Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 9, 2026
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mentioned this in public is because I thought it was just me. I thought I was being stupid because I can't imagine a scenario where doing more testing doesn't produce more positive results. I don't get it. All right, so apparently there's nobody here who even understands what the argument is, much less agrees or disagrees. It's like you don't even know what they're talking about. And we let that g…

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lines? It's probably an internal deadline. It's probably a deadline that looks like this. If we don't have this done by, pick a day, if we don't have this done by September we won't get to make any money this year because it'll be too late. So I would imagine that every vaccine has at least an internal company deadline because if it didn't nothing would happen. Nothing gets done without a deadline.

And the part if you're young, this is the part you don't know, and I would encourage you if this sounds ridiculous, if the first time you hear this you say that doesn't make any sense at all, I would ask you to talk to somebody experienced in just life. If you give a deadline people will meet it. It's like magic. It's one of the greatest tricks of management is that people do work toward deadlines. It's just that. And so when the president makes, and I think we would all agree, an artificial deadline to get this done by let's say before election day, does that make the world a worse place or a better place? Now if you're inexperienced what you're going to say to yourself, whoa that's going to make them cut corners, that's a dangerous situation. That would be the inexperienced view of the world. And I think the Democrats will count on you or enough people to have an inexperienced world view. Here's the experienced world view. Those FDA people and the people who have to approve this, they're not going to throw away their whole lives to approve something that doesn't look solid. There are a lot of people who are going to put their whole careers on the line to sign off on this thing. And they would, I think most of them or at least enough of them would be willing to quit rather than put something out that they didn't feel comfortable with. So this deadline will almost certainly cause one of two things to happen. It'll either be done before election day and it will be solid, or it won't be done because the FDA will not have approved it. There are only two possibilities. So the possibility of it being done before election day and being shoddy and having the president force people to say things they don't believe are true about the safety of it, very unlikely in the real world. Very unlikely. Because this is life and death. If it were just a project and maybe there was just money on the line, oh yeah you get people to lie about that. It would be easy to get people lying about how good is your product or anything like that. But life and death, we're talking about people in the FDA or whoever has to sign off on stuff. We're talking about people who would know they would be putting their name on something that could kill or injure tens of thousands of people if you know worst case scenario. That's not a risk people take. All right. Typically. And we would hope that there's maximum transparency on those people. And if the news business wants to keep everybody honest, which would be a good idea, we should get the names of the people who need to sign off, both government and medical, and really, really talk to those people. Know who they are. Put the light on th

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em and say here's the deal. We are literally going to trust you with our lives. We are going to trust you with the fate of the republic, Bob, or whatever their names are. Bob, we're looking at you. Do not sign that piece of paper, Bob or whoever, unless you're willing to put your life on it that this is a good decision. Nobody's magic. We can't, you can't be right all the time. But we're watching,…

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