Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 23, 2026
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of the show, right? And people are paying you a lot of money to put on a show. You can't just skip an important part of it. But she decided to pull out of the French Open entirely, and she said she didn't want to do these interviews to protect her mental health. What the hell does that mean? I mean, it's probably important. I'm not going to minimize it, because when somebody says they need to do…

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necessary. So that's the same direction we're going.

You know, there'll be lots of edge questions about cruise ships. You know, there'll be special cases where people are genuinely in close contact and maybe it's not quite ready yet. You could argue that. But for all the easy stuff such as the workplace, you're not going to need any kind of a pass.

Speaking of mask mandates at work, it looks like the Occupational Safety and Health Organization — so this is a U.S. group called OSHA — they may still issue a workplace mask mandate consistent with Biden's executive orders. But that would be at odds with the CDC's guidelines that vaccinated people don't need to wear masks indoors.

So you're an American citizen and you know that the CDC says you don't need the masks indoors if you're vaccinated, but OSHA, who's also looking out for your safety in the workplace, might say that you do. So I think this is undetermined yet, but they might say that you do.

Here's my take on this, and I've told you before: the public is in charge. All right? If you think the government's in charge with this mask mandate stuff, there's something about the world that you don't understand. The government's not in charge. The people will decide when they're done with masks and where, and they'll decide by just doing it. Because if enough people do it, it's unarrestable, right? There's no recourse. It's just how many people do it.

If one person violates a rule, well, they're in trouble. Two people, probably in trouble. Three people, they're in trouble. Four people, they're probably in trouble. A thousand people, nobody's in trouble. Yeah. If a thousand people decide, well, today's the day, no mask — and I think that in the workplace specifically, the workplace, I can't imagine any workplace that I've been in where we wouldn't walk into the workplace and say, hey everybody, let's have a meeting. OSHA says this, CDC says this, what do you say? And the meeting would say if you're vaccinated, take your mask off. And that would be it.

And that office, at least that floor of that office, would be mask-free. And then other people would hear about that floor and they'd say, did you get away with it so far? No penalty. And then they would do it too. So the next 30 days, the public will completely take control of this issue again. Not counting stuff like cruise ships, right? There will be special cases, and I don't think the public is quite qualified for those. But when you talk about something like the workplace and the CDC has already weighed in about the risks, I do think the public is qualified to make a decision about their risk-reward, and the public will make that decision.

So don'

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t ever believe that the government's in charge. You know, they're in charge in an emergency. They're in charge in some specific situations. But they're not in charge. The public is always in charge. They just have to choose to use their authority or not. That's the only decision. It may be that if OSHA gets away with this, you'll see more remote work, and maybe that's good. You know, there's an a…

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