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June 18, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
27:27
Episode 34 - Why Kanye and John Legend Are Watching Different Movies
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Hey everybody It's time to get in here We're going to do a little whiteboard talk on our favorite topic.
Try to ignore the sounds of gardeners outside.
So today I'm going to talk about The disagreement between Kanye and John Legend.
If you're following the news, you know that Kanye has expressed some love for President Trump as a person.
No discussion of policies, just that it's okay for him to like him.
John Legend has weighed in publicly on Twitter and said, hey, you know, he's not happy about this because it seems to be validating who he thinks is a racist, which is President Trump.
And then it got more interesting because Kanye this morning sent a screenshot of the text exchange between John Legend, who contacted him by text, And made an impassioned and genuine request that Kanye rethink his support of President Trump because it's harmful in John Legend's opinion.
Let me start by saying both of these people, John Legend and Kanye, are trying to help.
So all credit to them because both of them are absolutely putting their reputations on the line.
They're putting some skin in the game.
They both have completely positive intentions.
But here's the interesting thing.
They're looking at the same set of facts but seeing two completely different movies.
And I wanted to give you just a brief explanation of how these two smart, accomplished, well-informed people can look at exactly the same stuff, but see completely different things.
John Legend sees, you know, kind of a monster.
You know, Trump is a racist.
Kanye sees it differently.
How can that be?
They're both smart, well-informed, and I'm pretty sure Kanye is not crazy, at least in this sense.
So how can that be?
Let me explain it. Now, the normal world, as you know, is quite common.
In fact, it's universal.
It's not just common. It's the universal way the human people look at things.
Human people. Human beings.
We have lots of confirmation bias and lots of cognitive dissonance and we imagine that we're rational creatures, but we're not.
Now, if you said to both these people, hey Kanye, hey John Legend, have you heard of these concepts, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias?
I'll bet both of them would say yes and that they would know essentially what those mean and that they're common things.
I think Kanye might be a step ahead In the sense that even if you know what these things are, there's a second trap.
And the trap is that you believe that these are the things that happen to other people.
If you understand what they are, but you've only gone so far as to believe that this is something that happens to the dumb people, It's certainly not something that happens to you because you would recognize it and you would immediately not do it.
If you think that's what these mean, you're not quite understanding them.
And I believe Kanye is probably operating at a little bit higher level of comprehension in the sense that I think he would understand that these are universal traits and that you can't tell which of you is wrong.
And I apply this to myself.
So in everything I say, I would not know if I'm wrong.
I wouldn't. I would have no way to know.
Now there's some ways you can check stuff, but you can't ever really know if you're the one who's in the wrong movie.
But let me run through a couple of different pieces of confirmation bias.
And I picked the two most frequently noted ones, right?
There are lots and lots of them, and I think John Legend would be the first one to point this out.
It's like, okay, you only mentioned two things, but look, I got a long list.
What about everything else on the list?
In the interest of time, I'm only going to make the point with two of them, Even though I know the list exists, because if I can debunk the two most common ones, then it'll at least open your mind to say, wait a minute, maybe that other stuff on the list isn't exactly what I thought if those two have been debunked.
Alright, so let's do that.
So the one thing that people like to say is that why is it that essentially, I think 100% of the out-of-the-closet racists support President Trump?
That's very worrying, right?
If that's the only thing you knew, is all the racists are voting for the same candidate, your hair catches on fire and you say, ah, that's not good.
I don't like this guy.
If the racists like him, I don't like him.
That's pretty reasonable.
It's pretty reasonable, right?
That should be a gigantic red flag.
So the fact that African Americans and more than half of the country sees that gigantic red flag, that's normal.
They should see that.
This situation is a big red flag.
So how do you explain it?
Well, one movie says, well, it must be that they can hear the secret racist whistle, and they feel correctly, this would be one movie's version, that the president's a big ol' racist, and so they support him.
That fits all the facts that we see in evidence, right?
But here's another set of facts that also fit.
And I would argue that they fit a little better.
And I did it with a Venn diagram.
So here you've got, let's say the topic is stricter immigration, President Trump's preferred immigration policies.
So that's the topic.
If you do the Venn diagram, I think the GOP mainstream, the people who are not racist, would be saying, yeah, we like more immigration control, you know, tighter borders, because it's good for American jobs that might lower crime.
It's good for economics in general.
The racists would also like all that stuff.
Who doesn't? Who doesn't like more jobs, better economy, less crime?
So everybody agrees on that stuff, right?
But they additionally want fewer brown people.
Okay? That's what makes them racist.
If they wanted more brown people, they wouldn't be racist.
Or at least they wouldn't be white supremacist racists.
So, how can it be That all of these racists are supporting Trump.
Well, it's easy. He's got the only policy which, in their opinion, would result in fewer brown people.
But that doesn't say anything about these guys.
Nor does it say anything about President Trump.
Because his policy is about jobs and crime and economics.
The fewer brown people is, wait for it, Probably not exactly what the races were hoping for.
Because remember, President Trump's preferred immigration strategy is that we take the most qualified people from every country that has, let's say, good government systems so that we can identify them.
The whole point of the seven-country ban is that those countries are not even all Muslim, right?
Because I think North Korea is on there.
But the point of it is that they don't have good systems for identifying their own citizens, so then we can't tell who we're getting.
So, President Trump's preferred system would take the best people from wherever they come from.
In this context, the best means economically they can take care of themselves and also add to the country.
So they're not bringing in problems.
Most of them are going to be brown.
Here I say brown to cover everybody who's not a classic generic white person.
So that would include all of Asia, all of India, all of Africa, every country that's in play.
So I don't think the racists would get what they want.
But here's the thing.
Immigration is just sufficiently complicated enough.
That people default to their biases because it's a little hard to follow.
Most of us don't know the details of who wants to do what and if this policy would change what by how much.
It's a little hard to follow.
And so whenever you have complication, people default to bias.
Racists say, well, I don't understand this whole thing, but it seems like less immigration would get fewer brown people.
That must be good if you're a racist.
So it makes perfect sense that racists would vote Republican, but for different reasons.
By analogy, criminals have guns and police have guns.
But that doesn't make criminals police.
People can like things for completely different reasons.
A criminal likes a gun for making crime.
Police like guns for stopping crime.
Same gun. President Trump is one gun.
Terrible analogy, I know.
Forgive me for this analogy.
He's one gun. The criminals can use him.
The good people can use him.
For different reasons.
Let's talk about the Charlottesville hoax.
This is usually at the top of the list when people say, well, you know, it's no longer in doubt.
The president is definitely a racist because...
The Charlottesville situation in which he referred to people who were at the event as quote, fine people.
Now, the people who were trapped in their mental prisons say, my God, there's more evidence of what we already believed.
How can he call these tiki-carrying racists who have self-labeled themselves?
They've labeled themselves as racists.
You don't even have to wonder if they're racist.
They are self-labeled.
They're margin. They're out.
And then the President of the United States gets on TV and says there were fine people there.
Ah! Head exploding.
He must be a racist.
Now it's proven. Well, there are two explanations that fit the facts and evidence.
One of them is the one I just said.
Under this movie, and there are some problems with this movie, but in this movie, the President of the United States is a giant racist.
And although he's a very capable person who, you know, made billions in real estate, conquered the reality TV show world, won the nomination, became president, is making progress with North Korea where nobody could, has goosed the economy.
He's done a lot of things that feel like the sort of things that only really smart, capable people can do.
But how would that explain how this person who is so smart and so capable over decades would decide that it was a good idea to go on national television as a sitting president and say, you know, I think I'll side with the people marching with tiki torches who are racists.
In order to believe that he did that, you have to believe that he decided to go against his own family.
Because remember, the Tiki Torch people were doing anti-Semitic chants.
His daughter is converted to Judaism.
His son-in-law, who's in the administration, is a Jew.
His grandkids are Jews, his main advisors, lots of them are Jews.
Netanyahu loves him.
Israel loves him.
He's moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
So you would have to believe, in order to believe movie one, where the president is a racist and he has called the racists in Charlottesville fine people, to believe that set of facts, you have to believe that he went against his family and that he decided that it would be a good you have to believe that he went against his family and that he decided that it would be a good idea to Maybe. You know, we've seen strange things happen, right?
Maybe. But, let's compare it to the other movie, and then you can decide which one seems to fit the facts a little better.
So movie two says the president believed, incorrectly, That there might have been some people there protesting the removal of statues.
Remember, the whole event was around whether the Confederate statues should be removed.
And the President is for keeping the statues.
And he thinks he's not a racist?
Well, I don't want to get it in his head, so let me recheck that.
I mock people for imagining they can imagine what other people are thinking.
So let me back off of that.
Let's just say that he's in favor of keeping the Confederate statues for historical reasons and there are a lot of people in this space who agree.
For the record, I completely disagree with keeping the statues.
The statues are not history.
The statues are decorations.
You would not decorate your own house in a way that offended half of the country, or even 20% of your neighborhood.
You just wouldn't do it, right?
Because you'd be kind of a dick if you did that.
So the statues, while I understand the argument that it's part of history and you don't want to change history, the history is still with us.
It's in the internet. It's in the history books.
No one's going to forget it.
Moreover, nobody ever learned history from a statue.
Probably throughout history, not many people ever learned something from a statue.
So I call the statues decorations, and in my opinion, if somebody on my team is offended by the decorations, that's a good reason to change a decoration, because it's just a decoration.
The point of a decoration is to make people feel good.
If your decoration makes people feel bad, get rid of it!
Let the history go.
Put it in the books, put it in the internet.
It's a decoration. You just don't need it.
So that's my view. I only give you that as an aside so you can kind of put it in context with this discussion.
So the president is on the other side of me on this issue.
He thinks the statues are fine, wants to keep them, doesn't think that's racist.
It's just a reflection of history.
His comment that there were some fine people there Isn't it a little more likely, given the history of this president, that he wasn't well informed about who was there?
If somebody told you there was a protest around Confederate statues, who would you assume was there?
You would assume that there were people who say, hey, that's racist.
Get rid of those statues. You'd be right.
And you would assume that there would be some just ordinary Republicans who say, hey, don't change my history.
I like it there, because even though I don't like slavery, I don't like what that represents, it's just part of history.
Why change the history? Those would be good people that you'd disagree with.
So the president made an assumption Or let's say under movie 2 scenario, he just didn't know who was there exactly.
He knew that there were some racists there.
He knew that there were anti-racists there.
A reasonable person would have assumed, and I'm saying that because that's what I assumed.
I'm pretty reasonable.
I assumed that there were people there just saying, hey, we want to keep the statue, but we're not racists.
Now it turns out that there were people like that, but there weren't many of them.
So it doesn't really help the argument to say, well, there were 25 of them there, because that's not really enough to make a difference.
They were there, there just weren't many of them.
So what is more likely?
That a president who is competent enough to be in this position has suddenly decided, yeah, I think I'll just go full racist on TV. And insult my family and all of my closest advisors and make problems with Israel.
Is that likely? Does that sound like a good explanation of what happened?
Compared to movie two, where the president didn't know all the facts about a situation that was still sort of evolving, and there was a little bit of a fog of war there, and he assumed the most reasonable thing...
Let me say it again. The most reasonable thing you could ever assume...
About Charlottesville is that there were some non-racists who just thought they would prefer keeping the statues.
If you have a protest and a counter-protest of keep the statues and get rid of the statues, you're going to attract people who just like statues and it's not a racial thing.
They just like their history even though I disagree with them.
So, Charlottesville was picked up by the mainstream media and they hammered on it forever trying to sell you on movie one.
Most people bought movie one if they were already Inclined to believe it.
If they were inclined to believe it, movie one looked totally reasonable.
They're like, yeah, I guess he just threw his entire family under the bus.
And now the time has gone by.
It gets harder to explain movie one.
Because why is it that Netanyahu isn't bothered by this?
It's hard to explain.
Why is it that his Jewish family members, his daughter or son-in-law, why haven't they quit or at least sent a tweet saying, hey, don't throw us under the bus?
Maybe they wouldn't, loyalty or whatever, but it doesn't really fit too well.
Versus movie two, the president who never has a command of all the facts, once again, just like every other time, made an assumption and didn't have all the facts.
How ordinary would that be?
If you've seen it basically 100% of the time on every single topic, he's always dealing at sort of a conceptual level, which, by the way, I think usually works.
And he doesn't have every single detail about a complicated situation.
I'm not sure he needs it.
But this would be the most typical situation.
I call the Charlottesville a hoax.
Very similar To the Russia collusion story.
Russia collusion looked really, really convincing to a lot of people for how long?
A year and a half? And now they're going to have to grapple with the fact that nobody could find this collusion.
They could find people associated with Trump who did illegal things, who lied about things, and they need to be dealt with.
But the actual collusion, the very first thing, how many people believe that?
Well, the people who were not inclined to believe it didn't and saw plenty of reason not to believe it.
The people who were inclined to believe there's something wrong with this guy, he must be colluding, they did believe it.
And we're looking at the same set of facts.
So, recapping the Kanye versus John Legend.
John, if you're looking at this, and somebody will probably tweet it to you, I hate to take your time, but I want to promise you that I've spent a lot of time with Trump supporters.
And I don't see this.
I just don't see it.
I believe you see it.
I believe you actually see it.
But I don't see it.
And I think if you were to actually gather up some Trump supporters, put them in a room, spend an hour with them.
See if you can see it.
Because that's not the sort of thing people can hide.
You could tease that out of somebody over the course of an hour.
Maybe you've got to give them a drink, you know, something.
But you're not going to be able to miss it.
If you think it's there, gather some Trump supporters.
See if you can find it.
A year and a half, I don't see it.
I'm not a Republican.
I'm not a conservative.
I'm left of Bernie, even though the media has labeled me as alt-right this week.
Again, well, here's a good example.
If you're wondering how easy it is for people to be completely wrong, look how many people labeled me alt-right and a men's rights advocate this week, and also a Holocaust denier this week.
Just this week!
These are major publications who could have easily just Googled to find out it's not true.
I was also called retired this week.
Somebody has called me a former cartoonist.
If you look at all the things that were just said about me this week, with all of the facts just in public to dispute it and to, you know, debunk it, we don't live in a world where the facts are guiding us these days.
So, Kanye has opened a window, a door maybe, a crack in the universe.
And it's hard.
It's going to be hard for people to, you know, kind of make their way to the other side of the hole.
But it's happening.
It's happening. You know, you can feel it.
Let me ask you this.
Just a yes or a no to this question.
How many of you feel it?
How many of you feel something really good that's about to happen?
Maybe it's already happening.
Say, yeah, look at the S's.
You can feel it before you can see it.
You can feel it before your logic catches up to it.
And that's where it all starts, right?
Change starts with the feeling.
It doesn't start with the facts.
Because we saw, the facts just don't convince people.
Nobody gets talked into something by a fact.
We think we do.
We want to. We would like our facts to convince other people, and then we say, hey, why didn't my fact change your mind?
Well, the same thing's happening the other way.
They're giving you facts, and it's not changing your mind either.
So why is this different?
I'll tell you why this is different.
Because it's not fact-based.
The split, the racial divide, was always, at least in a large part, I'm not going to say that racism doesn't exist.
I'm not going to be the guy that says we're post-racial, racism doesn't exist.
Plenty of stuff to fix.
Plenty of stuff to fix.
But the way we're feeling about each other, It's a little bit ginned up.
It's a little bit a product of the election cycle we went through and top rate influencers on both sides selling a version of reality that a lot of people bought into.
And they bought into it because they could feel it.
So the competing versions of reality were not really fact-based.
They were to take our emotions somewhere and two paths were formed.
These emotions and these emotions.
What you're feeling now And this is all Kanye and Candace.
Anytime I give credit to Kanye, you should, in your mind, interpret that to include Candace Owens, who was sort of the brave voice that got things going.
But the two of them have just changed how we feel.
Now, so far that hasn't spread to John Legend.
It's not gonna be that dramatic.
It's not like turning a switch. But I gotta tell you, John, look for it yourself and see if you can find where the Trump supporters The ones you think want fewer brown people, see if you can find in any of this Kanye,
Chance the Rapper, Candace Owens, see if you can find with any of these people rank and file normal Republicans who are saying racist things about them or indeed not totally supporting them completely.
Watch how easily, how effortlessly, and more than that, watch how enthusiastically Trump Republicans are embracing Candace, Kanye.
Chance the Rapper didn't embrace Trump, but he simply said, hey, you don't have to be a Democrat.
Which felt like a civilization-changing concept.
It shouldn't, but it feels like it.
So, just watch.
It's all real. The good feelings that you're seeing about the folks who are breaking a hole in reality, that's real.
None of that's pretend.
So, That's what I wanted to talk about today, and I hope this helps.
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