Trump Gets Booed at MSG as Republicans Push Extreme Immigration Agenda

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I'm not going to come in here with the blow torch and get it hot and solder and put the copper pipes to come. I'm not doing it. I call a very nice man to handle it. When to call the experts and when to do it yourself. That's This Week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Rager Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Tarleff. All right. We just launched a new show called The Week where we pulled together the biggest stories and best conversations from across all of our pods. It's one 20-minute episode every Friday on the Prophetic Pod, breaking down what mattered and what didn't and what it all means, narrated by the inimitable, breathy, buttery tones of George Hahn. So please check it out The Week on your Prophetic Pod feed. All right. Let's get into it. The president attended Game 3 of the NBA playoffs at Madison Square Garden on Monday and was greeted with a pretty loud reaction from the crowd. Let's watch. The most predictable boo you could. Didn't we see this coming a mile away? We did. Flashing red lights and also a lot of changes to protocols that should have indicated to this utter narcissist that maybe he should stay away. I mean, making people wait three hours to be able to get into the building, canceling the watch parties outside of the garden. Like, I get it. And he is a lifelong Next Fan. He is a New Yorker. He's one of our more famous New Yorkers. I'm not taking that away from him, but you know that people are going to be pissed off about this. People who inherently don't like you and then on top of it, you're rolling up there and you're thinking like, if they lose, which they did, people are going to be saying that it's about you and you're forcing the players to have to answer questions about you. I think they did a very good job like dodging around about it. But news flash, Donald Trump is selfish. Yeah. Okay. So I don't think there's a lot to say here. The refereeing was terrible. I know you don't want to talk about this. You just pretend like you're not here. You can go on your phone. I just got to say this. The refereeing was on point when the next one. No, no, no, no. Don't do that. This is not about that. I'm now on Knicks and Six. I'm just saying take a look at the refereeing. Mike Brown is not a complainer. You know, 24 free throws for the Spurs and the second half only eight for the Knicks. I'm sure you're not following this viral meme thing, but my new favorite is my mayor, Muslim, my bagel Jewish, Donald Trump killed the vibe, but Knicks and Five. So I actually think it's going to be a six, but there you go. Wow. There you go. I would, I would think not to go to conspiracy theory, but I would think every additional game is another few hundred million dollars in ad revenue. Maybe that's unfair. A federal judge has blocked Trump's $100,000 fee for H1B visas. Trump ramped up that feedback in September to restrict the number of people in the program. And it had the intended effect dramatically reducing H1B visa requests. Jess, this is just one piece of a much larger immigration agenda that is still playing out. What do you think this means for immigration policy and for the economy? I mean, what we're going to see this week is going to be big with ramming through another 70 billion in funding for immigration enforcement that goes way beyond CBP and ICE at this point. But I think something that has been pretty under covered and this actually goes into two areas, one of which we touched on a few weeks ago. When we were talking about the Mipha Pristone case is that there are two areas where actually the Republican base feels like Trump hasn't been conservative enough. And one of them is on abortion with long term pro life activists that feel like he's really dropped the ball and like they got the dobs decision, but then he basically was like, I'm done with this. And then the other is in immigration and a lot of that you can connect to what happened in Minneapolis and sending Tom Homan in and getting someone like Greg Bovino out who is just giving the most frightening interviews about how actually the goal is to deport. I think it was 106 million people. So a third of the country should be deported. But there are hardliners who feel like Trump has let them down not only in getting the folks that would be day workers at a Home Depot, but offering too many visas for people to be here and H1B has always been a big focal point for them on that. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out in the next few months, but I feel like they have to kind of duck and cover if you look at this electorate and how it is definitely shifting bluer and bluer, at least a center left that you don't want to be out on the campaign trail talking about how you need more people in Delaney Hall or the Dilley Correctional Center and that you're restricting all of these visas. So I'm watching the tension, I would say. This is yet another own goal and that is over the last 80 years, America has built the most extraordinary valuable talent magnet in history. And now we're charging admission like we're like it's Disneyland. This debate or the H1B debate isn't really about immigration. The way I would frame it is it's about whether America wants to import ambition or export opportunity. Germany's raised the number of visas they're granting to Indian workers from 20,000 to 90,000. China is rolling out the welcome mat and we're putting up a toll booth. A quick example, 20% of the NASAC by market cap is run by not immigrants, Indian immigrants. I mean, I keep getting, I'm so impressed by this president's ability to find elegant ways to reduce our prosperity, whether it's tariffs, whether it's overextending ourself abroad, whether it's deficit spending and saying, okay, we're the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and for some reason this year we get all first round draft choices. Every one of them we get. That's America every year. We get the best and brightest from basically every western country. My father's from Scotland and he always used to say, and Scotland has a history of some of the most talented minds and academics and economists and he said, the best and brightest in Scotland all have one thing in common, they left for America. And we decided as the Buccaneers, no, we don't want these first round draft choices. It's just insane except Trump's company applied for 184 foreign workers last year, the highest number ever. Apparently immigration is a crisis right up until somebody needs a fucking groundskeeper at Mar-a-Lago. I mean, it's just another, okay, own goal tariff, own goal Iran. I know own goal around an immigration policy that's totally reductive. This doesn't mean you should be able to get into the country. We should let in a quarter of a million people who just put up the right arm and say asylum. And by the way, the thing we found out about asylum seekers in, or people granted asylum in Germany, 70% of them have vacation and gone home. They were supposedly under physical threat, but they've gone home since then on vacation. So there are absolutely holes in our immigration system that need to be cauterized, but to not allow the best and brightest to come here. You know, I see these kids every day, I call them kids, are PhD students at business schools. I'm droning on here, but at business schools, basically the foreign students of business schools means daddy is rich. I always say on the first day of class, just to set the tone for how politically incorrect it's going to be, all the foreign students here, I said get to know them because they're the funnest to party with and their dad is the rich dude in whatever country they came from. He owns the brewery, owns the newspaper. The PhD students you're going to meet from foreign nations are legitimately the brightest people you're ever going to meet because they were elevated about 45 times by scoring 102% on every test in Mumbai. And then getting, we pay them, we pay the PhD students and we get the best and brightest. We don't charge them $200,000 to take ethics and sustainability on leadership courses, which are a fucking waste of money. Anyways, that's my thought on immigration. I feel like we haven't had an update lately on the PhD students and the kind of, the people who work in our labs, right, that are developing our most important drugs, et cetera, because we saw obviously this huge push from other countries to take them from us when Trump first came into office and was arresting PhD students for writing op-eds that he didn't like, et cetera. Has that kind of slowed down? Because I know like China, for instance, was making bids for entire labs, right, saying to people at Harvard, we'll take everybody. Like we'll take your janitor to the guy who's in charge of this because we know that the next development in robotics or medicine or whatever it is, is coming out of this place and we'll pay anything for it. But I feel like that's gone away as a plot line. Is that still happening or are people staying more? The honest answer is I don't know. I haven't been on campus much since COVID. I know that it's not only China being aggressive, it's France and the UK. They've both passed bills to allocate funding to try and recruit the best and brightest academics from the US. They see an opportunity. And there was a lot of chatter, my understanding is amongst academics thinking, and why is it a little bit different or at least the business goes a little bit different. It's kind of the last stop where people become very unproductive. They're like 65 and they were the bomb and gap to accounting in 1988 and that they decide once their kids are out of the house. They'll move from whatever the hot school or from Flagler or from Darden. They'll go be empty nesters in Soho. So I don't know if we're the right. I'm long-winded way of saying I don't know. I know there was a lot of chatter about, like you said, entire labs being lifted, but I don't know if it's actually happened. I hope that they stay and then all the gets reversed. Yes, I like to be on top. That's like academically, whatever. Please move on now. I'm not going to touch that. 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I don't want to be too negative, but I don't find this to be a satisfactory answer. I have read the release from Jeffery's office. We will convene five working groups on the affordability issue so we can dive deeper with member-driven engagement on policy and legislative proposals. These working groups fall into the following categories, housing, gas and utilities, groceries and goods, caregiving and health care. Duh, right? Mm-hmm. Like, oh, okay, those are things that cost a lot. We should fix them. Like, what is the solution? I know everyone is super busy and navigating the Trump era is impossible, right? Like, we're just sitting here podcasting and we feel overwhelmed for it, let alone if you actually have to be the legislative backstop to try to keep these criminals at bay, essentially. But hire more people if that's what you need to do. Hire consultants, whoever, to just get us something tangible that doesn't just say we're going to go into a room with other very smart people and bat around ideas on how to deal with, you know, the sandwich generation or what it costs for caregiving. Just say, everyone who is caring for someone, you get $1,000. There. I mean, maybe that's not, $12,000. You have $1,000 a month, right? If you are a full-time carer, I don't know if that would actually work. You need to check that with someone smarter than me. But you get my point, right? Like, on health care, I think it has to be we want to move towards Medicare for all. The Obamacare subsidies, it's not enough. You shouldn't have to live like this, right? We shouldn't be negotiating for something that's actually not satisfactory. So this is our goal. These are the steps that we're going to take to get there. You'll be able to, like, negotiate across state lines. It's going to improve Obamacare. Like, give me that. I want it. Yeah. It's typical Democrats cosplaying Obama and just thinking they can run on anti-Trump and being indignant without any fucking ideas. And there are several proposals they could lay out that would get, I think, America excited. Tax credits for housing developers in concert with YIMBY federal legislation, similar to what they've done in Austin and Minneapolis that dramatically increases housing stock, such that prices come down. Rents have gone down 30% or 40%. Housing prices down 20% in Austin. A billion GLP one does is to try and take medical costs from $13.5 down to $12, down to $11, down to $9 as the nodal health care crisis or a cost for 200 other chronic diseases is obesity. Trying to give every kid $7,000 when they're born, compounds to their $65, and in 20 or 30 years, we're going to announce we're doing away with Social Security, interest rates start to dive, and people's credit card bills, auto loans, and mortgages go down. A massive increase in minimum wage that gives consumers more power again. I mean, there's just so many policies that they could outline that with lower Medicare by two years a year for 20 years, until effectively we have Medicare for everyone, there are so many things they can propose. Yeah. I also love the ones when people say for every new regulation, we're going to cut 10. Yeah, perfect. Do it. Just say it. Perfect. And we're going to start with housing and make sure that we never have a disaster like what happened in the Palisades where people can't rebuild their homes because we have so much red tape. And antitrust, if you go from three major chicken producers to 11, the cost of chicken is going to go down, folks. If you break up big pharma, if you break up big energy, if you break up big tech, the rents are going to go down. But all this shit is boring. Tax policy is boring. Do away with the estate tax exemption such that you can actually fund the government. Get fiscal sanity. Such an interest rates go way down. Tax universities that have endowments over a billion dollars that aren't growing their freshman class faster than population size. That's that we have more affordable on ramps to the middle class lifestyle that is still higher ed. I mean, there are so many common sense programs that have been tried elsewhere that actually work, raise compensation for congressmen and senators to one in $3 million a year and have absolutely zero tolerance for taking any money, basically neuter citizens united from the top down such that we stopped this overrun of government that has transferred wealth and power from consumers and earners to the owners to shareholders. There's just there's a series of policies that we could enact, but unfortunately they take longer than any election cycle. And they're not that interesting and they're not that dramatic and they're not that romantic. But the American people don't want to have an adult conversation. I don't even think it's the fault of our leadership. I think Americans, their eyes glaze over when we start talking about antitrust or interest rates, because the only way you address affordability is with really boring, mechanical, long term shit. And no one appears to want to have these conversations. I think you could do both. I really do. I don't want to be too much of the like just tell the people what they want to hear, but that is how you win an election. So I'm pretty cool with like a surface level nod to the fact that people want to hear that you've really heard them, right? And that you understand what their experience is. And then get the boring guys in like the back door and have them sitting in the rooms figuring out all the stuff that you were just talking about. But you've got to have like, we're Hollywood, right? Like liberals make the most compelling content that exists on this earth. So put a bunch of them in the room and say, like the guys who just came up with office romance, the J.Lo Brett Goldstein movie, like get them on there and have some headlines, right? Or whatever you're going to do, you know, tell Ted Durandos. I had not thought of that. I had not thought of that. Or pitch competitions. People love that, right? Like there are so many concerned liberals. This is everything from moderate Republicans to people who have always been part of the Democratic Party, you know, concerned about the future of this country, want it the very least to have divided government, right? That we need some sort of backstop and ask them for their suggestions. I mean, I'm on all of these email lists from people who work in a wide variety of fields and what they send out on their sub-stack or their, you know, Beehive newsletter, whatever it is, it's all about how to push democracy forward, right? Like how can we get better outcomes? How can we fix life from, you know, the people who are doing okay, that kind of mid-rich to the working class people who can't afford to live anywhere near where they go to work? I mean, the average commuter I'm sitting in midtown Manhattan, there's 90 minutes getting here from wherever they live so that they can serve us coffee, right? Like, why are we not talking about that stuff? Why do we have like working groups? Now, all right, look, one of the many existential crises facing Western democracies right now is the population rates, birth rates are absolutely crashing. They're below replacement rates. Do you see the data on the phone that they're tying it now to the phone? Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. We used to think it was tied to economics, but they've done all these economic experiments in Northern Europe and Japan and those don't seem to be working. They think it's about status and then where I was headed is housing. And that is expensive housing is essentially birth control. For every 10% increase in housing prices, birth rates go down a percent because getting a house is sort of a bridge to, all right, we're going to practice family and we have a spare bedroom, okay, it's time to fill the spare bedroom. And median home price is now roughly six to seven times median income nationally. Historically, it's been between three and four X. I mean, instead of drill baby drill, I think a Democrat could run on one thing. Here's a very detailed plan for building 10 million homes in the next 10 years. We can do it, adopt the Minneapolis and Austin model, but it's not only appeals to younger people, it appeals to parents who want to get their kids out of their house and also realize that what it costs them to buy their house, what it used to cost to buy a mansion. I bought my first home in Pichero Hill, San Francisco for $285,000 when I was a year out of business school. And we had to borrow the money from my girlfriend's parents for the down payment, but we could buy a house in San Francisco at 28, first time home buyers and now over 40, 60% of them are all cash buyers. And I think part of the reason you see people spending five and 10 grand to go to Coachella or to Ibiza and see black coffee is I think young people have just given up on saving for a house. They've just given up. They started looking and like, okay, this shitty home is $1.4 million. I've saved $22,000. I'm going to need $400,000 for, fuck it, I'm going to Thailand or I'm going to, you know, I'm going to Mykonos. And that's not great for the economy, nor is it great for birth rates in just taking it forward. If we don't have enough young people supporting an increasingly unproductive and expensive senior population, the economy literally collapses on itself. We've had a complete rewiring of the core tenants of the American dream for younger millennials and Gen Zs. And it will be the same for alphas coming up. Like your boomer parent or grandparent in some cases, you know, version of what it means to succeed here looks wildly different because of how let down these generations have been in terms of what they can access, right? With a hard day's work. This is not about being a lazy grifter, right? This is like, no, I'm actually busting my butt, right? And I still can't own a home anywhere near where I have to go to work. And opportunity is different with remote working this way, right? You've seen resurgence of, you know, towns and cities that weren't necessarily high on people's lists to live in because they can work remotely for some of these great companies from there. And I think there's some good to that, but people are definitely leaning into experiences versus owning things. And I think there's some degree of magic to that. But at the end of the day, if you're going to have a couple of kids, they need somewhere to sleep. And that's why people are like, oh, well, what am I supposed to do? I'm going to go to Coachella instead of, you know, just stay the baby. There is some nuance here and it's generational. And that is if you own assets, it's not just inflation. The real conversation is around asset inflation. And what do I mean by that? If you own a home in stocks, as people, most people in my generation do, you see a restaurant bills up 30%. It's sort of a novelty. You're like, oh my God, can you get over the inflation? But meanwhile, my stock portfolio has tripled in the last 10 years. My home is worth four times what it used to be worth. But if you're younger and you don't own assets yet, you feel as if you've just been kicked in the nuts after being mugged. I mean, you just, your future has just evaporated. It's just like, okay, the on ramp into an upper middle class lifestyle has been shut down and blown up. So I do think this is a generational issue. Let's talk a little bit about Speaker Mike Johnson has a very different vision for what they prioritize if they kept the majority. Let's listen to a clip. And then we're going to lead up to what we have to do and address the largest spending items. The thing, the reason we're in trouble is because over 74% of federal spending is on autopilot mandatory spending. That's your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and then things like Social Security. They have to be adjusted and fixed. We have a plan to do that next year. And it's critical because we're at $40 trillion. Well, first of all, the idea that he cares about the debt or the deficit when they ram through that big, beautiful bill is ludicrous. I mean, this is the kind of gold stuff, right, that you want for an election because voters on both sides of the aisle do not want to hear about cuts to entitlements. It's just like you said, those are the grown up conversations that no one is interested in come election time. So we get lucky, right? Like, we're going to go have a working group. But we have Mike Johnson is saying out loud that they're going to cut these programs that people depend on and that Donald Trump, by the way, has over and over and over again promised would not get cut. So, you know, yay, I guess. Well, they're, I mean, the reality is Democrats want more social spending and higher taxes and Republicans want lower taxes and more defense spending and lower social spending. And the only thing that passes for bipartisanship is they get together and say, okay, let's cut taxes and increase social spending. And the result is George Washington to George Bush 30 or 7 trillion in deficits, George Bush to Donald Trump, another 30 trillion. And that's just nothing but a tax on young people because eventually they have to pay it back and everything is going to be more expensive because of interest rates because, you know, now the second largest line item behind our entitlements is interest rate on the debt. I actually agree with him here, but the problem is it's not, it's a cynical, it's incredibly cynical for him to say that because he doesn't propose or doesn't actually have the stones to say this is what we're going to do. They're talking about taking the military budget from a trillion to 1.4 trillion just as we have tons of evidence that the future of warfare is asymmetric and it's not about expensive platforms. It's about your ability to develop cheap and cheerful communications and drone warfare. We could absolutely take our military budget probably down to $600 billion, save $800 billion a year if we did it thoughtfully and focused on asymmetric warfare. And also just a general bipartisan agreement that says, okay, you can take $7 trillion and spending to $5 trillion, which is our receipts without putting the economy into a coma. But if you took it down to $6 trillion, say the Democrats say, all right, you raise taxes by $500 billion, we'll find cuts of $500 billion, you take the deficit down to $1 trillion, hope the economy continues to grow at 2% to 3%. And then in six to 10 years, you have something resembling a fiscally responsible budget. And by the way, that begins to pay for itself because interest rates start to come down. But again, no fucking adults in the room, just we need to cut medica, we need to cut entitlements. All right, boss, you're talking about increasing the military budget by $400 billion while you're cutting taxes and now you're saying you want to cut entitlements, at least say what you think we should do. I think he's right, but he's cynical. He's not serious about it. It's not an adult conversation. It's just a weapon of mass distraction. Any thoughts before we move on to the next topic here? Well, just that your budget and the legislation that you put forward, a reflection of your values and your morals, right? Those are what they're telling. It was what you're telegraphing to the public that you care about. And when you hear Mike Johnson, whether you think that the math or the mechanics of this is actually important because these programs are going to go insolvent, right? And not too long from now is one thing, but you do hear him almost in the same breath saying things like, well, we need private jet deductions, right? Like, that's a core part of how we're going to keep these people who are big earners for the country and they pay a lot in taxes and they employ a ton of people and they really need this thing. And then you turn around and you say things like, well, we can make cuts to Medicaid and that won't make it any different. So that's actually the right thing to do because there are a bunch of mooters, right? And there are a bunch of people who are, you know, using the system unfairly. And I think that we really need to continue to amplify that kind of thinking or that kind of framing, I guess I should say, about these policy positions because they are a reflection of your morals and your morality and their morals are bankrupt. Yeah, I think every election comes down to one decision. Are people more angry about their grocery bill or culture wars? And when things are good, they're more worried about a culture war. And when things are bad, they're more worried about their grocery bill. And it definitely feels as if people are much more worried about their grocery bill here. Anyways, moving on, Trump's former head of border control, Greg Bevinno says he's considering a potential run in 2028. Oh, God, I would love this. With an apparent slogan, men fight back. Right on Tarzan. He also posted on X that his priority would be deporting 106 million illegals who are here. Just doing some quick math. The current U.S. population is about 340 million referenced before. That would mean removing nearly a third of the country. Gosh, this is, I'm going to give you the first and the last comment on this one. No, I've gone first and last a lot. I just, I think the longer that he is in the spotlight, because I think a lot of people, they knew that they didn't like what was going on with immigration enforcement, but they couldn't attach a face to it besides Stephen Miller's. And this is like an equally ugly mug, right, that you could be staring at for the next several months. I mean, someone coming out there saying, well, I want to get rid of 106 million people. Like, I don't, I don't even think in Stephen Miller and his wildest, squirrel murdering dreams. Thinks that you're getting 106 million out of this country. Also, there aren't 106 million people here who are illegally. So that's everybody who has a visa of some kind. It's like green card holders as well. Insane. Hi, I'm Maria Sharapova, host of the Pretty Tough Podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week, model, sports illustrated cover girl and entrepreneur, Ashley Graham talks about the time she almost quit. I called my mom and I said, mom, I just, I'm not going to do this anymore. And she told me, no, you are going to stick this out. Your body is going to change someone's life. Every decade, you're going to go through something different. So be really happy with who you are right now, because things change. Check out Pretty Tough, new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the space X, which also considers itself an AI company will be going public in maybe just a few weeks from now. Welcome to the era of the Omega IPO. We are about to see millionaires, billionaires, and yes, probably even the world's first trillionaire created overnight. And yes, it's that guy. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Tech pros who are going to make all the money, they need our money way more than we need their products. And we're going to remind you why on today, explain from Vox. Who is actually winning the war between Russia and Ukraine? Right now it's clear that Ukraine is much more confident. Time now looks increasingly on Ukraine's side. And there's no obvious reasons for them to negotiate a ceasefire in the near term just because the United States or somebody else wants it. I'm John Finer and I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we discussed the war in Ukraine with Michael Kaufman, one of the leading analysts of the conflict who recently returned from the front lines. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. So moving from campaigns to courts, the public integrity project has filed a lawsuit trying to block Trump's planned 80th birthday UFC celebration on the White House South Lawn. The lawsuit contends that Trump's approval of the June 14th event was unlawful. Do you think this has any chance of succeeding, Jess? I think that thing's happening. Like, I think they're having the UFC fight. I mean, we should get a legal expert on here to talk about the intricacies of it. Nothing that I've seen suggests that we are not going to be having the fight. I guess the big question will be about taking it down since Trump is floating or floated that he'd like to keep it up. But even Dana White, who's expressed some concern about having this event in general, he paid for it and he's paying to take it down too. So I think it's going to happen and then I think it's going to go away. I think Trump is going to be extremely disappointed. There's been reporting about all of the celebrities that Dana White asked to come, people who are fans of UFC. And shocker, Jared Leto doesn't want to come and sit in the front row at Trump's weird UFC themed birthday party, something that you couldn't even really tie to America 250 since it's on June 14th, which is his birthday, when he becomes really, really old, turns 80. So do you think, I mean, I guess you don't really know about the lawsuit aspect of it, but you're presuming it's going to happen, right? Oh yeah, it's going to happen. And I have direct evidence they're reaching really deep into the barrel in terms of who they're inviting. I think in some ways, it's an interesting political move. I think owning, quote unquote, I don't want to say owning masculinity, but owning this performative toxic version that cosplays masculinity is a good idea politically, as evidenced by the fact that Tucker Carlson is trying to shore up the far right and the gripers. So I think it's a good idea. Have you ever been to an MMA fight? No, I'm not. I'm squeamish about that kind of stuff. Yeah, I agree. I'm the same way. I remember meeting one of the great fighters, MMA fighters in Vegas, again, named Chuck Lydell or Lydell. And he just couldn't have been the first off the cover of physical specimen, obviously. He looked like a literally a warrior. And he was such a gentleman, such a nice man. And I saw an interview recently, and he's having trouble speaking. I mean, it's just, anyways, I guess the same is true of boxing, but I'm with you. I find the whole thing a little bit disturbing. Okay, so before we wrap up, we have to talk about a story that sounds like it came from a dystopian novel. The New Silicon Valley status symbol isn't a yot or a private jet. A New Forbes report is highlighting a bizarre new luxury tech workers paying as much as $23,000 a day for escorts, not just for sex, but for companionship from people who can talk AI, biohacking, and crypto at their level. Okay, I'm not sure I buy this. Is it what you're saying? Oh, it came from boards now. I think this is one weirdo they interviewed. I'm not buying this. Do you have any thoughts on paying $23,000 a day for someone, for a friend it sounds like, a smart friend? I mean, I think this is why the the DSA left is doing well, right? Like, you shouldn't be paying $500,000 for a next ticket, and you shouldn't be paying $23,000 for a blowjob and a conversation about open AI. So I think that it is just depraved enough that I feel like it is going on in some niche sector of society at this point. But by these people, I feel really bad for them. I mean, I think it's, I guess, it moves with inflation, that sex work. And I have read other articles about how much more people pay for sex workers than they have in the past. But think about what these guys' lives are like if you're considering spending, you know, $20,000 plus for someone to hang with you. And also, what you must think about your own brain, right? And like how arrogant you have to be. And I get it, I mean, I'm not, I don't use prostitutes. Like, I'm not someone who's like, oh, I can completely compartmentalize this and I just want, you know, that event. Like, I like having sex with people that I also am in love with, predominantly my husband, not predominantly all the time, just my husband. But like, this is just- I just love watching you squirm here. You literally tie yourself up. Let me take that. Let me take this one. So, okay, so I've heard getting sex is less than $23,000. What you have here is that what's expensive for these guys is to buy someone who finds you interesting. That's, that's what costs the other $22,000. Despite building rockets, conquering markets, they're still struggling with the same thing as a sophomore at Ohio State, loneliness. And, you know, this is what happens when a society, I find this fascinating. I think this is what happens when a society optimizes for achievement and underinvesting community. And eventually, the market creates a substitute. The reason Jay Shetty, he just sold his podcast for $100 million is the same reason these guys have to pay $23,000. And that is, they're lonely and they never developed real social skills. And Jay Shetty has basically tapped into the biggest market in podcasting. And that is people are desperate for a friend. And he's kind of there. He's kind of cosplaying their friend for 60 minutes. The real story here isn't about escorts. That's what that's clickbait. It's about people built who are building the future increasingly can't form relationships without intermediaries and without some sort of market dynamic here. And, you know, the Valley keeps promising this brave new world of AI companions. And that's because they've already proven there's enormous demand for human ones. And so I find the whole thing again, $1,000 for sex, $22,000 for someone to pretend you're interesting. Should we leave it there, Jess? I'm out. God knows what I would say if we kept going on. And I'm John. Love my husband. Let's go. Bye. All right. Jess, have a great rest of the week. Nixon five, I guess. Is that right? Is that what you're saying? Realistically six, but we'll go Nixon five. Tomorrow night, it'll be interesting. Then we can talk about it on Thursday. Get excited. I can't wait.