A touching tribute from George H.W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, on his father's life and legacy. Also, an update on Microsoft's new plans for artificial intelligence, and a look at the stock market.
00:07:47.740I, you know, I don't know that it's so much that we're actually altering what it is to be a male so far as it's just sort of bad to think about it.
00:07:58.300I do think there's some of that going on right now where it's, you know, I've mentioned before on your show that I moved here from New York.
00:08:04.540Um, and, uh, one of the things that was interesting to me about that experience was, uh, I didn't go into New York thinking of myself as a white male.
00:08:46.900Uh, like, or if we'll say, for example, if I have a contrary opinion, that's something that it's like, well, you know, you are coming from a position of privilege.
00:08:53.680Uh, and, and which is a way of saying it.
00:10:06.200I, I, I think in general, whenever your, your instinct is to engage with people by negating their ability to make an argument, it's a bad thing.
00:10:14.060You know, uh, it's, it's one thing to go.
00:10:43.900Uh, the, the, the photo, I'm sure it's been making the rounds, but the photo that I thought was very touching was, and he's so quiet about it.
00:10:49.360Uh, George H.W. Bush was a guy who really didn't like political theater.
00:10:54.460Um, he was raised by his mother to not use the pronoun I very often.
00:10:57.780But, um, I think in his eighties, uh, there's this great photo of him completely bald because one of the secret servicemen, uh, his son, I think, had got leukemia.
00:11:06.740And so all the secret servicemen, um, shaved their heads in support and George H.W. Bush just did it.
00:11:11.620Um, and like, you know, it wasn't like a huge national story.
00:11:14.220It did make the rounds a little bit, but it wasn't like he did a press conference.
00:11:16.760It's just, he wanted to be supportive of this kid.
00:11:18.460And I, I think that kind of, um, you know, that deep character that was very much concerned with people around him rather than adulation.
00:13:02.260In his inaugural address, the 41st president of the United States said this.
00:13:06.860We cannot hope only to leave our children a bigger car, a bigger bank account.
00:13:13.340We must hope to give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home, his neighborhood, and town better than he found it.
00:13:24.860What do we want the men and women who work with us to say when we are no longer there?
00:13:29.020That we were more driven to succeed than anyone around us?
00:13:34.360Or that we stopped to ask if a sick child had gotten better and stayed a moment there to trade a word of friendship?
00:13:42.840Well, Dad, we're going to remember you for exactly that and much more.
00:13:49.180Your decency, sincerity, and kind soul will stay with us forever.
00:13:53.180So through our tears, let us know the blessings of knowing and loving you, a great and noble man, the best father, a son, or daughter could have.
00:14:07.660And in our grief, let us smile knowing that Dad is hugging Robin and holding Mom's hand again.
00:14:15.220And here's a guy who has put on a strong face all week and been lifting other people up.
00:14:27.980I don't know if you saw yesterday when he was accompanying the casket and everything else, but it dawned on me yesterday the last time I saw him look like that.
00:14:38.220He had this, he had almost like a frown, but he was biting his lip, and you could tell that he wasn't, I mean, he was engaged and he was trying to hold it together.
00:14:49.140And I realized yesterday as they were doing another 21, you know, cannon salute, and I watched him, and I realized I haven't seen that face on George.
00:15:02.540I've only seen it once, one other time.
00:15:04.040And it's when they whispered in his ear, we're under attack.
00:15:08.600Remember, he sat there and he kind of frowned and he bit his lip.
00:15:13.080That guy was working hard to hold it together all day.
00:15:41.060I mean, they did a secondary funeral in Houston, or I guess a college station at the George H. W. Bush Library.
00:15:47.960And I'm really glad they did, because that's got to be very tough to have to put on that level of public-facing decorum when you're burning up inside.
00:15:59.380And here he is, doing a job as a son and a former president of honoring his father the way his father and mother would have been proud, instead of wallowing in his own grief.
00:16:18.340I just, I find this family remarkable.
00:16:22.020Out of curiosity, what do you think George H. W. Bush is going to be remembered for?
00:16:28.140Like, I think probably the Cold War and character.
00:16:31.800I think those are the two things that are going to really stand out.
00:19:46.720A group of students in California have an annual whiteness forum.
00:19:52.260Now, we were, I'm pretty sure, don't you think, Andrew, we're pretty sure this is they're not for whiteness.
00:19:59.900No, I was confused by that because the title of like the annual whiteness conference or something, I thought, oh, that's, you need to steer clear of that.
00:20:06.600But, no, I think it's about whiteness and probably not in a favorable capacity.
00:20:52.120So, you never picked up on that, Steve?
00:20:54.060I didn't, but, you know, there's, there's a couple of things at play in stories like this.
00:21:00.140Every year on my show, Glenn, we, we always go in, we start a new year with like a theme.
00:21:04.600I try to model myself after my all-time favorite bands, U2 and the Beatles, and just kind of reinvent yourself so you're not just doing the same stale thing.
00:21:13.840And so, our, our theme for next year is no BS.
00:21:17.540And, and one of the things, and we started it yesterday on this clip with Katie Turrett, MSNBC, talking about how meaningless life is because we won't, you know, focus wholeheartedly on, on global warming.
00:21:28.460And, and I think what I mean by BS in these cases is force them to live by what they claim they believe.
00:21:35.580For example, if you really believe that, if that whiteness is racist and you're at a university, remove yourself from the university then, drop out of school so that someone of color may have your spot.
00:21:48.660When Kirsten Powers said on CNN a couple of weeks ago that she has been a beneficiary of the white patriarchy, if you really believe that, Kirsten, quit your paid gig at CNN so someone of color may have that spot.
00:22:03.160If you really believe that, you know, what happened to Native Americans was so absolutely dreadful and terrible that you just can't even, then give up all the trappings of Western civilization, trade in Wi-Fi for Wampum, and join the local reservation.
00:22:18.320And if Katie Turrett really believes that all is meaningless because we won't make global warming our single-minded focus, you know, don't take that gas-guzzling, you know, SUV unmarked out front of 30 Rock home to your posh flat there on the Upper East Side.
00:22:33.720Quit your gig and, you know, grab a placard and go out there in Times Square, bang your drum, and say, bring out your dead.
00:22:41.180These people don't believe any of this stuff.
00:22:43.820They may feel it, but they don't believe it.
00:23:23.680Well, in fairness, when you have three homes while you're suffering for, you know, the working class, that requires a lot of jet travel to get back and forth to those $50,000 honorarium speaking engagements.
00:23:36.040Steve, I'm going to push back a little bit.
00:23:38.820But I will posit, I do think that generally Democrats and progressives do believe the stuff they're espousing.
00:23:45.000I don't know that they always live up to it.
00:23:46.840And so I would say the gap is one of hypocrisy, but not of actual, you know, sort of cynical lying about the ideology they're professing.
00:24:16.460The credo of progressivism is very simple, because I want to.
00:24:20.360Whatever I want, I will justify whatever I need to reverse engineer, whatever philosophy I need to deconstruct, whatever cafeteria Christianity I need to choose from the menu, where Leviticus both is terrible to gays, but also the basis of my immigration system at the exact same time.
00:24:37.180I can just do whatever I want because I want to.
00:24:40.400And then when I finish Antonio Gramsci's long march through the institutions, so I control the college campuses and I control the media, four legs good, two legs bad becomes four legs are good, but two legs are even better, because I want to.
00:24:53.800It's really about coercion, control, and power.
00:24:56.540And that's really what progressivism is.
00:24:58.560And now you're watching it, to borrow one of its own terms, transition.
00:25:02.320It is transitioning now from postmodernism to evangelism to cultural terraforming.
00:25:07.340And you saw that with one of the most powerful progressives in the world this week, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.
00:25:12.560He was literally talking about deplatforming people that he finds objectionable.
00:27:02.680However, they have a different way of doing it.
00:27:04.340So putting all of them into that kind of anarchic destroying the civilization thing, I think, would be overshooting the mark.
00:27:13.280And I don't think that I'd like your opinion on this, Steve, that what's happening in Paris goes to show that 80 percent of the people in France believe in global warming.
00:27:41.740And that's where a real problem comes in.
00:27:44.120And I think what you're talking about, you know, it's do as I say, not as I do.
00:27:48.080Well, that's that is the childlike thinking of I want things without consequences or I want to pass those consequences on somebody else.
00:27:59.500And this has been a several staged cultural devolution.
00:28:03.020It's been a cloward pivoting on a devolution scale.
00:28:06.760That's what the welfare state was the first salvo.
00:28:09.860And you begin this notion that we're going to devolve from a safety net to a full fledged welfare state.
00:28:15.180And at the heart of it is this notion that I have to subsidize other people's poor choices that and therefore you're not accountable for your actions.
00:28:24.200And we're going to create things like marriage penalties and we're going to incentivize things like out of wedlock births.
00:28:30.660That's the first and opening salvo that I'm entitled to something that doesn't belong to me rather than face accountability for a poor life choice that I made.
00:28:39.120You meet you reach the next stage now where this mindset becomes institutionalized.
00:28:43.240And that's what you're talking about right now.
00:28:45.520And this goes to the theme of our show was for this year, which was worldview.
00:28:49.780And we started off our year talking about the seven deadly worldviews in the last stage.
00:28:55.500And the last stage is secular humanism or postmodernism.
00:28:58.800And it's always whatever it's been called in past eras.
00:29:02.160It's a temporary staging ground because we want to believe in something transcendent.
00:29:06.680We all have the Blaise Pascal described God shaped hole in our heart.
00:29:10.580And so this is the final stage of deconstruction in order to prepare the culture for the next transcendent truth to come.
00:29:18.160If you look at Europe, the two transcendent truths, and they're about a quarter century ahead of us on the devolution scale.
00:29:23.700The two new transcendent truths are cultural Marxism and Islam, which is, you know, you have a lot of former Catholic churches now or mosques in Europe.
00:29:33.060The same thing is going to happen here as well.
00:29:35.440If you don't see spiritual revival in America, in a quarter century, we're going to be exactly where you see France, exactly where you see the U.K.
00:32:01.380It is normal for a market to have to retrench, for irrational advancements to need to get taken out of the marketplace and more rational advancements to come take their place.
00:32:10.240So the one school of thought is this is a normal or healthy retrenchment.
00:32:15.720The other school of thought looks back about seven or eight years and goes, it's not possible for this to be a normal or rational retrenchment because the market for the last seven to eight years has not been normal or rational.
00:32:27.340We came out of the financial crisis and did abnormal, irrational things.
00:32:32.020We built up the market with $4 trillion of printed money.
00:32:36.100We brought $2 trillion of corporate money back into the United States.
00:32:39.700Trump did that, brought that money back in from overseas, and the companies took some of that money and gave it back to the workers.
00:32:45.340We saw those press releases when they occurred.
00:32:47.540But the vast majority of that money, they took it, and to avoid paying taxes on it, they invested it in their own stock.
00:32:53.740Now, it was no longer a tax that year.
00:32:55.880It would be a capital gain for the following year.
00:32:58.460So $2 trillion additional went into the market that otherwise would not have been there in stock buybacks.
00:33:04.560So there really are those two competing schools of thought,
00:33:07.600one that you'll hear from Merrill Lynch that says, this is a normal, rational retrenchment.
00:33:12.580Even if we see a 10%, 15% decline in the market, that's a healthy retrenchment.
00:33:18.960And early in next year, those gains will re-manifest themselves.
00:33:22.340And then the other one looks back a few more years and just says, I'm not really sure that's the case because we didn't enter a healthy period.
00:33:28.880And so what does that mean for a percentage of loss?
00:33:34.760To get back to where we should have been, if this was a normal, healthy retrenchment,
00:33:40.640the Dow would have to lose more than 15% to 20% of its total value from where it got to in terms of an all-time high.
00:37:23.520How does that result in the Communist Party's downfall?
00:37:25.940We are with Justin Wheeler, who is one of the guys who does research for me and watches the economy for me and just stock market and tries to explain different things.
00:37:35.820And we were talking about Donald Trump and his tariffs with China.
00:37:41.760He may be, may be playing a game of chess with China.
00:37:49.600And it's not just about a new trade deal.
00:37:52.480It's actually about taking at least President Xi out.
00:37:58.600He is significantly damaging President Xi in China.
00:38:03.680Yeah, I mean, China is an interesting economy because it is still a classical mix of a strong communist regime.
00:38:12.760But over the last 20 years, they have adopted capitalist principles in order to grow.
00:38:17.520That is how they have been able to grow is by saying, well, we got Hong Kong and Hong Kong's working.
00:38:25.600And we've experienced this, quote unquote, Chinese miracle.
00:38:30.400You know, Trump as a strategist, we talk about is he playing chess or is he playing checkers?
00:38:35.240And Trump as a strategist, his, you know, if you read his two books from the 60s, but especially The Art of the Deal, which was used in Wall Street.
00:38:43.600And one of the things you learn from the movie Wall Street is that these wealthy businessmen want to acquire or partner with companies.
00:38:51.720And they don't look at a company that's having a Chinese miracle and say, I want to partner with them.
00:39:58.280I take the knees out from underneath that communist regime.
00:40:01.400I hurt them where they can't hurt me back, at least not in a grand scale.
00:40:06.360Well, yes, cars are going to be a little bit more expensive over here.
00:40:09.400But over there, they will have 5 million people out of work.
00:40:13.820And those people protest and those people support the communist party.
00:40:17.900And so it does a significant service to him in elevating his negotiating power and his position of power with them to do things that weaken that regime.
00:41:30.180You have Chinese people over the last 15 years that used to live on a rural farm and work for the Communist Party growing rice and then now drive a car in Shanghai.
00:41:40.220And just like us, if it comes to giving up that car, they now know I can have a car.
00:41:46.880So if you end up with 5 or 10 or 20 million unemployed people in rural China that is not covered by the news media and where people still are poor, no, it won't matter.
00:41:56.520If you end up with 5 or 10 million unemployed people in Shanghai and in the larger metropolitan areas, it will matter significantly.
00:42:05.100That's really what happened to the Soviet Union.
00:42:07.740The Soviet Union collapsed on the protest of 10 million people, but 200 million citizens, but 10 million people protested.
00:42:15.900The entire communist regime collapsed.
00:42:19.760Yeah, and the one thing that the communists have known, and this is why I think that they have their total surveillance state by 2020, is they can't handle, they're so fragile that they can't handle any real unrest.
00:42:37.020I mean, this is why they built those ghost cities.
00:42:39.860They built those damn ghost cities because they can't have this stop because they know if it stops, there's been enough people who have built those that are looking in going, I don't live like this.
00:42:55.420And once they see that, they want that.
00:42:58.640I think the Chinese regime has been far more competent in terms of retaining its totalitarianism than the Soviets were, because Gorbachev, and this is not a slander to Reagan, by the way, but when we say that Reagan won the Cold War, I think that you're giving communism far too much credit.
00:43:14.020I'm sorry, you're giving Reagan too much credit and communism too much credit.
00:43:16.900Communism collapsed because communism is stupid.
00:43:19.160But what Gorbachev did was Gorbachev looked at this kind of fraying Soviet empire, and he went, here's what I'm going to do.
00:43:25.540I'm going to give people more freedom, and they will love me and the government as a result of this.
00:43:29.480And what happened was they went, you know what, now that I've got more freedom, I think of myself more as a Ukrainian than I do as a Soviet citizen, and the whole thing imploded.
00:43:35.680China's learned from that model, and China's gone.
00:43:37.840We're going to give enough economic freedom that we can get some money going, but we're not going to give any type of, no, you do not get any rights to protest or anything like that.
00:43:45.520And they've managed to keep that grip on power.
00:44:29.520We've talked previously, and I'm sure you've covered a lot on the whole credit rating system, the social credit rating system they have, where if you're looking at the wrong Google search images, you're seeing unpatriotic pornography, whatever the thing is, they can begin to algorithmically determine that you could be a problem person.
00:44:44.060And we're just going to grind you to a dust to make sure that that doesn't happen.