Shownotes
We want to thank Bernie Moreno for stopping by the 511 Studios for this chat about his upcoming race for the U.S. Senate seat, representing Ohio.
Bernie Moreno is a first-generation immigrant and a candidate for the United States Senate. With a focus on common sense and a commitment to serving Ohio, Moreno's unique perspective and experience bring forth some thought-provoking insights. We explore his take on issues such as term limits, government intervention in the auto industry, the decline of Ohio's middle class, and the complexities of immigration and border policies.
We cover:
- Term Limits and Unfettered Service
- The Auto Industry and Government Intervention
- The Decline of Ohio's Middle Class
- The Complexities of Immigration and Border Policies
Bernie Moreno's candid conversation provides valuable insights into the changing dynamics of American politics. From the importance of term limits and the impact of government intervention in the auto industry to the decline of Ohio's middle class and the complexities of immigration policies, Moreno's unique perspective sheds light on critical issues facing the nation. As voters and informed citizens, it is essential to consider these insights and engage in thoughtful discussions to shape the future of our democracy.
Stephen Palmer is the Managing Partner for the law firm, Palmer Legal Defense. He has specialized almost exclusively in criminal defense for over 26 years. Steve is also a partner in Criminal Defense Consultants, a firm focused wholly on helping criminal defense attorneys design winning strategies for their clients.
Norm Murdock is an automobile racing driver and owner of a high-performance and restoration car parts company. He earned undergraduate degrees in literature and journalism and graduated with a Juris Doctor from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1985. He worked in the IT industry for two years before launching a career in government relations in Columbus, Ohio. Norm has assisted clients in the Transportation, Education, Healthcare, and Public Infrastructure sectors.
Brett Johnson is an award-winning podcast consultant and small business owner for nearly 10 years, leaving a long career in radio. He is passionate about helping small businesses tell their story through podcasts, and he believes podcasting is a great opportunity for different voices to speak and be heard.
Recorded at the 511 Studios, in the Brewery District in downtown Columbus, OH.
info@commonsenseohioshow.com
Copyright 2024 Common Sense Ohio
Transcripts
It is 721 23. 721 23, lucky, isn't it? 21 and 7.
[:Yeah.
[:All right. Well, it's Common sense Ohio. If that makes any common sense to you, figure it out and give us a shout. You can do that at www.commonsenseohioshow.com, where you can ask us to cover topics. You can check out Norm's blog, Brett's blog, and mine is still lagging behind. But one of these days I'll have a blog, I promise. I promise. And this is all about common sense as anybody who's a regular listener knows. And we're starting to get listeners all over down in Florida, I think Texas, and around Ohio. We've had different guests over the last year or so to share their common sense with us. And that's what we're going to do today. We've got Norm, obviously, in the studio. Brett's in the studio. And we're going to review... Hold on, we're going to introduce Bernie Moreno, who is a candidate for the United States Senate. He's here in the studio with us. And Bernie, you might be the first guest we've had to actually had the interest in coming down and checking out the studio. So thank you for that. Everybody else tunes in remotely on Zoom or otherwise. Norm, why don't you take it from there and introduce our guest here?
[:Sure. I don't want to go on too long. Let Bernie go ahead and give us his profile. But Bernie, this is off your Wikipedia page, not yours, but Wiki's page. So if I get anything messed up. But you came here as a first generation immigrant. I did. Which is just totally exciting. And what also is really cool, folks, is I think under the constitution, Bernie is ineligible to be president. So that means he can be unfettered. He doesn't have to think about consequences of later office, higher office. He can be the real guy in the US Senate.
[:That's actually my superpower. That's superpower. It is because you know what happens is I don't worry about my decisions affecting New Hampshire or Iowa or South Carolina. I'm going to be the guy that just worries about getting things done for Ohio and know that my career will be over after two terms because that's what I'm going to serve, two terms and then come home. And I think that's what it should be.
[:Wow. Did you.
[:Read my notes?
[:I was going to ask that. About the term limit.
[:I'm the chairman of US... Well, I'm the chair of US Term limits for Ohio. That's why.
[:I was going to ask you about you being a part of that and also term limits. There goes one question.
[:So Bernie's family, I believe, came from Bogota, Columbia. He's the youngest of seven. Seven? Yeah.
[:Six boys and a girl.
[:He made it in my industry. Now, I'm just a little micro race car auto parts supplier. But Bernie graduated as a Wolverine up in Michigan. Not going to hold that against him.
[:Great school. That part we can edit out when.
[:We're in Columbus. I actually, being from Cincinnati, I cheered for the Wolverines for many years. When I came to Columbus, well, that wasn't going to work.
[:Wait a minute. How does Cincinnati have anything to do with the Wolverine? You said you were in Cincinnati as if it's commonplace for Cincinnati people to like Michigan.
[:They have the coolest helmet. I get.
[:It, but it's irrelevant as far as Cincinnati.
[:Well, yeah, I know. But when you're a kid...
[:Of course, the Bangles have the worst helmet.
[:Well, here we go. So Bernie cut his teeth at Saturn, which was a very experimental division of General Motors, no longer around, just like Pontiac's.
[:Not around. Those are the.
[:Undentable cars. Oldsmobile cars. Exactly right. They have polymer panels.
[:It was super high tech. Bernie, when he was 14, if I got this story straight, wrote a letter, or maybe 16, to Roger Smith, who was CEO of General Motors. Bernie had all these ideas. And Saturn pretty much did everything he put in that letter. Aluminum engine, on and on and on, all this cool stuff. And so a lot of people think Saturn really should still be here.
[:Well, it was about changing General Motors, changing the culture of General Motors, starting with a clean sheet of paper. It reminds me of Washington, DC, honestly, because back then, the car business was really broken. You pretty much have a scenario in those big corporations where people who work there think about themselves, their career. Their decision is the lens of this helped me get my next promotion, my next big thing, increase my salary, versus what's good for dealers, what's good for customers, what's good for the company? What's good for the workers? That's not what happened back then in the car business. And it's exactly what's wrong with DC today.
[:And the car business. This is my own editorial. It's not Bernie's. These words, obviously. But the current head of the UAW seems intent on having a strike right now in his verbiage. And that's not good.
[:So there is something legitimate going on there, though, which is that the government is pushing electric cars to the point where it's becoming a mandate. Think of what we went through with COVID with the vaccine. It wasn't the vaccine was good or bad as the conversation. The big conversation was, do I, the government, get to tell you what to do? And so what's happening with electric cars is that same thing. Ohio is the largest producer of internal combustion engines as a state in the country. Internal combustion engines jobs are plentiful in America. China is the world leader in electric car technology. They control 80 % of the base minerals. I think what the UAW is concerned about is if we rush down the cliff of going towards mandating electric cars, killing internal combustion engines, what does that have an impact on jobs? Okay. And so that's a.
[:Legitimate concern. Oh, hell yeah.
[:Yeah, very good. Let me ask you a question, because you're speaking my language, I cannot stand when the government tries to overreach and regulate the private business sector. And certainly, constitutionally, there's a basis to do that. You can say that auto manufacturers impact interstate commerce. And if you follow the constitutional history of that, Congress would have the power. But it's not like the regulations always come directly. Sometimes they come indirectly. What's the level of control that the federal government is exercising over the auto industry? How are they doing it? Is it by other regulations, maybe, collateral impact in the industry, or is it a direct do this or else?
[:Well, right now they're doing it through the EPA with tailpipe emission. B asically, they're setting a standard by 2032 that can only be met with electric cars because that rule is designed for electric cars. What they're saying is that two thirds of all cars made by 2032 have to be electric, but the natural market demand is 17 %. This is not my words. This is a McKinsey study that was just completed. You're asking to move consumer behavior by 50 points, that's trillions of dollars of government subsidies. At the end of the day, you aren't really solving a problem because there's not enough lithium to power these cars. The lithium mining is absolutely awful for the environment. The batteries are very heavy, so you end up with much heavier vehicles that go through tires much more frequently. The batteries become obsolete. Think of your iPhone. What did you do with your last seven iPhones, by the way? They're sitting in a dump somewhere. Imagine that's your car. For the working class Americans, that $8,000 to $15,000 car is critical. That's how they get to work. That's the car they can buy. They can't afford a new $50,000 car.
[:Well, that car won't exist because an $8,000 fully electric vehicle that needs a brand new battery, well, that battery all that battery cost $25,000, $30,000. So you destroy the car market segment that working class Americans rely on. And that's Sherrod Brown. That's what he's pushing for. And yet at the same time, he says he's for the working man. But look what he's doing to him. He's killing him jobs. And no better example than Lordstown, Ohio. Lordstown was 4,000, 6,000 union workers producing the Chevy C ruze. Great plant, doing a great job. Rather than Sherrod Brown going there proactively figuring, Hey, how do you stay here? What he did is absolutely nothing because Lordstown Motors came in. It was basically a Ponson scheme, by the way, took hundreds of millions of dollars of government aid, promised this bright electric future, and now the company is bankrupt.
[:Yeah, I remember that. It was big headlines. I'm like, Who are they going to sell these cars to? Yeah.
[:I had proposed with a very substantial business partner to go in there, keep the plant open. We would be the customer. We were going to create a rival to Uber and Lyft called You Got It! C ruise. You cruise to work, you cruise home. The cars would all be made in red, white and blue. The drivers would be standardized, uniform, very well trained. We went to General Motors with that proposal. General Motors heard us out. I sat with Mary Barrow and her executive team. At the end of the day, the answer was, is we have this other option called Lordstown Motors, to which I argued and said, Guys, that car is never going to make it. It's commercially unviable. They don't have the money, they don't have the backing. Everything they're saying isn't true. But GM went with that option. Where was Sherri Brown? He was on the side of Lordstown Motors.
[:Wow. Just jumping ahead a little bit because I was going to ask this question. I googled you. The first thing I see in the legacy mainstream media is that you see mega Republican or all these derogatory conservative type words. But this doesn't necessarily sound conservative. The traditional platform would be for the other side, maybe to say, We're going to protect the workers. We're going to protect the unions. We're going to do we can to preserve these jobs. So I guess, what is your brand of conservatism, if you have one? And where does it lie when you have this government intervention in a private business? How far should it go and where does it stop? And what can you do if you're in DC to stop Well.
[:We should always have policymakers that are looking out to grow our middle class. I think that's what President Trump did is redefine the Republican Party that way, that we're the party of the working class. We're the party that's going to put America first. Those are just your podcast, common sense ideas. You don't want a political party that's looking out for one group versus another. Everybody can agree that we need a growing, thriving middle class. I came from a country where you have the very, very wealthy and then everybody else. And that tears at the social fabric. And what we've seen is our middle class declined quite a bit over the last 30, 40 years. We've given it to China. You look at China's middle class, it's grown at the same time that our middle class has dropped. I'm going to give you guys a crazy stat that you remember. You ready for a crazy stat of the day? If you go to 1949, six of the 14 wealthiest cities in America were in Ohio, T oledo, Youngstown, Columbus, Dayton, Akron, Cleveland was number two. Today, 2023, none of the top 30 wealthiest cities are in Ohio, and the top 15 are all either California, Massachusetts, or Washington DC.
[:That's how much the heartland has been stripped out over the last 60, 70 years. And that's why people are so angry. And that's why we've been able to move a lot of these classical Democrat working class voters to the Republican side because they see guys like Sherri Brown says, I hear you saying the words that you're on my side, but I also see the reality of what's happening in my town. President Trump was one that says, I'm standing up for you for the forgotten man and woman of America. That's who we have to advocate for.
[:It's funny. One of the common jokes, sometimes even on this show is people will say Trump was the only Democrat I've ever voted for. In large part, he's like, That was a traditional Democrat platform to go in and protect the working folks, protect the small towns, and be the champion for voice that people otherwise didn't hear in DC. And Trump switched it. He did.
[:And you look at the Democrats today, they're the party of big business. They're the party of giant banks, giant corporations, multinational companies, very well connected leads. That's who they are right now. You look at where Sheridan Brown is going to get his money from in this campaign, it's going to be Hollywood, it's going to be Wall Street, it's going to be big tech. Where I'm going to get my money from is that truck driver, that middle class worker, the carpenter, the mill worker, those are the ones that are going to contribute to my campaign. That's who I'm going to fight for. That lens is for everything, whether it's foreign policy, energy policy, ag policy. We need food security, we need to protect our farmers. Sheridan Brown wants these big giant multinational companies to own our farms and our farmland. He allows China to come in and buy our farmland, which is insane. Allows the Chinese government to come in and buy land next to our military bases. That should never be allowed.
[:Crazy.
[:It's crazy. Because again, not common sense, right?
[:Yeah. I mean, if the Bernie Marino dealership conglomerate wanted to go to China and buy property, they wouldn't allow you to do that. But we allow them to buy property here. We're still not on anything approaching an equal, respectful interchange with China. It's a one way system. And this past couple of weeks, it's symbolic, all the bowing like Janet Yellen and John Kerry and these people when they go to China, they look like they're submissive to them. They are.
[:When an American company goes there to do business, it's a 51 49. They're the minority partner. They go in there, they steal our intellectual property. They then, of course, copy what we do. That company goes out of business. But that CEO who made that decision doesn't last long enough in his position to have those ramifications. It happens to the next guy. But that CEO makes a fortune during that period of time. He's got.
[:The Golden Perish.
[:He's got the Golden Perishet.
[:Right, exactly. Another parallel to American politics. This is a Thomas Saw idea where you have these... Right now, I'm going to call it what it is. A lot of Democrats will come in with these individual platforms, like, we're going to forgive student loans, or we're going to do this. It's just these ad hoc things that sound really good. And then they all fail miserably, and the fallout doesn't happen until after they're out of office. And then the next guy will have to deal with it and get the blame for the problem. And then the Dems will say, Well, you just didn't let us do enough. If we could have only spent more of your money, we would have made it work. And it seems like you're recognizing that in a very real grassroots way with your platform.
[:No, absolutely. And these guys make a whole lot of money, let's be honest. You would never think it like somebody said to you, Hey, how did you make so much money? How did you become so successful? Typically, I did this, I created this, I had this idea. There's, I was an elected official, which is crazy. How is Nancy Pelosi worth $300 million? Chuck Schumer, 80. Barack Obama, $190 million dollars. Being a public elected official, that's not the way any person would think that you should be able to make money. And we got to go back to the model, which is do something in your life, go serve your country, come home.
[:That's not what we have today. We weren't intended to have a political class and we shouldn't have one.
[:You've got your 15 priorities on the website. I want to go back to you mentioned beat communist China. Can you elaborate a little bit on because we're on that train right now talking about it. So what are some ideas that you're thinking about trying to get accomplished? Because 15 priorities, God bless you. I hope you can do it. It's a.
[:Lot to do. 12 years.
[:But can you talk about it? Because we're on that conversation right now about beating China. I think it's a problem. Obviously, we just talked about, what are some ideas you're thinking about trying to implement to help.
[:Especially Ohio? Shorter term, we have to be logical about the way we have a relationship with China. We don't want to go to war with China, by the way. Let's just make that crystal clear. We're also, by the way, the party of peace. The left is the party of War. Let's just get that out of the way. We're going to have a good relationship with China, but a lot of these guys don't know how to negotiate. When you go into negotiation, you've got to win, but I got to win too. It can't be one sided. When I say we, meaning the country, America has got to win. So with China, you have to reset the relationship. In China, I've been there a bunch of times. They control everything there. They know that these base chemicals are coming to Mexico. They know those chemicals are being used to make fentanyl. And they know fentanyl is killing 100 plus thousand Americans. They know that. So you say to them, listen, you got a choice. We want to be a good partner with you. We want to have a decent trade relationship with you. That's fair. You do that, you can't have this.
[:It's a choice with China. So you want to end our relationship, you keep sending those chemicals. But we're not even doing that. Think about how crazy that is. If you knew your next door neighbor was poisoning your water and your well, would you not go over and have a conversation with them and say, Hey, I can't invite you to the picnic if you keep doing that. So that's number one. But then it goes back to also other things, like this woke ideology, this idea that you wake up one day a man and the next day a woman, and that our military is obsessed with thinking about woke culture, woke ideology. This is why we're losing soldiers because fighting and being in the military is a family business. It's typically the dad, the son, the grandkid. Well, they don't want their kids to be in there because they're sick of the nonsense. So we have to make certain we're doing that education in our schools. What are we teaching our kids? Are we teaching them to be the best in the world, to compete with the best engineers all over the planet? We're teaching them how to be soft and weak and think about all these other things that should not be taught at schools.
[:So competing with China is a 360. We have to really fundamentally change a lot of parts of our society.
[:Okay. Your focus is... That's a cultural argument. We need to get back to culture and say what's important here is going to be teaching our kids a traditional education, a classical education, not just cram full of woke nonsense. And then if you take that all the way up to its highest level, then we get back to the point where Americans breed this, the old citizen soldier argument. Because we are American citizens, we have this capability of creative and intellectual thought that's not just a one sided ideological mess. And that's what we're competing against with China. They are cramming down, you're going to be this and you're going to be the best at this one thing, and that's how it's going to be. So we're almost like we're taking on drones.
[:What I can tell you is somebody who came from a different country, from Columbia, if you look at what makes America unique and different, what do you feel differently here than when I do back when I was visiting relatives in Columbia? It's this idea of American exceptionalism, that we are the greatest country on Earth, that our business model is about working really hard, merit, perseverance, right? The pulling yourself up for your bootstraps. That's what made America what it is. This Western, Hey, the country started on the East Coast, but look at this Western expansion of really just going through grit and determination. That's what is America. We're losing that. We're now fighting the grievance Olympics today in America, and we got to get past all that as a society. We're really serious about taking on China. But let me make it clear, China wants to lead the world. America has led the world for the last 75 years, and as a result, the world is more prosperous, more secure, and more free. A Chinese view of that is every one of those things would be very different.
[:No question.
[:No question. There's almost like there's this notion out there that because America has done bad things in its history, then we shouldn't be the world leaders. The other people will be better at it. And if nothing else, you look at it like there's a vacuum out there. And who's going to fill it if we don't? It's going to be China because it's not going to be Spain. It's not going to be France. It's not going to be these It's not going to be the Scandinavian socialist utopias. It's going to be China if we don't do something. This is the common sense that we look for on this show is people actually say this stuff out loud because it just makes sense.
[:Bernie, I've got to ask, because of your family's history of coming from Columbia, if I understand right, your father was a surgeon, is that correct?
[:In Columbia, my dad was actually the Dean of the medical school, Secretary of Health. And then my mom decided one day in December of '71 that she wanted us to grow up very differently. So we didn't come to the US with nothing, but we had a very different life when we arrived in America. Nine of us living in a two bedroom apartment versus what we had in Columbia. My dad, when he got to the US six months later, because he wasn't 100 % on board with the program at that point, but he was making $5 an hour as a surgical assistant. My mom would have us at the flea market selling Colombian trickets kids on Saturdays. She realized that a lot of people would want to move to South Florida, at least have a place in South Florida from South America. Got a real estate license. And both of them, because of America, became very successful. And watching that was really informed who I am today.
[:Yeah, it's a Horatio Algir story. You're alluding to that go west young man, that attitude that Ronald Reagan, frankly, with his General Electric theater, and then later in his political career, Governor of California and President for two terms, he started that make America great again phrase that Trump picked up on. But he had that sunny city, shiny city on the hill America as a concept that we strive to make greater and better, and it's never perfect. But that idea that if you put yourself against the wheel that you can have a great outcome, that the opportunities are here. Your family and your personal story of taking a beat up Mercedes Ben dealership on the West Side of Cleveland and turning it into this 15 dealerships in four states, over a billion in sales is truly incredible. It's a tribute to your acumen, but it had to be working 24 hours a day. It was hard work.
[:Yeah, but that's what America is all about. I think sometimes when you live in that shining city on the hill and never lived anywhere else versus you saw that city on the hill and you appreciated that much more, I think that's what's wrong with a lot of what we have going on today. I think Americans have taken for granted how great and special this country is for sure. And you have to fight for it. It doesn't happen automatically. Reagan told us that in 1989. I'll give you another stat, though, boy, your mind. Reagan, his famous farewell address to America, which is a 45 minutes speech, by the way, which think about in today's 30 second videos, we don't watch many 45 minutes ones. He talked about, of course, freedom is one generation away. It's very famously quoted. But back then, he also had a little regret. He said he didn't do enough. Government was still too big. Government was still too omnipresent. At that point, government was 8 % of our GDP, 8 % 1989. It's 34 % today.
[:34 % today. He said government is not the solution. It is the problem.
[:I think that's what defines my candidacy in the primary versus my opponents, especially State Senator Dolan. He views government as not doing enough. I view government as doing too much. I think we need to get government to a larger state out of the way. Government can set guardrails, but government isn't going to solve all your problems. I think that we've gotten a whole host of elected officials over the last 10, 20, 30 years that want to tell you that government is going to solve all your problems. When in reality, if you really strip it back, government causes enormous amounts of problems. It interferes in markets. We talked about that with electric cars. We need more housing here in central Ohio. Is that crystal clear to everybody, right? Absolutely. So what's government's role? How about getting the building permits happening faster? Not having the EPA and the Ohio Department of Environment find half of a frog leg, and now you need to do a 10 year frog leg study. Those are the things that will clear the way. A lot of more than government subsidies, government incentives. In Cleveland, we have a huge crisis in homicides, huge problem like you do here in Columbus.
[:The Mayor's answer is, Let's give $10,000 incentives for people to become police officers. Would you let your son be a police officer in the Columbus PD or in the Cleveland PD? Sadly, you'd be worried about that. But what should we be doing? We should be making the police heroes in the community, right? Making certain that you know, Wow, you're a police officer. We're going to really honor you and respect your job. But what are we doing? We're crushing them, making them feel like they're the bad guys. It's simple stuff, common sense. But it's a lot of that that's really what's missing. I was intrigued by your podcast, actually, because those two simple words, common sense is exactly what's missing from Washington, DC.
[:It doesn't apply. There's no question about we all lean conservatively, but it should apply everywhere. Everybody should just take a common sense approach at these problems and then solve them. That's why I'm so intrigued by a candidate like you. You come from the business world where you can't just go virtue signal and succeed. In fact, quite the opposite, you would be crushed like a grape. And maybe that's the next question. It's like, what do you think you can bring, maybe versus other people who have either tried or who are running against you, based on your business background? Because it started at zero and you build it. What do you bring to the table that others in DC are missing?
[:Well, I understand accountability. I understand how to make compromises when I need to, when to stay strong when I'm not. I know how to negotiate. I understand also that what leadership really means, which is bringing people from one place to another. I think one of the things that I talk about all the time on a campaign trail, because it bothers me to hear people say, I hate those liberals. The Bible teaches us to hate the sin and love the sinner.
[:It's like Norm, he.
[:Loves.
[:Everybody. You have to say that out loud.
[:Every time. But that's really important and exceptional because we're Americans. We're all the same. Now, I may hate your ideas. That's right. But then my job, because I love you, is to move you to a better place where you open your eyes to thinking about things a little bit differently. Let's be honest, the corporate media is the biggest culprits here. They're the ones who are really stirring up this hatred and vile political dialog where we can't sit down and have an agreeable conversation, even though we may disagree. Agree. You mentioned about how I'm described, a Trump backed MAGA extremist. If I was a liberal running for the United States Senate, it would be Bernie Marino, Hispanic immigrant with compelling life story, and Rose petals would be showered upon me when I drove down High Street. It shouldn't be that way. We should be talking about the battlefield of ideas. What are your ideas? What are his ideas? Which ideas resonate more and will work better?
[:And we've talked about that around the table a lot too, is understand where people are coming from to this point, hear their story, and understand why they think they do. Because it's legitimate.
[:No.
[:Totally. Because it's our life. How can we say that they don't see it that way?
[:Right. At Saturn, we used to have a great expression, equally informed people seldom disagree. And the problem to a large extent in politics today is not everybody's equally informed. I will say, make the case, because I see it every day that I think Conservatives are much more informed. I think Liberals tend to buy into what they see on CNN and MSNBC. I think when we watch Fox News, we may watch it and say, We know it's an opinion show. We understand it's an opinion show. But when the left watches CNN, they view that as 100 % fact. That's fact. I used to make.
[:That argument to everybody. It's fact. I used to make that argument to everybody. At least Fox News admits it. They admit their bias. It's like they come from a conservative angle. They have opinions. It is what it is. Take it or leave it. But the idea that you tout yourself CNN or MSNBC as being the truth when clearly it's not. I mean, clearly it's all slanted in a very obvious direction. That's when it gets sinister because I think you're right. I think people tend to buy it and then they just adopt those ideals without any due consideration of what they're actually believing in. I think it's like this external belief structure. People ascribe to it to answer all their decisions, right or wrong, I can't question that. It is what it is. I think that's our woke ideology right now.
[:Yeah. Bernie, one of the things that happened in Columbia that is illustrative of flagrant disregard for justice and disregard for the citizens having any confidence in a legal system, in a law enforcement system, was when Escobar blew up the Supreme Court building and destroyed all of the paper records, anything to do with his imprisoned and his trial because he didn't like the outcome. And we see here in America, if not outright burning down of courthouses like it happened during BLM and TFA a couple of years ago, where that was tried and we lost a couple of police stations. But now a more insidious misuse, these hearings that Congressman Jim Jordan here from Ohio on the weaponization of the Department of Justice this, the FBI, IRS, you go down the list and we see the persecution, whether we're going to vote for Donald Trump or De Santis or who that is. But when we see a President tied up in six or seven cases, it's clearly political. And when we see Hunter Biden and Joe Biden taking what now appears to be completely authenticated evidence, bribes from foreign countries, including China and Ukraine, obviously, none of that is sitting well with the American people.
[:What I fear is, like the citizens of Colombia, we're going to get to a point of cyn where people just think the system is not there for them. It's there for the anointed. That seems to me to be a corrosive element that could destroy the country from within unless we fix it.
[:The way I think about democracies is I think of it like a brick wall. The bricks are fundamental elements of democracy, but the mortar that binds it all is faith in these institutions. Over COVID, we've lost faith in our health care institutions. With Joe Biden, we've lost faith in our government. The media, we've lost faith in the media a long time ago. Critical institution in a democracy. But now we're losing trust in our criminal justice system, the FBI, the DOJ. Again, it's not whether you like President Trump or not. That's not the question. The question is, we all know crystal clear, if President Trump was losing the polls or not running at all, there would be zero of these cases we'd be move out forward. So you look at it and go, We need to have a fundamentally fair justice system. I said this to a reporter that came out to an event yesterday. I said, If there's any group that should be most curious and most in the forefront is the media saying, Wait a second, a sitting United States President with his attorney general who did not become a Supreme Court Justice because of the opposing party is prosecuting his chief political rival.
[:If we were providing foreign aid to a country that was doing that, we would eliminate our foreign aid until that changed. And yet here we are in America, and it's very, very dangerous because there's not a lot of mortar left. And once all the mortar is gone, the bricks just collapsed. And that's what I'm worried about. That's why I'm running. Because if we allow this country to go off the cliff, we can't be the... Those of us in this room, those of us who are listening, cannot be the first generation American history that leaves this country worse for our kids and our grandkids in the way we got it. I'm not prepared to do that. I love my kids. I love my grandbaby, too, on the way. I can't do that. I can't say to them, Hey, I had a great ride. America was great for me, but look at it. I'm leaving it to you. Broken, shattered. All these institutions destroyed and completely and fundamentally broke, that's morally reprieensible. I don't think we will. I'm very optimistic. I think we will leave this country in better shape, but it's going to require a lot of us to.
[:Work really hard. No, I think a majority of us feel that way. I think we do. This push comes to shove. It just has to be brought out. No, I don't want that to happen. I think a lot of us are handcuffed going, but what do we do?
[:Well, we.
[:Have to get in. I think that's the question. What can I do as a citizen of this United States? I will then vote, of course, and listen.
[:Well, it's not enough. We have to get uncomfortably engaged to the point where you think, man, but I have so many other things to do. Why am I doing this? I meet so many people, I say, I don't do politics. Okay, it's not an option anymore. It's an option where you have to fight for this country. And it doesn't mean you have to run for office like I'm doing, but you can be a poll watcher. You can make phone calls. You can pass out yard signs. You can post thoughts on social media. You can go out there and put yourself out there and talk about these things. Well, you guys are doing it. You're doing that with this podcast. So all of us have to do a lot more to a little bit more, depending on how much we're doing, because the other side is relentless. Let's just face it. The state is a 65, 35 state. 65 % of the people in this state would agree with most of what we're talking about here. But that 35 % is so incredibly loud that we feel like it's a 90 10 situation. They're 90 %.
[:It's not. But we aren't vocal. We shut down. We say, I don't want to get in the conflict. You got to go out there and you got to fight.
[:Yeah. Which is a lot about what we try to do here, I guess. The common sense idea was born, at least for me, to some extent in the courtroom, you can't just go in and start screaming at juries and win a case. You have to come at them with common sense. And what I found, and Brett, you see this all the time in your podcast business, when we get people around this roundtable, irrespective of what their political bent is, we all tend to agree on most stuff. And then I can explain our position to them in a common sense way. I've had actually people listen to me all the way nodding the whole way down. And then I have somebody in the corner saying, They have no idea that you just turn them into a conservative. Because we all agree on what the problems are and what makes common sense, and then the rest of it is rhetoric.
[:Absolutely. And again, it goes back to this idea of love the sinner, hate the sin. And if you really believe that, then you say, How do I rescue them? You look at things like, for example, this insane transgender movement. My oldest son is gay. I think the idea of accepting people who are gay, who are adults, who want to live their life that they've decided, I think most of us are to the point where we accept that. That's not our business.
[:100 %.
[:But sexualizing children, giving kids gender mutilation surgery, that's wrong. The child isn't in a position to make that decision. A five year old doesn't even know what it means to be a boy versus a girl. You You don't change genetics that way. I was in New York City three and a half weeks ago visiting my daughter who lives on sixth Avenue, and you had men completely naked walking down the street. Completely naked, by the way. I'm not talking about they just had underwear on them. I'm talking about full blown naked. I'm on bikes, on scooters, walking, and interacting with children. When did that become legal? Women were topless. What does that have to do with being gay? That's just a hedonistic display where you have this moral decay highlighted by that, those things we can fight against. We can say that's crystal clear wrong, and we have to speak clearly about that and not say, Oh, you hate gay people. I hate gay people. It's not about being gay. It's about hating the idea that you would do that to a child.
[:That alphabet soup is not a community. You and I both know a lot of gay people. P ersonally, I don't know any of them. None of my friends that are gay suffer from pedophilia. None of them are looking to have relationships with little boys or little girls, whether they're lesbian or gay. They're fully adjusted adults. And so to lump all this together, LGBT, whatever, the BLT sandwich thing, that's ridiculous. And I think the trans movement and the pedophilia movement and some of these other fringe, they're not really communities. To latch on to African Americans' struggle for civil rights or to latch on to the gay community's struggle for acceptance and civil rights is a false notion. Those are not communities that the gays that I know do not support that philosophy. And certainly their parents of little boys and girls, and they don't want any predator interacting with their children.
[:None of it makes sense. I can't even imagine arguing the counterpoint for that. Well, exactly. And it's been what we've societal norms for as long as.
[:We remember. The problem is it's not an argument, it's a shout down. So you're talk about this, you don't like this, you must not like that. Let me change gears a little bit. It's in the same notion. You were an immigrant, and now we have this open border thing going on. Where do you come down on that? And how do you fix some of this? Fix the border crisis that's happening?
[:It's actually the main motivating factor that made me jump into this line of work. How do you allow a country to leave its borders open and reward people who are violating our laws to come here illegally? When I came here legally, went through a rigorous process, had to learn English, learn the history of the country, became a citizen. It's one of the greatest days of my life to be able to take that oath of citizenship. And I remember getting the certificate and feeling incredibly proud. Then look at that and go, Well, you're minimizing that. You're destroying that feeling that I had by rewarding these people who are coming here for handouts, violating our laws. By the way, easily fixed. We need to tell people, if you cross our border illegally, you forfeit the right for asylum. We have to adjudicate asylum cases while the person stays in Mexico. We have to ask Mexico to keep the troops on the border. We have to finish the wall. We have to give Mexico the choice that Columbia made. You can be our largest legal trading partner or our largest illegal trading partner, but not both. And if you choose to be the illegal trading partner, the legal trade is going to go away.
[:And obviously, I believe Mexico will make the right decision. We then designate the drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and we wipe them off the face of the earth, just like we killed Pablo Escobar, by the way, and freed Columbia as a result of that. And that's common sense. Nobody would say, And by the way, that's not an anti immigrant position. Although, by the way, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer who's a crazy activist says that I'm a Nazi sympathizer and immigrants and hate South Americans. To which, of course, my response is, maybe a cousin or two, but everybody's got those in their family, right?
[:That's crazy. But you make a good point, right? And I think Trump, to some extent, made this point when he said Mexico was going to pay for the wall. But what he was really saying, I think, maybe not what he was really saying, but what's important about that notion is there's really two things going on here. We've got our border open and Mexico is doing nothing to stop it either. And I think both those problems need to be solved at the same time. Or maybe the solution requires both those problems to be solved.
[:Well, the drug cartels are in charge of our immigration policy today. So if you had a friend, I'm going to build an incredible constituent services operation. Like, if you need something from the federal government, when I'm your United States Senator, you're going to think you're calling the Ritz Carlton of the Four Seasons. I mean, we're going to have constituent service that nobody has ever seen anything like that in their lives. If you call me in that scenario today, and I'm a Senator, and you said, Hey, I need help getting a friend to come to the US to visit, get a visa, wants to come here and work for six months and then go home, impossible. Today, it's impossible to come to America legally. But if you want to come here illegally, fly to Mexico City, find a drug cartel member, they're at every corner, they'll smuggle you across the cross the border, and that's how you come to America. That's insane.
[:Yeah, I have a friend in England that is in a rock and roll band, progressive rock band, older guy. And his band wanted to do a tour in the United States. And because ostensibly, they'd earn a little bit of bar proceeds for putting on their concerts. They would have to get, as you say, a visa. It's impossible. It's impossible.
[:But.
[:We're not even getting our artists to come here.
[:Send them to Mexico City. They cross the border, pay drug cartel a couple grand, and they're here for seven years with no problem. By the way, full benefits, a cell phone, unemployment insurance, SNAP benefits, everything that you could ever imagine. Unbelievable. There's no scenario in which that makes sense. But yet that's what the Biden, it's what the Democrats are doing, that's what the media is hiding. We have to fix that. We can fix that. We will fix that.
[:So are you looking at that the government of Mexico has gone so far that they've lost control that they maybe can't fix what they've got.
[:Down there? Oh, yeah. This is if you watch...
[:How do we approach this?
[:I would encourage you to watch the show Narcos on Netflix the first season. The first season, the other season's got a little dramatic. That's 98 % accurate. I didn't know that. I had many, many, many relatives that were kidnapped, killed. You talked about the Supreme Court. It wasn't that he just bombed the building. He killed every member of the Supreme Court, every single one. He killed the leading presidential candidate. He would go to Mayor's of small towns and say, Hey, nice to meet you. Good guy. I'm going to give you two choices. I'll give you a million dollars, which would change your life forever, or I'll murder every single member of your family and then you and you'll watch it. Let me know tomorrow what you decide. And then he walks out of your house. These are impossible choices. You do that with police officers. The country was at the edge of being a collapsed nation. When we came in, we went to America and said, We want to be a good partner. The American military came in. We killed Pablo Escobar. We wiped out the drug cartels. What's happening in Mexico is Colombia by times 100.
[:These are much more ruthless people. What they're doing now is making billions and billions of dollars trafficking humans, trafficking children. I went to the border. I met and visually saw four people cross the river. They arrived. Women were in tears. The man I talked to, I'm fluent in Spanish, they told the story that when they left Nicaragua, 20 small children were with them. They didn't know who they were. The drug cartel members at night would get stoned, would get drunk, and they would throw the kids off the trains and off the busses to compete. Who could throw them further? Three of them were alive by the time the journey was over. The women had been raped along the way. They gave girls, young girls, 12, 13, 14 years old, birth control pills. The NGOs do because they know they're going to get raped. The men were beaten at gunpoint. This is what we're allowing. Think about that. Our American leaders are allowing that to happen, enabling that to happen, and rewarding these drug cartels with billions and billions of dollars in annual revenue. Is it.
[:About votes, in your opinion? Is it about building that constituency of dependency on the federal government? Is that why, in particular, the Democrats, some of the... I have to say some of the big business like your agricultural combines that want cheap labor and other industries. So I have to say there is a little Chamber of Commerce culpability. But it's mainly Democrats that seem interested in allowing this open border. In your opinion, is it about building that constituency so that Texas turns blue, for example?
[:I wouldn't venture to guess because it would take me down a rabbit hole. But I think there's a fine line between being naive and just being stupid. I think they believe that it's America's moral duty to solve the problems of the rest of the world. They view it as money that's not really there. So it's an esoteric comment. So we say we're going to spend billions and trillions of dollars helping other citizens in other countries. I'm not so interested in where the money comes from because it's certainly not my money. Got you. In other words, if we go out somewhere and I'm spending your money, t and not my money, I'm not so restrained. I know. I don't think about it too much.
[:I always say this, it's always easy to spend somebody else's money.
[:Sure. So they look at it and say, look, you can walk down High Street here and things are pretty good, generally pretty good in terms of compared to walking down the street of a developing nation. The idea to some of these radical leftists is that's fundamentally unfair. It's America's duty to solve that problem. The incidentals of the stuff that we're just talking about right now is in their mind, I probably believe collateral damage. Maybe that happens, but at the end of the day, the ends justify the means, so to speak. It's a very sad way to think. But the reality is the Democrat Party that I knew when I got to America that I remember my parents talking about that we see with the Kennedys and we see with Tip O'Neil, that party is gone.
[:Ronald Reagan was a Democrat.
[:That party is completely... The party that was the party of the Mahoney Valley of Dayton of Northwest Ohio, that party is gone. And what it's been replaced with this very fringey, born in a PhD lab in an East Coast university progressive view of the world. And what's interesting about Sherrod Brown is that he is in that group. That's what he firmly believes. The guy who went to Yale, but he represents Ohio. How did.
[:That happen? They'll say it's fundamentally unfair that we have this prosperous economy and we can debate about how prosperous it is right now, really, but they'll say it's unfair that we have this and they don't have that. But they'll never actually ask, how did that happen? Why are we so far advanced? Why do you walk down High Street and you see restaurants that are working? You see businesses thriving. You've got your business going. And it's not just because we're racist, awful, evil people. The American ideal is we let individuals prosper on their own and come up with their own ideas and do things unfettered and unchecked by an overbearing government, and it seems to work. And so it seems like instead of talking about those things, they're just saying it's unfair, so we shouldn't have this. And somehow if we give them everything we have, it'll be fixed. And they still don't have the prosperous business even after we give them all the money.
[:It's still crap. Microcosm of that, Bernie, was this thing that I saw in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The public school system there just removed advanced mathematics because the school board there... I think Princeton's in Cambridge, right? One of the...
[:I know, Harvard and MIT.
[:Yeah, Harvard and MIT. One of the Ivy's, though, Harvard and MIT. So the elementary school district in Cambridge decided no more advanced math because it's somehow racist because certain groups were doing better in math in terms of their identities, which, hey, Bernie couldn't help that he's Hispanic. I can't help I'm half Lebanese. Nobody can help how they're born. Who cares what popular... Didn't we just have a Supreme Court decision on this involving Harvard?
[:Which was great because I'll give you a quick story. So my youngest son gets to college while ago, six, seven years ago, and he gets a letter three days before class starts that says, Hey, we see that you're Hispanic, so we have special counseling and tutoring available for you. By the way, a student, 1,400 SAT, tons of AP classes, and somehow there's something wrong with him because his dad was born in South America. The far left is very racist. The easiest thing to understand the far extreme left is it's all about projection. So when they say assault on democracy, because that's what they're doing. When they say racism, it's because they're racist. It really is the most incredible display of projection I've ever, ever seen. How do you assault democracy when you're calling for freedom and liberty? During COVID, what were we calling for? I wasn't saying I didn't want to get vaccinated. I was saying I should make that choice. I wasn't saying that the mask don't work because I'm some crazy person, but because mask didn't work. I'm not saying that the vaccine isn't good, but it certainly won't stop the spread of COVID.
[:And yet you weren't even allowed to say that. Discuss it. You don't want to... When somebody controls your words, they're controlling your thoughts, and ultimately controlling you, which is what this country... What we fought a revolution about. That was the basis of the American Revolution is self governance. That's what I call our vision statement, which is our Declaration of Independence talks about, right? That we hold these truths to be self evident. That's the basis of America. And we keep trying to change that, even even though it's really worked well.
[:Let's talk about the horse race. This is the ugly part. Ronald Reagan famously said there was the 11th Commandment or whatever. He had some phrase with it. Thou shalt not tear down a fellow Republican, and all that thing. And you seem like... You remind me a lot of Vivek Ramaswami. You're a sunny personality, you're upbeat, you're positive. You're not... You're You didn't throw any big bombs at your two primary opponents, Frank and Matt. And we didn't endorse and we're not in that business. But the thing is about your approach seems to be not so negative, but you're bullish long term on America. I sense that from you. But in terms of the horse race, give us the important dates, Bernie, of the primary people need to register by when? How do they back your candidacy? And when do we know whether it's you as the Republican nominee? If you could go through that a little bit. Sure.
[:So let's start it backwards. So May 19 is the primary. So the good news is we live in Ohio, so we'll know the night of May 19 through the winter is. I suspect that's going to be me. I wouldn't do this if I didn't think I was going to win. Early voting starts 30 days before that, so call it February 19th, 20th is when early voting starts. To get on the ballot, we have to submit about a thousand names that are validated by December 19th. I think the field is set now. I don't think there's any others jumping into the race. The important other piece is fundraising is key because when you sit in front of somebody, they hear you, they hear your pitch, they get to know you and they write you a check, pretty certain they're going to vote for you. We broke an all time fundraising record last quarter, raised almost $2.3 million. Most of that from Ohio. That's a big deal. Matt, who had been in the race for six months, put in $4 million of his own money and after six months got 3.8 million left. So that means he's burning more money running his campaign.
[:In that he's collecting from donors. That's not a good signal. He has anemic fundraising. Again, he's standing in front of people, they're hearing his message and they're not writing a check. So that's telling you everything you need to know there. Frank's a nice man. Matt's a nice man. My perspective is, you know why I'm doing this? I've illustrated this in this interview today. I don't think that replacing Sherrod Brown, whose number one problem is that he's never been in the private sector with somebody else who's really never been in the private sector isn't the trade off that we want. I think the good thing about Matt Dolan is that he really believes the things that he believes in, but they're left of center ideas. They're not the ideas that most conservative Republicans do. But I give him credit for at least having those core beliefs. But I'm a conservative and unapologetic about that. Frank, I think, is still trying to find who he is, and I think voters see that. I think when all said and done and the voters have a chance to see the three of us, they'll make the decision that I believe that they'll pick me.
[:Here's the thing that you'll never hear reported in the news. The left doesn't have that choice. Think about how crazy it is. So if you're a Republican out there, you get three choices. That's pretty good, right? You got vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate. Over over in the Democrat side, you got one, right? You got a gray hair little white guy. That's your choice. There isn't anybody even brave enough. Alison Russell, Nina Turner, Emilia Sykes, Casey Weinstein, Justin Bieber. Where are all these guys with any courage to run against Sharon Brown and at least give their voters a choice? I want more than one choice. We're Republicans. We give our voters choice. I think that's a good thing. We should be happy about that.
[:How do you stay healthy through all this fundraising and being in front of people?
[:Well, first watch the diet because there's a lot of meals involved.
[:It's going to.
[:Be a crazy life.
[:Every person goes.
[:Through it. Isn't the state fair coming up. Yeah, there it is. That's what you need right now.
[:Stay away from the fried donuts. Although I'll give a commercial to Wayne County best donuts. Oh, my God.
[:It's unbelievable. You got to go down to Circleville during the pumpkin show. Oh, yeah. You got to call it a festival.
[:Do not call it a festival. That's how they know you're not a local.
[:Well, that Italian district in Cleveland, I don't know how you stay.
[:Out of there. Well, by the way, the Valley's got a great Italian food. But now I think watch the diet. Get out of the car every once in a while. Walk. I did that this morning in Akron. I was in a meeting this morning up there. I said to the driver, I said, Let me out here. And I walked three or four or five blocks. Those are the things that you do. I play pick a ball a lot.
[:Hey, Bernie, can I play consultant for 10 seconds? One of the things that Governor Rodes was famous for, you may hate me for this, is he would spend a night in one of those animal barns at the state fair. I don't know if it was where they did the butter sculpture, but you might pull away some of those rural voters that I'm sure Frank, being a farmer, thinks he's got that locked up. You might want to go into one of those places and say, You know what? I'm going to go for the Jim Rodes constituency.
[:Well, let me bring this back because I had one more topic I wanted to talk to you about. You're a business guy, and that means that to some extent you've had to be, not even to some extent, you've had to be fiscally responsible in spending not only your own money to develop your business, but then other investor money, and you have people to answer for. How do you handle the entitlement problem that's just looming? It's not even on the horizon anymore. It seems like it's on us, whether it's going to be social security coming right quick or whether it's a...
[:What are we get, Steve? 33 trillion in debt?
[:Yeah, not to mention the debt. And we've basically... How much further do you think we can go in this country without ruining it forever financially? And what do we do to fix it?
[:Well, if we lose this next election and the Democrats stay in power, we hit the inflection point. It's over. There's no way you can't get past that. We're at $32.5 trillion in debt. We added a trillion dollars in the last 30 days since the debt ceiling was removed. A trillion dollars which is the number that you say, but it doesn't really mean anything. So you got debt service that's about a trillion dollars a year. Right now, that's just interest. That's not interest in principle. That's just like making your minimum.
[:Payment on your credit card. Our debt service alone is a trillion. A year. A year.
[:Yeah, think about that for a second. Think about your own personal finances, right? Our GDP is about 20 %, so you're talking about one 20th of your income is just the interest in your credit cards. That's not sustainable. And it's compounding at a rate four times the way the economy is growing. So our debt's growing at 8 % and our economy is growing at 2 %. So you can see you just map it out. At some point by the end of next decade, we're at almost 50 trillion. By the end of 2050, we're at 75 trillion. At that point, you hit an inflection point. You just can't come back from that. So we have to fix it. We have to stop paying people who can work, not to work. We're giving about $43,200 to people in benefits not to work. The people who are making less than that recognize that, by the way. They really know what's going on. They're not stupid, they're very smart, and they know that that's completely unfair and insulting to them. That's why when you go to a restaurant, tip well, tip really well, because they know they could stay home and make more money, but they're not.
[:And by the way, it's a double whammy because you're not only making the transfer payment, but you're losing the productivity of that person being in the workforce to about eight million people in that situation. So we got to fix that. We got to grow our economy, encourage business people to invest and grow our economy. That helps as well. We have to make priorities. What do we do in our lives every day? I can't do this and that, so I'm only going to do this. We have to run the government more efficiently. My tech company that I started makes car titles digital. We're in West Virginia as our main client that we started with. We're saving them tens of millions of dollars just because we made car titles instead of being paper, being digital. So we can save a lot of money in the way we run the government. We just never really looked at that before. Lots of opportunity but we got to have... Here's ultimately what we need. We need serious people to tackle these serious problems. And if you send career politicians, somebody looks at it and goes, Well, why are you saying such...
[:Is that a slur? It is in the sense that if all you're thinking about is your political career, you're not really there to solve the problem. So when you have people that are there to serve the country to solve the problem, then that's how things get fixed.
[:Yeah, 100 %. Yeah, I agree. I was thinking 15 dealerships, you have a ton of people I would imagine that don't have college degrees that are earning a good living in that consortium.
[:That you build. Technicians, salespeople, valets, car wash guys, porters, drivers, service advisors. I would say if we had, call it 1200 team members, I never called them employees, 1200 team members, I'd say 80 % of them didn't have a college degree.
[:That's fantastic. So that's that whole Mike Rho thing. I saw where JD just introduced some bill or some effort. I know he endorsed you for your run for US Senate, and he's big on that. This thing where we're underwriting kids who make the college choice to the detriment really, I mean, we're not buying vans and saws and plumbing tools for boys and girls that want to go into the trades. And it seems unfair to me if we're going to have socialism and we support the kids that go to college and end up being professors, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and all that stuff, but we're not doing anything to really bring up the kids that want to have those blue collar jobs. And that's fundamentally unfair.
[:To some extent, we're even shaming them. They want to shaming you. Something wrong with you. They're just discouraging you. They're discouraging your plumber. Oh, my gosh, you're a plumber. I'm a gender studies major. Well, the plumber makes five, six, seven times as much money as a gender studies major.
[:Your diesel mechanics are making a.
[:Good living. My technicians, I never call them mechanics technicians, we're all making six figures. That's fantastic. Doing very well, working hard. But look at this student debt forgiveness. All that's doing, this is what's not told about that story. Forget the normal part of the story, which is why would one group of people pay somebody else's debt off? The bigger part of the story is it lets the colleges and universities off the hook. They will use that to raise their tuition. They're the ones that aren't delivering. You look at the history of Pell grants in America. Every time Pell grants expanded, college tuitions went up. You have places like Ohio State University, you have 162 diversity, equity, and inclusion officers. What do they do all day? Harvard, ready for this one? Harvard has more administrators than students. Oh, my God. So where's our money going? Where's this debt coming? How does somebody leave a university when we have Pell grants with tens of thousands of dollars in debt? Because the colleges do not care whether that student fails or succeeds or not. When I was involved in Cuyoga Community College, I went there when I first started.
[:They wanted me to donate all kinds of money. I had no money. My change drawer was my working capital. But I found out about Tri Sea L ater and wanted to help. Then I e graduation rate for black kids in that school was 1 %. 1 % graduation or completion rate. Insane. But they'd have all kinds of beautiful galas and beautiful new buildings. Anyway, make a long story short, my wife and I wanted to help because we think education is the core of equality. And so we went there and studied the topic, went to Tri Sea with a plan, backed it up with $100,000 that they had to spend every year to help these students. We got 425 kids through Tri Sea at an 84 % graduation rate, mostly black and Hispanic kids.
[:How did you do it? What did you focus on?
[:You fix all the little problems. It's the same way when you go into it. I wasn't ever in a position to buy successful dealerships. I couldn't afford them. I couldn't afford them. So I bought unsuccessful dealerships. You fix your offers. Right. And fix your hoppers. And fix your hoppers. Is like, Well, the weeds are growing in the parking lot, right? They don't sell a lot of cars. The salespeople look like they had all nighters. They didn't answer their phones, automated attendance, press one for sales, press two for service. First indication of place is terrible. You can't get a hold of the dealer. Those are the things I looked for. Then the other one was when you walked in and you say, This seems crazy. Oh, yeah, it's how we always do it. That's the first sign of a broken system. We did all those little things. I'll give you a one nugget, easy one. In these community colleges, a lot of it is first generation college students. They require a birth certificate to enroll in your test scores, your report cards, package of shape work. Parents don't know how to provide that to their kids.
[:So a lot of times the kids just give up and then don't enroll, or they drop out pretty quickly because they don't have a support structure to help them there. So what we do is we included something called intrusive advising. The other thing is they can say to you, I want to be a lawyer. You want to be a lawyer? That's fantastic. I hate reading. One of those two things has to change. I want to be a doctor. I can't stand the sight of blood. I want to be a business major, but I can't pass calculus. Now, whether you believe calculus is important in business or not, it's a requirement in our state system. I'll give you the example at CSU. At CSU, where I was the chair of the board, we used to require calculus at any point during a student's career. So somebody could go five and a half years as a business student, and the second semester, their fifth year to graduate, they still can't pass calculus. Guess what? Start all over. Oh, my God. So now what we do is what makes sense is you have to take calculus in your first year, and if you fail it, you get a counselor that says, Hey, what are we doing here?
[:Maybe you need to be a communications major or something else because that's a requirement to be business major. Those are the common sense things, but nobody cared. The whole institution didn't... The success of the student was not even something that they even thought about, let alone.
[:Focused on. The other thing that was remarkable about what you said is not to sneeze at what you were doing, but it was only 100,000. Because you hear of people buying stadiums or entire departments.
[:Yeah, they want their name on something. But you gave money to do things.
[:And it wasn't that much. It was 100.
[:Grand a year for five years.
[:No, I got it. But there's people that give 20 million or millions of dollars and it does nothing.
[:No, it's not true. It pays for 142 diversity equity increase.
[:My point is, you took a reasonable investment into a college and you made it effective.
[:Well, the ROI.
[:Is high. A hundred %. And the other part of it could be, by the way. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, the ROI. Well, the other part of the money was used for is, let's say the kid needed two grand to get to complete college. Just couldn't find it. So that we filled in that gap to close that gap so they could go do that instead of going out and getting a job. Because you know what happens once they leave the system? You're not going back.
[:You're not going back.
[:It's very hard to get hard to go back after you... Now you're paying for your own apartment. You bought a beater car. You can get around.
[:You got.
[:Some pocket change. You got some date money and that job at Amazon.
[:Exactly. I'll give you another example. So my wife, who's amazing, she mentored these kids from sixth grade all the way through college, mostly black kids that she met when she was over at breakthrough. And one particular one calls her. He was going to OSU freshman year, calls her and says, Hey, I'm dropping out. And he goes, What do you mean dropping out? And she goes, I'm dropping out. She goes, Where are you right now? She literally says, Where are you right now? He goes, Well, I'm at home. I'm going to come see you. Turns out the mom had been paying rent perfectly. She was a nurse, so she had a good job paying rent. But the water bill that's a whole other situation, by the way. These people in these poor communities get totally crushed by a lot of different things. The water bill was more than in my house. And this is a small little two bedroom house. My house is bigger. Her water bill is five times what my water bill was. What the heck? Hadn't paid it for two years. And so now the landlord is evicting her. So he felt he needed to be the man of the house, come in and help the mom.
[:So I negotiated the deal with the landlord. I think the bill was $1800. We paid the water bill for them. As a result of us paying that $1,800 water bill for that mom, this kid graduated from OSU now. He's got a great job and he's got a bright future. $1,800.
[:And he could pay a.
[:Water bill for his mom forever. $1800. What would that kid's life have looked like had he not gone to OSU, gone back into the neighborhood? And who knows even if you'd be alive today? $1800. You get these nonprofit CEOs. Do your research on that. That'll blow your mind. These guys who run these nonprofits are making $5, 6, 7, 8 hundred million a year to help poor people.
[:Think.
[:About that for a second. It's crazy. And Cleveland, the Cleveland Foundation just built a new multimillion dollars state of the art headquarters.
[:So you've given us a couple of examples that make perfect sense. And it's like, I know it when I see it. But there's this meandering line here of where do the curves cross on giving somebody something versus teaching them how to fish versus giving them a fish. And the examples you gave are very individually focused. And it makes sense if you're you have the ability to give that individual focus. But how do you scale that up, I guess, is the question.
[:Well, you have to give the universities the incentives to say your job is to get these kids to complete school, get a job, and improve their situation. So if you're starting out at ability to make 40 grand, we're going to graduate you and you can make 80. They should be measured on that level of success. Of course, intellectual development is an important part of it, but they're completely not focused on anything other than growing their staffs. These presidents, these universities make obscene amounts of money. A lot of times they're fired or let go and they still get a full salary for 3, 4, 5, 6 years. By the way, sometimes forever.
[:That's just happened at Ohio State. Yeah, the lady's leaving early and she's getting paid off and there's a.
[:Nondisclosure agreement. Elizabeth Warren, Senator from Massachusetts, teaches one class at Harvard. One class at Harvard makes $600,000 a year. Oh, come on. That's lunacy. Lunacy. So yeah, forgive student debt that we caused. That's like that buy here, pay here car lot that's charging 30 % interest and charging $700 a month for the $5,000 car and saying, hey, pay off these people's loans.
[:Bernie, I got to ask you just I know you probably got to get running, but final question for me, at least, do you have any strong feelings about this issue 1? Taking Frank aside, he's pushing that and all that. I'm in favor of it. I know I think Steve is. I'm not sure Brett has a definitive, but the idea of having to have 60 % of the electorate back a change to our state constitution mirrors the federal... That you need more than 50 % of the states to approve an amendment. So I see the logic and it prevents saturation advertising to change people's mind by outside interests. I am a little uncomfortable with the idea that Ohio has always been 50 %, now we're going to 60 %. So I have a little discomfort, but I intellectually understand why we're doing it.
[:No, I'm going to vote for issue one. I think everybody should go for issue one. I think it's about 100 % about protecting our constitution.
[:So you're not reflexively, Oh, Frank's for it.
[:That bullshit. That's the politics that people are sick of. No, I think at the end of the day, the one thing I would knock Frank on is that he said it's 100 % about abortion, which is screwed up the messaging because it's 100 % about protecting the Constitution. It should have been done a long time ago. I agree. I don't love that it's being done in August. I think it should have been done, again, many years ago during the normal election cycle. But that doesn't mean because the process to get here may not have been perfect and that maybe it's overdue. It doesn't make the actual vote bad. Yeah, it's still a good idea. It's still a good idea. It should be 60 %. Citizen initiatives could still be 50 %. You still have the right to elect your officials that come to Columbus to make laws. So it's just a good government measure that's, again, common sense. Okay.
[:One last thing. So what's the campaign like in this new day and age? Now, we like to think that podcasts are controlling the campaign, but it seems like it's got to be... Maybe it's easier, maybe it's harder. You're not just on paying for commercials. Here you are in our studio in Columbus, and you were in Akron before. How is this this new media platform change the game?
[:Podcasts are huge. I mean, it's people, especially younger people, they've unplugged. They don't have TV, they don't watch TV. Social media has become very noisy. People like to dig deeper into issues. I love podcast because it's not a 280 character comment. That's a cliché line, a 30 second commercial. You really get to know the person out. One of the things that I encourage all voters, whether they're voting for me or anybody else, get to know who you're electing. Do your job. This is a job interview. Treat it as an important job interview. If somebody's coming to work for me, I'm not asking them to give me a 30 second pitch and then walk out of my office. I want to know who are you? What's your background? I need to be able to look into your heart, look into your soul and say, do you believe the things that you're saying or is this just you're just trying to get elected? I think it's really important for voters to get to know who I am, who Frank is, who Matt is, and by the way, who Sherrod is. And I guess said, the Democrats, unfortunately, don't go through that process.
[:It's been self selected for them.
[:You guys all have debates.
[:Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.
[:Well, look, last call to action. How did they get to your website? And learn.
[:More about you, Bernie. Yeah. So social media @ Bernie Marino on Twitter. Some amazing hot takes on my Twitter. It's just me, by the way. If you're wondering who wrote that, that was me. And then at the website, Bernie Moreno, M O R E N O. Com. If they like what they heard today, they can contribute $5, $10, $15. If they really like what they heard, they can contribute maybe 100. If you didn't like anything I said, my name is Frank LaRose.
[:Awesome. Well, look, with that, we're going to wrap it up. I won't go into the long typical intro, but you can still check us out at www.commonsenseohioshow.Com. Send us questions, send us thoughts, send us concerns. Check out Norm's blog. Norm loves everybody, as always. I do. Here we are right from the middle, common sense Ohio.
