Episode 534 Scott Adams: Predicting, Deutsche Bank, Brennan, China, Iran
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Hey, I'm back!
Yes, I know it's been a long time since we had coffee, but we're gonna have some simultaneous sippin' today.
And it's gonna be extra good, because I know you've been holding back.
Hey everybody, come on in here, grab a seat.
Make sure you're where you can see.
Get a good seat up in the front.
And it's about time for the simultaneous sip.
And all you need to participate in this sacred ceremony is some kind of a cup or a mug or a glass.
It could be a stein or a chalice, maybe a thermos, possibly a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
I'm sorry I left you yesterday.
Caught me by surprise.
It was a travel day. I thought I'd have time, but I did not.
And so, today will be twice as good.
That's right. I'm taking all of the goodness you would have heard yesterday, but I couldn't get to it.
I'm packaging it to today for twice as good a coffee with Scott Adams.
Let us start.
So there's some politician named, a Republican guy named Justin Amash, who has apparently broken ranks with the Republicans and he says, I have read that Mueller report and it has all kinds of impeachable conduct.
It has impeachable conduct.
That's pretty vague, isn't it?
If your best argument sounds like this, Scott, he did impeachable things.
You're in pretty good shape.
Let me tell you what sounds very bad.
Scott murdered a guy.
Scott murdered a guy named Bob.
That sounds pretty bad.
If somebody says, Scott, you murdered somebody, I'm like, whoa, I'm in trouble.
I'm going to jail. That's a pretty specific allegation.
Here's what I'm not worried about.
Scott may have, if you look at the totality of evidence, nothing individual that mattered too much.
No crimes. Yeah, no crimes.
And there was no conspiracy or anything like that.
But if you look at the big picture, if you sort of get far away, like in outer space, And there's a lot of it, and you put a lot of things together that don't mean much, from outer space, it could give you the impression,
sort of a vague, uneasy feeling, that there might be something that I would call a conduct Collectively speaking, which in a philosophical and maybe generic sense could be somewhere in the general vicinity of something we should at least have a conversation about,
impeachment. Under those conditions, how much do I worry?
Not a lot.
Not a lot. Now, Amash is probably being kind of clever because he's getting all kinds of attention.
What was the thing that Justin Amash was most famous for before this?
He was most famous for nobody ever heard of him.
So Justin Amash's greatest claim to fame prior to selling out the Republicans was that nobody ever heard of him.
So I guess he's done better than that.
Now we've heard of him. That's not nothing.
So there's something I'm sort of tracking, changing topic a little bit about Joe Biden.
I call it the Sleepy Joe...
I'll give it a name.
Let's say the Sleepy Joe Visibility Metric.
Yeah, let's call it that. The Sleepy Joe visibility metric.
And it goes like this. Sleepy Joe Biden is the dominant front-runner for the Democrats.
It's the biggest story in the country, politically, partly because everything else is going well.
Look for the big stories about the economy on the front page of CNN. Oh, there are none, because the economy is going well.
Look for the big story about the war we're in.
Oh, There is no big story because we're winding down wars everywhere.
Look for the big story about how our Chinese trade talks are going to end the world.
Oh, well, that doesn't seem to be happening because, again, the economy is doing well.
So we've got this weird world where there isn't much to talk about except the 2020 election.
It's still the biggest thing, right?
So, if the biggest competitor, the only person who could change the equation and maybe, you know, have a chance of beating President Trump, that would be a big, big, big, big change in the world.
It's a big story. Do you see a lot of interviews with Joe Biden?
So far, I've seen zero.
I mean, I think he's had them.
I think he's...
He must have talked to the press in the last several weeks, but it just kind of comes and goes.
It seems to me that the anti-Trump press either has no confidence in Biden or is hoping that the less they talk about him, the less he gaffes.
It seems to me That, you know, I don't know that this is any collusion, but maybe collectively people have made the same idea.
The more we see of Joe Biden, the more we'll like him?
Fill in the end of this sentence.
The more the public sees of Joe Biden, now fill in the blanks.
What do you think is the answer to that?
The more we see him, the more we'll love him?
Does that work? Okay, let's try it again.
The more we see of Joe Biden, the more smarter things he'll say.
I don't know. It doesn't quite fit.
The more we see of Joe Biden, the more we'll know he's young enough and vital enough to do the job.
Maybe. Could be.
Or how about this one?
Let's try this one on.
The more we see of Joe Biden...
The more gaffes he'll make.
Which one of those things sounds a little truer?
Which one feels right?
It certainly seems to me that this time in the prior presidential election, we saw a wall-to-wall, non-stop Trump, didn't we?
Trump, the candidate, said the more I get on TV, the better.
And he did everything he could to be on TV and get all this free press.
And he got a lot of it.
Joe Biden is doing exactly the opposite.
Trump made a calculation that the more Trump you saw, the more likely he would get elected.
Think about that.
Trump correctly deduced, and it's obvious that he knew this, I'm not reading minds.
I think he actually said this.
There's a quote of his early on.
Trump was about removing all the oxygen from the other candidates.
He was about just eliminating any attention on anything but Trump.
And that worked. Because apparently the more Trump you see, the more likely you want him for your president.
Not everybody, of course. Half the country doesn't.
But for the people who voted for him, the more they saw, apparently the more they liked.
On average. But Biden seems to be the opposite.
Now, keep watching this because it's too early.
It could be that Biden isn't doing anything interesting.
And later he will.
Excuse me. So maybe we'll see more of that.
Now, the President has done his North Korea trick with Iran.
He's tweeted at Iran after moving military assets into the region based on some vaguely specified risk that Iran was doing something dangerous, maybe to do with loading missiles on boats, maybe more than that, we don't know. But But Trump tweeted, and I was looking for the exact tweet, but it's not handy.
Somebody can help me with the words here.
He basically said that if Iran ever attacked the United States' interests, not the homeland necessarily, but if they did something dangerous, that Iran would essentially cease to exist.
Now, those are my words, not the President's, but he essentially said that.
And I thought, that is such the right thing to do.
And once again, this is another one of those situations where future presidents are going to have to answer to the way Trump did business in his administration.
Every future president is going to be compared to how this president handled stuff.
And the way he handles stuff tends to have a pattern.
Have you noticed it? Step one...
The Trump step is, oh my God, he can't do that.
That's too provocative. That's too dangerous.
The world will explode.
We should never do whatever it is that Trump says we should do.
Step two is we do it anyway.
So for whatever reason, he gets his way.
And we say, my God, my God, I can't believe he's doing this.
This was everything we feared.
I can't believe it.
The world is going to end. Then step three, you say, okay, it didn't work out.
Okay, I admit. I admit this didn't work out.
But there's a lot of things we don't like about this president unrelated to this.
And how many times have you seen this?
Let's take North Korea.
Oh my God, my God, you can't say fire and fury.
You can't be treating a leader with nuclear weapons the way you're tweeting.
This will never... Okay, you're doing it anyway.
I see you're doing it anyway.
But my God, don't do this.
We all warned you and you're doing it...
Okay, it did work out.
Yes, we admit this worked out exactly the way you hoped it would.
But man, what about Charlottesville?
What about some other thing?
You see it with the trade talks with China.
Trade talks are bad.
Trade wars are bad.
It's bad, it's bad, it's bad.
Okay, you're doing it anyway. We say you're doing it anyway, but man, this is not going to turn...
Okay, the economy is doing better than anybody hoped.
Sure. All right. So this was, it turns out...
Looks like both the left and the right agree it was exactly the right time to get tough on trade with China.
Okay. But even though we were totally wrong about this, and even though we were totally wrong about the way he approached North Korea, he's got other problems.
I'm sure there are other things he's doing wrong.
There must be other unrelated things that he's just doing completely wrong.
Let's talk about those for a while.
So, same thing with Iran, except I think there's a little less pushback this time.
Here's what I like about his Iran warning.
The first thing I like about his Iran warning is that it's on Twitter and it's public.
I love the fact that it's public because he's talking to the public of the United States and he's letting Iran see the reaction directly with no filter From the public.
And so they can look at his tweet that says, if you mess with us, we will end you, meaning end the regime in Iran, not kill all the people.
That should be the proper interpretation is that we would change the regime, not that Iran would cease to exist as a country.
And so the Ayatollah can look at the comments to the tweet.
And I haven't looked at them, but I imagine that the comments are largely supportive of the concept that if Iran goes too far, we've got a pretty dangerous president, and he's unpredictable, and I'm pretty sure he would use the opening to redo the Middle East.
So the last thing that Iran wants to give a President Trump is an excuse to redo the map of the Middle East.
What do they imagine that a President Trump would like to do?
He wouldn't mind redoing the map of the Middle East if the point of it was to make it a safer place for Israel, for our other allies in the region.
So, I think they're going to look at his comments and say, I do not see the citizens of the United States pushing back on this idea of eliminating Iran.
And if the citizens are not pushing back on it, and I don't think we are in general, obviously there's always people on both sides of everything, but I don't think the public's pushing back on it.
So imagine you're over in Iran.
You're looking at the biggest military ever assembled in the history of the galaxy.
It's pointing all of its guns at you.
You've got the most unpredictable president who, it should be said, wouldn't mind redoing the Middle East if he had a reason.
You know, if he had an excuse, at the moment, he has no excuse.
At the moment, there's not an immediate need for him to, you know, remove the regime in Iran.
Not at the moment.
Do they want to give him a moment?
Do they want to create an excuse that would give this president, who is the biggest military ever created in the galaxy, in the history of humanity, Do you want to give him an excuse to use some of those weapons?
You don't. So what I love is the clarity of it.
I think a normal president would have said something along the lines of, Iran, if you mess with us, there will be a big response, right?
Big generic, if you do something for us, all options are on the table.
Now, I do like it when our government says all options are on the table.
I like that as a...
I've always liked that as just a standard good thing to say.
Keeps all your options open, makes him wonder.
But when Trump does it, he goes way beyond all options are open.
He makes it binary.
If you screw with us, we will end your whole country.
That's as clear as you can get.
Now again, end the whole country does not mean, and I think we all agree, does not mean kill all the people in Iran.
Because we kind of like, not even kinda, we like the Iranian people.
By the way, if you've ever spent any time with Iranian people in America, they are unusually warm, awesome people.
The average Iranian who lives in this country whether first or second generation are really great people.
I'm pretty sure anybody who's had any contact with an Iranian in this country has, by and large, a pretty positive opinion.
So we certainly don't dislike the people of Iran, but we have some problems with their government.
And the President is very clear about that difference.
And Israel is very clear about that difference, which I believe is legitimate, by the way.
I think the Israeli people don't have a beef with Iranian people.
I just don't think that's not much of a thing.
It's really government to government problem.
And it's good to keep it that way.
Of course, the headlines are all about the Game of Thrones finale last night.
I would like to show you in a one-act play my reaction to the finale of Game of Thrones.
Yes, I slept through.
At least parts of the finale.
What I took away from the finale was some people died.
And it was over.
But I don't want to talk about Game of Thrones because that's not interesting for this Periscope.
What I'm going to talk about is that Game of Thrones, the finale, is about a third of all the news today.
Something like a third of all the real estate and the time spent on talking about news is about a TV show.
Can you have a better administration, the Trump administration, than to make one third of the news about a TV show?
Do you have any idea how much that signifies the golden age?
Let me tell you what the Golden Age looks like.
Now remember, the Golden Age I defined as a time when most of your problems are solved, or on the way to being solved.
So here are the headlines from the Golden Age.
There's some stuff about Ford cutting workers.
Now that would be negative, right?
There's a very big company, they're cutting workers.
Except that The context is the strongest economy the United States has ever had.
So really it's one company having some trouble, which is news.
It's definitely news. It's not good news.
But it's not about the economy.
It's about one company.
So that's probably a quarter of the page is that.
Another big piece of...
This is CNN's homepage.
So I'm looking at how much real estate is devoted to each kind of topic.
Then there's a whole bunch of stuff about how this Justin Amash is talking about impeachment that isn't going to happen.
That's a big story.
It's about some person is against the president, but it doesn't really matter because impeachment can't happen because the Republicans have too much control in the Senate.
It's a story without a story.
It's a story about something that can't happen.
Impeachment. Actually just can't happen.
Alright, here's some more.
There's a big piece about Buttigieg and his appearance on Fox News.
Who cares?
There's a candidate who had a town hall on Fox News, which probably ended his chances of winning because he appeared on Fox News.
It probably didn't work out to his favor.
Then there's a bunch of stuff about weather and blah, blah, blah, and nothing, nothing, and then Game of Thrones.
That's it. Think about that for a moment, will you?
There isn't really any bad news.
How do you have a whole page...
Of CNN, and the worst they can come up with is people didn't like the Game of Thrones ending.
That's really amazing, isn't it?
You want some more good news?
Here it comes. AOC recently said that she's open to the conversation about nuclear energy as part of the Green New Deal.
It gets better.
And then she adds, Especially the newer technologies.
Boom! Goes the dynamite.
Do you feel it?
That was the far left and the far right.
Boop. It's the biggest news in the world.
It's not on the CNN homepage, because it's sort of not the news that they like to specialize on.
It's also not on the Fox News page.
Because Fox News doesn't like to give too much positive attention to AOC, they're far more likely to do a story about her if it's negative.
But it's also not on CNN. CNN would like to do positive stories about AOC. Their audience would love that.
But AOC is being smart about nuclear energy.
Say what you will about anything else, her views on the economy, etc.
I'm not talking about anything else she's done that you don't like.
She does represent a big point of view and an influential point of view, even if it's not big, on the right.
And she has said...
Unambiguously, open to the conversation of nuclear, especially the newer technologies.
In other words, she now understands there is a difference.
This is the biggest news in the world, completely ignored.
Why? Because nuclear energy is probably the biggest part of what's going to drive Drive the world's economy in the next 30, 40 years is probably one of the biggest factors, and she just endorsed the conversation.
Now, I'm pretty sure she knows enough about the topic that when she says I'm open to the conversation, it means she's already agreed that the risk-reward makes sense.
That's sort of how I interpret it.
That she knows the risk versus the reward of nuclear, when you look at it in the context of climate change being, in her opinion, an extinction event, potentially, then suddenly she has essentially endorsed the path that most people on the right would say makes sense, as long as she's saying, do everything fast.
Do more wind, do more solar, develop new technologies as fast as possible, maybe look at ways to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, and also look hard at nuclear, newer technologies.
That is the thinking style, the point of view, the way to frame our risk for climate change in the most completely productive way.
Because whether you believe climate change is the big risk or a small risk or no risk at all, you still want as much green energy and low-cost energy, which is what nuclear gives you, as you can get.
So this is like one of the most positive developments in the world.
Now, can all of you take a little more patting on the back?
I'd like to prime you.
You know how this works.
One hand back here. Get ready to pat yourself on the back, because there will be a moment in which this makes perfect sense.
Prepare yourself to give yourself a self-pat on the back.
Here it comes. You in this Periscope have watched me, and especially with the help of Mark Schneider, who has been the primary advocate about the newer nuclear technologies.
You've seen You've seen us talk all the time.
Many of you have helped boost that message.
You've helped me boost it on Twitter.
You've boosted it on Periscope.
Do you think that our collective boosting of that message about the newer technologies of nuclear stuff, do you think that that message got through to AOC? We don't know.
But what do you think?
Yeah, I'm going to watch your messages for a while because I'm not going to pat myself on the back until I have agreement.
Do you think that message got through?
Probably. I'm saying yeses.
All right, that's enough yeses.
We can't confirm this, but here's what we do know.
Hand ready. Hand ready.
We do know we did the right thing.
We boosted the right message, and the right people do have the message.
I'm sure other people got to them.
I'm sure that we're not the only force, but we were one of them.
Get ready. Pat yourself on the back.
Good job. Good job.
Now, and I'm going to say this again.
There is no way...
For us to know if anything that we did collectively or individually made a difference.
We don't know that. But it sure looks like it did.
And at the very least, we were part of a collective group that were sending a similar message.
So at the very least, we were part of boosting the message.
So look at this model.
I've said this before, that social media, to a large extent, is the government.
Because you saw that the government was out of tune.
I think that's actually a really good way to put it.
I'm going to go with this analogy.
It seemed like the government was out of tune, meaning that they didn't even seem to have a disagreement.
There wasn't really a disagreement on nuclear.
It was more like one side was ignoring it or maybe wasn't quite up to date.
We don't know exactly what was going on, but it was out of tune.
There was an obvious solution, or at least a path forward, for this Green New Deal and for climate risk, and the government seemed to be missing the obvious.
They were like one step off.
They were so close to being on the right path, but there was some wiggle in the system.
And I feel as though social media allowed the public To fine-tune the government and to get them at least saying, oh yeah, that does need to be part of the conversation.
So AOC has said it now, needs to be part of the conversation.
And, of course, people on the right have already been there.
And then you've got people who I respect the most, such as Bill Gates.
The reason I respect him the most is because it's obvious that his intentions are all in the positive direction.
He does the work, he's brilliant, and he's not political.
He does not align with any side.
So, Bill Gates is still probably my number one role model in the world.
So, anyway. So, that's all good news.
Let's talk about this. This seems like this should be the biggest story in the world, but isn't.
I say that a lot. But let me develop this point a little bit.
So we know now that apparently Comey wrote in an email that included his upper echelon staff that apparently, according to Comey in an email, So this was back in the beginnings of the investigation about Russia collusion.
So Kobe sent an email that Brennan insisted the dossier be included in the intel assessment.
To which I say to myself, how do you interpret that?
Brennan would know...
It seems to me, you know, can't read his mind, but common sense tells you that he would have known that the sources of the intel were Russian spooks.
Brennan had to know that the source of the intel was Russian, you know, intel people.
And then he wanted it to be included Think about that.
What is being reported is that Brennan was aware that Russian intel people had created a questionable document that almost certainly was false information because it came from sources that would give you false information.
And that it was, by its nature, would affect the election.
Now, we see people on the right say, hey, doesn't that prove that Brennan was the one who was doing the Russia collusion?
To which I say, that makes 100% sense.
Brennan knew what he was doing.
He knew where the sources were.
He knew how reliable they were, which was not.
he knew that it was disinformation or he had to know because he was smart enough to know that from high Russian sources who wanted to change the result of the election and Brennan wanted to change the result of the election the same way the Russians did apparently by some kind of no let me modify that statement I don't know that the Russians wanted to change it the same way Brennan wanted to change it.
We know that the Russians wanted to interfere, and all that looked like interference.
But why is it that the entire news cycle is not, oh, Russia collusion is real, and it turns out it was Brennan Who, as far as we can tell, until, you know, it's not confirmed, you need investigations, but as far as we can tell, the paper trail says that Brennan and Comey were involved with Russian interference.
In other words, that they colluded with Russia.
How is that not objectively, obviously true?
How is it not completely, obviously, objectively true that Brennan and Comey Have a paper trail saying that they indeed colluded with Russia, meaning colluded with a Steele dossier that came from Russian sources, which they knew, to change this, to interfere with the election.
How is that not completely 100% a true statement?
Now again, you know, you need investigations to make sure that emails meant what you thought and people were doing what we imagined.
But here's my theory.
It's cognitive blindness.
Meaning that we can logically see the connection that I just drew, but we can't quite wrap our heads around the fact that we had the story opposite for two years plus.
Because the whole story had been framed so vigorously as the Trump Organization was colluding with Russia, and now we know it was literally the opposite.
The Trump Organization was being framed By people colluding with Russia.
Now, again, it could turn out that that interpretation that I just gave you is overstated.
That could be the case.
But the evidence that we have very strongly suggests that was the case.
And there doesn't seem to be a counter-narrative to that.
In other words, there's nobody arguing the other side.
There's just evidence that very clearly says that and that's it.
That's all we know. So I think that the human brain can't make that much of a 180.
It's hard to go from two and a half years of thinking the Trumps were involved with Russia collusion.
We can get ourselves, or some of us can, to a new truth that that didn't happen.
But if you notice that half of the country can't even get there, half of the country is still stuck in the last movie, Where they believe that the Mueller report actually shows collusion.
They're actually reading the same page, and they can't even see the words the way they were intended, apparently, because they see a completely different story on the same page.
And it's a page written by lawyers to be as clear as possible.
And as clear as possible is, we cannot determine any collusion or conspiracy.
So I think that what we're seeing is a weird cognitive blindness that we see in a lot of different situations where it's just too hard for people to get their heads into that new frame because it's so different from what it had been two years ago.
And it's not because the facts don't clearly and unambiguously suggest that's what we should be talking about.
Because the facts do clearly and unambiguously state That Brennan was colluding with Russia to change the result of a U.S. election.
I just don't see any other way those facts could be interpreted.
But again, that's just the facts and evidence.
You always have to wait to give people their day in court.
Brennan, like anybody else, is innocent until proven guilty.
I don't want to suggest otherwise.
But if you're in the news business, you should be talking about the news that is In evidence.
And the news and evidence does not look good for Brennan.
Why is that not on the front page?
Why is the front page of CNN not...
Well, it looks like there's very strong evidence that the head of the CIA was trying to change the results of the election, and we've got a paper trail that proves it, and all evidence points that way perfectly.
How is that not the front page of CNN? There's something definitely broken in the system.
Alright, let's talk about executives at Deutsche Bank.
So here's the headline.
I think this was a CNN headline.
Executives at Deutsche Bank rejected the advice of their specialists when some transactions by the Trump Organization got flagged.
Alright, so there's a bank, Deutsche Bank, and they have specialists who look for transactions that are questionable.
The specialists, it is reported, flagged transactions from the Trump Organization, and then upper management looked at the situation and decided to let it go.
In other words, they did not pursue any kind of legal or other recourse.
Now, is that a story?
If you have never worked for a bank, that looks like kind of a story, doesn't it?
I have worked for a bank.
I have many years as a banker working in a number of different areas within the bank.
Pretty wide experience from lending to retail to the back systems, etc.
So I have a pretty broad experience in banking.
Let me interpret this story from the ridiculous version that you're getting To what it really means.
All right, I'm going to do the bank translation.
Here's what this means.
When you hear that specialists flag something, do you hear, oh my God, the top experts in banking had an opinion, but the bosses overrode it?
Is that what you're saying? Because you shouldn't be hearing it that way.
When you hear that a specialist flag something, That just means there was a big transaction and maybe it had a lot to do with cash.
That's it. The reason that a specialist would flag a transaction is just because it's a big dollar amount and maybe cash is involved.
That's it. That's the whole story.
Do you know how often there's a big transaction with cash involved?
All the time. All the frickin' time.
And those specialists probably flag all of them.
Do you know that banks, you know, if you do any transaction over $10,000, and maybe the dollar amounts changed since I was a banker, but in the old days, anything over $10,000 got flagged.
Do you know how many times I, as a banker, flagged a transaction?
Bunch of times. I personally, as a bank teller, flagged a lot of transactions.
Because there was something about them that I needed a supervisor to look at.
Something about it that was out of the bounds of my responsibility.
Maybe it was just a big dollar amount.
Maybe it was a complicated transaction.
I wanted to make sure it got done right.
Maybe there was something about it that was non-standard.
It got flagged. It means nothing.
The specialists flagged the transaction.
And when you see that their superiors looked at it and decided it wasn't worth pursuing, what you have described is every day at the bank.
That's every day at the bank.
Every day, underlings bring things to their boss and they say, here's some things that are non-standard, what do you think?
And the boss says, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, boop.
Pretty much all of the things that get flagged as non-standard eventually get improved.
What is missing in this CNN story?
What is missing is how often this happens and what percentage of things that get flagged end up being illegal.
What is your guess? If you hear a story with no context, specialist flagged some transactions in a bank, what does your brain go to?
Well, your brain automatically thinks, incorrectly, that this must be an unusual, bothersome kind of thing in which, you know, you really have to worry about it.
They leave out the context.
The context is how often do things get flagged in a bank And then they just get approved because that's just the process.
That's the normal banking process.
The normal banking process is people flagging stuff all the time.
And then bosses saying, that's okay, I'm glad you flagged it, but I see no problem.
Ordinary, ordinary business reported as extraordinary.
Now that's fake news, isn't it?
Would you say if something that's completely ordinary...
Is reported the opposite, as if it's extraordinary, isn't that fake news?
In what way could that not be fake news?
Because imagine how this could have been reported all so accurately.
Deutsche Bank is a bank like normal banks.
Okay? Normal.
They have processes in which anything that's non-standard or a big dollar amount, for example, gets flagged by people who watch this stuff.
They check it with their superiors and 99% of the time, or whatever the percentage is, there's nothing wrong with the transaction and the superiors approve it and it goes through.
That is called banking.
What I just described is banking.
Flagging things, looking for exceptions, making sure all risks have been accounted for, making sure that the right people are brought into the decision.
Banking. It's just banking.
That was the story.
That's the only thing we know.
Now if it turns out that there are other facts that come out, that's another story.
But the story we know Is that banking happened.
That's it. That's all we know.
All right. A little too much on that.
Let's see what else we got.
There's a story in The Atlantic, I think, I tweeted around yesterday, that apparently researchers tried to figure out if people are good at predicting.
And they tried to figure out if people who are experts in a topic are better at predicting.
What the future will be in that topic?
And what do you think they found out?
Is it true that experts in a topic are better than average, better than just someone else, at predicting what will happen?
And the answer is, nope.
They're not. No difference at all.
So, then they did another, they did more research, and they found out that the people who were best at predicting Had, wait for it, wait for it, good talent stacks.
Now, the article doesn't use my term for it, but a talent stack, an idea I introduced in my book, Caterfield, Almost Everything and Still Win Big, is the idea that if you have a little bit of knowledge on a bunch of different fields, you're better at predicting it.
That's really my primary message in that book, is that you have a better understanding of your world, including being able to predict what happens, if you have a broad set of experience.
So for example, someone who knows just science would be handicapped compared to somebody who knows science, but they also have a business background.
Or they also have a philosophy background.
Or they also have a history background.
Or an artist background.
So any kind of breadth of experience allows you to see around corners better than if you're in a silo and you're really good at one.
How is this important?
Well, I'll tell you. So somebody asked me the name of the book again.
My book that all this came from, the idea of Talent Stacks, is How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
You don't need to remember the name of the book.
Just remember my name and How to Fail.
It's a long title, so if you look for my name in my books, you'll find it.
If you look for How to Fail, you'll find it.
Now, here's the good news.
The good news is that my upcoming book, LoserThink, is a deeper dive on what you should know about each field to make you better at understanding your world.
So in other words, I'm going to take you for a tour about what a historian would know, you know, how an artist would look at things, how an economist would look at things, but I'm not going to teach you those disciplines.
I'm just going to teach you the key things that people learn, the big picture stuff, so that you'll instantly, instantly after you read the book, Be able to see how the world looks through a variety of filters instead of just one.
So if you want to see the world through more than one filter, this gives you a preview of those other filters so that you can see around objects.
You can see the future a little better.
And I was very happy to see that this research completely I'll give you an example.
So here's just the smallest example.
If you had never heard of the The idea of sunk costs.
Economists all know what sunk costs are.
It means you've already spent a lot of money here, but your next decision should not account for the fact that you spent a lot of money already.
You should treat money that you've already spent as if it's gone.
And it's a new decision today whether to spend more money on that same thing.
Now, that's an economist's way of viewing the world, which an artist might not think of.
An artist might say, man, I've already put a million dollars into this.
I'd better put some more money into it to justify the million I already spent.
That's how artists think.
Economists say, that million's gone.
It's just gone. We're good to go.
The Loser Thing book will be a deeper dive into concepts like that, things that are real easy to learn, like sunk costs, but if you haven't been exposed to them at least once, you wouldn't know that that was something you needed to consider.
All right, you're going to like that book, by the way.
That'll be out around November.
You can pre-order it now.
All right. I love the fact that only a few members of Congress have read the Mueller report.
What does that tell you about the world?
Now I always tell you that you should check your filter on the world against your observation.
So if you believe the world is a certain way, but you observe things are not going the way your view of the world predicts, well maybe then you should consider a new filter on the world.
My filter on the world, as you know, is that people don't use facts to make decisions.
Now, in the specific context of, say, finance, you know, if you're doing accounting or if you're doing a scientific experiment, then facts matter, of course.
But our normal life, we're not doing science.
You know, I didn't do any science today.
You probably didn't either. But we make lots of decisions in lots of irrational ways, and the facts don't really influence us so much.
The Mueller report shows that as clearly as anything could show you.
We were all waiting for the Mueller report because we thought the facts would change how we feel about stuff.
I never believed that to be the case.
My filter on the world is that it didn't matter how many facts were in the Mueller report.
Had it said that the President was totally guilty, the Republicans would have said, I don't see it.
I see the report.
I don't see any guilt in there.
Had the report said that he was completely exonerated, You know that the Democrats would say, I don't see any exoneration there.
I'm reading the same report you are.
Now, as luck would have it, Mueller was ambiguous enough that it was easy in this case to take whatever opinion you wanted.
Oh yeah, he totally made the case for impeachment, says Justin Amash.
Republicans say, I'm looking at the same thing.
I don't see any justification for impeachment in there.
So, if you expected...
That the Mueller report would have facts and that the facts would change people's opinion.
You were in a different movie than I was.
In my movie, there was never a chance that the facts would change anybody's opinion.
Now, you can imagine that there would be some kind of fact that would take you so far it would change your opinion.
In other words, like a real smoking gun, or even more than a smoking gun, a videotape of a crime.
You could imagine some extreme where the facts would actually change people's opinion.
But it wasn't likely that we were going to see that.
I mean, we would have seen that coming ahead of time.
It would have been leaked or something.
So within the range of what this Mueller report was likely to be, you should have predicted from the start that it wouldn't change any minds.
If you were predicting it would change minds, make a mental note that your filter on the world did not meet reality.
Make another note that my filter on reality, the facts don't change opinions, Was correct.
So much so that most of the politicians who deeply care about this biggest question in the world didn't even bother to read it.
And the people who could see the unredacted versions largely didn't even bother going to look.
Nobody really cared about the facts.
So just keep a note that that point of view succeeded this time in predicting again.
All right. I think that's about...
Oh, I have a question.
About social media.
So maybe you can... So this is a question, not an opinion.
I want you to fact check me here.
I need somebody who's got a little more knowledge about APIs and social media platforms than I do.
Could somebody create an interface, a program, an application...
That could post your content to any of the different platforms.
Now this part I know is true.
So there are like Hootsuite and other programs that let you schedule and then post your content to multiple platforms.
But Could somebody make a version of that in which you could also read content from only the platforms you wanted to read but collect it from all the platforms and also post all the platforms and And here's the best part, because I think the answer is yes to all those things, right?
But this is where you need to fact check me.
Could you create a higher level platform that simply interacts with all the social media platforms for the purpose of being able to create competition where none exists?
Let me say more about that.
What can Facebook do that Twitter cannot do?
Not much, right? I can post a picture on Twitter.
I can post a picture on Facebook.
Now, there's a small difference, meaning that my Twitter posts are open to the public, whereas my Facebook posts I can make private and or public.
Very small change.
Twitter could do that, right? Could you build an interface above all the social media programs that did whatever filtering you wanted to do?
But here's the important part.
Here's the important part.
Could you, when one of the platforms starts discriminating, move your attention and traffic to the one that is discriminating less or not at all?
So, for example, you see a number of competing platforms.
I saw one today called politichatter.com.
Now, I think they want to be sort of a competitor to Twitter for politics and be unfiltered.
But, of course, they have a rough road because it's hard to get anybody to go to a new platform.
But if you had a platform above the platforms...
You could just add that one in there and you wouldn't have to use any extra effort to post to there or to read there.
And then over time, you can sort of move your traffic where people are being less abusive.
Let me give you an example. Suppose you and all your friends had this new, higher-level application that was simply interacting with different social media platforms.
And Facebook deplatforms Candace Owens.
Now, they had her on suspension for a week for reasons that, when they looked at it, even they decided were not sufficient, so they reversed it.
But you as a consumer, if you see somebody getting deplatformed, you could very easily just check the box that takes that platform out of your traffic for a while.
Because you would still see everybody's tweets, everybody's pictures, but they would just be coming to you through a different platform.
Because people would be using all the platforms just by being part of one app.
So could you create competition where there is none, By some kind of a higher app that would reward Twitter, let's say, for being more...
And I think this is true. There's probably a difference with the platforms in terms of their openness to free speech.
We saw, for example, that Twitter, I think, has been more cautious than Facebook on a few cases.
And it would be easy for you to, let's say, incent Twitter by giving them more traffic And take traffic away from Facebook, but people would still see all your posts and all your content because they could see it through other platforms.
Now, I don't know if any of this is legal or if the platforms would close you down so that you couldn't use their platform with this third party.
I suspect that would be the problem.
So the general idea, and maybe this specific application is not a good one, but the general idea is how can we as customers put market pressure on the platforms to stay within the bounds of good censorship and not bad censorship.
When I say good censorship, There is content I don't want to see on the platforms.
I don't want to see ISIS propaganda.
I don't want to see anti-Semitic stuff.
So I don't mind that the platforms are editing, but when they go too far, you want the market to immediately respond in ways that influence their bottom line immediately.
Because let's say, for example, if Facebook...
Well, I'll give you a concrete example.
When Candace Owens got kicked off of Facebook for a little while, mentally I said to myself, I'm just not going to log on to Facebook for a week.
So I personally boycotted Facebook, but I didn't give up my account.
Nor would I. I think that cancelling your account Is sort of, you know, punching yourself in the face, because we sort of need these social media accounts to be part of society.
But I can certainly say to myself, I'll bet I could go a week without logging on to Facebook.
Because all the posts will still be there, you know, if I feel like it.
But I probably wouldn't look at as many posts if I wait a week.
I'm not going to bother to go down the whole thing.
I might look at the new one. So I said to myself, I will mentally boycott them.
But wouldn't it have been good if I had a platform, I could just click them off for a week.
And I could give them, how about this?
Shouldn't the public be able to give Facebook a one-week suspension?
That's the way to frame it.
Finally, okay, I accidentally got to the right answer by feeling around.
Right now, social media platforms can give an individual a one-week suspension.
But the public cannot give the social media platforms a one-week suspension.
But why not? How hard would it be for that to be a thing?
Now, I'm not saying that the conservatives should all cancel their accounts with Facebook if they see somebody get a suspension.
But you can certainly make your feeling known.
By simply giving them a one-week suspension of clicks.
And if something like a quarter of all conservatives gave Facebook a one-week suspension, they would actually see it in their bottom line.
They would actually notice that their graph just plunged 10% for no reason, or whatever.
So just something to think about.
So here's the general thought is this.
Whenever you have competition, you get better results.
And the social media situation has evolved to a point where we don't have equality of competition.
The customers don't have as much power as they should have.
You know, usually the customer is always right.
Social media is the one place where that's just not true.
Am I right?
For most businesses, the statement the customer is always right, you know, within balance, of course, is a fair statement.
And companies actually act as though that's the case.
Oh, whatever you want.
We'll make this right. We want to keep you as a customer for life, etc.
But the big social media platforms, they don't really need you.
They need most people, but they don't need you, apparently.
And so there's nothing stopping them from Just, you know, slapping off a customer, even if that customer maybe was in the gray area.
There's just no penalty for it.
So I think to stop this slippery slope, you need a little bit more customer control than we currently have.
So maybe we'll see that.
And by the way, my original statement about the deplatforming of conservatives was always that The slippery slope doesn't exist.
Meaning that a counterforce always appears when it looks like a slippery slope is going to happen.
So you never really get the slippery slope because the counterforce always appears.
And the counterforce is people saying, okay, you got rid of that person and I can see why you did it even though I would prefer free speech.
Like, that wouldn't make sense.
I don't like it, but at least I understand why you say, here's our standards, this is outside of our standards.
At least I get it. It's credible, even if I prefer it didn't happen.
But when you start throwing in a Candace Owens, that's not credible.
The conservatives will look at that and say, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What did she say that got her kicked off the platform?
And then you say, that's it?
You got kicked off the platform for that, and there was a big pushback.
So the pushback does appear when things go too far.
Now, that exact level where things end up might not be where you want it, but it's not going to go forever.
And I think you already saw the pushback.
I think the ironic...
Here's the irony with the conservatives being banned.
The worst problem about being a Trump supporter in 2016 was that you were associated with the worst people who were on the same side.
My biggest problem in 2016 is that I could so easily be lumped in with some of the worst things that people could say in the world who also happened like the president for their own reasons, not the same reasons as mine.
And what happens when those people get de-platformed?
My credibility goes up.
So I'm having a hard time completely being against any banning of anybody when that banning is good for me.
I hate to say it, but because I'm lumped in with a class of people that I would not lump myself in with, I wouldn't identify with other people's comments.
I just have my own comments.
But it's easy for part of the country to say, yeah, you're a Trump supporter.
You must be a neo-Nazi, because those guys like Trump, too.
I would be pretty happy if all of those voices, the neo-Nazis, etc., should they violate anything, I'd be happy if they go away.
It makes me look better.
So, it's sort of a...
How do you make a phone call go away?
There we go. Alright, so that's enough from that.
That's all I got for now.
And I will talk to you.
Somebody said, then who will defend you?
I don't know what you mean. Am I happy with unequal banning?
Yes, I am happy with unequal banning.
Let me complete that thought.
Somebody said, would I be happy if the conservatives got more banned than the people on the left?
Yes. Do you know why?
Because when the people on the left are allowed to be terrible, they're ruining the brand of all the people on the left.
That the anti-Trumpers can self-immolate if the worst of them pollute the rest of the brand.
If on the conservative side, the people who are most extreme get banned, then my brand, people who say good things about President Trump, improves.
Now, is that free speech?
No, it's not free speech.
That is not free speech.
It is speech within a prescribed zone, which is not too extreme in any direction.
So am I happy if I can live within the approved zone?
Because I don't think I've ever said anything that would get me kicked off a platform.
And I also don't think I ever would.
I don't see any situation where I personally would get deplatformed.
I just don't see it. But if people who are making my brand look bad get deplatformed, I say two things.
Hey, that's not free speech, because it isn't, but it's also a private company and they have rules and standards and they get to enforce those.
At the other hand, I say, hey, makes me look a little better.
I don't know. I'm not so sure that you should worry about the other side not getting as banned.
Because every time that they're allowed to go forward with their awfulness, it just makes their whole side look less credible.
All right. That's all for now.
And I'll make a bet with you that if I ever get deplatformed, I will deserve it.
There's my prediction, right?
So here's another case where you can use your filter on life to predict.
My filter on life says that there is no slippery slope for these bands of conservatives.
That there is no slippery slope.
Because the counterforce is already formed.
There would have been a slippery slope if no counterforce is formed, but they always do.
So my filter says that somebody like me We'll never get banned.
Unless I really did something that was legitimately bannable.
I don't think I would intentionally.
So that's the prediction.
If you think that I will someday get banned, keep that prediction in your head.
Keep that prediction in your head and see if it happens.
Now today I went after, or yesterday, I went after the SPLC. For the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, who is supposedly the entity which points out all the bad people on race so that they can be deplatformed, etc., they actually repeated the Charlottesville Fine People hoax in a tweet yesterday.
So I reported them.
I mean, actually, legitimately.
No joke.
This is not political theater.
I legitimately reported them for spreading a race hoax.
Because that race hoax is unambiguously false.
They should know it.
And even if it's an accident, it's the same effect.
They need to get educated and get rid of that type of speaking.
But that is absolutely racially divisive on a top level.
I don't want you to see any politics in this.
It's not tit for tat.
It's not those things.
This is legitimately hate speech against Trump supporters who are mostly white.
And they did it.
It was public. It's unambiguously racially offensive to me.
I am racially offended by that tweet.
And It's all the things that they're supposed to exist to not do, they did publicly and unambiguously.
So I reported them.
Now, here's the thing.
Will I be deplatformed for that?
I say no.
I say there is no way that I would be deplatformed for calling out bad racial divisive stuff.
No way. Because I'm right.
I think you have to at least be wrong.
Actually, being right isn't enough to keep you from being de-platformed.
But you have to have a good intention.
I think it's pretty obvious that my intention is to get rid of a racially divisive...
I never know, is it divisive?
Divisive? Divisive?
People say that differently, and I'm never sure which is the right way.
But it's racially damaging, and I wanted to get rid of it.
I think that kind of stuff has no place in the public discussion, because it's fake and it's bad for everybody.
So we'll see. I don't think that a person like me can get kicked off a platform.
Because I have both good intentions, and in this case, you know, I have the truth on my side.