Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 2, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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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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still people who think this happened. There's still people who believe this. And boy does it trigger them. Of course they go crazy because you're calling them out to embarrass them for a fake memory which they still think is true. And so they're going to start to defend their false memory, which they can't. It's not possible because it didn't happen.

And here's the new trick. So the new trick compared to the old trick — the old technique was I would show them the transcript and make my argument and it never worked. The new one is this: I say if you believe it happened, I challenge you to go find the transcript and paste it in the comments.

And of course they think, "What kind of trick is this? Are you telling me that if I go get the transcript myself I'm going to debunk myself?" And of course they don't believe that. And the first thing that they will do, predictably, is go get the fake transcript, which is the first half where they leave out Trump's clarification that was unprompted that modifies what he said. So you're not confused if you only see the top half. You are confused. That's why he clarified it.

So that's the first thing they'll do is say, "Here it is. Here's the transcript. I win. I said he said it in public. There's the transcript. I've won my case."

And then you say, "No it isn't. That's not the transcript. Now go back and find the whole transcript."

Now the reason that I do this is because it is impossible to talk somebody into believing something they thought they saw with their own eyes. But it might be possible to get them to talk themselves out of it. You have to make them work. Because if you do the work and say here's the transcript, just read it, that just never works because they're just automatically in defensive mode. But if you make them do the work on their own — "You go find me the transcript. No that wasn't it. Nope, nope, you did not find the transcript yet. You found the fake one. Now go back and find the rest of it because even you can see that wasn't the last thing he said. I mean you can tell from the excerpt that's not done."

So we'll see if that works. I'll report in later but it looked like it was making an effect.

All right, I'd like to read to you two versions of the news, okay? One version, let's say the two movies on one screen version of the news, and it's about the Pennsylvania legal challenges. And it goes like this.

First I'll give you the news from the, let's say the right. The news is there are lots of irregularities and constitutional violations in the Pennsylvania election and it's working itself through the legal system and we have some indication from the Suprem

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e Court that they're likely to agree and throw out a bunch of votes. So Pennsylvania is looking good. Not only that but a couple dozen state legislators have said that they don't trust the certification of the election. Pretty good source, right? Pretty good. All right, somebody just reminded me to put my ring back on. Thank you. Here's the second version of the news. Pennsylvania, they keep try…

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