Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive October 9, 2026
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ous, he's created some kind of an advisory board, the intelligence experts group, and it's comprised of private sector experts who are going to give their unique perspective on the federal government's intelligence workings. And two of the people that were appointed to that were John Brennan and James Clapper. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Now this audience is well trained. I would say that the…

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you would just deal with the information and you'd judge it good or bad or something like that. But if you get mad and go after the person who said it, oh well that's exactly what you'd expect from a science-disbelieving MAGA person, right? That's a tell for somebody who's in the waking trance. They can't process why what they're hearing doesn't match what they've been brainwashed to believe. So the brainwashing is causing them to have an angry reaction to having the brainwashing being challenged by facts or reason.

So here's another one. Look for the unusually high confidence in an opinion which is word salad. So somebody will give you an opinion in words and you look at the words and you'll say well I understand how the sentence makes sense but not how the point makes sense. It looks like you just strung words together and it looks like a pattern of words I've seen before. You know sort of like the large language model because most people's opinions are assigned by their preferred media and they'll use even the same language to describe it. So if you see somebody with high confidence but when they describe their opinion it sounds like word salad, it's the combination of the high confidence and the inability to say anything that makes sense. That's a tell that they're in a waking trance, brainwashed.

And to use other words, but the other way is one that I can see but I can't explain how to do it. One of the biggest skills of a hypnotist is to observe the subject as they're hypnotizing them and to see if it's working or not. And you can tell if it's working by very subtle differences in their posture, their breathing, their skin tone. There might be a flushness. There could be little ticks in their bodies. So there's a whole bunch of things while their eyes are open or closed. It's different but you look for just the smallest tells of muscle ticks and posture and stuff. Now when I have a conversation with somebody who's showing these other tells I'm usually also seeing it in their body. You can actually tell somebody's brainwashed in a waking trance if you're trained to see it. So I have this terrible feeling that many of you don't have, which is when I'm walking around in public I can tell, not just walking around but if you're having a conversation with somebody about politics you can see them go into the trance and you know the eyes will change and their mannerism will change and they'll just be in the trance. Yeah, the Trump derangement syndrome trance.

Now the other thing that you look for is the wide-eyed. If anybody saw Kirby talking to Martha MacCallum and he was being asked a series of questions. When Kirby was telling you something that was true and you didn't have any doubt about it that's true, his eyes would be normal and he would talk like this, blah blah blah blah blah, this is true. As soon as he went into propaganda mode his eyes would bug out like Adam Schiff. And the bug eyes, if it's somebody who doesn't have bug eyes all the time, when they're trying to tell you something then their eyes go big is because they know they're lying or they know it's propaganda and they're trying to use their eyes to sell you what their words can't. Right, they use the eyes when they know that the words are not convincing. When the words are convincing because it's just something normal and obvious he doesn't do that. But watch Kirby's big eyes. That's another sign of somebody brainwashing you.

So I have this terrible experience where it's like I'm walking around with zombies and people who are in a hypnotic state and propagandists. And if you think you're walking around with a bunch of people who are listening to the news and forming their own opinions, you're not even in my same world. We are not in the same world because I don't see anything like that. I don't see people listening to the news and forming their own opinions. I see people who have been propagandized and people who are propaganda people. Now nothing's 100 percent right. If there's a news topic that you don't have any emotional interest in there's a really good chance you're just looking at the facts. But as soon as you introduce any bit of emotion, any bit of caring, any bit of team play, which is enough, just team play, oh I gotta win, then everything goes off the rails and turns into pure propaganda. People go into trance mode, their eyes get big, and there's nothing happening there in the form of reason or reasoning or even honest debate.

Social credit scores, I don't think anything could stop it. I feel like we're going to have to start another country. So you know how the United States was formed by a group of people who wanted specific freedoms and religious freedom I think was top of the list, right? And then that morphed into other freedoms like freedom of speech that sounded good, freedom of assembly, that stuff. So the country was formed because where people were before they didn't have the freedom that they wanted. But unfortunately America has turned into a propaganda cesspool so we don't have anything like free speech. You know you can get banned if you even try. And we're just taking people out for political things and something they did 20 years ago which might have been plenty bad but it's not really a good system.

So it's almost like you want to go to a green field and say all right if you were the founders of the country and you knew that the internet was coming would you have done anything differently? Maybe you would. One of the things you might have done is you might have written right into the Constitution that free speech applies to all digital means and it doesn't matter if somebody privately owns those digital means, they cannot stop your free speech or something like that. But to imagine that the system that was built in a pre-internet world should fit our current system is sort of unreasonable. It's unreasonable to think that our current system is applicable to the mass brainwashing digital world we're in. So at the very least we should rethink free speech like how do you protect it? And my view is that the one and only way to protect it is with Community Notes or a system like that.

So you could imagine for example that Facebook and the other platforms, let's say the government said here's the deal, your platforms can be anything you want as long as it's legal but the one thing you can't do is suppress opinions and not allow context to be added to them. So you have to build a system like Community Notes that context can be added to any political opinions or medical or scientific and that the platform can't take them away. So if you're going to let people have speech on your platform you have to let everybody have speech on your platform. And there might be still some things like child-related things that just have to be banned but generally speaking you'd say free speech means everybody gets to talk anything they want as long as it's legal and you have to provide a

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context tool like Community Notes. Now how different would things be if everything had context in it? Like really, really different. And there should be some law that says you can't be for example demonetized based on an accusation which is what's happening to Russell Brand. Russell Brand is being demonetized because of an accusation. The serious ones but unproven, very unproven in the court of l…

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