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June 7, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:53
Episode 557 Scott Adams: Demise of VOX and the Daily Beast, Nervous Nancy, Floppy Joe, Shadowbanning
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
You better get in here while it's still possible, while social media still allows you to find me.
I don't know how much longer this will last.
Starting to think that my reign here on Periscope might be winding down, but we'll see.
So we'll talk about all that.
But before we do... I know why you're here.
And it has to do with a simultaneous sip.
Maybe you're grabbing a cup or a glass or a mug right now.
Could it be a stein or a chalice or a tankard?
A vessel of any kind?
Maybe a thermos or a flask?
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
I would like to begin by reiterating a clarification from yesterday.
Some days ago, I had retweeted something by Joe Concha.
It was an article written by somebody else in which somebody else repeated the fine people fake news.
And I had commented on that, but I think sometime between the time that I tweeted it and the time I talked about it on Periscope, I had conflated in my mind the tweeter and the author and had mistakenly identified Joe Concha as the author, but he was actually a tweeter of an article that had one line of fake news in it.
Now, Joe asked me to apologize publicly.
To which I say, of course!
If anybody's going to apologize publicly for a mistake, it should be the creator of the 48-hour rule.
So I did just that.
But I added a tweet...
So there's something he has that he can look at and forward.
If anybody gives him a trouble, he'll have something specific that he can just forward to them.
So I'm taking the apology off of its original place, Periscope, and putting it in addition on Twitter so that it's written instead of spoken.
Anyway, I suggest that all of you do the same, which is if somebody asks you to correct an error, that you do it right away.
Acknowledge it and correct it.
And so I have.
Enough about that.
Let me get to my prediction.
I'm going to make the following prediction.
The two publications will be out of business within 12 months.
One is Vox and the other is The Daily Beast.
So my prediction is both of those publications will cease to exist within 12 months.
The reasons being...
Different, but somehow similar.
Number one, Well, Vox, of course, has the problem that their brand has somehow now become synonymous with the worst person who works there.
What's his name?
Carlos? Carlos Massa?
I forget his name.
So he's becoming controversial because he caused, apparently, some demonetization of Steven Crowder and maybe some other people.
And what this did was raise his profile.
And unfortunately, his profile is the very worst thing that you could want as your banner.
I remember the first time I saw one of his videos.
So I didn't know him, didn't know he was associated with Vox, didn't know anything about him.
I just saw a video. I remember watching the video and thinking to myself, am I watching the worst human being I've ever seen in my life?
I mean, I'm not talking about people who are mass murderers.
They're worse. But in terms of a person who's not actually physically hurting anybody, at least directly, I thought, my God, the fake news and the whole presentation seems designed to cause some kind of a race war.
And then, as it went on, it was obvious that he just was a racist.
Of course, that's always an opinion, right?
Everybody gets to have their own opinion of who's a racist, right?
There's no test.
It's subjective, isn't it?
Now, if I watched his presentation and my impression, my opinion, and this is honest, by the way, my honest opinion is that he's just a racist.
Now, I get to have that opinion, I'm pretty sure.
But anyway, so Vox has two problems.
Apparently their writers are on strike.
That's not good. Apparently they weren't making money before, and they've just destroyed any hope they have of a good reputation in the world, thanks to this one employee.
So extra, extra bad.
I don't know how they can keep him on.
But apparently they like what he's doing.
He gets a lot of clicks. So I think Vox, their reputation is gone.
Their business model is broken.
And more importantly, they have just painted a giant target on their backs.
So from a business perspective, you don't ever want to do what Vox did.
From a business perspective, it's one thing to have half of the country, or whatever the percentage is, it's one thing to have a part of the country like you, and a part of the country that says, you're not my thing.
Any business can survive that situation.
They only need that the people who don't like them don't care that much.
Do you get it? Here's the important part.
In order to be successful, you need some people who like you, which they have, but you also necessarily need some people, the people who don't like you, to also not care.
They just don't care one way or another.
They're just ignoring you.
That situation changed.
Vox now just angered half of the United States.
I'm not exaggerating, but there's some large number of conservatives who have just said to themselves, huh, if there were ever a way to legally hurt Vox, I would certainly do it.
Because they've outed themselves as not a credible player, not...
Not interested in reality, not interested in anything, but really creating a bad situation in the country in return for clicks.
So when you have that many people who are now motivated to do something to act against your interests, well, I don't know exactly how this will play out.
It could turn into more lawsuits.
It could turn out to pressure on their advertisers.
You don't know how it will play out.
But Vox has crossed a line from something that you didn't like but you could easily ignore to something that is now literally an enemy.
They're an enemy of the people, but they're a double enemy of the class that they've identified for attack.
Likewise, the Daily Beast, I think, has...
It's unlikely to be around for similar reasons.
There are some publications that seem to have crossed some kind of weird line from at least pretending to be something like news or something like a legitimate publication to something else, something darker.
And so I think both of those publications are unlikely to last 12 months.
That's my prediction.
All right, let's talk about Twitter.
It has some new rules, terms of service.
Apparently they've shortened them.
And I did a quick look and I saw nothing that I would object to.
Twitter looks to be like they have some kind of more clear, easier to read ideas about what violates their terms of service, what kind of things would get you kicked off.
So that's all good. I would love to see, but don't expect it, that if there were ever a perfect time for Twitter to do an amnesty, Meaning allowing back on the platform people who had been kicked off before, so long as what they got kicked off for was something that would have been okay under the clarified terms of service.
So I think it would be amazing for their reputation and everything else if they did, or at least considered, some kind of a mass forgiveness of people Who maybe didn't understand their terms of service because by their own reckoning they were too complicated and maybe people violated them without knowing.
But now that they've clarified them, this is really the perfect time to say, okay, now it's more clear.
Try it again. And if you violate it again, maybe you have to be banned again.
But at least it's clear.
This would be the perfect time to do it.
I don't expect it to happen.
Here's why I don't expect it to happen.
I told you that my Twitter traffic fell off a ledge in the last week.
And I've suggested, and I'm going to suggest this again, here's a concept that is so true across all different areas and fields and projects and interests that you should always keep this in mind.
It's probably the central rule of management.
If you had to have one rule about management, it would be this.
If you can measure it, you can manage it.
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
So when you look at managers, what they're doing, you will find that the things that they can measure, they're going to actually do a good job on because they can test things and they will operate on things that can be measured.
It's just human nature and it makes sense commonsensically as well.
If you look at shadow banning and throttling and all the allegations about what the social media networks are doing under the hood to suppress certain kinds of people and opinions, what's the problem with that?
If you wanted to fix that, could you?
If it can't be measured, you can't fix it.
And the only people who could measure it are the people who are not going to tell you.
If, hypothetically, there's something going on, those people would not want you to know, so therefore there's no way to measure it.
And so I asked myself, is there no way to measure it?
Is there no way for external entities to identify it without having the insider information that only the companies themselves would have?
I don't know. But I just used a tool that you saw me tweet for AJ Cortez's account.
Somebody alerted me that there's a way you can test for shadow banning.
Just look on my latest tweet.
You can see it.
And I forget what it's called.
Somebody will say it in the comments here.
And I ran that.
And it said that, sure enough, AJ Cortez...
Was being prohibited from the suggestions.
So in other words, if you were looking for like-minded people, sometimes it suggests who you follow.
And it actually came up with the result that he'd been banned.
Now he said that in the last three months, his Twitter followers went from healthy growth every month to boom, just fell off a cliff.
And then I said that mine fell off a cliff a week ago.
Now the first question I ask...
The first question I ask is, is this shadow banning tool accurate?
Is it accurate? Can somebody fact check that for me?
And that's what I tweeted.
I asked for a fact check.
I don't know if we can trust...
Yes, it's called shadowban.eu.
So, shadow...
shadowban.eu.
So I'm looking for information as to whether that's accurate.
Because if it's accurate, it shows that they did, in fact, throttled somebody who I would consider not even slightly controversial.
Certainly nothing that would violate terms of service.
People, of course, are telling me every day that they're not seeing my tweets and they don't get the notifications.
That stuff, I can never tell if that has to do with the settings or selective memory or any of that.
So it's hard to determine from that.
But the other thing I did recently was I told you I'm using an app called Social Blade.
And it's a free app.
And if you have more than one account, it's handy.
Because, as you can see, I've set it up for my two main social media accounts.
It doesn't matter that you can see them.
So one is for Twitter, and the other is for YouTube.
Now, those are probably comparable in the sense that, you know, I have...
I use them both every day, so I put content on them every day, and I put similar content on them every day.
So the things I say in Periscope are very similar to and often I talk about my tweets.
So you should expect that their movement would be similar.
Now, not exact, and this is not a science, but I'm suggesting ways that maybe there could be external checks on things.
So what I did was I go to my list of Twitter followers, and I can see here that they had been healthy hundreds a day, and then it just falls off a ledge in the past week.
So what I do is, okay, if Twitter traffic fell off in the last week, Does that mean it's just summer?
Because that could be a thing, right?
It's not unusual for summer to slow down social media traffic.
So I go over to YouTube, and I don't see the same drop.
So the same days that you would have expected if it were just summer...
YouTube would go down, too, about the same, wouldn't it?
If, let's say, internet traffic dropped by 20% just because it's summer, I would see a 20% drop in Twitter, something like a 20% drop on YouTube, right?
But I don't.
I see a sudden drop on Twitter not matched by a sudden drop on YouTube.
Same content, same time, publishing every day.
Is that meaningful? I think it is.
Because even if you imagine that YouTube is doing some throttling, I don't know if they are in my case, and if you imagine that Twitter is doing some throttling, and again, I can't confirm that they are, you would expect that they might not do it at the same time and in the same way.
So whenever you saw a disconnect A sudden drop of traffic on a, let's say, a comparable platform, and finding comparables might be the hard part here, that should raise a flag, correct?
So what I'm doing is I'm suggesting that there should be some ways to compare platforms and find any disconnects and flag it.
So in my case...
I would say the evidence strongly suggests there's something going on here that's terrible.
Now, I was reading a little bit on the shadowban.eu site about how they do things and a little bit of explanation.
And they had a scary paragraph talking about Twitter's official response to whether or not shadow banning happens.
And apparently they use some very specific lawyer-like language To say we're not shadow banning, but then they define shadow banning in such a limited way that it's not really what we're talking about.
So one of the things that apparently would not be shadow banning, because of the way they defined it, would be if your tweets don't show up, if my tweets don't show up in your feed, that's not called shadow banning apparently.
Because you can still go directly to my account and read all my tweets.
So my tweets are not hidden.
Every one of them is right there on my Twitter feed.
It's just that you might not see them.
Perhaps, like AJ Cortez, maybe you just don't come up as a recommended person to follow.
Would that be shadow banning?
Well, by all of our definitions, yes.
By the definition of Twitter, apparently no.
So, here's the big issue.
I cannot determine, nor can any of you, whether there's really something going on here.
Because every time you think you see something, It isn't that different from what confirmation bias would look like, and you've got to keep that in your head to stay sane.
So, for example, is A.J. Cortez, the fact that that one piece of software identified that he was being shadowbanned, is that real?
I don't know. How do you and I know that that piece of software, that shadowband.eu, how do we know that's accurate?
How do we know that it doesn't have false positives?
We don't know. How reliable is software from people you don't know?
Not reliable, right?
In general, it's not reliable.
I don't know any way to test that.
Now... So, what I would suggest is that developers and people who understand how to use the APIs of these various services find some way to find comparables.
So, for example, let's say, here's another suggestion that's in the same line.
Let's say you had My account, my Twitter account, and AJ Cortez's account.
Let's say you had determined, and I'm not sure this is the case, but let's say you had determined that they do similar kinds of things and they have a lot of followers in common.
So the content and the followers have a lot in common.
Let's say you added them to several other accounts which you found largely similar.
They might be the same scale, same size.
They might be similar content, similar followers.
And then you say to yourself, do any one of them show sudden drops?
Because probably whatever would be happening that would look like shadow banning would probably hit some people first And it may not have the same effect on every person who is there.
Let's say they're comparable.
So that's one way to measure.
You could say, uh-oh, A.J. Cortez took a drop.
The comparables did not, so he's being targeted.
Or the comparables on other platforms did not take a drop at the same time, therefore he's being targeted.
You wouldn't always know, but perhaps you could, if you were looking at enough accounts over time, both comparing within the social media and also across platforms, could you find a statistical, reliable way to say something's going on here?
I think so.
I think the smartest people in the world can figure out how to do that.
But you always have the problem that you couldn't confirm it.
So even if you were sure you were getting it right, you probably couldn't confirm it.
So that's the problem. All right, let's move on.
Did you hear that Michael Wolff, who was a big anti-Trumper, who wrote some crappy book full of lies, and then he had a follow-up book that's another crappy book full of lies about the president.
Did you notice that he sort of came and went and nobody cared?
So CNN had him on, but maybe only once?
Because Michael Wolff is so...
His credibility is...
Well, I refer to him on Twitter as the poor man's Michael Avenatti.
And let me put it this way.
If someone can refer to you as the poor man's Michael Avenatti...
And people who read my tweets say, oh, you got a point there.
He is sort of the poor man's Michael Avenatti.
If you find that people will laugh at that because it seems true, well, well, maybe it's time to not be on CNN so much.
So I think CNN has learned from their Michael Avenatti episode so that even the poor man's Michael Avenatti doesn't get much attention.
Honestly, I don't even know what Michael Wolff said this time.
I knew he had a book.
I didn't click on a single link.
Did you? Did any of you click on any Michael Wolff has a new book story?
Every time I saw one, I said, well, not clicking on that, because I know there's nothing in there that's real.
I imagine that those who measure these sorts of things noticed.
I have a suggestion.
That is very, very self-serving for how to help with conservatives who are demonetized.
I'm going to toss this out here because I don't know if it's a brilliant idea or a terrible idea, but I know for sure.
So before you say it, let me acknowledge this is at least partly self-serving.
So don't think that I don't have self-interest in this idea, but...
You could take me out of the idea, and the idea would still stand alone.
So I'm going to use suggestion for dealing with these demonetized people.
You might recognize where this suggestion comes from, but I'm not going to say it.
Here's the idea. My startup has a crypto token called the WEN. We have millions of them which are worth nothing unless people decide to use them and trade them and use them within the app or they can use them outside the app on exchanges, they can trade them, etc.
So the only thing that makes any crypto token or coin useful is demand.
Suppose Suppose, and I'm not offering this yet, I just want to fly it out there.
Suppose I were to gift The larger conservatives who got deplatformed with a whole bunch of WEN tokens.
All they would need to receive them is just open up an interface account or have an ERC-20 wallet.
Very easy. I mean, a couple of minutes to set up an account.
I could just say to somebody like Dave Rubin or Stephen Crowder, And again, it wouldn't be for every person, so I would probably have to pick my areas.
But I'd look for people who had not done something so bad they were kicked off a platform entirely.
But had only done something so bad they got demonetized.
I could say, here's a bunch of when.
All you have to do is accept it.
There's no obligation. And then anybody who wanted to support those people could simply also buy the token.
You could buy them at whenhub.com, you could buy them on hotbit.io and some other exchanges.
So you could buy them in a variety of ways, and if anybody buys them for any reason, to use it within my app, simply to support these creators, to use it as your own gifts, because you could also gift it to people.
So you could buy the when and say, hey, Dave Rubin, you got demonetized, if he gets demonetized, and say, here's some when.
You know, not a lot. I'll give you $20 worth, whatever.
That demand would become self-fulfilling.
In other words, the mere fact that lots of people were buying it just to help people who had been demonetized would create its value.
And so the people who got them for nothing, because I decided to give them a bunch, would make a million dollars.
So you can make somebody like Steven Crowder or Dave Rubin or, you know, I'm talking about the people who are not going to get kicked off a platform, but might be throttled, they might be demonetized.
And I could just say, all right, here's a bunch of when.
If the public wants these to be valuable and they want you to be rich because you got demonetized, you can do it easily.
All right. So I'm not going to say that's...
Somebody says it's too complicated.
Well, let me simplify it.
I would tell these people to open up a wallet that takes about a minute.
They just put in their information.
It takes about a minute. And then I can send them stuff and they don't even have to do anything.
It'll just, you know, it'll just appear in their wallet.
I mean, it's a simple process.
They don't have to do anything.
If the when never becomes valuable enough that they say, hey, let me cash these in, then that's it.
That's the whole process. If it does become valuable, cashing it in is simple.
You just sign up for one of the exchanges and trade it for Bitcoin, trade it for US dollars, that sort of thing.
All right, that's the idea. I'll just leave that out there for a minute.
Do you see that Russia seems to be testing us on the sea and in the air?
So there's a story about a near collision of sea, and then that's been added to some stories about some Russian aircraft intercepted some U.S. military planes in international waters.
Here's what I ask you about this.
Is this real?
I have a real concern that the news about Russia playing chicken with the United States It's based on real events.
I mean, I think the actual reported events are completely real.
But there's something I'm worried about here.
And let me get to it.
It seems that the key piece of this is the naval thing that happened.
So the two ships, the Russian ship and the U.S. ship, came within, I don't know, 150 feet of each other, which is way too dangerous.
And it looks like the Russians did it intentionally.
Now, that's being used as sort of the main story, and then they add, oh, but they did these things in the air, and they tried to intercept us in the air, etc.
But here's the thing. I think the air interceptions are not that unusual, are they?
I don't know how unusual they are.
Because it seems to me that our militaries, at least in the air, are sort of testing each other every now and then.
We get near their airspace to test their defenses.
They get near our airspace to test our defenses.
They do an intercept for sometimes a reason that makes sense to them, sometimes it doesn't.
So I don't know how much the air stuff is different or bigger or newer or more dangerous than normal.
So that's just a question mark, right?
But when I saw this naval one, this one looks suspicious to me, and here's why.
If you have never had experience sailing, you wouldn't know what I'm going to tell you next, which is that ships and boats have rules of right-of-way.
It has to do with the size of the ship and the direction and stuff, and I don't know all the rules, but it is true.
There's something called a right-of-way, and it's an understanding that everybody on the ocean knows.
For example, if you're in a narrow channel of water, and there's a very large ship coming your way, and it looks like it's in your way, and you're on a small boat, The big ship has the right of way.
That's the rule. The reason is the small ship can get out of the way easily.
So the big ship has the right of way over the small ship.
But there are other rules about who's doing what that are also understood.
Now, my understanding about this near collision is that the US ship slowed down artificially because it was landing some, I think, helicopters.
So you had a Russian ship who believed, probably, it had the right of way, and you had a U.S. ship, which normally would be traveling at a higher speed, but slowed down.
Now, did the Russian ship know that the U.S. ship was in a process, landing a helicopter, that required it to slow down?
I don't know. Because it's possible that Russia simply misread the situation and said, Russia has the right of way, and in order to sort of maintain our status, if you will, or whatever, our respect, they decided to make sure that they did not lose their right of way.
They didn't want to be scared off their right of way, because they had the right of way.
Now, if all the Russians did was pursue their right of way and it got too close because they misjudged what the U.S. was doing, which was slowing down to land some helicopters, would it have looked very much like what happened and have nothing to do with them testing us?
Maybe. Yeah, I'm not sure that the bigger ship is the only criteria for right of way.
I'm not a sailor, so somebody who knows this stuff, ideally somebody who has naval experience can answer that.
But before you decide that the US and Russia have some kind of military conflict just about ready to happen, I would ask you to at least consider That the news industry wants some news and they want it to be about Russia.
And I just don't know if these are coincidences that they've packaged up as news.
It might be.
So here's my temporary position is that it's leaning fake news.
It's leaning fake news.
I'm not going to conclude that, but if I had to bet on it, and you said, Scott, you've got to bet $1,000 that this is either the beginning of some dangerous trend, or it's a bunch of coincidences and an accident, which do you bet?
I would bet fake news.
So, doesn't mean it's true, but that's what I bet.
All right. I saw there was somebody who was described as an architect of the Green New Deal, Alright, so this is a person, I'll tell you the name in a second, not AOC, but somebody who worked on it.
Her first name is Rihanna, and I'll tell you the last name in a moment because the simulation is just so wonderful.
You know, the simulation is the idea that we're actually just made of software and there's some creator, because when you see coincidences like this one that I'm going to describe in a moment, you have to ask yourself, Is this really a coincidence?
Well, it probably is, but it's still funny.
Here it is. So somebody who's the architect of the Green New Deal, her first name is Rihanna, is, of course, the most lefty left you could ever be.
So you can't really be the architect of the Green New Deal unless you're super left, right?
What is the last name of the person who is identified with being super left, right?
Well, it's a hyphenated name, so obviously her husband, she and her husband have different last names, and they hyphenated.
I don't know which name was which, but one of the names was Gunn, G-U-N-N, Gunn, and the other name was Wright, W-R-I-G-H-T, and they decided to hyphenate it in this order, Gunnright.
Gunnrights. The most lefty person in the United States, her last name is Gunwrights.
I didn't make that up.
Oh, somebody said it could be a woman's spouse.
You are correct. You are correct.
I mistakenly said that, assumed that she was married to a man, and I should not assume that.
So her spouse had a different name.
So I don't know what to say about it.
It's just so funny. I looked at it and I thought, am I reading this right?
Is the leftiest person in the United States actually named after the Second Amendment?
Because that's just too good.
And did she not see that when they decided to name?
Because, I don't know, would it be better or worse if it was right gun?
Right gun would not be as on the nose as gun rights, but...
Anyway, so she made a prediction in some article...
That if we don't do the Green New Deal, or maybe even if we do, the climate change problem is this big.
This is how big, she says, the climate change problem is.
That we're talking about 150 million deaths, which she described as 25 holocausts.
Now, first of all, anybody who compares anything to the Holocaust loses all credibility for me.
I don't care who you are or what you're talking about.
I don't care if you're left or right.
If you're comparing your crap, whatever that is, to the Holocaust, I'm sorry.
There's almost nothing else I can hear you say after that.
Because there's nothing that compares to the Holocaust.
There are other bad things, but they're different.
Never, never compare anything to the Holocaust, unless it's, you know, exactly like it, I suppose.
But what are the odds?
Let's say you were asked to make a bet.
And here's the bet.
You have to bet that 150 million extra people will die because of the temperature going up at least 1.5 degrees.
Or you have to bet that fewer people will die.
In other words, people will be saved.
There will be fewer deaths than ever, even with climate change.
Which way would you bet? Would you bet that this is the time that the doom and gloomers are right and 150 million people die, or that actually less will die than have been dying historically?
Well, if you studied history, or Bjorn Lomborg, anything he writes about, in terms of the risks of death, you would see that we've become so good at avoiding death, even if the problem is the same or bigger, that if you were going to bet on it, you would bet that nobody died.
That would be the smart bet.
Even if Climate change is exactly what the scientists say, even if it's on the high end.
I would bet the number of deaths We'll be zero and probably fewer people will die than used to die just from other old reasons.
So the obvious examples are we're better at surviving and predicting storms.
If the ocean rises, people aren't going to be standing on the beach and suddenly drown.
They're going to have years to say, hey, this used to be up to my ankles, but now it seems like it's up to my shins.
I don't think people are going to drown because the ocean got bigger.
Now, what about death from famine?
Well, do you think that in 30 years, we'll be better or worse at getting food to people who need it?
We're going to be way better!
It's not even going to be close.
30 years from now, probably nobody will starve, no matter what's happening.
The temperature could be so hot outside that you barely can go outdoors during the summer.
And people still would be less likely to starve because we're so much better at getting food to people.
All right. So I think that's ridiculous.
Attorney General Bill Barr.
This was from, I think, Fox News Report.
Said, got a surprise this week when he hosted a listening session for civil rights groups supposedly concerned about the Justice Department's commitment to police reform.
Hardly anybody showed up.
So, Bill Barr, I guess he promised during his confirmation hearings, he promised Kamala Harris that if he were confirmed, he would have the Justice Department looked into police reform.
Now, I'm assuming that police reform...
It refers to anything that would look like racial bias.
I assume that's the context, right?
Correct me if I'm wrong.
But I think it has to do with police shootings and racial bias.
So remember I told you that Black Lives Matter just sort of disappeared?
You just don't even hear about them anymore?
They went from a big deal to, I guess, did they disband?
Do they still have meetings?
I don't even know. So imagine that the Attorney General holds a listening session specifically to hear what those kinds of concerns are, and almost nobody showed up.
It was just a big old waste of time.
And I told you that we haven't had a, as far as I know, a high-profile police shooting that is one of those questionable ones where people say, hey, what's going on there?
Somebody says it's the body cams.
Well, remember, I suggested that instead of talking about it, we just make sure that there are more body cams, because the body cams kind of solve all those problems.
I mean, don't solve all the problems, but it comes pretty close.
So it feels like a problem that just sort of people stopped caring about or that they stopped talking about it or did it get solved?
Did something happen? Sort of a mystery.
But it's a problem that literally just went away.
Now everybody's talking about President Trump's threat that he would impose tariffs on Mexico if they don't do more to control their border.
And what we're hearing is some positive stuff about Mexico's response.
Apparently they sent a bunch of their own National Guard, their version of the National Guard, to the border of Guatemala.
So they've armed, you know, they've fortified their military presence on the Guatemalan border to keep people from coming in the first place.
There's some talk about changing their immigration sort of, you know, what's the rule?
What's the word about people who want asylum?
There are asylum rules. So then Mexico might be looking at some of their laws.
And there was something else I did.
Oh, they started freezing some bank accounts of people who were suspected of trafficking, and I guess trafficking and immigration being part of the same conversation.
So, here's the question.
Did President Trump's threat of terrorists work?
Well, we don't know yet.
But the early indications are that it made some difference, or is likely to make a difference.
Now, what makes that work?
I would say the first thing that makes it work is that it's coming from Trump.
And Trump is in a protracted, long-term tariff battle with China.
Do you see how the tariff battle with China Helps him on immigration.
Because here's something that nobody in Mexico believes.
Are you ready for this? Something that no one in Mexico believes.
That he wouldn't make good on the threat.
Nobody in Mexico thinks he's bluffing.
Think about that. Almost any other time you have a situation like this, if you don't do this, I'll do this, you at least think Maybe he's bluffing.
Maybe we should test it a little bit.
We could always pull it back.
If it turns out he's not bluffing, we could always change our mind later, but let's push it because he's probably bluffing.
Does it look like Mexico considered for half a second that he was bluffing?
Nope. Did it matter to Mexico That so many experts and economists and people even on the Republican side and people on the Democrat side, did it matter to Mexico that so much of the country was telling Trump, don't do it, don't do it, it's bad for our economy?
Did that matter?
Nope. Think about that.
Imagine any other president, And imagine that both sides of the aisle are telling the president not to do it.
Republicans are telling him not to do it.
Democrats are telling him not to do it.
Now, replace Trump with Obama.
Do you think that Mexico would say, oh, Obama's definitely going to put this tariff on us, even though so many experts on both sides are telling him not to do it?
They would say, no, this sounds like a bluff.
I don't think he can do this politically.
Now change out Obama, put in Trump, what do they think?
Abso-frickin-lutely he's gonna do it.
He's gonna do it, and it doesn't matter how many people tell him not to.
Do you know why? Because he's right, and it works, and if you don't make good on your threats, you don't get anything.
So he's definitely gonna make good on his threats.
He will make good on his threats.
That's what gives him currency.
That's what gives him the ability to negotiate.
And you see that so powerfully here with Mexico, if it comes to a good solution or an improvement.
We'll see. All right, we've got to talk about some new nicknames here.
We've got President Trump is testing out Nervous Nancy for Nancy Pelosi.
I have rated this among his very best.
Nervous Nancy is up there with Low Energy Jeb as just a home run.
Now, I don't know if he'll keep it, because it depends if the public retweets it and stuff.
I'm sure they're keeping an eye on how people are responding to it.
But let me tell you how perfect this is, and then I'm going to compare it to something that's not perfect so you can see the difference.
Nervous Nancy... Has a number of qualities.
Number one, and this is his secret sauce, it's something that visually is reinforcing.
Every time you see her, you're going to wonder, hey, what's going on?
Is she old?
Does she have a mental problem?
Is she drinking? Is she sick?
Or is she nervous?
Now, had Trump said, I think she's drinking or she's mentally incompetent, people would say, oh, come on.
Come on.
That's not really an evidence.
You know, you could have your suspicions, but that's not fair.
But when you say somebody's nervous, everybody's nervous.
Sometimes we're more nervous than other times, but you can't really debunk it because without getting inside her head, how in the world can you know if she's nervous or not?
So it's brilliant because it doesn't go too far.
Calling her a drunk or insane would go too far.
Nervous is well within his acceptable range where people aren't going to say we must impeach him for calling Nancy Pelosi nervous.
So it's safe, but imagine how that gets in your head.
This is the part people don't get.
When Trump refers to Biden as sleepy, he's changing Biden's behavior and he's calling out something for the press to look at.
So the press is going to pay attention to how hard Joe Biden is campaigning.
And if it's not hard enough, they're going to call it out because the president calls him sleepy.
If Joe Biden responds to that by trying to up his energy, he's going to look like a fake.
Because if you put your energy higher than your normal energy, people say, what's wrong with you today?
It just looks fake.
So he can't do that.
And if he tries to put, let's say he adds more events or something, he's actually going to get tired because he's pretty old.
So Trump is using sort of a...
Trash talk psychology that you would use on a golf course.
I was imagining, after he came up with Nervous Nancy, I was imagining how hard it would be to beat Trump at golf.
Can you imagine trying to golf with Trump, even if you were better than him a little bit?
You'd be talking in the golf cart, and he'd be saying stuff that just gets in your head.
You'd be driving in the golf cart, and Trump would be like, hey, nice day.
He'd be talking about different things, nothing.
And then he'd say, hey, I notice your stroke's a little smoother than normal.
And the competitor thinks, my stroke's a little smoother than normal?
I haven't changed anything.
I wonder what's What makes my stroke look smoother?
Well, he didn't insult me. That's actually a compliment, isn't it?
I think my stroke is...
And then by the time that golfer gets to the ball, he's barely going to be able to hit the ball.
The ball's going to go in the trees.
Because all the golfer is thinking about is his stroke.
Now, if you're a golfer, you already know this, right?
You don't comment on somebody's form during a match.
You don't do that, right?
Can the golfers here confirm?
I'm not much of a golfer, but can you confirm that the last thing that would be fair game is to mention anything about somebody's technique Or how they're feeling.
Or suppose you said to your golfer, say, hey, what's the matter today?
And the golfer says, what do you mean, what's the matter?
I'm just asking you, is there anything wrong with you today?
You look a little off today.
What do you mean? What do you mean I look a little off?
That would be enough. To completely ruin somebody's game.
It's the same technique that Trump is taking to politics.
You know, the same way that he's brought entertainment and reality TV skills, which he's weaponized really effectively, he's bringing sort of sports trash talking skills into politics like you've never seen them.
So imagine you're nervous Nancy.
The next time you're speaking in public, what's it going to do to you to know that half of the country is watching you to see if you're nervous?
Think about it. If you haven't thought of it this way, you're missing the best part.
The best part is what it does to her future behavior.
Because you can't ignore that.
It's impossible to ignore.
The next time she's in public, She's going to be speaking, and because there have been all these clips of her changing her word or hesitating and pausing, before you had seen it framed as nervous, maybe it didn't mean as much to you.
If nobody had been talking about, you know, there's something wrong with her speech because of that fake video that slowed down her speech and made it look like she was slurring, if none of that had ever happened, you wouldn't even notice.
Because people who speak without a script in public often need to pause, change a word, misspeak, you know, stammer.
Completely normal, and certainly completely normal over a certain age.
But Trump just got in her head so hard that the first time she gets flustered, misses a word, has to correct, the first time she has an imperfection, She's going to be thinking about the things she has to fix, thinking about what she wants to say, thinking about how to say it, and thinking about how to make it look not nervous.
How's that going to look?
Let's just say her golf game is not going to be on point.
And that is the genius of what he does.
Now, let's compare that.
Let's compare it to...
To Don Jr.'s tweet, I think it was yesterday or today, in which he was referring to Joe Biden changing his stance about the funding of abortion.
So I guess Biden had been at one point supportive of the idea that the federal government should not fund abortions.
He now changed that to, yes, yes, the government should be funding abortions.
Now Don Jr.
tweeted with the hashtag FloppyJoe.
Now, on a humor level, Floppy Joe is tremendous.
It's just got the right words, the right letters, you know, it rhymes with Sloppy Joe, that makes you laugh, and sure enough, Joe Biden flip-flops, so it fits.
So, it's kind of great, right?
Floppy Joe, just as good as Nervous Nancy, right?
No, not even close.
Floppy Joe is very funny, and in the context of a tweet, it's actually great.
So as a humorous tweet that gets your attention, gets a lot of retweets and stuff, it's great.
So Don Jr.
came up with a great nickname for getting more tweets.
But you notice that Floppy Joe isn't really going to change Biden's behavior.
I mean, because what's the worst thing that could happen is he'll stop changing his mind.
I don't know if that even hurts him.
So Floppy Joe doesn't have the weaponized quality that's actually going to change how you see Joe Biden forever.
It just doesn't change how you see him.
But low-energy Jeb?
Oh, that definitely changed how you see him.
Crooked Hillary? Well, that probably heightened whatever suspicions you already had, for sure.
Nervous Nancy? Oh, that absolutely changes how you see her.
Floppy Joe? Brilliantly funny.
A great tweet.
Probably doesn't change anything in the election.
So there's the difference.
So it would be easy for you to say, if you're sort of not versed in the persuasion of it, that those are both good because they both make you laugh.
But one of them is weaponized and one of them is just good tweeting.
All right. I think that hit all of the points that I wanted to hit today.
And so, I ask you, is there anything else that you'd like...
Oh, I have one question for you.
I'm going to put this out here. I have a book that was my sequel to God's Debris, wrote years ago, called The Religion War.
And I've never created the...
I've never created the audiobook for it.
Would any of you be interested in hearing the audiobook in chapter form on YouTube?
In other words, I could just read my own book...
On YouTube, and then you can listen to it as a podcast, or you can listen to it as a...
Now, I'd probably...
I don't know if I would break it up into separate chapters or what I'd do.
I might do that. Okay.
A lot of people are saying yes.
I mean, why wouldn't you? It's free.
You can listen or not listen.
Alright, I'll think about doing that.
I'll find the right time to do that, and then we'll go.
Question. I have improved my lighting setup in this room.
Is my lighting better today than usual?
Usually I can't tell until the replay.
So here's the question. Is my lighting good today?
Oh, I don't know what you're saying yes to now.
Can somebody tell me if my lighting's good?
I'm waiting for some of the comments to go through.
All right, well, I'll look at them later.
Good, I'm glad so many of you are saying yes to that.
Well, then I'll do that. Isn't this the beauty of the medium?
You can watch in real time as you're influencing me and then I do something on social media and that influences other people.
So you're actually... I hope you feel this.
In real time, you're influencing me and then I'll do things that will influence other people.
This is real and it's powerful and it's fun.
Somebody says too bright.
I think you might be right. I won't know until I see the ultimate replay.
All right. Enough for now.
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