PBD Podcast - Iran REJECTS Trump's 15 Point Peace Plan | PBD #765

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Patrick Bet-David, Tom Ellsworth, Brandon Aceto, and Barry Habib break down Iran rejecting Trump’s 15-point peace plan, a $580 million oil trade ahead of Trump’s ultimatum extension, Dave Ramsey warning Gen Z about corporate America, and Federal Reserve rate hike signals impacting inflation, interest rates, and the U.S. economy.--------👍 LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE!Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4kSVkso⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4lzQph2⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj⁠⁠⁠💬 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 victory. I know this life meant for me. Adam, what's your point? The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever size, right? You are a 101? My son's right, very.

I don't think I've ever said this before. Okay, so we got business podcast Wednesday. We have the Great Barry Habee here with us, as well as Brandon Acito and Tom Ellsward. The goal is to get smarter and make better. decisions. It's a lot going on. I mean, obviously, we have to still continue talking about the stuff that's going on with Iran. I think there's a 15-point plan to end the war with Iran. As Trump says, the regime has agreed to scrap nuclear program. What does that really mean? Iran's come back and made their request. They want reparations for the damages that is taking place. We'll

go back and forth. We'll address that. And then at the same time, just this morning, could have been last night, but I think it's this morning. The age to join the military that was always 30, because I'll never forget being in boot camp and a 34 year old guy was with us. We were 18, 19 years over like, what are you doing? He says, I got out, did eight years, want to come back in to finish my 20 years. I said, you're 33, 34, 34, 45. Now, as of today, for some of you that are open and interested, Vinny's outside right now trying to get a job just so you guys know that.

He's concerned. He's worried that AI is going to replace his character on the podcast. And he says, look, I've got to go back into the military. The age is officially from 35 to 42 years old. I wonder why. Maybe they want you, they need you. We'll talk about it. Vinny's requesting if they can raise it to 48th,

they're not listening to them. But we'll see what's going to happen there. Aside from that, a few other things that's going on. Wall Street Journal comes out with a story. With everything that's being talked about, you would think they're talking about lowering the rates, right? But no. Wall Street Journal comes out with a story

talking about a Fed likely high. Next, not cuts, Wall Street Journal. Just a couple days ago, they're talking about that. What do you mean rate hikes? Well, maybe they're going to be raising the rates. When it comes on to no masks for ICE agents, for airports, a lot of videos going around showing the fact that ICE agents are being polite, given water, taking care of people, being respectful to them. So there's a lot of good messaging right now going with ICE agents, going out there working while TSA agents are not working. I don't know what the number is. Over 400 TSA agents have, TSA employees have full-on quits since the shutdown. Absent hit 12% of the 30,000 workforce. That's 3450 as of Sunday. If you're traveling, it's still not a good sign. And some places are addressing it. Some places are not.

A hidden $580 million oil bet. I don't even know if it's hidden because we know about it. But it was a $580 million oil bet just before Trump's Iran announcement, $6,200 contracts. Can't imagine quickly you put in the money, boom. You made a ton of money right afterwards. A lot of people, 60,200 people were part-to-who knew? How did they know?

What did they know? We'll address that. Michael Burry's got some thoughts that we'll get into on the SMP, his concern. There's a story that came out with a seat geek job listing. Very weird. Who posts a job listing? And the way they describe it, advertising up to 25,000, They're paying $121,000, $275,000,

analytics engineer, and advertising up to $25,000 in gender-affirming care benefits. Is that a recruiting tactic today? By the way, we're about to show our recruiting video. We don't offer that. If we're thinking, we don't offer that here. If you're going to do something like that, you can go pay it for it yourself.

It's not, you're an adult, you can do it. But can you imagine it's gotten to a point that some companies are so woke that they're thinking by doing that, They're going to get people that are going to come work for them. Maybe it's going to work. Maybe we're the naive ones, and they're the ones that are right. Obviously, we know the answer to that question. New York City homeowners age, average age of New York City homeowner hits record high.

You know how all the average age is today? 58.8 years old, 59 years old, homeowners. And we have a gas prices story we'll get into just this morning. I think oil is at 88. The Dow is up two points. Everything is up about two points. SMP, NASDAQ, everything's up to. We'll address those stories as well.

Aside from that, we got more things going on with Iran that we got to talk about. There's a story that came out by Barron's tax to rich or kill income taxes. States are divided on what to do, flat out divided on what to do with numbers. We'll talk about that with California, Washington, Florida, Texas. and then Russia largest oil port crippled and huge Ukrainian drone attack. This came out of nowhere. Nobody was like, wait a minute. While this is going on with Iran, Ukraine is attacking Russia.

Yes, why? Well, Ukraine is trying to say, hey, man, you're not going to sell that oil. We have to put some pain in you because while they're negotiating their terms, we haven't finalized our terms. What do you want to do? So can you imagine Zelensky's position? This is a great time to make some noise. while everybody is looking at the other side, let's come and do this.

Dave Ramsey warns, the young hopeful, locked out of housing market. Corporate America has screwed you. That's Dave Ramsey. We'll address that. Anthropics says Claude. Lots of news this week with Claude. I don't know if you've been following it. A lot of news this week with Claude.

Anthropics says Claude can now use your computer to finish tasks for you in AI agent push. I'll have Tom shared with you guys what Claude is doing if he's comfortable with it. he is. He'll share some of those stories because there's a girl we keep hearing about Courtney and we're kind of hearing about Courtney a little too much lately. None of us have met her. She's a secret. We can't meet her, but she's emailing all of us. And so this Courtney girl, wherever you are, please reveal yourself. Everyone's trying to know who you are and Vinny wants to know if you're single. We don't know that yet. So with that being said, before we get into the stories, a couple things. Number one, 51% of you consume the content.

here on the podcast, we have not subscribed. We'd like to take PBD podcast to 5 million subscribers. We're at 2.9 million right now. We're going to have something we'll announce here soon, and we'd like to take Vaitainment to 10 million subscribers. We're currently at 7.1, 7.16 million subscribers. So if you haven't yet, if you enjoy what we do, you support the conversations that we have,

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We just got the floor plan for how high we can go here. We're planning on building a building, and we got some good news on how high we can go on the building that we're going to build here to house a couple thousand employees. We're hiring aggressively. Rob, if you want to play the clip for some people that just think this is a podcast, there's a lot of stuff that's going on here,

go for it and play this clip. Many times when people think about entertainment, 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-devil consulting. sales, setters. And then on the complete office 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 Vietimism for everybody. For the right person,

this could be the last company you ever will. workforce. So if you're watching this and you want to learn more, go to vt.com forward slash careers and apply now. Again, go to vt.com careers and if you know somebody that's looking for a job, fully qualified or has a job, but they're not happy, fully talented, share this video with them as well. With that being said, let's get right into it. First thing I want to talk about is story that comes out, U.S. S.S. 10's 15-point plan to end war with Iran, as Trump says the regime to scrap the nuclear program.

Okay, so let's read through this. The U.S. has sent a 15-point plan and cease proposal to end the war in the Middle East, and President Trump claims the regime has already agreed to a critical part of the peace, no nuclear weapons. Deve agreed, Trump said Tuesday, of his biggest demand.

Rob, is this the president speaking? Yes, sir. Go for it. I think it was the turning point to make you want to pursue a ceasefire. A few days ago, you know, you said you wanted to continue bombing Iran, now you want to pursue peace talks.

Was there something that... fact that they're talking to us and they're talking sense. And remember it all starts with they cannot have a nuclear weapon. Just, you know, I said yesterday, what are they said, what are the top 10? I said, well, number one, two, and three is they can't have a nuclear weapon. And they're not going to have a nuclear weapon. And we're talking about that. And I don't want to say in advance, but they've agreed they will never have a nuclear weapon. They've agreed to that. Okay, so that's what the president's saying. This is the 15 points. Iran must dismantle existing nuclear program, that's number one.

Number two, Iran must commit never to person nuclear weapons. It's the same as number one, but it's like we're never going to have it. Number three, no uranium enrichment on Iranian territory. They're all the same thing, but again, that's number three. Number four, Iran must hand its stockpile of enriched uranium to the

International Atomic Energy Agency. 444, same topic. Five, the Natanz Esfahan and Fordon nuclear facilities must be dismantled. What does that mean? The IAEA must be granted full access to Iran's nuclear facilities. Great.

Iran must abandon its regional proxy paradigm. Eight, Iran must seize the funding, directing, and arming its proxies. Nine, the Strait of Hormuz must remain open. Ten, Iran's missile program must be limited in both range and quantity. 11. Iran must limit its use of missiles to self-defense. In return, Iran would benefit from 12. the end of sanctions imposed by the international community,

the U.S. assistant to advance its civilian nuclear program, and U.S. snapback mechanism allowing for automatic reimposition of sanctions if Iran fails to comply would be removed. Now, this is what they said. Rob, do we have anything of them responding to this? Because I think there was also what the Iranian foreign minister responded to this as well. Tom, I'll come to you first and then bury next. Tom, your thoughts on this.

Well, there's basically four points to it. When you see 15, Pat was very correctly pointing out in those top six. So you have, A, nuclear program, uranium, manufacturing facilities, that's A. B, Hamas and Hezbollah. You must stop funding them. C, you can build missiles, but only little ones to defend your borders. And then, D, the sanctions go away. So it's nukes, Hamas, missiles, and sanctions.

And that's a 15 point with you get down to it. Now, what's interesting about this is, you know, they are so dedicated to it. They tried previously to get them to a grid nuclear program. They didn't do it. You know, this, when I see this, I hope we get some progress on it. I hope there's a negotiation. I hope that all the destruction of so much infrastructure and things that we've gone after is sending a message that gets them over the line.

But this is only part of it for me. The other part for me here is who are they negotiating with? Who's going to sign the paper? The current regime. What happened about a new regime that would give, bring the people back to the glory of Iran and all the people that were protesting in the streets and the ones that were slaughtered for something?

Pat, who signs this? If the current regime signs it? Okay, so what? The war's over, but now don't we go back to the people? Yeah, I mean, the question that becomes. So it's neither a regime change or a regime collapse. So which one was it? Correct.

But now the current regime is going to sign a document. Of course. So guess what? You're in charge. What was accomplished? For the people that are now in the, that, first of all, what do you think the IRGC does minutes after this gets signed if it's the same regime? Oh, they're going to go back.

Oh, we have Pride Month. They're going to have head bashing month. You know, it's terrible. Yeah, that won't be changing. That won't be changing. Barry, worry out with this. So look, you're right, Tom. Clearly, but what we would accomplish is the three important things.

If we could stop the money flow to Hamas, Hezbollah, you know, Houthis, if we could do that, that's a very big plus for us. If we can keep oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz without it being a future threat that it would be shut down, that's great for us. That's great for worldwide economy. And I think the stock market's kind of reacting to that this morning. And, of course, the several points on the no nukes that you mentioned. And the thing I worry about is compliance, because we've heard this from them before.

So I don't know how they would get around having Iran potentially do something that's sneaky. You know, if that could be contemplated, then I think that the give on the side of the U.S. is saying, hey, in lieu of boots on the ground, in lieu of loss of life, in lieu of further economic harm, we have to leave the current regime in place. I think that that's, you know, when you sum it up, and Tom did an excellent job as well, I think when you sum it up, that's the give that is being thought of to say,

okay, if we can accomplish these things, that's pretty good progress. We don't get everything, but it's pretty good progress. Brandon. Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think if we make peace of them with this current, whatever you call it, regime right now, whoever's leading things,

I think that's a worse situation than before. And, I mean, if we do happen to make a piece to a, with them. The most important thing is that they actually agree to less inspect their facilities thoroughly because if you guys remember the Iran nuclear deal that Obama made, it was essentially we gave Iran a ton of money, billions and billions of dollars in return for them promising not to develop nuclear weapons. I think they were supposed to cap uranium enrichment at like 3%, but they never let us inspect it. So they were doing all the things that they weren't supposed to do. We weren't holding them accountable for the inspections. So that's why they have things like the missiles

that go much farther than we thought. I don't necessarily think that they have enriched uranium to the degree that people are saying on using it as the grounds to do this invasion, but they could. They could have all kinds of things we don't know about because we didn't hold them accountable with the inspection. So I think at this point with how far we've gone, I think you go harder and go more savage with them and just get it over with because it's going to be a worse situation. Like, why are we delay in the inevitable? They're not going to stop giving money to the terrorist groups.

They're not going to stop trying to have a nuclear weapon because look how much we leave North Korea alone. Now they have nuclear weapons. So they're trying to follow that model. Yeah. And by the way, Rob, if you want to play this clip, because the four, Minister Arakchi said complete different thing. This is just a couple of days ago. Go ahead, Rob. I don't think the question of talking with Americans or negotiation with Americans once again

would be on the table because, you know, we have a very bitter experience of talking with Americans. We negotiated with them last year in last June and they attacked us in the middle of negotiations. And again this year, they tried to convince us. that this time is different. They promised us that they don't have any intention to attack us. And they wanted to resolve Iran's nuclear question peacefully and to find a negotiated solution

and we finally accepted. But again, after three rounds of negotiation and after the American team in the negotiation, you know, said itself that we made a big progress. Still, they decided to attack us. So I don't think, you know, talking with Americans anymore would be, you know, on our agenda anymore. By the way, his ask, number one, full lifting of sanctions, which is one of the things they're talking,

that's their number one priority, removal of U.S. military presence in the region, meaning closure of U.S. basis in the Gulf. It's what their ask is. No way. I mean, who's going to be doing that? Then reparations, which is, yeah, you've got to pay for all this stuff that happened. Control of revenue from straight of her moves, ability to change or control. shipping flow, keep the missile program, right to nuclear capability, security guarantees that

U.S. won't attack again, respect recognition of regional power, acknowledge our role in the Middle East. That's what they're asking. They're not going to get that. And here's the other side of it, is that by the time this five-day pause in attacks ends, U.S. will be in a position militarily because troops would have arrived there. So, you know, Trump has always, it was very good at kind of talking one way or having one way and then using the element of surprise to our advantage. So I wonder, is that another repeat of that if we are positioning ourselves, buying some time for that? And then, as Brandon said, maybe going in a little bit more, you know, to use his word, a little bit more savage. I mean, we really don't know, but that is a possibility.

So, Rob, do you have the clip of what MBS? Which clip is this year? Because I want to play what MBS said. This is one of the Iranian officials listing their demands for a ceasefire. This is when? This was earlier this week, I believe, Monday or Tuesday. Go ahead. Until all our damages are recovered, until all economic sanctions are lifted, and until we obtain an international legal guarantee against Iran's, against America's interference in Iran's affairs, this war will continue.

And I'll explain why such a decision has been made by our nation, our leader, and our armed forces. I will state in the interview that whether our conflict with America is just a 12-day war and a Ramadan war, or rather a 47-year saga that we must bring to an end right here and now. Okay, so that's that on what he's saying. Similar request to what I just read. Okay, MBS comes out. I have the comments here where he says, he fears if Trump retreats now, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the region will be left to face angry Iran. I think he told us to is this the interview, Rob, or? I'm looking for the clip.

I found this clip. I'm not sure if it's him, though. Yeah, angry Iran. He told us to New York Times. Then yesterday, when the president is being interviewed, they asked the president. I don't know if you saw that clip, Rob. They're asking him, hey, I just texted it to you, Rob. I'm sorry, I texted it to myself. Reporter asks the president, is MBS encouraging you

to do certain things related to Iran? And here's what the president had to say. Go forward. Saudi Arabia. What do you hear with Saudi Arabia? I'm just hearing that you've been talking and that he has been encouraging you to do certain things related to Iran. Can you share that? He's a warrior. He does.

Yeah, he's a warrior. He's fighting with us, by the way. Saudi Arabia has been excellent. And UAE, excellent. And I will tell you, Qatar, incredible. Saudi Arabia. What do you hear with Saudi Arabia? Yeah, so there you have it.

So he's responded the way he is. And, Rob, I don't know if there was an interview with him or not. It was just like a face-to-face interview. Barry, you make a good point because, you know, when you think about this, is he putting out the 15 points to give a little bit more time because he got an update that USS Tripoli needs four more days, needs five more days because I got a quote here, very weird quote, and I don't know if I like this quote, but let me read this quote to you from Netanyahu.

Here's what Netanyahu just said, okay? Look what his quote is. Netanyahu just said when asked how long you think this is going to last He told Fox News, may take some time, but it's not going to take years. He vowed to keep striking Iran's enemies and help topple its regime after missile attacks. He called Iran's behavior threatening the entire world. So there's two different problems. There's the Israel problem.

There's the world problem. There's the America problem. The Israel problem is what? You just attack these guys. Guess what, Tom, with the Israel problem? They are furious with you. right now. They're not happy with you with what you have going on. And Israel has to sit there and say, dude, if we don't finish this off right now, you think they're going to let us go? They're going

to come back and take us out. Then you have a world problem. Did this even make the world a safer place? Did it make Gulf states feel better? Did it make them feel more comfortable? Are Europeans and NATO allies feeling more comfortable about this? Then the last one is what? Trump, the president. How is this sitting in America? How is America? How is America? America reacting to this? Is America sitting there because we just had a Democrat that won in Palm Beach? Is it Palm Beach? Emily. I don't know what her last name is. Emily Gregory. Emily Gregory, who just won in Palm Beach. And Democrat flips Florida State House district that includes Trump's Marlago. Okay. I mean, that's his house. So what are they saying? Tom,

you made a good point earlier that, you know, we've talked about this for the last four or five years. if there's one thing we've been consistent about, don't worry about Democrats and Republicans, who runs America as independents, okay? That's who runs American elections. If independents are kind of going like this, you know, it's like, hey, we're not fully with this, okay? Your base may be with you, this may be with you,

but us independents were kind of leaning this way. Do you see that pattern kind of happening, Tom? Yeah, this is a flip of a district. This was a Republican, this was a GOP district. and now Gregory has won it, the special election. And so now you look at it and say, okay, what does this say? Like a couple hundred votes, by the one. The Boca guy won by like 13, 14 votes.

Right. And then under audit, it went down to three votes and even one vote in Boca. So, yeah, that was debated back and forth right on the edge of a knife. So what this says is that the independence in Florida are basically not saying, hey, overnight, I became liberal. but what they're saying is, I don't like what's going on, and this is the way I'm leaning. And it doesn't take much to move that, especially in the lavender districts. Miami, Brower County is blue. Miami is blue, but lighter blue than it's been.

And it goes lavender certain times. I'm sorry, I just wanted to say. The point that Pat made is very true is that the America problem is, it has this issue. by the way, there's just a canary in the coal mine for the midterm elections as well. And that's the bigger issue that has to be contemplated. So the public opinion right now does not favor what's going on for the most part. Maybe they're looking at it short term. Maybe they're feeling what's going on with gasoline prices and they just don't have a distaste for it.

I don't know if they're thinking about the bigger picture like you had mentioned. This is an opportunity for a bigger picture here. But it has to be balanced as far as, you know, what are you willing? and a sacrifice for it. It's a really tough situation to be in. There's not really a narrative either. Like normally you have a narrative behind a war of like, oh, we have to do this because of this reason. Like 9-11, there was revenge. Sometimes there's an imminent threat. But they don't really have like a narrative to capture that tolerance. So that's, I think that's part of it too. Got it. Rob, what is this?

This is the president yesterday in the Oval Office. He talks about receiving a gift from Iran. And it shows that the United States is now dealing with the right people in the regime. Let's hear it. They did something yesterday that was amazing, actually. They gave us a present, and the president arrived today. It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. And I'm not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a very significant prize.

And they gave it to us, and they said they were going to give it. So that meant one thing to me would deal with the right people. Is that nuclear-related? No, it wasn't nuclear-related. It was oil and gas related, and it was a very nice thing they did. But what it showed me is that we're dealing with the right people. Because you don't know, because the leadership was killed, all gone. Comini, all gone, as the expression goes, the past Supreme Leader.

And then the new Supreme Leader was racked up, at a minimum racked up pretty good, and everyone else was gone. And then many of the people in the third tier are gone, but we're dealing with the people in the third tier But we're dealing with a group of people that I think turned out. And the present, the gift they made to us was very significant. And they said they were going to do it. And it happened. And they're the only ones they could have done.

So much fog of war right now. You're hearing everything to sit there and say, what is really going on, what is really being said? Is politics being played? Who's he talking to? Is it games? Is it not games? Or is the other side sitting and saying, what the hell is he talking about? We didn't give you anything.

There's so much that's going on right now. you think about it, wouldn't that be like the perfect scenario for the U.S. if the regime in kind of like save face is there, but those who are in charge of the regime are not as radical? I don't know if that's a possible. Oh, no way. No, no. Okay, so let me ask you,

how long, if you spent 10 years with Lucky Luciano, okay, how long do you need to spend, every second of the day with Lucky to become like Lucky. How long? What do you think the timeline is? How long do you need to spend with the cartel from Mexico?

Give me one of the heavyweights cartels of Mexico. Name any one of them. El Chapo? How long do I need to spend with El Chapo? How long do I need to spend with the Manson's? How long do I need to spend with these guys to become them? What do you think that timeline is? Not long. What do you think that's honestly? It's a very good question because how long do you think that is? Three months, six, months, 12 months, two years, three years? Not long.

No, not long at all. We have a case study. What would you say? What would you say to it? I think a thousand hours? You think it's a thousand hours? I think it's... I, you know, if you're going into it and you're manipulable, you know, three weeks, I mean, we saw what happened

in history when Patty Hurst was kidnapped. And then she basically went from, they say psychologically she went from Stockholm syndrome where you kind of start to lean with the feelings of your captors to actually participating with the Symbionese Liberation Army and a bank hit. How long did that take? Efflee Bailey was her lawyer, by the way.

Right. She was only 19 years old. She was very impressive. It was only like 30 days. Okay. So here's the question. How many people have spent a thousand plus hours with the current regime, Chameenay, Pezeshkian, any. of those guys to be true believers? How many? They all are. They all have a couple hundred.

So they all have. The point I'm making is if the president's saying we're talking to the right people, is there some sort of a shift or a tone change? I have no idea. I don't know who he's talking to. Yeah. So, so, so, so, so, so. Or is he softening us up that the regime's not going to change? No, I, I think, such a fail. I think it is. I think, I think, I think, look, if you, here's what the debate was. The first debate was, should we or should we not? Right. So then the president says, Iranian people, we have your back. Okay?

Then Iranian people are becoming bolder to go out there. So now the president's position is what? We have your back. That's a statement being made from the most powerful person in the world. And I'm warning you guys, don't hang anybody. Don't execute. Right. But they kept doing it, right?

And they kept doing it. And they're turning off the internet. And we saw the numbers that came up, 31,000, 33,000, 70,000. And then they came back and said, no, no, we didn't kill 30,000 of our people. We only killed 3,117 of our own people. Rob, can you find that clip that where that's the clip I was trying to find with Adaguchi?

Where he said, we didn't kill 31,000 people. That's incorrect. We killed only 3,117 of our own people, as if like he's trying to say, look, we're nice people. So then from there, everyone's now debating. Don't do it, do it, don't do it, do it, do it, don't do it. We're not in, we're out. And then who makes the decision? The president.

Now we're in. Why are we going in? regime collapse, regime change. So now at the end, it's a nuclear. I don't know if I buy the fact that, so if now it ends and you claim the war is done, so the position for me would become like this. If you're talking to BB,

hey, listen, here's what we're doing. What's that? We're disconnecting from here, and we're going out, which I don't think is happening because we just got to report right now two hours ago from an insider, good friend, that rangers said this Sunday, they're being deployed, you know, boots on the ground going out this Sunday.

And they're calling their families, hey, this is what's going on. This is a ranger. This is not somebody. Listen, we are getting deployed, and they're telling us here's what we're going. So if he's talking like this that we're negotiating, but on the back end we're sending in, is he trying to deflect and confuse? Is that Trump's lineup doing things? Because if he doesn't, and it comes back and it was a new.

nuclear negotiation and you just killed 50 of their family members, you now, you thought they were angry? You just increased the temperature of anger to hold a different level that the world. So then the people that were, you know, non-interventionists are going to come out and say, what? I told you you shouldn't have gotten in the first place. So he's in a very interesting place. But again, I voted for him to, you know, in these situations to trust the decisions he's making. Let's see what they're going to be doing. Because no matter how much we talk about, guess what we don't have we don't have all the information we don't have all the intel we know what they're going to be doing top rob did you find that clip i'm still looking yeah it's a it's a it's a it's a

it's a it's a clip from two days ago where he says that so if you do find it let me know uh any thoughts and yeah it's a lot of smoke screens but i think that's intentional and i mean if it's going to follow the patterns of what he's done in the past it's something he's distraction distraction distraction uh confused people and then boom out nowhere something swift fast and uh super effective happens where I don't think the Tripoli is going to ultimately play a role in whatever happens because everybody in the world's looking at it, watching it, saying, okay, it's three days away now, it's two days away now, it's one day away now. So I think something different is going to happen aside from that, maybe with Carrigan.

But, you know, there's no way that we just make a deal with them now because that would be a worse situation than we went into in the first place. So it gets like a, you know, what goes from a extremist hostile regime to a pissed off extremist hostile regime, like, you know, with oil at a higher price and with all the infrastructure for oil halfway damage. So, yeah, no, you have to go all the way now, no half measures. Tom. Yeah, I hate it because, you know, I like that Maduro was in and out. I liked that I thought we had conducted a precision bombing up in the hills and had gotten to some nuclear facilities. And now there's a little part of me that's like, you know, here we go again,

weapons of mass destruction, except that now we can see a missile going 4,000 miles. We see one, and you can't have that, right? Now that you have a missile, it's like North Korea. When you have an ability to throw a missile this far, now you're just scared to death and what kind of a bomb can be on top of it. Now you have trouble. And so I'm with that we got to finish this up. We have to do it.

You know, if we see the reports that the USS Tripoli is there. The USS Boxer, which we brought up on this podcast first, has left San Diego a week ago. and is in route. It's still over a week out. And, you know, at the end of this ultimatum, you know, they got to get it together. I mean, the Iranians have a decision to make at the end of the ultimatum because Trump has got a set of arms and a set of tactics that are ready. The FT Financial Times ran a story talking about ground invasion of Carg Island. Everybody is waking up to the fact that's, wait a minute.

the Americans are not just talking back and forth here. This is not a debate like in the American Congress. The Americans are continuing to move their military assets around. And at the end of this saying, if we don't have an agreement in place, they're going to take the next step. And the next step is going to be Carr Island. And by the way, the U.S.S. Tripoli is also part of what's called the Iron Dome, but it's an envelope of protection so all the mine sweepers can clear the rest of the Gulf.

So Trump has next bullets in this gun, and he's serious. This is not a long discussion, Pat. If this is that, you know, we talked, I mentioned it earlier. He's very good at, you know, these distractions where similar to Midnight Hammer, if that is a similar situation, well, at least for a short period of time, it would probably impact oil prices higher. So it would be a good time to go long oil. Also would probably hurt bond prices and for a period of time hurt stock prices.

So that is something to come. contemplate, you know, if you're listening to this on, you know, from a business perspective, that's something to contemplate. But clearly it's a much bigger picture here. Yeah. Let's go to that. Let's go to that on what happened yesterday. And we got, again, a lot of other stories here that will go through. But one of the stories that came out is $580 million oil bet just before Trump's announcement, within seconds before Trump's post, traders placed extraordinary large oil future bets, roughly $5,100 contracts on Brent, WTI crude oil, 13 million barrels were traded between 1049 to 1050 GMT,

worth well over $500 million. Some report cite 6200 contracts at 580 in that minute immediately after Trump announced that 1105 GMT, which is like 15 minutes later, 13,000 plus contracts, 13 million barrels, exchange hands in one minute oil prices plunged on the news. Brent crude oil fell 15% from 112 to 99 and WTIWI, WTI, fell from 99 to 86 by comparison before the war Brent traded at 300,000 contracts a day. Recently, daily volume have jumped to 1,000 contracts a day. Tom, thoughts on this story.

I hate it. I absolutely hate this because the average American, the average investor, has no access to this. Who knew what the president was going to say? A circle of people in Washington, D.C. They know what the president's going to say. And these contracts are going out and basically after our tradings that some people, don't even have access to and they put this out here. You know, this is why we need the insider trading rules that they won't pass.

You know, I look at this and I come to this, I've said it before. It's like, we don't need term limits. We need jail. You know, it's like, it's like if you're, there's the old joke. If a senator is elected, what should he get? And then the answer is 24 to 36, right? If you were elected. This disgusts me, Pat.

somebody made a bundle of money knowing what the president was going to say and they went out and jumped on the contracts, a person or a group of people. This is horrible. I couldn't agree more with you. It is disgusting. And, you know, the increase in the amount of contracts in a situation where it's volatile, okay. But the timing of this certainly stinks. And I don't think it's somebody. It's timing.

Yeah. I think it's a lot of people, Tom, that made money on it. This is just, it's not fair. It's not fair to folks like us who want to try and make investments based upon. upon the information that's available, and this is clearly cheating. Yeah, I mean, even 9-11, the same thing happened, COVID, the same thing happened. You know, constantly when government contracts are getting given now for Google or Amazon, you know, their front run in that stuff, too.

So, I mean, there's just layers and layers and layers of unfair advantage for, you know, the bigger investors or people in Congress. You know, they do like the payment for order flow thing where they could see a big line of retail investors come and trying to invest in something, and then they could cut the line and go in front of them before that comes in. So, yeah, there's a whole lot of nasty stuff with the way that stocks are investing as a structure against the average person. Let's remember it kind of got swept under the rug, but you had three Fed members resign. The bonds.

Exactly. You had Rosengrin, Kaplan, and may have been clouded. I don't want to speak out incorrectly, but I know Rosengrin and Kaplan both resigned because there was questionable trading that they had. Which is crazy. These are Fed members at the time. Yeah, they were the ones deploying those bonds. Yeah, yeah. Boston Fred President Rosengrin and Dallas Fed President Kaplan,

who now works at an investment bank. Yeah, so was Rosengren admitted. Vice Chair Richard Clarita. That's what it was. It was clarita. So I was right. Okay. There you go on them resigning.

And by the way, this kind of leads to the story that came out from Wall Street Journal, Fed likely hikes next, not cuts. This is two days ago. market now see a rate height more likely than a cut this year. The Atlanta Fed probability tracker shows Fed cut odds plummeting from 60% in February to 16% now. And Fed hikes odds going up from zero to 15% over the next three months. By late March, futures imply 85% chance of no move through June. Hike odds, 15% cut zero.

So inflation remains above target with 2.4% year over year, well above the 2%. The core PCE was 2.8% in January, and one standard note, 100% basis point hike would add about $300 billion annually in interest on $30 trillion of U.S. debt, roughly 6% of the federal budget. Barry, what is this story all about? So a couple of things here. One, Fed Funds, Futures contracts are extraordinarily volatile. So they are going to move. So you can't read too much into future months.

but the most recent month tends to be more accurate. I don't think we're going to see rate hikes. I mean, let's never say never. But we know that nothing's going to happen until Kevin Warsh takes the reins and he'll preside over the June meeting, right? The one that we have, I think it's April 29th. We're not going to have any Fed action. Yeah, flat.

Yeah, but Kevin Warsh is a really, really good person to have at the reins. Remember that Powell was an attorney, not a trained economist. Kevin Worse has experience at the Fed. He certainly has the chops for this. And I believe that he would like to cut if we have inflation under control, if this situation is under control, because you need it. The job market, we are not creating jobs. GDP is pretty soft when you think about it and you remove all of the noise. It's pretty soft GDP.

It's trading just below 2%. When you look at the final demand component, which takes out things like inventory and government spending, when we get the real numbers, which I like looking at is final demand, it's just under. 2% that's kind of anemic growth. And given the labor market conditions, the Fed should be in a position to cut. The fear is inflation. But inflation's overstated by, we've talked about this in the past shelter. It's also probably going to get some relief as the tariffs come off this summer. And you should start to see that because they were instituted last summer. So, you know, unlike inflation tariffs are one step up and then it flattens out and then it's a one-time price adjustment. So I think he'd like to cut. We don't want Kevin Warsh in there as a dove who looks to cut.

all the time. You know, I wish Powell would have been, you know, hiking rates back in 2021 and 2022. So, so you, you want a Fed chair that doesn't look in the rearview mirror as they're driving down the freeway like we'd seen with Jerome Powell. You want somebody that could look through the front windshield and look through these. I thought Christopher Waller would have been a great Fed chair. If you hear him speak, he oftentimes talks about looking forward. I think Kevin Warsh will do the same thing. So I don't think we're going to see a hike. I think it's likely that we see one or two cuts by the end of the year. Tom. I'm on the same page with the cuts.

I'm still in for definitely one cut, and I feel relatively confident there's going to be two. But if you take a look at the way the news media, even the business news media, not the deep business news media, the popular stuff, the surface stuff, they react to market forces the same way they react to last night's score of a baseball game.

Oh, Yankees 8, Boston 2, Yankees on a roll. And that's just a headline. And I think what you have to look at all these statistics, you have to look at the totality of it. For instance, this is, you know, inflation is stubbornly above 2%. Yeah, but look where it is really, and it's overstated, as Barry said, and take a look at what's really happening with unemployment

and take a look at what's really happening with the economy. You know what business needs? A little bit cheaper money to make some investment. And you know what the U.S. freaking government needs? A little bit cheaper money when we refile all this debt, which is coming up. So this is, I don't want a knee-jerk reaction just drop, drop, drop, drop, drop, drop. Because Trump says, you know, take them down to one, take him down to one. No, no, no, no, no.

I'm not on that page at all. And I am definitely not on the page of that Trump becomes the de facto head of the Fed where he decides what he wants and then just forces it. I think what we've got coming in wars is a really, good person, and I think he's strong, if he's got an even hand. And I see these headlines, why the next Fed rate move could be a hike.

It's because they're looking at the last three little things that happened, like the score of last night's baseball game. I'd like to underscore these, first of all, great points. And one of the things that people look at when they see the economy and they say, well, you know what, the labor market is strong, is they misread the initial jobless claims numbers. You know, we'll get that tomorrow. And they have been very, very well.

So this is people filing for unemployment benefits, as you guys know, for the first time. And those numbers have been extraordinarily low and consistent. I think that people that are looking at that and they watch people on CNBC talk about it and other economists and even publications that, I think they missed the point. I think that their thinking is pre-pandemic thinking. I mean, think about it from a logical perspective. Median income in the U.S. is $87,000 per household. So let's just say somebody's making $80,000 or $90,000.

You just, heaven forbid, you just lost your job. Yes, you could claim unemployment benefits and collect $300, $400 a week, but that's not going to make ends meet. But what do you have today? You have gig economy. I could do Instacart. I can do Uber. I could do Lyft.

And while that might not be something I want to do forever, that can help me make ends meet. But that would disqualify me from going on the ranks of unemployment benefits because I wouldn't be able to collect it. So I think that unemployment benefits are artificially low. And I think because we have a gig economy, that the number is truly much higher. When you take a look at how many people

have also fallen off unemployment benefits, because either 26 weeks expired or the 19 weeks depending on the state that you're in, those numbers are continuously growing. And one other thing is job openings, job openings are plummeting. If you take a look at the last three years, they are absolutely plummeting. The Joltz report, you could see it on a graph.

It is, it paints the picture. But even that is incorrect because it's interesting, you guys probably know this, but the way that job openings are accounted for is it's not a government number that comes across the whole country. It is state by state, and they aggregate them. Again, post-pandemic, you could work from anywhere. So if I'm an employer and it's a job that can be worked from home, I'm not going to be limited to one state. I'll post the same job in several states, which means that that's going to be counted multiple times in certain situations. So I think as bad as the numbers look for job openings, the true story is it's much worse.

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We'd love to talk. Business. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at about amazon.ca. Yep, and I'll give you a simple chart and people that are watching can see it. Rob, I just send it to you, just text to you right here, just one click away. Look at this is, this is Fred, you know, St. Louis statistics. This is Fred, which is Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis.

They put out a lot of statistics. Pat, look at what's happened since the end of COVID, since COVID peak 2020. Look at what was happening to the number of multiple job holders in the United States. Look at that. This isn't, this is. That's in how many? Is that in the thousand? That's in the thousand. So it's correct. Go all the way up. 488,000 people right now hold multiple jobs. That they can count. And this is a full-time, and this is people that have full-time employment. So it's like a subset of a subset. So you have to treat this as a trend line and look at it across the population. This is exactly what Barry is talking about. It's such an unhealthy sign. I'm going to play devil's advocate, though.

So I actually disagreed with you guys last time we spoke where you guys, you guys, you guys were saying that we should cut rates. I was saying that we should hike rates because I think that disposable income is getting hurt because of, you know, I think inflation is understated, if anything between housing and food. But with the oil situation now, that's why they're talking about hiking rates instead. But I think they're misreading that. Now, there's some debate about this, but typically when oil goes up like this, there's

argument that, yes, it makes everything else expensive, but also destroys disposable income. So a lot of things actually go down in price because people don't have the extra disposable income to buy it. So I think an argument can be made that maybe you do need to either keep rates the same or cut rates now that oil's this high. Because this situation tends to make everything deflate because people don't have as much disposable income. So that kind of causes recessive aspects with the market. And when you cut rates, when the market goes up, when house prices go up, then the wealth effect happens where people have more money and they spend more money on goods and services. And that pushes prices up.

So it's a question of, do people need more money or do things need to be less expensive? Everybody thinks selfishly. So you're sounding like a buyer. Yeah. And maybe Barry and Tom are speaking on behalf of the owner and the seller. Yeah. Okay. So as the buyer, what do you want?

You want everything to be discounted. So your idea, your philosophy. Fair market value. It is fair market value, but you want to be able to get a bit of a discount. and maybe, you know, you may think certain things are overpriced. Barry may be saying, you know, and Tom may be saying, and speaking, like, as a president, politician, guess what the president wants?

The president wants what? Yeah. He says, look, I want housing prices to go up. I don't want housing to go. He's an owner. He's an owner. Because he's an owner, but the way the system is set up to get reelected,

sometimes the right thing to do won't get you reelected and hurt you in the midterms. Right. So you may not be wrong, but the likelihood of doing what you're proposing won't happen because there's a midterm coming up in six or seven months. It's like Argentina situation. The price is coming down, though. I don't think that that's a good thing. Just like people say deflation is worse than inflation.

It's true. It is. Nobody wants to buy the bottom. Think about this, though. Think about if you're waiting for prices to come down. By the way, you're going to wait a long time. If you're waiting for prices to come down and you win, you're right, prices come down.

Now guess what? Now you're starting to root for them to go up, aren't you? Because if they continue to go down, are you buying at the bottom? That's a losing problem. That's what I'm saying. It's the buyer and the seller's mentality. So check this out.

That buyer becomes a seller and owner. So here's what you have to be thinking about, Brandon. Something for you to consider. If you're the president, hear me out, who should you win over? those who want the market and the economy to go up because they're vested, because they have invested into property,

because they have invested in equities, because they have invested into what the market is doing, or those who are on the sidelines? Who should you make better policies for? I get it. People who own things carry more weight. I'm more in the business of making sure I make the climate better for those who have more to lose. Because those who have more to lose are taking risks and the others are not.

But the people who own things right now, the boomers, for example, who own, like, half the wealth. I'm going to go to that. No, I'm going to go, because I think the Dave Ramsey story, I'm going to come to you first because I want to hear your thoughts because there are millions of people that do agree with you, and I want that argument to be made as well. Barry, I know you're talking

to Rob about a chart. Do you want to kind of tell us what the chart? I just wanted to show the Joltz report. That's not this one, but if you look at this Joltz report, Fred has a little bit better view of it if you have the Fred one. You'd see that peak there, and you could just see what has been happening since 20-12. Can you explain to us what this is what we were talking about.

you post a job that's available. So this is a job opening. I want to hire you, just like you did at the very beginning. You're hiring, right? So this is in the thousands, just to speak clearly with everybody that's watching this.

So if I add a thousand to that, that means there's, in March of 2022, there was 12.3 million job openings in a market. And that's kind down to about 6.4 million, if I'm not mistaken, is where we should be in the Laced report.

Right. I think there's one more that we're missing on the data points. Yeah, it's around there. So 6.5. million. But as you can see, and what's happening here, Pat, is if you contemplate the fact that this does incorporate what I talked about earlier, you can post jobs in several states. The way this data is aggregated, it's state by state, and you add them up, it's highly likely and very

probable that this is overstated because there are multiple postings. You did not have that pre-pandemic. Oh, so this could, okay, I got it. So yeah, but how many is that? So let's just, is that 1%? It's not 10%. It's probably, let's say it's 3%. Because we've been hiring for a long time, but let's just say like right now we'll do job postings for certain jobs and we're recruiting now from New York market, from San Francisco, from L.A., from Chicago, from Dallas.

So let's just say we are. Let's say it's 5%. But that's a 500% increase on that one job, though. It is. But that's 6.5 million job postings. take 300,000 out is really 6.2 million. It's not that big of a difference. In either case, the fact that it's likely overstated

is just on top of the fact that you can't ignore the trajectory of where we're doing. So what's the point you're making? The point is that the job market has got a lot of weakness. I agree. We've got creations which have been negative more times than they have been positive on the BLS report in the last six months, seven months. Is that just because of rates, though, you think? Because it looks like that lines are pretty closely with where rates are, like even going back on that chart.

No, because rates were... They're at zero until 2022. I understand. That is absolutely correct, which really underscores the point that while it's not entirely rate-driven, it does tell you that the Fed really needs to help this economy by cutting rates because the labor market is soft. I mean, but every time the Fed tries to help the economy, then they end up over-correcting and making the situation worse. Because of the real-view mirror effect, because if the... How many times have we heard them say we're data dependent?

I agree with you. But the fact that they are constantly data dependent and they're looking at data that is either lagging, old, or overstated, they're making the wrong decision. It's kind of like, I think Alan Greenspan gave this, and the maestro was a terrific fed chair. No, I thought he was a good fed chair. 18 and a half years, you know, we did have a situation,

but over the 18 and a half years most of the time, he did get it right. It's not an easy job. But with Greenspan, what he gave was the analogy of a shower. And he said, if you go into your shower and you turn the water all the way hot because it comes out cold, then you have to adjust it later, it becomes too hot. And then if you go the other way, he said, you should probably set it where it's going to be and be patient. And I don't think we've seen that from the Fed.

I think they, as you had just said, overcorrect one direction or the other. Yeah, I can't say it stated strongly enough. I think it's the most poisonous, toxic, horrible thing in our society that some group of old people controls the price of money because what socialism or communism is is when a border people control the price. of things. But the most important thing in our world is money. So they control the price of money and they get it wrong every time. So I think that's one of the biggest problems that we face. That and the gold standard getting taken out. You may not be wrong, but it's where we are right now. Okay. So that decision was made many years ago before us in 1906 or 1913 at the Jekyll Island.

And we know that meeting that. I've been in that room. I held a meeting in that room five, six, seven years ago. It's a very historic place. It's right outside of Jacksonville. I think it's like a, It's like an hour away from Georgia and Jacksonville. It's right there. But anyways, going to this. Let me tell you where I want to go with this because you almost went there, but you didn't go there. That's job market right now.

So I'll read a couple of headlines and you see where it's going. Business Insider, how tech broke the job market. All right. Business Insider yesterday. Employees are taking pay cuts in huge numbers. Dave Ramsey warns, Young hopefuls, locked out of housing market, corporate America screwed you. So these messages are coming left and right, right?

What should I be doing? And I think, Rob, let's go with the one of employees are taking pay cuts in huge numbers. Let me read this to you and kind of go through it. Because when you're seeing a market, Facebook's claiming they're going to let go of 20% from 78,000 to losing, what, 15,800 people. These are $370,000 your jobs, high-paying jobs. Where's that job going to? Is this the conversations of Claude?

Hey, we can do the job of this many people. I don't need to hire this many people anymore. And, you know, Jack Dorsey's tweet of six weeks ago, he just opened up and said, this is what I'm going through. What do you want me to do? AI developers. Yes, AI developers. Now you've got developers that are coming in that is good of a developer.

You may be a full stack, but a lot of them behind closed doors are just kind of using Claude and others to help them doing that. They're using different language learning models. So they're not even doing what they learn how to do. They're relying on it because they don't even know they're replacing themselves. sometimes on the way they're working. It's a very interesting climate right now. Let me read the story to you and I'm going to come to you guys. So employees taking pay cards in huge numbers. What is this? Yesterday when we were going through the story,

Humberto kept saying, can we please not talk about that story? And I said, look, you brought the story up. So we got to talk about it. So since losing his job in 2023, Scott has applied to 1,600 jobs, completed 78 interviews, and depleted his savings just to stay afloat. This guy reminds me of the Jubilee guy, but they're different guys. The constant rejection has become so unbearable that he went on antidepressants. Now, remember, this is business insider, so it's a little bit of a woke type of a thing. So as you're reading this, please, you know, brace for impact. There's emotion that's probably the person that wrote this, went to a, you know, school that's more of a left-leaning.

journalistic school. So Rob, can we find out who wrote this article? Actually want to know who the author this article is. So when a recruiter from a staffing company called with a job offer last December, he hung up, walked upstairs, told his wife the news and cried it finally happened. He remembers thinking the triumph through though bittersweet, the position was a six-month contract as a technician, two steps down from his previous role as a senior manager. He'd have no guarantee of work once the contract ends, and he'd be earning only half what he made. before accepting this is going to set my career back five years, he told me. I know I'm really good.

I want a chance to prove myself. We've all heard about how grueling the white-collar job search has become, but the market is so tough right now that even the people, landing jobs, often aren't the success stories they appear to be. Revellio Labs and analytic provider recently looked at the data collects from across the Internet and found that an alarming share of people are settling for roles that pay less than the ones they had before, among all white-collar workers who change jobs at the end of last year, 40% of them took salary cuts of more than 10% Revalio Labs analysis showed

that's the highest share in at least a decade. The share of professionals getting similarly large raises is also at its lowest level. Tom. Well, guess what? We have now come to the other side of the supply chain, right? This is, to me, this is supply and demand. Now, call it AI, call it adjustments. call it, say, CEOs are using AI and AI washing to justify right sizing.

By the way, Meta came out. Remember, I called them out, Pat, and I said that some of those job layoffs were from the metaverse. Remember, this large, large hole that Facebook dug and started when they rebranded meta, started pouring billions and billions of dollars in. And analysts were saying, just how big is that hole for the Metaverse you keep pouring billions of dollars into? Well, guess what?

They came out and said, well, yeah, some of these layoffs this week, yeah, there's a good number of them that are Metaverse. Then he came out and said, how about 1,500? And then there were Reddit, there was Reddit responses from people that claimed to be inside Facebook that said, yeah, buddy, more like 4,500 to 6,000 of them related to the Metaverse. So there's AI washing going on on the layoffs. What am I getting to? Well, there is a supply difference happening. in that article it also provided statistics that the number of large percent raises are down oh that means people aren't having to give raises to keep people remember you had to pay the bribe during

covid or lose your best engineer who said I'm walking across the street that I work from home and I can have my dog on my lap and all these things I can do well the supply has changed and right now there's fewer job openings there's people looking for them and now you have a supply issue and guess what happens. Price goes down when supply goes up. And I think that's what's happening now. And it's also happening on a regional basis. Now, is some of it AI, maybe? Is some of it that the economy is taking a pulse right now? You're looking at the number of jobs that were that being made. It's basically flat for four months. Even if you go back and you say, oh, the 92,000 job losses, they're going to revise that down. Yeah, okay, go back and look at all those. Let's say we revise it. It basically says

flat. It doesn't say that we lost half a million jobs and there's a recession and all. It says it's basically flat. Yeah, certainly it's much more acute in the tech sector, of course, because AIS that now could that branch out, it potentially could. But if you look at the numbers from ADP and you look at the job stayers and job switchers, while the numbers have certainly come down on the switchers, it's still a premium. They're still about roughly six and a half percent year over year versus roughly four and a half percent year over year on the job stayers. So there's still some premium. So I think in the tech sector, this is very, acute, but there are probably other sectors where they are still relatively stable.

Brandon. Yeah, I mean, the situation in 2021, 2021, 2022 was, wow, land, that was, I mean, anybody reasonable should have thought that that was unsustainable. We just had a ton of money pouring into the economy. We had, you know, companies with a zero percent interest rates taking out loans, so they were able to pay a ton of money like that. So that's why that craziness was happening. But while I think people that are around my age in this ballpark are in a tougher

situation than historically speaking. I think it's still entirely feasible to get whatever you want out of life. If you're, you know, make sure you're exceptional in some way or go the extra mile in other ways. But if you do what everybody else does, you're going to get what everybody else gets. So this guy applying to 1600 jobs on LinkedIn or whatever. I mean, yeah, like you're blending in with everybody else. I mean, like, for example, when I came here, I took like all these crazy drastic measures that nobody else would have done. I was like contacting every single person I worked at the company. I was mailing stuff here. Like all these different. Very creative, the way you got the job here. Yeah. So I mean, I think that that's how people have to think.

I agree. And by the way, look what happened. You got one job, then another job, then now you're running it on the consulting side, which is a complete different thing. And your background was what? A master's in national security and a bachelor's in national security, right? But you have the drive to go get it done. This is why sometimes when I hear stories like this, when, hey, here's what this person's going through and here's how long it's taken to do this and here's how long it's taken to do that if the people that are in this mindset that you can't go get sometimes you have to go and see what the market wants to pay you today sometimes your market price changes some people come in like let me tell you do you know I used to be with CNN or Fox or MSNBC and I'm going to start a podcast and I want

you to pay me $10 million five-year contract my first of all have you ever done a podcast no you think your fame is going to translate? from CNN to just start a podcast. Didn't Jake Tapper just recently on CNN? Was he doing a show? And they're trying to do it on the podcast, because CNN is starting to realize what's going on. This is him actually doing this.

This is really his new set. Wow. And Rob, this isn't a podcast, right? No, this is actual CNN cable TV. Can you play this for the first 30 seconds? So you're probably wondering what's going on, why we're in my office for the first hour of the lead today. So it's an experiment.

This is my actual desk where I do my actual work, not the desk in the studio. And we thought we would bring you into the space where me and my team do our actual journalism and plan the show every day. So here we are giving it a shot. You might also be wondering about the decor, the posters and the kerchiefs and such on my wall. Well, the theme is these are all losing presidential campaigns. And this hobby started 26 years ago after I covered my very first presidential campaign in the year 2000. You can pause. So, you know, a lot of times people are like, well, I want to go from there to this.

And then you look at ranking for some podcasts. They're like, how is that guy beating that guy? How are amateurs beating professionals? The market is going to tell you exactly how they feel. Like, I'll give you an idea. Yesterday we're having a conversation. I think Justin's in the room. Could have been yesterday.

It could have been two days ago. Justin remembered this. And the conversation was, hey, what do we want to do with the chat? I said, what do you mean? He said, man, the chat says this, the chat says that, the chat says this. What do we do with the checks? I know Tom reads every one of the chats that comes out, right? He's going through it right now.

No, I'm not. I do. What do you do with the chat, right? What do you look at the chat? You know, why don't we shut down the chat? Why? Man, that's brutal sometimes. I said, no.

You sure? Absolutely. Why not? Let them rip. Why? That's the difference between mainstream media and independent podcasters. You and I cannot watch, you know, the news on TV and see what listeners are actually saying. You just have to accept the fact that that's what the messaging is.

Then you read the commentary. And by the way, I'll go and I'll look at Instagram or X or YouTube and I'll see comment sections. And this is the part that's a very important skill set that people have to pick up nowadays. So yesterday there was a post made and I watched the video and I went down. And I looked at the first account I clicked on. Follows 3,000 people has zero followers. Follows 992 people has 17 followers. So I said, you're a bot, you're a bot, you're a bot, you're a bot, this is real.

You're a bot, you're a bot, you're a bot, you're a bot, this is real. That effort has to be on you. And on top of that, here's the other part that's happening right now, which is a beautiful thing because, you know, you have to know propaganda. Like, this is the greatest season to be in a propaganda. business. If you're an enemy, if you want to divide a nation, if you want to divide a political party, if you want to divide a family, if you want to divide a team, if you want to divide a state, if you want to, if you want to divide anything today, the greatest propaganda weapon ever

has been handed to you that even the amateur, the guy that wrote the book propaganda, will look at it and say, my God, we can really destroy some great states today because of the propaganda tool that we have, right? And you'll see all these videos of, I remember, one time one guy says, Pat, one of our clients was a previous presidential candidate that got up to 19%. I won't say his name. He said, he was one of our big clients. I said, what do mean he was one of our big clients? He says, come in the room. I go into the room. I'm not even kidding with you. Thousands of phones who are all sending tweets, who are all sending comments, who are all, I said, so what do you do? He says, we can take anybody and make the market believe

they are trending more than anything else. And the back end, like where the Internet is coming from? they're able to link it to different places so it doesn't show like it's all from one location coming so it doesn't even trigger an X or Facebook or the old Twitter or YouTube to be able to read this. Guess what the market's going to say. We want the chat, we leave the chat. A lot of people don't like to do it.

I love it. I love for the market to go through it and filter each other out because you got to be almost, what's the word, Tom? You got to be almost, there's a word for it where when I was on the podcast with Joe and Joe and I were talking about comments and Joe says, but Pat, you can't compare us because we're used to comments. We're used to what's going on.

The average person is not, right? I love that the market is speaking to each other to see what's going to be happening. The market right now when they're talking about jobs, people are saying it's a scary time for jobs. Forget about the article we're reading. The market is saying, Pat, I'm afraid, had 22 students here two weeks ago. Top ambassadors of this great school, 4.85 GP. going, getting accepted into big schools. Yeah.

We're talking about schools like, you know, that, you know, Ivy League and some of these other, and I'm talking to these guys. And we're talking about career planning, what they do next. What should we do? How do we reposition ourselves? This is not a time to go into, you have to find a way to compete against everybody else.

And even look, I'll go to the Day Ramsey story. Dave Ramsey warns young people, locked out of housing market, corporate America has screwed you. Rob, do you have the clip of? on Dave Ramsey, or if you want to play this clip. Here's what Dave Ramsey had to say about it. Go ahead. This is that corporate America has screwed you. Car debt is at an all-time high.

The car companies have now got you signing up for $1,200 car payments. Student loan debt is at an all-time high. And this is Gen Z in millennials. And, of course, credit card debt, thank you to the big banks, is at an all-time high. When you're drowning in personal debt, you can't afford to buy a freaking house. That's what's happened.

We've had these big companies, the car companies, the banks, and Congress with the student loan debt screwing these two generations at a record like never before. And so what we're finding is we're finding lots of Gen Ziers, lots of millennials able to buy a home when they fight through and sell the stupid car and get rid of these debts. Do you think that that's why they're maybe not going out there and buying those first-time homes? They're looking to other investments? Well, they're not looking at other investments. They're broke.

disposable income has been eaten up by those three categories I was talking about. Again, card debt is out of control. Very, what do you think he's talking about with the Gen Z? I think he's talking his book to some degree. You know, certainly there is a lot of debt out there. You're thinking he's selling a book right now. I think he's just talking his book. His whole thing is, you're going to get you out of debt.

So that's his whole. For sure. That's a good point. Okay. So, but he'd make some good points. And clearly the evidence is there that we have seen credit card debt rise rather significantly. I believe it's up 22% over the past four or five years. So we have seen a big jump up in credit card debt and the amount that you're carrying. So that has a, that has a, you know,

a very poor effect on your overall ability to purchase a home. But I do believe that what we really need to look at is on the overall picture, if I'm looking to purchase a home right now, my down payment is definitely part of that problem. Is the down payment? I have to come with the savings. Also, my psyche is another one because I'm hearing all this negative stuff about the housing market. And many people don't have the education. Some people think you need 20% to buy a home. They don't realize you can buy a home with three and a half or five percent. If you ask, I think there was a survey that was done by the, by Realtor.com, about half the individuals that are asked to buy a home, they think you need 20% down. So there is an educational

gap there in people entering the housing market. That said, it's still a challenge to buy home. But what Ramsey's also talking about here is, is that, you know, this debt is something that is pushed upon people. To some extent it is you get 100 credit card offers in the mail, but there also should be some financial education as well to make good decisions too. When Westchap first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and

actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. This episode is brought to you by FedEx. These days, the power move isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate lunch. The real power move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks. Level up your business with FedEx, the new power move. It's both hands have to. Well, we live in an instant satisfaction society, and that's why, and I've been railing against this, your credit cards now were about to hit $1.3 trillion.

and we're 1.28 trillion right now. The numbers I saw, which was the January monthly calculations. Number one. Number two, BNPL had all kinds of default figures that were popping up in January. What does that mean? Well, it means that the Christmas and holiday purchases and post-holiday sales, and you went and bought a big-screen TV for another $1,000 and everything, you know, at Best Buy and got it installed for your Super Bowl party,

and you put it on BNPL, and then you only made half of the first payment, and you triggered the hyper-interest rate. Look carefully at BNPL. If you don't pay those two, three, or four very specific payments on specific dates, the slam-bam that you get on the interest rate is insane. It's 30% or more in some cases. And so part of it is, Pat, we can talk about student loans and manipulation to students and the cost of tuition, and all rail against colleges that basically used the U.S. government student loan program to raise tuition. It's a monopoly.

We could talk about that. But I'm going to stick with the consumer. There's some common sense for the consumer and financial education that's needed that Barry was alluding to because no college manipulated you to spend a thousand bucks at Best Buy on a big screen TV and put it on BMPL, right?

Nobody forced you to do that. So there's got to be some common sense on the consumer and I'll say, oh, these people are being victimized, victimized. You know, that's not always the case. And, you know, the things that have happened to car loans are correct. They kept stretching it out. I remember when I remember where I was when a friend says, hey, I got a 60-month car loan. I said, you got a 60-month car loan?

When I had bought a Ford escort after I got out of college, a little Ford escort, cheap to insure, reliable. No, economical in terms of gas. That was my criteria. It was a 48-month car loan with an option to bring it down to 36. So you know what I did? I got my bonus and I put like an extra $1,000 down and I had a 36-month car loan. So you still had 36 and 48. Now look at the lengths of them.

36 months now is a-oh, you want 36 months? Lisa, this is what we're going to do. the consumer, you know, has to have a hand in their own salvation here, in my opinion. And Dave Ramsey's, Dave Ramsey's right, but to merely sweep it off and say, oh, corporate America has screwed you, maybe there's some of that going on. But come on, Dave, consumers have to have, you know, common sense. You see a 400-pound person and you say the food got in there somehow. Yeah. Brandon. Yeah, so I don't think it's just corporate America. I'm using an analogy, but first I'll say my base case is that I think boomers pillaged America pillaged their

generations after them, Gen X and Millennials and Gen Z. And I'll use the analogy that you guys have all done well for yourselves. Do you think if you were to take out an amount of debt that exceeded your net worth by like five to six X and then left your kids and grandkids with that, would that put them in a good situation? Are you talking about the federal deficit? Yeah. Okay. Well, you could say that for the last three generations.

right? Yeah, going back to boomers. So boomers, but boomers have been running Congress. I don't like to generalize all boomers as pillaging. I don't like that. No, well, it's not, it's obviously not all of them, because it's not all of them controlled society, but the ones that are in politics, the ones that are in business, the monetary policy.

So when I say boomers, I'm saying, like, the boomers that run society. Okay, so it's not boomers. No, like a lot of people have no idea what's going on, but, like, you know, people aren't as aware of what's going on as they should be. What's your question? Go back to a question. I share your higher, but. So if you put, if you put,

If you start off in a strong position, but then you take out an amount of debt to pull a lifestyle forward that you want to exceed your current capacity for a lifestyle. Like meaning, are you talking house or college? For the analogy I used? Yeah, the analogy you're just like for this. If you're this age, you buy this, you buy this, what do you do? So I'm talking for standard of living. So, you know, say you're doing well, but like you're in the top 1%, but you want even more than you have. You take out an amount of debt that exceeds your net worth by 5 to 10x or.

exceed your yearly. To buy a house. Yeah, to buy a house, to buy boats, to buy cars. And then your kids end up getting left with that debt. So you start off with like a high- We also have the asset. Yeah. Like we have assets here, but our debt exceeds our yearly revenue. Like our tax revenue is like $5 trillion. Our debt's like $40 trillion. Right. So there was no always the case that our national debt exceeded our annual revenue. So I'm saying that the reason our standard living has gone down, the reason our disposable income has gone down is because the generations prior to us have pulled forward money that, you know, from the future to themselves, inflated assets.

Now those assets are much more expensive. Is that available to you? Is that the ability to do that? Are those options available to you? To pull wealth forward like that? Yeah. Are those options available to you? We're still doing it, yeah.

Like the last five years, for example, we're technically pulling wealth forward from the future when we're printing a couple trillion dollars. To me, there's two things. There's two things on how I price. process that. One way I process that, Brandon, is you and I, in every sales organization, there's comp plans. And sales organizations will often change compliance. And sometimes why do they change compliance? Let's go reason why sales, we've all been in sales. So why do sales organizations change complaints? Think about it. One, they realize they're over pain. Two, bad habits were being

created by sales guys. And it was affected. They were like gaming the system. Three, to produce better quality clients that stay on the book, so it's a long-term valuation versus short-term. But why do they change compliance? There's a reason why they change compliance. And I'm going to tell you one other thing why they change compliance that goes to you. Sometimes they change complains that benefits

to guys that no longer work, okay? The guys that are like, man, I haven't done shit for a while, but, dude, change the complaint to benefit. I wasn't a company that changed the comp plan for the guys that were no longer working that just wanted more to go to them, that they're no longer working. Okay.

regardless of what happened, you have a couple choices. Either you maximize that comp plan and eventually have so much clout and voice that you can, what, impact the comp plan? Yeah. I don't know if that made sense. It does. So go maximize whatever the current comp plan you have, then get moral authority, then go talk about it and then do something about it. Those are really your options. Yeah.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah, and that's what I'm doing. And I love that. I'm just making it clear to everybody. want you to keep doing that. But a part that what Tom and Barry are saying is that the guy, in my opinion, the guy, there's a saying, I took my kid to a tryout with one of the most well-known soccer teams here. And one of the coaches shows up. And these kids are talking about, well, that kid's going to be younger next year. And that kid, the new age thing that they're doing is

going to go with this. And the coach said one thing that shut every parent up. You know what the coach said? What? Very simple line. He said, if you're good enough, you're old enough. So no parent could say anything about their son, because every parent thinks their son is what? The greatest. The greatest.

And it's like, no, we have 12-year-olds that are beating 16-year-olds. We have 10-year-olds that are doing laps around 14-year-olds. So guess what? If your kid is good enough, you're what? You're old enough. Yeah. So what's the point? I have a feeling

the guys that made it in the 70s would have made it in the 90s, would have made it in the 2010s, and would have made it in 2026. Why? What do they have? They're going to find a way to make the current tax system

and complom working their favor. And I will lean towards that mindset than anything else. Like, you know, just yesterday, we're doing some math on athletes, right? Like if you're an athlete, you play for four different teams. I made this video and I was talking about it.

But let's just say somebody makes $2,000. $100,000 a year. And over the next 10 years, what's your income going to be next 10 years? What are you going to make? $2 million. Okay. So if you live in California on that $2 million, you're going to pay an additional 13.3% in taxes. What's 13.3% in taxes over 10 years? What's 133 on $2 million? $260,000 if you don't count for the growth of it. That's right. 260,000. In New York, it's $250,000. By the way, if you lived in Texas, Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Florida, what happens to that $250, $260,000? In your pocket.

You take that $260,000. You use compound interest at 4,8, 11.5%, which is what the SMP has done, the last, you know, what do you call it, 40 years. Rob, run this calculation, $260,000, 40 years from now at 4%, at 8%, at 11.5%. What is it turned into it? Now, let me tell you where I'm going with this. I don't have to live in California. Yeah. I don't have to live in Illinois.

I don't have to live in New York. Well, you don't understand I'm a true New Yorker. My family are true Iranian, Armenian, and Syrian, but they chose to go somewhere where their kids are going to have a better career. They're going to do better for themselves, not in four years, Rob, in 40 years, in 40 years. In 40 years. Easy way to do it is you have that many doubles. You use the rule of 70s.

Yeah, I totally get that. But to me, if I'm going. to that in, you know, 20 years and just put in 40 years, here's what you'll see. The 4% turns into 1.2, 8% turns into 5.6, 12% turns into 24 million. You living in New York or California, making $200,000 a year, cost your future kids' generational wealth of potentially $24 million. That's your decision. Nobody told you to do it.

So to me, a lot of this stuff, when they go into poor me, You don't understand all this stuff. I get it. It's a message. But if you're using that the reason why you're losing, not you, because you're a worker. You're one of the hardest working guys in a building. But some kids or younger men and women who use that as the reason why they're not winning,

that's exactly the mindset why you are in the situation that you are in right now. You've got to change it. You've got to go to a climate where your peer pressure challenges you to work better, to make better decisions. I'll go to this next story to be thinking about it. And it's about Claude. Can I give one quick thing on that? Yeah, go for it.

So I totally agree with you on that, but the fact of the matter is that, you know, the rule of 80, 20, you know, 80% of people are just regular people. And, you know, I'm not concerned about myself at all. I know exactly what I need to do to get where I want to get. But people who are just average people that are trying to work a job. Like back in the day, they could have an okay standard of living. Right now, those people are going to get eviscerated, and that's not good for society. Could I ask you a question? Yeah.

How many those guys have taken a cloud course that's six months to learn how to use Clark? Not enough of them. Then whose fault is that? Yeah, there is. But here's what I'm. I'm saying, is the information out there for everybody, probably more than ever. Don't tell me you don't have an opportunity. Like my kids, if they're going to come to me and talking about you don't understand. No, no, you don't understand. Forget about the challenges. Every generation

we're all going to have different challenges. You know, the silent generation, which is what, the 20s, right? Great Depression. That generation had different problems than the ones. Would you rather be your generation or silent generation? Think about it. The silent generation went through what? Holy moly. You're talking about a scary time, food. We're sitting at night. You've been worn in the same clothes for three years. Break bread.

This is your piece, your piece, your piece. Hey, guys, I'm just going to try to go make some money today and come back. They found a way. They found a way. Every generation has to face a new crisis that you have to find a way to overcome. You have to find a way to overcome. Claude comes out with Anthropic. Okay, I'll read this to you.

Okay. Anthropics said, and what's crazy is it sounds like I'm preaching at him or lecturing him. You guys should see how this guy works. I'm not even kidding with you. Why do you think he's the young guy that's on the pocket? Why do I put him on here? You think I put him on here because, you know, I put him on you because he's smart and he works his ass off in the building. He has that reputation. And, you know, he has a reputation of a guy that's smart. He's a reader. He's always working on himself. That message is not to you. You're going to be fine in life. That message is to a 26-year-old that's listened to you right now. Yes, Brandon is. speaking on our behalf, but they don't work as hard as you're working. So they can't sit there and say, you're playing video games and stream and feeling sorry for yourself. Get off your ass and do something with your life.

That messaging is ever going, no matter what the time is, well, let me read this article, and I'm going to come to you, especially with you as well on Claude, because I know you got thoughts on this. Anthropics says Claude can now use your computer to finish tasks for you in AI agent push. All right. So this is CNBC story that we're looking at. And Tom, I'm coming to you because we all want to meet Courtney. It's just that's what's come down to.

I swear to God if we don't meet Courtney. Courtney, if you're out there, manect me. I want to know where you are, Courtney. So Anthropic Claw can now use a person's computer complete task as a company looks to create an AI agent that can rival the viral open claw. Users can now message Claw a task from a phone. An AIGM will then complete that task. Anthroping announced on Monday after.

being prompted, Cloud can now open apps on your computer, navigate a web browser, fill in spreadsheets, Anthropics said, one prompt Anthropic demonstrated in a video post Monday is a user running late for a meeting. The user asks Claude to export a pitch deck as a PDF file in the chat to a meeting invite. The video shows Claude carrying out. Is this the video, Rob? Yes. We're going to show that video here in a minute. The Claude carried out the task. Latest update from Anthropic underscores a push from AI firms to create so-called agents that can anonymously, autonomously carry out tasks on behalf of users at any time. Rob, do you want to show this from the beginning?

So, Tom, maybe why don't you narrate over what this is doing right now to explain what's going on? Yeah, what AI is doing is... Keep playing the clip while... ...increasing its ability to do tasks. AI is not sitting there impersonating you, sending an email. Maybe someday it will. So what is this doing in the clip? Is it just kind of doing...

What it's doing is it's doing what you would do. It opened up your calendar. It's basically doing what an assistant in the Philippines would do. Over COVID. No, seriously, over COVID, you could basically give assistance proxy to go do things. Start a code task? Did it really say started? Go back a little bit, Rob.

Go back 10 seconds. Look at this here. So start the Dev server screenshot, the library page, and send it to me before the demo at 3 p.m. Please on it, starting a code task to run the deaf server and grab the screenshot. Press play. Yeah, so it's saying take a screenshot of something on my desk and then send that in the meeting invitation so people could look at that and we can get on a Zoom together and talk. And so it goes and does the task for you. It'll also, hey, open the spreadsheet and put the following numbers into the last column for today's sales and then send me the chart that's on the second tab of the spreadsheet.

Boom, that's a task. that's not like managing the sales force for you. So what these tasks are doing and what cloud and what AI agents that you could create with OpenClaw are doing. And that's what Courtney is. Courtney is an AI agent or a replicant that I created with OpenClaw on a Amazon EC2 server that I put Ubuntu Linux on, put OpenClaude on it, and then taught her certain skills

so that she can do things so that I can get to the brainwork and making the decisions. but the gathering of data, assembling it, I get it. Now, I still check it. I still check it very, very carefully. And now what they're saying with Claude is, hey, if you want Claude to do some advanced tasks like open Excel, drop some things in, open my email, attach this and send it. Courtney does that to Rob. Courtney does a news sweep in the morning that I have right here.

It's like what are Americans reading most based on 30 news outlets in the United States? And the number one story of everything was 15-point plan from Iran. It gives us all the places that are covering it and how. So that was helpful to us when we think, hey, these are the highest. That's a task. That's a task. So think of the AI agents as doing chores for you so that you can faster get to the work of managing humans around you and making decisions. How much are you using Courtney right now?

Courtney does about probably 15 tasks a day. 15 tasks a day. Yep. Are you comfortable sharing some of them with the public? Sure. I do an email scan in the morning. What's the prompt? What do you tell the prompt?

Well, I've created it as what's called a cron job, a chronological job. So once I got it right, I say run that job every morning at 745 a.m. She goes through all the email and she looks for anything that's at vt.com and gives me your prioritize, a few other people prioritize. Tell me what those are. And she'll give it to me in a recording so I can listen to it in the car. So she reads me my email summary in the morning. It's a summary, though. It's not reading all the emails.

No, I can ask that, but I just want the summary. That's one. Second, it says when Rob sends the summary for the, uh, the podcasts, our stories, I say, hey, can you compare that to the stories that are hot out there that a lot of people are watching? Yeah. Because we want to give value on the podcast. I'm going to give value in the podcast.

So I compare the hottest stories versus the ones we scanned. Ah, these 10 are really good. And then we do our prep. It usually overlaps. I also ask, I'll say, hey, here is a standard spreadsheet that comes out of our sales reporting system. here can you i have a job that's been created do as you always do turn this into bar charts so i can give this to pat so we can easily see the data and he can have a meeting with sales guess what now nobody is sitting there for 20 minutes making that so those are the example so can i say something

here uh tom if you're comfortable sharing at this point adams promoted your age many times how old are you tom i am 63 okay and i look younger thank you very much but sorry ladies i'm married Yeah. So 63, married and his mistress's name is Courtney, who is not a real person. Okay. But check this out. You're 63 years old. The average, let's go to the 80% of 63 year olds. What does the 80% of 63 year olds do? Getting excited for retirement. Get excited for retirement. Yeah, two more years. That's what they're doing. Here's a guy at 63 with all the tasks that he has. The other day he's at the airport at 3.45 with his daughter who just went back and he's ready to come to the podcast. So that means if he's at the airport at 345, what time you think they got up that day? Two o'clock. He had a full workday till 9, 10 o'clock at night. Not one complaint about anything. Crush the podcast, goes and is learning how to identify this task. That's what I mean by at any generation. If Tom was born in any generation, Tom would have been a value add to that society. That's the part. So what? What?

What I'm trying to say is, don't tell me you're 63 years old. This is for the kids. Don't tell me you're 22 years old and no, this is for the 63 year olds. No, this is for anybody and everybody. This is for you take the time to, thank you, Alicia. You take the time to go learn about what's going on. Look at the way Tom just flat out to explain what he's doing with it every day. How much time is that, Tom, how much time is that saving you from what you put into this?

I believe that I've already found about four or five hours a week, which is huge. And how much time did you put into it? but learn how to do all of it. I started with when it was called, you know, um, you know, Claudebot, then Maltbot. So I was in Aspen when we were on vacation, reading about it and creating the,

the primitive basics of it at that time. How many total hours into it? I probably spent about 40 hours getting it up and going. And then I, now I've, I've honed it and honed it and honed. 80 hours total? Yeah, probably 80, probably a couple hundred because I like to read.

Perfect. So a couple hundred. but it's giving you back five hours a week, five hours. And quality decisions of what comes out. Five hours, better performance, better quality. What is five hours given back to you over five years? Think about that. Five hours every week, that's 50 weeks, 255 years, 12, 150 hours given back to them.

It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's sick. To see that taking place. Barry, are you doing anything with plot? I'm a fellow baby boomer as well. That's why we were so defensive. You look good. The two of us were like, you know, wait a second, we're not pillaging anymore.

We didn't rip you off. So we use AI a lot in our company and in Iowa. We use AI a lot. I use AI all the time. Obviously, Pat, you know, I've had a medical challenge that, you know, I'm still dealing with. But thank God we're in a better place now. But as I went through it, literally I would talk with AI hours a day. to try and learn.

And what winds up happening for your health. Yeah, for health. So what wound up happening is that I'd speak with physicians. They don't ask me if I were a physician. But you also have to be very careful because I like what Tom said with these agents. And when you use them, they don't always get it right. You have to constantly fine-tune. And you have to know which questions it has.

You can't accept the responses as, okay, blindly. That's why I love what he said. I check everything. And that's a big, big part of it. You have to check everything. That's a key. I love it. Brandon, are you currently yourself?

You're 30. Did you turn 31 or you're 30? Okay. How are you using your language learning models right now while you're building your consulting business? Yeah, oh no, a ton. It's helping with everything. You can plug into Monday.com.

You can plug into Excel sheets. You could, like all types of admin tasks. How many hours a week do you use language learning models? Hours a week? I'd say it's part of my everyday. So, like, cumulatively, like maybe three hours a day I'm interacting with it. So 21 hours a week, give or take. Every day, including Saturdays and Sundays.

Yeah, I work every day. Got it. But yeah, no, definitely. It expands the amount of things I'm able to do so much. Like, I'm able to probably like a whole day's worth of work within one hour or two hours because of it. Yeah. And by the way, if you're watching this right now, and I'm just being straight up with you, I'm going to give you a challenge, okay?

Here's a challenge. If you're watching and saying, holy shit, what did just Tom say? Menectum. Go ahead and Menectum. Tom will share that knowledge with you. And by the way, you can cold email people nowadays or DM them and they got thousands of messages. People can't get back to you.

But if you pay for it, they'll get back to you. That's the whole purpose of Meneck. Meneck Tom and say, Tom, what are you doing with Claude and how can I use it for myself? Maybe schedule a call with Tom on Moneck. And if you have questions for Brandon or Barry, everybody here's on Meneck as well. We'll be announcing something a little bit crazy

in a couple weeks about Meneck that has to do with going to the World Cup finals, which are like $30,000, $40,000 tickets. But anyways, please don't repeat that to anybody else. I'm just sharing it with you. I don't want anybody except the five of us that are here together watching this. And the couple of you that are watching this right now

out there in the YouTube world and Spotify world. All right. So next story I want to get to. The next story is farmers. This story got me so emotional that I came in on fire. yesterday. And I brought Tom in. I brought Paul and I said, guys, I want to share this with you. Rob, do you have that clip of the farmers? If you go to my Twitter account, okay? If you go to my

Twitter account, here's what you'll find. Keep going. Keep going. It's like the right there, that video. So check this out. Imagine you own a farm that's been passed to you from your family and a family that passed it to you, bless you, grandparents passed down to you, that farm is roughly $26,000 an acre, which would be a total of $2.6 million. And a data center company comes in and offers you 10 times the amount. What do you mean? Not $2.6 million. We'll pay you $26 million.

What would you do? Here's what this lady did when they got the $26 million offer. Go for it, Rob. If it's my way, I'll stay and hold and feed an Asian. 26 million doesn't mean anything. Some people might find it hard to understand how Delcia Bear can turn away a $26 million offer to buy some of her land until you spend a little time with her walking the dirt road she grew up on and in the house her daddy built. My grandfather and a whole bunch of family has all lived here for years,

paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it, even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America. when people didn't have anything else. Delcia is one of dozens of landowners approached by an anonymous buyer, one of the major players in artificial intelligence, likely Google or Meta or Amazon, to purchase their land. The market value for land in Mason County is about $6,000 an acre. The realtor that came to her door last April offered her and her mother about 10 times that.

They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we're not. We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don't have any water and poison, we know we've had it. Delcia's mom, Ida Huddleston, is now 82 years old. She says she does not need the money or the hassle. She was born on this land, and she plans to die here, and she certainly does not trust the promises made by the AI companies or the people who want them to build here. So what do you say to the people who are in? in town that say, hey, this is going to bring jobs. This is going to bring economic prosperity. I say, they're a liar and the truth ain't in them, is what I say. It's a scam. For Delcia,

scam or not, she says she's connected to her home like Scarlett O'Hara was in Gone with the Wind. As long as she was attached to that land, her spirit never would die. That's the exact same thing for me right here. As long as I'm on this land, as long as it's feeding me, as long as it's taken care of me, there's nothing can destroy me if I've got this land. You're not amazing. That's cool.

You're not amazing. And not kind of emotional, right, when you watch it. Wow. Right? You know, I watched this multiple times and it reminded me of something, you know, back in the days, there was a Paul Harvey, okay? And Paul Harvey told the story one time about

the farmer. Rob, I sent it to you. This is one of the most, I don't know why. It's one of the most emotional videos you'll listen to on how it ends. I brought Tom in. Tom and I are literally sitting in my office, and Tom is asking himself, why the hell is Pat showing me a video of farming? Are we about to go into the farm business?

Are we going to turn our 11-acre property into a farm? Are we now all of a sudden going to see cows and stuff like that? And animals, I mean, I'm sure Vinny would like the animals. Are we going to do that? I said, no, just watch this video to the end, because I have some thoughts. I'm thinking about something. Watch this message, this sermon from Paul Harvey decades ago on farmers.

Go ahead, Rob. And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker. So God made a farmer. God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at the meeting of the school board. So God made a farmer. I need somebody with arms strong enough to wrestle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame can tankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding, visiting ladies, then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon and mean it. So God made a farmer.

God said I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn coat and watch it die, and dry his eyes and say maybe next year. I need somebody who can shape an axe hand with a child. from a persimmons sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire feed sacks and shoe scraps, who planting time and harvest season will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon and then painting from tractor back put in another 72 hours. So God made a farmer. God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed

to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in midfield and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place. So God made a farmer. God said I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark. It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and rake and disk, and plow and plant and tie the fleece

and strain the milk and replenish the self-feater and finish a hard week's work with a five-mile drive to church. somebody who'd bail a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what dad does. So God made a farmer. Wow. Wow. Isn't that not powerful?

Wow. Is that not amazing? Rob, send me that. That's crazy. Is that not amazing? It's beautiful, Harvey. You know, there's something about farmers that's emotional. I don't know what it is.

You know, to me, I'm convinced God's favorite sport is baseball. I think he watches baseball. And a part of baseball for me is when you think about the movie with Kevin Costner, what is it called the Field of Dreams? Yeah. And they're on that farm and, you know, shoeless Joe Jackson comes out. And every night they're out there. this can't be real. I'm telling you, people are going to come and they start showing up and

just a good old, you know, you and I sit there and we eat the chicken or we eat this. And we don't think about it. You know, where did the state come from? What did the chicken come from? Like, how did they do it? What do they do? It's because of farmers. And the fact that you hear. So it's funny because we went from all AI, what Courtney is doing, what Anthropics, what Claude is doing. But to me, I would prefer to talk to human beings. every single day and not have to talk to these language learning models. I prefer team human. I prefer people.

I prefer us going. I don't think people realize truly, if you work here, Tom, Brandon, Rob, guys in the back that are doing their thing, Justin, how often do we run podcast? All day we're running a podcast. It's always like this. We're always talking like this.

What do you think about this? What do you think? Well, here's what I'm. I would do, and it's constant debate back and forth. You know why? I love human beings, man. I love people. It's not even close. All these tools that are out there, we got to use it to be competitive. But at the end of the day, there is something so beautiful about what a farmer does that an AI language learning model will never, ever get my heart the way a farmer gets my heart. Something about it. Something about it.

When you see that, Tom, your thoughts? You know, I think that in an age of technology and everything that's out there, you know, it grows up around you and everything that's going on. And sometimes you miss, you can miss the human side of it. And Paul Harvey, I remember listening to Paul Harvey. I was in college and I would go over my, go oversee my grandma, like twice a week, right around lunchtime, just to check on her and say hi. Never mind, she'd made lunch, you know, and I'm a college student.

I'm broke. And she'd be listening to news and on AM radio in L.A. and Paul Harvey used to come on at noon on AM radio in L.A. And I would hear him in his common sense tone, and it was just the human tone. And then I see this and I see the images that are put with it. And it's like, you know, have we lost it? Have we lost that humanness? has the anonymity of the internet allowed people to be just so intense with their words

that they've lost the human side of it. And so when I see that, I just think of the human side, and it's like, wow, you know, how much more can we, you know, calibrate, you know, to the human side? You know, that's what I love about baseball games. I love going to baseball games because you're sitting around a lot of other people. Well, but you're also sitting around other people. Right? And you're forced to sit really close to the other, so you meet somebody and you talk to somebody. Would you rather sit next to other people or Courtney?

Can you imagine if like the Anthropica sitting next to you? So Courtney, what's the most likely result that this game's going to end up with? This is probably going to end up being a score of four, two, where the pitcher will have nine strikeouts. What a boring conversation. Can you imagine that? No. I want to talk to a human being that's going to make a mistake, that's emotional, that acts dumb, says dumb things at time. You know, and sometimes you get it right.

You get it. Like, wow, that was a great point. And, you know, you want that feeling. What COVID did to us was what? And what COVID did to us is just tell us, no matter, the most annoying thing in the world, which is a human being, is also the thing we love the most. Yeah. We missed it. How you doing, man?

Remember, it's like you're hugging. You hugged in a different way. It was like a hug like bodybuilder's hugs. Like, man, how you doing? Man, what's, you're a human being. This is cool. I'm seeing other people. You wanted to go to restaurants.

There's other people here, man. This is so great. It was a very weird thing. But I think as we're going this next direction, there was a guy in L.A., Tom, you may remember this guy from the church. He was a felon. He went to prison for many years. And he looked like a felon.

And he talked like a felon. And when I mean like a felon, I'm talking tatted up, probably on TRT, juiced up but on fire with Jesus. And just sincere. And he came up with a very weird idea. Here's what his idea was. He worked for a junkyard when he got out of prison because nobody would hire him.

And he made a promise to himself that he's going to build a company that 100% of all his hires are what? Exfellants. Ex-cons. 100%. So he goes, he saves the money that he makes working at this junkyard,

and he buys a junkyard later on. And he's got like 100 or something employees. They're doing 27, 28 million a year. Guess what they are. Every one of them was a felon. And he says, look, I'm team second chances because I understand. You know what I think's going to happen?

I think we're going to experience that in the future where some companies are like, we hire human beings. Can you imagine? It's going to be like, look, I know it's not the popular thing to do is 2052 or 2048. Think about what 2048 is going to be like. We're in 2026. What is 2048 going to look like?

You know, the woman in the podcast was said something that I haven't, a lot of what she said obviously struck a chord, but the fact that, you know, food and water, you take the, take this land for data centers, understand the profit motive, but where's food and water going to come from if that just continues to get eaten up? So, I mean, she said, so God lost this.

woman. I mean, she really... Innocent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know how many people could turn down that type of money with that type of belief in conviction. You know, think of, you know, most of us, if we're honest, it's a hard thing to turn down and have that type of moral compass that this woman has. So, you know, it's wonderful to see. Yeah, I agree. Inspirational. Some people would say 26 million is not what it used to be. But Brandon, what do you think about it? Yeah, I'll say you converted me a little bit because I, there are, like, you're, like, last couple years, I was kind of hard on the farmers, and I was all team vertical farming and desalination and whatnot, talking about how irrigation is inefficient. But you're totally right.

You know, farming is a beautiful thing. And it's like the old... It's like church, man. Yeah. Going to a good church. Interactive with the world, you know? Interactive with living things all that. It's so beautiful, man. If you're a farmer out there, I just want to say thank you. Honestly, thank you. You know how we walk, at least when you're going to the airport and you see a man in uniform, what can you say? Thank you for your service. Unfortunately, we don't have a uniform farmer's wear for us to say thank you for your service. But truly, I want to say thank you to you. You're so important for society.

You're doing God's work. Can you imagine how important of your job? You're doing God's work, and we're all grateful for you. May you have protection to continue doing what you're doing. The legacy left behind you with your father, your grandfather, your grandmother, all of them. Very important. Very important what you're doing. Okay, let's go to the next story. Next door I want to get into before we wrap up. I got a couple angles I want to go with.

I'm trying to see which one to go with. Well, let's go with this one here. Interesting thing with, it's funny, we went AI. Now we went farmers. Now we're going to go on robots. Okay. We're going to throw you off today. This is when robots don't work.

So a restaurant robot goes crazy that literally has a leash on. The owner or the worker has a leash on that they had to take this. robot away. And we're like, hey, man, customers were starting to freak out because how this robot was dancing, like it's doing some stuff. You just have to see it to believe it, Rob.

Is this it? Yes, sir. Okay, so this is like the robot going around. Imagine you're like at a Chipotle or a restaurant and you're doing your thing. And this guy's walking like, wait a minute, who's this robot? This is a taste of what the future looks right. Go ahead, Rob.

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That's crazy. There's two people, now three people. You got three people that can't stop this robot. It's all fun games now. That's right, until they're everywhere. Ripping your arms off. Yeah. It's like a drone.

Let me control it. Just turn it off. That red button. Can you find a red button? It's like you want to end zoom or mute. Can't find the end button. So this robot is just going out of it. I'm good.

What's stopping from smashing somebody over the head? Nothing. Yeah. Nothing. It's a human being pressing the end button. So now imagine put 50 million of these guys in the world. Strongest military. Whoever controls it.

Whoever's independent has a strong. You can pause it right there. Barry, when you see this, what's your initial reaction? You know, all this stuff is really in its infancy, what I think about is what's it going to be like 10 years from now, 5 years or 20 years now, what difference will we see in the world that it's just going to be? Because the acceleration of it, I mean, we all know like Moore's Law, but I think that this is even at a different scale how fast AI has developed. You know, Tom and I remember when we were kids, like a big innovation, we had a microwave oven. That was a big thing. You know, so, but to see innovation happen and robotics, I was in a restaurant the other day.

It wasn't a robot like that, but a little robot that brings your food out, which, you know, it kind of surprised me a little bit. It just brings your food out and stops with your, in Florida. In Florida, at the airport. Oh, wow. At the airport. It was at BoCampers Airport at the JetBlue Terminal. So, a little robot, break. And here's your food.

food. I was like, wow, man. By the way, that's coming to everybody. So we're going to one day go out and you're all of a sudden going to be. Remember the day Chad GBT was dropped? Yeah. And how life changed the way every business was being here like, wait a minute. This was a

dramatic change. All of a sudden, we're going to go everywhere and you're going to see these guys, you know, Tom may actually have Courtney become the robot that's walking around the office. Tom, robot, when you see this, how do you react to it? Well, This is humanoid, obviously.

I look at that and I wonder, you know, how many small jobs, how many warehouse jobs, how many delivery, you know, and all that goes away. And what does that slice of society do? You know, it's kind of, you know, it's kind of, you know, it's comical to see this. But then I think about the second thing, the security hack, you know, you security hack and now you shut down a company's ability to do work.

and to ship. So I see two sides of it. One, things are going to get quick and efficient, thanks to the robots. Second, you know, there's new levels of security, new levels of risk for businesses that depend on them. And then it's like, you know, I remember, you know, jobs I had and except the summer I worked in construction, you know, I worked in a steakhouse and a high-end steakhouse. so is a chef's assistant. And it's like, do those, does that job go away? Is there, is there that job in the future if somebody wanted to do that?

So I kind of think of that. It's like entry level and basic jobs. And what happens to that? All the, all the tasks. If all you do is a task and it's repetitive, look out. Yeah, well, that's probably not a good use of the time of humans. I mean, you know, you could really make anything a job that shouldn't be a job like the Milton Freeman example of, oh, so why don't you just like use, have people use spoons to

dig holes if you're trying to just give people jobs. But so I think that'll be fine. That's happened a bunch of times where like half the job market's been replaced by technology. And, you know, there's different timelines of how fast it sells itself out. But I think new things that we aren't even thinking of right now will present themselves as jobs. But what I'm still scared of is even more so than the hacking aspect of is the robots, like, you know, getting hacked and then just running around ripping people's arms and legs off. and, you know, taken over. Because, I don't know, that thing, like, they couldn't even hold that thing back.

That's a tiny robot. Like, I don't know why people are comfortable having them in their houses and the restaurants. Oh, they're going to be. It's crazy to me. They're going to be. But, Brandon, that's what I was talking about is, like, what is this like in the futures, like, you know, like the singularity? What if they start thinking for themselves?

Yeah. And what if, I don't know, either it just takes some programming or maybe they learn it themselves, and then there's potentially a malicious aspect of it. Yeah, I don't, I'm not, like, I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm not a regulation guy, but I don't know. Should it be regulated? I don't like the idea of something, like, much stronger than me, just, like, operating freely around me, you know?

It's like... Well, don't get married. Oh, my God. Oh, man. But, yeah, no, I don't feel good about it. I think there should be some regulation. And, like, we were talking about regulating AI a couple years ago, but everybody stopped talking about that.

See, the problem is the following. because you know what the world is becoming, a smaller place, if you think about it. And so if I'm the leader of the free world and I'm in U.S., and other countries are not following the same regulation as me and you're building robots, I don't have a choice but to build robots. I don't have a choice but to build robots. Matter of fact, just what I have to do. Be better and faster.

Build it even faster, bigger, and better. This is just a reality, what direction we're going to. And you're going to see, I'm telling you, you're going to see, I am so convinced of this. In 30 years, I'm going to be how old, 77 years old. In 30 years, you're going to see societies that are saying, this is 100% human society. Yeah.

And people are going to be like, no way. Let's go to such and such ranch or such and such. city and such and such and such a vill. And you go in and everybody is people. This is small little city, 5,000, 50,000. And you're like, I kind of like this. You're going to see how much we're going to miss the days where it's 100% people.

You will see. At the end of the day, AI robots, they're ice cold. No emotions. We have something emotion. It's going to go back to nostalgic times where it was just, remember back in the world. the days when it was us just the people, that's how you're going to reminisce. Yeah.

It's going to be such a weird thing to reminisce about. And those cities are like, listen, man, if you're coming over here, you can't do this, you can't do this, you can't do this, because we just want to be human beings. They don't want to be regular people. I think there's going to be there. But then at the same time, these other guys who have the robots are going to impose their powers to say, you don't have a choice, but to listen to what we have to tell you, it is going to be a very different war.

Yeah. It's scary who controls them, the idea of who controls the robots. It's a part of it is, you know, part of it is controlling it long term. Let's do one last story. You can see the police force, by the way, being totally robotic. By the way, did you guys watch that movie? What's the other movie I talk about, Rob? Not the one that just came out with Ryan Gosling.

That one's called Project Hail Mary or Operation Hail Mary. If you haven't seen that, go watch it. About 30 years ago, Robocop? No, no, no. The interrogator. Mercy. The movie came out with Mercy. Mercy.

Mercy. Guys, two movies this weekend. I'm not an executive producer on this. I'm not going to get paid. Go watch one of these two movies. Watch Mercy or watch Hail Mary. Mercy is the best example of what AI is going to be doing. A.J.

Where are you going to go to court and you have 90 minutes to explain to the judge that you did not commit a murder? The movie Mercy highly recommend this weekend. Go watch it. You'll see why. You'll thank me later. Do we want to do one last story, Tom? This last story I got is

about taxes. Do we do that? Tax the rich or kill income taxes? Or do we do tech exec, accused of smuggling invidia chips to China resides from the board? You want to do that one? Taxes? We did so much AI stuff. So let's do taxes. Tax the rich or kill income taxes. States are divided on what to do. This is a barren story a couple days ago and it's not, I mean, it's truly what's going on right now. Some states just want to tax the crap out of you. And some states are, you. And some states are divided on. saying like DeSantis, who was on Hannity yesterday, and Hannity asked him, are you going to be running in 2020? He says, I don't know. So, of course you have to run. It's just get a better marketing campaign. But, you know, for him, he wants to get rid of property taxes. Yeah.

So here's a story. Let me read it to. Page 21. Oh, I'm sorry, it says page 21, but it's not on page 10. So page 10 tax the ridge or kill income taxes. Let's go to this. While you're pulling it, While you're pulling it up, Pat, you know, we talk a lot about housing affordability, the price of the home as well as interest rates, right? But a huge chunk of that is the enormous rise we've seen in insurance costs and property taxes. And that's part of the affordability problem that no one talks about. It's true. It is very true.

So let me read this to you. U.S. states are heading in a different direction on tax policy, reflecting diverging views of wealth and economic growth. California has grabbed headlines with a proposed ballot initiative for a one-time, and tax networked on billionaires on March 11. Washington State passed a millionaire tax on personal income above a million and expanded a tax credit for low-income families. Maine, Connecticut and Rhode Island are among several other states where a proposal exists to boost tax on the wealthiest residence. New York City, Mandani has also steered debate with a proposed two percentage point increase

in the city's income taxes for those that make over a million dollars. At the same time, South Carolina, Georgia, Missouri are seeking to cut personal income tax a year after Oklahoma and Mississippi created a plan to eliminate personal income tax altogether to spur economic growth and attract businesses to their states, that some states governed largely by Republicans are cutting taxes to spur growth, while those governed largely by Democrats are raising them to pay public services, is a century-old trend Matt Gardner's senior fellow at Nonpartisan Institute on Taxation Economic Policy Set. Barry, thoughts on this.

What works throughout history, over-tax, I mean, you know, it just doesn't work because you're going to lose your, and you're already losing some of the more desirable individuals you have there. Sure, some level of taxation may be appropriate, but if you overtax, you're going to wind up on the losing end of this. There's only so much of this that you can do. And it's easy to stay in power, and it's easy to vote for it because the majority of people are going to vote. It goes, oh, that doesn't affect me, and I don't make that much money or this and that. So it's easy to vote for it, but the effects that they don't realize, again, it is an age-old, problem and it's an age-old debate, but the reason why you have to have a balance is because

if you do too much taxation, you will wind up increasing the burden and reducing the quality of life to those who are left behind. Tom. You know, what's really interesting, I love state budgets as a topic to discuss because in the United States, a state budget, there's a sense of truth to it because states can't run deficits. At the end of the year, they got to sell bonds, they got to do something. They got to balance it. They've got to find the money somewhere. If they've had a natural disaster or hurricane, Florida, earthquake in California, you can get federal relief dollars. But at the end of the day, you've got to balance the budget. So if you promise this and you do this, now you have to tax. And if you tax, you get the outcome.

people don't understand it. If you talk to the average person, most people are in favor of very reasonable taxes because they like shiny fire trucks that are in good condition, firemen, police, streetlights at work, streets without potholes, and sewage systems that actually flow. Americans are all very in favor of this. And, you know, it takes taxes to do those, to do those basic things and a public park for people to walk their dogs. They understand.

But the rest of it is when it comes down to you decide to win the vote, you're going to promise free, and then the other guy's got to pay for it, and then the other guy leaves. Because guess what? You have to balance the state budget. So now you've got to go get bonds and you can't get them. Do you think Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island want to raise the taxes coming up in election year? No, they don't. They know they're about to get a cold bucket of water in the face.

They know what's going to happen, but they got no choice. and they have to go with the tax the rich, and that has to be the angle that they're pushing. So guess what? Every action has a consequence and a reaction. And right now you're seeing states raise taxes and lose citizens that are moving. I have so much respect for these founding fathers

that created the way they did, that you have options. If you're sitting in a state, that's destroying you with taxes, you have 49 other options. Where do you want to go? Pick and shoes. Pat, this brings up a much bigger issue that, you know, we know that within six years, you're going to have a mandatory 23% cut in Social Security benefits. That's just mandatory unless something changes. But if you've looked, and there's charts, I don't know if you could find it, Rob, where you have inflows and outflows of government money. So the inflows are approximately you know, five trillion, the outflows are approximately seven trillion.

Probably no more precise numbers, but that's a round ballpark number. And if you say, okay, so how do I balance the budget? What can I do? If you look at the areas that you could cut, you have to pay interest on the debt, which is pretty much as big as Social Security is, do you touch Social Security? That's a third rail. Do you touch the health care portions? It becomes very difficult. And the portions that are remaining out there, there's really not that much where you could cut. This is the sad state of affairs that we are in. It's easy to talk about it, but it's a very, very difficult way to balance it.

I think that Social Security, we have to think about something like this. You got it, Rob, perfect. You could see health care, interest on the debt, Social Security. This may be an old chart from 2024. Interest on the debt has gone up clearly since then. It will be a trillion this year and it will be above defense spending for the first time ever. That's right. And those two will be 25% of the total budget.

Right. Interesting. We were having snapped on Musk when he started going after the fraud. Because, I mean, there is some fraud to be found here that could narrow it down. But it sounds like he got really scared when he was poking around with the social security fraud. Yeah. And one of the things you can do, there's a calculator that you can go on where you could kind of try and balance or extend Social Security. The biggest one that we have to consider is extending the age of where you start getting benefits. I mean, you can't shock the system. Yeah, it's no-brainer. But you have to phase into that, right? Because otherwise, we're, we're, definitely heading down a bad path here,

and people just have to suck it up and say, okay, you know, the only way the system works is if we delay some of those benefits a little bit longer. People are living longer. You talked about the age of... New Yorkers, 58.8. Yeah.

You know, some of that is just because people are living longer. And also, there's another story, Pat, that you see median age of a first-time homebuyer. There's some discrepancies there. The media picked up on the 40 years old. That's one survey. And that's problems with that one. is a 120 question survey.

A lot of young people aren't going to do that low response rate. And it also will count you as a first-time home buyer if you owned a home, rented, and then owned a home again. So that's skewed. It's probably closer to 34, 35, but that's a little above the historical average. So we have to address, in realistic terms, these issues. Tom and I was saying the same thing. Some level of taxation is appropriate, but you can't just spend crazy. Rucklessly.

It's a very weird thing they're doing. By the way, here's all it is. Increasing taxes, if you're for it, you think the government can do a better job than free market and people. That's all it is. You think money going to them, they're better with that money than free market. Bren, I'll give you final thoughts here. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty straightforward with the impact of state income taxes like Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts. They used to be great places.

But when you put state income taxes in, it decimates the incentive to, um, owned a business. And that money doesn't even go towards productive things. Like look at California. I think they get like $250 billion a year in state income taxes. And somehow they're always short of money for, you know, highway projects, for homelessness, for health care, for their, everybody talks about the California pension system as being the number one that's most likely to go down. They're going to have to get bailed out, which is crazy. So don't know where all that money goes. And I mean, Florida only gets $50 billion from the sales tax and like all the cumulative taxes or the state. And somehow we're cruising along fine with everything that we need. So I don't know,

call me crazy, but maybe some of that money is going towards things that shouldn't go to in California. Yeah, DeSantis said, our real estate revenue went from $30 billion to, I don't know what the number was, a massive number in the last five years. He said, it doubled. And I said, we don't, we didn't do anything different. It just went up. So you mean to tell me that's the right thing to do? I don't agree with it. So I kind of, what DeSantis is doing, man. I mean, he is as a governor and the way he thinks. He's a phenomenal governor. Yes. Phenomenal governor on what he's done. Yeah, property income tax revenue went from $31 billion to now $60 billion. It says, we don't need that additional $30 billion.

A rise in $20 billion from $19 to $24. Forget about what it is in 2026. What do you do with that $30 billion? He said, why do we need it? Why don't we just give it back to the people? If you're living here, you say it's your house, you've paid it off. Why are we still taxing you? That doesn't make any sense. So I like the way he thinks, well, what to happen. One thing on the, first of all, the tax thing that is absolutely fantastic, but what we were talking about just a moment ago, what was your point that you just made a moment ago? The fraud and the deficit spending or what the money actually get spent on? California, taxes. Yeah, where they shone out those hundreds of billions? Yeah, I lost my train

of thought on that. Oh, the pension system. We were talking about the pension system. There's another point I wanted to make, but it's okay. We covered it well. Okay. All good. Well, gang, Friday, I will not be doing a podcast, but there will be a podcast and somebody will be sitting in. So for some of you guys that are wondering, you know, if Adam and a significant other are going to be on or not, on Friday, Adam will be on the podcast, not his significant other, but he'll be on with Tom and with Vinny and a person that has agreed to come in do my job as a host on Friday will be the one and only Sean Hannity. So Sean will be the one that is the sitting host for the podcast on Friday,

the one and only great Sean Hannity Friday. So there will be a podcast. So if you want to come in and read the commentary on what's going to be happening, and I'm running an event at Sales Leadership Summit at the Doral. Those of you guys are coming, I can't wait to see all of you guys there. Right after this, we're heading. to our events. We're looking forward to seeing you guys there, but enjoy this weekend. I won't be with you. I'll be with you on Monday, but definitely do not miss the show on Friday. Barry,

thanks for coming on. Tom, great commentary today, guys, everybody, Brandon, any one of them, if you got value and you have questions for them. God bless everybody. Take care. Bye bye, bye, bye.