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Sept. 6, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:05:29
Episode 209 Scott Adams: Nike, The WH Traitor-Mole, the Woodward Book and Twitter
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Hey everybody Hey Ryan and Cindy and the rest of you.
Hey Jack.
Come on in.
What a newsy day we have.
I haven't even opened CNN yet, but there's so much just from yesterday, I barely can handle it.
Hello, Barry. Is everybody ready for the simultaneous sip?
I know that's why you came.
And I'm ready. If I'm ready, you're ready.
Get ready for the simultaneous sip.
Hmm. Has someone just said...
Is it a great news day?
I guess there's a lot of it.
I better open CNN just to make sure I'm not missing anything that happened within the last five minutes.
All right, so you know what's interesting is I'd entirely forgotten the Kavanaugh hearings.
There's so much news that the whole Kavanaugh thing just didn't even seem interesting to me.
Now part of the reason is it's not interesting.
Because the vote's gonna go the way the vote goes and, you know, the rest is just for show.
All right, let's talk about Nike.
So, as you know, I'm pro-Kaepernac in the limited sense that his protest is completely effective.
It's effective in the sense that before you can get any action, first you must get attention.
It's always a two-part problem.
Part one, getting attention, success!
Some people say, hey, he should not be protesting at his place of work, thinking about the other NFL players in particular at this point.
To which I say, that's why it works.
It works because it offends you.
And people say, he should not be disrespecting the flag.
And I say, that's why you're paying attention.
That's why it works.
So independent of whether his mission is a good mission, which I'll talk about in a minute, getting your attention, he got it.
And I've been swamped by people on Twitter Telling me, no, why are you saying that his protest is successful?
How can you say that? To which I say, you're talking to me about him.
That's what a successful protest looks like.
You and I talking about it.
It's not ambiguous.
There's no subjectivity whatsoever.
If we're talking about him, he got our attention.
Then the second part of that is, attention for what?
You know, what's he want done?
What's the problem? And of course he's talking about police brutality against black and brown people.
Now, a lot of people said to me, well wait a minute, there is no evidence.
The data does not suggest that there's more police violence against any group.
And you think that matters.
I'm going to tell you a huge, let's say, reality difference between my reality and that which most people, maybe 95% or more, occupy.
You think that it matters whether Kaepernick's issue is real, meaning the data suggests that it's real, or it's just his imagination.
You think that matters, don't you?
Don't you think it totally matters?
What could matter more than that?
Whether he's talking about a real thing, which real data suggests is real, versus it's all in his mind, and in this case, it would mean that it's also in the mind of other people.
You think that matters.
It doesn't. You want it to.
You think it should.
Other people are saying it should matter.
It should matter.
But it doesn't.
The fact that you think it should doesn't move the needle.
Because your opinion that it should matter, whether it's a real fact or an imagined fact, won't change anybody's mind.
Because their lived experience is that it's real.
That's, you know, what they observe, they see it happening to their friends, etc.
So, somebody's saying, if we stop talking about it, it'll go away.
No, it's not going to go away if I stop talking about it.
Because it's their lived experience.
I'm talking about the African American community.
Their reality...
No matter what you think it should be, it's irrelevant.
Their lived reality is that what Kaepernick is talking about is real.
So what do you do when you've got a problem that some people think is as real as anything could be?
They know people who have been beat up.
They've watched it on TV. It's real, it's real, it's real.
And the other part of the country, which would need to get on board to make anything useful happen, they say, you're imagining it.
It's just not even real.
What do you do in that situation?
Well, you think that that's the problem, right?
You think you're stuck there.
Some people's real, some say it's real, some doesn't.
There's nothing you can do.
Wrong. You can do exactly the same thing Whether it's real or not real.
It's exactly the same solution.
You hate hearing that, don't you?
It's the same solution if it's real or if it's not real.
It's the same solution.
What's the first thing you do if it's real?
What's the first thing you would do?
If you were sure it was real, that there's massive police problems, what would you do if you were king and you could solve it?
The first thing you do is make sure that you were tracking it as well as possible.
You'd put a lot of effort into making sure that the reporting of it was accurate.
What would you do if you were imagining it was real?
And it wasn't. What's the first thing you'd do if you were trying to deal with it as if it's real, but it's imaginary?
You would improve the tracking of it.
In both cases, you would do exactly the same thing.
Right. So don't tell me that it matters, whether it's real or not real, until we can track it to the point where both sides agree.
And we can't do that right now, apparently.
Otherwise, we'd agree on the reality of it.
So, it doesn't matter if it's real.
You do the same thing.
And if people are living a reality in which it's real...
That's reality. That's their reality.
Alright. You've had enough of that, I can tell from the comments.
Let's talk about Nike. So Nike has this new commercial with Kaepernick.
And I just tweeted a survey, who knows if this is accurate, but the survey saying that essentially the public opinion of Nike just dropped by 50%.
So they've got a number of metrics, but the essence of it is that Nike's brand just took a 50% hit.
50% in like a week.
Somebody says it is tracked, but I would argue not credibly.
Because if it were credible, we wouldn't have any question about whether it's accurate or not.
That's obvious.
So it has to be credible.
Now, the thing that bothered me about the Nike ad Is not that it was self-immolating, because it's possible that there'll just be a momentary bump and a year from now nobody will remember or it won't make any difference.
But there was also an indication that a quarter of the people who watch NFL were less likely to watch it because of the Nike commercial.
Just feel how big that is.
Nike not only seems to have destroyed their own brand, but they destroyed their own brand so thoroughly It might take a quarter of the traffic away from an entirely unrelated industry.
Not completely unrelated, because it's, you know, Kaepernick.
But it's a different industry.
The NFL is just trying to deal with their own problems, and this shoe company over here did such a bad job with their own brand that they destroyed a related brand.
That's pretty bad!
Alright, here's the other problem.
When Nike moves from, well, we're all about sports.
You know, that's your brand.
We're sports, sports, sports.
That's our brand. A little bit of a lifestyle thing, but mostly lifestyle-y sports, right?
But the moment they put Kaepernick as their brand, They've done what lawyers say you should never do in court, which is open up a line of questioning that you don't want opened.
And the moment they said, okay, this is bigger than sports now.
This is about social good.
And that's what a Kaepernick spokesperson does for you.
As soon as they open that door, What happened?
If you watched social media for five minutes, you saw pictures of Nike sweatshops.
Now, I don't know if Nike has sweatshops, so I don't want to be the one who comes on here and says, Nike has sweatshops and children are working in them.
I have no idea if anything like that is true.
It's the sort of thing you'd almost have to be there in person to really be confident you know what's going on.
And secondly, it could be that these, you know, if you want to call them sweatshops or factories, it might be the best opportunity that the people working there had.
It might be better than the alternative.
So you have to factor that in.
But what is true is that Nike doesn't want us talking about their sweatshops slash factories.
Let's call it a factory with a lot of people in human conditions doing this all day.
There's nothing great about it.
So Nike has opened up the question of all of their corporate behavior.
They probably wish they hadn't done that, but that's what happened.
But none of that is the part that's bothering me.
Because those are their decisions.
They hurt their brand.
That's their business.
And if they think that the social benefit is better than the importance of their brand, well, it's an interesting decision.
I'm sure their stockholders don't love it.
But it's theirs to make.
It's none of my business, right?
Here's my problem.
The commercial itself.
The message of the commercial, if you haven't seen it, this is the Kaepernick commercial, shows a lot of people who are succeeding in sporting type ways by trying really hard at their chosen sport.
And the idea of it is that if you try really hard You can be a superstar.
Or you can be a good skateboarder.
Here's the thing. It's the worst life advice you're ever going to see.
You should not be trying real hard.
The very opening part of the commercial is somebody who's trying to skateboard on a railing and keeps falling off on the concrete with no pads.
No helmet, no pads.
And they show the guy trying it over and over, or different people, I can't tell.
And they fall off on concrete with no helmet and no pads.
And what is Nike's advice?
Just get right back on there and keep doing it.
Because once you're done, you will have mastered the all-important art that will be a great life skill of balancing a skateboard on a railing in a public place.
Well, if it doesn't work, you'll be crippled for life.
But if it does work, you will have mastered this amazing life skill which will serve you so well into your golden years of being able to skateboard on a railing.
It's the worst message you could ever, ever tell your youth.
Everything about this story, and I mean this seriously, I'm completely serious when I say this, If all of the police brutality is exactly what you say it is, and I say you meaning, you know, Kaepernick, if it's all true, and I know most of you think it isn't true based on the data, but just bear with me here for the point.
If it were all true, would it be a better or worse thing than the message of the commercial?
Because that commercial is really frickin' influential.
How many people are saying to themselves, hey, I think I'll study a little bit less and put a little bit more effort into this basketball?
Because this is my ticket out.
Why do I know that?
Because a famous person told me, and I look up to that famous person, and Nike told me, and they've made my emotions really, they've really ramped up my emotions.
That commercial's got me going.
I'm just gonna do it. I'm just gonna do it.
I think I'll pick this ridiculous, absolutely worthless frickin' goal of trying to skateboard on a rail or try to be an NFL quarterback, dumbest goal anybody ever had as a kid, Even if sometimes it works, it's still the dumbest goal.
I'm gonna take this message from Nike and I'm gonna wrap my life plan around the worst advice anybody ever gave.
It's the worst advice and it's really persuasive at the same time.
It's been said that the only thing worse than an idiot at work is a productive idiot.
If your coworker is an idiot, but he can't get anything done, he's kind of harmless.
But if he's an idiot and he's really good at it, he gets a lot of stuff done, but it's all idiot stuff, that's the worst possible situation.
Nike is giving you the worst life advice you've ever seen.
Like seriously, the only thing worse than Nike's advice would be, how about a life of crime?
Let's compare those two.
Let's compare a life of crime as life advice versus Nike's dumb ass frickin' advice that you should pick one ridiculous worthless skill and put all of your energy into it until you're good at that one worthless skill that has almost no chance in helping you in life while you're ignoring everything that could help you.
If you go into a life of crime Sometimes it works.
Not very often.
But I have to think that one out of, I don't know, 50 drug dealers come out okay?
What would you say is the odds?
Maybe one out of 100?
Let's say one out of 100.
Let's say one out of 100 professional criminals just get away with it.
Pretty good deal, right?
One out of a hundred get away with it.
Oh sure, 99 of them are either in jail or killed.
Their lives are destroyed.
But one out of a hundred has a pretty good life as a criminal.
Let's compare that life advice to Nike's life advice to become a famous quarterback.
How about that?
Is it one out of a hundred who become a famous quarterback?
No. It's more like one out of tens of thousands or something, right?
Nike's advice is worse, literally, than telling people to become professional criminals.
You can't get much worse than that advice for the people who are most likely to be damaged by it.
You know, you're talking about their advertising to young people who in many cases have no good role models, they have not read my book, had failed almost everything and still went big, that teaches you to build a talent stack around useful skills.
What is not a useful skill?
Skateboarding on a rail!
That might kill you. That's not a useful skill.
It's not good risk management.
It cannot work in the long term.
He has everything wrong about it.
So I'm a little bit upset about it.
Most of the time I don't get, you know, actually emotionally involved in the stuff I'm talking about on Periscope.
It's usually just fun.
So if I'm emotionally involved, it's because it's fun or interesting or something.
But I'm actually mad about this.
Like, I'm legit mad because I'm not sure the rest of the world can quite see the catastrophe that this is.
The badness of this message, and let's face it, if you're talking to an adult, and most of us are adults, when you and I have a conversation about whether Kaepernick is doing a good thing or a bad thing, that's an adult conversation,
right? So when I say he's doing a good thing, I can slice it finely, and I can say, yeah, the protest part, A+. And I can say something that's nuanced like, the reason I love the flag, the reason I respect the United States and the flag, is because Kaepernick can do that.
My flag has no value unless somebody can protest it and get away with it.
And then you can say, no, but I don't like it when you protest the flag, etc.
You shouldn't do that. But that's at least an adult conversation.
Now imagine you're a kid You're eight years old and you're watching this commercial and you see Kaepernick flouting the law, being the rebel, losing his job, putting all of his effort into this one thing.
What kind of a message is it sending to a kid?
Probably not good, right?
Maybe that kid should just stay in school and learn some useful skills and maybe not try to become Colin Kaepernick.
Even though, again, I'm pro-Kaepernac in the sense that his protest was effective and that a big part of the country thinks the issue is real and you have to deal with it as if it's real because so many people believe it's real, whether it is or not.
Alright, that's enough about Kaepernick.
Let's talk about Woodward's book, which is related to this New York Times article about the secret mobile trader insider.
Have you heard this? So these two stories sort of dovetail, the Woodward book and the secret mole in the White House.
And it makes you wonder if the secret mole is also who talked to Woodward or not.
Maybe we'll never know.
But the idea is that there are people in the White House Who are managing the president.
In other words, they're not working for him.
They're not doing what he needs to do.
They're trying to force decisions through their own treacherous actions.
For example, there are reports, which we don't know if these are credible or not, right?
But the reports that, documents that the president wants to sign, they'll steal off his desk so he doesn't notice they're gone and nothing gets signed.
Or they'll slow walk something or they'll delay something.
But basically the staff trying to thwart the boss.
And then, of course, there are also the stories in the Woodward book about the president saying unkind things and being tough on various staff members and stuff.
So the first thing I would say about it, which I said before, is that if Woodward were to write a book about any CEO of any company, It would look a lot like this book.
Because if you start talking to a lot of staff members, which ones are going to talk to you?
Think about it. So you're Woodward, and you're trying to find people in the White House administration to talk to you about the president.
Which ones talk to you?
Well, if you're lucky enough to get the ones who support the president...
They're just going to say, ah, he's great.
He's doing a good job.
You can see it. It's in the numbers.
Unemployment's good, etc.
Well, that's not a book.
Woodward had nothing.
If he only talks to the people who are in favor of the president, even if it's 99% of the people in the White House, I doubt it is, but even if it were...
If 99% of them were 100% in favor of this president, they'd either not talk to Woodward, because they don't want to say the wrong thing, or they'd just say something nice about the president and there's no book there.
So you only need those 2% disgruntled people.
Omarosa, somebody says.
Maybe. You only need 2% disgruntled who will say absolutely anything.
What does... What does Alan Dershowitz say about people who take immunity in order to testify?
You know, his famous thing is he says, sometimes they sing and sometimes they compose.
If you put somebody in a situation where their incentive is to make stuff up, what are they going to do?
If your source is someone who has a clear incentive, a really clear incentive, to make stuff up, what's going to happen?
Well, pretty much every time they're going to make stuff up.
Now, making stuff up doesn't mean things are untrue, which is the weird part.
I tweeted an article that you absolutely have to read.
It's in my Twitter feed from yesterday.
And I forget the author in the article, but the gist of it is talking about Woodward's book about John Belushi.
And that someone who was actually close to that situation read the Woodward book to see what he reported and then they said, okay, here's what really happened.
And here's the freaky thing.
The facts that Woodward reported, and this is about Belushi, were accurate.
But when it was put together by Woodward, it was completely different from actual reality.
So those two things can happen.
All the facts can be right, but because of the way he combined them, it changed entirely the nature of the situation.
So it was completely misleading without any facts being wrong.
And that, if you haven't done the subject of lots of articles, you wouldn't know, is ordinary.
It's not extraordinary.
It's ordinary to take real facts and turn them into the opposite of what they mean without changing the facts.
You can do that just by the context, the timing, the way you frame it.
So given that we know he's done it on the Belushi book, what would you assume about his other books?
It would be reasonable to assume that that's his M.O. because writers don't change that much.
And therefore, the current book is no more credible than the Belushi book, which was not credible.
But, that said, the story of people within the staff trying to manage the president, trying to thwart his worst impulses, how much of the details are probably technically true?
Maybe all of them.
But even if all the details are true, Does it mean the story is true?
No. Not even close.
Those two things are almost unrelated, even though you think they should be tightly coupled.
You think getting all the facts true means the story's true, right?
Seems like how could those two things be different?
But I'm telling you, it's typical, it's ordinary, it's routine that the story is different from what the facts are telling you.
Completely normal. So what would that look like?
And now I'm speculating.
So now I'm leaving the field of things I know about to speculate to make the point.
The speculation is this.
Suppose you had one disgruntled employee of the White House who might even be fired by now.
Suppose you just had one.
And that person is interviewed.
Do they say that there are other people like them?
Yes, they do. Of course they say they're more like me.
Because in the break room or when they talk to their friend and they said, ah, this president is terrible, something has to be done, their friend said, ah, yeah, sure.
So people tend to think other people agree with them, even if the other person was just sort of, you know, being agreeable.
So it's possible that if there are one or two moles in the White House, That might be all there are, and that would be completely normal for any large organization.
So the first thing is that Woodward has painted it as large-ish, meaning there's a significant number of moles who are working against the president and trying to stop his crazy impulses.
But there might be one.
There might be one and a half, hundreds or however many there are.
Then there was also the report that there were some cabinet members considering the 25th Amendment, removing the president for being a crazy person.
How normal is that?
Well, given that CNN and so much of the news was talking about that topic, And given that everybody thinks their boss has lost it at one point or another, is it possible that somebody in the administration had legitimately talked about, you know, hey, should we be talking about removing this president?
Probably. Probably.
And it would be completely normal.
Right? So the painting that as not normal...
is what you would expect if somebody's making a book out of it.
You don't want to say, yeah, there are disgruntled people in the White House, but of course there are hundreds of people and they're dealing with a situation they've never been in before, which is the most unusual leadership style they've ever seen.
What would be the normal outcome of hundreds of people who are used to one kind of management style all their life and now are subjected to the most different management style they will ever experience?
What is the normal outcome of that?
Disgruntled people. People who are sure that they know what the president should be doing.
Imagine any of those people who are disgruntled in the White House right now.
Imagine what they would have advised this president when he was a candidate.
Would their advice have been, you know, hey, here's how you get elected.
Tweet a bunch of outrageous stuff.
Would they have advised that?
No. They would have said, you're crazy and if you keep tweeting like this, I think you have to get medical help.
Right? Don't you think that those same people, had they been working for the campaign, would have said, Candidate Trump, you're acting a little crazy now.
This is never going to work because I'm so smart.
I've spent all my years working for normal people who do things the normal way, and this isn't the normal way.
So I'm pretty sure you're crazy.
And then he gets nominated.
Okay, but now stop doing the crazy stuff.
I see why, well, he got lucky and he got nominated and, you know, it's just a weird coincidence.
But now you really have to stop doing the crazy stuff.
And then he gets elected president.
Now he's in the White House.
Do people who think like that...
Stop thinking the president is crazy just because he got elected?
No, they don't.
They still think everything he's doing is a giant mistake, according to them.
The people who have probably been wrong about everything for three years.
So if you've been wrong about everything for three years, and you see this president doing, yet again, something you wouldn't do, and you're sure that normal leaders wouldn't do, what are you going to say?
You're going to say, he must be crazy.
But you keep watching it work.
That's the thing.
Nobody is arguing that the country is falling apart in terms of its structural stuff.
Structurally, if you're looking at the country, its bones.
Economy, strong as hell.
Military, strong as hell and getting better.
ISIS defeated. What about all these crazy trade wars?
Well, it's looking a lot less crazy today, isn't it?
You've got Mexico coming on board.
I think Canada is going to be there pretty soon.
You've got a little issue with North Korea and China being linked, so you've got to figure out how to dance with them.
But it looks like we're getting that figured out.
So why is it that all the big stuff, there's not been a major terrorist attack on our soil, right?
Since the Trump, I'm never sure about my timing, but I think that's true.
So why is it that this president is so crazy, but yet things are going so well?
Well, the moles probably think it's because they're keeping him from his craziest impulses.
But here's the thing.
When you hear these reports of the president suggested this crazy idea, and it's a good thing his staff stopped him.
It's a good thing that General Mattis decided not to do what the president suggested.
So that's the way it's being reported.
What you're seeing is a president who simply pushes every door.
He just doesn't accept that the old way of thinking or doing are just automatically right.
So when a President Trump walks into a meeting and says something like...
And I don't know if he really said this, but it was reported at one time.
If he says something like, why don't we use a nuclear weapon in the Middle East...
If that's reported out of context, your hair is on fire.
Ah! He's actually asking that question?
Ah! Why can't we have a nuclear weapon?
Ah! But here's the context.
It seems that he pushes on every assumption.
And then when he gets pushed back, He says, okay, that's a pushback.
And that pushback made complete sense.
So, if you made me president, would I ask that question?
I might. I might.
Just to make sure that I understand why it can never be done.
Because what if they came back and said, no, you'd never want a nuclear weapon to explode in the Middle East.
Oh, but we have been developing one that would have a limited range and there would be no nuclear fallout.
We just haven't told anybody it's a secret weapon.
Now, nothing like that's happening, I'm sure.
But the fact that you're pushing on every door is not a sign of bad leadership.
It just isn't.
So if you get that reported out of context, that he asked something, he provoked something, he said something that sounds crazy, you have to understand it in terms of pushing every door all the time, just to see what happens.
And he's doing it in the context of talking to the very people who can tell him where the borders are.
He's just finding where the borders are.
His entire leadership style If you could encapsulate Trump's leadership style, the thing that got him into the job, with one sort of summary of what he did, it would look like this.
What's the box I'm supposed to be in?
Okay, this is the box I'm supposed to stay in.
Now watch this.
How about now? No, no, no.
We told you that this is the box, but now that you've expanded it.
Okay, well, that wasn't so bad.
But dammit, do not, do not make...
No, okay, stop, stop, stop.
You'll never be president. Don't, don't do it, don't do it.
All right, so pushing the envelope is what he does.
That's what he does. But he relies on reasonable people and experts to say, okay, you've pushed far enough.
That's why we're having good results, because the experts do tell him when he's pushed far enough.
Now, these whole stories about Gary Cohn taking stuff off his desk, who knows if any of that's true?
I mean, it's more likely not true than true.
But if it is true, imagine how easily that gets taken out of context.
Because it sounds like the moles are sneaking in and rummaging through the Oval Office desk and taking this little document and ha ha ha, he'll never remember it.
Well, maybe.
I mean, anything's possible.
But here's the more reasonable version of that.
What, you put the document on his desk to sign?
You know, I really think he needs to hear from some more people.
I really think that there's something happening now that we didn't know about when the document was put together.
Let's just pull that off until we can clear up a few things not quite ready to get that signed.
And I really want to take another run at him to see if I can convince him.
So I'm going to pull that off his desk.
We'll get back to it. If that story got told to Woodward, how would he retell the story?
Because he doesn't know the mental process of the person.
The only story that he heard is Gary Cohn snuck in his office and took that document off his desk.
We don't know what Gary Cohn was thinking because that's the important part.
If what he was thinking was, there's more information to be considered, and I don't think the president would be well served by acting at this moment, that's exactly what you want Gary Cohn to do, if that's the truth.
Hypothetically, if he thought there was really more conversation than needed to be happening.
He might want to postpone that.
And you might think, well, this is just the easiest way to do it.
I'll just pull this off the desk.
When this topic comes up again, we'll present the new information.
We'll try to get through it that way.
So just see how easily, by imagining what people are thinking, you can change the facts into something else.
Look in the Woodward book.
You're going to see lots of excerpts from it.
Look for this effect.
Look for several facts that may or may not be true, followed by gigantic assumptions about people's inner thoughts.
It's the assumptions about people's inner thoughts, the mind reading, that is what changes facts into fiction.
So saying that Gary Cohn took a document off the president's desk might actually be true.
But assuming that the reason he did it is because Gary Cohn's inner thoughts believe that the president has some kind of mental problem, that's not really...
That's not reporting.
That's mind-reading.
All right. How many of you watched Jack Dorsey's testimony?
It wasn't on the major networks.
I think it was on C-SPAN. Did anybody watch...
Jack Dorsey of Twitter talking to Congress.
I watched a lot of it.
I couldn't get through all of it, but I watched a lot of it.
And, my God, it was interesting.
It was so interesting.
I didn't think that it would be.
Yeah, there was one protester and then one of the congressmen used to be an auctioneer and he went into auctioneer mode to sort of entertain the group while the protester was making noise, which was kind of entertaining, just a little sideshow. But let's evaluate the actual event itself.
So here's what happened. So Jack Dorsey, the CEO, who's also CEO of Square, right?
So he's a double CEO of two really big businesses.
Now they bring in the CEO of two businesses, and the two businesses matter, because, you know, who even has enough time to run one business, but running two businesses is impressive.
And they asked him detailed questions about data, percentages, statistics, and things.
And very few of those questions would have been exactly something you can anticipate, because they were pretty specific.
And because he's the CEO, he of course did not know those detailed technical questions.
So I think the event It was sort of strange to watch because on the big picture stuff, you know, Jack said it's not our intention to be, essentially he said it's not our intention to be biased and that as a company they're trying to be as unbiased as possible.
But then when the politicians asked for details to say, essentially trying to get to the fact that there might be some bias baked into the system, And how could you be sure?
Those required a lot of information that is either really hard to come by, or doesn't exist, or if it does exist, probably one person in Twitter knows that, and the CEO doesn't necessarily, which would not be unusual, because the CEO doesn't know everything the staff knows.
So it looked like a giant waste of time.
So that's my bottom line.
I believe the government learned absolutely nothing.
And is there anybody who had a different opinion?
And I don't blame the government, I don't blame the politicians, and I don't blame Jack Dorsey for that fact.
It was just the wrong context.
Because the things that they were asking him...
We're not the things that a CEO would typically have at his disposal just because you're asking at the moment.
So it was a whole lot of, we'll get back to you.
And that was an entirely reasonable thing to say, we'll get back to you.
Now, let's evaluate Jack's persuasion talents.
Persuasion-wise, I would say he played it really well.
So if you're anti-Twitter, you may not like to hear this, but he played the...
I think that his approach was probably as good as it could have been.
Because what he did right was he completely accepted the criticism as being important.
And he completely accepted wherever there were situations that Twitter had an imbalance, let's say, whether it was a bug or it was something that looked like it was more conservatives than liberals were affected.
He simply admitted all of it and said, yeah, that's a problem.
We're trying to fix that.
He admitted also that the problem, the larger problem, is I think maybe even impossible to fix.
But they're doing everything they can to make it better.
So he did a really good job of explaining that there's no end point to it.
You can't fix this.
All you can do is keep trying to improve what you're doing.
And I thought that was pretty good, persuasion-wise.
But the question that, well I'll give you an example of a question that would have been great if we could have heard an answer but we didn't.
And one of the questions was when the search result problem happened and there were a bunch of conservatives who said, hey, these politicians, these conservatives are not showing up in search.
And then Jack mentioned that, I think he mentioned it, or maybe one of the questioners mentioned it, that there were also Democrats who didn't show up.
And therefore, if it's true that both conservatives and liberals We're not showing up in the search.
That's evidence there's more of a bug than some kind of bias.
But one of the politicians asked, can you tell us, did it affect, let's say, way more conservatives than it affected Democrats?
We know that both were affected, but was it balanced?
Was it 50-50 or was it 90-10?
Because that would really tell you something, wouldn't it?
Or at least it would tell you where to keep looking.
And that, among many other detailed questions, Jack did not have an immediate answer, but I think he committed to getting back on that.
And I'm thinking, well, that would have been good to know, but we don't know the answer to that.
We don't know the answer to that.
So it's hard to come up to an opinion without knowing that data.
Now, the answer that I wanted to hear, and I don't know I don't know if we heard it, because I didn't hear every minute of it.
But I wanted to know how many people understand the algorithm.
I wanted to know, and of all of Twitter, how many people understand The whole algorithm.
Because I think he said that there were, I may have heard this wrong, but did I hear that there were maybe a hundred variables?
But there are lots and lots of variables.
I think they call them signals.
So signals meaning there's something about the activity of users that's unique and that's a signal that's either good or bad in terms of how much exposure you'll get on Twitter.
And In the context that I watched it, it seemed to me that it's very likely that nobody, literally nobody, really understands that if you change this variable, it would be either biased or unbiased in its output.
I got the feeling that nobody knows.
And not because they're not trying, not because they're not smart, not because they're biased, none of those reasons.
Just because it's complicated.
And if it's true that we've reached a point where no human, literally no human, not one, understands the entire algorithm and the algorithm determines what we see and therefore what we think and therefore what we vote, the algorithm is already running the country.
You get that, right? This is an important point.
If no human understands all of the algorithm, humans are no longer in charge.
Am I wrong? The algorithm is changing what we see.
What we see determines what we think.
What we think determines how we act in terms of how we vote.
And no human...
It's causing this chain of events.
It's being caused by a series of code that no human fully understands.
And I don't think that's for lack of trying or lack of talent or lack of wanting to.
It's just complicated.
So, I don't think this is a fixable problem.
Let me give you, I was trying to think of an example of something that would be a signal That would not be obvious in terms of how it affected the bias, you know, let's say the result, not an intentional bias, but let's say an outcome that was biased.
And it seems to me there probably are lots of things that, there are probably lots of words that conservatives use that liberals do not, wouldn't you say?
And vice versa.
There are probably lots of words that liberals use that conservatives don't.
Is it likely that with their somewhat different vocabularies that they're all treated the same given that they use effectively a different language?
Probably not. There's probably some signals in the way people talk that are just different between conservatives and liberals.
Take just one example.
Guns. Both sides talk about guns, but do they use the same words?
Probably not.
I wouldn't think so.
Are any of those differences in words part of the many, many signals that Twitter picks up?
I don't know, but I'm using this just as an example.
It seems like you could have unintentional bias that no human was aware of.
Because once you put that signal into the mix, you know, it gets mixed up with the soup and no human can pull out, you know, that this one caused the bias or not.
Imagine this. Imagine if from this day on the algorithm was fixed so that it was perfectly unbiased.
This can't happen.
I don't think it's even possible.
But imagine if it was. It's just a thought experiment.
That you locked in Twitter's lack of bias.
The algorithm was never biased from that point on.
Would that lock in The bias that we already have.
In other words, if one group was ahead of the other group, and then you locked it in so that from that moment on there would be no advantage, would you be locking in the advantage that already existed?
Maybe. I don't know.
How would you know? And what does fairness look like?
Suppose the country is 30% conservatives and suppose it's 35% liberals.
I don't know if any of that's true.
I'm just making up numbers. Suppose that's true.
What does fairness look like?
Does fairness look like, well, if there's 35% of these guys and 30% of these guys, we better give a little bit more time to the bigger group?
Is that fair? Or does it have to do with the quality of what they're saying, the health, as Twitter likes to say?
Which, by the way, is an excellent persuasion term.
The conversational health.
I really like that framing, even though it's hard to define.
I don't know...
I've told you in other periscopes that fairness was invented so that idiots would have something to talk about.
Because fairness is just an opinion.
Fairness rarely is actually something that the real world can serve up in a way everybody looks at it and goes, oh, that's fair.
You know, there's nothing you could do with the tax code.
There's nothing you could do with it.
You could go to a flat tax.
You could go to graduated tax.
No matter what you do, you cannot get everybody to say, oh, that's fair.
It'll always look unfair to someone.
So if you're trying to create algorithms that are fair, you can't do it.
It isn't logically possible.
I'm not telling you that it's hard to do, and therefore we'll have to be smarter or work harder or anything.
I'm telling you it's logically impossible to be fair.
It can't be done.
Fairness is not an objective measure.
It's always going to be an opinion.
So the problem that Twitter has is Is that society has put on them a standard which is literally impossible.
So you have two impossibilities.
One is, hey, Twitter, why don't you just go out of business because you can't be fair?
Well, that's not really going to happen, right?
Twitter is not going to stop doing what it's doing.
Facebook is not going to stop being Facebook.
We're never going to have a world where there's no social media, there's no mass communications.
So that can't happen.
And then the other...
The other magical thought is, well, if they're gonna be here, and that's the way the world is from now on, then we're gonna have to make sure that it's fair.
That's not a thing.
No matter how much you want it to be fair, no matter how hard they try, no matter how many billions they pour into it, no matter how smart the people, no matter how dedicated, no matter how many years they try, Fairness isn't a thing.
It's just not a thing.
It doesn't exist.
It exists only in your mind as something that you think you would know when you saw it.
But the person right next to you has a different opinion.
There is no such thing as fairness.
And that is the standard that's been put on these social media companies.
They can't reach it.
They can't reach it.
Now, Jack pointed out that no matter what you do, the trolls will always stay ahead of you, people will find out ways to game the system, so it's sort of a permanent arms race where you're just trying to stay ahead, sort of like security.
Security being the better example, as Jack pointed out.
That's one problem, but the bigger problem is that you're chasing a standard that isn't a rational standard, because it doesn't exist.
There is no fairness bar.
You can't hold it in your hand.
Oh, look, I got some fairness.
Look at it, everybody. Here it is.
Got some fairness. It doesn't exist.
Alright, so, given that we're in a situation where humans probably will never understand the algorithms, and given that That the algorithms, it would be almost vanishingly small, impossible odds that the algorithm produces fair outcomes.
Well, let's say unbiased.
Fairness doesn't exist, but let's say unbiased.
In other words, that it doesn't lean left or lean right.
Kind of impossible.
The algorithm is going to lean one direction on every possible dimension and we won't know because we don't we can't penetrate what's happening in there so we have a standard that can't be reached and as long as that standard can't be reached wait for it AI already runs the world it's the present you're wondering when is that day that the computers will be running the world and And the people will not.
Well, here it is.
The algorithm is already running the world.
Now, the problem, of course, is that there are human beings making judgment calls about every one of these signals.
Hey, put this one in, take that one out.
And they probably do understand in a very general way what tweaking these signals might do to the entire algorithm.
And so you would imagine that if there's a way that they could lean left or a way that they could lean right, that there will be a tendency over time, not on every signal and not on every person, but on average, that's just sort of nudge to the left if that's the nature of most of the employees who are involved in the decision making.
So I don't know that there's any way to fix this, frankly.
And then how do you adjust for persuasive ability?
Let's say that Twitter is biased in one direction or the other, but let's say one of the parties is just more persuasive than the other.
Well, is that fair? Is it fair that one side is more persuasive, that they have better arguments?
It probably isn't!
Life isn't fair.
So anyway, that's where we are with that.
The one question I didn't see addressed, I saw the politicians ask lots of questions, but I didn't see the one that I cared about the most, which is lots of people have noticed that people follow and then they get automatically unfollowed.
So I didn't see that come up in the questioning.
The thing where you like something and then it unlikes, where you follow somebody and then you get automatically unfollowed.
I didn't see anybody address that.
Did anybody talk about that?
Because I fast forward through some, you know, maybe an hour of the four hours or whatever it was.
It came up in the testimony of victims.
Somebody says they did not.
Yeah, to me, that felt like the primary thing.
And I didn't see anybody even mention it.
Now, if they had mentioned it, I don't know that Jack would have been in a position to know the You know, exactly what was behind it.
Because, as I've told you in other periscopes, that back when I was having that problem, I did communicate with, you know, the top person at Twitter who deals with that stuff, and they couldn't get me an answer.
So it seemed to me that they didn't know why it was happening, or didn't tell me.
How do you know the difference between shadow banning and buggy software?
Well, you don't, is the quick answer.
But what you would look for is, are there lots of people on the left who are complaining about the same thing?
So for three years or so, I've been hearing conservatives say, hey, I automatically got unfollowed or that like disappeared.
In that three years, I personally have heard zero reports, zero reports of it happening to anybody on the left.
And it's so noticeable that it's not something like they wouldn't have noticed, right?
It's very noticeable because I've gotten hundreds of reports.
So even if we were imagining it on the right, wouldn't they also be imagining it on the left?
If it's one of those things that once it's in your head, do you think you see it?
If it was a bug, wouldn't it affect everybody?
And if it were affecting everyone, what are the odds that only the conservatives would have been complaining about it?
Or that if both sides are complaining about it, what are the odds that somebody hasn't written an article in the New York Times or somewhere else who said, yes, all the things the conservatives say are happening to them are indeed happening.
We've confirmed it. It's easy to check.
And it's happening to everyone else.
So it doesn't mean anything.
Where's that article?
Right? Remember, I always teach you to look for the empty space.
Look for the thing that isn't, because that's so revealing.
Where's the article that says all the things that conservatives are complaining about with Twitter behavior is also happening to everyone else?
Because, by the way, I'm not ruling out that possibility.
It's entirely possible that Somebody wrote that and I've never seen it.
So if you've seen it, just forward it to me.
You should never assume that because you don't know something, it doesn't exist.
Somebody says they saw that article.
If you have that, can you forward that to me on Twitter?
Did you figure out your split-screen issues?
I think so, but I'm waiting for one cable.
So I should have that by Friday, but I won't have it implemented by Friday.
So maybe next week. All right.
Have I said enough for today?
I think I have.
I'm going to keep it on this.
And give me some feedback.
Did you like today's periscope or no?
I saw some complaining in the beginning.
I was getting a little bit repetitive, it sounded like.
Oh yeah, Kim Kardashian at the White House for prison reform.
Yeah, let me say one more thing.
I saw Van Jones in that picture again.
And I always say this about Van Jones.
I think he's the most credible voice on the left.
So Van Jones, this gigantic Trump critic.
But when it comes to a topic, prison reform, Where Van Jones apparently thinks he can make a difference.
I don't want to be a mind reader, but he's part of the effort, so one assumes that he thinks he can make a difference.
So, Van Jones is a perfect example of what you should teach your kids.
Compare the Nike commercial, the worst advice any child ever got, To Van Jones as a role model.
Van Jones has a lot of criticisms for this administration.
A lot of criticisms.
But when he had the opportunity to make a difference, and the only way to do that was to work with them, did he say, no, I'm not going to work with them.
I don't want to make the world a better place.
He did not. He played it like a man.
He played it like an adult.
Let's de-sex it and say he played it like an adult.
De-sexist it.
He played it like an adult.
That's what you want to teach your kids.
Teach your kids to be like Van Jones.
At least in this limited way.
That his criticisms are...
I would say, you know, if you disagree with them, let me say that they're honest.
They're honest criticisms, and he's making the adult decisions to work with the people he needs to to get something done.
So, hats off to Van Jones.
Alright, that's enough for today.
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