Warner Bros Bidding War & Musk’s Retirement Warning | PBD #741
Mr. Beast’s Beast Industries—a $473M revenue juggernaut in 2024, projected to hit $899M in 2025—diversifies across media (YouTube, TikTok), consumer products (Feastables’ $250M chocolate brand), and a creator-advertiser marketplace. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s AI-driven retirement warning sparks debate over job automation, with critics dismissing his "singularity" claims as reckless. NYC Mayor Eric Adams faces backlash for proposed 10%+ property tax hikes on middle-class homeowners amid recession fears, while AI’s legal role—like Chris Pratt’s AI judge—raises questions about empathy vs. data in justice. Alibaba and BYD’s military ties, now cleared by the U.S., contrast with Hermès CEO Axel Dumas’ Epstein rejection, underscoring reputational risks. The episode ends with a focus on adapting to AI’s exponential shifts—and the perils of misreading economic signals, like the yield curve’s bull steepening since September 2024. [Automatically generated summary]
A big fight broke out over Disney, Paramount, or YouTube where Time Warner should go to.
Jeff got angry because Tom's not here today.
And shout out to Tom, who's in Vegas, representing the Future Looks Bright Shoes at the Magic Show.
And then we're going to Italy at the Mycombe Show as well, which is going to be great, exciting.
We'll give you an update on that.
But we've got a lot of stories to talk about today.
We got three brilliant minds again with us.
Pom Snyder and Aseto is in the house with the stories that we have.
We may go with the first one.
Elon Musk says retirement may be a thing that we have to get rid of.
Like, I don't even think if retirement is a real thing or not.
And there's a clip on it.
Mamdani, this noble man, this sweetheart of a man, Pomp wrote a long email to him, wrong, long tweet to him.
And Pom, I'm going to come to you because you're a New York guy.
He said they are forced, forced in New York because Hoko's not working with them to tap into the defined, the retirement plan of the New York City.
Can you imagine?
The word he used, because of everything that's going on, our hands, we're forced.
We would never do this, but we're forced.
You got to love communist.
So the Vikings on the same page as Elon Musk.
They're just going to eliminate retirement together.
Two different ways.
But, you know, you love communists because when they campaign, they talk about, you know, how bad force is.
And then when they win elections, all they want to do is force.
So it is what it is.
Jesse Jackson, charismatic champion of civil rights, died at 84.
May he rest in peace.
The whole thing with CBS and Stephen Colbert, they took the interview down.
They didn't want it to be up.
Is it a true story or was it a spectacle because maybe Colbert doesn't like the fact that Jimmy Kemmel got all that love from the hate and the backlash?
Maybe he's trying to create it.
Maybe he's watching what happened with Don Lemon having record-breaking followership and his, what do you call it, substack, you know, subscribers going up.
He's like, man, I want to get some hate.
Can you cancel me so I can come out and say you can't cancel me?
And then an email comes out saying CBS said you just have to make sure you give the right amount of time to the other side.
But that's not what he wanted you to see.
And we'll talk about that.
Side note, we won't get into this, but apparently there's a fight going on with Rondo Razzie and Gino Carano.
We'll see how that goes.
We will talk about Momdani.
We will talk about Palantir moving its headquarters from Denver to Miami.
So that's a lot of engineers coming this way.
Trump says Japan to invest in energy industrial projects in Ohio, Texas, and Georgia.
Berkshire Hathaway.
We kind of talked about this in the back.
I don't know what Pom's position is going to be with this.
Berkshire Hathaway invests in New York Times and trims Apple.
So they're more pro-New York Times and less Apple.
Very weird.
You would go this way, but not Apple.
I'm curious to know what you guys are thinking about that.
Vicks surges 18% to 20.82 as inflation surprised and fed the transition sparks market reassessment.
Vance, a little concerned about what's going on with Anthropic.
Obviously, Elon made some comments about it.
So did Hexet.
So Elon Hexet and Vance, they're kind of on the same page when it comes down to Anthropic.
We'll talk about that.
Logan Paul sells a record-breaking card for $16.4 million.
Pikachu Illustrator sold for more than any Mickey Mantle card ever, which, by the way, you know what that means.
And it's not good, but it's great if you own the cards.
That means the market just, the comps went up like this a little bit, right?
So you can't go negotiate a deal right now because anybody who had a card, guess what they're going to say?
Well, did you see how the Pikachu's?
That means this card is worth this.
And they're going to make those kinds of arguments.
So we'll see.
We'll see what happened there.
McDonald's, folks, some good news for some of you guys, very small percentage of the audience that consumes this content is testing GLP1 friendly menus as Ozempic patients seek out protein-packed meals.
Weird because McDonald's had a record-breaking quarter.
Apparently, they were up 8.6% or 6.8% while Wendy's is shutting places down.
Don't know why.
Maybe we'll find out here from some folks on why that is.
So then Gen Z locked out of home buying, puts in money in the market.
This new video, did you guys see the Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise video?
Did you, Jeff?
Did you see this video?
Have you seen this video yet or not?
No.
Have you seen a pop?
I love the fact that you haven't seen it because you're going to see it for the first time.
Okay.
It is so real.
Then there's another movie that they made.
Did you see the movie they made?
A $200 million production movie that they made in a day all because of AI.
This is a very different direction that we're going to be going.
We'll talk about obviously Paramount.
And then we got a few other things.
You know, China, Alibaba, and BYD have links to Chinese military.
U.S. concludes.
Annual Sales Leadership Summit00:02:19
A shout out to Hermet CEO.
A lot of people are getting criticized right now for being on the Epstein files.
I think there's a good story here that we should give respect to a CEO that did it right.
And then let me see what else we got here.
We'll cover that.
This one story: farmers are aging and their kids don't want to be in a family business.
A little scary, but we may hit up that story as well.
And then Waymo is paying DoorDash gig workers to close the Robo Taxi doors.
Can you imagine?
Hey, can you close that door?
We'll give you five bucks.
Uber gets out.
Yeah, boom.
All right, you got paid five bucks.
Wait, you have to get out.
You don't have to just drive by roll down the wall.
That is wild that that is happening.
But, anyways, with that being said, gang, before we get into the stories, we have our annual sales leadership summit that is coming up.
This year, we're doing it at the Trump Dorale.
I went to the property the other day.
Unbelievably beautiful property.
And if you're a sales person or a sales leader or a CEO that wants to drive sales and find superstars and develop superstars, Rob, play that clip that you have.
I think Alicia sent it to you.
Go right ahead, buddy.
I got a question for you.
Which of these two skill sets guarantee success more?
You being able to recruit rock stars, eight and ninth, coming in talented, and they changed the company overnight.
Or two, you knowing how to develop rock stars.
Which of these two guarantees success?
From my experience, when I was not a rock star and I got lucky and I recruited a rock star, I could never keep the rock star.
Eventually, I obsessed over developing people to succeed in sales.
Once I did that, all the rock stars started knocking on the doors because they wanted to work with me.
This is why once a year I host an event called the Sales Leadership Summit.
This year, we're doing it on March 25th through the 27th at Trump Dorale.
If you want to find out how you and your team can attend this event to learn how to become better sales leaders, click on a link below, fill out your information.
One of our consultants will get a hold of you.
There you go, Rob.
That's the QR code.
And we're going to put the link below, Rob, if you can put the link below as well for people to go learn more about it and fill out the information.
One of our representatives will call you and answer any questions you may have about the event.
And hopefully, we'll see you there March 25th to the 27th at the Trump Dorale.
Having said that, let's get right into it.
Okay, so Paramount.
Spotify's Future in Streaming Controversy00:14:38
You know, we're seeing stories about who's supposed to buy Time Warner.
Paramount is out, right?
Oh, Paramount's not going to be getting it.
It's probably going to be Netflix.
And then these stories start coming.
Paramount grows more confident.
Warner Brothers and Discovery will drop Netflix bid.
And a lot of people, Tom is texting me all night.
He said, let me tell you what's going on here.
I said, well, I'm going to go to Snyder first on this and then pop and see what we do.
So confidence is growing inside Paramount Skydance and Warner Brothers Discovery.
It's deal with Netflix in a matter of days and reopen a months-long bidding war of the company.
The Warner Brothers, if Warner Brothers does reopen the process, it will have less to do with the recent barely enhanced offer by Paramount, where it didn't increase its all-cash deal of $78 billion bid, other than agreeing to cover a breakup fee to walk away from Netflix, then the worries about valuation and the regulatory uncertainty.
At the Post reported last week, the firm known as WBD Warner Brothers that controls the iconic Warner Brothers studio, HBO Max Streaming, and cable properties like CNN Discovery has been under massive pressure to consider the sweetened offer from Paramount Skydance.
Increasingly, Warner Brothers investors believe the nearly sealed $72 billion deal from Netflix for the studio and the streaming service is facing insurmountable regulatory hurdles while they also are questioning the valuation of the Netflix offer.
Jeff, what do you stand with this?
Again, I think that it's an admission that the industry, as it was, is failing, that there's enough technological change and evolution that they're trying their best to keep the horse alive as long as they possibly can.
And the only way to do that is to create streaming libraries that are big enough to survive the fact that they have all just junk.
But why do you think this happened, though?
It's going this way, and the market's like, yeah, I don't think they're going to pick it up.
I don't think Paramount's going to pick it up.
And then all of a sudden, I'll come back here.
No, we should look at Paramount.
Why do you think that's the problem?
There's stuff going on behind the scenes because this has become such a hot-button thing.
The government's getting involved.
I mean, we've got lawyers involved.
There's a lot at stake for all parties involved, which means it's too much to just simply say, oh, Netflix, you take it.
We'll be fine.
We'll go someplace else.
Again, the competition issue is really what's driving everything.
The fact that social media, I specifically say YouTube, but it's not just YouTube.
You would rather have it go to YouTube.
No, I'm saying YouTube is eating their lunch.
Social media is eating their lunch.
The idea of appointment television, that kind of stuff, baby boomers do that.
Most young people.
Appointment television.
That's what they call it.
They call it.
That's what they call it.
That's not my term.
They call it appointment television.
The idea that somebody.
76 million boomers out there.
You just pissed off.
I know.
I'm sorry.
But to all the younger people who have, like, for example, never seen a nightly news report.
Yeah.
They're not going to sit down at 6.30 p.m. and watch CBS News.
That property is dead.
What do you think?
You think it's going to end up going to Paramount?
You think it's going to end up going to Netflix?
What are your thoughts?
I think that all the numbers, everything everyone's focused on, the wrong thing to focus on.
There's only one thing that matters.
Tell me.
Who are the people?
You're going to bet against the Ellisons?
They got Netflix's market cap is $325 billion.
Larry Ellison personally is worth $225 billion.
His net worth is almost as much as the entire Netflix business.
So they got the money.
The second thing is you got people running Netflix who aren't the founders.
You have basically professional CEOs who've come in.
So you're in a surrounding.
Are you talking about Ted?
Yeah, they're not the founders, right?
But Reed is still involved, right?
That's fine.
But you're in a dogfight.
You need people who know how to fight, right?
It's like taking somebody who is like a bodybuilder at the gym.
They look real and good, right?
They got the big muscles as well.
They fight the UFC guy.
But you fight a street fighter.
They don't got the muscles, but they whoop your ass, right?
And so same thing here is you basically have a very entrepreneurial family that is just going to keep fighting.
And you see it.
Every time you see a headline come across, what do they talk about?
Let me ask you.
We're going to go red alert.
We're going to go real hard at this.
Here's a question for you.
How much does diplomacy and building relationship with the current administration matter in deals this size?
10 out of 10.
You think so?
Yeah.
Tell me why.
I think that's the entire reason why this is happening.
Like, look at the Calciods.
I think they were up like 60% that Netflix is going to win a week or two ago, and now it totally flipped.
And now they're saying Paramount.
You have the updated Calciods.
Yeah, now it says Paramount is the favorite.
Is that it?
Yeah.
Angels successfully took what Warner Brothers.
So red is who?
Red is Netflix?
No, none before July 2027 is red at 15%.
Netflix at 36.4%.
Paramount at 49.8%.
Can you go to the peak of Netflix Blue, whatever that was in June, July, January, right there?
Yeah, it was like two weeks ago.
70%.
Wow.
72% of Paramount was at what?
Is that say 16.2%?
And now it's what?
Today it is 49% Paramount.
Netflix 36.2%.
But without any breaking news.
Sorry.
Without any breaking news happening, though.
So I think that's, like you said, behind the scenes stuff.
And I think that's the forces of the political will behind it.
So is it a government backlash?
Is it a public backlash?
Is it like you're saying, is it the street fight between?
Well, there are some other things that have happened.
There's been a couple of deals that occurred where people started to realize, wait a second, because there's this whole controversy.
And I don't know all the details, right?
But there's this whole controversy over how much is some of the assets actually worth and shares versus cash.
Cash is king.
$1 equals $1, right?
But the second you start talking about, hey, we're going to give you some shares.
Well, is that share worth $1 or is it worth $3?
And there's a bunch of debate about that.
But there's been some public market deals that have happened where now it's calling into question things that Netflix was previously saying.
And so I think that you have a combination of factors.
You've got the politics like they're talking about.
You've got the characters that are, you know, kind of playing through this.
And then you also have, okay, we're getting more data from the market that maybe it's just that, look, these legacy assets might not be as valuable as everybody thought they were.
And by the way, long term, go 20 years, not five years, go 20 years, 2046.
What does the media look like?
What does Netflix look like?
What does YouTube look like?
What does Time Warner look like?
What do these guys look like?
Well, you know a great point, Versant.
You know, this like CNBC, MSNBC, they all got spun out from NBC Universal.
It's down 35% since they went public.
Versant.
Versant.
So like industry.
Yeah, NBC has all these assets.
They basically took CNBC, MSNBC, Golf Channel, television stuff, and they spun it out.
And they say, that's our streaming business.
We don't want to have our movie film library, all this stuff funding this other stuff.
So we're going to break these out into two separate businesses.
That Versant business that got spun out is now down 35%.
So what they thought it was going to go out at, obviously the market is repricing it 35% lower.
So then you go and you look at Netflix, you look at these other things.
And I think to your point, like, how much TV do you watch versus YouTube, social media, Netflix?
Just not that much.
It's a place.
Oh, sorry.
No finish.
No, so it's just like it is less valuable than it was, you know, five, 10 years ago.
It's $75 billion value to Paramount and $75 billion value to Netflix where they want to pick something like this up, Brandon.
Yeah, no, I just think if this goes through for Netflix, it kind of creates a fortress for content.
Like that example, I think it's because that's like a knockoff streaming service, what they made there.
But Netflix is Netflix because it has most of the content on it.
Then if they get this, it's like the primary source for content that people actually want to watch.
So yeah, I think just because it has market dominance already and this would give it like stuff that it doesn't even have.
So I think it would give it more of that monopoly that we're trying to avoid.
Well, we'll see.
Can you go to Tom's tweet real quick?
Go to Tom's tweet since Tom is not here.
Warner Brothers, Discovery just pulled a power move, set the Netflix merger vote to March 20th, told shareholders to vote yes on Netflix.
Also reopened talks with Paramount for seven days.
Paramount immediately raised their offer from 31 to 31 up from 30 translation.
Warner Brothers telling Netflix, we're with you while whispering to Paramount, show us what you really got, like dating two people at once.
Classic corporate auction.
Warner Brothers shareholder will win.
Employees brace for layoffs.
Either way, Hollywood consolidation, fewer buyers, worse deals for talent, higher prices for consumers.
The trick will be getting this through the Federal Trade Commission hearings.
That will be a mini-series by itself.
By the way, Tom, quick shout out to you.
You got a laugh from a text joke, not an actual joke.
So maybe in the future, we should test this out more often.
I want to get to the next part here.
Apple announces they want to take on YouTube and Spotify with new video podcasting push.
Apple.
When you think podcasting, you don't think about Apple.
I don't even think Apple pays.
Rob, does Apple pay anything in AdSense?
I don't think Apple pays anything, right?
There is no pay from Apple.
Not in comparison to Spotify.
Not in comparison to Spotify and YouTube.
And by the way, YouTube used to be higher.
Now, apparently, Spotify even pays better than YouTube on AdSense.
We get the reports on a weekly basis, and you'll see Spotify getting above it.
But Apple on Monday announced that it'll bring a new integrated video podcast experience to Apple Podcasts this spring.
This move comes as video viewership continues to reshape podcasting.
About 37% of people ages 12 and up watch video podcasts monthly, according to Edison Research.
The update brings Apple Podcasts more in line with its competitor, Spotify, YouTube, and now Netflix, which have increasingly leaned into video podcasting.
20 years ago, Apple helped take podcasting mainstream by adding podcasts to iTunes.
And more than a decade ago, we introduced dedicated Apple podcast apps as Eddie Q, Apple's senior vice president of services in a statement by bringing categories leading video experience to Apple Podcasts.
We're putting creators in full control of their content and how they build their business, making them easier than ever for audiences to listen.
I get it, but what are you paying?
Pomp, your thoughts on this?
Well, I think that look what you guys are doing here, right?
This is basically what TV used to be.
And so what's the difference between a podcast or a TV segment?
It's actually the distribution.
There is no big difference.
And as somebody who goes on legacy television quite a bit, but also is on the internet, people always ask why you go on TV.
And I tell them it's because I use the TV as a clip to then put on social media.
It's basically just content creation.
There's a different vibe.
There's different people, different characters, different conversation there.
But it's really just to drive the distribution on social media.
So I think that's one big piece of it.
And what these guys are realizing is also that the business economics of podcasts or that type of content is much more favorable to both the content creator, but also to the distributor.
So if I want to go and I want to license CNBC or I want to license CNN or whatever, there's all of these things involved, including all the agents that are involved for the hosts themselves, how much the unions are involved in producing the show, the distribution, all the people who have a hand in the cookie jar in terms of getting a cut.
Well, if you just go straight to YouTube or you go straight to Spotify or you go straight to Apple, now all of a sudden you don't have all those people who are extracting value along the way.
And so what you're able to do is you're able to get the content to the audience in a much more cheap, streamlined way.
And so that means that there's more profit for everyone to enjoy.
And I think that's why Apple, who's really not only a hardware company, now a services company, they want to get in this game because they realize they're going to make more money here licensing this content than they are in some of these other kind of traditional legacy media.
But I got to tell you, Apple is not going to win this race with Spotify and YouTube.
Apple, you know what Apple's mindset's always been?
You're lucky to be on our app.
Therefore, you pay us a third, right?
And they had that whole lawsuit that happened that changed the numbers.
What was that video game company that was the first one brave enough to sue Apple?
You know who I'm talking about?
Epic.
Epic, yeah, Epic that went through it.
So when I look it up right now on what Spotify does and what Apple does and what YouTube does.
So Spotify pays 50% of the ad revenue goes to eligible creators under its partner model, okay?
Podcasters can offer pay tiers and keep 100% of the subscription minus processing fees, okay?
YouTube, you'll typically make $1 to $2 per thousand monetized views.
So you could make $1,500 to $2,500 per half a million monthly views that you have.
Okay, so they'll share the AdSense 55, 45.
Apple pays nothing.
The only thing they do is if you have a subscription model.
So if Apple wants to compete, and if they go this model with no AdSense, they're not going to be able to compete with the other guys.
Apple has to figure out a way to bring the AdSense model to it.
And by the way, if they did, they would be so competitive if they started allowing content creators to get paid.
They're not there right now.
Rob, think about it.
Can you run a poll real quick?
When you think about podcasting, matter of fact, just ask the question, where do you consume your podcast?
That's kind of an unfair place to ask the question because they're watching it on YouTube.
But maybe ask the question the following way.
Which of these do you look at as a preferred podcast platform?
Spotify, YouTube.
Okay, you already have it.
Can you run the poll?
Let me see the poll.
It put 89% where?
YouTube?
Spotify now, but this is we're asking people on YouTube.
Here's one piece that I would say is if Apple came to me and they said, hey, we're going to give you the distribution, but we're not going to make any money for you.
We're not going to sell any ads against your content.
I would actually prefer to put the content on Apple because they're going to give me distribution, but they're not going to take anything.
And so if you look at most people who are creating content, I think that there's a large portion of them that they rely on the AdSense.
So if you're on YouTube, a lot of people are not selling ads themselves.
They're just getting the AdSense.
But for the higher level, the more sophisticated shows or content creators, they're monetizing themselves.
So if you look at like the revenue for anything we put on YouTube, the amount of AdSense dollars we get compared to what we sell ourselves is immaterial.
So what I want is I want distribution.
Are you comfortable sharing that number?
No, they probably won't let us do that.
Our team would get mad.
But let me ask you a question.
Well, let's just say it's like 10 to 1.
10 to 1 on what you do.
Like we sell direct ads ourselves versus the other one.
This is what the YouTube uses.
Yeah.
So to me, I would say I understand what you're saying because you're a pro, but you're not everybody.
Correct.
And so to me, if you want to get mass, mass exposure and growth, guess what?
You have to hit that market up that doesn't have a sponsorship division.
Mr. Beast's Distribution Dilemma00:15:28
Yes.
That's not doing it.
So we're not all Patrick Bed David, but you know, we're talking about it.
But we're not all pump is what I'm saying because you get a lot of sponsorship money.
We don't do with everybody.
We have one sponsor that we work with.
And, you know, that's kind of how we'll do certain things with.
But to me, I think Apple has an opportunity.
And I wonder why the reasoning is.
Jeff, where are you at with this?
I think it's great because, like you said, it opens the door for potentially other business models, right?
That's competition.
That's what it's supposed to do.
And that's why social media and these kinds of platforms, you're right.
It's about distribution.
It's not necessarily about ads.
If you have a different business model and you don't want to go through the traditional YouTube or whatever else, Apple gives you the opportunity to get to a different marketplace and different set of eyeballs.
And if you can figure out how to make money on that, that's terrific.
Do you think Apple's eventually going to offer an AdSense division?
I think they have to.
I mean, otherwise, why are they doing that?
You think they will?
They have to.
If they do, who has a bigger distribution than them?
Exactly.
They have to have some kind of distribution.
There's got to be some kind of idea.
I mean, they're not just doing this as, you know, we're getting our asses kicked by all the other platforms.
We need to just get in the game.
They have some idea here.
And I think it's exactly what Anthony is saying.
It's lazy.
It's what?
It's lazy.
Like, how about freaking create something?
I mean, like, they just mooch off other ideas of the last decade or so.
I mean, ever since Steve Jobs died, they haven't created anything.
They just, you know, Apple banking, now this.
I mean, how about create something that's the biggest market cap in the world?
Well, they would tell you we did create podcasting.
Yeah, but they've seen jobs.
Oh, you're right.
And by the way, I think you also have a good point that a lot of people are on your side as well that criticize why they're not creating any new products.
I mean, if you get a story, do you think Apple wants to hear a story that says Berkshire Hathaway chooses to invest?
I don't know what page that story is, Rob.
Berkshire Hathaway chooses to invest in New York Times.
And there it is.
Berkshire Hathaway invests in New York Times and trims Apple.
You think that's a good story?
No.
Berkshire Hathaway.
Now, some people may say, well, you know, Buffett is no longer involved, so it's a different person that's doing it.
But there is a level of criticism towards new things they're creating.
It's like, what's the growth story?
You know, like, they don't haven't heard of Apple AI yet.
Not even a peep about it.
I get that.
Do you think they eventually will get into AdSense?
Yeah.
For podcasting.
Yeah, they should, but it's not like a huge revenue stream.
It's not huge vertical.
I mean, I don't know what the story is as far as a huge growth story for Apple.
You know, it's like there's a huge growth story for the other, like there's a huge growth story for Tesla, Google, but not Apple.
No, like they already have the full potential of the phone market.
Pomp, you look like you want to say something.
I think Apple has always done the exact same thing, which is they own the hardware market.
They have a very luxury position there.
They've been very good at international expansion to the point where I think people even criticize them that they are very focused on Asia, China, et cetera.
And I don't know if you guys have seen this chart where basically every single one of the large tech companies is heavily investing in data centers and GPUs and all this stuff.
And it's just like the capex expenditure on this thing has exploded and Apple is basically flat.
And everyone's like, well, why are they not spending money on this?
And so when you see that, you start to ask yourself, okay, like, what's the strategy here?
Well, if you own the hardware, that is the consumer device in people's hands, you own distribution.
If you own distribution, what have they done over the last 15 years or so?
They have started to expand their revenue sources by offering services.
Some of those services were just like App Store bullshit that they were essentially just taking the 30%.
But they also did Apple Music and they started to kind of get into all these things.
When you get into podcast, what I think is really interesting about the internet is the internet not only has opened up these new business models, but there's a very strong argument that Mr. Beast is the new, you know, whatever, ABC or whatever channel.
Paramount.
It's paramount.
Exactly.
So there was a clip that recently went viral of Mr. Beast and the president of Beast Industries, and they were talking at the Deal Book Summit and they said, well, what's your business?
He said, all right, well, we got the content, and that includes everything from going on YouTube to now they have the Amazon show and Beast Games and all that.
Then they've got an entire consumer product division, which started out as like knickknack type food and feastables, lunchy or whatever it's called.
Now they just bought a bank, right?
They bought a fintech app that they're going to go distribute.
And then they're saying, oh, wait a second, but we're also going to create a marketplace for creators and advertisers to come and get connected to each other.
So they're realizing that, hold on, if we have distribution, then we can put products through that distribution, but then we also can create a marketplace where we can take a fee.
That's Apple's business.
Apple has the distribution.
They create services.
Then they have the marketplace.
And so I just think that distribution naturally leads itself to wanting all these different revenue sources.
And so they get into podcasts.
Yeah, of course they're going to eventually do AdSense.
But I think they're also going to try to figure out how do you do it in the Apple way?
What's the other things that you can do that YouTube or others may not be able to do?
And where was this?
The Mr. Beast.
Mr. Beast is at the Deal Book Summit.
If you go to Twitter, just do a Beast business line maybe or something like that.
It's called What Summit?
Deal Book Summit.
Deal Book.
Go to Media.
Yeah, just do Mr. Beast and then click on Media.
Let's see.
Well, you're looking, all that relies on them being the main phone for people.
What if they got disrupted by their technology?
Then they'd be destroyed pretty quickly, no?
Wasn't that kind of like an arrogant assumption, though?
If we own the technology, if we own the device, then people will just naturally flow from there.
That may have worked 10 years ago.
The entire space has changed.
Right.
You don't think that applies today?
You don't think distribution wins?
No, it does, but the distribution, the nature and character of distribution, as Anthony's saying, is completely changing.
Right.
That's the evolution here.
That gets us back to Paramount and Netflix and everything else.
Search on Twitter.
Search Mr. Beast Consumer, but Mr. Beast is all one word.
The entire media ecosystem is being rewritten.
It's completely rewritten, but it's only maybe a third of the way through it.
How long is it, Rob?
One minute, 16 seconds.
Let's watch it.
Go for it.
So we have three divisions.
Our media division, which obviously, as Jimmy talked about, YouTube is the anchor, but our shorts on TikTok and Instagram.
Beast Games, which season two is airing in January.
We just dropped animation.
We also are working on other channels.
So all of the content is one division, and that today is about half the revenue.
And then we have a second division, which is our consumer products and services.
Feastables being the anchor, our chocolate brand, the largest ethically sourced chocolate brand in the world.
Our Mr. Beast Labs toy, where our toy is now the number one action figure in America.
And our Lunch Lay, which is our snack product, in addition to our joint venture with Jack Links for Beef Jerky.
We're also launching a phone company, Beast Mobile, and a financial services platform in there, wrapped in financial literacy and access to the world's information in making sure we're doing good while doing well.
And then the last one, which we're really excited about, is building a two-sided marketplace and a global creator platform, matching creators with Fortune 1000 marketers who want to be able to access the creator influencer economy in an efficient way to be able to build demand for their products and services.
This is what you call the ultimate flywheel.
The importance of first winning with distribution, and then you can pick and choose.
I just pulled up some numbers here.
2024, their holding company, okay, Beast Industries, did $473 million in revenue.
2025, projected, Beast Industries, the numbers are not finalized, $899 million.
You know that snack brand that he was talking about, Feastables?
You know, it's a top-line revenue just on Feastables.
$250 million in sales just in 2024 when you think about this.
So this is the engine, the brand being created.
The flywheel, some of the things that we talked about a year and a half ago at the Vault Conference, and those who were there, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
This is powerful.
This is powerful.
The question is, Pomp, is this duplicatable?
Could anybody do what Mr. Beast is doing?
Maybe not at his level, but is it duplicatable?
Well, I think that there's people who are already doing it.
So Kim Kardashian and Mr. Beast, from a business model standpoint, same thing, right?
Get attention, drive distribution, build businesses, put it through the distribution.
If you look at Jake and Logan Paul, I mean, they're two of the best entrepreneurs, I think, of our generation, right?
Same thing.
Get attention, build distribution, put products and services through it.
So it's definitely replicatable.
Now, what I think is really interesting for Jimmy is going to be his audience tends to be younger and tends to have smaller dollars than, let's say, a Ryan Serhant or somebody with a much larger audience that is, or I'm sorry, with a much smaller audience, but a richer.
Correct.
So what is he going to do as they grow in age?
So he's already got the relationship with them.
And now you see him going into the fintech space, right?
So if he can grow with this audience over time, it is going to be insane as they come into more money and they start to have disposable income.
He's going to be able to sell them all kinds of things that previously looked like snacks that are high volume, low prices.
How closely you think he studies PewDiePie as a case study to see what was done right and what was done wrong?
Because think about it.
10 years ago, PewDiePie runs the world, right?
If you remember when they were racing with that other Indian YouTube channel, what was the other YouTube channel called when he was competing with?
It starts with a T. Can you ask the question, which T-Series?
Is it called T-Series?
I think so.
I think it's called T-Series on who would get to $100 million first.
And I think Beast got there or something.
But how much do you think he studies PewDiePie to say, I don't want to make some of those mistakes or do what he did right?
I've talked to Jimmy a number of times, and the two things I can tell you is one, he is incredibly intelligent and he's very strategic.
But the second thing is, and I hope he doesn't mind me sharing this, he called me one time and just out of the blue.
And I answered, he goes, Pomp, teach me something.
I said, Jimmy, you okay?
Teach me something.
And we started talking about, you know, yeah, he just had five minutes and he was just calling people on his phone and he was just like, hey, what's something you learned this week or whatever?
Wow.
That tells you everything you need to know about a person in terms of their ability to continue to grow, learn, you know, try to get better, et cetera.
This guy is the top of his game.
The gentleman that you saw talking there, Jeff, is he's a former CEO of Shutterfly.
He worked at SoftBank.
Now he came in as the president, and I think he's the CEO of Beast Industries.
You don't recruit talent like that unless you're hyper-ambitious and those people look under the hood and say, you've got the goods.
What's the comp for a guy like that?
What's he making?
Probably not enough?
$3 to $20 million?
I mean, it all depends on what is the equity package, right?
But from a cash perspective, maybe he's getting paid, you know, one, two million bucks in cash.
And then on the equity side, upside whatever you'd end up doing.
Well, it also depends on how much is he going to bet on himself, right?
Like one of the things that's becoming very popular in public markets is the CEOs who take these kind of performance-based packages.
And so, you know, I've even taken inspiration from whether it's Elon Musk, at Caso, at Open Door, et cetera.
It's people just saying, listen, shareholders want to see executives win if they're winning.
They don't want to see the executive making $25 million a year as the stock goes down.
And by the way, it's so funny while we're talking about this.
Last week, Logan Paul broke a record with Ken Golden on the most expensive card ever sold.
And you have the clip rock?
Go for it.
Go ahead.
So, Logan Paul.
Ken Golden.
Yes.
Tonight, you sold the PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator card for $16,492,000.
On behalf of Guinness World Records, I can now confirm you have achieved a new record title for the, not only for the most expensive Pokemon card ever sold at auction, but also the overall record for the most expensive trading card ever sold at auction.
Oh, my God.
Okay, you can pause it right there.
Question is, he bought it for $4 or $5 million.
Okay, sells it for $16.4.
What's the likelihood an average guy with zero following who bought it, let's just say when he did for $5 million, would sell it for $16.4 today?
How much of it was $16.4 because it's Logan Paul and Ken Golden?
And how much of it is because of the asset?
I don't think the price is determined by who's selling.
I think the price is determined by who's buying.
And AJ Scaramucci, Anthony Scaramucci's son, I called him.
I said, hey, he's kind of crazy.
He paid $6.5 million.
Why?
And what he told me was his entire thesis is that we are going to see the dollar get debased over the long run and scarce assets are going to do very well.
And so he, you know, he says some of this publicly where he wants to buy this card.
He wants to buy the Declaration of Independence.
There's a bunch of these assets that he wants.
And he basically wants to then put them together.
He's got this website, treasuretrove.com.
It's just, you know, you type in your email, he's going to like email you later or something.
But basically, his whole idea is: can he go collect all of these super rare, scarce assets?
And he believes that this card went from $5 million to $16 million.
He thinks that this card is worth over $100 million in the future.
Whether he's right or not, I have no clue.
I don't know that much about Pokemon.
But what I do know is that it's a pretty good thesis.
If you see gold, Bitcoin, real estate, all these things that historically have done very well, he's basically just betting on scarcity.
And he's like, what's more scarce than the number one Pokemon card in the world?
What's more scarce than the Declaration of Independence, right?
And so let's see if he's right, but it's a pretty interesting thesis.
So now all of a sudden, if you think it's worth, you know, $100 million, you're willing to pay $16 because you think you're going to get a great return.
So it's less about who's selling.
It's more about who's buying and what their view.
I do think it's going to be worth $100 million.
I think any of these non-duplicatable assets that are one-off, especially the one-of-one, anything limited, numbered, one-on-one.
I had a call with Kevin O'Leary and his partner.
We got on a call together and we talked about what they're doing with collectible cards.
Kevin's now all of a sudden into the card business and they're buying up a bunch of numbered limited edition type of stuff.
Where are you at with this, Jeff?
I think it's still true.
I think that the seller is part of the story here.
You think part of it is a seller more than the buyer?
You're right.
It's scarcity, but you can also create artificial scarcity, right?
Because if you have a very unique product and it gets even more unique because there's a story behind it or a person behind it, that certainly doesn't hurt.
So I think there is definitely some scarcity.
You're saying the story has value to it.
The story has value because it creates artificial scarcity.
It's not just a unique item.
It's a unique item with a story that you cannot replicate.
What is that big-ass diamond that everybody wanted forever?
It was nothing more than a big diamond, but it had a ridiculous story and lore behind it.
So they created artificial scarcity out of it.
Is that something you're interested in?
You want that big ass diamond or you're saying that you're not?
No, I don't want to.
I don't want the figure true card either.
Do you think that's unique or do you think that's always how assets have you know kind of risen in prices?
Like the story has always been a value driver.
It's not one or the other.
There's always different ways to do things.
But I think in certain situations like this, the story becomes part of the scarcity.
Robots Saving Retirement?00:08:39
And by the way, have you spoken to Ken before?
I'm sure you have.
Ken Golden?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
We were together at an event with Ken.
Ken's ability to tell stories and promote.
Oh my God.
This guy, if you ever see him sell a card and you just watch it for one minute, you will notice you're suddenly saying, I need this card.
I need this piece.
He is phenomenal at what he does.
He's the best in the game.
You know who he is?
He's the Don King of collectibles.
You're not lying.
Yes.
So we'll see what happened here with the collectible card space.
Let me get into the next story.
Next story I want to get to is Elon Musk and retirement.
Rob, what page is that on?
There it is.
14.
Elon Musk says you can skip retirement savings in the age of AI.
Not so fast.
Okay, this is a Fox News story.
Let's see how this story goes.
Rob, if you want to play the clip first, go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, one side recommendation I have is like, don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years.
It won't matter.
Okay.
Either we're not going to be here or.
Can you expand on that a little bit?
You won't need to save for retirement.
If any of the things that we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.
The services will be there to support you.
You'll have the home.
You'll have the healthcare.
You'll have the entertainment.
The way this unfolds is fundamentally impossible to predict because of self-improvement of the AI and the accelerating timeline.
It's called singularity for a reason.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know what goes happen.
What happens after the event arising?
Exactly.
You can't never see past the black hole or the horizon, the light going.
Ray has a singularity out way too far.
I mean, this is like the next, what?
What's your timeline for this?
We're in the singularity.
Well, we are in the singularity for sure.
We're in the midst of it right now, for sure.
And they would just be able to do it.
We're in this beautiful sweet spot, which is, you know, the roller coasters.
We're just a great analogy.
It's like that feeling.
You're at the top of the roller coaster and you're about to go.
Yeah, but you know, it's going to be a lot of Gs when you hit it.
Yeah, a lot of G's when you hit it.
It's like pure, like, I don't have to just have court side seats.
I'm on the court.
Exactly.
And it blows my, and still blows my mind sometimes, multiple times a week.
Yeah.
And so this one, I think, Jeff, your thoughts.
Do you agree?
This is insane.
He just said, look, we can't predict how this is going to go.
So the next thing he says, or the thing before that is, don't save for retirement.
We have no idea how this is going to look on the other side.
So just say, screw it.
The hell with it.
Just trust us that this is going to go well and you're going to be taken care of.
Is that how you process it?
That he's saying, trust us, that we'll figure it out.
He's saying, trust us.
This is all going to work the way we want it to work and that you won't need to save for retirement.
And then he also says, we don't know how the hell it's going to work out.
I mean, to me, this is completely insane.
Pop.
Brian, you go first.
And then I got a lot of thoughts on this.
Okay, so let me hear what he says first.
Yeah, no, it's super reckless.
I mean, I'm curious, like, how many times has Elon Musk been wrong?
I know there's been a lot of them, but I mean, like, to put $800 billion.
I know, but still, he's been wrong.
He's made crazy predictions.
He's been wrong about with timelines and everything.
But look at the stakes that if he is wrong, like, I mean, people already don't save for retirement.
So, like, how many people are going to be influenced by that and say, oh, yeah, screw.
I'm going to be able to have UBI in the future.
So I'm not going to save for retirement.
And then what if he's wrong?
So it's super reckless.
So I'm literally building a company around this because I think that this is the single most important thing that the everyday American has to understand is happening right now.
There is an arms race that is about to occur, which is there is artificial intelligence that is being built at hyper speed.
And that artificial intelligence is being able to automate away tasks and eventually jobs at a very, very fast rate.
Now, let me give you a couple of examples.
How many software engineers now aren't writing code?
They're just letting AI do it.
I am an investor in a lot of these companies.
50 plus percent of the code being written inside these companies is written by AI.
Now there is Claude Cowork.
So now it can go and do a bunch of tasks that an entry-level employee could do.
You're now starting to even see Elon in that same interview, or I'm sorry, he did an interview with the cheeky pint with Duarkesh and one of the Colson brothers.
He kept saying, we think that Grok has a way to learn faster than all the other models.
And he wouldn't say why.
And so I started thinking about, because he kept mentioning Tesla, the Tesla model.
And so I said, oh my God, he is basically going to have people just record their computer screen while they work.
And they're going to use the machine learning to figure out how to do what you do.
And so I tweeted that.
Elon responded.
I didn't tag him anything.
He responded.
He said, pretty much.
And so what's going to happen here is artificial intelligence is going to go put a bunch of people out of work.
What I believe is the arms race is we have to race to harness artificial intelligence to make you money.
Because basically what's going to happen here is if we do not harness the ability for artificial intelligence to make people money in terms of you have capital, you give it to the artificial intelligence, it goes into the market and makes you money.
What is going to happen is you're going to be out of work.
You're not going to have any capital and you're going to not have a path because the machines can do a better job at anything that you do.
And so the first thing that we did is we built this product called CFO Sylvia, which basically you come in, you load all of your different accounts, you put your bank account, your crypto, your brokerage, all that stuff in there.
And then you can start to talk to the AI and ask it simple questions.
How to get my tax rate down?
What should I do if I want to have this net worth in five years or 10 years?
You can also ask it, like, how does this current event go ahead and impact my current portfolio?
And the beauty of this is if you ask a chat GPT or, you know, Anthropic or any of these other guys, it'll give you very basic answers.
You know, here's what people do to get their tax rate down.
What this does is it tells you to your specific situation, asset by asset, what to do.
And what's interesting about this is we start to get feedback from these users.
What are these users saying?
I trust the AI more than I trust a human person.
I tell the AI more things than I would normally tell you.
I ask questions I wouldn't ask a human because the human will judge me, but I can ask these questions here.
And so what you start to realize is people are going to put all of their information and context into these systems and they're basically going to say, help me.
And CFO Silvia is doing it on the finance side.
But what we start to see now is, okay, if there is an arms race occurring, what you're going to see is you're going to see finance get automated.
Because ultimately, if you're an average person and you're saying, I'll go to work every single day and I might lose my job in the future, what do I do?
I'm going to have to use this technology to get ahead or it's going to put me out of business.
And so that is the arms race.
Do you agree with them, though?
Do you agree with them that retirement's not something that's important today?
I think that, one, you should always have some sort of safety net, right?
What I think that he's basically saying here, though, is he's actually not saying don't have retirement.
What I think he's saying is humans are not going to drive their retirement.
It is going to be all this other stuff.
So what the future I envision is you're going to eventually take your money and just going to give it to the AI.
And the AI is going to make sure that you have monthly income, that you've got retirement money, et cetera.
Now, there's a gap between where we are with the technology and where that eventually will be.
But you see this.
Like people are passively investing in indexes.
You see them constantly looking for, you know, there's all these AI bots and stuff that are now trying to figure out how to use the technology in the financial markets.
High frequency trading.
Hedge funds have been doing this for a long time.
So my view of this is he's right that you are not going to be trading your time for money in the future in the way that we've thought about that over time.
But he's wrong in that you're still going to need money.
And so you need some sort of retirement.
That's interesting.
So how does that, I mean, again, how does that work for, say, a plumber?
Well, the whole idea is that, you know, look, if I said to you right now, what can robots do?
Most people say electricians are safe, plumbers are safe, et cetera.
Okay, but if I went back five years ago and I said, do you think that robots are going to build homes?
You would tell me I'm crazy.
I've seen multiple videos online.
Now, the homes don't look the same, but they're 3D printed.
They've got these cement automation, all this kind of stuff.
And so as we rapidly get here, I think one of the aspects of all this AI stuff and robotics that to me is frankly, it breaks my mind, right?
Because it's scary and exciting at the same time is this idea of exponential production.
So if the humanoid robots can start producing more humanoid robots, then what is going to be that future look like?
Now, the one thing I will say is I actually think that the last human moat that exists is right here.
This is the last human moat.
There is not a thing in your brain that is a moat compared to software.
Software is going to be able to do everything that you mentally can do.
The Last Human Moat00:12:09
But this, your five fingers in your hand, the dexterity, the mobility of your hand.
What's going to be the value of knowledge?
What is going to be the value of knowledge?
What is going to be the value of somebody who has got a great memory and knows a lot of facts?
Like, what is going to be useless?
Something that we admire that in 10 years, we're going to say, you know, so what?
You're so smart.
You have all that information?
I can take Johnny off the street.
He's a homeless guy, put a $2.2 million latest chip model from NVIDIA that's this, and he's going to have access to every single book ever written, every fact in his brain.
He's going to have every information there.
Now it's about, let's see how good of a processor it is.
What do we value today that because of AI, we will not intend 20 years?
Creativity.
You think creativity.
Creativity, the ability to go beyond what we have today.
So you think in 20 years we won't value creativity?
No, I think we will value more creativity.
How about the know-how you were not going to?
Know-how, knowledge, facts, memorization.
You can replicate a lot of, I mean, because those are more mechanical processes.
It's about the ability to go beyond where we have today.
I mean, that's what human ingenuity has been since we were.
I agree.
You know, there's five things we score at the company.
Every quarter we do our calibration, and it's based on five things.
E-A-T-I-R.
E is effort.
A is attitude.
T is teamwork.
I is innovation and then R is results.
Three weeks ago, we're doing our calibration meeting and all the managers coming in and they're scoring everybody.
And then one of our guys, Mario, scores someone a seven on innovation and gives these other two guys a one.
And I said, why did you give these guys, this guy seven and these two other one?
He says, well, because of this, this, and that.
I said, okay, great.
I said, but why this guy seven?
Because of this.
And then he pauses, says, look, Pat, not going to lie to you.
I don't even know how to score for innovation.
I said, that's fair.
A lot of other people probably feel this way.
That was the right answer.
So we have to figure out how to quantify on how to score innovation.
And we did, by the way.
And here's what our system was.
Four-step process that we wrote out on the board.
Number one was, how creative is this person?
Which goes back to what you just talked about.
That's the number one element of creativity to us.
Number two was, does this person ask critical thinking questions all the time?
We're sitting in a room and say, why do we have that over there?
Should we move this prompt over here?
On the website, should we move the CTA here?
The video that we did, I don't know if I like the way it starts the first three seconds.
Maybe we move the intro of this clip to second 48 and then move that one to first three seconds.
So that is the critical thinking.
So you got creativity, critical thinking.
Number three is actually always thinking about how we can improve everything.
And last but not least, this implementation, because you can have all the first three and you don't implement it means nothing.
I agree with you.
To me, the way you're presenting it, Pomp, is this is how I see it.
Today you go to a Morgan Stanley guy or Goldman Sachs or a JP Morgan Chase guy.
I have $10 million.
How should we invest?
Well, let's go small cap.
You know, what's your risk tolerance, time horizon, all this other stuff?
All right, we're going to buy some this.
We're going to buy some this.
We're going to buy some that.
Let's put some cash.
Let's put some this.
Your age is 50 years old.
So 50 minus 100.
Let's go 50 equities, 50 bonds, 50.
Okay, great.
No problem.
You're saying in the next two, three, five, 10 years, that person's going to have, I got $10 million.
You give to the AI, and AI will say, how aggressive do you want me to go find work to create a business?
Are you willing to risk that this could not work?
And my brains of my engineers or the AI is going to go build this company.
Okay.
It's going to go do this for us.
Is that kind of how you're processing it?
I'm saying two things.
One is today, the AI will give you information that no human is able to do at the speed and the cost.
I'm not saying information.
So I know about clause.
I'm talking about.
But you need the information first and you need people to get used to getting the information.
What I'm going to is to kind of go back to what Milan is saying.
Are we going to get to a point that it's purely about here's the engines for AI?
I give you 10 million.
Go start something.
Go build something.
Go market something and I do nothing.
Then I take that 10 million and now it's like 88 million.
Go do something.
So you think is that?
There's two things that are happening right now.
This is not like a, hey, is it going to happen in the future?
The first thing is there's a bunch of experiments that people have where they're basically saying, let me give $10,020,000 to this AI.
Go into the market and make me money.
Whether it's a crypto market, stock market, whatever, right?
So that to me is not very different than high-frequency trading now with better technology.
But that is definitely happening.
The second thing that I find really interesting is there's been a couple of these demos that have now gone viral online where people will say to the AI, create me a business that makes X dollars per week, per month, per year.
Come back when you're done.
And the AI will go and it'll say, okay, well, if I need to make $100,000 a month, what industry should I go into?
Let me go look at the TAMs of all these industries.
Where is there a lot of competition that I could go and undercut cost?
Like it does, you know, kind of like a business analysis.
Then it says, okay, well, if I need to be in that industry, what products should I serve or what service, right?
What could I create?
Okay, let's create a website.
Let's get a URL.
And it starts doing all this stuff.
And these people are running these experiments.
And what they're essentially doing is they're giving the AI, right?
Right now, one of the biggest stories about Apple is that they are actually selling out of the Mac minis, these small computers, because people are buying them hand over fist and they are basically setting them up and they're putting an AI on it, giving it full control of the computer and saying, I'm going to give you a phone number.
I'm going to give you an email address.
I'm going to log you into all these accounts.
Go.
And so I always go to and I say, right now, if we look back three years, most of this stuff didn't exist, right?
Chat GPT, AI agents, this is all brand new.
This is the worst the technology is ever going to be.
And so there's a huge gap right now between how the technology works and how people know how to leverage it.
I don't know if you guys saw recently there was this huge breakthrough in science where these very sophisticated scientists came out and they said, look, 12 months ago, we didn't know how to use this technology.
Now we actually know what questions to ask the technology.
And so we started to solve really hard problems because we got better at using the tool, right?
It's like somebody who doesn't know how to use a shovel, all of a sudden learns how to use the shovel.
So one thing that we've got for your audience is anyone who wants, anyone who signs up for CFO Sylvia next 24 hours, we're going to send them 100 prompts that I use on a periodic basis to better use AI to manage my finances.
And what you'll see in these prompts is you can start to do things that you don't even know to ask.
So like some of the popular stuff, what do rich people do to save money on their taxes?
How should I take some of those ideas and implement them in my portfolio?
All of a sudden, there's a bunch of stuff you just don't even know to ask.
You don't know to Google this stuff.
And when you go to whether it's an advisor, a friend, an assistant, whatever, and you say, hey, what are the things that I should be thinking about?
They are limited by human knowledge.
And so this is going to get applied to every single sector.
And that's why you see insurance companies saying we're going to charge less for premiums because software is better at driving, right?
All the way through the economy.
Yeah, and I love that.
But also at the same time, I'm going to, what is your meeting with your investment banker or financial advisor going to look like every quarter?
You're not going to have it.
That's what I'm saying.
If it's going to go, I don't know if you're not going to fully have it.
Oh, they're going to get automated away.
They 100% are going to get automated.
I think there will still be a role for the creative side and the advice side.
But maybe this is something I disagree with Jeff on is, and I like talking to Jeff because he makes me think much more critically about this stuff.
But I actually would argue that if I said to somebody, hey, you need to be creative about whatever art or prompting or whatever, if you simply ask the AI, come up with 20 prompts that I should ask about some topic or write me a prompt.
Do you think in 20 years we'll have a president?
Well, who is president?
It begs the question.
You're just talking about what is the role of the president.
But think about it.
What is the role of a financial advisor?
What is the role of a doctor?
What is the role of any of these jobs, right?
But do you think in 20 years we'll have a president?
Yes, because I don't think that that job has a verifiable end state.
Whereas I do think that a financial advisor, a lawyer, et cetera, those are verifiable end states.
most of it.
Now, lawyers still have to go to court and argue and all this stuff, but we get to a weird place where...
Do we have automated courts?
So that I was going to say, that recent movie that just came out with Chris Brad?
Did you see the movie with Chris Brad?
No, I haven't seen him.
Hey, can you pull up this movie?
By the way, everybody.
But that's a good question.
Do you think we'll have automated judges?
Well, here's what I'm saying.
I think we have to define what we think AI is going to do.
To me, it's more like a human-robot partnership.
How can we make human beings more creative?
Augment the human.
Augment the human.
And so you don't eliminate necessarily the role of the human.
Maybe you eliminate some of the roles that humans use.
Jeff, do you know what this movie's about?
No.
Let me tell you what this movie is about.
Okay.
This movie is about Chris Pratt, who's an agent.
He's a detective.
He gets accused of killing his own wife.
Okay?
He wakes up.
He's sitting in a chair, handcuffs, shackles.
He has 90 minutes where he's sitting in front of this judge called Mercy to make the argument why he is not guilty.
If he doesn't, he's gone.
If he does make the argument, he's free.
And the most powerful, so the judge is an AI.
You have to watch this movie, by the way.
You have to watch this movie.
You know how the movie ends?
The movie, I'm not going to tell you what ends up happening, but I'll tell you one special line that he says at the end that's scary as hell.
He says, I guess what we learned is just like human beings can make mistakes, so can AI.
And it's about the judge when you see this.
There's also, that's the thing.
There's also a survival instinct in human beings.
We're not just going to go passively be eliminated by AI.
I think human beings, this is where the creativity comes in.
The most creative humans are going to figure out how to partner with AI to stay on top of the game.
I just, I go back to, is there a verifiable end state of the judge?
Yes or no?
If the answer is yes, it'll be automated.
Like if we have a lazy population that says, it may be better.
Does a judge in the current judicial process end up helping or hurting humans when you add in bias, error, et cetera?
There's a huge debate that we could have in terms of the role of the judge.
Why aren't you just replacing human bias with AI bias?
Well, so let me give you a good example is there's a study that shows if you are up for a parole, you know the worst time to go in front of the parole judge?
Right before lunch.
So they looked at throughout the time of lunch because people want to get to lunch.
Look it up.
There's a crazy study that shows if you go with.
You're flirting with something very dangerous.
No, so that's the thing.
You're flirting with something.
Let me explain to you why.
Look at this.
The hungry judge effect.
I get that, but you're flirting with something very dangerous.
But are you going to replace it with a worse bias from AI?
The question becomes how much of the law should include empathy versus fact?
And I don't have a good answer.
So you're going to put that into some coder's hands to code empathy.
But you know what you're flirting with?
Let me tell you what.
There's no easy answer here.
There's definitely no easy answer, right?
But this is the conversation that people should have.
Because you're right.
The legal system, let's face it, it can be improved.
Definitely be improved.
But this is where I think the creativity comes in.
You give the tools to the judge or lawyers, whatever.
That's the question.
It's a partnership with AI.
flirting you're flirting with with uh with we got him now But you've hit a nerve.
I'm going to tell you why, though.
I'm going to tell you why.
Because where you're going, if you fully go there, you know how there's what different parties do we have right now?
We have the Republican Party, Democratic Party, Independent Party, Communism, Social Establishment, whatever you want to call it, right?
It is going to be human and the AI party.
That's what it's going to come down to.
And if you go there, guess what?
They're going to win.
If it's going to be those two together where you put them as the superior, they're going to win.
Why?
AI and Human Competition00:06:21
The instinct insight of you, whether we know it or not, we're super competitive, all of us.
We're sizing each other up 24-7.
The most noble person in the world, Mother Teresa, she's a psycho competitor.
If you understand what I'm saying, pastors are psycho competitors.
Joel Osteen, Billy Graham, it's in here.
You can't get rid of it.
It's in our gene.
Okay.
So then when it gets to a point and in your mind, you realize you can get AI on your side, then you see a couple different people, you know, barrier to entry.
What do you now have?
It's about elimination of competition.
Then what takes place?
Now we're not banking on human team.
Now we're banking on purely wealth and finance.
And by the way, that's an empty place to be.
Sergey Brin did an interview recently.
I don't know if you saw this or not.
And he's talking about what happened when he retired during COVID and how it was the biggest mistake of his life.
This is a guy that's worth a couple hundred billion dollars that just bought $174 million house, I think, in Miami.
Rob, can you play this clip, please?
Go for it.
Retired like one month before COVID hit, and it was like the worst decision.
I had this vision that I was going to sit in cafes and study physics, which was my passion at the time.
And yeah, that didn't work because there were no more cafes.
I was just kind of stewing and kind of felt myself spiraling, kind of not being sharp.
And then I was like, I got to get back to the office.
We're 260 today.
Time was close, but after a number of months, we started to have some folks going to the office.
And I started to do that occasionally.
And then started spending more and more time on what later became called Gemini, which is super exciting.
And to be able to have that technical creative output, I think that's very rewarding.
As opposed to if I'd like stayed retired, I think that would have been a bad mistake.
Just the way he speaks.
Does he sound motivational to you?
Does he sound inspired to you?
I used to see this all the time when I used to manage money for people.
I used to tell them when they get closer to retirement age.
That's why you got retired.
Because he wants to get rid of you.
Yeah.
So don't retire because what you would see is that people who retire completely commit to retirement, they are dead within a couple of years.
You know, you know what is the dirty truth of this whole AI thing?
I have a lot of friends that run a lot of companies.
Right now, two things are true.
They have never worked as hard as they are working right now because they see there is an arms race and they want to win.
To your point, that competition, if you control the machines, you control the intelligence.
All right, that's the first thing.
The second thing, their day-to-day life at work is harder than it has ever been.
Not only is there the speed of the innovation and everything, they can't keep up, but AI is taking away all the easy tasks.
So the only thing that are left are all the hard tasks now.
So they've got to spend, you know, in terms of like density of hard tasks in a day is actually going up.
And so it's this weird dynamic of like, you're promised an economic or societal like utopia and abundance, but actually the lives of the people who understand what's happening here, they're working harder and they're spending more of their day on the hard problems, which I actually think is leading to many of them not being as happy.
Yeah.
So when I see some like this and I see a guy having $266 billion, you know what he can buy?
He doesn't just buy that $16.4 million card.
He buys the entire company.
He buys the entire brand.
He can buy fanatics.
He can buy industries.
He can buy leagues if he wants to.
That's the kind of money that he has.
Because he's a creative guy.
He has to have the key.
But there is a problem, though.
There is a problem.
This video here, I made this video a couple days ago and I had my son record me.
And it says the only noise that scares parents.
Okay, Rob, go ahead and play.
Yep.
What is the only noise that scares parents?
Silence.
I knew what it was before evening.
But check this out.
Do you know what the point is with what we're talking about right now with AI?
Here's a point.
Check this out.
What happens if all of a sudden this race goes so quickly and then we replace everybody?
What happens when a bunch of people have a lot of time on their hands?
The last time I had a lot of time on my hands, my hair was orange.
I'm just letting you know last time I had a lot of time on my hands.
It is so important for everybody to have a job and do something.
Even if everything gets automated, I don't want to stay home all day.
Even if we have half the population staying home doing nothing, that is a horrible society, horrible society.
We have to have purpose.
We have to be going after something.
So to me, the only thing is the question becomes if you allow AI to run with no regulation, if you allow it to, is this something that you want to highly deregulate?
Do you want to leave it open to let it go?
And typically, you know, as a capitalist, you want deregulation.
You don't want regulation.
You want it to go.
But at what level?
Will it be at a level of replacing human beings?
Will it be at the level of replacing what people are doing?
Like right now, how long ago do you think the NFL could have changed referees and done 100% AI?
They could have done it five years ago.
How come they don't do it?
Do you want it?
They are, but do you want it to be 100% getting rid of the referee?
So that's the thing is.
I don't know about that because then guess what happens?
First is the referee.
Then the first team announces an AI head coach.
We don't want a head coach.
We want an AI head coach.
That's a job.
Then it goes to, listen, XYZ company just built a running back and the NFL has agreed that each team can have three AI robot players.
Now you got a robot player that pays $88 million and sponsorship.
So that's an anthropic quarterback.
This one has the open AI quarterback.
This one has the game changes in a very big way if we go too much there.
Self-Driving Babies?00:05:22
Go ahead.
Final thoughts before we move on.
It's interesting because they're trying to figure out, you know, did the ball cross the plane or not replay all this stuff, right?
I do think, I think as Jeff said earlier, is like this idea of human error is also an important point.
So like baseball is actually the better example to me where there's a strike zone.
When you watch a baseball game, they tell you whether it was in the strike zone or not.
But there's still an umpire and the umpire still makes balls or strikes.
I love that.
Yeah.
It's a human-robot partnership.
Yeah.
And so I do think that there is this transition period where people are trying to figure this out.
The last thing I'll say about this whole thing, though, is my number one piece of advice for people is to start using the technology.
Because the one thing that I know for sure is you are going to get left behind if you use none of it.
Now, how extreme is the impact is up for debate.
But if you are not using this technology on a day-to-day basis, you are going to fall behind.
And so you can start, you know, replace some of your Google searches with using AI, use it at work, right?
You know, you can start slow, but if you are not using this stuff, you're going to be left behind.
Yep.
I don't, that part I don't disagree, but it's very important to realize.
By the way, we played a clip the other day in 2022, October 17th, when I said Dow's going to go to 50,000 by 2026.
You nailed it.
And yeah, I nailed it, but I'm telling you, very soon, this whole political party concept could go away and it could be human versus AI.
And that could be 20 years away.
But you know what's funny is like if you look at how Trump won in 2016, there's now a bunch of like information that's come out where basically they were selling the red hats and they were using that to get the data to then put into look-alight audience on Facebook and they were using the Facebook advertising.
Like that wasn't quote-unquote artificial intelligence, but that lookalike audience technology is machine learning and all this type of stuff.
For sure, right?
We do it ourselves, for sure.
And so it's like whoever starts to use the technology more and more?
Only if human is above.
It's the only thing if that stays above.
If all of a sudden, look what happened right now, birth rate in America, 1.58.
Do you know last year we only had 3.6 million babies born in America?
Do you know how many babies we had born in America in 1940?
3.6 million.
But we did it with 150 million people.
And we only did 3.6 million with 340 million people.
Do you know America, three times we want on a run of 4 million plus babies every year?
Once we did it five years, once we did it seven years, once we did it 11 years, the most babies we ever made in a year is what?
4.3 million babies.
So then you go through a list of why we're not making babies anymore, right?
Okay.
So one is, I think it's called Envion, the introduction of, what do you call it, birth control pills.
I think the year is 1960, that it was FDA approved and it was only available to married women.
in certain states.
Now it's everywhere, right?
Then you have Roe v. Wade, which abortion, 65 million kids we've killed the last 50, 60 something years, right?
That's the real Holocaust that some people talk about.
Then you have in 1957, which was the highest birth rate we ever had in America, that's documented 3.77.
That year, women were in the workforce 35% of the time.
Today, women are in the workforce 65 to 70% of the time.
Very different.
You know, that whole dual income, we want both to go to work.
So when you look at the stats, you're like, yeah, let's get women working as well.
This is going to be great.
We have double the workforce.
Birth rate dropped.
What else?
You know, people were having kids at 22, 23 years old.
Now they're having kids at 30 years old, 32 years old, 34 years old.
So some of the movements that we adjusted, we took a different kind of a hit.
So the only thing for me is like my, you know, my thoughts when it comes down to stuff like this, we have to be very careful that we don't over-edify AI to human.
And if it goes that way, you will be a slave to AI in no time.
It will own you in no time.
If you think about this, right?
So like one of the core principles that I usually revert to when I'm making kind of evaluations of this stuff is, does it hurt somebody else?
Right.
If it hurts somebody else, then you know.
Not yet, though.
Well, but there's things that other people don't.
No, no, of course.
But like if you think of this phone, right?
And you say to yourself, okay, somebody making that phone is saying, oh, you can connect with your family.
You can learn information.
You can do all this stuff.
Well, there's a bunch of studies that show scrolling social media is incredibly bad, not only for your focus, for your energy levels, but also just your mental health and kind of all this stuff.
And so it's, as a society, how do we make a trade-off between is social media regulated to a certain degree or not?
You know, how should we be for kids?
You can't, but that's the thing is then is age demographic.
You can't do that, though, because if you and all the ethical people like you make the same decision, then who will be left to run the AI arms race?
It'll be the psychopath.
What I'm saying, though, is just like, I think as a society, it's not just AI.
It's like there's a bunch of these technology things we're trying to figure out, right?
So like self-driving cars is another one.
We have verifiable objective data.
Self-driving cars are much safer than a human driver.
There are a massive amount of people who are fighting against this saying we should not have self-driving cars on the street.
That's a Dunning-Kruger effect.
Everybody thinks they're above average drivers.
Do you want to know what I do at dinners now?
Whenever I host dinners, we had a big conference last week and I had a dinner and there's probably 25 people or so.
And I asked, I said, in this room, how many of you guys use AI on a daily basis?
Farms to Algorithms00:06:37
This is, you know, kind of business crowd.
Everyone raised their hand and say, Grey, how many of you think that your job is going to get replaced by AI in the next five years?
Not one person raised their hand.
I said, well, listen, by the odds, some of you ain't going to be here in five years.
It's just nobody thinks it's them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I get that.
Let me get to this next story, which has to do with this.
And I'm going to come to you first, Jeff.
Farmers are aging.
Perfect.
And their kids don't want to be in the family business.
This is a Wall Street Journal story.
This is the very, very important of what's taking place.
It's a great story.
Don Gunip is running out of time.
The fifth generation farmer still wakes early in the morning to tend to roughly 1,000 acres of corn and soybeans and 40 cattle.
But for four decades of grueling work about with dealing with prostate, cancer and surgery to replace both of his hips with titanium implants has taken a toll.
The 74-year-old estimates he can maintain the current workload for a couple more years.
74 years old.
Under the gaze of generations of the UNEPs, the black and white photos, he gathers his four siblings to chart the future of their family's farm and contemplates a day where they longer cares for the land that runs on that road.
It's his family's road.
The natural choice to take over, his son or daughter left for college and now work in corporate fields.
His siblings made the same decision.
It's disappointing to me, he says, holding back tears.
That's the way the dice were rolled.
And you have to accept what life gives you.
The number of farmers in America have been shrinking for years, but rising costs and weak commodity prices are pushing more families out at a faster rate.
In 2015, 315 farms filed for bankruptcy, up 46% from 2024.
U.S. court data shows those left are aging.
There are more farmers 75 and older than under the age of 35.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, they are facing tough choices and tougher prospects.
Family agriculture is in crisis, and American farmers and ranchers are fighting for their livelihoods as National Farmers Union president.
What do you say, Jeff?
This is going to sound cold, but this is the key here is family farms.
Family farms are just uncompetitive.
Factory farms are far more competitive, far more productive.
The cost of food goes down, which is as a society what we want.
We want cheaper food.
In fact, we've been so successful at it, our poorest people are more likely to be obese than not.
So what the market is saying in a self-organizational structure, that family farms cannot compete.
And it brings us back to the AI argument.
We've been through this before.
In 1800, 90% of the American workforce were farm workers.
Either you owned your farm or you worked for somebody else.
By 1900, it was down to like 40%, 30%.
It only went further from there.
So the only question, bring us back to AI, is we're doing the same type of thing here, technological revolution.
Will human beings be able to be creative enough and stay, as you say, Patrick, stay on top of the heap enough so that we just reinvent new roles because people don't want to work.
People want to survive.
There'll be a place for creativity, that kind of thing.
The only question for AI is whether or not this is actually different.
You know, they keep calling it the singularity.
I'm kind of doubtful about that.
I mean, it's going to definitely revolutionize the future.
But as far as economic processes are concerned, we've eliminated industries before.
You used to go in an elevator in New York City in the 1920s.
Somebody had to press the button for you, right?
We don't miss the elevator operators, right?
We don't miss telephone operators.
In fact, we would not have had the internet if it hadn't been for the elimination of telephone operators.
We automated that process.
Where did the telephone operators go?
Where did the elevator operators go?
They found new employment doing something else.
So as AI takes over more of the mundane stuff first, does it invent, do people invent new industries and opportunities to absorb the rest of the labor force?
There'll be a shift, not an elimination.
That's the optimistic take.
I don't know that for sure.
None of us know that for sure, but that's the optimistic take.
And this part of this is part of it.
Moving unproductive farms out of the system because they're unproductive.
They can't compete.
That's a societal good.
Nobody's making that decision.
The marketplace is making that decision.
And over time, people who used to run farms or used to work on the farms will migrate to something else, which is exactly what this story is telling us.
There is a hopeful element in it.
Pomp.
I think there's three things on this.
The part this article left out is definitely like big farming is somewhat of an oligopoly and definitely has made family farming very difficult.
If you go talk to farmers, they actually point to that as the biggest kind of culprit.
They'll also point to things like tariffs, et cetera, that may have had smaller impact.
But the big thing is just like, you know, the John Deeres of the world, et cetera, have had this consolidated power.
There's this great book.
And I always, whenever I come on here, I like to bring kind of gifts for the audience, maybe.
And this book, I think, is probably the single book I've read in the last year that has made me think differently about a bunch of things.
It's called Leaving a Legacy.
Basically, what this guy does is he looks at society and he says, hey, there's things that we have been convinced of that may not actually be the right way to think about this.
And he comes at it from the perspective of if you want to build, you know, a thousand-year family, if you want to think very long-term.
And three key things he talks about.
One is nepotism.
We've been told that nepotism is a bad thing, but he actually uses the example of family farms.
He says, if you're a fifth-generation farmer, you don't go and try to find who can get the extra 15% yield out of your farm.
You think about, let me raise my son or daughter to take over the farm because this has provided value.
Yeah, this has provided value to our family and food, et cetera, and helped us get a living.
So he's got a bunch of stuff there.
Second thing is philanthropy.
He talks about the idea that we've somehow, in this bureaucratic process, been convinced that, you know, giving water to kids in Africa, very noble cause.
But most people who do that are never going to actually meet those kids.
And yet in your own neighborhood, in your local community, there's a bunch of people who need help.
And so philanthropy used to be this thing that was more kind of local rather than global.
And so we've gotten away from that.
But then the third thing he talks about is he spends a lot of time talking about this idea that as individuals, we have been convinced that everything that we work our entire lives for, we should not give to our children.
We should not actually pass that wealth on.
He says that.
And he goes right at the heart of many of these issues, which I think consensus has been reached.
And his point is, if you think long term, then you need multiple generations to accomplish things.
He goes back to the farmer.
But the other thing he says that I think is really important, it feeds into this AI, feeds into the farm, et cetera, is a lot of people don't want to give money to their kids because they say, I'm going to mess them up.
His point is, well, no, you just didn't raise your kids right then because there's plenty of families who pass on money through generations.
And if they did a good job raising their kids, then their kids aren't messed up.
Dumas' Long-Term Vision00:15:48
I'm 100% aligned with everything you said right there.
Fascinating.
That's a topic.
That is a topic that's been very important to me the last five years with generational planning.
I brought a guy on the podcast probably 10 years ago when I had my first son, second son.
He was a guy that deals with the billionaire families in Seattle.
And he tells a story about the Franklin Templeton story, which apparently they allowed him to tell the story publicly.
They had 16 grandkids, of which 15 of them had drug and alcohol issues.
And only one of them was the one.
Again, this is him telling this story on what he shared.
And he said, typically, by the time a person like me shows up, it's too late.
You need me before you have kids.
You need me to start thinking about the stuff before.
And then there's a bunch of legacy planning events you can go to to talk about what it looks like, G1, G2, G3, G4, G5.
And it's very enlightening.
So I just ordered a book myself right now when he recommended it.
So we'll see how that book is.
All right, let's get to the next story.
Next story I want to get to is which one do we want to go to?
There's so many.
Can we give a shout out to this Hermes CEO that he rejected financial predator Jeffrey Epstein's outreach?
I mean, we're not going to go to the other Epstein stories.
We'll go on that on Friday.
But here's Hermay CEO.
Okay.
This guy was approached allegedly by Epstein.
Rob, I think this is on page seven.
Is that him?
Is that this?
Yeah, there you go.
So let me read this to you.
Everyone's being hit up in a negative way.
Let's give a good story here.
Axel Dumas told Reuters that Epstein approached him in 2013 as a company was defending itself against a hostile takeover attempt by Louis Vuitton.
I think I was a target.
I was a young CEO and we were in the middle of LVMH affair.
He was a financial predator.
Dumas was quoted as saying he already had a hateful reputation.
Documents released by the Justice Department showed that Epstein sent several messages to Dumas' assistant in 2013 and 2014 asking for meetings with the CEO.
Epstein also sought the company's help in designing his private jet, but Hermes refused.
Dumas told Reuters that he met with Epstein once in March 2013 during a company event at an Adeliar where the brand makes its product.
According to Dumas, Epstein was not on the guest list.
Indeed, instead, he joined a group that included an award-winning director, Woody Allen, and his wife.
Dumas told Reuters that Epstein kept trying to get an audience with him.
After that, he tried three times to meet with me, and I refused every time.
The exec recounted.
I can't tell you exactly what we knew about him or not because I can't remember 13 years ago, but he already had a loathsome reputation.
The DOJ files, including small receipts of purchase, made at Hermes store in Paris.
Show Epstein was a fan of the French brand that caters to the ultra-wealthy and had emailed to ask if it could design my plane.
And one email to his assistant, Epstein, writes, track down Axel Dumas and Hermes headquarters, Paris.
The email shows Dumas own the system politely refusing Epstein's invitations to meet him in November 13 and January 2014, citing a prior engagement.
What do you think about the story?
What do you think about the story?
Snyder, you go first.
Yeah, I mean, there's two things here.
One is Epstein had a horrible reputation at that time, yet most people, it seems, didn't care.
So, I mean, this guy seems like he's the exception rather than the rule, which is incredibly sad and disappointing and disheartening.
But I don't think it's necessarily surprising, which we've talked about many times before.
And the other thing is the downside of something like this is guilt by association, right?
And I think that's really the point of the story.
The reason we have courts set up and we have a due process set up is so that something like this doesn't happen.
But when you get wrapped up into this sensationalized story with Epstein for really obvious reasons, things like this fall through the crack.
So if you're just named in the Epstein file, suddenly you're guilty of association, which is, I'm going to use the term, it's un-American.
Pop, how do you probably get invited to a lot of stuff?
You get a lot of emails.
I got something even crazier for you.
There's people in the chat are saying that I'm in the Epstein files, right?
So Saturday night when DOJ releases it, all of a sudden my phone blows up.
The hell, how?
I never don't know who this guy is.
Never talk to this guy.
I'll start.
How am I in the Epstein files?
See an email.
It's a phishing email.
The phishing email is somebody used my name with a, it got pulled up, with a fake email.
That's not my email.
And it says that I am, I think there's two or three.
It says that I'm an informant for the IRGC.
And he better give me $10,000.
And this is an email to Epstein's brother.
I swear, this is the funniest thing.
This is in the DOJ Epstein file release.
And so I'm like, wait, what the hell is going on here?
Did you know that before?
No, I had no clue.
So in the file release, so the reason why I say this is because now remember, this is sent in 2020.
This is when Bitcoin, everything was ripping, all this stuff.
We were getting these phishing emails.
Every person I ever talked to in my life, every person I ever knew, our investment firm, we were getting these all over the place.
That is so funny.
Now, here's what's crazy.
Two things I took away from this.
This is obviously not me, just for the record.
So you're not part of the IRGC.
I am not part of the IRGC.
And as one friend told me, he goes, I knew it wasn't you because you would ask for more than 10K.
But is now anybody who is caught in any email who's mentioned all this stuff, they get, you know, kind of your guilt by association thing.
That's very real.
There's a lot of people caught up in this who had nothing to do, which hides the people who actually did do bad things.
So by going and trying to label everybody, you actually are able to protect the people who actually did bad stuff, who should get found and prosecuted.
The second thing is that when you go and you look at this, it took me 30 minutes, 45 minutes, to figure out whether this was a real email or not.
I saw somebody tweet it and I said, is that AI?
Is it real?
Is it not?
Had to go and I found the file, right?
Went to the thing, all this stuff.
And so what it started to get me to think about is like this guy, not only did he resist it multiple times, but he explicitly says that he had a bad reputation.
We've heard from a lot of other people who said, oh, I didn't know what his reputation was, all this kind of stuff.
And so either those people are lying or they actually didn't know, right?
They just got introduced to somebody, whatever they didn't, Google them, all posted stuff.
It now makes me, every time I get introduced to somebody new, I do a little bit of homework, right?
Especially when you know that they are kind of involved in somebody's elite circles, et cetera.
And so I think it's just a good reminder to everybody is, look, just know the people that you're doing stuff with and spend a little bit, couple minutes figuring that out so you're not caught in any of these situations.
And good for this guy.
So true.
To say, you know, hey, look, I don't want to meet you.
I think this is actually a good story because every story is something bad, Brandon.
Yeah.
Do you think they're doing the thing where they're associating so many people with it that they and that gets discredited?
So it like protects people who actually are associated with it because they're almost like diminishing the credibility of these reports that are coming out with the amount of people that are attached to it.
Like it's amazing that we're finding a connection potentially between like every major person out there in Epstein.
So I almost wonder if they're trying to diminish the allegation of that.
You know what I mean?
You think that's what it is?
Not with a specific case, but I mean, Hillary Clinton was being asked about it and she's like, release all the files.
We don't know anything about this.
You know, I didn't have a relationship with the fellow.
And then she gets asked about, how about Jelaine Maxwell?
I think I met her at a couple, you know, Clinton Foundation events, but I don't have a relationship with her.
Yet at the same time, when her daughter got married, and Rob was saying this earlier, they had 500 people there.
Nobody just walks onto that.
And then Jelaine Maxwell has a seat right there.
Zoom in a little bit.
That's Chelsea.
That's the father.
That's Jelaine right there at the wedding.
So look, there's different angles and different directions to go.
All I'm saying is for this specific story to isolate, kudos to him for what he's doing.
And it's something everybody has to be aware of nowadays more than ever before.
Let me get to the next thing.
By the way, Tony Robbins and I were speaking.
He said something to me.
He said, one guy came to me.
I think he stole a lot of money from him, some big number, $400 million, massive number that he talks about.
Somebody stole that from Tony?
From Tony in a business deal.
He says, moving forward, what we did is every single person that we went into business with, we did an extensive background check on them.
So if you raise money from someone, they will do like they've probably done it to you multiple times.
They'll do a background check and they did mine.
It was this thick.
And the investor came to me and says, okay, we're green lit moving forward.
I said, what did you find?
He says, did you know your license was suspended twice?
I said, twice?
I thought it was once.
He said, no, it was twice.
I said, wow, what was the second time?
He said, well, that's the worst thing that came out.
I said, okay, that's great to know.
So these people that are putting money, you got to do the background check.
I had the Heritage Foundation president yesterday here, Dr. Kevin Roberts.
And their job for vetting Pomp, which is very interesting, is you want to be a, you become a president.
Let's just say Pomp becomes a president, but you've never been a senator to Congress.
So you don't know the swamp.
You don't know the people.
You're like Trump.
You're not like Bush or Biden.
They already know everybody, right?
You come to us with Heritage.
We vet the names.
And we have draft picks for each position.
You want this?
Seven names.
Draft pick, they vet.
This background.
This came out, this came out, this came out.
Here's a, you know, what direction you want to go with these candidates that you have.
Even with that vetting process, think about who gets through.
Right?
Because I asked the question yesterday.
I said, if a person came to you that wants to give $2 million to the foundation, but if they were on the Epstein Island, would you take the money?
So now charities have to be careful with this.
Campaigns have to be careful with this, right?
This gets very tricky, slippery slope.
You know, even there was this photo company that was taking pictures of kids in schools that the school all of a sudden said, no, we don't want to deal with this company that comes and takes pictures of schools because the investor was on the Epstein list in a bad way.
The school did a timeout.
We're no longer taking pictures with this company.
They went to a different direction.
SPF.
When he was giving out all the money to the politicians and stuff, if you did a background check on him, it would have came back super clean.
So it's not just about the person.
It's also where's the money coming from?
Yeah.
Right?
So like it is.
I mean, look, these are first world problems.
If somebody's going to a foundation saying, I'll give $2 million.
But there is like that is part now of vetting is who's the person and where's the money coming from?
This kind of goes into where some of the high-intense background check products being good.
You see IMG Academy?
What about it?
Oh, pull this up.
Do IMG Academy sanction?
I just saw this, I think it was yesterday or day before.
IMG now had to pay a $1.7 million fine for accepting students and tuition linked to the Mexican cartoons.
Stop it.
Stop it.
Go a little bit lower, Rob.
Go a little bit lower.
Okay.
An elite Florida camera 1.7.1 settlement for accepting tuition from two students that ties with an Exxon Cartel.
IMG Academy of Prestigious Bradenton Prep School Nonazo Powerhouse will work over massive sum for wow.
But it's like seriously.
We were there a few months ago.
Or someone to one of their camps.
U.S. Treasury Department.
I mean, this is like serious stuff.
Now, again, how many students go to that school over all these years?
How do you track it?
Two students, and now you got headlines.
You got to pay $1.7 million.
But how do you track that, though?
How do you know where the money is coming from?
And that's a trade-off if you try to go the route of tracking it because then that's like control of your money.
Federal official who didn't name the students or specify the sports they played said IMG accepted the tuition of $98,000 for one and $102,000 for another from two specially designated national individuals who provided money and services to sanction drug cartels.
But how would they know?
Did they?
Because the only way they're paying a fine is because the paper troll showed that they knew where the money was coming from and they accepted it.
The bank should have known.
I mean, that's the KYC issue.
Yeah.
The banks should have known that this was dirty money and these are the same.
Know your clients.
Yeah.
Go a little bit lower.
Go a little bit lower.
Which raises other questions, but there it is.
So it was hit with 89 penalties for violating the foreign narcotics kinkpin sanctions regulation.
The banks should have known that these individuals.
So why are they paying the fine?
I don't know.
There's always a lot of details to this.
Guys, you guys are the smartest.
Is AI beating you?
Don't let AI do this to you.
I'm expecting an answer from you guys.
Banks get away with things.
If you look at this, right?
Like, there's also a bunch of companies now that have all popped up that first started crypto.
Now they're doing it in the traditional banking world, tokenization.
All so they're going to be doing this stuff to try to figure out, you know, where do these assets come from?
And it's all like CYA stuff.
But you know what this tells me?
This tells me we need a product for this.
This is a big problem to solve.
You need it moving forward.
I mean, not to get off topic, but I mean, they say that if it wasn't for drug money in 2007, that the whole banking system would have crashed.
So it's probably not a thread that they want to pull on.
Wait, what?
Wait, are you supporting drug money coming?
I'm not.
I'm saying that the banking system allegedly depends on it, according to what reports said in 2008.
2008, the banking system didn't crash because there was drug money.
Because there was drug money in the banks.
Who said this?
There's a report.
There's articles that say that.
Yeah.
Not to go down a rabbit hole, but that was he didn't even go to Google.
He went to ChatGPT.
While we're doing this, can we go to New York?
Because Mamdani wants your money, folks.
And honestly, he's getting sick and tired of the fact that the governor's not supporting him raising taxes, and it's not cool.
It's not cool.
And they forced him to do this.
You know what he sounds like?
He sounds like the spouse that hits the wife and says, you made me do this.
I would have never done this to you.
You made me do this.
This.
Mamdani sounds like that.
Rob, do you have the clip?
Is this the one, Rob?
The one that this is the one.
Okay, watch this here, folks.
Go ahead.
Would rather do is ensure that they remain as they are so that the city can be on firm financial footing.
However, in order to get to this point of closing the gap on both this fiscal year and the next fiscal year, we are forced to raid the rainy day fund, the retiree health benefits trust reserve, and to increase property taxes across these other years.
There you go.
Okay, so what is this one?
What is the next one, Rob, that you have?
This is just him going into more detail.
Play?
Tax increase.
This would effectively be a tax on working and middle-class New Yorkers who have a median income of $122,000.
The second path also requires us to raid our reserves.
It would mean withdrawing $980 million from our city's rainy day fund in fiscal year 2026 and $229 million from the Retiree Health Benefit Trust in fiscal year 2027.
These are steps that have been taken before, but only in moments of extraordinary external crisis.
Mayor Bloomberg's response to the 2008 financial collapse and Mayor de Blasio's response to the enormous revenue shortfall caused by the pandemic.
We do not want to have to turn to such drastic measures to balance our budget.
That's a threat.
That's the point.
It's blackmail.
This is totally blackmail.
It can continue.
We saw it happen in the UK.
You're careful, though.
The guy to your right lives there.
So you will go ahead and continue.
We don't like that.
We don't work at you.
But no, we saw it in the UK.
What happens is leftist governments come in and they say, oh, my God, we just discovered these numbers.
And these numbers are horrific.
The only way we can get out of this crisis is if we tax the hell out of everybody.
California's Dilemma: Options and Hope00:14:51
And oh, by the way, we're raising expenses.
You know, we're going to raise expenses to all our, to do all the stuff that we want to do.
The UK did that in 2024.
The Labor government comes in.
They say, oh, my God, we have this massive shortfall.
We now have to institute a payroll tax, which eventually created lots of job losses on top of everything else.
But typical playbook.
That's what happens.
And the other side of that is if you don't give us the money, look at, I mean, look at the language you use.
The only time we've ever done this, 2008, 2020, it will be catastrophic unless you get the state government to fund every last thing that we want the state government to fund.
Pomp.
I got a lot to say about this because we warned everybody this was going to happen.
How funny is it that the guy who promised free transportation, free food, and free child care is now saying we ain't got enough money?
Well, the first thing you could do is stop giving out free stuff.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is he said that we have two options.
Those two options, oh, you already found it.
Yeah, you're already on top of this.
All right.
So the second thing is that he says we got two options.
We can either have the New York state increase our budget, or we could tax the hell out of homeowner or the rich and the profitable businesses.
Well, we got a third option.
Why don't we just spend less money?
You may say, how do we do that?
Well, back in this tweet, I sent to him to our amazing mayor on January 29th.
I responded to him and I said, hey, let me give you a couple of examples.
Because he announced these chief savings officers.
And I said, all right, well, if there's these chief saving officers, just search my name in chief savings officer.
I said, let's make the big cuts, right?
I said, New York City needs a leader with the backbone to make the hard decisions.
I believe you're young and enthusiastic enough to pull this off if you wanted to.
For example, there's $3 to $4 billion of annual savings that could be captured if you merely stop the aggressive enhancement to city workers' retirement benefits and you cut the ridiculous administrative bloat inside the Department of Education.
And you could accomplish this without losing any teachers, firemen, police officers, or city workers.
You wouldn't have to raise taxes on anyone.
Every hospital and school would stay open, and you don't need the chief savings officers.
So there is the closing of this gap by him simply just saying, we are not moving forward, going to keep increasing aggressively the benefits to all of the retirees.
So people who aren't retired yet, we're just going to stop making bigger and bigger promises to them.
Just keep it where it is.
And then 40% of the New York City budget goes to the Department of Education, and the number of administrators there has absolutely exploded.
And so when you look at this, you start to say to yourself, this is not a revenue problem.
This is a spending problem.
And if they have a $122 billion budget, the state of Florida is $117 billion.
There's 15 more million people that live in the state of Florida than New York City.
How the hell is New York City spending more money than the entire state of Florida on a budget?
It's not a spending problem.
It's a philosophy problem.
It's crazy.
Mandami was, he's exactly who we thought he was, and he advertises the entire story.
I love that he's coming through.
I love that he's doing exactly what we thought he's going to do.
People voted for this.
They voted for the fantasy and the fairy tale.
And once you vote for it, you're kind of stuck with it.
And that's the political process that goes on here is that you vote for all the stuff, and then the blackmail happens to make sure that it happens.
You want to know what I think is going to end up happening?
Go forward.
He ain't going to get any of this done.
No way.
You know why?
He's saying he's going to raise property taxes 10%.
It's not like a 1% increase, 2% increase.
Look at the people.
He said he's going to raise property tax 10%.
I think that's what he said, right?
He said 10% increase in property taxes, 9.7% or something.
To who, though?
To who?
Every voter.
People above 122.
In the clip you played, he said, look, this is going to hit middle-class earners, which are the people he's supposed to be protecting.
Yeah, but the biggest barrier to— So you're saying he's not going to be able to do it.
Do you think he'll be able to do it to the 2008?
32%.
They will revolt.
32% of New Yorkers own homes compared to.
So the lowest in other states.
The national average out of all.
They're 65%, right?
So we're at 32%.
Of the people who own the homes, everyone thinks that it's just rich people.
But actually, if you look in Queens, the Bronx, et cetera, the homeowners there, they're not quote-unquote rich.
These are middle-class, lower middle-class Americans.
You're going to raise their property taxes 10%?
Stop.
Anti-retirement money.
Stop.
He's a black man.
Who does he need for that to happen?
Whose approval does he need?
He needs the state government.
He needs Hokul to get on and get on.
But he's trying to get around Hokul.
He's trying to do it in a way without needing Hokul.
He's threatening.
He's threatening.
Look, I'm going to decimate your core voter audience.
I think it'd be the state of Congress, state, because they're for financial.
This is New York City versus New York State.
But you know what?
If you flip around to the other side, you want to see the future of politics?
This guy is an incredible entertainer.
Look, think about this.
Trump, remember when he did the tariffs?
He had the science fair boards come out, right?
And they had all the tariff rates and they were doing their science fair presentation.
Everyone was like, look, these guys, you saw what Mamdani had.
He had the science fair boards out.
He was doing the whole thing.
He's duplicating Trump very closely.
He understands.
He understands the game.
They're all doing it now.
Yeah, but by the way, I hope he comes through with all of it.
I hope he comes through with it.
I really hope he comes through with all of it.
You get what you vote for?
You know why, though?
No, let me tell you why.
Come on.
I'm going to tell you why.
I'm going to tell you why.
Every once in a while, the world needs to be reminded of what doesn't work.
Every once in a while, you need a reminder.
And if a guy like this comes in, by the way, during COVID, what are the two states that lost a trillion dollars of wealth that left?
New York and California.
Do you know right now, the only state that has lost a trillion dollars of wealth on two different occasions is California.
Hasn't happened on New York yet.
That article hasn't hit yet.
But it's coming soon if he continues the way he's doing.
And I'm encouraging Kim, please continue with all this stuff.
Keep doing it.
For some of you guys that are in New York, they're like, but he's not a bad guy.
It's okay.
You know, we hate, you know, who were the other guys, Sleewa, or who is Sleewa, or who is Cuomo?
Did you see you saw this?
Very, very sad, but I think that the number, look up how many people died during the cold front.
I think it was 16 or 20 people.
So there's this standing philosophy that they take off.
They take the homeless people off, right?
And he didn't take them in.
He said, Hey, if you want to stay outside, you can stay outside.
Obviously, a lot of people died.
Not everyone died from the cold front.
Some of these are drug overdoses, et cetera, right?
But definitely there are people who died because they got left outside.
But then I don't know if you guys saw recently the police shot and arrested a guy who ran at them with a knife.
And Mamdani came out and he basically said, I think that you guys should take the handcuffs off of him and let him go.
I saw that.
And so you have two.
And he went and visited him at the hospital.
Is that the one you're talking about?
He should have been visited by a social worker.
Yeah.
And so now you got two problems, right?
One is, I don't think anybody who says, hey, if you run out of the cops with a knife, right, you should be free.
But the second thing is now you have the mayor who's what is he going to inject himself into every single thing before the courts do?
So what, now all of a sudden, if you got to go to a jury, every jury member.
I hope he continues.
No, I'm telling you.
You know why?
You know why?
Because all the people that had the money and the resources in New York, you could have done more.
You could have done more.
I hope he continues.
You guys, and I'm not talking about you.
The people that don't want to say the wrong thing to lose customers, who are like, well, I don't want to say anything because I don't want to seem like I'm against Momdani.
The people that stayed quiet, I'm so glad you're getting what you're getting.
I'm so glad you're getting what you're getting.
By the way, kudos to the people that got a ton of backlash that a lot of people said a lot of negative things about who came out and said things.
Kudos to you.
Ackman was one of them.
There's a few of them.
You were out there saying stuff as well, but there were a few of them that were doing that.
But the rest of you in New York, guess what?
Your silence is causing this.
Your silence.
Your, I don't want to get the other.
And behind closed doors, some people were vocal, but I hope he keeps pushing the envelope and he succeeds.
I'm banking on this guy succeeding.
We need a new case study of what happens when you allow somebody like, and by the way, this is a trifecta of a candidate because what you said right now is crime, right?
Because that's safety.
Then you have economical ideology, which is capitalism, socialism, and communism.
Then you have religious, where he's out there, you know, putting his hand on the Quran and speaking from the Quran on peace.
So you have all three.
And guess what scares some of the richer guys to speak against about it?
It's this here.
They'll speak out against this, but this is why this is a perfect candidate that scares a lot of the billionaires and media people to say anything.
And again, I'm rooting for you, buddy.
Well, it's all California, though.
So why isn't like, I would say, why isn't California a case study that scared people out of that, though?
But it is, though, a trillion dollars left.
But they're still voting for him, though.
So do you think New York's ever going to vote somebody like this out again?
No, but New York has voted Republican mayors.
New York could have voted the mayor in a different way, and they didn't.
By the way, these days of just, you know what, I don't deal with politics.
I'm just going to sit and grow my business and I'm not going to do anything.
Keep doing that.
See what happens.
There's a reason why eventually guys realize we need an office in Virginia.
We need an office in D.C.
We need an office in some of these places.
Why?
Because you need the help of some of these guys that are behind closed doors or else guys like this are going to run it and destroy.
Maybe if you said what is the greatest city in America, what is it?
It's New York City.
The crypto industry is a great example of this.
The crypto industry for 12, 13 years said, hey, we're not into politics.
We're outside the system.
We don't care about all that stuff.
It changed.
Well, politics came for crypto.
And guess what?
All of a sudden, those guys turned on a dime.
They raised a bunch of money.
They got Sherrod Brown, a bunch of these guys out of office.
There's no atheists in Foxhole.
Listen, I will tell you right now, you go to Washington, D.C., you know the number one thing that these politicians are scared of, the fair shake pack.
They got a couple hundred million dollars, and they are incredibly effective at going at some of these politicians.
And so, again, you know, money does have a huge impact on this stuff.
But more importantly, is that industry realized, hey, if we don't participate here, then we're going to get rules we don't like.
But this is this is part of that.
We've seen this before.
We've seen this playbook in smaller ways.
I mean, why do cities vote heavily Democratic and have for decades?
The reason is back in the 60s and 70s, they called it white flight.
It was really getting away from Democratic policy.
So those who are in the middle class all move to the suburbs.
And what happens is the inner cities are left with either wealthy, ultra-wealthy, or the vast majority are poor people.
And the vast majority are poor people who get most of their livelihoods, for lack of a better term.
They get welfare and state aid through the Democratic machine.
So eventually the goal is to get rid of the safe people, to get rid of the middle class.
And what's left will always vote for the Uniparty or the single party, Democrats.
It's playbook as we've seen throughout history.
Same thing, California.
Why is California one party state?
Anybody who could leave left.
Well, why do you think Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton recently came out and started saying that the mass migration and everything was a mistake or in homelessness in California?
You're asking me?
Yeah, I'm asking you.
No, I'm asking you.
No, no, I think where they're going right now is the following.
The one part that I'm surprised Hillary's not distancing herself from because they're going to lose.
It's 10 out of 10 they lose is they are distancing from homelessness.
She did say stuff about mass migration was a problem.
She said that a couple of days ago.
I think it was in Munich.
I don't know where it was, maybe another place that she did.
But they are still keeping the position of transgender, interviewing somebody from that site.
See, there are a lot of Democrats that don't subscribe to the transgender.
You saw the $2 million lawsuit with the transitioner, the transitioner that came back.
And by the way, over the next five years, you're going to see, in my opinion, hundreds of those happening all over the place.
Doctors who help kids with puberty blockers are sitting around finding ways to get an insurance lawyer to protect them because they know they're going to be targeted.
It's coming their way in no time.
You should have never touched the kids.
You should have never touched the kids.
So if you think about where politics goes away, Pomp, my opinion, is take Epstein and take the trans issue.
There's Democrats and Republicans who are like, no, I'm good.
I'm not there.
Epstein, I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat.
You're on the list and you did something.
I want to know about it, right?
We don't do politics here.
85% of us, 90% of us.
We get on the same page.
So I think this is where they realize in 2028 and midterms, they have to come a little bit to the center.
If they don't go a little bit to the center, you got Mandani, you got AOC, you got all these guys.
If you don't come here, they're worried what happens in 2028.
So maybe it's even an indirect way of Obama giving feedback to Newsom, okay, in his very gentle way.
Because the way Obama will do it, it's a very massaged, gentle way to his own party.
I think he is speaking to Newsom.
I think they're worried about who's going to be their leading candidate for 2028.
AOC is being talked about whether she wants to compete.
She's number two right now on Calci.
If you pull up the list, AOC is number two on Calci.
Maybe it's changed as of today.
Yeah.
But Robin, pull it up.
Number one is Newsom.
I think number two is, yep, AOC is number two.
Yeah, number one is Newsome.
Go a little bit lower to see the rest of the names, Rob.
So number two, Kamala, okay, John Osoff and Shapiro and Kamala are third.
So that changed.
Shapiro came up because he wasn't third.
Kamala was third.
Prisker down.
Budich, five, but even with Butichic, did you hear what the stat came out about how many African-American men voted for Pete Budich?
Did you see that number?
No, how many?
Zero.
Zero.
And Stephen A. Smith said on one of his shows, he says, we just don't do that.
Yeah.
You can't.
So they have to go back to comment.
If you really unpack, and I've been fascinated with Trump's ability to be an outsider and to win.
Forget all of his policies, forget him as a person, just as a student of communication on the internet and in modern society.
One of the things that is kind of crazy, if you go on the internet and you look, there are people across all sorts of different demographics that would say, hey, you know, that's my president.
That's the guy I voted for, all that kind of stuff.
Yield Curve and Deflationary Pressures00:11:53
But also, there's a guy who's got, you know, gold toilets in Manhattan, has convinced, you know, farmers in Iowa that they're the same person, right?
He speaks their language, though.
But that's the thing is, I do think that the polished politician has kind of gone to the side.
And I actually think that's why Momdani is so compelling to people is because he's speaking to like a millennial generation in their language, in their format.
I'm so glad he's winning.
Trump is FDR.
I'm so glad he's winning.
He's the guy who says, yeah, FDR is the same thing.
Gold toilets, everything about that.
FDR was the guy who said, I hear you.
I listen to you.
People thought they could actually be heard during the Great Depression, of course.
Trump's same thing.
He got elected in 2016 by saying the unemployment rate's fake.
Rustbelt lost all these jobs.
I'm going to do something about it.
He connected to people in the same way, even though he's not the prototypical red state rural area politician.
That's what everybody else is trying to replicate.
How do we become Trump?
How do we find disaffected voices and become their outlet?
Yeah.
And by the way, let's do one last story before we wrap up.
But those of you guys that are listening here, whether you greet with Snyder or not, or you greet with Pomp, they're officially on Manect.
So you can Manect Snyder, Jeff.
I call last name because in the military, we only do last name Pomp.
You know this.
So you can message Snyder and get smarter.
He's on there now.
And you can do the same with Pomp and learn more about the software and different things they're doing.
And then Aseto is also there.
Okay.
Brandon's also there if you want to Manect him as well.
But let's go to the last quote.
We're all going to compete over who can answer the most questions.
The competition is going to be who's going to be the lightweight at the top.
Alex Jones started answering his Manek this morning, so he's moved up to third place.
It'll be interesting to see.
The lightweight is wide open, but we'll see that.
It's a very competitive climate on Manect.
Okay, so let's get to the next.
What's the last?
Is there a story you have strong opinions on?
Do you want to go to the Colbert story?
Or you guys don't have strong opinions there.
You want to go to Colbert?
You want to go to pick the story.
Give me a good, fiery story.
Can I give you one that we were talking about backstage that I genuinely would look forward to talking about?
So one of the theories a lot of great investors have right now is that deflation is a much bigger risk than inflation.
I tend to agree with them in tariffs, deportations, AI, robotics, all this stuff is very deflationary.
Jeff was talking about this idea of if there is deflation, then there may not be the debasement trade and all these things that people have been talking about.
So maybe you want to describe a little bit as to kind of your current viewpoint on there's this deflationary pressure, but what does that mean for the dollar or for asset prices?
Yeah, well, I think a lot of what happens a lot of times is people create a narrative and then go looking for ways to support it.
What I do is try to look at the markets in particular, never focus on one market or another and see what they're telling me and then try as best as we can to construct a narrative about what the markets are saying.
So start with something like the yield curve.
The yield curve has been bull steepening since September of 2024.
Bull steepening is a very negative deflationary signal.
Let's begot.
Let's define our terms here.
Because you and I were talking about this, and I know a lot of people don't realize there's two different forms of what is called deflation.
One of them is very good, one that we really want to see, and the hope for AI is it creates this productive disinflation.
We all know what productive disinflation is.
You know, when we were younger, we know what it is intuitively.
When we were younger, you know, you bought a fancy computer.
It was really, really expensive.
But over time, it gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
That's not harmful deflation.
That's free market capitalism doing what it does well.
That's not what the markets are saying.
What the markets are saying is that the economic situation is getting worse, not better, and therefore it's going to lead to market volatility at the very least.
It's going to lead to economic volatility, which, by the way, you've already seen.
We had no job growth last year.
An entire friggin year without no job growth is going to have downstream consequences.
So what the markets are saying is that balance of probability, you're going to see interest rates go down and stay there for a pretty long time, which is not an inflationary situation.
It's the opposite situation.
And the counter argument to that is that in a situation like that, that's going to unleash the money printing machine of the government.
The discussion that we were having is that the government doesn't actually have a money printer.
Money comes from the banking system.
And if the banking system is not in the mood to create money, it won't.
It won't matter what the Fed does.
It won't matter what the federal government does.
If the banks don't create money, there won't be money.
And it's really not about supply.
It's about circulation, which is why we watch these signals like the yield curve.
So last year, for example, when everybody was talking about tariff inflation, sell America, treasury rejection, the treasury market itself was saying, I don't see any of those things.
Yield curve kept bulls deepening, which said there is no tariff inflation.
We have a bigger problem on the employment side for macroeconomic reasons, not for AI.
And that the outcome of that is going to be something that looks like a recession for too many people if it doesn't actually become an outright recession itself.
So in that situation, very different set of outcomes than dollar debasement, inflation, and everything.
So you start the treasury yield curve and look at other assets like gold.
If you're looking at strictly gold, gold goes parabolic.
You think, well, there's dollar debasement.
But gold can go up for other reasons.
So you take gold and balance it against the treasury yield curve.
Treasury yield curve says no dollar debasement, no deflation.
What is gold saying?
Gold tends to go up during periods when people want to own a safe haven.
A safe haven, safe haven demand looks a lot like what the treasury yield curve says.
If you're in China, for example, and we go through a deflationary period as I just described it, macroeconomic downturn, you're not going to want to own Yuan assets.
They don't care about Jay Powell or Federal Reserve interest rates or the dollar.
They're saying, do I want to invest in something in China?
Hell no.
I'm going to own gold.
So gold as a signal wasn't about dollar debasement.
It was about safe haven.
That fits with the treasury market.
And it fits with a whole bunch of other markets as well.
When you think through that, you mentioned gold.
What about stocks?
Stocks volatility now.
Volatility up or down?
Both directions.
So there's an anxiety that maybe there's something to the macroeconomic case that maybe AI won't be able to overcome with all of its positives.
And believe me, I'm long-run positive on AI for the reasons that we discussed.
So you got market volatility in the stock market that is consistent with safe haven demand, treasury yield curve, bull steepening.
You start to pull in all of these various signals that are coalescing on what we hope is an accurate narrative, but a common narrative, which is more of a recessionary downturn type of environment.
And then you get the macroeconomic data that suggests, yeah, that's the case, at least for enough of the population that it becomes a major issue.
Again, zero job growth for an entire year.
That is an unhealthy economy.
And you don't just gloss over that.
An unhealthy economy that gets more and more unhealthy.
And I imagine most of the people watching me are saying the same thing.
Yes, this is an unhealthy economy.
This is a sick situation.
So the markets are saying, yes, we hear you.
Not only do we hear you, we're betting on the consequences of that unhealthy economy.
What are you saying, though?
Because right now, you got the story that also came out yesterday.
U.S. debt set to crush World War II record.
I'm sure you saw that.
Yep.
As annual deficit explode to $3 trillion within a decade.
Right.
So where are you going with this?
What I'm saying is you're saying there could be a possible market correction?
Which market are you talking about?
Stock market?
Yes.
Let's start with the deficit.
The deficit under these types of conditions, the marketplace, the general financial marketplace, wants to own that debt because it is most liquid.
Traditionally, bond markets, government bond markets, for a variety of reasons, and none of them are actually really good.
They are the most liquid assets.
So in a downturn, safe haven, you want to own U.S. treasuries regardless of the amount of treasuries that are printed.
We saw this during the New Deal, heard the same arguments back then.
You know, FDR is going to bankrupt the country.
It's going to explode the dollar, which actually did.
Treasury market, you know, interest rates are going to go double digits.
They actually did the other thing.
During the 1930s, treasury yields fell.
They stayed down the entire decade because of demand for safety and liquidity, what's perceived to be safety and liquidity.
So if you see the U.S. government go absolutely ape shit issuing debt, pardon my language, I think it's appropriate here.
We all agree that deficits are unsustainable or deficits are a major issue.
It's not an issue for the treasury market.
And the reason why it's not an issue for the treasury market is because of this perceived demand for safety, which is the other side of gold and some other things.
So that is a huge signal.
Is it problematic for the rest of the world if the U.S. isn't issuing all that debt, though?
Yeah, that's actually an issue.
We don't have enough treasuries.
I know that's going to be a lot of money.
Meaning there's not enough deficit spending?
It's not the deficit spending.
It's the financial instruments that are at the end of it.
Isn't that what creates the treasuries, though, is the deficit spending?
Right.
It's a perverse situation where we actually need the government to create treasuries in order to satiate the market demand for it.
Pump.
That's trippy.
We come in from different ways.
I think we agree in that.
I do believe people are drastically underestimating the risk of deflation.
I look at trueflation over the CPI metrics.
Trueflation is showing under 2% every single day this year.
So we are right now that this morning they were at like 0.8 or so.
And so what I believe is going to happen is they are going to actually want the government to print more money.
And we disagree a little bit in terms of how that happens.
But if you have a deflationary pressure like this, we have been trained for the last 15 years.
If the government prints money, you get inflation.
But if you have tariffs, you have the deportations, you have the AI, you have the robotics, the government could actually go and try to stimulate the economy, bring down interest rates, print money, and you can still have that deflationary pressure.
And so I keep calling it like a monetary slingshot, which is in the short term, I actually think there's a number of assets that are going to have some sort of headwind to them.
So you may get that volatility in the stock market.
Bitcoin's obviously down.
You know, gold has kind of come off of the highs.
But if they are going to go and do this kind of to address the deflation, over the long run, they're going to destroy the currency.
And if they do that, then you're going to want to own these assets over the long run.
So whether you're buying Pokemon cards, right, or you're buying, in my case, Bitcoin, gold, whatever, I think that you're going to do very well over the long run.
And so what scares me is when people try to trade this stuff on a day-to-day basis because of the volatility, because of the announcements, because of the geopolitical kind of differences on a day-to-day basis, it's just very hard.
And so it's more so just what is in your portfolio for the next 10 years to benefit from something like this.
And I think it's going to end up being those scarce kind of hard assets.
I think equities is, you know, if you're too careful to try to time, we've all seen the chart of if you were, you know, you try to time the market and you were out for a period, it goes from 12.4% over last eight years to, you know, 9.1%.
If you're out 20 of the days, you're at 6%.
And how important it is to be there on the big days, when big days happen, and be able to tolerate the bad days.
But if you go away from equities long-term, if you're somebody that's not what, you know, professionals that do this on a daily basis, it's problematic if you try to time it right now.
And I do talk to certain people.
I remember when COVID happened, one of my executives took out all their money out of equities when it hit 18,000.
Remember when Dow hit 18,000?
Everything out of equities.
They lost 3 million bucks, took it out of equities, came back in equities, you know, at what?
At 33,000.
You know what it is to lose that 18 to 33,000?
You're not going to get that back again.
And these guys were in their, they were older.
They were not younger.
It's not like it was somebody that's 48 years old that could afford it.
This was somebody that was a little bit older, closer to retirement that did something like this.
Losing 18 to 33,00000:01:03
Anyways, the goal is to get smarter, and we delivered again today with Pomp, Snyder, and Seto.
Great to have you guys on.
Gang, if anybody's watching this again, you got any questions for them, Manect them.
If you want to learn more about what they're doing with Sylvia, Sylvia, you can also Manect them.
He'll tell you more about it.
But with that being said, there's a reason why maybe if Momdani wins and keeps kicking ass, maybe this guy named Pompliano will choose to come back to Florida so we can do stuff like this more often and maybe even with a live audience.
I don't know.
So maybe Mamdani is going to push Pomp out the next three years and says, look, you can bring the engineers here, just like Palantir just announced they're coming back to Miami.
I think you hired Mamdani as your recruiter.
You voted for him.
You got him.
So you guys got him.
Anyways, Gang, God bless.
We'll do it again.
Next live is what, Friday?
What do we have going on tomorrow?
Tomorrow is who?
Kevin Roberts.
Oh, Dr. Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation.
Yes, sir.
It's a little intense the way it gets.
It's intense the first 30 minutes, but I think you're going to enjoy the interview.