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Sept. 9, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
46:24
Episode 657 Scott Adams: Hey, I’m Late, Grab Coffee
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Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Hello, everybody. Come on in here.
Sorry I'm a little bit late.
I know that this may have thrown your entire simultaneous sipping schedule into a frenzy.
And so I'm here to make it up to you.
Because all you need is, sing along with me, a cup or a mug or a glass, a steinoteles, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
But you don't have to have coffee.
You can have your favorite liquid.
Put it in your glass. Get ready for the simultaneous sip.
It's the best part of the day.
It's the dopamine hit that makes everything better.
Go! Oh, that was every bit as good as I hoped it would be.
Well, later today I'll be heading off to a recording studio to start my three-day marathon of recording my new book on audio called LoserThink.
So feel bad for me because I'll be in a darkened studio for hours and hours reading my own book, which at least I'll like the book.
So there's that.
All right. Let me start with the good news.
Don't you like news that just starts with the good news?
Here's the good news.
Here are some of the worst problems on the planet Earth, according to the news organizations.
Sharpie Gate. Somebody drawing a Sharpie line on a weather map.
The president is insulting Chrissy Teigen on Twitter.
Biden blames his contact lenses for bloodying his eye.
I don't know if he was trying to take his lenses out with his elbows or how that happens, but that was his story.
And maybe people are staying at the Trump Hotel and it looks suspicious.
That's it. Those are your top stories of the day.
Sharpie Gate, Chrissy Teigen, Biden's contact lens, and people staying at the Trump Hotel, and we need some more information.
That's our big problems in the world.
Here's another big problem.
I mention this every month or so, but the longer you don't hear about this, the more suspicious I am.
And here's the thing. How often have we heard, since this president got elected, how often have we heard the administration reduced some environmental law or did something that has an environmental impact?
How many times have you heard that story?
Quite a few times, right?
Now, honestly, when I hear any one of those stories, I go, ugh.
I don't like the sound of that.
I don't like the sound of some environmental regulation being relaxed.
It must be there for a reason, right?
So that story will come out, blah, blah, blah, some environmental thing has been relaxed, and it will be a big problem.
And then what happens?
Nothing. It just gets quiet.
Now, it could be that the environmental problems take so long to develop That there's not much else to report on.
Maybe. But is that what's going on?
I don't know. Here's what I suspect.
I suspect that the regulations that are targeted for relaxation are the ones that the science didn't quite support, or it was ambiguous, or it was such a small impact That it wasn't worth it given the economic or other benefits that come, because good economics also save lives.
So if you were to, let's say hypothetically, if you were to change a law on fracking, and scientifically and statistically it looked like doing so would kill three people.
I'll just throw out random numbers.
Let's say that fracking would have some effect on the water or something, and that over time, three people would die who would not necessarily have died otherwise.
We'd have to compare that To how many people live when you improve the economy?
Because people do live longer, better lives when the economy is put together.
So here's my question.
This is another one of the dogs that don't bark.
We hear when the administration cancels an environmental law, and it should worry us.
What we don't see is the follow-up reporting.
Where they say, well, it looks like this law will, you know, kill three people, but the administration hopes it will save 100.
Is that what they're saying?
I don't know. There's no reporting.
So that's my basic statement, that it keeps getting reported as environmental catastrophes, but without the follow-up, and without the pro and the con, you know, what's the pro, what's the con, I don't know if we know anything about it.
So I would be suspicious of that.
Let's talk about the Taliban.
So I'm seeing some people pushing back on the idea that Trump would invite the head of the Taliban to meet with him.
Because if you're giving them that much, let's say, respect, and it doesn't look like they're necessarily going to stick to a deal anyway, aren't you just giving them something for nothing, giving them a PR win, etc.?
Here's what I say about Trump meeting with the head of the Taliban, which is similar to what I said about him meeting with Kim Jong-un, which is similar to what I will say about him if he meets with, let's say, the president of Iran.
You can't really make a deal until the people who can approve the deal are in the same room.
If you've never negotiated, it would make sense to you to say, well, why can't Trump just send his best negotiator?
And if they make a deal, then the president can sign it, but he doesn't need to be there.
You would only think that's a good idea if you had never negotiated.
Have you ever tried to negotiate when you're not talking to the person who makes the decision?
I have. Lots and lots of times.
So I used to be a contract negotiator when I was in my corporate world.
So that was my primary job for several years, was to negotiate contracts.
Then when I became a cartoonist, I did a lot of licensing deals.
And again, I was involved with lots and lots and lots of contract negotiations.
It was pretty much a continuous process over my whole career.
And there's one thing I can guarantee you.
If the people who make the decision are not part of the process, you are not negotiating.
You have the illusion of negotiating, but when underlings are negotiating, there's no negotiating going on.
Because what happens is the underling goes back to the boss and says, I asked for X, and he said no.
What's the boss say?
Okay. Well, I guess we didn't get it.
No. The boss says, go back and get that thing.
They said no. And the underling says, well, I did my best.
What am I going to do? And the boss says, well, I'm not going to sign it this way.
Go back and get it.
So the underling goes back, and the underling's talking to usually another underling, and they can't make anything happen because an underling will get fired for capitulating.
An underling will get fired for making an offer to meet in the middle.
Underlings can't negotiate.
It's just a waste of time.
Now, the underlings can get you in the ballpark.
The underlings can find out if you're serious.
The underlings can find out what topics are on the table, which ones are sticky.
So there's a lot of things the underlings can do to sort of frame it a little bit.
But one thing the underlings can't do is make a concession.
And if you're not making concessions, you're not negotiating.
You're not negotiating. You're just talking.
You're wasting time. I have wasted years by having underlings negotiate.
Usually it means a lawyer talking to a lawyer on the other side.
I wasted, I think, a year and a half negotiating with Hollywood with just the lawyers talking for a movie deal.
Do you think that deal got done?
No. Because if you have underlings negotiate about something for a year, And they're getting paid to do it, which is the worst case scenario.
You don't get a deal.
You get more negotiating because that's what they get paid for.
And they don't have the authority to concede, even if you tell them.
They tend not to use it.
So here's what I say.
Trump seems to be the only person I've seen in the presidency who understands negotiating.
There's no such thing as negotiating unless the decision-maker's in the room.
So he put the decision-makers in the room, or tried, in the case of the Taliban.
Now, what are the odds that putting them in the room would produce a good agreement?
Not very high, but it's higher than zero, and zero is what the old system was going to get you.
If you don't put them in the room, no deal gets done.
Now, let's say you're the Taliban.
Would you believe a deal the United States made because you trust the United States?
No, you would not.
Would it help to be in the room with the President of the United States telling you in person, we will do this?
Yeah, it would. Now, you're still not going to trust the President of the United States just automatically, but the way human beings work, there is a big difference when you're talking to somebody in person, you're looking them in the eye, and you're making a personal commitment.
It makes a difference.
The President knew that makes a difference, so he tried to make it happen.
So I would say that the president is the only smart one in this story because he knew that it's not negotiating until you're in the same room.
Here's the other part of the story that's not being reported.
I've predicted this for a while.
Maybe five years or so I predicted this.
That the fate of Afghanistan, in terms of the United States involvement there militarily, is that we would reduce our forces eventually to a drone only.
You know, let's say drone plus some special forces plus, you know, intelligence, maybe some cyber operations and stuff.
But intelligence plus drones would be what we would leave in Afghanistan someday.
Now, when you hear people say, hey, why are we talking about pulling out of Afghanistan?
It will just reconstitute into an Al-Qaeda safe house and an ISIS safe house, right?
Not if the plan is to leave a drone army that becomes, wait for it, wait for it, here's the cool part, our testing spot for all of our future drone warfare and robotic warfare.
It looks to me, and it's obvious that the United States would not say this as directly as I'm going to say it.
The only reason that we would be considering pulling out, given that I think everybody knows the vacuum would be filled with bad people.
You know, I think Trump knows that.
I think everybody who wants us to pull out knows it would be dangerous because it would fill up with bad guys again.
Unless... Unless we've reached a point where we already know that our intelligence and our surveillance on the ground from satellites and drones and cyber use and cyber techniques and everything else is so good that if the bad guys start reconstituting, we can pick up a screen, send out a drone, and take out their entire unit without leaving a desk.
So here's my prediction.
My prediction is that the United States is not telling its citizens or anybody else, because it shouldn't, how good we are at drone warfare already, and how much better we will be in the next few years.
Because I think we're reaching the point where ground troops are sort of marginally unnecessary.
We would still need to be able to send down some special forces for some special cases, and I imagine we'd have enough forces there to do that.
But for your everyday, hey, there's a bunch of ISIS collecting over here and it looks like they have a lot of weapons, I don't think we have to leave the desk anymore.
I think you just say, huh, looks like a bunch of ISIS guys with weapons.
Push a button, no more ISIS guys with weapons.
So, here's my prediction.
The reason that we're getting serious about moving out of Afghanistan and the reason that you, the citizens, are not getting a sufficient answer about how that will continue to protect us in the future is that the United States can't say directly how good we are at drone warfare already.
And I'll bet it's really, really, really freaking good.
Whatever you're seeing in the news about how good drones are, Fast forward that five years, because that's what the military can do now.
They just don't want you to know it.
So, I think drone warfare is here, and I think Afghanistan is about to become our drone and robot testing facility.
And we're going to get real good at it, because we will be one of the few countries who is actually actively testing that stuff in a war theater.
So watch for that.
How hard would it be, here's a hypothetical question for you, to build an AI health system that you populate with all of your medical information, including your lifestyle choices, to build an AI health system that you populate with all of your medical information, including your lifestyle choices, what you eat, even more information than your doctor has.
So imagine you were to populate your own database with all of your healthcare stuff, and let's say that you were happy that it was protected so that other people couldn't see it.
How hard would it be to build an AI system that could look at everybody's privately built database, and then when you have a health problem, you say, oh, my knee is hurting, or whatever it is, and you put in your symptoms, and then you can see what all the other people who had these similar symptoms did about it and what worked.
Would that not be as good as a doctor fairly quickly?
Because you could fairly quickly get to the point where it asks the right questions.
Imagine if it just did this.
This is version 1.0.
Somebody's saying WebMD.
But here's what WebMD doesn't do.
WebMD does not have my medical records.
So what I really want to do is not know that if I have this symptom, it might be one of these three problems.
I want to say if I have this system, and I'm taking these meds already for other things, and on this age, and on this even ethnicity, because it might be a genetic component, and I put in my 23andMe database.
How about that, right?
Just link my genetic test to it.
And I took a full-body MRA. So imagine I can collect data about me and my health and my lifestyle and all this, and I can take stuff from my devices, my personal devices that are checking my health all the time.
I can put that all in there and just say, all right, my knee hurts.
And have it just say, okay, if your knee hurts, this is the order that you would check things, right?
It might be a different order from other people who say my knee hurts.
Because if a fat guy says, you know, excuse me for using the vulgar term for overweight, but if a fat guy says my knees hurt, What's the first thing you say?
Well, in your situation, try losing some weight.
If a skinny person says, my knee is hurt, well, maybe you start somewhere else as you're the first thing to check.
So you have to compare what are the symptoms, what are the likely things these symptoms associated with, but then connect it to your own personal detailed situation.
And my guess is that you would be as accurate as a doctor.
That's my guess. And then it would get there fairly quickly, and then we already have all of that technology.
It just isn't put together.
So that's just a question.
Here was an interesting thing.
You all know that Andrew McCabe, ex-FBI person who is no friend of President Trump, Is now working at CNN, and you probably said to yourself, that's such a strange choice.
Are they just doing this to poke the president, and how much value could he add?
And I got the answer to that today, and it turns out Andrew McCabe can add a lot of value.
You can hate him for whatever you want to hate, but he just did a piece I just read on CNN's website that's really good.
It's probably the best Maybe it is the best.
Probably the best piece on gun control options that I've seen.
And it came from Andrew McCabe.
Were you expecting that? Now, I'll just tell you it's on CNN's website, but the two things he mentioned, because he has deep involvement with the FBI, he's been involved with, I guess, gun registration in his job, he could answer in a more detailed level, what's wrong with it?
Here are two things he pointed out.
One is that the system is overloaded, so people are getting through just because their application times out before it can really be looked at.
So there are thousands of people getting guns every year who should not because the process for checking has a timer on it.
If it takes more than three days for the ones that are special cases, they just get their gun.
So he's saying, why don't we just add a few days?
You know, because it's not the biggest thing in the world to add a few days to waiting for your special case.
In other words, there's something in your record that flagged the special case.
Give them a little more time.
What if it takes a month? Is that the worst thing in the world?
It takes a month to work it out?
So that seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion, which I'd never heard before.
Just give them a few extra days for the special cases.
Most people would get it right away, but they're only this small group who have something going on.
Another one has to do with the definition of what an outstanding warrant is.
Apparently, there's some kind of law that says if you have an outstanding warrant, you can't get a gun right away.
Until you clear your warrant.
Now, apparently, at some point, that had been modified to mean something specific about your special warrant.
And McCabe points out, why don't we just make it simpler and say, if you still have an outstanding warrant, you've got to get that cleared.
It shouldn't be the government's problem to clear your warrant.
If you have a warrant for an arrest, you don't get a gun.
If you can clear it, because it's illegitimate, That's on you.
Go clear it. And then you can get your gun.
And I thought to myself, whether you love those suggestions or not, and I think people just line up on what they feel about guns, those are the most common sense and well-informed suggestions that I've heard.
Again, if you're saying it's unconstitutional or whatever, the Supreme Court can work that out.
But in terms of a practical, you could do it tomorrow.
Why isn't the country debating this?
These are the two best suggestions I've seen, period.
So let me say that whatever you want to say about Andrew McCabe, he added something to the conversation that I would consider valuable.
All right. So that's good.
What else we got? Mark Sanford wants to primary President Trump.
And I listened to him talking about it.
I think he was on Fox News last night.
And, oh man, he has nothing.
Mark Sanford has nothing.
I just used the phrase, I'm going to mock.
When I say we should have a conversation about...
Whenever you hear a politician say we need to have a conversation about X, it means they don't have an opinion.
Give us your opinion. If you think you have an opinion, we want to hear it.
If you say the country has to have a conversation...
Shut up!
Now, when I said we had to have a...
When I said that Andrew McCabe added to the conversation...
A better way to say that is he added information which is useful for making decisions.
So that's a real addition.
But Mark Sanford says, yeah, we have to have a conversation about debt.
Okay. What's he adding?
Nothing. I don't need somebody to run for office to tell me to have conversations.
And then on every other topic, he said the same thing.
We've got to have a conversation about this.
We need to have a conversation about it.
Nobody wants the conversation guy.
We want the one who says, build the wall, or give us the Green New Deal.
You know, those are opposites. But you want somebody who's got an opinion.
You don't want the conversation guy.
All right, so...
Here's the funniest story of the day.
Russia's blaming Google of interfering with their elections.
How awesome is that?
Russia is blaming Google for interfering with Russian elections.
Specifically, what Google is doing is through their YouTube part of their business, they're surfacing videos of protesters so that their Russian citizens keep seeing videos of protests against Putin, and Putin wants that to stop.
So, and I didn't know this, but I guess back in May, Putin signed into law some measures to enable the creation of a national internet for Russia, That could operate separately from the rest of the world.
That's right. Russia has started to build its own internet that doesn't reach the rest of the world so that they can keep information from getting in.
Sort of like China.
Sort of like Iran.
Sort of like North Korea.
Here's a prediction that is both the easiest prediction in the world and the most obvious.
No country can survive for the long term with a private internet and no access to the rest of the world.
Does anybody disagree with that statement?
If you want to label yourself as a failed state, you have to get yourself off of the world's internet and onto your own private one so that your citizens can't see anything.
It is a sign of desperation.
Yeah, and where I live in the restaurant business, if you see a restaurant that used to be open for lunch and dinner, and then they start advertising that they're going to be open for breakfast, that's a restaurant that's not going to be there in two years.
Because the restaurant that was built for lunch and dinner...
It wouldn't try to offer breakfast unless they were desperate, because breakfast is sort of the last thing you want to order, last thing you want to have because it doubles your work and it's a low margin business, etc.
So likewise, if you see a restaurant adding breakfast to their lunch and dinner, You want to expect them to be closed pretty soon.
And if you see a country trying to close down its internet and keep the rest of the world off it, it means they know they don't have a system that can last.
That's really admitting that the restaurant can't last.
All right. So the problem with breakfast as an added to a restaurant is that it increases your workload just tremendously.
So it's a tough thing to jam in there.
It's usually a sign of desperation.
So here's the thing.
Technology will guarantee...
Don't you think this is true?
The technology will guarantee...
That the countries that try to close their internet will fail, wouldn't you say?
Don't you think it's a 100% chance that countries that are trying to penetrate the internet in other countries will be able to do it?
One way or another. Take, for example, cell phone.
I was thinking about this the other day.
I think this technology exists.
But maybe not. All right, so your phone has Wi-Fi on it, right?
Could you set up a system where my phone's Wi-Fi talks to your phone next door, and then that talks to the neighbor's phone?
And if enough people are in enough places, those phones can create an impromptu network so that if at least one of those phones gets to the outside world, could you be connected to the outside world?
I don't know if that's possible, but it seems to me that, yeah, somebody's using the word mesh here in the comments.
Could you create a mesh network of non-state-controlled nodes so that you can get out no matter what the state is trying to do?
I think yes. So I'm seeing a lot of people say yes in the comments.
I know a lot of you have technical training, so I would guess that somebody's saying that exists, and I think I read about something like that.
I think I did read about that, but I don't know if that's for very local stuff or what the limitations are.
So I would say that Russia has now signaled itself as a failed state.
I didn't know that.
Meaning that they know they can't survive if information is freely available to their citizens.
Think about that. Think about being a citizen of Russia and learning that your government knows it can't survive.
The government can't survive if you have information that is unrestricted.
Think about that. Can the United States survive unrestricted information?
Barely. Barely.
I think we can, but barely.
Because look at how all the fake news is tearing the country apart.
That's what you get with unrestricted information.
Unrestricted internet means that your news turns fake.
Right? Your news turns fake, like ours did.
So the problem with the United States is that our news is fake.
And we know it. But we think we're smart enough to sort out what's fake and what's not.
We're not. We're terrible at it.
But in Russia, they're going to know it's not real, and they're going to feel they don't have any option.
They're going to look at the news and say, I know it's not real, but I don't know where else to look, because they cut off my internet.
So, I think everybody's going to have to go to full information and full fake news because it's going to be the only way to survive in this tough world.
So, there's a story on CNN this morning about a report It says that when Trump first got in office, and maybe it was around 2017, that the U.S. had to extract a spy,
not had to, but wanted to, extract a top spy from Russia because they were afraid that Trump would mishandle confidential information and give up the person's identity and he would be killed or captured.
And so they extracted a spy just in case it wasn't safe because Trump might give away too many secrets.
Now, do you believe that story?
I don't.
Here's one test for fake news.
Now, it's not a test to see if something is true or false, okay?
So this following test is not a true-false test.
It's a credibility test.
It's only telling you if it's something you should consider true or false.
If it's not credible, you don't even have to go to the question of whether it's true or false.
Because the source itself is like, could be true, could be false, but we really don't know anything.
It's not credible.
Here's what's not credible.
A report about what our top secret spy organization did, or why they did it.
That's not credible. It's not even supposed to be credible.
If it's a report from our top-secret spy organization, you shouldn't believe that.
It's literally an organization of professional liars whose job it is to fool people, including this country.
There's no prohibition against continuing to be persuasive in the way you want just because it's Americans.
I mean, there are some limitations, but none that would stop him from doing this sort of thing.
So, what is the most beautiful fake news you could have?
The most beautiful fake news is one nobody can check.
You can't check to make sure it's true.
So, a negative story about the president that's based on claims you can't check from our most secret organization?
Perfect. That is perfect fake news.
Can't check. It's believable by the people who want to believe that sort of thing, but you can't check.
It's great. All right.
That is all I have for today.
Because I do have to get ready and go read my LoserThink book for hours.
If you're watching the Bill Pulte saga on Twitter, as many people have decided that there's something wrong with giving money away, okay.
But it's been a real clinic on people's mentality.
It's been a real clinic on what I call LoserThink.
Loser think meaning unproductive ways of thinking.
That doesn't mean you're stupid or uninformed necessarily.
It just means that you have an unproductive way of thinking about life.
The most unproductive way of thinking about life is complaining about people giving away their money in a way that's not exactly the way other people do it or the way you think it should be done.
Now, you could be right about everything you're saying.
You could be right that there's a better way to do it.
That could be true. But if that's what you're complaining about, if that's what you're complaining about, you're just not part of the productive part of the world.
Because what Bill Pulte is doing, and what I'm helping him do, and lots of others are helping, is we're experimenting to see what it is that would get people to give more than they were giving before.
So it might be true that other people are doing it better.
But how will we know until we experiment?
So I'm trying an experiment right now in which I'm trying to multiply the benefits of the gift.
And the technique that I'm using right now is I'm using the charitable gift to inform people of something that would be really useful in general.
So I'm giving away a gift.
I'll probably announce it today or tomorrow.
To $1,000 to buy school supplies to a teacher who teaches the talent stack concept.
Now, the talent stack concept comes from my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
But here's the thing.
A perfect alternative philanthropic system from the ones we know about would allow the people who give To get a benefit, because that's incentive, right?
You want the people who are giving to get something too.
If you take that part out, you're going to get less giving.
You'll still get plenty of giving.
Billionaires will still give money privately.
But it would be nice to give those billionaires credit.
Because that's good for them.
It would be nice to thank people.
It would be nice to acknowledge them giving.
You want to create an incentive system, some kind of incentive system, usually psychological, could be financial, but financial plus psychological so that people will give more money.
That's a good thing as long as you're disclosing exactly what you're doing.
So would it be good for me to make more attention to a concept that came out in my book that is for sale online?
You know, as a book. Of course it would.
It would be good for me if more people knew that I have a book that would be helpful to them and they might buy it.
Right? So, is it wrong?
to suggest a model for giving in which a teacher who is worthy gets a thousand dollars and in the process I'm telling people about a book that if they are aware of this talent stack concept could be tremendously helpful tremendously helpful to a lot of kids and as they learn it they could teach others and so it could spread So the idea is that the kids are tremendously benefited by simply hearing of this talent stack idea.
By putting it on Twitter, you can see in the comments a lot of people said, what's a talent stack?
I'm a teacher. I had to Google talent stack.
So I've exposed, I don't know, maybe tens of thousands of people through one tweet to at least the words Talent Stack to make them think, well, what's that?
Why would you give money away for something?
Why would a teacher be teaching it?
What's the benefit of it?
So that's the whole point.
The whole point is growing the knowledge of that.
I think there's nearly 100% agreement that it's good and should be taught to kids.
If it were controversial, then I don't think this would make as much sense.
Let's get rid of the Nazi.
But since talent stacks are not controversial, there's nobody on the other side of the argument.
Nobody says it's a bad idea.
Everybody says it's a good idea.
Period. Everybody. Every teacher, every adult who hears it says that's a good idea.
So, am I a bad person?
Because I've suggested a model that's good for a teacher, good for the students, very good for anybody who hears about it and didn't know about it, but also good for me.
Because as an author, maybe I'll sell some books.
Am I a bad person, having fully disclosed that?
Likewise, one of the controversies is that Bill Pulte is using the Cash app, which is associated with Jack Dorsey and Twitter.
Well, here's the thing. Jack Dorsey and Bill Pulte are already working together on a major philanthropic project to remove blight from St.
Louis. Maybe you saw the story.
It's a national story. Why wouldn't Bill Pulte use a product associated with Jack?
He has a choice of lots of ways to give the money away.
Why would he not use something that works fine?
And it's associated with Jack, because Jack's working with him on philanthropy.
Why wouldn't he do that?
Not doing it would be stupid.
That's it. That's the beginning and the end of the story.
Why wouldn't he do that?
Of course he would. Likewise, if Bill Pulte had an app, I'd use it.
He wouldn't have to pay me to use it.
I'd use it because I'm working with Bill.
Of course I'm going to use his app.
If your neighbor owns a business, are you more likely to shop there?
Of course! If you've got a friend who owns a company, are you more likely to be a customer?
Of course! That's how the world works.
So stop complaining about the wrong things.
Anyway, I'll announce the winner of that today or tomorrow, and that will be fun.
Oh, let me ask you this.
Would you like me to have Jack Dorsey on as a guest to one of my Periscopes?
Would you like to do that?
Let's see in your comments.
Because I've already asked, and he already said yes.
So, I don't know, scheduling might be difficult.
You know, obviously he's a busy guy.
He might be the busiest guy in the world.
I have no idea how Jack Dorsey survives his schedule with the number of things he has to do, but I have asked him.
He did say yes, and he asked me to wait a while because he has some traveling going on.
So I will ask him to come on.
We'll ask him all the tough questions.
I'll tell you my starting points.
Here's my starting points, and I'll give you a little background.
A year, I don't know, a couple years ago, or whatever it was, when people were first concerned about Twitter shadow banning, and I was complaining about it on Twitter, Jack contacted me and offered that one of his executives in charge of enough things that she would be the right person to do it, said, we don't know what this shadow banning is all about.
Could we get more information about what it is you see?
And could you work with this executive who is the right person to talk to?
And so I did. So I worked with Jack's executive and I said, all right, here's what we're seeing.
This is what people are reporting.
This person said they followed me and got unfollowed.
This person liked something and got unliked.
And I was feeding her the data and she was looking into them one at a time.
Now, there does seem to be some kind of mixture of two things happening, at least.
One thing that's happening is there are legitimate, I believe, legitimate technical hiccups, legitimate confirmation bias, legitimate false memories, etc.
So there is some amount of what people see as shadow banning that I would be willing to bet my life You know, like gun to head, I would easily bet my life on the following statement.
Some of it's not real.
I don't know how much, but some of it is clearly imagination plus technical glitches, you know, that are normal.
For example, one of the things people pointed out is you might like something on your phone, your mobile device, but the mobile device needs to still send it up to the database in the sky at Twitter.
Twitter has to acknowledge it and get it back to your phone for it to be a completed transaction.
Well, if you like something and then there's a glitch with your communication, it's possible that that handshake doesn't happen.
You thought you liked something.
The transaction didn't go through.
It doesn't give you an error message.
It just didn't happen.
So I don't know if that's an actual example, but it's the sort of thing people talk about when they say that some of it is imagination because there's just ordinary technical back and forth that's happening.
But there is another category in addition to the ones that absolutely are definitely imaginary.
I'll call that the unexplained category because it's literally unexplained.
In that category, how do you explain my brother following me on Twitter and only following one person?
That's it. The only reason he had Twitter.
To follow one person and he's very careful And one day he was unsubscribed, my brother, after following me for months and months.
So that's not a scenario where the technical glitch failed to make a handshake.
That's somebody who was a follower for months and months and months, and I don't have to wonder if he hit the wrong button, right?
He didn't hit the wrong button.
There was no point at which he went to change the only thing he had Twitter for, which is to follow me.
Right? So, and then of course, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of reports from other people saying similar things.
So, that falls into the category of unexplained.
Here's my, I'll give you my theory hypothesis.
Here's my hypothesis.
My hypothesis is that at the social media companies, it would be impossible for the leadership to know what the algorithms are doing.
Because it's too complicated.
When we talk about the algorithm, we're not talking about an equation that's this long and you can look at the variables and you say, oh, variable x.
If I tweak that a little bit, it's obvious what that will do to the end.
Nothing like that.
It's so impossibly complicated with probably lots of people handling their little input, not exactly knowing how that goes through the whole system.
I'll bet you that there is literally no one Literally zero people who understand the algorithm at Twitter completely.
And I'll bet there are literally zero people who understand it at the other social media platforms, just based on complexity.
And based on if you have enough complexity, you end up distributing jobs across different specialties.
And if you have a bunch of specialists, maybe nobody really knows what's going on.
So... Why am I crying over this now has been happening for years to the right.
Well, idiot, I'm going to get rid of you just for being dumb.
So here's the thing.
I'm pretty sure that there's something like shadow ban happening and that there is some bias happening at the algorithm level that is maybe targeting Targeting one side more than the other.
But I doubt that there's anybody who knows the full extent of it or why or what variables exactly are getting tweaked or what keywords.
There might actually be nobody or there could be one person.
You could have a rogue programmer whose job it is to make little decisions about this or that.
And they know that if they choose this over that, they're probably going to get a different result.
And there may not be anybody whose job it is to look at all the variables they control and say, okay, Bob, what'd you do with this variable?
Okay, okay. What'd you do with this one?
Do we know that's fair? There's probably nobody who has that job.
I'll bet. So, here's my take.
I believe that the social media CEOs could not, could not possibly understand their own algorithms because there's nobody on the staff who understands them.
Nor is there anybody on the staff who could understand them.
They're too complicated. But there are definitely individuals making individual decisions, and I don't know that they could be managed at the level that you need to manage them if it were your objective to get rid of bias.
So, that's the way I would approach the question.
And I don't think you've seen anybody approach it that way.
Because here's one of the things that I explain in my book, Loser Think.
I talk about how if you have exposure to different fields...
You have more vision about situations.
I've been a programmer.
I've worked with technical people for years.
So when I talk about the algorithm, I know how complicated it has to be without actually being directly involved.
I think everybody who has technical experience is agreeing with me right now, right?
You don't have to be directly involved, if you have any technical experience at all, to understand that these algorithms are amazingly complicated.
And that it's unlikely anybody understands them completely.
Somebody says they do not agree.
I'm surprised. But most people are saying they agree.
It helps to have a variety of experience from business to persuasion to even technical experience to, you saw my experience on negotiating, helped understand the Taliban situation, etc.
So that's what Loser Thinking is about.
It's about teaching you the quick, basic skills from a number of fields so that you can look at things with more eyes.
And I think you're going to like it.
That's all for now, and I'll talk to you later.
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