Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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Episodes Episode #2989 Segments
MainContent Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2989 CWSA 10/15/25

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t were an outside job, you know, it wasn't the United States involved, I don't know if you could cover that up. But an inside job, yeah, you could cover up an inside job. All right. You probably saw the story that some group I never heard of called the Young Republican National Federation, some of their private or internal text messages got revealed. And there were some very provocative and inapp…

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me, but I'm pretty sure they didn't say yes, but he's saying that they said yes to him. Now, we can't prove that because we weren't in the room, but did they say yes to him? If they said yes to him, that would carry some weight. But I also love the fact that if they didn't say yes to him, he might still say that they did because that would be another example of him changing reality as opposed to negotiating.

So suppose Trump convinced the other members of Hamas that when he talked to the leadership, they had agreed to disarm. What if that had never happened? Would it still be smart for Trump to say, "Yeah, I talked to them. They said they're going to disarm." Yes, it would because it would make the other people who also don't have good communication with their leadership think, "Oh, well, maybe that's what we've agreed to." So I like how clever it is whether it happened or not. And remember, people are just now getting used to the fact that Trump gets things done without being technically accurate about everything he says. He's not technically accurate about everything he says, but he sure knows how to get results. And this might be one of those examples.

So we don't know the truth of it. It's possible that Hamas just felt cornered in the meeting and lied to him just to get past the meeting. It's possible they lied to him, but I'm kind of entertained by the possibility that nobody ever said that and that he could still sell it because he could still sell it. So we'll see. And it would be for the good. I think everybody'd be better off if he did sell it.

I guess Bill Clinton has been claiming that when he was in office, he had made an offer to the Palestinians, there was a once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunity. But let's just say that not everybody agrees that that really happened. Aaron Maté is claiming that Clinton's been saying that for a while, but there's a book by Robert Malley who served as US peace negotiator on Clinton and he says no, that didn't happen there. There was nothing like that that happened there. There was never a deal on the table that the Palestinians could have accepted.

But let's talk about this two-state solution which I feel is my responsibility to solve. So your basic situation here is another impossibility. How could it be possible that Israel gets their one-state solution? You know it's a mixed bag in Israel. Some people would like two, some would like one. But the government, certainly Netanyahu, is not in favor of two. The Palestinians are also of mixed opinion, but a lot of them would like a two-state solution. Some of them would like a one-state solution, but not the one state that they have, if you know what I mean. So you've got these sort of impossible to reconcile positions. It can't be a two, and it can't be a one. So there are two things that are possible, two states or one state. And the one thing we know for sure is that two states won't work because there'll always be enough religious people in each state to think the other one shouldn't exist and there'll be continuous conflict. So it's not like two ordinary states. It's more like a religious situation where if they were just two nonreligious countries, yes, two-state solution. I would be pushing for that hard. It's like, yeah, you just want to live and have a good economy. There's no religion involved here. Oh yeah, you could probably figure out how to live next to each other. But as soon as you add the God told us this is our land and they both have it, that's not reconcilable. You can't reconcile that with one or two. There's always going to be half the people who want to go to war to change that situation.

So do you know what you need? Can you guess what I'm going to say next? You need a reframe. If there are only two possibilities and you know for sure neither of them will work, you got to reframe. So is there a reframe? I'm going to suggest this. We think of things in terms of the way things have always been done and that becomes your prison. Greg Gutfeld talks about the prison of two ideas. When you get locked into well there are only two things. It's either a one or a two. One state or two state. But what if you released on that and you said there's something that's not a one state and it's not a two state. What if it was a, I'll just make up some words, a special conscience zone. I'm using conscience as a substitute for religion because you don't want to pick the right religion. That's not a thing. But isn't the thing that makes part of the world different is how people feel internally. What makes that place different is how all the people involved feel internally. Now there's an external part where people are getting killed and there's wars and there's boundaries and all that but we have sort of an understanding of that and it's not getting us to any kind of a good place.

But if you change the focus from the kinetic physical boundary kind of thing to the internal state of the people involved that's a reframe. So I would say that this might be the one place on earth that you don't want something like a standard country. So it wouldn't be one country, but it also wouldn't be two. It would be all by itself and not even a country. It would be a land of conscience where if you wanted to be there, you would meet a certain set of requirements, you know, because you have to have some kind of order. But that it would be run as a sort of an open whatever your conscience tells you to believe this is the place to do it and this is not the place where we fight with each other and you find some way to get God on both sides. For example, could you bring together the leading people from both religions and could you find any moderates who say, "You know what? If God were in the room with us, what would he want? Would he want us to

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be fighting or would he want us to live our conscience and express our best feelings about the world and the afterworld and all that." So this is not a complete idea. I'm just sort of leaning in the direction of something that might have some possibility. But if you've ruled out one country and you've ruled out two countries, you're going to have to find something that's not one of those two thin…

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