Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 10, 2026
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ng else for a while. First up in the news, Linda Tripp has passed away just hours ago I guess. And she was called the Clinton sex scandal whistleblower. She died at the age of 70. And I would like to read this sentence to you from the Daily Mail. This is a British publication and I want you to fill in the last part of the sentence. Now I swear I'm not making this up. Everything I tell you is tota…

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how to be uninteresting. You know, love him or hate him, you know he annoys you, you know you love him, whatever. No matter what you think of him I just don't think it's in his character that he can be uninteresting. Like in any context, anywhere, in any room, under any situation. Everything he says is just like, "Wait, what?" And this is another one.

So his reaction when he heard the news, he was talking about it, he said, quote, "I don't know why President Obama hasn't supported Joe Biden a long time ago." Trump says he feels something is wrong. It does amaze me that President Obama hasn't supported Sleepy Joe. He knows something that you don't know that I think I know that you don't know.

Now you have to admit, if you had said, okay we're gonna have this moment where you're going to say something in public and I want you to get the best writers in the world and bring them together and try to come up with a sentence or two that's so provocative and so it screws with your head that the people can't stop talking about it for 24 hours. You have the best writers in the world and be like, well suppose he says this. No that won't work. And I don't know if the best writers in the world could have come up with something that's more provocative than the way I think he just sort of came up with it on the spot. I mean that really is a gift. You have to admit, love it or hate it, you just can't turn away. It's just so interesting the way he does it.

Now of course one of the many things he does right in holding your attention, I talked about before, it's an author's trick and a writer's trick which is you create curiosity. And you see the president do that all the time. He says, well you know you'll find out later. He always has, he likes to have little surprises. He likes to tease you that there might be a surprise coming. So he knows how to keep you interested by not giving you the answer. Because anybody, any standard normal politician who didn't know how to do this stuff so well, a normal politician would have just made an accusation, right? A normal politician would say, well Joe Biden's socialist too or he voted against that thing or he was for this war or something. But that's how any normal politician would have approached it. You just say a fact. But the fact gives you no curiosity. There's no curiosity. It's just like, yeah of course you say that because you're on the other side. I'm gonna hear this a million more times.

It doesn't stick at all. Trump puts it in the form of a puzzle, a riddle. It's a quiz. It's sort of a quiz and a

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riddle and sort of a story with a cliffhanger. You don't know quite what the answer to the story is but you feel you have a notion and there might be the same notion he has. Now I've told you before that two of the strongest forms of persuasion are pacing and leading. And so in this case the president is sort of pacing the public because the public feels almost exactly the way he's framing it. Wh…

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