11/4/25: Consumers Slash Grocery Spending, Elon Warns Rogan On AI, Trump Denies Binance Pardon Corruption

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human 1969 Malcolm and Martin are gone America is in crisis and at Morehouse College the students make their move These students including a young Samuel L. Jackson locked up the members of the Board of Trustees including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget I'm Hans Charles Listen to the A-Building on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:01Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:37Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com.

2:10Turning now to the economy, a lot of relevant news. I'm going to put this up here on the screen. The CEO of Kraft Heinz has now said they have the worst consumer sentiment in decades, pointing out the drop in the number of consumers who are buying staples. They lowered their sales outlook and that the feeling of U.S. shoppers has fallen, quote, to a historic low. The company now expects full organic net sales to be down 3 % to 3.5%, with slower growth also in emerging markets and pressure in the U.S. retail. They said that higher prices from inflation and expected headwinds from curtailed food stamp funding were creating a tough environment for U.S.

2:48shoppers, that the drop in their overall sales has led to some 17 % drop in their overall stock price compared with the 17 % rise in the S &P 500. higher prices from inflation, food stamps, funding are all creating a, quote, tough environment, they say, for shoppers. And I think that that, I mean, that's really grim. We talked previously about the McDonald's CEO. Now, I'm not saying Heinz products and McDonald's and any of that is healthy, but it's indicative of consumer sentiment of behavior. And what he was showing is like people were skipping breakfast. And I think a lot of comments were, oh, well, if they're skipping McDonald's breakfast and eating breakfast at home, then maybe that's a good thing.

3:28But But there's not actually a ton of data that even necessarily shows that because of the grocery price increase. And so the fact that staples themselves have become not only more expensive but people are deciding not to buy them I think is one of those like edge indicators in the grocery store to say, oh, man, like things are really buying. Yeah. People are cutting back on like ketchup. Like when you have to cut on ketchup and mustard. I mean, by the way, how much ketchup are people eating? How many times do people buy ketchup? How about every six months? I don't even like ketchup. So we have a toddler.

3:57Oh, really? You're going to see how much ketchup your household can go through. If you never give them ketchup, then they'll never know. Disgusting because of what my son would like dip his apple slices in it. And I was like, oh, oh. That killed any sort of appetite I ever had for ketchup. So our family has long cut back on ketchup because I refuse to use this. Disgusting. Anyway, let's go ahead and put C2 up on the screen because it's not just Kraft Heinz. You also have Chipotle. I actually didn't even realize this. They have this very young customer base. They really cater to them. They've been like, you know, like there's like a whole Jim bro tie in.

4:33Here's a good way to get lots of protein for relatively inexpensive price. Easy, you know, relatively affordable. Tastes good. I personally, I like Chipotle. I know you're a big Chipotle fan, Sagar, but. I used to be. Not anymore. At the current price, I'm no longer a consumer. It's too much. So anyway, they say millennials and Gen Zers have helped power Chipotle sales despite rising menu prices and slowdowns at rival chains. In recent months, though, a harsher economic reality is set in rising student loan payments, stagnant wage growth, and rising health insurance costs have bumped burritos down younger consumers' priority lists.

5:05They're just eating with us less frequently. And they're eating at home more often, the Chipotle CEO, Scott Boatwright, said in an interview. And their stock is getting trashed right now. And guess what? They're not the only ones. I mean, you have the top line of the stock market, you know, just keeps going up, up, up. That's all because of these tech stocks, NVIDIA leading the charge. But other tech stocks that are AI-enabled, these sort of like consumer staple type of companies, they are actually really suffering and underperforming because you see this consumer pullback. And we can put C3 up on the screen, which is going to have a major impact as well.

5:41So we covered yesterday, you know, the Trump administration was saying we're not going to pay any SNAP benefits. A judge came in and said you actually have to. You have to tap these emergency funds. So now they're saying they're going to pay half of the SNAP benefits for November. However, there continues to be. I mean, those funds haven't hit for people yet. Here we are November 4th. And there is no real telling when they will hit. So an Agriculture Department official who oversees the SNAP program said in a court filing that, quote, there are procedural difficulties that states will likely experience, which would affect November SNAP benefits reaching households in a timely manner and in the correctly reduced amounts.

6:20For some states, required system changes that have to be implemented could take weeks or several months and could lead to payment errors and significant delays. So for the 43 million people who are on SNAP benefits, I mean, this is just an absolute, you know, it's an absolute catastrophe. And of course, it's going to have a ripple effect throughout the economy. And, you know, some of the places that are going to be hit the hardest are actually stores in rural America where you have more impoverished populations and a lot of the revenue from the store comes from EBT, comes from the SNAP program.

6:55So, you know, even though you've got this ruling in the Trump administration now saying, OK, we'll give you half, which is already, you know, a 50 percent reduction is a massive, massive hit. No telling when they'll even get access to those funds either. Yeah. I mean, one of the things. Well, this is where it comes down to cost, let's say with Chipotle and generally. Like I remember when it was$6 a bowl. This actually was not that long ago. And I used to eat Chipotle five days a week, literally, back in my early 20s. There was one right next to where I used to live. I was on name basis. Now though, like they had this recent advertisement, I'm not sure if you've seen, it's carne asada and red chimichurri.

7:34I was like, all right, got to try it. Okay. It's like catnip. So if you look at the overall price, when I was done, keep in mind, we live in a high cost of living area. It was$22 for tax. I mean, look again, maybe the red Jimmy cherry though. Listen, it's good. I loved it. I'm not going to say I didn't like it. Uh, was it$22 good? I don't know. Again, maybe boomer brain, but that's one of those where, you know, I don't drink alcohol. That's kind of what I expect to pay. If I go to like a mid tier restaurant, right? Like I want to be sitting and getting some service, not some literally something in a, in a, in a paper bag that's wrapped in foil.

8:06They're eating on a couch when you're watching TV. That's just, in my head, that should cost around eight to 10 bucks. So$22, not happening anymore. And you just have to think about how, again, for young people, especially if you eat out a lot, of course, it's about convenience. And one of it is, it used to be so that it was a little bit more expensive to eat out, but not all that much more. And maybe you could justify the value in your time. Like I said, at 13 to 18 bucks for a bowl, depending on what you're getting in there, how is that possibly even worth it anymore? I mean, you have to cook at home.

8:38But then you can't blame them either because look at how expensive beef is. Right, but exactly. So then you're like, okay, so I'm going to eat at home. It's like, oh, oh no. Yeah, exactly. You're paying for carne asada there or you can pay for it at Costco. You're paying a shit ton for it basically no matter what. That is the part where when you see how it pervades, you know, even influencer culture. I think I've talked about this, about those YouTube channels where it's like cook like your grandma from the Great Depression. Those channels saw a huge explosion over the last couple of years. That's part of why.

9:11It's so exorbitantly expensive. Stuff that was once not even, I mean, would you call Chipotle luxury? Like, I wouldn't. It was$6. I even remember in New York you would pay$7 or something like that. It just was not that expensive. You know, even in Midtown, it was like$7.50, I'm pretty sure, if I recall. Now, I mean, what,$15 probably? That's a lot of money. And you have that for everything because it's not just defensive Chipotle. It's all fast food. And consider what the minimum wage is, right? It's still$7.25. $7.25 an hour or something like that? And, I mean, even in states that have increased it, maybe they've upped it maybe to$15.

9:48So you're working an hour to get one Chipotle bowl. I don't even know if it would buy it. It wouldn't buy a drink. It definitely wouldn't. With tax, where I live, it would be about$15, I think. And this is really the story of our economy. Put C4 up on the screen. This is the story and the reality of our economy today. So now the top 10 percent of income earners account for 50 percent. So half of all spending is being done by the top 10 percent of earners. And so you have this incredibly lopsided economy. And then, of course, what happens is all the incentive, like if you are a business wanting to make money, is to cater to the people who have the money, who have money to spend.

10:28And so increasingly, you know, the economy becomes more and more tilted and lopsided towards catering to the affluent. There's a bunch of let's go and put Kobe C letter did a long thread with a bunch of other indicators about the reality of the economy today. Let's go ahead and start these. They write the elephant in the room. AI stocks are outperforming consumer stocks by 20 % plus over the last 60 days. And as AI investment exceeds a trillion dollars per year, car repossessions are at 2009 levels. There are two U.S. economies, rich versus poor, and AI is the lifeline of it all. And really think about that because overwhelmingly the people who hold stocks are the wealthy.

11:11And so they're benefiting from this massive, you know, continued growth in the stock market. But if you're just a regular wage earner trying to make it, you are getting screwed. Let's put the next element up on the screen. So here are the sort of consumer-focused brands whose stock prices are suffering. They say on the other side of the table is a more bleak picture as opposed to the AI stocks. Consumer-facing stocks are getting crushed. Latest earnings season only underscored that. Take a look at the year-to-date performance of these consumer stocks. General Mills and Kraft Heinz, which we mentioned before, are in a bear market.

11:46Put the next one up on the screen. The economy is particularly bad for Americans who are seeking entry-level jobs. The U.S. unemployment rate for youth graduates, age 20 to 24, so people are, you know, just coming into the job market, has averaged 8.1 % over the last three months. That's the highest in four years. This is up sharply from under 4 % just two years ago when the AI boom began. So it certainly looks like AI adoption is starting to take a hit on the job market, especially with new college grads in particular or new associate degree holders. And let's put this last one up on the screen as well.

12:21This is a look at auto repossessions. We are now at have seen a huge increase in just the past year. And vehicle seizures are at the highest level that we have seen since 2009. So you have a huge spike in 2009, Great Recession. Then it declines. Then it climbs back up and reaches a peak during the COVID era, which makes sense, again, when people are losing their jobs and out of work and struggling through COVID. Then it declines. And now we are back on the march up. So on the one hand, you have these record earnings for NVIDIA and all of this excitement about AI and these tech stocks that are just going up and up and up.

13:01And then the rest of the economy tells a very different story about what the reality is for people. And that's why I mentioned in our A block, our election coverage, you know, in Trump's first term at this point, people were happy with where the economy was. You know, some 60 plus percent said the economy is good versus those saying it was poor. Now it's flipped and it's 70 plus percent who say that the economy is actually poor and only maybe 25 percent that say it is doing well. So, you know, for people's own experience in their life, they are really feeling the pinch and feeling the pain in spite of what the, you know, top line on the stock market is doing.

14:02had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

14:45What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated.

15:23Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

15:43I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Nat Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends... Hi, Bowen. Hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt. Hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

16:17Why don't we transition to AI then? So just to show everybody what's happening with that. Yeah, of course. So Elon Musk went back on with Joe Rogan and made some comments about how nobody's going to work anymore in the future. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Cars are going to be autonomous. But there's just so many desk jobs where really what people are doing is they're processing email or they're answering the phone. and just anything that isn't moving atoms, like anything that is not doing physical work, that will obviously be the first thing. Those jobs will be and are being eliminated by AI at a very rapid pace.

17:05Ultimately, working will be optional because you'll have robots plus AI and we'll have, in a benign scenario, universal high income. Not just universal basic income, universal high income, meaning anyone can have any products or services that they want. But there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way. So you anticipate a basic income that the economy will boost to such an extent that a high income would be available to almost everybody. So we'd essentially eliminate poverty. In the benign scenario, yes. There's multiple scenarios. There are multiple scenarios. There's a lot of ways this movie can end.

17:54The reason I'm so concerned about AI safety is that one of the possibilities is the Terminator scenario. It's not zero percent. that. So that's why it's like, I'm like really banging the drum on AI needs to be maximally truth seeking. Like don't make, don't force AI to believe a lie. Like that, for example, the founding fathers were actually a group of diverse women or that misgendering is worth a nuclear war. Because if that's the case, and then you get the robots and the AI becomes omnipotent, it can enforce that outcome.

18:33And then, unless you're a diverse woman, you're out of the picture. So we're toast. So the benign scenario is that all the jobs are gone. Yes. Then what did he call it? What scenario do you call it? Basically where everyone's dead is the other scenario, which he says, there's not a 0 % chance. Okay, well, what percent are we talking here? Not that he knows, right? But if you talk to anyone who has been deeply involved in this technology, none of them will tell you that the like absolutely apocalyptic scenario is 0%. So we're just rolling the dice. I mean, even if it's a 1 % 1 in 100 chance of complete human extinction, I don't for me, that's a too high of a risk.

19:16I don't want to take that chance, right? That seems insane. And yet, you know, the Terminator scenario. Right. And there's a bunch of I mean, there's a bunch of assumptions here, too. He's like, oh, well, you know, there won't be jobs anymore, but we are going to have a really high basic income. What indication do you have that there's any like likelihood of that politically occurring? Because right now you have just like a bunch of oligarchs who are consolidating all of the money in power, you know, and they are going to find us to be if if they've made it so that labor is useless. They're going to find us useless.

19:46They're going to want to keep us around for what? For what reason? So even that is like very optimistic and very hopeful. And that's but that's the benign scenario that they're contemplating here. And then Sagar, Elon is interesting in all of this, as I would say, a bit of a cautionary tale, because he's right that he came into AI development very concerned about safety. That's why with Sam Altman, he sets up open AI. The idea is we're going to keep this as a nonprofit. We're not going to make it profit driven. It's going to be open, right? That's the open and open AI so people can see the development and open source models and whatever.

20:18And then when he realizes that, you know, other companies and Sam is taking this in this other direction and other companies are joining the A.I. race as well. And it's basically off to it's just an arms race both between the companies and between the U.S. and China. He's like, OK, well, I guess I'm just joining the arms race here. And I think it's utterly delusional to think that you're going to keep A.I. quote unquote safe because it doesn't think the founder founding farmers are diverse women. I mean, that's his view that he's articulated multiple times is he believes that if it's like an anti-woke AI, then somehow that's going to like save us all and mitigate us from the most consequential catastrophes.

20:56And I think that is so incredibly delusional as to defy like any kind of logic. Well, I think that both are actually very dangerous, both woke AI and so-called anti-woke AI, because the whole point around it is actually about society and having feedback into both and that neither should be controlled at a centralized level from an oligarch. Yeah, I mean, I think it's sort of irrelevant whether it's – like that just completely misses the question of what the problems are. I don't know if it's irrelevant because, I mean, part of the thing is with oligarchical capture, as you can all see with the Trump people, is that they're incredibly fickle and they believe nothing.

21:27So they could also – it wasn't that long ago the pronouns were in bio. Right. But think about like when when Elon intervened and tried to make Grok less woke, it ended up within a matter of days calling itself. Yes, Hitler. No, that's what I'm talking about. That's the thing is that we have this, I think, illusion that they understand what this technology is. They don't. They don't. This is not something they programmed. It's something they grew. It's a an alien intelligence that they grew. That's the best way to think of it. And so they try to do all these tests to figure out, like, is it deceiving us?

21:59Is it doing nefarious things? Is it going to, like, you know, is it going to break out of the lab and copy itself? And is it going to conform when we tell it to change how it operates? Is it going to actually conform? And they don't actually know. They do these tests and these experiments. And in many instances, they find that it will lie to them. It will deceive them. It will try to blackmail them. It will copy itself onto another server to try to preserve its original objectives. And they'll do some clues to try to fix that one, to plug that one hole. They have no idea whether they've fixed the problem.

22:32They have no idea what's going on under the surface. No clue. And that's where we are today with the limited, you know, level of AI development that we have today. That's to say nothing of where they want these things ultimately to go. Well, let's pick up on that. Ross Douthat just did a great interview with an AI safety advocate. D4, guys, let's go ahead and play it. artificial intelligence is able to start navigating the real world, right? So because advances in robotics, like right now, I just watched a video showing cutting edge robots struggling to open a refrigerator door and stock a refrigerator, right?

23:10So would you expect that those advances would be supercharged as well? So it isn't just, you know, podcasters and AGI researchers who are replaced, but plumbers and electricians are replaced by robots? Yes, exactly. And that's going to be a huge shock. I think that most people are not really expecting something like that. They're expecting that we sort of have AI progress that looks kind of like it does today, where companies run by humans are gradually like tinkering with new robot designs and gradually like figuring out how to make the AI good at X or Y. Whereas in fact, it will be more like you already have this army of super intelligences that are better than humans at every intellectual task and also that are better at learning new tasks fast and better at figuring out how to design stuff.

24:00And then that army of super intelligences is the thing that's figuring out how to automate the plumbing job, which means that they're going to be able to figure out how to automate it much faster than an ordinary tech company full of humans would be able to figure out. So this guy is the author, co-author of a sort of forecast of where I is heading, AI is heading called AI 2027, which I read through. And, you know, the near term predictions are much more reasonable. And the longer they go out, obviously, it becomes more difficult to make predictions of what it's going to look like. But what he's pointing to here is, you know, myself, including you, and I think there's a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the idea and the promise of AGI and what this is, if it's actually going to be as transformative as people are saying.

24:43And what he's explaining there is the reason you're going to hit this point of exponential growth in terms of the capability is because it's increasingly going to be taken out of the hands of humans. And you're going to have AI training AI, where it's, you know, constant improvement, where you have effectively like an army of AI that is researching and improving itself. And the humans are just like the high level supervisors who aren't even really capable of completely supervised because they don't actually know. They do have to sleep. They do get sick. They do have a limited ability to like really understand what's happening under the hood here.