Unredacted Epstein files name six powerful figures—including Leslie Wexner’s $77M Manhattan gift to Epstein and Dubai Ports CEO Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulyam’s 2007 "torture video" emails—while Peter Schiff warns Trump’s debt-inflation strategy masks a 75% Dow decline in gold-adjusted terms, despite its 50,000 milestone. Meanwhile, California’s jock tax and border policies spark debates over fairness and global respect, while Holtec’s $10B nuclear IPO signals a shift toward Gen 5 reactors, potentially reshaping energy markets amid regulatory skepticism. [Automatically generated summary]
Okay, so we got a special podcast here for you guys today.
We got a lot of stories to cover.
It's supposed to be a business podcast.
We do Wednesday to talk about business.
And then you get reports this morning about El Paso shooting, right?
And not El Paso shooting.
The El Paso airport shutting down for the next till, what is it, February 28th?
No flights in or out.
First thing in the morning.
No one knows what's going on down the street from Fort Bliss.
90,000 soldiers.
People want to know how did this take place.
You know, is there something going on we don't know about?
Did Mexico's airport across the street from El Paso shut down?
It didn't.
So is there something we know?
Are they reporting any of this stuff?
We're going to talk about that as well.
We have to.
And then, of course, with some of the stuff that was released with Epstein files, with the six names that was just leaked by Rokana that they're now talking about and a few other things that we'll get into.
And we just got the jobs report that we just got an update on as well here minutes ago.
But let me go through the stories and we'll have our guests introduce them.
So we're going to talk about gold.
The guys that we have here on the podcast kind of like gold a lot, okay?
And not a little bit.
They kind of love it a lot.
And you're probably going to hear some I told you so's.
You know, it's going to be one of those moments where I told you gold's going to be at 5,000.
And then we're going to see if they're going to say gold is going to get to 50,000 one day.
Who knows?
Is it going to be, you know, crypto?
You know, one of our guests today believes all roads lead to gold.
We'll debate it.
We'll hash it out.
I'm a guy that owns a lot of golds.
I'm a fan of gold as well.
So who knows?
Who knows what will happen?
Trump's predicting $100,000 on Dell by the time he leaves office.
Claims he was right about everything.
Trump pick, the Fed picks Worsch.
He picked him, he says, because he can get the economy to grow 15% growth.
California's billionaire tax will be disastrous and cause wealthy to flee.
Give me one second.
Hang on one second.
Wealthy to flee economists predicts.
January layoffs rose to the highest level for the month since 09.
All morning this morning, they were saying that there's going to be negative news report for jobs and it's going to be bad.
S ⁇ P is already predicting China's property slump will be worse than it expected.
This year, January layoffs rose to the highest level for the month since 2009.
Novo Nordisk sues him and hers.
This is a story Tom's not happy about.
Copycat versions of We Govie Drug.
Him stock fell 18%.
I mean, the stock fell, not, you know what I'm saying?
The stock fell 18%.
For some of you guys at award, apparently it still works.
Job hunters.
This is the weirdest story.
I don't know if you guys seen the story or not.
Job hunters are so desperate that they're paying to get recruited.
Not like you're looking for a job.
You're paying the recruiter saying, please tell them I'm the person.
I'll give you a site.
Get me the job.
Tell them they should hire me instead of the other person.
Times are changing.
Nuclear sector is poised to be its biggest IPO on Euros.
It's going to be nuclear.
We'll talk about that.
Treasury Secretary predicts blockbuster 2026 for U.S. economy as Dow hits historic milestone.
Proposed ban on investors in a housing market hits a wall in Congress.
Housing affordability packets set to advance in Congress amid home cost concerns.
Zuckerberg is the latest California billionaire to buy Florida home.
It's happening left and right.
CIA looks to speed up access to new tech in race against China.
And then we got a couple other stories here.
Social networks face big tobacco moments over addiction cases.
And EU warns TikTok over addictive feeds and risks to children.
Okay.
With that being said, let's get right into it.
Our guests today, Peter Schiff and Luke Gorman.
Luke, if you don't mind, we've had Peter a couple times before.
Take him in and introduce yourself to the audience, please.
Thank you, Patrick.
Luke Groman, I founded FFTT, an investment research firm 12 years ago.
Spent 30 years in investment research doing bottoms-up fundamental channel checks first.
And FFTT over the last 12 years is focused on doing aggregating publicly available data points to identify developing economic bottlenecks in macro and thematic markets.
Beautiful.
There you go.
So the guy knows what he's talking about when it comes to money.
And there's two types of people here: the super, super technical, and then we have someone that's going to be able to simplify it for you as well.
Hank Ty, we're going to get smarter by the end of the podcast.
Tom, tell us about the jobs report that just came in.
Well, the jobs report just broke.
830 popped out, and the headlines were two sets of headlines.
One was that 130,000, a little bit more than 130,000 jobs were created in January.
Multiple reports over the last 48 hours coming out of the weekend was they were expecting about 55,000 for the month, and they were expecting some revisions maybe to go back as far as OP 24, right?
They were expecting like 18 months of revisions.
You know, the Department of Labor, a little bit politicized, more than a little bit, they tend to go back and revise.
What this has done to the market today, though, is that in addition to this, they announced that inflation was a tick lower, 4.3 versus 4.4, which is good that it didn't move.
And the market seems pretty happy that it wasn't bad news.
What does this mean, Peter?
What does this mean to the average guy?
It doesn't mean anything.
I mean, you got to take these government jobs numbers with a grain of salt.
They are highly politicized and they are almost always revised down, not just once, but multiple times.
The revisions that we just got, which was for about a year's worth of data, this is not the first downward revision.
Maybe it's like the third or the fourth.
But if you go back to all these jobs reports that came out, let's say during the last year of Biden's term, almost every report was initially a beat.
We created more jobs than we expected.
They've now revised them so many times that they're all misses.
But many of the reports which said we created jobs, we now know that we actually lost jobs.
They would have been reported as negative numbers had they been reported accurately the first time.
But the markets react to these numbers as if they're real.
The government takes credit.
You know, the Fed was taking credit for this strong labor market.
The Biden administration, Wall Street.
If you go back to my podcasts, every single jobs beat that came out, I said it's not a beat.
Just wait for the revisions.
They're all going to be misses.
I think we're losing jobs.
I think the economy is a lot weaker than the government claims.
And that was the case.
And that is the case today.
You know, the Trump administration is telling the same type of lies that the Biden administration did.
The economy is far weaker than is being claimed.
In fact, we're probably in a protracted recession that's been going on for years.
And also, inflation is a lot higher than they claim.
So the economy is weaker, inflation is stronger.
And that's what is being confirmed by the markets.
Look at gold over $5,000.
Look at this dollar hitting a new all-time record low against the Swiss franc.
You can see what's happening in the market.
Look at rising long-term bond yields as the world is losing confidence in the U.S. dollar and our ability to manage our debt.
And our debt is exploding.
I mean, if we really had a strong economy, budget deficits would not be going up.
They'd be coming down.
Luke, what would you say?
Economic Cycles and Inflation00:15:29
Yeah, I would tend to agree with a lot of that.
And I think a key question is that how much of it is cyclical versus how much of it is secular.
In other words, the economy goes through cycles over time.
And I think there is starting to be the dawning realization or maybe even fear that some of these job losses are starting to be related to the pace of AI and technology and robotics.
And if that's the case, that's problematic because that is much more structural in nature and would require a much more structural reaction or aggressive response from policymakers to offset.
And so that's something I've been very focused on literally in the last month, month and a half, two months of just AI is fundamentally incompatible with the system as it's structured.
Incompatible with the system that's structured.
Yes.
Tell me more.
Well, the United States has a debt-based currency, debt-based system, and about half of our tax receipts come from individual taxpayers.
And the working model, I've been talking about this for going on three years now, has been, you know, one of the advantages of being in Cleveland, Ohio, where we're located, is we lived through AI productivity shock 1.0.
It was called the China shock.
The economists called it a China shock.
And that was productivity miracle, significantly reduced costs, significantly reduced regulation because they sent factories to China.
They sent the jobs to China for blue-collar workers.
China went into the WTO at the end of 01.
And in the next seven to eight years, manufacturing employment in the United States fell 30 to 35 percent.
And so that's been my working model for what AI and robotics are likely to do to white-collar workers.
And having been, having seen what happened to blue-collar workers when AI productivity miracle in China hit, you can extrapolate without having to be too aggressive with the assumptions.
For example, 1990, the biggest employer across the United States was manufacturing.
Today, in 2025, according to the New York Times, in 38 of 50 states, the single biggest employer is healthcare.
Within that, it's not practitioners.
It is mostly administration.
There are few industries that are more ripe for AI disruption than healthcare administration.
The machines just do it better than people do.
And so now the reason why it's fundamentally incompatible is ultimately because we have a debt-based system, because people borrow to buy their cars, they borrow to buy their houses, they borrow on their credit cards.
What happens when?
Because it's starting to look like it's when, and it might already be starting.
People making $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 in good white-collar jobs, they have never had to worry about being displaced by a cheap Chinese laborer on the other side of the world.
The machine is now the cheap Chinese laborer.
And so when they lose their jobs, when their wages are compressed, how do they pay their mortgage?
How do they pay their car?
How do they pay their credit card?
And we know what happens from there because we saw in 2007, 2008, when they stopped paying their mortgages.
That's why it's fundamentally interesting.
So you guys are on the same page.
What do you think is about to happen to the economy?
You guys both think there's going to be a market correction.
There's some huge problems that underlie the economy, but productivity gains from AI are not one of them.
I mean, remember, to the extent that we're able to eliminate labor because of AI, that's a positive.
That's a good thing.
That's how the economy grows.
That's how our standard of living rises.
We find more productive ways to produce more stuff.
The problem is going to be if the people who are displaced from AI can't find productive employment someplace else, which would normally happen absent all of the government interference in the economy and the ways the government has been undermining our economy for years, particularly with artificially low interest rates, which unfortunately are going to get even lower.
The United States economy is, unfortunately, a consumer credit-based economy, and the lending comes from abroad.
We have an economy that is completely dysfunctional because of decades of bad monetary and fiscal policy.
The United States is completely dependent on the rest of the world to produce the goods that we don't make and loan us the money that we don't save.
And I think what's happening right now is the world is pulling the rug out from under that phony economy.
I think Donald Trump has basically given the world a kick in the ass to get them to do what they should have done a long time ago, and that is ditch the dollar, move away from the dollar as the reserve currency.
Central banks are getting rid of dollars and buying gold.
And I think the world is going to move away from bilateral trade in U.S. dollars.
So we're not going to be able to finance these massive trade deficits, these massive budget deficits.
And that is the problem.
We're headed not for a financial crisis like we had in 2008, but a sovereign debt and U.S. dollar crisis, which is considerably worse for the U.S. and will be much more disruptive for the standard of living of typical Americans.
Tom, what do you think?
Well, Peter, you've been talking about this for a lot of years in various ways, to be fair.
And I'm not picking on you here.
What makes first quarter 26 different?
Because you've had these warnings going on for a while.
Now, I agree with you about the robots, and government has pointed out because they've recommended like a robot tax for each job, each job that you replace, Pat, we're going to put a tax on the robot as a tax-paying unit because it's a unit of productivity.
Now, that's insanity, and the EU actually voted that down a couple of years ago, which was kind of shocking by their standards.
But what's different here in 26 versus last year versus 24 versus 20?
You've given the call several times.
Well, we're just further along in the process.
I mean, if you look at the last couple of years, gold broke out.
It was at $2,000 an ounce at the beginning of 2024.
It's over $5,000 now.
That is a considerable move in the price of gold.
That is a major warning that what I've been warning about myself is now happening.
The market is confirming what I've been saying.
Look, I saw this train wreck coming way in advance.
Potentially, had policymakers paid attention to what I was saying, we might have been able to diffuse the bomb.
But now it's obviously going off.
You could see it in the foreign exchange market.
You could see it in the long-term treasury yields.
Look how many times the Fed has cut interest rates, yet look what's happened to long-term rates.
The Fed has completely lost control of the long-term bond market.
That's why they surreptitiously went back to quantitative easing.
They haven't acknowledged or admitted that it's QE, but that's exactly what they're doing.
And I'm going to come back.
They're expanding the money supply right now.
They're monetizing more debt because private demand for U.S. debt is evaporating.
Foreign governments don't want to buy our debt.
Private investors don't want to buy our debt.
And so rates are going to rise.
And we've reached that point where we have this massive stagflationary collapse.
We have inflation that's running out of control.
I mean, why do you think the Fed is allowing inflation?
It's well above target.
If their target is 2%, we're well above 3%.
Yet instead of raising rates, which they should be doing, they're cutting rates.
They're doing that.
So let me do that.
Let me go to the story here.
Okay, Rob, if you want to pull this up.
Trump says Fed picks Fed pick wars can get economy to at 15% growth, which, by the way, I know you guys, this sounds like a good story, but there's many arguments to it.
Rob, go ahead and play this clip.
Luke, I'm going to come to you first.
And they say, 3% growth.
Oh, this is great.
GDP.
3% GDP.
2.5%.
They're very happy.
2.5%.
2%.
1%.
They're happy with anything.
We should grow 15 or 20%.
Larry, every time we're growing, they stop it by announcing that we're going to raise interest rates.
So we're going to do 5.4%.
It was announced with a Democratic shutdown, which costs us at least a point and a half.
People don't realize we could have been at 7%.
We should be at 15%.
I'll tell you: if our new head of the Fed, who I think is going to be great, and he's a really high-quality person, he was a very, and your friend Kevin was great, but I want to keep him with us too.
I said to King, look, I want to keep, I had the two Kevins, right?
But I wanted to keep him with us.
He's doing great.
But if he does the job that he's capable, we can grow at 15%.
I think more than that.
Well, 15 is the big numbers here.
But Larry, you can do it.
The problem is every time we used to grow at 15%.
And, you know, when we were starting as a country, we were growing because we had spirit and we had the right incentives.
Today we have a lot of socialism, a lot of communism.
We have a lot of bad things.
But there's no reason.
You can positively.
So, Luke, what concerns you about this and what excites you about it?
I think the 15% number on an absolute number is probably a little bit of Trump being Trump, which is to say, you know, everything is superlatives.
However, I think he's getting at what the game plan is.
I think one of the great charms, in my opinion, of Trump is he will often tell you what the plan is.
Even sometimes when he shouldn't, he does.
And I agree that we are in a Western sovereign debt crisis, that we have a debt problem, we have a deficit problem.
There's two ways out of it.
You either default on the debt, which is simply not possible, or you financially repress the debt.
You devalue the currency.
And so what I think Trump is telling us is that we're going to run a version of the playbook that we ran in World War II.
So during World War II, we ran debt the GDP up to 110%.
And from 1945 to 1951, debt the GDP fell from 110% to 55% in just five years.
How did we do that?
Simple.
We grew rapidly.
We had yield curve control, which is to say the Fed went to Treasury and said, we will buy every three-month T-bill you offer at three-eighths of a percent, no questions asked.
We will buy every ten-year Treasury you offer at two and a half percent, no questions asked.
They kept those yields there, and they printed as much money as they needed to.
And U.S. inflation took off, and U.S. real rates, which is the, say, nominal GDP growth minus inflation, real rates were negative 13% at the lows.
So basically, we inflated the debt away, and ultimately, we grew nominally, probably at 15 or 20 or 25%.
And fast forward to 2020 in COVID.
We ran a very similar version of that playbook.
If you look at the U.S. debt to GDP, it peaked at about 130% around mid-2020.
It fell down to about 115% in under a year.
How did we do that?
Simple.
We grew GDP at about 12 to 15% nominally with about 8 to 10% inflation in that number.
And the Fed was buying hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds at basically zero.
And so when he talks about Warsh and he talks about 15%, I think they understand they are in a corner.
The only way out of this is of another version of that, where they are going to run this economy extremely hot, and you're going to have high growth in every person.
First of all, hang on, Pete.
Hang on.
Is this going to be beneficial to the average person?
Who does this benefit?
So there's winners and losers in any choice, of course, right?
So the winner over the last 50 years of financialization have been bondholders, Wall Street, Washington deficits.
The loser has been the middle and working class of America, the wage earner.
To my eyes, what the Trump administration appears to be doing is trying to reverse that.
Listen to what Scott Bessend has said repeatedly.
It says time for Main Street, not Wall Street.
Wall Street will still do okay, but Main Street will do well.
Look at immigration policy.
They are intentionally, regardless of how one feels about it politically, the fact is they are removing supplies of blue-collar labor from this country that has kept a cap on wages.
And now they bring in a Fed share that he says is going to grow GDP 15%.
They ultimately, what I think they're trying to do is flip the script versus the last 50 years, which is wages are going to rise.
They're going to try to run the Henry Ford model, which is to say Henry Ford famously said, I pay my workers more than I need to because I want them to be able to afford to buy the Model T's coming off the line because that is a sustainable, that's a sustainable economic model.
Hold on, let me finish, Peter.
The trade representative Jamison Greer at Davos in a speech is fascinating.
He gave a speech at Davos.
All the speeches that came out at Davos three weeks ago got a lot of press time.
His was not picked up by Financial Times.
It was not picked up by the Wall Street Journal.
It was not picked up by Bloomberg.
The only one that picked it up was Fox News.
And just a blurb.
He came out and said exactly this.
We are going back to a system where we are going to benefit the working class, basically a more sustainable system.
So the winners are going to be wages.
The losers are going to be the bondholders on a real basis.
They're going to get paid every dollar their own, but we're going to go, we're going to have a period of the economy is going to grow fast.
Do you agree?
Okay, no, I don't agree with pretty much just about any of this stuff.
So let's get back to reality.
But just first to make a side point, because I don't like hearing the nonsense about Henry Ford.
So the reason that Ford paid workers $5 a day was not so they could buy his cars.
That would be nonsense.
The reason he did that was to retain workers.
There was a lot of turnover, and Ford invested a lot to train his workers on the assembly line.
So in order to retain workers and reduce turnover, he paid higher wages.
And Ford workers back then in real terms were making a lot more than they're making today.
And of course, back then, they paid no income taxes.
They paid no Social Security taxes.
So it was good to be a worker in America before the government screwed up our economy.
But I want to get to this idea that we're just somehow going to replay what happened after the Second World War.
So first of all, we ran up a lot of debt during the Second World War.
Now, one thing that happened during the Second World War was we introduced a withholding tax, and we pretty much tripled the income tax.
So vast majority of Americans paid no income taxes at all prior to the Second World War.
They started paying during the war to pay for the war.
Now, when the war ended and we demobilized all the troops and we stopped the fighting, the government never got rid of the income tax.
They never reversed the tax hikes that were implemented to pay for the war.
So the government had all of this revenue coming in that it didn't have before from taxpayers.
Dollars Losing Value00:15:40
And that also helped to bring down the debt relative to GDP.
And yes, we did create a lot of inflation during the 1960s that manifests itself in the 1970s that also helped to bring it down.
But back then, America was a completely different country than we are today.
We were the world's biggest creditor nation.
We were the world's biggest exporter of manufactured goods.
We had huge trade surpluses.
We were still a sovereign nation.
Today, we're completely broke.
We're the world's biggest debtor nation.
We have massive trade deficits.
We have no savings.
We're not increasing taxes the way we hiked them during the Second World War.
We've recently cut taxes.
Meanwhile, we've already bled the typical American household dry.
They have all this debt.
People didn't have credit card debt in the 1950s.
They didn't have all these student loans.
Student loans didn't even exist back then.
So Americans are drowning in debt.
They have no ability to pay higher taxes to reduce these deficits.
I agree with one thing that you said.
We're going to try to inflate them away.
But the biggest losers in this inflation are not just going to be bondholders, but wage earners.
The average American is going to see the value of his savings and his wages completely eviscerated by the inflation that's about to hit.
And what's going to happen, too, is decades of the inflation that we exported, because we took a lot of the money that we printed and we sent it abroad.
And our creditors, instead of buying our products, which didn't exist, they bought our financial assets.
And that whole thing is going to be reversing.
So the world is going to be selling U.S. bonds, U.S. stocks, raising U.S. dollars.
All those dollars are going to come home, bidding up non-existent good prices.
So all the inflation is going to move out of financial assets.
So yes, Wall Street is going to lose, but all the inflation is going to move into consumer goods.
So Main Street is going to lose too.
Everybody in America is going to lose.
The only winners will be the people who got out of Dodge.
So Americans who read the writing on the wall and who divested of U.S. financial assets, got into foreign stocks, got into foreign bonds, got into precious metals and other inflation hedges.
Yes, they'll win.
They'll win as investors.
They'll lose as Americans, but they'll make a lot of money off of the collapse of this bubble economy that has been inflating for decades.
And I've been warning about it for decades because I understood the fundamental problems.
These are the problems that led me to accurately forecast the 2008 financial crisis because I understood all the mistakes that the Fed made to make that crisis inevitable.
But I also understood the even bigger mistakes that they've made since the 2008 financial crisis, and including the mistakes that Walsh is going to make once he takes over from Powell.
All right.
If they inflate away, you said they don't have savings, but then you said they're going to get their savings inflated away.
Those who do have savings, there are some Americans, baby boomers, that still have savings.
Yes, there are others that only have debt.
And sure, their debt is going to get inflated away.
Somebody is depending on that debt as their asset.
So we're going to wipe out a lot of the financial assets of Americans.
But when we wipe out a lot of the debts, the Americans that own the bonds are going to get wiped out.
Which people own the mortgages?
Which Americans are those?
Well, maybe the.
Roughly what percent of income strata do they higher income.
But also, you know, there are lower income Americans that have insurance, that have people have life insurance policies that have cash value that are going to get me.
I want to hear you.
They're going to get wiped out.
Why are you asking that?
The reason I ask that is because one of the big problems everyone identifies we have a K-shaped economy, right?
We have the record wealth inequality.
The only way to fix that at some point is for something to happen that narrows these.
And we're heading on a path where what we're going to do is rich get richer, poor get richer.
I agree.
We can keep this going, in which case the currency will ultimately get destroyed, or we can implement some policies that allow wages to rise in this country, let profit dollars rise, but profit margins shrink.
I agree.
I agree.
If this guy's in debt to this guy, which is Peter's right, that's how it is, and this guy's debt gets inflated away, which means this guy's asset gets inflated away.
That's how you start closing the case.
This is not, look, yes, the wealth gap is going to close.
The rich are going to get poorer, and the poor are going to get poorer too.
But the rich are going to get poorer faster than the poor.
So if you think that's a good thing, that we're going to narrow the wealth gap by everybody getting poorer.
Well, you know, but I would rather do it another way, right?
But unfortunately, that is not the way this is going to happen.
And the biggest problem for the average American is going to be the complete unaffordability of just about everything that we now take for granted.
Because all these problems are going to be too expensive for most Americans.
So one of the things I think we have to remember is when people talk about our debt, you know, where is our debt?
Only right now, right now today, posted 28% of our debt is internationally.
The rest is owned by us, the Social Security Trust Fund.
The Fed owns, what, 18 to 21% of the total debt today.
So it's money we owe ourselves, which has devalued our dollar.
So when we think about the debt, it's not like there's this big boogeyman internationally that we have to all pay.
What is happening is it's going to affect the value of the dollar that we carry.
And that's what people need to understand.
The average person is the reason that your house costs twice as much and your parents are happy because they call it equity.
You call it unaffordability because you're 25 years old with a college degree and you're trying to start.
Well, that was happened because we printed more dollars.
And if there's more of something, it's less valuable.
If there's one Michael Jordan rookie card, it's $5 million.
If there's a thousand Michael Jordan rookie cards, they're $5,000.
That's the way the average person should be thinking about our money, right?
Is how much of it's out there.
And the total debt we have, we owe almost 80% of it to ourselves, which is affecting the value of our dollar and the affordability.
And what these men are talking about in technical terms from two different perspectives is how that's going to shake out to remedy.
And the remedy is, as they say, chemotherapy almost killed me.
Well, guess what?
That's kind of what's going to happen with the economy.
Yeah, but owing it to ourselves, you know, doesn't mean it's not a problem because, you know, it is because it affects the value of that dollar and what we can do with it.
Well, the dollar is going to go down in value regardless.
But the fact that we owe the majority of our debt, some Americans owe it to other Americans, doesn't make that any less of a problem.
And look, the Social Security Trust Funds are basically worthless because all they have is U.S. government bonds and the U.S. government owes that money to itself.
I'm going to get to the next story.
I'm going to get to the next story.
Okay.
Rob, pull up the video with Trump saying Dow's going to get to 100,000, predicting it's going to get to 100,000.
I think you have that clip.
And then let's go to the Scott Besson and then we'll go to Luke.
Go for it.
As you probably saw today, the stock market, the Dow just hit 50,000, three years ahead of schedule.
They said probably couldn't be done in the four-year period.
We did it in one year.
So we're three years ahead of schedule, broken all-time record, 50,000, which they say couldn't happen.
On the crime front, it was just announced that murders are down and crime is down.
It's got the lowest point in 125 years, the year, 1,900.
And that's a big, big number.
Did he say it's going to get to 100,000?
So that was him bragging about the 50,000.
But here is his tweet where he mentions that it's going to hit to 100,000.
Record stock market and national security driven by our great tariffs.
I am predicting 100,000 on the Dow by the end of my term.
Remember, Trump was right about everything.
I hope the U.S. Supreme Court is watching.
Luke.
Well, but I think he's, again, I think it goes back to what's the value of the dollar, right?
The Dow is priced in dollar terms.
If we look at, for example, the Dow last year, use SP just 500 because I'm familiar with it.
But if you look at the SP 500 last year in dollar terms, I think it was up 17 or 18%, 19%.
Gold in dollar terms was up 60%.
So in gold terms, the SP fell.
The SP in gold terms has been down one year, two years, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 25 years, and a total return basis.
So if you invest in the SP 25 years ago with dividends reinvested, the so-called pet rock has beaten the SP over the last 25 years.
Yeah.
And so it's a question of ultimately when you're inflating away the debt, you're inflating away dollar debt.
Equities are going to do well.
And here, I think it's ultimately, again, another sort of signal from Trump of, hey, here's what's going to happen, folks.
I think he does care about the country.
And I think if he gets, if one way you mitigate some of the societal fallout of doing this that I think Peter rightfully highlights is if enough, if you get more people to buy stocks at 50,000, you inflate the debt away, then people are going to be able to hedge/slash make some money on that as they're doing it.
That's the plan.
First of all, Trump.
And go to Brandon, and then I'll come to you.
Go ahead, Brandon.
Yeah, thanks.
I mean, I don't know whether Trump's trying to just devaluate the currency or inflate away the debt.
But I don't see a scenario in which growing the economy 15 percent or taking the Dow to 100,000 is going to be good for the average person because, you know, it's going to think it is.
No, I don't see how you could expect that to be good.
Everything's going to be more expensive if that happens.
And it's a similar thing to COVID.
So the average person doesn't own a lot of stocks.
I think 90% of stocks are owned by, what, 10% of the population?
And same thing with real estate, cars, food, basic things.
The basic things that everybody needs is going to get more expensive like it is right now.
That's why I laugh every time they say that inflation's down because the things that everybody needs isn't down.
It's like, well, I don't know, just probably goods and services are down a little bit.
Maybe oil, a few things here and there.
They change the basket around a lot.
So I don't think that inflation is actually down.
I think it's like you can't have that amount of growth without that amount of inflation.
Well, he said a couple things.
I want you to process this, okay?
You have two different types of president.
They asked him the question: you know, what are you doing about home affordability?
One end, hey, these big blackrock companies, we're putting a stop to you going and buying all this stuff.
He says, but I want property value to go up.
I don't want it to go down.
I want it to go up.
I don't want it to go down to make it affordable for you.
I want to go up.
Okay.
Two, Dow.
I want Dow to go to 100,000.
He's thinking like a boomer.
Yeah, I get it.
But who does that hurt?
Who does it not hurt?
To me, if you're not in equities, you're going to be destroyed if you're not in equities.
And everybody who wants to find a way to time the market, I remember one time we had Peter on, and Peter said, if I had my money in Mac 7, I would have had a lot more money than I do today.
I think this was four or five years ago when we had a conversation together.
What was that?
I don't remember what it was.
I said I would have more money in Mac 7, but now it's hard to say.
I may have more money now because I was in gold stocks.
It's kind of a tough call.
I don't know about Mac 7.
I think Mac 7 destroyed gold.
So let me get to this.
Let me comment.
I will come to you.
Peter, you got to let me run the show.
And everyone's got to speak.
There's five names here.
And I'll come to you.
I'll control it.
I'm the point guard.
I'll come to you to score.
Please respect that.
Okay.
So two things.
Bitcoin versus gold.
High, low.
The last five years, Bitcoin's low has been 15,497.
Bitcoin's high, 126,230, October of 2025.
Today, Bitcoin $68,000 and some change.
Gold, five years.
Low, $1,618.
High, 56 on change, 56, 26, whatever it is.
Today, 50.99.
It could have changed 50.86 today.
Peter, I'm going to come to you with this because this is a victory for you because you've been talking about gold for quite some time.
What is your prediction for gold versus Bitcoin in the next few years?
Well, first of all, I want to talk gold Dow before I go gold Bitcoin because, you know, when Trump comes out and he says that the Dow's 50,000, first of all, he's claiming credit for it as if he's the reason it's there.
And remember, we kept making record highs in the Dow when Biden was president.
And Trump said, well, that was the worst economy ever, but we still had record highs in the Dow.
And he talks about his great tariffs.
The Dow's at 50,000 despite his lousy tariffs, not because of them.
His tariffs are not helping the economy.
They're harming the economy.
But the $50,000 Dow, when gold's at 5,000, the Dow is 10 ounces of gold.
It was over 40 ounces of gold 25 years ago.
So this is a major bear market, a 75% decline in the real value of U.S. stocks.
That is going to continue.
Even if Trump is right that the Dow hits $100,000, which I doubt by the end of his term, what if gold is $20,000?
Now the Dow is only worth five ounces of gold.
Even the people who own stocks are going to be worse off if the Dow goes up like that because stocks are not going to go up as much as inflation.
But this is another reason the government likes inflation is because it makes the numbers bigger.
And so it creates the illusion that you're getting richer even as you're getting poorer.
Now, talking about illusions, when you talk about Bitcoin, look, Bitcoin has been a bubble for a long time.
I think it was running out of air.
Then they got Wall Street involved.
And Wall Street got into Bitcoin in a big way, not because they believed in it, but because they believed other people were dumb enough to believe in it and they wanted to make money off it.
They wanted to book the action.
They wanted crypto gamblers at their casino.
So Wall Street got involved to generate fees.
They got all these ETFs.
They started doing banking deals.
Then I think the market started to implode until we got Trump.
The crypto industry used a lot of their gains to bribe Trump.
They gave a lot of money to his campaign.
A lot of people voted for him because they hoped he would make their Bitcoin more valuable, became like a special interest group.
So politics got involved.
And I think that's the main reason that Bitcoin shot up to $126,000 was the high.
The air is coming out of the bubble now.
It's down about 50%.
I think the entire narrative that Bitcoin is digital gold, which I never believed, fell apart last year when gold had its best year since 1979.
Bitcoin went down.
Gold is having another great year so far in 2026.
Bitcoin is having a horrible year.
It's going, you know, micro strategy or strategy is having an even worse year.
But I think we're headed substantially lower in Bitcoin.
I think a lot of the money that came into these ETFs is going to bail.
I think a lot of that money, unfortunately, came out of gold ETFs, came out of gold stock ETFs.
The investing public was selling their gold and their gold mining stocks when they should have been buying more, and they were taking the money and overpaying for basically nothing.
And so they loaded up on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's Energy Wasteland00:08:34
And I think all that money is going to come out.
I think all these ridiculous Bitcoin treasury companies like Strategy are now loaded up with Bitcoin.
They need to get rid of it.
All I see is a decline.
The media is trying to hype it up, trying to create the impression that this is some kind of buying opportunity, that you're getting Bitcoin on sale, but you're still overpaying for it.
It has very little value.
Luke, do you agree?
In the short run, I think Bitcoin has a lot more downside.
It is, to me, has, I've been calling it the last functioning smoke alarm of liquidity.
I think it is a very interesting technology in the long run.
It is a essentially energy tide neutral reserve asset.
The rest of crypto, I pay no attention to.
Bitcoin for me is the only thing I watch in the crypto world.
It may have some challenges down the road at some point in terms of certain technology, but technology changeovers, if quantum ever someday is an issue, I don't think it's an issue now.
I don't think it's going to be for a number of years, but it could be someday.
But I don't think that's why it's selling off.
I think as the last functioning smoke alarm of liquidity, I think the move from $125,000 to $67,000, wherever we are today, it's the first indicator of a softening economy, of a risk-off environment.
And I think that is a message that should be heated, Tom.
So I have a little bit different view.
I've never subscribed to Charlie Munger's original statement.
He says, I think Bitcoin is poison.
Matter of fact, I think it's rat poison.
I see the value of it.
Is it proving to be the inflation hedge that they said it was?
Well, let's wait and see.
This is certainly a bump.
45% or 47% in the past 22 days.
I mean, that's a pop.
And now we're going to see, you know, will the real Bitcoin police stand up?
But I'm not a traditionalist that discounts it.
I think it's going.
Is it going to a million?
I don't have that as my guidance, at least not tomorrow.
But I think that Bitcoin is stronger than people give it credit for.
And I am because there's one element about Bitcoin, and maybe I'm crazy, and maybe you can tell me that I'm nuts or missed something.
There is a limited supply.
And whenever you have a limited supply, then you're not going to have a situation like the Fed.
The Fed keeps printing money, Pat.
And so I tend to be, am I a bull?
I'm not a raw raging bull, but I think long-term Bitcoin is going to be fine.
But I don't know if I'm with the million-dollar and five-year crowd.
Yeah.
Well, I think the limited supply is ultimately meaningless when there's no more demand.
I mean, the only demand for Bitcoin comes from speculators who think they're going to get rich.
And the way people get rich on Bitcoin is they sell it to somebody else who also believes that they can get rich selling it to another person at an even higher price.
But there's no fundamental value proposition for Bitcoin.
It doesn't do anything.
I disagree with that.
I disagree.
Because actually, if you look at some of the worst regimes in the world, the Taliban, they crack down.
They don't allow women to be educated.
When we left Tallyban, moved back in, the Tallyban couldn't stop Bitcoin.
We had people here sending Bitcoin to continue to educate women, and the Taliban couldn't stop it.
Right, but why don't they just buy a stable coin that's just as liquid, just as easy, or tokenized gold?
I mean, there are tokens that are backed by real gold that are just, in fact, easier to transfer.
You can do it quicker and cheaper than Bitcoin.
So if you want.
You're still centralized with those.
You're still like the Bitcoin.
So what?
Who cares if it's centralized?
It's a store of value.
Because the Taliban can go get the gold.
The Taliban can put it.
So take Tether Gold.
Tether Gold has all their gold stored in Switzerland.
The Taliban can't go to Switzerland and get any of that gold.
So if you own Tether Gold, you own something that's just as safe as Bitcoin, except you actually own gold.
You own something of real value.
You don't have just a string of numbers that means absolutely nothing.
I mean, there are 2.1 quadrillion Satoshis.
There are a lot of Satoshis, and no matter how many you have, you can't do a thing with them.
Whereas gold is a very valuable mineral that is being held by central bank as reserves, but it's used in industry.
It's something real.
So if I had the choice between holding on to tokenized gold versus tokenized nothing, I'm going to take tokenized gold.
The reason that people want Bitcoin is to get rich, not to use it as a medium of exchange or as a currency.
Because if you want to use a currency or a medium of exchange, there are plenty of other tokens that are much better.
The only demand for Bitcoin is because people think it's going to a million.
They think it's going to 10 million because that's what they're being told.
Well, I agree.
That's why they hold it.
I just say there's the use case of because look, I mean, you can have the gold in Switzerland, and I agree.
And I own gold.
I like gold a lot.
I'm a big gold bull.
And the American government came in and took Russia's FX reserves.
The American government came in and took American gold.
Anytime you have something centralized or control of the control of the banking pipelines that we do, there's a risk there.
I'm not saying it's a high risk.
I don't live my life worried about the, but Bitcoin is a, it has the ability where you can literally, with 24 or 12 passwords, you can, I can literally, I could go to Fort Lauderdale Airport.
I could get on a plane.
I could fly anywhere in the world.
I could get a job as a janitor for a couple months.
I could buy an iPhone.
I could download the app and I could download my entire net worth to my phone.
There are lots of value.
There are a lot of other tokens.
There are no other ways you could do that.
No, there are a lot about the blockchain and the exact same thing.
All the whole alternate populations.
No, but there are thousands of other tokens that you could do the exact same thing.
In theory, but yeah, not in theory.
In theory.
Why?
Who says it's the best?
Because the proof of work algorithm.
Well, who cares about proof of work?
First of all, there are other tokens that are proof of work, but proof of work doesn't mean anything if the work doesn't produce anything.
Look, I can spend half my day digging holes in the ground, and I can spend the other half of the day filling them back up again.
And at the end of the day, I can prove that I worked all day, but my efforts resulted in absolutely nothing.
When you work to create a Bitcoin, you've wasted that energy.
You talk about Bitcoin being energy.
All of the energy used to create Bitcoin is a complete waste.
Bitcoin is not a defense.
Well, if the U.S. needs to build out its electrical grid, Ted Cruz talked about this a couple years ago.
He's been one of the few people.
We don't need Bitcoin for that.
No, but we are electrical grid.
No, but the challenge in building an electrical grid is that you can't just say, hey, I want to build a data center in Miami.
I'm going to put up a data center.
Go.
You have to have the grid.
Electrical grid is very, it has to be balanced out.
It's a very intricate engineering problem.
And one of the ways you can build flex capacity, if you're trying to grow your grid really rapidly to try to catch up to the Chinese who have built an entire American grid in four years, by the way, One way you can build for bigger grid than you presently need to build capacity is you start sticking Bitcoin miners on the back of it.
It's a bunch of nonsense.
And then you can take the Bitcoin miner down when you need to.
Texas does this as well.
But to say that we should waste energy so it's not wasting it.
It is not wasting.
How is it not wasted when you're just creating nothing?
Because mining.
It's because of thermodynamics.
Say energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
It can only change its form.
You're not wasting any energy.
No, yes, you are.
The energy is gone.
We've used it up.
No, you haven't.
Yes, we have.
You can't reuse the energy that we used to create the Bitcoin.
It's gone.
So you're saying Newton's laws of thermodynamics.
No, this has got nothing to do with Newton's laws of thermodynamics.
Okay, so if I drive my car and the gas is gone, what am I going to do?
Can I is what happened to that gas?
It's gone, right?
I can't reuse it.
It's been converted into it.
But all right, but it's gone.
I can't use it anymore.
I mean, you can't use it in that form.
But I know whatever energy was used to mine Bitcoin is gone.
We can't use it to light up our homes or to power anything.
We've already consumed it.
Whatever was utilized.
What you're saying is the nonsense that the crypto community tries to put out there to try to justify this complete waste of energy.
El Paso Airport Shutdown Mystery00:05:54
Okay, let's go to the next story.
Rob, do me a favor.
El Paso, what do we know so far about what happened with the airport at El Paso?
One, we know this morning, if you want to play that one clip, announcing that they're shutting down the airport.
It was in the group chat that we sent, Rob, if you want to just go to it, you have it.
It was a video that we sent this morning out of nowhere.
They announced, Rob, go back.
There's a video.
Go up, go up, go up, go up.
That video right there.
That video right there.
Fox.
So announced this morning out of nowhere.
The FAA grounds all flights.
Go ahead and play this clip.
This is in El Paso.
Go ahead, Rob.
FAA is halting all flights to and from El Paso, Texas for 10 days for unspecified special security reasons.
And they're warning that any pilots who don't comply, quote, may be intercepted, detained, and interviewed by law enforcement.
El Paso Airport confirming the news in a statement saying in part the FAA on short notice issued a temporary flight restriction halting all flights to and from El Paso.
Commercial airlines operating out of El Paso are being informed of the restriction, which appears to be security related.
Southwest, United, American, and Delta all operate flights there.
And Fort Bliss Army base is right next door.
So now here's what's weird about it.
Tom, I'm going to come to you first.
The last time El Paso shut down their airport was 9-11 till 9-13, two days.
And that was when World Trade Center came down.
How much bigger can this be for them to shut it down five times longer than 9-11?
Hasn't happened for 25 years, Tom.
What is going on here?
What are you thinking?
So I have one take, and then I'm going to repeat something.
So my take is whenever you see something like this, you ask yourself a question.
Okay, if you're grounding the flights in and out, it is an outside security threat.
Meaning, airports have closed for two hours.
Midway Field, like nine years ago, had to close for two hours because employees pointed out that there was a rogue employee that was in the baggage area.
And so the baggage area, in other words, he was an employee in the baggage area and they thought he was bad.
So they said, hang on, we don't want him putting something in baggage that goes on an airplane.
They shut for two hours.
They sweep.
They're satisfied with it.
Back up and running.
This is like, does somebody outside the airport is there, or do they have reliable information that somebody is trying to get a stinger or something there to take down a U.S. aircraft?
Why would you stop flights coming into or going out of?
You're stopping all traffic.
So it's not like something inside because why would the flight from St. Louis have anything to worry about if it was a baggage handler trying to do something?
It's like, wait a minute.
So the first thing is they have a security thing.
They've got reliable threat information.
And they've like, hey, we got to do this.
The second side of it was, this is, I was reading, of course, it only takes five seconds for this.
Is that this is training?
They're training us to get used to the government closing down airports as a means of control.
So everybody's going to see that on X this morning as well.
I set that aside.
I think they have a security threat that's external and they're having to create perimeter here and they're having to go look for it.
Peter, where are you at with this?
I have no idea.
I mean, look, what are you thinking?
I have no idea.
I mean, the questions I would be asking, I have no idea, but A, I'd be trying to find pilots or something that would know, but what's around there?
What industries are around there?
Is there a staging area in terms of military relative to cartel activity?
I have no idea why they would do that.
I agree.
It's odd.
10 days to shut it down?
Yeah, it's a big.
It's a big number.
Be creative.
What do you think is a crazy thing that's going on here?
Yeah, well, I mean, it's the closest state of the border or the closest major airport to the border, I believe.
And think about all the countries that we're messing with that are in that general area in South America.
Like we're causing problems for Cuba, we're causing problems for Venezuela.
To some degree, we're causing problems for Mexico.
So, yeah, like Tom said, maybe they got wind of some type of surfaced air missile weapon that went missing and narrowed it down to that area and are playing it safe while they're looking for that.
So, yeah, probably something that's like a threat to a flight that's taken off in that general area just because it's that close to the border.
That's what I would think.
And because of all the activity in South America from us, Rob, how many soldiers at Fort Bliss is it?
90,000-ish?
What's the number?
Can we see Fort Bliss over 8,000 recently deployed to Europe?
It's one of the largest U.S. Army bases, covering over 1.3 million acres.
Think about that.
Yeah, it's a lot.
So when you're thinking about 8,000, but what is the total number of soldiers there?
Total number of soldiers there.
Is it 90K?
It's a big number.
When I was in the military, we would hear about Fort Bliss.
So it could be a couple things.
You know, pure speculation.
One, you know, hey, if I was the market, I would say these handful of theories.
One, look over here.
Something's going on to El Paso.
And then do it from Virginia, Fort Belvo, or whatever.
You use a Fort Benning and then go there.
But put all the attention here, guys.
Look over here, everybody, El Paso.
Quietly do the mission from somewhere else.
It's pretty strategic to do that, right?
Okay, 28,700 to 30,000.
No, you were right.
Soldiers.
90.
You were right.
90,000.
What is a 90,000, Tom?
When you count everybody together in terms of families, soldiers, and 90K.
That's a lot.
That's a good size base.
So that's one.
Two, is there some equipment they have there that they're using to go to Iran or do something that they don't want anybody to know about?
Maybe.
I don't know.
Jeffrey Epstein Files Revealed00:14:54
Remember how low-key Trump said something five days ago.
He said, just remember what we did with Venezuela.
We worked on it for four months and then all of a sudden we did it when people forgot about it.
Now, who knows what they're doing there?
Next is, you know, this Epstein story is coming out and getting the attention of TV, everybody talking about it.
This is a pretty good distraction right there.
Okay.
Maybe something there to confuse the audience.
I don't know.
I just think there's a lot of, you know, weird things.
For somebody to shut down an airport for that many days and you only did it for two days when 3,600 people died.
There's got to be something going on here that is above our pay grade.
And I guess Peter gave us the best insight on this.
It was a very hero insight Peter gave us.
All right, let's go to the next one.
Help and Dome time.
How close y'all you guys follow on the Epstein files?
Are you following any of it?
A little bit?
You have some thoughts on it?
Let me cover a couple of it.
All right.
We have to do it anyway.
We have to cover it because a couple of things came out.
Okay, so two stories.
One is Trump told Palm Beach Office, Chief, thank goodness you're stopping Epstein.
Called Jelaine Maxwell evil in 06.
Phone call, FBI document.
This is New York Post.
Rob, is that a video or what is it that you have here?
This is from the actual Epstein files.
The highlighted portion talks about Trump contacting, I believe his name was Michael Ryder, which was the chief of police for Palm Beach Police Department.
They were the ones investigating the 2006 charges against Epstein.
So what does it say in there that you're highlighting?
Trump says Maxwell was Epstein's operative.
She is evil.
And to focus on her, Trump was one of the very first people to call when people found out that they were investigating Epstein.
This is from October 18th of 2019, an interview of, I believe, Michael Ryder, who was the police chief in Palm Beach.
He was a police chief of Palm Beach, and he was a top cop from 01 to 09.
And the future president was one of the very first people to call when people found out that authorities were investigating Epstein for sex with girls as young as 14, whom he had hired to give him massages.
Thank goodness you're stopping him.
Everyone has known he's been doing this.
Trump was quoted as telling Peter on the call, adding that he got the call, he got the hell out of the uh, out of there on one occasion when he was around Epstein while teenagers were present.
Ryder recounted that Epstein donated $40,000 to the department for the purchase of a machine to review security footages, cut a $90,000 check to buy a fingerprinting machine around the first, around the time his first victim came forward and gave more than others to police scholarship fund for children.
Tom, how do you process this information?
So, you know, what's really interesting, either Trump is crazy like a fox or, you know, forgot.
How would you, with all the accusation on Trump, if I had this letter that was out there, unless this was classified, but this appears to be a garden variety summary of an interview you would do with the police.
And if I'm Trump, why don't I put this out five years ago?
Guys, I thought he was a creep.
I said he thought it was a creep.
And by the way, go take a look at my interview I did with the police.
What do you think?
Yep.
You think he forgot?
I don't think he forgot, or do you just hold it?
But there's been so much heat and he wants us to go away.
Why didn't he play this card earlier unless the FBI as part of the Epstein investigation classified the document?
Because this was a police, local police interview with Trump, right?
That's what they showed it as.
So did during the, what was it, the 2014 or whatever it was, when Epstein's deal was cut and the investigation was, did they classify it and he couldn't put it out?
Okay, so you're thinking that's why.
Luke, why are you at with this?
What would you do?
Well, if that's me, I would say go back and look at the records of the phone call I made in 06.
It's documented.
I've been saying this for a while.
This only makes him look good.
It's not like this makes him look bad.
It makes him look very good.
It's like I told you so, Trump.
Yeah, I don't really have a strong feeling on it.
My question is kind of like, why are we getting this now, right?
You can find a clip of Cindy McCain saying, I think at a Council on the Council on Foreign Relations event a decade ago, we all knew what he was doing, he being Epstein.
And so why now?
I'm always, you know, and it's all awful.
It's very hard to read, to be honest.
And so I haven't read a lot of it.
So, but like, why are we getting this now?
I don't know.
Maybe it's just time.
Maybe it's just time for it to come out.
Maybe it's part of a bigger plan.
I don't know.
Rob, has he tweeted about this?
There it is.
That's the clip right there.
Play that clip, Rob.
Epstein was hiding in plain sight.
We all knew about him.
We all knew what he was doing.
But we had no one that was, no legal aspect that would go after him.
They were afraid of him.
For whatever reason, they were afraid of him.
Plain sight.
Unbelievable that the whole market knew about it.
Brandon, you look like you want to say something.
Yeah, I mean, that's a great point that Tom brings up.
Like, why wouldn't he bring it up?
For example, when Elon Musk said what he said about Trump last summer, like the peak moment of Trump having a reason to defend himself, or during when the Wall Street Journal article came out, I think, when he sued them, was that Wall Street Journal that came out saying that he had the letter?
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
So that would have been a great time for it.
Before it was written.
The Elon Musk tweet would have been a great time for it.
And Trump has a sharp memory.
So, you know, like, I would think that this would be top of mind for him, like, remembering, oh, yeah, I called the police and reported this.
So that is super weird.
But I hate the story because it's so annoying.
You get like one drip every couple of months.
That's crazy, but it doesn't give you anywhere close to the bullshit.
The pressure has never been this high, Brandon.
I know.
Yeah.
The pressure to leak it has never been this high.
Peter.
Look, look, the problem I have with Trump's credibility is there are so many things that I know that he lies about that I just never can give him the benefit of the doubt given his track record.
But it's not just Trump.
I mean, I think everybody that had anything to do with Epstein has an incentive to lie about their relationship.
You know, so what else would you expect?
I mean, no, everybody wants to distance themselves from him.
Everyone wants to claim, oh, I knew he was a creep.
He was horrible.
I stayed away.
But obviously, that's not the case.
There were a lot of people that had very cozy relationships with Epstein, whether they were involved in any of these alleged activities or not.
But they don't even care because it's appearances that get you in trouble.
So you have to basically put as much distance between yourself and Epstein as you possibly can.
And I think in order to do that, a lot of people end up lying about it.
And I know what happens from personal experience with government is first they lie and then they lie again to cover up the fact that they lied the first time.
And so I'm sure that that's going on.
And we're not getting the real story with respect to Epstein.
And here you go, Howard Ludnick, of course.
Because he lied about his relationship.
And then when it comes out that he lied, then, okay, what does he do again?
Well, he lies some more.
Let me justify it.
Play the clip.
I think you understand the root of concern here.
It's the way you described very emphatically your first encounter with him in his apartment.
Said you were disgusted, would never have any contact with him again.
Did you, in fact, make the visit to Jeffrey Epstein's private island?
I did have lunch with him as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation.
My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies.
I had another couple with they were there as well with their children, and we had lunch on the island.
That is true for an hour, and we left with all of my children, with my nannies, and my wife all together.
We were on family vacation.
We were not apart to suggest there was anything untoward about that in 2012.
I don't recall why we did it, but Mr. Secretary, again, as I said, there's thoughts.
Well, I mean, I think prior to that, he had said he had no encounter with Epstein.
And so then when it came out that he was there, now he had to admit that he was there.
But look, I mean, was he there for an hour?
I mean, what he's on his yacht, he happens to be going by Little St. James, and he pulls in and out, and in an hour, he's already gone.
I mean, it takes probably almost an hour just to dock and get your boat out of there.
I mean, I don't know.
I think that maybe he didn't do anything wrong initially, but he didn't even want to admit to even a superficial relationship because even that was going to be potentially toxic.
So I think everybody's instinct is just to lie about anything, any connection they had.
And then if they get caught in a lie, they want to lie some more to minimize it.
So I don't know that we'll ever find out the truth because none of these guys wants to tell the truth.
Yeah.
So, Rob, there's another clip, Rob, if you can play this one here.
This is Rocana naming the six people that they finally mentioned yesterday.
And one of them, the last name he mentions, I'm not surprised, but one of them created a ton of controversy.
Go ahead, Rob.
Congressman Massey and I went to the Department of Justice to read the unredacted Epstein files.
We spent about two hours there, and we learned that 70 to 80 percent of the files are still redacted.
In fact, there were six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason.
When Congressman Massey and I pointed this out to the Department of Justice, they acknowledged their mistake, and now they have revealed the identity of these six powerful men.
These men are Salvatore Navora, Zorab Michelad, Leopig Leonor, Nikola Caputa, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulyam, CEO of Dubai Ports World, and billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner.
Okay, Rob, so we know about Leslie Wexner.
He's the Victoria Secret guy.
He's the guy that gave, gifted Epstein for no reason, the biggest private residence in Manhattan.
I think it's 54,000 square feet, 77 million bucks, give or take price point.
So that we know, that there's something going on over him.
That's not a guy necessarily you trust.
But how about the other fellow, Rob?
What do we know about the other fellow?
What do we know about him and what was he involved in?
Was there any messages, exchanges that you can share as well?
Yes.
So this is Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulyam, CEO of DP World.
I believe they're a logistics company based in the Middle East.
And then this was the email that I found right here, where Epstein is emailing him regarding a torture video of some sort back in April of 2007.
Torture video?
Yes.
This down at the bottom.
Where are you?
Are you okay?
I love the torture video.
That was Epstein 2, reportedly, according to the reports to the Sultan.
So he loved the torture video that the Sultan sent him?
That's what it was.
Or showed him.
Yes.
That's the direction of this communication.
What other exchanges are there, Rob?
I'd have to go back and look.
Was there one that said, you know, the girl was all about business, not about...
Yes.
So have you guys seen this one or no?
Yeah.
So apparently he emails him and it says, listen, the girl you introduced me to was more about business, not about.
We almost can't even read it to you, but we'll let you see it for yourself.
Zoom in.
Let me find the actual term here.
Yeah.
So anyway, so this one's on the list as well.
Tom, do you think as they're getting to this point right there?
Yes, Soleiman responded according to the email channel after several attempts for several months.
We managed to meet in New York.
There's a misunderstanding.
She wanted some business.
While I only wanted some, you know, you can read the next sex.
Praise Allah.
There are still people like you, Epstein replied.
Can you just praise Allah like you who don't want to do business, just want to go?
Wow.
Do you think the pressure is so much that it's at the tipping point that they have to show?
Because two days ago, they allowed Anna Pani, Paulino Luna, and a bunch of the representatives to come in and take a look.
You can't record anything.
You can't take your phone.
And they all came out disgusted.
The things they read about Jelaine Maxwell.
I think Jelaine Maxwell was in a hearing yesterday or two days ago being questioned.
And the way she answered things.
Yeah, which one is this, Rob?
This is where she pleads the fifth when questioned.
Go for it.
Ms. Maxwell, were you a close friend and confidant of Jeffrey Epstein?
I would like to answer your question, but on the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer this question and any related questions.
My habeas petition is pending in the southern district of New York.
I therefore invoke my right to silence under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Okay, you can pause it right there.
By the way, there are people that are calling for the resignation of Howard Lutnick for the story that he told.
The White House is saying, we're not doing anything.
We're staying with the guy.
So they're keeping him.
And then at the same time, while this is taking place, you know, one of the stories comes out by Joe Rogan about Epstein.
Rob, if you want to pull that up, that's probably the funniest one.
He's talking to Bobby Kennedy's wife, and Epstein's name comes up.
And apparently there was a moment where he wanted to meet with Rogan.
This is Rogan's response.
Go for it.
I'm in the files for not going.
Huh?
Yeah, I'm in the files for not going.
Jeffrey Epstein was trying to meet with me.
Oh, I did see that.
Yeah, and I was like, what?
No, thanks.
Yeah.
Aren't you glad?
Yeah, but I would have never went anyway.
It's like, it's not even a possibility that I would have went.
Especially after I Googled him.
I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
This is like 2017.
One of my guests was trying to get me to meet him.
I was like, bitch, are you high?
What the fuck are you talking about?
For what reason would you?
What would be if I was a guy who was like sucking up to the rich and powerful, if I was really interested in hanging out with rich and powerful people?
In The Files For Not Going00:03:22
You know, it's crazy.
That's so crazy.
But, yeah, some people.
Some people get intoxicated by being in a circle of rich and powerful people, even if they're not.
This is a little weird.
I don't even have to do that.
You know why this is a little weird?
Why is this a little weird?
Not for Joe, but I mean, respectfully, I think Bobby's talked about that.
He was on a flight with Epstein a couple times with the kids, if I'm not mistaken, Rob.
So, you know, it's a very interesting conversation.
Now, listen, you know, a lot of people did stuff with Epstein on flights and different things.
Hey, I'm going to this.
Just the other day, we're going to D.C. to have a visit in D.C. Couple of the guys here that were going to the same event.
They're like, hey, can we jump on a private jet and go with you?
And we couldn't do it.
These are good guys.
So these types of things happen when you're going on business trips.
Can I hop on with you and do this?
But, you know, for Joe to say that and that was documented, that is the best way to be in the Epstein files.
I don't think you can be in the Epstein files in a better way.
There's so many people that are in the Epstein files.
I mean, I'm in there a few times.
I mean, but it's got nothing to do with Epstein.
There's just so many documents.
What do they say about you?
They were just, somebody was just referencing me.
They saw me on television or they read something I wrote.
It's just in the email.
You are in the Epstein files, Peter Schiff.
Congratulations to you.
But there are a lot of people.
Just starting to see it.
What does it say?
This is the Department of Justice's website where you can search by terms in the Epstein library, and there are four references to Mr. Schiff.
References.
So they're communicating about Peter.
That's what they're saying.
I'm sure they're saying how wrong he's about the market all the time.
So at least they were complimentary about that part.
Okay, so Tom, I'll give you the final thoughts on the Epstein story and then we'll move on.
I think this is getting hot enough that it finally the dam has to break.
You know, we had something like this happen in nation's history before.
Not maybe not like Epstein with a number of people, but it was the Watergate files and the Watergate tapes.
And when Nixon resigned, finally, all these tapes were released.
And we heard Nixon and Kissinger saying things about China.
We heard Nixon saying things about senators.
We heard people that were in, you know, two House of Representatives that were in the Oval Office talking down to other congressmen and congresswomen while they spoke to the president and didn't know what was there.
But finally, the dam broke and it all came out and everything came out and it was impossible.
And so the nation got over it.
They said, okay, so Nixon's gone.
Ford's not going to get re-elected.
He was never elected, but Ford's not going to win the election, was the assumption.
Chuck Coulson was in prison, Gordon Liddy, Ehrlichman, JR Haldeman, Archibald Cox was the special prosecutor.
All of a sudden, there was no more questions.
You're old enough to remember this.
Remember this?
It just stopped because we're all like, okay, so now we know what happened.
And I think what's about to happen here is what is there left to protect?
So much.
Right?
There's so much stuff to protect.
But there's more Bill Gates, but it's like, okay, who's just like Bill Gates?
Who's just like this guy?
Who's just like this guy?
Stock Market Bubble Worries00:06:05
And I think the dominoes are going to fall.
I had a last night, I was asked, funny thing, I was got home in the kitchen.
I was talking to Kim and Brooke because Epstein things is everywhere.
Even Brooke, just casually looking in the news for F1 testing, runs into Epstein stories.
And she's no, seriously, she's asked, F1 is doing preseason testing.
She says, there's all this news about Epstein.
And I said, look, it goes like this.
Right now, if everyone is released that's in here, it's like everyone's got a Mexican standoff and a mutual suicide pact right now because you know you're in there.
I know I'm in there.
I'm talking about a bunch of people together.
If they break your name and you bring me into it, I'm breaking this.
So it's like, you know what I'm saying?
All these people are in like this mutual suicide pact.
And if that goes down, I think we lose probably 40% of the capacity to fund elections in this country, which maybe isn't a bad thing.
But meanwhile, while all this is going on, I think we're on the verge of a major economic crisis and we're focusing our attention in the wrong place.
How did I know you would get it all the way back?
Yes, the story is.
And I think the main goal of the Trump administration is just to try to blow more air into the bubble and hope it doesn't pop until he's out of Dodge.
But I don't think that's going to work.
I think there's too many holes in this bubble right now.
Let me go through this work.
Here's Scott Besant.
Rob, if you want to pull up Scott Besant.
Peter Schiff is obviously a massive fan of Trump and Scott Besson.
If you want to pull this one up about what Scott had to say is going to be happening in 2026, go ahead, Rob.
What kind of growth are you expecting for 2026?
We're looking at Friday's market rally.
The Dow was up 1,200 points, 2.5%.
The NASDAQ was up 1%.
Even gold was up.
And when you look at year-to-date, actually, gold has outperformed stocks.
Gold up 14% year-to-date, the SP 500 up 1%.
Tell us your expectations for growth.
And also a word on gold.
What's driving that move as well?
Well, Maria, what I can tell you is what we are seeing the cyclical components of the market expand.
So that's why the Dow hit a new high.
But importantly, the Russell, which is a small cap index, has hit a new high.
We're seeing the industrial sectors under the market hit new highs.
And in my 35, 40 years on Wall Street, that tells me Wall Street is telling you that Main Street is about to prosper.
We are seeing a big cyclical recovery.
The president's agenda set the table in 2025, and now the American people are going to benefit in 26.
And that's what the stock market is telling us.
Stock market lives in the future, and I think we're going to have very strong economic growth and very strong job gains and very strong real income growth.
Tom, do you agree?
Here's what I think.
I see what he's saying.
I think the case shape, what we're seeing right now, is going to continue.
Right now, you are seeing layoffs.
Some people were blaming AI.
I don't buy into all of that.
I think some of it is AI washing, and they're moving and they're making.
And by the way, it was UPS and FedEx was like 54% of the total layoffs are coming from transportation.
That was coming out of all the holiday where they have extra drivers and extra things going on on holiday deliveries.
And we've also kind of popped the bubble on that.
Here's what I think.
The consumer is not going to be the recipient because they've got more paychecks and because or higher paychecks and they can go do this.
They're $1.28 trillion in credit card debt right now.
Assuming that stats correct, I share your skepticism about a lot of these stats.
This is number one.
But those that have major indexes on managed IRAs and 401ks, the consumers are going to benefit there because those balances are going to go up.
Inflated dollars, yes.
And on Main Street, I think that's what you're going to see.
And in terms of Wall Street, you're seeing it right now.
You're seeing that what's happening with the Dow and you're seeing what's happening with the PE.
Yeah, first of all, whenever Scott Besson talks, you're not getting honest opinion.
He's there to basically pump up Trump.
And so whatever he's asked, he's going to spin it as well.
I'm not fully on that page.
So that's not my opinion.
Yeah, that is my opinion.
And you'll notice that he conveniently sidestepped the point that Maria made about gold and how gold is up so much more than stocks.
He didn't even want to go there to acknowledge the fact that stocks are actually falling in real value.
But the main reason that U.S. stocks are up is because everybody expects the Fed to create more money.
We're going to cut interest rates.
We're going to have more stimulus.
And that is why the markets are going up.
They're not going up because of a productivity boom or because it's forecasting a strong economy.
Stocks are going up for the same reason they went up under Biden, because we're blowing more air into the bubble.
They're looking to the Fed.
If the Fed was doing the right thing, which would be to raise interest rates, which is what they should be doing, they prematurely stopped raising rates.
They're too low.
And if the Fed continued to shrink its balance sheet, which is what it should be doing instead of expanding it, the stock market would be collapsing.
Luke.
Yeah, I think he's kind of staying on point with the Trump administration in terms of, hey, do I like him?
Yes is the short answer.
I like him.
I think he very much knows what he's talking about.
I do think the nature of his role is such that he has to be a bit of a politician.
And we've seen signs of that, right?
We sat down with Tucker in April of last year and said, hey, we have all the leverage against China.
I was like, nah, but that's not true.
And he has to know that.
There's other things he's kind of said here or there where he has to know.
He's been in markets 40 years.
He knows.
He worked for Soros for 15 years.
He knows markets.
Helping Companies Filter Job Applicants00:03:40
So there have been things he has said where you kind of, as a market practitioner, you go, he doesn't really believe that, but I get the seat he's in, you know, there's an element where he has to sort of total line in the middle.
How hard is it to find a guy like that who can talk technical terms with anybody at the highest level, but also knows how to sit with media, get asked the tough questions, media trained, and be able to take the information that's technical and give it to the average person to understand when he needs to do that as well.
It's hard to do.
I think that part of it is hard to do.
I think he's kind of doing that, but I'm going to get to this next story.
I'm a fan.
Which is going to be a reflection of what's going on with the economy.
All right.
So story comes out.
Job hunters are so desperate that they're paying people to get hired and recruited.
And by the way, this is not a story from Inquire.
This is a story from Wall Street Journal.
So landing a white-collar job is getting so tough that candidates, not companies, are paying recruiters to match them with positions.
Through good economic times and bad recruiters have usually operated the other way around.
Companies pay them to find talent for tough, to fill positions.
Now, though, job seekers are hiring a new crop of what are called reverse recruiters to help them crack a competitive market.
Daniel Beharano, 36 years old, signed up for reverse recruiting service, a referral last year after receiving an email pitch from the company.
Refer's AI agent connected him with an executive at Golden, a volunteer management company, which was looking for platform engineer and data scientist.
Beharano got the offer after several interviews.
He then paid, referred 20% of his first month's pay once it landed in his bank account.
Tom, your thoughts on this?
So I think what's going on here is a couple of things going on.
Is it tougher to find a job?
Yes, in many sectors it is right now.
Is the job market tightening?
Yes, it appears to be.
And it may be worse in certain sectors.
It may be worse in certain geographies where you live.
So yes, it's good to have a Sherpa that's going to take you up to Everest and going to help you through it.
The other thing is that companies are having a horrible time trying to filter out incoming inquiries for jobs.
And it's hard to have yourself show up in that.
We see it from any of the clients at Bet David Consulting.
They talk about that.
There are so many bots and so many fake resumes.
I'll give you a real world example.
We put up a job opening for a business analyst, and we were inundated by a set of resumes that were coming from offering us people from a certain country, but there were brokers in the middle trying to offer them to us and saying, and we can help you with the H-1B.
That spam was on top of good candidates that we wanted to see, that we wanted to review, good quality people, citizens ready to work.
And so that's one of the reasons that Bet David Consulting, we built higher metrics to help filter that.
Right now, filter is the headline here.
It's not what they're talking about.
People are actually paying to get a company to help them filter in to find a job the same way that companies are willing to pay money for someone.
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
That's almost broken.
The system is broken.
Let me explain to you what this means.
This is like saying the market has changed so much because of female-driven AI that men create that women are paying men to go on a date with them.
Filtering the Job Market00:08:33
That's the best comparison I can make.
That's a good comparison.
That's a weird thing to happen.
Why do you think we're here?
Why do you think we're here?
Where people are paying for recruiters to place them at a company.
Well, look, there's no question that we have a weak labor market in the United States.
I mean, first of all, look at the data that came out last week.
Challenger reported the largest January announced layoffs since January 2009, where we were in the financial crisis, a great recession.
Look at the Joltz numbers that just came out.
There was a collapse in job openings.
So we have a weak labor market.
The only thing strong is inflation.
And, you know, you had the clip from Fox News with Bessett on there.
Well, I was on Fox and Friends not too long ago on a Saturday, and unfortunately, I'll probably never be on again because I went on and I told the truth about consumer prices and inflation.
And Trump went ballistic on Truth Social and just chastised Fox for having me on, said I was a jerk, said I was a loser, that I was just a Trump hater.
And they said, find the booker who put this jerk on.
And ever since then, nobody will return my emails at Fox News.
I think they got me completely banned from the network for speaking honestly.
You know, Trump actually said that I was wrong because I claimed that prices were going up when, according to Trump, they're going down.
They're going down massively.
So the cost of living, according to Donald Trump.
By the way, did you vote for him?
Well, I live in Puerto Rico, so it doesn't matter.
I voted for him.
So the only time I voted for him where it counted was the first time he ran in 2016.
I lived in Connecticut then, and I was able to vote, although he lost Connecticut.
Is this the tweet?
Why would Fox and Friends we can put on a stockbroker named Peter Schiff, a Trump-hating loser who has already proven to be wrong?
Either the show made a mistake or it's heading in a different direction.
He thinks prices are going up when, in fact, they're coming down.
Gasoline hit $199 yesterday in certain states, and it's big since Biden.
Other prices are almost down.
Biden caused the affordability crisis.
I'm fixing it along with everything else.
Much of it, like the border, is already fixed.
Check out the Booker.
But I actually encouraged all of my followers to vote for Trump over Harris.
So I probably got the president a lot of votes.
It's not like I have a small following.
A lot of people do pay attention to what I say.
And I encourage people.
In fact, I was a big Trump defender when all the lawfare was going out against him for January 6th and a lot of other things.
I completely supported Donald Trump when I thought he was in the right.
So I'm not just your typical Trump hater who's got Trump derangement syndrome.
The people who I think have Trump derangement syndrome are the people that support him no matter what, no matter what he does, no matter what lies he tells.
If you're just going to support him, you're the one that's deranged.
Luke.
Sorry, what was the original question again?
I apologize.
Job, job, people are paying people to get a job.
Yeah, I think ultimately, you know, Tom said something interesting about the H-1B, that these get flooded with the H-1B, and that was a huge political debate around.
And it's interesting, any, if you look, something I've observed at least, any time you have an economic policy floated in this country that looks to boost American wages, whether that be H-1B limits, whether that be border restrictions and deportations, et cetera, they don't get framed in economic terms.
Never.
They never, ever get framed in economic terms.
They always get framed in the media in social terms, in social justice terms.
And I'm the social justice guy, but if you had a fair and balanced media, they would say, here's the social justice angle.
And America, if we remove this many workers at H-1B or whatever, your wages as a graduating engineer from Cal or Stanford or the University of Michigan would go up over time by this much.
And if you were a laborer and there were this many deportations, over time, your wages would rise this much.
There's a reason why the media never frames the economic argument for these policies is people would vote for them.
And that's not what they want.
The powers that be want to cap wages.
These are methods they use to cap away.
So first, I think it's really interesting, Tom, your point on H-1Bs, that, okay, there are this flood.
End of the day, I add that H-1B to the graduating kids.
It tells me what the flow of funds, what you were highlighting, which is there's too much supply.
There's not enough demand for those kids, for those jobs, ultimately.
My point was, I'm sorry about it.
Give me one second.
My point was, think about how hard it is for us to find good candidates in the crowd because we have to get through the spam of these machines that are being run by brokers that are trying to throw H-1Bs when they see certain position titles.
Now think about the good person on the other end trying to find a job and break through that, who is now in a tightening job market where it's harder to find the jobs and saying, damn it, I need help to break through, Pat.
You know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to pay somebody to see if they can get me to the front of the line.
How do I get TSA PreCheck to get through the front of this line so these people can see me so I can get a job?
I think that the job search in the digital world is a little bit broken right now.
We just heard that half the traffic on the internet was bots, right?
And we're seeing the bots in our inbox where we're trying to find great candidates.
So I think there's a couple of things going on here between economy and availability of jobs, tightening market, but then how hard it is for us to filter out.
Brandon, you're 30 years old.
Your friends are looking for jobs, right?
You went to school.
You got a bachelor's and a master's in national security.
When you talk to your friends that are looking for jobs, what are they telling you?
Yeah, so a lot of people have really similar skill sets, like kind of cookie-cutter products of college.
And I think that's part of the problem too.
I mean, so like, you know, the range for somebody with an average degree is probably $60,000 to $85,000 for a job they're applying for.
And the skill sets are usually like liberal arts to something with math or STEM, STEM, you'll end up doing better.
But this is a cross-current of so many weird things.
Like it's such a weird situation, but I think the things that are causing it is things like distorting the economy with artificially low or high interest rates, somebody else being involved with that.
The zombie companies, silly companies that shouldn't exist do exist.
Companies that would exist if we weren't interfering in it don't exist yet.
The H-1B visas trying to hire cheap labor, right?
So all the illegal immigrants.
So a lot of, it's not one thing in particular, but it's all these things that are creating this like bizarre, backwards, dystopian situation.
So I mean, it's just a product of government being involved where it shouldn't be and not being involved where it should be.
Peter.
And certainly because of the massive subsidy that government provides to education.
I mean, we graduate a lot more people with liberal arts degrees than would graduate in a free market.
So we're putting these students into a job market that doesn't have jobs for what they just wasted taxpayer money studying for four or five years.
You know, if we had a free market in college, we wouldn't have all this student debt and we'd have much lower tuition.
And the only people that would go to college would be people who would actually benefit from the degree.
A lot of people would just get jobs right out of high school and maybe even not even go to high school.
And we might actually have quality jobs for those people to move into if the federal government or if the Fed didn't artificially suppress interest rates, if we didn't have savings that could finance capital investments.
So our whole economy has been screwed up by government intervention.
But I wanted to point out, you know, Donald Trump makes a big deal about cheap gas.
Well, oil prices are now up about 20% since they hit the lows.
All the oil stocks are hitting 52-week highs.
They're indicating that oil prices are going to rise.
And I think the one thing the president has been hanging his hat on, cheap gas, is going to go away.
I think by the time the midterm elections roll around, we're going to be looking at $80 to $100 a barrel oil, and everything else is going to be a lot more expensive.
So the story that inflation is dead and buried is going to be completely gone.
Inflation Returns00:14:31
And the box that the Republicans are going to be in, unfortunately, in the midterms, is they're going to be in the position of trying to lie to the public to convince them that a bad economy is good, whereas the Democrats are going to be able to be honest about how bad the economy is, and they're just going to lie that they're going to fix it.
So you say that.
But Peter, this is the question.
Then why is it that Trump's approval rating with the people that voted for him went up from 74% to 79%?
Well, his overall approval ratings are pretty weak.
No, with his face, with the people that voted for him, not overall, because overall could be mainstream media bashing him, negativity, anything and everything they can.
They're going to say negative things about him.
But why are the people that voted for him happier than when they voted for him?
Look, I think Trump voters really like Trump.
I think Trump is almost like a modern-day folk hero at this point.
And I think the fact that he almost died, he survived that assassination attempt, I think really raised his level in the eyes of the public to that kind of folk hero.
So I think that people who like the president just really like him.
And they listen to him and they're thinking because he's basically sticking his thumb in the eye of the establishment.
He's telling them what they want to hear about shaking things up and about breaking.
Why else do you think they like him?
All that stuff is gibberish, right?
Specific results.
What happened to crime from a year ago?
Down 20%.
Murder.
What happened to the border?
Zero.
How important is security to them?
Yeah, I think there's a perception.
The perception is that.
No, no, that's not perception.
No, no, no.
There's two different things.
Perception is, hey, you're 6'9 with a 38-inch vertical leap.
My perception is you're going to score 30 points tonight.
And you play basketball.
The reality is you suck.
You score zero.
No, this is border went to zero, right?
So crime went down.
American people feel safer.
The world respects America again.
Well, I don't know that the world, I would disagree that the world respects America.
Oh, really?
No one's coming knocking on the door.
No, no, no.
That's all made up.
I mean, if the world was respecting America more, they would be that the fact that everybody is begging to make deals.
Look, the world is moving on from the United States.
Look at China.
I mean, China's trade with the U.S. is down substantially, but their trade with the rest of the world is up substantially to the point where they're exporting more now than they were before our tariffs.
So I think the world has less respect for the United States now than it did in the past.
But American voters, yeah, it may resonate with them.
I think they like the fact that Trump is pushing back against the political correctness movement that was kind of spearheaded by the Democrats with the woke agenda.
And I think there has been a cultural backlash against that.
And I think that has been a positive of Trump in pushing back against that.
But yes, I think the U.S. is less respected.
In fact, look what Trump just did with Greenland.
I mean, basically threatening an ally that, hey, you know, if we can't make a deal on our terms to buy Greenland, we're going to invade.
We're going to send the U.S. military in there because nobody can stop us because we have this powerful military and we can do whatever we want.
I think that sent a very, very bad message to the rest of the world.
Even though Trump ultimately backed down from that, he contemplated it in public.
He actually talked about using our military to annex Greenland.
You know, that did not go over well.
Look at what's happening with Canada.
Look at our relationship with Canada.
You know, we're driving everybody closer to China, closer to Russia, because Trump is around the world.
You sound investigating every other group.
Respectfully, you sound like such a weak leader.
And you ran for president.
I'm not a weak leader.
Oh, wait a minute.
But wait a minute.
You sound like it because to me, you ran for president before.
I never ran for president.
I ran for Senate once.
Did you think about running for president or was there speculation or story or something?
Seriously, but I mean, I did run for U.S. Senate in 2010, but I didn't even win the Republican nomination, but I ran in the Republican primaries in the state of Connecticut for U.S. Senate.
Right.
But to me, when I'm listening to this, and this guy's sitting there going around, you know, presenting ideas that we've never had before.
A prior guy that was in there was doing what?
Nothing.
Are you kidding me?
Like for us to be protected and you position China in a way that people are sitting there saying, what's going to happen next with China?
We've driven people closer to China.
Other countries are developing relationships with China that they didn't have.
Look what's happening in South America.
Look at how much more popular, you know, they're building these deepwater ports in South America so that China can trade with this continent without having to go through Long Beach or San Pedro.
I mean, the United States is being pushed out, and they're going to be a lot closer to Canada.
Canada is our biggest trading partner, but they're going to end up doing a lot more business with China than Mexico is.
Yeah, I think you truly are underestimating the amount of things that these guys have done.
There's a reason why you go and CNN.
Well, I'll go to CNN.
I mean, CNN, nobody hates Trump more than CNN.
And CNN will tell you their Democrats are not for the Democratic Party right now.
They can't stand their policies.
They're the worst approval rating with their own base.
On the Republican side, CNN shows that people that voted for Trump are happier with them today than before.
For a guy like me that I'm seeing, a guy named, you know, Jimmy Carter gives up Panama.
It's like, it's okay.
Let him keep it.
Let him take care of this.
And then now he's sitting there saying, wait a minute, China can go out there and do damage to us at Panama Canal.
We've got to figure out a way to take control of this.
It's building the relationship there for us to be protected.
China's getting into Venezuela.
He's coming closer to say, you can do what you want to do there.
Don't touch the Western Hemisphere.
I feel safer with the guy at the top that's negotiating like that.
I do.
And a lot of American people do as well, in many different ways.
You may have your, you know, be a little bit butthurt because of some things maybe, you know, that didn't go your way.
And I know sometimes you play the contrarian.
That's kind of your stick when you play that role.
Financially, I've never made this much money in my life.
I made so much money during the Trump presidency.
So I'm not talking my book.
Everything Trump is doing is making me richer.
And safer.
And safer.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, our government is very corrupt.
I mean, I know that from firsthand.
I mean, we have an extremely corrupt government even safe.
Let's be fair now.
Do you feel safer?
Honestly.
Well, I don't feel any different as far as that.
Where did you live before?
Well, I was living in Connecticut before Trump won.
I mean, I was living in Puerto Rico.
I was living in Puerto Rico during Carl.
Crime-ridden Fairfield County.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I haven't lived in Fairfield County since 2017.
I have a house.
Well, then you're not everybody.
You're not everybody.
That's my point.
Let me explain to you.
You're not everybody, though, because the average American feels safer.
Maybe.
No, it's not maybe.
No, no, it's not.
You can't say maybe.
Polls show that everybody in America trusts Republicans to protect the border more than Democrats.
You live in Puerto Rico.
This is pure data that's coming out of the country.
We'll see.
Look, it's not like, not like I like the Democrats.
I was probably one of the biggest critics of Biden out there, more so than most Republicans.
But, you know, I criticize bad policies regardless of what policy, what you're promoting them.
You're cherry-picking policy.
No, no.
Well, no, I just charge bad policy.
No, no, but you can do that.
And that's the problem.
And I mainly focus on economic policy because that's really where my area of expertise is.
And so when I see bad economic policy, and look at what the president is advocating.
He wants to control credit card interest rates at 10%.
When Harris talked about price controls on groceries, oh, she's a socialist.
But Donald Trump wants to control the price of credit cards.
That's not socialism.
And in fact, if you look at his industrial policy, I mean, he does not want the free market to allocate capital.
He wants to pick the winners and losers himself.
He wants to decide what companies and what industries should get capital and then use the power of government to direct capital.
I don't know if that's fair in credit cards because what the president did is he came out and floated that.
And there was a lot of response, including here from us, that said, wait a minute, do you want to really get in and do that?
But it was part of a broader narrative that he was on for that whole week about affordability, that we have to do some things for affordability for the American consumer.
Cut government spending.
And then he backed down on the credit card stuff because he got feedback from Jamie Dimon and others like this.
But guess what he forced?
He forced a dialogue on the subject and he forced a dialogue on accountability.
Now, if you look at all the policies across, I'm a little shocked.
I would love to hear you say, you know, on safety and the border, I think he did a good job.
My area of expertise is economics.
I'm really not happy about it.
And I've been very vocal about it.
But it's like you got to be capable of giving the credit on something that's benefiting a lot of Americans and safety at the border and murders are down.
Those are facts.
Those are not reviews.
Those aren't stats that are going to get revised.
But the affordability problem is a function of the big, beautiful bill.
I mean, the fact that Donald Trump signed on to a legislation.
Affordability started.
I got to stop you.
Affordability started by your own words.
What happened after COVID when the Biden administration pumped all that money in there and it was a good idea?
That started under Trump.
Trump signed on to all the COVID bailouts and all the stimulus.
The Fed slashed.
It was tripled under Biden.
You've got to be fair with it.
The same thing would have happened under Trump.
Had Trump won re-elected.
Biden was the president.
It could have should have.
And that was a lucky.
Biden was the president.
That was a lucky break for Trump because now he could blame everything on Biden.
Had Trump won, it would have been the same inflation.
It was the same policies.
Look at what they did with the Big Beautiful Bill.
I don't know.
You can't balance credit with criticism on certain policies.
All they did was they cut taxes on tips.
They cut taxes on overtime, cut taxes on Social Security.
These are highly inflationary tax cuts.
They don't grow the economy.
Government spending, meanwhile, increased.
All of the Biden spending was preserved under Trump and increased.
It's fine.
They had an opportunity to cut some of the Biden spending, and they didn't cut any of it.
They increased it.
Yeah.
So you know what's crazy?
You know, like last week we had this guy on Jared Moscovich, who's a liberal.
He's a Democrat.
He's not a Trump guy.
But you know what he was capable of doing?
He was capable of saying, these are the things I like that he does.
These are the things I'm fully against.
You lose credibility when it's like, nah, I can't give him credit here or there.
For us, I sat there and I said, I don't know if I want to put the 10% credit card limit there, but I like the fact that he called Elizabeth Warren.
And at least he's willing to reach to the other side of the aisle.
And Elizabeth Warren's like, holy shit, he called me.
What did he say?
He asked me for advice.
Really?
Well, I'm not going to give you credit for quoting a ridiculous proposal like government fixed price.
But he doesn't understand why that's.
First time in a long time that it's good that somebody is the Epstein files, what do we call it here?
The biggest flipping fumble of this administration, biggest F up on what you did.
We're comfortable saying that, but you lose credibility.
It's like, no, Ask how many millions of people that live by the border are happy what the hell is going on with their kids are playing outside.
Go ahead and ask how they feel.
Go call the people that live in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, and San Diego and ask, how do you feel when the kids are playing outside today versus a year and a half ago, two years ago?
Ask them.
Ask the stories of people that were worried about what the hell is going to happen when my wife's going to work, when my mother's going to work.
See what they tell you.
Not everything is money.
There's a bunch of different things that you got to do.
See what it looks like when he works on a World Economic Forum.
Everybody stops and is watching this guy speaking and Newsom goes up on stage who's going to be the candidate that's going to be opposing him on the other side, tries to make fun of his own country that he's representing.
Absolutely embarrassing for somebody to go out there and do that.
So for me, on the highest stage, I'm proud that he's negotiating on our behalf.
I don't ever give somebody a job as an executive when you hire, and I expect 100% of perfect decisions.
I don't make 100% perfect decisions when somebody listens to my company, but you're trusting my instinct.
And my instinct is if I have somebody in the boardroom that's going to sit there and negotiate on my behalf, I don't think there's anybody in America that would have done a better job of negotiating on our behalf than this guy.
What is he negotiating?
What are you referring to?
What is he negotiating?
What is he negotiating?
What are you actually thinking about?
Are you not following what's going on?
What is he negotiating?
What are people listening to and watching and they're seeing others?
Every one of these guys.
You're talking about trade deals that you think he's negotiating?
So you're saying Biden negotiated better?
You're saying Obama negotiated better with people?
You don't need to negotiate better.
You think Biden or Obama negotiated better with Venezuela?
What do you think they negotiated?
What did they do?
You're talking about trade deals.
I'm not talking trade deals.
But the best thing to do is just eliminate our tariffs and bring them to zero.
It doesn't matter what the rest of the world does.
The best policy is free trade.
Allow Americans to freely trade with anyone they want.
There's nothing that needs to negotiate.
But the speech that he made at the Economic Forum backfired.
He went out there and claimed that the whole global economy only works because of America.
That if it wasn't for America buying everything on credit that the world produces, that the world economy would collapse.
As if they would have nothing to do with all their factories if they weren't making the goods available to Americans.
America does not drive the global economy.
Global Economy's Caboose00:14:57
We're the caboose.
We get pulled along.
The power of the economy is production.
The world can produce goods.
It doesn't need us to consume those goods.
They're perfectly capable of consuming their goods.
Really?
It doesn't need us to consume those goods.
No, wow.
Of course not.
Because we're 31 trillion reasons.
By the way, I am so glad we invited you today on the podcast.
And by the way, Rob, did we invite or did Peter say he's in town to be here?
But you invited me before.
And then you asked me to pay you for private jet.
I said, I'm not paying you for a private jet.
I'm going to come by myself.
No problem.
But I am so glad you're here today.
I'm so glad you're here today.
And a market gets to hear you because you still can't find yourself to give credit to what this guy has done.
Well, you're on whatever he's done.
It has nothing to do with, okay, you know, is the stuff he's done on the border good or bad?
The bigger macro stuff overshadows it.
And when we end up with a total socialist Democrat in 2028, because of how horrible the economy is, whatever good things were done are going to be erased by that.
I mean, the bigger picture is much broader than some of the things that he's done that are good.
And I've given him credit along the way for things that I thought he was right.
But the bigger picture stuff, the more important stuff is so wrong.
And again, for you to misunderstand the fact that it's above security and safety.
I'm sorry.
How safe are we going to be?
What is above safety and security?
12 to 15 million people came here last four years.
You don't live in America.
Wait a minute.
You don't live in America to know what that feels like.
You live in Puerto Rico.
Where border is part of America.
But it's not the same as living under the border.
It's not out there.
You guys don't know what the border is.
What do you mean?
We're a Spanish country.
What border do you have?
What border do you have?
We're an island, but I mean.
The average person sat in America last four years saying, what the hell is going on to crime?
All right.
And you can't sit there and say, what happened to crime?
Listen, there is nothing we do if we're not safe.
Nothing.
The brain doesn't work if it's not safe.
If I can't breathe, I don't think about how the stock market is doing.
If I can't have oxygen right now, I don't say, hey, I'm about to die.
Can you tell me what Bitcoin's at?
Where does go at?
Because I don't give a shit about oxygen.
We're safe for the first time in many years.
That's very important to the average American making $60,000, not to guys like us worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
To us, we're going to be safe no matter what.
For me, if the average guy doesn't feel safe, that's got a wife, husband, kids, that are willing to go out and play in a regular public park.
What the hell does America look like?
I mean, you got to give a little bit of credit with this guy some for America be the safe.
This is what the average person looks at first.
It's not about where comes everything else.
Look, if on a broader scheme of things, if I think the policies are wrong and we're headed for an economic crisis that are going to get blamed on the Republican Party, they're going to get blamed on capitalism.
They're going to get blamed on everything that people believe that Trump stands for, but he doesn't.
And the problems predate Trump.
I mean, Trump was part of it when he was president during his first term, but we have been kicking the can down the road for multiple administrations of both parties.
Everybody makes the problems worse and everybody hopes that it doesn't collapse on their watch.
Well, we're in very grave danger of it blowing up now under Trump's watch.
And the things that he's done that are positive are going to disappear beneath that problem.
Why, though?
Why, though?
Why?
Because when you're looking at a massive collapse in the dollar and consumer prices soaring like we've never seen before in this country, when you're looking at widespread shortages and empty shelves and rolling blackouts, because the dollar has collapsed and we can no longer afford to import all the goods that the rest of the world produces.
And when there's an economic boom that's taking place outside the United States in the emerging markets, because the world is no longer burdened with having to support the U.S. economy, when the world can now consume what it produces and invest its savings domestically instead of loaning itself.
Explain to me why all these countries and companies said they're going to invest trillions of dollars in America.
They said that because Donald Trump wants to hear that.
That's what you tell Donald Trump.
But wait a minute.
How come we've never seen that before?
No, no, no.
This gets back to the whole reversal of Main Street versus Wall Street because when you think about it, what has been the losers versus winners?
Since the China productivity miracle, what did we do?
We sent jobs and factories to China.
We brought consumer goods in here, right?
We sent them the dollars.
They take the dollars.
They reinvest them in our markets, and that was the cycle that it's broken down.
I think part of why we're seeing these companies that are moving to invest, and there's a couple different CEO surveys have come out and said exactly what you said, Patrick, which is there's not only is it increasing, but the number of global CEOs looking to spend their most, the biggest chunk of their global capex dollar in America.
If you are going to reverse the trade flows of the last 50 years, you have to reverse the physical flows.
In other words, you need to bring some of the capacity back here.
You need to, and yes, that's inflationary, and that's just going to be part of the price of admission.
Maybe some of that will be offset with productivity with AI.
Who knows?
I don't know.
But ultimately, I think that it's a hugely bullish thing for the U.S.
And I think that's part of the reason why you're seeing these companies say, all right, Trump came out and said the old deal's off.
Like in every way, shape, or form, globalism's dead as it's been defined.
We heard that over and over.
Okay, then we're going to be more regionalist.
And that means the, you know, the, in this, we, the United States is sort of in the position of Europe after World War II.
Except we didn't get our factories bombed out.
We got them shipped overseas by a trade deal.
What did Europe, what were growth rates in Europe after World War II from 1945 to 65?
They exploded higher.
Why did we this exporting of jobs going overseas?
Who started it?
Nixon.
Clinton.
Gold standard.
Nixon.
I mean, it was a 40-year trend, right?
When you really tie back to what triggered it, once the United States went off the gold standard in 1971, it triggered a set of incentives that basically, once we made the dollar the dollar became the reserve currency rather than gold, we suddenly had to run the deficits to supply the world the dollars.
And to do that, we had to offshore this stuff to create the deficits, to supply the dollars.
And it sort of looks, it sort of worked for a time.
Nixon doing that.
We weren't exactly winning the Cold War in 1971.
No.
And so when we did that, that was a huge Trump card that Kissinger played.
It was a case of, hey, the Soviets are beating us in a lot of ways.
They've got way more oil, way more materials.
But by playing that card and setting up the petrodollar, we were able to print dollars for oil and commodities, which is easier than lifting it out of ground than the Soviets were doing.
We win the Cold War.
In a perfect world, when the Berlin Wall came down in 89, we would have sat down, had another monetary conference in 89, like a Bretton Woods, and said, okay, Berlin Wall comes down, and here's the new world order.
We're going to meet and we're going to say, here's what the monetary system is going to look like.
Here's the new multinational organizations, or maybe we just continue them, right?
The IMF, WTO, whatever we were, you know, UN, et cetera.
But we didn't do that.
Instead, in 89, we decided to pursue a unipolar moment in history, which is now clearly ending.
And it's in our interest to end it, by the way, because it has hollowed us out too much in the other direction.
But we now are going to be able to get to the point where we're going to be able to do it.
This is the question I'm going to do.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to come to you.
My concern is the following.
Okay, if I was in the White House when Nixon was, would we have gone off the gold standard?
I don't know.
Was that a good decision?
I don't know.
I'm 60%.
No, it wasn't a good decision.
40%, I don't know, right?
The triangular diplomacy, that we kind of look at it and say, guys, Soviet, if these guys keep getting stronger, let's help China.
China moved up, whatever.
We helped them from number 10, number 11, number 9 to now number 2.
And now Russia has got a smaller GDP than Canada.
Canada's at 2.3.
I think Russia's at 2.1, some number like that.
So we destroyed, I mean, essentially, we kind of brought them down and put them in their place.
But then we built China.
Now, finally, a guy comes in and is like, listen, guys, I'm sorry.
All these deals you guys have had with the previous presidents, we got to shake things up.
That's a massive shake-up.
By the way, you know what's hard about that massive shake-up?
You know what's the chance of succeeding?
Do you know what's the chance of Trump succeeding with this massive shake-up?
It's not great.
It's not, it's not.
What's your opinion on what the I'll write your number down?
Hang on.
I'll write my number down.
I want to hear your thoughts.
Okay.
What do you think is the percentage of him being number 16?
Conceding that success might look different for you and me, this shift is so monumental.
The shift of it going well, I would say it's under 50%.
I'm at 5%.
It's so hard.
It's very hard.
You can do that.
But you know what the problem is for me?
So what do we do?
Don't do it.
Don't try to get it.
Well, and it's what you always have to look at what's the other side if we don't do it, right?
If we don't do it, we know where we're going, right?
Admiral Michael Mullen, who was a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2011, has this fascinating quote.
He said, the biggest threat to America is not our debt.
It's not weapons of mass destruction.
It's not terrorism.
It's not bioweapons.
Excuse me.
It's not bioweapons.
It's not terrorism.
It's our debt.
He said, we are borrowing money from China to build weapons to face down China using components made in China.
The U.S. military, for the last 15 years, has been saying as loudly as they could, we cannot source our own military without Chinese goods.
You are not a sovereign nation.
If you do not have a defense industrial base, you are not a sovereign nation.
It simply hasn't been marked to market yet.
And that started to be marked to market in COVID.
Remembering COVID, we're like, oh, we need all this PPE and mass.
And people look around and go, oh, it's all made in China.
And then in 2022, same kind of dynamic.
The head of the UN came out in, or excuse me, of NATO, Mark Rudy, came out in 2025, early last year, said the Russians, with their small GDP, are out-producing the entirety of NATO, including America, four to one.
Why?
Because they have an industrial base and we do not have a sufficient industrial base.
And so this is one of these national security questions.
What's that?
This is last year.
He said it last year.
They got a little bit of a labor manufacturing balance because of the five-year Ukraine war, too.
Yeah.
Oh, and they are measure their percent of investment on defense right now because they have a hot conversation.
No, This isn't percentage goods.
This is total goods.
How many do the Russians produce?
How many do the Americans produce?
The Russians outproduce four more tins of stuff, absolute numbers, than the U.S., and the U.S. can't produce it, and we can't produce it without the Chinese.
So part of what we're watching Trump, I think the why is so important anytime you're watching someone, anyone do anything, especially a Donald Trump.
And I think Donald Trump's why in doing this is the U.S. military's why in doing this, which is if we go down this path, the Chinese will make 100% of the U.S. military in 10 years, in five years.
And at that point, the United States is no longer a sovereign country.
Full stop.
End of the discussion.
What do you hear so often when people say, well, ultimately, the U.S. military backs the dollar?
Well, if the Chinese make the military that backs the dollar, what do we have?
We have zero.
Yeah, you have to recognize, though, the fact that we relied on the dollar's reserve currency status for decades.
That allowed us to hollow out our manufacturing base and supplant it with this service sector consumer credit-based economy that is harmful, but we've been living beyond our means for decades as a result of this.
And yes, the sooner it ends, the better, because the longer it takes, the worse it's going to be when we have to be confronted by reality.
But that is what is about to happen on not on our terms, on the world's terms.
They are going to move away from the U.S. dollar.
It's not going to be the reserve currency.
And so all of these, what you look at as virtuous things are going to reverse.
But the only way that we can prepare for a world where the dollar is no longer the reserve currency and we cannot live beyond our means is to start now dramatically shrinking the size of our government, which is incompatible with the economy that we need to build.
We need massive cuts to government spending.
Instead, we've had increased government spending.
We need dramatic increases in personal savings, which means we need much higher interest rates to encourage that so we can finance the investment.
And we actually need to get a handle on our debt.
I think we need to restructure it.
I think we actually need an organized default because we now have so much debt that we have built up that if interest rates were allowed to rise to a level that would actually encourage savings, the government would have to default anyway.
There is no way that we could service the debt that we have at the interest rates that we need and that we will have in a post-U.S. dollar reserve currency world.
Because if Americans can only borrow to the extent that we save, we have very little savings and everybody has massive debt.
So we have to have very high interest rates in this country, but we can't afford them.
And also, you know, you can't build products from strip malls.
We have a country that is built now to distribute imports.
Our biggest employers are like FedEx and UPS and Walmart and Amazon, right?
We don't build the stuff that we transport and that we consume.
And to do that is going to require significant investment in building factories and reconstituting supply chains in training workers.
This is a monumental task.
And everything we're doing right now is in the wrong direction.
I got it.
Okay, Rob, do you want to pull up the news that just came up with El Paso, why the reason took place?
Did you guys see this or no?
No.
Did you get an alert?
Apparently, El Paso, the reason why they shut down the airport was because there were drones flown over cartel drones.
And allegedly for that, Skies Ryan International Airport will close several hours Wednesday.
Go a little bit lower, Rob.
The FA on Wednesday morning abruptly closed temporarily.
Super Bowl Taxes00:07:21
There's no threat to commercial aviation.
The agency said in a statement, all flights will resume as normal.
New York Times Wednesday reported that the shutdown was due to military testing of counter-unscrewed aircraft, uncrewed aircraft, technology at Fort Pliss.
Moments later, U.S. Transportation Sean Duffy acted swiftly to address a cartel drone in insertion, adding that the threat has been neutralized.
Speaking at a news press conference, Wednesday report of Ronic Escobar, who represents El Paso and the U.S. Representative, said Duffy's explanation does not align with the information that we in Congress have been told.
Mexican President Scheinbaum has disputed the reason for shutdown, saying the country's government has no knowledge of such insurgent per the time.
So that's kind of the reports of both sides.
We still don't have a clue what the hell is going on.
Okay.
Army seems to be fretting about their flights tomorrow.
Okay, there you go.
So that's somebody just texted me saying that just happened.
Let me get to the next story here.
Next story I want to go to is a fun one.
Let's have some fun with this one here.
Boomerous ISIN is counting how much Sam Darnold makes and the Super Bowl champions or players make going to play the Super Bowl in San Francisco, and it's called the jock tax.
If you're not aware of it, this video is not going to want to make you go play in the NFL and move and play in California because they tax the shit out of you.
Go ahead and play this clip.
For winning the Super Bowl, the winning team, each player gets $178,000.
In other words, the Super Bowl isn't a part of their salary.
And because the game was played in California and California has a jock tax and they look at duty days.
So each team spends seven days in the state of California.
So those are seven duty days and they pierce your regular salary at 3.5%.
So he has to pay when you take an account, he got the $178,000 plus his overall salary.
He has to pay the state of California for spending seven days there $249,000.
That's just so stupid.
He evidently ends up playing the Super Bowl.
No, keep playing it, bro.
Keep playing it.
What happened to the audio guys?
That's just so stupid.
It ends up costing him $71,000 to go play in California.
Now, if I'm the NFL PA, now you got to remember, it's probably even more than that because since he's in Seattle, he's playing against San Francisco 49ers.
That's another day he's there.
And he's playing against the L.A. Ramps.
That's another day he's there.
So he's probably had like nine or 10 duty days, or maybe even more than that in the state of California.
So if I'm the NFL PA, I'm like, hey, we're not playing any more Super Bowls in Bingo, you know, in California.
We're just not doing it.
Can you imagine that, Tom, your thoughts?
Well, you know what?
This is where opportunity meets tax.
You know, Dem saw an opportunity and they tax him.
They say, wait a minute, these millionaire athletes, Brumers Heisen played in Cincinnati.
He's from Cincinnati and he's coming here for a business trip.
I don't get taxed on a business trip.
I go to business trips.
You're on business trips to all kinds of places.
We went to Washington, D.C.
We had to conduct a business there.
We've conducted business in New York.
They don't call us on the phone and say, excuse me, were you here for two days staying in a hotel?
Did you do a contract there?
Did you do something there?
They don't do it to us.
These guys are on business trips.
He's based working for a company called the Cincinnati, called the, he's in Seattle.
That's where his employer is, the Seahawks.
He works for a company in Seattle.
That's where they are.
They're incorporated.
But because he goes on business trips, they tax him.
That's why it's called the jock tax.
This is opportunistic.
It shouldn't be there.
There is not a CMO tax.
There's not a CFO tax.
There's not a sales director tax that every time a sales director conducts business in some other place.
If he works for Ben David— Tom, don't give him ideas.
Some states will do that to you.
My understanding is you technically have to pay taxes in states where you go visit while you're where you're, you know, I'll go bad money.
I'll just do it in Smith.
Mi denero es men.
But that's it.
This has always bothered me.
Peter Warrior.
Because other businesses, it doesn't happen.
I can't believe that they're playing next year's Super Bowl in California too, given these dynamics.
I mean, if I were the NFL, I wouldn't have any of these games in any states that have a tax like that.
And I don't even know constitutionally because he's actually being taxed not just on the income that he earned playing the Super Bowl.
I can understand if they want to say, look, you actually played the game in California.
So we're going to impose our income tax on your earnings on the game only.
But to go back and say, we're going to tax all of your earnings all throughout the year just because you were here.
I mean, I don't even see how that's constitutional for them to be able to do that.
But look, I mean, California is a high-tax state.
They're trying to continue to find more ways to bleed the population.
And when they can't bleed their own population, they try to get other people that happen to be traveling through California.
Look, you know, maybe you should avoid the state completely.
Just don't even go in there for a business trip.
You never know what kind of thing you can get roped into.
In fact, now a lot of the taxes that they're talking about, even if you leave the state, they want to tax you for 10 years after you're gone.
So you can't even escape.
Luke.
Yeah, it's a rough one.
If I was an athlete, that would frustrate me, especially given these guys have limited playing careers, particularly in the NFL.
But they do this everywhere.
I mean, it's an opportunity.
And look, the bigger, I think, macro picture is a lot of these states are because lots of other places do this, right?
Like, it's very easy.
Hey, I know what you make.
Your contract is public information for a lot of these guys.
And I know exactly when you arrive.
I know exactly when you leave.
You're on the schedule here.
Someone was telling me that the major league baseball teams, like the players' tax returns are like that thick because they play 162 games.
And so we know you're in New York for six days.
We know you're in Boston for six days.
We know you're in Minneapolis for eight days.
And we know exactly when you were there.
And so they have to, so literally they have state tax returns for all these fans.
Otani deferred his payment.
They got to pay their account to file all this.
Oh yeah.
Wonder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it is a these Dodgers.
Let me tell you, the Dodger fans, they're just weird people.
By the way, does capitalism, Pat, let me interview you.
Doesn't capitalism always find a way?
Yes.
The Otani contract is just the beginning.
I said six months ago, I said, you know what I think could happen?
You could have a Dodger player that says, I'll play at home for nothing.
Just pay me my whole contract in 2035 or I'll be retired in Florida.
But I will play for nothing, my home games.
So in California, what?
No, I play for nothing.
As a matter of fact, I'll play for nothing, you know, all year, which is basically what Otani did.
They converge on the Bobby Benilla contract, right?
Tai Lopez Ponzi Settlement00:05:07
Is there a question there?
I said, I can ask you.
I'm sorry, no, no, no, no.
I'm sorry.
Shout out to Danker415 who said this is why Otani has the for paid out.
But no, I think for me, if I'm a player, if I'm a player, if I'm a player, I'm going to be like, guys, can we, and if I have some poll, guys, Super Bowl, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, what else you got?
Give me another one.
Definitely not Puerto Rico.
We're not going to Puerto Rico because those guys don't believe in security.
Who else you got?
Seattle, there's no income tax in the state of Washington.
Okay, Seattle, Vegas, Nevada.
You got a couple of these places.
That's a great state.
But I'm not going back to this place.
All right, let's do one other story, maybe two other stories, and then we'll wrap up.
Okay.
This is a weird story.
I don't know what you guys are going to say about this.
If you have an opinion, great.
If you don't, great.
Ty Lopez, did you guys follow the story, what happened or no?
Have you been seeing what happened?
So FBI probe self-help guru Tai Lopez and Ponzi scheme that acquired Radio Shack, Pier 1 Imports.
The report just came out.
Now, keep in mind, a few months ago, this happened.
We didn't say a lot about it.
We just kind of moved on.
Tom, I'm going to come to you here.
What is going on here?
I mean, the question that you see is it's unclear whether the three defendants will be on the hook for the $112 million they allegedly swindled from investors, according to the SEC, but they may still face criminal charges even after settlement.
Is there anything here or is this noise?
I don't think it's noise when a court of jurisdiction and the SEC is leveling civil fraud against you.
And right now, apparently they went out there.
As the story goes, what's being reported is they said, hey, they had this company.
I think they called it RevUp or Rev or something like that.
They said, hey, we're going to bring Radio Shack back.
We're going to bring these things back.
Maybe we'll create an e-commerce play.
So there's this offer.
You know, entrepreneurs make offers all the time.
And apparently Ty Lopez and some others were involved in that.
Pier One, Radio Shack, once upon a time, beloved brands in America that were retailers.
So they go and do this.
They get people to invest in it.
The allegation is maybe they took fees, and you have that over 100 million number that's being passed around in these news reports.
Now, they say no criminal charges have been filed, but Tai Lopez is in settlement talks with the SEC.
Whenever you see that, if you see your name in the paper that says settlement talks with the SEC, that's probably why no criminal charges have been filed because you were voluntarily at the table and you were talking to people about making this situation come to a conclusion, usually with you paying a fine, admitting no guilt, and moving on.
It appears that we are at that phase, Pat.
It appears here.
Does it appear that Tai Lopez did nothing?
That's not what these news reports are saying.
And whatever Tai Lopez did, he is now at a desk with his lawyer, with the SEC, negotiating a settlement, which usually comes with paying a fine and then accepting limitations the SEC puts on you.
Such as what?
What could those things be?
Well, you can no longer be a director in a company.
You can no longer trade.
You can no longer solicit.
Well, like if you're like an investment banker representing buying and selling of companies, there's like a list of things that they'll say you can't do.
Most notably is what happened to Martha Stewart.
You can't be a director on any boards.
You can't have a fiduciary responsibility.
Do you have thoughts on this?
Well, I mean, I don't have thoughts on this particular case because I'm not familiar with it, but I have a lot of thoughts on the SEC and FINRA because I think these government agencies do a lot more harm than good.
I think we would be better off without them.
I think a lot more investors end up getting victimized by fraud because of these government agencies.
You know, the original Ponzi scheme was Charles Ponzi.
And when he ran his scheme, there was no SEC.
There was no equivalent of FINRA.
And that whole thing collapsed in about a year because of the free market ferretted out.
But meanwhile, Bernie Madoff perpetuated a much bigger Ponzi scheme than Charles Ponzi.
It went on for decades because he was protected by the SEC.
He was protected by FINRA.
And, you know, these government agencies lull the public into a false sense of security that because the government is watching out, that they don't have to, you know, be on the lookout themselves.
I think it would be much better if we didn't have the government involved, if we had more free market forces, because I think it would be harder for these scams to be perpetuated.
And I think, you know, the markets would do a better job of policing themselves than having the government do it because it ends up being corrupted by the very people it ends up regulating.
And then the investing public ends up being harmed.
Nuclear Messaging00:04:56
Anything here?
You guys are good.
Okay, let's move on to the next one.
Last story I want to do is California 5% tax, and then we'll wrap up.
So California, where is that at, Rob?
That is on California billionaire tax will be disastrous and cause wealthy to flee economists predicts.
Is this a newer story, Rob, or is that a story from was there a video on this one, Rob?
This is from February 6th.
Do you have a video on this one?
I do.
It's a little long, though.
Okay, so then let me skip that one.
Let me go to a different one.
Tom chose this one.
We'll wrap up with this one here.
Nuclear sector is poised to be for its biggest IPO in years.
So let's kind of go through this.
Holtec International Nuclear Energy Company that's on the verge of reopening a shuttered reactor in Michigan has filed confidentially with SEC to go public.
It could be one of the biggest IPOs in the nuclear industry and yours, likely valued at over $10 billion.
Florida-based Holtec makes equipment to store nuclear waste and decommissions existing nuclear plants.
The annual income is over $500 million.
A person familiar with its finances said last year, the news about the IPO was reported by Axios.
Tom, what do we know about the story?
Well, here's what we know.
Nuclear next-gen reactors, I think they call them the Gen 5s or something like that, are smaller footprint.
It's not like Three Mile Island or pictures of Chernobyl.
It's a completely different design, but it's very, very good at making electricity or, excuse me, making the heat that spins turbines that make electricity because it's steam and heat and spinning turbines.
That's how you make electricity.
And whatever makes that heat most efficiently is good.
And so this company has now bought a defunct power plant, is retrofitting it.
And this is just the beginning.
It has been three decades, I believe, since we've had a green light foundational construction permit for nuclear in the U.S.
And this is what we need because with data centers coming online and all of the EV usage, never mind the current headlines about maybe EV, you know, Tesla's down because others up.
EVs are still being sold, even if it's not the volume it was yesteryear.
And that power is used by people at night.
So guess what?
You've got data centers, you've got increasing use of EVs, and we need energy to provide that.
And we don't want to do fossil fuel.
There's the greens that are out there trying to prevent that.
And so nuclear come back.
We've been talking on this podcast about it, Pat, for two years.
And here we have a company under Trump is now going to have an IPO to go forward and to retrofit this one, build the others.
We need more power in America.
This is a very good thing.
And when you hear the word nuclear, don't think about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
These are modern, small footprint, much safer, more highly regulated plants.
And now we're going to have one trading, a company, Holtec, trading publicly.
Thoughts?
Well, I agree.
I'm a big fan of nuclear power.
If you want me to give Trump credit, I'll give him credit there.
At least the administration has a positive.
But guys, the man can do it.
Oh, my gosh.
It took the last 10 seconds of the podcast to be able to give credit.
Two hours, 21 minutes, and 13 seconds.
We get there.
Yeah, I think it's a very big positive.
We've been very bullish to our clients for a number of years on electrical infrastructure equities.
And I think we are still in the, or, you know, maybe we're coming to the end of the beginning in terms of the open field running for the rebuilding of U.S. electrical infrastructure.
And I think this kind of fits right into that.
Brandon, any thoughts?
Yeah, no-brainer.
We've been talking about it for years.
It's the best energy.
I don't know why we haven't been building it, so it's good that we're building it now.
Yeah, fantastic.
I'm excited about it.
Look, I went in on a handful of the companies, and we talked about this, I think, a year ago.
I don't think there's a choice.
I think they have to go.
The whole thing becomes is messaging.
Use the word nuclear, people freak out.
Like if I said today Peter Schiff is on OnlyFans, you would think Peter Schiff is, you know, doing, you know, feet videos and stuff like that.
But maybe it's, what do you get financial advice, right?
So we have to be able to reposition the verbiage with nuclear.
And I think that's marketing.
I think that's marketing, storytelling, and education.
Hopefully we figured out.
Guys, this was great.
It was good having you on.
Luke, we've never met.
Very impressed.
Really, really liked your analysis.
Peter, you definitely like the camera.
You definitely shine when you got the camera.
You got a lot of strong opinions.
And I appreciate you coming down.
It's always good to have a good back and forth discussion.