The Difference Between a Firework and a Gunshot

(A companion piece to The Dollar Series - on how to see clearly when everyone else is reacting.)

Aisle Twelve

June 26th, 2025. It is 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.

You are at Target. 

You have a half-full cart. 

Your four-year-old is in the seat, kicking her feet, holding a box of crackers she is not going to eat. 

You are halfway down the cereal aisle, reading the back of a box, not really thinking about anything.

And then you hear it.

A loud, explosive boom from somewhere in the back of the store.

Your body freezes before your brain even has a chance to catch up. 

Your hand lets go of the cereal. 

Your eyes snap to the ceiling. 

You grab your daughter out of the cart and pull her into your chest without thinking. 

You look toward the exits. 

You are already running the math on where the nearest wall is and how fast you can get behind it.

Your heart is pounding so hard you can feel it in your teeth.

Then, over the store speakers, in a bored and slightly annoyed voice:

"Cleanup needed on aisle twelve. Pallet drop."

That was it. An employee stocking shelves dropped a pallet of something heavy. 

No shooter.

No danger. No emergency. Just a warehouse worker having a bad day.

You put your daughter back in the cart. Your hands are shaking. You stand there for a second trying to decide whether to feel stupid or grateful.

Here is the thing.

You reacted correctly.

Given the context - Thursday afternoon, inside a crowded store, no warning, no expectation - your brain did exactly what it was supposed to do. 

A loud boom in that environment has to be treated like a threat until proven otherwise. 

The cost of assuming 'it is nothing' is catastrophic. The cost of overreacting is a little embarrassment.

Your body knew the math. It defaulted to the safe decision instead of the fatal one. Good.

Now I want you to hold onto that feeling - the one in your chest, the one in your hands, the one that made you reach for your kid without thinking - because last week, a version of that feeling swept through about 200 million Americans at the same time.

And I want to tell you why almost every one of them was wrong.

The Post Everybody Felt in Their Chest

Last Tuesday, President Trump posted on Truth Social that an entire civilization would die that night, never to be brought back again. 

He threatened to bomb Iran’s bridges, its power plants, and its infrastructure. 

He set a deadline.

Social media exploded.

Trump had lost his mind. 

He was going to commit a war crime. 

He was embarrassing the country. 

He was proving, finally, that he was unfit for office.

That was the loudest 24 hours on the internet I can remember.

And I want to tell you something honestly.

I felt it for about three seconds. Then I went back to what I was doing.

Not because I am a defender of the president. 

Not because I am blindly loyal to anyone in Washington. 

Not because I somehow knew what was going to happen next.

But because I have spent years building a "muscle" that most people never think to develop. 

And when you build this muscle, moments like last Tuesday stop feeling like crises. They start feeling like data.

In this article, I want to show you what that muscle is, how I used it that night, and how you can start building it for yourself.

Because if you can see clearly when everyone around you is reacting, you will make better decisions about your money, your business, and your life than 95 percent of the people you know.

Most "information" is not data.

Here is something people in my world do not like to admit.

Most days are all noise.

Think about the people you follow on social media. The commentators, the analysts, the podcasters, the news anchors. 

They have to post every single day. 

They need to have a take on every single headline. 

That is how they keep their audience.

But the honest truth is that 80 percent of what hits the news cycle has no lasting consequence. 

It is noise. 

It fills airtime. 

It generates clicks. 

It changes nothing.

Only about 2 days out of every 10 actually contain something worth paying attention to.

The secret is not to study harder. The secret is to recognize the 20 percent and ignore the other 80.

That sounds simple. It is not. 

Because the 80 percent is loud. 

The 80 percent is engineered to grab you by the throat and scream at you. 

And when you are surrounded by noise that is designed to feel important, the hardest thing in the world is to sit still and say:

This is not the moment. Wait for the real one.

Four Days Earlier

Take a deep breath and put yourself in this moment.

It is June 30th, 2025. Nine o’clock at night. 

Four days ago, you were at Target with your 4-year-old when your heart almost jumped out of your chest. 

But now, tonight, you are calm - you are quietly relaxing on your couch with a blanket pulled over your legs. 

The TV is on low in the background, something on Netflix that was supposed to be better than it actually was. 

Your windows are open - it is one of those cool summer evenings - the kind where the humidity finally breaks and a fresh breeze moves through the house. 

You can hear the quiet chirps of crickets outside. You can hear the hum of the neighborhood settling in for the night. 

Somewhere down the street a screen door closes.

You are tired, but not quite ready for bed. 

The kind of tired where your eyes keep drifting shut and you keep telling yourself

"five more minutes, then I’ll go up."

And then it happens.

A loud boom from outside.

Your heart jumps for half a second. 

Your eyes come open. 

Your head tilts toward the window.

And then, before the flinch is even finished, you are already settling back into the couch.

4th of July started early. Someone couldn’t wait a few more days.

You pull the blanket a little higher. You go back to your show. You never stand up. You never reach for your phone. You never even pause what you were watching.

Now hold on for a second.

Same you. Same ears. Same nervous system that had you shaking in aisle twelve three days ago.

Same. Exact. Sound.

Completely different response.

Why?

Because the context around the sound told you exactly what it was.

In aisle twelve, the context was danger. 

A crowded store on a Thursday afternoon. 

No warning. 

No reason for a boom. 

In that moment, your body knew that not reacting may have fatal consequences.

So, you reacted… Appropriately. 

But, now it is June 30th, the context was different. 

A summer evening. 

Four days before a national holiday. 

Windows open. 

Crickets. 

A neighborhood you have known for years. 

Your body made the right call in the other direction. A boom in that context is a firework. 

You could bet on it with your eyes closed.

Same sound. Two completely opposite reactions. Both correct.

That is the whole game.

Every loud moment in the news is either a firework or a gunshot. 

But, here’s the thing: they sound identical. 

And, they feel identical to people who are not paying attention. 

But they are not the same thing. 

And your job - if you want to make good decisions with your money, your time, and your attention - is to learn how to tell the difference.

Here is the hard part.

Gunshots are real. They happen. 

But fireworks happen a lot more often.

If you treat every boom like a gunshot, you will spend your life in panic and burn out before anything real ever happens.

If you treat every boom like a firework, you will get blindsided the one time it actually matters.

The muscle you have to build is the ability to sit through the firework show every single day, calmly, while staying sharp enough to recognize the gunshot the moment it actually goes off.

Watching the Player, Not the Post

So how did I know last Tuesday’s post was a firework?

I want to be clear about something first - the point is not that I was right. The point is that anyone can do this if they understand how to think about the person they are trying to read.

Most people make a fundamental mistake when they try to analyze Trump. 

They treat him like a president. 

They ask,

What would a president do here? 

What should a president know here? 

How should a president be acting here?

That is the wrong frame. 

Because Trump is not, at his core, a president…

He is a master at branding who happened to become president.

Say whatever you want about the man - love him or hate him - but you knew his name long before he ran for office. 

You knew his name long before Facebook existed. 

You knew his name before you knew most of the people who matter in your own industry. 

That is not an accident. 

That is the work of someone who has spent 50 years mastering one single craft.

Controlling the narrative.

Once you see him as a branding master first - and a politician second - his behavior stops being chaotic and starts being predictable. 

He puts his name in giant gold letters on the side of skyscrapers. 

He builds a reality television empire around a catchphrase. 

He slaps Trump across steaks, vodka, a university, a line of sneakers, and a deck of trading cards. 

He launches his own social media platform because the old one would not let him control his own narrative. 

He takes a line from a Reagan speech - Make America Great Again - and turns it into one of the most recognizable political movements in modern history.

Do I agree with all of it? No.

But does the whole world know my family’s last name? Also no.

And that right there is where almost everyone goes wrong when they try to read a person like Trump.

They look at what he does and they ask the worst possible question.

Would I do that?

And when the answer is no, they write him off. 

They decide he must be crazy. 

They decide he must be stupid. 

They decide he must be unhinged. 

Because if a reasonable person like them would never do it, no reasonable person would.

That is the whole trap.

If you did the things Trump does, the world would know your name too. 

Your face would be on the side of buildings. 

Your catchphrase would be on t-shirts in every airport in America. 

You would have a reality show, a steak line, and your name in gold on an airplane.

You do not do those things. That is why nobody outside your zip code has heard of you. 

That is not an insult. It is just the truth. 

I do not do those things either - because I am not a master at branding, and I do not have the same vision Trump has for himself. 

Most people do not. That is exactly why most people cannot read him.

Predictive validity does not start with what you would do. It starts with what the other person would do.

And to figure out what the other person would do, you have to stop using yourself as the reference point. 

You have to study them. 

Their incentives. 

Their pattern. 

Their guiding vision. 

The thing they want so badly they would burn down everything in their way to get it.

Stop asking,

What would I do?

Start asking,

What does this person want more than anything in the world?

Once you make that switch, the fog lifts.

Trump does not do the things he does because he is unhinged. He does them because he understands, at a cellular level, that the person who owns the narrative owns the outcome.

And once you understand that, you can ask the right question.

Not,

what would a president do?

But,

what does the narrative require here?

Trump's Grand Vision.

Here is the thing about Trump that almost no one says out loud.

He wants to be on Mt. Rushmore.

I do not mean that as a joke. I mean it literally. 

Everything this man has ever done points to one overarching vision - to be remembered as a legend.

The kingpin of Manhattan. 

The president who made America great again. 

The leader who brought peace to the Middle East. 

The face that goes next to Washington and Lincoln on the side of a mountain.

These are not shifting goalposts. They are escalating dreams of grandeur that have been in place for decades.

And once you see that as the guiding principle, you have a tool. You have a filter. 

You can look at any move Trump makes and ask one simple question.

Does this get him closer to Mt. Rushmore, or does it push him further away?

Bombing bridges at 3 in the morning. 

Leveling power plants. 

Killing civilians in Tehran while the rest of the world watches in horror.

Does that get a man onto Mt. Rushmore?

No.

That is the opposite of the vision. 

Mt. Rushmore is carved for peacemakers, liberators, and protectors. 

Not for men who bomb civilians at midnight.

In fact, Trump has been saying the exact opposite from day one. 

He has talked about freeing the Iranian people. 

He pointed to the footage of Iranians dancing in the streets of American cities when the strikes landed on the regime. 

That is the story he is telling the world. That is the feather he wants in his cap - the president who broke a 40-year-old hostile regime and set its people free.

So when he posts that a civilization is going to die tonight, what is actually happening?

He is putting pressure on the other side of the table.

The more bombastic and off the wall he sounds, the more reluctant his opponent is to call the bluff. 

Because if you are the one on the receiving end of that post, you cannot afford to guess wrong. 

You cannot risk being the person who looked at the threat and said,

“he is just posting, he does not mean it,”

only to wake up and find out that this time he actually did mean it.

That is the ‘genius’ of it.

It only works because you cannot call the bluff.

The 90 Percent Rule

Now I want to be honest with you about something, because this is where most people get predictive validity wrong.

I am not going to tell you I was 100 percent sure Trump was not going to bomb those bridges.

Nobody gets to 100 percent on anything in the real world. 

Not me. 

Not you. 

Not the analysts on television who speak in absolute certainty. 

That kind of confidence is a tell. It is the signature of someone selling you something, or someone who has not thought hard enough about the problem.

What I will tell you is this.

I was about 90 percent sure it was only a firework.

The Mt. Rushmore frame, the branding pattern, the decades of behavior, the specific wording of the post, the timing relative to the negotiation, the absence of any real military signaling behind the scenes…

All of it pointed to noise, not signal. 

I would have bet real money on that read. I would have bet it with confidence.

But here is the part that matters.

I would not have bet my kids’ lives on it.

And that is the exact reason the post still works.

If you are the receiver of that wrath - if you are sitting in Tehran reading that post at midnight - you cannot chance the 10 percent. 

The downside is too catastrophic. 

Even if you are 90 percent sure it is only theater, there is still a 10 percent chance that,

civilization will die tonight.

And that is simply not a risk any rational leader takes.

So you hedge. You move. You come back to the table. 

You take the deal.

That is how this kind of pressure campaign works. 

It does not require certainty. It requires asymmetry. 

The cost of ignoring the 10 percent is so high that the other side has no choice but to respond to the 90 percent as if it were real.

Understanding this does not make you cynical. It makes you clear.

Emotional Validity

Meanwhile, scroll through social media that same night.

What were people actually doing?

They were feeling. 

They were scared he might do it. 

They were embarrassed that this is our president. 

They were convinced he had finally lost his grip on reality. 

They were posting, reposting, commenting, reacting - and every single one of those reactions was being driven by one thing.

Emotion.

Not analysis. Not pattern recognition. Not a decades-long study of the man’s actual behavior. 

Emotion.

And here is the trap - the emotion felt like information.

It felt like they were seeing clearly. 

It felt like anyone who disagreed was blind. 

It felt like the only reasonable response to what was in front of them.

But feelings are not facts. 

And the more urgent a feeling gets, the better it disguises itself as certainty.

I want you to remember a line from earlier in this series, because it applies here more than anywhere.

Think clearly when every algorithm, every headline, and every emotion is telling you not to. Separate the noise from the signal. Separate how you feel from what the evidence actually says. Ask the only question that matters when your financial future is at stake - what is most likely to happen?

That is predictive validity in one paragraph.

And what most of the internet was running on that night was the opposite. 

I call it emotional validity.

The conviction that because something feels true, it must be true. 

Emotional validity is loud. 

It is comforting. 

It lets you vent. 

It lets you feel righteous.

It also loses you money, loses you opportunities, and loses you the ability to see the world as it actually is.

Every time you let emotional validity drive your read of a situation, you are taking the noise and treating it like signal. 

You are flinching on your couch on June 30th like it is a shooting in a Target. 

You are wasting energy you could have saved for the moment that actually matters.

How You Build the Muscle

I want to leave you with something practical, because the whole point of this is to help you get better at this yourself.

Predictive validity is not a gift. It is a muscle. 

And like any muscle, it only grows when you put it under load.

Here is how I built mine, and here is how you can too.

Start writing your predictions down.

When something big hits the news - a post, a policy, a headline, a market move - before you read what anyone else thinks, write down what you believe is most likely to happen next. 

Be specific. Put a rough percentage on it.

I think there is a 70 percent chance this ends in X, and a 30 percent chance it ends in Y.

Then wait.

When the outcome arrives, go back and look at what you wrote.

Every time you are right, you will learn something about how you read the signal.

But the real gold is in the times you are wrong.

Every wrong prediction teaches you something about where your reading was off - what you missed, what you over-weighted, what you assumed when you should have questioned. 

And over time, those lessons compound in a way that almost nothing else in life does.

I have been doing this for years. For the past 36 months I have done it every single day. 

And the reason I am finally comfortable writing about it publicly is because I have enough of my own track record, on paper, to know where the muscle is strong and where it is still growing.

You do not have to wait 36 months to get value from this. You will feel the difference inside of 30 days.

Why This Matters for Everything Else

Here is what I want you to take away from all of this.

The Dollar Series is about the biggest financial story of our lifetime. 

It is about what happens when a country decides it will do whatever it takes to protect the seat at the center of the world’s money, and it is about the moves being made, right now, to keep us in that seat.

But none of that analysis matters if you cannot tell a firework from a gunshot.

Because the next few years are going to be loud. 

The posts are going to get louder. 

The headlines are going to get louder. 

The panic is going to get louder. 

And the people who keep their heads are going to end up in a very different financial position than the people who get knocked off center by every boom they hear.

You do not need a PhD in economics to navigate what is coming.

You need to build the muscle.

You need to watch the person, not the post.

You need to study the pattern, not the story.

You need to ask, every single time, the only question that has ever mattered.

What is most likely to happen?

And then - this is the part most people skip - you need to be willing to sit with your answer, calmly, while the rest of the world is screaming.

Dalio saw the storm.

Bessent understands the board.

Miran drew the map.

Trump is the one willing to take the shot.

And you are the one who has to stay clear enough to see what is actually happening - so you can act while everyone else is still reacting.

-Mike Neubauer

Founding Member, Grand Vision Family Office

P.S. If you’d like to learn more about me, and

why I take the time to write these articles,

I shared a bit more on this page.