MM #299 The Iran War🚨, Oil Spikes, & AI Layoffs | What It Means for Your Money & Investments

Summary

Market Mondays Ep. 299 — The Iran War🚨, Oil Spikes, & AI Layoffs | What It Means for Your Money & Investments

Date: March 3, 2026
Hosts: Rashad Bilal, Troy Millings, Ian Dunlap (EYL Network)
Episode Focus:
How current global conflicts, the rise in oil prices, and the wave of AI-driven layoffs are impacting markets—and what it all means for your investments.

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Episode Overview

In this packed episode of Market Mondays, the team dives deep into three major topics currently making headlines:

• The escalation of the Iran war and its effects on global markets
• The spike in oil prices and economic implications
• The trend of AI-driven layoffs, with a focus on Jack Dorsey’s bold workforce cuts

The hosts break down what these pivotal events mean for stock market investors, discuss real strategies for turbulent times, and answer key investment questions. A special segment features New York State Comptroller candidate Adam Boenke Deco, unpacking the critical role of state pension management and wealth-building opportunities.

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Major Themes & Key Takeaways

1. AI Layoffs & Workforce Evolution

Key Segment: [09:00]–[27:34]

• Jack Dorsey's Workforce Cuts:
  Jack Dorsey, inspired by Elon Musk’s aggressive cuts at Twitter/X, cut 40% of his company’s staff to prioritize efficiency and profit margins through automation and AI. The immediate effect: stock gains, showing Wall Street’s approval for such moves despite their social consequences.

  • Ian: “He's just merely adapting to what the environment is telling him to do... It was necessary… [for] higher profit margins.” [09:37]

• Macro Trend:

  • Tech and multiple Fortune 100 companies are quietly planning multi-year staggered layoffs, buffered against public backlash.
  • "Every major tech company on earth over the next four years is going to let off a majority of their workforce… they're just staggering it so they're not demonized in public." — Ian [13:18]

• Broader Job Market Impact:

  • Growing disconnect between employment numbers and job quality/new creation.
  • “42% of new grads can't find a job. Like across all industries. Think about how terrifying that is.” — Ian [19:51]
  • Technology displaces jobs in both high-skill (education, medical) and low-skill sectors (e.g., driving)—and not enough new opportunities are emerging as before.

• Market and Social Risks:

  • The increasing pace could disrupt not just individual careers, but consumer spending and economic stability if not managed.
  • “If people lose jobs, then people don’t have capital to spend… with all the conflict we're seeing now, if inflation starts to rise, we got a huge problem.” — Troy [14:10]

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2. The Iran War & Geopolitical Shockwaves

Key Segment: [51:16]–[65:48]

• Escalation and Market Response:

  • Despite major events, including the assassination of the Iranian Supreme Leader and retaliatory strikes, the market’s reaction was muted—surprisingly resilient.
  • “This has been priced in already… it's interesting that it happened on Saturday and not Friday… by the time we got to the futures market on Sunday night, it popped up but is reverting to the mean now.” — Ian [53:05]
  • "Do nothing… don't let the drama move you. The market is resilient." — Troy [55:18]

• Wartime Investing & Morality:

  • Classic defense stocks (Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics) popped in anticipation, but much of the ‘easy’ profit opportunity occurred months ago for insiders.
  • “The real gains are in the private market—public trades in war are already priced in before the news hits.” — Ian [70:19]

• Long-Term Lessons:

  • Investors should focus on ‘war-and-AI-proof’ companies: names like McDonald’s, Amgen, Eli Lilly, Nvidia.
  • “Build an AI-proof, war-proof portfolio. That is my investment advice of the year.” — Ian [65:18]

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3. Oil Prices – Where’s the Danger Zone?

Key Segment: [28:46]–[36:51]

• Thresholds for Market Stress:

  • The Trigger: $93.50/barrel is the crucial oil price to watch; markets get shaky at this level, and real economic pain historically comes between $110–$120.
    • “If we get to $93.50, it will start to have some negative effects in the economy… $80 is not that.” — Ian [28:46]
    • “110–120 with historical data—that’s cautionary, that's red flag time.” — Troy [29:37]

• Trading & Investment Tips:

  • It’s too late for a quick oil trade unless you catch the move in the first 10–15 minutes of futures.
  • Heavier bets now might risk downside—oil is likely to revert back down [$66–$74 range].
  • “Any illusion of crude going to 110 in this cycle—it’s not gonna happen.” — Ian [77:41]

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4. Investing vs. Paying Off Debt – Opportunity Cost

Key Segment: [32:43]–[40:32]

• The panel agrees: invest excess capital if the expected market return exceeds loan rates, except for high-interest debts (e.g. credit cards).
• Great quote:
  • “The thing people never tell you about paying off debt is the opportunity cost… that 300k in five years could be 1.1 million just with long-term investing.” — Ian [32:52]

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5. Netflix/Paramount/Warner Deal – Media, Debt, and Platform Power

Key Segment: [41:05]–[51:16]

• Netflix walked away from a $72B Warner Bros deal, collected a $2.8B breakup fee, and now has capital to pursue profitable ventures (e.g., live sports).
• “Sometimes, walking away is the best deal you can do. I like this for Netflix.” — Troy [45:10]
• The panel discusses the competitive challenges Netflix faces from YouTube and other platforms, the future of media content, and international growth.

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6. Special Guest: Adam Boenke Deco, NY State Comptroller Candidate

Key Segment: [86:13]–[120:51]

• Controls NY's $300B pension fund and has total discretion over allocations—one of the most powerful financial roles in the United States.
  • “One person, the state comptroller, controls where $300 billion goes.” — Adam [95:36]
• Advocates for using the pension fund more actively for regional development (housing, infrastructure), and investing through diverse managers to help close the racial wealth gap.
• Reveals most of NY’s pension real estate isn’t even invested in NY; aims to change this for better returns and impact.
  • “If this was run like Canadian pensions—where they invest in, own, and operate whole systems—the returns could be 10–11% annualized, not just 6–7%.” — Adam [103:27],[105:23]
• [Details on his platform, election June 23; see adam4newyork.com]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This generation of investors is smarter… everything is already priced in.” — Ian [17:12]

• "The quality of the job market over the last 10 years has not dramatically improved—those jobs that were erased in '08 never came back.” — Ian [26:43]

• "You have to build an AI-proof, war-proof portfolio. That is your assignment for this year.” — Ian [65:18]

• “If you listen to the investing advice from the show, you would have had the 50, a 50 ball. We gonna talk about that—100,000 to 100.” — Ian [07:00]

• On investing in war: “The need to separate emotion from investing—don’t let this thing play out. The market is resilient.” — Troy [55:18]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment | |-----------|----------------------------------------------| | 09:00 | AI Layoffs & Jack Dorsey's Move | | 14:35 | Job Shock: Could AI Crash the Market? | | 21:49 | Do New Technologies Create Enough New Jobs? | | 28:46 | Oil Price Danger Zones | | 32:43 | Investing vs. Paying Off Debt | | 41:05 | Netflix/Paramount Deal | | 51:16 | Iran War Market Impacts | | 65:18 | Building a War-Proof, AI-Proof Portfolio | | 86:13 | Special Guest: Adam Boenke Deco, NY Comptroller | | 103:27 | How Pension Funds Are Allocated | | 117:34 | NY Budget Efficiency, Wasting, and Solutions |

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In Summary

Market Mondays #299 serves as a comprehensive guide for investors grappling with today’s most urgent issues—wars, oil spikes, and the disruptive rise of AI. The hosts urge listeners to build resilient, future-proof portfolios, understand the deeper implications of global conflicts, and watch the shifting opportunities as old jobs fade and new ones emerge. The conversation with Adam Boenke Deco adds a crucial perspective on public wealth management and the untapped power of collective savings.

Action Steps:

• Watch oil price levels ($93.50/barrel as early warning, 110–120 as critical danger).
• Invest in companies resilient to AI automation and geopolitical risk.
• Consider opportunity cost: invest if expected returns exceed debt cost.
• For NY residents, pay attention to the June 23rd primary for Comptroller!

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For More:

• [Blackout Late Night Show] Wednesdays, 9 PM EST
• [Market Mondays Interviews] Thursdays, 12 PM EST
• www.ianinvest.com for more from Ian and Red Panda Stock Club
• Support Adam Boenke Deco: adam4newyork.com

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Transcript

[Rashad]

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[Troy]

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[Adam]

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[Troy]

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[Adam]

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[Troy]

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[Adam]

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[Rashad]

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[Ian]

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[Adam]

got safety well in hand.

[Troy]

Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop

[Rashad]

by Grainger for the ones who get it done. For me, entrepreneurship has always been the way.

[Ian]

Investing is important because it's the only way you are going to be able to rich and wealthy for your family. We can close the wealth gap by working together.

[Rashad]

Market Monday is the biggest investment show ever.

[Adam]

My life has literally changed since watching eyl.

[Troy]

When you can make people money and you can add value, they're going to be forever indebted to you.

[Ian]

I promise you this year I'm going to make y' all even more money.

[Troy]

Disclaimer do your own research. Our content is intended to be used and must be used for informational purposes only. It's very important to do your own analysis before making any investment based on your own personal circumstances. You should take independent financial advice from a professional in connection with or independently research and verify any information that you find on our show and wish to rely upon whether for the purpose of making an investment decision or otherwise. Let's build our knowledge, our community and our brokerage accounts. Love is love.

[Rashad]

Yeah.

[Troy]

Yeah.

[Ian]

Hey. Yeah.

[Troy]

Hey. Happy Monday.

[Ian]

Happy Monday. How y' all doing?

[Troy]

Are we good, man? We good. It was a. A pleasant, a pleasant weekend. Weather wise here in New York. Got a little chilly today. It is first trading day of March. Some some events.

[Ian]

An eventful one to say the least.

[Troy]

Eventful weekend in the world of news and conflict. I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit but we here, man. We here. We blessed. How you feeling?

[Ian]

Amazing. Happy to be here. I wish I could be there with y' all in person. Shoddy. How you feeling, Troy? How you feeling?

[Rashad]

Good, good. Can't complain, man. Happy to be here. Just happy to be here.

[Ian]

Yeah, man. Had a hell of a birthday celebration. That cake was fire too, by the way. Glad to celebrate living life.

[Rashad]

You know that's a fact, man. You only get one. You only get one. Congratulations on the, on the Good Morning America feature as well.

[Ian]

Thank you, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. Shout out to everybody at gma, all the crew, the hosts, Geo with everybody. So I appreciate it. So yeah man, we got to do another One, we gotta do a part two.

[Troy]

I was watching early. I'm like, oh, my gosh. With the, with the news that had happened, I'm like, yo, they better, they better keep that segment. And true to their word, man, they got you, got you your time in there. It was, it was a good segment, man. Shout out to you, man.

[Ian]

I appreciate that. That's love.

[Troy]

You said What I said 2Tech2 index

[Ian]

all day, every day. All day, every day. And shout out to everybody who supported I love you. Ideally, for real.

[Rashad]

No, that was a good look. That was a good look. We got a lot to talk about. First and foremost, man, happy birthday to Troy.

[Troy]

Oh, yeah.

[Rashad]

Tomorrow, Pisces season is continuing.

[Troy]

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Shout out to everybody that's celebrating their birthday this week. It is definitely Pisces season. I know. We got Ty. Shout out to Ty Davis.

[Rashad]

His birthday is there Friday.

[Troy]

Our brother Court. Big Court Sam, I think Sam. Black Sam. Shout out to Black Sam. The whole marathon team on the opening of the Long beach establishment. Amazing. Look. Our Pisces brother, Black Sam. Happy birthday to him. Yeah, it's Pisces season, man. I'm blessed. I'm really blessed to, to be here, share another year with y' all and, you know, just keep going. Try to have as much impact as possible, man. Appreciate the shout. Love is love. Y' all know how we do.

[Ian]

Absolutely.

[Rashad]

What you doing for your birthday?

[Troy]

I, I, I don't know.

[Ian]

I don't.

[Troy]

You know what? You know, I honestly said that I've been extremely blessed over, over the past 12 months, man. And so just being able to have another birthday, you know, with building the house and, you know, making sure that everything is going on, on a personal level, health, you know, I've been going to the doctor a lot, making sure my health is good. The business making sure that that's intact.

[Rashad]

We.

[Troy]

I'm grateful, man. I'm grateful to see another year. To be honest with you. I, I couldn't even ask for anything else. Health, family and love. That's it.

[Ian]

That's when you know, life getting good, you don't even need no party. Just like, yo, yeah, yo, man, God is good. God is good. All the time. All the time.

[Troy]

That's a fact.

[Rashad]

So what are you doing, though?

[Troy]

I don't know, because, you know, I. This is one of those benefits he deflected. No, no, no. When, when, when you, when you, when you're in love and you got a amazing spouse, they plan the day for you. So I don't really know what the plans are. I just know that there are plans. And so if you see me outside, shoot me a holla, but I'll be outside. I know I gotta go to the city a little bit tomorrow afternoon. So I'll be out there. I don't know what we're doing, but hopefully something nice. I know she got something to play.

[Ian]

My boy gonna see my daddy on his birthday, then go out.

[Troy]

Remember that tax you talking about?

[Ian]

My boy. Yeah. Real quick. If I ever said anything bad, blame me. My bad, my diamond, peace, my brother, all that.

[Troy]

That's a fact. That's a fact.

[Rashad]

All right, so yeah, we got, we got a big week Wednesday. We back with Blackout, 9 o' clock Eastern standard time. We got special guest, hit maker. He gonna be coming on the show.

[Adam]

Wow.

[Rashad]

Last week he got some things to clear up. And yeah, we're going to be talking about last week as well. You know, it's crazy that that's the moment that it took to go viral after everything, but it is what it is. Blackout is not market Mondays. It's not earn your leisure. It's Blackout. It's his own separate entity. It's an opinion based late night show where we talk about a variety of different topics that not necessarily are financially related. Some are financially related.

[Troy]

Wait, did something happen?

[Rashad]

You know, something a little viral for,

[Ian]

you know,

[Rashad]

but we gonna talk about it.

[Ian]

Anybody that had any criticism, comment a lot tonight, please fire information. They did, they went to Steve Harvey house, had to get through three levels of security, gave you all this brilliant information. It's like, oh, why you have her on here? Comment tonight if I made you money, please put yes in chat. But don't be, don't be upset. And if it don't apply to you, let it fly.

[Troy]

We have friends.

[Ian]

If you listen to the investing advice from the show, you would have had the 50,

[Rashad]

a 50 ball. But we gonna talk about, we're gonna

[Troy]

talk about that 100,000 to 100.

[Rashad]

But we also gonna talk about, you know, Iran. We got a lot to talk about on Wednesday. So tune into Wednesday Blackout, man. Shout out to Blackout. And then Thursday, 12:00 Eastern Standard Time, we got my boy two chains.

[Ian]

True.

[Rashad]

Yes, sir. He got a new book out today, actually tomorrow. So get the book. Make sure you get the book. That's important. Good brother right there. But he chopped it up with us and we had a great conversation. Shout out to two chains anytime we get to see chains is always a pleasure. You know, he's a, he's, he's, he's a funny guy, smooth dude. So, so two chains on Thursday at

[Troy]

12 o' clock I'll play a partner. You know we talked about and when we, we speak about maturation, we talk about growth in our artists and you know, our celebrities. We got to bring up his name a lot more because how he's transitioned into, you know, just the top of the tier. Father, husband, he's everywhere and he's, he's carried himself as the same person. He's just grown. So love Chains, man. The book is incredible. Make sure y' all go support that. Let's run that up. Let's make sure that it hits every best seller's list. It's an important book about intuition and having introspective thoughts. So shout out to him and just

[Ian]

overall a great person, man. Like good energy, good spirit, great business person, great artists. Like yeah, support him. Tune in to the interview. Always a good time. Always a good time.

[Rashad]

Ian, any announcements?

[Ian]

Once again, thank you to everybody who supported me on gma. If you haven't seen it, clips will be out soon. If you want to get rich from the market, go to ianinvest.com enjoy. Rampatto Stock Club the call would be this Sunday at 9pm Central. If I made you money. Please put yes in chat and let's have an amazing show.

[Rashad]

Yeah, let's get to it. We're gonna, we got some other stuff to announce. What's up? We'll say a little later. Let's get the show running. So let's talk about Jack Dorsey. You know, shout out to Jack Dorsey spoke at Invest Fest last year. Get your tickets but cut 40% of the staff and as a result the stock price went up. So first let's talk about, you know, the Jack Dorsey move and then we'll talk about the broader range implific implications that that may have on on the stock market for a variety of other companies. But what do you think of Jack Dorsey making the that drastic cut in his staff for artificial intelligence?

[Ian]

I think he's just merely adapting to what the environment is telling him to do and we have to be very honest. Like he saw Elon buy his company, go in, slash the workforce. The company, you can argue may be thriving more than ever and it's unfortunate on the employment side but if you're looking at a human capital cost side, we'll talk about morality and investing later. It was necessary like if you are able to do some of these things with agents, automation, LLMs, it doesn't make sense to have your profit margins Below when your stock has been beat up and you're probably one of the tech icons that has not benefited from this LLM movement and seeing the gain like the stock has been destroyed over the last four or five years. So I think it was a great move for the stock. I think everyone's moving to an era of efficiency. I think now he's just allowed to do so. But this isn't the first or the last move that's going to happen. We'll talk like 1.2 trillion in credit card debt. Over 3 million jobs have been lost and since 2019, I think that number by four years will probably get up to seven or six and a half million. He's just going to be one of many. But I think he waited a while to do this so he will still be in favor. But I think it was long overdue that he let off some of the human capital costs for the business to have higher profit margins. But what do you guys think?

[Troy]

Yeah, I agree with you when you talk about AI number one, it's the simple formula, right? Higher efficiency, higher margins, lower cost. Right. So if you got higher margins, obviously you're going to see revenue go up. I think there's part of it that that holds true. I think AI is a story in this obviously and there's plenty of other companies. I'll go down a list of companies where we're seeing this happen. But I also you, you pointed out four to five years. And so if we go to four to five years, if we look back to pre pandemic, he really is at the same amount of employees that he had pretty much. Right. And so there might be that, that thought that maybe he had over hired.

[Ian]

Right.

[Troy]

Because of the demand that happened and admittedly he did. And this was a course of correction. Right. Like we over hired, admittedly what happened when you over hired and the margins weren't efficient. You saw what happened to the stock. It's been down, it's been, it's been beat down until you cut jobs. Get it back to the levels we were at. Now again it goes back to that formula. Higher efficiency, higher margins, lower costs on the, on the capital of people. And so that, that's happening across the board. We can talk about Amazon, who's done it? Intel, we know Microsoft for sure, ups. I mean the list goes on telltale if they can figure out how to be more efficient and have higher margins for a lot of these companies and we talked about profit margins, especially when it comes to Amazon, I think they had 10% which is improving. They're going to make sure that they can do it. And if they have to spend extra capital to do it, they're going to make sure that they do it. So they can, that can happen at a faster rate. I think what we have to figure out is how we're going to adapt to this change. That's the key, right? Like we, we see it happening. How will we adapt? Because I don't think it'll be like, hey, everybody's cutting their, you know, their employee numbers in half or 40%. That's pretty drastic. But the people who will figure out, all right, we can see the writings on the wall. How are we going to adapt? How are we going to figure out how to create frameworks so that we can be successful? The people who do that will be okay. They'll be okay.

[Ian]

Yeah. And let's be honest, I know we've all heard the conversation. These are going to be staggered layoffs. No one can withstand the public backlash of letting off 60 to 70% of their workforce at one time. So this is going to be a multi year effort. This block needs to cut more to, I mean, they went up 27%. It doesn't offset the losses if you've held it from before then. But every major tech company on earth over the next four years is going to let off a majority of their workforce. There's no way around it. They're just staggering it so that they're not demonizing the public. But there's a lot of conversations, especially around the top 100 of how many they're going to let go and when to let go accordingly. So this won't be the last cut that we see at all by any stretch of the imagination.

[Troy]

It's, it's delicate. You want to go.

[Rashad]

I was going. That leads to the next question, actually.

[Troy]

Oh, I just want to say it's a delicate thing because, well, when we talk about reducing force, right, we saw revenues go up, but if revenues go up and people lose jobs, then people don't have capital to spend. So it's, it's a delicate thing, which is why it has to be staggered. It won't be all at once. Because if that happens, you know, obviously with all the conflict that we're seeing now, if inflation starts to rise, we got a huge problem on our hands.

[Rashad]

So. Yeah, that leads to the next question. As far as can an AI job shock crash the stock market,

[Ian]

It's a great question. I don't think it would be this alone because they're not Doing the normal reporting of the job numbers, CPI or even the term recession. So I think it could be a combination of factors like if we go into a multi decade war, which we will talk about in a little bit, in combination with slower hiring and contracted, in a contracted economy that will lead to a crash, but AI alone won't do it. But is it a major pillar? For sure. And there isn't enough talk because often when AI comes into play, people say, well, at some point they have to introduce universal basic income. If you think this administration is going to do anything fair for those of us that are not like in the 1%, we have another thing coming. I don't think UBI will come under this administration and I don't think they give a damn about if we land in a recession or not. So is it the. A major pillar? Yes. Is it the only pillar? Absolutely not. I don't think it'll be the lever that breaks the economy wide open.

[Troy]

Yeah, yeah, it'll be. I think the, the most important word is that it's going to be disruptive. It'll be disruptive. And I think what we've seen just in these first two months of this year is that yes, AI is a huge piece of this puzzle. But when we talk about, we step back and look at the big picture. How far down are these indexes with AI and the big tech companies? We're down like 1% in the S P, maybe 2 1/2% in NASDAQ. We're not even in correction territory. And these stocks are kind of just lagging, which is good if you're looking at a broad economy. Right. Like, are utilities doing well? Are the staples doing well? Are industrials performing? Like somewhere there is a market that is actually saying, okay, well, you know, they always talk about rotation, rotation, rotation. For me, it's technology is always going to be part of the rotation because you need it inside of any business. But the fact that it's being spread across like we're starting to see growth in these other areas while tech is kind of consolidating is a good sign. And it tells you that yes, disruptive, not end all, be all. Although it feels like it if you're in some of these companies, you're right, it's still early.

[Ian]

But if this was 2015 and we had this AI issue paired with this Iran conflict, the market would have dropped 12%. Like this generation of investors is smarter and hedge funds are pouring in. More like, and I put this on Instagram last week, everything is already priced in like, I was talking to sources last week about people in the Navy being moved out of certain bases into hotels in Bahrain. This was already priced in. So everyone. And we'll talk about it in a little bit, like if you should profit or not from the war. But people knew this three weeks ago. This is going to happen. This isn't like something that happened overnight. So. But I do agree that it's early. I think 2027 would be incredibly challenging on a number of fronts and I think there'll be a lot of headwinds and truth that is revealed that will send the market sliding to the downside.

[Troy]

I'm starting to agree with you a little bit more on this 2027 thing.

[Ian]

Right.

[Troy]

Like some of the writing is starting to like, appear on the wall for me a little bit. Right. Like just, just forever. Like I'm extremely bullish. But I'm starting to see the signs that there's something happening here. Right. When we talk about all the economic factors, we talk about the debt, but we also talk about the capex spend, which has been a huge story this year. At some point in the next 12 months, we're gonna have to see where this capex is going and what it's being spent for. And if you've overspent, because most of these, the, the, the, the mega cap companies are saying, look, we're not even ashamed to say that we might overspend. We just have to make sure that we get this right. So 2027 is.

[Ian]

Get them right. Shi. Why do you say it's early though?

[Troy]

Like, like what do you see and

[Ian]

what do you feel? Business.

[Rashad]

Well, we don't, we don't, we don't, we don't know the full effects of what it's really going to do to the workforce. This is just the beginning of them laying off 40. So if the beginning is to lay off 40% of your workforce, if that's the beginning, that's, that's scary, that's concerning because that's like, okay, what happens three years down the line or what happens when we enforce when now you lay off 95% of your workforce, that's one company. But what happens when that happens across industries? And so I think we're just starting to see the effects of this as far as the job market. So we don't really know how this is going to play out on the economy. Because I mean, yeah, if you look at, in a situation where you have now 70% of workforce just getting laid off, that's, that's Pretty catastrophic.

[Troy]

So you're saying for, for Block.

[Rashad]

Block is one company, but I'm just saying just in general for the broader

[Ian]

economy, I mean, you guys reported it. 42% of new grads can't find a job. They can't find a job. Like across all industries. Think about how terrifying that is.

[Troy]

There's another study that's saying that the ones who did find a job were let go within the first six to 12 months, which is again, interesting. I agree. I think that it is still early, but it's also early from the other end of the spectrum as well. Right. Like, we don't know what the new careers will be in the space because they haven't been created yet. The companies that will take advantage may not be here. Right. Like when you, you think about how far we've come from a technological standpoint in the past 15 years. Right. Like we didn't even have a meta, we didn't have a Uber. These things weren't prominent. They are now. They're part of our society. We don't know where those, what those companies will look like. But as technology gets better, new career paths will be introduced as well.

[Rashad]

But the scary thing about it is we're not necessarily seeing new careers. Yeah. So it's like, all right, yes, if people may no longer at some point in time, take mass transportation, but they are driving cars now. That's a new industry for people that are actually making cars. But what we're seeing is technology companies replacing humans with robots or artificial intelligence. So that's not necessarily promising for a lot of new jobs. There's a certain amount of jobs that, that creates on the computer science side. But it's not like we're creating new industries where it's like, okay, we moved from cotton, but now we are in factories. Like, we're not necessarily creating new industries where workers are needed.

[Troy]

Uber would be a perfect example of that. Right. Transportation is the same industry they've disrupted and changed the way that we transport. Right. We transport goods, we transport each other. Whereas like, we'll, we'll see what the technology provides. We. I don't know yet.

[Rashad]

That's a perfect example too, because now autonomous driving is taking that down.

[Ian]

Great. And even with that, if you look from the crash of 2008.

[Troy]

Yeah.

[Ian]

2015, that job market slid down. Right. Career wise from 2015 to 2025. Even if U.S. using an example of Uber, there isn't broad scale benefit there. And also with CapEx, which is really scary for all the companies that are spending all this money on Capex, no one except Nvidia tells you how to get. They're going to get a return. Like if I was to say you, Rashad Troy, give me a hundred million dollars and you're like, what's the return? I'm like, I'll tell you later, after I build a data center, you would tell me, go fuck myself.

[Troy]

Here's the pushback. The companies, let's take the metas, the Amazons, the Googles, Microsoft, Nvidia will put to the side the people that are actually spending it or committing to. Would you agree that these are some of the greatest CEOs that have ever walked this planet?

[Rashad]

Yeah, but that doesn't directly correlate to helping.

[Troy]

No, no, no, I'm just asking, I'm just asking. I'm just asking.

[Ian]

That position. They would say you're leading a witness, but to answer my brother, I would say yes, yes.

[Troy]

And they have some of the greatest CFOs under their, you know, their jurisdiction. My thing is like, can they sold

[Ian]

it when he spent all that money on the Metaverse?

[Troy]

Can they all afford to get this wrong?

[Rashad]

It's not about getting it wrong.

[Troy]

If it will, it will be if

[Rashad]

you're making more money for, for your shareholders and you're making more money.

[Troy]

I'm just saying if they get it wrong because that's the key. It's like, I think they're trying to say, how are you justifying the spending? How are you justifying the spending? Meta is the first one to say, like, here we, we acquired a company, here's how we're justifying the spending.

[Ian]

Look, we've got, I like metal and I've said that from the very beginning. This is different than 2022 for them for sure.

[Troy]

But they're the first ones to say, here's how we can make revenue from it. We don't know what Amazon's going to do just yet, right? They haven't released it. They're still having to spend. The idea is that, do you believe, do you believe in these companies and the fact that they can't afford to get it wrong?

[Rashad]

Well, I think we're also talking about two different things. Going back to what Ian has said as far as Uber didn't paraphrasing. That's not really helping a lot of people, right? You still struggling if you're an Uber driver. But even that, right, it's like, okay, the number one, we went, we said this before, but if you remember, put in chat, what's the number one career for men in, on, on Earth? Like what's the number one career for men in Earth? Like what do most men do as far as percentage wise? What's the highest percentage of work that men do on, on planet Earth?

[Ian]

Quiz question time.

[Rashad]

Put in chat. If you remember from a couple months

[Ian]

ago we went over this, remember Clue voice do remember.

[Rashad]

Yes. Drivers.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Rashad]

So that, that is a low skilled career. That's why so many people could do it. You don't have to have an education, you don't even have to be able to read, you don't have to, have to know math to be able to drive. And you can drive, you could drive a truck, you can drive a cab, you can drive a school bus. There's a variety of different things. That's the number one occupation percentage wise for, for men on planet Earth. Now what happens when autonomous driving wipes out at least even 20% of that? Like we're looking at long term. We're looking at long term. This is gonna be long term effects for people that's going to be very detrimental to society as far as not being able to find a job. If you can't find a job now. And Bill Gates said that the number one profession that's under attack is education and medical. So those are high skill education. Now you got something like driver, which is low skill. So you're going to have mass layoffs in low skill and you're going to have mass layoffs in high skill.

[Troy]

I think we're, I don't, I don't think we're so far away from having autonomous at the large scale. Whereas if you look at EV sales here in America, look at what the percentages of people who actually have EVs compared to the rest of the automotive industry is very small. So taking a 20%. I don't know if we're there in the next 20 years, we may not be there. So those, those jobs will still be there. And that's just here in America. Like we're talking about developing countries that don't even have that technology to even force, you know, I mean, so I think those, those are still stay.

[Ian]

All right, you're talking about quality jobs.

[Rashad]

Yeah, they're already disappearing. But let's, but we got to move on. I don't want to stick because we do have a guest coming on later.

[Ian]

But I will say this one final point real quick.

[Troy]

Yeah.

[Ian]

Whenever a company says we're looking to disrupt an industry, it's no different than the war attack. They're looking to unstabilize a current ecosystem and take the market share for themselves. Even though there's been an addition of Uber DoorDash, that delivery system that does not replace the jobs that were lost in the 2008 crash, the job market is still those jobs that were erased in 2007, 8 and 9 never came back. So to your point, Rashad, because I think we arguing two different points, but to be very clear, the quality of the job market over the last 10 years has not dramatically improved.

[Rashad]

And that, and that shows, and that shows. That shows in the wages.

[Troy]

But that, but they'll argue that people have jobs, right? Like that'll be the argument. Yes, they're not the highest pain, but people are employed.

[Rashad]

A lot of people aren't employed though,

[Troy]

according to the unemployment rate.

[Rashad]

I don't, I mean, releasing numbers.

[Troy]

Well, they, they did, but I mean you could say like, hey, who's, who's gauging those numbers? Like do we believe the numbers on

[Ian]

March 6th a month?

[Rashad]

That's a fact. On March 6th we'll be in Queens, St. John's University in Queens, New York for the financial Freedom Summit. Thank you Campus Campus Coin Invest, in collaboration with Queen South High Schools this year there will be continue to grow under the leadership of Superintendent Joseph Ives will be speaking with 1500 New York City public school students about ownership, investing, building wealth and a variety of different other things. So yeah, tap in, follow Campus Coin Invest for more information. But yeah, a couple of days we'll be in Queens. So speaking of high school students in the Queens area. So shout out to Queens. Queens, get the money. Let's talk about oil. We will be talking about Iran in a little bit. We didn't talk about Iran yet. But what, what price of oil becomes dangerous for stocks?

[Ian]

I know a lot of people are talking about $80. That isn't the number. The number is $93.50. If we get to that level, it will start to have some negative effects in the economy. I know people have been asking about an oil trade and how do I play oil futures. It's too late. But set an alert. If we get to 93.50, it will give you a reason to be concerned about how stocks are going to perform, how the economy is going to go. The higher the oil prices, usually the worst the economy does. So 80 is not that. It's like a snooze alarm. It's the first alarm to put on, but it's not the real level. 93.50 is the, is a real level that you need to Worry about if we get there, you'll have some pushback and contraction in the market long term.

[Troy]

Yo, that's crazy. You had 90. I was going higher. I was going higher. I, I had, I had it at between 110 and 120. Like the historical data. If you look at any recession that's tied to oil, 73, oil embargo 79, Iranian revolution in 2008, oh, it was at $147. In 2022 we were at 130. Although it was short lived. Remember that one month we had crude? That was, that was crazy.

[Ian]

It was negative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Troy]

So like one 110 to 120 with that, that's, that's cautionary, that's red flag. That means gas prices will be surging, Right. Consumer spending will fall. Inflation will be the conversation in that time. And most importantly, and this is important and this is why I'm bullish in 2026 and I was in 2025, corporate earnings will start to fall because their margins, if they get above that level. If they get above that level. Oh for sure.

[Ian]

Oh yeah.

[Troy]

Corporate earnings. And so if you looked every earnings, if you look, I mean I think in 2025, 79 of the s P had positive earnings growth for the year. Right. We're off to a pretty similar start. I know stocks have pulled back and companies have pulled back, but if you look at their earnings growth, they're all making, they're still making money. We start seeing oil in those levels, that changes and that's dangerous. Right. And those are the things we can't control. Like when we foresee these things, we can't control that. Right. Those having a conflict, starting a war, that's, we, we can't.

[Ian]

Right.

[Troy]

We don't have a say in that. Right.

[Ian]

But we knew it was going to come because he was like war heavy president. And once you have investment in Halliburton Palantir, you know he's going to lean and use that especially as some information come out. Yeah.

[Troy]

I mean even if you, you follow the chessboard, right, like Venezuela, what did we take from them? Iran, what do they have that can help contribute to what we took from Venezuela? Allegedly. The writing is, the writing is there. But if we get to, like I said, if we get to those levels, 110, 120, that's. Yeah, yeah, we gotta be mindful. And then we start to see maybe the VIX spike again. We talked about The Vix and RSI last week Vic start and it got up to 25 today dropped back down. But if it starts getting in that 2530 range.

[Ian]

Okay, okay. Someone else. Can I tell why I came up with the number of 9,350? If you get your tickets to Invest Fest and I do in a presentation, I will tell you why those levels are so important. Go to investfest.com see you there.

[Rashad]

Investments.com VIP night black tie this year. Okay, let's talk about hit the like button and share. We will be talking about Iran shortly. Very shortly. Should you invest or pay off debt? I think that that was a question from the audience.

[Troy]

Perhaps they said should I use my $300,000 inheritance to pay off debt or invest in the stock market? How would you divide it?

[Ian]

It's a great question. Kudos to the brother who sent us in. Should I pay off my house or invest into the market 100%? If it was my choice, I will put all of the money into the market. The thing that people never tell you about paying off debt is that the opportunity cost that you're going like that 300,000 in five years could just long term investing, no options, no futures, nothing, no warrants alone could be 1.1. And it's a bad feeling. If this is your only time having 300,000, it really sucks to give it to a company and they send you a letter saying hey, thank you for paying this off. You're at zero. It's one of the worst feelings. And guess what? As soon as that happens, your H Vac on go out or a meteor is going to fly through. You got to get a new roof. It's about opportunity cost a lot of times and I like Dave Ramsey a lot. But paying down debt, there is a heartbreaking feeling that comes with getting to zero and knowing you haven't push your financial situation forward. I would say invest in the market for five years, then pay off the house with those proceeds and then you have 5, 600, $700,000 left after. You'll be okay.

[Rashad]

Yeah, I think it comes down to what you can expect to earn. If the, if the earn is higher than the interest rate, then that's how you know whether. So for instance, if your mortgage interest rate is 6% but you expect to earn 12% in the market while you're doubling. So like you said, the opportunity cost, you're actually losing 6% by, by not actually investing in the market. Now if it's like a loan shark situation or out of control credit card that's 28 or.

[Ian]

Yeah, 30. Yeah.

[Rashad]

Then that might that might be something to consider because now you may not be able to get 30 every single year in the stock market. So now that might be that. That's a different situation. But most of the time you don't have, you're not going to have that. When it comes to those type of large debts usually are student loan payments and home mortgages. So if you have a home mortgage, as Ian said, or a student loan payment, as long as you continue to make monthly payments and you're not, you know, just struggling completely struggling financially underwater, as long as you can make more money in an investment than your interest rate, then the debt is not, is not a crippling thing. So people that say debt, all debt is bad, I don't necessarily agree with that. I think the, the premise of it is that, yeah, you don't want to just be swimming in debt, but all debt is not bad as long as you can manage the debt and as long as you're doing something more productive with the money than the, the amount of money that you actually borrowed.

[Troy]

That's a fact. That's a fact. I, I had this story and I shared it before about investing. And I was trying to do the responsible thing. Like I closed on the house in, in 2022. I was like, you know what? Let's just estimate that it's going to cost me a $10,000 a month, right, to make sure that the bill. Everything's escrow account. And so every month I created a mortgage account and every month I put $10,000 in it since 2022, right now you can do the math on that. That's a couple hundred thousand dollars. I'm like, all right, perfect. I already have three years of the mortgage paid. Then I thought to myself, what if I would have just. What if I would have just put that in the S P. Now granted, I have a brokerage account and it's, it's okay. The brokers count is okay. Shout out to everybody. Eylu I still ain't got it, but had I put the 10th that that money into the S P since 2022, you're talking about a year that we net. Netted what, 2017 and 23% that I probably. And I did the calculations on it. If I would have kept that strategy, I probably would have made like 1.7 million.

[Ian]

See, opportunity costs, Aisha. That's the other part. You fighting against tailwinds of upside. Shout out to you. Thanks. Crazy.

[Troy]

What I would have put into the, the account, that brokerage account would have paid for the house. Meanwhile, I'm putting money aside to pay for the house.

[Ian]

Yep. And the crazy part, the mortgage companies are taking part of your capital and deploying it into the market and the banks are fractional reserve lending on the capital and rotating it into the market but telling you to pay them to fundraise.

[Rashad]

Yeah, yeah. And then somebody said by that logic then everyone with a paid off house should get another mortgage and invest. But no one does that. Balance is key. But well, yeah, that's not necessarily a bad idea. It's so. Okay. I actually did that sometimes that's actually, I can actually speak on this firsthand experience. I purchased a property in cash and I refinanced it and cash out refi. It's called a cash out refi. And I got more money from the cash out refi than I actually used to purchase the property because the property was under undervalued when I brought it. And when they appraised it, it appraised higher than our services. So yeah, that's not technically a bad strategy. If, if you know what you're going to do with the money. If you're going to invest the money in Taisha Diaz and that might not be a great turn on investment

[Ian]

you have that most don't. You are incredibly conservative and incredibly patient. You can't refi a house and then go get zero day expiration options on it and then like this is going to be my way to freedom.

[Rashad]

Yeah. Somebody said, somebody says don't borrow money to invest. My question is, my question is why? Why? Why not?

[Ian]

If I could do it all over again in 2020, if I could have got the rate of like less than 4%, I would have borrowed every dollar I could to put it to the market. If I could get like got $5 million at 4%, 5% depends on.

[Rashad]

Because that's literally what you're doing when you buy a house. You're, you're literally, you're literally borrowing money for an investment. You're literally doing that every. So I just think that, I'm not saying that that's the right thing to do in every situation, but blanket statements like don't borrow money to invest. If I said, if I said I'm a loan you $100,000 at a 5% interest rate and you can invest and earn 30% a year, well, that's a good investment. Why, why would you not?

[Ian]

Because most people are going to put in a bad investment, they can put it in a bad vehicle, they're going

[Troy]

to be uneducated undisciplined, and do something that they shouldn't. But that's the best. That's a good. I mean, that's 25 net.

[Ian]

Yeah, but they're gonna put it in something that goes up 40 and it crashes 55%

[Troy]

most times. Most times you're right. That's why I said you can't skip a step. You can't skip a step.

[Ian]

You gotta go through.

[Troy]

Yep, you gotta go.

[Ian]

And you only learn to be patient and diligent and only invest in high quality companies after you've been burned by bad ones. Like somebody like, oh, why don't you invest in this? I'm like, it's not a good asset. You don't know it because you've never lost a hundred grand in a day in the market. 200 grand a day in the market. You don't know what that feels like. So. But what do I know? I love you all.

[Troy]

Yeah, that's a feeling. It's a feeling. You know what happens when those days happen? I take a picture of it just to say, like, how you feel? You okay?

[Ian]

Left up

[Troy]

fat. Better days for sure.

[Ian]

Feel like Maduro. Oh, Jesus, take the wheel.

[Rashad]

That's a fact. Okay, so let's go into this Netflix Warner Brothers situation. What's your thoughts?

[Ian]

I think it's really fascinating going back to the debt conversation. I don't know what the parameters were, but my first thought was as a executive is I'm happy. I will be happy to not have to service a $90 billion debt bill. Like, just hypothetically, if the debt was 2%, what does that payment look like? There's a lot of conversation about if Netflix should have forced their way into a bid. But sometimes the best investment is the one that costs so much. That is going to be a burden or a headache to you. And also too, I know Larry personally guaranteed the debt, but I want to ask you guys, being a media moguls that you are, is this investment in linear TV worth it? You, I, I get the, the swath of companies being bundled together. This reminds me of the big short when you're having credit default swaps put together in a bucket. It was, it's like a media index fund they put together, but in linear television. Is that worth what they pay for it? So I think it's a win for Netflix, but I want to get you guys perspective on the media side. Should they have paid this much and was Netflix smart to stay out of this deal?

[Troy]

Couple things, I think. What was that Wednesday he shot? It came over to my house, I said, look, I typed up this, this piece, you know, about Netflix and Warner Brothers. I think they might walk away from the deal today. I was just like, I just had. I just, you know, the way things are looking the, the four days, you know, David Ellison being at the State of the Union, Tess Aeronautics being at the White House the next day, I'm

[Ian]

just like, yeah, you're threatening Susan Rice if, if you guys get the deal.

[Troy]

It just felt like all those things are happening. And then if, you know, it reminded me of the conversation we've been having all 2025 about Larry Ellison and the fact that he is one of the wealthiest people in the world that doesn't have a quote, unquote form of media. They've all done it, right? Like Zuckerberg has it, Bezos has it, Obviously, Elon has it. And here is Larry Ellison without any form of media. Yes. He's known for software, obviously, in Oracle, I think he was willing to pay whatever it took to get this. In fact, that's why they made the bid so ridiculous that Netflix said, you know what, Sometimes walking away is the best deal. And so they got CBS and they got CNN right inside this deal, amongst other properties, for sure. But I'm just talking from the media standpoint. You got Fox and now you got CBS and you got cnn now controlled by supporters of, you know, the current administration, which is interesting. And I think that was Larry Ellison's, you know, goal the whole time for Netflix, though, why I thought, like, this would be a good opportunity for them. Was that okay, you were on the hook for 72 billion and now that comes back to the company. In addition to that, you get 2.8 billion from walking away. So now your Next. You got 75 billion back into the company. What does that do? Well, how long is it going to take Warner Brothers and Skydance Paramount to become profitable from this deal? You want to talk about debt, how

[Ian]

long people, how much they pay for it?

[Troy]

110 billion.

[Ian]

I don't.

[Troy]

They bought it at $32 a share. All types of incentives. How long you think it's going to take for them to become profitable? Right. Netflix goes back into regularly scheduled programming. Now they have actually more money to now go out and pursue live sports to stay further ahead in the streaming space. I thought it was a great opportunity for them to say, all right, let's walk away. Let's continue what we were doing. We were going down the right path. Let's keep going. If you watch, since they announced this merger they've been down 23%. They've been hit hard. Obviously they had to split. Like this is a good opportunity for them. Sometimes walking away is the best thing you can do. I like this for Netflix.

[Rashad]

Netflix Stock is up 21 this week. So what's the, what's the, what's the trajectory for next, for next. For Netflix stocks?

[Ian]

I, I think they've gotten beaten up unfairly with the number one thing that investors love is certainty. So now that you know that this chess piece isn't on the table, I think it's back to regularly scheduled programming. Also too for Netflix. Like Trump said he was going to come after a member of the board. You don't want any political combatants coming after your company. So now you're out of the clear. Right? You survived in like El Mencho from this corporate battle. They did a great job going back to Capex spending of not overspending. And also too like you said, they have capital now. If, if they start to make a creator's fund or pay creators more at Netflix, which is one of the weaknesses of their alliance, I think they can get some great headwinds. I think we should see them to continue to rally. And I think them and Meta are the two companies. I'm looking to see how quickly they rally to then give us an indication of where the stock market is going to go. Netflix and Meta are my two canaries in the coal mine for 26 to see how this market shakes out. But shoddy for you. Like, do you think this is a great investment on Paramount? Like if you had 160 laying around, right. Would you pay 110 for the swath of companies that Paramount got and that deal? Like I went and looked, I'm like, there are no hit shows on. None of them broadcasts. They have.

[Troy]

Don't do that to hbo. Don't do that to hbo, man.

[Rashad]

It's definitely outdated. But I also think that it's interesting. I saw the, I forget exactly what he was his title, but he was, he was a high ranking executive of Netflix in the uk. Like high, like president, something like that. And he was saying that, talking about YouTube and he was just saying how YouTube has such an unfair advantage because like NBC and he was saying like the BBC but like CBS, all of these shows, they put their content on YouTube for free.

[Ian]

Yep, smart.

[Rashad]

So he was like, he was like, how can we compete? How can we compete when network television is putting their content on YouTube for free, getting paid on the back end through AdSense. But YouTube is not paying for their content. They would never put their content on Netflix for free. Netflix has to license $100 million deals to get old shows, reruns for a

[Ian]

two week run rate, even sports.

[Rashad]

So it's like, yeah, to answer your question, I don't think that was a good idea for them to pay that much for that, for that suite. But I think then Netflix has other problems outside of that. Not just YouTube, but just other forms of streaming that is coming up and short form content and different things that nature is like, you know, they spending a lot of money. This podcast thing. I have suspicions that it's not working. That's just my, that's just my suspicions. I don't know if it's true or not, but how much money you're going to throw at Floyd and Mike Tyson. It's like you're doing a lot of spending and that's.

[Troy]

They're going to have those on Netflix. Yeah, all of them.

[Rashad]

Well, the Mike Tyson and Floyd one, I think. Yeah. Pacquiao too.

[Troy]

Pack yo.

[Rashad]

Pacquiao too. So it's like, I don't know. I don't know if this model is really sustainable long term.

[Troy]

I think they're so far ahead. The difference between the free content that the, the Paramounts of the world, the Comcast of the world, that, that's like the network linear. They have obviously shows that are meant for streaming. ABC Disney would be an example of that. Right. Like right now, if you don't have Hulu, how do you watch Paradise? You can't. Right. You got to wait. Right. So they'll make specific things. I think what Netflix has done is had original content that people have loved and come to adore and they've, they've done it like every year. We think like, oh, that's it. They can't have another one. And it's another one. Right. It's Stranger things. Right. And then it's Wednesday.

[Adam]

Right.

[Troy]

Like they've been pretty good with that, I think now I don't know if it's original content now. I think they take the Apple model where it's like, yeah, we could bring new products to the table or we can get new regions. That's always been my thing with Netflix. How do we become more of an international brand where it can be serviced other places? Disney has been able to do that a little bit.

[Ian]

Right.

[Troy]

If you talk about some, some other countries. How does, how does Netflix get into that space? Because in terms of streaming outside of YouTube, they're number one. Disney would be number two. And then I don't even know. You can flip a coin on who number three is now that Paramount and all that's mixed together. But those, those are the two clear favorites. I think the international play for them is there and they have the capital, so it'll be interesting to see what they do. I think this, it goes, it crosses back over 100. I wouldn't be surprised to see that. 115.

[Ian]

Yeah. At some point I think it'll get to like 110, 111. But to business, okay. For my investors, whenever you hear capital being spent, first thought has to be how are they going to 5x or 11x this? Rashad, to your point, Netflix has to figure out a business model where you're paying 0 for the content and it's high produced. So you keep the same standards and you have to incentivize creators. Bring me a hit show that is shot well lit, well edited, everything that you need, and we'll pay you on the performance model because how much longer can you continue to pour out 20 to 40 million for a show for the retention rate for them to be five? Like, I don't hear nobody talking about Stranger Things about Vecna or Will or like, where's the video game? There's no back end model and it sucks just from a cost basis to put all this money into a product and people burn through it through three

[Rashad]

days and you could, yeah, you could watch the show in four days. That's it. That's why they got podcasts, because it's low cost and it's something that you could. Is sustainable for, for years, weekly. But okay, let's talk about Iran. Let's get into this the moment we all been waiting for. So hit your like button and share. Okay, Everybody knows by now, America, Israel waged war on Iran a couple days ago. Bombed, killed the Supreme Leader, then killed the new supreme Leader. Iran retaliated and has strikes on different military bases throughout the Middle East. Qatar, uae. They bombed the oil facility in our. In Saudi Arabia today. Saudi, Kuwait. Okay, so this is, we're going to talk about it on blackout for sure.

[Ian]

For sure.

[Rashad]

We have to because we have to in detail on a geopolitical side and different things of that nature. But just in short, this is something that, like you said, Ian, I don't think it was too much of a surprise. I mean, they had the ships there for three weeks, just parked out. So I don't think it was like, oh, what the hell just happened? But still a little, you know, a Little shocking that it would just escalate so quickly. But you know, when you have orders, you must follow them. So we'll talk about that on Wednesday. But what, what's the, what's the, what's the implicit. What's the implication for the stock market?

[Ian]

Nothing controversial.

[Rashad]

Take.

[Ian]

But this is already, and I want to give complete credit to Shelley on Red Panda Stock Club call, tune in every Sunday to get breaking news and information. She was bringing this up four months ago, but this has been priced in already. Like, and I put it on Instagram and I don't know it was going to be such a, such a backlash for it. But why are we looking for the investment play on war and genocide? I was the same one who said don't invest in Palantir for the same reason. But if you want to talk about alpha and edge in a scenario, this is not 1992, the Palantir. Northrop Grundman played General Dynamics, Exxon, that was priced in a year ago. That, that's not the move. So as far as the implication, and it's interesting that it happened on Saturday and not Friday and not on Monday because he knows what impact that would have had on the market. It was cushioned over the weekend. So by the time we got to the futures market on Sunday night. Yeah. Or popped up. But it's also reverting back to the mean now. So like in terms of three months, we won't even be talking about the situation and how it's affected the market. Most of the indexes rose as a result after that, the midday drop and we were good. This isn't April of last year. It's not one of those situations. Now, if we can. Now my concern is if because of the situation, we enter up in a half decade war, that's going to have some like implications for sure. But this week, none at all. What do you guys think?

[Troy]

You know, it sounds like you're being facetious when you say nothing but like, I'm dead.

[Ian]

I'm serious.

[Rashad]

I'm with you.

[Troy]

I'm with. I mean, when we think about the market that we've seen, especially since we've had market Mondays and we've talked about this before, think about all the things that should have created a market. You had a pandemic, you had global conflict, you had an alleged assassination attempt on a candidate.

[Ian]

You got a recession that was not

[Troy]

announced, a recession that happened. A bear market, which was quick. You had obviously a bull market. You had Liberation Day. Right. What Liberation Day looked like the aftermath of that and comparing it to this, right? Watching the news on Saturday, it felt very like, oh my gosh, where are we headed for the market, right? Obviously, you know, we. Would you pray for the people's lives who are being lost, right, in war. You know, there's always going to be cales. And you think about that first. Then it's like, where, where are we headed with this? Like, how are we going for a downturn Monday and then all Sunday night you're looking at it and you know, around 7 o' clock you see those futures and it's down. And then around 10 o' clock you're like, wait, dude, this isn't really. And you know what's funny? It didn't, it didn't move the needle. And then your post came up about it being priced in on my phone and I was like, people got to understand that part, right? Like there's going to be a separation. There's going to be a separation of emotion and investing. And this is one of those stories, like I got a few texts, they're like, yo, yo, should we sell everything? I'm like, you don't do anything. Don't, don't do anything. Don't let this thing play out. But I mean the market is resilient. Here's my question to you. Have you ever seen it this resilient? Like this five year stretch? Have you ever seen it this resilient?

[Ian]

No, but it's this resilient because they're waiting for the mass exodus and when they finally announced the recession, he will have given his people. And we can talk about the Kashi Prediction market scandal that's kind of going on.

[Troy]

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about it.

[Rashad]

But it's also, it's also resilient because it's artificially being propped up.

[Ian]

Propped up. That's what I'm saying.

[Rashad]

Yeah, that's not, that's not sustainable. That's not, it's not, it's not resilient because fundamentals are strongly.

[Ian]

Because of the economic.

[Rashad]

It's being artificially. Wait, which fundamentals are American economy and what aspect?

[Ian]

1.2 trillion dollar in credit card debt 42 as you guys reported of college students can't find a job. Debt to GDP is at 150% and the normal baseline by 2035 should be 220. America's broke and most of the companies are broken underneath them.

[Troy]

All right, well, can I go back?

[Ian]

Yeah, of course.

[Troy]

Are our corporate earnings gaining or are they losing in the past year, has inflation gone down? Like you could use those metrics.

[Rashad]

But even the corporate earnings thing can be. They're buying, they're buying from each other, they're manipulating.

[Troy]

But that. Finish that.

[Ian]

Hold on, guys, can we get along? Because I don't want the interruption.

[Troy]

This is a great point. That's a great point. That's a great point.

[Ian]

Finish that.

[Rashad]

They're buying from each other.

[Ian]

Chip, right? Let's be real. If I got a H200, Shoddy has a R200. Troy, you got a T200. I give Shoddy 2 billion. You, Rashad gives you three, and you give me five. Even if I never wanted to say, because it was Nvidia, the circular economy thing is complete. It's complete.

[Troy]

And that's all fear. I'm not knocking that. In fact, I was the one, remember, I was like circular economy, right? But that's not the entire economy. In fact, earlier we were talking about the broad spread of the economy, right? When we're talking about industrials, those. Those are moving too. That has nothing to do with the circular chip movement. And those are still moving, Right? But they all are related to AI, right? If we're talking about energy, look at what GeV's done. Look what Caterpillar's done, right? If we're talking about. Look at, look at industrial. Look at it. I mean, we're actually watching the growth happen. It's happening, right? I'm saying, so it's happening.

[Ian]

You can have a stronger economy and stronger corporate earnings. Almost sound like Bernie Sanders. Partially pushed up through corporate buybacks and the shit be inflated.

[Troy]

Fair, but I'm just saying it still shows resilience. It could fall.

[Ian]

Yeah. I mean, I shot the building. Ben Carlson the things that the market has been resilient through. Kuwaiti conflict in 1998, Afghanistan war 01, Iraq war 2003, Syrian civil war 2011, Iraq war 2013, Ukraine crisis 2014, Yemen 2014, Hamas 2023, Covid 2020. I agree a thousand percent. I've always say that the market is read to stay up. Even though the market has been this resilient. I haven't in my life seen and I'm pro. Hyper concentration. I've never seen this much focus and hyper concentration on a few companies and no one mentions 200 of the other companies and how they're doing. And the biggest lesson in all this, the war AI is find a group of companies that are AI war, destruction, proof. That's the real lesson. McDonald's is one of them. Amgen is one of them. Lily's One of them. I think Nvidia is one of them. But pick four and be good.

[Troy]

Do, do you think he will allow. When I say he, the president with his ego and his narcissist. Would you. Do you think he will allow some the market to tank? I feel like he will make sure that he puts in restrictions and make sure that this thing stays afloat.

[Ian]

Like announcing the recession like Biden did.

[Troy]

By any means necessary. I mean, I don't know. What do y' all think?

[Rashad]

Some things is out of your control. He's going to try his hardest. Of course. Any president tries the hardest. That's that, that's not just him. That's Biden. That's Obama.

[Troy]

Joe, set us back.

[Rashad]

Anybody. Hey, every president's going to try their hardest. But some things are out of your control. Even, even how he manipulates the market at a certain point. You can't manipulate everything. If that was the case, there would never be a bull market. There would never be a bear market. George Bush didn't want that to happen. He didn't want that to happen. That's not.

[Troy]

I'm with you. I'm with you. I'm with you. There should not be a built market. But something in my mind tells me they actually want this to get better opportunities to position themselves, to buy for

[Ian]

themselves the same way Rumsfeld wanted.

[Rashad]

Short term. You talking about short term market manipulation.

[Troy]

He allegedly, allegedly. He's suggesting that that could happen.

[Rashad]

He's done that several different times.

[Troy]

He's doing it now.

[Rashad]

But that's different from a prolonged bear market. He doesn't want a prolonged bear.

[Troy]

That's what I'm saying. Do you that I'm saying. Which is nothing.

[Ian]

Doesn't want it but. Right.

[Troy]

He's not going to allow that to happen. I feel like.

[Rashad]

But I don't know if he, if it might be out of his control at a certain point. Like I said, the president does have tremendous power, but doesn't have all of the power in the world. True.

[Troy]

But this is just so unprecedented. When you look back to Liberation Day, when you look at, to these tariff fiascos, when you look to a guy who's saying, hey, it's a good day to buy and we watched the market just go on a tear. Yo, The Dow's at 50,000. Here's where we're. It's like he's not just saying these things. It feels like maybe he is. But then I'm like,

[Rashad]

right, look, he couldn't, he couldn't, he couldn't help Crypto, no matter what they did, they put all their might into it. This is the most crypto friendly administration in the history. Ever.

[Troy]

Yeah.

[Rashad]

And bitcoin. Same price lower than what it was when he first came in office. That's a, that's a telltale sign. That's sometimes no matter how much you want something to happen, some, some, some, some things are out of your control.

[Troy]

Crypto, that's a good example. But I might even argue just to play God's advocate here, that yo, they already ran up to 6 billion before

[Ian]

their family personally is going to be right.

[Rashad]

He made billions of dollars, I'm saying for the crypto industry. Oh, there's a crypto industry. There's a crypto lobby.

[Troy]

Yeah.

[Rashad]

Even people like Robinhood and Coinbase, they're lobbyists. And the administration tried to help crypto as much as it could and it hasn't helped.

[Troy]

This is the story of the 1. As the purchasing manager at a manufacturing

[Rashad]

plant, she knows the only thing more

[Troy]

important than having the right safety gear is having it there when you need it. That's why she partners with Grainger for auto reordering.

[Adam]

So her team members can count on her to have cut resistant gloves on

[Troy]

hand and each shift can run safely and efficiently.

[Ian]

Call 1-800-granger.

[Adam]

Click granger.com or just stop by Ranger

[Troy]

for the ones who get it done. Still, we're still early, but it's almost. And we'll see.

[Rashad]

A certain point, it's like he's been

[Troy]

in one, this is year two for him.

[Rashad]

Yeah.

[Troy]

So let's see at the end of his term where we're at. Because now that would be the test.

[Rashad]

But no, he does not want the stock market to crash. No, he won't.

[Troy]

He gonna prop that.

[Rashad]

But we'll see. We'll see. And like I said, we will talk about. We will talk about Iran on blackout. The other side of the conversation.

[Ian]

The other side of our conversation. I gotta call my dad and leave. I'm with you. You my dog, you know, through the fire.

[Troy]

I gotta restricted airspace.

[Ian]

Yeah, for sure. Because it's a conversation that we need to have this tough to have as to the underpinning of why. And why now. Why now?

[Troy]

The logistics of it. The countries that are affected, the chess pieces that are moving.

[Ian]

Yep.

[Troy]

It's very interesting that that's one of those, those things about social media. It's like they'll give you a tea leaf or something. And then it's like, nah, I gotta go figure this out. I gotta go. Let me Go a deeper dive into. Is this real? Yeah.

[Ian]

Build an AI proof, war proof portfolio. That is my investment advice of the year. That is not moved regardless of what happens. It's tough to do, but if you listen to me and need insight, go to Ian invest.com and join Red Panda. But that is your assignment for this year is to find four companies that are indestructible and unshakable regardless of what happens to you politically. That is your assignment for this year.

[Rashad]

The Clintons gave their deposition.

[Troy]

Saw that.

[Ian]

So how was that? You talk about a Wednesday.

[Rashad]

Yeah, we talking about Wednesday.

[Troy]

It happened. It happened. I don't know Nothing.

[Rashad]

But even on the Iran thing, like, I feel like if you don't know, if you don't know by now, then there's not even no point of us really even talking about it because America has the stupidest citizens in the history of any civilization.

[Ian]

That's what

[Rashad]

at scale.

[Ian]

That's egregious.

[Troy]

That's a bit much.

[Rashad]

America's not educated. There's a large portion of the country at scale. And they, and so the fact that they was able to pull this off and there's still a lot of people that are perfectly fine with it, there's nothing to say anyway.

[Ian]

They have trained through measures of food, water. We talked about on blackout, WI Fi, birth control. I don't know if you guys saw that. Even the Depravara shot is, has allegedly 43% more chance of giving women brain tumors. And the Rockefeller institution owning the American education system if the citizens are, quote, unquote, uneducated. It is done by design as a part of the population.

[Rashad]

Yeah.

[Troy]

Tell them what you think they should know.

[Rashad]

Yeah.

[Ian]

Yep.

[Rashad]

Okay.

[Ian]

Company. So any information that you get is filtered a certain way as well. Allegedly.

[Rashad]

It's like, hey, guys, let's, let's bomb a nuclear facility for a country that doesn't have nuclear bombs. And then let's bomb the country so they don't get nuclear bombs. But they've been two weeks away from nuclear bombs since 1996. Yeah, that's a good idea.

[Troy]

And you obliterated them in June.

[Rashad]

That's why. That's what I'm saying.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Troy]

Don't forget. Yeah. Maybe there's a new definition for that.

[Rashad]

Yeah. What, what stocks is going to benefit from Iran? You just talked about how you don't think any stocks will benefit. But are there any stocks?

[Ian]

I don't say any, but, but I want to be very clear. And, and for those of you who be like, well, Apple has Done evil. And the. I've talked about that, too. I talked about paler before all y' all had all this insight. I was the one saying this because I was doing it beforehand. I talked about the ills of investing and the cobalt mining and all the beers. And I get you, but I want to be clear, okay?

[Adam]

The.

[Ian]

The stocks that you guys want to hear. Palantir locked Avav. It fell apart. Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics. The trade was there months ago. Months. Like, I got sources there telling me, yo, troops get moved here. So if I knew this was going to happen weeks ago. When you think Alex Carp knew? Skate to where the car is going to be, not to the. By the time you get the news, it's been filtered through the channels that they are allowed to say on their broad airways, it's too late. You got to go find the next trade. You got to find the dinosaur trade and the next viral outbreak. That's an issue. This isn't so. Of course, Palantir had a little pop today, but it's not like 2012 where this news would have given you a 15 or 20% bump. Even the futures market, it popped up on Sunday. It's already regressing to the mean. We're probably back in a 64, 62 range in two weeks, three weeks. So it's too late.

[Troy]

Yeah. I feel like we've had this conversation like four times in the past year when it was like, hey, if he's elected, what companies do we think we should be looking at? Here go the companies. Then he is elected and like, hey, he's big, right? On defense, he's big on war. Here are the companies then they bomb in June, right? Allegedly obliterate. Hey, those are the companies, right? These are the company. And Raytheon, I know you gave a great list. I would add Raytheon in there as well. Rtx, even Boeing, you might even want to add. But it's the same companies. It's the same companies.

[Ian]

I like the post you put up this morning there. This is the real thing. An amazing interview that you guys had with the gentleman who talked about exits. The other part that's not being talked about. All the money on these wars are private institutions all like the 50 x's they're not public. They're not letting the public get to their private coffers like that anymore. Now, if you got an Andrew at 11 bucks or 8 bucks a few years ago, and now you're seeing the upswing for when they're going to on board and Be a part of publicly traded market, you would have saw a swing up there. But a 5 to 7% move isn't a hell of like put in chat. Look where AVAV was yesterday in comparison to today fell apart. Yeah, the, the best moves like those deals and conversations that are happening, the real gains are in a private market. But now you have to learn how to not get screwed out of your private gains even on an exit. So y' all been on fire.

[Troy]

They thought that they would have a private company like Anthropic under pressure, giving them a deadline that didn't really work out as well right now. I was telling him earlier, like anthropis, the number one app in App Store, it was TR. It was number 200 in January. They said no to the government. Open AI did something different, but Anthropic said no. And now they're not going out

[Ian]

desperately. Open AI needs the capital and how much debt they've incurred because that's what happens when you take an idea that isn't solely your creation. It doesn't work out in your favor. And as a result, I think Anthropic is going to become a fan favorite. Some people were saying it was bad business to have the, to not do the deal with the government, but there's an investor class and hedge fund, pension fund, fund of fund space that doesn't want to have AI be a catalyst for murder.

[Troy]

Yeah.

[Rashad]

And, and it's like I always say, you can't do a good deal with a bad person if you, if you are a company that is trying to like really pitch yourself as democratizing, you know, artificial intelligence. And now you, you working with the CIA publicly, publicly, like you can't do a good deal with a bad person. Why would you, the guys, the guy starts award for no reason. Like, why would you want your name attached to it? Like you said, I think that that speaks a lot about Sam Altman and his character, but also the desperate, the desperate move that they have to make because they like trying so hard to just attach themselves to something that you know. And it's like, okay, I'll run to this. Like when you, when you know that you got a good product and you know that you, you're confident, you don't just run to anything in the moment of like, yo, get down and lay down. It's like, you gotta, you gotta have enough courage to walk away sometimes.

[Troy]

That's a fact. It was like, oh, you won't do it.

[Adam]

I will.

[Troy]

You won't do it.

[Ian]

I will immediately.

[Troy]

And even they. They had. They put the deadline for them on Friday. Obviously we saw the strike happen on Saturday. But they were still using Anthropom. They're gonna wear wean off using it. But they're still using it now. I think within the next three months, it'll be completely banned for all government officials. But they're still using it now.

[Ian]

Man, I've been a big fan of open AI for the longest since 2021. Think of how crazy it has to be to have all that compute. But you can't use that compute and intellectual property to find a business model to make you not do a deal to help kill people. You got all this fucking genius computer. Which when they go to court, Eli. And that's another big threat if you look at the SWAT analysis. What if that court case doesn't go well

[Troy]

with OpenAI and Elon? Yeah, yeah.

[Ian]

Because if you're cash strapped, you're fighting someone who has a lot of capital and access to capital on hand, and his trajectory is going up and momentum is in his favor. When Sam had a bright idea, he's losing. It reminds me. Shot the freeway. It reminds me when Freeway and 50 were both coming out and Freeway had that little league and then 50 just took off. How do you drop this like this? Open AI is the equivalent of Microsoft operating system in the early 1990s. How the hell do you lose a sleep? Anthropic turns down the deal and you run over there like a groupie to him and so. Oh, I'll do it.

[Troy]

Have they lost the league? Technically, no.

[Ian]

I would say the fever isn't there

[Adam]

the way it was.

[Troy]

Yes.

[Adam]

Two years prior, six months ago.

[Troy]

Right. Like if it wasn't. If it wasn't two months ago, it was. Hey, you know, Gemini is here and they really got this thing, this nano banana. This is crazy.

[Ian]

Right?

[Troy]

And what they're doing is pretty impressive. And they're using TPUs. And that was the story. And now it's, you know, Claude. It's pretty superior in some large language model theories. It's like, okay, well, now it's Claude. They still are doing, I think, 800 million. Some crazy number. And I think that's great, but it

[Ian]

doesn't go to the bottom line number of. Okay, hypothetically, if y' all was at Tao and 19, Keys call you and say, boy trum. Rashad, you hear Tucker Carlson ask Ian what happened with the murder at Red Panda. Would you back away from me or would you come closer? When Tucker asked the question about what happened with the engineer and acceptable answer wasn't given. That was one of the telltale signs of decaying brand trust there.

[Troy]

Yeah, yeah, I'm with you on that. 100%. The brand, it feels under attack. And the more he speaks. There was a time when he didn't speak as much and now he's everywhere and he's speaking. They might want to sit him down just for a little bit. Just for a little bit.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Rashad]

What's the. How do you trade oil futures?

[Ian]

I know y' all gonna be mad at me. This episode, the oil trade is over with unless you're riding it to the downside. Now, if we go into another war or hypothetically if the straight remains closed for a long period of time, that may be an issue. We may see it push back up to 74.3. But if anything, you should play the reversion back down to 66 over maybe a month or two. But the spike of expecting it to go like Troy, like you said, 110, 115, that's not going to happen. Now if this happens again, I will say on a Sunday night, if you can get in on the first 10 minutes or first 15 minutes of the move, you can see some gains there. But expecting this move to repeat this, this crude trade is not the gold trade of last year like a lot of people think that's going to happen. I don't think that this is it. We may pop back up to 74, but I have us reverting back to or dropping back to 66 within a month. So if anything, you want to play it to the downside. And if you look at what the long term trend of crude is, it is to the downside. This is an 04, this is not 05. Like you said. In 2020, oil futures went negative, which I never saw for any other asset. So if anything, I would revert to the mean and I would stay long on the Dow side, NASDAQ side and ES side as well. But, but any illusion of crude going to 110 in this cycle of trading, it's not gonna happen.

[Troy]

Yeah. Or crude is, is not for the faint of heart. No, it really isn't. I, I, it's not easy. I remember, yeah, I was, I was trading options contracts on marathon oil, I believe maybe in 22. Yeah, it's, it's one of those spaces where you try to understand it and you feel like you have a firm grip on it. And then again, it's just this, how speculative it is. It, it's a lot. I wouldn't recommend it.

[Adam]

But you, you brought up.

[Troy]

You brought up gold of 2025.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Troy]

In times like this, uncertainty, what do you think about gold present day.

[Ian]

Right.

[Troy]

The outlook, does it look even greater now when you see conflict or war like this?

[Ian]

Yes. But more important, as I illustrated before, these are some of the things that the market has survived. Let's go. 1980 Iran irre war 82 Arab Israel war, the Falkland Islands, the Gulf War 1990 Afghanistan 2001 Kosovo conflict 1999. To think stay long to market. I know y' all get tired of me saying two tech two index, but just like running Triangle with Mike Shaq and Kobe on the team, it works. In KDF4Run, you only have to pick four companies. The issue is you try and take advantage of every mispricing in the market and by the time they report that news, it is long gone. Where's all the quantum talk everybody had last year? I said nothing about no quantum. Nothing. Just stay invested in the things that are going to work long term and you be. You'll be a. Okay, so stay long the market. Gold of course is an amazing hedge. Bitcoin at the right price is a hedge. Stay long gold. But I think too many times hearing the news deviates you from your plan. Like for example, you guys, you recording and working every day. You didn't say, well now I'm going to open up a gold dispensary. No invest fest market Monday, same routine. And the people who stick within the same routine. Because when you're building your portfolio, you have to factor in war triage for my investors, you have to factor in the depopulation. If depopulation happens over a 10 year period and let's say 42 million people are erased from earth, have you factored in which companies are still going to be profitable and help those that are remaining? You have to factor every bad scenario in. If you haven't, you're going to be and that's your fault. If I've made you money. Please put yes in chat. I'm not playing the 26. Been doing the show six years. Listen, the first time tell me y' all mess the one you don't know. I fell a hundred bucks today you're investing in Avav over Exxon. Remy, my voice. Are you dumb? Exxon bro.

[Rashad]

Why did. Why did Nvidia drop last week after the earnings? It was up today but yeah, after the earnings had dropped. So what's the deal with that?

[Ian]

The. The amazing part is like an hour after I had put my Some of my synopsis in Telegram for Stock Club. I saw Rashad, you doing the voiceover and Troy back in the theater room, which I'm loving this series. Right. And I. The point that we both agree upon for sure is sometime great is not great great enough. Like what Wall street wants Nvidia to do is triple the numbers that they're doing now and it's mathematically impossible. They want Nvidia to almost produce Ponzi like returns to have a positive outlook going forward. With Nvidia, I wouldn't play the earnings game. If you're playing long term, you are fine. But I think they have been so exceptional. It's like that, that one year, like when Barkley got MVP over Jordan and it's like, yeah, Barkley had a great season with Phoenix and Dan Marley and Tom Chambers, whoever was on the team, right? Who?

[Troy]

Kev Johnson.

[Ian]

Okay. Kevin John Beast, right. Underrated point guard. But Mike probably should have got that mvp. So because they've been doing great for so long, investors are not happy with the revenue numbers and then the guidance. And I think that's misguided because if it was any other company, people will be jumping into the heavens over the returns. So what do you guys think?

[Troy]

I mean, you want to talk about it almost is Ponzi scheme numbers. These numbers are ridiculous. We can't just like pretend like they're not.

[Ian]

Definitely are.

[Troy]

Yeah. 79. I think they're 91 year over year in terms of revenue growth. We talked about the data center growth. We talked about the future guidance. It's all there, man. You know what's interesting? I looked at 31 analysts. Their target. None of them are under 250 for the year. No, none of them are under 250. Did what we saw was an opportunity. If we looked at the EMAs. I know a lot of people have been doing their technical analysis, right? We were watching that 174 line. Let's see if it goes under there. Right? That's the 400 day EMA on a daily chart. Let's see if it goes under there. It flirted with it, it bounced right back off of it. This is an opportune time. If you're buying a stock long term, you should have it. If you're buying leaps out a year, two years, you should have it. Nvidia is not going anywhere. It is the greatest company in this United States currently. But again, the capex spend is still the concern because a lot of people are spending with them, which is interesting to put the the company that is taking most of this revenue and has a 53% or 57% profit margin is the one that's actually pulling back.

[Ian]

And once again, asymmetric risk to reward. Like if the highest 212 and it got to 197, that's not the time to be pouring money in. And I mean if you guys. Listen, I gave, I gave you guys a price where to enter. But asymmetry in your mathematical equation of when to buy definitely has two factor in. Given that they knew these attacks were going to happen now, it's not the right time to deploy the capital.

[Troy]

Yeah, and if, if any other sector we looked at, like we said, software moved up. Think about what, when they're talking about Capex band, where are they spending the money? Yeah, we could talk about infrastructure, but what's going inside the infrastructure, GPUs, who are they spending it with? Majority of them are spending with. Nvidia is going to be here. If you got into the stock, congratulations, it will be here. It's not going anywhere.

[Rashad]

What's the top asset for the next 12 months?

[Ian]

The ones we've been telling you about. I think it's a great question, but the ones we've been telling you about, stocks, gold, crypto, real estate, the matrix of what to invest in amongst the, the good elite won't change. We don't have access to the waterways and ocean rights and air rights. So the stocks, real estate, crypto and gold. Okay, well, what do you guys think?

[Troy]

If there's another answer that. That is the answer. That's the answer. That's the answer, folks.

[Rashad]

Yes, sir. Let's bring our guest up. We have a guest. Let's bring our guest up, shall we? Hey, how's it going?

[Adam]

What's going on? What's the word?

[Ian]

How are you?

[Adam]

Happy market Monday.

[Troy]

How you feeling, man?

[Adam]

I can't complain. I don't have much in the market, so I'm. My shirt is still on my, on my back, so no complaints.

[Troy]

You got, you got, you got a lot in the art behind you. It's beautiful. So that's an investment.

[Ian]

No pun intended.

[Troy]

Yeah, that's an investment in itself.

[Adam]

Appreciate it.

[Rashad]

So Adam, let me, let me, Adam, let me see if I can get this correct. Bone K Deco.

[Adam]

Yeah, that's close enough for a name, ain't it?

[Ian]

You my dog? Yeah.

[Rashad]

Bucket Deco. So, okay, interesting conversation that we had. We got introduced by Champ, shout out to him, but Harvard educated. And you are running for a very interesting position. New York State Comptroller Something that most people have no idea what that actually even means, but from a business financial standpoint, is pretty much like the CFO and man talking about the budget that it controls. And it's one of the most powerful positions in the country, really, if you really think about it, because you think of New York as the capital of capitalism. So the person that's kind of like in charge of the money for the. For the most important part of America when it comes to finances are concerned, and you would be. You would be his. You would be making history as the first black controller, I believe. Right. City controller. So can you.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Rashad]

Explain. Just explain. I have some questions, but before we even start the line of questioning, explain what the title is and why it's important financially.

[Adam]

Yeah, no, I appreciate y' all having me on and definitely looking forward to chopping it up about this video. Very, very important office. And it's simple. It controls the money in New York State, and as you noted, this is the capital of capital in terms of how money flows, not only in New York, but beyond. And so there's a lot of responsibility related to it. I think the two most important in terms of the office is one, you are the head of the state's pension fund, which is nearly $300 billion. So you are one of the world's most important investors and one of the world's largest institutional investors. And then two, you have oversight over the $254 billion state budget. So where money goes, schools, roads, firefighters, the whole bit. And so it's an incredibly important job. And I got a lot of ideas on how we should try to do things differently in terms of being able to not only invest as we honor our obligations to the people who've served our state, but how are we able to, again, be a proactive player in a whole variety of markets to the benefit of New Yorkers. So, yeah, it is a very, very key job in terms. Especially today, given all of the things y' all are covering, whether it be the oil markets, whether it be stock market, whether it be infrastructure, real estate, the pension fund in particular. Particular can be a very powerful player.

[Troy]

I'm interested in how one prepares to even take on this title. Like what. What did you study? Like, are you an economy? Like, how. How did we get to this point where it's like, this is obviously one of the most important jobs in the country, definitely in the state. How did you even prepare to be in this position?

[Adam]

Yeah, no, it's a good. It's a great question. My wife asked Me, me that all the time. But, no, I think it really starts from parents, really. Like, I mean, what I love about what y' all are doing is y' all are bringing to life, like, how one thinks about, like, economics and the markets. But, like, it's really dollars and cents. It starts at your house, it starts at the kitchen table. It starts with the basics that you're trying to do. And so, you know, my dad came here, 50 bucks in his pocket, clothes. He was wearing an extra set in the suitcase, and worked at McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts, Janitor, the whole bit, and was trying to think about how to, again, create a better life for himself. And so through that, like, was the whole lesson about, like, how do you build up your financial base? And, you know, I was fortunate. I got scholarships to go to, you know, boarding school, college, Harvard Business School. But, like, you know, I think for a lot of folks, it. They didn't have that, like. And my. My pursuit in this office is how do we create broader sets of opportunities for folks to participate in the market. Right. Or to participate in the economy more generally. And so whether that's working in organizing, working in finance, working in non profits, my whole thing has been like, how do we get people to play in the playing field, the economic playing field, especially the ones y' all are talking about. Right. Like, we're hearing about crypto 15 years ago, and it was white boys that I went to school with, they had access, they had the plug to that. Not even 15. This was like 2010, 2009, when first coins were coming out. And so to me, that is all about sort of, again, access, opportunity, and then, like, being able to shape the office in a way that enables folks to have greater access to that when you win.

[Ian]

How do you use pension funds to empower black and brown communities and to get more wealth? And also, why not upsetting current administrative forces that will lead to attacks down the line.

[Adam]

Yeah. So I think for me, it's real simple. Right? Like, I mean, y' all got Robert Smith on many times, though, I'm sure. Sure. And it's about, like, who. Who does the pension fund allocate money or capital toward? Right. And Robert, obviously successful investor, but initially, like, you know, it's a black guy starting a private equity firm in SAS that was not intuitive, that people were like, yep, we're going to throw money into this. But I think there's a whole array of folks, folks of color, who have that same exact set of ideas, talent. And by the way, it actually would Be a good return for the pension fund getting in early on a lot of emerging managers of this kind. And so my view is I'd like for us to look like the Canadian model. So y' all were talking about like the things y' all would be focusing on the next 12 months from now. Absolutely. They are focused on energy, they are focused on transportation infrastructure, they're focused on housing, real estate, like real assets. And to me that's the way in which, if we were to operate in that same model, look, we got a housing crisis in New York. Right. And to me that housing crisis is actually a market opportunity for the pension fund to be a catalytic player in actually creating not only more housing supply, but also making money for the pension fund. Because if we can build more, like the demand is clearly there. And so I just think there are a number of places and areas, whether it's emerging managers, whether it's housing, whether it's infrastructure, that we could actually again make money for retirees and do right by black and brown communities here in New York. And I think if you do that, I don't. There are going to be people who are going to be like, ah, I can't believe we're making, we're making money. Like that sucks.

[Troy]

Like.

[Adam]

So I think to me that's the way in which we can hopefully be able to get a lot of people on board.

[Rashad]

Let's stay on this pension conversation for a little bit and I'm going to have a follow up question to this. But okay, explain to the people this is important for them to know how much money is in the pension that you're referring to.

[Adam]

Oh, nearly $300 billion.

[Rashad]

$300 billion in the pension. Now who controls where that money goes?

[Adam]

One person, the state comptroller.

[Rashad]

So one person controls where $300 billion goes.

[Adam]

Right.

[Rashad]

So if you get elected, you single handedly would be able to control $300 billion.

[Adam]

Yeah, that would be one of the largest capital allocators in the world.

[Rashad]

Okay. And speaking of Robert Smith, so what he said was you. So this pension that we're referring to, this is teachers, civilians.

[Adam]

Yeah, teachers, civil servants. So everybody outside of New York City

[Rashad]

has a picture that works the occupations.

[Adam]

Oh, we're talking about teachers, we talking about police, fire, sanitation, like your little local town board. Everybody outside of New York City sends, if you're a public employee for a town, for the state, it all goes to the Penn State pension fund, which is called New York Common.

[Rashad]

So this is why the Robert Smith. You mentioned Robert Smith, to tie it all in. So when we spoke to him at Carnegie hall, so he was saying that when you look at those jobs that you just referred to, at least probably 25% or more are black people, black and Hispanic people, probably even 40% when you add that population in as well.

[Adam]

Right, right.

[Rashad]

But 99% of the money that gets allocated goes to white fund managers or they have no access as far as the money managers. So Robert Smith's thing was that he was saying, okay, if it's 25% of the population that's working those jobs as black, 25% of the money management should be, should be in black hands. Money management hands. Right. Because that's, it's a higher level conversation as far as we talk about access to capital, but there's access to invest capital as well. And it's been proven that black money managers traditionally have invested more in black businesses as well. So it's a trickle down effect.

[Adam]

Absolutely. I would say you more likely to generate alpha that way too, by the way, because you're basically looking at opportunities that again, have higher upside but don't necessarily have a lot of capital toward them. Right. Think of like Shea Moisture, for instance, right before the whole market started to explode with like, you know, Black Beauty. He was like the only cat in the market playing in that space for a long time or could really scale up. And then when everybody started realizing it was like, oh, wow, like there's actually a lot of money in this, in this, in this segment. So to me, there's a lot of, there's a lot of areas like this I think Robert's touched on and I think he's a good example in himself, which is, yeah, like if you make the investment in diverse managers, especially when they have diverse strategies, you're likely going to get, you know, greater outcome, greater upside because like, no one's really playing in that space. And that's where I think again, the pension fund can really, can do phenomenal work.

[Troy]

In terms of the pension fund, what are the top priorities that we invest in? I guess what would be the top priorities for you? I know you said you want to do things differently. Is it that addressing housing? Is it infrastructure? Is it job creation? Like, what do you see? Right. Because that, I mean, 300 billion is, I mean, you're one of the largest asset movers in, in obviously in the state, in the country. What, what do you prioritize at that position?

[Adam]

Yeah, so I think for me, the paramount consideration and I think y' all would, y' all would definitely be on board is. Is whatever said investment gonna make money? Like, is this actually going to generate a return? And then from that perspective, then I start looking like, okay, once we've checked that box, like, how does this fit within the broader portfolio or in the construction that we got, right? So like, half of it is equities, another 35% is around, around alternatives. So think real estate, PE, hedge fund. It could be a whole set of other asset classes, in my view is if you look at the Canadians, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, you look at Quebec's cdpq, so those cats are moving very differently. They're not only making money for retirees, they're also investing in housing, clean infrastructure, their transportation. In Montreal, if y' all have been, they literally built a train, the REM rail system up there. They own, operated it, the whole bit. And so my view is like, oh, if you can make money and make very key investments in strengthening the regional economy, then that's going to be a win win for all sides, for the state and for the retirees. But I think the important part, I think about it in terms of, is like, look, it would suck if we give you a pension and you can't afford to live in New York, or you can't afford to ride the subway, or you can't afford to pay your Con Ed bill. And we had all this big pool of money. And again, my view is, as an investor, and y' all know this, you want to be taking advantage of dislocation. Like, clearly got a housing shortage, housing supply problem. So if we can start investing in housing supply again, we're going to make money because we know there's demand. We got transportation needs. Should we be investing in infrastructure? Like, we got a big situation for those who live, like in New York City, Long island, man, Con Ed bills are going through the roof and we need more capacity, right? Like, it can't just be building data centers. Like, I want to do what the Canadians are doing. They own the distribution and transmission networks. And so they not only making money sending energy down to Con Ed, they also own the actual infrastructure that is enabling electricity we produce. And so for me, I think there's a lot of downstream effects when you start actually owning the kind of physical infrastructure that enables data centers, that enables clean energy to be built. That's this type of stuff that to y' all point, like, if you have access to water rights and ocean, like, that's the better out, you have a real stable return that way, and everybody's feeding off of your platform versus, like, oh, we got to take piece by piece here. Like, that's just not, to me, I feel like that's the game we've been playing. But like the real game is like we should just be owning the platform that everybody needs in order to grow.

[Ian]

I have a two parter for you. For you. Number one, can you talk to me about asset allocation? So you have private equity hedge fund, like you talked about building a platform. And then secondly, like, what are you expecting the annual returns to be from a person who's deploying $300 billion in two different markets?

[Adam]

Yeah. So from an asset allocation perspective, again, I'd like to look a little more like the Canadians. Like, so we got 15% in real estate, but a lot of that is not even in New York. Most of it's not in New York, which seems kind of bonkers to me if you're like, well, this is one of the most valuable real estate markets in the world and you got this dislocation.

[Rashad]

Where's it, where's it invested?

[Ian]

Great question.

[Adam]

It's in like Texas, it's in Illinois and Florida. Now that's not to say that those markets aren't popping off, but like, but

[Ian]

a better return would be, a better

[Adam]

return would be right here in New York. Right. So I just think from kind of the distribution with geographic distribution of like where we kind of put money, I think that is something that we would need to think a little bit deeply about. Again, I like the Canadians because again, they are, you know, they're inequities, but they're also in alternatives. And they're in alternatives but in a way that again is foundational. I like owning the foundational pieces rather than owning the kind of scrap. I'd rather have people pay rent to us versus like we kind of smash and grab, like real quick in and out, for instance. So that's my, my view now when you look at the kind of returns that I would think that we could be generating, I would say if we're talking again similar to Ontario teachers, CPP or the Australian pensions, they're getting 9, 10, 11% annualized, 10 year annualized. I mean common is only. The state pension fund is only getting like 6, 7, 8 at best. And so I feel like there's again a lot more orange to squeeze in the juice if we can again think about that allocation a bit differently.

[Rashad]

So, okay, as the controller does not answer to the governor or state legislator,

[Adam]

the state constitution is incredibly clear. There is one person who is responsible for the state pension fund. It is The Office of the State Comptroller, it is unique. There is really no other state, there are few other states that do it like this. But like you, to make an investment, you ain't got to go through the governor, you ain't got to go through, through the legislature. It is the soul trusted.

[Rashad]

So the reason why I asked you guys is so interesting because even we think of Vegas, from what I've been told, the teachers pension fund that helped fund Vegas with Jimmy Hoffa and those guys and Bugsy Siegel back in the day. So man, this is so interesting on a variety of different levels because hey, I never knew what the controller, is it the comptroller or control comp. I never knew what the comptroller did. And I don't think the vast majority of people would really do for that for their states. But it's not taught in school. Civics education is something that's vitally important. It's like up there with financial literacy. But man, who knew that one person was in control of $300 billion and they don't have to answer to anybody. Like that alone is something that's, that's a very important thing.

[Adam]

Yeah. I mean, to put it in perspective, the State Comptroller of New York controls more money than the President of the United States, the Governor of New York and the Mayor of New York City. Like single handedly tomorrow, if they want to go buy $300 billion of Apple stock or Nvidia stock, they could go do that like. So it is, yeah, it is a very fascinating role and can do a lot like. I mean, that's why I think again, getting folks with perspectives that are beyond what the status quo is and is incredibly important in a role like that.

[Troy]

How often do we, do we change our comptroller? I'm looking at who we currently have as comptroller. How often does that position. Position become available and what like obviously, you know, when people vote, they, they just look for the main person on the ticket and they never look at anything else but that. That line item is there, correct?

[Adam]

Yeah, it's there. I mean we haven't had a comptroller election, man, since I was probably in college or high school. Like it has been 20 years since we've had a primary for the comptroller.

[Rashad]

Why, why, why, why is that? Nobody ran.

[Adam]

I think it's part of it was, I think, you know, nobody really was thinking about it in a real way. And part of my view about this is to your point was just like every, you know, a lot of people Think a governor, lieutenant, like ag, even attorney General.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Adam]

But like man, the comptroller, as you noted, this is the one cat who can do a lot. Yeah. And so yeah, I just think it's been lack of competition and just another like it's just kind of not been on people's radar for like 20 years.

[Ian]

Can you tell me why? Why have you said the returns have been 6 to 7%? But given all the capital influence, access to investment opportunity, access to Wall street, why is the returns been so low?

[Adam]

You know, I think that's just the nature of like, you know, the current folks, they just been like passive. Like, you know, gonna do anything different? Crypto. Nah, I don't want to talk about that. Like alternative. I'm okay on that. Like, you know, we ain't losing money, so. Yeah, can't complain.

[Ian]

You can't lose a job and keep

[Adam]

a 20 year term if you're not losing money. No one's crying. But like if we talk about going out and actually trying to make money, that's a whole. Then you needs a whole different mindset and that mindset just doesn't exist exist today.

[Rashad]

So when, when is the election?

[Adam]

Election? June 23rd.

[Rashad]

And that's for New York State. The difference between New York, New York City is different. There's a New York City comptroller.

[Adam]

Yeah, there's a New York City comptroller, which strangely enough, a lot of more people know about, but he's not, he or she doesn't have as much authority as the state one. So like, thought to your point, Rashad? Like they got a board on the New York City one. So the mayor's got appointees, the city comptroller has appointees, labor unions have appointees. So there's responsibilities kind of like carved up. And on the state level is one trustee. State comptroller. That's it.

[Rashad]

So it's all right. When's the election?

[Adam]

June 23rd.

[Rashad]

That's the primary?

[Adam]

Yeah, primary. June 23rd.

[Rashad]

Democratic primary. How many people are running?

[Adam]

We got a few cats. We'll see. I mean right now, you know, things are inevitable. But at least right now, Tom and myself, for now.

[Rashad]

Tom is the guy that's in it right now.

[Adam]

Yeah, he's in it right now. We'll see. We'll see what goes on between now

[Troy]

and then, but yeah, Tom Dinopoly. Is that how you pronounce it?

[Adam]

Yeah. DiNapoli is it? Is that right?

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Rashad]

So, okay, so how can people. All right, this is interesting. You running, I guess you're running the full fledged campaign right now. People can contribute even if they don't live in New York. Like what's the give? The whole. The political.

[Adam]

If cats want to support. Absolutely. You know, we run in grassroots style, so I'm all for it. So donations, you could contribute on the website adam4newyork.com now if you live in New York, contributions, a match six times by the state.

[Troy]

So.

[Adam]

So you give $25, that sucker turns into 175. So it's a game changer in terms of participation. And it's similar to the city has a matching funds program too. So that's a, that's its own for all state residents. Yeah, you just got to be a state New York state resident to vote.

[Rashad]

But you can contribute even if you're not a New York state resident.

[Adam]

Yeah, you can contribute if you don't even live in New York. Yeah.

[Rashad]

And it's a Democratic primary. That's the June, right? Democratic primary.

[Adam]

Huh?

[Rashad]

The Democratic primary. That's what you're running for in June.

[Adam]

Yeah, Democratic primary. Exactly.

[Rashad]

And then if you win that, then the, the November would be like, yeah, we. Okay, all right. All right. What's your road map from now till then? What are you doing to raise awareness?

[Adam]

Is man spreading the word on, on stuff like this? Like, I mean, we just want to go out, tell folks not only what the comptroller is, who the comptroller is, but like what the comptroller should be doing. Right. Again, if we talking seriously about solving the housing crisis, solving our energy crisis, solving transportation, then there's an opportunity to make money. And I think the pension fund can do two things, right. We can honor our obligations to retirees and be able to solve these like deep pressing issues in black and brown communities. So that to me, I think is just like going to be the focus on how we get sort of from here to point B. And we do that just by reaching folks day by day, person by person, conversation by conversation.

[Rashad]

But these are, these are the things that people need to know because this is what people really need to vote for. Like, these are the things they might have like 10,000 people that vote. Like nobody even knows to even vote for something like that. Like, that's, that's actually something that's vitally important for people to vote for.

[Adam]

Yeah, yeah. To me, the way I'm thinking about it is just like, look, if you know housing is a problem, if you know transportation is a problem, if you know energy is a problem, then yeah, this is the one person who single handedly can go out and try to make changes on this and by the way, make investments on this and again, make money doing this. Like, so I don't think it's crazy. The other idea that we had is talking about creating a trust fund for the children of the state. So y' all know unclaimed funds?

[Rashad]

No.

[Ian]

Yeah.

[Adam]

So there's $20 billion sitting in unclaimed funds today.

[Ian]

Yep.

[Rashad]

What? What Unclaimed funds is like, explain that to, like, a life insurance policy that nobody ever claims.

[Adam]

Yeah. So tomorrow y' all decide, like, yo, I'm leaving New York. I got $1,000 at J.P. morgan. I don't even bother to go close the account. J.P. morgan, by law, has to give the money to the state. And there's a bunch of stuff like this. Gift cards, bank accounts, insurance policies. So the number has gone from 3 billion in 20 years to 20 billion today. And so what it does right now, it just sits in the States checking account, which is the state's general reserve. And my view is, why don't we take this money? Because it's going to continue to pile up, put in an investment trust, even at a 5% return. 5% at 20 billion is what, what, a billion dollars? We give every kid who's born in New York a thousand dollars a dividend. It's in their bank account. Sits in this. In an investment account controlled by the controller. You see how the money grows over time. Stocks bond. It's also like education for kids. Basic. Same deal like y' all had, my dad had gave me. It was just like, oh, this is how things in the market kind of move. And at age 18, you could go to college or vocational school. You can take care of a sick parent. Like, I've had to. You could but put a down payment toward your first house or start a business. So we're taking the money and not just like, just kind of keeping it around. Yeah, misusing, actually putting in. In the market and trying to do right and grow it, but also invest in our people. So, like, again, these are things that are very. Yeah, like, the controllers haven't really thought about it that way, but I'm like, we need to transform this job completely. It can't just be like, I'm bookkeeping for numbers in the past. We need to be talking about how we invest in the future. Because, like, let's be honest, if we don't solve housing, if we don't solve energy, if we don't solve any of these issues, I mean, y' all see every day how Many people are leaving New York. I know. Going to Charlotte, going to Houston, going to Atlanta.

[Ian]

Florida. Yep.

[Rashad]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Going to Florida. Can't afford to live here. Like, it's crazy. And so my view is, like, we need to, like, do things fundamentally differently, and so that's kind of why the office matters.

[Troy]

Yeah. I was even thinking on a personal level, living here in Westchester, the amount of property tax, the amount of government wasting. I know you have the authority to audit agencies and authorities, like, just touch on that for a little bit, because I feel like, look, we can't get a role. I mean, it's the same thing over and over. We're looking at money being wasted. We know that our schools aren't getting better, but our property tax is going up. How do we. Like, is that the role that we now complain to the state comptroller to finally get something that can say, all right, this is how we're spending. Here's how we can do it more efficiently? Yeah.

[Adam]

So that's my thing. Right? Like, think about that for a second. It is a legitimate question to be asking. We got a $254 billion budget,

[Troy]

and

[Adam]

we can't afford to have housing infrastructure. We can't afford to do all this. Like, it's a wild amount of money. $254 billion. Just to put it in perspective, it's a thousand millions in 1 billion. So then multiply that by 254. That's the kind of money we're talking about. And we can't solve the housing crisis. We can't stop. Like, people have a legitimate reason to be like, yo, what are taxes going to work? Y' all keep asking for more money, and, like, y' all can't even get the subway to run on time. Like, don't make no sense. Like. And so to me, that's kind of the questions that the comptroller, again, instead of just being like, well, you know, the numbers came in, the money's out, and that's it. It's just like, who's holding who accountable? And to me, at 254, bro, that's a lot of money. Like, how you telling me, like, you can't afford to build more housing with 254? Like, that's crazy. Like, and so I think we gotta make. We gotta do things way, way differently, bro. Like, it's just. This isn't working the way it's been before for.

[Ian]

And it.

[Adam]

It's not just simply give us more money. Like, you got to tell us how the money is being Used today.

[Troy]

Amen.

[Ian]

When we get you elected, how soon can we come to the office? And is there any special advisory roles that we can.

[Adam]

Oh, man, I love. Got a few ideas market Monday we gotta do.

[Ian]

We gotta have. Have an audience. Come to the office.

[Adam]

Yeah, I would. I would love. Because like this is to me, the question that we have is. And again, it's going to be a debate we're going to have in the spring. Right. Which is can we honor our obligations to retirees? Because some people can be like, oh, you know, why. Why are we trying to invest in housing with the pension fund and infrastructure and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we honor our obligations and invest boldly in the next generation?

[Ian]

Yeah. And it's mandatory. Yep.

[Rashad]

All right, my brother. Well, thank you for joining us.

[Adam]

Say the Website Again, please, Adam. A D E M4F O R New York N E W-Y-O-R-K.com I appreciate Y', all, man.

[Ian]

Yeah, I appreciate you.

[Rashad]

What's your social media? What's your social media.

[Adam]

Oh, my first and last name just. You could type it in ig, you could put it in Twitter or what I guess they call it X now and all the other socials. But yeah, just my name. Easy.

[Rashad]

Yeah. All right, brother. Thank you, man. Appreciate it.

[Troy]

Appreciate you, my guy. Yes, sir.

[Rashad]

All right.

[Troy]

I even know that.

[Ian]

That it.

[Troy]

So if you're a New York state resident, that the state will match the donation.

[Ian]

So I gotta move to me packing district. Paul, Long Island.

[Troy]

No, no, no, no, no. Go to living a little different there for sure.

[Rashad]

That was education informative.

[Ian]

Yes. And it's one of those positions, like you said, that are not sexy. But to your point, that's really like a financial monarchy.

[Troy]

You don't answer to any. They don't answer to anyone. That's.

[Adam]

Wow.

[Troy]

Wow.

[Ian]

Yeah. I'm gonna do a breakdown, of course for a. For. For the retail investors who may say, well, 6% is terrible. You have different parameters of risk that you're even allowed to take as you're looking at people's pension funds. But is there a way to like you said, meet the obligations and get alpha? Like even in that case, 13 return, he would be what y' all think Michael Saylor is so. Huh?

[Troy]

I said with that level of capital,

[Ian]

the 13 and there's so much infrastructure, like you said, innovation. Just in a city alone, you could have picked spots easily of where to invest in him. But if the brother gets in office, maybe we'll have of conversation. So I hope you all enjoyed it. Yeah.

[Rashad]

That was interesting, man. That was interesting.

[Ian]

Sh. I'm calling you tomorrow.

[Rashad]

Oh, tomorrow. I mean, Wednesday. We'll be back. Blackout, nine o'. Clock. Check it out.

[Ian]

Shout out. For having us go viral and for everyone who has not made the investment material go viral, make the stock stuff go viral. Please, please, asap.

[Troy]

That's more life changing.

[Ian]

Yeah, they didn't talk to Iguodala and yo Gotti went around the world, went to Africa, Shaka bars. That's okay. It shows a lot about the culture too. And I love y'. All. And to y' all men who are hurt about the number, because it's a lot of that too. We talk about it on Blackout. Not saying that you should deploy it there, but some of y' all are crying because that cash messed up. We talk about it on Blackout.

[Troy]

That's more than I'm making.

[Rashad]

Blackout is a show. It's an opinion based show. Once again. It's not. It's not Market Mondays. It's not earn your leisure. It's another offering from us. I know, I know. We've established a brand of financial literacy. So it's like bandaid everything that we do.

[Troy]

Platform.

[Ian]

Such a person. You're supposed to be the epitome of financial excellence and you put Aisha on your show.

[Troy]

We got friends in many different walks of life. Many different walks of life.

[Ian]

Micron eat all. Lily called Bitcoin at 20K and that's what went viral. Bernice, Melissa, Ford, let's do a deal. Hey, Alex, call Corinne. We give him a list of four. Bernice, super episode coming. No pun intended.

[Troy]

Live. No, live. Live in person.

[Adam]

Live in person.

[Ian]

Yeah. Tila Tequila. What's she at? Did a super ensemble.

[Troy]

I love Karen.

[Ian]

I love. Correct. Don't get Holly and Winnie too,

[Troy]

you know. You know.

[Ian]

Live report,

[Rashad]

Thursday, 12 o'. Clock. We got two chains.

[Troy]

True.

[Rashad]

Get the book out now. Shout out to Two chains, man. Good brother right there. So, yeah, we back. We back in full of flack. But yeah, man, you know, if we. If we did disappoint you from the Aisha conversation, I am sorry, but we gotta be honest. This is. This is just the duality of life. Like, you know. Yeah, we can't. We can't pretend to be something that we're not. We have these conversations, like we don't talk about stocks all the time. Like, you know, and to be honest, that's probably even a more relevant conversation because more people losing their wealth because of bad relationship decisions than in the market.

[Ian]

Absolutely. And photos of you out of capital, 50,000amonth into the market over a 10 year period is 11.5 if you're getting 12% return a year. If you double that, you'll be at 22 million. Invest wisely. And also too, ladies, if you find a way to catch a sim, I'm not mad at you. Tell them 20, some of them got 24. You

[Troy]

know, I got nothing. I got no parts of this.

[Ian]

Smart man.

[Troy]

Everything's tricky out right now. Everything's tricky.

[Ian]

Stay safe and stay locked in to your purpose, please. Yeah, please. And if you stay on your dean, invest into the market and they know you're not going, they'll just be happy to be along for the ride.

[Troy]

They tell them don't go chasing waterfalls. Yeah.

[Ian]

Once again, thank you Francois for the connection and Good morning America. Thank y' all to for the support Troy shot. Thank you, Wolf. Thank you for producing episodes Today here at WTF Media Studios here in New York City, Midtown and SoHo location. And if you're in LA West Hollywood and get the book, you deserve to be rich.

[Troy]

That's a fact.

[Ian]

Big fact.

[Troy]

That's a fact.

[Rashad]

All right, y', all, it's been real. What's happen Wednesday.

[Troy]

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