Episode 1088 Scott Adams: Kids and School Openings, Herd Immunity, Biden's Cadaver Strategy, Teachers Unions
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
146.6852
Summary
Scott Adams is back with another episode of Coffee with Scott Adams. This week, he talks about AOC's Green New Deal, George Conway, and why AOC is not quite a child anymore. Plus, he calls out one of President Trump's best persuasion plays.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for a Coffee with Scott Adams.
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One of, if not the best, moments of your entire life.
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Sure, you're thinking to yourself, well what about the birth of my first child?
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But it was no simultaneous sip, I think we can agree.
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And to enjoy the simultaneous sip, all you need is a cupper mug or a glass of tanker,
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chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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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's coming up now.
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I guess there's some things that even the simultaneous sip can't fix.
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Speaking of George Conway, he wrote a scathing article.
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And if you saw the tweets about the article, you would know that if you're a Trump supporter,
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The Democrats, by the way, once you see this, you can't unsee it.
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The Republicans, by and large, try to argue with data and reasons.
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But they're at least trying to use reasons, and they're trying really hard to use data,
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It's just really hard, because the science is changing, the data is always incomplete,
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If you talk about the whole world, we're not all good at it.
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But Democrats seem to have completely abandoned that fool's errand,
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because trying to be rational in the irrational world doesn't work as well as you would hope it would.
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But the Democrats have completely abandoned that model in favor of replacing it all with sarcasm.
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They literally use sarcasm as a substitute for reasons.
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And you'll see that all the time, now that I mention it.
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And certainly that whole George Conway article was that.
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Included in his article, he's trying to dump on the president for being wrong or being silly or being crazy.
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And he spreads the fake news that the president suggested drinking disinfectant.
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Now, if you're going to spread the most obvious fake news as if it's true,
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you don't have any respect for the people reading your stuff.
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Oh, I want to call out one of President Trump's best persuasion plays.
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And I didn't see it live, but I heard about it.
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It is true that the president referred to the Green New Deal as a child's plan.
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So I want to call out that that is really, really good framing.
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Because first of all, you've got Greta, who looks young.
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But because she looks young, and because the children are the ones who are protesting, etc.,
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there is very, very much a young flavor to the Green New Deal.
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So there is, in your biased, irrational mind, it does bias toward young people
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who want to, you know, get the most active in fixing climate change as they see it.
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Now, what's good about this is that it's what I call a high ground maneuver.
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Once you say something is a child's plan, you can kind of walk away.
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Because once you've so labeled it, it starts looking like it.
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When I was a kid, I was very angry at my father.
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I was angry at my father that he would not help me build a functional airplane
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And I thought, how hard is it really to build an airplane?
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How hard is it to put an engine on a little airplane that you build in the backyard?
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Build me a functioning airplane or you're worthless to me.
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What kind of an unscientific father do I have who can't build me a functioning airplane and a wood?
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A child's plan is build me an airplane and a wood, dad.
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I'm not sure your father has all of the lightweight materials and tools necessary to build a functioning airplane.
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Likewise, the Green New Deal, when you throw in the get rid of meat and airplanes and stuff like that,
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And I think that it's sort of a waste of time to engage it like it's serious.
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Simply calling it a child's plan is really good because it's not as if we're capable of hashing out the details.
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It's not like we're capable of knowing if those long-range projection models are accurate or accurate enough within a range.
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We don't know what the economic outcome will be.
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We don't know what new technologies will come up, what changes will surprise us.
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One of the things that this whole COVID thing is doing, and I talk about this in the terms of persuasion,
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everything that's associated with everything else gets smeared by anything that happens to one of them.
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So let's say you were a twin, and your twin causes a horrible murder.
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Well, even if you had nothing to do with it, it kind of washes over onto you.
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You shouldn't, but people aren't going to look at you the same.
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It's just the way our world works, that if there's any relationship with two things,
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whatever happens to one just bleeds over into the other in our irrational minds.
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And look what's happening as we collectively, we citizens of Earth, try to figure out what is scientific
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and what is not scientific in this COVID situation.
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And the more we wrestle with this, and the more we see science failing and failing and failing,
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And, of course, as we all are sophisticated to know, science is mostly about failing,
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So you're mostly failing until you hit that little nugget of truth that maybe you can hold onto for a while.
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But when you're in it, it looks like mostly failing, right?
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If you get to just check out the end result, it's like, hey, good job, scientists.
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But if you're actually in the process of the science creating the answers and not knowing the answers,
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it just looks like science is completely incompetent.
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Science is every bit as good as it was last year when you trusted it more.
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It's just that you're in the fight and you get to see all the ugly stuff because they can't hide it.
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Now, what's that do to your thoughts about climate change?
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If we were rational creatures, we would say, oh, you can't compare these two things.
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That's how science works until you become more right than you're wrong.
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We're going to have to test a lot of stuff and make sure we can reproduce those tests and everything else.
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suddenly, suddenly, whatever bad feelings you're going to develop from this about science, and you know you are, right?
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If you're watching this, it's hard to be just as confident about scientists as it was a year ago.
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A year ago, I'll bet you felt a little bit better about the accuracy of science.
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Now you're going to take that to the climate change discussion.
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And even if you don't acknowledge that that baggage is coming with you, it's coming with you.
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And it's healthy because the problem with the climate argument is that there's a bit of an over-claim about what they can know about the future,
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certainly about the economics of the future and how we'll adjust to higher temperatures, et cetera.
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I am on, in case anybody's new to this, I'm on the team that says temperatures are almost certainly going up and that humans are some part of that.
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But it doesn't mean it's the end of the world because we're really good at adapting.
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Let me give you an anecdote from my past that will be useful in understanding the present.
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We are obsessed with trying to figure out which of our leaders are brilliant and which of them are idiots, right?
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Oh, that Swedish prime minister or whatever they have, king.
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I'm so American, I don't even know the form of government of our allies.
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When I was working at Crocker Bank, a big bank that was bought by Wells Fargo later, but in San Francisco, it was a real big bank.
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And my job was to study the performance of the individual branch managers on a variety of measures that senior management would provide.
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They'd say, you have to cross-sell this much and bring in these many deposits, et cetera.
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And then I was in charge of collecting all the data, putting it into some kind of summary reports, doing a little programming to make reports, and to tell management which managers did better.
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But apparently, I'm the wrong person for that job, because that's not how it went.
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I went into the senior vice president, who was sort of the person I mostly reported to for this information.
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And I said, you know, if I'm being honest, you're not really measuring the skill of the managers, because if you give them a goal, and some exceed the goal, and some don't meet the goal, but the goal is different for each branch.
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Right? So every branch had its own goal that was customized for their situation.
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I said, if you find out that somebody exceeded their goal, and somebody did not, what have you actually measured?
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What you measured is the quality of the person who set the goal.
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Because whoever set that target, what if they were wrong?
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You haven't measured the quality of the management.
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All you've done is measured the quality of your measuring.
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On top of that, I said, you do realize that even the data,
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forget about the fact that measuring against these arbitrary goals that senior management made,
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I guarantee you that the data that's coming in is not reliable.
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And I gave reasons, you know, this data is not reliable for this reason.
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I had to use an estimate, I had to make an assumption, whatever.
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And this is when the senior vice president looked at me
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and gave me one of the biggest red pills I've ever choked down.
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This is one of the biggest red pills you will ever eat.
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I'm in charge of figuring out which branches are doing well and which are not.
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Because it's so bad, you're going to be firing people who did a great job.
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And my senior vice president, who was one of these,
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I honestly think he was one of these enlightened people.
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He was a six foot, I think he was six foot eight bearded elf of a guy.
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And there was just something a little bit more aware about him.
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He was just seeing things a little more clearly.
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And when I told him that my data was completely worthless
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for the intended task of managing his managers,
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he looked at me and he gave me this red pill that I give to you.
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I'm only going to use it when it agrees with what I was going to do anyway.
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When there was a manager that he felt, for his own reasons,
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If they coincidentally said that manager did not meet their numbers,
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And if he found somebody he thought was doing a good job,
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It was my professional job to make data that wasn't accurate,
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So, if you don't understand that that's the normal way the world works,
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So, and of course, the Dilbert cartoon was born out of that experience.
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Specifically, the experience that the insanity that I experienced at one company
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and I realized, you know, my first thought was,
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I'm getting away from that company that makes irrational decisions.
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and now it's all going to be, you know, good, rational.
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If you were going to invent a fictional character
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who was going to appear at this point in history,
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but they're going to appear on the scene as a hero,
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to give somebody who was going to be really smart,
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I mean, the Scott part tells you they're smart.
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but it's the Scott part that tells you they're smart.
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who could hold the entire earth and heavens on its shoulder.
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What a great character name for this simulation.
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Oh, it turns out that that's the new White House medical advisor
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and you know of him from the hydroxychloroquine videos,
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you know that he's in favor of at least giving it a chance
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And he weighed in recently on this herd immunity question,
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that some people have some kind of natural T cell immunity
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that's not the kind of immunity you pick up on a test
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And that there may be so many people that have it
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that real herd immunity comes at lower than 20%.
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You've got a bunch of people on the cruise ship
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which is not to say that either of them are false
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so the vagueness of the predictions is very powerful
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because when you when you have vague predictions people do the work for you
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and so you let's say you you had four predictions one of them is clearly right
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but could have been right by coincidence you know could have been a good guess
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and let's say two of them are a little bit ambiguous well it's going to look like a belief to a believer it's going to look like three out of four were right
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because they're going to say this one is definitely right and these other two
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well you know if I didn't have this one that was right maybe I wouldn't believe that they're those vague things are true but since I got one right
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I'm going to say these other two were close enough the way they were worded allows for me to say that this thing that happened fits
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the reason that Dilbert doesn't have a last name
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here's the other thing that religion and Q gets right
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just the things you focus on become more important to you over time
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the nature of Q is that they say do your own research
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and I think there's something nerdily delicious
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was that he was a mentally unstable Russian agent