John Rush kicks off a jam-packed hour of Rush to Reason with guest Jim Paff from The Conservative Caucus, diving into one of the strangest political and cultural flashpoints of the week: the Super Bowl halftime controversy.
The conversation breaks down the media praise for Bad Bunny, the backlash against TPUSA’s alternative halftime show, and the growing frustration with so-called Christian organizations attacking conservatives while ignoring the real cultural rot on display. Rush and Paff also discuss Kid Rock’s performance, accountability on both sides, and why conservatives can’t afford sloppy execution when they claim the moral high ground.
From there, the
SPEAKER 08 :
This is Rush to Reason. You are going to shut your damn yapper and listen for a change because I got you pegged, sweetheart. You want to take the easy way out because you’re scared. And you’re scared because if you try and fail, there’s only you to blame. Let me break this down for you. Life is scary. Get used to it. There are no magical fixes. With your host, John Rush.
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SPEAKER 10 :
Are you crazy? Am I? Or am I so sane that you just blew your mind?
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s Rush to Reason with your host, John Rush, presented by Cub Creek Heating and Air Conditioning.
SPEAKER 17 :
All right, welcome. Hour number three, Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560. Appreciate you joining us. Now we have got Jim Paff joining us, conservative caucus. Jim, how are you, sir? I’m doing well. How are you doing, sir? I’m doing very well. So where do you want to start? Minnesota, Bad Bunny, the bill that actually made it through the House today, where do you want to start?
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, maybe Bad Bunny real quick, because, listen, we’re hearing a lot about, for example, we just heard Bob Duco over the break talking about how the Washington Post was saying Bad Bunny was… some sort of family thing that we could all be proud of, which is just a joke. It’s bad enough that Washington Post says this stuff. The Christianity Today people… which is now a woke progressive, so-called Christian magazine, once very conservative and theologically conservative under Billy Graham, its founder. They were out saying something very similar. Their editor, Mike Foster, was just praising that. And then he brought up, he was talking about beating up the TPUSA alternative halftime show. And he’s dredging out of the past from 2001 some lyrics of a Kid Rock song that were actually quite equally lascivious to anything that was happening with Bad Bunny, except that Kid Rock was actually preaching the gospel, telling people to turn to Jesus during the TPO. But this supposedly Christian organization is going against the gospel because they want to make a political point against Trump supporters and TPUSA. This is crazy.
SPEAKER 17 :
Yeah, and again, is Kid Rock a saint? No, I think he’d be the first person to tell you that. Has he had a dramatic turnaround? In his life, well, according to what he was doing at the halftime program, Jim, I think you’d have a hard time saying that he hasn’t. I mean, the reality is people change. You know, things happen in their lives for various reasons. And we all have a past. And I get it. Some of Kid Rock’s songs are probably not meant for the, how should I say this, for the kids, if you would. In other words, probably not. But at the end of the day, was it a great halftime show they put on? Yes. Now, I said some things in the podcast. You guys will hear this tomorrow and then through the weekend as well. And I’ll say, Jim, just straight up that I thought both shows and I don’t know the lyrics of Bad Bunny. So it’s hard for me to actually judge that one when you don’t know the lyrics and come to find out the lyrics aren’t great. And there might even be some FCC fines when it’s all said and done. We’ll see how that actually ends up shaking out. But I’ll be honest. I didn’t give either one of them. much over a five. I thought the set for Bad Bunny was really great. Everything else, I couldn’t tell you anything about it because I don’t know what he sang. A TPUSA, they did well. Kid Rock at the end, that was a 10 as far as the song goes. The rest of it, I felt, was about a five. The one complaining about TPUSA, and this is our side, and our side’s got to do better. Jim, I’m going to say this straight up. If you’re going to do the halftime show, you know exactly what it is down to the nanosecond that the NFL is giving you to put on the show. Don’t allow the last song to be cut in half because now everybody turned over to watch the Super Bowl again because you went too long. That’s dumb.
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, and listen, they threw this together in a short period of time. You know what?
SPEAKER 17 :
I get that. No grace on my part, though, Jim. If we’re going to be professionals and we’re going to be conservatives and we’re going to set the stage and we’re going to complain about Bad Bunny and we’re going to do an alternative, then do it right.
SPEAKER 10 :
No, and I was going to say that. They threw it together in about a month. They decided to do it. They’re going to plan it every year hereafter. Which is great. It’s going to have a greater likelihood. But the point is that even if Kid Rock was totally faking it about Christian faith, it still is absurd for a supposedly Christian magazine to be saying that that was horrible and that it’s also horrible not to accept bad buddies speaking something in Spanish because they want to make a point about immigration that is really stupid. Exactly. We need to keep our eyes out about that.
SPEAKER 17 :
No, no. As I said in the podcast, we still need to hold things accountable. I don’t care what side of the aisle we’re on, and we’re on this side. And, yes, we also believe in you do you, we do us, and so on. But in this case where you’ve got a large audience, 120 million people, lots of kids, kids watch football, and so on, yeah, you want things to be correct. And, again, I don’t speak Spanish, so I don’t know exactly what was said. But from what I understand, Jim, what Bad Bunny sang, they weren’t great lyrics.
SPEAKER 10 :
It was pretty bad, but we have to hold them accountable, but we also need to hold ourselves accountable. That’s right. There’s a group of people who claim to be Christians who were beaten up on the TPUSA thing when it was actually, for whatever errors were there, a wonderful alternative to the crap that was taking place during the Super Bowl. So so we and same with Republicans, just like we’re accountable to Republican politicians. We’re not just just because the Republicans were not saying, OK, everything’s great. No, it’s not always great.
SPEAKER 17 :
So we have to be aware of that. No, I agree. And by the way, I think it’s great. You know me, Jim. I think choice is great. I think we should always have. choice I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having one two or three different Super Bowl shows if you want to watch that instead of what the NFL is putting on in fact competition breeds excellence and the NFL starts having competition they’ll start looking at things a little bit differently they’ll up their game that’s what you know that’s what capitalism by the way Jim and competition does it breeds excellence
SPEAKER 10 :
No, and seriously, your criticisms should be well taken and then should be built upon. And that is what we need to do. And by the way, it is the NFL’s choice to do whatever they want to do. I’m not trying to stop them.
SPEAKER 17 :
Me neither.
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, I want to stop them from doing these things if I can, through market forces, through shame. We’re calling them out for what they’ve done when it’s really bad. Then we should say something’s bad when it’s bad. Everybody gets free speech. You do not get to have no consequences for your free speech when it’s stupid.
SPEAKER 17 :
Yep. No, you’re exactly right. And again, for all of you listening, you know me, Jim. I’m one where, yeah, if the NFL wants to do that, great. I like your approach, by the way. Have enough competition whereby the NFL now has to say, well, wait a minute. Maybe Jay-Z’s not our best guy. You know, Apple Music, Jay-Z. Maybe those aren’t the best guys to be running. the halftime show and maybe we should rethink this because guess what we’ve got some competition we’re losing some viewers in fact you could look at the stands even you know we’re losing people in the stands when it’s all said and done we want a better performance because people are going to tune in someplace else if we don’t that that’s a good thing well
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, I was thinking about this. Whitney Houston sang in her repertoire some adultery songs and stuff like this that we would say were not culturally really the best. But that would have been a more family-friendly thing than what we’re observing and have observed since the wardrobe malfunction in NFL halftime shows, other than Prince, which was actually a really good one.
SPEAKER 17 :
Real quick, the Save America Act went through the House today. Of course, there’s lots of people on the left accusing our side of just being, you know, we’re trying to shut down people. They can’t vote. They can’t do this. They can’t do that. And by the way, Jim, I can’t I’ve never heard such absurd statements in my life when it comes to people not having the proper documentation to be able to vote. It’s it basically is demeaning to those individuals, if you ask me.
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, many of those individuals feel demeaned by this stupid argument. You know, you heard Dick Durbin. There was a Lindell TV person who was interviewing him and asked him, what do you think of it? He says, this is a horrible thing. And he says, he makes the statement, listen, I think we need to verify people that are eligible to vote. But these things go way overboard. And it’s just a perfect example of the equivocation that politicians do. Equivocation is changing the definition of the terms you’re using in the middle of the debate. And so on one side, he says, we want to make sure all eligible voters can vote. On the other side of it, he doesn’t want eligible voters to vote. He wants to continue these systems that are frankly absurd and are allowing people to vote who should never be there, either because they’re not eligible or because they don’t take the time to see their citizenship duty the way that they ought to see it. Listen, We need only citizens voting in this country. I’ve been saying a lot lately that we can deal with a lot of political problems that we have, and some of them are very severe, but we’ve had very severe times in this country. You know, if you look back at the history of the lead up to the Civil War, politics was horrible then. It was a really tense, bad time, but we survived that. What we can never survive is not having elections that are fair and that are validated and that only the people who are eligible to vote vote. That’s what the SAVE Act and now the Save America Act, which is really what they just passed out of the House, that enhances the ID requirement. That is really critical to help us make sure that we can have elections that are real. You go to California right now, they don’t even have elections. There’s nothing like elections there. You have unlimited vote gathering, which means the custody issue on many ballots going in there is absurd. You could even have people printing up ballots and falsifying and making it, and it would be hard… to detect that, not to mention their jungle primaries, where you really don’t have a two party system in most areas of that state.
SPEAKER 18 :
Right.
SPEAKER 10 :
So we don’t want to go there. We need to go back to what we had before. And I think that would include same day voting. I remember being concerned in Colorado when we went to 20 day early voting in the clerk’s office, an expanded absentee ballot. But you know what? When I was running the marriage amendment, when that came out, we worked the system and we made it work in the right way and doing it in an honorable fashion but it’s gotten so out of hand with mail ballots even if everything’s done well they won’t even let us validate it to make sure that it’s real so this has got to change and i’m very glad for it having passed out of the house awesome jim path again conservative caucus how do folks find you Go to theconservativecaucus.com. You can find us at TC Caucus on X, and you can find me, Jim Paff, on X as well, too.
SPEAKER 17 :
You’re awesome. Jim, I appreciate it very much. Thanks, sir. I appreciate you calling in. Thanks, John. You bet. Have a great night. Again, Dr. Scott, he is up next. And don’t forget, if you want a doctor that thinks like we do and wants what’s best for you, living your best life, look no further than Dr. Scott, 303-663-6990.
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SPEAKER 17 :
This is Rush to Reason on KLZ 560. And we’re back. Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560. Okay, I want to follow up on a topic that Andy and I were discussing last hour, last night, yesterday. And we had put out on Facebook, you know, hey, give us who your gubernatorial favorite is, who you’re supporting, and tell us why. And we had no phone calls in, but Andy had some dialogue on his post yesterday. that he threw up, encouraging people to call in. And a lot of those comments were made after we were done with the show. It really would have been nice if you guys would have just called in and we could have had some dialogue on the show. My fear with that is, or my thought with that is, is you’re too fearful to do so. And I’m going to be real honest here, because you can’t support – in words and dialogue with me or Andy who you’re supporting and why. And we said yesterday, we would be nice, we’d have a good conversation, but I just want to know why are you supporting your particular candidate? Well, I want to address something else. Because in Andy’s post, as I was reading through them, there were some folks there that are supporting Greg Lopez. Which, fine, you can support whoever you want to. And Andy’s point is, Greg’s now on the other team. And he is. And there’s no doubt about that. So you might support Greg. Good for you. But the reality is Greg’s on the other team. Greg left the Republican Party. He put a U, unaffiliated, independent, whatever you want to call it, but technically a U, unaffiliated, next to his name. And that’s the ticket that he’s going to run on. And by the way, huge mistake. Huge mistake. I don’t know that I would consider Greg the enemy per se, but really he is. I mean, if you really want to get down, when you talk about politics and winning an election, and let me say it this way, I don’t look at Greg personally as the enemy. He’s a great guy. I love Greg dearly. But politically speaking, when you’re trying to move the football forward with the R’s, which is what I am and what Andy is, and really what this station stands for, If we’re going to move the R forward, how does an unaffiliated help us do that? They don’t, folks. In fact, they’re going to draw people away from us. In fact, Andy’s made it very clear. Greg, when he goes out and speaks, he’s drawing away voters from the Republican side. When Greg goes out and raises money, he’s pulling money away from the Republican side. When Greg goes out and does anything along those lines, speaking engagements, etc., he’s not speaking to Democrats. He’s speaking to Republicans. conservatives, I guess you could say. Maybe they don’t all have an R next to their name, but he’s drawing from those that would vote Republican. So at the end of the day, is Greg, politically speaking, the enemy? Absolutely he is, 1,000%. And I’ve said that many times in this program, and I will stand by my words. He is now the enemy. He is no different, in my opinion, than a Democrat. He jumped the ship, if you would. He went overboard. He’s no longer a Republican, not in this particular election. And here’s the thing. He may not realize this, but this is the truth. He may want to come back someday to the Republican Party, but he’s done. His political career as a Republican is over. He’s done. He killed it by doing what he just did. And I say what he just did. It’s been well over a month plus now that he’s done this, but he’s killed his political career in Colorado by doing what he’s doing. It’s dumb on his part. He should have asked me. I would have told him straight up, bad move, stupid move, dumbest thing you could ever do. There’s been other people that have done that and tried. They’ve tried to come back into the party and actually do something, and it doesn’t work. And the reason is because now you’ve lost everybody’s trust. You were a Republican for the longest time. You drew off of the Republican end of things forever. And then all of a sudden you don’t like the way the party is being run, which, by the way, I’m just going to say this straight up. It’s your fault, Greg. The party is the way it is because I told you through proper channels to run for the GOP chair. And you could now be a part of the solution, fixing it instead of running for governor. But you chose to go another direction. Dumb on your part. You should have listened to me. You’d now be the GOP chair and probably be the GOP chair for four or six years. Easy. Maybe longer. And you could have really helped solidify things in Colorado and could have probably done a lot, even in this particular election right now, gubernatorial speaking. But you wanted to be governor and you’re not going to be anyways. I’m sorry, folks. I’m just being straight upon us. Not going to be anyways, even with an our next year name, not going to be. You’ve done it twice. It’s not going to fly the third time. You should have taken my advice and done what I said. And I know folks that know Greg are listening. Tell Greg I said that, please. He’s cooking his own goose and it’s stupid on his part. He should have listened to me. But he didn’t. And now here we are. And the reality is, and I’m going to say this straight up, he is an enemy now, politically speaking, in this particular campaign moving forward. He’s the enemy. Why? Because he doesn’t have an R next to his name, folks. How hard is this to decipher? I mean, how hard is this to figure out? Some of you that are listening that are Greg supporters, I am really confused. How hard is this? He no longer is an R. He is not an R, meaning he’s against the R’s. So he’s the enemy, politically speaking. This isn’t that hard to figure out. But yet some of you listening, you’re just knuckleheads, I guess. I don’t get it. This makes no sense to me. Some of you are really smart people that I have a lot of respect for. But you don’t understand how this works, I guess. When you’re not in the party any longer and you’re still running a campaign against those that are in the party, you’re the enemy of the party. How hard is this? I hope I’m explaining this. I mean, I think right now a six or seven year old, if I explain this this way and laid it out, they would understand what I’m talking about. I can tell you one thing. My nine year old grandson would understand this. Why don’t you? Why don’t you? This isn’t that difficult. So I’m upset in a way because some of you, our guests are clueless as to how politics work. And when Greg decided to leave the party and go someplace else, that’s exactly what he did. He left the party. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, folks. You can’t leave the party and still expect a certain amount of the party to support you. It doesn’t work that way. Not in my book. I’m not supporting him. I wouldn’t give Greg a nickel. I wouldn’t give him a nickel of anything right now. I mean, if he asked to be on air, I don’t have any choice, according to the guidelines. But trust me, it would not be an easy conversation for him because I’m going to ask a lot of tough questions because he made huge mistakes, in my opinion. Big, big mistakes. And frankly, had he listened to me, like I said a moment ago, he wouldn’t be where he’s at today. But he wanted to do his own thing. Most people do. So they do. And they don’t listen. And now Greg’s political career, I’m sorry to say, is over. At least in this state. He might be able to go someplace else and do something, but in Colorado, he’s done. He’s never doing anything here again. I could be completely wrong there, but I don’t think I am, folks. This one’s easy. When you jump the ship and you now want to climb back on after you’ve upset the ship, they’re not going to let you back in. It’s that simple. And even if they do let you back in, it’s very limited as far as what they’ll let you do. Because people have a memory. So, again, I hate to address this, but I think I needed to because of things that were going on in the post that Andy was posting and so on. And the reality is Andy didn’t say anything wrong. Andy said everything exactly the way I’ve said it many, many times on this program. Greg is a knucklehead. and did things completely backwards as to what he should have done. And frankly, if he had just made a phone call to me, I could have straightened him out in about 15 minutes. But Greg chooses to listen to other people, not me. That’s on Greg. That’s not on me. That’s not on Andy. I’m not saying that Andy and I are strategists by any stretch of the imagination, but you know what? We don’t pick too many of these things wrong. We get pretty much every election right based upon what we know the pulse of the state is. And I’m not wrong, and Andy’s not wrong when it comes to Greg and the direction that he’s headed in his political career, frankly, here in Colorado, is now over. Roof Savers of Colorado coming up next. Make sure that you’re dialed in when it comes to your roof and the extension of the life of. And what I mean by that is the Roof Max product will extend the life of your roof for up to 15 years, saving you money, saving you money on insurance in a lot of cases as well. 303-710-6916.
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SPEAKER 17 :
Okay, we are back. Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560. Thanks for joining us today. Scott Garlis joining us. Scott, how are you, sir? Hey, John, I’m well. How are you? Good. Bent Pine Capital. Talk to us, A, the stock market. How are things doing? We didn’t talk about this last week, but over 50,000. I didn’t look to see where we ended today, but it’s not doing all that bad. Did I lose you? You there, Scott? There you go.
SPEAKER 09 :
Sorry, I have some technical issues.
SPEAKER 17 :
No, you’re back. We got you. We got you now.
SPEAKER 09 :
You’re back. In terms of the stock market today, I didn’t look at the end of the day.
SPEAKER 17 :
Down just a tad, not very much.
SPEAKER 09 :
Yeah, we chopped around. We started strong. We dropped. Yeah, it went back up. So really no big change. The big driver today was the jobs number that came out this morning.
SPEAKER 15 :
Right.
SPEAKER 09 :
And that was from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the – The expectation from Wall Street was for a gain of 66,000 jobs. We actually got a gain of 130,000. That’s a lot.
SPEAKER 17 :
That’s huge.
SPEAKER 09 :
Yeah, that was actually a very nice rebound compared to what we saw last month. After some revisions, the December jobs gain was 48,000. It was also a big change versus all of last year. We averaged after revisions came through, 15,000 jobs a month last year.
SPEAKER 17 :
Wow, that’s good.
SPEAKER 09 :
That’s a big turnaround. And part of that revision was January dropped down to negative 48,000 from January 25. So it’s, yeah, it’s quite a change. That’s great. Yeah, but it’s still below the average we’ve seen over the last decade, which has been around 204,000 jobs every January.
SPEAKER 17 :
Okay. What do you think the Fed’s going to think of that?
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, yeah, that’s exactly where I was going. So the silver lining here is it’s still not back to normal, and it still says policy’s probably too tight. Now, what the Fed’s going to look at that and say probably, they’re going to say, okay, well, maybe the rate cuts we did at the end of last year are having some impact. which I think it’s still a bit early. But that’ll be how the Fed looks at it. Now, you also had Kevin Hassett, director of the NEC, came out yesterday and said, don’t be surprised if the job numbers are weak over the next few months going into the spring, summer. So I was a bit shocked that this number came in as high as it did after he made that comment.
SPEAKER 17 :
Interesting. So the Fed meets again. I’m sorry, I don’t have this in front of me. Do they meet again in March? They meet in March. Yes, they meet again in March. So I guess we’ll see what happens in March, especially now where we know we’ve got changes that will be coming on to the Fed board. And I guess that’s a question I had for you. We didn’t talk about this much last week. But given the fact that Trump’s already got his pick, you know, do these guys coast the next couple of meetings? Do they still do the hard work? What will they do from now until May?
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, so on Friday, we’re going to get the CPI numbers, and that’s going to be our first look at January inflation. Now, a lot of the gauges I look at, it picked back up a little bit, but didn’t really see a whole lot. In fact, if you look at the national gas average prices at the pump, the national average was sub $3 for the first time in years in January.
SPEAKER 18 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 09 :
And that’s usually a leading indicator of inflation. The other thing, too, the housing market, existing home sales are picking up, but that’s because prices are softening.
SPEAKER 17 :
Okay. Which is not a bad thing, depending upon where you’re at, right?
SPEAKER 09 :
No, not at all. Even more importantly, I want to say house prices. So existing homes make up about 90% of the housing market. Housing prices account for like 30, 35% of the inflation data, especially for CPI. So that’s a big weight that’s backing off. Again, that should show us that inflation is slowing down. Now, last January, we talked about this from a non-seasonally adjusted basis. And the reason I bring those three words up is because that’s how the annualized data is calculated. And that’s what we want to really look at from a policy standpoint. Last January, non-seasonally adjusted inflation rose 0.7%. The average since 2000 has been around 0.2% to 0.3%. If we get a 0.2% print, or let’s say we get a 0.3% print when that number comes out on Friday, as that old number drops off, that means the rate of inflation, we could see a drop to… 2.2% to 2.3% on an annualized basis.
SPEAKER 17 :
I see.
SPEAKER 09 :
So that’s a really big deal from a monetary policy standpoint because the Fed’s like, hey, our target’s 2%. We could be there by the time the February data comes out in a month.
SPEAKER 17 :
Okay, so… Which, you know my feelings on that. We’re still not low enough. It’s not low enough to drive what businesses are doing. I’m going to talk about AI in a moment because that’s another factor I think that the Fed needs to start looking at when it comes to some of this. And what I mean by that is if you’re going to encourage the service sector to do more hiring, and you’re going to get companies to actually spend money in areas where they wouldn’t have otherwise spent it because their borrowing costs are now cheaper. That’s the thing the Fed, to me, just keeps missing over and over and over again is when borrowing costs come down, companies reinvest and do more. They remodel. They reinvest. They retool. They buy trucks and equipment and so on. I’m not saying they don’t do that when the prices are higher, but the lower that interest rate gets and the cheaper it is, the more they do.
SPEAKER 09 :
That’s correct. And if you look at what’s going on with data center build-out right now and what that means for the economy over the next few years, potentially, some of these companies are going into the public markets now and borrowing money to build these data centers to meet customer demand. Well, exactly to your point, if you get borrowing costs even lower, that’s going to make it easier for them. That’s going to help them spend more. That’s really going to make this economy boom.
SPEAKER 17 :
Right. It really does. And I would have thought by now that the Fed would fully understand these things. And I don’t want to say that they don’t understand, but it’s almost like they’re well, I have my own feelings on that. I think they’re so politically bullheaded that they don’t care about some of the things you and I are talking about, because at the end of the day, they really don’t care about the economy anymore. and all of that. In fact, I think they care the opposite. I think they want to do everything they possibly can, Jerome Powell especially, to upset the midterms because, frankly, in my opinion, he’s working for the Democrat team right now, and if he can do anything to stifle the midterms, that’s what he’s going to do. I don’t think he’s going to be successful because, to your point, I think if he doesn’t do anything, it’s going to look too obvious that that’s the team that he’s playing on. And with what you’re saying and some of these numbers that may come out before he even leaves, I don’t think he’s going to have any choice but to do another rate cut.
SPEAKER 09 :
It’s really interesting, too. I agree with you on all of this. Policy is too tight. If we really see inflation drop over the next couple of months with what the job market is doing, cows can have a hard time arguing why they’re not cutting rates.
SPEAKER 17 :
Correct.
SPEAKER 09 :
Um, but there is another interesting thing from an economic standpoint. Uh, I came across recently, there’s a guy named Craig Fuller. Uh, he’s the CEO at a company called freight waves.
SPEAKER 18 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 09 :
And they’re very focused on the transportation industry, like trucking in particular. Right. Right. So one of the things, um, he put out there the other day that is, is not really being picked up in a lot of places. Um, They’re starting to see a big-time rebound in trucking activity, but it’s not coming from the ports. So it’s not coming from imports. And where they’re seeing it, they’re seeing it in the Rust Belt. And they’re seeing it in those countries like Indiana, Ohio, Michigan. And his point is, like, we’re starting to see manufacturing come back here.
SPEAKER 17 :
Gotcha. By the way, that’s not what the press will tell you or what anybody on the left will tell you. So that’s interesting because you’re not going to see that publicized anywhere.
SPEAKER 09 :
And people can go look up Freight Alley and Freight Waves on Twitter. And you can see there’s a three-minute video Craig Fuller put out two days ago about this. And he said it’s a real surprise. because it’s not coming from port activity. It’s coming from inland, and it’s coming from the Rust Belt. And he said, you know, this is saying good things about the changes that are happening economically. And he said this is the first real signal he’s seen from an infrastructure side where it’s really starting to show up. Now, part of that could be, you know, a bunch of these big data center guys are doing buildouts in Ohio. I know that’s one state in particular, maybe Michigan, maybe Illinois, but that would fit with that also. Maybe we’re starting to see more cars bought from the U.S. because of whatever might be happening on the tariff fund. You would know better about that than me.
SPEAKER 17 :
Right.
SPEAKER 09 :
But that could be driving as well.
SPEAKER 17 :
No, could be. Okay, so let’s shift over to AI for a moment because I was reading – there’s an article out today. I haven’t talked about it yet, but some of you may have actually seen this article. But it’s talking about the changes in AI and what’s really happening now and this last update of the two largest AI – Yeah, I mean, basically, there’s a release that came out, I believe it was Monday, and what this new release does is literally a programmer can sit down and tell AI that, hey, I need you to build this app with this functionality, with this look, this feel, this functionality, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And literally, the AI will go and build the app. act like a user and test the app, and then come back with a final full product ready to go, and it’ll do it in about four hours, and the particular programmer that used to spend several days doing that, even with AI, no longer has to. In other words, AI is now basically reinventing itself.
SPEAKER 09 :
Yeah, I mean, hi. Gosh, sorry, I keep coughing. I believe some of that could be going on. Definitely, these iterations are going to keep getting smarter and smarter. Jensen Wang keeps talking about that. So there was an anthropic drop, the new cloud code, I believe it was, last week.
SPEAKER 18 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 09 :
It freaked out everybody in the software space. They’re saying, oh, my God, AI is going to write software now. It’s going to put every software company out of business. So there’s this MIT study that every who’s like CNBC, Bloomberg, they, they all put, it came out over the summer and they all cited it as like, and they said, no one is going to invest in AI. AI is dead. It’s a waste of money. And that’s why everything’s going to tank. The economy’s going to tank. Stock market’s going to tank. Now, last week, they’re saying that AI is going to steal every software job and put every software company in the world out of business.
SPEAKER 17 :
And by the way, neither one of those statements are true. There’s probably some truth to both sides of that. Is AI everything that it’s cracked up to be? You know, actually probably is, but is it going to put everybody out of work? No. Is it going to put every software company out, and here’s how I’d answer that. It depends, Scott. It depends upon how those particular software companies respond and want to advance themselves with AI, and I think the frustrating part for even a lot of us as users is the fact that, I’ll give you an example. In the automotive world, we’ve got a plethora of point-of-sale systems you can use that literally none of them right now have incorporated AI into, which has got to be the stupidest thing there is because you literally, as a shop owner, could eliminate certain individuals in your shop with your costs, basically, by incorporating some AI into it. And yet these companies refuse to do so. And I don’t really know why. My feeling is the minute somebody does, those guys are going to be left behind.
SPEAKER 09 :
You’re exactly right, and that was one of the big points that the same MIT paper that supposedly said AI is not going to work, nobody’s going to use it, it concluded that software is the most important guardrail for AI, and software is what enables AI to really work and do its job well. Back to what you just said, it’s the companies that are employing AI into their software to make it better, more user-friendly. They’re going to succeed because Jensen Wang was talking about this. And again, it feeds back into what you were talking about before. Jensen said his company now is able to do more and produce more revenue per employee because they’re using AI on top of software to make every worker more efficient so that they can better do their jobs. And they can discover other things and put efforts toward other things they weren’t previously able to do. So as a result, over the course of the last year and change, NVIDIA has actually become a more profitable company in the process.
SPEAKER 17 :
Right, right. And by the way, I think it’s going to continue to. And again, some of these software companies, you’re going to see some die. You’re going to see some succeed. You’re going to see some new ones get fired up. And you’re going to see some where, again, they didn’t exist before, Scott. They figured out how to incorporate some of the things that I’m talking about into software. Owners will look at that, jump ship, because they know they can save money. And I’m sorry to say this, folks, and I’m not trying to be mean or rude, but what’s happening with AI and robotics and so on is the simple fact, and I’m sorry to say this, Scott, but our American workforce is lazy. I’m sorry, they’re lazy and unreliable. I’m an employer. I think I can say this firsthand probably better than anyone. Our American workforce has become very unreliable and lazy, meaning if an owner has the ability to replace that person, with some sort of a machine or software that they don’t have to dink with anything where somebody calls in sick or they’ve got this ailment or that ailment or they just did this or they just did that and they can’t come to work and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, if that machine can replace all of that, well, of course that owner is going to head that direction. They’re not stupid.
SPEAKER 09 :
Exactly. And if it allows them, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So, you know, one of the things we’re seeing from this, and I think these are some of the dynamics we’re seeing play out economically right now, the reason we’re seeing these weak employment numbers, but we have an outfit like the Atlanta Fed is forecasting fourth quarter GDP of 3.7% because it’s starting to play out in the workforce and the economy all the things you’re talking about.
SPEAKER 18 :
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 09 :
And think about, again, the railroad. Everybody thought, oh, my God, the railroad’s going to put everybody out of business.
SPEAKER 17 :
No, it opened up things. It didn’t.
SPEAKER 09 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 17 :
And AI will do the same thing. It just depends on your attitude, what you’re looking at, and how you want to work yourself into the, let’s just say it, the new workforce, Scott, that’s going to be out there. And for those of you listening, that new workforce isn’t a decade away. It’s months away.
SPEAKER 09 :
So going back to what you said about Jerome Powell and the Fed not being able to see some of this stuff, you know, back in the 90s, as the Internet was just starting to take off, Alan Greenspan was the Fed chair. Alan Greenspan actually saw a lot of this coming. He was forward-looking about it. So, you know, back in the early 90s, you had, you know, Barely anybody used the Internet, and by 2020, everybody did. That’s right. So the economy in real dollar terms, GDP, expanded from $6.2 trillion to, you know, we were at $21.4 trillion by 2020, by the end of 2020. So, again, back to what we were just saying about efficiency and growth, you know, this is exactly what we’re looking at coming down the pipe.
SPEAKER 18 :
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 09 :
And the Fed, they have room to enable a lot of this by cutting interest rates and helping these companies grow and spend on more workers and more production.
SPEAKER 17 :
Absolutely. How do folks find you, Scott? Great, great advice, by the way. How do they find you?
SPEAKER 09 :
Yeah, sure. LinkedIn, Twitter, or Substack, see Scott Garlis.
SPEAKER 17 :
Ben Pine Capital. Scott, as always, I appreciate it. Have a great rest of your night.
SPEAKER 09 :
John, thanks so much for your time.
SPEAKER 17 :
You’re very welcome, man. I appreciate it. Up next, Golden Eagle Financial. Again, if you want a financial advisor that you can talk to directly, Scott’s a great guy, gives a lot of advice. But if you want to sit down and have a face-to-face, do that with Al Smith today. Find him at Golden Eagle Financial. And you can do that, by the way, just go to klzradio.com.
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SPEAKER 06 :
This isn’t rage radio. This is real, relatable radio. Back to Rush to Reason.
SPEAKER 17 :
All right, we are back. Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560. A couple things to finish up here for this particular day. I talked about the potential legislature. They were running a bill trying to get a tax set on empty houses, vacant homes. That… died luckily so that’s a good thing by the way um we’ll continue to watch those sorts of things because i don’t think that’s probably completely dead but in that particular case it is or this particular case i should say it is so i’ll keep you updated on some of the other bills and things that i talked about earlier in the week you guys sent me this and i saw this on my own on my own as well but somebody had sent me this and said you know not the proper role of government and first first thought i had as well and that is the city of denver I believe it’s at Washington Park. And I don’t go there. Charlie probably knows more about this than I do. But the city is now taking over the bike boat rentals at two parks, basically taking longtime operators that have been there running these things. They’ve done it on a three to five year agreement, a contract, I guess you could say. And yet Denver Parks and Recreation have decided to, it’s Washington Park and City Park both, they’ve decided to take those over on their own. And truthfully, I can tell you why, because they’re thinking that there’s more of a cash cow there for them, and they’re trying to justify and keep city workers on payroll by doing so. And why farm that out to somebody that does it more efficiently than the city does when you could just do it more inefficiently with city workers? I’m sorry, folks, that’s exactly how this works. By the way, the owner of this particular establishment that’s doing this already, they only generate about $500,000 a year in gross revenue. They employ about two dozen people each season. But they have, in the past 21 years, paid City of Denver, the parks and rec, about $700,000 and $500,000 in taxes. So you know what? The city of Denver should just take that money and run. But no, that’s not how cities do things. They think they can do it better. And here’s the reality. They can’t. I’ve said this many, many times. I’ll continue to say it. If you want something screwed up, just let the city or the government, county, whatever, run it. And it will be. So I don’t know exactly how this is going to pan out as far as the city running it. I do know this current owner was talking about how all of the things that he’s got, the bikes and swans and paddle boats and so on, things that he’s actually been renting out in the past, he’s now got a lot of that stuff listed on Facebook Marketplace. So I guess for some of you that have gone to those things before and you think one of those might be handy to have around the house or the farm or whatever, you know what? Knock your socks off. They’re probably going to be for sale at a pretty discounted price. Yeah, thank you, Charlie. Charlie said, is the city buying all new ones? Well, from what it sounds like, they already have been. This guy kind of saw the handwriting on the wall because they’ve been bringing quote-unquote inventory of their own in, and yes, they’re buying all new stuff. So again, folks, as I just said, if you want something screwed up, just let the city do it. Instead of just letting this particular individual, this vendor, continue to work and do what he’s been doing all of these years, they feel like they can do it better, and now they’re going to go spend a bunch of money on new equipment that they didn’t have to, meaning at the end of the day, they’re going to have to have a lot more return than what they’ve had with this particular person to pay all of those things back because this person, I’m sure, does things much differently than what the city’s doing. And I’ll tell you this, The service quality will go down. That one I can guarantee you. You will not get the same level of service out of the city that you’ve been getting out of the old owner that’s been doing this for Denver Parks and Rec. So once again, Denver Parks and Rec, congratulations. another not proper use of government, not a proper role of government when it’s all said and done. So there you have it. Thanks for sending me those articles, by the way. Keep doing that. 307-282-22 is our text line. Guys, I’m going to get out of here. Have a fabulous evening. Be safe out there. I’ll see you tomorrow. Rush to Reason, Denver’s Afternoon Rush, KLZ 560.
