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June 19, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
31:19
Episode 571 Scott Adams: Hacking the Algorithm and Other Stuff
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Hey everybody, guess what?
Guess what? It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, featuring the highlight of your day.
The place where your dopamine starts getting on board, starts to become part of your day.
Yeah! Sorry I'm a little late.
I'll tell you why in a moment.
But first, grab a Tankard or a stein or a chalice.
Grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your thermos, your flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like the coffee.
That's what I like. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
Ah! Delightful!
Well, I was just sending out a humorous tweet, which made me be a little late here.
I couldn't quite get the wording right, but I was watching a video of, it looks like, Jerry Nadler walking in for his hearings with Hope Hicks.
You have to see this tweet, because the contrast, Ali Alexander just pointed this out, it's the funniest contrast.
So, normally I don't like to talk about people's appearances.
Because it's sort of the lowest end of humor is talking about people's appearances.
But I can't help it this time.
This time it's just sort of in your face.
So find the video, you can look at the one I tweeted, but you'll see others, in which Hope Hicks is walking down the hallway to the hearing, apparently with Nadler and crew, followed by Nadler.
Now, Hope X, I don't know if she had a good hair day, the lighting was good, but she looks like...
I don't know, the most beautiful supermodel who ever walked down the hallway, or the second most beautiful.
You know, Christine is the most beautiful.
But she's walking down the hallway and, you know, just looking good and, you know, very, very out of place in this political hallway with a bunch of politicians.
And then the very next person is Nadler.
Now, Nadler's pants, if you haven't noticed, every year his pants level gets higher and higher until he's wearing his pants starting about here now.
And I was trying to write a funny tweet about, you know, what's going to happen if his pants keep getting higher.
And then I thought, wait a minute.
Will they think I'm making a tweet about his pants because Hope Hicks is looking good?
No, I don't want to do that.
That's not the direction I want to go.
So I went with, you have to keep an eye on Nadler's pants, because if they keep rising at this rate, he's going to have to unzip his fly just to talk.
And I think that was worth saying.
Yes, it wasn't important, but it was worth saying.
All right, let's talk about some other interesting news.
So both Joe Biden and Don Lemon have once again in public...
Once again, spreading the FPH. Now, if you don't know what the FPH is, there's a reason I'm using the letters instead of the words.
Because I did a little test yesterday to see if YouTube would demonetize me for a certain word, or a certain set of words.
Those words start with F, P, and H. What do you think?
Do you think... And I did the test, so I would say nothing else that could possibly be over the line.
So I was very clear it was a single-purpose periscope, just a test, which then got loaded onto YouTube.
What do you think happened?
Demonetized. Instantly.
Demonetized. No curse words.
No incorrect information.
So there were no curses, no incorrect information.
It was not offensive in any way.
There was no offensive material.
The only thing in it was the three words that started with F, P, and H. Those of you who are on Periscope watching this can see what that means.
Those of you who are watching this later on YouTube...
Who are doing it on YouTube will not see those words, but you can figure it out by context.
Now, somebody here is asking me if it might be because of another word, another word that sometimes is used to refer to bad people who have a certain belief system.
And if I were to spell it backwards, it would be I-Z-A-N. So I made sure that I didn't use that word, you know, use the word correctly, in my test.
Now, it did get re-monetized fairly quickly.
So it was instantly demonetized on YouTube.
So the test worked.
There was nothing offensive in it.
It was just content that apparently somebody doesn't want to monetize.
And I do understand...
That you would not want to pair advertisements with any conversation on that topic because most people talking about that topic are going to say something that the advertisers wouldn't want to associate with.
I don't. But here's the problem.
Even if you get demonetized temporarily, And then re-monetized?
It doesn't help at all.
Because all of your monetization happens in the first 24 hours.
So pretty much, at least in my case, the viewership is 80% on the first day.
So if they demonetize the first day and then say, oops, well, it was an overage, we'll re-monetize you.
It doesn't help at all.
It doesn't help at all.
Because you've already lost all of your monetization.
So this was shocking.
Just shocking. That content that was completely clean and appropriate and not controversial even.
Not controversial at all.
Some people might disagree with it, but it wouldn't be controversial in the normal sense.
So, anyway, it seems to me that I put a little more work into how we could determine what the algorithm is doing without being the holders of the algorithm.
And here's how I'd do it.
What you do is you take a bunch of different accounts, YouTube accounts, and you'd ask them to report their experience.
So if they got demonetized, they would report to this central website or something when they got demonetized and what was demonetized.
Then that central site can do the same thing that I assume YouTube does, which is do a speech-to-text and then look for text that may have been the problem text.
Now, in the case of YouTube, they're looking for text that they've already banned or they want to throttle, and then it does its thing, presumably.
I'm presuming that's how it happens.
I might be wrong.
So if you wanted to find out what keywords they were looking for, Without them telling you, because they won't, you can have a number of accounts that volunteer to tell you when they get demonetized.
And then, once somebody reports they've been demonetized, the central site, that's sort of a monitoring site, could check their speech-to-text, only if they get demonetized, and then run it against other people who are demonetized and find the correlations.
So if every time somebody says orange, it gets demonetized, you would notice that because it would happen to a variety of accounts that wouldn't have much of anything else in common.
So, if you had enough accounts who were willing to report when they got demonetized to a central monitoring organization or person, I think you could work backwards.
I think you could work backwards to figure out what the keywords were and why you got banned.
And that would have been very helpful in this situation.
All right. Sorry.
I saw that Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton, who are on opposite sides of politics, are combining to do some kind of a fentanyl sanctions bill against China.
So in other words, Congress is working across the aisle.
Thank you, Congress. Thank you, Chuck Schumer.
I'll always call out when the people I don't agree with do something I like.
Chuck Schumer is doing something I like a lot.
Thank you, Chuck Schumer.
Strong play, Chuck Schumer.
So, I guess the idea is that they will identify what companies have direct or indirect involvement with fentanyl production in China, and if they seem to be, according to us, if they seem to be involved in any kind of illicit fentanyl trade, that we will sanction them and make them hurt financially.
Now, what does that tell you that we need to do that?
The fact that we need to do this tells you that President Xi lied to our president when he said that he would increase the penalties on fentanyl and make it a capital case, a death penalty case, and that they would change the law and that they would start getting Tough on them.
Now remember what I've said from the start.
I said from the start, don't know that you can believe that.
That could be just something they're holding out there.
And apparently, apparently, they were going to hold that hostage possibly as part of the trade negotiations.
Do you know what I say if I hear that China is holding that out as a trade negotiation item?
Well, what I say would get me demonetized everywhere.
Because what I will say privately about China, if that's what they're doing, if they're holding this out as a negotiating variable, well then, I don't want to say what I'm going to say because you can think it.
Those of you who don't know, I lost my stepson in October, actually September, to fentanyl, to a drug overdose in which fentanyl was part of it.
And I don't think we should do any kind of a trade deal with China as long as fentanyl from there is coming into our country and it's obvious they're not trying to stop it.
We should just look for other places to trade.
I noted in the news that Apple is starting to ask its suppliers to consider looking around for different countries to build the parts for the iPhones and the iPads.
Now, I say to Apple, Apple, I'm down.
By the way, I own stock in Apple, not much, just, you know, ordinary part of my portfolio.
But I would be willing to take a hit to my stock, 20%.
I would take a 20% reduction in my Apple stock price for them to take on the extra expense of moving to another country, get out of China.
So, Apple?
One of the, maybe the greatest, you could argue that Apple is the greatest American company of all time.
I don't know how you would measure that sort of thing, but you could argue it's the greatest American company.
And at the moment, the greatest American company is enriching our biggest enemy in the world.
And I'm going to say China is an enemy, because as long as they're not doing anything about the fentanyl, They're in, let's say, a non-shooting war with us in which they're taking maybe 50,000 lives a year and we're taking none.
So I think we should crush their economy.
I'm in favor of crushing China's economy because they're stealing our IP and sending us poison and killing 50,000 Americans per year and trying to dominate us.
We should just crush their economy.
I'm not in favor of any kind of trade deal.
Now, if we get one, I'm sure the stock will go up.
People will be happy about that.
But I really think the long-term move is to get companies out of there and just shut them down.
There's a certain requirement to capitalism, which is trust.
Now, even in the capitalist system, of course, nobody fully trusts anybody and there are plenty of bad actors, etc.
So you have to have a good core system, etc., to make capitalism work.
But at the moment, we don't have these kinds of problems with Germany.
We don't have the kinds of problems we have trading with China.
We don't have them with I don't know.
Pick any other country.
Mexico? You know, even Mexico.
We've got our issues with Mexico, but we don't have...
Well, we do have a problem with Mexico.
It's a bad example. Yeah, let's say India.
Actually, I think India might be a little bit of a source for fentanyl.
I would have to research that, but there might be some coming in from India.
Don't quote me on that, because I'm not sure about that.
But the point is, China is not a dependable partner, and capitalism doesn't work unless you have some minimum level of trust.
Trust, but verify, but you have to have a minimum level of at least believing they'll do some of the things they say they'll do, and they don't seem to be in that mold.
They seem to have taken themselves out of the capitalist system, By simply not being a reliable, dependable, honest, or a fair player in any sense.
So I say we should move all of our industry out of China as quickly as possible, and I personally will pay extra to get that done.
All right. Here's a question for you.
Who builds the voting machines for smaller democracies?
I don't know the answer to this question, so it's a question that I probably should know the answer.
I shouldn't ask it.
But for countries that have legitimate voting processes and people really do, you know, the leaders do change based on the votes, who makes those voting machines?
Let's say Africa.
If you were to look at the entire continent of Africa, I don't know exactly how many of those countries have legitimate democracies, how many of them have public governments, dictators, etc.
But over time, you would expect there would be more and more democratic-looking countries in Africa.
Who makes their voting machines?
Because whoever makes the voting machines eventually, you know, once they're off of paper ballots, yeah.
So certainly at the low end, People are on paper ballots.
But at some point, even the paper ballots have to be added up, right?
Even the paper ballots get reported somewhere.
They get into a computer.
Somewhere there's some computing going on to count stuff up.
It seems to me that whatever country is in charge of the voting technology, whether it's the voting machines or it's where they sum up the totals of the voting machines, That country would essentially be at the mercy of whoever makes the machines, I would think. And so I would keep an eye on that.
Good news, Russia has put a nuclear...
I shouldn't stop in the middle of that sentence.
Russia put a nuclear power plant on a boat.
So they've figured out how to make a small enough nuclear power plant that they can put it on a boat and take it to a remote part of Russia, pull into the bay, hook it up with wires, and provide power to remote places where it would be too hard, apparently, to go build a Build a plant.
It would just be too hard. So they put it on a boat and take the boat there.
Now think about that. Yeah, I know.
You're worried that the Russians don't have the same safety standards that we would like.
I got a question for you.
What happens when radiation gets in the ocean?
I always wondered...
If you had a big nuclear event in the ocean, like let's say when we did our underwater nuclear tests and stuff, where does all that radiation go?
If you fill the ocean with radiation, doesn't it just sort of spread out forever?
Does it stay in one place?
I don't understand the risks.
I don't know the risks of a nuclear event in the ocean.
Is that big or small?
I can't tell. Those are the big stories of the day.
I got a little late start today because my fire alarm went off, or at least the low battery alarm went off.
So I'm going to look on CNN's homepage and see what I missed.
Magician's body found after a failed river escape stunt.
Well, here's my advice to anybody who wants to copy Houdini.
That's really not the kind of job that has a long life expectancy.
I do not recommend that any of you get into the magician Houdini sort of thing.
Oh, I forgot to talk about the president.
Duh. So how many of you watched the president's announcement speech last night?
I watched it while I was floating in the pool.
Yes, I have a pool.
And I'm floating there and I had my phone just playing the speech.
And I listened to it for, I don't know, half an hour, 45 minutes or something.
And here's the thing.
I never got bored.
I can't remember the last time I watched some other politician speak for half an hour and I didn't get bored.
Think about that. When was the last time that happened?
I liked when Bill Clinton spoke.
So back in the Bill Clinton days, he could keep me entertained for a long time.
I really liked him as a public speaker.
Obama's a good public speaker.
But not that interesting over the long haul.
He's a little dry. He's great at his job.
Obama's an amazing politician, but he's a little dry on his speeches.
Reagan was great.
If any of you were old enough to be around during Reagan's time, Reagan was great.
He could hold the crowd.
But man, nobody can hold a crowd like Trump.
I don't know if we'll ever have a president Who can do what he does.
The size of his crowds are partly a reflection of his popularity in a political sense, but partly a reflection of he's putting on the best show in the country right now.
If he sold tickets to his show, people would buy them.
He doesn't sell tickets, but people would buy those tickets.
Anyway, so my favorite part, and I will note that he just keeps getting better and better at that.
So his ability to hold a crowd and really have them in the palm of his hand is just getting better and better.
And he did a little A-B testing on his upcoming slogan.
So I hope you caught that part because it was brilliant.
It was simple.
And something that you might have said, well, I would have done too, but you didn't.
And he did. And so he said to the crowd, I'll paraphrase, but he said basically, you know, there's a big question about what slogan we should have.
And he talked about how Make America Great Again was possibly the greatest slogan of all time, which I agree.
I would say he has a strong claim, a very strong claim, To say that that was the best branding, best slogan ever created for a political event.
I think he could say that with a, you know, that feels like a supportable statement.
But after he says, but it's the greatest one, how can we move from this greatest thing?
Can we really come up with a better slogan than that?
So he sets it up perfectly because he's signaling to the crowd Indirectly, but still clearly, he's telling the crowd, without telling them, he's telling them, it's time to move on.
But he told them it's time to move on by paying complete respect to the old one.
So he didn't stomp on it.
He said it was just the greatest thing ever.
Sorry. But then he said...
What about, you know, comparing it to keep America great?
And so then he did a sort of a vote from the crowd where they would cheer.
And now he's set them up.
So he's told the crowd...
He hasn't told the crowd...
What he prefers in direct language, but he's very much told them he prefers the new one, all right?
So he hasn't said it, but he has indicated it, and then he does the what do you like, and they cheer for make America great again, and then he says keep America great, and the crowd goes nuts, of course exactly like he primed them to do.
So it was In one way, you could say it was a fairly ordinary thing to do.
You simply ask the crowd for their opinion and monitor their response.
So in one sense, very ordinary.
But here's the thing.
Nobody else did it.
It worked.
It was an amazing moment.
So he has a way of taking the ordinary That was available to everybody.
You know, everybody had the ability to work a crowd this way.
He didn't have any special access to a crowd or anything.
But he worked that crowd like I've never seen a crowd work.
And I'm going to say that actually as a literal, not a figurative statement.
I don't think I've ever seen anybody own a crowd that hard.
You know, musicians own their crowds in different ways, but this was masterful.
Now let me, if you're not aware of the technique, let me tell you the technique he used.
Technique number one.
He has associated his rally speeches with fun and humor and laughing and good times.
So people showed up in the perfect mood.
They showed up laughing happy, Ready for a good time.
So he's primed them over the years to know that this is going to be a fun night and they show up in a good mood because they're expecting it to become self-fulfilling.
But here's the brilliant part.
For the first, I don't know how many minutes, a big chunk of time, all the president did Was say things that people who are his supporters already believe to be true, and he said them in the way that they believe them to be true.
In other words, he just went down the line of everything that a Republican Trump supporter believes is true, and he said it in his own words.
That's called pacing.
He said nothing that a Trump supporter would disagree with.
And he kept hitting it.
Boom, boom, boom. He did not try to challenge the group.
He did not try to introduce a new idea.
It was the wrong place.
He wanted to pace them.
He wanted to say what they were thinking as they were thinking it.
And there was a point there where he actually, I forget the exact words, but he actually said something like, you're thinking this, or I know what you're thinking, which is technique.
That's persuasion technique.
So he was trying to create the understanding that what he was saying is what they were thinking.
That's pacing. What he's saying is what they're thinking, but he's saying it in a clever way, a little bit better way than they're thinking it.
Once he's got them on their side, he asks them to do something.
Asking your crowd to do something is a very, very, very, very...
Very, very, very, very, very, very effective thing to do.
I'm hitting this because if you only learn one thing from this periscope, it would be the best thing you ever learned.
Let me say it again.
If you can make your crowd do something, do something beyond, you know, just clapping and showing up.
If you can make them do something, you can own them.
So he paces them first.
Hey, I'm you. The things coming out of my mouth are just the things you're thinking.
Then he has them on his side.
Gets them excited, gets their energy up, and then he asks them to do something, which is to vote which of these things he liked.
If you want to do that on a small scale with your own audiences, one of the ways that I did it back in my corporate days was I would hand out Tic Tacs before I talked about a boring topic.
And I would tell people, here, here's some Tic Tacs, pass them around, everybody take a Tic Tac.
Because it'll keep you from yawning.
And it does. If your audience has a tic-tac, they won't yawn.
People who have a tic-tac in their mouth don't yawn.
It's true. So I would make them take a tic-tac and pass it around.
Now what I'm doing is making them do something.
I'm making them do something for me.
And that's part of controlling the crowd.
If you could make them do something small, You get them on their side.
So he wants them to do things.
Very important. Physically do things with their body.
Alright, so it was a masterful time.
You can imagine... I felt bad for...
Can you imagine one of the Democrats watching that thing?
Can you imagine you're one of the Democrat challengers if you watched that Trump rally?
You just want to quit.
It was so, so strong.
I mean, you can dislike this president and still say, all right, even though I don't like this president, that rally was amazing.
Because it was. It was just amazing.
I'm so happy to be alive during this time to actually see this.
Because you could imagine that describing what this is like to some future generation isn't going to work.
Because you have to experience it.
So I was also thinking, can you imagine how good he is at this right now?
Forget about politics. He's just good at this rally stuff and speeches.
Imagine how good he will be in his second term in the fourth year.
Think about it.
Second term Trump, fourth year of his second term.
Nothing to lose.
Top of his game.
Experienced, relaxed, best there's ever been.
Imagine last year of Trump rally.
Imagine the size of the crowds.
Because people will know, in his final year, people will know that they'll never see this again.
Think about that.
In his last year of office, Presuming that he gets a second term.
Everybody who ever thought of going to one is going to say, this will never happen again.
We have to go see this once in our life.
The crowds are going to be...
He might have a crowd of a million.
He might be the first president.
I'll make a prediction.
Here's a prediction. Assuming that Trump gets re-elected, which I think is true, In his fourth year of the second term, his last year, I predict he'll have at least one event, live event, that will attract one million voters.
One million. That's my prediction.
I think he got over 100,000 at this last one, but 1 million.
It'll be the first time. Now, obviously, a million people can't watch a live event, so they would be watching screens.
They would just be sort of in the general area.
But I think he's going to get a million people on the street just out of respect.
So that's...
Somebody says, hold me to that.
Please do. Oh, July 4th.
Yeah, it might be the 4th of July.
You're right, in his final year.
All right, so that's all I have for now.
Sleepy Joe isn't doing much.
We're waiting for Trump to live-tweet their debates.
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