Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 10, 2026
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d to myself, wait a minute. Is there anybody who doesn't know it's easier to learn something that matters to you than something that doesn't matter to you at all is harder to learn? I feel like I do that. Then you kind of know that. You have survival. Blah blah. Pretty obvious. But it's good to know that there's a whole bunch of interesting science about how to rewire your brain for success and h…

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say? I don't. I'm simply going to tell you the story and you can decide whether it sounds true to you or not. To be frank, it doesn't sound true, okay?

If I had to bet on it, I was a little bit that it was exaggerated to me. But it's funny. It goes like this. The Russian conscripts are reportedly so poorly trained they got like two weeks of training, digging ditches mostly, and went to the firing range twice, and that was their whole training. And they pushed them out there with not enough food or weapons. And here's the report. I think this was from the New York Post. The conscripts report back home somehow. They can communicate back home. I don't even know how they're doing that, but somehow they do. And the people back home in Russia are reporting that the conscripts are saying, quote, they would lie on the ground for hours long pretending to be dead for a simple reason. They had no other weapons except some assault rifles, and against them were mortars and drones. And if they had moved a finger, a drone would kill them right away.

So the Russian conscripts, which they've rushed to the front, are laying on the ground and pretending to be dead because that's their best military strategy. That's all they have. And I'm not even joking because you know your best military strategy at minimum is to survive, right? I mean, unless it's a suicide mission, which this is not. So they need to survive. So that is a military requirement, a mission, right, to survive. And the conscripts have decided, perhaps not wrongly, that the best way they can survive is to just lay in a field and pretend to be dead until the war is over. Because they think the drones are so omnipresent that the Ukrainian drones are just watching them all the time. And you know, if they move an arm, they'll be shot by the drone somehow.

Somebody says it's BS because the drones have thermal imaging. I don't know. Maybe. Now, just possible. Worse now.

All right, give me your opinion. This doesn't sound true, does it? I do believe that maybe somebody played dead on some occasion. That makes sense in a war. People are always playing dead, so t

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hat's not unusual. But do you think it's like what the conscripts are doing? Like they're all walking out as soon as their commander turns around. They're like, and as soon as nobody's watching, they just... I don't think it's happening. I don't think it's happening. But it's pretty hilarious as a report. But again, I don't think it's true. You know, this is... let me give you a little lesson on…

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