Oct. 15, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
19:06
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Boom boom boom. | |
| Hey Tyler. | |
| Hey Jeffrey. | |
| I'm a little bit late this morning. | |
| Not my favorite day. | |
| Virus Joe. | |
| Steven. Good morning everybody. | |
| So I woke up this morning to Find out in a tweet that Christina has broken up with me. | |
| So I just read the tweet myself, so obviously I knew there was something brewing, but I wasn't expecting that this morning. | |
| So if I don't seem like I'm in my normal mood, I think you understand I'm not having a good month. | |
| But enough of that. | |
| Let's talk about Elizabeth Warren. | |
| No, before we do that, will you join me for the simultaneous sip? | |
| Please do. So Elizabeth Warren did something that's just sort of delicious news. | |
| It's the kind of news that you say to yourself, I'm glad there's news because this is interesting news. | |
| And the news was that Elizabeth Warren had a DNA test done to find out if she had any Native American in her. | |
| And Turns out that she got a DNA expert to look at her results, and he concluded that there was a very high likelihood that there's some Native American in her background. | |
| Now, I was surprised that you can't confirm it, but I guess the way DNA works is there's always a little bit of uncertainty, especially if the line goes back a while. | |
| So there was some possibility that the line goes back far enough that She might be 1 512th American Indian. | |
| Don't know for sure. She might be 1 32nd. | |
| So I think the range that she could be is between 1 32nd and 1 512th. | |
| But here's the interesting thing about it. | |
| It still feels to me sort of tone deaf. | |
| And The reason it seems tone deaf is if you've seen the commercial, so she's developed this whole campaign ad around it in which she shows the pictures of her family and her relatives talking and then she shows the test results being read by the DNA expert and then she ends it all. | |
| By talking about the pride in her heritage. | |
| And then she ends it all standing next to her family. | |
| And the family is the whitest looking family you've ever seen in your life. | |
| And I thought to myself, again, if you're African American, And you're looking at her celebrating her 1 32nd to 1 512th range of Native American that may or may not actually be in her. | |
| Pretty sure it is, but might not be. | |
| So there's at least some chance it's not. | |
| Very small chance it's not. | |
| So she did prove her claim. | |
| So I would say that the reliability of the test probably looks like it did prove her claim. | |
| But she took what could have been good, which is a simple fact, and then she ruined it with the visuals. | |
| Because if you just think of Elizabeth Warren, and so here's the other way to have played it. | |
| If you just think of Elizabeth Warren, and then you think of is she or is she not Native American, and then she presents you with A DNA test and an expert that says, yeah, she's almost certainly got some Native American in her. | |
| Not much. Wouldn't that be like a total win? | |
| Like that would be a complete win. | |
| If the only images in your head are Elizabeth Warren herself and the DNA test supports her claim. | |
| That's a clean win. | |
| But instead... She builds a commercial around it in which the focus is on her whiter-than-white relatives and her. | |
| And it just shows a whole bunch of white people standing around celebrating not being white, I guess, or not being entirely white. | |
| And I thought to myself, If you're African American and you're seeing these whiter-than-white people smiling because they may have one 512th Native American, what's that feel like? | |
| So the visual of her standing with her super white-looking family, I think it detracted from the message because it just looked like she was taking advantage of Again, the claim against her is that she took advantage of it. | |
| And there she is, she builds a commercial taking advantage of it. | |
| In other words, she did in fact build a commercial that by any reasonable interpretation, Was taking advantage of her... | |
| Now, it was couched in a defense. | |
| You know, it's like, hey, you've attacked me. | |
| Here's my defense. I just proved you wrong. | |
| That part's good. | |
| But she took it a little too far and started making it feel like it was an important advantage she had in some way. | |
| And it just felt like she sold that too hard. | |
| I don't know if anybody else will have the same impression. | |
| But like all good news stories, it holds open the possibility that either side has an argument. | |
| You know, that's what makes it a good story. | |
| So the people who say she should not be talking about being Native American are going to use the low number and say, she's only one 512th Native American. | |
| And People who are supporting her are going to say, well, she could be as much as 1 32nd. | |
| That's pretty close. That's a lot. | |
| That's fair. So everybody gets a little bit something out of this. | |
| There's something to like, something not to like. | |
| Let's talk about this guy who I will call Khashoggi, but I'm listening to the people on the news who are trying to pronounce it correctly. | |
| And I cannot speak Arabic, and I cannot even begin to pronounce correctly his last name, but it's something like Chachogi, or something like that, but you know who I'm talking about. | |
| So the journalist who got killed in the embassy, allegedly by Saudi Arabia, confirmation to be determined. | |
| And remember I said there's probably more to this story than we know? | |
| And sure enough, the more just keeps coming out. | |
| There's just more and more and more. | |
| Now, none of it is entirely surprising, but there's just more of it. | |
| So there's just more... | |
| More suspicion that he might have had some dirt on the royal family. | |
| He might have been the biggest threat to overthrow the royal family in Saudi Arabia in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood. | |
| He might have been a spy for the United States. | |
| He could have been turned by us. | |
| So there's all this speculation. | |
| Most of which has no evidence to back it up except, you know, sketchy evidence. | |
| And the more that I see about it, the more I wonder if the right framing for this is Saudi Arabia kills a journalist. | |
| Because that's the way it's being reported, right? | |
| And it's being reported that way because the news is run by journalists. | |
| So when journalists see a journalist get killed by a government, you can bet that they're going to make a big deal about that. | |
| And they should, and they are. | |
| But this gentleman, Khashoggi or Khashoggi or whatever, he's way more than a journalist, isn't he? | |
| I'm not even sure it's fair to call him a journalist, although that was his occupation, apparently. | |
| It feels like he was more of an activist, more of a revolutionary. | |
| He was living in self-imposed exile, which is, you know, that's got to at least make you scratch your head and say there might be more going on here than just being a journalist. | |
| So we may never know. | |
| But what is clear is that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia don't want to be enemies. | |
| So we are two countries who really, really don't want to be on the other side of each other. | |
| Because, you know, there's an enemy of our... | |
| No. How does that work? | |
| We have a common enemy in Iran, for example. | |
| And Saudi Arabia looks like it's heading in the right direction. | |
| Albeit more slowly than many people would like, but at least directionally, they're heading toward loosening up a little bit, getting a little friendlier with Israel, and working better with the United States until this happened. | |
| I think we really need to know whether this Cheshogi guy was up to something bad. | |
| Now, I don't know how... | |
| I'm offended to be about this. | |
| You know, there are lots of things in the news where you actually feel something yourself. | |
| So if there's something that's an affront against the United States, I kind of feel it. | |
| You probably do too. | |
| If there's a risk to the United States, I kind of feel the risk. | |
| North Korea was a good example. | |
| You can actually feel that risk every day. | |
| And there are other things that are very central to the United States, our economy, you know, our trade deals, etc. | |
| These things are, you can feel them almost, because you feel like you're part of the country, and when something happens that affects the country, you feel it. | |
| But with this journalist being killed in a Saudi embassy in Turkey, I don't really feel it. | |
| Yeah, the The media is trying to make me feel it by connecting it to our relationship with Saudi Arabia. | |
| And so if something bad goes wrong there, and there's a good risk of that, yeah, I would feel that. | |
| But I'm having trouble caring, frankly. | |
| He's not an ordinary journalist, in which I would care a lot. | |
| Because if they're killing ordinary journalists who just happen to be critics, that would be one thing. | |
| But it does feel as though there might be more going on, and I don't feel like we're ever going to know what that more is. | |
| We're just not going to know what's going on. | |
| We'll never know. | |
| So under those circumstances, since the original crime doesn't really... | |
| I just don't feel it. | |
| It just doesn't feel like a United States problem. | |
| It feels like Somebody likened it to a mafia hit against their own people. | |
| It feels like the mafia killed a member of the mafia. | |
| So technically he was in a competing mafia, right? | |
| So he was the one who may not be on the same side as the mafia, might have a different godfather or something. | |
| But it still feels like their business. | |
| Far more than it feels like my business. | |
| And we'll see if that makes any difference going forward. | |
| Let's talk about climate change. | |
| So the President did a 60 Minutes interview in which I thought there would be a lot more news. | |
| And I'm seeing little clips taken out of the interview in which the anti-Trump media is trying to turn it into something crazy. | |
| You know, trying to turn it into something provocative. | |
| But I don't know, did we just get used to him? | |
| Did the world just get used to President Trump? | |
| And now when he gives this 60 Minutes interview, I felt as though he said something that would have been news making every 30 seconds. | |
| But there's just not much there, is there? | |
| It feels like he just said all the things you expected him to say. | |
| He was a little bit provocative like he always is. | |
| He doesn't say things the way people say it. | |
| But it didn't feel like he quite ever made any big news, which had to be disappointing to them. | |
| But one of the news that they're pulling out to try to turn into news is that the president said something about climate change, doesn't know how much of it is human-caused versus natural cycles, but they take that perfectly Perfectly reasonable sounding, | |
| I'm going to say sounding so I don't talk about science, they take a reasonable sounding explanation that we're not sure, in the president's opinion, this is not my opinion, in the president's opinion we're not sure what's going on, but that there are natural cycles, and so it's hard to sort out what's natural and what isn't. | |
| Now, I'm not smart enough to know if that's a good explanation or a bad one. | |
| I'll just say that's his explanation. | |
| My own explanations of climate change are a little different, and you've heard them before. | |
| But even that, they had to take out a context to turn it into news. | |
| If you keep it in context, He's just saying that scientists are political. | |
| So here's what he said, if you keep the context. | |
| Scientists are political, and you have to be careful about their mass agreement on this issue, because it's a political issue. | |
| Fair, right? | |
| If scientists are involved, but scientists are involved in a very political situation, even scientists would agree that introduces bias. | |
| That's important to say, right? | |
| It's not just the president who would say there's bias involved with climate change. | |
| Even scientists, other kinds of scientists, scientists who study persuasion, who study bias, people who study the mind. | |
| All of those scientists would agree that if you take reasonable objective scientists and put them in a supercharged political environment in which they do have a side, that the odds of that influencing the result are very high. | |
| So, so far what the president said, scientists agree with, which is if you put normal objective people who even intend to be objective in a highly political situation, You should have less credibility in their results. | |
| That's a fair statement. | |
| Now, the scientific process is supposed to check for that. | |
| That's why you have duplicated experiments. | |
| That's why you have peer-reviewed stuff. | |
| But at the same time, and in the news last week, We saw the hoax that was played on the reviewers of the scientific studies, the papers that get published. | |
| And we saw that people could just make up stuff and get their papers published fairly reliably. | |
| So there was a group who played a long-term hoax in which they wrote just crazy papers and tried to get them approved. | |
| Now what's interesting is That they chose an area of science that they knew was highly politicized. | |
| So they did a test which is very similar to what the president was talking about with the climate scientists. | |
| Which is the hoaxers did all their papers in the social sciences area, which is super political. | |
| And sure enough, the super political area ignored science. | |
| So it was a whole bunch of scientists who review papers, they do the peer reviews, and they decide what's in the publication. | |
| But the hoaxers demonstrated that more likely than not, You're going to find pure review for things that people politically agree with independent of the science. | |
| That's been shown this week. | |
| So when the president makes the same case, He's on pretty strong ground because just last week it was shown to be true that politics influenced whether something gets published, how people think of it, whether they agree. | |
| So that part's demonstrated beyond a doubt, in my opinion. | |
| And there have been other studies showing that scientific papers and studies are hard to reproduce. | |
| In fact, most of the times they're not reproducible. | |
| Sorry, getting messages. | |
| It was a call from Christina. | |
| You're right. So I will get back to her. | |
| And I guess that's all for today. |
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