Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 2, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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. Those two things are not equal. One is a picture. A picture is really strong. That gets in your head and lives there forever. A concept just sort of washes over you in terms of persuasion. So AOC wins every time that meme goes around by repetition, empathy, visual persuasion against a concept. And the concept doesn't really carry very far even when it's true. I've been asked often recently if t…

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f because they'll always share in it after it's gone. And people can collect them. Now people used to collect my physical signature back in the peak of Dilbert mania, especially in the '90s. People would actually buy my autograph at autograph swap meets and stuff. And sometimes they would check with me. They'd send me an image and say, just want to make sure I bought your autograph. Or sometimes I would draw a little Dilbert comic. They'd say, I just want to make sure this was really you. And I would look at it and I'd say, sorry, definitely not me. So you bought a fake autograph.

And of course there are statistics that physical autographs are very often fake. Really, really often faked. As in so often you wouldn't want to know. So that's in development. I won't tell you the angle we're going to take on the NFTs, but you'll like it.

Elon Musk continues to be interesting. And he tweeted today or yesterday, "I admit to judging books by their cover." Is that a great tweet? I admit to — there's no — and then later he clarified that he meant that literally books. He wasn't making a metaphor about life. He would say no, literally books. I judge them by their cover.

Now the funniest thing about this is that someone else after I tweeted that everyone does that because everyone judges a book by its cover. We all do, right? And it's a pretty good method. It's a pretty good method because among other things the cover is going to have, you know, is this a New York Times best-selling author? That's on the cover. What's the name of the author? Is this somebody I know? Somebody I shoul

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d listen to? It's right there on the cover. And then beyond that I would say that if you can't come up with a good cover, well maybe your book's not so good either, right? Maybe your publisher doesn't have their stuff together. So maybe they don't even pick good authors. So yeah, you can judge a lot. In the same way that you can judge people by their clothing, adjusted by income of course. But you…

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