Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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There's some bunch of free technology platforms for people who are going to work at home. So you've seen, and again this is beautiful and inspiring to watch, that the country, the United States, the citizens are just sort of jumping in and saying what can I do. And you're seeing the tech companies do this. And I tweeted around a list of technology platforms that are good for working at home like D…

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All right so let me give you an update on demonetization and YouTube. So I learned yesterday from Google, so this what I'm going to say now is not my opinion or a guessing. This is actually from my contact at Google who is the right person for this, not just an employee at Google but the person who does this job who is my contact. And I've been assigned this contact because I was complaining about demonetization and they were demonetizing any reference to coronavirus. And I believe they still are but they have now stated publicly now that they recognize that that's an issue because most of the coronavirus coverage is people trying to be helpful. All right I'm doing nothing but talking about coronavirus except trying to be helpful. So the demonetizing has two impacts but one of them is obvious. I'm a little uncertain of the other. So my Google contact told me yesterday something that I believe I don't understand correctly or I disagree with or there's something going on that I need to figure out. But anyway she said that demonetizing doesn't change how many people see it but I'm almost positive that's not true. So I'm gonna verify that and I think maybe we're talking about different things. Because here's what I believe to be true. I believe that their recommendation engine favors monetized content because why wouldn't it, right? Why wouldn't it favor its own monetized content? Yeah if it's going to suggest things for people to see, things which are monetized are by definition the things that are great for YouTube, right? Somebody says there are thieves but I don't think there's any evidence that ads are playing that people are not getting paid for. I don't think that's going on. I've not seen any evidence of that. I think they either show ads or don't show ads. They don't show the ads and then keep the money. That's the opposite. It wouldn't make sense. The reason that Google demonetizes those things is on behalf of their advertisers. If Google made all the decisions with nobody else giving input they would monetize everything. Why the heck wouldn't they? If they're gonna allow the content on their platform at all of course they would monetize it if they could. So be careful about who's Google making a decision and who's the advertisers making a decision. I have confirmed the experience I'm having is identical to what David Pakman is experiencing on YouTube. I just saw an update from him and his experience, he's an anti-Trump left-leaning guy, and his demonetization experience is identical to mine. So if you're thinking oh Scott, Scott's got, they're blaming the advertisers but really it's Google that's doing it, mm-hmm there's no evidence of that. The evidence is that liberals and conservatives are both being demonetized because of the content. If you mentioned politics or coronavirus it's just automatic. So we're trying to work through that but there appears to be no solution to that as far as I can tell. Somebody says it's both the advertisers and the Google bias. That's the speculation that I don't see evidence of it but I neither could I disprove it. Can't prove a negative. Somebody says Google has proven to be biased in search engines. Yes but this isn't search. So I'm not saying they're not biased. I'm just saying I don't have any evidence that would lead me to say that, given that liberals and conservatives are both affected.

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What's going on with your show with Christina? We have beta tested that and rejected it. So Christina and I were going to do a separate thing with the two of us and we filmed a few and played it back to see if we liked what we saw. And we just didn't enjoy doing it enough. So I think if it had been bad but we loved doing it we probably would have done it until we could do it well. But it was bad a…

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