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Visit progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. Marcus Limonis is in the studio. Marcus, great to see you again.
It's been two hours. I know. I know. And are you going to the U.S. Open?
Is that why you're wearing the tie? I'm wearing my yellow tie. You know, I put it on this morning. My wife said it looked ridiculous. I like it.
Because it's not spring. I said it's tennis week in New York. Absolutely. It's the only good thing happening in New York right now, other than the people. This election is not going to make me feel so good about my tie.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right, absolutely.
So first off, where's the economy at from your perspective, from the people you meet and from the businesses you're in? Yeah, I actually think the economy is okay. I mean, there's obviously a lot of noise around tariffs. People are concerned. This latest move on Friday by Trump to address the investigation of furniture is going to put Think a few businesses in a bit of a so there was a discussion on Friday.
President Trump talked about investigating the importing of furniture from around the globe. And I think what he's really looking for is: have people been trying to circumvent the tariff process? Have they been trying to take stuff to Canada, around the Horn, around the water, and making sure that there is a very specific process around furniture? The idea is in Michigan, a lot of commercial furniture is made. Grand Rapids, you go up, you see Steelcase, Kimball.
You go into North Carolina, that's where Hickory is, all the furniture that's built there. I know the idea is that we want to build more here.
Okay, Brian, you and I have talked about it. You understand that takes time. You can't just pop up a factory tomorrow and start making furniture. We don't have the manufacturing capacity to do it. But I do agree with President Trump that any company.
That is circumventing. Any process around the tariffs needs to be investigated and there needs to be harsh consequences for it. I mean, remember the USMT, the US-Mexico trade agreement. we watch China start building factories in Mexico and saying, okay, these are Mexican companies. They're not.
They're Chinese companies. I think we want to look for those loopholes. And what I am concerned about is what does it ultimately do to the consumer? The consumer right now seems to be fine. Seems to be fine.
Because I think a lot of the manufacturers are kind of eating a lot of the retailers are eating the costs. I think the manufacturers are eating some of the cost, the distributors are eating some of the cost, and candidly, the consumer is absorbing some of the cost. But it doesn't seem to be breaking anybody yet. Couple of things. If uh President Trump can get the price of everyday goods down.
We haven't really seen that in the supermarket. Inflation is just over 2%, 2.5%. But the cost of everyday goods has not come down. How do you do that?
Well, I think the average person on the street thinks inflation and they think COVID. And COVID was a function of the supply and demand curve breaking, right? People were there's free money everywhere. People were consuming more than could be produced. In this particular case, inflation is transitory.
There's a reset of the price. It isn't that demand is outpacing supply, and that's what's driving up the price. Tariffs, other costs that are out there are driving up the price, and consumers seem to be able to be settling into that a little bit more. How do you drop general prices? I'm not sure you can.
There's not many moments in history where prices go back. Right. I don't see them go backwards. Because we had that 9% push two and a half, three years ago. You went ahead, and one of the companies that you reinvigorated was Bed Bath and Beyond.
You made a decision last week. I looked at the math. It doesn't pay for us to go into California or not. Gavin Newsom is trying to be president. He took that personal and he mocked the fact that Bed Bath and Beyond anymore.
It's not relevant anymore. You know, it's funny. What was that exchange like? You know, I put out a statement, I think it was last Tuesday morning, talking about how difficult it is to do business in California. And it was purely on the basis of if you go into California to rent a space, it's expensive.
If you have to hire people, it's expensive. If you have to pay all these tort fees, it's expensive. And the cost, the yield for doing business in California isn't good. Minimum wage, too? It's not a labor issue.
A lot of people came after me and said, you don't want to pay people the right amount of money. I have no problem paying people more than they're worth. No problem. It's all the other layers of expenses that are out there. Instead of Gavin Newsom, Governor Newsom, coming out and saying, hey, I don't agree with your position.
I think you're wrong about these five things. I'd love to have a discussion with you and other business leaders. His comment was. In fact, it came out of his press room first. Let us know when Bed Bath and Beyond is relevant again.
I understand you've opened one store. Call us when you open two. He then comes back and says things like: I created this new red hat. It says Newsome was right about everything. Bed Bath and Beyond called me and asked me if they could sell it.
I said, absolutely not. It's the amount of time. And so I'm on these text chains with chairmans and CEOs of big major technology companies in California saying, Marcus, we love you, we like him. There was a text change set up between all three of us. I said, listen, I'd be happy to talk about it.
Governor, I'd be happy to sit down and talk about what the issues are. No response. No response. And so I'm not sure. I'm sure he's a pleasant and delightful human being.
You do? I'm sure he is. Sure. I have to believe the best in everybody. But from a philosophical standpoint, I'm not sure what game he's playing right now.
Right. To me, I would be just mad. If I'm a public official, I'm doing a service. My goal is to bring as much industry as possible to the people that put me in office. I couldn't care less whether Gavin Newsom liked me or not.
If I'm the governor, I'm calling up Marcus Limonis and I'm saying, how do I work this out? Number one, I wouldn't start with personal insults, but Trump has done that too. But he says when you come to see him, I'll give you the best example to contrast the two. He didn't like the CEO of, I think it was Intel. He said he's got too many hooks to the Chinese.
So this guy calls up and says, Can I come see you? He said, Of course. They met? And now it looks like the government owns a piece of Intel. Go ahead, let's work it out face to face.
That seems to be the way you roll. Listen, I got frustrated and I had to hold everything back from getting really hyperbolic with him. What I realize is I'm setting an example for other business leaders and other young folks who are looking at that saying, you can disagree about a topic. I did, I did. But you can disagree about a topic.
But at the end of the day, if you have the fourth largest economy in the world, as he's told me nine times and told everybody else, why not try to have the third largest economy? Why not try to figure out a way to generate more from the marketplace as opposed to just raising taxes and generating? What? I've even a better suggestion. If you have the fourth largest economy, maybe you could try to get it out of the red and move it to the black.
Why are you in deficit, yet you have the highest taxes in the country? Maybe we could work on the math problem together. Or maybe I'm going to get one of the most successful business people in the country to give me some advice and tell me what other states are doing. I wrote him a whole dissertation about the nine steps to actually solve this problem in California. I posted it.
Everybody else reposted it. His office saw it. He just doesn't want to engage. And I'm not quite sure. And I said to him, if you have aspirations of being more than the governor, This is the moment where you can show people that you can rise above the silliness.
I don't have time to talk about selling hats on my own. Neither do I.
So, how do you feel about this? I know Republicans are not happy with it, like Rand Paul, but the President of the United States said to Intel. And I think Nvidia I think we should own a piece of this. We are subsidizing Intel. We're incentivizing you to come back with your production.
Shouldn't the American people benefit from this? Guys like Bernie Sanders love this. Mark we know Secretary Luttnick loves this. At least he says he does his Commerce Secretary. Marcus, how do you feel about it?
Why does Bernie Sanders love it? He says the American people should benefit from the public investment in a private company. I think that both sides of the aisle have probably created a little bit of misinformation. It isn't like on Friday Donald Trump decided to shake hands with Intel and write a check. There was money that was already deployed inside of Intel.
It's already deployed. By the previous administration. That's right. It's not new money. It's not new money.
It's money that's already deployed. And the goal behind our government is: once something is done, how do you maximize the outcome? And I think the way they're looking at it is if we can drive chip making here in the US and we can drive advancement at Intel, rather than taking my loan back if I can Two exit, three exit, four exit. Why wouldn't I do that? I understand that people don't want, on both sides of the aisle, people don't want government to be involved in private business.
but the money was already there. It's not a new transaction. On the other side, you talk about NVIDIA and Trump saying, Hey, I want to get a little vague for everything you sell into China. For the country, not for him. That's right.
People are upset about that. Listen, if you want to pay me a fee to go do business somewhere else, business that you're going to do anyway, and it's going to build the value of the company, and the American public is going to make money from that, I don't understand what the problem is. People are making this correlation that we're acting like China with the government owning businesses. Listen, during COVID, didn't we put a lot of money in the big three in the autos? Absolutely.
Did we get all our money back? How about two thousand eight? Did we get all our money back? No.
Okay. A couple of things. If I'm competing with Intel. You have a company and you're making chips, and all of a sudden the government's invested in Intel. How do we feel about that?
Now, is the government going to be picking winners and losers? Is there going to be certain things, especially something as high tech and really as national security oriented? I think that's probably the real issue that has merit. Is the government picking winners and losers? And any time you have a dog in the fight, Your job is to pick the winners.
Your job is to give that business advancement. If you and I bought 10% of whatever company it was, we're going to promote it, we're going to adorn it, we're going to tell other people about it, we're going to want that business to win because we have a vested interest in it. I don't know why that's a bad thing. Right. Okay.
So, do we have another segment? We do.
Okay, great.
So, when we come back, I want to talk about your show tonight. All right. And I also want to get your take on the deficit. I think all this is for one reason. As the tariffs come in and the pieces of places like Intel come in, the President is laser focused on the deficit.
I know Scott Besant is, and I'm wondering if this could be a bigger play than that. To try to reverse the $37 trillion and stop it from growing, which it did, I understand, last month. Because the interest rate on that debt is taking away all our discretionary spending. Does Marcus Limonis feel that way? His show is going to be on tonight on FBN at 8 o'clock.
It's called The Fixer, Don't Move. From his mouth to your ears, it's Brian Kilmead. Marcus Limonis is here. He's host of the Pixar. He just bought Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
Executive Chairman there. And Marcus, I'm excited that you're going to be on FBN tonight. Yeah, I'll meet you. It's a different kind of episode. You know, we've had, we aired them all on the network, and now we're airing them on Fox Business.
This is, I think, the fifth episode. Tonight's a good example. Kind of like the relationship with Kevin Newsome. Not every relationship's going to work out. And I think the viewer is going to be really stunned to see that happen.
Really stunned.
So, we do have a clip, Allison. Is it from this episode?
Okay, great.
Let's listen.
So when people come in, it's BYOB at our location. Other locations, if we do get to open those, we'll be able to have a liquor license provided it's, you know, Hoboken is a BYOB town because of the liquor license laws. But why did you pick a location that you couldn't get a liquor license if that was your concept? We wouldn't want to have the liquor license be the limiting factor to growth. But isn't Tipsy in your name?
Yeah. But that's why they need BYOB? We're B-Y-O-K. Cool. That was cool, which is like, that's the stupidest thing I ever did.
It accelerated from there, and I ended up, you have to watch it, but I ended up. having a blowout with them about five minutes later. And what happens is, can you just tell everyone because you're not an actor? But you have a terrible actor. In fact, I tried to do a movie and it was terrible.
It's really it's really uh uh it's almost like following over my shoulder as I go into a business to try to help them figure out what's right and what's wrong. I do it with my own money. I invest or I don't invest. In this particular case, I don't invest. And over the years, I've done it a lot.
And the goal is really to have people understand the do's and don'ts of business. Right. But it's really understanding.
So, you want the audience watching to pick stuff up? I want them to play along. I want them to say, like on social, we're out there texting, and people say, don't do it, invest, don't invest. I want people to play along, but I want young kids to learn. The art of the handshake, the art of the deal, how to be honorable, how to treat people with respect, what not to do, what to do.
I don't want to give too much out of the episode, but what did you go in hoping to do a deal, or did you say, I'm taking this? I'm taking this and I'm going to, I see potential here. When I pick them specifically from tonight. I was going in to teach them and the viewer a lesson. I didn't actually think I would ever do a deal.
I went in to teach them a lesson about the right attitude and the right mindset, and they didn't have it. Who taught you the fundamentals? Where did you learn the fundamentals? I learned the fundamentals on Southwest A Street in Lejeune. It's Little Havana in Miami.
And that's the hard knocks. My family had a car business in the middle of Little Havana in the 1990s. And one day, well, I'll share a couple stories with you, but people used to come in from around the world. And I remember being there as a little kid and seeing men show up. Uh from South America with uh uh suitcases full of cash.
Suitcases. Like a million dollars of cash to buy 10 suburbans, 12 suburbans, 20 suburbans. And so I learned a little bit about that. I also watched my dad negotiate with the city of Miami and how the backroom deals were done. My dad passed away now, and I saw him bribe people, and I saw how government worked, and I saw it all.
So when I came out, I was like, there's a way to do business, and then I'm going to do it the opposite of how my dad did it. But you have the street smart gene. I'm more of a street smarts person than I am a book smarts person. What did you learn in school? I think I was a Political science major at Marquette.
So you didn't do much business. I had terrible grades.
So a lot of this stuff is on instinct and what you learned as a kid. It's time, I'm young, so I started business when I was 25. I worked my first public company. I was 27. Leah Acoca hired me as the CEO of a public company.
Wow. The company was going out of business. I learned how to wind it down. And that company was? It was an RV business.
It doesn't exist anymore. Holiday RV superstores.
So I've learned a lot. And you picked a, so you have this, you literally have learned on the street. I'm a pretty scrappy guy. That's how people would describe me. I could put on a tie and a suit.
This is the only time I ever dressed like this. Did you ever feel compelled to get the PhD, being that you've had that type of success? Did you want the paperwork to back in? No, because business is too much of a drug for me. I love it.
It's just the way I consume it. I'd have to stop and go to school.
So I asked Phil Knight, I go, I read your book. It must have been so stressful every month not being able to make payroll and having to play to the bank. And he said, Brian. I loved every second of it. I go, you didn't know if you were going to survive.
You didn't know if the sneakers were going to be. 2008 and 2009, same thing for me. I was in the RV business. I thought I was going to go out of business. Car business and the housing market combined.
Awful. But it's the stress that you thrive on because you feel you can solve it. That's what I do. I'm a problem. I'm a fixer.
There you go. We have the shell on Fox. Check it out. It's on Fox Nation and Fox Business. It's called The Fixer.
Marcus Kimonis, thanks so much. Hopefully, you'll continue to come by. You got it, buddy. It's Will Kane Country. Watch it live at noon Eastern Monday through Thursday at FoxNews.com or on the Fox News YouTube channel.
And don't miss the show. Listen and follow the podcast five days a week at FoxnewsPodcasts.com or wherever you download your favorite podcasts.
