Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas

Context —

nother one. How much DNA testing is being done of the people who have the worst outcomes versus the ones who do not? Is anybody doing that? Which expert is telling you yeah, we better start testing DNA and get ahead of this and find out if there's anything about some people that makes them more susceptible? I'm not aware of any. Are you? Do you think a month from now that nobody will be testing DN…

← Previous segment →

even a little bit objective and you said who gave you better information about this medical situation, it would be me. I'm not even a little bit unconfident about that opinion. Right? I think you'd agree.

All right. I've come up with an idea that's a little half-baked and maybe somebody can help me with this. You know that my startup created its own crypto token. Lots of people did this in the past. But once you create a crypto token it just sort of lives forever. You know, you don't have to close it or do anything. You create the token and it just lives in the internet forever. And I don't think it can ever change. I suppose anything could happen. So the "When" is a token that exists on the internet and will live forever no matter what you do.

But like most cryptocurrencies, you know, its value starts out optimistically and then it drops until it becomes vanishingly small. I don't even know what it is at the moment. But here's my idea. You know most of the reason that dollar bills are valuable is that the government backs them. You know, the full faith and guarantee of the government is what makes your US dollar worth anything because you know that if everything else went wrong at least the government would take it when you pay your taxes. So there's always a market for a dollar if only the government collecting taxes.

But with cryptocurrency, if you can't guarantee that someone will ever want one, then its value just goes to zero. So here's my idea. I'm going to peg the value of the "When" to one roll of toilet paper. So that one roll of toilet paper will become the backing. Now here's the part I haven't quite figured out. I have to be able to figure out some way tha

Context —

t you could legitimately trade some "When" and actually get a roll of toilet paper. And actually you get a roll of toilet paper. Somebody says worst Periscope ever. Well you will never have to listen to another one. Good for you. So if anybody can figure out how to do that, like maybe it would require an actual warehouse full of toilet paper. And so here's the other part of the deal. You could di…

Next segment → →