Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 23, 2026
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we need based on economics. But I get the other argument, right? I just prefer this one. This is one of those where there really isn't another argument. This isn't like the other stuff. This is purely a psychological phenomenon. Has nothing to do with how smart you are, how much you know. Probably doesn't have anything to do with any of that. But let's walk through it. My hypothesis is this: If…

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s that there's a man who is totally not resisting arrest, had his hands on his steering wheel, and was in a controlled environment, and that the police just opened fire and executed him. Is there any chance that's true?

Again, think of the story that you believed, if some of you did, about being limited to one hamburger per month. And if you stepped away from it, you should have been able to know that was not true from the first moment. Do that with this one too. Just do the same thing. Just step away from it for a moment. Imagine you'd never seen any Floyd stuff. Imagine you weren't biased by any of the news. Imagine you were not left or right. You're just looking at the story. And that story is that a man who is fully controlled and was causing no trouble at all, police opened up on him and just executed him where he was. Is there any chance that's true? I mean, is there even one percent chance that the story the way it's being reported is even close to true? No, right? It's like the hamburger story. You don't have to Google this one. You don't have to Google it. It didn't happen. I mean, at least the way it's being reported. There's something else happening here that would explain why we saw what we saw. Could be a mistake. Could be, you know, maybe they thought he was resisting arrest. Maybe they thought he was reaching for something. Who knows? But it's definitely not a story about a black man being executed by police. It's not that.

So anyway, be careful what you believe.

All right, here's another fake news. This one from Fox. So in case you're wondering, do I only call out the fake news on the left? Nope. Fox has some explaining to do. So here's another one. Fox News is reporting that John Kerry shared some secrets, military secrets, with Iran. Here are the details. So there was this secret recording of the foreign minister Zarif in Iran. And in it, he said that he learned from John Kerry but had not learned even from his own government in Iran that Israel had attacked over 200 sites in Syria that were Iranian-backed sites.

And so the way Fox News is covering this, and it's just fake news, is that John Kerry gave up military secrets to Iran. Now again, just like the hamburger story, just take a little distance, right? Because when you first hear this you say, "My God, we heard it on the video." I'm sorry, we heard it on the audio. There's no doubt about it. We heard Zarif say that John Kerry gave him military secrets. It's right on the audio, so it can't be not true. We saw the transcript of the audio, right?

Can anybody tell me in the news why this is obviously fake news? Go. Let's see if I have to tell you the answer to this. Can you see this one? You got it, Rupert? No, I don't think the audio was necessarily edited in any bad way. Somebody says it's too on the nose. No, that's not what I'm looking for. Leaked tapes. You're wondering maybe why they were leaked. Too on the nose? No, that's not it. Thank you, Bill. Bill Blodgett got it.

So when I tell you, yeah, some of you are getting the right answer now. It wasn't a secret. Do you think that Iran's military was unaware that they had been attacked 200 times? I don't think so. Do you think that Soleimani, the general who is supporting all of these various Iranian proxies and everything, do you think he was unaware that Israel had attacked them 200 times? Of course not. Of course not. The story is about Zarif being out of the loop. That's the story. The story is not that John Kerry gave him secret military information. The story is Zarif was the last one to find out in his own country. Fox News turned this into some kind of a story about John Kerry giving away military secrets. That's not in the story. There's no evidence of that. There's only evidence that Zarif was so out of the loop he didn't know that his own country or their resources had been attacked 200 times. That's the story.

Now, when I point these things out, are any of you saying, "Oh my God, you're right. Of course Iran knew, just Zarif didn't know. That's it. That's the whole story."

All right, so there's that fake news.

There's another big story. Was this on CNN? I think it was on CNN, probably other places too, where there's some zoning, local zoning commission guy who got fired or quit or something for refusing to call a black woman on a Zoom call with other people "doctor," even when she clarified that she had a doctoral degree and would like to be called doctor. He called her Mrs. whatever her last name was, and that was considered very racist. And so he quit or got fired or something. I think he quit.

But let me put the positive spin on this. What was the racist part of this? This was the racism story of the day? That's it? There's not even any racism in the story. There's no racism in the story. Yet this is the best we can come up with for a national story to show how racist we are. And there's none in it. If the best story about racism that you can come up with doesn't have any, you're in pretty good shape. Because I'm pretty sure the entire news industry is scouring the nation for really good stories of racism, and this is it. A story of somebody who didn't want to call somebody a doctor because they weren't a medical doctor, presumably didn't think it was important, didn't like being corrected. But where was the part about her being black? There was no evidence that they had anything to do with this guy's actions.

If you had said, is it because she's a woman? I would have said, well, you know, maybe that's a little bit more of an argument. But there's also no evidence of that. Although I don't think a man would have treated another man the way he treated her. But that's speculation too. Again, that's in my head. I don't know that he would have treated a man differently, but it did look like you wouldn't talk to a man that way. I have to say, usually you don't talk to a man that way because even on Zoom, because, Ben, can you correct me on this? If a man talked to another man like that even on Zoom, wouldn't he feel like he'd be causing some trouble? Somebody says George says I would. Yeah, maybe you would. Anyway, if that's the worst we have, we're in pretty good shape.

Here's what Salon wrote about Bill Gates. This is the headline: "Bill Gates says no to sharing vaccine formulas with global poor to end pandemic." Wow, that's pretty bad, this headline. "Bill Gates says no to sharing vaccine formulas with global poor to end the pandemic." Why does Bill Gates hate the poor according to this headline? Why does he not want to end the pandemic according to this headline?

Do you know what the story says? Do you think the story will support this headline that Bill Gates says no to sharing vaccines with poor countries? What do you think? When you read the story, will the story support that headline? Again, hamburger, one per month. You don't have to Google it. You don't even need to read this story to know this headline isn't true. Why? Because Bill Gates would never say this. He wouldn't. Nobody would say that.

But if you read the story, what is the real story? The real story is that even if you give them the formulas, they don't have the resources to make the vaccine. So what he was saying is there's no point in giving them the formulas because they can't use them. There's no factory that is up to the standards they would need to produce them. Well, so if you give them the formulas and they produce them in substandard factories, did you come out ahead? Because maybe you made a bunch of vaccines that kill people because they might be hurrying and it might be worse for them than if they unfortunately waited.

So if you read the story, he has perfectly good reasons that you say, "Oh, that's a pretty good reason." What's the point of giving them the formula if they can't use it or if they did use it they would use it in such a speedy way that they couldn't do it right and it'd be more dangerous? Don't you think that should have been the headline? Don't you think the headline should have been "Bill Gates explains that sharing the formula won't help as much as you think"? Wasn't that the headline? "Bill Gates explains sharing the formula won't help as much as you think it would." Instead, "Bill Gates says no to sharing formula with poor people so that they'll die in the freaking pandemic." That's what Salon said.

Once you see how much the media is abusing this guy, Bill Gates, it's hard to unsee it. You'll see it everywhere.

All right, Project Veritas has filed a lawsuit against CNN. This is pretty interesting. I would not place any bets on them winning this lawsuit, but the fact that they're turning it into a case is in and of itself good constructive pushback. I do think the media needs pushback, and I do think people need to sue them when there's something that seems way over the line. And I think you could argue this is way over the line.

So here's the setup. Twitter took Project Veritas off over some video that regarded CNN, a CNN insider saying some bad things about CNN. And the reporting on CNN about that from Ana Cabrera said Twitter took them down for posting other people's private information. Now, was that true? Well, it turns out that CNN has done exactly the same thing and Twitter never took them down, which is showing somebody on their own front lawn. Apparently that's too private. So we know that Twitter did not apply the standard the same. CNN can do it. Project Veritas got taken down.

Then also CNN reported, and it was in a tweet I think from Ana Cabrera, that the problem was really repeated violations of privacy information as opposed to, I think the first reporting was that they had too many inaccuracies or it was false statements or something. So now CNN has tried to misreport this at least two times. Stelter said that Veritas got taken down from Twitter for violating multiple rules, but Project Veritas is only aware of one rule that they violated. And it was the same one that CNN violated. So CNN's reporting on this is just pure fake news. Pure fake news. I mean, just the purest of fake news. Just a fact that's not true. They just report it like it's true. That's not even trying to be accurate. And I think the evidence suggests there's no real intention to be accurate from CNN. But I don't know if being intentionally inaccurate is enough to cause Project Veritas to win their suit because it's pretty hard to prove intention. All right, we'll see.

Richard Grenell tweeted that, you know, why is Joe Biden not walking from Marine One to the White House? Apparently they had a car service picking him up from the helicopter and taking him to the White House. And you remember of course that Trump famously would always be walking across that span. You'd see all the video of that. And so Richard Grenell is asking, huh, why is Joe Biden not walking that short span that everybody else walks?

Well, here's the fun part. Are you ready? Do you think we could push this question of why Joe Biden was not walking from Marine One until CNN is forced to run another manly video package of Joe Biden? Because remember Project Veritas showed us that one of the technical directors admitted that they were trying to make Biden look manly and vital by showing video of him riding a bike and video of him in his classic sports car and riding up and down the driveway and wearing his aviator glasses and stuff. But I wonder if we could make CNN create another manly package for Biden just by talking about this a lot. Because if social media ramps up Richard Grenell's question of why Joe Biden had to be walked, aren't it? Won't CNN just have to respond with another propaganda package about him chopping wood or fighting a grizzly bear? I want to see if we can get a video on CNN of Joe Biden wrestling with something like wrestling with a grizzly bear or something. Let's see if we can do that.

In other news, that's scary. The cartels, the Mexican cartels, are using their own drones, the quadrotor ones, the ones with like four little helicopter rotors. And they're strapping the C4 to it and using them as basically guided missiles. So cartels have their own flying bombs now that they're killing each other with.

And so I ask you this question. What is our technology for identifying the operator of a drone? Can somebody help me out here on the technology? If a state actor knocks down a drone, can we tell who the operator was? You might be able to tell who owned it at one time or where it was purchased, but could you know who is actually on the controls at the moment the bad thing happened? I don't know that you could right now.

If you can't tell who's at the controls, what does that tell us about the future? Well, it at least opens up the possibility that private people will be funding mercenaries to run drones to take out the cartels. Now, I'm not suggesting it. I'm predicting it. So cartels don't need to come after me. I'm just predicting it. How long will it be before there's some kind of a mercenary group that says, look, you can go on your computer and you can make our, you know, we'll sign you up and you can operate one of our drones and you can bomb the cartels yourself and nobody will ever know. You could be the one who personally kills, takes out the cartel.

What if you don't need to be operating them but rather you just put in a little GPS coordinate and you send off your drone and it just flies to its designated place and blows up? Well, you know that's coming. There's nothing that's going to stop that from happening. So at the moment you still need a person and you need to be close enough that the person is controlling it with their controls. But the next obvious step is you just put a GPS destination in it, throw it in the air and go have lunch, and the thing flies for five miles, finds its destination, comes straight down. Boom.

And I feel as though the cartels have opened up a can of worms here in which superior forces will be using this weapon against them fairly soon. So I think that the cartels will be destroyed by mercenary drone armies. That's my prediction. Cartels will be destroyed by mercenary drone stuff.

Somebody says it's illegal. Yeah, I know it's illegal. Yeah, I know that.

I did a search for on Google Trends for cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance. What do you think the trend of how often people are googling the p

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hrase cognitive dissonance? What do you think is happening to that? Well, it turns out that the searches for that term have been increasing every year for I don't know 10 or 12 years. But around the election of Trump and then around the next election, the search terms peaked and it's still going up. So here's my question. Did I have anything to do with that? Because a lot of you heard the term or…

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