December 19, 2025 • 13 mins
Mark Simone talks about Mamdani taking office in January; the city council gave themselves a raise; Biden can't seem to raise enough money for his library; PBS Newshour bias; stock market breaking records; winter weather predictions, and financial issues with the BLM movement.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's Mark Simone. Welcome to the bonus segment of
for all you podcast listeners there. Remember I'll be away
for the next two weeks. Curtis Slee, what will be
filling in for me? That will be great to hear,
Curtis Again, a lot of stuff's gonna happen in two weeks.
You know. January first is inauguration day here in New York,
(00:22):
Mom Donnie takes office. Everybody not you know, just on edge,
not knowing what to think. What could happen when he
takes office. Well, a couple of things. First of all,
there's obviously you know, and it's worse than we thought.
There's a big budget shortfall about to hit New York
(00:42):
New York City. The budget is a mess New York
City and New York State too, but especially in New
York City. Over spends like crazy the budget. If anybody
rational we're running New York City could cut the budget
in half. We just waste tremendous amounts of money, spend
more than we should, and that's why we're taxing people
like crazy. But looks like there's gonna be a two
(01:03):
billion dollar shortfall the first year for Mom Donnie's gonna
get hit with being two billion short in his budget,
and by the end of his term that could go
to thirteen billion. And these numbers are coming from the controller,
who's Brad Lander, who's Mom Donnie's friend. But it's going
to be a horrible budget situation two billion short, so
(01:26):
it's gonna be very, very challenging. Now you know he's
talking about free this, free that, Well, you can't do
any of that, or even build some housing, and you
can't do any of that if you're two billion short
in money and you can't even pay the bills you got.
And then Mam Donnie's got some big challenges that are
going to hit him right away. Federal funding cuts are possible. Also,
(01:48):
they're going into contract negotiations with the Police Benevolent Association
and DC thirty seven, that's the city's largest municipal union. Now,
you know, if you're just a kid, if your mom Donnie,
and you've never had an actual job, if you've never
been a manager, if you've never run anything, possibly the
biggest challenge you could ever have is union negotiation. So
(02:12):
imagine a kid who's never had a job has to
sit down with DC thirty seven, a massive municipal union
and try to negotiate with them. This is where he's
going to get himself into real trouble. And this is
where Donald Trump might jump in. You know, He's got
an ongoing relationship now with Mom Donnie. They continue to
(02:32):
talk phone calls every so often. So in the middle
of Mom Donnie gets really stuck in this horrible union negotiation,
Trump might call him and say, you want me to
help you through this. Trump's an expert at negotiating with unions.
You know, when you build one hundred story skyscrapers everywhere,
you got to deal with a lot of unions. So
(02:53):
he might become like a big brother to him, a
mentor to him, showed him how to get through these
union negotiations, and you might see more of that. As
frightening as the thought of Mom Donnie as mayor is,
it might not be so bad if Trump becomes the
coach on the sidelines there. Hey, speaking of which, in
the middle of all this shortfall they wanted to be
money budget shortfall, New York City Council just voted themselves
(03:16):
the big rays sixteen percent raise for themselves, which also
means you have to do at the same time you
have to give the mayor a raise. The public advocate arrays,
the borough presidents have to get a raised, which is
why you won't see them complain about the city council
passing this. Now. In their defense, they haven't seen a
raise for many, many, many many years. But still sixteen percent,
(03:42):
that's a lot of money. Hey, Joe Biden may be
about to be hit with the biggest embarrassment any president
has ever been hit with. You know, when you're done
as president and you leave, first big project is you
have a presidential library. And if you've been president of
the United States, you got big donors that have supported
(04:03):
you for many, many years, massive big donors, billionaires, zillionaires,
And that's who you turn to when you got to
build a presidential library. First parton, you go to the donors.
You raise twenty thirty forty fifty million from the donors.
Then maybe you go to your supporters, the public, you
raise another fifty Biden is in big trouble. He's been
(04:23):
trying for two years and they can't raise any money.
He's raised like a two million dollars, which you need
like two hundred million to build a presidential library. They
think by the end of twenty twenty seven, they're hoping
to get to eleven million. So at that rate, it'd
be another twelve years before he could build a library.
(04:44):
Biden would then be a I don't know where. He'd
be ninety five at the time, So he may be
the first president not to be able to build a
presidential library. This would be the most embarrassing thing ever. Ever.
They're at four million right now, so if he's doing
four million a year, I mean that's going to be
(05:05):
fifty years to get the money for a library. It's
going to be impossible. This would be the biggest embarrassment ever.
First president who cannot raise money for a presidential library.
Now you know he's got these big donors, very very
wealthy billionaires Hedgeman, but obviously you don't think there's any
future for this guy. The only reason you give money
for a Clinton presidential library or a Bush presidential library,
(05:27):
if you're a big donors, you want to keep the
relationship going for a couple of reasons. One, you want
to be able to see the guy, have the guy
come to your events or parties, shake hands with you,
you know whoever your business people, or you'll want the
president to pull some strings for you, make some phone
calls for you to Washington or A lot of guys
used to Bill Clinton around the world. Bill Clinton had
(05:48):
a great relationship with all the foreign leaders. So if
you were a big zillionaire business guy and you need
to do some business in India, Bill Clinton could call
up the president of India and get you in the
door whatever you needed. So apparently these guys feel Biden
has no clout anywhere, no clout with anybody in Washington.
World leaders won't even take his call. So they're not
(06:10):
donating to the Presidential Library. Extremely extremely embarrassing for Biden.
Now what does he do? There is a secret plan
if all else fails, They're going to go to the
University of Delaware, where he's got a good relationship, and
take a building already existing at the University of Delaware.
(06:30):
Maybe you know, they've got a few library type buildings
and they'll call one of them the Biden Presidential Library.
That way, they'll never actually build a presidential library, but
the University of Delaware will establish one in one of
their buildings on campus, and then as soon as he dies,
they'll take the name off and take the building back
let's see here, PBS Public Broadcast. How could he cut
(06:53):
the funding for PBS. Well, here's exactly why, because wasn't
PBS supposed to be educational program I mean British dramas
and comedies and sesame Street. Well, somehow they got into slanted, slanted, biased,
deceptive news coverage and PBS has been doing this for years,
(07:15):
the most awful Trump bashing, slanted left wing new Why
would the government pay for that? Hey, if you want
to be a very slanted left wing news organization, go
ahead knock yourself out, but don't expect the taxpayers to
pay for it. So here's the latest one, the PBS
News Hour with their whole panel that holds segment on
(07:35):
how Trump is a racist? Is overtly racist rhetoric? What
the hell they're talking about? But they just bash him
and bash him and bash him. David Brooks was part
of the panel, Jonathan k part. So if you're ever oh,
they were talking about Elon Omer's comments about Omar, which
we're not racist. She is a horrible, horrible person, and
(07:56):
she's involved in what must what might be the biggest
taxpayer political scandal in history. So she's certainly a worthy target.
But if you're wondering how did PBS get its funding cut, well,
put up a picture of David Brooks, Jonathan k Part,
all of those people over there, just the most slanted,
awful coverage. Hey, you know, stock market's been going crazy.
(08:21):
It's going to hit the fifty thousand by the end
of next year, could hit sixty thousand. And what's this
all about? Some people say, well, it's AI that's really
doing it. AI is making the stock market go crazy.
So some people are starting to wonder, wait a minute,
didn't we go through this twenty five years ago with
the dot com bubble? Remember the end of the nineties,
same thing, same thing, stock market going crazy, people were
(08:43):
making a fortune, stock soaring, but it was a dot
com bubble and it burst and it was an economic
disaster and calamity for the country when it bursts. So
some people are saying, wait, are we doing the same
thing here? Haven't we created an exact same sort of bubble,
only this time it's an a eyebubble. Well, experts of
studying this there are striking similarities, but they point out
(09:05):
there's notable differences, and one of them is everybody's talking
about this being a bubble. And they always say if
everybody's saying it's a bubble, it probably isn't one. But
I remember in the late nineties people there were people
saying it was a bubble. But one big difference is
the scale of the price gains. Yeah, Navidia is up
(09:26):
a lot because of AI, but you know it's up
fifty four percent. You go back to the dot com bubble,
the stocks were going up five hundred percent, five thousand percent.
It was totally out of control and there are ups
and downs. So yeah, it's a bubble, but it's a
tiny one. It's not the tough sort of bubble. And
(09:49):
people are saying, don't worry, it's not that bad. And
also remember with the AI these companies are bringing in revenue.
They are bringing in revenue. That was the difference. The
dot com bubble of the time was Yahoo and those
kinds of and there was no profit. They were losing fortunes.
Well that's not the case with any of these AI companies.
(10:09):
Definitely strong profits. So big difference. Now he's when you
go to a party or you're arguing, people will say, well,
what's going to happen in the midterms, Who's going to
win the Republicans and the Democrats. Will the GOP hold
the House the Senate in the midterms, And people are
giving you these predictions, don't listen to it. There is
absolutely no way to predict this right now. It's like saying,
(10:33):
who's going to win the Super Bowl in twenty twenty eight.
Don't There's no way you could even forecast anything like that.
There's no such thing. It's December. The midterms are eleven
months away. The whole landscape is going to change six
times between now and then. Everything's going to change the economy,
the world situation, everything. We don't even know who the
(10:55):
candidates are going to be yet, some are some Republicans
will drop out, some Democrats will, you know, drop out
before the race that we have no idea who's running,
We have no idea what the country will look like,
what the landscape will look like. Do not listen to
anybody's predictions about the midterms. They are totally worthless right now.
You know, every fall you get these news stories about
(11:19):
it's going to be a very bad winter, it's going
to be a lot of snow this winter, it's going
to be a very cold winter, And they're always wrong.
And that's because if you talk to real weather experts,
the best weather people in the world, they'll tell you
there's no such thing as a seasonal forecast. It's impossible.
You could forecast. You can really only forecast accurately three
(11:39):
days out. You could sort of put together sort of
an accurate ten day forecast, but that's about it. You
can't forecast twelve months out, you can't do it, or
even three months out. You can't forecast two months out.
It's impossible. So there's no such thing as a seasonal forecast. Hey,
remember Black Lives Matter, Well, people are still looking into it,
(12:01):
and apparently it's still the grifters who are behind that
are still splitting up all sorts of stuff. They're all
sorts of scammers involved. They're looking back on it now,
people studying and say billions of dollars were scammed out
of American institutions. The Feds are actually going after people.
The Oklahoma City BLM franchise, three million dollar fraud scheme.
(12:23):
They've been caught in all over the place, Atlanta donations
stolen at half a million dollars. They're finding this all
over the country. You start seeing prosecutions of all of
this looks like many, many, maybe up to a billion altogether,
with stolen, scammed, skimmed BLM leaders paying for vacations, cars, properties,
(12:45):
all sorts of stuff needed to their name. In fact,
they're saying they can't find a BLM branch that did
not have a slush fund for its local leaders. So
you're going to see more and more people indicted. Remember
the smartest companies gave. Amazon gave one hundred and seventy million,
City Group pledged a billion dollars, Nike gave one hundred
(13:05):
and fifty million. Now, some of the money may have
been used responsibly, but they're saying most of it was scammed.
They're hunting these people down right now for prosecution, so
you may see a lot of that in the coming year. Hey,
this has been the bonus segment of the podcast. Thanks
for listening. I'm going to be off for the next
two weeks Christmas break. I'll be back after New Year's
(13:28):
Curtis will be filling in for me, so be listing
that should be interesting. Have a great holiday and great
talking to me. I'll see you next year.
Hey, it's Mark Simone. Welcome to the bonus segment of
for all you podcast listeners there. Remember I'll be away
for the next two weeks. Curtis Slee, what will be
filling in for me? That will be great to hear,
Curtis Again, a lot of stuff's gonna happen in two weeks.
You know. January first is inauguration day here in New York,
(00:22):
Mom Donnie takes office. Everybody not you know, just on edge,
not knowing what to think. What could happen when he
takes office. Well, a couple of things. First of all,
there's obviously you know, and it's worse than we thought.
There's a big budget shortfall about to hit New York
(00:42):
New York City. The budget is a mess New York
City and New York State too, but especially in New
York City. Over spends like crazy the budget. If anybody
rational we're running New York City could cut the budget
in half. We just waste tremendous amounts of money, spend
more than we should, and that's why we're taxing people
like crazy. But looks like there's gonna be a two
(01:03):
billion dollar shortfall the first year for Mom Donnie's gonna
get hit with being two billion short in his budget,
and by the end of his term that could go
to thirteen billion. And these numbers are coming from the controller,
who's Brad Lander, who's Mom Donnie's friend. But it's going
to be a horrible budget situation two billion short, so
(01:26):
it's gonna be very, very challenging. Now you know he's
talking about free this, free that, Well, you can't do
any of that, or even build some housing, and you
can't do any of that if you're two billion short
in money and you can't even pay the bills you got.
And then Mam Donnie's got some big challenges that are
going to hit him right away. Federal funding cuts are possible. Also,
(01:48):
they're going into contract negotiations with the Police Benevolent Association
and DC thirty seven, that's the city's largest municipal union. Now,
you know, if you're just a kid, if your mom Donnie,
and you've never had an actual job, if you've never
been a manager, if you've never run anything, possibly the
biggest challenge you could ever have is union negotiation. So
(02:12):
imagine a kid who's never had a job has to
sit down with DC thirty seven, a massive municipal union
and try to negotiate with them. This is where he's
going to get himself into real trouble. And this is
where Donald Trump might jump in. You know, He's got
an ongoing relationship now with Mom Donnie. They continue to
(02:32):
talk phone calls every so often. So in the middle
of Mom Donnie gets really stuck in this horrible union negotiation,
Trump might call him and say, you want me to
help you through this. Trump's an expert at negotiating with unions.
You know, when you build one hundred story skyscrapers everywhere,
you got to deal with a lot of unions. So
(02:53):
he might become like a big brother to him, a
mentor to him, showed him how to get through these
union negotiations, and you might see more of that. As
frightening as the thought of Mom Donnie as mayor is,
it might not be so bad if Trump becomes the
coach on the sidelines there. Hey, speaking of which, in
the middle of all this shortfall they wanted to be
money budget shortfall, New York City Council just voted themselves
(03:16):
the big rays sixteen percent raise for themselves, which also
means you have to do at the same time you
have to give the mayor a raise. The public advocate arrays,
the borough presidents have to get a raised, which is
why you won't see them complain about the city council
passing this. Now. In their defense, they haven't seen a
raise for many, many, many many years. But still sixteen percent,
(03:42):
that's a lot of money. Hey, Joe Biden may be
about to be hit with the biggest embarrassment any president
has ever been hit with. You know, when you're done
as president and you leave, first big project is you
have a presidential library. And if you've been president of
the United States, you got big donors that have supported
(04:03):
you for many, many years, massive big donors, billionaires, zillionaires,
And that's who you turn to when you got to
build a presidential library. First parton, you go to the donors.
You raise twenty thirty forty fifty million from the donors.
Then maybe you go to your supporters, the public, you
raise another fifty Biden is in big trouble. He's been
(04:23):
trying for two years and they can't raise any money.
He's raised like a two million dollars, which you need
like two hundred million to build a presidential library. They
think by the end of twenty twenty seven, they're hoping
to get to eleven million. So at that rate, it'd
be another twelve years before he could build a library.
(04:44):
Biden would then be a I don't know where. He'd
be ninety five at the time, So he may be
the first president not to be able to build a
presidential library. This would be the most embarrassing thing ever. Ever.
They're at four million right now, so if he's doing
four million a year, I mean that's going to be
(05:05):
fifty years to get the money for a library. It's
going to be impossible. This would be the biggest embarrassment ever.
First president who cannot raise money for a presidential library.
Now you know he's got these big donors, very very
wealthy billionaires Hedgeman, but obviously you don't think there's any
future for this guy. The only reason you give money
for a Clinton presidential library or a Bush presidential library,
(05:27):
if you're a big donors, you want to keep the
relationship going for a couple of reasons. One, you want
to be able to see the guy, have the guy
come to your events or parties, shake hands with you,
you know whoever your business people, or you'll want the
president to pull some strings for you, make some phone
calls for you to Washington or A lot of guys
used to Bill Clinton around the world. Bill Clinton had
(05:48):
a great relationship with all the foreign leaders. So if
you were a big zillionaire business guy and you need
to do some business in India, Bill Clinton could call
up the president of India and get you in the
door whatever you needed. So apparently these guys feel Biden
has no clout anywhere, no clout with anybody in Washington.
World leaders won't even take his call. So they're not
(06:10):
donating to the Presidential Library. Extremely extremely embarrassing for Biden.
Now what does he do? There is a secret plan
if all else fails, They're going to go to the
University of Delaware, where he's got a good relationship, and
take a building already existing at the University of Delaware.
(06:30):
Maybe you know, they've got a few library type buildings
and they'll call one of them the Biden Presidential Library.
That way, they'll never actually build a presidential library, but
the University of Delaware will establish one in one of
their buildings on campus, and then as soon as he dies,
they'll take the name off and take the building back
let's see here, PBS Public Broadcast. How could he cut
(06:53):
the funding for PBS. Well, here's exactly why, because wasn't
PBS supposed to be educational program I mean British dramas
and comedies and sesame Street. Well, somehow they got into slanted, slanted, biased,
deceptive news coverage and PBS has been doing this for years,
(07:15):
the most awful Trump bashing, slanted left wing new Why
would the government pay for that? Hey, if you want
to be a very slanted left wing news organization, go
ahead knock yourself out, but don't expect the taxpayers to
pay for it. So here's the latest one, the PBS
News Hour with their whole panel that holds segment on
(07:35):
how Trump is a racist? Is overtly racist rhetoric? What
the hell they're talking about? But they just bash him
and bash him and bash him. David Brooks was part
of the panel, Jonathan k part. So if you're ever oh,
they were talking about Elon Omer's comments about Omar, which
we're not racist. She is a horrible, horrible person, and
(07:56):
she's involved in what must what might be the biggest
taxpayer political scandal in history. So she's certainly a worthy target.
But if you're wondering how did PBS get its funding cut, well,
put up a picture of David Brooks, Jonathan k Part,
all of those people over there, just the most slanted,
awful coverage. Hey, you know, stock market's been going crazy.
(08:21):
It's going to hit the fifty thousand by the end
of next year, could hit sixty thousand. And what's this
all about? Some people say, well, it's AI that's really
doing it. AI is making the stock market go crazy.
So some people are starting to wonder, wait a minute,
didn't we go through this twenty five years ago with
the dot com bubble? Remember the end of the nineties,
same thing, same thing, stock market going crazy, people were
(08:43):
making a fortune, stock soaring, but it was a dot
com bubble and it burst and it was an economic
disaster and calamity for the country when it bursts. So
some people are saying, wait, are we doing the same
thing here? Haven't we created an exact same sort of bubble,
only this time it's an a eyebubble. Well, experts of
studying this there are striking similarities, but they point out
(09:05):
there's notable differences, and one of them is everybody's talking
about this being a bubble. And they always say if
everybody's saying it's a bubble, it probably isn't one. But
I remember in the late nineties people there were people
saying it was a bubble. But one big difference is
the scale of the price gains. Yeah, Navidia is up
(09:26):
a lot because of AI, but you know it's up
fifty four percent. You go back to the dot com bubble,
the stocks were going up five hundred percent, five thousand percent.
It was totally out of control and there are ups
and downs. So yeah, it's a bubble, but it's a
tiny one. It's not the tough sort of bubble. And
(09:49):
people are saying, don't worry, it's not that bad. And
also remember with the AI these companies are bringing in revenue.
They are bringing in revenue. That was the difference. The
dot com bubble of the time was Yahoo and those
kinds of and there was no profit. They were losing fortunes.
Well that's not the case with any of these AI companies.
(10:09):
Definitely strong profits. So big difference. Now he's when you
go to a party or you're arguing, people will say, well,
what's going to happen in the midterms, Who's going to
win the Republicans and the Democrats. Will the GOP hold
the House the Senate in the midterms, And people are
giving you these predictions, don't listen to it. There is
absolutely no way to predict this right now. It's like saying,
(10:33):
who's going to win the Super Bowl in twenty twenty eight.
Don't There's no way you could even forecast anything like that.
There's no such thing. It's December. The midterms are eleven
months away. The whole landscape is going to change six
times between now and then. Everything's going to change the economy,
the world situation, everything. We don't even know who the
(10:55):
candidates are going to be yet, some are some Republicans
will drop out, some Democrats will, you know, drop out
before the race that we have no idea who's running,
We have no idea what the country will look like,
what the landscape will look like. Do not listen to
anybody's predictions about the midterms. They are totally worthless right now.
You know, every fall you get these news stories about
(11:19):
it's going to be a very bad winter, it's going
to be a lot of snow this winter, it's going
to be a very cold winter, And they're always wrong.
And that's because if you talk to real weather experts,
the best weather people in the world, they'll tell you
there's no such thing as a seasonal forecast. It's impossible.
You could forecast. You can really only forecast accurately three
(11:39):
days out. You could sort of put together sort of
an accurate ten day forecast, but that's about it. You
can't forecast twelve months out, you can't do it, or
even three months out. You can't forecast two months out.
It's impossible. So there's no such thing as a seasonal forecast. Hey,
remember Black Lives Matter, Well, people are still looking into it,
(12:01):
and apparently it's still the grifters who are behind that
are still splitting up all sorts of stuff. They're all
sorts of scammers involved. They're looking back on it now,
people studying and say billions of dollars were scammed out
of American institutions. The Feds are actually going after people.
The Oklahoma City BLM franchise, three million dollar fraud scheme.
(12:23):
They've been caught in all over the place, Atlanta donations
stolen at half a million dollars. They're finding this all
over the country. You start seeing prosecutions of all of
this looks like many, many, maybe up to a billion altogether,
with stolen, scammed, skimmed BLM leaders paying for vacations, cars, properties,
(12:45):
all sorts of stuff needed to their name. In fact,
they're saying they can't find a BLM branch that did
not have a slush fund for its local leaders. So
you're going to see more and more people indicted. Remember
the smartest companies gave. Amazon gave one hundred and seventy million,
City Group pledged a billion dollars, Nike gave one hundred
(13:05):
and fifty million. Now, some of the money may have
been used responsibly, but they're saying most of it was scammed.
They're hunting these people down right now for prosecution, so
you may see a lot of that in the coming year. Hey,
this has been the bonus segment of the podcast. Thanks
for listening. I'm going to be off for the next
two weeks Christmas break. I'll be back after New Year's
(13:28):
Curtis will be filling in for me, so be listing
that should be interesting. Have a great holiday and great
talking to me. I'll see you next year.
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