Speaker 1: Well, hello, how are you welcome to the Big Podcast
on this Friday. Today is the sixth day of March,
the Year of Our Lord, twenty twenty six. My name
is Tom Sullivan, and pardon the head cold. Still yeah,
it says, stays around for a while. But we have
a lot to go over Ian. We've got everything on
the very latest on the Iran war. But oil and
gas prices some startling numbers today, new numbers we haven't
seen in a very long time. As far as the
price of oil ninety two dollars a barrel ninety two.
It was in the high fifties just a few weeks ago.
So we're getting a rapid increase in that and that's
because of obviously the strait of horror moves and the
fact that it's very hard to get shipments of oil
to go back to normal. We got a jobs report
out that was rather shocking. Today. We've got the Department
of Homeland Security going through the transition. The day after
Christy Nome got the axe and Jesse Jackson. The funeral
for Jesse Jackson was held today in Chicago at a
huge facility. There was thousands of people at this funeral
and at the funeral was speaking. Bill Clinton was there,
then Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris was
there as well. So three former presidents and former vice
president at the funeral. Today. It was I saw I
saw a guy who kind of started off the services earlier.
It was late East Coast time, around eleven o'clock in
the morning, and he was kind of funny, he said.
As he addressed the crowd that was there for the funeral,
he said, he said, now this is going to be
a Southern funeral, and I kind of what's the Southern funeral?
And he says, well, he says, we'll try and keep
it to no more than three hours. And so as
it went, it went four and a half hours, and
so it's in fact, I think it's still going. I'm
not quite sure, but it was. It was a big
send off for the civil rights leader who never no,
never held political office, but certainly powerful. I was struck
by Joe Biden. Joe was there with doctor Jill and no.
Obama's wife was not there, Michelle, No, and neither was Hillary.
Bill Clinton was by himself. Obama was by himself. Joe
Biden had Jill there and I think it was probably
she's has to be there. They came in and there
was the handshaking, in the hugging of a few people
in this net and everything else, and then Joe went
up to where he was supposed to sit in the
front row, and he and doctor Joe kind of stood
there and everybody else was glad handing and saying hello
and seeing old friends, and Joe just stood there like
he wasn't he was lost. I'm not sure he knew
where he was. Let me just put it that way.
Looked lost, more so than when we would see some
of that behavior when he was occupying the White House.
So rest in peace, Jesse Jackson. Meantime, let's start off
today with the carryover from yesterday with Christine Ome. This uh,
this is this is rather unbelievable. I think of what happened,
I'm going to guess that they're probably going to drop
this because it seems like everybody is trying to be
nice to Christy Nomes as she basically got the acts,
but there were this this advertising deal was the thing
that really irked the president, not yes about the money,
but also about the fact that she blamed him, saying, yo,
no he approved all this and he did not. But
there's a real question about the corruption involved here, a
corruption question, and will Congress actually go in and investigate?
And I would say that in November, if the Democrats
take back the House, I would think that they might
start a criminal investigation on her. She had this two
hundred and twenty thousand dollars AD budget that she decided
to give out, and how she gave it out was
to said, well, because of the emergency at the border,
we don't have to do government bidding. We can just
do no bid contracts. So the award of the contracts
to two different places. One of them was the Strategy
Group that has played a central role in her campaign
when she was governor in South Dakota. Corey Lowandowski, her
top aid, has worked extensively with this rategy group. And
then they had a subcontractor, but they won't say who
that was. It's all very secret. Well, the problem with
the strategy group. Have you ever seen the spokeswoman for
the Department of Homeland Security. Her name is Christian McLoughlin,
and she doesn't execute a lot of confidence. She's kind
of I don't want to talk down about the woman,
but she doesn't seem like she's really top caliber type
of person. Well guess what. So she's been the spokeswoman
for DHS. Her husband happens to be the owner of
the Strategy Group. So it's all very incestuous, it's all
very inside, and we're talking about two hundred and twenty
million dollar contract. So John Kennedy was Senator. John Kennedy
was asked about it today and this is what he said.
Speaker 2: Well, well, there's nothing extraordinary about what I did. There's
nothing mysterious about what I did. I did my job
as a senator. I'm very fond of the Secretary. I
congratulated her at the hearing, and I was sincere in
my congratulations about executing the president's policy and securing the
southern border. I have been concerned, though, as have other
senators who have chosen not to speak out. I've been
concerned about the fact that we have managerial problems at
the Department for a while that are distracting from the
President's and our agenda. And I knew before the hearing.
I had a list of eight issues I wanted to
bring up with the Secretary.
Speaker 3: I only got to two.
Speaker 2: I don't want to overstate this business about calling the
White House. I called the White House two days before.
I had a very brief conversation and just said, look, folks,
I just want to know I'm asked some tough questions.
I didn't tell them the questions. We didn't talk at
linked about it. They said, okay, you don't do your job,
no big deal. I did my job as a senator.
And one of the things I asked the Secretary about
was the fact that she spent a quarter of a
billion dollars uh putting ads out across America, a court
of a billion dollars in which she was prominently displayed.
They looked a great deal like political ads. Uh. And
I found that breathtaking. And when I see what I
perceived to be spending porn, I don't care who does it.
I'm going to call it out. I'm pretty cheap when
it comes to taxpayer money. Asked quick when I walk
and and that that's what happened. It also came out
those uh the ship Turnedy nine it that these were
no bid contracts, and then apparently some of them went
to did not go to people uh whose names she
got off ZIP recruiter. They went to political friends, and
we talked about that and I was stunned when she
answered categorically that the President approved every single.
Speaker 1: Bit of it.
Speaker 2: Later that day, I got a call from President Trump.
He was he was mad as a mama wasp. Uh
he's he said, Kennedy, I hope you understand that I
had nothing to do with this, and I said, well,
I do believe you, mister President.
Speaker 1: He was not happy.
Speaker 2: It was clear to me after that conversation that uh,
the Secretary's time at uh the department was limited, Uh,
that that to be bunched. She was she was dead
is fried chicken, and he we talked about a few
names that he might consider, and then what happened happened.
It's not personal, but President Trump was very irritated that
the secretary had seemed to buying this on him.
Speaker 1: So there's kind of the background on what led to this.
Because John Kennedy's question about the ad budget is the
thing that sent the whole thing over the top. But
there was a lot of mismanagement that had gone on
for some time. So now you've got Mark Wayne Mullen
and he's going to be he has been nominated. They're
going to try and hurry up the nomination process for him.
Chad Woolf, former acting DHS, had this to say.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he'll likely be confirmed. It may be along party
line votes, although I believe Senator Fetterman has indicated that
he would vote for him, so it may be bipartisan regardless.
I think the White House is probably going to work
with the Senate to try to expedite that as close
as they can to the end of this as the
President has indicated.
Speaker 1: Well, it's not just John Fetterman. Peter Welch, a longtime
big Democrat from Vermont, had expressed his feelings this way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he'll be confirmed. The question is whether they'll be
bipartused this report for him and Mark Waynemullen is competent
and he's honest. So those are two good things that
Christina did not have. This is going to give us
an opportunity to have a real discussion about what's going
on with Department of Homeland Security.
Speaker 1: So that was good to hear that he thinks Mark
Wayne Mullen is competent and honest, and those are character
qualities that you would think most people would want in
a high position. Back to Chad.
Speaker 4: Wolfe, well, look, I think I think Senator Mullen is
the right person for this job. He's a patriot, He
understands the threats to the homeland, having served on Armed
Services Committee. He also understands the border, and he understands
immigration enforcement obviously a key priority of the Trump administration.
So he you know, if confirmed, he's going to step
into a big job, no doubt, and he has the
opportunity to continue a lot of success that the Department
has had over these thirteen or fourteen months. Has made
tremendous progress to where they took over from the Biden
administration that really had an open border, and so he's
going to build on that success and probably put his
stamp on the Department and do things a little differently.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about oil and gas. Because of the
situation with Iran and the oil that comes out of
the Strait of Hormuse or is not coming out of
the State of Hormuz, oil prices continued higher again today.
They opened at seventy nine dollars this morning and this
afternoon the contract wound up at ninety one dollars, hit
ninety two. But they're going to it trades later. But
I mean ass of right now. This is a ninety
one dollar crude oil per barrel. That is up from
like I said, it was just a few weeks ago
it was in the high fifties, fifty eight to fifty nine.
So you can expect the price at the pump will
also be skyrocketing. Here. The President was asked about it
today and he basically said, it is what it is,
but the question is how long will it go? And
he seemed to indicate he thought it would be very temporary.
So did Chris write the Energy Secretary, when will.
Speaker 5: There be some relief for folks at the pump? I
think it's of order. Weeks, I would say, in the
worst case, but it's weeks, not months. And look, Iran.
Speaker 6: Has been an escalator of energy prices forty seven years,
the whole history of their regime. We've got a little
bit of an interruption right now to finally put an
end to their ability to recavoc to kill Americans and
to terrorize their neighbors.
Speaker 1: And Doug Bergham, the Interior Secretary, just got back this
last night. He was down in Venezuela and had this
comment about the oil war coming from that part of
the world.
Speaker 7: Well, the thing we saw yesterday in Venezuela is this
is a country. They love the NBA, they love Major
League Baseball, they love the US dollar.
Speaker 1: They want to do business. They're looking forward.
Speaker 7: That we brought with us part of our delegation, a
set of US companies, some of the leaders in critical
minerals and mining, a set of our top oil and
gas producers were also part of that meeting. Everybody wants
to get started, and actually yesterday we did sign multiple
deals they're going to help move this forward. State Department Treasury,
Marco Rubio, at Chris Wright, the whole team working together
and lifting giving those licenses. So we're seeing technology, capital
and people flow into Venezuela, which is going to help
them get their production back up towards the levels that
they used to produce, which is substantially higher than where
they are today.
Speaker 1: Well, where gas prices are today go to triple a.
Take a look at the average across the nation. This
is the cheap stuff. Three dollars and thirty two cents.
It was two dollars and a week ago, two dollars
ninety eight cents. A month ago, he was two dollars
ninety cents so it's gone in a month from two
ninety up to three dollars thirty two cents, and you
can bet that those prices are probably going to be
going higher. Jeremy Siegel, who is the professor of finance
at the Wharton School, has well. He came out today
and just said, with all of this going on in
the market continuing to sell off, he says he's worried.
I'm very cautious.
Speaker 8: I say, if we don't get some breakthrough over the weekend,
I think I think we'll see one hundred dollar oil
next week. And remember it began the year under sixty.
I mean that that would be if we do get that,
that's a seventy percent increase in price, and that will
set I mean, I think gasoline is is set to
soar in any case, So you know, I think there
are there are headwinds.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 8: Your other guest thought that the tax refund might offset them,
but I think that the oil shock actually could be
bigger than what we get on the refunds, which were
well advertised, and some people have probably already maybe spent
their extra their extra money. So I wouldn't be surprised
to see a correction in the market. You know, we
haven't had one for a long time, and I mean
that would be we're not even the pullback zone yet,
which is you know, five to ten percent correction is
ten and more. I don't think any bear market is coming.
And by the way, I mean, if we get a
breakthrough this, we would get a coiled market spring upward.
But trends look like this is going to drag on
a lot longer than I and the administration i'd hoped.
Speaker 1: Okay, so he's not. He's worried, and the question is
how long will this drag on? Well, we're in day seven,
so we're really just getting started. And when the war
broke out a week ago, go back to the news
conference out of the Pentagon and there was Pete Hegseith
talking about the fact he didn't know. He says it
could go three to four weeks, could go three weeks,
could go five weeks. President I think said five to
six weeks. So we're just one week into all of this.
The David Sanger, who writes about national security, this is
his guess. Well, I'm sure that we could keep the
battle tempo up some but for weeks months, as the
President has said, it though clearly there's going to be
some shortages. But what happened after the unconditional surrenders at
Appomattics on the Missouri with Germany, we put in an
occupation for that lasted four years. That is exactly what
President Trump and his base, the MAGA base, wants to avoid.
That's the prescription for forever wars. So essentially, his study
of history says, all the way from the Civil War
to right up to World War Two, we put occupation
forces in and they're going to be there for a while.
We'll see how this turns out. It's still a lot
of people are trying to figure out what the future
of Iran even looks like. Michael Rubin with the American
Enterprise Institute looks at it this way.
Speaker 9: Hey, Brian, this is what you need to understand about
Iran in nineteen seventy nine, when you had the revolution,
people united what they were against the Shaw. They were
promised Islamic democracy. They gotten either, but they got the
Iran Iraq War, a war that killed a million people.
Speaker 1: This has.
Speaker 9: This has led the Iranan people to be very very
frightened of change and the sacrifice that might come next.
And look the chance of a civil war inside Iran
is very very high. That said, they are willing to
step up. They hate this regime. It has no legitimacy.
The worst thing we could do, however, snatch defeat from
the dolls of victory, or by supporting a Kurdish model
and signaling to the Iranian people that perhaps their country
is going to be dismantled. That would be the worst
option at this point.
Speaker 1: So what I heard today was everybody and their brother
trying to figure out what the future is. And again
I repeat, we're on day six, so we're barely getting started,
and they're trying to predict the future. Jeremy Siegel back
to him. He's trying of looking at the future as well,
but starting with short term and the price of oil.
Speaker 8: And the short run here, oil does matter more than
anything else. You know, the price of gas, the lean
is probably the most visible price of any price in
the consumer a basket.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 8: You know, we're in a midterm year. Politician is gonna
be an awful lot of.
Speaker 1: It one way or the other.
Speaker 8: Uh, you know, I mean the Democrats themselves didn't like
this war, and I'm gonna blame the high price on
gasoline on Trump. Uh, so there's gonna be a lot
of fighting back and forth on this issue. And uh,
you know it's from what I I've talked to some
oil experts and the shutdowns. Uh, you know what is
going on in the Gulf, what is going around the
world in terms of shipping. I mean, it's it's cannot
be fixed overnight. It's going to have some some lasting effects,
at least in the near term on the come in
the long term. I'm as bullish as ever, So don't
uh don't don't believe that, but I do think that
what I see short term does worry me.
Speaker 1: So, like I said, I keep repeating, we're going six
days here. But Alex Carr is one of the smartest
guys in the tech world. He is the head of
Palaeer And maybe you don't know about Palunteer, but Palenteer
basically does a bunch of secret government projects, technology projects.
They have for a long time. And you may have
seen some news this past week about the fact that
the Pentagon got mad at Anthropic, which they wanted to
Anthropic to provide autonomous weapons and also surveillance using AI,
and Anthropic said, look at we're willing to do all
kinds of wonderful things for you, but we're not going
to do government surveillance and we're not going to do
autonomous weapons. That's just not meets our values. And so
the Pentagon said, fine, take a flying leap and went
to open AI and said how about you guys, and
they said, okay, we'll do it. But then there's people
with open AI that are already saying, way a minute,
we're not going to do that. So there's a big
argument about the ethics of AI technology and war, and
Alex Karp is at the forefront of the whole idea
about using technology in the military in a way that
will actually be for the good. Here's Alex.
Speaker 10: Two things that Silicon Valley has to figure out is
what are we going to how are we going to
ethically talk about what's going to happen. You're going to
have to have a discussion on the battlefield where you know,
the rebuttable presumption meaning it doesn't happen, is that we
are going to do the maximum amount to make sure
our warfighters come home safely. If we could get rid
of the cultural misunderstanding, we could get pretty close to
agreements here yeah, but you're dealing with worlds that never
ever ever talk.
Speaker 1: So what are you talking about? And it's already I
don't know if it's crossed your mind or not. Again,
I hate repeating myself, but we're just starting in this war.
And yet the casualty numbers h one is terrible. But
war usually there's hundreds, if not thousands of casualties right
out of the gate. And there may be on the
streets of Tehran, and there may be in Beirut, and
we certainly know about our six service members that have
been killed. But if war can be fought more with
AI war machines and the humans are not in danger,
that's where Karp is going with this whole idea. A
venture capitalist from Andresen her name is Catherine Boyle, kind
of goes down this same road.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 11: I think the Department of War has been laser focused
on artificial intelligence in this operation in two ways. One
is in the targeting and bringing together disparate amounts of data,
of doing simulations, and of making sure that our war
fighters are safe and far away from the action in
terms of making those decisions. But then also in terms
of autonomy, we are now seeing attriatable systems that are unmanned,
uncrew doing the work that used to have to be
done by a manned system, and that means that our
war fighters are going to be a lot safer. So
I think what you're seeing out of this out of
the Department of War is that artificial intelligence is going
to be more and more important to the warfighter and
more and more important in operations, and it's being used
in a variety of ways that are very important for
the warfighter.
Speaker 1: Oh maybe this is a transition to that where we
have you know, terminator type machines that are out there
fighting the wars instead of the humans at least being
close to where the combat is. A rather big report
out today. This was the first Friday of the month,
and so we got our jobs report out and it
was a shocker. We were expecting, you know, a couple
hundred thousand jobs maybe. Well, instead it turned out to
be we we lost ninety two thousand jobs last month,
lost ninety two thousand. A big portion of that was
in healthcare because there was a big nurses strike going
on in New York City, but ninety two thousand payrolls
were lost last month. In addition, to that. December was
revised down to minus seventeen thousand, January was revised down
by four thousand to one hundred and twenty six thousand.
So we this was a terrible labor report that came out.
Unemployment rate went up from four point three to four
point four, average hourly earnings three point eight percent year
over year, that's about the inflation rate. And the number
of long term unemployed that changed very little, but again
it looked weak. Natasha Sarah from Yale at.
Speaker 12: This since what we're seeing is that this job's report
was amiss. It was a ninety two thousand dollars ninety
two thousand jobs loss relative to what was expected to
be around a fifty thousand gain number. And if you
take in collection what we've learned about the last few
months in the labor market, essentially alongside the downward revisions
for December and January, we now know that the labor
market has essentially stalled. We're in a situation where it
is across all sectors and we're not seeing jobs being added,
and in some sense that is continuing a downward trend
that had been going on for several months in response
to a lot of uncertainty about the way in which
the economy is functioning.
Speaker 13: Probably a bunch of that has to do with the
nature of tariffs being at these levels that we haven't
seen in the last century. And also some of that
might very well be starting to reflect the fact that
artificial intelligence, in this boon associated with it, is going
to have downstream effects in the labor market. And so
we're in kind of an uncertain time. And to your point,
these numbers are already out of date because they're not
reflecting all that's happened in the last week as a
result of this war.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, the impact on our economy from this war
hasn't even been started to be calculated yet. Speaking of
the war and people that are stuck overseas, I found
I don't know, I'm hearing all these people complaining. I
think they feel like they're entire the kind of the
people you've run into the feel entitled that they need
to be handled first. But there's a lot of people
that are in Doha and Abu Dhabi and Bahrain and
Saudi Arabia. There's a number of places, and guess what,
when war starts, planes don't fly. They don't want to
get shot out of the air. But the thing that
streaks me is that people are demanding that planes fly anyway.
I'm thinking, would you want to get on a plane
that's flying through an area that they're shooting missiles?
Speaker 9: Not me.
Speaker 1: I'm just sitting in my hotel room, thank you, and
wait for things to calm down. And even though it's
nowhere nearback to normal, I was looking at the flight
tracker maps today and there are a number of flights
that are going and coming from those cities in the
middle of this war zone that are being attacked. Nobody
thought that Iran would attack their Arab neighbors, but because
of that, and they've been hitting air bases and airports
that a lot of the air traffic is starting to rebuild.
But at the same time, I don't know about you,
but before the war started, were you surprised that it started?
I mean, I thought, I'm not dialing into the State
Department every day, But there was plenty of news about
the fact that the State Department was warning people to
get out of those countries, warning them to leave, warning
them they were evacuating embassy staff. Wouldn't that give you
a little bit of clue about gem maybe if I'm
in Doha, maybe I should get on a plane to
get out of here. So they're working at the State
Department trying to figure out how to get all those
people out. And then in other news late this afternoon,
the White House is having a roundtable with a bunch
of people that are involved in collegiate sports at various levels.
I mean, there's a whole bunch of who's who. Let
me look at the list.
Speaker 12: Here.
Speaker 1: We've got Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, the president of
the New York Yankees, Randy Levine, he's there, Tiger Woods,
Bryson d Chambro, Tim Tebow, Tony Dungey, Mac Brown all invited,
Nick Saban, former coach at Alabama. But really as who's who,
And the reason they're getting together is because of the
problems in college sports with the nil business destroying college sports.
It's the name, image, likeness, payments, and some of these
college kids are making millions of dollars off of it,
and they're leaving their schools. No, there's no loyalty anymore
to their schools. If you can get a couple million
dollars more by switching to a different university, off you go,
and so they're trying to figure out how to solve
all of this. Here's what the president said this morning
before hosting this conference.
Speaker 14: You can't pay a quarterback fourteen million dollars to come
out of high school. They don't even know he's going
to be a very good player. Colleges cannot afford to
be paying the kind of salaries that you're hearing about.
And frankly, if you didn't have a very strong salary
cap in sports, and even then in professional sports, it
would they'll all be at a business.
Speaker 1: Tommy Lauren, a conservative commentator. She also doubled down on that.
Speaker 15: Yeah, when they call it the Wild West is because
that's what it is, and you know, the whole concept
of nil and the money to we made for it
is exactly what she said, Molly, Athletes.
Speaker 1: That play hard and.
Speaker 15: You know, the school's making so much money off of
their name, image and likeness, they want a piece of
that pie. And I think that most people would agree
that they deserve some piece of that and they need
to get some.
Speaker 1: Skin in the game, so to speak.
Speaker 15: But it's become something that's destroying college sports. What people
love about college sports as opposed to professional sports like
the NBA, MLB, NFL is that it's about loyalty.
Speaker 1: It's about team spirit.
Speaker 15: It's about this pride that you have in your school
and the loyalty that your athletes have to it, and it's.
Speaker 3: You know, it builds that spirit.
Speaker 15: But then you have nil and you've got the revolving
door of a portal and people going where they can
make the most money, and you lose that loyalty and
you lose some of that school spirit. And so President
Trump rightly understands that while with everything going on in
the world with ron and jobs and everything like that,
it might seem like small potatoes, but to him and
understanding the American culture, he understands something that needs to
be addressed. And once again the theme of the day,
President Trump understands he is uniquely qualified to tackle this,
and he's got a great roundtable of people that I
think can help.
Speaker 1: We'll see what kind of answers that they can come
up with for solving the n L college portal problem.
Back to business, let's wrap up Wall Street for the day,
the Dow finishing down four hundred fifty three. It was
down much deeper than that earlier down four fifty three,
the down at forty seven thousand and five oh one,
the SMP down ninety, the NASDAC down three hundred and
sixty one, Gold up one hundred two dollars, is now
at five thousand and one eighty one. And the price
of oil, man, it's up a ninety one dollars and
some change for one barrel of oil. So that's it
you had. And you heard Jeremy Siggles say maybe one
hundred dollars if there's no breakthrough this weekend. I adopt
there's going to be any breakthrough in this short of time.
So have yourself a wonderful weekend. Thank you for coming
by today. We will be back on Monday, and we
certainly hope to see you then.
Speaker 8: A