows what could happen.
00:30:58.980
I'm getting to the real payoff here on persuasion.
00:31:04.380
Now you're really going to learn something next.
00:31:08.420
Do you remember when Zoran and maybe some other people trotted out the word affordability?
00:31:24.280
I'd never heard affordability being used as the main word.
00:31:31.420
But I'd never heard it used as sort of the campaign's main theme.
00:31:35.000
And I thought to myself, oh, my God, you can't really beat that.
00:31:39.940
So what are Republicans going to do to counter that?
00:31:49.200
So it's not like you remember Kerry did it when he read it.
00:32:12.020
He would have, I believe, exactly the same reaction to it that I did.
00:32:24.660
But, as you know, Trump is the unmatched persuasion expert of our time.
00:32:31.660
Is there anything he could have done to counter the effectiveness of affordability?
00:32:46.540
I was coming up blank, and I think about this stuff all the time.
00:32:56.160
If you've been paying attention for the last week, he did the smartest thing you'll ever say.
00:33:06.800
So he didn't say, you know, this is my own word.
00:33:28.060
And my guess is that behind closed doors, it was probably that word that allowed them to say, you know what?
00:33:37.580
I think we can say good things about each other when we're out in that other room.
00:33:42.120
Because if you're down with affordability, and I'm down with affordability, we can work together.
00:33:49.360
If I told you that one of these candidates was the common sense candidate, common sense.
00:34:00.480
But affordability sounds like common sense, doesn't it?
00:34:08.280
So it perfectly fits Trump's whole MAGA everything.
00:34:16.800
And at the same time, if it's Zoran's whole, it's got to be affordable because nobody can afford to live in New York City.
00:34:28.160
And Trump noticed that, apparently, and decided that he would get on that channel and that nothing could kick him off.
00:34:37.760
And that once he's on there, the only thing that could happen is Zoran can leave.
00:34:46.800
So since they're both committed to this affordability thing, but the president of the United States has more tools simply by being president, Zoran probably can't get to affordability without a little bit of help from a variety of places, including the president.
00:35:03.520
So the fact that Trump not only noticed that the word was a high ground killer word.
00:35:11.820
So the first part is simply recognizing the power of that word.
00:35:22.120
The second part was knowing what to do about it.
00:35:32.600
Because right now, I just think of affordability as something that two of our leaders have embraced, and I hope the rest of them get on board.
00:35:41.460
That's three for three of three of three of three of the hardest things you can do in persuasion.
00:35:52.560
And then totally embrace it and co-opt it and turn it into your own thing.
00:36:14.560
Canada can be a global leader in reducing the harm caused by smoking, but it requires actionable steps.
00:36:21.620
Now is the time to modernize Canadian laws so that adult smokers have information and access to better alternatives.
00:36:41.500
Meanwhile, CNN's Harry Enten tells us that the polls are not looking so good for Trump.
00:36:48.240
And I guess the independents in January of earlier this year in January, he was only down four with independents, and now he's down 43.
00:37:03.820
Now, how do you explain that the independents liked him, if not, or at least liked him a lot more in January, but it's completely collapsed?
00:37:32.820
Imagine, if you will, that Trump became president, as he did, and he did everything wrong, and he only made mistakes.
00:37:42.700
What would happen to his poll numbers if he got in the job and didn't solve any problems?
00:37:48.680
His poll numbers would fall through the roof, or not, fall through the basement, right?
00:37:54.980
So if he does a really terrible, terrible job, his poll numbers would look a lot like they do now.
00:38:01.500
What would happen, on the other hand, if he came into office, and let's say there were five really big problems that the country cared about a lot,
00:38:10.900
and he immediately solved all five, let's say he ended some wars, closed the border, put an end to inflation.
00:38:29.700
What would happen if Trump solved all the problems that could be solved, and what was left didn't look like that big a problem,
00:38:39.940
or it didn't look like something that only Trump could solve?
00:38:47.060
Well, once you solve all your big problems, you start thinking about things like empathy, because it's a luxury.
00:38:56.820
If everything's falling apart, and you're in mortal danger, well, then you need a Trump to do the things that no one else can do,
00:39:05.860
because no one else can do it, and it's a mortal danger.
00:39:08.780
People are pouring across the border, or the dollar is becoming worth a penny.
00:39:15.080
I mean, these are mortal, end-of-the-world existential problems.
00:39:23.480
So you have this weird situation where it's going to be hard for us to distinguish,
00:39:29.080
is Trump less popular because he solved all the Trump-only problems?
00:39:34.600
I would say the border was kind of a Trump-only could-solve-it situation.
00:39:41.040
But once it's solved, then the next Republican can certainly maintain.
00:39:47.420
So I've always predicted that Trump's poll numbers would fall through the floor.
00:40:01.420
And there would probably be a point sort of early in the election cycle, well, after he'd been elected,
00:40:07.860
there would be a point early on where maybe he'd hit the best numbers he'd ever had,
00:40:11.820
because he hadn't done anything yet, and they're hoping he could solve the big problems.
00:40:15.500
But I did predict, in public, that once he solved the biggest problems,
00:40:21.940
his polls would drop, because you didn't need Trump for business as usual.
00:40:29.220
Business as usual is, uh, Marco Rubio, he could do that.
00:40:40.440
But, uh, you really need to do something that's going to make everybody hate you
00:40:50.740
So once we finish all these, only Trump can do it problems.
00:40:54.900
Um, if you combine the fact that Trump won't be running for office again,
00:41:05.640
his popularity as president should, should naturally come to an end.
00:41:16.400
and I don't know if I would be bold enough to predict this yet,
00:41:19.000
where the type of success that he gets is so undeniably, crazily good
00:41:25.840
that before he leaves office, and maybe after, uh, his, his numbers will creep back up.
00:41:33.700
But if, for example, he does put an end to the Ukraine war,
00:41:39.420
and we'll talk about that in a minute, uh, if he pulled that off,
00:41:42.460
and if he got our, our budget a little bit closer to balance,
00:41:48.260
and if Gaza was heading in the right direction,
00:41:55.160
and if the employment numbers were just crazy good,
00:41:58.800
because, you know, it took a few, took two years, let's say,
00:42:02.880
but we finally trained enough American construction workers.
00:42:06.780
I mean, just take, take a look at construction, just pick one.
00:42:10.440
If the only thing that happened is you waited two years,
00:42:14.960
well, on day one, it looks like, oh, that Trump, he made a mistake.
00:42:32.960
will have figured out how to hire locals one way or the other,
00:42:41.780
where if Trump succeeds on, on this whole range of things
00:42:55.940
and then let's say he turns down the temperature a little bit
00:43:27.380
with you being friendly with Zoran in the Oval Office,
00:43:38.640
is that Trump's poll numbers will continue to drop
00:43:50.460
for the lowest popularity of a sitting president.
00:44:05.620
he'll have the best poll numbers of any president
00:45:02.480
So Trump called just to make sure I was doing okay,
00:45:23.920
There's no way your brain can actually process it,
00:46:03.200
But it doesn't really need any extra details, does it?
00:46:17.620
I'm sure also because Trump originally got him involved,
00:46:34.180
And they're definitely giving me a high-quality product.
00:47:55.340
I guess today might be the fourth year of the war.
00:47:58.200
You know, there's something about random numbers
00:48:42.280
whatever it will take to make the hard decisions.