It's the last full show of the year and we're here to deliver some holiday cheer! We talk about a variety of topics, including: Christmas cheer, China, the stock market, and much, much more!
00:02:04.000We're going to do about 20 minutes today and then go to mostly Mug Club segment and then tomorrow we have our end of year Christmas special.
00:02:10.000Look, if you don't have the holiday cheer in your heart right now, get it.
00:02:16.000And if that means you have to watch Die Hard to get it because it is a Christmas movie, then you do it.
00:04:22.000I want you guys to comment about this.
00:04:24.000What do you think is going to happen with the recent surge of COVID in China and how do you think that is going to impact the rest of the world?
00:04:30.000There's a lot of doomsday prognosticators out there saying that this is the beginning of the end.
00:04:35.000The sky is falling and everything's going to crap.
00:04:38.000So I want to hear what you have to say about that.
00:04:40.000But before we do, I just want to let you know why Steven is out today.
00:04:44.000This has been an incredibly stressful year.
00:04:46.000When we get to the end of the year, we're kind of all running on fumes a little bit, right?
00:04:52.000I usually get sick after we do that because the adrenaline stops kind of running.
00:04:57.000I hit a wall pretty hard last Wednesday.
00:04:59.000Steven's been hitting a wall for quite a while, but he doesn't have the luxury of not coming in and doing the show as often because he wants to make sure that he is giving you what you've paid for and making sure that he is performing.
00:05:10.000But this is not a show where we just come in and talk, right?
00:05:14.000It's easy if you do that, and I'm not taking anything away from anybody who does that for a living and just kind of talks into a microphone, because that's not hard, it's not to say that that is an easy thing overall, but it's easy in comparison, because basically what we're doing is doing kind of a Saturday Night Live sketch, like we have comedy, we're doing late night, we're doing news, we're doing all of these things kind of pushed together, and the prep time for that and the intensity level that you have to maintain just at some point takes a little bit of a toll, and then throw in all of the other stuff that we're doing right now.
00:05:43.000Uh, and so, you know, there's actually, you know, we want to make sure that the hashtag save Steven, uh, starts going around.
00:05:48.000In fact, some people have already gotten an advance start on this and there was some, I saw some pictures of the, the, the water tower actually somebody did.
00:06:08.000Again, if you are a Mug Club subscriber right now, or you would like to be a Mug Club subscriber, go there, enter your email address for us.
00:06:18.000That is the way that we know that we can keep in touch with you once we make this transition and kind of figure out what we're going to do in the new year.
00:06:26.000Make sure you do that right now for us guys.
00:06:27.000Do it and make sure that you have an email in there so that we can get in touch with you in the new year.
00:06:34.000So with that said, thank you to everybody who has done that.
00:06:38.000But like we found out the other day, you're not going to get a newsletter.
00:06:40.000This is not going to be like hot tips on where to do fine dining around the country.
00:06:44.000This is not something where you're going to get crowded.
00:11:24.000People complain about the atomic bomb, and I understand why, because it's one of these seminal moments in history where something that had never happened before and destruction on that scale from that kind of a device had never been seen before.
00:11:35.000But when you look at the firebombing, it was far more destructive, and I believe more people died during the firebombing than did during the atomic.
00:12:02.000You do it as quickly and swiftly as possible.
00:12:04.000And we understood very, very clearly that it was going to cost a lot of lives, both on their side and our side, if we were going to do a land invasion of the mainland.
00:12:12.000Right, and I don't know if you've read the book Hiroshima, which just details first-hand accounts of that morning.
00:12:57.000By the way, we hope we don't open a black hole up and destroy the entire Earth, but we'll see.
00:13:01.000And the thing, just a real other thing I want to add about Oppenheimer that's really interesting is many of the scientists that he was working with and dabbling with they were like communists.
00:13:09.000And he was watched very very closely as a communist for most of his time developing the bomb.
00:14:12.000Plenty of instances where we kind of wanted to.
00:14:14.000But anyway, speaking of people that we don't really like, actually I'm going to get into the China story in just a second because this kind of freaked me out yesterday and I immediately, anytime I think of anything Chinese, including food, I talk to Lane because he has some on-the-ground China reporters.
00:14:30.000He has not slept with a Chinese spy yet that we know of.
00:14:33.000We're still doing some background checks to make sure where he's getting his information.
00:14:38.000But yesterday we talked about this, and we had this incredible acoustic soundtrack, 61 second long promo, so if you listen to podcasts anywhere, go and listen to our podcast, Apple, Spotify, Android, whatever you do, 61 seconds of this beautiful sound of Joe Louis.
00:15:11.000That's the only number that we can really get.
00:15:13.000We thank you for everybody who did that yesterday.
00:15:14.000But please, if you have not, or if you just want to hear it again, let us know by going and listening wherever you have your podcast, because that's something that Steven may do a little bit of while we're kind of figuring out our next steps here.
00:15:26.000So you might hear some podcasts that he drops, but we're not gonna be doing the full show
00:17:10.000You could have been talking about anything.
00:17:12.000The note on the newscaster, he looks like the why are you gay guy.
00:17:16.000Well, one boring guy tossed to another more boring guy to cover the story that is anything but boring.
00:17:28.000You kind of screwed that one up, guys.
00:17:29.000But for most of the pandemic, you've seen videos that we were referring to just a second ago, like all these montages coming out on social media.
00:17:35.000And, you know, look, we always try to vet these things to make sure that they're real.
00:18:21.000So basically, the last clip was the people who had been shut in and forced to stay in their apartments, whether it was because of the welding the doors closed, which I think is a fire hazard, but I don't know.
00:18:31.000I mean, if you're trying to get rid of COVID, I guess burning people's fine.
00:18:36.000That's what started the whole unrest, was the people that were shot in their apartments and they died because of a fire.
00:18:40.000So that was them yelling, kind of, as a community, which was a lot of people, to be let out, basically.
00:18:47.000So that was a form of protest by them, right?
00:18:50.000And, you know, the Communist Chinese Party did a bit of a 180, right?
00:18:54.000We gave them a lot of credit for this, but we said that this was going to be a problem from the beginning, but now videos in China mostly look like this.
00:22:22.000But last week, China's top infectious disease expert Zhang Nanshan changed his tune, telling state media that, quote, Omicron has become significantly less pathogenic, with the mortality rate recently falling to around 0.1 percent, about the same as that of the Flu.
00:22:41.000In most cases, patients do not need to go to the hospital and can stay home.
00:22:44.000Well, that's good when you lock them in their homes and tell them that they can stay home, China.
00:22:49.000That's fantastic consistency in policy.
00:22:52.000But if you want to see the biggest flip-flop, check out this foreign shill here.
00:22:57.000Taiwan opened up and over the first six months had 20,000 deaths.
00:23:01.000If China opens up starting now... I hate these people.
00:23:04.000God bless all of you smart Western people who know better than Xi Jinping, who know better than Mario Fernando, who know better than the Arshadah 20th National Congress.
00:23:14.000So he's on Chinese state media right now.
00:23:31.000So China has been spending three years evaluating and assessing this evolving pandemic and the evolving variants and finally saw this result in Shanghai.
00:23:45.000Most recently, Chongqing with many thousands of cases, Guangzhou with many thousands of cases, confirming Shanghai, very, very low death rate.
00:23:54.000So the government finally could say, wow, we can now pivot this 100% focus on protecting health.
00:24:02.000Now, unfortunately, we can't because people are getting frustrated.
00:24:06.000Now we can pivot back to a more balanced It's people like you that are the problem.
00:24:17.000You're going out there and carrying the water for the CCP, basically extolling the virtues of Dear Leader, you know, in basically their language, and saying that, yes, you guys don't know better.
00:24:32.000Forget taking away rights that I guess they technically don't have over there because We don't have the same rights as we do here, right?
00:24:37.000But it's supposed to be a country that can produce a lot of goods for the rest of the world, and so I guess we'll just turn a blind eye to it, and then 10 days later say, well, they've reversed course because they found new information.
00:25:36.000Well, I mean, Fauci would probably stick them in a fly cage and have them killed too, but... I don't think the sand flies can eat the metal.
00:25:44.000I don't think it works the same way, but I understand your point.
00:26:14.000Totally different movie where they don't have flies that eat metal.
00:26:20.000So one of the reasons that we brought this up was that this, you know, I started hearing a lot about the doomsday predictions and then we're going to go to Mug Club here in just a minute.
00:26:28.000We're going to talk more about the Twitter files.
00:26:29.000I'll give you kind of a briefer on it.
00:26:39.000We hate the Chinese government because it oppresses their people.
00:26:42.000We don't want them to have to deal with stuff like this and we've been saying for a long time like, hey, these kind of shutdowns are going to lead you to some really dangerous times eventually.
00:26:51.000Now we'll talk about the 100% effective vaccine that I'm sure these people were forced to take and why there are issues when there cannot possibly be any issues, trust the science, but one of the things we're gonna have to deal with is the economic fallout from this, right?
00:27:08.000So there are a lot of people worried that we're basically just kind of crawling out of this supply chain issue, right?
00:27:15.000Where this pent-up demand, blah, blah, blah, the Biden administration completely screwing up every possible thing that they could.
00:27:21.000And us kind of heading into a recession, being in a recession, how deep is the recession going to be?
00:27:26.000How much is the Fed going to screw up the recession to now?
00:27:28.000Oh no, China's basically losing tons of its citizens and people may start closing down again.
00:27:33.000People may start restricting travel again.
00:27:36.000It just is this never-ending cycle of issues that we're going to deal with.
00:27:40.000And the World Bank actually cut China's growth target to 4.3%.
00:28:09.000If you're in a union out there, you're part of the problem a lot of the times.
00:28:12.000I don't dislike you, I dislike the people that run the unions.
00:28:15.000I don't think it's a problem for you to have a voice with management.
00:28:18.000I don't think that's an issue at all, but I think in today's world, when you start to have unrealistic expectations, i.e.
00:28:25.000$15 an hour, $25 an hour, a living wage, and nobody out there is willing to take those jobs, I could not believe it when $15 an hour was put forth and they're like, we'll just put these little kiosks in McDonald's.
00:28:53.000If the Chinese economy doesn't open, the global economy will suffer with tourism and exports.
00:28:59.000But resurgent Chinese economy will likely lead to more inflation as well.
00:29:03.000So we've got some issues to deal with with this story.
00:29:06.000We'll update you guys at some point but I'm betting it's going to all work itself out by the time we come back and you'll have a lot more of that information.
00:29:14.000So it's hard for us to say tune in again next week because we're here next week to be able to give you the rest of the story.
00:29:47.000The other news and information you can get from our social media stuff, we'll provide updates there.
00:29:51.000That's what the social media stuff is going to be for, but this is specifically if you want to join Mud Club.
00:29:55.000So make sure that we hear from you, and make sure that you go and listen to Joe Lewis's sweet, sweet vocal chords as he howls with the... Yeah, that right there.
00:30:06.000It's actually fun to be near him when he does that.
00:30:43.000You need to be concerned about what this reveals.
00:30:47.000Hunter Biden had no, had zero understanding of international finance.
00:30:54.000When his dad becomes Vice President of the United States, he goes and does deals in Russia, in China, and in Ukraine in international finance.
00:31:05.000Makes money from it in ways that make no sense, provides no real service, provides no products Doesn't have a business that's set up to run prior to this that's just a continuation, like Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner do, where they actually make clothing in China.
00:31:37.000And then the FBI sets up a scenario so that Twitter can be ready for the misinformation that they think is coming down the road that is absolutely chilling because it is almost exactly what then happens.