Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 24, 2026
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's part of the 1619 Project. And somebody got a Pulitzer Prize for that completely false claim. Of course you're all going to watch the VP debates tonight. I think the VP debate is going to be more interesting than you think. Might be more interesting than you think. Of course the big drama is that Kamala Harris is going to ask for a Plexiglas wall and Pence wants to have no wall. Now if it turns…

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hat it means he's testing it. Because that would be a normal procedure. You let the vice president test it. If it doesn't work you just don't do it yourself. If it becomes a big controversy and it's a problem then the president could say, well that was the vice president. Just listen to me. And sort of make it go away because that's typical too. Vice presidents do sometimes say something that the top of the ticket has to modify. Fairly ordinary I think. It's happened in a lot of different races. So it's a low-risk thing for Pence to try on a new argument. So see if he does that.

And here's what's interesting, and I've said this a number of times and I'm just going to keep saying it. I think Pence is the most underrated public servant in America. The most underrated in terms of how good he is. Because the job of the vice president is primarily not to cause trouble, right? You don't want to become a problem. You just want to be a steady spare tire. And I think he does that better than just about anybody's ever done it. I think that he stays out of trouble like nobody's business. He also can win debates. I believe he was considered the winner of his Tim Kaine debate in 2016. He's good at it. He's excellent in public. He's not going to have a weird gaffe. He's going to be prepared. He's going to present well. He's not going to have an emotional flip-out moment. He's strong enough to handle whatever is coming. He is really solid.

Now do you know that about Kamala Harris? Would you say to yourself, yeah I know Kamala Harris is just as strong as all those things I said about Pence? Nope. She could have some moments to capture the news cycle and that could be dangerous. But she's not in his class. He is just a better debater. And if I were her I'd be a little bit worried because people are going to look at the vice presidential debate a little bit harder than they would normally because people are looking at Kamala as maybe the top of the ticket. Think about this. Pence could, I'm not predicting this because this would be an unlikely outcome, but he could end the election tonight. That's possible. Here's how he'd have to do it. He would just have to expose Kamala and just destroy her and eviscerate her in the debate. If he does that, suddenly Joe Biden doesn't look like such a good package because you've always thought, all right, really it's about the number two, right? If he destroys number two he destroys number one. That wouldn't be true the reverse. If Pence were to lose the debate, what's anybody going to say really? Are you going to say therefore I change my vote? Nope. You're not going to change your vote.

So first of all it's very unlikely he's going to lose. It'll be a tie or he'll win. I would say that's a fair estimate. But he might win. And this is the thing I don't think people are counting on. He has the skill. He does have the skill compared to Kamala Harris to eviscerate her. Now probably not. I think she'll rise to the challenge and usually these things look close even if you think somebody won. But he does have the talent. He has the talent to completely take her out. And I don't think the risk works in the other direction in this case. So if he exposes her as unusually weak, could change the race. We'll see.

Have you noticed, let me just do a little recap here on, oh I want to talk about Sweden before we do that. So I was looking at a tweet by, I don't know how to pronounce his name, Yianan Weiss I think, Yennan or Yianan. And he showed some graphs about showing Sweden compared to some other countries, UK, France and Spain. And the point he was making is that Sweden is doing great in terms of death rate and infections. So very low and I think trending down whereas there are at least three countries he mentioned and the US I think he threw in there too. So UK, France and Spain where they're having more infections now. His point was that Sweden has essentially stopped the lockdown. They've gone back to something closer to normal. And he's saying that Sweden is doing great doing none of the things that the countries that are doing poorly feel they need to do like the lockdowns and the masks and stuff.

Now I don't, first of all I don't think the Sweden story is that clean. I think that the Swedes are wearing masks and I think that they are voluntarily socially distancing. So it's not really a clean comparison. But he tries to make this case and I am not convinced. And here's why. Number one, every time y

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ou see somebody say I'm going to compare one country no matter what country to these three or four or five countries, you can just forget what they're saying because nothing they say is useful. If out of all the countries in the world, I don't know 180 whatever there are, if you're going to take six of them and say I can tell something from these six, that's probably not true. It's probably cherry…

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