Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm supposed to take sweet victory. I know this life meant for me. Adam, what's your point? The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever saw. It's right here.
You are a one-on-one? My son's right there.
I don't think I've ever said this before.
Okay, so we got business podcast Wednesday. We have the great Barry Habib here with us, as well as Brandon Aceto and Tom Ellsworth. The goal is to get smarter and make better decisions. There's a lot going on. I mean, obviously, we have to still continue talking about the stuff that's going on with Iran. I think there's a 15-point plan to end the war with Iran.
As Trump says, the regime has agreed to scrap nuclear program. What does that really mean? Iran's come back and made their request. They want reparations for the damages that has taken place. We'll go back and forth. We'll address that.
And then at the same time, just this morning, could have been last night, but I think it's this morning, the age to join the military that was always 34, 35, because I'll never forget being in boot camp, and a 34-year-old guy was with us. We were 18, 19 years old. We're like, what are you doing? He says, I got out. Did eight years, want to come back in to finish my 20 years.
I said, you're 33, 34. Maximum age at the time was 34, 35. Now, as of today, for some of you that are open and interested, Vinny's outside right now trying to get a job, just so you guys know that. He's concerned. He's worried that AI is going to replace him. his character on the podcast, and he says, look, I've got to go back into the military. The age is officially from 35 to 42 years old.
I wonder why. Maybe they want you, they need you. We'll talk about it. Vinny's requesting if they can raise it to 48. They're not listening to him. But we'll see what's going to happen there.
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Chapter 2: What are the key points of Trump's 15-point peace plan?
Aside from that, a few other things that's going on. Wall Street Journal comes out with a story. With everything that's being talked about, you would think – They're talking about lowering the rates, right? But no. Wall Street Journal comes out with a story talking about a Fed likely hikes next, not cuts. Wall Street Journal, just a couple days ago, they're talking about that.
What do you mean rate hikes? Well, maybe they're going to be raising the... Rates, when it comes down to no masks for ICE agents for airports, a lot of videos going around showing the fact that ICE agents are being polite, giving water, taking care of people, being respectful to them.
So there's a lot of good messaging right now going with ICE agents going out there working while TSA agents are not working.
Chapter 3: What demands does Iran make in response to the peace plan?
I don't know what the number is. Over 400 TSA employees have full-on quit since the shutdown. Absent hit 12% of the 30,000 workforce. That's 3,450 as of Sunday. If you're traveling, it's still not a good sign. And some places are addressing it. Some places are not. A hidden $580 million oil bet. I don't even know if it's hidden because we know about it. But it was a $580 million oil bet.
Just before Trump's Iran announcement, 6,200 contracts. Can you imagine? Quickly, you put in the money, boom. You made a ton of money right afterwards. A lot of people, 6,200 people were part of it. Who knew? How did they know? What did they know? We'll address that. Michael Burry's got some thoughts that we'll get into on the SMP, his concern.
There's a story that came out with a seat geek job listing. Very weird. Who posts a job listing? And the way they describe it, advertising up to 25,000, they're paying $121,000, $275,000, analytics engineer, and advertising up to $25,000 in gender-affirming care benefits. Is that a recruiting tactic today? By the way, we're about to show our recruiting video. We don't offer that.
We're thinking we don't offer that here. If you're going to do something like that, you can go pay for it yourself. You're an adult. You can do it. But can you imagine it's gotten to a point that some companies are so woke that they're thinking by doing that, they're going to get people that are going to come work for them. Maybe it's going to work.
Maybe we're the naive ones, and they're the ones that are right. Obviously, we know the answer to that question. New York City homeowners age. Average age of New York City homeowner hits record high. You know how old the average age is today? 58.8 years old, 59 years old homeowners. And we have a gas prices story we'll get into just this morning. I think oil is at 88. The Dow is up two points.
Everything is up about two points. S&P, NASDAQ, everything's up two. We'll address those stories as well. Aside from that, we got more things going on with Iran that we got to talk about. There's a story that came out by Barron's Tax the Rich. or kill income taxes. States are divided on what to do. Flat out divided on what to do with numbers.
We'll talk about that with California, Washington, Florida, Texas, and then Russia. Largest oil port crippled and huge oil Ukrainian drone attack. This came out of nowhere. Nobody was like, wait a minute. While this is going on with Iran, Ukraine is attacking Russia? Yes. Why? Well, Ukraine is trying to say, hey, man, you're not going to sell that oil.
We have to put some pain in you because while they're negotiating their terms, we haven't finalized our terms. What do you want to do? So can you imagine Zelensky's position? This is a great time to make some noise. While everybody is looking at the other side, let's come and do this. Dave Ramsey warns. The young hopeful locked out of housing market. Corporate America has screwed you.
That's Dave Ramsey. We'll address that. Anthropix says, Claude, lots of news this week with Claude. I don't know if you've been following it. A lot of news this week with Claude. Anthropix says, Claude can now use your computer to finish tasks for you in AI agent push. I'll have Tom share with you guys what Claude is doing, if he's comfortable with it. I'm sure he is.
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Chapter 4: How is the U.S. economy impacted by recent Federal Reserve signals?
He'll share some of those stories because there's a girl we keep hearing about, Courtney, and we're kind of hearing about Courtney a little too much lately. None of us have met her. She's a secret. We can't meet her, but she's emailing all of us. And so this Courtney girl, wherever you are, please reveal yourself. Everyone's trying to know who you are, and Vinny wants to know if you're single.
We don't know that yet. So with that being said, before we get into the stories... Couple things. Number one, 51% of you consume the content here on the podcast who have not subscribed. We'd like to take PBD Podcast to 5 million subscribers. We're at 2.9 million right now. We're going to have something we'll announce here soon. And we'd like to take Valuetainment to 10 million subscribers.
We're currently at 7.1, 7.16 million subscribers. So if you haven't yet, if you enjoy what we do, you support the conversations that we have, click on that subscribe button. It helps us out a lot with the algorithms.
And last but not least, if you're a full-stack developer, if you're a good editor, if you're somebody with an MBA, if you're somebody that's been in the consulting side, we're hiring aggressively right now. We just got the floor plan for how high we can go here.
We're planning on building a building, and we got some good news on how high we can go on the building that we're going to build here to house a couple thousand employees. We're hiring aggressively. Rob, if you want to play the clip for some people that just think this is a podcast, there's a lot of stuff that's going on here. Go for it and play this clip.
Many times when people think about Valuetainment, all they think about is a podcast, but it's a lot more than that. It's nine companies working together on an 11-acre campus. If I was to give you a virtual tour here, you'll see the HR department hiring, talent acquisition. We have full-stack developers that are working on Manect and Hiremetrics.
We have a full-fledged events team that puts together events with thousands of people. We have a merch department designing the latest product. We just launched EFLB shoes made in Italy. We have a marketing department And if you go to the complete opposite side of the building, 50, 60 people making calls, working for David Consulting, sales, setters.
And then on the complete opposite side of the campus, there's a full-on production company with editors, shooters, creating content, doing podcasts. Then you can drive down a couple miles and go to our private boardroom, Cigar Lounge, with members only. Regardless of what it is, working at Valuetainment every day is a surprise.
You could be walking into work and right next to you is a governor, is a billionaire, is an athlete. We are hiring aggressively. But Valuetainment isn't for everybody. For the right person, this could be the last company you ever work for. So if you're watching this and you want to learn more, go to vt.com forward slash careers and apply now.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of propaganda in today's society?
And on top of that, here's the other part that's happening right now, which is a beautiful thing because you have to know propaganda. This is the greatest season to be in a propaganda business.
If you're an enemy, if you want to divide a nation, if you want to divide a political party, if you want to divide a family, if you want to divide a team, if you want to divide a state, if you want to divide anything today, the greatest propaganda weapon ever has been handed to you that even the amateur, the guy that wrote the book Propaganda, will look at it and say, my God.
God, we can really destroy some great states today because of the propaganda tool that we have, right? And you'll see all these videos of, I remember one time, one guy says, Pat, one of our clients was a previous presidential candidate that got up to 19%. I won't say his name. He said he was one of our big clients. I said, what do you mean he was one of our big clients? He says, come in the room.
I go into the room. I'm not even kidding with you. Thousands of phones. who are all sending tweets, who are all sending comments, who are all, I said, so what do you do?
He says, we can take anybody and make the market believe they are trending more than anything else, and the back end, like where the internet is coming from, they're able to link it to different places, so it doesn't show like it's all from one location coming, so it doesn't even trigger an X or a Facebook or the old Twitter or YouTube to be able to read this.
Guess what the market's going to say? We want the chat. We leave the chat. A lot of people don't like to do it. I love it. I love for the market to go through it and filter each other out because you got to be almost... What's the word, Tom? You got to be almost...
There's a word for it where when I was on the podcast with Joe, and Joe and I were talking about comments, and Joe says, well, Pat, you can't compare us because we're used to comments. We're used to what's going on. The average person is not, right? I love that the market is speaking to each other to see what's going to be happening.
The market right now when they're talking about jobs, people are saying it's a scary time for jobs. Forget about the article we're reading. The market is saying, Pat, I'm afraid I had 22 students here two weeks ago.
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Chapter 6: How does Dave Ramsey warn Gen Z about financial challenges?
Top ambassadors of this great school, 4.85 GPA, getting accepted into big schools. We're talking about schools like Ivy League and some of these others. And I'm talking to these guys, and we're talking about career planning, what they do next. What should we do? How do we reposition ourselves? This is not a time to go into – you have to find a way to compete against everybody else.
And even, look, I'll go to the Dave Ramsey story. Dave Ramsey warns young people. Locked out of housing market, corporate America has screwed you. Rob, do you have the clip on Dave Ramsey or if you want to play this clip? Here's what Dave Ramsey had to say about it. Go ahead. Corporate America has screwed you.
Chapter 7: What insights do experts provide on the rising debt crisis for young people?
Car debt is at an all-time high. The car companies have now got you signing up for $1,200 car payments. Student loan debt is at an all-time high. And this is Gen Z and millennials. And of course, credit card debt, thank you to the big banks, is at an all-time high. When you're drowning in personal debt, you can't afford to buy a freaking house. And that's what's happened.
We've had these big companies, the car companies, the banks, and Congress with the student loan debt, screwing these two generations at a record like never before. And so what we're finding is we're finding lots of Gen Zers, lots of millennials able to buy a home when they fight through and sell the stupid car and get rid of these debts.
Do you think that that's why they're maybe not going out there and buying those first-time homes? They're looking to other investments?
Well, they're not looking at other investments. They're broke. Their disposable income has been eaten up by those three categories I was talking about. Again, car debt is out of control.
Our message to Gen Z, I think he's talking his book to some degree. You know, certainly there is a lot of debt out there. We've seen that.
You're thinking he's selling a book right now?
I think he's just talking his book. His whole thing is, I'm going to get you out of debt. For sure.
That's a good point.
But he'd make some good points. And clearly, the evidence is there that we have seen credit card debt rise rather significantly. I believe it's up 22% over the past four or five years. So we have seen a big jump up in credit card debt in the amount that you're carrying. So that has a very poor effect on your overall ability to purchase a home. But I do believe that what...
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Chapter 8: How are states approaching tax policy in the U.S.?
What does that mean? Well, it means that the Christmas and holiday purchases and post-holiday sales and you went and bought a big screen TV for another thousand dollars and everything, you know, at Best Buy and got it installed for your Super Bowl party and you put it on BNPL. And then you only made half of the first payment and you triggered the hyper interest rate. Look carefully at BNPL.
If you don't pay those two, three or four very specific payments on specific dates, the slam bam that you get on the interest rate is insane. It's 30 percent or more in some cases. And so part of it is, Pat, we can talk about student loans and manipulation of students and the cost of tuition and all rail against colleges that basically use the U.S.
government student loan program to raise tuition.
It's a monopoly.
It's a monopoly. We could talk about that. But I'm going to stick with the consumer. There's some common sense for the consumer and financial education that's needed, that Barry was alluding to, because no college manipulated you to spend $1,000 at Best Buy on a big-screen TV and put it on BNPL, right? Nobody forced you to do that. So there's got to be some common sense on the consumer.
And I'll say, oh, these people are being victimized, victimized. You know, that's not always the case. And, you know, the things that have happened to car loans are correct. They kept stretching it out. I remember when – I remember where I was when a friend says, hey, I got a 60-month car loan. I say, you got a 60-month car loan?
When I had bought a Ford Escort after I got out of college, a little Ford Escort, cheap to insure, reliable, economical in terms of gas, that was my criteria. It was a 48-month car loan with an option to bring it down to 36. So you know what I did? I got my bonus and I put like an extra $1,000 down and I had a 36-month car loan. So you still had 36 and 48. Now look at the lengths of them.
36 months now is, oh, you want 36 months? Lease it. Lease it. This is what we're going to do. So the consumer, you know, has to have a hand in their own salvation here, in my opinion. And Dave Ramsey's right. But to merely sweep it off and say, oh, corporate America has screwed you, maybe there's some of that going on. But come on, Dave. Consumers have to have, you know, common sense.
You see a 400-pound person and you say the food got in there somehow, right? Yeah. Brandon. Yeah. So I don't think it's just corporate America. I'm going to use an analogy. But first, I'll say my base case is that I think boomers pillaged America, pillaged their generations after them, Gen X and millennials and Gen Z. And I'll use the analogy that you guys have all done well for yourselves.
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