PBD Podcast - DeSantis Fights Trump On AI, Ford's $19B EV DISASTER + Musk's Net Worth SKYROCKETS | PBD Podcast | Ep. 701

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Patrick Bet-David, Tom Ellsworth, and Brandon Aceto are joined by Anthony Pompliano to break down Trump’s new AI executive order, Ford’s major pivot on electric vehicles, and Elon Musk’s net worth skyrocketing amid the latest market moves.------🏢 GET HIRED! LEARN MORE ABOUT VT CAREERS: https://bit.ly/4oT0ciV👨‍💼 LEARN MORE ABOUT HIRE METRICS: https://bit.ly/4aSBMmi💰 LEARN MORE ABOUT CFO SILVIA: https://bit.ly/4qfBOcC🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON SPOTIFY: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4g57zR2Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4kSVkso Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!ABOUT US:Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm supposed to take sweet with me. I know this life's meant for me. Adam, what's your point? The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever size. Right here. You are a one of one?

My son's drive there. I think I've ever said this before. All right. All right. Business Wednesday, it is. we have Pompiliano back here with us to make everybody smarter. Like I say, every single time, I am surrounded by three brilliant, genius minds. And I simply ask questions.

I'm just a regular guy trying to get smarter guys. You and I, us regular people, our goal by the time it's done to get slightly smarter than we were a minute before getting on the show. Palm, great to have you back on the show. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. But I'm here to try to learn from you. Stop with the nonsense.

All right. So let's get into the stories. Let's get into the stories. We've got a lot of stuff that's going on. There's this guy named, I'm a hard time pronouncing his name. I think it's Elon or Elon, Ellen or Elon that is about to be the first trillion. If you're not following the story. Who's that?

This guy named Elon Musk, apparently, that's doing this one company called SpaceX. That's going to be the biggest IPO. And apparently, that's going to get him close to like $800 billion net worth. So we're thinking about starting a go fund before him, just to kind of help him. He needs a little bit of help. He lives in a small house. I mean, I know he needs finances. So we'll figure that part out.

Hasid's fed share candidacy received pushback from high-level people close to Trump, including Jamie Diamond. Jamie wants Warsh instead of Hassett. And Trump picks fight with MAGA allies and issue an AI executive order. And this governor out of Florida, Ron DeSantis, is like, I don't know about that. I think we can regulate AI in our own way because we have the right as a state. So we'll kind of process that together. Why single-income households are a bygone area? according to experts. No more single income households. Both husband and wife are working.

McDonald's posts creepy AI, have you guys seen this commercial, the AI General Christmas out? Yeah. I watch it at first I'm like, this has to be a spoof. And my guys are like, no, this is really them. They had to later on take it down. Did they really take it down? Yes. Do you not hate Christmas? Do you not hate this? I'm like, it's actually an interesting creative, but maybe, you know, you have different thoughts on it will play for you as well. No, Brandon's got some thoughts on this. White House launches two-year, tech force hiring for roughly 1,000 jobs that will pay $130,000 to $195,000. Trump sues BBC for $10 billion, claims defamation from a Panorama documentary.

Powell says he wants to turn this job over with economy in really good shape before departure. He's such a now noble. He cares about legacy and all this stuff. And the moment we read the story yesterday, guys, when we do story prep, there's some Sometimes I'll go through stories, and Tom will allow me to get to the next one. Sometimes, some stories, and I tell Tom, Tom, the podcast is tomorrow. Tom blew up with this story. Who does he think he is?

Now it's about legacy? What about all this time? So anyways, Tom's, you know, he's got his... I said that. I did. So we will have Tom share that with you guys today and see maybe he feels a little bit better about the guy today. Who knows? Why everyone got Trump's tariff wrong?

That's a Wall Street Journal story. Even they were saying it's not a good idea. Ron DeSantis mocks this guy of Canada. Pretty successful guy, Doug Ford, Florida is hurting due to Canadian boycott remark. And you should see what the Santa said about it, as if Florida needs Canadians. Every other day, if I'm out here walking the streets, I meet a Canadian. They're great people. They drink coconut beer.

They like their Toronto Blue Jays that made to the World Series. I don't like the Toronto Blue Jays because they took out our Yankees. He loves the Blue Jays because they caused it to be the greatest world series of all time and he's a Dodger guy. But, you know, Canadians are great people, Tom.

We got one, you know, Canadian blood in the house here today. Canadian derivative, I am. Yeah, that's right. So UPS buys hundreds of robots to unload trucks and automation push. McKinsey plots thousands of job cuts and slowdown for consultant consulting industry. Maybe we're going to talk about how this consulting industry is a waste of time.

Should you hire consultants? If you do, who should you hire? Who knows? We'll talk about that as well. Then we have next one, the rise of dual income household, same as the other one video. This next story is very, very interesting. Ford writes down $19.5 billion as it pivots electric lighting line of vehicles. Let me tell you, out of all the stories here, that's probably my top three on what's going on with cars.

And you have to see why that's so important. At the same time, Tesla stock closes at 2025 high After Musk confirms driverless robotaxy tests underway in Austin Can U.S. automakers compete with Chinese EVs While focused on gas guzzlers And then we have a couple other things here about Palm Beach This place will win when it comes onto business JP Morgan debut's first money market token fund on Ethereum

Pop, I'm sure you got some thoughts on that Micro Strategy decides to buy some more Bitcoin, another billion for that guy for second week. Bitcoin is dropping to $86,000 due to a lack of conviction. You know that, Ryan. People have a lack of conviction. Keeps a lit on crypto prices. Yahoo Finance. Pomp is about to call this journalist from Columbia University out in a second tier when we get to it. U.S. declares energy emergency as cold snap hits northeast. Oil settles at lowest 2021. Arizona City unanimously rejects AI Data Center after resident outcry. We got a couple of the stories to get into here. We definitely have to talk about

AI and jobs. I know you got a lot of stuff to say about that. So we'll get to that as well with the job market. People are worried. Is it going to affect me? Is it not going to affect me? I have my whole thoughts on that as well. But prior to getting into that, here's what's going on. Last year, every time I'm at this campus and I'm in my conference room and I look to my left and I see 15 people walking to the other building, they're getting a tour. That means we've hired 15 new people. Okay. And last week, we had 10 new hires that we heard, we had 45 job openings. Right now we have 35 job openings. We are hiring.

If you're somebody highly qualified, you're educated, you're hungry, you want to be part of something that you want to go on a run for 20 years. A lot of people, if you just watch us, you think it's a podcast. And by the way, you may have a son, a daughter, a friend, somebody that's fully, fully qualified that wants to be part of something and bring their talent to us. Not an easy place to work. You know, we work very, very hard at a place like this.

But if you think this is just a podcast, I want you to watch this clip to give you a little bit of a glimpse, and then I'll give you a link to go apply for the 35 job openings that we have right now. Go ahead, Rob. Many times when people think about value taming, all they think about is a podcast, but it's a lot more than that.

It's nine companies working together on an 11-acre campus. If I was to give you a virtual tour here, you'll see the HR department hiring, talent acquisition. We have full-stack developers that are working on MNAC and hire metrics. We have a full-fledged events team that puts together events with thousands of people.

We have a merch department designing the latest product We just launched the FLB shoes made in Italy. We have a marketing department. And if you go to the complete opposite side of the building, 50, 60 people making calls working for bed david consulting, sales, setters. And then on the complete opposite side of the campus, there's a full-on production company with editors, shooters, creating content, doing podcasts.

Then he can drive down a couple miles and go to our private boardroom, cigar lounge with members only. Regardless of what it is, working at Valuetainment, every day is a surprise. You could be walking into work and right next to you is a, governor, is a billionaire, as an athlete. We are hiring aggressively, but vitaminism for everybody. For the right person, this could be the last company you ever work for. So, if you're watching this and you want to learn more, go to vt.com forward slash careers and apply now. There you go to

VT.com forward slash careers and apply now. Rob, if we can put the link below as well, that will be wonderful. Okay. Can I say something about the people I met here? Please, go for it. excellent a plus every single person high energy smart and uh ask every place i go ask them uh what's it like working here what's the best part what's the worst part and uh the woman that i was just talking with you know she told me she said it's great to have a leader who's pushing forward there's a movement you feel like you're contributing but it's fun as well it's very rare where you can work really hard and have fun i love that yeah well appreciate you for saying that yeah whoever said that can we i might apply i might apply she she was a good sales pitch all right okay

talents to just north of South Beach. Okay, sounds good. Well, thank you. Let's get right into it. Tom. You know what? I'm going to start off with that story because I do think it's a very big story when it comes on to cars and how wrong the previous administration got it and how confused these automakers are right now. Ford writes down $19.5 billion as it pivots electric lightning, lighting line of vehicles. And this is page of. 11 if you want to go to. This is a fortune story. So let's go through it. So Ford searches for finding profitability for its electric vehicle continues. So the Dearborn Michigan-based automaker

will make a series of changes to its line of vehicles and production facility to focus on producing affordable vehicles that better aligned with customer desires it's announced on Monday. The company will also scrap production of certain larger EVs, ready, including the F-150 Lightning, which it will retool as an electric vehicle with a gas power generator, as well as redouble development of smaller, lower cost cars, including a mid-sized pickup truck in 2027. I can go give a lot of other stats here, but I'm just going to go to Tom. Tom, $19.5 billion, what's going on with Ford?

Well, I happen to think that a set of governors, blue governors, led by Gavin Newsom, owe the shareholders probably half of that. because you had, you know, California said, oh, by 2030, what was it? By 2030, you have to be 30 percent EVs. They had these steps, and they basically stepped on, you know, the demand side of the automakers and said, you will do this. Meanwhile, California didn't have the electric infrastructure to do that, and they don't even have the electric infrastructure to power the data centers that are going to be

in California, which is not as many as going to be elsewhere, which is another story. But you had all the automakers got behind it. The point is. Ford got behind it. The F-150 Lightning pickup had a Super Bowl ad. They had everything they were doing on this. And we can see Jim Farley is on here talking to, who is that, Cudlow, about it? And Mari Barra said, GM is all in. As a matter of fact, Cadillac will be the all-electric division.

She went all in. It was Cadillac. It would be the all electric division. They all went there. And guess what they found out? Battery technology is expensive to make. They also found out that, guess what? you know, you've got to be able to charge these things.

And then Elon Musk proved that he wasn't just Tesla. He was a service station network selling, you're saying, hey, you use the same connector on the car. You could use my superchargers everywhere. But the automakers, excuse me, went all in. And now they're backing off. Tom, did they go all in because they didn't have a choice? Was it a business move? Was it a force move?

They made a business decision at gunpoint of green legislation with states like California saying you will be this percent by this time so they had no choice but they also went all in and so because they believed look if you believe that Biden was going to be reelected or that common was going to be elected or that the green that aOC and the green mandate and everything was going to continue then you went that way to protect your business because you know under federal guidelines you had to do it meanwhile the consumers were discovering that when you take that $7,500 subsidy, remember all the headlines about this. Yes. When you take that off, it points back to the hybrid vehicles being more cost-effective,

and you have a Honda Civic hybrid that can go 600 miles because it's a small fuel tank, and a little generator keeps recharging battery. It's actually more efficient, and it actually was less dollars. And so Ford has said, listen, the all-electric stuff, we can't make it work on a 5,000 pound pickup. We can't make it work on the SUVs. We're writing all that off, 19.5 written down, but we're going to have a big effort to put the hybrids in the middle because we know Americans like the fact that the hybrids are more economically priced, and you can go 600 miles on your crossover or your Honda Civic, and that's where the market is. But this is really, I feel like that California owes the Ford shareholders probably half of that $10 billion

because that was done at legislative gunpoint, and they didn't have the electrical power infrastructure to really support. If the consumers had done that, it would have been a brownout at night. Okay, so, Pam, I'm going to come to you, but I want you to think about this question as well. So what makes them say by 2030, like here's Newsom saying, issued an executive order requiring, these are mandates, all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California to be zero emission by 2035, this directive is the foundation of California's advanced clean cars, a second regulation targeting 100% of EV sales by 2035. when they're saying things like this, are they working collaboratively with these automakers who know how difficult it is to do that? Or is it just like a, hey, it's a marketing campaign, guys, press release,

release that, here's what we got to do in California, shit. Or is it more like, well, let's piss off Elon Musk a little bit. What do you think it is? I think that this is the classic mistake people making business, which is people thought that the consumer was buying an electric vehicle because it was electric. People are not buying a Tesla because it's electric. you're buying because it's a better car.

It just happens to be electric. And that's a huge difference, right? If you get in a Tesla, the first time people sit in there, they feel like this is a car from the future. There's a computer on wheels. This thing is cool. There's full self-driving, all that stuff now. But before you even had the full self-driving,

you got in and everything was kind of reimagined. You had the big screen, you had all this, but it was a better experience as a car. So what Elon did was Elon, I think, very smartly, if you go back and you read his master plan for Tesla, et cetera, he said, listen, if I just show up, remember like the original electric vehicles? They were kind of these, like, small little things.

It kind of made you feel like, you know, maybe not as manly. You're getting this little thing, you know, pull up. Somebody sitting in an F-150, jacked up next to you at the red light, right? People didn't want to ride in those things, right? It was kind of like a stupid little car, almost like a clown car, right? Well, what Elon did is he made the Tesla cool. And so he started with the roadster, and it was kind of like a sports car, right? It was a higher price point.

And people said, you know, it's a status thing. Now, Elon has a history of doing this, because if you notice, he also made it cool to go work in the government. Right? So his whole thing is, can you make something? high status. And so by making the Tesla high status, people said, I want that car. Oh, by the way, I will deal with the fact that it's electric. Because I think a lot of people also, to Tom's point, it's easier just to go get gas at the gas station. It's easier on a long trip. It's easier if I don't have to go and charge this because I don't have a charger at my house and sit there

for 25 minutes for it to charge up. So Tesla being a superior car is what drove those sales. Well, what did Ford and GM and all these guys do? They basically, we're going to take our exact same car, which is inferior to the Tesla, and we're simply going to try to rip out the gas engine and put in an electric vehicle. Most consumers buying a Ford F-150, they don't care about an electric vehicle, and actually, that may be a negative. Why would I want to buy a big truck that's electric if it's harder for me to go do the things I need to do? So I think that's probably the biggest thing is when you do these mandates, they're, you know, again, let's just say they have good intentions, you can question whether they do or not. But it doesn't address the actual driver of

the consumer behavior. You have to make the car cool. And these car companies in the government, they weren't doing that. And that's why Tesla continues to dominate. Very basic. Go back to marketing, make a good product. People will come in and buy it. And by the way, it's also a, like I remember one time I'm talking to your friend, Tom, Jim Scott Bell, and I'm writing this fiction book. And I had such a massive mission messaging in the fiction book. He says, remember, if the message you want to put in the fiction book is more, is bigger than the entertainment aspect of the book. you won't sell. He said, if the entertainment is 95%,

a messaging is 5%, then you'll sell. These guys try to do EV is 95%, the design is 5%, looks ugly. Guess what? You're going to go by it because you're a responsible person. Rob, can you pull up a poll? I'm actually curious with the audience. What percentage of the audience

has an EV versus a gas and input both? Because some people have both, right? My wife's got gas, I drive an EV. Just run a poll on that if you can. just to see what they're saying. Brandon, what are your thoughts on this story? Yeah, I really hate waste of potential more than anything. And the amount of money that's been poured into the EV initiative,

it's so sad because, like, we talk about all the time about the things that actually would benefit from government subsidies, like a home builder's initiative or an initiative to build nuclear reactors to give us more power for the country. But we've spent probably hundreds of billions of dollars over the last 10 years into trying to pressure or incentivize companies into building EVs. And I sent Rob a chart

that shows the amount of material that is required to build an EV versus a gas-powered car. And like, does this look like a good return on investment, especially when the output of energy is not higher? So I almost am forced to wonder since... But you're shown this.

The average person wants to know. You and I know what this is. Can you explain this what this means? So the green circles are the amount of materials, like metals and whatnot that go into the inputs of a car. The black circles are gas-powered cars. So the...

You said, regular car. No, that's green as EV cars, right? Yes, correct. So you need each one of those to build an EV car. Yes. And why is that so complex? Why is the EV more complex? Yeah. It's just, you know, it's not something that I think would be created if the market wasn't being forced to create it. That's the point is that the government's putting a lot of pressure on companies to build it, but it's not something that would be really profitable or a good return on investment, I think, to build if they weren't getting pressure to do it. You know, we could debate that. But I, I almost wonder, since energy matches the population growth,

I almost wonder if the government wants to do this to maybe slow population growth, because the more energy you have in the country that's free and accessible, the faster the population grows. So it creates a lot of weird questions why they're saying that we need this to save the world, why they're saying we're running off oil when we've established it, we're probably not.

Let me ask you a question. All these different minerals that we need, right? Yeah. Does U.S. have access to all of them internally or do we need to go elsewhere to get these? I know the answer to the question. I'm asking you for a reason. A lot of them, no, we don't have abundant amounts of it.

And a lot of them, you know, they're in places like China. They're in South America. So, yeah, no, it's not readily accessible. There's also a place in Africa, right? There's also a spot in Africa that has a, what is it called? Yeah, multiple places. But there's one main place in Africa. So this makes us reliant on other people.

But if we want to make gas, that's it, gas cars, can we make that not relying on anybody else? More so than the EVs because, you know, like, it's just a matter of, like, sheer volume of precious metals and natural resources. And, you know, like, it's a quick side note. I do have a tough time, like, taking the whole EV thing seriously when something like the Invention Secrecy Act is in place. Like, we have no idea what the hell is in there, but there's 6,000 patents of things that could possibly be better than electric and gas. So that's another angle to take with us. By the way, you look like you want to say so I'll come to you in a second. So watch this here.

What type of vehicle do you own gas, EV, both, gas, and gas. 89% EV 4%, both 7. So let's just say 89 to 11, okay, meaning you own at least an EV in your car. That's a, you know, that's a big ratio still in America where cars are at, and that's a 3,400-volt sample. Do you have any final thoughts on this story before we get to the next one, Pomp?

I just think that the legacy car makers, they're getting their butts kicked by Elon Musk. And what it really highlights is you have companies that are being managed by corporate executives, not by entrepreneurs. And so one area where we do see immense amount of innovation, which people in America don't like to acknowledge, it's China. I don't know if you've seen any of these videos of these Chinese electric vehicles. I mean, these things are parallel parking by themselves. They've got all kinds of cool, you know, gadgets, et cetera, in there. And so it begs the question, I think, is it an incentive thing as to American companies don't want to innovate?

Is there some sort of, we don't have the skilled, you know, engineers, et cetera, to go do this? Is there a capital component? There's something going on as to why majority of the American car companies are not innovating at the same rate that the startup of Tesla or these Chinese car companies are doing. And so I think that if we could answer that question, that then could help change this market. And maybe you would actually have people want to go buy these, not because they're EVs, but because they're just better cars. And by the way, it's funny you're saying that. Wall Street Journal just did a story on that a couple of days ago. Can U.S. automakers compete with Chinese EVs while focused, focused on gas guzzlers?

And this goes back to Tom talking about the $2,500, $7,500 tax credit that they had in the past. Tom, where are you up with this, with what Pomp said? Can U.S. automakers compete with Chinese EVs? Yeah, I think there's three points. There's the point of why can't the U.S. automakers, whatever they make, make a cool next-gen car. Why can't they get there? And if it's electric because they got a mandate from California, that's part of it, but they can't blame that whole thing. That's why I say 50% of it.

The other 50% is you decided. You decided to go all in. So, A, make a cool car. B, the Green Lobby really messed with decision making. It says, and C, now we find out that hybrid's actually a better deal for the consumer all the way around. But let's go back to point A. it's like where is the leadership in the automakers that said screw the EV mandate all of our data shows that people really like hybrids

and it costs them less let's make the coolest effing hybrid ever seen to mankind and let's make it really hip no let's just take our existing cars because they mandated and let's make them all electric I thought Fisker was pretty cool I thought the Fisker car when it first came out you know which one was it karma was it in New York if you get on Uber you want you want some free alpha for your your viewers in the Uber app there's actually an electric option and what almost always happens is you get a Tesla or a Fisker and it's cheaper now in New York is a lot of density so it's about the

same time waiting in other cities not so much but those Fisker cars it's like I don't know how many are in America but I think at least half of them are Uber drivers in New York City I listen I love that you had a did you have a Fisker or I had a Fisker Ocean the crossover is that the one you had yes I did and what happened to the solar panels right They went bankrupt and I gave it back to Fisker. Did something happen to the car, though? Yeah, it got hit. It took a shot, but it wasn't too bad.

But by the way, I could show you the pictures of it, but it wasn't that bad, but since they're bankrupt, they couldn't provide parts. They couldn't provide parts because they went bankrupt. Yep. And Liberty Mutual said, we can't do this. So it's done, done. So it went back to Fisker. So what do you do?

What do you do when it's done like? like that. I mean, what do you do with the car? Is it kind of like the old DeLorean? Yeah, I got a check from Fisker and Fisker took the car back. Got it. Interesting. At least that's what happened. Let me go to the next story with Tesla because all this stuff going on, Tesla's had a closing at 2025 high after Musk confirms driverless robotaxy tests underway in Austin. Rob, do you have a video of that of the Robotaxy test? I think it's good for us to see this year. Tom, so what is the story with this Robotaxi causing Tesla. Is this it? Oh, let's take a look at this. Sure. Amazing. Is that real rap or is that a AI?

No, this is real. That's actually happening. Yep. Okay. So Robotaxy in Austin causing Tesla stock to go up. Is it just that? Is it the additional robots they're talking about? What else is it that's causing Tesla to have record-breaking numbers in 2025 with their stock prices? I think the stock prices going up because two major manufacturers just announced that they were going to be competing less with Tesla, number one. And number two, Tesla is funny. This announcement comes after Waymo runs into a poor guy in Arizona. After one of them ran into a construction site and got stuck in wet cement. That's a true story in San Francisco. The driverless taxi runs through cones and gets stuck in wet cement in a construction zone. That's a true story.

It's a true story. You can, Rob will find it. It's actually very, very, at the, I think it was, what was not funny is I think it hit a woman, then it drove into a construction site, then it drove into wet cement. And so all of those stories of the starting of driverless taxi. It's not a funny story, Tom. You're laughing like it's a funny story. There it is.

There it is. Forbes. Cruise, Robotaxi drives into wet concrete. Waymo shows off same. So it's like they had their teething pains, but now, but now with a full self-drawn. driving and other things. Tesla's coming out and saying, okay, teething pains for taxis, everybody else takes the headlines. I've now got it going in Austin. It's working. So competitors off, this here, and guess what? Those are all things. What do you think? It just

feeds the stock price because all that is good news for Tesla. I think what we're watching is Tesla is going, you know, Bitcoin, I always say, went from a contrarian trade to consensus trade. What's happening with Tesla right now is you're watching basically the early adopters, right? These people, they bought this thing. Wall Street hated it. Every single person with a spreadsheet told you how Elon Musk is a fraud. He's lying. He can't, you know, ever get profitable. This company sucks. And a bunch of people on the internet that are individuals who said, hey, I actually think that these cars are pretty good. I drive one. I, you know, went and sat in one. And I don't think it's a car company. I think it's a machine learning company. I think it's a, you know,

data company. Now what you're seeing... I think it's a service station selling electricity to all the rest of carmakers. Yeah, well, what you're seeing now is you're seeing the transition, right? You're seeing those early adopters essentially are being proven right because now you have all of Wall Street realize, wait a second, this isn't a car company. We're using the wrong comps the entire time. This is a robotics company. This is an AI company. And when you see that car driving on the road, it is really hard to say that this is just a car company. And then you realize that he's sending updates over the air via this software. But then you also see him using a lot of the same technology and saying, wait a second,

if a car can do this, what if I can make a humanoid robot do this? And so now what he's really doing is he's expanding the total adjustable market of this business, and he's finally convincing Wall Street and these large pools of capital that this is not a car company. This is a robotics and an AI company, and it's getting re-rated by these organizations. There's a lot of folks for a long time who said, I don't own Tesla because of all the issues. Now what they're realizing is if I'm a public market investor and I want to invest in AI or robotics, what stock do I buy? Well, you can go buy Nvidia, you can buy some power companies, you can buy some of the like components or the infrastructure,

but there's not a lot of companies where you can go buy exposure to the future of AI and robotics. And so, yeah, you can go buy Google stock, but you also get YouTube and search and all this other stuff. Tesla is probably the most pure play exposure in the public market to AI and robotics.

And so now the world is convinced, we need this. They realize that this company is going to be that company and you see people piling and stock price goes up. But the part that no one ever talks about is all those people who used to hold Tesla stock,

they're still holding. They have this rabid fan base. And so they have this like retail investor engagement or like the cult of Elon around the stock. The fact that those people believe so fervently in the future of the stock means that they're not selling. And so when that new capital comes in, it's not like they just come and buy it from, you know, the existing shareholders at some reasonable price. They all are pushing the share price up. And so that's why you're seeing the explosive. I mean, it's up 10% the last five days.

It's just large pools of capital pouring capital in and the people who currently hold the shares aren't willing to sell it because they've got a very long-term belief. in stock. It's a stabilization effect. Last month is up 21% last five days up 10%. Insanity. Tom, go ahead. It's a stabilization effect. Remember in the old days where you would have, okay, who are the institutional investors in Hilton? And you have what was called the Widows and Orphan Stock because it was a dividend. But you had five big institutions, Piper Jaffrey, you know, the old Merrill Lynch, the old Lehman brothers. They each own four and a half percent, staying under the five percent rule. And they say, said, well, we're not selling. We believe in it.

They're opening more hotels. We're fine. Well, you multiply that out, Pat, suddenly you had 22% of the stock's not going anywhere. That was like a stabilizing anchor because it reduces the volatility because it's just, it's holding. And that's what you have. You have the people that, whether they're memes or fans or whatever it is, they are the equivalent. You just might as well call them as the entrenched holders are like a large institutional bank that actually brings stability to the stock. Are you long Tesla because of Elon or are you long Tesla because of Tesla?

Like is it at a point where it's flipped where you're more long Tesla with Elon lower or is it still your long Tesla because of Elon? I'm long Tesla by itself, but I'm very long Tesla because of Elon because I believe what the next chapter will bring. Is it is it more Tesla or more Elon? Give me the 50. Oh, by far. I think it's not even close to the same company without Alon.

Because I don't think anybody else could, like, imagine what he wants to do with it. You know? Like, I think it's, like, going to be, like, entrenched the way that Apple's entrenched in our lives, but, like, on a bigger scale, like, the way that our phones and laptops are entrenched in our lives, like, the cars and the robots, they'll be in everybody's house someday. They'll be entrenched in everybody's lives. But, like, I don't think that anybody else is enough of a visionary. So you don't think the company is yet at a point where it's not just because of the jockey,

where the jockey is managing the horse. It's not the horse yet. No, and I... You're still leaning on the guy driving it. Yeah, I don't think anybody else has the driver vision to do that way. But that's true of most companies, right? I mean, just look at Google.

Google was getting their butt kicked and all those AI stuff and all the infrastructure data centers, et cetera. And the founders came back. Right? Open door. Another great example. The founders left. All of a sudden, they came back.

If you look at, you know, Amazon, I think a lot of people are saying, wait a second, are they behind? Bezos isn't, you know, they're as much anymore. Look at Meta. they've been able to navigate multiple new technologies now because they've got the founder who's at the helm.

You've got Elon obviously is a great example. I mean, you just go company by company by company. The companies that are still run by their founders tend to outperform the companies that are run by kind of professional managers. It's not a knock against the professional manager. It's just there's something different, right? There's this great...

I fully agree. There's this great thought of the source of an idea is really important. So even if you have two co-founders, who's the source? Who called who and said, hey, let's start a company, right? That person has intuition about something, sees the world a certain way, has a drive of something, you know, really said, hey, I want to go put this in the world. Elon is the epitome of that, and so I think that he's really important. Well, we're talking about founders.

And you know what, let's, I was going to go to a different direction. Let's go Elon first, and I'll go to a founder story. This founder had this idea that she raised money and she could go buy a house in the Caribbean and do other things. But the guys, that's a bad idea. We'll talk about that. But let's first recognize somebody that Musk's fortune soars. above $600 billion on new SpaceX's valuation.

You ready for this, folks? Elon Musk is about to be a trillionaire. Okay, this says page nine. Do I have page nine? He's underpaid. He's underpaid. You think he's underpaid? 100%.

I don't know if I disagree. So what is the new deal? The new deal they have with him is if he's able to get this number above $8.5 trillion, I think he's going to end up getting, what do you call it, a trillion dollars in pay? He has to get the valuation above $8.50. But let me read this to you.

This is SpaceX for you. That's with Tesla. It's not even with this company. So Musk's wealth has reached over $600 billion. World's richest person in the world is now worth $6.38. According to Bloomberg's billionaire index, the SpaceX evaluation of $800 billion, in an hour share sale,

a deal that makes the Star Base, Texas-based rocket maker, the world's most valuable private company, Musk is its founder and CEO, Musk's 42% stake is now worth $317 billion after a liquidity discount applied to private companies. For the first time, an individual has been calculated to be worth more than $600 billion by Bloomberg's wealth index. Musk 54 reached the $100 billion mark in 2020 as the value of Tesla Inc, where he was a CEO, and now you're talking about, he was worth just $4.8 billion when it was added to the index in 2013. By the way, just, it was worth just like it's just a $4.8 billion dollar guy in 2013. Pop, what's going on with this guy? Well, if you think about how capitalism should work,

whoever creates the most value for everybody else should end up with the most resources, right? Should end up with the most money. Name somebody who's done it better than him. The stat I just constantly cannot get out of my head is Elon Musk for 30 years, for three decades. He has averaged the creation of a multi-billion dollar company every five years for 30 years. There's nobody in the world.

who's ever done that before. It is incredible. And it's not like, oh, let me go do a roll-up of everybody else's businesses and it's like financial engineering. It is from scratch. We're going to build a product

to solve something at scale. It's crazy. So who should be richer than him? He's created more value for anybody else. Should there be a cap on how wealthy he should be? No, I actually think that if you give him money, right? So think of it this way.

When he sold PayPal, he got $180 million. He took that money and turned it into $600 billion. We should be asking ourselves, how do we give this guy more money? I don't know if you saw the recent interview. He was asked, if you lost all your money. Somebody took it all away from you, and you had to start over again. How would you make $1,000 or something? Kind of a normal interview question.

You expect them, I'd go do a lemonade stand or something. And he just looks at the interviewer, and he says, well, I don't think it would take very long for me to make money back because I would just go ask people to give me some, and I would turn it into more. And he's like, I've been pretty good at doing that. And his point being that, like, people start to understand this guy is good at, if you give him resources, he will come back with many, many more resources for you. And so if you look at SpaceX, they, there's only two companies in the world, is my understanding, that have reusable rockets. And the second one, which is Blue Origin, just got it done after 20-something years.

Elon is average, I don't know how many rocket launches they're doing on an annual basis now, but it's almost like one a day, I think. I mean, it is crazy how fast they have gone from. This technology doesn't exist to being able to do that. And now he's talking about Starlink. He's going to beam the internet down. So if you control the internet, that's pretty valuable. And now he's even talking about doing data centers in space. And so you start to see all this come together and you're like, wait a minute, this guy is basically getting emboldened to be even bigger, to go even crazier.

But maybe that's what the world needs. Who else would sit here and say, let's put data centers in space? like maybe the guy who was like let's launch a rocket and bring it back down to earth and use it again do you think this whole civilization on a different planet is a reality with elan i think that he genuinely would like to accomplish it i think that he understands there's a lot of you know physics involved in being able to do something um but when you look at the steps that he's taken it's almost like he pushes from an innovation standpoint point, figures out how to make a business out of it, pushes again innovation-wise,

figures out how to make a business. But the businesses are almost being used to drive profit so that he can then fund the next step of innovation. And so, you know, one of the things he's been talking about, I'm blown away by the fact that in today's day and age, you can go on YouTube or the Internet, and you can listen to the world's richest man, the best entrepreneur of our lifetime, in his own words, talk for two hours. A hundred years ago, that was impossible, right?

I mean, maybe you read in the newspaper something and you had no clues, you know, a one-line interview. What he's been talking about is all this focus on small reactors, all this stuff, he's basically like, stop fooling around with this stuff. Let's go put things in space and harness 24-7 access to the sun, which has this really powerful energy source, and we'll be able to use that to power both Earth and space. I'm not a scientist. I don't know what's going to end up being the right thing, but what I do know is you start talking like that. Why is the company only worth $1.5 trillion, right? You almost start to think to yourself, wait a second. I remember when people in the venture community were buying SpaceX stock at $10 billion, $20 billion valuation, how big could it get?

You know, there's not $100 billion companies. It's $1.5 trillion. We come back and do this again in 10 years, $10 billion, $20 billion, or $10 trillion, $20 trillion? Like, I mean, how big could it get, right? Yeah. A lot of it has to do with how, to me, the operator better be protected because he's becoming more powerful than most countries as an individual, the amount of influence he has as an individual, not only financially, because the

difference between him and a lot of, like when you said Google, if Sergey Brin and his partner went into the podcast or they tweeted something out or posted something on Facebook or something on their Instagram account. Versus Elon goes and tweet something. He's not on Instagram. He's not on Facebook. He's not on YouTube. If he just goes tweet something,

what is his reach with people? How much of a disruptor is he? What can he change? So to me, you know, it's a, it's a very different animal of what he's doing, but he is more powerful than a lot of people. So he better have the best security

in the world. He better be protected. He better be taking care of himself. He better have the right people better have, like the smartest of the smartest and the most brutal people better be protecting this guy to make sure he sticks around long term. Tom, thoughts on Elon. Well, first of all, I agree. And second of all, I think he is crazily underpaid. If you just did a simple, you know, when you talk numbers that are so big that

are beyond comprehension, you get an emotional reaction because the emotional reaction comes from the inability to comprehend. So when the average person thinks a trillion dollars, they're thinking about that from the perspective of a working person that's got good skills, that's out there trying to make a living, and they really can't fathom it. So the knee-jerk reaction is, which the politicos use, is that. On the other side of it, I just look at commission-based theory. And commission-based theory says, okay, everything you invent as a founder, a founder's share after dilution at series D, series E, usually hovers around 27.5%.

So if you take a series A, series B, series C, D, and you just look at that. You say, okay, well, let's just lock him at 30% assuming all these companies and then just add it up. And it's like commission-based theory. And then you add it up and you go, wow, that's not so crazy. And I look at it and I say, that's low because he didn't have to do a series A and give up 20%. He didn't have to do a series B and give up 15% and then give up 12 and 1% and then give up 10%. the typical flow. He didn't have to do that. And so, therefore, his commission rate is higher. And you look at it and you say, wait a minute, I think he's already a trillionaire because when I look at them saying,

well, and we apply the private company discount, this is not a private company in a traditional sense. This guy walks up to Goldman, the same way IBM walks up to Goldman and says, I need $100 billion in bonds. IBM makes that phone call, and they say, what are you doing? Well, we're doing this thing, in the sky and Big Blue, whatever they call their thing, and they get it. Elon Musk can do the same thing. So he's not really a private company. So when you apply a private company discount, I think he's already $1.5 trillion guy. I think he's already there.

Yeah, I've been saying this guy's going to be a trillionaire in the next two to three years for, you know, for some time. I think he is a, I think he's a unique, very unique guy, very, very unique guy on what we have right now as an operator. It's not easy to handle pressure of one company, one board, one investor, times the amount he has then to attract and hire people, then to have people move from areas to come to you because they want to work with you and run with you. That's a lot of different moving parts that you got. You got to applaud the hell out of it.

From an operator to another operator, I have so many friends that ask me, why are you operating? Take your money and just invest and have a better life, you know, and stop dealing with the pressures of hiring and do. If you love it, you freaking love being in the arena. There's something about building businesses. There's something about building businesses. It sucks.

It's hard. It's challenging. But if you love the game, you love the game. Nobody plays the game and loves the game more than this game. You've got to respect them. Brandon, thoughts on this. Yeah, just like in terms of value creation, I mean, look at what NASA's created over the last 10 years, given $2.28 billion. And then look at what SpaceX has created, given $20 billion over the last years.

You know, so it's wasted taxpayer of money going towards what? So, like, everybody who works for NASA for the most part is paid with taxpayer money, and then Elon's creating jobs for people and then creating a much better product that's going to take us to a place where we could potentially harness the energy of the sun, which, by the way, I'm not sure if this is the exact step. I heard that if you harness all the energy from the sun for just one day, you could power the entire world for, like, a thousand years, because we don't even come close to, like, harnessing the full energy of the sun in a day.

So if he starts flirting with that, then, yeah, we have infinite energy. So, yeah, the most valuable thing you could possibly do. And I think he's not the most powerful private army in the world in a couple years when he gets this robot fleet going. So I think his security will be good with that. Yeah, I appreciate the NASA comment. But just look at this, the Department of Transportation under Joe Biden and Buttigieg attempted to build charging stations. Attempted to be entrepreneur to build charging stations. And look at the multi-billion dollar bill that the American people paid.

And I do not think they built their 50th station. Do you think when he went into Doge, and he did what he did with Doge, do you think some of his long-term motives were revealed? Like, do you think he thinks that was a good move? Do you think he thinks it was a right move for him, or no? He got a lot from that. I think that if he could go in and the only goal was to make the government efficient, he would have been very successful.

What I think he realized was there's a lot of people who don't want it to be efficient. There's a lot of people who are actually benefiting from the waste, abuse, the fraud, all this stuff, right? I mean, if you look at the Minnesota situation, I mean, it's just crazy. And some of it is not even economic, right? Some of it is just, I don't want to offend anybody. So I know you're doing something bad, but I'm going to let you keep doing it type thing. So you can't take his, you know, skill set, his expertise of going in.

I mean, you've ever seen the visual of the rocket engine and how it's, it's like really complex and then all the iterations and eventually it's like this beautiful, very sleek, simple thing, right? That's basically we don't undo the government, but you can't do that because there's a bunch of people with their hand in the cookie jar. Now, I know a number of people who are close with Elon and I think that they regret all of the wasted time.

Right? If you think about what they could have accomplished instead of spending their time doing that. But at the same time, I think that he understands having a monopoly on attention is a very powerful thing. You know, him and Trump, I think, are very similar in that sense. And so Elon Musk is more famous today than he was before, even if some portion of those new people don't like him. But remember when they were protesting outside the Tesla showrooms?

They were sitting on fire. They were saying he was a fascist, all this crazy stuff. Stocks had an all-time high. So in a weird way, it actually didn't have the long-term impact that Tim Wall standing on stage screaming and yelling about the stocks going down. I think it's doubled since then. We ran after party in D.C. I don't know if it was inauguration.

I don't know what it was. Was it inauguration? Yeah, it was an inauguration. We're in our inauguration. We're at this house. And Rob, were you with us? Were you at the house? Yeah.

So we're at this house. How do you describe this house? Like a party house. Like it was Dwight Howard's previous house. Like a bachelor pad. It was Dwight Howard's previous. It's exactly a bachelor pad. Like where you like to live.

And an awesome word gets said that Elon's coming to the party. Great. My son is there. Tom and my son are on the rooftop screaming at the fashion. I come out. I come out, I'm trying to find my son. I'm like, he's either making out with somebody or he's got a bad influence. Let me go make sure he's not taking advantage of it.

Because at the time, it was 12 years old. Yeah, 12 years old. I thought what we did was funny. We got up on the roof and we yelled back at the people. We sang to them, the old John Lennon song, all we are saying is give fascism a chance. And they're screaming out top. By the way, the rooftops probably five stories high,

and they're cursing Tom and my son. And so anyways, afterwards, we decide to leave. We go downstairs. We have security with us. And there's, I don't know, 40 cops outside. One guy starts spitting on my security guard. And he lands one on him. And they rested him right there.

It was pretty nasty on what happened at the, because that time, you know, Elon is coming in and he's doing what he's doing. Yeah, did you find a house or no? That's good security guard. He's willing to take one for you. Yeah, he's willing to. Is that the house, Rob?

Yep. That's the house. That's the roof, so visualize Tom and my 13-year-old son all the way up top right there. Exactly where it's funny. Screaming at these guys and singing, I'm like, what kind of an influencer are you, Tom? I thought you're going to teach this guy some good things, but who knows? Maybe they both have an edge of time. Tico City had a very good time.

He did have a very good time. By the way, this is the engine you were talking about Pomp. So when Pomp talked about it, this is the engine on how the evolution, how far we're going. That's a visual of what they wanted to do to the government. And, you know, obviously they ran into a lot of roadblocks. Well, the government employees prefer government people on the top prefer. prefer the left. The establishment wants to further respond to the left, not the one to the right

because you don't want it to be efficient. You want to be able to show we need 200,000 jobs. Not really, we can get this thing done with 890 people. No, no, no, we need 200,000 jobs of people who never show up to work. So check this out, folks. Sometimes you have to learn what not to do. This is a story of what not. We just got an example of Elon of what to do. Here's what not to do. The FBI is investigating a startup founder, accused of using VC money to pay for her house and a Caribbean wedding.

You know that's a bad idea, but she thought it was a good idea. It's a business insider story. Shiloh Lucky, great name. Founder and CEO, is this a Rob? Founder and former CEO of Compilant, an LA-based tax-compliance startup that raised more than $13 million, some top venture capitalists. It's under criminal investigation for alleged security and bank fraud, according to court filings. In a civil complaint, the SEC has charged Lucky with violating securities laws for using millions of dollars of company funds to pay for home Super Bowl tickets. And a destination wedding in the Caribbean, the SEC alleges she painted a rosy picture of the company booming revenue with compelant, never brought in more than 600.

And you ready for this? Never brought it more than $620 in monthly revenue. Now, not $620,000. $620. Like, this is more than an FLB shoe. That's the most, that means she only sold one FLB shoe in her career, reached by telephone. Lucky said, I don't have anything to offer and hung up.

Startups face far less regulatory scrutiny from public companies and founders sometimes present over optimistic. growth stories like VCs rush to fund hot companies with limited diligence after high-profile scandals like Theranos and FTX regulators have taken the tougher line. Startup founders cannot fake it until they make it by falsified revenues. Metrics, SEC Regional Director Monique Winkler said, including the seven-year prison sentence for Charlie Javis and fraud. Anyway, it's a bunch of different people on top of this. So here's a question. Tom, you've been part of 2.2, billion dollars of exits raising money you got a bunch of deal toys in your office and you've

done a bunch of different things how to hell do you one do something this stupid and how do you as an investor fall for somebody like her well first of all once the investors made their investment there's a board involved and what's not stated in the story is who called the regulators who called the SEC. Somebody called the SEC. And I'll tell you who called the SEC. One of the investors called the SEC after getting rid of the rest of the investors and saying, okay, this is probably now a smoking crater, meaning the money is evaporated and there'll be no follow-on and there'll be no value to sell. So I'm not standing for this crap and they called the regular. That's what happened. Because one of the biggest things, whenever we did a round of financing, the board always had visibility access to the

capital accounts. So you get 10 million, and this is how it works, Pat. And you saw this on a lesser scale, but you were an established company with expansion capital with a demonstrated track record of being responsible and building your company. These are pure startup people. And pure startup, it goes like this. Okay, the 10 million will come in. We're going to leave 2 million in the checking. You're going to put 8 million into this CD, and you're going to use it over the next six months. But they have visibility to the account balances. They have observation rights of the accounts. And so when she starts doing this, unfortunately, these founders think that when they've

received the money, hey, man, I'm rich, and I can go and I got to fake it until I make it. And what happens is one of the investors, I believe, it's not stated, but my gut tells me one of the investors called the regulator. And so we got, listen, we got this thing, somebody needs to take this chick down. we're going to write this thing off, and it's a smoking crater, and, you know, we need some help here. And then somebody who wants to continue with their career in public prosecution says, okay, I'll take the case. So now she, Charlie Javits, that defrauded J.P. Morgan on the Frank app for student loans. And then Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, who did everything she could to get pregnant and have babies to avoid incarceration after she was found guilty.

That's what she did. All they need is, you know what, we need one more woman to commit fraud so the four of them could play bridge because it takes four to play bridge. One more woman and we could have this. But this is hubris and the biggest hysterical point to me, she named the company compliant. Tom, stop it. You know what the best part of the story is? What's that? She didn't trick a single good investor.

If you think about it, all of the people in the captain, table. They're not known for being world-class investors. If think of Theranos, none of the top Silicon Valley investors were in there. The system is designed where the best in the world, they understand this stuff. They can sniff this stuff out. They avoid investing in this. And so usually when I see these stories and I go look at the cap table, you will almost never see the top investors. Now, FTX was a little bit different, right? That was one of the, I think that's why that story was so explosive was the best investors in the world actually were investors. But if you go through many of these things, and this one in particular, I don't recognize a single person who's on that

cap table, in terms of firms, people, et cetera. And so, you know, if you don't have the best investors in the world investing, that either means that they looked at it and they saw some red flag and they avoided investing or how good was the governance, how good was the financial controls, how good was, you know, whatever. Pomp, five and a half million dollar seed round for The company was led by Kraft Ventures, a VC firm co-founded by David Sachs. Oh, Kraft Ventures was in there. Yeah, I take that back. I take that back.

I take that back. David. David. Oh, no, David. Go to the cap table. Oh, my God. Are you kidding me. The list I saw did not have craft on it.

Can you pull up the compliant cap table? Yeah, I just, let me see where I'm getting this article from. Let's go to Crunch Base. Let's see if they got the. Yeah, there you go. I just, it says, it's from Business Insatter. It says, who else is on there? Here, let me send it to you.

The other thing, just why you're pulling that up, that the other article had was, she was telling investors, they went from $2,500 a month in revenue to $250,000. And one of the things about the venture world is the venture world would break down if every single update, every single number that was shared with a private investor was audited. And so there is this element of, trust. I think that goes into, you know, these updates, et cetera. And so obviously that ends up being a huge problem. Do you, is there not a full cap table? 2025 and a half million dollars to sit on craft ventures. Yeah. So yeah, craft ventures is the,

is the one. The other ones, you know, they're, they're not necessarily known as really big venture funds. The craft, man. Craft was in it. Yeah, I'm looking to rob just to see how this happens. So her, her name was Shiloh Johnson. She starts a, a compliant company as a tax-compliant startup. Let me say this again to you. So she starts a tax-compliance company and she uses the money to go to Super Bowl, fund her wedding, and buy a place in Caribbean.

And is there even a video of how she speaks and what she says, Rob? Yes, I think she must be captivating. That's it, Shiloh, Johnson. Let me just see how good of a salesperson she is. Let's just see what she sounds like. And it actually can be a good thing. I think at first it's like gum and prayer.

And in 2019, when you started, how were you when you jumped? His voice. That would be four years ago, so I was 34. And you have some key numbers to illustrate the growth of the business of the last three years since it hit the market? Yeah, I'd say for comparison or understanding. I'm the solo founder, so I was the first person in the company, first employee. And last three or so years, we are not 56 employees. We went from 1 to 4 to 11, 25 to now 56.

So that's really exciting. I've been able to raise now over 13.3 million. It's cool. And not an easy fee for someone that looks like me in the U.S. And so that's been really exciting. And now she says that. What is she about to say? What is she about to say?

9,000 or so small businesses that find us usually by a mobile or pretty popular in the mobile world. Yeah, that's what we're doing. How we're doing it. That's phenomenal growth. I thought she's going to say a revenue number there. 9,000 businesses, $250 of monthly revenue. how you do that I don't know

I'm gonna be giving it away for free she has the audacity state and it's hard for somebody to look like me to do that but then like in the background she's doing this so like that's some serious audacity well in her SECKs filing her age is listed 41 so I don't know when that interview was

her TikTok account is followed by tens of thousands of people where she presents herself as sharing expertise on personal finance and taxes well she's going to be in jail helping some people with their finances. It's funny because yesterday I had the former president of Honduras who was just pardoned by the president, who originally was accused of funneling 400 tons of cocaine. And it was here yesterday on the podcast. And we did a two-hour interview. And by the way,

the audience, this is the guy that they're saying, how the hell does Trump's administration pardon a drug cartel that took money from El Chapo and his brother. even build cocaine with another guy named El Cinco and another guy named El Rojo that he was friends with with the block of cocaine had his brother's initial on a T.H. Tony Hernandez. Anyways, he's going to make, why are you laughing talk? You can't make this up. I'm telling you his story. You're judging this guy. This guy's been away from his family. All this time. He thinks this is funny stuff. He's been in prison. And by the way, where I'm going with this is he was in prison with SBF, right? With SBF. You know, I said, so who were you in prison with?

He said, I was in prison with, you know, Sam, Sam Bankman-Fried. And every day for a year and a half, they became good friends. And Sam helped them out with his case. I said, who else were you in prison with? He says, I was in prison with a major producer. You guys know his name. He's a very big mogul. He's a music mogul.

I said, Did he? He says, yes, Diddy. I was in prison with Diddy. As you were in prison for Niddy? How long? It says two months. I said, what stories do you have with? I used to tell him one time he was getting mad to with another person over what the TV station to watch the news and they were fighting. I said it's not worth it. Just pick your battles. Pick your fights. I said he was probably watching a documentary is what he was. And then he says there was this other rapper. His name is Robert. Robert 6.9. I said Robert 6.9. I said, Takashi 6.9. By the way, the stories were insane. So.

Shiloh, you're about to go have similar stories. Can you imagine them all hanging out? What is that? I mean, the stories you're going to come out with? Diddy, SBF, Juan, Takashi 6-9. Hang on. I have an idea. What TV station to watch?

You do the money. Spf, you do the money. I got the drugs. You make a record label. Let's make a comeback. All we got to be is pardoned. There was a song like that back in the place. I'll be right back. What is it say? I've got the brains. You've got the looks. Let's make lots of money.

Who's saying that song about that? All we need is a Honduran guy. I don't know who it was, but it's actually a very interesting interview that I come out here tomorrow. So stay tuned for that. Man, what a rough situation with this Shiloh girl. Poor girl looking like that. Pet shop boys.

Is that what it was? Pet shop boys. Yeah. I've got the brains. I'll stop singing, but it's a good song. That's a good song. All right. McDonald's folks, tell me if this commercial will make you or your kids

go to McDonald's for a Happy Meal or a Big Mac. McDonald's thought it was a good idea to make an AI-generated Christmas ad, but they got so much backlash that the marketing team is like, guys, take that down. This isn't good. Watch this for yourself and tell us if you like it or not. Go ahead, Rob. It's the most terrible time of the year. All the shots turn to Mayhem.

even center no space and the tree redecorated your place it's the most terrible time of the year the roast turns at your home and the cookies burn too freaking chaos it feels like a zoo it's the most terror time of the year so you believe from the madness the lights and the cheer and I like it. You like it? Why people got a problem with it? But you're being honest, you're joking. I swear.

By the way, I liked it from the marketing standpoint as well. It's what I said yesterday. I've never seen it. I thought it was good, but apparently they took it down. Brandon, do we know why they took it down? Too much backlash, which is a terrible move, I think. Like, just lean into it at that point. Keep it, meaning if you're already in it.

And that's a win, too, to get to piss people. off with marketing. I think that's a win because it's you know like attention is the name of the game right? Do they not like it? Do they not like it because of the AI or did they not like it because of the message? You know, worst time like Yeah, so they're mad about the Christmas being a terrible

time, not about it being AI. This is this commercial was produced for McDonald's Netherlands, just so you know. Not Compton, Netherlands, but we have decided to remove our AI generated Christmas adverts, spokesperson said it was intended to reflect the stress moments that can occur

during the holidays in the Netherlands, but we recognize that for many of our guests, the season is the most wonderful time of the year. We respect that and remain committed to creating experiences that offer good times and good food for everyone. This moment serves as an important learning as we explore the effective use of AI. Imagine Elon saying something

and people having backlash and him taking it down and saying, oh, sorry, and issuing a statement that says, you know, like basically AI-generated PR statement. never that would never happen with them no but they're they're just covering you know covering their butts yeah that would never happen with them top you your family guy you got girls but you also have a dark sense of humor i think you like there's a part of it that i think you like that it's picking on the stress and things you know people getting gifts and snow and ice and you know

oh come on and it's got this homage back to um to to to clark plugging in the the christmas tree and, you know, come on. Yeah. I mean, it's a... Rob, can you run a poll? National Ampoon's Christmas vacation, you know, Griswold, you know, shutting down the neighborhood because of all the lights you put up. I think it's funny, and it talks about this.

And now the back end of it is, oh, hideout McDonald's the beginning of the year, it's kind of tongue-in-cheek. So if there was a group of people who says, hey, you're really picking on Christmas, I don't think they were picking on Christmas. I think they were picking on, you know, getting together. I mean, I was making jokes about Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, the only holiday in America where you get together with everybody around the table

that's a little too small, including the three cousins you don't like and give everyone a knife. So it's like that's Thanksgiving in America, right? So I don't think there was anything wrong with it. I think McDonald's knee-jerked. And I think what I would have done if I was McDonald's says, hey, we're picking on the stress of holiday season.

We're not picking on anything else. Can you lighten up a little bit aren't you kind of making my point? If I was a CEO, that's what I said. You're kind of making my point that you're taking it kind of serious. I'm not picking on. Look, there was not one thing in there like, like, you know, desecrating the manger or a nativity scene. They didn't cross that line. It was all of the things we go through celebrating and in the cold and the slush and the wind and Christmas carolers are trying to sing there with cold wind. So that's never happened. You've never seen that? Come on. Netherlands.

Some sensitive people live in Netherlands. I thought they were good. Aren't they pretty good at soccer at times? You can't be good at soccer and be that sensitive? You know what they left out in the Netherlands? Really? Yeah. All the Nordic countries, I think are pretty sensitive. Why is it? Why do think they're sensitive? I don't know, because there's not a lot of problems there. What's in the food? Is it the food? Is it the drinks? Is it the beer?

I thought they were going to be upset about the AI. That's why when I saw them take it down, I thought that they were going to be like, oh, you used AI to do this. You can kill jobs. Like, yeah, the fact that it was to You know what they didn't add? This is Netherlands. All they had to add was one thing is Max Verstappen, opening up a present. Is he Netherlands?

Yeah. So all they needed was Max to open up a box that says two points. Has anybody ever seen Max's interviews? This is like the last guy who is sensitive. He holds nothing back. By the way, he should have won. And he didn't. But we already talked about that.

If you want to entertain yourself, watch Max and his father in interviews. And you tell me who's got a foul mouth more, him or his father? He had a baby this year. Scroll down a little bit and look who his wife is. Who's his wife? Kelly P.K. Oh, wow. Daughter of three-time world champion Nelson P.K.

Good for him. By the way, Bolsonaro likes Nelson P.K. More than he likes Senna. And I was not happy about that. I was not happy about that one else. Let's throw his ass in prison. So funny. Sorry.

Too soon? You are so. You guys want to talk about the AI. I'm trying to find the story to go to, but take the lead. Tell us about what's going on with that. No, no, no, no, the product that you guys built. Let's talk about yours first, and then we'll talk about the one we built. Just go to it.

Just talk about what's going on because I think what's important is, well, let me go with this, and then let's go into what you're talking about, because it has to do with the same thing. McKinsey plots thousands of job cuts and slowdown for consulting industry, okay? And we know McKinsey. Then when it comes down to consulting, that a cream of the crop, under James McKinsey and then the guy, the godfather that helped build the company, a man named Marvin Bauer. Go to any McKinsey office and drop the name Marvin Bauer.

Look what they'll say about him. Marvin Bauer is the man that's respected by anybody and everybody who's ever worked at McKinsey. But let me tell the story. So McKinsey and Company gathered in a consulting giant's birthplace in late October, Bob Sternfeld delivered a rally cry. We will kick some ass as we start our second century. The firm's top executive told the thousands of attendees, but away from the 100-year festivities in Chicago,

McKinsey's bosses have been conveying a more pragmatic message, pragmatic message, it's time to get leaner. The firm's leadership has discussed with managers in non-client-facing departments. They need to cut about 10% of headcount across their business according to people with knowledge of the matter that could amount to a few thousand job cuts than McKinsey would stagger over the next 18 to 24 months.

the people said asking not to be identified because the details are private for McKenzie to go-to advisor for companies and countries. It's the type of cost-cutting approach that its consultants often prescribe to clients. The firm's revenue growth has flattened in the past five years. As our firm marks 100 years,

we're operating in a moment, shaped by rapid advances in AI that are transforming businesses and society, McKinsey spokesman said, just as we're partnering with clients to strengthen the organization, we're on our own journey to improve the effectiveness

and efficiency of our own support functions. Do you think this is consulting industry? Do you think this is AI? What do you think is going on here? This is going to be the story of business for the next decade. I mean, this is the single most important thing

that people got to pay attention to is if you look across public markets, there's a couple things that I find very interesting. Companies that are talking about using AI are outperforming the companies that are not talking about using AI. Why is that? What does AI do?

Artificial intelligence. You take superhuman intelligence, and you apply it to a problem. There's this great interview that I heard, and they said, if you can verify something, you can automate it, right? So what is McKinsey doing? McKinsey creates reports, and it creates presentations, and it creates outcomes that they then suggest to people. So as you look across all these public companies and also these consulting firms, et cetera, is all of the leaders are saying the same thing. We are going to produce more revenue, but we are going to do it with less people. what that means is that they are going to become more efficient

if they become more efficient they're more productive lower cost then that should mean that they are more profitable more profitable means they should be more valuable so everything in the capitalistic structure says go and uses AI to be more productive do it with less employees now when you see that happening from an investor seat you say well I want to invest in companies where they're becoming more efficient more profitable more productive what I think is more interesting is what is happening for the average person so I'll give you a couple of examples The first is there are these new coding tools.

So you can go and there's cursor, windsurf, et cetera. What you do is you go in and you basically say, hey, I want to write code. So I'm a human that wants to write this code, but I need help. And that help historically would mean I would need a team of 5, 10, 20 different engineers that would also be producing code next to me.

Well, maybe what I could do is I could write code, but also I could have the AI write some code as well. Now, I as one human just became more productive. That productivity tool means that I contribute more to my company. I produce more revenue, right, at a lower cost. And so that's good for the company. It's good for me, too, because guess what? I'm more productive as an engineer, et cetera.

Those tools are very valuable. I know you guys have built something in the HR space, very similar, right? Can you start to automate some of this? You guys can talk about that in a second. What we did is we built something called Sylvia, so CFO Sylvia. And in this product, what we found very interesting is wealthy, rich people, they have entire teams that are focused on helping them manage their finances and address all of their financial life. So you go and you have an accountant and you've got a financial advisor, you've got a tax expert, you've got a lawyer, you've got a lawyer, You've got all this stuff.

They're very expensive teams. But again, if you can verify something, then you can go and you can manage it. And so what we did is we basically created a product where you go and you sign up. You attach all of your account, your bank account, your crypto account, your brokerage account, your credit cards. You can put your real estate, your car, collectible, private invest, everything into this thing. It'll track your net worth. But then we created tons of AI agents and AI that you can then go and start talking to Sylvia. Now, what's interesting about this is you can do simple things.

What's your bank account? What's your cash balance? what's your debt to equity ratio. But what I find really interesting is you can do something like upload your tax returns and ask Sylvia, how do I get my tax rate down? Now Sylvia is going to say, well, what's in your tax return,

what's in your portfolio, and what are our information on the Internet and bring all that stuff together? I even can go in there and I can say something like, you know, Pat, if you upload all of your finances, let's run a Monte Carlo simulation, and we're going to run 100,000 simulations

using state-of-the-art AI, and it is going to predict where you are going to be financially in 10 years. And it can do that in like two or three minutes. The way it's doing it is it's actually writing custom code, writing Python in the background, right, to go and do this. Then we've seen people going in and they'll say, you know what I want to do? I'm thinking about buying Tesla stock. I heard these guys talking about it. Sounds interesting. You can go and you can ask the AI, do deep research on Tesla stock and let me know whether you think I should actually

have this in my portfolio. Well, usually if I asked you that, you would tell me a very watered down version of what you think about Tesla stock. But because it's so. superhuman intelligence, it will go and it will do fundamental analysis, technical analysis, sentiment analysis. It'll present a proke argument, a con argument. But then it'll even tell you things like, you know what, you've got a lot of tech stocks. You probably want a smaller allocation because you're very correlated to tech. Or it may say to you one-time purchase versus dollar cost averaging over time, right? These are things that are human, it would take way too long to do. And so this product, people can go try it out. It's c-fosilvia.com. When you go to

CFO Sylvia, it basically gives you super intelligence in your pocket to apply towards your finances. McKinsey says, well, wait a second. If you can do this for general purpose questions, like on a Google, if you can do this for finance with something like CFO Sylvia, how hard would it be for us to generate a presentation, a consulting report, a answer to a customer question, like all this stuff, right? And so you start to apply this over and over and over again throughout the economy. you're squeezing inefficiency out

you're giving productivity to the people the CFO Silvia is free so you go and when you start using this thing all of a sudden now you don't need to go hire a bunch of people so the reason why I say this is the conversation for the next decade if I don't have to go hire let's say an investment professional

because now I have superhuman intelligence doing it well where does that person go where do they go and earn a living where does the money that I'm saving not buying you know hiring them where does that go where do you actually think they go I think it's a very complex, nuanced conversation because each one is different. So the factory worker that gets replaced by a humanoid robot has a very different outlook and opportunity than the white-collar worker who would go and normally work at a family office as an investment professional.

Tell me why. Well, if you are a knowledge worker or a white-collar worker, one, you actually think you're not the one that gets automated away. So that's the biggest thing is like it's not clear to you that you're the one that's in the target of the AI kind of train. The second thing is there's going to be a bifurcation of those people. You know, one of the things, as we built the Sylvia product, if you're an RIA, if you're a financial advisor, you could sit there and say, you know what, this product is, this thing's going to put me out of work, right? People aren't going to have to talk to me. They can just talk to AI. That's bad for me.

The smartest RIAs, they've been calling us up and they've been saying, hey, you know what? We want to try to use this product. We're going to give it to our clients, and we want to have access to the account because now our clients can ask more questions. They don't want to email me every day. They feel awkward doing that, right? They might not want to tell me everything about their finance because they're embarrassed or they're taking risk or whatever. But they'll do it with the software, and then I can help them because I see what they're

interested in, what questions they're asking. I get more data and access, all that stuff. So the story of technology has always been embracing technology usually actually separates people. And so if you think about McKinsey, they could sit there and say, you know what, we're not going to use AI. We're not going to touch this stuff. Well, there's a lot of people who are just going to say, I don't need McKinsey to use AI. I'm just going to go to chat GPT or whatever. I'm going to tell it to create the

presentation. And by the way, that's what they're going through right now, just so you know that. Of course. I had a conversation with a senior partner at McKinsey and very successful guy. He's a type of guy that makes eight figures. He's done very well for himself. And I said, so what's the biggest thing you've experienced with AI disruption at McKinsey? He says, I'll give you an idea. He says, go to chat GBT when it first came out. I wanted to test what we were at Wood McKinsey. Client comes in, we need to write a report form. Okay, we go, we do our thing.

So one night, I just sit there and I feed ChadGBT, GBT, the intel that I want to feed it, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, write me a report. It spits out the report. I take it, I send it just to see how the team's going to react. The team looks at it,

they get back to me and they said, we know this is ChatGBT, but holy shit. Mm-hmm. that this is what Chatsubit can do. Without any training, without any customization, just like off the shelf. Without any training.

So what he's trying to say is, go ahead, Tom. No, he cranked out it was a preliminary due diligence report. It's crazy. By the way, this is not two or three. This is not Gemini three. This is the first one that came out. So they're sitting there saying, wait a minute, this product that's a half a million dollar product.

Now do we, what do we do with this product? So maybe it's not 100% what we would do with our experience, because it's not. But what if it's 90%, what is a 93% of what we can do worth to them? Is it worth them just going through chat? You didn't pay in 20 bucks a month or 40 bucks a month, whatever it is? I think that's the part with the consulting side

that is changing the game for a lot of these bigger guys. And what I wonder is the following. I've been in a, I'm just in a very, because our consulting firm has grown exponentially. And we're helping a lot of these. He's mid-sized, like even this year, we did a business planning workshop. Our attendance will skyrocketed over last year. These are people around the world that are paying, that are doing, and how quickly the

engagements are turning. Guy comes in, does a day with us on consulting on a business planning for 2026, runs a, you know, business got a, I don't know, the guy we were with two nights ago, we went and visited this guy in Dallas, got a $250 million EBIT. Good size EBITO, good business. He's got 70 locations, 30 countries, so the successful guy. And then you're talking to these guys coming and say, hey, we'd like to do an engagement with you.

Why? Because we're curious how you did XYZ. We're interested in this. So I think the consulting space is going to be disrupted by expert operators. I don't know if the value of back in the days when Marvin Bauer, for every five new hires that they would bring on board to McKinsey, two were from Harvard. James McKinsey did a phenomenal job establishing that relationship with Harvard.

were two out of five were Harvard. But that doesn't, I talked to another guy, another senior partner from BCG, and he says, the days of you valuing an MBA from Harvard is not the same. He says, today, craziest thing he told me, I was telling this to my niece two days ago, my sister, Paulette and Grace, I said, what he said is, we perphrases, we're having more success bringing gritty guys or gals that went to University of Florida. But they didn't get accepted into the school that they wanted, Even though University of Florida, Tom, I think it's a top seven school.

What do you put in? Number seven, number seven of American public universities. Think about that. So he's like, we like that second because the Harvard guys are coming and they're like, well, yeah, you know, so they're harder to work with. These other guys are coming up. So I don't know how this disruption is going to change for us when it comes on to Hierometrics. And what we did is a follow one. When we came out with Hierometrics, Rob, if you want to pull it up, I looked at this last year.

Okay, last year we had 11,000 resumes that we got to. for the entire year. Of the 11,000 resumes that we got the entire year, Pomp, we interviewed 1,300 of them. We can't get to the entire 11,000. Neither should we, right? But, so around 15 percent or something. Right. Did we hire the right people? I don't know. Did we hire based on bias? I don't know. But if you go to hire metrics.com, on hire metrics.com, what we did with this, this year, we've gotten 35,000 resumes. And so the 35,000 resumes, this is a leak that we found in our business. All of a sudden, I keep going around asking everybody,

hey, how are you doing? I said, you know, you need some new person I get started. So where are you from? New Jersey. All right, cool. Where are you from? New Jersey. Where are you from?

New Jersey. There's an epidemic going on here in the company. Somebody from New Jersey got a job here and turned around and hired a bunch of people. But not in a bad way. The guy's still with us. We love him. He's with us four years. Rob, where are you from, Rob?

New Jersey. Okay. How many New Jersey people do we have here? Quite a bit. I would say it's maybe 10%. Think about that. Of the 150 employees, 10% are from Jersey, okay? So then I'm like, let me go to HR.

50% of our HR department is from New Jersey. So what is the icebreaker? Where are you from, Pop, New Jersey? No way. What part? Well, I went to such and such school. Man, I went to. No, we used to play you guys.

Well, you know, did you go to that pizza? Okay, so there was like, what we did with hire. metrics that every interview that comes and we want them to go through here. Higher metrics does an AI interview with you. You upload your resume. After you apply, there's a bunch of job openings you can go and see it. You can upload

your resume. After you upload your resume, you do a five-minute interview. It asks you the question. It knows if you are using AI to answer the AI questions. You can throw the AI off. Somebody that's watching this right now, go test it for yourself and ask funny questions.

Like Tom will say, you know what? I will not work anywhere near Adam and I need to get paid this. Ha, ha, ha, Tom, I like your sense of humor. We appreciate sense of humor here. However, can we get back and be focused a little bit? When it comes on to this question, how would you handle this issue? And it'll come back in the reporting, it'll say, this person interviewed with lots of competency.

He did get distracted. He made one disturbing comment. I'm not sure if that should be considered for applying or not, but it's something we ought to be thinking about. And then they give a score. And me as the business owner, I can say, I only on. want to interview people that scored over 80 or over 70 or whatever and it spits out that alert to you and you kind of see what came in. So the part with us when we're looking at AI is

I want to interview the 35,000 resume. I want all of them. And if an AI can do that for us and spit out a score for them and then we can say, look at that guy. Why did that guy get an 89? Why do you score an 87? And then he comes in or she comes in like, wow, very, very impressive. So specialized skill, competency and culture. Is there a match? Is there a fit for the company? But that's the reason why we came up and we created hire metrics specifically for us and now guess who's asking for it, our clients that we serve.

They're like, can we do it? Here's what's interesting to me. So let's just say that you have the 35,000 people who apply. If you were to hire people to go interview every single one of them, let's say somebody could interview, 10 people a day, five days a week, right? You just start doing the math. You're like, you would have to hire a lot of people

to go and do this and be able to do it successfully. But what is happening in the interview? I mean, you just described it, right? You're asking a question, you're receiving information you're synthesizing that information and then you are making a conclusion like that's what a computer can do now

that is what an LLM is built to do but here's the part that I think that people have not yet caught on so everyone knows about you know AI they go and they use chat GBT etc higher metrics I'm guessing you guys either already doing this or about to do this CFO Sylvia we've started to do this

etc McKenzie as well you start to build task specific AI agents what does that mean so today if I come in and I say, hey, Patrick, I need help with my business. You've got to be able to understand finance, marketing, operations, right? HR, all these different things, and you're looking at it holistically.

But ideally what I could do is I could come and I could say, hey, Patrick, I need your team of experts, these 25 different people who are all experts in each individual 25 fields, and can they help me? Well, with these task-specific AI agents, you know, if you go back to the CFO-Sov thing, for example, there's an AI agent that should be able to just answer the question, read my tax returns telling me how to get my tax rate down. Another agent should be really good at saying evaluate this company for me. Another agent should be really good at saying, you know, what is like, one of my favorite questions to ask. You attach all your accounts. What will happen

to my portfolio in the next recession? And it's good. It'll go and figure out what happened in all the recessions and which assets drew down how much of the correlations and then they'll look at your portfolio and then it'll spit out and say, hey, you know what? You got a lot of tech stocks in the next recession if tech goes down you may lose 30% of your exposure by the way if you got a lot of cash you're going to be just fine right and it can do this but it's task specific AI agents and so I think that at McKinsey they're not just going to have one single AI that can do everything they have to adjust they don't have a choice they have to adjust because these questions are being asked and so here's my question time I'm going to come to you with this one here and

pop I'm going to come back to you with this Brandon keep keep thinking about this I got you So AI replacing jobs has been a probably on the top five fear porn channels the last five years. Is that fair? To say AI has been the top five fear porn stuff that people have been worried about. You know, we had COVID, we had 5G, we had surveillance, we had all this stuff. But you can put AI as one of them. Okay, fine. The more and more I think about AI, the less and less I worry about,

the individuals losing their jobs. And I'll tell you why, from my standpoint. Tom, I'm going to come to you first, and then I'll give my thoughts. With the stuff that he's talking about, with the stuff that I'm talking about with AI, how nasty you think AI is going to end up being for the average person that's got a job?

How nasty you think it's going to be for the average person running a small business? I'm running a small business. You know, we'll sit down a lot of time with some business owners, pomp, and they're still using manual, like, of course, manual, They're doing 29 million year, all manual.

It's not like they're running a small, all piece of paper. They're still that old school, and then they go hand that over to their accountant. Hey, help us put this together. How scary you think it's going to be, or is it not as scary as people make it out to be top? So I see a barbell factory, a big plates over here, big plates over here, and skinny in the middle. If you are an Amazon, seasonal warehouse worker, you know, robots are doing that now. and the entire warehouse has run on on on on those bots you've got self-driving car taxis you've got self-driving trucks so you have all that by way that's AI that's the application of AI at its

at a high sophisticated level now something he said when he's talking about AI agents and he's also talking about Python the first word that comes to my mind is Claude right I I don't really look at Gemini 3 and chat gbt I see them as search replace Like 80% of what's going on, I'm pulling that number out of the air. I think a huge, huge, huge percent of it, is it 80, is 85? I don't know. Is search replacement doing search better? Getting contextualized answers because you can ask a question of search.

That's what I see Gemini through your chat, TBT. And I see that as a utility for the people that are office workers. They're turning up. They can get more information faster, like McKinsey said. You can get the diligence report there. But when I start to look at Claude, and Claude cranking out in Python that now I can go do things with and creating out the agents, suddenly I believe that, you know what, you've got an analyst, let's go ask Fred in tax.

Well, maybe Fred is still in tax over at McKinsey, but it's not Fred and 10 humans anymore. It's Fred and four humans who are harnessing things like Claude writing the AI agents. So that's the barbell effect. I think you're going to see job dilution because AI agents can help do more, but you're still going to see humans at the midst of it. It's not suddenly going to be what they call a dark cage, and a dark cage used to be what they referred to as a data center, that there's no humans at work there.

It's just a dark cage. So that's what I think. I think on the low end here, you're going to see a lot of it, and you're going to see white color consolidation, because when you, by way, are you using Anthropic when you talked about, it's cranking out and... It's one of the things we use, yeah. Yeah, when you said it's cranking it out in Python,

you're talking about agents, I immediately thought because I think Anthropic and Claude is doing that better than anybody else. Well, here's the thing is, like, when you describe this barbell, the barbell of impact is very real. There's certain people who are going to use this to an advantage. There's certain people are going to get displaced.

But I actually think if you look at this from a different angle, you say, actually, everyone's on an equal playing field right now. This stuff is new. chat chbd came out three years ago so we're three years into a 50 year journey you can sit today sit here know nothing about AI you don't even know how to spell AI and you can go on the internet

and you can Google and simply say how do I use AI how do I learn to build something with AI how do I and you just start asking questions and I bet if you spent two weeks doing this the holidays you got extra time right go out and start doing it you will become so proficient at using these tools that you will have a leg up on your colleagues at work but also if you are one of the people who are going to get displaced

you just got superhuman intelligence at your fingertips you can do anything you can build a company you can go and get a job you can do all this kind of stuff to the point where you're sitting there talking about that you're using higher metrics to go and evaluate 35,000 jobs well you know what I've heard I've seen multiple people online say well I lost my job so you know what I did I used AI and I applied to whatever 5,000 jobs and I was I was able to do it, and I customized the resume for every single one of the jobs based on the company,

and I had it scrape the website and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And put the buzzwords onto my resume, but keep my resume honest. Of course. And so you look at that and you say, you know, on one side, there's a story of displacement. On the other side, there's a story of empowerment. And I think the part that people forget in these stories is the world is better off because we have electricity and refrigeration and all these technologies. The world is going to be significantly better off because of AI. It's just, are you going to sit there and let the world.

happen to you? Are you going to have agency and go learn how to use those tools? And I think my message to people over and over again has been, we are three years into a 50-year journey. You have essentially a level playing field. Learn how to use the tools, and you will be one of the people who benefit from it rather than get displaced by it. Okay. Got it. Makes sense. Brandon, do you have thoughts on this? Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's like the coolest, most unique economic time we've ever lived. And it's like literally the industrial revolution where, you know, we were learning how to use, like, oil and gas to build the new economy and, you know, like, when we were discover electricity. So it's, like, it's scary for some people in the sense that

you don't really know, like, where to apply yourself and, like, where to strategically gain a skill set, because, like, a lot of things could be wiped out that we're not anticipating. But, no, like, it's, like, it's simultaneously, like, the biggest, I think, money-making opportunity and, like, and career opportunity, I guess, in our lifetimes. And, like, you know, every time that there's this big technological, technological displaced, And, like, yeah, 50% of the jobs get wiped out. But then, you know, there's jobs that we never even thought before that. And people could get...

Let me tell you where I'm at with this when it comes on to AI. I'm at a complete different place right now. The more and more I think about it. Okay, let's kind of go with this. Let's say AI gets so amazing that it replaces 80% of jobs. Great. What did you just get rid of? Customers.

You just got rid of customers. You need people to buy your products. What else do you? you need. You need people to start businesses. What else do you need? You need people to create jobs for other people. For instance, like for me, if there's a bookstore around my house and they're good people running it, they're not some socialist communist, I want to keep them in business. So I'll go buy a bunch of books from them as a way of saying, I don't need the books. I'll just go buy a thousand dollars worth of books. Go ahead. Let's grab it. Let's go. Why? I want the guy to

stay in business. We'll go to Barnes & Noble. We probably spend $10,000 to $20,000 to have Barnes & Noble. Why? It's a way I want Barnes & Noble to stay in business that's local to me, down the street from me at Fort Lauderdale. I want the guy to stay in business. Restaurants they go to. Like, for example, the moment this one restaurant called Angelo Elia shut down, I can't tell you how much it dramatically changed my life in a negative way. Tom, how many times a week was at Angeloelia? Be honest. How many times. How many times a week was that, Angela Elia? Oh, we were there two times, three times a week during the week, and then I stopped

counting the number of weekends. It was easier to count the weekends we missed because we were always there. Hey, Tom, I'm over here a Saturday. We bring the kids over. Kids are having an amazing pizza. This is Angela Elliott. And Pat and I were framing the destruction of Earth. Do you know how many great ideas we came up with Angela Elia in that corner?

So a small business locally that's part of your life that shuts down affects you. So now you mean to tell me you're worried about AI replacing jobs that now, how are those guys going to come by and buy from us? By the way, let me ask you another question. Here's the other thing. What do you think is horrible for society? A bunch of people with a lot of time on their hands? Do you think that's a safe society? No.

Actually go into it. So you got a city that has driven 100% on AI and you got a million people living there. 80% of them don't need to have a job because you're going to give them U.S. whatever bullshit you want to talk about. How safe is your city? What percentage of those people here is orange or pink or green? What happens when you have a lot of time on your hands? Do we do good when we have a lot of time on our hands?

Alcoholism and drug abuse is tied to that. Are you kidding me? Like there's a part of this thing with AI to me that, you know, you need to keep people active. My job as a parent is to make sure all my kids are as active as part of it. possible. Whether it's with sports, different things they're learning, you know, fighting, Muay, whatever it is, I want to keep them active. You want to give, like, you want to go into fear of AI that they're going to give UBI to people and people are going to be sitting home, just clocking in, taking checks. You think that's good for marriages? You think that's good

for a relationship? You think that's good? I don't think it is. So I think long-term, a society that if 80% of the jobs are going to be replaced by AI, that's a very problematic place. to be. So yes, I get it. By the way, what we just both talked about is we're both using AI to develop what we're developing. So it's not like we're leveraging it, but don't get it twisted. We also have

35 job openings. We're also hiring people. So to me, long term, political leaders better also get some ideas about realizing you do not want to have a society where you're replacing job. The people that are worried about it, listen, small

business owners. I will tell small business owners. If you don't figure right away to make AI help you become more efficient, while you still keep the human touch, like customer service, I want to talk to somebody if I'm going to your restaurant. If you can keep the customer touch, if you can keep the unreasonable hospitality, but if you're able to access a lot of this technology that's out there for you, say you don't, your competitor does, Devon Edge over you. So yes, do use it, but no, I don't think long term 80% of jobs are going to be cut because we need people to make money so they can buy stuff. Can you give a devil's advocate argument to that? Actually, intentionally argue against

it. Well, I think that you mentioned you're using AI, we're using AI, right? So if you can go to, you know, hiremetrics.com, CFOSylvia.com. You're like, oh, my God, there's all this AI. There's people who work at the company, right? Open AI has a lot of people that work at the company. Invidia has a lot of people that work at the company, right? So there's jobs being created. Now, I think from this like devil's advocate standpoint, one of the aspects that I think is is really interesting is there are going to be old jobs or traditional jobs that start to use AI and then they're going to be AI native jobs. So one of the things is this whole idea of like vibe coding, right? It's basically people who are not technical who now can use these tools and they can

start to create things without having that computer science degree or thing. That's an AI native job that previously didn't exist. That's very different than hey, I was already a software engineer and now I use the tool. And you can go through society, right? And you can see actually what we want is we want an explosion of AI-native job creation to offset the displacement of this other thing.

Now, one of their aspect that I think is really interesting here is how does the government play into this? I know you guys have a story about the federal government has this AI executive order that came out and then some states, including Florida, are saying, hey, wait a second,

the state should still be involved. One aspect that I think is very interesting. So I have a friend, Shriam-Christian, who I worked at Facebook. a number of years ago, he is focused on AI at the White House. And anyone you're talking to tech, like, I like that guy, right? He's one of the rare people who can have a very long career. He's worked at Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, et cetera.

And no matter who he's worked with, they like them. So that's a good start. But what they realized was this is actually not just a technology. This is a nationally strategic technology that has national security implications. So the conversation that's about to start happening in America, humanoid robots are coming. It's a version of AI, this embodied AI. We cannot allow for Chinese manufactured humanoid robots

to exist in the United States. Because you basically have a walking, talking, thinking, recording piece of hardware that is sending data back. They are mapping the 3D environment. They are listening. They're talking like, oh, that's scary. we won't even let Huawei into America. We're definitely not going to look at the human oils, right?

So you start to think about this stuff. And so the reason why I bring that up is now all of a sudden the job creation or AI native jobs, et cetera, we're going to have to build all this stuff in America. We are not going to be able to outsource the creation of some of this stuff to other countries. And so that should lead to a tailwind of job creation that's restoring the manufacturing in America, et cetera. Are we prepared to be able to do that? Do we have the people who are being educated, who have the skill sets, who have the desire, to go work in these factories, et cetera.

Like, we're in a weird time. And I know people are promising the humanoid robots will be manufacturing the humanoid robots. Maybe. I don't know. I know right now that AI can write code. And so AI can create more AI software.

But I think your point about, you know, if there's a lot of people with a lot of free time. That's a terrible society. Let me tell you, I was a kid with a lot of time on my head. I had a one point in GPA. I seen the pictures. I was a kid about, a lot of time on my hands. You don't want a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands.

By the way, you know, you know who gets credit right now? You don't who gets credit for lowering crime? I'm going to give a shout out to a company that nobody's going to guess I'm going to give a shout out to. Walmart. You know how many people they employ? Number one employer in America. What's Walmart's market cap? Can you look at Walmart's market cap? It's not that much. Okay. Don't get me wrong. It's like 840. Okay, 920 now. It's not $4 trillion like Nvidia. By the way, Walmart's only worth $990. 19 billion compared to Nvidia's 4 trillion. Invideo only employs 35,000 people.

Walmart employs 2.1 million people. Take those 2.1 million jobs that actually think who works the profile of the people that work at Walmart. Take those jobs out. What's crime look like? Amazon employs 1.5 million. And Amazon gets all these shots taken. Amazon employs 1.5 million.

Allied Universal employs 800,000. Accenture 742. FedEx is 547. We need these jobs, okay? We need these jobs. We need these people to be out there getting these, you know. So to me, a part of it is the distraction. A part of it is keeping people active.

But I do think, in the crazy, and we can get into this story because Trump picks a fight with Magi allies, issued an AI executive order, and DeSantis had something to say about that. Rob, if you want to pull this up. So this is on page 7. I think you got a video on this.

So President Trump has picked the five American conservative at Capitol Hill by issue an executive order to chill state effort to regulate AI proposals similar to one that conservative critics of Big Tech defeated on Capitol Hill earlier this month. Here's the president. Go forward. Are you more worried about the U.S. winning the race for AI dominance with China or about AI's potential threat to humanity? Both. We're looking at that very strong. We have a lot of threats in the opposite way. If we don't do it, you know, you look at the medical and medical. medical research, already the things have come out of AI in terms of medical and cancer research and things were way ahead of what we ever thought would be just from the infancy of AI. So really, both, and we want to be very careful with it. We also know that a big part of our economy, it could be 50, 60 percent of our economy going forward, for a period of time,

at least, especially during the startup, is AI and AI-based. We have trillions of dollars of construction going on and that construction would stop or it would certainly be a lot of it would be halted so look we're leading china we're leading china by a lot china knows that and not doing this would be the greatest gift to china and other countries but china in particular that china has ever received we thank you for watching and so that's that's the that's the dichotomy i know but he just allowed the blackwell chips to go to china though So that contradicts what he says right there. But I think that the part that makes this difficult.

And by the way, I don't know what the answer is. I think that's the part everyone's got to start with is. I see people online, they're like, he should have done that. You don't know what he should have done because you don't have all the information either, right? But is it a competition with China 100%. We got to win. At the same time, most people, I think, believe in states' rights. And so then you say, okay, well, if the state's rights, because if you look at actually in Florida, what they're doing,

it's all about protecting the use of your name, image, likeness, et cetera, in the AI, right? So they're trying to protect their citizens, which makes sense. But then if you look at it from a business perspective, so every time that an AI model comes out, do they have to have a different, you know, kind of structure on a state-by-state basis? Well, that's kind of hard to innovate. So I've got to do something different in Florida than I got to do in Virginia, then I got to do in Texas, then I got to do in North Dakota. Well, who's going to go do that, right?

That kind of goes back to the car story we talked about with the 19.5 billion for Tesla, California. right. But by the way, this is DeSantis' position on the same topic. Go ahead, Rob. The president issued an executive order, and some people were saying, well, no, this blocks the states from doing, it doesn't. If you should read it and see, first of all, an executive order can't block the states. You can preempt states under Article I powers through congressional legislation on certain issues, but you can't do it through executive order. But if you read it, they actually say a lot of the stuff we're talking about, are things that they're encouraging states to do. They say it doesn't prevent child safety.

It doesn't prevent any of that stuff. So even reading it very broadly, I think the stuff we're doing is going to be very consistent. But irrespective, clearly we have a right to do this. Now what it does say is because they're worried about California, Colorado doing really crazy things, that they could have the Attorney General bring challenges to state laws under the Dormant Commerce Clause,

which is, you know, a legal doctrine. And I don't know how successful that would be. But the reality is, you know, I don't anticipate that even happening, you know, against any of the stuff we're doing in Florida. But if it does, I think we would be well positioned to be able to prevail on that. Pause. Tom, who do you side with? Who sounds more reasonable here?

DeSantis puts up the AI Bill of Rights. I think it sounds very, very reasonable. And I don't think there's anything at the federal level that's basically contradictory yet because DeSantis is correct. an executive order on one side, it's intent on one side at the federal level, but then it's Florida. Well, look, every state has its own electric regulation. Every state has its own insurance regulation. Every state has a variety of regulations that are native to that state. The Florida environmental regulations protecting the offshore area are like five times more

complex as they are in Mississippi. Why? Because look how big the coastline is and look at what they're protecting. So this is very natural that you'll have these things with with the state. But what he's talking about is there is a specific precedent. Remember, precedent drives laws, laws drive precedent and then secondary and then precedent drives behavior. Well, there is a woman that was up there sitting next to him whose son was groomed and manipulated by an AI bot. And tragically, he became incredibly depressed. And the bot even suggested. And he took his own life after engaging with this AI bot. And so she's sitting next to him and he's saying, look, this regulation. DeSantis is who you're talking about. Right. And DeSantis is saying, hey, here's

an example of something that we need to jump in right now and help. We make the speed limits on our roads. So we need to make the speed limit here on AI. We need to protect this and protect named image. What's also is the very last line of the Florida AI Bill of Rights at the very bottom It says, also, data centers that are built here cannot impact the rate payers of Florida power disproportionately. The data centers, if you're going to work here, and he said, look, it's not a lot of jobs. It's 12 jobs that are in these data centers once they're all built. They're largely dark facilities. He says, fine, pay property taxes in Florida do it.

However, you have to figure out how to augment the power or pay a subsidy to help augment the power generation. I think that's very sensible because he's saying, hey, we can't have all this open land that's in the north part of Florida, south of Jacksonville, well north of Orlando, and people putting data centers on because there's open, cheap land, and you're on the grid. He said, if that's going to make the rate of electricity

go up for Floridians, I don't want that, and I'm putting this. So the Florida AI Bill of Rights is running it quicker. Lastly, which is quicker and more nimble? A small group or a national group? The small group. That's a state. And that is the function of state's rights to nimbly respond to things very, very quickly and then get government help when you need it.

When a hurricane hits, and this is, I'll give everybody this example, the governor will declare the state a disaster area and say, I need federal resources because what just hit me is so damn big. But in the meantime, who determines where a stop sign goes? The state. Who puts up a street light? the state who makes building permit decisions in a given area, the state, because the federal government can't handle that. So I think that I'm with the states on this one, and I'm with DeSantis. Now, I'm also, I understand how a tech company will say, am I going to be asked to follow

50 state laws to put a national program in place? Well, there's something to be said for that, and I think we'll figure it out, but DeSantis is trying to protect citizens from electric costs and name image likeness and get in front of it right now. He's doing the right thing as a governor leading a state of citizens who are being impacted. Brandon? Yeah, I don't necessarily side with one or the other, but I could be critical of both of them. Like this bill, for example, it's over 1,000 pages. I mean, who's read the entire thing?

Like, I understand the argument for needing a fast process to implement things. Like, you don't want to go state by state having to get approval for it. So, like, fine, that particular issue, that particular concern, let's get that scored away. But, like, nobody has any idea what's in that. this bill and like we're talking about AI like it's a you know as powerful as a nuclear weapon so like I like I don't like the idea of like override like federal powers and that that being like the system for everybody for like anytime the federal government's gotten like the main control over something it hasn't ended up in a good situation and I don't like that he's saying that it's

for the reason of competing with China for it like I said before he approved China receiving blackwell trips from Nvidia so we're really we're really concerned about China beating us in the a race are catching up to us and why are we sending chips there that are used to build AI so yeah I think that China China has the edge because whatever they say you better do it's a dictatorship it's a communist regime the economy's capitalism fine but it's a dictatorship you you have to listen to authoritarian leadership whatever they're talking about so but also the lifestyle is not the way our lifestyle is Americans we're different we are given certain options. And even though the example we talked about earlier with the cars, the 19 and a half

billion for Ford, where causing Elon to leave California and go to Austin and seeing the fact that Musk wants to make, you know, what do you call it? Not Musk. Musum wants to make, you know, 35 by 2035, 100% of, you know, cartermakers, EV and all this stuff. I think we got to change that. That was a shitty idea. With AI, I would much rather leave it to 50 states. I would much rather leave it to 50 states. I get what they're talking about some of the stuff that's got to be federal. Yes, we have a federal minimum wage, 725. But let the state, if they want to do 15 bucks an hour, you know, leave it be. If a state wants to do 20 bucks an hour, state needs to have its own AI regulatory requirements. But man, some states, like if I'm running a state, I'm like, hey,

my number one is for the younger families to have jobs, make money, be able to afford a house, and be able to have kids and be happy. What can I do to create a state? for that versus what can I do to create a state to get all the AI people to move to me. Maybe that's also not a bad idea, but my goal is to make sure it's a place for people. Who is the number one customer? Is the number one customer AI? Will in the future the number one customer become the AI? Who's going to be the number one customer?

If you're running the state, who is your number one customer? Think about it. Your people. Who is your number one customer? Citizen. Yes, citizens. So are you making it better for the citizen? Are you making it better for them to Florida?

It's going to be a very, like you said, it's complex on how it's going to be argued the next three, five, ten years. Go ahead. I just think the federal government should establish the loosest set of rules, and then to your point, the states can constrict it more. We're on the same page. Yeah. We're on the same page. I actually think that they're optimizing for two different things. Federal government is trying to compete in a geopolitical, you know, competition on the global stage, and the states are trying to protect their citizens. And so what you have to do is, ideally, the United States would work great if we could put those two things together.

And if that's the direction we go, let it be if some states want to be tighter. And then if you don't like it, leave. Go to a different state. If you like it, great, go to that state. But you'll be able to make the decision accordingly. Let me do two more stories, and I will wrap up. So this next, and Rob, can you pull up the story of what happened with World Cup ticket prizes? Did you guys see that?

What they had to do? That they were forced to learn. I know your brother probably knows all about this. But we're going to go with the story first. So this guy named Doug Ford decided to take a shot at Desantis. He mocks DeSantis, then DeSantis mocks Doug Ford because Doug Ford says Florida is hurting. Rob, go to play that clip on Florida hurting. Go for it. They're no longer flying to Florida. They're not being snowbirds. Basically, it's dried up.

There's been an organic boycott of tourism in New America. Do you support that? And are you going to go to Florida this year? Yeah, so let me let me tell you. It's going to be the first time I'm not going to Florida. talk to so many people don't let this guy Trump determine and ruin your life and everything I'm that's my personal choice maybe some families have gone to florida their whole lives go to florida you know that that's great but i encourage you to stay here and support local local tourism but you can't let the one one tyrant change your lives right you just can't let it happen i'm doing out of my own personal choice because i i just can't do it but don't let this guy change your lives If you go down and you see, you know, maybe their grandparents are down there.

Maybe they're somewhere else. So we'll get through this, but they're hurting down there right now. They're hurting on all fronts. They're hurting on their economy. President Trump is at the lowest rating that any government, any president has been in the first year. And God knows, probably 100 years. So it's taking effect. Okay, pause that.

All right. Now let's go to the Santa's responding. I don't know if he knows what's going on here. Every day Canadians are moving here. They're trying to avoid your escape taxes that you have. Here's Ron DeSantis. Actually, we continue to break tourism records and win the Stanley Cup. Florida breaks its own record again, 34.4 million visitors in second quarter of 2025.

Tom, what do you have to say about this with what Doug Ford is taking shots at the governor? Well, words talk, numbers scream, and Ron DeSantis just checked. Doug Ford into the boards. Excuse me, I'm over here dying. No, what I was saying is DeSantis absolutely checked Doug Ford into the boards on this. It's like, oh, they're hurting down there. That's just those toss-away comments by a politician

who's not looking at the numbers. And is the economy perfect? No. You said, but we've got, but look at tourism down here. And by the way, all I have to do is look around the Canadian license plate. There's a hell of a lot of Ontario license plates down here this time of year, which means that they're still down here. Are they down here for tourism, or are they down here for the ultra cold part of the winter

for rheumatism and arthritis and just enjoy the weather and everything? Seems like a lot of them are down here, and it's all happening. So I love my governor, and I love this comment by my governor. I thought it was a beautiful, measured factual response. And I think that, if anything, up there in Canada, they're really, they're suffering. from Trump derangement syndrome, and it frustrates them that certain things are still going well here. I think it just pisses them off because remember, what percent of the American economy is the Canadian economy? I think the answer is 6.1. Canada is Florida.

Well, I think Canada is only is 6.1 of like the U.S. economy, 6.1%. So it's like, dude, you need the trading partner. You need this. in the middle of your socialist hissy fit and debanking truckers and doing all the things you guys have done in the last two years, what have you done to help yourselves outside of political headlines that make it look like you're saying something? They need to get it together because the Canadian people are down here are factually talking to us. We have wonderful Canadians that came down here, moved down here, paid the exit tax. We didn't know them. Pat and I didn't know who these guys are, they introduced themselves at the cigar lounge.

Who are you? We're from Canada, we moved down here, and we love your cigar lounge, and now we're members, and we paid the exit tax, and we've emigrated legally. It took us four and a half years to put this together, but we went through the proper channels, and we're like, welcome, what are you going to do? And you remember what they said, Pat? Well, we're going to figure it out, but we're going to start something. Me and, me and Roy here, we're starting something, because we had the means to sell our homes

and come down here. God bless them. God bless them, but those people left Canada. Two great business partners that have significant wealth just left Canada. And they're at our cigar lounge. They come to the, guys, can I meet other people here, friends? I want to make friends.

I said, you're not just going to make friends. You're going to make friends from the exact town you left in Toronto. I'll go to the other side. I grab Roberto. I go to the other side. I'm like, here, guys, make friends. Toronto family, same values, business owners, go to dinner together. They're best friends now that they met at the boardroom cigar lounge,

which, by the way, Boardroom Cigar Lounge, Rob, if you want to put up the clip, January 2nd to kick it off, we'll be doing a live podcast with Stephen A. Smith on January 2nd to kick off the New Year with Stephen A. Smith. It'll be on a Friday night. It'll be our first podcast of the year that we'll be doing at the Cigar Lounge. You've got to be a member to be at the event. You want to learn more, Rob, put the link below for them to go to it. So, Pomp, yourself, when you hear a story like this, you lived here for a couple years. You're back in New York now, okay?

when you were down here, what was the experience like, and now going back to New York, do you feel you're becoming more Canadian because you're closer to Canada? Maybe you're going to side with Doug. Where are you at with this? I think Doug Ford, you know, there's this thing of, you step on other people in order to try to make yourself seem taller.

It seems like Doug Ford's entire strategy, right? If he can put his name in a headline next to Trump, if he can put his name in a headline next to DeSantis, you know, then people know who Doug Ford is. But my guess is that nobody in America really cares about Doug Ford, nobody knows who he is, and probably in Canada, and I'm going to remember him in a couple of years. The reason being is because if you sit and you constantly just attack everyone, you are destructive, you're not constructive. And history is very kind to people who are constructive, who build things, who create things, who solve problems, who are constantly optimistic and pushing forward. What we have is a very large divergence in politicians.

I'll give you an example here in America that just came out. I don't know if you guys saw the recent video from Bernie Sanders. This one is all time. He wants to put a moratorium on building data centers in America. Okay, why? Because he believes that AI only benefits rich people. And so he's going through this whole thing, and you're saying, wait a second, hold on, man. We're locked in a geopolitical competition.

Like you heard Trump, you heard DeSan, you heard, they're trying to push this forward. There's got to be some guardrails right there. somewhat of like a prudent approach to a new technology that's obviously innovative and Bernie said yeah look at this he wants to put a moratorium on the construction of data centers

that are powering the unregulated sprint to develop and deploy AI probably the single most important technology that not only by the way as you heard Trump talk about in the Oval Office is going to help push drug development forward right is going to do all these different things

and then when you listen to this thing he wants democracy to catch up I don't even know what that means Regulation of taxes As democracy Right But like A normal person

We just say that So I mean Look again Forget whatever your politics are But if you look at a Doug Ford To Bernie Sanders Right You know again

Sometimes they may have a good idea or two But these things as they approach AI And this global competition It just seems like It's all about marketing But it's not actually about Driving results for

For their citizens You know what the exit taxes Like if you wanted to leave Canada. Say you had, you invested into something a million dollars. You bought a business. Now it's worth $5 million. Okay. You're selling, you got $4 million in capital gains. To exit and leave Canada and take your money, you have to pay your 50% taxes, give or take. So your $4 million goes to $2 million, then you can leave Canada and come to Florida. It's like being divorced. Same as the U.S. Yeah. Exit tax is what they got. Would you say? It's like getting divorced. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Well, it's, it is a divorce, but they don't want you to leave, but people are leaving. in a major way. How often do you run into Canadians here? Oh, a good amount. And like you're saying, it's crazy, like the caliber of people they're losing to. I think about, like, who's being attracted to the things they're saying, and then who's being attracted to a place like this. Like, you know, I'll take high help for people like that all day.

And, yeah, man, it's like, why is this guy taking a shot, like, the place in the biggest position of strength? Like, it's objectively false that we're doing bad here. Like, it's the highest growth rate of any of the states aside from Texas. But you got to love the fact. And by the way, do you, just a crazy question. Maybe we don't need to spend a lot of time on this. Just a crazy, crazy question.

Is there any chance the sentence can be a president one day? Is there any chance? Yeah, someday. Is there any chance? Can you ask the poll, Rob? Okay. You know, what time frame? What should be the poll, what should be the poll?

In the next 25 years is it possible? Is there any chance DeSantis will be a president? put yes no what should be the poll what should be the question I think the time frames key is like just put yes or no is there any chance

that census could be a president one day let's see what the audience will say what do you think Bob I don't know it's a cop out answer but I really don't know right I mean look I can make an argument on both sides

if you want to take a constructive conversation then Florida is a very fast growing state they've got low taxes I think that there's a lot of people who have moved here and so people are voting with their dollars and feet and they want to go there

on the other hand there's a lot of things where the culture wars and you know things that just like the general population doesn't really care about right um but again you know trump trump became president he engaged in some of the stuff as well so the the thing that i find most interesting about politics and predicting the future is not so much the candidates and how they'll evolve it's that the world evolves you know if you think about trump trump people have talked about this at nauseam he's like an 1980s 1990s democrat but he's republican now right who's running and so sometimes so when you look at it through that lens like everything he does makes a ton of sense. Imagine telling someone in 1990 Donald Trump's going to be president as a Republican. Then I'm like, shut up, right? So that's only, you know, a couple decades. Well, what's going to happen in 30 years from now? Could DeSantis be president as a Democrat? I don't know. What do you mean? You start this. Okay. Let me ask you a question. Right. Within right now in the constructs and the politics and the parties we see right now, we got like 6040, no, 5743. So less. in 6040. But let me give you the scenario. J.D. Vance is defeated. Marco Rubio was the VP and everything

they tried because of whatever issues the Democrats are in power for one administration. We all know what's going to happen to the U.S. government. In that next election, would a centrist, practical, common sense Republican have wings? I think he could. So I think it's all in the context of the future and how is it plays out? The way it's going right now, could he be president next time? I don't think that plays out. I don't think the Republican machine, the donors and everything that goes in. We're getting there plays for him. But what if the Republicans lose that one? And then four years later, they're looking for like this practical guy who looks at, look what I did for Florida. Look, guys, look what I did for Florida. And look,

you thought you had J.D. Vance. It didn't happen. And we've had this crazy Gavin Newsom for four years I'm your guy. I think at that point you take the survey again, it's different. So I think we have to see the pages turn. I love how he's governing right now. I love the governor. I am a staunch defender of term limits, and I hope that what comes after his term limit

is a continuation of the common sense he brings. My only problem with this was one thing when I had him on the podcast. I had one problem with him. He didn't call Trump. He didn't say thank you. And he went in attack mode instead of wanting to build collaboration relationship he went after the guy thinking he's above him

because he had one and a half million more votes than he did when he first got elected on one by 33, 33, 34,000 votes. It's the only thing. 2024, I only wanted one person to win for president because of what happened the last four years. And history only wanted one person on the conservative side to get voted to win.

My opinion, the Santas can have his time, but that was the only problem. Everything else, if this guy in the future decides to I don't think he's going away Now that his wife is not going to be running And Byron Donald's and others are going to be fighting in Florida And by the way, for a lot of people that I think it's going to be a lock Don't, did you see who won in Miami?

Do you see what she's doing out there? So you want a good one? Yeah. I used to ask people on the podcast all time, who do you think could be president? What's the most outrageous? The best answer I ever heard was Ivanka Trump as a Democrat. Hmm.

Right? but I started thinking about it more and you know the two sleepers that I think they could be president Kim Kardashian or the Rock and the Rock one of the things that people don't realize is in the debate stage

there's a bunch of studies that show whoever is most physically dominant usually gets the votes so Trump when he's on the stage he's in the middle right and there's like this thing

from a voter standpoint but he also if you listen to a lot of interviews they've asked him would you ever be president He goes, well, you know, if the American people wanted me to be, right, he's kind of keeping the door open. But the reason why I think Kim Kardashian is so interesting is because I think there's a very large contingent of the country

that an hour realizes a lot of elections are determined by white, liberal, young women. Well, who do they look up to? Whether you like it or not, Kim Kardashian is one of those people. She has immense reach. Do you think that some of these guys in the politics role have reach? Talk about a single Instagram post from her. And she's the only person I know who's been like a community. million who can go from sex tape to reality TV star to lawyer to uh entrepreneur and so i don't know

if these types of people want to be president but i think that what we're learning is having a monopoly on attention drives outcomes of election mom donnie is a great example of that in new york city these are people who have on a scale in politics off the charts monopoly on attention yeah yeah yeah i mean listen i i i i was with you when you said Ivanka's a Democrat. I'm like, okay, that's creative. I was with you when he said to Iraq because we've talked about it.

Him and I speak, you know, and we've had him at one of our events. And specifically, we talked about presidency. Kim Kardashian, that's when I'm like, you know, are you trying to get her on the CFO Sylvia? Is that what the idea is? Hey, Kim, can you please

go download? CFOSilvia.com. Pull that up, Rob. Pull that up. If she asks and says, change it to CFO Kim, I would do it. And maybe you change the picture of Kim. She only can get higher if she goes through higher metrics, right? President Kardashian, how exactly did you get people to agree the end of the Ukraine war? I can't tell you inside of information. But, yeah, I mean, listen, she's got a massive depth chart.

So she may be able to do it. Who knows? Their contact list is massive. Well, yeah. But going back to it with what we're talking about. The only last thing I'm going to wrap up with, Rob, can you pull up what happened with the World Cup tickets? So World Cup tickets, apparently they came out and they gave the prices,

and all of a sudden, it was so expensive, people lost their minds and saying, what the hell are you doing? So FIFA slashes, 2026 World Cup ticket prices after backlash. Go a little bit lower. I think it was 4,000 something. There you go. That's what it was. So the Slash, most loyal fans, global backlash,

and some will get the tickets for $60 a ticket for the final instead of being asked to pay $4,185. By the way, we try to get a suite. One of the suites we were looking at, we like the suite, 885 for 17 tickets, $885,000 for 17 tickets. $885,000 for 17 tickets. A suite, yeah. And then the day after Trump did the ball thing and, you know, he got the Peace Award from the FIFA president, that day, that same suite was trading for $3,000. 3.1 million. Oh, my God.

So we're in the business for a suite, but we won't be paying that kind of money. We may be about to get one done, and who knows what to happen. This is going to be, like, when is the next time the World Cup's going to be in the U.S.? Two decades, three decades, four decades, five decades? What was the last one? In a U.S.? Yeah, 94, Rose Bowl. Is that what it was?

Could have been. So maybe every 30 years we bring it to the U.S. So 30 years from that. The final? The finals? The finals is going to be in Jersey. No, I know, but that's the one that's the suite at the finals. Yeah. And you know where the second place match is going to be? The third and fourth place match is going to be in Miami down here.

They're playing in Miami down here, but the finals are going to be in Jets. Do you remember what happened? Is it Coppa Cup? Is that what? That was what got played in Miami and all the fans were like overwhelmed in the stadium? Oh, well, you remember that? Yeah, in the video, yeah. It was pretty nasty. Like Americans aren't that fanatic about sports. No, no, no. These guys are really. religious. It's a religion to them. We have a good friend who's a sea

level executive with the Stephen Ross's organization runs the dolphins in the stadium. And he spent the next month of his life with insurance adjusters. It was horrible. It was. That's what climate do the AC ducks and stuff. It's craziness. All right. They destroyed an escalator.

Great to have you back on. Thank you guys for having me. We're going to put the link below to CFO Sylvia for people who want to learn more about it. Highermetrics.com. Go check out the merch that you guys have. Yes, FLB shoes. I'm wearing him today again. But, uh, guys, uh, tomorrow, stay tuned for the president of, oh, you have a clip of it? I have the intro if you want. Oh, let's see it. Let's see what we got. Really, I'm curious now. Go for it. There are people that think you helped funnel

400 tons of cocaine into America. They think you took the one million dollar bribe from El Chapo. It took millions of dollars to help with your campaign for 2013. Today, Juan Orlando Hernandez, The former president of Honduras was extradited to the United States to face federal charges. The only explanation that I have is because they wanted to get rid of me. I got you. So they put you there so somebody would kill you to get rid of you. That logic makes sense to me. You were in prison with Diddy and Sandbankman Free? Yeah. Did you speak with them? There was another guy, a rapper, who's very famous. They call it 69.

You got to 69? Yeah. So the same day that this meeting happens, this picture right here, which is Kamala Harris and Siomata Castro, our meeting. On that same day, you get indicted? Yes. When you talk about the deep state in America, some people said, that's a conspiracy theory. I have leaving. Tomorrow morning, 9 a.m. folks. 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, guys, stay tuned with this.

By the way, it's a two-hour conversation from the beginning to the end is interesting, and you want to know more. You can have more interest in Honduras government tomorrow than you've ever had in your entire life when you hear these stories. Anyways, Pam, great to have you back on, buddy. Thank you guys.

We don't see you. Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy New Year, all of it, but we will do it again this Friday, and we have two guys thrown back up. One guy's going to come who was at the White House yesterday, Mr. Sosnik, and Vincent Oshano hangs up with a lot of animals.

We'll be back on Friday. God bless everybody. Take care. Bye bye, bye, bye.