PBD Podcast - Massie's Primary Loss + AI Wars Heat Up | PBD #802

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Patrick Bet-David, Tom Ellsworth, Richard Werner and Luke Gromen break down Thomas Massie’s Kentucky primary loss, the escalating OpenAI vs. Anthropic AI war, Meta’s 8,000 employee layoffs, Trump shutting down Xi-Russia claims, and the Fed’s inflation-driven interest rate warning.------📺 SUBSCRIBE TO LUKE GROMEN'S FFTT, LLC: https://bit.ly/3OgGy4c💰 LUKE GROMEN'S FFTT, LLC: https://bit.ly/47yPzfCⓂ️ MINNECT WITH RICHARD WERNER: https://bit.ly/3NSJ8NN✍️ SUBSCRIBE TO RICHARD WERNER'S SUBSTACK: https://bit.ly/4s7AVDd💬 TEXT US: Text “VAULT” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates on speakers at The Vault Conference 2026!🦁 THE VAULT 2026: AUG 31ST TO SEPT 1ST: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4mZdLhD⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ⓜ️ 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🇰 KALSHI: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://kalshi.com/pbd⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm so excited. It takes sweet victory. I know this life's meant for me. Adam, what's your point? The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever size. Right here.

You are a one of one? My son's dry. I think I've ever said this before. Okay, sounds good. Gang, we have to change it up today because my son, the oldest son, graduated eighth grade, so I have to go in there and sneak out to come here, be with you guys. We have a special guest today.

You know, when they were on last time, it was a great conversation. We should almost create a show, the Luke and Richard show. I don't know if it's the last name or it should be the first thing. We'll figure it out, but we have brilliant minds in the house, including Tom. A lot happened last night. You know, I don't know what direction to go with you. One is the big race with Thomas Massey with Galeraine, which was massive. People were, it's the biggest primary race we've had with the money being spent.

32 to 34 million dollars, Trump, the biggest data that you see, which was shocking to everybody who thought Trump's endorsement no longer meant anything, the guy went 39 and 0 in the middle of a war. How do you do that? Everyone was upset the guy that went 39 and 0. You can say any, you know, economy, affordability, Iran, oil, gas prices, and he went 39 and 0 with his endorsement. It is such a key. Can you imagine if you're him, Brian, I'm going to sleep last night saying, I told you so, you should never go against me, and all the other guys that did kind of lost. It was so bad that remember Bill Cassidy, who was the fellow, I think, in Louisiana, Tom. Is Cassidy out of Louisiana, Rob?

Out of Cassidy that he voted, he was one of the seven senators, I think, that voted for J6 as a Republican against the president for the impeachment. And he lost to a fellow that Trump endorsed yesterday, while all this stuff is going on and nobody is paying attention to it, maybe the biggest thing that happened last night that no one talked about, not a lot of people talked about, remember this is the sport of politics,

is the Senate advances Iran war power resolution, historic first Senate voted 50 to 47 on Tuesday to advance a war power resolution, requiring Trump to end military operation in Iran or obtain congressional authorization. But the biggest thing on this, guess how Bill Cassidy voted, who previously seven times in a row voted, no, what do you think he voted last night? He finally said, let me side with Trump after he lost.

Kind of weird, right, when he think about what's going on here. So maybe he's thinking about his career long time. I better get my act together. The history of Mitch McConnell is gone. I think Mitch McConnell is no longer going to be there 40-something plus years. I know a lot of people will miss them. I'm sure you're going to be very emotional because you want people to be in politics. politics for 40 plus years. Maybe you won't even extend term limits. Maybe when they're dead,

they're still in there. So some people still want them to continue. I don't know what you want to call that, Luke. But Mitch McConnell is no longer going to have a seat. I think somebody know, I don't think he competed for it though, Tom, right? I think somebody else came and took the spot, Tom, if I'm not mistaken, with Mitch McConnell. I believe so. Yeah, the Senate is no longer a corrupt hospice. Yes. That would be California. Change, which, by the way, his family's probably happy. His Asian wife that has a lot of business over there is probably happy. They cannot just kind of relax and enjoy themselves, spend time with the grandkids. And I don't know if he's got great grandkids.

Maybe he does. And at this point, you just don't want your grandfather to suffer what he's going through. Just relax and enjoy the last few years you have with your kids. NATO ships. NATO turns around and says, hey, we may just support the president now. Oh, now you want to do it? Now that you realize the guy may decide not to send money your way anymore. Now you want to go support it.

Then there was another $1.8 billion slush fund. attorney quits hours after $1.8 billion slush fund to pay MAGA allies and J6 rioters sparks backlash. Big story. At the same time, there's an IRS investigation, Rob, on page nine. I think that's an addendum story that came out. Very weird how this thing ended, by the way, where it says, what page is that on, Rob? I'm trying to see what page.

You told me earlier, so I screwed up with the number I wrote here. Yeah, that would be addendum nine. Addendum 9 New Settlement News. Oh, there is. New Settlement Bars IRS from investigating Trump, his family, for past tax issues.

That comes out. San Diego Shooter, we have to talk about that. I mean, we'll go through that. Another devastating, very weird what happened here. But we'll talk about on the business front, which is on the business side, maybe the biggest story yesterday. You got Open AI

and Anthropic who are both competing, right? Open AI Anthropic. On the night when all this stuff is taking place, and you know the lawsuit with Elon Musk because, hey, Elon lost, because he filed too late, et cetera, et cetera. So it's kind of like, well, Sam Altman is winning. On that night, his co-founder of OpenAI decides to leave and go join Anthropic.

Wait, what? Yes. He decides to leave and go join Anthropic, and you have to hear the reasons why he wants to do that, why he wants to leave. We'll talk about that as well. Facebook layoffs, they're doing something very weird. I think they're doing it today, if I'm not mistaken, Tom. Today, Facebook did something weird where they're laying people off,

but the way they're doing it, they told all their employees, don't come to work today. What do you mean? Just don't come to work today. It's either because they're so worried it's going to be nasty or two, they want to sweep the entire place for people not to put shifts in conversation and recording and cameras, all this stuff that they're doing. But today, if you're at Facebook, if you DM somebody and a girl doesn't get back to you fast today, it's because Facebook's taking a day off.

Just letting you know, don't get upset. They'll get their act together on Instagram. A lot of you guys will be upset. Hang in there. They're laying off people, but they told everybody stay home today, not to come to the office. And then Nina loans are back. You know when Nina comes back to the club?

It's not good news. But Nina's back. You know how she's back? Remember back in the days the loans that caused WAMU. Do you remember WAMU? We're old enough to remember WAMU, Washington Mutual Bank. I loved WAMU. They had the best, you know, when you would go to the front.

Their setup was sick. I just really liked that. That's how I met Moral and Tikran. They had great employees, great customer service, but they had Nina, no income, no asset loans, and a $330 billion company goes out of business and who buys them for $1.9 billion, chase on a discount because of no income, no asset loans, but they're making a comeback. Good idea, bad idea. I think it's a horrible idea, but we'll see.

Maybe these guys are going to say it's a phenomenal idea. Pat, stop being so upset about the no income. We need Nina to come back. Maybe Richard Warner's going to tell me that because of quantitative easing and tightening, we need Nina to come back. I don't know. I never liked Nina. She was beautiful, very attractive.

But once she started dating her, she was a homewrecker. I'm just telling you. She was easy. But she was very easy. But a lot of guys liked her. She got around a lot. So Nina is making a comeback. All right.

So apparently there was a conversation between Trump and Xi, where Xi told Trump, allegedly, according to reports, Richard, I don't know if you saw this or not, that Putin regrets the war with Ukraine. And then Trump had to come out and correct them. Someone says, she never said that. That never was talked about. But apparently, Xi told Trump that Putin regrets the war against Ukraine. I don't know what that means.

Maybe we'll have some thoughts on it. And then a couple of other stores, if you guys are looking for a discount, you're looking at people like discounts. Like, I know people that are in the discount game like, hey, I wouldn't want getting a nice discount for shirt or suit or something like that. Well, universities that offer MBAs, it's a lot. a fire sale on MBAs today. So if you're looking for getting an NBA at a discount, it's a good season.

Right now there's a lot of discounts when it comes onto this. And by the way, did you guys see all these commencement speeches where, you know, Eric Schmidt from Google got up and he said, well, you know, the AI Industrial Revolution. Boo! Did you see this? Well, somebody yesterday, the co-founder of Apple got up and gave a speech about AI was a very different thing. But, Tom, he arrived.

He said something. It's in my notes. Okay, I'm glad you have that. We're going to go through that as well. It was fantastic. But this thing with AI is real. Kids are, Rob is telling me yesterday how his son says,

him and his friends are not using any AI. They're driving together, Rob, if you want to tell the story what he told you that day. Yeah, because I have grok in my Tesla. Yeah. And I was asking the questions. And my son said, why don't you just go home and actually use Google

and do the researcher yourself? He was shaming me for using AI. How old is he said 16? 16, but it's a trend among all of their friends that they don't want to use AI. What's his first name? Benjamin. Benjamin.

Shout out to you, buddy. Good for you for challenging us to use our brains. I am thankful for the Benjamins of the world. All right. Next. Fed, Tom's got some bad news for you guys. Anytime we have bad news, we have to make sure Tom delivers it. Apparently the Fed's going to raise rates.

Okay. So if you were thinking about buying a house, Brandon, and you blame everything on boomers, this is your chance to go buy something because rates are about to go up according to Tom. All these boomers. have decided to raise rates on you folks. Blame the boomers, right? Last of the boomers speaking now.

That's right. He's going to drop the bad news for you guys. And then to all our friends in Seamy Valley, I still live right next to Seamy Valley, 1-18 Freeway. All the cops used to retire in Seamy Valley. It's one of the safest places to live in L.A. because your neighbors are, odds are. They were cops.

It was a great way to go to the beach because you would go 118 Freeway. I just love that entire area. I used to go to a church called Shepherd of the Hill. with Dudley Rutherford, which a lot of people from Seamy Valley would come. 1,700 acres. Only, I think, 5% as of last night is contained. 44,000 people have been asked to be evacuated. Our prayers are with you who are living in Seamy Valley.

I love that area, and we're hoping. I got a lot of friends I was texting this morning. I hope everybody's going to be okay, and nothing will happen to your homes, but those fires are not looking good. Hopefully everything will end up working itself out. Karen Bass is heading to Ghana to see if she can bring Yeah, she's going to want to help out.

And then maybe if we get a chance, we'll have some stories about airlines. With that being said, I want to remind you guys that the VALC conference we do once year, Rob, if you want to, for those guys that are small business owners and you want to find how to compete in a market like this, don't go about it yourself. Being a community with other people, they can share with you what they're doing. We grew this thing from first event being 440 people to last year, nearly 8,000 people. This year, we're expecting 12,000 people at MGM Grand Arena. Rob, I don't know if they've given you the video or not.

If you do have it, if you want to play the clip, go for it. And it's a great opportunity for all of us to get together in one place where we talk about business, family. There's no walking on eggs shows. We'll talk about every single thing at one event. Go ahead, Rob. Successful business people speak the language others. It's like when I lived in Germany at age 10 and a month late I'm speaking in German because

I immersed myself in a community of Germans, I speak that language. The same applies for business. So studies have shown that 65% of people that immerse themselves, up in a new language, completely feel like a different person on the other side. So what does it mean? You go to a business conference. You're at the VAL Conference. 12,000 other people around you for four days. We're speaking a language that we're fluent in, in business, how we walk into room, how we negotiate a deal, how we hire somebody, how we raise capital, how we come up with a new strategy, the more you're around that you all of a sudden start speaking that language fluently.

So when you go back home, you do deals in a different way. You handle your business in a different way. If you want to get fluent, and speak in a business language, once year we host a conference called the Vault Conference. This year for the first time, we're doing it at the MGM Grand Arena on Las Vegas, where we go through this 296-page manual with 12,000 people over four days in one room. If you haven't yet registered, click on a link above or below. Bring your spouse, bring your partner, bring your peers. Let's spend four days to get out Las Vegas, August 31st through September 3rd. Looking forward to seeing you there. Go to Vault 2026.com, get your ticket again. Vault 226.com. Get your ticket. I'll wait to see you

and your family at the Vault Conference together. Having said that, let's get right into it. I say we start off with a business story. And the business story I want to start off with is OpenAI and Anthropics. Something quietly legendary happened yesterday in business. Everybody's, we're going to get into the political store, but everybody was paying attention to this one headline 22 hours ago. Open AI co-founder, Andresge Carpathie. joints, anthropic. Wait, what? Yes.

Didn't we just get the news that Elon Musk was soon, you know, opened the AI and they dropped the case because it was too late to be filed? Yes. Wasn't that like a timing thing where, hey, maybe Sam Altman got himself a little bit of a victory? No, let me read this to you. Andre Carpati, known as one of the best AI researchers in the world and a founding member of Open AI, announced Tuesday that he's joining AI lap Anthropic.

That's like going from the Yankees to the Red Sox. That's like going from the Dodgers to the Yankees. Yankees, which is actually a good move if you do that. That's like going from, you know, the Lakers to the Clippers. You don't join the Clippers. You don't join a different team. But they're leaving anthropic, leaving and going to Anthroping, and why this matters, the higher is a major coup for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent.

And another sign the company is emerging as a magnet for some of the industry's most respected technical minds. Driving the newest Carpathie will start next week at Anthropics pre-training program, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core, knowledge, capabilities, and according to Anthropic, Carpathie will help launch a new team, focus on using cloud itself to accelerate pre-training research and increasing important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. I think the next few years at the frontier and LLM will be especially formative.

I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. Tom, why is it such a big deal? It's a big deal because he and Sam Altman are going back and forth. I mean, he tried to lead before, left for a little while, tried to do his own thing. this, but he was always assumed to be out there kind of in Sam Altman's orbit. You know, you started here and everything. And now he just says, you know what? I'm going to Anthropic. And you have to remember, Anthropic was started, you know, Dario left and went in the name of safety. He said, I think safety is more important. I think there should be safe AI. I think we need to

put guardrails around it. I think we need to do these things. And he was claiming that Sam and Open AI were just going too fast and not doing it. Well, uh, car. The fact felt largely the same way. And now he comes up, he's going there. And this is the guy who's taught, like, the first. There's an interesting step, Pat. He gets permission to teach this course on neural networks at Stanford. And he got his PhD at Stanford.

The first time he teaches that they rounded up like 150 curious students. You ready for this? Two years later, there's a waiting list. And every time the course was offered, there's 750 students. want to get into it. So this guy has been seen at Stanford and in Silicon Valley as this neural network genius. And now he is on the eve of IPO season. He is now at Anthropic with Dariomedi. This is a big deal. Look, what do you think about this story? It's really interesting you bring up his point about safety. I didn't know that Carpathie was aligned that way

because Carpathie put out on X, three, four months ago, a study that he had conducted that looked at the risk to existing U.S. jobs by sector, by the, I think there's 192 job classifications or something, in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And he went by jobs category across the entire U.S. economy and rated each individual job category with the risk, of job loss from AI over the next several years. And what he found was shocking,

which was that roughly 26 million jobs in America are at between very high or extremely high risk of being disintermediated by AI. He put this out, it's a fascinating chart because it just shows each area as a square and then green is very low risk. So there it is right there. That's the, that's part of it. That's part of it there, right?

So you can see the areas. So red is bad, green is good. Red is bad, green is good. And you can see it there. And so this genius, this guy that's worried about safety, which to your point, Pat, I think, is really interesting going from to the more safety or the, however you want to term it, focused AI model. This is something he put out three months ago, which is, I mean, look at it. accountants gone lawyers gone

market researchers gone software developers gone general office clerks gone I mean it is 26 I mean but if you keep going some of these jobs you just said stuff that maybe we would say okay that makes sense though Luke

those are going to be gone bookkeeping okay gone receptionist okay yep and then but you go on the right side software developers gone gone gone computer what is that say on the bottom computer I can't see the additional sort of

yeah it's Let's just say computer signs. Lawyers. Lawyers isn't the red. Lawyers are gone. Wow. Project managers, human resources, accountants, purchasing. Which ones are green? Let's focus on the greening. Home health, hand laborers, food and service beverage, cooks, waiters, electricians, you know, right there in the middle. Construction laborers, carpenter, general maintenance, janitors, child care.

you know, it's a fascinating chart because you have one of the, you know, the best geniuses in AI three months ago saying what China was to blue collar workers 25 years ago, AI is going to be to white collar workers in the next five years. So if I'm, I just came from the eighth grade graduation, right, this morning. And my niece is graduating as well, high school. She's valedictorian. She's going to very good school. So these kids are doing everything that they're told to do. When they see this, Like Steve Wozniak is given a commencement speech. I don't know if you guys saw this or not. So we saw what Eric Schmidt got with Google. We saw what the other lady got when she spoke at University of Central Florida. Bood hardcore. Here's what Wozniak said.

Go ahead, Rob. We'll have AI. Y'all have AI. Actual intelligence. Now watch what he says. Which is very funny what he says. My entire life in the technical world, I've been following people that were trying to figure out how to make a brain. software, hardware, synapse chips.

And I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain. Takes nine months. It's funny, right? You all have a promising message, right? He gave a message that is at least giving kids some confidence. How do you feel? If I'm a 19-year-old, 22-year-old, coming out of high school, going to college, I got a lot of worries.

The kids are talking to each other. What do you tell them? I don't know. I mean, I've got three boys, 25, 23, and 20. And we have this conversation with them a lot because the world is changing so far. There are kids graduating high school today that are going to go and they've played by all the right rules. And the world's going to be different in, forget about four years. It's going to be different in two years at the pace at which AI is moving.

So I don't know what, I think what you have to do is, and I know what we've done with our boys, which is be honest with them, communicate, and then just talk about. critical thinking, like, like Wozniak says, learn how to think, think critically, have character, you know, as I felt. What skills are they taking? What skills are your three boys going and what are you majoring in? So the oldest one's already out of college. He's working in audit analytics at a major U.S. Bank. And he's actually working on AI governance. His mother and I are, he's going to be taking a online course through MIT that anyone can take, that you have to, you know, there's a tuition associated with it, but it's around AI because he sees,

he's basically, he sees the dragon common, and, you know, we've taught them. And when you see the dragon, you don't run from the dragon, you run at the dragon. Middle one is actually going into funeral services, very AI proof. Sales or? He's, his, his longtime girlfriend, his family, her family owns funeral home. And so he's been working there. And so he actually likes the business, and it's a great business. So he's moving there, and the youngest one's doing cybersecurity,

which we specifically talked about. Let's find something where there is, you can leverage it, where you're not going to be in a red square. Luke, what's that MIT course? And is that available for everybody? It's available for everybody. I'd have to ask my wife. I know she's watching.

Is it an online type? It's an online type of class. Anybody can take it. Would you mind texting your wife and see if she can respond back, so maybe by the end of it we can share with the audience? Richard, your thoughts on this? I'm actually quite positive. We do know that in recent, well, actually decades,

there's been this tendency to, for companies, you know, to merge and companies get bigger, and staffing in many big companies has become somewhat bloated. I mean, there was, David Graber wrote this book, Bullshit Jobs and apologize for the language. which has the book title. And the argument is that actually a lot of these jobs are sort of redundant and that has become part of the sort of European-American,

you know, industrialized country, business, modus operandi. And I think these jobs are clearly now endangered. But at the same time, AI gives a lot of people new opportunity. and the most important area, which I think is very important for economic growth, is not going to suffer. What is that? And I think that's right up your alley and all the things you're doing, Pat. Entrepreneurs, you know, owners of small firms, small firms, micro-business, entrepreneurs have now more opportunities. And essentially what, you know, I would, you know, as a professor also at uni, what I'm telling the young generation is you've got to, you know, if you so far you haven't thought about being an entrepreneur, you should think about it now.

And it's an exciting thing. And I try to, you know, give some examples. And essentially think of ways to set up a new business, offer new goods and services. and there's just so many areas because of the changes and they're going to be big changes it's really a fantastic opportunity for small firms now one important bottleneck exists and that is

small firms and that's very well known I mean they are the biggest employer and that's why I'm not really worried that much about the overall economy and I think if things go well and done well and the policies the right policies adopted then we can actually see literally higher economic growth as a result of this

and also more job creation because it's not the big firms that are the big employer. 60% of jobs are with these small and medium-sized enterprises and in many ways they're less effective because they're usually lean and they'd like to hire more people but they can't because. So what is the restriction here? What is the limiting factor

that has been limiting growth of small firms because they're the ones that deliver productivity and job creation and therefore really the most important players in the economy. It's just because they're small, we tend to ignore them. It's not famous big names, right? There's a totally unknown, tiny local players. But they could be exporters globally, as we see in Germany, for example. Many of the family-owned small firms are global exporters.

Well, the limiting factor is finance. Most small firms are in the position where they already have a lot of good ideas. great ideas to expand, but the money is the limiting factor. And, I mean, there's a lot of research being done on this. Small firms are mostly held back by the lack of funding from their main source of external funding. Of course, there's internal funding, and that's the single most important source for everyone, is their retained earnings and also family and friends. But for external funding, small firms, and we're talking about these micro-business, very small firms,

they're not really able to access, you know, capital markets. The way the bigger guys do. Even venture capital. I mean, it's all much bigger. So they get money, external money, from banks. And there is one principle. And we did a study with my collaborator on the U.S. over 20 years in total, because there used to be, you know, more banks.

In total, it's more than 10,000 banks that we followed for 20 years. Of course, during that time, many also merged. And we classified them into different size categories. And what we found is a very, very strong message. The bigger a bank is, the less it's interested in... Small businesses. In lending to small firms. And of course, that makes perfect sense.

And in many ways you can't blame the banks. And so the banks that lend most to small firms are the small banks. And it's really the smallest category is the biggest lender to small firms. the second smallest category of banks is the second biggest lender. And so it goes on until you come to the biggest banks and they're the smallest, you know, they have the lowest propensity to lend to small firms. Now what we also found over time, over these 20 years,

is that, because of quite naturally, banks also grow. And as they grow and move into a new size category, they also lend less to small firms. That alone, that alone, nothing else, you know, considering. is a reason why we should always create new banks. And the government should make it easy, the regulators should make it easy, to always have new startup banks, small banks,

because banks merge and get bigger and grow. And then the lowest category, of small categories, small firms, already not interesting for them. And we've had this problem in the past 15 years in the US and in Europe very strongly that there's been a wave of mergers, the number of banks is declined by thousands, by thousands.

And it's interesting what you said, though. Here's the part on the correlation, because when you said 60% of the jobs are small business owners, you're the one that shared with me and taught me the, you know, we had 14,000. We talked about it the last couple of years. And so you got me thinking with this. But do you know what else has been declining, which is a concern, is the same way bigger banks are picking up the smaller banks or the banks that are screwing up and going out of business so Chase keeps getting bigger?

Yeah. You know, you said 60% of jobs. are created by small business owners, right? We've always thought about this number. This is the, so 60% of total employment is with small and medium-sized enterprises. Do you know what that number is today? That used to be the case in the 70s and the 80s.

Yeah, is it going down? It's at 45% today. Yeah, yeah, which is unhealthy. It's not good. There is an opportunity for the younger entrepreneurs to do something with that, but this kind of leads me into the next thing, okay? And again, as we're having this conversation,

Tom, I'm going to come to you with this year. Facebook layoffs, I don't know what page that story on, but this is a very, very interesting story. Rob, if you have what page the story is, so Facebook is laying off a bunch of people today. But guess what they announced to their employees? If you just tell me the page, I'll go to it. The meta layoffs are addendum page seven. I see it. Perfect. So Facebook is laying off 8,000 employees today amid AI transformation, but guess what they're telling their employees? Don't come to work today. What do you mean? No, no, while we're doing, just work from home today.

Don't come to work today. Why don't I need to come to work today? Well, here's why. For the last month, employees that Meta have been on the edge. April, they were told that 8,000 of them were 10% of the workforce will be laid off on May 20th. May 20th is here. As Meta made itself, remade itself for the artificial intelligence age, on Monday, they learned another 7,000 would be reassigned to new AI initiatives. The act started to fall in Singapore, where at 4 a.m. local time, Wednesday.

emails went out to workers who were being laid off. Employees in Britain, U.S. and elsewhere will be notified Wednesday morning in their respective time zone. Mehta's offices were set to be mostly empty on Wednesday after Janelle Gale, the company's head of human resources, told employees this week that they should work from home on the office walls. Some workers had hung up flyers sharing a petition to stop Meadows new program to track their data for AI training.

Eight employees said some workers scavenged the office for first. free snacks and laptop chargers on Monday in case they no longer had jobs by the end of the weeks at the employees who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, the turmoil of meta which owns Facebook and Instagram WhatsApp offers an up close of layoffs in the AI age last week. The networking giant Cisco said it would eliminate 4,000 jobs that has shifted more resources to AI. Microsoft Block, Coinbase recently announced layoffs or buyouts because of the powerful technology. So Tom, we're seeing this. Going into companies like meta, massive company, multi-trillionado company, how important of a story is this?

I think it's very important. We covered this about a month, month and a half ago. I remember one of the things that I had done research and found out was that there was a lot of people, the first layoff that they were announcing. They announced in January 2026. And in that January 26 announcement, what was hidden the fact that there was 1,500, then another 700, then another 1,000, that were all supposedly related to reality. Labs. Now, what is Reality Labs? That is the name that Facebook gave to the group that was building Metaverse. So in other words, they have been delaying, and the people that were there put the comments on, by way, Reddit suddenly becomes the conscious of Facebook because everything can go out there and people have burner accounts on Reddit and whatnot. You found out that a reality labs that was formerly, what would they call that, Oculus, they were going to put on the goggles

and all that. So that was bloat. So what I'm getting to is there was a lot of bloat. that was delayed layoffs that Facebook did early in the year that Wall Street loves. Wall Street loves it when you take a one-time charge, and it's not long-term, because now you've reduced operating expenses as long as you're showing growth. Now your P.E.'s up. Life is good. Good things are happening. But what this is signaling is a bigger contraction. And the big statement inside of the Facebook announcement that I saw, 7,000 people internally being reassigned to AI initiatives from whatever they were working on.

And I was trying to find on Reddit and other places how much of that was Reality Labs. And the answer is a good amount of it is, but I didn't find any like hard figures. So if you were working on various things, smart engineers are being put on the product that they think needs more smart engineers, which is AI, which I thought was very, very interesting how this happened. And to give you the scope of AI and maybe get right back, kind of reflect on banking, we just talked about, Pat. You want some very interesting investment stories. So this is related to it. In Q1, 2026, this was the largest global VC investment period of all time. $331 billion globally venture-funded investment.

Now, did that go into small companies that are there, people with a hoodie trying to get someone in there? Nope. 50% of it went into four companies. Open AI, Anthropic, XAI, and Waymo. 50% of four companies. 50% of it. Wow. And then 80% of the total went into AI and 65% of the 80% or 50% of the total was only Open AI Anthropic XAI and Waymo. But wait a minute, who's got all that money? That's a ton of money. You know, this used to be that when you reach this way, you would hear about fidelity, T-Roe Price and Black Rock, all who have venture arms, and they would jump into things like WeWork. They would jump into things like late stage Uber before Uber went public.

That's what the money coming from. You know where this money came from? Check this out. It came from the following. SoftBank put $30 billion in 2026 into OpenAI. That's Japan. Middle East and Gulf states, check this out. MGX, that's the UAE's version of PIF, which is Saudi's.

public investment fund, right? So MGX was UAE, took the lead. They're the lead in OpenAI's $122 billion round. And they also invested in, remember, put two chips on two companies, Anthropics 30 billion Series G that just happened, and then Humane, PIF, put $3 billion into XAI, and then, not to be outdone, you know who led Anthropics Series G? Singapore, GIC and Temasek. These are giant sovereign funds that are now putting the money in because the dollars are so big. You don't go down, you don't go to Sequoia. You don't go to benchmark. You don't go to the usual suspects there, Kleiner Perkins.

You are now having to go right past the big U.S. banks that used to do these things, and I named them, you know, people like TROPrice, Fidelity, all have big CBC corporate venture capital groups. But look at the amount of this money coming from there into AI internationally. And then you look at 7,000 people at Facebook, get shifted over to AI. They get rid of the bloat that they had with the old metaverse. And boom, then 10,000 people are out there looking for jobs. It's all happening. And the question is, you know, Carpathie, who is joining Anthropic now on pre-training, pre-training is important.

That's step one. That's where you somehow assimilate huge, massive stacks of data and let the AI go digest it like food. And that's what he's going to work on is pre-training. And so the question is, do you have Anthropic now having to go scale to meet it? And something you said about the alignment, are they really aligned on safety, or did they just go hire the scaling guy in advance of the IPO? And now they've got to go jumping into pre-training because they've joined the scaling race. Luke, thoughts.

It's a lot there with Facebook, with the money going into 330 billion, 50% going to four companies. It's fascinating on number of levels. Number one, who has to play now, right? So who has to play? It's these big sovereign wealth funds. Then you get into, okay, we're in this race with China. Are we going to be able to firewall technology historically? It's a little trickier if it's not in our borders.

Is this foreign-owned infrastructure or foreign investment? investment. We don't know. Number two, you know, it ties into the war. What happens when, you know, the biggest hyperscaler infrastructure was in the UAE? They, Iran's drones were targeted at very specific parts of that infrastructure. Where is it at? From a financing standpoint, the longer this war drags on, the more, you know, the Saudis ran a, they're running a nearly, I believe, 20% budget deficit. They've spent three quarters of their projected deficit for the year in the first quarter. So they are going to blow, so they're going to need to go out and borrow money just to finance this. So, or are they going to sell other assets to make sure they make,

that's, that has market implications. That ultimately puts interest rates up, which we're seeing go across the world. I think it's, it's all, it also points to, you know, to Richard's point, it's, it, it, it, to the extent there is a disruption at a, at a meta. I mean, this sounds very familiar to, I think any American engineer listening to this where over the last 20 years, they, they, they, they trained their replacement over in a, in a, in a low-cost country, and then we're let go. It's to the extent that the meta is almost doing this with an AI where people are training the model internally and then being let go. And then, you know, like I said, with richard's point, it ultimately is an opportunity for entrepreneurship. If you can use the AI well as an

entrepreneur, you can compete in the same way that iTunes and distributed music, if you will, changed and broke the monopoly of the record companies and the, and you know, now it comes down to be successful in the music business. I mean, there's a lot more musician. There's a lot more choice, but you were not beholden to the record companies, to getting radio air time, to the, to the promotional companies. If you can play and you can work, you've got a shot. And so that's, you know, there's a whole slew of, you know, from the very good of, hey, if you can play, you've got a shot. So if you're a great thinker and you use AI, well, you can take on any company, no matter their market cap from anywhere in the world. There's, you know, some, you know,

probably some poor kids sitting in India today that's an absolute genius and working in a garage, living at home, and is going to come up with the next big thing in the next three years. And he's not going to have graduated from MIT or Stanford or any of these places. AI can do that. And the flip side of it is this disruption side at the other end of the spectrum of companies have data. Corporate America, maybe the biggest underappreciated asset in America is all these companies' data. told that, for example, Procter & Gamble holds the value of their data at basically zero on their balance sheet. There's no explicit is what I've been told. And if that's the case, think about

what's the actual monetary value of Procter & Gamble's data. It's immeasurable. And so if they can use that data, use AI, wow, A, it's great for corporate America. And B, the better they can use it the more efficient they can be great for corporate America, but more efficient means doing more with less. And usually doing more with less in the corporate world is doing more earnings with less people. Richard. Yeah, so the threat is clearly, you know, to the big companies are threatened by AI and the established players, exactly as Luke explained. And that's also where we have the more bloated employment practices because, you know, inside companies, it's politics, it's hierarchies, people building little empires, they're hiring their team and

there's competition inside companies between groups and players. And you get all these games and, you know, fun and games. But small firms cannot afford any of that. Small firms, micro-businesses, they're extremely lean structures. And it boils down to entrepreneurs, their ideas, their creativity and their entrepreneurial energy, flexibility, speed, and quick decisions, intuition, understanding, and having a hunch that, oh, this could now become a thing and actually going for it.

Now, this is something, this entrepreneurial spirit, and I think at Volt, you know, there would be a lot of, you know, input and discussions of things like that, and that are relevant there. That's something AI has not figured out yet, and that they haven't been able to train AI to do. So entrepreneurs are safe. In fact, is the other way around. Entrepreneurs now get more opportunities and they're getting a big boost if they use this. And I think they will because, you know, that's the whole point. And small firms, people are more flexible and they are able to think outside the box. But the funding thing is a limit. So I think actually we should argue. And

interestingly, you know, we have at the end of the week a new Fed chair sworn. in. And so Kevin Walsh has actually said that he believes productivity is going to go up thanks to AI. And that has implications for monetary policy. And he's going to run monetary policy with that in mind. Well, and I'm, you know, I mean, this is a message to him really and to his people. There's some good people at the Fed. For example, Mickey Bowman, who's the vice chair, she actually, you know, is a great reporter of small banks, local banks, community banks. That's her thing. Well, so what are the implications for monetary policy of AI?

It is this point that we now have an additional reason, bigger reason than ever before, to have a new drive where we say, hey, this is a bit like in the first half or middle part of the 19th century where America was an emerging market economy, and was growing really fast, you know, double-digit growth. That was the United States, because it was all pioneering new things and also new technology and entrepreneurship.

And at that time, it was so much easier to establish banks to fund this because we need the funding. And nobody's figured out anything better and more efficient than this decentralized mechanism for decentralized local decision-making, which is having many local banks. And, you know, we discussed China when the Chinese, Deng Xiaoping had this explained in Japan to him and he got it very quickly and he moved from central banking, central planning, one bank, Soviet system to the decentralized model that

the Asian high growth economy is actually adopted from Germany and originally Prussia, which used to be the first high growth economy even earlier and they had many, many small local banks because it's important. It is actually principal that the Prussian army introduced. you know, the officer in the field has to have decision-making power. That was the idea of the Prussian king, and he put it in the laws. It was even in the Prussian constitution

and the laws concerning the army. Whereas Britain, and then later United States in the Second World War, they used the old, which is actually the central planning idea, that the officer gets instructions, not just what to do,

but also how to do it. And that's the most frustrating thing, because in the fog of war, things change very quickly. But you have orders to do this, which doesn't make any sense, right? And this is how you become very ineffective. And, you know, there's studies, military studies, on the First World War. Dumbled all sorts of international researchers looking at the German army and the British Army,

and the German army was much more effective. And the same in the Second World War, American Army and German Army. And again, the German army was much more effective with, I mean, usually outnumbered, you know, 10 to 1 or even more, you know, on the Eastern Front, you know, 50 or 100 to 1, and extremely effective, you know, doesn't mean you have to win the war because, of course, you can be so outnumbered, but that's established. And why was that? Because of this old Prussian principle that the officer in the field had decision-making power. Now, for this to work, and the Prussians understood this, and later Germany understood this very well, you have to train people. So education

is very important because they have to be able to make these decisions but you want to decentralize this and in the economy this is reflected by a structure of many many small firms and they get their money from banks and this is what works and it's very well established and so having you know like China

moving to 5,000 banks with you know all these local branches and then essentially millions of local loan offices receiving hundreds of millions of applications from small firms. And they are trained to do this. They select the most effective, most promising applications. And when a bank lends, this is the other important thing, while this is directly linked to monetary policy, when a bank gives a loan, it's actually money creation.

People tend to forget this because the textbooks and the mainstream media still talks about banks as intermediaries. They gather deposits and they lend this money, which is not true, actually. And what I've empirically shown with my empirical test, you know, if you Google can banks individually create money out of nothing, you know, get the paper as it's published in a highly ranked finance journal or the other one lost entry in economics, you find the proof that banks, when a bank gives a loan, it's allowed by our system, this is the system,

has been around for centuries, to create new money. So the loan money that a company gets is actually newly created money that's added to the money supply and that has macroeconomic consequences. So if banks mostly lend for productive business investment

to entrepreneurs, small firms, that's when you get maximum growth. The question is with the regulation. They need to deregulate to open it up. Exactly. Right now it's still too hard. That's the restriction. Well, let's see if they're going to do that or not

because the market needs it. Every time, like even we talked about the last time with the country, quantitative easing when money went in money went to the rich money went to the big companies money want to buybacks money want to bail out and it didn't go to the people that needed it so we need to and i do the president needs to see this i think they're aware of this and hopefully something changes about it but i do want to go to the next story i do want to go to the next story because we have i have 16 more stories to go at this pace we're only hitting three stories so next one

i'm going to go to is with the primaries yesterday the biggest primary race ever 32 to 34 million put into the Thomas Massey race against Galrain, which he was projected to, I mean, Massey had a massive lead, and then all of a sudden kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller. More money was being put into it. And next thing, you know, news comes out. It's even, thank you. Then it went to, well, he's got a lead. Then he went to.

Well, no, he lost. And then, you know, so the Trump, the biggest tweet yesterday that the president put, because everybody said, well, because of the economy, because of affordability, because of Iran, because of the war, because of interest rates, because of all this stuff, there is no way a Trump endorsement has the same weight anymore. And guess what he tweeted? This is it. 625 a.m. 37 and 0. Anybody he endorsed, 1. Pennsylvania, 10 and 0. Alabama, 6 and 0. Kentucky 6 and 0. Oregon 1 and 0. Idaho 5 and 0. Georgia 9 and 0. And there's a lot of people that are not happy about this. There's a lot of people that are hoping his endorsement no longer carries weight,

but it does. So Massey yesterday, he lost to the Navy SEAL, Galrain. And here's what Massey had to say in his speech last. And I want to get your thoughts on why do you think this happened? Go ahead. I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede. And it took a while to find Ed Galrine in Tel Aviv. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids. And I want to give back to the community. Ooh. Then it's the VIII. of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setter.

An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. I did get the call for you. I have called and conceded the race. We've been honorable the whole time, and we're going to stay that way. Okay, and he kept goodness.

Tom, why do you think Massey lost last night? Massey lost for one reason. The power of influence in the political races out there on the Republican side still rests with Donald Trump. You've got your issues, you've got places out there, but Trump went out and said, that's not my guy anymore, that's my guy. And you have these folks up there that are trying to play the money game, do the spending game. And here you had this incredible spend, but the guy who still is carrying the influence with, the American voter on the Republican side is Donald J. Trump.

And he went sideways on Trump, and Trump got behind the opponent. And by the way, you know, you could sit there and ask yourself, not just us, well, let's go to a Starbucks in the middle of the district and ask people, what do you really know about Gowleron? And people were like, well, there's a lot of money floating around, but they didn't know. He's a farmer was a Navy SEAL. They know, and then you say, okay, that's good. At least you know his name.

You know, he's a farmer Navy SEAL. But nobody really knew him. But when Trump comes out and says, I'm not with this guy, I'm tired of it. I'm over here. Guess what? That just showed everybody where the weight was. I think it's that simple. By the way, what is this Trump talking about Massey?

Go forward, Rob. The Massey thing. He was a bad guy. He deserves some of us. Thank you very much, everybody. Wait. What a surprise me have to be. You can pause it right there.

Okay, look, why do you think? I, you know, what I will put the context with this as I don't, A, it's not my ballot, B, there's a lot of money in our elections, but I think it has a lot to do with money. I think it has a lot to do with money. It's America. Do you think it's money or do you think it's endorsement? Because Jeb Bush had $140 million and Trump beat him on day one. So we can say money.

Trump didn't have anything to do on day one with money. Nobody in 2015 when he ran. And then there was another guy. If you remember Scott Walker, do you remember the name Scott Walker? He disappeared. He was supposed to be our president. I don't know if you remember that or not. Scott Walker was like the guy.

You know, Hillary Clinton had all the money. You know, Kamala Harris had all the money. So is it really all the money? Because money doesn't seem to help Hillary, didn't help Kamala, didn't help Scott Walker, didn't help Jeff Bush. but how is it that in this case you think it's just money? I would, I mean, I would say it's, I mean, clearly his, his, I'm not saying his, his, his, Trump's endorsement clearly still means a lot.

Clearly, you can't argue that with, with the races. You know, you look at, what was it? He won by, it was, I think, a total of 90,000 votes, was it? He won by 7,000 votes, something like that. You know, 32 million bucks to swing 7,000 votes, it's a lot. I mean, the fact is it's the single biggest, spend in a congressional election. That is a lot of money. Indeed. And I think, you know, if centralization works everywhere else, there's spending a lot of money works everywhere else,

I don't think you can discount it. But the reality of it is, why doesn't he get more money? He can get more money. Who's that? Massey. He's got a lot of billion of friends that are on the side. I even think he had a guy named Jeff Yass, who is a $65 billion net worth guy, who is part of a lot of pro-Israel programs. He gave Massey a million dollars. He got some money. It's not like he couldn't get more money. Why doesn't he get more money?

Yeah. Good question. I don't know. I think it has to do with the age composition of the voters. That's actually a very good point. If you want to pull that up, Rob, because the audience needs to see this. The older boomers voted for him, and the only age category that Galeraine won was the older I'll pull this up while you're going. Precisely.

So it is only the older voters. Now, who are they? And why does it make a difference? I mean, obviously, you could do further analysis on their political sort of leanings and so on. But I think the single most important correlating factor is their attention to particular media, namely the mainstream media. So the oldest age group is the one that is most influenced by mainstream media. And that, I think, was a big factor.

And I think it was also, you know, about foreign policy, while the younger groups were unhappy with Trump's endorsement and were actually not going for Trump's endorsed candidate. And we're going for Massey because of his stance of not taking money from, you know, foreign influence groups and so on. And they like that. But that's basically spread in social media. and in the more recent, the new media. So I think that's the link. It's the media and the link to the age group. And as Luke is saying, you know,

it's actually the gap wasn't that huge. So over time, what is going to happen is clear. And, you know, so next time round, it could just by the age dynamics could look very different as the younger groups, of course, the other today younger, move forward and become more dominant. Yeah, but also, also the other part is when I was younger, I was probably also a socialist.

I was probably also rich people are bad because my mother was a communist. That is impossible. Probably not. I was never a socialist, but my mother was a communist. So for me, we probably didn't like rich people. And so, you know, the saying, you know, when you're younger and you don't vote Democrat, you know, you don't have a hard one. When you're older and you vote Democrat, you don't have a brain, right? You know, kind of, you've heard that saying before.

So the question becomes when you look at this, 65 and up, he won the 45 to 64, Massey won, and then the 30 to 34 Massey won, 18 to 29, Massey one, thank you. Massey one, when you look at something like this, but it goes to the following, because Massey was a fan favorite by a lot of people. And then to me, I think something happened, and here's what I think happened with Massey. Massey was a fan favorite. Massey was a guy that maybe, you know, three, four, four, five years ago, you're like, this guy's special. COVID, the stuff that he was doing, the positions

that he was taking, you're like, okay, we like this guy. And then all of a sudden, something got in his ear, somebody, I have a speculation on who I think it is, but somebody got in his ear that said, I think you're bigger than Trump. I think you can go against Trump. I think you can be Trump. Tell you, you know what, you know, the big, beautiful bill voting against it, migration, voting against it. Then all of a sudden, he's voting against Trump and he's siding with Democrats. I I mean, do you realize who were the people that were most devastated last night? A lot of Democrats. Roe kind of devastated.

A lot of liberals coming out. I said, I can't believe this guy lost. And this is where it kind of takes me, and I want to go a little bit deeper into the story with these guys. And I'll ask you guys about the time. I'll come to you and then Richard, I'll come to you afterwards. Is if you think you're bigger than the establishment, then prove it. Because guess what Trump did in 2015? Trumping against the establishment.

Trump called out everybody in the establishment, and the establishment was who? The Bushes. He beat them single-handedly. Carl Rove, establishment. He beat them single-handedly. Fox News, they were not for Trump. They beat him single-handedly. Mainstream media.

He wasn't against them. He beat the mainstream media single-handedly. Every other story criticizing him about the Republican, they wanted Jeff Bush, they wanted Ted Cruz, they wanted all these establishment guys. He beat him. based on what? Based on the policies that he went with, which is what? Border, migration, crime, NATO, China, that's what he went on.

Okay. The market said, listen, I like what this guy has to say, let's give him a shot. He won. So Massey goes up there. If I were to ask you right now, what was Massey's biggest top three points? What did Massey run on? If you were, Tom, what did Massey run on? What are the top three things Massey run on?

Did you follow it closely? I can't say closely, but, I think a key point is what you said about, you know, when he voted against these bills. But stay on this for a second. I want you to stay on this. What did Massey run on? What were Massey? Because it's very, very important.

They're not taking foreign money. I think that certainly came up. So that's one. What else? Anti-war, right? Anti-war, right? Okay, so what else? Epstein is one.

We have to put Epstein. He voted against a big, he did that. He voted against a big, beautiful bill, right? Multiple times he voted against the president on the ideas that he had. but a bigger one was mainly Israel. There's an article that came out, Rob, that said Israel divided the Republican Party. I don't know if you've seen that thing that Israel divided. You know what I think America is saying?

I think America is kind of saying, look, guys, of course, everybody, like Trump said something the other day, everybody spies on everybody when he's meeting with G. We spy on China, they spy on us. Everybody is using their intel to steal from everybody. Everybody at this level is doing. You don't think Israel is using Epstein to get intel on American politicians and world politicians. You're naive if you don't believe that. I fully believe that.

I had three-hour conversation with his brother. Fully believe they were a part of that. But you don't think we do that? You don't think others do that? So I think America's finally come up and they say, listen, man, if everything was about Israel, and if that's an issue that America is fully on, Trump would have lost yesterday, 0 to 39. If America was like, well, Thomas Massey and all these guys that everything they're blaming Israel, Israel, Israel,

money coming from the outside, A-PAC, Adelson, which Adelson gave a lot of money. We know who Mariam Aidan. Well, these are the people that are running the president. Guess what America said? Yeah, you guys are famous on Twitter. You guys are big podcasters. This is not how America feels.

39-0, because if you truly have a message that you want to disrupt the establishment, the market would have sided with you. And they didn't last night. It was a devastating loss last night. It was a massive victory for the president last night. And I know a lot of people are out there saying, well, you know this, you know that, you know this.

Because sometimes like, I remember DeSantis. I'll compare DeSantis to Massey in a very weird way. Okay. I live in Florida because I love DeSantis. I think he's a great governor, okay? Phenomenal governor, and you're always welcome to come here from Cleveland. You love us here. Okay, he's a phenomenal governor.

governor, right? Okay. But I was against him when he ran against the president and he never called him. I was against him. I'm like, hey, the guy helped you when I was against it. So somebody in Massey's ear and DeSantis's ear said, hey, you can beat him. You can beat him. He's not right. DeSantis believed it. Massey believed it. They both lost. So now what are you doing moving forward? Now, DeSantis has recovered from it. I don't know what Massey's going to do because Massey's now saying he's going to be running in 2028. But the market is telling you what direction they're going. The market is telling you what issues matter to us going into 27, 28. And they're watching. If you can't win the Congress, how to hell you're going to win presidency in 2028? So, very different. Yesterday was a very,

very big night. Of course, this will lead to midterms and different things that's coming on. But we'll see. I know a lot of people are not happy. I know a lot of people are happy. But it was a weird night last night. I think one issue is what you mentioned, this key example, the Big Beautiful Bill. So here we have this huge piece of legislation with so many different issues put together. And that was used quite cleverly, if I may say, by the advertising against Massey, picking something that a lot of Americans would agree on

in the Big Beautiful Bill and saying, oh, Massey, voted against that. Well, actually, he found some bad points in the Big Beautiful Bill that a lot of Americans also think is bad and that's why he thought we can't vote for it. And you see, so the issue is you can

actually mess things up and confuse people and confuse voters and really distort politics if you have this. I think we need a reform. I mean, one is looking at the money side of U.S. elections. That's been a longstanding issue in general. But the second

one is, and that's perhaps simpler to push through, to have a parcel law that says we need single-issue bills. Well, I would say, too, as much as the market and the electoral side clearly delivered a message. In the financial markets yesterday, it's interesting, the bond market delivered a message. U.S. 10-year treasury yields are up 70 basis points since this war started. They're breaking out to a very dangerous level. Japanese bond market, breaking.

UK bond market, breaking. And so there's at the same very debt, 30-year treasury yesterday, highest in 19 years. And so if we, clearly, the electoral, it's almost be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it, good and hard. The American public may get exactly, you know, 37 and O is a pro-war pro-spending agenda. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think it's a pro-war pro-spending agenda. And I'll tell you why I don't think that is.

You see, that's the thing the market says because we all have biases, right? I have it, you have it, you have it, we all have it. It's okay. That's okay. And we'll debate at them, we'll hash it out. And then the audience gets to decide at the end and say, you know what, Luke, you're full of shit.

Pat, you don't know what you're talking about. Whatever Trump says you're going to side with him. You know what, Richard, you don't know what you're. Okay, that's fair. This is why when you put the camera on, we get that. But last night, while this is going on, guess what Senate voted for? We can say pro-war all we want.

Trump didn't win the Senate last night because there was a Senate, War resolution last night. Let me see what page this is on. If you tell me, Rob, what page that is on. Seven times they voted no last night. Number eight, they vote, yes. Massive.

Put the president in handcuffed. This is massive. Because yesterday, the people who got voted to become senators voted to not allow the president to do what he wants to do with the war. So I don't think America is a pro-war. I don't think that's the argument that was made. So yesterday, U.S. Senate. Senate advances Iran war power resolution. Historic first. The Senate voted 50 to 47 on Tuesday

to advance war power resolution requiring Trump to end military operation in Iran and obtain congressional authorization. This was the eight attempt since the war began February 28 and the first to succeed. And a decisive flip, Bill Cassidy, Republican Louisiana, who recently lost, who had voted no on all prior times switched after Louisiana primary loss, removed political leverage over, him. The war has now run 81 days, 21 days past the 60-day war powers act of legal deadlines. So Tom, why is this so important? What are they saying? Because, you know, it's very interesting here. There are sore loser laws that people are going to see subheads on today. And what the sore loser laws are, you remember when Lieberman ran as an independent in Connecticut

2006? The Democrats blew him up in the primary. They were pissed at him. And then he ran as independent and the people of Connecticut said, no, we still want you. Okay. Well, guess what? Massey is in a state that has what's called sore loser laws. You may not run in a special election or the general election and flip party and try to play games. Make sense, Pat? Well, guess what you have of Bill Cassidy? That is a BS sore loser vote. Seven times you voted. And remember, war powers is really misnamed. It's war limit powers resolution because you're limiting the powers of the president. And so if you vote in favor of war powers,

you're voting in favor of limiting the power of the president. So Cassidy, seven times he votes, yes. Give the man the power to complete the action of we've started. Don't hold them up. Give him the power to do that. And you freaking lose your primary, and it's like a sore loser. You come out, well, I lost, you lose.

I'm flipping over. So I'm going to vote in favor of war powers, which is war, no power. to Trump past a certain window of activity, 60 days or whatever it is. And that's why it's big. You know what it shows, Pat? It shows that Cassidy does not have a defined position in that vote. If you have a defined position on everything from oil exploration in the Gulf to the plight

of a small fish in a stream where there's going to be a hydro plant, you don't see people moving. You see people take a position and generally hold up. budgets, you see people move votes. Why? Different things can be in the budget. We make a different agreement. We different banking controls. Okay, I'll switch my vote.

But on a decided topic like this, you rarely see people switch. And this guy lost his primary and flipped his vote with a big F you to the president. And by the way, guess who sat out yesterday as well? Cornyn. The three Republicans didn't even vote. Cornyn is one of them. Who was Cornyn going up against? Paxton. Who got an endorsement yesterday?

Paxton got an endorsement yesterday from who? The president. So there's a lot of moving parts. So for me, like, you know, to say, well, the neo-cons are back in power again. And they're the ones in charge. And we're going back to the Republican Party, being a war party and all this other stuff. That messaging, you better believe it's going to be during the 27, 28, when the, what do you call it, presidential election comes around as well as the midterms. I think that is going to come up. I do think the president's going to take yesterday as a victory, but this Iran thing with the Senate-Iran war power resolution, that kind of puts them a little bit in the gridlock.

It's an interesting dichotomy, right? Because, yeah, 37-0, and at the same time, taking powers away on the Iran... I like that, though. But you know what I like about it? Yeah, that's how it's supposed to work a little bit, right? That's why I love America. Yeah.

That's why I love America. You know, it gives you the safety protection where it's like, well, listen, you may have won here, but you'll lost you. You may have lost here, but you win here, so it's okay. Let's, Trump may have lost 2020, but he's flipped three Supreme Court seats. If it doesn't flip those three Supreme Court seats, what happens when he was gone 2020? A lot of things could have changed. So as much as people are worried about what's going on, what I'm watching for is more the sport of politics.

Luke is, let me, and I'll come to you, what I'm watching for is what will be the main three to five issues in 2028 when people run for president. And I'm so curious to see what's going to resonate with who, Richard. I think it is the issue that Trump, as you mentioned earlier, won on, which is no foreign wars. And where he flipped, it seems. And I think, you know, I'm really with Luke on this. I think, you know, this was at the background, of course, of this primary with Massey and others. And this Senate vote is really, I mean, that's a process. It's not a final result.

is not passed. But even if it was passed, it would just require to get a Congress vote. But presently, would Congress actually turn down this proposal to make it a proper official war? You know, a lot of them are receiving funding. Massey was one of the few who was not receiving funding from Israel and APEC, you know. So actually, does that really make such a big difference? But I think the voter is watching this, and I think quite a lot have been disappointed by this,

you know, Trump flipping on one of his fundamental messages that they loved, you know, tackling the establishment, the warmongers, the military industrial complex, and stopping this use of tax money for these foreign wars that don't really benefit the U.S. I think this is going to come back. Yeah, and again, it's going to be, do you worry, more about APEC and Israel and BB's really running Trump or do you worry more about Iran

have a nuclear weapon controlling the Strait of Hormuz, controlling the cables that go through the state of Hormuz, you have to make a decision for yourself. Who's going to be selling the story better? But I do think there's going to be winners and losers. And America's going to say that was not really an issue that we really cared a lot about. Like I had Westmore on the other day and he's still sticking to the transgender position for Democrats. I think that's going to be a position that's going to hurt them long term. If you're going to be a position that's going to hurt them long term. If you're still a Democrat saying, no, transgender is still, we should allow them to have puberty blockers. That's going to hurt you. So we'll see. Maybe Thomas Massey wins 2028 and,

you know, and the audience that is saying is right is right. Maybe he lost Kentucky, but he's going to win long term. Maybe there's more people. Or maybe the Republicans view Trump as the president. Everybody else is just a mouthpiece with opinions that they have and it's going to filter itself out. We'll see what it happened there. Next time I want to get to is the following. apparently Trump, when these having a conversation with Xi, she apparently told Trump and Trump and I did that Putin regrets the war with, what do he call it, with Ukraine. But when asked about it, this is what the president had to say. Go ahead.

The president, you mentioned that the ball was your gift. It's a gift. It's a gift for me. Yeah. So now, while that's going on, the Financial Times reported, that Xi during last week's summit with Trump and Beijing said Putin might end up regretting invading Ukraine, citing unnamed people familiar with the U.S. assessment of the discussions. The Atlas said that the comments were made during the wide-range talks that touched on the war in Ukraine.

Putin and Xi are set to meet in China for their own summit with the Russian leader, eager to tap Beijing's help on a major gas pipeline project. Russia's heavily sanctioned economy is strongly dependent on China. Tom, thoughts on this story? Well, the Financial Times is not the Daily Mail. The Financial Times is not the National Enquirer. The Financial Times has a source, and they're talking about this. And by the way, I give it the sniff test.

350,000 casualties, allegedly, is the estimate that we've seen that Russia has encountered. And remember, whose Nord Stream pipeline was at? Who lost the revenue going into Germany? 51% Russia. Correct. So guess what? Who's really hurting here? Who's the only guy that's not getting aid from the outside?

Ukraine was getting aid from everybody, insultingly bringing a flag into our Congress and getting a big check from Nancy Pelosi. So Ukraine's been getting help from everybody. Who's Russia been getting help from? Kind of, sort of. She? She, right?

Oh, yeah. But is he backing up the truck? No, I don't think so. And Russia's lost revenue on energy trade. And so I look at that and say, could Putin be saying, you know, I regret this? Probably not. But would he be saying, boy, this has gone longer than I thought, and I'm sure not having fun? I think that very much could have happened.

But when the Financial Times comes out with a source like that, Pat, I really lean into that and I go, wow, you know what? That sounds, if I'm over Putin, what do you think he's saying right now? Everybody helped Ukraine. It stalled you. And then you lost key energy trading on embargoes on a blown up pipeline. You know, Putin's not sitting back there saying, yeah, just wait till the 15th round. I'm going to knock this guy out.

I think it may also have been a slight translation error, you know, by the interpreter. because we do know that Putin and has said this on the record, and it's similar but slightly different, that he's regretful concerning this war. And that's very natural because the Ukrainian people and the Russian people are very closely related. Many Ukrainians have Russian as their first language. President Zelenskyy, his mother tongue, is Russian, not Ukrainian.

And of course, the other thing is these languages are actually very similar, but that's another point. But even considering the differences, actually Zelensky was a Russian speaker originally and so on. So it's clear the Russians didn't really want to make war on Ukrainians. I know Russians, I know Ukrainians, and really most feel we're like brothers. We're the same people or we're brothers and sisters. Many Ukrainians have fled to Russia.

And of course there's these clear ethnic Ukrainians as well. But the reason why it started, as we know, is really what happened in 2014, which was the Western-backed, CIA-backed coup, coup d'etat takeover in Kiev, the Maidan false flag, because, of course, they were doing this as a COVID operation, driving out the elected president, who was friendly with Russia, which is what the majority of people want. I mean Zelensky, when he ran, he was on the ticket, like somebody else, to have no war with Russia, no foreign wars. And people love that.

They don't want, you know, Ukrainians didn't want the war, and Russians didn't want the war. In that sense, of course, everyone thinks this is very regretful. This is also why it's slow because the Russians are very careful. They do, in principle, not want to hurt any civilians. but they felt compelled that they had to intervene as they explained, you know, before they did this. Their last warning document, you know, just a few months

before the February invasion started. It was in December, I think, you know, to the West, to the U.S., the warning. And it was that, well, the Minsk Agreement, Minsk 1 and 2 have been ignored. These were peaceful, diplomatic ways of resolving things and handling things, but the Ukrainian side didn't actually stick to it.

Later we learned from Angela Merkel, oh, that was a trick anyway. We just wanted to win time against the Russians, which has showed the lack of good faith in this process. But more importantly, for eight years, there's been bombing by Kiev of the Ukrainian population, in Ukraine, the population that there are Ukrainians, but Russian speakers in the southern East,

Dombas and Lukansk, you see, literally bombing and people died. I mean, estimates 30,000, 40,000 in these eight years. And of course, Russia was very clear, and it's a very popular opinion. Russia is not just Putin. I think he's actually one of the more moderate leaders in Russia, that something has to be done. We can't just stand idly by while Kiev is making war on its own people. Remember when we said this about Saddam Hussein, oh, he's bombing his own people. We have to intervene. Well, it was much grander scale with more dead people than when we thought we have to intervene in Iraq, you see? And that's the reality. And everyone can check these facts. So, of course, the attitude therefore has always been, this is very regretful. And I'm sure

Putin will have mentioned this towards, you know, Xi Jinping and others, you know, were very regretful about this war and having had to invade. Luke. I wouldn't have too much to add there. I do think it adds the you can go back to it's either a Wall Street Journal or New York Times article 2024 or maybe 2025 but talking about the CIA secret involvement where basically we were doing everything except for you know all the targeting all the you know the ISR intelligence surveillance reconnaissance information for the targeting for targeting actual targets inside Russia so basically we did everything and then we basically basically hold the Ukrainians hand and we push the red button and the missile launches and we were doing that.

And they are openly talking about this. It's like the secret history of CIA's involvement in the Ukraine war, whatever. The challenge is as it relates, I think now to Iran prospectively, which is the Russians, the Russians said once we started hitting a Russian territory, once Ukrainians did with our help, the Russians said we are not going to retaliate immediately. we will retaliate a time and place of our choosing. The time and place of their choosing, as it turned out, ended up being about three days after we attacked Iran

because all of a sudden they were using a system called apparently Glonass, GLO, N-A-S, very accurate targeting. We didn't think the Iranians were going to be very accurate with their missiles. They were extraordinarily accurate with their missiles, so much so that we've evacuated a lot of our Middle East bases because we couldn't knock this stuff down. Why? Because they were in a direct retaliation, for us hitting Russian targets on behalf of Ukrainians,

the Russians were helping the Iranians target our assets across the Middle East. And we're still locked out of a lot of our bases as a result of this. And this is where we get into going forward. Okay, the War Powers Act versus the 37 and O. Is the 37 and O that when Massey's running on a non-Iranian war platform, is that the American public saying more war? because if we get more war, to be clear, we're going to be fighting in Iran being helped by the Russians.

And the Russians missiles, they have always been extremely good, very good targeting. We're going to be fighting in Iran that is going to be getting dual-use supplies because the Chinese are masters of strategic ambiguity, right? Is that used in military or is that civilian? The Chinese will tell you yes. They're going to be, they already are being backfilled by both the Russians and the Chinese. And so that's where I look at this whole conversation of, I agree that I'm sure he said it's regretful, you can't be happy about it. I do think part of the reason it's taken this long is because they are being careful.

They could go in and just hit Ukraine with a bunch of Oreschniks, and this thing would be over by Sunday afternoon. And you'd kill 20 million people. Which do you think will end first? Russia, Ukraine, or the war with Iran? Probably the war with Iran, maybe, but I don't think Kormuz is going to open up. anytime soon. What's any time soon for you? Oh, it's going to be still closed. At least July 4th, I think maybe, you know, increasingly it's Iran has a high degree of fire control over Strait of Hormuz still. It's going to be closed until Iran wants it open. And you've seen the

list of demands Iran's making. The Americans and the Iranians are far, far, far, far, in a big way. Big, big way. So I wouldn't be surprised, you know, when this war started, I said I wouldn't be surprised it was still closed at the end of May. That's a layup now. And I remember saying to a client, hey, don't be surprised. I would start stress testing your portfolio for Hormuz to still be closed on the 4th of July. This was like 6th of March. And they looked at me like, oh my God, that would not be good. I think July 4th, it's probably still going to be closed. I think it's probably still going to be closed Labor Day. Because again, the Iranians have more fire control. We have destroyed far less of their missiles than we said. They're getting resupplied. They are getting tired. They are getting

targeting help from the Russians thanks to our actions as it relates to Ukraine and in the Ukraine-Russian war. And so it's, I don't know. I think they both could drag on and drag on, and it's just not a good situation. Tom, do you agree? Not entirely. I'll go this way. Okay. What you have right now, the largest number of empty tankers around Karg Island since the war began was on what day? Well, February 28th, right? Started? No, May 18th.

Day before yesterday, it was the largest number of empty tankers around Karg Island since the war began. And NATO countries are saying, can we please loosen this up and get this open? So somebody's making statements, NATO countries. somebody's moving tankers into position. These are empty tankers that are around Carg Island. And if the people that are sending the empty tankers there think that the U.S., who has the naval assets in the Gulf ready to go, is going to go up.

Remember, we were tracking the minesweepers and the Marine Corps invasion ships that came from San Diego. It came all the way over, and now they're by India, now they're here, and now they're there. So why would all of these countries, and their insurer, Lloyds of London, be telling them, or, Why would they be getting staged? There's more tankers there. So I think that's a sign that at least somebody thinks something's listening up.

And so I think the Iran war is going to be over long before the Russia-Ukraine war because I think there's a little part of Zelensky and Ukraine that is corrupt, that doesn't really want it to end because he still has ways to get his aid. I think that there's something coming here. Is it next Tuesday? I don't think so. But all I do is I just look at assets. And I look at assets like that.

Why are all these countries moving tankers into position and more since the war began? Richard. It's a tough call because essentially I think both wars will continue, sadly, because in both cases we have quite influential groups at work on the Western side, NATO-American side, that want these wars to merge into a world war. Sadly, they want? Yes, yes. Why do you think NATO wants that?

Well, why do people want a world war? It's a very good question, and I'll try to be very brief on this one, but we have to look at how the first World War started. It really started, and this is a big topic, but it was a strategic global consideration. The seas were controlled by the British Navy, and therefore world trade, and we're talking about trade disruption

and potential blockades and blackmail, all that power was with Britain. And so what Germany did, which was a rising power, just like the United States, high-growth economy, doing extremely well imperial Germany, was they had in the lines with the Ottoman Empire, which is the whole Middle Eastern area huge, and they were now building,

and this was just at the turn of the same, century, they were building the Berlin-Istanbul-Baghdad-Basra Railway, also known as the Berlin-Baghdad railway. That was a massive, massive strategic challenge to Britain because it would have essentially immediately rendered this global British dominance via the Navy, the control of the oceans, irrelevant because you can do trade much cheaper, much faster on that railway, linking essentially Europe with Eurasia, even down to India and so on, and you can trade both ways. And of course, troops, military can be sent, and these were already allied countries partly. So the British decided, and this is well recorded, we have to stop this.

It's an absolute must. This must be stopped. And they tried various schemes, but it didn't really work. And they figured out the only way to stop this is to make war on Germany. Now, what is the modern Germany that Britain felt Germany was challenging Britain and that led to World War I via this Berlin-Baghdad Railway challenging the sort of military, the Navy control of the seas? What is the modern equivalent?

Of course, it's China, and key strategic thinkers in the US have been very clear. There's a lot of policy documents on this that the real enemy is China. And what they have been doing is the modern equivalent of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, which is the Belt and Road Initiative, which was launched by Xi Jinping 11 years ago. And it is essentially circumventing the American control over the seas. and we see it in the alliances that China has formed, and of course the bricks and all these, and by having the Belt and Road infrastructure on the continent,

there's also a sea path, and of course they've also been building up their navy. It's not as if they're not doing anything on that front either. So there's a massive challenge for China. Now, I think what has been happening with US foreign policy this year is all about China. you know, it's not sort of articulated. Yeah, but say World War, like, they want to, NATO wants a World War?

That's the only way to take down this Belt and Road initiative, the Berlin-Bacted Railway, was stopped thanks to First World War, and then Britain invaded Iraq, and then just divvied up the Ottoman Empire, and it's all British created artificial countries, you know, and so then you can manipulate the wars ever since. You control the oil, that's the most important thing, and they've done that quite successfully, including staging various coup d'etatals, also in Iran,

Mossadegh, you know, a Democratic-elected leader of Iran. But the key thing is this. So why is this year foreign policy been dominated by this? Venezuela. That's where it started. And it was a very important event because essentially all pretense was dropped. So far for decades, it's all been about COVID operations when, you know, when we kill a president in Latin America, when we take out and have regime change in Latin America.

It's all plausible deniability. No, it's done overtly, but why? Why Venezuela? What is about? It's about oil. It's a key source of oil for China. China has built these refineries that you need for that particular type of heavy oil that Venezuela produces and has the biggest resources in oil actually in the world. So that disrupted, to some extent, Chinese energy plants as significantly because all these refineries in China were made for this very specific Venezueless. New Zealand heavy crude oil. And then of course, Iran is another key source. And the key piece of information that led me to put this together is when I saw that what was actually bombed in these bombing campaigns, US-Israeli bombing of Iran, it clearly included key belt and road infrastructure, railways and bridges, particularly roads and supply lines.

So, you know, it is hitting this challenge, this perceived challenge of U.S. Navy dominance and the only way to really stop this ultimately leading up to a third world, which of course,

you know, nobody should aim for a world war and nobody should actually pursue wars is what I believe, but I fear this is what's happening. I don't think so. I don't think so because I think NATO is shitting bricks about a war taking place. I think NATO is worried if anything were to take place.

I understand what you're saying. I think they're sitting around saying, guys, like this story here from Bloomberg, NATO is starting to consider Hormu's mission to protect ships. Just a few weeks ago, they were saying, no, we're not going to let you use this, and we're not going to let you travel, fly over us. Now they're like, hey, how can we help you through? What do you need? But that's escalation.

These are escalation steps. So, you know. Two leading to a war? Of course. You've got now other military also participating on the Western side. Well, that is increasing the probability. That's escalation. Did you think empty...

Hang on, let me ask you. I respect your intellect and where you're going from, but do you think that's an escalation point when at the same time innocent sailors on empty tankers are congregating around one of the largest targets? Those aren't military ships, and those are owned by many people. Yeah, you're right. It's an important point of war.

Full stop. Okay, there's more ships that have been there since the start of the war. You're right. But the blockade is our position. Correct. The blockades are our position. Our position. But it was open until we bombed Iran.

I know. But what I'm saying to you is we are choosing the war. But to say NATO wants the war, that's the point of a convention here. I'm not actually saying NATO wants the war. It's not necessarily NATO. Well, NATO, but what is NATO? NATO is a tool. It is dominated by the deep state, which is, you know, U.S. deep state dominates

NATO. There's nobody in the NATO leadership. You think you think you think Trump and US wants this war to continue with Iran? You don't think they want it to be done? Well, what does Trump want concerning wars? I mean, I do think his personal true opinion is what he originally said and back in you know when he was first president that he doesn't want any of this. But it looks like he's not really in control of that decision. So somebody else is making that decision for him, sadly and I think this the military industrial you really believe that you think somebody else making a decision well that's what we witnessed I would just I would use Marker Rubio's State Department but a document on April 21st said we are in

Iran defending the legality of the war state department document you can find it online we are in Iran at the request of and the collective defense of our ally Israel those are so Secretary Rubio's words so okay so I want I want to qualify this so you guys are saying this is a war that we're in because somebody else wants us to be in this war? At least in part, I don't think it's in America's interests. I fail to see how it is in America's acute interests at this same time. So which you see that that's the part where this argument gets manhandled by a clip from Trump in 1987 when he said he would attack, he would go to Kerk Island and he would Iran. This has been a message that's been given for a long time,

where his position with Iran, the speech he gave, I don't know if you've seen this clip or not. Have you ever seen what the president said in Iran in 80s? Yeah, yeah, 40 years ago. And have you heard what Rubio said 15 years ago or 10 years ago in Iran? He said, I want this thing to be documented, right? Yeah, this is back in 1980s. Play this clip, Rob?

The Iranian situation is a case in point, that this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold out hostages to my way of thinking is a horror. You're advocating that we should have gone in there with troops, et cetera, and brought our boys out. I absolutely feel that, yes. I don't think there's any question. So was his boss BB back then? Did he even know BB back then?

Can you type in when Trump met BB to say, this is the part where the contradiction slips out and you kind of lose credibility to say, not you. The people that say, well, his boss is telling him what to do. Rob, when is the first time Trump and BB met ever? Can you tell me, you know, what Bibi was doing in 1985? What was Bibi doing in 1985? Was he in the military? Was he a journalist? Was he a politician?

What was he doing in the 80s? 1985? So the president, 1997, is an ambassador to the shen? Okay. These guys haven't met. These guys haven't spoken. So that argument loses credibility because this guy's been saying this for a while. You could rephrase the question.

When did he, for the first time, accept money from Zionist, billionaires? I mean, that's also a lazy argument. I just go to the... By the way, here's how it works. Let me just put it to you this way, Richard. That is such a lazy argument that's getting so old. You know why it's getting old and it's such a lazy argument? It's, okay, give me one president that has taken money from Israel, from other people.

Give me one that hasn't taken it. Give me one that if there's people that are giving money, like, what do you say to that? Both side, left side, right side, everyone's giving money, and what are they doing? The moment they came up, I had Paul Manafort on the podcast a long time ago. And I said, why don't we get money out of politics? Why don't they do it? I'd love for there to be no money in politics. Yeah, yeah, that'd be good.

It'd be good for who? It'd be good for all of us, right? But this is for you to say, well, this is because he took money. And this is because he did this. I'm asking when it's the first time. No, I would say, I go back to black and white, his own administration. Yeah. Three weeks ago, the State Department said we are in Iran at the request

of and in the collective of Israel. Rubio commented on that to say what he said. Did you see the other clip when he reacted to those comments? I've seen one from early on where he said something similar. I have not seen the more reason. He responded to that and he gave his position. So to him, the ally in there is Israel is an ally. Iran's not an ally.

Sure. So it's an ally. It's a relationship. So then you can be anti-Israel and say, screw Israel. Okay, great. Then that's your position as well. It's like, hey, you know, I was like anti-Ukraine. Why?

That's not our war. Why are we getting involved in a war that's not all? But this is a war that we decided to do. So if the president is deciding this war, then that's his position. And then you can say whatever you want. Yeah, like for Ukraine, we kept giving money, we kept giving money, we kept giving money, everybody's supposed to wear, what do you call it? The pin? That was double dumb.

But to say, well, it's because of Israel's war and all this other stuff. By the way, I also think that's an element of why some positions going into 2020, this rhetoric of these guys are owned, owned, owned. Yes, I think a lot of these guys are owned. But president's documented what he said 40 years ago. This position hasn't changed. His vice president's position, you know, said, hey, if you want the party of war, if you want to go to war, vote for Kamala Harris.

He said that on a tweet at the end of 2020. JD Vance. But J.D. Vance is not a war guy. He's a non-interventionist guy. Correct. Correct. Yeah. So I think I do feel, I understand the frustration. or the feeling that regardless of what this was of a feeling

that has been a position reversal. A lot of people around him have, you know, or some people are doing it. I agree. And by the way, I agree the sensitivities of any of these issues. This is why we have these discussions. And for me, it's not about the politics of it. It's around, again, what we're seeing in the bond market. Let's go to that.

Let's actually go to that. I want to go to that for the audience to kind of see this before we wrap up. So story comes out because everybody's talking. But, well, you know, we're going to get a new guy because they're going to low rates. They got a low rates, Luke. They're going low rates. If I was the, we were the low rates a long time ago. And in all of us, it's like, wait a minute, because of what's going on to inflation,

to your point, now they're talking about raising rates. What do you mean raising rates? Yeah, we may be raising rates. So Fed will have to raise rates. Do you have to clip on that, Rob, about Fed having to raise rates? Is this it? Go for it, Rob. And I think you guys are probably on the same page on this topic.

Go ahead, Rob. But you think the Fed could actually hike rates in July? Well, I think the bond market is calling for that. I think the reason bond yields have gone up is because the perception is that the Fed is behind the curve on inflation. And the Fed has to clearly show that they're dropping their easing bias, which is what they had in their April meeting, and move not to a neutral bias, but moved to a tightening bias at the June meeting coming up in a few weeks. and then after that I think they have to follow up and actually show that they're willing to raise rates

and do it by 25 basis points. The two-year is now indicating that the federal funds rate is too low. The federal funds rate range is 3.5 to 3.75%. The two years at 4.1%. And it's a pretty good leading indicator of what the Fed should do. Luke, to the average person, what does this mean? Rates going up? No one's expecting it to go up.

You can go back to February 2025. Secretary Besson and Trump together said, judge our economic policy success or failure by the yield on the 10-year Treasury yield and judge us over time. Well, the day they bombed Iran, the 10-year treasury yielded 3.96%. Yesterday, it traded at 4.66%. Yields up 70 basis points in eight or nine weeks. The translation of what that gentleman just said, Yardini,

is essentially the Fed follows on interest rates relative to the market. And the market rate that the Fed tends to follow is the two-year U.S. Treasury bond yield. The two-year Treasury bond yield is rising. It is above Fed funds rate. And what he is saying is the market, based on market factors, higher inflation, in particular, higher inflation expectations as well, as a direct result of his, foreign policy choices in Iran are now projecting interest rate hikes. This has enormous implications for not just the private sector, but the United States has a lot of debt. It needs to roll over. And we've spent the last two or three years since Janet Yellen at the end of 2023 shifted issuance forward to the front end rather than terming out debt at the long end when they could. And she didn't because they couldn't. They would have blown up the bond market then. So they shifted it to the front end. Well, that's fine. That buys you time. But you better not start a war that sends yields up on the front end after you've shifted all your debt to the front end and need to roll it.

Because now you're doing a payday loan, higher, higher, higher. That to me is why I'm so worked up about the Iran war is from day one, I've thought Hormuzing be closed way longer you think. And once that happens, you're going to have big, big inflation. And it is just starting. We had the big inflation print PPI last week. We've seen PCE pick up. everybody's raising prices. The price, you call up the ISM manufacturing and services, prices paid components. They are at the highest level since 2022. We are having a Biden inflation under Trump,

as a result of Iran, into a refinancing of debt that has been shifted to the front end. This is, and the bond market action that we are seeing, you're seeing 10-year yields in Japan, UK, US, EU, you know, German, French, they are all skyrocketing and they all have high debt. But the two highest, Japan and the U.S. And so, and it is all a function of this war. We have really harmed, we've really shot ourselves, not in the foot, but a little bit higher up on our leg as a result of this war from an economic standpoint. So there are two dates. Pat and I both have talked about that this thing has to be resolved by June 15th, so that now we have an opportunity for, you know, the cost of oil to come down and then to run through the summer to let everything else.

supplies come back up and the cost of aviation fuel. Everything is derived on oil to come down. It says that that's got to happen. But here are the two dates that are really important, Pat. June 18th, 19th, July 28, 29. Those are the next two Fed meetings in June 18th, 19th. Kevin Warsh is going to be his first meeting as a Fed, and he's going to be facing two things, Pat.

He's got inflation led by oil in the midst of a war on one side, and on the other side, he's got, please don't let another company talk about unemployment and AI. Because if he's got unemployment over here, he should be lowering rates so that businesses can get access to capital more cheaply to build, invest, and make jobs. But over here, if inflation is up, well, that's an overheated economy. You've got to bring the value of the dollar up so you bring up the rate to help cool inflation. that Kevin Warsh is coming in, he's standing in the middle of a tunnel, and he's looking out both ends of the tunnel, and there's a light coming. And one is inflation, and the other one is unemployment. This is a really hard problem that's about to be faced, and everything we just said is correct.

But we could boil it down to make it simple for people listening. When inflation is up, you raise rates to bring prices down and help people. When unemployment is up, you lower rates so that businesses can borrow more. more cheaply and create jobs so those you are unemployed can get one. There's the simple. Unfortunately, both of them are happening right now. In June 18th, 19th, Kevin Warsh walks into his new job for the first time, and everybody is going to dissect that paragraph preamble that all Fed Chair make,

that they come to the microphone and read, and the markets are going to be sitting there, and you're going to watch four-point market movements on that paragraph. And I would add to you, I think one of the things the markets are starting to try, to grasp with with the bond market, stock market volatility we've had over the last couple of weeks is what regardless of whether he raises rates or cuts rates, long-end yields are going to rise. And that's the part people don't get yet because foreigners are borrowed $13 trillion, $14 trillion in dollar denominated debt, number one. So when we strengthen the dollar by raising rates, they need to defend their currencies. They need to, what do they do? They sell treasury bonds to, to,

raise dollars to service their debt to defend their currencies. We've also complicated by virtue of our war in Iran bidding up oil prices, what is oil still almost mostly bought in? It's bought in dollars. Foreign oil importing creditors of the United States, China, Japan, Korea, when they need oil, what do they need more? Oil and food in dollars or bonds? Oil and food. So we have taken, And they're two, when Warsh makes his choice, if he cuts rates into an oil spike, long ends going up. That's inflationary, dollar's going to fall. Okay, we get that. The real kicker is if he raises rates to fight inflation, the long end is going to go up even faster because now the dollar is going to start.

He's screwed either way. He's screwed either way. And he screwed because of this warfick storm. Because of this war. But by the way, so my position with that, I agree on the fact that the side effects, of the war are impacting the economy in a big way. This is why I said if you're going to do this, look, as a leader sometimes, Luke, my opinion,

as a leader sometimes, you get judged to take certain risks, okay? And the risks you take, how many employees do you? I'm assuming you run a company. We've got a team probably six people. Okay, six people. Okay, and you probably ran, have you ran businesses before? Yes, sure, sure. Okay, so how many employees have you had at the peak?

Well, at the peak was maybe 20. Okay, 20 employees. All right. So what percentage of decisions we make as leaders you think we succeed in? What percentage you think? I think the percentage shrinks probably with the bigger the organization. And there is no bigger organization than running the United States. Exactly.

But here's a part. So to me, as a leader, you look at it and you came off a winning streak, Venezuela, smooth, easy. You got all these good things that's happening. So maybe you trusted your military and said, this is going to be easier. It's going to be going in. We're out. And you're like, oh, shit. Iran is a lot more capable and stubborn

than we thought they're going to be. Which his generals told him, by the way, in a very reminiscent and other bad military decision. But I want you know, generals told them both sides. That's fair. That's fair. To say, like, if I'm going to be in the room, some are going to say, you know, you have to pick interest.

So I think he made the decision. But now that you're in it, it's like you buy a company, you're like, I should have never bought the company. The guy's a freaking womanizer. He goes to the casino every night. Why didn't I do a $20,000 background check? I would have seen the fact that he's got three DUIs. Shit, but we already bought this company.

Let's make the best of it. We're in it now. So let's rebuild it and sell it or deploy or whatever it is, right? Okay. My date for him is June 14th. If they can find a way to get it done by June 14th, I think that's a good thing. If they can.

And the reason why I'm saying June 14, after June 14, new cycle is going to change. We're going to move on very quickly. And we're going to go to all the other stuff. And then you got the World Cup that's coming. Then you got his birthday death's coming. Then you got Fortugella. If this goes the way it's going right now, by midterms,

it's going to be a very different story. Now, I'll give you the other part that nobody is thinking about. And then, Richard, I want to come to you for your thoughts. You know what's the other thing that they got? That it's weirdly this guy keeps winning. In a weirdest way, this guy keeps winning. What's one the biggest victories they had in the last few weeks? What's the one topic that we're not even talking about today?

But what's one the biggest victories these guys have had the last few weeks that no one's talking about? What do you think it is? Tom, what do you think is one of the biggest victories they've had the last few weeks? Well, let me help the question a little bit better. That gets him to not be as worried about the midterms. What's one of the biggest victories they've had the last few weeks that gets him to not worry about the midterms? Trump?

Yeah. 39 and 0. No, no. What is it? 37 and no. What is it? Redistricting. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah.

Do you guys know how big that is? Are you following, like, the redistricting stuff? What is going to do? You're not following it? No, I've never said. The South is going to look like the North just looked like for decades. The plus minus of picking up just because of redistricting could be 20 seats. Wow.

20 seats. And by the way, the lady comes out yesterday, Rob. Can you play this? I don't know what her name is. I think Stacey Abrams. It may be something else. It's a clip I sent to the group yesterday. That one right here.

Watch this clip here. Okay. This is Stacey Abrams. Talking about what just happened to the redistricting push and how big and how, negatively it impacts Democrats. Go ahead, Rob. Your ability to use those same democratic institutions to your benefit. With these new maps, we know that analysis by Fair Fight and Black Voters Matters show that we could lose 19 to 20 congressional seats,

but we could lose up to 191 state legislative seats. And in the south, those state legislators draw city council districts, county commission districts, school board districts, and they draw state legislative lines. And so if you want to know if your child is going to have fair and equitable access to education, that will be diminished if your families can't participate in elections and elect leaders who value your education. If you want health care in the South, it's the state legislature that decides whether you have access. All of the things that disproportionately harm communities of color will now be decided by people who disproportionately dislike and vote against the needs of people of color. But what we have to remember, and this is why I started the 10 Steps campaign,

this is a national fight. It may start in the South. They're panicking right now. They know what's happening. So in my opinion, because you know Trump's a card guy. Remember he sits with Zelensky? What does he say? You don't have the cards.

And he says, I'm not playing poker with you, right? This is not about cards on leverage. It is. But you know, Trump is a leverage guy. He's sitting there saying, I just picked up 1920 seats. Midterms, no matter what it goes, worst case scenario, we're still going to be fine. I am hoping that's not what he's thinking. I think it's exactly what he's thinking.

I'm hoping he's not. It's so interesting you point out, because I've been watching his actions based on what I know and what I'm being told about how hormones ain't going to be open on June 14th. And I've been wondering why he is so okay with that. This would explain why he's so okay with that. I'm 20% it opens on the 14th.

If it does, we will move on. If it doesn't, you are not using the World Cup, the 4th of July, 250 year anniversary as an incredible, sometimes in life you need great positive distractions. The greatest positive distractions he could have asked for are around the corner.

It's 250. Everybody's like, oh my God, the greatness of America, the industrial revolution, look what we did, and look at the people that we produce on the amount of wealth and jobs and innovation and history and lining on the bottom. And then, boom, World Cup, oh, my God, look, Namor and Messy and Portugal and the U.S. and pro. And then, boom, midterms.

Okay, so I am hopeful. That's why I said 20%. I'm 20% by June 4th. Is there a calcium on this to say that thing? Because if there is a calcium on this. I'm not bet it. I'll bet against it. It ain't happening.

You don't think it's going to. I think it's, I would take the under on 20. You mean, if ever, what do you think it is? But I think you're right about the district. Oh, I think it's. Percentage that it's June 14. I would take five. Oh, shit.

You're that low. Okay. The other guy gets, we started a fight in a fight. If you don't knock him out early, the other guy, The other guy gets a say. But look at this. Cali's on your side. I'm just saying if they're sitting around,

Cali's even saying before August is 31st, before 2027 is 50%. That means 50% of people think this is going into 2027. They're on your side. That's interesting. That's interesting. So we'll see. Richard, thoughts.

Yeah. Well, let me just come back to the bond market and monetary policy. There is, I mean, there is an official narrative in central banking, monetary economics and the markets and the media perpetuating this, namely lower interest rates lead to higher growth. If we raise rates, this slows down the economy, and haven't we heard this? Dozens of times, I mean, you hear it daily.

What's the empirical evidence for this? I did the first empirical study of this question, the relationship between interest rates and economic growth, because this has been repeated for half a century. Actually, you could even argue going back to Dave Ricardo 200 years. It's been repeated without empirical test. There's been no study actually checking what's the relationship between growth and interest rates. Turns out it's not a negative relationship.

It's a positive relationship. What about the causation? Which one causes which? You can Google this published study, actually. It's called reconsidering monetary policy, published in a leading finance journal. The conclusion is, so interest rates and growth are positively correlated. So we get higher growth and higher rates happening together, and lower growth and lower rates happening together.

Probably especially when you have high levels of debt like we do. And now the next question is, okay, which causes which? What's the causation? And we also did the statistical tests for Granger Causality, statistical causation. And it's not from interest rates to growth. It's from growth to interest rates. So how does the economy really work? We've been told interest rates move everything.

That's a key tool is not true. Interest rates follow nominal GDP growth. That includes inflation, nominal growth, okay? Real growth plus inflation is the normal growth. And what's driving nominal growth? It's credit creation in the monetary system, which is largely banks, but manipulated mostly by the central bank

that can move total credit rate. Richard, you know what you and I need to do, because this is the third time you brought banks up. Why don't we just start a bank together? Let's start a bank. How about we start a bank together? Maybe from somewhere in France or something like that and find a way to bring, what do you think about that?

Please continue. I'm just, you got me thinking there for it. Well, they are the key players. And, you know, of course there's a reason why they're not in the textbooks. And central banks, you know, the economics models don't have banks in them. It's because you're not supposed to know this. This is like secret knowledge, how things really are run. So, but what are the implications?

for monetary policy now. So Kevin Walsh wants to steepen the yield curve. Well, that's happening, I think. So, okay, he's okay on that. I can get a tick. The market is doing fine. Because the Fed reacts to the bond market, and the bond market reacts to nominal GDP

before it's published. You know, we don't know the official figures yet, but the bond market is a very good indicator of where we're heading. So why is it going up? Well, because of inflation. Why is inflation? You see, and that goes back to the real,

cause behind this is money creation, credit creation. And that's not surprising because we have this problem of record national debt and massive spending, just the servicing costs, as we all know by now, you know, exceeding military budgets, which of course are very bloated and are going to rise further. Just servicing, you know, the interest on the old debt is already massive. So, and we're on this trajectory where it's exponential, basically, the time it takes now for another trillion to be added to the national debt. I mean, it used to be decades, then it became a decade, then it became less than a decade, then it became years. Well, it's months now, but soon it will be weeks, and then it will be days. Literally, that's where we're heading. So, and the

pressure is on the Fed, which will not advertise this, and they will not. not be discussed and will be not be in the minutes, but, you know, it's working on ways to do a monetization without people realizing. Of course, we do have the stable coins as another policy venture to get demand for treasuries. But as Luke mentioned, I mean, foreigners are selling, Japan is selling, China is selling, U.S. treasuries. And they have good reasons. They have arguments. Oh, you would like to help. But actually, sorry, we have, you know, Japan, the yen is so undervalued. Richard, we talk about international buyers and sellers,

including a small island and a Caribbean that it's a disproportionate amount of U.S. treasuries, shockingly, right? So let me ask you a question. But the majority of U.S. Treasury is owned by us. All the municipalities and all the states, are they holding? Are they selling? Are they buying?

Are they playing with the Fed balance sheet? What are they doing? Well, I mean, point taken, but we have growth of the debt, and that means we need new buyers. It's at the market. It's at the margin where the pressure is on. Do they have the capacity to add on to their, you know, to their holdings of treasury? Well, people talk about China as a big boogeyman, but it's actually Japan that owns more than anybody else. One point four trillion. Bias, one point one. And they've got a,

they're, they have a lead, solid lead. Yeah, but the two biggest holders are the Japan and the UK, and both of them, look at the bond yields of Japan and the UK. They are going vertical their bond yields. So they are having bond market problems themselves. Now, why is it? Is that important? It's important for two reasons. Number one, the higher a UK yield goes for a Britain, the more likely they are to buy a British bond than an American bond. Ditto the Japanese. The higher a Japanese yield goes, the more likely they are to buy a Japanese bond than they are to buy an American bond. And so generally speaking, if you want to know where the U.S. interest rates are going, just look at Japanese and UK yields. Those two countries hold 25% of the total of the foreign-held portion of our treasuries. Now, the other thing that's a little bit more inside baseball, but probably more important, is if you look at the spread of the Japanese 10-year yield minus, excuse me, the American 10-year yield minus the Japanese-year yield, right? Ten-year yield. So how much more is the American bond yielding than the Japanese bond?

And then chart that against the yen. Normally, you would expect a narrowing spread between what you can earn in America versus what you can earn as a rate of interest in Japan to lead to a higher yen. Starting in the third quarter of last year, this relationship flipped. This has always been a positively correlated relationship. All of a sudden, a higher Japanese bond yield, which should drive capital from America and Japan, is leading to a weaker yen. That is emerging market bond price action.

That's a currency crisis coming to the biggest debtor nation in the world, but they're a creditor overall. They have the most debt in the world. Same thing. Britain, our second biggest creditor, forever. higher 10-year yield, 10-year American yield, minus 10-year U.K. yield, guilt-yield, relative to the pound sterling against the dollar. Narrowing yield or higher relative yield in U.K.

Drives capital, drives the pound up against the dollar. Starting last year, also roughly in the third quarter, maybe early fourth quarter, that relationship flipped. Now the U.K. is also demonstrating emerging market price action with a currency or In other words, what the market is telling us about Japan and the UK who own collectively 25% of our foreign-held portion of our debt, they are our two biggest creditors, is saying yields are already too high in Japan and in the UK they are going to cause a currency and debt crisis. Which is why they're protecting their currencies.

Which is, but ultimately then, what do they sell when they have to protect their currencies? They sell U.S. Treasury bonds to raise dollars. to buy pounds and to buy yen. And that's why the 10-year yield is rising so much. And part of all this cycles back to this discussion did not happen. You seem skeptical, Tom. You're not joining the fear porn camp. Why are you not joining the fear-point camp?

Because I think this is true, but I look at the total amount of the debt. The Fed owns 10, Social Security, Medicare, owned 20, and then Goldman Sachs, Black Rock, and all the states own 45. Am I right? Yes, internally. So if foreigners hold, I don't know, it's probably... But we're in the zone, right? I think so. I think so.

I'll grant it. We can... Yeah, yeah. So, yes, this stuff happens internationally, and yes, it's a quarter of the total debt. And yes, they're going to sell it. Just a quarter of the foreign help portion. So it's all at 10% overall. Correct.

Yeah. So I see them and I see them defending their currencies. Okay. But I look at how much is owned by us and what we print and what we owe ourselves. And I don't see... those two, I see what they're doing and what they have to do themselves and I see with their problems that they have, but I don't see them as having the cataclysmic effect on the stack. Oh, it will. It's absolutely priced on the margin. You're seeing it in the tenure. Now, to your

point, we own it ourselves. The Fed is one of the biggest holders. Where did they get the money to buy it? They printed the money. And ultimately, that's where this is going to go. The tenure yield is going to go 4.66, 4.7, 4.8. And they're going to come in, and it'll probably regulatory under Warsh where they'll come out and they'll go, okay, we're going to cut rates at the front end and we're going to sell rates at the back end because that will sort of be enough magical handwave me to say, listen, we're shrinking the balance sheet. This is Main Street, not Wall Street. And we can flip the debt to a lower rate, which I just did. Well, hold on. They will then cut, they'll change the regulations because right now, if they change

regulations, they will allow the banks to buy more treasuries. Right now, if they buy more Treasury's, though, it counts against their capital ratio. So banks right now is that the regulations are written, they can lend to the government by treasuries, or they can lend to Main Street. They can't do both. Warsh will lower the regulations so they can do both. They can double count. It's very inflationary, very growth, pro-growth, and I think that's some version of what they're going to do. And so then you get into who owns the bonds? We all own the bonds. Who's going to pay for all of this? We all are. Inflation is going to go from 4% to 6% to 8% to 10%. It won't be reported as.

such, but you'll see it. And that's where it'll get tricky later on this year. Perhaps, maybe not. If they control the through districting, it doesn't matter. This is what has to happen, but this is what's going to happen. So you sound like you're arguing all the way down the street to the inflate out, right? Well, that's what's going to happen. There's no question. It started. All the debt will be ultimately inflated out at the expense of the people. Yes. And right now, the one argument is on that side is we are just crossed 23 cents on the dollar, I think, the budget is paying the interest. And if the rates stay up, next year's budget, it'll be 25 cents under the dollar.

Think about what the old Wall Street trick is, right? When you have a bad bond, when you have a bad deal, what is Wall Street famous for? Who do they get to buy their bad deals? Retail. What has happened to the U.S.'s treasury holdings over the last 10 years? You can see it. They publish it every quarter. Foreign and international as a share has dropped from every year for the last 10 to 12 years.

Who's been the biggest marginal buyer? Mom and pop. Fed. and U.S. banks. So Fed, they can create the money. They don't care either way. But if you look at every disaster in my career, I've been doing this 30 years from a finance standpoint, every bubble that bursts, who are the last people into the bubble? Commercial banks and U.S. mom and pop retail. Who's been the biggest buyer of treasuries, particularly at the seven to 10 year duration, seven to 30 year duration? Mom and pop and the commercial banks. And that's just how it's going to go. And so you're

going to have, it's manifesting as political divisiveness, right? Why cost of living is rising. Cost of living is going to keep rising. Can Trump overcome it? Maybe because of some of these very astute political moves he's making with the redistricting, etc. But this... Not with cost of living. I don't think cost of living

that, I mean, you saw what the Anthropic CEO said the other day. He's saying unemployment is going to go to 10% and GDP is going to go skyrocketing. So if unemployment goes up and the perfect storm here is you're fighting these language learning models now coding in ways that makes no flippin' sense. You watch how they're coding right now. It's insane to me. Like when you're talking about the younger entrepreneurs can come and out compete with the other guys, because you can run a

company as if you have 20 engineers based on these language learning models. So take that, which you can't put the blame of that on Trump. You can't say, well, AI taking jobs, that's on him. So that's the perfect storm. Then you got the war. then you got the debt, then you got interest rates, you got all of this stuff combining together. You know, good luck with affordability. Yeah, and I want to be clear that once interest rates hit a point, they're not going to let them go higher. I don't think the tenure is going to, you know, could it go to six for a cup of coffee, six percent for a cup of coffee? Sure, anything can happen.

But above five percent, empirically over the last five years, every time the 10-year treasury yield in the United States goes up to 4.6 to 4.8 percent or higher, we immediately start to have dysfunction in the U.S. Treasury market. You can see that power. And so they will stop it there. And it's simple. The release valve is the dollar. The release valve is higher inflation. That's just how it works.

You can control the price of money or the quantity of money. You can't control them. Where's your money in right now? Where are you investing your money in right now? I am in a blend of gold, T-bills, electrical infrastructure in the United States. It's a huge area of benefits, both from real growth and inflation. And so short term, you're in T bills. T bills, gold, and a lot.

What's the ratio? What's the percentage? What's that? Like Fermi? Fermi, the announcement, I don't know if you saw what happened with Fermi. No, I didn't see it. Electrical infrastructure. Keep going. Okay, sorry.

So what percentage is gold, the way you're looking at? Gold is probably a quarter. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Because, look, what we're talking about here is really good for the stock market in dollar terms. It's really bad for the stock market in gold terms. We can go back to 2022. the United States stock market is up whatever it is,

the S&P 500 total return is up, I don't know, 60, 70% in dollar terms. It's down 40% in gold terms. You go back to 2000. The S&P 500's up 1,700%. It is down 50%, 60% in gold terms. And so to me, it's just a currency issue ultimately. Really, we have too much debt.

We're not going to default. They will do what they have to do to make the money. That's an inflationary setup. Can you do it in 30 seconds? I'm going to do one more story before we wrap up. It is possible to control the quantity and prices separately because it's not possible in equilibrium, but we don't have equilibrium. Of course, the solution would be to create hundreds, in fact, thousands more banks that will create

credit, fund productivity. You get more growth, which solves your, you know. Product, that's a good point. Productivity is the key. And so on and so on. But the conclusion really is it's going to be key what the Fed is going to do. and we have to see what Kevin Walsh is going to do. But just on past Fed performance, we have to assume, unfortunately,

that maybe they're not yet catching on, that they need to help create many, many banks. That will be the way out. But instead, there will be more monetization, money creation. By the way, I covered this in my substack, Rwerner.substack.com, if you may just mention that. But that's what I think we have to watch. And my forecast has been that we're going to get another huge bout of inflation,

similar to what we had before. And it's a replay of the 70s. You know, we had 73, first bout, and then 78, 79. And this is really playing out again. And the constellation is very similar, you know, Middle East, oil. But central bank money creation was then the key and remains the key now. And I think the money printing is going to be on. By the way, if you got questions for Richard Warner, he's on Menecht as well.

Luke, where can people find you? They can find me at Luke at Luke Groman on X, and they can also find me at FFTT-LC.com. FF-F-T-T-T. Yep, there it is. Okay. Rob, can we put the links below as well? So if people want to go find great conversation as usual, I love that. The debate is what's great about it, where the audience gets to learn. And I think we had that, gang.

Great being with you guys today. Rob, what do we have tomorrow? Do we have anything tomorrow or not? Nothing tomorrow. Friday, we're back. Friday we're back again with the podcast. And don't Manek Rob today. He's lost his voice.

If you want to, he may respond back. You will not hear his voice if he does respond back. God bless everybody. Take care. Bye bye bye, bye, bye, bye.