After a big drop in the stock market, is the tech bubble about to burst? And what does that mean for the Trump administration, affordability, and the free markets? First, there s still time to win my personal Dailywire lifetime membership!
00:00:44.000As of this morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures, those were also tumbling.
00:00:48.000And the question is: what the hell is going on?
00:00:49.000And it may be that many people are beginning to realize that a lot of these big tech companies, which are investing in each other, that they are betting on a payoff from AI that may not actually accrue to those companies.
00:01:00.000So, for example, Oracle has become a heavy investor in OpenAI, which is the chat GPT company.
00:01:07.000OpenAI is not publicly traded, but you have a bunch of publicly traded companies that are basically doing circular cash deals with OpenAI.
00:01:14.000And so, if you're investing in Oracle, you are partially investing in, for example, OpenAI.
00:01:19.000Or if you are investing in NVIDIA, you are partially investing in OpenAI.
00:01:23.000A lot of money is being passed between all of these companies at the top end of the market because some provide services to other members of that particular crew.
00:01:32.000Well, the problem is: is the gain from AI going to accrue to OpenAI?
00:01:58.000Not just because Perplexity is one of our sponsors via Comet, but also because if I'm doing research, it is easier to get my research started by asking a sophisticated question of Comet, for example, and then to do my secondary research based off of that answer than it is to simply compile 10 different sources and then have to synthesize all of those sources just to answer a relatively simple question.
00:02:32.000And a lot of investors are beginning to ask that particular question.
00:02:35.000According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. stocks posted their worst day in the month, unwinding a rally that began with news of a deal to end the federal government's longest closure.
00:02:42.000Declines were broad, with tech stocks sliding alongside the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which lost almost 800 points.
00:02:49.000Shares of smaller companies dropped, with the Russell 2000 index losing 2.8%.
00:02:52.000Bitcoin also extended its recent fall, slipping back below $100,000 to its lowest 4 p.m. level since May.
00:03:00.000President Trump signed, of course, that spending legislation late on Wednesday, but investors, according to the Wall Street Journal, are now worried the incoming torrent of data could swing markets and upend bets on a December interest rate cut they'd once taken for granted.
00:03:14.000And actually, if you check with our sponsor, Calci, right now, on the odds that there will, in fact, be a rate cut, those odds have been plummeting all week long.
00:03:36.000In fact, I'm highly skeptical the Fed is going to cut rates given the current state of the economy because inflation has not been put to bed because liquidity actually is not all that hard to get for businesses right now.
00:03:48.000And because inflating the economy by lowering those interest rates again and pumping more money into the economy could be a mistake.
00:04:19.000If what you're worried about is whether there's going to be incrementally lower interest rates for businesses to artificially spice things up in terms of liquidity, to inject more money into the economy, and that's what you're waiting on, that does not bode well.
00:04:33.000It does not mean that the fundamentals seem particularly strong to me.
00:04:38.000Well, again, because so much of what is happening at the top end of the market and the vast majority of the gains in the stock market are located in the Magnificent 7, in those top seven companies.
00:04:48.000The rest of the stock market over the past couple of years has been essentially flat, maybe slight increase.
00:04:53.000The top end of the market has exploded.
00:04:55.000That's what's driven the Dow Jones industrial average up to 48,000.
00:05:00.000But what exactly is happening at the top end of the market?
00:05:02.000So back in October, there's a piece from the New York Times that explained how much money is passing hands between companies like, for example, OpenAI and companies like NVIDIA.
00:05:13.000According to the New York Times, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, says technological revolutions are driven by more than technology.
00:05:20.000They're driven by new ways of paying for them.
00:05:22.000He recently said there is always a lot of focus on technological innovation.
00:05:26.000What really drives a lot of progress is when people also figure out how to innovate on the financial model.
00:05:33.000I mean, new financial tools do unlock new capacities for liquidity.
00:05:37.000It is also true that new financial tools sometimes are very risky and dangerous.
00:05:43.000Over the last several years, as the New York Times points out, Mr. Altman's company has found unusual and creative ways of paying for the computing power needed to fuel its ambitions.
00:05:52.000Many of the deals OpenAI has struck with chipmakers, cloud computing companies, and others are strangely circular.
00:05:57.000OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services.
00:06:06.000So, for example, from 2019 through 2023, Microsoft was OpenAI's primary investor.
00:06:13.000Microsoft pumped more than $13 billion into the startup, and then OpenAI funneled most of those billions back into Microsoft, buying cloud computing power needed to fuel the development of new AI technologies.
00:06:26.000By the summer of last year, OpenAI could not get all the computing power they wanted from Microsoft, so they started signing cloud computing contracts with other companies, including Oracle and little-known startups with names like Core Weave.
00:06:36.000Across three different deals signed this year, OpenAI agreed to pay Core Weave, a company that builds AI data centers, more than $22 billion for computing power.
00:06:45.000As part of these agreements, OpenAI receives $350 million in Core Weave stock, which could ultimately help pay for this computing power.
00:06:54.000OpenAI struggled to get additional investment from Microsoft, so instead it went to SoftBank, which then lent it $40 billion.
00:07:02.000At the same time, OpenAI has been working with various companies to build its own computing data centers rather than relying on cloud computing deals.
00:07:10.000So the company is raising $100 billion to help OpenAI build data centers in Texas and Ohio.
00:07:15.000Oracle has agreed to spend $300 billion building new data centers for OpenAI in Texas, New Mexico, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
00:07:23.000OpenAI will then pay Oracle roughly the same amount to use these computing facilities over the next several years.
00:07:30.000So, again, there's a lot of circular money movement right here.
00:07:35.000Last month, NVIDIA announced it intends to invest $100 billion in OpenAI over the next several years, which will help OpenAI pay for its new data centers.
00:07:43.000And then OpenAI will use that money to buy chips from NVIDIA.
00:07:48.000So again, there's nothing particularly corrupt about all of this, but it's everybody betting on the same horses over and over and over and over.
00:07:55.000If you keep betting on the same horses over and over and over, and those horses don't come in, things get ugly.
00:08:00.000What happens if OpenAI does not deliver the gains it has promised everybody?
00:08:03.000Well, it's not going to be able to pay for all of those bills.
00:08:05.000It's not going to be able to pay Oracle or NVIDIA or any of the other companies that bet on it.
00:08:11.000In fact, according to Baron's, Oracle stock has given back all the gains from the cloud computing group NVIDIA Moment as investors grow increasingly cautious over investments linked to the AI boom and shares just keep falling.
00:08:22.000When Oracle reported earnings in September, the results included a massive revenue forecast.
00:08:27.000That forecast has become a source of consternation due to the source of that revenue, OpenAI, which plans to spend $1.4 trillion building and accessing AI data centers over the next decade.
00:08:37.000In fact, Oracle is also trading at least in part as a proxy for OpenAI.
00:08:41.000Remember, OpenAI is a private company.
00:08:43.000It means you and I, we can't buy stock in OpenAI.
00:08:47.000The only companies that are buying stock from OpenAI are making private deals for OpenAI.
00:08:53.000Okay, but it is not publicly traded, so we don't know its actual real market valuation at this point.
00:09:00.000And again, are the gains to OpenAI, the profits to OpenAI going to accrue to a multiple of seven or 10 or 15 from where they currently are, their earnings?
00:09:09.000That would just be to pay their bills and keep the lights on.
00:09:11.000And that would have to happen pretty fast.
00:09:15.000One of its biggest commitments is a reported $300 billion agreement to buy computing power for Oracle.
00:09:20.000That deal represented about 65% of its so-called RPO forecast that sent the stock soaring in early September.
00:09:29.000Oracle tapped the corporate bond market for an $18 billion debt sale that triggered a wave of new issues from tech giants like Meta.
00:09:36.000Private credit markets wobbled following a spate of auto-related bankruptcies and broader market liquidity dried up.
00:09:41.000So again, one of the reasons why they're going to need market liquidity is to make these sorts of deals.
00:09:47.000So again, optimism around AI eventually, it could peter out, given the fact that earnings, it's going to take a while for those earnings to actually accrue.
00:09:56.000And stock traders, you know, unless the stock keeps going up, caution is warranted.
00:10:01.000And so people are starting to divest a little bit from the top of the market.
00:10:05.000That's why you're seeing the market start to drop a little bit right now.
00:10:09.000And you could see that turn into a wave if, for example, OpenAI ever reports any bad news.
00:10:14.000Or if one of these other major AI companies starts to report decreased profit share.
00:10:21.000Or people start to think, generally speaking, that it'll take longer for AI to filter into every aspect of the market and then down to the original companies than they thought it would.
00:10:30.000There's some early indicators that's happening, by the way.
00:10:33.000Alrighty, coming up, more economic reports, some little bit disquieting.
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00:12:11.000Travis Kelsey feels like he's a little on the way in.
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00:13:06.000According to CNBC, professional investors have been using the market's record-setting run as an opportunity to take profits.
00:13:12.000Retail investors have been doing much of the heavy lifting in the latest run of the three-year-old bull market.
00:13:17.000Hedge funds and other institutional clients have been the biggest net sellers of single stocks and exchange-traded funds this year, unloading more than $67 billion worth of equities in 2025.
00:13:26.000Now, if institutional investors are being replaced by retail investors, institutional investors are significantly more sophisticated than retail investors, just generally speaking.
00:13:37.000Hedge fund managers are doing this for a living.
00:13:39.000They're doing this with large amounts of money.
00:13:41.000They're doing this with 401ks and trust funds.
00:13:44.000They're doing this with gigantic pension funds.
00:13:48.000So if in fact they are pulling out of the market and you are buying stock from a hedge fund, you might want to think about who's more sophisticated, you or the hedge fund.
00:13:58.000Retail investors might be pushing up the market, but the reality is that the people who are the sophisticated investors are saying, I'm going to get out.
00:14:06.000Well, the getting is good, at least at the top end of the market.
00:14:09.000Now, again, I'm not saying that a stock market crash is imminent.
00:14:12.000I'm saying that there is a bubble, it seems to me, in a lot of areas.
00:14:19.000And when you have a market that is this frothy, the possibility of bubbles bursting is pretty robust.
00:14:25.000That doesn't mean recession or depression, but it does mean the possibility of stagnation.
00:14:29.000Since, again, so much economic growth right now is predicated on tech.
00:14:35.000According to the CNBC, retail investors have been the market's backbone, the most consistent dip buyers since 2020, a behavior forged during the pandemic rebound, the Wall Street Investment Bank said.
00:14:45.000That strategy has paid off handsomely as the SP 500 reached multiple all-time highs this year.
00:14:52.000Part of the inflationary market is people actually getting more dollars from the federal government.
00:14:57.000One of the reasons why there's been a push by many members of the government for the Federal Reserve to lower those interest rates is because they are hoping retail investors will take that money and then sink it back into the stock market.
00:15:09.000That tension will be in focus this week as scores of high-profile institutional investors gather at CNBC's Delivering Alpha Investor Summit on Thursday in New York City, offering the world a chance to hear how some of the industry's most influential voices are navigating this volatile market.
00:15:24.000Again, I would be wary, and frankly, I am wary.
00:15:28.000Meanwhile, other signs that things may be starting to slow.
00:15:33.000Foreclosures are once again on the rise in the United States.
00:15:36.000New data from ATTOM shows more homeowners falling behind on their mortgages amid job losses and soaring living costs, according to the Daily Mail.
00:15:43.000In October alone, there were 36,766 foreclosure filings, the first step up in the process when a lender warns a borrower they're in default.
00:15:51.000That's up 3% from September and 19% from a year ago.
00:15:56.000Today's homeowners have safer loans, and the real estate values haven't dropped so dramatically.
00:16:01.000So, if a bank has to foreclose, it's not like it's going to completely take the legs out from under the bank the way that it did during the crash of 2008.
00:16:09.000But as those foreclosure rates go up, a couple things happen: one is good and one is bad.
00:16:14.000The good thing that's happening is that that is the additional supply that you need in the market.
00:16:18.000So, if you're worried about not being able to afford a house, it turns out that when people can't afford their current houses and they get out and the bank has to seize that house and then resell it, the price are going to go down.
00:16:29.000But it is also a sign that people can't afford things right now.
00:16:32.000Both those things are true at the same exact time.
00:16:34.000Meanwhile, companies are cutting jobs.
00:16:37.000I mean, there's no question this is happening.
00:16:38.000Verizon is planning to cut roughly 15,000 jobs.
00:16:42.000The cuts are the largest ever for the carrier, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:16:45.000They're set to take place in the next week.
00:16:47.000The majority of the reduction is expected to be made through layoffs.
00:16:51.000Verizon is also going to transition its stores into franchise operations, which is going to shift employees off its own payroll.
00:17:00.000Now, they've lost a lot of phone subscribers.
00:17:03.000There's a lot of competition in this area for sure.
00:17:06.000But again, one of the things that we are seeing here is big companies that are running into headwinds, clearly.
00:17:14.000Okay, so if affordability is a problem, if we are worried about the stock market, if we're concerned that Americans are going to suffer some significant temporary job dislocation as AI starts to filter into the market, if we're doing what is the solution to all of that now, there are two solutions that are basically being offered.
00:17:34.000One used to be called left-wing and one used to be called right-wing, but we don't actually have a left and a right anymore since pretty much all economic discussions now cross-cut.
00:17:43.000There are people who are voting Republican who agree with Elizabeth Warren on economics.
00:17:47.000I can't say there are a lot of people who are voting Democrat who agree with me on economics, but you know, that is what it is.
00:17:56.000Their proposal is big government interventionism, ban things, regulate things, force sales, take over businesses, tax the hell out of people.
00:18:05.000More government involvement supposedly will solve affordability.
00:18:08.000It will supposedly create more broad-based prosperity, take money away from the top end of the market, supposedly get rid of the market cap of Oracle or Meta, and suddenly people will become richer.
00:19:31.000So one of your choices is momdaniism, where you yell about how things are unfair, and then you try to tax the hell out of people, and then they leave your jurisdiction, and then you tax the hell out of the second richest people, and then they leave your jurisdiction.
00:19:44.000And then the services you're providing don't actually stack up because it turns out that if nobody has an interest in protecting private property, then actually the places they live get worse.
00:19:54.000This is what happened with supposed affordable housing in, for example, St. Louis when the government tried this in the 60s.
00:20:01.000They tried to build these gigantic affordable housing complexes, government-owned, and people treated them like trash because they felt no actual responsibility for a thing they didn't own.
00:20:10.000Nonetheless, this is what Democrats are pushing.
00:20:12.000This would be the AOC wing of the Democratic Party.
00:20:14.000So AOC and parts of the Democratic Party that are growing believe that sort of traditional Democratic Party politics are over, that it's time to basically shut everything down, shut everything down in the name of vast government redistributionism.
00:20:31.000Especially with this administration, my concern is that the lesson that they're learning is that Democrats are elite and that next time we just need to hurt working people and working Americans more to get them to fold.
00:20:42.000And I don't want them to learn that lesson.
00:20:44.000And I want us to be a party that says we're going to get results for people.
00:20:48.000Okay, the AOC part of the Democratic Party is on the ascent.
00:20:53.000Yesterday, Zaran Mamdani, the self-stated socialist, held a secretive meeting, according to the New York Post, with far-left U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday, a sit-down that was captured by an eagle-eyed New Yorker whose office is across from the mayor-elect headquarters.
00:21:07.000She then tweeted out, tax the rich, billionaire tears not pictured, which, I mean, pathetic, truly pathetic.
00:21:16.000Tax the rich, billionaires, not, billionaire tiers not pictured.
00:21:20.000Okay, the people who are paying all the bills in New York City are the rich people.
00:21:24.000That is just true by the tax receipts in New York City.
00:21:29.000There are a lot of people in New York who pay taxes.
00:21:31.000The people who are paying net taxes, meaning taxes minus the benefits received from the government, those people are at the top of the income spectrum.
00:21:53.000And then everybody gets poorer because nobody has money to invest in innovation, for example.
00:21:57.000And I understand all the dyspepsia about innovation.
00:21:59.000I just talked about some of the dyspepsia in the middle of a bubble.
00:22:04.000Joseph Schumpeter, the famous economist, talked about creative destruction.
00:22:07.000He talked about the idea that when you have markets, free markets tend to make bad things in the market or less efficient things in the market obsolete, and that destroys them.
00:22:17.000And in the short term, that looks bad, but it's creative because what grows out of that is something better.
00:22:22.000That if you want an automobile-based economy, it will destroy the wheel rights, the people who make wheels for wagons.
00:22:28.000Those people will no longer actually have a job, but then they will find new jobs.
00:22:33.000And so in the moment, it'll look really bad.
00:22:43.000I think that AI will end up being a supplement in the way that virtually all other technologies are supplements to your jobs.
00:22:48.000There are certain jobs that will probably get automated out of existence where AI will do them.
00:22:53.000Ironically, those will likely be the very white-collar jobs that the media was touting about 15 years ago when members of the media were telling welders to code.
00:23:02.000Well, now it seems much more likely that coders are going to have to learn to weld because AI is actually quite good at the things that the coders taught the AI to do, like coding.
00:23:12.000So it'll be fascinating to see which ways the job market moves.
00:23:15.000In fact, the job market is likely to move more toward a blue collar than it is to move toward sort of middle management white collar.
00:23:28.000Again, not to pretend there are no downsides to AI, particularly in the immediate term, but the sort of Luddite philosophy that if you take a technology out to a field and beat it to death with a hammer, that somehow you're going to be able to prevent the future from happening, unlikely.
00:23:42.000Other countries like China will just take an advantage on you and then they will undercut your entire market and they will gain global market share and they will gain more geopolitical power and you will have worse products for a higher price working a worse job.
00:23:55.000That is the likely outcome of worse tech because historically that's the outcome of worst tech.
00:24:00.000Coming up, we'll get into what should the strategy be with regard to affordability and the housing market and all the rest.
00:24:06.000But first, look, I'm on the road constantly covering news stories, political events, you name it. between the flights and the hotel room.
00:24:11.000Sometimes getting that proper nutritional meal is the first thing that goes out the window.
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00:26:19.000It costs a lot of money to buy a home.
00:26:22.000There's a big argument online yesterday about in 1950, a man and his wife and his two kids, he could work a job and he could own a home and you can't do that today.
00:26:30.000And people were pointing out that the homes in 1950 kind of sucked.
00:27:12.000That is not, in fact, a fundamental betrayal of the American contract.
00:27:16.000Okay, you deciding that you wish to leave home to go to college, that you wish to leave college to go to a different city for a job.
00:27:25.000And people have been doing this for literally all of human history and all of American history.
00:27:30.000Now, that doesn't, that's a different question from what can we do on a broad national or local scale in order to make things more affordable.
00:27:35.000New York is never going to be as affordable as Des Moines, Iowa.
00:27:52.000And yes, there are things you can do to bring down costs somewhat significantly, but it's never going to be the price of Iowa to live in New York.
00:28:00.000That's just not the way that it works.
00:29:13.000The price of energy has gone way down.
00:29:15.000The price of gasoline has gone way down.
00:29:17.000And as we know, when the price of energy goes down, that starts to filter out into the entire economy, but that also takes a little bit of time.
00:29:32.000It's just not likely to be convincing to the American people.
00:29:34.000So what strategies can actually be tried?
00:29:35.000Well, one strategy is to yell at the Fed.
00:29:38.000The administration has tried this also, yelling at the Fed, telling them they need to lower those interest rates more to therefore inject more liquidity into the economy, and that this somehow won't be inflationary.
00:30:00.000You can go view a YouTube video that I did a few years back, searching on YouTube, where I explain exactly what the Federal Reserve does in order to inject liquidity into the economy and how it relates to inflation.
00:30:10.000Peter Navarro, who of course is a tariff hawk, he loves tariffs, big on tariffs.
00:30:16.000He's blaming Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve for lack of growth.
00:30:21.000I think that Jay Powell is almost purposely being an obstructionist to this administration.
00:31:08.000Ironically, the Trump administration is now tacitly acknowledging that the tariff regime that they put in place actually does damage Americans at, for example, the supermarket.
00:31:16.000So yesterday, the Trump administration said import taxes on coffee and bananas will be lowered as part of trade deals with four Latin American countries.
00:31:25.000The agreements with Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Ecuador come as President Trump faces scrutiny over his handling of the economy and concerns about affordability.
00:31:34.000As part of an initial framework, a reciprocal tariff of 10% will stay on goods from Guatemala, Argentina, and El Salvador, as will a 15% tax on imports from Ecuador into the U.S.
00:31:43.000But the deals will exempt products that cannot be produced in the United States in sufficient quantities, like coffee.
00:31:50.000The U.S.-Argentina deal also addresses beef producers' access to foreign markets.
00:31:54.000So I'm just going to point out right now that this is a tacit admission that tariffs increase prices on American consumers.
00:32:02.000If you say, I want the prices to go down on bananas and thus I have removed the tariffs on bananas, what does that mean?
00:32:09.000It means that, yes, by restricting supply through tariffs to bananas, the prices of bananas go up.
00:32:14.000This is true for all other products as well.
00:32:17.000When you put tariffs on products, the prices tend to go up because, of course, you're putting an artificial restriction on the supply of the product.
00:32:25.000As we discussed yesterday and will continue to discuss, the laws of supply and demand are very basic.
00:32:30.000If the demand remains stable and the supply goes down, the prices go up.
00:32:34.000Again, if there are fewer bananas and the same number of people to buy those bananas and more people competing to buy those bananas, the price goes up.
00:32:41.000So the president acknowledging that coffee is too expensive and bananas are too expensive, and thus perhaps we should lower the tariffs on coffee and bananas.
00:32:48.000What if we took that logic and extended over a wide variety of other products?
00:32:54.000That might seem like a thing worth doing.
00:32:57.000And one of the things worth pointing out is that when the president says he's keeping blanket tariffs on countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Argentina, and then he says he's going to carve out things like bananas and coffee, that is a pretty giant carve out.
00:33:09.000In fact, I asked our sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity, what are the top products exported to the United States by Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Argentina?
00:33:20.000The top exports from Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Argentina to the United States consist mainly of agricultural products, textiles, and primary commodities, with most recent percentages reflecting their significance in trade for 2024 to 2025.
00:33:33.000Guatemala, 22.9% of their export market to the United States is bananas.
00:33:39.000Another 11% is knit sweaters, and 9% is coffee.
00:33:43.000Other products include melons, papayas, and apparel.
00:34:28.000So, you know, when I look at these percentages, I think these are pretty big carve-outs, number one.
00:34:31.000And number two, this is in fact a tacit admission.
00:34:34.000Of course, of course, because basic economics is correct, that if you wish to lower prices, perhaps you should remove trade barriers on the countries that are going to supply you cheaper and better products.
00:34:44.000By the way, it is worth noting that there is a reason why competitors try to cut off foreign markets for their competitors.
00:34:55.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is now joining Microsoft in supporting legislation that threatens to further limit NVIDIA's ability to export to China.
00:35:03.000The moves by Microsoft and Amazon to work against a company they are deeply intertwined with highlights the fierce nature of the AI race.
00:35:09.000The companies are all jockeying for favorable policy to stay ahead of competitors.
00:35:13.000NVIDIA is fighting for access to the Chinese market despite security concerns.
00:35:18.000Microsoft came out publicly in favor of legislation in order to stop the distribution of NVIDIA chips.
00:35:25.000Officials at Amazon's cloud unit have said that they support it as well.
00:35:42.000Shipping them, our best tech, is a huge, gigantic mistake.
00:35:47.000But I think one of the reasons, obviously, Microsoft and Google and Amazon are doing all this is because they would very much prefer to have preferential pricing on the chips by removing a potential market in China.
00:36:12.000Well, the Trump administration is, in fact, pursuing that in some areas.
00:36:16.000The Trump administration announced Thursday that oil and gas drilling would be allowed in a fragile expanse of tundra and wetlands in northern Alaska that is home to caribou, grizzly bears, and thousands of migratory birds.
00:36:25.000I remember writing about this back when I was in college.
00:36:29.000The move reverses actions taken during the Biden administration to restrict development in half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, that is 23.5 million acres of federal land in the North Slope.
00:36:40.000The expanse is some of the last remaining pristine wilderness in the country.
00:36:44.000Okay, America has a lot of wilderness and a lot of pristine wilderness, of course.
00:36:49.000Unlocking more jobs, unlocking more oil production will bring down prices.
00:36:53.000That is the nature of creating more supply.
00:37:04.000The reality is that the Democrats have suggested, again, when we talk about Democrat solutions, they always involve redistribution and seizure of wealth.
00:37:12.000The Democrats have suggested the only way to bring down the cost of health care is to subsidize healthcare, therefore raising the cost of healthcare.
00:37:17.000There's a reason that the price of healthcare in the United States has continued to outpace the market.
00:37:24.000Rich Lowry has a good column at the New York Post.
00:37:26.000He says, as Avic Roy of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity points out, and Avic Roy is a very, very good scholar, Barack Obama ran for president promising his healthcare reform would reduce premiums by $2,500 per family.
00:37:39.000Roy notes that the premiums for the benchmark silver Obamacare plans have nearly tripled since 2013.
00:37:46.000Deductibles for those same silver plans have more than doubled, outpacing the rate of increase for employer-sponsored plans.
00:37:51.000So, actually, the price of Obamacare is increasing faster than like your private health insurance.
00:37:56.000Democrats don't even pretend anymore that Obamacare is going to reduce the cost.
00:38:00.000Instead, they say we have to just keep pouring money down that rat hole.
00:38:04.000The biggest problem with Obamacare, of course, is that it redistributes healthcare coverage from young people to old people.
00:38:10.000It forces young people to buy a particular level of healthcare coverage in order to be covered in the Obamacare exchanges.
00:38:18.000And then they use that money to pay for older people and their health insurance.
00:38:23.000Instead, what Avik Roy proposes is a more free market solution, what's called a reinsurance program, which pays the cost of people with preexisting conditions, which is a straight-up subsidy to people with pre-existing conditions, which has always been the problem.
00:38:36.000Because insurance for people who have preexisting conditions is not insurance, it's just healthcare.
00:38:42.000I can't buy insurance for a broken leg after I have a broken leg.
00:38:45.000If I do that, that's just called healthcare.
00:38:47.000It's like buying fire insurance for your house after it's burned down already.
00:38:51.000The age ban imposed by Obamacare, which mandates that young people can't pay too much less than old people, should be eliminated.
00:39:00.000You should be able to buy catastrophic plans, particularly for people who are young, because if you're young, your minor injuries aren't going to cost you that much money.
00:39:07.000It's really only if you have a car wreck or a serious disease that you need serious health insurance coverage.
00:39:15.000Again, free market solutions here would be a good thing.
00:39:18.000And Republicans should explain that because otherwise, you're just going to have Democrats explaining that we should continue to pour money down the rat hole of Obamacare.
00:39:27.000Now, again, the Trump administration keeps throwing out government-based solutions for the housing issue.
00:39:34.000The reality is that if you wish for there to be more supply of housing, you need to allow people the market conditions to build more supply of housing.
00:39:45.000Now, one thing that the vice president said about this, and he and I have pretty significant disagreements on our economic vision, but he is right that deporting 30 million illegal immigrants would definitely help.
00:39:55.000I mean, you have a lot of people in the country who should not be here and who are taking up housing space.
00:40:07.000Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who are taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens.
00:40:15.000And at the same time, we weren't building enough new houses to begin with, even for the population that we had.
00:40:21.000So, what we're doing is trying to make it easier to build houses, trying to make it easier to build factories and things like that so that people have good jobs.
00:40:29.000We're also getting all of those illegal aliens out of our country, and you're already seeing it start to pay some dividends.
00:40:36.000Now, again, he's not wrong about this.
00:40:38.000We have way too many people in this country who do not belong in this country, obviously.
00:40:48.000The actual thing that's going to solve the housing affordability crisis is deregulation.
00:40:53.000It's going to be free market capitalism.
00:40:56.000It's actually going to be banks making real decisions about who can afford a home and where.
00:41:02.000Otherwise, you end up with government subsidies that push up the price of housing by giving many, many people who probably don't have the credit worthiness to get a private loan access to houses, which then will go bust.
00:41:16.000And then you have, again, a repeat of subprime housing crises.
00:41:19.000Government-based solutions tend to have precisely the opposite effect of what they are attempting to achieve.
00:41:26.000So, markets, free market, I know, free market capitalism.
00:41:32.000I don't know when it fell out of fashion for the right to stop talking about free markets and to instead suggest that government solutions are the actual answer.
00:41:41.000You know, growing up as a conservative, this was sort of rote conservatism, was the idea that private property, free markets, should be, at least in the first instance, the solution.
00:41:53.000Doesn't mean all problems will be solved by markets, but it does mean that if you get rid of markets or heavily intervene in markets or put your grubby government fingers on the markets, you're skewing all the incentive structures and you end up undermining the very thing that you are attempting to do in the vast majority of cases.
00:42:08.000Already, meanwhile, the Democrats, some Republicans, they continue to try to attack President Trump over Jeffrey Epstein.
00:42:15.000And nothing has been released from the new Epstein emails that is particularly shocking about President Trump.
00:42:21.000I'm waiting for the supposed smoking gun in the same way that I was waiting for the Russiagate smoking gun for years and years and years, and it never happened.
00:42:27.000And it feels very much the same at this point.
00:42:30.000Now, again, I'm fine with all of the Epstein files being whatever is available, what can be released.
00:42:35.000Not only am I fine with it, I think it would be good.
00:42:38.000And I think that there is a Streisand effect thing that is going on where the president says that he wants to abide by the law and then he brings people in and he browbeats them because he doesn't want certain files being released.
00:42:49.000And people are asking, well, why does he not want the files?
00:42:52.000Again, that's a Barbara Streisand effect.
00:43:13.000Democrats, however, are out there spinning up every old story, every unspecified allegation.
00:43:20.000For example, Representative Robert Garcia went on MSNBC and then claimed that Epstein was doing his work at Mar-a-Lago, which, again, there is no support for this idea evidentiarily that Mar-a-Lago was like a center of human trafficking on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein.
00:43:36.000The reality is that every time we get a new batch of documents, there are a lot more questions.
00:43:41.000And in my opinion, signs point back to the White House.
00:43:44.000When you think about Epstein, his six-trafficking ring, Ghelane Maxwell, all this happened in New York.
00:43:57.000So, you know, a little much, a little much, and you can see now who's pushing this, right?
00:44:02.000Democrats who wish to smear President Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and some Republicans who wish to smear President Trump with Jeffrey Epstein, mainly because they don't like a lot of Trump's policies and are trying to undermine his credibility within his own party.
00:44:14.000Again, I think the solution to that is more transparency, but I'm not sure that that's going to solve it because there are some ill-motivated actors, shall we say.
00:44:22.000Meanwhile, CNN is now trotting out old stories again.
00:44:25.000So CNN brought forth a swimsuit model named Stacey Williams, who claims that she was groped by Trump all the way back in 1993.
00:44:32.000Now, this has been in the public eye for a long, long time.
00:44:35.000In fact, it was already brought out, I think, last year, two years ago.
00:45:32.000According to The Guardian, this is more than a year ago.
00:45:36.000A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993 in what she believes was a twisted game between the two men.
00:45:49.000Now, again, she only came out with this story, I guess, in 2024.
00:45:54.000I'm wondering why it would take you 21 years to tell that story, given the fact, I'm sorry, 31 years to tell that story, given the fact that Donald Trump has already been president once and has been the most famous person on earth for several decades at this point.
00:46:08.000Caroline Levitt at the time, who is a press secretary for the Trump campaign, said these accusations made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election are unequivocally false.
00:46:18.000It's obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.
00:46:23.000Now, again, the attempt to retail these stories anew because Democrats leaked three emails out of context to the New York Times.
00:46:33.000It's actually wildly counterproductive for the body politic.
00:46:36.000And meanwhile, in what is an actual scandal, remember Representative Matt Gates?
00:46:39.000Remember that time when the Trump administration briefly attempted to nominate him for attorney general?
00:46:44.000And then the entire Republican caucus went, oh, what now?
00:46:47.000Well, it turns out the entire Republican caucus was right.
00:46:49.000What now was the proper response to the idea that Representative Matt Gates should be Attorney General of the United States, according to the New York Times?
00:46:56.000She was 17 and a high school junior in Florida.
00:46:59.000She was working at McDonald's and she was living in and out of a homeless shelter, hoping to save up to buy braces to fix her teeth.
00:47:05.000She falsely advertised herself in 2017 as 18 years old on a website that matches men looking for companionship with young women looking to make money.
00:47:14.000What followed would set off a chain of events that would have a dramatic impact on her life and help upend the political career of one of the men she would encounter, Representative Matt Gates, the Florida Republican.
00:47:24.000A bipartisan health ethics committee investigation determined there was substantial evidence he had sex with the 17-year-old.
00:47:29.000The report included testimony from the girl about how she was paid by Gates for the sex.
00:47:35.000In response to a request from McClatchy, a federal judge has now unsealed court documents from a related civil case that shed some light on the girl's background.
00:47:43.000Apparently, she was a then-homeless 17-year-old high schooler.
00:47:48.000The girl's lawyer agreed to confirm some basic biographical information about her client.
00:47:54.000So, again, apparently, the girl began this path of meeting Gates during her junior year in high school.
00:48:05.000One of them was so poor, the parent was living in and out of a homeless shelter.
00:48:08.000When the girl and her siblings were staying with that parent, they lived also in the homeless shelter.
00:48:11.000To make extra money, the girl worked at McDonald's.
00:48:14.000She began looking for other ways to make money and turned to a website that advertised itself as a sugar dating website that primarily connected older men and younger women seeking mutually beneficial relationships through the website.
00:48:25.000In April of her junior year in high school, she met Joel Greenberg, a Florida tax collector who is a friend and ally of Gates.
00:48:32.000Greenberg invited the 17-year-old to a meeting on his boat.
00:48:34.000At that meeting, they did not have sex, but Greenberg paid her $400.
00:48:37.000He also gave her ecstasy and told her to try it at home.
00:48:41.000Then he contacted her again, and then they met up at a hotel where they had sex, and she was paid another $400.
00:48:47.000Apparently, he would have sex with her seven times for money before she turned 18, and he would give her ecstasy.
00:48:52.000On July 15th, 2017, he asked the girl and others to attend a party at the home of Chris Dorworth, a former Republican member of the Florida State House, who at the time worked as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners.
00:49:05.000At the party, the girl who was 17 later testified both cocaine and ecstasy were offered to her.
00:49:44.000Now, I will say that there are a group of Democrats, there are a large group of people on the left who would say that this sort of thing is bizarrely legitimate, to which I say, what the hell, man?
00:51:09.000If you actually committed crimes, then you will be, in fact, prosecuted.
00:51:12.000And if you don't, then presumably you will not.
00:51:15.000Now, we'll have to see what exactly he did.
00:51:18.000The probe will investigate allegations, according to Fox News, of millions of dollars in loans and refinancing based on Swallow declaring that his primary residence was in Washington, D.C. According to the report, the director of the federal housing agency, Bill Pulte, sent A.G. Pambondi a letter on Wednesday accusing Swallow of possibly making false or misleading statements on loan documents.
00:51:37.000Apparently, the investigation is into possible mortgage fraud, tax fraud at the state and local levels, insurance fraud, and any related crimes.
00:51:43.000We will have to see, of course, how this plays out.
00:51:44.000Innocent until proven guilty is, of course, the rule of the day in all of this.
00:51:50.000Okay, meanwhile, John Fetterman yesterday was unfortunately hospitalized, according to a statement that was put out on his X page.
00:51:59.000During an early morning walk, Senator Fetterman sustained a fall near his home in Braddock.
00:52:03.000Out of an abundance of caution, he was transported to a hospital in Pittsburgh.
00:52:06.000Upon evaluation, it was established he had a ventricular fibrillation flare-up that led to Senator Fetterman feeling lightheaded, falling to the ground, and hitting his face with minor injuries.
00:52:14.000Senator Fetterman had this to say: if you thought my face looked bad before, wait until you see it now.
00:52:21.000Listen, again, Senator Fetterman, he may be the last courageous person in the Democratic Party.
00:52:35.000He says he is doing well and receiving routine observation at the hospital.
00:52:39.000He has opted to stay so doctors can fine-tune his medication regimen.
00:52:42.000Senator Fetterman is grateful for the EMT's doctors and nurses who are providing his care.
00:52:47.000So we'll bring you all the health updates as they emerge for Senator Fetterman, maybe the last sane Democratic senator.
00:52:54.000Okay, meanwhile, fascinating things happening at our nation's colleges and universities.
00:52:59.000So Texas A ⁇ M has decided to crack down on woke in the classroom.
00:53:02.000According to the New York Times, Texas A ⁇ M University System Regions voted on Thursday to limit how instructors may discuss matters like gender identity and race ideology in classrooms, tightening the rules in a conservative state where debates over academic freedom have flared for months.
00:53:15.000Regions who met in college station on Thursday afternoon unanimously backed a revised proposal decreeing no courses, quote, will advocate race or gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity without a campus president's approval of the course and related materials.
00:53:29.000A related measure that regents approved said the faculty members could not teach material inconsistent with the approved syllabus for the course.
00:53:39.000What is the educational value of teaching queer theory at Texas AM?
00:53:45.000Please explain, please explain how the taxpayers of Texas are somehow benefited by this or the tuition payers of Texas are somehow benefited by this.
00:53:56.000In September, Texas AM fired a lecturer after a student accused her of teaching a course that recognized more than two genders.
00:54:03.000I mean, again, why this is controversial is beyond me.
00:54:06.000I understand that there are a lot of dumb theories that emerge from the universities.
00:54:09.000There is no reason the taxpayers should subsidize it.
00:54:13.000There are some members of the university faculty who are upset because they believe that they should be able to do whatever they want with other people's money.
00:54:21.000Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor, said it was, quote, tempting to agree no academic system course should advocate race or gender ideology since no serious academic course should promote any ideology.
00:54:31.000But he said, seeking truth sometimes meant exploring contested ideas.
00:54:34.000But okay, if you say, here's gender ideology and here's what his critics say, my guess is that the president of the university will greenlight that course.
00:54:44.000Also, there are a bunch of professors there, particularly in the STEM fields, who say, you know what, we need better education because it turns out our educational system is absolutely collapsing.
00:54:57.000According to the free press, good piece by Tanner Now over there, California officials expect math students in public school to know basic math by the end of second grade.
00:55:08.000But when some incoming college students were asked basic questions, about 20% could not correctly count.
00:55:14.000Like, here's the problem: okay, Sarah had nine pennies and nine dimes.
00:55:26.000But apparently, 20% of college students got it wrong, incoming college students.
00:55:31.000And as for the question, solve 10 minus 2, parentheses, and then parentheses, 4 minus 6x equals 0.
00:55:39.000Okay, which is like a very, very basic algebra question.
00:55:41.00080% of incoming college students couldn't solve that problem.
00:55:45.000We've got a problem in our educational system for sure.
00:55:48.000A report released last week by the University of California San Diego, which has about 45,000 students and is one of America's highest-ranked public universities, said that the number of entering first-year students whose math skills fall below middle school level increased at nearly 30-fold between 2020 and 2025.
00:56:06.000The deterioration of basic academic preparation has left incoming students, quote, increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.
00:56:16.000The percentage of students who have now been placed in remedial math at UC San Diego is nearing 10%, like one out of every 10.
00:56:26.000And again, that's after they admit these people.
00:56:27.000Remember, a lot of applicants get rejected.
00:56:31.000Last fall, Harvard University offered remedial math.
00:56:37.000The university systems, I mean, we're failing at the middle school level, we're failing at the high school level, and we're increasingly failing at the college level because of all of the focus on politically heterodox leftism, as opposed to, you know, actually teaching people the things that matter.
00:56:55.000And then meanwhile, we're telling people that they need to take out a $50,000 per year loan in order to even get basic employment on the other end.
00:57:02.000That needs to change and change in a major way.
00:57:04.000All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
00:57:07.000We'll get into the BBC apologizing to President Trump after slandering him.
00:57:11.000Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.
00:57:13.000If you're not a member, become a member.