Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 12, 2026
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MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2872 CWSA 06/18/25

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about this? What about the immigrants? Oh god, whoa. That's called drama. There's a story that seems mostly in the Just the News outlet about China and the fake ballots. Are you following that one? Now, I'm waiting for other news sources to pick it up and validate it because I can't tell how big a deal this is. But the story is that Kash Patel found some documents in the FBI suggesting that the F…

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move him. Because even if they didn't believe it, they'd still have to move him. And then maybe they could detect the movement. So it could be a trick. I'm just speculating. It could be that they didn't know where he was, but if they say they know where he is, maybe he'll act differently, but also maybe it'll create some action that they can track and then they can find him. So that might be coming.

Meanwhile, there's a worry that Iran will try to block the Strait of Hormuz where a lot of the world's oil goes through. But I was looking at the Amuse account on X and he says that China buys about 60% of all the seaborne crude from Iran and Grok backed that up, about 60%. And China is responsible for nearly all of Iran's oil exports. They buy about 90% of it. So what would happen to China if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz? And the answer is even if Iran wanted to punish the western world, it doesn't look like they could do it with the Strait of Hormuz unless they punish their biggest supporter, which would be China. So do you think Iran would take out that much oil from China by closing the Strait of Hormuz? Because once they close it, I don't know how long it would ever take to open it up again.

So I'm curious whether Iran will go after the Strait of Hormuz because I feel like China would be tapping them on the shoulder and saying, you know, that would be the one thing maybe you shouldn't go after because that would hurt us pretty directly. Anyway, I guess there are a couple of oil tankers that are on fire in the strait, but only because they crashed into each other. I don't know how that happens. How does an oil tanker crash into another oil tanker? Like, you couldn't see that coming. There's a reason.

Anyway, let's see what Trump has been saying about Iran. Apparently the reporting is that Trump is considering quote a range of options. So that feels like news. He's considering a range of options, but it's not really news because that's what everybody does all the time. You wake up in the morning and you consider a range of options. It doesn't mean anything, but it sounds like news. Trump has also signaled on social media that he wants from Iran unconditional surrender. Now, is that the way you talk about Iran? Do you think that gets them to the negotiating table? If you say unconditional surrender, that feels like exactly the opposite of what you would say if you wanted to talk. That's pretty much the end of talking.

So what did the Supreme Leader say about that? Well, and also that Trump said that we know where the Supreme Leader is and we don't plan to kill him. Quote, "At least for now." Imagine being the supreme leader of Iran and the people who have taken out all of your generals basically, they found a way to get to all the generals and they say well we're not going to kill you at least not for now. How would you ever sleep because you would expect this to happen at any moment then anyway? So you would not be surprised that the supreme leader of Iran says that Iran won't surrender. So apparently no unconditional surrender is imminent. And he says that any US military intervention will bring irreparable consequences. Irreparable I say. And he says the Iranian nation is not one to surrender. Which I believe I told you.

And he says about Trump's comments, he goes, "Those who are wise never speak to this nation in the language of threats." And I think that's right in the sense that if you ever wanted to make a deal with Iran, you would never talk to them with words like unconditional surrender. You know, you'd say stuff like, "Well, we just have this one problem with the nuclear program and maybe some of your ballistic missiles, so let's talk about that." But if you say unconditional surrender, you're sort of signaling that you're not going to talk. And Iran is signaling back that they're not going to talk either. So I wouldn't expect any kind of peace deal, ceasefire breakthrough. That's not happening. And Iran says that US involvement will lead to all-out war, whatever that means.

So our cyber experts are worried that Iran might try a cyber attack on the US. And the question that I have about that is if it were so easy to do a cyber attack on the US, wouldn't we see a lot more of it? I feel like maybe it's sort of hard to attack the US infrastructure. You know, maybe China has some, we hear that China has penetrated basically everything, but as Iran, and would China help them and say, "Here, here's the keys to the car. Go take down the grid." I don't know. I think China will do what China normally does, which is try to stay out of it. That's the way I'd play it. Just stay out of it.

Meanwhile, the Hindustan Times, I saw this in a Mario post. The Hindustan Times is speculating who might take over if the Supreme Leader were to, let's say, have an accident. If something happened to him, who would take over? And they always show pictures of the top people who might take over looking exactly like the guy they would take over for. Like they have the same beard, they got the same outfit on, they're wearing the same wire rim glasses. I feel like if you took out the Supreme Leader, they would replace the Supreme Leader with another Supreme Leader that was so similar to the one that you just had that you wouldn't even know the difference. Like you could go down like five deep into who's next in line and the fifth person would just look like the person who just left and all the people above them. Just a gray bearded guy with the same kind of hat and the same kind of look and the same attitude and would say all the same things.

So if you think that taking out the top domestic leader would get you a good result, I don't think there's any evidence of that. It just looks like you would get a younger, madder, more angry terrorist. It just seems like it would get worse. So I can see why Trump would not want to be rushing to take out the top guy.

Meanwhile, both sides are talking about the military action like it's a movie sequel. They're using movie sequel language and I've never seen so much marketing talk about a war. So the Israelis are saying that very soon like maybe today or tomorrow we're going to see an operation from Mossad that makes the pager deal they did with Hezbollah look like child's play. So do you believe that? Do you believe that in the next 24 hours Mossad will have done some gigantic effective attack that nob

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ody saw coming and it's more impressive than the pagers blowing up on Hezbollah? Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's just to scare the Iranians. And meanwhile the Iranians say, so what Mossad said is quote, "When the dust settles, you're going to see some surprises on Thursday night and Friday that will make the beeper operation almost seem simple." And then Iran says that Israel is going to have…

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