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Scott Adams: How a Hypnotist Sees a Verbal Slip

By Scott Adams
April 5th, 2017 @ 8:22am

A few days ago, Mike Cernovich broke the news that ex-Obama advisor Susan Rice had asked for the identities of Americans caught up in electronic surveillance of foreigners, including some Trump associates. After Mike broke the story, the big news organizations followed. I asked my well-informed Trump-hating friend what he thought of the story.

He said he hadn’t heard of it.

I was surprised. It was the headline news. While we were on the phone, he checked CNN’s website on his computer and informed me that no such story existed. In his words, it was probably “fake news” that he assumed I saw “on Breitbart” or some other site he considers below his standard of news excellence.

So I asked him to navigate over to Business Insider (partly owned by Jeff Bezos) to see if the story was there. And sure enough, it was. Prominently. My friend read the story and agreed it should have been covered on CNN as well.

That’s when I had the entertaining experience of explaining to my friend that his news habit of relying on CNN and the New York Times made him more of a victim of manipulation than a consumer of news. I explained that unless he is sampling stories from both sides (left and right), he is being completely misled by one of the sides. Both sides get the facts right, usually, and eventually. The manipulation comes in the form of what they emphasize and what they deemphasize. CNN apparently decided that the Susan Rice story was not important news. Coincidentally, this particular news also made them look like ridiculous turds for mocking the Trump “wiretapping” claim non-stop as a sign of the president’s character and perhaps his sanity.

We don’t know all the facts yet, but we do know that Trump’s claim of being “wiretapped” by Obama is starting to look dangerously close to something similar to the truth. CNN did not see that coming, and it would be awkward to walk-back all of their mocking. So they just sort of ignored it.

A few days after the event, when I assumed CNN had caught up to the pack, I Googled “Susan Rice” to update myself on the story before writing this blog post. CNN’s top story on Susan Rice is from 2012. See it at the bottom.



Anyway, my point today is about Susan Rice’s unusual wording in denying any leaking of the Trump surveillance information. She said, “I leaked nothing to nobody and never have and never would.”

When I learned to be a hypnotist, my instructor taught the class that some types of verbal slips are actually a message of honesty from the subconscious. Rice’s odd wording leaves open the possibility that she leaked SOMETHING to someone. To a hypnotist, Rice’s choice of words would be regarded as an unintentional confession of leaking.

To be perfectly clear, I have no science to back this point. And I assume some hypnotists would see it differently. But I have been tracking this sort of verbal slip for decades, and I find it surprisingly predictive.

The example our hypnosis teacher used in class is that when you are on a first date with a woman, and she intends to say, “I’m famished,” but uses the wrong word and says, “I’m ravished” instead, she is signalling an interest in sex. I didn’t believe that was true until a woman mixed-up those two words on a date with me. That date worked out well.

I don’t know if Susan Rice is being honest in her denial of leaking. But if I had to bet, I’d go with my training.

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You might enjoy reading my book because sometimes you are famished and sometimes ravished.

I’m also on…

Twitter (includes Periscope): @scottadamssays?

YouTube: At this link.

Instagram: ScottAdams925

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/159226601511/how-a-hypnotist-sees-a-verbal-slip