Episode 928 Scott Adams： Free College, Teach Math to Pundits and Demise of the Green New Deal
Episode Stats
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Summary
On today's show, Scott Adams talks about the latest conspiracy theory about the "No Masks, Bring the Kids" sign, and why he thinks it's not a real sign at all. Plus, we talk about the Black Lives Matter protests, and whether or not they're really about freedom.
Transcript
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Well, as the curtain begins to drop on another day in the land of coronavirus, we prepare
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for a very special evening with Scott Adams, this time with whiteboards.
00:00:27.680
What is the proper plural name for whiteboards?
00:00:53.540
I've got some tips for you if you're a protester.
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If you plan to protest the restrictions on opening up the economy, and you see a sign
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posted in your local town, and it mentions when the protests will be, and your sign says,
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It might be somebody who just thought it was funny.
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I say that because that was floating around the internet, and people were shocked.
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Because they thought to themselves, are you serious?
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That they're going to have a protest, and they're actually saying, bring the kids and don't wear
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In the real world, usually things just remind you of other things.
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You know, and sometimes there are two stories in the news that both involve tigers or something.
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But when you see a story that is this perfect to the narrative, you know, that the narrative
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being from, at least from the left, that the people going to these protests are not that
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So that would be the narrative from the Democrats.
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So this sign is a little too perfect because it fits the narrative.
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Now, what would a real sign say from real conservatives who were legitimately protesting for freedom?
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What would a real sign say for people who really cared about individual freedom?
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So your tip-off should be that no conservative organizer would tell people what to wear.
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That's the opposite of what they're protesting.
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So, of course, when it's so perfect to look contradictory and stupid, that's not a real sign.
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Now, as I said on Twitter, if the Russians are not already organizing these protests, are they slipping?
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If Putin is leaving this one alone, I mean, you might as well get rid of the KGB.
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All you've got to do is start a little Facebook page, put together a little protest, say, don't bring your masks, be sure to bring your kids.
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So I wouldn't trust any of the protests to be genuine, actually.
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Literally, I wouldn't trust any of them to be genuine.
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Now, that doesn't mean that the people attending are not genuine, because I think they are.
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But you've got to wonder about whose idea it was to pick the time and the date.
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So I won't go so far as to say that they're all organized by other countries.
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And I ask again, whatever happened to Black Lives Matter?
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Did Black Lives Matter just decide that they succeeded and now they're done?
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There's another study that's not peer-reviewed yet that says hydroxychloroquine gave worse outcomes.
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And even when paired with the azithromycin, it gave worse outcomes.
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But what's weird is that they didn't say they paired it with zinc, which my understanding is that's sort of the magic part.
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If you don't pair it with the zinc and the azithromycin, I don't think that even the people who say it works suggest that it would work without the zinc.
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So you go to CNN and you see stories that say hydroxychloroquine doesn't work.
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You go to Fox and you find stories that say it works.
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So at this point, I'm going to still go with my 60-40, 60% chance that it doesn't work.
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But there's another thing that might have a lot of potential.
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So there's a doctor who noticed that there's something weird about the lungs of people who have coronavirus in that they could have very low oxygen, so low that you would expect them to actually be dead.
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And they're still walking around and texting on their phones and stuff, even though their oxygen level is basically death level.
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And apparently this is not common to other conditions.
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If your oxygen gets below a certain level, normally you just pass out and die, I guess, however you die.
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So the thought is that that might be the earliest thing you could catch, at least of the symptoms that are the dangerous ones.
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By the time it gets in your lungs, that's the danger.
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So the thinking is that you might be able to catch a whole bunch of early cases, then maybe that does make a difference if you've got some therapeutics.
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But at the very least, you can pull them out and, you know, you can isolate them.
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So that could be huge because the cost of a little oxygen sensor, I'm sure they're all sold out.
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My guess is that every one is sold out everywhere.
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But they're not hard to make because, you know, it's a pretty small electronic device.
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So I would think there's a non-zero chance, and I realize I'm being pretty optimistic with this,
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there's a non-zero chance that the oxygen sensors could be a third of the solution, you know, with whatever else turns out to work.
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I want to give you a little math lesson on virality.
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So what I'm going to teach you next, you should not be getting from me, because I don't know what I'm talking about.
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If I'm not, just tell me and I'll get rid of this video right away.
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Would you rather have a virus with a 1% death rate, with a R4, I'm not sure if I'm expressing that right,
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but the idea is that one person might give it to four people on average.
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All right, so this is like a mild flu that we get every year.
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Now, what we're seeing from the pundits is consistently confusing 1% and 0.01%.
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And the people who are telling you that we should reopen the economy right away because it's just like the regular flu are saying,
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hey, the regular flu is just 1% and this one is too.
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No, they're confusing 1% with 0.01%, which would be the regular flu.
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The best we know is that coronavirus is, you know, 10 times more deadly.
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And again, all of these numbers could change by an order of magnitude.
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So don't get hung up on the numbers I'm putting here.
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So the first thing they get wrong is they confuse 1% and 0.01%.
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If you've made that mistake, you should just retire.
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You know, you should just leave the conversation if you can't tell the difference between those two things.
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Secondly, they completely ignore the virality difference.
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Now, my understanding is that the normal flu has whatever the number is.
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I don't think it's two, but whatever that number is, is presumed to be, and again, we don't know for sure
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because you'd have to know a lot more about the infections and the asymptomatic people and all that.
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But the assumption is that it's way more viral.
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So if you forget the R part, there's no point in even comparing them
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because you're just ignoring a big part of the equation.
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I'm looking at all your comments, and you have many of them.
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Now, watch in the comments how many people are going to struggle with this.
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Because what we're hearing from the pundits, let's see if I can do this.
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What we've heard from the pundits is that we might have a weak virus.
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So we've heard that it might be a weaker virus than we thought, only 1%.
00:12:02.600
But if it's still that viral, it's the worst thing that ever happened.
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Now, do we know that the coronavirus is more viral?
00:12:21.540
Have we heard of other nursing homes where a regular flu just takes out the nursing home?
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There must be the regular flu on cruise ships practically every cruise.
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But have we ever heard an entire cruise ship where people are dying on board?
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So there's clearly something about coronavirus that is impacting hospitals in a way regular flu doesn't, impacting nursing homes, impacting cruise ships.
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So that all suggests that it has more virality.
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And even if this death rate is much lower than the original estimates, it would still destroy civilization if left to spread.
00:13:07.620
Let's say we never come up with a vaccine, which I think is entirely possible.
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I would say I have low confidence that we're going to have a vaccine for this kind of ever.
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I mean, I'd love to think that we would, but honestly, I don't think we're going to.
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I think we'll have to reach herd immunity, and that's probably the end of the story.
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Now, that's not bad news, because maybe that's just the only way to get there.
00:13:37.940
Yeah, there's definitely a difference in the death rates, but I heard there's 30 different versions of it.
00:13:47.900
Now, what did most people, the pundits, say when they found out that there was a study that maybe there were a lot more people infected?
00:13:56.160
They said, oh, this is good news, because if there are a lot more people who have the coronavirus than we thought,
00:14:03.280
then the percentage of people dying from it is way smaller, and that's where you got down to the 1%.
00:14:08.500
And people hailed that as good news, and then they mistakenly said 1% is the same as 0.01%, and then it all went to hell.
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So you should ignore everybody who's tried to do any math on this, including me.
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I saw this argument from Larry Schweikart on Twitter, who believes there's somebody named Dr. Lee, I think a British doctor,
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who has determined that lockdowns make it worse.
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If you can only find one doctor to back your theory, you should be a little less confident about it than tweeting it.
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If you can find several doctors that would agree with you that the social isolation doesn't make any difference,
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if there are several doctors, I'd say you could maybe take a stab at that being true.
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But if you only got that one, I would say hold off on your confidence there.
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The other thing Larry Schweikart says that I would take issue with is that economists have estimated that you kill 40,000 people
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Do you believe that 1% extra unemployment will kill 40,000 people?
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Well, there's something left out, don't you think?
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Because if everybody in the country were unemployed for one week,
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So it wouldn't matter how much unemployment it was.
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If it only lasted a week and nobody starved to death, probably nobody would die.
00:16:18.540
I mean, you could argue that maybe a few extra people would commit suicide because of the lockdown,
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But I think there are a whole bunch of other people who don't die because we're not in traffic.
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So it seems to me that when the economists say 40,000 die for every 1% of unemployment,
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they have to mean long-term unemployment, right?
00:16:44.860
I don't think they mean that unemployment has a bump over the summer
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and then fairly quickly in the next several months gets back to a normal rate.
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You know, that's not the kind of unemployment that kills 40,000 people per point.
00:17:11.380
Now, there are days when the simulation serves up the most delicious of stories.
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If you have not heard this yet, prepare to receive a delicious story.
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A story that tastes so good, you can taste it with your ears.
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Yes, that is Christine on the piano downstairs.
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I told her she could play while I was on Periscope so I'd have some background music.
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So this little tidbit comes to you courtesy of Michael Schellenberger writing in Forbes.
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If you're not following Michael Schellenberger on Twitter, you really should.
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And he wrote a little summary and review of a new film produced by Michael Moore.
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If you haven't heard what it's about, prepare your ears for a delicious story.
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I mean, you're actually going to be able to taste this in your ears.
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This is Michael Moore's documentary that he's produced.
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And it's being released free to the public on YouTube today.
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Well, you'd expect Michael Moore would care about Earth Day and the environment.
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Because we know he cares a lot about the environment.
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It's about the documentary reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms,
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biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments.
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that suggests that the Green New Deal type of technologies don't work.
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And when I say don't work, I mean that they cause as much problems or more than they solve.
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But I'm going to say something that I've also said about Bill Maher.
00:20:00.140
And one of the things I like about him, even when I disagree with specific opinions,
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is it's obvious that he is an actual flexible thinker.
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If you give him a better argument, if you give him data, he's capable of changing his mind.
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Very few people can do that, especially public figures.
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Michael Moore, if you recall, was one of the first Democrats who said,
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He was the one who could peer through the bubble.
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Everybody else was lost in the bubble, and they couldn't see it.
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you know, hold your opinion of Michael Moore's politics,
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the fact he doesn't go to the gym as much as you want.
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And surprisingly, you know, maybe you don't expect it.
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But I consider him a very flexible thinker, like Bill Maher, in a good way.
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And I think what happened is he came upon this honestly.
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And I think it ended up in a place that maybe wasn't his first choice.
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And I think he had the intellectual integrity to go ahead and say he produced this thing.
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Now, I'm planning on watching it tonight with Christina, if we can find it.
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So, I'll tell you if it's as interesting as I think it is.
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But it feels as if the Green New Deal is so dead.
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And then I am going to amaze you by flipping around my whiteboard and completely redesigning college.
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I'm going to redesign college so it's free, almost.
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It's going to be so close to free, you barely can tell the difference.
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Before we show you the amazingness, which is the other side of my whiteboard, let me tell you this story.
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I had just graduated college, Oneonta, New York.
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And I took my belongings from my dorm room and I moved them back to Wyndham, New York, where I grew up, my family home.
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I traded it to my sister for a one-way ticket to California.
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My calculation was there may never be another time in my life when I have a completely blank slate.
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And so the first thing I should do to improve my odds of a good life is to simply move where I have the greatest odds of a good life.
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Someplace that has good weather, good economics, good travel, you know, just good everything.
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And so I sold that car for a one-way ticket to California.
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I had two suitcases and $2,000 that I got for graduation plus some of my own money.
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And I went to San Francisco and, you know, long story short, made my life here.
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One of the best decisions I ever made because I moved from a place with no opportunity to a place with unlimited opportunity.
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Now, you might say to yourself, the other way to look at my situation is I had nothing to lose.
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If you ever get a chance to start anything, whatever it is, from scratch,
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something that you never get to start from scratch, such as your entire life,
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It's the one time you can really make something out of nothing.
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The bad news about the coronavirus, you already know.
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But there's one weird aspect of this in that it destroys everything we assumed about big institutions and the way we used to do things.
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And I'm sure that online education got a big boost.
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But how could you make college almost free and way better, way better?
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So I'm going to call it free, meaning that it's almost free.
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You would first develop a Yelp-like search engine for classes.
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And the Yelp search engine would be able to search on any platform.
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So even within a subscription service, it would be able to search for a specific class.
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So let's say you wanted to take a specific class.
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And you could say, oh, there's one on YouTube, but there's a more highly rated one on Udemy.
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How hard would it be to build a Yelp search engine for individual classes?
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You know, that's well within the range of stuff we do, right?
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I don't know if I've ever mentioned that, but just one of my many oddities.
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But that was actually just a spelling error, not dyslexia.
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We all know that higher education evolved over time.
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And because it just sort of evolved and got ossified and, you know, it just doesn't need
00:26:59.860
So I would like to invent a major, which is the major that would be free.
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So you'd start with this, and then if it works, you can expand it to other majors especially.
00:27:11.260
But I would invent a major called life strategy.
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And life strategy would be a not-too-deep dive about all of the good stuff.
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You know, the 80% that matters that you can get quickly in these and maybe other situations.
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So every skill requires communication, persuasion, economics.
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Statistics, I don't mean in the math sense necessarily.
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But mostly I'm talking about practical statistics.
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An example of that would be the idea of diversifying your portfolio.
00:27:45.160
Another example would be having a talent stack where every time you add a talent that works
00:27:51.580
well together, you multiply your odds of success.
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So when I say statistics, I mean figuring out the odds of things.
00:28:04.440
You don't want to teach people a little bit of design, a little bit of history.
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History is useful not because it repeats, but because you see a whole bunch of patterns.
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So the more patterns you see of like, oh, when history was like that, the thing you have
00:28:20.660
So the more patterns you see, the more well-rounded you are.
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You should learn a little bit about managing, how to hire and fire.
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I can do a better job of lining this up for you.
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A little bit about startups if you wanted to start your own company.
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Basically, banking and investing, one of the biggest needs, especially in the lower-income
00:28:41.760
community, and you hear this from Black Lives Matter and activists in those communities,
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that people really need to learn how to handle money.
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You take it for granted if you've been around a family that knows how to do it.
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But if you've never learned how to manage credit or get a loan or any of that stuff, how
00:29:07.900
So you should teach all those basic things, how to stack your skills, a little bit about
00:29:12.900
technology so you'd understand the basics of what's an app, what's the cloud, how do
00:29:21.260
Now, the details of all this are highly variable.
00:29:30.860
Imagine, if you will, that the government in the United States said, we're going to have
00:29:38.500
Like anybody who gets through these classes, you're really going to want to hire.
00:29:43.480
Now, the exception would be the STEM and some specialties.
00:29:47.720
You still need lawyers and doctors and scientists and stuff.
00:29:53.080
This major is just for the generalists, the people who might want to start a company, the
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people who are going to go to work for a Fortune 500 company and be trained within some special
00:30:04.740
So the idea was maybe the government could certify it, but maybe individuals could.
00:30:19.260
So, well, I don't have that kind of credibility.
00:30:21.540
Imagine if somebody who did have credibility came up with a set of classes and said, if you
00:30:27.440
do this many hours and these things and meet this checklist, you've got a degree.
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How long should it take you to get this degree?
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Now, if you're full-time, you know, maybe two years, part-time or something.
00:30:50.900
So here's, let me make a bold claim, all right?
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I know you like it when I make cocky, unsupported, bold claims, but that wouldn't be me if I didn't
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You take a group of 100 students chosen randomly from any community except the black community.
00:31:20.080
And I'll take 100 African-American students from the poorest school.
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And let's assume that they have good enough grades so that they could qualify for this.
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You know, probably a high school education, high school degree.
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I'll take 100 African-American, low-income kids, and I'll give them some version of strategy.
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It might only even be one year, but that's what they'll get.
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And then you let the other, the control group, the 100, everybody else, they take whatever
00:31:54.100
Now, you subtract out the STEM people because they're all going to get good jobs.
00:32:00.120
So in both sides, if anybody's STEM on either side, you toss them out.
00:32:04.120
So you just compare my 100 African-American students from a poor neighborhood who have
00:32:12.880
They understand how to manage money, how to start businesses.
00:32:20.600
I forgot the right networking, but networking would be one of the skills that would be up
00:32:24.640
They've learned business writing, they can give a speech, and they have these skills.
00:32:33.560
Check with me in 10 years, and my group of 100 African-American students from a poor neighborhood
00:32:40.880
will all be, on average, will be earning more money than the control group.
00:32:46.140
Because the control group took, you know, dumbass college courses.
00:32:51.880
You know, they were taking sociology and anthropology and, you know, French literature and bullshit.
00:32:57.680
And 100 of my hypothetical African-American students from a poor neighborhood just got solid gold
00:33:09.880
You know, the math of, if you try 10 things, one of them might work, it's pretty strong math.
00:33:19.140
The math of, if you diversify your portfolio, you're not going to lose it all by making one
00:33:29.020
And skill stacking, the idea that you can cleverly stack your skills and that improves your odds.
00:33:37.980
So you give me the group who runs their life based on the math of life, the things we know
00:33:44.380
are the best stuff, the things that combine best, always have the best career potential,
00:33:49.120
the things that let you see the furthest and manage things the most effectively.
00:33:55.480
My bet is I'll give a one-year education to people and they will be ahead in income in
00:34:02.740
So let me see in the comments what part of this do you think is impractical.
00:34:10.300
Now, there's an assumed part of it that, you know, is unstated, which is that the free
00:34:15.400
market would allow the quality of these classes to continually improve.
00:34:20.200
And some of these classes might be free, like on YouTube, and some of them might be, and
00:34:27.920
some of them might be, well, somebody says racism, I don't even know how that fits into
00:34:35.100
And so some of them might be free, some of them might cost, you know, $20 because they're
00:34:40.800
It's like the best rated class for, you know, organic chemistry.
00:34:45.220
But organic chemistry is so bad that you'd be willing to pay $20 to get the good one,
00:34:56.460
Well, they would if the government gave it credentials, and they would if they saw what
00:35:01.940
the kids were learning, and they would if you had a little bit of a track record to
00:35:08.900
So I think you would have to, you'd probably have to subsidize it or something for a while
00:35:17.360
Somebody said Jordan Peterson had a similar idea.
00:35:22.660
No, I would not call this like a brilliant, innovative, new idea that nobody ever had.
00:35:29.120
The only claim I'm going to make is this more like a prediction?
00:35:32.760
Accreditation, because this is all easy, right?
00:35:36.000
Don't you know that there will be a Yelp for college classes that are online, you know,
00:35:44.940
It's just too obvious that that would someday exist.
00:35:53.940
Accreditation is what I should say, not credentials.
00:35:57.100
Need to add the scientific method in the major.
00:36:03.520
I thought I, actually I did have, thank you for that.
00:36:08.200
I did have the scientific method on my first draft, and I missed it when I wrote it out here.
00:36:19.820
And also networking is the other one that I forgot.
00:36:41.800
And I know this sounds like I'm making this up, but I swear that was also on the first draft.
00:36:55.940
You can imagine other things, too, such as learning how to travel.
00:37:02.520
You know, if you were a poor kid and you'd literally never been on an airplane,
00:37:07.140
wouldn't you like a one-day class, at least, to teach you, how do you book a flight?
00:37:15.040
You know, there are a lot of things that you just assume that people know, but it's only because you've been around it.
00:37:19.400
If you've never been around it, you'd have no way to know how to book a flight and navigate an airport.
00:37:34.340
So each of these categories have subcategories.
00:37:37.680
You know, communication would include speeches and writing and maybe social media.
00:37:47.020
Well, the whole point is to not start a school.
00:37:50.540
The whole point is that you don't need a physical school.
00:38:06.060
You know, it seems to me that homeschooling is likely to be good.
00:38:10.960
You know, I have, of course, a little bit of experience with kids in school recently.
00:38:17.820
And I'll tell you my personal opinion, which is matched somewhat by the kids themselves.
00:38:26.720
You know, kids today, I just feel sorry for them because school sounds, from the social perspective, you know, because they're bullies and mean people and everybody's fighting to be liked and stuff.
00:38:39.640
And the pressure, it actually sounds kind of terrible.
00:38:43.200
I mean, I don't know how bad it was when I was a kid, because you forget.
00:38:46.280
You know, you don't really remember exactly what it was like.
00:38:50.440
But today, it looks like it's just a pretty bad deal.
00:39:05.660
I think critical thinking is the better term for it.
00:39:14.600
You see the point that if you spent a little time, you could come up with a life strategy class that would be better than anything that anybody's learning.
00:39:23.660
Give you, and I will talk to you in the morning.
00:39:36.620
And tonight, you're going to have a wonderful night's sleep.
00:39:40.140
I hope the dulcet tones of Christina on the piano have put you in the mood to drift off thinking about all the great ways that you can reinvent yourself.
00:39:51.540
Because if you find yourself in a situation where there's nothing to lose, well, then, you're free.
00:40:00.340
If you really want freedom, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, as Janice Joplin famously said before she died of an overdose.
00:40:11.260
But, of course, that takes away the motivational quality of it.