Episode 557 Scott Adams: Demise of VOX and the Daily Beast, Nervous Nancy, Floppy Joe, Shadowbanning
Date: 2019-06-07 | Duration: 55:57
Topics
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Rough Transcript
This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.
Transcript
[0:04]
[Music] hey everybody come on in here you better get in here while it’s still possible while social media still allows you to find me i don’t know how much longer this will last starting to think that my rain here on periscope might be winding down but we’ll see so we’ll talk about all that but before we do i know why you’re here it has to do with a simultaneous sip maybe you’re grabbing a cup or a glass or a mug right now could it be a steiner chalice or a tankard a vessel of any kind maybe a thermos or a flask fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip i would like to begin by reiterating a clarification from yesterday
[1:05]
from yesterday um um i had some days ago i had tweeted a tweeted a i’d retweeted something by joe koncha it was an article written by somebody else in which the somebody else repeated the fine people fake news and i had commented on that but i think sometime between the time that i tweeted it it and the time i talked about it on periscope i had conflated in my mind the tweeter and the author and had mistakenly identified joe concha as the author but he was actually a tweeter of an article that had one line of fake news in it now now joe asked me to apologize publicly to which i say of course if anybody’s going to apologize publicly for a mistake you should be the creator of the 48-hour rule so i did just that but i added the i added a tweet so
[2:08]
but i added the i added a tweet so there’s something he has that he can he can look at and forward if anybody if anybody gives him a trouble he’ll have something specific that he can just forward to them so i’m taking the apology off of its original place periscope and putting it in addition on twitter so that it’s it’s written instead of spoken anyway um i suggest that all of you do the same which is if somebody asks you to correct an error that you do it right away acknowledge it and correct it and so i have enough about that let me get to my prediction i’m going to make the following prediction the two publications will be out of business within 12 months one is vox and the other is the daily beast so my prediction is both of those publications will cease to exist within 12 months the reasons being different but
[3:10]
different but but somehow similar number one well vox of course has the problem that their brand has somehow now become synonymous with their the worst person who works there what’s his name carlos carlos massa i forget his name but uh so he’s he’s becoming controversial because he caused apparently some demonetization of stephen crowder and maybe some other people and and what this did was raise his profile and unfortunately his profile is the very worst thing that you could want as your as your banner i remember the first time i saw one of his videos so i didn’t i didn’t know him didn’t know he was associated with vox didn’t do anything about him i just saw a video i remember watching the video and thinking myself am i watching the worst human being i’ve
[4:11]
am i watching the worst human being i’ve ever seen in my life i mean i’m not talking about people who are mass murderers they’re they’re worse but in terms of a person who’s not actually you know physically hurting anybody at least directly i i thought my god the the fake news and the the the whole presentation seems designed to cause some kind of a race war and then as it went on it was it was obvious that he just wasn’t racist of course that’s always an opinion right everybody gets to have their own opinion of who’s a racist right there there’s no test it’s subjective isn’t it now if i i watched his presentation and my impression my opinion and this is honest by the way my honest opinion is that he’s just a racist now now i get to have that opinion i’m pretty sure but anyway so vox has two problems apparently their writers are on strike that’s not good apparently they weren’t
[5:13]
that’s not good apparently they weren’t making money before and they’ve just destroyed any hope they have of of a good reputation in the world thanks to this this one employee who’s so extra extra bad i’ve you know i i i i don’t know how they can keep them on but apparently they they like what he’s doing he gets a lot of clicks so i think vox the reputation is gone their business model is broken and more importantly they have just painted a giant target on their backs so from a business perspective you don’t ever want to do what vox did from a business perspective it’s one thing to have uh half of the country or whatever the percentage is it’s it’s one thing to have a part of the country like you and a part of the country that says ah you’re not my thing any business can survive that situation they only need that the people who don’t
[6:13]
they only need that the people who don’t like them don’t care that much do you get it here’s the important part they only need in order to be successful you need some people who like you which they have but you also necessarily need some people who the people who don’t like you to also not care they just don’t care one way or another they’re just ignoring you that situation changed vox now just angered half of the united states i’m not exaggerating but there’s some large number of conservatives who have just said to themselves huh if there were ever a way to legally hurt vox i would certainly do it because they’ve they’ve outed themselves as as not a credible player not not interested in reality not interested in anything but really creating a bad situation in the country in return for clicks so when you have that many people who
[7:14]
so when you have that many people who are now motivated to do something to act against your interests well i don’t know exactly how this will play out it could turn into more lawsuits it could turn out to pressure on their advertisers you don’t know how it will play out but vox says crossed a line from something that you didn’t like but you could easily ignore to something that is now literally an enemy they’re an enemy of the people but they’re a double enemy of the class that they’ve identified for attack likewise the daily beast i think has is unlikely to be around for similar reasons that there are some publications that seem to have crossed some kind of weird line from from at least pretending to be something like news or something like you know a legitimate publication to something else something darker and so i think i think both of those publications
[8:16]
think i think both of those publications are unlikely to last 12 months that’s my that’s my prediction all right let’s talk about twitter has some new rules terms of service apparently they’ve shortened them and i did a quick look and i saw nothing that i would that i would object to twitter looks to be like they have some kind of a more clear easier to read ideas about what violates their terms of service what kind of things would get you kicked off so that’s all good i would love to see but don’t expect it that if there were ever a perfect time for twitter to do in amnesty meaning allowing back on the platform people who had been kicked off before so long as what they got kicked off for was was something that would have been okay under the clarified terms uh terms of service so i think it would be an amazing uh
[9:16]
so i think it would be an amazing uh amazing for their reputation and everything else if they did some or at least considered some kind of a mass forgiveness of people who maybe didn’t understand their terms of service because by their own by their own reckoning they were too complicated and maybe people violated them without knowing but now that they’ve clarified them this is really the perfect time to say okay now it’s more clear try it again and if you violated it again maybe uh you know maybe you have to be banned again but at least it’s clear this would be the perfect time to do it i don’t expect it to happen here’s why i don’t expect it to happen um i told you that my twitter traffic fell off a ledge in the last week and i’ve suggested and i’m going to suggest this again here’s a here’s a concept that is so true across all different
[10:16]
that is so true across all different areas and fields and projects and interests that you should always keep this in mind it’s the it’s the probably the central rule of management if you had to have one rule about management it would be this if you can measure it you can manage it if you can’t measure it you can’t make you can’t manage it so when you look at you know managers what they’re doing you will find that the things that they can measure they’re going to actually do a good job on because they can test things and and they will they will operate on things that can be measured it’s just human nature and and it makes sense commonsensically as well if you look at shadow banning and throttling and all the allegations about what the social media networks are doing under the hood to suppress certain kinds of people and opinions what’s the problem with that
[11:16]
what’s the problem with that if you wanted to fix that could you not if it can’t be measured you can’t fix it and the only people who could measure it are the people who are not going to tell you if hypothetically there’s something going on those people would not want you to know so therefore there’s no way to measure it and so i ask myself is there no way to measure it is is there no way for for external entities to identify it without having the insider information that only the companies themselves would have i don’t know but i just used a tool that you saw me tweet for aj cortez’s account somebody alerted me that there’s a way you can test for shadow banning you just look on my latest tweet you can you can see it and i forget what it’s called somebody will say it in the comments here and i ran that and it said that sure enough aj cortez
[12:18]
aj cortez was being prohibited from the suggestions so in other words if you’re looking for like-minded people sometimes it suggests who you follow and it actually came up with the result that he’d been banned now he said that in the last three months his his twitter followers went from healthy growth every month to boom just fell off a cliff and then i said that mine fell off a cliff a week ago now the first question i ask is is this shadow bending tool accurate is it accurate can somebody fact check that for me and that’s what i tweeted i i asked for a fact check i don’t know if we can trust yeah yes it’s called shadowband.edu so shadow ban ban as one word shadowban dot eu so i’m looking for information as to whether that’s accurate because if it’s
[13:20]
whether that’s accurate because if it’s accurate it shows that they did in fact throttled somebody who i would consider not even slightly controversial certainly nothing that would violate terms of service um um people of course are telling me every day that they’re not seeing my tweets and they don’t get the notifications that stuff i can never tell if that has to do with the settings or or or selective memory or any of that so it’s hard to it’s hard to determine from that but the other thing i did recently was um i told you i’m using an app called socialblade and it’s a free app and if you have more than one account it’s handy because as you can see i set it up for my two main social media accounts it doesn’t matter you can see them so one is for twitter and the other is for youtube now those are probably comparable in the sense
[14:20]
comparable in the sense that um you know i have i use them both every day so i put content on them every day and i put similar content on them every day so the things i say on periscope are very similar to and often i talk about my tweets so you should expect that their movement would be similar now not exact and this is not a science but i’m suggesting ways that maybe there could be external checks on things so what i did was i go to my uh list of twitter followers and i can see here that they have been healthy hundreds a day and then it just falls off a ledge in the past week so what i do is okay if twitter traffic fell off in the last week does that mean it’s just summer because that could be a thing right it’s not unusual for summer to slow down social media traffic so i go over to youtube
[15:24]
and i don’t see the same drop so the same days that you would have expected if it were just summer youtube would go down too about the same wouldn’t it if let’s say internet traffic dropped by 20 just because it’s summer i would see a 20 drop in twitter something like it was 20 drop on youtube right but i don’t i see a sudden drop on twitter not matched by a sudden drop on youtube same content same time publishing every day is that meaningful i think it is because even if you imagine that youtube is doing some throttling i don’t know if they are in my case and if you imagine that twitter is doing some throttling and again i can’t confirm that they are you would expect that they might not do it at the same time and in the same way so whenever you saw a disconnect you know a sudden drop of traffic on a
[16:25]
you know a sudden drop of traffic on a let’s say a comparable platform and and finding comparables might be the hard hard part here that should raise the flag correct so what i’m doing is i’m suggesting that there should be some ways to have a compare platforms and find any disconnects and flag it so in my case i would say the evidence strongly suggests there’s something going on here that’s terrible now i was reading a little bit on the shadowband.eu site about how they do things a little bit of explanation and they had a scary paragraph talking about twitter’s official response to whether or not shadow banning happens and apparently they use some very specific lawyer lawyer-like language to say we’re not shadow banning but then they define shadow banning in such a limited way
[17:27]
in such a limited way that it’s not really what we’re talking about so one of the things that apparently would not be shadow banning because the way they defined it would be if your tweets don’t show up if my tweets don’t show up in your feed that’s not called shadow banning apparently because you can still go to my uh you can still go directly to my account and read all my tweets so my tweets are not hidden they’re all every one of them is right there on my twitter feed it’s just that you might not see them perhaps like aj cortez maybe you just don’t come up as a recommended person to follow would that be shadow bending well by all of our definitions yes by the definition of of twitter apparently no so here’s the big issue i cannot determine nork in any of you whether there’s really something going on here because every time you think you
[18:28]
on here because every time you think you see something it isn’t that different from what confirmation bias would look like and you got to keep that in your head to stay sane so for example is aj cortez the the fact that that one piece of software identified that he was being shadow banned is that real i don’t know how do you and i know that that piece of software that shadowband.edu how do we know that’s accurate how do we know that it doesn’t have false positives we don’t know how reliable is software from people you don’t know not reliable right in general it’s not reliable i don’t know any way to to test that now so what i would suggest is that developers and people who understand how to use the apis of these various services find some way to find comparables so for example
[19:30]
so for example let’s say here’s another suggestion that’s in the same line let’s say you had had you know my account my twitter account and aj cortez account let’s say you were determined and i’m not sure this is the case but let’s say you you had determined that they do similar kinds of things and they have a lot of followers in common so the content and the followers have a lot in common and let’s say you added them to several other accounts which you found largely similar they might be the same scale same size they might be similar content similar followers and then you say to yourself do any one of them showed sudden drops because probably whatever would be happening that would look like shadow banding would probably hit some people first and may not have the same effect on every person who is there let’s say they’re comparable so that’s one way to measure you could say oh
[20:30]
say oh aj cortez took a drop the comparables did not so he’s being targeted or the comparables on other platforms did not take a drop at the same time therefore he’s being targeted you wouldn’t always know but perhaps you could if you were looking at enough accounts over time both comparing within the within the social media and also across platforms could you find a statistical reliable way to say something’s going on here i think so i think the smartest people in the world can figure out how to do that but you always have the problem that you couldn’t confirm it so even if you were sure you were getting it right you probably couldn’t confirm it so that’s a problem all right let’s move on um did you hear that michael wolff uh he was a big anti-trumper who wrote a wrote some crappy book full of lies and then he had a follow-up book that’s another crappy book full of lies about the president
[21:30]
the president did you notice that he sort of came and went and nobody cared so cnn had him on but maybe only once because michael wolff is so his credibility is well i i referred to him on twitter as the poor man’s michael avenatti and and if let me put it this way if someone can refer to you as the poor man’s michael avenatti and people who read my tweets say oh you got a point there he is sort of the poor man’s michael avenatti if you find that people will laugh at that because it seems true well well maybe maybe it’s time to not be on cnn so much so i think cnn has learned from their michael avenatti episode so that even the poor man’s michael avenatti doesn’t get much attention honestly i don’t even know what michael wolff said this time i i knew he had a
[22:31]
wolff said this time i i knew he had a book i didn’t click on a single link did you did any of you click on any michael wolff has a new book story every time i saw one i said well i’m not clicking on that because i know there’s nothing in there that’s real i imagine that the those who measure that measure these sorts of things noticed i have a suggestion that is very very self-serving for how to help with conservatives who are demonetized i’m gonna toss this out here because i don’t know if it’s a brilliant idea or a terrible idea but i know for sure so before you say it let me acknowledge this is at least partly self-serving all right so don’t think that i don’t have self-interest in this idea but uh you could take me out of the idea and the idea would still stand alone all right so i’m going to use i’m going to use suggestion for dealing with these demonetized people uh
[23:31]
uh you might recognize where this suggestion comes from but i’m not going to say it here’s the idea my startup has a crypto token called the when we have millions of them which are worth nothing unless people decide to use them and trade them and use them within the app or they can use them on outside the app on exchanges they can trade them etc so the only thing that makes any crypto token or coin uh useful is demand suppose suppose and i’m not i’m not offering this yet i just want to fly it out there suppose i were to gift um um the larger conservatives who got de-platformed with a whole bunch of when tokens all they would need to receive them is just open up a you know an interface account or have a erc20 wallet very easy i mean a couple of minutes to set up an account i could
[24:32]
minutes to set up an account i could just say to somebody like a dave rubin or uh or uh or a stephen crowder and again it wouldn’t be for every person so i would even i would probably have to pick my areas but i looked for people who had not done something so bad they were kicked off a platform entirely but it only done something so bad they got demonetized i could say here’s a bunch of when all you have to do is accept that there’s no obligation and then anybody who wanted to support those people could simply also buy the token you could buy them at onehub.com you could buy them on hotbit io and some other exchanges so you could buy them in a variety of ways and if anybody buys them for any reason to use it within my app simply to support these creators to use it as your own gifts because you can also gift it to people so you could buy the when and say hey dave rubin you got demonetized if if he gets demonetized and say here’s some
[25:32]
gets demonetized and say here’s some when you know not a lot i’ll give you 20 worth whatever that demand would become self-fulfilling in other words the mere fact that lots of people were buying it just to help people who had been demonetized would create its value and so the people who got them for nothing because i decided to give them a bunch would make a million dollars so you could make somebody like stephen crowder or dave rubin or yeah i’m talking about the people who are not going to get kicked off a platform but might be throttled they might be demonetized and i could just say all right here’s a bunch of when if the public wants these to be valuable and they want you to be rich because you got demonetized you can do it easily all right so i’m not going to say that’s uh somebody says it’s too complicated well let me simplify it i would i would tell these people to open up a wallet that takes about a
[26:34]
open up a wallet that takes about a minute they just put in their information takes about a minute and then i can send them stuff and they don’t even have to do anything it’ll just you know they’ll just appear in their wallet i mean it’s a simple process they don’t have to do anything if if the when never becomes valuable enough that they say hey let me cash these in then that’s it that’s the whole process if it does become valuable cashing it in is simple you just sign up for one of the exchanges and trade it for bitcoin trade it for u.s dollars that sort of thing all right that’s the idea i’ll just leave that out there for a minute um do you see that russia seems to be testing us on the sea and in the air so there is a story about a near collision at sea and then that’s been added to some stories about some uh russian aircraft intercepted some uh u.s military planes in international waters here’s what i asked you about this is this real i have a real concern
[27:36]
is this real i have a real concern that the news about russia playing chicken with the united states is based on real events i mean i think the actual reported events are completely real but there’s something i’m worried about here and let me get to it it seems that the um the key piece of this is the um the naval thing that happened so the two ships the russian ship and the u.s ship came within i don’t know 150 feet of each other which is way too dangerous and it looks like the russians did it intentionally now that’s being used as sort of the the main story and then they add oh but they they did these things in the air and they tried to intercept us in the air etc but here’s the thing i think the air interceptions are not that unusual are they i don’t know how unusual they are because it seems to me that our military militaries at least in the air are sort of testing each other every now and then you know we we get near their airspace to test their defenses they get
[28:37]
airspace to test their defenses they get near our airspace to test our defenses they do an intercept for sometimes a reason that makes sense to them sometimes it doesn’t so i don’t know how much the air stuff is different or bigger or newer or more dangerous than normal so that’s just a question mark right but when i saw this naval one this one looks suspicious to me and here’s why if you have never had experience sailing you wouldn’t know what i’m going to tell you next which is that ships and boats have rules of right right of way right it has to do with the size of the ship and the direction and stuff and i don’t know all the rules but it is true there’s something called a right-of-way and it’s an understanding that everybody on the ocean knows for example if you’re in a narrow channel of water and there’s a very large uh ship coming your way and it looks like it’s in your way and
[29:38]
and it looks like it’s in your way and you’re on a small boat the big ship has the right of way that’s the rule the reason is the small ship can get out of the way easily so the big ship has the right-of-way over the small ship but there are other rules about who’s doing what that are also understood now my understanding about this near collision is that the u.s ship slowed down artificially because it was landing some um i think helicopters so you had a russian ship who believed probably they had the right-of-way and you had a u.s ship which normally would be traveling at a higher speed but slowed down now now did the russian ship know that the u.s ship was in a process landing a helicopter that required it to slow down i don’t know because it’s possible that russia simply misread the situation and said russia has the right-of-way
[30:40]
russia has the right-of-way and in order to sort of maintain our you know our status if you will or whatever our respect they decided to make sure that they did not lose their right of way they didn’t want to be scared off their right away because they had the right away now if all the russians did was pursue their right of way and it got too close because they misjudged what the us was doing which was slowing down to land some helicopters would it have looked very much like what happened and have nothing to do with them testing us maybe yeah i’m not sure that the bigger ship is the only criteria for right of way i’m not a i’m not a sailor so somebody who knows this stuff uh uh ideally somebody who has naval experience can answer that um but before you before you decide that the us and russia have some kind of military conflict just about ready to happen
[31:40]
happen i would ask you to at least consider that the news industry wants some news and they want it to be about russia and i just don’t know if these are coincidences that they packaged up as news it might be so i’m gonna so here’s my my temporary position is that it’s leaning fake news it’s leaning fake news i’m not gonna conclude that but if i had to bet on it and you said scott you’ve got about a thousand dollars that this is either the beginning of some dangerous trend or it’s a bunch of coincidences and and an accident which do you bet i would bet fake news so doesn’t mean it’s true but that’s where i bet all right um um i saw there was somebody who was uh described as an architect of the green new deal all right so this is a person who uh i’ll tell you the name in a second
[32:41]
i’ll tell you the name in a second not aoc but somebody who worked on it her first name is rihanna and i’ll tell you the last name in a moment because the simulation is just so wonderful you know the simulation is the idea that we’re actually just made of software and there’s some creator because when you see coincidences like this one that i’m going to describe in a moment you have to ask yourself is this really a coincidence well it probably is but it’s still funny here it is so somebody who’s the architect of the green new deal her first name is rihanna is of course the most lefty left you could ever be so you can’t really be the architect of the green new deal unless you’re super left right what is the last name of the person who is identified with being super left well it’s a hyphenated name so obviously her husband she and her husband have different last names and they hyphenated
[33:42]
names and they hyphenated i don’t know which name was which but one of the names was gun g-u-n-n gun and the other name was right w-r-i-g-h-t and they decided to hyphenate it in this order gun rights the most lefty person in the united states her last name is gun rights i didn’t make that up oh somebody said could be a woman’s spouse you were correct you’re correct i mistakenly said that assumed that she was married to a man and i should not assume that so her spouse had a different name so i don’t know what to say about it it’s just so funny i looked at it and i thought am i reading this right is the leftiest person in the united states actually named after the second amendment because that’s just too good and did she not see that when when they decided to name because i don’t know would it be better
[34:43]
because i don’t know would it be better or worse if it was right gun right gun would not be as as on the nose as gun rights but rare anyway so she made a prediction in some article that uh the if we don’t do the green new deal or maybe even if we do the climate change problem is this big this is how big she says the climate change problem is that uh we’re talking about 150 million deaths which he described as 25 holocausts now now first of all anybody who compares anything to the holocaust is that loses all credibility for me i don’t care who you are what you’re talking about i don’t care if you’re left or right if you’re comparing your crap whatever that is to the holocaust i’m sorry there’s almost nothing else i can hear you say after that because there’s nothing that compares to the
[35:43]
there’s nothing that compares to the holocaust there are other bad things but they’re different never never compare anything to the holocaust unless it’s you know exactly like it i suppose but what are the odds let’s say you were asked to make a bet and here’s the bet you have to bet that 150 million extra people will die because of the temperature going up at least 1.5 degrees or you have to bet that fewer people will die in other words people will be saved there will be fewer deaths than ever even with the climate change which way would you bet would you bet that this is the time that the doom and gloomers are right and 150 million people die or that actually less will die than have been dying historically well if you studied history or or bjorn lomborg anything he’s he writes
[36:43]
bjorn lomborg anything he’s he writes about um in terms of the risks of death you would see that we we’ve become so good at avoiding death even if the problem is the same or bigger that if you were going to bet on it you would bet that nobody died that would be the smart bet even if climate change is exactly what the scientists say even if it’s on the high end i would bet the number of deaths will be zero and probably fewer people will die than used to die just from other old reasons so the the obvious examples are we’re better at surviving and predicting storms uh if the if the ocean rises people aren’t going to be standing on the beach and suddenly drown they’re going to have years to say hey this this used to be up to my ankles but now it seems like it’s up to my shins i don’t think people are going to drown because the ocean got bigger now what about
[37:44]
now what about death from famine well do you think that in 30 years we’ll be better or worse at getting food to people who need it we’re going to be way better it’s not even going to be close 30 years from now probably nobody will starve no matter what’s happening it wouldn’t matter you know the temperature could be so hot outside that you barely can go outdoors during the summer and people still would be less likely to starve because we’re so much better at getting food to people all right so i think that’s ridiculous um attorney general bill barr this was from i think fox news report said got a surprise this week when he hosted a listening session for civil rights groups supposedly concerned about the justice department’s commitment to police reform hardly anybody showed up
[38:48]
bill barr i guess he promised uh during his uh confirmation hearings he promised kamala harris that if he were confirmed he would have the justice department looked into police reform now i’m assuming that police reform refers to um um anything that would look like racial bias i assume that’s the context right correct me if i’m wrong but i think it has to do with police shootings and and racial bias so remember i told you that um black lives matter just sort of disappeared like you just don’t even hear about them anymore they went from a big deal to i guess they did they disband and do they still have meetings i don’t even know so imagine that the attorney general holds a listening session specifically to hear what you know those kinds of concerns are and almost nobody shut up it was just a big waste of time i and i told you that we haven’t had a
[39:49]
i and i told you that we haven’t had a as far as i know a high-profile police shooting that is one of those questionable ones where people say hey what’s going on there somebody says it’s the body cams well remember i suggested that instead of talking about it we just make sure that there are more body cams because the body cams kind of solve all those problems i mean don’t solve all the problems but it comes pretty close so so it feels like a problem that just sort of people stopped caring about or that they stopped talking about it or did it get solved did something happen sort of a mystery but it’s a problem that literally just went away now everybody’s talking about president trump’s threat that he would impose tariffs on mexico if they don’t do more to control their border and what we’re hearing is um some positive stuff about mexico’s response apparently they sent a bunch of
[40:50]
response apparently they sent a bunch of their own national guard their version of the national guard to the border of guatemala so they’ve armed you know they’ve fortified their their military presence on the guatemalan border to keep people from coming in the first place there’s some talk about changing their immigration sort of uh you know what’s the rule what’s the word about people who want asylum their asylum rules so then mexico might be looking at some of their laws and there’s something else they did oh they started freezing some bank accounts of people who were suspected of trafficking and i guess trafficking and immigration being part of the same conversation so here’s the question did president trump’s threat of terrorists work well we don’t know yet but the early indications are that it
[41:51]
but the early indications are that it made some difference or is likely to have a make a difference now what makes that work i would say the first thing that makes it work is that it’s coming from trump and trump is in a protracted long-term tariff battle with china do you see how the tariff battle with china helps him on immigration because here here’s something that nobody in mexico believes are you ready for this something that no one in mexico believes that he wouldn’t make good on the threat nobody in mexico thinks he’s bluffing think about that almost any other time you have a situation like this if you don’t do this i’ll do this you at least think maybe he’s bluffing maybe we should test it a little bit you know we could always pull it back if if it turns out he’s not bluffing we could always change your mind later but let’s push it because he’s probably bluffing does it look like mexico
[42:52]
does it look like mexico considered for half a second that he was bluffing nope did it matter to mexico that so many experts and economists and and people even on the republican side and people on the democrat side didn’t matter to mexico that so much of the country was telling trump don’t do it don’t do it it’s bad for our economy did that matter nope think about that imagine any other president and imagine that both sides of the aisle are telling the president not to do it republicans are telling him not to do it democrats are telling him not to do it now replace trump with obama do you think that mexico would say oh obama’s definitely going to put this tariff on us even though so many experts on both sides are telling him not to do it they would say no this sounds like a bluff i don’t think he can do this politically now change that obama put in trump what do they think
[43:52]
do they think abso freaking lutely he’s going to do it he’s going to do it and it doesn’t matter how many people tell him not to do you know why because he’s right and it works and if you don’t make good on your threats you don’t get anything so he’s definitely going to make good on his threats he will make good on his threats that’s what gives him currency that’s what gives him the ability to negotiate and you see that so powerfully here with mexico if it comes to a good solution or an improvement we’ll see uh all right we got to talk about some new nicknames here we’ve got uh uh president trump is testing out nervous nancy for nancy pelosi i have rated this among among his very best nervous nancy is up there with low energy jeb as just a home run now i don’t know if he’ll keep it because it depends if you know if the public retweets it and stuff i’m sure
[44:52]
public retweets it and stuff i’m sure they’re keeping an eye on how people responding to it but let me tell you how perfect this is and then i’m going to compare it to something that’s not perfect so you can see the difference nervous nancy has a number of qualities number one and this is his secret sauce it’s something that visually is reinforcing every time you see her you’re gonna wonder hey what’s going on is she old does she have a mental problem is she drinking is she sick or is she nervous now had trump said i think she’s drinking where she’s she’s mentally incompetent people would say oh come on come on that’s that’s not really an evidence you know you could have your suspicions but that’s not fair but when you say somebody’s nervous everybody’s nervous sometimes we’re more nervous than other times but you can’t really debunk it
[45:52]
but you can’t really debunk it because without getting inside her head how in the world can you know if she’s she’s nervous or not so it’s brilliant because it doesn’t go too far calling her a drunk or insane would go too far nervous is is well within his acceptable range where people aren’t going to say we must impeach him for calling nancy pelosi nervous you know that so he’s it’s safe but imagine how that gets in your head this is the part people people don’t get when trump refers to biden as sleepy he’s changing biden’s behavior and he’s calling out something for the press to look at so the press is going to pay attention to how hard joe biden is campaigning and if it’s not hard enough they’re going to call it out because the president calls him sleepy if joe biden responds to that by trying to up his energy he’s going to look like a fake because if you put your energy higher than your normal energy people
[46:52]
higher than your normal energy people say what’s wrong with you today it just looks fake so he can’t do that and if he if he tries to put let’s say he adds more events or something he’s actually going to get tired because he’s pretty old so trump is using um sort of a trash talk psychology that you would use on a golf course i was imagining after after he came up with uh nervous nancy i was imagining how hard it would be to beat uh trump at golf can you imagine trying to golf with trump even if you were better than him a little bit you know you’d be talking in the golf cart and he’d be saying stuff that just gets in your head you know you’d be driving in the golf cart and trump would be like hey nice day you know he’d be talking about different things nothing and then he’d say hey notice i notice uh your stroke’s a little smoother than normal and and the competitor thinks my strokes a little smoother than normal i haven’t changed anything i wonder
[47:53]
i haven’t changed anything i wonder what’s what makes my stroke look smoother well he didn’t insult me that’s actually a compliment isn’t it i think my stroke is and then by the time that golfer gets to the ball he’s barely going to be able to hit the ball the ball the ball is going to go in the trees because all the golfer is thinking about is a stroke now now if you’re a golfer you already know this right you don’t comment on somebody’s form during a match you don’t do that right can can the golfers here confirm i’m not much of a golfer but i but can you confirm that the last thing that would be fair game is to mention anything about somebody’s um technique or how they’re feeling or suppose you said to your gulf say hey what’s matter today and the golfer says what do you mean what’s the matter i’m just asking is anything wrong with you today you look a little
[48:54]
little look a little off today what do you mean what do you mean i look a little off that would be enough to completely ruin somebody’s game it’s the same technique that trump is taking to politics you know the same way that he’s brought um entertainment and reality tv skills which he’s weaponized really effectively he’s bringing sort of sports trash talking skills into politics like you’ve never seen them so imagine you’re imagine you’re nervous uh nervous nancy the next time you’re speaking in public what’s it going to do to you to know that half of the country is watching you to see if you’re nervous think about it if you have if you haven’t thought of it this way you’re missing the best part the best part is what it does to her future behavior because you can’t ignore that it’s it’s impossible to ignore the next time she’s in public
[49:54]
the next time she’s in public she’s going to be speaking and because there have been all these clips of her um changing changing her word or hesitating and pausing before you had seen it framed as nervous maybe it didn’t mean as much to you if if nobody had been talking about you know there’s something wrong with her speech because that fake video this slowed down her speech and made it look like she was slurring if none of that had ever happened you wouldn’t even notice because people who speak without a script in public often need to pause change a word misspeak you know stammer completely normal and certainly completely normal over a certain age but trump just got in her head so hard that the first time she she gets flustered misses a word has to correct the first time she has a an imperfection she’s going to be thinking about the things she has to fix thinking about what she wants to say thinking about how to say it and
[50:56]
thinking about how to say it and thinking about how to make it look not nervous how is that going to look let’s just say her golf game is not going to be on point and that is the genius of what he does now let’s compare that let’s compare it to um to don junior’s uh tweet i think it was yesterday or today in which he was referring to joe biden changing his stance about the funding of abortion so i guess uh biden had been at one point supportive of the idea that the federal government should not fund abortions he now changed that to uh yes yes the government should should be funding abortions now don jr tweeted with the hashtag floppy joe now on a huber level floppy joe is tremendous it’s just got the right words the right letters it you know it rhymes with sloppy joe
[51:58]
it rhymes with sloppy joe that makes you laugh um and and sure enough joe biden flip-flops so it fits so it’s kind of great right floppy joe just as good as nervous nancy right no no not even close floppy joe is very funny and in the context of a tweet it’s actually great so as a humorous tweet that gets your attention gets a lot of retweets and stuff that’s great so so don jr came up with a great nickname for getting more tweets but you notice that floppy joe isn’t really gonna change biden’s behavior i mean because what the what’s the worst thing that could happen is he’ll he’ll stop changing his mind i don’t know if that even hurts him so floppy joe doesn’t have the weaponized quality that’s actually going to change how you see joe biden forever it just doesn’t change how you see him but but low energy jeb
[52:59]
low energy jeb oh that definitely changed how you see them crooked hillary well that probably heightened whatever suspicions you already had for sure nervous nancy oh that absolutely changes how you see her floppy joe brilliantly funny a great tweet probably doesn’t change anything in the in the election so there’s there’s the difference so it’s easy it would be easy for you to say if you if you’re sort of not reversed in the persuasion of it that those are both good because they both make you laugh but one of them is weaponized and one of them’s just good good good tweeting all right um i think that hit all of the points that i wanted to hit today and so i ask you is there anything else that you’d like oh i have one question for you i’m gonna put this out here i have a book that was my sequel to god’s debris wrote years ago called the religion war
[54:00]
wrote years ago called the religion war and i’ve never created the um i’ve never created the audiobook for it uh would any of you be interested in hearing the audiobook in chapter forum on youtube in other words i could just read my own book on youtube and then you can listen to it as a podcast or you can listen to it as a now i’d probably probably i don’t know if i would break it up into separate chapters or what i do i might do that um um okay a lot of people are saying yes i mean why wouldn’t you it’s free you can always you can listen or not listen all right i’ll think about doing that i’ll find the right time to do that and then we’ll go um um question i have improved my lighting setup in this room is my lighting better today than usual usually i can’t tell until the re the replay so here’s the question is my lighting good today
[55:03]
lighting good today oh i don’t know which one what you’re saying yes do now um um can somebody tell me if my lighting’s good i’m waiting for some of the comments to go through all right well i’ll look at them later um um good i’m glad so many of you are saying yes to that well then i’ll do that isn’t this the beauty of the the medium you you can watch in real time as you’re influencing me and then i do something on social media and that influences other people so you’re actually i hope you feel this like in real time you’re influencing me and then i’ll do things that will influence other people this is this is real and it’s powerful and and it’s fun somebody says too bright i think you might be right i’ll i won’t know until i see the ultimate replay all right enough for now i will talk to you later