i don't see. what the. u.s. officials raid the chinese consulate in houston right after it is evacuated on washington's orders and the u.s. secretary of state calls on other nations to join forces against china. portland witnesses another night of chaos says u.s. federal troops used tear gas and rubber bullets to break up a crowd of activists. and a face mask along takes effect in england but it is still unclear who should be enforcing the measures leaving small businesses and their owners. those are your headlines at this hour i will be back tomorrow with another look at your news and we program the weekly will start in about an hour right here on arch international students.

i am max kaiser this is the kaiser report the best show rated recently by show ratings amount of us as the best show in the world welcome stacy is that when i hear twitter accounts that you created. i get it well you know what the theme of this episode of kaiser report is you know those black friday shopping stampedes and shopping riots that everybody looks forward to the 1st friday after thanksgiving where people go and beat each other up in order to get a discount on a flat screen television or actually some sort of useless item that they don't need this started this trend started they say in 2005 according to the wikipedia black

friday has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year in the united states since 2005 all the news reports which at that time were inaccurate have described as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time similar stories resurface year upon year at this time portraying hysteria and shortage of stop creating a state of positive feedback the other is a shortage of stuff perceived shortage and people get you know black friday they rushed the stores and they get into office fights or brawls and it's like an american thing and amazingly it's like migrated to the rest of the world even though these other countries don't have to giving even though that they don't have these big box discounters they still like to go to the store and beat each other up because they figure that's like being an american they get a hamburger from mcdonald's you beat each other up on black friday and you're saying the national anthem i mean america is the culture that people 'd love and we're going to get into this comparing this to robin hood app traders but you know i want to show you what i bought in black friday and that was

a mini max it did sit on the shelf for. i do while but most people didn't realize many macs actually stood in for you for a few episodes during lockdown and nobody even noticed so it was worth the 599 not 599 but 5 dollars 99 cents i paid for this many macs know that outsold elf on a shelf for 3 christmas it's a row before christmas got cancelled because the car council culture and the generation and this also the justice i got a calculator only paid $6.00 for a member back of the 1970 s. i bought one for $800.00 so that was a good one the 1st quite a bargain this was a i've no idea what this is but it looks like a keyhole but it's attached to nothing. to unlock the present knowing not into the safe of vault of nothingness put the key here and enter the void so this this was definitely worth the 17000000 i pay for it this is where i would keep my stuff in

case i was out there hunting in the bush with davy crocket i would keep my little packet of you don't do much that these days but it was a bargain at $47.00 and who doesn't want the spare in the cupboard i got this. mock out again and you know this is the standard style very stylish that moscow do where your own jumped up you know they were in this even over 30 below 0 you can you can be made from the forehead down if you have been choked on if you like your miami beach right is the amazing russian technology there so i know i did almost forgot here this is a 2 can i got also on the sal simply because i thought it would be a good friend for plucky you know plucky lonely a lot of times he's a manic depressive isn't it so i get him a nice 2 can like this he can have fun plucky the point is that one participates in

one of these shopping stampedes and pretty much you put the stuff. on the shelf and never use that again but you feel better because you got a 50 percent discount well you know a lot of robin hood traders look at the markets and think they're getting 50 or 60 or 70 or 90 percent discounts when a company on the verge of bankruptcy their shares collapse in like wow a 90 percent discount before declared bankruptcy it was $100.00 now it's only 10 what a bargain right well $20000.00 robin-hood traders are in for a rude surprise as c.b.l. prepares to file bankruptcy bloomberg reports small operator c.b.l. and associates is preparing to file for bankruptcy the headline hit after hours on friday sinking shares by at least 20 percent and you could see shares collapsed by 20 percent then they opened down 23 percent on monday mornings incredible you know these rabid traders are really learning some important lessons about trading stocks

and because in this case the perception that becomes something has dropped 90 percent that it can't go any lower and of course people who are experienced in markets know that if it's dropped 90 percent the chances of it dropping another 90 percent are actually quite high things that are trading at all time highs tend to trade at new all time highs things trading at all time lows tend to trade a new all time lows that's a very subtle and kind of nuanced real fact of trading you find it in books like reminiscence of a stock operator by just livermore written in the 1920 s. conserve the bible of trade if you really want to learn how to trade these things i suggest you read that very slim book and educate yourself on how these things actually work but jeff robin hood apps these kids jency i don't mind picking their pockets every day i can see where they're making the mistakes i just capitalize on their naivete but in my view i'm helping them learn it's like i could give money to the college fund of america or 'd i could help robin hood traders

lose money in my pocket. well this is an interesting chart you can see the green line here is the users of robin hood app versus the price of c.b.l. and you see as it keeps on going down and it keeps going down robin hood apertures keep on piling in just for fun i went over to twitter and entered the house and a dollar sign c.b.l. to look at what people are talking about these day traders were saying on twitter holding c.b.l. and buying more to average down confident they're going to reach an agreement with the banks are selling. so this is somebody on july 18th the day then they basically were filing for bankruptcy so there are agreements in place with creditors that the creditors when you the equity holders lose as we've said many times as they keep on piling into these bankrupt companies yeah these robber who traders would be buying deck chairs on the titanic you know because the price keeps going down and they're really cheap about a dollar

a share i'm going to buy more while i'm on the lifeboat we. could do it do it do it in the dot com days when i guess it was really generation x. participating in the dot com days and the last of the boomers like yourself and you know people are piling in on these companies that had no earnings because they had bought like a u.r.l. like pets dot com but these were companies that were in the beginning of not only a tech industry which was still quite new at that point and you know the world wide web you know monetizing that that was brand new at the time in the late ninety's but also like these companies at least you could imagine that they might grow into something huge like pets dot com or whatever even the infrastructure companies that did fall after that the hype that once everybody realized like the power of the possibility of the world wide web they went bonkers right well with these sort of

bankruptcy speculators these shopping. stampedes to invest in bankrupt companies there are literally companies at the end completely of their life cycle hertz over 100 years old it was one of the 1st of the rental car companies now we're in the day and age of and other right sharing our ups that started to destroy that business and we're in a post pandemic world well not yet but one day we might be and people business people aren't traveling anymore malls dead they're not coming back and they're buying these bankrupt companies awaiting petroleum oil whole oil industry dead so these are end of life cycle that these young robin-hood apertures are piling into the i think that's a remarkable kind of insight interesting point there that the gent acts on the last the baby boomers who are speculating in the 990 s. on the birth of companies that went public for the 1st time and they would have these pops and then there was

a sting norma's crash here the millenniums and gen zinni are speculating on the death of companies and companies that are dying and declared their dead companies and their client plowing their way in to speculate on the death of a company so there seems to be a very elegant kind of comic circle being square here i'm not exactly sure what it all means but it is quite beautiful well i think it's kind of a trickle down situation and if you look at the these people piling into dead companies not only dead companies but dead industries dead business models. look at the chart from the united states the government the treasury monthly u.s. surpluses and deficit since 1980. look at huge the deficits are getting lookout more and more bankrupt slowly and then suddenly it's becoming bankrupt and yet you see you know investors around the world many of them from this mysterious

caribbean area piling into treasuries. there's often. excess demand for negative the open bottoms i mean we're making fun of all these millennia old and gen buying up robin hood out you know chairs on robin hood after bankrupt companies and dead business models but the same thing globally with investors bond investors doing the same thing they're being paid you know they're paying government to borrow from them so like how much less insane how much of a stampede at the supermarket like we all make fun of those walmart rioters and we're making fun of the robin hood app rioters and what about the bond traders well it's all of us short termism so the appeal of buying negative interest rate bonds is the greater fool theory that i was going to buy after you bought it and you can get a short term profit and the reason why short term profit seeking a so paramount today is because people are broke and they're bankrupt and they're drug addled and they're drunk. and you put them on line with free trading on an app

and they do stupid things so the secret of course is to get rich slow but nobody has 20 years to do that everyone has to make money in the next 20 minutes or face the creditors and that includes institutions pension funds you know i think government is trying to make money in the next 20 minutes otherwise it's going to have to declare bankruptcy and that's unfortunate but true so it's the risk gets more extreme like a gambling addict at the casino they only have one bet left before they're taken to prison and they put it all on red right on the roulette wheel that's america now that it's bankrupt no more defense ability pennsic i was blown out there like we're going to put their entire future the country on a red spin that rule that will maybe maybe we'll let you know fred smith who is the founder of fedex actually the company was down to us last $5000.00 or $15000.00 he did go to vegas he did put it on the roulette wheel he did win and he saved the

company without that lucky spin. in vegas fed ex the company would never have survived ok but that was a one in the 10000000000 shot you can't roll the entire future of the country on a rule on a bit of the roll that wheel well don it. does that. i want to point out to the last seconds here i do want to point out that you know just like those robin hood app traders are hoping for something that never what happens in real life which is the bankruptcy that equity holders are going to make any money the same with all the investors in this failed business model of a global system based on the u.s. dollar any currency would fail and that reserve currency but we're all a doubling down on this hoping like some sort of miracle the bankruptcy judge basically makes us all whole can link up the fun of the fun about the. well we'll be back after this moment ago it.

capitalism in the united states abandon the united states the leading capitalists in this country are now global capitalist grab that link that leads them there middle class without jobs without a future it's a disaster covered over with endless eater but the reality is a disaster and if mr trump were here you would see other people emerging trying to make a political career by pointing to this. problem drugs don't always come from unscrupulous dealers but from pharmacies to in every

state in the united states we've seen fairy sharp increase in the number of people seeking treatment for addiction to prescription opioids oids invented america under the banner of medicine persisted with the pain but instead of trying to wean him off though she did go sefer dose after dose after dose and really became his drug dealer so who's to blame patients doctors manufacturers all the governments of. welcome back to the kaiser report imax keyser time now to turn 10 a fantail way to more it is the host of breakdown an l w author he's also the author of long raids on sunday at his sub stack i follow this guy on twitter he's a deep thinker we're going to interview him right now is pretty darn interesting

that they now welcome a thing so much for having me everybody is talking about open ai g p t 3 is the most powerful artificial intelligence language model ever is this something we should celebrate or fear i think it goes both ways i mean i don't think you can have a i advantage without worrying a little bit about it the specifics of this one the model that's been released the thing that makes it less scary to me which may be relevant for other parts of our conversation is that it can't do narrative so basically this is sucked in 16475000000000 inputs half a trillion words and so it can predict with incredible accuracy affectively what the next word is supposed to be based on context so it makes it easy for it to do things like imitate blog post and people style the scary thing that of course is that you can imagine you know essays op eds or whatever coming out from max or from the faneuil hall that sounds just like us if people are reading us a lot because it's good at doing that sort of imitation the less scary thing is it

doesn't really have any comprehension of what it's putting out there it's just really a predictor so it's not kind of intelligent in any meaningful way it's just very impressive but it's still i think you know every advance that ai has implications for a lot of different roles in jobs and everything else and ultimately you know it's about trajectory and last year g p t 2 came out and people were blown away that it existed and it's taking an even less them out of time for it to be sort of this new version that's 2 orders of magnitude stronger so you know the question that we have with ai i think are bigger than. any one specific implementation or model but it reminds us that this is going to be a serious part of our future right you think can't stand narrative what does that mean and means that it has a hard time keeping a coherent thought it doesn't have a mental model of the world all it has is the ability to read other stuff and so let's say that you and i wanted to kind of construct a story or you know your we're going to talk about

a bunch of different things today but you know if we talk about the the wall street right wall street bath and robin hood and these sort of things i'm coming into that with a set of mental models that help put that in context for the world it doesn't have anything like that and so what this amounts to is that after a couple paragraphs it can get kind of disjointed and weird and go on strange non sequiturs and tangents and so it can craft a story basically it can do bullet points it can do essays it can do a lot of very impressive things but it can't keep kind of a coherent picture of the world that it's all building up to look at an age where pay paul. i don't really believe in any narrative right because everything's become fake this cell in the president says that's fake news and mainstream media is fake there is a feeling telling people that don't believe any narrative if you have an ai bot that doing is rape our taj as it were and it famous from what you find from other fake nez it's going to be difficult to convince anybody that anything is worth listening to and i think that might be one of the risks of this particular piece of

technology now moving on the free money p.p.p. bailouts the massive money printing operations enhanced unemployment benefits universal basic and come put the scale of the money printing into some sort of macroeconomic context and where does this go and mean it goes bigger i mean you're seeing already the all of the kind of like but a little headlines menuhin back on the hill talking about more in stimulus and wanting to get both the fiscal and the monetary engine going in concert you have the e.u. who just approved a $2000000000.00 carbon recovery package and so i think that the biggest thing for me is to hold inside the numbers if the normalization of the methods right when this happened there wasn't a question there wasn't a debate about whether we were going to engage in these programs there wasn't a national kind of conversation about whether the fed was kind of moving outside of its mandate with the special purpose vehicles it was just assumed that when things got bad the fed was going to be there and the real impact to me is again less the

actual dollars and cents in fact is people who are arguing right now that you know as as a kind of percentage of g.d.p. the fed's balance sheet is still low relative to the e.c.b. in japan and things like that i think what matters much more is again the narrative implications and the normalization of the fed beds backstopping everything right when you say they are normalizing the fed going outside of a say normal channels and using special purpose vehicles to bypass let that's called what it is. passed the law right there would be a veiling lawlessly for the benefit of whom the other thing that i need the money is trickling down to a fast majority of folks in the country same dollars get stuck in the pockets of the kleptocrats and i can tell you there so isn't this effectively a boeing saying as a coach it would be a coup if it wasn't already the power structure in place traded i mean and maybe revealing the coup that happened

a long time ago more baldly but i think that the the reality is that there's only one instrument that they have to kind of exert their will on the markets and that's an instrument that by definition is going to get to the sort of actors right that can tell you there's insiders faster and i think in a lot of ways that's why you're seeing people kind of throw out the assumption that that traditional policy is going to do anything for them and are just trying to kind of assert themselves like barbarians at the gate in the market so i think that the only qualms i have with your definition of this is a coup is that it's been going on for a long time and and if anything this just kind of made it more clear the antecedents got back to the reagan years and the federal reserve's greenspan put all the deregulation and basically wiping away the security back to 33 and 34 that cleaned up the mass of the speculative bubble of the 1920 so we're back kind of into almost a replay of all the excesses that occurred at that time the robin hood

trading generation is out there on that app trading up a frenzy and they're buying stock in bankrupt companies with their with their p.p.p. money and their and their universal basic and come money they're buying hertz and j.c. penney and whiting petroleum and mall operators c.b.l. these are companies that are going bankrupt and they're attracting a lot of training on behalf of a robin hood app traders tell me what's going on here. there's a lot i think that there's a couple different ways to look at it one is the question of does this actually have a role in markets and if you asked you know wall street professionals a few months ago whether this was a real force they would kind of dismiss it right there blowing it off i think that the tone has shifted a little bit and it's something that people are taking more seriously part of the reason for that is that this whole movement has infiltrated financial media which

has historically been extraordinarily exclusionary almost by definition right financial media is designed to make people feel less knowledgeable and less understanding because it's made to feel that people who do understand all the acronyms and and get it you know they feel like an in-group that's really what financial media does that's what it profits from so now you have forces like dave portnoy the founder of our school sports who are just absolutely warping the media narrative to fit what he's telling and he's it is an ignore of will force and that's creating more momentum around it which i think goes back to the strategy here and sammy all of this represents and some ways a base level discontent with with the options available to participate in the market and so rather than just kind of passively accepting that you just have to put your money into your 401 k. and go on your merry way people are saying no this is ridiculous i'm going to go see what we can do and that's why you have these sort of semi coordinated efforts like wall street bets which are not just kind of meaning although memes are an

important part they're basically weaponize ing memes and playing a game of chicken with the rest of the markets and i think that that's what the bankruptcy bat was all about is it was a bet that they were going to make this thing looks so ridiculous that some percentage of people just had to foam 0 in and they were willing to play that that game of chicken in a way that potentially other institutional investors just couldn't hang with you know the f.a.a. with a part no i am a day traders on the robin hood traders they have buying hertz aka even though it's bankrupt as monitor they had a senate. and i think ultimately that's unhealthy for this generation the millennial think and say they are getting hooked on senate i would go farther i would say it's the monetization of nihilism and it is a i mean you know not everyone right i don't want to go too far but i do believe that. one of the one of the responses to this that rings least true to me and that i think is the one of the biggest examples we have of kind of peril question right

now is oh when this bubble inevitably blow up like it always will these guys are going to be disillusioned and my theory is that the disillusionment is table stakes for this disillusionment and the reason they got in disillusionment is going to college in college that 12 years later without feeling like you got farther along disillusionment is not being able to buy a house because houses just keep going up disillusionment is as all of these things right it's the places that inflation is they can hold that aren't the silly little you know consumer price index and so if people are being told and structurally forced into participating in markets as their only means of getting ahead in any meaningful way why wouldn't you do it in a way that's more that's more kind of barbarian and serves your own interests and doesn't play by the rules when the rules have left you behind why would you accept them as the way to play the game if you think you can figure something out that out now that has nothing to do with efficacy especially in the long term but i understand the nihilism and the frustration but to your point i do think that it's

unhealthy we don't want people to engage in our markets in is that even a bad faith because the whole thing is bad faith in some ways but in a way that presumed that nothing is there for them other than to grab the loot that they can before the whole city burns to the ground enough out of what we have right now good point their value right off in about dollar milkshake and dollar wrecking ball tell us about this is one of the biggest questions i think that really there is so much disagreement about in the world is on the one hand you have this theory that the dollar. is the only game in town ultimately and that the dollar and the u.s. more broadly effectively suck all the liquidity of the world into their system because it's the only place for excess savings in other parts of the world particularly asia and europe to go that's kind of the dollar milkshake theory call has kind of redefined it as the dollar wrecking ball and talked about its delivery as impact on other parts of the market the other side of it is has to do with the counterpoint i

guess is that the dollar has been kind of weaker than some people thought or as a reset a little bit and so really no one has any friggin idea right now about the dollar and part of the opacity and part of the confusion in the system has to do with the fact that when we talk about the dollar we're not just talking about the dollar itself but dollar equivalents right we're talking about the the entire euro dollar system the entire world of u.s. dollar denominated debt that is not kind of in the in the formal u.s. bank system so it's i think that for me the reason that i cover it so often is that the place of the dollar is the world's reserve currency has and the way that that manifest has an outside impact on other assets other economies other real economy issues and it's one area where there really is not a single band of conventional wisdom there's very strong kind of competing theories for what happens so when paul krugman at the new york times says that what backs the dollar are a man with a gun with that example of monetizing nihilism yes or no i would call that

foundational nihilism of a system but i would maybe argue that it's the other way around i think in some ways the dollar has been the most effective weapon in the u.s. arsenal for a very long time now and part of the reason that there's big stakes is that if that changes who knows what happens samael thank so much being on the kaiser report i have to have me and s. going to do it for this edition of the cars are a part of a back a fair bit i want to thank our guests a panel with a more if you like a touch treatise on kaiser report that i found bio. ah no team no crowd. no shots.

actually helps because. track no one. points your thirst for action. dark industry comes to life in los angeles every night. dozens of women sells their bodies on the streets many of them under-age. los angeles police reveal a taste of their daily challenge no if you're going to exploit our child here in los angeles father we're going to come out as the officers going undercover as sex workers and customers to fight the early sex trade.

a lot of young people know nothing about julian assange. do you know. anything about this man and what happened to him do you want to know about that 10 years ago. wiki leaks released a whole lot of information about the crimes that were being committed by place to play war crimes but mostly the us governments and particularly the murder of innocent civilians. or the country just pretend to know and this is the 1st and they didn't think about it kind of forced us to acknowledge it you know we couldn't ignore it. he's an idealist he's on a mission.