Episode 1295 Scott Adams: The Ongoing Disinformation Campaign Against the American Public, and Tiger Too
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 13 minutes
Words per Minute
146.16739
Summary
In this episode, Scott Adams talks about the latest in pandemic news, charter schools, and whether or not the government should have more money to spend on public schools. Plus, the dopamine hit of the day: The simultaneous sip.
Transcript
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Once again, isn't it great that there's coffee with Scott Adams every day?
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And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a challenge.
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And fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day,
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
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In pandemic news, the new single shot of vaccination from J&J, it looks like it has 85% efficacy.
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And if you don't like the word efficacy, well, you haven't said it out loud.
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And it has 85% efficacy 28 days after you get it, and that's pretty good.
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Would you take the single shot that gave you 85% efficacy, or would you wait for the double shot that gives you a little bit more?
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I told you that I'm going to wait until the last possible moment, because I'm not eligible yet.
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As you know, I think over 20 states have legislation to associate funding for school with the children instead of the school,
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so that the child could go to a different competing school, a private school, for example,
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and the funding would move with them, the government funding.
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So that is a really big trend that's happening now.
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Corey DeAngelis, you'll find him on Twitter, does the most tweeting about this productively.
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But a new study says, according to Corey, that charter schools are 35% more cost-effective
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and produce a 46% larger return on investment than district schools.
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You know, this is the sort of statistic that you want to trust because it agrees with you already.
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I want it to be true that having competition in anything makes things better, just as a general statement.
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No matter the field, if you add competition to it, it should make things better.
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So I want it to be true that these charter schools are more cost-effective.
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But then you would also have to factor in what happens to the school they left behind.
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So I don't think things like this can be studied, actually.
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But at the very least, it can help you size things.
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So I think this at least is evidence that charter schools are not worse.
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But I don't think you could say that numbers such as this, I wouldn't ever trust them to be accurate, per se.
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But if there were some big problem where they spent more money and got less results, you'd probably see it.
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Digital Doug on Twitter was questioning the fact that the coronavirus numbers in the United States are over half a million deaths,
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whereas regular seasonal flu would be, you know, maybe 10% of that, typically.
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And Digital Doug says, if you pay hospitals five figures for treating the flu, meaning the regular seasonal flu,
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and five figures more for putting patients on respirators, let's see what the regular flu numbers look like then.
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So Digital Doug believes that if hospitals were incentivized to record the regular seasonal flu,
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that there would be 10 times as much death attributed to the regular flu.
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Now, let me tell you how to think of this argument.
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If the argument is that financial incentives cause people to code more things as coronavirus,
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That if you, and I say this a million times, if you put friction on something, you'll get less of it.
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You add friction, and you get a little less of it.
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If you add incentives, again, for almost anything, you're going to get more of it.
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So the argument is that incentives have been added somewhat accidentally because, you know, people had good intentions.
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But there's an incentive to say that something is a COVID infection or a COVID death when maybe it was a gray area, right?
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If there were just as many coronavirus deaths as the regular flu, early on, pretty good argument.
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It doesn't mean it's true, but you'd have to take it seriously.
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Suppose the corona deaths were 20% more than the regular flu deaths in any year.
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Ah, then you'd have to take that argument pretty seriously.
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Because, like I said, you incentivize anything, and it wouldn't be surprising to get 20% more of something that had a financial incentive.
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We're at 10 times more deaths from coronavirus.
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If you incentivize something, you get more of it.
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But you don't get 10 times more without somebody noticing that there's something up, right?
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We are way beyond the point where questioning whether coronavirus deaths are real is a rational opinion.
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It used to be a rational opinion, which I think time has shown us did not hold up.
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But you are not being rational today if you think that the issue is miscounting.
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We're not even close to that being a reasonable hypothesis.
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So, I think you need to update your thinking on that.
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So, Ivor Cummins, who you probably see on the internet, tweets a lot about the coronavirus,
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tweeted a graph today that shows that Sweden's excess deaths are among the lowest in Europe.
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And the claim is that they did not do as aggressive a lockdown and social distancing,
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and therefore proof positive that lockdowns and social distancing don't work,
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according to Ivor or Ivor, I don't know how to pronounce his first name, Cummins.
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So, I just tweeted this right before I came on live here,
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Do you think that when the other people comment on his tweet,
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do you think they're going to say, oh yeah, we checked the numbers,
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Yeah, I'm seeing in the comments there's some disagreement about whether it's true or not.
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This is the kind of statistic that is just a little suspiciously too on the nose, isn't it?
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Now, by the end of this live stream, I could be changing my mind.
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In other words, if the people I consider good at fact-checking look at this and they say,
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wow, yeah, it does look like Sweden is a mystery.
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They didn't lock down and they got the same result, or better.
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All right, I just saw a comment that's making my brain explode, but I'm not going to go there.
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So, fact-checkers, check me on that Sweden death thing.
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Elon Musk continues to be the most interesting of the billionaires,
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maybe just the most interesting person in the country right now while Trump is taking a little break.
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And I guess he was asked to comment on a Washington Post story that was critical of Tesla.
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And, as you know, the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos,
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who you could consider a competitor to Elon Musk,
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because they're both trying to conquer space, if you will.
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And they're trading places as the richest person in America.
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And here was Elon Musk's reply to the Washington Post hit piece on Tesla.
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Musk replied to the paper's request for his story.
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If you put together, like, a team of experts in communication,
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and said, all right, team of experts, we're going to have to respond to this,
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Well, we'll put out this statement, it'll be, you know, hundreds of words,
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and we make good cars, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
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Now, what's beautiful about it is not just the comment
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And by the way, I don't know that the story has any bias.
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It's the smallest comment you could make that packs the most powerful punch.
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Because you can't really think of anything but what Elon said, right?
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I didn't even read the story, but, like, if I had,
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So what Elon Musk does is he simply does things more interestingly
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Tesla doesn't do standard marketing, does it, in advertising?
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I thought that was true, that they don't do regular ads
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All you have to do is put a bioweapon defense in your car
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He just acts more interesting than other people
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Now, you have to be able to pull that off, right?
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Because this comment from Musk was probably just off the top of his head.
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so that the headlines just go with your interesting comment
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All right, Stephen Crowder, you know him from Louder on Crowder.
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The story this morning was that he had been suspended from Twitter
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after saying that he can confirm that some people voted
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Please, please, please, please don't cancel me.
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Please, please give me another minute of social media.
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So I don't know if he's back or I got the story wrong.
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Let's go with that because that sounds right anyway.
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my new theme is that if somebody gets banned or censored,
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I'm going to send them some money for being censored.
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and I know a lot of people are on the same page,
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that individually you might buy his shirt or his mug from his store.
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but basically you're just voting for freedom of speech.
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whenever you see one of these situations happen.
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that I do not agree with all of the things Stephen Crowder says.
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That's not what we're here to talk about, right?
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And I'll tell you, just so I'm on record with it,
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I'm not a fan of his argument that there are two genders.
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It's based on observation and biology and stuff like that.
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And it is convenient and useful to have two genders
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I think a more productive way to look at people
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That's the healthiest way to look at the world.