to see you. Wow. Look at you. It's really you in the room. Look, you ready to take notes and everything.
No, no, no, no pads ready to go. You know what this is going to be because someday you're
going to say, well, Don Rosen said on this date, this is we haven't in the court case when I'm
up on some trial or something. You're going to say, listen, I have the notes here. I don't
know what I'll be on trial for. Yeah, that would say it's Bart Simpson. And they say, what are
you going to be on trial for someday? Oh, teacher planted evidence in my locker. Okay.
Now the former mayor, you didn't want to run again. I'm going to ask you, why didn't you
want to run again?
Well, there's a couple things. The first thing is elections are hard on your kids and your
family. But the second thing is my daughter said, you know, daddy, I want you back home.
So, you know, when you're when your little ones are saying, hey, we want you back around, it's,
you know, it really kind of tells you that it's time. The other thing is we put together, you
know, we had a plan for the city. It was a 10 year plan. And we did it pretty much about 99%
of it eight years. And one of the things my wife said to me is she asked me to, you know, look
back at the plan. How are you done? So because when we were talking about running again, and when
I looked at it and said, we got about 99% of it done, she said, so what are you going to do?
You're going to be bored. And I thought to myself, huh, okay. But the really the big factor was the
Great Lakes and St. Lawrence city's initiative coming and saying, we really want you to think about
your job. And that was, you know, when you have those two things going together, your family
saying, you know, maybe it's time. And somebody saying, hey, we're going to present you with something
that, you know, you've you've always been part of. Then those two things really come to mesh pretty
quick. You want to do politics again? I'll put this way. Do you ever get the bug to do politics
again? Well, I think it's not so much the bug to do politics because I think the part of the
problem in today's society is everybody wants to be something, right? They want the title.
What I worry about is the job. So do I do I think about, you know, doing the job and getting into
a space where we can make dramatic change? I always think about that. That's why I got into consulting
after working for the governor. It's, you know, I wanted to I wanted to make dramatic change. And that's,
you know, what I'm trying to do with the job that I'm doing now. So I don't see it as really so much,
you know, getting back and to be in a politician, you know, which daily always had a great phrase,
which is we're not politicians, we're mirrors because we have to deal with everything. We can't worry about
the politics. We have to just deal with the stuff on the ground. I'd last nine seconds in that job.
Nine seconds because the first time somebody opened their mouth, I'd tell them what I thought. And then I'd be out.
No, not necessarily. Oh, yeah, necessarily. Trust me. Nine seconds. I'd be done with that job,
any political job because I would never keep my mouth shut. I don't know how to, you know,
if somebody says something that I really think is stupid, I'm going to say, what are you stupid?
And that would be at my career's over. Well, you know, nowadays, we never know.
Right now. There's a lot of crazy things being talked about right now. But, you know, to me,
it comes down to the point where, you know, I'm older now than I am younger. That's for sure.
But it comes down to the point of, what do you want to accomplish in life? And for me,
with the consulting I'm doing now or anything I'm going to do until I retire is, you know,
make the planet a better place for our kids. Let's talk about that because you left to deal with water,
yeah, water. And people say, well, water, we got water, I got water, I turn on my tap, I got water.
For now, you do, you and I talked about this movie, The Big Short.
And the movie was about the housing bust where everything went, Goldman Sachs,
when I had a business, people lost their homes. It was a big giant bubble that burst.
And the movie was called The Big Short. And one of the people that predicted it was a doctor,
played by Christian Bale in the film. He had all this math Donnie said, this is going to happen.
And after it happened at the end of the movie, the last thing he does, they put on the screen.
Now he's going to deal with water. And people in the theater went, well, you water, what's going on with water?
We're going to tap, not going to work water.
So I ask you, why was he so concerned about water?
Well, a couple of things, people have to have water to survive.
Number one, number two, the amount of fresh water in the world is minute.
Yeah, we look at the oceans, we can't drink that stuff.
Right. And to process it, do drink it is very energy intensive.
And you're left with a brine that's kind of somewhat dangerous.
So the thing that he was looking at was that with all this limited fresh water,
and we are blessed with the gray lakes, right? We have all this fresh water on us when we think what's the big deal?
Well, the big deal is that's a very, very small percentage of what we have on this planet to drink.
So it's very precious. So what he looked at was the technology.
And I think what he may have seen was that while we look at the water now and we go, well,
you know, we have the clean air act, clean water acts. We've been cleaning up our water.
There's a whole new level of things that have come up.
When I was a kid, they were dumping water into the river, you know, direct pollution,
not cleaning it through the wastewater treatment plant, and that was causing the problem.
Well, we cleaned that up, but now you have invasive species.
You have plastics in the water. You have PFAS in the water.
Okay, stop it. Stop it. PFAS, because I have that listed here.
I never heard it said like that before until this morning. PFAS is one of those.
Yeah. So the best way to describe it, the word, the name of it is so long that,
people forget it in a heartbeat, but what it happens is back during World War II for the most part
when they were doing the Manhattan Project, they had to have something that was really, really a strong bonding agent
that would prevent fire or other things like that from penetrating certain levels.
So they created this chemical, which is considered by many to be the strongest bond man's ever created.
It's three carbon chains with, I believe, a fluoride, a fluorine chain, and then three more carbon chains.
So it's the seven chain link product that we created as humans.
It's the kind of things that they put on the heat shield for the space missions.
It's what's in firefighting foam. That's why they can put the foam on a fire and it doesn't just burn through it.
It's in your nonstick pans. It's on your, your clothing, your, to make your clothing, clothing water resistant.
So in other words, it's in the public space and it has been since the 50s.
There was a great movie done by Mark Ruffalo, one of our locals from Kenosha.
And the boy, let me think for a second. I'll remember the movie in a second, but the movie shows that in the, I think it was in the 90s,
he was a chemical attorney. And he found that, because his mom called him about a neighbor who was a farmer whose cows were dying.
So he went out there to check it out and the farmer was complaining that the stream behind his house was being contaminated by a chemical plant up the way.
So he starts looking into what he finds out through all this research that this through, I think it was a 3M plant,
was dumping into this stream, the cows were drinking it, they're drinking PFAS.
And so they were, their bodies were basically getting very, very large and then they would die.
So he starts looking into it and finds that, yes, this is, it's a really, really bad chemical.
And for the most part, as I recall, it gets into your liver and your brain, creates, once it bioaccumulates, it causes cancer.
And it's very, very deadly. So we've had this stuff in our system for a long, long time.
As a matter of fact, just about every living organism on the planet has PFAS, including, you know, whales and things like that,
that they found underneath, yes, dark waters. That's the movie by Mark Ruffalo, correct.
They found it in, you know, animals in the Antarctic.
So we've been using this for so long and they've been dumping it for so long, many times illegally,
that this is seeped through into the water systems and so it bioaccumulates.
Now, let me give you an example of how bad this is. Some of these facts may not be 100%, but I'm thinking I'm pretty close on it.
So the federal level for PFAS, for acceptability, is what they call four PPT, which is four parts per trillion.
That's like taking one drop of water and four Olympics swimming pools. That's considered okay.
All right, if you're drinking water with four PPT or less, we had a, when I was the guy asked the governor to put me on
in some water space while I was working for revenue. So I sat on the committee that designed the rules,
rags, and budget for PFAS for Wisconsin. We had it about 20 PPT that the feds came in lower.
So we had a lower standard. There is a city up north. And I won't name it because I don't want people,
candidly bothering those folks, but it's a very small community way up north.
They tested at 46,000 PPT. So basically they're drinking pure poison.
Now in my estimation, it's pure poison. They, the state came in and some, some of the elected officials up there said,
this is all nonsense. This is all made up nonsense. So they tested it again. It was 47,000 parts per trillion.
The amount of cancer victims that are in that community, I think may rate as number one in the country per capita.
This is like Aaron Brockovich. Yeah. Well, this puts Aaron Brockovich to shame. Aaron Brockovich,
which he did was nothing compared to what they found with PFAS. And not to say, not to, you know,
downsize what Aaron Brockovich did. She's a great woman. It's great research, right?
But this is at a level that exceeds everything that they were doing because this is global.
And were these people know they're drinking?
Add water? Well, they, they were told by people that they weren't and they kept drinking it.
But if the cancer rate's going up, I mean, you,
the former mayor that was there who is a proponent to get this stopped and cleaned up has had 23 surgeries.
And I think he's had four different parts of cancer and the death rate in the community that they're in was at 65,
then down to 60, 50s, now it's in the 40s. So 40 year olds are dying from drinking this stuff that they have drank in the past.
Now they, the DNR and everybody you've come in and said, okay, stop.
We're going to give you, you know, bottled water for now. And by the way, we don't know what's in bottled water.
So sometimes there's PFAS in bottled water. Yeah, I know. Look at your bottled water.
This is spring water. Yeah, but most bottled water is not tested. If it is, it's tested.
So in a limited, no matter, well, I always tell everybody drink your tap water. It's far, it's likely far better.
You know what it is? You say that and I drink tap water. And it's like, I don't like the taste of it.
It's just not refreshing to me. I've told you once before my wife goes to what's it petrifying springs or petrified.
And she gets the water out of it.
Artesian well, whatever it is. And she gets it there. And we used to run it through a filter and you said stop doing that.
And she stopped because it filled out all the good stuff. So now she just, we load up one of those big bottles.
And every weekend she drinks only that water. I tried it.
It doesn't taste good. I don't like the taste. I'm so used to this.
Nice mountain water. And there is in Milwaukee.
Rod Lancer is no longer with us, but he was one of the founders of summer fest.
And it was also the controller for the city of Milwaukee.
He took up my mother father and I on a tour of Milwaukee. He wanted to test it out with us.
And he took us to this street. It's a residential street. And there's a line of people with bottles filling it up.
And it just drips out 24 seven.
And it's right out of the ground. That's where the whale comes up right on this person's right on the sidewalk.
And people bring their bottles and fill it up in the bill. It's fresh water.
Yeah, you know, the all water we should test, right?
We're blessed with the gray lakes. And the fact that since we have so much water out there, any PFAS that gets in the gray lakes for the most part is diluted to a point where it's not a problem.
Right. So for us, even though we're pulling in water from the gray lakes, they may test it one or zero PPT just because it's.
It's so diluted. How do you know when you drink and sludge?
Well, that's why we test our water all the time.
You said this ice mountain may not be daddy. You know if it's tested.
Well, the rules and regs for testing bottled water are very, very light.
And we've asked in the past for the rules to be so they test them on a regular basis.
Because even the spring water can be diluted. I mean PFAS travels very, very well through water.
And if it rains and there's PFAS in the ground, that rain will push that PFAS through into the aquifer.
So what's happening in areas like I was talking about up north is they're trying to figure out if they can dig a lower well where there's not PFAS yet.
Right. But the bigger question is how do we clean it up and how do we mitigate it?
Because if we don't generations forever be drinking this stuff. It's not good for you.
This is scary stuff. It's, you know, this is the stuff that, you know, we talk about fixing, right?
We can't ignore it. We have to fix it.
So what are you?
What are you as a just ordinary citizen? What do you recommend people drink cap water?
Yeah, I mean, if you walk in as that tested tap water two or three times a day.
Oh, is it really? Oh, yeah. Oh, we've got one of the best water departments.
They test it. But when it goes through my pipes and gets to my house, that's not tested at my faucet.
And who knows what it picked up in the pipes leading to my house.
So there's two things to, you know, be rest assured upon.
The first thing is that one of the things that we do after we purify the water is we put a little bit of chlorine in it.
And that's so that while it's traveling through your pipes, if any impurities are in there, that chlorine is killing it.
Right. The second thing is if you have any feel where you pipe or you get your water out of the tap and you smell a little bit of chlorine,
all you got to do is fill up a container, put it out overnight in that chlorine will dissipate.
So we're so used to when we want to drink a water, we just get it.
Yeah, we're not used to preparing it like my wife does with a giant bottle.
Well, I'm not used to preparing it. I want to drink a water. I'm thirsty. I grab it and I drink it.
You know, and for the most part, you're going to be absolutely fine because there's another thing that we do is we add a chemical.
And I would, I think I remember the chemical makeup, but I'm not going to say it.
But so we put a chemical into the water and what that is is a binder agent and that binder agent doesn't hurt the human body at all.
But the binder agent allows any place where there's lead. It can, it, it, it hears the lead.
So if you had lead pipes, it adheres to the lead and then it creates a border, a boundary so that the rest of the water goes through without touching lead or or having any flakes of lead off into the water.
So we actually do a pretty amazing job of making sure that your water is the best tasting water in America and is the best water in America.
And you know, we've got the award to prove it. So remember crypto sporadium. Oh, yeah, a great bug on a great lake.
Well, I was at the 80s, right? Crypto sporadium. Yeah, that's actually what got us to build the wastewater, the water treatment plant that we have now.
Former senior John Dickard is here. The first half hour we talked about water.
And now I'm, you know, from my bottled water in the garbage and just drink orange juice. I'm sure there's something wrong with that too with the pesticides and everything.
Is there anything I could drink that's guaranteed to not kill me?
Good old Racine water tap water. Yeah, but you said this stuff in there too.
Oh, it's, I mean, listen, it's some of the best water in the world. Our purification system is 99.9 to the sixth power or something pure.
It's, it's good stuff. As people tell me now I drink this bottled water, I have here.
People tell me the plastic from the bottle if you leave it into long kind of filters into the water, right?
Sometimes there's, there's some evidence that, especially if it's in sunlight, some of the plastic will break down and that's what they call microplastics.
Microplastics are in a lot of things because, you know, we, we allow garbage and sometimes it just tends to get into our waterways.
I mean, you see what's happening in the ocean. So sometimes that happens, the microplastics break down in the sun.
And fish will start eating them because they think it's plankton or a plant or something.
So yeah, so you know, this is the part that I talked about where, you know, you thought when we did the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, we kind of solved a lot of the problems.
We've created new ones and it's primarily just because people are understanding their actions and what those actions cost.
And if this didn't scare you enough, let's talk about cybersecurity.
Now, this bothers me and you know, I check every one of my accounts before I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning, because I just want to make sure I have a,
my wife says, well, what are you checking for it? You know, it's fine. She never checks anything. I check it all the time because I want to make sure it's just as it should be.
It doesn't take long for someone to hack into something and destroy your life. It's real quick.
Yeah, let me, and that's on a small scale. Yeah, but I think you're talking about the larger scale.
Yeah, I mean, so I guess the best way to put it is we had a meeting. I'm not drinking this.
We had a meeting with myself and some of my good friends, Mayor's Villanoi, set up by another good friend of mine who's a Mayor of one of the Illinois cities.
And we met with a group of folks from NSA CIA and some folks that have been 20 or 30 years in cybersecurity work.
They, we had a very, very difficult conversation, but a very good one about the fact that really we are not prepared for cyber attacks.
They're happening. They're happening every single day in America. They're just what they call tester attacks.
So the city was hit with, I believe it was around somewhere. Our USD was hit with some type of a cyber attack.
I think no, there's a lot of communities around Wisconsin and our region that have been hit with these cyber attacks.
And primarily what they're doing is they're testing. So we have three really bad guys out there that are not necessarily.
Friends with America and this is their way of creating a warfare without having war.
And that is a Russia, China and Iran are the three probably biggest in the cyber space.
And you know, anybody from, let's say somebody from Iran who wants to just kind of mess with the US right now, they can be in the Caribbean on a computer, you know,
just masking everything that they're doing. And that, that's the tough part. That's, that's why, you know, when you think about it for the first time in the history of warfare,
we have a small group of people that can really undermine the critical infrastructure of our community, our whole, our whole country for that matter.
And it's a lot of people don't say it because what tends to happen is in a disaster, people don't necessarily want to figure out how to fix it.
They just want to blame right doing a blame somebody or something.
So what we are talking about doing a friend of mine and I was who's just a retired mayor now.
He's starting to educate communities on this very issue and prepare for it.
And you know, we did some of that when I was mayor, we made sure that some critical infrastructure areas were prepared for it.
I'm not going to mention what they are. But these, so these things happen. Tiktok is a great way for China, for instance, to get access to your information.
But it's so good. They're so good at it that, you know, they shut down the East Coast a couple years ago with their natural gas line.
So there's all these little tests that happen out there and they're prodding and finding out where they can go.
But I asked, when I was mayor, I asked one of the, one of the folks from defense, you know, I said, how bad is this?
And remember, this is over 10 years ago. She said they can do anything they want. It's just a matter of what our response is.
But how do you know who did it? And that's the critical issue. You don't know who did it.
So people say, so what they have my name and address, so what is it a big, so what or is it important that they, especially the tiktokers, because they put information in there.
Well, it's, yeah, it's not, they don't just have your name and address. They have all your, all your data for your, you know, your, your bank accounts, you could have union accounts.
The figure that what they're going to try to hack is try to get around your passcode. A lot of them don't try to find your passcode.
They just try to go around it or they find it you took a picture of something. It's on your phone. They're looking at that.
So the problem here now that you're with the tiktokers. So what if you don't have any of the social media stuff?
It helps. I mean, it helps. There's no doubt about it. But our, our information is out there with credit cards, with health histories, things like that.
So the idea here is in China, actually, it's a playbook for this. And the idea is to create as much disruption in the United States as possible, which takes our focus off of other global issues.
So we are, we're thinking about that. And the likelihood is the average American is really not prepared for their energy going down for a week or a month or three months.
They're not prepared, you know, from a food perspective, even basic water issues, right?
So what we're trying to do is educate people on how to be protected. And we're hoping to get out and start educating local communities on how to prepare for issues like this.
Because, you know, the next war is probably not going to be fought with, you know, battleships and tanks. It's going to be fought with electronics.
There's a Julia Roberts movie out on this that, that really demonstrates what would happen if, if this was actually done.
It's not the Pelican brief is no, no, no, it's recent. It's more recent than that. I'll, I'll look it up.
Not to look at IMDB again. You brought up the moral film.
Yes, you do.
And the thing is really what the key here is to be prepared, right?
To give you an example, one of the things that they, they tied a pitch on you when you're a mayor is to be a smart city.
And I always said, I, I don't think smart cities are that smart because what you're doing is you're allowing, you know, too many people to have access to your critical systems over a phone.
The phone is completely insecure. Your iPhone is completely and utterly insecure.
Even where my password is one, two, three, four.
Yeah, you get a password for a mile long. It doesn't matter.
It's insecure. So the, so the thing is you don't want access.
So, so one of the things that they did when they found out that the East Coast, for instance, was hacked and they shut down the natural gas lines.
In the middle of winter, by the way, a couple of years ago, it was the middle winter. And that was just a little, you know, a little ploy.
Hey, look what we can do.
A local community person had their, their heat in air conditioning units on a smartphone, right?
So, okay, so this person in a public works department somewhere in America could get on smartphone and he could turn on, you know, heat or whatever unbuildings throughout the community.
Well, they got into his phone through a social media network. They got into his phone because they went back and they tracked all this took a month to find to figure out how they did it.
But they went to his phone. They got into the city.
They sat in the city for about a month or two.
And before they left, they dropped not only a little cyber bomb off, but they actually got into the backup storage that was supposed to be the safe area.
And they blew all that up too. So they got into the city's servers and they got into the backup servers. So they blew all that up before they left them and went to the state.
Got into the state. They're hanging around there for a couple of months trying to figure out how to get to the feds.
Once they got to the feds, they didn't want to leave a trail. So they just went into the federal program, found out eventually where the line shut off was for that natural gas line.
And then shut it off for about a day or so just to say, look what we can do.
So when we talk about we, whoever this country was that did it.
So, you know, there's there's a lot of this going on and of the stuff that you see today and people say, I can you believe that we were shut down.
I mean, you just saw it. Where's it spain last week? Well, the electricity went off my phone went off.
Yeah, that probably wasn't just, you know, a squirrel getting in.
Well, we also don't know what happened in Newark airport when they lost communication with the planes. They haven't told us yet what caused that problem for 90 seconds.
Can you imagine flying blind all those planes coming into Newark?
Yeah, the administration's got to get moving the second gear here on this stuff.
Could that have been a cyber security problem? We don't know yet.
So this is the thing is that you can't stop it. You think they send tests out that they do to send us out.
Every single day just to make sure they can do it and let us know they can do it.
John Dickards with me here. It's a former mayor for scene, but now he's into totally something different.
He's at a consultant, but we're talking about water and cyber security.
I came in this morning feeling good. The sun was up. The air was crisp. I said, we have a great day.
Now I'm scared to death. I'm afraid to drink the water. I brought a bottle of water with me this morning.
I'm going to toss it right in the can and now I find out everybody's on my phone.
No, I don't do any banking on my phone. I don't use my credit card. It only a few places.
I pay cash at other places. I never use it at the gas station because they put those little scanning things on it.
I won't do it with that. So I never use a supermarket. We'll use it things like that, but not gasoline.
I don't use it at any place that I'm not familiar with. I want to make sure.
But even that doesn't guarantee anything. I remember once Target was, I used my credit card at Target once,
and they were hacked and get this message in the mail. You might have checked security because we were hacked and all your information got out.
Oh, come on. Can't you even protect it? What are you doing over there? They're really working on.
There's no way to protect it. Well, there's levels. They have levels of security.
A lot of people pay a lot of money to protect data, but it seems to me.
I'm not a NSA security analyst on this, but it seems to me that you really,
it's just a matter of when and where they want to do it and how they want to do it.
But I will tell you this, just to show you how amazing it says, when I was at, when I left as mayor
and I was at the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence City's initiative, this is how fast it goes.
I went to DC. I took the honorable Mike Vandersteen from Shaboykin. He was our chair.
We went out to Washington to start talking to people about the Great Lakes water initiative
and making sure that they had the money in it. While we were out there, my staff got a call.
Because I had taken a picture on Facebook and with Mike and posted it that we're out working the hill.
We got a, my staff got a call and this is how sophisticated they are. They said, hey, Melissa, I'm at.
She got an email. I apologize. She got an email. I'm in DC.
There's an emergency fundraiser going on. I need you to send a check for $10,000.
So I can help out this senator at this, at this location.
Now, she didn't have the authority to do it and Melissa was smart enough to know that that's not something that I would do.
So she called me and said, do you know that this happened?
And I said, we've been hacked. I said, did you, do you think any numbers or anything?
She said, no, of course not. I said, I called the bank, shut down the system.
I'll be back later tonight and we'll deal with it tomorrow.
They had, they were that fast within an hour of me putting posting that Facebook link.
They were smart enough to figure out where I worked, how I worked, what I was doing,
and to get the right message into my staff and the email to potentially release $10,000.
Now, paranoid, I am. If my stepson or my wife sends me a link on Facebook, I'm going to check, I'm going to do it.
I will call them up and say, did you send this? Where did you get it from?
And that's how paranoid it is. I don't even trust my wife or my stepson or my daughter for that matter.
Yeah. To go send me anything because I don't know if they sent it.
And I don't know where they got it from when you start clicking on links.
If you send me a photo to look at that, that looks good.
When you start clicking on links, you don't know where it's taking you.
No case in point. I worked at a radio station in Lake Geneva.
It's only one station there. I worked there and I get a call one weekend morning, the station's off the air.
Russians hacked the radio station, shut it down, wiped all their computers clean.
No more commercials, no more music. They wiped them clean and they sent them a ransom.
Yeah.
And the FBI was called in because radio stations are federally licensed.
So they call the FBI in and they dealt with the hackers.
Now, the owner of the station had the were with all to buy ransomware insurance, ransom insurance.
So we had it.
So the insurance company was going to pay them the FBI negotiator talked them down to like $25,000 or something like that.
I forget what the amount was, but talked them down greatly.
They paid it. They gave them the codes to get everything back up and running, but it took weeks.
Yeah.
Because each song had a different code, each commercial had a different code.
It took weeks to get that place back on the air again.
And you know how they got hacked?
Somebody at the station opened an email.
When they did that, it said a time clock.
And the time clock was three months.
Yeah.
And three months to the moment that they opened that email, boom, it went off.
Now, it's three months ago, so they can't remember who did it.
Well, they have to hide their tracks.
So that's how they hide their tracks.
Yeah.
It's the start of the clock.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what I always tell everybody is, listen, if somebody calls and says, hello, is this Don Rosen?
You don't say yes.
Nope.
You say who's calling?
Because if you say yes, they can use that as an authorization for a bank.
Right.
I read that.
They can take your yes voice.
Right.
And then they'll use that.
Yeah.
So the thing is nowadays, what I always tell people is, listen, be cautious.
I'm not saying, you know, freak out in the whole world's falling in on you.
Just be cautious.
If you think something is odd, it probably is.
If you think something is off, it probably is.
So the best thing you can do is ask your banker credit.
You need to do dual factor authentic authentication for your accounts.
So when you pop up account on your phone or on your computer, they send you a link to your phone.
And if you punch in that link, then okay, they know what's you coming in.
That's the safest way you can be for your bank.
But you know what?
That's such a pain in the butt to do that.
Occasionally, my banks and my credit card will send me, they test it every once in a while.
They'll send you a link with a code.
Right.
And you get a punch in that code.
It's a lot better than your your accounts disappearing.
I know.
I know.
It's just the world we live in now.
I mean, people laugh at me because I write out checks.
But there's a reason.
I'm very cautious about, you know, I write out checks too.
I don't do anything.
I don't do any banking online.
Not one thing you can't.
They say, well, you know, and they always send you this thing every month.
We want you to switch to digital from paper.
Yeah.
I'm not doing that.
I'm not going to be paperless.
I want checks.
Now, checks have their own problem because if you put them in a mailbox, they had people breaking in
and using acetone to wipe off the ink and then rewrite the checks and cash them.
So it's got its own problems.
But I use this pen.
And this pen you can't erase because it soaks into the paper.
Right.
But even that they could probably get around.
There's no guarantee on anything.
There's people trying to do everything.
So I say, you know, the first thing is no Department of Revenue or IRS agent will ever call you.
So if anybody ever calls you from either of those two, just hang up because they will never call you.
I worked for the Department of Revenue.
You know, I worked at the federal level with the Department of IRS.
They will never, ever, ever, ever call you no matter what they think they won't call you.
So just hang up on them.
But the second thing is if you think it's a scam or you think it's odd.
And do you think that one of your relatives is calling you?
Just hang up and call them back.
You hear these stories and there's a woman on YouTube.
She just plays these hackers on the phone for everything.
They're worth these scammers.
Yeah.
And she gets your friends to be an old lady.
I don't want them.
But it takes $90,000, which account and the guy in the other end from India, Pakistan or wherever.
And he's talking away.
You take it and you put it in this account.
You do this.
You do this.
But I don't know which account.
Then she does the Siri voice is account.
Account means something at a bank.
And she just plays these guys for all their worth.
She knows it.
But a lot of people don't know it's a scam.
They make a lot of money off it.
I mean, the gentleman that I take care of, John Schubert.
He had a relative that she lost $60,000 one year.
She thought all these scams were legitimate people.
So I mean, what we need here is just a base level of preparedness.
That's the key.
Instead of responding like we do right now, especially with the areas of global climate change issues.
You know, we've seen all these floods and fires and everything else going on.
You know, a lot of that stuff can be prepared for.
Just like when you're talking about your security and your financial security and your cyber security.
It's basic preparation and just basic knowledge goes a long, long way in stopping these folks.
So that's what we're going to look to do is to get out there and start working with local communities
just to be basically prepared so that you really do a lot of prevention.
And whether it's water or cyber or anything, even your health.
All of that stuff, a lot of it can be prepared for so you don't have to have the risk later.
I thank you for coming in.
Of course, I think I made your day.
And you did.