Scott Adams (0:00)

Buddy, come on in. And Looks like it. Stocks are up. Yay. Probably because of G7. Let's get the comments working and then we got a show for you. Looking good. Good morning everyone, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams and you've never had a better time. But if you'd like to try taking this up to levels that no one can understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, well, all you need for that is a cup of mugger, a glass of tankard shells, stein, a canteen, choker, flask, a vessel of any kind filled with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine you hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Sublime. Just perfect. Well, I wonder, is there any science that could have been skipped just by asking me? Well, Eric Dolan, writing for Psy Post. He's my favorite writer lately. According to him, a single dose of psilocybin can reduce your alcohol consumption if you have an alcohol consumption problem. They found that one dose of psilocybin caused a long term reduction, pretty big one reduction in drinking. Now how could they have done that study cheaper? Well, given that every time they have a hypothesis about how it will improve your mental state or your behavior, it works every time. When was the last time you saw a psilocybin study where they said, oh, we tested it on this and it didn't work? Apparently it works on everything you tested on. So I don't know what else it could do. But if you would ask me, does it reduce your level of drinking, I would have said yes, save you a little money. Correction or update. I'm told that President Trump has offered to pay for the building of the ballroom. Is that confirmed? I haven't seen it, but in the comments people are telling me that he's going to pay for it himself. Do we know how much that's going to cost? What's it cost to build a ballroom on the White House? That sounds really expensive. I don't know. You want to take a guess? Does anybody know? I'm going to guess. I'm going to guess. $23 million. What do you think? 23 million. Just a guess. Anyway. So the no Kings rally, or protest, whatever you want to call it, the no Kings protest has been hugely successful because there are no kings at all. And even President Trump, in a truth social, said that it was successful because there are no kings trying to replace him. I Think he borrowed my joke, but it's a good one. Apparently there were over 5 million people, according to the organizers, of course. Now, what happens if 5 million people protest, but there's not much violence, and the headlines are about a manhunt for a killer, and Israel and Iran are having a war? Well, it's a lot like it didn't happen at all. Here's my question. Has there ever been a big protest where there was no violence and it changed the policy? Is that even a thing? I feel like even though nobody wants real violence, especially with your protests, if you don't have any violence or, you know, breakage or, you know, mass some kind of disobedience, I feel like that's not enough to change anything. Otherwise, it's just taking a walk. So 5 billion people took a walk for a thing that didn't need to be done on a nice day, and absolutely nothing is different. But they're claiming success. So one of the mysteries, which maybe isn't a mystery at all, is why. Why are the attendees at these anti Trump events almost all senior citizens? And I took a crack at answering that by saying that it's easier to scare them. You can scare old people easier because they feel more vulnerable, and they're also easier to fool. Now, they also are the main audience for mainstream news. Can you imagine what your opinion would be if you only watched CNN and MSNBC and ABC News? What would your opinion of Trump be? Well, it wouldn't be very positive because you would just think, oh, it's like Walter Cronkite, he hasn't lied to us yet. I think the fact that the senior citizens feel a little more vulnerable, on top of that, they're easier to brainwash. And the fact that they watch the mainstream media, they don't watch acts, puts them at a real disadvantage, but they also have time on their hands. So a nice walk on a June day turned out to be what 5 million people wanted, and they were lonely and they didn't have much else going on. So did that change anything in the world? Probably not. But did you know that Alex Soros and Uma Abedin, they got married in the Hamptons, and there were a lot of elite people there, the Clintons and others. Breitbart is writing about this. Now, here's my question. Does that look like the most fake marriage you've ever seen in your life? They just don't look like they're really a couple. And she is 49, I think. Right, 49. So I'm guessing that they don't plan to have children. And I wonder, isn't that a weird kind of a weird problem? Because normally if you've got billions of dollars, you're controlling, you want to have some kind of an heir, but apparently Alex Soros does not need an heir, so. Or it looks like it, I don't know, unless they adopt or something. But I'm not going to bet on it because that wedding looks to be sort of like you remember the old days when a royal family would try to marry off their kid to another royal family? It feels like that. So we'll keep an eye on that. Also, according to Eric Dolan and Psy Post, did you know that people believe in conspiracies tend to overrate their cognitive abilities, and they also think that others agree with them. So one of the traits of people who believe conspiracies is that they also have a greater degree of certainty. Now, have you heard me say that certainty is the only mistake? If you're positive about some kind of conspiracy theory, that should tell you to check your thinking, you might be right. But if you're positive, I don't know, certainty is sort of a signal for believing. All right, Karen Bass is telling us that she went around looking for the Marines who were allegedly deployed in LA thanks to Trump because of the anti Trump protests, or the anti ICE protests, I guess. And she said she saw no Marines and didn't see any trouble. So she says the local law enforcement has total control, which I think they do. Now, this is another example of sort of the analogy thinking. If you said to yourself, oh, this is like the protests of, or what was it, the riots of 1992, then you would probably be wrong, because it's not like that. But whenever you're influenced by something that you remember, such as, oh, it's like the Holocaust, or oh, it's like this other riot, or oh, it's like the Civil War. You're probably way off because you never have two things. They're sort of the same. Oh, it's like Neville Chamberlain saying peace in her time. Anyway, we'll get back to that. Well, apparently coffee is considered to reduce your risk of wanting to take your own life, whereas energy drinks will increase your risk of wanting to take your own life. And both of them give you energy. So if you had to pick, I would pick the coffee. Now, how many times have I told you there's a study that says that drinking coffee is good for you and psilocybin is good for you. Well, now put them together. Then you've got something, all right. And apparently there's a new risk called gas station heroin, which I'd never heard before. So you ever go into the little place, you buy stuff at the gas station, and you see these little energy shots, and they've got some kind of drug in them called. I didn't write it down. But apparently these are addictive and they have serious side effects. So US Poison Control has been getting a lot of calls about these. So watch out if you think you're getting an energy drink from the gas station. Maybe not. Maybe not. Well, the manhunt is entered for the suspect who shot four people. Two of them died. And it's. This is in Minnesota. Vance Luther Bolter. They found him in a crop field, and he's the one who impersonated a police officer to get access to his crimes. And they got him. And it makes me wonder, what are the odds of being on the run in 2025 and getting away with it? I feel like the hardest thing in the world would be to go on the run. So, of course, I spent some time thinking about how I would do it. Have any of you thought, all right, if I were a fugitive from the law, what would I do? And here's my best idea. The best idea is you'd have to have access to a house that was not your own house and had no tie to you in name. So you'd have to get a friend or an acquaintance to rent a house that wasn't where you live. And then you go directly to that house and you just have somebody else who lives there who answers the door. So if anybody knocks, you just have your confederate answer the door and say, no, no, I don't have anybody in my attic. Now, I can't think of any other way that you could go on the run and stay on the run for very long because eventually facial recognition would get you or something. But if you're ever on the run from the law, you want to make sure you have a second house that's not in your name. That's my advice anyway. Trump, by now should be in Canada at the G7. And the stock market is up because people are thinking that that will help grease some of the trade deals. Now, you might say to yourself, what kind of trade negotiations are going to happen in these little side meetings to G7? And the answer is, there might be because it's Trump. So some of these deals, it sounds like, are kind of close. You know, there might be, like, one thing they haven't agreed on yet. So that's the sort of thing that you could imagine Trump saying, all right, I'll take you from 37% tariff down to 25. That's my final offer. So maybe it's entirely possible he'll get some deals closer to done or done. And the market is reacting. So according to Trump, we have trade deals. All we have to do is send a letter and say, this is what you're going to have to pay. So that would suggest that these things, which are negotiable, have already been negotiated, at least for a number of countries, the big ones, and that we're just waiting to find out what it is they agreed on. So stocks are up. Israel is trying to debunk a bunch of false reports that are coming out about the war. Remember, I warned you that because it's a war situation, you can't really believe much of anything. You can believe the big stuff, like Israel really did attack Iran, and you could believe that Iran really responded. You could probably believe that the various generals and, and heads of military that they say they killed, probably most of them, they did kill. But once you get down to a lower level of detail, you should get really skeptical. You know, whether. Whether you like that news or don't like it, you should tell yourself, well, maybe, but, you know, in the context of war, a lot of stuff is fake. I'm not going to tell you what things Israel is debunking, because there wasn't one thing on that list I'd ever heard of. So it's not like. It's not like it's in the major news or anything, but there were a bunch of things that they debunked because it's that kind of situation. Now, I've been listening to all the various opinions about Israel and Iran, and I remind you, if you're new to my podcast, that if it feels like I'm giving you a moral judgment, I'm not. I'm not giving you an ethical or moral judgment on anything that anybody's doing. And I'm not telling you my preference. I'm just observing and in some cases, predicting. But it's not my country. And so since I'm America first, I will care about America and make opinions on America, but when it comes to Israel, I will observe and predict. And if you see more than that in my comments, you might be reading too much into it. Okay, so I've been watching the various experts, if you can call it that, talking about the odds that Iran really was going to break out sometime soon and have a nuclear weapon. And the argument against it is that Netanyahu has been saying that they're going to have a nuclear weapon any minute for 40 years now. Somebody said 30 years and then somebody corrected him, said, no, it's actually 40 years. He's been saying the same thing, any minute now, any year now. And sure enough, we've been predicting that Iran would break out and have that nuclear weapon any minute now. Now, does that tell you that we didn't have to worry? No, that would be analogy thinking. That would be saying that whatever is happening now is the same as what has happened in the past and therefore the past is predictive of what's happening now. No, obviously they've mastered the whole missile situation, so they'd have something to put a nuke on. Obviously they had enriched the uranium to much closer to the level that you need for a bomb. Obviously they had lots of nuclear experts, some of whom almost certainly would know how to weaponize that stuff. So is there anything about the current situation that you could learn from 30 years of essentially being wrong, that they're going to break out any minute? And the answer is not really. You'd have to look at the situation completely on its own. But if you're looking at the pattern, I would say that there's a lot of stuff like AI. If you look at AI, for example, AI has been predicted for 40 years, but now it's actually here. So if you had used the last 40 years of predicting AI, you would predict that we wouldn't have it, but we do. And maybe you're thinking of fusion because fusion was always the thing that's going to be here in 10 years, but never is. But it does look like fusion is closer than it's ever been. So there are a number of situations in which you could say the past does predict the future, but you never know which one those are. So I would worry about that now, General Mike Flynn says, and he would know more than I would know about this situation. He says that it's a psychotic regime, Iran, and that they were very close to breaking out with a uranium enriched warhead. So in his opinion, we were just about there. And so here's another one, climate change. If your model is climate change and You've watched for 40 years as experts say, oh, any minute the icebergs are all going to melt and you're going to be underwater and then it never happens. And then you look at Iran, you'd say, oh, it's one of those things where for 40 years. We say it's going to happen at any minute, but then it never happens at all. Maybe. How many of you think that Iran legitimately knew it would never make a nuclear weapon? How many of you think and how many of you are certain? Like you're positive they never would have made a nuclear weapon? Because they haven't said that, you know, the ayatollahs have said, you know, we have no intention of making a nuclear weapon. It would be anti Islamic and blah, blah, blah. But you can't really trust that. So I would say this is one of those situations where certainty is the only mistake. You might be right. But if you're certain, how could you possibly be certain about that? So you'd have to play the odds based on uncertainty, I think. Well, Wall Street Journal is reporting that Israel has destroyed one third of the Iranian missile launchers. Those would be the ones that are attacking Israel right now. So only one third of them have been destroyed. That would be about 120 of them. Now. Does that sound like success to you? It doesn't sound like success to me. And do they have to destroy all of them? Because I saw some news coverage yesterday, I forget which general it was, but one of the military experts was saying that Israel appeared to stop shooting down the incoming missiles. Was it last night or the night before? I think the night before. And the speculation was that Israel was either for some reason allowing some destruction, which I don't think makes sense, or they were running out of defensive missiles, the kind that are the shield, you know, that shoot down the incoming missiles. Do you think that's possible? Do you think that Israel is literally running out of defensive missiles and so is the US Maybe because, you know, Iran had just hella lots of missiles. That's a California term, hella. But they had hella missiles. Do you say that in your state they got hella missiles? It's sort of a California thing, so we don't know about that. But I would say that if they only got a third of them, that that's not exactly a big victory, at least on the missile side. They may have blown up a lot of the stockpiles though, so that part we don't know. And then also Wall Street Journal, according to the UN Atomic Agency chief, the Iranian nuclear sites are basically intact because the ones we could get to or the ones Israel could get to with their weapons are well fortified. So their biggest one at Fordow is untouched, basically. And apparently a number of the other facilities are untouched. So if their goal was to dismantle the Iranian nuclear facilities. That did not happen. And it doesn't look like they're close. It looks like mostly, mostly that stuff is untouched. So that's not good. Now, here's the big question I have. At what point did Israel know that they could not complete the job without the United States being militarily involved? Does it bother you that Israel may have launched an attack knowing that they could not succeed at getting rid of the nuclear facilities in Iran without the US Being actively involved in the attack? Because that would suggest that they were confident or at least hopeful that they could essentially bully or persuade the United States to get militarily involved because they had gotten us a little bit pregnant. So does that bother you? Because Israel must have known that they couldn't get to those nuclear facilities on their own. So are they playing us? Are they playing a game where if they get halfway in, the United States will say, oh, I wish we were not. At this point, I wasn't in favor of the attack, but now that we're halfway in, I guess it would make more sense to finish the job. Because what could be more dangerous? What could be more dangerous than destroying much of Iran's military and leadership and then leaving intact the most dangerous part of their arsenal? Wouldn't that be the worst case? So, and then I asked myself this question. Why is this situation so movie perfect? Like, what are the odds of that? What are the odds that Israel requires the United States military to be part of it and we don't want to? But on the other hand, a lot of people see the argument for it, and again, I'm not giving you my argument. These are not my preferences. I'm just observing and predicting. So what the hell does Trump do if he gets militarily involved? That would be very anti maga, anti America first. But on the other hand, can he really leave Iran to reconstitute and be a hundred times more angry than they were before and by then have canceled all their agreements not to build nuclear weapons? And then wouldn't they make a race to complete at least a few weapons? Wouldn't that be the most logical thing for Iran to do? So how did we get in this situation? It's so movie perfect that there's that little wrinkle that only America can complete the job, but we don't want to. And then the only thing that's missing from the movie is that the only person who could pilot the plane to blow up for now is Tom Cruise. Only Tom Cruise can complete this mission. Doesn't it feel like that, like it's just, it's just way too movie perfect, you know, in a bad way, not in a good way. So there's that. And again I ask what did Israel know that they couldn't complete the job without us? Because that bothers me a little bit. There is also news that Trump convinced Israel not to take out the Ayatollah, the non military leadership. Now, do you believe that? Remember, we're in the context of, you know, war and all the reporting in the war is questionable at best. Do you think that Israel was going to take out the Supreme Leader? And Trump talked about, of it. It's believable. It's believable. I don't know if it's true. And then Brett Baer asked Netanyahu on an interview, he said, do you have intel that the assassination attempts on Trump were directly were directed from Iran? And Netanyahu says through proxies, yes, through their intel, yes, they want to kill him. Look, he's enemy number one. And they said that they tried to kill him as well, enemy number two. So do you believe that? Do you believe that Iran tried to kill Trump twice and that Trump, when he got a chance to kill them back, canceled it? Maybe, maybe, maybe. I'm going to say that's just a maybe. I'm not automatically going to believe all of that. The part I believe the least is that Iran tried to kill Trump. That part, that's a tough one. Maybe, but it doesn't feel like that would have been in Iran's best interest. So anyway, the Israel situation is dividing America, as you might imagine. But in terms of the elected officials, it seems to be tougher on the Democrats because the Democrats have people who are all in on whatever it is that Israel wants militarily, we should do it. And then there are other Democrats who are very anti war and think it would be a big mistake to get involved militarily. So the Democrat leadership, we're not talking about the voters, just the leadership are divided, whereas the Republicans are seemingly less divided. But, and that would mean that the Republicans are more in favor of military support for Israel. But the Maggie supporters from, I think Charlie Kirk and maybe Steve Bannon and lots of others and Marjorie Taylor Greene, so there are a number of very prominent pro Trump people who are saying, absolutely not, no way, do not get involved, you know, further than we are. The only involvement now is probably intelligence and helping Israel shoot down incoming. But getting more involved than that would be a big divider in the world of the, you Know America first, Mega world. Mehdi Hassan, who you know him from, I think he got released from msnbc, but he's a very lefty, lefty kind of guy. He said in a X post, he said, to say I'm no fan of Tucker Carlson is an understatement. I loathe much of what he stands for and says. But if he helps persuade Trump to keep the US out of a full on war with Iran, then we'll owe him a great deal of gratitude. It kills me to write this, but it's true. So Tucker is also one of the ones who doesn't want to get us more involved. And let me read Tucker Carlson's opinion, and I'm going to call it a half opinion because I don't think his opinion covers the whole situation. But he says the real divide is between people who support Israel and people who support Iran or the Palestinians. The real divide is between those who casually encourage violence and those who seek to prevent it, between warmongers and peacemakers. Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who's calling Donald Trump today to demand airstrikes and other direct US military involvement. On that list, according to Tucker, would be Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter, whoever that is, and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will have to answer for this. But you should know their names. Now, now here's my, here's why I call it a half pinion. I think if you have an opinion on this, that you need to be able to draw out what it looks like in both directions. So if you said I don't want us to get into a, you know, a deeper military problem with Iran, that totally makes sense if all you're looking at is the cost. So it would cost us a bunch of money, we would probably lose a bunch of lives. We would have all kinds of, you know, unknowns in terms of terrorism coming our way, etc. So for the half of the opinion that Tucker expresses is completely accurate, that if we get involved there's a gigantic risk and it's going to be expensive and all kinds of problems. But doesn't he also have an obligation to draw out what the alternative would look like? That would be the other half of the opinion. And the alternative is that you, you, let's just say injure Iran deeply. Everything from their ego to taking out their, a lot of their leadership, you destroy a whole bunch of stuff, you humiliate them and then you let them reconstitute and then they just build back what they had, are you better off or are they far more likely to use, you know, the many more missiles that they make than they have now? And there would be better ones, probably. And would they more likely race to complete their nuclear weapon? And if they completed it, what are the odds that would use it? And what are the odds they would simply use it to make an umbrella to protect their proxies? In other words, their proxies might still do all the work, you know, once those are reconstituted as well. But you wouldn't want to attack the homeland because then they'd have a nuke. So does Tucker Carlson's opinion cover both sides of the risk? I would say no. It doesn't mean he's wrong. So remember, I'm not taking a side, I'm just observing and predicting. So what's wrong with this opinion is that it acts like one side is free, that if you get militarily involved, that's going to be very expensive in treasure and lives. If you, it would be. But if you, if you don't do those things, then it's just sort of free. Is it, is that a adult, complete, reasonable opinion that if you let Iran reconstitute from this point, having taken as much, you know, abuse as they have, are you going to be in better shape? I don't know. Marjorie Taylor Greene also is very anti war and she says we're finding out who the real American first people are and she thinks we're a bunch of fakes. The fakes would be the ones who are calling for war. And I would ask Marjorie Taylor Greene the following question, the same question, which is, what does it look like if we don't go to war? Now, again, if you're new to me, it sounds like I'm in favor of war. I'm not. I'm asking the most reasonable question you could ask, which is what happens if you do it and also what happens if you don't do it? So you need to be able to game both the scientists of the future. I would say if we do it, it's going to be a huge mess. Like, we'll probably come under more attack. It'll be very expensive. We'll think we got all of their facilities, but we won't. We'll never know when we're done. It will kick off a round of their attacks on us and then we'll have to attack them back and then we'll be running out of weapons and who knows? Yeah, it'll, it'll drain our treasury more so certainly being militarily involved more than we are is going to be really expensive in all the ways we don't want it to be. But what happens if we don't? What happens if we don't? If you can't. If you can't game that out and say, all right, here's my opinion. And I'm not saying this is my opinion. I'm just saying this is what one might say. You might say, well, it's been 40 years and they haven't broken out with their nuclear weapons. So if they say they're not going to do it, maybe we should just trust them. Do you feel comfortable with that? To just trust them? If they say, no, no, seriously, we're not going to. Because it seems to me that all that refining of the fuel, why would they need to do that unless they were planning to get as close as possible to break out? It seems to me that Iran was acting exactly like a country that wanted to break out, or at least have the ability to break out whenever they wanted to. So if they go back to where they were, aren't they going to try even harder to break out sooner? I don't know. But beware of half opinions. What is dedication?