Latest / Profits & Politics / Bob talks with Mitch Roschelle about post-election, and Vince Gill!

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Bob talks with Mitch Roschelle about post-election, and Vince Gill! · Profits & Politics

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: All right, let's bring in Mitch Rochelle.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: He is a macro strategist, which means he knows everything right in line, right next to God.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: So he is not quite omnipotent, but he is omniscient.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: So let's talk uh Mitch about what's going on.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Here, here's what I want to ask you as the the expert that you've been and following the markets for years and years.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: We have a situation right now which a lot of people think that the AI is creating a bubble, especially since there's so much money being borrowed, not to put out in equity to drive data centers and all the rest with the calculations that come along with it.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yet you still have great earnings, and then you have what happens to be uh a third year of a presidential term coming up.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: Leave aside the politics.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: History says the third year of a presidential term is usually the best uh as far as the stock market.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: So what are you watching?
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a lot to unpack there, Bob.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: But what's interesting is we also have the prospects of a divided government.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: And you add that to the mix, and it's often why there's a lot of chicken and egg there.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: The reason why the third term of a presidential is because the presidential party often loses the midterms.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's sort of also part of history.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: And what the, believe it or not, what the market likes is indecision on the part of government, uh, federal government, that is.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason for that is that they can easily more easily handicap.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's trite to say what stock market investors and the market as an organism doesn't like is uncertainty.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: And when they know in year three of a presidential term that dysfunction will be certain, they actually like that because it sort of takes off the table a lot of things from a policy perspective that could um interfere.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what would that be?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: That would be some regulation that gets promulgated um by the administration, not through executive order, but through Congress, or some spending that happens that they don't like, or tax policy that they don't like, or they feel investors won't like.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's sort of off the table.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the that's where we'll be.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is we're going into it with tremendous cross currents in the United States, tremendous geopolitical cross currents with wars that are that seemingly unending around the world, uh, unrest in Western civilizations in Europe.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a whole lot there.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the market's slowly trying to digest it all.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: And what about the argument that there's an awful lot of borrowed money driving AI?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: And if that bubble See, I don't know if it's a bubble.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you and I are old enough to remember dot com.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: Was it a bubble?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: But what we're doing right here, because of the internet, right?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: We're we're talking online because that so we both know that AI is definitely part of the future.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: We're not Luddites, we're not putting our head in the sand, but not everybody's gonna win.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot of money out there.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have any concern that even as we see a third year that tends to be positive in a presidential term, we have this so-called bubble that's driving the action in the stock market that may not be able to be sustained?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's we're in that period where winners and losers start getting parsed out.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's go back to the dot-com fit, you know, bubble, legitimate bubble.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: The dot-com bubble was anything that literally had dot-com in its name.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: I remember getting a cold call from a seemingly reputable firm, stockbroker, saying, I got a tip for you, you know, in the days when they weren't worried about, you know, stuff on recorded lines that would put them in jail for insider trading.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, What was it?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like Sports Authority, if you remember that brand.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because Sports Authority has a website called sportsauthority.com.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the analyst reports, they're not ascribing any value to sportsauthority.com.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: And this was early enough when there were companies that didn't even have a dot com.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't even have a digital means of interacting with their customers.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Forget about using that as a selling platform.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: They just didn't even have a landing page.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the point where I remember literally, like it was yesterday, sitting there looking at this mutual fund that I had of technology stocks and saying, I wonder if I should sell this because if literally this is where we are.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of that going on, Bob, right now, today in the market, where if it's chip, chip adjacent, everybody's chasing it.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Look at people all of a sudden woke up one day and realized that wow, we need more memory.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: And Scandisk, this like sleepy company that sold the memory chips that went into cameras that people don't even have anymore.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: I probably have six of them in a drawer, like literally not too far from where my left arm is right now, that probably needed memory chips.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that uh company was capable of producing memory that was needed for the entire ecosystem of AI.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And boom, that stock took off.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then Intel, um, Intel sort of rode the curve up.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Intel was dead money if you were an investor for 20 years.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Then all of a sudden, Intel went from 20 to 100.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Forget about the government's involvement in it, and it rode the wave, only to find out recently in an earnings report that Intel was incapable of delivering.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and as a result, their stock got hammered into market.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying Intel's a loser and Scandis is an I'm I'm just using those two as examples.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: I don't need the hate mail from people.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact of the matter is, um, that's where we're going right now.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're separating winners from losing.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: But you asked something really important, which is the other bubble that no one's talking about.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that bubble is debt.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what I want to do, I I had a conversation with an investor recently in a business that I'm in asking me about the market and interest rates.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, right after the global financial crisis, and I I sort of feel like you and I probably had this conversation once at the time, Bob, there was$17 trillion of sovereign debt.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't corporate debt, this is debt of countries that had a negative yield, meaning the interest rate on that debt was below zero, meaning that people were so worried about the safety and security of their money in that country or outside of that country that they were willing to pay a country to hold their money for them.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning you when you when if you bought a$1,000 bond uh when when it matured, you got less than$1,000 back at maturity, basically.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: So when that happened, I was saying from the mountaintop on a lot of media platforms, we have coming the biggest bubble we've ever seen in our life:$19 trillion worth of debt that when interest rates go up is going to drop like a rock and get repriced.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're actually seeing that come to roost now.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: And during the period when interest rates were artificially intentionally low, right, we inflated yet another housing bubble, potentially.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: I would argue it's not, but we we definitely inflated housing prices and created an affordability problem in our country for housing.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and on the other side, what we did was we created problems on the balance sheets of financial institutions where the bonds and so forth, the fixed income instruments that they held, were dropping, right, as the the values were dropping as prices were going up.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's all because we bought all of this stuff and we invested in income-producing assets like crazy because we were chasing yield because interest rates were so low.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually think the real financial crisis, lowercase F, lowercase C, that is, that is in the background right now is the repricing of all of this debt and then layering on with it the trillions of dollars of debt that were that were raising equity dollars to get put out in the form of debt by private equity to lend money to these superscalers because they're borrow, they may have$250 billion on the balance sheet, but they're gonna borrow$250 billion to build data centers.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: And who knows what the right number of data centers are?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Forget about the the public outcry of NIMBYism.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Who knows if they need that many data centers?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the thing that that as a real estate guy to the core that scares me.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Are we building too much stuff?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like, is is this like Dubai built building after building after building after building and then they they weren't occupied?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: China built entire neighborhoods that never got occupied.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: Are we doing that with data?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's happened in China, yeah.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: So um, and in any event, those are the I I know probably a longer ramble than you expected, but I don't think it's it's so much about the stock market.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think the looming thing in the background is that we could potentially see ourselves writing off over a trillion dollars of debt somewhere in the future.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, then that takes us if you want to talk about debt.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I guess theoretically nobody has more than the federal government and uh$40 trillion at this point.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the concerns is some of this is actually in short-term instruments that well, long-term instruments that were low, and they're coming due.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: So when you refinance the government's debt, it's not gonna be at 2%, it's gonna be at 5%.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: And we already, I think it was$1.4 trillion over the last fiscal year, we had to pay just for interest on the debt.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: The only thing bigger than that, I believe, is Social Security as far as a budget item.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: So let's talk about the government.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: And if you could do uh something to rein in what these, I don't care, Republic, Democrat, they had both parties have contributed to this.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: Both parties uh are ignoring it, they're not even running on it anymore, Mitch.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, back in the 90s, they actually ran on it, then they balanced the budget, both parties got together and did it.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we had a pretty good run there for a while.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: And right now, if I would even argue this, Mitch, if we had another great financial crisis right now, we wouldn't be able to bail ourselves out.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we would just bail ourselves out with paper, right?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's it would be paper.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: That and that means just so people know what you're saying is yeah, they would come up with the money and the value of your dollar would go down and inflation would zoom up.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, most likely.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, listen, we have an airline in jet blue, not to pick on them.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're my favorite airlines uh from flying back and forth to New York to Florida.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're on the verge of bankruptcy, right?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and and the first thing you Google is if you go into your you know search bar and you write something about jet blue, it automatically fills will my medallion status be lost if I uh if if they file bankruptcy, will my points be gone?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then AI, Gemini spits out this whole thing.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it it said of the big airlines, every one of them has filed bankruptcy at least once in the last 10 years, right?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: So what does that what does that really mean?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: That really means that there's bondholders in the company who are not going to get 100 cents on the dollar.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: That means that the people who are shareholders, publicly traded shareholders in that company, will probably end up having their shares converted into some other instrument as new capital comes in to recapitalize the company.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: The reason why I use pick on pick on jet blue is we are just so accustomed to these kinds of things happening and us bailing them out with with some government subsidy, you know, right corporate welfare.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: But back to your$1.4 trillion worth of debt service, the Department of Defense slash war's budget is a trillion dollars.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: We're spending more on debt service than we are on protecting ourselves.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Social Security is more, but Social Security is a third rail issue.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: And with all the provocation that has gone on in this election cycle, and I can't really say is this one more provocative than two years ago or six years ago or eight years ago, but it seems, by God, pretty provocative in terms of rhetoric.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Why does no one have the guts to say something about Social Security?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the and by the way, I am over 65.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I am on Medicare.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: I will tell you, Medicare for all is the stupidest thing in the world because I actually have Medicare and I have the best possible Medicare Advantage plan that you can buy, which cost me a fortune, okay?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And Medicare, um, Medicare sucks.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, it's just terrible.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Medicare for all would be a disaster, okay?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: But Social Security, I think about it, and I think, you know, the most common question if you type in Social Security is should I take it to 62?
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Should I take it to 65?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: Should I take it to 67?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Should I wait until 70, right?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at that, okay, that's for perhaps our age cohort, but it's it's without question that younger generations, and I'm including millennials, not to mention Gen Z, they're gonna work differently, they're gonna work longer, their income is gonna be not a W 2 form for their entire life from the same company, the way our system was designed.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: They'll pay more self-employment tax than they will pay FICA, which is the you know, the Social Security deduction that shows up on your uh, you know, W-2 form at the end of the year or in your weekly, monthly paycheck.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that needs to be restructured.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it isn't hard.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody in corporate America figures it change the retirement age, change uh, and when when the re when the Republicans advance a bill that changes the growth rate in an assumption in an actuarial model from four to three and a half, okay?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting in the weeds, the left goes crazy in campaign areas that were taking away your social security.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: And no one, no one has the guts.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: It it almost reminds me of the immigrant, the fact that we have the most broken system in our country for immigration policy.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Agree.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: I that was my first thought, too.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's like we always run on these issues, Mitch, and they never fix them.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: So immigration can be fixed.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: George W.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: actually tried to do it, but it's like no, no, no.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: We like running on that issue.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: So the same thing you're talking about with Social Security.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry, folks, but yeah, uh, some people don't need it.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like Donald Trump probably gets Social Security checks, which is preposterous, right?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's meant by the way, it's mandatory that he gets Social Security checks.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: Right, same with Joe Biden, by the way, okay?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: So they don't need it.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: So let's stop giving it.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: There should be a means test.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: We need to raise the retirement age.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: We have gotten from a point in which there are like six people paying into the system for every one taking it out, to down to two and a half paying in to one taking it out.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: And we can't afford that.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: Now, the only good thing I would say the younger generations have is a lot of boomers are going to be dying over the next decade or two, right?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe giving their money to their kids, yeah.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so maybe that that's a help uh financially for the country.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: But uh I didn't mean to interrupt you, Mitch, but I'm no no no no, it's it's it's your show, Bob.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, no, but it's it it's absolutely crazy that no one has the guts.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And and here we have 435 people running for the House, okay?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: We have Republicans that are basically running uncontested in certain jurisdictions, and we have Democrats running uncontested.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Nancy Pelosi is still running for re-election, okay?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they're not gonna get primaried.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's funny in itself, really.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: These are the people who should be advancing that issue because they could do it with zero political risk.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe Mike Johnson, who's running basically unopposed, maybe Mike Johnson can't do it because it's going to have a trickle-down effect on his caucus, on his members.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I get that and I respect that.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but Nancy Pelosi, like, geez, like, you know, immigration, like, if you really, really care about immigration policy, right?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Take it, run with it, be the spokesperson for it, because you can do it with absolute political immunity.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And she's like, I don't think she cares anymore.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to get it.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: No, she doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't care.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I I picked on I picked on the wrong, right, but I picked on the wrong Democrat.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: But like, you know, what why doesn't Adam Schiff change his focus?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: He lives in California.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's one of two senators in the state of California.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, California has an immigration crisis.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Or Republicans in Texas that are entrenched in their seats in the House that are never going to lose them.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't they run on immigration reform?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because here's what's very interesting.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I had this conversation with uh a friend the other day, uh, one of the New York Post people.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I said, isn't it interesting how Talarico and Paxton are a close race?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: But Ashley Moody and Nixon in Florida, where I live, are not a close race.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Both are red states, both both have had tremendous net immigration of voting age people, okay?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yet Florida, which had a lot of liberal tendencies in the past, okay.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: People from the Northeast who were liberals moved down there.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Florida is hard red, okay, is staying hard red, gubernatorial, uh, congressional races for the most part, um, and um the Senate race.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yet Texas, Greg Abbott's gonna walk in, you know.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: That was terrible.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't mean to say that, but Greg Abbott is going to keep his seat, okay, without any challenge, without spending a dime on campaign ads because he didn't have to.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: And Paxson and Talarico are close.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: What happened in what happened?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: Mitch, in that case, he's a very bad candidate.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: John Cornyn would have.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, no question about it.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Paxson's a terrible candidate.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: No, no question about it.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: My point is that the fact that it's even a discussion suggests to me that there's enough people that would vote for Taller Rico, okay, or voted for Taller Rico, okay.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that that says something about the purplification of a state and why, in that state that has had more immigration issues than any other state in the country, okay?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, why isn't it the number one issue in every election in that state, right?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's not Paxton right.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: Paxton is an attorney general.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, my wife's uh from Texas.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: We spend a lot of time in Texas.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we're going down there right after Christmas.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's got uh I have said this all along.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'll I'll believe it turns blue when I see it.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: And even that this election, it's going to be this election is uh almost doesn't count.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, clearly it counts, but it doesn't matter.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: It counts for six years, though, right?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: It counts for six years.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: This is not normal.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I d I'll tell you, Mitch, just if we want to talk about not specific races, but in your and my lifetime, and what we've seen as far as what a Democrat is and what a Republican is, neither one of them do I recognize that those are not Reagan Republicans and those are not Clinton Democrats, right?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: So um both of them, you could argue, knew how to be president and knew how to get votes and accomplish things.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh Reagan really brought down tax rate uh tax rates, which thank God, because they were ridiculous.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then Clinton helped balance the budget.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: People say, oh, that was Newt Gingrich.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I got news for you.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: The guy in the White House worked with the people in the House and the Senate and got it done.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I I respect that.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it seems like a long time.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: And getting back to those two topics the the border, social security, they can be solved.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: And they don't address it.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, here's what's interesting, and I love reminding audiences of this.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: Ronald Reagan ran on tax reform.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: That was he also ran on Make America Great Again, too.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like that was the expression, okay?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, but he ran on tax reform.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee at the time was Dan Rostinkowski, who was a um first generation American from Chicago, okay, as bad as blue-collar of a dude as you could possibly imagine.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he was a Democrat.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: He was bought and paid for by unions, okay.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: He was an old school sort of Chicago uh Democrat.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that, and you know, let's remember, you know the TV Channel 7 used to have whatever the Constitution Rock or whatever it's called, right?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: Legislation starts in the House of Representatives, okay?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Legislation starts in committee in the House of Representatives.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: The guy who becomes a bill.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, how it becomes a bill, exactly.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: You can play the B role in the background.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: The way that that piece of legislation, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act in his second term, the Tax Reform Act in his first term, the way those became law is a Democrat pushed those onto the floor.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: An agenda of a Republican president was advanced by a Democrat.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: We've lost that.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the other thing everybody forgets.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: The first person to introduce tax reform in a meaningful way, because our tax rates in our country were too high, was JFK.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: JFK was a supply side economist.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: He believed in deregulation.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: He believed in lower taxes.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's tragic that, you know, he didn't get to see two terms.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: But we've gotten so far away from that.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Republicans believe in small government, okay?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Democrats believe in people relying on the government.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: That that hasn't changed.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: But if I told you things that came out of the mouths of certain Republicans or Democrats, and then I said, tell me if that person's a Republican or a Democrat, some cases, if I didn't tell you who was, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then the fringes in the parties have gotten control.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Crazy.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: They've gotten crazy and they've taken more and more control through gerrymandering and going back every single time.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: And they they're not going to touch the threat on the uh conservatives is from the right, the threat from liberals is on the left.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's nothing in it for them to come to the middle and solve these problems that we're talking about.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: And uh getting back to JFK, yeah, you wonder if he would be a Democrat.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: He cut, I think the highest marginal rate was like 90, 91%.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: And people, you know, in fact, if you you asked Ronald Reagan, and I know this from talking to Art Laffer, he said the reason Ronald Reagan was a supply cider is that he used to do two movies a year.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: He was an actor, a successful one, obviously in Hollywood, because he said the third one was essentially for free because the taxes were so high.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: So he didn't bother.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: So when he got in office, you and I remember when it was lowered to 28%, it was like, thank God.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: Now, was it too low?
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe, but I got news for you.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: It made a big deal.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: We had a strong economy in the mid-80s.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it was kind of a magic time for a lot of people.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: So when he ran that commercial saying it's morning in America, he got 49 states.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't BS, it was it really wasn't a difference.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: And people felt like, okay, I can't you know what's very interesting.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and mind you, I worked for uh an accounting firm throughout all of Reagan's presidency for the most part.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: I was in college for the beginning of it.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, my first presidential election I could vote in uh my office in my house in Florida.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: I have a big painting of Ronald Reagan in my office.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm a huge fan.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: I I too have talked to Art Laffer a bunch about uh Ronald Reagan.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but what's fascinating to me is the trade-offs that were made to pass tax legislation by Reagan and Rostinkowski are compromises that I don't know how we get back to today.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: So at the time in 1986 when the Tax Reform Act was passed, they took away tax shelters.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, if you had money, and I'm I'm talking about you being upper middle class.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not talking about you being a billionaire.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: No one even talked about billionaires.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: Talking about LPs and that sort of thing.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, limited partnerships, exactly.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you could invest in real estate or oil and gas or whatever.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: You could buy these or movies, even you couldn't.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you wrote it off and you didn't pay income taxes if you were a doctor, a dentist, some sort of professional.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you didn't pay any taxes because you bought a tax shelter.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: And they took that away.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: By taking that away, they destroyed the savings and loan industry because that's who lent money to all these vehicles.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I got my cut my teeth in the real estate industry by cleaning up banks for a living.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I I, you know, it's the greatest education I could ever have, right?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I'd write a book about it and 10 people would read it.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact of the matter is, those trade-offs don't exist today.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can't take away the quote-unquote carried interest uh feature that private equity relies on.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: And for your audience, that means that if you have gains, if you're the sponsor of an investment vehicle in the world of private equity, and you have gains, those gains are taxed at capital gain rates and not ordinary income rates.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a big debate as to whether or not they should be taxed at the 39% or the 28%.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that's a perk for the wealthy in the eyes of many.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: When when um why can't you take that away?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: Because that it always comes down to I'm gonna Yeah, oh no, I got an answer.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Where did Joe Biden have Thanksgiving dinner for his four years in presidency?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was on Nantucket.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: He went to Thanksgiving, the same place.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: He went to one of the founders of our private industry, private equity industry in the United States, was his host for Thanksgiving for four years.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm not gonna throw the private equity shop under the bus.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what's his name?
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Rubinstein from the Carlisle guy.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, okay.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's where he that's where he went.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's where he went for Thanksgiving.
• 28:53
  unknown: Yeah.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think that was?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that was let's protect the carried interest benefit.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Trump's not a per se private equity guy, so it's not like that's a big, you know, no, he's a real estate guy who he's a real estate guy.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he's not a he doesn't take money and make it into more money.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: He takes your money and makes it into his money.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: His money.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: I you know what it's funny.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: Can I tell you a funny thing?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I used to um clean up in my professional life a lot of messes.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, some big insurance company invested with a real estate developer in a joint venture, and I used to call it the uh experience money transfer.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the insurance company had a lot of money, and the real estate developer had a lot of experience in developing real estate.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: So the insurance company would give the money to the real estate developer because he was experienced.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then five years later, when everything went to garbage, um, the real estate developer had all the money, and the insurance company had a really bad experience.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we used to say that when I was uh a broker at Merrill Lynch and then she was something in Manhattan.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: My job is to take your money and my experience and turn it into my money and your experience.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: Your experience, exactly.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: But but but I don't understand.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And listen, I invest in things in which I'm a you know co-general partner sponsor, and I appreciate the tax benefit of getting it taxed, God willing, at capital gains rates.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: But these are one of those things that, like, in the to answer your question, that Reagan and Rostinkowski, and with the help of Art La Art Laffer and others, and believe it or not, Ted Kennedy was involved in all of that stuff.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like, they sat down and hammered things out.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is not a problem you can blame on Donald Trump.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is not a problem you can blame on Barack Obama.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is not a problem you can blame on George Bush.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: But somehow the money that has flowed into the electorate, uh, to our election cycles that has gone to the more provocative candidates, the more provocative races, um, their rhetoric has been what's ripped us in half.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, add to it cable news that didn't exist when it existed, add to it social media that didn't exist in those days.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: And like I watched a clip last night on social media of some jackass suggesting that that learjet that killed nine people, not terribly far from where I live in Florida, was some sort of act of terror.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: I have no and the support for that was that around Mar-a-Lago, the Department of the War has put in, and the Secret Service has put in anti-aircraft um devices uh to protect the president when he's there.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like that's not news, that's not real.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's not a single source for that, but guess what?
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: That clip had 46,000 likes when I saw it yesterday.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's crazy.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's that's the world we live in.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what makes it harder if you are a candidate to push forward a piece of legislation.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know what?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: I once had this conversation with um some of my friends at Fox who who had been in the government, and we talked this off the air.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about term limits.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, there's a lot and and and I've always been a non-believer in term limits.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I always felt like that's the job of the electorate to decide when somebody's been there too long.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's what they didn't answer.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's what the founder said, yeah.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's what the founder said.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I kind of go back to.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Also, life expectancy wasn't as long in 1776 as it is now.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: They were 90-year-old people doing it.
• 32:50
  unknown: Yeah.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they didn't have GLP ones, right?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, that's so or Lipitor or any of that stuff.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: So, but when I think about it, the good thing about a term limit in the case of the executive branch in that in the United States that does have a term limit.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: In the case of executive branches in states that have term limits, the lame duck session is the time to actually get that stuff done.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because you, you know, your legacy Barack Obama could have been something, okay?
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like Obamacare is a train wreck.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: We knew it was a train wreck.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: Your legacy in in your last two years could have been to fix Obamacare.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: The Republicans were running on the two words they used was repeal and replace, repeal and replace, repeal and replace.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Why didn't they have Obama replacement?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: I understand that.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I understand that, right?
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: But so why not come up with an idea together?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: You want to repeal it, okay?
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: Let's figure out what the alternative is, okay?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do that.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: My legacy could be the closest thing to Medicare for all, okay?
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: But Obama felt he was compromising with these exchanges because he wanted single payer, right?
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: And right, right.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I'll tell you, there's so many problems.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: I I look at it, Mitch, that the biggest problem we have is the gerrymandered districts that uh ensure that I want to say 85 to 90 percent of the elections we already know.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that all the other ones are up in the air right now is making this an interesting election, yeah.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: But the the most of them are determined.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_02: That needs to change.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: And the only way that changes is if they expand the size of the House of Representatives, which is not the easiest thing to do, because then everybody is like, well, wait a minute, why should we do that?
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: If we're gonna give up power, it's a hard thing to accomplish.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: In the early going, the uh the country, the whole concept of the house was that it got bigger as the country got bigger.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: The country got bigger, yeah.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: And it did until it stopped at 435, which is where we are.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: That happened in the early 1900s.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: Now there's been a little change with Alaska and and Alaska Hawaii.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and then added three for DC.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: But this is basically where we were.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: If you had gone back to there was a 12th amendment, there were 10 that became the Bill of Rights.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: There was another one that eventually passed, uh, that Congress couldn't pass itself a raise until it was out of session to effect that uh session.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then there was another one said that uh the size of the district um would stay below a certain point.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: And if you had stayed at 50,000 the way it was originally, we would now have over 6,600 representatives.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: Now clearly you can't have that, but there's some say that you could have more so that every every district would be roughly the size of Wyoming population-wise, and that would add about a hundred members of the House of Representatives.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: So then you would have to go in and recut up the districts, yeah, and it would be harder to gerrymander because the whole concept of representatives is to give voice to the populace and not follow the the parties now run Congress.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: The parties do.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, I live in um a congressional district in Florida that Lois Frankel had forever, and to her south was Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: And Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is congressional district, did not get gerrymandered all that much, but my congressional district went from being like that, horizontal, a vertical, to being horizontal, and now it goes west.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: So Jared Moskowitz is now uh was not my congressman, but in the election, I would be voting for either Jared Moskowitz or Scott Singer.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Scott Singer is the mayor of um Boca Ratan.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: Jared Moskowitz is a two-term, I think, congressman, uh, lives out in Parkland.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's funny, you look at these two guys, they're the same dude.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: Literally, they're very much the same guy.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: The thing is, Jared Moskowitz voted with um Biden 80 something percent of the time.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we don't know what Scott Singer's voting record is.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh his endorsement from Trump is not entirely clear.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, he tends to be more progressive, but that's an interesting result of gerrymandering to me, okay?
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Which is the candidates that you got aren't that much different.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: But when gerrymandering, and by the way, my old congressional district in New York, which was Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, when it was gerrymandered five years ago, whenever it was six years ago, uh, gave my congressional district, uh, my old congressional district in New York, Mike Lawler.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: In the ad.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: I used to live up.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know that's where you live.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's that's New York's 17th, I believe, right?
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: And uh lived in New City.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you were up that way.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, right.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, that's where uh Lawler's in Nyack.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think Mike Lawler is in Nyack.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but um shout out to my buddy from Hartsdale House of Pizza, who's his next door neighbor, but in any event, but in any event, um, but Mike Lawler, like I could never imagine in a million years that in suburban New York I was represented, even though I've been a Florida voter for five years, I was represented by a Republican.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like I remember I and but uh a Republican who listens to the other side because he knows.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, I've talked to Mike Lyler, and I'm sure you have also.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, have as well.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: And the irony is Trump doesn't do as well in New York, and in most places, Trump does well in these other states, right?
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_02: Which helps the down ballot candidates if they're Republicans, yes, and in his case, Trump at the top of the ballot actually hurts him, which because in New York they tend to not like him.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, and I I there's I think there's a couple of reasons for that.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think New York is probably more familiar with Donald Trump historically than others, uh, because Donald Trump was on the skyline when you drove into New York City and you kind of knew who he was, and the apprentice, and and um I think the the work, but what what I find fascinating, and the working class people um in New York are Trump supporters.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the naturalized citizens in New York, by and large, are Trump supporters, okay?
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: Union workers in New York um, by and large, are Trump supporters.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I find it fascinating because but but I'm with you 100%.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, down ballot, he doesn't necessarily do well.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: And there's two New Yorks, right?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's the New York C'est upstate New York and New York City.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: Bruce Blakeman's finding it out, and my friend Lee Lee Zeldan found it out the hard way.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's right, literally, like 10 blocks and Manhattan can get you not to be the governor of the state if they come out and vote.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um Bruce Blakeman is a serious candidate.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: Lee Zeldan was a very serious candidate.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like they put you know clowns up.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, those are real serious, credentialed candidates uh running against basically somebody who inherited the governorship.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: He did.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um like it should be a legitimate close race, but New York's one of those places that people just vote along party lines and probably dating myself by pulling a lever.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, that's fine.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_02: There was even, it used to be back in the day, you could pull one lever, yeah, and all of them would go with that.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, blue collar, I I've always said that the Reagan Democrats, yes, and there there were a lot of them, working class people, Reagan Democrats, people that came over and voted for him, are now Trump Republicans.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: And listen, I I I grew up in a Democrat household.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: My mother was a New York City school teacher, and she was her union rep.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, voted as Democrats their entire life.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the new the paper the newspaper my father read was the Daily News and not the New York Post.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um I, you know, I I made my own decision um about politics, and I leaned right from probably the time I was 15.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: I voted for Reagan.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I really haven't looked back.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: I've shaken my head a lot in the last 30 years, but I I haven't really looked back.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: If my parents, may they rest in peace, are no longer with us, if if I told them things that have been said by Democrats about Israel, okay, they wouldn't believe me.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: And after, and I'll leave you with this, after October 7th, I was stunned.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: I forget about the horror of what happened.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: I was stunned by how Republicans were like firefighters, they ran into the burning political building, okay, and they got behind Israel lockstep.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't like Mike Johnson sent out a memo, okay?
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: They just they just to their core knew it and the Democrats were like the Democrats were changed, yeah.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: Times have changed.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: But then I could then I could say Republicans, Mitch, have changed over the years.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: They used to be against Vladimir Putin and Russia.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I the this world is just topsy turvy right now, and and uh that's why, you know, it's a strange time.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I appreciate all the time you've uh uh under the weather, not with us today.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but we'll wrap this up if you can give me two words, and I'm gonna give you a clue as what the two words are.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they have to do with Leonard Skinnard, and um people would raise their flag their their lighters.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: They'd want to hear one more song at the end.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: Freebird.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: Freebird.