"Trust Your Instinct in 2025" by Daniel Guss
It's more reliable than the mainstream media, social media, government and even Artificial “Intelligence.”
Hello, happy new year and welcome back.
Fuck.
What a great, multi-purpose word with a badass brand. I prefer it applied deftly, like an epicure’s seasoning.
As in, in just five years, the 1980s will be fifty years ago.
Fuuuck.
That interjection is also a satiric misspelling.
Oh for fuck’s sake, noun, I’m just joshing to ease us into our fresh, new chapter which we might as well call Karen’s Crisping of Los Angeles, given how Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass got the fuck out of dodge, adverb, despite knowing the place was going to go up in huge fucking flames, exclamatory adjective.
Why the fuck, exclamation, did the Los Angeles Times editorial board endorse her anyway?!?!?
While no era is without its problems, there are vastly more things to worry about now than the 80s. The best, perhaps last, safety net for our well-being, prosperity and peace of mind in 2025 may be trusting our own instinct, which is what we will explore today.
On New Year’s Eve, I published a personal story, “A Dog’s Funny Exit Line.” So let’s bridge ourselves into ‘25 and celebrate symmetry by bookending it with another personal story about trusting my own instinct.
Let’s go for a car ride.
A while back, I was driving south on Sepulveda Boulevard in Sherman Oaks toward Ventura Boulevard, sensing that I was being followed.
Below, I placed a red arrow at the bottom of a current Google Earth image of where I was at the time. Looking south, say hello to the San Diego Freeway (405) to the west of the arrow and the Sherman Oaks Galleria a block further south at Ventura Boulevard.
The next cross street is Camarillo.
Having had advanced professional training about personal safety and situational and sensory awareness, I quickly turned and sped west on Camarillo before making an abrupt three-point turn and rocketed back east on Camarillo.
Whoever was following me was slow to adapt.
This allowed at least one car to get between mine and theirs. As the green light turned yellow, I tapped my brakes to slow the cars behind me, as if intending to stop. But then I floored it and darted safely across Sepulveda, leaving the pursuers blocked-in at the now-red light.
The red arrow, below, now shows my abrupt maneuver west on Camarillo. The green arrow shows my subsequent egress east on it.
With good reason, I was later complimented on my instincts, which are apparently still sharp.
I recently pointed out to some friends that a suspicious vehicle was likely following me. After deploying some of them to document the vehicle’s features, license plate and occupants, I asked them to note how soon the vehicle leaves after I exit, which I soon did.
About a minute after I departed, I received this text:
When I am at liberty to do so, I will let you know more.
Which brings us back to trusting your own instinct.
What does your instinct tell you about bias in the mainstream news media these days?
One recent example is when the Walt Disney Company paid president-elect Donald Trump $15 million plus $1 million more for legal expenses to settle his defamation lawsuit about comments that ABC News host George Stephanopoulos made about him on the air, despite reportedly being warned not to.
It’s the same George Stephanopoulos who, in 2015, failed to disclose a series of donations that he made to the Clinton Foundation prior to moderating a scheduled GOP debate.
This forced him to drop out of his moderator role and apologize for failing to disclose those donations. Peter Schweizer, author of the book “Clinton Cash,” later accused Stephanopoulos of “massive breach of ethical standards,” yet Disney has kept him on the payroll to this day, but perhaps not for much longer.
There are scores of other media bias examples including CNN’s Candy Crowley, ABC News’ David Muir and even 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl, and others where the public was, how shall we say, misled (to the negative side) about Republican candidates. The most prominent journalist to lose their career over such dishonesty was CBS News’ Dan Rather in 2005. His $70 million lawsuit against his former employer was eventually dismissed.
But when it came to pretending that Joe Biden was steady, alert and secure as POTUS 46, the news media not only dutifully puked its stomach full of lies (to the positive side in support of Biden) about his irrefutably diminished capacity, in one instance, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough told his viewers on the cable outlet’s “Morning Joe,” “And eff you if you can’t handle the truth.”
Scarborough’s diatribe is shown here:
Scarborough, an attorney and former member of Congress, either blatantly lied or has America’s worst instinct imaginable. Yet he is still employed by Comcast, the owner of MSNBC, helping sink the news channel into further oblivion, recently falling behind upstart NewsNation in the key 25-54 demographic, and soon likely to be spun-off.
And how about that Mark Zuckerberg?
The tech entrepreneur whose name is synonymous with social media, and his Facebook, Meta or whatever mish-mosh is next, recently decided to end its doubtful “fact checking” function.
What does your instinct tell you about that, considering Meta’s stock price is quadruple what it was four years ago? A sudden change of heart about transparency or staying ahead of an investigation that might end Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, which insulates social media companies from content liability?
The fuck you think, adverb of emphasis?
How’s your instinct about government?
What to make of the Biden administration allowing tens of millions of unvetted migrants into the country, while Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, a former U.S. Attorney and product of U.C. Berkeley and LA’s own Loyola Law School, repeatedly declared “the border is closed!”
The Biden administration only got irked about it when red state governors like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida transported the migrants to blue enclaves.
Does it imply the plan was to flood the red zones with people likely to help flip them blue once and for all, especially with a 6-3 conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court?
Does it not imply that?
If not, then why the Dem outcry only when the migrants overwhelmed New York, Boston, Martha’s Vineyard and other special blue places? Didn’t they say that those concerns were racist when expressed by everyone else?
And then there are the federal and state legal cases against Trump — all of them — which didn’t get rolling until the recently concluded election season was underway.
Flooding the zone, once again?
Is it a mere coincidence that the federal and Georgia cases against Trump eventually fell apart, with the New York “hush money” case almost guaranteed to be thrown out on appeal?
If your instinct says coincidence, I’ll quote the Hot Chocolate lyric from the 70s: Where're you from, you sexy thing?
Leading up to our recent Election Day, I didn’t publicly predict the outcomes or make endorsements. But I did privately among friends, forecasting that Trump would get at least 297, based more on instinct than math.
I was wrong. He got 312.
So let’s belly-up to the bar to celebrate our hopefully evolving instinct. Extra lime, please, as I leave you with this thought.
If humans are flawed and have biases, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, which was created by and relies upon inherently flawed human input and engineering, will always be subject to error. It’s already irretrievably baked into AI. Some great examples can be read at EvidentlyAI.com. Even Elon Musk, who understands its rapid evolution, estimates that AI stands a 10%-20% chance of going bad.
But the one thing that AI will never be able to do is feel.
Not feel like a person, dog, cat or elephant. Whether love or hate, celebrating or suffering, or even contemplation — which is another way to say instinct — AI will never be able to feel.
We will always own that.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, won the LA Press Club’s “Online Journalist of the Year” and “Best Activism Journalism” awards in June ‘23. In June ‘24, he won its “Best Commentary, Non-Political” award. He has contributed to CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)