Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 2, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes Episode #571 Segments
MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 571 Scott Adams - Hacking the Algorithm and Other Stuff

Context —

All right. Sorry. I saw that Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton, who are on opposite sides of politics, are combining to do some kind of a fentanyl sanctions bill against China. So in other words, if Congress is working across the aisle, thank you Congress. Thank you, Chuck Schumer. I'm gonna always call out when the people I don't agree with do something I like. Chuck Schumer is doing something I like…

← Previous segment →

All right, here's a question for you. Who builds the voting machines for smaller democracies? I don't know the answer to this question so it's a question that I probably should know the answer. I shouldn't ask it. But for countries that have legitimate voting processes and people really do, you know the leaders do change based on the votes, who makes those voting machines?

Let's say Africa. If you were to look at the entire continent of Africa, I don't know exactly how many of those countries have legitimate democracies. Seventy of them have puppet governments, dictators, etc. But over time you would expect there would be more and more democratic-looking countries in Africa. Who makes their voting machines?

Because whoever makes the voting machines, eventually once they're off of paper ballots, yeah so there's certainly at the low end people are on paper ballots. But at some point even the paper ballots have to be added up, right? Even the paper ballots get reported somewhere. They get into a computer somewhere. There's some computing going on to count stuff up.

It seems to me that whatever country is in charge of the voting technology, whether it's the voting machines or it's where they sum up the totals of the voting machines, that country would essentially be at the mercy of whoever makes the machines, I would think. And so I would keep an eye on that.

Context —

Good news. Russia has put a new nuclear power plant on a boat. So they've figured out how to make a small enough nuclear power plant that they can put it on a boat and take it to a remote part of Russia, pull into the bay, hook it up with wires and provide power to remote places where it would be too hard apparently to go build a building. So they put it on a boat and take the boat there. Now thi…

Next segment → →