NYSE's Polymarket Bet, Gold & Bitcoin Skyrocket, Candace Owens Texts & Wall Street Woos Trump | PBD
Patrick Bet-David, Eric Bolling, Tom Ellsworth, and Brandon Aceto break down the NYSE’s $2 billion Polymarket investment, gold and Bitcoin’s massive surge, Candace Owens' Charlie Kirk text messages, and how Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac & Wall Street are moving to woo Trump.
------
Ⓜ️ PBD ENTREPRENEUR CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/46U4DTM
👕 THE VT GENTLEMAN'S COLLECTION: https://bit.ly/3L026zX
🎧 LISTEN TO ERIC BOLLING'S 'THE EDGE': https://apple.co/4h4N3RG
Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP
🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj
🍋 ZEST IT FORWARD: https://bit.ly/4kJ71lc
📕 PBD'S BOOK "THE ACADEMY": https://bit.ly/41rtEV4
🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON SPOTIFY: https://bit.ly/4g57zR2
🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ITUNES: https://bit.ly/4g1bXAh
🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ALL PLATFORMS: https://bit.ly/4eXQl6A
Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4kSVkso
👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2
📰 VTNEWS.AI: https://bit.ly/3OExClZ
🎓 VALUETAINMENT UNIVERSITY: https://bit.ly/3TEWlZQ
📺 JOIN THE CHANNEL: https://bit.ly/4g5C6Or
💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!
TIME STAMPS:
00:00 - Show intro
01:32 - Topics on the podcast.
08:32 - Ⓜ️ PBD ENTREPRENEUR CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/46U4DTM
10:17 - Uber and Lyft unionizes in California.
24:25 - Trump tariffs will fund WIC thru shutdown.
39:01 - Gold prices skyrocket
47:22 - Bitcoin hits $125K
58:50 - NYSE invests in Polymarket.
1:05:03 - Eric Bolling responds to Candace Owens comments.
1:21:06 - Canada gym charges white people more.
1:25:46 - Bari Weiss announced as editor at CBS.
1:37:34 - Sharpie moves production back to the U.S.
1:47:23 - WSJ article on culture vs compensation.
1:58:09 - Major banks try to woo Trump.
SUBSCRIBE TO:
@VALUETAINMENT
@ValuetainmentComedy
@theunusualsuspectspodcast
@HerTakePod
@bizdocpodcast
ABOUT US:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Moving forward, our plan is once a week for us to do podcasts purely on business stories.
And we're doing that today.
Brandon here, quick shout-out, was here at 8 a.m.
Normally, the seat, someone's not sitting there till 8.59.
Rob told me at 8 a.m., he was sitting here.
We have Eric back here with us, Eric Bowling, with his business background that he has.
And then obviously Tom Ellsworth to go through stories.
Quick shout out to Aaron Judge.
What a flipping home run you hit yesterday.
Off the pole, three inches from being foul.
When you hit that home run, Tom was furious.
I heard things are being thrown around at his house.
I was getting some footage from a guy I hired Paparazzi outside to see how Tom was reacting to the Yankees winning.
It's not a fairy.
It's a fair pole.
It's a fair poll.
What a great game it was yesterday.
We were screaming so loud in our house.
We got complaints in the entire Fort Auditor community, and we'll gladly do it again.
And they're back at it again tonight.
Anyway, let me get that out of my system because it was a nerve-wracking the first two games.
Anyways, a lot of business stories to go through.
I brought a bar of gold with me here today.
You know why?
Because I bought a bunch of these.
These, when I bought them, I'm like, let me just set it aside in case Armageddon happens and I got to go buy pizza or something like that.
I got to melt it here for a large pizza, right?
I got a bunch of these.
I bought it for like $50,000,000.
They're apparently $128,000 right now.
These guys right now.
And King Griffin from Citadel is worried why the prices of gold is going up, which we'll talk about that, right?
The whole gold story.
And you have a whole different perspective of what's happened the last three years on how the U.S. dollar has done to gold.
I won't give it away.
He's going to give you that stat.
You'll be blown away by it.
Aside from that, Saudi is trying to compete.
And they're not trying to compete.
They're trying to buy up anything they can.
And recently, a Saudi-led deal went to an enormous deal to acquire EA Sports.
Okay.
Whether you play the games or not, they bought him out.
Brandon's got a list of other companies Saudi's bought over the last few years and then what else they want to buy.
Why is this so important?
Tom was part of a company that they started that they sold to EA Sports in 2004 for $680, $80 million.
It was called Jam Dad.
So Tom's going to give some insight on that as well.
Gig drivers.
You ready for this one?
Gig drivers win the right to unionize in California.
What?
A few hundred thousand.
We're talking Uber.
We're talking Lyft.
We're talking these guys that are going to be now unionized.
Is that a good thing?
Who's going to pay price for it?
We will see.
New York Stock Exchange owner to invest $2 billion in betting platform, polymarket.
Tom loves that story.
Anxiety and uncertainty push gold to $4,000 an ounce.
First time ever.
And Brandon was even saying some of the guys that are pro-gold people, they're confused themselves.
We will cover that.
Paramount buys the free press, ushering a new era at CBS with Barry Weiss.
There's been a bunch of clips resurfacing with Barry Weiss, but she is now directly reporting, I believe, to Larry Ellison's son, who is pretty much running that whole deal that the Ellison family purchased.
She's not reporting to anybody else.
She's reporting directly to him.
Rumor has it.
We'll talk about the Sharpies.
If you use Sharpies, Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by manufacturing them where?
Not in El Salvador, not in China, not anywhere else.
In America.
How are they doing it?
We're going to talk about it.
Well done.
Yeah, well done.
Woke Jim.
Ready for this one, folks?
We're going to put the link below for those of you guys that want to go become members at this place.
Woke Jim proudly charges white customers double the rate they offer by, what is it, B-I-P-O-C exercises?
What is that, Rob?
BIPOC exercises?
I don't want to butcher this one.
I think it's black interracial people of color?
Okay, so that's what it is.
Now, let me ask you, do I get even a lower discount than BIPOC?
Because I'm from Iran?
I'd love to go there and say, I'd like to get a discount.
I think I got to get lesser than BIPOC.
And I don't know how they're going to react to me.
Maybe we'll make a phone call live on the podcast at this place.
Can we find the number to this place, Rob?
Actually, I wouldn't mind calling these guys on speaker on the podcast and see if they'll give me a membership.
Could you say you identified it?
I'm sorry.
I identified a raised nephew.
I feel like I've had a more difficult life than the people that are part of the BIPOC community.
Can I get even a lesser discount?
Let's see what they'll say to me.
Young people are richer than boomers were.
This is a recent story.
Brandon doesn't like this story.
Matter of fact, Brandon wants to go, you know, like, he's upset at boomers.
He's not happy about boomers.
We're going to have to hold Brandon back today a little bit when it comes up to the market.
It's a crash housing market.
Prices come down.
Yeah.
Parents are penniless, but you get your first house.
SP 500 NASDAQ reach all-time closing highs on AI deal making boost.
Bitcoin hits a new all-time high.
So while we're talking about this, you know what's the tough thing about this?
You want to know how it sounds if I that's how it sounds when you drop.
This thing is so heavy, it's not even funny.
So let's just say if I want to move a million dollar of these things and I'm going through the airport.
You know what it's going to feel like?
You know what happens if you want to move a million dollars of Bitcoin, you're going through the airport?
Nobody knows.
It's with you and your phone over here that you're tracking.
So that's the argument for.
26 letters in your head.
Yeah, that's the crypto community for you.
$6 billion floods crypto in one week.
Institutions going all in.
Wait TC, who just bought $120 million of Bitcoin.
I guess they like it now.
Yeah, now they do.
Now they do.
It's mainstream.
Yeah.
It's going to compete with gold at some point.
I think it's going to get ahead of gold.
I think it already probably has.
I think gold's going to have a hard time competing with Bitcoin long term.
We'll talk about it.
Charlie Munger, God rest his soul, called it rap poison.
Yeah.
Sam Altman warns that AI industry is due for a spectacular implosion.
Not explosion, implosion.
Correction.
Big banks woo Trump for roles on blockbuster IPOs.
Remember Freddie Mac and all these other companies?
It's kind of coming up right now.
And then we got a couple other stories that just came out, folks.
This is why you got to love Trump.
You ready?
So you can check this out.
So you know when you think about the program WIC, what does WIC stand for?
Rob, what does WIC stand for?
Women, infant, and children's children, I believe.
I think you actually got it.
I think you actually got it on what it stands for.
I think it is.
Women, infants, and children.
Yeah, I think you got it.
So WIC typically is for folks who are having a hard time financially.
And sometimes for certain communities, most biggest percentage of getting these, some would say it's African American.
Statistically, it's been written about.
So what does Trump do?
Trump says with the government shutdown, we're going to use the tariff revenue that came in to fund WIC programs during the shutdown.
Tell me you know a better marketer than this guy on doing something like this, but he threatens no back pay for some of the federal workers who are going through the shutdown.
And he's blaming the Democrats.
We will cover that.
And then Tesla reveals cheaper version of its cars.
Rob told me this morning the Tesla that he bought many years ago for $50,000, the new Tesla is not only cheaper by $11,000, but it also gives you 70 more miles per charge than the one that Rob got.
So, and Rob's going to give his affiliate code at the end.
If you guys want to buy a Tesla, please use his affiliate code to make sure he gets credit for it.
We want to make sure he becomes the number one Tesla salesperson that's on the PBD podcast here.
Compensational culture.
I actually love this story with Wall Street Journal: the best managed companies.
Which one is more important?
How much you pay people or the culture that you create?
And then NVIDIA decides to give just somewhere like $20 billion to Elon's XAI company.
And then Trump met with Canada, Mark Carney, and they're having a bunch of conversations together.
Anyways, gang, before we get into it, two things.
Number one, see this shirt I'm wearing with the Vaitina logo here on the Future Looks Bright?
I have probably 30 shirts in my closet.
My wife says, babe, these shirts are my favorites.
When you wear them once, okay, you're going to see how it feels, how smooth it is.
You're going to feel like someone's hugging you all day, telling you how awesome you are.
Okay.
If you haven't yet ordered, I think some of the sizes are gone, but we do still have some left.
This is the business show that we're talking about here.
You got them in white with the gold logo, Future Looks Bright on the bottom of the shirt.
You got them in black, which looks great.
And you got them in blue.
Black goes with gold.
And we have the blue as well.
You may as well order all three of them if you're somebody that's in business and you're regularly wearing business shirts.
And then we got some of that blue jacket that's left and the whole business series that's going to be there.
Now, you can go to VTMerch.com to place your order.
Number two, if you're with us right now and you're an entrepreneur, small business owner, we have a circle on Maneck dedicated to just business owners.
Okay.
It's going to be called the PBD.
It's called the PBD Entrepreneur Circle.
There is a ton of networking going on there.
If you haven't yet joined the circle, download the app, go to PBD Entrepreneur Circle, get in there.
We're talking ideas, notes, PDFs, different things that I do.
I post all this stuff in here, and you can join for free to see what we're talking about.
And if you want to be able to network and message each other, it's five bucks a month for you guys to be able to talk to each other in that circle that we have.
Rob, do we have a QR code for that or not?
We do.
There's a lower third, and the link is in the description append to the chat.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
Okay, so let's get right into the story.
Oh, which story do we want to get into?
Let's get into the gig drivers who win the right to unionize in California, Eric.
Now, here's what the story is telling us.
Rob, I think you got a video on this.
Before you got the video, let me just read a couple things here and then we'll go to the video.
Drivers for gig companies like Uber Lyft gained the right to unionize in California on Friday thanks to a bill signed by Governor Newsome.
The bill allows unions representing drivers to bargain for better wages and benefits and could serve as a model for other states given the size of California's ride-hailing industry.
You ready?
You want to know how many drivers they have in California for Uber and Lyft?
You think it's 50,000?
It's a lot.
100,000?
That's a lot of people.
800,000 drivers that use Uber and Lyft.
According to the bill's backers, only Massachusetts had a similar law, which was passed through a ballot measure last year.
The bill could help resolve a year-long fight in which drivers group have pushed for employee status, which confers protection like a wage floor and a right to unionize while gig companies resist it.
Rob, go ahead and play this clip.
Well, more than 800,000 drivers for ride-hailing companies in California will soon be able to join a union and bargain collectively for better wages and benefits.
Governor Newsom signed the new measure into law yesterday.
The governor and state lawmakers struck a deal with Uber and Lyft in September.
The agreement also includes a measure that would reduce Uber and Lyft's insurance requirements for accidents caused by underinsured drivers.
There we go.
Okay, Tom, your thoughts on the story.
Well, this is what all the gig economy have been fighting over a beachhead that's very important, and it's the contractor W-2 beachhead.
Because if they're declared to be W-2, then you have to pay the matching part of FICA.
It's about 6%.
That's also known as the self-employment tax.
If you self-employ and you're a contractor or 1099, you have to pay both sides of it.
And so they've been fighting it on that basis also because there's insurance reasons and control reasons.
So they want the contractors.
They want everybody to be 1099 contractors.
It reduces costs for the company and gives the company more flexibility with the drivers.
The drivers want to be, usually, they push for W-2.
Well, what this bill did is gives them the ability to collective bargaining as contractors.
It doesn't give up W-2.
And what's really interesting, Uber and Lyft dropped their opposition after the preservation of the contractor W-2 Gulf was preserved.
In other words, this maintains 1099 status.
So Uber and Lyft just say, look, as long as they're 1099s, I'm good.
I'll deal with them collectively bargaining on the hourly rate or the percent.
It's not really an hourly rate.
It's the percent of the fare.
And so, but it's also, you know, commie Fornia strikes again, and it's a populist drive that, you know, that Gavin Newsom is putting in.
And if you want to be an Uber driver and you want to make a little more, drive at busier times, you know, and, you know, stage yourself as an XL or a comfort driver and get a little bit more percent out of it.
And so it's a gig.
It's a side hustle.
Are you surprised that this happened, Eric?
Are you surprised that this is a 1099 independent contractor?
This is I may do Uber for an hour a week, two hours a week.
This is maybe I do Uber full-time, 40, 50 hours a week.
You want to now move them to W-2?
Were you surprised by this decision?
I'm not surprised because it's California or there's time that say Comifornia, but it strikes me a fool's plate on the driver's part because the more you push, you want to unionize, you're obviously going to cost the company more money because there will be some that aren't 1099.
There'll be a push or maybe someday there'll be a push to go away from a percentage of fares into a guaranteed number, a minimum wage, so to speak.
It's California.
Anything can happen there.
It strikes me that the same way, remember about five, seven years ago, you go into a Publix or you go into a CVS and they're teaching you how to self check yourself out, express, self-check out.
And I'm thinking, do you realize you're putting yourself out of business?
You're teaching me how to do this so they don't have to hire you anymore.
And they didn't really realize it.
And now we see it.
There's 12 self-checkouts and one actual human being checking people out.
The same thing's going to happen with the gig economies.
If people are forcing these companies to accept them as a union, you're going to drive the cost up.
And that technology of driverless autopilot cars is right around the corner.
They will be out of business as human beings.
There's no question.
They don't have to pay them anything if it's a computer, if it's technology that's driving the car.
Waymo, if you say, by the way, Patrick, if you say 800,000 of these folks, 800,000 people, what are they going to do when they go to autopilot cars?
What are those 800,000?
By the way, that's a good point because those cars are being made in California in Silicon Valley.
So it's not like they're, it's a different state.
It's being built over there.
Waymo got through some early missteps and are on a phased approach to mainstream in Arizona, I believe, I believe in Phoenix.
There's a human, there's a human that sits there, you know, reading an e-book or something or texting that has to be in there, but that's just part of the program.
But what do you do when the human, remember, that human, Arizona said, you have to have an emergency human there, but they're not driving.
The car is driving.
What happens when that's completely automated?
And then they go back and said, you won this battle here, but then you lost the war.
So, Brandon, your thoughts?
Because I got a question for you guys on this topic because just last week, we had the Teamster president, fourth generation president of Teamster, fourth president, Teamster member.
Now he's the youngest president, Sean O'Brien, who spoke at the RNC.
He was here last week.
And while I'm pushing back on Union, I'm going to share with you what he did in the middle of it and how he looked at Rob and asked four questions from Rob just to see the business model of how unions work.
But I'm going to come back to this.
I got a question for you guys.
Go ahead, Brandon.
Your thoughts on this.
Yeah, I just, I just like this so much and I dislike this mindset so much.
I was really annoyed when I was listening to that guy speak.
And I did Uber for a little bit when I was in college and I considered it a privilege to have the access to software that allowed me to make some money whenever I wanted to.
If I wanted to take a couple hours here and there to drive people around, I don't think that these people should feel entitled to having a set wage.
I think that they should be thankful to have the access to this software that gives them the ability to make money when they want to.
And you could say that lobbying that Uber does makes it more difficult for a competitor to come along and offer a better offer.
Like I mean, lifted that for a little bit.
So normally the market takes care of this type of thing.
If it was really that bad of a rate or that bad of a deal or you couldn't function with it, then they wouldn't do it anymore.
But there's still 800,000 people doing it.
So obviously they're able to get what they want out of it for the most part.
But yeah, Uber shouldn't be a thing you're doing full-time anyway.
It should be something you're doing to bridge yourself to something else.
But the Predo principle applies to this.
I think where 80% of people are, you know, like not exceptional people, not willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want.
And 20% of people aren't in that category.
So I think that's a good question.
You know what Sean O'Brien said?
What's that?
He said 95%.
I see audio, Tom.
It said 95% of people, he believes, are exceptional people.
But this is the question.
No, no.
And by the way, that's their view because they represent workers.
He has to have that mindset, right?
But here's a question I got for you guys.
Two things.
One, when he was here, the Teamster president was here.
I'm watching the mindset of a union community.
So I'm pushing back on him.
I'm asking him questions on certain things.
And obviously, he played a very important role for the 2024 election.
Kamala Harris was the only candidate that went there.
And every year, every time there's an election, they ask 16 questions of the candidates.
Kamala was the only person that refused to answer all the 16 questions and only answered three.
Kamala.
Even Biden showed up.
Trump answered all the questions.
So they can't stand.
Kamala disrespected these guys in the highest way, but I want to learn more about Union.
So when I'm pushing back on Union, all of a sudden he looks at Rob.
He says, Rob, did Pat text you after work yesterday?
Yes.
Pat said he texted you earlier today.
What time did he text you?
Rob says 9.01.
Did you get it?
He's saying, you know, 9.01.
And then he says, well, few things.
If you're watching this and you want to be part of a union, number one, how would you like a guaranteed raise every year?
Number two, how would you like to make sure your health insurance premium never goes up?
Number three, how would you like to have a, what was it, a retirement plan or something like that, Rob, that he said, pension plan.
Pension.
And then number four, there was one other thing that took place on what it was, right?
But he put it in a funny way that we were doing it, but there was a part of it that was serious, the employee against the employer, right?
That was the method that was going on.
So the question becomes two things that I want to address.
Number one, Tom, and Eric, who takes a hit here the most?
One, you said drivers, the 800,000 because of Waymo comes out.
We got that one.
But how about the guy that's Ubering?
So if you're spending $10 to go somewhere, if they raise the wages on them, Uber has to pass it to you because Uber's still got to make sure they're getting their 20, 30, 40% of their EBIT or whatever margins they got.
So that means people in California, if you were going from A to Z and it was costing you 12 bucks, now it could be 18 bucks.
That's one.
So the consumer is going to take a hit.
So that's one question.
But the second part of the question I want to ask you guys is, what is the process of being union?
What is the process?
So when they go about getting these 800,000 people, who prompts the conversation of union before a company gets unionized, before an industry gets unionized?
What is the procedure?
Do you know?
Well, I think you'll hear about these things.
And Eric, I love your perspective too.
You'll hear that there were union organizers.
These are ambassadors from some main union.
You've got United Auto Workers.
You've got the giant one that's in Las Vegas, S-C-I-U, service employees.
S CIU, service employees that are all the maids and people working at hotels.
So let's say I've got a hotel and I don't have union workers.
They send ambassadors to talk to my people.
It's legal to walk across my parking lot when those people walk out at five o'clock and say, hi, I'm in the union over here.
I think you need representation.
Come visit us one evening and we're going to have a meeting to tell you about it.
That's how they start the organization.
And they create all, get people coming over and says, you guys could vote to unionize and then join us.
And then we will be the mouthpiece for you.
So that's usually what happens.
You get people to evangelize, then they come to meetings, then they agree.
Hey, all of us at Pat ⁇ Tom's Independent Hotel, we should be in this because we can make $11 an hour, not $8 an hour or whatever it is.
And we get all these things.
Let's go have a meeting over here.
And they meet at Denny's, they meet places, and suddenly you're meeting in crowds.
And suddenly we get a knock on the door that says, I got signatures from 200 of your 300 people that want to join this union.
I'd like to know what you're going to do about it because we think your hotel, just like everybody else, should be a union shop.
And you kind of get pinched.
That's kind of how it works.
What have I missed?
Nothing, nothing at all.
Or someone will say, hey, we're not unionized.
That hotel over there is unionized.
They pick up a phone, call SEIU, and say, send someone over.
They start the negotiation.
And at that point, the managers of management of the company starts to panic because they realize if there is a unionization, if it becomes a union shop, their costs are going up, period.
Full stop.
He can ask Rob, hey, Rob, how would you like?
How would you take a free Tesla every year too on top of it?
How'd you like, you know, to be sunny every day?
That's great.
But someone's got to pay for that.
And it does, by the way, Sean O'Brien is under the same gun that these workers are in California.
Teamsters, trucks are going to be driverless too, eventually.
Eventually, you're going to eliminate the human aspect of moving a vehicle from one place to the other.
Airline pilots as well.
They can unionize all you want, try and suck the last few drops of blood out of the turnip, so to speak, because they're on their way out.
And that's the reality.
So I guess if I'm in the Teamsters or trucking or transportation industry or the gig economies, you wait.
You just wait and you go, okay, we'll play this game with you until we see how things play out.
It will be a drastically reduced union membership across the board.
And On an ideal that's done nothing but slide.
It's the way cable news used to be a monster, and it evaporates 8.5% per year of its viewership to digital, right?
Same thing will happen over time to all these unions, Teamsters especially, because they're all physically driven drivers and whatnot.
They're on their way up.
All this stuff accelerates the problem for the worker.
Do you remember when Bloomberg announced that the minimum wage?
He was the first one with the big minimum wage speech.
We covered this on the podcast.
You and I talked about it.
So he got all upset about Fast Food New York.
We're going to do the wage for fast food New York.
And you know what?
Within six months, McDonald's was trialing kiosks.
Why?
Because if you push capitalism against the wall, it's going to respond.
It's going to find Gavin Newsom and these things, it doesn't help the workers very long because it accelerates the response by business because Uber is on the stock market.
Their pressure is: hey, buddy, you know, your PE ratio is down and now your stock price is down.
So they have to respond.
Let's get to the next story.
Let's get to the next story.
I think we got plenty of this story.
Let's get to the next one.
So, President Trump decides due to the government shutdown, he will use tariff revenue to fund WIC programs during the shutdown.
Think about how creative of a thinking this is.
Rob, is this a clip of him saying that?
It's actually just a quick news up about it.
Go forward.
And now we're learning where some of that money will go.
The White House has just announced that the Women and Children Food Program will not be cut off while the government is shut down.
Some of the money.
Yeah, when you're looking at this, Trump remembers that too.
The tariff will used to keep afloat a federal food system program for nearly 7 million pregnant women, new moms, and young children during the government shutdown.
The program known as WIC was expected to run out of money soon because Congress has yet to approve a federal spending package, the fiscal 2026, which started on October 1st.
The National WIC Association has predicted that the program funding would last only a week or two into the shutdown.
White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt announced the tariff idea in a post on X. Democrats are so cruel in their continual votes to shut down a government that they forced WIC program for their most vulnerable women and children to run out this week.
She wrote, Thankfully, President Trump and the White House have identified a creative solution to transfer resources from Section 232 tariff revenue to this critical program.
Eric, your thoughts on this?
I may take a different tack on this than maybe a lot of people at the table.
I think it's great politics on Trump's part.
It's great politics and horrible policy.
Here's why.
I'm never, ever going to be a fan of this tariff situation that he's decided to put into play.
I'm a free marketeer.
I'm straight up libertarian.
I think we leave our equity markets, all our markets, our financial markets alone.
They're the crown jewel of financial markets around the world.
They've created insane wealth for the American people.
Stop playing with the free market.
It would take care of itself.
The tariff changes the dynamic.
But I know why he's doing it because Trump likes the power of having that tariff over foreign leaders.
Like he's using it for just about everything to negotiate peace with wars, to negotiate deals, to negotiate almost anything he wants.
Now he's going to use this tariff revenue, which $200 billion is not a lot of money given what he's actually doing.
It's too much interruption into the markets.
We'll talk about why gold prices are exceeding $4,000.
I believe it has a lot to do with tariffs.
I think he's using it to say, hey, look at this beautiful, this beautiful opportunity to take care of women and underprivileged people and children with the money that the Democrats are holding back because of the shutdown.
Using it as a political um, I guess, a gun to the, to the Democrats head.
Like you want to mess with women and children and minorities?
Well, keep the, keep the government shut down.
We'll throw them some, some money from tariffs.
He also said you at one point he was going to use the money to send back to American households two thousand dollars to some household.
He's using it as a political ploy, a tool which I?
I just don't.
I don't at least a bad taste of top.
Do you agree with Eric?
Um, yes and no.
I I understand the headline.
It's great politics, a horrible policy.
I'm also free market.
But the tariff situation, I agree with it from the standpoint of let's lever and correct unfair counter tariffs that are around the world.
I agree with that as a political threat.
But then get them off, turn them off and let it get.
Get everybody to the, to the, to the table, and get everybody to cooperate and then back off.
That's what I feel about it.
Now I happen to think I agree with Eric in that the president's doing a very good job of what the Democrats usually do.
Oh, thanks to you and the shutdown, and the shutdown's all because of your guys.
Guess what you know, because of this program people won't get their Ebt cards in Boston, and they're then they'll be going hungry as we approach thanksgiving.
That's always the Democrat line.
You shut down the government and then pick victim group here in this part of the sentence, and then this part of the sentence put, don't get something.
There's two blanks, victim and what don't you get.
And then say it's Trump fault, Trump bad, Trump bad, Trump bad.
He's preempting that and saying you know what?
Thank goodness i'm such a genius with tariffs because i've got all this money now to keep the WICK money going to these people, and that's one of your programs, but i'm making sure these kids don't lose out.
Tom, he didn't have to use the tariff money to have the same policy though.
Right right, I mean there's, there's plenty of money sloshing around, there's a seven trillion dollars, and he's got the Eopen and he's got he could have.
He could have signed an executive order or just pushed the money out to the WICK people without saying oh, this tariff program I have is so good, we're gonna help.
He's kind of patting himself on the back and then using the check, of course.
But like wouldn't you, like the I, anybody that's in that position.
If one of your main things what, what did he keep saying?
He says man, I think the sexiest word in the dictionary is tariffs.
Right, if that's what he kept running on, it's like it's probably love and maybe go, I don't know, maybe religion.
A tariff has to be there, remember when he was kind of joined with everybody.
So of course he has to do this and use it this way, because this is a way of doing, taking the weight off and saying the Democrats because okay Rob, can you do me a favor and do you have that clip of Trump calling out the Democrats in the House?
For you know, this is a Democrat shutdown.
This is a Democrat shutdown.
This is a Democrat shutdown.
He is playing politics because the other guys are playing politics.
So what is he going to do?
Just sit there and take it.
Go ahead, Rob.
Well, they're Dem.
I call them democrat layoffs.
They're Democrat layoffs.
They're causing it.
We're ready to go back.
You know, we have a record-setting economy.
We have a record-setting country.
Prices are way down.
We're doing better than the country's ever, And the Democrats hate seeing that.
It's up to them.
Anybody laid off, that's because of the Democrats.
Okay, so Brandon, your thoughts on this.
Yeah, I disagree with both of you guys on tariffs.
But for the WIC payments, that's $600 million a month.
So I guess out of if we've raised $60 billion, that's not that bad.
But there's probably a lot too many people on WIC.
That program's been abused a lot.
But I mean, I would ask you guys, is it important to have a strong industrial base?
And is it important to have a strong middle class?
Because the goal of tariffs is to strengthen both of those things.
And I think without a strong middle class and without a strong industrial base, we're vulnerable in an economic sense and in a national security sense.
How do tariffs strengthen the middle class?
Because it creates better middle class jobs.
Do you think it's a good thing that we have hollowed out factories in the middle of the country?
No, America is a good thing.
I'm still trying to.
So the leap is that you believe creating this tariff, using this tariff threat will force companies back to the United States.
I actually don't think it goes far enough to.
Now, this is a do you believe all these people who are pledging $500 billion or Apple a trillion dollars in various companies?
Do you believe they're actually going to break around on these plants that they're promoting?
Yeah, I think NVIDIA is going to.
I think Meta or not, Microsoft pulled out of what they said they're going to do, but I think that at the very least, it's going to encourage some of them to do it.
So you're big corporate guys, CEOs, right?
Patrick, you talk, you guys talk to them all the time.
Their outlook isn't the next year, year and a half.
Their outlook is generally, yeah, what are we doing this year, but we want to do 10 years down the road, right?
Is any way, would a great CEO pick any CEO?
Tim Cook, fine, Apple.
Isn't it his best interest to tell Trump, yes, we're going to earmark a trillion dollars over the next five, 10 years to build plants here and build iPhones here?
And then you just waits and sees.
Trump is moving the target with these tariffs all the time.
He just dropped an auto tariff.
Why?
And it would cost these companies a lot of money to do it.
It's cheaper to do business overseas.
That labor is cheaper.
The construction costs, capital expenditure costs are much lower overseas than here.
Why don't you just wait?
Why don't you just say, yeah, yes, we're going to do that?
Yes, yes, we're going to do that.
And wait and see if there's a MAGA president after that.
Otherwise, you're making major, major investments based on something that could go.
If Trump wakes up and says, you know what, tariffs are off.
Now you've made all this investment here when it could be done cheaper and your competitor goes right to Taiwan and builds the stuff that they're going to be forced to build here at higher cost.
Yeah, it's a valid point that they could put that up, but it's never going to be a good thing for America that you're hiring other countries to build your products because that's taking away middle-class jobs in America and taking away leverage and power from us from having our own supply line here.
Like look at all the things that we were short on during COVID, like pharmaceuticals and critical things for defense.
So I don't ever see a good situation where we're building offshore and that's going to help the middle class.
Like that's a big reason why the wealth gap has expanded so much because companies saved like 90% of manufacturing costs and that costs a lot.
Like look at all the old factories that have been hollowed out that are thriving in the 80s.
What's wrong with the Williams?
What's wrong with the wealth gap?
I mean, the middle class has gotten hammered and the top 1% has gone up more.
It's a free market, baby.
You want to work hard?
We're not in the free market, though.
Do you want to innovate better in the free market?
Yeah, that's the goal.
I think it's a good idea.
I know it's the goal, but we're not in a free market.
Well, we're less free today than we were April 1st, the day before the tariffs went into play.
But generally, it's been a pretty good run for America and our markets.
So what do you think peak America was?
I would say probably the 1950s was a peak America economy.
I don't even know what that means.
What do you mean?
I would say, like, in terms of the strongest middle class that we've had, I'd say the 1950s was probably peak America.
They're way wealthier now than they were in the 50s.
Right now?
Hell yeah.
All right, so one person could work and support an entire family?
I'm just saying, I'm saying the middle class, the standard of living in the middle class is substantially higher now than it was in the 50s.
No, it's not.
Two people have to work to support a family.
And rent a house and buy a house.
And their net worth is higher and they're living longer.
Against inflation, their net worth is much smaller, though.
The numbers are going up and up and up.
And yes, it's going up faster than the top 1%.
But so what?
Rising tide raises all boats.
No, it doesn't.
The cost to buy a house, it took an average of two and a half years of an average salary to buy an average-priced house in the 70s.
Today cost, it takes nine years of an average salary to buy an average-priced house.
So, no, the middle class is getting decimated, and that's not good.
Like, the biggest barrier against socialism is a strong middle class, and the worse off our middle class is, the closer we get towards socialist tendencies.
That's why these college kids are freaking out about socialism today because they're.
Brandon, you got people on EBT cards walking around with iPhones.
I think the standard of living in America is highest in the world.
But the lower class has actually been benefiting and going up in standard of living more than the middle class because of all the subsidies and all the welfare.
So that's a bad thing, too, is that the middle class works harder than the lower class and gets less.
I hear what you're saying, and these are all economic terms.
When you go into school, you hear about the, you know, what's your economic wealth versus, you know, the median versus the mean, right?
And there is a difference in that.
I get that versus inflation in today's dollars.
But the reality is we're living in bigger homes, driving more expensive cars, have more money.
There's an issue, though.
There's an issue there with the one leak that I'm listening to both, Libertarian and Fully, we're on the same page politically when it comes down to economy as a libertarian.
But you also have a very good point, in my opinion.
Rob, can you put how many houses were we building 50 years ago per year?
We were building 500,000 houses a year.
Right now we're building 50,000 houses per year.
So now these bigger companies are coming and buying up existing things.
Nobody is building.
Why?
The business of being in the building industry sucks today.
It is not a good industry to be in.
The margins are smaller.
You used to be able to make more money back in the days.
You're making less money to build.
You used to be able to profit a good amount.
Now you can't.
It's a very, very different situation on how many houses we were building then than today, Rob.
What is the data that we looked at, Brandon?
Yeah, let me grab that chart.
We have that.
We'll show it to you in a minute when you're looking at that.
And there may be some correction on the numbers that I'm giving, but we'll get it for you.
And the average house, we used to build 1,200 square foot homes.
Now we're not.
Now it's the averages.
We're trying to build 1,800 to 2,400 square foot homes.
But there's no more starter homes.
Like it's kind of like, you know, when you want to end up having a nice car, you start off with maybe a Ford Focus.
My first car was a used car, 1979 Honda Accord.
Then I bought a 1983 Chevy S10 Long Bed.
Then I went to Mitsubishi Eclipse 1990 Turbo.
Then I went to an expedition.
Then I had a setback and I went back to Ford Focus.
Then I went to S600 Mercedes.
Then I went to an Escalate.
Then I went to Corvette.
Then I went to Ferrari.
But it's like stepping stone to go.
Right here, look at this.
Number of new homes constructed under 1,400 square feet.
Look how many we used to do.
We used to do 500,000 of them 50 years ago.
Right now we're doing 50,000 of these.
And this home isn't for people like you and I.
We have bedrooms that are 1,400 square feet.
But this is for a starter family that's coming in that needs a property that's 25 years old.
I do think there's some challenges when we're looking at numbers like this.
And let me just get into the gold conversation because you made a point about the gold.
So I want to get into that.
And maybe there's a ties with the gold part.
So gold, gold officially is at roughly $4,000 an ounce.
Rob, can you go pull up how much a gold for?
$40,054 today.
This $40,054.
$1,054.
And by the way, I have a ton of gold myself.
I'm a fan of it.
I have a ton of gold.
And I would buy them and I would set them aside.
$4,060 today.
So, this right here, can you look at what the price of a kilo of gold is?
Price of kilo gold is to the right, the kilo gold bar today.
See right there?
Okay, there you go.
What is it today?
Holy shit, it just hit $130,000.
It was $128 yesterday.
So this thing right here made $2,000 in a day.
Okay.
I bought this at $50,000 just a few years ago.
And I set them aside.
$130,000 now today.
And when you're reading this, even gold experts are kind of confused of why this thing's going up.
Let me read this.
Citadel's Griffin calls rush to gold a safer asset concerning.
Now, Ken Griffin is a DECA billionaire, not a DECA millionaire.
He's a DECA billionaire.
When he left Chicago, people were frightened.
I was at a meeting at a Goldman Sachs meeting at St. Regis in Chicago, right on the water.
And literally everybody who was on the stage, whether it was the Walsh family or the Rheinsdorf or the Crow family, the name Ken Golden kept coming up of why they're leaving Chicago.
Here's what Ken had to say about gold.
Go forward, Rob.
Gold is at record highs.
And the appreciation in other dollar substitutes, to use that word loosely, in items like crypto, for example, is unbelievable.
So we're seeing substantial asset inflation away from the dollar as people are looking for ways to effectively de-dollarize or de-risk their portfolios vis-a-vis U.S. sovereign risk.
Are you really seeing that?
Just check the price of gold.
Well, I mean, I don't have to look very hard.
It's a life of its own.
What?
It's a life of its own, gold.
No, but it's a life of its own as you see sovereigns around the world, as you see central banks around the world, as you see individual investors around the world go, you know what?
I now view gold as a safe harbor asset in a way that the dollar used to be viewed.
That's what's really concerning to me.
Do you agree with America?
Even more so.
And I think what he's actually doing is making a case for crypto by accident, not even realizing what he's doing.
I've done this a long time, Patrick.
I started trading in the Comex, sorry, trading gold in 1985.
I've never seen a market where the equity market is rallying to all-time highs.
We made all-time highs in all three of the major indices.
At the same time, breaking records, gold's up 50% year over year, incredible.
And cryptocurrency making new highs as well.
And there's one theory I have, and I just have to feel like there's a lot of liquidity sloshing out there.
That's why people felt they missed this whole AI move up.
And now we're hearing it might be a bubble.
By the way, Jensen Yuang was just on CNBC a couple hours ago, an hour ago, saying that we're just in the beginning phases of the AI rally, which is very promising.
NVIDIA CEO, $4.5 trillion.
Get this.
NVIDIA is the most highest market cap company on the planet.
It's worth $4.5 trillion.
The first time any company exceeded $1 trillion was Apple seven years ago only.
And now NVIDIA is $4.5 trillion in seven years.
Very quickly, I think the point he's making is: yes, the U.S. dollar is being abandoned.
It's always had weakness.
I've been doing trading for 40 years, 35 years.
It's always been a weak.
It started here and it's never really rallied long.
It rallied a little bit coming out of COVID, but this is the continuation of a weaker US dollar for whatever reason.
Geopolitics is, as Fisher just said, central banks are buying gold in crypto.
That's why we're seeing brand new highs because they're worried about, I believe, what the tariff situation could end up being if it becomes even more exacerbated by Trump.
Yeah, so Bitcoin hits an all-time high of $123,600.
$126 yesterday.
Right now, it's at $123,000.
Brandon, your thoughts on this?
You had some comments to make earlier when you said, you know, gold going up, the way it's compared to the dollar the last few years.
What number did you state earlier?
So it's crazy.
I mean, there's been a marketing campaign to not look at gold as a form of money because I don't think that the government likes me to own gold or when the consensus is for people to obtain gold.
But the value of the dollar versus gold, the dollar has lost 50% of its value against gold over the last three years.
And I agree with Eric that it could be for the tariffs because gold is a good indicator of future inflation.
Gold actually started rising quickly in 2019.
So it almost predicted the money printing in 2020, very interestingly.
So it could be for the tariffs.
But also, I think this is interesting that for the first time since 1996, the central banks have more gold on their balance sheet than treasuries.
And I almost see it as like a credit default swap situation where they didn't let the price of the bonds move until they got themselves positioned to where they had enough of them to where it wouldn't hurt them if they let the market do what it did.
So if you see right here, the net balance of gold owned by central banks has gone crazy over the last 10 years.
So I think maybe now they're in a position where they're comfortable letting it go to its natural price because they will have gotten hurt before if they let it go to its natural price because there's a lot of short selling, suppressing the price.
So there's a lot here.
If I may just quickly jump in, agree with all that.
Probably the reason why it will continue for the time being, especially if geopolitics remain at least somewhat unstable.
The market capitalization of all the gold in the world is about $27 trillion.
Crypto right now, Bitcoin right now is about a $2 trillion number.
It's got a lot.
The crypto versus gold has a lot of upside is my point.
And as the banks and central banks around the world get more comfortable with owning Bitcoin and making sure that the government doesn't get involved in regulating Bitcoin, right?
That's the whole beauty.
Patrick says you want to walk through the airport with $4 million of Bitcoin.
No one's going to stop you.
Try and do that with five of those gold bars.
You're stopped.
So the more people get comfortable with it, the more it's going to increase versus, and you may see the trade go from sell gold, buy Bitcoin.
That could be, it could be the hedge against whatever bad things are happening in the general economy.
Maybe they just move the hedge from gold into crypto.
I'm a big buyer of both, though, right now.
Tom, your thoughts?
To the average person, they say, whoa, what is de-dollarize?
What is going on?
Look, when you have something that's scarce, like a baseball card, there's only one of them.
The price goes up when many people want to buy that baseball card.
That's the way to think about gold and to think about Bitcoin.
And it's no mistake when we talk about the creation of more gold is mining and the creation of more Bitcoin is mining.
Both are scarce by definition or control.
The definition that's tied to gold is the ability to extract it from the earth and from streams and places where you can mine it.
And then Bitcoin specifically, there's a limit.
So that scarcity helps create the value.
Why is it important to de-dollarize?
Why do we have $4 trillion companies?
We don't.
We have $2 trillion companies, but we printed a bunch of money and the price became an illusion.
So when you say de-dollarize, it's also de-risk from a socialist government policy if the next socialist president we have chooses, as Biden did, to print the hell out of money to just crop dust the American people with relief payments.
That's what happened.
So when you say de-dollarize, what you're really saying is stepping away from the inflationary risk of the dollar that a lunatic president on the socialist side could just decide to print the hell out of it.
Why is this also tied to geopolitics?
Well, why do you have to print when you had COVID?
Or if you have great global wars where a whole bunch of equipment is needed, two countries beat the crap out of each other, and then you need all this relief to rebuild the countries.
Guess what?
The U.S. usually steps in, prints a bunch of money, gives it to the defense contractors.
All the equipment is used for these two guys to destroy themselves, and then we rebuild the economy.
So when you say de-dollarize, Ken Griffin is right.
The risk to the dollar, it's not a constrained supply the way gold and crypto is.
They can just print the hell out of it based on an administration, and then it inflates.
We don't have $4 trillion companies.
We have $2 trillion companies based on 2015 value of the dollar.
And then we printed it to death.
Sorry for the speech.
Yeah, no, this is a part.
So now the conversation becomes a lot of people are sitting there saying, man, should I be buying more?
Should I just count maybe it's the peak?
Maybe I missed it.
Well, let me tell you what happened this week.
$6 billion floods crypto in one week.
Instructions going all in.
Institutions going all in on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solano.
Let me read this to you.
So this is just this week that we're talking about, Rob.
I don't know if you got a clip on this one or not.
I don't know if you do.
I don't think you do.
Okay.
So let me read it to you.
And then this kind of addresses one of the questions.
Digit asset investment products attracted a record-breaking $5.95 billion inflows.
This week, the largest weekly total record on record, driven by delayed responses to weak U.S. employment data and concerns over government stability following the shutdown that began on October 1st, according to CoinShares, Bitcoin let an unprecedented $3.55 billion in weekly inflows, while Ethereum got $1.48 billion and Solano broke its weekly record of $706 million.
The surge pushed total assets under management to an all-time high of $254 billion.
The United States dominates regional inflows with a record of $5 billion in weekly flows while Switzerland broke its own record of $506 million.
Interesting.
$563 million in Switzerland.
Germany posted its second largest weekly inflow of $312 million.
XRP also saw substantial inflows of $219 million, though other altcoins attracted minimal capital.
Bitcoin spot ETF alone recorded $3.24 billion.
So the question for what's on a lot of people's minds is, am I behind?
Did I miss the mark?
I know you said earlier, you know, gold is a $27 trillion, you know, total gold worldwide market caps $27 trillion.
Bitcoin is roughly $2 trillion.
It's got about 14X to go to catch up to Bitcoin, to gold.
Does that mean gold 14Xing 120 today means that it could potentially go to $1.6 million per Bitcoin?
Yes.
Yes, it could.
All things remaining equal.
I just don't think all things will remain equal.
I think the bid in Bitcoin will continue.
Here's why, Patrick.
For the vast majority, I've been trading cryptocurrencies since around 2015 or so.
For the vast majority of that time, up until what's the lowest you ever bought a Bitcoin?
$12,000.
Yeah.
But I've also sold $17,000 Bitcoins, which I was not so thrilled about.
But I will tell you that up until about two years, maybe even a year and a half ago, you were only able to buy Bitcoin.
It was very hard.
It was hard.
You have a Coinbase account or Robinhood or one of the others, and it gets convoluted.
You need this long, you know, your wallet ID.
You lose your wallet.
There's a famous story of a guy who had $10 billion value today in a Bitcoin on a laptop.
He threw it away in the garbage and he's suing the town to get access to the garbage dump and they won't give it to him because he's willing to spend $50 million to dig up the dump.
And they won't do it probably because they want the $10 billion in Bitcoin.
My point is.
Thanks for letting us know it's in there.
About a year and a half ago, they got the regulatory approval to turn Bitcoin and cryptos into ETFs, exchange-traded funds.
I'm a heavy investor in IBIT.
That's BlackRock's Bitcoin fund.
It trades.
penny for penny with the actual Bitcoin price because they're so massive.
They're huge.
And they just have to have the same amount of risk on own the Bitcoin versus what they have risk with me.
So it tracks it perfectly, but it allows anyone with a stock account to start trading cryptocurrencies and not have to worry about, am I going to get hacked with, I can't tell you how many times some fake Coinbase hacker has tried to hit me up saying, oh, you know, thank you for your, you know, your blah, blah, blah of Coinbase.
I'm like, no, I didn't give you anything from Coinbase.
And they just try and hook it up.
If you didn't do this, click here or call us now.
And it's always an Indian call center somewhere, right?
But now you can do it with a legitimate stockbroker, any stockhouse.
You do it yourself with Schraub and you're trading Bitcoin and others.
Ethereum has them as well.
I think that liquidity, that money pool going in will continue to drive Bitcoin up.
I would say, rather than, again, the way to trade these things, I think Mark Cuban said it best.
Take 2% of your net worth, something that you're not going to miss.
God forbid it all goes south.
Buy Bitcoin, buy crypto, and just put it away.
Don't even look at it.
Don't look at it day to day.
Don't look at the price.
And I believe over time, I think you will see a million dollar Bitcoin eventually.
How long do you think?
You know, Pat, did you?
Give me short term, give me long term.
So if the market stays good, maybe 10 years, if the market gets really bad, like if things start to get hairy, you know, you'll know when the market is turning, when there's a really good news story about a stock, Apple, NVIDIA, somewhere, and it goes up a little bit and it crashes afterwards.
That means good news, bad action.
That's the time where the market inflection happens.
We've had a massive run up, massive run-up in the markets.
It's due for correction.
I think if the market does start to turn south, things, the stories will follow the market.
They always do from euphoria all the way up on the way down.
It's horrible.
When that happens, I think you could see a million dollar Bitcoin in three to five years.
In three to five years.
Time, your thoughts.
I'm with that, and I'll give it to you right here.
If midterms are not particularly good and there's risk at 28 and 2028, and if we go back to a Democrat socialist president in 28, I think you could see a million dollar Bitcoin by 2032.
That's my estimate, six years.
Brandon.
Estimate or just consensus?
So I'm not going to lie.
So I definitely see the future for crypto.
I see the use cases for it.
I think it's going to be really interesting to see what replaces the Swift system because it's a really antiquated way that we trade money from country to country or person to person.
So that needs to be replaced.
But I can't help but be a little bit creeped out about Bitcoin because of the fact that we've never seen the creator of it before and the creator's name literally means central intelligence.
Satoshi Nakamoto means central intelligence.
So that's a little bit weird.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I think the fact that BlackRock and everybody is adopting it shows that it could be legitimate.
I think central banks will start putting on their reserves.
And when that happens, then it'll be just similar to cash.
But I wonder what the winner is going to be in terms of what's used for the global payment system.
So whatever technology is best.
I think it may be none of that.
It may not be a payment system.
It may be just an asset to hold.
I mean, literally, you can't lop off a corner of that gold bar and go buy a cup of coffee.
It could be.
It could be that every company, every country and every company will need a Bitcoin treasury, will need to just have it in their treasury somewhere.
That's a massive amount of buying.
The way every company, if you're not starting the AI program right now, you're way behind.
You're going to be left behind.
Yeah, I do think we should do a gold standard type of thing with an asset that is able to grow faster than gold is able to grow.
So to restrain our money supply in some way, I get the reason for getting off the gold standard, but I think Bitcoin or something like that can serve as a way to somewhat restrain or keep the money supply under control.
Yeah.
So then the question becomes: do you think Swift eventually is going to get replaced?
It has to.
What do you think, Tom?
So we're, yes, I do.
A lot of things are evolving.
You know, you just, and they're being replaced by, you know, modern systems.
I mean, you look, I think we're on the two-year anniversary of LIBOR went away and we replaced it with SOFR.
So there's a lot of things that just naturally evolving in the financial services industry.
And Swift is one was one transport system.
And thanks to blockchain and other things you can put together, you're going to have different transfer systems.
I mean, look at right now.
It's very, very interesting.
ACH is younger than WIRE, right?
Yet WIRE is still faster.
So sometimes modern things get in their own way.
What a great point, Tom.
What a great point.
ACH is younger than Wire, yet WIRE is faster.
So you're saying.
With 10 warnings on it.
When you click here, the other bank's going to get it.
Be sure it's a bank.
Yeah, but you got guys, you hear Ripple, XRP, Swift, what that could do.
And you saw how much money was put into Ripple just in the last couple of days.
Record-breaking for them as well, XRP.
So what is your thoughts with that?
Yeah, I think that Swift is a very antiquated system.
It's funny how it's actually a messaging device where you say, hey, we're sending you over X amount of money.
Okay, and the bank adjusts accordingly.
So it doesn't actually send money as far as I understand it.
But all the stats I've seen on how fast Ripple could do it or any of the others that are competitors for that, they could do it much faster, much more cheaply.
And that's really the pain point of replacing that system is because you can't send a large amount of money to somebody in another place in the world instantly right now.
You're not alone.
A lot of people are thinking that.
A lot of people are saying that.
We had a meeting last week, Tom.
You and I at Casa D'Angelo with a guy that's working with a different coin that people are talking about.
But that's the discussion.
What is eventually going to replace that?
By the way, to validate what you were talking about with the ETF, Bitcoin today, Fidelity buys $112 million in Bitcoin as ETFs see $1.19 billion in inflows.
Okay, so let's go to the next store here.
Miley, Patrick, very quickly, very liquid trading as well, right?
So you have the tight bid and offer.
You want to move size.
You can move size with tight bids and offer.
The ETF is a great way to trade.
Fantastic.
Rob ran a poll.
Rob, can you pull up that poll?
I actually like that poll that you ran.
If you had $100,000 to invest, where are you going to put your money?
Is it going to be gold and precious metals, crypto or stock market?
Look what people said.
Very interesting.
Zoom in, Rob.
5,500 people voted.
Gold and other precious metals, 38%.
Do you see what Jeff got on 26?
Stock market 23.
Huh.
Interesting how the audience voted.
I kind of agree because you see what Jeff Gunlock said the other day.
He said 25% of your portfolio in gold is not unreasonable right now.
25% in gold today is not unreasonable.
The amount of the trillions in our portfolio.
By the way, but you have to tell who Jeff Gunlack is.
He's the bond king.
But he's a bond guy.
Don't buy stock money.
So meaning you have to know who he is and where he's coming from.
He's a $1.6 billion.
We've had him on by Timmin before with Daniel DeMartino Booth.
We did that interview, I don't know, four or five years ago.
Throw something in here real quick.
mentioned the bond guys, right?
Another win in the sales to these alternate assets, gold, crypto, even oil for that matter, is interest rates.
They're clearly, there's a push to reduce interest rates.
That frees up a lot of risk capital, and they won't flow into NVIDIA at $4.5 trillion.
I don't even know what the valuation is.
I'm guessing it's going to go towards gold and crypto.
It's the hype right now.
It's the feel-good, and it's bailing everyone out.
You buy it, it goes down, just hold, wait for a while.
I'm not suggesting you buy and be blindly holding, but I do think there's really good upside to crypto and gold.
Well, we'll see.
Let's go to the next story.
New York City, NYC stock exchange owner to invest $2 billion in betting platform called Polymarket.
Okay.
Very interesting story because Tom says, you know, a gambler is buying a gambling website, right?
But let me look at this up here and go through with you.
Intercontinental Exchange Inc., owner of the New York Stock Exchange, plans to invest much as $2 billion in cash in Polymarket, a crypto-based betting platform.
The transaction value is the company which lets traders, wagers, wager on the outcome of real world events such as elections and sports at roughly $8 billion.
ICE said in a statement Tuesday, it'll become a glow.
ICE is a global distributor polymarkets, events that are driven data, providing customers with sentiments.
Here's a video, Rob, if you want to play this clip.
Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, is getting into prediction markets.
The company said on Tuesday it will invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket, a platform that allows users to profit from predicting outcomes across topics ranging from sports and entertainment to politics and the economy.
The move would help the exchange operator expand beyond its traditional trading avenues.
Tom, your thoughts on this?
Because this is a story that you were interested in.
Very, interesting.
So there's two big predictive markets out there that are really, really giant.
One is Calci, K-A-L-S-H-I, and the other is Polymarket.
Polymarket is global access.
They have a lack of censorship.
In other words, they don't allow certain influences to come in there.
And you have to be comfortable with crypto on that.
Whereas Calci is primarily regulated U.S. and it's cash-based.
But both of them are these predictive markets.
And what's interesting, whenever you go to buy a stock, you can go in there and say, what do the analysts think?
And you go down a list of analysts.
Oh, here's Jeffries.
Here's Merrill Lynch, all this stuff.
And there's three buy ratings, two neutral ratings, and one guy out there says, hold.
So those are analysts.
So those help you make decisions.
Well, in the same way, when we go to Las Vegas, we say, what's the line right now?
The line will move.
It gets set by Vegas, but then the line moves with the money.
Oh, you know, Patriots are now only a three and a half point, now a three point, now on two point, and then somebody gets hurt.
They're only a one and a half point.
So the lines move.
And that line is moved by the crowd of gamblers.
So first it gets set, then it moves.
What you have here is Polymarket.
Now, ICE, it's kind of funny.
ICE owns the New York Stock Exchange.
People who don't know what that means, you're going to freak out.
The Intercontinental Exchange Company.
So what's very interesting about this is they're now going to NYSC will have access to the polymarket data to distribute it to its members.
So now you could have five analysts.
And then what does Polymarket say, which is a neutralized, centralized gathering of what the public thinks.
And so now you see that.
And I think this is really interesting.
Is this a good bet?
Like, would you do it if you were them?
Can you understand this purchase?
I completely understand what they're doing.
Because Kalchi opened its doors about six months ago and said, here, go look at all of our predictions.
Our final predictions, you go look what happened afterwards.
And Kalshi's correlation was very high.
So people are like, well, wait a minute.
You know, they pick favorites and underdogs based on gambling because they want to make money in gambling.
So there's a certain part of what the house is doing.
But in Kaushi, it was what the overall market was doing.
It's pretty accurate.
And so Polymarket, that data will now be available.
And you will also say, analyst, analyst, what do you think?
I want to stand on.
I'm texting Jeff Sprecker right now.
He's a CEO of the Intercontinent Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange.
Full disclosure, years ago, I've known Jeff a long time.
Great guy, great CEO.
I think this is a brilliant.
I just told him we were on right now.
I told him it was a brilliant move.
He said, Thank you.
It's likely the largest private investment ever made in crypto.
And that is a little twist to it because, you know, he's pushing everything forward.
The reason why I love this trade, this bet, a $2 billion bet, which is not a lot of money for a company like ICE or New York Stock Exchange, they're smart.
They see their competition.
I don't care what you say.
Part of investing, if you're a day trader, you're a trader, long-term trader, part of investing, there's a little gambling feel to it, right?
If I make money, I feel great.
If I lose money, I feel horror.
There's a gamble to it.
The polymarkets let you bet on everything, whether it's an election, the outcome of a sporting event.
And by the way, the beauty of the markets like this is you continue to bet as not only the money flows, but as the game changes.
The Ravens throw the ball down the field and the guy catches it on the five.
All of a sudden, it goes, you know, swings towards Raisin.
Ravens, you want to bet.
So there's constant activity.
Exchanges want that.
Exchanges want buys and sells in and out.
The more they take a piece of, you know, they wet their beak with every single transaction.
Brilliant move, Jeff Sprecker.
Brilliant move.
Bravo.
He's watching now, Brandon.
Your thoughts.
Yeah, no, I concur.
I mean, it's probably the best predictive data gathering tool out there.
I mean, data is what the future economy is going to be built on.
And if you're in the business of making predictions, you want to access as much data as possible.
I saw that they are 90 to 94% accurate with the predictions they make on polymarkets.
I mean, think of the power of that applied to the stock market and investments in the stock market.
Better than Kramer?
Yeah, like the opposite of Kramer.
Yeah, this reminds me of, do you remember that one movie back in the days, Rob?
You may remember this, where these rich people are sitting in a hotel room and they're trying to find anything and everything to bet on.
You know, the cleaning crew comes in.
Who can hang on the curtains the longest?
It was just anything and everything.
I want to see, is it trading places?
I think, is it trading places?
No, it was.
Is it rat race?
It's rat race.
No, no, it's rat race.
Anyways, it's oh, it's one of those movies where they're literally betting on anything and everything they can get on.
And that's kind of what polymarket is.
Pick something you want to bet on, they're going to come up with it.
All right.
Next story I want to get to.
You and I spoke last time when we were on the podcast.
We talked about Candace Owens, if you remember, when the Candace Owens conversation came about.
And then I called you and I said, hey, Eric, people are asking questions about two items.
One, the comment you made about being on the board, and the other one was a comment made about that Candace hadn't spoken at Turning Point USA for two years.
I think you said that.
And then the audience on sent a message, which was June of 2024, you know, 18 months or 14 months prior to you speaking.
I know you responded to it on your channel, but people want to see on you responding here as well.
What do you have to say to the audience?
So it remains 2019.
I was going from a show I was hosting in DC to a restaurant just outside the DC area.
I get a phone call.
It's Charlie Kirk.
He said, Eric, I'd love to have you on the board of Turning Point USA.
It wasn't maybe a year or two of its real gusto at the time.
I said, Charlie, I love your vision.
I'd love to do that.
I've spoken and I was an advisory board member from 2019 to 2024, 2024 ballpark, early 24.
And then I moved over to the honorary board.
I'm still on their honorary board.
So anyone who says, like, oh, he's not on the board.
No, I'm not on the actual day-to-day business of the board board.
But I'm an honorary board member after spending five years as an advisory board member.
Clear that up.
Walk past that.
As far as the comment on Candace, Pat, I think I said I hadn't seen her or she hadn't been a speaker at TPUSA for a couple years.
And I was, I guess I was mistaken because it was 18 months.
And I had forgotten about the 2024 event as I think she was pregnant.
Anyway, Candace Owens' army let me know it.
They were very upset.
And this was all stemming from kind of a back and forth I had with Adam about she was blaming Israel for Charlie Kirk's assassination.
I just didn't think that was a fair assessment.
And then it turns out the next day she said it was the U.S. government who assassinated Charlie Kirk.
I have no axe to grind with Candace Owens or her fan base.
That's fine.
I'm just living in the real world a little bit, a little bit more reality based.
I believe there are forces behind Charlie Kirk's assassination, but I don't think it's Israel.
I'm pretty sure it's not.
And I'm pretty sure it's not the U.S. government.
Who do you think it is?
I mean, I think it's the trans activist group funded by the, you know, the Soros network of liberal progressive lunatics.
And whether it's directly funded or they just fund these Antifa groups and these, these, it riles up their base and their base is anti-Trump.
Anything pro-Trump gets in the way.
And because of Charlie's success reaching into young people, he became a target to this whole Antifa trans progressive left cabal.
Did you see the text that Candace showed a couple days ago?
Have you seen the text she's shown the exam?
I don't think I've seen it.
Charlie, do you have the text?
I don't know if you do or not.
If you do, pull it up.
I'll read it.
Is that a, oh man, it's going to be too long to go through for three minutes.
But if you, is there.
Okay, Charlie Kirk, right?
Go to the text part.
Okay.
So Charliko just lost another huge Jewish donor.
$2 million here because we won't cancel Tucker Carlson.
I'm thinking of inviting Candace at 3.49 p.m.
Oh, Charlie Kirk, Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes.
I cannot and will not be bullied like this.
This is Charlie Kirk saying this, leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.
Please don't invite Candace.
This might feel good short term, but it's not good long term in my opinion.
Like all groups, you're going to get a wide variety of opinions.
That nasty free will thing that God bestowed on us makes life frustrating at times.
Can you go a little bit right to see what the next exchange is?
I don't believe there is.
Is that it?
I think that's it.
And then Andrew Colvett from Turning Point USA came out yesterday.
I do have that clip as well where he confirms that those text messages are real.
Okay, you want to play that clip?
Yes.
So Andrew is Andrew's the good-looking guy that spoke at the executive producer of Charlie Kirk's show.
Yeah, he's been around Charlie since the very beginning.
Yes, yes, yes.
Absolutely.
I started the show to address some of the things that have been going around on public, namely about a text, a group text chain that has been made known and released by Candace Owens.
And I just want to address it head on because, you know, that was a text grab, a screen grab that I had shared with people.
So it is authentic.
And I want to go into it because I actually am really excited that the truth is out there.
I first started this show to address some of the things that have been going around on public, namely about a text, a group text chain that has been made known and released by Candace Owens.
And I just want to address it head on because, you know, that was a text grab, a screen grab that I just don't again.
Okay.
But he's confirming that that screen grab of that text message did happen.
So what Candace was showing.
Did he say because he shared it with somebody?
Yes.
No, no, he's saying he shared it with somebody and then that somebody shared it with Candace.
Yes.
Why are you sharing it yourself?
I don't know.
I understand.
Look, at the end of the day, here's what I'm interested in.
I don't care who was behind it.
I just want to know who was.
I literally could care less who's behind it.
I just want to know who was.
When you're going back, Brandon, what do you think about when you hear these stories?
Because you follow this stuff a lot closer than I do.
Where are you at with this?
Yeah, I mean, I'm at 99% certainty that there was some sort of organized force behind it.
I mean, I think it'd be reckless to say that we know for sure who it was, but there's overwhelming evidence that there's foul play afoot and there's evidence destruction, evidence hiding, evidence tampering.
And when you can't answer simple questions, that just raises all kinds of red flags.
And there's the lack of answering simple questions with direct answers as far as the eye could see.
So, I mean, it's sad to think about, I mean, especially when we had a...
Can you see the pressures happening from people that are giving money?
Can you see that happening?
Me?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I absolutely see that happening.
I could see donors saying, hey, I gave to you and I'm coming from this angle.
And these are my preferences, the things that I support.
And I'm giving you on that.
And because I think you're in line with that.
Donors put pressures on colleges.
Donors put pressure on the new zoo that's being built.
Donor pressure, especially mega donor pressure on recipients is very, very real.
And I'm with Brandon.
There's a lot of things I just don't like about this.
And, you know, from the from there's an Oswald type feeling of this when, you know, the governor of Utah goes in, we got him.
You know, that's not how these cases happen.
We have made an arrest in this case, and we have high confidence that the suspect we've arrested, it will be proven, is guilty.
That's the way you say it.
And remember with Oswald, they held up the gun immediately.
They held up the gun here.
I see these parallels.
It was like, wow, that was fast.
And I just, a lot of it just bothers me.
And I want to hear, and I don't speculate.
I don't go further.
I just say I see these things and this bothers me as a fair-minded individual just looking at it.
And I just want to know who, like you.
I just want to know.
Yeah, I will tell you firsthand.
I was at an event of Turning Point USA Mar-a-Lago.
You may have gone with me.
You may have not.
I don't remember.
Maybe we spoke about it outside, Tom.
He raised $41 million that night.
Okay.
It was an incredible night.
Well, let me tell you when this was.
This is when Biden had won and the Republican Party, a group of it that voted for Trump, had stepped away from him and become more pro-DeSantis.
This is probably 22-ish at the end of whenever he does the last thing of the year where he's raising the most money, December.
Maybe it's like a, you know, some kind of, I'm sure you would know.
December, that's their big event.
Okay, so that's the student action summit.
So I'm just, I'm just an outsider.
I'm not an insider with Turning Point Us.
I have a relationship with Charlie Kirk.
Him and I have spent a lot of time together.
And one of our last conversations, if you remember, Tom, when we had at the dinner, the lunch we had at the mansions at MGM, where he wanted to have a meeting with me, you, and him long term, what he said about our relationship with Valitim and him with us long term.
Maybe one day we'll talk about that.
But when I'm at that charity event, I'm sizing everybody up and I'm just kind of seeing who's given the money.
I'd like to pledge $100,000.
I'd like to pledge $500,000.
And they kept a big one for the end.
And we'd like to pledge, you know, family, money, offices, everybody's there.
$2 million, $4 million.
Total was $41 million.
One lady got up and she said something.
And she said, some of you here are hesitating to pledge because you're worried.
If Charlie is going to be behind only Trump and not DeSantis, if DeSantis were to be the lead and not Trump.
And he says, here's one thing we know.
Charlie is going to do the right thing.
This lady is saying this.
She was probably in her late 60s, early 70s.
Very gentle way she spoke.
But I'm in the back and all I'm thinking about is, man, if you get into a business like this where you're raising money, you have to know that these guys are giving a million, $2 million.
And they're not just asking for a better table and a better seat.
They're probably going to be pressuring you to do different things as well.
What does that look like?
Back in the days I watched Dudley was doing a charity.
We went to it and we raised a bunch of money and I'm like, wow, what a great professional fundraiser.
He recommended a book I read about raising money.
It was a guy that had raised $2.1 billion.
He was called The Greatest Beggar of All Time.
He joked about, I'm the greatest beggar of all time.
And I read the book and I said, man, this is not for everybody.
To be in a business of raising money, especially politically like this, I can for sure see how it can be annoying.
So when I'm reading that text, I do believe that a person like Charlie Kirk will be like, I'm so sick and tired of you guys now.
Let me have who I want to have.
Like I remember one time, you remember this, Tom, when we're in a board meeting and my board sits down and says, you have to get everyone of your salespeople vaccinated.
Like, no, I don't.
Yeah, you do.
No, I don't.
I'm not going to get anybody.
You have to get every insurance guy to get vaccinated.
And we had a tough meeting.
I said, guys, I'm just telling you right now, it's not going to happen.
We started this company for people that have a free choice.
But the board will try to do that, especially.
Thank God we kept 80% of the company where we had control and they couldn't make us do anything.
But this is a different situation.
I'll give you the final words here on this topic here.
Listen, where do we go from here?
Yes, I would agree with everything that.
Do you want to know who killed Charlie?
Would you like to know who killed Charlie?
I would like to get confirmation of who I believe killed Charlie.
Patrick, we were sitting here, what, less than a week after Charlie was assassinated.
And that text message between the alleged assassin and his boyfriend or his lover spelled out exactly the detail of why he did it, where he did it, how long he's been planning it.
They gave him bullshit text messages.
Because it was just laid it out to slam the door on this guy for murder conviction, firing squad, so that the bigger brains and money behind the operation would never be discovered.
I believe that to the bottom of my heart.
And I'm not generally a conspiracy guy.
The old guy that goes down and says, I shot him immediately.
Like, who has the wherewithal to do that?
And then the clown up front jumping around, making himself, there was just too many things that fell into place for it to be.
Yeah, the only guy that doesn't jump under a table when gunshots happen.
Yeah.
It's an old man.
Oh, and the other idiot up front.
You know, the guy waving like this seconds after Charlie's assassin.
And then you do construction on the site.
And then it's just too many, and then too many.
And then, and I'll stop on the end then.
And then you send the limo back to Ford Motor Company within 48 hours and it's on.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
May just tie this up with Candace.
Yeah.
Okay.
So there were emails and text messages going back where Charlie may have been disillusioned.
That doesn't make the case for Israel assassinating Charlie.
Oh, is that what she's because I think it's not that?
I'm guessing that was the leab.
Is that what's being insinuated?
To be fair to Kansas, I don't think she ever said, I blame Israel.
I don't think at all.
I think she had concerns about me.
In fact, Bill Ackman said she's way off.
She accused Bill Ackman of going to a party in the Hamptons.
No, those are two different things, Tom.
So if I may, the one area where I had a challenge with is the, what do you call it, the Bill Ackman thing exchange, where Bill Ackman was like, I really don't want to respond to this, but let me go with one of my long, you know, Bible quality type of a response that he writes 50,000 words and he responds to it, right?
And then he shared a text message of afterwards.
They talk about getting the ladies to go out to dinner together, and Charlie validated.
Yeah, look, it seemed like a very cordial.
The $150 million, I don't know about the $150 million offer that was made by Netanyahu or whoever to help Turning Point USA.
That was one of the claims that was made.
My problem is, if it's zero to here's who did it, and you can have text, you can have other things.
Great.
That's fantastic.
Let's read it and let's speculate.
But to go zero to, I think this is who was behind it, I think it's too early to do so.
Let's put all the people, you know, all the, what do you call it, like the movie, was it usual suspects with Kaiser Sosi?
You got all the guys in, like, who do you think it is?
I think it's this guy.
I think it's that guy.
I think it's this guy.
And sometimes it is Kaiser Sosi, but sometimes it takes till the end of the movie to find out it was Kaiser Sosi.
And he tells a whole joke and he walks away and the limp is gone and then boom, you know, Kevin Spacey walks away and everything changed.
So we don't know.
All I'm saying, by the way, I appreciate you for being straight up about it and addressing this.
And by the way, just so you guys know, he addressed it within 48 hours or 72 hours when I made the phone call.
He talked about it at his show while you were doing it with Turning Point USA property, with Andrew, if I'm not mistaken.
Andrew and I, we were inside the compound the day after the memorial.
It was a Monday after the Sunday memorial.
And I did the show.
I taped the show from inside the TPUSA compound.
There was massive celebrating of Charlie's life outside the walls.
And we were invited in.
I did it with Andrew.
I mean, the suggestion that I wasn't or am not involved with TPUSA is asinine.
Yeah, and I made the call to Candace Owens.
Candace and I had a 30-minute conversation that day as well.
I say, Candace, and we spoke about it, and we had a very, very good conversation together about this specific issue.
And yeah, listen, anybody that's interested on finding out what happened here, I want to know because I love Charlie Kirk.
Charlie to me was one of a kind.
He was somebody that my kids looked up to, my boys looked up to.
And there's a lot of guys right now.
It's like, hi, I'm the new Charlie Kirk.
No, you're not.
It takes 10 plus years.
It takes 31 years to be a Charlie Kirk, a lot of work.
And you have to be multifaceted like Charlie.
And God willing, I think others will rise up in their own way.
But just like everybody was waiting for Reagan, nothing happened, God gave us a Trump.
And Trump was able to go against evil, maybe in ways that others couldn't.
All right, let's get to the next story here.
Folks, if you're watching this and you're thinking about being part of a woke gym, I have a company for you to consider here.
This woke gym, this is a daily mail story, proudly charges white customers double the rate they offer BIPOCs, which B-I-P-O-C stands for Black.
Rob, do you want to tell us what BIPOC is?
Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
Would I qualify for that, Rob?
I'm actually being serious.
Would I qualify for that?
Can I please get that discount?
Did you get the number to the gym?
I want to call him right now while we're on the phone together.
Our studios.
I hope they're open at a time like this.
If it's California 723, hopefully they're open.
Do you have a number there?
Yes, I do.
I'll text it to you.
And is it based out of Canada?
Yes, Canada.
Oh, shit.
I mean, Toronto.
It could be on our call.
I'll call them right now.
Always the freaking community.
So let me read this to you, Tom.
Can you make a phone call to your family, Tom, with all these Canadians making decisions like this?
So a Canadian boutique fitness studio has sparked outrage after proudly advertising race-based pricing that charges white clients twice as much as non-whites.
Our studios, a trendy wellness gym based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, openly promoted a $30 drop-in rate for white visitors while offering heavily discounted $15 exclusively for black, indigenous, and people of color customers.
Such a policy would violate Canada's own anti-discrimination laws and amounts of race-based economic segregation, but our studios, Nova Scotia, charges double for white people.
Anyways, there's screenshots of this.
Brandon, your thoughts on this story, Hero.
Yeah, I mean, so what would happen if the reverse was happening, if it was a discount for white people, but double for black people or people that are of a different ethnicity?
Would that be okay?
Like, why is it impossible to be racist against white people today?
Like, I see that said all the time that it's impossible to be racist against white people.
So why is it that white people today are being treated badly for what white people of the past did to people of a different ethnicity?
That's what I think about it.
Tom, how do you see this?
First of all, I see it politically in Canada.
The further east you go, the weirder it gets.
So as soon as you get really east of Montreal, it starts to get even more weird.
And I think you have that.
And Nova Scotia is Halifax, Nova Scotia is you got this island right next to Prince Edward Island, PEI.
Good oysters out of PEI, by the way.
There's something good coming out of Canada.
And then you've got this extreme left that's out of there, extreme left.
And so it doesn't surprise me in a world that is so extreme left that you have extreme things happening such as this, that you could actually look in the mirror and think that it is fair-minded.
Well, what they think is it's equalizing or in its retaliation, it is equalizing.
They don't think of equality today.
They think of equalizing.
And so something you do as far left to like this is in equalizing, even if it doesn't, if it's not equal and fair at the moment.
But you're so far left in your thinking that they think it's perfectly okay to do it.
I just called them right now and they don't pick up phone calls.
They said, we're so busy.
The gym is so packed right now with Middle Easterns and brown and Hispanics and African Americans.
They just, they just can't answer the call.
Eric, your thoughts on the story.
Affirmative action failed at the Supreme Court years ago.
This is their way of grabbing some headlines.
And, you know, again, being a free market person, you're free to charge whatever you want to whoever you want.
But I agree with Brendan.
If it were reversed, the races were reversed.
There, you go, minorities are going to have to pay more because we just don't like you.
I guess that's the reason.
They put a reason why white people are being charged more other than their racist themselves.
They'll drive themselves.
Here's my concern, though, Patrick, is that the world right now is in a, has been in the last 10 months or so, has been in a push back against the canceled culture, against the woke mob and whatnot.
My concern is they're just laying in wait until Trump's not in office anymore, and they just push this stuff right back to the fore.
I agree.
And it scares me because that's why he needs to, well, as some of our friends would say, win the 2028 election himself or put someone in who can take the Trump torch and go forward, which is a very tall ask.
No, very, very tall ask for some like that.
But we'll see.
We'll see what's going to happen.
Now, next story I want to get to is Paramount Buys the Free Press, ushering a new era of CBS news.
And this is with Barry Weiss.
Rob, I think you got a clip on this one here if you want to pull up.
So Barry Weiss, everybody's going back and forth.
Is this really going to happen?
Is the purchase going to take place?
But the announcement's been made.
Here you go, Rob.
Go for it.
CBS News has a new editor-in-chief today, and that has attracted some attention in journalism circles.
She's Barry Weiss, who's the founder of a very successful website called the Free Press.
She started the Free Press about five years ago after leaving as an opinion editor at the New York Times, complaining that some people there were angry at her because she didn't necessarily always reflect a liberal point of view there.
She has crusaded against anti-woke culture at the free press.
Her hiring at CBS has led some people to wonder if it's a friendly move in the direction of President Donald Trump.
But CBS, in her hiring, says that they are trying to get at a more fair and balanced approach in its journalism and not always be enthralled to orthodoxies of both sides.
Weiss began her job today at CBS News and wrote a memo to her new staff members saying she believes in these same core journalism philosophies that most of them have.
Tom, thoughts on this?
Well, what most people don't remember was that there was a time in America, if you look back in history, where there was a very trusted news voice.
And he was on CBS and people tuned in to hear what he was saying.
He looked like a kind old uncle or a young grandfather and his name was Walter Cronkite.
And at that time, people had a degree of trust.
What is Uncle Walter going to say tonight?
And that was CBS.
And it used to be called the Tiffany Network back in the day.
And there's a tremendous history with it.
And my, how far it has fallen.
It is dead last.
I mean, it's not just last.
It's last by a lot.
When you look at the Q3 YouTube views where people on the YouTube platform going to these brands to get their news, it is dead, dead last.
And they need a Hail Mary.
And they also just got bought because the Ellisons and the Skydance transaction now own it.
And so Barry Weiss is going to report directly to David Ellison, who's hired her.
David Ellison's the CEO of Skydance and Paramount.
Correct.
And that's Ellison's son who is spearheading the investment, the acquisition's made.
But also, she's going to be right next to sidelines with a guy named Tom Sobrowski, who is a very liberal president of CBS News.
And I don't know how liberal.
I'll just say he is written as the very liberal president of CBS News.
How this is going to work, that she is, you know, I always look at it this way.
You have a big mug of hot coffee.
You drop one ice cube at it.
You just drop it a couple degrees.
And I kind of feel like that's kind of what they're doing here, dropping Barry Weiss in.
It feels to me a little bit like a Hail Mary or a real attempt, unless there is a wholesale change for some true moderate thinkers.
And good luck finding a large batch of moderate thinkers that you could sweep into CBS News.
And remember, by the way, those numbers that we showed a couple of days ago, Rob, of the media company, where did CBS rank on YouTube views the last quarter?
If you go to it, we shared this a couple of days ago.
I think CBS was the last on that entire list.
Yeah, CBS was last on that.
Not just last.
Go look in their numbers.
And you brought this up.
You said maybe this is the reason why they are getting a Barry Weiss, to get somebody younger that knows how to get these eyeballs.
And Barry Weiss maybe used this as a negotiation to say, if you want me, you have to pay $150 million right there.
CBS News was last at 163 million views.
Then it's ABS 359.
Then it's NBC 424.
Not even half of ABC.
That is pretty wild how bad it is.
And we had 692 million views between Vietnam and PBD Podcast last quarter.
That's 4Xing, more than 4Xing what CBS did the last quarter.
So good move, bad move, buying the free press.
Hail Mary, I agree with Tom.
So Barry Weiss started her career at the New York Times and she was perceived as left of center.
And then she tried to push to the middle, trying to report fairly on Trump and whatnot.
Felt unwelcomed at New York Times.
She goes off on her own, puts together the free press.
She's a wildly talented reporter.
She's brilliant.
She's a great writer.
And to sell her free press, which she built from the ground up that quickly, it was probably only, what, two years or something?
She said five years.
Five years.
Okay, well, she started with a sub stack, I think.
She built her audience, but a quick turnaround to make 150 large.
Here's the question, though.
So she gets dropped into CBS News.
CBS is one of the broadcast networks that are clearly leaning left.
I used to work at Sinclair, which owned 200 stations across the country, separate stations, ABC, NBC, CBS, a couple of Foxes, and a few CNNs.
Every news director, with the vast majority of news directors, are left-leaning people.
So she's going to get dropped into CBS, which has maybe 1,000 affiliates or so, and change the whole dynamic, maybe, but I just found out that Trump is right now in talks with CBS to do a sit-down with 60 Minutes, which if you remember in 2020, Leslie Stahl basically called him out live on 60 Minutes saying that the Hunter Biden laptop story was misinformation, Russian disinformation.
He was livid.
I interviewed him right after, Patrick, right after he left Leslie Stahl.
I was at the White House.
I was doing a town hall, and he was lit up, pissed off.
I mean, he was, it was supposed to be an hour town hall.
About 20 minutes into it, he leans on a commercial break.
He's like, I'm going to go.
I'm like, Mr. President, we blocked an hour for it.
To his credit, he finished the full hour, but he was lit up.
He's never forgotten that.
He's sued CBS, sued 60 Minutes, and now they're in talks to have a sit-down with Trump.
Maybe because he'll be doing it.
Will it be Leslie Stahl?
Probably not.
She's 78.
How old is Leslie Stall?
Yeah, I don't think he wants to sit with her.
He was batshit.
I actually would think he would want to sit with her.
My point is, maybe, maybe, maybe Larry Weiss greased the tables to get Trump in.
To create an opening to go there.
Brandon, your thoughts on this.
Yeah, so I think we're missing one of the scariest parts of this.
So I think that the kid here, Larry Elson's kid, is somebody we have to keep an eye on over the next couple of years.
Because think about the power of, I guess, Oracle and Skydance now.
So Larry Ellison gives his son the money for Skydance, and Skydance goes and gets Paramount and CBS.
And now Oracle is getting TikTok.
So, you know, Larry Ellison's 83, I think.
So he's, I don't know, say he has 10 years left.
His kid's going to have all those media assets when Larry Ellison's gone.
And Larry Ellison, sorry, he doesn't give me the best vibes when he's somebody who gleeingly talks about how his employees have to wear body cameras and they're always recording even when they're in the bathroom or on lunch.
They're always recording in case they need to access that information.
And he talks about a future where everything's being recorded all the time.
You pull up that video.
Actually, there's a video of him saying that in an interview.
Please continue.
Yeah.
And so I just think it's something to keep an eye on that people that think this way have so much control over media assets that shape the youth and the old people because, you know, CBS Paramount's more old people.
TikTok's the youth.
So they're kind of hitting it from every angle.
Or kind of like Lachlan Murdoch.
He's not the old man, and we don't really know what we're getting yet.
Right.
But we can see it changing.
Right.
So, yeah, the kid here is somebody to definitely pay attention to and keep an eye on.
I don't know too much about him.
I know what Larry Ellison creeped me out a lot when he says things like this.
If Rob's.
Do you have it, Rob?
I'm looking right now.
Yeah, it's actually not, it's all over YouTube.
But anyways, yeah, so look, I mean, there's no question Larry Ellison's son is going to be a power player on the opposing side, just the same way as Alex Soros is going to be a power player on the other side.
This is kind of what happens when generational wealth and influence passes to the next person and what that other person is going to be doing.
You know, we may every year in December, we rank the top 50 power players in media every year.
We make this and it's based on a very interesting ranking.
Takes us a few days to do it.
It's not something that we do within five minutes or five hours.
Takes a long time to do.
It's a golf score, all this other stuff that we do.
And you know what's one of the things that we look at when we give people a power player last time that's even higher?
It's based on how many kids they have that they're going to pass down the influence that they currently have.
Does that make sense?
You have to kind of look and see, like some of the people don't have kids.
You got some guys that are super wealthy, but they don't have any kids.
And some of the guys do have kids.
Some of them have young girls that just want to get into art.
I think Bezos kids, if you go to Jeff Bezos' kids, Jeff Bezos' kids, I want to say he's got, three sons and one adopted daughter.
Yeah, I don't know who it was that they only had girls and they were only in art and had no interest in business.
But you have to look at it.
Sanchez's kids, maybe?
Maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know which one it was.
But play that clip by Larry Ellison and let's see what he has to say here.
Go for it.
The police will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording, watching and recording everything that's going on.
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
And it's unimpeachable.
The cars have cameras on them.
I think we have a squad car here someplace.
But those kind of applications using AI, if we can use AI, and we're using AI to monitor the video.
So if that altercation had occurred, that occurred in Memphis, the chief of police would be immediately notified.
It's not people that are looking at those cameras.
It's AI that's looking at the camera.
No, no, no.
You can't do this.
It would be like a shooting.
That's going to be immediately that's going to be a lot of fun.
Does he talk about a workplace rob or no?
I'm not sure.
Fast forward a little bit to see if he says it.
Okay, all right.
So I think one of the things he did say that you're working and you're doing the kind of stuff that you're doing.
You know what this reminds me?
You ever seen the movie Horrible Bosses?
Yeah.
You remember at the end how Kevin Spacey gets caught?
While the car, whatever, what's the car that talks to somebody?
Is it Siri?
Sirius X?
No, it's not.
What is it when the car?
On-star.
So Kevin Spacey is saying what he's saying and OnStar is recording the whole thing.
And he's like, we heard everything you had to say.
Here's what you have to say.
You are under arrest.
And the cop shows up and all night.
So I don't know.
Believe it or not, some people afford.
This creeps me out for somebody to be able to watch every single thing that you're doing.
But, you know, Palantir, you know, some of these guys, you know, we had a guy on that he can detect anybody where they're from based on the camera.
They put the camera on you.
You're from here.
You're from there.
So we're headed in that direction.
This is how the government decides to use this.
When back in the days, TSA was trying to do it.
And you look at the history of the CIA funding Palantir, CIA wanting to do it themselves.
And then Palantir is like, we'll do it ourselves.
And then gradually within 23, 24 years, there are a lot of people that are uncomfortable.
But the average Joe is like, well, if we can get the criminal like this, this is awesome, right?
We'll see.
We'll see what's going to happen.
In the name of safety, freedom was lost.
That's right.
In the name of safety, freedom is lost.
Let's get into a couple other stories here and then we'll wrap it up.
Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by manufacturing them in the U.S.
So, if you ever use Sharpie, here's what Sharpie is doing now, okay?
And they're making a lot of money, by the way, doing this.
Tucked in foothills of Tennessee, Tennessee, Smoky Mountain is a factory that has figured out to manufacture in America that's cheaper, quicker, and better.
It's the home of a famous American writing implement, the Sharpie marker, pen barrels world along automated assembly lines that rapidly fill them in ink.
At least a half a billion Sharpie markers are churned out here every year, each one made of six parts.
Only the felt tip is important from Japan.
It didn't used to be this way.
Back in 2018, many Sharpies were made abroad.
That's when Chris Peterson, who was the CFO of Sharpie Maker Newell brands, challenged his team to answer a question: how could they keep Newell from becoming obsolete compared with factories in Asia?
I felt like we had an opportunity to dramatically improve our U.S. manufacturing.
He said Peterson is now the CEO.
And these days, most Sharpies in all 93 colors are made at this 37-year-old factory.
Tom, your thoughts on the story.
This is an example of what happens when leadership says, you know what?
I want the jobs to be here.
Why shouldn't we?
Can we do it right here?
It's easy to outsource.
It's easy to do that.
And the free market says you can do that.
But he gave him a challenge.
Can we do it here?
Can we do it?
Can we put American ingenuity to work and make it happen?
And now he's done it.
And now they're in the process of bringing back, because they did some of it overseas.
There is a type of highlighter that is that Smeargard, we got them right here, which are coming back.
This one's going to come back to the U.S.
And I think it's a great example of when you decide, or you may not always be able to do it, but this is a leader that says, here we are in this factory.
I don't want to be a hollowed out factory in this little country town to say, hey, man, they used to make Sharpies over there.
Now they're in Vietnam.
He says, I want to challenge us to do it.
And along the way, they started making a custom Sharpie about six years ago for some guy named Donald Trump.
So you see those longer and they have a certain width tip.
Do you know what that is?
That's a custom Sharpie.
When he was here and he signed the wall, he gave it to Pat.
And it's so I think it's a great story of leadership.
And it turned out that they were able to do it.
I don't think every industry is going to be able to say, hey, let's just do it here.
I think there's certain realities of costs or sourcing certain components that just will fight against you.
You're not going to be able to do it.
But I think this is really cool to see an American company say, hey, we're going to do it.
Eric, your thoughts?
It's terrific.
It's what every responsible CEO should be doing.
He should be petitioning his workforce saying, how can we become more efficient?
I don't know the details of how they did it, but I'm guessing they're automating.
Patrick, I'm guessing they're eliminating human beings and they're having AI-driven machine manufacturing, which, you know, you can call it a job, Brandon, here in the United States, but if a human being isn't actually performing the job, I'm not sure you should count it as a job.
Look, I'm all for technology moving forward.
When the free market gets messed with, and I think part of this, it may be in response to Trump's tariffs.
I don't know, but everyone should be doing it anyway to reduce their costs.
It doesn't strike me as something that everyone can do.
If they have the capital to do it, they should do it anyway, I guess.
And you want to be the biggest boost to the U.S. economy manufacturing-wise?
Just bring down, bring it to zero the corporate repatriation of funds.
You're a big international company, it's overseas.
It had gotten as high as 35%.
So you earn your profit overseas and it's sitting in an England bank account because that's where you do a lot of your sales in Europe.
To bring it back to the United States, even if you're domiciled in the United States, they were charging companies 35%.
Trump has gotten it down some, but you're going to pay taxes over there already.
You bring it back here if tax paid already.
You want to see upside, there's where manufacturing plants get purchased.
Check me on this.
I thought Apple's largest bank account was Ireland or in the UK related to the Ireland deal that they did on manufacturing over there.
But Apple had a, to your point, didn't Apple have like this massive Ireland deal?
They have trillions.
There's something like $5 trillion of U.S. domiciled corporations with that $5 trillion sitting in foreign bank accounts and they can't bring it back because they've been taxed on it already as a company, wherever they were, wherever the sales were happening.
And to bring it back another 35% at some point at some price.
So this playing games with the tax code really, it doesn't sit well with me personally.
Yeah, I'm with you there.
And I guess the problem is that with the jobs overseas is that like the natural cycle of things, Ray Dalio made this great video, got like 40 million views about the cycles that goes and where when your country gets richer, your citizens require higher wages.
So naturally you offshore your jobs to be able to build things more cheaply and affordably.
But that ends up growing that country and making that country the next powerhouse.
So the way, like, how do we offset that or slow that down?
I do think automation is a good thing in that regard.
If we could offset the amount of jobs that we send overseas or the jobs that we create overseas, like in China, like we create a superpower in China because of that cycle, but China shots off in the foot because of messing with the market.
Yeah, to your point, like they stopped people from having kids.
So I think they delayed taking the superpower status.
Can you imagine if Trump or whoever, by the way, I have zero faith in Howard Luttnick.
I don't think he could come up with this.
I don't think he rubbed two brain cells together to figure this out.
But Tom, if you're a corporate CEO with $10 billion in a German bank, right?
Costs you 35%.
Maybe it's down to 25% under Trump right now.
What if Trump were to come to you and say, hey, Tom, domicile, bring that $10 billion, $20 billion back to the United States, zero cost to do it, no tax on it whatsoever, as long as you earmark half of it for capital investment in a U.S.-based entity, hiring Americans.
So if I've got no international, you're saying that it's trapped over there because of my international sales.
Correct.
Got it.
Yeah.
And you pay taxes on it in that foreign country.
I paid taxes on it in Germany.
So I sell a bunch of stuff in Germany, pay my taxes on the money.
Money's sitting in the bank.
But if I bring it back over here, the U.S. government says, oh, wait a minute, I'm going to tax 35% of that.
So it's almost like it's a toll charge just to bring the money back.
If you let me bring it back to zero, I'm going to, I'm going to, and you say I have to earmark so much of it for capital.
Guess what?
It's coming back.
Yeah.
And now I'm, and I'm going to invest back here in the U.S. with it.
Capital investment in human investment too, because likely you're going to need people unless you come back to the USA.
It's one of those things people don't know about how money gets trapped around the world and it could come back and do good.
But the individual jurisdictions, countries, and her name, Van der Leyen, who wants to keep all the money in Europe.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And I do think that would be a good use of capital rather than going to the government, going to jobs.
But I mean, I would want to make sure that they stay true to that.
Like, you know, when the government bailed out the banks in 2008, they said, yeah, contingent upon you giving that out and lending it to stimulate the economy.
They didn't lend it.
They gave it to themselves.
So I would want to make sure that we upheld that.
But yeah, I just think that to maintain superpower status and to maintain a strong middle class, that we have to be mindful and put a lot of thought and energy into keeping jobs here and not offshoring jobs because that helps large companies.
That doesn't help the middle class and it doesn't put American in a position of it.
You know what I like?
Here's what I like.
I like the fact that there's case studies like this that could inspire somebody else to say, let's see if we could do something better here.
That's what I like.
It's a case study.
You got it.
Sharpie, phenomenal.
I'm online looking at their headquarters, looking at a bunch of different stuff.
You go on their website.
It tells the history of what Sharpie did and how it got started.
I love it.
I love hearing stories like this of other business owners that they're saying.
Can you imagine you built a marker company?
Can you go to Sharpie's website?
If you just go to sharpie.com and are you on sharpie.com?
Yeah.
I went to sharpie.com and then on sharpie.com, this is by far why I love.
Go to the about us if you could, Rob.
There's a page here that says about us.
I don't know if you have it or not.
About Sharpie.
Look at this.
Brief history.
1857.
Guy, what's his name?
Let's give him a shout out real quick.
Frederick Reddington.
Reddington.
And William Sanford.
Okay, so go lower, open up a factory, then it grows a little bit, keep going a little bit lower and keeps growing, whatever that product is.
Then you got the additional stuff they do in 1899, then the ink company that comes out, then the Sharpies that they come out 1930 to 1964.
Then it gets more colorful.
Then all of a sudden all over the place.
And then today, it's a company that sold a half a billion of these Sharpies per year.
How sick is capitalism?
Don't you love it?
I absolutely love it.
Imagine how many people this guy employed in the foothills of, you know, Tennessee, Smoky Mountains.
It's great.
I love it.
Good story.
All right, let's get to the next one here.
Next story I'd like to get to is I'd like to do a little bit of a, do we go into that one?
We can go into that one.
But yeah, let's do this one here.
It's a little bit of business cultural things to talk about.
Wall Street Journal does an article titled, Compensation or Culture.
The best managed companies lean into both.
But I think one can probably be better than the other one.
So let me read it to you and then let's have a little bit of a discourse here.
In the 1940s, as Peter Drucker got a close-up look at General Motors, he was struck by how unmotivated many of the company's employees were, especially considering that most were making decent money for the great majority of automobile workers.
The only meaning of a job is in the paycheck, not in anything connected with the work or the product.
Drucker observed in his landmark study of GM, concept of the corporation, no wonder that this result is an unhappy and discontented worker, he wrote.
Eight decades later, these words ring as true as ever.
If a company wants to attract and retain the talent, it needs to thrive.
It can't skimp on compensation, but neither can it neglect culture.
This is the key finding from new research conducted by a team at the University of Bern in Switzerland using a massive, using a measure of corporate effectiveness created by Peter Drucker Institute, Graduate University, Peter Drucker Institute on 35 different indicators of assessing five essential factors, customer satisfaction, innovation, social responsibility, employee engagement and development and financial strength.
Companies compared in each of these five areas as well as their general effectiveness through standardized scores with a range of 0 to 100 and a mean of 50 Drucker-defined effectiveness as doing the right things well.
Tom, what's more important, culture or comp?
Well, I'll give you two examples.
And people say, well, compensation is more important.
That'll help the culture.
Well, then explain certain charities.
And I'm not talking about Greenpeace or liberal ones that are out there, you know, activist charities.
I'm talking just straight charities.
Explain how charities where everybody is either volunteering or making next to nothing have these amazing cultures and that the people love working together and there's such a great vibe of what's going on and they don't have compensation.
Then go look at, I read a thing about the highest above market compensation was an investment bank and I'm trying to remember the name.
I'm going to get this wrong.
I'm going to say, I think, but folks, if you look it up and you say that's not right, I think it was Piper Jeffrey I was reading about like in 2005 and that they were the most above median throughout the company.
So in other words, this bank, people were making a lot of money and they were making more than the average, but they described the culture as so competitive and so toxic that the tenure rate there was very low.
It's like three years.
And so there's an example.
You can have all the compensation in the world and it's just so toxic, nobody says they're three years and yet you can make a bunch of money.
And then you've got charities where you make nothing at all.
And there's some of these charities where the culture is just unbelievable and you give everything to work there.
You have to have a blend and it starts at the top.
You look at Tom Shoes or you look at Zappos.
And even though we read about Zappos and the tragic story of their CEO and what ultimately happened to him, he created this unbelievable culture that was really good and positive that was there.
So I think you have to have a blend.
You have to have a blend of both.
And it starts at the top with the leader.
And I've seen it.
And, you know, the reference points I had, the data shows you can have all the money in the world and you can have all the culture in the world.
You know, it doesn't have to be one or two.
I think it's both.
I'm leaning towards the, you know, if you're going to compensate people better, they'll generally accept a little bit less of the comforts of, let's say, a Silicon Valley company where you go in and there's free lunch and there's a massage over there after work and there's a wine bar.
I've experienced companies where it's the opposite, where there's literally none of that.
It's bare bones and you go in there for one reason, one reason only, to make money, to get better.
I would hire people on the trading floor.
It's a disaster of a place.
I mean, it's horrible.
It's over at the time, overcrowded.
People would be sweating, pulling.
There was no order.
It was chaos.
It was control chaos.
But guys would come up to me and I, you sure you want to do this?
Yeah, well, there's, you know, there's no, there's no corporate free lunch over here.
You're just going to work with me and for me on the floor, but you're going to learn how I do this.
And you're going to learn that you can put yourself up, go into those trading pits every day, risk your own capital, walk out, and someday you'll have a 5,000 square foot home or a beautiful car.
So the aspiration of success, I think that, let's call it a carrot, I think is a lot better than the soft little nudge of the stick of culture.
Yeah, no, I think.
Rob, I'm going to come to you as well.
Go ahead, Brian.
I think it's unsustainable to have long-term people if you don't have both, because I think that if you, you know, you could be making plenty of money, but if it's not an enjoyable place to be at, I think you're going to burn out and resent it.
I mean, the corporate America culture is just so poisonous and unpleasant to be around.
I was at a big giant pharma company for a couple of years.
And, you know, like super nice buildings, super nice amenities and all that, but everybody just acts like a total weirdo in those places.
Like it's like everybody's walking on eggshells, being politically correct.
You're afraid to say something slightly controversial because HR reports are flying around left and right.
So that's no fun.
And the right culture, like the startup type of culture is so enjoyable and fun and you create memories and everything.
So of course money's, you know, you have to make a good amount of money to be happy at a job, but also the culture, you can't have a enjoyable workplace without a good culture.
Is this shifting, Patrick?
I mean, maybe people my age who remember stock market crashes.
I had parents who experienced the economic recessions, depressions.
So we kind of ingrained in our childhood as, well, it's important to be successful.
And I think over the last 40 or 50 years, young people, 30 years, young people have grown up without a lot of fear of the dark side because they've never seen it, right?
They've never seen, you know, walking.
Is my account going to be zero today?
Are we going into a recession in 2007?
Is this going to be the end of life as we know it in America?
At one point, people were talking about you can't put your money in banks because banks are failing.
Boom, boom, boom.
Let me get my cash and stick it under my mattress.
Those things stay in your mind.
So, you know, if you're 20 or 25 years old, maybe you don't have that risk of, hey, I could be broke.
Or I don't know what it's like to be broke.
I'm not going to ever be broke.
Life is never.
And so you push for the more cultural things surrounding you when you go to work rather than the, I want to make sure I have enough money so I never go back to broke world.
There hasn't been a job shortage lately, it feels like there hasn't been a big situation where there's like a high unemployment rate.
People couldn't get jobs, right?
So I think that is a point.
Yeah.
So the fear of that existing isn't there, especially during COVID.
If you remember, guys are like, if you don't give me this, I'm going to go to, I want to work from home two times a week and you need to give me three times and I'll open the, if you don't, I'm going to leave you to this.
So that kind of happened.
But then it's back to normalcy a little bit right now.
But Rob, what would you say about this?
I think culture is more important because if you guys are all pushing towards the same idea, the same, then eventually the money will come.
But it starts with culture.
I tend to agree with you because, you know, I've ran a 1099 company only and a W-2 company only.
Like right now, everything in Lion Holding is W-2 benefits, 401k, you know, all the stuff that we're having.
We're going to make some big announcements on the first week of January.
Culture versus comp.
Comp is very important.
You got to make sure guys are making the right kind of money to be happy about it.
But if I worked, like I went to a company one time, Iron Mountain, it was an office in Newport Beach or something, Anaheim.
And I went in and they brought me in as a speaker and I'm going around.
I'm just looking at everybody.
I'm like, the energy was so off.
Everybody coming in late, leaving early, casual.
I start asking questions.
What is the vision of the company?
Where do you guys want to go?
What are you guys going to take over?
Give me what the competition is.
Who is the enemy?
No, we're just a very collaborative type of place.
We're our leader's bulletin in the office.
Who is seventh place?
Who is 12th place?
We don't want to be competitive because competitiveness leads to combativeness.
No, it doesn't.
How do you run a sales office without a leader's bulletin?
Who's number two?
Tell me who didn't make the top 10.
Tell me who's number one for the last three months in a row.
Tell me who's whooping everyone's ass.
Who is the person that's kicking everyone's tail that maybe doesn't have the biggest personality, that works the hardest, comes on the latest, comes on the earliest, leaves the latest, comes in and works on the weekends for themselves because they're running their own business.
Who has got the best story?
No, no, no, that's too much competition.
I said, listen, you guys don't need me.
I can't help you.
There's nothing I can do with this environment.
And then you saw a couple of guys are like, well, what do we do?
I said, sell me the vision.
You come up here.
Sell me the vision why I should work here.
Right now, if you were hiring somebody like, I would never want to work for your company.
I would never want to be here.
I would never want to do anything here.
I go to lunch break and I see what's in their kitchen and all the stuff that they have.
I'm like, what a boring, flipping place to be.
Then you go work at a company or for a group of people that you know they're going places.
The energy is just there.
It's a little edgy, not for everybody.
It's like, oh my God, something's going on over here.
These people are up to something very, very unique.
And then you have that in place.
And then the company starts making money.
And then when the company starts making money, then you get salary, bonus, L-tip, equity, dividends.
Then all of a sudden, 5, 10, 15 years later, a guy that maybe wasn't as qualified as the other 18 people you hired, he's now running a business unit.
He's a multi-millionaire, got a great life, hasn't thought about money for a long time.
And how did that happen?
So if you can find a way to mix the two together, but I do agree with Rob, I think culture comes first, and culture will attract the right people to be with you long term.
And there's something very, very special if you can pull off both of them together.
Let's do, is it 1059?
Let's do one last.
Is there a story you really, really want to do before we wrap up?
Tom Brennan, is there a story we really, really want to do before we wrap up?
The Moody's IPO.
You want to do the Moody's IPO, the one with the big banks?
What do you think, Tom?
Let's do that one.
Let's do the big banks woo Trump for roles on Blockbuster IPO.
And this is a Wall Street Journal story.
This is a very, very good story.
Tom, I'm coming to you first.
Okay, dope.
And so here's what's going on here.
Coleman Sachs Chief David Solomon was at the White House this summer pitching President Trump on why his bank should lead a huge coming deal, the initial public offering of mortgage giants, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
Midway through the presentation, Trump invited a group of athletes from his Council on Sports and Fitness.
Solomon continued speaking as President Trump wrestler Triple H and golfer Bryson de Shambu looked on it, looked on.
It was a surreal meeting befitting what is perhaps the strongest IPO backoff ever.
All of major banks have been working to land roles on what could be one of the largest stock offerings in history.
And in doing so, the banks are wrestling with a host of novel, novel issues thanks to the unpredictability of Trump and the complicated nature of taking government-backed entities public.
The winners stand to earn not only hefty fees, but bragging rights for having worked on a deal that could reap the government billions of dollars.
Everyone wants to be on this.
One top bank executive said the CEOs of the country's six largest banks, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo have all made pilgrimages to the White House.
They have counted Trump and others involved.
They have quartered Trump and others involved, including Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, Federal Housing Finance Agent Chief Bill Paulty, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Trump officials have fielded calls from smaller investment banks too.
Tom, what is going on here?
Well, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the two basically mortgage purchasers, and they're part of the federal government.
One was created in 1938.
That was Fannie Mae.
And then in the 1970s, Freddie Mac was created to give competition to Fannie Mae.
And they also wanted some help for thrifts and SNLs.
And then shortly thereafter, we had this whole debacle with the SNL.
So we all know how that party ended.
Not that Freddie was part of it, but it was a wild-time wild west.
So you have these two entities that are out there.
And when you hear about a mortgage, you say, well, that's a conforming mortgage or a jumbo mortgage.
These are the ones that help set those standards for those mortgage sizes.
But they're out there.
And they want to take them public.
And there's a question of do they go public independently, which is like what the National Mortgage Association, I think, National NMBS, I think, National Mortgage Bank Association wants.
And then there's people saying, put them together, like Bill Ackman, he's a big proponent of the Great American Mortgage Corporation.
Put them both together, take them public.
Here's the prize.
Do you know what the fees are for this?
I added up the fees based on a 3.5% all-in banking fee.
It's over a billion dollars in fees for a single IPO, and the math on the IPO is $300 billion.
At least.
At least.
That's the low end of the entire business.
That's the low end of it.
And so basically you have, I think they're called GE.
What does GES stand for?
It's the government something.
Right, if you, you just add it.
If you go back to where you were.
Government-sponsored enterprise.
Sponsored.
Yeah, the operative word there.
And so now it's going to be an independent corporation that is on the stock market.
So you could see the rise and fall of its stock prices going to be rising and falling with the mortgage market.
So right now, you would assume in the future with what's going on right now with interest rates and a number of mortgages, number of refines going on, probably a flat, probably a flat stock price right now.
But what's really interesting about this is this is a bunch of money that goes to the federal government.
And then this GES, government-sponsored enterprise, becomes this public company.
I think what's going to win, in my opinion, I think what'll ultimately end, probably just rolling them into one and doing it, because the legacy one was created so long ago, 1938, one in 1970, and they don't really do things different.
I think they've both adopted, I think they've both adopted the same mortgage limits now.
I think they use the same limits on what's a jumbo and not a jumbo.
But this is pretty interesting.
And so everybody's running to the trough to get a piece of it.
And it's kind of funny.
David Solomon, Goldman Sucks should be the one, Mr. President, that takes this thing public.
I got a little respect for David Solomon, but can you imagine him sitting in a White House?
Triple H walks out.
I got some friends here, too.
Hey, come listen to what we're doing with mortgages.
Triple H, Bryson, David.
David's also a DJ at night.
Okay, continue.
What were you saying?
To me, that'd be kind of funny to be like, wait, what am I doing here?
It's honesty.
It's a way of saying, look, man, I'm meeting with a lot of powerful people.
Okay, like pump the brakes.
But go ahead, Triple H. What do you got?
Go for you.
What do you want to do?
I think Trump is doing what Trump does.
Eric, your thoughts on this.
My thoughts are it probably will be closer to $500 billion IPO.
I think anytime we can get any entity off the government books is I love the idea.
I just I'm concerned that Solomon petitioning the Trump administration for the probably a billion, maybe closer to a billion and a half dollars in fees to bring this entity public, which, you know, on a $500 billion IPO, not a lot, but someone's going to get paid.
My concern is that Trump wants to take a piece of this too, right?
So he wants the government to somehow stay involved, not unlike he did with Intel, where he took 10 government, like it or not, U.S. government, you taxpayers own 10% of Intel.
I don't love this because it's a slippery slope.
I understand what he's doing, but you're not always going to have a President Trump, and you just might get a liberal president one day.
You will.
And if they start picking winners and losers, solar, water and clean air, lithium mines last week.
If you start getting government involved in private industry, you're going to hurt the industry.
You're also likely going to take it on the chin someday.
And what's a an invest a liberal president invests $20 billion in a company, it starts going south, what are they going to do?
Of course they're going to turn around if a bunch of them and just raise their taxes.
Less control over the free market, the better for me.
So yeah, get Fannie and Freddie off the government books.
Brandon.
Yes, this is another disaster created by FDR and the New Deal.
Under FDR, the thing is created.
And now they own 50% of the mortgages in the United States.
And since 2008, when they got bailed out, the Treasury owns 80% of the common stock of Freddie and Fanny.
So yeah, I agree.
I definitely think it's a good thing to get that off the government's books onto the private market.
But it reminds me of how the government started subsidizing student loans because they want everybody to have the ability to get a student loan.
So, I am just getting into this whole thing now, but I'm wondering if this pushed up the entire housing market artificially because it's giving access to mortgages to people who wouldn't otherwise qualify if it was just standard banks giving these mortgages.
So, I don't even know if these are good, necessary institutions because since it was created by FDR, everything the FDR created, I questioned.
So, good thing that Trump is getting it off their books.
I agree, it's bad for the government to own things, so I hope he doesn't do that.
But I'm questioning the existence of these institutions from the beginning.
Yeah, so folks, if you have an FDR shirt, please send it to Brandon.
You can Minect him and give him some love.
Eric is also on Manect himself based on the conversation we had here.
Are you taking a gold home?
I won't steal, but the weight of it, Patrick.
It's just ridiculous what it feels like.
Wow, it's when you look at it, it doesn't feel like it's that heavy.
It's so beautiful.
No, that's a key.
Tom, grab it, see how heavy it is.
It's unreal how heavy that one that's a kilo, yes.
That's a kilo.
This is 2.2 pounds.
Yeah, but it feels, if you say 2.2 pounds, if you go like this 100 times, you're going to get a pump.
You're going to get a pump.
Anyways, gang, great to be with you.
We will do this again Friday.
Tomorrow podcast will be going out with Gerald Paul.
We have probably one of my favorite conversations of the year.
We talked about the big pharma.
We talked about how Merck used to use cocaine in their products.
We talked about the Oxlocotton Kink family that's the wealthiest private business, $14 billion net worth.
The Sacklers, I believe, if I'm not mistaken.
We talked about why traditional Catholics and Jews have a feud because he is a Catholic married to a Jew for 45 years.
They've been together.
And then we talked about a bunch of different things.
I think you're going to enjoy this conversation tomorrow.
