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Dec. 27, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:42
Episode 352 Scott Adams: The Fence-Wall, Reid Hoffman, Visiting the Troops, Stock Market
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Time Text
Well, let's try this.
We're going to try it without a microphone.
And this is coming to you from my phone.
So neither of my iPads is working for reasons that are mysterious.
And neither of my microphones work.
So I've got two iPads and two different microphones and no combination of them work together.
So, so far my phone has worked most of the time, so this will at least tell us if the problem is the iPad or the service.
Alright, let's talk about a few things.
Since I'm expecting this Periscope will not work, I'll just jump into a few things and see how far we get before it fails.
You know, I've been trying to popularize the word whence, which is a combination of wall and fence.
But I've decided that whence is a little too clever, it's not sticky enough, and we could do better.
If what we're trying to do is come up with a name that will make everybody happy...
The trick here is that the Republicans need to think they got a wall and the Democrats need to think it's a fence.
And the steel slat structure conveniently makes the case for both of those.
It's sort of a fence that looks like a wall, sort of.
But I think the better name would be the fence wall.
Fence dash wall.
Fence wall. Here's why.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but President Trump has correctly identified that the real problem is President Trump.
In other words, it's personal.
So when the Democrats are rejecting his border structure, they're not really rejecting border security.
That's the impact of it.
The outcome is that it rejects border security.
But that's not the purpose.
Nancy Pelosi has made it very clear that the wall equals the president's penis.
I'm not even joking.
Nancy Pelosi has very clearly made it her argument that the wall is the president's penis.
And she doesn't want to support the president's penis.
So it doesn't matter that she also wants border security.
She just can't support this president's penis because it's personal.
So the president, quite rightly, has tried to depersonalize it.
And by the way, let me give credit where credit is due.
Nancy Pelosi had a really good line that's consistent with her philosophy that this is about the president's penis.
She doesn't use those words.
But she was mocking him for backing down from a solid structure.
And she said the other day, well, at first he wanted this all concrete wall.
It's concrete everywhere. And now he wants to do some kind of a steel structure.
And what's next?
A beaded curtain?
All right. Now you have to say...
Forget about the politics.
The technique was really good.
So that was Nancy Pelosi's line, that the president was backing down from a concrete structure to some kind of a steel wall, and what's next?
A beaded curtain? Now, what does beaded curtain have in common with her other attacks on the president?
She is basically trying to emasculate him.
She's trying to emasculate him.
So she's turned it into a manhood question.
Oh, you're going to have a wall?
That's really just your manhood at stake there.
And then if you don't get your wall, you're getting a beaded curtain.
So she's basically mocking his manhood because this has never been about border security, right?
Nobody really thinks this is about border security anymore, do they?
It's so clearly gone beyond everybody agreeing that border security is important.
Everybody's already agreed that some might be a little wall-ish and some might be a little fence-ish and some might be drones or whatnot.
So there's no real point of disagreement, except that they can't let President Trump win.
So here's my suggestion.
Instead of calling it a fence or a wall, call it a fence wall.
Fence stash wall.
You put fence first, and you put the actual word in there.
Wentz was cute, but didn't really have the benefits of fence wall.
I'll bet you can't say fence wall without wanting to say it again.
Fence wall. Fence wall.
It's pretty sticky. Alright, there was an amusing story that seems to be running only on Fox News.
Let me make sure before I say that.
I might be wrong about this.
Yes, I don't see it on CNN. So the biggest story on Fox News doesn't even exist on CNN. It's about billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman.
Apparently, he donated seven-something million dollars to Democrats during the 2016 election.
And one of the organizations he donated to, unbeknownst to him, he didn't know exactly what everybody was doing, because when you're donating that much money and you donate to a bunch of different organizations, you don't really know everything those organizations are doing.
And one of those organizations, quite awkwardly, Was trying to influence the Alabama race with Doug Jones and Roy Moore.
They had a false flag online operation in which they were pretending to be Russians influencing the election.
So they were trying to make it look as if the Russians were behind the Republicans in the Alabama election.
Now, I don't know if there was enough influence to change the election.
But how awkward is it The Democrats ran a fake Russian online operation just at the time when Republicans are blaming Democrats for maybe making up this whole Russian collusion story.
So it turns out that making up Russia collusion stories is something Democrats do.
So here's the question you no longer have to wonder if it's true or is it not true.
Do Democratic operatives pretend to be Russians?
Yes. Now, it's kind of awkward, isn't it?
It's kind of awkward.
Because before you thought to yourself, well, I'll tell you one thing that never happens.
You know, at least one thing we know doesn't happen is that the Democrats are not just pretending to be Russians and pretending to collude.
That doesn't happen.
Well, well, it happened.
Now, the question of whether it also happened during the presidential election, we don't have any evidence of that, right?
So I'm not aware of any evidence that would suggest Democrats were behind it.
But, especially with the hacking stuff, there have been lots of, I would say, credible speculation.
Credible speculation doesn't mean it's true.
It just means it's quite believable based on what we know.
And there is credible speculation that even the Russians hacking of the DNC might have been a false flag and wasn't Russian at all.
So just when the Democrats would not want you to believe there is any such thing as fake Russian collusion, we have proof Now let's talk about the troop visit.
President Trump cleverly Visited the troops the day after Christmas.
He was a big hit.
Got lots of video clips of the troops cheering and enthusiastic and all those things which the anti-Trumper say can't happen.
So it was from a PR perspective for the president, it was a really, really good move.
Here's the funny part.
On Fox News, it was reported that the president can really keep a secret, or his team can, and that nobody knew.
Nobody knew he was going to Iraq.
That's how it was. So it was a big, well-kept secret, and there were no leaks.
So that's how it was reported on Fox News.
At the same time, was it Politico or Vox?
I forget, one of the anti-Trump news organizations.
They were reporting that it was the worst-kept secret ever Completely different, completely opposite words.
And their argument was not about the leaks.
I don't think they reported any leaks, but that there were so many clues that it was going to happen that people knew it was happening.
And apparently there are people around the world now, amateurs, who track plane tail numbers and they know if Air Force One, the one that goes overseas.
They know whether that's in action.
They knew that the president stopped tweeting.
They knew that he had said he might go.
So apparently there were all these clues that made some number of amateur sleuths know for sure he was on his way.
So completely opposite news.
One, well-kept secret.
The other, everybody knew.
He had left so many clues, it was obvious.
Even amateurs figured it out.
There's your two movies on one screen.
Let's talk about the stock market.
So the other day we had an historic drop in the market.
Historic! There's always some kind of a record to be broken.
And so the stock market went down a ton and everybody said, my god, it's the end of the world.
What I said was, might be a good time to buy stocks.
Now I advise you, never, ever, ever, ever take financial advice from a cartoonist.
Never, ever, ever, ever do not take financial advice from cartoonists.
But I did tell you that I was a big buyer on the dip.
So I went in pretty heavy as a buyer.
And then the market went up a whole bunch yesterday.
You should expect that it should go down today.
Not a lot, but it'll probably pull back a little from what I did yesterday.
That would all be normal.
Now there are a few things you need to know about the end of the year.
The last quarter tends to get You know, frothy as people are doing things for tax reasons, etc.
But that final week, the Christmas week, is a special week because there aren't many people trading at all.
So I haven't seen the news on this, but I would guess that the trading volume is low.
If you don't follow the market, that doesn't mean anything to you.
But here's what it should mean.
When the trading market is low, meaning there are just not many people trading because everybody's away on Christmas, it doesn't take as many people to totally move the market.
Because if, let's say, instead of millions of people buying things, I'll just simplify it, there were only five people left in town who even cared about stocks.
So this is just a wild example.
So instead of tens of millions of people buying stocks every day, it's Christmas.
Let's say there's just five people in the whole world who even care.
Well, if those five people have more buyers than they have sellers, The price of the market will zoom up because there's so much more demand than there is supply.
Nobody's around to sell any stocks.
So the people who want to buy it are going to have to bid up the price to get somebody to sell it.
In an efficient market where there are millions of people, things tend to be more stable.
But as soon as that big number becomes a small number, it can get wilder.
I believe that you would, if you fact check that, I think that's right.
So, the point of it is, Christmas week, you should naturally see lots of volatility.
If you also have headlines.
You probably also need some news events to drive things.
But let me ask you something.
What is different from In terms of big economic news, what was different the day the stock market went down a lot versus the day it went up a lot?
What was different? What big economic change happened in two days?
Well, Trump said it was a good time to buy, but so did I. There are two people who said it was a good time to buy on one of them.
But do you think that's why it went up?
Because I'll bet before the end of the week we'll have another down day.
Do you think it'll go down for any economic reason?
None of this stuff has anything to do with economics.
It's just bouncing around because people's psychology is bouncing around.
So it's smaller volume and people are a little bit crazier than normal.
So it's just completely normal that it's bouncing around.
It doesn't mean anything about anything.
It's down 500 today.
It means absolutely nothing.
Well, I'll tell you what it does mean.
When the market took a sharp upturn yesterday, I said to myself, oh crap!
Because I was planning to buy some more.
And I thought, man, at least I got in toward the bottom.
But I was hoping it would stay low for a little longer.
I wanted to make some more decisions.
But now it's back down again.
So I will almost certainly be a buyer again today after I get off of this.
But don't take my advice.
Do not take my advice about this stuff.
The things to watch in terms of wondering if the market is going to go down forever is unemployment.
That tends to be really the...
If you're going to watch one thing, You want to watch unemployment.
If you're going to watch one thing for the stock market, probably the Fed.
Now online, I'm getting a question from one of my critics.
One of the problems with being right as much as I am, if you've been watching me for a while, you know that I've been extraordinarily right About political predictions, etc.
Maybe more than anybody's ever been right.
I don't know how to measure such a thing, but I'd certainly be in the top 10% of people who have ever been right about political predictions.
And so when people think I might be wrong about something, they pile into Twitter and they say Dale-like things that look like this.
Oh, I can't wait to say what Scott Adams says when he twists himself into a pretzel and tries to explain this.
Oh, Scott, explain this.
Explain this now. Try to explain this.
And scene. So the Dales come after me and they tell me, explain this.
Now, I don't, you know, if it's on Twitter, I don't have time to give the full context, but the full context looks like this.
I'm not the guy who needs to explain everything.
I didn't really sign up for the job of explaining everything.
I explain the things that are interesting, and maybe I have a unique take on them.
It really isn't my job to explain absolutely everything, so I don't accept that as my obligation.
Every now and then, one of the Dales will ask a perfectly good question.
I think it's accidental.
It's probably one of those random chance sort of things.
But today somebody did one.
And somebody said, the president is criticizing the Fed chief, but the president had the option of keeping Janet Yellen, who was more dovish about interest rates, Wouldn't that have been a better decision?
So isn't it obviously true that the president made a mistake by replacing Janet Yellen, who may have been more inclined to keep the interest rates low?
To which I say, well, that's a really good point.
In a world with one variable, if the only variable in the world Was that Janet Yellen was a little softer on interest rates, and the guy he appointed was a little more hard-nosed on it, if we even knew that.
I don't even know if we knew that.
But if that was the only variable in the world, yeah, that would be a bad hiring decision if there were no other variables.
But here's the other context.
The first context Is that we don't know what Janet Yellen would have done.
So if Janet Yellen had been in charge, would she have raised interest rates?
Don't know. So we don't really have anything to compare it to.
Because she would have been reacting to the same economic impact that Powell has.
The other thing we don't know, or here's the other context.
As I often say, and I've often said about this president, hiring is mostly guessing.
Firing is the skill.
When you hire somebody, you're looking at somebody who has never done the job you're hiring for, right?
Powell has never been the Fed chief.
And before that, Janet Yellen had never been the Fed chief until she was.
When you hire somebody for a job they have never done before, you're guessing.
So the job of hiring for the government is almost entirely guessing from people who are qualified enough to be in the conversation.
But beyond that, it's kind of guessing.
The skill is firing.
Are you willing to fire somebody who is as popular as You know, somebody like General Mattis.
Now Mattis actually quit, but I think he was kind of forced down, if you know what I mean.
I think Mattis knew that if he didn't quit, maybe he was in trouble.
But the point is, firing takes skill because you have to know to do it quickly and efficiently.
You want to not wait around for things to change.
So the president's pretty good at firing.
Is he also good at hiring?
We have no way to know because hiring is just guessing and the president, this particular president, has a smaller pool of applicants than most presidents because he's been so vilified by the press and the other side that even his own team doesn't want to be on his team, meaning the Republicans.
Sorry. So he does have a natural disadvantage because he doesn't get to hire from the same pool as another president might.
So we're going into the new year.
Did you notice that all of the legal risk for the president just sort of disappeared from the headlines for a week?
Didn't really go away.
Just it was boring and nobody wanted to talk about it and nothing was really happening.
So let me give you my prediction for 2019.
My prediction is there will be no impeachment.
There will certainly be talk about it and maybe the House will, you know, dick around with a little bit, but there will be no impeachment of the president in 2019 or 2020.
There will be no impeachment.
That is my prediction. Likewise, I predict that the president will not be in any big legal jeopardy, although it will sound like it if you listen to MSNBC and if you listen to CNN. For most of this year and next, they will be talking about how any minute, oh, any minute now, any minute now, this president is going to be all impeached.
But here's the thing.
If President Trump doesn't get impeached in the first six months of 2019, isn't it going to be kind of too late?
Because if you get into the end of 2019 and they haven't impeached him, all the smart people are going to say, eh, he's only got a year left, let's just beat him in the election.
So it's not going to make a ton of sense to impeach him for Things that probably won't even be real.
Let's see. Don't get a Pinocchio nose like your leader, somebody says in all caps.
Well, I'm glad we got the Dale to come in and type in all caps and say, Scott, don't get a Pinocchio nose like your leader.
Don't get a Pinocchio nose.
Thank you, Dale, for coming in and screaming at me in all caps something that makes no sense at all.
Appreciate you coming in for comic relief.
Alright, um...
Scott is still bald, though.
Well, thank you for pointing that out.
I appreciate that you come into my periscopes to point out my physical...
my physical disadvantages.
Appreciate it. Thanks for stopping by.
Merry Christmas. Um...
Yeah, I think that Russian collusion will be a big disappointment to people.
you're not going to get the Russian collusion that you were hoping for.
Well, I hope all of you got my book.
By the way, did you notice I tweeted out that...
My book, Win Bigly, the paperback version that's recently out.
So the paperback version was, wait for this, the most requested book on Amazon.
Do you realize how big a deal that is?
Was it most requested?
I think that was the title.
Most pre-ordered or most requested.
Now, imagine how many books there are on Amazon.
Do you have any idea how many books there are on Amazon?
A lot of books!
And there are a lot of new books as well.
So any given week, there are a ton of new books.
And mine was the most requested new book on all of Amazon for the week of Christmas.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Now, I would like to give a shout out, given that my book went bigly.
It's the most requested book on all of Amazon this past week.
I would like to give a special message to the haters and the losers who told me in 2015 and every day since then, Scott and now I would like to ask Dale to come in to complete this sentence.
They said to me, Scott, stick to drawing comics!
Stick to drawing comics!
You don't know what you're talking about!
Stick to drawing comics!
And scene.
Stick to drawing comics.
The most loser-ish advice that anybody ever gave.
Courtesy of Dale.
Because you know where my life would be if I took loser advice.
Stick to your day job.
Well, I wouldn't be talking to you now.
I wouldn't be a cartoonist.
I would not have best-selling books.
I would not have been one of the highest paid speakers in the world.
Not at the moment, but I'm off the speaking circuit at the moment.
But almost everything I've ever done fell into the category of I shouldn't be doing it.
Because some loser told me I shouldn't.
I should stick to my day job.
So I'll tell you, it's one thing...
Let me put this in context.
If a person is thinking about themselves and they say to themselves, hey, maybe I should stick to my day job and not try this new thing.
Well, that would be a loser philosophy, wouldn't you say?
It's a loser philosophy to not try.
But if you take that loser philosophy that you've applied to your own life And then you go online and you seek out somebody who has a track record of leaving his box and succeeding.
And you tell that third party that you don't even know personally that they should get in their box and they should not try because you're such a loser that you're not trying.
That my friends is double losing.
That is loser squared.
It's one thing to be a loser with your own philosophy, and it only affects you.
But if you decide that not only are you such a loser that you're not going to get out of your box yourself, but you want to go stop other people from getting outside of their box by mocking them back into it, you, sir, are a double loser.
Loser times two. Or loser squared, if we want to take it up a level.
Yeah, my book, God's Debris, if you haven't seen that one, it was a 2001 book.
God's Debris is one of the most impactful books that people have ever read.
I mean, one of the most common comments I get about that book, it's fiction by the way, is that it blew people away, is the best book they've ever read.
Would I have written a book on religious philosophy, If I had stayed in my box and kept my day job.
And there's almost nothing I've done in my adult life that would have been good if I had stayed in my box.
It's such a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad philosophy of life.
All right. You can try to get a wife.
All men need a wife, somebody says here on comments.
Well, thank you for that advice.
I'm just looking at your comments.
All right. Yesterday, I was taking calls on the Interface by WinHub app.
If you're not familiar with that, that's my startup As an app in which you can be an expert or call an expert for an immediate video call, or you can schedule it.
So we've added scheduling to the app so you can schedule a call with any of the experts on it.
And the scheduling tool is making a big difference, so we're getting a lot more sign-ups because of the scheduling, a lot more connected calls, so that's all working well.
But yesterday I was taking calls as an expert.
And I was giving people virtual autographs.
I don't know if you caught that. But people were calling me yesterday on the app, and I was using my whiteboard, which I'll show you.
Get ready. So, can't see it too clearly, but I had some artwork there, an autograph, and I was just filling in people's names.
So that they could take a screenshot.
So everybody who took a screenshot got an autograph that was customized to them.
And so those conversations just happened within the apps.
So that was on the interface by WenHub app.
So if you know anybody who is a celebrity and wants to connect with fans, they can either charge or not charge.
The app lets you do as much or as little charging as you want to.
But it was really fun to...
I got to meet a number of people that I only interact with on Twitter.
So it was actually a really...
It was like this weird virtual reunion of people that I've known a long time but I've never met.
So the people I've been interacting with for three years on Twitter suddenly showed up live on video through the app and it was very cool.
Yeah, it's Interface by WinHub is the name of the app and we will be adding some doctors pretty soon and I talked to a lawyer yesterday who's going on for some family practice stuff and lots of experts going on for all kinds of stuff.
If you go on there, my advice to you would be the more specific your expertise, probably the better your chances.
The general experts that say I'm a marketing expert or engineering, it's probably a little too generic.
So you want to say something pretty specific to get people.
Were they different than you imagined?
The experts? I don't know that I had a specific idea for that.
All right. I'm just looking at your comments.
Can you discuss Cheshuggi and the Washington Post?
Is there something new about Cheshuggi and the Washington Post?
Because we've talked about him quite a bit.
Let's talk about Israel and Syria.
So if the United States pulls out of Syria, There's some conversation that it might give Israel more of a free punch against Hezbollah.
So in other words, Israel might go hard militarily against any Iranian-supported troops that are still in Syria.
And it could be that our engagement there is actually keeping Israel from doing all that they might want to do.
So I think what you're going to see is that the US will step out and that the only thing that could protect the Iranian-backed forces in Syria are if Russia wanted the Iranians to have more control in Syria.
Because if Israel and Russia and Turkey And Saudi Arabia and anybody else who's got forces, if all of them are against the Iranian-backed forces, or at least not helping them, it's going to be tough for Iran to keep any kind of a footprint there.
So it seems to me that everything that you're seeing in the Middle East is either directly or indirectly related to squeezing Iran.
And that's probably the way to look at it.
Look at every event that's happened recently and every event that you think might happen And say, how does that squeeze Iran?
And if it does, then everything makes sense in context.
There's only one game over there right now, which is squeeze Iran until they fold.
And the beauty is you can squeeze as long as you want, you know, because time is on, time is not on Iran's side.
All right.
Yeah, Israel and Russia seem to get along.
So I've got a feeling that Syria being in Russian hands is not going to be the problem for Israel.
So apparently Putin was all happy because Russia tested some kind of supersonic or some kind of a space missile.
That they can shoot up into space and then it's impossible to intercept.
So now Russia has an impossible to intercept nuclear deterrent.
Hypersonic missile. And I'm thinking to myself, I don't know if that really changes anything.
They seem to indicate that it's a response to the missile defense that we helped put in close to their borders.
I don't know if that's true, but I'm going to say something I've said before, I'll say again.
The three countries that should be allies are the United States, Russia, and China, at least militarily.
Because those three countries will never attack each other.
And all we're going to have is these endless little proxy wars that just don't help anybody.
All this cyber stuff we do against each other, all of the little poking and prodding and dirty tricks.
Why? Why?
We are not natural enemies.
Let me tell you what a natural enemy looks like.
In the Middle East, there are people with radically different religions, and some of those religions say that they should kill the other religion.
And they share a border and they have disputed territory.
Now you put all of that together and then there's economics on top of that and bad history and everything.
Those people have a reason to be enemies.
Now you could argue they shouldn't have a reason, they ought to change it, etc.
But the fact is that in the Middle East there are natural enemies.
That they have differences that are real.
But if you look at the United States and Russia, and China even, we don't really have real natural enemy reasons.
We don't share a border with Russia or China.
There is no possibility that anybody could win in a war.
And we have a common enemy, which is radical Islam.
Now, China might look at it a little differently, but we don't really have a reason to be enemies.
It's some kind of weird historical, psychological evolution that got us to where we are that we just don't need to be there.
And I don't know if the problem is that nobody can go first.
Because if you imagine, let's say the United States said, hey, we've just decided that us poking Russia and Russia poking us back doesn't help us, so we'll just stop doing it.
It probably wouldn't stop Russia.
If we just stopped doing every aggressive cyber thing, if we just stopped spying, if we just stopped poking them in all the ways we could poke them, if we just stopped with the sanctions, it probably wouldn't change anything.
They would probably just keep doing everything to us because they have their own deep state, right?
I don't think Putin has the total control that people say because any big organization, there are lots of complexities.
So I think Russia would just keep poking us because that's their job.
There are people whose job it is to poke the United States.
So unless they were all simultaneously fired, which wouldn't happen, That we couldn't even stop it on our end and hope that that would stop it on their end.
And I think it would work the same way.
If tomorrow Russia just stopped every aggressive cyber thing, every bad thing that they do to the United States, if they just stopped it all, we wouldn't stop poking them, would we?
Because we've got this big built-up machine, you know, that's sort of embedded in our government, whose jobs it is to poke Russia.
So, I don't know how you stop.
Because we're both sort of committed to this inertia that is now completely divorced from reasons.
Let me put it this way.
Do you think that Putin believes That continually screwing the United States and our allies is the best thing that he could be doing compared to trading with the allies and having full security and his economy zooming.
Which of those two worlds would Putin prefer?
I think it's obvious.
Putin would take better security and a better economy if it were available.
But it's not.
Because we're poking them, they're poking us, and nobody can stop first.
And if somebody did stop first, they wouldn't stop the other one.
Because we both build machinery that will go on to poke each other, independent of if there's ever a reason.
If there could be one enormous, gigantic improvement in the world, it would look like this.
The US, Russia and China making a military alliance, maybe not like a traditional military alliance where you agree to fight each other's wars or something like that, but something where we just acknowledge that the three countries have gone beyond the level where it's rational to be enemies.
It is not rational to be an enemy with somebody who can kick your ass.
It is rational to have enemies that you could potentially defeat.
If there's somebody stronger than you or strong enough to destroy you in a nuclear flash, those are the people you should be trying hard to be friends with.
Because the alternative is irrational.
But, like everybody else in the world, it's easy to say this stuff.
I just don't know how to get there.
Except to say that it's probably a psychological problem and not a physical one because we are not natural enemies.
Now, if I had to suggest one way to get to a better place with Russia and China, it would be that framing.
So, I would start framing it that way.
You could say, There are natural enemies in the world, people who share borders, people who have wildly different religions that are in conflict.
They're natural enemies.
We don't share a border with Russia or China and we don't have an ideology that's really counter to theirs and vice versa.
There's nothing that the Russians need in the future or China needs in the future that requires the United States to be destroyed.
So if we could figure out how the three of us could thrive and team up against any, let's say, smaller terrorist kind of movements, that would be the ideal golden age scenario.
But I think you have to start talking about it that way before it can become real.
So it's probably going to take 20 years of saying, by the way, we're natural friends, not natural enemies, which is true.
We are natural friends with China and Russia.
We're just not acting like it.
All right. I'm just looking at your comments.
Yeah, I understand all of the little Magnitsky and Browder problems and all that stuff.
There are lots and lots of little problems that we have with both countries, but none of them should get in the way.
Because nobody is really benefiting from any of these problems.
The new triumvirate, yeah.
Watch Oliver Stone's Ukraine on fire.
Actually, I will look for that.
Now, I don't doubt that Putin has ambitions to dominate his neighbors.
But you have to ask yourself...
How much of that is reaction to our missiles and our offensive posture?
How much of that is because he needs, I don't know, how much of what he does is because he needs pipelines and warm weather ports and stuff like that?
Can an unlimited number of people live on Earth?
Well, we're probably nowhere near the limit of people we could put on the earth.
But when people become economically prosperous, they stop having as many children, we have learned.
And so, in all likelihood, if you improve the economics of the poorest people, they will have fewer children, not more.
So it's sort of a self-correcting problem.
Leaders benefit from having enemies.
Yes, but we could have common enemies.
What are your thoughts on the Kevin Spacey video?
I tried to watch it, but it was too creepy and I only got five seconds into it and I just didn't want to have anything to do with Kevin Spacey anymore.
Predictions for 2019.
Well, prediction that the Mueller thing will not produce any impeachment.
What else would you like predicted for 2019?
Is there anything else you want to know?
Oh, I would say the odds.
Let's see, what are the odds?
I don't want to make a prediction about Ruth Bader Ginsburg because that depends on her health.
So I'm going to be silent on Ruth Bader Ginsburg because I don't want to be betting against anybody's health.
Yeah, so nothing on RGB. Stocks will end the year higher.
So 2019 will be an up year for stocks.
I don't know how much, but it'll be up.
North Korea will make significant progress.
Now, North Korea, remember that this is a long-term process.
If it takes 20 years for North Korea to work out the nukes and to get some degree of reunification, that's fine.
Because we're already not a target and we're heading in the right direction.
So as long as your progress is in the right direction, you don't really have to hurry.
Bitcoin is thoroughly unpredictable.
There's no way to know anything about Bitcoin.
So, Alexandria Octavia Cortez.
I think people have figured out That she is the real deal at this point.
And by the real deal, I mean that she has persuasion game like Trump, just on the other side.
So even the people who would understand that her policies are not, let's say, refined or even coherent, would also recognize that that might not matter, and she would not be the first person whose policies were not A +, who did just fine anyway.
So, I still want an answer to my question of why we can't try one state as the test for free education and free healthcare.
If it doesn't work in one state, could we hope that it would ever work nationally?
Because I know that there would be some economies of scale and stuff, but if it's a state, I mean, a state is a big enough entity, isn't it?
You know, couldn't you test it Everything you needed to test in one state.
So instead of saying yes or no on universal health care, why not say this?
If one state wants to try it and they want to absorb the risk of, you know, whatever running up of their deficit, etc.
If one state wants to try it, the federal government should approve it or at least, you know, support it.
It's not a question of approving it.
But if I were President Trump, I would say, hey, if you think that's a good idea, try it in one state and let's see what happens.
See if you can wall it off and make it not infect any other state and then let's just run it for two years.
See how it goes. Do I review comments after the periscope ends?
Generally not, but in some cases yes.
Which states should try?
Well, the beauty is that's up to the states.
If you're the federal government, let's say you're President Trump, you don't need to argue whether socialized medicine is good or bad.
You should instead argue that something like that could be tested.
And unless there's at least one state, given that there are lots of blue states, if you can't get one state to test it and to keep it within the state so it doesn't affect other taxpayers, why should the federal government be serious about something that no state even wants to do?
So there may be some context and some facts that I'm not aware of that makes that a bad idea.
Venezuela already tested that idea.
No, they didn't. Any comparison to Venezuela is just silly.
Because there's only one Venezuela.
You can't take too much of a lesson out of what's happening there.
Test in one city.
Yeah, a city might not be big enough because you need to be at least a large enough entity That you can negotiate for prices and you have some buying power.
So I don't know how big that needs to be.
Maybe some economists can tell us.
Because it could be that a big city is enough.
You know, if it's New York City, of course it'd be enough.
Massachusetts? Maybe.
I don't know how close they are to that kind of situation already.
Will we get a wall?
We will get a fence wall.
So in 2019, there will be serious construction on a fence wall.
All they need to do to settle this funding for the fence wall is the following.
To say, we want to give it a budget, a starter budget, whether that's 3 billion or 5 billion, I wouldn't know.
And you say, let's turn it over to the engineers.
We'll let the engineers decide.
You know, what it looks like where.
And then we'll reassess after we build it for a year.
So imagine if President Trump said, all right, here's the deal.
We need our $5 billion.
Let's say they might negotiate it down to, you know, $3.5 or something just to act like they did something.
But we'll say, let's get our starter budget.
We'll turn it over to the engineers.
We'll let the engineers decide what they're putting where within our specifications.
So part of the specifications might be that you need to be able to see through it, which kind of gets rid of concrete.
It's harder to build a concrete structure that you can see through than it is the steel slat thing.
So you should take Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and President Trump out of the engineering decisions.
The first one of the three who says that is the winner, because that's the high ground.
Once you get the high ground, the conversation's over.
So if you plop me into that conversation, I say, why are politicians making engineering decisions?
Let's approve a starter budget.
Let's turn it over to the engineers.
Let's have them build something for a year, and let's reassess.
We should reassess this every year.
Why are we even talking about funding the entire structure?
We should reassess it every year.
Let's see what the engineers can do.
Let's see if what they do makes a difference.
Let's test it small.
All right, you say that, and the conversation is over.
And if you call it a fence wall, Then you've given the Democrats enough of an ego comedown that they might accept it.
Because remember, the Democrats don't want good policy.
I do realize how partisan this sounds, but I don't think this is an exaggeration.
At this point, the Democrats are not concerned with policy or budget when it comes to the fence wall.
They are concerned about Revenge or making the president look bad or something personal.
So the president has stepped down from the ego, the ego position.
The ego position is it's going to be a Trump wall and it's going to be, you know, the huge wall in, you know, much of the border.
That's the ego position.
Trump has stepped down from the ego position.
He's now at, you could call it a fence, you could call it a wall, we want border security.
Call it whatever you like.
So he's already gone out of the position that they couldn't stand.
It's sort of up to them.
There is one word that he needs to utter To finish this off, tell me, what is the one word, literally one word, that President Trump can say in a tweet or out loud that would end the fence wall?
Fence wall, no.
I mean, that would be a helpful one, but yes.
To say it's personal.
Close. So maybe there are three things that are important.
One is to call it a fence wall, and he's sort of already there, so I'd say that part's essentially done.
The other is to say, don't make it personal.
He's also said that in engineer.
Somebody got it. The one word that ends the fence wall funding problem is the word engineer.
The moment you say politicians should not be making the detailed decision, we're about the budget and the specifications.
Let's turn it over to the engineers.
If you say engineer, you got your funding.
That is my prediction.
And so I will leave it there.
And I think we've done enough for today.
Please enjoy your day.
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