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June 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
34:20
Episode 68 - Laurel, Yanny, Cillizza, Kim and Hamas
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
Did I say come on in here?
Apparently I need some more coffee.
And it's time for the simultaneous sip.
For the early birds who know how to get in here quickly, it's time.
Well, so the big story of the day is the dumbest story of the day, but also the coolest story of the day.
It's this Yanni vs.
Laurel thing. If somehow you missed it yesterday, there's a sound clip in which some people hear very clearly the word Yanni and others hear very clearly the word Yanni.
So some people are hearing Yanni and then the other people are hearing Yanni.
I'm just screwing with you.
Some people are hearing Laurel and some people are hearing Yanni.
I just wondered if you'd notice.
Now it turns out that the secret to it is it's actually both words and depending on what sound system you hear or how sensitive your hearing is, you might hear one versus the other or both.
And here's the interesting thing.
As an audio, let's say an audio illusion, it's really cool.
But it's more than that.
It's more than that.
Because of the context.
The context of the world.
Remember I told you that we would start to see reality itself in a different way.
And I've been telling you that we're watching simultaneously two movies on the same screen.
The first time you hear that you say, there's no two movies on one screen.
There's just one movie.
It's the one I see. Everybody else is just stupid or uninformed.
And then you start seeing people with this Yanni and Laurel thing, and you're pretty sure that there's nothing wrong with those people, and they are looking at the same clip or listening to it, and you realize, oh my god, we can be in the same room, literally, same room, listening to the same file, And having a completely different experience.
Now, my point of view that I've been talking about for a few years now is that that's the normal way reality works.
This little Laurel Yanni thing is not the weird little exception that you think it is.
That is a little peek behind the curtain.
When you go through this Yanni and Laurel experience, you have the small, small, small version of a psychedelic experience.
A psychedelic experience allows you to see your same reality through a completely different filter, even though you know that an hour ago it looked completely different.
and you realize that your perceptions are just a filter.
Your perceptions are not part of the world.
The world's doing whatever the world's doing.
Your perceptions are your world.
And you see this with the Yanni and Laurel thing.
I give another example of that in my book, Win Bigly.
It's called the McGurk Effect, and so I won't talk about that here, but in my book, or you could just Google it, McGurk Effect.
It's a related phenomenon, and it's spelled M-C-G-U-R-K. If you Google McGurk Effect, it comes up top of the list.
Alright, so our normal world is that we're all looking at the same stuff and we're seeing different things.
Maybe I should give you an example.
Okay, I will. Some of you saw the news about Chris Silliza, a writer He's a writer personality pundit for CNN. And he's being criticized for publishing a tweet with a photo that seemed to some people as though he had overlaid some kind of like a gun crosshairs on President Trump.
Those people were saying Yanni.
Chris explained almost immediately, uh-oh, that's just a mistake.
When the GIF was created, there's a little screen capture tool that looks like those crosshairs and we forgot to take it out.
Now once you see the explanation, it's pretty obvious that that's all it was.
So let me, first of all, be consistent with everything I say about whoever is on either side of the Trump situation.
Criticizing Silliza for an artifact in a GIF or a GIF, depending on...
I guess GIF and GIF are kind of like Yanni and Laurel, right?
Everybody's got their preference.
But criticizing him for that is just...
All right, somebody actually said he meant it.
If you believe that he really meant that, you're seeing a perfect Ianni-Laurel situation.
Because in my view, it's completely obvious he did not mean that.
I mean, it could not be more 100% obvious that there's nothing to that Saliza story.
It's just an artifact.
But I am aware that some people are seeing it like it's just a fact that he put crosshairs on the president.
It's no different.
The fact that you see it clearly, and that I see it clearly differently, doesn't tell you anything about the thing.
It only tells you about you, and it tells you something about me.
We're probably both seeing what we want to see.
I would suggest that my view is probably more unbiased because the person I'm defending is somebody that I've criticized a number of times in public.
So if I were operating unbiased, I'd probably be biased against him.
But to me it's obvious that there was no crime, no foul.
He deleted it. He explained it.
It's the end of the story. Let's talk about Israel and Hamas and Gaza.
As we watch the news story of Israel, Hamas, Gaza, we're seeing Yanni and Laurel play out again.
Some people see Israel bravely defending itself against armed intruders.
And for them, that's their Laurel.
And other people see innocent women and children being slaughtered by the dozens, and that's their Yanni.
People are seeing these just as clearly, but they're different.
Now, here's the context I would put on this.
Any loss of life is a tragedy.
So let's start with the human part.
Any loss of life is a tragedy.
And nobody wants anybody to die for dumb reasons, or any reason really.
But you don't want people to die for dumb reasons especially.
So it's a tragedy first.
But how big of a tragedy is it?
Because in our world, size matters.
One person dying is far too much.
But if millions of people die, that's worse, the way we score things.
So how many people did...
Did die and get wounded in the Palestinian uprising, protests I guess you'd call it.
Here's the thing.
The purpose of the demonstrations, the purpose, the intended purpose of the people doing it, is public opinion.
The purpose of it is not to overrun Israel, because they don't think that their protesters are going to breach the wall and take over Israel.
It's nothing like that. They're doing it entirely for the look of it, for the persuasion, for the coverage.
Now, if that's the situation, if they're doing it for the coverage, Do you think that the data coming out of there is accurate?
In other words, if the Palestinians said, Israel has killed X number of people, what are the odds that that's accurate?
Approximately zero, right?
So the odds of the number that's coming out of the protesters Anyway, you look at it, even if you're on their side, right?
So forget about what side you're on, whose empathy you have.
The situation is they're creating a persuasion event in which, unfortunately, part of this is people are going to get hurt.
And that's part of what makes it powerful.
So if the Palestinians say, a hundred people got shot, You can mentally dial that back to some people got shot.
It might be two or three.
So you should look for a factor of maybe a 50x, 100x, whatever, from the actual number who are injured to the number that's being reported.
Why can we expect that?
Because that's what it is.
It is a persuasion event.
The point of it is to get the biggest number of reported killed while having the smallest number of actually people hurt.
Because nobody wants their own people to get hurt, but they want to get that number as high as possible.
So the reporting I've seen is completely inconsistent, meaning that if so many people are being injured and killed, if those numbers are anywhere near correct, it would be all over video.
The videos we see are of individuals who seem to be a little bit wounded or something.
So you can't really determine how many actually are hurt, but we're not seeing any confirmation of large numbers being hurt.
So you should assume that whatever the number is, it's too much.
Now, at this moment, a lot of people watching this are having a Yanni and Laurel moment, because some people are hearing me say, I don't care if they get hurt, even though I'm as clearly as possible saying exactly the opposite.
I'm saying clearly and consistently it's a tragedy if even one person gets hurt.
Nobody wants anybody to be hurt.
We wish it wouldn't happen.
We wish it couldn't happen. But it is also true that however many real people got hurt, the reporting should be 50x, 100x, because that's the point.
The point of it is to report the biggest number.
That's how they get the biggest advantage.
Alright, so yeah, and then the folks who are pro-Israel are going to see all the video of the guy with the fake crutches and the fake dead people and stuff like that.
But we don't know...
You have to be careful because even the pictures of the fakes could be fakes.
I saw a video yesterday of a bunch of people who were pretending to be dead bodies, but they were laughing and joking in between pictures.
And I said to myself, oh my god, I guess that means that the dead are really just faked.
But then I thought for half a second more, and I thought, oh my god, the video of the faking might be faked.
So in other words, we have now reached a point.
I'm going to call it.
I'm going to call it right now.
We've reached a point where video and photos lie.
Remember when you were young, people used to say, pictures don't lie.
Hey, the picture doesn't lie.
We're not there anymore.
The pictures are actually primarily designed for lying now.
It used to be that a picture was the one way you settled it.
I got a picture.
I guess we can all look at the picture and agree this is what happened.
It's right there on the picture. Today, that's completely reversed.
Today, if you see a picture, it always comes from someone who's trying to persuade you, not somebody who's trying to give you the truth.
So sometimes the pictures are faked, sometimes taken out of context, and sometimes it's just Yanni and Laurel.
You see the same picture and you get two different interpretations.
All right. Let's talk about North Korea.
As I had warned you maybe a month ago, I said you should expect at least one walk away.
This appears to be at least one walk away, in which North Korea is saying, you know, darn your eyes, you're not playing fair with us.
Now, let me give you a little history of North Korea.
The usual history that we hear, we meaning let's say Americans, probably true in Europe, the history that we always hear about the U.S. dealing with North Korea is that we make a deal with them and then those dang North Koreans break the deal and everything falls apart.
You should be aware that that's the Yanni version of the past.
The Laurel version of the past, which I can't tell you is true or not true.
I'll just tell you there's two movies.
I honestly don't know which one's true.
I don't even have a guess.
I'm just going to tell you what they are.
One version is that North Korea in the past has always cheated on our agreements.
The other version is the United States is the one who started every cheat.
So in other words, there are two versions, one in which, and this has been reported by Western sources, not just North Korea, there's one version in which we have screwed North Korea every time we had an agreement with them, and that caused North Korea to break the deal.
So there are two completely versions, two different versions.
So if you're saying to yourself, well, history is going to repeat, those North Koreans keep breaking deals, I would suggest to you that there's at least one movie in which it's up to us, because we're the ones who keep breaking deals according to the one movie.
And I don't know if it's the true movie.
It's just a Laurel and Yanni situation.
So here's what I would expect.
Clearly, there's nobody who...
I don't think there's anybody involved in the conversations with North Korea who is super surprised at where we're at.
Because probably we negotiated by saying, hey, we have the superior negotiating power here, so we just asked for as much as we could get.
And I'm sure we asked for, hey, why don't you just give away your nuclear weapons and we won't give you anything.
That was probably the first offer.
And I think North Korea, just speculating, may have thought, well, we'll just do what we can, and they'll start meeting us halfway, and we'll meet in the middle.
And they may have believed that they moved further than we have moved so far.
So this may be them taking a stand and saying, all right, I made some moves.
I'll see you make some moves, or we're not going to get anywhere.
But I think we have moves we can make, short of easing up on the sanctions.
By the way, you haven't heard anything about sanctions in a few weeks, have you?
What about all the economic sanctions?
I'm guessing that we eased up on those.
But I don't know that, just because we haven't heard about it.
China is influencing North Korea.
Yeah, I'm sure they are.
But I'm pretty sure China doesn't want a war on the Korean Peninsula.
So I would be very surprised if China is telling North Korea to keep their nukes.
To me, that doesn't pass the sniff test.
ZTE.
I don't think we know enough about the ZTE deal, but it's being terribly misreported.
You know, the news likes to deal with one variable at a time.
So the one variable at a time that they can deal with is, oh, we were going to sanction ZTE, but then China asked us not to, so we just changed our mind, and now we're not doing it.
That's the one variable analysis, which is just completely misleading.
Because it's all tied up with North Korea, with the trade deals, with the farmers in America.
It's a big complicated thing.
So the fact that one of those variables moved or reversed doesn't tell you anything.
You would need to see the whole picture to know even what that means.
So my guess is that President Trump reversed the ZTE decision, or he's working on some kind of accommodation there, because we got something in return.
But we're not going to say what we got in return.
All right. The media flatters ignorance.
That's an interesting way to put it.
Let us have a simultaneous sip and try to enjoy our day.
Ah.
Yeah, John Brennan.
So John Brennan's name keeps popping up in the news.
Brennan and Clapper.
You know, I've got to tell you a story.
So years ago, I was a bank teller.
It was my first job in a college.
I worked as a teller at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco.
And we would get robbed a lot.
It's not an often reported fact, but banks in metropolitan areas get robbed all the time.
And they often get robbed when customers are in the bank and don't even know it got robbed.
That happened twice when I was working.
So twice I got robbed by armed or allegedly armed people.
One showed a gun, put it in my nose, and the other one just showed it, you know, did the pocket gun thing where it's like, yeah, give me your money.
But I suspect that was a gun as well.
Yeah, so one of the guys who robbed me put a gun to my nose and said, give me all your money.
That was a scary moment because you're trained to hit the alarm at the same time you're giving the money.
I won't tell you how because that would be a bank secret.
But I was actually looking down the barrel of a gun While I trip the alarm.
Now, if you don't think that takes some nerves, you're wrong.
Because it's fairly common for people being robbed to not trip the alarm because they don't want to get their head blown off.
And indeed, when the police came later, the police said, well, that's pretty brave because a week ago a teller got her head blown off in a robbery because she tripped the alarm.
Or was suspected of it, I guess.
So anyway, here's the point of my story.
So the perpetrator was caught, and he was put in a lineup.
And I was called down by the FBI. I guess it was the FBI. Was it the FBI? Because it was a federal case.
I think it was the FBI. And there was a lineup.
So it was an official, just like on television, a lineup.
So they had several people pretending to be the bank robber and one who was the actual bank robber.
And then I and several other tellers who had been robbed by the same perpetrator at different banks at different times were all there at the same time to look behind the one-way mirror Is it called a one-way mirror or a two-way mirror?
I forget. But we could see and they couldn't see us.
And here's the point of my story.
The guy who was guilty looked so guilty that even if I had not been the victim of the crime, I'm pretty sure I could have picked him out of the lineup.
He was the guiltiest looking guy you ever saw standing next to a bunch of people who looked like they were pretending.
To me it was obvious. I just looked at the guy and I'm like, seriously?
He's not even trying to pretend not to be the guy who robbed me?
But it was also obvious.
So everybody in the room picked the same perpetrator.
Nobody was confused. It was pretty easy.
We all got the same one. Let's get back to Brennan and Clapper.
When I look at John Brennan and Clapper, I see that guy standing in the lineup.
Those two guys look so guilty to me.
Now, you don't send people to jail because some cartoonist says they look guilty.
But I did tell you that Hillary Clinton didn't look healthy not long before she collapsed and had pneumonia.
Well, I would not even bet necessarily on my own ability to identify criminality in somebody just by looking at them.
I'm talking about the way they talk as well as the physicality of it.
It's the way they operate.
But honest to God, I've never seen anybody who looks as guilty as John Brennan and Clapper.
They just scream guilt.
And I remember thinking this long before I even understood what their jobs were.
Way in the beginning when this first Russia collusion business was happening I wasn't really paying a lot of attention, you know, not as much as I am now.
And there would be various talking heads of, yeah, blah, blah, blah, Trump did this, blah, blah, Trump did this.
And Brennan and Clapper would be two of them.
But every time they were on TV, I would stop and I'd say, what is wrong with these two guys?
There's something else going on with these two.
Because there's lots of people like, let me say, who's the guy Rick?
Rick somebody. So there are a number of anti-Trumpers.
Rick Wilson, is it? But there are a number of anti-Trumpers who are just as angry about Trump.
They're just as bellicose about him.
But they don't personally look guilty.
They just look like they're lying or they're biased or they're emotional.
They might just be honest.
But they look like they're giving some version of what they believe.
Brennan and Clapper just look so freaking guilty to me.
And I can't get that out of my head.
And I'll tell you again that I came to that conclusion before I had any idea That they were involved with anything that would be even suspicious.
I came to that conclusion literally just by watching them on TV and saying, what's wrong with these guys?
There is something terribly just wrong.
All right. So, there is no way to know what either of them did, whether they did anything that was or was not illegal, untoward, treasonous, etc.
We have no idea. Or at least I have no idea.
I wouldn't know how to validate any of that.
But you won't see anybody look guiltier than them.
All right.
Less.
Scott is priming us because he knows.
Now, I don't really...
I don't have any secret information, if that's what you're thinking.
I do not.
Somebody said the New York Attorney General has that same guilty of something look.
Stormy's lawyer...
Let's talk about Stormy's lawyer.
Stormy's lawyer is a little bit of everything, isn't he?
Because the women love him.
The people on his side love him.
He's certainly a force of nature.
He seems very effective at what he's doing.
If I were to judge him as an advocate, as a lawyer, as a pit bull, I would say he's pretty strong in a lot of categories.
He's good on TV. But something tells me we're going to learn more about him than we know now.
Now, that's just because he has a certain personality, and I'm not going out on a limb to say he probably has an interesting life, and we're going to be finding out more about that.
Yeah, I wouldn't, you know, you can't trust, you can't trust the reporting about what he may or may not have done with taxes or other clients or any of that stuff.
We're in a world where initial reports about anybody doing anything are just not trustworthy.
So I wouldn't assume that any reporting you see about him is accurate.
It might be, but I wouldn't assume it.
Oh, let's talk about Ivanka unveiling.
So I guess there was some criticism because Ivanka was smiling during a ceremony, which the ceremony itself was a cause for smiling.
But outdoors, there was death and destruction and carnage from the protests.
Some people are saying, oh, it's a bad contrast.
Why did we get somebody who's not an experienced diplomat?
To which I say, are you freaking kidding me?
Do you think there's a more experienced diplomat than Ivanka?
That's just crazy.
And how much experience do you need to be a diplomat?
It doesn't look like the hardest job in the world, frankly.
So, given Ivanka's natural personality, her natural popularity, she's a good diplomat.
We should be so lucky as to have Ivanka show up at every foreign country.
There's no way that works against us.
Alright. Somebody says, is it smart to put a Jew in charge of the Middle East?
Talking about Kushner.
You know, here's the thing.
Somebody is either going to be a Jew or not a Jew.
Those are only the two possibilities, right?
And in either case, you have to wonder about bias.
So, everybody is something.
You can't really be unbiased about the Middle East, can you?
Probably the closest person to unbiased about the Middle East is me, because I'm not a believer.
I've said this before, that your ideal president of the United States would be someone who is not a believer of anything, religion-wise, but is very pro-religion, as I am.
I used to be sort of an angry atheist, but it's just so obvious that religion brings real benefits to real people that I am very pro-religion.
Why would a Swede be biased?
Well, because everybody is either Jewish or not Jewish.
And being on a team or not being on the team is enough for bias.
It's true that some would have less than others, but you can't get rid of it.
Yes, so did you see the dust-up between BuzzFeed and Candace Owens?
So Candace has said on Twitter that a BuzzFeed reporter was talking to college students who were still in college who knew Candace not too long ago or worked with her in some way.
According to Candace, they were threatening to out their names, effectively doxing them if they didn't give up the goods and tell BuzzFeed some good stories.
BuzzFeed did the worst denial you've ever seen.
So the accusation is that they were threatening to release the names of people who knew Candace, which would be bad for those people, if they didn't give them some goods, some dirt on Candace, I guess.
BuzzFeed, their response to that very specific accusation was, Candace doesn't say that interviewing people is an ordinary part of business.
To which I said, what?
That's not even denying the charge!
The thing that everybody agrees with is that interviewing people is ordinary and that a reporter interviewed people.
That's not in question.
The question is whether they were threatened.
They didn't even address the charge.
Now, that's not to say they're guilty, but If you were to take a thousand people who had been accused of, let's say, falsely accused of any crime, just randomly choose a thousand people and say, okay, I randomly choose you.
Now I'm going to accuse you of a crime you didn't do.
I'm going to say you murdered somebody or you did some extortion or something.
What's your first response?
Didn't do it. That's your first response.
That's the first response of innocent people.
I didn't do that. What are you talking about?
That didn't happen. That's what innocent people say.
Here's what guilty people say.
Well, I think the system by which this information was obtained was a normal system.
Why don't you tell people that the system which we used to obtain information was a normal system?
It's not even an answer to the question.
So while I don't know that BuzzFeed is exactly guilty of exactly what Candace says happened, and I know that Candace is credible and would have no reason to lie about this, I can't say for sure that BuzzFeed is guilty of these allegations.
I can only say that if you were to choose a thousand people randomly and accuse them of something they didn't do, I think just about all 1,000 of them would say we didn't do it.
Or something like that.
That's all we know. Yeah, somebody said, if you accuse somebody of...
Somebody had a humorous analogy.
That's all analogies are good for, is humor.
Somebody said, hey, you ran over my child in my driveway, and your response to that is, I have a driver's license.
No, I'm saying, you drove over my kid in the driveway.
Dude. Cars exist.
There's no way you don't sound guilty.
Alright, so that's it for today.
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