Episode 2049 Scott Adams: Reaper vs Russia, Not Hiring Pronoun People, Avoid The Woke, Dodd-Frank
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 24 minutes
Words per Minute
149.50996
Summary
Scott Adams talks about the recent crash of a Boeing 737-200 into a lake, and the mysterious crash of another plane into the ocean, and what could have caused them to do that? Plus, we talk about the Russian drone strike on the downed US Reaper, and whether or not it was self-destruction.
Transcript
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of civilization it's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine today, the thing that makes everything better.
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I can't read comments and do this at the same time.
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No, to answer your question in the comments, I'm very much not suicidal.
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I know it doesn't seem like this from the outside, but I'm not having a bad week.
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I know that people think I am, that I'm supposed to be suffering, but it's just not working out that way.
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I mean, some of it is I just like to focus on the future.
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Let's talk about that Russian incursion on the Reaper drone.
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I don't understand the video exactly because it seems like that jet got really close to that, like way too close.
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Like it came at it from the front and then it just pulled up just before it would have hit so it could dump the fuel on it.
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That makes more sense because I could understand somebody coming up from behind and pulling up, but it looked like they came from the front, which to me looked crazy.
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Could the fuel alone and just the mass of the fuel bend the propeller?
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If there was a physical contact, would it be one blade?
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Can you imagine physical contact affecting only one blade?
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Seems like the second blade would be right there, like, immediately.
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You know, even if it was a flying aircraft that hit, you know, one slightly.
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I don't know how the second one could avoid the collision.
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But then I don't understand how it would only be one propeller if it was the weight of the fuel.
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I mean, that doesn't make exactly a lot of sense either, does it?
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Yeah, I would say it's possible under the same concept as if you were to jump from a high space into a body of water,
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it would be like concrete if you fell, right, right, right?
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If your parachute didn't open and you landed on a lake or the ocean, it would be like landing on concrete.
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So the mass of the liquid fuel would be, you know, very soft if you just pushed your hand through it.
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But if you were to slap it at 1,000 miles an hour, your hand would fall off, I think.
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So it does seem to me that the fuel itself could have damaged you.
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I'm going to put that out there as a hypothesis.
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Then the Russians are apparently trying to recover the stuff.
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But was it General Milley who said, oh, we took care of making sure there's nothing useful to recover?
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You know, don't you think that it probably has a self-destruction kind of a thing?
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And the self-destruction should have worked fine because they had plenty of time between the, you know,
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the damage to the propeller and the time it went down.
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I guess I could believe that they destroyed the software, right?
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But do you think there's no technology in the Reaper that Russia wants?
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I suppose if it's just a bunch of debris spread across miles, there's not much you can get.
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But it's hard for me to believe there's nothing they can get out of it.
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That there's just nothing they can get that's useful?
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The other possibility is that we know that Russia has already had Reapers and taken them apart.
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So it's possible that we think they already know everything about the Reaper, but we can't say that out loud.
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Like, maybe the real answer is, well, I hate to tell you, but they don't really need to recover the debris to find out everything about the Reaper because maybe they already know.
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I was not aware that California has one or had one committee coming up with reparations, recommendations, but San Francisco was doing its own separate one.
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So I guess I was confused that there were two of them.
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I just thought they raised the numbers from the first recommendation.
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So forget everything I said about Gavin Newsom and his committee for the San Francisco one.
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But Gavin Newsom did play it correctly with his committee, the statewide one, that came up with some ridiculous numbers, which is, I'm sure, what he wanted.
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So that once the numbers were seen, everybody would say, oh, I guess we can't do that, and that's the end of it.
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But the San Francisco one seemed sillier because the people who formed the committee, you know, seem aligned with the people who came up with the recommendation.
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So they're the ones who came up with the $5 million per resident, $97,000 per year for 250 years, and you can buy a home for a dollar.
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But then I read that Robert Johnson, the founder of BET, he wanted something like $14 trillion set aside for black Americans.
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So increase the crushing national debt by 50%, and then everything would be good.
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It took three years for the San Francisco group to come up with a recommendation.
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What were they studying exactly for three years?
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Were they waiting for economists to give them some estimates and stuff?
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And did anybody tell them that their economists did the calculation incorrectly?
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I wonder if anybody told them they calculated it wrong.
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Now, when I say calculated it wrong, I don't mean that the raw numbers are wrong.
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But I do know that they didn't compare it to the alternative, did they?
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What kind of an economic analysis says, let's look at this without looking at what it would have been if you hadn't done this?
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The actual comparison would be to the people who did not leave Africa in the first place and were never a part of slavery.
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So if slavery had never intervened, what would your life look like?
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But I wouldn't compare it to what America is doing, even though I understand they were a big part of the labor force.
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The labor force, whether it's paid or a slave, they don't get ownership of the product of the work.
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Imagine if the slaves had been voluntary employees.
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They wouldn't have any ownership of anything else.
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And how much were white, poor Americans at that time earning?
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If you were poor and white, what you probably earned was enough to put a roof over your head and eat.
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And I'm not going to compare voluntary labor to slavery.
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I'm just saying that people were working for basically survival at the lowest end.
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There wasn't that much difference in the compensation part.
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It was a gigantic difference in, obviously, the ethical, moral, painful, evil part.
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But that's the part that would make sense to me as an estimate.
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If you came to me and said, all right, we're not going to look at the economic gain, because that sort of doesn't work.
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It's more about compensation for the bad thing that happened.
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But then the problem is that the bad thing that happened mostly happened to other people who are long dead.
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So if you took the approach of we're compensating for the pain and suffering, your argument isn't as strong, because the people who are directly affected have long passed.
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So then you have to default to an economic argument, because the economics certainly, you know, they ripple forward.
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So the argument that pain ripples forward is harder to sell.
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Well, people in my past had a really tough time.
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You know, even if there's something to it, nobody's going to believe it.
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But if you say early slaves created a bunch of economic benefit, but we did not benefit from it, then it sounds like something you could talk about.
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Unless the people you're talking to know how to do analysis.
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If the people you're talking to know how to do this work, they say, all right, what are you comparing it to?
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All right, you said you lost, like you lost a bunch of value.
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If they're comparing it to the white people, well, I think that's the wrong comparison.
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If you were a scientist, you'd say, what's the control group?
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If you're not going to at least compare it to the control group, it's just social persuasion.
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Any number you come up with is just ridiculous.
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Now, if you were to compare it even to the control group, I don't know what the answer would be.
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We'll never do that because the proper approach would be what?
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There are only a few people in the world who could say what I just said now and not get canceled.
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I've already extracted value from being canceled.
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It's simply a statement about how all scientific comparisons and all economic comparisons are properly done.
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But I couldn't even have said that and been safe.
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But, you know, if I had said something about it like that before and it became a viral video, I would be canceled for that.
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Just for saying that reparations are calculated incorrectly.
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Because it would just turn into racist says affirmations are not for black people.
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You know, you know the headline wouldn't match the story.
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How much do you think wokeness had to do with the failure of Silicon Valley Bank?
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I know that the politics in you wants to blame the wokeness.
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But at Silicon Valley Bank, there's no direct link.
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There's no smoking gun of, we decided to do only meetings about wokeness and nothing about risk management.
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But really, most of you are saying it was a big thing, huh?
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Do you think wokeness was responsible in any part with what happened to Silicon Valley Bank?
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But if you're saying there's an indirect link, that would be hard to prove.
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Can we meet in the middle that the hypothesis that it mattered?
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And the common sense, as if common sense exists.
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Jack, have you paid attention to nothing in the last few weeks?
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If there's one thing that's the dumbest thing you can say in the comments, is that the wokeness
00:16:32.880
It's like you don't know anything about anything.
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In the world, anything about me, anything about the last few weeks.
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It's like you'd have to know nothing about nothing, or nothing about everything.
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Like, the variety of mental capacity in the world just blows me away.
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Because you go through life thinking everybody's at least somewhere around the average.
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And then you run into somebody who clearly is operating with, like, an IQ of 70 or something.
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And somehow manage to log onto YouTube anyway, and make a comment in all caps.
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Anyway, what I was saying was, I don't think there's a direct correlation, but the argument
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for why it, let's say, the best way to say it would be, why it should be suspected, why
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it should be suspected, is that nobody can focus on multiple things.
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Now, the quick answer to that is, well, that's just every manager, right?
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I think wokeness is such a big thing that because you can show progress in wokeness by
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simply doing things that the data will say are woke, oh, look at these things I did, this
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So, you can prove your wokeness, but can you prove you did your risk management right until
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If the bank is just chugging along, nobody knows if you did risk management correctly
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So, everything I know about management tells me that people would put more interest in
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wokeness than risk management because that's where the reward would be.
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Now, that doesn't mean it's the reason they failed.
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But, there's no question that a company that has that as a visible goal, it would not distort
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So, you could argue for sure it was a distortion of good management technique.
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But whether that went the extra distance and was an important variable in the end product,
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This would be more the Democrat theory because they don't want to buy into the wokeness hypothesis.
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But they say Dodd-Frank would have made a difference.
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And then I keep reading, okay, and the difference would be because, and then it's not there.
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And then I'll read another article that says, but there's a widespread opinion that if Dodd-Frank,
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the regulation on banks, had not been weakened by the Trump administration, that maybe Silicon
00:20:00.580
Bank wouldn't have had, you know, that, the lack of oversight that may have contributed.
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To which I say, okay, and the details, the details are that the specific thing that changed
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was, was, and I'm keeping looking for it in the article.
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And then I finally saw somebody say, well, what they did was they changed the limit of
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So before, they had a lower limit, and the bank would have had to comply to, you know,
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But the little banks didn't want that, so they said, raise that rate.
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So if you're below this, I think it's 250 billion in assets, if you're below that level, we won't
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But above that level, they can handle the crushing regulations, and it'll make them safer.
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So some say that change that made Silicon Bank more, let's say, less regulated than the
00:21:04.380
Here's what I ask you, because I don't know the answer to the following question.
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My understanding is that the bank failed because they handled their risk management wrong.
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There were two assumptions that they got wrong.
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But here's the part most of the stories don't tell you.
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There's a part that's left out of most of the reporting.
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It wasn't just that they bought a bunch of long-term low-interest rate stuff, and then
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when interest rates went up, they had all this low-interest rate stuff, so they were
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It's that that would have been fine if the deposit flow had continued the way it normally
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Even their bad risk management wouldn't have been a crushing problem if the deposits had
00:22:03.340
But since their deposits took a hit, then their bad decision about interest rates became very
00:22:14.000
It rose to a problem when it wouldn't have risen to a problem except for the other situation.
00:22:17.680
Now, I've only seen a few people smart enough to explain that.
00:22:22.940
And they do explain it sometimes by saying it was like a Ponzi scheme, but not really.
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Only in the sense that as long as more money came in, if enough new money came in, it could
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So they had two problems, and it looks like they misjudged both of them.
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But I'm not sure it was as obvious when it was happening as it is to us after the fact.
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Because if they were depending on the inflows, and there was nothing that looked like it was
00:22:56.280
going to stop it, it's risky, and it's too risky, and it shouldn't have happened.
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I don't know the answer to this question, so maybe you don't.
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Even without Dodd-Frank, is there no reporting at all about the risk management position of a bank?
00:23:25.540
It must be so obvious that Dodd-Frank wouldn't have made any difference at all.
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So I think the Dodd-Frank reporting seems like fake news.
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With or without Dodd-Frank, was this problem at Silicon Bank not so obvious that the government
00:23:43.980
regulators could see it as well as all private investors who were paying attention?
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It seems to me that Dodd-Frank has nothing to do with this.
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I don't believe the news, just sort of in general.
00:24:03.860
But I feel like the whole Dodd-Frank thing is a diversion.
00:24:08.940
Because the problem wasn't hidden deeply in the paperwork of the company.
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It was the biggest top-line thing they were doing.
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Are you telling me that even without Dodd-Frank, the government can't see that?
00:24:28.460
The banks don't have to at least report what their capital situation is?
00:24:35.560
You're telling me that only Dodd-Frank requires you to tell where you put your money in the
00:24:49.960
We're, like, picking through the tea leaves here to figure out what we can know about
00:24:56.340
Anyway, I think the Dodd-Frank thing is bullshit.
00:25:01.880
I think it was probably an individual who was bad at their job.
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I think it probably comes down to one person who was bad at their job, and then a bunch
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of people who were bad at knowing who was bad at their job.
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You know, whoever the boss was also was asleep at the switch.
00:25:24.920
There was a video that was viral on Twitter in which a young woman said some version of
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she wouldn't want to work with people who have pronouns in their profiles.
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And I thought, hey, there's something that I can talk about without getting canceled.
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So I thought, wouldn't the world be better off if I say this out loud?
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I would never hire a person with pronouns in their bio.
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Now, last I checked, there were close to 5 million views.
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I can't tell if the 5 million are based on the original video that I retweeted with a comment.
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5 million views would be the original video, not the fact that I retweeted it.
00:26:26.880
Because I don't think I got 5 million views on my retweet.
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It would make more sense as total, wouldn't it?
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But whether it was from my retweet or her original, which said about the same thing,
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5 million people said, speaking as one almost and instantly,
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When young people are told, hey, pronouns are good.
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Put them in your bio and lead with your pronoun.
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Is there anybody telling them that it's going to destroy their career options?
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It won't necessarily destroy their life because they still have options.
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But the number of options that they have will be insanely fewer.
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Now, here's what it signals to me if I see pronouns.
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If you're going for a job interview, you come in telling what you can do for them, and you never stop saying it.
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The only time you ever talk about what they can do for you is when they make an offer.
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When they make an offer, you can negotiate that and the benefits and stuff, of course.
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Because now that's the approved time for that conversation.
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That's when your boss wants you to tell them or her.
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All right, your boss is looking for you to say what you need.
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You don't walk in and say, the beginning of this conversation, I'd like to make it clear, I'll only work under these conditions.
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But when you come in with your pronouns, you're saying, here's how you're going to treat me.
00:28:24.500
And if I'm not treated in this way, I'm signaling.
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But if somebody else sued you, I'd probably back them.
00:28:43.420
So it's such a, it's a signal that somebody doesn't understand the basics of success.
00:28:55.280
Who is it who doesn't understand that a first impression is really important?
00:29:05.000
And yet the pronoun people seem to have missed the biggest part of what they're doing.
00:29:13.160
Now, if they hang around in their little clump of people, they probably just get praise for what they're doing.
00:29:19.600
But somebody needs to tell them this affects their career.
00:29:23.800
And not just if it's on your resume, but if it's on your social media.
00:29:34.840
The people who do hiring for a living are, at least in the comments, are universally, close to universally,
00:29:42.320
saying, yeah, I throw away every resume, even if the pronouns are only on their social media.
00:29:52.680
It's a pretty big problem that the woke people do not realize that wokeness is nearly the complete opposite of success.
00:30:03.560
Like, all the concepts of everything from racism to wokeism, they sound good at the moment.
00:30:12.540
And if you're standing in the room with the persons you're talking about, it feels right.
00:30:18.040
But any sense of what it takes to succeed in this world is violated completely by every element of that philosophical framework.
00:30:26.780
So, if you want to be righteous and poor, that would be the way to go.
00:30:34.360
If you want to be successful, I would do the things that successful people do.
00:30:46.220
Yes, I'm making it dangerous for all cartoonists.
00:30:48.320
So, other people said, yeah, it signals, other hiring people were saying,
00:31:00.680
How many of you think that somebody who has pronouns is more likely to initiate a lawsuit against the boss?
00:31:12.640
I would think that even the people with the pronouns would agree with the statement
00:31:17.000
that the people with pronouns are more likely to voice an important complaint in that realm.
00:31:31.960
I don't want to spend time near any cluster of white people
00:31:36.760
who have been poisoned with the wokeness narrative.
00:31:39.220
And I'd say stay the hell away from white people who have that mindset.
00:31:43.520
So, I was looking at some of the people who believe the headlines,
00:31:53.840
Now, is it racist to not want to be around people
00:32:05.580
Because that's, you know, if you take away the hyperbole,
00:32:07.900
of course, I said it in the most provocative way.
00:32:11.100
But the context, for anybody who missed the context, was mindset.
00:32:24.480
I think some group of people are born with some characteristic
00:32:27.820
and I want to stay away from them because of the way they were born?
00:32:31.060
Oh, that's literally the opposite of anything I've ever said.
00:32:38.480
So, on my NPC list, one of the things is backpedaling.
00:32:54.200
to re-describe exactly what you said the first time.
00:32:58.520
The entire context was people being infected with the woke virus.
00:33:05.780
If you knew there were a bunch of people who had
00:33:10.960
would you want to spend a lot of time in the room?
00:33:14.020
Suppose you didn't know which ones had COVID and which ones didn't.
00:33:21.920
You're just saying this identifiable group of people
00:33:48.860
that's the quickest one that gets to the point,
00:34:22.780
So stay away from people who have that mindset.