HIT & RUN BLOG 5 Things Barack Obama Said in His Weirdly Off-the-Record MIT Speech

[Valin]

Reason Blog

"We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us," said the former president. "I know that seems like a low bar."

Robby Soave

Feb. 26, 2018

On Friday, former President Barack Obama spoke for an hour to an audience of hundreds of people at a major sports policy conference at MIT, but his remarks were off-the-record and kept completely secret by virtually all attendees, who had to agree that they would not record, photograph, tweet, or report on the event before being granted a seat in the audience. Reason obtained a recording of the speech, however, and the most newsworthy thing about it is the simple fact that the public wasn't supposed to hear it.

In his remarks, Obama expressed concern that Americans have segregated themselves into two "entirely different realities" where not just opinions but basic facts are in dispute, claimed to have left office without a major "embarrassing" scandal, and proved that he really loves basketball.

Those were some of the highlights from his talk at MIT's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on Friday. The event, attended by hundreds of sports industry professionals, journalists, and students, was cloaked in secrecy. Having listened to the entire thing, I'm not sure what all the secrecy was about—it was pretty standard Obama fare, and he never once said the word Trump, though Obama did seem to imply that his White House was remarkably drama-free in contrast. Here are five key takeaways:

 

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[Valin]

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2) It's okay to argue about how we should address climate change. It's not okay to deny the underlying science.

As an example of the kind of epistemic closure described above, Obama offered up the debate over climate change.

"You and I can have an argument about climate change in which you conclude, 'we're not going to stop the Chinese and the Indians from burning a bunch of coal, it's gone on for a pretty long time, we're just going to have to adapt, and maybe we'll invent some new energy source in the nick of time, and that's why I'm opposed to the Paris Accords,'" said Obama. "I'll come back and say, 'well no it just turns out if we just invest in some smart technology and we create a smart regulatory framework that incentivizes investment in clean energy, we can actually solve this problem now, and if we don't it's going to be catastrophic.'"

This kind of debate is healthy for a democracy, said Obama. But, "I can't have that same debate with somebody who just holds up a snowball in the middle of the Senate chamber in winter and says, 'look there's no climate change because it's snowing!' Which happened by the way. I didn't just make that up."

 

Opposed he says!

 

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