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Oct. 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
27:54
Episode 262 Scott Adams: Scott Interrogates Dale With a Bone Saw, Checks His DNA
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Hey everybody get in here We've got stuff to do this morning and I can't wait around all day.
So make sure you click that button, get in here.
And more importantly, make sure you have your cup, your mug, your chalice, your stein, your glass, your container.
Make sure it's full of a beverage.
Coffee is the best.
And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
So I thought I would perform an interview this morning.
An interrogation, you could call it.
I'll be interrogating Dale.
You may have known, you might know Dale.
Dale is an anti-Trumper.
He does not like anything about Trump.
And so, I'd like to introduce Dale.
Hello, I'm Dale. Dale, do you mind if I ask you a little bit about the Stormy Daniels situation and Elizabeth Warren's story?
Sure, go right ahead.
I'm winning. I'm winning.
Dale, it seems that the DNA test for Elizabeth Warren showed a really small percentage of Native American.
And in fact, according to the experts, you can't even tell if it's North American or South American.
So, did she win her bet with Trump?
Not a bet, but did she earn the million dollars he said he would give her if she had...
A DNA test?
Yes, she wins.
She wins a million dollars.
But, let me just walk you through this, Dale.
Now, it turns out that the average European American, somebody with European background, has on average more Native American DNA And would you say,
just to pick one example, that Stormy Daniels probably had more Native American DNA in her on any given weekend than Elizabeth Warren has ever had?
I don't know what you're getting at.
Stop interrogating me.
Interrogate you? You haven't seen anything, Dale.
I haven't even started to interrogate you, but if I did, you wouldn't like it.
So, Dale, if you don't mind, could you step over here for a little more interrogation?
What do you mean? Just over here.
I just want to do a little more interrogation.
This looks like a trap.
It's not a trap. It's just an interrogation.
Just step over here.
Come on. I'll be right back.
This will only take a minute.
*Pain* Ah! Ah! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
All right, so we won't be seeing any more of Dale today.
He disappeared. He was here a minute ago.
I feel like I saw him walk into my office, but I didn't see him walk out.
I'm thinking about announcing that the interrogation went wrong.
I'm not saying it yet.
I'm just putting it out there, just testing it.
See how the public responds to that, but I'm considering announcing that my interrogation of Dale went wrong.
Maybe. I don't know. Alright.
Does it seem to you...
Yeah, it was rogue agents.
I swear to God, I saw some rogue agents come into my office, and next thing I know, Dale is just gone.
They were carrying a lot of plastic.
Tarps, plastic bags, that sort of thing.
I don't think it meant anything. So have you noticed that the news is having trouble criticizing this president?
He's having the best week a president ever had.
So Stormy Daniels lost her defamation lawsuit.
They got kicked out of court.
And if I understand it right, Stormy Daniels has to pay for Trump's attorney fees.
And the joke that's going around on social media is that Trump is such a good negotiator, he's the first person who ever got a refund from a prostitute.
Which is very funny.
It seems to me that the criticisms against the president have really slowed down.
Not just on television, but, you know, in person.
People are starting to notice that their relatives have sort of chilled out a little bit.
And I wonder if there's something about the second year.
You know how people are, we're sort of tuned to think that big round numbers mean something.
So have you ever noticed that if anything is a hundred years old, People go, oh, it's 100, it's 100, that matters.
Well, it doesn't really matter, that's just an arbitrary number.
It happens to be a big even number.
But we're very influenced by even numbers.
There's something about a 10-year anniversary that's more important than an 11-year anniversary.
And as Trump rounds the bend and he's in the final stretch for his second year, Doesn't it feel like there's something about completing your second year of the presidency and having just about everything going right that just takes the piss out of your critics?
You know, if you're still in the first year or the first year and change, you're still sort of in the first year-ish.
And if the president's still in the first year, Year-ish, you know, whether it's a year and six months or a year and nine months, the critics are going to say to themselves, and I think they have, if we can get him in the first year, you know, we'll just get him before his first year is over and then we're good.
But what happens when the clock ticks on Election Day and it's two years?
I have this feeling that there's something about two years, and especially we'll be reminded of it because the news likes to do these year-end wrap-ups where they talk about what happened in the year.
So it will be impossible for the news to ignore the fact that it's the second year.
Now, what was the big story in the first year of the Trump administration?
Chaos and chaos and disorganization and incompetence.
But that's not really working in the second year, is it?
Because in the second year, it's just impossible to ignore that the economy is screaming, North Korea is going well, trade negotiations are going well.
It's just going to get harder and harder to say that there's some kind of first year, freshman year problem of chaos going on when the evidence is so strongly suggesting the opposite.
Now, you saw that the president could not resist commenting on Elizabeth Warren's horrible, horrible idea of the campaign ad that included the story of her getting her DNA tested.
And she concludes at the end, well look, turns out I have some American Indian No, I'm sorry, Native American.
It's hard to keep my PC terms straight.
Some Native American blood, so she's claiming victory.
But here's the problem, and I think all of you see it.
I tweeted out after I saw that ad that Elizabeth Warren was using science to, she was using science to lose the black vote.
And some people said, what do you mean?
I don't understand that.
Here's what I mean.
If you're, and it's just a question because I'm not black, right?
So I will always hesitate to imagine that I can think like any other person or group, but I imagine if I were black, I try to put myself in that position, and I see Elizabeth Warren trying to play off her, you know, one one-thousandth or whatever it is, Of maybe Native American to make some kind of a claim of minority status, which she has in the past.
She doesn't at the moment. I would not feel good about that.
It would look like a white woman trying to take advantage of a situation.
It would look like someone said it might be the death of identity politics.
I think that's optimistic, but at the same time, Well, let me put it this way.
I don't think it's the death of identity politics, because that's pretty sticky stuff.
But it might be the death of Democrats being able to use it effectively.
Because Elizabeth Warren is very close to being one of the top...
I don't know. Not close.
She's probably one of the top five...
You know, role models or icons of the Democrats.
And for somebody of her status in the Democratic Party to do such an amazing mistake in terms of how she treated it.
Now, let me be very careful.
Everything she said in the ad was both accurate and Sensitive, I guess.
So she said in her ad that she was not claiming any tribal affiliation.
She wasn't over-claiming at the moment.
At the moment, she's not over-claiming anything about her Native American DNA. But it didn't come off that way.
So even though her words said, well, I'm not claiming I'm a member of a tribe.
I realize that's a whole different standard.
The Cherokee Nation came out.
And slapped her down.
And even though she had not said anything that they should have disagreed with, just the very notion that she was playing in this realm and sort of Leaving some ambiguity about her Native American roots and I guess she had called herself Cherokee at one point in the past.
It seems to me that she did everything wrong here.
She was a top Democrat who used race as a tool nakedly and got caught and then slapped down by The very minority groups that she was hoping to identify with.
So you can't lose any harder than that.
So the president tweets that it was a con and a shame and that she's not really Native American.
And then the president goes on to claim that she got into Harvard, at least partly because of claiming her minority status.
Now here's the fun part.
Harvard denies that that was a consideration.
So the fact checkers are going to say, hey, President Trump, you failed the fact checking.
Harvard did not consider that.
But it's still a brilliant tweet from a political persuasion perspective.
Because if you read a story that says that somebody claimed minority status and then got into Harvard, and then you read that Harvard said, no, no, we didn't do that.
Who are you gonna believe?
Now, I don't know the facts, and if I had to guess, you know, my best guess is that it didn't make much difference, if any, for Harvard.
But no one's gonna believe that.
It is simply one of those stories that just by its nature, it's hard to believe.
So the president gets the win simply by putting it out there and making you deal with the question Of whether she used her fake minority status to get into Harvard.
Even if the answer is no, meaning that Harvard didn't consider it, it still looks like she tried.
And you also don't really believe Harvard, right?
Because they're not credible.
Harvard is not credible when they say we didn't consider her minority status.
Because even if it was just subconscious, even if it was just a tiebreaker, even if it could have gone either way, but it went her way, Do you really believe it?
No way to know. It's an unverifiable claim.
So it's a beautiful tweet because it makes you think past the question of whether she was faking her status and all the way to the question of whether it got her into Harvard.
So if you're dealing with a question of whether it helped get her into Harvard, you've already accepted the claim That she was trying to use a fake identity and fake identity politics for advantage.
So this is everything bad for Warren, possibly the worst week she's ever had, doing what she probably thought was a brilliant move.
Consider this.
If the only thing you know about Elizabeth Warren, and this is sort of true for me, since I don't live in Massachusetts, I don't know much about her.
Here are the things I know about Elizabeth Warren.
She made a fake claim about being a Native American, and then when she tested her DNA and found that there was basically, for all practical purposes, there was essentially none, She claimed there was.
Now, maybe there is, but it's not demonstrable by the DNA test, because it could have been North American, could have been South American, and it's less than the average person, the average European American, I guess.
So, you can make the claim either way, and you've got evidence to support it.
A bad week for Elizabeth Warren.
I think it's so bad that she can't get elected president because of it.
Would you say that?
Because it's such a dominant story, it's going to erase anything else she says or does or has done.
And here was my take on it.
So Elizabeth Warren gets great props from a lot of people For being a great professor and a great, what would you say, academic and a great intellectual.
So a lot of people who worked with her, seen her teach, are aware of her work in universities and stuff, say great things about her academic intellectual credentials.
But I can't think of a worse way to get elected president of the United States than going academic.
The DNA test struck me as the sort of thing an academic would do.
An academic is, at least in this country, and at least in this year, is just about the worst framing you could bring to a presidential election.
Because didn't it seem like, here's what it felt like.
And you can watch the difference between Trump's style and the academic style, if you want to call it that.
The academic said, if I can find even.018 percentage Native American in me, I've made my claim.
Right? Because if you're an academic and you look and the evidence says there's a.018 at least percentage in you, you say, there it is.
I used science.
Science gave me this answer.
I embrace the answer. I'm pro-science.
I'm good. I win. That is such an academic way to approach it.
Now look at President Trump's approach.
It's a total con.
There was no Native American in her.
She used it to get into Harvard.
So, compare these two approaches.
Everything about Warren's claim seems factual and scientific.
It's maybe an over-interpretation, but at least she showed us her work.
It was a very academic, collegial kind of thing to do.
President Trump may not pass all the fact-checking quite as cleanly But look at the power of his message.
It's a complete boot on the neck.
It's a complete slap-down.
It's got levels.
He's making you think past the sail.
It's pure persuasion.
It's a victory lap.
It's impossible to ignore.
It's real.
It's raw. It's powerful.
That was Trump's tweet.
Trump had about 11 levels of awesomeness in his tweet.
Elizabeth Warren was academic.
She was very academic.
Who wins the election?
It's not even close.
Do you want the president, who in this situation, this very unimportant, simple situation, in this very simple situation, she clearly did not do the best job.
Trump did.
And he did it right in front of everybody.
Now, if you're obsessed with the details of the accuracy of the tweet, then you're missing the point and the academic approach might appeal to you, but it's not much of a winning system.
Now, some of you are wondering, what does Dr.
Shiva say about all of this?
Well, I will talk to him tomorrow on Periscope, and we'll ask him.
So tomorrow, join me for coffee with Scott Adams, my morning periscope, in which I will be talking to Dr.
Shiva, who's running against Elizabeth Warren using the slogan, it takes a real Indian to beat a fake Indian.
But he's also the perfect person to talk about DNA. So this is one of those great Great moments when you can see quite starkly the difference between Dr.
Shiva and Elizabeth Warren.
They're running against each other for the Senate this year in Massachusetts.
And you see the academic, you see what Elizabeth Warren does, and it's so weak and tone-deaf and it works against their own brand.
It was a branding fail, it was a tone-deaf fail, it was an academic, just completely unimpressive.
Now compare that to Dr.
Shiva who comes in with also multiple academic credentials and degrees in a broad range of fields.
But he can come in and he actually can talk about the science of the DNA. How would you like to be Elizabeth Warren and you have to take this little DNA test and call somebody in to explain it to you?
Whereas Dr. Shiva is not only completely Indian, the other kind of Indian, but he also could explain the DNA to her if he had asked her.
Elizabeth Warren should have just invited the person she's running against to explain her own DNA test to her.
So it's just kind of funny because it shows you the contrast Dr.
Shiva has his broad talent stack.
He's run businesses. He's lived in other countries.
He's got five degrees, I think.
So there's just an extraordinary difference in the range of his talents.
And do you want that kind of talent stack in Congress?
Or do you want Elizabeth Warren, who will bring her academic, ineffective game to Congress, where she is?
Somebody says she should have apologized instead of running on the one-drop rule.
Yeah, you know, there was a way to win.
She could have actually just played it off as fun.
She could have taken the test.
She could have said, as somebody just said here, she could have said, look, you know, it was in my family lore, is that we were, you know, we had some blood in us.
Can't really tell from the test.
I hope I didn't offend anybody, but I was proud.
I was proud when I heard that I had Native American blood in me, and I wish I had more.
But let's just put this behind us.
I thought I had more than I have.
We did the test. Let's talk about the government.
She could have completely come out on top on this.
She could have just brushed it away, said, look, I dealt with it.
There's nothing here to see.
I wish I had more. I love Native Americans.
And everybody would have said, oh, well, and just moved on.
Yeah.
She lied, period.
Well, they're all lying, so I'm not sure that works as your best attack.
Strident and unappealing.
You realize how sexist that sounds.
So somebody just said that Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren are strident and unpleasant.
Doesn't that sound sexist?
So you have to be careful about some of your choices of words.
Is strident a word you hear used against men?
I don't know. It's a word you don't hear a lot.
I don't hear people being called strident a lot.
But to my ear, because two women were in the example, it just sounded sexist.
I wouldn't use that line of thinking.
I saw the new Trump tweets about Warren.
There's two of them, right? All right.
Is McCaskill done?
Probably not. Yeah, there certainly is some question about how Warren has used what she assumed to be her greater amount of Native American.
And I've told this story before.
When I grew up in my family, we were all told that we had a good dollop of Native American.
So when I grew up, I got the same story that Elizabeth Warren got.
Which is you have something like a great-great-grandmother who was Native American.
And when I had my DNA test, there's just no trace of anything like that.
So I think I fell to the same hoax that she did, a family hoax.
Scott, you've been spooked by feminists.
Incorrect! When I tell you that something sounds sexist, it is not because I am offended.
It is because I'm trying to teach you how to communicate more persuasively.
And if you accidentally sound sexist, even when you don't intend it, even if that's not in your heart, you've made a persuasion and speaking mistake that could easily be avoided.
So when I point it out, it's not because it offended me or I think it should offend anybody else.
that's because there was a better way to communicate that would get you what you want a little bit better.
Yeah, we won't be talking about my personal life today.
Did I write a recipe for Pow Wow Chow?
I didn't. You wouldn't want to eat any of my recipes.
Somebody else is saying that they were told they were 116th Native American and found out they were not.
Yeah, it's a fairly common story that people tell their kids.
Alright, we talked about Saudi Arabia.
You may have missed my interrogation of Dale.
But I will talk to you all later.
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