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Alex Jones Ruling, Trump & China ROCK Stocks, OpenAI + Walmart w/ @AnthonyPompliano | PBD Podcast | Ep. 667
02:14:34
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- [00:01]
A
Did you ever think you were made.
- [00:02]
B
Again.
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A
For me, Adam?
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B
What's your point?
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C
The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever saw.
- [00:15]
B
It's right here.
- [00:17]
C
You are a one of one.
- [00:18]
B
My son's right.
- [00:26]
C
Let me tell you what's crazy. Yesterday we're at the Ritz Carlton having an executive strategy session, and I walk outside with Tom and I'm looking at these three girls are on Tom's blue Porsche. Like, what are they doing around Tom's blue Porsche? And then I see Tom comes to me saying, a lady wrote a note on his Porsche. I don't even know if I should show it to you or not. I don't know if it's appropriate to show it to you. And then he comes and goes. Who would write something like this? Beautiful handwriting, Rob. Maybe I'm going to send it to you for us to show. Stay tuned. But you know what we may do, Rob? I may, at the end of the podcast, think about posting this picture just on r manect podcast Circle for free. You can go watch it. It is so inappropriate. Last week we talked about this Foreman that was flirting with Tom, you know, 30 some years ago, pre Kim and then female Foreman. I mean, it's just a bunch of different things that we're talking about. Anyways, deeply concerned, but whoever Crystal is, you have very good handwriting. I was so impressed by you by the way you wrote. Just a little bit inappropriate inviting Tom back to your hotel room. That kind of stuff shouldn't happen. But anyways, I thought you needed. I thought the audience needs to know that this man still got gaming.
- [01:29]
B
Well, down in Fort Lauderdale, all the retired women, I actually look young.
- [01:33]
C
They see someone like Tom, they're like, I want me some biz doc is what I want.
- [01:37]
B
It's relative, apparently.
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C
All right, let's go through some of these stories here. We have a special guest here, folks. If you're panicking about the crypto crash, the guy that's here is going to be your therapist, be your expert, give you a little bit of insight, a little bit of history. He and I did a podcast together four and a half years ago during COVID April 20th of 2021. The one and only Pompliano is in the house. Man. How you doing?
- [01:58]
A
Doing great. How are you guys?
- [01:59]
C
Fantastic. Very good. So we're going to go into a lot of different stories. Let me read them off to you and we'll get into it. Okay? So there was apparently a crypto crash. People were panicking, right? Bitcoin Ethereum XRP jump after crypto crash what's fueling the rebound after the crypto crash? A rush to hedge against another free fall. Jim Cramer, who has a history of getting everything right. Some people say whatever Jim Cramer says, do the complete opposite. You will be very wealthy. I'm not telling you, I'm just saying a lot of people say that about Jim Cramer. He fears growing influence of crypto over US Stocks. Here's why. I don't even know what that means. Let me read it one more time to you. Jim Cramer fears growing influence over crypto over US Stocks. He fears more people putting money in crypto than in U S Stocks. And he wants you to leave crypto and go into U S Stocks. I don't know if he's going to convince you or not. We'll talk about that today. There's a bunch of people saying go go is going to hit $5,000. And you know, it's that. I think it's at 4,150. Some change as of yesterday. I don't know what it is right now, Rob, if you can check Walmart stock pops on open AI partnership to create a chat GBT shopping experience Spotify partners with Netflix for video podcast distribution deal so Spotify is teaming up with Netflix. Bill Simmons and a couple other guys are putting their podcasts on Netflix. So meaning if you're Netflix and chilling, they can Netflix and watch a podcast While you're probably not going to be chilling. But I'm just saying, like if you're watching Netflix, you can now with some watch podcasts as well. MTV some are saying. Is MTV shutting down? These channels set to cease broadcasting. Reports say some of them are in Europe. But we'll talk about it. Tom's got some things to say about that. Warner Brothers Discovery rejected Paramount Skydance acquisition offer of $20 a share as too low to partner Supreme Court rejects Alex Jones Appeal of 1.4 billion auto redeformation judgment and Sandy Hook case What are you going to. The guy does not $1.4 billion. You want to get $1.4 billion at a guy that's worth maybe 10, 20, 30, $40 million. What kind of payment is he going to make? Is like making a million dollar pay. If you made a million dollar payment. Pomp every month for 50 years, what is that? That's 12 times 50? $600 million. Right. If you do that, they want 1.4 billion. Is it even 6? Yeah. 50 years, it's $600 million. Alex. I don't know how you're going to come up with the money. You may want to call a guy who is a African American guy who has this one thing, this company with a bird on it. He may help you out. I don't know. I don't know if anything's going to happen there, but that's a lot of money. We'll see what happened. Ken Griffin billionaire says Citadel Chicago exodus was not hard. Cites crime rates and taxes J.P. morgan Jamie Dimon says the four industries. J.P. morgan will invest billions, billions of dollars to preserve U.S. dominance. Obviously the U.S. stock stocks rebound after Trump's take on China gets a little bit softer on what he said. China says it'll fight to the very end after US said it was trying to hurt the world economy. Who knows? China blast new US trade curbs Treasury Secretary notes talks back on track TSMC's Q3 profit expected to soar 28% on AI spending boom. Oracle Cloud to deploy $50,000 50,000AMDI chips signaling new Nvidia competition and AI videos of dead celebrities are horrifying many of their families. Some of them we're not even going to play. Some of them are super inappropriate. But I'm not going to lie to you, the Martin Luther King one is phenomenal. You have to see a couple of them. Eminem singing a country song. It's great. 50 Cent, you know, up in a club in a country version. It's funny. But some of the other ones are pretty scary. We got a couple other stories here. That is in the addendum. I'll read to you. President Trump went after Stephanopoulos for how Stepanopoulos and ABC interviewed Jayd Vance. Even yesterday when he was doing a press conference, he was not even allowing ABC to ask questions like, no, I'm not coming to you the way you treated a vp. We're not going to be doing that. And then yesterday was Charlie Kirk's 32nd birthday, if he was still around 32nd birthday in Trump awards Charlie Kirk Medal of Freedom to his wife Erica widowed wife Erica. And Trump proclaims October 14th National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk. And then we got maybe these two stories that we get to BlackRock developing tokenization tech emit Bitcoin, Ethereum and ETF success. Now having said that, gang, on Monday, I introduced you to the FLBs, the FLB1 shoes future looks bright shoes. And let me tell you what happened since that day for black shoes that we had. I'll give you the report here for black size. Rob, I think you have it as well, size 8 and 11 and a half, sold out. If you place the order now, it's pre order. It'll get here second week of December for Brown 8, 12 and 13, sold out. Navy size 13, sold out. Everything you order on those sizes will be pre order. I shared with you the fact that a lot of the sizes are going to sell out. A lot of them. There's only four or five or six remaining for the shoe sizes.
- [07:20]
A
So.
- [07:20]
C
So for some of you that didn't see what we talked about on Monday, for the last 25 years, I speak a lot on stage and some of the events, whether it's my insurance company or the vault conference or BPW, at some events I can speak 40 hours while I'm on my just standing up talking and I'm wearing dress shoes and they're uncomfortable. I wanted to find a shoe that can combine both the comfort and the technology and the authentic Italian leather, the trainers, because I love those shoes. I didn't want it to be too heavy where I'm feeling like I'm carrying weight. We went to Italy, we put a shoe together called the FLBs. And I want to show you this clip one more time. And then I'm going to show you one other clip and then we'll give you some intel and then we'll get right into the stories. Go ahead and Rob, play this clip, please. When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast. We had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose toscanero. We chose true Italian craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skilled hands. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail. And we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the future. Looks bright collection. Not rushed, not disposable. Not ordinary, rather intentional. Luxurious. Timeless. So just so you know, if you're wondering, Pomp came in here, he saw the shoes and he kind of goes like this.
- [08:52]
A
He's like, I looked under the table.
- [08:54]
C
He's auditing me. He's like, let me see if this guy's a product of the product. 24 days in a robin wearing this. Just so you know that. 24 days in a robin wearing this. No matter where I go. Last night I was at the Casa deangelo. I was wearing this, the most comfortable trainer shoes with the Italian leather. And again, if you haven't placed the order for yourself or your spouse, this was us at the vault conference. Rob, if you want to play this clip, the launch of it when we did it here was so exciting. People were coming from all over the world. That was a 10 foot shoe that we put up. But guys coming back, how comfortable it is, how light it is, feeling the super foam at the bottom of it, taking pictures of it, sitting in boardrooms with your feet up, where somebody says, wait a minute, does that say future looks bright on the bottom of the shoe? Yes. Let's make a deal happen. Right? There's a certain sense of optimism when you're wearing these future looks bright shoes. So again, the black and brown, if you order them, we have them.
- [09:51]
B
Now.
- [09:52]
C
If they're sold out, pre order because you'll get it second week of December. The white, when it comes out, it will not last because, you know there's a certain material that we mixed it with. The light, the white is absolutely ridiculous. This will come out second week of December with the navy blue. The navy blue and the white will come second week of December. The black and the brown are here for you to order, depending on your size. So go to vtmerch.com, place your order and you can learn more about the comparison of how these shoes compared to a Tom Ford. Rob, if you can go a little bit lower to a Gucci, to a Berluti, to a Ferragamo, to a Zegna, make the comparison for yourself. Instead of spending 950, 11, 98, 95, 840. It's built in the same exact factories as Gucci, Louis vuitton, same ones, 599. I just put them on this morning. Took me half a second to put them on and I driver came, picked me up, got in the car, came over here. So if you haven't placed the order yet for yourself, for somebody else, place the order, go to vtmerch.com Having said that, let's get right into it, Pop. Crypto crash. Okay, they keep using that phrase, crypto crash. But to the people that are in the space of crime, I want to read this to you and I'm going to turn it over to you. So bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP jump after crypto crash, what is fueling the rebound? Let me read this. Robin, I think you got a couple video clips on this as well, if you want to pull them up. Okay, so bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were rallying on Monday, paring back some of their losses following President Trump's renewed tariff threat against China. Bitcoin was up 3.7% to $115,000 within 24 hours, according to CoinDesk, it's still trading about 9% off the record high, which was around 130, 131. I don't know the exact number it hit earlier this month. Ethereum jumped 9%. Solana jumped 8.2 XRP, up 9.4 within 24 hours. The tokens plummeted on Friday with Bitcoin racking up double digit percentage losses and failing below $110,000 at one point. The sell off out came after Trump threatened to hike tariffs on China, which likely sapped investors appetite for risk assets. What's really going on here? Is it really the reaction to tariffs? Is that what the fear was? What do you think caused the crash?
- [12:05]
A
Well, I think there's a couple of things that are worth unpacking. First of all is Trump understands market hours of the stock market. So what did he do? He waited till the stock market closed on Friday and then he came out and said, hey, we're going to put the 100% tariff on. I don't think that's a coincidence. As the market corrected in after hours stock, there's just not that many people who have access to the aftermarket stock. So what do they do? They look in their portfolio and they say, well, what market is open? Market has liquidity. Right now, if I want to sell, if I want to change my financial life or my portfolio, I'm going to sell cryptocurrency. And so bitcoin specifically sold off. It sold off $13,000, which is a pretty big move. An asset went down $13,000 in a single day, but it's only about 10%. And so if you go back and you look at all these bull markets, historically there have been multiple 30% drawdowns in these bull markets. And so this, I joke, is like a crypto crash for ants to the crypto crowd. Now to the stock market. If the stock market goes down 10, 20%, they're freaking out. They're talking about the Great Depression. They're, you know, 1929, all that kind of stuff. Yep. In the crypto again, it doesn't feel good to see your assets go down 10%, but it is still pretty small compared to what everyone has lived through. There's somebody who was chirping at me on Twitter yesterday and they said, you know, why are you saying that we shouldn't be worried about a market correction? I said, my brother, we've lived through two 80% drawdowns in four years. I said, your stock market crashes, they don't even register for the crypto people. So I think that plays into a lot of like what's going on with the retail folks.
- [13:29]
C
By the way, it's interesting what you say, the fact that for the regular guys that are trading after hours are like, what do I mess with now?
- [13:36]
A
They don't have access to any.
- [13:37]
C
They don't have access to anything where they do. With crypto, you can track what bitcoin is doing.
- [13:42]
A
Gold's closed, stocks are closed, bonds are. Everything is closed.
- [13:44]
C
Oh wow.
- [13:45]
A
Now here's the thing is Trump on Sunday night, you know, I posted this, this meme. It's like abracadabra, make the markets go back up, right? What does he do? He tweets out an hour and a half before a futures open on Sunday night. Like the guy knows what he's doing. And so, you know, that's fine, understand that. But I think the bigger thing about crypto and bitcoin in particular is if you sold your bitcoin because of geopolitical uncertainty, you had no clue what you were holding. The whole point of bitcoin, it is that it is a non sovereign asset. It is supposed to be the safe haven that you can go and hold regardless of what any government in the world does. And so I think that's part of what people are trying to figure out now is the hardcore bitcoiners, they know that they're looking to buy on dips, but you still get tons of new people who come in and obviously leverage plays a huge part of this. And so the big story over the weekend was there was $19 billion of leverage that got wiped out. Now you can look at that as prices went down. The way I look at it is we just reset the entire leverage in the system and therefore that probably clears us that we can go higher.
- [14:41]
C
Yeah, so it says 19 historic $19 billion sell off. But two accounts made $160 million. I don't know if you saw this article or not. The two accounts that placed bets against the market minutes before the News broke scored $160 million windfall. Bitcoin dropped 12%. Less popular tokens saw declines as steep as 80%. Coin coin glass, a crypto data platform. Ahead of the sell off two accounts on Hyper Liquid, a decentralized exchange that allows investors to make leverage bets on future crypto prices, place massive bets that bitcoin would and ether would fall by days. And Friday the positions were closed for $160 million in profits. You know when you see stuff like this, this is the Wall Street Journal story Right there, These guys made $160 million. How much do you know about this story? Do you know much about what happened?
- [15:29]
A
I've been paying attention to it. So a couple things. $19 billion. If you wipe out $19 billion of leverage, that doesn't mean that people holding cryptocurrencies lost $19 billion. Right. If you put, you know, $10 in, but you get $100 of leverage, right? You didn't put $100, you put $10 in. So there's some math that I think is a little bit misleading. The second thing is, you know, when prices go down, sometimes people make money. When prices go up, people make money. It's all about, what are they positioned, how are they positioned, all that kind of stuff. There is a trend that is happening in America, but also globally, which is the intertwining of finance and entertainment. And what you now see is whether it's the prediction markets, whether you see it's the stock market, whether you see crypto, people want something to talk about. You know, I joke all the time, like, financial markets have become like soap operas for young people. And so not only is there the gambling or speculation component to it, but what now in crypto is you have on chain analytics, you can go and you can see what are the positions people are taking, what wallets are moving. Right. All this information is almost like kind of new media to them. And so what people do is, oh, my God, there's this big liquidation. They immediately begin scouring all this data, trying to find some storyline, who caused it, who knew what, Right. Who made money here. And so when they find this, they kind of latch onto it. Now, does this person have information about the tariffs? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I don't know who the person is. Right. And so I tend to think that good investors, they're not paying attention to this stuff. They're just saying to themselves, listen, I want to continue to acquire this asset, hold it for a long time. This is more entertainment factor.
- [16:52]
C
Do we know who these two people are? You can't know who it is. Is it just pure speculation who they think it is?
- [16:58]
A
So there are strong maybe thesis as to who they are, because on the wallets, at times, people can start to identify whose wallet is, who got it. And so in one particular case, there's a guy who's associated with a wallet that they believe is the person who has it. But again, you don't have full confirmation. It's not like they're coming out and tweeting and Saying, hey, that was me that made 160 million buc.
- [17:19]
C
Is this a well known name or just somebody that's known in the crypto space?
- [17:22]
A
It's not even really not even known in that space.
- [17:25]
C
Okay, got it. So where are you at now with it? Are you. Because I think the last time we spoke you were a full on bitcoin Mac. You were all bitcoin. Have you opened up a little bit? Is your, you know, if I was to look at your wallet, would I see some additional things there outside of bitcoin?
- [17:42]
A
So I've always thought about this barbell, right? Which is basically, Bitcoin is a store of value asset called digital gold. They're not going to stop printing money. Bitcoin's not going to stop up. And it is going to be a great way to protect your economic value that you've earned. I don't think that thesis has changed. I actually think it's stronger today. You know, it kind of went from a contrarian trade to a consensus trade and now the world has kind of woken up to the fact that this thing's going to work. The other part that, you know, if you go back to 2016, 2017, that I've always thought was going to happen, whether again the hardcore bitcoiners, whether they like it or not, is this whole tokenization thing. And ultimately my understanding of the intersection of call it crypto and bitcoin with Wall street is once Wall street figured out that they could make money, they'd go all in. And that's what you've pretty much seen. Bitcoin ETF's BlackRock. Now the Bitcoin ETF is their single most profitable product in their entire product suite. So is BlackRock a Bitcoin company? It's the most profitable product they have, right? So now all of a sudden every other firm on Wall street says, wait a second, if they're making a bunch of money on this, maybe we should start participating. And so you're going to see a bunch of people start going in there. Then you start to see the bitcoin companies, right? The ETF is a Wall street wrapper for bitcoin. Now you start to see these public companies putting bitcoin on their balance sheet. That's a Wall street wrapper around bitcoin. What you're starting to see them talk about is they want to basically rip out cost and inefficiencies from the way that they trade stocks, the way that they trade various assets through this whole idea of tokenization. Now there's still a lot to figure out. The technology seems to work, but I don't think this is going to be a retail driven thing. I think this is going to very much be an institutional driven thing where they say to themselves, all the plumbing in Wal is, you know, T2 settlement times. If I go to buy a stock, I don't actually get it till tomorrow. You know, it's just kind of very antiquated type technology. These guys want to upgrade that stuff. And so it's kind of sounds sexy, but the actual work that they're doing is very, very kind of nerdy. And so I think that that will become a huge part of this story. But I don't think we're going to be talking about quote unquote, crypto. I think that's going to be much more of a kind of an institutional story.
- [19:43]
C
So going back to my question, do you own other things?
- [19:45]
A
I own bitcoin is probably 90 plus percent of the portfolio. And then I very publicly, In December of 2023, I had some. So I started out mining Ethereum way back in the day and I sold Ethereum and bought Solana, which ended up being a great trade. And I specifically said, look, this is a trade.
- [20:08]
C
I don't want nothing less.
- [20:10]
A
Yeah, I'm not going to be holding Solana, you know, five years from now.
- [20:13]
C
Right.
- [20:13]
A
But it's just from this perspective. And so I think that bitcoin is the king of the crypto market. It's going to remain the king of the crypto market. And I think it's probably, probably the only truly institutional asset that you're going to see central banks and others start to buy over time.
- [20:24]
C
What do you think about xrp? The conversations with XRP would ripple, whether it's a technology or the coin.
- [20:30]
A
I think that the market is very, very good at figuring out where value ends up accruing. And what you see in, let's call it, outside of bitcoin in the top 10 coins, what you will start to see is bitcoin's dominance has not only remained constant, it's actually gone up over time. And so I think that the market is assigning bitcoin as kind of in a class of its own. Now if you then go into, let's say coins 2 through 10, what you start to find is those are much more akin to me to like technology stocks. There's a lot of competition there. Right. So take xrp. My understanding is that they have a couple of different things that they've done. They're trying to do the stablecoin.
- [21:05]
B
Right.
- [21:05]
A
Well, they've got a lot of competition from Tether Circle. Now all of a sudden Stripe's getting in the game. Like there's a whole bunch of competition. There will probably be multiple winners, but heavy, heavy competition on top of that. One of the things that is interesting, not so much about XRP the coin, but about Ripple the company, is they have this kind of engine to generate profit and monetize that xrp. They've started to acquire real companies. So what they did is they bought, I think one of the companies was called Hidden Road. And these are like big acquisitions. These aren't like $5 acquisitions, these are like billion plus dollar acquisitions that they're doing.
- [21:38]
C
Rob, can you pull up a company's Ripple acquired?
- [21:41]
A
And so what you're starting to see is again, there's incredible controversy and debate, I think, over is XRP going to be sustainable, is it something that people are going to use? But what they've started to do is they started to take, I mean, look, $200 million acquisition, $1.25 billion acquisition, $250 million acquisition. Right. And so what they're doing is they're essentially using the monetization of their balance sheet and they're starting to acquire real companies. Now what I will say is we have seen this happen in traditional finance over time. You have a company that has very controversial or maybe unsustainable kind of business model, but they have some access to capital and they begin to convert that into something else. And look, the Bitcoin treasury companies, a lot of them had companies that weren't working and they said, well, why don't I just start to buy Bitcoin? And all of a sudden they kind of revive their business. And so I think that this is very interesting now there's kind of a delineation between XRP and Ripple, but I think that this acquisition stuff, people in the industry, even the people who don't like xrp, I think are saying to themselves, hey, that Hidden Road, that's a real company, pay $1.25 billion for it. Right? Okay. You may be able to end up with an entire set of infrastructure there that you can then go and actually build a, build a business with.
- [22:48]
C
What does Hidden Road do?
- [22:49]
A
Hidden Road, if, if I remember correctly, they do a lot of it's like market infrastructure. Right? So like again, it goes back to this idea of where value accrues in the crypto industry is really kind of really in finance in general. There's two Buckets. You have the retail facing platforms and then you have institutional facing, like infrastructure. And so the retail platforms, that's your Coinbase's finances, Gemini's, you know, tethers, all those guys. But then you've got this like, institutional infrastructure. Everything from market making to. Here you go. So like a global credit network for institutions, prime brokerage, clearing, financing. Right. All this stuff that is very institutional in nature.
- [23:28]
C
Is it like a Pershing. Is that what a. Would it be considered.
- [23:31]
B
Is.
- [23:32]
C
Is. Is hidden road company, Ripple Acquire, like a Pershing company. What is a hidden road? Yes, it is. Okay, sounds good. So I got it. I understand it.
- [23:48]
D
Okay.
- [23:49]
C
I mean, that's a big deal to buy something like that at 1.25 billion. And the guy that's running it, I think his name is Brad, I can't say Bradley. He seems like a very intellectual guy. He's involved on the. I've seen him with the Trump administration, a couple different things with them, but he doesn't just sound like one of these guys that came and created a coin, hey, let's sell a bunch of stuff and then let's go. They're actually creating technology and buying technology. Good for them. So you're, you're optimistic because you hear some people talk about Ripple could replace swift possibility of that. Of course, the likelihood of that happening is less than 5%.
- [24:28]
A
I wouldn't go that far in terms of. I think I know Brad. I think Brad is a nice guy. I think that the strategy that they're pursuing at Ripple is, if you were in their situation, I think it's very smart to go and acquire these businesses. I've always just said that my focus is on Bitcoin because I think of there's two problems in the world that I care about, and they're very interrelated. The first is, I believe that the single biggest issue, if you can correct this one issue, it will have a profound impact on people's lives around the globe, is if you can basically stop the debasement of the currency, if you can stop that, then all of a sudden, now what you do is you stop this silent theft, and now you allow people to actually keep the economic value that they've worked hard to earn. And so Bitcoin, to me, is the solution to that problem. There's kind of this heuristic of people have been complaining about this for decades, centuries. Right. If you go back through all these societies, Bitcoin is the first technology solution to the problem. And so I think that that is a very profound solution that is going to have an impact that we quite don't understand yet, frankly. Right. So I think that's one big problem. The second problem that I'm very interested in is this idea of the little guy or the quote, unquote, retail investor being able to get a level playing field against these large institutions. And I think that those two issues are very interrelated because now what we know in this country is you can't be a saver, you need to be an investor. As these retail folks realize, I have to become an investor, they need access to information, they need access to the market. So that's my focus. That's where I think I'm most passionate about. That's what I'm most intellectually stimulated by. What these guys are doing, I think, is something that is different and outside of it. And so it's just not something I spend, you know, any time on.
- [26:02]
C
Yeah. And then last but not least, on these topics. Doge, where are you at with Doge? Because they just had an announcement, if I'm not mistaken, either on Monday. Was it Monday or I think Monday they had an announcement. Where are you at with Doge?
- [26:14]
A
I think that Doge is entertaining. I don't own any and I think Bitcoin is probably the signal among the noise.
- [26:22]
C
Probably the signal. So you think Doge is noise is what you're saying?
- [26:26]
A
I generally think that, again, it goes back to Bitcoin is. Think of it as a savings technology. It's kind of the safe thing that if you earn money, you spend less than you make, you store it in your account. So one of the frameworks that I have is in your traditional finance life, you have a savings account, you got a checking account, you got a brokerage account.
- [26:45]
B
Right.
- [26:46]
A
In the digital world, you've got the same thing. Bitcoin is your digital savings account. When you earn it, you just store it there. It's going to protect your economic value over time. You have a checking account, which is your stablecoins, and then you're going to have a brokerage account. People can have all kinds of crazy stuff in there. That brokerage account is actually really, really hard to navigate. Just like the stock market is. If you're going to go pick individual stock names, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. Maybe you've got some information that you know or a unique view on the, on the world. I think that that is basically all the other, all the other coins.
- [27:13]
C
I actually love that breakdown. I love, I love how you broke it down that's to. To the average person that sees that. So you can play ball in your brokerage account and see what it does. But then you have your. Where you put your money, like. And by the way, some people, when they think about savings, they think about half a percent, quarter of a percent or a percent or money market sometimes 2, 3%. Bitcoin's not a half a percent. It's not the traditional saving account. So let me qualify that when he says that it is not half a percent, rate of return type of thing. Now let me get to the next thing and I'm going to open it up, guys, and we can talk about a few other stories. The great Jim Cramer. Okay, Who. What is the antonym of Nostradamus? Can you. You know what I'm saying, Rob? Like Skip Bayless. What is the antonym of Nostradamus they have to come up with. I mean, if there was a antonym for Nostradamus, it'd be Jim Cramer. Right? I think that's what I honestly think the dictionary needs.
- [28:08]
D
He called the mush.
- [28:09]
C
No, they need to really come up with the Italian days. They Kramer Damas type of thing. Because whatever he says. Dude, go to that tweet right there, Rob, that you had. That's a nice one right there. It's finally happening. Okay, which one? We had a previous. Okay, there you go. The hope we can take the air out of quantum nuke crypto and put money into real, real economy stocks. If it can be done seamlessly, then we will be fine. Jim Cramer hopes we can take the air out of crypto and put that money into real economy stock. Let me, let me read this to you. So Jim Cramer fears growing influence of crypto over US Stocks. He's mainly concerned about people like Anthony Popliano. He's just really concerned about.
- [28:47]
A
No, he likes me a lot and I'm giving you. You know why?
- [28:49]
C
Why is that?
- [28:50]
A
Because he made a lot of money and he sold the crypto and he bought a farm. So I tell him we own half each.
- [28:56]
C
Okay, all right, so let me go through this. So here we go. CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer has raised fresh concerns over what he calls the growing influence of cryptocurrency speculation under traditional financial system. In a recent post, he described the relationship between crypto and S&P 500, the tail wagging the dog, implying that the volatile digital asset are now dictating the direction of US equities, not the other way around. Crypto suggested that when crypto prices surge Wall street follows with gains. And when crypto market crashes, traditional stocks often tumble too. I've been worried this would happen for weeks, he wrote, highlighting how closely correlated the two markets have been. His comments come amid renewed turbulence triggered by US China trade tensions and growing uncertainty around the Federal Reserve next rate move. Kramer remarks coincided with the market correction that happened in Bitcoin. So what is, what is Kramer saying? And do you agree with him?
- [29:50]
A
I think that.
- [29:53]
C
Is it a fear? Is it old school thinking? Is it out of touch? Is it, is it wise? Is it like, you know, Benjamin Franklin, man, go save that penny. Is, is he, is he trying to get people to go back to the old way of doing things? What's he concerned about? What's he worried about?
- [30:10]
A
Again, I think that there's a bifurcation that's happening in the market that people who come from the legacy financial system are a little bit slower to maybe understand or adopt. Really, it comes down to, yes, there are real economy stocks. You can look at the Facebooks and you can go look at their P and L and their balance sheet and their growth rates and their valuation multiples and all that. You can go all around the stock market and find all these things. I think what you're finding is that a lot of young people though, understand these new technologies and they say to themselves, well, hold on a second, I'm really interested in artificial intelligence and Bitcoin and stablecoins and prediction markets and all these new shiny things that are providing value in a way that these guys are not paying attention to. If you look at use prediction markets, maybe as a great example, I think that a lot of folks in the traditional world are saying to themselves, this prediction market thing is about gambling, right? A lot of young people I know, they're saying that's the source of truth. That is the difference between these two groups of people. And so if you then look at something like bitcoin, right, they're saying, hey, that's gambling. Young people are saying, that's my savings account. If you look at stable coins, they're saying, oh, that's for gambling. Young people are saying, this is a faster, cheaper, better way for me to move money around the world. And so you just have this kind of viewpoint difference, which is fine. I do not think that it would be good for America to take money out of bitcoin and stablecoins. I think that actually those two things have been very good for America. I think that there are lots of new technologies that are actually the future of America, not the past. And so what we should be trying to do is actually move capital from low, multiple low growth industries into high growth kind of high impact industries. And I think that's where you see the tech industry kind of leading the way. And Wall street, they kind of chase where innovation ends up showing up.
- [31:47]
C
Tom, where are you at with this?
- [31:48]
B
Well, I think he said something very interesting. When you talk about the prediction markets, I think you're talking about Kelshi and Polymarket, correct? Yeah. And what's really interesting about those two things is, you know when people say, Gallup poll says young people don't trust Gallup, not because of Gallup, the company or any bad feeling about it. They just, that's old school to them. And they look at Calcium Polymarket and they see numbers trending and they see real people making real bets. And so their perceptions are, oh, the crowd is coming together and squeezing out the noise. And therefore I can trust this, rightly or wrongly. That's, that's the psycho. That's the psychology of the new generation. So when they look at that and they're like, that becomes their analyst. They don't go all the way. Scroll 20 lines down, 100 lines down to find out who the five tracking analysts are that are saying something about, you know, Nike, a stock they like, they go to Polymarket. What is Poly? They go to Kalshi. That's where they go. So it's a whole new perception. And, and they, they, they are in what I call the microwave plus thinking everything's got to be the microwave. Go in the microwave. Beep, beep, there's my popcorn. They have that same thinking about digital. They don't understand FedEx emails right now. They don't have to wait overnight for FedEx. So they are an instantaneous generation coming up, that trustee. And then they say, now I can go trade. And guess what crypto allows them to trade right now. They believe in the security of blockchain. They believe in the security of wallets. They love the story about the guy who's trying to up an entire dump to find his hard drive and trying to pay the city to do it. Because to them, that's just a validation of what's instant. And that's a whole different thinking of, shall we say, our nieces and nephews generation coming up. Which is the point you were making.
- [33:36]
A
Right, I agree. And you guys Remember during the 2024 election when on Polymarket, Trump's odds were significantly higher than the polls? They went and they talked to the guy who's in France. And they said, how did you know that Trump was gonna win? And what he said was, all the polls, they ask, hey, Tom, who are you gonna vote for? And people lie, right? They don't tell the truth. So what he did is he commissioned something called a neighbor poll, which basically he said, hey, Tom, who's your neighbor gonna vote for? And all of a sudden, people told the truth. And so this guy had a piece of information.
- [34:06]
C
Great question, right?
- [34:07]
A
Yeah. This guy had a piece of information that he had actually spent resources to go get. And so he was able to exploit or to get a financial reward for that piece of information. And so if you think about the Nobel Prize that just came out, I don't know if you guys saw that same couple hours before she won it, all of a sudden, her odds spiked on the prediction market. Now, it's unclear, why did that happen? There's only like five or six people at the Nobel foundation that knew that that was the winner. So somebody told somebody and they went into the prediction market. So the prediction market is. Is basically like an economic bounty. If you have information in the world, we will pay you to make it public. And so if you go through every.
- [34:48]
C
Single one, we will pay you to make it public.
- [34:51]
A
Correct.
- [34:51]
C
The Polymarket pays you to.
- [34:53]
A
What I mean by that is let's say there are five people at the Nobel foundation that knew that information. And let's say one of them told me, a cousin, a niece, whatever. All of a sudden, that niece has got a piece of information the world doesn't know yet. So if the niece goes on to polymarket or Kalshi and says this is going to be the winner, if they're right, which they believe they are, they get an economic reward. They're going to win because they're betting on the odds. Now, here's where it becomes really interesting is I actually think that this is going to take off in finance. Right now, it's taking off in sports because people are gambling and the odds are a little bit better. You're not betting against a house because of the way that this is structured. Let's take Tesla deliveries. So a lot of people will go buy the Tesla stock going into an earnings report, and they'll say, I think that Tesla's going to beat on the deliveries. So I think the stock's going to go up. Well, as people know, what will happen is Tesla will beat on the deliveries and maybe their guidance is lower, so the stock actually goes down. So you were right on your analysis. But because it's A complex, you know, evaluation, the stock can go down so it can move against you. So the prediction markets now do is they create a market and they just say hey, is Tesla going to beat on the deliveries or not? So you can isolate these data points. Now the reason why that becomes interesting is you cannot trade on material non public information. But what if you work at, let's say the company that makes the windshields and you start to realize that hey, the number of windshields that we are sending to Tesla, there's a correlation to whether they beat on deliveries or not. You don't actually have any of the Tesla information. Right. And again I think this is where regulators are gonna have to figure out what are the rules here? How do you start to look at this stuff. But now that person who worked at the windshield manufacturer, they're incentivized to give the world a piece of information which is, hey, Tesla is actually increasing the number of windshields that they're ordering. And so I think that's the type of stuff that we're starting to see is like there's like a market of truth that has an economic reward attached to it. And so I think that that is going to ultimately be what people look to.
- [36:42]
C
What is the compliance levels of Poly Market? Like what, who holds them accountable?
- [36:48]
A
Well my understanding is that these are marketplaces and so actually Tesla has to hold their employees accountable. Right. You can't go and you trade on.
- [36:56]
C
The market has zero risk.
- [36:59]
A
I think, I think that there's probably some risk that they take. Right. If they're facilitating certain things, if they're not kycing people like you know, there's regulatory risk. These are Kalshi I think was the first regulated US market under the CFTC.
- [37:10]
C
Market ever had a lawsuit. Can you look up like has Poly Market?
- [37:15]
B
Well in the two of them, one's regulated, one's not regulated, kind of definitionally. One's crypto oriented, one's cash oriented.
- [37:22]
A
Yeah.
- [37:23]
C
Including settlement with U.S. commodity futures in 2020. While it has not named it formal lawsuit action Generative. See if there's polymarket for offering illegal unregistered trading contracts which the agency defined as swaps. Polymarkers are ordered $1.4 million which is nothing, shut down non compliant markets and so on.
- [37:41]
A
So polymarket started and really went in one internationally. Kalshi started regulated in the United States. Think Coinbase versus Binance. And now polymarket is coming to the US and Kalshi is going international. So they're both going to end up being domestic and International. They just took kind of two different paths to get there. But that's where so interesting. Polymarket was huge. Kalshi has gone from like 4 or 5% of the market to like 70% of the market in the last like.
- [38:10]
B
Stop dollar contract year or two.
- [38:13]
C
From 4 to 70.
- [38:15]
A
Yeah. If you look up just like poly market versus Kalshi market share, a big part of it is one is more crypto native versus the other.
- [38:25]
C
September, Calcutt surprised Polymaker and become the market leader, capturing 60% of global prediction. The shift was largely driven by Calcutt's partnership, Robinhood Got it. Which gave it a large user base and a surge in sports related.
- [38:37]
A
Click on like images. I think there's like this great chart that, that'll show. No, those like individual ones. There's this great. I'll try to find it. But the. There's this great chart that basically shows the reversal. And so again like now polymarket is going to launch at the, I think end of this month or beginning of next month in the United States. And so there's going to be a real battle. Like remember a couple years ago, FanDuel, DraftKings, all these guys, I mean they were pouring money into customer acquisition.
- [39:03]
C
Absolutely.
- [39:04]
A
That's going to happen in these prediction.
- [39:05]
B
Markets and outfield walls.
- [39:06]
A
Outfield walls.
- [39:07]
C
So, so then great acquisition by who is. Yeah, that great acquisition by ice. We're picking him up, Adam.
- [39:16]
A
So I mean, this is just what the last year you can see Kalshi versus Polymarket. I mean, it was basically Kalshi was getting their ass kicked and now all of a sudden they've got more than 50% market share.
- [39:26]
B
You know, it's interesting, you were asking about regulation. It's illegal for me to say this. Hey, I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I just closed a deal for $600 million of Tesla windshields over the next two years. That's illegal to say. But you say, how you doing, Tom? My company's having a great year. We're having a really great year. We're private, but our investors are really happy. There's nothing illegal about that. Isn't Tesla one of your largest? Yeah, they're actually our largest customer. I can't say how large. Just that that's plenty for you to say. Okay, Tom's having a great year. He makes windshields. Tesla is his largest. Those are the kernels that end up in the river that gets traded. So how do you on that, Pat? How do you go compliance on that where you have a downstream Vendor who's actually not trying to be slimy or trying to be cute or clever and maybe wasn't. You're going to have the day where somebody from Polymarket or Kalshi runs around the back of the barn and gives somebody crypto in a second wallet to give them information. There is your compliance issue. There is where you have. But the manipulation won't be at the market level. The manipulations can be the betting market in 1 million $1 contracts that are on Kalshi. That's where the people are going to. Some people will get hurt and say this isn't fair. Now we have to step in. What do you think?
- [40:49]
A
I think that there are a lot of regulatory questions that are going to have to get figured out here. Because also I think what becomes really interesting is as you isolate these data points, it's if you work at a vendor and they're making windshields and you go and you buy Tesla stock because you say, hey, I like Tesla car. I think that, you know, they're ordering a lot of windshields, whatever. Right? Again, depending on all the details, regulators have a point of view. If all of a sudden though, you go and you say there's a prediction market on how many windshields is Tesla going to order this year? Right, because you could isolate that one.
- [41:18]
B
Data point, you buy yourself 10,000 contracts at 60%. Yes, right.
- [41:22]
A
That's a, that's a different story. So I think that now, look, the reason why it's taking off in the United States right now is sports. It's not finance, it's sports. And in sports gambling, there's a line, right, which kind of skews it and you're betting against a book. These prediction markets is peer to peer. So it's just you and I sitting down and saying, are the Browns going to win or not?
- [41:41]
D
They're not, I promise you that.
- [41:43]
A
Are the Giants going to win or not? So now all of a sudden it's a little bit, you know, quote unquote, more level playing field. And so a lot of people are moving over here because they're saying, wait a second, I can go and I can still get the same engagement of I'm betting on sports, but I'm not betting against a Vegas book with a line. And so I think that that is why you're seeing so much.
- [42:03]
C
What is the business model Polymarket like? It takes a percentage. Is that what it does?
- [42:07]
A
I think they, I think they Both just take 1%, if I remember correctly.
- [42:11]
C
Can you pull it up, Rob? Like how Does. How much does Poly Market or cowshe take? Like, what's their business model? How do they make money? Do you have an idea, Tom?
- [42:21]
B
Yeah, I think because 1% is not.
- [42:23]
C
A lot of money.
- [42:23]
D
Well, that's.
- [42:24]
C
I mean, that's what the big banks charge for a saying to you is, as a person that's doing it, I'm open to it. Like, but put the dollars. It ends up becoming a lot for them.
- [42:33]
A
So Polymarker, 2%.
- [42:34]
C
2% if you're on net winnings from trades, fears and markets. So it also benefits from SO trading fees on net winnings when a user makes a profit. Polymarket takes a 2% net winnings, for example. That's nothing.
- [42:45]
D
Well, if you do any traditional betting, you know, the juice is always 10% the vig. Right. So this is significantly less.
- [42:50]
C
Yeah, you bet a hundred dollars. So you win 200, you receive 198. That takes two bucks off. That's nothing.
- [42:56]
D
It's nothing compared to the marketplace.
- [42:58]
B
That's a marketplace. It's like ebay or Airbnb. It's the little. It's the small part.
- [43:03]
C
Correct. So, so the. So what. What was Poly markets revenue in 2024? Maybe 2025. What's poly markets revenue this year? Curious. 2025. Why are they done Q2 or. Okay, 2025. Total trade environment. 7.7 billion. Total revenue is not available. Well, just take 7.7 billion and take 2%. Right. So which can be significantly higher in activity. Activity has remained elevated in 2020, single month of September trading. $1.42 billion and one and a half billion dollars. So 7.7. So if you take 2% on 7.7 billion, it's $150 million. $155 million.
- [43:40]
D
Ain'T what it used to be, Pat.
- [43:42]
C
That 150 million, we all know $155 million. That becomes a 77 billion. It's $1.5 billion. And what is the market cap of Polymarket? What is a Polymarkets market?
- [43:52]
A
Polymarket was 9 billion with the ICE investment and Kalshi was like 5 billion.
- [43:57]
C
Wow.
- [43:57]
A
Yeah. I mean, these things are big in.
- [43:59]
B
The US elections cow. I like how she got 5 billion. I quote Kalshee.
- [44:04]
C
You don't think Couch is going to be a 50 billion auto company?
- [44:06]
A
Oh, I think the.
- [44:06]
B
I think it's going to be bigger than that.
- [44:08]
C
That's what I'm saying. So 5 billion is a steal. It's like tick tock. They just bought it for $14 billion. You know, the, the number they're looking at trading TikTok is 14 billion and they're allowed ByteDance to keep 20%. But the other 80, Oracle's coming in, I think. I think TikTok's a trillion dollar asset.
- [44:23]
B
Rob and I have quoted the Kalshi polls in here and the stuff we're covering and the reason is I'm looking back and I'm finding them like Rasmussen and Atlas intel were correct, they're right about a lot of these elections. They're right. And so the more they're right, the more it's a valuable voice. Like I say, Robin, I use it.
- [44:39]
C
Robin, can you, I'm sorry, while you're doing that, can you pull up who gave the 300 million? If you go to Crunchbase for Calchi, Kyle, she see who gave that $300 million that they just raised. Go ahead.
- [44:51]
A
You were saying? I think it's like Founders Fund in Sequoia, you know, one of the most interesting markets on these prediction platforms, the weather. So if you think about it, if you're a prediction market, what do you want? You want something that has a lot of volume but also you want something that settles often. So if you do an election it only once every four years. So you can have lots of people betting, but there's only one time settlement. So every four years it's a big number, but it's not that frequent weather. So these prediction markets have weather markets where people are literally sitting there trying to predict what is the highest temperature, the aggregate temperature number that will happen in New York or Chicago or San Francisco or Austin or Miami or whatever. Now again, I'm not going to go bet on the weather. But what I think is very interesting is, you know what is going to happen, that economic reward that sits out there. Somebody's going to figure out a more accurate way to predict the weather. It's going to incentivize innovation. And so you're telling me that there's not hedge funds, you're telling me there's not hedge funds that are sitting there saying, hey, if I got a couple million dollars every day on the line, I can't go figure out how to better measure.
- [46:01]
C
Don't do it in Florida, it's very volatile here. Bet in Texas, better than la Palm Springs.
- [46:09]
B
So to answer your question, Kalshee, Series D, all the adults showed up. Sequoia has been there since Series A. Sequoia's in there. General Catalyst, also pronounced General Narcissist. And then Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital are in there. So the, the adults are at the table in Series D. $300 million.
- [46:29]
C
Listen, this is, this is a steal if you ask me. This is an absolute steal of a $5 billion. Okay. No, this is a, this is my opinion guys, I'm not telling you go buy or do anything. I don't even know if you can participate because you got it. You got to be on the. But it's a no brainer. This ain't going away. This is a new way of doing it and it's going to be another disruptive for a lot of other companies out there.
- [46:52]
D
Adam, there seems to be three different camps here and I want you to kind of maybe isolate this. There's the big banks, big government, obviously Trump and every, everyone on that side of things have advocated for crypto. BlackRock, you mentioned Goldman Sachs is they're all doing their ETFs. You talked about that. So that's one the big stuff, the big markets. Number two, you sort of have like this day trading, gambling, poly market crowd who I would say are young or savvy and they're trying to make money and it's a lot of entertainment. And then the third I just say are just the average guy. It's like dude, I don't even know what the hell you guys are talking about. How do those all things intertwine? Whereas like the big banks are making all this money. You have the day traders using this for entertainment. You called it sort of like this asset allocation breakdown. And then you have the average guy being like dude, I can't even spell etf. How do you correlate and cross all these three together?
- [47:42]
A
Well, I think that the Wall Street Journal had a great article recently that said people who have are on the lower end of the income level. They are participating in the stock market at a rate that we've never seen before. So what you're getting is that like average Joe, average American, they are starting to understand I cannot save, I have to invest in the market. Right? And he goes so more working class Americans than ever are investing in the stock market. That's a great thing for the American citizen. Now what that means is they're going to do one of two things. Either going to come into the market and they're going to gamble and speculate and do all kinds of crazy stuff and get blown up and lose their money or they are going to actually come into the market and they're going to be sophisticated, they're going to buy things, use timeless investing principles. One of the data points that I pay a lot of attention to, zero day options. These things are highly speculative. They're now more than 50% of all options traded on Wall Street. Zero Day Options is basically betting. What is the price of this going to be at the end of today? That's more than 50% of all options traded on Wall Street. You see the rise. There's a Wall Street Journal reporter, this woman, Gunjan Banjari, who's done a fantastic job. She's talked to thousands of retail investors. And I did an interview with her and one of the things she told me, guess where she met a lot of them? AA meetings, Gamblers Anonymous. And so what happened is people were in there and some people are addicted to sports gambling, some people are addicted to Las Vegas.
- [49:01]
C
You may like her predictions.
- [49:03]
D
And then I'm interested, thank you. But Rob, you aren't verified yet, Rob.
- [49:08]
A
And then some, some people are there and they're addicted to options trading, they're addicted to day trading. And so I think that this is, you know, a blessing and a curse. As you have access now, people are participating. But also you're going to get downside, right? You're going to see these people come in and some of these articles you read and people are like, he, I put $20,000 into some stock and by the way, I only make $40,000 a year, right? So there's a downside to it. But I do think that the more people who have access to the market, obviously, the better for, for the whole.
- [49:35]
D
Concept of investing is it should not be fun, right?
- [49:39]
C
Like it should be boring.
- [49:40]
D
Should be watching paint dry, you should be watching grass grow. Like that's what I learned, you know, not day trading, decade trading. A lot of people have become very impatient. This microwave culture. What would your advice be to these people of like, I make 40 grand a year, I just pumped a $20,000 into some spot ETF trade, whatever that is. But that's not how investing works.
- [49:59]
A
Well, now do you see the 5x ETFs that got launched yesterday or got filed? This is crazy. I don't know. 5x if you go 5x levered ETFs. So, so there's ETFs on single names, right? So you can go, you can, or I'm sorry, there's ETFs that usually are a basket, the S&P 500, NASDAQ 100, etc. Recently, over the last two or three years, people have started to do two X ETFs and they position them as trading Tools. So they say, hey listen, you can go two times long by just buy the. Buying this etf you don't really need to understand leverage. You just buy the ETF and let's say you're going into an earnings call or something and you want some leverage on a single name stock. Well of course 2x comes out, they're very popular. Somebody launches 3x yesterday I saw, it's the first time I had ever seen. I don't know if there's been other ones but this volatility shares, they launched four 5x levered ETFs. So you can buy a single name ETF that has 5x leverage embedded into it. So you know retail is going to go buy it, right? You get 5x leverage, of course they're going to buy it. I think we're playing a dangerous game.
- [50:58]
D
Isn't this just sort of similar to sports gaming? I was like we're going to do a 10 team parlay and we're going.
- [51:03]
A
To crypto does it. Crypto offers 50x, you know, leverage right in some of these and some of these exchanges. So again it's like if, what's the saying on Wall street like when the ducks are quacking, feed them. But I mean that's what the platforms are doing is they're saying hey these, these folks want this stuff so we're giving it to them. But again I think that when you start getting into this 5x levered ETF world, right? Like is somebody to come out with 10x levered, are regulators going to approve that? What happens when the article comes out in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal about the people who all got blown up, you know, holding a 5x lever thing. There's if you look at do AMD ETF blow up? There was a AMD ETF. I think it was like a 3x or 2x ETF that. Yeah, here you go. So when OpenAI announced this deal with AMD, obviously the stock price exploded, went up 38%. And the granite shares, I think 3x levered fund, I think that's the one it blew up. Net asset value went to zero. Meaning that if you were holding that ETF you lost all your money because it was a 3x short ETF. So you're basically three times leverage short on a stock that goes up 38% off of an announcement. So like that is a perfect example where I think that people are sitting there and they're saying hey, you know, I think AMD is overvalued. It's going to go down. Let me put 3x leverage on like leverage is a hell of a drug.
- [52:22]
C
Tom, where you have with this?
- [52:23]
B
Well, there's, there's two things here. First of all, there's also gamification and there's things that are happening. And if you go look at Reddit and you look at the Reddit threads on there, and I don't mean just Wall street bets and Roaring Kitty and all that goes with that in the meme stocks, you go and look at things like, I've been doing this test so that we can come back with a number scream and do a little segment on it. And what I did was, you know, I read about these guys, Autopilot. What is Autopilot? Autopilot is very simply automated trading based on a formula. So you could go to Autopilot and you could select the Nancy Pelosi portfolio and connect it. So I said, I'm going to do a test. So on July 1, I took $50,000, I created a simple Robinhood account, basic. And then Pat, I went to Autopilot, filled out the credentials and said, okay, Autopilot, you can trade the $50,000 in my Robinhood according to the Nancy Pelosi disclosures.
- [53:24]
C
You did this.
- [53:24]
B
I did this. And I am at this. This is just a little test. So this is a small test in real world environment. Right now it's up 18.8%. It's gained 9,500 since July 1st.
- [53:36]
C
Stop it, Tom.
- [53:37]
B
No, I'm not just this little 50,000. I did this to do a test because I was reading that in the first like 90 Days of Autopilot being out there, some 40,000 accounts were created. And these were citizens out there, retail traders that were doing this. And by the way, there's also some very interesting things you can go find out. You can trade World War III portfolio on defense. Jim Simmons.
- [54:03]
C
You can do Jim Simmons.
- [54:05]
B
Yes, you can. And you can do Jim Simmons.
- [54:07]
A
You can do, probably do it off the inverse.
- [54:09]
C
Kramer, you, you can't do Jim Simmons.
- [54:12]
A
What they probably do, I don't know for sure.
- [54:14]
C
No way you can do Jim Simmons.
- [54:15]
A
No, because what they probably do is they probably take the 13F filings from Renaissance and then they just.
- [54:21]
C
You're too late if you do that.
- [54:22]
B
No, that's exact.
- [54:23]
A
This is, it depends, right?
- [54:25]
B
Well, I don't know.
- [54:26]
C
There's no way you can do the gym.
- [54:28]
A
That's what they're getting for the Pelosi.
- [54:29]
C
I mean, I understand they, they have.
- [54:33]
B
They show that if you had put money in the Jim Simmons tracker at 74% for what time period?
- [54:38]
A
One year.
- [54:38]
B
One year. One year from right now. This summer. Last. I mean, this fall. Last fall. And it is tracking publicly available information from Jim Simmons medallion.
- [54:46]
C
Jim Simmons closed his fund to his customers, told everybody to get out, and they just kept it for themselves. That's how amazing Renaissance Technologies was getting a rate of return of. Yeah, I mean, it was a ridiculous.
- [55:01]
B
Their.
- [55:02]
C
Their clients.
- [55:03]
B
By the Renaissance, their clients were getting.
- [55:06]
C
39 rate of return and they were getting 65 rate of return, give or take. And they said, folks, take your money out. We're not wanting any more new money.
- [55:14]
D
What was your return on your 50,000?
- [55:18]
C
Here's what I know.
- [55:18]
D
Tom, lunch is on you today.
- [55:21]
B
No, no, no, no, no. I'm doing.
- [55:22]
D
What do you mean?
- [55:22]
B
No? I'm doing this to show people were doing this with ten grand, five grand, and doing this like this and actually getting.
- [55:29]
C
I'm telling you, Tom, but let me. It's changing. Things are changing. Investment is changing. You know what is scary? You know what is scary about this? You know who should be scared about this? The traditional guys that are working at Morgan Stanley, the traditional guys that are working at chases, the traditional guys that are there.
- [55:47]
B
The middle.
- [55:47]
C
The middle where you're like, hey, man, why am I putting. You're coming. Well, this is going to give us a good rate of return of 6% annually for the next 10 years. Your money's going to double in 12 years. Excuse me. Yeah, your money's going. It is going to be a very, very competitive market for those guys. The financial advisor, the traditional good financial advisors that come to you and say, we got a great fund for you that can make this kind of money for you.
- [56:12]
A
Can I take it a step further?
- [56:13]
C
Yeah, go for it.
- [56:14]
A
We actually think that those guys are all going to go away from. For the most part, we. If you think what a financial advisor does. Financial advisor ingests information about your life, synthesizes it, looks into the market as to what's happening, both in financial markets, at various products, and then gives you back an output. It gives you advice, it gives you recommendations. All this stuff. We have built an AI version of that.
- [56:38]
C
This is CFO Sylvia.
- [56:40]
A
That is crushing in terms of not only is it smarter, it's faster, it's free. But what you start to realize is you can do things. So, like, the whole problem with. If you go to ChatGPT or Perplexity and you start asking it questions, it can give you advice about the Financial market. So it could tell you, hey, the stocks are up or down, or this stock here, let me do some analysis. Like it's pretty powerful stuff, but the thing it's always missing is your personal financial information. So it doesn't, it can't give you advice about your portfolio because they don't have access to that data. So what we did is we built this AI agent called Sylvia where you go in and you attach your bank account, your crypto account, your brokerage, you can attach your credit card, you can upload your tax returns. Like you just give it all your information. That data is anonymized and encrypted. My data's in there. I don't, I don't want anything to happen to it. And then you can start to ask questions. But you can do crazy things. You can say, hey, run a Monte Carlo simulation on my portfolio and tell me where I'm likely to be in 10 years and do a hundred thousand simulations. Or let's say that the US China trade deal happens within seconds. You can ask Sylvia, how is this trade deal going to impact my portfolio? And the AI will go and it'll read the entire breakdown of the trade deal, it'll look at your personal portfolio and it'll spit out to you exactly what is likely to happen. And so then you can even start to do things where you can say, hey, you know, go do deep research on Palantir stock. And when you do that deep research, I want you to tell me whether you think that I should buy the stock or not and how I should do it. And so it is going to go and look at not only Palantir, it'll come back and say, here's the pros and cons of Palantir stock, all this stuff. But then I'll look and say, do you have a concentration of tech stocks? Well, your concentration means you're very correlated to tech. And so maybe you should actually put a smaller position on rather than a larger position to Palantir. And oh, by the way, should I do a one time purchase or should I dollar cost average into the stock over six months? Right. You can start to do all this stuff in a very automated way and it does it in seconds. And so we actually think that the financial advisors are not going to be the ones who are recommending these products in the future because just like you're seeing the agency commerce happen in OpenAI, and I know we're probably going to talk about Walmart and a bunch of this stuff, stuff you're going to start seeing in finance, the AI is the one who's going to start directing people to where they should go. So Autopilot's a good example. Autopilot is just saying, hey, if you put your money in here, Tom, we're just going to follow the 13 Fs or we're going to follow the disclosures from Pelosi and the AI is essentially.
- [58:57]
B
Going to do it for you, the proxy you select.
- [58:58]
A
Correct. So we think that, you know, the Sylvia product is a good example where right now you don't put your assets on the platform, you just connect your data.
- [59:05]
C
This is. So who owns Autopilot, Tom?
- [59:08]
B
It's an independent, independent startup.
- [59:10]
A
Two guys, super smart guys. I talked to them. Very, very smart.
- [59:13]
C
How recent that they started?
- [59:15]
A
I think, like, let's go back and.
- [59:16]
B
Look at the history of it. I think two or four months.
- [59:18]
A
Yeah, two years ago.
- [59:20]
C
How much money have these guys raised?
- [59:21]
A
Three guys.
- [59:23]
C
How much have they raised? Rob, can you see how much money they've raised?
- [59:26]
A
Not, not, not a ton.
- [59:29]
C
How much money have these guys raised? Let's see. Autopilot.
- [59:33]
A
Yeah.
- [59:34]
D
Seven million.
- [59:36]
C
Seven million in. And where they based out of? Are they here, Florida or they. Silicon Valley.
- [59:43]
A
I forget. Rob, you're excellent. Google. He's really good. Yeah, you're fast.
- [59:51]
C
La. All right, got it. Interesting. This is the beautiful thing about capitalism and ideas people are going to come up with. Folks, if you want to learn more about CFO Sylvia, go to CFO Sylvia.com CFO Sylvia S I L V I A.com to learn more about it. But this is a, you know, this is a big. Because this is good.
- [60:13]
B
This is the good news.
- [60:15]
C
This is very good about capitalism. And by the way, this is why we chose to do the podcast once a week that's around business and, and money because we want people to start making more money and have more success for themselves as well. But this is the part about, you know, everybody wanted to go into Jim Simons Renaissance technology. By the way, he was one of the first guys ever that used AI. And he did that in 80. No, in the 60s, if I'm not mistaken. Can you, can you type in when Renaissance technologies got started? It could be late 60s, 70s.
- [60:44]
A
Oh, yeah, they've been doing it.
- [60:45]
C
Yeah, they've been doing it for a long time.
- [60:46]
A
He's a mathematician.
- [60:47]
C
He was a mathematician. Yeah, he was a. 1982. Okay. But he started earlier. He was a teacher at first, and then he somehow some way gets into this with Renaissance technologies and then it takes Off. There's another fellow in the story as well, outside of him, that there's a Howard Morgan guy. Yes. So what this does is Tom. So now imagine if you're Renaissance Technology, what do you do? Now if a company like this can come and use the way you're making the investment, what is your differentiator? You like it, you like it.
- [61:21]
A
Everyone on Autopilot's buying after you bought.
- [61:25]
C
So it, it only validates what you're doing. So a renaissance pushes the stock price higher.
- [61:30]
B
So in theory, secondary investors are like. So it even helps Nancy marking up your deal.
- [61:35]
C
So it also helps Nancy Pelosi.
- [61:37]
A
Yeah, that's a good way to think about it.
- [61:39]
D
What do you tell him? What did you say?
- [61:40]
B
It does what he said. Well, when a Series C comes up and it's Sequoia, they're marking up my deal. If I'm the Series B, they're marking up the valuation and they're putting more validation in with their investment. Now you have the public basically marking up the deal for everybody else that's already in.
- [61:56]
A
So the other thing that's happening in financial markets that I think people are starting to realize is I've talked with a lot of institutional investors, a lot of hedge funds in the last year or so. You have to remember that the young people who are growing up with a phone in their hand, they're on X, they're on Reddit, they're listening to podcasts, et cetera. They live a dual life. They're an institutional investor when they're at work, they're a retail investor when they're in their personal account. So now what's happening is historically it was the institutions who were leading and retail was trying to chase the trend. Right. Institution puts position on, they go on television, they start talking about it, retail goes and buys it.
- [62:30]
B
We like Nike.
- [62:32]
A
Correct. Now it's flipping. The retail investors are running into different investment themes because they don't have the constraints, they don't have an investment committee, they don't have, you know, rebalancing and all this stuff. So they're going to buy. Well, the people that are inside the institutions, these young people, they think of themselves as retail investors. They see the trends, they're sitting on Twitter all day, and so then they go and they advocate for those positions inside the institution. So a good example is open door, right. If you look at this open door stock, the retail investors all started to buy it. Basically, there's a hedge fund manager in Canada, this guy Eric Jackson, who comes out and he says, hey, I think this thing is significantly undervalued. It was trading at like 50 cents. And he says, I think that this thing can come back. And so he goes and he buys a position. I interviewed him when he did it, and, you know, I heard the pitch. I thought it was interesting. But I didn't do anything. I'd go buy the stock or whatever. Stock started to, to move up and I paying attention. I see all the retail guys and I see what they're, they're doing, and I say, you know what? I'm going to buy this stock. You know, I'm going to buy the stock. The company at the current moment doesn't look super attractive, but I think the retail guys are going to be able to advocate change inside this company. Basically like an activist campaign. So I buy a stock. All of a sudden, the retail guys, they get super loud. Within, I don't know, 72 hours of them really going hard. The CEO steps down. They get management to eventually agree to stop selling shares. They bring in a new CEO who's the former COO of Shopify. They bring back the founders onto the board of directors, all this stuff. So it's like the most successful activist campaign recently. Well, right after the retail guys all started buying the stock and advocating for all these changes, all the 13F start coming out, all the institutions start buying. You see all these guys are buying up this stock now. Some of it is they think interest rates are going to come down. This is in the residential real estate market. So that would be kind of a tailwind for, for the company. But a big part of it is they're paying attention to what the retail guys are doing. And so they're sitting there saying, wait a minute, why are all these guys all buying this stock? There's energy now, right? That there's momentum. They're advocating change. They're bringing back the founders, they're putting in this great CEO. Like that is going to change this company. And so the institutions follow retail, which is very different than 10 years ago.
- [64:37]
D
Isn't that kind of almost sort of validate what Jim Cramer was saying about the. The tail wagging the dog? Not the dog, because he said basically that volatile crypto trading is sort of insinuating why the capital markets are moving the direction they're going. So is Kramer kind of accurate?
- [64:51]
B
He was looking at liquidity flows.
- [64:53]
C
He is, but he's afraid of this pattern. That's my. That's where I understood it. He's worried that crypto is now the leader, not you know, that's not something.
- [65:04]
B
Important that you said, something really important that you said. And I can, for people that are listening, I'll take you back to the big short where you have the Asian gentleman that's working with Merrill Lynch. And Mark Baum comes over to his table at the restaurant, as you recall, and he says to him, and he says, I have a question for you. And he starts talking about the CDO collateralized debt obligation, which was nothing more than a big stack of mortgages put in an investment. And he starts describing the synthetic CDO and all of these mechanisms. And Mark Baum acts him saying, if the CDO market is this big, how big is the insurance market on the CDO? And he says, probably 20x. Remember that scene? And Bob suddenly realizes as he says that the insurance market on the CDO was the nuclear bomb. Now, what you just described, that is how the traditional organizations, Pat, think. And so the people that built the 3X are thinking we'll just build a 5X. That's the traditional people, the same people that built the synthetic CDOs that put the insurance on the CDOs. That is Wall street and the institutions building their products and opportunities. Meanwhile, all these other things are happening for the retail investors through Robinhood and then through Autopilot and then through Reddit and then through Kalshi and the democratization of opinion that you can look back and say, was it right or is it wrong? And do I like it? I see two different things happening for institutions that are making increasingly bigger bets. We're going to put 1.3 trillion in infrastructure, to quote a current event, and then retail coming. I see it like that. Do you think I'm nuts?
- [66:49]
A
I think you're dead on. One of the stats. Look up a retail percentage of the stock market. I think it's like 38% or something. Now that number I think is going to go to over 50, right. If you think about in the stock market, so it's like 35% is the latest number. I think it's like 38%. Now the reason why that's important is because if all of a sudden retail is bigger than the institutions in terms of the trading volume in the market, you have to start to look at what is retail doing, what are they interested in, what are the thing, the themes that they are investing behind. And I think that's a big reason why these institutions, right? So like some recent figures placing as high as 36%. And so that is a lot of these apps are starting to give access. But I also think that people drastically underestimate how smart these retail investors can be. So to me, they're still going to be the gamblers, right? The people who are just speculating in the market. But I think actually there is this kind of middle ground. There's the institutions, there's like retail with like $10 in an account. But there is something, I call them professional retail. There are people who, you know, it's the Google engineer who's got a million dollar salary. They're not dumb. But they're also saying, I don't trust the financial advisor, I don't trust the stock broker. I'm going to go and I'm going to invest in the market directly myself. I have access to information, I have access to the market via these apps. I'm going to go and I'm going to do it myself. That is a very fast growing segment.
- [68:08]
C
Of the market, let me tell you. Disruption at a high level is coming to the space at a high level. And it's, I remember one time, Tom, you and I went to Armonk and we're sitting there with Swiss Re and we're saying we want to introduce a model of underwriting for insurance. And I said, this model is going to get rid of actuaries. And they say you're going to face a very big problem here because a lot of these guys are, they're making 250, 400,000. A senior actuary. What is a senior 20 year vet actuary making? 400 grand, 300 grand. Pretty good life, what they're making, some of them half a million dollars says if you guys look, we can create a way. I want to underwrite somebody in 20 seconds. I don't want to underwrite somebody in four weeks. I don't want to wait two weeks. Can we do it based on 30 seconds? Can we pull up this data? That data, this. What if we do this?
- [68:57]
B
What if the data was there?
- [68:58]
C
The data's there.
- [68:59]
B
Your credit report was there, your driving record was there, your med check of whether. I don't, I don't smoke. Really? Then why do you have nick patches on your, on your med check? I can check, I can check all of that in 30 seconds. And I have to pay $6 for this, $4 for that, $13 for that.
- [69:14]
C
You know what's crazy?
- [69:15]
B
And now I can underwrite that in seconds for about 25 bucks.
- [69:18]
C
So check this out. We go and I start proposing that to different underwriters. I start meeting with them and one of the underwriters I met, but I won't even tell his name. But you know who I'm talking. Maybe you know who I'm talking about. I'm talking to this underwriter in Hawaii. Maybe you know where I'm going with this? Oh, yeah, this conversation. Yeah, I have a conversation with this underwriter in Hawaii.
- [69:36]
B
Letters.
- [69:37]
C
Yes. I have a conversation with this guy in Hawaii, and I'm presenting this thing to him. Oh, this will never happen. I said, is it because you're going to be replaced? Is it because that. Those jobs of the old school? Well, no. I mean, you're still going to need us. I said, I don't think so. I don't. I said, you probably have a safe job for five or 10 years. I said, buddy, your job's going to be extinct very soon. This whole concept of the AI thing that's coming and what these younger guys are building, and by the way, that was one of the reasons why I wasn't interested in staying insurance for 20 years. I was like, this is. If I'm fighting this, it's going to be too slow. We're going to go completely different route. And then we sold off. And the speed. The speed was my biggest thing. It's too slow. Let's go is what it was.
- [70:23]
B
And pomp. You'll love this. Cvc Corporate Venture Capital.
- [70:26]
A
Yep.
- [70:26]
B
Swiss re, one of the reinsurance companies. You know, reinsurance companies hide in Bermuda, some of the largest stacks of money on. On earth. They had one guy in a basement office that we went to speak to about innovation. Remember that guy? He was nice. Remember the spot? One guy who had an office literally in the basement in the old sections that didn't have this grand artwork and all this redone. And we're like, you guys are. You guys should be all over CBC and investments.
- [70:56]
A
I saw this in real time. In a different sector, there's a company called Figure Technologies that we invested in, and at the time they started getting into HELOCs, you know, home equity lines of credit, and historically helocs. I forget all the data, but it's like, takes like 45, 60 days. You got to send in physical paperwork, right. You got to fill it out. You got to send your pay stub, you got to get an employment letter. All this crazy stuff for a guy.
- [71:19]
B
With a job, living in a house he owns.
- [71:20]
A
Correct. So what they did is. And to kind of paraphrase is they basically said, you can come here. You basically use plaid to o office into your bank account. You fill out, you know, a Quick form within five minutes they tell you whether you're gonna get the HELOC or not and they send you the money. Within five days. They became like the second or third largest HELOC originator in, in the United States. And a huge reason was like, why do you have to send in your, you know, W2 if they could just see in your bank account you keep getting a direct deposit every two weeks. What is the amount of money? So it sounds very similar to what you're talking about is like if the med check, I think you called it, if you know that they've got nicotine patches, like, yeah, I'm assuming you're either.
- [71:58]
B
Smoking or trying to quit.
- [72:00]
A
So I just think like this whole like data business or this like, you know, automatic underwriting, automatic analysis is going to become very, very big as people realize that that now the data doesn't only exist, but also there have been companies that have popped up that have become the connectivity. So it makes it very simple for developers to be able to go and do it. Plaid's a great example for banks that there's many others like this. And so I think you're going to continue to see this over and over.
- [72:25]
D
It doesn't just come down to efficiency and cutting out the middleman and all the red tape and deregulation. Is that just what just efficiency fishes Efficiency.
- [72:32]
B
That's what it is.
- [72:33]
A
If you're not. So one of the things that you know, and I already know that I'm preaching to the choir here with the kind of entrepreneurship, but like if you think of what entrepreneur is, it's a problem solver. So if you're trying to offer something in the marketplace and somebody says to you, hey, you can have a 60 day process, you got to do all these paperwork, all this crazy stuff, or you can go on a website and click buttons and I'll tell you in five minutes whether you're going to get it or not, where are people going to go, obviously. So whether it's insurance, whether it's HELOCs, whether it's, you know, whatever sector like that is where the world is going. And I think that entrepreneurs are just trying to figure out where is there inefficiency that we can cut out?
- [73:02]
C
Let's go to the next story. Let's go to the next story. There. There is a new major player in media. To me, in my opinion, they're officially number one. My opinion, they're number one. I'll tell you why. Warner Brothers Discovery rejected Paramount skydance acquisition for $20 a share as too low. Now keep this in mind. Skydance. If you're watching this, you may say who the hell is Skydance? Skydance is a billion dollar revenue company, $90 million EBITDA to roughly $110 million EBITDA. So they got $100 million EBITDA 2010 they started, they co produced movies I believe like Top Gun, like Star Trek. They did a couple co producing with these movies. They've done pretty okay for themselves over the years. Skydance is ran by a guy named David Ellison, Larry Ellison's son. Larry Ellison, 41% owner of Oracle, who's worth $365 billion. And for a minute he was the richest man in the world. I believe this year alone his net worth has gone up 130something billion dollars, give or take just this year. So then last year, driven by Broadcom, last year Skydance goes out and buys a company called paramount for roughly $8 billion. And that $8 billion is some very, very, very strong assets that they bought. We're talking, you know, when you look at the list of companies, Rob, who Paramount owns. If you pull up who Paramount owns, most people probably don't even know what companies Paramount owns. Paramount owns, I believe bet they own CBS, they own Nickelodeon, MTV, CMT via VH1 when it used to be VH1. But now they come out and they want to buy Time Warner. Time Warner says no, the numbers are too low and they rejected the offer of $20 million. $20 a share by David Ellison. Bloomberg reports WND Shares close at 1710 share on Friday, up more than 36% since the news broke on September 11 of Ellison's interest in bidding for arrival just weeks after closing Skydance deal to acquire Paramount, Warner Brothers, Discovery, HBO, HBO, Max, Warner Brothers Entertainment, CNN, TNT, TBS and more has a market cap of $42 billion. So billion dollar company Rev Skydance buys a $8 billion Paramount and now wants to buy a $42 billion Time Warner. The Bloomberg story did not indicate whether Paramount bid included the assumption of WDBD's total debt, which is roughly $35.6 billion. Paramount Skydance has been in talks about Apollo Global Management, the asset management firm that was pre that had previously bid for Paramount Global. Jubal joining its bid is David's father, Larry Ellison. It's kind of cool when Larry Ellison's your dad worth $400 billion. Ellison, speaking last week at LA's Bloomberg Screentime Conference, did not confirm that Paramount Skydance has bid for wbd. But at this point, a Lot of people know. And on top of that, when the US government got involved and they said, hey TikTok, you're either done, we're shutting you down or we're owning you. And the president and whoever that was involved, they allowed ByteDance to keep 20% and allowed 80% to be owned by companies in America led by Larry Ellison. Rob, can you tell me who are the 80% owners of buying Tik Tok? And by the way, they're buying Tik Tok at a valuation of $14 billion.
- [76:23]
B
Thought it was Oracle through its corporate arm and Silver Lake. Silver Lake, Yeah.
- [76:27]
C
Silver Lake's involved in. Wow. Silver Lake money. Silver seems to be everywhere. That's where the money for our insurance company came from when they bought us. So essentially.
- [76:35]
A
So you like Silver Lake?
- [76:36]
C
We don't mind Silver Lake. Silver Lake has money. I think they're $100 billion company by the way, if I'm not mistaken.
- [76:41]
B
Like meaning assets, money Green. Yeah.
- [76:43]
C
So, so, so here's the question, here's the question becomes, can you tell me a power player in media now? Bigger? Yeah, 100 billion, $110 billion now. Can you tell me a power player now bigger than the Ellison's? Think about it. And by the way, Ellison, Larry Ellison is what, 80 to 83 years old? I don't know what his age is, but looks great. Looks great. I was about to say that he looks phenomenal for his still playing tennis. Still playing a lot of more than just tennis. But he's so 81 years old. Right. $370 billion net worth. And now you have Disney, which by the way, know what Disney's revenue is per year? I think Disney's revenue is 40. Can you look up Disney's revenue per year? It's a 43 billion. I don't know what their revenue is, but it's a. Was Disney's revenue per year 92 billion, 94 billion. Then you have on. Netflix's revenue was 43 billion. If you type in Netflix revenue, I think Netflix's revenue is 40, 43 billion. If I'm not mistaken, one of these guys is 43 billion. Is that it? Yeah, they're 20, 25 is 43 billion. So now you combine the revenues of all those companies is 92, 93, 94 billion is if they pull off all that stuff together. I don't know. That's a pretty nice place to be. How, how much does that change the media space? Tom, do you think Ellison's been sitting there trying to buy up all these media assets. Do you think it just happened accidentally? Why do you think they're picking them up? Where do you put them as the biggest power players in media right now.
- [78:05]
B
I think they are just four steps ahead of private equity because the, the old media from cable and satellite is content libraries that can be repurposed, reused, rewatched in a streaming environment. So the content libraries are valuable, but along the way you have to trim all these things off called the cable nets, because you're no longer doing that anymore. And that's those, those are very, very costly. And so Skydance is really, you might think of it as the first of the PE people because Ellison, team Ellison has a passion for it. And so they're out there first. And by the way, with them is people like Silverlake. And you also look at the industry is begging for consolidation. So number one, he is a power player and I think he's forward on the moves that are going to happen by big private equity. However, big private equity doesn't like all the debt and they also want to get to achievable ebitda. And so when you. The old deal maker. Who's the old deal maker? Bob Iger. Look at Bob. He. Look at these libraries he's bought. Look at. He bought you Star wars and Marvel and all these things. Isn't that amazing? And so he was the guy and then David Zaslav, well, not David Zaslav, spends his time alone at the bar at the Allen Conference up at the ski resort saying that the industry needs more consolidation. Translation, will somebody please buy CNN from me with this pack of channels? And he's not able to do it. So he, Ellison absolutely is the influential John Malone of his time on this and he's leading the steps on the industry consolidation. But you'll read the industries had so much debt when it was trying to assimilate that the question is like, what we just saw here is no word on what happens to the $35.6 billion credit card the cute young girl had when he married her. Who pays for that?
- [80:03]
A
You know what I think is one of the parts of the story that people are completely ignoring. You said earlier that number one, what do you need to be number one, you need capital, but you need ambition. This dude's hungry. You're telling me that the guy who's 42 years old, whose dad is the richest man in the world, he don't want to make a name for himself. He don't want to go and say.
- [80:24]
C
You know what I like about him?
- [80:24]
A
This is What I built.
- [80:25]
C
You know what I like about him? No. By the way, you should never, like, your kid's going to have a dad that has money. Right. That money's going to go to them. You should never fall for the trap of, well, you know, your daddy's money and all this other stuff. Yeah. The other day, one of my kids, one of my kids, he's in school, he's being. Trying to be punked by another guy. It was the one guy comes up to him and he says, first of all, you're just a rich guy's kid. That's what you are. You know, your dad's got money. And that's where he says, he says, wait a minute, who has a cell phone? You have an iPhone. My dad even hasn't bought me a cell phone. So maybe your dad is richer than my dad. And he says, no, everybody knows your dad is rich. And then he turns around and he says this, he says, look, it's not my fault. My dad works harder than your dad and the guy loses it. Right. But you know what? It is even I'm not saying, you know, I'm just the only person that works hard. That part of what David wants to do, I think. I love that those genes are being passed down to 100%. Good for you. Leverage the assets, leverage your dad's money, leverage the relationship. But then you're going to add your own little, you know, spice to it. You know, when Elon is having a hard time with certain relationship with X, when he's buying into it and he's going through all these issues and he's calling out Tim Cook every single day, and he goes to Larry Ellison's island to be with him for a couple days. And Larry says, hey, pump the brakes with going after Tim Cook. He's on your side. You want X to be on Apple, you know, on the platform. Don't go too hard with Apple. Look at them as a partner. Then he comes down, lowers the temperature. This is a very, very low key, powerful player. Don't get me wrong. He's got some stuff that he's doing is also, you know, wanting to make sure, watching every move and security. There's some things that freaks a lot of people out. But I think what I like about this, it happened quietly. Suddenly, boom, Paramount. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Number one, control with one of the social media companies, TikTok, which is the youth Paramount. Now, if they get Time Warner, Skydance at that age, I mean, think about it this way. Alex Soros, which a Lot of people talk about what does Alex control?
- [82:38]
D
Well, the Soros phone.
- [82:39]
C
So what does Soros control? What companies do they own? Actually think about it. They bought 400 radio stations. Right. Can you pull up Open Society is a charity. $7 billion he's given $32 billion suit. But what is. What is. What does. What media companies does the Soro family own? Not Murdoch Sorrow family own. So it's a very interesting game that we're playing right now. Audassi. Yeah. Which is a odyssey is there was second largest radio company this. The 400 radio stations. 230 radio stations go a little bit lower. 2005 Crooked Media. Okay, so that's a different one. Pot save America. Great respect that those guys are pretty big philanthropic funding. Yeah. I mean if you think about it though, Ellison's are like, you want to play that game? Let's play that game.
- [83:30]
D
Good.
- [83:31]
C
Let's go buy up all these other media companies. Which is a beautiful, beautiful thing to see. Competition is getting real here.
- [83:40]
D
What did you call them? You said that they're the new leader in media. They're the biggest.
- [83:44]
C
I mean, every year in December, we put our top 50 biggest power players in media. Every year we do this. If you go to last year's list, we're getting close to putting that list together this year in December. Every year we put this list together and this was 2024, 2025. Yeah. I don't know where the list is, but you can find it somewhere there, Rob, if you want to send that to Paul Williams as well. But every year we come up with a list. This year's list is going to be different and. And the way and we score it based on multiple different categories. One of the reasons Ellison ranks higher is because he's got a son to pass it to that won't be going away. So there is a generational duplication that is taking place there.
- [84:23]
D
Do you remember who was number one last year?
- [84:25]
C
I put Musk ahead of Trump last year.
- [84:27]
D
Okay. So you're like individuals is what this was.
- [84:29]
C
It's individuals. We do families and we do individuals. Families was different. Individuals is different. This becomes a power player. But anyways, we'll be looking at. Let's get to the next one here. So Spotify partners with Netflix for video podcast distribution deal. This is a TechCrunch story. Spotify, Netflix.
- [84:48]
A
Yes.
- [84:49]
C
Spotify is bringing its video podcast to Netflix starting next year, the company announced on Tuesday. Amid the company's push to further expand its video content selection and boost its ad business, Spotify has announced a partnership with Netflix that will showcase select video podcasts on popular streaming service. At launch, the Netflix Spotify partnership will bring a curated selection of sports, culture, lifestyle and true crime podcasts from Spotify Studios and a ringer to Netflix. Over time, the deal will see Spotify adding even more podcasts from other studios and genres. Spotify say the move Follow Spotify's increased focus on video podcasts, beginning with the launch of tools that made it possible for anyone to publish it their shows as videos. Over the last year, the company has added incentives that pay podcaster host for the popular videos and launched a partner program so hosts could monetize their video content in a challenge to YouTube. Spotify's interest in streaming video comes after a major shift in its podcast Strategy back in 2023, which included layoffs, including the chief of content Business officer Don Ostroff, who had led its podcast initiatives. And that's when they signed people like Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper and others, which some of them have expired, by the way. Tom, your thoughts on the story?
- [86:01]
B
Well, I was trying to figure out is this Spotify trying to monetize content that it has some control over, in some cases indirect ownership or direct ownership, and they're just trying to monetize their content. And hey, we've been really big, just as YouTube is big in the video podcast Netflix, you could help us monetize this or is this Netflix buying library and it has to be in the podcast lane to create, you know, because there's no difference between a series created by Netflix, you know, you know, season one, episode one, two, three, four, and a podcast. It's the same. So is it Netflix buying library or is it Spotify monetizing content? I think it's both. I think it's both. And I think it's a very convenient partnership. And I can see how it works for both because Spotify also, I think, realized that big money content creation was best left for people like Netflix. And Spotify is trying to enable rather than, you know, buy out the room. I mean, they tried to buy out the room during Ostrov's time and they came back and said it's kind of like Sirius satellite radio when they, you know, they bought NFL Sunday ticket and it kind of ran its course and things happened and it got split up. But I think it's both. And I think it's good. It's going to be good for the content creators who have big content because they'll be able to monetize on Netflix and with Spotify wanting to help them with that.
- [87:33]
C
Anthony, what are you thinking?
- [87:34]
A
Well, one of the things that we see in a lot of the data, I'm assuming you guys do as well, is on YouTube, the consumption is like 60% on mobile. Pretty high number, right? Like, I don't watch that, but it must be. Other people are watching on their phone. Second highest is on television.
- [87:51]
C
That's right.
- [87:52]
A
It's not on their laptop. And so I think that there's a kind of the millennial generation.
- [87:55]
C
Weird, though. I never thought that would be the case in business.
- [87:58]
A
I think we sit at our computers a lot, right? So we're used to doing things on our. On our computer. Most people, they got to watch on their phone or they get home, they're not watching tv. They're watching, you know, like, regular cable, new stuff. They're turning on the YouTube app or the Netflix app, right? So now what I think is basically that podcast is the perfect viewing experience sitting on your television, right? So I think that there's like a. A consumer trend or a consumer behavior that has changed here. And Netflix is realizing if we have somebody's attention, some people want to watch movies, some people want to watch sports, some people want to watch podcasts. Like, it's all the same thing. It's all entertainment to them. There's this guy, rich, over at LightShed. They're like a TMT or like a media analyst firm, and they do a lot of research for, you know, hedge funds and stuff like that. He told me years ago, he said, you got a podcast, you compete with Netflix, you compete with Spotify, you compete with Facebook. And that's. What do you mean? He goes, it's an attention economy because they're all actually competing with each other. So he says, so you're putting up content, but you're competing with the television stations, you're competing with the programming of a Netflix or an Amazon, or it's just all an attention economy. When somebody pulls up their phone or they turn on their television, are they going to watch you or they're going to watch somebody else? And that's just stuck with me because I think that that was very prescient and kind of how this has played out.
- [89:11]
C
See this. This goes back to when you're talking about Autopilot or when you're talking about some of these other companies that are creating disruptions. These podcasts are now. But. But the difference with Spotify and Netflix is they're saying, you know what? Instead of competing with you, come on down, bring your talents To Netflix. Bring your talents over here. Bring your talents to this. The other day, Tom and I were talking. I'm like, what if we go acquire iheartmedia and then we look up the numbers? Iheart used to be massive. 12 years ago, 10 years. I don't know what the time I would be with. 10, 12 years ago, iheart was a.
- [89:45]
B
Place to be the radio player.
- [89:47]
C
Do you know what iHeart's market cap right now is?
- [89:51]
B
Not a lot.
- [89:51]
C
I want to talk about $400 million. Do you know why?
- [89:56]
A
What's the financials?
- [89:57]
C
Do you know how much debt they have? Rob, can you pull up how much debt iheartmedia has?
- [90:01]
B
This pretty girl's got a credit card.
- [90:04]
C
Not just a small one. We're not talking about a million dollar credit card. They're in debt $5.14 billion.
- [90:13]
A
Levered up more than 10 times.
- [90:14]
C
Yeah, $5.14 billion. As of a few months ago. As of a few months ago. So if you buy iHeartrading, you're getting that debt and that's a massive, massive credit card debt.
- [90:27]
A
What's the, what's the revenue? They've got to be able to service the debt.
- [90:33]
B
Right.
- [90:34]
C
How long is that sustainable, though?
- [90:36]
A
Well, that, that's the question.
- [90:37]
C
How long is that sustainable? Few.
- [90:40]
A
Still doing 3.8 billion.
- [90:43]
C
Yeah. So Q1, 807, Q2, 934. It's still a player. But for iHeart to be only worth $300 million due to the debt, that's crazy.
- [90:55]
B
CFOs on Kelshi betting that rates go.
- [90:57]
C
Down.
- [90:59]
B
Because you want them to. I need them to.
- [91:01]
C
Adam, what do you think?
- [91:02]
D
So the revenue for iHeart in this instance is almost $4 billion annual, and the total debt owed is close to 5 billion. Is this not sort of similar to the US economy, where some could say. You looked at me like I'm either smart or crazy. Which one was it?
- [91:24]
A
No, I, I agree. I think the big thing with all these companies is if you're doing 3.8 billion. What I think we have seen now example after example, is it's probably a bloated company in terms of the number of employees. So already you got expenses that are kind of off the charts.
- [91:38]
D
Cut the.
- [91:39]
A
You know, I always used to hear a stick. If Elon Musk went to iHeartRadio, you think he could make it more profitable?
- [91:43]
D
Of course.
- [91:44]
A
Probably.
- [91:44]
B
Right.
- [91:45]
A
Okay, so you got some bloat in there. Second thing is, then you've got whatever that profit, I don't know. Look, real quick, what the profit of Iheart is you got to be able to service that debt. Y and so depending on what type of debt they have, the cost is going to range pretty. Yeah. Operating a net loss, right.
- [92:06]
B
Operating income of $35 million.
- [92:10]
A
So I mean you start to look at it, right? And you're like, okay, well now I understand why it's trading at, you know, three, $400 million. So like the market is usually pretty smart. And if the market is punishing a company like Iheart like this, there's a reason. Now if you look forward, like forget where they got themselves into. If you were to go in today and try to fix this business, you got a lot of work ahead, you gotta cut a lot of costs, you gotta get rid of the debt somehow or at least refinance it so it's more attractive. You gotta grow top line revenue. You and you probably got to worry about the existential threat like what happens when these guys get smacked with all this AI content that's coming.
- [92:41]
D
Right, right.
- [92:42]
C
It's another, it's another zombie company. It's just, it's a, it's another zombie company. Who's the CEO of iHeart? Can you pull up who the CEO of iHeart is? This is your iHeartMedia.
- [92:52]
B
Yeah, Robert Pittman. He has been there for 15 years.
- [92:56]
C
That smile is a little concerned. That's an old smile.
- [92:58]
D
Old world, right?
- [92:59]
C
Not a new smile.
- [93:00]
D
So it's a zombie company. So what's the difference in someone like this in the WNBA.
- [93:06]
B
Has somebody to pay the credit card.
- [93:08]
D
The NBA.
- [93:09]
C
Yeah, of course.
- [93:09]
B
This is, this is a good example of, you know, you almost say, are they, how close are they to throw in the towel time. And the reason I say that is because they aggregated where the debt come from, aggregating all these radio stations. And then radio stations died because remember what they thought, oh, it'll be a stack of streaming and you can go get any radio station station you want. Remember that? That was, it was happening on Bear Share, it was happening on Napster going back, back, back, back 20 years. And then everybody thought, well we'll just, you'll just be able to go get your favorite radio station from college or whatever and listen to it. And they aggregated it with a bunch of debt. And then guess what, that didn't happen because the radio stations are built for your taste on Pandora and Spotify. So suddenly another way they went out and well also I heart will hear will will be the largest producer of podcast. They've got I think the largest number of titles produced, but they still have this. And it's like, are you going to be able to turn the Titanic before the debt servicing? And you're never going to get to it. And so someone's going to buy this. They're going to have to restructure at some point. That'll knock down the debts 20%, and then somebody's going to go buy it for basically the podcast infrastructure, because the radio stations in there are not worth zero, but worth a lot less. So it's like. You see what I mean, Pat? It's like, what do you do with it? At some point in time you have to go through this painful. This is what the. This is what the. The bankruptcy in the chapter.
- [94:36]
C
I think the right. I think the right flywheel that buys it could do something to it, but.
- [94:42]
B
Not, not for 5 billion.
- [94:44]
C
No way. I'm just saying, the right buy for 300. Yeah, the right. You, you wouldn't. You would probably have to pay 600 billion. You'd probably have to pay maybe shy of a billion dollars because have them.
- [94:54]
B
File first and get all the debt knocked down.
- [94:55]
C
Yeah, but.
- [94:56]
A
So I don't think you have to file, though. That's the thing is these guys have distribution. Everyone looks at it as, what's the revenue of the current monetization. If you guys all took over this, I think what you immediately would do is you would start to expand. Think about your business, right, that you've built. You're going to start to do events, you're going to start to put products through the distribution. Like you're going to open up all these other revenue channels. And really what they have is they have a monopoly on distribution in a certain way. The problem is that they're pretty unilateral in their pursuit of. They're just trying to do advertising revenue. They think of it as a pure media business versus thinking as a distribution business. I think.
- [95:26]
C
I think the right strategic parts, the right strategic partner can really drive these guys. I think they're number three, number two. I don't know what number there are, but they're. But they're up there.
- [95:37]
D
Pat, let me ask you a question. You know, this makes me think of. They used to see when you started making content, there was an old phrase that says, you know, content is. Is king, but distribution is queen. But when I'm looking at these numbers, it means that profitability is like, God, because if you're, if you're just doing all this distribution and making all this great content. Yeah, but you're losing money what's the purpose of it?
- [95:56]
C
Many, many years ago, a. A big insurance company from, from a Dutch Netherlands insurance company bought a distribution company and a life insurance company at the same time. They use one to lose, but to drive massive valuation to this one because the EBITDA on this, the multiples were higher. So it worked. It worked in a. In a beautiful way. It worked massively. It worked. So I don't know. There needs to be the right flywheel that is sitting there saying, I'll take the laws to feed this. I'm all in. But there needs to be the right flywheel. Who that flywheel is, I don't know. I don't know who that flywheel is. You know, and a part of it. Sometimes when you're there for too long, like let's just say Robert Pittman said been there for 2011 and let's just say they were crushing it. What is the peak of iHeartMedia? Like, can you type in when was iHeartMedia number one? What year was iHeartMedia number one? What year was iHeartMedia number one, if you pull them up, was it 2019 was number one? Let me see. Mid to late 90s? No, I, I'm talking about like the last 15 years.
- [97:05]
A
So you mean look at stock price.
- [97:07]
C
Yeah. The reason why I'm asking this. Or maybe even if you ask what was iHeartMedia's highest valuation?
- [97:13]
A
Just do Max.
- [97:13]
C
Go Max. Max, right there. You were Rob. Go Max. So what year is that? 2021. It doesn't go past that. Okay, so they went public in what? 2020. Go to the max. Wrap to the, to the peak. Right there. Whatever. The top. No, right there. Yeah, right. To go a little bit higher there. Okay. 27, 36. And now it's what? Damn.
- [97:30]
A
Down 90.
- [97:31]
C
Down 90%. Right. Okay.
- [97:34]
A
I wonder if the debt is recent.
- [97:36]
C
I mean if you look at the sudden what happened in 2020? Juneish. What happened there? Right. But no, no, 2022. 2022. Right, right there. Like what is that drop off? Right. Because covet probably helped them out. Look at how covet they went up during COVID 12, April 14th.
- [97:53]
B
Go to the trough.
- [97:56]
C
Yeah. 689. So. So the reason why I asked this, sometime when he got a guy that's been there, the CEO, and maybe at the bottom of it, 22, 23, you give him a little bit of a chance. But since mid of 2023, it's been around the same man. Just bring somebody else in, but give somebody else a shot and see what they Do. What do you have to do?
- [98:14]
D
Is this even a CEO problem or is just. Just. This is a problem in the market. Because I heart used to be Clear Channel is actually my first job out of college. This is the radio industry in a nutshell. So how we. The radio industry is dead. I mean, what we're doing is essentially what radio.
- [98:30]
B
You know what's interesting with AV Free.
- [98:34]
A
Press just got bought for 150 million bucks.
- [98:37]
D
Very wise.
- [98:37]
B
Yeah.
- [98:38]
A
These guys are worth 400. Just think about this. That has been around. He's been the CEO for five times longer than the free presses existed. And so it's just a. It's a different business model. It's a different distribution point. Right. But it's also growth. So you don't have a business like this that's valued that way. If you're not. If. If you're growing fast.
- [98:58]
C
I would change. I would. I'm telling you, I would mix up the leader. Bring the new guy in, find the Brian Nickel type who took Chipotle from 7 billion to 71 billion, who was now with Starbucks. Bring a guy like that, who was in his mid-30s, early-40s, bring that person in, put him in there, give him a massive upside. Massive, massive upside. If HE10X is the company's valuation, allow him to be a billionaire. Whatever he does, allow him to be worth a half a billion, quarter billion dollars. You put something like that in place, new guy's going to come in, mix things up. And who knows? But I think the way they're going right now, keeping the same guy, and maybe he's watching this right now. I'm a big PBD podcast. Why would you say such a thing? I just think sometimes I remember once, Tom, you remember this one time, it's 2015, I didn't know if I was a good CEO. I had a meeting with Tom. I'm like, listen, man, maybe we need to hire a new CEO. Maybe we need to mix it up. Maybe I'm just a driver. I don't know. Do you remember that meeting, Tom?
- [99:46]
B
Yeah.
- [99:47]
C
I came to you. I'm like, look, I'm okay being chairman of the board, and let's bring somebody else in to run the entire company. And then I went to a Harvard OPM program, sat next to a guy that ran the Victoria's Secret of New Zealand and Australia. I said, I'm. We're going to kill it. I came back and I took it personal to work on being a driver and a CEO, to drive valuation, technology, all this stuff. And Things changed. It was a very different strategy and maybe he needs to go to a place to have a resurrection of himself and be. Because I still think there's something there. I don't want to spend a lot of time on iHeartMedia. We can move on. I just, you know, keep seeing something here. The right flywheel, the right seal. Something can happen there. Let's go to the next story. Let's go to Walmart. Walmart Stock pops on OpenAI partnership to create a chat GPT shopping experience Anthony, I'm going to come to you first, so let me read this to you guys. And Rob, is this a clip you got?
- [100:38]
A
Yes, sir.
- [100:38]
C
Go for it if you can.
- [100:39]
A
Play this clip announcing a partnership with Open Air to allow customers to buy goods directly within chat interest shoppers will get video and images along with purchase links inside their conversations. And this begs the question, will chat be incented to direct shoppers to Wal Mart over some alternatives? For more, let's bring in CNBC's MacKenzie Segalis.
- [100:59]
C
Mac.
- [101:00]
A
Hey, Mel. So to your question, no, this doesn't mean that Wall Walmart gets priority placement inside of ChatGPT. OpenAI told me that product results remain organic and unsponsored, ranked purely by what's most relevant to the user. Walmart simply building its own shopping experience into chat CBT through a new tool called instant checkout that makes it possible to complete a purchase, not to game the results. I also asked about how much of a cut OpenAI gets. They say that those merchant fees are bespoke, spoke, negotiated case by case. And it's not disclosing Wal Mart's cut that is important because this is one of the first ways that OpenAI is monetizing chat CBT beyond subscriptions with a fee structure that could ultimately resemble Apple's App Store. Investors are clearly rewarding the move. Wal Mart's market value climbed about $41 billion today, its second strongest session of the year, trailing only April 9 when Trump rolled back his tariff plan. Now, Walmart doesn't usually move this much and that underscores just how powerful AI driven commerce could become. Big picture everything OpenAI is doing in shopping and search chips away at Google's dominance positioning chatbots, the new starting point for discovery online.
- [102:09]
C
There you go, pop your thoughts on this.
- [102:12]
A
Well, I think first is obviously this is going to happen. Like Open Air has traffic. I think open AI was already 15% of the referral traffic to Walmart, so they're already sending traffic there. Amazon pioneered one click checkout in terms of they already have all my information. I just click at one time. Bam, I'm done. Right. So bringing that elsewhere on the Internet makes a ton of sense. I do think that there's been compression over time in terms of I have intent to buy, I have completed the purchase you've just seen on the Internet that continues to get compressed in terms of how long does it take, how many clicks do I have to take? Right, you just, just keep going down. That one click is a great example inside the feed. I think that there's. We're probably six to 12 months away from this. People are going to start getting really upset because Google's been getting attacked for this for 20 years. Are you putting your finger on the scale of what you're showing and are you getting paid for it? How are you disclosing it? Are you showing me one product versus another? Is it actually the best one? Walmart product versus an Amazon product versus that all is coming. Frankly, I think it's probably a lot of noise and it'll get figured out. But I think that that debate's coming. But more importantly is ChatGPT is doing this like a genic checkout? You're going to trust ChatGPT more than you trust people. You're going to trust the software. And so it comes back to this idea of, I do think that OpenAI and perplexity or any of these model companies, they are going to try to go get personal data because it makes their models more effective. And so it's not very helpful if you come in and you're searching for something and OpenAI doesn't know anything about you, but they save the history of your chats now so they can actually see all the things you're talking about. That makes it smarter about the recommendation, right? Google's the same way. They got a bunch of, you know, a data profile on you. They start to make recommendations like the more people use these products, the better they're going to get. And if all of a sudden you can one click checkout, Walmart is going to have actually a challenge is like if you put all of your business on ChatGPT, right? If it really does become, you know, billions of people around the world are using this thing now you're at the whim of those people. Ask the media industry about Facebook. Facebook gave them tons of traffic. They started to create tons of content for Facebook. Then Facebook took it away. That platform risk becomes real. And so I think like, those are the things that are coming here. But it makes sense that the stock goes up because people are realizing, hey, this is going to drive sales to Walmart.
- [104:31]
C
Tom?
- [104:32]
B
Yeah, I think there's another. I agree with that. And there's another angle here too. Walmart has been chasing Amazon being able to deliver as quick and sometimes quicker. Jennifer talked about some stuff, Pat. Remember Jennifer said to us, I actually ordered some stuff on Walmart that got.
- [104:47]
C
To me quicker than Amazon.
- [104:49]
B
It was like batteries or something. And it got to me quicker than the Amazon guy did. That's very, very interesting. So they were getting speed. The other thing is that overall E commerce is a category. Walmart turned a profit in Q1 and it was not a fluke. It wasn't just big holiday spending that waterfall into Q1 because in Q2 that profitability went up and the metrics that were underneath it went up. So Walmart has turned the corner. And the E Commerce division of Walmart's delivery system is because the stores are number one, right? Brick and mortar is now profitable and they're just adding things to it because they have to keep up with Amazon and they've caught them on speed. They're now profitable on E Commerce delivery. And this is another element. And who is more than happy to work with anybody but Amazon, who has its own homegrown Alexa system and its own servers and everything else? Everybody else says, hey, ChatGPT, Walmart, I'll work with you. You need a dance partner.
- [105:53]
C
Is this a revolutionary thing or is it just you have to do this?
- [105:56]
B
I think it's, I think they need a dance partner. I mean, if you take a look, everyone has a dance partner, right?
- [106:02]
D
What do you mean by dance partner?
- [106:03]
B
Google has Gemini, you know, Perplexity cut a deal. Apple is seeking, seeking a deeper deal. Everybody needs to be aligned with one of the, one of the majors. And there's going to be three ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for the most part. And now I know everybody's going to say, well, what about Julius? What about things? Yeah, well, Julius will crank it out in Python if you really want to be a developer and you want to run that lab. But I think this is Walmart gets empowered by OpenAI's technology to keep driving its E commerce and its overall business success. And so this wasn't something that was going to grow on its own. And somebody who's a natural enemy of Amazon becomes a very natural partner for Walmart.
- [106:50]
D
Let me ask you guys, when's the last time any of you went into a Walmart?
- [106:56]
C
Last month. I go to Walmart or Target. Yeah, it's trust me, like where Legos are. We go.
- [107:04]
D
You're getting the Lego stuff.
- [107:05]
A
I was gonna say Target.
- [107:06]
B
Yeah, yeah, we bought a whole bunch of stuff.
- [107:08]
D
Is there a Walmart here in South Florida? There's not one in Miami that I'm familiar with.
- [107:12]
C
Listen, if I can go to Target every day, my kids would make me go to Target every day. And there's.
- [107:17]
D
So you mean you like Target better than Walmart?
- [107:18]
C
It's just because they're here. If a Walmart was here, I'd go to Walmart. So it's not like I have a. I discriminate against either one of them. I'm not like that black pastor who won't go to Target. I am brown. I'm not black. I'll still go to Target. I'm not offended.
- [107:30]
D
Yeah, so I just feel like Walmart is a very, like, I could be wrong. A sort of like an outdated, antiquated Amazon underestimate. Just saying.
- [107:39]
C
I'm just tell you d, there's no.
- [107:41]
D
Walmart even in Miami.
- [107:42]
B
There are more newspapers on the Amazon Leisure section of the New York Times.
- [107:47]
C
By the way, living in big cities.
- [107:49]
D
Walmart exist in big cities.
- [107:51]
C
Let me tell. But here's what you got to realize. Rob, can you pull up how many stores Walmart has in America alone? How many total stores Walmart has?
- [108:00]
B
Be sure they add up. Sam's Club.
- [108:02]
C
Okay. In us. Look at the number. Oh, okay, just, just, just watch this. Now can you do me a favor? Can you type in how many. What do you want to call it? Amazon?
- [108:11]
A
90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of Walmart.
- [108:15]
C
But this is the part though. This right there, including Alaska, this is the part. Can you now ask, when it comes down to Amazon, what do you want to call it? Where Amazon stores the items that they sell to you? What do you want to call that? A warehouse. Warehouse. How many Amazon warehouses are there in America? Okay, this is the strategy that. Believe it or look at that.
- [108:37]
D
1300 versus what was the other one?
- [108:39]
C
So they have 4600. They have almost three times. Four times, three and a half times more than that. So what they're doing now, their storefronts are becoming fulfillment centers. Fulfillment centers.
- [108:50]
D
Kind of like the government.
- [108:51]
C
And that's why when Jennifer told me this about a month, two months ago, she's like, babe, let's order Walmart. Walmart delivers faster than Amazon. I'm like, there's no way in the world. Okay, watch this.
- [108:59]
D
So you just taught me something. I, I live my life on Amazon, everything I just order, it's there the next day.
- [109:03]
C
Test it for.
- [109:04]
D
You're saying you can do that on Walmart?
- [109:06]
C
In Walmart comes. Because they are three.
- [109:09]
D
Physical enough to go to the store.
- [109:10]
B
Yes.
- [109:13]
C
I didn't even think of that.
- [109:14]
A
Yeah.
- [109:15]
B
Test home goods, laundry detergent.
- [109:17]
C
There's.
- [109:18]
D
Sorry, just.
- [109:19]
C
By the way, there's a reason. There's a reason why Amazon bought. Is it Whole Foods that Amazon bought? Yeah, yeah, Amazon bought Whole Foods.
- [109:26]
D
Yeah, Whole Foods, exactly.
- [109:26]
C
There's a reason for that. Because it's like, you know, we have. We have certain other, you know, businesses that we can add to the flywheel. So Walmart, you know how much Walmart's doubled their market cap in the last couple years? They went from 300. The can you go to Walmart stock And let's just look at their market cap. What it looks like the last. Go to. Go to Max. Go back and just go to Max.
- [109:48]
D
Rob's getting.
- [109:49]
B
Look at that.
- [109:50]
C
Look at that. By the way, can you do me a favor? Go to. Go.
- [109:53]
B
Just do five years.
- [109:55]
C
Just do this, Rob. Go to 2015. Right there at the dip. You see right at the bottom of the dip right there. What's the stock?
- [110:02]
A
20 bucks.
- [110:02]
C
20 bucks. Where's it now? 109.
- [110:04]
D
Wow.
- [110:05]
C
That's a.
- [110:05]
D
That's a.
- [110:06]
C
That's, That's a. That's a real 870.
- [110:10]
A
Private company is what?
- [110:12]
C
No, it's a publicly traded.
- [110:14]
D
Publicly traded.
- [110:14]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [110:15]
A
Well, the other thing about if the narrative becomes if you order from Walmart, it gets here faster. If they start running commercials, say we're fast.
- [110:24]
C
They should. Have they or have they not? I don't know why they're not.
- [110:29]
A
But if that, if that's true, let.
- [110:30]
C
Me tell you, the point is, you.
- [110:31]
D
Don'T even think of.
- [110:34]
A
Every mom in America beyond Walmart.com tomorrow.
- [110:37]
C
This is not brought to you by Walmart. You're not a sponsor. Can you do me a favor? Order something small off of Walmart. Go ahead and do it and comment on it. The next podcast that we're doing or send them an act or tweet us, just order something off of Walmart right.
- [110:51]
B
Now, whatever it is, and check to.
- [110:53]
C
See how fast it comes to you. Okay. By the way, Walmart, I swear to God, if you get this idea from us, we're expecting. We're expecting that phone call. Mr. Walton, one of you guys, all the kids that award 60. We ain't taking that. That. Let's go to the next story. Let's talk about Alex Jones Supreme Court rejects Alex Jones's appeal of 1.4 billion auto defamation judgment on Sandy Hook's Case Rob, if you want to play this clip by CBS 1.4 billion, here's Alex, go forward.
- [111:21]
A
The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, leaving in place the 1.4 billion dollar judgment against him over his comments regarding the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting. Jones had claimed it was a hoax station by crisis actors. Twenty first graders and six educators were killed in the Newtown, Connecticut massacre. The InfoWars host had argued that a judge was wrong to find him liable.
- [111:44]
C
For defamation and infliction of emotional distress.
- [111:46]
A
Without holding a trial. The justices issued their order Tuesday without even asking the victims families to respond to Jones's appeal. Jones has faced mounting legal pressure after juries in Connecticut and Texas found him liable in 2022. He's repeated repeatedly tried to head off the sale of his far right platform infowars to pay for those damages. Jones filed for bankruptcy in late 2022 and his lawyers told the justices that the plaintiffs have no possible hope of collecting the entire judgment.
- [112:13]
C
He is separately appealing a 49 million.
- [112:15]
A
Dollar judgment in a similar defamation lawsuit in Texas after he failed to turn over documents sought by the parents of.
- [112:21]
C
Another Sandy Hook victim. Okay, Tom, what's going to happen here?
- [112:25]
B
Well, basically the headline should be this Supreme Court confirms man that unable to pay 1.4 billion remains unable to pay 1.4 billion. Right. It's kind of silly. So it became a headline because the media, apparently cbs, last place in media, didn't know that a war was ending in Gaza and a bunch of other things were happening on tariffs. So CBS News decides to cover this.
- [112:49]
C
You think so?
- [112:49]
B
Yeah, it's rather dull because this is a natural part of the appellate process. He's been to the circuit court for Circuit Court of appeals and now he's going to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says, you know what, this is so clear, we're not going to hear your appeal. And by the way, that happens hundreds of times a year as our solicitor general and the Supreme Court say, hey, we're not going to hear these cases, so never mind. So that's point one, that it was a natural thing. Supreme Court's not going to hear it. But point two is it means that he still probably is what he is, is impinged in his ability to make a living. But people forget that he could basically work on InfoWars 2.0 for a dollar and his wife owns the company and makes money on It. Because there's ways so a person can get around this. It just kind of reminds me of something my dad told me about money. Long, long, long, long time.
- [113:47]
C
Here we go, folks.
- [113:48]
B
And he said this. Go ahead, Tom. If you owe somebody a million dollars, you're in trouble. If you owe somebody a billion dollars, they're in trouble. Yeah.
- [113:58]
C
And your dad took that from Donald Trump. Just so you know that your dad took it from somebody else.
- [114:03]
B
I'm sure he did.
- [114:05]
C
He was probably watching Trump's tweet back in the 80s when Trump was tweeting back in the days, and he picked it up from him. So to you, I don't say so, Tom. To you, this is a nothing burger, is what you're saying.
- [114:15]
B
No, it's nothing. It's a nothing burger. It's. It just points out that can they.
- [114:19]
C
Stop him from making money? Can they stop him from paying his bills? Can they stop him from still growing his business and finding ways to make.
- [114:25]
B
I was on growing a business that has value. They can come in there and now try to.
- [114:30]
C
I was on the show the other day and one of the ads I heard. I don't know if anybody sells ads the way Alex does. One of his ads said this Omega 3, if you take. Has the possibility a lot of people who took it, they've had better dreams at night by. Did you take it? Did you take it? I have good dreams, but when I hear it, I'm like, but by the way, listen, it could. I'm not telling you it's a lie. I'm just saying that the way he's been. If. Can he continue to sell to make money to pay his bills, can he continue to do what he's doing?
- [115:06]
B
Yes, he can.
- [115:06]
C
I think he's a necessary voice form of entertainment and form of giving different angles. No one's thinking about.
- [115:11]
B
If he builds a company that's worth $100 million, then they're going to come down on him and ask him to monetize the value and make partial payments to the victims. But if he makes 100 grand a year, 150 grand a year, even 250 grand a year, you can't squeeze blood out of a rock. There's nothing here. And so the Supreme Court said, your case is so clear that there's no reason to hear it. You still owe them 1.4 billion. And hey, folks, over here on the left, there's no way he's going to.
- [115:38]
C
He's so entertaining, though. Let me tell you. He's entertaining and you Know, he. He has a. He always has a unique angle where he sees things that somebody else doesn't. And guess what? Whether he's right 10% of the time, 20% time, 30% of the time, he's been right on some very massive things.
- [115:55]
D
Right?
- [115:55]
C
9, 11. Like, some of the stuff that he, you know, went through. And what was that one community he went to? Bohemian Grove. Is that where he went to?
- [116:03]
D
That's where he made his name.
- [116:04]
C
This is a. So what do you think about all this stuff? I mean, by the way, Palm, you were one of the first that interviewed Tate, if I'm not mistaken, right? You were one of the big Tate interviews at the beginning.
- [116:15]
A
YouTube took it down. Oh, yeah, I didn't know that.
- [116:19]
C
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [116:20]
A
They took it. They left it for a month. Very, very popular because I was the first person to interview with them. So Tate, I can't remember if I DM'd him or he DM'd me first. But this is way before anyone knew who he was. He was a world champion kickboxer.
- [116:35]
D
This is in one year. 2020, 2021.
- [116:38]
A
I can look and see.
- [116:39]
C
But it was a very good interview.
- [116:41]
A
We started talking about. About bitcoin, like it had nothing to do with what he was posting. And again, no one really knew who he was. And I just thought, look, this is a guy who is trying to figure out investing and all that stuff.
- [116:56]
B
This was during your warm, collaborative, loving relationship with YouTube.
- [117:02]
C
No, he's still out. It's not. He doesn't have a channel. His YouTube is not a. The fact that they took his interview down was kind of weird.
- [117:08]
A
Well, here's.
- [117:08]
B
Here's a Crazy other things down on Pomp.
- [117:11]
A
Yeah, they deleted our channel at one point. So I got two great YouTube stories. One is the Tate interview. We do it now. I didn't. He wasn't really talking about all the things that he ended up talking about at the time. He was starting to post a little bit more. But he came in to do the interview, and I gotta say, you see the little clip there? He was in full Andrew Tate mode. I mean, he had the glasses on, the whole thing. Right, Whatever. But what I was interested in is his life story, how he made money, his family, all that kind of stuff. You know, Chess. All that kind of stuff. So post the interview comes very popular, you know, million or more views after 30 days, then they take it down. I say, that's kind of weird, but clips are still up, huh? Right? So, okay, fine, whatever. But after this, maybe six Months, nine months. We used to do a live stream show similar to this. And one day we. We end it. Five minutes later, the whole channel is deleted. Not like a video taken down deleted. And, you know, I got a big platform on other platforms. I get on Twitter, I say, you know, at the time, Susan WoodJackie was the CEO. I say, hey, what the hell's going on over there? Right? And I start tweeting, tweeting, tweeting. And long story short is we get the channel back. And it turns out that the way it was described to me is that there was an employee internally at YouTube who just hit the delete button. Oh, there's one person, again, I don't know if they somehow went around some sort of control or whatever, but again, it wasn't a video got taken down, it wasn't a suspension. It was the entire channel deleted. So my take on a lot of this stuff is I'm actually surprised it doesn't happen more. Right. Like, that was the first time I'd ever heard about that. First time I had experienced it.
- [118:43]
C
Alex Jones. You talking about Alex Jones?
- [118:45]
A
I'm just talking about in general on the Internet, the fact that there's not some robots, employee internally that does something.
- [118:50]
C
Oh, yeah, I see what you're saying.
- [118:51]
A
All that kind of stuff.
- [118:52]
C
Yes.
- [118:52]
A
So if you go back to Alex Jones, I think that there is a very unique balance in America, which is the test of free speech, is are you willing to protect the speech of the people you disagree with. Now what has become popular is this whole, like, hate speech stuff and all this kind of. What is free speech? What is not free speech? But what I do think is going to be more and more important over time is people like an Alex Jones who are talking about some of this stuff. What, what do you do with them is forget the money stuff. The money stuff is like the course will figure that out. Right. But in terms of allowing him to go on shows, allowing him to have a YouTube, allowing him to stream on a platform. Right?
- [119:39]
C
Yeah.
- [119:39]
A
You've got to start to figure out, how do you deal with this speech stuff? And so I think that $1.4 billion, a hell of a lot of money, I don't know if he's gonna pay it back.
- [119:47]
C
Here's how I process that. Okay. What did he say? He said, those are actors. Right. Okay. You're defaming the family. It's a very nasty claims to make. Right. And it's not allegedly. It's. This is what he thought was really happening. Okay. And of Course, the stories, family, heartbreaking, devastating, no question. We all remember the times where you're watching the videos and the families as they're going through that atrocity. But then you have somebody else that almost got another person to be the president of the free world, and they manipulated and edited a video to make the candidate look better. Cbs, what did CBS pay Trump? Rob, what is CBS patron? Was it 25 million? I don't know what the number was. I know STEPHANOPOULOS Was like 13 something million dollars. What was it, 16 million bucks? So you, you pay a 20 billion dollar company, pay 16 million dollars. But Alex Jones was worth what? What's Alex Jones worth? What's Alex Jones worth? Alex Jones net worth?
- [120:54]
A
Zero.
- [120:55]
C
I don't, I don't know what the net worth is. It's going to be neg. But I'm saying, like. Yeah, but what is this? What's, what's his, what was it before? Say 40 million, say 20 million, whatever. Let's just say 10 billion bucks. 1.4 billion. I mean, yes, sue him. Yes. Maybe get some money that you want to get. Fine, but what is your point of making a 1.4 billion? It's just very weird to me. It's all it is. Let's wrap up with this.
- [121:19]
D
Just say one thing about Alex Jones. For me, it's more about the lesson of Alex Jones than Alex Jones himself. For me, it's the. Comes down to reputation. It's the. So it's the whole story about the bridge builder who builds a thousand bridges. He does all these amazing things, a lifetime of good work, and he makes one stupid drunk mistake, has sex with a goat. He's no longer a bridge builder, he's a goat effort. And to me, I mean, even Rogan said it, he goes cold, like I did.
- [121:45]
A
I called I don't know what parable.
- [121:46]
C
That was great.
- [121:47]
A
That was a great one.
- [121:48]
C
Just so you know, he's not saying that's what Alex does. An analogy I don't want.
- [121:54]
B
I was sick.
- [121:54]
C
That same Supreme Court's gonna watch now. They're going to add this to the lawsuit about the goats.
- [121:59]
A
They're going to look for the bridges and the ghost.
- [122:01]
D
That's my friends in Hamas, they're doing the go ahead.
- [122:04]
C
Go ahead.
- [122:05]
D
To me, I mean, even Rogan said it. When we spoke to Rogan, he goes, you know, a lot of what he says is accurate, but he did mess up on that one thing. And it just goes to show you, you mess up so big one time, you know, the market could usually Be very forgiving. You talk about, you know, a comeback. And I mean, the. What Trump did is probably the most incredible thing. Most incredible comeback. What you said on Jesse Waters was immaculate. Of what Trump. The amazing comeback.
- [122:31]
C
It's crazy. When I said to Jesse Waters, who text me at 1:15 in the morning, who's that from? The Air Force One? The President, my man. I'm serious. At 115 is like, Hey, I just watch you on Jesse, you know. You know, me and Baron are big fans. Literally, at 115, I get. I'm like, this guy's on a flight back. Trump, he's on a flight back from the Middle east, from saving the Middle east, texting at 1:15 in the morning.
- [122:59]
D
You know what he texts me?
- [123:00]
A
What you.
- [123:01]
D
He goes, you're gay. I go, stop it, man.
- [123:03]
A
Why would you hear Kaitlan Collins. Oh, Trump's right again about Air Force One.
- [123:07]
C
No, What'd you say?
- [123:08]
A
She was doing an interview and a clip went viral. She said, yeah, it's really hard to be on Air Force One with Trump because as a journalist, he was covering what he's doing. He didn't sleep, so he wants to talk to someone. He'll tell staff, hey, go wake him up. I want to talk to him the whole flight. And he sleeps, like three hours, so he's just constantly waking people up. Incredible.
- [123:23]
C
I love it. I freaking love it. But you playing my rules. But let me tell you, though, that is why he is who he is. He goes at a pace, and everybody has to go match his pace. And it's not an easy job. If you remember the first term. A lot of people couldn't hang this time around. Rubio's hanging. Lutnicks hanging. Vance is trying to hang. Witkoff's hanging. Kushner came out of retirement and he's hanging. Right. You got a bunch of. Bunch of different people that are beast. Yeah. Do you have that clip? Do you have that clip, Rob, about ABC and what happened with the J.D. vance of Stephanopoulos and what Trump said to that. Yeah, maybe let's wrap up with that. Or you're looking wrap up with that.
- [124:04]
B
Why didn't the lawyers just help Alex?
- [124:06]
C
No, Rob, go. Go to the Vance interview first, if you could it. Yeah, so here's a good question. Here's. Here's Vance talking to Stephanopoulos. Okay. And Stephanopoulos is not letting them finish his points. Just watch it, folks. Go ahead, Rob, if this is the one, go ahead.
- [124:23]
A
I don't know what tape you're referring to, George.
- [124:26]
C
I saw media reports that Tom Homan accepted a bribe.
- [124:29]
A
There's no evidence of that. And here's George, why fewer and fewer people watch your program and why you're.
- [124:35]
C
Losing credibility because you're talking for now five minutes with the Vice President, United.
- [124:40]
A
States about this story regarding Tom Holman, a story that I've read about, but.
- [124:44]
C
I don't even know the video that you're talking about.
- [124:47]
A
Meanwhile, low income women can't get food.
- [124:50]
C
Because the Democrats and Chuck Schumer have.
- [124:52]
A
Shut down the government.
- [124:53]
C
Right now we're trying to figure out.
- [124:54]
A
How to pay our troops because Chuck Schumer has shut down the government.
- [124:57]
C
You are focused on a bogus story. You're insinuating criminal wrongdoing against a guy.
- [125:03]
A
Who has done nothing wrong.
- [125:04]
C
Instead of focusing on the fact that.
- [125:06]
A
Our country is struggling because our government's shut down, let's talk about the real issues.
- [125:11]
C
George, I think the American people would benefit much more from that than from you going down some weird left wing rabbit hole where the facts clearly show.
- [125:20]
A
That Tom Homan didn't engage in any criminal wrongdoing.
- [125:22]
C
It's not a weird left wing rabbit hole.
- [125:24]
B
I didn't insinuate anything.
- [125:25]
C
I had asked you whether Tom Holman.
- [125:27]
B
Accepted $50,000, as was heard on an.
- [125:29]
A
Audio tape recorded by the FBI in September 2024, and you did not answer the question.
- [125:34]
B
Thank you for your time this morning.
- [125:36]
C
No, I said that I don't. Up next. We'll be right back. Wow. Okay, so you cut off the Vice President and you don't let him come back. There is a guy who works at this thing called the White House off of Pennsylvania Avenue that saw that clip and here's what he did. Go ahead, Rob. Questions from the news and I'm sure they'll be extremely non hostile and friendly. Like JD Went through a very friendly.
- [126:01]
B
Interview with George Sloppadopoulos, who is nice enough to pay me $16 million.
- [126:07]
C
The last time we came, he had.
- [126:08]
B
To pay $16 million to me, which was good.
- [126:11]
C
It was worth it. It was worth having somebody lie.
- [126:15]
B
If you get $16 million, that's good.
- [126:18]
C
But JD had a very nasty person.
- [126:21]
B
Interviewing him and we can't let that happen. Just as inappropriate to cut off a highly respected Vice President of the United States mid sentence.
- [126:31]
C
I guess it's one way to win an argument.
- [126:32]
B
That was the only way he was.
- [126:33]
C
Going to win the argument.
- [126:34]
B
So it was pretty inappropriate.
- [126:36]
C
I want to tell you that I love that. I love backing up your guys. I love, you know, doing A message like that, how do you process this yourself?
- [126:45]
A
PAUL well, the number one thing that's running through the White House is loyalty. You see this across every single one of them. They're all loyal to him. He's loyal to them. And I think that they knew going into this that they learned from the first term that they were going to be attacked every single day non stop. And the only way to get through it is you got to lock arms and take it on headfirst. So I think that's one big lesson. But the other thing is actually in a weird way is good for JD that he got cut off because now everyone goes and watches the clip of him basically making his point. Because part of the thing that people forget is like a lot of folks don't watch these shows, correct? So the clip is where the attention, so whatever George asked him for 20 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever before nobody has any clue. All they know is George asked a question and JD Vance smacked him down. Right? And it's the disrespect to him that ends up making it go viral later. So in a weird way, it's like that the controversy actually drives the awareness of the point.
- [127:40]
C
So in other words, abc, if you're looking for a chief content creator, Pampliano would be willing to take that offer for a thousand bitcoins. If you want to make an offer, he's here, you can send him a message. He's taking offers. Tom, go ahead. Tom.
- [127:54]
B
No, I mean, it's so funny. You've got 400,000 people watching George Stephanopoulos show and then you have 1.6 million people. I'd love to know what is like, you know, we talk about the multiple in value for ebitda. It gives you a multiple in value for purchase. I'm wondering what the multiple and value for social media is when a traditional network news network flubs like that I'd like to figure out. I'm going to ask this guy at Call Sham said, can we figure this out so that we do you see where I'm going, Pat? Like media makes a flub and it guarantees a 5x circulation of what they don't want you to see.
- [128:29]
A
Well, here's the, you know, the biggest thing right now that business media for sure, but I think it's happened across the country. The number one thing these guys are all trying to figure out is there's a crisis of talent. Go look at business media in particular. Everyone is getting longer in their career. So if you want that new generation, if you Want the new perspective. Who do you go and find? They're trying to figure out who to do that, but most of the people who would have been that talent, they're going on the Internet, said I could do it, direct myself. And so I think that. I don't know about politics as much, but definitely the business media.
- [128:56]
B
Remember when David Faber and Aaron Ross Sorkin were the young guys?
- [128:59]
C
Yeah.
- [129:00]
B
Now they're the uncles.
- [129:01]
C
He's still old. He's still young, though.
- [129:03]
A
Andrew Ross.
- [129:04]
C
Yeah.
- [129:05]
A
He's got a. By the way, he's got a new book that came out yesterday.
- [129:07]
C
I think he's coming on the podcast coming up next week or right there.
- [129:10]
A
1929.
- [129:14]
D
Hold it up high.
- [129:14]
C
He's something like that. Yeah. Yeah, 1920.
- [129:17]
D
Anyways, so the, the problem with Stephanopoulos and I guess the, and the, the lamestream media is they're still looking for that gotcha moment. They're still trying to, to expose the other side here. You have, you have the. You have the sitting VP of the United States. Don't you want to have at least, at least a cordial relationship with someone like this? Because they're expecting it. It's almost like the 8 mile thing. It's like, I already know what you're gonna say. You're gonna try to get me, and I have this line ready to go. And this is why nobody watches your show. He was ready for that, J.D.
- [129:48]
A
And they tried to get.
- [129:49]
C
He loves it.
- [129:49]
D
You know that. And, and rather than Talking about the 10 million illegal aliens, whatever the number is that have come through the border, when, regarding Tom Homan, you want to kind of get them in this $50,000 bribe thing that JD Vance has nothing to do with. And then if you look at the, you know, trust and media rankings that we talked about recently and how that's plummeting. But if you look at the big three, abc, NBC, cbs. If you just scroll down a little bit, NBC has the highest quote, unquote, trust rankings of the three. Then cbs, and then ABC is less than the New York Times. Less than New York Times, one of the most leftist red newspapers in the country.
- [130:29]
C
Look at WaPo went the other way around. CNN all the way at the bottom. Go a little bit low. Rob. Let's see what the Atlantic is, which is. Yeah, absolutely.
- [130:36]
A
Wow.
- [130:36]
C
Even though MSNBC is number two, they're one of the lowest of the lowest. LA Times, New York Post. Interesting. Think Politico.
- [130:45]
D
This is like, if you go to the top, it'll give you the, the exact phrase of what it is, trust me. So meaning it hasn't changed.
- [130:54]
C
Good for you. Weather Channel. The Weather Channel market.
- [130:57]
A
Well, you know, the Weather Channel is.
- [130:58]
D
The most you want to know, incredible source out there.
- [131:01]
A
So it's fascinating because News Corp. They've made a big play into the new, into the weather because they see that as one of the next big battlegrounds between the entire culture wars, the politics etc is because of climate change.
- [131:14]
C
Well, interesting. That's important. But also if you want people to watch the Weather Channel, the host of the Weather Channel makes the weather better. So you have to almost like it. It has a little bit to do with talent of the person giving how the weather is doing. Right.
- [131:32]
A
I remember that's part of the strategy.
- [131:33]
C
I. I don't if you're targeting single, you know, males. Yeah, but I mean, listen, in Miami we do a weather channel. We bring one guy six pack chiseled and another girl and we said let us tell you how the weather is today. And we go for like six straight hours. I don't know careless what the weather is.
- [131:52]
A
You seen the, the, the Greeks doing the weather?
- [131:54]
C
No.
- [131:54]
D
They do it naked.
- [131:55]
A
Look up now look up the. It's like a famous video.
- [131:57]
C
This is not one of those porn.
- [132:00]
A
Yeah, this one, the first one right there. I think it's this first one. One.
- [132:03]
C
What do they do?
- [132:04]
A
60 seconds.
- [132:05]
C
I'm going to show you how.
- [132:06]
A
Hold on a second.
- [132:07]
D
We got to get those ad free. Rob, we got.
- [132:09]
A
Okay, so this woman, they, they play music and she's like goes viral all the time and she's always doing these like crazy, crazy videos.
- [132:19]
C
Have you seen.
- [132:20]
A
I think this is coverage what they.
- [132:21]
D
Do in Miami or in Latin America.
- [132:23]
C
Yeah, speak English. They gonna play.
- [132:26]
D
Hey, it's looking good outside today. And look at me. That's all they talk.
- [132:30]
C
Sounds good, gang. To wrap it up before we finish off, by the way, when you said the. The business content creators we just like for her take. We're looking for talent and we've had some very, very good conversations. We are aggressively looking for talent to put on our Wednesday business show repeatedly over and over again to cover business stories. If you know anybody, let us know. And last but not least, Pomp has a new book that is out called how to live an extraordinary Life. Pomp, can you tell us a little bit about this book?
- [133:04]
A
I wrote 65 letters to my children. And the whole idea is throughout my life I've been very fortunate to meet lots of great smart people. You guys are three of them. And I started to write down all the life lessons I picked up from other people, everything from professional life, personal relationships, happiness, how to be healthy, all that of kind kind of stuff. And on this maybe side quest or this mission to get more fathers to write letters to their kids because I think that strong dads in kids lives is very important. A lot of people I think look and say, hey, I learned XYZ from my dad. But usually it's passed down verbally. And so they got to say it like 50 times before you remember, right? Especially sons, I think that they say, hey, if my dad don't tell me 50 times, I don't remember. And so this was my kind of contribution of writing down 65 of those life lessons. And I think that hopefully more dads will do the same thing.
- [133:57]
C
And I love that. I love to inspire other dads to do the same. Folks, if you like the insight he shared with you here today, go support the man Rob. Put the link below for people to go place the order. How to Live an Extraordinary Life by Anthony Pompliano. If it's not for you, give it to your husband, give it to your son, give it to somebody that may want to read it. Having said that, palm, great having you on, buddy. Keep kicking ass. Thank you guys. We will see you guys on Thursday. God bless. Bye, bye. Bye, bye.
- [134:27]
A
Go get the shoes.
- [134:28]
C
Go get the shoes. Yes, go get the shoes.