Episode 262 Scott Adams: Scott Interrogates Dale With a Bone Saw, Checks His DNA
Date: 2018-10-16 | Duration: 27:59
Topics
Interrogating Dale about Elizabeth Warren’s lack of Cherokee DNA Criticism of President Trump has decreased lately President Trump’s Twitter jab at Elizabeth Warren’s Harvard admission Warren’s academic style thinking
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## Transcript
## [The Simultaneous Sip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_LhR05bYg&t=7s)
Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum! Hey everybody, get in here. We've got stuff to do this morning and 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.
## [Interrogating Dale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_LhR05bYg&t=44s)
I thought I would perform an interview this morning—an interrogation, you could call it. I'll be interrogating Dale. You might know Dale; Dale is an anti-Trumper and does not like anything about Trump. 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. 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... as she had a DNA test, he absolutely... yes, she wins! She wins the million dollars!"
Well, let me just walk you through this, Dale. It turns out that the average European American, somebody with a European background, has on average more Native American DNA than Warren. 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?"
Yeah, just over here. I just want to do a little more into the interrogation.
"This looks like a trap!"
It's not a trap, it’s just an interrogation. Just step over here. I'll be right back; this will only take a minute.
## [Rogue Agents and Dale’s Disappearance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_LhR05bYg&t=255s)
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 yet, I'm just putting it out there, just testing it to see how the public responds to that. But I'm considering announcing that my interrogation of Dale went wrong.
It was rogue agents. I swear to God, I saw some rogue agents come into my office and next thing I know, Dale was just gone. They were carrying a lot of plastic tarps, plastic bags, that sort of thing. I don't think it meant anything.
## [Trump’s Best Week and the Two-Year Mark](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_LhR05bYg&t=318s)
Have you noticed that the news is having trouble criticizing this president? He's having the best week a president ever had. Stormy Daniels lost her defamation lawsuit; that got kicked out of court. If I understand it right, Stormy Daniels has to pay for Trump's attorney fees. 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 be that the criticisms against the president have slowed down, not just on television, but in person. People are starting to notice that their relatives have chilled down a little bit. I wonder if there's something about the second year. We're sort of tuned to think that big round numbers mean something. Have you ever noticed that if anything is a hundred years old, people go, "Oh, it's a hundred, that matters"? Well, it doesn't really matter; that's just an arbitrary number that happens to be a big even number. But we're very influenced by even numbers. There's something about a ten-year anniversary that's more important than an eleven-year anniversary.
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? If you're still in the first year or the first year and change, the critics are going to say to themselves—and I think they have—"If we can get him in the first year, 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. It will be impossible for the news to ignore the fact that it's a second year now. What was the big story in the first year of the Trump administration? Chaos, 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, and trade negotiations are going well. It's just going to get harder and harder to say that there's some kind of freshman year problem of chaos going on when the evidence is so strongly suggesting the opposite.
## [Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test and Identity Politics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_LhR05bYg&t=502s)
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. She concludes at the end, "Well look, turns out I have some American Indian"—now I'm sorry, Native American, it's hard to keep my PC terms straight—"so I'm Native American blood." 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 lose the black vote. 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—I will always hesitate to imagine that I can think like any other person or a group. But I imagine if I were black, I’d try to put myself in that position and I see Elizabeth Warren trying to play off her 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. I would not feel good about that. It would look like a white woman trying to take advantage of a situation.
Someone said it might be the death of identity politics. I think that's optimistic. 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. Elizabeth Warren is probably one of the top five role models or icons of the Democrats. For somebody of her status in the Democratic Party to make such an amazing mistake in terms of how she treated it... let me be very careful. Everything she said in the ad was both accurate and sensitive, I guess. She said in her ad that she was not claiming any tribal affiliation; she wasn't over-claiming at the moment. But it didn't come off that way. Even though her words said, "Well, I'm not claiming I'm a member of a tribe," the Cherokee Nation came out and slapped her down. 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 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, got caught, and then was slapped down by the very minority groups that she was hoping to identify with. You can't lose any harder than that.
## [Trump’s Harvard Tweet and Thinking Past the Sale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_LhR05bYg&t=753s)
The president tweets that it was a con and a shame and that she's not really Native American. 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. 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. If you read a story that says 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 going to believe? I don't know the facts, and if I had to guess, my best guess is that it didn't make much difference, if any, for Harvard. But no one's going to believe that. It is simply one of those stories that, by its nature, is hard to believe.
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? There's no way to know. It's an unverifiable claim.
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. If you're dealing with the 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. 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—is her fake claim about being a Native American, then when she tested her DNA and found that there was essentially none, she claimed victory. It's not demonstrable by the DNA test because it could have been North American or South American, and it's less than the average European American. You can make the claim either way and you've got evidence to support it. But it was a bad week for Elizabeth Warren. I think it's so bad that she can't get elected president because of it. It’s such a dominant story, it's going to erase anything else she says or does.
## [Academic Style vs. Raw Persuasion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_LhR05bYg&t=996s)
Elizabeth Warren gets great props from a lot of people for being a great professor and a great intellectual. A lot of people who worked with her or have seen her teach are aware of her work in universities and say great things about her academic credentials. Well, 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—just about the worst framing you could bring to a presidential election. You could watch the difference between Trump's style and the academic style. The academic said, "If I can find even 0.018 percent Native American in me, I've made my claim!" Because if you're an academic and the evidence says there's a 0.018 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."
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 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 sale. 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 eleven levels of awesomeness in his tweet. Elizabeth Warren was academic. Who wins the election? It's not even close.
Do you want the president who, in this very simple situation, clearly did not do the best job? Trump did, and he did it right in front of everybody. If you're obsessed with the details of the accuracy of the tweet, then you're missing the point. The academic approach might appeal to you, but it's not much of a winning system.
## [Dr. Shiva and the Talent Stack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_LhR05bYg&t=1185s)
Now some of you are wondering: what does Dr. Shiva say about all of this? I will talk to him tomorrow on Periscope. 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."
He's also somewhat the perfect person to talk about DNA. This is one of those great moments when you can see quite historically the difference between Dr. Shiva and Elizabeth Warren. They're running against each other for the Senate this year in Massachusetts. You see the academic approach—what Elizabeth Warren does—and it's so weak and tone-deaf. It works against her own brand. It was a branding fail, a tone-deaf fail, and an academic fail.
Compare that to Dr. Shiva, who comes in with multiple academic credentials and degrees across a broad range of fields, but he can also 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 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? Elizabeth Warren should have just invited the person she's running against to explain her own DNA test to her.
It shows you the contrast in talent stacks. Dr. Shiva has his broad talent stack: he's run businesses, he's lived in other countries, he's got five degrees. There's just an extraordinary difference in the range of his talents. 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?
## [Persuasion Tips: Avoiding "Strident" and Family Hoaxes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_LhR05bYg&t=1372s)
Somebody says she should have apologized instead of running on the "one-drop rule." There was a way to win. She could have actually just played it off as fun. She could have taken the test and said, "Look, it was in my family lore that we had some blood in us. Can't really tell from the test. I hope I didn't offend anybody, but 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. She could have just brushed it away, said she dealt with it, and moved on.
Somebody just said that Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren are "strident" and "unpleasant." Doesn't that sound sexist? 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. But to my ear, because two women were in the example, that just sounded sexist. I wouldn't use that line of thinking.
Scott, you've been "spooked by feminists"? Incorrect. When I tell you something sounds sexist, it is not because I am offended; it is because I'm trying to teach you how to communicate more persuasively. 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. When I point it out, it's because there was a better way to communicate that would get you more of what you want.
There certainly is some question about how Warren has used what she assumed to be her greater amount of Native American ancestry. 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. I got the same story that Elizabeth Warren got, which is that you have a great-great-grandmother who was a Native American. When I had my DNA test, there was just no trace of anything like that. So I think I fell to the same hoax that she did—a family hoax.
We won't be talking about my personal life today. Did I write a recipe for a "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 1/16th Native American and found out they were not. Yeah, it's a fairly common story that people tell their kids.
All right, we talked about Saudi Arabia. You may have missed my interrogation of Dale, but I will talk to you all later. Bye for now.