RAMageddon AI Data Center WAR + Hormuz Blockade Updates | PBD #777

Patrick Bet-David, Tom Ellsworth, and Brandon Aceto are joined by Lyn Alden as they break down NATO’s response to the Strait of Hormuz blockade, rising economic pressure on Americans, the U. S. housing shortage, Mamdani’s grocery store cost overruns, gold price projections, the Sam Altman attack suspect arrest, and the rising costs of jobs and raising children. ------ 👍 LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! 🏢 WORK AT VALUETAINMENT: https://bit.ly/4ungnZZ 📗 LYN ALDEN'S "BROKEN MONEY": https://amzn.to/4tN8Baw 📈 LYN ALDEN'S INVESTMENT STRATEGY: https://bit.ly/4cexTZu Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4kSVkso⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4kSVkso Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP 👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4lzQph2⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj 🇰 KALSHI: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://kalshi.com/pbd⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ http://kalshi.com/pbd⁠ 💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time! ABOUT US:Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  My handshake is better than anything I ever signed, right here. You are a one of one? My sun's right there. I don't think I've ever said this before.

• 0:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Alright, so Wednesday Business Podcast, lots going on. Probably the biggest story to a lot of people here, apparently I'm sitting down talking to all our guys. I'm saying, "Tell me the biggest story that you're most concerned about." And Humberto says his biggest concern is the fact that a bag of Doritos right now is seven bucks. And I said, "Look, I mean, all this other stuff, Strait of Hormuz blockade, you know, gold, bitcoin, who cares? Doritos is seven bucks, guys. So we have to talk about it." And as usual, we bring some smart people here. Lynn Alden, it's great to have you here with us. Great to be here, thank you. Yes, I've seen your work, you're brilliant, you're very smart, macroeconomic. So we're looking forward to getting your insight as well. On Wednesdays, when we started doing this, I don't know what it was, Tom, a few months back. It's purely business, economy, numbers, and we'll do some politics as well.

• 1:12Patrick Bet-David?

  But let me go through some of the stories that we have going on. So tariff refunds unlikely to benefit consumers, CNBC CFO Council survey says. Trump declines to say which countries would help US with Hormuz blockade. The one thing we do know is that NATO allies refused to join Trump's Iranian port blockade, according to Reuters. US Begins Blockade in Strait of Hormuz, Trump warns Iran attack ships to stay away. UK Not Supporting US-Iran Blockade. As Francis Macron Confirms Multinational Talks on the Strait of Hormuz. I believe Vance, Tom, when is Vance meeting with, for part two, it's tomorrow, right?

• 1:49Tom Ellsworth?

  Tomorrow, Thursday, remember, it'll be very early US time because it's in the afternoon over there, but supposedly tomorrow.

• 1:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I wonder, you know, what some people are saying, you know, sending Vance, was it a... Strategic things to send a anti, you know, non-interventionist to go and negotiate. Was it a way? Because typically it should have been Marco Rubio. But you're sending Vance, are you setting him up for failure? Are you setting him up for success? Is this almost like a tryout to see how well you do on the bigger scale? Of going out there negotiating something this massive, you know, typically vice president. You make them the czar of the border and you never have to show up to it. You know, we know a couple of guys in the past.

• 2:27Tom Ellsworth?

  If you don't even know where it is.

• 2:29Patrick Bet-David?

  If you don't even know where it is, yeah, you think it's in Europe, but uh. Um, so US Iran weighing new talks on January 2nd. We'll talk about that venue Vance says US acquired some knowledge about Iran talks. China says it's ready to play constructive role for peace in the Gulf. Blackrock raises views on US stock on belief that war is over, profits are up. Major US cities offer cash incentives to spark growth, attract newcomers. I got a bunch of numbers I want to talk to you about with the market and the economy and gold, which we'll get to and Lynn, I want to get your thoughts on that because I know you you talk about gold and bitcoin. Um, US hospitals are emerging from bankruptcy only to falter again. Look at these parents here, anxious parents, according to Bloomberg, are spending upwards of $50,000

• 3:13Patrick Bet-David?

  to land their kids a job. It now costs $300,000 to raise a child in the US. Really daunting situation for parents. So if you want to have five kids, that's one and a half million dollars you need over a span of 18 years, you know, for each one of the kids. Americans say their incomes cannot keep up with rising prices. They're cutting back on groceries, rideshires and alcohol. Late payment rising for buy now pay later loans, survey says, we'll talk about that. Will gold reach $6,000 by the end of the year? Multiple companies are saying by the end of the year, it's going to be $6,000. And wait till you hear which one of them said it's going to be $6,300 by the end of the year. Housing shortage is at least 10 million.

• 3:57Patrick Bet-David?

  They said it was two and a half million a few years ago, then they said four million. Now it's 10 million shortage. So what kind of a cost is that good? Is a lot of jobs, is a lot of, if they do it in the right areas, what are the right areas? Some areas is not a good area, you know? Then it goes into the blue, red state because of taxes, because a lot of people are thinking about taxes. These eight US housing markets favor buyers. And then Sam Altman, I think we need to address that. And probably on the conversation with Sam Altman. Another stories about AI chatbots misdiagnosing over 80% of early medical cases. And then a couple of other things that we'll get into here, nearly 40% of Americans have less than $500 in cash savings. That is scary.

• 4:40Patrick Bet-David?

  40% of Americans have less than $500 to their name. Amazon to buy satellite firm, Globalstar in an 11.57 billion dollar deal to take on Musk's Starlink. So having said that with all the stories that we have going on, for those of you guys that follow the content closely and you see all the other stuff that we do, whether it's the business, the sports, the PBD podcast, the interviews that we do. On the backend, we are hiring aggressively in ways we've never have before. Whether it's full stack engineers, whether it's bookers, whether it's UI UX designers, whether it's consultants, whether it's SaaS sales, whether it's assistants, we're hiring aggressively right now.

• 5:25Patrick Bet-David?

  For some of you that maybe are looking for a job or you're at a company, you're winning, you're doing great things, but you want to find a different opportunity of a company that maybe is growing, that's got a big upside for you opportunity wise. You want to learn more, Rob, if you want to play the clip of what's going on here on ValueTainment. For some of you, this is more than just a podcast. Go ahead, Rob. Many times when people think about ValueTainment, all they think about is a podcast, but it's a lot more than that. It's nine companies working together on an 11 acre campus. If I was to give you a virtual tour here, you'll see the HR department hiring, talent acquisition. We have full stack developers that are working on Manac and HireMetrix. We have a full-fledged events team that puts together events with thousands of people.

• 6:07Patrick Bet-David?

  We have a merch department designing the latest product. We just launched the FOB shoes made in Italy. We have a marketing department. And if you go to the complete opposite side of the building, 50, 60 people making calls, working for Bedivik Consulting, sales setters, and then on the complete opposite side of the campus, there's a full-on production company with editors, shooters, creating content, doing podcasts. Then you can drive down a couple of miles and go to our private boardroom cigar lounge with members only. Regardless of what it is, working at ValueTainment. Every day is a surprise. You could be walking into work and right next to you is a governor, is a billionaire, is an athlete. We are hiring aggressively, but victimism for everybody. For the right person, this could be the last company you ever work for. So if you're watching

• 6:50Patrick Bet-David?

  this and you want to learn more, go to vt.com/ careers and apply now. There you go. Whether it's for yourself or somebody else, go to vt.com/ careers, apply. And if you know some very qualified, qualified people that are currently working that want to do something bigger, share it with them. We are paying reload for people that are coming here from New York and California as well as Austin, Dallas. I think nearly 50% of our guys that are working here are not from here. They moved here to want to be part of the team. So, all right, with that being said, let's get right into it. First thing I want to talk about, guys, is NATO allies refused to join Trump on the Iranian port blockade. Now, this is big news because at first it was like it's Spain. Well, you know,

• 7:35Patrick Bet-David?

  the Spain president, he's a socialist, even he says his family progressive. So, hey, I want to make you work with America, but you guys can't come and land over here. And he says, look, we don't need you. We're gonna do it by ourselves or not. Then it was Starmer. I don't want to be a part of this. Now it's the whole NATO allies refused to join Trump's Iranian port blockade, according to Reuters. Allies said on Monday they would not get involved in US President Trump's plan to blockade Iranian ports, proposing to intervene only once fighting ends in a move likely to anger Trump and increase strains in the alliance. Trump said the US military would eliminate any Iranian ships that came near the blockade that began on Monday after the weekend talks, failed to reach an agreement to end the six-week conflict with Iran. Trump initially

• 8:18Patrick Bet-David?

  said the US would work with other countries to block ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, but the US military later specified that the blockade would only apply to ships going to or from Iranian ports. Since the war started February 28, Iran has largely blocked the waterway for all ships, but its own, it has been seeking to make its control of strait permanent and possibly collect levies. From ships that use of the blockade will begin shortly, other countries will be involved with the blockade, Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Sunday. But NATO allies, including Britain and France, have said they would not be drawn into the conflict. So, he did say they will, they're not so far. Tom, what do we know about this? Especially now that crude oil is at what, 91.37? The market's reacting somewhat positively. S and P at 7,000.

• 9:03Patrick Bet-David?

  So, Wall Street, like you said earlier, is doing good. Main streets maybe taking a hit. But walk us through what you think's going on here with the blockade.

• 9:10Tom Ellsworth?

  So, there's a lot of gamesmanship going on in the, on the, in the world. So, right now, Britain and France have a problem, and I dove into this. Macron and Starmer have large Muslim populations, you know, you know, 8, 10, 12, 15%. That's a population you have to deal with, and they are a very loud population. And so publicly, they're saying, "We will not join the blockade." Well, what does that mean? "I will not put my ships next to your ships, so I won't join the blockade." But what was interesting, Britain and France through NATO said, "We are working on an initiative to open the strait." Pat, that's what they said. You know what that initiative is? Negotiating behind the scenes with the United States. So, "We won't join the blockade," like put our boats out there, and they say that for

• 9:55Tom Ellsworth?

  the headlines in their own countries, but behind the scenes, they are working with us, trying to negotiate and find a way out of it. And it's because they have to speak out of both sides of their mouth, because they're there. And what that is doing, that's upsetting Trump, because if you're not with me, you're against me, tremendously upsetting him. And it's also kind of undermining the historical importance of NATO. I mean, looking back and asking, "Hey, do we still need this? This was created at a time where we had a Cold War. We thought there was a bunch of missiles pointing at us, pointing back. Reagan put Pershing missiles in Germany, which caused the Russians to flip out, but that was all part of the NATO chess game." And a lot of people are asking, you know, "What does NATO do and what are, what are they necessary for?"

• 10:39Tom Ellsworth?

  And Trump is playing that card in the middle of it. "Okay, you're not with me, you're against me." Boom, maybe I'll leave NATO. But make no mistake, Britain and France are, have a two-faced thing going on. ...on here, public and private.

• 10:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Lynn, where do you stand with this?

• 10:54Speaker 03

  So I think a lot of it is symbolic and it's obviously political in the sense that no one really doubts the US Navy can do this blockade indefinitely if they want to. There's no world where US Navy has trouble stopping ships from going through. Obviously, the US Navy is limited in terms of getting the strait open because of all the asymmetric aspects to it, but actually blocking it is fairly simple for the US Navy to do. So trying to get NATO involved is more of that symbolic coalition effort rather than because the US actually needs their ships in any material way. And so their refusal doesn't, of course, impair the US's ability to keep the strait closed, but it does signal, like Tom mentioned, all the domestic political aspects they're dealing with, and it does ongoing kind of show the weakening of NATO over time, which is relevant in it. You know, it's increasing multiple of the world, and you know, we have fractures in

• 11:39Speaker 03

  our own backyard, let alone the world conflict.

• 11:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Rob, can you run a poll? And I want the poll to be, what's more likely to happen? US leaves NATO, NATO supports US versus Iran, and versus neither? Okay, just run that same poll on the podcast. Let's see what happens with it. Here's JD Vance when he's talking to Bret Baer, and Bret Baer's asking a question to see where he stands, because we remember JD Vance was a non-interventionist. It's kind of like, why are they sending him to negotiate? You know, is it intentional? Because if you send Rubio, you know where Rubio stands.

• 12:13Tom Ellsworth?

  Rubio and Wickoff, we know what they've been doing.

• 12:15Patrick Bet-David?

  That's right. So do you send JD to kind of get him to be bought in and say, I didn't know these people are this extreme? So here's what JD had to say to Bret Baer yesterday.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  As soon as it can. It's being reported that you had real skepticism about this at the beginning, and that you expressed that to the president. Is that true?

• 12:35Speaker 05

  Well, Bret, you know, I give my advice to the President of the United States, and we all do, and I expect that when I give advice to the President of the United States, that it's going to be private, because the president should rely on his senior advisers without them running to the media. What I will say, Bret, is that I 100% agree with the president on the fact that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. I've seen that just in the negotiation that we've had over the last couple of days, that these are... Tough negotiators, but they're fundamentally the kinds of people where them having a nuclear weapon would impose terrible costs on the entire world. If they're willing to engage in economic terrorism on the entire world, what would it mean? What leverage would they have if they had a nuclear bomb in Tehran?

• 13:18Speaker 05

  That's not an outcome that is acceptable to us or really should be acceptable to anybody. So I 100% support the president's goals here to keep nuclear weapons, to keep the worst weapons of war out of the hands of the Iranians. What do you think about what he said?

• 13:34Speaker 06

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• 14:03Speaker 07

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• 14:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, he's saying the right things. And I could hit NATO real quick, though. Yeah, of course. I mean, have we all lost sight of the fact that UK and France wouldn't be a country if it wasn't for America? And I mean, with the thing with NATO, what's a positive thing that NATO has done or a positive impact NATO's had in the last 30 years? I mean, nobody remembers that Russia wanted to be part of NATO, and Bill Clinton rejected that. Bill Clinton didn't reject that. No, Bill. He didn't answer him back, right? No, Bill Clinton said...

• 15:01Patrick Bet-David?

  No problem. He called somebody.

• 15:04Speaker 08

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:05Patrick Bet-David?

  And then he called back and said, "Not now." So wasn't he rejected? I don't know if I put that on Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was a gamer that he wanted to do it. Somebody he called.

• 15:14Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 15:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Said, "No." And a lot of people speculate who it is, but we don't know who that was.

• 15:18Speaker 08

  That's a good point. And I mean, the defense contractors led the committee to expand NATO. So I mean, the way I always see NATO is that we need something to throw money at after the Cold War ended, right? Because we just throw all the military money at NATO. And like the audacity of these guys, we have, we give them all these weapons. We have all of our military troops in their bases there. And like, the whole point is to deter Russia from aggression. But I would say that our expansion of NATO is what encouraged Russia to go into Ukraine. So, no, I think we should pull off NATO ASAP, especially.

• 15:45Patrick Bet-David?

  You think we should pull off NATO?

• 15:45Speaker 08

  A hundred percent. What's a positive thing that NATO's done?

• 15:47Tom Ellsworth?

  They did a hell of a job at Bosnia and Herzegovina, didn't they? Wow. They got in there, "Stop that. Not." And that was NATO's backyard.

• 15:55Patrick Bet-David?

  So, but if you're saying that, that means you're agreeing with them that we should leave NATO?

• 15:59Tom Ellsworth?

  I'm not saying we should leave NATO, but I'm saying you asked the question, "What have they done in the last?"

• 16:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Right. He asked the question. I'm just wondering.

• 16:06Tom Ellsworth?

  I'm making the point, yeah, they've done a terrible job.

• 16:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 16:09Tom Ellsworth?

  They let that go on in Bosnia. And so what? So I think it was Clinton finally agreed to drop tomahawks on enemy positions to see if they could break the back of the rebel general that was committing the genocide in the fields.

• 16:22Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think?

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Well, my focus is on finance and tech more than, more than do politics. I'm not, don't really have a firm opinion on that topic, other than I think that years ago it made sense to pressure NATO to put at least 2% of their GDP into the military, basically meeting all their ends with the bargain. Because for a long time, obviously, the US is like the bulk of NATO. So the rest of NATO is kind of that longer tail of other support compared to the US, which is almost all of it. At this point, there's obvious fractures. I wouldn't necessarily support going out of it, because that's, you know, it's kind of a temporary decision that can have permanent ramifications, but I'm certainly no expert on. You know.

• 16:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, maybe think about it from the economic side because you you watch how the market reacts to certain things, right? How how would the market react if all of a sudden, say, things are not going the right way? Say the Thursday negotiation gets nasty and behind closed doors, the president's not happy with the way NATO's supporting him hypothetically. He announces because you know he's capable of announcing anything. He announces we're out. How do you think the market reacts?

• 17:21Speaker 03

  My guess would be more muted than one might think. I mean, I think the market could have a sell off that day. I don't think it would be particularly catastrophic because when the market says, OK, what does this mean over the next, let alone weeks, what does this mean over years? Are we worried about any of those NATO members getting attacked more than they might otherwise, especially if the rest of NATO stays intact? So some of the smaller members are still defended by some of the bigger members? You know, multiple of them are nuclear powers. So I don't think anyone would would seriously increase worry about the safety of NATO countries just because the US was out in any sort of multi-year timeframe. Obviously, that has long-term implications for deterioration between the US and Europe in particular. But probably the market would just look through that, kind of like how it's been surprisingly resilient looking through all the the current energy shortages.

• 18:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes, it's interesting you're saying that because I don't know if you guys saw that or not. Zelensky the other day said in a press conference, he's been kind of quiet. He says UK should come back into NATO. I don't know if you saw that or not. Tom, did you see that with Zelensky saying, hey, UK should come back and you should rejoin? Is that it? We don't want anyone's lives. I think the EU and NATO can partner all as a military. I don't know if this is it or not, but it was one of the ones where we was asking for UK to come back in and rejoin NATO. I mean, not rejoin NATO, EU. My apologies. It's EU, not NATO. You know what he's looking for? He's looking for a pocket. Of course he is. Yeah, of course he is with with that taking place. But yeah, I don't know. I wonder, do you? How likely it is that Trump is capable of using that card to say we're pulling out,

• 18:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Tom? Give me a percentage because right now, the poll we ran, here's what the poll looks like. 3,000 votes, five minutes. What's more likely to happen? 51% say the US leaves NATO. That's the listeners. And we have some, our listeners are business owners. They're, these are people that. You know, run businesses, you know, are watching the market to see what's going on. Fifty-one percent thinks US leaves NATO. Fifteen percent think NATO will support US versus Iran. Thirty-four percent say neither. Tom, do you agree with them?

• 19:21Tom Ellsworth?

  Yeah, I think it's fifty-fifty because look at what will happen. We have bases in the Philippines. We have bases in Japan. We have bases everywhere. We would still have bases in Germany. You still have bases in the UK on the south coast of UK where we launch all the B-1 bombers from. All of that we would still have. So we would have regional defense alliances. So you leave NATO as a think, as a group at the middle, Pat, but we would still have all those bases and all of our military presence over there. And if something happened in Germany, we're going to be there to back them up. So I think it's fifty-fifty to leave NATO, but it would not change our deployment of resources in each country, the same way we've got resources deployed all around the world.

• 20:05Speaker 08

  You know what it would change? It would change the fact that none of those countries have invested their militaries in a big way since NATO got put in place because like they've all been hollowed out. They just rely on us that we'll have their back if they ever needed us. So, you know, they've gotten fat and happy and casual and they would immediately stop that, I think, if we pulled out of it. Because I mean, and you know, we don't have to pull out of it, but that's our leverage. You know, if we want them to do something, we have all the means at our disposal to encourage them to...

• 20:31Patrick Bet-David?

  The benefit, this is the benefit of having an unpredictable leader that's also predictable. That's the benefit of it. He keeps everybody on their toes and they don't know what's going to be happening. By the way, a couple of clips, Rob, if you want to play it. One of them is the clip where the president says he won't let Iran blackmail and extort the world by shutting down the strait. If you can play this clip.

• 20:52Speaker 09

  We can't let a country blackmail or extort the world because that's what they're doing. They're really blackmailing the world. We're not going to let that happen. And you know, the amazing thing is we don't, can you believe this? We don't use the strait. We don't need the strait. We have our own oil and gas, much more than we need. We have more oil and gas than Saudi Arabia. Think of this. We produce more Saudi Arabia and add Russia to it, substantially more. And by next year, we'll have double that amount. So we don't need it, but the world needs it. And many ships are heading to our country right now as we speak to load up with the best...

• 21:34Speaker 09

  Really, I guess you could say, somebody said the best and sweetest. I don't know exactly what sweet is, but when it relates to oil, it's a good thing. But they're coming to our country right now. There are many boats coming to our country now. It could very well be this is going to be settled before the...

• 21:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Now, you can pause this right here. Rob, go to the clip about what this is costing Iran on a daily basis and how long they can afford for this to happen, whether it's water, you know, their revenue coming in. This right here is a phenomenal clip by Jesse. Go ahead, Rob.

• 22:04Speaker 10

  Iranian oil blockade is probably the knockout punch. The Iranians are trying to outlast us. The longer the war goes on, the longer their regime can hold off a revolution. But their economy is experiencing a crippling depression. This blockade is costing the regime almost $400 million a day. That's $13 billion a month. Plus, the Iranians can only store oil for about two weeks before they have to start shutting off wells. The Iranians can't outlast us. The world's turning to us for energy. Over 120 empty oil tankers are on their way to the Gulf of America.

• 22:42Speaker 09

  Many ships are heading to our country right now.

• 22:44Patrick Bet-David?

  If you want to go a little bit further out to see when Jesse comes back, let him keep going. Okay, keep playing it. Keep playing it with Jesse.

• 22:52Speaker 10

  Oil and petrochemical industries have been wiped out. Without oil revenue, all they can sell are pistachios to Pakistanis. It could get worse. The president's still weighing limited airstrikes, saying a number of additional targets are very easy to hit. The Iranians are losing their cards here. And Vance, who just spent 20 hours negotiating with them, says that we're in the driver's seat.

• 23:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Tom.

• 23:16Tom Ellsworth?

  Economically speaking, we're in the driver's seat, but if, only if it's a rational Iran leader negotiating on the other side. When you have irrational leaders that just want to wait you out, then anything that you would do for them, I mean, look at the rebuilding of Japan after World War II. Look at the rebuilding of South Vietnam and look at all that that happened. You don't want these guys to be rebuilding, you know, the weaponry and what they do. And so, yeah, it's hitting them and it's hitting them hard. And yes, you've got this. And yes, drill, baby, drill and the renewed relationship with Venezuela and all that Venezuela oil coming out and benefiting the people of Venezuela, hopefully, more and more next

• 24:00Tom Ellsworth?

  year than this year. That's all good. But I look at it, yeah, it is. Are they going to break? Are they going to negotiate? Are they going to give up the nuclear option? And so a rational player would, but you have to remember, these are irrational players that would allow their own people, they'd allow 90% of their own people to die before they give up the card because it's a theocratic, it's a suicidal theocracy that believes in that endgame. And so in that way, they're not a rational actor.

• 24:32Patrick Bet-David?

  So Lynn, I'll give you those last thoughts on here, and I know it's more, you're more economy than something like this, but have you thought about what would be an ideal situation where the market's going to sit there and Trump comes out the winner? What could happen where Trump comes out the winner in this issue with Iran?

• 24:48Speaker 03

  I guess I don't see an agreement like years ago where Iran agrees to kind of defer any sort of nuclear program and has observers in in exchange for letting off the attacks and things like that. That's kind of the possibility here. There's also just, I mean, they can declare themselves a winner, the US can declare themselves a winner and kind of back out and, you know, see how the optics go. I think, you know, with that clip we saw, there's some simplification of talking points because even though the US does produce a lot of oil and gas, it's not as though we have just a bunch of spare capacity sitting around. We export a lot, we import a lot. Not all oil is the same because it has to be matched at certain types of refineries. And so, I mean, we've seen pretty clearly, obviously gasoline prices and other energy prices have spiked here in the US, just like many other parts of the world. We're not,

• 25:32Speaker 03

  you know, we're not the most vulnerable in the world. That's mostly going to be the poorer per capita developing countries that have to import a lot and are now being outbid by all the wealthy nations in the east and elsewhere. But we are impacted. And, you know, right now, there's, obviously Iran's on a clock. I mean, they've, you know, they've hyperinflated, not for the first time. They've got severe economic issues. They've got all sorts of issues. You know, but as Tom pointed out, they're ideological, more so than they're pragmatic. The US is also on a, I mean, a less severe ticking clock, but I mean, politically speaking, there's the midterms coming up right now. Consumer sentiment is a record low, lower than 2008, lower than the peak of COVID, lower than the late 70s. Those were kind of all other low points. We hit new lows.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  And that's partially because, I mean, gasoline prices at the pump are up and then even things you don't see directly, all the transportation costs, and you mentioned $7 Dorito bags.

• 26:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Crazy.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  That's part of that. I mean, going forward, all these things that have to move around the country, that's impacted by transportation costs.

• 26:28Patrick Bet-David?

  $5 diesel.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so, the US consumer is being squeezed, and then that, of course, has, you know, the polls are already shifting pretty greatly toward the midterms. So I think that the Trump administration has an incentive to try to get this wrapped up sooner rather than later. And then it's a force of wills between, obviously, you know, the average Iranian is a lot more impacted than the average American here, but they are a very resilient ideological type regime there.

• 26:54Patrick Bet-David?

  They are.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Way more than Venezuela.

• 26:55Patrick Bet-David?

  There's no question about it. When you look at where they're at with this. But you said something about the US economy. I want to kind of go through with this and come to you guys. So Americans, on Wall Street, you look at the numbers, like, you know, the wealthy is getting wealthier. It's not like they're being impacted by it. You know, they're happy. You're watching CNBC, it's like, oh, let me tell you, I was wrong. The market's doing great. We just crossed. So it's like, okay, the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is getting their asses handed to them. Let me read some numbers here to you. Americans are broke on paper. Incomes can't keep up with prices. This is a J.D. Power survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and I want to share this with you. This is for the Survey Monkey Quarterly Money Survey Q2 2026. Here

• 27:39Patrick Bet-David?

  we go. 65% of American consumers say prices are rising faster than their income, per J.D. Power survey of 4,000 US adults conducted February of 2026. This is pre-war. 56% of Americans say everyday life has become less affordable over the past year, per the CNBC Survey Monkey Quarterly Money Survey. Inflation in March 2026, 3.3% annualized, up from 2.4% in February. Okay? Gasoline prices are up 21.2% in March alone, for nearly three-quarters of an entire inflation increase. Real hourly earnings rose by only 1.4% over past year. Prices are up 16% cumulatively over the past four years. Forty-nine percent of Americans have reduced discretionary spending due to rising costs.

• 28:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Forty percent have dipped into their savings to cover daily expenses. Thirty-nine percent have used credit cards to pay for groceries or housing essentials. Thirty percent are taking extra work, a side hustle or second job. Forty percent of buy now, pay later borrowers have paid late on at least one installment in loan in the past year, up from 34% just two years ago. A 13% point jump per LendingTree. Fifty-four percent of buy now, pay later users say they couldn't make ends meet without these loans. Twenty-nine percent of buy now, pay later users are now using loans for groceries, up from 14%. Fifty-four percent of Americans think the economy will decline over the next year. Only 28% expect improvement. And we saw a story that came out saying 40% of Americans have less than $500 in savings.

• 29:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Forty percent of Americans have less than $500 in cash in the bank, that number. So, one, how did we get here? You can't put it on this administration. This has been built up for a while. And how do you address it? What do you do if you're going into midterms, you're seeing a Mondani winning? And I'll play the clip here in a minute about the free groceries. It's going to only cost us 60 million to build seven of them, and now it's costing 30 million to build one of them. But the average middle American is watching this message here saying, hey, who's going to fix this? Someone's got to fix this. How do we address this?

• 29:40Speaker 06

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• 30:10Speaker 07

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• 30:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, obviously a very difficult question. I mean, this really has been building since the global financial crisis. You know, we had the big financial implosion. Banks were more supportive than the average homeowner. So we got, you know, the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, kind of the right and left flanks of kind of populism and pushback against what they perceived as a pretty corrupt system. Throughout the 2010s, you had some rebuilding, but you had that kind of growing divide. And, you know, under Trump administration, I mean, the first one, he did tax cuts that were primarily aimed at the wealthy, even though we already kind of had that concentration. And we're, you know, I think we're continuing this policy. Even during COVID, you know, everyone kind of focuses on the STEMI checks and childcare tax credits. But the biggest, you know, bailouts went to the PPP loans that turned into grants

• 31:24Speaker 03

  for many wealthy business owners that weren't, you know, really planning on even laying off anywhere. There are people in the software industry or the, you know, investment industry that got big bailouts that didn't really need it.

• 31:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Massive bailout.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Massive bailout. And billions for certain corporations.

• 31:38Patrick Bet-David?

  We had a board meeting that, Tom, you may remember this, where one of the board members was like, "Hey, you know, we can get a few million dollars on the PPP." I said, "We just had our biggest month in the history of the company. We don't need a single penny from PPP. We refuse to take it. And we announced that we didn't take a single penny of it. I cannot tell you how it was received by our guys in the company because we didn't go take a single penny from anybody."

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:00Patrick Bet-David?

  On the PPP.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  And that's powerful because a lot of companies in that position that didn't need it, that weren't in a, you know, they're not like a restaurant.

• 32:06Patrick Bet-David?

  They needed it, restaurants needed it.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, they needed it.

• 32:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Those guys were getting crushed.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Exactly, but there are a lot of, a lot of others. I mean, I know software companies that basically said, if we don't take it, our competitors are going to take it. And that's how they justify taking it. Same thing with investment companies and just, you know, companies that weren't really planning on laying anyone off. So that all that just drops to the bottom line to the, the owners, which are, you know, on average, pretty wealthy. When you, when you look at the whole kind of COVID stimulus, it comes out to something like 50,000 per household. And you say, you go to the average median household and you say, I mean, did you get anywhere near $50,000 in support? Of course not. That, that, that diffused more opaquely through, unfortunately, kind of the, the higher end of the income stack. And then since then, I'm obviously, the inflation from all of that money printing has primarily impacted the, you know, the lower two thirds of the economy. We're in a very firm K-shaped economy.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  You know, I mentioned consumer sentiment before, consumer sentiment's at record lows while the stock market is, is roughly at record highs. That's pretty unprecedented. The only time it was even close to that was, was kind of the late seventies. And so, you know, that, that's that more stagflationary environment. I don't really see relief anywhere on the way. I mean, I think obviously the, the energy shortage is not helping. I'm on the record not really viewing tariffs as being helpful because normally in this type of environment over the past several years, you had service costs going up. That's where a lot of the inflation was. It was generally offset by lower goods prices. But over the past year or so, I mean, the Fed's done analysis of this, Cato Institute's done analysis on this. We've had something like a two to three percent unusual boost in goods prices, largely attributable to the tariffs.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  So the, you know, the median person's looking around and saying, you know, I thought this was America first and we have, we have wars, we have energy shortages, higher, you know, goods prices. There, there hasn't really been a lot of programs supporting that, either with tax cuts or any sort of refinement.

• 33:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Here's a question, Tom, and, and I'll come back to you guys as well, but Tom, specifically you. Is the solution to address this not winnable at the ballot? Meaning, to be able to fix this, there's no way in the world a person gets reelected if we wanted to find a way to fix this?

• 34:11Tom Ellsworth?

  I think it's very difficult right now, but I'm gonna go solution-based. We've talked about all the numbers, don't need to go through them again. There are two that I will mention quickly that are the most horrifying to me. And they're really horrifying. It's 1.3 trillion in consumer credit card debt and the balance of BNPL loans, which were taken out because they didn't have enough credit card, uh, credit left. And now seeing that 45%, as you pointed out in the stats, people have, there's only supposed to be, the average BNPL is 3.5 payments. Remember, you bought the TV, 200, 200, 200, and now you paid for your $600 TV that you bought in September so you could watch college football. Guess what? 45% of missed ones, so that means it's 33% miss rate. That's horrible. So that is on the back of the consumer.

• 34:56Tom Ellsworth?

  The consumer has more debt when everything else. There is one category where the government and the president can come together and help at the ballot box, and it is oil and energy, excuse me, electricity and oil. Oil meaning jet fuel to bring down air fares, gasoline for your car, diesel, which is gonna be shipping all those goods and services and Amazon Prime to your doorstep, diesel. And then heating oil for the Northways. We always forget about heating oil being such a critical part of the budget for people that live in the Northeast. And praise God that we had a pretty mild winter this year. Less heating oil per home was used this winter because it wasn't a severe winter in the Northeast. Then you get down to gasoline, and guess what?

• 35:38Tom Ellsworth?

  Natural gas, and there's a lot of natural gas that are in US electric power plants. This doesn't touch coal power plants. But if you get oil and you get all of those things down in a hurry, you can help the consumer in all those categories. And that helps them today in their budget.

• 35:55Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you do with electricity, Tom? With all the AI data centers we're building? I mean, when you look, when you look at the AI data centers, numbers-wise. Do you know, do you know how many AI data centers we had 10 years ago in America?

• 36:05Tom Ellsworth?

  Zero.

• 36:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Zero. You know how many we have right now? Four thousand.

• 36:09Tom Ellsworth?

  And we, and we showed this stat yesterday of the ones that haven't been built yet.

• 36:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Fifteen hundred of them.

• 36:14Tom Ellsworth?

  Because people are now protesting and coming to City Hall, like we covered the Missouri protest. Good citizens.

• 36:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Six billion dollars.

• 36:21Tom Ellsworth?

  Yep, exactly. So that is part of.

• 36:24Patrick Bet-David?

  But, but, but, no, but wait a minute. This is where I'm trying to go with you, Tom. How do you fix the electricity issue when we've committed to build all these AI data centers? The only state is that saying, don't come and touch us is Maine. You have already fifteen hundred of them that's going out. You have, uh, Arizona that I believe they build a new plant, the TSMC plant, what is it? Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company that they said was gonna, eleven billion dollar project, became a sixty billion dollar project. Now it's a hundred and sixty-five billion dollar project in Arizona. And then in Texas, I think Oracle, uh, OpenAI and, and one of the banks, it could have been SoftBank. I don't know which one it is. They committed to a, uh, a AI data center that's a hundred billion dollars

• 37:05Patrick Bet-David?

  that they're thinking is gonna go to half a trillion dollars all across the state of Texas that they're building. I think Microsoft is building one in Wisconsin for seven billion dollars. And every place they go to, electricity prices goes up. By the way, these, this whole Ramageddon war that you hear about, you, we've heard the Ramageddon, Ramageddon where.

• 37:23Tom Ellsworth?

  AI chips, but then the basic memory chips, RAM chips.

• 37:26Patrick Bet-David?

  That's right. So the DDR5, which is the latest model, uh, RAMs that you, you consume electronics. You have it in your computer, you have it in your PlayStation. Those things that we would buy for thirty, forty dollars, prices have skyrocketed two hundred percent to, three hundred percent to seven hundred percent. Then they came out and build these new chips called the HBM chips, which is fifteen to twenty times more effective than the DDR5. And so these companies are sitting there saying, wait a minute, we need this stuff, bring it to us. You know seventy percent of all the chips now that they're producing is all going to the AI, uh, uh, data centers? Seventy percent of these chips. Ten years ago, that wasn't the case. So these chip companies are like, wait a minute, priority, who do I sell it to first? Do I sell it to cars? Do I sell it to, you know, TVs?

• 38:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Do I sell it to PlayStation or do I sell it to a Sam Altman that went to? What were the two companies Sam Altman went to? Uh, Hynek's, am I saying it properly? What is the, the company? SK Hynek. SK Hynek's, right? If I'm saying it correctly, they, he goes to SK Hynek's and one other company. And he says to them, hey, I want to ramp up of needing these chips up to 900,000 a month by 2029. And they're sitting there saying, this is pretty amazing. So it's a non-binding commitment he makes behind closed doors. That's not public. All of a sudden it leaks last month to the world. And now he's saying, I don't know if I want to do it or not, because the latest, uh, uh, uh, uh, Google came out with a new project. If you guys have been following the Google story that came out, it's called, uh,

• 38:54Patrick Bet-David?

  they wrote a paper just a couple of weeks ago. Have you, have, followed the story?

• 38:58Speaker 08

  I'm, I'm familiar with what you're talking about.

• 38:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, Google just came out with a project that they wrote out saying, hey, we don't have to buy these chips. We can save 600% and make it more effective. So some of these companies are sitting out there saying, hey, do I keep going through the TSMCs? Do I keep, yeah, turbo quant redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression? They leaked this, so this changed Sam Altman's decision to kind of pump the gas, pump the brakes and say, do I go through these companies and buy these chips or not? But here's the reality of it, where I'm going to, and I want to kind of get your thoughts. Cause this is, you know, what you guys follow closely. So capitalism is capitalism. Who's going to say no to massive orders? Who's going to say no to 100 billion order orders? Who's going to say no to 50 billion order commitment? Your commitment is to your who?

• 39:44Patrick Bet-David?

  To your shareholders? Okay, so now let's go buy a bunch of lobbyists who are going to help us create these data centers, who we can sell it as we're bringing jobs to a local community. But the middle income guys, electricity prices are not going. We're not yet at a point with China that we have nuclear power. We're still relying the old way of getting energy. They're deciding to change the, the wafer that, by the way, the, the, the king of wafers is apparently Japan. Japan makes most of these guys and, you know, these Rams that they make it the two different ways. Cause the DDR5s are kind of flat and apparently with the HPMs, you can build it up to eight to 16 stack. Uh, go up like a very interesting, when you look at the difference between the two. But capitalism is not going to say no to that money. So who, how are you going to control electricity prices?

• 40:29Patrick Bet-David?

  The oil prices I get, stop the war, let's figure it out, let's get out of it. But how do you address the electricity price?

• 40:35Tom Ellsworth?

  Well, yes, I, I have it. So the two things that I say, the president has his pen and we can get oil and all those things we've talked about that have immediate economic benefit to an average consumer's budget. Now, electricity, guess what? On the demand side, it just happened and I've been calling for it on a, a program that, that you put on value attainment here, uh, number scream. We've been covering this and we've been talking about the rate player protection pledge, RPP. It was done by the White House on March 4th and he wanted a pledge from people to go, just go rate player protection pledge, rob, whitehouse.gov, I sent you the link. And they put that out as a pledge. It needs to be not a pledge.

• 41:17Tom Ellsworth?

  It needs to be legislation that says, if you build a data center, you have to invest in the offsetting, um, electricity, you know, needs. You have to be part of that. Oracle and Google went to the government and said, hey, will you support us gen five, gen six, micro nukes that we will put right next to our data center? And guess what? In a natural disaster, tornado and everything, will we divert that power to the grid to help citizens? So we will make our own power and if there is any excess, we'll put it on the grid at times of need. It, this is a rate player protection pledge, which was a PR, uh, uh, you know, event by the White House. The reason I call it PR, it was positive PR, trying to get everybody together to pledge,

• 42:01Tom Ellsworth?

  we're going to keep electricity down. Now turn this into legislation that says, you're building the data center, then you have to build to offset the electricity so it doesn't affect the consumer. Oh, Tom, you're talking about price controls. No, I'm not. I'm talking about supply of electricity. These two things on the president's pen and all of this, now you go to the ballot box with a positive message of things that you can do. Here's what you can't touch. You're not going to bring down food. You're not going to bring down milk. You're not going to bring down a lot of things. You're not going to bring on home insurance, car insurance, all those. You're not going to touch those on the inflationary scale, but you will touch this and it will give you a fighting chance at the ballot box, but the clouds are dark. And that was your original question is what do you do for the election?

• 42:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I, I, one of them, you have to stop the war. The other one, you gotta go get capitalism to say, you gotta help out the consumers as well locally. Brandon?

• 42:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, the biggest mistake he's making with this is acting like it doesn't exist. I mean, it's a undeniable fact that people are getting crushed, especially the middle.

• 42:59Patrick Bet-David?

  You mean affordability?

• 43:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, with affordability. I mean, he's talking constantly about what his plans for the war, what the, you know, it's almost over, this and that, but he keeps saying that inflation is gone, you know, we got past it. But the University of Michigan Consumer Consent Report, it was the worst of all time, like worse than 2008, you know, that lines up with the $400 per person thing. So, I mean, first thing is acknowledging it. I think that, even more so than the war, the fact that he's going out saying inflation is dead, I think that's his biggest pain point for the election. In terms of addressing it, I mean, the deficit spending, I think that's what's propped up not just the stock market, but inflation for the last, you know, 10, 20, 30 years. When we got off the gold standard, that enabled us to do the deficit spending. And I think, like, why not invest, like, this excess money

• 43:43Speaker 08

  that we've been pumping into the military industrial complex, or pumping into the healthcare system, or social security? Why haven't we been investing that into nuclear energy? Like, we've built, I think, three nuclear reactors in the last 30 years in America. So, you know, we got unexpectedly hit with this massive demand for energy from the AI data centers. Like, we already were in a delicate place from an energy demand standpoint, but now we're caught off guard for it because we had this massive demand that we weren't expecting. So, and the thing about oil, too, is that when that gets cheaper, I think that actually makes inflation go up in some things because it gives people excess disposable income. So, there's an argument that could be made that oil going up might actually make inflation and other things go down.

• 44:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Lynn?

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, I think with the electricity issue, we can kind of think of it like zoning more so than price controls, like, much like how residential and, you know, industrial things are generally separated at the local level. There can be, you know, these agreements, like all these protests against data centers and stuff, and the local politicians decide to let that project go forward. A lot of that can include agreements about how they're going to secure their own electricity. That when they build a data center, they also have to build the energy infrastructure around it, so they don't just come in and double everyone's electricity prices in the region and kind of benefit from the subsidies and other things that are already there. I think that's a huge factor. A lot of the data center companies that are, that I would consider best of class, they're advantaged because they've already secured. A lot of their own energy infrastructure, many of them, some of them were Bitcoin miners before they've kind of shifted.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  It's funny, a lot of people years ago were concerned about Bitcoin miners coming in and driving up prices. That was never a very rational concern, or at least over any sort of multi-year period, because Bitcoin miners need super cheap electricity. The problem with AI data centers is they actually can bid pretty high prices for electricity. They can, they can outbid local retail buyers. They also, you know, they want pretty low latency, so they want to generally be closer to population centers. They don't want to be out in, out in the middle of nowhere like Bitcoin miners are fine to being so. I think basically we are seeing, uh, this is a pretty real issue. Um, I think getting energy prices down is, is one of the nearest term fixes here. Um, you know, the, the more structural issues for how to make things more affordable. I, I think obviously tackling healthcare is a big area because the US spends by far the most per capita on healthcare in the world.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Uh, without necessarily better outcomes in many categories. But that's not obvious, that's not a multi-month issue. That's more of like a, a second half of term issue or, you know, the next administration, whoever that might be. But I think that getting, uh, you know, doing steps to kind of get healthcare costs down is more structural. One of the big structural things for this kind of K-shaped economy, but in the near term, it's more about putting out the fires. It's, it's more about putting out these immediate issues.

• 46:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Bob, can you run a poll and ask the question, how much has, how much has your electricity bill increased? And you can put stayed the same, up 10 or 20%. You know, uh, maybe, what, what should the tiers be? What should the tiers be, Tom? Up what? Up 10 or 20%?

• 46:31Tom Ellsworth?

  Yeah, I think you need to do, um, under 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 to 40.

• 46:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, just put 30 plus.

• 46:39Tom Ellsworth?

  Okay.

• 46:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Under 10, you know, 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 plus. Curious to know how much that's happened. Now, while this is going on, here's the other story that comes out, which is kind of interesting. White House, America is short 10 million homes. And we remember, we read this article a couple of years ago that was saying 4 million homes. And a few years prior to that, 2.6 million homes, right? But the White House comes out saying, uh, 10 million, the White House estimates of how many single family homes the US is missing. Per the Council of Economic Advisers, uh, uh, annual economic report of the president. This dwarfs prior estimates. Uh, Freddie Mac, November of 2024 said 3.7 million. National Association of Realtors in June of 2021 said 5.5 million. Now they're saying 10 million.

• 47:24Patrick Bet-David?

  If home building had continued at its historical pace of 6,000 new homes per million. People per year, the pace had held steady for decades before 2008. The US would have had 10 million more homes today. The 2008 financial crisis essentially cut the home building rate in half and it never fully recovered. The median home price right now is 534, up 52%, $534,000, up 52% from Q1 of 2020. According to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 40% Americans don't own a home, believe buying one in the future will be impossible. According to CNBC, only eight of the 50 largest US metro areas are currently buyer markets. Half of those eight are in Florida.

• 48:05Patrick Bet-David?

  The rest are Atlanta, Austin, Nashville, Riverside, and the US Senate passed a bill last month. An 89 to 10 vote, but its fate in the House is uncertain. So when you look at a number like this, they're saying if we don't use the number 534, we just assume it's $450,000 per unit. A 10 million unit shortages represents four and a half trillion dollars in housing wealth that could enter the market, could create jobs, could be good for some people. So when you see a story like this Tom, how do you react to it?

• 48:35Tom Ellsworth?

  So there's a supply and demand issue in housing and I'll give you two case studies. The first case study is Austin. During the big run up in prices in 2022, we were about to come out of COVID. We had inflation hit the asset. The underlying assets were hit by the inflation of printing money. So assets prices went up everywhere, such as stock market and homes, real estate. So number one, all those went up, but in Austin, Austin was in a gold rush of construction. It started in 2018. They were going nuts. Who was going to put their headquarters in Austin? Remember this Pat? Everybody. Oracle, I'm going to Austin. You know SpaceX, I'm going to Austin.

• 49:16Tom Ellsworth?

  All these Silicon Valley companies on the strength of South by Southwest and a favorable, you know, high tech and startup environment in Austin, Texas. Hey, we're all going to Austin and we're going to have low state income tax, by the way, and it's going to be pretty cool to live there. Guess what happened? They built, built, built, built, built, supply, supply. Right now rents are moderating in Austin and there is an excess supply of rental housing available, which is making Brandon, it actually affordable for people to find. Very affordably priced rentals in the near town areas, not downtown, but in the near town, like you don't have to live in, you know, in Round Rock and commute all the way down to Austin for your job.

• 49:57Tom Ellsworth?

  So there's, there's the supply coming together and that's exactly what they're talking about when you've flashed back on a national basis and say, not everybody was building like that. So everyone else has a shortage of rental homes, which is why they're coming to this 10 million number, number one. And so how do you get all that built now? Because now you're dealing with inflated materials. Austin was built since 2018 with the old material costs that started going up in 22. So now you start building homes on inflated copper, inflated concrete, inflated plywood, inflated labor costs, shortage of labor, so you have to pay people, construction guys more. Boom. Now to build out the supply, it's going to cost you more to do it.

• 50:40Tom Ellsworth?

  And the pressure, and Rob just put the chart up, look at the gap between sellers and buyers right now. Interest rates are back up to 6.4, 6.5. There's an estimated 1.359 buyers in America and 1.9 sellers, a gap of 600,000. So people on the existing homes can't afford to buy them. So there's the two problems. You've got to build more homes, but it's be inflated costs to do it. And the homes that are out there right now haven't come down enough. And if we all had done what Austin did back in 2018 and got too excited and built a bunch of supply, our citizens would have more affordable housing.

• 51:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Lynn?

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's, I mean, there's two main factors here. One is, is NIMBYism. So many, many areas don't want a lot of new supply because their existing homeowners are worried about their price disruption. Places like Austin are kind of the model to do it correctly, which is to allow new supply to come on the market when it's incentivized to do so. And so that, I mean, that's one factor. That's very, that's very region specific. And the other one is this, this more structural issue that for, for about 40 years, from, you know, 1980 to 2020, you, you had structurally rising home prices, both in nominal terms and as a percentage of average incomes. So the multiple of home value to, to income kept increasing, but for 40 years, that was roughly offset by Structurally declining interest rates.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  So you have higher housing costs, but you have decreased financing costs. So the monthly amount that they have to pay was kind of held in check, at least relative to their incomes. The issue is that once we hit zero rates and we started to get this more of inflation wave, we don't really have that tailwind behind us anymore, and I don't think it's coming back. I mean, the best we can hope for is just interest rates chop around in a sideways pattern here, up and down during boom years and bust years. But we don't really have that structural decline anymore. Which means, and we still have those very high multiples of income value to housing value to income value. And a lot of this is because as you have decades of money supply growth, it finds its way toward the scariest things, right?

• 52:42Speaker 03

  So things that we can get much better increase in the supply of, their price standard control, you know, grain prices, manufactured goods out of China, Moore's Law, anything, any electronic with Moore's Law and software and all that. All of that can be kept very low because there's not really much scarcity to it. But whether it's the best financial assets, you know, the best stocks, gold, Bitcoin, top-tier housing, but then even kind of just normal median housing, there's obviously a scarcity factor to that. And so that's where we get more and more people using their, you know, buying second homes as their piggy bank for lack of wanting to hold the money. And we're kind of at the phase where this really impacts the consumer because there's no structural decline in interest rates anymore.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Even if the Fed does cut rates going forward, it's not necessarily going to impact the long end and therefore mortgage rates. They have extreme tools, they can do like yield curve control, but they're not very popular when you have high inflation. And so I think a lot of it's going to come down to, you know, getting out of the way of builders, letting them build when the incentives are right to do so. But then stepping aside from that, it is just a structurally hard problem with no longer falling interest rates. And sellers are kind of locked in, they don't want to sell because they had locked in a 3.5% mortgage. But over time, more of them just become forced sellers anyway, and they have to bite the bullet and sell. So eventually the market can clear, but it can take quite a while.

• 54:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Rob, go back to that chart that you had, sellers and buyers, I mean, look at that. Look, we've never had this big of a gap. On sellers above buyers. Like if you go look at 2021, that was the worst time. Like if you look at the buyer's market at that time, look what it was like. Go to the difference. If you go a little bit prior to that, all the way to the top right.

• 54:26Tom Ellsworth?

  Two percent interest rates and those buyers were buying.

• 54:29Patrick Bet-David?

  That's right. Go a little bit to the right, Rob. Go a little bit to the other peak. Keep going, keep going. Right there. Look at that. Look at the peak between the buyers and the sellers. But if you go prior to that with the sellers and buyers, you have to go to 2015, 2016. That gap is not, keep going back, keep going back a little bit, Rob. Keep going back, back, back, back, back, back. Right there. No, a little bit to the front. Right there. One back. Okay, right there. Look at the difference between that. And that's still not as bad as it is today. So this has to be a horrible time to be a Realtor and a loan officer. I mean, if you're still a Realtor making money, you know, you have outlasted a lot of guys that have probably quit and left. I think, you know, we used to, we used to run our events, this last event that we had,

• 55:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Tom, the Sales Leadership Summit. Every year I would ask and say, raise your hand if you're in the mortgage industry. Four years ago, it was 40% were all in mortgage and real estate. We had, we had 403 people in the room, attendees. I asked them, raise your hand if you're in the mortgage business. How many people raised their hand?

• 55:34Tom Ellsworth?

  A guy named Phil.

• 55:35Patrick Bet-David?

  One, no, he's not kidding. One guy raised his hand. And five years ago, when he would talk to these guys, they had three Rolls Royces, two Ferraris, three homes, vacation homes, 17 Rolexes. It's a very different ballgame for some of these guys that they're going through. Brandon, your thoughts on the story?

• 55:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, this makes me think of something that absolutely blew my mind and made everything made, make sense a couple of weeks ago when you had Richard Werner on. So I remembered when the Fed changed the rule for the banks that they, they didn't have to have a reserve requirement in 2020. You know, it used to be 10%. They dropped it. I thought it was that they dropped it quick and they brought it back, but I didn't realize that they never brought back a reserve requirement for loans. Cause you know, when money creation is, uh, commercial banks lending money. So I was always wondering, I, I know we printed a couple of trillion or did a couple of trillion in debt from the treasury during COVID, but I'm like, man, that's really lasting five, six, seven years out into the future. But no, it seems, it's probably more the lack of a reserve requirement, cause that's infinite money that could be created. So that, that's what's pushing up the real estate market.

• 56:34Speaker 08

  You know, that's what's pushing up everything else in a big way, I bet, is the fact that, that there's no reserve requirement for the banks for how much money they can. Issue out to borrowers. But that's one side of it. The other side of it is we need to get these commodity prices down. And I mean, we do have the levers to do that. Like, so commodity prices, zoning. I mean, any of these places that are trying to restrict home building for just the sake of keeping the prices up, and you know, that's something that needs to be fought against viciously because your home as your number one asset, I don't think that's like a healthy place for society. I think it's more important for the younger generation to be in a position of strength rather than the older generation to maintain their number one asset.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  There's a caveat on that. It sometimes gets lost in discussion. So even though it is true that reserve requirements have been eliminated, when you actually look at banks in aggregate, they have pretty high reserves relative to their total assets and relative to deposits right now. But even though the requirement's gone, it doesn't mean that the reserve ratios actually went down in any material way. In fact, in the kind of the whole post-global financial crisis era, they're actually pretty high. The lowest they ever got was actually right before the whole subprime mortgage. That's when they really were extended, had tiny reserves. Regulations were very low at that time. Instead, what they have is kind of risk-adjusted capital ratios. So they actually still have a lot of regulations for how much kind of like low-risk or no-risk capital they have to hold, whether it's reserves, whether it's, you know, T-bills and things like that.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  And actually, their ratio of those kind of like low-risk or nominally no-risk assets is actually a pretty high percentage of their assets. So I don't really view banks as making aggressive loans is kind of the issue here in a similar way that it was leading up to 2008. You know, I think it's those other factors we discussed. The fact that interest rates are not going down, that the house that was affordable at 3% rates is not affordable at, you know, 6% rates unless we start to see more exhaustion from some of these sellers that say, you know, I've been, my house has been on the market for two years. I keep trimming prices, but I'm not getting any bites. I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and materially reduce the price in order to get buyers back in and say, you know, this house that I bought for 700,000, I'm trying to resell for 700,000,

• 58:46Speaker 03

  I might have to sell it for 600,000 just because the buyer's market's different now with higher rates.

• 58:51Patrick Bet-David?

  To the point, that's good for, that's good if we get to that point. But if you listen to CNBC today, yesterday, if you listen, everything they're talking about. Well, hopefully the new guy that can, you know, they're trying to sue Jerome Powell. Are you seeing this? Are you seeing the possible conversation of Jerome Powell? Are you following that story?

• 59:07Tom Ellsworth?

  Yeah, over the, the Not a bad idea. The, the build out of the Fed and did he, did he oversee a, a construction project to beautify the Fed? That just, you know, was a rip off to American taxpayers? That's kind of the White House angle.

• 59:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, but, but they're kind of trying to force him out earlier and he's not flinching. They're saying the new guy's going to come and change the rates and all this other stuff. So who knows what that reaction to the market is going to be with that. But can we, go ahead, Tom.

• 59:34Tom Ellsworth?

  So I'll just put one thing is what we have to keep in mind. It's fashionable to pick on interest rates. It's fashionable to pick on the Fed. It's fashionable to pick on boomers. I'm looking at you. Yeah, I know. But you have to remember, what percent increase has homeowners insurance gone up since 2021? Since the middle of COVID to today, five years. A lot. Forty-six percent. What is homeowners, HOA has gone up? A lot. Twenty-eight percent. So you have to remember, those are also chasing the consumer down the street when they're trying to do this. And by the way, that's not the greedy insurance companies. Insurance companies are pointing to the price of copper, lumber. Yeah. And concrete. Why? Because they have to pay for that when they rebuild your home. Higher replacement costs. If it's, if it's, if it burns down or you have a hurricane or a tornado.

• 1:00:20Tom Ellsworth?

  So the insurance rates goes up because of replacement costs, not necessarily because of greedy insurance companies, which is also fashionable. So all of it comes together to be this perfect storm in housing. I just wanted to add those, Pat.

• 1:00:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, I, I will tell you this, as we're going through this topic with affordability and people are like, well, you know, and nothing's going to happen, you know, the red, conservatives are still going to win. Economy is going to be fine. Mamdani beat everybody in New York City. And he came out, he's a socialist Islamist that came out and he won New York City, financial capital world. And then he said he's going to have grocery stores that he's going to build free. Free for folks who are having a hard time and all this other stuff, you know, eggs, the main essential stuff that they're gonna do. People still don't know exactly what the system's gonna be, and he said for 60 million, we'll be able to build in five different boroughs and all this other stuff. And they just launched their first, and the first one's gonna cost roughly 30 million bucks. Rob, if you wanna pull up the one, uh, the video of him announcing this, of Donnie,

• 1:01:16Patrick Bet-David?

  with the new grocery store that's coming out, is that the one, Rob? You just had it, uh, uh, is that the one? Go for it.

• 1:01:22Speaker 11

  And the first of your grocery stores will open next year?

• 1:01:26Speaker 12

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:27Speaker 11

  Why is it taking so long? I feel like a bodega opens every other week, uh, across New York City in every neighborhood. Why, why take so long to start this?

• 1:01:35Speaker 12

  Well, I think for a few reasons. The first is that we are talking about building something from the ground up. We're talking about this city's, city, first city-run grocery store in Manhattan that we need to both design, that we also need to construct. We're also going to be constructing it using prevailing wages. And it's also one part of a larger ecosystem, not just in terms of La Marqueta, but also here on this strip. We've seen the MTA has just completed their work in this very area. This requires a lot of inter-agency and inter-governmental coordination that we're going to be seeing. The store that will be open next year in 2027 and the additional stores that will be open by the end of 2029 will not require this same scale of production.

• 1:02:18Speaker 12

  The reason that we're announcing this is so that we can get started on this.

• 1:02:21Patrick Bet-David?

  So there you go. So 30 million, Tom, you look very excited about this. Lynn, do you foresee this, one, working successfully? And two, will other markets follow his lead?

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  I'm not particularly optimistic on it. Uh, when we look at the major grocery stores worldwide, at least the ones that are publicly traded, we had the financials on, grocery stores run at low, single-digit average profit margins. Uh, no one goes in the grocery business to get rich. You go into finance, you go into tech, you know, running a grocery store is not the most lucrative thing. These companies have refined their supply chains for, for years and decades. Uh, they have all the incentive in the world to run those as efficiently as possible because when you have multiple grocery stores in an area, if you try to overcharge, your competitor's gonna come in and say, well, you're, you're We're going to charge six bucks for Doritos. They're all under pressure. It's, you know, all the food that goes to, it's very logistically challenging to run a grocery store. A lot of those obviously have have quick turnover times in terms of their expiration.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  You need a lot of employees, which is more expensive in this labor environment. It's a very challenging business. I'm not very optimistic that they're going to come in and just miraculously run this cheaper than than all the commercial operators. I think like most things today, like you mentioned, the cost overruns on like, you know, Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Arizona. I think these are going to come in with cost overruns, just like almost that, even even in the private sector, that would happen, let alone, you know, them doing it.

• 1:03:44Patrick Bet-David?

  You're foreseeing seeing more of this stuff happening?

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Well, I see New York continuing with their path, probably getting some of these stores online. We'll see how long it takes. As the data comes in, I I'm not optimistic that a lot of others are going to want to copy that because unless they just run at massive losses and therefore subsidize food, it just doesn't, it's not, it's not really fundamentally addressing the the issue, in my, in my opinion.

• 1:04:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Tom?

• 1:04:07Tom Ellsworth?

  Look, say what you will about SNAP. SNAP, the problem with SNAP is we didn't regulate who received it and the wrong people received it that didn't really need it. SNAP is a subsidy so you can buy groceries. It would be far cheaper to have a very tightly controlled, fraud-filtered SNAP program to let people who are in challenging economic situations have a subsidy and just go into Costco than it would be to do this. This is, this is going to be a disaster. Ladies and gentlemen, Mandami's rail. There it is. You know, you've got, you know, Gavin Newsom standing under the bridge of a partially-built

• 1:04:51Tom Ellsworth?

  rail that's 100, that that looks like the price of oil last week, 128, 127, 131, 141. It's just going up and up and up on overruns and and it's billions. This is going to be Mandami's rail. We're going to go back and look at this and somebody is going to put the real dollars out to build all these. And as Lynn has correctly pointed out, government doesn't do this without overruns. It's just going to happen. You've got contractors take advantage of government. There's all these things are going to happen. This is gonna be a disaster. It's gonna look back and they're gonna close it and they're saying- I can't wait for that. Wait, maybe they should just- I'm so glad they're doing this. You know what I mean, Pat? Yeah. We have SNAP at the federal level. Yeah.

• 1:05:32Tom Ellsworth?

  We have SNAP. We just need to put a tighter collar on SNAP so it doesn't get defrauded. So that the people that really need some economic assistance, maybe can get it. And they can go to Costco and they can get food and, and live. But trying to do it this way, oh, capitalism didn't work and there's too many poor people? Government will do it? Oh, yeah. That's, you know what? It's all the memes on, uh, on Twitter where the guy flips out the folding chair and says, "Here we go," or the guy walks up with the popcorn. We have those memes everywhere. Guess what? Here they come.

• 1:06:05Speaker 06

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• 1:06:34Speaker 07

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• 1:07:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, the, I mean, this is the, the way that it goes. It's the journey that the middle class goes on when it goes from being the middle class to you get inflation, bad inflation, then the middle class becomes the lower class. Then they get socialist because a lot of people don't understand what's actually happening. And then somebody comes along, gives the nice sounding message of, "Oh, you're being ripped off by, you know, greedy business owners. Don't worry, I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna make things free and make things fair." And, you know, a lot of people buy that because a lot of people don't understand what's happening. So, I mean, New York's a small case study of that. California, in other ways, is a case study of that. But, uh, yeah, I know, um, we're talking about anticipating somebody crazy becoming the president because of that type of situation. I think that's what this, um, cost of living situation is gonna facilitate potentially. Right, so that's the scary thing and then people never end up understanding what's actually

• 1:07:50Speaker 08

  happening. That's the unfortunate part, you know, like eighty percent of the population will never understand why it's actually happening, why things are getting unaffordable and, you know, the impact of things like this, which is gonna make things more expensive.

• 1:08:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I mean, listen though, I'm telling you right now, this is why I say, the chances in my eyes, if this continues, and AOC is a bigger chance of winning in 2028 if affordability becomes a top issue, because she's going to hit this nonstop, and she has more credibility in this topic, at least she's been honest with this for her career. She is a socialist, some would call her communist, I don't know if she's a full-blown communist, I think she is a socialist, true and, you know, through and through, but, you know, this topic won't be going away. Let me get to the next one here, which is very interesting. Will gold

• 1:08:40Patrick Bet-David?

  reach 6,000 this year? Top three prediction about gold prices, okay? So, one, gold will surpass 6,000 this year, I think that is by JP Morgan Chase, they're assuming that gold will hit $6,300 in 2026. Of course, it's been very volatile, Rob, can you find out what it is right now, exactly right now, what's gold prices as you're going through? So what drives gold prices? Inflation is one, the change in prices, according to Yahoo Finance, goods and services, one of the most significant drivers for gold prices, instability, geopolitical issues affect gold rates, even like wars, higher tariffs, trade disputes can trigger surge in gold prices, economic uncertainty, recession, stock market fluctuations,

• 1:09:24Patrick Bet-David?

  and higher unemployment. And while we're going through this and we're looking at these numbers, more stuff came out, I want to kind of read this to you, because, you know, to find out what percentage of Americans own gold, I was surprised by the number. Gold rose 64% in 2025, one of the greatest single-year performances for any major asset class, it set 53 new all-time highs in 2025, surpassed 5,000 in central bank holdings, the annual price of gold in 2025 was at 4.31. Up forty-three percent right now. I think it's at forty-eight, forty-nine. The high it hit was fifty-four, nineteen.

• 1:10:02Patrick Bet-David?

  A fourteen percent drop in three days is what it had recently. JP Morgan said it's gonna hit sixty-three hundred dollars. UBS says sixty-two hundred dollars. Deutsche Bank says six thousand. Morgan Stanley says fifty-seven hundred. Goldman Sachs is fifty-four hundred as you're looking into this. And only ten point eight percent of the US population currently invest in physical gold, bars, billions and coins versus sixty-two percent who own stocks. Do you think it's gonna hit six thousand this year?

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  That's a little bit above my base case, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did. I mean, I've been structurally bullish on gold since twenty eighteen. But even as a bull, I would not have guessed we would have seen five thousand as quickly as we did. I think this consolidation's been healthy. I started getting pretty nervous when it's going vertical, even as a bull. There's a number of factors here. You know, I'm not as bullish at these levels as I was when, you know, gold had a one in front of it, you know, the thirteen hundred, fifteen hundred back then. But I don't view it as a bubble currently because I think what we've basically gone, if you've gone from structurally undervalued to right about a level that makes sense. I mean, it can grind higher from here. I wouldn't be surprised if it cracks a little bit, but I think it's more reasonably valued now. And there's a number of factors. One is when you print a ton of money,

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  it finds its way eventually into the kind of the scariest assets. Like I mentioned before, some things were way better at making the supply of when there's a big mismatch. With gold, almost no matter what price it goes to, overall production doesn't really grow by more than like two percent a year, based on most estimates compared to the amount of refined gold we have. So you can pour a lot of money into it and that supply angle's still very, very slow to change. And two, we have seen over time more and more kind of central bank interest in gold. We had this long period where they were, for decades, they were buying less gold, more treasuries. We started to see that kind of bottom out. And while they're not, you know, they're not like going out there rapidly selling the treasuries, but around the margins, they're saying, instead of adding to my reserves and treasuries, I'm gonna add some tonnage of gold because that's money they can hold in their own jurisdiction.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  It can't be, you know, frozen or sanctioned with the stroke of a pen. It's got that inherent debasement protection. You know, they don't want to have T-bills earning four percent when, you know, money supply is growing at a much higher rate than that. They'd rather have gold, at least as a higher percentage than they did at the bottom. So I think, yeah, there's a structural bid. And I think it's gonna grind higher over time. You know, six thousand's a little bit above my estimate, but it can always move faster than people think.

• 1:12:23Tom Ellsworth?

  Well, as you know, I'm not a deep gold guy like a Peter Schiff. I recognize it as an inflation hedge, but what I look at is, I look at, why are people putting the estimates? I don't just look at the headline numbers which get put out there for people to snack on. I really read into them. And JP Morgan made a very, very compelling case that Lynn just kind of touched on, on one of her subpoints here. And that is, central banks buying creates demand for the scarce asset, and that's going to drive the price. Because central banks tend to be more long focused, so they're not as sensitive to the inflation of price that they're creating by their demand as maybe the others in the

• 1:13:05Tom Ellsworth?

  market would be that are, you know, short-term trades in and out. So if central banks go to gold because of the dollar and the euro and, you know, global currencies, you know, having issue and uncertainties in the economies that support those, then I could see it, I could see it going to 6,000. But if it goes to 6,000, I don't like what the rest of the economy and the rest of the world looks like. If it goes to 6,000, because I would assume that central banks are reacting to a difficult situation. But I'm not as structurally deep on gold as she or Peter Schiff.

• 1:13:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think a lot of it too is that they just classified gold as tier one capital. The only other thing aside from treasuries, it was treasuries for a while, so central banks have been collecting it for that reason. I think China's been hoarding a lot of it too because they're trying to make a move as the next reserve currency. I don't think that that's possible because I don't think people would trust them enough for that. But, you know, with all the economic instability, the question of the dollar and the petrodollar thing that's being put in question too, I don't think it's a coincidence that this started happening when the tariffs were going into effect, when we started having problems in the Middle East. And when it happens, it happens fast because there's such a small amount of gold in the world that, you know, just the sheer narrative of it going up fast creates the reinforcing effect of it.

• 1:14:25Speaker 08

  But, I mean, the M2 money supply grows like 8% every year, so I think that's, like, however much the M2 money supply has grown since we got off the gold standard, like, that's probably where gold should be. Which is much higher than it is right now.

• 1:14:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Even much higher, so you're thinking higher even more than 6,000?

• 1:14:41Speaker 08

  If we were to match it up to like the amount of money that's been put into the economy, it's probably higher than it is today by a lot, but that would be unstable.

• 1:14:48Patrick Bet-David?

  This is an interesting poll. Rob ran a poll. Where are the majority of your investments? Gold, silver, crypto stocks? You know what percentage is gold?

• 1:14:57Speaker 08

  10.

• 1:14:57Patrick Bet-David?

  14%.

• 1:15:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Excuse me. 8% silver, 16% crypto, 62% stock. So some people majority is crypto and gold. Silver's the lowest. It's interesting. It's interesting seeing what's going on with some of the people out there when it comes down to that much in gold. I have gold. I have hard asset gold. Like I like the bars. I like having that set aside and every... You'll pick a few up and set it aside and you don't know what's gonna happen purely long-term. If you're doing short-term investments, you want to time the market, it's the wrong investment. You're buying gold the similar way you buy life insurance.

• 1:15:35Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:15:35Patrick Bet-David?

  It's a different kind of an asset you're picking up. All right, let me get to the next story here. Next story I want to get to... I got a couple of directions to go to, but I'm gonna go to this one here. Sam Altman's attack, suspect charged with attempted murder. This is Wall Street Journal story that comes out. Rob, I think you have a video on it. So if you want to go to the video first, then I'll read the rest of the stuff. I think this 20-year-old Daniel Moreno Gama was carrying an anti-AI document that included the names and addresses of apparent board members and chief executives. Is this the clip, Rob? Yes, sir. Go for it.

• 1:16:08Speaker 13

  Suspect who prosecutors say was trying to kill OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The suspect, they say, threw a Molotov cocktail at his home. That suspect is currently in custody facing a list of charges. Brooke Taylor is live on the ground outside the suspect's home in Spring, Texas. That's a suburban community just north of Houston. Brooke.

• 1:16:33Speaker 14

  Hi Harris, well Fox News exclusively here right now as FBI agents literally just swarmed the home of that 20-year-old suspect accused of trying to kill the CEO of OpenAI by throwing a Molotov cocktail at his house. Now we have the Harris County Sheriff's Office here and again the FBI. I want to say over a dozen federal agents and law enforcement officers, you could see his garage is open here. Now sources tell me the suspect was driven by strong anti-AI views and he was arrested in San Francisco carrying a document that he

• 1:17:12Speaker 14

  wrote attacking AI. That document is a three-part series and includes a list of names and addresses of other AI CEOs and investors.

• 1:17:23Patrick Bet-David?

  So by the way, when you're hearing this, got 20 years old, two counts of attempted murder, he's going to face 5 plus to 20 years mandatory minimum at 3:37 a.m. Friday, the time he allegedly threw, lit a Molotov cocktail-style incendiary device at Altman San Francisco home, igniting a fire at the exterior gate, three miles the distance. He then walked from Altman's home to OpenAI headquarters where he retrieved a chair and smashed glass doors, then told security guards he'd come to burn it down and kill anyone inside, found on Marano Gamma at arrest incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, a blue lighter, a handwritten AI document described by the FBI. The FBI raided his home, potential domestic terrorism

• 1:18:07Patrick Bet-David?

  charges. U.S. Attorney Kirk Misakian stated that if investigations show the attack were executed to change policy or coerce officials, federal prosecutors will treat them as domestic terrorism. Tom, your thoughts on this?

• 1:18:18Tom Ellsworth?

  So here we go. You have somebody that has a bit of a screw loose and a vendetta, and then you get this. And You've got, you know, low tech, you know, a Molotov cocktail is basically gasoline in a jar with a lid on it and some sort of a, you know, a fuse or a flame. And so it doesn't take much to be a domestic terrorist. And I think you've got a lot of people out here where, and I'm just leaving out the whole trans discussion because so many of these young men have been trans and had mental issues, you know, perhaps, you know, interrelated to that. I'm talking about you have men that are troubled, that are reaching out to lash out and, you

• 1:19:03Tom Ellsworth?

  know, believing that to go out and commit murder, you know, it's kind of like Luigi and United Healthcare. It's like, you know, what led you to be so upset and so compelled and so touched that you could go out and commit something like this? I think it's, I think it's part of a wider issue. What do you think?

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a tragedy, obviously. I haven't dived into that person's specific issues. But yeah, the broader trend, as we have more kind of wealth concentration, as we have more of this polarization that's happening, unfortunately, these things are likely to increase. People generally feel the social contract's broken, they don't, and then, you know, mental health issues kind of take over. You know, and so I think security's going to be a really big factor. I mean, that's kind of, living in a polarized economy makes everyone feel unsafe, ironically, even those that are benefiting from it. Because what is, what is wealth if you just have trouble being safe and moving around? There were some statistics a while back that are still true even before this whole kind of current AI wave, which is that young men in particular, basically men in their young

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  twenties, they were some of the most dislocated from employment at the current time, generally speaking.

• 1:20:13Tom Ellsworth?

  Dislocated?

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that they're the, although we have overall pretty low unemployment levels, it was young men in particular that were, that were kind of becoming a more problem area, where there's this pocket of unemployment showing up. It's not really affecting young women, it's not really affecting older men, but that pocket of, of young men was kind of impacted. That's where some of these issues are forming.

• 1:20:34Speaker 08

  You know what I would call it? I'd call it like the Joker mindset. Remember that nasty Joaquin Phoenix Joker?

• 1:20:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Hated the movie.

• 1:20:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, terrible message. But that's what, that's what this is though. Like this guy Luigi Mangione, they have that the victim nasty mindset where it's like somebody's oppressing them and they need to like be the hero and take somebody out because of that. But I mean, that's what I think of when I think of.

• 1:20:56Patrick Bet-David?

  But do you think it's them or do you think it's the teachers?

• 1:21:00Speaker 08

  Oh.

• 1:21:00Patrick Bet-David?

  The society, streamers that are injecting that hate in them for them to want to take action like this? What, what, what do you think it is?

• 1:21:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, I definitely think that um, you have guys, I guess, uh, who are like unexceptional guys have like a tougher time. Like especially with being influenced by certain things in society, especially if they're dealing with pain. So I think that there are people in certain situations are like more susceptible to being influenced like that. And like if they get enough of like a nasty hateful message, then they could be influenced to do something like that. So yeah, definitely society, but then it's certain people are more susceptible to it than others.

• 1:21:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I mean, you know what is a big business right now? Executive protection. It's a very big business right now. Guys are spending money on executive protection like never before because they're seeing stuff like this, like, look, I gotta protect myself. So they're setting aside a cost. Just look at this guy. Look at him. Walks up with a chair, throws it against the glass. Say he's gonna kill anyone he sees inside. Now, he looks like he's five, three, so I think it's gonna be hard because you know, he's, he's gonna need some stuff to. Is this guy really 20 years old?

• 1:22:01Speaker 08

  He looks like he's nine.

• 1:22:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, he looks, he looks and he needs to do some legs.

• 1:22:09Tom Ellsworth?

  Well, you know, you've, we've spoken to Prof. G. Galloway. Yeah. And he has written some very insightful um, articles on the state, state of men in society. And when you have isolation, indoctrination in the school, you know, all these people are bad, you're a victim, you're a victim, you're a victim. And then you have isolation. Through what Galloway correctly points out is a lack of dating and it's not just about guys going out getting laid, but it's a lack of natural relationships being formed with other people. And then economic desperation, they feel economic desperation.

• 1:22:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep.

• 1:22:50Tom Ellsworth?

  You take indoctrination, isolation, economic desperation, you know what you get? This guy. And, you know, we could do a longer podcast with people like Galloway and others and just talk about this, along with the FBI profiler that, that you talk with Pat, you know, this is what aims the gun, this is what pulls the trigger, this is, you know, there's a sequencing.

• 1:23:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep. Genetics loads the gun, personality aims the gun, experiences pulls the trigger, life experiences. So what do we know about this kid? What do we know about his parents upbringing? What facts do we have on him? Well, you know, who is he? What does his mom do? What does his dad do? What do we know about this guy? Is there anything we know about the guy? Cause the reports so far, I'm not seeing anything that's telling me what this guy's all about. Did he go to a specific school? Is he a UC Berkeley guy? You know?

• 1:23:43Tom Ellsworth?

  There's indoctrination, if it was that.

• 1:23:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, I mean, I'd want to know, you know, what, what other things are tied to somebody like this to get to this point and make a decision like this. Okay, let me get to the next story here and then we'll wrap up here fairly soon. Let me get to the next one. Okay. We already talked about this, but I'm going to get to it anyways. Anxious parents are spending $50,000 to land their kids a job. Okay. Landing your kids a job, spending $50,000. Uh, let's talk about it, career wise. So business is a brisk for coaches like Beth. Is this, is this the coach, Rob, or what is this video? No, this is a Bloomberg video about this. About this, go for it.

• 1:24:25Speaker 06

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:24:54Speaker 07

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:25:24Speaker 15

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• 1:25:55Speaker 16

  It's tough out there for the class of 2026. Hiring has slowed overall, and companies have pulled back on entry-level hiring as AI takes on more tasks, leaving many recent graduates stuck in their parents' basements. How to avert that fate? The answer for many parents is to hire their kid a career coach, years before they even have a career. Most of these packages run a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, things like application strategies, interview prep, that kind of thing. But some coaches charge upwards of $50,000 for intensive support and subject matter expertise. For coaches, business is booming. In 2019, about 5% of career coaches focused primarily on college students or new grads, according to the International Association of Career Coaches.

• 1:26:39Speaker 16

  More than a quarter now consider that group a core segment, according to its latest surveys. For parents who have already spent years paying for SAT tutors and college admissions consultants to get their kid into school, these services feel like a natural extension. And for those that are paying six figures for tuition, a few thousand for coaching can feel like a rational investment if it helps their kid land that first job.

• 1:27:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Can you pause? Is this a, is this an AI video or is this real, Rob? This is real. This is from Bloomberg News. Tom?

• 1:27:09Tom Ellsworth?

  Oh, my gosh. Where's my bong? Oh, my gosh.

• 1:27:13Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you process this?

• 1:27:14Tom Ellsworth?

  I'll tell you how I process this. You know what? They're connecting dots here that are being intentionally, I think, warped. And I'm not saying that about this particular writer, but I don't think there's correct interpretation here. When you enable your kids and you let them grow up in a limited consequence, like Special Olympics, and I'm not criticizing children, the sweet children of Special Olympics. I volunteered there. I am not besmirching them. But when you take that attitude that everybody gets a medal, and I'm going to prevent you from failure by giving things to you, you end up at the end with a kid that doesn't have the life skills. And where are the parents in all this? You know what? This reminded me up.

• 1:27:58Tom Ellsworth?

  Remember Operation Varsity Blues? It happened in 2019. Thirty-three parents took $25 million to bribe their way to get their kids into USC and other schools. And there was a lot of celebrities, the most famous, what I think was William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman, that ended up doing time and to falsify scores, bribe coaches to say, "Oh, I need this kid to be a scholarship there." And so, parents are now, it's all coming home to roost, Pat. If you are going to be a parent that doesn't seek to get your kid fully prepared for life, get ready to keep writing checks.

• 1:28:39Tom Ellsworth?

  And by the way, she says, "Well, after the tuition that they paid for, you know, $50,000 more doesn't seem like such a crazy example." What did you pay tuition on? Did you get a liberal arts degree in something, you know, unusable, like European art history? Or did you get an English degree and say, "The child wants to be a teacher," or something? Not all degrees have to be stemmed to be really useful for jobs. But I just get revved up, Pat, because I feel like, where are the parents? Why aren't you equipping your kids to be ready to go out there? And it may be a tough job market, yes, and you may have to go to New York or somewhere else for the job compared to your hometown or where your school is.

• 1:29:20Tom Ellsworth?

  But, good lord, you know, paying a coach to instill the things that already should be instilled, it just flips me out. And it kind of reminds me of all those imprisoned parents on Operation Varsity Blues that had to pay their kids' way into school because they weren't ready to get in the regular way. Earn it.

• 1:29:38Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think?

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  I graduated college during the global financial crisis. So I was, I was looking for jobs at that time.

• 1:29:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Where'd you go to? Where were you?

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Uh, Penn State.

• 1:29:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Really?

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Sick.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  And then I had to, I had to.

• 1:29:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Happy Valley. What year was it?

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  Uh, that, I graduated in 2010.

• 1:29:52Patrick Bet-David?

  So you were there when the culture was going through the mess?

• 1:29:54Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:29:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow. Was it a strange time to be?

• 1:29:56Speaker 03

  It was a strange time.

• 1:29:57Patrick Bet-David?

  My God.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it really, it really changed culture there. But the, the point is, I mean, I was in that kind of group that just had to grind for everything. Um, and we see everything from kind of like the, the, some of these like really elite childcare centers that have like lower acceptance rates than like Harvard, for example, that are super expensive. And then going all the way up to tutors, going all the way up to now like these, these coaches. It, it's just part of this very complex, you know, kind of way to spend money. Um, and I, I mean, right now, obviously the catalyst is AI has come in. We, we don't see like mass layoffs or anything. Obviously some companies report layoffs, but in general, companies are slower to hire because it's, let's figure out first how we can do more with less before we just bring on more people.

• 1:30:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  Uh, and so whenever you have a rapid tech change like that, there are these people that have a lot of student debt. They, they invested in a, in a, a degree that'll give them a, a historically what has been a pretty lucrative white collar job. And now AI comes along and says, well, maybe we only need half as many people doing that job because each one, uh, has all this support from AI going forward. And how can we optimize for that? So I think part of it is just this rough transition that's happening. Uh, but then, you know, some of it goes back to that other factor that when you have that kind of widening wealth divide, people will invest almost anything to try to, try to get to the higher end. Uh, and it doesn't always pay off. I mean, if anything, like, like Tom pointed out, sometimes it can be, it can, you know, come back and hurt you. I think obviously there, there are pockets of time where getting a tutor or getting a coach can fix a problem.

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  Um, but nothing really beats just, just grinding and, you know, having that motivation. And part of what motivated me at that age was I, I came from a very poor family. So, uh, you know, everything was on me. It was like there's, the fact that there was no safety net.

• 1:31:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  Uh, I grew up, uh, around Philadelphia. Uh, you know, when I was young, I was actually homeless for a little while. And then I grew up in a trailer park. So I, I kind of had this no safety net. It's kind of like in, in Dark Knight Riser where you have to make the jump without the rope. Obviously not that.

• 1:31:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Favorite scene.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Not that extreme, but it was a similar situation.

• 1:31:47Patrick Bet-David?

  What did mom and dad do?

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  Uh, my mom, uh, I mean, she had challenging issues. My dad was a cop for a long time, was a detective, and then he worked in a, uh, an alcohol rehab center. He was a, uh, first helping people detox and then managing a lot of it. Um, and, you know, he, he was a elderly, single father when I was, uh, uh, he, he raised me by himself at that point, so, um.

• 1:32:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Your father raised you? Your mom was in the picture?

• 1:32:11Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, after age seven, yeah.

• 1:32:12Patrick Bet-David?

  How, uh, uh, siblings?

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  I have, uh, my father has siblings from an older marriage. They're all old enough that they could be my parents. I have four half siblings.

• 1:32:21Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 1:32:21Speaker 03

  So effectively a single child. Um, but yeah, the, the whole point of that is that, you know, a lot of times the strongest motivator is need. Uh, sometimes all these other things are bandages, uh, where students just either not super motivated, uh, not grinding, uh, at the age that they're able to grind. Um, but, you know, I'm not a sociologist. It's not my, my area of focus, other than just relying on personal experience and seeing some of these inflated numbers. It's actually, we've seen some of similar dynamics out in East Asia, where they're obviously a very hyper competitive, uh, you know, market, uh, and you'll have a lot of parents really push their kids super hard, uh, to, to a way that even gets unhealthy at times because...

• 1:33:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I agree. I thi- I think there's a part of it, Tom, that, that my, my thoughts are, are different. What I would say to you is, I think any parent who wants to find a way to get their kids perform better in school, automatically you. I think any parent, and I'll tell you why. I think there's, I think this money is actually good money spent if the coach is the right coach. I, I watched Tom with his daughters. Your, your daughter got a 1560 on her SATs. She got 1530, no, 1530 on her SATs. Am I saying it correctly, or 1560?

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  1560.

• 1:33:34Patrick Bet-David?

  1560. By the way, she had a 1515 the first time, and they were like, "Yeah, we gotta go improve the score." I'm like, "What the hell are you talking about? Okay, 1515, you wanna, yeah, we gotta improve the score. I think we can do better." And then she goes and takes it. I don't know where we were when we got the score. We were somewhere in the world. We were celebrating.

• 1:33:53Speaker 03

  We were in Bermuda.

• 1:33:53Patrick Bet-David?

  We were in Bermuda. And then the, the, his youngest daughter's got a 5.12 GPA. By the way... Do you think it's worth to know how they raise their kids that gets them to perform the way that they do? Probably. And then if you're going through college planning, like right now, if your kid wants to play professional soccer one day, and finding out the route to go through IMG, to go through university, to go through MLS, to go through premier. I think that's a business model. I think that, I think there's a lot of value to that. I think for somebody that doesn't make those investments for the right people. I, I, I actually would be the one, I, for my career, I've, I've paid for people to go and ask these types of questions.

• 1:34:36Patrick Bet-David?

  I've paid so much money for my sons for their career with soccer, with sports, with politics. Cause I want to find out what do you want to pursue. So number one is what is a kid most interested in? What are their talents that they naturally are interested in? And then from there, pursuing it and getting hacks and strategies from different people. I'll never forget, first time I was 29 years old, Tom and I met at a restaurant in Topanga called Black Angus. Which by far the worst name for a restaurant in the history of mankind. And he told me, you should go do an executive health testing. So what are you talking about? He says, it's one day you go, you meet eight doctors and they check everything on you. So you're serious? He says, yes. So how much does it cost? I don't know what it was at the time, four, five, $6,000 UCLA, I went to it.

• 1:35:19Patrick Bet-David?

  And you literally, a nurse comes at six o'clock and she texts you, takes you, you get your eyes checked out. Heart, cancer, skin, throat, everything, one day. I said, I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how many times I've done this. And then they give you a book. Yeah, so you, that is the benefit of having consultants that are proven track record. Like if you want to find out somebody that's raised $2.2 billion in his career and sold a business for $680 million. How valuable is that to you? That's Tom Helsworth. So, so to me, I don't know, I, you know, I, I, if somebody's kid right now wants to get a national security major, a bachelor's and a master's, I would say, go ask this guy to see if it's worth doing it or not, because now he's in business. He may give you better feedback.

• 1:36:04Patrick Bet-David?

  We can't be cheap on advice. I'm not. I'm actually gonna support it. I just saw that commercial. The way they put it was a little bit of a weird commercial. And I'll get to this last one. We'll wrap up. The average cost of raising a kid right now is $300,000. We saw the numbers. The average cost of raising a kid right now is $300,000. Okay? And it used to be a lot less, apparently, according to the story. So, Rob, if you want to play this clip, go for it.

• 1:36:28Speaker 17

  It's expensive to raise a child.

• 1:36:30Speaker 18

  How expensive?

• 1:36:30Speaker 17

  It's gone up 30%, actually, nearly 30% over the past three years. It costs more than $300,000 to raise a child in the United States nowadays.

• 1:36:41Speaker 18

  So, apparently, it's all about where you live. And the most expensive places are Hawaii, Maryland, and Massachusetts. Of course, the South, you get a break. $17,000 in Mississippi, Alabama, 18,000, and South Dakota, 18,000.

• 1:36:58Speaker 17

  So, that's over the course of 18 years, right?

• 1:37:00Speaker 18

  Correct. For the first five years.

• 1:37:01Speaker 19

  Right. But since 2023, they say the cost of raising a kid is up 27%. So, just so you know, just keep track. They will pay you back, right? If you just keep that invoice.

• 1:37:11Speaker 18

  Do y'all think that most of this, though, is coming from the childcare costs that is impacting?

• 1:37:17Speaker 17

  Gosh, everything is so expensive.

• 1:37:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Go back to that number. Hawaii was 40K a year.

• 1:37:23Speaker 17

  Is no longer you buying things.

• 1:37:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Go back a little bit. Hawaii was 40K a year, Maryland 36, Massachusetts 34. And the lowest is what? South Dakota? That's what? 18,000 first five years? This is the first five years that they're saying the cost is. 40K. So, first five years, $200,000 if you want to raise them in Hawaii. Tom, what do you think about this when you see these numbers?

• 1:37:44Tom Ellsworth?

  I think that we've got a definite crisis in America that is one of the most joyful things you can have in life is having a child. And as I like to say, you want to raise them and watch the flower bloom. And I don't put weights on the shoulders of my girls. I told them, I said, "Look, if you do good and you work hard, you can have the choices in life. If you want to choose any university, then you gotta go get your SAT and you gotta have things." And I put it in terms of choice, not in terms of, you know, "Your grandpa was a doctor, I'm a doctor, you're gonna be a doctor." I don't put that weight on my kids. Some people do, you know, tiger moms and things like that, which we're not.

• 1:38:27Tom Ellsworth?

  But when I see this, you know, it makes me sad. Because one of the most wonderful things in life is to have a child. It's the one thing that a very good friend of mine said, that when you're, just when you're really, really good at it, they all go to school and they wish you had had more kids. Because you get really good at it after the first one or first two, like raising them. And then you wish that you had just, you know, kinda had a bigger family. And I think it's tragic that it costs this much. And most of the first five years is not medical. Most of the first five years cost apparently is in daycare. Because the assumption is that mom and dad both work. So really what they should be talking is the daycare cost to raise a kid. Incremental daycare cost.

• 1:39:12Tom Ellsworth?

  Because diapers and everything else are gonna be nominal. Because the price of diapers in Hawaii is marginally higher than Los Angeles, Pat. But at Costco, they're very close. So there are regional differences, the food and clothing. But they're not huge. Instead, this is really the daycare cost. And so how do you get the daycare down so that the parents can have the child, get proper care for them before they go to school? That's what I sit there as an entrepreneur saying. How do you figure that part out?

• 1:39:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Lynn?

• 1:39:43Speaker 03

  So some of it is going back a long time, a lot of it's structural. You know, the historical arrangement is you kinda have these more multi-generational families, where the grandparents can help more directly with all that experience that they get from the prior generation. And in the, for decades now, in the US environment, people move for jobs. They end up kinda isolated. And so a lot of it has to go into... To expense as you have two income households with no parents or no grandparents around like the the parents' parents. The only option is childcare, which is extraordinarily expensive, and it's only getting more expensive over time. And so a lot of that is that, you know, over over the course of many years, especially as these kind of economic pressures continue, all this stuff we talked about with housing, all the stuff we talked about how expensive

• 1:40:26Speaker 03

  it is to raise a kid, you'll probably see a gradual shift a little bit more toward that multi-generational house for largely from economic reasons. The more optimistic side of that is that as, you know, remote work from home or kind of remote work or just kind of like flexible working environments can allow some of these more customizable options to kind of, you know, allow someone to work while also keeping an eye on the kids. But there's no doubt about it. I mean, that's a very challenging structural problem. It's it's an issue in the US, but it's also an issue globally.

• 1:40:55Speaker 06

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:41:25Speaker 07

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:41:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, childcare is interesting. And I mean, you guys are totally right that that's the biggest expense with it. But I mean, it's fascinating that there's such a huge supply of it and there's not childcare facilities popping up left and right if there's like infinite supply and very scarce demand. I think it's a tough thing with margins because it's kind of restricted on how many kids you could watch based on how many people are there as caretakers. And then it's like regulated, but maybe with technology, there'd be some loosening up with that. I mean, that's that's definitely the biggest thing with that is um, the scalability of it.

• 1:42:25Patrick Bet-David?

  You know, you know, it's crazy with With life, like, for me, when I see what's going on right now with the youth, nothing is more important to me than making sure the youth grows up, having a chance to have their dreams become a reality, whatever that may be, whatever you want to do. If one of my kids wants to go in the military, guess what? I'm supporting you if you want to go in the military. If one of my kids wants to play sports, go into business, go into sales, start a bakery, do whatever you want to do, I'm going to support you. Of course, you want to encourage them to get in the right direction. You're going to give your feedback, here's what I suggest, consider this, consider that. But I remember when nothing was going right for me financially, and it's interesting when you're sharing your story. Typically, it's the other way around, right?

• 1:43:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Mom raises, dad's not in the picture. And dad's in the picture, not mom. And, and I'm working on a book right now with fatherhood, because, you know, eventually the publisher got me to be thinking about it for the last five, six years. I'm like, you know what, I'll think about it. I put thirty, forty pages of notes, and so interesting. Seeing the data of what not having a mother does to a young boy, or a young girl, the impact of it versus not a father being in the picture. It has very different reactions, right? And everybody has their own stories of what they're going through. You, you don't, you, you don't have any, we had, we had a guy in our church, Tom, if you remember this guy, we had a guy in our church,

• 1:43:50Patrick Bet-David?

  who, his testimony was, you can say his first name, I don't remember the whole thing. He was raised to lesbian mothers, and he became a pastor. You can say his first name.

• 1:44:03Tom Ellsworth?

  Oh yeah, because he wrote a book, his name is Caleb, and we can say his whole name. He wrote a book that bioted, he wrote a book called Messy Grace, and it's Pastor Caleb Coltonback.

• 1:44:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, nice, nice guy, funny guy, edgy, little bit awkward, but he would, he was a great storyteller. This guy right here, Messy Grace, and he's a pastor now. And he had lesbian parents growing up. You, you're not, that's not your fault. You, you were, you were born in a family that you were born in, and it is what it is. And you, from there, you got to figure out a way to make it work, you know? But I remember coming up, thinking to myself, man, what am I going to do? What's going to happen with me? Do I have a shot? Do I just go back in the military and do twenty years? I don't know. But for me, the one thing that was a saving grace for me till today, as crazy as it sounds, you know what book is sitting on his desk right now? It's called what? Selling Microsoft. So I still...

• 1:44:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Order books that are older books. This is a book written by a guy. I'm not recommending it. You're not gonna be able to find it because it's not published anymore. No, literally, you only buy them used. It's called Selling Microsoft. You know what was my saving grace? Reading books. I'm like, man, I gotta find a skill set. I gotta find, I didn't have, I didn't go to Penn State, so I didn't have the grades you had. You seem like you're brilliant. When I'm listening to you speak, you guys, Tom as well, Tom went to a CSUN and he got his MBA and eventually became an adjunct professor at Pepperdine and Biola, a couple of different places, yes. So, but for me, it was, I'm gonna put my head down. There was so much negativity around. I said, I'm gonna pick up books and that's gonna be my edge. And every time I read books, I'm like, man, what if I tried this?

• 1:45:42Patrick Bet-David?

  And you know what? I wasn't good in sales. I'm gonna, I'm gonna sell like this and negotiate. I'm gonna go learn, I'm gonna become mentally tough. I'm gonna become emotionally tough. I'm gonna start a business. I'm gonna do this. And then next thing you know, the rest is history. So, because eventually, we do have to get to a point where our youth believe that their dreams can become a reality. Getting married, having kids, putting them in schools, if public or private, buying a house, traveling the world, enjoying the small things in life. And I'm not talking about being a millionaire or a billionaire and any of that stuff. Just being able to live a good life where you feel you're bringing value and experience what it's like to have a child that calls you mommy, that calls you daddy.

• 1:46:25Patrick Bet-David?

  There's something very special about the juice of life. And naturally, for me, I am always optimistic about the future. Guy asked me a question. He says, did you really tell your ACL? I said, yeah. Why are you walking, running, not having the crutches and not complaining about it? I said, my entire life, I've been telling people to stop bitching and making excuses and feel sorry for yourself. I'm not gonna start feeling sorry for myself right now. Indeed. It is what it is. I gotta go out there and figure it out. And we got the surgery scheduled and I gotta go get it done. And the right doctors are out there. There's so much advancement and everything that's going on. But at the end of the day, if you, if you join the community of being a victim and feeling sorry for yourself and making excuses, just so you know, that is a massive community. You're gonna make a lot of friends that are gonna agree with you.

• 1:47:10Patrick Bet-David?

  And they're gonna say, me too. It's unfair. It's all this person's fault and that person's fault and the government and the pa, pa, pa, pa, pa. But if you can find that smaller minority community of people that don't want to make excuses that makes you a little bit uncomfortable, challenge you a little bit, you're kind of like, "Man, I feel like I gotta do more." And if you can hang around that community long enough, then eventually, good things can happen in your life as well. Lynn?

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  One optimistic thing I would add is that, obviously, the topic of AI is concerning a lot of people today. We even had that story about the person attacking the AI CEO.

• 1:47:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Altman?

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, Altman. But the doomerism aspect is all it's going to steal all their jobs. Whereas, the optimistic aspect is that as it makes us way more productive in a lot of things, it kind of reduces the complexity and the cost of multiple services, it frees up labor. Like, you mentioned the supply and demand mismatch of childcare. If there's all this demand for, there's these low acceptance rates, why aren't we bringing on more supply? And part of it is that as technology frees us up from certain types of work, obviously, raising children is a very human type of work to be doing. It's something, we want some of our best people doing it. And so, I think that over time, that's the optimistic side of technology, that it can reduce a lot of the burdens and allow us to shift more

• 1:48:27Speaker 03

  resources to things that are, one, hard to automate, two, we wouldn't really want to automate, and three, that we freed ourselves up to put more resources there.

• 1:48:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, great feedback there. I'm with you. And by the way, for those of you guys that want to learn more about Lynn, we have Lynn's latest book here, Broken Money: Why Our Financial System Is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better. Click on the link below. Support Lynn's book. Over 2,000 reviews. I highly recommend you go, if you enjoy the things that Lynn had to say, we're going to put the link below. If you don't mind signing that for me as well, that'd be great. Lynn, again, thank you for your time. Thanks for coming out here. Amazing to get your perspective.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  Thanks, Adam.

• 1:49:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Everybody, tomorrow, we have a podcast going up of Sadhguru. If you guys know Sadhguru, the guy who gets billions, on top of billions of views, who is from South India, and, you know, very, very interesting guy. We had a deep conversation together yesterday for a couple hours. That podcast will be going out sometime tomorrow. Very funny, very interesting, very insightful, and there were moments where we debated faith. It was very interesting. Having said that, take care, everybody. God bless. We'll see you guys tomorrow and Friday. Take care. Bye-bye, bye-bye.

• 1:49:45Speaker 07

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.