Episode 928 Scott Adams: Free College, Teach Math to Pundits and Demise of the Green New Deal

Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Well, as the curtain begins to drop on another day in the land of coronavirus, we prepare for a very special evening with Scott Adams, this time with whiteboards. Yeah, yeah, whiteboards. Right. I said plural. Whiteboards. What is the proper plural name for whiteboards? Whiteboard. I. No, that's not true. But we'll get to that. First, some quick hits. Has anybody seen Joe Biden? Joe Biden? Anybody? Has anybody seen Joe Biden? Still nothing. Okay, I've got some. Some tips for you. If you're a protester, if you plan to protest the restrictions on opening up the economy, and you see a sign posted in your local town and it mentions when the protest will be, and your sign says, no masks, Bring the kids. That's not a real sign. It might be a Russian sign, a Russian troll. It might be a Democratic operative. It might be somebody who just thought it was funny. It might be China. But you know what? It isn't a real sign. I say that because that was floating around the Internet and people were shocked because they thought to themselves, are you serious? Are you serious that they're going to have a protest and they're actually saying, bring the kids and don't wear masks? Come on. That can't be real. It's outrageous. It's outrageous. You know what else it is? It's a little bit too on the nose, isn't it? Have you ever heard me say that before? It's one of your best tells for a hoax. The real world is kind of messy. In the real world, usually things just remind you of other things. And, you know, and sometimes there are two stories in the news that both involve tigers or something. But when you see a story that is this perfect to the narrative, you know that the narrative being from. At least from the left, that the people going to these protests are not that bright. Right. So that would be the narrative from the Democrats. So this sign is a little too perfect because it fits the narrative. Don't bring masks. Now, what would a real sign say from real conservatives who were legitimately protesting for freedom? What would a real sign say for people who really cared about individual freedom? That's right. It wouldn't tell you to bring a mask. It wouldn't tell you not to bring a mask. It wouldn't even suggest. So your tip off should be that no conservative organizer would tell people what to wear. That's the opposite of freedom. That's the opposite of what they were protesting. So, of course, when it's so Perfect. To look contradictory and stupid. That's not a real sign. Now, as I said on Twitter, if the Russians are not already organizing these protests, are they slipping? What's up with Putin? This is sort of an obvious one. Putin. If Putin is leaving this one alone, I mean, you might as well get rid of the kgb. This one's sort of a layup. All you gotta do is start a little Facebook page, put together a little protest, say, don't bring your masks, be sure to bring your kids. Boom, there's social division. So I wouldn't trust any of the protests to be genuine. Actually, literally, I wouldn't trust any of them to be genuine. Now, that doesn't mean that the people attending are not genuine, because I think they are. The people attending are totally genuine. But you got to wonder about whose idea it was to pick the time of the date. And, you know, so I won't go so far as to say that they're all organized by other countries. But you have to assume some are, right? Don't you assume some are. They have to be. And I ask again, whatever happened to Black Lives Matter? Did Black Lives Matter just decide that they succeeded and now they're done? It's got to be a funding thing, right? They must have lost funding somehow. Here's good news and bad news. There's another study that's not peer reviewed yet that says hydroxychloroquine gave worse outcomes than. Than not using at all. And even when paired with the azithromycin, it gave worse outcomes. But what's weird is that they didn't say they paired it with zinc, which my understanding is that's sort of the. The magic part. If you don't pair it with the zinc and the azithromycin, I don't think. I don't think that even the people who say it works suggest that it would work without the zinc. So you go to CNN and you see stories that say hydroxychloroquine doesn't work. You go over to Fox and you find stories that say it works. And none of them are credible on either side. None of them are credible. So at this point, I'm going to still go with my 60, 40, 60% chance that it doesn't work, 40% chance that it does. But there's another thing that might have a lot of potential. Some of you saw this. So there's a doctor who noticed that there's something weird about the lungs of people who have coronavirus and that they could have very low oxygen so low that you would expect them to actually be dead and they're still walking around and texting on their phones and stuff even though their oxygen level is basically death level. And apparently this is not common to other conditions. If your oxygen gets below a certain level, normally you just pass out and die, I guess however you die. But. So the thought is that that might be the earliest thing you could catch at least of the symptoms that are the dangerous ones. By the time it gets in your lungs, that's the danger. 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. But at the very least you can pull them out of you, you can isolate them. So that could be huge because the cost of a little oxygen sensor. I'm sure they're all sold out. My guess is that everyone is sold out everywhere. But they're not hard to make because, you know, it's pretty small electronic device. So the. I would think there's a non zero chance. I realize I'm being pretty optimistic with this. 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. So I'd say that's very encouraging. I want to give you a little math lesson on virality, but you need to check my work. Okay? You should not be getting. 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, but I think I'm right. If I'm not, just tell me and I'll. I'll get rid of this video right away. So I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think what I'm saying makes sense. You, you decide. So here's a little quiz. Which. Which virus is worse? Which virus is worse? Would you rather have a virus with a 1% death rate with a R4? I'm not sure if I'm expressing that right, but the idea is that one person might give it to four people on average or a.01% death rate with an R2 virality? All right, what do you say? Which one is worse? Which one is worse? And by the way, these are not real viruses. I'm just making up these numbers. Which one is worse? Right, yeah, the one. This is. This is more like a mild flu. Alright, so this is like a mild flu that we get every year. This one destroys civilization. That's how different they are. This one you lose a few days of work. This one destroys civilization. Now, what we're seeing from the pundits is consistently confusing 1% and.01%. You've seen this all over the place, right? 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, hey, the Regular flu is just 1% and this one is 2. No, they're confusing 1% with 0.01%, which would be the regular flu. The best we know is that coronavirus is 10 times more deadly. And again, all of these numbers could change by order of magnitude. I'm just giving you the concept, so don't get hung up on the numbers I'm putting here. I'm speaking conceptually. So the first thing they get wrong is they confuse 1% and 0.01. If you've made that mistake, you should just retire. You should just leave the conversation if you can't tell the difference between those two things. Secondly, they completely ignore the virality difference. Now, my understanding is that the normal flu has whatever the number is. I don't think it's two, but whatever that number is is presumed to be. And again, we don't know for sure because you'd have to know a lot more about the infections and the asymptomatic people and all that. But the assumption is that it's way more viral. So if you forget the R part, there's no point in even comparing them because you're just ignoring a big part of the equation. Now, Why would one in a hundred. I'm looking at all your comments and you have many of them. 100,000American dies at the Hong Kong flu. All right, so did you get my point? Now watch in the comments how many people are going to struggle with this because what we're hearing from the pundits. Let's see if I can do this. What we've heard from the pundits is that we might have a weak virus. So we've heard that it might be a weaker virus than we thought, only 1%. But if it's still that viral, it's the worst thing that ever happened. Now, do we know that the coronavirus is more viral? Do we know that for sure? The answer is no. But we've seen what it did to nursing homes, and that doesn't look normal, right? Have we heard of other nursing homes where a regular flu just takes out the nursing home? What about the cruise ships? There must be the regular flu on cruise ships. Practically every cruise. But have we ever heard an entire cruise ship where people are dying on board? No. So there's clearly something about coronavirus that is impacting hospitals in a way regular flu doesn't. Impacting nursing homes, impacting cruise ships. So that all suggests that it has more virality. And even if this death rate is much lower than the original estimates, it would still destroy civilization if left to spread. So what is 1% of 7 billion? Let's say we never come up with a vaccine, which I think is entirely possible. I would say I have low confidence that we're going to have a vaccine for this kind of ever. I mean, I'd love to think that we would, but honestly, I don't think we're going to. I think we'll have to reach herd immunity, and that's probably the end of the story. Now, that's not bad news because, you know, maybe that's just the only way to get there. Death rates relate to different locales. Yeah, there's definitely difference in the death rates, but there I heard there's 30 different versions of it. All right, 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? They said, oh, this is good news, because if there are a lot more people who have the coronavirus than we thought, then the percentage of people dying from it is way smaller. And that's where you got down to the 1%. 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. So you should ignore everybody who's, who's tried to do any math on this, including me. Now, I saw this argument from Larry Schweikart on Twitter, who believes there's somebody named Dr. Lee, I think a British doctor who has determined that lockdowns make it worse. Now, here's another tip. If you can only find one doctor to back your theory, you should be a little less confident about it than tweeting it. If you can find several doctors that would agree with you that the social isolation doesn't make any difference. If there are several doctors, I'd say you could maybe take a stab at that being true. But if you only got that one, I would say hold off on your confidence there. The other thing Larry Schweikart says that I would take issue with is that economists have estimated that you kill 40,000 people for every 1% extra unemployment. You've heard that, right? You've probably heard on the news every 1% in unemployment kills 40,000 people. Do you believe that? Do you believe that 1% extra unemployment will kill 40,000 people? Well, there's something left out, don't you think? Do you think there's a variable left out? Time. Time. How about time? Because if everybody in the country were unemployed for one week, almost nobody would die, right? So it wouldn't matter how much unemployment it was if it only lasted a week and nobody starved to death, probably nobody would die. How about if it lasts two weeks? Two weeks, probably almost nobody. I mean, you could argue that maybe a few extra people would commit suicide because of the lockdown, you know, losing businesses and stuff. But I think there are a whole bunch of other people who don't die because we're not in traffic. I don't know. So it seems to me that when the economists say 40,000 die for every 1% of unemployment, they have to mean long term unemployment, right? I don't think they mean that unemployment has a bump over the summer and then fairly quickly in next several months gets back to a normal rate. I don't think they're talking about that. That's not the kind of unemployment that kills 40,000 people per point. So that's the math lesson for. Pundits. Now. There are days when the simulation serves up the most delicious of stories. Today is such a day. If you have not heard this yet, prepare to receive a delicious story. A story that tastes so good you can taste it with your ears. That's how good it is. And it goes like this. Yes, that is Christina on the piano downstairs. I told her she could play while I was on periscope so I'd have some background music. So this little tidbit comes to you courtesy of Michael Shellenberger writing in Forbes. If you're not following Michael Shellenberger on Twitter, you really should. He has some of the best content you'll see. And he's. He wrote a little summary and review of a new film produced by Michael Moore. You all know Michael Moore, right? I don't have to describe who Michael Moore is. You all know him. He's got a new documentary. If you haven't heard what it's about, prepare your ears for a delicious story. I mean, you're actually going to be able to taste this in your ears. It's so good. It's going to go in your ears, it's going to embrace your brain and it's just going to massage it. That's how good it is. All right, here it is. This is Michael Moore's documentary that he's produced. I don't think he's in it. And it's being released free to the public on YouTube today and the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Good. Well, you'd expect Michael Moore would care about Earth Day and the environment, because we know he cares a lot about the environment. So what's the name of this? It's called Planet of the Humans. Planet of the Humans. And what's it about? It's about. The documentary reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass and biofuels are wrecking natural environments. What? That's right. It's a documentary produced by Michael Moore that suggests that the Green New Deal type of technologies don't work. And when I say don't work, I mean that they. They cause as much problems or more than they solve. Now, did you see this coming? Because I did not see this coming. But I'm going to say something that I've also said about Bill Maher. You've heard me talk about Bill Maher, and one of the things I like about him, even when I disagree with specific opinions, is it's obvious that he is an actual flexible thinker. If you give him a better argument, if you give him data, he's capable of changing his mind. Very few people can do that, especially public figures. Michael Moore, if you recall, was one of the first Democrats who said, this Trump thing is real. He's reading the public right. He could win. Do you remember? He was the one who could peer through the bubble. Everybody else was lost in the bubble and they couldn't see it. They were actually blind to it. But Michael Moore, whatever you say about him, you know, hold your opinion of Michael Moore's politics. The thing he said that made you mad that time, the fact he doesn't go to the gym as much as you want, but he is a flexible mind, surprisingly. You know, maybe you don't expect it, but I. I consider him a very flexible thinker, like Bill Maher, in a good way. And I think what happened is he came upon this. Honestly, I think he. I think he funded this thing, probably didn't know where it would end up. And I think it ended up in a place that maybe wasn't his first choice. And I think he had the intellectual integrity to go ahead and say, produce this thing. So clap, clap, clap for Michael Moore. Now, I'm planning on watching it tonight with Christina. If we can find it, I'm sure we can find it. So I'll tell you if it's as interesting as I think it is, but it feels as if the green New Deal is so dead. Yeah, this Chariots of Fire, that's what you hear. What a great thing to be playing. All right, let me tell you a story. And then I am going to amaze you by flipping around my whiteboard and completely redesigning college. Are you ready for this? I'm going to redesign college so it's free. Almost. It's going to be so close to free you barely can tell the difference. And it's going to be fairly quick and it's fairly easy. Do you believe it? Before we show you the amazingness which is the other side of my whiteboard, let me tell you this story. It was 1979. I had just graduated college, Oneonta, New York. And I took my belongings from my dorm room and I moved them back to Wyndham, New York, where I grew up, my family owned. And there I traded my car, an old Dawson 510. I traded it to my sister for a one way ticket to California. Because I made this calculation. My calculation was there may never be another time in my life when I have a completely blank slate. I can actually move anywhere I want. 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. Someplace that has good weather, good economics, good travel, just good. Everything good, good. Everything that you need. And so I sold that car for a one way ticket to California. I had two suitcases and $2,000 that I got for graduation, plus some of my own money. And I went to San Francisco and you know, long story short, made my life here one of the best decisions I ever made. Because I moved from a place with no opportunity to a place with unlimited opportunity. And then I took advantage of it. Now you might say to yourself, the other way to look at my situation is I had nothing to lose. Because I didn't. I had nothing, so I had nothing to lose. Very rare to have a blank slate. But when you get one, do not let it go. If you ever get a chance to start anything, whatever it is, from scratch, something that you never get to start from scratch, such as your entire life, if you ever get that chance, don't blow it. This is like solid gold. It's the one time you can really make something out of nothing. You know, you can. You can get something done. Now this brings us to the coronavirus. The bad news about the coronavirus, you already know people Dying, the economy, the economy falling apart. But there's one weird aspect of this in that it. It destroys everything we assumed about big institutions and the way we used to do things. I'm sure that working at home will be a thing and I'm sure that, you know, online education got a. Got a big boost. But how could you make college almost free and way better? Way better. And here's how. So I'm going to call it free, meaning that it's almost free. You know, nothing's free free. But it goes like this. You would first develop a Yelp like search engine for classes. And the Yelp search engine would be able to search on any platform. So even within a subscription service, it would be able to search for a specific class. So let's say you wanted to take a specific class. You could look at the ratings and you could say, oh, there's one on YouTube, but there's a more highly rated one on Udemy. So Udemy, I don't know how you say that. So you go there instead. How hard would it be to build a Yelp search engine for individual classes? Not that hard. You know, that's well within the range of stuff we do. Right? Let me fix this. By the way. I'm dyslexic as hell. I don't know. I don't know if I've ever mentioned that, but just one of my many oddities. But that was actually just a spelling error, not dyslexia. So here's my idea. I would like to create a major that's useful. We all know that higher education evolved over time. And because it just sort of evolved and got ossified and, you know, just doesn't need to change. It just didn't change. It's just a mess. So I would like to invent a major which is the major that would be free. So you'd start with this and then if it works, you could expand it to other. Other majors especially. Well, I would invent a major called Life Strategy. And Life Strategy would be a not too deep dive, but all of the good stuff, you know, the 80% that matters that you can get quickly in these and maybe other other situations. So every skill requires communication, persuasion, economics, statistics. I don't mean in the math sense necessarily. You could do a little math, but mostly I'm talking practical statistics. An example of that would be the idea of diversifying your portfolio. That's practical statistics. Another example would be having a talent stack where every time you add a talent that works well together, you multiply your odds of success. So when I say statistics, I mean figuring out the odds of things. This looks like a better chance than this. How do you compare things? That sort of thing. You want to teach people a little bit of design, a little bit of history. History is useful not because it repeats, but because you see a whole bunch of patterns. So the more patterns you see of like, oh, when history was like that, the thing you have to watch for is this thing. So the more patterns you see, the more well rounded you are. You should learn a little bit about managing. How to hire and fire. See, I can do a better job of lining this up for you. How to hire and fire a little bit about startups. If you wanted to start your own company, banking and investing, one of the biggest needs, especially in the lower income community, and you hear this from Black Lives Matter and activists in those communities that people really need to learn how to handle money, you take it for granted. If you've been around a family that knows how to do it, you just sort of pick it up by association. But if you've never learned how to manage credit or, you know, get a loan or any of that stuff, how would you know if you didn't have anybody you could ask? So you should teach all those basic things, how to, how to stack your skills, a little bit about technology so you'd understand what's, you know, how to, the basics of what's an app, what's the cloud, you know, how do things work together. Now the details of all this are highly variable, so I'm just giving you the concept. Then we imagine that it's certified, could be certified by the government. Imagine if you will, that the government in the United States said, we're going to have one just amazing class. Like anybody who gets through these classes, you're really going to want to hire. Now the exception would be STEM and some specialties. You know, you still need lawyers and doctors and scientists and stuff. So they're not taking this major. This major is just for the generalists, the people who might want to start a company, the people who are going to, you know, go to work for a Fortune 500 company and be trained within some special job, etc. So the idea was maybe the government could certify it, but maybe individuals could, you know, what about me? Could I make one and then certify it? Why not? All you need is credibility, so. Well, I don't have that kind of credibility. Imagine if somebody who did have credibility came up with a set of classes and said, if you do this many hours and these things and meet this checklist, you've got a degree. How long should it take you to get this degree? I say one year. I say one year. And you could do it at night, you could do it at home. I think this degree is one year. Now if you full time, you know, maybe two years part time or something. So here's. Let me make a bold claim, all right? I know you like it when I make cocky, unsupported bold claims, but it wouldn't be me if I didn't do that, right? Here's my bold claim. You take a group of 100 students chosen randomly from any community except the black community. So it's any other group, you take 100 of them and I'll take 100 African American students from the poorest school. And let's assume that they have good enough grades so that they could qualify for this. You probably need some minimum standard, you know, probably a high school education, high school degree. I'll take 100 African American low income kids and I'll give them some version of strategy. That's what they'll learn. They might, it might only even be one year, but that's what they'll get. And then you let the other, the control group, the hundred, everybody else, they take whatever they want. Now you subtract out the STEM people because they're all going to get good jobs. That ruins the experiment. So in both sides, if anybody's STEM on either side, you toss them out. So you just compare my hundred African American students from a poor neighborhood who have learned solid gold strategy. They understand how to manage money, how to start businesses, they've seen lots of historical patterns, they learned how to network. I forgot the right networking. But networking would be one of the skills that would be up here. They've learned business writing, they can give a speech and they have these skills. And here's my cocky claim. Check with me in 10 years and my group of 100 African American students from a poor neighborhood will all be on average will be earning more money than the control group because the control group took dumbass college courses. They were taking sociology and anthropology and know French literature and bullshit. And a hundred of my hypothetical African American students from a poor neighborhood just got solid gold life strategy. That works because of math. It's just math. You know, the math of if you try 10 things, one of them might work. It's pretty strong math. The math of if you diversify your portfolio, you're not going to lose it all by making one Dumb gamble. It's just math, right? It's very simple math, but it's just math and skill stacking. The idea that you can cleverly stack your skills and that improves your odds. Again, it's just math. So you give me the group who runs their life based on the math of life. The things we know are the best stuff, the things that combine best always have the best career potential. The things that let you see the furthest and manage things the most effectively. That's my bet. My bet is I'll give a one year education to people and they will be ahead in income in 10 years. So let me see in the comments. What part of this do you think is impractical? Now? There's an assumed part of it that is unstated, which is that the free market will would allow the quality of these classes to continually improve. And some of these classes might be free, like on YouTube. And some of them might be. And some of them might be. Somebody says racism. I don't even know how that fits into this conversation. And so some of them might be free. Some of them might cost, you know, $20 because they're so good. It's like the best rated class for, you know, organic chemistry. But organic chemistry is so bad that you'd be willing to pay $20 to get the good one, you know, so you'd have a chance. Would corporations back it? Well, they would if the government gave it credentials. And they would if they saw what the kids were learning. And they would if you had a little bit of a track record to show that those kids performed better. So I think you would have to, you'd probably have to subsidize it or something for a while just to test it. Somebody said Jordan Peterson had a similar idea. That does not surprise me. No, I would not call this like a brilliant, innovative new idea that nobody ever had. The only claim I'm going to make is it's more like a prediction. Because this is all easy, right? Don't you know that there will be a yelp for college classes that are online, you know, in other classes, you know that's coming, right? It's just too obvious that that would someday exist. So does it need credentials? Well, it helps. It helps accreditation is what I should say. Not credentials need to add the scientific method in the, in the major. I thought I actually, I did have. Thank you for that. I did have the scientific method on my first draft and I missed it when I wrote it out here. Scientific method and also networking is the other one that I forgot and my pen's running it, silly as that. All right, so what do you think? Where did they learn how to interact socially? That should also be one of the classes. And I know this sounds like I'm making this up, but I swear that was also on the first draft. Social. Media, you can imagine. You can imagine other things too. Such as learning how to travel. Yeah. If you were a poor kid and you'd literally never been on an airplane, wouldn't you like a one day class at least to teach you? How do you book a flight? How does anybody fly? 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. If you've never been around it, you, you'd have no way to know how to book a flight and navigate an airport. You wouldn't even try. AD hypnosis and negotiation. Well, that's actually under persuasion, so each of these categories have subcategories. You know, communication would include speeches and writing and maybe social media. You could start a school with it. Well, the whole point is to not start a school. The whole point is that you don't need a physical school, but you can't make governments do it. Well, that's true. Could you do it for high school? I think you could. You know, it seems to me that homeschooling is likely to be good. You know, I have of course, a little bit of experience with kids in school recently. And I'll tell you my personal opinion, which is matched somewhat by the kids themselves. School is kind of a horror. 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. And the pressure. It actually sounds kind of terrible. I mean, I don't know how bad it was when I was a kid because you forget, you know, you don't really remember exactly what it was like, but I don't remember hating it. But today it looks like it's just a pretty bad deal. Critical thinking. Did I forget that one too? Damn. I had a logic course up there. I think critical thinking is the better term for it, but yeah, so. But anyway, you see the point, right? You see the point that if you spend a little time, you could come up with a life strategy class that would be better than anything that anybody's learning. All right, that's all I got for you today. Give you and I will talk to you in the morning. We got lots of fun stuff to talk about. And tonight you can have a wonderful night's sleep. 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. Because if you find yourself in a situation where there's nothing to lose, well, then you're free. If you really want freedom. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, as Janis Joplin famously said before she died of an overdose. But of course, that takes away the motivational quality of it. All right, I'll talk to you in the morning. Have a great night.