00:00:00.000Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
00:00:04.000Sauger and Jetty, we have a great conversation about debt, BNPL, young people, Israel, and more.
00:00:11.000And then I recap my viral conversation with Tucker Carlson, which you are able to listen to on the Tucker Carlson podcast page and so much more.
00:00:18.000Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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00:02:00.000So one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, this was kind of the theme of my Tucker conversation, and then we can get into more of the juicier, more headline-scintillating stuff in a little bit, is the plight of younger people.
00:02:10.000And you had a phenomenal take on this from their attachment to even draft kings to kind of this debt-financed economy.
00:02:17.000I touched on this yesterday the best that I could, but the kids are not all right.
00:02:22.000We are seeing it harder than ever to own homes, more depressed, more socially isolated.
00:02:27.000What's going on with younger people that you wish that more of our leaders, more boomers, more elders understood?
00:02:35.000Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite things Tucker Carlson ever said, I think it was in the election of 2020, is that whoever in this selection is going to make it easier for a 30-year-old American to buy a house and to raise a family is the only person who deserves to win.
00:02:48.000I think that's a really good heuristic.
00:02:50.000I mean, look at where we are right now, Charlie.
00:02:52.000The average first-time homebuyer in the United States is now 38 years old.
00:02:57.000It used to be 27 years old, not that long ago.
00:03:00.000The median homebuyer in the U.S. is 56 years old.
00:03:04.000So, you know, this gets to the conversation that you and Tucker really had about the selfishness of the boomer generation.
00:03:10.000And it's one of those where you're watching wealth not only be hoarded in the form of a home, but to be protected with so many different ordinances and different ways of living.
00:03:20.000And I'm not trying to make this some sort of entree point into Yimbyism, only to recognize the problem.
00:03:26.000Like right now, a 38-year-old who's buying their first-time home is leveraged up to the hilt to a point that they never were in the history of our country.
00:03:35.000Right now, the first-time homebuyer I mentioned, who's 38 years old, 42% of their after-tax income is being spent on their mortgage payment for that average 38-year-old, leaves very, very little room, you know, a wiggle room.
00:03:50.000I mean, the amount of expenses that come with having a child, both from your health insurance, premium, deductible, stroller, cars, I mean, changes your entire life in a genuinely irrevocable way.
00:04:00.000And then you look also for the rest of their finances.
00:04:04.000I just looked it up right before I came on the show.
00:04:06.000The average millennial credit card balance right now, today, is $5,000 to $6,000.
00:04:15.000The vast majority of Americans aren't able to meet that payment every single year.
00:04:19.000That means they're being charged userous credit card rates of some 19 to 31% in terms of their APR.
00:04:25.000So you are just watching runaway debt destroy the balance sheets.
00:04:30.000And then the entire system is basically, you know, we were talking about sports betting on Tucker's show is basically trying to sell degeneracy and debt to as many Americans as humanly possible, which is just getting them farther and farther away from what makes us fundamentally happy in this world.
00:05:23.000Just outside of platitudes and bumper stickers, what practically, can you point to two or three moments that decisions were made either through public policy or cultural moments where basically we decided we're not going to hand a good country off to our kids?
00:05:44.000Something definitely changed in the year 1971.
00:05:47.000There's a great website, WTF happened in the year 1971.
00:05:51.000There's all kinds of charts that show I love looking back at the cost of living.
00:05:55.000I mean, if I had to point to concrete different things, it would be number one is student debt.
00:06:00.000And that was, of course, the government's backstopping of the student debt crisis, guaranteeing of the loans, which caused runaway inflation in terms of education costs.
00:06:09.000I would also point to people like Joe Biden, who represented the state of Delaware and was called, you know, the senator from MBNA.
00:06:16.000But it's not really fair to just blame Joe Biden, who passed a speech of legislation in the 1980s protecting the credit card industry.
00:06:22.000Since that time, there has been an immense amount of pushback on Capitol Hill to even cap credit card interest rates or at the very least to go after the profit centers themselves that allow people really to get into this runaway debt situation.
00:06:35.000The housing story is a lot more complicated.
00:06:37.000I mean, you've talked a lot about here on your show with illegal immigration.
00:06:42.000I don't think that's all of the story, but at the very least, we know that we have a housing crisis and a shortage.
00:06:47.000But really, it's about the structure of our economy.
00:06:50.000You know, one of the things I really fundamentally believe is that not all Americans should have to be able to move to some sort of urban economic center if they don't want to.
00:07:00.000And increasingly, the way that our jobs and our economy and all is structured are in these super zip codes where the price and the cost of living, like where I live near the Washington, D.C. area, is just absolutely out of control.
00:07:12.000So unfortunately, I really can't point to a single point, one or two different things.
00:07:16.000Obviously, student debt and credit cards are one of them.
00:07:19.000But at this point, we are where we are, man.
00:07:20.000Like we got to deal with it at this point.
00:07:22.000And in terms of dealing with it, we have got to go after these massive profit centers, which just rip people off.
00:07:29.000And I don't see enough, I don't see enough energy on that in the Democrat or the Republican Party, honestly.
00:07:59.000There is hundreds of billions of dollars in debt in these Klarna-type, you know, buy now, pay later applications, the DraftKings, the FanDuel, all of these sports betting companies, which are just ruinously putting young men, specifically young men who are watching the show most likely, into horrible debt by selling them these terrible products, which are ripping them off.
00:08:41.000Yeah, I mean, I'm not talking about wealth confiscation.
00:08:44.000What I'm talking about is going after the centers of big business.
00:08:46.000One of the things that Tucker and I really pointed out in our show is if you look at the way to get filthy rich in America today, I encourage everybody, I'm not against billionaires.
00:08:55.000I want people to become billionaires, quote, the right way, in a productive way.
00:08:59.000The way people get rich right now is you can go and look at the new additions to the Forbes list.
00:09:03.000It's not the Elon Musk or the Jeff Bezos of the world who are creating these companies and hiring all these hundreds of thousands of people.
00:10:08.000And you should check out Breaking Points, his show.
00:10:13.000Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere-from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency.
00:10:21.000If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming fast.
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00:11:37.000First and foremost, is like I said, we need to look at not just the threat, but the fundamental way that we've watched the Chinese economy transform.
00:11:45.000Biggest problem that we have right now is that everything is centered around this idea of the number must go up.
00:11:51.000All of American retirement, capital, everything needs to return 8% to 10% because our entire future is invested in that.
00:11:58.000One of my favorite statistics is that the Shanghai Stock Exchange has barely gone up since the year 2009.
00:12:04.000But the material way that the Chinese economy and the Chinese way of life has dramatically increased from that time period.
00:12:09.000The reason why is because they don't care about the return on capital.
00:12:13.000What they care about is the return on their quality of life on their own industry.
00:12:18.000So, what I would point to is that the economy, the system, everything needs to be geared towards creating new products, new technologies, new ways of life that actually make it easier not for us to just buy a home, but to be able to move into a home, not have financialization in the credit card industry, sports betting.
00:12:36.000The best and the brightest of America should not be focused on milking the American consumer for every dollar they have.
00:12:42.000It should be focused on giving them new products and new ways to improve their lives.
00:12:46.000It is undeniable right now that the quality of life increase in China dwarfs the quality of life increase in the United States.
00:12:52.000This is not a veneration of the Chinese system.
00:12:54.000It's to say that we can do it in a more American way.
00:12:57.000And it's exactly the way our economy was structured from the 1940s up until the 1970s, before we literally just went runaway, you know, with financialization of our entire economy.
00:13:06.000So that's my number one way that I would try to fix this system.
00:13:11.000That's the only binary we're allowed to exist in, right?
00:13:13.000That if you dare say this, can you comment on that and how that actually makes us a prisoner of kind of a trapped binary when reality, there's hundreds of other little micro decisions and nuances that could improve the country other than, oh, you're some sort of totalitarian Marxist.
00:13:38.000Is to say President Eisenhower was a Marxist.
00:13:40.000Is that all of the leaders in that period were Marxist?
00:13:43.000No, what we are saying is that the United States tax code is a choice, a democratically elected one, that we are able to influence as to how we want our economy structured.
00:13:55.000It traces back to the revolutionary populism of Theodore Roosevelt and the original Republican progressive movement.
00:14:01.000I would actually say there's nothing more anti-Marxist than to say that we need to structure our economy to the benefit of all of our citizens, especially to avoid Marxism.
00:14:10.000That's what the British ruling class in the 1890s did.
00:14:13.000And it's also what Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and many others actually saved America from Marxism, from full-blown communism in the Bolshevik Revolution by making sure they responded to the needs of the people for a more well-regulated capitalism.
00:14:27.000And when I say that word regulation, I understand that people are worried about it, but they need to really listen and know that all government policy, even if it's in action, is just as much of a choice.
00:14:37.000We deserve a say in the way that our economy runs.
00:14:40.000Yeah, we made a decision in the 1980s and 1990s to reconfigure the American economy away from making stuff towards basically high finance, technology, and just a brain economy.
00:15:41.000I know that's not even close to what you believe or you're close to it.
00:15:44.000I also never want somebody that has an heterodox view of the Bibi Netanyahu government to be looped into the Jew hate category just because they're critical of a foreign government, which far too often happens.
00:16:10.000Yeah, I mean, I think it's just very important for people to understand that younger Americans feel that we are not currently in a healthy relationship with the state of Israel.
00:16:18.000And what I mean by that are the multiple passages of, quote, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionist positions through the House of Representatives, through the extent to which U.S. foreign policy and U.S. politics seems to resolve around this very small nation that's in the Middle East.
00:16:33.000And there's several different areas of that I could go into if you would like between right and left, because there is a large split between right and left young people.
00:16:40.000But the horseshoe, if you will, really comes together in thinking that our relationship with this foreign government is not healthy in the way that we discuss it, in the way that we, you know, basically look at the idea that you're allowed to, let's say, serve in a foreign military, including the Israeli military, not lose your citizenship.
00:16:56.000And in fact, view that as some sort of patriotic act in the way that one of these congressmen in the United States of America actually wore the uniform of a foreign military in the halls of the United States Congress.
00:17:05.000They view that as very abnormal, I really would say to the least.
00:17:09.000And at the most, I think what they're really watching is they believe at a fundamental level, and I'm really speaking for right-wing younger Americans here, is I think that what they look at is that the obsession and the, you know, almost subservience, you know, to this foreign nation, at least in terms of rhetoric, in terms of priority, is one that dwarfs any care or concern for the actual American citizen.
00:17:29.000On the left-wing side, I mean, I can say this because I do host a show with Crystal Ball as well.
00:17:34.000I think we all have to be honest that the conduct of the Israeli government and the way that it's waged its war on Gaza, we basically have watched effectively is that criticism necessarily of the humanitarian situation of what's happening in Gaza gets conflated at a high rhetorical level with anti-Semitism.
00:17:50.000Terms like blood libel and others are often applied to pointing out specific actions of the IDF.
00:17:57.000Let's say in the case of bombing this Catholic church or what they claim was an accident very recently, we could look at several instances, for example, of Palestinian civilians, you know, getting shot while they're coming to aid.
00:18:08.000Now, the prime minister of Israel and others, they offer differing explanations.
00:18:12.000However, a lot of those don't fall to scrutiny.
00:18:15.000And I think it's really unfortunate that we're not allowed to have an honest and a fact-based conversation.
00:18:20.000I think really all I can prioritize and advocate for here on this show, on my show as well, let's talk about it like it's any other country without a lot of the emotion, without, let's say, some other religion in this respect.
00:18:32.000You know, we need to instead to look at it in terms of what are we getting out of this relationship?
00:18:38.000And I think it's very clear that we have a special exception whenever it comes to Israel.
00:18:42.000It's your right to advocate for that if you would like.
00:18:44.000And without getting into the realm of Jew hate or anti-Semitism or others, it's just very important to be able to discuss it on its terms without a lot of the labels that start to come in.
00:18:55.000And I think that's where a lot of right and left-wing young Americans really feel as if their legitimate concerns around these two things are shut down to the point where they're going to be drifting in a very bad direction, Charlie, if really the blinders are not let up on this.
00:19:11.000Well, and so there's a couple of points that, and as you know, I advocate for America, for Western civilization.
00:19:18.000I loved my experience in Israel, and I fight up against these ridiculous kids on campus that I think have moral blindness on the topic.
00:19:25.000And I agree with a lot of what you're saying.
00:19:28.000We had an amazing focus group at the Sudan Action Summit, and a lot of our students, we're going to be posting it, by the way, it's about an hour and a half long, and they can't stand this Jew hate stuff, which we have to just stand united against.
00:19:51.000At the same time, a lot of these younger people, though, they say, guys, why is it that we don't have the same emphasis on the fact that I can't own a home and we talk so much about a foreign country?
00:20:03.000Do you think that one of the reasons younger people have this view is that they feel as if their needs, wants, and interests are underserved while a foreign nation gets a lot more attention.
00:20:14.000And I would point to the words of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been very courageous on this topic.
00:20:18.000This is a country that has its own universal health care, which has huge amounts of social services.
00:20:23.000A large percentage of their population is actually excluded from the draft.
00:20:27.000The United States taxpayer is on the hook for billions of dollars a year to this foreign country, including using the capital of our global empire to backstop its entire security across the world.
00:20:37.000That's not a normal, a healthy relationship.
00:20:39.000And it's not one which I think focuses on the needs of Americans.
00:21:10.000But we need an actual decoupling, not just in terms of foreign aid, but in terms of the way that we provide diplomatic cover for a lot of Israeli action, which I would call belligerent action in many cases.
00:21:20.000And also not to, you know, require the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars a year, the use of three carrier strike groups, for example, when Israel finds itself in a difficult position that they put themselves in.
00:21:31.000And so an actual and a full decoupling, a treatment of Israel like any other nation on its terms, this is a country which we barely do any bilateral trade with compared to even the top 25 nations that we conduct trade with.
00:21:44.000We need to treat it in the same way that we would any other nation, which we have a similar trading relationship, countries like Chile, countries like Switzerland, or any others in terms of what do we get out of this relationship.
00:21:55.000Right now, we are treating it very, very differently as if it's actually in the top five, not in terms of trade, but also in terms of its strategic interests to the United States.
00:22:04.000So a full decoupling, which you suggested there, I'm not sure if Prime Minister Netanyahu really believes that, considering a lot of his actions here in the United States, would certainly put us on the right direction.
00:22:14.000And that's why I'm very supportive of Marjorie Taylor Greene's amendment.
00:22:17.000I think it's unfortunate she didn't get enough support from her own colleagues.
00:22:20.000Yeah, I think a financial decoupling is one that needs to be the focus right now.
00:22:25.000And again, Bibi has said that in some ways, you can make an argument holds Israel back.
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00:23:56.000Yesterday, I was with Tucker Carlson in Maine.
00:24:00.000We had a phenomenal conversation about something that is not getting much media coverage.
00:24:04.000And President Donald Trump talked about this in the Oval today in so many words.
00:24:11.000It's very easy to focus on the stories that are popping up, and we should focus on them.
00:24:17.000We're going to continue to cover them.
00:24:19.000But there are sometimes these slow burn stories.
00:24:22.000There are stories that are not the biggest story until it's the biggest story.
00:24:26.000One of them is the fact that younger people have had their livelihoods and their futures intergenerationally stolen from them.
00:24:36.000And we've talked about this for quite some time.
00:24:38.000And we mean it beyond just the fiscal policy.
00:24:41.000It's beyond the fact that we're a $37 trillion debtor nation.
00:24:45.000It's beyond even the student loan debt.
00:24:47.000It is the quality of life and the purchasing power of every generation decreases.
00:24:52.000Every generation's dollar goes less and less as far as it did to prior generations.
00:25:00.000For example, the average home price used to be about three times the median income in America.
00:25:05.000Now it's seven times the median income in America.
00:25:09.000Young people are using a thing called BNPL, which is buy now, pay later.
00:25:14.000It's a financing operation, essentially, to be able to pay for groceries, pay for concert tickets, and it's a way to bypass the traditional credit card companies.
00:25:25.000Young people are getting into debt, serious debt while they're 20, 21, 22 years old.
00:25:29.000They're bankrupting themselves also on erroneous betting markets.
00:25:36.000To have to go and engage in credit to buy groceries, something's seriously wrong.
00:25:52.000And again, this is President Donald Trump's one of his great challenges.
00:25:56.000And I think he's going to get it done.
00:25:57.000But boy, this is generational stuff, which is the economy is growing.
00:26:03.000We have problems that would be and that you would most imply based on the data in front of us is if the economy was shrinking.
00:26:14.000Here's part of my conversation yesterday with Tucker Carlson.
00:26:16.000You can listen to the entire conversation on our YouTube channel in an annotated way and also on the Charlie Kirkshow podcast page, but of course, most importantly, on the Tucker Carlson podcast page.
00:26:29.000A lot of people over 50 think this is a foreign concept and they think, quite honestly, this is just the complaining of young people that don't want to work.
00:27:19.00038 years old is the average age of a first-time homebuyer.
00:27:23.000One of the reasons why this Tucker conversation I think was so important, and I want to drive and direct your attention to it, is that it required a longer form environment to really build this out.
00:27:33.000This is, and look, I love going on Fox News and was on last night with Jesse Waters.
00:27:38.000Just can't do this in a three to five minute segment.
00:27:40.000There's so many complexities and depth and nuances to this.
00:27:44.000And so, in the longer form, deep dive environment, we were able to paint a picture that if you have a generation that does not own stuff, then all of a sudden political radicalization starts to seep in.
00:27:59.000I have a question for all of you in the audience, and this should hammer at home.
00:28:03.000It's from my friend Frank Turek, and I told him as soon as he said it, I said, I'm going to steal this one, Frank.
00:28:08.000When was the last time you washed a rental car?
00:28:13.000When you rent a car from Hertz or from Avis, do you wash it?
00:28:16.000Do you go get the oil checked on that rental car?
00:28:52.000One of the solutions is let's lower rates.
00:28:54.000Once you lower rates, it will open up capital.
00:28:57.000It will make it easier for young people to borrow and they can get their slice of the American dream.
00:29:02.000Because once you're in the owner economy, unless you have a financial apocalypse or a cataclysmic event or you're really bad with money, it's very rare do you go from owner to renting.
00:29:15.000It happens, but once you go from renting to owner and you're in that kind of ownership economy and the mortgages are configured a certain way, the tax code is configured a certain way, and you're in the game.
00:29:28.000And what's happened is an entire generation, they're making their landlords rich and they're experiencing none of the upside of this economy.
00:29:39.000President Donald Trump was talking about Jerome Powell, too late Jerome Powell, and how high interest rates are a barrier to entry for so many young people in this country, about how they are not able to enter the housing market.
00:29:53.000And this is why the Tucker-Carlson conversation is so important.
00:29:56.000Let me play another piece of the Tucker conversation here.
00:30:02.000So your dollar is actually going, it's going, it's going less and less as far as it has year over year.
00:30:10.000So then what is the consequence of this?
00:30:12.000So you have a generation that is renting a lot more than it's owning.
00:30:15.000So when you do not own something, why would you defend it?
00:30:20.000And so you find then political radicalization start to seep in because an entire generation is getting routinely cynical year over year as their net worth either stays at zero or goes into negative.
00:30:34.000Now, my question for every Republican senator and congressman watching this: if you do not know these four letters, then you are not doing your job.
00:32:12.000I do want to play this one piece of tape here just to kind of conclude the whole segment on housing.
00:32:19.000Again, if you have a generation that does not own stuff and that is not invested in the economy, political radicalism ensues.
00:32:28.000And if you are over the age of 60 and you are watching this, you have benefited tremendously from the upside in this economy, tremendously.
00:32:36.000And it's time that we allow access to the next generation to the same American dream that so many of us, I put myself in that category, have enjoyed.
00:32:47.000But the young people that I represent and the young men that I talk to and women, but mostly men, they are on the outside looking in, and that creates bitterness.
00:32:58.000And you're not going to like the politics that comes next.
00:33:01.000There are two ways this is going to go.
00:33:03.000Way one is a left-wing confiscate the wealth, burn down the mansions, take over the corporate boardrooms, shoot the CEOs in the street like Luigi Maggioni did.
00:33:39.000Path two hopefully is a way that we can prudentially proceed.
00:33:44.000We're going to have to rethink how we view economics in the conservative movement, where it might mean at times we might have to adjust tax rates up a little bit while we also cut spending.
00:33:54.000It might mean that we have to close some loopholes.
00:33:56.000It might mean that we have to be a little less ideological when it comes to taxes.
00:34:00.000And maybe we should break up some monopolies.
00:34:06.000And I know that if we do not structurally fix this, I don't want AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Rashida Talib, Elon Omar, Zorhan Mamdani running the U.S. economy.
00:34:19.000And people say, oh, you're fear-mongering.
00:34:20.000No, I'm telling you right now, this generation, if the average home buying age is 38 years old, if the average age of a home buyer is 38 years old, that's probably only going to go up.
00:34:55.000Cutting rates is not the entire picture.
00:34:57.000Cutting rates is not the whole thing because the price is still high, but it will unlock more capital for people that are right on the edge of purchasing a home.
00:35:44.000People aren't able to buy a house because this guy is a numbskull.
00:35:49.000He keeps the rates too high and probably doing it for political reasons.
00:35:54.000The only time I remember him cutting rates, I mean, he cut the rates just before the election to try and help Kamala or whoever he was trying to help.
00:36:01.000Homes are inordinately expensive, especially in the Sun Belt.
00:36:06.000So you need less people that are trying to purchase them, and then you need to build new homes.
00:36:10.000We need 10 million new homes in the next three years.
00:36:12.000And I think President Donald Trump is looking at this.
00:36:14.000And this is where interest rates do play into this.
00:36:16.000If a developer is going to buy home, build homes, lower interest rates will incentivize him to build more homes.
00:36:23.000Understand that almost nobody is doing any construction or development on cash only.
00:36:28.000It's all financed with construction loans.
00:36:30.000And as someone who knows how those numbers work, if you lower interest rates, there will be more incentive for builders to build homes.