Godzilla of the truth in America, your oracle of the horrible. Thank you for being with us two weeks out before the election, and I am predicting still the Republicans gain two seats in the Senate. It's going to be a shocker. Tiffany is going to win that race in Minnesota. I'm also predicting the Republicans razor-thin hold the House. It all comes down to Jen Keggans and Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Keggans wins Virginia Beach, you're going to hold the House. That's all you need to know.
By the way, our live election night show, we've been doing it for 15 years. Mike Watson, Chris Saxman, Michael Farrell and me. We're going to be live on election night. We also have a party there. It'll be at the University Club, all over our network, 7:00 to I don't know, midnight, whenever we get off the air. We're going to be giving you all the results. We break it down like nobody else can, and it's not like they do on TV where they're giving you the top line. We go right into it and we make those predictions based on a lot of things that we've been covering forever. So you don't want to miss that. 7:00 to 11:00 p.m., our election night live broadcast. And if you want to come and check us out, we've got free food, cash bar. That'll be at the University Club in DC in Ward 2. That's my ward, Ward 2 chairman. So you want to check that out right at 16th Street. And if you want to go there, just go to our app Partiful. I know they talked me into this app. I used to do what was that thing? Eventbrite or something, but my staff was like, John, that's for people over 60. Well, I'm 68. That's why I do it. They know you got to do Partiful. Whatever. So you got to go there and just say you want to come so we can get you on the list and you're good to go. You're going to have a lot of fun.
Joining me now, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, probably the best chairman we've ever had. Chairman Carr, thank you for being with us. You are a beast. You're doing a super job.
Well, thanks so much, John. It's so good to be with you. You're killing it. I love listening to you. You bring such great news and information and insight to your viewers. So it's a real pleasure to be with you today.
I tell you what, you know, we do business with the FCC all the time because, you know, we're in the radio business. We own 23 radio stations. So, you guys have been great to work with and just want to thank you for that. And you know, you brought the staff in that understands one thing that we didn't have before you were there. You understand the small radio operator. You know, you own a lot of stations. It's not easy to do. So, we kind of depend on the FCC to guide us, make sure we follow the rules. And you guys have been excellent to work with. So, big shout out to your team.
President Trump has made affordability for America a central focus of his administration, including lowering prices for energy, prescription drugs, which he's done, housing, household costs like phone and internet bills. Now, just a little background, as FCC chairman, you focused on increasing competition in the wireless market to expand access across the spectrum. And these efforts are intended to give consumers more choices among providers that then lower their cost for basic internet service. I did an op-ed on it, basically outlining what you guys have done and how all of the costs have come up, but internet service, the service has been better and the costs have come down. How have you been able to do that?
Well, the op-ed was great. I'd commend everybody to read it. Thanks for putting that together and researching that. I think the FCC really epitomizes what President Trump is doing. And I want to step back because what he's doing is he's working on two fronts at the same time. You're not going to hear this a lot of times in the media that's out there. But one, he's taking near-term action that's delivering real relief for American families. And we can talk about that at the FCC. And then two, he's taking the sort of longer-term reforms that we need to our economy that are going to pay dividends tomorrow and down the road. He's doing both of those at the same time. So, the first one first, near-term. We are taking serious steps at the FCC to bring prices down for consumers. There was just a report out a week or two ago that showed prices are down up to 14% for internet services that people pay for. So, that's near-term relief. And the way he's doing that is we're cutting red tape. We're bringing spectrum, the airwaves, into the market like never before.
But the second piece that he's doing is so remarkable, too, is fundamentally reshaping our economy. And at the FCC again, for decades, we sent all of our jobs and all of our investment in tech manufacturing to the four corners of the globe, and companies, you know, got rich doing that, but American industrial base suffered. President Trump is onshoring all of that. So, for instance, we've prohibited foreign-produced drones from being allowed to come into the US, new models of that. Since President Trump did that, we've seen $5 billion newly flow into domestic manufacturing of drones here in the US. I've visited drone manufacturing plants in Pontiac, Michigan, in the sand hills of North Carolina. These are real buildings, real facilities, real concrete that's going up, jobs that are coming to communities. So, I don't think people understand what President Trump is doing. Both near-term immediate relief, but he's also setting us up for success in terms of jobs down the road.
So, I mean, prices have come down for consumers on internet access four times since I think July. And a lot of that because you've increased competition and opened things up. How do you continue that trend?
Yeah, we're in a good spot right now. So, during the Biden years, the FCC effectively fell into a deep malaise when it came to freeing up spectrum. So, the more spectrum you push into the marketplace for carriers to use, the more competition you get and that drives down prices. Well, our authority even to move spectrum into the commercial marketplace lapsed during the Biden years. President Trump restored it in one of his signature legislations, one big beautiful bill, Working Families Tax Cut Act, created a pipeline of hundreds of megahertz of spectrum. So, we're going to have a big auction of spectrum pushing it into the commercial marketplace coming up next summer, expected to raise, I don't know, somewhere around $60 billion plus or minus. We're going to raise over $100 billion total pushing spectrum out during President Trump's terms. We have a real pipeline of spectrum we're going to keep moving. And again, remember too, it's a totally new dynamic. President Trump has unleashed this new technology called direct-to-cell, meaning you go straight from your smartphone right to a low-earth orbit satellite, whether it's Starlink or Amazon. That's something that didn't exist during the Biden years. Trump has created it, and so we're seeing a lot of interesting competition coming from that as well.
Chairman Carr, elaborate for our audience that might not know exactly when you say we're going to expand spectrum. Just elaborate for our TV and radio audience what exactly the spectrum is and what you mean by that.
Yeah, so spectrum are these invisible airways. We measure them in terms of amount of megahertz. And so, we're moving a significant amount of spectrum and it falls into three main buckets. Low-band spectrum, which is great for coverage in rural areas. It covers a lot of ground. High-band spectrum, which doesn't travel very far, but it's great for high data rates, high-speed internet. And then mid-band spectrum, which is obviously a blend of the two. And we're pushing all that spectrum out there, but really focused on mid-band spectrum right now. That's sort of the Goldilocks. And that's why you're seeing prices coming down for consumer services including in-home internet because now we've got the spectrum out there that traditional mobile providers can provide basically fiber and cable-like speeds to your home because of the amount of spectrum we're pushing out there.
How does that affect your vision of expanding broadband access, high-speed internet access to rural communities in America, Chairman Carr?
Yeah, we really are within sort of a sightline now towards the end of the digital divide in this country. We've got this convergence of technology whether you're using 5G, 6G, fiber, cable, we call fixed wireless, or again this new generation of lower earth orbit satellites, Starlink being the most prominent, but there's others out there. We really are sort of reaching the sort of the end point here where we're getting close to ending the digital divide. While we're not there yet, there's still a lot of work to be had, but President Trump is making tremendous progress bringing families across that digital divide.
There was a, I read an article I think was called The American Conservative, and it cited one of my advertisers, so I want to give a disclaimer here mentioning it, but they did cite Patriot Mobile as an example of an alternative carrier that really didn't own the towers. They were just putting their signal, buying it, putting on various towers, and then offering like, you know, you could basically buy Verizon, Sprint, whatever you wanted, several of them, two of them with the same thing. A lot of these new carriers coming out taking advantage of this. How is that going to change the price landscape?
Yeah, this has been a really interesting competitive dynamic. So, in terms of the basics, you've got what we call network operators. So, that's Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile. So, they own their networks, they own the radios and the antennas that are on towers. But then, to your point, there's a layer of competitors on top of that called MVNOs, mobile virtual network operators. Virtual meaning they don't own the radios and the antennas, but they effectively rent or lease the airways from one or more carriers. So, you can either sign up for Verizon or AT&T, or you can sign up for an MVNO, Patriot Mobile like you noted being one of them. And depending on where you are and what offers are being made, an MVNO could give you a much more competitive, affordable price. And so, we like all of that competition. We want lots of competition among the actual network operators. We want lots of competition among the MVNOs as well, because at the end of the day it all is going to end up to the benefit of consumers.
I mean, you look at everything going up in this nation. The only thing coming down is access to the internet. That's the only price is coming down, and your mobile phone service coming down. And those MVNOs that you talk about, they're driving prices down from the big carriers as well, because they have to compete with them.
Yeah, it's a real good success story. Obviously, we're still dealing with Biden-era spending that's continuing to work its way through the system and sort of elevated levels of inflation from the Biden years. And Trump is bringing that down. And again, you can see it with the prices for internet services. And that's really pulling down on inflation. It's really increasing affordability, and we're saving people money. I mean, right now has never been a better time to price shop and comparison shop for a range of internet services. And it's going to continue to get better. And on top of that, you're getting faster speeds as well. So, internet speeds are up dramatically during the Biden years. So, price is down, speed's up. It's a pretty good deal right now to be a consumer.
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Shopping around for internet services.
I mean, it's pretty amazing what it's done. We're with the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr. Certainly with the president there, has a majority on the FCC. Brendan, I want to get to Arctic Frost. Oh, but before I get to that, how long ago was it where we were debating net neutrality? Remember that? Doesn't that seem like a distant memory? We were talking about the government basically running the internet?
You know, the left sort of hops from one hoax to another hoax to another hoax, and, you know, climate change has been one and, you know, net neutrality was the other one. If you remember, I mean, you couldn't avoid it a couple years ago when the Trump 45 administration repealed net neutrality, we were told it was literally the end of the internet as we know it. That was, you know, CNN, right? That's what CNN proclaimed on their headline, end of the internet as we know it. But obviously the opposite was true again, prices down, speeds up, more competition than ever before. But, you know, the left just kind of hops from one hoax to the next, but that was one for a little while and thankfully we all survived the great net neutrality apocalypse.
