Not only is it not going to help us economically, but how is this worth the political and international fallout when it's going to do nothing for the American farmer?

Well, nothing for the American farmer, nothing for the American consumer, because now we know that inflation is becoming not just a series of one-time shocks, but entrenched throughout the pricing structure in the United States.

So everybody's being hurt by this, particularly middle and lower income individuals, the farm community, anybody who's got shipping costs.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses has pointed out that shipping is so embedded in the cost now, their cost structure, that they can't do anything but raise prices.

And so inflation is becoming a more... durable issue, if you will, a more long lasting problem for the economy and one ultimately for the Federal Reserve.

And beyond that stuff to take, I mean, a much larger geopolitical look at this, I think, and maybe it's too strong to say this, but it looks like the administration in isolation switched sides in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Right.

It's getting worse.

... is beyond.

Oh, it's off the charts.

We've never seen a price like that before in my entire life, even in the 1980s when we were in the midst of both the Arab oil embargo in '73 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the prices never got that high.

Maybe as a percentage of disposable w- income you could argue back then similar, but 20 bucks is a lot of money.

And also, the farther you are away from the source of the oil and the refining capacity, the more expensive oil is anyway.

If you were to drill, baby, drill in Alaska, would that lower the price for Alaskans?

I mean, we, we're already...

Again, uh, Katie, we said this before.

85%.

Um, but when you, and you look a- around, uh, even New Jersey where I, I was driving yesterday, diesel is still well above $6 per gallon.

The funny thing about this, and, and, and funny, I mean ironic and strange, is, is that we produce over 5.1 million barrels of diesel per day and consume about 4.1 million.

We are a net exporter of diesel.

We don't really need Russian diesel.

A- and we're ...

Strangely, a Russian tanker arrived over the weekend with 350,000 tons of, of diesel to the United States.

Close.

So does the city council actually matter to companies like this?

No, and then the S&P and NASDAQ are both in record territory this morning as we speak.

So you've got this concentration of, of companies that are driving these two averages to new all-time highs.

You've got a legislative and regulatory moat that effectively these large companies are riding on behalf of Congress or larger federal organizations.

City councils just don't hold that much sway in something that seems to be an unstoppable force.

You know, there's gonna be about $6 trillion spent on AI infrastructure by 2031.

It's gonna pull in about $1.8 trillion, according to Bain, in revenue, and there's a $4.2 trillion gap.

What does this mean for the industry and, more importantly, for consumers?

But a, a $1,000 cost to fill up your tank, Ron.

Yeah.

Is that, is that in the realm of normal?

No, not at all, Katy.

[laughs] In fact, uh, uh, d- diesel prices are up somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 85% from where they were f- before the Iran war.

A- a- and it's one of those commodities that permeates into the, uh, economy far more than we realize.

As, as, as you mentioned, the cost of food, because food is delivered by truck, generally speaking, uh, the cost of shipping anything by, uh, a- any m- m- means, you know, any variety of means, uh, to get products and goods to your door has gone up.

And so the price of those goods consequently go up as well.

Is that in the realm of normal?

No, not at all, Katie.

[laughs] In fact, it, uh, r- di- diesel prices are up somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 85% from where they were f- before the Iran war.

And, and, and it's one of those commodities that permeates into the, uh, economy far more than we realize.

As, as, as you mentioned, the cost of food, because food is delivered by truck, generally speaking, uh, the cost of shipping anything by, uh, any m- m- means, you know, any variety of means, uh, to get products and goods to your door has gone up.

And so the price of those goods consequently go up as well.

So that's why food inflation is higher than it would otherwise be.

What do you think of this, Mike? Predicting Ohio as a loss.

And he's not addressing it.

And it goes deeper than that because there are real security concerns.

This is Orwellian language that they're using that agents got out of their sandbox and went and hacked some other company.

I mean, it's not a sandbox.

This is a lab.

This is a laboratory.

Nor are these people.

Is this straight over moves back open?

Why do we care?

Why do we care? Well, for years now, we've been asking auto companies to raise their fuel efficiency so we get more miles to the gallon.

So the higher the cost of gasoline, the farther your car goes on a single gallon of gas.

The president rolling back this to from 50 to 35 miles per gallon.

One is really ill-conceived.

Two, it puts an enormous burden on auto manufacturers to effectively retool their entire fleet of cars because they would have to redo the engines in order to lower the fuel efficiency that they currently enjoy.

We're at about 30 plus miles a gallon right now on average, which is extraordinarily high.

Oracle could be the canary in

Ron, can you walk us through the terms of this deal? Who's really coming out on top?

David Ellison, the new CEO of the Combined Entity, who is now getting control of, as we well know, Warner Discovery has CBS and its all attendant companies as well.

So it's a $100 billion deal, as you suggested.

And what's happening, and he wrote to his employees yesterday, he expects this deal to close and finalize in two weeks, in which case he will, as you said, have control of CBS, CNN, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and a whole host of other media assets.

So he is one.

It's a very big deal.

The consent decree that was signed forces them, if you will, to produce 30 to 32 feature films every year, which is more than what was expected, invest $1.5 billion in the local economy, and then also put together that oversight board, presumably for editorial independence for CBS and CNN.

Do you believe it?

Insana?

Well, it's a small rate hike.

So they raised rates by a quarter point.

The Federal Reserve is concerned about the very things we've been talking about, which is prices or inflation, however you want to characterize it.

And sadly, it's going to push up mortgage rates probably a little bit.

It's going to push up the cost of money, whether it's a consumer loan, whether it's an auto loan, less so on credit cards because they're stuck at 22 percent, no matter what the Fed does.

And right now, it's probably not going to do all that much.

didn't necessarily need to be.

So the increase in interest rates, what does that mean for your average American? How will that potentially impact them?

Well, in the short run, we've seen mortgage rates go up.

Mortgages now are back above 7%, which is not helpful if you're trying to buy a house.

Car loans are tied to the 10-year note, which is hovering around 5%.

So car loans are still expensive.

Student loans are expensive.

Not so much credit card loans because they're not really tied to any other rate other than the banks charging 22% on average for credit card debt.

We've seen those percentages go up.

And get the money back

...

And get the money back.

But I, I'm not sure how far they wanna go with, like, impeaching the president again and, and pretending to try to remove him when fundamentally the things that are affecting people most are the cost of living.

Now, there's not much they can do to lower it.

I mean, the only thing you could do is get a negotiated end to this war.

You can work to get the tariffs unwound and restore trade relations with Canada, with Europe.

Miles, I keep thinking of Trump's first, um, inaugural address, where he talked about human carnage, and now if you look at what voters are, are saying, I mean, this is how voters, 53% describe him as corrupt, 51% as dangerous, 47% as out of touch, 46% as cruel, 45% as racist.

Like, it, like, you gotta do something.

You have to do something, but you also have to ask what the motive is, and I actually did this with Claude today.

All right? I asked Claude what Dario Amodei's motive was in writing this 3,800, you know, word essay on the dangers that currently exist with respect to agentic artificial intelligence where the agents are doing things away from human interaction and even ignoring the instructions in this kind of Garden of Eden moment where they're getting instructions, ignoring the warnings, ignoring what they've been told to do, and go off and do things on their own.

And so on the one hand, Claude told me that Dario was sincere in his concerns.

On the other hand, it talked about something we call regulatory capture.

Is he writing this because what the AI folks want, Dario, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, is they want guardrails put up that keep l- inexpensive open source artificial intelligence services from cutting into their profits and taking away their business.

So there's some cynicism out there that maybe they're really just trying to protect their turf, slow their spending down before they go public so their books look better, and it's not really a concern about what it's going to do but what their position in the AI world is.

... getting those boosts.

Like, it, like you gotta do something.

You have to do something, but you also have to ask what the motive is.

And I actually did this with Claude today.

All right? I asked Claude what Dario Amodei's motive was in writing this 3,800, you know, word essay on the dangers that currently exist with respect to agentic artificial intelligence where the agents are doing things away from human interaction, and even ignoring the instructions in this kind of Garden of Eden moment where they're getting instructions, ignoring the warnings, ignoring what they've been told to do, and go off and do things on their own.

And so on the one hand, Claude told me that Dario was sincere in his concerns.

On the other hand, it talked about something we call regulatory capture.

Is he writing this because what the AI folks want, Dario, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, is they want guardrails put up that keep l- inexpensive, open source artificial intelligence services from cutting into their profits and taking away their business.

... getting those boosts.

Ron, does the president just not understand the fundamentals here?

Well, I'd be loathe to make that statement definitively, but he may understand it, but he also may not care because look, when you put out $5,000 to every adult in the United States, there are 270 million of them.

The price tag is $1.2 trillion.

As you pointed out, Antonio, we're already $40 trillion in debt.

Uh, It's been said by several of his administration officials that this would not come from taxes, but that would be very difficult to find a resource to fund this.

They're talking about the president's golden visas and so on and so forth.

Comes nowhere near the $1.2 trillion price tag.

But offering people free $5,000, is that conservative policy as you've seen it over the years?

Well,

I called CNBC to see where we were going to be positioned, knowing that both planes had already hit the towers.

And so I was coming down Park Avenue, so we had to cut across.

And a producer from MSNBC, John Zito, called me out on the street.

He had called in sick and we were making our way across when the building came down.

John ran down the street.

I took a right around the corner.

What effect has that had on you over the years and certainly in the aftermath?

Take me back to how your thinking about that moment has evolved in the past 25 years.

Yes, you know, it's a little more difficult this week than I would have initially imagined from an emotional perspective.

But when you go back, and I was not there when it happened I was having breakfast in the city and as soon as I found out that the two planes had hit the towers took a taxi down to Liberty Street a producer from MSNBC then called MSNBC John Zito called me out on the street he had called in sick that day and we were working our way from the east side of the towers where we were to the west side where all our equipment was and where all our teams were and as we were trying to cut across We were looking at both buildings on fire from the top on down and trying to figure out how they would put this fire out.

And at one point, the south tower, a piece fell off the side, a huge plume of smoke blew out, and we ran, John ran down the street, I made a right around the corner, and it went pitch black instantly.

And when you talk about the air quality and what we breathed in, for the amount of time I was down there, which was probably a couple of hours, it was another hour of just coughing up black material, you know, until I got up to the Today show set and then, you know, relayed to Tom, Matt, and Katie what I had seen.

And it was, as I described it at the time, it was in a certain sense, it was like a scene out of Independence Day.

It was, it had this nuclear winter feel.

That helps with closure and that would be a positive step.

Amen.

Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated.

You lived that story.

And it's an unusual place for us to be, as you know, when you're a participant and an observer of an event that takes place.

It puts you in a strange position.

As Andrea was saying, you know, with Tom and Tim and the rest of the crew that we had at the time, everyone stayed within themselves.

And it was a way in which that we could explain to the American people what exactly we had seen and experienced and do it in a way.

And then also, you know, at the time we stepped back because we immediately realized, from my perspective, of covering financial markets, that this was an attack not just on the political or even social fabric of the United States.

Right

... with Great Britain, with Canada, with Australia, you know, the five countries with which have Five Eyes, we have alienated all of those partners.

And so the intelligence that we would normally get from those people may go wanting, and that's the type of thing that can prevent a domestic terror attack given-

Okay, but take all of that, and then tie in the fact that technology is moving at this extraordinary rapid pace that even in our best day we can't keep up with.

We're s- we're, we're hearing the water supply is at risk.

We're hearing that a whole host of, you know, critical infrastructure in the United States is at risk from a terrorist attack.

No one is hardening that infrastructure.

No one's paying attention to it.

I mean,

just to a small extent in the short run.

In the longer run, we are driving Canada into the arms of Europe.

They're now talking about forging trade and geopolitical alliances with Europe.

They're doing more business with China, which is not something we necessarily want.

And so by alienating our closest neighbor and ally, we're pushing them further.

What is the positive argument for it? There isn't one.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

... more than anyone had ever anticipated.

You know, hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on that construction.

That's propping up our gross domestic product, as is the spending of the top 20%, uh, of wage earners in the United States.

You know, the folks at Moody's estimate that the top 20% account for about 50% of all consumer spending.

So you have this definitely two-tiered if not three-tiered economy where the upper income and then the very wealthy are doing quite well, and those in the middle and the lower are not doing so well.

And that's, again, reflected to a certain extent within the stock market.

Do you know what I mean?

If it's not just damaged, if this thing is actually down, what could that do to oil prices?

Oh, well, y- uh, S- Stephanie, I mean, it's hard to, to calculate the, the price spike that would happen, uh, i- if indeed Saudi facilities, you know, across the kingdom were, were, were attacked.

Those pipelines are all above ground, by the way, even the one that goes to the Red Sea, and that transships some 7 million barrels of oil per day.

So y- you've got the cutoff from the Strait of Hormuz and the, and the Persian Gulf, then you've got these overland, uh, pipelines that deliver and currently are diverting some of that oil that would've otherwise gone through the strait.

You start hitting, you know, one of the world's largest oil producers and damaging their physical infrastructure, w- we don't know where oil goes from here.

You know, 110, 120, 130.

A- a- and, and the US is already, you know, producing flat out at nearly 14 million barrels a day.

So to all those CEOs who are like, "Oh, don't pay attention to the things he says, he's just a showman," what about what he's doing?

Ron?

Well, I'm not sure, Jackie, anybody needs to stockpile anything per se.

The problem here with respect to imposing new tariffs on Canada, threatening to halt trade, as you mentioned, with the 97 countries with which we have a trade deficit, first of all, that latter piece... would throw us into a global economic recession, or worse, it would exacerbate inflation, it would do all those things that no one wants to see happen, having hyperinflation and a recession happen simultaneously.

With respect to Canada, our situation with them continues to deteriorate, and every time we add new tariffs, we're just putting more and more of a floor under inflation.

So the prices of goods, despite what the administration keeps saying, will not come down, whether it's dairy products, whether it's steel and aluminum in particular, or other electronic goods.

The other part of this is that we have an important relationship with Canada when it comes to the automobile supply chain.

Parts and pieces of U.S. cars go back and forth across the Canadian and Mexican border multiple times before they're ever put into a U.S.-made car.

Can you talk a little bit about what that actually means in practice? practical terms, why we are talking about the significance of it and how long you think it's going to take for that to come back down, since that's something that cabinet officials in this administration are not willing to answer going forward?

But what do we need to know about what's going on in the G20, why it's important, and maybe what's being undercovered, Ron?

Well, I think broadly speaking, these events – and this is the G20, as you say, finance ministers or treasury secretaries, however they're designated in a particular country, plus central bankers from around the world get together.

And they talk about the most pressing – largely most pressing economic issues of the day.

There's also the G7, which used to be the G8 when Russia was included pre-Crimea, where they got together and they talked more about geopolitical strategic alignment issues.

And that was at the presidential level.

Right.

So I've been to a couple of G8s, G7s, the G20s, you know, and this one in particular, I don't and it's often not a lot gets done.

But Will it replace all of our jobs and so on? So there's all kinds of trade-offs, and people make them very binary, but a lot of things can be true at once, but I guess the ones that scare us the most are the ones that motivate us the most.

We're gonna investigate this." They said nothing of the sort.

There is a completed report inside the Pentagon about the strike last year that killed dozens if not hundreds of schoolchildren in Manbij, I believe is the town.

Why hasn't that been released? Uh, Congress members have asked for this.

There's no excuse for it.

And the, the tradition of the American military is to release these kind of reports.

It's part of the ethos.

We don't intentionally commit war crimes.

I reached out to big Wall Street sources who know Bessent well, and the responses I got were basically pictures of Bessent's face with a clown nose on.