Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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Back to episode — Episode 3006 CWSA 11/01/25

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mine of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now. I remember when I had hot coffee. It was great. So you missed the, I was talking to the local subscribers before the real podcast started and I was telling them that I'd been complaining about the bad quality of my coffee warmer and one of my beloved subscribers on Locals sent me a new o…

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's got a power button. It'll actually tell you the temperature. My old one didn't have that. Tells you the temperature.

There's only one thing it doesn't do, which would be cool. You know, I'm not like any designer of coffee warmer pads or, you know, I'm no expert at it or anything, but there's one thing I would have added to it. I would have added to it the ability to warm your coffee because apparently it doesn't have that. But boy does it look like something that would. So that's not nothing.

All right, we're going to start with a reframe. I guess I'll have to get a new one. Reframe of the day. Oh, here's a good one. This is what I learned from my first editor when I was picked to be a syndicated cartoonist. There's an editor who has to say I like you and then they go forward. But until some editor says I like you, you get nothing.

All right. So when I got first syndicated, before they publish you, what they do before they publish you is they work with you for six months or so to make sure that you could produce a comic every day before they embarrass themselves by partnering with you and then find out you can't make a comic every day. So you have to prove you can do it.

So after about six months of proving I could do it, I would submit my work, but I was still a new cartoonist. So as a new cartoonist, your editor would put a little bit more of a thumb on the scale. Once you become a famous cartoonist, if your editor is any good at all, they say something closer to, you know how to do this better than I do, right? And then they sort of leave you alone but rarely now and then there might be something over the line but basically once you're published and you show you can do it the editor who is a good editor, I had a great editor, won't try to put

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a boot on your work but they have to say it if they are going to get you to change something. So this is from the earliest days where my editor was welcome to tell me that something worked or didn't work because I, you know, that was useful to me. But how do you tell somebody who's an artist that they worked all day on something and it's bad and it's not worthy of being published? Have you ever t…

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