UNC’s $50M Coach Deal, Trump Cease-Fire Fallout, GOP Warning Signs, Mamdani Momentum

Ultimize. The University of North Carolina just gave a basketball coach $50 million over just 6 years. $50 million plus another $4 million a year for his assistants. And this is at a public university. Let's put that next to something real. An adjunct professor at UNC— the people actually teaching students, grading papers, doing the core educational work can make roughly $3,000 to $5,000 per course. That's often as little as $20,000 to $40,000 a year if they're lucky enough to string together enough classes. So just so we're clear, one person is making $8 million a year to coach basketball. Another is making maybe $30,000 a year to teach actual students at the same institution, supported by the same public tax system. We're supposed to believe this makes sense. That's not capitalism. That's not socialism. That is the worst version of both. It's socialism when it comes to funding because taxpayers directly or indirectly are supporting this institution and all public institutions. It's hyper-capitalism when it comes to salaries because a handful of people are extracting enormous income at the very top. It's a rigged hybrid. Losses are socialized, gains are privatized, and the result is exactly what you'd expect: massive income inequality funded and legitimized by public institutions. And here's the part that should really bother people: we aren't just tolerating this, we're encouraging it. We are creating a system where wealthy donors pour money into so-called booster clubs, nonprofit entities tax advantage, and those funds fuel an athletic arms race. Bigger salaries, bigger facilities, bigger deals, all wrapped in the language of education and nonprofit mission. That's not education. That's a semi-professional sports league with a tax subsidy. So here's my proposal again, and let me make it very clear. If you work for an institution that receives taxpayer support directly or indirectly, You cannot make more than the President of the United States. That's $400,000. That's a lot of money. That's my proposal, a cap for anyone working at public institutions directly or indirectly receiving tax dollars. Your job is not— and I realize not all of us think the president is worth his $400,000 right now, but as a basic level cap, there's no reason to pay any public employee more than $400,000 a year. And before people say, well, then you'll lose all the best coaches. Let me stop you right there. No, you won't. First of all, the world will survive if 30 or 40 of the best basketball coaches in America have to make $400,000 a year instead of $8 million. We're not talking about surgeons in a war zone. We're talking about coaches. Second, if someone truly believes they're worth $8 million, great. Go coach in the NBA. Go to the private sector and where the market is fully private and not tied to public funding with a few caveats. Don't get me started about stadium funding. Anyway, that's how capitalism is supposed to work, but don't come into a publicly supported system and extract private market salaries. That's not capitalism. That's a loophole, and it's a very lucrative one. Now, let's talk about priorities. Universities are raising tuition. Students are taking on debt. Families are stretching to afford education. At the same time, we're telling the world that the most valuable employee on campus is the basketball coach or a football coach, not the professor, not the researcher, not the person educating the next generation, but the coach. That's not just a budget issue, that's a values issue. And values eventually show up in politics because voters may not follow every detail of higher education finance, but they understand unfairness. They understand when something feels out of balance. Nothing feels more out of balance than a publicly connected institution paying one employee $8 million while another struggles to make a living teaching students. So this isn't about being anti-sports. It's not about being anti-success. If private companies want to pay people $50 million, go for it. That's the market. That's capitalism. But when public institutions are involved, there has to be a line. There has to be a ceiling. There has to be some connection to reality. And the cleanest, simplest, most defensible line is this. No one on the public payroll directly or indirectly should make more than the President of the United States. Because if we can't agree on that, then we've completely lost the plot. Now, I realize this doesn't make me popular. I realize I've not convinced all of you. But I think it's an absolute, frankly, despicable obscenity. When I ask people this one question, I've never heard a single person give a good answer. What is the worst thing that could happen to our society as a whole if there were this cap and one university couldn't essentially get involved in a financial arms race to attract a coach with more money? What's the worst thing that would happen to society? Absolutely nothing. Maybe your team wouldn't do as well next year. Why does that matter? If you're at the point in your life when you look around at the world, refugee crisis, world hunger, a billion people in the world have no clean drinking water, and you're thinking the biggest problem in life, the area where I need to spend my donations, my charitable contributions, and my tax dollars is to win a few more games. There's something perverse and sick about you. I'm sorry. I realize that doesn't make me a lot of friends, but this is in obscenity, and this is an area where Frankly, it's a blight on both Republican and Democratic parties because Republicans are supposed to be against socialism. This is socializing losses. If you are a coach and you get a $50 million contract and you lose every game, and then you're fired after a season and a half, you still get almost all the money, you get 80% of the money. So it's heads I win, tails you lose situation. And the money is coming directly and indirectly from tax dollars. So if you're a Republican, you should be against that. If you're a Democrat, you're supposed to be in favor of equality. This is creating mass inequality. Think of how much tuition could be lowered if you could take the TV revenues from these big sports leagues and put it towards teachers' salaries and reducing tuition. So Democrats, this is a stain on your hands as well. You don't need a complete life overhaul. You don't need a 10-step system or a 90-day transformation. Most of the time you need a small shift repeated often enough that it sticks. That's it. If you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, I'd like to tighten up a few things, go to ultimize.com, U-L-T-A-M-I-Z-E dot com. There's a free course there for you, communication skills or habit building, and it's designed to give you something simple. Something you can use and repeat every day. Not overwhelm you, no complexity, just something you can use. Go to ultimize.com and start. According to multiple reports, the President of the United States publicly threatened to destroy Iran's bridges and power plants and went even further, posting that, quote, a whole civilization will die tonight if Iran didn't comply with his demands over the Strait of Hormuz. Then Just hours later, he backed off and announced a 2-week ceasefire. Let's just start there. That's not spin. That's not interpretation. That's what happened. So in one news cycle, we went from end of civilization to let's take a 2-week pause and think about it. That's not strategy. That's not chess. That's a guy flipping the board and then asking for credit because he picked up the pieces. And this is where the rest of the world He is way ahead of us in honesty. Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez delivered what might be the best line of the year. He said, quote, the government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket. That's brutal and it's accurate because what Trump is doing over and over again is creating the crisis, escalating the crisis, terrifying everyone involved, and then expecting a standing ovation when he partially walks it back. It's like hiring an arsonist who also sells fire extinguishers. Hey, good news everyone, the house is mostly burned down. And here's where I'm going to say something a lot of leaders are thinking but won't say out loud. Let me just say the quiet part out loud now. The leader of any other country— pick your country, France, Brazil, India— if their leader went on television and said, I might wipe out an entire civilization, civilization tonight, we wouldn't call that tough. We wouldn't call that negotiating leverage. We would call that dangerous. We would call that unstable. We would call that someone who cannot be trusted with power. We would call that person a terrorist. We would call that person an international war criminal. We would call that somebody who needs to be removed from power. And yet somehow when it happens here in the US, we're supposed to debate tone, messaging, optics. No, this is about basic judgment because this isn't just rhetoric floating in the air. This is the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on earth. Words at that level are not tweets. They're signals. They move markets, they move troops, they move missiles. And when those signals swing wildly, from annihilation to ceasefire in a matter of hours. It doesn't project strength. It projects unpredictability. And unpredictability at that level is not a feature. It's a bug, a very dangerous bug. Now layer on top of that what legal experts are saying when you publicly talk about targeting civilian infrastructure, bridges, power plants. That's not just aggressive. That crosses into territory that international law explicitly forbids. And when you say it out loud repeatedly, you're not making a threat, not just making a threat, you're potentially creating a record of intent. In plain English, you're putting your own words on the evidence table. And when asked about that, when asked, are you concerned this could be a war crime, the answer was, uh, no, I'm not. That's not reassuring. That's chilling. Now let's bring this back to something that should not be controversial. This is no longer about whether you like Trump. This is no longer about whether you think he's funny or strong or anti-establishment or talks like a real person or whatever brand label people want to attach to this. This is about fitness for office because we now have people across the political spectrum Democrats, Republicans, conservative commentators, even some allies, former allies of this president raising the same question. Is this behavior stable enough for someone in control of nuclear weapons? And that's where the 25th Amendment comes in, not as a political weapon, not as a partisan talking point, but as a constitutional safeguard. It exists for exactly this scenario. When a president's behavior raises serious questions about their ability to discharge the duties of the office. And here's the uncomfortable truth. If leaders around him, people inside the administration, truly believe this level of erratic escalation and sudden reversal is normal, then fine, defend it. But if they don't believe it's normal, if they privately think that it's reckless, dangerous, and out of control, then doing nothing is not neutral. Doing nothing is a decision, and it's a decision to accept that this level of volatility is acceptable for the most powerful office in the world. Let me give you one final way to think about this. If your airline pilot comes on the intercom and says, folks, I might crash the plane into a mountain tonight. Actually, never mind, we're good now. You wouldn't say, wow, what a strong negotiator. You'd say, get me off this plane. Now that's where we are. This is not about left versus right. This is about whether the person flying the plane has their hands steady on the controls or is just yanking the wheel around back and forth and hoping for applause when the plane doesn't crash. Right now the rest of the world is watching and they're not applauding, they are bracing. Folks, this is serious. I'm not asking for anything illegal to be done. I am asking every sane person in the world, if you're concerned about your own life, your children's life, the future of the planet, together we have to think about how to remove this menace from the White House. Let me ask you something. How many times have you heard a great idea and thought, that's really useful, and then never used it again? It happens to all of us, because without repetition, even the best ideas just fade. So instead of just collecting more information, do something different. Go to ultimize.com, U-L-T-A-M-I-Z-E.com, and grab the free course. You can start with communication skills or building better habits, but the key is it's designed to reinforce the message so it actually sticks. If you're already listening or watching this, you're halfway there. Just go to ultimize.com and take the next step. According to the New York Times, Republicans did win the special election in Georgia yesterday to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene. But the real story is that every single county in that district shifted significantly towards Democrats, producing a stunning 25-point swing compared to the 2024 presidential results. At the same time in Wisconsin, a liberal Supreme Court candidate won by an even larger margin than in previous cycles, while Republicans saw erosion in one of their most reliable strongholds, Waukesha County. So let's start with the headline Republicans want you to focus on: we won the seat. Okay, yes, you held a deep red district that was already yours. That's like a guy saying, great news, I still own my house, while ignoring the fact that it just dropped 40% in value overnight. Because the real number here, the only number that matters is 25 points. Make no mistake about it. This is not normal. This is not interesting. This is not, let's monitor the trend. This is a political earthquake. And here's where communication matters. Bad communicators look at outcomes. Great communicators look at signals. The outcome is Republican wins. The signal is voters just moved dramatically away from you, even in places that are supposed to love you. And Wisconsin, that's not a coincidence. That's confirmation. Because when you're losing ground in places like Waukesha County, historically a Republican vote machine, it's like Coca-Cola finding out it's losing market share in Atlanta. You don't say, let's stay the course. You say, what the hell's going on here? Now, let me connect this to something bigger, because this is where most political analysis completely falls apart. People talk about midterms, turnout, candidate quality. That's all fine. But what voters are reacting to right now is something much simpler. They are reacting to chaos. Chaos in tone, chaos in leadership, chaos in communication. Using the F-word out of the White House in official communication. When your party brand starts to feel exhausting, unpredictable, and constantly on edge, voters don't need a white paper to explain why they're drifting away. They just feel it, and feelings drive behavior. Now, here's the part no one in politics wants to say out loud. Let's do a stress test. Let's say that 25-point shift in Georgia wasn't a one-off. Let's say even partially that kind of movement shows up across the country in November. What happens? The answer is not Republicans have a tough night. The answer is Republicans get wiped out. Let's start with the House. There are 435 seats in the House of Representatives. In a normal cycle, maybe 30 or 40 are competitive. A 25-point shift doesn't just flip competitive seats, it obliterates them. It flips every district Republicans won by under 25 points. Which is dozens and dozens and dozens of seats. And then it starts eating into seats that were considered safe in the past. You're not talking about Democrats picking up 10 seats. You're talking about perhaps as many as 80 seats. That puts Democrats somewhere around 290 seats in the House. That's not a majority. That's a takeover. That's the kind of margin where one party doesn't just win, they control everything. Now, to be clear, I'm not predicting the Democrats win 290 seats, but we do have to look at these signals and what they are suggesting as of right now. A lot can change in the world of politics. Now, let's look at the Senate. Harder to flip, yes, but in that kind of environment, states like Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Alaska suddenly all in play. You could easily see Democrats picking up 2, 5 seats. Pushing them to something like 55 seats. Again, not dominance, but clear control. Now, here's the key point, and this is where smart people lean in. You don't need a full 25-point shift for this to happen. If the Georgia result is just an early warning signal and the real national shift is, say, 5 to 8 points, that alone is enough to flip the House comfortably. And put multiple Senate seats in danger. So, the takeaway is not this will happen. No, no one really knows the future. The takeaway is this could happen. And the fact that it's even plausible should terrify anyone paying attention, at least in Republican circles, because political parties don't collapse overnight. They ignore warning signs. They celebrate hollow victories. They tell themselves comforting stories We still won the seat. The fundamentals are strong. Everybody still loves Trump. The base is energized. That's not analysis, that's therapy. And voters can feel the difference. Let me give you the simplest way to understand this. Off-cycle elections like Georgia, Wisconsin, they're not the main event. They are the whisper before the shout. That's the electorate quietly saying, we're not happy. We're paying attention and we're starting to move. If that whisper turns into a shout in November, it's not gonna be close. So no, this was not a good night for Republicans, even though they technically won a House seat. It was a warning. And the question is not whether they heard it. The question is whether they're going to ignore it right up until the moment it's too loud to ignore anymore. Now, a couple of caveats here. Midterm elections tend to have smaller turnout It tends to attract more educated voters. That certainly in the last decade or so has been a factor in favor of Democrats that will not help them in a general election. So if you are rooting for Democrats in this next election, don't pop the champagne— the corks on the champagne bottles just yet. It's going to be a long, hard slog. But right now it does appear that more and more voters are saying, look, we didn't like the Democrats, but we really, really don't like the Republicans. I'll be honest with you, most people don't have a learning problem, they have a consistency problem. They'll watch something, listen to something, get fired up for a day, and then life takes over and everything resets. That's exactly the gap I'm trying to fix with Ultimize. So if you're getting something out of this show right now, go to ultimize.com, U-L-T-A-M-I-Z-E, and get a free course. There's one on communication skills, one on building better habits. And the whole idea is to make this part of your daily routine, not a one-time thing. It's simple, it's free, and it actually works if you use it. Ultimize.com. New polling data showing that a huge percentage of New Yorkers are very optimistic about the future under Mondomini, the new mayor, the Social Democrat, the member of the Socialist of America political party. Why is this inter— the other factor that's in the news is Real estate values up in New York City. Now we were told again and again and again last year, leading up to this campaign, if Mondame wins, it's the end of New York City. Uh, there'll be murders on every street corner every hour. Every person making more than minimum wage will flee the city and move to Florida. And it will be absolute Armageddon. It will be an apocalyptic, nightmarish scenario in New York. That's what we were told again and again and again by Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, by Fox News Channel, by all the usual commentary pundits of right-wing persuasion. And truth be told, a lot of Democrats were kind of nervous too, because most Democratic strategists get a little nervous about the S-word, socialism, socialist. And yet here we are. Mamdani appears to be making a lot of friends. He's making friends in the business community. He's making friends in finance, in big media, everywhere. So what's the real lesson here? You've got to learn how to filter out nonsense if you want to have an accurate sense of what's going on in the world. And too many people are just triggered. You put this word out there, socialism, and a lot of people stop thinking. They only think of, well, this is Fidel Castro and we're all going to starve to death. And they don't realize many of the most successful capitalistic nations consider themselves socialistic as well. France, Scandinavia, They have socialistic elements to their society. They have strong socialism parties. They have socialistic leaders from time to time. Now, I'm not in favor of what most people think of as pure socialism. I was certainly skeptical of this guy running under the banner of Democratic Socialist and Socialist of America. I don't particularly think it helps the national brand of the Democratic Party. But that's not his problem. His problem is how does he make a city of 8 million people, New York City, work? And it's too soon to say, oh, well, he's great, he's gonna be the most successful mayor ever. I'm not saying that. But he's now registered his first 100 days. And by all accounts, he at least hasn't committed any huge blunders. He hasn't screwed up anything royally. He hasn't angered the great orange leader in Washington to the point where stormtroopers and ICE officials have shut down New York City, which was one of the initial concerns. So here's the thing that is frankly going to offend some of my friends in the Republican Party, as well as some of my friends in the Democratic Party and libertarians as well. There is such a thing as raw political talent, raw political skills that are completely separate from ideology. There's strong communication skills. There's simply being charming. There is the ability to get people who don't agree with you to like you and give you the benefit of the doubt. There's the ability to work hard, long hours. There's the ability to be creative. There's the ability to communicate daily on a regular basis what you're trying to do. Those are all skills completely devoid of any political ideology. I would argue Ronald Reagan, the former Republican president, had that. I would also argue that Bandhani has that as well. And here's the point where politically correct conservative commentators are afraid of offending their base. So they are afraid of saying anybody who has different politics could possibly have these other good apolitical skills. And that's when they're just lying to you. They're saying, because someone has a policy I don't like, like raising taxes on the wealthy, They therefore have to be an unmitigated disaster at every level. Now, truth be told, there have been successful mayors across America's history who were libertarians, who were very, very conservative Republicans, and did not have a conservative Republican political base or an electorate. And there have been successful socialist mayors. Now, you might not be a big fan of Senator Bernie Sanders, but by all accounts, he was a beloved mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Got along great with the business community, got along great with the local Rotary Club, got along well with people across the political spectrum. Now, I think that's essentially what's happening to Mondani. He has raw political talent. Last time I was in New York City, which truth be told has not, it has been since I think this is third day in office, New York City never looked better. The biggest problem I have with New York City is the hotels are so high. Well, let me tell you something, Detroit wishes it had a problem like that. Baghdad wishes it had a problem like that. Most countries, most cities in the world would love the fact that their biggest problem in life is that everybody in the world wants to come and visit because they think it's So interesting, fun, and cool. So that's the biggest problem. It's not really a problem. And you can't have it both ways. You can't say, well, Mondame didn't bring business rents down. And at the same time say, we're predicting he's so awful for business, every business will flee and every building will be abandoned. You can't have it both ways. And that is unfortunately what we are seeing. With the Mondani critics today. So I say let's continue watching this guy. If you are a politician or you like to follow politics, figure out what's he doing well that maybe you want to see other politicians who share your beliefs doing, because the guy continues to be a master communicator. He understands what, frankly, Donald Trump understands, which is In modern politics, it's not just about running the best 30-second ads 30 days before the election and then getting down to the serious business of governing behind closed doors. He's publicly communicating with voters on a daily basis, continuing to post social media, continuing to be widely accessible to the media everywhere, and that's what's making him, at least so far, highly successful as the mayor of New York City. Let me just throw this out there for a second. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you already have more information than most people ever act on. That's not the problem. The problem is nothing is reinforcing it tomorrow or the next day or the next day. That's why I built Ultimize, to give you something you can use repeatedly, not just hear once and forget. So if this is resonating at all, just go to ultimize.com, grab the free course, communication skills, habit building, whichever one you want, and actually start putting this stuff into practice. It's free, no downside. Just go to ultimize.com.