August 16, 2023
During a visit to Beijing last month, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reportedly ate a magic mushroom-based dish known as Jian shou qing. In English, that’s “see hand blue,” a name probably meant to warn those who would consume it that this particular mushroom is hallucinogenic. “I was not aware that these mushrooms had hallucinogenic properties. I learned that later,” Yellen said, and your GZERO team is willing to suspend its disbelief. And they’re supposedly harmless when fully cooked.
But we do have questions. Will the mushrooms Yellen consumed change her US recession forecast? Do these mushrooms allow people to see the data on China’s youth unemployment rate, which has abruptly become invisible to the rest of us? And finally, in the interest of journalistic due diligence, where can we get some of these mushrooms?
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