Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 04-07-25_MONDAY_6AM

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

04-07-25_MONDAY_6AM

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at www.clouserdrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. Good morning. Ten minutes after, I'll make that 11 minutes after 6, it is Monday, the 7th of April, a kind of semi-rainy 52. And we're looking for a little more rain today.

It's going to start drying up tomorrow and then it starts warming up for a couple of days and it starts getting wet again. It's that typical kind of spring pattern. This is going to be a relatively cool wet spring and boy I got to tell you was I seeing it in my yard over the weekend and I will be the first to admit that I am the worst I am the worst landscaper as the talk show host that there could possibly be there's a reason But you know, I can't afford to hire a landscaper, you know, those sort of things. So I have to do such things myself.

I mean, yeah, I'll do it for some of the major, major stuff, but oh my gosh, I stepped out into the lawn and I started mowing and mowing and mowing, and I got most of the mowing and the weeding in before the end of the weekend as the rain started, but I'm just sore today. I'm just feeling beat. I don't know if there's enough a leave to take care of the bumps and grinds that I was doing yesterday, but it felt good to

actually get out there and whack out some of the weeds and do something kind of... but I tell you, I don't think I've seen a spring for a long time in which every square inch of the property seems to have some sort of weed on it unless you thoroughly treat it with tons and tons of chemicals. And I try not to do that. So I will be sore even more this week as I get down on my hands and knees and start pulling the weeds because I'm not a big fan of throwing a lot of stuff on the lawn other than some fertilizer. I do like that stuff that they sell, the ground clearing stuff, which has like an ammonia salt in it, which it decays after a day and just into like water and phosphorus or something

like that. Whatever it is, it doesn't really hurt the environment. In fact, you can even use it on organic crops, but all it does is just kills what's there, doesn't kill the root like Roundup does. But Roundup, do we really want to use lots of Roundup on everything? No, Roundup is supposed to be used in our food supply. Oh, did I say that out loud? Well, I'm sure that's something that Bobby Kennedy is going to be talking about over

time. All right. Markets, yeah, markets are still in a hissy fit. I don't know if we're going to call this correction. Bear market, some of it's already in bear market territory. It is a big deal. It is a big deal for people's finances, especially those that are getting close to entering retirement and you look at the 401k, become the 301k, and then you

start getting concerned, is it going to become the 201k and 101, and then just a 001? We don't want those kind of things, right? But I've done a lot of reading over the week. I tend to like to read financial bloggers. And what I like about financial bloggers as contrasted to a lot of political bloggers is that when you're dealing with people's money, it's serious as a heart attack, right? So you have to be right way more than you are wrong, otherwise you don't stay in business. That's just the way it goes. And there's a lot of difference of opinion when it comes to the Trump tariffs, quite

a bit. I can't exactly say that a lot of it is in the middle. It's like either one extreme or another. But there are a few that I read that I think are worthy of mentioning, but I share some of the thoughts that they're having on this one. And one of them is from Paradigm and it's Truth and Trends author Enrique Abeda. He's a famed analyst that once again has become famous for calling it correct more often than not. And he starts off with, you may be ready to move on from tariffs, but the market certainly isn't. Last week's tariff shocks, which sent the Nasdaq into a bear market, caused the worst one-day drop since 2020, are nowhere near over, that's what he says. Hopefully you took some time to unplug and rest, but I understand if you're feeling a little rattled. So let's take a minute today

to step back and put this all in perspective. To make sense of the current moment, you only have to turn back the clock to the last time that Donald Trump sent investors into a panic with tariffs. And it was Trump tariff 1.0 back in early 2018. Trump triggered a huge sell-off in the stock market after making comments at the Davos Economic Forum. This caused the stock market to plummet for the next few weeks. And he shows a chart here of this one. And back in 2018, the stock market went from a very overbought position to immediately being oversold. S&P traded down to the 200-day moving average and bounced 9% off

and then back above the 50-day and 100. So from there it would, in other words, he is talking about the fact that, yeah, it hurt really bad at first and then it got better. Now he says he's looking at the same chart though for the S&P 500 going into this most recent Trump tariff situation. And on Ricky says, it is spaced out differently, but it looks very similar. We had a very overbought stock market.

Well, the kind of things that you and I were talking about last week in which all you had to do was buy Apple and Amazon and Facebook Meta and Google, and then you got incredibly crazy wealthy over the last few years, right? Well, that's kind of been put to the test, right? We know that. So we had a very overbought stock market and a rapid sell-off, and then there was a multi-day rally of 5% and back of that 200-day moving average. So he's seeing a lot of similarities, a lot of rhyming. It's not a perfect rhyme between what Trump did to the markets back in 2008 as part of discussing tariffs then

and what he's doing now. So then I go to Spencer Jacob, who's at the Wall Street Journal. Big, big name, right? And he says, media mentioned Surge just over five years ago, the same week as online searches for sourdough bread and adopt a pet, it marks the pandemic's early day, but Wall Street's so-called fear gauge, the VIX, surpassed its October 2008 peak during the global financial crisis. It's tempting to look for a widely available barometer for when the bottom is in. If only it were so easy.

Sentiment extremes more often point to short-term suckers' rallies that crush spirits even more. So that's what they're concerned about over in the Wall Street Journal, that any rallies that we might see right now are a suckers' rally. In other words, the wee little guys go, hoo hoo, it's okay, buy the dip. And they're warning that it may not necessarily be that way. Now, there's another financial blogger who I read quite frequently,

even comment in his blog every now and then, we don't always agree, but it's Mike Shedlock. MishTalk.com is his website. And he posted a letter, an open letter to Trump on tariffs, but he's not listening. And this was actually from Shaye Bellaris, another financial guy, and Mish says that he doesn't agree with everything, but he thinks it's pretty well written, and I'll give you just a basic take on it.

He says, the frustrating part is that I was on board for a reset. Truly, I've said that publicly. I've written about it in this feed. I understood the need for a detox. For decades, the U.S. economy played the part of the rich guy at the table, picking up the check for a global order that no longer worked in our favor. We hollowed out our industrial base. We enabled unfair trade imbalances under the illusion of diplomacy. We subsidized demand for cheap imports while outsourcing the hard questions about how our domestic folks would adapt.

Eventually that had to stop. It was unsustainable financially, politically, and morally. We couldn't keep pretending that a consumption-led economy held together by zero interest rates and global fragility was a long-term solution. I wanted a rebalancing. I welcomed the idea of a harder, smarter, America-first policy that pushed for fair treatment, reciprocal agreements, and a real industrial strategy rooted in technological superiority, national security, and capital formation.

That would have been leadership. But that's not what this is. What you've rolled out isn't detox, it's whiplash. This isn't strategic decoupling, it's scattershot retaliation dressed up as reform. There's no roadmap, no operational playbook, no clear articulation of where this ends or what the metrics of success even are. It's not an attempt to responsibly unwind America's roles as the global shock absorber. It's a brute force attempt to disorder the existing system with no viable alternative in place. You can't replace a fragile supply chain with chaos and call it resilience.

You can't build American industry by torching the scaffolding that underpins capital flows, labor mobility, and global coordination, especially when the U.S. itself no longer has the domestic capacity to meet its own industrial needs. You talk about bringing jobs home, but the U.S. doesn't have the labor force, permitting structure or wage flexibility to stand up full-scale manufacturing at speed." That's just a brief mention from Shay Bolars. It's respectable. That is certainly a responsible corollary to what has been going on or to the praise. And one of my favorite writers of all on the web is a guy named Sean Ring. He's an American expat.

He lives in Italy. And he writes for The Root Awakening, rootawakening.com by the way, if you wanted to look this up. And he calls this the sell-off that might save America. And he starts his letter this morning. The important question Americans asked themselves last November at the ballot box was, do I want to live where gated communities are side by side with slums? Or do I want to live in a country where everyone at least has a shot to succeed? Or do I want to live in a country where everyone at least has a shot to succeed? If you were happy with the former, you voted for Kamala. If you wanted the latter, you voted for the Donald.

The last three trading days, including this morning's Asian and European sessions, have made grown men cry. I'm with Steve Bannon, who asked, where are all the Republicans right now? Make no mistake, this moment will separate those who merely wanted Trump to win to goose the stock market and those who wanted Trump to crash this corrupt system and rebuild one in which America's forgotten men and women can succeed again. Though I no longer vote in America, count me in the second camp. If you're retired or on the cusp of retirement, I understand how crippling it can be to watch your portfolio take the hit it's taken over the last few days.

Like deer in the headlights, you just freeze, wondering, should I have sold? Should I just hang in there and pray it gets better? It may not feel like it right now, Sean says, but this kind of butt-clenching stress will ultimately make you a better investor. Since Misery loves company, I can tell you my miner's portfolio has been utterly decimated. However, I didn't make the mistake of panic-selling like I did when the Fed cut 50 basis points last fall. I'm hanging in there because I do believe gold and silver will be the first to rebound

from this downturn, and there's evidence this is already happening. But he does talk about what we could be seeing here. He does caution though about a worst-case scenario. For a while he says, investors like Northstar charts have been discussing what's called a capital rotation event. This event involves investors rotating out of tech stocks and technology and in various industry and then they get into precious metals and commodities. So you rotate out of that get into gold, copper, silver, things like that. Again, I think mining stocks will do well out of this

and that's why I'm happy to take some lumps right now no matter how awful it feels. However, if this ends up being the case, Trump may regret taking a hammer to the markets. He may have set off a decades-long rotation. This means that the Standard & Poor's and NASDAQ won't return to any highs for quite some time. If you're already in gold and silver, you'll be fine. If you're in the miners, you'll be fine. If you're in the miners you'll be fine. If you think crypto will save you it doesn't look that way. This capital rotation event if it's true is very bearish for Bitcoin. Bitcoin looks more like tech stock than a currency or safe haven. It doesn't matter why, it just

matters how it acts. And finally this morning it says the world equity and indexes have been crushed again. So anyway, I just wanted to share with you a few of the thoughts of some of who I think are some of the better financial thinkers out there and some of the big names. Some of them maybe you don't know necessarily. They're not necessarily on TV. But I'm not convinced that the ones on TV are necessarily the ones to pay attention to, especially Jim Cramer. Now, Jim Cramer is talking about a Black Monday kind

of day sell-off, a Black Monday sort of deal, like just unprecedented. That's what he's predicting today. But Jim Kramer has also been one of the leading contrarian commentators out there. In fact, there are people on Reddit that follow Jim Kramer just to do exactly the opposite of what Jim Kramer on CNBC says. And then they make millions. It's that kind of thing. Oh, buy Bear Stearns and then Bear Stearns collapses. It's those kind of things. So I don't know. Interesting times when it comes to the money. And yeah, you got to pay attention to the money. I think that Sean Ring from Rude Awakening though is correct that the one thing you have to be careful about is that if you end up dynamiting the

capital flows, the capital flows into the United States, that could be a problem. You do have to watch the capital flow how the money is flowing in or out of a country. That's something that also Armstrong says, Armstrong on Armstrong Economics. Maybe I interviewed him a number of months ago. Watch the capital flows. And if it is assumed that the United States is going to go completely insular, it is not going to be much into trade, that's going to make it very difficult for capital flows to come in here. Why would you? There was another story I was reading over the weekend talking about Taiwan and Trump wanting Taiwan to essentially move into the United States and move more manufacturing into the United States.

into the United States and move more manufacturing into the United States. But Armstrong said, and I thought this was pretty interesting, that if Taiwan moves its chip manufacturing into the United States or more of it into the United States, there's no reason then to protect Taiwan if Communist China wants to go in there. So Armstrong is calling it a tariff trap if they end up responding to that because the chip manufacturing is about the only thing that keeps Taiwan free at the moment. I thought that was an interesting way of looking at some of this. So a lot of drama in the air, that is for sure. That is for sure.

I just wanted you to at least know a little bit about what some of the folks were thinking. This is the Bill Maier Show and you can tell me what you're thinking too. 770-5633. We'll have some time for open conversation on this and anything else on your mind today. Coming up we're going to be digging into the homelessness situation and a gentleman that used to run Rogue Retreat is working on a positive solution especially when it comes to senior citizen homeless. And I'm going to talk with Chad McComas about that in a round of hour. 629. We're going to talk about the EPA here in just a moment and some possible reform.

I know that the EPA climate change museum closed. Very sad, I know. I know. But you know, what is next? We'll have a conversation about that, some analysis on this. Yeah, we'll definitely be keeping an eye more on the markets. The market's opening up right now, as a matter of fact, just about four seconds ago. So we'll see where things are going. You're going to hear a lot about it. It will be three days in a row, probably three days in a row of challenges. But who knows? You never know when investment sentiment turns around a little bit. That is the economy of millions upon millions of people that are choosing where to put their money or where to not put their money as the case might be. Over the weekend, probably the

most exciting drama was the Hands Off Rally. Hands Off Rally we had several thousand according to the Rogue Valley Tribune, maybe a couple thousand, maybe up to three thousand in downtown Medford overall, you know, in the various parks and all uniting and all saying hands off, Elon Musk is a Nazi, an illegal African that needs to go back to Africa and make Africa great again, you know, all sorts of things that was going on. I don't know how you feel about this. It's like, boy, I'll tell you, after the hands-off rally over here in southern Oregon, you know, Grants Pass, Ashland, Medford, and then, you know, hands-off all over the country, I know that you'll be shocked to find out that hardcore leftists don't like Donald Trump. Who knew? Up until this time, I thought that they were just absolutely delighted with the Trump administration.

But of course, they want hands off this, hands off that, don't touch that, don't touch Social Security, don't do anything, don't cut government jobs, don't do anything. In other words, it was a protest of the enumerate, people who cannot understand numbers. And I'm sure that President Trump is just terrified in hiding under his desk this morning. As said, no Bill Maier ever. I don't think you'd ever see President Trump much afraid about this. But yeah, I needless to say, lots of drama and rather ineffectual because they're just pulling out the same playbook that lost them the election in 2024. Now, does this mean that it could be pretty close

in the midterms? Yeah, could be, could be. Conversation for another time though. We'll catch up on the rest of the news coming up and then into the EPA, the good, the bad and the ugly and a whole bunch more. We get your calls coming up seven o'clock and talking about someone really working to a positive end for senior homelessness here in southern Oregon, all coming up on the Bill Maier Show.

When the IRS comes knocking, the news can be shocking. Tell them you've hired a CPA tax expert at First.com. That's I-ZVAY.com. This is News Talk 1063 KMED and you're waking up with the Bill Meyers show. Jason Isaac joins me. He's the CEO of the American Energy Institute. And you know the work over there kind of serious is a heart attack because energy keeps us from all partying like it's 1799 again. Jason, welcome. It's good to have you on the program. Great to be on. Thanks for having me. Now, what do you do over there? What kind of energy do you specifically focus on or what kind of policies? Because it is a big deal because nothing happens without the energy. No, absolutely. It's not part of the economy. It's really the heart of the economy. And we're

a trade organization that represents American energy companies that unabashedly support free markets, were anti-subsidies, were anti-political agendas like DEI and ESG and decarbonization. These things that don't do anything to mitigate a changing environment or improve the environment at all, they just drive up the cost of everything. And so we do research to expose those. We do a lot of research on EVs and how much you and I are paying for them, even if we don't own them and it's substantial. We expose the climate cartel through the financial institutions that are driving capital away from responsible American energy companies and putting it into Chinese companies that could care less about human rights or the environment. And then so we just try to expose as much information as we can.

And really what it leads to, we're trying to get people to kind of wake up about this energy reality and our grid. Our grids are weakening across this country and around the world and places that are embracing the climate agenda are deindustrializing places like Germany, the United Kingdom, California. And we're just concerned that that's gonna happen here in the United States because costs for electricity are rising faster than people can keep up with them.

It's one of the reasons why there's millions of people every year that get their utility disconnected because they can't afford to pay it. And so we're just trying to expose what's driving that so that we can reduce the cost of energy. Jason, it's interesting when you talk about the cost of energy being a driver of industrial power because Oregon being next door to California, we have many of the same political diseases

here that apparently carbon is going to kill everything and of course we are carbon-based life forms and carbon dioxide is needed for plant food in order to feed life forms, you know, little, you know, minor things like this. But when you talk about the price of power rising substantially, that has happened here. I almost wonder if Oregon and California are trying to hide just overall energy starvation, you know, the closing of coal plants and blaming it on wildfire fighting techniques and such. I'm kind of wondering if that's what they're trying to do to hide the football, so to speak. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, they really are. I mean, you're absolutely right. We're carbon-based life forms. I've

testified in front of Congress, introduced myself by saying, hi, I'm Jason Isaac and I live a high carbon lifestyle. And I think the rest of the world should too, because the places that do are truly places that have economic prosperity, they have environmental leadership. We're world leaders in this country in clean air and that's something that a lot of people don't know about. We've reduced pollution, these things in certain concentrations actually impact human health. We've reduced it by 80%, nearly 80% over the last five decades, but the climate cult is focused on the Kool-Aid is really decarbonization or CO2.

Let's get rid of it, but that means we get rid of all life on Earth. It's trace gas in the atmosphere, 0.04%. But the globalist elites that want this one world, new world order government have realized that carbon is the thing that's in everything. So if we can scare people about how bad carbon dioxide is, then we can control every aspect of our lives. And it's really, you know, ESG, this environmental, social and governance scoring or investing practice, I refer to it as what it does to energy. It makes everything expensive, scarce, and government controlled.

And so we're moving in this direction. The United Kingdom, they started subsidizing people's electricity bills. So they're basically taking their tax dollars and then helping them pay off their electricity bills. It's still the same money coming from the same individuals. It's just increasing their burden. And that's unfortunately why manufacturing is leaving the United Kingdom. It's leaving Germany and it's heading to China where they're building a coal fire power plant every single week. Yeah, and they really just, the Chinese perform lip service and lip service only to the so-called climate change agenda.

Would you agree on that for the most part? You know, they're not going to stop mining coal just because Greenpeace says something. When the president pulled out of the Paris Accord, they were disappointed. They're disappointed because we're no longer going to hopefully not be subsidizing their cheap Chinese-made electricity from wind and solar. Every single thing is dependent on China for that. It takes up a lot of land. The density of those energy sources is not responsible at all.

What is responsible? Nuclear, natural gas, coal, small geographic footprint. And with our leading pollution control technology, we can capture everything as it's burned to heat up the hot water to spin the turbines to produce affordable and reliable electricity. Jason, let me ask you about the way things are. I don't know if you're necessarily paying much attention to the stock market. I've been talking about it a lot recently because a lot of people are invested in it these days Price of energy has been plummeting or at least a traditional energy source oil, you know down and

Capital is leaving the markets right now is just been a lot of a lot of concern about this Do you think there's a possibility that if we get into economically uncertain times here, which we might be, I don't know, maybe this is just something that will wash the rot out for a better energy future, but is there a possibility that all of the renewables that have been sold to us as low-cost, but they've been sold as low-cost only because they've been heavily subsidized by taxpayers and tax breaks in various other ways. Is there a possibility that this is actually good for actual real energy that we can depend on, not when Mother Nature wants it? In other words, when times get tough, you have to stop being stupid.

You can't afford to be stupid anymore with money, I guess is what I'm asking. Yeah, I really think over the past couple of decades, we've been in economic uncertainty because our country's been spending so much money and building up a deficit, and now we're paying, I think, number one expense driver or one of the top three is interest on money that we've borrowed. But low cost energy, there's two really big economic drivers or cost drivers to manufacturing, it's labor and it's energy. And the cost of energy coming down is going to attract manufacturing back to this country where we produce things more responsibly than anywhere else on the planet and I think that is going to be an absolutely great thing for the long

term. Let's bring back these jobs, let's bring back textiles, let's bring back automobile manufacturing and we're gonna see a boon like we've never seen before. It's gonna be a golden era all over again. The roaring 20s are gonna come back but fortunately we're getting into some corrections because we're cutting the money that you and I have been spending in the justice it's spending big time. I mean, we're seeing billions of dollars cut from the budget already. They're trying to get to, I think, one trillion this year. I believe it's going to happen.

There's so much waste. And it's just absolutely appalling that people are out there opposing, they're protesting against cuts in waste, fraud, and abuse. It's mind boggling to me, Bill. Well, I think the unspoken part about this though is that, Jason, there's been a big part of our economy, especially in the government industrial economy here, that has essentially been make-work jobs, kind of like the Soviet Union. And there are a lot of people, I guess, that are employed in that kind of work.

You know, they're college-educated, they're in there, the pay rates in the government jobs are pretty good for the most part, but they don't produce anything. That's our issue, right? Yeah, it's just like the EPA museum, it's getting shut down, $4 million spent to build this shrine up to the climate cult, it's getting shut down. $4 million spent to build this shrine

up to the climate cult, and $600,000 in annual cost. That's our money. Taxpayers should be furious about this waste. Well, I'm kind of wondering, how did an EPA climate change museum ever get started though? Seriously, do you know? In your latest?

Well, I think it's just the last administration wanted to just hand out some tax dollars to their friends to build this shrine, which is absolutely, and it goes up through 2000, I think 1617. There's nothing from the Trump administration, which is the first Trump administration did more to clean up EPA superfund sites, these historical sites that have needed to be reclaimed and repaired and had their land returned back to its normal stat. They did more than any previous administration in just four years to improve and protect and clean up these

EPA Superfund sites. Not an area were to mention of that in the now closed EPA Climate Museum. Imagine that. Jason Isaac is the CEO of the American Energy Institute. I wanted to bend your ear on something since you do study you know energy sources and their cost. I know that the Trump administration is a drill baby drill kind of return to that kind of situation. I have been told by some within the financial industry that we're still looking at a problem when it comes to energy return on investment. And now that we're doing a lot of fracking rather than the conventional well technology,

these wells tend to play out much more quickly. So drill baby drill may not be as happy an ending as has been sold to us. And that's what they're telling me. So I just, hey, it's kind of contrarian by wanting to ask you what you think about the that kind of take on the fracking world. Yeah, it's great to represent some of the companies that I do at the American Energy Institute just because we actually advocate for policies that reduce the cost of energy. We're okay with the cost of a barrel

of oil dropping a little bit to help out mankind. But it can only drop so far and then fracking becomes unreliable, right? You can't make that pencil. Yes, it's economical. At a certain point, it certainly does. But I will tell you the reduction in regulations, this deregulatory agenda from the Trump administration, the energy dominance agenda, means getting rid of these overburdened some regulations, this police state where you're going to be worried about getting sued or fined for every action that you take to produce energy, that is going away. We're going to get back to

responsible American energy production, not overburden some regulations. And those regulations have a significant cost driver. I mean, the cost drivers just to build a home, 25% are built up in regulation. So you're going to get rid of some of the overburden some regulations, you're going to reduce the cost of homes. And so that will actually reduce the cost to produce that energy and will have a much more lasting impact than any tariffs that we're seeing on steel right now. Okay, I hope you're right about that. I think we all hope that is the case.

My point being though is that, and this is what I was kind of focusing on, I don't know if you can comment on this or not, but is the fracking revolution that has brought us so much oil over the last few years something where we're just exhausting the last of our seed corn? In other words, because I'm reading that they play out much more quickly than conventional oil fields. Can you comment on that? Is it true? There's so much geology left. We are nowhere near peak oil again. We've been at peak oil again. We've been at peak oil a couple of times throughout history.

Yeah, I guess that's what I was asking about, if that's where we were. Okay. All right. No, we're not even close. There are other plays in Alaska that aren't even being touched, and the Trump administration is lifting regulations, trying to expedite the permits and the production of oil and natural gas in Alaska and other minerals, rare earth minerals, coal, there's so much there but the banks and the financial

institutions and insurance companies won't provide service if you're investing if you're doing production in Alaska. So we've got to get them to quit weaponizing against American energy companies. Now doesn't that have a lot to do with what you study a lot over at the American Energy Institute because you are a specialist on the ESG deal, right? Yeah, it really does and you can see that I was just looking at and I just had something published in the Daily Caller this weekend about companies doing that and it's interesting because I have a small office space. We had a policy from the Hartford and the Hartford sent us a

letter in February saying they were not going to renew our insurance policy because I represent a trade organization and I have Facebook posts that promote energy production. Really? That's what their letter stated. So they're attacking me for viewpoint discrimination. They're discriminating against trade organizations, a nonprofit trade organization, which they're being now, they're waking up to the realization that maybe they shouldn't be discriminating against oil and gas and forestry other industries

that are necessary to our survival and economic prosperity in this country. Yeah, so ESG though has been declared ESG has been declared dead several times by several people over the last year or two. I'm not convinced that it is because the more I talk especially in academia and in some sections of finance it's baked into the DNA of a lot of these organizations. Agree or disagree or where do you find yourselves? Absolutely agree. BlackRock, the world's largest financial institution that has been one of the leaders of pushing ESG policies over the last decade, their

CEO Larry Fink, their co-founder Larry Fink, was just saying they don't use those three letters anymore within BlackRock. And I've had multiple meetings with them because I helped write a law in Texas that put them on the boycott list here in Texas and has had billions of dollars pulled out from their management because they're using that capital to coerce companies to do things outside of their ordinary business purpose that's detrimental to the economic prosperity of their ordinary business purpose that's detrimental to the economic prosperity of Texas. But Larry Fink, just a couple of weeks ago in Houston,

was says, I still believe in decarbonization. I still support decarbonization. That is the E and ESG. So he's just using different terminology to drive the same thing. And he's going to use the capital that he oversees to manipulate markets because of his belief in a cult. What could be done about that or what should be in your opinion? And so what we did in Texas is we said if you boycott fossil fuels, you're no longer welcome to do business with the state of Texas. And there are several companies that have clear divestment positions against coal like BNP Barabas, this Bank of the West, as they're known here in the United States. They're owned by a French Brazilian

conglomerate. They have a clear position against coal and oil and gas, and so they're on the boycott list in Texas. BlackRock has been investing in companies and voting for shareholder proposals that tie executives' compensation to DEI and ESG metrics. That's outside of their ordinary business purpose. What about shareholder returns? And so they're on the boycott list. There's over a dozen companies that are on the boycott list in Texas. I think the Hartford should be added to it. And that's one way to do it because it's cost them billions of dollars. It's hurt their reputation. It's one of the reasons they've been spending so much money

on advertising lately. And we're going to continue to go after them until they change their behavior. In other states, we're going to expose them and let legislators know about the work that they are doing that's not great for America. And really, they're investing billions of dollars into China, and they're using American pensioner dollars to do that. And that's just a terrible thing. We need to get back to the America First agenda, and we need to get back to fiduciary responsibility when it comes to our investment. So that's one of the policies that we're pushing around the country with lawmakers around the

country. Now, in my opinion, Elon Musk is, you know, it's a mixed bag when you're dealing with Elon because I think you always have to remember that he is a business guy first. Does it give you pause that he has the ear of the president so deeply, and yet at the same time, made his business through the grift of the taxpayer largesse because he made the politically favored cars before anybody else would? Any thoughts on that? You're absolutely right.

And then we just published a report on what we internally call the deep state EV mandate. But it's really this EV mandate that's being driven from the federal government. And Tesla, in the third quarter of last year alone, had $739 million in revenue from selling credits to other automobile manufacturers to keep up with their corporate average fuel economy.

This is an arbitrary credit system that's been created by the federal government that is costing taxpayers, utility ratepayers, and purchasers of internal combustion engines, gasoline and diesel vehicles, costing them thousands of dollars. Every single EV that's sold in 2023 will receive almost $95,000 in subsidization that are born by the ratepayers, taxpayers, and buyers of gas vehicles. All right. Now, what can be done though about that, in essence, deep state federal mandate? Because has President Trump been able to attack that yet?

Now, Elon Musk has said, hey, he's happy with subsidies going away. That's really easy for him to say as his company's already built, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah, and I think he may be playing on the ignorance of the Americans who think there's just a $7,500 tax credit, federal tax credit to buy an EV, and that's like the smallest of the subsidy that's available for EVs.

And so this is where I think you see one of the challenges, but we're making recommendations to members of Congress and to state policymakers to help them get rid of that because you and I shouldn't be paying for wealthy individuals to drive electric vehicles. And it's actually something as a policymaker in Texas, when I was in the legislature, I worked on policies to do just that. I was told this bill of goods, that this is economic development, we're gonna bring manufacturing jobs, and we're gonna be helping the least among us

drive these incredibly affordable cars, electric vehicles, and it turns out they're not. We wind up subsidizing wealthy individuals, and so I'm trying to make amends by publishing this research and exposing the truth, the story that I wasn't hearing 10 years ago, so that people can hear this and make the decision for themselves. But it's grateful that Lee Zeldin at the EPA is cutting back on EV mandates within the

EPA. Chris Wright at the Secretary of Energy is doing the same thing with the Department of Energy and Sean Duffy at the Department of Transportation. He's the Secretary of Transportation. They're all doing the same thing. And that's how just intricate and how tangled this web is. It involves multiple government agencies, but there's actions that can be done. Get rid of the corporate average fuel economy credits. I mean these are just absolutely absurd. Auto manufacturers will get back to building hybrid electric vehicles that people really want, but they just don't get the credits for building them like they do with EVs. Yeah, I always thought that the hybrid was actually the

best of all the worlds. You know, you kind of have your cake and eat it too. A little more complexity and cost, but truly amazing mileage gains that, you know, you can't sniff at for sure. Jason Isaac, now you're a former congressman, right? Former congressman? Yeah, former representative in Texas, yes. In Texas, all right, very good. And now CEO of the American Energy Institute. What's the website people can read up on you? We appreciate the take on where things are going. Absolutely, AmericanEnergyInstitute.com or you can find me on exit Isaac for energy. Alright, very good. Jason, great talk. Thank you. Appreciate the call.

Thanks. 656. This is KMED at 99.3 KBXG.