Rich Habits Podcast - Public Launches Prediction Markets, Meta's Muse Charm, & $2T of Debt
Episode Date: September 25, 2026Leif Abraham sits down with Robert and Austin to talk about Public's newest asset class, prediction markets.Read more here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/public-launches-ai-agents-fo...r-prediction-markets-302888505.html✅ Ready to start investing? Open a brokerage account on Public.com/richhabits!---📝 Use Granola during your next meeting, completely free, click here: http://granola.ai/HABITS---🤖 VCX: the public ticker for private tech -- click here or visit https://getvcx.com/ to learn more! ---🚀 Invest alongside Robert and Austin and 1,100+ other members inside the Rich Habits Network, click here!---🏆 Wall Street Favorites is LIVE! Click here to see what Wall Street is buying before everyone else.---🧿 Protect your family with term life insurance from Suriance! Get a $1M+ policy for $50 or less per month. Click here!---‼️ Have feedback to share? Please let us a comment on Spotify! We're excited to mold these new weekly episodes to be exactly what our listeners want.---⚡️ Sign up for the Rich Habits Newsletter and never miss a market-moving headline again, click here!---⭐ Download our FREE Financial Planner – click here⭐ Download our FREE Budgeting Template – click here⭐ Earn 3.8% on your savings with a High-Yield Cash Account – click here⭐ Automatically buy stock where you shop with Grifin – click here⭐ Protect your family with term life insurance from Suriance – click here⭐ Use code “Spotify” for 15% off our 4-module video course – click here---📬 Inquire about working together – christian@witz.vc---This content is sponsored by NEOS Investments. The creator is compensated by NEOS to discuss NEOS ETFs. This content is for informational purposes only, and is not personalized investment, tax, or legal advice, and does not constitute an offer to buy or sell any security. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Before investing, carefully review the NEOS ETFs prospectus at neosfunds.com.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You're tuning in to the Rich Habits Radar, our Friday episode of the Rich Habits podcast
where every Friday morning we're coming at you with the biggest headlines impacting you
and your money. This episode is brought to you by VCX, the public ticker for private tech.
My name's Austin Hank Witts. I'm joined by my co-host Robert Croke. And the three things sitting
at the top of our Rich Habits Radar this week include public.com announcing prediction markets on their
platform, specifically the ability for their AI agents to use the information derived.
from these prediction markets to make informed decisions with your money.
Yes, very interesting and more on that later.
We'll also be talking about Meta's new Muse AI agent that has gone incredibly viral
and the new little charm keychain that was just announced,
as well as the $2 trillion ticking time bomb that is debt on U.S. apartments.
Robert, let's dig into our first story.
Definitely. I'm super excited about this because public just announced AI agents for prediction markets,
and it's really, really cool.
So Public, the investing platform
we've partnered with for years now,
just announced something that's a genuine
first for retail brokerage.
AI agents that can trade prediction markets
on your behalf and use those markets
as a live signal to trigger trades
anywhere in your portfolio.
Public already calls itself the world's first
agentic brokerage, and this launch is them
leaning all the way into that narrative.
Members, now as of time,
today have access to prediction markets across nine different categories on the platform.
Cryptocurrency, commodities, climate, economics, corporate events, markets, indices, tech and science,
and politics and elections. But the real story isn't that public added prediction markets because
plenty of platforms have already done that. The real story about this is what they are doing with these
AI agents on top of the prediction markets. Yeah, this is so cool because we've been talking about
public for years and today, as of today, members can trade these events directly the way you'd expect.
But they can also hand the reins to an AI agent and say in plain English what they want to happen
when the probability crosses a certain threshold. Life Abraham, Publix's co-CEO and co-founder,
put it this way. Quote, prediction markets give those agents a new input, real world events.
So members can trade a position on the event directly or use the market's data,
as the signal that triggers a trade anywhere else in their portfolio.
And the examples that public put out in their press release,
which will have linked in the show notes below,
are worth sitting with for a second
because they show exactly how far this can actually go.
So here's three examples they gave out in the press release.
The first example is,
if the probability of FDA approval for a healthcare stock in my portfolio
crosses 75%,
automatically execute a $5,000 market buy for that ticker symbol.
The second example they gave is, if the probability of at least three rate cuts this year rises by 10 percentage points in a single day, alert me and summarize my exposure to bank stocks.
And the third example they gave was if the probability of a Q3 earnings miss rises above 60% for any stock I own, buy in the money put options spending no more than $2,500 per position.
And the cool thing is it's not a chatbot answering questions about the market.
It's an autonomous agent sitting on top of a live prediction market feed, watching probabilities in real time, and executing actual trades, dollar amounts, and all the second a condition is met.
No open app, no manually checking the odds, no logging in at 2 a.m. because you're worried about a Fed decision, all automated.
And notice what public deliberately left out.
They specifically built this around events that move markets, rate decisions, earnings, FDA approvals,
elections and explicitly excluded sports and entertainment betting.
So this is not a gambling product wearing a fintech costume.
It's positioned as a genuine portfolio risk tool dressed up as a prediction market.
So Austin, this is really, really cool stuff.
I hope everyone is taking notes.
Break this down for us.
What does this mean for you and your money?
Yeah, I think it's awesome.
I mean, we all know public as this platform where you can have different asset classes.
they've got equities, they've got crypto, they've got bonds, they've got treasuries, they've got, you know, option
contracts, generated assets, AI agents, and now we've got prediction markets and the AI agents can use
the prediction markets like public.com is the best broker out there, full stop. Now, what I think is
interesting here is that prediction markets now stop being a side courtesy and start becoming the
actual input on how your portfolio behaves automatically and continuously without you having to be the
watching the screen every single moment. For years, prediction markets have been around. We know
Polymarket and Kalshi, and they've been treated as a novelty for political traders or people who want
to bet on election outcomes, but public just reposition the category entirely and sort of is
reframing it now as market infrastructure, which means you have this live probability feed that can
trigger real trades inside of a real brokerage account. So the winners here are less about the single
tickers and more about the trend. The trend is that public is strengthening
its position in the increasingly crowded agentic brokerage race.
And if this resonates with its members, I would expect to see Robin Hood, Charles Schwab,
and several others begin to start sniffing around the prediction market integrations of their
own within the next, I don't know, three, six, nine, 12 months.
Kalshi and Polymarket, which are two of the largest prediction market operators, also benefit
from a major brokerage, effectively validating the category as a serious financial infrastructure
rather than being this like, you know, gray area of y'all make some bets on, you know,
whatever the election outcome is going to be.
So I think public is absolutely trailblazing what it means to have a holistic portfolio,
not just in different asset classes, not just with prediction markets, which have been around for a while,
but to be able to take the information, the probability insight of that event contract saying,
wait a second, the Fed might raise interest rates.
That now is a higher odd happening.
than it was last week, what does this actually mean for my portfolio? What does AI tell me this
could mean? And what trade should I be thinking about if this type of outcome actually occurs?
Without, and again, we've kind of been, we had an episode about this, Robert. We talked about
how to use prediction markets in your own portfolio. We got some flack on it because y'all thought
we were talking about gambling. We're not. And public just validated our episode back from March,
essentially, which was us saying, hey, prediction markets tell you what is the chance of something
happening. And yeah, the chance of that thing could be a sports game or some sort of like bet on a
TV show. But it could also mean an election outcome. It could also mean the Federal Reserve.
It can mean, you know, Tesla deliveries. It can mean so many different things for you and your money.
And that episode now just got super validated by public that said, yeah, those probabilities are
important. Let's now also put an AI agent on top of it to make sure that they've got their eyes.
And it's really cool, Robert. I'm pumped. Yeah, we've talked about this for a few years now that
these prediction market data points are really, really important. But let's talk about the risk
that go along with it because automation can cut both ways. Let's say an agent executing a $5,000
buy, the instant a probability crosses 75% is powerful when you're right about the setup. And it's
just as fast at compounding a mistake if the market data driving that probability is thin,
manipulated, or just wrong. So prediction markets, especially in a less liquid category,
can move on small volume.
Handing a trading agent explicit dollar amount authority based on that data is a new kind of risk.
Most retailers have never had to think about before.
We love the tools, but we also want to make sure you understand the risk.
100%.
And, you know, we've seen this trend, Robert, from a lot of finance companies.
First, it was the robo advisor, automating your allocation to different index funds.
And then it was the AI chat assistant answering your questions about, you know,
how is my portfolio structured? What should I think about these investments? Now it's AI agents
executing real trades off of real time event probabilities. So whether or not you personally use
this specific feature, it's a preview of where every major brokerage is headed in my humble
opinion. And it's worth understanding and doing some research on before it becomes the default,
not just a cool thing that public.com does. Like, this is going to be the future. And you have to
understand where all this is going or you're going to get left behind, which is why you listen to the
rich habits radar in what we have on these weekly episodes. So to break all of this down, we are
joined by Life, co-founder and co-CEO of Public. Life, welcome back to the show. Hey, guys, go to see you.
Really glad you're here, man. Thanks so much for taking time today. Let's start with the
prediction markets themselves. We've watched this category of prediction markets explode over
the last couple of years, but Public is taking a pretty deliberate approach on the prediction
markets themselves. You're not offering sports or entertainment. You're focusing specifically
on events that could impact the financial markets. One, why did you decide to draw that line?
And two, what role do you think prediction markets should play for investors? Yeah. The instrument
of an event contract and like the use case of that, I would argue, has been stretched over the last
few years, right? And that's why you see it being used for sports and entertainment things and
all these kinds of things because, you know, in theory, it's just an instrument and you can
in theory, use it for a lot of different things. Now, obviously, we're, like, public as a platform
where people put the life savings into, they grow their wealth in it, et cetera. And even though
there might be a category of, like, entertainment finance, you know, let's call it, we think that
should be arms linked from your portfolio and your life savings, you know? But nevertheless,
there are, to your point, like, there are some really good use case.
for certain event contracts, aka prediction markets,
that can actually help you kind of maneuver the markets a little bit, you know?
And that's exactly what we're kind of focus on, right?
So like the high level principle for us is, you know,
basically events that move the markets,
so things that could have an impact on your portfolio,
and then you can either just trade those,
or you can also just use the data and like the, you know,
kind of live event probabilities and those signals
to, you know, do other things in your portfolio
that might not be related to actually trading those markets.
It might be related to something completely different, you know, that you're doing your portfolio.
Yeah, like just taking the insights from the probabilities of an event contract resolving to a yes, right?
Just taking that insight and saying, wait a second, that's interesting.
How might this impact the rest of my portfolio if it actually did happen?
Exactly.
And like an example is we're also showing the events on.
stock pages now, right? And if there's one use case that we very much believe in, it's this use
case of dissecting a company in its performance and its KPIs. And, you know, a lot of companies are
these like big behemoths now, they have multiple businesses and so on, you know, or also, I'm sure
most people who are sort of active in their, like, like in their portfolio had this moment happen
once where, you know, you have a trade in mind on an earnings call or something, you had your
thesis, you've done your research, you've done the work, you were right on what your thesis and
your work was, and the stocks tanked anyway because of something weird the CEO said on the call
or because, you know, the outlook was different than the analysts expected or whatever.
And so now, you know, what creation markets can do is you can dissect company performance
into specific KPIs, and if you basically want to be like, oh, I have a very bit understanding of,
you know, the model Y delivery numbers, because I.
I'm in the business, I'm forecasting this myself, whatever it might be, you can place a trade just on that as well.
And those are the aspects of that are quite interesting because then if you go to, you know, things like the Apple stock page, you're going to have to trade those events contracts, but you can at least even in the context of a stock, for example, see, hey, what does the prediction market?
What do the event, you know, a contract say around the probability of, you know, a European antitrust case to, you know, be won or lost, for example, you know.
and it might give you some understanding of like why the stock is priced a certain way and things like that.
Yeah, we've taken and talked about this for so long that we look at prediction markets because we're not gamblers.
And we look at this information as just another way to gain an edge on a thesis.
And you guys have blown that out of the water by making it so specific to what moves the markets because we don't care about entertainment and gambling.
And I think that's very, very important because there's been this debate over weather,
prediction markets are primarily another form of gambling or whether they're a legitimate source of
this information we all want those edges from. And if a market says there's a 70% probability of
three Fed rate cuts this year, for example, that becomes a real-time signal of what tens of thousands
of people collectively believe is going to happen. And so from your purview, how should investors
interpret those probabilities
and what makes prediction market data useful
alongside more traditional things
like analysts estimates, economic forecasts,
or these market implied expectations.
Break that down for our listeners.
Yeah, I mean, the general thesis
behind the data that prediction markets generate
is the sense of that the minute someone puts their real money,
their own money behind it,
would become more objective.
right suddenly your political opinion or whatever it might be does not matter because it only matters to you
you know what do i believe is going to happen and so i can put my own kind of opinion a little bit out of the
window and it becomes much more a much more rational kind of activity than from those people who
participate and because of that rational you know kind of analysis that everyone applies because it's
literally just about putting my own money to work and see if i win or lose so to say that that basically
creates a cleaner
outcome than
for example running a general poll
where you just call a bunch of people
and they will just express their opinion
because they have nothing to
lose as a study on the other end.
That is the general theory there.
Now I would always see caveat
that doesn't mean that
if you see a market
with an 80% probability that
will definitely
turn out to be that way.
There's many examples of prediction markets
completely flipping, you know, around at some point.
But it is, again, it is one data point that you can take into account.
And I think specifically you made the example of just like general public market analysts, you know.
I would always argue that a lot of public market analysts are actually quite biased, right?
Like if you're the bank who is IPOing a certain company, you know, there's a reason that banker or like that that bank will likely be, you know,
out first on the first six earnings quarter to the company to be able to ask a question
to set the tone and have a very nice lowball question be like oh congrats such a great quarter
you know because there's other financial centers that the bank had and whatnot to like you know make
sure that this is all fine and good and you're getting like a nice little you know kind of off landing
into the public markets and things like that right so like there are biases in these things
you know uh in the like old systems and um even just by like having more of a wisdom of the crowd and
blending it down versus a room of three analysts at Citibank or whatever that might be,
you know, already also I think makes the data potentially a little bit more useful
because it is this more crowd wisdom, you know, blended pool than just, you know,
a few guys in a conference room somewhere.
Well, definitely, and I think what this does is it levels the playing field for the retail
investor giving them more tools to work with.
But it also, I'm going to trust data more if people are putting their money where their mouths are.
And I think that's one of the key factors here is that people are actually betting on the data themselves.
So that's why I think prediction market data is so important when you're making these decisions.
So I really, really like that answer.
Yeah, I completely agree, right?
Because I remember back, you know, we're having midterms are coming up now, but I remember the most recent presidential election.
I feel like a lot of headlines were saying one thing, but then you log into some of these prediction markets and you see a completely different side of the story.
And that side of the story is what actually came true.
And so I agree with you life that, you know, when people put their money where their mouth is,
that to me is a real signal versus the noise of headlines and, you know, talking heads on the internet.
Now, speaking of some of the signal here, walk me through the actual mechanics because in your press release,
you gave this example of like an FDA approval, right?
If probability crosses 75% of this FDA approval for this specific stock, auto execute a buy of $2,000, $5,000, whatever it might be,
where is that probability data actually coming from?
How thick is the liquidity behind that probability?
And then even like what happens if maybe the market itself gets too thin
or maybe manipulated right before triggers are created there with the trade?
Like really walk our listeners through what's happening behind the scenes here?
Yeah, yeah.
And it obviously very much depends contract by contract.
Because think of the prediction markets as similar.
Like I have a float on a stock where it's like the amount of people
trading a certain amount of money
the exact same thing happens with an event contract
of course and so the more popular
contract the more people participate
you know in theory
the better and more
substantial the data behind it should be
right and if you have less people participate
then the data becomes thin up
and you know in theory
I would argue you should likely trust it less
you know or believe the data less
and that is obviously very
true to these markets as well right then
hence also why the more they mature
I think the better they will become, you know, because the more people have participated,
the better the data actually should end up being.
But hence also why, you know, often when you look at these charts on any kind of prediction
market, you always see that volume number in the lower left of like of the chart.
And I think there's actually a quite important number because it gives you a little bit
of like a specific, you know, value that you can kind of learn from a little bit of like,
okay, you know, at which volume numbers, you know, do I feel like I will, you know,
I believe the data becomes, like, starts to become substantial and so on.
That's still subjective, of course, you know.
But I think those things can help a lot in terms of like how, you know,
seriously should take the like current kind of standing of that chart.
Another example you gave that I want to talk about here too was around interest rates.
And I want to make sure I understand this.
I can properly, you know, educate everyone within the Rich Habits Network. And that is,
I can tell an agent that at the probability of at least three rate cuts this year rises by
10 percentage points in one day, alert me and summarize my exposure to bank stocks. I love that
example because the agent isn't necessarily trading the prediction market at all. It's using the
information from the prediction market to help me manage the rest of my portfolio. So walk us
through how far can you take this idea? And could we eventually have hundreds or thousands of
these real-time signals being monitored across all of our portfolios using these tools?
Yeah. And the answer is that can happen today. And the general thing is that thing about it
as you have, it's it is one more data source that you can plug into potentially making an order
or any other action.
It doesn't even mean you have to make a trade.
You can use these data points and connect them to your agents,
not even connect them and just like and have an agent kind of use them
to add things to your watch list, to send you an alert.
You know, so it doesn't have to lead to a trade at all times, right?
And so there's even just a sense of if you want to get a better feeling
around a certain topic in the markets,
you can have agents kind of serve you alerts, you know,
on these signals all the time,
just you develop a little bit of a better kind of understanding,
and feeling on these things, you know.
And then you can layer it as, you know, narrowly and deeply as you want, right?
So you could be that, hey, I want to look at the dot plot, but I also want to look at the
probability of the events contract, you know, and, you know, if both of those together equal
X, you know, only then I want to do this and that with my treasuries, you know?
And so you can really nerd out about the stuff and go really deep and build very complex things.
Obviously, the more complex you build something,
the less likely something will come out of it, you know,
because you're kind of going very deep in your if this and that stack a little bit
in a little equation there.
But, yeah, but like you can go as deep and wide as you can
and you can set up as many as you like, you know?
So.
Robert, before we ask Life our next question,
I need to talk about a tool that we started using to help run our business.
And we love this tool.
It's called granola, like the snack bar.
Yes.
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And we started using granola for these calls a few weeks ago.
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Robert, you know, because we find ourselves searching for specific action items.
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Austin, let's get back to the episode.
I'm curious from your perspective, life, how do you think about like the guardrails here
to make sure that investors understand the difference between using this like, you know,
prediction market signal with the probabilities versus treating it as like a crystal ball?
because I feel to your point earlier, you know, heading into 2026, you can go on any of the
prediction market websites back in January and February and the number one most popular
outcome for interest rates in 2006 were three rate cuts.
That is obviously not happening.
So it's like depending on the time and the day and the quarter and the month, right,
it's like just using about this stuff as a way of information and better, you know,
I just want to get your perspective on like holistically thinking about a portfolio versus
versus crystal ball, predict the markets, let me get fancy here and really start making some
aggressive predictions.
A hundred percent.
And that's exactly what I mean when we started this conversation earlier of people should
look at this as a data point, not the data point.
And there's enough examples out there where a market completely flips.
And I think what you're springing up with the interest rate cuts is a great example, right?
Like that has changed.
Maybe that's something that changed more gradually than just from one day to the next.
next, but it has definitely changed, right?
And so, you know, no one can predict the future.
As much as the word predict and prediction might be in this name of this, you know,
of this instrument now, but no one can.
And everyone's got to be cautious on, you know, not taking it as, you know, a truth-telling
machine, you know, they should take it as a signal.
And it's a signal, you know, which means you should likely have multiple signals that you
looking at before I make your own decisions and stuff, as you always should in any other
investment in any other asset class as well. 100% man. So zooming out, you guys, you know,
we love working with public and you guys build incredible tools. And this feels like another
bigger piece, a bigger idea that you've been building towards with public to become an
agentic brokerage. And for everyone watching and listening, historically a brokerage basically
gives you the access to the markets and then waits for you to tell it what to do.
But now we're talking about software that can monitor markets, understand your portfolio,
watch outside signals, and potentially take action for you.
So where does this ultimately go?
Let's think in the future a little bit here.
What does a brokerage account look like in three to five years from now with these AI
agents becoming as powerful as you expect?
If you look at what it does right now and then that will bring me to what it does in the future.
Right now, what agents are fantastic at is taking a kernel of an idea or an idea and turning it into action.
I would not say that it is fantastic yet at giving you ideas.
And we're getting there, you know, but I would say right now it's really good at you have a fairly specific understanding of what you want to do.
or you're picking something from the marketplace
even if you have like an agent marketplace, right?
And then you put that into action
and it executes as like a deterministic workflow
where you have a very clear understanding of what it does,
you know exactly what's going to do, and that's it, right?
So when you say agents, people's minds go to,
oh, let me prompt, make me a lot of money, don't make mistakes.
And that's obviously not how it works, you know.
It is much more about automating strategies.
But to automate a strategy,
you've got to know what the strategy is.
in the first place.
And currently we're still in the spot where it's really powerful if you know what the strategy
is in the first place.
And so that's what's really good.
Now where it's always going to go is that it has all the context in your portfolio.
You might not feed it the whole strategy, but you might feed it, you know, behavior.
You might feed it interests, you know, around your portfolio, you know, themes that you're
interested in, you know, industry that you're interested in, you know, specific things you might
understand well events that you care about earnings calls you know macro events etc and then it will
take all that input and it will essentially serve you things you know it doesn't mean it will
automatically trade for you all the time because then you're going into like full on you know you have
your you know AI advisor who like takes over your account I think it's going to take some time to
really get there but in this in between state between you're having already your different strategy
and the AI just running with it.
You have this in-between state of
it understanding a bunch of different things about you
and then serving you proactively
things to consider in your portfolio,
things to change in your portfolio, etc.
One thing that is running right now is quite popular.
One thing that people use agents in public for right now
is just taxors harvesting,
which a little bit is like a not-as-intelligent version
of what I'm just describing, you know,
because to do tax loss harvesting, you've got to know, okay, here's a position in my portfolio
that I'm currently down on. I want to harvest those losses. And so I'm going to take that
cash and put it into something similar that doesn't count as like a wash sale. And, you know,
and then three months later, I might revert that trade back, you know? And so on. And that is
always something that an agent is great at just automating. And so, you know, tax loss, like a portfolio,
why tax on harvesting agent is something a lot of people are doing.
And I would say there's a good example for like a kernel of how this is going to look like, right?
I want to like linger on this a little bit longer because it's cool.
I mean, not every day do we get the opportunity to kind of dig into the brains of people who are building a brokerage platform that's used by millions and millions and millions and millions of people, right?
So like talk to us more from your perspective, too, about like the prediction markets.
five years, three years, two years from now, how big do you think prediction markets are going to become within the broader financial ecosystem?
And do you think maybe there's use cases in three, four, five years from now that is popular that perhaps investors aren't even thinking about today?
Do you think those use cases are going to come from these objective AI agents that are figuring out new ways to use these prediction markets?
I think you're going to see the most growth in like securities based prediction markets.
with things around publicly traded assets.
So in that instance,
it's not like the Model Y delivery example.
The Model Y delivery is a contract that happens today,
but I think you're going to get deeper
into more KPIs around companies and so on.
And you can basically think about
like any custom company KPI that exists around the company,
you will have a market around.
And number one, I'm saying this
because it's, you know, kind of public knowledge
that between the SEC and the CFTC,
again, CFC regulates the actual,
futures contracts of rent contracts
and the SEC
regulates the securities so there has to be collaboration
in order to expand these types
of markets, the types of contracts more
like it's probably acknowledged that
that collaboration is
happening and so you are going
to see your growth in more
of these contracts to
go live.
That by itself I think will start to do
two things. Number one
as you have more ways
to trade you're going to have
more trades happen, more people participate
but number two, I think you want to see
institutions to get into it
or more into it
because again
there are some really interesting
trades you can make there
and if you know one
one use case people always talk about about
is like hedging and I would always argue
if you want to truly hedge for real
it's a quite sophisticated thing to do
because you also
have to think about the pricing of the contract
and you know you're a time decayed
and like, you know, when does it expire and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
And I would say that, like, the most normal retail investors, like,
they don't necessarily have the capacity or the, you know, sophistication to truly do that.
Maybe together with the I agents, it gets a little easier, you know,
but it's still a quite sophisticated thing if you, like, truly want to hedge well.
For institutions, they do that all their long.
It's their business, right?
They literally call hedge funds in most cases.
And so, you know, and so, you know, and so I think.
there's going to be a whole kind of, you know, market popping up terms of volume even just, you know, of, of more institutions, you know, using these instruments in their day to day as well.
And so that combination, I think, is going to start to, you know, likely going to lead to something where the non-sports entertainment markets, which is the stuff that we have on public, I would assume we'll have more volumes in the, you know, medium term future than the sports kind of sports trading.
sports betting markets have right now. That makes a lot of sense. And I guess my final like question
and more of just a statement I want to get your reaction to is, you know, Public is one of these
platforms that allows you to build a multi-asset portfolio. Now we have this, you know, another asset
class here of prediction markets. What's next? I can't even think of another asset class out there that
you guys don't already have some sort of exposure to. I mean, the corporate bonds, we have the treasuries,
we've got cryptocurrency, we've got, you know, option contracts, equities. And now,
prediction markets. I mean, you guys have absolutely everything. Is there something else around there
that you guys are excited about? A few things we could always ask about. One is real estate.
And the second is pre-IPO company exposure. Something is going to happen on each of these, for sure.
And then on the more active trading side, your actual futures, which we don't have yet, for example,
you know, you have like a whole game of like perpetuals coming up now, you know, as well,
which is a whole other category in some regard.
This is all on the much more active trading side,
much more risky things.
But I think the main thing we hear the most about
of people wanting to get more exposure to
is real estate and pre-IPO companies.
Well, when y'all launch those two,
come back on the show and talk about it, my friend.
Yeah, I definitely think that is a great direction.
You know, you think about the Rich Habits Network
and all the pre-IPO investing we do
and there's a huge appetite for it.
And because public,
is so incredibly trusted.
I think it's a great direction for the future,
for everything you guys are doing.
But Life, thank you so much for joining us.
For me, I think the biggest takeaway
is that prediction markets
don't necessarily have to be a standalone bet.
You said it's a data point, not the data point.
I really like that because it's just another tool
people can use to really be better retail investors.
And I really like that.
And when you combine that information with AI agents,
that can actually continually monitor everything you're doing.
You start to get a glimpse of what investing could look like in this agentic world.
So, life, congrats on the launch.
We always love having you on.
And thanks for coming back.
Thanks.
Good.
See you guys.
You too, man.
Thanks so much.
Man, I love it when Life, Yonick, the whole public team.
Steven Sykes, right?
We've done live streams with him inside the Rich Habits Network.
The whole public team, we're just so grateful to have them in our corner and be able to get some behind-the-scenes action here.
and bring that to our audience inside the rich habits podcast and the rich habits network.
Yeah, they definitely have the coolest tools and he is just, they're just always bringing the heat for our audience and I love it.
But Austin, before we jump into our next story, support from this show comes from VCX, the public ticker for private tech.
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That is getvcx.com. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including
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prospectus at getvcx.com. This is a paid sponsorship. So our next story, I think, is
pretty interesting because Meta just came out this week with some really interesting hardware.
And Shopify is giving in the thumbs up, the green flag, the Let's Keep Going.
So, Robert, let's jump into that story.
Yeah, definitely.
This is an exciting one that I've been following closely.
And Mark Zuckerberg spent Wednesday night at Meta Connect, proving that Muse, which is Meta's
two-week-old AI agent, isn't just a chatbot buried in an app anymore.
it's becoming the operating layer for every piece of hardware meta makes.
And just days later, Shopify agreed to let it start spending your money.
So let's start with what Mark Zuckerberg actually showed us on stage.
He was actually wearing a shirt that said, building is my love language, which, hey, listen, I'm
here for it.
As a shareholder, I hope you feel that way, Mark.
He announced that Muse is coming to Mehta's smart glasses with full hands-free activation,
which means a wake word, and then the agent completely takes over.
He live demoed it on stage, asking Muse through his glasses to book time on his calendar
with their chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, and it worked.
Alongside that, Meta unveiled the Muse charm, a keychain-sized device built specifically
to talk to your Muse agent, shipping just in time for the holidays.
Meta also announced audio-only smart glasses with no camera at all, which is a direct response.
to the privacy backlash they've got with their camera equipped glasses,
plus a new Rayban meta collaboration with Blackpinks Lisa,
which is a hologram video calling type thing that goes on with the Rayband display glasses.
It's like a photorealistic version of your face on a call.
Kind of cool.
Maybe don't want Austin hologram, but who knows?
And they also talked about a new VR headset glass vibe coming out,
spring of 2007, get this, Robert, for only $1,300.
If you've not yet seen Mark's post about this on Instagram,
you should definitely go check it out.
These VR glasses are sick.
Metaverse talk, that's gone.
Zuckerberg said,
we made the decision to folk a little bit less on the Metaverse,
and we're going in on those AI agents.
Well, I feel like he's back on track, and so is meta.
And Muse is already the number one app in the app store two weeks after launch,
and meta's not stopping at glasses.
New partnerships announced onstage,
including Walmart,
Sephora, Best Buy, and Gap,
letting Muse act as a shopping agent across their catalogs.
So, wow, this is going to be incredible to see how this unfolds.
And in a detail that tells you how nervous the retail world already is about this,
Amazon reportedly blocked Muse from completing purchases on its site over the weekend,
saying it wasn't authorized to do so.
Now, here's the pivot that makes this bigger than just a product keynote.
Two days before Connect, Shopify's CEO,
called it an easy and delightful way to shop and checkout with Muse.
Meta's chief AI officer Alexander Wang framed it from the other side.
Quote, I want to give our Musers access to a wide range of stores to find the absolute perfect products,
which tells me Muse won't just recommend a product anymore.
It'll complete the purchase on Shopify Rails without you even touching a checkout page,
which is kind of crazy, Robert.
That is so crazy.
and I'm excited about it though, and Wall Street already reacted.
Shopify's shares closed up 7.3% the day the partnership was announced.
And Deutsche Bank analysts called it another proof point
that leading AI platforms are integrating with Shopify's commerce infrastructure,
arguing it actually reinforces Shopify's moat,
its structured product catalog, merchant relationships,
and shop pay checkout infrastructure,
rather than getting disintermediated by A.A.
agents, which was the bare case going into this year. Meanwhile, Meadow's own stock is up 30% in September
alone on pace for its best month since July of 2013. All of you listening right now, remember,
we talked about the lawsuit with Mehta. I think it was early August. Meta was trading. Let's
look it up, Robert, because we got the receipts, and I think it's fun to do stuff like this.
We do have the receipts. So Meta stock back in August, everyone was crying about it being at
550, $560, $570 a share because of this big lawsuit hanging over it. Now it's at $776 a share,
40% return here in real time, up 40% in the last four weeks from those August lows. And I don't
know if you guys remember this, but Robert and I, we sat on screen, we said, listen, I'm buying
meta at $500, $550, $600 a share because it's going to be $1,000 a share stock by the end of
the decade, Mark Zuckerberg never bet against the Zuck. And guess what? It's up 40% in the last
four weeks. This is why you listen to the Rich Habits radar in the Rich Habits podcast. You're a part of
the Rich Habits Network. You take notes. You take action. You're a part of it, baby. You're in the
game. So, Robert, what does all of this mean for our listeners and their money? For me,
this is meta, stitching together three years of scattered, expensive bets that went awry. You know,
you've got the rayband glasses, the Quest headsets, an in-house AI model into a single distribution
funnel with Muse as the front door. And it's not staying inside Meta's walls by plugging into
ShopPay. Muse gets instant access to Shopify's entire merchant network without Meta having to build
its own commerce infrastructure from scratch, which I think is brilliant and good for them and good
for us for being ahead of this. So
winners, meta, obviously.
The stock's already telling you the market
likes this. Shopify benefits
twice over, both from the direct
integration and from Deutsche Bank's
read that this actually validates
rather than threatens its core business.
So Bulls should watch, shop
here, the named retail partners,
Walmart, Best Buy,
Sephora Gap, get a new AI
driven sales channel essentially
for free. And Invidia
and the broader AI infrastructure chain
keeps benefiting as more compute gets thrown at agent products racing to ship before the holidays.
So for me, it's all rainbows and unicorns here.
So much good stuff is happening around this launch and this new product.
Yeah, the rainbows and unicorns, though, come to an end with Amazon.
Yep.
Especially as Amazon's like, hey, I'm the largest e-commerce platform on the earth.
And they were like, you're not going to use my site, which means muse shopping ambitions
are currently capped by whoever's willing to let them in.
Walmart, Best Buy, Shopify.
like they're all saying yeah like I I want muse on our website because you're going to help us make more sales and you know all that cool goodwill and everything that's great but Amazon I mean they've got Alexa right like Amazon's like we're just going to build our own agent and then we're going to do our own thing so it makes sense why Amazon's kind of pushing back a little bit here on on the muse AI agent that meta has built but listen Robert it comes down to we talked about this on our live stream a couple weeks ago a couple months ago even inside the rich habits network which is
At the moment, tokens for AI agents, let's say it's at 100, right?
Like, let's just say that's like the unit for how many tokens are being used right now by AI agents.
By 2030, that 100 is going to turn into like 2000.
Like the amount of tokens these AI agents are going to use in the next two, three, four, five years will 20x.
And you have to be on the right side of that trade.
And we've talked about this for so long now.
And it's not just, you know, because Robert, I want to like really talk about this.
For the last three years, it's all been who's got the best model.
Who can build the best large language model?
And that's been OpenAI.
It's been anthropic.
It's been some of these open source things.
That was the race.
The race was finished.
When Open AI came out with ChatGPT6, Astra, it's smarter than like 99.999% of humans.
Like, we've got the smart brain, right?
We've got the superintelligence.
Now the race is the inference.
How quickly can we take that smart information and disseminate that
information to an AI agent, to a chatbot, to the application layer of the AI trading, get that
smart AI information over to people who need to use it to do tasks, like these muse agents,
like the grok bots, like the, you know, Alexa, I'm sure in the future is going to use,
the inference of how quickly those tokens can move and how quickly that information and intelligence
can move from the actual large LLM into the application layer. That, in my opinion, is where all this
is going, which is why I'm excited about Cerebrus. They've got the fastest tokens per second with their
GPUs. I'm excited for the neoclouds like fluid stack and nebius and maybe even the bloom energies of
the world as more data centers get built out. It's not all about who's got the best model.
It's how quickly can these tokens get the model information disseminated to the application layer
and who's going to benefit when it's 20 times more tokens getting spent on an annualized basis
because everyone now has a cute little meta-muse keychain on their backpack and says,
hey, Muse, or to meet Chipotle.
Yeah, you're 100% right because we look at it.
Remove friction, increase efficiency, more profits.
That's the move.
And that's what we're seeing here where everyone is going.
And another big takeaway, too, is we've moved away from AI agents just answering questions
to AI agents holding your credit card, making transactions, and doing
the things you wanted to do. And meta didn't just launch a chat bot upgrade this week. It launched
the checkout button of the future and got one of the largest commerce platforms in the world
to hand it the keys within two weeks of release. We're talking about Shopify here. So whoever
controls that checkout moment controls a generally new layer of retail. And right now that's meta and
Shopify moving super fast. Robert, we've talked a ton about AI agents and AI agents and AI
agents in this episode. Let's flip it to the other side. Let's talk about real estate. Let's talk a
little bit about, you know, tangible. For years now, apartment buildings, they've been the safest
bet in commercial real estate and now they're the sector with the biggest debt problem in the country.
And the bill on that debt is coming due whether landlords are ready for it or not. So let's talk about
with this $2 trillion ticking time bomb we alluded to in the intro. Apartment land.
landlords owe more than $1.8 trillion in debt over the next decade, according to the
Mortgage Bankers Association, the most of any commercial real estate sector.
$757 billion of that comes due between now and 2008, right?
That's a two-year shot clock.
Nearly 300 billion of that matures in 2026 alone.
On top of that is a record $310 billion that were due in 2025, the highest
single year total the Mortgage Bankers Association has ever tracked. Another $223 billion is due in
2007 and the loans that these landlords took out back in 2020 and 2021 when rates were around
2, 3, 4 percent, now have to get refinanced at 6 percent, 7 percent, maybe even higher,
depending on what the 10-year yield does. Austin, let's rewind of how this happened because we have to
think back that during the pandemic, office towers emptied out, hotels went quiet, and senior
housing shut down, but apartment rents were surging double digits nationwide. So multifamily became
one safe harbor in real estate and investors just piled in. Newark's Mike Wolfson called it,
quote, a sense of relative euphoria. And new construction flooded Sunbelt cities like Phoenix, Denver,
Atlanta, Austin, faster than people showed up to fill those units.
In City View CEO, Sean Burton put it bluntly, quote,
the chickens are coming home to roost,
and they're coming after their money and all of that debt
that likely won't be able to be paid for.
And here's where it turns from a landlord problem to a,
wow, that might impact my portfolio problem.
The delinquency rate on these multifamily loans
are packaged into commercial mortgage-backed securities,
That delinquency rate has jumped from 1% back in October of 2023 to 7.1% right now.
The sharpest increase of any property type, according to Morgan Stanley.
Trump says about 3% of this year's maturing loans that can't be extended are already in distress,
which is the highest level in five years.
Apartment values are down 3.5% in the past month alone and set more than 20% off their peak in 2022.
This is why, Austin, we talk about diversification.
And if you look right now, the casualties are already public.
Blackstone defaulted in June on a $90 million, Aries real estate loan tied to a Dallas apartment building it bought at the top of the market in 2021.
And Dallas-based syndicator S2 Capital has racked up $400 million in defaults across its Sun Belt portfolio.
and CEO Scott Everett dissolved the fund, told investors they won't get their money back,
is now being personally sued by lenders and just listed his own house for $45 million.
Bob Hart of True America summed it up as, quote,
no one is spared here.
We're seeing a lot of times up situations.
Even the merger activity tells the story.
Avalon Bay and Equity Residential agreed in May to a $69 billion combination,
partly to lean less on the expensive debt that is bringing them all down as we speak.
So, Austin, a lot of numbers there, a lot of scary things happening.
What does this mean for you and your money?
Well, you know, before we get into that, I think what could be really interesting to talk about for you,
Robert, is, does this feel like 2008 but for commercial real estate for apartments?
I mean, I've seen some interviews.
You know, Carlton Dennis did an interview with a really interesting individual.
His name is slipping me, but he was saying,
listen, it's 2008 right now when it comes to commercial real estate, apartments, you know,
office buildings, everything, and he's buying them up, pennies on the dollar. I wasn't old enough
in 2008 to take advantage of any real estate investing. You certainly were. I know you did a lot of
real estate investing in 2008. Does this, is this feel the same but just like a different part of
real estate to you? It does. It definitely feels the same. It's not single family homes. It's
commercial. And I think, and I see it right here in downtown St. Pete every day, they are building
buildings, apartment buildings, faster than they can put them together. And I just don't see, especially
at the rate of rents here in downtown St. Pete, how they're going to fill them. And I think the bigger
red flag here, and I see it all the time and the deals I look at, is how many of these deals
run out of money or get their financing yanked and they're sitting still. There's two within a two-block
radius of me right now that are either framed or the land is ready.
and they had to stop the project
because all of this funding is drying up
or it's so expensive
that a project that penciled two years ago
or three years ago
no longer pencils because the debt is so expensive.
Yeah, I think the debt being expensive
is what is important to call out
because I see here in our notes,
City View is buying foreclosed properties
directly from lenders at a 40% discount.
We heard from Burton
and he says his firm is calling it
some of the best buying opportunities I've seen in my entire career.
But that is buying those opportunities with cash on hand and spending real cash because you can't
borrow it right now because it's 7, 8, 9% depending on what you're actually looking for.
So, you know, big takeaway from me here is that this is what happens when an entire asset class
gets built on the assumption that ZERP, right, zero interest rate policy rates are going to be
permanent.
Everyone went out in 2020 and 2021 and they were like, oh, cool, yeah, we got 2% rates or whatever it might be.
You know, now that was on a floating note and those rates floated in the wrong direction.
And it's very, very interesting to see this take place.
But the part that kind of makes me mad, though, Robert, is like, it's hard to invest in commercial real estate if you're just a normal person.
I mean, we're hearing from like co-star and we're hearing from, you know, city view and like some of these big banks and big people saying, yeah, we're buying this.
stuff but raise your hand if you don't have 400 million to go buy some commercial thing like so it's kind of
it's got that that that part is the frustrating part for me and I think a lot of our audience members so
maybe I'll do some homework this weekend and we'll figure out what publicly traded reits might be
taken the best advantage of this or you know is this something that funrises doing behind the scenes that
maybe we don't know we can get ben Miller back on the podcast to talk about but it's like if this
really is 2008 all over again but for commercial real estate and people are buying stuff 40% off of what it was in
2022. Could be a really cool opportunity depending on where you have your money part.
Yeah, it's interesting because I feel like where everyone, these large companies are missing
the mark because they've stayed true to their thesis of building these buildings is not enough
people are looking at the real sectors of real estate that will thrive in the next five to 10 years.
And that is affordable apartments and affordable housing. I think everyone is still off the mark,
building all these fancy buildings with bigger units with stainless steel appliances,
when in fact I think they'd be way smarter if they brought the square footages down to
eight, nine hundred a square foot, had something that's just pretty basic, but in a good
location. So people could actually afford to live because it's a trickle effect.
These people are so strapped and their debt to income ratios are so maxed out.
Because if they want to live near their job, it's just really expensive.
in most cities. So I think people are missing the boat there and also retirement home facilities as well,
elder care facilities. There's a lot of ways these companies could pivot instead of building these
giant apartment buildings that people can't afford. And so now they're all backed into a corner
because how do they get out of what they've already done with this high interest debt?
Everybody, thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Rich Habich Radar. Congratulations again to
public unlaunching prediction markets and of course their AI agents ability to use the information
from those prediction markets to make informed decisions with your money. If you like this type of
coverage by myself and Robert, please consider joining us inside the Rich Habits Network and join
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