Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 9, 2026
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Omar, I haven't forgotten about you. I am going to get back to that. All you need is a copper margarita glass, a tankard, a Chelsea stein, the canteen, a joker flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better except the air quality. It's called the simult…

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, there is a smell of sulfur in the air, so I'm guessing Kamala Harris is in the state. I don't know. Just a guess. Somebody alerted me to the fact that Wikipedia has been updated to include my hoax, except that they don't know it's a hoax, which should tell you everything you need to know about Wikipedia. So Wikipedia thinks that I believe that Biden and Harris have satanic messaging. The part they miss is that when I introduced this idea I said publicly and clearly I don't believe in Satan. I'm just going to see if they take me out of context. Sure enough, got taken out of context, which is hilarious to me. Would be frightening to the rest of you, probably.

So there's a story about a California fire that's already burned 10,000 acres, and it was started by a gender reveal party. They had some kind of explosive device or incendiary device or something. Anyway, they had a party, they exploded something that burned 10,000 acres, and I wondered what name you would give the baby. What would be a good baby name for a baby whose gender reveal party destroyed ten thousand acres in flames and counting? I'm gonna go with Sparky. Don't you think Sparky would be a good nickname no matter what the baby's name would be? Hey, how'd you get that name? Well, it's embarrassing. My parents burned up half of California, so they call me Sparky.

Michael Cohen's book I guess is out because there's a bunch of tweets about it, and I don't know if you've read any of the quotes, but they're so over the top that they actually just read as funny now. Yeah, there was a time when you'd say to yourself, Trump said what, and you think I'm a little worried about that. What's that mean? But it's become so ridiculous at this point, the things that people are making up and putting in Trump's mouth. That's, I think the White House called it fan fiction. And I've got a feeling none of it is going to have any impact. I think these are all the things that people think are going to have an impact, and absolutely nobody cares. Here's why.

Number one, we have four years of Trump. We don't really have to wonder what he would do or how he would act as president. We know exactly how he's going to act. So revealing all these little things he may or may not have said at some point in the past doesn't really tell you anything you need to know, because what you need to know is what kind of president would he be? Asked and answered. We just watched it for four years. So if you want more of that, you know how to get it. And if you don't want more of that, you don't really need to read Michael Cohen's book, because what will Michael Cohen's book tell you that you didn't know already? Did you know, this may come as a shock to you, but did you know that Trump sometimes says things which people find offensive? I know. Big surprise, right? You didn't know that. And that's really all we're finding out.

So because the fake news and the critics want to put it in the worst possible sense, they'll turn it into he's a racist, he's whatever. But it all kind of fits into one category, doesn't it? If you take everything that Trump is accused of saying or thinking and you just sort of tried to summarize it, it's that he offends people who didn't already know that. Oh, somebody is saying that the baby name should be Smokey. Smokey would be a funny baby name. Smokey, Sparky. All right.

And here's the trick that the fake news and the publishers and the authors are playing on you, and it goes like this. Imagine if you will, close your eyes and imagine that all of your private conversations, the things you said one-on-one to your closest confidants over the course of your life, imagine that all of your private conversations suddenly became public. How would you look? Would you look offensive? Maybe. Maybe just a little bit. Would you look like you're a little bit biased or bigoted or maybe have some bad qualities? Would you look like you're a horn dog or you're crazy? Maybe.

And here's the trick. It's sort of a magic trick, if you will, on the public. The trick is that the way all of us talk privately to people we trust is completely different than the way we would speak publicly. Because if you're speaking publicly, you will speak in a way that you will protect your reputation, but also importantly you would protect the feelings of the people you are talking to, because you don't need to make any enemies, right? So when you speak in public, you speak a certain way that doesn't get anybody hurt, or you try to. When you speak privately, you don't have to worry about that because nobody's going to hear it except the person you're talking to, in a perfect world. In the real world, if you run for president and they decide they don't like you, they might write a book someday.

So when they take private conversations which wouldn't hurt anybody and they move them into the political realm, I say that responsibility for the message, once moved from the private realm to the public, should be on the messenger. That's right. So anything that you learned in the Cohen book that is offensive should be attributed to Cohen, because if Cohen didn't tell you, you wouldn't know it. Are the things that you would say in public that you think are not really harmful, they're not meant to have any bad intention, but they're pretty raw. You would just say it privately. You just wouldn't say the same thing in public.

Let me give you a specific example so you can get the sense of this. President Trump is alleged to have said that the service people who fought in Vietnam were suckers. Now, I don't think you can believe any of these reports because all these anonymous reports, etc., they just don't have credibility. But let's take it as our example and suppose he did. Suppose that did happen. What would you say to somebody in a private conversation if they said to you, you know, I think that the people who went to Vietnam, they meant well, they were serving their country, but you feel bad for 19-year-olds, 18-year-olds who are joining the service because they don't know, or they didn't know, that the press and the government were running a scam, that the war was not legitimate. And so privately you might say to your friends, you know, I think the service people who fought in that war, as noble as their motives were, they were suckers. They were suckers because if they'd known that the war was useless and couldn't be won and didn't have a purpose anyway, maybe they would have resisted. But instead they were good Americans, good patriots, did as they were told, did as the country asked. That's not wrong. It's just that the purpose they were asked to go fight didn't really have a good justification.

So if you were talking to your friend privately who understood you, knew your mind, knew your heart if you will, and you said, you know, I gotta say the people who fo

Context —

ught in that war were kind of suckers, would that offend you if your friend said it and nobody else was supposed to hear it? Let's say neither of you had served. Or alternately let's say both of you had served so that your peers, whichever way that goes, I think you would not be offended by that. Yeah, hoodwinked might be better. Somebody says in the comments hoodwinked might be a better way to pu…

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