The Ben Shapiro Show - The Economy Is About To Burst

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Nov. 14, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show

57:17

The Economy Is About To Burst

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ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		After a big drop in the stock market, is the tech bubble about to burst?
		And what does that mean for the Trump administration, affordability, and free markets?
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		All righty.
		So yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled about 800 points.
		As of this morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures, those were also tumbling.
		And the question is: what the hell is going on?
		And it may be that many people are beginning to realize that a lot of these big tech companies, which are investing in each other, that they are betting on a payoff from AI that may not actually accrue to those companies.
		So, for example, Oracle has become a heavy investor in OpenAI, which is the chat GPT company.
		OpenAI is not publicly traded, but you have a bunch of publicly traded companies that are basically doing circular cash deals with OpenAI.
		And so, if you're investing in Oracle, you are partially investing in, for example, OpenAI.
		Or if you are investing in NVIDIA, you are partially investing in OpenAI.
		A lot of money is being passed between all of these companies at the top end of the market because some provide services to other members of that particular crew.
		Well, the problem is: is the gain from AI going to accrue to OpenAI?
		Well, go to Meta.
		Who will actually benefit from the productivity increases we're going to see from AI?
		There's a difference between the proposition that AI is going to be transformative for the economy, which it absolutely will.
		You will be using AI in your job if you're not already.
		AI is going to increase productivity.
		I use AI regularly, right?
		Not just because Perplexity is one of our sponsors via Comet, but also because if I'm doing research, it is easier to get my research started by asking a sophisticated question of Comet, for example, and then to do my secondary research based off of that answer than it is to simply compile 10 different sources and then have to synthesize all of those sources just to answer a relatively simple question.
		It saves a lot of time.
		That's true for a lot of people.
		But does that mean that those companies are then reaping the benefits in terms of profits to them?
		What keeps the wheel spinning for those companies?
		That's the question.
		And a lot of investors are beginning to ask that particular question.
		According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. stocks posted their worst day in the month, unwinding a rally that began with news of a deal to end the federal government's longest closure.
		Declines were broad, with tech stocks sliding alongside the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which lost almost 800 points.
		Shares of smaller companies dropped, with the Russell 2000 index losing 2.8%.
		Bitcoin also extended its recent fall, slipping back below $100,000 to its lowest 4 p.m. level since May.
		President Trump signed, of course, that spending legislation late on Wednesday, but investors, according to the Wall Street Journal, are now worried the incoming torrent of data could swing markets and upend bets on a December interest rate cut they'd once taken for granted.
		And actually, if you check with our sponsor, Calci, right now, on the odds that there will, in fact, be a rate cut, those odds have been plummeting all week long.
		They've been going down.
		In fact, right now, Calci has it as basically dead even on whether the Fed is going to cut or whether the Fed is not going to cut.
		Like 50-50, essentially.
		And I think that's about right.
		In fact, I'm highly skeptical the Fed is going to cut rates given the current state of the economy because inflation has not been put to bed because liquidity actually is not all that hard to get for businesses right now.
		And because inflating the economy by lowering those interest rates again and pumping more money into the economy could be a mistake.
		So the SP 500 fell 1.7% on Thursday.
		The Dow dropped 1.7%.
		The tech-heavy NASDAQ composite sank 2.3%.
		Those are the biggest declines for all three major indices since October 10th.
		So what does it show?
		If the economy is this responsive to the possibility of a Fed rate cut or a Fed rate increase, that is not a strong economy.
		It isn't.
		If what you're worried about is whether there's going to be incrementally lower interest rates for businesses to artificially spice things up in terms of liquidity, to inject more money into the economy, and that's what you're waiting on, that does not bode well.
		It does not mean that the fundamentals seem particularly strong to me.
		Why?
		Well, again, because so much of what is happening at the top end of the market and the vast majority of the gains in the stock market are located in the Magnificent 7, in those top seven companies.
		The rest of the stock market over the past couple of years has been essentially flat, maybe slight increase.
		The top end of the market has exploded.
		That's what's driven the Dow Jones industrial average up to 48,000.
		But what exactly is happening at the top end of the market?
		So back in October, there's a piece from the New York Times that explained how much money is passing hands between companies like, for example, OpenAI and companies like NVIDIA.
		According to the New York Times, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, says technological revolutions are driven by more than technology.
	They're driven by new ways of paying for them.
	He recently said there is always a lot of focus on technological innovation.
	What really drives a lot of progress is when people also figure out how to innovate on the financial model.
	Now, that's true.
	I mean, new financial tools do unlock new capacities for liquidity.
	It is also true that new financial tools sometimes are very risky and dangerous.
	Over the last several years, as the New York Times points out, Mr. Altman's company has found unusual and creative ways of paying for the computing power needed to fuel its ambitions.
	Many of the deals OpenAI has struck with chipmakers, cloud computing companies, and others are strangely circular.
	OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services.
	So, for example, from 2019 through 2023, Microsoft was OpenAI's primary investor.
	Microsoft pumped more than $13 billion into the startup, and then OpenAI funneled most of those billions back into Microsoft, buying cloud computing power needed to fuel the development of new AI technologies.
	By the summer of last year, OpenAI could not get all the computing power they wanted from Microsoft, so they started signing cloud computing contracts with other companies, including Oracle and little-known startups with names like Core Weave.
	Across three different deals signed this year, OpenAI agreed to pay Core Weave, a company that builds AI data centers, more than $22 billion for computing power.
	As part of these agreements, OpenAI receives $350 million in Core Weave stock, which could ultimately help pay for this computing power.
	OpenAI struggled to get additional investment from Microsoft, so instead it went to SoftBank, which then lent it $40 billion.
	At the same time, OpenAI has been working with various companies to build its own computing data centers rather than relying on cloud computing deals.
	And that includes SoftBank.
	So the company is raising $100 billion to help OpenAI build data centers in Texas and Ohio.
	Oracle has agreed to spend $300 billion building new data centers for OpenAI in Texas, New Mexico, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
	OpenAI will then pay Oracle roughly the same amount to use these computing facilities over the next several years.
	So, again, there's a lot of circular money movement right here.
	Last month, NVIDIA announced it intends to invest $100 billion in OpenAI over the next several years, which will help OpenAI pay for its new data centers.
	And then OpenAI will use that money to buy chips from NVIDIA.
	So again, there's nothing particularly corrupt about all of this, but it's everybody betting on the same horses over and over and over and over.
	If you keep betting on the same horses over and over and over, and those horses don't come in, things get ugly.
	What happens if OpenAI does not deliver the gains it has promised everybody?
	Well, it's not going to be able to pay for all of those bills.
	It's not going to be able to pay Oracle or NVIDIA or any of the other companies that bet on it.
	In fact, according to Baron's, Oracle stock has given back all the gains from the cloud computing group NVIDIA Moment as investors grow increasingly cautious over investments linked to the AI boom and shares just keep falling.
	When Oracle reported earnings in September, the results included a massive revenue forecast.
	That forecast has become a source of consternation due to the source of that revenue, OpenAI, which plans to spend $1.4 trillion building and accessing AI data centers over the next decade.
	In fact, Oracle is also trading at least in part as a proxy for OpenAI.
	Remember, OpenAI is a private company.
	What does that mean?
	It means you and I, we can't buy stock in OpenAI.
	The only companies that are buying stock from OpenAI are making private deals for OpenAI.
	Okay, but it is not publicly traded, so we don't know its actual real market valuation at this point.
	And again, are the gains to OpenAI, the profits to OpenAI going to accrue to a multiple of seven or 10 or 15 from where they currently are, their earnings?
	That would just be to pay their bills and keep the lights on.
	And that would have to happen pretty fast.
	One of its biggest commitments is a reported $300 billion agreement to buy computing power for Oracle.
	That deal represented about 65% of its so-called RPO forecast that sent the stock soaring in early September.
	But a lot has happened since then.
	Oracle tapped the corporate bond market for an $18 billion debt sale that triggered a wave of new issues from tech giants like Meta.
	Private credit markets wobbled following a spate of auto-related bankruptcies and broader market liquidity dried up.
	So again, one of the reasons why they're going to need market liquidity is to make these sorts of deals.
	So again, optimism around AI eventually, it could peter out, given the fact that earnings, it's going to take a while for those earnings to actually accrue.
	And stock traders, you know, unless the stock keeps going up, caution is warranted.
	And so people are starting to divest a little bit from the top of the market.
	That's why you're seeing the market start to drop a little bit right now.
	And you could see that turn into a wave if, for example, OpenAI ever reports any bad news.
	Or if one of these other major AI companies starts to report decreased profit share.
	Or people start to think, generally speaking, that it'll take longer for AI to filter into every aspect of the market and then down to the original companies than they thought it would.
	There's some early indicators that's happening, by the way.
	Alrighty, coming up, more economic reports, some little bit disquieting.
	We'll get to that in a moment.
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	According to CNBC, professional investors have been using the market's record-setting run as an opportunity to take profits.
	Retail investors have been doing much of the heavy lifting in the latest run of the three-year-old bull market.
	Hedge funds and other institutional clients have been the biggest net sellers of single stocks and exchange-traded funds this year, unloading more than $67 billion worth of equities in 2025.
	Now, if institutional investors are being replaced by retail investors, institutional investors are significantly more sophisticated than retail investors, just generally speaking.
	Hedge fund managers are doing this for a living.
	They're doing this with large amounts of money.
	They're doing this with 401ks and trust funds.
	They're doing this with gigantic pension funds.
	So if in fact they are pulling out of the market and you are buying stock from a hedge fund, you might want to think about who's more sophisticated, you or the hedge fund.
	Retail investors might be pushing up the market, but the reality is that the people who are the sophisticated investors are saying, I'm going to get out.
	Well, the getting is good, at least at the top end of the market.
	Now, again, I'm not saying that a stock market crash is imminent.
	I'm saying that there is a bubble, it seems to me, in a lot of areas.
	In real estate, there's a bubble.
	In tech, there is a bubble.
	And when you have a market that is this frothy, the possibility of bubbles bursting is pretty robust.
	That doesn't mean recession or depression, but it does mean the possibility of stagnation.
	Since, again, so much economic growth right now is predicated on tech.
	According to the CNBC, retail investors have been the market's backbone, the most consistent dip buyers since 2020, a behavior forged during the pandemic rebound, the Wall Street Investment Bank said.
	That strategy has paid off handsomely as the SP 500 reached multiple all-time highs this year.
	Now, again, why?
	Part of the inflationary market is people actually getting more dollars from the federal government.
	One of the reasons why there's been a push by many members of the government for the Federal Reserve to lower those interest rates is because they are hoping retail investors will take that money and then sink it back into the stock market.
	That tension will be in focus this week as scores of high-profile institutional investors gather at CNBC's Delivering Alpha Investor Summit on Thursday in New York City, offering the world a chance to hear how some of the industry's most influential voices are navigating this volatile market.
	Again, I would be wary, and frankly, I am wary.
	Meanwhile, other signs that things may be starting to slow.
	Foreclosures are once again on the rise in the United States.
	New data from ATTOM shows more homeowners falling behind on their mortgages amid job losses and soaring living costs, according to the Daily Mail.
	In October alone, there were 36,766 foreclosure filings, the first step up in the process when a lender warns a borrower they're in default.
	That's up 3% from September and 19% from a year ago.
	Today's homeowners have safer loans, and the real estate values haven't dropped so dramatically.
	So, if a bank has to foreclose, it's not like it's going to completely take the legs out from under the bank the way that it did during the crash of 2008.
	But as those foreclosure rates go up, a couple things happen: one is good and one is bad.
	The good thing that's happening is that that is the additional supply that you need in the market.
	So, if you're worried about not being able to afford a house, it turns out that when people can't afford their current houses and they get out and the bank has to seize that house and then resell it, the price are going to go down.
	It's additional supply.
	But it is also a sign that people can't afford things right now.
	Both those things are true at the same exact time.
	Meanwhile, companies are cutting jobs.
	I mean, there's no question this is happening.
	Verizon is planning to cut roughly 15,000 jobs.
	The cuts are the largest ever for the carrier, according to the Wall Street Journal.
	They're set to take place in the next week.
	The majority of the reduction is expected to be made through layoffs.
	Verizon is also going to transition its stores into franchise operations, which is going to shift employees off its own payroll.
	Now, they've lost a lot of phone subscribers.
	There's a lot of competition in this area for sure.
	But again, one of the things that we are seeing here is big companies that are running into headwinds, clearly.
	Okay, so if affordability is a problem, if we are worried about the stock market, if we're concerned that Americans are going to suffer some significant temporary job dislocation as AI starts to filter into the market, if we're doing what is the solution to all of that now, there are two solutions that are basically being offered.
	One used to be called left-wing and one used to be called right-wing, but we don't actually have a left and a right anymore since pretty much all economic discussions now cross-cut.
	There are people who are voting Republican who agree with Elizabeth Warren on economics.
	I can't say there are a lot of people who are voting Democrat who agree with me on economics, but you know, that is what it is.
	The Democrats' proposal is socialism.
	Their proposal is big government interventionism, ban things, regulate things, force sales, take over businesses, tax the hell out of people.
	More government involvement supposedly will solve affordability.
	It will supposedly create more broad-based prosperity, take money away from the top end of the market, supposedly get rid of the market cap of Oracle or Meta, and suddenly people will become richer.
	Now, again, there's no logic to this.
	The thing that actually makes people richer is innovation.
	The thing that actually makes people's lives better is innovation.
	Remember, money is just a ruler.
	The amount of money you make is a ruler.
	What I mean by that is you use a ruler to measure things.
	The amount of money you make is a measurement of the goods that you can buy in exchange for the money.
	So you could titularly be making tons and tons and tons of money in a particular currency.
	If the currency is inflated and you're carrying it around in a wheelbarrow, it'll buy you nothing.
	That's true in, for example, Venezuela.
	It was true until very recently in Argentina.
	The real question is: what's the kind of stuff that you can get today?
	Innovation makes your stuff better and it makes your stuff cheaper.
	Competition makes your stuff better and it makes your stuff cheaper.
	All of that is true.
	But socialists believe that if they take control of all of the means of distribution, it used to be about the means of production.
	They seem to have given up on that in large part.
	Now they're more about the means of distribution of cash.
	If they just redistribute all day long, this will somehow make Americans better off.
	But again, the reality is forward progress in material terms is reliant on innovation, on the development of new products and services.
	Democrats don't want to believe this.
	So one of your choices is momdaniism, where you yell about how things are unfair, and then you try to tax the hell out of people, and then they leave your jurisdiction, and then you tax the hell out of the second richest people, and then they leave your jurisdiction.
	And then the services you're providing don't actually stack up because it turns out that if nobody has an interest in protecting private property, then actually the places they live get worse.
	This is what happened with supposed affordable housing in, for example, St. Louis when the government tried this in the 60s.
	They tried to build these gigantic affordable housing complexes, government-owned, and people treated them like trash because they felt no actual responsibility for a thing they didn't own.
	Nonetheless, this is what Democrats are pushing.
	This would be the AOC wing of the Democratic Party.
	So AOC and parts of the Democratic Party that are growing believe that sort of traditional Democratic Party politics are over, that it's time to basically shut everything down, shut everything down in the name of vast government redistributionism.
unidentified		Especially with this administration, my concern is that the lesson that they're learning is that Democrats are elite and that next time we just need to hurt working people and working Americans more to get them to fold.
		And I don't want them to learn that lesson.
		And I want us to be a party that says we're going to get results for people.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, the AOC part of the Democratic Party is on the ascent.
		There's no question that's the case.
		Yesterday, Zaran Mamdani, the self-stated socialist, held a secretive meeting, according to the New York Post, with far-left U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday, a sit-down that was captured by an eagle-eyed New Yorker whose office is across from the mayor-elect headquarters.
		She then tweeted out, tax the rich, billionaire tears not pictured, which, I mean, pathetic, truly pathetic.
		Tax the rich, billionaires, not, billionaire tiers not pictured.
		Okay, the people who are paying all the bills in New York City are the rich people.
		That is just true by the tax receipts in New York City.
		There are a lot of people in New York who pay taxes.
		The people who are paying net taxes, meaning taxes minus the benefits received from the government, those people are at the top of the income spectrum.
		That is also true federally.
		But the idea here is to punish rich people, that if you just punish them hard enough, suddenly things will get better.
		Now, the problem with this theory is it doesn't work.
		Punishing the rich doesn't make everybody richer.
		It just makes rich people poorer.
		That's all.
		And then everybody gets poorer because nobody has money to invest in innovation, for example.
		And I understand all the dyspepsia about innovation.
		I just talked about some of the dyspepsia in the middle of a bubble.
		Joseph Schumpeter, the famous economist, talked about creative destruction.
		He talked about the idea that when you have markets, free markets tend to make bad things in the market or less efficient things in the market obsolete, and that destroys them.
		And in the short term, that looks bad, but it's creative because what grows out of that is something better.
		That if you want an automobile-based economy, it will destroy the wheel rights, the people who make wheels for wagons.
		Those people will no longer actually have a job, but then they will find new jobs.
		And so in the moment, it'll look really bad.
		That's also true with regard to AI.
		I understand there are some of the AI doomers out there who believe that AI is going to take everybody's job.
		I don't believe that's the case.
		I think that AI will end up being a supplement in the way that virtually all other technologies are supplements to your jobs.
		There are certain jobs that will probably get automated out of existence where AI will do them.
		Ironically, those will likely be the very white-collar jobs that the media was touting about 15 years ago when members of the media were telling welders to code.
		Well, now it seems much more likely that coders are going to have to learn to weld because AI is actually quite good at the things that the coders taught the AI to do, like coding.
		So it'll be fascinating to see which ways the job market moves.
		In fact, the job market is likely to move more toward a blue collar than it is to move toward sort of middle management white collar.
		But the market will change.
		The market will move.
		Things will become more efficient.
		Everything will become cheaper.
		These are good things.
		Again, not to pretend there are no downsides to AI, particularly in the immediate term, but the sort of Luddite philosophy that if you take a technology out to a field and beat it to death with a hammer, that somehow you're going to be able to prevent the future from happening, unlikely.
		Other countries like China will just take an advantage on you and then they will undercut your entire market and they will gain global market share and they will gain more geopolitical power and you will have worse products for a higher price working a worse job.
		That is the likely outcome of worse tech because historically that's the outcome of worst tech.
		Coming up, we'll get into what should the strategy be with regard to affordability and the housing market and all the rest.
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		So what are the actual strategies that people who are, say, capitalists can use with regard to a lot of the economic unease right now?
		Because there's no question people are feeling uneasy.
		And that's totally understandable.
		Prices are really high, obviously.
		It costs a lot of money to buy a home.
		There's a big argument online yesterday about in 1950, a man and his wife and his two kids, he could work a job and he could own a home and you can't do that today.
		And people were pointing out that the homes in 1950 kind of sucked.
		They were like 900 square feet.
		And the guy's job wasn't that great.
		He was riveting in a factory.
		And also the entire rest of the world was destroyed by World War II.
		That's true.
		But that doesn't alleviate the fact that there are a lot of people right now who would like to buy a home who cannot afford to buy a home.
		So what policy changes can be made?
		We've been talking about this for days.
		Now, again, there are two separate questions to be asked that people are conflating.
		I think dishonestly.
		One is, what should you on a personal level do right now?
		And the answer for you on a personal level is to make a personal decision.
		And that personal decision may involve looking at your circumstances, where you live and deciding you can get a better job elsewhere.
		And that's not the end of the world.
		That is not, in fact, a fundamental betrayal of the American contract.
		Okay, you deciding that you wish to leave home to go to college, that you wish to leave college to go to a different city for a job.
		And people have been doing this for literally all of human history and all of American history.
		Now, that doesn't, that's a different question from what can we do on a broad national or local scale in order to make things more affordable.
		New York is never going to be as affordable as Des Moines, Iowa.
		It's not going to.
		Nothing you do.
		There are no policy things you can do that will make New York as affordable as Des Moines.
		Why?
		Because there are a lot more people in New York and a lot less real estate in New York and a lot more demand and a lot less supply.
		So things will be more expensive in New York.
		That's just a reality of the world.
		And yes, there are things you can do to bring down costs somewhat significantly, but it's never going to be the price of Iowa to live in New York.
		That's just not the way that it works.
		It has never worked that way.
		And literally all of human history has never worked that way.
		So recognizing economic realities, what can you do to alleviate some of these problems?
		Well, I'll tell you what you can't do is denial.
		Politically speaking, denial is a bad idea.
		So the administration lately has tried this.
		Again, this is nothing new.
		Barack Obama used to do this back when the economy under Barack Obama was bad, which it was.
		Barack Obama used to say that people just don't understand what we're doing.
		If we just articulate it better, then they'll understand.
		That tech never works.
	President Trump has been trying to do this a little bit.
	He's been going on shows and doing interviews in which he says that people just don't understand how good the economy is.
	Again, trying to talk people into feeling good, try it with your wife sometime.
	Seriously, like talking people into feeling good is almost never successful.
	The vice president was trying that yesterday.
	Here he was on Fox News.
jd vance ▲ ● ▼		I know that there are a lot of people out there, Sean, who are saying things are expensive.
		And we have to remember they're expensive because we inherited this terrible inflation crisis from the Biden administration.
		But you've already seen signs that things are getting better.
		The price of eggs has gone way down.
		The price of energy has gone way down.
		The price of gasoline has gone way down.
		And as we know, when the price of energy goes down, that starts to filter out into the entire economy, but that also takes a little bit of time.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah, again, that is not wrong.
		It's just not likely to be convincing to the American people.
		So what strategies can actually be tried?
		Well, one strategy is to yell at the Fed.
		The administration has tried this also, yelling at the Fed, telling them they need to lower those interest rates more to therefore inject more liquidity into the economy, and that this somehow won't be inflationary.
		Here's the thing.
		All the Fed can do is control the money supply.
		That's all they do.
		They control the money supply.
		They do it directly and they do it indirectly.
		The indirect version is by lowering that open markets overnight rate.
		That's the way they lower.
		You can go view a YouTube video that I did a few years back, searching on YouTube, where I explain exactly what the Federal Reserve does in order to inject liquidity into the economy and how it relates to inflation.
		Peter Navarro, who of course is a tariff hawk, he loves tariffs, big on tariffs.
		He's blaming Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve for lack of growth.
unidentified		I think that Jay Powell is almost purposely being an obstructionist to this administration.
		He's been through this the last time.
		He's doing it again.
		I don't know why.
		The man is costing this country literally hundreds of billions of dollars in growth and thousands of jobs.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So no, actually, I'm not a fan of Jerome Powell's policies.
		I think that he's been late on the ball every time.
		I think he was inflationary.
		I think that inflationary policy has been significantly more damaging than the somewhat moderate delays in lowering those interest rates.
		Blaming Jerome Powell for stagnation at the, you can blame Jerome Powell for inflation.
		Blaming him for a stagnation, I think, is another question.
		That's not going to do it.
		So what could do it?
		Ironically, the Trump administration is now tacitly acknowledging that the tariff regime that they put in place actually does damage Americans at, for example, the supermarket.
		So yesterday, the Trump administration said import taxes on coffee and bananas will be lowered as part of trade deals with four Latin American countries.
		The agreements with Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Ecuador come as President Trump faces scrutiny over his handling of the economy and concerns about affordability.
		As part of an initial framework, a reciprocal tariff of 10% will stay on goods from Guatemala, Argentina, and El Salvador, as will a 15% tax on imports from Ecuador into the U.S.
		But the deals will exempt products that cannot be produced in the United States in sufficient quantities, like coffee.
		The U.S.-Argentina deal also addresses beef producers' access to foreign markets.
		So I'm just going to point out right now that this is a tacit admission that tariffs increase prices on American consumers.
		That's what it is.
		If you say, I want the prices to go down on bananas and thus I have removed the tariffs on bananas, what does that mean?
		It means that, yes, by restricting supply through tariffs to bananas, the prices of bananas go up.
		This is true for all other products as well.
		When you put tariffs on products, the prices tend to go up because, of course, you're putting an artificial restriction on the supply of the product.
		As we discussed yesterday and will continue to discuss, the laws of supply and demand are very basic.
		If the demand remains stable and the supply goes down, the prices go up.
		Again, if there are fewer bananas and the same number of people to buy those bananas and more people competing to buy those bananas, the price goes up.
		So the president acknowledging that coffee is too expensive and bananas are too expensive, and thus perhaps we should lower the tariffs on coffee and bananas.
		What if we took that logic and extended over a wide variety of other products?
		Wouldn't that be nice?
		That might seem like a thing worth doing.
		And one of the things worth pointing out is that when the president says he's keeping blanket tariffs on countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Argentina, and then he says he's going to carve out things like bananas and coffee, that is a pretty giant carve out.
		In fact, I asked our sponsors over at Comet, a project of perplexity, what are the top products exported to the United States by Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Argentina?
		Please list percentages.
		The top exports from Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Argentina to the United States consist mainly of agricultural products, textiles, and primary commodities, with most recent percentages reflecting their significance in trade for 2024 to 2025.
		Guatemala, 22.9% of their export market to the United States is bananas.
		Another 11% is knit sweaters, and 9% is coffee.
		Other products include melons, papayas, and apparel.
		So I just have a question.
		Are those products you want to pay more for because we are protecting the domestic papaya industry or the domestic melon industry?
		It seems to me the answer is no.
		How about El Salvador?
		El Salvador, 44.5% of their exports to the United States are knit or crocheted apparel.
		I mean, I understand that the knitting industry in the United States requires significant protection.
		I mean, the Knitters Association of America must be upheld at all costs.
		But I mean, come on.
		Ecuador, crude oil is 25.1%.
		Fish, 20.3%.
		Fruits and nuts like bananas and plantains, 12.4%.
		Cocoa, 11%.
		So, you know, when I look at these percentages, I think these are pretty big carve-outs, number one.
		And number two, this is in fact a tacit admission.
		Of course, of course, because basic economics is correct, that if you wish to lower prices, perhaps you should remove trade barriers on the countries that are going to supply you cheaper and better products.
		By the way, it is worth noting that there is a reason why competitors try to cut off foreign markets for their competitors.
		So again, tacit admission.
		According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is now joining Microsoft in supporting legislation that threatens to further limit NVIDIA's ability to export to China.
		The moves by Microsoft and Amazon to work against a company they are deeply intertwined with highlights the fierce nature of the AI race.
		The companies are all jockeying for favorable policy to stay ahead of competitors.
		NVIDIA is fighting for access to the Chinese market despite security concerns.
		Microsoft came out publicly in favor of legislation in order to stop the distribution of NVIDIA chips.
		Officials at Amazon's cloud unit have said that they support it as well.
		Why?
		Well, because it gives Microsoft and Amazon preferential access to the chips at their data centers around the world.
		Now, I actually agree that there should be significant restrictions on the export of NVIDIA chips to China.
		The Chinese are our enemies.
		They're our geopolitical opponents.
		Shipping them, our best tech, is a huge, gigantic mistake.
		But I think one of the reasons, obviously, Microsoft and Google and Amazon are doing all this is because they would very much prefer to have preferential pricing on the chips by removing a potential market in China.
	Okay, so affordability.
	The Federal Reserve ain't going to do it.
	How about trade?
	Well, maybe if we got rid of some of those tariffs, that would help, which is, again, a free market policy.
	How about deregulation?
	Deregulation would help.
	Well, the Trump administration is, in fact, pursuing that in some areas.
	The Trump administration announced Thursday that oil and gas drilling would be allowed in a fragile expanse of tundra and wetlands in northern Alaska that is home to caribou, grizzly bears, and thousands of migratory birds.
	I remember writing about this back when I was in college.
	That was now 25 years ago.
	The move reverses actions taken during the Biden administration to restrict development in half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, that is 23.5 million acres of federal land in the North Slope.
	The expanse is some of the last remaining pristine wilderness in the country.
	Okay, America has a lot of wilderness and a lot of pristine wilderness, of course.
	Unlocking more jobs, unlocking more oil production will bring down prices.
	That is the nature of creating more supply.
	That is a good policy.
	On healthcare, the GOP can also move to make things more affordable.
unidentified		How?
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		By removing regulations.
		The reality is that the Democrats have suggested, again, when we talk about Democrat solutions, they always involve redistribution and seizure of wealth.
		The Democrats have suggested the only way to bring down the cost of health care is to subsidize healthcare, therefore raising the cost of healthcare.
		There's a reason that the price of healthcare in the United States has continued to outpace the market.
		Rich Lowry has a good column at the New York Post.
		He says, as Avic Roy of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity points out, and Avic Roy is a very, very good scholar, Barack Obama ran for president promising his healthcare reform would reduce premiums by $2,500 per family.
		Roy notes that the premiums for the benchmark silver Obamacare plans have nearly tripled since 2013.
		Deductibles for those same silver plans have more than doubled, outpacing the rate of increase for employer-sponsored plans.
		So, actually, the price of Obamacare is increasing faster than like your private health insurance.
		Democrats don't even pretend anymore that Obamacare is going to reduce the cost.
		Instead, they say we have to just keep pouring money down that rat hole.
		The biggest problem with Obamacare, of course, is that it redistributes healthcare coverage from young people to old people.
		That's what it does.
		It forces young people to buy a particular level of healthcare coverage in order to be covered in the Obamacare exchanges.
		And then they use that money to pay for older people and their health insurance.
		Instead, what Avik Roy proposes is a more free market solution, what's called a reinsurance program, which pays the cost of people with preexisting conditions, which is a straight-up subsidy to people with pre-existing conditions, which has always been the problem.
		Because insurance for people who have preexisting conditions is not insurance, it's just healthcare.
		I can't buy insurance for a broken leg after I have a broken leg.
		If I do that, that's just called healthcare.
		It's like buying fire insurance for your house after it's burned down already.
		The age ban imposed by Obamacare, which mandates that young people can't pay too much less than old people, should be eliminated.
		Obamacare taxes should be repealed.
		You should be able to buy catastrophic plans, particularly for people who are young, because if you're young, your minor injuries aren't going to cost you that much money.
		It's really only if you have a car wreck or a serious disease that you need serious health insurance coverage.
		Again, free market solutions here would be a good thing.
		And Republicans should explain that because otherwise, you're just going to have Democrats explaining that we should continue to pour money down the rat hole of Obamacare.
		And then we get to housing.
		Now, again, the Trump administration keeps throwing out government-based solutions for the housing issue.
		The reality is that if you wish for there to be more supply of housing, you need to allow people the market conditions to build more supply of housing.
		That's how that works.
		We need a higher supply.
		Now, one thing that the vice president said about this, and he and I have pretty significant disagreements on our economic vision, but he is right that deporting 30 million illegal immigrants would definitely help.
		I mean, you have a lot of people in the country who should not be here and who are taking up housing space.
		Here's the vice president.
jd vance ▲ ● ▼		A lot of young people are saying housing is way too expensive.
		Why is that?
		Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who are taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens.
		And at the same time, we weren't building enough new houses to begin with, even for the population that we had.
		So, what we're doing is trying to make it easier to build houses, trying to make it easier to build factories and things like that so that people have good jobs.
		We're also getting all of those illegal aliens out of our country, and you're already seeing it start to pay some dividends.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Now, again, he's not wrong about this.
		We have way too many people in this country who do not belong in this country, obviously.
		Obviously, that's true.
		But is that going to solve the housing affordability crisis?
		The answer is not really.
		The actual thing that's going to solve the housing affordability crisis is deregulation.
		It's going to be free market capitalism.
		It's actually going to be banks making real decisions about who can afford a home and where.
		Otherwise, you end up with government subsidies that push up the price of housing by giving many, many people who probably don't have the credit worthiness to get a private loan access to houses, which then will go bust.
		And then you have, again, a repeat of subprime housing crises.
		Government-based solutions tend to have precisely the opposite effect of what they are attempting to achieve.
		So, markets, free market, I know, free market capitalism.
		No one talks about this anymore.
		I don't know when it fell out of fashion for the right to stop talking about free markets and to instead suggest that government solutions are the actual answer.
		You know, growing up as a conservative, this was sort of rote conservatism, was the idea that private property, free markets, should be, at least in the first instance, the solution.
		Doesn't mean all problems will be solved by markets, but it does mean that if you get rid of markets or heavily intervene in markets or put your grubby government fingers on the markets, you're skewing all the incentive structures and you end up undermining the very thing that you are attempting to do in the vast majority of cases.
		Already, meanwhile, the Democrats, some Republicans, they continue to try to attack President Trump over Jeffrey Epstein.
		And nothing has been released from the new Epstein emails that is particularly shocking about President Trump.
		Literally nothing.
		I'm waiting for the supposed smoking gun in the same way that I was waiting for the Russiagate smoking gun for years and years and years, and it never happened.
		And it feels very much the same at this point.
		Now, again, I'm fine with all of the Epstein files being whatever is available, what can be released.
		Not only am I fine with it, I think it would be good.
		Again, more transparency is better.
		And I think that there is a Streisand effect thing that is going on where the president says that he wants to abide by the law and then he brings people in and he browbeats them because he doesn't want certain files being released.
		And people are asking, well, why does he not want the files?
		Again, that's a Barbara Streisand effect.
		Is there anything there?
		I highly, highly doubt it.
		Again, the Biden administration had full control over all of these files for four years.
		There was something, some smoking gun about Donald Trump and children there.
		You don't think the Biden administration relieked it?
		Donald Trump's personal tax returns were leaked.
		Like, give me a break.
		Give me a break.
		Democrats, however, are out there spinning up every old story, every unspecified allegation.
		For example, Representative Robert Garcia went on MSNBC and then claimed that Epstein was doing his work at Mar-a-Lago, which, again, there is no support for this idea evidentiarily that Mar-a-Lago was like a center of human trafficking on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein.
unidentified		The reality is that every time we get a new batch of documents, there are a lot more questions.
		And in my opinion, signs point back to the White House.
		When you think about Epstein, his six-trafficking ring, Ghelane Maxwell, all this happened in New York.
		It happened in South Florida.
		It happened at Mar-a-Lago.
		They ran in the same circles.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, a little much, a little much, and you can see now who's pushing this, right?
		Democrats who wish to smear President Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and some Republicans who wish to smear President Trump with Jeffrey Epstein, mainly because they don't like a lot of Trump's policies and are trying to undermine his credibility within his own party.
		Again, I think the solution to that is more transparency, but I'm not sure that that's going to solve it because there are some ill-motivated actors, shall we say.
		Meanwhile, CNN is now trotting out old stories again.
		So CNN brought forth a swimsuit model named Stacey Williams, who claims that she was groped by Trump all the way back in 1993.
		Now, this has been in the public eye for a long, long time.
		In fact, it was already brought out, I think, last year, two years ago.
		But CNN's going to retell it again.
		Here we go.
unidentified		He writes, my 20-year-old girlfriend in 93 that after two years, I gave to Donald.
		Now, by the way, you met him in 1992.
		When you see that, though, in this email in black and white, I quote unquote gave to Donald.
		What's your reaction?
		I mean, it screams about, you know, the mindset of these men.
		You know, the same two men who did what they did to me when Jeffrey Epstein walked me into Donald Trump's office to be groped by him.
		Clearly, we are these objects, these trophies, and it's deeply misogynistic.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Okay, now, again, this was dealt with last year.
		I mean, this is not anything new.
		According to The Guardian, this is more than a year ago.
		A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993 in what she believes was a twisted game between the two men.
		Now, again, she only came out with this story, I guess, in 2024.
		I'm wondering why it would take you 21 years to tell that story, given the fact, I'm sorry, 31 years to tell that story, given the fact that Donald Trump has already been president once and has been the most famous person on earth for several decades at this point.
		Caroline Levitt at the time, who is a press secretary for the Trump campaign, said these accusations made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election are unequivocally false.
		It's obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.
		Now, again, the attempt to retail these stories anew because Democrats leaked three emails out of context to the New York Times.
		It's not just silly.
		It's actually wildly counterproductive for the body politic.
		And meanwhile, in what is an actual scandal, remember Representative Matt Gates?
		Remember that time when the Trump administration briefly attempted to nominate him for attorney general?
		And then the entire Republican caucus went, oh, what now?
		Well, it turns out the entire Republican caucus was right.
		What now was the proper response to the idea that Representative Matt Gates should be Attorney General of the United States, according to the New York Times?
		She was 17 and a high school junior in Florida.
		She was working at McDonald's and she was living in and out of a homeless shelter, hoping to save up to buy braces to fix her teeth.
		She falsely advertised herself in 2017 as 18 years old on a website that matches men looking for companionship with young women looking to make money.
		What followed would set off a chain of events that would have a dramatic impact on her life and help upend the political career of one of the men she would encounter, Representative Matt Gates, the Florida Republican.
		A bipartisan health ethics committee investigation determined there was substantial evidence he had sex with the 17-year-old.
		The report included testimony from the girl about how she was paid by Gates for the sex.
		In response to a request from McClatchy, a federal judge has now unsealed court documents from a related civil case that shed some light on the girl's background.
		Apparently, she was a then-homeless 17-year-old high schooler.
		The girl's lawyer agreed to confirm some basic biographical information about her client.
		So, again, apparently, the girl began this path of meeting Gates during her junior year in high school.
		In December 2016, she turned 17.
		Her parents were divorced.
		One of them was so poor, the parent was living in and out of a homeless shelter.
		When the girl and her siblings were staying with that parent, they lived also in the homeless shelter.
		To make extra money, the girl worked at McDonald's.
		She began looking for other ways to make money and turned to a website that advertised itself as a sugar dating website that primarily connected older men and younger women seeking mutually beneficial relationships through the website.
		In April of her junior year in high school, she met Joel Greenberg, a Florida tax collector who is a friend and ally of Gates.
		Greenberg invited the 17-year-old to a meeting on his boat.
		At that meeting, they did not have sex, but Greenberg paid her $400.
		He also gave her ecstasy and told her to try it at home.
		Then he contacted her again, and then they met up at a hotel where they had sex, and she was paid another $400.
		Apparently, he would have sex with her seven times for money before she turned 18, and he would give her ecstasy.
		On July 15th, 2017, he asked the girl and others to attend a party at the home of Chris Dorworth, a former Republican member of the Florida State House, who at the time worked as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners.
		At the party, the girl who was 17 later testified both cocaine and ecstasy were offered to her.
		She took ecstasy and drank.
		She testified she danced naked in front of Mr. Dorworth and swam naked in the pool.
		Gates was there along with a girlfriend.
		Apparently, the girl twice had sex with Gates that evening.
		A court document quotes her as having testified she had sex with him once on a pool table or an air hockey table.
		She testified Dorworth saw Gates have sex with her on the game table and then laughed about it with other party goers.
		And she says that she saw Gates use cocaine that night.
		So, um, not great, Bob.
		I'm just going to put it out.
		I don't think he would have made a good attorney general.
		I don't.
		I just don't.
		Now, I will say that there are a group of Democrats, there are a large group of people on the left who would say that this sort of thing is bizarrely legitimate, to which I say, what the hell, man?
		Of course it isn't.
		It's ridiculous and disgusting and horrible.
		This is why when people say that sex work is work, well, no, sex is something very different from other types of quote-unquote work.
		And anybody claiming otherwise, it's ridiculous.
		Okay, meanwhile, other members of Congress now under scrutiny.
		Apparently, Eric Swalwell is under scrutiny.
		He is under scrutiny apparently for theoretically or allegedly taking out another bad mortgage.
		The DOJ has opened a probe, according to Fox News, into Swalwell over alleged mortgage fraud.
		Swalwell then went on MSNBC to respond.
		Here he was.
eric swalwell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I only have one mortgage and a residence in California, and I spend my time every week between California and Washington, D.C.
		This is, again, just Donald Trump doing everything he can to target his enemies.
		In our lawsuit, it's not lost on me that we've begun to depose members of the administration.
		And so you can connect the dots there if you will.
ben shapiro ▲ ● ▼		Now, he then claimed that he is being targeted alongside the likes of Letitia James, James Comey, John Bolton, Adam Schiff.
		Okay, there's only one problem.
		If you actually committed crimes, then you will be, in fact, prosecuted.
		And if you don't, then presumably you will not.
		Now, we'll have to see what exactly he did.
		The probe will investigate allegations, according to Fox News, of millions of dollars in loans and refinancing based on Swallow declaring that his primary residence was in Washington, D.C. According to the report, the director of the federal housing agency, Bill Pulte, sent A.G. Pambondi a letter on Wednesday accusing Swallow of possibly making false or misleading statements on loan documents.
		Apparently, the investigation is into possible mortgage fraud, tax fraud at the state and local levels, insurance fraud, and any related crimes.
		We will have to see, of course, how this plays out.
		Innocent until proven guilty is, of course, the rule of the day in all of this.
		Okay, meanwhile, John Fetterman yesterday was unfortunately hospitalized, according to a statement that was put out on his X page.
		During an early morning walk, Senator Fetterman sustained a fall near his home in Braddock.
		Out of an abundance of caution, he was transported to a hospital in Pittsburgh.
		Upon evaluation, it was established he had a ventricular fibrillation flare-up that led to Senator Fetterman feeling lightheaded, falling to the ground, and hitting his face with minor injuries.
		Senator Fetterman had this to say: if you thought my face looked bad before, wait until you see it now.
		Listen, again, Senator Fetterman, he may be the last courageous person in the Democratic Party.
		Also, like, it's hard to dislike the.
		I've met Senator Fetterman.
		He and I disagree on, I don't know, 80% of issues.
		Hard to dislike Senator Fetterman.
		He says he is doing well and receiving routine observation at the hospital.
		He has opted to stay so doctors can fine-tune his medication regimen.
		Senator Fetterman is grateful for the EMT's doctors and nurses who are providing his care.
		So we'll bring you all the health updates as they emerge for Senator Fetterman, maybe the last sane Democratic senator.
		Okay, meanwhile, fascinating things happening at our nation's colleges and universities.
		So Texas A ⁇ M has decided to crack down on woke in the classroom.
		According to the New York Times, Texas A ⁇ M University System Regions voted on Thursday to limit how instructors may discuss matters like gender identity and race ideology in classrooms, tightening the rules in a conservative state where debates over academic freedom have flared for months.
		Regions who met in college station on Thursday afternoon unanimously backed a revised proposal decreeing no courses, quote, will advocate race or gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity without a campus president's approval of the course and related materials.
		A related measure that regents approved said the faculty members could not teach material inconsistent with the approved syllabus for the course.
		Well, that is a good thing.
		That is a very good thing.
		What is the educational value of teaching queer theory at Texas AM?
		Please explain, please explain how the taxpayers of Texas are somehow benefited by this or the tuition payers of Texas are somehow benefited by this.
		In September, Texas AM fired a lecturer after a student accused her of teaching a course that recognized more than two genders.
		I mean, again, why this is controversial is beyond me.
		I understand that there are a lot of dumb theories that emerge from the universities.
		There is no reason the taxpayers should subsidize it.
		There are some members of the university faculty who are upset because they believe that they should be able to do whatever they want with other people's money.
		Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor, said it was, quote, tempting to agree no academic system course should advocate race or gender ideology since no serious academic course should promote any ideology.
		But he said, seeking truth sometimes meant exploring contested ideas.
		But okay, if you say, here's gender ideology and here's what his critics say, my guess is that the president of the university will greenlight that course.
		Also, there are a bunch of professors there, particularly in the STEM fields, who say, you know what, we need better education because it turns out our educational system is absolutely collapsing.
		And it is affecting higher education.
		According to the free press, good piece by Tanner Now over there, California officials expect math students in public school to know basic math by the end of second grade.
		But when some incoming college students were asked basic questions, about 20% could not correctly count.
		Like, here's the problem: okay, Sarah had nine pennies and nine dimes.
		How many coins did she have in all?
		That's not a question as to the value of the pennies and the dimes.
		That is a question of how many coins, right?
		That's an easy one.
		That's nine plus nine.
		But apparently, 20% of college students got it wrong, incoming college students.
		And as for the question, solve 10 minus 2, parentheses, and then parentheses, 4 minus 6x equals 0.
		Okay, which is like a very, very basic algebra question.
		80% of incoming college students couldn't solve that problem.
		We've got a problem in our educational system for sure.
		A report released last week by the University of California San Diego, which has about 45,000 students and is one of America's highest-ranked public universities, said that the number of entering first-year students whose math skills fall below middle school level increased at nearly 30-fold between 2020 and 2025.
		The deterioration of basic academic preparation has left incoming students, quote, increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.
		The percentage of students who have now been placed in remedial math at UC San Diego is nearing 10%, like one out of every 10.
		That's crazy.
		And again, that's after they admit these people.
		Remember, a lot of applicants get rejected.
		Last fall, Harvard University offered remedial math.
		The university systems, I mean, we're failing at the middle school level, we're failing at the high school level, and we're increasingly failing at the college level because of all of the focus on politically heterodox leftism, as opposed to, you know, actually teaching people the things that matter.
		And then meanwhile, we're telling people that they need to take out a $50,000 per year loan in order to even get basic employment on the other end.
	That needs to change and change in a major way.
	All righty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
	We'll get into the BBC apologizing to President Trump after slandering him.
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