Herr Schadenfreude Is Not a Friend of Ours – Ep 177

A great speaker can bend logic with emotions and exert undue influence on your decision making. The better someone speaks, the more discriminating your Sophist filter needs to be.

The Wedding Politburo gave me three minutes for this speech, as its members are still suffering from PTSD from my last one, which ran 50. Okay, I'll keep this one to 40.

Here is what changed my mind. Not something about gold, but many things about the dollar. The US dollar is the world's reserve currency. It has had a well-deserved place since WWII, and that rested on three things: the largest, steadiest, most diverse economy; a politically stable democracy; the best military.

Narrative change is a reversal of mass behavior. Economics and stock market valuation are governed by soft laws, but the reality bent by human behavior can disagree with these soft laws for much longer than rational actors would expect, or stay solvent. The change, going from euphoria to despair, is a change in narrative.