Been on already because we've been recording.

No.

Yes.

That dude, we've done every show this way.

Every show like it's a new thing.

Every single one.

Every single one.

All 300.

Let's go.

Can I.

Can I just bring them in?

Huh?

Welcome back to the number one financial literacy podcast in the world.

This is the higher Standard.

As episode 300.

Baby bro, we always have a little bit of small talk before we get into.

No, but this one is 300.

Bro, you're just.

You're over excited.

Come on, this is Sparta.

This is Sparta.

You can't do that.

Sitting across from me is my partner in crime, which I neglected to say on the last one.

You called me out for it.

It was very awkward for me.

It was awkward.

I can't believe I forgot it.

It's very strange.

Christopher Nahibi.

That's right.

Sitting across from me, my partner in time, the one and only, The Hawaiian Punch.

C4 drinking side Omar.

The only one that I'll drink now.

Thank you, my man.

And sitting behind the desk in the production suite, the Fijian himself.

Looking mighty slim rail.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you so much.

Like a solid £200 now.

No, no.

221.8.

Hey, you know what they say.

Starting strength you got to be at least down.

Can't be under 200.

I was thinking more like the higher standard.

Also helps you get in shape.

See?

Hey, you're welcome.

Where's.

Yeah, I haven't got my thank you card yet.

Yeah, hashtag mindpuff forever.

Yeah.

Speaking of which, they drink these too.

I actually picked these up today.

The elements, the salty citrus drinks.

Oh, Reill, step back.

Opening the Hawaiian punch, guys.

There you go.

Look at a man of many words tonight too.

He's excited.

I'm excited.

I'm happy.

You're happy, brother.

Yeah, right.

Give me what he had for breakfast.

Yeah.

What did you have for breakfast?

He had coffee because I caught him and his wife at the coffee shop.

Yeah.

Oh really?

Pumpkin spice cold brew.

Yeah, Pumpkin spices back.

Why do people go so crazy for pumpkin spice?

Stop.

You're that.

You're one of them, dude.

Yeah.

PSL for life, dog.

Psl.

Gang.

Yeah, See, he knows.

Gang.

Gang too.

I had like.

I have my drink normally.

Okay.

And just for those of you asking, I don't prefer Starbucks.

But Starbucks is convenient and relatively homogeneous.

It isn't the world's greatest coffee.

It's actually terrible.

But they have a good nitro cold brew.

I usually get two pumps sugar free vanilla in it because I keep it, you know, 70 calories or below.

But when PSL season comes around, better believe one of those pumps is psl.

One pump.

One pump.

I can't take more than I always.

Took you for a one pump kind of guy.

Yeah, see.

Yeah, see.

What'd you say, Rajille?

Did you make an adult comment or.

No.

August 26th think was National PSL Day n National.

Well, it's a holiday for me at least.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it could not be any more disingenuous.

No, I'm a cold, I'm, I'm a cold brew guy.

If I'm having coffee, it's cold brew nitro.

Cold brew nitro.

Come over to the house.

I've got like a little nitro machine.

I take any kind of cold brew and put the, put it in the nitro and then comes out all bubbly but creamy and frothy.

Just the way you like it.

Just the way you like it.

Yeah.

So we got a lot to get into.

In Tonight's episode, episode 300, we're going to go over some of the data points that, that relates to how healthy the U.S. economy is.

Oh yeah, I know.

We're going to get into Fed Governor Cook and whether she's still a Fed governor or she's not.

I know we're definitely got to go over those jobs numbers.

Yeah, we got a little bit of Robin Hood at the end.

Some gamification of the stock market because why not gamble with your money?

That's essentially what it is.

We'll explain that at the end.

But first let's get into the current situation a little bit bit, shall we?

Let's do it.

I feel like some of this is stuff that our listeners already know, but when you put it all together it's, it's a little shocking.

Okay.

Jobs data is Revised lower by 911,000 jobs.

It's the largest in history.

Some people argue it's the second largest.

I don't really care where you wind up there.

It's a big ass revision.

Okay.

June marked the first month with US job losses since 2021.

PPI inflation unexpectedly fell 0.1%.

Second decline in 17 months.

It's a small decline, but it's a decline.

That's a meaningful thing when you're talking about economic data.

US unemployment rate rose to 4.3%.

Reminder, the healthy quote number by the Fed is 4.5%.

Now revised healthy number.

It's the highest since July of 2024.

Awaiting August CPI in PCE inflation which last jumped in July.

So I mean, the last time they came out, they were pretty meaningful.

Meanwhile, the US economy has some bigger picture problems we should probably reference.

Okay, well, we have a record $18 trillion in U.S. household debt.

You, me, everybody, all combined, we got money, money, money, money that we owe 446 big bankruptcies in 2025, the most in 15 years.

$1.6 trillion deficit in 10 months of fiscal year end of 2026.

And well, $37 trillion in debt.

That's a record.

That is a record.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And most notably too, I think worth mentioning is for the first time since 1996, foreign central banks now hold more gold than they do US Treasuries.

Was that true?

I did not.

Yep, big problem.

What is that signaling?

Right.

What is that?

Why, why should people care about that?

Because the US dollar is a world currency reserve.

Right.

And it's essentially how the US is able to enforce a lot of their power on, onto other countries.

Right.

Carries a lot of dominance.

But if other foreign central banks are ditching the US dollar, meaning the Treasuries, that means the yields on those Treasuries have to go where they have to go up just to create a bigger demand for them.

Right.

And now if those yields do go up, remember for you just mentioned $37 trillion in debt.

For every 1 percentage point the interest rates go up.

That's an extra $370 billion in interest payments.

Yeah.

For every 1%.

That's where it's headed.

The numbers in million, billion and trillion are so significant.

I know.

That it becomes almost mind boggling when you consider the interest on those percent number, the number of zeros.

Yeah, it's really compelling stuff.

And that's why a lot of people, when they talk about like, you know, make it first million, get a million dollars in the bank and you get interest.

And yeah, it's all well and good and those are big numbers.

I'm not, I'm not downplaying those numbers at all.

But we need a billion trillion.

These numbers are gaining interest so fast that it's, it's just mind numbing.

Yeah.

And there's a great chart, see if you can find it.

Comparing a million, a billion and a trillion.

Oh yeah, they do a couple different versions of this.

The big one that they do that really resonates with people is in time.

Yeah, right.

The time one's interesting.

But a million, a million seconds is like somewhat of like 11 days and then a billion seconds is what, 30 years.

Yeah.

And then just go figure what a Trillion is.

They are meaningfully different numbers.

So when we throw these numbers around, we do it like all, you know.

There you go.

Yeah, one.

Yeah, exactly.

So you want to explain that?

Yeah, that little.

Yeah.

So we got, we got an image here with an individual standing in front of a million dollars.

100 million.

1 billion.

And then 1 trillion.

You can't even see the individual on the screen for 1 trillion.

Right.

It's just, it's, it's, it's too big to even fathom.

Yeah.

The numbers are meaningfully different.

So we throw them around.

They're big ass numbers.

They're important.

But let's get into the show content tonight because we got a lot to cover.

Okay, but before we do, can I just mention one last thing?

One data point.

Damn it.

That I want.

No, you, you referenced at the top.

You said June numbers got revised down for the first time.

You know, U.S. labor market showed a decrease in jobs.

Right.

Well I thought what was important to also note was when that number first came out, it's, there was a print of a positive 147,000 jobs.

It got revised down once, it got revised down a second time to a negative number.

I wouldn't be surprised if July and that same thing happens to July and August.

Right.

So you know, we should put ourselves.

On the back a little bit.

We, we did call the jobs revision down.

We did, yeah.

Yeah.

Fuzzy knuckle rub timer.

I don't really my, I shaved mine last night.

I have one.

But it's.

You're a little fuzzy.

Yeah, yeah, it's like a Velcro thing, one of the short hairs.

Right.

But like, and that's the problem with the Fed saying that the data point that we're going to continue to look at is the unemployment.

That's backwards looking data that also gets revised downwards months later.

And later on in the episode we're actually going to talk about why that data in and of itself has become very unreliable.

Because I think a lot of people hear those numbers and historically speaking they, they were a lot better.

They were more reliable and there's, there's clear answers as to why the way it's collected, how many people report in, it's all changed.

Right.

So and if you're one of those people that are on the sidelines looking for a new job, even the job openings numbers that came out, it showed there's 7.18 million job openings now.

So officially there are more people looking for jobs than there are actual job openings.

And you know, of that 7 million job openings that are posted.

How many of those are ghost positions?

Yeah, so I, I, I think I have a big problem with the numbers in and of itself because I don't think the reporting has kept up with technology.

I know that it's always been a thing where companies want to look stronger so they have more job postings out there.

They have these perpetual job postings for managing director originators or whatever it might be in their respective businesses that they don't really actually plan on hiring, but they want to look like they're growing.

Those have always been out there.

It's always been a problem.

And I can fully appreciate that's out there.

But there's a whole different cohort of jobs that are not real, that are out there, that are the scam jobs.

People who post on LinkedIn Jobs for Companies that aren't really big companies because they're trying to be a recruiter and they want, they want to try to find a job for you.

It's a sales pitch or there's multi level marketing scams and stuff like that.

There's all sorts of sales things.

There's, you know, weird franchisees pitches.

But as time has gone by and social media has become what it is today, attention media people have found different ways to get attention and sometimes that's preying on people who have needs, like for example, the need for a job.

And I, I think a lot of those jobs are toxic scam jobs, but we're looking at them and we're seeing them reported and we're going like, oh yeah, this is job openings, right?

And, and that's, and that's also the problem with looking, another problem with looking at the unemployment figure.

Right.

It doesn't take into account the people that took jobs that are paying less than what they were previously making or are now in part time jobs, right.

Or having to work multiple jobs, right.

Just to make ends meet.

Relying on a number like that, I don't know, isn't, isn't conducive to getting the job done.

If an economist were here, he or she would say something effective.

But that's what we have to rely on.

So that's what we use.

You know, you got more though you.

You really don't, that's materially reliable in the jobs market because some of it should, so much of it is, is fluid.

What I can tell you is, is there's an unquantifiable public sentiment that people feel a certain type of way that usually it's kind of like the butterflies in your stomach.

When you've got a bad feeling that something's bad is going to happen, you're like a little birdie, you know, like sitting on your shoulder, that there's a human baser instinct, intuition that's usually right.

Well, the jobs market's not different.

If you know a lot of people that are applying for jobs and they're saying that it's hard to get a job, they can't find a job, or it's, you know, they're getting some interviews, but they're not really, you know, closing.

That's because it's not a real job rich economy.

It's that simple.

Yeah.

And you're seeing a lot of companies now officially, I think I saw a report today from Microsoft that they're like one of the last standing companies that hadn't required their employees to return to office and now they're requiring it.

And so it's a way for them to be able to lay some people off without having to actually announce like a massive layoff.

Yeah.

And a lot of these companies that haven't.

So I have a question as it relates to this, to most companies, I don't know that we'll get an answer.

But if you're a company and you really committed, you went in on the remote work stuff like you downsize your office space in the last couple of years.

Right.

You would hope so.

I mean, you're talking three, four years since the pandemic, if not longer.

And you look at these offices, have you been carrying around all this office space that you're just not using for several years?

Because that's not exactly what I would call wise.

So if you're requiring people to return to office and you don't have the office space, so then you are in fact.

Right.

Calling people out and letting people go.

So then why are, why are companies having these fake ghost job postings to signal growth?

Who are they signaling to?

Who's actually looking at like these postings and these data that benefits them?

We'll get into a little bit of this when it comes to the retail section on the last, you know, kind of quarter of the show.

But certainly it used to be where analysts would cover stock and they would look at some of this data just kind of on a tertiary fringes.

They would mostly look at your public filings.

They look at the markets, they'd follow the sector.

So if I was a banking analyst, I would follow similarly situated community regional banks in your area.

I'd follow the banking, you know, region.

I would follow conferences and I'd be steeped in that as an analyst and my job would be to give my opinion for my company on these stocks.

Right.

But.

And we're Jill's.

Pull this up here from Reuters.

Microsoft mandates three day work from office starting next year.

Starting next year, yeah, yeah.

In February 2026.

That's a pretty good advance notice.

It's a good advance notice.

Yeah.

I mean it is.

But at the same time, I'm sure there's a lot of people who are in a bit disbelief.

So here's the problem with.

And Rajill, you can probably speak to your experience with this.

There's a lot of people who first hear this as an employee and they go, ah, there'll be somewhat of an uprising.

They won't actually do it.

Right.

Oh, what do you mean they won't actually do it?

So I think a lot of employees, they hear this from management and they see like the press release and stuff like this go out and they go, yeah, most employees aren't going to want to do that.

And then they're not going to walk in.

They don't want to deal with a bad public sentiment so they're going to back off this stance.

Oh, the back.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But no, not going to happen.

Let me tell you right now, when they require you to come back, they require you to come back.

That's right.

He said, he said.

That's right.

Yeah.

Sucks.

It's all because they need money.

So.

Well, there's also an efficiency thing.

Having looked at efficiency reports and being executive at a public trade institution, I can tell you that it is difficult to track efficiency in some careers.

Like if you're in marketing, you don't necessarily have KPIs or some type of performance metric that you track to that's tangible and tactile.

The same way as somebody making a product or manufacturing something does if you, you know, move some certain amount of units on a line, you know, so it comes down to the job and how, how they can track your efficiency.

But I can tell you without question of a doubt, people who work from home are in some ways less efficient, in some ways more efficient.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm speaking on personal experience.

I've never made myself more readily available than when I'm at home.

I just feel like you have to, you're required to work even more.

Right.

Answering calls later, answering emails later.

I don't know.

That's just my personal experience.

What about you, Rigil?

Oh, yeah, and I'm hourly too, but I work more than eight Hours.

But is that a good thing?

Is that a good thing?

You feel compelled to work more?

No.

I mean, as far as work life balance.

Yeah, that would you mean?

No, but look, if you're going to enjoy this benefit, then you better make sure you deliver on it too, in my opinion.

You know, so.

And the, the real crappy part is for some companies, they leave it up what to managers discretion.

And then what does that do to office morale when one manager is like, yeah, you guys can work from home.

And then this other department's like, nope, no, you can't.

It's tough.

Yeah, it's tough.

And, and there, there's reasons in some instances for that to be the case.

And some could argue you just transfer departments if you don't like that apartment.

Some would argue that that's not fair no matter how you do it because they have to have a job and that's what their experience is in.

I mean, I get it.

Both sides of the equation.

So we're not gonna be able to fix that problem tonight.

So let's talk about Lisa Cook.

Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

So we covered this in the show a couple episodes ago where Fed the FOMC has been under pressure from, you know, the President.

I like Lisa Cook.

That's not a flattering photo of Lisa Cook, though.

No, she looks very upset.

She looks very upset in this photo, like she did something wrong.

So effectively U.S. judge temporary blocks Trump from removing Fed Governor Cook.

And the reasons why are actually pretty stur forward and pretty standard.

Right.

So from the article, a federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from removing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

An early setback for the White House in an unprecedented legal battle that could append the central bank's long held independence.

Cook denies any wrongdoing.

President Trump has not identified anything related to Cook's conduct or job performance as a board member that would indicate that she is harming the board or the public interest by executing her duties unfaithfully or ineffectively.

Cobb, her attorney wrote.

I'm sorry, the judge wrote in her ruling.

That's going to be really important.

We'll circle back to that in a second.

Cobb found that the best reading of the law is that it only allows a Fed governor to be removed for misconduct while in office.

Okay.

The mortgage fraud claims against Cook all relate to actions she took prior to her U.S. senate confirmation in 2022.

Wow.

So that's an interesting one.

Yeah, that's, that's one way to get around it.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know if you're getting around.

Sounds like a technicality at that point.

It does sound like a technicality.

But the law does specifically say they can only be removed for cause.

Is this something that she has done during her tenure?

Is it a cause to remove her?

It comes down to moral fabric, ethical standards.

What's the morality?

Is anybody who's ever committed fraud unable to be a Fed governor?

In what level of fraud?

I mean, if you lied on a mortgage loan application, Right.

Or how much time would need to pass or what could you do to make it up?

Right.

Is it the Senate's responsibility during their Q and A session and part of their confirmation hearing?

Question due diligence.

Yeah.

Again, these are not things that I'm leaning on one way or the other.

I'm just asking the question questions, you know, just more esoterically.

Yeah, right.

You know, hey, what's the standard here?

Right?

And then what's the standard of proof?

So you have a loan application.

Does she have a right to a hearing?

In most HR and employment law around the country is if you're being accused of something, you have a right to a hearing and a response makes sense to me.

It doesn't seem like she's at least gotten that from what little I've seen of the interaction and I think all of us publicly.

So what do you think is the rationale or the reasoning to go after Fed Governor Cook?

Why?

Why now?

Why?

Why do this?

Just to just to cause an uproar or to.

For people to lose a little bit of faith in the system that add more pressure?

Well, strap on the tinfoil hat, boys.

Outside.

Actually, crown.

Strapping one on.

Okay, Temple, crown.

That's good.

Yeah, you got a big ass head.

That's how big.

Do you see what I'm saying?

Yeah.

So the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics lost her job after the last downward revision prior to this 911,000 down.

And you could argue that she was not doing her job.

She got bad data, the revisions are getting bigger.

That's an effective process.

You could say that it's justified her termination at this point.

Really?

You could, you could, you can make that argument.

I don't think you can though.

Why is that?

Because there's been a pattern, a history of constant revisions down.

We know it's the system in place on how they obtain the information and what they rely on ultimately to push out those prints.

There's a lot of estimates, and I'm.

Sure that's the former head's argument.

But here's what I would say in response to that, it is incumbent upon you to ensure that there is a more narrow window of revisions, and if you are not collecting data efficiently or there is a problem in the process to fix that process.

Yeah.

Again, I'm not advocating saying that it's justified that she lost her job over it.

I'm just giving you both sides of the equation.

But isn't that Elon's job or former job?

Yeah, that fell off quickly.

Yeah.

I mean, he's supposed to make things a little bit more efficient.

Do you like.

Meanwhile, I would like a trillion dollar compensation package.

Please, please.

Thank you.

I'll accept it.

Yeah.

Yes.

Go talk amongst yourselves.

Figure it out.

I mean, I'm worth it.

Imagine the ask.

He didn't ask.

He didn't have to.

You guys know what you need to do.

So here's a picture of cash on pallets, guys.

Okay?

You see this one where the person, the human looks really, really, really small and almost indistinguishable next to this giant seeming pile of cash.

Pallets.

That's the salary that I want.

Yeah.

He wants so many pallets.

He wants them falling off the container ship like they were happening in luggage today.

I want to break all the containers.

In Long beach that were just falling off the port today.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know what went wrong, but literally tens of containers just falling off into the port.

You're like, what's going on, guys?

Really?

Rajille, I think I know where your shirt went.

Yeah.

Did you look at all?

Here you go.

Yeah, the video is going up.

Oh, Geico.

Yeah.

You got to see this.

It's got an ad.

Go back up to the title.

There's dozens of shipping containers tumble off cargo ship into the water at port of Long Beach.

Look at this.

Look at this.

Shows.

Oh, Jesus.

This is in Long Beach.

Video showed shipping containers, some piled on top of another, floating in the water while the busy international car at.

Wow.

At the busy international cargo.

Wow.

That's how much money Elon wants.

He just wants falling off.

That's a lot.

That's more than a couple dozen.

Wow.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

My shirt really in there?

No, no, it might.

No, I think.

I think.

I think these containers that were from Portugal.

Oh, man.

Maybe my team packages.

Yeah, Ours are made in Portugal.

Okay, there's a lot of questions.

Unpack here.

Let's start with Portugal.

Why do you know Portugal?

You're gonna correct me.

There you go.

Why do you know that?

I read this.

I read this today.

So this Is what you did at work today.

Hold on, hold on.

How is it relevant to your job, sir?

What do you mean?

This is relevant to the economy.

Working from home is a bad thing.

This is relevant to the economy.

Wait, you don't got to TV on when you're working?

No, Christopher, it's background noise.

It's ambiance.

A lie.

You just lie.

I got three screens on at all times, not including the monitors.

300 billion of cargo each year.

Oh, into.

Into Port Alamo.

Yeah.

Not that much in the water.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If it wasn't water, you and I'd be out there right now fishing out some stuff.

Exactly.

Get out of the way.

These are my T shirts.

Right.

God.

And Regil.

Don't think I'm letting you off the hook.

Teemu.

What did you order?

Some lights and stuff for my son.

Like leds?

Yeah.

For his.

For his room or what?

Yeah, room and just random projects he wants to do.

Can we have a Teemu conversation?

Okay.

I've never brought anything up too.

For good reason.

It sucks.

Does it?

Okay.

Why not just buy off Amazon?

Like, how much money are you really saving going on Teemu?

I don't know.

I didn't think about that.

So why did you just open up the Temu app?

Or like, is it one of those.

You know, there's a lot of.

A lot of people out there that are boycotting, like, some of these companies.

I know Amazon's on the list for some of these people.

Is it because of that?

No.

Okay.

I don't like the.

I like Amazon because I know I'm going to get my package the next day.

I know they take out so many mom and pop shops though, right?

Like, and then.

I'll be honest.

I'll be honest.

You don't care?

No, I care.

But if your mom and pop shop, like, sell on Amazon too.

Yeah, I guess.

I mean, that's a little.

That's a little difficult, bro.

Okay, I'm.

I'm an asshole.

Yeah.

This back.

I don't know enough about it to say that that's probably effective solution.

But what I will say is I like the convenience of being able to get a package the next day.

Of course.

I mean, who doesn't?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's no terrible convenience.

Go ahead.

Hey, those people out there that want to leave us a review, now's the time.

Go leave us a review about Chris.

Meanwhile, we're just walking out the door.

Yeah.

On Fed Independence, there's a precedent setting I think is important.

No, U.S. president has ever successfully removed a Fed governor.

This be the first time, if actually done in.

The 1935 Banking act explicitly shielded governors from political dismissal to protect independence.

If Trump succeeded, it would rewrite 90 years of precedent.

So he likes to make headlines, bro.

Well, I mean, that's part of the reason a judge stepped in and said, we're gonna have to talk about this.

Yeah.

Arthur Burns lesson.

We talked about this on a previous show.

Nixon pressured Fed chair Arthur Burns in the early 1970s to keep rates low ahead of the 19 election.

Many economists argue this political interference caused the runaway inflation that led to stagflation.

And let that in the business be a reminder kids of foreshadowing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

You're good at that.

You know, I'm good.

Yeah.

Every once in a while I like.

Which, by the way, we also did call this stagflation, you know, over you.

Oh, you called this you when we were in the previous studio.

What's yours is mine was mine is yours.

I'm giving it to you.

You brought it up.

And I remember thinking, this guy right here, bro.

Stop it.

Yeah, yeah.

We got.

When we get it, we're going to get to it later in the show, but I want to do a little breakdown for the listeners on what that is and why it's.

Why, why it's.

It's.

It's rare.

Super, super, super rare and hard to identify.

Unlike the technical definition of recession, two successive negative quarters of GDP growth.

This is a little bit more complex.

Right.

It's a little bit more tactile.

Yeah.

I mean, just real quick down and dirty.

The reason why this is.

It's so rare is usually when you have rising inflation.

Right.

There's a lot of money supply that's going around and everyone's chasing after goods and inflation goes up.

And then on the contrary, when employment starts to go up and then demand starts to go down, you.

You don't have high inflation.

Unfortunately, we're now reaching a time where all things are happening at the same time.

Right.

And we talked about it, obviously, so.

Yeah, and we talked about it on previous episodes where we have data points working in opposite directions.

One signals that we should be cutting rates, the other says, no, you need to continue holding rates.

Yeah.

Right.

So it's like, what do you do?

I feel like there's no right answer.

You start an Instagram page, become a financial influencer.

That's what you do.

Yeah.

Anti guru Guru club.

Yeah, it's worked for us.

Speaking of which, somebody owns that website.

I'm Very upset about it.

Yeah.

I love that you looked it up.

I looked it up.

I was pissed off.

And the asshole who owned the higher standard.com wouldn't sell it to me.

Sold it to some bullshit third rate like rate company.

Our URL is the higher standard.

Higher standard podcast.com or ths pod if you want the merch.

And we're going to find some way to bring the branding in together with the URL stuff, but man.

Yeah, I'm salty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you ever get the figure on how much they sold it for?

Not yet.

I can get it.

We got it.

We'll get it, though.

I'll look at it.

It's not that it's not gonna be expensive.

That's gonna burn even more, right?

Yeah.

It's gonna bother me a whole lot.

So let's talk about the Wall Street Journal's job revisions in the Trump economy.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that and fewer jobs were created between April 2024 and March 2025 than previously estimated.

You know that that means that the creation was about half of what monthly survey showed, averaging about 75, 000 jobs a month.

Here's the part to pay attention to.

We're going to break that down.

Jobs revised down in nearly every industry, especially leisure and hospitality.

176,000.

I'm going to pause there for a second.

You and I spoke about this a year and a half ago.

Yeah.

We were like, for a while it was government going out.

Government jobs were leading the way.

And the second industry was leisure and hospitality.

You're like, where, why, who's.

Who's partying besides Virgil?

Right.

Who's traveling.

Yeah, the hotel jobs.

Like, I'm trying to understand what, like, what's going on.

All these hotels.

I mean, what hotel are you going to?

This busy.

Right?

And.

Yeah.

And then the second one.

Professional and business services.

158, 000.

I'm gonna assume those are all realtors.

And retail, 126,200.

The revisions came from the agency's annual benchmark, which aligns its monthly surveys of some 631,000 workplaces with state unemployment insurance tax records.

Yeah.

So this is the part.

And this is why I'm bringing up what might sound a little redundant.

Mr. Trump has good reason to be frustrated.

This is not my words.

It's the Wall Street Journal.

There's a lot of people who get real salty out here.

Yeah, we got to put the quotes up.

Yeah.

Air quotes.

Yeah, yeah, I'll do them for you.

The whole time, Mr. Trump.

Good reason to be frustrated.

Air quote.

Still, with the reliability of the monthly surveys, though, there's no evidence that they were rigged as he's claimed.

As we pointed out, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has overestimated job growth in recent years owing to declining survey response rates.

Only 43% of employers respond to the survey, down from 60% before the pandemic.

Okay, well, listen, I bet you the people that used to respond to these surveys for these companies are no longer at the companies.

No, they're like, somebody else is now having to assume those responsibilities.

They're like, guess what's not happening this month.

It's an elective response.

Yeah, I'm gonna elect not to do that.

I'm sure it requires so much work to respond.

This looks like a phishing email.

Hit the fish button.

Yeah, this is phishing fishing it.

Take a look at this.

That's.

That.

That excuse has got to be used 6, 000 times a day.

Yeah.

Oh, you sent me an email.

I thought it was phishing emails.

Honestly, I didn't.

I'm trying to be a good employee.

Right.

I'm a steward for the Internet security of this company.

Right.

If it wasn't for me, Gosh.

Yeah.

Y' all welcome.

Honestly, listen, I know all about technology now.

I took the last course.

Yeah.

What was the last one I took before I left?

Oh, it was on deep fakes.

This is Deep face.

There was.

There was, you know Nate Bargasky, the comedian?

No.

Oh, you know, he's clean comic.

That's why you don't know him.

Look at you.

Set you right up for that one.

This is.

This is my level of expertise with technology.

Right.

He had.

He has a whole bit on this.

I'm the same guy where if I load too many attachments onto an email and I go to click send and it says file too large.

I'll say that's not right.

Let me try clicking send again.

That's me.

Okay, you know what, I'm gonna.

Can we put some baby ears on?

I don't want anybody.

If you have kids in the car.

Here you go someplace people can hear you.

We do have listeners that say they've been listening to us with their 13 year old daughters.

Yeah, I'm going to cuss now, so tell your 13 year old daughter to tune out for a second.

Okay?

Okay.

Fuck you, Apple.

All right.

Like I wait.

Yeah, dude, I'm an Apple guy.

I love Apple.

Okay.

I had it on my calendar, the keynote.

I knew what the iPhone 17 Pro Max was gonna look like I was happy.

I'm still happy.

I know it isn't the world's greatest upgrade.

I'm cool, dog.

Like, I just want a 17 Pro.

Well, I mean, I'm Apple fanboy, too.

But then I turn around and go to the website today and I realize, you, me, Apple.

Why?

Because my color choices for the iPhone3, iPhone Pro Max, I get three colors.

Silver, which I don't want.

Negative.

Shiny, shiny.

No, no, no, no.

Okay, Midnight blue dog.

Just give me black.

It's simple.

Keep it industry standard.

Black.

Yeah, black.

And a thin one.

You got black and a regular one.

You know why?

You know what they're doing?

They're going to come out with the black later.

No, Apple doesn't do that.

No.

And then they're going to upcharge it.

Yeah, they don't do that.

No, no.

They don't know.

You'll rarely ever call.

So no black.

What's the third one?

Orange.

Stop it.

Construction worker orange.

This is where you got to put the presidential veto down.

And then some articles come out and they're like, oh, my God, Apple's so in vogue with these colorway palettes.

And I'm like, how much did Apple pay you to say that, asshole?

Come on, don't be that guy.

There's no way black wasn't the number one choice for years.

I don't understand.

Black, gold, blue.

Fine.

It's got to be orange, silver and dark blue.

Get you, Apple.

You.

Yeah, this is.

Yeah.

You know, they've been getting roasted, too.

They've been online.

Yeah, no, I think.

There you go.

That's.

That's weak.

I mean, I'm gonna order the blue one.

Obviously, it's the closest in proximity to black.

Yeah.

I mean, for us colorblind people, that does look kind of black.

Damn it.

I'm sorry.

I'm not gonna lie.

I forget every time.

Every time you do.

Yeah, but.

No, yeah, but Google came out trolling them.

They already came out with a commercial.

Samsung came out of hard.

Yeah, we waited.

We waited a year for this.

Samsung was not playing.

Yeah, they're like, let me.

Let us know when it folds.

God, I'm not.

That's not what.

It folds.

It's so good.

But seriously, though, I mean, if you're.

If you're somebody who's like an Apple fanboy, like me.

Yeah.

There's some things you could have done to make me like you.

Okay, Number one, come out with an iPad, slash iPhone, a phone that opens up the size of an iPad, mini.

Why am I the asshole?

Look, I will spend $2,000.

Yes, I want.

You would carry that around?

No, no, I want to be the size of an iPhone, but when I open it up, it looks like an iPad mini.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

Yeah.

Foldable phone.

Yeah, I want a foldable phone.

But that.

That's what I want, right?

That's not.

Don't make me the answer wrong with that.

Yeah, I want reverse charging.

I want to be able to put my AirPods in the back of it and charge my AirPods.

And my phone's low.

That's got to be someone.

They've already adopted the Samsung batteries.

They should be able to do that.

I'm just saying they should be able to do that.

There's a lot of things I want, I'm just not getting.

And the.

The Apple, like, Apple Watch update, it comes in black now.

Okay, so the watch comes in black, but it won't match my phone.

Fuck you, Apple.

I remember back in the day when I worked at Wells Fargo, and they made sure that, okay, when somebody comes in, they open up a checking account.

You got.

You got to hit them with the savings account, too.

And then you walk them over and you sign them up for online banking, and then you go right over back to your desk, and you get them to sign up for a debit card.

And the reason why they make sure you go through all these steps is you want to make sure that they use so many tools that they'll never leave.

That's true.

Too much of it works, right?

So now it's like, look, I got a phone, I got a watch, I got my AirPods, I got an iMac at home.

And the AirPod Pro 3s came out.

They have five tip sizes now, right?

Don't.

Don't be dirty.

Don't be dirty.

What you know about tip sizes?

5 tip sizes now.

Tip drill.

I'm excited about that because I'm a big dude.

I want big dude ears.

No, no, no, no, no.

They didn't go, let's make some smaller.

Make some bigger.

They just said, let's make some smaller ones.

You Apple.

So, wait, so this is the silicone part that, like, pops?

Yeah.

Because I.

So I. I switched to the beats.

It penetrates the ear.

Okay, stop.

I'm asking.

The tip penetrates the ear.

Okay, it's just a question.

Hold on.

And it.

It creates an airtight.

It doesn't.

It.

It fills it.

It's supposed to.

It's.

It plugs the ear.

The tip's supposed to fill your Ear hole.

Okay.

It plugs it.

So because it has noise canceling, the world's best in ear.

Active noise cancel.

So I got, I have the AirPods, but the one without the, the plug.

So I have those two.

I, I, those are much better.

I gave those to my mom.

Much better.

And they stay in.

They don't fall out for me.

Okay, well, these, these active noise canceling, which are amazing.

And I need the active noise canceling.

You want to know what's going on around you?

Okay, first of all, why aren't these in a color Apple?

Why?

These are still white.

I can't get a white iPhone to match.

Because they wanted to pop.

Yeah, I know why they should be black.

That's.

No, I got the black phone.

I got the black watch.

That's genius.

Yeah, they should be matte black.

They should.

Exactly.

Why aren't they?

That makes no sense.

I don't want to see my ear waxing.

You know why they want.

It's a status symbol.

When you see somebody walk around, they got the white, you know, that's, that's an apple.

And make them orange to match the goddamn phone.

Okay, give me something that matches the phone.

The beats that are coming out, the new ones are coming out.

They're coming in black and gray in orange and blue.

That matches the phone.

Because Beast knows what's up.

Smart.

Yeah.

Apple bot Beats, right?

Yeah, I know.

Nothing's nastier than pulling your AirPod Pro out.

It's white and seeing all the nasty ass earwax.

See, I know they got those third party companies where you can send them and they'll like wrap them for you, right?

I have no idea about that.

I am sure there are.

All right, so we got a little off topic there.

Oh, and you, Apple.

Yeah.

So there's a stagflation problem.

All right.

One could argue that we have been in a stagflation scenario for years.

Matter of fact, two years ago, when I first brought this up on the show, which is crazy persistent.

High inflation.

Check.

Right.

Combined with high unemployment.

Revised numbers down.

Check.

And stagnant demand in a country's economy.

Well, that sounds familiar, right?

Yeah.

And slow economic growth.

Right.

We've already had one quarter of negative growth.

We're on our way to our second.

Right, so some key takeaways here from this whole section which I think are important before we go on and talk about stagflation a little more in detail.

And mind you, hold on little, backtrack a little bit.

I know we've only had one quarter of negative GDP growth, right?

But if you were to remove any one of the Mag 7 away from there, boom, you got negative growth.

Can I say the quiet part out loud?

Like, bro, like, we've.

Those seven companies can be propping up the entire US Economy.

I know they are.

Yeah.

So it's like, that doesn't mean we have a healthy U.S. economy.

No, it doesn't.

And for them to spin it as if, like, oh, it's, it's great.

We're growing like Dow, NASDAQ all time high.

Everyone's like, yeah, keep the train going.

Right, Right.

Let me say the quiet part out loud.

How do you trust any of the good numbers the government's giving you now?

I mean, how are any of the.

Numbers they've given you reliable?

And if so, when earlier in the episode, when I asked you what was, what was the goal of going after Fed Governor Cook?

I think it's this.

It's just to, it was just to cause more uncertainty with everything that's being reported with.

From the people that it gets reported from, from the people that are making the decisions it makes.

You want to not trust them.

Him, right?

And so he can't get the blame because it's all happening under his administration.

Even though I hate that this happens.

I hate, even for, even for his sake, right, that whatever happens during his administration, it falls on him.

Even though it may have been caused from previous years.

Right.

You know, here's the sad part, okay?

I'm.

Maybe I'm naive, right?

I think to myself, if you're the president of this country, right, and, and you've got.

Got all sorts of things going on.

There could be aliens on Three Eye Atlas.

You don't know, man.

Egypt could have been made by a more sophisticated civilization than us.

We could just be the spawn of what's left, right?

You've got potential wars going all over the country.

Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine.

All these things are happening.

You would hate to think that he's like, ah, how do I disrupt the Fed and change the narrative?

No, I don't really.

No, no, hold on.

That's, that's very.

That that makes him come off as like a very calculated.

No, he's bro.

He's got a, a loose cannon, right?

He's firing at the hip, just whatever comes his way.

And he's deflecting constantly.

Okay?

Do you, do you really want somebody running your company who's a loose cannon and deflecting like constantly?

You want somebody who's strategic, pragmatic, thoughtful, and going to execute but, yeah, but.

That'S, that's why I, I've never liked this popularity contest.

You know what I don't like about the White House and the whole executive branch?

It's backwards.

What.

What about it?

So we have a system of checks and balances.

Legislative, the court system.

I'm sorry, the, the, the Senate.

Housing, the House.

The Senate.

I'm all sorts of.

Yeah, yeah.

This doesn't have any caffeine in it.

I'm just happy to talk to you.

I haven't seen you in a week.

Legislative, you got the, The Senate and the House of Representatives.

You got the judicial.

The, the actual court system.

And the executive branch, supposed to be a system of checks and balances.

Right.

But really the president's job is to be CEO of the biggest business in the world, which is the United States.

Right.

Okay, good.

We all agree.

That's all good.

As the kids say, that's sensational.

But in a real company, you have a board of directors, and the CEO's responsibility is to execute on the plan the vision of the board of directors.

Right, like that.

So there's like that oversight.

Who's going to hold you accountable?

You have that effective challenge, man.

Why is that important?

Right.

Like why, why?

But who gets to decide who'd be the board of directors?

That's a good question, honestly.

And they can't have lifetime seats.

No, you shouldn't.

I think what you do is you have.

You should have somebody, for continuity purposes, that, that bridges the gap between one presidency and another presidency.

Yeah.

It should be a bipartisan committee, politics notwithstanding.

You should have somebody who's a conservative, somebody who's a liberal, somebody who's a Republican, somebody's a Democrat.

And you should find a way to split it up.

Think of it as like if the.

And you could argue that the judiciary is this.

On some level.

They get to debate some of these things, like, for example, Lisa Cook.

But you really need a board of directors.

Yeah, but those Supreme Court seats are lifetime seats.

They are.

They are.

Right.

So again, okay, let me take a different tact here.

Let me just throw this out here.

If you're a president and you get two terms, which, you know, good for you, eight years, in theory, generally consecutive.

This is an anomaly.

You're only in the office for eight years.

How much can you really get done?

Right.

Versus some of these appointments, like you're pointing out, are lifetime appointments.

Multi, multi decade appointments.

Who do you think probably knows the ins and outs of the government more?

The current sitting president, who's the Quote, CEO or everybody else who's like, the director of the FBI.

Yeah.

Not.

No disrespect to Cash Patel.

Yeah.

Just another puppet.

Is that what you're saying?

I'm just saying, man.

He's.

No, they definitely.

They got the.

They have the.

The ins and outs.

But I mean, to your point, the systems, I. I don't.

I think could use some change.

Rogan had that bit right where he.

He says, you know, if Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson were to come back from the dead, and they wake up and they say.

And everyone's like, hey, man, look at all this stuff.

He's like, wait, hold on.

You guys haven't changed anything.

Everything's still operating the same way.

Yeah.

Come on.

That's not how this was supposed to happen.

Well, I mean, let's.

Let's get to it, right?

Like, the whole idea of the House of Representatives, of the Senate is these people represent you and me.

Do you really feel like they represent you and me?

Okay, so I was gonna bring this up, and look, I want to make sure I. I tiptoe on this very carefully because I'm not trying to offend anybody, but there is a age minimum.

Minimum requirement.

I know you're going.

I'm just gonna leave that there.

And I'm not gonna finish the rest of that sentence, but I'm like, I.

For someone to represent me personally, what I would personally like is it for them to be.

After they leave office, they still have to deal with the consequences of their decisions.

They're gonna have to live that out with whatever changes that may cause.

Right.

If you don't have to deal with the consequences, then it's like, come on, man.

What are we talking about?

I'm gonna leave that right there.

Yeah, I'm gonna.

I'm gonna let you stew in that one for a little bit.

Okay.

Thanks, man.

The 43 problem.

BLS surveys only get 43 response rate today versus 60 pre pandemic.

Like we talked about.

That's trying to guess the score of an NBA Finals game with only half the box score.

See, Saeeda made it NBA related, so you would understand.

Because I wouldn't understand any of the way.

The historical note worth mentioning here.

The benchmark revisions often swing the narrative.

In the early 1980s, revisions showed the US was already in recession months before policymakers publicly acknowledged it.

Sound familiar?

Well, good.

It should.

Yeah.

All right, let's move to the Yahoo.

Finance article.

Rejeel stagflation Jitters grow after Steepest Job.

Downgrade in decades and the executive producer of the show really let him rock a beard like that, huh?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's not as Marvel comics as ours, but certainly a good beard.

I respect it.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said the revisions confirmed the economy is slowing.

And this is a quote.

I think the economy is weakening, he told CNBC on Tuesday.

Whether it's on the way to recession or just weakening, I don't know.

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

Yeah, Jamie.

Hey, Jamie.

I think the unemployment market is weakening.

This is the problem, man.

This is like, come on.

He's not.

He's not being honest.

And the.

The problem with a lot of this, you said, like, they're not going to announce a recession until it's already over, when things are back on the upswing.

This way it works.

The National Bureau of Economic Research legitimately announces recessions after they've happened.

The news cycle you see leading into and declaring recessions is generally not official.

That's just somebody going, oh, my God, we had two negative quarters of successive GDP growth.

That's the definition of recession.

We're in a recession, America.

But then, literally when you start hitting the climax of the recovery piece of the recession, the National Bureau of Economic Research comes out and goes, oh, hey, guys, remember that time you guys said we had a recession?

You were right.

Just another way for them to control the narrative, right?

Where if.

If they were to say it now, the headline, risk for everything, Imagine what that would do to the stock market the next day.

Right?

But if we announce it later and we could say, oh, you guys know that pain and suffering you guys were dealing with?

It was a recession, but don't worry, we're already out of it.

I gotta be honest, my opinion on this has changed.

I honestly think the National Bureau of Economic Research came out and said, we're in a recession.

You'd have, like, the President, come on, go.

No, we're not negative.

Fire them.

You're all fired.

Who's your CEO?

They're fired.

Like, it would be that, right?

Like, I mean, I don't think anybody would believe it.

I think.

I think there's literally this consternation, there's frustration, and they.

They perceive these people as like, mainstream media outlets.

And it's.

You can't trust any of the data anymore, man.

Right.

And.

And.

And that's the reason why I took such big issue with the firing of the head, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because I'm like, you've literally now are making everybody afraid to report whatever it is that they have, right?

And it's like, now no one can trust anything.

It's like, what am I supposed to do?

I think we the people.

Come on, do it.

Do it.

You know, people.

There it is.

But hold on.

I think we have a right to know why she was fired.

You can't tell.

Listen, you can't have a black card and then just.

Just include yourself as part of the people.

Black car is kind of fading, bro.

You got to get a new one.

It's more like a taupe card these days.

You've been using it so much.

I actually haven't been using that much.

This month was a little light, but I'm.

I'm considering turning it in.

You're not really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why?

I mean, we talked about it.

The platinum package is just as good, right?

I'm spending 5k per card per year.

Don't get me wrong.

The Equinox membership pays for it.

It's.

You know that.

That in and of itself is $3,600 of the five grand that I would otherwise pay.

And then all the sax.

Fifth Avenue shopping you've been doing, we.

Get a thousand dollars a year, 2250 bucks a quarter.

So you have that all together.

It's 4600 just right there.

So if you travel once during the year, you're already paying back the five grand you spent.

But I don't know, man.

This is like this weird thing where people, like.

People literally think, like, you're like, oh.

I've got a black card.

Oh, my God.

It's amazing.

No one has ever said anything.

99% of my purchases are done with my phone.

Like, just go D cheap.

Like, you know, scanning the.

The chip thing so no one ever sees the car.

Even restaurants going face down or face up for them to see be like.

Yo, the phone faces you, and you do because they use facial id.

Yeah, but you got to tap it like this.

Now I got to do the bright ass.

You got to open it up.

You're not getting orange, though.

No, my wife is.

Yeah, I.

On purpose.

Never gonna lose that now, baby.

You're gonna know, right?

Got you my Pierce cerebellum.

Yeah, but.

Yeah, no, nobody ever sees.

Nobody ever says anything about it.

So if you think there's some kind of prestige that comes along with it, that's.

That's a.

That's a lie we tell ourselves to feel cool, right?

It's not that cool.

Yeah.

It's just not.

I'm sorry.

I mean, I wouldn't know, but, yeah, I guess Not.

I mean, if.

Definitely one of those things where.

If you, if you can reach it, I feel like it's a.

You feel like it's a milestone moment.

If you can get there, make sense of it.

It's marketing, dude.

Hey, side.

I mean, the difference between that and platinum is really not that much or what.

Other than the.

They get like a credit towards Equinox.

I get a full coverage of my.

Of my membership fee.

So instead of them like getting a portion of it covered, I get like 300 bucks covered.

I think whatever.

But that, what, that's the only way to, to make up for the.

The fee?

No, no.

If you, if you travel a lot, it's certainly worth it, but I'm not traveling anywhere near as much as I used to.

I'm spending a lot of time focusing my wife and my son and being at home and doing like, daddy stuff.

And I mean, you're not like falling out on a Minecraft with a black card, you know, I mean.

You know what I mean?

Have you bought anything on Minecraft?

We bought my son a couple skins.

He watches Milo, and I don't care what the guy's name.

He watched these two creators who create and create mode and tell you how to do things.

Yeah.

And he wanted to buy one of the skins.

Okay.

Yeah.

I've yet to introduce the kids to that world yet.

So we still treat it.

We treat the Switch as a game Boy, where we tell him, hey, I.

Even though I know that he knows that you could.

Because all his friends have it.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah, you gotta buy that.

You gotta buy it and you gotta stick the game in.

And that's the.

The only way we're getting games.

That's the only way.

Don't come in here asking me.

Let's go online and see what game we could buy today.

No, no, I get it.

So the way I look at Minecraft is, is there's not an ecosystem where you're really talking to anybody who's not your friend if you set it up right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's.

It's me who plays with him or his other friends.

And actually Rejeel son plays him from time to time, like once a week.

Yeah.

Nice.

Right?

And then.

But there's There are some.

Some interesting things, like it teaches you, like about how coal and copper are always found and veins of gold and how you make things and manufacture things.

And there's some of it that's.

That's, you know, a little hyperbole.

If you want to call it that but there's a lot about, about the world that's there.

You learn about different trees, learn about mining, hence the Minecraft.

You craft things.

Right.

And that it takes time and actually thought to build something out.

Oh, my son has been literally geeking out on building structures and so he brought me into his world, one of his creative worlds that he built.

And I'm like, whoa, you got like, he's got like libraries.

He's got like that's cool.

I mean it's a whole like, like imagine if you gave your son a couple of hours to build something and then you got to go into his world and see what he built.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a really fascinating Adam, Adam plays Minecraft and he what he builds.

He, he likes to build buildings with booby traps all inside.

There you go.

So and he's like dad, now you take the controller and go around and I'll fall for all the booby traps.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's pretty cool.

You just want to say boobies on the show.

Okay.

So yeah, booty traps.

Economists warned that the Fed faces a difficult balancing act at next week's meeting.

By the time you hear this, it'll literally be that day.

That's right.

And easing rates too aggressively could risk fueling inflation that is already above target while easing rates to cautiously risk tipping a fragile labor market into deeper recession.

That tension was evident in the bond market where the 10 year Treasury's yield climbed 4 basis points to near 4.1% on Tuesday and the 30 year pushed above 4.7, pushing mortgage rates up.

The move upward.

The the up.

I'm sorry.

The move unwound part of the recent rally, the Fed rate cut bets, suggesting traders may be increasingly bracing for recession or even stagflation with key inflation data, the Consumer Price Index due later that that week, now this week.

The if the CPI shows a worsening trend of higher inflation on Thursday tomorrow for us, then the market will begin worrying about stagflation, said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Charlotte, North Carolina based Northern Light Asset Management.

The bull market has been extremely resilient this year.

I would call it insane, but whatever.

But we could be approaching an inflection point where it begins, where it's tested again.

The scale of the revision quickly reverberated in Washington, D.C. where the integrity of the data has come under growing scrutiny, Vice President J.D.

vance said after the release.

It's difficult to overstate how useless BLS data had become.

While the White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt Ramped up pressure on the Fed chair Jerome Powell, arguing he has officially run out of excuses and must cut rates now.

Yeah, well, we got three meetings left and the day this episode drops will be one of the meetings.

Right.

After the recent revisions to the jobs data, we now have 100% chance at a rate cut in September.

And now even I think at the last time I checked, there was still a, there was a 12% chance at a 50 basis point cut.

That might change a little bit tomorrow.

I don't see 50 basis points happening.

I don't see that.

But the fact that it's even an option.

Right.

Yeah.

It just means people are concerned about where the numbers are going.

Yeah.

I wouldn't be surprised if you still only see one cut for the remainder of this year.

Right.

I mean a lot of people are hoping for multiple.

But what I do think that this all signals is easier monetary policy coming into 2026.

Right.

Definitely cuts into 20, 20, 26 and some quantitative easing as well.

Right.

So.

Well, I don't know, let's, let's pause there.

You don't think so?

Yeah.

So.

Housing market winds up being kind of this low hanging fruit.

That's obvious.

Housing pundits get like major heartburn.

When I had this conversation.

Yeah, you cut rates too much in Treasuries, follow along, housing prices will go up.

So the question I then naturally ask myself is there's two different cohorts of people in the housing market that I think we need to watch.

Number one, it's first time home buyers, can they afford to buy a house?

If interest rates dip down a little bit, maybe, maybe values should probably come down.

And you're seeing that in the Southeast, like the Florida market.

Big price corrections happening there.

Certainly you're seeing some of that in some parts of like the south, in the Sun Belt region.

Yeah.

But you're not seeing it on the west coast, you're not seeing it in the Northeast.

It's very, very subjective to the region.

The other cohorts, an interesting cohort.

Now, I don't think the problem is as, as we perceived it to be the lock in effect.

Oh yeah, people who got 2 and a half, 3%, 3 and a half percent mortgage rates, we are unlikely to see mortgage rates that low again in our lifetime times.

Wild, right?

To think about.

Wild.

Think about.

So at what point did those people start to refinance?

What's the catalyst for them to want to refinance their debt, their household debt?

Right.

It's gonna, at some point it's Gonna have to make financial sense, the need.

To tap into equity.

But there are home equity line of credit options that are out there.

There's all sorts of other options that are out there.

But those can be dangerous too, right?

They can be sure, but they're easier to get.

And they, they generally, because most people have, you know, ignored the benefit of this huge home price appreciation, they have enough equity to justify it.

And that world where lenders didn't want to go behind somebody else's first trustee, they wanted to be behind their own first trustee because in the worst case event scenario of default, they had more control.

Explain that somebody.

Because a lot of, a lot of people I think don't understand that, that that's actually difficult to do.

And a lot of banks generally won't want to be behind somebody else's first.

Well, leading up to the great, great financial crisis, right, the, or the, the great recession, if you will, the most people would go behind anybody else.

If you had a first trustee with Wells Fargo, anybody would give you a second deed of trust, a second loan behind your first as long as you had enough equity and enough cash flow to pay off that loan.

But then the default started happening during the financial crisis in which people were going, okay, wait a minute, so you've got enough money to pay off the first trustee in full when you sell this property, but we're selling it short of the value, so you won't be able to pay off that second trust deed.

So let's just say using numbers here, you've got a million dollar home, you've got a $500,000 first trust deed and it's gone up in value and now it's worth a million dollars.

You got a second trust deed worth $200,000 because you wanted to get a loan for home improvement.

You owe 700,000 on a million dollar property.

It's a 70% loan to value, right.

If that first trust deed is owned by Wells Fargo and the second trustee is owned by Said Omar.

Right.

Wells Fargo drives the default scenario.

They're the ones who make all the decisions because they're in the first lien position.

They have the prior rights.

When you do sell this property, we're going to get ours first.

Yes, you get yours first and then the second trustee gets their second and third and so forth and so on.

If there are there.

Right, right.

But what happened is sometimes property values, correct, and during the great financial crisis, they corrected down and some of those properties were worth 500,000 or 600.

So let's say in the scenario that's worth 600,000 now, no longer worth a million, but you still owe 700,000 on it.

You're selling it short of the value that you owe that first trustee at 500,000.

They get paid.

There's 100,000 left.

You can only pay off half that second trustee.

And as the second trustee lien holder, you have no control.

Right.

Now, if you own the first and you're Wells Fargo in the first position, the second position, now you have control over the entire thing.

Yes.

Right.

You can say what happens to your second trustee.

You can, you can arrange how the, the debt's gonna get paid because you own all the debt.

And that's what banks were starting to do, but they also wanted a more holistic picture of how much debt you had in the property.

Yeah.

So that, that was a byproduct of that.

That's going away.

Now there are people who are willing to go into second trustee position, and it's much more common to get that.

But for a long period of time, you could not get a loan behind somebody else's first trustee.

And that's probably because of how much the equity uprise.

Right?

Yeah.

Or the rise in equity everyone has experienced in the last five years.

Right.

Over.

Over.

Frothy baby.

Over 40.

It's frothy.

It's frothy.

You keep looking at the drink like it's got energy in it.

I'm so not used to seeing element.

Wow.

It's element, not element T. Element T. Lmnt.

Oh, you see the letters?

That's so cute.

Seven letters.

Yeah, that's what, that's what the boys call it.

You're cutie.

All right, so let's talk about stagflation specifically.

So in the 1970s.

Throwback.

The last major bout of stagflation came in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Inflation peaked at 13.5% in 1980, unemployment at 7.8%, and GDP growth was stagnant.

Paul Volcker, Sides boy.

You know that's Jerome Powell's boy.

Yep.

Which ironically may be a similar scenario.

Famously broke it with the brutal double digit rate hikes.

Jamie Dimon, you may know, echoes history.

Jamie Dimon's economy is weakening remark sounds eerily similar to the fed officials in 1979 who described the labor market as resilient but fragile.

So this is, there's some, there's some contradictions there.

But let's go on to this Business Insider article, and I don't like referencing Business Insider, but this one had some really key simple bullet points that I think are, are worthy.

For those of you who are interested in watching the economy, what happens next?

Next, stagflation.

Five signs.

The economy's worst case scenario is inching closer.

I'm going to say these and I would like to get your feedback on them.

But why is it the worst case scenario?

Well, it's.

Is it because there's no real clear path on how to get out of it?

Inflation doesn't have a clearer path per se, but there are levers you can pull to fix it.

It.

When you get to a stagflationary economy, it generally means the consumer doesn't believe in it anymore and the consumer doesn't believe in it anymore and it's flat.

There's so much fear in the markets, you have to quell human emotion.

Yeah.

And that becomes much, much difficult to, to try to work out.

Yeah.

Which is why in my mind you, you typically see some type of tertiary outside event affecting the economy when you get a stagflationary economy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

So job growth drops way below expectations.

Okay.

Sign number one.

Job growth is clearly signaling a slowdown in the economy.

Even factoring in concerns about data accuracy.

The latest BLS figures are now aligning with what other surveys and data providers have been indicating for months.

And say Omar, by the way.

And for years.

Yeah.

Kevin o', Neill, a senior research analyst at Brandywine Global, wrote in a note.

Number two, private employment fell short.

Employment in the private sector also stumbled.

Private employees hired 54,000 workers in the month of August, according to the latest ADP jobs report.

Lower than the 75,000 economists were expecting.

So jobs in the public and private sectors are not getting better.

Joblessness crept higher.

Unemployment.

The unemployment rate also ticked up to 4.3% from 4.2% in August, per the latest jobs report.

The overall jobless rate remains near historic lows, but it's the highest rate of unemployment the economy has seen since 2021.

You cannot ignore that even though it's a low number.

Number four, Manufacturing contracted while prices rose.

Yet another site, Omar prediction.

The manufacturing sector just logged at six straight month of contraction with the Institute of supply management manufacturing PMI coming in at 48.7% for the month of August.

Side was watching this like a hawk about a year and a half ago.

Yeah.

And this is this.

The reason why I was so concerned with this too is I know that the current administration is trying to make such a huge push to bring all these manufacturing jobs back but can you though?

Can't.

I know, right?

Yeah.

Which in my mind, I think there's some political shenanigans going on in Mexico right now.

Okay.

Where you're starting to see a lot of the higher ups of cartels.

Yeah.

Start to be brought in and they're crossing the border into the US and they're being brought to justice here.

I can't help but think, okay, is this the last frontier that we can get to for manufacturing at cheap labor is in Mexico?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're not going to get out of China, you're not going to get it out of Canada.

You might get some timber products out of there, stuff like that.

But the, the last frontier of new manufacturing like Horizon at cheap labor costs is in Mexico.

Yeah.

And it's no secret, you know, countries like China, India, Japan, they're all going away from the US Dollar.

Right.

They're all now heavily investing into gold.

That's right.

And gold is at an all time high in part because of that.

The last, the fifth thing to look for here is service prices rising.

The price index of the ISM service PMI came in at 69.2%.

That suggest, suggest that service prices in the economy are still rising.

Which is, which, that's the one, Right.

That's the, the component of inflation that I think bothers Jerome Powell and all his boys and Neel Kashkari in the back the most.

Right.

Because that's the one that they wanted to have the greatest impact on right away.

And unfortunately, for whatever reason, it wasn't able, it wasn't able to work.

Now, I know some people are listening, going, Chris, Jesus, that.

These are a lot of technical terms.

You guys are throwing a lot of bullshit at us.

Make this make sense.

Simple, okay.

Oh, I like simple.

Simple is easy.

You can't have inflation go up 20% in the last 10 years.

Everything around us costs 20% more.

Approximately, on average, our lives cost 20% more to maintain today than it did 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, wages not only did not keep up with that, but most employers said to their employees, hey, hey, hey, hey, I know that inflation went up 9% this year.

Yeah.

But it's going to go back down.

That's bullshit.

Inflation typically does not go back down.

Right.

Inflation typically goes up at an incrementally smaller number, but things continue to cost more.

So any employer that said to you, hey you, 9% this year went up, but we're only giving you a 3% salary increase, you can pretty much bank that.

6% is your drop.

Off in your cost living versus how much money you're making.

110.

Don't.

So when the CPI number comes out and it says that inflation has only gone up, you know, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9%, whatever the headline figure is going to be, that's not really how much inflation is.

All that's telling you is, first of all, it's weighing a.

Measuring a basket of goods.

That's right.

Right.

And what it's assuming for most people is, let's just say this C4 price goes up.

Oh, no.

Right.

No, they're not saying so they're not measuring C4 month over month, year over year.

No, they're measuring, okay, all of the drinks together.

If this price goes up, then the consumer is going to be smart and they're going to pick a cheaper option.

That's right.

That's how they look at it.

So when you're, when inflation goes up 2.7% and then you get your 3% salary increase, you're like, all right, cool, I'm still being inflation.

You're not.

The true inflation number is really like 5, 6%.

And let's, let's also not ignore that the whole point of an annual salary increase was a cost of living increase.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If your cost of living increase is not keeping up with inflation, even the reported figure, which is often underreported to the realities of the world, as you noted, then you are not.

You're getting a salary decrease.

Yeah.

Compared to the economy.

You lost buying power.

I mean, keep the perspective.

Everyone's like, oh, you should be happy you've got a job.

Fuck that.

I know, okay.

Yeah.

I want to be able to grow and humans want to.

That.

We're very simple creatures, okay.

We like doing things and staying busy.

We like growing.

If we're not feeling like we're staying busy and growing, we get depressed.

Yeah, there is.

It's okay to have, I think as humans, naturally, you enjoy a little bit of a challenge.

Right?

It's like that.

There's that chart.

There's the good flow chart.

Right.

If you play a game and the game is too easy, you're gonna get bored of it.

You're gonna drop the game.

The game's way too difficult.

You're gonna give up on the game.

But if it gives you that right amount of challenge, you're gonna keep going along and keep playing the game.

Right.

As you continue to get better, a lot of people put their faith and trust into the system, into thinking that this, if I do what I'm supposed to do, the system is going to take care of me.

Everything will work out because this is what I've been told is going to happen.

System is not designed to take care of you, brother.

No, yeah, brother.

It's not, unfortunately, it's not lot.

That's a hard, that's a hard reality and a hard thing to like, like understand and appreciate at like 39.

But let me also, some of us are in the 40s, brother.

So.

No, I'm just saying in general.

Let me put a bow on it though.

It doesn't have to be all like bitter pills, right?

Hugo once told me years ago that shout out, shout out to Hugo, that my net worth would be built largely off my investments, not on my salary, salary.

And I wrote him off at the time, but started investing anyway heavily into real estate, even when I really was incremental at best.

And I can tell you right now, I have the freedoms that I have because I took that advice and started acting on it.

Your job is never going to make you uber wealthy unless you're an executive at a public traded company or you start a company and you're the sole benefactor of the salary.

And most people in America don't fit into those categories.

Right.

So that's fine.

You can still become very, very successful.

But you've got to make investments between the hours of 5pm and 9am and I don't care if you do on the weekends, you do it at nights.

You've got to have some place you put your money that it's going to grow for you.

Yeah.

And that's something that we talk about on the show all the time.

It's so easy.

I see on YouTube there's so many videos that these financial gurus always make on financial mistakes that most people make or that, that are keeping you broke.

Right.

It's always the car payment that, that's the easy video for them to make.

It's like when you do get that pay bump or you do get that promotion or whatever the case may be, don't opt for the more expensive lifestyle.

Do yourself a favor and start investing right there.

Whatever you get.

Okay?

If you, if you want to upgrade one thing or whatever you need to, okay.

But take the bulk of that and then start investing more of it.

So you know what I like about that is that a lot of these financial influencers, they act like everybody is constantly watching their finances like a hawk every single day.

That isn't how most of us function.

We all look at it like, once a month, maybe twice a month.

But we're not looking at it holistically.

We're looking at how much money do I have to spend.

I think you're right.

And I think that's, that's, that's what I scares people the most.

No different than probably somebody that wants.

People that want to get in shape.

Like, man, I'm not trying to start counting calories, bro.

Like, that's not what I want to do.

And because of that, most people don't ever get in the shape they want to get into.

And what I would say is, is I've done that.

You know me, I used to care on the scale.

Yeah.

Everywhere I went, I literally could tell you the calories in everything.

I could.

Eyeball ounces of rice.

I mean, I knew my meal every single day was, was I had 5 grams of chicken.

I'm sorry, 5 ounces of chicken, 100 grams of jasmine white rice cooked.

Yeah.

Every single day.

Like, I knew that was what I was eating.

Or I had some type of 5 ounces of lean protein, and I knew approximately was in it.

I made ground protein in the night before.

I've done all that.

I've counted everything down to the ounce in the gram.

Hunter Biden has entered the chat.

Yeah, not that kind of gram.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But.

And I did it for years.

Years.

I would carry around a scale me, but I, I limited myself socially.

I couldn't do things.

Not sustainable.

Right.

It was sustainable, but it wasn't sustained.

It wasn't easily sustainable.

You think it's that that type of lifestyle is sustainable for most people.

I get.

If you're a fanatic and this is like, this is your number one hobby and this is what you enjoy doing.

It's a lifestyle that some people can adopt.

I don't think for the masses.

I don't think that's going to work.

So I think as it relates to food, I think people worship and idolize people who prefer to eat that way because they like it.

Not necessarily the measuring.

Like, there's a lot of women are better at this than men are.

There's a lot of women who like eating just really healthy.

Yeah, yeah.

Like they, they like salads with beets in it.

Beats nasty.

Never enjoyed a good ass.

Tastic.

Regil.

Tell me you don't like beets.

No, never enjoyed a good.

That wasn't compelling.

Not beats by Dre.

Like, yeah, the nasty, you know, Tastes like dirt.

No, I, I can't remember if I had so many jokes, so many skews.

So many skews.

Why are you doing this to me?

Shout out to Most def.

Yeah, I know you're listening.

Oh, God, he was so good.

Most def in 16 blocks, man.

Underrated movie.

Underrated movie.

Most def in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Come on.

Meow.

Good movie.

Love that movie.

Most def.

Yeah, he's talented.

No, but to your point, I feel like it, like, just like counting calories, that scares people when they have to think about budgeting and counting every last dollar every single month.

Right.

So don't do that.

Right.

Just mind the.

The key details.

How much is coming in?

How much is going out?

Are you saving?

Are you not saving?

And I think the biggest problem for most people is not the inability to have discipline.

We.

We demonize discipline.

We make people feel really bad.

I don't like when financially, Caleb Hammer does this.

He'll like, blast people.

And it infuriates me because I guess you can carrot in a stick, right?

You to be able to stick.

And I'm more the carrot guy.

But what I will say is, you can do this in a way that's meaningful and valuable, but it's not the discipline.

It's the planning in advance.

People often forget about big expenses that are coming up in the future.

Yeah.

Right.

So I have.

I'm replacing the windshield on the Rivian.

Got cracked today.

That's two grand insurance is going to pay me back.

But I.

The way I look at this is that's two grand I'm spending this month until I get that money to go back.

And here's what most people do is, like, they go, okay, I'm gonna get paid back on that, so I don't have to worry about that.

You know, I didn't really spend it.

No, but you did spend it, though.

Right?

Right.

And then when you get the money back, is it going directly against your credit card?

Or you can put in your checking account and then you go like, oh, there's more money in my checking account this month.

Yeah.

And then when it comes to pay your credit card bill, you look at and you go, oh, right.

Or how long does it take for it to come in?

And then you've not got interest on it.

So I. I like to.

I plan far out in advance.

My American Express, that black card fee comes through in November.

Five grand for my wife, five grand for me.

I know in September, my life insurance, I have a million dollars in life insurance.

I have half a million whole half a million term.

I have those that come through In September.

Yeah.

Right.

So I know like that.

So I plan in advance my spending for those months.

I know when the September event comes out for Apple, every other year I buy a new iPhone.

You already know that's coming, right?

Yeah.

So I plan accordingly.

No surprises.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's very rare that I buy something on a whim.

And the one that always shocks people and, and always pisses me off to no end is that car registration fee that comes in every.

Every time for me.

I'm like, ah, man.

See, people.

People hate.

On the classic cars that I got.

My Dawson is $190 a year.

Yeah.

That's a steal.

Yeah.

My.

My BMW isn't even registered yet because it's not even the road yet.

The ID4, the Volkswagen that we got.

Yeah, like 750 bucks.

Damn, you're not that tight.

Does that come with a prostate exam or something?

I mean, it felt like it.

Yeah.

Man.

I'm like, come on.

So you do know what a prostate exam feels like.

I've had many.

I'm not colorectal surgery.

Speaking of colorectal surgery, I've got very mixed emotions about what we're going to talk about next.

And I will be transparent.

I am still in part under an NDA with this organization, and I'm limited on to how much I can say about my Nexus to them, but I've got a great deal of respect for Vlad and Robin Hood.

Today they announced that they are aiming to add a social platform, something along the lines of Reddit or Wall Street Bets.

There's a great picture of Lot.

His wife is from Mishvajo, right?

Yeah.

Anyway, la.

The CEO of Robinhood.

The company will invite a small group of customers to join Robinhood Social early next year, then broaden the availability later.

The company said in a statement Tuesday.

Initially, all posts by traders will be required to include a trade of equities, options or other assets.

Those positions will continue to update in real time after they've been shared and comments on the post will be allowed.

So now if you.

If you imagine it's brilliant on their part, for.

For a multitude of reasons, it's brilliant, but it's also.

So the Internet's already doing this.

Let's be clear.

They're already doing this.

And the way I look at Robin Hood already.

Right.

What's the draw?

The draw is for the younger generation, right.

To come in.

You don't have.

You don't got to pay a fee for every transaction.

Right.

And they know they get worse execution here than they do on other platforms.

They pay a fee.

Right.

But everyone's okay with it.

That was the big thing.

Everyone's okay with it.

And really, really would.

Robin Hood really is in my, in my mind.

You don't got to speak to this if you can or you can't, but to my mind, it's.

Y' all a data company.

That's.

You guys are collecting data.

Right?

And.

No, no, they, they, they make money off the, the trades in the back end.

No, no, they get.

They make money off the trades of the back end, but really what they're doing, they're collecting a lot of data on that, on that younger generation.

Right.

Well, you know how you talked about Wells Fargo wanting to.

They.

They use the word cross sell then.

Now it's deep in the relationships in order to make it sticky.

See.

Oh, we got to go back to those epis.

Got it deep in.

And sticky in the same sentence, baby.

We got to go back to that where we, we read, you know, financial data or an article about a company and these terms and phrases that like to get floated around.

You take people behind the curtain.

What does it really mean?

Well, I mean, cross selling, deep in the relationship.

Yeah, dude, I, I was.

There's very few things I was really good at as an executive.

At least that's what the board said anyway.

Too soon.

But in any event, there are some things that I was really good at.

And that was polishing the language to be such that it was real and transparent and didn't sound hyper fluffy.

Like that was what I was good at.

That was.

Yeah, okay, that's allegedly.

I don't know, it's hard to tell.

Shout out to the board members who never called me.

So we're gonna remain quiet on this one.

So investors also will be able to follow the moves and statistics of other users who join Robinhood Social, including their one year in daily profit and loss statements and profit rates.

Can you imagine going on a Robinhood Social and be like, oh my God, Rejeel is up this much for the year.

This much.

Month over month.

He's trading these and these stocks like.

Oh my God, it's pretty flat.

I gotta follow Regill's trading.

It's a good flex.

That's a solid flex.

Can you imagine how big the real thing would feel?

Yeah, the real, the real ballers that want to put their money where their mouth is.

They're going to go over and they're going to have an account, not their full account account.

Right.

But they're providing a structured Ecosystem, you can't fake.

You're not gonna be able to fake it.

You're not gonna be able to fake it.

Right.

It's.

I trade.

You can go on Reddit or Wall street bets and say, I traded this and this, that this is what my numbers are.

And someone could be like following you, going like, oh, this guy's usually right.

But this, you could literally just, you know, laid out on the table whether.

People use it, whether people use it for that purpose or not.

There's definitely going to be users on the site tracking other people, that's for sure.

Wait, there's more.

Yeah, I'm on it.

I'm on it.

You ready for the cross sell?

Yeah, I'm in it.

No, I'm, I'm ready for the deepening.

Profiles for public figures such as former U.S. house Speaker Nancy Pelosi and billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, for example, will also be on the platform with their trades populated via public disclosures required by law.

Pelosi shares are held by her husband, according to the filings, and a spokesperson said in an email statement that she does not own any stock.

Stocks and she has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions.

That quote wasn't really necessary for the story, but I wanted to add it.

Well, well, they will also be on the.

No, they're allowed to be on the platform.

They're not gonna.

They can't guarantee.

No, no, no, no.

They're taking their.

Because they're required to file public filings and stuff that they trade.

Oh, but it's always looking in hindsight, right?

Yeah.

It's not real.

Not real time.

You'll be able to see it.

Yeah, yeah.

You'll be able to follow their holdings in real time.

Then they'll update what they sold old when they.

Yeah, yeah, I like that.

I like that.

Okay.

There's actually an app that does this now where you can literally pick their.

Their investments.

Oh, autopilot.

Yep.

Yeah.

Introducing the Pelosi tracker on autopilot.

So autopilot.

Genius on their.

On their part.

Yeah.

And that.

Do you think she authorized that?

A picture of use of her.

She's a public figure.

This is.

I know.

This is her.

This is her bracing for having to answer these questions every single time.

She's like, God, not again.

Again.

Scroll down.

It's the same face I make when I'm going number two.

Who's this?

Michael Burry.

Right.

Yeah.

Burry Tracker on autopilot.

That's a good one.

So who else?

We got common questions.

What portfolio options are there?

Love it.

Autopilot has multiple pilots that offer a variety of portfolios.

On top of our own Autopilot branded portfolios, our app includes portfolios from fantastic pilots like Quiver, Unusual Whales, and Liquidity.

Oh, I follow quantitative.

I, I, I actually followed that last one.

And, And Un Wave.

Yeah, I follow them.

And Unusual Whales.

All right.

Okay.

Interesting.

Backed by the best.

Next fun craft.

Nomad Ventures and Balahi Ventures.

I would argue that's not the best, but, you know, hey.

Yeah, but it, this feels like one of those, like, fun apps to be on just to be able to track people.

I like it, though.

I'm gonna, I'm.

Look, it's piqued my interest.

I like what they're doing.

Well, then I've got more for you.

More?

Yeah.

Okay, sugar bear, let's go.

All right.

In addition to the social media platform, the company will give retail traders the ability to take short positions in stocks.

Oh.

Oh, wow.

The big short comes back around.

See, this is, this is the data point that I was, I was referring to.

Right.

This is essentially the vix.

The vix.

You know, there was another index, like the VIX had a different name.

Name was there?

Oh, yeah.

I didn't know that.

I'll break that one down for you.

Maybe on a different episode.

Okay.

But yeah, we'll get there.

It's really fast.

It's not a lot.

It's not around anymore.

And I can explain why.

It's a really fascinating story.

So now they can short the market because that's what you want.

A bunch of retail traders doing, like GameStop and shorten the hell out of the market.

Because that worked out so well for them.

Yeah.

Select the index options.

Select the index options will also be available for overnight trading beginning the early next year.

Robin Hood said so.

Robin Hood's social trading play.

Let's unpack this a little bit.

Okay.

Okay.

This is not from the article.

This is.

This is from your friendly neighborhood.

Higher standard boys.

Okay.

The boys.

Echoes of the 1990s.

Online brokerages like E Trade and Amerit Trade transformed investing by democratizing access.

They had the first online platforms.

Right.

Robin Hood is trying to do the same for social investing, but with a twist of Wall street bets.

Gamification.

Now the idea of gamification and trading stock, gambling stock.

It's a little dicey.

It feels dicey and it feels a little dirty.

I don't like it.

A little dirty.

I don't like dirty.

Yeah.

You may or may not get herps.

Do you still want to do it.

Don'T want to do it.

May or may not know.

There's not a kind of protection in the world that's gonna make me go home at night and feel like I didn't get hers.

Yeah, not enough showers.

That's.

It's just not showers in the day.

There's just not.

There's too many fluids.

Just not his head.

He's like.

I know what he's talking about.

Moist.

You can bleep yourself for an element in there.

Transparency first.

All right.

Having to post trades to comments that's unprecedented in modern social investing platforms.

Imagine if the dot com era classic chat rooms required you to prove your trades before shilling your stock pick.

It's really important that they do the.

The.

The only reason this.

This works for Robin Hood.

No one was like, arrest them now.

Yeah.

Because this is their version of the blue check mark.

Yeah, that's what this is.

So a little historical sidebar here.

In the early 1900s, bucket shops.

Ever heard them?

Bucket shops.

Bucket shops.

No, I haven't heard them.

I just.

Off exchange betting parlors for stocks were outlawed for fueling reckless speculation.

Right.

Robin Hood Social critics are already drawing comparisons.

And I know you want to know more about these outlawed bucket shops.

Bucket shops were declared illegal in most states between 1905 and 1915.

Yeah.

The Supreme Court upheld laws banning them in Gatewood v. North Carolina in 1909, ruling that they promoted speculation fraud and financial instability.

The impact.

Interesting.

Their demise pushed more retail investors into legitimate brokerage firms, tightening regulation and reinforcing the NYSE's monopoly.

Monopoly on stock trading.

Yeah.

You know what this is, right?

This is the end of Kramer's career.

Man, Kramer's career should have been over.

A long time ago, but.

Yeah, but look, at least he always had an out, right?

Like I didn't know.

Look.

No, I want to see you put your money where your mouth is.

You said this a buy.

Go buy.

Let me see.

Yeah, if you buy, then I'll buy.

Why aren't you buying?

Kramer?

What happened?

Yeah, come on, Jimbo.

You said you.

You said to buy.

Yeah, but you buy.

Buy now.

Yeah, exactly.

I want to see the Dave Ramsey Exchange.

Oh, a Kramer.

J.

A Kramer and Dave Ramsey exchange is needed.

The Kramer Ramsey.

Yeah, Kramer Ramsey.

The Kramer Ramsey.

You can call it a Crame Ram.

Yeah.

Remember we had that whole thing?

What was it?

It was Never trust a man with ram in his last name.

Little Roll by Never Trust Man.

Ram.

This is episode 300.

We have.

We have to.

We have to live, you know, some of those old episod episodes.

I still live by that rule.

Yeah, man.

Yeah, so do I.

So do I. Oh, man.

So many good episodes.

What.

Thinking back, what was your.

One of your favorite ones?

The Team Chi Asano episode where you said nothing and looked at him.

That doesn't count as an episode.

That.

That's not.

That's not.

It wasn't Real episode for me.

Wasn't for you.

Oh, yeah, that one.

That one always sticks.

We had some good ones with the ruin in the room, too.

I remember the first time in the previous studio that was good.

No video.

No video.

But we had Yo.

MTV Raps on in the back.

That was weird.

That was weird.

It's hard to stay focused.

That almost seemed, like, eerie, right?

Like.

Because the first one.

No, I felt good.

This one.

This one.

This studio feels more like ours, obviously, you know, But I don't know.

I. I still get to this day, people.

People saying, oh, I came from Mind Pump, and, you know, I really like the shows and.

And they really, like, shout out to Adam and Sal and Justin and.

Yeah, man, they just.

I remember when we went up there and we hiked for, like, six miles, and that was a good walk.

Yeah, that was a good walk.

I was a fat little bastard.

On that show, though.

The video is compelling.

No, the one where we hiked for six miles, we went up there and we just interviewed Adam in his studio.

In their studio.

Oh, that's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

We went back a second time for you to do their show.

That's right.

That's right.

We did.

You have to pass the smell test before they can let you on the big stage.

I'll do your show, but for you to come on our show.

Hold on here.

Yeah, yeah.

He wants to come down to this studio the next time he's in town.

He should.

Yeah, we exchanged messages the other day.

I don't.

God, I just don't have time to talk to everybody as much as I want to.

It's so frustrating.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's it, man.

Yeah.

Especially with all the daddy stuff you're doing.

Yeah, man.

I enjoy every single bit of it.

I'm not.

I wouldn't sacrifice that for a million dollars.

Are you at the point now when you're doing daddy stuff for Jill?

I'm actually curious to know.

Your take when you're doing daddy stuff is like, watch off, phone off in the other room, and you're 100 devoted.

No.

Yeah, I tried to.

Yeah, I try to.

Yeah.

Just Put my phone on, like, away on the table or something.

Something.

Do Legos, color Kumon.

So we, we.

I try to make it a point where, like, I'll.

I'll try to do it my.

Because my daughter's all already saying, dad, you're always on your phone.

Please get off your phone.

My son's never said that to me.

I. I do make it a point to.

So I should be clear here.

I make it a point to.

To engage with him at the same time every single day, the exact same way.

Yeah, yeah.

So, like, in the morning when he gets up, up, I get him dressed, I'll make him breakfast, get him some chocolate milk, which is like his thing.

And then, you know, we'll talk a little bit about the day.

And then I'll walk him to school.

Nice.

Right?

Drop him off at school.

And then by the end of the day when I get home, it's usually I give him a bath, we dinner together, and I get him into bed.

Okay.

And none of those really involve technology, but we have been playing a little bit of Minecraft on my phone, him on his.

Oh, so you guys are eating dinner.

No, TV time.

TV's off.

You guys are eating dinner?

No, I will usually watch, like, something together that he's interested in together.

But I've also.

I've got a bit of a dissenting opinion on this stuff too.

Like.

Like what, a screen time?

Yeah.

I know that there's a sentiment around screens and what they do to children's behavior, and I don't necessarily disagree with it.

I think that's probably accurate.

But I also think that it's unavoidable as you become an adult to.

To be in these ecosystems.

And I think that the ideology of holding kids off on it.

It for as long as possible may be right, but it may be wrong.

If the world that we're seeing today progresses, then those who have the most exposure and are the most advanced with these technologies will likely be the more successful ones.

Yeah, I think it.

I think there needs to be.

You need to analyze, first of all, how's your kid utilizing these technologies?

Right, Right.

If you're watching a TV show like my.

I caught my kids watching a TV show on Netflix that was real jumpy.

A lot of cuts, not a lot of words, and it was just cutting back and forth.

And I was noticing that the behavior was starting to change and it would get them really antsy.

Right.

And I could just see that this.

This one particular, like, TV show was just having a real impact on them.

Like, guys, guys, look, we.

I can't have you watching this.

It's over stimulating it's way.

And they're not able.

You're right.

And they're not able to fully everything that's going on and take it all in.

Right.

So that's when you'll see the weird behaviors where you're sitting on the couch to now standing on the couch while watching.

You're like, what's going on, guys?

Like calm down.

So let me ask you a question and I'm legitimately curious.

I don't have an answer here.

Yeah.

But is it better to cut them off or is it better to teach them how to manage through those emotions while watching it?

Because one could argue that, that there, there will be moments that you're not around where they are going to get that exposure.

And is it better they know how to recognize it and respond or is it better to hit them fresh and give them a longer duration of time without that in their life?

I think for us, I try to use logical reasoning as much as possible.

What's logical though?

I mean give me.

No, like I'll try to talk them through it and if.

I'll see, I'll see if they can comprehend what I'm saying.

I saw, I saw an interview the other day.

There was like some psychologists on, I think it was Hassan Minaj's podcast and he was talking about how, you know, how we think kids are perceiving the information that we're telling them isn't always the case.

Right.

You might tell one kid.

You might tell one kid, hey, we're turning the TV off in five minutes.

We're gonna have dinner right after that.

Some kids aren't hearing that.

They're just hearing.

I don't have to turn the TV off now.

They're not, they're not, they're not that they just.

Oh, okay.

Not now.

Okay, cool.

Keep going.

But it's not just kids though, right.

This is humans in general.

So I, my wife and I do this with one another too.

Where I can see her and I'll use her as an example.

But I have my moments the exact same thing.

So this is not unique to her.

Yeah.

Where I know she's going to get so ingratiated in the ecosystem of her phone that it's hard for her to pull back from it.

I do the same thing.

I have found ways to self regulate in ways that I hope my son self regulates as well.

And I hope Adam and Ryan do the same thing.

Thing where like for me, like When I post social media, I post social media.

I don't scroll.

So if you see me post something on the socials, I'm posting it.

I might.

If you.

If you comment, I'll respond because I'll see that alert come through.

But I'm not going to sit there and scroll because there's nothing that social media has to offer me.

Right.

Outside of me providing content and me providing feedback in an ecosystem.

Yeah.

That's a discipline, though, right?

Right.

But it's a discipline I had to learn because I did get lost in it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But then not everybody has that level of discipline, dude.

It's a.

It's a real addiction.

It is super addiction.

It's designed to be addictive.

I agree with that.

Yeah.

You know, so it's like not everybody.

Not everybody can, you know, put those restrictions on themselves.

Like.

But let's take the logic and expand it a little bit.

So again, more questions, and I agree.

I want to hear where you're going with this, but I'm asking the question.

It's an addiction, Design addiction.

It's not something you're drinking or smoking, but certainly mentally stimulation, mental stimulation.

And it preys on.

On inner human psychology.

Okay, but alcohol is an addiction.

Is your solution to tell the kids they can't ever have alcohol?

No, no.

Or is your solution to teach them how to have alcohol responsibly when the time comes?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

And for.

For us at home, it's always, look, you.

If you show me you can handle it well, then we can.

You can have it.

If it's mismanaged now I got to take it away until you show me that.

That you've earned another shot at it.

Right.

So, for instance, an example would be if there's certain channel we've just now started letting the kids watch.

YouTube.

Not away from YouTube.

Kids.

Oh, wow.

Channels.

That scares the hell out of me.

No, it's not just the adult.

It's access to the adult channels with less parental controls.

They can search.

They can search.

Right.

And so they know that there are specific channels that we.

Okay.

And there's ones that we don't.

Okay.

Like the Dude.

Perfect.

Guys, clean channels.

Let's see, there's this.

The guy that he went to the basketball camp for.

Right.

Bucket squad.

The guy's name is Jesser.

Okay.

He's been around for 15 years.

He's made some stuff that is slightly questionable, but I know that anything that's made in the last year and onward is 100 clean because that's when he started partnering with NBA.

Right?

So I told Adam, I'm like, I know you really like this guy, and I see why he's entertaining training.

He talks about all the stuff you want to talk about.

He's cool.

Like, he introduces him to things that I would never be able to introduce him to because I just don't have that time and I don't know everything.

But if I catch you watching a video that's older than a year and I know he knows, he's smart enough to know, right?

He looked at the day on the videos posted like two years ago, right?

Be like, hey, I told you no.

Now I gotta take this away.

I trusted you with it.

Now I gotta take it away until you've earned that trust again.

Then he'll always ask me, me, how can I build the trust?

I'm like, why don't you do things that you feel like builds trust with me?

You already know what you need to do.

Why do I have to tell you?

Right?

So it's kind of.

It's kind of like that.

I don't feel like there's one way to.

To parent any kid.

You could probably speak to this as a former executive.

Right.

There's no one way to manage everybody.

You got to play to their strengths.

Yeah.

You have to.

I think we do this too much in society where we compare workers to that.

But the gambit of human emotions is one that is very complex.

And we all carry trauma and different experiences which manifests itself into emotions that we try to label similarly situated emotions from similar situated people.

But the reasons that you express anger, or my son or Rajeel or my wife expresses anger might be very different.

Different.

And they're manifestations of different things.

And some emotions are simple, like somebody dies.

People cry emotionally.

But sometimes you look at the reason why they're crying and you go, some people will miss the time that they had.

Some people miss the time they didn't get.

Some people will miss those opportunities in the future.

Some people are just, you know, thinking about their own deaths, you know, and it's.

So when it comes to.

To managing the emotions and people and all that stuff with, with work, the best thing I can do is try to.

To give them the credence of hearing out why they feel a certain way, because I can't assume it when it comes to the kids.

It's even more important to me because in a perfect world, our kids wouldn't have trauma.

Right?

Right.

But understanding why they react emotionally, I've never told you this, but your son reminds me a lot of me as a kid.

I was very emotional and very sensitive and kind of very aware of the world.

And Rejeel son reminds me a lot of me when I was younger.

Super curious, likes to know how things work and.

And I was a lot like that.

And for me personally, it took a long time to learn how to manage what's inherent.

Like, I'm a very inherently emotional person.

But was there an influence, is there an influence that you could pinpoint to what helped you figure out that you need to manage this, or is it just you becoming an adult and over time it just kind of happened.

I didn't have a dad like you and Rajeel.

I had a dad and I'm grateful for what he was and what he wasn't.

Yeah, me too.

You know, and I had to live through a lot of trauma and a lot of really fucked up things, none of which that I hold on to to this day.

I've let all that go and I'm happy to.

I'm an open book on the stuff, so we can do an entire episode on it.

But.

For me, learning how to my emotions didn't help in difficult times was kind of a key like thing for me.

Because as much as I'm emotional, and this in your son too is, I'm also hyper logical.

Right.

Like I'm hyper logical.

So because of that, I can logically think through my emotions.

In instances where I think a lot of people are emotional and reactive, I get emotional and I ask myself why.

Yeah, so I'll do like, I'll watch a TV show show and I'll get like, like, you know, kind of like, oh my God, they'll like logically think myself through it and it goes away.

Ah, got it.

You know, but it was learning through really difficult times.

Now do you feel like that has helped you or made it harder to connect with people?

Harder to connect people?

Yeah, like, and as.

When I say connect like understanding or you know, relating, not relating, I get.

Most people, I think, because the logic's there and I inherently feel the same way.

I think people see me as non reactive to things emotionally now.

And part of this is being in that C suite role at a public trade institution.

People come to executives and companies with problems, only no one comes to me going like, hey, this is working amazing.

Tell me what I think.

I get 90% of the conversations I have.

Unless you're me or you're trying to flex, look how good of a job I'm doing.

Yeah, you Go.

And I was chief operating officer, so for the last two years.

So over two years.

So two.

I don't know, whatever.

And my people would come to me with broken operations.

This needs to be fixed.

And that was one of those things where it's not an easy gig, but I don't react to the emotions of it.

I go, okay, tell me what's wrong.

And then in my head, I'm prioritizing.

But a lot of times people come to you with problems.

They're coming to problems that are meaningful to them.

They.

They went above their manager, their manager, their managers, you know, and they went through this trail of people, or they haven't got the responses.

They're coming to you with frustrations.

Yeah.

So do you think it's kind of like a. I say this to my family members who are doctors, right?

Like you.

The.

The biggest knock on doctors, right, all the time is they.

They get hit on for.

They don't connect to the patients.

They don't connect to the patients.

But the money.

The money's.

They get.

What said is the money's in the treatment, not the cure, right?

That's when they label them like that.

And you guys are part of big pharma, and you guys don't really care.

About the people or couldn't be farther from the truth.

Or.

Or is it that you have somebody like, let's just say my cousin Weiss, right, Who has.

Did all his rotations and worked and saw plenty of patients, and he actually aspired to be a family practitioner, right?

Just because that's what he liked to.

He had opportunities to do specialties, but he's like, no, I want.

In states, like where he was, where he went to med school at Vermont, like, the family practitioner does a lot more than what you see here in California, right?

And he's like, I tell you, try to help people, and they just don't want the fix.

They don't want the answers.

They say, give me the medication, which.

Is also what they've been taught.

But so it's like now he's become desensitized to caring, right?

Imagine patient after patient, day after day, month over month, year over year over year.

It's like, eventually.

So it's like.

It's one of the big criticisms over GLP ones right now is everyone's like, okay, you.

You don't want to put in the work.

You just want the solution.

And on some level, I. I understand that.

But on another level, like, on a. I have an obese person's, like, mentality.

In history.

I might not look like it, but I do.

My face looks like it.

On the Mind Pop episode that was on you.

Check it out with me.

Check it out.

But, but.

So I know that it quiets the food noise.

I know that there's real, meaningful, tangible benefits that are outside of it that a skinny person or somebody who hasn't been large before would really appreciate.

But yeah, I get the desensitization to it.

Because we're all humans.

We want the easy way.

We want the easy explanation.

But it's not unique to this.

I mean, dude, look at history.

We as humans have tried to define history through the most arrogant, easiest solution ever.

Yeah.

Oh, we're the smartest species in the world.

We're brilliant.

Everybody else is dumb.

That came before us.

And we are the last stop of evolution.

No, we're not.

Yeah.

A million years from now, humans won't look like they do that.

I remember.

Was it in the movie or was it after that movie?

I read something from the movie the Martian with.

Was it Matt Damon?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's a botanist.

Yeah.

Great movie.

Yeah, Amazing movie, right?

More of a comedy than I actually thought.

Yeah, but it's.

I think it was in that movie.

It said it would only take a thousand years for us to go extinct and for agriculture to take over and make it seem like we were never here.

Yeah.

So I've got thousand years.

Think about.

Think about all the infrastructure that's been built out.

It could all make.

It would all appear like it was.

It was gone, bro, you want to walk through some stuff that.

This is the kind of stuff that I keep.

I. I get up every single morning at like 4 or 5 o' clock in the morning with thoughts like this.

And this is just how my mind works.

Works.

And it's fucked up.

I think to myself, okay, let's say there was a cataclysmic event and humanity as we know it gets largely wiped out.

It's impossible to wipe us all out.

But, you know, let's say largely wiped out.

Yeah.

And let's say you mean regil survive.

I call bunkies with Regiel.

Dibs.

Long range dibs.

Get the warmth.

Adam, in the other room.

Yeah, only for a little while longer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a sliding door, bro.

The back door, not the front door.

So let's say this happens, right, and everything's wiped out and the three of us are trying to survive.

You don't have access to technology.

Everything's gone.

What you have is a deforested Planet that, that will hopefully reforest itself with time to give us resources that we can really utilize.

Because at some point in time, the man made resources are going to run out.

And that'll probably happen in a couple hundred years.

During our lifetime, they'll probably run out.

The next couple years we'll tell stories about these screens and things.

We used to watch TVs on, like plasma TVs.

Right.

200 years later, 300 years later.

That sounds like hyperbole.

You just used to look at his reflection in the water.

Yeah, right.

You know, but then you look around the world and you say to yourself, like, okay, then what, what does all this really mean?

It's just a blip in time.

And we think of our, we think of time in the context of our lifetimes.

100 years on average, if you're lucky.

But a thousand years from now, 2,000 years from now.

Yeah.

And then I think about like, okay, like the pyramids, you know, I think about a lot.

You know, you're Jervis San Onofre.

The, the two.

The nuclear site in San Onofre.

The two giant round domes.

Oh, yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Some other side of the road, let's just say a cataclysmic event hit, right.

And everything was wiped out.

You would drive by those two big round concrete domes, right.

You can call them boobies if you want to.

I know you want to.

That's what I always look.

That's what they look like.

Maybe that's what the pyramids were.

Cataclysmic event hit, and you got two giant pyramids just like these two round domes that are energy production.

Yeah, but, but there's a, there's a lot of coincidences with the placements of those pyramids, Right.

They align to the stars.

But I mean, you could look at these and say they align between cities.

You could find a way to.

They're always built.