| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Pessimists vs. Optimists
00:06:29
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|
| Okay, let's see. | |
| Here it is. | |
| Pessimists are usually right, and optimists are usually wrong, but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists. | |
| Okay? | |
| So that was a quote I used in my Bible commentary. | |
| Everywhere I looked. | |
| So here, a quote by Thomas L. Friedman in Goodreads. | |
| That's a very, very big site about books that are recommended to you. | |
| That's in Goodreads. | |
| Let's see. | |
| A to Z quotes. | |
| Thomas Friedman quotes. | |
| Pessimists are usually right, but optimists. | |
| And optimists are usually wrong, but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists. | |
| So Goodreads, and A to Z quotes, and McKinsey and Company, and let's see, who else has it? | |
| LinkedIn. | |
| Reddit. | |
| Everybody. | |
| So I have said to you, and it sounds bizarre, and I don't really care because it's true, I have what can be described as almost an erotic attraction to truth. | |
| Truth is everything. | |
| So I was simply... | |
| I'm interested because if I'm putting this quote into my Bible commentary, then I need to give it the proper attribution. | |
| I'm a very big stickler on that. | |
| I am the opposite of Claudine Gay. | |
| I am fanatical about not plagiarizing, for moral reasons, not even legal reasons. | |
| So I have to find out the source of the quote. | |
| So fine, if Thomas Friedman, whom I don't particularly care for, is the source, so what? | |
| It's a good quote. | |
| I'll use it. | |
| I can't use it without attributing it to the author of the quote. | |
| So I simply did a search on the New York Times archives, which you would think Goodreads and LinkedIn And all these others would do if they're giving quotes, right? | |
| Like, where did he say it? | |
| Well, I found it. | |
| And you know what he said? | |
| As someone much smarter than I once said, and then he gives the quote. | |
| It is not from Thomas Friedman. | |
| Thomas Friedman never claimed it was from Thomas Friedman. | |
| Thomas Friedman himself said it was from somebody else. | |
| We don't know who it was from. | |
| This is a very disturbing thing. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Very, very disturbing. | |
| That a quotation site does not look up the source of the quotation. | |
| What the hell are they there for? | |
| It's the one thing they do and they don't do it well. | |
| Someone dear to me and my wife and I, we had a very interesting and I guess sad discussion with her over the weekend. | |
| A truly good soul. | |
| And she said, I simply don't know what to believe. | |
| And Americans didn't say that 50 years ago. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Historians had a commitment to truth. | |
| Anthropologists did. | |
| Sociologists did. | |
| There was a commitment to truth. | |
| It doesn't mean every American told the truth. | |
| For those of you who went to college and don't understand the purpose of a generalization, I just needed to add that. | |
| There was a commitment to truth greater than today. | |
| Let's put it that way. | |
| Because the left was not that powerful then. | |
| And truth is not a left-wing value. | |
| It's a liberal value and a conservative value. | |
| And liberals who tend left would similarly not have a commitment to it. | |
| What I'm about to say may surprise many of you. | |
| And I would totally understand if it did. | |
| And it's a rare area where I differ with someone very dear to me. | |
| But the more I have read about the Kennedy assassination, the more I have wondered if we have been told the whole truth. | |
| I'll just leave it at that. | |
| Truth. | |
| But this Friedman quote is such a perfect example. | |
| He himself said, I am not the source of this quote. | |
| But everywhere. | |
| he is given as the source of the quote I really I do sympathize with people I The issue that we had the discussion with this wonderful person in our lives was global warming and climate change and so on. | |
|
Very Troubling Issue
00:00:21
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|
| And she said, And I get it. | |
| I don't know whom to believe. | |
| Do you take a vote? | |
| How do you know? | |
| It's a very, very troubling issue. | |
| But I do have one guideline. | |