00:22:09.600And so if you had way fewer illegal immigrants,
00:22:13.080people would have to pay way less for housing in the New York City area.
00:22:17.600And so the whole concept of freezing rent actually gets the incentive structure backwards,
00:22:24.400because what you need to do is encourage building and create far more rentable units
00:22:31.400and encourage the rehabilitation of some of these buildings that are otherwise not rentable right now.
00:22:38.060And when you freeze rent, you actually create an economic disincentive to increase the amount of available housing in Manhattan and the New York City area.
00:22:49.780So this is also basic that, you know, the laws of economics do apply across party and across city and across state,
00:22:58.960whether they're blue or red, and the fact that we can't even have a real argument with Mom Donnie,
00:23:03.820where people point out this is, first of all, as Cuomo said, he doesn't even have the authority to do it.
00:23:08.540But if you truly desperately thought that rent was too high in New York City,
00:23:12.240what you should do is figure out a way to build as many new housing units as possible,
00:23:18.620which feels like very basic common sense to me, but it runs into, oh, well, then we've got climate issues,
00:23:26.280or it's so hard to get building permits, and so many of you out there are just fed up with this.
00:24:52.920It'll cost you so much to evict people in Washington, D.C. that you end up paying them off to leave.
00:25:00.380Who wants to go through the headache of, I'm going to build a new eight unit, you know, multifamily in Northeast D.C.
00:25:07.160And I'm going to, when half your tenants can say, I'm not paying you anymore, and you end up paying them to leave after they've, you know, screwed you out of eight months of rent.
00:25:17.980And, by the way, a couple of stories that are also out there.
00:25:21.680Let me build on this for a minute, Buck.
00:25:23.440L.A., a lot of you listening to us right now in L.A. are nodding along.
00:25:29.100They still haven't gotten the ability to rebuild the areas that were burned down in Los Angeles because getting building permits in Democrat-run cities,
00:25:39.520even for burned down homes, is virtually impossible.
00:25:44.580And you know who knows this better than anybody.
00:25:47.260Trump, who is a builder and is building a ballroom right now because he found out there weren't zoning restrictions in D.C.
00:25:53.160Speaking of D.C., Buck, all flights at Reagan National have been halted following a reported bomb threat on an arriving aircraft.
00:26:03.900And so the whole air traffic yesterday, we talked about Houston.
00:26:07.940Houston, there's a report that just came out that starting next week they may have to restrict airspace because of the government shutdown,
00:26:16.260meaning whole swaths of the country they're going to be restricting air travel.
00:26:21.700I think Democrats are going to come to the negotiating table and get this thing done, as we have told you, as soon as the election is over.
00:26:28.840They think it's beneficial to them to have the government shut down in these elections.
00:26:33.480I think that has been clearly their calculus.
00:26:35.500But I do think that this is a significant story that is building in intensity.
00:26:44.380And some of you listening to us right now, and I was a part of this in Chicago on Friday because they shut down Nashville's airport for a while when I was trying to travel.
00:26:53.260A lot of people right now are getting caught up in frustrated, trying to get through TSA, trying to get on planes.
00:29:00.960Also, if you're not a reader, I read the entire thing on audiobook.
00:29:04.620Are you scheduled to be in the audiobook chamber?
00:29:06.980I say that because it is somewhat accurate.
00:29:09.440Over the Christmas holiday, bah humbug, Ebeneezer Scrooge coming for my holiday.
00:29:15.360I can't wait until you come back in January because I've recorded the last three of my books.
00:29:22.320You guys know I mispronounce words all the time.
00:29:24.380They have you there reading, and every time you mispronounce anything or you miss a word or whatever else, they stop you.
00:29:32.240It is unbelievably challenging to just read an entire book, to say nothing of the fact that you think, oh, I should have put that paragraph there.
00:29:54.040So if you're like my wife and you listen to books more than you read them because you're driving kids around or you're on the road a lot, you're a trucker, you got that option too.
00:30:03.220I would seriously, deeply appreciate if you would go buy a copy of Balls today and drive me up the bestseller.
00:30:09.080People are asking what charity you're going to donate the proceeds to, I might add.
00:30:21.520Significant at Vanderbilt Law School about commitment to free speech principles for lawyers because I'm troubled by what I've seen so many law schools out there doing when they're not.
00:30:34.960Basically, the whole idea of being a lawyer is you have to sometimes advocate for things that you might personally disagree with.
00:30:42.880And I see a lot of law schools now saying, well, if it's not the right woke perspective, then we don't even feel like we should teach advocacy here.
00:30:51.340And I deeply disagree with that, as does my wife.
00:30:54.760So we're trying to work on something there that could be significant.
00:30:57.360So in 20 years, is Uncle Clay going to be able to get a little Jimmy Speed into Vanderbilt Law School?
00:33:25.080You tell me if you would sign on to these and or what you are seeing.
00:33:28.860If Cittarelli is going to win in New Jersey, Republicans have to turn out in huge numbers today because he's down around 250 or so thousand votes, it appears, based on early voting and the mail ballots, absentees.
00:33:44.380Virginia is looking bad for winsome seers.
00:33:49.260But Jason Meares, the attorney general, is in a tight race and has a decent chance.
00:33:55.420Lieutenant Governor is going to be competitive there.
00:33:57.700And it looks like Momdani is going to win and potentially win with more than 50 percent of the vote.
00:34:54.380A lot of the big Republican counties have yet to report.
00:34:57.080Some of the other big Republican counties have reported.
00:35:00.900But definitely Mikey Sherrill's district is definitely showing up in full force, presumably, for her.
00:35:06.900It's a pretty safe Democratic district.
00:35:08.960Over in Virginia, what I've sat there and seen right now is, you know, Republican counties are kind of in a mix right now.
00:35:17.420There's counties like Caroline County, Greene County, Norton County, which are doing fairly well.
00:35:23.440You know, they're coming up in pretty large numbers.
00:35:26.720But also, at the same exact time, there's other super big Republican counties like Appomattox and Buchanan, which are having horrendous turnout.
00:35:33.780So Republicans are making up some of the best turnout counties and some of the worst at the same exact time.
00:35:39.340Places like Alexandria, Fairfax, they're about 50 percent of their 2024 election day as of right now, 55 to 60.
00:35:47.940New York City is going to have the largest turnout in mayoral history.
00:35:51.640We're easily going to blow past, I think, 2 million votes.
00:35:54.380And it's pretty safe to say largest election ever was in 1991 for 1993, rather, for Giuliani.
00:36:03.980This is going to be at least 2 million, tremendously high turnout.
00:36:09.100And in places like the Bronx, which had not voted at all on before Election Day, horrendous voting before Election Day, had tremendously high turnout.
00:36:18.920So, Ryan, in the New York race, the thing that you hear about constantly from the Mamdani camp is just variations on cost of living and how Mamdani says he's going to bring those costs down.
00:36:32.400This is, as far as I'm concerned, like fairytale stuff.
00:36:38.800Is it a similar situation in New Jersey?
00:36:42.020What are the biggest things that are at issue that are actually moving, mobilizing voters and that could make the difference here in turnout when you look at the issues between Cheryl and Cittarelli?
00:36:53.340Well, the biggest issue, and I cover this on the Numbers Game podcast for a whole episode, one of the biggest issues in both Virginia and New Jersey are electric prices.
00:37:04.040Two-thirds of electric price increases, according to CNN, were because, not that that's a reliable source, but two-thirds of the increased cost was because of...
00:37:11.340Dory, every time you mention CNN on our show, Ryan, we play a little boo in the podcast.
00:37:17.980Well, I think the article was good, but a tremendous amount of the data centers and data centers that are popping up everywhere and how the increased costs are coming in states like that.
00:37:30.220What happened in New Jersey and what happened in Virginia is that Democrats are going to nationalize it, right, make the whole election about Donald Trump and say,
00:37:37.260a vote for me is a vote against Trump, even Jay Jones is doing that as an attorney in the general race.
00:37:44.260Cittarelli's talked a lot about, you know, cost of living, how they'd be effective, an effective administrator.
00:37:51.320That, I don't know what's moving on numbers.
00:37:55.120Right now, Democrat numbers are fairly strong in a number of places, but numbers are strong, by the way, everywhere.
00:38:01.700I'm looking at races across the country.
00:38:03.460There's an election in Miami going on right now.
00:38:05.260Democrat turnout is gigantic right now in Miami.
00:38:08.660The race elections in Pennsylvania, there's lines around the corner in Pittsburgh to go vote.
00:38:14.300This is a very, this is probably going to be the highest turnout election than off, off, non-primary, non-presidential, non-midterm years probably ever.
00:38:25.360What's the impact, if anything, of Trump saying Cuomo should be your vote, Slewa can't win?
00:38:32.280He waited until the night before the election.
00:38:35.540There's been arguments that it actually helps Momdani.
00:38:38.320At this point, does it have any impact and prediction from you?
00:38:43.540Do you think that Momdani is likely to get over 50 percent?
00:38:47.420In which case, all the talk about Slewa versus Cuomo versus Eric Adams may not end up having mattered because if he gets over half the vote,
00:38:55.280then it doesn't matter how much split vote there was.
00:38:59.240Yeah, it's not helpful for Trump to weigh in because he's so disliked by two-thirds of New Yorkers.
00:39:06.300A 30 percent, 33 percent love him or like him, and two-thirds can't stand him in New York.
00:39:11.380And I don't think that it's necessarily helpful to Cuomo.
00:39:13.440I think Curtis Lewa could have done not only more for himself by Team Manpo Cuomo,
00:39:20.360but also helping the Republicans running down ballot in New York City, which is going to be tremendously important if Momdani becomes mayor.
00:42:49.860They're voting in early elections and like presidentials.
00:42:52.180Some of these counties I'm looking at in New Jersey, where it was five to one in 2020, like blue counties, five to one Democrat in 2021,
00:42:59.480it's looking like eight or nine to one Democrat right now.
00:43:02.580Just Democrat turnout is through the roof in some of these places, especially these white college-educated areas.
00:43:08.620And they are voting like it's a presidential election.
00:43:11.120Republicans really need to wake up if they think, even with all this gerrymandering that they're doing and things that are working in their favor,
00:43:17.580if they think they can win on that alone, they cannot when it comes to this kind of turnout.
00:43:22.120The turnout is immense, and Republicans need to match it in a significant way and really need to have answers on certain things in the economy,
00:43:29.540which I think are really pressing people's questions on quality of life.
00:43:32.880So, any last-minute thoughts for how you think New York is going to go, specifically, Ryan, as the votes are coming in right now?
00:43:43.160Is a Cuomo, this is really what I'm leaning toward, is a last-minute Cuomo miracle in the cards, or have you already written this off?
00:43:51.680I mean, listen, I'm not writing anything off.
00:44:02.880And that is Cuomo's biggest mistake in this general election.
00:44:05.580In the primary, he didn't do anything right.
00:44:07.560But in the general, he needed the hundreds of thousands of Trump voters in the city of New York who could sit there and vote for an election to say,
00:44:15.560I'm going to vote for Cuomo because he's going to do X, Y, and Z.
00:44:18.180He's going to support the problem solvers, the common sense caucus, which is Republicans and Democrats in the city council.
00:44:39.080I'm shocked at how inept he has been, Ryan, honestly.
00:44:42.240Like, for a guy who was the governor, it's like he's like the – who's the little blonde-haired sort of idiot king in the beginning of Game of Thrones?
00:45:49.380He's just not a good – he's just not a good politician is actually what has been exposed in all this, meaning he's not even good at pretending to be good at things.
00:55:07.620I remember meeting the vice president on several occasions when he was the vice president in the Oval Office.
00:55:12.640And I will tell you, Clay, it was, we had multiple wars going on, a very different Oval Office experience as a young CIA analyst briefing then Vice President Cheney than what we got when Clay and Buck show up to hang out with Trump in the Oval.
00:55:28.580I mean, just night, and it didn't even feel like the same movie set, the same universe.
00:55:33.980It's just a totally different feeling.
00:55:35.580There was an intensity and a solemnity under those Bush years because of 9-11 and everything else.
00:55:41.880And you walked in there, and you made sure your jacket and tie were crisp, and it was, yes, Mr. President, no, Mr. President.
00:55:46.680You know, we went in there and saw Trump, and he's like, we got the owner of the Saints.
00:56:41.140I think he loved his country, and I think he did what he thought was best for the country.
00:56:45.040And I think a lot of the stuff that was used to attack him about how it was like he was enriching himself, that actually wasn't true.
00:56:52.120And even the unitary chief executive attacks on Dick Cheney, I mean, those are, he believed that the president had the authority to make important decisions.
00:57:00.040I was in the Oval Office, and I could tell you that the vice president, watching them make decisions and discuss at various points, and the vice president was deferential to George W. Bush as president.
00:57:10.640This notion that he was the puppet master in Bush, the media, because they could get away with this, Clay.
00:57:18.720I know we've got Election Day here, but I think the media lied to people so much about George W. Bush that they have this complete, they weren't, you know, because of Trump and the way he did things by going right to them and bypassing the media, people's conception of who George W. Bush is, a lot of just everyday America, is a complete caricature.
00:57:38.800The guy was not dumb, the guy was not shy about leadership and making decisions, and was actually very, he wasn't a scholar of Middle Eastern history, you know, but guess what, neither is Kamala or Biden or any of them, right?
00:57:54.660But the notion that he was some sort of buffoon and was bumbling and an idiot is absurd, not true at all.
00:58:00.740Not only that, I mean, it's funny, remember early in Trump 2.0, it didn't work because it's Trump, you can't call somebody a dictator and then be like, they tried to say that Trump wasn't president.
00:58:13.840Remember they tried to say President Elon, they tried to demean the person in the chief executive office, the president of the United States, and so the argument when Bush was there was, oh, Cheney's the actual president.
00:58:26.040They tried to argue, oh, Trump's there, Elon's the president.
00:58:30.500You ever hear anybody argue that Obama wasn't the president when Obama was in office?
00:58:36.060You ever hear anybody argue Clinton wasn't the president when Clinton was in office?
00:58:40.200Whatever you thought of their vice president.
00:58:42.320Now, to be fair, during Biden, people may have accurately said it's actually Obama who's still president.
00:58:49.400And to be fair, during Clinton, there may have been moments where he was busy otherwise, occupied, not really with the running of the country.
00:58:58.220Indisposed would be one thing you could say about Bill Clinton.
00:59:05.840The guy had a, he did have a remarkable career.
00:59:07.800And I do think, I think the best thing that can be said for him, the things that can be said for him is he loved his country and he tried, but he was wrong on some big stuff.
00:59:17.000And unfortunately, he got particularly wrong toward the end about, about Trump and the, and the, you know, the, the trajectory of the country.
00:59:23.440I think, and I think it was personal because of the repudiation of Bush Cheney by Trump.
00:59:55.520But people forget that World War I had just destroyed an entire generation of Europe, including Englishmen and, and, and, uh, people from the United Kingdom.
01:00:03.560And he was hoping we wouldn't have to do that again, right?
01:00:06.240He may have had the wrong remedy, but he, he, he didn't want to go to war.
01:00:11.160I mean, that is this reasonable thing to do.
01:00:14.400And to be fair, I've read, uh, the oral history recently in the last year or so of nine 11, because I wanted to re, uh, uh, experience that.
01:00:23.120And remember they thought the white house was going to get hit and Cheney was underground monitoring nine 11 while Bush was up in air force one.
01:00:33.680And nobody could get in touch with him because they were trying to keep him safe.
01:00:37.240People forget this because they always think now of KSM Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in his like, you know, pulled t-shirt and getting arrested and all this stuff.
01:00:45.820They were planning multiple nine 11s and that's real.
01:00:49.660They were going to keep coming at us with all kinds of stuff.
01:00:52.020The war on terror was absolutely necessary.
01:00:54.280And those of you who fought it should always remember that and always feel, uh, you know, honored in your service for the fact that they were coming for us.
01:01:26.240You, you can say that he was a warmonger and he made the wrong decision and it was terrible, but, but he actually didn't do this.
01:01:31.740It's to make money through Halliburton for himself.
01:01:33.360And I, I just, I like the criticisms to be rooted in reality.
01:01:37.360Um, one thing that stood out to me as I reread to experience the history of nine 11, that is really kind of crazy to think about is there was almost no communication to the president because air force one wasn't able to get telephone signals.
01:01:51.700They weren't able, obviously the internet was not in place.
01:01:55.600They've got spotty every now and then television.
01:01:58.580So Cheney had to manage much of nine 11 because their president, they were afraid of where the next strike might be.
01:02:52.560Uh, if, if it's not, if it's not for him and, and saying, let's roll that plane ends up, we, we have a smoldering United States Capitol or White House.
01:03:03.200United flight 93, I think, to, if I'm getting, remembering that.
01:03:07.560But, but to be, you know, to be fair to Cheney's memory, we needed a wartime consigliere, so to speak, after 9-11.
01:03:15.780I'm not saying that everything was good or right, but I mean, the guy, the guy did step up and, and a lot of bad guys needed to be taken off the battlefield.