Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 25, 2026
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I don't know what the real number is. People are going to say, are you telling me we saved twenty-five thousand lives by not driving? And then we can bank that savings and always save twenty-five thousand lives a year? Or for the full year maybe it's fifty thousand. Could we save fifty thousand lives a year just by having self-driving cars that would almost never crash? I mean if you did it right…

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ally the transmission of information and training will be the biggest market in the world. That's what I think.

Dr. Carlson asked a question that has had me scratching my head since I heard it. And I guess I did a fact check on this because there's an assumption in this or a fact that I'm not sure about. But what Tucker said was that outside of Wuhan there hasn't been a major breakout in China. There hasn't been another city in China that got real problems like New York or Wuhan. And Tucker says, what's up with that? Because we also learned that maybe the virus is even way more viral than we thought. So how could it be way more viral than we thought? Millions of people have left Wuhan since the worst part of the pandemic. They're traveling all around. It's super viral. And we don't have other major outbreaks in China. How would you even speculate that that's possible?

Well let's do that. Let's speculate. Number one is that China is lying. Okay, that's the obvious one, right? The most obvious one is they're lying. But if what happened in Wuhan was happening anywhere else, how would we not notice? Is it possible that something as big as Wuhan or half of Wuhan would still be gigantic? It would still be a really big deal. How would we not notice that even with their control of the media and everything else? We would know, right?

So one possibility is it is happening and China is like, you know, millions of people are dying. We just don't know. I guess it's possible, right? I guess that's one possibility.

Here's another possibility. They have a vaccine. What's the possibility that they have a vaccine? Well here again you have the same problem as the first example. If they had a vaccine it means they would have vaccinated, what, hundreds of millions of people? Do you think there's any chance we wouldn't know if hundreds of millions of people were forcefully vaccinated in a period of a few weeks? Yeah, we'd know that, right? Again we don't have great visibility about everything happening in China but something of that size we know, right?

So I'm going to rule out vaccination and I'm going to rule out that it is actually big outbreaks everywhere because we would notice those two things.

Here's another one. Suppose, I see it in the comments, you're a little bit ahead of me. Suppose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and zinc work really, really well. And by work really well I mean well enough that it doesn't overwhelm your hospitals even if you've got an outbreak. Would you know, would you be aware of it if a lot of regular Chinese people were having something that was like a mild cold but they were taking their meds and it didn't hospitalize them and they got better in a week? Would the rest of the world know that that was happening on a massive scale? Well here again we might know because that's a lot of hydroxychloroquine if they're handing it out like candy over there to a billion or whatever plus people. Wouldn't we know that? I think we would know. But of the three choices it's the one we would least likely know. Would you agree with that? That if they had a vaccine they had forced hundreds of millions of people to take it in a few weeks, we know that. If millions of people were dying, we know that. But if they were giving out massive amounts of hydroxychloroquine anytime somebody showed the first signs of symptoms, would we know that? Because let's say they only gave it to the people who showed symptoms. Do we know? Maybe not.

So if I had to guess I would say that would be the one that's slightly more likely. Or it could be some other therapeutic.

I'm hearing a lot of people worrying that the crackdown and the shelter-in-place orders and al

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l that are the beginning of softening us up for the ultimate dictator move where all of our rights and freedoms are taken away from us. I'm finding no sympathy for that opinion because first of all I don't think it's happening. I just think we're doing what we need to for the emergency and when it's over we'll get rid of the things. So there's some sense that any kind of surveillance or tracking o…

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