Do you want to be an American?
Here we go sloany seven hundred WLW. We jump in with this. President Trump says Iran wants a deal and the war could end in days. But Iran says there are no talks, no negotiations, as strait is closed. And now we're having word that maybe there are some individuals inside Iran that are talking to God only knows. We don't have no idea who's telling the truth. And what
happens if this whole thing falls apart. We're now sending troops, actual physical United States Marines and an expeditionary unit to the Middle East. We're starting to get troops on the ground, and certainly Democrats, but particularly a number of Republicans do not want that to happen. And what happens if we have to have ground trips? So we're going to go in and get the nuclear arsenal, We're going to go get the nukes out. That means boots on the ground.
What does that look like? How do we navigate this? And every day this war goes on with no off ramp, problematic for US and our economy. Joining the show is doctor Markensel, former Director of International Studies and Human Rights Studies program founder all at the University of Dayton. He's our Middle Eastern Terrorism and the Leastern expert, doctor Mark. Good morning, How are you, good morning?
How are you sing?
I'm doing well. Thanks.
So Trump postponed the strikes on the infrastructure for five days, cooled off. We saw the economy rebound, the markets reacted really really well. To that said, We've had conversations, but there's about a lot of mixed messages in there saying, well, we decimated everything. There's no one to talk to just a couple days ago, because we killed everybody, and now we're somehow negotiating with someone who didn't exist three days ago.
So Iran flatly denies any negotiations that are happening. Who's telling the truth and why does it matter from a strategic standpoint?
Oh my.
So there's an old adage, right that the first casualty of war is the truth. Yes, and that seems to apply to the commander in chief, President Trump.
We don't know what the truth is. You're right, we.
Obliterated their nuclear material, but they can get bomb in two weeks.
That's why we attacked.
No, no, no, there's We'll only accept complete unconditional thrender. We're having talks and they're going, well, we just don't know what's going on now. I gotta tell you, Scott, I've been one of those pessimists to believe that conflict with the Islamic Republic Iran was was virtually inevitable given
that regime influence the Mid Eastern weapons. But having a commander in chief who seems not to be sending clear giving clear answers to the American people about what the object of this war is is very.
Very very frightening.
Another of us have lived through the last time we did this, in that we had there's mission creep, right, we're going to uh, we're gonna go and we're going to take out Saddam, Who's okay. Great, Well we did that, and you know, we're in Afghanistan, we're in Iraq, we're we're all over the place. And we lost a number of well a lot of really good young people through the war. But at the same time, we still really
know what the outstraats was. Okay, we toppled regime and then what happened, I mean ultimately ended with Biden pulling half acidly out of Afghanistan. And so what did we gain? We broke trust again in the Middle East? Are we set to do that all over again here?
It would appear so, I mean, the they the real goal is to topple the regime. That's that's clearly Israel's desire. The presidents has said it many times. But at the same time, he promised as as a political candidate, not to have these permanent wars, these regime change.
Wars, and that's exactly what we're doing.
So it's it's it's we don't know whether he's confused or he's deceptive, but either way does not bode well for the next phase. Now you mentioned the Marines are on the en route. What they're talking about extracting new clear material is going to take boots on the ground. Yeah, you know, we're gonna go in it and it's gonna be hot. We're gonna fight our way in and extract that material which is deeply buried deeply unide the country or who knows. We have a diplomatic off ramp in
the United Nations. The International Atomic Energy Commission goes in and supervises the extraction that material.
Do you really trust the UN to do that? I mean the un is pretty worthless in my opinion.
Youah, yeah, I'm with you, But it's gonna be someone who's gonna have to supervise the extraction of this material.
Uh.
And you know you don't hear it's spoken of very much. Is it possible? We're worried about the enrichment of the the uranium and can they develop what weapons?
Sure, they can develop dirty bombs. They can put it out of.
Low enriched material and fired in a ballistic missile, uh to tell Aviv and essentially turn into a nuclear wasteland. So the pre it has really opened up a courvial cannib worms here.
And I think it's a lot was like me.
I mean, we grew up there and you as well saw what the Iola did seventy nine. See what we see the regime and how pre seventy nine it look very western there. You know, women are going to university and now today, of course it's a dystopian hellhole and has been so for fifty years. No problem with decapitating the regime and provided though that we can kind of
nudge them in the right direction. Now we're not good at nation building for sure, but right now there's just no clear picture coming out for I think the American people to understand that Trump says Iran has agreed to never have a nuclear weapon. But given their track record the Obama deal, for example, the Republican Guard lying about their missiles or missile range, why would anyone believe that,
let alone the un of the United States. And if so, can't they just move there the fishing ball material somewhere else.
Yeah, those are all logistical questions, technical questions that are
difficult to answer. One thing's clear to me as a political scientist, is very interested in the nature of the regime that deocratic to telitarian state, is that you know, Israel clearly wanted and Trump seems to have been convinced that, you know, a blitz creed strike will topple that regime and we'll get a democratic So we don't have to put put you on the ground, we don't have to do what we did with that entertaining and so we can do it sort of magically. That's just a miss
this miscalculation. So we could find a diplomatic ard ramp where we deal with the nuclear matil but leave in place the regime. There's an incredible missile program the strikes in Tel Aviv yesterday and today are really uptick in the in the escalation of the violence. One Israeli UH military commander said, what we got here with yesterday was something entirely new. No think about this for a second. They have been We've been bombing them for a month.
The most sophisticated air force in the worlds were bombing them for a month, and they still have the ability to fire rockets at US, you know, so gives you a sense of what that regime would be and if they continue to build this missile program for a decade, another another few years.
So there's a need for conflict.
But you're right, we don't handle it well, and we certainly don't handle it well when there's uh, there's there's not. There's a lack of clarity in our strategic objective. We just can't get that from the president. And if you're an American citizen, particularly you're a president President supporter, Maggot supporter, Yeah, who believed what he said about no new wars, no regime changed wars, Stay stay at home, And suddenly you're looking at gas prices. You feel this at a really
deep political level. You've been deceived. This is a very terrible situation where.
They're market slag. Bizarre.
It is.
I'm starting to see the Trump did this. Bumpers are stickers on gas pumps now, like like with like they did with Biden and he was in charge. And it's just it's a bizarre world in which.
We live right now.
What if it worked, if we just simply said it's in a ray I think ran I think Israel does this the time to time. It's like, okay, well, you know what, we think you're getting too powerful, you're starting to build missiles up, and you're we're going to take you out. They launch a tactical strike and it's over. They're not invading, they're not trying to regime change, but they will as soon as it starts to bubble up or it looks like their enemy has too much, they
go and they take it out. Should this have been that they're just simply okay, well, unless you're gonna play the game, we're gonna swat you back down. We're gonna take your program back several years and we'll keep you in check.
That way.
Would that have worked, who knows, But I mean it really means will will be repeating this conflict every few years. Yeah, to steem kind of what Israel's doing with Lebanon, with in Lebanon. Yeah, right, with every few years we've forgotten about We've gotten with the President's Board of Peace, with mister Truman, we forgot about that entirely Middle East. It becomes such a quagmire. Is that Vietnam term? So yeah, it requurs clarity and thoughts to about our strategic objectives
and what is realistically possible. But we're not hearing that. We're hearing the president saying one thing one day, one thing, another thing the same day, and you can tell he's doing it for political reasons. Clearly he said we're at these constructive talks. I'm not a betting fellow, but I would bet on this that was clearly intended to influence the markets and the gas prices.
So apparently false.
It does not raise confidence in the administration and the president.
Yeah, so what we say, Okay, just a few days ago, we wiped everything out, there's no one to talk to, and then hours later it's like, well, we're negotiating and we're talking to this the most respected Iranian official, I guess wit Coffin Jerk Kushner are talking to this individual?
Is that really a person? Who would this be?
You reminds me of Back to Iron, Remember Ron Condra Oliver North. Remember they flew over They had some secret meeting with the moderate, the Islamic moderates of the regime, and it was a complete falsehood or challaby in a rock. He had insights into what's actually inside of a rock. Trust him. So they may be talking to someone, they're clearly not talking to someone who's in the senior leadership
of a deeply entrenched utilitarian state. So they're talking to somebody, but the person they're talking to can't can't speak for the regime.
Yeah, he is.
Doctor Mark Anseilaco from the University of Daton on the show this morning, seven hundred ww R Resident Middle Eastern Expert and terrorism expert on the show and contemplating with the move is here?
What the play is here? With Trump?
And you know, he's really good at pivoting and saying what's on his mind, but it seems like he's making this up from one second to the next. And even if you're mad, I think you agree. Is like, just tell us what's going on with the plan? Is there a plan here, And with each passing day it feels less and less like there's a plan, but more and more like we're going to be involved in something. It's a drag on for a long time, we hope not.
And we're trying to find an off ramp here. And you wonder what the Trump administration inside the White House is trying to figure on the same what the play is. Right now, you've got people saying, well, this is Vietnam and Tet Offensive all over again. You know, thirty years ago,
I couldn't tell you what the Tet Offensive was. But when you're older and you watch a lot of doctor Menors and War, as my wife calls it, you learned that the Tet Offensive was during the Vietnam conflict, in which in the Tet the holiday their New Year's they launched the North Vietnamese launched huge attacks on US installations throughout Vietnam, and people go, my guy, who was a turning port in the war, we got hand. No, we actually turned them back and beat the hell out of
the Vietnamese in that. But it's a situation where and again everything repeats itself. Historically, we won militarily, but we lost politically. Is that a similar parallel here.
Let me take a different angle at that the Vietnam thing. You know, when the United States simply declared victory and left, and we left ourselves at decent interval before when we left, before the North Threet and these took over. It was the two years that seems to be the president. Remember, the President has said he's the one who will decide when they've capitulated, when they've given.
A gut feeling, right, the gut feeling.
So he'll just say, like we won, we're leaving, okay.
And it meantime, by the way, the damage to the infrastructure in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of all Na, right, all the all the everything that's been struck by in the in the petroleum industry, everything's been struck by both sides in this has really damaged oil production that has affected multiple countries in the in the Golf and affected the global economy. So for the president to say, we launched this war for this reason, I'm going to declare victory.
Even though we didn't achieve.
The subjectives still left behind, uh a tremendous amount of damage that will affect their economy for some time.
So, I mean good, I was a view that a war was good.
I'm going to come with with Iran given the nature industry team and their militarization. But the president of the United States does not inspire confidence. Does not inspire confidence, is all I can put in.
I sense that. And now the report out this morning. The breaking element here is there may be negotiations with the US and around held in Pakistan. We're continuing striking military targets as well. We've kind of laid off the straight of our moves to say, okay, well, let's maybe have some negotiations here, but we'll see if this is indeed true, if it plays out in the meantime. Of course,
we have all sorts of juice on our side. I mean, you look at it, with all the stuff we've been talking about, Mark Zelaco, you know, maybe for the first time in a long time, we have the bulk of not all of the Middle East going, hey, we got to do something about Iran. Because they're launching missiles of Tel Aviv, which is nothing new, but Oman Dubai is under attack. It's everyone around them in the region wants this regime gone. This should be a lot easier than what we're talking about.
Your shouldn't it.
Yeah, what's happened since October twenty seventh when when Hamas attacked Israel. What's happened the destruction of Hamas and the serious debilitation of Hamas. Now his Bolah, the Jutis Siri has fallen, you know. So there's been there's been major geopolitical transformation in the Middle East. Uh, and the future
is there to whole. I mean like in Lebanon for example, right now Israel bringing h the force of the bear on his Bela people, Shia who are you know, linked to his Belah are turning against it because yet again these fanatics have exposed us to another Israeli war. This happened Hamas now with his Belah in Lebanon. So there's a transformation in Middle East. But it's this small, it's got to clear, it's still it's still burunning. But yeah, the global community now with all these brackets from far
from around hitting other Gulf states. Yes, he has woken them to the threat. They they've actually known about the thread for a very long time. We've always been fearful of Shia aggressive iron and yeah, so there's there's really a world war, a regional war going on right now, and we're deb in the middle of it.
Yeah, I want to think that.
You know, there are back channels, and what happened was we're able to sit down and we're gonna negotiate with someone and around because you know, clearly look at the regime right now, and they lost not just the head of the beast, but pretty much the middle and part of the tail right now, and they're struggling. And we still have no word if the newly installed Ayatola is even alive at this point because no one seen the guy.
We have someonetile rise to power for sure. Uh, but I'm sure they want an end of this thing as well. Can will There's be some capitulation here. I don't know if it'll be like Trump said, Hey, listen, we'll decide who goes into who's going to be in power in Iran, and we'll work together. I don't see that happening, but I'm clearly Iran wants it in this thing.
Who knows what Iran wants? And you're absolutely right, we do not know who we're speaking to. We do not know, you know, we could be speaking to someone who's an eatola, but they can't. If they didn't make promises, they can't deliver it.
That Yeah, that's true.
So we simply don't know.
Now, Israel's got a greater visibility into Iran. I mean, they have penetrated Iron for quite some time, you know. That's why the decapitation's rights were so simple, and because they've been they penetrated for for decades. But we don't have that, We don't have that visibility.
We don't have it. And we talked about this in the program last time I was on.
I don't trust the intelligence community right now, given the quality of their leadership either.
So we're in it.
We're in a global crisis right now, and we have serious concerns about our ability to manage our way through it.
Yeah, we're not losing sleep over over bombing the hell of a ran long time overdue. But what does an accept American win look like here? And is it achievable? That's the big question. What's the off ramp? Doctor Mark and Sulaco at the University up Dton. As always, thanks to the inside, appreciate it, Thank you, take care. We've got a news update here happening in just minutes as we count down to opening Day twenty twenty six on seven hundred WLW protein soda. There you go, There you go,
Sloani here, seven hundred WW. Thanks for joining the show this morning. I love the criticism. Talk badly about Trump. You get killed by the AMaGA crowd. And if you go, hi, man, you know this is something Trump did. It's really good. You get killed by the progressive crowd. So that means I'm doing what I do here, and that is I make my own mind up based on what's happening at that exact moment in time. And if you subscribe to the political kool aid, and let me back up a second,
how about some good news? You know, generally news and talk great, it's all negative. The world's ending, it's crime, it's all my god, we're gonna get This is why you got to buy gold and you got to buy an emergency medical kid, and you need a raider and more gold and how bad are things right now? Some perspective for you. And I thought of this because I keep hearing and we play them here. But the Thomas Massey is I love Thomas Massey as a libertarian leaning person.
I think he's refreshing we should you know, you should call the the other side should be held accountable. Okay, but I think it says a lot more if you can hold your own side accountable, which he does. However, these ads he's running against Ed gall Ryan, and Ed's been on the show many times, a great guy. The tagline and it is not just a Trump hater a Trump trader. Now, I just wonder who that's targeted to. Not you, I don't think, or me, because waitn hold on,
let me christ my. So Trump is endorsing a guy that hates him? How does that even How does that even make sense? Except in the world of politics. If you're so into the political identity that you're a whole identity is whether you're a Trump supporter or Trump hater, I kind of feel bad for you. Why would he endorse then? Why would Trump endorse a guy who hates him or is a trader? To maga, it just it doesn't make any sense. But it's politics. It's not supposed
to make any sense. You have the people who tell you politics is the most important thing in the world really believe this kind of stuff. What makes you think, like, am I normal? Or are they abnormal? I think he got that right, you're normal. But I mentioned how we got to pump the brakes on this whole thing in granted, Iran is illustrative of where we are with Donald Trump right now. I was like, from one minute to the next,
it's a different story. We wipe them completely out, they have no nukes left, but we got to go get the nukes. You know, We're going to do this all from a tactical position, and we're going to strike them until they scream uncle. And we're going to put our own people in there and they're going to go with it. And that's not happening. And also, no boots on the ground except for all the Marines we're sending there. Okay, that only maybe makes sense and true social but the
reality is this. I mean, you think the sky is falling for you, it probably is because we live in a it's like a vibe pression, right, Vibe depression will call this trademark, like consumer sentiment has. Right now, consumer sentiment is below where we were in the financial crisis of two thousand and eight, below where we were in the pandemic of twenty twenty. Despite if you look at the numbers, they're pretty good The biggest driver to where you think the economy is great or it's awful is
party affiliation. Economic perception now tracks who's in the White House more than actually what's in your paycheck. And obviously Democrats are more negative on the economy now than Republicans were under Biden, which proves the point.
And so it gets back to that.
Thomas masseyad both sides have done complete one to eighty and the economy hasn't moved. Trump called Biden's economy in nightmares a candidate and now says America's economy is bigger, better, and rich are stronger than ever. Democrats went from Harris bragging it was the strongest commomy in the world, just screaming affordability crisis.
Well, guess what.
Let's look at the actual numbers. They're almost identical year over year across every major metric. Almost all major metrics, so GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, real wages, mortgage rates, the budget deficit, all were in the measurement era of twenty twenty four. Levels real purchasing power wages grew one point four percent. It grew one point to under Biden. Tariffs read roughly added a half point to inflation, painful, but
nowhere near the economic armageddon that democrats predicted. On either side about ninety percent years, economy has a little involvement in trade. Most Americans didn't meaningfully change their behavior over tariffs. Gas will do that, for sure, but tariff's not so much. And Gretin, who hell wants to pay more when you promise everything would be cheaper. AI has been a disruptor, but it hasn't moved the macro needle despite all the hype. And yeah, the war is hurting us consumers, but markets
expect us to be temporary. This is not nineteen seventy nine. We'll talk about that later in the show with Andy Shaeffer at eleven thirty five with all Worth first perspective on this one. But why is consumer cent it done? Because you know, if you think it's bad, it's bad. You know your wallet didn't change when the rieter changed, but your moon might have. And the economy is it's an ocean liner, it's not a it's not a speedboat.
And presidents take a lot of credit and dis themselves all the time from the bad, but presidents move it far far less. And either side wants you to believe, and that is true whether it's a Democrat or Republican, And we'll take all the credit when things are going well and it's the other guy's fault when it's not, Like how much longer can you keep lemming Biden for stuff after your office for a year?
Okay?
At some point it's like, all right, yeah, we'll give you like the first six eight months, but after that, when you're a year in, you to own that economy. And I think it's fair and reasonable to hold to the standards on which you promise, which you ran on, whether it's Biden or whether it's Trump. But again, the
problem is politics. The politics is clouding a lot of people's judgment in this thing that you look at and go, wow, it's you know, if Biden, if Kamala Harrison won and let's say, hey, you know, we're going to raise everyone's taxes to pay for all these programs we want. I wonder how many people who are progressives wouldn't think twice about it, going, oh, yeah, we're gonna say, but you're paying more money, more money is coming out. Yeah, but
it's for something I believe in. Okay, So how is that any different than those people who wanted the Iran decapitated. You know, can we I got okay, I gotta pay harder gas prices a while, But but there's hope there. And on either side there's probably not not much as changing. I mean, you're really gonna you think Iran's is simply going to wake up one day and they're gonna look like Canada Now, not gonna happen. I almost assure that. But we are sitting down and negotiating. But we weren't
negotiating because they're dead. But now they're alive and we're talking to people like it makes no sense. And now if you've started adding more people or more troops on the ground, that's the problem right there, and that we cannot have because something like sixty percent of us, sixty percent of Americans do not want that at all, don't want it at all, whether you're a Democrat or republic and that's a growing number with each and every passing day.
So just a little perspective here, the glass half full, half empty, that's what the glass looks like. It's actually it's a glass, and you decide I it's half full or empty. And right now, too many people are thinking the glass is half empty when it's it's really not. It's the same glass. It's the same almost the same amount of liquid.
It's damn.
You look at the you know, some things have gone up, some things have gone down, but it's a trade off. The overall economy is still really really strong despite what you may think. And yeah, gas is a pain in the button. Tariffs have added to that, but we seem to be absorbing it, which is which is good. Boy, here's a dumb person. This is gonna be the dumbest person ever did Are you a fan or Reacher?
On?
Uh?
Was on Amazon? You know, I am all of about mindless violence, just inhuman I watched a movie over the weekend just like that, and like once in a while, it just hits like it's a stupid movie. The premise is dumb, but there's a lot of ass whooping going on and sometimes you just need that, like the good guys.
And when Mary talking about this, the more you see of those you know, hero kind of guys out there, the enforcers that people you know, way back in the old old days, you know, guy like Chuck Bronson make those movies when the you know, the seventies, when the streets of New York and other big cities were burning basically, and it was crime was out of control, the economy was bad, and so you need these everyday men to step up and you know, fight the bad guys because
the good guys aren't like we have in Cincinnati right now. You know, the bad guys are run around. Do what that bad guys do. You kind of like need a vigilante type out there to set things straight, and Reacher is kind of that guy. If you're a fan of that show. The actor's name is Alan Richson, and from what I've read about the guy, he's being a big
fan of show. He's like the nicest guy in the world, like those church hangs out neighborhood just like you know, just an every day guy, a Shuck's kind of guy. But his job in the TV show reachur in some of the other movies. He's then actually made a movie I watched a couple of weekends ago that was just purely awful.
That he was in. I think his first not a major motion picture, but it was. It was terrible.
He's trying to get back into the Armated military because his brother died, and then anyway, winds up like on some sort of mission and it's a practice thing, except it turns into aliens invade America. Like I don't know what's going on here. I lost interest, but Alan Richmond and rich is fantastic.
So he is.
There's video on TMZ of this. And he's a big boy, I mean, Alan Richman is. He's a house. He's a freaking house. And he's going through his neighborhood on his motorcycle with I guess kids. I guess his kids maybe were there. This is a Nashville right down the road from us here, and he's the neighbor that the angry neighbor said. He's driving up and down on his bike excessive speed, revving his engine, disturbing the piece, and so he flips off Alan Richson, and Alan Richon well returns.
The gester flips him back off.
So the next day or daily he comes to driving back down and apparently the victim of the alleged victim, Ronnie Taylor said, Alan Richard was riding his Kawasaki through the quiet Well to do national suburbs, flying at excessive speed and revving his engine and all these things.
And he's with his kids.
So I don't know if he's doing that or not, but nonetheless, all this this guy comes up Rodnie Taylor and pushes him off his motors, up his motorcycle and then hits him two more times, at which point is when a neighbor starts recording this. And it looks like a dad fight and a toddler because you see this guy down on one of ay and and Alan Richin is just pommeling this guy.
So he's on video on TMZ and he looks like.
You know, the before and after, except this is the after is not really good. He's got a shot, he's all. He's all, he's beat to hell. Guy looks like he's been through it. But how dumb are you? I bad get it.
Somebody's speeding up and down, but he wondered this guy is all, does he got it all together? And again, it doesn't matter if you live in the poorest neighborhoods or the wealthiest neighborhoods, there's always that guy. I just got to feel in this. Ronnie Taylor's that guy. Like he's driving. Okay, is the bike a little loud? Maybe you're disturbing the piece. You're speeding up and down Okay, so maybe you're going a couple of miles over the
speed limit. I mean, I'm probably not driving eighty ninety up and down the street. But he responds to me, going, hey man, you know it's kind of quiet. He flips the guy off, so that starts, and then then he comes back around and this guy shoves reach her off his bike. Well, what do you think is gonna happen? F around and find out. Yeah, I just I live the story went, I don't really have a dog in the sun. It's interesting, But why would you pick a fight with that dude? And he said, I had no
idea who he would. I don't know even if you didn't know who he was. And he's an actor, he's playing a tough guy. He's still a big dude.
You know.
You mess around with that, you gotta gets your ass whooped.
There's another one I can't figure out too. This is this is another story. You need more information of it. This guy name is Dayton Weber. He's twenty seven. He is a professional cornhole player. He is on the tour, the Cornhole Tour, whatever the cornhole tour is, and he is now in jail in Maryland charged with first degree murder.
So the dude's rolling in his car and he's got witnesses, he's got people in the back seat, and the victim is also a twenty seven year old man named Brad Wells, and mister Wells was shot by Dayton Webber, the cornhole guy, the front seat passenger. They got in an argument while Weber is driving. Maybe I don't know who they're fighting over, reacher,
I don't know, maybe fighting about the Iran war. Shoot the guy dead in his own car, the corn hole professional and fled with the body still in the car. After the backseat passengers refuse to help get rid of the body. It's like, I need you to help me get rid of this guy and just shot. Like, no, we're not doing that. What we are going to do is go right to the police. Here is the increased difficulty level on this crime. Sorry, what's the big deal?
Corn professional goal or player murder someone? I suppose cornhole players can get angry, Sure, why not? The dude is a quadruple amputee. Now I know we have prosthetics and things like that, but the quadruple amptit ampute driving a car and while driving the car also a professional cornhole player while while driving the car, somehow is able to get a gun and shoot this guy. And the biggest question you have is how how a would a quad ampute? I have no idea how that works. I'm not making
fun of the contition. I'm just curious. You're driving and shooting a guy and you play cornwall professionally pretty good, maybe like an Oscar Pistorius kind of thing, you know, the blade runner thing, but that one is like leaving Huh, I wonder what that looked like exactly.
That's exactly what I wonder. Do we have video?
I kind of need to see some video there, just asking we got news on the way in just minutes.
And then as we focus.
About Iran and you know, possible lone wolf attacks and maybe nuclear salts and dirty bombs and all these things that were scared to death of are we not paying attention to the obvious? Based on what happened with Striker Medical Devices and most recently Microsoft in that attack. Is our buddy Chris Nihi, CEO of Cincinnia based Vision in Cybersecurity, has done some research and you're not going to believe what he found out relative to now computer code being
infected with malware. Nobody knows about it. He just did some investigation and broke this. Don't share that with you. Next, and why we should be more concerned about hackers then we should be about bombers. Next Scott's Loan Show, seven hundred WW Cincinnati.
Do you want to be an American slill?
Be back on seven hundred WLW.
I don't know if you know this word war trying to get out of it, but so we are definitely in it. And you know, we're concerned about attacks in the homeland, lone wolf attacks and things like that. The biggest one is, you know, cyber attacks. And remember a couple of weeks ago, if that we had the attack on Striker, the medical company, and they're still trying to
dig out from that. An Iranian linked hacking group called three thirteen team claim responsibility for Microsoft's three sixty five out it just last week, saying the knocked out service for five hours and wanted to extend the attack. And it looked like it's fine. They were able to fix that. But these things might be part of a big one yet to come. And he's uncovered something that indicates that
that is true. His name is Chris Nihisk. He is the CEO of Cincinnati based Vigilant Cybersecurity, joined to the show this morning. Chris, welcome, how are you.
I'm doing great, Scotts, good to be here.
So real quick, let's back up Microsoft, and I remember three sixty five wasn't work. I was getting mail and it affect a lot of people, but it was kind of a blitz. It wasn't a huge outage, right, Like we're talking like Striker that was. That was a massive attack, shutting that company down essentially. Let's back up to that. Then with Striker, these stories get reported. Yeah, they had all their data taken away and they completely deleted the hard drives and they have all their data and Striker
has nothing. Can you tell me what's going on inside Striker today now that we're not paying attention to it anymore, are they able to function?
Right?
I mean, so they're they're they're coming back online. They're working through that. And that's how these these things happen, is they take down the operations of an organization and then that organization start to you know, bring themselves back on. Now there's not a lot of information coming out of Striker, and you know, and and I understand why they don't want to really release a lot of opsect types of types of things of what they're doing or even what happened.
And I'm sure that the US Department Defense is not letting them say a lot of things either because it's so connected. But you know, it is it is going to be a long road for them to bring things back online.
Okay, fair enough.
Then on we had the Microsoft out just last week, and like I said, I we were affected by a little bit, but that wasn't really a big one.
Was it.
It wasn't a big one. And then in fact, that actually happened again yesterday. So there were last week there were two outages with Microsoft, you know, with different products that they have. You know, there was an a rainy group that came out that said that they were attributed to it. Microsoft has not released that yet and they've actually kept they keep saying that it was an internal issue.
And then yesterday they had another outage that they said was because of a virtual assistant that they deployed that caused it. Just it was buggy and it took things down again. So in the last few weeks, Microsoft's had
two outages. Now the thing that's important to note here is whether it's attributed to a threat actor or not, it's still It's something you and I've been talking about for a long time here is that so many organizations have put all their eggs in one basket or just a few, and so when these applications go down, your entire business halts. And so you know, the real big things to learn here from Microsoft is, you know, make
sure that you've got redundancy in your organization. Now there are going to be and we'll talk about some more stuff here in a second, but there's going to be more and more attacks. So like we just we just know that that's going to happen, that will continue to happen even beyond the ramp, right, And and the one thing that's interesting here too is these attacks just don't happen.
Like you know, with the Striker for instance, more than likely they were inside Striker's environment for months, more than likely. You know, I think we'll you know, we find that out with almost every breach. The average time and attackers in a company is two in eighty seven days. So they were in that environment more than likely. Right, if statistics go way before we.
Even attack your RM Okay, so that makes sense. All this stuff's coming together. And as we said, you know, with the Iran war, Chris, you know, we're focused on missiles and bombs and terrorist attacks and things like that, of course, but the cyber ones to simply go by the wayside, you know, okay, strike and people have largely forgotten about that. It feels to me like we should be more concerned about this than actual physical bombs and missiles as opposed to cyber attacks.
Well, I think we should, you know, and you know, we have a i would say, very very soft underbelly that a lot of people don't that aren't aware of. And when it comes to cybersecurity, you know, bombs and missiles in some ways that and that's more. You know,
it's called kinetic warfare. That type of kinetic warfare in some ways is a distraction in a lot of ways now because if you really want to take a company down or a country down, you take down their core infrastructure, right, And that's what happened last couple of days with you know, Trump saying, hey, we're going to take out your nuclear, your power stations, and Rand's like, okay, cool, we'll take out your water and your power.
So it's it is a it is a it is a big.
Strength game, you know.
Okay, good Chris and I heis here, CEO of Cincinnati based Vigilant Cybersecurity, on the show, kind of rehashing what happened with Striker the cyber tech. A couple of weeks ago, we had the Microsoft outage that affected a lot of people, but briefly and you've done some research here that that indicates the worst is yet to come and has to do with something called GitHub. And GitHub is basically if you have Google Cloud or one Drive, and you know
everything stored to cloud. Basically it's the cloud of computer code. It's where all the programmers put their code in the cloud. And that has been compromised.
So and I want to be really clear here and carefully. The GitHub itself great platform. It is an amazing place that allows developers put code there, both private code and public code. Get up itself hasn't been compromised the and and I also want to say that the open source community is a huge community that enables developers to develop applications and get them out there so people can use them. And there's so many people that develop software for free
it's been countless hours doing that. Now, what what we found so that this happened about three weeks ago. We saw this this small story pop up just in the community, uh, you know, the cyber community and a little bit on on on Instagram and things are not on Instagram but Twitter. About a company called Trivia. Now, Trivia is a security tool that is used by developers that once they they launch code, they use this tool to develop it. Because a lot of people that develop software on that put
it up on GitHub that's open source. There're those small people, you know, small teams, so they use these other applications to scan them what happened. So when you do that, because you have small teams, you're trying to do all this. There are these things called actions. What actions are is basically automation. So if I deployed new software, those actions that automation will kick off to do a whole bunch
of different things. Right now, the way that open source software works is someone will develop a piece of software and then other people think it's cool and they'll fork it, or they'll they'll they'll take that software and build on top of it. And so you can have a single piece of software that might have millions of other applications built on top of it, and these could be they could be hard monitors, they could be whatever right that's out there.
So so when.
This came across, something that didn't feel right, so I started doing a bunch of research. My team started doing a bunch of research. We took some of our code in our applications and actually made it made it into a scanner that we released for free.
It's called runner.
Guard, but basically what we did started scanning of top fifty thousand used applications out on GitHub to fifty thousand repositories, and we found that in this Trivia attack too. What happened was this attacker took over some authentication tokens and they then implemented code into Trivia's the security ski inner's actual code, so they broke through into GitHub uploaded state
code that had vulnerabilities in it. That code then got spread through these actions to thousands and thousands of other applications that Trivia used. So if you used Triviy, more than likely your open source code was infected with malware. Over the last couple of weeks. Then they came back to Trivia and attacked them again with more of these vulnerabilities that Trivia had a second time, they did it a third time, and then literally last couple of days,
they defaced their entire webing. So we looked into this, We're like, man, if Trivia's vulnerable to this, who else is scan? Fifty thousand repos? Twenty thousand, two hundred and sixty five repos are vulnerable to the exact same attack. That's one hundred and ninety two thousand vulnerabilities. And the scary part about it is on top of those twenty thousand repos.
Remember I said, it's like an upside down tumid.
Right, five hundred and ninety million projects are vulnerable.
Way, five hundred ninety million projects. Five hundred and ninety million projects. That's yeah, that's pretty much all the projects, say, all the projects, right, all the projects.
It's a lot of.
Projects projects And so what's so?
All?
Right?
So that's infected? And is this just Iran doing this? Is it Iraqi hackers? Bangladeshi and they're all organized on telegram? I guess that's where they.
Yeah, so those are and those are vulnerable projects. So those are not projects that have been compromised that we know of yet now highly likely that they have because if they found trivia, they've gone and kicked off some of these and these other reposts. Now we've been scanning, We've been, we've been notifying, We've been you know, I have not slept much, you know, in the last few weeks. You know, when you and I spoke last week, I had literally been up the entire night. A few members
for our team as well. Because this is a big deal. Is that these companies. There's two things that have to happen. One is companies that develop open source software need to validate whether or not they have these vulnerabilities. And Scott it's it's literally a three minute fix. It's a three minute fix.
Gotcha.
Yeah, christ heis is here CEO of since they based vision and cybersecurity. You know, we're worried about missile attacks and Loana wolf attacks with Iran in the Middle East, and we really need to be concerned more about cyber attacks. We saw what happens Striker, the medical device company Microsoft three sixty five outage, and now Chris and his team at vigilant As uncovered something huge and the depository, the cloud for.
Code called GitHub has.
Been compromised to a degree, not itself but one of the And so we're talking pretty much all these projects, which is in the tens of hundreds of millions, have all been compromised with this malicious code and malicious software. And so let me bring it to well the potentially potentially potentially, But I mean, they don't do it just to go, hey, we're kicking the tires on this, and this is what you found. And there's other cybersecurity firms
and experts that are doing the same thing. Here's where it comes to the whoa scary part. So there's this group called apt Iran which may be part of this whole thing you're talking about. They claim that they caused an explosion to kill a thirty year old father in Nebraska last year. Fremont, Nebraska last year. Friends and family said, well, friends and family, I'm reading the story. Your friends of themly confirmed that the identity two girls killed at a
biofields place. So the dad was there, third year old dad was working and his daughter were there with him and the biofield there's an explosion of bioicles but killed all three of them. And Iranian hackers have taken responsibility for it, and so that does Now, if you're the government, you go out, we want to admit that that's possible that the Iranians caused this to happen and killed three people to a man is a father and his two girls.
You certainly don't want that getting out. You do, and you don't, right. I think it's I think as.
A you know, I was, yeah, well, we won't talk about that, but basically.
Yeah, you're doing you you don't exactly so censored.
Because ultimately, you know, you have to inform the public of what's really going on, because the danger is the speculation.
Right, right, that's the danger.
The danger is the you know, because you know, the conspiracies happen when people know something's off and the data is just enough to tell them that it's off, but they don't know how to explain it, and so they make up and that's where conspiracy or so so I think I think the US government has to do a much better job of talking about what's actually happening so
the public doesn't freak out as much. Now, you know, we talked two years ago about the colonial attack, right, and we talked about then that the Colonial pipeline attack was more of a test and that's what I believe it was. Yeah, yeah, because when they took over that one thing people don't know is inside of a pipeline are these sensors. And if you can get access to those sensors, which you know colonial said that the attackers didn't, but if you get access to those sensors, you can
actually heat them up and explode a pipeline. And so so we just have to be aware that as a country we're very vulnerable and we need to be we need to be pointing our attention to making sure we're less vulnerable. Gotcha, he is Chris and I high CEO at Vigilant Cybersecurity. And now you know, thanks again for the time, buddy, I appreciate it.
Got I mean anytime.
Yeah, lone wolves and missiles. Yeah, where we got an eye out with the cyber stuff. Man, that that's going to be the big one we are due. I hate to say it, but a cyber nine to eleven is coming. It's coming. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not weeks and we were a month, but soon it's coming. Scott Sloan Show, seven hundred w O Tuesday Morning with Sloan Here seven hundred WWE countdown is on the opening day.
I'll be live at Holy Grail Banks starting at nine a m. I always love rolling up on Thursday morning, Opening day and seeing the long line of potential drunks lined up outside. I can't wait wind up, start dragging at nine o'clock in the morning. That is fan flippantastic right there, and I'm right there with you too. So we'll be live all day long, taking new first pitch at four to ten here on the Home of the Red seven hundred ww as. The Boston Red Sox are
in town and they will travel well. And if you think the price of admission is too high you can't get a ticket, just wait a day, wait till Friday, because it'll be immeasurably cheaper. We go nuts for opening day. Now if the weather's bad, it all looks like it's gonna be good, so we'll be fine. But typically you have a little bit of rain or it's cold, you start to thin up by like the fourth fifth inning
here in Cincinnati, Ohio. But good news is much cheaper ticket and maybe better better conditions for the Don't forget they play one hundred and sixty one games after this. Are you prepared as well? They would say, are you prepared? What is the biggest threat to our national security? Would you say it is the border, which we've done a great job closing to some degree, But would you agree
that that is the biggest threat to national security? I would say, no is the biggest threat to our national security. The straight of Hormuz gas prices, and in particular Iran. I would say no is the biggest threat to our national security. Our debt, that's a bingo.
Right now.
We have surpassed the thirty eight trillion dollar debt mark in America. The debt expected to climb over fifty four trillion over the next ten years. We're now in the territory that we haven't seen since nineteen forty, since the advent of World War Two. And meanwhile, debt held by the public jumped from ninety nine percent of the GDP to one hundred and sixteen percent of economic output is the target for twenty thirty four, and almost three times
as high. They's tread an increase speaks volumes about how quickly things are spiraling out of control. Talk about the debt spiral before because there is a limit to how much any debt a government can accumulate before a debt spiral begins because the fear of default causes interest rates to get higher and higher, which are trying to keep low,
and another interest rate cut coming. I believe we'll talk to Andy Shaeffer about this coming up in about an hour, but I think he's going to say, yeah, they paused, but there's gonna be another one coming.
But they're going to pret sudents.
Interests are gonna start to go back up, which causes higher deficits and more debt because you have to borrow more money because you're paying higher interest rates. The interest rates go up and you borrow more money, and that is the debt spiral that we're facing right now. And the big question is can we stomach what is going to be needed to write the ship? And I say no, not right now. Do you really want your taxes to go up? Do you want to get less benefits and
pay more? No one does. And politicians know this, and they're savvy, and that's why we've ignored this. The Treasury just released their fiscal twenty twenty five report, not not long ago, and we have six trillion dollars, just six point six trillion, but six trillion and assets.
What are our liabilities?
Because if they teach you this in high school, you have assets, which is the positive. You have liabilities, which is a negative. And if your positives are more than your negatives, you're in good shape. But if your negatives are more than your positives, you ain't a good shape. Six trillion on assets, forty eight trillion in liabilities. Let me say that again in a different way. We are negative forty one point seven two trillion right now, and that's up a couple trillion for in the whole winter
a year ago. And that doesn't include things like Social Security. That doesn't include Medicare. Those are funded obligations, those are tracked separately. Those jumped over ten trillion dollars in a single year. Medicare Part B alone accounts for almost seven trillion of the surge. He added all together one hundred and thirty six trillion in total federal obligations. That's five times I said, five times the size of the entire
US economy. So the analogy was like, is okay, I don't understand these number.
I don't understand I don't know trillions. I don't know how many zeros. That is I don't know.
I know, that's a hell of a lot of money. That's that's actually beyond a hell of it. Here's a hell of a lot of money.
And away over here.
When it comes to the deficit, I don't even know how to count that high. But from an analogy standpoint, to make it about your household, take eight zeros, take away eight zeros to turn federal finances into household budget. So just take the zeros all out of this. So if you earn fifty two thousand dollars, your household is spending seventy three thousand, which means you're running up twenty thousand dollars in new debt every year, and you're now
currently one point three million underwater. That's uncle Sam, that's how we bid. Just take all those zeros off, and that's if you ran your household that way. I'm making fifty two, I'm spending seventy three. That's a deficit of twenty thousand dollars every year. And now it's gone on so long, we're about a million three underwater. Might as well just keep spending into oblivion here. The only thing is you can declare bankruptcy. We really can't do that.
We really can't do that, and we can't really even tell you if the books are accurate, partly because well, things like the Pentagon, their finances are a mess, and that is a substantial amount of our federal deficit. And we're you know, there's two bills to address this right now. There's the Federal Commission Act that would force a public reckoning with hard choices on taxes and spending. There's one
a resolution in the House. Another one that calls for a constitutional convention to propose a balanced budget amendment modeled on Switzerland. Some I'm called the debt break because they're in trouble, but the numbers are real. The financial report was released just a few days ago by the Treasury and it's six trillion in assets, forty seven point seven eight liabilities. That is, by every measure, upside down. And
no one is talking about this. It's like, yeah, well that's how we run the show here.
Are you?
Are you happy with that? I'm, for one, not happy with it. I'm nervous about my future, but because I plan to live another thirty years, planning on and actually doing it are two different things. But I were about my kids you probably write your kids, maybe grand kids come along, something like that, and we just it's not sustainable. Now, are we insolvent? America is a dead beat nation? We are,
but are we insolvent? And that's not what the Treasury you just describe this therein report never uses this word. And this is more like private sector insolvency, almost like the household analogy.
I just gave you the key distinction.
There is like a company the US can taxi can borrow, you know, the US we can borrow against our own currency and theoretically print money. It doesn't mean that the trajectory isn't alarming. It is, but you know, calling it insolvent, someone saying we're insolvent, it's okay, that's I think flame it a little bit here. But you know, if we're over the topic, call it we're insolvent. We're dead beats.
We count are.
You know we're burning through a trillion dollars every five months. That's twice the historic pace, and that should be disturbing to anyone listening, regardless of who you voted or didn't vote for. So roughly that's almost four hundred thousand dollars per American or more than four hundred thousand dollars per American. Actually, if you do it, I mean close enough, right, so your your original sin is four hundred thousand dollars. You know,
it wasn't that long ago. We forgot about that. Moody's downgraded the United States because of our spending. Big beautiful bill came along and it drove the deficit even higher. What happened to doze, by the way, how did that work out? Did nothing? This is a crisis. Is a crisis for Republicans. This is a crisis for Democrats and independents and Libertarians and Green Party whomever, whatever it is you believe in or don't believe. And it's a problem
for all of us. And all those entsies, particularly the Democrats and Republicans, got us to where we are right now. We're not holding their feet to the fire. And there's going to be a reckoning coming up. And we talk about this all the time. The reckoning is going to be if we get flipped around, if we get upside down and the interest rates start going up up and up, and we have to borrow more money just to keep the lights on. I mean, we saw what the EU
went through. Certain nations. We've seen other nations go on. It is going to be a crisis of magnitude because we are, of course, we're the world economy in the United States of America. And as you'll hear from Andy Schaeffer at eleven thirty five, if you look at the economy's doing pretty well right now. But even Wall Street has ignored the debt bump issue entirely. We're not buying our debt to keep our interests at low. Inflation is
going to be what it is in the future. It's going to go up because the central banks people won't be buying our debt anymore. It's over a trillion dollars in debt. Service, Medicare is up there. Defense is a trillion dollars a trillion. We're not gonna get real we need defense, but you know, do we need things like a golden dome? And look how much money another two hundred billion for Iran that apparently I guess a few
days ago is wiped out. But now we're negotiating with them like we're not getting a straight story to Washington.
Is a problem.
Veterans, benefits and services, those are things that I'm not saying so just as we are. But you talk about Medicare, defense, veterans benefits, debt service, those things are fixed. We can't change those, and those are supposed to Well, we're gon we're gonna change everything with Doge didn't change anything. It's about what six percent of the deficit, and we're already burned through that money. So this is a crisis that at some point it is going to have to be
addressed in Congress. It's going to happen sooner rather than later. But is it astounding to you that we have largely become insolvent for lack of better terms, are completely upside down? And this report was issued three days ago, and I think I'm the only one talking about it. You know, I don't know if you ignore it, does it just go?
Wait?
How does that usually work? No one wants to hear about this. No one wants to go, well, okay, what's your solution, smart ass? Well, the solution to be we're going to have to figure out what to cut. There's going to have to be some some tests for retire reason. God, you know, we run commercials all the time about protecting your social security and like aus, what that's going to have to be on the table all of those entitlement programs,
and they are entitlement programs. No, no, they're not intolments. I work for that right something you're entitled too as I am. I'm getting to that age or I got to start looking at this stuff is going to be available and what's got to go away? How do we how do we cut spending. It's got to come from all ears. It's got to come from and Totnement's got to come from defense, it's got to come from medicare all these things, and we're going to pay more and get less.
And that's the reality.
I think the future of the definition of a patriot is not going to be someone who's wearing a tri cornered hat and we the People T shirt or having a million bumper stickers about the environment and other things in the back of your volvo. What it's going to be is people going, Okay, I got to pay more and get less. To me, that that's what patriots in the future going to be. It's an economic patriot. There's
just no two ways about it. We're spending like drunk sailors and no one's At some time the chairs are going to the music and the stop and I'm gonna be all that chair is the problem here? How they get to Mary Mountain Richard on Scotsland Show, Good Morning, How are you.
Ye, Scott guye to talk to you?
Thanks for checking in.
I wouldn't.
I don't know.
I just hate to disagree with you, but I don't think the national debt is our biggest national security issue, mainly because maybe because when you have there is no real national debt. We issue debt in our own currency. The US government can never go bankrupt. I got to ask you one question, who are we in debt too? Banks? What do they use our currency that our Treasury department?
Well, I would say the banks, but who's who's controlling that debt? It'd be countries like China.
China. Well, we just don't pay China, we.
Don't have okay, So what does that do then? Okay?
So but then we still have to borrow money, right? What will that do to the interest?
We don't have to borrow money, and we can create it. We create our own currency. If you if you were your kitchen table and you're you're paying your bills, you have to pay your bills. You cannot create your own currency.
I understand that we have that we have the ability to print money, which we have, but the problem is this, the more you print, the more it devalues the face of that currency. Now where the world currency reserve? What happens when we get to the point where where there's a stronger economy, and you know, there's there's always been a fight like, well, the greenback is the current world reserve currency.
If this keeps up, it's not going to be in the future.
US economy is by far the world's biggest, no question that there. There is nobody that's even close to it. And if they don't want to do business with us, then they're going to have a real problem. So there you go. And if and if worst comes to words, okay, we just an issue a new currency if we had to, you know, you based on the amount of productivity in your economy. There is no national debt. It's made up and that's a made up thing.
Got so so so anyway, but we all agree on this that the interest rates will go up.
Correct, they could do that, But we can also create a new currency. Sure, Department and in Control.
America can do that. But what about the companies? All this this economic engine of America. The companies that borrow money, what about their interest rates?
Their interest rates? We can create a new currency. Well, so we can set it up. We don't have to have We are not we're not beholden to big banks if we don't want to be. We can create our own currency based on the size of our economy if we want to. There is no national debt. It's a made up thing. And you know we can agree to disagree on.
Yeah, sure, sure, sure, But the solution is, like we did what that point.
You have a point about printing too much money. You can't just willing really do that because it will create inflation. You are correct on that, but we have the ability to control that.
You know.
So, but that but that obligation, I guess I'll let you go because I got some other clulture. That obligation doesn't go away. You know, you're saying, Okay, we replaced a dollar with a new national currency or digital dollar, whatever it is. There's shock waves from that. You know, we've got the thirty eight trillion dollars debt crisis. But then you're talking about that transition, which I don't trust the government to do. Now you're talking about hyper inflation.
It could wipe savings out overnight that happened in Argentina for example, and the collapse of the preserve currency are held in the US dollars. A switch would destabilize the central banks worldwide in the crash would I mean, I think it'd be an implosion, is what it is. It just I don't think your arguing makes sense to me anyway. Maybe somebody does, but I appreciate the debate. I got to get a news update in we're running little bit late. News is coming up in about seven minutes here. And
then Greg lost them from Buckeye. Well they took oh yesterday, they took away your THG beverages. Now they want to take away more of your money from your house. In light of all of the property taxes you're paying, Ohio, they want another tax on what you do in your house.
We'll explain next on the big one. Hang on, I want to.
Be an American idiot. He's got on seven hundred WW.
So what's sustainable Ohio taking away from you today?
Yesterday it was THC drinks, you know, because that's killed in a lot of people share today. How about some higher taxes are you a fan of higher taxes. I'm a big fan of higher taxes. Oh, the Ohio legislature, the General Assembly is moving to tax you, mister and missus homeowner if you decide that you're going to rent out your home like Airbnb or verbo for a few days. Seems to me like a raw deal. You know, new taxes. There's no protections in here. Local governments can still ban
you from doinging entirely. Doesn't feel like free enterprise to me. Joining the show from the Buckeye Institute in Columbus is Greg Laws and Greg.
Welcome, thanks for having me on.
We have this, as you.
Know, being in Ohio, you know we have this insane property tax burden going on right now, some people paying three hundred percent more property taxes. There's a move to eliminate property taxes entirely. And now this is this a good idea?
Well, it's certainly not a good idea to just tax people. There's an argument that in some areas, some that don't have like as many hotels, especially some rural areas, that they that they still have what they call visitor and bureau. Visitor bureau can into with tourism, that they that there may be a need for something. But the concern we have is that there are several bills out there, and one of them, in particular, unfortunately, House Bill one sixty one,
is just a tax bill. It just applies the logic tax to an Airbnb or verbo or any of these short term rentals. But it does nothing about what is a growing problem in Ohio, which is that local governments are oftentimes preventing people from doing it. They're putting bands on airbnbs and verbos. That's something that is happening under the home rules stuff. I think we talked about home earlier before, and we think that's a terrible situation. So
you know, I'll tell you this. You can't just flat tax on something and then just give keep government with the power to just continue to ban things. It really is violating people's personal property rights. And we think that's a bad idea.
Yeah, I guess you're a local minsipality. If you have a problem with the your HOA can ban people from doing that, and you sign your rights away when you do that. You buy property there, here's the rules. You want to move there or not. Okay, I can't buy you know, I own rental property. There's someones I own that are part of an hoa where you can't rent
them out. Okay, fine, great, but I knew that going ahead of time, coming back and then taxing people for something they're already paying taxes on seems criminal to me. You're already paying the property tax. I got to pay you more tax because I'm renting it out.
Well, the argument is that you have hotels that already have these taxes that are apply to them. I and the hotels have have for a long time made the case that with the advent of all these new things short term rentals, that they're being taxed, but that's essentially an unfair competition, and that it's making sure that they don't have the revenue to go back into again some of these various marketing pages and stuff that happens in
different counties for tourism. So that's the argument that's there. And you know, first of all, we don't like new taxes, guys. It's always been against new taxes. But what I testified last week to a committee on this in the Ohio House Representatives, the argument that we made is we certainly don't like taxes if you're not going to make sure that people are protected. And I think this is the thing that it's so to me, we just about what's
happening across the high most governments is these bands. I get people are worried about having a party house in their neighborhoods that isn't under control, And there's several things that deal with this. First of all, you can still have and should still be able to have local nuisance laws and things like that. If people are doing crazy stuff or you know, having animal house happening and then you know next door to you, you know, there's ways
to address it. By the way, folks like Airbnb have policies for the platform where if you start doing things like that, you're rinning it out and you really maybe one time you can get away that, but you know, it's like I think it's like a three times and you're out sort of thing, right where if this is a recurring pattern and you're not taking responsibility in your neighborhood with your property, they can't use their platform anymore to rent it out. Yeah, so we have protections for people.
We shouldn't be banning them. We certainly shouldn't be taxing people and then not guaranteeing that you still can have the right to do what you want to with hero.
From Yeah, I want to circle back on the zero protections argument that you made there, Greg Lawson, and I think that's true. You know, we have nuisance laws in Cincinnati,
and I could never figure this out. Is if you own property in Cincinnati and you rent it out and people are you know, either Airbnb or verbal or just rental just you know, regular rental, long term ratl short tomorrow, if those people are causing a problem and then you know, causing the neighborhood, maybe racing up and down the street, or there's trash all over the place, or playing in loud music right their nuisance, the city of Cincinnati makes
somehow the landlord eventually responsible for that. Like no, if you're an adult and you're renting property and you are doing stuff like that, that that that's on the city, that's on law enforce meant to cite that person. That shouldn't be on the landlord. I mean, if they're in there dealing drugs and I know about it, maybe a different story. But if they're just a nuisance, that's the
individual's responsibility. I you know, I don't get a ticket, speeding ticket because you know, my son uses my car, let's say. And that was the argument with speed cameras obviously, is you're citing me for something I can't control.
That's that's on them, give them the ticket.
We should the people who are doing the offense of people. That should be right. Both that's the law and that's exactly right. That's what should happen. Now if you're again doing this on an ongoing basis where you're not taking care to bet the people that you have coming in and this isn't you know, an isolated incident that's happening
all the time. I think there may be a little bit of a different argument there because at that point you are sort of not taking the responsibility with your own property at that point, and then you are having
an avergine impact from your neighbors and stuff. But the point that it is disturbing about this is when when you make these blanket terminations by the local governments just not doing which is actually I think really remarkable, when you because you make curlier we have this profit taxes and we have local governments who should be scared quite a bit about the prospects of that making the ballot.
Whether it does or not, nobody can say for sure at this point because they haven't sumitted signatures for this constitucial limit. But if that happens, you never believe they're going to want to have some revenue. But you're gonna have a hard time having revenue by the time you start banning everybody from being able to do that thing. Yeah, it just makes no sense from so many different perspectives. Well, is it great?
Great?
Where does it end?
I mean, like, if I'm I use my house, let's say, for my small business, do I have to pay an extra tax there?
I don't know.
My spouse is really good makes sourd o bread and she's selling some sourdough bread.
Do I have to?
I mean, where do I Wand with the taxation here, I'm already paying the damn property taxes we're you're too damn high, and now if I rent it out, I've got to pay even more. You mentioned too zero protections for the whole What does that mean the zero protection area.
Well, we're basically saying that people have the right to be able to make decisions with what they want to do with their property. Obviously, with the reason. You know, you know, there are certain things where you can't let your properly go to the hell and a hand askt and stuff of that nature. But this whole notion, and it's happening in jurisdiction after jurisdiction where they can come
in and stop it. And I harp on this point because this is not isolating what this isn't one or two jurisdictions, and it isn't just one or two places in the state. It's really it's all over the state the proportion, So it's not it's not just a regional phenomenon. And this is the problem that I see, which is local government, you know, kind of running them off with these things. Yeah, it's a it's actually a much bigger issue.
I mean, there's there's a whole bunch of problems frankly with local government and II and I think I've molmented some of those in the past on your show, and I probably will again.
We're on the same page.
And this is just one more example of it. So you know, again, there's some bills that are out there, by the way that would have some degree, would would maybe do the tax, but would include prohibitions and preempt local government from being able to do the banning of the short term rentals.
How do how does the home rule apply there?
Though, well, I'm sure they'll sue uh and make an argument that that's violation. But if it's written the right way, the legislature does have the ability to write laws that are of statewide applicability. Now that's a little sometimes it's been in the eye of beholder, and there's been a lot of push and pull, frankly, between the General Assembly and local governments, especially in recent years, over many different things.
There's been second amendment to issues. There's been issues like plastic bags, some jurisdictions way in the dand cracking and so there's all these various things that happened. But we've made the case of the buck ask that that the General simply have the right to be able to do preemption, because if you allow all these locals to prevent all sorts of different active short term rentals, it's certainly one
of them. But you know, we're seeing this with data centers too now coming out, so we're seeing a lot of these things, and the General simply has acted in the past to say no, you can't do that. They and we think that under certain circumstances, that is an appropriate thing, because what you end up with is you end up with a you know, it's sort of a little bit of a joke to say it this way, but it's a crazy patchwork of different regulations and frusteristations.
But that makes it hard to do different things. And it's one of the problems Ohio has, and at a mid Western state issue in general, because of a sort of the history there. But when you look at southern states and you look at Western states, and you look at states that are really growing with populations that are
really expanding. You know, you can talk about the weather and stuff, and I'm sure that has some degree of influence, but it's taxes, it's regulations, and Kino taxes and regulations now are worse at the local level than they are at the state level. Well, that is something that less that you need to deal with.
Yeah, I mean, look look at it this way.
Kathy Hochell, governor in New York State, she went on Campaigtrios, said, hey, listen, you know what, if you're a billionaire, if you've got all this money, we don't want you here unless you're going to pay your fair share. Well, guess what, I just saw a study where a huge number of them have moved to Texas, cal I think, Arizona, California, some some of California, don't know why, but to Texas primarily.
And now she's she's begging those people to come back because they you know, she guys said I'm gonna screw.
You when it comes to taxes. You should be paying your fair share.
Well, guess what liberal Democrat or conservative Republican aside, they all moved out of the state and now they don't have enough money to pay for their what it is they want to do, the same thing would apply here. I mean Indiana, Florida and Arizona also do this as well, where they blocked local short term rental bands. And Ohio wants to be next. By the way, Greg Lawson's here from Buckeye Institute in Columbus as the state of Ohio yesterday took the THG drinks away today higher taxes a
top of the insane property tax were paying. Now, if you want to rent out your home of the weekend as someone, they want to tax you and there's no protections there for you, basically meaning they're going to tax the activity and not protect your right to do it. And you know you could pay tax today and face a local band tomorrow in your state or in your township municipality. HOA is different because that's part of the
deal when you buy something in an HOA. But Greg Lawson, I can't help but think back to all of these seismic shifts, these change agents that happened in the world back in the day when Uber and Lyft came along. I remember tax I remember the cab drivers, Like at CBG at the airport, we're up an arms saying wait, well, hold on just a second. If you have these independent people coming in not paying a tax, they're not paying all these fees and fares, what about our They wanted
to protect their industry. I think the same thing is happening here with the rentals. This has got to be the hotel motel industry that pays an exorbited amount of taxes. Like every time we raise a tack, well we'll just add to the luxury check. We'll just add to the hotel motel tax on this. And when you get a hotel night for I don't know, one hundred and fifty bucks, you get the bill, and it's like, you know, almost two hundred dollars are probably more than two hundred because
of the taxes added on here. I feel for the established business is like hotels, motels in this case taxes. I mean New York City alone, the price of a hack medallion, which basically is a transferable physical license plate that's a round circle to medallion and they attach it to the hood of a yellow cab in New York the cost of one of those medallions is now over
a million dollars. So from a business perspective, it doesn't seem fair that they're competing with uber and left drivers who don't have to pay that exorbitant tax.
I think this is the same model.
Well, I think this is a broad That is a big question about taxation and what's a fair tax. Where everybody is and when you're mailing certain people, they're going to get very upset about the new entrance into the marketplace, and so they're going to you know, they prefer them to you know, not enter the marketplaces, but they certainly want them to do that. That's just where you start hearing about the level playing field argument, which on one
hand is correct. That's an economic theory. It says it it's a right thing to do is to make sure that people that are similar kinds of businesses aren't being disproportionately impacted one versus another because of a specific rule or in taxation. You want it to be fair across the board. And so that's certainly the argument they're using. And I think you have to look at what are
we doing with these revenues. I mean, we've had lodging tetch for a while, and unfortunately it's a sort of scene that the soapy allow counters like right, because what you're essentially saying is we're going to raise the revenue on the backs of people who don't necessarily live so that we can do that now, you know, I mean they that is the Florida certainly does do that with some of their taxes and stuff because we have a lot of tourism and stuff that comes through there.
Uh.
And so I get what the rationale is, but we need to be really careful how we think about this and when we're doing this, and you occasionally see bills and the or things and budget bills and stuff. They'll had an additional thing for one visitor Bereavers another Visitors Bureau, and I'm not trying to just brag on them. They can't help to raise awareness, do certain things to build the infrastructure to bring in concerts or conferences or what
are sporting events and stuff like that. So there may be some rationale for some of that, but we need to be very careful when we're applying this and then when we start applaying it to new people. We need to really think about what we're doing and how we're spending the existing resources that we have.
Greg Laws and Buckeye and watch out for it. It's House Bill one sixty one. Come in for more property texts, basically what this is all the best, Thanks again, Bud, I appreciate you.
Thank you.
We'll get a news update in here momentarily on the Big one seven hundred WW. This is why I wake up in the morning to see how we're going to get screwed the next day and then talk to you about it. Coming up next, Andy Schaeffer, we'll look at the other side of this thing. If you're hearing this goes, oh it's too much. Hold on just a second. I got some information for it. It's going to make you a little bit happier today despite all the craziness in the world.
Simply money. Next seven hundred w.
Do time to talk about money, how to make it, how to keep it, and how to keep others off your stack. This is all worth advice with Andy Schaeffer.
All Right, I promised we had some hand news for your today, happy news today. And Andy, what happy news do we have today relative to your savings, your investment, your future, your retirement, your college fund, on all that stuff.
Anything good, Give me something. Lead off with a good story.
Okay, that sounds good, well fed. Sherman Powell spoke last week. The FOMC had their regular meeting, and one of the good things that came out of it, and you know, not all of it was good, but what he did say is that our growth is tracking a little bit higher this year than we previously thought. So, you know, in spite of everything that's going on and Iran, you know, we're looking at GDP growth this year about.
Two point six percent.
So there's something for you to start out with to get it going on a positive note.
You know, earlier this morning I mentioned this, and it's true. You know, consumer sentiment is cratered. It's below the financial crisis and pandemic lows, and the economic perception is that things aren't good right now, and Democrats are way more negative on the economy Republicans under Biden were at this particular time, which shows you how the needle moves right,
and I point it is early going. You know, if you start looking at things, if you start looking at the economy, it really the needle hasn't moved that much. While some of the parts of the puzzle may have changed. You know, gas prices, for example, are are going up, right, but that's off set by other things that really, whether it was Biden or Trump. If you look at the Coracon economic numbers that you're talking about here, not a lot has changed like that. It's it's not a speedboat,
it's an ocean liner. The economy, that's right.
And you know, furthermore, we saw the FOMC characterize unemployment as little changed as well. You know, we're looking at an unemployment rate to remain at about four point four percent. Now, obviously that's a little bit higher than it was last year or the year before, but historically that's really good.
Scott, Yeah, one hundred percent.
And you know there's a I think a truth social effect as well. A single social media post from President Trump sent oil prices down like fifteen dollars a barrel. The S and P was more than, you know, one two percent in two minutes. So it's like a lot of the investors are reacting to what he's putting out on social and that's crazy because normally we don't pay attention to that.
Why is this different, Well, I think people do pay attention to it.
You know, Normally a lot of investors react to headlines and a lot of minutia, and sometimes they can be irrational in nature. And obviously this isn't ideal with what we're going through with Iran. You know, there's a lot of fears from not only the citizens of the United States, but investors in general. And it all comes down to the straight over moves. You know, what does it look like? We're at war with Iran? You know, we continue to
bomb over there. And basically what President Trump said is that, hey, we actually have some talks that are going on right now. So he said that he's going to suspend a lot of the bombing, particularly on the energy sites in Iran,
and he said, hey, we're talking to them now. Interestingly, Iran came back and their parliamentary president basically said, you know, that's fake news, using a term that Trump always uses, and said that you know, we're not having any talks, but I do suspect that talks have been going on.
Iran typically does. There's been examples of Iran delegates and United States delegates in the same hotel where they would have to change their schedules so it didn't appear that Iran was actually talking to the United States.
So they have a history of this.
So these five days are critical, and that's why we saw the market's rise significantly yesterday. If it starts to appear that we're going to have a resolution and the straight oh Hoordor moves starts to open up, you're going to see not only oil prices fall, which we saw yesterday they were somewhere in the low nineties, but they will continue to fall. And if you're out of the market at this point and we do come to an agreement with Iran, you're going to be left holding the back.
Yeah.
And as I mentioned before, you the data show's GDP growth you mentioned inflation waged unployment kind of identical to where we were last time before, it's pre Trump and now with Trump and the numbers haven't really changed, consumer sentiment keeps hitting new loads. Is that because we're bombarded by negative information all the time.
That's part of it. But I also think it's the potential fear of what can happen if we don't rep this thing up in Iran right, and if it continues to delay and delay, and remember Iran is very good and negotiations and delaying to try to get what they want. If that continues on and we do start to see oil prices creep back up again, if they start to get over one hundred and twenty five dollars per barrel,
that can have a long term impact on inflation. And certainly what we don't want to see is the FED have to reverse course and start to raise interest rates as opposed to cut interest rates. And if that happens, you'll see the markets start to tank. So I think a lot of what investors are looking at now are trying to play the odds to say, does it look like we're having success or does it look like this thing can spiral out of control?
Now?
The FED Chairman's pals credit when asked directly about the conflict in Iran and how does that have an effect on their decision making from a FED point of view. He basically brushed it off and said, you know, it's just too soon to tell.
On that.
He said, usually when we have these types of geopolitical conflicts, they are fairly short term. They're not overreacting to it. But they said that they are keeping an eye on it. Ooka for now, the FED isn't overly worried about what's going on in the Middle East.
I guess it's the oil pricing. Right, Oil is right around just below ninety eight dollars. It went from one thirteen to ninety eight right after he Trump posted that on true social but it's still historically elevated. And what point does that become a serious drag on the economy.
Yeah, So the problem from a data standpoint is if oil starts to go up higher than seventy five percent one hundred percent on a to your over year pricing, then it becomes a problem. And again that number somewhere around one hundred and twenty five dollars a barrel. I do think Donald Trump has a very close eye on that. He's already implementing some different things try to keep oil
prices down. You know, he wanted to open up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and release one hundred and seventy two million barrels.
That's nothing.
Yeah, well, and that's the point. You know, he's doing all these things. There's another one that you know they're looking at is, you know, trying to loosen the formula rules for gasoline. They're also talking about the potential of a fuel tax holiday worth about eighteen point four percent per gallon on gasoline and twenty four point four cents on diesel. Well, all these things, I think or just you know, just trying to shine up something that's not
very shiny to make people feel better about things. It all comes down to the straight, oh horror moves our NATO partners and also our allies in the Middle East. You're starting to see Saudi Arabia and the UAE start to consider joining the war as well. Now, yes, that will help us, but that also push fears into the minds of investors that this conflict is expanding, not contracting.
I got you, Andy Shaffer, simply money this morning on seven hundred WT. Sent you straight with the money. Taking the emotion out just getting to the fact, which I love very much. Some antlers are saying that this could be a repeat of nineteen seventy nine all over again, when the Shaw was run out of town, so to speak. And then of course we had the I told look put in place there, and we know the story from nineteen seventy nine, but we also had with that stagflation.
But that only happens with the sustained attack on the Middle East oil infrastructure. How realistic is that risk right now? And what specific triggers investors are looking for?
Yeah, so I think you know, people hear the terminology stagflation quite a bit. And essecially what stagflation is, it's slowing economic growth, high unemployment, and rising prices. So yes, if we start to see prices increase again, that's part of the fear of stagflation. But if you start to see high unemployment as well, that becomes a significant problem. And that's what we like largely saw on the Jimmy Carter years and in the early Ronald Regan years. Now
we just talked about the labor numbers. Unemployment is not high and it's not a threat to be high. So I don't think it's realistic at this point to worry about stagflation.
But I'm sure the feed has their eye on it.
But right now it's not a big threat.
Okay, So we're told tariffs add maybe a half point to inflation when I triggering a recession. But now we've got oil prices we mentioned on top of the existing tariffs, are with that combined, are we getting to a tipping point a little bit closer because of those two things and that leverage?
Certainly, And I think there is a timeframe on this, and I think the Trump administration is very aware of it, and I think that's why they've been ramping up a lot of the strikes that we've had over the last week or so. You know, they are threatening to target the energy infrastructure of Iran, and the leaders over there right now certainly don't want that to happen because that can cripple their economy overall. And so I think the
fact that we have dominated the airspace over there. We're even sent in Apache helicopters and some A ten warthogs, which usually is a signal that things are pretty secure from an air superiority standpoint. To really protect what has already been dominated that does signal that we are in position to really do what we want over there. And I do think that gives a Trump administration leverage and and you know, will allow the Iranians to come to
the table. And I think that's largely what we saw Sunday night and into Monday, and that's why the market's ran so very well yesterday.
Gotcha, Andy Shaeffer, you mentioned at the onset here the good news the Fed left the interest rates unchanged simply because they're they're they're in their target range and they're comfortable keep it on hold until we get inflation. And the other thing there is labor market trends. We're not quite sure because the government shutdowns are not getting data and that's really the problem.
Yeah, and I think, you know, the Fitty even talked about the impact of AI on the labor market as well.
You know.
Overall, I think the practical takeaway here is that there is a plan in the Middle East, and they also the FED also has a plan to potentially raise rates slightly higher. There are some economists that think it might be necessary, they're not there yet. I think there were only two members that thought that might be a good idea, but there is some margin pressure due to higher energy costs and so the market volatility. You know, investors are looking at as the FED tries to reprice all of
this based on what's going on over there. But as always FED chairman pals, you know, Fed Committee, they are taking in a conscious approach. I think as long as we get everything wrapped up in Iran and come to some sort of deal over the next couple of weeks, it's going to be back to business as usual. I think the markets will run and I do think that the AS will likely cut rates, probably in.
JAID, which is good news for home buyers home sellers. So let's get a little bit more juice going on here. That's that's wonderful. Despite all this negative news out there, the economy remains pretty steadfast. It takes a lot for the economy to spiral downward. And it may be, who knows, today, some God forbid, there might be some major groundshift that we don't see happening here, a major cataclysmic event, which is always a possibility, natural disaster, man made disaster, or
otherwise that'll bring the economy to a screeching all. Think of COVID or nine to eleven, for example. We just don't know what that's going to be. But you know, you can't really set your watch by it. Those things happen. But right now, that's the only thing that can trip us up, is what you're saying.
Yeah, And you have to remember furthermore that the markets one hundred percent of the time have met and exceeded their previous highs. We did go through COVID, well, the markets fell about fifty percent. We are significantly higher from a S and P five hundred standpoint than we were during COVID. When the tariffs were announced last April, the markets fell another thirty percent. So we're significantly higher than
we were last April. And so if you have other strategies in place, like having some decent amount of cash reserves to be able to not participate in the volatility, then you're gonna be fine. You just have to be smart about understanding how the volatility works and have a clear head and have a little bit of poise, and you'll be just fine.
All right.
He's Andy Shaeffer at all Worth Financial and they have a show called Simply Money. It airs at six o'clock every weeknight on fifty five karc and for more go there but all Worth Financial and Andy checks in every Tuesday and let us know how things are going with your money. He's pretty steady, Eddie, Andy, all the best. Have a good one, buddy.
All right, Scott talks.
Appreciate jss he don't don't freak out, don't flip out. Don't lose your bleep, baby, don't lose your bleep. We are counting down to opening day, today being Tuesday. My bad math tells me that it's two days away. You got tomorrow and then Thursday. We're live the Holy Grail Banks to kick off the twenty twenty six highly anticipated campaign here on the home of the Red seven hundred WWT, Cincinnati,