Episode 2048 Scott Adams: Banks, Cartels, CIA Manipulation, Narrative Poisoning, The Success Reframe
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Banks incentivizing bad behavior
Facebook employees down 25%
US Reaper drones fly over Black Sea?
San Francisco reparations update
RFK Jr. on manipulation of Americans
Things being said about SVB
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best thing that's ever happened to you.
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Okay.
Well, let's talk about all the stories.
Would you like to talk about banking?
Sorry, I just nodded off there.
You know, I was a banker for a number of years.
I started my career as a banker.
Thought I'd be a big old banker guy.
So I know a little bit about banking.
A little bit.
So let's talk about Silicon Valley Bank.
So here's something I know that people just figured out.
I'm not the one person who knew it.
You knew it too.
But here it is.
When the idea of banks It was created, and then it evolved into modern banking.
It was a good design.
And one of the things that was good about it is that even if there was something that looked like a banking weakness, communication among people was so slow that unless you saw a line forming in front of the bank, you couldn't tell there was a bank run.
So you wouldn't know to get in on it, because you wouldn't even know it was happening.
So, bank runs were naturally, let's say, prevented just by poor communication.
Suddenly, you've got Twitter and the Internet.
Suddenly, not only can you instantly tell people there might be a problem, everybody knows at the same time, that's a big problem, but it's worse.
They don't even have to go stand in line.
They just pull out their app and say, All my money, move it somewhere else.
Boop.
So when you have those two things that went from sort of a little bit difficult to do, find out what's happening with your bank, number one, and two, actually go stand in a long line to get your money out, there was a natural slowdown.
So we now have a banking system that was created for slow communication and inefficient withdrawals.
And then those two things changed.
That's a big problem.
So I would say that social media and banking apps that are just more efficient are actually the risk of the system.
Almost as much as bad decisions and poor risk management.
The fact that we have two mismatched systems, our communication system Is mismatched with our banking system.
That has to get fixed.
I don't know exactly what the fix is, but there has to be something that's like, maybe, I hate to say government regulation, but banks are heavily regulated for a reason.
There's a reason to regulate.
That's the one place you really want some regulation, in my opinion.
If you're going to get rid of all regulation, get rid of banking last.
You want to keep that one around.
Not too much regulation, but You want some?
So, what would we do?
Maybe some kind of a government break?
Where the break's just gone?
Now, there's an analogy to this whole banking problem that I've been thinking about.
Have you ever thought about how unfair it is that if somebody knows to form a, let's say, LLC, Limited Liability Corporation, or a corporation, which takes a lawyer, you have to need a lawyer to do that.
If somebody does that little bit of paperwork, They protect themselves individually from all kinds of legal risks and bankruptcy and stuff.
But if you don't do that paperwork, you don't have those protections.
Does that sound like a good system to you?
If you happen to know to do it, you're protected just from some paperwork.
And if you didn't know to do it, you wouldn't be protected.
That's a terrible system.
Here's a better system.
If you're a business, you have all the protections of a corporation.
How about that?
What's wrong with that?
If you're in business, you get all the protections of a corporation.
You don't have to do the paperwork.
I don't see any problem with that.
And how about this for banks?
Taking that concept.
How about if you're a depositor, the government protects you?
How about that?
I don't think they're having limits.
I've seen some really bad takes.
And it goes like this.
If you don't have a $250,000 limit that's really a strict limit and you really stick to it and you never change it, it will incentivize bad behavior.
So let's take this example with Silicon Valley Bank.
Let's say the Silicon Valley bankers who made the mistakes, let's say that they were aware there was a good chance that even the 250 would be guaranteed beyond that if something went wrong.
So under those conditions, if those leaders, and especially the risk management person, so would the risk management person say to themselves, well, I thought I was evaluating the risk properly, but you know, All those depositors would be protected.
Huh.
So I guess I don't have that much risk.
The only risk would be, let's see, I would lose all of my money.
I would lose my reputation forever.
It would be dangerous to go outside if I ran into a depositor.
And everything that I care about in my life would be destroyed.
I'm going to do it because the depositors are protected.
Maybe.
That's the actual thinking.
I actually saw like an actual adult say that the executives would be disincentivized by what happens with the depositors as if they would not be disincentivized by losing all of their own money.
You don't think that's enough?
You don't think that the risk of losing everything?
That's what happened to the executives.
I mean, they made some money before they lost their jobs.
But do you think anybody in the real world who's an executive is thinking to themselves, well, yes, this will definitely destroy my life, but what I really care about is that $250,000 limit, and I think the government will protect a little bit more because they did that one time, so I'm going to change everything I'm doing because of the depositors, not about my entire life being on the line.
It's insane.
It's just crazy.
Now, changing the amount that's protected for depositors will make no difference to anybody's decision making.
Because they don't give a shit.
The whole problem is that the executives didn't care about the depositors.
Am I right?
The entire problem is that the executives were not working for the benefit of the depositors.
They never would.
They never will.
It's not the real world.
People just don't care.
They care about their own situation.
And that's not going to change.
And to watch actual adults in the real world in 2023 get up there and imagine that those executives would have acted differently if the 250 had been a bigger number.
Come on.
That's crazy.
Am I wrong?
Does anybody disagree?
I don't believe there's anybody disagreeing.
I don't see any disagreement in the comments, and I usually do.
That's how poorly managed we are.
That's how capable our leaders are.
There were real leaders arguing that point, and still are.
Still are.
That's still a point that's being made by supposedly serious adults.
How could you possibly believe that?
Crazy.
The other thing we learned about Silicon Valley Bank is that the speed of mass hysterias in general, you know, I'll call a bank run a mass hysteria because you're causing the problem by thinking it's a problem.
It's a little different than a mass hysteria, but you can see the parallels.
So now anything that could have been a mass hysteria before becomes one almost instantly because of the speed of communication.
So that's a problem.
I'm going to talk about some other perceptual problems, and then it'll be a theme by the time I'm done, so put a pin in that.
Zuckerberg at Facebook, he's cutting 11,000, I guess 11,000 people got cut in November, another 10,000 being cut.
Do you say to yourself, uh-oh, How could Facebook possibly continue as a company if they get rid of one out of four employees, which is what it will be when they do this latest round.
They will have lost one out of four employees.
Do you know what the experts say?
You're not going to notice a difference.
Because the tech companies that were wildly profitable, they end up doing a lot of, let's say, optional stuff.
A lot of optional stuff.
A lot of people working on the next big thing that doesn't work out and somebody else is also working on the next big thing.
So it's a whole bunch of people who are working on stuff that's not the core business because they can make an argument for it and because the budget allowed it.
So here's my parallel to that.
My first Dilbert experience, kind of.
When I left the phone company, I'm sorry, when I left the bank and went to the phone company, the local phone company, it wasn't long after the divestiture from where all the phone companies were owned by AT&T.
So once the individual phone companies were created, they got some allocation of capital from what had been the master entity that was very profitable.
So it turns out that the company I worked for had big piles of money coming in Just because of the divestiture, it had nothing to do with their business.
It was just vast piles of capital that we had to employ.
How many of the things that we spent that money on were necessary, do you think?
Because we realized early on that whatever we established as our budget for the group I was working in, it probably would be sort of the good starting point.
So after that capital started trickling out, because it wouldn't last forever, we'd have a large budget And then we'd be able to say, hey, we better keep having this large budget.
You might have to cut some other things, but look at all these things we're doing.
So people were fighting to spend the most budget because that was their best interest.
I'm not making that up.
We had conversations about how to overspend and like move some expenses into the current year to make sure that our expenses were as high as possible.
That was a real thing that happened.
Real thing.
Now, do you think that a bank like Silicon Valley Bank, which at one point looked pretty profitable, do you think that all the things they were doing were like right on target to their basic?
No, and they were doing lots of social things and donating money to politics and all that stuff.
Facebook, I assume it's the same thing.
If you got rid of 25% of the workforce, no problem.
How about Twitter?
What percentage of Twitter did Elon Musk fire?
I don't know the number.
Is it like half or something?
Does anybody have that percentage?
I'm not sure I've seen it exactly.
Got a little technical problem here.
Oh no.
Technical problem on Locals.
Looks like Locals is down.
I'm going to reboot Locals.
See if that works.
Should be one click and back in business.
Back in business.
Sorry about the technical problem there.
All right, somebody says 50%.
50% at Twitter.
And has anybody noticed that Twitter is worse?
Now, there have been a few technical problems, but I think there always were.
Oh, is it 75%?
Did he get rid of 75%?
My personal subjective experience is that Twitter is better.
I feel it's better.
It's got a little more features.
I don't know.
To me it looks better.
And that is not unusual from the Dilbert perspective.
But I think they're hiding the bigger story here.
Here's the bigger story on Facebook.
Do you know anybody under the age of 18 who uses Facebook?
I don't.
No.
Nobody.
Now, they do use subsets of the corporation.
They use Instagram, for sure.
And they might be using WhatsApp.
But actual Facebook?
I think the real story here is that Facebook has no potential for the future unless they become an entirely different company.
Which, to Zuckerberg's credit, Is exactly what he's trying to do.
He is a good manager.
I gotta say.
You know, say what you will about him for any political stuff or any other problems you have.
But he has proven to be a durable and reliable leader who has a good vision of the future.
So I think he can own that.
I appreciate him for that.
And he's stayed out of trouble too.
Have you noticed how much trouble Zuckerberg stays out of?
He's really, really good at staying out of trouble.
You don't notice it, because you don't notice the trouble he didn't cause.
But he's just really good at not causing any controversies.
However, I think the problem is that if he doesn't make meta work, Facebook has no future.
When all the tech companies got dumped during the beginning of the I bought in because I thought, oh, this is the best price I'll ever get.
Turns out Amazon is lower than that.
Amazon is lower than before the pandemic at the moment.
So that didn't work out.
The other ones did, but the one that I wouldn't even touch was Facebook.
Like I never was even tempted to own Facebook because some of the best advice I got early on was don't You know, don't get too interested in anything that kids don't want to use, because the timer is on.
It can't last.
All right.
This is just a story about me.
This is just about me, so if you'll indulge me.
It's sort of a, I don't know, sign of the times sort of thing.
But there's some gentleman on Twitter who was really, really mad at me today.
But I can't get interested enough to find out why.
But he's really, really mad.
And he's talking about how people who follow me on Twitter are doing things and that's my fault.
I guess people who follow him on Twitter, follow me on Twitter, are doing something to him and he doesn't like it.
So somehow that's my fault, but I don't even know who he is.
Now, the only thing I know is he may have been in the media and may have said something about me, but I wasn't reading any of those stories.
Like, I don't know what he said.
But he reminded me, because I said, you know, can you leave me out of this?
I don't even know who you are.
He was all mad at me for the things I've done to him.
I literally didn't even know who he was.
That's like a typical day for me.
So I asked him on Twitter, you know, hey, I don't even know what this story is about, can you leave me out of it?
So he tweets that I had once retweeted a deepfake that involved him.
And so that was on me, because I had retweeted a deepfake that I guess in his mind was not complimentary or something.
But when I retweeted it, I labeled it in the retweet, right above it, in clear language, that it's the AI version.
Like, I'm calling it out as a deepfake.
And he got mad at me for doing that, because I guess more people saw it.
But I called it out as not real.
I mean, I couldn't have been more clear.
It was one sentence, and it just said that.
It's the AI version.
I guess I could have been more clear, but he is hella mad.
I just think it's funny that he's so mad at me and I don't even know why.
And I'm not incentivized to find out.
It just doesn't matter.
All right, there was a Russian jet that messed with one of our predator, no, what kind of drones?
A Reaper drone, I guess?
So did you know that the United States was flying Reaper drones over the Black Sea?
Why were we doing that?
Why?
I feel like that's direct American involvement in a war zone.
I realize I'm supposed to be on the American side here, and I am, but why do we do that?
And why do we think we can get away with that?
Flying American, even though it's a drone, it's unmanned, but it's a major military asset.
We're just flying it around Russia's neighborhood, Now, I get that it wasn't in their territorial zone, but it is a hot war.
It's a hot war.
If you fly your military assets in and around a hot war, somebody's gonna mess with it.
So, I don't know.
I think that's just two countries.
Bumping jets.
I didn't see much there for a story.
You see, neither side wants it to escalate, so it won't.
You would need at least one side to be willing to escalate.
And neither side wants to escalate and then some direct confrontation.
So I don't even have a problem with Russia knocking that drone down.
I guess they had some technique where they tried to fly their jets over it and dump their fuel on it.
I'd never heard of that.
Is that something they invented on the spot or is that an actual thing?
Dumping your fuel on the drone?
But I guess that didn't work.
Then somehow they actually clipped the propeller or something.
They clipped something and it went down.
But did they intentionally, do you think they intentionally put their jet so close to it that it clipped it?
And it hurt the drone more than it hurt the jet?
You say yes.
I can't imagine being brave enough to knock down a drone with my plane and hope that I would get back okay.
That doesn't sound right to me.
It sounds like maybe they were getting close to do something else and maybe hit it accidentally.
I don't know.
Or maybe the drone closed the gap and it wasn't the jet.
It's possible the drone went after the jet.
Which would be dumb, but maybe.
They may have thought, well, let's just bump this chat and see what happens.
I don't know.
None of it, I think, will become anything big.
You see, the New York Times was talking about how DeSantis is now saying he's not crazy about defending Ukraine and that it's a territorial dispute.
Now this would put DeSantis in the same bucket as Trump.
Trump was already there being not crazy about this war.
And as the New York Times put it, if you put the support of Trump plus DeSantis together, 75% of Republicans, at least the leaders of 75% of Republicans, given that people like different leaders, and of Ukraine, 75%.
But here's what's missing in the conversation.
I don't think Trump or DeSantis can describe what it looks like if we leave.
And without that, it's not a real opinion.
It's just a political opinion.
Sounds good.
Sounds good to the base.
But what would it look like?
How in the world would you not expect the Ukrainian people to be crushed by Russia?
You've got to be able to say that out loud.
See, if you can't say that out loud, you don't belong in the conversation.
I like the Willie Brown statement on that.
If you're not willing to say, we should get out of there, and I fully understand that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people will be crushed by this.
And I fully understand that it would look like America is backing away from a fight.
And I fully understand that it could embolden Russia, but we don't know.
We don't know, but it could embolden them.
That would be a greater risk.
And it might give them A recovery time to get their energy dominance back over Europe.
Because you can imagine the Europeans would start signing deals again.
Am I wrong?
Yeah, they would just start signing deals again as soon as the war was over.
So, we'd have to understand that getting out of Ukraine means giving everything back, crushing Ukraine, having wasted our money, wasted our reputation, wasted all those lives.
Now, it still might be the best idea.
If it sounded like I said to you, so don't do it, I didn't say that.
Because I don't know what the best idea is.
But I know that I don't want to follow a leader who can't describe it.
Just describe your plan.
Here's my plan.
We pull out in six months.
Russia will definitely wipe out Ukraine.
They'll fight boldly but lose in the long run.
Then the Ukrainians will maybe be starved like the Holodomor.
And certainly all their leaders will be executed that we've had over here.
We're pretty happy with Zelensky, but he'd obviously be tortured and executed.
And just describe it.
Now, if you can say that directly to the American people, and then say, and we should still do it.
We should still do it.
Because the alternative is even worse.
That's somebody I would believe.
That's somebody I could follow.
That would be a real leader.
Tell us the truth.
And I can handle the hard truth.
I can handle that.
I can't handle half a truth.
I can't handle an obvious lie.
But if DeSantis or Trump could give us the actual truth, here's what it looks like, and it's really, really gonna suck for these people.
But we need to do it.
I'll listen to that.
I'm not pre-convinced, but I'm gonna listen to that.
But I'm not gonna listen to, oh, we shouldn't be there.
Oh, we shouldn't be there is just That's for public consumption.
That has nothing to do with policy.
That's just for... Do you think that if DeSantis became president tomorrow, he could actually pull the trigger and start pulling people out?
No.
It would take about a minute and a half for the, you know, the, what do you call it, the military-industrial complex to own him.
Take about a minute.
And then he'd be like, oh, well, we definitely want to phase out, but not so quickly.
You know, we have to do it right.
So it might take two years, which coincidentally is exactly the amount of time the war would have taken on its own.
So I think it would instantly turn into, we've got to do what we're already doing because it's too late to turn back.
I think that's the truth.
I think it's too late to turn back.
Might be.
We'll see.
Yeah.
Once again, I'd like to give a public congratulations to Gavin Newsom for one of the best political plays of the year.
I've told you before that he, instead of saying no to reparations, well actually this is more the San Francisco board, but the San Francisco board came up with the recommendations.
So here's what they came up with.
I was going to try to read it without laughing, but I don't know that I could do that.
So the reason it's brilliant is that when you ask the people who are in favor of reparations to come back with a detailed plan, you can know in advance that the detailed plan will just be laughable.
Like actually just laughable.
And then you don't have to be the person who's against reparations.
You're the person who tried to get a committee to come up with a plan.
Well, it's not your fault if the committee came up with a laughable plan that nobody would possibly implement.
Well, that's not your fault.
So Gavin Newsom for the win.
Here's the plan that the committee came up with.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors met Tuesday.
This is from Fox News site.
In official discussions on reparations, with $5 million payments on the table for every eligible black adult in the city, Oh no, I'm not done.
I'm not done.
The board expressed, quote, unanimous support for reparations during the meeting, even after Stanford University Hoover Institution calculated that the proposal would cost non-black families in the city at least $600,000 each.
Members of the San Francisco board also expressed interest in other forms of reparations, because that's not enough, for the city's roughly 50,000 black residents, including a guaranteed for the city's roughly 50,000 black residents, including a guaranteed annual income of $97,000 For 250 years, each person.
a year for 250 years.
For 250 years, each person.
What is the average lifespan of a black resident of San Francisco?
I don't know.
I think they live longer there, probably to 1,000.
1,000.
But anyway, $97,000 for 250 years, and wait, hold on, and a home that they would purchase for $1 for a family.
$1.
So they want $1 home purchases.
Now, since the person selling the home obviously has to be compensated, you would have to add the, you know, roughly I don't know.
What's a home in San Francisco?
A million dollars?
Two million dollars?
So you'd have to add a million dollars to each black family.
So the $600,000 per non-black resident that they have to pay, you'd have to jack that up another, you know, maybe $100,000 to buy all the homes.
But also to pay the annual $9,700,000 for 250 years, well, probably each non-black resident, maybe a million dollars.
Maybe a million dollars per non-black resident as their fee to pay for the fact that none of them had anything to do with slavery.
All right, well, I'd like to double down on something that got me in trouble and say that, as I tweeted, I don't want to spend time near any cluster of white people who have been poisoned by wokeness narratives.
Is that racist?
Is it racist to say I don't want to be near any cluster of white people who have that mindset?
Now, I don't think I would be canceled for saying that, would I?
No.
Super racist.
Super racist.
But it does not include conservatives.
White conservatives?
Great.
And by the way, black conservatives?
Love them.
You know, I don't even know if I've ever seen a black conservative who wasn't doing well.
Have you?
Is it my imagination or is it every time I have any encounter with a black conservative, young, younger, older, they seem to have done okay.
Like they have, you know, jobs and families usually and like all the things you'd imagine, you know, signify some kind of personal success.
So, I think when I got in trouble, my hyperbole disguised the fact that I was talking about a mindset, not anything genetic.
Was there any of you who misunderstood my comments?
The context of staying away from, I won't say it again out loud, but people who have a mindset that you're the problem.
Why would you want to be around people whose mindset is you're the problem?
Did anybody figure out When I said, hey, black Americans are being poisoned, largely by white people, to believe that white people are the problem.
Why would you want to be around that?
Literally nobody disagreed with the idea.
It's just that it's racist.
So I'll say the same thing about white people.
White people who are in a Democrat cluster, I'm sure there are some of them that are just great.
Even, I'm sure there are some progressives who are actually just great people who have a little bit different opinion.
I don't mind them.
Of course.
And of course I'd judge everybody individually.
Because you have to.
It's the only smart thing to do.
Judge people individually.
And when I say judge people individually, that's not a race frame.
Have I ever explained that?
When I say I'm adamant about every individual must be treated as an individual, not a race, not a religion, that's based on math.
That's not based on any racial anything.
That's a personal success math-based strategy.
The more people you have access to, the more successful you will be.
It's called networking.
Those are the people who will offer you jobs, blah blah blah.
It's about mindset and it's not about race.
It never was about race.
It was never about race.
But my hyperbole quite intentionally made it look that way.
RFK Jr.
was on a video recently, I was listening to him, and he reminds us that before Obama's presidency, it was illegal for the CIA to manipulate the minds of Americans.
They could do it in other countries, but it was illegal for them to try to brainwash Americans.
Obama changed that and made it legal again to brainwash Americans.
So, Do you think that he made it legal just in case anybody ever wanted to?
Or do you think that the CIA immediately said, whoa, we better immediately start a department to manage the opinions of Americans?
If you've learned nothing from what I've taught you about the Dilbert kind of organizations, the moment it was legal, you should assume that somebody at the CIA said, you know what?
If you were to give me a promotion and a budget, I could run the department that is in charge of this.
And we won't go wild.
We'll only use it when it's necessary for public safety.
For example, maybe we'll stop a bank run.
How about that?
Maybe we'll stop a bank run.
And that would be good.
I wouldn't mind that.
Would you mind if you found out later that the CIA had managed, somehow managed our mines to stop a bank run?
Some say they would mind.
And I respect that opinion.
Yeah, some would say they'd mind.
Others would say, you know what?
Under that specific situation, I'd rather they stepped in.
And I think both could be supported.
I think smart people could be on both sides of that question.
But, doesn't it make you wonder?
Now, let me ask you this.
Do you think the CIA totally said, this isn't our thing?
Or do you think the CIA said, oh, this is exactly our thing.
We've got to stop this bank run.
And if the CIA wanted to stop a bank run, how would they do it?
What would be the tools they would employ?
Well, what they would use is people.
People who were willing to do what they asked them to do.
So they would go to newspapers, and they would go to networks, and various... But they would also make sure that they got some prominent voices that were persuasive to say what they wanted to say.
Did you see a number of prominent voices that were on the side of controlling the bank run and taking care of it?
Well, you did.
Now, I'm not saying that they were CIA-influenced.
I'm saying that's how they would do it, which is different from any individual being part of that.
So I'm not making an accusation about any individual.
I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised.
Oh, if somebody says me, no, no, nobody contacted me.
Well, that's a good point.
If nobody contacted me.
But would people think that I was pro-CIA or a critic of the CIA?
How would you interpret my public work?
As a critic of intelligence agencies?
50 members of whom signed the Laptop from Hell disinformation?
Well, somebody says I'm both, and that's fair.
Yeah, I'm both.
Because I think we need the CIA.
But clearly, you know, if you look at the behavior of our intelligence organizations in the last several years, they do seem weaponized against us.
And they do seem politicized.
So I've been saying that for a long time.
Alright, so here's my question to you.
If the CIA Had the legal ability to manage public minds and brainwash people, would they act against their critics?
Do you think the CIA would act to minimize their critics?
Some say yes.
Because it's legal.
It would be legal to protect their own brand.
If they could argue that that was good for the country.
Oh yeah, we don't want the CIA to be dismantled.
That would keep the country in a weak state.
So we'll manipulate people into thinking we're awesome.
And one of the ways we do that might be to get rid of our critics.
Do you remember when the newspapers cancelled me?
But suspiciously only Democrats seemed to be really, really angry.
Whereas conservatives, once they heard the context I was talking about, conservatives almost to a person said, you shouldn't be canceled for that, even if they didn't like it.
Even if they thought I was over the line or too offensive, pretty much conservatives said, you know, still it's not cancelable, in their opinions.
And pretty much it was just Democrats versus Republicans in the end.
So my first take on this was that it was really political, meaning that the newspapers wanted to get rid of me and anybody who was a Democrat wanted to get rid of me.
And I would say that if you looked at the last several years, anybody who was paying attention could see that I could move the dial.
How many would agree with that statement?
That in the realm of politics, That I can move the dial.
I can actually change people's opinions in a way that's important.
So the locals people mostly say yes.
They're a little bit ahead of the... Yeah, you see yeses here.
Now those of you who don't agree, like there's some nos, right?
So those of you who say no, the only point I'm going to make is look at all the yeses.
So I'm not going to say I am or am not influential.
I'm just going to say look at the yeses.
If the public thinks I'm influential, do you think the CIA thinks so?
Do you think the CIA hasn't noticed?
Me?
Do you think the CIA, who is an expert on persuasion, doesn't know exactly what I can do and what I can't do?
Of course they do.
They know exactly how much influence I have and which direction I'm likely to push it.
And it's not necessarily in their favor.
And then the newspapers canceled me.
How many newspapers did it take to create the run on newspapers?
It's like a run on banks.
Like if the first few newspapers say, we must cancel you, let's say the Washington Post.
Washington Post was the second big paper.
If the Washington Post cancels me, do you think these smaller papers can keep me in the pages?
Nope.
It really only took the Washington Post.
Because once they took a stand, The other papers just sort of, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because the Washington Post is a newsmaker.
They decide what is true for the smaller newspapers.
So how much would the CIA have to tweak a knob to get rid of me as a public figure?
They needed one editor in one place to write an editorial and say, cancel this guy.
That's all it would take.
One editor in one place.
Do you think the newspapers did this on their own?
Because they could have.
I'm not saying they didn't.
It's entirely possible.
It's just what you thought it was.
Public complained.
The newspapers had too much pressure.
Newspapers also didn't like me because I criticized the news a lot.
And so it was just a news thing and it was just business and there was nothing suspicious here.
Very possible.
But I can't really conceive of a situation where the CIA wouldn't want to take me out.
And they have the ability.
It's one phone call.
One phone call cancels me worldwide.
Now do you think that I will have as much influence after being cancelled?
What do you think?
Will I have as much influence after being cancelled?
Well it would be a good bet that I would go away like Roseanne.
If you were going to bet, you'd bet, okay, it's going to be a Roseanne situation.
You know, he might come back in five years or something, but basically he's off the field for the next election cycle.
Somebody says, this is not an issue for the CIA.
Let me tell you why it is.
The CIA does want to protect its own power and its own mission.
And I'm a critic.
It's pretty straightforward.
If people don't try to get rid of their critics when they can, I wouldn't understand the CIA if they couldn't act on things that they thought were important.
So, I'm not going to make a claim that the CIA decided to cancel me.
I'm going to make the following claim.
It would look just like this.
It would look exactly like this.
And you wouldn't be able to know.
Now the problem is not me, because, you know, I know some people say when I talk about my situation it's whining or complaining.
I'm not whining or complaining.
I'm just describing.
My life is fine.
I'm in a good place.
I don't have a problem in the world.
But you should know that you can't tell what stories are real anymore.
If the CIA decides that's your narrative, that's your narrative.
They only have to get a few news people to say it's true and then it's a big story everybody's talking about.
So if you thought it was hard For the CIA or anybody else to change the entire narrative or to take out a person?
It's not.
It's one phone call.
It's just one phone call.
That's it.
You can change the whole narrative.
Which doesn't mean they're doing it.
It's just that they could.
Alright, Rasmussen did a poll on designated the cartels as terrorist organizations.
It turns out 79% of likely U.S.
voters are in favor.
Of designated New Mexican drug cartels as a serious threat to the United States.
Who would disagree with that?
I mean, seems obvious, right?
Let me see.
Disagree.
Okay.
Well, 20% strongly disagree with that.
20%.
But then there's another 10% that are not sure.
So let's say the 10% that are not sure You know, if they found out a little more, they could go either way.
It's sort of a coin flip.
So take half of them and add it to the 20.
Oh.
Yeah, that would be 25%.
We're not in favor of that.
Huh.
Very surprising.
Very surprising.
I don't know.
I wonder how many of the people who said they wanted to be designated as a terrorist organization, how many of them know that that guarantees military action?
I'm not sure if the people answering the poll knew that they were voting for war.
They're voting for a hot war.
If they're in favor of that.
Now I do.
I'm in favor of a hot war.
A limited one.
I mean one that just goes after the bad guys.
But I can say that loud.
All right.
Here's a shift in the narrative that I'm seeing, and you can decide if I have anything to do with this.
So your assignment will be, as I mentioned, a few different related stories, to see if anything that happened to me recently allows people to talk this way in public.
In other words, have I had any impact, accidentally, on broadening The discussion zone.
Things you can say out loud.
Here's some things that people are saying out loud, which I'm not agreeing with.
This is important.
These are not things I agree with.
The point is, people are saying it out loud.
That the problem with Silicon Valley Bank was a diversity hire.
Now, as people point out, most of the leadership was white men.
But the person in charge of Risk management may have been a diversity, let's say, influenced hire.
Now, I'm not going to say that that was why the person got hired.
I'm just saying that that's the conversation.
And I don't know that we would have had that conversation out loud before.
And the out loud part is, OK, we should at least look at whether this was caused by a diversity hire.
We should look at it.
People are saying that out loud.
I don't think you could say that out loud, I don't know, a month ago?
It seems like you couldn't say that.
Here's another one.
The report is that Southwest Airlines has consciously decided to reduce the risk, or reduce the safety, to get more diversity in their pilots.
That's actually being spoken about out loud and in the news that your plane might go down because of diversity hiring.
Now again, this is not my opinion.
My only point is that it's now a conversation.
People are actually saying this shit out loud now.
And then the third one, Joe Rogan, I just saw he was saying on his show that he'd vote for Trump over Biden because Biden's just an empty shell of a human at this point.
But he pointed out that the Biden administration couldn't even hire good people because he used Sam Brinton as the cross-dressing Bag-stealing guy.
Used him as an example of somebody who clearly, in Joe's opinion, was a diversity hire and clearly could not have been the best choice.
The implication is there was a better choice.
So again, I have no opinion on whether Sam Brenton was brilliant at his job.
He could have been.
I mean, I don't There's no smoking gun, in my opinion, that says that any of these people are less qualified.
There's no smoking gun.
But it is part of the conversation now.
And it should be.
Because it might have mattered.
Like, it might be true that Sam Brinton is purely a diversity hire.
Now, why do I say that?
Let me explain to you everything about every big organization.
Here's the thing.
In any big organization, whether it's business or government, it is better to appear woke because everyone can observe it right away.
You can see it.
How many people of color do you have on your board?
How many people did you hire?
What is your diversity?
It's just obvious.
But, that's more important to look woke, because people can see it, compared to being competent, which is often invisible.
Do you know what happens if you're good at your job?
Nobody notices.
Because there are no problems.
If the risk manager at Silicon Valley Bank had done everything right, you would never have even known that was a bank.
I literally never heard of that bank.
I'd never heard of it.
The only reason we were even talking about it is that somebody was not competent.
But we don't know if that's because of a diversity hire.
That would be a leap that's not in evidence.
But here's what you can know for sure.
Managers being managers and leaders being leaders, they will choose to look good compared to performing well.
Does anybody disagree with that?
If they have to choose, now the first choice we all say is, but Scott, but Scott, you can do both.
You can have great diversity hires, and you can have great performance.
There's no conflict at all.
I'm not saying there's a conflict.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that the managers don't care if there's a conflict.
They're going to manage to what you can see.
They're not going to manage to a long-term output that you can't determine if it's because of who they hired or not.
The Silicon Valley Bank is a perfect example.
There are people saying, oh, this might have been a diversity hire problem.
But there will always be people who say, reasonably, there's no direct link.
There's no direct link.
It's really about interest rates and the environment and whatever.
So managers will always manage to that which can be confirmed by everybody, the things you can see.
And it will never manage to the things that can't be proven.
The things that can't be proven, you can manage those by the way you talk about it.
This is the same reason that a new leader likes to come in and then change all the metrics and the departments, because what it does is it erases the past.
And so you can't be compared to what you've done before, because once you've reorganized, all the measurements of who's doing what are now obsolete.
So you erase the past, and then you say, the new things we're doing, yeah, they're not paying off now.
Of course, it's early.
But these changes I've made, if you wait five years, well, we'll be in good shape then.
I've really set us up for the future.
No, it's not good now, because it's an investment, right?
So if Zuckerberg were not the head of his company, and he said, all right, Facebook maybe isn't killing it at the moment, but look what I'm doing with Meta, right?
Meta is Zuckerberg's way of saying we're doing something good that you can see.
Hey, look at these pictures of us in meta.
Hey, look at these goggles that you wear.
Hey, it's all visual.
And it diverts you from the fact that their core business doesn't have a future because young people don't use it.
So you see this effect everywhere all the time.
It's universal.
It's every company, every organization.
Managers manage to what can be seen and easily agreed upon by observers, especially their bosses, but also the public.
So it's not a case, and this is where everybody will go wrong, it's not a case of there are not enough diversity hires.
That might also be the case.
Might also, and that would be systemic racism, blah, blah, blah.
But if you have a situation where everybody has to have a high number of diversity hires, and everybody's scrambling for the same limited pool of people, in theory, and in practice, you will always get lower performance.
Not because the people are bad, but because the managers will manage to the look, not the reality.
Does that, am I clear enough about that distinction?
There could also be a question that there just aren't enough, you know, the limited pool of who everybody wants to hire because everybody's looking at the same pool of people.
It might just be a shortage of people.
That would give you a terrible result too.
But you don't even need that.
Those people could all be better than everybody else.
And the fact that people are managing to the look still gets you to a bad place every time.
So it's a Dilbert problem, and I would summarize it this way, I'd say that wokeness is a good goal that became a bad system.
I would, on top of what I've said already, every good idea gets ruined by exaggerating it to absurdity.
Let me give you a concept.
Are taxes a good idea?
Some absolutists say, no, no taxes.
I think taxes are a good idea because it allows you to fund the military.
Yeah, fund the military.
But are the current level of taxes good?
No, it's too much.
Everything that's good in small amounts will eventually be ruined by people who have figured out how to make money by taking it too far.
When I say that the base idea of Woke is a good goal, I get a lot of pushback.
But here's what I mean.
On day one, it was a good idea.
By day three, it was already ruined.
On day one, it looked like, you know, wouldn't it be great if we treated everybody with the same level of respect?
And that's what I think wokeness is at its base.
To which I say, yes, yes, on board.
Everybody should be treated as their own individual.
And respect them totally, unless their individual performance says otherwise.
Absolutely.
But as soon as you go from treat everybody with respect, and oh, and by the way, I'd like to be called by these pronouns.
To which I also say, okay, don't judge me if I get it wrong, but I like calling people what they like to be called.
It's just polite.
And next thing you know, white people aren't hired.
What?
We immediately went from treat everybody with respect to everyone except white people.
That's where we are now.
It's literally just anti-white.
Now, does that mean it was always a bad idea?
No, no.
It's like everything else.
Everything starts as a good idea.
It just turns to shit when it gets extended by the grifters and the media.
Like, everybody's got to talk about it.
They've got to signal.
They've got to be on that team.
And actually, you know, Drew Barrymore is on her knees in front of a trans activist on her show.
That was big news today.
And I think that was a trivial, trivial news bit.
But yeah, everything goes too far.
Here's what I'm going to do for the world.
If you've been watching me for a while, if you've read my past books, you know that I always talk about systems being better than goals.
And you know that I like to reframe things.
So I'm going to show you the first draft of my four-page PowerPoint presentation, the title of I think you can see it there, I'll read it.
The Racism Mindset and the Success Mindset choose one.
Now, I could just go home after the title page because that's the whole story.
They're incompatible.
They're incompatible.
The Racism Mindset Or the entire topic has lots of good historical things we should all know.
So in terms of information, it's pretty good.
I like the information.
But if you make it your focus and you build your systems around looking backwards, you're doing everything that's the opposite of what successful people do.
And I'll detail that on this page.
So on one column, I showed you an earlier version of this.
I'm just refining it because I think it's important.
So on one column you've got the things that racism cares about.
Equity, well I'll just read it to you.
Equity, focusing on the past, injustices.
Systemic racism, reparations, dividing people by race, that's the racism mindset does that.
Turning things into oppressor and victim model.
Resentment, resentment of current people for not doing enough as well as old You know, the long dead.
And then the racism mindset is basically, could be summarized as, I can't because... I can't succeed because racism.
I can't get this job because racism.
So it's a can't because philosophy.
Now the success mindset has a direct, or pretty direct, some of it is a little indirect, but correlation Where what you would do for success would be, instead of focusing on equity, you would say, how about winning?
How about winning?
Have you ever heard anybody in the success industry, like somebody who really knows about how to do success, have you ever said, if you work hard, you could be average?
You know, if you put your muscles into it, and your brains, and you work hard, you could be as good as other people.
That's ridiculous.
Any success mentor would tell you, why aren't you trying to win?
If everybody tries to win, and we're playing by fair rules, and we're not breaking any laws, the whole society is better.
Just everybody try to win.
That works.
How about focusing on the past versus focusing on the future?
If you want to be successful, you have to focus on the future.
It's not optional.
Nobody ever got successful just thinking about the past.
Or how about systemic racism?
It's a real thing.
You can't forget about it, can't ignore it.
But if you have a success mindset, you're not thinking about what's stopping you.
You're thinking optimistically.
Nothing can stop me.
Oh, your problem is systemic racism?
No problem.
That won't stop me.
Oh, your problem is that you're short?
Let's say you're a man and you're short.
No problem.
I'll work with that.
I'll make that work.
Your problem is that you're less healthy or maybe you're disabled?
No problem.
I'll make that work.
Yeah, I can make that work.
So the success mindset is all about the problems won't stop you.
The racism mindset is all about the racism did stop you.
It did.
And it's going to keep stopping you.
So that's what your brain should focus on.
The cleanest one is reparations.
Reparations is you owe me something.
Whereas the success mindset is what can you do for other people?
And also reciprocity.
If you hear Jeff Bezos talk about Amazon, right, what made Amazon work?
He says, an obsessive focus on the customer.
Did that work out for Amazon?
Yeah.
I use Amazon specifically because I can feel their obsessive focus on the customer.
You can feel it.
It's like an actual feeling, right?
Everything from the one-click shopping to how easy it is to, you know, reorder things.
It is insanely customer focused, and that's Jeff Bezos.
That's all Jeff Bezos.
He is forcing them to be customer focused, and probably there's a big problem when they're not.
My guess.
You'd probably get fired if you lose that focus for a minute.
Now, that's a winner's attitude.
But looking at things as, you know, as reparations you owe me is a short-term strategy at best.
The racism mindset divides people by race, but if you're in a success mindset, you're playing the odds.
Why would you limit yourself to part of the public?
By thinking that some people are against you, stay away from these people, whatever.
Network is you try to meet as many people as you can from wherever.
Might come in handy.
Of course, the racism mindset is about resentment, and how does that work if you're trying to find a mentor?
Imagine you're a young black person, you're trying to make it in the world, you're in a big company, and you'd like to find a mentor, because everybody would.
Like, it's good to have a mentor.
But most of them are white.
What do you do?
If you have resentment toward white people for racism, It's going to be harder to get a mentor, because I think that resentment is going to come through pretty quickly.
People are going to notice.
You can't really hide it.
It would come out in your language and the things you focus on, et cetera.
And then the can't because turns into the can-do mindset with success.
So that's the list.
I think you should be at least At the very least, you should agree that the lists don't line up.
Would you agree?
Would you agree that the racism mindset, the way it's being used in America, is opposite of the success mindset?
That's the thing that bugs me the most.
And part of what is misunderstood about me Is that I'm coming from everything from a success filter, not a race filter.
But if you come from that filter, it can be really jarring.
It can be jarring to somebody who's in the other filter.
Very jarring, as we learned.
But I should also say that you don't want to ignore history.
You want to teach the history, of course, but don't focus on it.
You should focus on strategies for the future.
It's just a focus question.
Don't forget it.
And then here's the kill shot.
All right.
I'll read these, but you can see it's just three points.
The kill shot is the persuasive dagger that I'm going to put into some people reading this.
Here's the dagger.
A child who learns the tools and strategies of success will do better in life than one who is taught to see life as a race struggle.
How does that feel?
How does that feel?
Yeah.
You're killing your kids by teaching them the wrong frame.
You're just ruining their lives.
And you know it.
You can't argue with it.
Because nobody's going to argue that ignoring the tools and strategies of success to focus on race struggle is a good strategy.
Literally no one would believe that.
And yet we're doing it.
So that's the dagger.
Then here's some explanation.
Point two, the media, race grifters, well-meaning teachers, see I'm not insulting teachers, but well-meaning teachers and professional activists are poisoning race relations and destroying the future of black American kids by teaching them a losing mindset.
Do you think the Asian American kids are learning to focus on race?
Or are they learning to focus on building a talent stack?
Which is central to success.
Maybe they're focused on staying in a jail and not doing drugs, which are essential to success.
Now, we've got to stop pretending that every culture is being raised with useful mentoring messages.
It's just not happening.
Some of the cultures are getting useful mentoring success-related messages, and the black culture is being poisoned into thinking there's a reason that's going to hold them back and nothing's going to change it.
That's what they're taught.
And I would imagine that the progressive white part of the population is taught the same thing.
So they would be on board with that.
But it doesn't matter as much that progressive whites buy into that frame, because it's not them.
It's not them.
They're probably going about their own lives however they want.
But I'm watching something that looks like a black holocaust.
Obviously that's hyperbole.
I'm looking at something that's a disaster for black Americans and I don't think they're doing it to themselves.
I believe that white America is allowing the situation that is the current situation.
To me it looks like the media assigns people's opinions and the media is still controlled by white people.
So if we have these opinions, it's because somebody told the left and the right what to think, largely.
And then they adopted those opinions.
And those opinions are not coming mostly from black people.
It wasn't black people who cancelled me.
I had zero cancellations from anybody black.
Zero.
It was all white people.
So I don't see the blame being squarely on anybody in black America.
I see the teachers' unions being evil, and they're a mixture of everything.
I see white Americans creating this situation that's not good for anybody.
And I think the only people who can save themselves are black Americans.
Because if black Americans rely on white people to help them with their reparations, they're going to get the Gavin Newsom treatment.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we'd love to help you.
How about you do a committee and come back with your recommendations on reparations?
And then I'm helping.
Look at me being supportive.
Good.
Good going there.
I'm so supportive.
No, only black America can help black America.
And if you think that I'm talking about like white tricks for success, no, it's what all black successful people do.
It's all what white successful people do.
It's all the same.
Look to the future, be optimistic, use some gratitude, have reciprocity, just basic stuff.
Build a, you know, stay in a jail, build a talent stack, have systems over goals.
There's like 12 things you have to learn and it would take you 20 minutes to learn all 12 of them.
Right?
It would take you 20 minutes to learn all the techniques of success.
20 minutes.
And then you're good to go.
There will still be lots of racism, but you'll cut through it like hot poker through butter.
And then my final statement here to close down is, the reason no one told you this before is because there is a high social penalty for doing so.
There is a high social penalty for being honest on this topic.
I don't know if you know anybody who had that issue.
Now my problem was not the honesty, it was the hyperbole.
The honesty part everybody was okay with.
But I did cause a little trouble, more than I thought, by a little extra hyperbole.
But as you know, the people that have watched me use this pattern before, they know that I was causing trouble to draw fire.
I didn't think I'd draw that much.
It was a calculated risk.
I knew there was a risk.
So that's why I'm not complaining.
The reason I'm not complaining is because I intentionally did something with a high risk that had, in my opinion, a potential high reward for the country, not for me.
And maybe it didn't work out.
So far, I'm pretty happy with how things are turning out.
So we don't know.
We don't know.
All newspapers ended up Not being able to run it because my syndication company and then my book publisher cancelled me.
So that cancels distribution.
So they couldn't, newspapers couldn't carry it even if they wanted to.
Yeah.
So here's, this is the message that I plan to die on this hill.
And I'm going to die on the hill that all the ESG, CRT, DEI, are crushing the chances for black American success.
And because they are such an important part of my country, that's bad for me.
Right?
It's bad for me when black Americans don't do well.
That's bad for me.
And that's why I've put so much attention in trying to fix that specific situation.
But Maybe the CIA took me out for political reasons.
Maybe the Democrats took me out for political reasons.
The only thing I know is that the conservative part of the country understands this message completely.
True or false?
Most of you lean right if you're watching this, even though I don't.
Yeah, every one of you is agreeing.
Every one of you is agreeing.
Look at the comments.
Absolutely zero pushback.
I got cancelled for this.
It's the way I did it, so it's my own damn fault.
But look at the bigger picture.
Was cancelling me good for black America?
Well, let me ask you this question.
Was cancelling me good or bad for black America?
Because this is what I'm bringing.
This is what I'm bringing.
This is my offer.
It's free.
And by the way, you don't need to buy any of my books.
Like, I have a book that I think is good.
You can't buy it at the moment because it's cancelled.
But if you could buy it, it would just be one of the things you could do.
I'm proposing that the tools of success are so widely available, you could just Google it.
You could pick up a different book.
You could ask somebody who's successful.
I don't care where you get it.
That's the unimportant part.
So that's why I'm interested in working on homeschooling, because I think you could make a difference in the curriculum by just introducing a module about personal success.
And a module about personal success, if you could do it well, I think would guarantee that homeschoolers outperformed everybody else.
They probably already do.
But it would just make it clean.
And I would make the following bet.
Then if you gave me a group of randomized black Americans, or even poor, let's say low income.
So they're randomized except they're all low income.
And you compare that to a randomized group of white kids, and you say, Scott, you're going to work with a randomized group of black kids.
You're going to teach them the tools of success that work for everybody.
And then the white kids will just be the control group.
They're just taught a regular education.
Come back in 20 years, who's making more money?
I guarantee it's my group.
I guarantee it.
You should place a very large bet on that if the group that has the tools of success does well.
I would do groveling.
Make it a web series.
A web series teaching the rules of success.
The trouble is, I don't know if people are watching videos that are longer than 30 seconds.
If I did it, it would be a series of 30-second reels.
That's probably the only way to do it.
Because kids aren't going to read it.
You could turn it into a course for a teacher, and then the teacher could work with the kids.
But for mass communication, it's hard to reach kids.
You'd need something really simple.
I'm trying not to say TikTok because I want TikTok to go away.
Homeschooling is great only if the parents are well-educated.
That's probably true.
Although I think that's changing.
My understanding is that the homeschool market is now robust enough that you can find videos of good teachers.
I think people coordinate to have maybe the smartest parents Teach a few of them or something.
I think they're finding workarounds, but it's true.
If the parents aren't starting with a good basis of knowledge, it's going to be harder.
Charter schools, yeah.
I'm in favor of all of those alternative schooling things.
All right, that's all I got for you today.
Stevie, we'll talk about how the bell curve is for suckers.
Actually, I'll do it right now.
Anytime I have this kind of conversation, somebody says, bell curve, bell curve, bell curve.
And you know what that means.
The idea is that the racially, let's say, provocative members of the white community think that that's the whole explanation.
Here's why I disagree.
Most people are average.
That's my whole argument.
I'm only talking about average people.
If it's true that there are more white people who are genius scientists, how does that affect you and me?
Suppose it's true.
Suppose there's a bunch of freaks who are white that are so smart, you know, they're the quantum physicists and stuff.
Suppose that's true.
What does that have to do with the guy who walks in for the job in your company?
Nothing.
Doesn't tell you anything about an individual.
The fact that there might be some freakishly smart people in one group skews the average.
So my point is, you're talking about the exceptions.
Now, how about black America?
Do they have an unusual number of people who, because of poverty and even low nutritional stuff, Is there anything that's skewing that average?
Probably, right?
But if the average person, you know, the people in let's say the 80% bulk of both the white and the black population, if anybody in that middle 80% of white or black comes into your office for an interview and they have roughly similar credentials, you can't tell them apart.
You have no idea who's going to be good on the job.
Nobody can do that.
It's just not a thing.
Because the middle is just the middle.
The geniuses that may have been skewing it, and the people who don't have any job and never will, who are skewing it in another group, they're not the people we're talking about.
Right?
They're just not the people.
So when you try to deal with, if you're using an average to decide how to deal with an individual, that's just nonsense.
There may be some use for that information.
But I think it's overused.
So I reject it as useful, right?
I'm not rejecting it as, I don't know if the science is measuring the right thing or not.
I don't know how much IQ is really telling you about success.
I mean, it's highly correlated, but there may be other things that are correlated that are sort of obscuring the real thing going on.
So those are all interesting topics, but when you're talking about personal success, it's about the person standing in front of you.
It's not about anybody's average.
It's the person standing in front of you.
All right.
That's all for now, YouTube.
I'm going to talk to the locals people a little bit more.
