Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
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Episodes Episode #270 Segments
MainContent Confirmation Bias

Back to episode — Episode 270 Scott Adams - Caravans, Khashoggi, Avenatti

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e is either. So the question of whether a foreign entity can kill somebody on your soil, get caught, and still not cause any major problems has been answered. We already have the answer. You can kill people on foreign soil. And here's the key part. The other people are killing people that we think should not be killed. That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that we kill people that even t…

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say oh he's doing this and you can tell that if people do this it will lead to this bad result. That has to exist, right?

Well so I asked people to explain it to me, what's so bad about him, and people would resort to generalities. And I thought to myself well maybe everybody thinks somebody else knows what he's doing. They don't. They can't quite explain it themselves but they've heard it so many times that yes. So there's stories about him being a Nazi collaborator which was apparently true when he was a child. All right so that's not like being a Nazi collaborator. Being a Nazi collaborator when you're a child doesn't mean you are one. It just means you didn't want to get killed. So certainly don't blame him for being a 14-year-old who did what he was told so he didn't get killed.

So people pointed me to Lee Stranahan, if I'm pronouncing it right, Stranahan, who apparently is one of the most knowledgeable people on the question of George Soros. He was nice enough to make a video explaining his view. I don't like to watch long-form videos. I know it's ironic but I usually don't have a half an hour to sit down and absorb something long. So I said you know could he just summarize it? Just put it in a tweet. I don't need the details but just what is it in one sentence, two sentences, three sentences? Tell me what he's doing that's so bad. Because it seemed to me that if you can describe anything that's real in a few sentences, watch me do it. So I'm gonna just describe any problem that's a real problem with just a few words. Okay here's one. China's trade deals are unfair. Now I'm leaving out the details but just telling you that tells you the basic idea, right? I'd have to support that with some details but you understand it's just one sentence. I could say ISIS are a bunch of terrorists who want to kill us. Totally understandable. All right you don't know the details but you get that. Fentanyl coming from Chinese labs is killing 30,000 Americans here. That's a problem. One sentence and I described it. And I think you could go down a very long list. Climate change. People are worried that climate change is warming the world and will destroy our climate. One sentence and I understand what's wrong with climate change. Now I still need the details but it only took one sentence to give me the general idea.

Now people are saying open borders. As far as I can tell that's just false. All right I think that's just false. The open borders. Because I think that the way people are interpreting that is literally no borders as in no countries. I don't believe there's any indication that Soros wants to get rid of actual borders. If I'm wrong it's been five years that nobody sent me a link that would support the fact he wants to get rid of borders. I think he might want to have better systems for bringing in temporary workers across borders which is exactly what the president wants. The president also would like a better immigration system so that you could easily bring people across borders for work but they wouldn't necessarily be residents.

All right so I sort of asked Lee on Twitter to just sort of tell me what is the problem, the basic problem. And he did. And this is the part I feel bad about because I know he's like a legitimate guy doing legitimate stuff and has lots of followers and he's very popular. But when he tried to summarize it it was generalities. And when I see generalities I call it word salad. And I felt bad about that. But when I see generalities and then I asked him you know could he link, could he show me a link to somebody who would explain it in a written article just because it's faster, and Lee actually said that he's probably the one who knows the most about this topic and one of the problems is that there aren't good articles that sort of tell the story. If there were he would have linked me to them.

Now what do you do if you're me in this situation? So here's the setup. I wrote a book called "Win Bigly" in which some of what, I don't know if I said it as explicitly as I'm gonna say it now, but you get the idea that if somebody can't explain fairly succinctly what the problem is it might be imagination. In other words a mass delusion. So a mass delusion would be the tell for that would be that everybody's afraid of it but when they go to explain what they're afraid of it sort of doesn't make sense. In other words you can't agree with it or disagree with it. It just actually doesn't make sense. That's the key. So if you're looking for a Salem witch trials situation, if you're looking at Trump derangement syndrome, if you're looking at any kind of thing that you're wondering is this real or is this some kind of a national hallucination, look for the word salad. Look for the inability of anybody involved to succinctly explain what's wrong.

So and you can see it in the comments. So let me put it to you right now. Your comments have enough space for you to tell me what's wrong with Soros. So he's a currency manipulator. That is true. It's also legal and it's also not the reason that people are complaining about him. Read his book "Open Society." That's an example of, so whoever said somebody just said read his book "Open Society," that's an example of you being in a hallucination. It's not an example of you making your case. Because if you were making your case you'd say George Soros killed the baby and I'd say oh he did. I don't have the details but now I know what your problem is. If it were real you'd say George Soros wants to overthrow the government of the United States and I'd say oh I understand that. I'll still need to see the details but I understand it. If you say read his own book you are indicating to me in the strongest possible way that you don't know what the problem is and it's somebody else's book. He wrote it. He explains it. If you can't explain it in one sentence what the problem is it's not in his book.

So that's my challenge to you. I'm looking at you. He's a proven anarchist. That's not true. He funds Antifa. Does he? Does he? So he funds a variety of interests but why funding Antifa is not the worst problem in the world because Antifa really is not terribly important in the big picture. Does he fund Antifa because he wants them to take over the world? Does he fund Antifa because he wants to take over the United States? Or does he fund Antifa because some parts of what they say he agrees with? So he might be against racism for example as is Antifa. So the most cogent argument is that he's accidentally funding bad groups. That's pretty vague isn't it? Pretty vague.

Take for example apparently somebody said he's funding Black Lives Matter. Now it seems to me that funding Black Lives Matter is very similar to being against racism. He doesn't have to agree with everything the groups do. If he agrees with sort of the main thrust he can't be responsible for the actions of every single person in Black Lives Matter. But he can say yeah I think police brutality is something to worry about. I think racism is something that needs to be addressed more aggressively. That's not exactly a monster.

Somebody says I can't watch this anymore. He's a Nazi. I believe he is not a Nazi and I believe that all of you, not all of you, I believe that most of you have been duped. Duped. I hate to say it. I think most of you have been duped by the Soros stuff. Being against racism and being for Black Lives Matter aren't the same thing. Now they're not exactly the same thing but there's no indication that Soros has bad intentions, is there? Let me say this. Does anybody think that in Soros' own mind he has evil intentions or do you believe that he has good intentions for the world but his idea of how to get there is different from a lot of other people's ideas? What do you think? I've seen no evidence he has bad intentions. Now I'm not ruling it out but if you look at the fact that nobody can explain it. He destabilized currencies. Yes, completely legally. You know the trouble is that everybody in the high finance world is doing stuff that if you were to look at it from some kind of fairness filter you'd say they ought not be doing that. You know there are some things that are useful but a lot of it in the high finance world looks like just people doing shenanigans.

Somebody says I think you're just playing with us. Well I'm challenging you. So to be very clear there's no trick to what I'm doing right now so there's no hidden motive. I am telling you that I don't see a compelling reason to think he's the devil. I see the reasons that you might not agree with some of the organizations he's funding but they're sort of trivial. They don't seem to be and they don't seem to have bad intentions.

All right, I know you don't like hearing this topic because it so disagrees with your preconceived notions about him. And let me be very clear I'm not defending him. I'm saying I don't know much about him but it's very telling that those of you on here can't come up with a coherent problem with him. That there's a lot of people signing out on this topic. All right so if you want to make your George Soros case I'm open to it. So if you think I was givi

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ng you an opinion on George Soros you're wrong. I was telling you that I'm puzzled by why your opinions about him are so unpersuasive and that's not a coincidence. And I'm gonna talk to you all later.

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