NEWSMAX

Transform a nation. Al Lenza's parents traveled overseas three times after immigrating to the US in 1961. Lenza estimated he's taken 500 trips in his 50 years. Wow. How many times have you been overseas? Probably 30. Yeah, a couple times a year for like 15 years. Yeah, I guess 50 years. You stack them up, you start going more frequently. But that's still 10 times a year for 50 years. His home office is filled with self printed books with recollections from each one he's working on more. The semi retired 70 year old has already been to Barcelona three times in the past year. You have more time and more money, he said of his current phase of life. The clock is running out. American travel has transformed. The clock is running out on you visiting Idaho, buddy. It's time to romanticize the States. Yeah. I saw a funny thing about spending time in the American south and picking up a Southern. You saw that, picking up the Southern accent and being like, oh, yeah, you know, this summer I spent a couple weeks in Georgia. Oh, it just rubs off on you. When you're there. You really have to go spend some time in the American South. It's remarkable. Do you plan to go to all 50 states? Ooh, yeah, that'd be fun. I feel like road trips, camping, those types of activities. You sort of have to like lean into it. You have to be doing a lot of cannonballs, a lot of rallies. But you need excuses because I think once you get to like 42 states, the last eight are going to feel like a complete slog. Unless you have a reason to visit each one or you're hitting a bunch of them in a quick tour. Do you count landing in an airport if you don't leave the airport? No. You don't count that? Why? No. Why would that? Because physically you're the state. You're physically in the state. Like you're legally in that state. You don't count it? Well, I don't count it as visiting the state. What about a layover in a country? You leave and you're out of the airport for three hours. Does that count? Say, yeah, I've been to Japan. Three hours outside. I actually do count that. You do count that. I think if you are, what's the minimum? Basically leave security. What if I leave security? Take the bus on a little loop around the parking lot back. That counts. Book it. That counts. Book it. Okay. Okay. Book it. That's the fastest way to see every state flight hop from airport to airport, get out, do the bus loop Come back, hop on the next plane. You could probably do all 50. That would be a fun exercise, actually, to figure out. How do you. How do you visit all 50 states in the fastest amount of time? Yeah, right. Is it world record? Yeah, world record. I'm thinking just figure it out. And, and the rule is, the rule is you can't just land in the airport and step on the tarmac. You have to actually physically step outside of the airport on. Basically on a regular plan. I think you got to do like really small rural airports. Okay. Yeah. Fly a small airports and a charter. Yeah. Gotta be a fast plane. Oh, yeah, it does. A helicopter. And you fly it yourself and you bounce around. That might be doable. I wonder. There's gotta be some states where it's faster to drive. Right. Like Rhode island, that area. Maybe faster to drive than. Deal with all the plane stuff. Driving at 300 miles an hour. Deal with all the plane stuff. I don't know. Airport, step out and then get out again. Wait, so if you're flying your own Cessna, you land, you step off the plane. Does that count? No, I'm saying you have to be outside of the airport, but I think if you landed on just like some farmland, you could maybe count that. You could maybe book that. But do you have to get out of the plane? I do think you have to touch the ground. Oh, no, I'm going down. Mayday. Mayday. I'm landing on a golf course. Hopping out, hopping back in. Okay, I'm good. That's maybe the fastest way. Who knows? Anyway. Yeah, so. So actually some, some. Some planes you can just land on, you know, a street or even a dirt. A dirt road if it's long enough. And so that's probably actually the fastest way. Tyler, figure out some. Some figure out the route to hit a bunch to land on some farmland in every state. And then. And then. Okay, well, anyway, back to the unstoppable American tourist. What's going on here? American travel has transformed in recent decades. A nation of former homebodies has become one of zealous and moneyed international travelers, infiltrating every cobblestone corner of Europe and rapidly filling lesser known destinations. Americans took a record 24 million trips to Europe in 2025. Portugal received nearly five times the number of U.S. visitors last year as it did a decade earlier. Greece took in four times as many. Is it getting crowded in these. In these foreign tourist destinations? I've been to Greece. I've never been to Portugal. Have you ever been to either Greece or Portugal? Tyler. Greece or Portugal? No, I actually. Santorini is beautiful. Portugal, yes. Greece, no. Okay. Were you surfing in Portugal? Yes. Oh, okay. Nazare 100 foot wave near nearby. Okay. Consulting firm Tourism Economics expects American visits to Europe will have increased another 5% by the end of the year. The travel is helping boost economies even as it has angered many locals who say their cities now relying on foreign visitors are no longer serving them. Behind the shift is a supercharged US Economy that is in the course of a generation. That in the course of a generation has created a larger and wealthier class of Americans that views travel as an essential rather than a luxury. Older Americans. Let's find out what the older Americans are doing. Older Americans who are driving this new era of Travel hold about 110 trillion in wealth. Wow. We should get these folks financing the AI build out. They got plenty to spend. Instead of traveling, you should just. Barcelona three times in a year from America is just insane. I'm sorry. That could. That money could be sitting with John Gray, Blackstone. It could be going over to Jensen. Could be allocating that for you. Could be putting it all on the line for you. You could have your Apple Vision Pro doing Barcelona simulator. Yeah. Yeah. Gen AI just generate a picture of you in Barcelona. Job finished. Generate hundreds of images, potentially make a music video of yourself playing a song about Barcelona in Barcelona. People will love that. People will love. People will love that. That rising wealth has coincided with dramatic changes in the travel industry itself. Foreign travel has become more accessible and social media has made it easy to envy, emulate and one up, friends. Vacations. Apologize to Mark Zuckerberg. He is stimulating the global travel economy. We didn't even consider that. This is huge. Everyone needs to travel because of this. The whole world is growing because of Meta. You see a picture of somebody in Barcelona, you're like, I gotta go for the fourth time. This is happening. This is happening. You have no defense. Defeated lion retreats. Defeated lion retreats. It's a good point. I just. I just wish that he was twisting the knobs and to make it even more. Make it to make Idaho and places. Oh, yeah. Okay. You. But yeah, this is, this is, this is. This is putting a thumb on the scale. You know, you don't. You want a thumb on the scale? You're saying his thumbs not on the scale enough. Well, interesting. Okay. Yeah. I just want to know what his values are. Yeah. Biased. I'm on this. Biased over here. A trip to the continent is a well worn path for us elites. I like calling Europe just The continent. It's a good. Maybe we should try and reclaim that as part of your make America tourism friendly campaign. We are the continent. The new continent. Yeah, it really does have to be devastating. If you're in Malibu and then you find out, oh, there's New Malibu somewhere else. It's like, wait, what about me? I feel like my town's going well and you're in York or England or Hampshire or Jersey and you're like, ah, it's probably nothing. People will get bored of New York. They'll come back to regular York. And they didn't anyway. By the 1950s and the 1960s, when boomers were growing up, Americans traveling abroad were in rare air, a glamorous jet set who wore their best for flights on Pan Am and twa. They were soon joined by young adventurous backpackers who filled hostels and traveled on the cheap. As the cold war waned and airlines expanded, travel opened up first further to the masses. And the European Union's free travel area made it easy to fly to the continent and hop between countries. Fascinating stat that I always come back to. People will share that photo of, oh, people in 1950 and 60, every seat on the plane looked like first class. Don't forget what they took from you. The world you remember doesn't exist. That whole thing. There are more people flying in first class today than people flew at all in the 60s. Wow. So like just the first. So you really need to comp the first class experience today with a lie. Flat seat. They give you a glass of champagne. It's actually a pretty luxurious experience. Maybe not the best, but it's pretty good. Unless you're in JetBlue mint and they won't let you pass back steak. That's brutal. But for most airlines it's pretty good. And we still haven't got CEO of JetBlue. We gotta, we gotta get some answers and we gotta push. We do, we do. For a policy update. We do. We do. So in 1990, fewer than 5% of Americans had a passport. Pretty crazy. Now more than 50% do, aided in part by a mandate requiring passports for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean that took effect in 2007. And a post pandemic travel rush, the US issued an a record 27 million passports in fiscal 2025. Amy Burch Buchanan, 55, took her first flight in 1988 to visit her then boyfriend in England. She had a cassette tape full of journey songs to listen to on the plane and her parents walked her directly to the gate. The PJ experience. Basically. Back then, onboard passengers were dressed to the nines, sipping cocktails and smoking cigarettes. What about an airline where you can't smoke cigarettes but you can smoke cigars? I think that might see some traction. Something there? Yeah, Spirit Airlines? Why not American Spirit? It makes so much sense. I don't know, it seems like a no brainer. Nobody was wearing yoga pants. It was very elegant, says Buchanan, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas. She returned home a changed woman with British bands like Depeche Mode on her Walkman, new clothes and wanderlust that she eventually passed down to her three kids. Her eldest daughter, Avery, moved to the UK around two years ago and now travels across Europe. Her middle daughter went to Kenya this year. They've really reached out much further as they've gone out on their own. Europe is often a gateway drug. Portugal and Greece have seen the biggest percentage increases in US Visitors of any country over the past decade, according to US Government data. The UK and Italy have seen the largest increases in the total number of tourists getting millions of additional Americans a year arriving by air. Only six only 6% of US travelers to Europe in 2025 said it was their first time flying abroad. Many of these tourists are visiting multiple times a year, stopping at the Eiffel Tower and the in the Coliseum, but also taking country walks in the Cotswolds and Viking cruises on the Danube. A growing share of consumer spending is going toward foreign travel as habits change and prices rise. Open skies agreements deregulated airline competition on international routes starting in the 1990s, leading to much cheaper airfares and more international flights from the U.S. said Clifford Winston, a Brookings Institution economist who studied the PACS. In 1984, a round trip weekend fare between New York and London on pan AM cost $669, today's equivalent of $2,150. Over the past decade, economy airfare to the region rose 56% more than inflation. The average one way economy plane ticket from US to Europe, not including taxes and fees, cost $588 this year, up from 533 in 2025. So even though it's getting more expensive to fly, people are still doing it more and more because of Instagram, baby. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway as much as Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider, use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Row.

Years and just keep chipping away. Try to try stuff, see what moves the needle and just hope that slowly but surely over time we can build more housing. Do you have any idea of like, what the shape of that legislation might actually look like? Because it's just saying, like, we need to build more. A lot of you get a lot of thumbs up. But what are we actually changing? Are we, are we making the time to permitting more? Are we hiring more people that review permits? Are we changing the requirements for fireproofing or something? Like, it's very. It gets nitty gritty really fast. So one thing that might be that resonate with your audience is that right now the financing piece is really hard. And what happened was similar to VC and private equity, a lot of people invested money in 2021, 2022. Interest rates were low in real estate, we'd say cap rates were lower, valuations were high. Sure. And they got blown out pretty bad over the next few years and the equity got wiped out. Maybe people are still sitting on loans. So as we see the apartment marketing apartment market starting to turn, time to build apartments again. There's no equity to go around and you can't get a deal done unless there are equity investors ready to go because they all got wiped out last time. They're gun shy. And then nowadays maybe you'd rather fund a data center than an apartment building. So I think finding ways to finance new developments and maybe the public sector can have some role here, whether it's subsidizing or tax incentives, things like that, that's something that we should look into. Interesting, interesting. What role do you think other buyers in the market that aren't specifically someone going to either buy a house that they'll live in or.

42 states. The last eight are going to feel like a complete slog unless you have a reason to visit each one or you're hitting a bunch of them in a quick tour. Do you count landing in an airport if you don't leave the airport? No. You don't count that? Why? No. Why would that? Because physically you're experienced the state. You're physically in the state, like you're legally in that state. You don't count it? Well, I don't count it as visiting the state. What about, what about a layover in a country? You leave and you're out of the airport for three hours, does that count? Say, yeah, I've been to Japan. Three hours outside. You actually do count that. You do count that. I think if you are, what's the minimum amount? You basically leave security. What if I leave security? Take the bus on a little loop around the parking lot back. That counts. Book it. That counts. Book it. Okay. Okay. That's the fastest way to see every state flight. Hop from airport to airport, get out, do the bus loop, come back, hop on the next plane. You could probably do all 50. That would be a fun exercise actually to figure out how do you, how do you visit all 50 states in the fastest amount of time? Yeah. Right. Is it world record prop? Yeah, world record. I, I'm thinking, let's figure it out. And, and the, and the rule is, the rule is you can't just land in the airport and step on the tarmac. You have to actually physically step outside of the airport on, basically on, on a regular plan. I think you got to do like really small rural airports. Okay. Yeah. Fly a small airports and a charter. Yeah. To be a fast plane. Oh, yeah, the helicopter. Thinking I was Cessna. And you fly it yourself and you bounce around. That might be doable. I wonder. There's got to be some states where it's faster to drive. Right. Like Rhode island, that area. Maybe faster to drive than. Deal with all the plane stuff. Driving at 300 miles an hour. Deal with all the plane stuff. I don't know, land in a small airport, step out and then get out again. Wait, so, so, so if you're in a, if you're flying your own Cessna, you land, you step off the plane. Does that count? Now I'm saying you have to be, you have to be outside of the airport. But I think if you landed on just like a, some farmland. Oh, you could maybe count that. You can maybe book that. But do you have to get out of the plane? I do think you have to touch the ground. Oh, no. I'm going down. Mayday. Mayday. I'm landing on a golf course. Hopping out, hopping back in. Okay, I'm good. That's maybe the fastest way. Who knows? Anyway, yeah, so actually, some planes, you can just land on a street or even a dirt road if it's long enough. And so that's probably actually the fastest way. Tyler, figure out some. Figure out the route to hit a bunch to land on some farmland in every state, and then. Okay, well, anyway, back to the unstoppable.

I think the bottoming call is twofold. One is that the hardest hit states over the past few years, places like Florida and Texas, now see inventory dropping and new orders for homebuilders are rising. That's kind of your classic bottoming, wait, cycle recovery. And then San Francisco is clearly a market that very similar to 2010, 2011 is leading the country in terms of what this expansion looks like. And I'm really excited and interested to see where that broadening out goes over the next six or 12 months. How important is actual development?

Feels like he maybe can't say for sure. Anyway, there's a bunch of other good stories. Last but not least, Leonardo DiCaprio urged Chilean authorities to protect a critically endangered frog from a proposed power transmission project. This feels like something that's solvable. Like, I think that. I think we can protect the frogs and do the power transmission project. Yeah. Do you agree, John? I know nothing about the situation, but I have. I have a little faith. Spiny chest frog. There's a thousand of them that remain in the wild. I think. I think Leo should let them move in, bring them to America, put them in a zoo or something. I think they want to live there. I think. I think you got to do a lot of work. I don't know, maybe beam the power somehow. Do something else. Yeah. Interesting. It's got to be rough being the. Being in the Chilean government and just being like, Leo just comes over the top. 60. He sent 60 million Instagram followers our way, and they're sarced. It's got to be brutal. Well, good luck. Hopefully the frog can be protected while the power transmission project goes on. Frogs on hamster wheels powering, generating power. Maybe that's the future. Who knows? Well, thank you so much for tuning in to tvpn. Leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for a new.

For the AI Era unlock seamless real time experiences and new value. With Cisco, we got to talk about the American tourist. The American tourist has become unstoppable. A supercharged US economy helped transform a nation. Al Lenza's parents traveled overseas three times after immigrating to the US in 1961. Lenza estimated he's taken 500 trips in his 50 years. Wow. How many times have you been overseas? Probably 30. Yeah, a couple times a year for like 15 years. Yeah, I guess 50 years. You stack them up, you start going more frequently. But that's still 10 times a year for 50 years. His home office is filled with self printed books with recollections from each one he's working on more. The semi retired 70 year old has already been to Barcelona three times in the past year. You have more time and more money, he said of his current phase in life. The clock is running out. American travel has transformed. The clock is running out on you visiting Idaho, buddy. It's time to romanticize the States. Yeah. I saw a funny thing about spending time in the American south and picking up a Southern. You saw that picking up the southern accent and being like, oh, yeah. I mean, you know, this summer I spent a couple weeks in Georgia. Oh, it just rubs off on you when you're there. You really have to go spend some time in the American South. It's remarkable. Do you plan to go to all 50 states? Ooh, yeah. Yeah, that'd be fun. I feel like road trips, camping, those types of activities, you sort of have to like lean into it. You have to be doing a lot of cannonballs, a lot of rallies. But you need excuses because I think once you get to like 42 states, the last eight are going to feel like a complete slog. Unless you have a reason to visit each one or you're hitting a bunch of them in a quick tour. Do you count landing in an airport if you don't leave the airport? No. You don't count that? Why? No. Why would that? Because physically you're experienced the state. You're physically in the state. Like you're legally in that state. You don't count it? Well, I don't count it as visiting the state. What about, what about a layover in a country? You leave and you're out of the airport for three hours. Does that count? Say, yeah, I've been to Japan. Three hours outside. You actually do count that. You do count that. I think if you are, what's the minimum amount? You basically leave security. What if I leave security Take the bus on a little loop around the parking lot back. That counts. Book it. That counts. Book it. Okay. Okay. That's the fastest way to see every state flight. Hop from airport to airport, get out, do the bus loop, come back, hop on the next plane. You could probably do all 50. That would be a fun exercise actually, to figure out how do you, how do you visit all 50 states in the fastest amount of time? Yeah. Right. Is it world record prop? Yeah, world record. I, I'm thinking that you need to figure it out. And, and the, and the rule is, the rule is you can't just land in the airport and step on the tarmac. You have to actually physically step outside of the airport on. Basically on. On a regular plan. I think you got to do like really small rural airports. Okay. Yeah. Fly a Small airports and a charter. Yeah. To be a fast plane. Oh, yeah, the helicopter thinking. I was thinking you fly it yourself and you bounce around. That might be doable. I wonder. There's got to be some states where it's faster to drive. Right. Like Rhode island, that area. Maybe faster to drive than deal with all the plane stuff. Driving at 300 miles an hour, deal with all the plane stuff. I don't know, Land in a small airport, step out, and then get out again. Wait, so, so, so if you're in a, if you're flying your own Cessna, you land, you, you step off the plane. Does that count? No, I'm saying you have to be outside of the airport, but I think if you landed on just like some farmland, you could maybe count that. You could maybe book that. But do you have to get out of the plane? I do think you have to touch the ground. Oh, no. I'm going down. Mayday, Mayday. I'm landing on a golf course. Hopping out, hopping back in. Oh, okay. I'm good. That's maybe the fastest way. Who knows? Anyway, yeah. So actually some planes you can just land on a street or even a dirt road if it's long, long enough. And so that's probably actually the fastest way. Tyler, figure out some, some figure out the route to hit a bunch to land on some farmland in every state. And then, and then. Okay, well, anyway, back to the unstoppable American tourist. What's going on here? American travel has transformed in recent decades. A nation of former homebodies has become one of zealous and moneyed international travelers, infiltrating every cobblestone corner of Europe and rapidly filling lesser known destinations. Americans took a record 24 million trips to Europe in 2025, Portugal received nearly five times the number of US visitors last year as it did a decade earlier. Greece took in four times as many. Is it getting crowded in these foreign tourist destinations? I've been to Greece. I've never been to Portugal. Have you ever been to either Greece or Portugal, Tyler? Greece or Portugal? No, I actually. Santorini is beautiful. Portugal, yes. Greece, no. Okay. Were you surfing in Portugal? Yes. Okay. Nazare. 100 foot wave nearby. Okay. Consulting firm Tourism Economics expects American visits to Europe will have increased another 5% by the end of the year. The travel is helping boost economies even as it has angered many locals who say their cities now relying on foreign visitors are no longer serving them. Behind the shift is a supercharged US Economy that is in the course of a generation. That in the course of a generation has created a larger and wealthier class of Americans that views travel as an essential rather than a luxury. Older Americans. Let's find out what the older Americans are doing. Older Americans who are driving this new era of Travel hold about 110 trillion in wealth. Wow. We should get these folks financing the AI build out. They got plenty to spend. Instead of traveling, you should just. Barcelona three times in a year from America is just insane. I'm sorry. That could. That money could be sitting with John Gray Blackstone. It could be going over to Jensen. Could be allocating that for you. Could be putting it all on the line for you. You could have your Apple Vision Pro doing Barcelona simulator. Yeah, yeah. Gen AI, just generate a picture of you in Barcelona. Job finished. Generate hundreds of images, potentially make a music video of yourself playing a song about Barcelona in Barcelona. People will love that. People will love that. That rising wealth has coincided with dramatic changes in the travel industry itself. Foreign travel has become more accessible and social media has made it easy to envy, emulate. And one up, friends, vacations. Apologize to Mark Zuckerberg. He is stimulating the global travel economy. We didn't even consider that. This is huge. Everyone needs to travel because of this. The whole world is growing because of Meta. You see a picture of somebody in Barcelona, you're like, I gotta go for the fourth time. This is happening. This is happening. You have no defense. Defeated lion retreats. Defeated lion retreats. It's a good point. I just. I just wish that he was twisting the knobs and to make it even more. Make it to make Idaho and places. Oh, okay. You. But yeah, this is, this is, this is. This is putting a thumb on the scale. You know, you don't. You want a thumb on the scale. You're saying his thumbs not on the scale Enough. Well, interesting. Okay, yeah. I just want to know what his values are. Yeah, biased. I'm on this biased over here. A trip to the continent is a well worn path for us elites. I like calling Europe just the continent. It's a good. Maybe we should try and reclaim that as part of your make America tourism friendly campaign. We are the continent. The new continent. Yeah, it really does have to be devastating if you're in Malibu and then you find out, oh, there's New Malibu somewhere else. It's like, wait, what about me? I feel like my town's going well and you're in York or England or Hampshire or Jersey and you're like, ah, it's probably nothing. People will get bored of New York. They'll come back to regular York. And they didn't anyway. By the 1950s and the 1960s when boomers were growing up, Americans traveling abroad were in rare air, a glamorous jet set who wore their best for flights on Pan Am and twa. They were soon joined by young adventurous backpackers who filled hostels and traveled on the cheap. As the cold war waned and airlines expanded, travel opened up first further to the masses. And the European Union's free travel area made it easy to fly to the continent and hop between countries. Fascinating stat that I always come back to. People will share that photo of. Oh, people in 1950 and 60, every seat on the plane looked like first class. Don't forget what they took from you. The world you remember doesn't exist. That whole thing. There are more people flying in first class today than people flew at all in the 60s. Wow. So like just the first. So you really need to comp the first class experience today with a lie flat seat. They give you a glass of champagne. It's actually a pretty luxurious experience. Maybe not the best, but it's pretty good. Unless you're in JetBlue mint and they won't let you pass back steak. That's brutal. But for most airlines, it's pretty good. And we still haven't got CEO of JetBlue. We gotta, we gotta get some answers and we gotta push. We do, we do. For a policy update. We do. We do. So in 1990, fewer than 5% of Americans had a passport. Pretty crazy. Now more than 50% do, aided in part by a mandate requiring passports for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. That took effect in 2007. And a post pandemic travel rush. The US issued an a record 27 million passports in fiscal 2025, Amy Burch Buchanan, 55, took her first flight in 1988 to visit her then boyfriend in England. She had a cassette tape full of journey songs to listen to on the plane and her parents walked her directly to the gate. The PJ experience, basically. Back then, onboard passengers were dressed to the nines, sipping cocktails and smoking cigarettes. What about an airline where can't smoke cigarettes but you can smoke cigars? I think that might see some traction. Something there? Yeah, Spirit Airlines? Why not American Spirit? It makes so much sense. I don't know. It seems like a no brainer. Nobody was wearing yoga pants. It was very elegant, says Buchanan, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas. She returned home a changed woman with British bands like Depeche Mode on her Walkman, new clothes and wanderlust that she eventually passed down to her three kids. Her eldest daughter, Avery, moved to the UK around two years ago and now travels across Europe. Her middle daughter went to Kenya this year. They've really reached out much further as they've gone out on their own. Europe is often a gateway drug. Portugal and Greece have seen the biggest percentage increases in US Visitors of any country over the past decade, according to US Government data. The UK And Italy have seen the largest increases in the total number of tourists getting millions of additional Americans a year arriving by air. Only six only 6% of US travelers to Europe in 2025 said it was their first time flying abroad. Many of these tourists are visiting multiple times a year, stopping at the Eiffel Tower and the in the Coliseum, but also taking country walks in the Cotswolds and Viking cruises on the Danube. A growing share of consumer spending is going toward foreign travel as habits change and prices rise. Open skies agreements deregulated airline competition on international routes starting in the 1990s, leading to much cheaper airfares and more international flights from the U.S. said Clifford Winston, a Brookings Institution economist who studied the PACS. In 1984, a round trip weekend fare between New York and London on pan AM cost $669, today's equivalent of $2,150. Over the past decade, economy airfare to the region rose 56% more than inflation. The average one way economy plane ticket from US to Europe, not including taxes and fees, cost $588 this year, up from 533 in 2025. So even though it's getting more expensive to fly, people are still doing it more and more because of Instagram, baby. Anyway, let me tell you about.

On social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. There are some other stories. Paramount is threatening to leave California by October 1st if the state refuses to negotiate a settlement in the legal fight over its Warner Brothers Discovery merger. We've been covering the story back and forth for a while, but according to Variety, Paramount CEO David Ellison wants a quick resolution to the antitrust lawsuit brought by 12 state attorneys general seeking to block the deal. He has now told senior executives that Paramount is prepared to begin the process of moving its operations out of California if Attorney General Rob Bonta doesn't enter settlement talks. Ellison reportedly told his leadership team last week that the Paramount Skydance board has already approved the relocation plans. If negotiations with Bonta haven't begun by August 1, the company would start preparing, preparing its exit. With Paramount's Los Angeles headquarters potentially moving out of the state as early as October, the threat dramatically raises the stakes in Paramount's fight with Bonta, who has emerged as a leading opponent of the Warner Brothers Discovery acquisition. Bonta hasn't publicly detailed what Paramount would need to offer to resolve the case, but he has said that any acceptable remedies would likely need to be structural, such as asset divestitures, rather than behavioral commitments like maintaining certain levels of production. So it's not going to be enough for Ellison, say, hey, we're still going to do 12 movies a year, 24 movies a year. It needs to be something specific about the structure, like the actual structure of the company. Paramount is also racing against an expensive clock. Beginning October 1, the company will owe Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders a $7 million, $7 million per day ticking fee until the transaction closes. The state's antitrust trial isn't scheduled to begin until May 2nd of 2027. So almost nine months from now, meaning Paramount could rack up roughly $1.2 billion in payments by the time the case is expected to conclude. Ellison is effectively putting pressure on California from the other direction. If the state won't help find a path to closing the merger, Paramount is prepared to take. Start taking jobs elsewhere. Yeah, so, so he's, he's trying to force the issue that this gets extremely painful for the Ellisons if this antitrust thing just drags on. You could imagine it dragging on for a couple years. That puts a pause on all of their integration plans. It just makes everything a lot harder. And yeah, I don't think he has the. This, this seems like his one option. Right. It's kind of the nuclear option. It's going to piss off a lot of the industry here in la. It is the most symbolic move because according to Variety, the company's L A headquarters would be the first operation to leave. And Ellison already has a five year plan to move most studio jobs out of California. No destination has been selected, but Georgia, Texas and Tennessee reportedly under construction consideration. So it's like if you're moving the LA headquarters, the iconic Paramount headquarters, everyone's seen the water tower. That is a huge shot across the bow. As opposed to something that might actually be more economically impactful, like just, oh, for this production, we were going to make it in la, we're going to do it in, in Atlanta. That might actually move more dollars around. But maintaining that headquarters is so symbolic. Right. So Ellison and much of Paramount senior leadership currently work from the historic Paramount Picture Studio lot in Hollywood. But maybe it will be moving to Georgia, Texas or Tennessee. I wonder where they will go. Anyway, we'll work on getting, we're working on getting a few folks on the show. Oh yeah, ASAP to break down the deal. Yeah. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So, speaking of publicly traded companies, Elon Musk may have found a shortcut to unlocking a trillion dollar payday. He needed a win.