Morning Run with Amy and TJ and iHeartRadio Podcast. Good morning everyone, and welcome to Morning Run. It's Monday, June twenty third. I'm Amy Robach when.
I'm TJ Holmes on the Run this morning. Iran says it will retaliate. Trump says you better not. And now the world waits for what's next after the US attack on Iran's nuclear program, an attack that we now know involved a lot of public deception even from the President.
Himself and President Trump at odds with his administration regarding regime change in Iran, the President saying he wants to make Iran great again. Plus nearly two hundred million Americans are sweltering in extreme heat the eastern half of the United States under a dangerous heat dome.
Also this morning, a potential mass shooting at a Michigan church averted by quick acting parishioners. Also, Texas is now legally requiring schools to display the Ten Commandments every school and in every single classroom.
And the Diddy t T trial resumes for its seventh and likely last week of testimony, as Diddy's defense is set to begin and end this week, And a man whose name you may not know but has likely impacted all of our lives. Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, has passed at the age of eighty.
Also this morning, Elon Musk finally launches his long awaited driverless robo taxi in Austin, Texas, and he promises it's coming to a city near you and soon. Plus the reviews are good, but the box office was bad, really bad for Pixar's Elio actually was the worst ever and heartbreak for the Indiana Pacers well before they lost Game seven of the NBA Finals last night. Do you want to say congratulations to the Oklahoma City Thunder, but a big storyline had to do with the Indiana Pacers Superstar.
Yeah. How you feeling this morning? I know you stayed up late last night.
I feel like I always do. Ready to go right?
Well, we begin our run on this Monday with the latest on the US attack on Iran. Iran has promised retaliation after President Trump ordered those strikes on three nuclear sites over the weekend, and now we wait to see if they will actually follow through on that threat.
That President Trump advised against retaliation, reminding Iran that there are quote many targets left and that quote any retaliation by Iran against the United States of America will be met with force far greater than this weekend strikes, which Trump claims totally obliterated those nuclear facilities.
And we've gotten more fascinating details about how the US military pulled off this plan completely undetected. According to the Pentagon, seven B two bombers flew from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri heading to Iran.
Yeah, they had to refuel in flight a couple of times as they made their way over the Atlantic to Iran. This was an eighteen hour flight. This was happening as another group of B two bombers was heading west to Guam. Those were decoys. Those were the ones that were widely reported about in the media. Now, when the bombers reached Iranian airspace, they were joined by other US aircraft and the first bunker bus were dropped around two ten am local time in Iran.
Eventually, fourteen of those bombs were dropped and the operation was over in twenty five minutes. The Pentagon said more than one hundred and twenty five US military aircraft were part of that operation. We're talking fighter jets, refueling planes, surveillance planes. And remember when President Trump said he was going to make up his mind in two weeks whether to strike Iran.
Well, apparently that was a ruse.
Yes, several media outlets are reporting that the President had already made up his mind to launch attacks when he told the press that he was going to be thinking about it for two weeks, and this was also part of the deception. Meanwhile, so mixed messages we're getting now from President Trump, Vice President of Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio about whether or not the US actually wants regime change in Iran.
Right, Rubio and Vance were out on the Sunday morning shows unequivocally stating that regime change was not the goal of the US in this operation. We don't want regime change. We want to end the nuclear program. That is what Van said on NBC. Rubio was over on CBS saying what we are focused on is not changing the regime.
But Trump said hold my beer because he was singing a whole different tune later on social media, writing it's not politically correct to use the term regime change, but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change, and he ended the message with Mega. So he has coined a new phrase, Mega, an acronym for make Iran great again.
All right, next up on Iran. If you live east of the Rocky Mountains, you are currently under what weather experts are calling a heat dome. Nearly two hundred million Americans are sweltering.
It's hot, it's humid. It's uncomfortable, of course, but it is dangerous. Heat, folks, is the number one weather killer in the US. Not flaws, not tornadoes, not hurricane Just about everybody in the upper eastern half of the US will be at one hundred degrees or it's sleeps gonna feel like it's one hundred degrees plus today.
One weather expert put it this way.
From Minnesota to Maine, there are extreme heat watches and warnings.
Now.
The heat dome is a weather phenomenon where high pressure in the atmosphere traps both heat and humidity. And unfortunately, this is not a short term event. It began over the weekend and it's gonna be with us through at least Wednesday.
Yeah. On Sunday, the heat index in Chicago reached one hundred and three. It was eighty degrees there at seven thirty in the morning. Minneapolis meanwhile broke a record going back to nineteen ten after they reached a high up ninety six with a triple digit heat index. And Madison was nasty hot as well, and it was just plain nasty. They have this annual naked bike ride that they do there and they had to do this in a one hundred degree weather pretty much, so yeah, that's just nasty.
Yeah.
It was described as a sticky, sweaty affair. I don't even want to envision that. And yet, unfortunately, somehow, I am all right. Two Major League based while players actually became ill from the extreme heat playing their games in Saint Louis and in Chicago. And get this, Philly has declared a heat emergency with the heat and dex expected today to climb as high as one hundred and eight degrees. I can't even get my head around that. Here in New York City and Boston and DC all expecting triple
digit heat and deceased today as well. So folks, please try to stay cool, stay inside, and drink tons of water.
And for the next leg of our run. Now, let's head up to Michigan, and police say a church security guard and church parishioners prevented a large scale mass shooting by taking down a gunman at Sunday service. This was at the Crossport Community Church in Wayne, Michigan. This is just west of Detroit.
According to police, church service was going on when church members notice a man get out of a car in tactical gear and carrying two guns. He started shooting outside the church, hitting one person in the leg, and was making his way towards the church.
And that's when police say a church member ran him down with his pickup truck and that gave church security staff enough time to intervene. Security returned fire and killed the gunman. The man who polisse was not affiliated with the church but was having a severe mental health crisis. But the one person who was shot in the leg outside the church is believed to have non life threatening injuries. So crisis or excuse me, I actould say a major tragedy possibly averted here?
Yeah, definitely.
Wow.
That's scary stuff, all right.
Next up on our run, every public school in Texas is now required to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. The state legislature passed the measure earlier this month, and the governor. Governor Greg Abbott signed that bill into law over the weekend.
And this bill not only says the Ten Commandments should be displayed in every classroom, it gives specifics about the size of the display in order to make sure that Ten Commandments are visible from anywhere in the classroom. Yes, the bill actually says that the Ten Commandments must be displayed on quote durable poster or framed copy on display, and even gives the minimum size requirement. It has to be sixteen inches wide and twenty inches tall.
That is specific.
Indeed, the law also addresses the possibility of schools saying we don't have the money to pay for this display, so if they can afford it, the law says schools are required to accept any offer of privately donated Ten Commandment displays. And well, you might not be surprised here, but this is fully expected to get a legal challenge and.
Almost fully expected to lose. Similar laws have been tried in Arkansas and Louisiana. A court rule just friday that Louisiana's law was unconstitutional, and Arkansas's law is being challenged as we speak. Also, the Supreme Court decades ago struck down a ten commandments law in Kentucky, but the court's current conservative lean is giving some proponents hope.
All right.
Next up on our run, this is the seventh and possibly final week of testimony in the Diddy trial. The jury deciding Sean Comb's fate could begin deliberating in a matter of days. The trial resumes this morning in Lower Manhattan, with the prosecution expected to rest its case.
Yeah, they have their so called summary witness on the stand at Homeland Security Agent. He's going to continue to his testimony this morning. He was up there on Friday. He's going through text timelines, travel receipts, other documents, trying to connect all the dots for the jury and show that Combs was the one organizing and paying for all
these so called freakfs. The defense has said last week that it only needs one to two days to put on its case, so the judge said that closing arguments are tentatively scheduled for this Thursday.
Wow, hard to believe it's almost over all right.
Next up on our run, Fred Smith has died at the age of eighty. You might not know his name, but you have undoubtedly depended on him at some point in your life to get your Christmas gifts, your tax returns, or merchandise delivered on time.
Yeah, because Smith is the founder of fed X. He died over the weekend of natural causes. According to the company, Smith was a visionary who created a whole new industry of express delivery. Is a Yale grad and a decorated Marine Corpvette. He started the company in nineteen seventy three in Memphis, promising to deliver parcels faster than the Post Office. He started with fourteen planes flying to twenty five cities.
Today, the company has five hundred thousand employees, serves two hundred and twenty countries, and delivers seventeen million packages a day. Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen put it this way, Memphis has lost its most important citizen. I love what you added here at the end of the story, TJ. This is what you found out.
He says.
He called his company Federal Express because he thought it made his little company sound like a big deal.
And it worked. It's just FedEx now it works so perfectly. What a visionary. I mean, what he did nobody was doing, and he changed an industry. Everybody's trying to do what they're doing now ups and all these other delivery services. It's absolutely incredible. He has had such a common name, Fredsmith, changed the world fred Smith. But yeah, what a what a guy. And this is somebody I grew up knowing so much about because I grew up there in the
Memphis area. So yeah, he talked about this being such a success story or something we were proud of there.
That's really cool.
And I didn't know he hailed from Memphis, So that's a nice note to know about your hometown.
All right, we'll stay with us here, folks on this Monday morning run. When we come back, folks in Austin have a new option for getting to and from places and it won't be a driver behind the wheel. Also coming up, how is it possible that a movie that made twenty one million dollars is deemed a historic disappointment and a disappointment in the NBA Finals last night not just because the Pacers lost, but because of what they
lost in the first quarter. We continue on this Monday morning run in Austin, Texas, where Elon Musk has launched his first robo taxi ridse. He did this on Sunday and the ride will cost you flat fee of four dollars and twenty cents.
A lot of people say he deliberately chose that price point as a nod to marijuana, but we digress anyway. The Guinea Pigs, a group of social media influencers and Tesla investors, many of whom as you might expected, posted videos about their rides on social media, and they were mostly described as uneventful. Some people talked about how cool it was, but uneventful is certainly the way you want
this type of ride to go. While no one was driving the vehicles, there was a human safety monitor on the passenger side where there were no pedals or steering wheels.
That doesn't sound fun. For now, there are just a dozen robotaxis and service in Austin. Musk says that will grow to hundreds of thousands of vehicles next year. This has been a decade long drink from Musk, whose ultimate division is to launch his futuristic cyber cab without a steering wheel or pedals. He's calling this a lounge on wheels. He wants to launch this in the next few years. While this is Tesla's official in into autonomous rides, Google
already has it's Weimo vehicles. Is that what they're calling it.
Yeah.
Weimo vehicles in place in San Francisco, Austin, Phoenix, in LA. It's testing its vehicles with safety monitors in DC and plans to expand to New York, Atlanta, and Miami.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, I had not heard anything of Weimo, heard tons about robotaxis. But Weimo just completed its tenth million paid ride. That's incredible. Well, how do you feel about getting into a robo.
Not getting into a vehicle that does not have a driver behind the wheel. That's just it, And I'm not going to come around on that. That's just me. Yeah.
No, I mean I don't know how I feel about it yet. I'm going to give it some time and some years of being tested before I agree to do that.
All right.
Next up on our morning run, a movie that made twenty one million dollars at the box office this weekend is being called a huge disappointment. Not by us, This is by people who rate these standards and what their expectations are in the box office. Why was it such a disappointment because it was the worst opening for a Pixar movie ever.
This is lio I would say maybe you saw it this weekend, but apparently a lot of you did not. It's about a boy who dreams of meeting aliens. It finished third at the box office despite positive reviews. So we got positive reviews and twenty one million doesn't sound terrible. But this movie is from Pixar, the storied animation studio that set really high expectations for its films over the years with the likes of mega hits like Toy Story,
The Incredibles, Cars, and Inside Out. In fact, Inside Out Too just may one point seven billion dollars last year, so they have a high standard that they've set for themselves. Now, Ilo cost an estimated one hundred and fifty million dollars to make, so it's not off to a good start.
Yeah, they have a lot of making up to do.
The live action How to Train Your Dragon was on top at the box office for a second straight weekend and has now made an estimated three hundred and sixty million dollars worldwide.
The new release, The One I'm.
Dying to See twenty eight years later, came in second with a very respectable thirty million dollars, so we'll have to add to that number soon.
Well reviewed as well, that one is very well reviewed. In fact, one of the commercials they have been showing as a quote from a creek that said, this is the best film of the year. Wow, eight years later, that's exciting. Well, final leg of our run this morning, and it was heartbreak in the NBA Finals last night, and it came long before a winner or a loser
was determined. At the final buzzer, Indiana Pacers superstar Tyrese Haliburton went down to the floor in agony in the first quarter and immediately began slapping the floor and with emotion evident on his face, you could see him screaming, no, no, no, he knew it was over, and by us looking at him and his reaction, we knew it was over. Just like that, the PACER's best player was out and they'd have to try to win Game seven and the NBA
Championship without him. He of course, had been hampered by a calf strain in his right leg, and it looks like now something happened to where he popped his achilles oh, possibly in that same right leg, reminiscent of something that happened to Kevin Durant in twenty nineteen in the NBA Finals. He was out there, he was gonna try. It was no way. They were not gonna let this kid play,
and he wasn't gonna play. But there was risk involved, and sure enough, first quarter, the worst nightmare happened.
That is just so heartbreaking that despite hanging tough and even having a slight lead at halftime, the Pacers were not able to keep pace with the Oklahoma City Thunder and n League MVP.
Shay Gilgos Alexander, Kid, why did you give yourself out?
I don't know, of course, I don't know how to say that. Geez, I'm so.
Okay, Shay Gilgious Alexander, Jay Gilgius Alexander, think about gorgeous.
He's not gorgeous, He's Gilgeous, all.
Right, I'll just call him Gilgious from now on. So the Thunder one game seven, one oh three to ninety one, and.
They win the NBA title for twenty twenty five. This is the first title for Oklahoma City, which won with one of the youngest teams in league history. I believe this is the second youngest team to ever make an NBA Finals. Guldas Alexander was named MVP of the NBA Finals. He has now won just a handful of players to ever win League MVP and Finals MVP in the same year. The other people who do who've done this go by
just one name, lebron Kareem Shack, Magic Jordan. Jordan in fact did it four times, but a few others on that list. But this was an incredible year, a historic year for that team. Congrats to them, and just you just hate You want everybody to be full strength and everybody to be at their best, and you hate to see an injury like that.
Yeah, that's tough to watch, but yes, congratulations to Oklahoma City. Well, as you go about your Monday, we would like you to consider this.
This is your quote of the day.
Doubt kills more dreams than failure. Ever will. I'm not sure where you pluck the American poet I don't know.
The name, No, Susie Cassim.
I don't know who she is either, But I found this quote and it stood out to me because I hadn't thought about it like that. Everyone is concerned or worried about failing everyone. No one wants to think about not succeeding, and that ends up being the dream killer. It's not the failure. It's the doubt. It's the thought that you can't do it, that you can't make it, that you can't achieve it. I just thought that was a really cool way to approach things and to maybe
rejigger your thinking. When you're trying to go for something or achieve something, it's your doubt that's going to be the dream killer, not the failure itself.
So i'd take that with you today on this Monday, folks, Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
And with that, we want to thank you for listening to us on our morning ron But we also would like you to check out our new It's a relationship advice column on Yahoo ask Amy and TJ. Every Monday, there is a new question posed to us where we give our best advice, and we'd love for you all to weigh in on that with your comments. And then on the weekends we usually we like to reach comments and get your input as to what this person who's asking us a question would like advice for. So please
check it out Yahoo. It's on the life page ask Amy and TJ. And with that, thank you for running with us everyone.
I'm Amy Robot and I'm TJ. Holmes, we'll see you soon.