Verdict with Ted Cruz - July 21, 2026


Bonus: Daily Review with Clay and Buck - Jul 21 2026


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour

Words per minute

172.6

Word count

10,501

Sentence count

301


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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00:00:20.000 Welcome in Tuesday edition, Clay and Buck Internal Civil War
00:00:26.380 with the democrat party as the fear of the rise of socialists and communists inside of the left
00:00:35.300 grows and begins to spread to saner members of that party we will address and discuss secretary
00:00:43.400 of treasury also known as the treasury secretary scott besant going to be on with us at 2 30
00:00:51.380 Eastern in the third hour of the program. We are often running
00:00:55.340 on YouTube as well as nearly 600
00:00:59.260 AM FM affiliates across the country and
00:01:03.160 Sirius XM. We appreciate all of you
00:01:06.980 hanging out with us. And Buck, you and I, and by the way
00:01:11.340 it's primary day in Arizona. Arizona, of course, one of
00:01:15.380 the great battlegrounds out there. A nominee going to be picked to
00:01:19.320 run against Katie Hobbs, who is one of the most vulnerable incumbent governors anywhere
00:01:24.820 in the country, Democrat or Republican.
00:01:27.920 So we will follow that and certainly be talking about it tomorrow.
00:01:32.660 But we begin with, I think it's fair to say, Buck, you may know him personally.
00:01:38.660 I do not.
00:01:39.500 I think it is fair to say that Van Jones is one of the most intellectually consistent
00:01:47.900 to the extent it exists and or rational of the democrat prognosticators on television on a
00:01:55.380 regular basis is that damning someone with faint praise or having worked at cnn would that in your
00:02:01.980 mind be an accurate way to describe him considering the larger cohort of colleagues that he is
00:02:08.180 competing with i mean if we were looking at the depth chart of the other team so to speak
00:02:13.560 van jones is one of the more capable and i would i would tell you and you can get mad at me but
00:02:22.580 it's all true one of the more charming when he wants to be uh people on the democrat side and
00:02:29.360 has been moderating over there in recent years relative to the field okay so i just want everyone
00:02:37.180 understand relative to other democrat commentators he has become more establishment i think as he has
00:02:43.240 gotten older and uh a lot of you if you spend five minutes talking to him as i have uh several times
00:02:49.300 in the past you would you would find him actually quite affable which i cannot say for a lot of
00:02:54.860 people on the left in the commentary business but then actually is a good uh good guy to hang out
00:03:00.160 with uh in the green room so okay yes to your question of because because he he was fired from
00:03:05.880 the Obama administration and this goes back you know uh his sort of radical green uh party or you
00:03:12.620 know uh he said some pretty radical stuff way back in the day he is less radical he's kind of on the
00:03:18.120 AOC trajectory built the brand as a radical and now moving more mainstream which is something we'll
00:03:24.300 return to here as a theme on the show uh so here he is on CNN uh saying these are not progressives
00:03:32.220 These are regressives going after the left wing in his party.
00:03:38.140 Again, CNN, Van Jones, cut 32.
00:03:41.600 I am tired, tired, tired of a set of people on the very far left in the Democratic Party.
00:03:48.700 Ideas that are literally insane, nutty, moronic, dangerous, bigoted are not progressive.
00:03:56.080 They're regressive and they should not be in our party.
00:03:58.540 um okay so that is one part of this i believe we have another cut uh where he's saying my phone is
00:04:07.060 blowing up with people after he called out the far left on his party cut 11 this phone has been
00:04:15.000 blowing up all day governors from both parties senators from both parties democrats in the house
00:04:19.860 calling thanking me for saying what everybody's been saying behind the scenes which is that this
00:04:24.600 stuff is going too far. I am a progressive Democrat. You want to talk about prison reform?
00:04:29.040 I've done prison reform. I never said, have no prisons. Where are you going to put the Klan?
00:04:32.680 I've done police reform. I never said no police. Where are you going to put the pedophiles? Who's
00:04:36.100 going to grab the pedophiles? This stuff is going too far. And part of the thing that has to happen
00:04:40.080 is we saw what happened in the Republican party when things started going in a nutty direction
00:04:44.100 and nobody stood up. I am happy that the young people are fighting for affordability, Medicare
00:04:49.000 for all, all the good things. I've been waiting my whole life to see a youth movement do what it's
00:04:53.040 doing but it's being hijacked by people who are putting in nutty ideas okay so buck here i think
00:04:59.500 van jones why he is an interesting voice for this is the far left of the democrat party the new york
00:05:06.280 times has a story about that this morning i believe 85 percent of the so-called democrat
00:05:12.020 socialists are white so the democrat party which claims that it is this great rainbow coalition
00:05:19.060 of people of a variety of different backgrounds the far left of the democrat party is overwhelmingly
00:05:25.920 relatively rich college educated white kids who don't have a lot in common with very many black
00:05:32.900 and brown voters and i think it's interesting that van jones the black guy is calling them out
00:05:37.800 a couple of things here one is yes the far left ideologues of the democrat party are overwhelmingly
00:05:47.640 white um i would disagree with van jones in this notion of it's being hijacked this is now party
00:05:56.580 mainstream actually that they're just saying out loud what a lot of the democrats really do believe
00:06:02.480 whether it's about israel or it's about the trans stuff or it's about the open borders who who has
00:06:10.000 what prominent democrat has fully repudiated biden's open borders policy meaning saying
00:06:16.000 that this was terrible our party betrayed the american people we let in 10 million illegals
00:06:21.340 plus 10 million plus whatever the number is on purpose clay not a single one and they won't
00:06:26.600 because that's actually what the democrat party really is the problem isn't that the left is
00:06:31.900 hijacking the party it's that they're being a little too loud going into the midterm election
00:06:36.060 and a little too honest about what they really believe now the other thing that i think is
00:06:40.520 interesting and this also goes to your point about the democrat socialists of america um
00:06:45.960 that uh the minority the primary minority voting blocs the democrats are you know black voters and
00:06:53.780 hispanic voters and i think that a lot of democrat black and hispanic voters do view the politics of
00:07:01.180 their party as a much more transactional thing right it's i want you know i i want uh medicare
00:07:07.140 for all or i want you know more benefits i want more state assistance i want more state whatever
00:07:11.740 it may be it's the white you know master's degree in whatever you know zoologies gender studies
00:07:22.120 from portland that are saying that you know we should have full-blown communist policy meaning
00:07:29.420 the takeover of of uh industry by the state and all that sort of stuff right so so there is this
00:07:35.440 divide but i will tell everybody they will come together and they will share power this is it's
00:07:41.280 not really a it's a divide where they're squabbling within the family so to speak but there's not
00:07:46.140 really a major separation here because ultimately they're willing to do whatever it takes to be in
00:07:50.760 power because they want a massively powerful state this is where i do think there should be
00:07:57.260 more attention paid to it mom donnie won largely being elected as his base on people in their 20s
00:08:06.600 and 30s whose mom and dad helped pay their uh who helped pay their rent in new york city that have
00:08:13.760 decided they don't like capitalism anymore so this tension is is very real and i think what do you
00:08:21.820 talk about class versus wealth um what what's the phrase you last for no it's it's wealth versus
00:08:27.260 status is the dichotomy okay so i think one of the foremost drivers of the far left right now
00:08:35.900 is people who are high status from an education perspective yes but they are not able to have
00:08:43.500 the societal success that they believe they should be entitled to based on their degree pedigree
00:08:49.620 and so they resent what they see in the larger world
00:08:54.760 and they have to figure out a reason why they are not having the success
00:08:59.480 that they should be having.
00:09:00.540 I feel like you saw what I saw probably on X,
00:09:03.680 which was the Nate Silver, Chris Hayes from MS Now back and forth.
00:09:08.720 Am I right on this?
00:09:09.740 Well, this is trending right now on social media
00:09:12.860 because Nate Silver called out what he says is the base of the left,
00:09:17.380 which is overly educated young people and i do think when you spend three hundred thousand dollars
00:09:24.240 on a degree and you come out and you make sixty thousand dollars a year there's a lot of people
00:09:29.680 who feel like the system is broken because they did everything that they think should be rewarded
00:09:34.440 and they aren't that is true and the next step in this and a lot of our people right now with us
00:09:42.280 are going to be nodding their heads there is so much seething resentment from upper middle class
00:09:50.480 primarily whites not entirely but upper middle class whites in liberal enclaves either a city
00:09:57.120 or a very blue suburb who go to doesn't even have to be an elite school but some kind of a name
00:10:04.160 brand school a brand a college that people know of or they get a degree that's supposed to sound
00:10:09.280 fancy and they're now 30 35 maybe 40 and the guy who started a plumbing company yeah or the guy who
00:10:19.720 has been selling rvs or the guy who's a really skilled electrician is making money hand over
00:10:27.660 fist buying a boat and a jet ski for the weekend and the gender studies major is furious about this
00:10:36.700 That is a very real blue, red, left, right dynamic right now in America.
00:10:44.080 White-collar jobs are getting replaced, and blue-collar jobs, many of them are becoming more valuable.
00:10:52.680 The asset, the skill that you actually have.
00:10:54.760 The other thing I would add into this, Buck, is they may well know people who happen to jump on the right company train and go work in some AI business.
00:11:05.340 so it's not only that they feel like they're being squeezed and left behind by the plumber
00:11:10.800 or the electrician out there who's having more financial success than they are and they're
00:11:15.280 looking around and saying but he didn't do as well on the sat as i did but he didn't get uh
00:11:21.120 as many different ap credits as i did why is he doing better and then the guy who is their
00:11:26.400 contemporary who may have gone to their school is suddenly worth millions of dollars because he
00:11:31.740 went to go work for open ai or xai or whatever it is and that divide like you're in that middle part
00:11:38.200 and you feel like you're getting left behind and the only way to explain it is capitalism is broken
00:11:43.100 and so i need to be a socialist now this is a critical but this is the whole this is behind
00:11:47.860 the whole dsa uh ethos right now and why all these people are uh clay and i love bringing the data to
00:11:55.460 this conversation which nate silver sort of spurred this by uh what we talked about we should pull
00:12:00.640 some of that we can just read through for everybody some of that online exchange by the way chris hayes
00:12:05.820 is an outlier in that he went to brown university the most intellectually unserious of the ivy league
00:12:12.440 just a fact you brown graduates can get mad at me it's true um in the most intellectually unserious
00:12:18.460 of the ivy league and the most liberal as well by the way not a surprise uh and he is a millionaire
00:12:24.940 many times over by doing what we do commentary but he's speaking for the class of white brooklynite
00:12:32.460 i went to brandeis i went to um colgate you know whatever gw no offense clay i went to one of these
00:12:41.040 schools that's super expensive amherst and i don't now have some fancy job that's paying me what i
00:12:47.920 think i'm worth to my point that i just made because i think a lot of people might even sneer
00:12:51.960 they go oh yeah sure buck the plumbers are making more than guys with master's degrees
00:12:56.160 if you own your plumbing business you are if you got four or five employees 80 percent i'm sorry
00:13:03.480 uh 20 percent of millionaires now are headed by retirees of the remaining 80 percent of people
00:13:09.800 with a million dollars or more net worth okay over two-thirds are self-employed small business
00:13:17.520 owners yeah what guys i mean this is the facts are the facts look the best way to make money
00:13:24.540 in america is to own a business that's just the reality now are there other ways that you can go
00:13:31.580 through the elite educational cadre and end up wealthy yes are there some incredibly highly
00:13:37.460 paid lawyers who are making millions of dollars a year yes highly paid doctors and whatnot but
00:13:43.280 the best way to make money is to own a small business that might not even be a very sexy
00:13:48.460 business can i tell you something true i don't think we've ever talked about this before
00:13:51.980 you i think are an outlier in this way in that you were willing to do you had a law degree but
00:13:58.900 were willing to do the media thing with a wife and kid or kids at the time yeah two kids there's no
00:14:07.300 way i would have started this career if i was married with kids no way because i thought the
00:14:11.880 I knew the failure rate was super, super, meaning failure rate that you could stay in this business and make a living over the long term.
00:14:17.980 A lot of people drop out, go do something else.
00:14:19.600 And by the way, a lot of them are very happy, and they have great lives, and they had fun doing media for five or ten years.
00:14:24.620 You are the rare bird in that you must have looked at Laura and been like, yeah, I'm going to write stuff online and make money doing it.
00:14:30.960 I did the same thing, but I was a single guy, no kids, no debt, no nothing, and so I could live very, very cheaply.
00:14:38.640 I'm just saying, if it wasn't for that, Clay, I would have gone to a business and probably
00:14:43.300 tried to start a business like a normal business in America.
00:14:47.220 I have a great wife, and I also have very high risk tolerance, and one might say a lot
00:14:54.320 of self-confidence that may or may not be justified, but so far has served me well.
00:14:59.120 And part of that is, I was just talking about people who make millions of dollars.
00:15:02.680 You know, law partners at big-time law firms, they make 10, 15.
00:15:07.500 Some of them now are making $20 million a year.
00:15:11.820 That's the kind of lawyers that big insurance companies, that big business,
00:15:16.760 those are the guys and gals that they are hiring.
00:15:20.200 Do you have those kind of resources?
00:15:22.220 No, you do not.
00:15:23.400 But guess what?
00:15:24.200 You may be fighting against them,
00:15:26.320 and that's why you need the best legal representation you can find,
00:15:30.160 and that's what we're doing at ClayTravisLaw.com.
00:15:34.180 Nationwide, we have the ability to represent you and go toe-to-toe with the big attorneys at the big insurance companies, at the big law firms that are fighting against your interest.
00:15:45.840 This is for the little guy.
00:15:47.620 This is to be able to find the right representation nationwide.
00:15:51.780 We can look over your case.
00:15:53.200 It doesn't cost you anything at all.
00:15:54.980 You can go check it out.
00:15:56.060 There's a phone number there if you want to call it as well, ClayTravisLaw.com.
00:16:00.600 I've been a lawyer for over 20 years now.
00:16:02.840 clay travis law.com get the kind of lawyer you need to fight back against the big business
00:16:10.120 lawyers out there charging a thousand dollars an hour making millions of dollars a year
00:16:15.400 clay travis law.com we'll get lawyers who can fight for you nationwide clay travis law.com
00:16:23.500 looking for normal in a world of crazy clay and buck have your back get bell pure fiber internet
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00:16:44.300 Second hour of Clay
00:16:45.620 and Buck kicks off right now. Everybody,
00:16:47.660 thanks for being here with us as always.
00:16:51.340 Interesting
00:16:51.820 to see the hand-wringing from within the
00:16:53.780 Democrat establishment
00:16:55.760 over the rise
00:16:57.440 of the far left from
00:16:59.680 within the Democrat ranks.
00:17:01.640 Clay, I think that there's something going on here
00:17:05.680 They want to harness this rabid enthusiasm
00:17:10.240 But they also don't want it to be in charge
00:17:14.360 It's like they want to have a pit bull
00:17:18.920 To roam the junkyard to keep people away
00:17:21.800 But they want to be able to put on a leash when they want to as well
00:17:24.480 They don't want this left wing stuff to get too
00:17:27.860 Sorry, I didn't even mean now the pit bull owners are going to come after
00:17:31.460 Let me tell you something.
00:17:33.000 If you want to waste your whole day responding to emails,
00:17:36.040 say anything about pit bulls being ferocious.
00:17:39.080 Anything at all.
00:17:40.100 I know you're not really a big dog guy.
00:17:41.640 I'm a huge dog guy.
00:17:43.140 Pit bull owners.
00:17:44.560 Guys, I'm just.
00:17:45.420 Every time you mention this, we get.
00:17:47.420 This is one where I don't have a crazy strong take on it.
00:17:52.260 And so everybody just gets mad at you for your super strong pit bull take.
00:17:56.460 I'm not doing it today.
00:17:57.420 Okay, pit bull owners.
00:17:58.340 We're not doing this today.
00:17:59.300 I know your pit bull is as sweet as a little baby piglet and you know blah blah blah I'm not doing
00:18:04.060 it today okay I just want to put that aside you know one day you'll know that I'm right but put
00:18:08.340 that aside so they want to be able to control this left-wing enthusiasm and and so they want
00:18:15.880 to give voice to it while not ceding too much of the of the power in the party going into this
00:18:23.040 midterm election so that's why you have for example isn't Mark Warner am I isn't he worth
00:18:28.360 like hundreds of millions of dollars am i right about this right isn't he one he's super wealthy
00:18:33.140 i don't know how wealthy he is but i think 100 million plus would be a good uh a good a good
00:18:38.900 guess uh uh crazy rich crazy rich okay so this guy's got a got a lot of cash and here he is
00:18:47.120 talking about this cut 13 talking about him so this is the senator from virginia saying
00:18:51.740 why are dsa democrat socialists of america democratic socialists of america uh why are they
00:18:59.000 having a moment right now listen to this play 13 i very much disagree with some of the dsa
00:19:04.300 positions but there is a level of wealth inequality in this country that we got to address
00:19:08.900 with it's one of the reasons why on the ai issues we need a revenue stream that the tech community
00:19:13.960 pays into to help on this worker transformation one of the things that i get upset with on the
00:19:18.700 Democratic side, and I think we're starting to change this and recognize this. We talk a good
00:19:23.660 game sometimes, but actually delivering. A huge frustration for me was when we put all the money,
00:19:28.540 $62 billion, into broadband, but under President Biden, we didn't put a mile of fiber in the ground
00:19:33.600 because partially the law set up, but we had way too much bureaucracy. I think the Democratic
00:19:37.860 Party directionally is right. I think we ought to talk less and deliver more, and that frustration
00:19:42.560 if we don't deliver more comes out with some of these folks on the extreme.
00:19:46.500 clay they are good at promising stuff and appealing to people's emotions but
00:19:53.460 they are bad at actually governing they can't get anything done i think one of the best examples of
00:20:02.980 this they still talk about health care think about how i one of my great frustrations and i'm i'm
00:20:08.580 gonna i'm gonna hand it to you with this but one of my great frustrations is with people who don't
00:20:13.740 take accountability and don't learn from mistakes we all make mistakes we all make errors every
00:20:19.040 thing you know clay even you are wrong sometimes we all make mistakes okay this can happen and
00:20:25.540 clay's like i mean really though am i really like but yes we all make errors but do you learn from
00:20:30.760 them or not do you get better do you get smarter do you get stronger do you get faster those are
00:20:34.100 the those are the things that you should be thinking about as you do this democrats are
00:20:38.000 talking about medicare for all now as if this is some brilliant new idea people like me were
00:20:43.300 telling them in 2010 15 years 16 years ago depending you're going to ruin health care
00:20:51.520 with your obamacare nonsense and you're eventually just going to be crying about how we need
00:20:55.760 a single-payer system medicare for all yada yada yada and yet instead of saying wow you guys are
00:21:02.140 right obamacare is a travesty it did triple everybody's premium costs it didn't make anything
00:21:07.200 better and you saw us a mile away with this medicare for all what do they do exactly what
00:21:12.160 they said they would do or we said they would do so a bunch of things one i think we were talking
00:21:17.840 about the rise of democrat socialism which is just a pathway to communism i do think many young
00:21:24.540 people have the historical knowledge of a goldfish and if you you and i even though you like to make
00:21:33.280 fun of how much older i am you were able to grow up in an era when you were cognizant of communism
00:21:40.960 and the battle of the Cold War going on.
00:21:44.420 And if you grew up in the 1980s or the 90s,
00:21:47.860 certainly if you grew up in the 40s, the 50s, 60s, 70s,
00:21:51.560 you experienced that.
00:21:53.180 So you have seen the evil that communism can bring to bear.
00:21:58.120 Many of the people listening to us right now,
00:22:00.340 we could open up phone lines and we would just say,
00:22:02.980 hey, did you grow up during a communist era
00:22:05.860 before you were fortunate enough to become a United States citizen?
00:22:09.300 What did you see there?
00:22:10.320 Many people right now living in Cuba, a lot of reports came out about the failures of Cuba, actually seeing what happens when far left wing policies are put in place used to be something that Americans had experienced.
00:22:24.160 Now there is none of that. And so these kids, young people who, frankly, are idealistic, often morons, they don't know any better.
00:22:32.800 And then you've got glib and very talented social media stars like Mom Donnie, like AOC, like even Bernie Sanders, who can sell this to a new generation that doesn't have the skills to realize they're being sold a bill of goods.
00:22:49.740 We played that cut of Senator Mark Warner Buck.
00:22:52.520 He used to represent an element of the Democrat Party.
00:22:57.560 You referenced his wealth.
00:22:59.020 I think he is a self-made wealthy person through business.
00:23:03.740 There used to be Democrat politicians who made money and then went into politics.
00:23:10.340 He's maybe the last one who understands how to make a profit and how to pay employees.
00:23:16.080 Well, I hate this, though.
00:23:17.540 By the way, he's worth $200 million.
00:23:18.900 dollars that's like because there are disclosures about this we're in the senate just he's worth
00:23:22.800 over 200 million dollars so he's more he his kids his kids kids kids unless they get really crazy
00:23:30.140 uh with their money they're they're never going to have to really work or worry about money
00:23:33.920 what i think is interesting though is instead of seeing the pathway that he had understanding that
00:23:39.540 america makes that possible and wanting more of that uh by the way not just the opportunity for
00:23:46.420 people but also the wealth generation effect of what he's been able to do meaning there's a lot
00:23:51.840 of people along the way that he's paying that he's giving money to that he's employing he's doing
00:23:55.360 he's going to play this game of yeah um i'm going to pretend like i feel sorry for what i made as
00:24:00.800 well and i want to play footsie with these imbeciles who think that if we have uh clowns
00:24:07.160 dressing up literally dressing up as mao as that hassan piker guy did recently he's wearing like
00:24:12.480 a Mao suit in public good way to get attention um that this always were sorry always fails it
00:24:19.180 never works and it always leads to disaster and more suffering here is Andrew Cuomo another
00:24:25.420 establishment old guard democrat who has this to say play 12. the democratic party is in the
00:24:33.420 middle of the civil war right and you have moderate mainstream democrats such as myself
00:24:38.600 which have been challenged by the far left extremists.
00:24:44.260 Socialism has not worked anywhere on the globe.
00:24:47.860 Promises of free lunch, free buses, free rent, free everything.
00:24:51.980 There is no such thing as free.
00:24:53.780 Someone always pays.
00:24:56.400 This is a dream.
00:24:57.960 This is nirvana.
00:24:59.280 This is utopia.
00:25:00.880 And they're selling to young people who are buying it.
00:25:04.240 But it's not going to work.
00:25:05.620 And the socialist movement is the best thing the Republicans have going for them.
00:25:11.820 He is correct until the end, right?
00:25:14.620 I mean, meaning he doesn't understand that his team is actually the socialist team.
00:25:18.720 They just call themselves Democrats.
00:25:20.520 This also, I think, is symptomatic of a refusal to look in the mirror.
00:25:26.920 And let me explain what I mean by this.
00:25:29.080 We talked about the wake of the 2024 election.
00:25:32.320 were democrats going to look in the mirror and say hey the reason we lost wasn't because people
00:25:40.620 heard our message and rejected it it was because we didn't tell our story good enough the messenger
00:25:50.300 was wrong it should have been somebody other than kamala here is what i think democrats are missing
00:25:55.960 and i would put myself in this camp and i think there are many people out there listening to us
00:26:00.660 right now who are similar to me the democrat party that you grew up with does not exist anymore
00:26:08.940 you go back and look at things that barack obama said in 2008 certainly you go back and look at
00:26:15.700 things that bill clinton said in 1992 and 1996 heck that al gore said leaving aside the crazy
00:26:22.280 climate change stuff in 2000 that party does not exist and buck why does that matter if they were
00:26:30.300 intelligent bill clinton managed to get elected in 1992 yes partly because ross perot was in the
00:26:36.760 race and partly because george bush senior did not run a very good campaign in 92 but also because
00:26:44.820 he went back to the drawing board after beat downs in 1980 1984 1988 and said we have to come up with
00:26:55.020 a new message because we're just wrong and the democrat party right now is just anti-trump no
00:27:03.140 matter what trump says by the way even if trump says some things that democrats advocated for as
00:27:08.260 recently as a few years ago can we get the audio did you see this circulating on social media book
00:27:13.980 of kamala harris saying we need way more paper ballots to make sure that our elections are secure
00:27:20.080 in 2019 i mean if sometimes you sit around out there and you think to yourself boy this doesn't
00:27:28.280 like the opinion that i have now you're telling me is a far right wing opinion it doesn't it
00:27:33.900 seems like a very moderate opinion from 2008 2012 2016 even 2019 they have gone so insanely radical
00:27:43.140 and they haven't recognized that the reason people are rejecting them
00:27:48.320 is because of their message,
00:27:50.640 not because their message isn't being communicated well enough.
00:27:54.460 So anyway, I just think this is super important
00:27:56.740 because the failure to acknowledge why you lost
00:28:00.200 is a huge part of why I believe they will continue to lose.
00:28:05.080 Maybe they can scrape somebody, drag somebody over the line
00:28:08.080 like they did Biden in 2020
00:28:09.640 by just lying about what he actually believes but the reality is they're wrong on all the issues
00:28:17.660 that matter and voters who are paying attention even voters like me who voted democrat when we
00:28:22.760 were younger have left them i bet there are a million people listening to us today buck
00:28:28.120 i mean this seriously that at some point in time have voted for democrats and are here because
00:28:35.100 they actually do pay attention to what the
00:28:37.240 arguments are, and they recognize that
00:28:39.260 Democrats are just wrong on all
00:28:41.200 of these issues.
00:28:43.300 Yeah. Well said.
00:28:45.780 Thank you.
00:28:46.840 And again,
00:28:48.460 what they may do is find
00:28:51.140 I think it's going to be Kamala, because I think
00:28:53.100 identity politics has so overtaken the party.
00:28:55.180 As I've said, I think she's going to be the nominee.
00:28:57.480 Maybe AOC is going to be able
00:28:59.120 to be a more moderate version
00:29:00.720 of Kamala Harris and appeal to the
00:29:03.180 same minority female voters.
00:29:05.100 and be able to kind of clip away some of those supporters, I don't know.
00:29:10.760 The other option is they just go find the blandest white guy possible, Andy Beshear,
00:29:16.460 and try to drag him across the finish line and argue he's a red state governor.
00:29:21.660 He's like Bill Clinton all over again.
00:29:23.440 That's the Biden move, basically.
00:29:24.680 Yeah, that basically is what they did with Biden.
00:29:26.500 You get some white guy that seems like, well, because he doesn't really stand for very much,
00:29:31.280 he's moderate, which is not actually true, but nonetheless.
00:29:34.580 Yeah, no, that is always possible.
00:29:36.860 It would be very interesting.
00:29:37.560 Look, hey, just from the pure entertainment and information perspective,
00:29:42.800 watching the Democrats fight this out over the next 18 months or so
00:29:48.720 is going to be fascinating.
00:29:50.440 It will be really interesting to see how this goes
00:29:52.440 because I don't think there is a –
00:29:54.480 this is a rare moment where there is no conventional wisdom at all
00:29:58.440 about who the party leader is or will be.
00:30:01.660 it's totally an up for grab situation it's like day one of the world cup some of us pick england
00:30:08.900 and then get very sad but it could be anybody is the point there's a whole bunch of different
00:30:13.520 options in here um legacy box is incredible it's a company that we love they've been a sponsor here
00:30:19.900 for years i've used them for my own family's memories clay's using for his family's memories
00:30:24.520 it's just really cool they take your old media as you know now a lot of you have done it and
00:30:29.560 that's great you should tell other people about it and if you haven't done it yet now is the time
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00:30:48.440 transferred that old media to new digital media for over two million families whole process is
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00:31:03.180 on the cloud ready to watch and share from anywhere this makes an excellent gift too it's like giving
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00:31:20.500 pals clay and buck on the iheart app you know what let's hop into this welcome back to clay and buck
00:31:25.940 uh so my friend john lefebvre who's on uh who's on uh x he's pretty active on x he was some of
00:31:37.320 you may recall if you're an og twitter user he was the goldman sachs elevator account do you
00:31:42.600 remember that clay oh yeah that was him john yeah yeah yeah so and he wrote a book about it i've had
00:31:48.480 him on podcast before he shared this uh and i i think it's really interesting and we're it's it's
00:31:55.440 a talker as they say so let's let's talk about this a little bit he wrote this if you have kids
00:31:59.760 under 13 i do again this is john writing they'll never drive a car except occasionally for fun
00:32:06.840 the first car at 16 right of passage is dead they'll just get a self-driving tesla you set
00:32:13.820 the speed limit cap the acceleration lock the safety features enforce curfew and get pinged
00:32:19.500 the second they break the rules safest car on the road and one of the most affordable and since
00:32:25.480 most cars spend 90 of their life parked this one will make money pay for itself as a robo taxi when
00:32:32.660 not being used it's also an entrepreneurial financial literacy tool every kid will become
00:32:38.720 a small business owner also that's point one which we'll talk about this is a separate point
00:32:44.540 But I'll just put this out there where or if they go to college won't matter either.
00:32:51.840 Our job as parents now is to instill intellectual curiosity, happiness, and give them foundational
00:32:59.160 support via hard assets and diversified cash flow.
00:33:03.660 The future is going to be wild, unknown unknowns.
00:33:08.700 Clay, I we should talk about it.
00:33:12.140 I co-sign both of those fully.
00:33:17.240 What say you?
00:33:18.260 Point one.
00:33:18.940 I told my 11-year-old recently as I was riding along in the Tesla, which we bought,
00:33:25.160 and some people out there say, Tesla's Super is $50,000, which for cars these days, brand
00:33:33.580 new, the car that we have, was $50,000.
00:33:37.140 and tesla gives you one percent interest for the next seven years i believe so one percent interest
00:33:46.220 the inflation rate is roughly three percent right 2.8 whatever the heck it is so less than inflation
00:33:52.300 and you have seven years to pay it off all right so this is not me sitting around saying everybody
00:33:57.660 should go buy a i don't know like a a bmw suv or i think bmw has suvs or a ranger rover or something
00:34:06.760 like that that everybody knows is super expensive this is a very affordable car for the masses that
00:34:12.160 i bought for my teenage son because teenage boys are morons and they often take way too many risks
00:34:18.560 when they're driving and i think self-driving cars are safer for teenage boys on in general
00:34:24.360 than said than driving themselves so i didn't i didn't have this uh in my life because i grew up
00:34:29.440 in new york city where kids were just taking the subway or taxis if it was you know at night or
00:34:34.920 whatever to get around or walking obviously but people didn't have car a lot of my friends didn't
00:34:40.860 get driver's licenses until they were basically in college yeah i got one at 16 but a lot of people
00:34:46.040 waited till they were a little bit older but i when i went to college i had a lot of friends
00:34:50.220 from all over the country and they all would tell me that there was a very common thing of the high
00:34:56.600 school tragedy of one kid in their high school class it was a pretty big school you know usually
00:35:02.740 in the suburbs somewhere died in a car accident yeah that was a common thing that i heard from a
00:35:07.580 lot of my friends which i you know you're talking about like a 16 year old kid maybe had a friend
00:35:12.000 or two in the car i went to the funeral actually of a 16 year old who i knew who wasn't living in
00:35:18.120 new york at the time but died you know her boyfriend ran a stop sign they you know they
00:35:23.220 got t-boned by so that was a horrible thing i think that is effectively going to be gone here
00:35:30.520 along with a lot of other changes.
00:35:32.600 But I think that people haven't really, like, this isn't one of these,
00:35:36.700 oh, they're going to be like robo-taxis everywhere in the sky thing.
00:35:40.000 That's a little further off for a bunch of reasons
00:35:42.380 because the sky is already very crowded, by the way.
00:35:44.140 It's a big problem.
00:35:45.560 Clay, this is here.
00:35:46.880 Yeah.
00:35:47.140 This is here now.
00:35:48.920 I think it is akin to, and I don't know what the exact year would have been,
00:35:53.740 but in 1926, let's say, there would have been somebody out there
00:36:00.240 I don't know when the radio officially took off, but there might have been a guy on the radio 100 years ago telling you, hey, everybody out there who spent their whole lives riding horses, this car is going to be a big deal, and all of the knowledge that you have about horses, it's basically going to be worthless in a few years.
00:36:20.840 I am here to tell you, and think about that.
00:36:23.380 In 1910, almost everyone in the country, in the entire United States,
00:36:29.880 would have known how to take care of a horse.
00:36:32.120 Immense amount of knowledge.
00:36:33.360 How do you feed a horse?
00:36:34.440 How do you put down a horse?
00:36:35.600 How do you make sure the horse's feet are okay?
00:36:38.540 Like, all of this would have been very standard.
00:36:41.020 I'm going to teach every young person, everybody who's 30, 40 years old,
00:36:46.580 everybody who's certainly older than that,
00:36:48.100 everybody would have had immense knowledge about horses now most of you unless you are tended to be
00:36:54.140 extremely wealthy or a cowboy you're not on horses very much right i'm telling you that that point
00:37:01.120 about driving cars buck 40 000 people a year die in car accidents 40 000 to your point 16 year olds
00:37:11.100 really young people everybody listening to us right now almost i bet can tell you a story
00:37:17.220 awful one about a teenage boy or girl they know who died early on driving and by the way people
00:37:23.720 have lost moms dads you know going to the grocery store this will become a story that your grandkids
00:37:30.300 will look around and say it's crazy i'm telling you the tech is there it's going to change
00:37:34.500 overwhelmingly and it's going to happen fast it's absolutely the case by the way i i uh where i live
00:37:40.140 i am friends with a few neighbors in neighbor families who have kids who are your kids age
00:37:46.580 clay you know 16 year old 17 year old around there they're all getting teslas yes the parents
00:37:52.820 are getting that and people say oh but it's so no actually for new car prices and especially
00:37:57.020 i'm saying 50k 1 interest we're not paid by tesla we probably should be they should be a
00:38:01.880 presenting sponsor but i'm telling you i just bought a brand new tesla this spring it was 50
00:38:07.480 000 all in and uh and they have one percent interest so this is not some super rich person
00:38:15.420 oh my goodness when you look at what new cars cost and you got one that was probably pretty
00:38:19.960 souped up with some extras i mean you can get it was nice yeah it was not but i mean it was
00:38:23.420 they have like a hundred thousand dollar version i didn't get that for my kids but for 50 000 by
00:38:27.940 the way you can also buy them used for 25 30k like they hold their value i think decently you
00:38:33.920 can get a standard model three not really sorry we're doing a free tesla commercial here did you
00:38:38.520 ever get your tesla drive by the way weren't you supposed to get to do a test drive i'm a little
00:38:43.020 upset about they kept canceling on me because i was being lazy and and having them they were
00:38:46.900 supposed to come to me but that's a whole other conversation um the model 3 standard starts at
00:38:52.800 36 grand right now which i got a model car with a few that is not in whistles that's very that is
00:38:58.220 not expensive that's not an expensive new car i i know i know that sounds crazy because you used
00:39:03.100 to be able to get like a brand spanking new bmw with you know for 36 grand you know 15 years ago
00:39:08.300 uh but yeah that's a for new car price it's not that expensive here's the thing though that does
00:39:12.460 concern me we haven't even gotten the college conversation yet which is also something from
00:39:15.940 john's tweet that i thought was really interesting but i did have this experience of getting into
00:39:21.160 the autonomous driving uh what do you call them you know the google cars the um waymos waymos
00:39:28.020 thank you i got into the waymo i love the waymo i love it's not like trump i love the waymo some
00:39:33.260 people are saying it's beautiful very nice in the waymo uh it's fantastic it's it's a it's terrific
00:39:39.100 the waymo but i got into a waymo and i i don't i when i'm driving around miami beach proper if i'm
00:39:47.820 not getting on a highway no one goes more you can't go more than 20 because there's traffic
00:39:52.020 and stuff so i'm going 20 miles an hour i didn't put my seat belt on i got a i got a naughty a
00:39:59.280 naughty boy email from waymo google being like if we see you not using your seat belt again we're
00:40:05.560 going to ban you now this reminds me of when uber did the whole mask thing and i got threatened with
00:40:13.140 being banned from uber during the pandemic because i kept taking my mask off in the uber car and and
00:40:20.900 they were like you know if you do this again we're going to be now of course that was by the way uber
00:40:24.460 you were wrong that was completely pointless and stupid and uber should be ashamed of themselves
00:40:28.280 they're not but they should be ashamed uber corporate for that decision um because it was
00:40:32.520 preposterous but the future of cars that have software and pro this there is a there is a
00:40:42.320 freedom issue that i can see brother element that is fair to discuss this is going to be you know
00:40:48.100 by the way they're going to be able to the same way they can pull your cell phone data right now
00:40:53.400 which they can law enforcement can easily do that know everywhere you've been they do this now for
00:40:57.820 florida new york tax stuff they think you're in new york too much they'll pull your cell phone
00:41:02.000 data easy for them to do and they'll know exactly where you are um they'll be able to do this with
00:41:07.900 cars they'll know now i think that's also true of some cars that have a gps in them but they're
00:41:13.220 gonna clay they're gonna know how fast you went they're gonna know if you went through any red
00:41:17.220 lights they're gonna they're gonna know everything and now our insurance companies going to just say
00:41:21.580 you know what you know how we're gonna gauge your insurance costs we're gonna just pull all the data
00:41:25.740 from your car and we're gonna so this is there's a little part of this that is because by the way
00:41:30.800 can you go over the speed limit anymore now are they going to start saying you know what we're
00:41:34.520 just going to pass a law that they have to set that you never go over the speed limit with your
00:41:37.980 autonomous driving so everyone's going to be going 35 when they should be going 50 yeah it's it's
00:41:43.120 going to be fascinating there are going to be a lot of questions to ask i one of my favorite
00:41:46.780 economic lessons that i got back in school and i don't know how many of you have heard this example
00:41:51.580 but everything in life is about analyzing risk and obviously this was a huge part of the discussion
00:41:57.300 surrounding covid if we made the speed limits 15 or 20 miles an hour in this country no one
00:42:05.540 basically would die in cars ever right i guess you could still drive off the side of a mountain
00:42:10.900 you could still drive into water really slowly uh and and find yourself dying in that method method
00:42:19.060 but basically we have said hey we think it's important to be able to drive 70 miles an hour
00:42:24.660 and as a result we're willing to accept 40 000 deaths a year i do think the economic analysis
00:42:32.240 of how we set speed limits and everything else self-driving cars buck should be so much better
00:42:38.600 at handling traffic and so much better at keeping us safe that what i hope doesn't happen is what
00:42:47.340 i'm already seeing happen which is if a self-driving vehicle is involved in an accident
00:42:53.000 it's front page news oh my goodness but if 20 people die in my home state of tennessee every
00:43:00.980 day which may or may not be roughly the math of how many people die every day most of them never
00:43:06.600 make the news so self-driving cars are going to have to have a proven record that starts to be
00:43:11.300 like the airlines where now if if if a plane crashes it is incredibly rare for an american
00:43:20.420 and I'm not trying to jinx anything here,
00:43:23.300 but it's incredibly rare for an American carrier
00:43:25.000 to have a fatal crash these days.
00:43:26.740 We go years, years without an airline fatality.
00:43:31.620 I think that they're going to be able to get to the place
00:43:33.840 where autonomous driving caused fatality.
00:43:37.580 Now, that's a different thing,
00:43:38.940 because some people are going to T-bone an autonomous car
00:43:41.460 because they're maniacs and they're driving improperly or something.
00:43:43.860 But the software causing the fatality, I think,
00:43:47.860 is going to be at such a it's going to be so much safer than what human beings are capable of
00:43:54.220 by the numbers that it will start to be seen as clearly unsafe to drive versus autonomous.
00:44:01.100 I mean, the numbers already indicate that, but perception is going to show that, I think,
00:44:05.780 very soon. Yeah. And look, here's where things can change rapidly. Imagine what your car insurance
00:44:11.340 bill would be if suddenly traffic accidents dropped by half imagine what your uh health
00:44:18.720 insurance would be if suddenly the number of people being severely injured in automobile
00:44:23.920 accidents collapsed as well the benefits of this being able to be done safely really start to scale
00:44:32.980 on a way that i don't think here's another one buck think about how much fewer because these
00:44:38.300 vehicles are going to be able to constantly circle circle they'll drop you off and then
00:44:43.300 they'll be able to go back to a house or they'll be able to go to a holding pen somewhere think
00:44:48.160 about the amount of space that we waste on parking lots probably the most inefficient thing in
00:44:55.000 america is the amount of parking lot space that we have to have think about the the the way more
00:45:00.640 housing that we could build way more affordably in really desirable areas if you didn't need
00:45:07.540 400 yards of parking for all of the places we go the grocery stores the malls the shopping areas
00:45:14.360 it's transformative on a level that i don't think a lot of people have really thought through yet
00:45:18.960 and just to be clear this is in progress what we're talking about this is not pie in the sky
00:45:24.220 or one day some people are far more aware of it in their day-to-day lives than others like i have
00:45:28.860 waymos driving outside my house all the time now i mean this is just this is going on and i've
00:45:32.640 gotten in them um but with teslas now my garage is full of teslas with tesla chargers in them
00:45:37.920 the garage where i live you're you where you live i plug in a buck i plug my car in like it's my
00:45:44.760 cell phone it's just a wall charger like i just put i mean any moron i am a moron on tech uh i can
00:45:51.820 easily plug it in um and you can charge it anywhere and by the way we should also the future
00:45:56.820 should be nuclear so you don't have to rely on fossil fuels not because i'm worried about climate
00:46:01.920 change but just because it's far more efficient you can have way better nuclear power plants
00:46:06.340 which means the more electric you go at all we're going to be living in the jetsons here
00:46:11.460 pretty soon maybe not quite with the air taxi stuff but there's going to be some pretty
00:46:15.720 the robot are you going to do the robot order for the fall you know there's the robot i'm not a big
00:46:20.620 i'm not a big robot guy that makes me a little bit more nervous i don't know we get a robot that
00:46:24.460 we put in a vols jersey and it says nice things about sec football and all of a sudden i think
00:46:29.440 Like Jeeves the robot is going to be like, yes, Clay Travis, we will watch the game.
00:46:33.940 Like, I could see this happening.
00:46:35.500 I got kids to watch games with.
00:46:37.000 I'm going to be slow on the robot uptake.
00:46:39.520 Fair enough.
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00:47:26.820 keeping it real keeping it right clay and buck find them on the iheart app or wherever you get
00:47:34.280 your podcast get bell pure fiber internet with crave netflix and disney plus from 94 a month
00:47:40.860 price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit visit bell.ca
00:47:45.960 for details and to check availability bell connection is everything welcome in clay and
00:47:52.160 buck joined now by treasury secretary scott besant we appreciate him taking the time to hang out with
00:47:58.200 us and we'll dive right into this because buck has a one-year-old that he has signed up for trump
00:48:03.540 accounts for people out there that have not done this that have young children what can the impact
00:48:09.400 over time over 20 years mean for these young kids and why should they be signing up i'll let you make
00:48:15.720 a pitch. Good, gentlemen. Good to be with you. And so everyone, children age 18 to newborns
00:48:24.620 should be signing up for newborns who were born during President Trump's term. They're
00:48:29.260 going to get a $1,000 seed investment from the U.S. Treasury. That's going to be put
00:48:34.040 into a low-cost index option. And that could compound at historical rates. Just that $1,000
00:48:43.220 could be between $3,000 and $5,000 at age 18.
00:48:49.940 Parents, employers, family members, friends can put up to $5,000 a year tax-free into the account.
00:49:00.740 And if that maximum is made over the years, then you could have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:49:07.440 We've got some of our nation's great philanthropists like Susan Michael Dell.
00:49:12.040 are putting up $6.25 billion for children who are not in the top 25% of zip codes by income level.
00:49:21.920 And that will go to children across the age groups.
00:49:26.740 Harold Hamm, for instance, another great philanthropist, is doing the same thing in Oklahoma.
00:49:33.760 us so like these things could really be stacked and it's a very good way for families to start
00:49:40.920 saving for their children and at age 18 becomes the child's property they become an adult
00:49:49.080 and they can either use it for they can use it for anything but school car purchase home down
00:49:57.380 payment, or it could be rolled into a classic IRA, which at age 60, 65 could be in the hundreds
00:50:08.380 of thousands. Secretary Besson, appreciate you being with us. We're talking a lot these days
00:50:13.720 about how the American people feel about the economy, and with the midterm election looming,
00:50:19.660 it's obviously something that isn't just a matter of public sentiment, but will soon be
00:50:24.580 public vote uh about how things are going what's your overview uh your sense of how things are
00:50:31.280 going what's going really well what's the administration focused on putting more attention
00:50:35.720 on and what can we expect from now until the end of this year in terms of action either from your
00:50:40.460 office or from the administration more broadly yeah so uh look let me just look back and i'll
00:50:47.120 tell you what we're not going to do we're not going to do what the biden administration did
00:50:50.720 and said that, like anyone with economic anxiety, that they don't know what they're talking about.
00:50:56.740 It's a vibe session.
00:50:58.580 We understand that there was this torrid inflation during the Biden years,
00:51:04.480 21.5% statistical inflation, probably higher for working families, probably in the mid-30s.
00:51:13.640 And thus far, the underlying economy is quite strong.
00:51:19.520 Core inflation has been coming down, and we've got this temporary price spike,
00:51:26.060 mainly in gasoline and energy, energy crude derivatives, because of the conflict in Iran.
00:51:34.180 We will get to the other side of this.
00:51:36.380 We had prices are well off the high.
00:51:39.320 We had a brief respite, respite for a few weeks.
00:51:47.140 The conflict has, the kinetic portion of the conflict has resumed again, but we'll get to the other side of this.
00:51:53.420 The other thing that we are seeing are the benefits of, you can either call it the one big beautiful bill or the working families tax cuts.
00:52:01.380 I'm also the IRS commissioner acting, I would add, and that we saw 44% of filers took one of the president's signature policies,
00:52:14.380 policies, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, reduced Social Security taxes for great seniors
00:52:20.900 or deductibility of interest on American-made cars. And 97% of the people who took those
00:52:29.360 deductions make less than $200,000. We've got the enhanced child tax credit. There are a lot
00:52:38.180 of things in this bill. We're talking to Treasury Secretary Scott Besson. I know one thing you've
00:52:43.500 been focused on you just mentioned oil and gas prices there's talk that there may be new pipelines
00:52:48.980 being built that could potentially take down the percentage of oil and gas that has to travel
00:52:54.120 through the Strait of Hormuz which would lessen some of the Iranian leadership's power but you
00:53:00.520 have been tracking working on all of the funds that are being hidden that have been in the
00:53:06.580 Ayatollah's control what have you found by being able to track those dollars and how much is this
00:53:12.880 kleptocracy, which we don't talk about a lot, the actual theft that's occurring from the Iranian
00:53:18.060 people on behalf of their leadership. What have you found? Well, we found billions of dollars
00:53:24.040 that we're tracking it across the globe. We have some of it in blocked accounts. We have frozen
00:53:31.160 crypto wallets. We believe that we have found the trust company that controls the new Ayatollah's
00:53:40.100 property portfolio across the globe, several hundred million dollar properties. We hope to
00:53:45.340 be able to publish photos and addresses of those properties. And most importantly, we are
00:53:52.520 husbanding these assets for the Iranian people. It belongs to them. This is a kleptocracy
00:54:00.460 masking as a religious organization on the Ayatollah side.
00:54:07.400 And then the IRGC, the Iranian Republican Guard,
00:54:11.240 we think that they maybe skim a third of the oil revenues.
00:54:16.720 So we have been tracking both individual Guard members
00:54:20.280 and clamping down on their economy.
00:54:24.740 The first six weeks, the kinetic portion of the war,
00:54:28.080 which our military executed brilliantly, destroyed their Air Force, destroyed their Navy.
00:54:36.720 I believe we destroyed 85% or 90% of their missile production capability,
00:54:41.480 destroyed a large amount of their existing missile stockpile and drones.
00:54:49.080 And then we moved on.
00:54:50.700 So that was epic fury.
00:54:51.820 We moved on to what we call economic fury.
00:54:55.240 And that includes the blockade.
00:54:58.080 which I believe shocked the Iranians that they were having oil,
00:55:05.560 they were having to take down their oil production.
00:55:08.900 We gave them a chance.
00:55:10.300 We took the blockade down, took the sanctions off for a few days,
00:55:15.340 and they did not perform.
00:55:18.860 So we are constricting and tightening the noose again.
00:55:25.620 Secretary of the Treasury, Besson with us now.
00:55:28.080 Mr. Secretary, I just wanted you to react to this headline and then give us whatever details you can,
00:55:33.760 because we know that anti-fraud efforts for this administration have become a major focus.
00:55:41.340 And the Post reported this morning, New York Post, Treasury stopped nearly $100 million in taxpayer money from going to dead people.
00:55:50.520 What's going on here?
00:55:52.640 Well, it gives new meaning to dead beats.
00:55:55.300 But what we've been able to do, thanks to President Trump's leadership, we've been able to use – there's a government-wide program called the Do Not Pay, but we were not able to access that.
00:56:11.480 The systems don't talk to each other, and there's a good privacy side to that, but there's an inefficient side to that for Treasury, for Social Security, or tax payments.
00:56:24.280 So we've been able to merge those two, and we think that we've stopped almost $100 million in payments last year,
00:56:34.100 and we think it's going to total almost $350 million for people.
00:56:42.560 I would assume it's either fraud from people who created the accounts or taken them over
00:56:49.520 or relatives who just didn't want to admit that they weren't supposed to get the checks anymore.
00:56:58.140 I know you're from South Carolina, and I know this is probably the last question we'll have time for.
00:57:03.640 How well did you know Lindsey Graham?
00:57:05.240 What do you think about his sister succeeding him?
00:57:08.280 Did you consider at all, I know you have a very serious job right now in the cabinet,
00:57:12.200 did you consider at all the possibility of potentially running for the Senate?
00:57:16.740 I knew Senator Graham very well. He was a great American, a great patriot. He loved his state. He loved his country.
00:57:27.560 And all I'll say is it was unfortunate. He was busy taking care of the American people and didn't take very good care of himself.
00:57:35.740 I think Darlene's a fantastic person. There are some other great candidates, too.
00:57:40.560 is that I had a house in the Myrtle Beach area, Russell Frye, the congressman from there,
00:57:47.320 7th District. I think that 7th District voted 81% for President Trump. So Myrtle Beach is Trump
00:57:55.740 country. And he threw his hat in the ring this morning. So there's some great choices. It's
00:58:02.040 going to be a very fulsome republican primary and look I think I have the best job in DC and
00:58:11.200 it's an honor to help President Trump and I think this is the best way to do it I have one boss who
00:58:17.600 doesn't ever sleep and I prefer that than having 5.5 million great South Carolinians
00:58:24.440 that's outstanding how often does he call you in the middle of the night by the way I know I said
00:58:31.740 final question but how often does president trump call you in the middle of the night what's that
00:58:35.680 like uh well it always begins with the question scott i didn't wake you did i no no sir i am
00:58:42.900 always awake at 152 on a tuesday there you go secretary bestin thanks for coming on and please
00:58:49.860 come back soon appreciate you sir okay thank you let me tell you about rapid radios for a moment
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