DeSantis Set To Announce 2024 Run On Twitter With Elon Musk w/ Rob Smith | PBD Podcast | Episode 273
PBD Podcast Episode 273. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Rob Smith, Tom Ellsworth and Adam Sosnick.
4:50 - DeSantis 2024 Presidential Bid With Elon Musk
42:57 - Democratic Activist Calls Florida a Terrorist State
53:15 - Bud Light Sales Dropped 28% Compared To The Previous Year
1:05:33 - Will Your Bank Be The Next To FAIL?
1:12:41 - Massive Drop In Cable News Viewership
1:20:54 - The Daily Wire Will Stream All Shows On Twitter
1:26:56 -Tucker Carlson Sends Legal Threat To PAC Urging Him to Run For President
1:30:10 - Could Taiwan Trigger World War III?
1:35:43 - Reaction To Hillary Clinton Defending Biden
1:41:43 - Lawmakers Calls For $14 Trillion In Reparations to black Americans
1:50:40 - Patrick Bet-David Reacts To Iran Hanging Three People On Drug Charges
1:55:52 - The Shocking Decline of Faith In America
------
Get Your Tickets for The Vault 2023 NOW ⬇️⬇️ The BIGGEST EVENT in VT History!
**TOM BRADY, MIKE TYSON & PATRICK BET-DAVID on one stage!**
https://thevaultconference.com/
Check out StopWoke.com: https://bit.ly/43oAys5
Follow Rob Smith on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3q35mQJ
Follow Rob Smith on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3IF7On8------
Want to get clear on your next 5 business moves? https://valuetainment.com/academy/
Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you bet on Jolieth when we got bet taved?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we can't no value to hated.
I'd be running, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
All right, so we got a home team podcast today with a friend in the house, Rob Smith.
We got a lot to talk about.
If you don't know who Rob Smith is, you will in a minute.
He's a decorated Iraq war veteran.
He served five years in the Army, including two tours in the Middle East during Operation Iraq Freedom.
He was awarded the Army Accommodation Medal and Combat Infantry Badge.
He has spoken about politics and current events at Yale University, Google, Deutsche Bank, Venerable University, and dozens of other colleges, universities, and companies across America.
There's a, I want to say a special you did that got 10 plus million views.
Was it with Vice?
Yeah, it was the Vice.
I love it.
Black conservatives.
Black conservatives debate black liberals.
Phenomenal.
I mean, if you've never seen it, you've got to watch it.
And then you're based out of Florida now.
You're with Turning Point USA Contributor.
You promote their values of fiscal responsibility, free market, limited government daily, and you hold a master's degree from Columbia University.
Columbia University.
Yes, I was with Turning Point.
Okay.
I was with Turning Point.
Did a lot of work with Turning Point.
Great organization.
Now, sort of kind of doing my own thing.
I love it.
But yeah, so that Vice video was crazy, went crazy.
Black conservatives versus black liberals.
Still, like, I've done a lot of stuff, but that's still the thing that people come up to me, airports, Amtrak, whatever, like, oh, and that thing still flies crazy to this day.
Somebody goes and watches that, like, it still goes hard.
Still goes hard.
I love it.
I think, honestly, I think everybody who hasn't seen it should see it because the exchange, how you handled it, how, you know, they got triggered and uncomfortable.
Oh, my God.
He's kind of doing the same thing to me.
It's a very interesting exchange to watch, but it's good to have you on.
We've got a lot of topics to cover today.
A ton of topics.
Obviously, this guy named, what's his name?
Ron, I want to say, right?
Ron DeSantis is announcing that he's running for office today.
He's got a big announcement.
We don't know what it is, but of course we all know what it is.
Don't know what it is.
And he's making the announcement with Elon Musk on Twitter spaces.
And everybody else from mainstream media is probably disappointed that that announcement wasn't being made on mainstream media.
A lot's changing in the marketplace, so we'll talk about that.
We know economy-wise, Tom, you got a few things to talk about with Jamie Dimon warning some additional banks that may go out of business due to the commercial real estate loans.
Inflation pummeled U.S. household finances last year.
Indeed.
We got a few things to talk about with Apple.
Announces multi-billion dollar deal with Broadcom for U.S.-made chips.
China-Taiwan tension.
Daily Wire just announced that they're planning on taking their podcast potentially on Twitter, following Tucker's lead.
So they may also take their podcast to Twitter.
Reports of Instagram making Twitter competitor prompts comment from Linda, who is now the CEO of Twitter.
Looming existential crisis for cable news.
Wait till you see the data that we have here.
Tucker Carlson sends a legal threat to PAC urging him to run for president.
That's a news week story.
And then we got a few other things that's going on back here with Target is flip-flopping with the decision that they made.
And then MSNBC guest claims Florida is about to be a terrorist state for black and LGBTQ community.
And then Berkeley holds a segregated graduation ceremony for black students only.
And last but not least, this is a story that we want to touch.
Tom doesn't want to touch it, but we're probably going to touch it.
It's how Bud Light Blew It.
And before we get into the stories, guys, we're about to announce our next live.
We're about to announce our next live podcast.
For those of you that have attended it, you know how insane it gets, whether it's now that we're doing it at night, the cigar lounge afterwards, the exchanges, the conversations, the networking.
If you want to be one of the first to know, because the moment we announce it, the VIP tech itself within the first seven, eight minutes.
The last two times, they saw within the first seven, eight minutes.
So if you want to know and be the first text award podcast to 310-340-1132, once again, text award podcast to 3-103-40-1132.
Having said that, let's get right into the story with DeSantis and Musk.
I think we start with that right off the bat.
So DeSantis said to announce 2024 run for Twitter with Elon Musk.
This is a New York Times story that I'm reading.
Governor Ron DeSantis said to announce presidential campaign on Twitter in a live audio conversation with Musk.
Sources reveal that DeSantis aims to reach a wide online audience, stating it's the right thing for society and it's the great thing for our brand.
That's what Musk said.
DeSantis faces the challenge of capturing attention amid competition from former President Donald Trump, who is expected to return to Twitter.
By the way, if he's saying he's expected to return to Twitter, that's pretty wild.
A pro-Trump super PAC criticizes DeSantis' campaign launch as out of touch and mocks his after party at the upscale four seasons resort in Miami.
Musk, who will moderate the Twitter event, has expressed support for DeSantis in the past, although not formally endorsing and Musk has shifted his support toward the right and has engaged the right in conspiracy theories on social media.
Again, remember, this is a New York Times story.
Rob, thoughts on the story?
All right.
So first of all, what people have to understand about Ron DeSantis is that he loathes the mainstream media.
He really does not like these people.
Okay.
These people attack him.
They try to obfuscate.
They try to do all these different things.
He does not like these people.
So this is a brilliant move to take his announcement to Twitter to Elon Musk because he knows that that is going to be the most powerful platform.
These platforms that we have online, whether it's YouTube, Facebook, but Twitter is the most powerful free speech platform in the world right now.
So that is where he's going to take his message.
He knows that as he runs for president over the next year to year and a half, the mainstream media, which basically focuses as like an arm of the Democrat Party at this point, is going to attack him at every turn.
It's a brilliant move.
I think that it'll be very interesting.
And, you know, as far as DeSantis's capabilities as president or his possibilities, I have a lot of thoughts that I'll get into if you want me to.
So I had dinner with DeSantis at the governor's mansion a couple months ago.
And I think I told you about this the last time that I came here, right?
So he was literally sitting right here.
It was a three and a half hour dinner and it was endless.
It was a long dinner.
But I really got the sense of who it was endless.
But I got the sense of who DeSantis really is, right?
Outside of, you know, how the team presented him on Twitter and all this other stuff.
And so this is the thing.
This person is whip smart.
This is a very, very, very smart man.
This is a very smart individual policy-wise, okay?
I think the issue that he is going to have is in these interactions with regular people, the sort of small talk, the things that you have to do as somebody that's an entrepreneur, somebody that is a politician or somebody that is a public figure.
These are not things that come natural to him.
Okay.
And it becomes very obvious when you spend more than five minutes with him.
So I think that the fear is if he gets into this situation where if you ever went to the Iowa State Fair, and you know this is basically a humiliation ritual that we put our candidates for office and our candidates for president through as a society.
And you've got a Ron DeSantis out in the Iowa State Fair, like, you know, eating a hot dog on a stick or something like that and having to engage with people.
The opportunity there and the threat there is to have a very negative viral moment where he's kind of just being a little awkward.
The left takes that, blows it up.
Got it.
Tom, what are your thoughts on this?
Well, I agree with that.
And I also think that there's a macro element.
And you're in the system, so you see some of this.
Yes.
The ad sales vice presidents at MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News are pissing on themselves today because social media and alternative platforms are taking the biggest show of the year to the American people.
That's the scary part, right?
When you think of being a guy that's from that space, you know, to see, I bet they're probably losing their minds.
How the hell do we lose this?
Yeah.
And I think that this is part of his strategy.
You have to understand the DeSantis strategy and his entire team is that they want to make the mainstream media irrelevant.
Okay.
They do because they know that these people are going to be anti-them no matter what.
Fox, though.
Because Fox, to me, is more DeSantis than they are Trump right now.
You know, I do not know.
I think that he's still going to use Fox.
Fox is still a very large cable news conservative entity, right?
He went there to promote his book.
He still uses that.
And he knows that he will get a friendlier interview with Fox than he will get from a CNN or an MSNBC.
But I think the long-term strategy is in his eyes to delegitimize the mainstream media in the eyes of the people that are his actual base.
I asked him at that dinner.
He was actually, he actually got a little pissed at even the suggestion of this question.
I was like, oh, you know, when you go on book tour, you're going to go to the view.
He's like, why would I go to the view?
You know, they're not going to give me a fair shape, blah, blah, blah.
And he kind of like went on and on.
I was like, okay.
So it's, you know, not going to the view.
You know, it's something funny.
I just wrote down here, do you think he's going to end up doing the CNN town hall, DMSNBC, going on The View, going on opposition, going on all those guys?
I think the strategy, I think if Musk is in his ear, Musk knows they're going to get him more eyeballs on Twitter spaces and people will be able to answer questions, ask questions from him while they're going back and forth.
I think that part's going to be the new direction because when you are making an announcement, like, you know, even a CNN town hall, the CNN town hall, who's asking questions?
The people that are in there, right?
But it's still formatted in a weird, you know, mechanical way.
But if you do Twitter spaces, it's set up in a way where it's like, hey, so tell us what you think about this.
Hey, hey, Ron, I had a question for you.
That one time, what happened with Disney and Bob Iker, would you have done that again?
Hey, the decision you made to go to six weeks abortion, do you think that kind of hurt you and you could have kind of set that aside and not really gone there?
Why did you go there in the first place?
Would you say that was one of your mistakes?
Twitter spaces, you can't really moderate what people are going to ask.
Most people on town hall, they stand up and they do the following.
Think about it.
They go like this.
Hi, Governor Ron DeSantis.
I just want to tell you, I love the work you do.
I'm a resident of Tallahassee.
You're amazing.
Okay.
So if you were to do, no, no, no, no.
Nobody does this on Twitter.
It's scripted.
Yeah, it's completely scripted.
This is the mechanical part to go away from it.
But there's, you got some thoughts you want to say on that?
Yeah, for it.
Okay, go for it.
But I got a few other things.
By the way, at this dinner, was his wife there?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I did get to talk about Casey.
Okay.
So everything that Ron DeSantis lacks in terms of, you know, maybe a little personal charisma in terms of being able to interact with people, Casey has at times 20.
Agree.
Casey DeSantis is absolutely fabulous.
She has all of that stuff.
So she is going to be such a huge part of this campaign.
And I think that she will be a very big part of this moving forward.
She's gorgeous.
She's intelligent.
This was a television newswoman before, before she became his wife and became the first lady of Florida, right?
So everything that he's lacking in that department, she has.
I think she's going to be a huge star.
I think that conservatives are going to fall in love with this woman if they have not already.
And I think not speak highly enough.
I think mothers are going to fall in love with her.
I think just independents are going to fall with her.
I think Democrats are going to fall in love with her.
We also had the opportunity to meet with DeSantis recently without disclosing much details.
And Ron and Casey sat at the head of a room and there was a handful of us in this room.
And I fully agree with you.
Ron DeSantis is 100% a policy wonk.
Even when he walked in the room, it wasn't like, hey, everybody, thanks for being here.
You know, hey, how you doing, buddy?
None of that.
It was like, hi.
So my agenda worked out.
And basically in the fiscal year, we're all like, oh, okay, we're getting right into this stuff.
Yeah.
And he just went teachers unions and this and that.
No humanity, like marketing perspective whatsoever.
But she spoke, and it was very impressive.
Pat, would you agree?
Yeah, I mean, there's no question about it, that she is a formidable first lady.
And by the way, if you go back to the last eight first ladies, I should go back to the first, let's go all the way back to Reagan.
Okay.
Nancy was super protective.
If you read books about Nancy, she was a ball buster behind closed doors and she would not let you take advantage of her husband.
Very cold.
Yeah, very cold.
So sometimes she hurt the direction he would go.
But eventually, she was somebody you had to win over.
She wasn't John F. Kennedy's wife, Jackie.
Jackie was just beautiful and she wasn't like, you know, she was just put together, nice clothes, marketing, all that stuff.
But Nancy was actually like a fighter and people feared her.
You go to any of the other ones, you know, we've had great ones.
You know, there's Michelle, Melania.
But to me, Michelle is a Michelle is a superstar of a first lady for the Democratic Party.
She's not good for the Republican side.
You know, she would dig at Obama all the time and, you know, she's this, he's that.
That is a very good play for the Dems, maybe not on the Republican side.
Casey is a first lady for a, you know, the Republican audience, independent, also winning part of the left as well.
And if you look at Trump's wife, Trump's wife is a model who has an audience, but Trump's wife's not going to get in there and do the work that, you know, not do the work.
But she's not going to get in there and saying, hey, I'm going to campaign over here.
You go over here.
I'm going to go give this speech.
That was his daughter.
Trump's wife, the role of a first lady in a strange way was played by Ivanka, which she was a powerhouse.
When she spoke, people lost their minds when she would speak because she had that part with her.
But there's a few things that we have to be thinking about right now with this announcement.
Okay.
So one, is it too late?
Okay, so let's address some of the FAQs.
Is it too late?
You know, it's already too late.
He's panicking.
He's kind of announcing right now.
I thought he was going to make the announcement after all the other stuff.
Why is he doing it sooner?
Okay.
Maybe he's doing that after the Disney stuff that happened.
Maybe he's doing it after some of the, you know, not the best start to a campaign.
What people have to realize is Trump announces is in 2015, he announced running on June 2014, I believe, or something.
Can you check Trump's birthday?
Whatever Trump's birthday was, that's when he announced.
And he wasn't a political figure.
So for him to say, I'm going to run June 14th, June 14th.
Yeah, he announced 2015, June 14th.
So essentially, that's what?
That's three weeks from today.
So if he announces today, he's still fine.
Two, Trump is still ahead, 37% as of today.
So it's not like it's a small lead that they have.
Three, most of Trump's ads have been towards DeSantis.
A lot of the ads they've been spending.
And I think I saw on Fox the article that Trump spent more money ads against DeSantis than they did for midterms.
More money was spent on ads against DeSantis than midterms.
What does that mean?
That means the mega, even Trump's campaign sees him as a formidable threat right there.
Trump's PAC spent $15.3 million on DeSantis ad, more than midterms total.
So we have to know that as well.
Now, Tim Scott comes out with $20 million.
He announces it this week, right?
$20 million, which is fine.
You got $20 million.
And I think Tim's going to get the job on whoever the next administration is.
And he may be a great VP candidate.
I think he is a role player.
DeSantis, they said 86 million, what, four weeks ago?
He's going to get 100 million.
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon gives him $50, $100, $200 million.
This is, because here's what I think is happening.
This is what I think is happening with this whole Elon thing.
I think this is more about Elon than it's about DeSantis.
This kind of sounds weird, but I think it's about more Elon than DeSantis.
I think Elon is realizing this political game is kind of cool.
And you can be Iron Man, which is cool.
And he played a role of Iron Man.
What happens when you're Ironman?
Well, you know, you hook up with all the top Hollywood celebrity, you know, women, and you can kind of go and say, yeah, I used to date her.
Yeah, I used to be with Amber Heard.
Yeah, I used to, yeah.
So you're kind of over that.
Now what?
Okay, next thing is, well, I don't know.
I get respect, but legacy, this is a pretty interesting fight.
I don't like what they're doing, kind of like what Sebastian was saying yesterday.
But now it's kind of like, you know what job is open?
What job is open?
Who the hell is the next Murdoch?
Who the hell is the next media?
Who didn't, I wouldn't mind competing for that kind of power.
And what if I have the business?
What if I have the billions?
I can never run for office like that Turner.
I can never run for office like, you know, Trump.
What if I do this?
So Musk is a case study to show can a Musk, with the help of Rogan and others, convert and catch up on a 37-point lead that the opponent has.
If they catch up, you know what this says in the marketplace?
In the marketplace, the most powerful man in politics is officially Elon Musk.
If he pulls this off, if he doesn't pull it off and Trump still wins, and by the way, even if they get close and the difference is like 3%, 4%, 5%, Elon Musk will be the most, you know how they have Suzanne Scott as a number one person?
Next year's Mediites list needs to scrap everybody else and put Elon Musk as number one.
That's my opinion.
Do you think this is going to be considered an endorsement for Ron DeSantis?
Like, this is a big deal.
Like, you talked about that he's basically making the legacy media irrelevant.
I think he still is going to need to, you know, make appearances on mainstream media, CNN, Fox.
I don't think he's necessarily going to make them irrelevant.
He doesn't want to be fully reliant on that for sure.
But this move with Elon, this is massive.
So first, Tucker.
Yeah.
Now you got DeSantis, this upcoming announcement.
The question is, Trump's been so aligned with True Social, he hasn't made any concessions to doing anything with Twitter.
Is this going to be the straw that broke the camel's back to make Trump say, all right, screw it.
If DeSantis is getting all this attention with Elon freaking Musk on Twitter, I got to go ahead and head to Twitter.
I want to know if that's something that you think Trump's going to do.
I believe so, absolutely.
I believe Trump will be back on Twitter.
And honestly, you know, the true social thing hasn't really taken off the way that they want it to.
Remember, you think?
So remember when they announced the digital world acquisition corporate, the DWAC thing, right?
And so basically what that was, and I'm going to get in trouble with Mog World, but that's fine.
Like I'm out of Trump World.
I did that.
I don't care anymore.
Look, a lot of them who knew what was happening made a lot of money off of the DWAC thing, right?
And then it went right there.
So all of them made their money and then they disappeared, right?
And so True Social is going to be a big part of that.
I remember all the rumors about, you know, when Trump left the White House that they were going to announce Trump TV and they were going to do this whole media conglomerate thing, right?
So yes, Trump will absolutely be back on Twitter.
Here's the thing that people don't understand about Trump, because number one, nobody in the circle wants to say anything negative.
Okay.
And one of their fundamental weaknesses right now is that they live in a bubble where nobody can speak the truth.
Trump's fatal flaw is that he just loves attention too much.
He loves attention so much that he will not just stay on true social.
The true social post can make a little bit of a news cycle and make a couple blogs, whatever, but him being on Twitter is seismic.
And that is a man, and that is a movement at this point that just thrives on attention.
And I would not be surprised if he came back to Twitter literally within the space of the next few weeks just to sort of tamp down on some of this momentum in this conversation that we're having about Elon and about DeSantis announcing on Twitter.
So yeah, he'll be back there.
Absolutely.
100%.
You know, I think there's an angle here.
And maybe because I'm a little geeky that I see.
I had the privilege of being at some confabs where I saw some tech CEOs at certain points in their career.
And then I see them later, how they engage the media and talk to the media.
I saw Zuckerberg on stage 2008, 2009.
That guy was not ready for prime time.
Now he can carry his own on a congressional hearing and with the media.
And if you want to take a look at 15 years ago, the way Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the rest of the, and Reid Hoffman and the rest of the PayPal mafia, you look at them doing a team interview on TV and disrupting financial services, PayPal.
They were geeks.
They were college guys.
They were barely able to carry the conversation.
Now look at Elon Musk, how he can play the media and how he can present it.
If this week is about Elon Musk having a big week for Twitter, the platform, having a big week for Elon Musk, the power broker, and then having a big week in general for attention, if that's all it is, then that's all it is.
But if there is a true friendship and a relationship forming between DeSantis and Musk, and Musk can say, Ron, I've been there.
This is how you have to get there.
I think that's a very powerful combination if there's a real relationship there, because DeSantis can learn from Elon, who was very geeky and awkward and now can carry his own with the media.
You know who else I think good to be in his ear?
A Joe Rogan.
I think a Joe being in the middle.
100%.
So for example, like let me, if I'm DeSantis' campaign manager, let's just say, let's go through the step process.
Number one, is he making the launch in the best possible way?
I don't think there's a better way to make the announcement.
I really don't think there's a better platform for him to go to to make the announcement than Twitter spaces.
I'm 100%.
That's number one.
Nothing's above it.
Okay, let's look at some of the next 10, 15 moves.
Let's process the next 10, 15 moves.
Okay.
Number one, in the 10, 15 moves, you got to get on the Rogan podcast.
Okay.
You got to get on a Megan Kelly podcast.
You got to get on the PBD podcast.
You got to go to those three.
Why?
Rogan's going to humanize you because Rogan's going to bring out the human side of you.
You're going to talk and it's going to be a great conversation.
Megan Kelly is going to get the women who are not happy about the decision you made for the six weeks because that was a big hit.
And she's going to come at you.
You're going to go show.
You're going to go there.
And they can make up a little bit on that too.
You can see his humanness.
He can come over here and talk about how the business audience can trust him, how the entrepreneurs, capitalism, as well as some of the stuff that we've addressed over the last 12 months.
And then from there to me, he's got to do a CNN town hall.
He's got to do an MSNBC town hall.
He's got to go on a view.
He's got to go to the places he doesn't want to go.
Why?
Because the other guy is going to go to all those places.
For example, do you think Trump's going to do Twitter spaces in the next three, six, 12 months?
100%.
What do you think is the Twitter space is going to be with Trump and Musk?
You think that's going to be the biggest Twitter spaces in the history of Twitter?
It's going to shut it down.
By the way, a couple things to be thinking about.
A couple of things to be thinking about.
I want you to go on YouTube right now.
Always look at the stuff like this.
Go on YouTube and search the following words.
Okay.
Search the words DeSantis and Musk.
Type in DeSantis Musk.
Take the end out.
Yeah.
So then go to filters to the top left.
Go to today.
Go to today.
Yeah, that's today.
And then go to view count.
Go back to filters.
Go to view count.
Okay.
And now let's look at how many people cared about the announcement yesterday.
The numbers are not that big, by the way.
So if you look at 161 WPBF, you got MBC 212.
Bloomberg, 5,200.
Gola Lord, make that.
Yeah, exactly.
CNN, only 50,000.
Okay.
NBC, only 30,000.
Forbes, only 83,000.
DeSantis on MSNBC, 69,000.
102,000 on ABC.
2,800.
That's 17 hours ago.
2,900.
Keep going lower and lower.
102,000, 83,000 now.
Somebody may say, well, Pat, you got to go look at Fox because I bet when they said this guy was going to announce the Fox one probably has a million and a half.
Okay, go to Fox's channel.
Okay.
Go to Fox News's channel.
If you go to Fox News's channel and go to videos, okay, and then let's go lower and go to the part where they announced DeSantis and Musk.
Go back and zoom out to see if there's any other ones.
Maybe other people are a little bit lower.
Okay, how much is that one?
25,000 views.
Keep going lower.
Maybe there's another one.
Keep going lower.
Not that.
We're already at a day.
Okay.
So meaning, this is the point.
If only that few people are caring about the announcement, this says a couple different things to me.
Okay.
One, the bit of an irrelevance so far where people really don't care because they've in their mind made up their minds the guy is going to be Trump for the Republican side.
Again, I may be wrong.
Two, if this is where you are, you now have to play the comeback game.
So the comeback game to me, this doesn't mean it's over at all.
The comeback game to me is you have to out town hall Trump.
You have to out be sitting there with people, shaking hands, doing convos.
You have to go on the kind of a campaign a few people have ever done to show your face everywhere for people to say, this guy's strong.
This guy's likable.
He's willing to sit down with the opposition.
We all know he's brilliant.
We all know he's smart.
Damn, I love his wife and how they work together.
I totally relate to what she's saying.
she's going to protect me as a mom we're good to go but meaning the announcement wasn't as big of a I want you to think about this.
Say the biggest announcement you're ever going to make in your life and you're going to make it with the richest man in the world.
Shouldn't it get millions?
It did not.
So that's a little bit of a concern.
There's nobody in the world you could have made the announcement with that's a bigger name than Elon Musk.
So tonight's Twitter, Twitter spaces, on how it's going to be held.
I wonder how many people are going to log on.
I wonder how many people are going to get how many views it's going to get.
And I wonder how many people are going to get on there because Musk is doing it.
And I wonder how many people are going to get on there because of DeSantis.
How he shows up today, it's got to be so important on how you prepare.
Meaning, I'm sitting with him, Casey.
I'm saying, babe, tell these five jokes, okay?
Self-deprecate yourself a little bit, okay?
Talk about, you know, what it is, you know, about being a father, how much you love being that, but you know, you're doing your best to be a great father in your marriage and how much you love America, but self-deprecate a little bit yourself.
If you can do that, because today it's really a Nixon opportunity, meaning Nixon was great on radio.
You don't see DeSantis' face tonight.
It's Twitter spaces.
It's a good position for him to be only his voice, not the face and reaction or any of these.
There's no visual Twitter spaces and only audio spaces.
So anyways, those are some of the things I'm thinking about when it comes down to this.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, I just want to say I disagree.
Yeah.
And I'm going to tell you why I disagree.
We have to understand this.
DeSantis is not running a general election right now.
We're still in the primary.
And I think that sometimes people who do this and sort of like are in this world, in this media world, in this political world or whatever, sometimes we can be in a bit of a bubble, right?
And so I want to step out of the bubble a little bit.
And we have to realize that his pure focus right now is beating Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
It's not going on.
It's not appealing to independents.
It's not trying to get people from the left to come in.
It is to beat Donald Trump, to present himself to Republican primary voters as the viable alternative to Donald Trump.
So I think that what he needs to do right now and what he's doing is he has to get out to where these people are.
So the view in CNN and MSNBC and mainstream, those are not a concern until he gets the nomination because those people hate his guts already.
So his team is making the calculation that I have to go where my people are.
So I don't know that these low numbers on YouTube and I don't know that these low numbers are indicative of a lack of enthusiasm.
And I don't even know if there needs to be a whole lot of enthusiasm for the announcement outside of this base.
The only thing he needs is that base.
He needs enough Republican primary voters to make the choice for him against Donald Trump.
And then after that, that's when he goes to the gauntlet of the mainstream news.
And one more point that I wanted to make is that when we talk about DeSantis having to go on here, Joe Rogan, the Megan Kelly podcast, I think that as people that have a sphere of influence in the sort of free thinking conservative media world, like whatever you want to call it, I think that there's a responsibility for us to ask these people tough questions as well.
Not to be like the view where we're actively going out against you, but to ask real questions.
Megan Kelly has said before on her show that she has been inviting DeSantis on for months and he won't take the invite because Megan Kelly's going to ask him questions.
Of course.
You know, and I think that that's our responsibility, you know, Megan Kelly's responsibility, Joe Rogan's responsibility to ask them tough and real questions, but not, you know, to be attacking them in a way that they know.
No, I don't think anyone, I don't think Joe's attacking.
I think Joe's going to be the safest place for him to go.
And again, I think Joe has the gift of making people like you.
Like he increases your likability score.
I think Megan Kelly has women that follow her that are going to be saying, okay, if Megan Kelly gives the nod, because Megan Kelly is not going to be a Trump supporter.
Yeah.
She's going to be more DeSantis.
So it's a very safe place as well for her to go to, for him to go to.
But, you know, again, hopefully you're right.
I think sometimes when you're saying Trump's camp has only people around him that are telling him what he wants to hear, I think the same can be said about DeSantis.
Oh, absolutely.
I think that was the biggest flop of any book launches in the history of presidential candidates for him to come out with the book and the launch did the way that it did.
I can't think of a person who was at the number one position or number two position for president to launch the book as bad as they did.
All he had to do with the book launch is tell his publisher, wait three months.
Let's launch it in June.
Let's launch it in May.
Not let's launch it in February.
Everybody forgot the look you just made, you forgot that his book came out four months ago.
I read it came out and I didn't know that it did.
I mean, it just came out.
It just, it happened and then it kind of disappeared.
That's terrible, bro.
I didn't go to any point.
The point is, I don't know what we'll do.
It should have launched right about now.
You launched today.
You launched today on the Twitter spaces.
Today's the day you launched.
Well, again, his biggest problem is that he has a marketing problem.
So he's going to have to address that.
And then back to your point, you're absolutely right.
He is focused on the primary right now.
The general rule is you focus on the primary, then you pivot in the general election.
We all know that.
He does have a game plan, an agenda.
Remember the whole whiteboard thing?
Where essentially, if you look at the conservative base, one third of it is never going to not vote for Trump.
Never happening, not happening whatsoever.
Another third of it, all right, is potentially, maybe like a quarter of it, potentially willing to go outside of Trump or DeSantis, right?
Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Pence, what have you.
So meaning there's a chunk, 50% or so, that is quote unquote right for the taking.
This is his game plan.
So his intentions are he's going to the run to the right of Trump.
He's going to say, I'm more conservative than Trump.
I have more conservative values than Trump.
That's not my opinion.
That is literally his gameplay.
You're right.
Okay.
I don't think it's a good move for them.
Are you kidding me?
That's a terrible.
Yeah.
That's Ted Cruz.
I don't want to.
That's the Ted Cruz movement.
Yeah, I don't want to hijack, but in that conversation that we were having in the three-hour, that three and a half hour dinner, there are some things about the space and there are some things about the people that they need that they don't get.
They do not get.
Wait, what was that again?
Say that again?
I think that there are some things about where the space is right now.
We've gone to conservative, free-thinking, independent, whatever.
There are things about this space that they do not get.
Gotcha.
I agree.
There's things about the space that they do not get.
Because again, you're in a bubble.
The same thing you said with Trump.
You're saying he's in a bubble.
I actually think he's in a lesser of a bubble than DeSantis is in a bubble.
I think Trump's bubble, he's got people around him that, look, he'll go to UFC.
He has people like Dana White around.
We think Dana's going to be like, yes, sir.
What do you think about this?
Can I ask you a question?
What happened on the thing with you and Elon?
I mean, let's get, hey, what happened with you and Rogan?
I talked to Joe the other day.
I don't see Dana White being that guy.
You go on Nelk, boys.
It's very risky to talk to younger 20, 30-year-old boys.
And yeah, you don't ever know what those guys are going to be asking you.
They're not like proper Sean Had in any safe space.
So I think, believe it or not, I think Trump has less protection than DeSantis has.
DeSantis has been, it's like a fighter.
And by the way, this is what's going to sound crazy.
I see this guy as a brawler.
I totally see this guy.
Like, this guy's a brawler.
He's a fighter.
Hey, can you guys honestly take those masks down?
Like, why do you want?
You don't need to do this.
Take your masks off.
What are we doing here?
I like that.
You know what?
We're not going to do that right now.
I like that.
There's a part of that that, and by the way, do you remember back in the days people used to say America's not ready for a president out of New York?
Chris Christie, you judge, we just, New York is not America.
We're not ready for somebody that's going to be so bombastic.
And well, guess what?
What are you talking about?
America's ready for a guy from New York.
And this guy's not from New York.
He's more proper.
He's a fighter.
He's being protected a little too much.
And you got to go fight some people that annoyed him.
And there's your fighter analogy.
I think his whole narrative for months now, don't forget, he just won re-election for governor of Florida November.
20 points.
That was his focus, right?
He beat the loving snot out of Charlie Christ.
And his whole thing was like, listen, speaking of being in a bubble, you know, we're focused on DeSantis because we live in Florida.
Clearly, based on national media or YouTube, it's not a main focus.
He's been focused on Florida.
Did numbers surprise you?
A little bit, but again, his whole thing is I'm not a candidate yet.
They're talking about me so much.
Trump's going against me.
They spent millions of dollars again.
I'm not even a candidate.
I'm not even a candidate.
But I'll tell you what.
To speak to your fighter analogy, remember in Rocky and Apollo Creed when they go out and then they do their fight and he goes, all right, all right, how do we want to do this?
And Apollo just goes, ding, ding.
The fight is on now, as of today.
Rocky was for the people.
DeSantis is not yet coming across as he's for the people.
Rocky won the people.
He has to win the people.
Listen, Ron DeSantis, Casey, whoever's watching this, if you watch this clip at all, Governor Ron DeSantis, we're in Florida because of you.
I got a recommendation for you.
Get away from everybody and watch the movie Gladiator and then go to the scene where Russell Crowe asks, I also want my freedom.
And he says the magical words, win the crowd, win your freedom.
You're brilliant.
You're smart.
You're intellectual.
You're intelligent.
You got a great resume.
You have won.
You have not won their freedom.
You have not won the people.
You have to do whatever you can to win the people today.
Okay.
Not the smart people in the room.
You know, sometimes you're like, well, I can sit with anybody and I can beat them intellectually.
That's not how you win.
No.
Okay.
I can sit there and talk.
That's not, you got to win the crowd.
You got to win the crowd.
We had a girl years ago when I got into the insurance space.
This girl was the smartest girl in our office.
It's 2003.
Okay.
She saw herself as an Oprah Winfrey, smart girl, brilliant.
And everybody would go to her to questions.
So some of the guys that I was training would say things like this to me.
They would say, Pat, I got to tell you, man, I go to her because she knows more about insurance than you do.
I'm like, does she?
Yeah, she knows more about products than you do.
I said, you're right.
Go to her.
So they would go to her to learn about products, but they would come to me when it came down to sell.
They would come to me when it was time to promote.
They would come to me when it was time to train.
They would come to me when it was time to drive.
And guess what?
I knew about products as well.
But she spent her entire life wanting to know everything about the product and not the people.
And then all of a sudden, fast forward 10 years later, she's by herself, knows everything about products, but she's got nobody to train.
And everybody wakes up and says, oh my God, we thought that guy didn't know anything about products, but he won the crowd.
Nobody cares how much you know about policy level at the humane level.
You can outschool any governor, any senator, any congressman, anybody when it comes down to issues.
Yes, but you got to win the crowd.
And you have not won the crowd yet.
That's my biggest criticism.
You win the crowd, you win your election, you become a president.
PBD, you are 10 million percent accurate.
I was hoping to be 11 million percent.
Well, you know, my math is so good.
I got to get better.
I'm trying to win the people.
Because I'll tell you why.
You see, like in the Republican primary, people are like, how did Trump do it?
How did Trump do it?
Well, you know, they say you got to talk to people like at a fifth grade level, but they broke down candidates.
And it was like, well, Jeb Bush talks at a sixth grade level.
Ted Cruz is at an eighth grade level.
And Trump is at a third grade level.
And I don't mean that condescendingly.
I mean, he is talking right to the people, simple terms, build a wall, lock her up, drain the swamp.
These are messaging points that people can chant, get behind.
DeSantis, as of now, has none of that.
And I got to tell you about Trump.
Okay, so you guys met Trump, yes?
Yes.
Okay, so met him multiple times.
And the amount of charisma that this person has is that like people can see it and people can see the videos of the rallies or whatever, but the charisma is off the charts.
There's extra charisma.
There's extra charisma.
This is somebody that can go into a room.
He can talk to billionaires.
He can talk to the guy that's a cashier at McDonald's.
And that is something.
There are these intangibles, right?
There are certain things that you cannot teach.
There are certain things that you cannot train.
You cannot train the ability and you cannot teach the ability that he has to connect with the American people.
And one more thing that I will say about Trump, if we're talking to Trump versus DeSantis thing, and this is what I think a lot of people miss: there is now a nostalgia factor for a lot of people in the base when it comes to the Donald Trump presidency.
Because when they look back at their actual lives, not what the media was saying, not what paid operatives and the MAGA camp or the DeSantis camp are saying.
When they look back to their actual lives, their lives were better.
Their gas was cheaper.
Their groceries were cheaper.
They were making more money, and the money that they were making was going further.
So now they feel the results of this Biden economy in their own lives.
And man, I want to go back to that.
I remember what my life was like when Tom, can I build you up for a second?
I think what Tom said is almost metaphorical.
Okay, sometimes I'm not going to touch it, Tom.
I'll touch this.
What you said about the analogy, how you're a geek and you would go to these Silicon Valley type things, and you saw the Reed Hoffman's of the world and the Elon Musk of the world and the Peter Thiels of the world.
And they were just kind of these nerdy tech guys getting started.
Suddenly famous, great little companies.
And now you look at them now and they've been media trained and they're media savvy.
Think about how to Congress a couple times.
Exactly.
All that.
Just think about how long Trump has been in front of the cameras and on stage.
Wow.
We're talking 40 years.
All right.
In New York.
And he's so we're talking DeSantis.
We're talking four years.
Okay.
Maybe.
So he's got some catching up to do.
Anyway, this is what I was saying.
No, in relation to what I want to get Tom's last final thoughts and then we'll go to the next story.
Go on.
I think what everybody remember is it's baseball season.
Right now, this feels a little bit like spring training.
And in 60 days in August, we're going to have two all-candidate debates.
One is in Milwaukee, the other is in Simi Valley.
And they're in August.
Opening day, Tom.
That is opening day of the Republican.
And then guess what happens?
Nothing happens for 120 days until we get to January.
And so what will happen in those 120 days?
Well, if interest rates don't move the other way, people are thinking about how they're doing.
If there is a recession and more layoffs to the end of the year, people are going to be thinking about what they're doing.
There is a lot of opportunities to talk to candidates over those 120 days to say, what's your plan?
What's your plan?
It sucks now.
I know you want us all to vote for you, but what's your plan for 120 days from opening day?
And it's going to get kind of tough and it's going to get redundant and a little boring.
But then the first polls at the beginning of January, because it's a fact that the, because it's Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina.
So you have Iowa, which is now really a light blue state now.
It's no longer red.
It is light blue.
And then you have New Hampshire, which is very light red, always contrasting Vermont that is dark blue.
And then you get South Carolina, bright red.
Those happen in, and I say that's baseball playoffs.
That's when the game really starts in January with those playoffs.
But we're going to go through just like the long summer of baseball.
We're going to see what's going to happen.
But what is happening right now is pride organizations are canceling events all over Florida due to climate of fear after state passes anti-LGBTQ laws.
This is an insider story.
Pride events in Florida are being canceled due to the law and organizations, organizers on St. Cloud canceled their events, citing the unsafe environment created by recent laws targeting the LGBTQ community.
The decision followed the signing of a bill by Governor Ron DeSantis that imposes penalties on businesses allowing children to witness adult live performances with potentially sexually explicit content.
Other pride events in Tampa, Port St. Lucie, and Lake County have also been canceled due to concerns over this.
MSNBC guests claims Florida is about to be a terrorist state for black and LGBTQ people.
This is a mediite story.
Democratic strategist Aisha C. Mills appeared on MSNBC deadline and claimed that Florida is about to be a terrorist state for black and LGBTQ people, praising the NAACP's travel advisory as extremely clever.
Mills expressed her personal discomfort as a lesbian and a black woman, stating that she does not want to have anything to do with Florida and believes that many others feel the same way.
She commented, she commended the NAACP for issuing the advisory and thanked them for their broad guidance.
And the representative Brian Donalds criticized the travel advisory as stupid and without basis, while Fox News contributor Raldo Rivera dismissed it as a fear-mongering publicity stunt.
So how much of this, what they're doing, are they trying to, you know, they're realizing DeSantis is potentially going to be who he's going to be and they're trying to target him.
What do you think is, and can they actually make Florida terrorist states?
What do you think about these two stories?
Well, it's ridiculous.
Look, am I allowed to like, what's the language, bro?
You can go.
Okay, look, number one, like, I'm a black gay dude, and Aisha Mills is full of shit.
All right.
She's full of shit.
And what's going on here, you have to understand there's a lot of different things that's going on.
Ron DeSantis is seen as, so I think that the left is more scared of Ron DeSantis than they are of Donald Trump just because they know how to deal with Trump and they're not quite sure how to deal with DeSantis, right?
So there's a lot of this political stuff that is happening that's sort of trying to make it seem as if Florida is just this apartheid state.
And if you are black or gay or both or whatever, then you just live in this constant fear and constant danger.
It is completely ridiculous.
I've been living in Florida for the past three years.
I've been living in Miami for the past year.
This is a great place.
Doesn't matter if you're black, white, gay, straight, whatever.
Florida is just a great place to live.
Okay.
And so what this is all about is the LGBTQIAK, the alphabet people, the rainbow mafia, right?
I don't identify with any of that stuff.
Like I'm just a gay dude.
But they are, they're becoming this sort of target market for the Democrats, right?
They want to make them another victim group.
Like they've made black people a victim group, that they've tried to make Latinos a victim group.
They want to make these LGBT people like a victim group for them.
So in order for them to be a victim group for the left, they have to push their propaganda that says that you can't live in Florida.
All of these laws are bad.
All of this other stuff.
It is completely ridiculous.
Like it just is not based in reality.
And when you look at these quote-unquote anti-LGBTQ laws, it is, again, bullshit.
Number one, there's no such thing as a trans child.
And a lot of these laws are basically in laws in Florida and other states.
It's basically saying that we need to pump the brakes on pumping young kids full of puberty blockers and doing all these experiments that do not have any long-term studies.
Okay.
That is not anti-LGBTQ or whatever.
That is just pro-common sense.
Okay.
And so look, I'm somebody like, I'm a guy like, you know, I watched Rupa's drag race and I went to drag brunts and all of that other stuff.
It is all, and Megan Kelly had said the same thing on her podcast.
I heard that it had always been just this fun thing for adults to do.
And it is keyword, adults, adults, adults.
And this had never become a thing that was oriented towards children until recently in the past five to seven years.
And I'll say something that got me in a little bit of trouble when I said this on other outlets.
What a lot of people don't realize about the fact that all of this stuff is now being targeted towards kids, the drag queen story hours and the transitioning of kids, all of this other stuff.
What you have to understand is that the radical far-left queer theory people, okay, that is where all of this stuff comes from.
And the fundamental goal for the queer theory people is a normalization of pedophilia, right?
So you have to understand that that is where this is all supposed to be headed.
That is their goal.
But the idea that Florida is someplace that is Not a great place that is not a safe space that is somewhere that is dangerous for me as a black gay dude is fundamentally ridiculous.
It's complete bullshit.
And anybody with half a brain will see the political machinations at play here.
Yeah, Rob, I couldn't have said it better.
Completely agree with me.
By the way, is there anybody that could weigh in on this better than a black gay dude living in Florida?
I mean, hello, you couldn't even write this script.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, this is so nonsensical, hyperbolic, and hypocrisy at its finest.
So I'm not a black gay dude.
I'm just a straight white dude.
But I'll give you, I've been living in Florida for over 40 years.
I thought you were going to come out for a second.
I thought this was like an announcement.
This isn't that episode.
Because today's the day of announcement, Ron made the announcement.
I thought maybe you were going to be able to do it.
Stay tuned for tomorrow's softcast.
No, actually, I was going to announce that.
I was going to announce that I'm straight on this podcast.
Breaking news.
So we convinced them, y'all.
Okay, you were telling us how to do it.
So what I was going to say is, I've lived in Florida for 40 years.
And if you know anything about Florida, Memorial Day weekend, which is this weekend.
Yeah.
Black people from all over the country come here for summer break.
Yeah.
Okay.
Or black people.
It used to be Atlanta, Freaknik, whatever it used to be.
Yeah.
Been there, done that.
Great bookstore.
My type of bookstore.
But so I like, how many black people are going to be like, yeah, yeah, all that LGBT pride gay NAACP come out.
It's like, yeah, I'm still going to get my freak going in South Beach.
Yeah.
So it's so nonsensical.
And then last week or last month was Pride Week in Miami.
Of course.
Zero issues.
Literally.
No problems.
On Sunday brunch, have you ever been to the on Ocean Drive?
They have the Rob knows it.
I mean, they do the drag queen stuff.
So like the narrative is not matching reality.
It's ridiculous.
And let me make a point because you brought, it's really funny that you brought this up.
So and literally, and I was going to tweet about this.
I was going to do a little video about this.
Miami Beach has a Pride event.
Miami Beef Pride.
This is literally subsidized by the Florida government.
They have all sorts of sponsors there.
There were very expensive DJs that were there.
There were sponsorships from Delta, American Express.
There were police officers there, all of that other stuff completely free to anybody that wanted to go, by the way.
Oh, yeah.
So Florida is such a terrorist state.
Yeah.
And Ron DeSantis is basically Stalin when it comes to gay people, right?
It's ridiculous.
Like it just does not pass the smell test even for a second.
And here's the thing about the gay and lesbian vote.
I don't say LGBTQ and nobody should say LGBTQ because it's like, it's just, it's ridiculous.
Like most people, we're talking about gays and lesbians here, right?
In the last election, they had found that 30% of gays and lesbians voted for Trump, right?
So that's a 70-30 split.
I personally think that it's more because I come across gay guys all the time.
At first, when I came out as a conservative gay dude or whatever, at first, it's like, you know, you lose all your friends.
Everybody's like, oh, you're a pariah, right?
But now, like, I go to, oh, hey, Rob, like, you're that guy, right?
Yeah, yeah, I'm that guy.
No, now I understand what you're saying.
Oh, this trans kid stuff is crazy.
All of this, you know, this drag queen stuff is crazy.
Why there have to be kids there?
All of that other stuff.
So gays and lesbians are more conservative than people think, especially, you know, talk a gay dude that's making 250K plus a year.
You think this person is going to be voting for Democrats?
Absolutely not.
Why?
No, they're thinking about taxes.
They're thinking about the same thing everybody else.
Everybody else thinks that it's identity politics.
Oh, it's fine.
Oh, you're black.
And you're gay.
You must vote Democrat.
Absolutely.
It's bomb words.
This is Geraldo summed it up perfectly.
This is a fear-mongering publicity stud.
He was in, out.
Geraldo knows media.
He's been around a long time.
He sees these are just bomb words, like when you point at somebody and yell racist, racist.
You know, it's distracting bomb words.
And what is interesting, Aisha Mills, who is full of crap, as you pointed out, she called it, oh, that was extremely clever.
She didn't say, wow, that's an important message to keep people safe.
That's what you say if you really think there's a problem.
That's what you say if you think there is really risk somewhere.
Instead, she comes out, oh, that was very clever to say it that way.
I thought that was very telling.
It's like she unveiled the whole, you know, lunacy of the issue.
Look, there's a famous poet that once said, for those that are wondering whether they should come to Florida or not to have a good time, this famous poet said, get your freak on.
Her name is Missy Elliott.
Okay, so if you're looking at coming to Florida to have a good time, don't worry about it.
Come on down here.
She is right.
And for those of you guys that have a family and you want to come down here and get your freak on in a different way with your own spouse, you can move to Fort Lauderdale or Palm Beach or Bolca or Ball Harbor.
Right now, we're looking at properties all over the place.
We're looking at Miami right now because we're wondering what we're going to be doing with the land that we're going to buy.
We're going to buy the land here.
Mayor Swarz is a very, very aggressive recruiter, and he's trying to talk to us about potentially moving vitamin to Miami.
But we're going to see what's going to happen.
But Tom, let's go into the Bud Light story.
Here's a Bud Light story.
So we, this week, I'm going to show you guys a clip with Tom, which is classic.
I tried to get Tom to do something he was not too happy about.
Rob, if you can find this clip before we get into it on Twitter, just go to my account.
So first, I'll read the story and then I'm going to show the video.
But let's first go into the story.
What page?
How Bud Light Blew it, page 18, Wall Street Journal story.
Bud Light, the popular beer brand, faced backlash and a boycott after sending a personalized can to a transgender de la Mulvini.
We all know that story.
The boycott has a significant impact on Bud Light sales, which dropped more than 28% compared to the previous year.
That's a lot.
28%.
That's a third.
In an effort to recover, the company plans to include Bud Light in its sponsorship of a veterans organization and focus on television commercials highlighting themes like football and country music.
So for me, when we're in Dallas, we're staying at this beautiful Hotel Thompson.
We're at the suite all the way at the top.
It's the corner suite, massive suite, beautiful place.
And I'm trying to be hospitable to Tom.
And here's how Tom reacts.
Very disappointing.
Go ahead and play the clip.
So when you stay in a penthouse like this, all the way at the top, you got to get Tom the right kind of drink.
Sabell, can you please serve Mr. Ellsworth the proper drink?
By the fact this was not set up.
Stop mooning, Gus, and take your listeners.
What is it?
We can't see it.
No, I won't even touch the bottle.
What?
I can't see it.
What is it?
Sam doesn't know the time.
I just have a Bud Light.
I will not touch the bottle.
Are you joking?
Tom will not touch the bottle.
Tom, I will not touch the bottle.
Touch it.
No.
Just touch it, Tom.
Are you being serious?
I'm being deadly serious.
What do you have a press?
Just a beer.
No, it's not a beer.
You know how you make Bud Light?
You know how you make Bud Light?
Tell us.
You let a horse drink cores and put a bucket underneath, and the horse filters the cores, and that's how you make Bud Light.
Wow, you see, that's why you're Tom is offended.
What is going on with Bud Light?
What do you want to tell us about Bud Light here?
Well, I'm disappointed a little bit in corporate leadership.
You know, I do case studies, look at corporate leaders and stuff, and how you lead through turbulent times.
And right now, you've got the CEO, Budweiser, saying it was one can.
It was one picture.
We didn't have a contract.
Well, wait a minute.
You didn't have a contract?
Really?
It was a handshake agreement.
Yeah, exactly right.
And it's a, and there was one person that was in the marketing group, and we shot her and we shot her boss.
And we are getting back to where it was.
It was and so you see what the CEO is doing is trying to rinse responsibility off the organization and and not only have they thrown the marketing person and her boss under the bus, they're backing up the bus going back and forth to make sure they're dead.
And that is what's happening.
It's really number one, the best thing to do is to say, you know what?
My team made a mistake and the buck stops with me and I'm the CEO here.
And you know what?
We're always trying to market and we're trying to market to various groups.
This was a freaking big bonehead error.
And you know what?
We're stepping back from it.
And this is how it happened.
Instead, wait, oh, it was only one can and it was only one incident.
And there was only one person and she didn't have permission from her boss.
Does that sound like a weak?
You know leadership.
You do the vault conference.
You talk to leaders all the time, Pat.
Does that sound like a weak leader running from blame or a strong leader coming to the microphone?
You know what this last night you and I had a very good conversation together for 45 minutes.
Okay.
And we're watching a Miami Heat game.
He's giving me commentary.
I needed help.
So he's kind of telling me, watch this place, all this stuff.
But I told him something last night.
I said, you know, in life, here's what mistake we can make and you shouldn't make.
You have to take a stand and have a position.
When you take a stand and take a position, what happens next is there is opposition.
You take a position, there is opposition.
Position, opposition.
Great.
That's natural.
Hey, I think Michael Jordan's the greatest of all time.
You're a moron.
LeBron's the greatest of all time.
That's opposition.
I think the Yankees are the greatest organization of all.
Steinbraham, are you kidding me?
It's really the Dodgers.
I think I'm a Muslim this.
Christian, did you know that?
That's the opposition, right?
Okay.
Bud Light took a position.
Their audience are male, white, military, wanting to drink.
Last thing they want to think about is just politics.
They just want to drink, have a good time.
They love America.
They want to go to a bar.
It's not expensive beer.
They want to have a good conversation.
Most people, when you think about Bud Light, you think about a great conversation in a moment you shared with a friend, right?
Then these guys try to increase their ESG score.
And Bud Light, Anheuser-Busch, ends up having a perfect ESG score, okay?
One of the best ESG scores in America.
Do you know what they just did?
The ESG score organization came out and said, I don't know if you saw this or not.
They came out and they said LGBTQ group slashes Anheuser-Busch's perfect rating.
They had a perfect rating after backlashing, backtracking on Dylan Mulvaney's Bud Light controversy.
So what are they doing now?
Now they're backing up and they're saying, yeah, I don't know if we support what they're doing.
They went from a perfect score of 100.
Only 20 companies, I believe, had the perfect score of 100.
So here's what Bud Light did.
You already had your loyal audience that's been loyal to you for decades, but you also wanted to win over the S CEI corporate equity index score and increase that.
You know what happened?
You lost both.
Not only did you lose your customers, but you lost the people that you were trying to please.
That's what happens when you conform.
People see through it and they say, it's bullshit.
We don't like what you stand for.
You don't have a backbone.
Dude, I'm stepping away.
So they lose 28%.
You know who gained 28%?
All the other guys.
Coors and everybody else.
Your customers went elsewhere.
And for the, you know, America is pretty forgiving.
So I think eventually they're going to get over it and kind of be like, yeah, whatever.
But it's going to take a minute.
And the only way they can do it is by firing the current CEO, firing the current CMO, firing the VP of ops, showing the fact that you fired everybody in that department, making a public announcement that we don't care about our ESG score, our CEI score, our DEI score.
If you don't do that, those people are not coming back.
But if you do do that and you replace them with a better CEO, better VP of marketing, better, they're going to come out and say, here's what I'm, I love America.
Here's what I believe in, da-da-da-da.
And look, we just want to make good beer.
Bud Lights make great beer for many, many years.
That's what we want to get back to.
If you show that you don't care about wanting to please these guys, I think customers will show back up.
But that's going to take a year or two to do.
100%.
And Budweiser USA is owned by Anheuser-Busch USA is owned by InBEV, which is a giant beer conglomerate that also owns Stella Artois and many other Corona and many other things.
You're right.
And what InBev needs to do and says, we didn't buy you to pee in the pool.
We bought you to keep growing as one of the dynamic brands that lines up like Coca-Cola and others with the last hundred years of Americana.
It's a very American iconic brand.
And InBEV needs to do exactly what Pat just said.
Said, you, you, and you, you're done.
We bought you not to do this.
And you guys have just puked on your own shoes.
This is over.
So here's the thing.
So I want to give a little bit more context to this.
This actually falls in line with something I'm launching in the next couple of weeks.
So everybody, like go to stopwoke.com.
You'll see what's called stopwoke.com.
Put it in the description in the comments.
It's great that you got that.
So here's the thing.
In a couple of weeks, we're going to launch what I'm calling the corporate fairness index.
Okay.
So StopWoke has partnered with the Rainey Institute for Public Policy in DC.
We've actually come up with methodology.
We're going to announce the top five wokest companies in America.
We're also creating a curriculum.
We're also creating a curriculum.
Yep.
To go into these corporations and to say, okay, this is what you do to sort of get away from this.
What people don't realize about this Bud Light thing and what people don't realize about the Dylan Mulvaney thing and all of this other stuff is that the human rights campaign, they have something called the Corporate Equality Index.
This is a grift.
They have shaken down these corporations for the past 20 years.
The human rights campaign calls itself an LGBT advocacy organization.
It is a far left Democrat super PAC at this point that gets $45 million in grants and contributions in 2020.
I personally know for a fact that they have shaken down a major bank to the tune of nine figures when they threaten them with dropping their sort of their score.
So Bud Light had to do this in order to get 100% rating on this corporate equality index, which is something that the HRC puts out.
So the only way we can stop this, like we can talk about corporations are too woke, all of that other stuff.
What we need to do is number one, go into these corporations, de-incentivize the importance of something like the Corporate Equality Index, and give these corporations an off-ramp.
Give them an off-ramp to say, you know, you can do your diversity and all that stuff.
That's fine.
But also you have to, you have to sort of appeal to the other side of the aisle as well.
So we do not stop the fight against corporate wokeness until we de-incentivize the importance of the corporate equality index.
That's why I'm launching the corporate fairness index in a couple of weeks.
We're going to be doing a lot of stuff about that.
There's a lot of companies that are very interested in this.
And I believe that as a consultancy, this is an emerging market.
These companies and these corporations want an off-ramp.
They want a way out.
I love it.
And by the way, you know who funds the HRC?
Democrats.
Open Society Foundation.
And you know who's open society.
Soros.
You gave them $100 million in 2012.
We're not even talking recently.
$100 million in 2012.
But go ahead.
You're going to say something.
And one of the things that is I'm going, I'm literally going to the swamp tomorrow.
I'm hitting up donors and I'm doing these presentations and all this stuff.
So when I'm hitting up donors, especially conservative leaning mega donors for organizations like StopWoke that are doing this stuff, that we're building this corporate fairness index up and we're going to do this work.
The first thing that they say is, oh, well, don't we already have this?
Don't we already have that?
Well, I give to this politician, I give that to politician.
When you said that the human rights campaign is funded by George Soros and his open borders society, open whatever society, the left, these people fund all kinds of organizations to the tune of billions of dollars.
And we don't have very many things like this on the right that are things that are advocating for our agenda.
And the reason why is that we have a donor base, as conservatives that are so consumed with get this politician and get this, all this other stuff.
The change that needs to happen in this country, and this last thing I'll say, I know I've been going on a bit of a tangent.
The change that needs to happen in this country is a cultural change.
It will start with the culture and the politicians will follow.
It is not the other way around.
And this is what people need to get.
I love it.
This is what I'm going to tell the people.
Stopwalker.
Stopwalk.com.
We got it all over the place.
Rob, respect to you.
Yeah, sorry.
That's what you're doing.
Can we get a little sneak preview of the top five most remote companies?
Give us something to work with here, guys.
I do not want to spoil anything.
I got a couple places that have the exclusive.
One place that has the exclusive.
I will say that these are companies.
I know that the top five, I know two in the top five are household names.
Got it.
Household names.
So I hate to disappoint you, but what we did is the last three months, we've been trying to increase our ESG score and our CI score.
And this is why I'm here.
No, no, this is what we did yesterday.
If you want to play this clip to try to increase, who is it?
Who knows?
Hey, guys, what's up, Pat?
What's up, guys?
Oh, my little God.
Viny Movany in the house with Demberler.
Yo, what's up?
Look at that.
Look at that.
Chicken legs, man.
Oh, my God.
Look at it, boy.
Look at that.
Where are you at, Bud Light?
I'm going to get a Bud Light right now.
Don't give them away.
Holy, that's a good look.
You just increased our ESQ score.
You're amazing.
I love you guys.
Take it easy.
It's crazy.
He was walking around like that all day yesterday in the office.
I'm like, he comes in.
I'm in the conference.
I'm like, bro, what are you doing?
He's like, we're doing a skid.
I'm like, okay, makes sense.
All right, let's go to the next story here.
Tom, Jamie Diamond warns souring commercial real estate loans could threaten some banks.
And by the way, when he says that, interpretation, we're about to buy some more banks.
Exactly.
So Jamie Morgan Jays raises concerns about commercial real estate loans, cautioning that certain locations, office properties, construction loans could pose problems for banks, diamond states.
The offside in this case will probably be real estate.
It could be very isolated.
It won't be every bank.
Despite historically low loan defaults, Diamond highlights the impact of rising interest rates and changes in the working environment on commercial buildings, especially in markets like San Francisco.
He believes there will be a credit cycle stating, my view is it will be very normal with the exception of real estate.
Diamond advises banks to prepare for higher interest rates, urging them to plan for rates going as high as six or seven percent.
That's not something people in the real estate business want to hear.
Tom, what other insight do you have on this story here?
Well, let's take it from the CEO office in the penthouse, and we'll take it all the way down to your house.
First of all, let me translate for Jamie Diamond.
I read it and I was able to translate it.
There are some failing banks that have some furniture that will look great in my office.
And so it's basically what's about to happen.
It's basically for the last nine months, JP Morgan has been basically like Batman, that when Janet Yellen and the Fed are in trouble with banks and failing and everything, they turn up, they turn on the bat spotlight, and Jamie Diamond comes to the rescue and helps them pick up the pieces of these banks by taking parts, assimilating them into JP Morgan.
And then the rest of the things, the investor, the depositors ended up being protected by the federal government because the deposit that was beyond FDIC limits, government took care of it.
But what Diamond is saying here is that he's saying it without being inflammatory.
The banking crisis is not over because the interest rate crisis isn't over.
And we all know what's happening in commercial real estate.
It's getting rough.
And Rob, do you have, I sent you a follow-up email, which was the mortgage highest rate since early March.
Take a look at this, PBD.
For people, if you happen to be driving and you can't see what's on the screen right now, it's a chart showing the interest rates.
And we had a bump up at about 6.25% in February.
Now we're about to have another bump up after we came off the spike, which was October, November.
We were above seven, about seven and an eighth.
And so the interest rates and homes are not going down.
Even though we talk about the Fed that maybe Druin Powell has been up to see the cheerleader for the last time this year and interest rates are going to be flat, what's really happening right now is the interest rates and mortgages are actually ticking up a little bit and the houses are still not moving.
And we're here going to be a lot of headlines over the course of the summer about things going on in banking.
So it's still going to be tough for people to sell houses.
It's going to be tough for people to get mortgages in new cities if your job moves and you're laid off and you have to go somewhere.
And so it's going to be a long, hot summer.
And you're going to see Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase get bigger because there are going to be some small banks that were highly exposed to commercial real estate get clobbered.
Is there any names?
I'll have some names next week, but not any big names are out there.
There's regionals.
See, there's regionals that may do really well, like an IndyMac that does really well in Indianapolis.
And so they did a couple large buildings in Indianapolis, and now those buildings have low occupancy rate, a troubled mortgage.
And that's what knocks over a bank that is serving the local commercial market because local commercial banks are tied to local commercial politicians, tied to local downtowns that are getting built.
The national banks have less clout and interest on those than they have in broad-based consumer things.
I credit.
If you're a buyer right now, commercial real estate, are you buying now?
Are you waiting six, 12, 18 months?
What would you recommend on the commercial real estate side?
You know, the Oracle of Omaha says when it's raining outside, run outside with a washtub.
And I think by the end of the summer, it's going to be raining hard in commercial real estate.
And if your business is in a position to move up or you're able to grow or take advantage of space, I think you're going to have opportunities to do it right around Labor Day.
Interesting.
PBD, what's the fallout from this?
Because I believe, what was the bank that Chase acquired?
Was it First Republic?
I think they had 80-something branches in, I don't know, 8 to 10 states.
They acquired that.
Silicon Valley.
Closed some of the branches, took some of the loan assets that were still good, began to service them.
And then you got Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank with the other two banks.
They were taken over by the FDIC, I want to say.
So walk me through the mindset of Jamie Diamond.
You're just kind of sitting there like, all right, let's see which one of these bad boy banks, regional banks, we're going to acquire next.
And then what are the ramifications of that when these mid-sized banks, regional banks shutter, and then all of a sudden we're back with these four big mega banks?
How does that affect the economy at that point?
I can draw a picture for you really easy.
It's really easy to see.
Let's spin back 15 years and look at our cell phone choices.
And I'm going to give you some names that are gone.
Singular, AT ⁇ T when it was smaller, Nextel, Sprint, GT MobileNet.
And then you also had the ones you still have now.
You had Bell Atlantic Mobile before it became Verizon.
And you take a look at that.
Now look at the consolidation.
You have four choices now.
You have independents that are, you know, the small ones, the phones for the elderly, phones for people in fixed income.
And then you've got T-Mobile, which now owns Sprint.
And you've got Verizon, and you've got ATT.
What are your other choices?
You got cricket.
Cricket is one of the small ones to serve a certain populace.
The same thing's happening in banking.
What you saw happening in mobile phones is what is happening in banking.
What you saw happening in cable TV.
Remember, you had all these different choices, and all of a sudden, well, you got Dish and you got director of TV on satellite.
And then you got whoever's got the cable in the street, probably Cox or Comcast.
And suddenly you didn't have very many choices.
OTT democratized that.
As long as you get internet to your house, you can choose anything.
But the same thing is happening with banks.
How will that affect the average consumer?
If they're like, all these banks are being consolidated, I'm left with only four choices.
Well, on my podcast, I pointed out that I said, look, you know, if you have a local bank that really serves business as well and you have a first-name basis and they give you all kinds of loans and support for equipment, make the relationship there, but also have an emergency account with money in it and make one major payment a month, maybe your building rent, and have that with Chase or with B of A. Good feedback.
Every Monday morning at what time?
1130?
11.30.
Eastern Standard Time.
BizDoc.
Next story here.
Looming existential crisis for cable news.
This is a Washington Post story.
Cable news declining influence and troubled business model are evident as TV viewership drops and court cutting accelerates.
The recent CNN Town Hall with Donald Trump drew just 3.3 million views, highlighting the industry's wanting power.
According to research firms, cable subscription have declined from 70% just seven years ago, 2016, to under 40% today.
That's massive in a short period of time.
Despite the decline, cable news networks remain profitable due to license fees paid by cable operators.
However, as cable subscribers continue to decrease, license fees may become unaffordable for operators posing a threat to the financial foundation of cable news.
While networks have ventured into digital platforms, streaming services and apps have yet to match the popularity and profitability of traditional cable.
The future of cable news is uncertain with the industry grappling with challenges and adapting to streaming and appealing to younger viewers.
This is pretty wild that that's taking place.
Rob, what are your thoughts on this?
I have lots of thoughts on this.
You know, I'm somebody that operates in both spaces, and not a lot of people do, right?
Because some people that are in the cable news world are just there.
And then some people that are sort of in our world are just here.
So I've been able to sort of negotiate both spaces.
They really are two different things.
The fundamental problem that I see with the cable news networks, and you can, they're interchangeable at this point.
You can switch out any of them, is that number one, it is an older, older, older audience, right?
And so they are not making the investments talent-wise.
They're not making the investments infrastructure-wise.
They're not making the investments content-wise in order to bring that age down.
They are more focused on keeping the older audience that they have right now than they are in trying to build up the younger generation of eyeballs.
And that doesn't mean that you take a 32-year-old and put them on cable news.
Like, that doesn't matter.
A lot of the people for me, a lot of people that follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at RobSmithOnline, but a lot of people that follow me would not see a lot of my cable news clips if I did not, you know, package them up and post them on my social media.
This is a huge problem.
Now, what I think is going to happen is that maybe in the next 12 to 15 years, when places like Value Tainment are built up, when places like DW, like all of these content hubs, these people are going to see their declining relevance and they're just going to start gobbling these companies up, right?
But yes, they are becoming less and less relevant because the people that are the youngest people that come up to me on the streets or that are my fan base or whatever, like they're finding me on Insta, they're finding me on TikTok.
You know, they're finding me on YouTube.
These people don't know what cable news is.
And I think that as media people, again, we live in this bubble where we give these networks kind of like a lot more relevance than I think that they have to people that do not live in this world because people that do not live in this world could care less.
They're on their phones.
You know, they're following their people on Twitter, Insta, Facebook, YouTube, whatever.
Adam.
Yeah, I mean, if you just look at these numbers, it's almost shocking.
If a company, if you did any company, Tesla, you know, JP Morgan Chase, pick a company, Amazon, Apple, the list goes on and on.
If you said that cable subscriptions have declined from over 70% of households as of 2016 to now under 40% today, okay?
What is that?
40% drop, give or take?
That's massive.
Massive.
Okay, now let's go five years from now.
If it's at 40% now, using that same math, now you're at 20%.
At what point are you just completely out of business and bankrupt?
It's pretty shocking.
And I love how they say here, the future of cable news is uncertain with the industry grappling with the challenges and adapting to streaming and appealing the younger viewers.
Uncertain.
That's only one thing.
Pretty certain that it's completely in decline.
Well, it's only one thing.
Only one thing is making cable news people stick around.
What's YouTube?
No, sports.
Sports.
So what Phoenix Suns did, if you can pull up Phoenix Suns, Phoenix Suns are moving away from relying on media to control them and cable.
They're launching their games to be played on an OTT, their own OTT, The Suns.
Do you realize what will happen if these guys succeed?
If they go away, whichever, everything you need to know about the Suns' new media deal and the NBA's RSN problem.
So if these guys get away and they say, if you want to watch the Suns play, $9.99 a month.
Okay.
If all of a sudden a million people in Phoenix or nationwide that like the Phoenix Suns pay $9.99 a month or whatever the dollar amount is, now they're making $120 million a year off their OTT and they don't need to put that anywhere else.
They own rights.
If ESPN wants clips, they got to buy it.
If other people want the clips, there's certain benefits that you get.
So sports is holding people within the cable network.
Once sports goes and these YouTube NFL deals, these, you know, Spotify, if they do something, they're not right now.
If Twitter picks up something with sports, if gradually this happens, unfortunately, cable news will be newspapers very quickly and they'll have to transition.
Now, don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean they're going to be done-done.
Some of these guys behind closed doors are working on, you know, creating their stuff, moving their stuff from a cable to OTT.
You know, Fox is doing Fox Nation.
CNN tried to do CNN Plus, where Carrie Lake wanted to do the interview with CNN.
I don't know if you remember that or not.
There's some of these things that are out there, but we'll see what's going to happen.
Tom, any thoughts on this?
Yeah, you can also see that although I think Pat and I both agree that the NBA is not a very good product right now.
Gold nuggets.
Yeah, exactly.
Reliance.
I mean, the product itself.
You also see things happening.
For instance, I believe it's the Porton Trailblazers.
They're the first NBA team.
The classic thing was a notable sportscaster doing play-by-play, and then maybe a retired player or someone who's incredibly respected in the game doing side-by-side color commentary.
Well, Portland has actually put a stats guy there.
And what they're doing is they're putting small stats things out there that appeal to the younger audience that's more likely to play fantasy sports.
And they are the first NBA team that part of their broadcast team as they do OTT is like a side-by-side stats guy.
So not only do you see it going away from mainstream, the Bally sports is just, you know, the mother of invention is crisis.
And the Bally sports crisis is giving opportunity for Phoenix Suns to do it their way and what the Portland Trailblazers are doing with their with their with their stats guy.
And I think how it's being broadcast is changing as well as where it's being consumed.
I'm actually a little disappointed myself that when you said what they're what they're doing, you know, what's changing this, and you said sports, because I'm that guy.
I don't have cable.
I don't, I haven't had cable in years.
Yeah.
I do, I watch everything on YouTube, but I do want to watch Miami Heat go to the NBA Finals when they beat the Celtics eventually.
And I done exactly that.
I pay for YouTube TV and I figure out ways to basically maneuver the system just to watch the heat game, but I refuse to pay $9.99 a month for basically stuff that I don't watch.
And I do believe that the NBA is a good product these days, despite everything that happened in the bubble.
I disagree with Ty.
By the way, I think it's going to be a better product when LeBron retires.
And when LeBron, Carmelo, Chris Paul, when these guys retire, I think the new age players I like more than this woke age of players that kind of messed up the game a little bit.
And, you know, a guy as big as him has become the greatest flopper of all time.
I made a recommendation the other day for Masterclass to hire LeBron, give him a few million dollars to teach a course on flopping.
I actually think it would do very good with the new age people, but that's a completely different conversation.
Next, Daily Wire, who is growing month in, month out, will stream all shows on Twitter is what they're saying.
This is a Hill story.
The Daily Wire, prominent right-wing media company, will stream all of its shows on Twitter starting May 30th, aiming to expand its audience.
According to Daily Wire's CEO, co-CEO, Jeremy Boring, the overwhelming amount of positive feedback from our advertisers and audience signals tremendous opportunity.
The move comes as conservative media personalities increasingly turn to Twitter, seen at, it is the platform that refuses to engage in content censorship based on politics.
Former Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, announced bringing his program to Twitter and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis plans to formally announce, obviously we know that, the Daily Wire multimedia content featuring fire breathing conservative commentary covers politics, pop culture, and entertainment.
Matt Walsh, apparently, who on his YouTube channel was saying he was making around $100,000 a month and he had something that he put about the trends or the drag shows he was going against that he got a strike and he says, you know what, if this is what you guys are doing, we're moving away from it.
So what are your thoughts about Daily Wire choosing to take all of their talents, big names, Shapiro, Peterson, Candace Owens, Matt Walsh?
You got a lot of good guys there to Twitter.
Huge, massive.
Look, it cannot be overstated the importance of this move right now.
And DW was ahead of the curve with a lot of this stuff because they started doing, you know, their full video podcast.
And you want to talk about Daily Wire.
For me, as somebody that is sort of, you know, looking to venture into the video podcast space now, I look at a Candace Owens podcast as like, this is what a video podcast should look like.
This is what it should be.
This person is on point.
She looks fantastic every day.
It's culturally relevant.
It is all of these different things.
So when you take these things and put them on Twitter as the full video element, what this is saying is that Twitter and Elon Musk's move, remember the new CEO of Twitter, Linda Yaccarino, what did she do before that?
She was head of ad sales at NBC Universal.
They are turning Twitter into a hub for video content.
And they have not even started to talk about how they're going to be monetizing that yet outside of subscriptions.
And so this is what I say.
And I was saying to one of your guys before you came to do the podcast.
On Twitter, it is not going to be enough to just say shit in order to get a following at this point nowadays.
Like maybe you could have before, maybe a little bit right now.
Yeah, you can just hop on Twitter and start saying things.
This is going to become a platform for high quality video content for people that know how to articulate themselves on camera, for people that know how to put that video content out there.
And we talk about the decline of cable news and we talk about the fact that Matt Walsh cannot say factual things about quote unquote transgender youth on YouTube without getting completely demonetized on YouTube.
Twitter is the new platform.
So they're ahead of the curve.
They were ahead of the curve two years ago when they started creating and producing these podcasts.
I did Candace's podcast a couple of times back when they were doing sort of like the panel format and then they kind of switched it to where it's just her and I think that that format works a lot better.
I think it's a lot stronger.
But I think this is a seismic move.
Tom.
I think, and I just looked up something here.
I want to grab a couple dates.
I think the move of her going to Twitter is as big as when Cheryl Sandberg went to Facebook.
Cheryl Sandberg is not credited with making Facebook's ad business.
She is credited with making Facebook profitable.
It was unprofitable until she got there and she put the ad business and the associated monetization programs in place.
And she did so without diving in and changing what was on Facebook.
The product guys were, excuse me, the product individuals were responsible for that, led by Zuck himself.
And I think that that's what's going on here.
I think that she's looked at it.
This is how they're going to monetize it.
And that, you know, Elon Musk knows what he wants to do with the product.
He knows what he's adding to the product.
And I think he's been pretty sensible about it.
So I think this is as big as Cheryl Sandberg going to Facebook in 2008.
She made the company profitable in short order.
And then they put her on the board of directors in 2012.
Well, let me just give kudos to you because this bleeds right into the previous story, which is speaking of Meta, Facebook, Twitter, everything that you're talking about, Linda Yaquarino and Cheryl Sandberg.
The story from Fox Business is reports of Instagram making Twitter competitor prompts comment from Linda Yaccarino.
You've said you've been very critical of Facebook, where basically all they do is just copy what their competitor is doing or buy their competitor and they just make something different or improve upon it.
And that's essentially what Instagram, they're like, holy shit, Elon's onto something.
Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO, is onto something.
We're just going to follow in their footsteps, which basically bleeds into the previous story.
Cable news is dying.
Everything's going onto digital media these days.
Everything's going onto YouTube, Facebook, meta.
It's like the writing's on the wall.
And Elon Musk is essentially leading the charger.
It's been there.
And let me make a point about Facebook.
I think that a lot of people, Facebook is seen as stodgy and old and irrelevant, whatever.
So I've got about closing up 500,000 followers on Facebook.
I do videos on Facebook every single day.
The ad revenue that you can make as an individual solo creator from Facebook videos, people have no idea.
All right.
People have no idea.
And the reason that I'm so excited about Twitter as a creator, because if I could be making those Facebook numbers as myself, me personally as a creator, if I can be making those numbers on Twitter, game on.
Without risk.
Without risking.
Yes, that's a good point because there are certain things that I cannot say on Facebook.
There are certain topics that I cannot go into on Facebook.
But it's a huge deal.
Linda Yaccarino, game on everything we need to know about Instagram's Twitter clone due this summer.
I love that.
This is great.
Just game on.
I love that.
Competition.
Yeah, I love that answer she gives right there.
Okay, so next story we can go to.
Let me see which story I want to go into here.
Let's do.
Tucker Carlson sends legal threat to PAC urging him to run for president.
It's kind of interesting move here by his lawyers.
So, Tucker Carlson's lawyer, Harmeet Dylan, has issued a legal threat to the draft Tucker PAC stating that Carlson will not run for president in 2024 under any circumstances.
Dylan warned the group to seize its effort and vow to use legal means to protect Carlson's rights and supporters.
The draft Tucker PAC released a video and ad urging Tucker to run for president, praising his ability to combat leftists in both parties, and comparing him to the late Rush Limbaugh.
Dylan responded on Twitter, declaring that the PAC was unauthorized and criticizing Newsmax for airing the ad.
She warned donors about being deceived and urged them not to contribute to the pack.
This pack is unauthorized, fruitless to contribute, getting ripped off.
They owe their viewers better than this.
Rob.
Look, it's a scam pack, and obviously it's a scam pack.
And Harmeet knows that Harmeet is a deeply, deeply intelligent woman, so she knows what's going on here.
And what a lot of people don't understand about the political world is like, number one, it's full of grifters and it's full of people that are running hustles and running grifts.
And so you got a bunch of people, probably nobody knows who is behind this scam pack, but a bunch of people that had enough money to put together to run ads on Newsmax.
And they're basically saying, we're going to use Tucker's name and we're going to bring in all of this money.
Nobody knows who these people are.
Nobody knows where this money is going.
Whatever.
It's a scam.
Harmeet saw it.
Tucker saw it.
And they're like, they want to put an end to it.
Is this normal?
Is this common?
Does this happen?
Oh, my God.
Are you cutting in the swamp?
Oh, my goodness.
Are they trying to, is this an organization that sincerely wants to help Tucker run or no?
They're just trying to make some money.
I believe that these people are trying to make money and they're trying to use the biggest name in our space, probably one of the biggest names in America to do it.
This is what Sebastian Gorko was talking about yesterday with Trump and how basically the parasites just got him and just trying to siphon off money from Trump world.
They are political consultants, and if it's an even year, even numbered year, they make even more money.
Yep.
Ah, good morning.
And they make money whether or not their candidates win or lose.
This is what people do not understand about the swamp.
Like the pollsters.
I don't have to be right.
Yeah, they don't have to be.
I just have to be retained.
Yeah.
These people are scammers.
They're grifters.
The swamp is full of these people.
And they will take a big name and they will use that name to make money.
Because this is what I don't like about this entire situation is that they literally underestimate the intelligence of the audience, of the MAGA base of whatever.
And in their minds, in the minds of some of these scammers, the MAGA base is a bunch of rubes to be grifted.
Interesting.
All right.
Well, I can tell you there's a lot of people that would like to see the guy run, but I know that's not what he wants to do.
He wants a different life.
If he did, I think he's got a big following.
I actually think he would bump into the number two spot overnight.
I think he's that powerful of a guy and likable.
Because remember, the key word is what?
Winning.
You win the people.
You win your freedom.
He's one people.
He's one people.
It's the hardest thing to do.
Okay.
Next story.
China-Taiwan tensions could grip 2024 elections.
As Musk, Buffett, and Dahlio sounds alarmed.
This is a CNBC story.
Influential business leaders such as Elon Musk, Buffett, and Dalio raising concerns about the escalating tensions between U.S. and China over Taiwan with implications for the 2024 election.
Musk emphasizes the inevitability of the situation and its adverse impact on global companies.
While Buffett has divested from Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing companies due to geopolitical concerns, Dahlio warns of the risk of a war-like scenario between the two superpowers.
The issue of Taiwan is becoming a focal point in the political landscape.
With Republican contenders like Ron DeSantis, Glenn Yonkin, and John Bolton highlighting the need to deter a potential Chinese invasion of the island, lawmakers are introducing legislation to counter China's growing influence.
The 2024 election cycle is expected to bring increased anti-Chinese rhetoric and a focus on addressing China's actions.
Tom.
Well, what's really interesting is you've been listening to this podcast long enough.
You knew that a year ago we called this.
We said that what was going on in Taiwan was about global market share of chips and to influence chips and to put spyware on chips.
That's what this is about.
This is not about we want to right the wrong because we sent Chain Kai-shek to the Isle of Formosa, later named Taiwan, and we want to get our property back.
That is the political spin, and that's part of the spin that comes out of the People's Republic of China government.
If you take a look at this chart, we showed this before and it hasn't changed.
This is the market share of advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the world.
The world.
Look at Taiwan and look at South Korea, Samsung.
That is almost 80% of the world.
And we've seen announcements coming up because people are waking up to this and realize it's not about China taking back Taiwan because it's their beloved island and homeland.
They want the chips.
And so when China, you saw that we covered on podcasts about three weeks ago, right?
Apple made an announcement they were making a deal with India to manufacture iPhones in India.
Now Apple's announcing they want to make a deal with Broadcom to get chips.
You also see that now Buffett divested himself of TSMC.
There it is right there.
Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing company.
Buffett was an investor in the largest chip maker in the world.
He has pulled back.
Why?
It's risk.
It's full risk.
That's what's going on here.
And in the election year, this is a business story.
This is a foreign policy story.
And this is an inflation story because what's about to happen.
And you see challenges that U.S. companies have getting permits to build what's called a fab.
It's a chip fab when you hear that in local news.
That's a factory.
So if you hear a chip fabs coming to town, that's good.
That's usually a lot of jobs making chips here in the United States.
But that's what's going on in Taiwan.
Everybody has woken up to something that we were saying here on the podcast a year ago.
And now you even see Apple, who's cozy with China, saying, Yeah, I need manufacturing in India.
I need chips made elsewhere because they're all starting to sweat.
I'll just add to this: you know, part of the listeners or everyone, the shout out to the value tainers that listen to what we talk about here.
There's one thing I've learned since being a part of the PPD podcast for three years: just can't understate the situation that's going on with China.
Okay.
So yesterday you did a poll, you know, major concerns.
What should campaign campaigns be about?
You put Ukraine, you put Epstein, I believe that was the whole thing.
You know, immigration, healthcare.
Everyone can give their top five.
Here's what I will tell you, and I'll speak in very plain language.
Whatever candidate puts China relations in a top five scenario, that is exactly where I'm going to be gravitating my vote for because it does not get spoken about.
I know Trump did China and everything that happened with that, but it's such an important situation that's going on in international relations with China.
And it can't be understated.
But also international relations as well, but also just in the amount of massive influence that China has over our culture, over our entertainment industry, over our business sector, all of that other stuff.
And making our medicine, making our medicine, all of these things.
Giving us COVID?
Yeah, the fentanyl that's coming into this country from China, like all of that stuff.
And even thinking about TikTok, right?
And I'm not necessarily in the banned TikTok thing, but you have to think about what are these images that are being put through this platform and that are being disseminated to the youth of our country, okay?
Divisive stuff.
You got people dying in TikTok challenges, all this other stuff.
This is literally cultural and psychological warfare to the level to which we've never seen before.
And nobody wants to talk about this stuff, least of all a lot of these politicians who are in some way owned by China.
I do believe personally, I don't know if I'm going to get in trouble for saying this.
I believe that Biden is in some way compromised by China.
Something on that laptop, like something that is going on, they've got something on this guy.
Okay.
And if we don't have politicians that are that are willing to stand up, people that want to lead this country, people that want to lead America into the revival that this country needs, if they're not going to stand up to China, if they're not going to stand up and start talking about this, I don't want to hear anything they have to say.
So I'm with you on that.
I think a lot of people are there with you.
Matter of fact, talking about Biden, Hillary Clinton says Biden's age is a legitimate issue.
People have every right to consider it is what she said.
During an interview at the Financial Times Weekend Festival, Clinton addressed Biden's stumble at the G7 summit saying, every time that happens, your heart is in your mouth because these things could be consequential.
Is that a concern?
It's a concern for everyone.
While other Democrats have dismissed age-related concerns, Clinton expresses her belief that Biden can be re-elected, stating, I obviously hope he stays very focused and able to compete in the election because I think he can be re-elected.
And that's what we should all hope for.
Then Joe Biden peddles his worst lie in front of U.S. Marines during Japan trip, which this is just uncomfortable.
It's awkward.
It doesn't make any sense to make this kind of a blunder.
During his trip in Japan, President Joe Biden falsely claimed, my son was a major in the U.S. Army.
We lost him in Iraq, referring to his son Bo's death.
However, Bo died of brain cancer in America.
Biden has repeatedly made this false statement to portray himself as a gold star parent and score political points.
The president's erroneous remark occurred during an informal visit with troops at Marine Corps Air Station Awakuni.
The traveling press corps was kept at a distance and the White House did not release an official transcript potentially allowing the error to go unnoticed by the public.
The fabrication has been previously called out, including by the New York Times.
Biden's false claim diminishes the sacrifices of those who died in combat and is seen as shameless and disrespectful.
Equating his son's death from cancer with the deaths of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is deeply problematic.
It's shameful.
Do you have the clip?
Yes, go for it.
My son is a major, U.S. Army, lost him in Iraq, like you all, all of our country.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I can't do that, though.
That's just, that's the, go ahead.
Shameful, infuriating.
I'm a veteran.
You're a veteran as well.
And look, what this speaks to is the fact that this is somebody that's obviously in mental decline.
If you watch Joe Biden, if you watch his action, if you see him stumbling up these steps, you see him tripping over the teleprompter, if you see him telling these outright lies, this is somebody that needs to be sitting down in a rocking chair on a porch right now playing with his grandkids.
This is not somebody that needs to be the leader of the free world.
But here's the thing.
He is given a pass on this over and over and over again because when he lies, who's going to point it out?
Conservative media, the New York Post, et cetera, et cetera.
And mainstream media is just going to pretend that this doesn't happen.
They're just going to, you know, just sweep it under the rug.
And I want to get back to one thing about Hillary Clinton making the remark about Biden's age.
And this is going to be an unpopular opinion.
I love Hillary Clinton.
I'm obsessed with her.
She is so evil.
She is so unbelievably evil.
She is my favorite supervillain.
She's like Thanos in the Avengers.
Like, this is why I love Hillary Clinton so much because she is just so fundamentally evil.
And what you have to understand about a supervillain that is as fundamentally evil as Hillary Clinton is, that there is not a word that comes out of her mouth that does not have a political motive behind it.
She knew exactly what she was saying right there.
She knew that these remarks are going to go viral.
And there is a point.
There is a reason behind her talking about Biden's mental decline and his cognitive decline and all of this other stuff.
Does that mean that she's trying to get in?
I don't put anything past Hillary Clinton at this point.
Does this mean that they're trying to get somebody to run against Biden?
Who knows?
But the blood is in the water.
Hillary Clinton, that villain, that evil human being right there saying this, there's some political motivations.
No doubt that she has an agenda every time she speaks.
Can we play this clip, Rob?
Yeah, it's like, is she running or is she still pissed at him?
That's what I was thinking when I heard it.
Can you raise the audience?
They're whispering.
Is really that low?
Every time that happens, your heart is in your mouth because these things could be consequential.
Is that a concern?
Well, I mean, it's a concern for anyone.
And we've had presidents who've fallen before who are a lot younger and people didn't go into heart palpitations.
But his age is an issue, and people have every right to consider it.
But, you know, he has this great saying, and, you know, I think he's right.
You know, don't judge him by running against the Almighty, but against the alternative.
And I am, you know, of the camp that I think, you know, he's determined to run.
He has a good record that three years ago, people would not have predicted would have gotten done.
He doesn't get the credit yet that he deserves.
By the way, you know, but people call a lot of people as the greatest poker players of all time.
Is there a better poker player than her?
She's got a two in a 10, and she'll look at you as if she's got pocket aces.
There's not a better person in the game than Hillary Clinton.
She may be the greatest poker player of all time.
Look, guys, this is what I tell you.
This is what I say.
She is a skilled policy.
This is what I tell my audience all the time.
My problematic out there.
I say this all the time.
These people think that you are stupid.
These people think that you're dumb.
These people think that you do not know facts.
These people think that you will believe everything that they tell you.
So when Hillary Clinton sits on that stage and she talks about Biden having a good record, the expectation is that the people that are watching her are dumb enough to believe everything that she says.
By the way, I wonder if it's comedy.
I wonder if she thinks people are dumb.
And I wonder if people actually buy what she has to say.
Next story here, reparations fight roars as some cities push million-dollar payments to black Americans are civic obligation.
And so the battle of reparations intensifying the United States.
This is a Fox News story with discussions at the local, state, and federal levels considering million dollar payments to black Americans.
Representative Corey Bush and progressive lawmakers have introduced a reparations now resolution calling for $14 billion in reparations, citing a moral and legal obligation to address the impact of slavery on black lives.
Reparations initiatives have emerged at the municipal and state levels with proposals for direct payments and assistance programs.
The California Reparations Tax Force recommended $1.2 million payment to eligible black residents, while Evanston, Illinois, Evanston, Illinois, approved a plan to provide $25,000 for home repairs or down payments to qualified black residents.
Critics argued that reparations should not be pursued and that they divert attention from addressing critical issues in black communities.
What are your thoughts on this?
Look, there's a lot of thoughts.
Number one, no greater than Bayard Rustin, who is a legendary icon of the civil rights movie.
One of the ones that co-founded that co-organized the March in Washington.
And this is Bayard Russon said this in the 60s.
And he said that his father was not a slave, nor was his grandfather or something like that.
So in his mind, reparations was a silly conversation that we need to move forward from that.
And so, look, you have to understand that this is how the left, this is what the left does, and this is what Democrats do when they're trying to appeal to black Americans.
They have nothing substantial to offer black Americans in terms of policies.
They know that their policies are actually detrimental to the lives of African Americans.
So what do they do?
Every election year, it comes up: here's the handout.
Here's some reparations.
Here's this.
Here's that.
I don't know how long people are going to fall for it.
Look, when I came out as a conservative five years ago and you saw the Vice video and all that stuff, and I was like, you know, right?
I'm like, you know, black people, like, we got to wake up, all that other stuff.
Five years later, I do not know because they somehow continue to keep falling for this, right?
And if they continue to keep falling for this stuff, the Democrats are going to continue to keep pushing it.
And one more point that I'll make about quote-unquote reparations is that we have seen billions of dollars that the federal government has given in terms of programs to help advance African Americans, in terms of welfare stuff, in terms of all of this other stuff.
And what has that really done?
All right.
Like it hasn't really done a whole hell of a lot to benefit, you know, lower-income black communities across the country.
And the issue that these communities face is, again, not a political issue.
It is a cultural issue.
I would the great Alan West.
I was watching one of his videos from my Facebook page yesterday, and he made this.
He basically was debating with this college leftist.
And he basically said, the fundamental problems in the African American community are not going to be solved by the government.
They're going to be solved by the family structure.
Why are there no men in the house?
Where are the family structure?
And the federal government has de-incentivized fathers in the household for the better part of the past 40, 50, 60 years.
Until you fix that, all of these problems are never going to get fixed.
But Democrats don't want to fix the problem.
They want to pretend that they fix the problems and they want to basically buy black votes.
This is me off.
You know what?
I'm going to follow that up with some facts here.
And also, we need to look no further than our vice president, who was a proponent of the California Three Strikes Laws.
And it was three strikes, and then you spend your life in prison.
So if you're a third conviction, your life in prison.
But drug distribution convictions counted as a full strike.
So an 18-year-old individual sells two ounces of marijuana before it's legal.
That's a strike.
And it was Kamala Harris that pushed that in California and it disproportionately imprisoned for those relatively minor drug distribution offenses.
I'm not talking about fentanyl.
I'm talking about pot, talking about marijuana, graphs.
And she put an enormous amount of men of color in the California state prisons.
Yeah, Kamala the cop.
Kamala, the that's it.
You ever see those memes?
It was like Kamala Harris and the Kamala the cop.
Yep.
Well, let me ask you.
I feel like you're a good person to ask about this.
I'm actually here representing all black people.
Of course.
That's why I'm using it as a representative.
That's exactly why I'm asking this question.
I'll be over here.
They're talking about $14 trillion in reparations.
Okay.
What's our GDP?
$22 trillion.
So we're talking almost two-thirds of our U.S. economy GDP going towards reparations.
Yeah.
And also, dummies, where is the money coming from?
I want to go math here.
I'm not trying to go, you know, identity politics.
I'm not trying to call anybody names here.
I want to understand where's this money actually coming from?
You see, California, in San Francisco, didn't Dodgers go there recently?
They're talking about giving people $5 million checks.
How is this being funded?
Fundamentally, they want it to come from the tax dollars.
And here's the thing: like, if you can, we got our fucking debt ceiling.
We can barely pay our own freaking bills with the statement.
It's $31 trillion in debt.
Where is this money coming from?
Yeah, so I want you to understand.
I want you to understand.
He's a small thinker over here.
Don't try to reason.
Come up with some trillions.
I want you to understand the reasoning behind what they do it and how this also ties into sort of the anti-capitalism, anti-millionaire, billionaire rhetoric that they also try to push to leftists.
Okay.
So on one hand, they're going to say, you are entitled to reparations because you're so black and you're so oppressed and the legacy of slavery and the trauma and all that other stuff.
And you're entitled to this money.
You are not meant to think where the money is supposed to come from.
Okay.
It's obviously going to come from taxpayer dollars.
It's obviously going to come from the federal government, right?
But if you have a group of people that are so anti-capitalist, anti-millionaire, anti-billionaire, whatever, they're never really good.
They're not thinking about tax.
My ex-best friend was a total Bernie Sanders leftist.
He was perfectly thrilled to just take taxpayer money.
These are not the people that are going to be paying for that stuff, right?
And so fundamentally, if you get these people to hate capitalism, hate millionaires, hate billionaires, and then say there's all this free money that's going to be coming to you because you're such a victim and vote for us and we'll do it.
Of course it's going to be tax dollars.
But they're not thinking about the fact that this is literally their own money that they're going to be getting back.
I think they have to be very careful with this because do you know, you know, when you look at numbers like this, do you know who the first slave owner was in America?
Do you know the first ever slave owner in America?
Do you actually know this?
It was a black man.
It was a black man.
Wow.
It was Anthony Johnson.
Okay.
If you just type in first Anthony Johnson was the first slave owner in America.
So this is kind of a, you know, when you go through the stats and you go through stories and you go through what happened and you go through the moment with Don Lemon that he brought that one lady on and he's asking about what do you think about reparations.
Yeah, we should go back to the Africans who were the original slave owners.
Oh, yeah, we really need to look into this.
You know, we really need to look into this.
You know, when you do things like this, it's a travesty what happened to slavery.
Listen, man, I'm Armenian.
Armenian genocide.
I'm half Assyrian.
Assyrian genocide, Greeks, what the Turks did to them.
It's catastrophic.
It's terrible what happened to those folks.
Terrible what happened to the Holocaust.
Holocaust.
So slim, nobody's sitting here saying any of that stuff.
But I think the way this is going about is another thing to run for election.
And I think it may get a lot of people's attention to say, can we win some more African-American votes?
But what you pointed out earlier is the gay vote, you were saying 70%, 30% voted for Trump in 2016 or 2020.
I think those numbers came out in 2020.
2020.
When you think about that, and then the African-American vote, for the longest time, Democrats have had 92% of the vote since 1964, and it's gone to 88%, 84%.
So it's kind of going in a different direction to say, look, I don't know what the Democrats have done for me.
Nothing's really changed in my life when I look back.
You just make my top 20, 30 cities in crime in America, 27 are driven by Democrats.
So this NAACP is sitting there saying, hey, you know, you should not go to Florida.
Great.
That's great.
Why don't you talk?
So you want people to go to the top 27, 30 cities where 27 are Democrats and they're not safe.
They can say these things, but the opposition argument's going to be very easy to come back to this.
I want to go to this other story.
Rob, can you pull up the story of what happened in Iran?
Okay.
This is going to sound like it's out of a movie.
It's not.
This is not out of a movie.
I'll send a link to you on what just happened in Iran.
And if you read this, you're almost going to say, yeah, I don't know if this is true.
Iran has hanged three people on drug charges amid continued criticism of its execution practices and increased death penalty sentences.
The three men identified as Shahab Mansour Nassab, Samad Gervand, and Saeed Gervand were hanged after more than 39 kilograms of heroin.
They're saying that's what the reason was.
And precursors and processing equipment were confiscated with them.
Judiciary website said on Sunday.
Now, that's the story you're reading.
I'll give you another story for you to read, Rob, is this one I'm about to send to you.
These guys that just went through this, they were anti-government protest.
They were not supporting what they're doing in Iran today.
And they spoke out about it.
Okay, if you can pull up the link I just sent you.
And Iran sits there and says, yeah, this is kind of, we got to make a statement too.
So Iran executes three men accused over anti-government protests.
Iran has executed three men.
It said it was implicit in their deaths of three members of security forces during anti-government protests, drawn condemnation from rights groups and the EU, and risking further international isolation.
So that story you pulled up was a different story than this one here, Rob.
These are two different stories.
Saleh Mirachemi, Majit Khasemi, Zaid Yaqubi were killed on Friday morning.
The TASNIM agency reported crowds had gathered outside the prison where they were being held on Thursday night as rumors of their imminent execution grew.
Cultural figures inside and outside Iran, as well as family members, had steeped, had stepped up a campaign over the past weekend to halt the executions on the grounds that Iranian authorities had failed to produce definitive evidence of the men responsibly for the deaths of two members of Basij parliamentary force and law enforcement officers on 16 November.
So it goes and goes telling these different stories.
Go on Twitter now to see what's trending right now.
Go on Twitter to see what's trending right now.
Go to Twitter and see on the right what's trending.
King, if you go to more of them to show one of them should be King Reza Palavi is trending 16,000, 17,000.
On my screen, it shows as number three.
If you type in King Reza Palavi, you may have a hard time spelling that.
Here's what's going on with Iran.
When events like this happen, Iran just a year ago, they had so much momentum, so much momentum with what was going on.
You're seeing Reza Pahlavi, the son of King Reza Palavi, the gentleman right there.
He and I have had multiple meetings together, had multiple conversations together.
People in Iran are starting to worry about what's going to happen.
And he is all over the place right now talking about the fact that this is an opportunity for Iran to be freed.
We can live in a country like America for people that complain about America.
When's the last time you went outside and you said, you know what, they're hanging three different people today outside of D.C.?
Yeah, you know what happened?
These guys talked against the president and they're hanging him.
What?
You're serious?
That would never happen.
Just out of movies.
No, that actually just happened in Iran.
Those types of things are still happening in countries like Iran.
And it's such a weird position for them to be in because on one end, parents want to see Iran be free again.
But the fear of getting their kids to be motivated by this and they go out there and all of a sudden they're like, man, I lost my son.
The parent doesn't want to experience risking something like that.
So you can encourage them and say, look, keep fighting.
I was like, you're not even in here to know how ugly it is.
What do you mean, keep fighting?
It is a decision they need to be making.
But one of my dreams is to one day take my kids to Iran to Khiyaban E-Rojat and show them where their father was raised and I lived there 10 years and how the history of this empire, they went from being where they were at to the king building Iran into a place where women finally had a voice.
But it'll be interesting to see what happens here.
I like seeing him all over the place.
The son talking about this.
There's more and more momentum going on there.
But this was a tragic event that just took place in Iran this week.
And this is amazing perspective.
Something that really clicked for me is when you shared the story of when you first came to America and your mom was watching just regular news and the commentator was saying something negative about her president.
And what was her reaction?
She says, poor guy, they're going to kill him tomorrow.
Because that's normal in Iran.
You don't talk against, you know, presidents.
That's just not something you do in Iran.
You don't do that.
In America, it's normal.
In America, it's a business model.
Like, we're doing it today.
Last two hours.
This is what we've been doing.
I'd be homeless otherwise.
You wouldn't be homeless, man.
It'd be five of us outside today.
So it's like, hey, Rob's going to say, look, I'm just working here, man.
I wasn't doing anything.
I'm just having my drink and enjoying it.
But it'd be me, Adam, Rob, and Tom outside of ITI and a statement being made.
Talk about us one more time.
That would be the case in Iran.
Okay.
So I'll wrap up with the story from Wall Street Journal, get a couple of commentary and wrap this up.
Does God exist?
Only half of Americans say a definite yes.
This is a story on page 18, if you want to go to it.
So only 50% of Americans are certain about the existence of God.
According to the General Social Survey, this marks a decline from 60% over 60% in 2008, indicating a shift in religious beliefs.
The survey also reveals that 34% of Americans never attend church, the highest figure recorded in five decades.
Additionally, the number of Americans claiming no religion has increased from 27% in 2022, up from 19% in 2012.
While religious affiliation and church attendance continue to decline, belief in some form of higher power remains prevalent.
Nearly three quarters of Americans believe in life after death, and only 7% of the population identifies as atheists.
Despite these trends, the United States remains relatively religious compared to other countries.
So now, here's what's so wild about this.
Half of America, more than half of America, believe the Russia collusion was a real deal.
So they're willing to believe a fake narrative like that for three years, and then Durham comes on and points it out, but they have a hard time believing in God.
But I have to see it because I have to see it to believe that there's a God.
Dude, you never saw anything about Russia, but you believed in Russia collusion.
What do you mean you have to see it?
No, but you know, there was a little bit of Russian stuff going on.
No, there was nothing going on.
It was just something that you believed in.
So the second concern here is the following.
You know who historically governments and establishments always feared?
Who they've feared?
They've always feared men and women who believed in a higher power above the government, above the establishment.
The establishment doesn't like that because the establishment secretly, their desire is to be God.
Their dream is to be God.
Their dream is to be feared.
Their dream is they're jealous.
You know, it says God is jealous.
You know, the establishment is way more jealous than Goddess.
They want all the attention.
They want all the control.
They want all the limelight.
The difference between a relationship with a God where it's free will, you and I get to make some dumb choices and we do on a daily basis and we go through that and we pay the price for it.
The establishment doesn't want to give you the free will.
The establishment wants you to do what they want you to do.
They want to control you.
So, you know, for me, there's a part of this that for some people that are listening to this, everybody falls into one of three categories.
You're either part of the oblivious camp, which is a big percentage, let's say 80%, is the oblivious camp.
What is the oblivious camp?
Man, I don't have time to pay.
I don't really have an influence.
You think my vote really counts?
I just want to have my beer and watch a football game.
And you know what?
I don't even know what's going on with Bud Light.
I'll go to Corps and Heineken.
I don't know what's going on.
The Oblivious crowd.
Number two is the anti-establishment crowd.
The anti-establishment crowd, historically, who is in that camp?
Let's give some names.
Andrew Jackson, anti-establishment crowd.
John F. Kennedy, the Kennedys, anti-establishment crowd.
Ronald Reagan, anti-establishment crowd.
Ross Perot, anti-establishment crowd.
Trump, anti-establishment crowd.
Bernie Sanders, anti-establishment crowd until he caved.
Elon Musk, anti-establishment crowd.
I can go on and on, give you so many different names.
Ronald Reagan, out of all the money that was spent in his campaign, he spent 9.6% of his own money to put into it.
Trump was 72%.
Ross Perot was 97%.
Didn't take any money from anybody.
When Kennedy was running, his father said, I will use 100% of my life savings to make sure my son ends up becoming a president.
He only ended up using 50% of the entire campaign.
I think it was like 25 million bucks at a time where Joseph Kennedy was worth $400 million in the 60s.
So you look at some of these things and you look at Hillary Clinton.
You know how much money she spent on her campaign?
Zero of her own money.
You know how much Biden spent on the campaign?
Nothing.
They don't go and use their own money.
They use money from other people.
They're the establishment.
They're controlled.
You have to know the direction of faith.
You may say, Pat, what does this have to do with God?
This is what it has to do with God.
I'm a pretty paranoid guy.
I'm a skeptical guy.
This is what happens when you're Middle Eastern.
You naturally have a hard time for the establishment.
You naturally have a hard time with faith.
Church.
I was an atheist for 25 years of my life because I saw stuff in church and I didn't like it.
And I saw stuff on the government.
I didn't like it.
I saw the gamesmanship, all this other stuff.
Here's what I will tell you: the more your family and your kids don't believe in a higher power, they will replace that with another higher power.
And that higher power is you when you're alive, but when you die, that higher power could end up being the government when you're dead.
I would much rather have my kids make the mistake of believing there's a God, and when they die, they realize there isn't, than risk my kids not believing there's a God and they make the government being the God and then risk being controlled and we die.
We're like, shoot, there was a God.
The risk is better having faith in your life because you don't fear powerful men.
Men of faith don't fear the establishment.
Men of faith don't fear dying because they believe there's afterlife.
Men of faith speak in a complete different way than men of the establishment.
If there's ever been a time, ever, I told you last night, what did I tell you last night at 10 o'clock at night?
What did I say to you last night?
I said a lot, but the church part, what I say to you, go to temple, go to church.
Go to temple.
I'm not even a Jew.
I said, go to the temple.
You're Mormon.
You're not going to church.
Go to your church.
You're Catholic.
You're not going to go.
You're Christian.
You're not going to go.
You're Muslim.
I don't care what it is.
I will much rather have a person believe in a faith.
This is not a faith debate.
We need more people believing in God.
This great nation of America, the miracle that it ended up becoming where so many of us have won and got the rewards of these men and women who sacrificed that came before us.
These men and women casted a vision that the only thing that gave them the credit that this is possible, that it can actually happen, was God.
And then we wake up a 270-year-old company called the United States of America.
By the way, for a longest time, it was a corporation.
America was founded as a federal corporation as well.
United States of America, you can look this up.
This idea with these men and women that became what it is today and other countries that have been around a lot longer than we have, then we beat those guys.
Yeah, I don't think that happens without God.
So if you believed in Russia collusion for three years, you can definitely start believing in God.
You don't have to have all the facts to want to believe in God.
Your life's going to be a lot better.
You're going to become a better parent, better leader, better spouse, better friend, better in every possible way.
Anyways, Tom, thoughts on this story here with Wall Street Journal.
And by the way, this is a Hill story we're talking about here, right?
This is a Hill story.
So what are your thoughts on this story?
Well, I think America is still a place of faith.
When you compare all those stats to the rest of the world, America is still a place of faith.
And I think that if all of us would turn to our faith tradition, I think we would be treating each other better.
I would think that we would be calling on the people we elect for higher standards of integrity or hell, just to have a standard of integrity.
And I can't agree with you any more stridently with what you just said and how you summed it up, that this is the time to lead your family, to lead your friends, to lead your community.
And standards of faith, integrity, and character are found in faith in big stocks because faith can drive character.
Character drives people.
People then come together and form organizations called businesses, civic groups, friendships, communities.
Final thoughts, guys, before we wrap up here.
Rob, it was great having you on the podcast here today.
Gang, we're going to put the website again here, stopwoke.com, stopwoke.com.
Go to it.
We'll put the link in description chat, a comment section for you to go to it again, stopwoke.com.
You can also follow Rob, all his social media platform links will be below.
You can find him at Rob Smith.
Is it online?
Rob Switter?
Rob Smith online.
Is it the same as well on Instagram?
It's the same everywhere.
Same everywhere.
Perfect.
Rob Smith online.
I'm on a trip right now.
I got to go to New York, but you got what?
You got a podcast here this week?
I've got a podcast tomorrow, and then next Friday is the live event with Fresh and Fifth.
That's right.
Next Friday is a live event with Fresh and Fifth here, I think, June 2nd.
June 2nd, get your tickets on.
Thursday night or Friday night?
Friday night.
Ladies, party, the craziness, the arguments, fights.
If you like that kind of stuff, you don't want to miss this.
Go to 5990live.com.
I love it, Tom.
And Monday is Memorial Day.
We'll be enjoying a little bit of a picnic.
And so I believe it'll be Tuesday afternoon that the BizTalk people.
You're doing a picnic.
Like literally an old school picnic.
You just took me visually to a place sitting in the grass with a picnic and you're making sandwiches, stuff like that.
And ants.
Tom, I've got one wish for you on Memorial Day, and it's exactly what Pat said.
I want you this weekend.
I want you to be with your family, and I want you to get your freak on.
