Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 2, 2026
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ing on in the Middle East, and I hate to be fascinated by war and death, but it's hard not to be. You know, if you're a human you've always got these two thoughts going on. Well that's horrible, I hope there's less of that. I don't want any death and destruction over there. But on the other hand, it's really interesting, which is not really fun. Somebody said it's the Scott sophistry hour. Anybod…

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e not seen any, not one piece of evidence. Certainly nothing's been proven in court. So I think we could all agree that the allegations that Israel is behind that assassination are baseless by definition because there's no evidence, right?

Don't you know that if something is baseless then I guess you have to treat it like it didn't happen because it's baseless?

Now I have argued of course that there are some situations which are so obvious that you don't really need too much proof. Do you? How much proof do you need that Israel was behind that assassination? Would you be willing to make decisions and act upon your belief that Israel was behind it while knowing it's baseless? I thought we didn't do that. Can you act upon something with no evidence just because you know that the way the situation is constructed there really is sort of only one person who could have been behind it, if you know what I mean? It wasn't Estonia. Estonia gets a free pass in all of this stuff, don't they?

So we'll watch that. But it looks to me that Israel has made the right chess move because if you're the second in command of the nuclear program in Iran, you're not so effective today, I don't think. You're not doing much communicating with your staff if you're the number two nuclear guy. So at the very least it's going to make things less efficient over there.

All right, let's talk about something else.

So I tweeted today my minimum requirement for unity with Democrats. Now Democrats are calling for unity, some of them anyway, and I like the concept of unity and I like anytime a national leader calls for unity we should take that pretty seriously. And I think that the United States should have as its very strong goal to be unified. Of course you need a system to get there.

But here is what I would recommend. In order to get good with somebody it helps if you tell them what it would take because you don't want somebody who's trying to find some unity with you just guessing what you need, right? It just isn't very efficient for the other person to say, "Okay, I want some unity with you. I'd like to get along. I'm gonna guess what it would take to do that." Why make them guess? Why not just say, "Look, I'll be okay with you under the following conditions. You know, I'll still hate your policies and we'll still argue about politics, but I'll be okay with you as a citizen, as a person. I'll be okay with you under the following conditions." And here are my conditions.

Now it's not the only things that have ever bothered me. I'm just saying it's the minimum to think about unity. And my minimum requirement is that the Democrats apologize for the fine people hoax, the drinking bleach hoax, and the Russian collusion hoax, which they like to confuse with Russian interference, which actually did happen.

And of course I'm using a little persuasion trick. Do you recognize it? What persuasion trick am I using? Maybe more than one. Let's see how good you are at spotting them. Now I've been training you for a few years. I'll read it again and then you tell me what persuasion trick. Yeah, laundry list is one of them but there's another one I'm going for. All right, see if you can catch it.

"My minimum requirement for unity with Democrats is an apology for the fine people hoax, the drinking bleach hoax, and the Russian collusion hoax."

Somebody says high ground. No, it's — I see why you're saying high gr

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ound but that's not what I was going for. It's "think past the sale." That is correct. Very good. Most of you are actually getting the right answer. Would you have gotten that answer before I started talking about this "think past the sale" thing? Would you have all spotted that? Because I'd like to think that I set your filter so that you can spot it now. All right, so it is a persuasion trick t…

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