Episode 261 Scott Adams: Warren’s DNA test, Khashoggi, Climate Change
Date: 2018-10-15 | Duration: 19:10
Topics
Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test results Khashoggi story, more and more speculation popping up He may have been much more than just a journalist President Trump’s 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl
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## Transcript
## [Personal Update and Elizabeth Warren](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QFqvJTxJeg&t=8s)
Hey Tyler, hey Geoffrey. I'm a little bit late this morning. Not my favorite day. Joe, Stephen, good morning everybody. I woke up this morning to find out in a tweet that Christina has broken up with me. I just read the tweet myself. 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. Before we do that, will you join me for the simultaneous sip? Please do so.
## [Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test Results](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QFqvJTxJeg&t=73s)
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." The news was that Elizabeth Warren had a DNA test done to find out if she had any Native American in her. It 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.
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. There was some possibility that the line goes back far enough that she might be 1/512 Native American. We don't know for sure; she might be 1/32. I think the range she could be is between 1/32 and 1/512.
But here's the interesting thing about it: it still feels sort of tone-deaf. The reason it seems tone-deaf is if you've seen the commercial. She's developed this whole campaign ad around it in which she shows pictures of her family and her relatives talking, and then she shows the test results being read by the DNA expert. Then she ends it all by talking about the pride in her heritage, standing next to her family—and the family is the whitest-looking family you've ever seen in your life.
I thought to myself: if you're African American and you're looking at her celebrating her 1/32 to 1/512 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 small chance it’s not—she did prove her claim. I would say 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.
If you just think of Elizabeth Warren and then you think of whether she is or is not Native American, and then she presents you with a DNA test and an expert, she’s almost certainly got some Native American in her. Not much. Wouldn't that be like a total win? That would be a clean win if the only images in your head are Elizabeth Warren herself and the DNA test supporting her claim.
Instead, she builds a commercial around it in which the focus is on her whiter-than-white relatives. It just shows a whole bunch of white people standing around celebrating not being white, I guess, or not being entirely white. I thought to myself: if you're African American and you're seeing these whiter-than-white people smiling because they may have 1/512 Native American, what does that feel like? The visual of her standing with her super-white-looking family detracted from the message.
It detracted from the message because it just looked like she was taking advantage again. The claim against her is that she took advantage of it, and there she is, building 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 heritage. It was couched in a defense—"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. It just felt like she sold that too hard.
I don't know if anybody else has the same impression, but like all good news stories, it holds open the possibility that either side has an argument. That's what makes it a good story. The people who say she should not be talking about being Native American are going to use the low number and say she is only 1/512 Native American. People who are supporting her are going to say, "Well, she could be as much as 1/32. That's pretty close. That's a lot." Everybody gets a little bit of something out of this.
## [The Jamal Khashoggi Investigation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QFqvJTxJeg&t=379s)
Let's talk about this guy who I will call Khashoggi. I'm listening to the people on the news who are trying to pronounce it correctly. I cannot speak Arabic and I could not even begin to pronounce his last name correctly, but it's something like "Khashoggi." You know who I'm talking about—the journalist who got killed in the embassy, allegedly by Saudi Arabia. Confirmation is to be determined.
Remember, I said there's probably more to this story than we know. Sure enough, more keeps coming out. None of it is entirely surprising, but there's just more and 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 of the United States; he could have been turned by us. There's all this speculation, most of which has no evidence to back it up except sketchy evidence.
The more I see about it, the more I wonder if the right framing for this is "Saudi Arabia kills a journalist." That's the way it's being reported because the news is run by journalists. When journalists see a journalist get killed by a government, you can bet they're going to make a big deal about that. They should, and they are. But this gentleman, Khashoggi, was way more than a journalist, wasn't he? I'm not even sure it's fair to call him a journalist, even though 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 has got to at least make you scratch your head and say there might be more going on here than just being a journalist.
We may never know, but what is clear is that the US and Saudi Arabia don't want to be enemies. There we are, two countries who really, really don't want to be on the other side of each other because we have a common enemy in Iran. 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 Khashoggi guy was up to something bad. I don't know how offended to be about this. There are lots of things in the news where you actually feel something yourself. If there's an affront against the United States, I tend to feel it. 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. There are other things that are very central to the United States—our economy, our trade deals, etc. These things you can feel almost because you feel like you're part of the country.
But with this journalist being killed in a Saudi embassy in Turkey, how do I really feel it? The media is trying to make me feel it by connecting it to our relationship with Saudi Arabia. If something goes wrong there, and there's a good risk of that, I would feel that. But I’m having trouble caring, frankly. It’s not that he's an ordinary journalist, in which case I would care a lot. If they're killing ordinary journalists who just happened 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.
Under those circumstances, since the original crime doesn't really... I just don't feel it. It 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. Technically, he was in a competing mafia. He might have had a different Godfather or something, but it still feels like their business far more than it feels like my business. We'll see if that makes any difference going forward.
## [Climate Change and Trump’s 60 Minutes Interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QFqvJTxJeg&t=751s)
Let's talk about climate change. The President did a 60 Minutes interview in which I thought there would be a lot more news. I'm seeing little clips taken out of the interview in which the anti-Trump media is trying to turn it into something crazy or provocative. But did we just get used to him? Did the world just get used to a President Trump? Now when he gives a 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. 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 other people say them—but it didn't feel like he quite ever made any big news, which had to be disappointing to them.
One piece of news they're pulling out to try to turn into news is that the President said something about climate change—that he doesn't know how much of it is human-caused versus natural cycles. They take that perfectly reasonable-sounding explanation—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—we're not sure what's going on, but there are natural cycles and it's hard to sort out what's natural and what isn't. 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.
Even that, they had to take out of context to turn it into news. If you keep the context, he's just saying that scientists are political. Here is what he said: scientists are political, and you have to be careful about their mass agreement on this issue because it's a political issue. Even scientists would agree that a political situation introduces bias. That's important to say. It's not just the President who would say there's bias involved with climate change. Other kinds of scientists—scientists who study persuasion, bias, or the mind—would all agree that if you take reasonable, objective scientists and put them in a supercharged political environment in which they have a side, the odds of that influencing the result are very high.
So far, what the President said, scientists agree with: if you put normal, objective people who even intend to be objective in a highly political situation, you should have less credibility in their result. That's a fair statement. The scientific process is supposed to check for that—that's why you have duplicated experiments and peer-reviewed stuff.
But at the same time, in the news last week, we saw the hoax that was played on the reviewers of scientific studies. We saw that people could just make up stuff and get their papers published fairly reliably. There was a group who played a long-term hoax in which they wrote just crazy papers and tried to get them approved. What's interesting is that they chose an area of science that they knew was highly politicized. They did a test which is very similar to what the President was talking about with the climate scientists.
The hoaxers did all their papers in the social sciences area, which is super political, and sure enough, the super political area ignored science. It was a whole bunch of scientists who review papers, do peer reviews, and decide what goes in the publication, but the hoaxers demonstrated that more likely than not, you're going to find peer review for things that people politically agree with, independent of the science. That's been shown this week.
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 influences whether something gets published and how people think about whether they agree. That part's demonstrated beyond a doubt, in my opinion. There have been other studies showing that scientific papers and studies are hard to reproduce. In fact, most of the time they're not reproducible.
Sorry, I'm getting messages... it was a call from Christina. I will get back to her. I guess that's all for today. I'll talk to you later.