 Hello there, I'm George frankly and I'm going to take a look at how even the best and brightest people can make truly Stupid decisions and terrible predictions and what we can learn from them. This is dare to be stupid This time on dare to be stupid force multipliers or the sure thing versus the underdoge In 2013 two men told a joke that never quite landed In fact, the joke is still soaring sky-high as we speak that joke is dogecoin a parody cryptocurrency Founded on the twin economic principles of memes and comic sands a financial powerhouse. This was not yet now eight years later Dogecoin is a financial powerhouse easily more than ever intended It's a competitive cryptocurrency that has made many people wealthy thanks to the dumbest of dumb money Dogecoin was set up for failure on paper. It had nothing going for it and yet now it's an explosive success It was destined to be the underdog or under doge and now it's the mouse that roared But back in 1982 a lion roared and a squeak came out Argentina ambitiously took on the British Empire and had the deck stacked in their favor on paper They had everything going for them and yet it all fell apart That's right. Doge and the Falklands war are two sides of the same crypto coin an underdog that climbed a victory and a Top dog that dropped the ball. Why did these radically different forces go one way on paper and the opposite in practice? Let's talk about paperwork predictions and how force multipliers can flip the script To many people dogecoin is no joke to its two creators Jackson Palmer and Billy Marcus It was absolutely a joke dogecoin wasn't even a coin at its inception Palmer an adobe software engineer jokingly made a name a logo and a website as the extent of the joke and that was that Marcus an IBM engineer had toyed with the idea of parody crypto coins before he had created a blockchain of bells the Resident currency of animal crossing those two jokes crossed paths and birthed a new one Dogecoin the litecoin derivative actual real cryptocurrency Born of jokes and born to be a joke dogecoin did not take itself seriously The terrible font and meme speak stayed front and center as the brand identity even better The coin launched with totally randomized block mining rewards Unlike the deflationary rewards of Bitcoin or more stable yields of other blockchains Doge brought only chaos the rewards were made up and the prices don't matter The best you could say was that dogecoin was just like coin only dumb Argentina was not a joke especially not under the frustrated military junta that came to power in the 1970s By 1982 the nation was aggressively militarized economically struggling and facing growing civil unrest The country had a surplus of force and a deficit of patriotism. They needed a win The ideal win was obvious the Falkland Islands the Falklands an island archipelago in the South Atlantic Have been the target of various European colonists throughout the 1700s until Great Britain asserted dominance in 1833 from that point onwards Britain was the de facto owner But Argentina the closest neighboring coast always professed their own ownership over the nearby islands The dispute simmered into the 20th century were eventually even the UN attempted to step in and mediate to no results The islands had been a long-standing emblem of Argentinian sovereignty and a final bastion of colonialism under the old British Empire The reclamation of those islands would be a major political and social victory for Argentina's leadership and the large-scale Undertaking would be a helpful distraction from the nation's economic woes Moreover despite the seemingly massive strength of a world power like the United Kingdom Argentina was actually poised to pull it off Now this is a sore point for both nations even today pop culture talks about the Falklands war pretty flippantly as if Argentina was an Upstart child that stuck its hands in a lion cage history. However paints a different picture Argentina was no child and they had no intention of entering the conflict as an underdog the numbers were encouraging Superpower or not Britain was over 13,000 kilometers from the Falklands Argentina's near shore was only 500 kilometers Argentina had the range and infrastructure to bring the entire nation's resources to bear on those islands Her Majesty and Mrs. Thatcher would have to organize from limited staging areas and operate entirely off of their naval vessels Argentina was guaranteed air superiority from the start and the UK was guaranteed to start on the back foot Any response the Brits could muster would take weeks to arrive and be outnumbered at least two to one at every turn And that's just the supply chain logistics the political theater also favored the Argentines Britain and the rest of NATO were preoccupied with some fad called the Cold War and it would be dangerous to pull forces away from Soviet facing positions Just to put out brush fires on some distant island the Brits would have no air cover no supply chain and no element of surprise The simple fact was that Argentina could sweep the islands overnight probably without firing a shot and it would be a fate Accomplete Britain would wake up the next morning to find out they had already lost a war For Britain to do anything about it would be an expensive and Sisyphean task all just to keep ownership over some islands that have been practically Independent for years the material the numbers and the famous principle of rational self-interest all agreed the Argentina that dares wins So they lost they lost bad and I'll get to that but first what the hell is up with dogecoin? Dogecoin was a joke and it did jokie well-meaning things It was entertaining enough that many people showed interest in it and that created some movement The community used it for fun exchanges and that is a basis for charity crowdfunding and within its first few months it rocketed to $0.001 one-tenth of a cent that may not seem like much but a growth of point 001 over a basis of well zero equals exactly calculator error percent The momentum and the upbeat press coverage reached the point of the famous dogecoin sponsored NASCAR in 2014 now Memorable as that may be this was not the watershed moment. You may think it is rather. It was a telling moment The car wasn't magically funded by the inherent value of dogecoin instead Dogecoin was simply used as the pledge token that the community pushed in order to raise funds for their crazy NASCAR dream This was a unique case of the tail wagging the doge the car wasn't sponsored by the legitimacy of dogecoin's value It was dogecoin's value that was legitimized by the car Suddenly the joke coin you've been hearing about has a billboard on wheels with a million eyes on it This was the first of many force multipliers to apply leverage to the plucky doge face to duck it So then what is a force multiplier? It's a difficult thing to put into numbers and that's why it can have such a dramatic effect on numbers It's primarily a military term referring to an element of a situation that can amplify the effective manpower of soldiers on the field Sometimes this can be directly quantified perhaps a force of 50 men on horseback can fight with the efficacy of 100 men on foot That would be a force multiplier of two Often though it will defy obvious measures 100 men marching on full stomachs will undoubtedly outperform 100 men going hungry But it'll be hard to give that a precise number at its simplest a force multiplier is literally a lever a Stone that three men could move by hand could be moved by one man with a lever the lever doesn't replace two of the men Nor does it make one man suddenly stronger. It's only a multiplier a coefficient that amplifies the existing basis It may shock you but a stone sitting next to a pile of unattended levers will probably not go anywhere Force multipliers of two or three can be game changing But force multipliers into the hundreds or the thousands can be reality warping an underdog with 1% odds and a 200 force multiplier Isn't an underdog anymore. It's a sure bet if you can spot it Dogecoin regardless of any intrinsic or functional qualities has been buffeted by unique force multipliers The dogecoin NASCAR was just one of a long series of public spectacles that bolstered its value through familiarity and positive Association in a world of high-risk hard to understand speculative currency gambles and scams the friendly face of dogecoin continued to show up in shockingly pleasant contexts Sandwich between the horror stories of other plundered startups and costly crypto crashes were stories of dogecoin cars Dogecoin charities and silly tales of casual folks hitting it big with the friendly dog joke crypto Dogecoin through its perceived harmlessness Inadvertently developed the most non-threatening PR campaign in all of crypto paired with the occasional name drops by celebrities like Snoop dogs Gene Simmons or the Tesla guy, you know the guy to Tim Tesla Dogecoin gained a powerful positive association effect regardless of what it is how it works or how it was intended as My evergreen source of quotes the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman warned us quote a Reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth and quote With a traditional press that often spared it from the usual crypto Naysaying and celebrities that hyped it without any pretense of technical merits Dogecoin wrote a long slow wave of positive familiarity the kind of marketing mind share professionals would sell their souls for Dogecoin enthusiasts have joined the rush to fund interesting causes like the Jamaican bobsled team or sometimes just to bolster the value to prove that they can Dogecoin today has over 10,000 to percent 12 month ROI. It's traded on Coinbase. It's a mainstream crypto currency So much so that its creators have long since disavowed it as yet another speculative fad overrun by opportunists That friendly joking origin story accidentally gave doge enough force to reach legitimacy So will that force multiplier last if the joke is over? That's not for me to speculate what I can say for certain is that the Falklands are decidedly still British islands today Argentina counted on superior numbers discouraging or outright defeating British retaliation and they were wrong about both on April 2nd 1982 Argentina swept over the Falklands in a single day with minimal fighting and minimal casualties and that was the only step that went by the numbers There was very little deliberation in London. Britain was not going to ignore the transgression much less abandoned the residents of the islands Thatcher had a Navy task force moving south the next day Argentina had been right that Britain would be on the back foot They had no contingency plans for such an event and only a few days of speculation before it occurred They scrambled a ragtag group of over a hundred ships less than half of them actually Royal Navy vessels The British task force carried six thousand fighting troops and took over two weeks to arrive Facing an immediate force of 10,000 Argentines with another 10,000 in reserve On board two aircraft carriers the Brits had around 40 air fighters that would face up against over 200 Argentinian fighting aircraft. I could keep attempting to scrape together rough numbers for all sorts of minutiae But the message is clear Argentina had overwhelming numbers and access to even more and yet they were overwhelmingly defeated within eight weeks The numbers didn't matter even the technology didn't matter the force multiplying influence of tactics and experience simply defied statistics Post-war Britain at the height of the Cold War No less was fielding some of the most capable troops in the world trained by the experienced soldiers that had struggled Innovated and won in the Second World War Argentina was fielding a force largely of mandatory conscripted soldiers trained without that kind of leadership British pilots outmatched their opponents so severely that their obvious numerical and mechanical handicaps never even mattered The primary Royal Navy jet on the scene was the Harrier jump jet a specialty fighter made for short runway takeoffs That compromised its speed and its handling Argentina was flying Dessault Mirage fighters a decidedly faster and more agile machine than the Royal Harrier and yet British pilots took on two or three of the more maneuverable Argentinian fighters at a time and Consistently one for every one British fixed-wing aircraft shot down Argentina lost seven One of the strangest and most overlooked match-ups in this conflict is I think a microcosm of the larger problem Argentina faced The Falklands War was one of the only times in modern history that two militaries fielded the exact same infantry rifle against each other Both Argentina and the UK were equipped with the reliable Belgian made FN FAL battle rifle This seemingly identical pairing was totally offset by the multiplier effect of skill and experience You see the British models were strictly single-shot semi-auto the Argentinian FAL rifles were select fire models Typically set to fully automatic fire something that looks great in the movies, but is wildly ineffective in the real world The FAL was an overpowered rifle chambered to fire very large caliber rounds single shots were hard-hitting and accurate But a FAL on full auto was completely uncontrollable a mechanical bull spraying random lead The lessons of World War two where modern battle rifle tactics were developed and over a century of British military Hyper-focus on marksmanship all combined to make the exact same weapon several times more effective when placed in the hands of a Royal Marine Conversely the ignorance of Argentine leadership had an inverse multiplier effect the Argentine rifle and the men holding it were both made less than the sum of their parts It's extremely easy and extremely satisfying to glorify a decisive victory by an underdog But by now it's clear Britain was never going to be the underdog The United Kingdom was never at risk of losing and at worst they would have simply won at a higher cost It's all relative and no single spreadsheet of metrics will ever capture every factor at work The raw mechanical limits of a lone human being or a modest crypto coin are only a small basis of their potential The right tools the right information and the right communication can multiply that potential tenfold If we look past the numbers if we look at the message behind this conflict, there's no satisfaction Young Argentinians conscripted against their will were sent by inexperienced egotist dictators against a global war machine And their arrogance those leaders thought everything on the numbers and nothing of the context the details the unknowns Given the right opportunity and the right story a joke cryptocurrency can hold its own against the big dogs With the right story in the right numbers I can make it sound like a global nuclear superpower was the underdog against a tiny south american dictatorship Without all the details, it's never a sure bet who is or is not the underdog And you'll never have all the details Thanks for listening as always remember that all of my job titles come with the word armchair If you're an expert and i'm getting it wrong i'd like to hear from you You've been listening to speaking of bitcoin this episode was written performed and edited by george frankly with additional production support by adamby levin If you have any questions or comments send us an email at adamantspeakingofbitcoin.show and until next time. Thanks for listening