Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
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to believe it would have none. Even if the only thing it did is affect somehow the way we acted because you know that you're drawn toward things you think about a lot. Your behavior is attracted to whatever you're thinking about the most just somewhat automatically and subconsciously. So could we just think our way into problems? I don't know. But I'd like to at least give consideration to thinki…

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narrative before? How about Trump-Russia collusion? That's a diversion narrative for the fact that Hillary was literally colluding with Russia apparently. All right I'll say allegedly or apparently.

How often are diversion narratives really all we're seeing and how often are we just wrong? Because my usual interpretation of these things is that there are two worlds because there's a Democrat side and a Republican side so we all understand that part. But some of these go beyond that. It seems like there's something else going on besides just the teams. These diversion narratives seem to be almost the operating system of civilization at this point. It's just diversion narratives.

Let's talk about some more as we go. But here's something that I've said a number of times and I just want to explain my thinking on it better because often I'm talking about a topic in the news then we all get diverted about the topic but really I'm trying to say something about the way we think about things.

So if you'll allow me to divorce myself from the topic of something whether it's true or false, all right forget about what's true I don't care about that at the moment. It has to do with a tweet I saw this morning from a Twitter user who calls himself Still Unvaccinated PhD. And he's responding to my thought that the category of rogue experts are generally wrong. And he says rogue doctors and scientists as Adams says likes to call them are often the ones who discover huge breakthroughs in different industries.

Now I agree with that don't you all? Wouldn't you say that the rogues, you know the ones bucking the standard, pretty much create everything good? When you agree, I mean they're all rogues you know all the ones that really make a difference they're all rogues. So have I ever said anything that would be conflicting with that? I've never said anything that conflicts with the fact that pretty much all progress seems to come from rogues and sometimes whistleblowers right?

But is there any conflict with that with the fact that I say that ninety percent of the time the rogues are wrong? You shouldn't think there's any conflict with that. And here's an analogy that's just used to help you see the math better I guess. It goes like this. You know about Google and you know about Amazon.com and you know about Microsoft and you know about all these gigantic companies that at one point were just startups.

If you saw them when they were startups you would have said well the odds are at best one in ten. That's optimistic. It's probably one in twenty. But let's say one in ten. So if you're looking at all startups as ninety percent of them are going to fail and you can be pretty sure that's true. But the ones that become famous are so famous that the narrative of the famous ones makes you cognitively blind to the fact that most things that are like that, most things that are in their category, the category of rogues taking on the world and winning, you know Jeff Bezos is a great example, taking on the world and winning.

So just know that everything important comes from the rogues but mostly they fail. So I use it as a prediction shortcut. So whenever there's a rogue I just say well I'm gonna go with the ninety. I'll vote against it. I'll vote against it.

So when I tell you that I've got suspicions about let's say a Doctor Malone or McCullough, Doctor Corey, any of the names you've seen that are the rogue doctors as I like to call them, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with anything about their science. How would I know? I'm just saying they're in the category that if you and I are going to take a bet I'll bet with the ninety. It's just a category, a category-related prediction that's all. I obviously can't counteract their science.

Jack Posobiec has another tweet and maybe a scoop I don't know but he tweets that Biden chief of staff Ron Klain is planning to start leaking and pushing a narrative. A narrative you say? What kind of a narrative? That President Zelensky of Ukraine is Kremlin compromised. This is according to a White House staffer. And again Jack's got good sources.

So here's the two worlds. Do you see reality just splitting? So I have to admit that when you see Zelensky being less worried about his country being invaded than the United States it's a perfectly reasonable question. Why is Zelensky less worried than we are right? But there's not just one way to explain that.

One explanation is that he is just as worried but he wants to play it differently. He doesn't want to cause panic. So we don't know he's less worried. He's talking about how we talk about it. So he doesn't want the rhetoric to be as high as it is. But t

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his might create an opening for this second narrative that Zelensky is a puppet of the Kremlin and he's practically inviting them in. And then the other narrative that nothing like that is happening. So once again two worlds. Does the simulation require that in every case? And I'm not even sure this is a Democrat or Republican question is it? Because I think you could find people on both sides of…

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