Aug. 15, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
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| Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody! | |
| I know my theme song gets better every time. | |
| So, one of the questions, I know you're here for the answer. | |
| Question is, what is better than the simultaneous sip? | |
| Answer? Nothing. | |
| Nothing is better than the simultaneous sip. | |
| In the entire world, oh sure, you think the birth of your children, your marriage, you might think world peace, feeding the hungry, stopping climate change, you might think those are important things. | |
| But I think they're overrated compared to the simultaneous sip. | |
| And all you need to participate to feel the amazing, intense pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day to get your day off right is you need a cover of mug or glasses, dine a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the simultaneous sip. | |
| That's right. Not a damn thing is better than the simultaneous Sith. | |
| Well, let's talk about some stuff. | |
| As many of you remember, when Jeffrey Epstein's death was announced, 99.9% of the world said, he was murdered. | |
| Murdered, I say. | |
| People got in there and they murdered him right in front of our noses. | |
| And I, alone on planet Earth, As is what I'm used to now. | |
| Alone on planet Earth. | |
| I said, you know, not so fast. | |
| Sure, everybody on Earth wants them dead, but if you have a hypothesis that says incompetence could have been an explanation, well, I'd go with the odds. | |
| And so my prediction was that as we learn more and more about the Epstein death, that we would not find additional evidence that he had been murdered, but that we would find additional evidence that it was a suicide. | |
| Now, the latest news was he had broken neck bones. | |
| Now, he was found hung in his cell. | |
| And, of course, the first article I read makes it sound like, well, broken neck bones. | |
| And then it starts out by saying, that is consistent with being strangled. | |
| And it is. | |
| It is. Also consistent with hanging yourself. | |
| Apparently there are two ways that typically you'll see this sort of thing, which is one is suicide and the other is somebody kills you. | |
| So you have evidence that's compatible with both. | |
| Do you remember the so-called shrieking? | |
| So when it was reported that it was heard there was some shrieking around the time of the death, I said, could the shrieking be coming from a man? | |
| Because when a man shrieks, what word do you use to describe it? | |
| If you hear a man, let's say, making a loud verbal noise in distress, what's the first word you think of? | |
| Scream. I heard a man screaming. | |
| Right? Would you say shriek? | |
| Now, Now, suppose you heard a loud verbal sound coming out of an adult woman's mouth. | |
| If you heard, let's say, a very troubled, large, loud noise coming from the mouth of a woman in the distance, and she was very troubled, would you call that a scream? | |
| Well, you might. But you might call that a screech. | |
| So, it was revealed today that one of the guards, one of the two guards that were asleep, was a woman. | |
| So my theory, that it was suicide, said that the shrieking was probably one of the guards. | |
| And now we find that one of the guards was a woman. | |
| I don't know what percentage of total guards are women. | |
| It might be pretty high now. | |
| Maybe it's higher than I think it is. | |
| But that was my hypothesis, was that a woman was one of the first ones to find him and realize that her life was going to have some trouble. | |
| Not only did she have to deal with a dead guy that was on her watch, but her life It's not going to be the same because of this. | |
| So, we don't know everything about this, but we do know that so far 100% of what we've heard is consistent with suicide, and it is now being reported as a presumed suicide. | |
| So I don't believe anybody in an official capacity is calling it anything else. | |
| Am I right? Is there anybody in an official capacity who is expressly leaving open the murder hypothesis? | |
| Of course they have to look into it and they have to get all the details. | |
| But have you heard anybody official who actually knows something say, well, we haven't ruled out murder? | |
| I don't believe... | |
| Well, Rudy's a political animal. | |
| Somebody said Rudy Giuliani. | |
| But he's a political person. | |
| Alright, here's more evidence of this simulation. | |
| Here's a true story from the headlines. | |
| Andy Dick was a dick who grabbed a guy by the dick, allegedly. | |
| And therefore that guy came back and punched him in the face. | |
| So the guy who punched Andy Dick in the face, and looks like he injured him pretty badly, which is no joking matter, claims that it was provoked, although not at the moment, but rather moments before, he claims that he had said goodbye to Andy Dick, you know, said good show or something, and that Andy Dick had winked at him and grabbed his crotch. | |
| And then I guess he thought about it for a moment and then came back and punched him. | |
| Now, who knows if that's true, first of all, but let's say it's true. | |
| What exactly is the legal treatment for that? | |
| How long do you have to wait or how soon after being sexually assaulted can you punch somebody in the face and almost kill them before it becomes illegal? | |
| I don't know the answer to that, do you? | |
| If you're in public and somebody grabs you by your genitals in public, could you, legally, immediately punch them as hard as you can in the face and kill them? | |
| And actually kill them? | |
| Let's say there were witnesses, so there's no doubt about what happened. | |
| If somebody came up to you and grabbed you by your junk, And you knew that they were doing it for sexual purposes because Andy Dick was bisexual, I believe. | |
| Could you punch them as hard as you want and actually kill them and get off as, no, it just happened in the moment. | |
| It was just a reaction. | |
| I don't know. I think so. | |
| Suppose you walk away for 10 seconds Because you're just sort of disoriented for a moment. | |
| And after the guy's let go, 10 seconds later, you walk up and punch him and kill him. | |
| How long? What is the waiting period? | |
| At which point it becomes a crime. | |
| I don't know. So I guess the legal system will sort that out. | |
| And if he was actually grabbed by his crotch, I'm sure there were witnesses. | |
| So we'll probably find that out. | |
| All right. Kamala Harris is getting a lot of pushback for, quote, politicizing the latest shooting and police action in Philadelphia. | |
| I don't like to talk about the mass shootings, so that's not what I'm going to do here. | |
| I'm just going to talk about the politicizing of it. | |
| All right, so apparently while the event was going on, Kamala was on TV. The word politicizing is sort of a general word, but I assume that she was using... | |
| The event as a sort of a launch point to talk about, you know, gun crime and why she should be president. | |
| What do you think about that? | |
| What do you think of Kamala Harris, quote, politicizing an event while it's happening and people are still in harm's way? | |
| What do you think about that? | |
| I'll look at your comments while they're going by. | |
| I'll tell you what I think about it while you're commenting. | |
| I'm 100% good with it. | |
| Not only am I okay with it, I approve of it. | |
| So I'm not even neutral. | |
| I approve. And I know you're going to hate me for it, right? | |
| I approve if she does it. | |
| I approve if President Trump does it. | |
| I approve if anybody does it. | |
| So long as the thing that they're promoting is something that legitimate people could think would be a solution. | |
| Now, I get your disgust. | |
| And I would agree with your disgust, you know, if she were standing on the same block as the event. | |
| So you have sort of a visceral reaction to it, which is, and I can't talk you out of a visceral reaction. | |
| So if you just have like a human reaction of, I completely get that. | |
| But there's no reason for it. | |
| It's not a reason-based reaction. | |
| It's just a... Now, should we make decisions based on your feeling of... | |
| Probably not. | |
| It's probably not the best way to make a decision. | |
| Here's my point. If you want to get something done on a topic of great national importance that is totally roadblocked, do you believe that anything is going to happen with guns? | |
| I don't. Don't you think there's just a complete inability to do anything about guns? | |
| Yeah. What would you do with a problem that could be solved in the normal, polite ways and the normal routines that you use to solve problems? | |
| Well, if you do something gross in an environment where something normal would work just fine, I think you have to answer to that. | |
| You know, why are you being gross? | |
| Why are you being so inconsiderate of the victims? | |
| Like, why are you being so icky and ugh when there's death happening right now? | |
| Why are you doing that? Now, if there were some other alternative to solve this, what she perceives and much of the country perceives as a major gun problem, If there was some other normal way to do it, I'd say, well, you should be doing it the normal way. | |
| Why are you being a jerk? You don't have to be a jerk. | |
| Just use the normal process. | |
| Use the Congress, get some votes, do that sort of thing. | |
| But the one thing we know for sure is that that won't work. | |
| We know that we don't have in this country any kind of a process. | |
| There's no process. | |
| We don't have a Congress that can pass a new law. | |
| We don't have anybody saying, hey, let's test it small and see how it goes. | |
| Now, hold on. | |
| It's irrelevant that you say there's no gun problem. | |
| Do you get that you could be right or you could be wrong? | |
| But do you get that's irrelevant to the conversation? | |
| What's relevant is The people involved have a genuine belief, even if they're wrong, a genuine belief that it's a big problem, and a genuine belief that they have some solutions. | |
| Under those conditions, that person is operating ethically and morally, as I'm going to explain a little bit more, even if they're wrong about the facts. | |
| So don't argue the facts. | |
| That's not the topic right now. | |
| We're talking about whether somebody is icky For politicizing the shooting. | |
| So here's my take on it. | |
| If you can't solve a problem any other way, trump it. | |
| Trump it, meaning play it like Trump would. | |
| What would Trump do if he wanted to solve the gun problem? | |
| Because I don't think he does, honestly. | |
| I think on some level, if he could wave a magic wand, something would happen and people wouldn't shoot each other anymore. | |
| He'd do that. So he wants it solved in the magic way, clearly. | |
| But there's no evidence that this president is really moving toward any kind of aggressive solution. | |
| If he were, what would it look like? | |
| What would it look like if President Trump wanted to solve the gun violence problem in this country? | |
| I'll tell you what it would look like. | |
| He would grab that box and he would shake it. | |
| He would just shake the heck out of it. | |
| Because the old box full of variables was getting us nowhere and would get us nowhere. | |
| So you've got to shake the box. | |
| And then see what's left. Okay, shut the box. | |
| Now how are the variables lined up? | |
| No? Still no? | |
| Shake it again. Still no? | |
| Shake it again. It's a good process. | |
| Because if the variables you have don't work, you've got to change the variables. | |
| So Kamala Harris comes in during the most politicizing, sensitive moment, and she comes in like a bulldozer and politicizes the frickin' thing. | |
| Good. Now, the assumption is that she genuinely believes that a solution needs to happen and that we can't get there with our normal process. | |
| Under those conditions, and I think those are reasonable assumptions, I do think most Democrats believe there's a real problem, that with some real better government we could make some progress. | |
| I think they really believe that, and I don't disagree with it at all. | |
| So, I am 100% backing of Kamala Harris politicizing a shooting in progress. | |
| You know why? Because that's why we're talking about her. | |
| Do you know what the other cowards were doing? | |
| Waiting. Everybody else who's running against her for president looks like an idiot now. | |
| To me. I know not to you. | |
| To you, they look more awesome because they didn't politicize it. | |
| I get that. But only one person shook the box that needed to be shook. | |
| She said, I'm going to go in there while this shooting's in progress. | |
| Screw this. I don't have to be polite anymore. | |
| I don't need to make you feel good. | |
| I don't need to make the other side feel good. | |
| All you people who are disgusted by it, don't care. | |
| I'm not going to make you feel good anymore. | |
| I'm not going to let people get gunned down in America because you can feel better that way. | |
| Just not going to do it. | |
| So Kamala Harris comes in here, shakes the box, and says, look at me. | |
| I just shook your damn box. | |
| Can we do something now? | |
| All right. Now, will anything positive come of it? | |
| Probably not. Probably not. | |
| Because the gun thing is just so hard to fix. | |
| Probably it has to get a lot worse before anything's going to get better. | |
| But I'm 100% supportive of her politicizing the heck out of it, so long as it's honest. | |
| And it looks like it is. | |
| Shake the box, Kamala. | |
| All right. Have you all seen the disturbing slash entertaining video of comedian Bill Hader? | |
| Doing imitations of Tom Cruise on, I guess, an old video of a Letterman interview. | |
| And while he's talking, his face morphs into Tom Cruise. | |
| And then when he talks like himself, it goes back. | |
| And then there's another video where he does the same thing with Arnold Schwarzenegger talking on another show. | |
| And he morphs into Arnold Schwarzenegger's face while he's doing an impression. | |
| And then when the impression ends, he goes back to his own face. | |
| And it is so seamless that You can't even see the technology happening. | |
| You're just blinking your eyes and you're going, what's happening? | |
| Wait, oh, that's Tom Cruise. | |
| That's Bill Hader. It is so freaky to see how seamlessly it happens. | |
| You can't detect the technology happening. | |
| He's just one person and then he's another person. | |
| And that tells you everything you need to know about what the next 10 years looks like. | |
| That's what we can do today. | |
| Right now we can do that. | |
| You know, we meaning people who can do that can do that. | |
| I can't do it. You can't do it. | |
| But people can do it. | |
| And so I ask you this. | |
| Suppose you wanted to build an AI that was very human-like. | |
| Suppose you took me and created a deepfake of me, specifically me because of this next fact. | |
| I have more public opinions on more topics than perhaps anybody in the world. | |
| I don't know if that's true, but let's put that out there and you can argue with me on it, but you'll agree that I'm among the most public opinionated people who ever lived. | |
| Public opinionated. | |
| Everybody has opinions, but I'm unique in that for 30 years I've been saying things in public. | |
| Interviews and the Dilbert cartoon and blog posts and videos and books, etc. | |
| You could probably find opinions from me on just about every topic. | |
| Now, imagine you're building an AI. And the AI is going to be a reproduction of me, a deepfake of me, and you're going to have a conversation with it. | |
| And the deepfake really just deals with keywords. | |
| It's the simplest AI in the world. | |
| It just sort of operates on keywords. | |
| So you come up to the deepfake, Scott, and you say, Hey, Scott, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| You know, there's a big gun problem today in the news. | |
| Did you see it? And my AI hears gun problem news. | |
| And so it starts saying the things that I always say about guns and the news. | |
| And it runs through something like what I just talked about with politicizing it. | |
| Maybe it says something about trying it, A-B testing it in states. | |
| Maybe it says something about Congress can't get there. | |
| But there's a whole bunch of opinions that I would just start talking about. | |
| Now, would you be able to distinguish what my deep fake did, which is just recognizing your keywords, and then I just give my opinions, would you know I wasn't real? | |
| Because if you came up to me in real life and said, blah, blah, blah, did you see the shooting on the news, what would I say? | |
| I'd probably say, you know, yes or no, I saw it, but then I would give my opinion on the topic, and it would look exactly like my AI. Now, you might not be able to interrupt it and, you know, as quickly interact with it as a real person, but almost immediately, if my AI just started saying what it felt, based on keywords from any topic, it would be about 80% alive. | |
| At least in the way you perceive it. | |
| The last 20% is hard, but you would be 80% there with nothing but keywords and Google searches of things I've said before. | |
| Think about it. So that's how close we are to artificial reality. | |
| How many people have you ever had a conversation with in which the answers that you got from them did not seem to be human? | |
| In other words, no matter what you say, the thing they say doesn't seem to be related to what you said. | |
| Let me give you an example. | |
| Every time I talk to a Democrat about the fine people hoax, and I take them down what I call the hoax funnel, you would expect that a live human being, like a real person, an organic human, if they said, I have this belief X, and you said, oh, you are mistaken. | |
| Here's the transcript. Here's the video. | |
| You can look for yourself. It's very compact. | |
| You can see this sentence that absolutely says the opposite of what you believe to be true. | |
| Okay, human being, now that you've seen evidence that is absolutely incontrovertible, you can look at it, you can verify it, and it's the opposite of what you believe. | |
| You'll change your mind now, right? | |
| No. Nobody. | |
| Not one person. | |
| Do you think organic human beings see information that counters their opinion and then change their mind? | |
| Never! And so if you were trying to build an AI that represented people, how would you build the AI to deal with new information that proved their old opinion was wrong? | |
| What would be the proper way to program that? | |
| If you programmed it to change its mind, I would instantly know it was a robot. | |
| If I went to somebody who was a Democrat someday in the future when we can't tell androids from real people, and I said, hey, you know, the thing you've been saying about the fine people thing didn't happen. | |
| It's reported wrong. | |
| Here's the transcript. And let's say this creature looked at the transcript and said, I have been wrong all along. | |
| It seems that my information was inaccurate. | |
| I changed my opinion now completely to now agree with you, and I disavow everything that I said five minutes ago. | |
| You'd know you were talking to a robot. | |
| It would be instant. | |
| You'd be like, ah, robot. | |
| Robot. So how long will we have to go before we realize the central truth of human beings? | |
| We can't program artificial intelligence Because there's no real intelligence. | |
| You can't make a photocopy of a nothing. | |
| If you photocopy a nothing, something that doesn't exist, do you know how many pictures of unicorns we have? | |
| Zero! The reason you can't take a picture of a unicorn is they don't exist. | |
| How many pictures of the Loch Ness monster that are actually real pictures do we have? | |
| None. I guess that's a bad example because we have some fake pictures. | |
| But if you try to build an artificial intelligence, it's not going to look like a human. | |
| Sorry. Someday, by the way, I'm pretty sure that nobody else in the world is saying publicly, or at least as often, as what I'm saying. | |
| That you can't build artificial intelligence because there's an illusion involved. | |
| And the illusion is that the humans are intelligent. | |
| You know, once you lose that illusion, you can build artificial intelligence like that. | |
| Someday, somebody's going to build an AI based on that truth that people are not rational. | |
| And when you talk to it, you're going to say, holy hell, I think I'm talking to my co-worker. | |
| Because it's like talking to a wall. | |
| And you say to yourself, oh, talking to a wall? | |
| Does that sound like a human being? | |
| Yes! Yes! | |
| That's exactly what talking to a human being sounds like. | |
| Talking to somebody who can't hear you, can't reason, and can't change their mind. | |
| That's what it feels like. | |
| All right. Too much on that. | |
| Thomas Friedman, a well-known Democrat, no lover of the president, no lover of Republicans in general, interestingly, says that the getting tough with China, which Trump has done, was the right move. | |
| Now, Friedman suggests that the trade war and the tariffs are not the right way to deal with it, but that we had to put our foot down. | |
| In other words, we could no longer keep going the way we were going with our current trade deals. | |
| So even Friedman says, no, you couldn't do that. | |
| You just couldn't continue with those lopsided deals. | |
| That's a big deal. It's a big deal. | |
| And you see, I think even Bernie has agreed with the president on that. | |
| But Friedman says that he would prefer the TPP over the trade wars with China. | |
| And that's the opposite of what the president did. | |
| And so I look at that and I say, huh, let's talk to a human being. | |
| And I want to make sure I'm not talking to any androids or any artificial intelligence. | |
| So let's talk to a human being. | |
| So I'll go up to a human being and he'll say, Hey, Thomas Friedman thinks TPP would have been a better deal than tariffs. | |
| What do you think, human being? | |
| What would the human say? | |
| Oh, what's a trade deal? | |
| Can you remind me what a tariff is? | |
| China, we do trading with China? | |
| Okay, I wasn't aware of that, but okay. | |
| And TPP is some kind of toilet paper thing? | |
| What is the TPP? Some kind of trade deal with... | |
| What's different between TPP and making a deal with China? | |
| I don't know what any of those things are. | |
| Or to quote a family guy, I don't know about any of that. | |
| How can the average human being look at this statement and have an opinion? | |
| Here's the statement. TPP might have been a better way to go instead of tariffs with China. | |
| What? I don't know. | |
| Maybe. Do you think Thomas Friedman knows enough about either TPP or tariffs with China? | |
| Is he an economist? | |
| I don't know. Maybe he is. You know, I look at that and I say to myself, this might be the smartest thing anybody ever said, or the dumbest thing. | |
| I can't even judge if it's the smartest thing anybody ever said, or the dumbest thing anybody ever said. | |
| Now, Friedman's pretty smart, so I'm going to lean toward there's something there, but I don't know what. | |
| I can't judge it. Can you? | |
| So, to Thomas Friedman I say, first a compliment. | |
| Smart guy, does good work, writes good books. | |
| Secondly, you've overestimated the understanding of the public severely. | |
| We don't know what TPP is. | |
| We barely know what a tariff is. | |
| And we certainly don't know how it's all going to play out. | |
| Nobody knows even what the old trade deals were to know exactly what it is that we want to do differently. | |
| Here's my prediction. | |
| You ready? We will Never have a comprehensive trade deal with China. | |
| I believe that we will simply evolve away from it. | |
| Because it appears that their business model, if you will, is power and not compromise. | |
| It's sort of an American thing to even offer a deal that's fair to both sides. | |
| It's a very American thing. | |
| Somebody says goalpost moving. | |
| If you're referring to me, I did believe that we would get a China trade deal. | |
| That was before I understood that they didn't want one. | |
| The minimum requirement for having a deal is that both sides want a deal. | |
| But what we're learning is that China doesn't want a deal. | |
| They want the same thing that they had, which is an unbalanced deal. | |
| So the only thing they want is the one thing we're not going to give them, at least under the Trump administration. | |
| So you don't have two sides trying to find a deal that's good for both sides. | |
| And as long as that's not happening, well, I wouldn't expect a deal if you don't have two sides trying to make a deal. | |
| Apparently, we just have two sides pretending to talk But China doesn't want any kind of a deal that would be anything like fair. | |
| So I don't see that changing, and so therefore my prediction has changed. | |
| So my prediction has changed to I don't think we're ever going to have a comprehensive trade deal with China. | |
| I think we'll just tariff and adjust over time. | |
| Here's an economic rule that's one of the The best, most useful rules of economics you'll ever hear. | |
| Here's the sort of thing that only people, you know, deal with economics and spend some time studying it would know. | |
| It's very simple to know, and it explains a lot of stuff. | |
| Like, you could be the smartest person in the room if you only know this one thing. | |
| Are you ready? Here's the one thing. | |
| Markets adjust. | |
| Whatever the rules are, or whatever the situation is, you can either change the situation, or you can just wait. | |
| Because the market will simply adjust to whatever. | |
| If you change the tax law, the market will be discombobulated for a little while. | |
| But if you check back in 10 years, the market adjusts it. | |
| The market adjusts to anything. | |
| You know, just about anything. | |
| The market adjusts over time. | |
| So if we were to say, okay, it looks like we can never have a deal with China, the market would have discombobulation in the short term where everybody said, oh, my hair's on fire. | |
| You know, what do we do? | |
| We don't know where things are going. | |
| What will become of us? | |
| And then you'll check back in 10 years and you'll find that Central America is just bristling with new companies that moved from China to be closer to the markets. | |
| It took care of the immigration problem by absorbing labor in Central America. | |
| And we no longer have a dispute with China because we just tariff them, they tariff us. | |
| It all works out in the long run. | |
| So remember that rule. | |
| Markets can adjust To just about anything, except maybe socialism, I suppose, as somebody was saying. | |
| So as long as you have freedom and capitalism and money can move across borders and ideas can move and people have freedom of expression, freedom to try things, freedom to try startups, as long as a lot of things can be tried and fail, and still, as long as a few things work, you're moving forward. | |
| As long as we have the economy that looks the way we look, markets... | |
| So, I say no deal with China. | |
| Let's talk about Hong Kong, because that comes into the same topic. | |
| Here's my prediction on Hong Kong. | |
| Are you ready? China wins. | |
| China wins. So, whatever it is that China wants... | |
| And if Hong Kong, I think they want to impose their legal system and Hong Kong wants to keep their semi-autonomous legal system, there isn't any other way this can go. | |
| So imagining that there are two potential outcomes, I don't know. | |
| There really aren't two potential outcomes. | |
| There is one potential outcome. | |
| In the long run, big China gets what it wants. | |
| Because Hong Kong, remember, I may have some of my history wrong, so I'm just spitballing here. | |
| But originally, Great Britain owned Hong Kong, and it was, I think, a 99-year lease. | |
| Because even Great Britain knew that although they had a claim to Hong Kong, they couldn't hold it. | |
| Because it's right there in China, you know, sort of China adjacent. | |
| So there was no way in the long run, there was no way that Great Britain could keep it. | |
| So they, it's a British protector, as somebody's saying. | |
| That might be the better way to describe it. | |
| In the long run, Great Britain knew that they couldn't keep control of something that's literally sitting right on China's doorstep and claimed by China. | |
| It just wasn't going to happen. And it's the same situation now. | |
| In the short run, China might say, well, you know, we might have to, things are getting violent, so we might have to back off for a little while. | |
| But in the long run, China's gonna get everything they want in Hong Kong. | |
| The residents of Hong Kong probably just need to get used to the fact that the Chinese government will be able to accuse them of crimes, extradite them to China proper, and do anything they want with them, just like every other citizen of China. | |
| So I'm pretty sure That's the way Hong Kong's gonna go. | |
| If you see the opposite happening, if you see China saying, all right, all right, you people in Hong Kong can have your autonomy, we back down, what would that do to everybody else in China? | |
| Remember, China's got a lot of different groups and it's just this gigantic, sprawling place. | |
| If they allow any part of their kingdom to successfully rebel, That's a problem because it makes everybody else say, hey, Hong Kong, look at what Hong Kong did. | |
| So China doesn't have an option of losing in the long run on Hong Kong. | |
| So I say that I'm sorry for Hong Kong, but you are going to become China. | |
| I don't see any other way that goes. | |
| All right. Trump tweeted on this topic. | |
| He says, I know President Xi of China very well. | |
| He is a great leader who very much has the respect of his people. | |
| So this is one of the things that Trump does well. | |
| So he starts with respecting President Xi, which is probably the right play every time. | |
| So he starts with respect, and then he can get a little critical. | |
| He is also a good man in a tough business, in quotes. | |
| So he's acknowledging that Xi has a tough job running a big... | |
| A sprawling enterprise there. | |
| And then Trump says, I have zero doubt that if President Xi wants to quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem, he can do it. | |
| Personal meaning? So Trump seems to be offering to be part of this process. | |
| Now, what Trump says, I agree completely. | |
| He says he has no doubt that if President Xi wanted to quickly and humanely solve it, he could. | |
| Well, of course. But do you know what? | |
| President Xi is unlikely to want. | |
| To quickly and solve it in a humane way. | |
| He doesn't want that. | |
| What he wants far more than that is to exert control over Hong Kong. | |
| So, sure, President Xi could solve this humanely. | |
| No doubt about that. | |
| Why would he? I don't think it's even good for him. | |
| In fact, if I were an advisor, I hate to say this, but if I were a personal advisor to President Xi, Would I tell him to take a meeting with President Trump and then change my mind and solve things in Hong Kong? | |
| It's like the worst idea ever because it would make Xi look weak and it would set the precedent that rebellion works sometimes. | |
| Doesn't want that. So whatever is going to happen in the long run, China will prevail over Hong Kong because what else could happen? | |
| All right. People are talking about the stock market and How that's going to affect Trump's re-election. | |
| So everything, you know, gets filtered through the 2020 election at this point until then. | |
| And so the big question is, if the stock market takes a reversal, will Trump lose his support? | |
| And especially if the Democrats can blame him for the China part of it and therefore blame him for whatever minor recession happens. | |
| Here's my guess. | |
| I think the market is going to be pretty darn choppy. | |
| And it makes you wonder what the so-called elite masters of the world are going to do. | |
| Because if you were a Democrat money person, wouldn't you want all the Democrats sort of collectively to sell their stocks right now? | |
| Because if the smart Democrats got out, that was a pretty good play. | |
| If the money people who are Democrats said, all right, wait until about this far before the election. | |
| You don't want to be too late. | |
| You don't want to be too soon. | |
| And just sell the crap out of the market. | |
| Because you'd be selling at a high. | |
| The market will go down because people will follow you because it looks like it's going down. | |
| So the panic selling will start. | |
| And then, no matter who gets elected, if Trump gets elected, the market will go back up. | |
| If the alternative gets elected, whoever it is, the market will go back up. | |
| There are two possibilities. | |
| No matter who gets elected in 2020, the market's going to go up. | |
| So that's my prediction. | |
| No matter who gets elected, the market's going up. | |
| Assuming that the selling was political, and I believe the selling was political, that is, there are enough Democrats who hope for a recession that they're going to make it happen. | |
| Because you don't need everybody to agree there's going to be a recession. | |
| What percentage do you need? | |
| 20% of the Democrats? | |
| Would that be enough? If 20% of Democrats suddenly and coordinatedly, even if they don't coordinate with each other, but just sort of mentally they all know it's time, if 20% of Democrats sold their stocks at a high, number one, good play, because I don't think we're going to see the high that we recently had for a while, at least not until election. | |
| If they sold it for the high and they're going to wait to buy it back on election day, Smart play. | |
| Very smart play. | |
| Smart enough that I wish I'd done it. | |
| If I could have sold all of my stocks a month ago, or whenever it was at a nice high, and not bought them back until, you know, election day, before we even know what the result is, I would have done that. | |
| I would have sold every stock and I would have waited until Election Day because I think Democrats are going to artificially depress the market because they want it to go down so badly. | |
| And things sort of go in the direction you want them to go, right? | |
| If you've got tens of millions of Democrats who are investors who are willing and actually prefer a short-term pullback in the market just so they can get their political preference, They're gonna act in ways that make that happen. | |
| And then the panic sellers will follow them, because they'll say, oh no, it's a depression. | |
| Sell, sell, sell. | |
| Now what you should see, if it's political selling, here's what you should see. | |
| You ready? If you see the market get killed between now and 2020 and stay low, at the same time that profits are good and unemployment is good, You saw political manipulation. | |
| If the market goes down and then for its own reasons, unemployment turns bad and profits turn bad, well then I'd say, okay, the market is anticipating the change in the market and that's just like normal. | |
| But if you see a disconnect Wait till you see your first stories and say, wait a minute, the market's down, but all the things that normally drive markets are looking good. | |
| Now that yield curve, people are saying, hey, look at the bond market, that's signaling that stocks are going to go down and the economy's going down. | |
| Maybe. Maybe it is. | |
| But maybe that's just the indication that people are getting out of stocks for political purposes. | |
| Because if you're moving your money out of stocks, It's going to go into bonds. | |
| And if it goes into the right kind of bonds, the price of the bond is bid up, which lowers the yield, which makes the yield curve invert. | |
| Aren't you glad I have a degree in economics to explain these things to you? | |
| So, That signal that you read about that you don't really understand, most of you are not into economics, and when you read something in the news like, hey, the yield curve is inverted, that's a sign that the economy will go bad. | |
| How many of you even know what that means? | |
| How many of you watching this Periscope knows what the hell that means, that there's a yield curve inversion? | |
| Nobody, right? 1% of you? | |
| But what it means is people move their money from stocks into bonds and because of supply and demand it changes the nature of the bonds. | |
| So when you see the nature of the bonds price and interest rates moving like that and moving in a certain direction, it indicates bad things. | |
| But all it really indicates is people move money out of bonds. | |
| That's all it indicated. I'm sorry, move money out of stocks and into bonds, certain classes of bonds. | |
| That could be just political manipulation. | |
| Maybe not coordinated. | |
| Perhaps it could just be lots of people thinking in the same way. | |
| It's like, I don't know, you know, maybe it's risky. | |
| That's another reason to sell my stocks now. | |
| But I'd certainly like to see that stock market go down. | |
| So here's what I would do. If I were a Trump supporter, You might do what I did. | |
| I sold a lot of stocks last week. | |
| I don't want to brag, but I got out early. | |
| Now, I didn't sell my whole portfolio, but there was a certain targeted number of stocks that I wasn't crazy about keeping anyway. | |
| Normally, I would have sold those holdings and moved them into something probably just a Probably just an unmanaged fund. | |
| But instead, I moved it into cash, and I might not put it in the stock market until closer to the election. | |
| So I'm going to wait to see if there's any way to tell there's a bottom to this thing. | |
| But I sold some serious stocks, and I'm glad I did. | |
| All right. Let me say again. | |
| I haven't said it yet at this Periscope. | |
| I am not a financial advisor. | |
| Do not take your financial advice from me. | |
| I can tell you what I've done, but absolutely you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever take advice from cartoonists on finance. | |
| This is not a finance recommendation. | |
| All right. Did you see Steve King, Representative Steve King, got in trouble again? | |
| The latest thing he said, there's some weird quote taken out of context. | |
| If there hadn't been rape and incest, there wouldn't be many of us here. | |
| And I'm thinking, well, I think I understand the context, that there were a lot of those things in the past. | |
| I don't know what, you know, the clip is taken out of context, so you'd have to sort of guess what he was talking about. | |
| But I gotta say, talk about something that would be hard to defend. | |
| Yeah, I don't know how. | |
| He's going to defend that one. | |
| Good luck on that. | |
| Somebody says he's right. | |
| Like, that matters. Does it matter if he had a mathematically accurate statement? | |
| Probably not. I mean, I don't know what point he was making, but the fact that he said it at all is pretty shocking. | |
| All right. What good is cash-holding? | |
| Loser thinking. I didn't say I'm gonna hold it in cash. | |
| I did not say that I'm holding cash. | |
| All right. Somebody said, what is offensive about that statement, though? | |
| Well, nothing. Nothing. | |
| There's nothing offensive about it. | |
| It just makes it look Like, people shake their heads and say, it sounds like crazy talk. | |
| But I think that has to do with the fact that it was taken out of context. | |
| If we saw it in context, I doubt it would sound the same. | |
| But the fact that he said those words out loud, he sort of walked himself into a trap. | |
| I also, yeah, I'm not going to tell you. | |
| I was going to say something else, but I wouldn't want you to be influenced by it. | |
| You should test your persuasion worldview by predicting stock markets. | |
| Well, predicting stock markets is sort of a fool's game, except for the very big long-term moves. | |
| So I would take the Warren Buffett approach, which is long-term, holding U.S. equities is a really good deal. | |
| But apparently even Warren Buffett is sitting on a gigantic pile of cash. | |
| So I think he thinks businesses are too expensive at the moment. | |
| Could the Epstein guards have been drugged? | |
| Somebody asks. Yes. | |
| In the anything's possible world. | |
| But as I was explaining yesterday, my own experience as a Overnight security guard is that falling asleep is the norm. | |
| I probably had at least a little bit of a nap every single time I worked that job, and I would be amazed if prison guards don't catch a nap when they're working overnight in 12-hour shifts, absolutely no stimulation, and all the inmates are just literally just sleeping in their beds. | |
| I got a feeling that taking a nap under those conditions is closer to normal. | |
| Here's what I don't expect you'll ever learn. | |
| You will not learn that the two security guards who slept during Epstein's death, you will not learn that it's the first time they ever took a nap at work. | |
| I don't know if they'll ever admit how many naps they took, but it's probably closer to every time than it is closer to rare. | |
| That's my guess, is that it's more likely they took at least a little bit of a nap every night. | |
| It was probably one of the benefits of the job. | |
| I guarantee that at least some of those guards thought, you know, this is the best job in the world. | |
| I can just take a nap, falsify my time card, and blah, blah, blah. | |
| Oh yeah, so we've got the story of the... | |
| Allegedly, there's a portrait, a painting at Jeffrey Epstein's, one of his homes, which one? | |
| New York or the island, I forget, in which there was a door open and the painting was spotted of allegedly Bill Clinton, at least this is what the grainy photograph looks like, Bill Clinton in a blue dress and heels. | |
| What's that all about? | |
| Now, my first guess, if I had to guess... | |
| What's going on there? Probably it was a gift. | |
| And probably it was a gift he didn't want that much. | |
| Because it didn't look like it was hanging on a wall, right? | |
| It looked like it was just in a room propped up on the floor. | |
| And the door was open and somebody saw it. | |
| So something tells me that it was a gift. | |
| And since he had pretty weird friends, you'd have to know what the person who gave the gift was thinking. | |
| To have any opinion on it. | |
| So who knows what that means? | |
| I don't know if it demonstrates what Epstein was thinking, or if it just demonstrates what the gift giver was thinking, and once he got it, he was like, well, what am I going to do with this? | |
| I can't throw it away. Yeah, I can't throw it away. | |
| I can't put it on the wall. What am I going to do with this? | |
| Maybe it was just for a joke. | |
| Now somebody said that the blue dress is actually the same blue dress that Hillary wore for something. | |
| So it's actually Hillary's dress. | |
| It just happens to be blue. | |
| And the red shoes, I don't know what the red shoes mean. | |
| Others are saying it's Lewinsky, but it doesn't seem to be the same style dress as Lewinsky was wearing. | |
| So do your own math on that. | |
| All right. Who knows what that's all about? | |
| I think we'll learn more and more about all this. | |
| I think it's amazing that the assistant to Epstein, Maxwell, I can't pronounce her first name, we don't know where she is. | |
| How hard would it be to hide in 2019 if you were a modern person in the modern world? | |
| It feels like it would be impossible to hide for long, because there's got to be something that gives you away. | |
| I mean, imagine, if you will, that law enforcement gets, let's say, court approval to wiretap all of the people that she's known to know. | |
| And then they just pick up every conversation. | |
| Ghislaine, yes, that's her first name. | |
| They pick up every conversation of the people who are even in the wide circle of people she's likely to ever call. | |
| And then they put a voice recognition thing on there, and they just record all the conversations of people she might remotely want to contact ever. | |
| And then they just search for her voice. | |
| And when her voice pops up, they track the call. | |
| Boom. Somebody said she was found. | |
| They found her in New England. | |
| I don't believe so. | |
| There's reports of finding her, but there's no confirmation. | |
| I understood there was some home they thought she was in, but that's not been determined. | |
| No technology if you're hiding. | |
| Yes, it is entirely true that she might simply be avoiding all technology. | |
| And she might not be speaking into any kind of a phone, etc. | |
| But remember, all she'd have to do is walk past a digital assistant. | |
| You know, I'm pretty sure the government can turn on your phone and listen to see if she's there. | |
| Right? Can't the government activate my phone and listen to this conversation right now if they want to? | |
| If they want to. I think they can. | |
| I don't know if they use that kind of technology for ordinary crime solving, but I think they can. | |
| Somebody says you could have voice altering technology. | |
| Yeah, you could. | |
| Do you think she has that? | |
| I don't know. You could. | |
| I just don't think she has that. | |
| All right. We'll see if she can run forever. | |
| This will be a second part of the story that's fun to watch. | |
| But that's all I got for today. |
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