In the latest episode of The Narrative Game, Ben and Grant discuss the Narrative Early Warning System (N.E.W.S.) developed by Ben and Rusty Guinn to help not just investors, but everybody understand and sidestep the increasing amount of ‘controlled’ news funneled into our social media feeds, news sources and conversations with friends.
NEWS is the culmination of a 30 year-long project which Ben has been developing since his earliest academic research and is designed to alert people to the signals and clues that what you may be reading has been delivered to you at a very specific time in a very specific way and through a very specific medium in order to generate a very specific reaction.
Arming yourself with the defensive weaponry required to sidestep the ‘nudging state’ has never been more important so start fighting back today by listening to Ben.
Grant Williams:
Before we get going. Here’s the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss during the Narrative Game should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. And now on with the show.
Grant Williams:
Welcome everybody to another edition of the Narrative Game. Joining me as always bringing the narrative and his game, the man himself, Ben Hunt. Hi mate. How are you?
Ben Hunt:
Hey, hey Grant. I’m doing super. Doing super.
Grant Williams:
Fantastic. Now it is, I think what I would have to call on your behalf, a target rich environment for the narrative conscious among us, Ben.
Ben Hunt:
Nice. Yes.
Grant Williams:
And there’s a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about, but I’m going to save that for a little bit later on, because what I I really want to start with is your latest project, NEWS, which, you know, I go back to a dinner you and I had in San Antonio election night in 2016 and you-
Ben Hunt:
Mm-hmm.
Grant Williams:
… talked to me about you and Rusty were doing and it sounded equal parts, incredible and equal parts sci-fi and equal parts how the hell is he going to pull this off?
Ben Hunt:
Mad? Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Grant Williams:
But I know he will somehow and here we are. So let’s start with that. Let’s talk about what NEWS is. It’s genesis and what your aims are with it.
Ben Hunt:
Sure, sure. And boy, that was, I keep coming back to that night. That was election night, 2016.
Grant Williams:
That was crazy, right?
Ben Hunt:
When it all-
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
… when things all changed, right? So NEWS is an acronym and it stands for Narrative Early Warning System. Narrative Early Warning System. And I got to tell you, Grant, this goes back, gosh, how old are we now? This is crazy, this goes back more than 30 years.
Grant Williams:
Wow.
Ben Hunt:
This goes back to my academic research. This goes back to my first real book. It was called Getting to War and it’s the idea that you can use unstructured data. You can use the effort that journalists, politicians, central bankers, the effort they make to promote a story arc to support a narrative. You can measure it and you can use that as a signal for things that are going to happen. That took its shape, originally as a political notion of an early warning signal, primarily looking at governments that were looking to start a fight, start a war, you know? A big case study on the Argentine, you know, junta in Starting the Falklands Malvinas Conflict.
Ben Hunt:
What I found is like clockwork. Three, four months before a government starts something risky like going to war, they’ll start, you can call them trial balloons. You can call them editorializing. It takes a lot of different forms. Back 32 years ago, all I was able to do was to read newspaper editorials and hire grad students who could read the different languages ‘cause you’re looking at the domestic media they’re published it and that’s a project that still has a lot of legs. It was the project that we used to say before Russia made the major invasion of Ukraine, we said and wrote about, it’s like this is happening guys. It’s not going to be some little faint here, little saying, no they’re gearing up, their domestic public opinion for a full scale war.
Ben Hunt:
So that was the genesis of an early warning system as it pertains to politics. Over the last three years, and this is not just a me thing, this is a project that my partner and I, Rusty Guinn, this is what we started our company to do, Second Foundation Partners. What we started to do was to build what we called the narrative machine. To build a microscope, to see the invisible world of narratives and we’ve had a couple of, I would say, yeah, breakthrough sounds too highfalutin of a word, but maybe not too highfalutin, right? Or maybe not too off the mark. I think we’ve had a couple of significant advances in our ability to build the narrative machine.
Ben Hunt:
When I say it’s a microscope, that’s exactly how I think about it. It’s this invisible world of narrative we’re trying to see and visualize that invisible world. The way that you have advances here is really by improving the magnification and the resolution of the lenses we have to see this invisible world. And recently we had one of these breakthroughs and it became clear to us that the narrative machine, this microscope that we had built, we had gone past our early stage, which was to really identify when narrative activity is taking place or not.
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
Right? It was, it’s a very fuzzy picture and I love this notion of resolution as a way of talking about progress here because our early work here with building the narrative machine, you could see that there’s this organism really the way I like to think about them of a narrative and you could say, “Oh, it’s growing now”, or “It’s dying now,” but it’s a very fuzzy picture you know? Not a lot of pixels in that resolution-
Grant Williams:
Right, right.
Ben Hunt:
… Well, the new development we’ve had here has led to an enormous increase in the resolution of our lenses to the point where we’re now just, it’s not just saying, oh, narrative activity is growing, peaking, dying off. No, it’s this specific narrative-
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
… is growing, peaking, dying off. This specific narrative is merging with this other narrative. We’re able to see the individual narratives and I got my partner’s, Rusty’s head just whirling because our mission, Grant, is, and again, it’s something out of the micro verse, out of little organisms, right? We think that narratives have become weaponized.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
We think that in the same way you can talk about gain of function research in a bio lab, to work on a virus we think there’s absolutely that same sort of work going on in every big tech and big media and big political operation today. Ways of actually tailoring the words to have the designed impact on us, the reader or the listener today.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
We want to build a vaccine for that, right? We want to inoculate the world against what we call fiat news, weaponized narratives. We have lots of phrases for this.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
But we all get the idea, right, that words are being used against us. That words are being used to shape and mold our behaviors in a very calculated fashion hence the idea of a narrative early warning system. What are the qualities of that? Well, we want it to be able to be something that we can use to run analysis and publish about different media outlets. To what degree are they promoting certain narratives that we’re not getting into fact checking right? There’s none of that what we’re doing. What we’re doing is, here are the hallmarks of a weaponized narrative and if you, the reader, or the listener, can have that little ding-ding-ding of the words you’re now reading are part of a-
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
… of a weaponized narrative, it gives you the critical distance, we think, to give a bit of inoculation. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to agree with them or disagree with them. It’s just that you get a little bit of critical distance and that’s what we’re trying to accomplish with the NEWS program, the narrative early warning system.
Grant Williams:
Well, I want to dig into this because it’s-
Ben Hunt:
Sure.
Grant Williams:
… a piece you wrote on Epsilon Theory that you published, I guess, what a week, 10 days ago, maybe? Maybe two weeks ago possibly?
Ben Hunt:
Yep.
Grant Williams:
Was as always, I think it was called Fifteen Faces of Fiat News and it was just, I mean, I hate to say it, but ‘cause I sound like a broken record, but just typical Ben and Rusty brilliance. It was fantastic and it was a long piece that going went into great detail and I would urge everybody listening to this to read that piece because it lays out in great detail what it is you’re trying to do and you know, Ben, it’s funny, you said to me, and this came up on Twitter a few days ago, someone mentioned something and I replied that ever since the day you said to me, everything you read, you need to say, why am I reading this and why am I reading it now?
Grant Williams:
Just that one thing from you has completely reshaped the way I read the news. The way I see the world around me and so what you’re doing with this narrative machine, the way you’re building that, normally you’d say to yourself, well, how is it possible to fight the kind of weapons that are being used if this language is being used against us, without our knowing it, in ways that we don’t really understand, my own experience tells me that you only need a little bit of exposure and you just need that why you’re reading this, why you’re reading that, you just need a filter, simple as that, to be able to counteract a lot of this stuff. And I mean, literally I read the news in a completely different way now than I did before you and I had that conversation and I said it on Twitter and I’ll say it here, I’m extremely grateful to you for that.
Ben Hunt:
Well, thank you Grant.
Grant Williams:
So let’s dig in a little bit to some of those 15 faces that you’ve identified and there are ones that I definitely want to ask you about, but I’d rather come at it from your side, of which is the most important for people to understand, then if there’s any that I want to dig into afterwards-
Ben Hunt:
Sure.
Grant Williams:
I’ll ask you.
Ben Hunt:
Sure. Well, first of all, you’re right about what it means to be inoculated, what it means to have a bit of, I call it critical distance because when I say ask yourself, why am I reading this now? That’s the goal here is to make us all a critical thinker, a critical consumer of the steady diet of weaponized narratives that are force fed to us. Critical doesn’t mean criticizing. Critical means, you know, it’s like critical race theory, right?
Grant Williams:
Right, right.
Ben Hunt:
It really is. I mean, that adjective critical is one of maintaining a distance, of looking at something and not just swallowing something whole. It’s chewing your food carefully.
Grant Williams:
There you go. There you go.
Ben Hunt:
Chewing your food carefully and that is exactly the goal here, Grant so for you, and I think for a lot of people, that just basic principle of ask yourself, why am I reading this now? That’s enough to give you that pause, which is the key here. Just giving you a little pause. The issue, and I think this is true for us just as human beings, is that when something is the water in which we swim, a phrase I like to use off the David Foster Wallace story, right? And when it’s the water in which you swim, we don’t really see it. We read the words, we hear the speech, but we don’t step back and we don’t examine the, I’ll call it, the construction of the words that were written for us.
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
The construction of the speech that we just heard. We take it at a face value that does not allow us to step back and look at the act of speaking to us. Why would somebody want to speak to us? The act of reading something that someone has written for us. Why would somebody write something for us? And it’s, I find, at least and in my life, I can give you a couple of good examples of this, until you are sensitized to something like a vaccine does, right? It sensitizes your immune system, that’s what we want to do, we want to build our own natural immune system to this stuff, stuff that we don’t have a big natural immune system to.
Grant Williams:
No, right.
Ben Hunt:
So a couple examples from my life, right? So, back in a prior life, started a company, software company, worked with construction equipment. Now, until I started this company, I never saw the construction equipment that’s all around us but now that I’ve been involved in that industry, I promise you, look out the window, if you’re in a town, you know, unless you’re out in the woods, look out the window and I promise you will see an item of construction equipment that somebody has rented from a construction rental spot somewhere. It’s crazy how much construction equipment equipment there is, we just don’t see it because it’s just everywhere.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
Example number two. Homeless people. Homeless people are everywhere, Grant, and we don’t see them because our brain, our mind, ignores them but once you’re sensitized to it, you will see homeless people everywhere. That’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to give that little pause, that little break that forces you to recognize, “aha!” These words of weaponized narrative are everywhere and here they are right in front of me in this article memory.
Grant Williams:
So the 15-
Ben Hunt:
Fifteen Faces of Fiat News.
Grant Williams:
Yeah, and the 15 kind of sections, I guess, that you break the piece down into, I mean, they’re all fascinating and I’ll say I do want to get you to talk about the ones you think are most important for people to understand, but let me just kick you off with-
Ben Hunt:
Sure.
Grant Williams:
… the missionary statements and the missionary warfare, because the missionary is something that you’ve spoken about on this podcast before. We’ve talked about this and it’s again, you know, it’s the man behind the podium, wagging his finger telling you what to think, but you had a chart in there which I think was it the dentity of missionary statements that you’d plotted?
Ben Hunt:
Yep. Yep.
Grant Williams:
And it was extraordinary-
Ben Hunt:
Exactly right.
Grant Williams:
… it was an extraordinary chart showing, and I think when you see that chart going bottom left to top right, almost 45 degrees, it’s given the context it’s in and knowing what I know about what you’ve taught me over these last few years, it was such a powerful chart to me because you realize what’s happening here. You realize that missionary statements are necessarily for the people making them, becoming more and more prevalent in our lives and you get a sense of, for me anyway, other people might read differently, but I get a sense of how increasingly precarious the situation must be getting if we are starting to see this many missionary statements from people telling us what’s important to think. So just, if you can recap the missionary idea and then talk about that chart on what it tells you ‘cause I was fascinated by it.
Ben Hunt:
You bet. I’m going to preface all this by saying that it’s comprehensive with 15 different aspects of fiat news. You know what we call fiat news? It’s it’s the idea of presenting opinion as fact. It’s again what we mean by weaponized narratives, but it’s so comprehensive ‘cause my partner, Rusty Guinn wrote this thing, and he’s the most-
Grant Williams:
Yep.
Ben Hunt:
… comprehensive person I know, it’s crazy but I’m so glad you picked this one of the 15 called missionary statements and I’ll describe what we mean, why we, yeah, missionary, why are we talking about that here, but let me say that these missionary statements, these are the most bold, obvious, direct use of telling you what to think of all of the 15 different categories we’ve got here. Some of these categories are, it’s a little bit sly, right? You know, they don’t want to hit you right over the head with-
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
… you know, telling you know how to think about something so they’ll catch it in, you know, experts say, or it’ll be in some unattributed source of expertise and we go through all of them, they’re about again 14 of them and then we’ve got missionary statements. So missionary statements are just very direct. Missionary statements are literally here’s how to think about X. They are the explainers that you would see on a Vox or one of these news sites, it’s one of these here’s what this really means, subtext: you who are not smart enough to figure out what it really means without being led by the nose for us to tell you what it really means. And we call them missionary statements because in game theory is at the heart of, I think what drives all of these.
Ben Hunt:
There’s the famous example of the common knowledge game. Again, this is at the heart of what we write about with Epsilon Theory, we’ve been writing about this for a long time for many years but for those that are new to it, the common knowledge game is the way in which common knowledge develops and then the way it changes our behavior. Common knowledge is not public knowledge, no, it’s actually, it could be private knowledge. It could be something that’s not really ever said out loud. Common knowledge is what we all know that we all know and the phrase “missionary statements” comes from the classic example of a common knowledge game and that classic example goes by the story of the green eyed tribe. I’ve told this story to you before Grant, but if you want me to-
Grant Williams:
No let’s hear it again.
Ben Hunt:
… tell you again quickly.
Grant Williams:
Let’s hear it again? Yes please.
Ben Hunt:
All right. So on the island of the green eyed tribe, blue eyes are taboo. Everybody has green eyes or everyone is supposed to have green eyes and if it so happens though that you have blue eyes, well, my goodness, because blue eyes are taboo, the next morning you have to get in your canoe and you have to leave the island forever. Fortunately, for anyone who does in fact have blue eyes on the island of the green eyed tribe, there are no reflective surfaces on this island so there are no mirrors for you to see the color of your own eyes and blue eyes are so taboo that it’s forbidden to even make reference to them. So nobody, if you have blue eyes, there’s no mirror for you to say, “Oh my God, I’ve got blue eyes.” And also nobody’s going to tell you, “Oh, Ben, you’ve got blue eyes” because it’s just, we can’t even, you can’t even make reference to it.
Ben Hunt:
So life goes on very peacefully with this tribe. Nobody has to leave the island, even though there’s some people there who have the blue eyes, who are the taboo attribute. So everything is all nice and happy until one day the missionary comes to the island and the missionary is he’s not party to these notions about taboo and so he gets up there in the middle of the village of this island of the green eyed tribes. He looks at everyone, he says, “Hey, at least one of you has got blue eyes.” Here’s the important part of this. He made this statement so that we all heard the statement or more important, we believe that everyone heard this statement. We hear that everyone heard at least one of you has got blue eyes. The missionary didn’t point out the person with the blue eyes.
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
But said, “At least one of you has got blue eyes.” So the question as this is typically posed, and kind of logic and game theory classes is what happens next? What happens next? Well, what happens next is that the next day, the person, if there’s, let’s say there’s one person with blue eyes, let’s say it’s me. So the next day I say, “He said, at least one person’s got blue eyes.” So I’ve seen everybody else in the village and I know that they all have have green eyes and when I, since I’ve seen that everyone else has got green eyes, I know, oh crap, I’m the one with blue eyes so the next morning I get my canoe and I leave the island, right? So that’s the easy case where only one person has blue eyes. He or she’s looked around, sees that everyone else has green eyes. The missionary said, “At least one of you has blue eyes.” So darn it, it must be me.
Ben Hunt:
What happens if there are two people with blue eyes? Well, I wake up the next morning, I’ve looked around and I know that there’s another person on the island who’s got blue eyes and so I wake up the next morning, confident that when I go to our kind of village central, that that one person who I know has got blue eyes will have seen that everyone else has got green eyes and so he will have left and imagine my surprise when I get there and I see that that fellow who I know has blue eyes, he’s still there.
Ben Hunt:
Well, how can that be? He knows our rules. He knows how taboo, oh, no. The only possible way that that person could still be here would be if he looked at the rest of us and he saw that there was somebody with blue eyes, but I’ve looked all around and I know that the only other person with blue eyes… It must be me. So if there are two people with blue eyes that on the morning of the second day, both people shove off on their canoe. The answer to this is that for any in number of villagers with the taboo blue eyes, they will all leave simultaneously on the third day.
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
Why is this interesting? It’s interesting for a couple reasons because we live in a world of this sort of taboo. We live in a world of behavior, live in a world where you don’t want to be the odd man out and I’m going to use a market analogy, you see this a ton in markets where a missionary, a central banker or something like that will make the statement. We’re going to have a recession and if that’s something that’s taboo, if that’s something that you’re offside for, you believe, oh, we’re not going to have a recession, then the way this plays out is that, and this is what I think what you see in markets is that after a missionary statement, there’ll be a period of time and then there will be a big sudden move in markets.
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
A big sudden move in markets and everybody will say, “Oh my God, where did that come from?” And what it came from is the way that common knowledge goes through a system, the more people who share that taboo, common knowledge, oh, there’s not going to be a recession. Oh my God, there’s going to be a recession. If there are a lot of them, it can take a little bit of time for that percolates and then they all leave simultaneously. They all go over to the, you know, they all leave the island with that viewpoint.
Grant Williams:
Right, right.
Ben Hunt:
And markets go way down so we see this all the time in the way that there’ll be a missionary statement, time will pass and then there’ll be a big punctuated move as people take themselves off the island.
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
That’s the kind of direct marketplace. We call them missionary statements because there used these used to be pretty darn rare, Grant, that’s what our chart is showing. It used to be kind of reserved for like a president to-
Grant Williams:
Yeah, yeah.
Ben Hunt:
… make a big, special event and say, “People, people, come around, let me tell you, I need to tell you what’s going on and here’s how I think we should be thinking about this.”
Grant Williams:
It’s the address from the Oval Office, right?
Ben Hunt:
It’s the address from the Oval Office and now is every Tom, Dick and Harry are saying here is how to think about my explainer on blah, blah, blah. That’s what we’re showing here and is the most, it’s the purest most direct form of weaponizing a narrative. Frankly, I didn’t think we’d see it, this pronounced.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
But we do, right? We absolutely do and it’s the sort of thing that should immediately give you some sort of pause when you see it in your media consumption.
Grant Williams:
The other one that jumped out at me, Ben was the bogeyman, because this is something-
Ben Hunt:
Yes.
Grant Williams:
… that I think we all kind of understand the concept of the bogeyman, but I think anyone that’s kind of read history and understands how kind of we, I’m using air quotes, “stumble” into wars.
Ben Hunt:
Mm-hmm.
Grant Williams:
We understand how bogeyman are very, very useful constructs so how is that playing out in our modern day world because again it feels as though we’re starting to get more and more bogeyman thrown at us more and more aggressively by as many sources as you can count.
Ben Hunt:
Yeah. The bogeyman, the creation of this other and the association of an argument with a bad guy is one of these things is also, we’re just seeing it skyrocketing in use. I just saw it the other day, where, oh, it was Matt Yglesias he was talking about there’s this antitrust effort going on, takes a lot of forms, you know, part of it is looking at the acquisitions that Amazon makes to stifle competition and create this behemoth that I think is very, very damaging, frankly, to small liberal society, like most trusts are, and he was making the argument, it was something like Amazon is trying to acquire this, essentially, a pharmaceutical delivery mechanism and of all people, Josh Hawley was being critical of this acquisition and so because, yeah, I think most right thinking people would say, oh, you know, Josh Hawley, oh my God…
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
Are you kidding me? But no, the argument then becomes you are consorting with very bad people if you are opposed to the acquisition that Amazon is making. Josh Hawley is opposed to that acquisition too. Need I say more, right? Thats the bogeyman and there’s so many different forms of this, right? From the you are, you’re consorting with bad people if you oppose to Amazon acquiring their pharmacy business. You see George Soros has used so much, Bill Gates is used for everything. If you-
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
… if you’ve ever, I bet you wrote this article using a Microsoft product didn’t you? It’s not yet to that extent, but it’s pretty darn close Grant, it’s pretty darn close. Again, it’s one of these where you’ll see this kind of throwaway line about Soros or the Koke Brothers you know?
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
Dark money from the Koke Brothers and that’s all you need to say right? Just say that as well. You know, nobody could be for that, that’s the side of evil. There’s that Godwin’s Law that when somebody starts comparing something to Hitler, it’s like, oh, come on, really?
Grant Williams:
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
Well, even that’s happening is so much more. Literally everything becomes you’re a Nazi.
Grant Williams:
Yeah. It’s so true.
Ben Hunt:
You’re a Nazi and it’s amazing how this has taken over so much of our conversation. Just amazing,
Grant Williams:
But it’s happened so fast and it’s happened in a way that, as you say, I kind of think of it as a gradient with Nazi on one end of it and a time when no one’s compared to Nazi’s because we all realize how ridiculous that is.
Ben Hunt:
Yeah.
Grant Williams:
Unless you’re an absolute Nazi, but there’s a gradient-
Ben Hunt:
Yeah.
Grant Williams:
… but this time, it seems like it’s not a smooth gradient. It’s three or four step changes in color and we get to the other end of the gradient and I find that extraordinary and I’m curious as to why we seem to be, is it urgency that’s moving us because we have to get to that side of the gradient fast because things are unraveling fast or is that the dog and the other side is the tail?
Ben Hunt:
No, I think, as in any sort of addiction, one writes like this in order to create that sort of dopamine or norepinephrine, chemical response in your brain, and like any sort of stimulus response effort, you’ve got to provide greater and greater stimulus to get a similar response. Every word of affect like this has been cheapened through overuse.
Grant Williams:
Mm-hmm.
Ben Hunt:
And the terrible part about this to me is that when there are actual Nazis running around, you’ve lost the ability to describe them.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
When everything is a Holocaust, when everything is an insurrection, when everything is treason, then nothing are those things.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
It cheapens the real thing because our sensitivity to these words has become so used to them. It’s so damaging, Grant, and it’s precisely because it has become so commonplace, it doesn’t stop. Quick example.
Grant Williams:
Right.
Ben Hunt:
You know, my website, we used to run some ads because we thought, oh, well, you know, we’ve got a fantastic demographic, we’ll, I think, be able to charge a little bit of a premium for the ads we run and we’d like to give an alternative for people who don’t want to pay a subscription and the like. We made all this effort now here are the things that can’t get advertised, here are all the hot words and there’s all the stuff or else, you know, you turn into Zero Hedge, right? And like.
New Speaker:
the ads on Zero Hedge. Well, the race to the bottom for these sort of ads and what get paid for ads, it’s astonishing. I mean, we’d get whatever we’d get, a quarter million, third of a million viewers on a month and we’d get like a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue and we realize what’s going on.
Ben Hunt:
Well, there are a lot of sites that they’re getting 50 ads on a page, right? There’s just basically a page of a advertising and this enormous race and so the, it’s more and more ads for less and less per ad revenue and to keep up, if that’s your business model, you just swamp the reader with ads.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
It’s crazy, Grant. It’s crazy but that same sort of devaluation, which is why we came up with this idea of fiat news in the first place, it’s it’s like fiat money. It’s like Gresham’s Law, but it’s applied to information, applied to news. Gresham’s Law of course being that bad money drives out good. It’s the same thing with information and news. Bad information drives out the good.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
That’s what’s happened to us.
Grant Williams:
Well, so, and again, I want to make sure that everybody goes and reads the Fifteen Faces of Fiat News because it’s important to read the whole thing, but before we move on to something else I want to talk to you about, how should people think about this and what little things can they do? So we’ve already covered that first one that say was such a revelation to me, but is there anything else that people can do to inoculate themselves to any degree against this problem? Is it just vigilance or are there little tricks they can do?
Ben Hunt:
Vigilance is one thing, right? Just to maintain that critical distance but the idea here is to launch this basically so it runs on your browser. It’s like a program called Grammarly that can check your grammar.
Grant Williams:
Yep.
Ben Hunt:
This can check what you’re reading for the signs of these aspects of Fiat news. What we’re really gratified about, Grant, is we’ve had a number of inquiries from news organizations and authors and writers, we’re saying, you know what? I’d like to be sure I’m not using this kind of language. I want to use it in the creation process.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
So that I don’t fall prey to that and that makes me feel great, yeah, I said, “Wow. Yeah, absolutely.” As a content creator, we’ve got to watch out for falling into these traps.
Grant Williams:
Sure.
Ben Hunt:
As well as being a reader. I tell you the other thing, Grant, which is in stepping back from the old act of consuming content is to put the phone down.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
It’s to have a conversation with an actual live human being.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
An actual live human being who doesn’t treat you as a means to an end.
Grant Williams:
Now there’s a thought.
Ben Hunt:
There’s the thought, right?
Grant Williams:
Huh?
Ben Hunt:
And it’s cloud is so fucking hard to break. I’ve been saying this and it’s my confession, but I’m only on my smartphone now, people are listening, this is the last thing I look at when I go to sleep at night. It’s the first thing I look at when I wake up, not my wife, my smartphone and how freaking pathetic is that?
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
But that is the life now and my goal is to break that addiction and that habit and I think that’s what we all have to do. We have to have more conversations with the actual human beings in our lives.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
That’s the real inoculation.
Grant Williams:
No, I think you’re absolutely right. I mean the problem, I guess, in the short term, is it gets harder and harder because, to your point, we’ve gotten out of the habit of having those conversations.
Ben Hunt:
Yes.
Grant Williams:
And we get triggered by them. People tend to struggle to have those conversations because they’re not used to being in a fluid dynamic with someone where opinions are being aired, that might challenge them and there’s a way to challenge those assumptions in a way that actually is good for everybody involved and we have gotten away from that.
Ben Hunt:
We really have, we really have, Grant, and it’s, I have it in my own life. I think we all have it in our personal lives and it’s just the power of that dopamine or epinephrine response. It’s there, it’s something that hits us right square on our brain chemicals.
Grant Williams:
Yeah. That’s true.
Ben Hunt:
And that’s why we got to make these extra efforts.
Grant Williams:
Well, I remain committed to the cause and at your disposal.
Ben Hunt:
Thank you.
Grant Williams:
And I’ll be able to help in any way you get this out there ‘cause I’d say, I think it’s such an important initiative, Ben, for everybody and congratulations on getting this amazing thing of yours to the point you have and I can’t wait to see –
Ben Hunt:
Thanks and I want to make one other kind of announcement that goes along with this, but a pack member, you know, we call our ET group made this very generous donation, the Vanderbilt University to establish a research center, The Applied Research Center, the ARC for Narrative Studies and so that’s getting off the ground and we want to raise a lot more money for that. This is not a for-profit kind of thing. We really do want to, that’s a mission to inoculate the world against weaponized narratives sounds again, pretty high pollutant, but there you go.
Grant Williams:
You know what? It’s a noble course so I think you’re entitled to be highfalutin. I know you’re not prone to be highfalutin. So I think we can let you, I think we let this one slide. I think it’s a noble course.
Ben Hunt:
Appreciate it. Thank you, friend.
Grant Williams:
Well, so listen, before we wrap up, it’s just one thing I wanted to talk to you about in a specific, given everything we’ve just talked about in terms of the abstract, the reframing of recession. You knew I was going to ask you about this, I know. I’m fascinated by this because as I’ve watched this kind develop over the last 10 days or so, I just keep hearing you in my head. Every article I read about it, everything I see on it, every time I think about it so just talk to me about reshaping the recession narrative, both from what’s attempted to be being done and also what you thought as you’ve watched this thing unravel over the last 10 days.
Ben Hunt:
Well, I think we all know what’s attempting to go on, right, is to say, no, we want to create a definition of recession so that you don’t use that word under the idea that the word has more power than the fact of six months of contracting real growth in the US economy.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
And there are a couple of different dimensions of this that are really striking to me. The dimension that’s not terribly striking to me is that there is this effort being made to not use that word, right? Because it’s a loaded word, it’s a politically useful word to your opponents. It’s a politically inconvenient word for you but I have been flabbergasted by the amount of resources and effort that has gone into not only pushing out this idea that you “must only understand a recession through the lens of employment and what the NBER says is a recession. Oh my God, if you deviate from that perception of what a recession means, you are the devil!” I can’t tell you how bizarre it is. The effort has been made. And it offends my sensibilities so many ways because I consider myself something of a connoisseur of narrative and it offends my sensibility in a couple of ways.
Ben Hunt:
Let me kind of go rattle them off for you. The first way it offends my sensibility is that it becomes a caricature of the expert say approach, right? When you have to have Paul Krugman go on to Brian Stalter Show or whatever, and proclaim on CNN that “no, this is not a recession, my God is not a…” It’s a joke. It’s just a self parity to a degree that is, if you have an ounce of critical thinking, you realize you’re just, you’re beclowning yourself. You are making just an utter fool of yourself. So it offends my sensibility that anyone could think this would be effective.
Ben Hunt:
The second way in which it offends me is a connoisseur of narrative is, oh my God, the way to approach this is not to fight it right? And not quite to embrace it, but you can handle it like J Powell did. You can say, well these numbers get revised a lot, certainly where there’s this issue of the contracting real growth, let’s talk about that and you just, you don’t fight it in this ham handed way. You could just kind of ooze your way over it and it no longer becomes a topic.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
Look is the RNC going to run articles about a recession? Fine, go at it. It is not like there’s some absence of things that they can say or will say whether it’s true or not. There was such a much more elegant way of approaching this from a narrative point of view. It seems impossible to me that anyone could approach this with such a ham handed. And third, this is what really bugs me. I just want some competence at governance from this administration. I think, sorry, this is me coming out here, the Trump administration is an absolute disaster, just a disaster, just so horrible and all I need right now is some simple competence at governance. That’s all we need and instead we get this crap? This is what we get? Are you kidding me? Oh my God, Grant, I… Call it sunshine, call it rot, call it whatever you want to do. We have six months of declining, real growth in this country.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
And that’s meaningful and let’s talk about that and not wage narrative, world world three over this Patinkin notion of, is it a recession or not? Oh my God, it’s just this combination of incompetence with super silly as “I’m the economist and I will tell you what it is”. And I can’t believe that in the year of our Lord, 2022, people who have successfully mounted national political campaigns are this politically incompetent.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
I can’t believe it.
Grant Williams:
But when I look at this, because I’m the same, I’m just bewildered by it, but I’m torn between, and I don’t know, which is better or worse, but A, are they this desperate that they are down to the Jedi mind trick now and that’s where we’ve reached or do they have the evidence to support that they might be able to get away with this because we’ve become so dumb at understanding what we’re being told. And I don’t know, which is worse. I don’t know which it is but either of those being the reality of it terrifies me.
Ben Hunt:
Yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean. I think that’s what scares me most of all as well, which is that there is no governance anymore. That that word doesn’t even mean anything. That it’s purely what we talk about in a lot of Epsilon Theory Notes, the cartoon of governance.
Grant Williams:
Mm-hmm.
Ben Hunt:
Cartoon in the technical sense. An abstraction of an abstraction, right? So you have the abstraction of governance and then you have the abstraction of the abstraction, which is the word in which we call it and so that everything is at this cartoon level. Recession? Not recession. All the ad spending, all the energy is on the cartoon level, not even at the abstracted level of that being, okay, the abstraction is the abstraction of our US economy is that, not on a nominal basis, but on a real basis, our output has declined for six months in a row now and that’s a big deal.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
Let’s talk about that. That would be where I think most policy conversations should be held at that abstraction, that you can’t talk about those nearly different real economic inputs. You have to have an abstraction in order to have a policy conversation but instead where we have is a conversation about the abstraction of the abstraction cartoon. You don’t just see this in politics. You see this in sports, you see this in markets where the conversation is not about an abstraction, which is a corporation but let’s say, but it’s an abstraction of an abstraction. It’s that three or four letter ticker.
Grant Williams:
Mm-hmm.
Ben Hunt:
We’re going to have the conversation about that as if that were a theme.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
And this is what pervades our society. It’s we’re no longer focused on an abstraction, which I think again, is where most policy, and that could be an investment policy conversation as well, should be had but we had these conversations around abstractions of abstractions of cartoons and so, yeah, Grant, I do worry that this is the apotheosis of that, right? That it, here we are and because we’re not inoculated against this, millions upon millions of people will have behaviors that are based on their perception of these cartoons.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
So yeah, it’s pretty depressing.
Grant Williams:
All right. Well, listen, I was hoping to finish on a more upbeat note, but they’re getting harder and harder to come by every day, but listen, Ben, again, my thanks to you and please pass on my thanks to Rusty for all the amazing work and just one more time, let people know where to kind of follow this as it develops and stay on topics. I really think, that honestly, it’s such an important initiative.
Ben Hunt:
Well, it’s Epsilon Theory and that’s on Twitter @epsilontheory. That’s epsilontheory.com. We’ve put a couple of these recent notes completely outside of the paywall. You can read a couple of our notes every month anyway but we’ve put these completely outside of the paywall ‘cause we do want a lot of people to look at them and that is the good news, Grant, right? It’s that it’s not just us, there are tons of people doing projects from the bottom up that are not in either the blue camp or the red camp that are not phrased in that way. They aren’t fact checking, they’re not trying to use you, they’re saying let’s find tools so that we can regain our own autonomy of mind and brother, if we can do that, then that’s how we get through this.
Grant Williams:
Yeah.
Ben Hunt:
It really is, Grant. It’s how we get through it.
Grant Williams:
Well, no one’s fighting harder than you and Rusty mate, so more power to you and again, thanks for taking time for this. I always enjoy these conversations so much and they’re incredibly valuable. So thank you.
Ben Hunt:
Thank you, Grant. Bye now.
Grant Williams:
Take care.
Grant Williams:
Well, thanks to Ben there for another just fabulous conversation. I really do find these chats with Ben just so valuable. It’s a different way of looking at things. It’s an incredibly well informed and insightful way looking at things and I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.
Grant Williams:
That’s it for me for another podcast. I’ll be back again with another guest very soon. In the meantime, my thanks to you all for listening. Don’t forget everything you want to read from Ben you’ll find at epsilontheory.com and @epsilontheory on Twitter. So please, if you don’t follow Ben and Rusty, you’re missing out, give them a follow. Thanks again for listening. I’ll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.
Grant Williams:
Nothing we discussed during the Narrative Game should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets.
