Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
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ould help me make a decision. You wouldn't hire that person. You would hire somebody who knows how to make a decision when the decision needs to be made. And if somebody doesn't say test it first they don't know how to make decisions. All right. Yeah somebody in the comments is saying the election system does work the way it was designed. That's true. It does work the way it was designed and it w…

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n. I think the copyright is irrelevant now. Here's the first thing you need to know about copyrights. You don't have to apply for a copyright. You have the copyright upon creation of art. So if you take your little pen and piece of paper — here's a copyright lesson for you — you take a piece of paper and a pen and you say here's my art. Here I made some art. It's copyrighted. It's copyrighted. It's already done. I didn't have to do anything. Creation, just creating it gives you the copyright. That's the law. People confuse the act of creation which creates a copyright with registering. So when you register something that makes it easier to defend in court. So someday somebody claims that it's theirs and you say aha here's a government document that shows on this date I drew this first. So anybody after this doesn't own the copyright. But you could still win that in court just as easily if you can also prove that you were first. The blockchain does that. So the blockchain makes copyright registering irrelevant because you have 100 percent certainty of when you created it because the blockchain does that. So you don't need copyright. So you have copyright but you don't need to register it. That would be an unnecessary step within the NFT world.

Now I'm not a lawyer. Here hear this carefully. I'm not a lawyer. Seems to me — I could be wrong but I do deal with copyright enough that I'm pretty confident — so I actually removed the copyright line from the NFT that I haven't listed yet for that reason. It seemed like there was no purpose for it. And I have the added advantage that I'm famous and Dilbert is famous so if anybody tried to invent Dilbert tomorrow it's sort of an easy court case. I just say ah here are all the newspapers for the last 30 years and you can see that I was first.

All right. When I sell the Dilbert for 2 million — I don't know what people will pay for this special Dilbert comic but we'll find out. I also could later do the first Dilbert comic. I would just have to do what Jack Dorsey did and certify it.

Could you do it? Can I do a single show with a professional toupee? A lot of you don't know this story but years ago I dressed up in a disguise with a toupee and a fake mustache and pretended to be a business consultant and went to an actual company and ran one of their meetings as a consultant. And nobody — and what I tried to do was it was a gag. I did it for the San Jose Mercury News as part of an article. And I got the senior management in the room to write the worst mission statement of all time because I was actually trying to persuade them to make the worst one they could make. It was like really long and convoluted and just it was useless. It was just they all agreed that it was terrific when I was done. And then I got a volunteer to put it to music because I said you know it's one thing to have a mission statement but people won't remember it so I'll need a volunteer to try to put it to music. And I actually got some of the senior executives to agree — some of them had some musical background — to

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actually try to come up with a jingle and a musical score for their mission statement. Now after I got them to agree to this complete ridiculousness I took off my mustache and my disguise and they quickly realized who I was. Yeah here's the weird thing. One of them suspected it before I even took off the disguise which is weird. All right that's all for now and I'll talk to you tomorrow.

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