Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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Episodes Episode #2494 Segments
MainContent Cognitive Reframing

Back to episode — Episode 2494 CWSA 06/03/24

Context —

some pictures and her mentor was the current president. But of all the things, this is the thing that stood out when I saw her picture. Working the crowds, she's wearing a ponytail and she's pulling it off. You know, not everyone can make a ponytail work, but she totally pulls off a ponytail while she's campaigning. What do a lot of American politicians do? Do they ever wear ponytails in any offic…

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n Arizona for the 2020 election. So that sounds pretty convincing. Does that sound pretty convincing? So this is a fact, right? It's a fact. And then I'm going to tell you why you're misinterpreting it. But it's a fact that you're supposed to know how many were mailed out, and then you're supposed to keep a record of how many were received. And don't you think it would be a problem if your record of how many you mailed out was way different than the ones you received?

Now if you received way fewer than you mailed out, totally normal. Not everybody's mail-in. But if you received substantially more coming in than you ever sent out, that would be a huge signal for fraud, would you agree? So do you agree that there's no other explanation for that? Okay, are you on the same page with me that there can't be any official explanation that would ever satisfy you if that's true, and it's true, it's confirmed to be true? So how do you interpret that? Think in your mind what could be any other explanation for why you get more in than you ever mailed out in the first place. So therefore there was pretty confirmed bad behavior, wouldn't you say?

All right, so here's what you're going to learn today. That what you think is you analyzing a situation is not what just happened. That's not what happened. What happened is you analyzed your own ability to imagine, and it failed you. You couldn't imagine a situation in which that could be okay, despite the fact that everything about it looks like it's not okay. All right, now I'm going to tell you what the official explanation was. Now I'm not going to say that the official explanation is correct. I'm just going to say that as soon as I heard it, it sounded correct. So it completely will. All right, you ready?

There are two ways to do mail-in voting. One way is they mail it to you. You get it in the mail, you fill it out, and you mail it back. If that was the only way it happened, then it would be a clear sign of fraud if more came back than were ever mailed. But there are two ways. One is it doesn't get mailed to you. You walk into a voting center, you pick it up from a shelf or something, you fill it out, and you drop it in a box. That would be called a mail-in, but nobody mailed it to you. You went to the place where they were sitting in a big pile, took one off the pile, filled it out, and dropped it in the box sitting next to it. Did you know that?

Now that's the claim from the official people who were debunking it. Now my point is not that the election was or was not fair. I would say it's hard from my perspective to know one way or the other. But the point is if you can't imagine what the alternative was, the problem is in your head. Your imagination is not up to the task.

Here's another case like that. I believe that you're all familiar with the fine people hoax about Charlottesville and how something was taken out of context and Democrats came to believe something that never happened. And you know the drinking bleach hoax. Democrats came to believe that Trump said maybe you should drink bleach. Never happened. It looks like there might be a version of that on the Republican side, and it's called Ashley Biden's diary.

So I tried talking about this yesterday with my audience and people just flipped out. And I thought, I'm going to stay away from this topic. And then I saw, thought to myself, no, the flipping out is the story. So I'm going to make you flip out. I challenged my audience because I never talked about the story and I don't want to get into the details. But I'll just say that there's a thing called Ashley Biden's diary, which some people say is fake and some people say is real. I think it's confirmed to be real as far as I know. But then there's a claim that there's a specific entry in there or entries that would, if true, would be a horrible situation that Joe Biden was involved in. I'm not even going to give you any details. I'll just tell you this.

I said, can somebody show me that? I keep hearing about it, but I've never seen it. Like, can you show me the words in the diary? And I said I don't believe it exists. So somebody showed it to me. And then the following thing happened. Here it is. Look right here. And said, I'm looking at it. I don't see what you said. It's right here. Okay, I'm reading it. I see every word you're pointing to. I don't see what you're s

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aying. Now does that mean that it's not there? I'll tell you what I saw. I saw something that was ambiguous that could be interpreted one of two ways. One way is President said you should drink bleach. The other way is that something ordinary happened that was worded poorly. Now I'm not going to defend anything that anybody did, so don't interpret this as me defending Joe Biden. I'm telling you t…

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