This episode of Speaking of Bitcoin on the Coin Desk Podcast Network is brought to you by nexo.io.

Hello there. I'm George Franklin, 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, what do you call an unthinkable disaster that's eminently thinkable?

Is an investment scam still a scam, if it's obvious that it's a scam?

It's the normalization of deviance, or the check engine light on the space shuttle.

There are few things more addictive in media than a good twist. The big turnabout, the I didn't see that one coming, the how could they moments,

when everything you expected takes a hard turn in a surprising new direction.

Darth Vader is Luke's father, Thanos turned half the heroes into cat litter, and Bruce Willis

was actually bald the whole time.

Yet there's an unspoken rule to good twists.

Just pass all the how could they's and didn't see that comings.

It's sort of an obligatory postscript, the, oh, it all makes sense now's.

The greatest twists aren't non sequitur as a random happenstance. Unpredictable as the

reveal may be, the legendary twists usually leave a trail, seeds of the idea that were planted

all the way down the path. After thought and review, a good twist won't seem like much of a twist

after all. An unearned twist becomes

disappointing, frustrating, and eventually, likely forgotten. Life, as many have threatened,

imitates art. And likewise, life actually has far fewer twists and random surprises than we

would like to believe. Many of the most shocking tragedies, disasters, and Ayrsat's twists of fate in the modern

age were actually the predictable consequences of known bad decisions.

Countless tragedies come not from shocking surprises or unforeseen twists, but from known hazards

...