Episode 1601 Scott Adams: Watch Me Transform Bad News Into Good News Right in Front of You
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Words per minute
139.36858
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3
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Summary
Scott Adams shares the strangest thing he learned while watching the new Matrix sequel, The Matrix: Afterlife. Scott Adams is a writer, podcaster, musician, and podcaster. He's also the host of the popular podcast, Coffee with Scott Adams.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of your life.
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And I know yesterday was amazing, but it just gets better every day.
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And if you'd like to take it up to the final level of awesomeness,
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All you need is a cover mug or a glass, a tanker gel sistine,
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a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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It's the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic.
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May I share with you the strangest thing that happened to me yesterday?
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As some of you know, I've been trying to learn to play the drums.
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or I'll remember a song that had some good drums in it,
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and I'll try to learn just that little bit of the fun part of the drums.
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And one of my favorite old-time songs was White Rabbit by the Jefferson Airplane.
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And the White Rabbit has a drum opening where there's like...
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You know, there's sort of a quick drum rolls in a number of places.
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And so yesterday, I guess it was yesterday morning,
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And I was just playing White Rabbit, White Rabbit, White Rabbit over and over again,
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I've never before been interested in playing anything about that song, White Rabbit.
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So I decide to watch The Matrix, the new Matrix sequel.
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You remember when Neo, in the movies, he was a hacker?
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I'll try to do this without giving away any plot, right?
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But it doesn't give away anything to say that he's been reimagined as a game designer.
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So Neo's job is a little bit closer to mine now.
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Because it's more about imagination and creating a story with characters that are designed.
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And interestingly, I've just been sort of teasing in public.
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Because Elon Musk, who's the big proponent of the simulation idea,
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tweeted that, you know, it feels like he's in a Dilbert comic.
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Which is weird, because that would make me the author of the simulation that Elon Musk is in,
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So it was like, okay, this is making my brain hurt.
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How many of you saw The Matrix yesterday when it came out?
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Okay, to tell you that this movie mapped my life would be an understatement.
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First of all, the song White Rabbit is prominently a part of the movie.
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So I'm watching a movie about this simulation, well, talking about this simulation.
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And it's not just in the background, it's like a featured element of the movie.
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And also there were two names in the movie that had a lot of direct, recent impact on me.
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I won't give you the names, but there were two names that I had some history with just recently
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And here's the thing that I finally figured out.
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You know how in the movie Neo is called the One?
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Now watch the movie, and just remember I just said that.
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And I never realized that when they were saying that Neo was the One,
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Now, the movie doesn't say what I'm saying, so that's not a spoiler.
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Anyway, I saw some bad reviews for the movie, but I have to say I loved it.
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Of course, the concept of it just blows my mind.
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If you like sci-fi and you like the first three, this is a real fun trip.
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But I can see why the critics had their problems with it, but I like it.
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I say the pandemic is over, for all practical purposes, when the reports about the pandemic
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And so you're seeing tweets today about the Omicron, you know, burning through the population
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and spreading like crazy and we're going to have peaks and we're already seeing surges
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and our holiday plans are going to be more surges.
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And you read it and there's no mention of death.
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But then go to the news and read a news story about the pandemic.
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Now, I'm still going to stick with the Greg Goffeld promoted February 1.
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If you haven't watched The Five, if you know, Greg is pushing February 1 as MI,
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co-pushers of February 1, trying to get the idea that the government needs to have some kind
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of a focused target, which, of course, is subject to revision, like any target would be.
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But after we get past this surge from the holidays that we know is coming,
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we really have to have a conversation with our government about getting back to normal life.
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And I think things are looking really good for February 1.
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Now, I know a lot of you want to say it's over already, blah, blah, blah.
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But China, interestingly, just locked down 13 million people in one of their bigger cities.
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They haven't detected Omicron in the country yet, which I don't believe.
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I mean, I don't believe it's not there, but I do believe it's not detected or not reported.
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But doesn't China have a big problem if they have Delta without Omicron?
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Because the weirdness of the, let's say, the effectiveness of which their lockdowns work.
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I mean, they're brutally cruel to the citizens, but they do seem to be effective, apparently,
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when you do the total lockdown, not the kind we do.
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So, what will happen if Delta starts sweeping through their major countries?
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I don't know that the Chinese healthcare system could handle a real outbreak.
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I mean, they had no choice but to lock down the whole city when they found it.
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But I think that they may be at the beginning of the pandemic.
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Can somebody who is smarter than I am, which is a lot of you, on anything involving pandemics and viruses,
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could you give me a reasonability check on this assumption,
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that China might be closer to the beginning of the pandemic?
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Because if they haven't had anything but vaccinations,
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and I don't think their vaccinations are that hot anyway,
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Now, their only hope is that Omicron gets there first, but maybe it's Delta.
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You know, that's why they locked down the city.
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Is your assumption that in the United States we have over-counted COVID deaths or under-counted?
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Tell me in the comments, what's your assumption?
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Let's see, if we over-counted or under-counted.
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Everybody here is saying, every one of you is saying over.
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Here's the argument why it's vastly under-counted.
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And I'm going to tell you the argument, and then you tell me if it doesn't sound reasonable.
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Now, what do you think is the process for counting deaths?
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Like, in your imagination, how do you imagine it happens?
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Now, the way I imagine it is that somebody dies in the hospital.
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The doctors say, okay, those symptoms look like COVID.
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Say, oh, we even know where the COVID came from.
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I think you can use your doctor judgment to say, oh, this is obviously COVID.
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I mean, you don't hear about it a lot, but there's still a lot of people who just die at home.
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Now, these are people who might have been in sort of a hospice situation at home,
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meaning that you knew they were going to go pretty soon.
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And the family member says, well, grandma died.
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And then does the doctor say, do you think it was COVID?
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They don't know if it's COVID, if there wasn't a test.
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So, there was a study done recently that showed, at least in one area where they did the study,
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that the number of COVID deaths were grossly undercounted.
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Dr. Robert Gaylord, hospitals were totally empty in 2020.
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Okay, I'm going to block you, A, for being stupid, because that comment is stupid,
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You all realize that how empty the hospitals were was because the hospitals stopped taking regular business.
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I mean, whether or not there was a COVID pandemic.
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So, the report said that when everybody is overworked, that they just don't do the same level of effort to have a cause on the death report.
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So, I guess our system for reporting cause of death just broke down completely.
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Now, my experience in the corporate world suggests undercounting.
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So, as the creator of the Dilbert comic, who knows a little bit about bureaucracy and how people act when they're at work,
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to me, these two competing stories, one is that too many things were coded COVID, which is possible,
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certainly in some places that may have happened,
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then the counter, the alternative explanation is that because people were incompetent and overworked
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and the system broke down, that they didn't report all the COVID.
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Which one of those seems more likely to you based on your life experience?
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The overcounted kind of assumes that everybody was sort of in on something
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or they had a standard that didn't make sense and everybody was adhering to some weird standard.
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Well, looks like I'm going to have a problem in a minute.
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All right, so there's a robot that can cultivate a desert.
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So there's this little robot that's autonomous.
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It'll go out, and it'll search for little wet spots, and it'll plant a seed.
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So if you let the robots run around on the edge of the desert long enough,
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they'll actually shrink the size of the desert by planting stuff around the edges until it grows in.
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There's a similar idea that I've seen tested in which you just let livestock wander around on the edge of the desert.
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So somewhere between where there's vegetation and the edge of the desert,
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And they'll eat the vegetation, they'll wander into the desert part, and they'll take a poop.
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And then the poop becomes a fertilizer from which something new grows.
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So as long as you've got livestock wandering around the edges of a desert, the desert gets smaller.
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So now we've got this robot that can shrink a desert, and we know the animal model.
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You can imagine having a robot that grabs the manure and takes it to the desert.
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So you can have the robot searching not for water, but for go shit.
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And if it finds some, it's like, oh, this is good.
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It grabs a little handful and goes over to the desert and dumps it there.
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But between these two technologies, and some combination thereof, we could shrink the size of deserts.
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I think that's certainly a path out, right, to shrink the deserts.
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Now, I'd also hypothesize some time ago that apparently one of the reasons that we get hurricanes on the east coast of the United States
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is that there's a time of year in which there's a temperature differential between the ocean and northern Africa.
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The ocean is cooler, and the difference causes the formation of hurricanes.
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Now, it only happens in one time a year because that's when the temperature differentials are just right.
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What happens if you shrink the desert in northern Africa?
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In theory, it should reduce the hurricane powers.
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Now, getting it done might be hard, but there's nothing technologically hard about it at all.
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Well, I don't know much about milkweed, but that sounds like something you've looked into.
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How many of you saw the compilation clip where the mainstream media is using the term a viral blizzard?
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Have you heard the term a viral blizzard for what's coming this winter?
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Viral blizzard, and everybody's using it at the same time.
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If you would like to know, and so some people ask me on Twitter, a few people ask me, does that look like professional work?
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Like, is there some professional persuader who came up with this viral blizzard thing because it sounds a little too good?
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Watch the series Dope Sick about Purdue Pharma, a real company.
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And in that movie, one of the characters explains a trick that Pharma uses, and then they used it.
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And the trick is you invent a condition so that people have a reason to prescribe your drugs.
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And in the movie, because they had a drug, OxyContin, that was good for pain, but it wore off too soon, sooner than they claimed it would last.
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So they invented a new category called breakthrough pain.
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And they said, oh, no, if your patient didn't get 12 hours of relief, that's because they're in that special category.
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But as soon as Purdue and all of its money people and the experts they hired to say these words out loud,
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they created the idea that there was a thing called breakthrough pain,
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and that the only way to treat it was to get twice as much OxyContin.
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In the series, they explain how they know to do it, because it's a common trick.
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We've got trillions of dollars of money on the line for vaccinations,
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should we become a country that keeps getting vaccinated.
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But if Omicron rips through and gives us natural immunity that actually works against the other variants,
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then a trillion dollars or more will be left on the table for big pharma.
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Trillions of dollars that they kind of expected to make would just go away
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if Omicron does the same thing as a vaccination, or better.
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It is not a coincidence that there's a name for it.
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The viral blizzard is the reason for vaccinations.
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If you didn't have a word for it, or a phrase, a viral blizzard,
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and you just described it, here's what it would sound like.
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so deaths will probably be, you know, reasonable and lower after the holidays.
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So it looks like, you know, we're in pretty good shape.
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If you just described it straight, that's what it would sound like.
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But if you really need people to get worried about the weakest virus of all time, Omicron,
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It's so many people got it that the hospitals could be overwhelmed,
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and you better get a vaccination just to keep the hospitals open, and stuff like that.
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Once you know that this is a common pharma trick,
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to come up with a new phrase that looks like a new kind of condition?
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Elon Musk said in an interview with the Babylon Bee guys,
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It's really interesting watching them just chat.
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But he says that you could have enough solar panels to power the whole country
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which is not very big considering the whole United States.
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So 100-square-miles would give you all the solar panels you need.
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You'd have batteries, of course, to store it so that you're live all the time.
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Now, of course, Elon doesn't mention environmental impact
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of all the discarded and old solar panels and stuff,
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But he did mention, and I had never heard this idea before, but I love it,
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that if you just put solar panels in the area around existing nuclear power plants,
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because people don't like to live near nuclear power plants,
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So you could put just solar panels only where there are nuclear power plants,
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and according to him, the solar panels around the nuclear power plant
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would produce more power than the power plant.
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Now, I'm assuming his math is good, because, you know, he's good at math.
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because the nuclear power plant is on the grid.
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So we have the exact right place to put not only nuclear waste,
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because the best place to store that is also right around the power plant,
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because it's the same place people don't want to live.
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that we've got these technologies that could solve everything.
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Well, Trump is back-making news, as he likes to do.
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So on January 6th, the most provocative date he could ever pick,
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he's going to have some kind of a press conference,
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and we don't know what's coming, but it's going to be fun.
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I know it's going to be fun. That's all I know.
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So, of course, he picks the most provocative date to do this.
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He said the insurrection took place on November 3rd,
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of last year and announced that he will hold a news conference on January 6th.
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So he's going to try to say that the election itself was the insurrection
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Trump says, why isn't the House, the unselect committee,
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investigating the cause of the January 6th protest,
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Now, that's a pretty good approach, isn't it, persuasion-wise,
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because fake news is something that was used against him.
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So it looks like he's trying to do a flip on the insurrection.
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Now, you know, there are answers to that question,
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So we live in a country in which for the last five years,
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True or false, we have learned that our intelligence agencies
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True or false, we have found out that Democrats
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Democrats cannot be trusted as evidenced by the Russia collusion hoax.
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would say the same thing about Republicans, right?
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but probably you're leaning right if you're watching this.
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So, both sides think the other side is not credible.
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Any illusion you had about the news being credible is gone.
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You know, did we manage the pandemic flawlessly?
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where literally every institution in this country
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is fraudulent and corrupt, or incompetent.
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is either corrupt, incompetent, or fraudulent.
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to all of this incompetence and fraud and corruption,
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in a way that would change the election result?