Ep. 2323 - What The HELL Is Going On With The Economy?!

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Speaker 8 Today, we'll get into all the vicissitudes of the American economy. Are things going up? Are things going down? What the hell is going on?

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Speaker 8 Pay half price at dailywire.com slash subscribe. Well, the fate of the Trump administration and perhaps Republicans in Congress as well is tied to American sentiment about the economy.

Speaker 8 And right now, nobody knows what the hell is going on or which way is up.

Speaker 8 Yesterday, according to the Wall Street Journal, stocks surrendered gains and closed sharply lower after a whirlwind day of trading that began after NVIDIA posted strong results.

Speaker 8 The NASDAQ composite led indices lower after being up on the day more than 2%, and then it ended up closing 2.2% lower. NVIDIA itself actually finished the day down 3.2%.

Speaker 8 So they reported an actual profit of something like $62 billion.

Speaker 8 And they ended up down on the day. Why? Because people are expecting that there is in fact an AI bubble.
And that expectation is not unreal.

Speaker 8 Again, whenever there's a transformative technology, people seem to think that just because there is a bubble, that means that the underlying technology is not transformative.

Speaker 8 If you look back at the history of investment, there is always a speculative bubble around brand new technologies. And then failing companies tend to get cleaned out.

Speaker 8 And you remember the successful companies. So you remember Henry Ford because Ford ended up being a wildly successful company.

Speaker 8 But there were dozens of other automobile companies that were startups at the time that ended up crapping out. In fact, Ford had several of them before he actually started the Ford Motor Company.

Speaker 8 The same thing was true of the internet. When the internet bubble burst in 2000, everybody remembers pets.com as sort of the thing that represented the era.

Speaker 8 But what we should remember is that actually the internet has completely transformed everybody's life. We all work on the internet.
We all do commerce on the internet. We all interact on the internet.

Speaker 8 The stock market bubble of 2000 did not mean the internet wasn't important. There were idiots like Paul Krugman who tried to suggest that it wasn't important.

Speaker 8 It was very important, but that is not mutually exclusive to a bubble. And that's also true with regard to AI.

Speaker 8 So people are looking at the current AI boom and they're thinking that at some point here, it has to crap out.

Speaker 8 Some of these companies are just not going to be able to develop the kind of margins or gross income that justifies the investment they are currently making.

Speaker 8 Open AI being the most obvious example of a company that is not publicly traded, but has so many contracts with publicly traded companies ranging from Oracle to NVIDIA, that if it craps out, then that could take down a bunch of companies with it or at least severely damage their market capitalization.

Speaker 8 According to the New York Times, it would not be a stretch to describe this period of hyperactive growth in the tech industry as a historic moment.

Speaker 8 NVIDIA said on Wednesday its quarterly profit had jumped to nearly $32 billion, up 65% from a year earlier and 245% from the year before that.

Speaker 8 Just three weeks ago, NVIDIA became the first publicly traded company to be worth $5 trillion, meaning NVIDIA is now worth more, according to the stock market than the entire economy of Germany.

Speaker 8 But some industry insiders say there is something ominous lurking behind all the bubbly news.

Speaker 8 They are looking at the eye-popping growth and the same stunning wealth creation as Jensen Huang, and they see a house of cards.

Speaker 8 Even NVIDIA's growth can be explained away because, again, demand for the company's chips doesn't mean that people want to use AI.

Speaker 8 It means that companies are building giant AI systems in the hope that somebody will pay to use them eventually.

Speaker 8 And this is going to be the question. At some point, the productivity generation from AI is going to have to start matching up to the investments that are being made.

Speaker 8 Evan Conrad, a chief executive of San Francisco Compute, a startup specializing in AI, says Stargate alone, if it does actually reach $500 billion, would be the largest infrastructure project in the world several times over.

Speaker 8 Stargate is, of course, a $500 billion data center project in the United States,

Speaker 8 enough to fund the Manhattan Project 15 times over.

Speaker 8 It could pay for the entire Apollo Moon program twice. So the amount of investment at some point is going to have to be channeled into actual gains.

Speaker 8 Goldman Sachs estimates NVIDIA, for example, will make 15% of all of its sales next year from what critics call circular deals.

Speaker 8 And so people are betting on whether there's going to be an AI boom that justifies all this or an AI bust. And we don't know which way it's going, which is why people are freaking out.

Speaker 8 They're also freaking out because if AI does succeed, there will be some temporary job dislocation. There are a lot of jobs that will become obsolete.

Speaker 8 If you want to hear me discuss this with Matt Walsh, Andrew Claven, Michael Molls, go listen to our episode of Friendly Fire. It came out a couple of days ago.
We discussed this at some length.

Speaker 8 The history of job creation is that the economy becomes more productive. You get nicer things for cheaper prices.
You work fewer hours. Your grandparents are working many more hours than you work.

Speaker 8 But it also means that there is, with technological change, significant job dislocation, people losing the kind of jobs they've historically held. And then they have to find new jobs, retrain.

Speaker 8 One of the points that I made to Matt Walsh, who's very critical of AI, is that if you named the jobs that many people hold in today's economy to people living in 1997, when the internet was first really getting started, if people in 1997 said, hey, this is going to destroy a huge number of jobs, for example,

Speaker 8 if you're able to buy everything from Amazon, a bunch of small mom and pop shops might go out of business, which is true. So what's going to happen to those jobs?

Speaker 8 Well, you know, they and their kids are going to end up doing online marketing, social media management.

Speaker 8 They are going to end up having small micro businesses that use shipping via Amazon, right? All these things would have been unthinkable in 1997. Amazon was a used bookstore company.

Speaker 8 I mean, that's what it was. It sold used books to start.

Speaker 8 And yet we've generated millions and millions of jobs off of areas that we didn't even know exist. And this is just the way the economy tends to work.

Speaker 8 That doesn't mean that the angst and the heartburn about job dislocation are somehow false. And so two things can be true at once.

Speaker 8 We can be in a transformative, amazing time for the economy, and the uncertainty can be real, and the concern can be real, and it can't all be alleviated by the government.

Speaker 8 And so right now you have a lot of uncertainty and dyspepsia. Now, it is also true, it is also true that some of what is being sold in the news is just not really true.

Speaker 8 So for example, there's been a lot of talk about housing unaffordability, and it is true. that housing is way less affordable than it was in say 2020 in just pure dollar terms.
Why?

Speaker 8 Well, because we inflated the currency massively between 2020 and 2024.

Speaker 8 The inflationary policy that was pursued in bipartisan fashion, by the way, in 2020 during COVID, when we had a massive artificial shutdown and the government paid everybody to stay home, was then followed on in 2021 and 2022 by even more massively inflationary policy under President Biden.

Speaker 8 And what that led to is an increase in the price of pretty much everything, but particularly housing, because when people didn't know what to do with their money, they figured, I'm going to plow that into the housing market.

Speaker 8 Because historically, the housing market has been an excellent repository of wealth.

Speaker 8 The way that you got wealthy is you bought a house, and then if you got richer, maybe sold that house and bought another house that was bigger and kept upgrading your wealth level.

Speaker 8 That's what my parents did. I think what many Americans' parents did.
It's what I've done myself.

Speaker 8 However, there's some myth-making right now. about the price of housing in the United States.
So Zara Mamdani wins in New York and he shouts about housing unaffordability. And of course, he's right.

Speaker 8 New York is really, really unaffordable.

Speaker 8 We talked yesterday on the program about many of the reasons that is regulations, rent freezes, all of that makes it really unpalatable to build new units in New York.

Speaker 8 And many of the units that already exist, it costs more to rent them out to somebody than it would be to keep them empty.

Speaker 8 Like the maintenance costs on it, the taxes on it actually cost more to rent than to just keep it empty. So you have 50,000 so-called ghost apartments in New York City.

Speaker 8 Okay, but this is also obscuring a simple truth. In many parts of the country, the prices in housing have been on the decline, not the incline.

Speaker 8 Already coming up, we'll get to some things people think about the economy that just are not quite true.

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Speaker 8 So I asked our sponsors and friends over at Comet, which is a project of perplexity.

Speaker 8 Have housing prices gone down in populous areas, leaving aside New York, Chicago, LA, and Seattle over the last year?

Speaker 8 And according to comment, housing prices have declined over the last year in several populous metropolitan areas outside of New York, Chicago, LA, and Seattle, with the largest decreases seen mostly in Florida, Texas, and some southern and western cities.

Speaker 8 Now, what you'll notice about that is those are all red areas, where, by the way, population is increasing.

Speaker 8 So, when you have areas like LA or Chicago or Seattle or New York, where population is leaving and the housing prices are increasing, you're reducing demand, and yet somehow

Speaker 8 you are still having the prices prices go up. That is regulation.
That is regulatory overreach. That is the rationale.

Speaker 8 According to Perplexity, according to our sponsors of Red Comet, Austin saw median listing prices fall by nearly 15% over the last three years and about 6% year over year.

Speaker 8 Miami's prices have dropped 19% over the last three years and roughly 4% to 4.6% in the past 12 months. Why did this happen, by the way?

Speaker 8 Because when there was a gigantic rush during COVID to Florida and to Texas, then one of the things that happened is the housing prices went up, right? Same supply, higher demand, higher prices.

Speaker 8 But then what happened? Every developer in Florida decided to build. The building went nuts in Florida.
The building went nuts in Dallas and Austin and Houston. And so now there's more inventory.

Speaker 8 And then the demand slacked a little bit. Now the prices are down.
Tampa has experienced a 6.2% year-over-year decline. Dallas and Houston saw home values decrease by 3.9% and 1.9%, respectively.

Speaker 8 Atlanta recorded a roughly 3.1% decrease in home values.

Speaker 8 There are a bunch of areas, actually, that have experienced year-over-year declines between 0.9% and 4.3%.

Speaker 8 Many of the areas in the Rust Belt and the Midwest saw home prices increase, but some of that is because a lot of those home prices were already fairly cheap.

Speaker 8 If you were looking at a house in Cincinnati, it's not going to cost you what a house in, say, New York would cost. Nationally, U.S.
home values have actually remained mostly flat over the last year.

Speaker 8 So it's important to look at the contrasting areas. The United States is not homogenous.

Speaker 8 Saying that it's unaffordable to live in New York City does not mean it is just as unaffordable to live in Austin. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't affordability problems in Austin.

Speaker 8 Groceries, particularly, have been a major issue. And again, that's because the value of your dollar just is not worth what it once was because there are more dollars chasing the same number of goods.

Speaker 8 As Milton Friedman famously said over and over and over, Inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

Speaker 8 What he meant is you really get inflation as a factor factor of how much money the government is pumping into the economy.

Speaker 8 With that said,

Speaker 8 having to explain this, like explaining this in real ways, is the job of the Trump administration.

Speaker 8 And one of the things that they are falling into is this routine where they either say that people's feelings are fake, which, you know, I can say because, again, that's my show, and I can say that facts don't care about your feelings, but politicians, feelings very often don't care about their facts.

Speaker 8 Howard Luttnick, the commerce secretary, he's been saying that the economic dyspepsia is fake fake news.

Speaker 8 Well, you know, it may be true that much of what is being distributed about the economy is fake news. The dyspepsia is not fake news by the polling data.

Speaker 12 It's just fake news. You've got so many factories being built.

Speaker 12 You know, I know people talk about when the factories come online, but the construction jobs alone, you can't invest $3 trillion a year without driving our GDP off the charts.

Speaker 12 You're going to see fours, you're going to see fives, and you're going to see 6% GDP growth under this president because the factory is coming home. The tariffs are bringing them home.

Speaker 8 Hey, so again, you know, it is not true that the tariffs are bringing manufacturing home. That is not true by the statistics.
However, some of the angst about the economy is, in fact, overstated.

Speaker 8 The idea that you absolutely cannot get a job anywhere. We have a 4.4% unemployment rate.
By historic rates, that is actually close to full employment.

Speaker 8 And in many of the high-tech industries, we actually still have more job openings than we have job applicants in some of these areas.

Speaker 8 Meanwhile, the vice president is begging Americans for patience, which, you know,

Speaker 8 the problem with begging people for patience is that they are not patient.

Speaker 13 And even though we've made incredible progress, we understand that there's a lot more work to do. And the thing that I'd ask for the American people is a little bit of patience.

Speaker 13 This economy was not harmed in 10 months.

Speaker 13 It took a deliberate four-year administration that was making life harder for everyday Americans, that was importing foreign workers instead of giving jobs to American workers, that was over-regulating, over-taxing, overspending.

Speaker 13 They were doing everything wrong. And as much progress as we've made, it's going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom.

Speaker 8 Okay, so we will see if that is true or if that is not true. Okay, but.
One of the things you actually do have to explain to the American people comes with some strings, right?

Speaker 8 If you explain, as I just did, that the economy is heterogeneous, that living in Florida and Texas is not the same thing as living in New York, and that blanket solutions are not going to work the same way.

Speaker 8 That is a politically difficult thing to do, but it is a politically necessary thing to do because otherwise people are going to look at the solutions that you are proposing.

Speaker 8 And when they don't work the way they think they should, when the housing affordability crisis in New York does not alleviate, they blame you for that.

Speaker 8 Right? You see some of this in the marketing from the administration.

Speaker 8 So the Department of Homeland Security, they put out a tweet yesterday in which they basically suggested that every single problem in the United States can be attributed to illegal immigration.

Speaker 8 Now, there are a lot of problems in the United States that can be attributed to illegal immigration, but to sort of use the hammer available to treat every single thing as a nail is a mistake and no one's going to buy it.

Speaker 8 They put out a tweet yesterday that said rent is too high. There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.
Okay, so first of all.

Speaker 8 There is some truth that there is upward housing pressure based on the population. That is true.

Speaker 8 It is also true that illegal immigrants immigrants are likely to be living many, many people to some of the cheapest housing in America.

Speaker 8 They're not the ones who are taking up suburban houses for the most part. Groceries cost too much.
There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country. Again, higher demand is true,

Speaker 8 but there aren't enough jobs. There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.
Women don't feel safe walking down the street.

Speaker 8 There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.

Speaker 8 Okay, again, I don't, I'm not even arguing that criminal illegal immigration does not actually drive up prices or create traffic or put pressures on the healthcare system. All of that is true.

Speaker 8 But the conclusion here, which is many problems, a simple answer,

Speaker 8 no,

Speaker 8 actually.

Speaker 8 Many problems may have one factor that is a simple answer, but that is not the only factor. And pretending that it is, is likely to result in, again,

Speaker 8 fruitless promises. Because first of all, this administration will not.
They're not going to deport 20 million illegal immigrants. It's not going to happen.

Speaker 8 The administration is deporting some people, for sure.

Speaker 8 We have seen one of the tremendous achievements of the administration is that the job growth that has occurred under the Trump administration is going to American-born workers.

Speaker 8 It is not going to foreign-born workers, illegal immigrants, and the rest. And that's a good thing.

Speaker 8 But promising a panacea is a mistake because then people expect more than they are likely to receive. Now, with that said, Democrats do the exact same thing.

Speaker 8 Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, yesterday, he suggested, so if J.D.

Speaker 8 Vance is suggesting that homeownership is unaffordable due to illegal immigration which again maybe on the margins true but that's really not why housing is unaffordable as a general rule

Speaker 8 hakeem jeffries is saying that home ownership is unaffordable because of climate change which is just insane

Speaker 14 homeownership has become unaffordable in far too many places ripping away the possibility of home ownership for millions of Americans.

Speaker 14 And we know that home ownership has always been central to the great American dream.

Speaker 14 And so it's incredibly important that we deal with the climate crisis

Speaker 14 because there is only

Speaker 14 one

Speaker 14 earth. There is no planet B, we have no other option.

Speaker 8 Okay, well, I mean, really? So your solution to affordability is to yell at the sun?

Speaker 8 Good luck with that.

Speaker 8 Folks, there's stuff that's solvable and there's stuff that is not solvable. And there are solutions being provided that are real and then there are ones that are not particularly real.

Speaker 8 When it comes to the economy, the best thing the government can do is get the hell out of the way as both a mid-range and a long-range strategy. That is the best thing the government can do.

Speaker 8 You can always have a short-range strategy, a sugar high where the government pumps money into an economy or the government subsidizes an industry or the government regulates out of existence some sort of practice.

Speaker 8 You can try all those things. They are short-term, temporary solutions that actually exacerbate the mid-term to long-term problems.

Speaker 8 And until somebody in politics says the truth about the way that free markets work, things are likely in the midterm and the long range to actually get worse, not better. This is the thing.

Speaker 8 Many of the solutions that Trump is actually pursuing are free market solutions. And those are the ones you should be talking about because they are, in fact, working.

Speaker 8 They are, in fact, doing the thing they are supposed to be doing. Already coming up, we'll be joined by Stephen Moore, economic advisor to the President of the United States.

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Speaker 8 Joining me on the line to discuss is Stephen Moore, former economic advisor to President Trump and co-founder of Unleash Prosperity, an organization dedicated to educating policymakers and the public about government policies that have been proven to maximize economic growth.

Speaker 8 Of course, he is the host also of The More Money Show. Stephen, thanks so much for taking the time.
Really appreciate it.

Speaker 10 Hi, Ben. Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 8 So, let's talk about the state of the economy. Honestly, I feel like everybody is confused and bamboozled about what is happening in the economy right now.

Speaker 8 There are a lot of different cross-currents that are sort of competing for supremacy. Why don't we start with where we are just generally in the economy? Do we have a good economy?

Speaker 8 Do we have a bad economy? Do we have an unsure economy? Where are things right now?

Speaker 10 Well, you just use the word bamboozled, and I like that word a lot to describe what's going on in terms of the media perception of the economy and frankly, a lot of Americans.

Speaker 10 So let me start with the very big picture, if I may. And one of the reasons I love doing your show.
in particular, Ben, is because you're reaching an age group that I don't speak to very often.

Speaker 10 That is young people. I know that because my two sons are big, big fanciers.
So first of all, my advice to young people is stop complaining, stop whining. What are you whining about?

Speaker 10 This is the greatest time ever in the history of the world world to be alive. And this is the greatest nation in the history of the world to be in.
And so the opportunities are abundant today.

Speaker 10 The average young person is going to have a living standard that is double the living standard of my parents. So stop complaining.
The jobs are out there.

Speaker 10 Look, I know there's some, you know, a little bit of contraction in the job market right now. But look, when I graduated from college, we had a 10% unemployment rate.
We had 15% inflation.

Speaker 10 You know, it was just, it was a terrible situation. I'm bullish on the U.S.
economy. I think anybody who gets off their buff and gets off the

Speaker 10 their computer games and watching TV and goes out and get a job, they're out there.

Speaker 10 And one other quick, quick piece of advice to people under the age of, especially 25, the best thing you can do is get a job.

Speaker 10 Even if you're 19, 20 years old, 17 years old, the younger you get your first job, Ben, the more successful you will be in your life.

Speaker 8 So let's talk about some of the issues that people are themselves apparently feeling and talking about. The big one, of course, is the continuation of inflation.

Speaker 8 Obviously, the rates of inflation have come down radically under President Trump. And

Speaker 8 the thing that I keep talking about on the show is that it is true that President Trump has sort of stabilized the inflation rate.

Speaker 8 But the thing that people are comparing the prices to are not the prices last year. What they're actually comparing the prices to in their heads are prices from 2020.

Speaker 8 And those prices are just not coming back because the only way to get those prices to come back would presumably be an actual economic downturn involving significant unemployment.

Speaker 8 Because we blew too much money in the economy, unless you're going to suck amazing amounts of money out of the economy, those prices are basically going to stay where they are.

Speaker 8 And that is, in fact, Joe Biden's fault and not President Trump's fault.

Speaker 10 Well, okay, good points. So, first of all, let's address the first point that you make, which is that we just did some numbers that unleashed prosperity starting from the beginning of

Speaker 10 the pandemic, COVID, to today,

Speaker 10 87.5%,

Speaker 10 almost 90%, 87.5% of the inflation that you're feeling when you go to the grocery store, when you pay your rent, your utility bill, your medical bill, 87.5% of that happened under Biden, not Trump.

Speaker 10 And Trump is right to say, look, I inherited this inflation vest. I didn't cause it.
In his first, just some numbers. And in Trump's first term,

Speaker 10 his first four years in office, the inflation rate was 2%.

Speaker 10 Biden comes in 18 months after entering office, the inflation rate's 9.1%.

Speaker 10 And over the average of his presidency, it was about 5% to 5.5%.

Speaker 10 Today, the inflation rate is

Speaker 10 somewhere between 2.5% and 3%. Now, that's a little too high.
We want to get it down to the Fed target, which is 2%, which is the sort of rated growth of the overall U.S. economy.

Speaker 10 Trump is right to say, look, I didn't cause this crisis.

Speaker 10 And especially, by the way, Ben, in the case of healthcare, where if you really want to see a villain here for the high cost of living, look at President Barack Obama, who said that his signature achievement as president was to pay.

Speaker 10 You remember this, they passed Obamacare. And people like me said this is going to blow a lid off of spending.
It's not going to work.

Speaker 10 It's going to bankrupt the country and bankrupt the healthcare system. And that's exactly what has happened.
Obamacare has led to a doubling to tripling of healthcare prices in the last 15 years.

Speaker 10 Thanks a lot, Barack. You did a great job.

Speaker 8 So, you know, there are some other questions with regard to inflation that I have. And one of them is the president has constantly called for a lowering of the interest rates.

Speaker 8 And to me, I'm talking with investors. It doesn't seem like there is a lack of liquidity in the economy.

Speaker 8 Typically, you lower the interest rates when there's a lack of liquidity, when it feels like there's an economic contraction that's happening.

Speaker 8 You're not going to lower the interest rates when the economy is running hot and when the stock market continues to churn and when the inflation rate is still riding about 50% higher than the Fed's target rate.

Speaker 8 By the way,

Speaker 8 I'm a Vienna school guy, so I think that the inflation rate target should actually be zero, not 2%.

Speaker 10 Putting that aside. Okay, I can live with that.
the

Speaker 8 the the the attempt to you know push the federal federal reserve into lowering those interest rates as though what we really have is a problem is spurring liquidity and consumption why why is the president still pushing that wouldn't he be better off at this point basically just saying listen the fed policy is what the fed policy is and let's you know work on deregulation and freer trade for example

Speaker 10 so let me put this in a big broad perspective uh because i'm what you call a supply sider with you know art laffer and Larry Kudlow and Ronald Reagan and Steve Forbes.

Speaker 10 And the reason they call us supply siders is that we believe that the best solution for almost every problem in the economy is to grow the economy, increase the supply of goods and services, increase production, because it's very simple.

Speaker 10 And it's amazing how many, even PhD economists don't understand this universal truth. Ben, if the economy produces more apples, what happens to the price of apples?

Speaker 8 Price drops.

Speaker 10 They go down, right? So if you want less inflation, produce more. And in fact, even you sort of, you know, were saying, well, you know, maybe we're going to meet

Speaker 10 a recession to lower prices. That's not true.

Speaker 10 The way you bring down prices is to produce more and get people working, getting people to produce more. That's point number one.

Speaker 10 Point number two, I believe that there is way, way, way too much emphasis in Washington and Wall Street on what the Fed is going to do. The Fed does not control the interest rate.

Speaker 10 Let me say that again. The Fed does not control the interest rate.

Speaker 10 You said you're an Austrian economist, so you know the interest rate is set by the law of supply and demand for credit. And so all the Fed controls is the overnight interest rate.

Speaker 10 Do you borrow at the overnight interest rate rate?

Speaker 10 You don't. I don't.
Almost nobody does except for banks. And so my point here is that.

Speaker 10 And even Trump, and I love Trump. I'm a Trump guy.
I was one of his advisors. I think he's been an amazing president, but he's wrong on this.

Speaker 10 Whether the Fed lowers or raises interest rates is not going to necessarily affect the mortgage rate of the 10-year treasury bill. And I'll give you evidence of that, Ben.

Speaker 10 Back when Biden was president, the Fed lowered interest rates three times in 2024. And what happened to the mortgage rate?

Speaker 8 It went up.

Speaker 10 It went up. So why is that? Because what affects the long-term interest rate is what we call inflationary expectations.
That if you believe, let me keep this very simple.

Speaker 10 Ben, if you believe that the interest rate, I mean, the inflation rate is going to be 5%,

Speaker 10 are you going to lend me money at 3%?

Speaker 8 No, that'd be idiotic.

Speaker 10 Right. Well, that's sometimes a lot of idiotic thinking in Washington.
We got to grow our way out of this.

Speaker 10 I'm very proud of the fact that because of so many of Trump's great policies on reducing taxes, reducing regulations, producing more energy, we are seeing,

Speaker 10 we're starting to see the inflation rate go down, and we've achieved almost 4% economic growth. That's a phenomenal rate of growth over the last six months.

Speaker 8 Okay, so meanwhile, there are a lot of worries, obviously, about AI and not just about AI itself.

Speaker 8 I tend to be an optimist when it comes to tech, but about whether we are actually in a stock market bubble, because the vast majority of gains in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for example, have accrued to the Mag 7.

Speaker 8 The Mag 7 represent an extraordinary percentage at this point of all stock market growth over the course of the last several years. Obviously, NVIDIA's numbers are eye-watering and eye-popping.

Speaker 8 According to the markets, the company NVIDIA is now worth more than the entire economy of the country of Germany.

Speaker 8 And so

Speaker 8 when you look at NVIDIA and then you look at the sort of circular deals that are being made between, say, NVIDIA and private companies like OpenAI, where OpenAI is talking about expending $1.4 trillion in capital over the next 10 years just on data centers and data infrastructure, and they generated a $20 billion return this year, there are a lot of people.

Speaker 8 including me, are pretty nervous that we may be in an AI bubble. Not to say that AI isn't important, but two things can be true at once.
AI can be really important and transformative.

Speaker 8 And also, whenever you get a new technology, there tends to be a lot of speculation in that area. And then it tends to consolidate down into the most productive companies.

Speaker 8 This happened with the internet. Hell, it happened with cars.
So would we be surprised if this happened with AI as well?

Speaker 10 Well, I could probably talk to you for about 45 minutes about AI, and there's a lot in that question, but I'll just make a couple of observations on this.

Speaker 10 Number one, I mean, I'm so envious of younger people like you.

Speaker 10 I'm 65, but, you know, especially people in their 20s and 30s you're going to see the most amazing uh economic transformation over the next 25 or 30 years i mean it's amazing what is coming uh just to give you an example ben i just uh joined the board of a company called lightspeed and we build houses with robots.

Speaker 10 Within probably how long, I mean, in 10 years, there won't be truck drivers.

Speaker 10 All trucks will be automated. You know, already in a lot of parts of the country, Uber and

Speaker 10 Lyft cars are automated. So you get in the car, and by the way, this dramatically reduces prices because you don't have to have a human driving the car.
A machine does.

Speaker 10 This is very much like the revolution that happened in agriculture 100 to 150 years ago, where it used to be 35 out of every 100 Americans was working in the fields, and now two out of every 100 work in the fields, and we produce more food than we can possibly consume.

Speaker 10 And so this is going to be an exciting period

Speaker 10 ahead. You ask the question of whether there's a bubble, maybe.
You know, I'm a little nervous about it too. But think about this.
I mean, you want to

Speaker 10 go USA. We have seven companies, the magnificent seven.

Speaker 10 You know, you mentioned a few of them, Amazon, Apple, Google,

Speaker 10 Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, Meta, that are worth more than all of the companies in Europe combined. So we need to dominate the AI and robotics age the way we've dominated the internet age.

Speaker 10 How did we do that as a country? What was the key to making America so, so completely dominant in the internet age? You know what it was?

Speaker 10 Back in the mid-1990s, when of all people, Bill Clinton, the Democrat, was president in a Republican Congress, we passed a bill that basically said, we are going to make the internet.

Speaker 10 tax-free, subsidy-free, and regulation-free. And we just created the Wild West.
We just said, go out there and build these companies. And we built these amazing, amazing companies.
You're right.

Speaker 10 There's going to be some sorting out. You may recall that in 2000, there was a crash in the technology market.
It was a pretty deep crash because prices did get overvalued.

Speaker 10 But, you know, that's the way markets work.

Speaker 8 Well, meanwhile, there is dyspepsia. You know, you mentioned young people and the job market.
And because the educational system is now, we're in a transitional economy, right?

Speaker 8 We're in a period where we're moving from agriculture to, you know,

Speaker 8 to manufacturing or manufacturing to service. I mean, it is that large of a shift.

Speaker 8 And so there real concern, and I understand it on an individual level about the job dislocation that's going to happen, right?

Speaker 8 There's no question that, for example, automating trucks is going to make things more efficient. It's going to bring down prices for the vast majority of Americans.

Speaker 8 Where do the truck drivers go is always the question.

Speaker 8 And so, you know, I think that this is one of the dangers for the Trump administration or for any administration that's in power, because there is no, the creative destruction that Schumper describes when it comes to markets is real.

Speaker 8 And there is a destruction half to that creative destruction, meaning, you know, in 10 years, all those people will have new jobs. But what happens in the meantime?

Speaker 8 What would you say about the potential of AI to wipe out huge numbers of jobs?

Speaker 8 And how long do you think it takes for that to move through the market and then create new jobs that we've never even heard of yet?

Speaker 10 Well, the whole idea, let's just start with what economics is all about. It's about increasing production of goods and services.

Speaker 10 And the idea is to create as many resources as possible with the least amount of work, right,

Speaker 10 and labor. And that's what's essentially happening with this,

Speaker 10 just like it happened with the age of the tractor and and and then the age of the computer and now the age of uh ai

Speaker 10 i'm very concerned about um our education system i don't think we're preparing young people for this revolution i mean you've got uh kids that are graduating with political science degrees and psychology degrees and ethnic study degrees and and guess what there's not a big demand for that right now so they're you know they're they're spending uh you know sometimes two hundred thousand dollars for a college degree that it really isn't isn't very worthwhile.

Speaker 10 I believe just one tip for young people, and I said it before, but I'm going to say it again. The younger you start working, Ben,

Speaker 10 the evidence is crystal clear about this. It's been true for 200 years.
The younger you start working and getting that first job, the more successful you will be in your life.

Speaker 10 And people go, oh, Steve Morris for child labor.

Speaker 10 Look, my wife grew up on a farm. She is one of the most productive people I've ever met.
She's incredible.

Speaker 10 She started working since she's 11 years years old, cleaning out the stables and things like that. So this idea that, you know, people, you got 25-year-olds who haven't worked.

Speaker 8 Well, that is Stephen Moore. You can go check out all of his work over at Unleash Prosperity.
Stephen, thanks so much for the time. Really appreciate the insight.

Speaker 10 Thank you, Ben.

Speaker 8 All righty, coming up, Zoran Mondani headed to the White House. How will that go? We'll get into it.
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Speaker 8 Okay, well, some of this is likely to come to a head today when Zoran Mamdani, the communist mayor of New York, is to arrive at the White House. That is happening around 3 p.m.
today.

Speaker 8 Apparently, they're going to be meeting behind closed doors.

Speaker 8 So it won't be one of those open sessions like with Vladimir Zelensky earlier in the year, which would have been the most amusing form of all of this.

Speaker 8 Zora Mamdani says he wants to speak plainly to President Trump about affordability. This is according to the New York Post.

Speaker 8 Mamdani gave a City Hall Park news conference on Thursday. He said, said, I have many disagreements with the president.

Speaker 8 I believe we should be relentless and pursue all avenues and all meetings that could make our city affordable for every single New Yorker. Well, I mean, he could start by resigning.

Speaker 8 That would probably be the best way to start making it more affordable to live in New York.

Speaker 8 He said, I intend to make it clear to President Trump I will work with him on any agenda that benefits New Yorkers. If an agenda hurts New Yorkers, I will also be the first to say so.

Speaker 8 The White House is significantly more skeptical of Zorn Mamdani's visit. Here is Caroline Lovitt explaining.

Speaker 15 It speaks volumes that tomorrow we have a communist coming to the White House because that's who the Democrat Party elected as the mayor of the largest city in the country.

Speaker 15 I think it's very telling, but I also think it speaks to the fact that President Trump is willing to meet with anyone and talk to anyone and to try to do what's right on behalf of the American people, whether they live in blue states or red states or blue cities.

Speaker 8 By the way, it is also true that Doramdani continues his unbroken record of virtue signaling to the worst people in America.

Speaker 8 So one of the big controversy that has broken out in New York is that just the other night, a bunch of anti-Semites, and I use that word advisedly because of what they were yelling, gathered outside of an Orthodox congregation in Manhattan's Upper East Side, chanting from New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada.

Speaker 8 Again, globalize the intifada, that is a violent call. Okay, intifada is a violent uprising.
Calling to globalize the intifada in New York means go kill people in New York. That's what that means.

Speaker 8 So why were they outside a synagogue yelling? I mean, by the way, they're also chanting resistance. You make us proud.
Take another settler out. They consider every Jew in Israel to be a settler.

Speaker 8 I don't know how else to describe that other than Jew hatred. I mean, that's what that is.
They were literally outside a synagogue in New York. What were they protesting?

Speaker 8 There's a group called Mefesh Benefesh

Speaker 8 in Israel that facilitates for people who want to move to Israel, if you're in England, America, wherever. They help facilitate your move to Israel.

Speaker 8 So how did Zoram Amdani respond to the anti-Semitism? Well, he blamed everybody.

Speaker 8 His spokesperson said, quote, the mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night's protest and will continue to do so.

Speaker 8 He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation and that the sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.

Speaker 8 That is an insane statement. Nothing that was happening in the synagogue violates international law.
First of all, there are a few problems.

Speaker 8 One, international law can go screw because it's the most useless pile of crap that ever was conceived by man or anyone else. It's ridiculous.
There is no such thing as international law.

Speaker 8 There are just international interests. The notion that there is a governing body that decides what is right and wrong, that includes Russia and China and Iran,

Speaker 8 it's absurd. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 8 American domestic law protects First Amendment religious activity. International law typically protects some of the worst people on earth while attacking places like America.

Speaker 8 Which is why the United States is not a party to, for example, the International Criminal Court that Zorin Mamdani likes to cite.

Speaker 8 The International Criminal Court used by human rights-violating regimes like South Africa as a sword against any place they don't like. Ridiculous.

Speaker 8 Okay, but beyond that, again, from a purely American perspective, New York is not an international city. It's an American city.

Speaker 8 If you're an American living in an American city and your mayor is saying that you can't go to your synagogue or church because you might be quote unquote violating international law.

Speaker 8 I mean, listen, there are international standards that

Speaker 8 pertain to, for example, the quote-unquote abuse of religious materials that largely are focused on not violating the scruples of radical Muslims.

Speaker 8 There are, in fact, bodies that prosecute acts like that under hate speech. Is that something that we're going to do in the United States because Zoram Mamdani says it violates international law?

Speaker 8 What a joke he is. Truly a joke.
And more than that, a dangerous joke. All right, it's time for some fast fact.

Speaker 8 And let's begin with some fascinating polling data. This is from Gallup.
Americans are actually showing some consensus on issues. I know.
It's shocking. Those issues are, for example,

Speaker 8 democratic values.

Speaker 8 So, asked whether political leaders should compromise with the other party to get some things done, even if they don't like some parts of the compromise, or whether political leaders should stick to their beliefs and avoid compromise, even if nothing gets done, 80% of Americans believe.

Speaker 8 that political leaders should compromise with the other party to get things done. Now, of course, when you dig beneath the hood, the question is what's the nature of the compromise?

Speaker 8 But Americans are not actually, in fact, begging for kind of the wild partisanship that was demonstrated by the Democrats during the latest government shutdown.

Speaker 8 On political violence, 83% of Americans say it is never okay for people to use violence to achieve a political goal. And by the way, that does include a broad majority of Democrats.

Speaker 8 This one is kind of fascinating. On the question of whether the U.S.
is stronger as a nation because it has people from different races, religions, and cultures, or the U.S.

Speaker 8 is weaker as a nation because it has people from different races, religions, and cultures.

Speaker 8 84% of Americans believe the United States is stronger as a nation because it has people from different races, religions, and cultures, that America is not, in fact, homogenous.

Speaker 8 Now, we will get into another under the hood question in a minute here from this poll about how fast American culture has been transitioning, which is the real objection that many people have.

Speaker 8 And that's being misread.

Speaker 8 That objection, which is a very real and legitimate objection, is being misread into a critique of America as a creedal nation entirely by large parts of the right at this point, where people say things are changing too fast.

Speaker 8 We don't want this many people coming in. Mass migration is changing the fabric of the country incredibly fast and in the wrong ways.

Speaker 8 Those are all legitimate perspectives, and they are all perspectives that I think most Americans probably agree with.

Speaker 8 However, to read that into, okay, what we need is a homogeneous nation, racially, religion, like totally homogeneous.

Speaker 8 That, of course, is not traditionally American, and it is a massive electoral loser.

Speaker 8 On facts versus opinions, 88% of Americans say there are facts and then there are opinions. Only 10% of Americans say facts are just opinions and points of view.

Speaker 8 Okay, so again, some of the breakdown here is really, really interesting.

Speaker 8 So that under-the-hood question that I think is the big one that is dividing the country, basically right down the middle, is the nature of change in America.

Speaker 8 The right is not anti people of all races or people of a wide variety of religions, while acknowledging, of course, the biblical heritage of the United States. The question is the pace of change.

Speaker 8 So, according to this Gallup poll,

Speaker 8 for this statement, please indicate which comes closer to your view, even if neither is exactly right. Over the past 25 years, cultural changes in U.S.

Speaker 8 society have happened too fast, or cultural changes in the United States have happened at a reasonable pace over the course of the past 25 years.

Speaker 8 So, that answer is 49.49.

Speaker 8 49.49,

Speaker 8 right? Literally half and half. Half Americans think things are moving too fast.
Half Americans think that things are moving kind of reasonably.

Speaker 8 The age breakdown is that as you get older, people think things are happening too fast. Democrats overwhelmingly think that things are happening at a reasonable pace, two to one.

Speaker 8 Republicans, two to one, think that things are happening too fast. Independents are split exactly 50-50.
This is the nature of the division in the country.

Speaker 8 This is the nature of the division in the country.

Speaker 8 But here's the thing. There is no one complaining that the change is happening too slowly.

Speaker 8 Okay, that is the real key to this poll. No one is saying that the change is happening too slowly, that we need to accelerate the pace of change in the United States.
No one is saying that.

Speaker 8 Again, that's fascinating because what that means is that the sort of radical left, which wants to accelerate change, is not going to be popular.

Speaker 8 And a radical right that also wishes to radically decelerate like change in the opposite direction or to a place that America never historically has been. That is not what Americans want.

Speaker 8 Virtually all Americans believe either that the pace of change is about right or that's moving too fast. Americans are an incremental people.
We are not a radical change people.

Speaker 8 That is not what we are.

Speaker 8 Another basic split among Americans is whether people are responsible for their own needs. on a basic individual level or the government is responsible for making sure the basic needs are met.

Speaker 8 Directly 50-50. Directly 50-50 again.
Democrats, 70-30 believe that the government should be responsible for making individuals' basic needs are met. Republicans, 72 to 27, believe the opposite.

Speaker 8 So despite the sort of populist movement believe that they can just side with the Democrats, most Republicans do not believe this. Republicans are still pro-free market and individual responsibility.

Speaker 8 This is, in fact, a hallmark of conservatism. And the bizarre attempt to sort of retcon conservatism into a left-wing social democratic populism from Wisconsin in 1918 is bizarre for sure.

Speaker 8 By the way, independents are split right down the middle. Slightly more independents believe that people should be responsible for maintaining their own basic needs than that the government should be.

Speaker 8 Okay, meanwhile, again, the bottom line is that there is discord here, but

Speaker 8 this is the Overton window. Okay, the Overton window in America, meaning the place of kind of rational discourse is in the middle of all of this.

Speaker 8 There are a lot lot of open questions to be left there, but there are a few things that Americans are pretty clearly rejecting overall. One, political violence.

Speaker 8 Two, the idea you should never talk to or work with anybody on the other side of the political aisle. And three, radical, fast change, radical change.
Americans don't love it.

Speaker 8 They are not in favor of it. They certainly don't want things accelerating from here.
So any accelerationism. from either side is likely to be rejected by the American people.

Speaker 8 Okay, meanwhile, our media are very much focused focused on accelerationism and partisanship and exacerbating it.

Speaker 8 And again, this is not to avoid blame for partisan politicians who also do it, but I have to say that things are increasingly stupid here in the United States, like truly stupid.

Speaker 8 So, yesterday, the big story of the day was a rather stupid story. It was led off by a bunch of Democrats.
We put up their video yesterday.

Speaker 8 This is a bunch of Democrats ranging from Senator Alyssis Lotkin of Michigan to Representative Crowe,

Speaker 8 Jason Crow of Colorado, calling on members of the military to disobey illegal orders. Now, we should note what this is and what it isn't.

Speaker 8 There's what it says, and then there's what it implies, and now we're playing in the dumb space between them. So, what it actually says is not illegal.

Speaker 8 Telling people they don't and cannot obey illegal orders, that, of course, is true.

Speaker 8 Duh.

Speaker 8 If somebody gives you an order to go mow down a bunch of school children for no reason, and there would be no reason,

Speaker 8 if someone tells you to to go do that, then you have to disobey that order if you're in the U.S. military, obviously.

Speaker 8 Okay, so the question becomes why they filmed that video.

Speaker 8 And the answer is because the implication is that the Trump administration is routinely giving illegal orders, and thus you should just disobey the Trump administration.

Speaker 8 So, once again, we are living in stupid land where Democrats will interpret this video as saying nothing new, and Republicans will interpret this video as saying that members of the military should disobey legal orders, not illegal orders.

Speaker 8 Here is the video:

Speaker 16 like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution.

Speaker 13 Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren't just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear.
You can refuse illegal orders.

Speaker 16 You can refuse illegal orders.

Speaker 13 You must refuse illegal orders.

Speaker 16 No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.

Speaker 13 We know this is hard and that it's a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you're serving in the CIA, in the Army, or Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical.

Speaker 16 And know that we have your back.

Speaker 8 Okay, so this pissed off President Trump, I think, kind of justifiably, because the implication is that President Trump is routinely giving illegal orders, which, of course, is not true.

Speaker 8 Well, that then caused the President of the United States to put out a statement on Truth Social in which he said that these lawmakers were guilty of what he called, quote, seditious behavior punishable by death.

Speaker 8 Which, I mean,

Speaker 8 is that true? No. I mean, no.
There's not a court in America that could convict them of seditious behavior punishable by death.

Speaker 8 That is actually not seditious behavior punishable by death.

Speaker 8 You may say that it is seditious behavior, but saying it's punishable by death means like a legal violation. They would have to go to trial.

Speaker 8 You'd have to make the claim that they were actually inciting treason against the government.

Speaker 8 Hey, by the way, unlawfully failing to follow an order is not, in fact, punishable by death, even in the United States military.

Speaker 8 He wrote, quote, each one of these traitors to our country should be arrested and put on trial. Their words cannot be allowed to stand.
An example must be set.

Speaker 8 Now, here's the thing about President Trump.

Speaker 8 Here's the thing about President Trump. We're all used to this by now.

Speaker 8 Are we going back to 2017 when everybody just went nuts with their hair on fire about the crap that he was putting on at that time, X, or what was called Twitter at the time?

Speaker 8 Like, we've done this before.

Speaker 8 These sort of bizarre news cycles where Trump says something that is uncalibrated, to say the least, and then everybody runs around like a chicken with their head cut off.

Speaker 8 Can we just point out Trump is not actual?

Speaker 8 I understand that

Speaker 8 now we're doing the reverse, right? Democrats are going to read that comment. They're going to say he is literally calling for them to be arrested and put on trial and executed.

Speaker 8 And if you read the language, that is literally what he is calling for. And then there's the reality, which is Trump is not going to do any of that stuff, which we all know, obviously.

Speaker 8 When Caroline Lovitt was asked if President Trump wants people executed, here's what she had to say at the White House.

Speaker 15 Just to be clear, does the president want to execute members of Congress?

Speaker 15 No.

Speaker 15 Let's be clear about what the president is responding to, because many in this room want to talk about the president's response, but not what brought the president to responding in this way.

Speaker 15 You have sitting members of the United States Congress.

Speaker 15 who conspired together to orchestrate a video message to members of the United States military, to active duty service members, to members of the national security apparatus encouraging them to defy the president's lawful orders.

Speaker 8 Okay, so again, the answer to the matters there is the beginning where she says no, he doesn't want people executed.

Speaker 8 Democrats, of course, decided to jump on this and they make hay out of it, as one would.

Speaker 8 So apparently, Democrats put out a statement from Mark Kelly, Alyssa Slotkin, Jason Crowe, Crystal Luzzio, Maggie Goodlunder, and Chrissy Houlihan, who are the people in the video, in which they said, what's most telling is that the president considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law.

Speaker 8 Our service members should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oaths to the Constitution, an obligation to follow only lawful orders.

Speaker 8 It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duties. They're going to rely on the literal thing that they said, which, again, understandable.

Speaker 8 And they're going to avoid the implication of what they said. This is what Representative Crowe had to say in his own defense.

Speaker 17 To be clear, we are not calling on folks right now to debate, to disobey any type of unlawful order.

Speaker 17 There is very real and deep concern about what this president has threatened to do over and over again. There are three more years left of this administration.

Speaker 17 If we are not talking about this and having a conversation about it and demystifying this conversation, we are not fulfilling our duty.

Speaker 17 We are reminding people that have taken the oath what that oath requires of them to do.

Speaker 8 Okay, can I just point out this whole controversy is incredibly stupid, like truly stupid. The Democrats put out there something inflammatory.

Speaker 8 President Trump bit on the inflammatory thing and said something even more inflammatory. And now everybody is just taking their various sides and complaining about it.
This is a stupid controversy.

Speaker 8 Okay. It's a stupid controversy that was generated by the left predominantly.
President Trump, again, went too far in his comments, which,

Speaker 8 like, I know, like, we've seen him for 10 years. Come on.
Okay. And then everybody went nuts in response.
Okay.

Speaker 8 Now, there's sort of a parallel stupid story, and that is that the president and vice president were not actually invited to the funeral for Dick Cheney. So I have a rule about funerals.

Speaker 8 The family gets to invite who they want. That's my rule about funerals.
Nobody gets to make a claim that they should have a seat at somebody else's funeral. That's really, really silly.

Speaker 8 Now, I have a critique of who the Cheneys invited to the funeral. It actually has nothing to do with Trump and Vance.

Speaker 8 I totally understand. If you are Dick Cheney and you opposed Trump and Vance and

Speaker 8 Trump and Vance routinely attacked Liz Cheney and Liz Cheney has a horrible relationship with Trump and Vance, I totally get that. Your dad is dead and he's in the box in front of you on the stage.

Speaker 8 You don't want to be looking over and seeing the people who basically destroyed your political career and who you attempted to foster impeachment charges against in President Trump or go after him post-January 6th.

Speaker 8 Like, I totally get that. You don't want that at the funeral, right? I mean, just on a human level, you understand that.

Speaker 8 I think the bigger question here is why, for example, President Biden was invited.

Speaker 8 Because if you're talking about somebody who helped destroy Dick Cheney's legacy, one of those people would be Joe Biden, who as vice president was very much in favor of the precipitous withdrawal from Iraq that led to the loss of some of the gains that had been actually made in the late stages of the Bush administration with the 2007 surge.

Speaker 8 And then also it was Joe Biden who presided over the complete collapse of American support in Afghanistan, handing the entire country back to the Taliban.

Speaker 8 So, you know, I have more critiques of the Cheney family for inviting Joe Biden than I do for the Cheney family inviting and not inviting Trump and vans.

Speaker 8 But, you know, the right is going a little bit nuts over this.

Speaker 8 I don't know. I'm just not there.
I'm just not there. When it comes to funerals, basic rule: you get to invite who you want.

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Speaker 8 Studio is Michael Watley. He most recently served as chairman of the Republican National Committee after President Trump asked him to help lead the party's 2024 efforts.

Speaker 8 He also previously served as the North Carolina Republican Party chairman. Now he's running for Senate in North Carolina.
Michael, thanks so much for taking the time.

Speaker 11 Really appreciate it. It's great to be on with you.
Thank you.

Speaker 8 So, your race, I think it is not an exaggeration to say that in 2026, it may be the most important race in the country. The amount of money that's going to flow into this race is extraordinary.

Speaker 8 It is a purple state with an open seat. Tom Tillis is stepping down from from that seat.
So how does the race look? Why is this race so important?

Speaker 11 Well, the race is so important because North Carolina is a true bellwether state. You know, it's one of the seven battleground states that we fought in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Speaker 11 And it is very close. Like you said, it's a purple state.
We're 30% Republican. We're 30% Democrat.
We're 40% unaffiliated.

Speaker 8 So it's true purple.

Speaker 11 And as North Carolina goes, I think honestly the Senate can go.

Speaker 11 And when you talk about having a hold, we talk about a three-seat majority in the Senate right now for the Republicans.

Speaker 11 You know, that gets pretty dicey if we cannot hold on to North Carolina. That's exactly right.

Speaker 8 I mean, when you look at the map, you're looking at North Carolina, you're looking at Maine, you're looking possibly at Texas, possibly at Iowa.

Speaker 8 It's not an easy map for Democrats, but if they take North Carolina, the map starts to get significantly more blue quickly.

Speaker 8 One of the problems in North Carolina is that it used to be a little bit more red. It's obviously moved more purple in recent years.
There was a bad gubernatorial race last time around.

Speaker 8 Josh Stein is now the governor in North Carolina. You're facing down Roy Cooper, the ex-governor of North Carolina.
Where do you think his vulnerabilities are?

Speaker 8 What should people in the country and in North Carolina governor?

Speaker 11 Well, I think the fact that he is a card-carrying member of the woke mob and he has portrayed himself very successfully throughout his tenure as an elected official, as a Naw Shocks guy from Nash County, North Carolina, trying to portray himself as a moderate.

Speaker 11 But the fact is that this is a guy who has a record that is out of mainstream with North Carolina, whether it's on crime, whether it's on the budgets and tax cuts and the economy, or it's on any number of other issues where he is out of the mainstream.

Speaker 11 But we need to spend the time prosecuting that case and letting people know about his record.

Speaker 8 So when you talk about his record and in specific,

Speaker 8 what went wrong under his tenure in North Carolina, what do you think are sort of the big points that people need to know? Sure.

Speaker 11 Well, when you think about how you win in a state like North Carolina, right, or really any battleground state around the country, what we did with President Trump was we made it sure that everybody understood his agenda, which was to rebuild the economy, to restore our borders, and to make sure that America is respected again around the world.

Speaker 11 What that translates to in North Carolina is you need economic policies that are going to create jobs and raise wages.

Speaker 11 We need tax policy, trade policy, and regulatory policy that are going to help our small businesses, our manufacturers, and particularly our farmers.

Speaker 11 So we're going to go out and we're going to work on that all day long. We also have more men and women in uniform and veterans than any other state in the country.

Speaker 11 So being able to ensure that they have what they need to protect our interests and allies around the world is going to be extraordinarily important for us.

Speaker 11 And in this particular race, we really want to spend a lot of time focusing on the fact that the highest and most important function of any government is protecting its citizens.

Speaker 11 And we have a governor who has not only vetoed legislation which would force sheriffs to honor ICE detainers and move criminal illegal aliens out of the state, he also issued an executive order while he was governor that created cashless bail, created pretrial release, and really emptied the jails.

Speaker 11 And so we have a revolving door with criminals right now, with violent criminals in North Carolina that has caused a huge problem.

Speaker 11 You know, many people recall that video, the horrific video from Charlotte Light Rail, where Irena Zorotska got off work at 11.30, beautiful young young lady, gets on the wrong rail car, sits in the wrong seat, and the guy behind her just horrifically slit her throat and killed her.

Speaker 11 That guy had been arrested, DeCarlos Brown Jr., 14 times and released 14 times under Roy Cooper's soft-on-crime policies. You know, it is so prevalent.

Speaker 11 We actually on the campaign started a digital campaign called Mugshot Mondays. And every week we highlight somebody who's been arrested and released 50 times or more in North Carolina.

Speaker 11 That's absolutely unacceptable.

Speaker 11 And so when we think about what are the issue sets that really are going to matter in a place like Charlotte, in a place like Raleigh, in a place like Wilmington, North Carolina, in our rural areas, our urban areas,

Speaker 11 it's going to come down to making sure that we're keeping our kids and our communities safe.

Speaker 8 Now, as I mentioned before, the amount of money that's going to pour into this race is extraordinary. Democrats are expected to raise just tons and tons of money to try and take this seat.

Speaker 8 It would be a flip, obviously. How much money are they going to raise for this race?

Speaker 11 You know, we're hearing projections as much as $600 to $800 million is going to be spent in North Carolina.

Speaker 11 You know, and it was one of the most expensive Senate races in history back in 2020, the last time we were up with Tom Tillis. And that's the seat that I'm going to be running for right now.
So

Speaker 11 it is, as you said, the Democrats understand.

Speaker 11 that this is one where they think they can pick this off. Roy Cooper has raised a ton of money for his governor's races previously, and we know that he's going to have a ton of money.

Speaker 11 So we're out making sure that we have the resources. But I firmly believe, and Donald Trump is the most clear example of this in our lifetime, that good politics is a reflection of good policy.

Speaker 11 And that when you go out there and you argue for the issues that the American people vote on, in my case, the issues that the North Carolina voters care about and put solutions on the table, that ultimately is going to be the most important factor in the race.

Speaker 8 So for people who want to help out your campaign, obviously it's a huge campaign. It's got to get started early.
So, where should they go to help you out?

Speaker 11 MichaelWatley.com. You know, that's the website where folks can go and they can invest.
They can also sign up to be a volunteer. You know, this is going to be a movement campaign.

Speaker 11 We need to make sure that we have people that are up and that are out, that are going to be making phone calls and knocking on doors. And most importantly, having that five-minute conversation.

Speaker 11 You know, anytime we have somebody have a five-minute conversation with a friend or a family member, a colleague, a coworker to talk about how important this race is, that's really, truly the most important factor that we can have.

Speaker 11 And they can also follow me on X at Watley NC.

Speaker 11 We've got about 100,000 followers and we've got a really good presence there and talk about all the issues that we really care about in this race.

Speaker 8 Well, meanwhile, while the Democrats are spending enormous amounts of money or looking at spending enormous amounts of money in North Carolina, they're having some cash problems of their own.

Speaker 8 So obviously that used to be your job at the RNC. When you look at the Democratic National Committee having to take out a $15 million loan, what does that say to you?

Speaker 11 Well, I think it says that the Democrats have really, truly learned nothing after the 2024 election cycle. You know, they ran as an open borders inflationary policy, woke, weak America party.

Speaker 11 They lost. They lost the House.
They lost the Senate. They lost the presidential race.

Speaker 11 And they've really, truly doubled down on that agenda right now. It's not a surprise that they cannot raise the type of money that they are used to having, right?

Speaker 11 And the Republican Party, you know, we set up a very positive relationship with donors and supporters all across the country and we're able to make sure that we had the resources that we needed.

Speaker 11 When I left the RNC, I think we were $80, $85 million cash on hand for the DNC right now to have $3 million cash on hand before that loan.

Speaker 11 I really think it shows you that not just physically they're bankrupt, but in terms of their agenda, that they do not have an agenda that is inspiring the American people right now.

Speaker 8 Well, Michael Watley, good luck in your race. Thank you so much for stopping by.
Really thank you.

Speaker 11 Thank you. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 8 Joining us on the line is investigative reporter for the Daily Wire, Luke Roziak. He is also an award-winning journalist.

Speaker 8 He just won an Investigative Journalism Award for his Doge reporting, the prestigious Dow Prize. Luke, thanks so much for joining the show, really appreciate it.

Speaker 18 Hey, Ben, thanks for having me.

Speaker 8 So congratulations on that. Explain what the Dow Prize is and why it matters.

Speaker 18 It's sort of an alternative to the Pulitzer Prize for conservative-leaning or independent journalists. And it's sort of a big deal.

Speaker 18 This guy named Dow Feng, who's a businessman who escaped communist China and loves America, America, teamed up with the National Journalism Center and kind of went all out.

Speaker 18 So there was this fancy gala in D.C. on Wednesday.
Everybody was there in the Washington, D.C. conservative reporting world.

Speaker 18 And they gave out some big prizes, including big cash prizes. And all of this is because the Pulitzers, of course, have given awards to left-wing stories that are like literally provably wrong.

Speaker 8 So let's talk about your reporting on Doge. Obviously, you won an awards for going inside what Doge was doing.
What has been the long-term impact of Doge?

Speaker 8 Because obviously it was a very hot topic very early on in the administration. It seems to have fallen out of the headlines a lot.
What do you think the impact of Doge was and is?

Speaker 18 You know, we've got to make sure it has long-term impact.

Speaker 18 I think the best thing that happened was sort of just a renewed enthusiasm, putting the idea that we as conservatives should be against government waste back on the radar, because it was certainly something we had kind of forgotten about for a few years there.

Speaker 18 Obviously, they've got to deal with the injunctions. They've got to make sure that not too many layoffs are kind of

Speaker 18 reversed because of things like the shutdown negotiations.

Speaker 18 But I think that really it just was a return to sort of founding principles, that this is a classic thing that Republicans should be concerned about.

Speaker 18 So there was a lot more attention to things like inspectors general and the government accountability office and people like that who hopefully will be empowered and will be sort of in the spotlight, even as Doge itself kind of recedes.

Speaker 8 So Luke, obviously one of the big factors here was the involvement of Elon Musk.

Speaker 8 Elon and the president have had some hot times, have had some cold times, been a love-hate, lukewarm, very hot, very cold relationship. Where do things currently stand with the president and Elon?

Speaker 18 I believe he was in D.C. this week.
You know, traffic was certainly shut down during the awards ceremony. It was very difficult to get in.

Speaker 18 And I think that's because they had Elon and the Saudis and some others all at the Kennedy Center. So I think they're buds again.

Speaker 8 So Luke Roziak, congrats again on winning this prize. It's very cool for you.
Very cool for the Daily Wire as well. That's Luke Roziak, our investigative reporter here at the Daily Wire.

Speaker 8 Luke, thanks for the time.

Speaker 18 Thanks, Ben.

Speaker 8 All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now. We will get into a strong pitch from the president to Ukraine about a Russia-Ukraine peace deal.
What does that look like? Is it good?

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