Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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break it, is this something that would cause maybe a predictable problem if I go this way versus that. It's a risk management situation. A lot of it is guessing. A lot of it's intuition. So anybody who is operating at the child level that says that a candidate is bringing chaos when in fact chaos is the canvas, they're not really a good observer. I've noticed this correlation anecdotally and I w…

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t of us. I don't think that's wrong. I believe that Nancy Pelosi should be able to get her hair done indoors because she's the Speaker of the House and you know there are things that you can't do on the sidewalk if you're the Speaker of the House.

Now if everybody else was on the sidewalk, they're anonymous people walk by, that's fine, it's safe, it's good enough. But if you're the president of the United States or you're the Speaker of the House or you're Rand Paul, yeah that's okay with me if they take you alone because being indoors, the problem is not just indoors. The problem is indoors with lots of people. If you take Nancy indoors with one person who's wearing a mask and let's say that Nancy has been tested, she probably has been recently, it's not the biggest risk in the world and she is safer indoors than she would be outdoors.

I get that other people say hey other people we did our own hair, we worked it out. But she's also in her 80s. I don't know, can she do her own hair? Being in her 80s is a bigger problem to me than the fact she got her hair blown out. So I would like to be consistent because there's no way in the world there won't be Republicans and other people who get caught without masks etc. You know maybe it'll happen to me. You know maybe I'll get caught on some video without a mask or something and it's just I can't get interested in it.

All right, but I understand it's a fun story in a political season.

Chicago police released surveillance video of suspects looting the store and they're asking for help identifying them. Now the people that they're showing don't have masks on. Some do but most of them don't. Now what do you tell yourself when you see that Chicago is asking the public to help them identify the pictures that they're publishing, presumably online, I don't know if it's in any newspapers too? What does that tell you? Think through what do you know is true.

If Chicago is printing photos of people and saying public can you identify them, here's what you know is true. Chicago are really, really incompetent. Do you know how hard it would be to identify every person in that photo? Here's how hard it would be. All right, I'm going to demonstrate this.

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This will be the entire effort to identify every single one within two seconds. So the entire time to identify every picture, my claim is sub two seconds. And it looks — let me demonstrate it. It looks like this. Let's say this is the picture. Now this is my phone and I look at the picture and I push this button and then their face comes up and I've identified them. You can do that with an app. It…

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