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The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Tue Dec 30, 2025
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a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
My name is Peter Jacobson.
I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Joining us today we have Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and the founder of the Gortney Institute.
And we're going to be talking today while Russ will lead us in action.
That's all right.
We're going to let you take the lead here fairly shortly anyway.
But I don't know if you all are familiar with these betting markets that have been there.
Really, Peter's the one who introduced me to them.
I don't think I was too up on them prior to him joining forces here at OU about five years ago.
And I guess it came up, I think, first of all, with the election cycle.
That would have been the Biden regime.
Yeah.
And Peter was like, well, the betting markets are have.
you know so-and-so in the lead or whatever and sometimes it'd be for other races but it was specifically the presidential race and oh and it was also who was going to be the candidate at the time too or something so anyway there are places like polymarket and some and some others that
take essentially bets and so they come up with a you know who's going to win the presidential election and then people actually put money on it and it works very similar to what a bookie does with sports betting but you see where people are actually putting their money and that helps guide knowledge about the topic because it means a little bit more in economics anyway when people are putting their money where their mouth is so these
markets seem to be getting larger and more popular.
And so, Peter thought it'd be a good topic for us to hit today.
What else do you got to say, Peter?
Yeah, so specifically what brought this up is CNN has announced that it's going to be partnering with Callsheet to integrate prediction markets or betting markets into their new cycle.
And I think I want to talk about to what extent this could be a good thing or a bad thing or both.
I think it's going to be mostly a good thing, but there are some possible downsides that I think we could address.
So let's talk about the upside.
CNN is not known for being an unbiased source.
Uh, any listener knows that CNN is kind of a left-leaning news organization, at least by reputation, as most are except for Fox, which has the opposite reputation.
But CNN particularly egregious from 2016 to 2020 in terms of like apparent bias.
And so,
This is a problem whenever you have people essentially making the news is you have an attempt to try to guide the news to be something that would be beneficial for the people on your side of the political aisle.
So you report political news in such a way that benefits your side of the political aisle.
And there's an obvious incentive to do that, both on the part of the owners of the company and so far as their interest in politics, the top level management, and so far as they can escape owner control or even just the anchor, so the day-to-day basis.
And so
For that reason, mainstream news is not really well regarded compared to like the Walter Cronkite era of news, right?
Journalist is what we used to call instead of opinion makers.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
The profession of journalist has gone really far down in the public opinion, I'd say over the last 20 years.
Probably a good way to explain this.
Maybe even once a heroic profession by popular opinion is now considered like, you know, it's like next to tobacco executive, right?
And so adding prediction markets is valuable because one good thing about prediction markets is money doesn't care about your opinion very much.
And so if CNN decides that they want to
try to, I blank you on the exact word, try to depress the listeners.
There's a more technical term.
The Republican listeners are new, so that way, dishearten them.
Oh, discourage.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Try to get the other side discouraged.
They could maybe run biased, like oversampled.
polls on the presidential election and then do a bunch of reporting on how, you know, the Republican candidate has historic low numbers.
And that can make a headline, but it can't make it true, right?
If it's oversampled, if the polls oversampled, then the reality is that's not what the numbers are.
So the prediction market is valuable because anybody who has enough intelligence to figure this out
can then bet against essentially CNN's claim there.
And when they bet against CNN's claim, that's reflected in the value of the prediction market.
So if CNN is saying that Donald Trump has a 40% chance of winning according to our polls, and the prediction market says Donald Trump has a 55% chance of winning, I'm going to bet on the money rather than the bias.
Because again, doesn't matter what your political opinion is, you should not be, and some people still do, but you shouldn't be betting according to who you want to win.
Betting is about who you think is going to win, right?
Yeah.
And so there's a tax on ideological people who are biased in prediction markets.
There's no such tax on journalist, at least not obviously.
In fact, there might be premium.
They might get a benefit for that in the industry, it kind of seems like.
Yeah.
And so insofar as CNN is incorporating prediction markets, I actually could see this as a benefit because I think it's going to squeeze some of the bias out of their organization because bias that ignores reality can't exist in markets.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I didn't even think about it until you just said it, that by using it, you're saying they're going to not say, according to a recent CNN poll, they'll actually use the Kalshi data.
Yes.
Yeah, that's the claim.
That does add a lot more... They're going to start integrating... ...massity and validity to their claims that they can say, I'm reporting unbiased data.
Yeah, in so much as the Kalshee platform is unbiased and untainted, so that would be the next area where hopefully the owners of these places can prove through transparency and other means that it's not being corrupted.
Because to me, as a naive computer guy, oh, this says 40%.
Let's just make it 45.
I think that one, you know, to me, it's just editing with my word processor, but hopefully they have algorithms and security to not have that boat swayed.
But that's certainly an issue, isn't it?
Or do you know how these betting platforms
kind of protect their security that, you know, a George Soros or somebody else can't come in and put large wagers down to sway those percentages, because that's really moved the percentages, correct?
It's dollars bet.
I mean, I think it's possible that like a large donor could come in and try to sway the percentages, but when they do that, they lose money, right?
And, you know, what are your two options?
George Soros can call up CNN.
He probably doesn't have to offer them that much money to convince
them to
do something, or he could lose millions of dollars doing the same thing.
And by the way, maybe to no effect, right?
Because if, as far as he's manipulating that prediction market, he's still actually going to lose, that he's going to change the probability to seem like his side's going to win.
Right.
But if he has to change... But that uses more people to bet more against that.
Yeah, and if he
hasn't changed the fundamentals,
then... And that's awesome
that
there is kind of a self-correcting mechanism, the invisible hand there of if somebody is swaying at the direction that the general public doesn't think it's going, they haven't sent him to bet more against it and offset some of that.
Yeah, and to give a...
concrete example of this happening a long time ago and listen we might have talked about this on the podcast before because it's one of my favorite topics but kind of the original financial bets economics I mean there have been lots of best throughout history but in terms of like news and politics was the Julian Simon bet so Julian and Simon Paul are like two academics they have different views about what was going to happen to world resources
Paul Ehrlich was convinced overpopulation was going to cause us to run out of resources.
Julian Simon was convinced that human creativity would kind of outrun population growth and allow us to have actually more access to resources.
So they put money on it.
Julian Simon said, OK, one of the most unreproducible objects we have on Earth is metal, right?
Like we can't create metal.
You can't create iron.
It's just in the ground or copper or something like
And so if we're really running out of these things, they should become more expensive to consumers over time, right?
That's what happens when we run out of something.
It's more difficult to acquire, aka more difficult to buy.
And so Ehrlich and Simon over 10 years had a bet about what would happen to the price of a bunch of different metals.
And Simon won.
And Simon's argument was like, I couldn't make the media believe me like, you know,
Paul Ehrlich's going on, Johnny Carson, you know, he's on the front page of all these things.
The news won't even let one of my, you know, columns into the newspaper.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to instead of just talk, I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, right?
If someone's not willing to bet against me, talk is cheap, right?
And so I think integrating this into news has a lot of potential benefits.
because there's a lot of cheap talk out of journalists, right?
Like it's very low cost for someone who's a journalist to claim, you know, I've never seen this level of excitement on from the progressives before.
Like a phrase like that, it's so like immeasurable, unfalsifiable.
There's no.
cost to a person when they make that sort of comments.
But if we could say, OK, well, let's hit a benchmark for what energy looks like.
Maybe it's voter turnout.
And let's bet on that instead of just making up that energy is really high right
So really powerful tool, I think, for cutting through basically nonsense.
Since we talked about Soros, I think of bring up his famous bet.
It was kind of like a bet in a sense, although I think he had it pretty well figured out.
So he broke the Bank of England.
So how Soros made his fortune, I don't know, he might have had other means, well, he must have had other means, so other businesses and other things.
But the famous one in economics was that the Bank of England had a fixed exchange rate for the pound, the British pound.
And the problem with the fixed exchange rate is that if you go to
you can always sell more of your currency to flood the market because you can print it, right?
So you can manipulate it one direction, but the other direction you can't, you only have a certain reserves of let's say US dollars in the Bank of England.
And so if they need to fix the exchange rate and it's falling, they need to sell dollars and buy back pounds.
Well, they eventually will run out of dollars.
And so the Soros bet was he thought they were at a critical point and he just started, he kept buying dollars.
and selling pounds.
And so the Bank of England had to do that and then eventually broke the bank, meaning they ran out of dollars and they could no longer support that fixed exchange rate.
So then once it plummeted, he's holding all of that money to buy him back and make a fortune.
Breaking the bank.
That was essentially a bet because presumably he didn't exactly know, although maybe there was.
data on the amount of dollars so anyway not to get sidetracked too much but the the vetting stuff is interesting and like you said kind of calls people out to be accountable for not just cheap talk but actually putting their money where their mouth is but CNN doing that is impressive
Now, another one of these betting places, I believe, was starting to enter sports betting.
And so most of these betting markets, as I understood it, I just saw a good morning, the good morning show, Sunday morning, they were interviewing the owners of this betting market and talking about it.
And they were starting to be entering sports betting, which then, of course, DraftKings and all these other ones have to be sanctioned from state to state.
Whereas currently,
they're not sanctioned.
And so, you know, again, we've had a recent problems with Chauncey Billups and some NBA stars that were tanking some scores.
And so, you know, what do you think are the concerns there?
I think
This might be a good spot for our cliffhanger and come back and think, you know, what are ways that we can try to keep people out of swaying it more so?
And I think one of those answers might be with limits, but let's kind of hit that topic and others when we get back.
I'll be back in just a
bit.
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Okay, so we're back and continuing on with maybe ways that we can be more comforted with some of these betting markets.
I know that there's algorithms that look for patterns and possibly people who are close to the network of
of people that might be in in power to sway things like NBA players.
That was somehow detected.
I think that was the FBI working on that one, if I remember right.
But the interview from the Sunday morning group, they also said they have algorithms to try to detect people doing that.
And I believe they also had dollar limits.
So it'd be difficult to sway something if the bets are limited to
X amount.
And if there's, you know, just to make up a number, $100,000 worth of bets and the bets are limited to 500, it'd be more difficult to do that or, you know, limited to 200.
So I don't know what you got thoughts on that one.
Yeah, I think you bring up a good point about the sort of fine line between prediction markets and gambling.
Yeah.
And here's how I would think about the line, because I think there is a line.
And two minutes ago, I didn't, as I was like sitting here and talking, I was thinking, so I think the most characteristic
part of a of gambling is that there's a house and that the house always wins, right?
And so in so far as prediction markets have like the house always wins sort of mentality, which to some extent they do.
I mean, these companies do make a cut of everything.
It is a little bit of gambling, right?
Whereas by the way, that that's not true necessarily the stock market, right?
There's no obvious like house for the stock market, like you can win and win and win and win.
now I do think now the brokers are kind of I do think if you're if you're doing penny stocks or you're
day trading or basically gambling.
So it's a little more complicated.
But if you're doing something that scientifically generates constant, basically, to some extent, gambling is in the eye of the holder.
If you have actual information that you know is going to come in, that's not incorporated in the price today, that will be incorporated in the price tomorrow, you're not gambling.
By the way, that also there's legality issues there on whether or not your information qualifies as insider information or not.
But it's kind of beside the point.
My point is just this.
Oh, these are pretty close.
What is the difference between a political prediction market, an individual stock market, and a sports betting market?
It's like, there may be a degree, but not kinds, right?
These are like very similar ventures.
And so the upside of betting markets is that they do kind of economize and give information out.
And so this was the positive that we were talking about.
But as you're pointing out, there is
a negative side of things, which is the influence.
And by the way, this is why, and actually the basketball scandal is the perfect example of the point shaving, is the reason that I tell my students you should never gamble on sports.
And it's not because like you aren't smart.
It's because there's information that you don't have that other people do have.
And maybe they have it legitimately and maybe they have it illegitimately according to their law.
It actually kind of doesn't matter if they don't get caught, right?
But you don't know if a person's point shaving
Other people do know that.
You don't know if a person's injury is as serious as the team is reported.
But there are people who are closer to the team, or maybe journalists who are closer to the team, who do know that, right?
And there are ways that people get that information out.
And actually, I have no problem with speculation.
And so none of this bothers me.
But
you got to recognize where you are in the market.
And like you sitting on your couch knowing basketball, like you're not going to beat the sports statisticians out there.
You're not going to beat the people who have team information, whether they should or shouldn't have that information.
That's why you never reduce sports spending.
It's also, as Russ has pointed out on many podcasts, why we don't trade individual stocks.
Same reason.
Or to the extent at which we do, we keep it a small part of the portfolio.
And so this ability to sway these prediction markets is kind of a problem.
And actually, I was thinking of an example.
They have really silly prediction markets out there.
I'll give two examples.
One, I'm going to keep more vague because it's not appropriate for the podcast.
But earlier in the year, there was a certain kind of object being thrown on the court in WNBA games.
Like this was a big news story.
It happened week after week.
And there was a prediction market for is it going to happen this week?
And I thought to myself, like,
it would be
very easy for a guy who has like zero net worth to like tell one of his friends like, hey,
put you know forty thousand dollars on yes and then he does this thing maybe gets arrested even but like it's if if the chance is fifty fifty he's making forty thousand bucks off of it he splits it with his friend twenty thousand dollars to go to jail that's a pretty good deal for most people
and so it's like that's a place where like even though
public has an ability.
Another example of this was there was a bet on whether Vladimir Zelensky would wear a suit before the end of the year.
This was like a betting market.
It's like,
oh, he's always in a T shirt.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Trump made a big deal out of this.
And so, but why couldn't Zelensky go and tell a bunch of like Ukrainian operatives?
I
could go say, go bet.
Yes, I'll do it tomorrow.
And we're going to make a bunch of money for Ukraine.
And like, what's Pauli market going to do?
Like tell the government of Ukraine to give the money back like they don't have that jurisdiction.
Right.
And so.
uh you know betting markets have the upside of sharing the information cutting through the nonsense but they can also be subject to certain manipulations and like i do wonder or in worry about you know what happens when we talk about like presidential elections of like you've got a primary as there's a frontrunner
And maybe they have a pretty significant, like, 40% chance of winning.
What happens when, like, people try to do violent things in order to stop somebody from winning
and when you
make money, right?
And large organizations could do this.
So, Russ, I think you're right.
I think these betting companies, if they are smart, not just if they're moral, but if they're smart too, they will try to impose limits to prevent this sort of thing.
Because ultimately, the first time that we discover somebody did something crazy to
win a bet on some betting market is when the betting markets get shut down or like totally state controlled, right?
So betting markets have their upsides, they have downsides.
on that still think prediction markets are better than journalists.
And so I'm happy with the CNN decision.
Yeah.
But I don't really apart from like, I think in 2016, I made one political bet.
I don't participate in prediction markets because like, I don't have like the people who win in prediction markets are either lucky or have insider information.
I'm not interested in trying to be lucky.
And I don't have insider information,
going to be an observer.
I'm going to free ride off of the information I get from these prediction markets.
Yeah.
And I think that's a benefit to me, but it will come at the
cost of, you know, some people in some situations for sure.
Well, and I learned before, even when I thought I had inside information, not in a real illegal way.
I lost money anyway, but it's like, there's still risk involved.
Maybe it's a little bit lower if you think you have inside information, but sometimes it might not be as reliable as some people think.
And
let me clarify too for the listener, since I've been using the term a lot and not been clear about it.
Insider information I'm kind of using informally if you have actual company or bet insider information It's illegal to profit off of that But but loosely when I say insider information is like imagine you like created a model that helped you predict things like scientifically That's allowable in both the stock market and sports betting markets and there are people who do
that they do it and what I'm saying is
Listeners 90% of you are not doing that I'm not capable of doing that Maybe some of you at home are capable of doing that but and I'm not even trying to right and so it's kind of silly for me to be like well
Well, I think the chief's surrounded right now.
It's like, yeah, but what do I know?
I don't know anything about sports, right?
I sit on the couch and I watch and I'm surprised every week.
I shouldn't try to pretend like I know more than
I know.
Well, my friend who I won't name is a pretty smart statistician and he was basically trying to
figure out if the computer could figure out a little bit extra information that the market doesn't have.
So to back up a little bit what Peter and I have really been discussing is that the knowledge, all of the knowledge about the, whether it's the stock or the bet is embodied in the price.
So the stock price reflects the value of the company given all the current knowledge that's out there.
So this is the rational expectations hypothesis for stocks that embodies it.
So the question is,
Do you really have information that is above what general knowledge would be?
And so Hayek famously said there's a knowledge problem that no single mind can have all of the knowledge necessary to do that.
And so some of the simple mundane knowledge, tacit knowledge that is out there doesn't get public.
And so maybe there is a way to have a true edge and not just
face, you know, true 50-50 odds
that
you actually can enhance beyond what either the betting market is saying or what the stock market price is or, you know, all these things we've been talking about.
And so one of the things I wanted to get into was AI predictions.
So I think Hayek would be challenged to some degree that now we live in a world where, yes, a single human mind wouldn't be able to have all the information, but can an AI
mind processing.
I still believe Hyax thesis is correct, but it's diminished a bit that AI is going to allow people to have more knowledge.
But if everybody has access to the same AI, then there's no edge anymore.
And so we're right back to where we started at the current price of the current betting markets have it.
So I don't know, do you got any additional thoughts on AI as it relates to this topic?
Yeah, I think insofar as AI is able to do that, which it's not obvious to me that it is.
In fact, I think what you just said makes me think that AI is not going to add much, which is that I actually think markets are probably more effective at capturing information than AI.
I think AI tells people the answers that they want.
think markets tell people the answers that are.
And so what I mean by that is
AI is kind of infamous right now for hallucinating citations.
so if you say, hey, Mises talked about tariffs in this book, tell me where in the book it was.
Even if you're wrong about your premise, it will give you a chapter.
It'll either make up a chapter
or it'll
say it's in a chapter.
And I've done this before.
Even if he's never talked about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's happened.
I've done this before.
I've said, hey,
I think this quote that goes something like this is in this book.
Tell me where it is.
And it told me something.
I'm like, that's I responded.
That's not a chapter in the book.
And it's like, oh, it's actually a heading under this chapter.
And I look, I read the whole chapter.
It's like, it's not in there either.
And why do prediction markets do it?
Well, because prediction market or sorry, not prediction markets.
Why do why does AI do it?
AI is designed to get people to ask questions and to provide answers.
It survives off positive feedback.
Nobody ever gives positive feedback when an AI says, I don't know.
And so it's evolved I don't know out of its vocabulary and replaced it with making things up in hopes that it's getting it right because you know if you make things up let's say you get it right 10% of the time you're getting positive feedback once if you say I don't know 10 times you never get positive feedback so they've it's evolved an inability to admit ignorance
but it also claims from the get-go if I remember correctly that well I didn't tell us it was gonna lie but it now that's it learns now from you correcting it that it won't make that mistake again yeah
I think that it won't make another
price.
What has to be solved is the systematic bias towards answering when there's no answer, right?
And I think that'll be fixed sometime, but my point is just this.
The way that the AI is evolving is not towards truth.
We're trying to make it hit truth, but we're just changing the parameters to approximate truth, right?
Markets are actually moving towards truth,
right?
It's so great to start back to our CNN and journalists.
They're just telling us what we want to hear too, right?
Whatever their basis.
That's a
great, maybe AI is just like a slightly better CNN.
If
you told AI to be unbiased, you actually might be able to succeed at getting less bias out of it.
But
the end of the day, enough positive feedback from listeners, and it's probably going to move in the direction of the listeners, just like it does for the comments that
it makes.
If they get enough people accepting the lie,
then that would build itself the wrong direction as well.
We think about our students, of course, at the university, who are the naive at this point in their career, writing about economics or whatever on some paper.
And so they go to AI and they're like, oh, it says this chapter and this topic.
OK, I'll put it in the paper.
So they accept what the AI said.
So AI gets kind of an affirmation of, oh, I did good there.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great point.
And one last thing I wanted to say down.
So I think we've talked about positive.
Positives is that we share information.
There's also negatives, which is A, the attempt to manipulate.
But also, there's two sides to that.
One is, like, you don't like that prediction markets are inaccurate because people are manipulating them.
But you also don't like that people are going out into the real world and trying to change the world to make money on the prediction market.
Like, that's a scary possibility, too.
But I do want to defend prediction markets on one charge that I've seen.
So I saw the CNN-Calci post on Twitter, and right underneath of it, someone posted a screenshot of the betting odds for the New York City mayor race.
And it had Cuomo at 46% and Mondami at 40%.
It's like, oh, great.
I'm so excited for this being incorporated in CNN.
All right.
Well, this has been a production of the Gordon Institute here at Ottawa University.
I hope you liked the listen.
And please pass this along to friends and family that might like to listen to.
So other than that, be fruitful and multiply.
Thanks.
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And one of the universal constants is the Hames Homes people, beautiful, affordable and safe.
homes for families they've been doing it for well over half a century multi-generationally and so we're delighted to have back on our show today a greatly named Curtis Haymes who has the name of his
Outstanding grandfather, the founder co-founder with Norma of Hames Homes and part of this multi-generational management team that pilots Grandview and Summit View and Beautiful Sea Rapids in your listing, of course.
On America's original blowtorch, the original 50,000 clear channel wattage station, of which there is no other in the hemisphere at 1540 KXEL, plus that FM 100.5, which not only dominates eastern Iowa Waterloo, see to fall, see rapids, Iowa City, Dubuque, Quad Cities,
That's all, but it carams into 17 states and four Canadian provinces.
Curtis, we are so glad to have you back today.
This is the time to make the big move in 2026 and interest rates are going down.
GDP is up.
It looks like we're going to be having a nice tailwind for a great economic 2026.
This is the time to check out of Hames Homes, isn't it?
Absolutely.
We've never been more ready.
Our inventory is high.
And I think getting a route in front of that tailwind is a great, great, great idea.
A wonderful, wonderful time to be a buyer.
It is.
And you know, Curtis, I try to keep
in shape a little bit during the winter season and exercise when I can.
And you know, it's important with these New Year's resolutions.
I love the fact you guys are always interested in the person, not the checkbook, but the person.
You do so many things to help your residents.
your owners have healthier, happier, and live more comfortably in a Homes in the Hames community.
And when I think about what you guys have going on, whether someone, they're this year with a Hames home in your, some of your grand-view neighbors, whether their goal is to walk more or get fresh air every day,
or find activities that the whole family, including the family pets, can enjoy.
Your community there, Curtis, offers plenty of reasons to get moving.
You guys have got walking trails, open green spaces, playgrounds,
Frisbee golf courses, dog parks in your communities like Grandview and Summit View.
And shoot, you can turn exercise into everyday living out there at a Hames Homes.
Beautiful park style settings really make it easier to step outside and stay active.
Absolutely.
What a great time of year to take advantage of our great interest rates and our very high inventory that we're ready.
and get closed and settled and be ready to take advantage of all that green space here at the Hames communities come spring.
We are the place to help someone take their New Year's resolutions and kick them into high gear.
We're glad to help however we can.
We love taking good care of these individuals who are homeowners here in our communities and we want to take good care of everyone and that's very well said.
We don't have, you're not a name or a number, we're a family business.
And we want to take care of everybody as an individual.
You guys do it so well.
You're award-winning.
And obviously, you guys help folks with the organizational standpoint.
Your sites are designed with room for garage or shed.
And all homes include one or both.
That gives everybody built-in options for storage and organizing that.
That's absolutely key.
And if you need even more room, there's open storage available at reasonable prices.
But, you know,
Curtis, we've talked about renting in the past.
The nice thing about having your own four walls of your own home complete with your excellent insulation and your thoughtful construction, you guys are low on noise and really nice on getting restful sleep there in those quiet neighborhoods.
Absolutely.
That's a great point.
And what the phrasing we like to use is that we're a planned community.
What we want is good neighbors and we have an expectation
of a background check before people move in and then we have some very common sense standards that we want our homeowners to follow and to be good neighbors.
So a clean, safe, quiet community for residents of all ages is what we're excited and proud to have.
Indeed you've got those noise guidelines very reasonable and very helpful for everybody And I just think you guys you're the homes people and you're the people people it started with Curt Norma But you know you guys have always been known for your safe welcoming atmosphere the neighbors there are friendly I've been through your neighborhoods there.
It's an idyllic set of communities You're more than a number
It is a community basis there and it's locally owned and managed by you folks.
So you guys really have that focus on that quiet, very clean neighborhoods.
And you know what?
People are proud to live there and they should be, Curtis.
I appreciate that.
It goes back to, well, you mentioned Kurt and he's my grandfather.
He had a lot of different catchphrases, but one that sticks with me quite a bit is that it's a people business.
and we're doing business person to person.
This is not a corporation.
We're not a nameless, faceless entity.
It's a family business, and we want families to come and stay with us.
He was a giant of a man in so many ways.
My father and mother adored him going back to 1970.
And you know, Kurt was one of my greatest encouragers to someday run for public office.
And I will never forget his great encouragement.
And you know, guys, it still exists today.
If you need help, there's always someone there.
It could be Barbara, it could be Troy, it could be
Kurt could be Clint.
They're available to answer your questions or help point you toward trusted local vendors.
So, Curtis, what's the best way to drive by and get an appointment and see the beautiful homes?
What's the best way to use that legacy Marion phone number?
What's the best way to search you guys online?
There's a treasure trove of
information and ways to get in touch with making it a great and exciting 2026.
We
love seeing people.
We have a lot of information on our Facebook page.
It's just titled Hames Homes.
Our website, HamesHomes.com.
Please call us.
I love that legacy phone number that we talk about every time.
319-377-4863.
But our favorite is always in person.
Please call and set an appointment.
Clinton or I would love to love to visit with anyone.
who has questions at any phase in the process.
If people are early on, we like to call that phase getting educated.
And if you don't see something on our web, or a Google search is making your eyes cross, we'd love, love having people call in or visit, or just come in and see us in person.
Beautifully said, Curtis.
You know, I always get wistful and nostalgic.
when I see that beautiful legacy number because that number is almost identical except for that very last digit to my dad mom's dental practice of which your family were patients.
And we always treasure that loyalty and friendship.
And I'm so glad you've got that number because that's still now a number that mom has very close to your legacy number.
And it is great that some traditions perdure Curtis.
I agree.
That's wonderful.
I love hearing that story.
Thank you.
Thank you for sharing, John.
Well, guys, God bless the Hames family and do yourselves a favor.
Get that family into a beautiful, safe, affordable home, close to retail, close to the airport, close to healthcare, in beautiful Southwest Sea Rapids.
Hames, the Homes people.
Always glad to have them on here at the mid break of our Jacobson report here on the mighty blowtorch KXEL and Curtis, go Hawks.
They take that bowl game.
Let's beat the Vandy Dandies.
One more win in 2025.
Let's go.
Go Hawks.
And that puts Kirk Ferrantz over the 600 mark for percentage of wins and qualifies him for the Hall of Fame.
Should he ever retire?
So I want to win this one big time here, Curtis.
I love it.
Should he ever retire?
I love that phrasing.
Absolutely.
Hey, Curtis, I'm 65, and I've only had two Hawkeye football head coaches since high school.
Fry and Ferris, the FNF boys.
That is tradition.
I love it.
Let's go
Hawks.
Go Hawks, and we'll be back in just a moment.
Thanks again, Tip of the Fedora to Curtis Haymes.
Catch you on the other side of the New Year.
Happy New Year, Curtis.
Happy New Year.
Bye-bye.
Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.
Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.
This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
My name is Peter Jacobson.
I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Joining us today we have Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and also the founder of the Gortney Institute and Dr. Justin Clark, the Menard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.
All right, so we thought we'd talk about the morality of maybe war but also bombing people.
So it's been in the news lately that
We have taken out some Venezuelan ships that we were told are carrying drugs and Heading their way to the United States.
So presumably the US has operatives and information on the drug trafficking and other things that might be going on in the seas heading towards Florida or wherever it's heading towards our border and so
there was an incident where presumably the boat was bombed and there was a couple people that survived it somehow and were adrift at sea and the reports are that they were told to kill the remaining two and I don't know if that was direct or not but this is kind of the news out there so
um you know we have our resident philosopher here on the morality we've done some book clubs on just war like when is war just you know when is it okay to engage in how and and so there's people that are claiming you know this is a murder or a war crime or uh whatever so it's kind of rules of engagement and then there's been some other things with the uh trump administration um
kind of setting the stage so that we might have a little bit more of a avenue to pursue threats with Venezuela to open the door.
But I kind of, at least for starters, wanted to get on on this path of, you know, is it moral for us, Dr. Clark, to
retaliate if we think there's been a very good evidence of a high weight to America of drugs that are ultimately leading to the drug crisis and killing of Americans.
Does that give us the right to do that if we think that harm is coming our way?
Take it away, Dr. Philosophy
Clark.
So I think there's two questions there.
The first might be something like, well, what does just war theory say about this?
And the second would be, regardless of just war theory, what's the right answer in this case?
And I'm not sure that I know the answer to either of those questions.
think one of the things to think about with just war theory is that just war theory was developed largely by I think historically by Catholic Catholic theology and it was an attempt to try to bring some kind of order to war to make war less
destructive and so things like wars are can only be just if they're fought defensively that is you know you're not allowed to throw the first stone as it were and then there's prohibitions against intentionally killing
Innocence in battle, right?
And then this gets developed into like, well, what do we do with people who are captured in battle?
When are we required to capture people in battle rather than kill them if they've surrendered to that kind of thing?
And so you could see how a framework that's developed like that would have something to say about a case where...
you take a foreign combatant surrenders on the battlefield, what we have to do with them, right?
But I think there are two problems with applying that to the Venezuela case, which is, again, that there was a boat that was allegedly smuggling drugs.
And the way that that was handled, it was that there was a strike that killed, I guess,
some people on the boat and destroy the boat and then a second strike to kill the remaining survivors.
And that apparently this was intentional.
And the thing is like to make this, it's going to be a stretch to apply just war theory to this no matter what because they aren't regular combatants, right?
And I kind of see this as maybe the failure of just war theory as a whole to cope with warfare in general post-World War I.
In World War I, you have sides lining up against each other in trenches, and the innocents are kind of separated from the battlefield, right?
But beginning in World War II, we have the large-scale bombing of industrial munitions manufacturing.
We have the firebombing of Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which are war crimes, according to...
to just war theory.
So both sides of the war, the victors and the losers, running afoul of just war theory.
And then, I mean, that's even easy compared to warfare in the 21st century, where we are declaring war against these like Al Qaeda or whatever, these cells, which are embedded within a population.
So it seems like,
Just War Theory only works if you're fighting other people that also agree to abide by Just War Theory.
I heard somebody who described getting beat up in eighth grade and they said, I took a lot of karate classes, but it turns out karate only works if you're fighting other people that also only agree to use karate, right?
And I think something similar to that with Just War Theory, where, I mean, if we're, in the rise of the 20th century, we have total war, right?
Which is,
entire populations mobilized against each other.
There's a line in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where they're having a knife fight to see who rules the gang.
And Butch, I think it's Butch, he kicks the big guy in the balls, you know, and he goes, that's against the rules.
And it's rules.
There's no rules in a knife fight.
And I think something similar applies to war.
If we're really serious about war being total war, it's tough to come up with rules that both sides agree to.
As Hobb said, in war, the two virtues are aggression and lying, force and fraud.
So that's my just war answer.
So I don't know, maybe we could stop there and say,
I don't know what you guys think about that.
The applicability of just war theory to this case, I'm just not sure, even if we could figure out how to make just war theory apply, whether that would tell us what the right thing to do in this case is.
Yeah, so I guess there's a
I was just trying to think of it if it matters that they were in international waters compared to let's say a domestic attack of some sort or domestic drug dealers for that matter and the you know the force that we think we can use morally against them like is there a difference there again presumably the CIA or whatever other organization has awesome intel that this was real but
You know, there's been some questionable things.
If there were smuggling drugs into the U.S., it might have been the CIA on the boat.
Hold on, I'm getting drone-striked right now.
Yeah, I was going
to say.
Yeah, I don't know.
So my take on this is, I do think the context of Just War Theory is warfare, and I think it's strictly warfare.
And so I don't think that we can have a comparable thing here because even if you sort of like talk about cartels, well cartels just aren't nations right at the end of the day.
And so the way that you handle criminals maybe also follows rules but even like in a you know traditional Christian background it wouldn't be equivalent to just war theory I don't think.
You could draw principles, probably, so I'm not opposed to that idea.
The other thing, and kind of related to what Justin was saying, maybe a little different, is I don't know that I agree from a Christian perspective that, like, just war theory only applies if someone else is also ascribing to just war theory.
I think part of just war theory is that, like, you actually are beholden to follow the limitations, even if your opponent doesn't, which maybe puts you in a bad position.
Or
you
might get killed.
Yeah.
But I think, like,
in general, like that's what moral rule does, is it constrains you in a way that you might not like.
But I will say the other kind of contextual thing about just war theory is that just war theory began to be theorized when Christians began to take over governments, right?
And so like the real context of developing just war theory is now that Constantine, who is a Christian, controls an empire.
What sort of moral rules and laws does he follow?
And I know a lot of our presidents call themselves Christian, but at the end of the day, we are not a
Christian controlled country politically.
Some people want us to be, that's a totally different question.
Yeah, but at the end of the day, we have a secular government right now.
Maybe we weren't always somewhat argued that we didn't always, but we do now.
And so I agree with Justin in a sense of saying like, should we follow just war theory?
It's like, well, you'd have to have steps A through Y before you got there.
And just war theory would be step Z. And so why are we talking about Z at all?
My concern with the whole I'm opposed to the drone striking thing and I am not opposed to being careful about like who's coming into our country and all this stuff and so I understand like the the needs of preventing like unrestricted access of drugs and violent gangs into our country I am totally on board with that but I've never liked drone strikes for the sole fact that like who are these people being drone strikes?
Are they American citizens?
Of course, our government says no, but, you know, our government could say no to any person they drone strike, right?
It's only when whistleblowers figure out the U.S.
government did something wrong that we would ever hear about it.
And so, you know, every drone strike is against a terrorist until some whistleblower group finds out that it was actually like a U.N.
diplomat that we blew up in Afghanistan at one time, right?
Or actually no, it was a hospital we blew up instead.
So,
I don't like the idea that the government can just decide, here's a boat of people, I'm going to blow them up.
I think that we are perfectly within our capability to intercept these boats.
If we're not, then we should divest from our equipment and add staff members who can go out in their own boats, right?
Seems like it should be cheaper to drive a boat than it should be to launch a missile out of the sky.
Could be wrong.
And so intercepts these people.
deal with them via courts.
Some people will say, well, they're not citizens, so they don't have a right to jury.
I don't want to argue about the judicial question, because there is a judicial question there.
But as a matter of fact, I would still like to deal with those people in court, because we just don't know who citizens are and aren't when the government's deciding to make the calls.
The government will always buy.
So as they weren't a citizen, we don't have to give them rights.
And we would never know, right?
This is just a smoldering pile of ash in the middle of the ocean.
How will we ever find out?
So I don't like the drone strikes.
I think, by the way, they're mostly distractions.
I think the Trump administration has perfected the art of doing edgy things to distract from failure.
I think the Trump administration has had a stagnant two or three months.
I don't think they've done anything of note.
A lot of their big projects they started have failed.
And so now Trump is coming out and saying naughty words.
And Pete Hagseth is tweeting like, you know, he, I can't remember what the meme tweet he put out was about this.
It was like some cartoon character blowing up a boat
or something.
Franklin.
Yeah.
Right.
It was Franklin the turtle blowing up a boat.
It's like, isn't this funny?
And it's like, dude, you don't get paid to post memes, or at least I don't think you do.
Why don't you actually just do your job?
And that's how I feel about the Trump administration general right now is stop posting, start doing.
And I don't think doing is just blowing up boats, right?
Like you promised change, change is not just blowing up a random narco boat in the water.
Like what impact is that gonna make?
They're gonna say, oh, it's lives, but you need systematic changes.
Not like we blew up a boat one time, aren't we good?
So,
yeah.
So a couple of things to add that when Justin was talking came to mind, I believe
administration, I don't know if I necessarily want to say Trump or Hex either whatever, but said that Maduro is essentially the leader of this drug cartel, which might change a little bit putting it more into the war context.
Again, I don't know how much goes on of nefarious activity that Maduro is a part of since he basically took over the country by force as well and got rid of democracy.
So there you've got the leader of the country that might be on the inside of this
action going or at least benefiting in some in some case if he gets you know half of the drug revenue or whatever because the country is kind of hurting in terms of tax revenue since the whole economy is kind of imploded.
So that was one thing we've recently taken steps to close the airspace over Venezuela which is usually a move when we're getting closer to you know some sort of conflicts anyway.
I don't know if I want to put the war word on there or not.
And then with the bombing, I mean, is it, we can disagree with it, but it also, if drug trafficking's been going on for the last 40, 50 years and we've done interceptions of boats and we're still having a heavier flow coming, was this just kind of a final straw to say, I'm gonna really send a message to these guys, you're gonna die if these boats continue to come.
And so I guess what I'm saying is, is it more of a way to send a message and actually get some real action and some real change that maybe hasn't happened for a long time with other methods like intercepting the boat and giving them some sort of trial or whatever.
And I'm just throwing that out there to be devil's advocate.
If that's the case, that might change a little bit on the approach we take to try to stifle the trafficking.
I don't know.
I think that, for me, the outrage around it seems totally fabricated, personally, and I'll tell you why.
It's like when there was a huge outrage against George W. Bush.
for initiating wars of regime change in the Middle East.
And then Barack Obama was elected on an anti-war platform.
And when Obama was elected, he stopped doing as many boots on the ground.
operations and switched to a drone program.
The Obama administration launched the drone strike program in the United States.
And it's a way of doing foreign policy where you put less American lives on the line, right?
And that's a trade-off.
In fact, in the Obama administration, there were 10 times more drone strikes than in the Bush administration.
And during the Obama administration, we drone-striked American citizens.
One of whom was the son of an Al Qaeda operative.
The Al Qaeda operative wasn't even there, but we drone-striked his son.
And when I asked about it, Robert Gates, Obama's press secretary at the time said, well, I would say he should have had a better dad, which is a really terrible thing to say.
The kid himself wasn't guilty of anything, right?
We not only did that, we also drone-striked a bunch of Afghan weddings where we were
killing people who were just going to celebrate a wedding.
We have done this so many different times.
And then when Obama got out and Trump won went in, the drone strike against Iran's Soleimani, I think his name was, who was one of the leaders, the leader of the Iranian Guard.
And immediately after that happened,
that there was this eruption of outrage on the left like how dare Trump drone strike and it's like dude you guys just initiated this drone program um so I uh we have this history of doing one thing and then objecting to the objecting to it when the other side does the exact same thing and it seems to me like this was kind of set up because one day before the this drone strike outrage um
you had Mark Kelly and another senator, I can't remember.
They put out this video saying, make sure the armed forces know you guys don't have to follow unconstitutional orders.
And then it was like, and by the way, the very next day, we're going to tell you this thing that we have been doing for the last 20 years is unconstitutional and unacceptable.
And it's like, if it was unacceptable,
it should have been unacceptable for the last 20 years.
And in fact, there are people who have been writing about it saying, this is unacceptable for the last 20 years.
And I trust the people who have been saying that for the last 20 years.
And they're also very mad about this one too, right?
But it's the selective partisan outrage over it that makes me think this isn't.
this isn't a really serious debate unless you really want to object to all of it which I respect that opinion and it's an opinion that I'm very close to you know I think it's a valid one and I might hold it but you can't just be selectively outraged about this stuff.
Yeah, maybe this looks like a good spot for break when we come back.
I'm hearing the difference between politics and the military industrial complex.
Did I say that right?
That it looks like the military industrial complex is winning because they seem to keep doing it.
So, well, this has been a production of the Gordon Institute here at Ottawa University.
I'd like to thank you all for listening.
Five Star Rating helps other people find us.
Otherwise, feel free to just pass this along to your friends and family that might like to take a listen.
Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.
Thanks.
you
Thanks again, guys!
Tell your friends about the podcast, kxel.com slash Jacobson, J-A-C-O-B-S-E-N.
In the meantime, listen to all the wisdom of Jeff Stein during his weekday news and commentary, and folks, always remember and never forget to be safe, be smart, be good, be strong, love Jesus Christ, and God bless us, everyone!
Till we meet again, have a great weekend and bye-bye!
