Solving America's Problems

A real estate investor lost a million dollars in about 18 months, starting with a partner he brought on way too early. Ben Allgeyer tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley why a 28-year-old with a good job and savings still won't buy: fear, fed by a season of political ads during football games. If you don't have a pile of cash beyond the down payment, he says, keep renting. He says the fix starts with people learning to keep cash instead of spending their first big check on a car. He also explains where his deals come from now...

Freddie Mac's 30-year average rate rose to 7.4% last week, up from 6.3% a year ago, which Jerremy Alexander Newsome says adds $294 a month on a $400,000 loan. He and Dave Conley start with Russia, which is about to sell America diesel, with a first load that covers less than two hours of the world's demand. Jerremy says SpaceX buying airwaves sent the three biggest phone companies down as much as 13% by close, then walks the charts on Walmart, Dollar General and Nike, down 80% from its highs. Dave puts the 10-year at 5.24% and argues the Fed has to find new tools for...

The economy added 29,000 jobs against 90,000 expected, and the Nasdaq is still at all-time highs. Jerremy Alexander Newsome says the 10-year Treasury rose a fifth straight week to 5.277%, pushing the 30-year mortgage to 7.28%, the highest since 2023, and he thinks double-digit mortgage rates could land before the next president's term. Dave Conley calls it demand destruction: the Fed squeezes everyone while Congress, which holds the power of the purse, sits it out, and higher rates do nothing about diesel or $6.50 gas in Las Vegas. Jerremy walks the charts on NVIDIA at record highs, Meta up 41% since August, Tesla still down 17% for...

Nashville approved every one of roughly 200 rezoning requests over two years, added about 75,000 housing units in a decade, and is still net less dense than it was 25 years ago. Christopher Serkin uses that to argue looser zoning alone won't deliver affordability, and that homeowners associations would fill the void if zoning vanished. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley press him on Wall Street, the 2008 crash and whether housing can be both affordable and a good investment. He says it can't. He also explains why the left and right agreeing on zoning makes him nervous, and why a state overriding...

For roughly the first 85 to 90 years of zoning, the left and right split on it. Now they agree it's the problem. Christopher Serkin says that convergence makes him nervous, and he calls it the liberal-tarian consensus. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley ask who should decide how fast a neighborhood changes. He says it depends on the market, and that a state overriding local control feels very different in Tennessee than in California or New York. He gets heavy pushback when he asks for government to build housing itself, and he doesn't trust a less regulated market to deliver...

Housing can't be both affordable and a good investment. Christopher Serkin says that tension is the lesson the country forgot after 2008, when so many recent buyers lost everything. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley ask whether zoning is really the whole story. He says it's one problem among several, and that fixing only zoning could make outcomes worse in many markets. He also argues home prices are one piece of a wider rise in asset prices, a return to capital instead of labor. Jerremy asks whether it's so bad if people rent and put their money in the stock...

Nashville approved every one of roughly 200 rezoning requests over two years and added about 75,000 housing units in a decade, and it is still net less dense than it was 25 years ago. Christopher Serkin says that's why he doubts looser zoning alone delivers affordability. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley ask what fills the gap if zoning disappears, and he says homeowners associations would, which he calls worse in every dimension. He also tells the story of his mother, a weaver in a Vermont town of 900, who helped the town buy a defunct ski mountain and lock it up with...

In 1976, homes under 1,400 square feet made up a third of new construction; by 2020, that number was 7%. Gene Eidelman sold $100 million in real estate within three years of arriving as a refugee, then built Azure Printed Homes, which 3D-prints houses from recycled plastic in weeks instead of months. He details the zoning fights blocking affordable manufactured homes, wildfire data showing 2008-code houses survived 80% of the time versus 80% destroyed before it, and how LA could house its homeless for under $100,000 each instead of a million. Jerremy and Dave press him on financing, factory quality control, and how his company stacks up...

Homes built under California's 2008 fire code survived last year's wildfires 80% of the time; homes built before it were destroyed 80% of the time. Gene Eidelman breaks down the cheap fixes behind that gap — double-pane windows, mesh over AC vents, no wooden fences touching the house. He and Jerremy also dig into LA County's homelessness numbers: 75,000 people, with only 18% showing drug addiction the moment they first hit the street. Cities routinely spend up to a million dollars and six years building one unit; Gene says he can do it for under $100,000 in six months. He closes by comparing his company directly to...

One Ohio city's zoning code outright bans manufactured homes in a low-income neighborhood — even for a project explicitly meant to be affordable. Gene Eidelman calls it a holdover from 1960s trailer-park stigma that has nothing to do with how these homes actually perform today. He walks through how ADUs, junior ADUs, and new state rules allowing four to eight units per lot are quietly solving California's housing shortage, while cities like Laguna Beach still block almost everything. Dave presses him on how an ADU actually changes a homeowner's life day to day. Gene also flags a real financing gap: so...

The ten-year Treasury just hit 5%, and the Fed hiked for the first time since 2023. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley walk through what that does: a weaker dollar, higher asset prices, Bitcoin at $84,836, and, in Jerremy's view, an 85% likelihood of a recession or depression within ten years as part of the boom-bust cycle. Dave points out the cabinet has one engineer while 56 of 57 senior leaders in China hold technical degrees, and that diesel is feeding inflation across everything. Jerremy's chart walk covers NVIDIA back to $230, Bitcoin's next target of $90,000, and a small bearish hedge on silver. Dave closes on...

In 1976, homes under 1,400 square feet made up a third of new construction; by 2020, that number had fallen to 7%. Gene Eidelman arrived in the U.S. as a refugee from the former Soviet Union, got his real estate license within a year, and sold $100 million in property within three years. He's since built thousands of homes and co-founded Azure Printed Homes, which 3D-prints houses from recycled plastic in weeks instead of months. America is short roughly 10 million homes, he says, and the real fix isn't more supply of any size — it's smaller, factory-built homes people can actually afford. He also br...

Austin added new housing three times faster than the rest of the country for a decade — rents dropped below the national average, and young families left anyway, in numbers big enough that schools are now closing. Ryan Puzycki, who sits on Austin's zoning board, says outdated codes banned entire housing types — no fourplexes, no missing middle, no SROs. He traces the homelessness crisis straight back to America banning its cheapest housing type. Jerremy and Dave press him on BlackRock, Houston's fix, and what's next.

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Houston cut its homeless population by 60 to 70 percent over the past decade — while San Francisco spends roughly five times more per person for worse results. Ryan Puzycki says Houston made it easy to build housing, then used homeless dollars for rapid rehousing instead of expensive permanent supportive housing. He also names Texas's bipartisan Senate Bill 840 as a state model, and argues single-family zoning mostly protects incumbents, not future homeowners.

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America once had millions of single-room-occupancy units — the cheapest legal housing in the country — and cities spent decades tearing them down. Ryan Puzycki calls this lost category the "banished bottom," and traces the rise of chronic homelessness to almost the same years those units disappeared. He also argues family flight, not average rent, is the real measure of whether a city is failing. Dave presses him on Wall Street buying up single-family homes — Ryan says the outrage is mostly overblown.

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Austin added new housing three times faster than the rest of the country for a decade, and rents fell below the national average. Young families left anyway — enough that Austin's own schools are now closing for lack of kids. Ryan Puzycki sits on Austin's zoning board and says a decades-old code banned entire housing types, from fourplexes to corner stores mixed with apartments. He also ran a San Francisco preschool with a waitlist of hundreds, where teachers commuted 90 minutes each way just to afford rent.

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More than half of homeowners are locked into a rate under 4%, and an estimated 1.7 million home sales never happened because of it. Daniel Sosa has worked mortgages since 2007, when he watched Stockton become the foreclosure epicenter of the country. He tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that 65% of today's homeowners sit below a 4% rate with zero incentive to sell, while 5 million buyers wait on a market short roughly 3 million homes. He explains why 97% of today's loans are fully documented and fixed-rate — the opposite of the "Wild West" stated-income loans that caused 2008 — and describes turning away a police officer earn...

Dave Conley presses Daniel Sosa on exactly who gets rejected versus approved. Daniel says anybody can eventually qualify for a home — the real question is credit profile and income, and credit-challenged buyers get a step-by-step plan instead of a flat no. He describes taking one client's credit score from 702 to 740 over 30 days to avoid $16,000 in points, and explains how self-employed borrowers who don't show enough income on paper still qualify through bank statement programs. Looking 20 years out, he predicts the average family will pay $5,000 a month in rent within his lifetime.

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Jerremy Alexander Newsome challenges Daniel Sosa to steelman the case against his own industry: don't easier loans just inflate prices further? Daniel doesn't dodge it — he says 65% of homeowners today sit below a 4% rate and have zero incentive to sell, while an estimated 5 million buyers wait on a market short roughly 3 million homes. He lays out why a 2008-style crash can't repeat, since 97% of today's loans are fully documented and fixed-rate instead of the adjustable "ticking time bombs" that caused the last one. And he describes turning away a police officer earning $300K who technically qualified for a $1.7 million ho...

Diesel prices have never been higher — and it's already reshaping the 2026 midterms. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley break down how record diesel and fertilizer costs are pushing rural Trump voters to sit out the vote rather than flip blue, with Dave giving 50% odds Democrats sweep both the House and Senate. Fed hike odds for September 16th jumped from 50% to 60% overnight after a stronger-than-expected August jobs report. Meanwhile, US-Iran missile and tanker strikes in the Persian Gulf are pushing diesel even higher, and bond markets are straining as institutional buyers say they're tapped out. Tesla's Cybercab launch drew a fe...

More than half of homeowners are locked into a rate under 4%, and an estimated 1.7 million home sales never happened because of it. Daniel Sosa, a mortgage broker who started in the business in 2007, tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley he never charges the $1,300 to $2,500 in ancillary fees most banks build into every closing, saving clients $7,000 to $9,000 per transaction on average. He walks through the bank statement and profit-and-loss programs self-employed borrowers use to qualify without tax returns, and says entry-level buyers in his market now need six figures of household income just to qualify. For the first time...

More than half of Americans with a mortgage are locked in under 4%, freezing nearly two million home sales. JD Cobb has spent two decades closing loans in Texas, and his advice runs against the wait-and-see instinct: buy at today's price, refinance later. He takes Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley through the whole machine — the four Cs, who really owns your note, the pay option ARMs he watched build the 2008 collapse, and the occupancy fraud no computer catches. He explains why self-employed borrowers get squeezed by their own write-offs and how insurance now kills approvals outright. He closes with th...

There are twelve down payment assistance programs in Austin and Travis County alone, and JD Cobb says almost nobody asks. He names TSAC and TDHCA, which cover three to five percent down, plus a mortgage credit certificate he can count as monthly income. He tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that a soft credit pull costs the buyer nothing and that he'll pay to rescore a client's credit himself. He calls out new-build "incentives" as money rolled straight back into the loan. In the lightning round he names the biggest myth his clients believe — that they need twenty pe...

The average American buyer is now 38 years old — Dave Conley bought his first home in his twenties and had to borrow the down payment from friends. Dave and Jerremy Alexander Newsome press JD Cobb on where the starter home went, and JD is blunt: Gen Z is skipping steps, and his own first house cost $187,000. He explains what happens when a self-employed file hits an underwriter's desk, why writing off most of your income makes you unlendable, and the one thing a computer can't catch — occupancy fraud. Then insurance: a file that died on flood costs, and AI drawing bloc...

Construction spending has fallen every month since Trump took office — except in months when the project was a data center. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley say the Nasdaq rode Nvidia’s earnings higher while the Russell 2000 dropped 1.4% in the same stretch, proof the AI trade and the real economy are pulling apart. They point to Walmart, Target, and Home Depot calling margin pressure “psychological” when people can’t afford gas. Dave flags the U.S. government now holding stakes in 31 private companies and calls it more socialist than anything the left has proposed. Jerremy and Dave also break down Iran...

More than half of Americans with a mortgage are locked in under 4%, and that lock-in alone has frozen out nearly two million home sales. JD Cobb's answer sounds backwards: don't wait for the rate, buy at today's price and refinance later. He walks Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley through what a refinance actually involves, the four Cs every lender checks, and who owns your loan once it's sold on the secondary market. He explains why a portable mortgage would unfreeze the market and why mortgage-backed securities make it so hard. He also names the loan programs that were...

The national debt crossed $40 trillion this week. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley mark it with cake and party hats — the cake is on fire. The Treasury just doubled its long-end buyback program to at least $48 billion per operation, running September 9 through November 4, with the 30-year flirting with 5.3%. Dave’s read: six AI executives — Zuck, Elon, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Dario, and Satya — are holding up the entire US economy on valuations built from replacing human jobs, while everyone else ends up in the mines. Jerremy sees NVIDIA’s seven straight selling days into Wednesday’s earnings as a buyable dip...

Diesel and gas prices are 45% higher than nine months ago — the highest August prices on record. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley call AI CapEx spending the only thing propping up an economy strained by that energy squeeze. Dave argues the pain is landing hardest on consumers trading down from Home Depot and Whole Foods to Aldi's and dollar stores, and points out Congress works three-day weeks for five months a year while Mitch McConnell once took six weeks of paid sick leave with no return date. Jerremy tracks Reddit's addition to the S&P 500, a potential breakout in Ho...

22.6 million U.S. households now pay more for housing than they can afford, and the average home costs five times the average salary. Sam Froerer, who co-owns thousands of apartment units through Compass Capital, has never owned his own home himself. He tells hosts Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that the industry treats tenants like a commodity, and the top 50 owners control under 11% of it. He's building a model where a slice of every rent check turns residents into fractional owners of the building itself.

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A $100,000 investment can show $60,000 of paper losses in year one — a tax benefit ordinary renters never get access to. Sam Froerer tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that Trump-era policy restored 100% bonus depreciation after Biden had cut it to 40%. He argues the top 1% pulling away from everyone else is the same pattern behind every collapsed civilization in history. Asked what he'd do with $50 million to fix housing, Sam says he'd buy three more properties to prove his model works before pitching it to private equity and pension funds. In the lightning round, he says homeownership under 35 is, as of...

Landlords call it "value-add," and raising rent $100 to $200 a month after new cabinets and a dog park is the same move the industry has run for decades. Sam Froerer calls his own company "experience-add" instead, telling Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that renters need income at two-and-a-half times rent just to qualify. Insurance per unit in Florida and Texas tripled from $600 to $3,000 a year, reshaping where he invests. A fire that started on one resident's porch burned down twenty units in a single night. Sam also floats a REIT-style model where part of every rent payment buys residents...

Payrolls fell 23,000 in July against a consensus near +80,000, and the unemployment rate dropped anyway. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley read that as a labor force shrinking by 264,000 rather than a job market healing. Dave ties it to people leaving the country entirely — which pushes inflation up, not down, especially in skilled trades and services. Diesel, gas and jet fuel now run 45% above February, and Iran has named its price to reopen the Strait of Hormuz: lift the naval blockade, withdraw forces, pay war reparations, release frozen assets. Google reported $9.11 earnings per share against a $2.87 estimate on $119 billion in qu...

22.6 million U.S. households now pay more for housing than they can afford, and the average home costs five times what the average family makes. Sam Froerer co-owns thousands of apartment units through Compass Capital — and has never owned his own home. He tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that the industry's top 50 owners control less than 11% of it, and most landlords treat tenants as a commodity to evict and replace rather than serve. Chick-fil-A makes three times the revenue of the average McDonald's despite longer wait times, and Sam argues that gap is exactly what his industry ig...

The 30-year Treasury hit 5.28% intraday this week, the highest borrowing cost since 2007, and it has nothing to do with a recession. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley open on Palantir, which Dave calls "wired into" the central nervous system of the US government heading into tonight's earnings — the stock sits right on its 100-week moving average after a 40% pullback, and a gap below $117 could trigger one of the biggest sell-offs in months. Apple posted strong earnings but gapped down anyway, admitting it's getting bullied on AI the same week Amazon and Nvidia printed record gains. Dave ties the bond bl...

The top 400 richest families in America pay about 2% in taxes while everyone else pays 20 to 26%. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley kick off a new series on housing, laying out why the American dream of homeownership is structurally rigged — flat wages, boomers holding 70% of property, and a tax code built as welfare for the top 20%. They trace housing booms back to the 1920s and post-WWII Levittowns, then debate renting versus owning, closing with international fixes from Tokyo, Vienna, and Austin.

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Real estate investor Grant Cardone says never buy a home — rent instead, and put your money in the market. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley debate the case for renting versus owning. Dave, who's rented for over a decade, lays out the freedom of renting against the nonstop chores of ownership. They find zero libertarian voices anywhere in their research — everyone agrees housing is broken. Internationally, Vienna's rents run roughly a third of market rate, Tokyo's the cheapest big city on Earth, and one city's rent control crushed new construction by 48%.

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The top 400 richest families in America pay about 2% in taxes — while everyone else pays 20 to 26%. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley dig into what surprised them most in their research. Dave says the tax code was quite literally built for people not to pay taxes, funneling mortgage and college-savings deductions mostly to the top 20%. He found 30 million American children living in poverty — more than any country in Europe, Korea, or Japan. Economist Assar Lindbeck's line comes up: rent control is the fastest way to destroy a city besides bombing it.

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Elon Musk's net worth is down to "only" $600 billion after SpaceX lost $500 billion in value over the past month. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley open on the US-Iran conflict — Iran's health ministry says 50 civilians are dead and hundreds are hospitalized, and there's still no diplomacy on the table. Micron is down 34% since June 24, Intel's off 35%, and Dell has doubled since March while chopping sideways at resistance. Jerremy expects SpaceX to keep falling before a relief rally, and thinks Tesla will "ping-pong" through earnings the same way it did last summer. Dave breaks down the local political fights erupting ov...

Baby boomers now own roughly 70% of American homes and property — and politicians are too scared to touch it. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley lay out the thesis for a new series on housing: wages stayed flat while prices and interest rates exploded. Dave says the newest housing law just passed the Senate 85-5 and became law without a presidential signature. It bars investors who own 350+ single-family homes from buying more, but carves out purpose-built rentals — and comes with $200 billion in completely unfunded grants.

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The best U.S. cash experiments still can't prove money durably improves health or child outcomes. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley spend five episodes chasing why, hearing from Ron Lynch that free cash is a chain, not a check, and from Chris Rimbal that money itself may vanish within 20 years. Dr. Conley and Dr. Rhodes weigh in last: cash helps, but isn't the answer either host hoped for. Jerremy pitches a Citizen Capital share system instead of a handout, and Dave argues the AI disruption they keep circling has already arrived.

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