Episode 209 Scott Adams: Nike, The WH Traitor-Mole, the Woodward Book and Twitter
Date: 2018-09-06 | Duration: 1:05:34
Topics
Nike commercial is the worst life advice ever offered youth A life of crime has more chance of success than Nike’s message New York Times, Woodward’s book and the White House traitor-mole Real facts can be combined into a non-credible story President Trump’s leadership style is “pushing on every door” Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO) congressional testimony about bias Is Twitter’s algorithm bias a fixable problem?
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## Transcript
## [Introduction and Simultaneous Sip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFEDuCO6OkI&t=8s)
Hey everybody. Hey Ryan and Cindy and the rest of you. Hey Jack, come on in. What a newsy day we have. I haven't even opened CNN yet, but there's so much just from yesterday I barely could handle it. Hello Perry. Is everybody ready for the simultaneous sip? I know that's why you came, and I'm ready. If I'm ready, you're ready. Get ready for the simultaneous sip.
As someone just said, is it a great news day or just because there's a lot of it? I better open CNN just to make sure I'm not missing anything that happened within the last five minutes. What's interesting is I'd entirely forgotten the Kavanaugh hearings. There's so much news that the whole Kavanaugh thing just didn't even seem interesting to me. Part of the reason is it's not interesting because the vote's going to go the way the vote goes, and the rest is just for show.
## [Nike and Colin Kaepernick’s Protest](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFEDuCO6OkI&t=71s)
Let's talk about Nike. As you know, I'm pro-Kaepernick in the limited sense that his protest is completely effective. It's effective in the sense that before you can get any action, first you must get attention. It's always a two-part problem. Part one: getting attention. Success. Some people say he should not be protesting at his place of work, thinking about the other NFL players in particular at this point, to which I say: that's why it works. It works because it offends you. People say he should not be disrespecting the flag, and I say that's why you're paying attention. That's why it works.
Independent of whether his mission is a good mission, which I'll talk about in a minute, he got your attention. I've been swamped by people on Twitter telling me, "Why are you saying that his protest is successful? How can you say that?" To which I say: you're talking to me about him. That's what a successful protest looks like. You and I talking about it. It's not ambiguous. There's no subjectivity whatsoever. If we're talking about him, he got our attention.
The second part of that is attention for what? What does he want done? What's the problem? Of course, he's talking about police brutality against black and brown people. A lot of people said to me, "But wait a minute, there is no evidence. The data does not suggest that there's more police violence against any group." You think that matters? I'm going to tell you a huge reality difference between my reality and that which most people—maybe 95% or more—occupy. You think that it matters whether Kaepernick's issue is real, meaning the data suggests that it's real, or it's just his imagination. You think that matters, don't you? Don't you think it totally matters? What could matter more than that?
It doesn't. You want it to. You think it should. Other people say it should matter, but it doesn't. The fact that you think it should doesn't move the needle because your opinion that it should matter—whether it's a real fact or an imagined fact—won't change anybody's mind because their lived experience is that it is real. What they observe, they see it happening to their friends, etc.
Somebody's saying if we stop talking about it, it'll go away. No, it's not going to go away if I stop talking about it because it's their lived experience. I'm talking about the African-American community. Their reality, no matter what you think it should be, is irrelevant. Their lived reality is that what Kaepernick's talking about is real.
What do you do when you've got a problem that some people think is as real as anything could be, and the other part of the country, which would need to get on board to make anything useful happen, says you're imagining it? You think you're stuck there. You can do exactly the same thing whether it's real or not real. It's exactly the same solution. You hate hearing that, don't you?
What's the first thing you do if it's real? You'd make sure that you were tracking it as well as possible. You'd put a lot of effort into making sure that the reporting of it was accurate. What would you do if you were imagining it was real and it wasn't? You would improve the tracking of it. In both cases, you would do exactly the same thing. Don't tell me that it matters whether it's real or not real until we can track it to the point where both sides agree, and we can't do that right now. Apparently, otherwise we'd agree on the reality of it.
## [Nike’s Brand Damage and Sweatshop Allegations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFEDuCO6OkI&t=440s)
Nike has this new commercial with Kaepernick. I just tweeted a survey—who knows if this is accurate—but the survey says that essentially the public opinion of Nike just dropped by 50%. Nike's brand just took a 50% hit in like a week. Somebody says it is tracked, but I would argue not credibly, because if it were credible, we wouldn't have any question about whether it's accurate or not.
The thing that bothered me about the Nike ad is not that it was self-immolating, because it's possible that there'll just be a momentary bump and a year from now nobody will remember. But there was also an indication that a quarter of the people who watch NFL were less likely to watch it because of the Nike commercial. Feel how big that is. Nike not only seems to have destroyed their own brand, but they destroyed it so thoroughly it might take a quarter of the traffic away from an entirely unrelated industry—different industry, the NFL—which is just trying to deal with their own problems. This shoe company over here did such a bad job with their own brand that they destroyed a related brand. That's pretty bad.
Here's the other problem. When Nike moves from "we're all about sports" to putting Kaepernick as their brand, they've done what lawyers say you should never do in court, which is open up a line of questioning that you don't want opened. As soon as they said, "This is bigger than sports now; this is about social good," what happened? If you watch social media for five minutes, you saw pictures of Nike sweatshops.
I don't know if Nike has sweatshops. I don't want to be the one who says children are working in them. I have no idea if anything like that is true. It's the sort of thing you'd almost have to be there in person to really be confident. Secondly, it could be that these factories might be the best opportunity that the people working there had. You have to factor that in. But what is true is that Nike doesn't want us talking about their factories with a lot of people in inhuman conditions. Nike has opened up the question of all of their corporate behavior. They probably wish they hadn't done that.
## [Nike’s Bad Life Advice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFEDuCO6OkI&t=746s)
None of that is the part that's bothering me. Here's my problem: the message of the commercial itself. The commercial shows a lot of people succeeding in sporting ways by trying really hard. The idea is that if you try really hard, you can be a superstar or a good skateboarder. It's the worst life advice you're ever going to see. You should not be trying real hard.
The very opening part of the commercial is somebody who's trying to skateboard on a railing and keeps falling off on the concrete with no pads, no helmet. Nike's advice: just get right back on there and keep doing it because once you're done, you will have mastered the all-important art of balancing a skateboard on a railing in a public place. If it doesn't work, you'll be crippled for life. If it does work, you will have mastered this amazing life skill which will serve you so well into your golden years.
It's the worst message you could ever tell your youth. If all of the police brutality is exactly what Kaepernick says it is, would it be a better or worse thing than the message of the commercial? That commercial is really freaking influential. How many people are saying to themselves, "Hey, I think I'll study a little bit less and put a little bit more effort into this basketball because this is my ticket out"? Why do I know that? Because a famous person told me and Nike told me, and they've really ramped up my emotions. I'm going to pick this ridiculous, absolutely worthless freaking goal of trying to skateboard on a rail or trying to be an NFL quarterback. Dumbest goal anybody ever had as a kid, even if sometimes it works. I'm going to take this message from Nike and wrap my life plan around the worst advice anybody ever gave.
It's been said that the only thing worse than an idiot at work is a productive idiot. If your coworker is an idiot but he can't get anything done, he's kind of harmless. But if he's an idiot and he's really good at it, that's the worst possible situation. Nike is giving you the worst life advice you've ever seen. The only thing worse than Nike's advice would be: how about a life of crime?
Let's compare a life of crime as life advice versus Nike's advice. I have to think that one out of 100 professional criminals just get away with it. That's a pretty good deal, right? One out of 100 get away with it. Sure, 99 of them are either in jail or killed, their lives are destroyed. But one out of 100 has a pretty good life as a criminal. Let's compare that to the advice to become a famous quarterback. Is it one out of 100? No, it's more like one out of tens of thousands. Nike's advice is worse, literally, than telling people to become professional criminals.
You're talking about advertising to young people who, in many cases, have no good role models. They have not read my book, *How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Bigly*, which teaches you to build a talent stack around useful skills. What is not a useful skill? Skateboarding on a rail that might kill you. That's not a useful skill. It's not good risk management.
Most of the time, I don't get actually emotionally involved in the stuff I'm talking about on Periscope. But I'm actually mad about this. I'm legit mad because I'm not sure the rest of the world can quite see the catastrophe that this message is. When you and I have a conversation about whether Kaepernick is doing a good thing or a bad thing, that's an adult conversation. I can say something nuanced like: the reason I respect the United States and the flag is because Kaepernick can do that. My flag has no value unless somebody can protest it and get away with it.
But imagine you're an eight-year-old and you're watching this commercial. You see Kaepernick flouting the law, being the rebel, losing his job, putting all of his effort into this one thing. What kind of message is it sending to a kid? Probably not good. Maybe that kid should just stay in school and learn some useful skills.
## [Woodward’s Book and the White House Mole](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFEDuCO6OkI&t=1240s)
Let's talk about Woodward's book and this New York Times article about the secret mole traitor insider. These two stories sort of dovetail. It makes you wonder if the secret mole is also who talked to Woodward. We maybe will never know. The idea is that there are people in the White House who are managing the president. In other words, they're not working for him; they're trying to force decisions through their own treacherous actions.
There are reports that documents the president wants to sign, they'll steal off his desk so he doesn't notice they're gone and nothing gets signed. Or they'll slow walk something. Basically, the staff is trying to thwart the boss. Then there are the stories in the Woodward book about the president saying unkind things and being tough on staff members.
The first thing I would say is that if Woodward were to write a book about any CEO of any company, it would look a lot like this book. If you start talking to a lot of staff members, which ones are going to talk to you? If you're lucky enough to get the ones who support the president, they're just going to say, "He's great, he's doing a good job." That's not a book. Woodward has nothing if he only talks to people who are in favor of the president. You only need those 2% disgruntled people.
What does Alan Dershowitz say about people who take immunity in order to testify? His famous thing is he says sometimes they sing and sometimes they compose. If you put somebody in a situation where their incentive is to make stuff up, what are they going to do? Every time, they're going to make stuff up.
Making stuff up doesn't mean things are untrue, which is the weird part. I tweeted an article talking about Woodward's book about John Belushi. Someone who was actually close to that situation read the Woodward book and said, "Here's what really happened." Here's the freaky thing: the facts that Woodward reported about Belushi were accurate, but when it was put together by Woodward, it was completely different from actual reality. Those two things can happen. All the facts can be right, but because of the way he combined them, it changed entirely the nature of the situation. It was completely misleading without any facts being wrong.
It is ordinary to take real facts and turn them into the opposite of what they mean without changing the facts. You can do that just by the context, the timing, the way you frame it. Given that we know he's done it on the Belushi book, what would you assume about his other books? The story of people within the staff trying to thwart his "worst impulses"—how many of the details are technically true? Maybe all of them. But even if all the details are true, does it mean the story is true? No.
Suppose you had one disgruntled employee of the White House. Do they say that there are other people like them? Yes, they do. In the breakroom, when they say, "This president is terrible," and their friend says, "Yeah, sure," people tend to think other people agree with them. It's possible that if there are one or two moles, that might be all there are. Woodward has painted it as a significant number of moles working against the president.
Then there was the report that some cabinet members were considering the 25th Amendment. Given that everybody thinks their boss has lost it at one point or another, is it possible that somebody in the administration had talked about it? Probably. It would be completely normal. Painting that as not normal is what you would expect if somebody's making a book out of it.
## [Trump’s "Pushing on Every Door" Leadership Style](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFEDuCO6OkI&t=2033s)
Imagine what those disgruntled people would have advised this president when he was a candidate. Their advice would not have been, "Tweet a bunch of outrageous stuff." They would have said, "You're crazy, and you have to get medical help." Then he gets nominated. Then he gets elected president. Do people who think like that stop thinking the president is crazy just because he got elected? No, they still think everything he's doing is a giant mistake—according to the people who have been wrong about everything for three years.
You keep watching it work. Structurally, the country's bones are strong. Economy strong as hell, military strong as hell, ISIS defeated. What about all these crazy trade wars? It's looking a lot less crazy today. You've got Mexico coming on board; I think Canada is going to be there pretty soon. There's not been a major terrorist attack on our soil since the Trump—I'm never sure about my timing, but I think that's true.
Why is it that this president is so crazy, but yet things are going so well? The moles probably think it's because they're keeping him from his craziest impulses. But here's the thing: you're seeing a president who simply pushes every door. He just doesn't accept that the old way of thinking or doing is automatically right. When a President Trump walks into a meeting and says something like, "Why don't we use a nuclear weapon in the Middle East?"—if that's reported out of context, your hair is on fire. But he pushes on every assumption.
If you made me president, I might ask that question just to make sure that I understand why it can never be done. The fact that you're pushing on every door is not a sign of bad leadership. He relies on reasonable people and experts to say, "You've pushed far enough."
These stories about Gary Cohn taking stuff off his desk—who knows if any of that's true? But if it is, imagine how easily that gets taken out of context. The more reasonable version is that someone said, "I really think he needs to hear from some more people. I really think there's something happening now that we didn't know about when the document was put together. Let's just pull that off until we can clear up a few things." If that story got told to Woodward, how would he retell it? Gary Cohn snuck in his office and took that document off his desk.
In the Woodward book, you're going to see several facts that may or may not be true followed by gigantic assumptions about people's inner thoughts. It's the assumptions about inner thoughts—the mind-reading—that changes facts into fiction.
## [Jack Dorsey’s Congressional Testimony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFEDuCO6OkI&t=2402s)
Did anybody watch Jack Dorsey of Twitter talking to Congress? It was so interesting. There was one protester, and then one of the congressmen, Billy Long, used to be an auctioneer. He went into auctioneer mode to sort of entertain the group while the protester was making noise.
They bring in the CEO of two businesses, Twitter and Square. They asked him detailed questions about data percentages and statistics. Because he's the CEO, of course he did not know those detailed technical questions. It looked like a giant waste of time. The government learned absolutely nothing. I don't blame the politicians, and I don't blame Jack Dorsey. It was just the wrong context.
Persuasion-wise, I would say he played it really well. He completely accepted the criticism as being important. Wherever there were situations that Twitter had an imbalance, whether it was a bug or something that looked like more conservatives than liberals were affected, he simply admitted all of it and said, "Yeah, that's a problem, we're trying to fix that." He admitted also that the larger problem is maybe even impossible to fix, but they're doing everything they can.
One of the questions was: when the search result problem happened and a bunch of conservatives said, "These politicians are not showing up in search," Jack mentioned that there were also Democrats who didn't show up. One of the politicians asked, "Can you tell us, did it affect way more conservatives than it affected Democrats?" Jack did not have an immediate answer. That would have been good to know.
## [The Inscrutable Twitter Algorithm](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFEDuCO6OkI&t=2772s)
I wanted to know how many people understand the whole algorithm. I think he said there were lots and lots of variables—they call them signals. It seemed to me that very likely nobody, literally nobody, really understands that if you change this variable, it would be either biased or unbiased in its output. Not because they're not trying, but just because it's complicated.
If it's true that we've reached a point where no human understands the entire algorithm, and the algorithm determines what we see, and therefore what we think, and therefore how we vote, the algorithm is already running the country. If no human understands all of the algorithm, humans are no longer in charge.
I was trying to think of an example of a signal that would not be obvious. There are probably lots of words that conservatives use that liberals do not, and vice versa. Is it likely that with their different vocabularies, they're all treated the same? Probably not. Take guns. Both sides talk about guns, but do they use the same words? Any of those differences in words are part of the signals that Twitter picks up. It seems like you could have unintentional bias that no human was aware of.
Imagine if from this day on, the algorithm was fixed so that it was perfectly unbiased. Would that lock in the bias that we already have? If one group was ahead of the other and then you locked it in so there would be no advantage, would you be locking in the advantage that already existed?
What does fairness look like? Suppose the country is 30% conservative and 35% liberal. Does fairness look like giving a little bit more time to the bigger group? Or does it have to do with the "conversational health," as Twitter likes to say?
Fairness was invented so that idiots would have something to talk about. Fairness is just an opinion. You could go to a flat tax or a graduated tax; no matter what you do, you cannot get everybody to say, "Oh, that's fair." If you're trying to create algorithms that are fair, you can't do it. It isn't logically possible. It's an impossible standard.
AI already runs the world. It's the present. You are wondering when is that day that the computers will be running the world. Here it is. The algorithm is already running the world. There are human beings making judgment calls about these signals, and they probably do understand in a very general way what tweaking these signals might do. You would imagine that if most of the employees lean left, there will be a tendency over time for the algorithm to just sort of nudge to the left.
One question I didn't see addressed: lots of people have noticed that people follow and then they get automatically unfollowed. I didn't see that come up. I fast-forwarded through maybe an hour of it. How do you know the difference between shadow banning and buggy software? You don't. But what you would look for is: are there lots of people on the left who are complaining about the same thing? For three years, I've heard conservatives say, "I automatically got unfollowed," or that "like" disappeared. In that three years, I personally have heard zero reports of it happening to anybody on the left. It's very noticeable because I've gotten hundreds of reports. If it was a bug, wouldn't it affect everybody?
## [Van Jones and Prison Reform](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFEDuCO6OkI&t=3824s)
I saw Kardashian at the White House for prison reform. I saw Van Jones in that picture again. I think he's the most credible voice on the left. He is a gigantic Trump critic, but when it comes to a topic like prison reform where he thinks he can make a difference, he's part of the effort.
Van Jones is a perfect example of what you should teach your kids. Compare the Nike commercial, the worst advice any child ever got, to Van Jones as a role model. Van Jones has a lot of criticisms for this administration, but when he had the opportunity to make a difference, did he say, "No, I'm not going to work with them"? He did not. He played it like an adult. That's what you want to teach your kids: teach your kids to be like Van Jones, at least in this limited way. His criticisms are honest, and he's making the adult decision to work with the people he needs to get something done. Hats off to Van Jones.
That's enough for today. I will talk to you later.