Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
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. And alone among, I felt, I felt like a loon among observers. And I doubt I was alone. One has to assume that in other places people were saying the same thing. But I didn't see it when I said it. And I said, well, that's just clearly a lie. Here's why I thought it was a lie. It's in a little book called Loserthink. It's my book. I'm sure you've all read it. If you haven't, what's wrong with you…

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e times, let's hold off on, you know, shooting the people on our own team. Let's wait. Because if he has a good explanation I'm open to it. But otherwise he has to be fired.

Of course there's some tweets going around today. I guess on February 7th Secretary Pompeo was tweeting a photo of American planes being loaded up or unloaded, I guess. Apparently in February 7th the United States sent many pallets of PPE, the protective stuff that we need in this country and we have a shortage of. We sent a plane load to Wuhan to help them with their shortage. Now people are saying, my God, you incompetent monsters. You, President Trump and Secretary Pompeo, how could you possibly be sending our limited supplies, which we're basically, you know, right at the ragged edge of running out of in our crisis? How could you send our critical national resources to a strategic frenemy, enemy, whatever you want to call China? How does that make sense?

Well let me tell you, everybody's a genius in hindsight. How many people in the United States, be they political or scientific, knew on February 7th that the United States would run out of protective equipment? Or raise your hand. Raise your hand if on February 7th you knew that the United States didn't have enough of this stuff and couldn't make it fast enough and or couldn't get a supply. Right? Raise your hand if you knew that on February 7th. You fricking liars. If you got your hands up you didn't know. Pompeo didn't know. Trump didn't know. Of course there were scientists and of course there were probably individuals who were saying, no, no, maybe you shouldn't do that. But nobody knew on February 7th.

Here's why I know we didn't know. Because we still don't know. Do you know if we have enough, let's say N95 masks, not only available but do we have enough in the pipeline so we'll be okay? Do you know? No, you don't know. You don't know. I don't know. Is there anybody in the world who knows? No. The reason I know we don't know this is because Pence said yesterday we don't know. That was yesterday. How did he know? How could he have known in February 7th we wouldn't have enough? Do you think on February 7th Mike Pence knew we didn't have enough masks? He doesn't know today. He doesn't know. Nobody knows. Nobody's even collected the fricking information.

Do you, did you know on February 7th that we had no mechanism for all of the hospitals in the country to report what critical supplies they might run out of in a crisis? That system didn't exist. So flying completely blind, the president, presumably, and the Secretary of State, probably, and others made a decision to give some supplies that they had access to to Wuhan. I don't know if those supplies made any difference at all. You know, I don't even know if it's enough because even when they talk about millions and mil

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lions of anything, yeah, when it comes to medical supplies you actually go through millions of stuff really, really quickly. So you can see really big numbers of what we shipped and, you know, it might have been one hospital rips through them in, you know, five days or something. So it's not as much as you think. That's the first thing. And as a percentage of the United States total supply of tha…

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