Episode 1601 Scott Adams: Watch Me Transform Bad News Into Good News Right in Front of You
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
139.36858
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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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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to all of this incompetence and fraud and corruption,
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in a way that would change the election result?