Episode 1695 Scott Adams: Headline Lies, Plus My Prediction How Mushrooms Will Change The World
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Supreme Court of Fact-Checking
FBI internal report on compliance errors
Sean Penn, The Oscars and...Zelenskyy?
Biden says Putin should be removed?
CNN says Ukraine counterattacking, reclaiming cities?
Whiteboard: Mushroom Prediction
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Good morning, everybody, and today will be the most amazing and educational coffee with Scott Adams of all time.
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking that the standard has been so high up to now that how could I exceed that level of excellence?
Well, let me tell you, just when you think you've had enough, I'm going to give you another dose.
Today, among other things, I will teach you how to smuggle a reptile, And how magic mushrooms will change the world.
It's going to be epic!
So, so good.
And what do you need to enjoy it?
Well, you need to be watching.
But also, you need a copper mug or glass of tank or chalice inside a canteen jug or glass of vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Have I ever mentioned I like coffee?
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day.
It's the thing that makes, honestly, it's everything better.
It's called The Simultaneous Sip, and you're here for it.
Wow. Go.
Ah, yeah.
Yeah. Well, lead story today, according to CNN, a man was arrested at the border from trying to smuggle reptiles into the United States, and some of them were endangered.
Now, Jose Manuel Perez, also known as Julio Rodriguez, so he got captured and he had 60 living reptiles hidden in his clothes, authorities said.
Sixty. So, in his actual clothing, he had 60 reptiles.
Now, the question you're asking is, is that any kind of a record?
Well, I don't know what the actual world record is for number of live reptiles in your clothing.
I can only speak from personal experience.
Most I've ever got was 30.
I've never... Has anybody beat that?
I've never had more than 30 live reptiles in my clothing at the same time, but this guy got 60, and I think that speaks well of his professionalism.
He may have figured a way to get, like, you know how in a shoe box, if you turn one of the shoes backwards, they fit better?
You know what I mean? He may have figured out something like that with the reptiles.
He's like, whoa, if I take these two lizards and you put them face to face, they take up too much space.
But if you turn them around, you sort of 69 the lizards, if you know what I mean.
Saves a little space.
So it could be that the story has missed the lead.
This isn't really so much about smuggling reptiles as it is about a genius.
I mean... Do you think you could get 60 reptiles into your clothing?
This man is a genius.
We should hire him immediately for possibly cyber stuff.
Now, here's the question that a lot of you are asking.
If you're going to put 60 reptiles in your clothing, what is the proper way to distribute the reptiles for the optimal reptile smuggling situation?
That's what you were thinking, wasn't it?
And here's how I would handle it.
And I'm sure he handled it the same way.
Now, you've got different sizes of reptiles, right?
So you've got some snaky things that are just like, you know, thick strings.
But you've also got some baby alligators, they said.
Little baby alligators. And this is the way you'd want to distribute them.
Now, keep in mind that if you get stopped...
And you're trying to act cool?
It's going to be hard to act normal if you have 60 live reptiles in your clothing.
You'd probably get a little squirmy.
Am I right? You'd be like, hi.
Hi, officer. What do you got there?
Nothing. Nothing.
Why are you doing that? What?
What am I doing?
It'd be a little like that.
Now, if you're only listening...
You're missing the best show ever.
This was totally a visual gag.
But it gets better, and those of you on audio, I'm so sorry for you now, because of what you're about to miss.
All right, here's the way you do it.
You take the largest lizard.
I believe it would be the alligator.
You want the alligator to be strategically placed to divert attention from your otherwise squirmy body.
Because if you've got lizards, people are going to notice.
They're going to notice you're squirming, or they might see a little lizard action in your arms or whatever.
So what you do, and I might have to adjust the camera a little bit here.
Pardon my red pajamas.
So this is the way I'd handle it.
I would take the alligators, the baby alligators, they're about this size, and you put them right down the front, right here.
And then if you're stopped by anybody at the Border Patrol, you use the alligator's natural motions as a distraction from the other reptiles that are distributed around your body.
And let me give you an example of how this would look.
Excuse me, sir, will you stop right there?
And I'd turn to him and I'd say, what?
What? What? Naturally, he's going to look down.
And let's say there are two Border Patrol agents.
Maybe they're both female because it's funnier.
And one of them says, excuse me, sir, do you have something in your pants?
And I say, no.
That's a rather embarrassing question, isn't it?
I mean, I'm happy.
I'm feeling healthy. I'm having a good day.
But... You know, nothing.
Are you smuggling anything in your pants?
No. What?
Smuggling something in my pants?
No. Sir?
Can you please move along?
So that's how I'd handle it.
Now, I'm no reptile smuggling commercial expert.
But I do know a little bit about magic tricks.
And if you want somebody not to notice the other 59 reptiles, you put one alligator down your front.
Boom. You're all good.
Alright, so that's my first advice to you.
So Elon Musk asked if Twitter was, you know, doing a good job with free speech.
Of course everybody said, no!
And then people said, Elon, You must buy Twitter and turn it into a fair thing.
What do you think? Should Elon Musk...
I actually don't think this is really likely to happen.
But do you think he should buy Twitter?
A lot of people were saying it.
It's nothing he said himself.
I've seen lots of yeses.
Here's the problem. So there are a number of Twitter clones already, right?
Don't they end up doing pretty much the same thing?
That was the problem, right?
There's some types of speech that everybody has to ban.
And it ends up that the stuff that gets protected And not banned on the other platforms.
It's such a narrow little area of somebody telling a bad joke, basically.
So I don't know that building a competitor works, and I don't know that owning Twitter works.
You're still going to end up banning largely the same things.
Now, one way you could avoid it is to not have any ads.
I think that's the only way, actually.
If you have advertisers, the advertisers won't associate with certain kinds of content, and therefore you can't really have a viable platform if you use advertisers as your income.
Now, if you were a trillionaire and you had enough money, I don't know, maybe you could build a platform that didn't cost money and also didn't have ads.
But I doubt it. I mean, as rich as anybody is, it's still going to cost you, like, billions a year, isn't it?
I don't know if anybody would do that.
Not even the richest person in the world.
So I'm not sure that there's really a play, economically, business model-wise, to either buy Twitter or to try to promote an alternative, because I just don't know that they end up that different.
Now, the exception would be a subscription service.
If you're in a subscription service, people tend to all be happy, because they're just buying what they want, and when they don't want it, they can immediately stop buying it.
So subscription does solve everything, but here's what it doesn't solve.
Scale, right?
But subscriptions, sort of by definition, end up being a smaller universe.
So you need something like a Twitter, Facebook meta to reach the public if you're going to do anything that's trying to influence a wide bunch of people.
So nobody really has a model, or they would have done it already, I suppose, to fix the problems that basically everybody sees.
I mean, everybody sees the same problem.
So, here's what I suggested in reply to Elon.
And you've heard this idea, but look how well this fits.
I said, we don't need a new platform.
We need a Supreme Court of fact-checking.
And then I gave a few elements to what that would look like.
Not a complete standard.
But I said, first of all, it should be non-government.
And then everybody who got mad at me said, stop giving the government so much power.
And I said, no, the first thing is non-government.
The government's not part of it.
And then people said, it's a slippery slope until the government takes all...
No. I said, it's not government.
The government's over here, and then that's separate.
And then my idea would be, like, over here, without any of the government.
And then my critics say, you can't give the government that much power, to which I say, well, I'm just going to fucking shoot myself in the head now, because I don't seem to be able to get this message across the non-government part.
Very key to the whole plan.
Secondly, I would like to stipulate to my critics that if you have a good idea that you design like a fucking idiot, your good idea may not be successful.
So I will stipulate, if you did the dumbest possible things...
You would get a bad result.
Can we all agree on that?
Can we find common ground that if you were to simply appoint for life a bunch of fact-checkers, you would not get a good result?
Can we agree? And if there's somebody whose job it is to be the picker of the fact-checkers, again, would we agree you're not going to get a good result?
So can we agree that there are a whole bunch of ways you could definitely fuck this thing up?
In real obvious ways.
Because if you give anybody any kind of power that's lasting, it'll be corrupt.
Of course. And so, some of the elements one might imagine in a system would be full transparency so that everybody can see everything about it all the time.
You can see the minority opinion saying, we don't agree with this fact check at all.
Here's why. Have you ever seen a fact check with a minority opinion?
Have I not already made a better system?
Be honest. Have I not already doubled the value of every fact check organization?
Simply allowing that here's their opinion, and then here's the best minority opinion.
Am I right? Just one change.
Okay? Now, suppose the fact-checkers had comments that could be attached to them so that everybody could comment.
I don't think the fact-checking sites have comments, do they?
Maybe some do. Can somebody fact-check my comment about the fact-checkers?
When I look at fact-check sites, I don't think they allow counterpoints in any kind of comment field, right?
How about that? Now, that doesn't mean that people's comments are additive, but wouldn't you like to be able to see them?
Because there are times when people say, hey, look at this link.
You forgot about this.
I'd like to see that. Now, I'm not saying that these specific things I'm mentioning are what you need.
But you definitely need a very short incumbency, the person who's doing the job of fact-checking.
Let's say there's a group, like a Supreme Court of fact-checking, Oh, not part of the government.
Alright, did anybody miss the part about it should be a private enterprise?
Let's say a non-profit, but non-government.
Because you can't have profit and you can't have government.
Those are the two things you can't have.
Then you want people to do it who you know who they are, and they're there for a short time.
Could be just a week, right?
Is there any reason that you couldn't appoint people for one week?
And then maybe the next people you appoint, they might actually go back and change the fact check.
Because you'd want to be able to...
Here's another thing you'd want. You'd want to have a process by which you continually re-evaluate your old fact checks as needed and update them.
Because as the composition of the fact-checkers changes through some very transparent process, maybe some of the old opinions get revised.
Wouldn't you like to see the record of what they said and why they revised it?
Yes. To me, it seems that the entire business model of the news could be replaced by fact-checking.
You know, would you go to CNN to read the news when you know it's going to be biased basically every time, or would you go to the fact check site that has the news, the main opinion, and then the minority opinion, plus the best user comments that bubbled up?
I don't know. Depends on the interface, right?
If you do a better interface for anything, people come.
Good interface solves a lot of problems.
So imagine if you had full transparency, very short incumbencies, some kind of a process, which I have not figured out yet, and maybe that's the killer, maybe there's no way to figure it out, but I think there is, of how to select people for very short terms to make some fact-check decisions, maybe for one week, maybe for one month, and then immediately get to new ones.
Because here's a secret of contract negotiation.
You ready for this? So I did contract negotiation professionally for years.
If there's some uncertainty or risk about the deal, make it short term.
That fixes all kinds of stuff.
The problem with any kind of a deal or a contract is that you make a bad one and then you're stuck with it for a long time.
So you can fix almost any potential problem by saying, well, let's just do it for a week.
We'll make it really short. So you make the incumbency of the fact-checkers really, really short.
Because if you go a week with a bad fact, well, it might get fixed by next week.
And that would be not bad by the standards of these things.
So, yes, maybe it's a jury system.
We haven't fully designed it.
But my only point is, if you imagine it couldn't be designed properly...
I'm positive you're wrong about that.
Does anybody want to disagree?
So my statement is, I'm not saying we would design it properly.
I'm saying that if you do design it improperly, it won't work.
But I believe it could be designed in a way that everybody would say, yeah, it's sort of like democracy.
You complain about everything, but you're like, ah, okay, I get it.
There was a process.
Now, My contention is this would embarrass the other platforms into at least addressing the fact that the fact-check went a certain way.
Could you imagine CNN ignoring an Elon Musk fact-check organization that had come to the opposite conclusion than their own news coverage?
If the fact check thing gets big enough and gets its own attention, you really couldn't go against it, could you?
Because you'd sort of have to mention it, or if you didn't, everybody who saw your story would immediately tweet at you, hey, the fact checkers say your story is fake news.
It would be a way to basically control the worst excesses of all the fake news.
Now, having made my case, but acknowledging that I've not fully designed it, I've just given you elements that it seems like would have to be there.
Full transparency, short terms, minority opinion, user comments.
So far? Now, the most important process, perhaps, is how you pick the people.
Suppose... You did it randomly.
Suppose people who had a certain level of qualifications, and maybe you'd say, you know, I don't know, you had to be certain professions, I don't know, would that be too discriminatory?
You would want people who other people looked at and said, okay, that's a smart person.
Now, if it were a jury trial, I would be perfectly okay with the regular citizens making those decisions.
That's a pretty good system.
Because a jury trial, they can break down the complexity into simple enough that the jury can make good decisions.
But I think if you're trying to decide if a fact is true, such as global warming will destroy the world, I don't think you want your ordinary citizens to be making the more complicated fact-check decisions, do you?
Well, actually, let me inject some uncommon humility into my live stream and say, I don't really know that, do I?
My bias is that you need people of a certain level of credential, both to do a good job, but also for other people to think they're doing a good job.
But maybe not. Maybe you could test the system and you find out it's just like the jury system.
I see people disagree.
I actually respect that disagreement.
I could be wrong about that.
It could be that average citizens do a pretty good job on this stuff.
Who knows? Maybe you see both.
Maybe there'd be two systems.
You know, if you review movies, a movie review would have the expert opinion and then what the audiences are saying.
I find that useful, don't you?
That when the experts disagree with the audience, that does tell you something.
Wouldn't you like to see a case where, with fact checks, the experts say it's true and the audience says it's still not?
That would actually be useful, wouldn't it?
You wouldn't know exactly who's right, but it would be useful.
It would tell you what needs to be worked on or who needs to make their argument better.
All right, so I think it could be done.
And I also further would think that only somebody as clever as Elon Musk could figure out how to engineer truth.
Ooh, I like how I summarized that.
Only somebody as clever as Elon Musk...
Could figure out how to engineer a system that produces truth.
Because remember, the Constitution and our court systems are that.
They're engineered to produce government and engineered to produce truth and justice.
Now, they make mistakes, but you have to admit...
All right, let me give you a little thought experiment.
Before you had ever heard of a jury trial...
Could you imagine that somebody would have invented that process and it would work?
Think about it. Nobody had ever invented jury trials.
And somebody comes in and says, I got this idea.
Instead of having the smartest people decide if people go to jail, we'll have...
These illiterate average citizens, you know, at the time, making these life and death decisions about other people, and they barely know anything except where their horse shits, basically.
And they'll make all the important decisions.
And not only that, will these completely, you know, random citizens make all these decisions, but here's the good part.
The rest of the public will consider that a really good system.
Do you think you could have sold that system?
Think about it. That is something that if it didn't exist, you would never convince people that would work.
Am I right? You know I'm right.
You would never be able to convince people that system would work, and it turns out it's the best one we have.
So when you're looking at the, you know, can you engineer a system that would produce truth for the news, a fact check, if you think that that can't be done, Just have some humility, because I don't think you would have seen that a jury of your peers would have worked if it didn't already exist.
I don't think you would have seen it. I wouldn't have.
I'm not sure I would have...
I don't know.
I really don't know if I would have gotten behind that if I'd never heard of it before.
Then the other thing that Elon Musk could do that nobody else could do, and I think I almost mean that literally...
Something he could do that maybe no one else could do, and I don't mean just the money.
He could A-B test it through embarrassment.
The through embarrassment part is the superpower part.
He could put up something and have it fail and say, whoops!
Just say, well, that was a huge failure.
Let's try this second one.
Whoops! Total failure.
Yeah, let's try another one.
And then maybe he has it on the third try.
Who else could do that?
Seriously. Who else could fail, like, right in front of you?
And then say, let's try it again.
We'll tweak this. He could.
Kanye could. Damn it.
Damn it, you're right.
Yeah, Kanye could do that.
But Elon could do it.
All right, so he's not the only one.
Yeah, Kanye could do it. Alright, update on the Taylor Hawkins tragic story.
50-year-old drummer for the Foo Fighters.
Died suddenly and nobody was surprised that today the urine toxicology test said that he had 10...
Psychoactive substances in his body, including THC, tricyclic antidepressants, benzos, and opioids.
What would be one of the things that would be in the category of opioids unspecified?
What would be one unspecified specific opioid that is sometimes known to kill people?
Yeah. Now, there's no mention whether fentanyl was involved, and I'm not entirely sure they can determine, can they?
I would think they could, right?
We may never know.
However, this also brings up a very disturbing fact.
What would be the cause of death on the death certificate if somebody has 10 drugs and they die of an OD? What would they say on the death certificate?
And I hate the fact that a bunch of you are going to know the answer to this.
Do you know why a bunch of you are going to know the answer to this?
Because you've experienced it, as have I. So unfortunately, I know the answer to this question because I had to go through it.
The answer is you can't identify the one drug that killed somebody.
So there's some generic term about a multiple drug overdose.
So, what if fentanyl is killing twice as many people as we think?
Because that may actually be possible.
Don't know. But my stepson's death was not listed as fentanyl.
That was just one thing he had.
But what kills you?
Right? It wasn't the THC in his blood, was it?
It wasn't the beer. Probably there was only one thing that killed him, but he had ten things, so the doctors say, well, you never know.
Maybe the fentanyl.
So here's the argument. You never know if the fentanyl by itself would have been enough.
But certainly you do know, because of the outcome, that the fentanyl plus the other stuff definitely was enough.
So since you can't know it was the fentanyl, you give it a generic thing.
What does that mean for our fentanyl death numbers?
Is there any possibility or any chance at all that they're not understated?
They have to be, right?
Am I wrong? I'd love to see a doctor's opinion on this because I'm way out of my area.
But if If these multiple drug, which is very typical, by the way, and overdose is typically multiple drugs, I think.
I would think almost all the time.
Because people who take stuff, take stuff.
They don't stop with the one thing.
So, I don't know if that will come out as a fentanyl story or not, but I wouldn't be surprised.
In a related story, there's a non-profit that can make fentanyl test strips.
A little piece of paper you can stick in your drugs to find out if there's any fentanyl in what you thought was your, I don't know, heroin or fake Xanax or cocaine or whatever.
But I don't know that that's going to get a lot of play.
You know what I mean? I don't know how many addicts are going to waste some of their product for the purpose of testing it.
Because you'd have to use up some of it for testing, right?
Kind of expensive. So I just don't see junkies using test strips.
I like the idea. It's better than not having them, but it's a pretty small plug.
Well, I guess there was an audit of the FBI, an internal audit, and there's some report that came out that's highly redacted, but it found 747 compliance errors In 353 separate cases.
So about two compliance errors per case in the category of sensitive investigative matters.
So in other words, the stuff that's important.
So there were two investigative errors or compliance errors on average for every case.
And the Bureau acknowledged the audit findings were unacceptable.
What would be the acceptable number?
So 747 compliance errors, average of two per case.
That's too much.
What would be the right number?
One per case.
Now, if you've worked in a big organization, you might see this a little differently.
Allow me to explain.
If you went to any major corporation and looked at anything that anybody's doing in a project, how many compliance errors would you find just in a corporation that has broken its own internal rules or maybe some statute or law?
Let's say this is a substantial project.
Probably every one.
Yeah, because we have so many rules and regulations and standards that you really can't do anything important without breaking a few.
So, do you think that the FBI could even get their job done without intelligently cutting some corners?
Yes-ish, but I would imagine if you're an agent and you're tasked with being efficient, Probably the only way you can be efficient is by ignoring the rules of your own organization.
That would be very typical. The only way you can get anything done in a corporation is figuring out a way around their own rules.
Literally. Am I right?
Anybody who's worked for a big company...
Watch in the comments, you'll see confirmation that, yeah, it's coming already.
If you work in a big company, your biggest problem is figuring out how to get around your own internal organization.
So it looks like the FBI, probably exactly the same problem as any big organization.
Certainly. Certainly the same problems.
And it looks like the FBI agents are making the mistake of trying to do their jobs.
Now that would be the friendliest interpretation.
The friendliest interpretation is sometimes you've just got to break your own rules to get anything done.
It doesn't mean it's evil.
But on the other hand, it's the FBI. If there's anybody who shouldn't be breaking any rules, it would be the FBI because there's so much at stake.
So I can't give them a pass, nor should you.
We can't say, well, everybody's a little sloppy.
It doesn't work that way for the FBI. So yeah, they've got to fix that.
But certainly everything we've thought about their reliability is being confirmed.
Well, here's big news on Ukraine.
You know, it seems like every day had been like every other day.
You know, all the news is Russia still attacking.
But now we've got some actual new news.
So Sean Penn vowed to destroy his Academy Award if Zelensky isn't invited to speak at the Oscars.
So, Oscars, Russia-Ukraine war.
You can see why Sean Penn thinks that these two things should be paired.
Because what I want with my mindless popcorn entertainment is a little bit more war talk in the middle of a war.
So, good idea from Sean Penn to combine those two art forms, first of all.
And second of all, I think that he's starting a trend that I can back.
And I, too, would like to support Sean Penn.
And this is the award I got for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 1997.
It's called the Rubin Award.
Now, this is like the Academy Awards for cartoonists.
And if Zelensky doesn't get to speak at the Rubins...
I will destroy this.
I will destroy this.
And not only that, but, I mean, just look at me.
Obviously, I've had more awards than one.
For example, one of my best awards here, very proud of this, this was the Deepai Scott Adams Celebrity Waiter for the Radisson Hotel in 2009.
So there were a lot of celebrity waiters that year.
But none really reached the standard that I achieved.
Now, this award means a lot to me, my celebrity waiter award.
And if we don't immediately lower the temperature for climate change, immediately, and I'm talking in the next month, if we don't get the climate change fixed in the next month, I'm going to destroy this.
This will be just shards, completely destroyed.
I'm not done. You think that's all the awards I've won?
No. I also won the Shoemate Adams 2003 Masters Tennis Championship, which was held on my tennis court between me and one other person.
Now, the good news is the worst anybody did was come in second.
There were only two of us.
But I did prevail, and I did go to the trophy shop and make myself an award.
Now, that doesn't make it any less prestigious, the fact that I went and made an award for myself.
Some of you will complain and say that means less.
It doesn't. It doesn't.
Now, this award will be completely destroyed...
If I see any masking in public, if I see anybody with a mask in public, I'm going to take this and just go smash it on the ground.
And I realize that I'm going to have to accomplish a few more things to get a few more awards because there's a lot of society that needs to be fixed.
And... If I can join with Sean Penn and destroy my personal wards to fix the world, I feel I should do that.
And so I'm with you, Sean.
Let's do this. Well, let's talk about Ukraine.
Ukraine won't negotiate losing any territory.
What? It seems like there's not much left of Ukraine, but they won't negotiate any loss of territory that they've already lost.
Those Ukrainians are holding tough, let me tell you.
But if Ukraine won't negotiate, and of course Russia won't negotiate, because they wouldn't have anybody to negotiate with on the territorial stuff, and it's the only thing they want, or, you know, the main thing they want, has this not become a decapitation war?
So isn't the entire war down to, can they kill Zelenskyy, Before Putin is, I don't know, maybe taken out by his own people or something like that.
So if nobody's willing to negotiate, does it just go on forever because the two leaders?
I mean, they should both be assassinated at this point.
No, I'm kidding. Don't demonetize me.
Nobody should be assassinated.
I'm just saying that I can't love either one of them at this point.
I don't love either one of them.
So Biden went overseas and only made two blunders that we've heard of.
He accidentally suggested that U.S. troops would go to Ukraine, which of course would trigger World War III. And he also seemed to call for regime change of Putin, which would also trigger World War III. So it was a pretty good trip, pretty good trip, because he only did two things which have a pretty good chance of triggering the entire annihilation of civilization.
Civilization. But civilization had a good run, and the mainstream media is going sort of softly on him for these things.
And indeed, the White House quickly clarified...
That when Biden says that Vladimir Putin must go, that really they're not talking about regime change, even though those words sound exactly like it.
What they're talking about is that he should assert less control over his neighbors.
So if you say the sky is blue, the White House will say, I think you're misinterpreting that sky is blue comment.
What he's saying is your dog has fleas.
And you think to yourself...
Well, none of those words, like, that's not even close, really, is it?
And then the White House says, please, please, Peter Doocy, don't be that way, Peter Doocy.
You need to understand that when the president says the sky is blue, he really means, if you look at the context, that your dog has fleas.
And that's pretty obvious.
Yes, you have been gaslighted by the White House.
It was misspeak.
Now, of course, Biden is not planning on sending troops, and he's not planning on a decapitation strike on Putin.
And even Russia kind of ignored it and said, well, that's sort of up to the Russian people.
It was kind of probably a good play for the Russians not to make that a big deal.
Because I think they want to downplay any story about Putin being in jeopardy, right?
Because wasn't that an interesting response from Russia?
Imagine, if you will, Putin calling for the removal of Biden in ways that sounded like maybe you mean violently.
That would be a pretty big story.
A pretty big story.
Shouldn't it be a pretty big story the other way?
It is a pretty big story.
But Russia, instead of playing it up like maybe you think they would, it's like, hey, hey, these guys think that taking out a leader is good.
Hey, stop it. Instead, they minimized it.
They minimized it by saying, no, it's up to Russian people.
Basically, they just treated it like trash talk, like it didn't have any real-world meaning.
That was exactly the right way to play that.
Because, do you know what the Russians don't want to be in?
Any kind of conversation about removing Putin, even if the dominant opinion is that he should not be removed, you don't even want to have the conversation.
Because do you know what matters?
Is it important things?
Is that what matters to us?
No. No.
There's no evidence that important things matter to us.
What does matter to us?
Well, what people tell us we should think about and how often we're exposed to it.
What we think is important is what we're exposed to the most.
That's it. That's the whole mechanism.
If the only thing you were exposed to was some trash on the sidewalk, that would be your biggest problem in the world.
It's the only thing you're thinking about.
I mean, it wouldn't change the fact that somebody might nuke you in 10 minutes, but the only thing you're exposed to is this trash on the sidewalk.
It's the biggest problem in the world to me.
So the only thing you have to do to make something the biggest problem is to expose people to it a lot.
The last thing that Russia wants is a conversation about whether Putin should or should not be removed.
Do you know why? It's thinking past the sale.
If you can get people to discuss whether he should or should not be removed, you've already gotten them to agree there was something removable in the topic.
Something removable.
The war crimes. And indeed, most people would agree with that.
So imagine the Russian people who don't know what the hell is going on suddenly finding that the news keeps talking about whether Putin should be removed by his own people.
And you're in Russia and you hear that and you're like, wait a minute.
Why is that even a national topic?
I thought the war was going well.
Everything looks good. Why would the Russian people remove him?
He's popular. So it's pretty good persuasion to get the Russian people to yak about how inappropriate it was for Biden to mention it.
Let me be even-handed.
If Trump had said that, And left some ambiguity so he could say, oh, I didn't mean take out Putin.
And it caused everybody to talk about removing Putin.
I would have called it genius.
You know I would have.
I would have called that genius.
I think Biden blundered into it.
But Russia did exactly the right thing by minimizing it.
So if Biden had blundered in a way that was an actual blunder...
I mean, it was a blunder to do it, I think.
But I don't think it was blunderous.
Meaning that if it had been a blunder, Russia would have amplified it.
Am I right? If Biden mentioning Putin being removed by any means...
If that had not been good for the war effort of the Ukrainians, the Russians would have been talking about that like crazy.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, why are you talking about that?
Unfair. Hey, yeah, we did some bad things, but look what you're doing.
Hey, yeah, okay, we bombed some civilians, granted, but look what you're doing.
You're trying to assassinate leaders?
No, no. So it could be one of the best blunders Biden made.
All right. And of course, CNN is reporting that the Ukrainians are counterattacking and reclaimed several cities.
How true does that sound to you?
Are the Ukrainians, quote, counterattacking and counterattacking to the extent that it should be a headline?
All right. Obviously, there are counterattacks.
I think that's obvious.
But are they counterattacking to such a degree that it's important and could change the course of the war?
I don't know. Who knows?
But we don't believe anything that comes out of the war zone.
But here's what I think about reclaimed several cities.
Here's how to interpret it.
Is there any indication that the Russians plan to conquer and hold And hold every town in Hamlet and city.
There's no evidence of that at all.
There's plenty of evidence that they needed to fight their way from wherever they were to wherever they were going, which probably included going through cities and smaller ones and, you know, taking out the defenses there so that they sort of clear the space to move where they want to move.
So in my best guess, these so-called reclaimed cities are ones that Russia didn't want, wasn't trying to hold, was just passing through.
I think it's fake news.
What do you think? Do you think there's any chance that there's a serious Ukraine counterattack that's really, like, making a difference?
Somebody says, you must be young.
Hey, that's my line.
They named no cities.
Now, you know, I was going to say that, and then I thought maybe I read it wrong.
Right? Because it seemed like there were...
The news was saying that the Ukrainians had recaptured some cities but didn't mention them.
And I thought, oh, I probably read it too fast and they were mentioned.
But has somebody else noticed that?
That they didn't mention the cities?
I mean, that's all you need to know, right?
If they don't mention the city...
You know...
All right. Here's my most wild prediction of the day, and I feel pretty confident about this.
I'm going to tell you how mushrooms will make America dominate China.
You ready for this? And I mean this.
This is real. So, here's something you might not be aware of, but you're pretty smart, so maybe you are.
Let's see. All right.
Were you aware that only maybe two years ago it was impractical to do illegal mushrooms?
And by the way, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not recommending any illegal drugs.
Children, if you're watching this, don't.
Go to bed immediately, even though it's the morning, go back to bed.
And don't do drugs.
I'm talking about what's going to happen, not what I want to happen, okay?
2020 was kind of impractical because you couldn't find it easily.
It would be hard to know what quantity.
You would be more afraid of the legal consequences.
But in the last two years, there have been huge movements toward decriminalizing.
I suspect, and I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that in California, for example, if you got caught with some small user quantity of mushrooms, that probably basically nothing would happen to you.
I mean, I don't know that.
But I think locally, it's so at least mentally decriminalized, mentally decriminalized, not technically, that I don't even know if the court systems would do anything.
I think they'd just send you home.
I'm not sure. But I think in California, it's basically close to legal just because the court system doesn't care.
I'll need a fact check on that, but I'm not sure.
However, in 2022, the mushroom business has matured.
And you can now buy chocolate bars that are metered, so you know if you take this little square, it gives you this kind of effect.
If you take two of those squares, this kind of effect.
Now, they appear to be widely available, at least in California.
If they're widely available, they've solved the biggest problem of dosage so that you feel a little bit safe.
I mean, this is not FDA-approved stuff, right?
But you're going to feel safer if somebody did the work of putting it in a nice package and metering the doses.
Once it becomes easy, here's what's going to happen.
Our old ways of looking at things are going to just dissolve.
When enough people in a society have had the mushroom experience, again, I'm not recommending it, I'm just describing it.
Their sense of what is possible will change, and their sense of what can't be changed will be obliterated.
Obliterated. And this is going to happen in a big way in the United States in the next few years.
I'm talking about two to five years.
If you've noticed how quickly mushrooms went from a secret topic...
To a headline topic, pretty much in all the major media.
And it's even bipartisan.
I mentioned this yesterday.
Both Republicans and Democrats are working on bills to decriminalize, legalize, make it medically available, etc.
So it's definitely going to happen.
There's no doubt about it. Mushrooms are going to be really big in the United States.
Will they be big in China?
Probably not. They're not so big on drugs, are they?
What's going to happen is our old frames will dissolve.
It will cause a total social re-engineering for everything important, from school to family to work.
And the outcome of that is that the United States will destroy its old frames faster than other countries.
What happens when you destroy your old way of doing things...
Faster than other countries.
You dominate them.
You dominate them.
And I actually think, and this is not a joke, that nobody understands how big this is.
There are a few people who do.
I would love to hear an opinion from, let's say, Mike Cernovich.
I don't think he'll disagree, but I'd love to hear his opinion.
People who have not had any experience with this realm don't have any idea what's coming.
This will be a total rewiring of our consciousness.
Remember I told you that Trump would change everything about reality?
And he did. He didn't just change politics.
He changed our ability to perceive the world objectively, and we learned that it's just purely subjective, and that we're all living in completely different movies, and we have no idea what's going on.
So I correctly predicted that years in advance, and it happened.
And that was a weird prediction, wasn't it?
I was the only one that made it.
And I'm doing it again in this realm.
There will, you know, and it might only take a, I don't know, 10 or 20% penetration into the public.
I'm not talking about everybody doing mushrooms.
I'm talking about a penetration.
Let me ask you this.
What would happen if the rate of mental illness in this country was cut in half in five years?
Do you know what mental health is as a cost to society?
It's through the roof.
It's enormous. Mushrooms could probably cut that in half in five years.
Think about it. That's just crazy.
People who have done mushrooms often tend to go on and do amazing things.
I don't know if it's a causation or correlation.
It could be that people who take risks take all kinds of risks.
That would make sense. But having experienced mushrooms, Mushrooms when I was in my 20s, just once.
It's my opinion that it changes you so fundamentally and so permanently that it makes you more effective.
It actually just makes you able to achieve more.
That's what it felt like.
And I think other people have had similar experiences.
And I'm seeing in the comments, yeah, just once.
Now, other people say, you know, different dosages and, you know, take them over time and get different...
I don't know. I have no opinion about what's a proper dose of anything.
But that was my experience.
And other people have had a similar experience.
So you're going to see America dominate China, and it's going to be in large part because the mushrooms will change our effectiveness in a way that China can't compete.
Because culturally, I just don't think they're all going to be taking mushrooms.
In this country?
Yup. And let me tell you already that Silicon Valley...
I guess I could tell you this.
I've told you this before. Do you know why Silicon Valley is so successful?
Lots of reasons. Really smart people, universities nearby.
Once you get a concentration of people, then it's easier to get more of those kinds of people.
It's all those things. But the people in Silicon Valley are not operating under normal human conditions.
They're starting out as really capable people, and then they're finding ways to take it to the next level.
And they're basically brain hacking.
And it's the people who can hack anything.
They can hack computers, networks, systems, countries, and now they're working on their own brain.
Do you think that the smartest people in the world who can hack anything could, collectively, as they're working together with this thing, do you think that they can figure out how to boost their own performance By finding the right combination of legal and, in some cases, illegal substances.
And the answer is, if you think drugs are about junkies, well, unfortunately, most of it is.
But there's a small percentage of the world who are not addicted, And are using it scientifically and in a very calculated, engineered way, A-B testing, really doing the research and the testing and talking to other people and comparing notes and stuff.
And those people are operating at just a higher level than humans have ever operated at.
Let me say it again.
If you took the smartest person...
You know, the smartest people in Silicon Valley, and let's say you already said, oh, these are the smartest you can get.
You know, others might be as smart, but this is about as good as you can get.
And then you said, all right, now this group, we're going to say you should start experimenting with neurotropics and everything from minerals to various legal and illegal microdosing.
Do you think they're doing that already?
Like crazy. They are doing A-B testing on themselves like crazy.
Are they good at it?
They're good at everything.
Just hear that part again.
These are the smartest people in Silicon Valley.
Are they good at hacking their own brains with chemistry and testing?
They're good at everything.
If there's anything you need to understand, that collectively...
This is a group of people, they don't fail collectively.
Individually, you know, companies fail, etc., of course.
But collectively, yeah, yeah, it is working.
And they will tell you that.
And it makes a big difference.
Now, what's the downside? A lot, right?
A lot. Don't you think that there's anybody in Silicon Valley who thought they were just being smart...
Who ended up drifting into too much drugs and becoming addicts?
Of course. I mean, I've never heard of any story, but I wouldn't, right?
So don't think that any of this is safe.
I'm saying these are risk-taking people by nature.
The entrepreneurs are risk-takers.
And they are definitely juicing themselves and taking themselves to a level of human cognition and capability That society's probably never experienced in the history of humankind.
So there's some fun stuff ahead, because the best and the brightest are testing their ways to new levels of effectiveness.
And in a way, that's the most important story that's happening right now.
You could take anything in the world and then look into the future and say, how is climate change going to be addressed or remediated or solved?
Well, it's probably going to be a whole bunch of really smart people, and would you bet against at least one of those smart people who makes an impact, you know, invents something, starts a company, whatever, would you bet against one of them having had some experience with psychedelics?
I don't know the answer to this, but do you think Elon Musk has ever experienced psychedelics?
He's probably spoken about it.
Does anybody know the answer to that question?
I think you're guessing. I see some people say yes, but you're guessing, right?
I don't know that that's ever been confirmed.
But here's the thing.
I feel like you could...
It takes one to know one.
You know what I mean? Here's a weird thing about a psychedelic experience.
If you do it once, you can often pick people out of a crowd who have done it.
Am I wrong? I mean, not strangers out of a crowd, but you could know somebody for a while and just say, I know what you've done.
Am I wrong? Anybody who's had the experience, yeah, I'm seeing confirmation.
Because if you think it doesn't change you permanently, you're really wrong.
In the same way that travel changes you.
That's the best analogy.
It's a bad analogy, but the best one I can.
I believe that you can pick out people fairly easily who are widely traveled.
Would you agree with that?
If they never mention their travels, and you just talk to somebody on some topic for a while, don't you think you could pick out some...
And I'm not talking about somebody who's born in another country and has an accent or something.
I'm talking about just somebody who doesn't have any tell, Except just the way they act and talk and think.
I'll bet you could pick out somebody who has traveled a lot.
Because their mind would be more open.
And I think you could pick it out pretty quickly.
I think. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes the amazing, amazing content, which we call Coffee with Scott Adams.
I think you'll agree it's among the best things you've ever seen in your whole life.
Matched only by possibly tomorrow.
And so, I bid you adieu on YouTube.
Thanks for joining. And I'm going to talk to the people on Locos for a little bit.
