Luck, Skill & Timing

r money. So that's the good news. What's the bad news? Well, the bad news is that the picture on the front of the bill is the guy who's going to kill you. So there's that. That's such a good troll. I don't care if it happens or not, but if it did happen, I would never stop laughing. And I would immediately run to the bank and get me one. I would put it on my wall. It would be the best art worth $250 ever until somebody steals it. Well, you've heard me talk about how the climate models are all bad, but here's a followup on that. So apparently there's a 42-page report from the president's energy department that was released in July, and we've talked about it before, but I'm going to add something to it. And they showed 36 climate models and then they showed how they're all wildly off of the actual temperatures that we've observed. 36 models. Now if you've lived in the real world or you've been in like a real corporation or if you're just a certain age, what do you know? If the only thing you know is that there are 36 different models for measuring the weather, what do you know for sure? Well, what I know for sure is if science was sure that they could model things with models, there would be one. There would be one because it would be the one where the scientists say, "Oh, yeah, that's the one." If you have 36, what's that telling you? You know, you lived in the real world. You're not a scientist, but you've lived in the real world and there are 36 different models. Well, I'll tell you what it tells me. It tells me there used to be a hundred and that the ones that didn't come close enough to reality, they just quietly threw away. So what you're seeing is the surviving models and they still needed 36 of them. So all you're seeing is a survivor bias. They started with lots of models. They looked at what was really happening. Some of the models by coincidence were close to reality. So they said, "Well, these must be the good ones." No, they're not the good ones. There were a hundred and they were all over the place. Some of them were going to be close. There was no science there at all. It's just, oh, let's keep the ones that were close as if they're scientific. But do you think in 10 years that those will be kept? I don't. I don't. So here's the thing I'm going to add. If you knew that climate change was an existential risk and the biggest problem in the world and then your darn new president, darn him, he puts his name on a report that says the climate models are all bunk and haven't come anywhere near reality. What would you do if you knew that the climate models were real and that they represented an existential threat? It was the most important thing

Episode 2983 CWSA 10/09/25

sk from AI is that it will not make money. And apparently that is a really big risk. So there is a growing feeling, and I saw it again today, that AI may be plateauing and not getting much better from where it is. And I am actually seeing the word plateau in this article from Futurism. And it reports that some AI companies are kind of weaning themselves off a little bit of AI they were using and some of them are shutting down projects and they realize that the amount of money that is being put into it could probably never be made up. So not only is AI not going to blackmail you or try to make a copy of itself, it might bankrupt you by pretending to be so useful that you put a trillion dollars of investment into it to get a billion dollars back in return. So it might be deadly but economically, if you know what I mean. So here is a story that made me happy. Foreign investment in China has collapsed 99 percent in the last three years. Rod Martin has a thread on this. I think somebody named James Gory did an analysis of it and apparentl

Episode 2931 CWSA 08/18/25

asure that is dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens right now. Go. Perfect. Oh, did you ever stop to think that there have been, let's say, a million years of human evolution and you happen to be here at exactly the right time for the simultaneous sip? Talk about luck. Wow. Or as I like

Episode 2923 CWSA 08/10/25

tise whatsoever? Here's another one. When Russia was threatening to attack Ukraine, I got one prediction 100% wrong, as wrong as anything could be. And I said that Putin must be bluffing because he must know that it's not going to be as easy as people say. So I predicted that he wouldn't go in, but I also predicted that if he did, he would not be able to conquer Ukraine in two weeks. And that the ground assets that he sent in would be too vulnerable to high-tech air stuff, you know, missiles and drones and stuff. And that's what happened. So I have no military experience, but why was it that my prediction that Ukraine would be able to hold off Moscow, why was that right so far? I mean, you could argue if you wait forever, it'll become wrong, and that's true. But I was just about the most right on a military question. How's that possible when I don't have any military expertise? How about the fact that I predicted that Trump would win in 2016? What was my prior political experience? None. None. None at all. How did I get that right in a domain that I shouldn't have known anything? How about when the Ukraine war was newer and I predicted that Prigozhin, remember Prigozhin? I predicted that he would turn on Moscow and try to overthrow Putin. I'm the only person who said that. Nobody else in the world said that. And then he did. And then when he got obviously murdered immediately by Putin once they got their hands on him, the news told you that he was flying off to Belarus to live his life happily. And I laughed at you and said, "No, he's already been killed. There's no way he's still alive." And of course, I was right about that. Now, how did I get all of those predictions right? I mean, those are really specific predictions, and nobody else made them. Well, I don't have any expertise in that area, right? But how did I get that right? And so you could probably come up with a few more. Here's my theory. I believe that the reason I have an advantage over the experts is that experts are not allowed to depart from the other expert opinions. That as soon as you, let's say you're a military expert, as soon as a few people say, "Well, Russia is going to just crush Ukraine in 10 minutes," you don't want to be the person who's on the other side of that if you're an actual expert. So it's just safer to go with the majority, I guess. And I have the freedom. I don't know anything about any of these topics there. I have no expertise in any of these domains. I have the freedom to say, well, what's it look like? And then I just apply usually the Dilbert filter to it and a persuasion filter. Usually some economic filter, just basic stuff. And I say, well, looks to me like this is going to happen. So I would argue that it could be that being an expert makes you because you can't really throw away your whole career over a specific prediction. But I could make a wild prediction and if I'm wrong, well, I'll just say, "Oh, I got that one totally wrong." It wouldn't make any difference at all. So I have a little bit more freedom to consider the alternatives. So maybe that's what's going on. It's my best guess. As you know, Minnesota is in a pitched battle with California to see which would make the shittiest state. If I said to you that a housing program has been caught stealing $100 million, a housing program, what state would you imagine that was? We'll play this game. The answer is Minnesota. So there's a new story. $100 million stolen from some housing program. Here's another one. A man got 28 years in prison, according to the Associated Press, the AP, for $48 million of COVID era food and fraud scandal. Is that California or Minnesota? The answer is Minnesota. Minnesota. So there you go. California, if you give us a hundred billion dollars for a bullet train, we'll probably just keep that money. If you give us money to fix the fire damage in LA, well, we'll just let somebody steal it, probably. I don't think we'll build any new homes or help any people. So which state is shittier, Minnesota or California? I'm going to say that Minnesota is shittier simply because they have worse weather and more mosquitoes and otherwise we're both corrupt. I got this question so many times from so many people and I don't want to have individual arguments with all of you. So people keep asking me,

Episode 2920 CWSA 08/07/25

Rand Paul he wants to reissue criminal referrals about Fauci and Fauci's involvement with the lab and funding it and all that. And I think it was related to Fauci allegedly lying under oath. But when it looked like Fauci had a pardon from the Biden auto pen process, then there was no point in having a criminal referral because he was already pardoned for everything. But now since the autopen is being questioned and some people are saying, was it even legal to do all these pardons if Biden maybe didn't even know what he was doing or it went through underlings? So that was enough of an opening for Senator Paul to reissue his criminal referral. It seems to me like I just see Moby Dick when I read about Rand Paul going after Fauci. I feel like Fauci is just this great white whale and Rand Paul will go to his grave trying to put that guy in jail. I don't know if he ever will, but he's trying. Let's talk about the autopen situation. So if you follow the right-leaning news, as most of you do, but you don't follow other news or other podcasters, you would probably think this autopen thing is a real big scandal and it really matters and it's going to change things if we get to the bottom of it. I don't feel that that's true because I don't feel there's necessarily a crime there and I don't feel that any of his rulings will be reversed because Biden has confirmed that he individually approved everything that was signed. Now did he? No, of course not. He didn't know everything that got signed. I don't even know if he knew his name. But he's the only one who could testify that he knew or didn't know what he was doing. And I also think that the excuse that he gave some guidelines, you know, you can pardon people if they fall under these guidelines. I don't think it's a big deal if he didn't know the specifics and then his staff said, "All right, we have the guidelines. So as long as we're within the guidelines, he's pre-approved it and then he auto-penned it." Is that the biggest problem in the world? Not really. Is that illegal? Not that I know of. Apparently there's enough of a paper trail that you can determine that the aides were talking to Biden in the process of figuring out what to auto-pen. If you knew that they were talking to Biden about what to auto-pen and what not to and Biden also said, "Oh yeah, I basically approved everything." There's not much there. Right. So if you're waiting for this auto pen thing to become a much bigger legal thing or something like that, I don't think it will. And I don't think any of them will be reversed. I could be surprised, but my prediction will be none of the autopen stuff will be reversed by a court or anything else. But I saw Mark Halperin on his podcast 2Way, which is great by the way, great podcast. He was saying that there's something missing. There's a dog not barking in the New York Times coverage of it because you probably said to yourself, well, why did it take the New York Times so long to get on that story about the autopen but then they eventually did and they did a big feature story on it. So you say to yourself, all right, a little later than I wanted, but at least the New York Times legitimately looked into it. But then Mark Halperin points out that there are some things that you definitely would have seen in the story if it had been a story about Republicans and Trump. And he says, "So what do law professors think about that? What

Episode 2898 CWSA 07/15/25

ers behind the paywall on either Locals.com or here on X, if you're watching on X, you would know that Asok the intern is being deported to Albania, even though he has no connection to Albania. But he will get due process. You will get due process. The due process will happen at Alligator Alcatraz. So that's what you're missing. That's today's Sunday comic. Asok is getting deported. Anyway, Grok has now been officially updated, and it's being called Super Grok. And I decided to do a little test on Super Grok. Yep, there it is. And the test was, there was a little mystery that I'd been having that was making me feel like I might be insane. Have you heard Elon Musk? He said this a number of times on X. He said, "The most entertaining outcome is the most likely." How many of you have seen Elon Musk say that? He said it again today. So he retweeted his earlier time he said it. And every time I see that, I would say to myself, why does that look so familiar? And then I would start to think, oh, wait a minute, didn't I invent that? Isn't that something I said? And apparently he gets credit for being the inventor of that saying. So I thought, well, let's give Super Grok a test because actually I was wondering if I was insane. I actually thought, am I losing it? Like, have I lost the ability to tell what came out of my mouth versus what I read on X? And really, I was wondering if I lost it. And I thought, am I just being like the weird narcissistic crazy person who's just now hallucinating like an LLM? And so I asked what was the earliest that I think I asked Super Grok, when was the first time I said it? And apparently it was the very first thing I ever said about politics. How many of you remember in 2015 I wrote a blog post called Clown Genius, and it was a reframe of Trump from being this clown who was running for president. Nobody took him seriously. And I wrote that viral blog post called Clown Genius in which I explained, oh, you have no idea what's coming. This is not a clown. This is a clown genius, and he kno

Episode 2889 CWSA 07/06/25