Episode 158 Scott Adams: The Good News Breaking Out Everywhere

Something there. All right, people, people, please. Hey, Bruce, Owen, Jeremy, come on in. Here says Gino. Ascension. It's time. Oh yeah, it's time. Not only is it time for the simultaneous sip and coffee with Scott Adams, but it's time to celebrate the good news. Sometimes we get so broken down and beaten up by the bad news that we forget to stop and celebrate. But today, let us drink to the GDP. 4.1. Yeah, Yeah, that's some good gdp. Simultaneous sipping. So take a look at how the news has morphed and shifted and evolved very quickly. I'll give you some headlines from cnn, just starting from the top left of their page, where in theory those are the important stories. In the top left there is the gdp. So that's reported as the top news. Remember I told you it seemed to me like there's some kind of shift happening at cnn, a shift toward a little more balance. And sure enough, the top two stories are the economy is doing well, the GDP numbers, and then a live update that says Trump. This isn't a one time shot, in other words, just quoting something positive from the President and how the US Economy is doing in four charts. Now that's funny because when I first looked at this page, it was linking to an opinion piece saying that the President was responsible for the good news. But I don't see that piece now. So that may have gone away. So we've got, let's see, what do we got going on? We've got the 55 service people's remains that are being returned by North Korea, which of course is different from denuclearizing, but it's all heading in the right direction. We see the economy doing well. And on cnn, the question asked, I just watched an interview and the question asked was what's behind it? And it seems that at least part of what's behind it is consumer optimism. What is it that makes consumers optimistic? Persuasion. That's right. Consumers were optimistic and somebody or something made them that way. What was it? Well, President Trump is certainly a big part of that. There's of course news about the European Union agreeing to agree they don't have a final deal, but agreeing on a framework to get there. So now it's looking like the trade war. Suddenly, with the flipping of the EU to working with us, it now seems that the trade war might be more of a positive. So suddenly the biggest problem in the world just flipped positive and might actually come out much better than anybody suspected. And that's the same thing that happened with North Korea. Remember, I Keep telling you how often the worst problem when it looks like it's the deepest, worst situation that might be. It might be exactly that. It might be the worst thing and getting worse. But we're not good at telling the difference between, oh my God, we're almost doomed and hey, everything's fixed, it's better than ever. We humans can't tell the difference. Those look a lot alike to us. So the trade war, if you want to call it that, I would call it a negotiation, fits that pattern that it looks like it's doomed until at least one big entity, in this case the eu, says, all right, you know, you have some points, let's negotiate. And that's where we are now. So trade's going well. I saw the tax cuts, getting some credit for the good economic news. I don't know how much that is deserved. I don't know how long it will last. But that's the way it's being reported even on cnn. So once again you're seeing CNN being objective about that. Alright, so North Korea is going well. Syria, you know, that area has some very positive things with Israel talking to Russia, with Russia maybe getting a little distance between themselves and Iran. These are gigantic shifts. You're seeing almost all of the biggest metrics either good or heading that way. In other words, even the signs are good. I call that the golden age. The golden age, when the way you think about things is the important part, not a physical constraint. Here are some examples. The the reason the economy is doing so well. Well, to a large extent, it's because people expected it to. So people invested, consumers spent. So the economy is clearly the best example of the golden age, where our problems are psychological, not physical. And if you get the psychology right, with the right optimistic leaders, then you got the economy right and that's what's happening. You saw that with North Korea. Probably the problem, the base problem, was psychological because we didn't really want to attack them, they didn't want to attack us. So it was a problem of thinking what the other one was thinking and not doing it well. And it looks like we may have gotten past that, where North Korea said, well, there's just no reason to attack you. And we're saying we didn't really have a reason to attack you, but we have lots of good reasons to work well together. Same thing I think you're seeing with Iran. You saw Israel, for example, saying very clearly, if you could find a way to work with us, this could be really great. But it's the way you're thinking about the situation that's holding you back. So Iran also is a psychological problem masquerading as a physical problem. Now, in this context, of all the things that are going right for the president, but for the world and the United States in particular, so we've got all the big stuff, North Korea, the Middle east, the economy, the courts, every one of those big things. Unemployment is going well. So what do the critics have left to criticize the president? This is what it's down to. Just think about this. Think about all those things he got right. War, Middle east, the economy, the courts. He got all that right or it's heading in the right direction. What's the biggest criticism? I'm not even making this up. The biggest criticism is he might have known about a meeting. A meeting. That's it. The biggest headline criticism of the president is, well, I think he might have known about that meeting. Now, you can try to turn that into the worst problem in the world, but any way you want to spin it, whether he did know or he didn't know, whether he lied or he didn't lie, it's a story about a meeting that he didn't even attend. Think about it. All that's left is he may or may not have been forthcoming about a meeting that he didn't even attend. That's it. Now, I suppose Mueller or somebody can indict a ham sandwich, as they like to say, so maybe there's something they can construe as some kind of an illegal something. But it kind of comes down to there was a meeting he didn't attend and maybe he said something about it that doesn't pass the fact checking. Why would he do such a thing? Well, it wasn't important. So sometimes when things are not important, you just try to get past them. And maybe that's all that's happening here. And nothing happened at the meeting, as somebody points out. Right. It was a question about a meeting that was never important in the first place in terms of the content of the meeting, which obviously changed the election results. So remember, I promised you a summer of love. Consider some of the headlines. You saw Nikki Haley calling for more civil conversation online. You've seen, I've seen now cnn, and especially I kept mentioning Chr Cuomo because he seems to be a dominant voice of reason at cnn and he seems to have turned a corner in a good way, a way that's good for the country of objectivity. And that seems new and it seems good and it seems worthy of respect. Now let Me ask you this. Has your Twitter experience been meaner than usual? Just, let's say in just the last few weeks. Think about just the last two weeks. Keep it very local. The last two weeks, has your Twitter experience been people being meaner, same as usual or not as bad? Tell me, please. Let's see your comments here. Somebody saying, tamer, same subsided. Nicer, same, not as bad. Meaner, not as bad. Same, same, same. Meaner, slightly less same now since I started blocking Nazis. Meaner, same, not as bad, not as bad. Slightly meaner, not as bad, not as bad. All right, now this is very, very far from being a scientific poll, and we've got comments all over the place, but I would suggest this. Maybe it's because it's what I want to hear, but when I tell you something that sounds more like I want this to be true than it actually is true, put it in context. That sometimes I'm talking about things that are true, and sometimes I'm causing them to be true. And it might look the same to you if you ask people, hey, are people being as bad or not as bad on Twitter? What you should expect, because of the way our brains are organized, is that you will remember all the bad comments. So because we tend to remember the worst of their interactions online, it's likely that things could be getting better or staying the same. And a lot of people would still report as getting worse because they're influenced by that last thing that happened five minutes ago, and it was bad. So it's a hard survey to do. Even if you did it in some scientific way, people would remember it differently than it was happening, and they would remember the bad parts more. So here's my point. There were a number of people who said it's not as bad. That's what it felt like to me. To me, it felt like my Twitter got less bad. And it's a very recent change. Now, it could be they changed their algorithm. It's entirely possible that Twitter just changed something to get rid of the crazies. And some of them were coming after me, and there are fewer of them. It does feel like the ones coming after me. Most of you have seen Microtics. If you follow me on Twitter and you knew how weirdly similar they were, they would come in and I don't want to give ideas, but they all. They would all say the same fairly lame things, and they were weirdly similar. So it made me think it was organized. At one point in the election cycle, it probably was. So I don't know if it's organized now, but there's less of it at the moment. Now, we've talked about this before. I told you, my new technique on Twitter is that the first time my critic gets personal, as opposed to talking about an idea, they can talk about my ideas and criticize them all day long. I like that. Criticizing my ideas is just, you know, that's a good system. They criticize my ideas, I criticize theirs. Maybe we come up with better ideas after that. But when people come after me personally, I call them a Nazi and tell them I'm blocking them because I block Nazis. Now, my experience of this has been that, first of all, it makes my Twitter experience way more pleasant. And a number of you have started trying it and reporting the same thing. It doesn't feel like it would make you feel as good as it does, but it really does. You feel immediately good because you've labeled them, you've told them why, and you're not lying. What would be more Nazi like than going after the person instead of the idea? That gets pretty close to the definition of Nazi, right? It's about the human. It's not about their ideas or what they're doing. It's about the person. So when people come after you personally, that feels pretty Hitler like. So I say I block anybody who comes after me personally, and then I never have to see them again. Because I realized that for every troll or critic that would come after me personally if I responded in my usual clever way and then left them the ability to respond again, if I did that, then I would have three or four emails, interactions with an unpleasant Nazi. But if I call them a Nazi and block them on the first, Just the first sign they're coming after me personally, I never have to hear them again. Now, some of them create new accounts just to come back and say their thing again, but it's kind of rare. And then I just block them again. So that gives me two bytes. Now, I also wonder what that does to the algorithm if you call somebody a Nazi. I wonder if that. I wonder if that works against me or the person I labeled. I'm not sure how that works. Probably works against me, too. Somebody says, scott, do you have issues with being shadowbanned? I have issues with people reporting that I am, but the types of reports change over time. So I probably have fewer. I think I have fewer people saying that I'm shadowbanned than I ever have before. And I don't know if that's just a. It could be just. Could be just a cognitive Thing, Maybe I just don't notice. Maybe people got tired of saying it, maybe they don't notice. So I actually don't know. I do not know if I'm shadowbanned. Now, in the current world, shadow banned would mean that the algorithm does not favor whatever you're doing. So if you imagine, for example, that this is just a hypothetical, if I'm following a lot of political people on both sides, which is what I do, I probably follow more. Yeah, I certainly follow more Trump supporters, but I follow lots of people on both sides, you know, a lot of CNN people, etc. So if you're following people on both sides, one of those two sides might be saying different things than the other. So following both sides might work against you because it guarantees that you're getting some unpleasant people, whatever you think that looks like, because there's a different form of unpleasantness on the left and the right. And maybe the algorithm punishes one of them more than the other, based on your interactions. I don't know. But speculatively, there could be just a algorithm that's doing things, and maybe not the same every week. It could be that on a week where I retweet some people who have their own bad tweets that I've never seen, that I get suppressed a little. But then the very next week, if I retweet somebody who is loved by the angels, maybe I get a little less shadow band that week. I don't know. So without knowing how the algorithm works, it would be impossible to know for sure. Yeah, I went to the shadow band website and it said I was not shadowbanned, but I don't have any confidence that that website is accurate. And like I said, it could be that it's entirely possible that you're shadow banned in the morning, not shadow banned in the afternoon, and then re shadowbanned by the evening. Just because the algorithm is continually monitoring whatever's going on, who you retweet, who you interact with, what kind of words they use, what topic is in there. So it's entirely possible it comes and goes. I mean, I imagine it would. Right. It wouldn't be a permanent thing because it would have to keep testing to see what you're up to. Yeah, I don't trust the site at all. I should have a Dale account. You're right. Sometimes they delay posting your tweet, maybe. You know, I. There's always a. There's a confirmation bias trap here. Once you tell yourself that shadow banning exists, you see it everywhere. So you have to be careful, because some amount of whatever is happening online is system problems. So when you say one of the things they do is when you post a tweet, it takes a while to show up. Well, that just might be a system backlog, could be a time of day thing. So you really don't know. Let me give you my best example of confirmation bias. You saw the videos of Project Veritas, I think, where there's a video of an alleged Twitter engineer talking about shadow banning and what it is and how it works. Have you all seen the video of the alleged Twitter engineer talking about shadow banning? Most of you have. Now, if you saw that, it would be hard to walk away from that and tell yourself that it's not happening, because there was an actual live video of an actual Twitter engineer describing what it is, how it's done, and why it's done. But you know what is missing in the video that you didn't notice? What is missing in the video that you didn't notice? I want to see if anybody caught it. There's something that's not there. That's the important part. It's not what's there, because what's there is terrible. There's something that's not real and not there. That is the most important part of the story. Proof is, you know, proof is hard to come by if you're just looking at a video. So it's true that there's no proof. Him admitting that they do it. Bingo, boom. What is missing in that video is any context in which that engineer says, we do that. He describes what it is and why someone would do it. That is really different than saying, they do it. And there's nothing in there that says anything like, I know the guy who does it. I used to do it. We talked about it before implementing it. We're getting away with it. So far, there are a hundred ways he could have indicated they're actually doing it. None of it was on the video. All you saw was somebody explaining what it is exactly the way I just did. Because I just explained to you what shadow banding is, why you do it, and how it's done. I just explained the same thing that the guy, the engineer on Twitter, did. Now some of you can say, scott, Scott, Scott, you're being so naive. Why are you so naive? Of course they're doing it. You. You saw the engineer describing it in his own words. You've seen the evidence. That's all true. We saw the engineer describing what it is without the part of saying that they do it, which seems pretty important. And we see the evidence, we believe, how would that look different if none of it was happening, just conceptually? So don't tell me whether it is or is not happening. Don't tell me that Shadow banning is or is not happening right now. That's a separate conversation. Tell me how it would look different to you if it wasn't happening. It would look the same. Not only would it look the same, it would look identical to what you see now if it wasn't happening. So if it is happening or if it isn't happening, I don't know, but I know it would look identical either way. So if you think, Scott, you're so naive. Can't you see it's right in front of your eyes? I would say you're not operating at the highest level of awareness. At the highest level of awareness, you would know that you can't tell the difference. Now, if you look at all that is happening to everybody and all the different ways that there were things that seem a little more obviously Shadow Banny, my guess is that it has happened, but there's probably a complicated story to it, as in some engineer was tweaking an algorithm. Senior management does not work on the algorithm, does not know. If you tweak this variable, what happens. They're just people working in the trenches. They're playing with it. They're the only ones who know how the algorithm works. Maybe they're a little liberal, maybe they're a little anti trump. Maybe a little of that bias got into their work, which is very different than saying that Twitter management was behind it. Now, I told you the story that Jack Dorsey had reached out to me a year ago, at least a year ago, maybe more than a year, to say that they weren't doing shadow banning and could I give him evidence of it so they would find out what's going on. And I said at the time, that is not what you do if you're actually Shadow banning and you know it. It's the and you know it part that I think is important. Even somebody saying, calling him a liar, even if you are a liar, you wouldn't do that. You wouldn't do what he did if you were a liar. You just would let people wonder what it was. You wouldn't approach and say, can you give me some examples? Because I'm pretty sure this isn't happening. That's just not what you do. Now, I told you that I submitted a number of examples to one of his lieutenants and got several responses, but then the responses sort of just stopped coming back. So my guess is that when Twitter management dug into it and tried to understand what their algorithm was actually doing, because, remember, it's complicated. I doubt the algorithm is something that a civilian can look at and say, oh, yeah, look at this algorithm. There's a box checked that says, don't tweet things. For conservatives, it's probably nothing like that. There's probably this big, complicated, multivariable equation that's checking things and adjusting on the fly and all kinds of stuff. I'm guessing. I'm guessing it's complicated. And I'll bet management didn't really know what it was doing. They probably just didn't know. And I would guess that by now they've done some work to try to distinguish between the people who are just Nazi trolls and the people who are political people with unpleasant preferences. I'm not getting your tweets all the time. Yeah, so I hear that people don't get my notifications and my tweets. What I don't know is how common that is. Take, for example. Let me give you an example. I tweet several times a day. I've heard it said that the optimum number of times to tweet might be closer to one or two per day, whereas it's not uncommon for me to do seven tweets a day. Now, is it possible that the algorithm says, hey, you've already tweeted two or three things today. I'm going to slow down your other tweets. Maybe fewer people see them because we don't want this to be all about Scott. So maybe my first few tweets get through. Maybe the algorithm says, hey, he's an over tweeter. We don't want to give all of the attention to this one guy just because he keeps tweeting. So it's entirely possible that I'm being throttled down for a reason that has nothing to do with politics. It is also entirely possible that I'm completely wrong about that. Remember, confirmation bias would give you exactly the same look. The there would be no difference. You couldn't tell. And then there are some people who say they don't get notices and stuff. And every once in a while, it's because a filter is checked. Maybe they just get notices and don't notice. So there are too many ways to explain this. You're pretty wrong about that. Somebody says, I don't know which part I'm wrong about. Most of that was speculative anyway. Do you listen to Dan Bongino, I listen to him when he's on Fox News quite often. He seems quite angry at the way the world is going. I think even Dan Bongino can have a good day this week or a good day this day. Somebody says the Treason Tower meeting was collusion. So here's a question for you. When is it illegal to have a meeting and have somebody tell you something? That's good to know. That's also true. Is that ever illegal? Do you want to live in a country where it's illegal to take a meeting and hear what they have to say? You know, I've said this before, but there might be some new people on here if you put me in the situation of Don Jr. And I guess Jared was in that meeting in Manafort and somebody said, hey, there's somebody who has information that would be very useful to you. Why don't you take the elevator downstairs and hear it? I would take that meeting, and if something came out of that meeting that worried me in terms of something illegal, something the FBI should know about, then I would turn it over to the FBI, But I would definitely take the meeting first. Compare these two outcomes. One, you immediately turn it over to the FBI, and they either do or they do something or not. But in this case, the FBI wouldn't have done anything because no criminal thing happened. The worst they could do is talk to the people in the meeting, and the people in the meeting would say no. Turns out it was a trick. We didn't even have any stuff about Hillary. We just wanted to talk about a different topic. So we just tricked him into the meeting. So if he turned it over to the FBI first, he doesn't get the information. And the FBI also probably doesn't do anything useful, because even if there was information, probably the FBI isn't going to find out anything from that meeting. Probably. But if you find out the information first and then you decide whether or not to turn it over to the FBI, it seems to me you have broken no laws and you've covered all your bases and you have the information. It is not illegal to have information, assuming it's not marked as proprietary or something. Well, even then, it's not illegal to have it. Let me ask you this, since I'm no lawyer. If somebody handed you U.S. intelligence information that was marked top secret, they hand it to you. Is it illegal to read it, or is it only illegal for the giver? It's obviously illegal for somebody to give it to you. But is it illegal to read something that somebody Hands you. I don't know the answer to that. Now, that's not the situation with Don Jr. Because it wasn't our country. Nothing was presented as. It's illegal to read it. So if somebody handed you just a document and it was top secret. Suppose it wasn't labeled. Yeah. I think most of you are not lawyers either. So I think we should be careful not to believe each other. And probably even lawyers would disagree. Somebody saying, jesus Christ, you're dumb, Scott, the people who say that. The people who say that. I don't think you're following along these periscopes. All right, somebody says I am a lawyer, but then you didn't say what your opinion was in the same message. So it's illegal to pass it on. I know that part. So could somebody give me a. An opinion that says that you are a lawyer and then your opinion in the same message? Because I've got opinions and people saying they're lawyers, but I can't pair them up this way. Yeah, that's what I thought. So somebody said the press reads them all the time, so it's not illegal, or at least it's not prosecuted. Maybe that's the line. Oh, yeah, maybe that's the line. I believe the press has a history of reporting on things that were stolen, top secret documents. And that might be illegal, but I think there's a rule about not a rule, but there's a precedent that they leave that alone because there's a First Amendment thing there, so it could be illegal and also trivial at the same time, which is weird. Press is covered by freedom of the press. Freedom of the press is not a right. Freedom of speech is a right. Am I wrong about that? There's no such thing as freedom of the press in terms of the Constitution, is there? There's freedom of speech. You just have to be debriefed. Interesting. All right, so there's some things I don't know about that. But the point is, I would have taken that meeting. It would have been dumb not to take the meeting. The real question is, what do you do after you take the meeting? In the case of the Don Jr. Meeting with the Russians, nothing came out of the meeting, so there was nothing to do. Had he gotten the FBI involved in the first place, it would have been this big complicated time suck of FBI and what's it all mean, and what did you do? And you better lawyer up and all that. The only smart way to play it was to go to the meeting first. And then if you need to get The FBI involved, you do it, then. Freedom of the press is in the First Amendment. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying the First Amendment covers freedom of the press. So there's somebody who says they're a lawyer and if they received it in good faith, arguably it's not illegal, or at least maybe you wouldn't be prosecuted for it. Keep in mind that what Russia said they allegedly had on Hillary, they first of all didn't have. At least in that meeting, they didn't have anything. And secondly, they did not present it as any kind of a state secret. It was not presented as a top secret anything. It was just presented as information. Nothing came. Except that WikiLeaks email. Those had nothing to do with that meeting. You're conflating completely different things. Oh, is the phrase of the press is in the First Amendment. Let me correct myself here. Let me actually read the First Amendment. What exactly does the First Amendment say? Or of the press? Okay, let me read the First Amendment. It's been a long time since I read it. Just so I correct my earlier error. So First Amendment, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free speech thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. So the press is actually specifically mentioned. I actually didn't remember that. Or the right of the people to assemble, blah, blah, petition for grievances. But in any case, the original point stays the same, which is that the First Amendment covers people and it calls out the press specifically. But I would think that even if the press was not called out, they're people. So it should have. It seemed like a clarification that was unnecessary, a little bit redundant, but maybe that's good. What is the press? But you think it means they can ask, do I have allergies? I do. Says it's the freedom to write, not attend. Okay. We do have the right of assembly in any way we want. I don't know if that includes meetings. It should. It's the right to produce written words. Well, I can't argue about what the Constitution means. If I could, I'd be a candidate for the Supreme Court. All right, so I think we're going to wrap it up. Consider that we're having a good day today. All the big things are moving in the right direction. And the worst thing in the news is there was a meeting somebody didn't attend. That's it. And that's all for now.